Bumper Stickers

A bumper sticker yesterday: "Non-Judgement Day is Near."

Oh, how clever.

In our rush to be fair to everyone we've deliberately repudiated the greatness of this country and our history, and for decades have taught that nothing matters so much as never taking sides, because we don't know better... we're just dumb Americans.

While I have hope for a reversal of some of this, Hugh Hewitt has a column titled "The Collapse of Judgment" that illustrates the situation nicely.

He says, "We are, it seems, in danger of losing any sense of priority, of scale, of genuine importance."

"If you could save the victims of one of the following four events, which group would you save?

1. The victims of Fidel Castro's "revolution?"

2. The victims of Hezbollah's ambushes, rockets and missiles over the past three weeks?

3. The victims of the Seattle attack on the Jewish federation?

4. The victims of Mel Gibson's repulsive outburst of anti-Semitic venom?

If all human life is valued equally, you'd have to save Castro's millions of victims, the Hezbollah's thousands, then the one dead and many injured in Seattle, and then Gibson's offended. As an extraordinary week draws to a close, though, you wouldn't have any sense of scale or importance if you had been watching American media or reading American commentary."

Hope you have a chance to read it.

Global Warming... no, wait, cooling, no... wait... um...

Personally, I think "global warming" is an enormously unfortunate and dangerous movement that may impact the poorest of nations and people hardest, for reasons that don't exist. There has been legitimate criticism since the beginning, and hundreds and hundreds of scientists all over the world have been registering their opposition over the last few years, but the political and media machines rage on.

Media, always looking to make a buck from the latest sensation and fueled by ranks full of sympathizers, seems to have a short memory. The folks at the Business & Media Institute took a long look at print media coverage over the last hundred years or so. You'll find what they found interesting.

It found that many publications now claiming the world is on the brink of a global warming disaster said the same about an impending ice age – just 30 years ago. Several major ones, including The New York Times, Time magazine and Newsweek, have reported on three or even four different climate shifts since 1895.

They cite example after example of position-reversal (but no acknowledgement of those reversals...)

How about this...

The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst hysteria about the dangers of a new ice age. The media had been spreading warnings of a cooling period since the 1950s, but those alarms grew louder in the 1970s.

Three months before, on January 11, The Washington Post told readers to “get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come,” in an article titled “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” The article quoted climatologist Reid Bryson, who said “there’s no relief in sight” about the cooling trend.

Journalists took the threat of another ice age seriously. Fortune magazine actually won a “Science Writing Award” from the American Institute of Physics for its own analysis of the danger. “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed,” Fortune announced in February 1974.

“It is the root cause of a lot of that unpleasant weather around the world and they warn that it carries the potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude."

And hysteria sold back then, just like it does now...

“The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations,” wrote Lowell Ponte in his 1976 book “The Cooling.”

If the proper measures weren’t taken, he cautioned, then the cooling would lead to “world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000.”

But wait... global warming? NO! An impending Ice Age! And this was in 1976!

The media just needs something to talk about... just like fashion, it swings back and forth.

Today’s global warming advocates probably don’t even realize their claims aren’t original. Before the cooling worries of the ’70s, America went through global warming fever for several decades around World War II.

The nation entered the “longest warm spell since 1776,” according to a March 27, 1933, New York Times headline. Shifting climate gears from ice to heat, the Associated Press article began “That next ice age, if one is coming … is still a long way off.”

And schools teach it, as if it were fact, which it ain't.

But it sells, for money and position...

Spring 2006 has been swamped with climate change hype in every type of media – books, newspapers, magazines, online, TV and even movies.

One-time presidential candidate Al Gore, a patron saint of the environmental movement, is releasing “An Inconvenient Truth” in book and movie form, warning, “Our ability to live is what is at stake.”

Care for an informed debate? Nice, balanced presentation of all sides? You won't find it in the mainstream...

Despite all the historical shifting from one position to another, many in the media no longer welcome opposing views on the climate. CBS reporter Scott Pelley went so far as to compare climate change skeptics with Holocaust deniers.

“If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel,” Pelley asked, “am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?” he said in an interview on March 23 with CBS News’s PublicEye blog.

He added that the whole idea of impartial journalism just didn’t work for climate stories. “There becomes a point in journalism where striving for balance becomes irresponsible,” he said.

Pelley’s comments ignored an essential point: that 30 years ago, the media were certain about the prospect of a new ice age. And that is only the most recent example of how much journalists have changed their minds on this essential debate.

Some in the media would probably argue that they merely report what scientists tell them, but that would be only half true.

Journalists decide not only what they cover; they also decide whether to include opposing viewpoints. That’s a balance lacking in the current “debate.”

This isn’t a question of science. It’s a question of whether Americans can trust what the media tell them about science.

The article is good and worth reading, "Fire and Ice."

Stopping the Neighborhood Bully

It's a mistake to let a bully push you around for too long. You should make attempts to resolve things peacefully, but don't let it go on too long, or you begin to lose on a number of levels, and that makes it harder to stick up for yourself in the end.

Israel has made the mistake of letting it go for too long, and the world has made it very hard indeed.

Thomas Sowell talks about pacifists and pacifism, up at the recently renovated Townhall.com. It's a great short read.

"...there have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent."

"An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations and concessions. "

"The most catastrophic result of "peace" movements was World War II. While Hitler was arming Germany to the teeth, "peace" movements in Britain were advocating that their own country disarm "as an example to others." "

I really love his opening line -

"One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts."

"Ordinary bravery"

From WWII, a true story... an incredible true story... of heroic action.
The Officers' Club

"He and other pilots fought to remain in formation so they could use each other's guns to defend the group. Rojohn saw a B-17 ahead of him burst into flames and slide sickeningly toward the earth. He gunned his ship forward to fill in the gap.

He felt a huge impact. The big bomber shuddered, felt suddenly very heavy and began losing altitude. Rojohn grasped almost immediately that he had collided with another plane."

Government facilitates growth...

...by getting out of the way. Steven Greenhut, in an article at the Wall Street Journal Online, with a great example of how a free market is better than government.

"The area is developing quickly, without controversy and without a single piece of property taken by eminent domain. Early signs point to an enormous success."

I wish we could send this story to every planner, and teach it in schools...

"Anaheim's old downtown was obliterated in the 1970s through past uses of eminent domain and urban renewal. Now, the city (population: 328,000) wants to build a new downtown, and the target location is called the Platinum Triangle, an area of one-story warehouses near Angel Stadium. In the typical world of redevelopment, officials would choose a plan and a developer, offer subsidies and exclusive development rights, and exert pressure on existing property owners to leave the area. Instead, Anaheim created a land-value premium by creating an overlay zone that allowed almost any imaginable use of property. Because current owners could now sell to a wider range of buyers, the Platinum Triangle is booming, with billions in private investment, millions of square feet of office, restaurant and retail space, and more than a dozen new high-rises in the works."

AMERICAN CITIZEN SOLDIER: SHOOT THE MESSENGERS

Buck Sargent writes from Iraq. AMERICAN CITIZEN SOLDIER: SHOOT THE MESSENGERS

I agree:

"Back at the Gotham City Times, the race to the bottom to release the home team play book continues unimpeded by guilt and unburdened by conscience. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to merely undermine the war at every opportunity and underplay the elections at every turn. No, Al-Qaeda has now been given an above the fold heads-up to switch their long distance call-a-friend-of-Osama plan to ATnT 10-10-2-20, which will bookend nicely with the nuclear launch codes I fully expect to find on the Arts & Leisure page any day now. Compounding their treachery, the Treason Times shamelessly highlighted the results of a "secret" Pentagon investigation identifying the vulnerable spots in individual body armor worn by every soldier and Marine currently under fire. [Note to the Gray Lady’s foreign correspondents: Your body armor likely exhibits the very same weak points]. What was it Darwin had to say about natural selection and the instinct for self-preservation? Species bound for extinction tend to lack it."

The Immorality and Failure of "Welfare"

Yeah, well, maybe the title is a little overbearing, but it's a) really true that welfare the way it is often imposed by governments is immoral, and b) it's worse than a failure, it's an addictive trap. The first generation born into a welfare dependency begins to develop a sense of entitlement that simply grows as future generations are born. Why is it immoral? A system that creates dependency undermines a person's ability to help themselves. You rob people of their ability to do for themselves... and they don't even know it, most times. You just take it. Powerless-ness and dependency then become unconscious habit, and the self eventually turns on itself. "I can't" becomes the default self-image, and psychological homeostasis cements it, on the personal and social level.

Over at CATO Unbound, David Schmidtz has a great essay, "When Inequality Matters" (thanks, Instapundit!). From individuals to societies, these things matter... please read this excerpt carefully:

"Here is a truism about the wealth of nations: Zero-sum games do not increase it. Historically, the welfare of the poor always—always—depends on putting people in a position where their best shot at prosperity is to find a way of making other people better off. The key to long-run welfare never has been and never will be a matter of making sure the game’s best players lose. When we insist on creating enough power to beat the best players in zero-sum games, it is just a matter of time before the best players capture the very power we created in the hope of using it against them. We are never so unequal, or so oppressed, as when we give a dictator the power to equalize us. By contrast, the kinds of equality we have reason to care about will be kinds that in some way facilitate society as a positive sum game."