The New Clarion

And we are worse off than we were a year ago.  Obama is exactly the disaster we expected him to be.  Perhaps more shameless than expected, given the Chairman Mao ornament on the White House Christmas tree.  But one man’s mass murdering totalitarian dictator is another man’s hero, right?

 The endless war against the barbarians continues, as we sit like prisoners on our airplanes, unwilling to defeat those who continue to attack us.  Perfectly able to defeat them, of course, but completely unwilling to assert our right to self-defense.  So we cast suspicious glances at airline passengers, instead, and hope for the best.

In Iran, a revolution may be brewing.  But suppose the mullahs are overthrown, and a new, presumably non-theocratic, regime takes power.  Can we trust Obama to do the right thing?  After all, Ahmedinejad was elected.  Won’t Obama call for his reinstatement, as he did with the Chavez-imitator down in Honduras?  After all, revolutions are not legal.

“We believe that the coup was not legal and that President Zelaya remains the democratically elected president there,” Obama said.

Just insert the name Ahmedinejad, and you have a good idea what Obama might say. 

On the environmentalist front, the global warming gravy-train continues chugging along, distributing government largesse at every stop.  Not just for scientists on the government dole, now, but for every country that can think of a reason to make the West feel guilty for being the beacon of civilization for the last 500 years or so.  That is an unforgivable sin, when one’s goal is an Earth rid of the disease, Man.

The spectacle of Senators selling their votes for cash would embarrass men of integrity.  Since there aren’t any such men in the Senate, the Senators are merely puzzled at the reaction to their venality.  It’s a time honored tradition there.  So what if it involves the incipient nationalization of the health care industry?  What makes them special?  Truly, nothing makes them special.  If car makers can be taken over by the government, so can medical practitioners.  Some of us don’t think it’s right for car makers to be taken over by the government either, if individual rights have any meaning.  Obviously, to our current governors, they do not.

On the positive side of the ledger, Obama’s popularity with the public is plummeting.  On the negative side, that means we might get a Republican in office again.  Heads they win, tails we lose.

We all know there is only one long term solution to our problems: a rational philosophy.  With a rational philosophy comes a rational morality, egoism.  To that end, the best news this year is the continued high sales of Atlas Shrugged, and especially the continued success of the books for teachers program of the Ayn Rand Institute.  If we can reach enough of them before their spirit is killed by the comprachicos, we might still right the ship before it sinks.

I’ve read that 6th century a.d. Italy was devastated by General Belisarius’s war to conquer the country for Byzantium. He didn’t bomb Italy back to the stone age, he did it with sword, fire and horse. One result was that land that had been cultivated for centuries returned to the wild. This has always struck me as an eloquent symbol of the beginning of the Dark Ages.

Now the US government is pursuing the same results as Belisarius — not by waging war against its own citizens (or is it?) — but by paying farmers to plant trees instead of crops.

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1. Janet Napolitano first says “the system worked.” Then  she says the system “did not work.”

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In response to the Al Qaida terrorist attack on Christmas day, the Obama administration has responded forcefully, punishing and restricting the freedom of… innocent airline passengers.

According to a new TSA security directive distributed to airlines on Saturday, airlines are to “disable aircraft-integrated passenger communications systems and services (phone, internet access services, live television programming, global positioning systems) prior to boarding and during all phases of flight.” Also: all passenger access to carry-on luggage, getting up from seats and having anything on laps is banned one hour before all landings.

But lest you think Obama cares nothing about freedom and rights, rest assured that Abdulmutallab will not be sent to Guantanamo Bay and treated as a prisoner of war. We wouldn’t want to interrogate him to find out who armed and trained him (however incompetently), so that future attacks might be thwarted. No, the security of Americans is not as important as Abdulmutallab’s constitutional rights. The enemy combatant has been given lawyers.

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One of Obama’s strategies for “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” is to subordinate US sovereignty to international law. Instead of an independent America that pursues its national self-interest, the left wants an America restricted by international law. You could say their goal is the opposite of Washington’s famous advice against entangling alliances — the left very much wants an America entangled, bound and subservient to foreign countries.

So I’m suspicious of an Obama executive order that rescinds parts of a Reagon EO. As I understand it, Interpol is now no longer subject to search and seizure in America. This doesn’t mean that Interpol can search and seize American citizens, but that it cannot be searched and seized by American law enforcement. If any reader with an understanding of international law can tell us the significance of this, please do so in the comments.

UPDATE: Captain Ed looks at this EO revision. He makes an interesting point: American citizens have fewer rights before Interpol than captured foreign terrorists have in America.

“The personal is the political” is a New Leftist slogan. I think what it really means is morality is altruist-collectivist-statist. Your values are not personal, but are bound up in and determined by politics.

This inversion of hierarchy makes politics more fundamental than morality, and so demotes values. Values are no longer intensely personal, but are collectivist: one conforms out of duty to the group. This creates a bizarre way of looking at the world, as seen in this video by Rock the Vote, which advises young people to withhold sex from people who oppose the leftist campaign to nationalize medicine.

Religious fundamentalists would probably say the young people in this video are “selfish” because they’re having sex. As Mencken said, puritanism is the suspicion that someone somewhere is having fun. The real problem with the morality of these young people — promiscuous-collectivist, if you will — is that they lack the true self-esteem to feel intense passion about their values. Instead sex is all casual. Let’s do it. No, let’s not do it because you oppose health care reform. Whatever.

These young conformists are the product of Dewey’s educational theory, which makes “socialization” an important concern of education. Americans now have a socialized morality and way of thinking. The Democrats are currently in the process of remaking our society so that it reflects the prevailing morality.

The brilliance of the New Left is that they focused on changing culture first, and left economics to follow. An individualist culture would never accept socialism, but a collectivist culture will go along with statism in docile obedience. The wonder is that our fragmented, diverse nation still has a significant portion of individualists resisting the growth of the state.

I see Associated Press science reporter Seth Borenstein is in the news again. This time it’s Anthoney Watts at Watts Up With That (WUWT). Mr Watts is calling for the AP to divorce it self of Mr. Borenstein’s services due to obvious reporting bias. I couldn’t agree more. In fact I thought Obama might appoint him PR Czar for the GW doomsday bunch. (more…)

A real scientist takes on just one aspect of Al Gore’s propaganda masterpiece, An Inconvenient Truth, the part about mosquitoes:

I am a scientist, not a climatologist, so I don’t dabble in climatology. My speciality is the epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases. As [Al Gore's] film [An Inconvenient Truth] began, I knew Mr Gore would get to mosquitoes: they’re a favourite with climate-change activists. When he got to them, it was all I feared. In his serious voice, Mr Gore presented a nifty animation, a band of little mosquitoes fluttering their way up the slopes of a snow-capped mountain, and he repeated the old line: Nairobi used to be ‘above the mosquito line, the limit at which mosquitoes can survive, but now…’ Those little mosquitoes kept climbing.

The truth? Nairobi means ‘the place of cool waters’ in the Masai language. The town grew up around a camp, set up in 1899 during the construction of a railway, the famous ‘Lunatic Express’. There certainly was water there — and mosquitoes. From the start, the place was plagued with malaria, so much so that a few years later doctors tried to have the whole town moved to a healthier place. By 1927, the disease had become such a plague in the ‘White Highlands’ that £40,000 (equivalent to about £350,000 today) was earmarked for malaria control. The authorities understood the root of the problem: forest clearance had created the perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.

The brazen lies of the totalitarian left are mind-boggling. But how long can they keep pushing lies and ignoring the truth before the whole global warming establishment collapses? If we had a press willing to explore real inconvenient truths, the collapse would have come years ago.

This is how you use power:

The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn’t move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a “command-and-control” role over the process in a way that could hurt business. 

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But while administration officials have long said they prefer Congress take action on climate change, the economic official who spoke with reporters Tuesday night made clear that the EPA will not wait and is prepared to act on its own. 

And it won’t be pretty. 

“If you don’t pass this legislation, then … the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area,” the official said. “And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

The Obama administration is saying, in effect: “Don’t worry about the adverse economic effects of cap and trade, because if you don’t pass it, we will do it by bureaucratic fiat and we’ll really screw things up.” Unbelievable.

Always alert for news about the increasing depravity of the totalitarian left, this story caught my eye:

A pack of leftists has put a $200,000 price on the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donohue. Oh, it’s not a plot to kill him, they claim, only a bounty to get him arrested. It’s one heck of a coarsening of U.S. politics.

Is it just us, or is this the most despicable act the hipster left has come up with since MoveOn.org tried to smear General David Petraeus as General Betray-Us in a New York Times ad last year?

Just one more item of evidence that the left has abandoned reason and embraced force. The left is determined to lie, smear and intimidate its opponents into silence. Instead of answering arguments, the left destroys lives.

Here’s a lighter take on Climategate:

The release of previously-sequestered emails, documents, and program code offered confirmation of what many anthropogenic global warming (AGW) skeptics always suspected: the politicization of climate science had utterly corrupted the findings. Those findings, viz. that global warming was taking place and that man’s actions had brought it about, formed the basis for broad international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Accord. The upcoming Copenhagen conference was intended to be the venue where the “alarms” were finally answered and the developed world was going to commence the sacrifices necessary to atone for their development.

But the emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England have cast unavoidable doubts as to the legitimacy of the long-heralded consensus that had found the science to be “settled.” World leaders, when they weren’t feigning ignorance of the controversy, began to backpedal from commitments due to the groundswell of grassroots outrage.
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Things are moving fast in America. Like water that swirls faster the closer it gets to the center as it goes down the drain. With the New Left in control of the executive and legislative branches, they know they have to get things done now before the next election.

Henry Waxman wants the government to bail out newspapers. (And always remember there was a Supreme Court case in the 1940′s that said in essence, what the state funds, the state controls.)

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