harmonicminer

At Townhall, Jonah Goldberg points out that big business supported Obama 2 to 1 against McCain, because it hoped to cash in at taxpayer expense:

It’s worth remembering that Obama was the preferred candidate of Wall Street, and the industry gave to Democrats by a 2-1 margin at the beginning of last year. The top business donor to Democrats in 2008 was Goldman Sachs, and nearly 75 cents out of every dollar of Goldman’s political donations from 2006 to 2008 went to Democrats. Few can gainsay the investment, given how well Goldman Sachs has done under the Obama administration.

It’s not just Wall Street. Obama led in fundraising from most big business sectors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Aside from the desire to back the winner, and the cultural liberalness of East and West Coast plutocrats, why did Obama get so much support from precisely the constituency he demonizes?

Because it was good business. A host of big corporations bet that the much-vaunted Obama era would materialize. For instance, nearly 30 major corporations and environmental groups invested in Obama’s promise to force the American economy into a new cap-and-trade system via the United States Climate Action Partnership (CAP).

Whatever the benefits of such a scheme for the economy and environment as a whole, these corporations, led by General Electric, were looking simply to cash in on government policies. GE, which makes many wind, solar and nuclear doodads that would be profitable under “cap-and-trade,” was poised to make billions if Obama succeeded in seizing control of the “carbon economy.” GE is still protecting its bet, but after the failure in Copenhagen, the “climategate” scandals and perhaps most significantly, that implosion of Obama’s new progressive era, several heavyweights — Caterpillar, BP and ConocoPhillips — have pulled out of CAP, with rumors that more will follow. There are similar rumblings of discontent within the ranks of PhRMA, the trade association for the pharmaceutical industry, which had cut an $80 billion deal with the White House last year for its support of ObamaCare, only to see the whole thing unravel.

The lesson here is fairly simple: Big business is not “right wing,” it’s vampiric. It will pursue any opportunity to make a big profit at little risk. Getting in bed with politicians is increasingly the safest investment for these “crony capitalists.” But only if the politicians can actually deliver. The political failures of the Obama White House have translated into business failures for firms more eager to make money off taxpayers instead of consumers.

That’s good news. The bad news will be if the Republicans once again opt to be the cheap dates of big business. For years, the GOP defended big business in the spirit of free enterprise while businesses never showed much interest in the principle themselves. Now that their bet on the Democrats has crapped out, it’d be nice if they stopped trying to game the system and focused instead on satisfying the consumer.

Go back and read the title of this post. Then read this, to which I’ve linked before.  Ignore the reviews, pro and con, and just take it on its own terms… and see if you can refute the history.  I think you can’t.

There hasn’t been a “free market” in the USA for sometime.  The government’s power to tax and regulate, and to give tax breaks and regulatory exceptions, is the reason there is so much lobbying in the Beltway.  It could not have been otherwise, once corporate taxes got high, and the regulation of business became one of the chief functions of government.  The merry-go-round career path of government “service” to lobbyist, and often back to government “service,” is the biggest indicator of this.  The essential role of a lobbyist in the modern world is to figure out who should get the money that the lobbyist’s principals have to donate.

When big business couldn’t count on government to help it get captive markets, and to restrain competitors, it had to compete for consumers on the basis of price and quality.  That’s why Rockefeller kept cutting the price of kerosene in the 19th century, not exactly an act of violence against the consumers of the day.

It’s unfortunate that so many people still believe that we live in a “free market” economy and that “the market” is the cause for so much economic woe today.  But we have had a “mixed economy” that often crossed the line into “crony capitalism” or just plain “state capitalism” (especially in time of war), for over a century.  The government is by far the most responsible for our current economic mess.  The lobbyists of big business (the johns) wouldn’t have any place to spend their money if politicians weren’t pimping themselves out.  Those lobbyists are often the ones who write campaign finance law and regulations.

It’s simple.  If big business didn’t think it was going to get something out of it, why would it donate so much money to politicians?  And more particularly, why did it give so much to Obama?

Let’s hope that if the Republicans do get some power back, they don’t blow it this time.

THE TOTALITIES OF COPENHAGEN: GLOBAL WARMING AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TRUE BELIEF

One of the deeper motivations that animate global warming true believers is the totalitarian impulse. This is not to say that global warmists are closet Stalinists, but their intellectual methods are instructively similar, says columnist Bret Stephens.

Revolutionary fervor:

* There’s a distinct tendency among climate alarmists toward uncompromising radicalism, a hatred of “bourgeois” values, and disgust with democratic practices.
* So President Obama wants to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 83 percent from current levels by 2050, levels not seen since the 1870s — in effect, the Industrial Revolution in reverse.
* Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, insists that “our lifestyles are unsustainable.”
* Al Gore gets crowds going by insisting that “civil disobedience has a role to play” in strong-arming governments to do his bidding (this from the man who once sought to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution).

Utopianism:

* In the world as it is, climate alarmists see humanity hurtling toward certain doom.
* In the world as it might be, humanity has seen the light and changed its patterns of behavior, becoming the green equivalent of the Soviet “new man.”
* At his disposal are technologies that defy the laws of thermodynamics; the problems now attributed to global warming abate or disappear.

Anti-humanism:

* In his 2007 best seller “The World Without Us,” environmentalist Alan Weisman considers what the planet would be like without mankind, and finds it’s no bad thing.
* The U.N. Population Fund complains in a recent report that “no human is genuinely ‘carbon neutral’” — its latest argument against children.
* John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, cut his teeth in the policy world as an overpopulation obsessive worried about global cooling.
* But whether warming or cooling, the problem for the climate alarmists, as for other totalitarians, always seems to boil down to the human race itself.

Today, of course, the very idea of totalitarianism is considered passé. Yet the course of the 20th century was defined by totalitarian regimes, and it would be dangerous to assume that the habits of mind that sustained them have vanished into the mists, says Stephens.

It’s fashionable to speak of “religious fundamentalists” in a phrase designed to obscure the essentially benign intent of Christian fundamentalists (if you can find one anymore), by using a single-breathed phrase that also includes Islamic fundamentalists of the Islamo-fascist variety.  A couple dozen leftist columnists and some government officials have darkly hinted that, before long, “sexist, homophobic, anti-choice Christianists” will be as dangerous as Osama bin Laden, if they aren’t already.  After all, didn’t they just shoot that nice abortion doctor who was just rescuing women from a difficult situation?

I think, however, that the only non-Islamic fundamentalists who pose a real danger to the West are the eco-pagan totalitarians, who believe they have the divine dispensation to control how the rest of us live our lives and conduct our businesses, because only they have the pure vision and the purer hearts to make the judgments about just how we should be using energy, how much we should be using, when we should use it, in what form we should use it, how much we should pay for it, and what our punishment should be if we don’t comply with their enlightened prescriptions…  not to say proscriptions.

It is difficult to think of a more anti-human agenda.

But these particular fundamentalists want a LOT more than a mere tithe.  They mean to control just about every aspect of your life, to one degree or another.

Baptism may continue to be a sacrament in the eco-totalitarian regime…  but it will be in cold water.

The lies of the global warming eco-panic crowd may finally be exposed in Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

It is, of course, early days in the investigation of the stolen emails.  Perhaps it will all turn out to be a huge hoax.  But, here are more details.

Of course, the AGW eco-panic mongers of the world will say that this isn’t the only data, that many other independent data sources have confirmed the same conclusions, and it can’t ALL be a hoax.

Maybe not.  Some of it could be just simple, politically motivated non-science.  There are probably some well-meaning sorts who have particular data that doesn’t, by itself, refute AGW, so they have trusted those who are sure they have data that confirms it.  But it seems that maybe there aren’t as many scientists as previously claimed who are “sure” they have confirming data…  so they cook the books.

Here is an attempt at damage control.  You can decide how successful you think it is.  My impression: while accusing the hackers of “cherry picking”, they have “cherry picked” the emails the hackers “cherry picked” to try to make their points.  Your mileage may vary.  But I wonder how many of these bleats about the nasty, illegal, immoral hackers were issued by people who were similarly distressed when the New York Times exposed critical US programs to protect us from terrorists.  (You may say this is a loose connection, but the political dimension of the AGW controversy is the entire point….  and the politics of eco-panic mongers and anti-American Leftists are remarkably parallel.)  Here is someone who takes it more seriously.

This seems like a good time to review all those scientists who have thought all along that AGW was, if true, a very minor contributor to whatever overall warming may exist (which it seems is less and less).

h/t:  Mike

Some people think there are just too many of us, and are telling us to do Family Planning to Save the Planet?

What’s the best way to save the planet? Don’t have kids, say researchers from Oregon State University.

“Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle,” the report states.

Hmm. I suppose I’m OK with people who believe this being the ones doing the family planning.

The myth of over-population is exploded here.  But even the pessimists now accept that the world’s population will peak at around 9 billion at mid-century or so, and then begin a slow, steady decline.  Runaway population growth is no more a given than runaway global warming.

The worst thing is for people in developed nations to reduce their own numbers by reducing fertility, though exactly that is happening.  Yet, it is people in such nations who are the only ones likely to follow the benighted advice of the population doomsayers.  The maintenance of the technical and professional base that is required to feed and serve a large world population is crucial, and that technical and professional base will not be coming from the third world, even though third world population growth rates are higher.

At bottom, fear of greater human numbers is evidence of a kind of misanthropically misguided, myopic ideology that values worms, exotic rats, unusual trees and interesting insects more than it values humanity.  The earth is plenty big enough to hold and feed 10 billion people, the most we are ever likely to have. 

What’s more likely is that in about 70 years, real estate prices will start to drop as demand falls from the peak.  My great-grandkids will probably be able to pick up a mansion in sunny Wichita for a song….  right next to the super-farms that will have been feeding the world for decades.

Of course, people will have higher heating bills, due to the gradual onset of another ice age.

Watch this, from Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute.

I haven’t heard much about this from other sources…. I’m trying to get more information about it.  But if this fellow isn’t exaggerating, this is looking really ugly.

More info here and here and some especially scary nonsense from Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister.

Of course, green is the color of mold, really bad teeth, and gangrene.

This disastrous drag on the US economy has passed the House, narrowly.

The last chance to block it is in the Senate.  Don’t just assume that your senator can’t be moved.  Write them, evey day, to express your disapproval of a bill that even its proponents admit will make no significant difference to the climate, but which will weigh down an already struggling US economy.   This is purely a “feel good” bill for the eco-pagan elites, yet it is a bill which will hurt the poor more than anyone, because they are always the first hurt by a struggling economy.  The notion that only “the polluters” will pay more is risible.  Prices will be higher, and costs and fees will simply be passed on to the consumers, doing the most harm to those on the tightest budgets.  More subtle effects, but even more damaging to the poor, will be the jobs that will continue to move offshore, as the US becomes less competitive against other large economies that will never make such restrictions on their own producers.

Imagine a public pool that isn’t quite as perfectly clean as you’d like it to be.  Now imagine about 100 people in it, splashing around, many barely staying above water, but all required to be in the water, because there is simply nowhere else to be.  And now imagine throwing a 25 pound cleaning filter around the neck of one swimmer who is already struggling, a swimmer whose history is one of rescuing other swimmers, giving other swimmers short breathers while they hang on for a minute, even though you know that only an insignificant difference will be made by the 25 pound filter.

Now imagine being proud of your commitment to clean water, because you hung the filter around the neck of one swimmer.  Now imagine having friends in the press who are willing to repeat your line that “it won’t really hurt the swimmer who is carrying the extra weight” as if it’s true.  And imagine pretending that you’ve done a great service for the world, and being allowed to get away with it.

That’s about where we are today.

Call your senators.  Then write to them, or send email at least.  Then call them again.  You owe it to yourself, and anyone you care about.

Flotation devices are going to be in very short supply, and very expensive.

Reflections On an Age Now Fading… Read it all.

On matter of race, one detects beneath the therapeutic calls for inclusiveness, an unfortunate renewal of identity politics with a new harder edge-we saw that in the campaign with the slips about reparations and oppression studies, the clingers speech, Rev. Wright, and the ‘typical white person’ put down. Then with Eric Holder’s blast about Americans as “cowards” and now with the Supreme Court nominee’s somewhat derogatory remarks about the proverbial white male judge. We are not hearing praise of the melting pot ideal of intermarriage, assimilation, or integration-even if such elites in their private lives do not predicate their daily regimens in terms of racialism. I spent 21 years in a university in which quite affluent elites sought any multicultural patina possible for an edge in professional advancement and general leverage–the hyphenated name, the addition of the accent mark on the name, the non-American accentuation, occasional ethnic dress, the relabeling of one as a designated minority who otherwise had not previously emphasized race, etc.—that would suggest they were not part of the popular capitalist culture-supposedly centered on the white male-around them. Yet I left sensing the industry of race was doomed, due to the power of popular culture, the unworkable labyrinth of racial identification due to intermarriage, the laughable contradictions (the jet-black immigrant from India got no favored treatment, the light-skinned Costa Rican name Jorge piggy-backed onto the Mexican-American experience), the son of the Mexican father who used his name Gomez was authentic, the son of the Mexican mother who carried his non-Mexican father’s name Wilson was not. And on and on with this ridiculous neo-Confederate practice of adjudicating percentages of race to the sixteenth, and drops of targeted minority blood—a racist enterprise to the core. The only constant? The white male was fair game. It mattered little that more women were graduating than men, that under the racial spoils system we were beginning to see white males in less percentages than those found in the general population at the university; instead, it was sort of OK to trash, as in the manner of Sotomayor’s comment, the proverbial white male, as if we are collectively ashamed of everyone from the Wright Brothers to Lincoln to John Wayne to JFK.

When so close an observer of history and modern life as Victor Davis Hanson is this pessimistic, I feel the need to go see an escapist movie or something.

Read his entire article. Then go get a massage or a pedicure and try not to think about it.

As most of us know, half the battle is controlling the terms of the debate. And sometimes, it seems, if you want to sell something that few are buying, you need to consult a thesaurus.

Environmental issues consistently rate near the bottom of public worry, according to many public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. “We know why it’s lowest,” said Mr. Perkowitz, a marketer of outdoor clothing and home furnishings before he started ecoAmerica, whose activities are financed by corporations, foundations and individuals. “When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say ‘global warming,’ a certain group of Americans think that’s a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language. “Energy efficiency” makes people think of shivering in the dark. Instead, it is more effective to speak of “saving money for a more prosperous future.” In fact, the group’s surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.”

“Another key finding: remember to speak in TALKING POINTS aspirational language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology,” said the e-mail account of the group’s study.

Are Americans really this stupid?

Well, yes.  They elected Obama hoping for unspecified change.  Any old direction will do, it would seem.  They bought Clinton’s “contributions” for taxes, radical feminism’s “pro-choice” for anti-unborn child and pro-abortion, “gun control” for “guns for criminals only”, and “hate speech” for telling the truth, or at least exercising your First Amendment right to speak your mind.

One of the best ways to lie is just to pretend not to hear anyone who’s telling the truth, and keep right on as if they never spoke.  That’s exactly what’s happening in our national conversation, as the Left rules all the media but talk radio, and is gunning for that, too.  So “global warming” has morphed into “climate change” and “carbon taxes” is going to be “anti-pollution fees”, and so on.

In the meantime, if you had to bet, the smart money is that the earth is cooling, overall.  And the smarter money knows that even if it isn’t, the change is very gradual, probably has little to do with human activity, and it isn’t even clear that it will be a bad thing.

And by the way:  there were polar bears around when the earth was so warm that Greenland was verdant farm land, with nary a glacier in sight.  (That’s why it’s called GREENLAND.)   Somehow, the bears survived.

I suspect they will again.

When you think about it, it’s kind of funny that anyone is called a “climate czar.” Generally, a czar is someone who had power over something, and I think it’s pretty obvious that humans have very little power over the climate. But Obama’s new “climate czarina” is Carol M. Browner, and she is a card carrying socialist with bad plans for U.S. sovereignty and our economy.  (Much more at the link.)

Until last week, Carol M. Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s pick as global warming czar, was listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change.

By Thursday, Mrs. Browner’s name and biography had been removed from Socialist International’s Web page, though a photo of her speaking June 30 to the group’s congress in Greece was still available.

Socialist International, an umbrella group for many of the world’s social democratic political parties such as Britain’s Labor Party, says it supports socialism and is harshly critical of U.S. policies.

The group’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, the organization’s action arm on climate change, says the developed world must reduce consumption and commit to binding and punitive limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Many of us have long said that “climate change” is just a smokescreen for socialist takeovers of various aspects of the economy, or maybe just the whole thing. Obama’s appointment does nothing to allay such concerns.

We’ve been commenting on this already. Here’s a Telegraph article saying that 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to “natural factors” such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely “masking the underlying warming trend”, and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

H/T: AzusaPacificAlumni

The last time I looked, Thomas Friedman is neither a climate scientist, meterologist, physicist, or economist.  His academic training is in “Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Studies”. He’s a journalist. That’s it. So I hope Obama is not taking seriously this advice from Friedman to him, which presupposes Friedman’s ability to make scientific and economic judgments:

[Friedman] insisted that the challenge facing Obama required a revolutionary attitude to environmental policy, if the new administration wanted to avoid the devastating effects of global warming.

“We can do it if our next president, who I have great hopes for, is ready to be as radical as the moment we are in,” Friedman, whose previous bestseller was “The World is Flat”, told a lunch hosted by The Asia Society.

“Our next president is going to be called on to be more radical — I am talking crazy, wild-hair, paint-on-your-face, ring-in-your-nose radical — in what he does, than any president since FDR,” he said, referring to Franklin D Roosevelt, US president during the 1930s depression and the Second World War.

Continue reading “Time to get RADICAL?”

This is about our adventures in dividing a 5 acre lot into two 2.5 acre lots, in San Bernardino County in southern California. It will include human folly, financial folly, governmental folly, economic folly, and environmental folly. Plenty of folly to go around. If you missed it, this post will make a lot more sense if you read Part 1 first.

So, we hired a real estate agent to help us through the land subdivision process. We were starting this about 2 years ago, when the real estate boom was in full flower, and everybody was very busy, including our agent, all the county offices and employees involved, and all the private companies the county engages to perform certain services for it. So, initially, we waited.

Then we waited some more.

What we didn’t know is that while we were waiting, the prices for every aspect of the process were going up, eventually reaching about $20,000, instead of the $14,000-$15,000 we were told initially.

Continue reading “Dividing the promised land part 2″

This is about our adventures in dividing a 5 acre lot into two 2.5 acre lots, in San Bernardino County in southern California.  It will include human folly, financial folly, governmental folly, economic folly, and environmental folly.  Plenty of folly to go around.

My family and I live on the south half of the 5 acre lot.  The lot is defined as “sub-dividable” by the county.  We bought it 6 years ago, had a house built on it, assuming that we could subdivide it when we chose, and either sell the other half, or build on the other half, then sell it.

You know what they say about assumptions.

We moved into the house a little more than 4 years ago.  As you may recall, the go-go real estate market was in full swing.  When we began to check into it, we discovered that the cost to subdivide the property into two separate lots was estimated at $14,000 – $15,000.  Wow.  Who knew?  We asked why, and were told about all the things that “had to be done” before the lot could be divided.

“But,” we protested, “we just bought the lot, and built on it.  Environmental studies were already done.  Drainage has been determined.  Percolation tests have been done.”  (Those are necessary to determine that the ground will tolerate a septic tank, since it’s a pretty remote area.)  We continued, “And the survey was just done to determine the exact limits of the property before we were allowed to buy it.  All you have to do is draw a line down the middle of it.  Nothing has changed in the last six years.”

The county employee smiled condescendingly and explained that it all had to be done again.  I asked why, and was told, “It’s the state law for part of it, and county regulations for the rest of it.”  Did I mention that it was going to be $14,000 – $15,000 to get all this stuff done again?

Basically, we were staying in Judah, and wanted to sell Israel. Unfortunately, the Assyrians run the county, and the Babylonians run the state.  We could wait for Sharia Law to take over, and pay the jizya, or we could just bite the bullet and pay tribute now.

Continue reading “Dividing the promised land part 1″

Victor Davis Hanson is in fine fettle indeed, in Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts. Herewith, two of them, but all are worth the reading.

5. California is now a valuable touchstone to the country, a warning of what not to do. Rarely has a single generation inherited so much natural wealth and bounty from the investment and hard work of those more noble now resting in our cemeteries—and squandered that gift within a generation. Compare the vast gulf from old Governor Pat Brown to Gray Davis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. We did not invest in many dams, canals, rails, and airports (though we use them all to excess); we sued each other rather than planned; wrote impact statements rather than left behind infrastructure; we redistributed, indulged, blamed, and so managed all at once to create a state with about the highest income and sales taxes and the worst schools, roads, hospitals, and airports. A walk through downtown San Francisco, a stroll up the Fresno downtown mall, a drive along highway 101 (yes, in many places it is still a four-lane, pot-holed highway), an afternoon at LAX, a glance at the catalogue of Cal State Monterey, a visit to the park in Parlier—all that would make our forefathers weep. We can’t build a new nuclear plant; can’t drill a new offshore oil well; can’t build an all-weather road across the Sierra; can’t build a few tracts of new affordable houses in the Bay Area; can’t build a dam for a water-short state; and can’t create even a mediocre passenger rail system. Everything else—well, we do that well.

…

10. The K-12 public education system is essentially wrecked. No longer can any professor expect an incoming college freshman to know what Okinawa, John Quincy Adams, Shiloh, the Parthenon, the Reformation, John Locke, the Second Amendment, or the Pythagorean Theorem is. An entire American culture, the West itself, its ideas and experiences, have simply vanished on the altar of therapy. This upcoming generation knows instead not to judge anyone by absolute standards (but not why so); to remember to say that its own Western culture is no different from, or indeed far worse than, the alternatives; that race, class, and gender are, well, important in some vague sense; that global warming is manmade and very soon will kill us all; that we must have hope and change of some undefined sort; that AIDs is no more a homosexual- than a heterosexual-prone disease; and that the following things and people for some reason must be bad, or at least must in public company be said to be bad (in no particular order): Wal-Mart, cowboys, the Vietnam War, oil companies, coal plants, nuclear power, George Bush, chemicals, leather, guns, states like Utah and Kansas, Sarah Palin, vans and SUVs.