The New Clarion

At The Little Things, Amy Mossoff has an admirable habit of posting three good things that happen to her every day. I have decided that I will do that also but only occasionally since I’m a part time blogger. So on this dreary, rainy, overcast Sunday I have three good things to report. First, the wife and I had breakfast with our second son, his wife and our 3 1/2 yr old grand daughter. Very enjoyable.

Second, I was able to read the liberal-leftist editorial page of the Detroit Free Press without giving in to the urge to kick or hit something. I’m proud of myself. The more I realize that the battle has to be fought at the level of fundamental ideas, the more I am beginning to see that getting all emotional over all the god-awful ideas on these printed pages is a waste of time. Better to keep pumping out good ideas or at least attacking some bad ones just to let readers know they are bad.

The third good thing was when I turned to the letters page and discovered my LTE was the lead one of 8 LTEs under the headline “Big government is a bad solution.”

“Editorial page editor Stephen Henderson’s column last Sunday (“Huge numbers come with big change”) was wrong in saying that “no one is arguing credibly against government action to shore up financial markets, spur job creation or thaw credit markets.”

A majority of Americans flooded their congressional representatives urging against the bailout bill and stimulus packages. They are being ignored by Congress and the president.

And the idea that Obama will abandon an effort if it doesn’t work is utter nonsense. Doesn’t work? According to what standard? Obama is a pragmatist. He doesn’t believe in standards. He’s shooting from the hip now and will do so in the next crisis.”

Michael Neibel

While there were other things wrong with that editorial by Mr Henderson, my purpose was to counter two false notions: that there was no credible opposition to the massive spending; that the citizens are being ignored, and that Obama’s pragmatism would guarantee that any failed efforts would be abandoned. I don’t think so. What would it mean for a pragmatist to abandon something that doesn’t work?

Suppose a dear friend is seriously ill in a hospital. You go to see him and ask the nurse what is his diagnosis? “Diagnosis?” she exclaims. “Silly man. We don’t deal in such abstract theories. We have to pay attention to the real world, the here and now.” “So how do you plan to make him better?” you ask. She replies “The doctor has given him a shot of medicine A. If that doesn’t work I’m sure he’ll go to others.” But what about his medical history?” you inquire. “Sir” she says painfully, “everyone knows that what was true yesterday won’t be true today and to rely on that would be simply irresponsible.” “But” you cry, “What if he dies”? “Well” she admits, “that would be unfortunate but at least we tried. We took action! We did something!” You start to consider funeral arrangements.

Happily our hospitals haven’t deteriorated to this yet. But our universities, media and body politic has. Obama is just the latest administrator who has surrounded himself (cabinet) with just such doctors and nurses which he drew from the political hospital (congress).

I’ve decided that some future LTEs will try to focus on how pragmatism doesn’t work. So, with that and despite the rain, it wasn’t a bad day after all.

Thirty years ago Petr Beckmann, a professor of electrical engineering, published a pamphlet titled The Non-Problem of Nuclear Wastes.  In it he showed that while no source of energy is entirely free of waste storage dangers, nuclear waste was less of a problem than any other viable energy source, especially coal.  Among the many problems of coal waste disposal is its sheer mass, which dwarfs nuclear waste; coal itself is radioactive (but no one suggests a “nuclear priesthood” needs to watch over it for a thousand years); it emits particulates into the air which get into people’s lungs, causing fatalities; and coal waste contains other toxins, some of which remain toxic forever (such as arsenic), unlike radioactivity, which eventually decays to below the level of radioactivity of the ore that it originally came from.

He showed how bad coal is in comparison to nuclear, not because he was against coal, but simply to show that nuclear is a better, cleaner, and safer source of energy.   Also, he bases his arguments on the sensible idea that American nuclear plants would reprocess spent fuel, which would reduce the amount of nuclear waste – something which is not being done, again, for political reasons.

At any rate, I bring this issue up because President Obama has apparently decided that nuclear waste could never be safe in Yucca Mountain, and he won’t allow it to be stored there.   This simply isn’t a rational conclusion, as Beckmann demonstrates in his pamphlet.  I advise anyone with an interest in the so-called problem of nuclear waste disposal to read Beckmann’s pamphlet. 

On a related note, a promising new nuclear energy technology is written up in Technology Review, something called a Traveling-Wave Reactor.  It would reduce the already minute amount of waste produced by the nuclear industry.

Many blogs do a caption contest every Friday wherein the blogger posts a picture and then visitors leave their take on an appropriate and funny caption for that photo. I really enjoy contributing to those sorts of things, but it doesn’t seem appropriate for TNC so how about a comment contest on Fridays. We select an article—nothing too lengthy—and you supply a comment analyzing it. Our commenters thus far have been exceedingly insightful so I’ll be most interested to read your take. Winner gets a free RSS subscription to TNC!

“Obama Steadfast on Healthcare”

Moderation in life is a good thing. We must balance our long-term plans with the need for short-term rewards. So we forego spending today so we can save for a vacation six months from now. Many of us drink alcohol but we stop before we get drunk. Life is about taking an expansive view of our interests in these and countless other ways.

Along the same lines, there is value in keeping an open mind about subjects. Dogmatism, which means the refusal to think, leads one away from a reality orientation by turning a blind eye towards contradictory facts. But an open mind is not a wide-open mind, considering each new proposition devoid of context. And it also does not mean that there are no absolutes; you can achieve certainty about particular conclusions you have reached through careful deliberation.

But there are fundamental distinctions about which you cannot be silent. There are fundamental decisions you simply must make. The nature and existence of God is one such decision. Another is freedom versus slavery. These types of choices demand confrontation and it is one or the other that must prevail. Admixtures are unpalatable at best and fatal at worst.

That is why I view the political moderate as a despicable creature. Like agnostics, faced with a choice between two fundamentally conflicting viewpoints, he shrugs and says, “Who am I to know?” David Brooks’s recent manifesto is a bold statement of a lack of boldness, a defense of an indefensible position.

The political fecklessness and intellectual vapidity Brooks laments about the centrists stem from an inherent lack of principle. The two camps are principled: the liberals believe that the state is supreme and should be able to do whatever is necessary to further its aims; the capitalists believe that individual rights are sacrosanct and that government is instituted to secure and protect those rights. The man in the middle—Brooks in this case—objects only to the rigidity of both positions. He seeks a “vision that puts competitiveness and growth first, not redistribution first.” Redistribution is not out of the question; it just should not be the first priority.

In this political calculus, it is only the capitalist vision that must capitulate. Once the sanctity of the individual’s right to life, liberty, and property is conceded, then it is just a matter of degree—the state is supreme, it faces no limit in principle. If you get a group in power that is more oriented towards freedom, then people might get more of what they earn or face less strictures on their activities. But there is nothing to stop the next group from rolling back those concessions or tightening the handcuffs.

This is no time for moderation of our appetite for liberty. Let us be immoderate! We must not be open to the ideas of slavery. Let us be close-minded! Circle the wagons, truck no compromise, revel in their failures. To paraphrase Churchill, we shall fight them on the blogs, we shall fight them in the newspapers, we shall fight them in the town halls; we must never surrender.

To the surprise of no one who understands capitalism, hybrid cars are not selling.  The powers that be in our government want Americans to buy and drive hybrid vehicles, to save the earth from the putative anthropogenic global warming crisis.  So the government either mandates the production of such vehicles outright, or “encourages” their production in a multitude of ways, e.g., preventing oil exploration, raising taxes on gasoline, mandating specific miles per gallon that vehicles must achieve, spending taxpayers’ money on hybrid research, and everything in between. 

And what is the result of all this government central planning?  Mike Jackson, the CEO of AutoNation, the nation’s largest car dealer, spoke on this subject recently:

There are way too many Toyota Prius hybrids sitting on his car lots across America.

They stretch “as far as the eye can see,” Jackson remarked at The Wall Street’s Journal ECO: nomics conference. He estimated he had some 600,000 hybrid cars “that no one wants.

That’s what happens when businessmen do what the government wants, instead of what the market wants. And what is Mr. Jackson’s solution to this problem?

“I’m looking for a change in consumer behavior,” Jackson said.

One way to motivate consumers to buy more hybrids is a national gasoline tax that would push gas-pump prices to the neighborhood of $4 a gallon, Jackson said. This would help drive down petroleum prices, something that benefits U.S. chemical and airline companies.

This “would keep money in the good ole USA. What’s wrong with that?” Jackson remarked.

Roger Kimball asks the question of the hour: Is Obama incompetent or malevolent? Or to put it another way, is he a fool or a villain? Or both?

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Rush Limbaugh’s speech to CPAC (transcript) over the weekend seems to be the political story of the week. It’s probably a bigger story than it should be. Why it is such a big story is interesting to ponder in itself.

Over the years I have come down on Rush hard. I’ve called him Republican Water Boy and Statist Monster. I have a lot of problems with him, but I agree with something Leonard Peikoff said on his radio show back in the ’90s, that Rush is better than his enemies on the left. (Dr. Peikoff’s opinion of Rush might be less now that he sees the religious right as the greatest threat to American freedom.)

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President Barack Obama delivered a speech before both houses of Congress last Tuesday and Lousiana governor Bobby Jindal gave the Republican response shortly afterwards.

Given the gravity of the moment, we at TNC decided to collect our thoughts on the speeches as a panel discussion.

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Evidently there exists a non-binding resolution at the UN that urges member countries to pass laws restricting FREEDOM OF SPEECH.  The particular object of this restriction is the criticism of religion, so-called blasphemy, with the main impetus behind it coming from Islamic countries, who don’t like Islam to be criticized. 

That such a non-binding resolution is on the books at the UN is sufficient reason to kick that organization out of Amerrica and into some Islamic totalitarian country, where it belongs.  But the Islamic countries are now pressing to make this into a Binding Resolution.  If America were to allow that to happen, I submit that we will have lost the war we are fumbling our way through at present.  Imagine, half way through WWII, the Axis Powers proposed a law forbidding criticism of totalitarianism, and the Allies accepted it.  What then would we have been fighting for?

What are we fighting for now, if there is nothing to criticize in the Religion of Peace, Islam?

I don’t see any chance that America will allow this totalitarian edict to pass in the UN.  But the fact that we have anything to do with the countries pushing it is so grotesque a circumstance, that one is forced to be ready for anything to happen, even to the abolishment of the First Amendment.

This story was brought to my attention at Little Green Footballs, where there is a video of Christopher Hitchens defending the First Amendment on the Lou Dobbs show against the Islamic Totalitarians.

(Edited to add the Axis Powers comparison.)