Archive for December 2009

Kind Hearts and Bitter Enemies

Thursday, December 31, 2009

As of this writing, Rush Limbaugh is resting comfortably, after being admitted to a hospital in Hawaii for chest pains last night. For Rush’s fans and well-wishers, it proved to be a tense evening of Tweets and frequently-refreshed web pages, filling the Internet with hopes and prayers.

For many on the Left, it was an evening of vicious gloating and death wishes.

I won’t link to any of the cesspools that pass for liberal discussion forums. You can find them yourself, if you feel like dumpster diving. You can check out the Twitter topic for Rush Limbaugh to see a lovely holiday assortment of sweets and nuts. No level of desire to be polite or even-handed will ever lead me to pretend the Left and Right are equally vicious when it comes to high-profile figures grappling with their mortality. To be sure, there are plenty of individuals on the Right who reacted to the death of Ted Kennedy with curses and mean spirits. The collective depth of their bitterness is a pond beside the vast sea of hatred that defines the modern Left. You won’t have to look hard to find sweaty rants from liberals who hoped that being blocked from NFL ownership would prove to be a fatal condition for Rush.

Why is Limbaugh so hated by liberals? He makes fun of their leaders and punctures their objects of worship, but there is no shortage of commentators or entertainers who do the same thing to conservatives… in spades, and often cloaked in the guise of “hard” news. It’s instructive that liberals had to fabricate the smears they used to deny Limbaugh his lifelong dream of owning a football team. After all those years of whining about how terrible he is, they couldn’t find any real quotes to condemn him with. They don’t hate him for what he says. They hate him because he can say it without becoming the hobgoblin they fervently want him to be.

It’s not pleasant for the Left to realize that one man can push back against the tide of a popular culture they have controlled for decades, and topple the thrones and altars built by reverent news anchors with good cheer, and a profound lack of venom. Limbaugh has shown some anger and exasperation during his many years on the air, but he’s never been vicious. Compare that to the way liberals were casually vicious to Sarah Palin… often without seeming particularly angry at her.

Our political and cultural disagreements have, inevitably, become more corrosive as the size of the State expanded. There were plenty of hard words flying around between the political opponents of prior generations – the “flame wars” of the Republic’s first century sometimes ended in pistol duels. In the modern era, bitterness has become horribly pervasive. The luxury of discussing politics as a matter of high-minded philosophy is denied to the citizens of a super-State… whose jobs, moral beliefs, and very lives have all become chips on the table, in a high-stakes game played at cable-news speed.

The venom displayed by the people who spent last night wishing Rush Limbaugh would die in that hospital is regrettable, and despicable… but it’s not entirely unreasonable. After all, those who cursed him have been told that anyone who opposes President Obama’s health-care plan wants poor people to die. Anyone who opposes massive taxes and gigantic social programs is a heartless miser. Those who speak out against the excesses of radical environmentalism are the paid operatives of shadowy corporate interests. Those who criticize the awful record of Democrats on national security are inhuman warmongers who thirst for the blood of foreign devils. Anyone who would champion a minority or woman who was officially excommunicated by the civil-rights or feminist elite is a racist.

Rush Limbaugh does all of these things on a daily basis, and he does them better than anyone else. He is the paramount champion of ideas that liberals have been instructed to hate, without hesitation or reflection, and his success delays the coming of a utopia they have been promised all their lives. Do you enjoy playing a few casual hands of poker for pennies with your friends? Would you play the same way if your entire life savings were part of the ante? What if you were told innocent strangers would be made to suffer for every hand you lost? That is the type of game we are compelled to play, when we discuss the politics of the monstrous and incompetent government we have allowed to grow in Washington.

Beneath the tribalism that leads some to declare their hatred of Rush Limbaugh with the same bloodless ferocity they would announce their spite for a rival football team, lies the hot fury of liberals who believe Rush Limbaugh is making fools of the brilliant saviors who stand only a few trillion dollars away from defeating injustice, and soothing the pain of need. Influencing a total State requires absolute commitment to all-consuming politics.

Anyone who believes in socialist government should reconcile themselves to a future where today’s moderates become tomorrow’s Enemies of the State, just as yesterday’s JFK liberals would be dismissed as right-wing maniacs today. The stakes for political and cultural discourse will continue to rise, as more of our lives and wealth become scarce resources to be allocated by the State. To keep that system going, you will need to silence people like Rush Limbaugh. Get used to the people who wanted him to conveniently expire in that hospital room last night. You will soon enough find yourself under the table of our command economy, fighting with them for scraps… and your success will be determined by your ability to designate enemies, and hate them with sufficient dedication.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

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Posted in Culture ♦ 20 Comments »

The Challenge of Freedom

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Writing in the U.K. Times Online, Michael Binyon asks if Iran is approaching the tipping point of revolution. It’s a revolution observers in the West have anticipated for a long time. Ever since the massive protests against the stolen elections of early 2009, when a murderer’s bullet slammed into Neda Soltan’s chest, we’ve wondered if the Iranian people would stand up and overthrow their sinister regime. Neda’s name became a prayer in the West, and many of us thought it would soon become a battle cry ringing through the stale air of Tehran.

New demonstrations are under way, and there have been fresh atrocities, but the regime remains in power. Charles Krauthammer has encouraged the Obama Administration to declare the regime illegitimate… but by the time that happens, the lumberjacks of liberty will already be shouting “Timber!” as the dead regime comes tumbling down.

The melancholy truth is that tyranny is extremely difficult to overcome. Every successful revolution has been a desperate struggle, conducted in the defiance of inevitable defeat. As a religious and spiritual people, we have a tendency to regard the triumph of the righteous as assured, and see victory as the destiny of virtue. The evidence of history says otherwise. No one would have given the American patriots winning odds at the outset of the Revolutionary War, fought against the most disciplined and well-equipped military force of the era, by men who marched through the snow in the tatters of disintegrating boots.

Even patriotic Americans of today don’t always appreciate how special our achievement is… not just in its success, but its endurance. Most victorious “revolutions” end with a new class of slaves cleaning up the victory celebrations, beneath the whips of a new set of tyrants. As Binyon points out in his Times Online article, grisly regimes like North Korea remain in power, despite decades of poverty and manifest failure. The image of a lone, unarmed man standing against a line of tanks in Tienanmen Square hangs proudly in the gallery of Western memory, but it is virtually unknown to the people of China, its rightful owners. Brutal oppression works. That’s why humanity is still sick with it, after thousands of years.

Freedom is not a gift, or even a prize to be taken in battle. It is a challenge, and it is frightening. Modern Americans are born with the greatest inheritance of freedom enjoyed by any children of mankind, but they don’t guard it jealously. Too many of them view it as a currency to be exchanged for benefits. Freedom implies responsibility, and choice is meaningless without the risk of failure. We’ve come to define “fairness” as “everybody wins.” To build that rickety and doomed variety of “fairness,” freedom must be melted down into nails.

Our current government does not provide a rousing defense of liberty to those battling oppression in Iran, and elsewhere. What do those people think, when they see an exhausted West that wallows in self-loathing? What conclusions do they draw, when they hear the grandchildren of the Greatest Generation meekly concede that freedom is a burden, and life depends on the subsidies and control of the State? What encouragement can they find in the example of a nation that racks up debt as if it doesn’t expect to survive long enough for the bills to come due? Should the Iranian resistance be eager to fight and die, to replace mullahs with swindlers who steal trillions with midnight votes?

Capitalism is the practical expression of freedom. The two concepts are inseparable. Freedom of speech without property produces nothing but serfs with active social lives. Our current President was pleased to accept a politically-motivated Nobel Prize from a committee that honored Yasser Arafat, a murderous totalitarian thug. He visited Copenhagen to receive polite applause from people that gave socialist dictator Hugo Chavez a thunderous ovation for his anti-capitalist ravings. Could anyone in this Administration deliver a heartfelt endorsement of capitalism to the hungry ears of the Iranian protesters? Would any of them even be willing to try?

President Obama’s belief that America’s standing in the world would improve with his election, because he’s a “good listener,” is the exact opposite of the truth. Wise people, and nations, are always listening carefully… but the world improves when America speaks with confidence. Obama’s cherished Indonesian childhood, and the travels through the Muslim world he boasts of, have proven to mean nothing to the forces of Islamic fascism. He should have spent more time learning what his American heritage means to the people dying on the streets of Tehran, and those like them around the world.

Iran’s future remains cloudy. Even if the rumors about the Ayatollah Khamenei preparing to flee the country are true, a great deal of butchery may separate us from the moment when the wheels of his plane leave the tarmac. The wildest dream of democracy would have the Iranian people put the rest of the theocracy on the next plane behind him, with no blankets or pillows, and strict instructions to remain seated during the last hour of the flight. Even if the story took such an incredible turn, we should be under no illusions that the people of a liberated Iran would automatically love us… but we should love them anyway. The American flag was not raised solely for the benefit of those who are blessed and honored to stand beneath it. It is a challenge to all the tyrants of the world.

I dearly hope that, before his time in office is done, President Obama comes to understand that the challenge of freedom was not meant to be mumbled, or cloaked in the false vanity of regret. It should be bellowed in the faces of butchers and dictators. America has a moral obligation to remain strong, brave, and confident. No one on Earth should ever have to face a disaster and wonder if the Americans will be able to help. No victim of oppression should ever look at us and wonder if we still think freedom is priceless.

Cross-posted at Hot Air.

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Posted in Islam, National Defense ♦ 41 Comments »

The Danger of Distraction

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Last week was a busy one in Washington. The Democrat-controlled Senate spent hundreds of millions in bribes, to buy the votes it needed for cloture on the massively unpopular health-care bill it plans to inject into the beating heart of American democracy and capitalism. Complex parliamentary maneuvers were made. The special concessions needed to win cloture added more complexity to a bill that was already thousands of pages long, including nonsense like declaring Nebraska to be the only state that would receive full Medicaid funding.

All of this effort was undertaken in the service of a bill whose uncertain fate has been delayed by a President suddenly very nervous about the polls. There is a better than even chance that Obamacare will die during its trek through the wasteland that separates the House and Senate, leaving its authors with nothing to show for their efforts but a bloated corpse. If it survives, it will tear our politics and economics apart, producing countless unexpected consequences, and possibly sparking something approaching a revolution among a public increasingly determined to resist an out-of-control Democrat Party.

While all of this was going on, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab was slipping on a set of explosive-laced underwear, apparently provided by al-Qaeda bomb makers, and preparing to board Northwest Flight 253. He walked right past a titanic federal government that views its $3.6 trillion budget as merely the larval stage to something really exciting. We got lucky – his bomb did not detonate, and brave passengers aboard Flight 253 took it from there. This led to the marvelous spectacle of manifestly incompetent Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano assuring us this was an example of how “the system works.”

No aspect of this system works. A lot of good people have done outstanding work in Homeland Security and law enforcement, to keep us safe. The system around them is decomposing rapidly.

If Abdul Farouk had been a little better at detonating his underwear, this Christmas weekend would have become a time of horror and heartrending loss, and Janet Napolitano would be sitting at home and sobbing as she watched the search for debris and body parts on CNN, and waited for the first subpoenas to arrive. Ask yourself what would happen to the chief of a private security firm who claimed the survival of hundreds of civilians, through sheer luck, constituted a validation of her “system.” Her company would already be as dead as ValuJet, and her future career as a security officer would involve Segways and food courts.

A few months ago, the Obama Administration tried blaming its endless failures on “distractions.” Legitimate criticism and political opposition is not a distraction. This is what a dangerously distracted government looks like. It should be spending less time trying to wrap itself in a cocoon of tax dollars, to emerge as the collective butterfly of Hugo Chavez’ dreams, and more time fulfilling its vital functions. Too bad some of that $867 billion “stimulus” bill didn’t go for putting more 3D imaging equipment in airports, or hiring more air marshals. I guess none of the Democrats’ big contributors have interests in those areas.

A distracted government does not consist of a President trying to ignore a ringing telephone to personally guide Predator drones into terrorist strongholds. It’s not about a few individuals trying to cram too much into their daily schedules. It’s about massive shifts in personnel, political capital, and funding. Prior to this weekend, the Obama Administration was devoting far more energy to its greedy anticipation of the health-care takeover than to homeland security. The glacial realignment of lifetime career personnel, throughout the complex maze of interconnected Washington bureaus, was already underway in response.

An aggressive, activist government will always be more interested in what it wants to do, than fundamental duties it must perform. Contrary to the paranoid liberal fantasies of the Bush era, there is very little useful power to be gained from exaggerating the importance of domestic security. Health-care reform will give statists direct control over your medicine, body, diet… and, with the kind of audacity that turned the interstate commerce clause into a mandate for limitless federal power, it will eventually give them control of nearly every aspect of your economic existence. Homeland security gives them the power to make you remain seated during the last hour of a flight, and keep your hand lotion in your checked baggage. No contest.

You can measure Obama’s understanding of the terrorist threat by his willingness to name 9/11 conspiracy nut Van Jones as “green jobs czar.” If Glenn Beck hadn’t forced Obama to toss Jones out with the evening trash, they’d probably be having some fascinating conversations about the events aboard Northwest Flight 253 right about now. Jones would doubtless be standing in front of a massive flowchart, made from newspaper clippings and colored string, trying to connect Abdul Farouk to the Bush family. A government serious about protecting its citizens from terrorism has absolutely no room for people like Van Jones. Period.

The continuing threat of terrorism is something Obama’s brand of corrupt deal-making and influence peddling is wholly unprepared to deal with. Unlike Nebraska senator Ben Nelson, jihadists don’t view their “deeply-held principles” as price tags. They are unimpressed by symbolic awards from the Nobel committee, climate-change fraud operations, or gaseous speeches. They see weakness in months of dithering over Afghanistan strategy. They smell opportunity when ideology trumps security, and 9/11 masterminds receive the benefits of American civilian courts. They can read Screening Management Standard Operating Procedures published online. They understand that both ideology and desire make Obama eager to turn away from security issues to focus on his domestic ambitions. Assassins love it when you turn your back on them.

The government wasn’t paying enough attention to Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab to take his visa away, after his father reported him as a terrorist. They let him board an airplane, even though he was on a terrorist watch list. They weren’t listening when he repeatedly defended 9/11 and the Taliban in school. Don’t worry – I’m sure the government will do a better job of managing your health care. After all, it’s what they really care about. Exploding underwear is an annoying distraction.

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Posted in National Defense ♦ 31 Comments »

Welcome everyone, and thank you…

Saturday, December 26, 2009

It was a wonderful surprise to get back from Christmas dinner and see how many people have left such kind words on the new website.  I’ve got a ton of email to catch up on, and I’ll work on adding to my blogroll over the next few days.  Thanks to everyone who made suggestions for improving the site!  I’m still learning about WordPress – I was always afraid to do any exploring on the Hot Air dashboard, for fear of crashing such a huge blog, and treated most of its controls like live cobras.

I’m overjoyed, and humbled, that “Joy to the World” meant something to so many people.  Times like these make me feel much less middle-aged, because there is something marvelously child-like about discovering an entirely new flavor of happiness.  I hope your Christmas was filled with such discoveries as well!

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Joy To The World

Thursday, December 24, 2009

I’m not a practicing member of any congregation, but I’ve never entertained a single atheist thought. No aspect of creation has led me to doubt the existence of the Creator. I have never doubted that life endures beyond the final beat of a mortal heart. Faith and feeling lead me to hold these beliefs, but I hold them in concert with reason, not in defiance of it. I don’t believe any part of creation was put here for us to ignore, or deny.

I don’t like the way religious people are treated by our popular culture. A search for virtue and enlightenment that has been in progress for centuries is too often judged by the sins of its past, or the oppression it is found pre-emptively guilty of wishing to enforce. A secular State that has no qualms about legislating morality responds aggressively to those who speak of transcendence. Churches are measured against a grim shade of Torquemada, entirely invisible to the happy congregations inside. Questioning the fitness of religious believers to serve in democracy is as absurd as constructing a theocracy. Ideas should be evaluated on their strengths. Far from the stereotype of thoughtless Bible-thumping drones, religious men and women – from the Founding Fathers to today – have been ready to show the philosophical homework that led them to their moral conclusions.

People of the Jewish and Christian faiths are not the proprietors of our civilization, but it’s grossly unfair to deny their pivotal role in shaping it. It is equally unfair to plow over the true meaning of Chanukah and Christmas, and erect a thousand-watt generic monument to “happy holidays” and the Winter Solstice above them. I have never understood the increasingly common modern neurosis of taking offense at a hearty cry of “Merry Christmas!” Christians offer this wish as a gift, not a commandment. This is their season of joy, the celebration of what they believe is the most important moment in history. Joy is a flame that grows higher with kindling. It is music that bursts with the eagerness to leap from heart to heart. It is not a sacrament to be hoarded only by believers.

Who can embrace the full meaning of the birth we celebrate in this season, without loving the sound of laughing children playing with new toys, or young voices raised in carols of sleigh bells, snow, and mistletoe? Those who don’t believe in the divinity of Christmas Day have no reason to injure the faith of those who do… and the faithful have no reason to suffocate anything that spreads joy through the world, on this day we take as proof that Heaven loves us, and wants us to be happy. Even the most confident atheist can appreciate the nobility of a “fairy tale” that says the Author of creation wrote his own son into the story, in a chapter that would end with unspeakable pain… but turn the first page of a new book, describing a world of redemption and forgiveness. If you believe Christmas is a superstition, you can at least wish that all of humanity’s superstitions were as beautiful.

Some people doubt the sanctity of Christmas because the date was moved around in ancient times, to align with pagan festivals. With the modern understanding of reality, I wonder how the date would be measured on Mars, which takes just under six hundred and eighty seven days to orbit the Sun… or in the ribbon of light that stretches between the sisters of a binary star… or at the event horizon of a singularity. The theory of relativity tells us that it’s always Christmas somewhere. December the 25th is as good a day as any.

Tonight, on Christmas Eve, some of us will long for husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters who serve in distant lands, and sleep beneath different constellations… but we can all share the radiant memory of a single star, that burns forever above both the humble and the wise. Distance, and even death, are banished in the calm of a silent night, and a joyous morning. Not all of the guests at our tables will be visible to the eye, but all can be felt equally in the heart. No one requires you to believe in anything, to cherish Christmas as a special day… but we can all share the courtesy, and honesty, of remembering why this day is so special, to so many. This is not a season for demands. It is for gifts, and invitations.

I have two gifts for everyone, both simple, but heartfelt. The first is that I’ve finally found the time to put together my own website, where I’ve re-posted everything I’ve written for Hot Air, and set up a way for people to contact me. It’s rather plain right now, but I’ll keep working on making it better, and maybe do some more interesting things with it in the future. The address is http://www.doczero.org/

My other gift is even more humble, but people have frequently asked for it. My name is John Hayward, and it has been… and will continue to be… my delight and honor to write for you.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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Posted in Culture ♦ 87 Comments »

What Democracy Is Not

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

I believe the current American government is far too large, and horribly corrupt. I often write critically of its actions. I don’t hate the government, however. The defense of liberty is not a romance with anarchy. The federal government has vital functions to perform. Over the centuries, the American political class has produced men and women of eloquence, courage, and honor. I hate how far short our current crop of politicians falls from the standard set by the creators of this republic. I hate what the republic has been twisted into, and I implore my fellow citizens to stand up and put a stop to it, because it teeters on the precipice of becoming something much worse.

The American democracy was not created to dictate the destiny of its citizens. It has a duty to avoid interfering with our hopes and dreams, except where necessary to maintain order. The government should not be conscripting us into the service of its hopes and dreams, with thousand-page draft notices. A nation becomes great because of what its people achieve, not because of what they are required to do… or what they are forbidden to do.

The goal of representative democracy should not be sending the most aggressive team of brigands to Washington, to pillage the other states. The unseemly haste of Democrats to buy enough votes for their awful health-care bill, and push it through by Christmas, is reminiscent of a gang of thieves panicking at the sound of a burglar alarm going off, and racing to stuff pillowcases full of swag before the cops show up.

The suggestion by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, that every senator and representative should service their constituents by haggling over the highest price for their votes, is an insult to patriotism. The states should combine their strength in the federal union, for those limited number of tasks that only the central government can perform. The union was not meant to be a weapon for looting the states that aren’t represented by ancient incumbents with powerful committee chairs.

The people of Nebraska did not send Ben Nelson to be first in line when the doors open on Washington’s big Black Friday sale of federal goodies, waving his so-called “principles” like a credit card. The voters of the other states should not have to watch their representatives mope around like disappointed shoppers who missed the best deals. Firm adherence to clearly-stated principles is not merely a desirable trait for a member of Congress. It isessential. Voting for a political hack who lies about everything he believes in, and has no position that lacks a price tag, is not an exercise in true democracy, any more than voting with a dart board and blindfold would be.

Sarah Palin described the revolting spectacle of the Senate health care bill on her Facebook page:

The administration’s promises of transparency and bipartisanship have been broken one by one. This entire process has been defined by midnight votes on weekends, closed-door meetings with industry lobbyists, and payoffs to politicians willing to sell their principles for sweetheart deals. Is it any wonder that Americans are so disillusioned with their leaders in Washington?

We reached the sorry moment Palin describes because our ruling class became disillusioned with us. When the government seizes control of something, it says that its citizens can no longer be trusted to manage it themselves. That’s true of the federal government’s legitimate responsibilities. National defense cannot be entrusted to irregular militias, no matter how patriotic and courageous their members. Health care is notsomething a free people can watch their government take away from them, ignoring the strident objections of a substantial majority. If we do, we are no longer free… and in the years to come, the ruling class will feel increasingly less pressure to pretend it serves the voters.

Transparency is not a gift to be promised in an election campaign, and withheld when opacity proves more convenient to the President. Bipartisanship is a compromise to meet the needs of all citizens, without exceeding the rules that constrain government. It is not a conspiracy to cobble together a coalition of dependents, and gain enough political strength to rewrite the rules.

Reckless deficit spending is not merely unwise financial policy. It is a damnable sin against democracy itself. Our nation was founded in defiance of the tyranny of taxation without representation. Levying monstrous taxes against generations unborn is an even more appalling example of that tyranny. Free men and women cannot be held responsible for the sins of their parents… and they cannot hold their children responsible for meeting their demands. Freedom does not carry the burdens of the past, or sustain itself by consuming the possibilities of the future. Liberty is meaningless in the absence of responsibility – you are not “free” unless you are accountable for your actions. An irresponsible democracy cannot survive for long.

Democracy is not about “rationing” goods and services through all-powerful Independent Medicare Death Panel Advisory Boards. Rationing means the people get what the government thinks they deserve. Those criteria will be determined with the same kind of back-room deals and midnight caucuses that put the Advisory Board in place. The government cannot control anything without rationing it. Rationing transforms your vote from a civic responsibility into a vital currency, which you must spend aggressively to survive.

Democracy is utterly incompatible with little rule-bending land mines hidden in gigantic bills, which only become public knowledge because they were spotted by a sharp-eyed staffer working for the opposition party. What is a half-written bill, largely unread by legislators, but an exercise in the same kind of arbitrary power that sent the Minutemen into the field against England? How does a responsible citizen assess the performance of his representatives, when their careers are spent voting on titanic hundred-billion-dollar bills with thousands of clauses? Responsibility drowns beneath huge bills sold with fraudulent accounting, based on promises no one takes seriously, with results no one could possibly predict.

What we have seen in the House and Senate during President Obama’s first year is not the behavior of a responsible Congress, acting in the humble service of its constituents, and conducting the lawful business of a democratic republic. Congress gains its legitimacy from the laws that bind it, not the spectacular spending bills it passes in defiance of those laws. We started down this path when we began judging government by the way it responded to thedemands of its citizens, instead of the faithful performance of its duties. It will take a lot of work to correct the situation. In undertaking that task, we will not be aspiring to a lofty ideal. We will be reclaiming our birthright. The Congress of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid has worked under cover of darkness to steal something incredibly precious, which the authors and signatories of the Constitution desperately wanted you to have.

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Posted in Politics ♦ 5 Comments »

The Suicide Fantasy

Monday, December 21, 2009

I went to see Avatar on Sunday evening, and found myself generally in agreement with Ed Morrissey’s review. Although many reviewers have complained the film takes too long to reach its climax, I thought the early and middle sections were the most enjoyable parts. The visual achievement is dazzling, in both design and execution, making the exploration of both the human and alien portions of Avatar’s beautiful world very entertaining.

Right after our hero consummates his relationship with his alien love, the whole thing goes very sour. I couldn’t quite put a name to its disagreeable flavor at first – it’s preachy and predictable, to be sure, but that isn’t what makes its gorgeous rainbow soup curdle during the grand finale. I figured it out later that night, while reading a seemingly unrelated post from Mark Steyn on National Review Online, discussing angry global warming fanatics reacting to their disappointment over the pointless farce at Copenhagen.

As quoted by Steyn, George Monbiot snarls, “Goodbye Africa, goodbye south Asia; goodbye glaciers and sea ice, coral reefs and rainforest. It was nice knowing you. Not that we really cared.” Meanwhile, Polly Toynbee shrieks, “What would it take? A tidal wave destroying New York maybe – New Orleans was the wrong people – with London, St. Petersburg, and Shanghai wiped out all at once.”

Avatar is the CGI-enhanced, $400 million version of the dark dreams peddled by Monbiot and Toynbee. It’s a suicide fantasy, the Hollywood blockbuster equivalent of a troubled teenager’s notebook sketches, scribbled by someone who hates himself only marginally less than he hates the rest of the world. To elaborate further, I must include some mild spoilers from the movie’s plot – although, really, if you’re more than twelve years old, you already know exactly what happens in this film. The only element of mystery awaiting you is finding out who kills the bad guy. I promise not to ruin that.

Science fiction and fantasy provide a storyteller with the fantastic power of an infinite blank canvas, upon which any setting can be created, to sustain any sort of plot. In Avatar, James Cameron has created a world that justifies the smug arrogance and bitter alienation of the radical environmentalist. The alien world of Pandora really is a maternal Gaia spirit, with every bit of the flora and fauna connected in a mystical web that capitalists and soldiers are too blind and stupid to see. The alien Na’vi really are what infantile liberal mythology has made of the American Indian: innocent, peace-loving, simple, and so harmonious with nature that they can literally plug it into their pony tails. Lacking the conflict and flaws that make the Indians so fascinating and tragic, the Na’vi are utterly boring, aside from the heroine brought vividly to life by a remarkable performance from Zoe Saldana. The childlike environmentalist daydream of a “perfect” society, sustainably at peace with Mother Nature, is captured in the image of the Na’vi tribe snuggled in hammock-like leaves, embraced by the vast branches of their goddess tree. No ambitions, no failures, no questions, no achievement, no future. These giant blue aliens leave absolutely no carbon footprint.

What happens to this wish-fulfillment watercolor of eco-paradise? Why, greedy idiots with guns and bulldozers show up to mow it down, of course. Humans suck, man. They deserve to die… and die they do, in a hail of arrows, fangs, teeth, and lots of screaming plummets from great heights. All those military toys beloved by the right-wing warmongers of the military-industrial complex prove to be useless against the righteous fury of an aroused Gaia and her chosen champion, a redeemed soldier who has seen the error of his ways. Take that, Marine killbot slaves of Big Business.

During the big battle scene, as dinosaurs were chowing down on soldiers, the middle-aged couple seated next to me were grinning happily… delighted by the defeat and destruction of their own miserable species. The dialogue in Avatar makes it clear that humanity’s future depended on the success of the Pandora mission. “We sent the aliens back to their dying world,” intones the hero, narrating scenes of the defeated humans as they’re perp-walked off the planet, just the way environmentalist radicals have dreamed of handling the executives of Exxon-Mobil. Earlier, the hero tells Pandora’s nature spirit about the evil of his fellow man: “They killed their mother, and they’ll kill you.” Good thing for the universe we’re doomed!

Just as Cameron brings the primitive superstitions of radical environmentalism to life on Pandora, his portrayal of the human invaders matches the stereotypes held by campus crusaders of Big Business and its blood-for-oil military stooges. The corporate and Marine villains of Avatar are incredibly stupid. For one thing, if the fate of humanity rests on the Pandora mission, you’d think the governments of Earth could find someone other than a backstabbing middle-management weasel and a blatantly psychotic colonel to run the show. Even if you can accept their moral bankruptcy, their incompetence is shocking. It never occurs to them to solve their Na’vi problem with a missile from orbit – and they’re explicitly shown watching orbital surveillance of the gathering alien armies. For that matter, they could have nuked the troublesome Na’vi goddess tree from orbit, then arrived at the blast site with medical supplies and tearful condolences for the horrible cosmic tragedy of a “meteor” they just couldn’t stop.

The villains are also as willfully blind as the Left imagines its capitalist boogeymen to be. They laugh down the report of a scientist who obviously knows what she’s talking about, and has hard evidence to back up her position. They also clearly never bothered to read the best-selling book on Na’vi culture written by said scientist, because if they had, they could have used their miraculous cloning technology to whip up a swarm of sacred milkweed pods and a big red dragon, and flown into their negotiations with the aliens as epic heroes of legend. They also could have made those negotiations, and violent conflict, completely unnecessary by simply tunneling horizontally into the huge deposit of vital minerals beneath the Na’vi tree city. But, you know, capitalists prefer genocide to creative thinking. Bullets are so much cheaper than drilling equipment.

The key to understanding the intentions behind Avatar, and the response of its audience, is to remember that the tale is set in the far future, and we are never shown the suffering billions dying on a ruined Earth. This is a suicide fantasy, exactly like those many of us indulge as teenagers: we’re so much wiser, smarter, and empathic than the bummer adults running the world around us. They don’t understand the mystic truth burning in our young hearts. They’ll be sad when we’re gone, and they’ll finally realize how righteous we were. They’ll finally understand their grim obsession with money and material goods is soul-crushing, because they’ll be standing over the pulverized dust of our radiant souls. Death and tragedy will tear the scales from their eyes.

The can of holistic whup-ass opened by the magical world of Pandora at the end of Avatar comes from the same grocery of doom that supplies George Monbiot and Polly Toynbee with their nightmares. Read their words again, and understand they don’t really believe those things will happen – no one is stupid enough to believe the twaddle about submerged cities dispensed by the global-warming cult. They want those things to happen. They daydream about glaciers melting and creating tidal waves that deposit soggy clumps of coral reef and rainforest in the middle of London. They shudder with orgasmic delight as they imagine drowning capitalists and politicians coughing out a spray of ice water, dodging the enraged polar bears swept into Fleet Street by the morning tide, and crying “George! Polly! You were right! You were right all along, and we were so blind… Save us!” But it will be too late, and George and Polly will only be able to fold their arms and blaze with smug satisfaction, glowing bright enough to remain clearly visible as they sink into the frigid depths.

Avatar was written by a man who thinks those who disagree with his environmentalist obsessions are so blind that, in the future they will create, the last decent man in the universe will lead a far more noble alien race to victory over us, and literally renounce his humanity as part of his reward. James Cameron invites you to join him in the most beautifully rendered adolescent daydream of suicide ever created, and share his sense of righteous superiority over those who refuse to applaud at the end. I’m a sucker for good-looking dragons, so I gave him a golf clap for those.

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Posted in Entertainment, Enviro-nitwits ♦ 74 Comments »

The Illusion of Design

Sunday, December 20, 2009

The basic argument in favor of government-run health care, among people who sincerely believe it’s the best way to reform the medical system, is that a program designed and administered by the State will provide health care to more people. As things stand, a certain number of people have no health insurance, and this is held to be unfair and dangerous… to the extent that the rest of us must endure a radical overhaul of the entire system, as the State takes control of the insurance industry first, and eventually all of medicine.

Why do these uninsured people lack coverage? The ostensible reason is that they cannot afford it, although in fact a sizable portion of the uninsured are young people who choose not to purchase expensive insurance, and many more are illegal aliens. Also, the nature of the laws surrounding health insurance make it very expensive to purchase privately, instead of receiving it as part of employment compensation, so rising unemployment (the signature feature of the Obama economy) means more uninsured. Still, the popular conception of the case for health care reform is based on the haunting image of millions of poverty-stricken sick people, wasting away from the lack of health insurance. As the slogan tossed around through Twitter earlier this year put it, “no one should have to die because they can’t afford health insurance.”

Why is health insurance so expensive that the poor cannot afford it? The Left believes this is a failure of the free market, with greedy health-insurance companies callously pricing their product out of reach, and slapping exorbitant premiums on anyone who isn’t the picture of health. The true answer is that government is primarily responsible for distortions in the health insurance market, dating back to the wage controls that made it commonplace for employers to offer health benefits as a means of attracting skilled employees. The law preventing the sale of health insurance across state lines is an example of government-induced price distortions. For a contrasting example of medical services becoming more affordable in response to free-market competition, consider the constantly falling price ofLasik eye surgery. The Left refuses to think clearly on this subject, and maintains that health care is a “human right” that should be available “free” to everyone.

Liberals insist it is simply unthinkable to allow financial considerations to impact the distribution of this essential human right. As Kirsten Powers put itrecently, “Americans will die if we don’t provide universal health insurance.” Because money is the instrument through which free people express their will and make choices, the argument for socialized medicine boils down to the superiority of design and control over competition and choice.

So, in summary, the case for nationalizing health insurance is that health care cannot be entrusted to the unpredictability and greed of the free market. The individual purchasing decisions of free men and women are too chaotic. The only way to ensure access to health care for everyone is for the State to install a massive, strictly enforced system, complete with huge fines and jail time for those who fail to comply. This system would be superior to the free market, because it would be carefully designed by brilliant minds… engineered to deliver an incredibly complex, ever-changing service to hundreds of millions of Americans.

Is anyone stupid enough to think a “carefully designed system” is what the Democrats are about to drop on us?

Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) held up the Senate reform bill over his heartfelt concerns over abortion funding… until he was bought off with hundreds of millions of dollars in enhanced funding for Medicaid in his state. In a similar vein, language worth over $100 million was added to the bill, targeting the state of Louisiana, to purchase the vote of “moderate” Democrat Mary Landrieu. In other words, this “carefully designed” health care bill has different rules for people who happen to live in Nebraska or Louisiana, because this was necessary to buy the votes of their senators.

The Congressional Budget Office scoring for the health care reform bill is based on tricks and gimmicks, including Medicare reductions and cuts of over 20% in physician payments, that no one seriously believes will actually happen. A great deal of this health care reform package is a delusional fantasy, if not an outright fraud.

Socialist senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont jammed a 767-page amendment into the bill, then violated Senate procedures to suddenly withdraw it when Republicans forced the entire amendment to be read on the Senate floor.

Far from being a brilliant plan constructed by top doctors and financial experts in a government brain trust, this health-care bill is a twisted, deformed political document, seen in its entirety by only a few high-ranking politicians belonging to a single political party. Its components have not been precisely crafted as part of a fantastic system calibrated to ensure the maximum access to quality health care for all Americans.

The bill is not being examined with transparency and careful deliberation by representatives who behave as humble servants of the people and their Constitution. Instead, it’s being hastily rammed through in the dead of night, over the objection of powerful majorities of the American people, with desperate last-minute deals cut to acquire the necessary votes, financed by vast sums of taxpayer money. The primary consideration is not crafting the most sophisticated and intelligent health care reform… it’s getting a bill pushed through before angry voters have a chance to blast the Democrats out of Congress. Look at it this way: if the average middle-class American paid about $5000 in federal income tax last year, then you might be one of the 20,000 people who paid for Mary Landrieu’s vote, in the hope of giving Barack Obama a bill to sign as a Christmas present.

Aside from the nauseating payoffs, this kind of legislative taffy pull is to be expected in a representative republic. That’s how it works. People elect Congressional representation to look out for their interests. Legislation is modified by demands that can range from mild objections to stubborn intransigence. Parliamentary procedures are invoked by experienced politicians to shape the debate. Regional interests and passionate beliefs are poured into a bubbling stew of sections and sub-paragraphs. All of this is inevitable, and therefore good reason to avoid the absolute madness of allowing the President and Congress to nationalize industries, or posture as wise stewards of a high-performance command economy.

The moral imperative for socialized medicine is the belief that government can design a system to distribute health care more efficiently than the free markets. I challenge anyone who sincerely believes this to review the recent events in the House and Senate, and realize that representative government isutterly incapable of designing any such system. The merciless and tyrannical enforcement techniques required to ensure hundreds of millions of people comply with health care reform are utterly indefensible in the service of a monstrosity stitched together from back-room deals and nine-figure bribes.

The only logical way to maintain the integrity of a vast, complex program designed to control a trillion-dollar industry is to dispense with the “representative” part of our government model. Those who seriously believe the State must control health care, which is tied into the bulk of our economy and technological development, should stop fooling around with half-measures of tyranny. If health care is truly a “human right” that must be provided “at any cost,” then take a cold, hard look at the tortured gestation of the rough beast slouching from Harry Reid’s office to be born… and understand that liberty, democracy, and representation must be sacrificed, as part of that cost.

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Posted in Healthcare ♦ 3 Comments »

The Mystery of Unemployment

Sunday, December 20, 2009

The Associated Press expressed confusion today over an “unexpected” rise in unemployment claims. Rising unemployment rates always seem to come as a surprise to this Administration and its media allies. Maybe I can help explain the mystery of unemployment to them.

Reducing unemployment would, of course, require the creation of more jobs.Jobs are created by businesses, right?

Wrong.

Jobs are not “created” by businesses. They are created in response todemand. Dropping a pile of money on a business does not inspire it to hire more people. Only increases in demand will do that. More specifically, the anticipation of future, steady demand prompts job creation. A business hires people in anticipation of rising demand from its customers.

Almost every business, with rare specialized exceptions, is eager to see increased demand, and therefore happy to hire people. Expansion is a joyous event. No businessman likes firing people in response to falling demand. In fact, it takes some pretty grim sales forecasts to make a business stop hiring, and bleak horizons indeed to provoke layoffs.

The purpose of a business entity is making a profit, through satisfying the demands of its customers. Jobs are a commodity the business purchases to accomplish this. Jobs are not the reason the business exists. A farm does not exist to grow corn, or hire farmhands. Its purpose is to sell corn. The land, seeds, and farmhands are all resources that help it fulfill this purpose.

Sustained job creation requires sustained demand. Temporary surges in demand produce temporary jobs. A car dealership that responded to the Cash for Clunkers program by hiring people to meet the artificial spike in demand it created would have ended up letting most of them go in the following quarter, when sales plummeted.

Government cannot create true demand. It can only create bubbles of spending, which is not the same thing… and its methods of creating these spending bubbles are horrendously inefficient, even discounting the outright theft and larceny of pork-barrel heists like the Obama “stimulus” bill. Of course it didn’t produce sustained job creation. It was nothing but a transfer of over eight hundred billion dollars to favored Democrat constituencies. Handing politically favored groups piles of money to spend does not stimulate economic growth. It only stimulates politics.

Relying on stimulus spending to spur job growth is the kind of Keynesian delusion that only works with small colonies of people on desert islands. Another such growth-killing fantasy is the notion that granting tax cuts in a recession is “dangerous,” because the taxpayers will just use the money to pay down debt, instead of making new purchases. Once again, this concept confuses money with demand. Money is the mechanism for expressingdemand. People and corporations purchase goods and services because they want or need them. Needs generate more long-term activity than “wants.” Reducing the supply of money will slow down the purchase of wants, and eventually needs.

High levels of consumer debt also reduce purchases. Businesses carefully consider the amount of interest they’re paying on their debt. Some individuals keep an eye on these figures too, but even the most clueless shopaholic notices when their credit limits are exceeded, or their monthly payments become unbearable. Giving someone the means to pay down their debt does not reduce their demand for goods and services. Leaving them to wallow in debt, while the government remains lavishly funded (and corrupts the money supply with its own astronomical debts) will certainly do so.

The economy is composed of countless transactions in which people and corporations create value by fulfilling each other’s needs. The government also has demands, but they are inherently inefficient, because they are guided by political considerations. Obtaining the best value for the lowest price is never high on their list of priorities, although politicians occasionally find it necessary to pretend otherwise.

The money spent by government to fulfill its demands is not “earned” in transactions that produce positive value. When you hire someone, you are spending money to obtain services you cannot efficiently provide yourself. You value these services more than the money you’re spending. You might need to hire a neurosurgeon to operate on you, because you can’t possibly do it yourself – even if you happen to be a neurosurgeon. The surgeon, in turn, might spend a few hundred dollars hiring a maid to clean his house. He couldclean the house himself, of course, but it’s more efficient to hire the maid, because his time is generates far greater value performing surgery, or enjoying leisure activities. Both the maid hiring a surgeon, and the surgeon hiring a maid, are transactions that create value.

Government doesn’t work that way. It seizes its money from taxpayers, who rarely choose to “hire” the government instead of a free-market alternative – certainly not on the scale of a multi-trillion dollar federal budget. Even when a government service is freely purchased, like the Post Office or Amtrak, the product is heavily subsidized by taxpayers, or enjoys legal advantages unavailable to private competitors. Government is a vacuum of healthy demand. Put simply, the primary objective of most government spending is the acquisition of votes, not the creation of value.

The Associated Press, and anyone else baffled by persistent unemployment, should ask themselves what effect draining trillions of dollars from the private sector, nationalizing industries, and running up astronomical federal debt has on the kind of healthy demand that creates value. What can a business do to enhance its sales in a command economy, other than curry favor with politicians? What future do people see when the American landscape is frozen in the wobbling shadow of a system that must, inevitably, collapse?

Your job was not created by your employer. It was created by the people who needed your employer. When the government controls everything, who needs anyone?

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Posted in Economics ♦ 2 Comments »

At Any Cost

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Writing about health-care reform in the New York Post, Kirsten Powers asks:

What will health-care reform cost?

This question has become the obsession distracting us from the moral imperative to provide health care to all Americans.

The richest, most powerful, most amazing nation in the world should treat its citizens who fall ill better than some broken Third World country. If we can afford to try to rebuild Afghanistan with little hope of success, then arguing about paying for Americans to have health coverage seems petty.

This is a concise summary of the child-like belief system that produces disasters like ObamaCare. It has become the final, desperate argument of liberals as their push for government control of health care collapses. Later in her essay, Powers puts it even more bluntly:

But when it comes to health-care reform, Democrats and the Obama Administration have ignored the big picture: Americans will die if we don’t provide universal health insurance.

Never mind the costs, you greedy fools! People will die if we don’t nationalize the entire health-care sector of our economy! Note that Powers does not even pretend to talk about “public options” or government-funded “alternatives” to private health insurance. The only alternatives are “free” health care for everyone, or a mountain of corpses. By extension, anyone stubborn and venal enough to oppose the life-affirming moral imperative of national health care must want people to die.

The black irony that socialized medicine will, inevitably, pay for abortions is doubtless lost on her. I guess we’re only supposed to be concerned about the free market killing those who accomplish the wondrous transformation from non-viable tissue mass into fully-vested member of the proletariat, by managing to escape the maternity ward with a beating heart.

As infantile as this line of reasoning seems, it deserves serious engagement, because it is a common argument used by the Left to cut off debate. Stop asking questions, stop fretting about your liberties, and stop being suspicious of our magnificent President and the wizards of Congress. Don’t you know that people are dying out there? Why, in the time required for the aborted reading of the 767-page Sanders amendment Wednesday night, a sizable number of uninsured Americans must have given up the ghost. I’m sure Kirsten Powers could get us a rough estimate of the death toll from the Urban Institute.

If there’s a moral imperative to provide health care for everyone without regard to the cost, then we should stop fooling around with half-measures and enslave doctors. There’s no reason we should allow them expensive creature comforts, vacations, or other luxuries that would distract them from spending every waking hour providing health care. If the State’s moral requirement to provide free health care to its citizens over-rides their property rights… if it’s acceptable to punish them with huge fines and imprisonment for failing to co-operate with government control… then there is no reason to respect any individual liberties of health-care providers. People are dying, doctors. You can live at the medical facilities, and function passably well with seven hours of sleep and two hour-long meal breaks. We can conscript nurses, technicians, and orderlies to assist the doctors. The government can seize whatever land is needed for medical facilities, and commandeer whatever transportation is required to get sick people to the captive physicians.

You might raise the practical objection that slave doctors would be unlikely to provide high quality medical care. Also, you wouldn’t find many people choosing medical careers in the future. We could pluck promising students from high school and junior college, and march them into med schools to begin their lives of servitude, but the quality of care would probably decline even further. Even if we can get past the whole “slavery” hang-up… which should not be difficult for people who think the Constitution authorizes Congress to throw citizens in jail for failing to purchase government-approved health insurance.. it’s a system that would not improve public health, because it would not increase public access to quality medical care. We would be increasing supply at a horrendous loss of quality… and the catastrophic loss of quality is, ultimately, a reduction in supply. One good doctor is worth far more than a dozen miserable medical thralls, who keep looking away from your test results to calculate their odds of jumping over the electrified fences and disarming their explosive collars.

What we need to do, in order to save the lives of those with serious illness, is increase the supply of medical care. If we tried to impose a command structure on our economy, to force the supply of medicine to improve, we would suffer reductions in the quality of life in other areas. Would anyone want to live in a country where military bases, fire houses, grocery stores, and libraries were sacrificed to divert maximum resources into building hospitals and staffing them with doctors? This is not a fanciful question, because governments around the world have employed precisely this type of command economy over the last century, designed by allegedly wise and compassionate collectivists to invest national productivity with scientific accuracy. All of them – every last one – were miserable failures, soaked in poverty, violence, and environmental neglect. It’s easy to find the socialized medicine systems of the world – just look for the sick people desperately trying to escape from them, or the frightened and agonized pregnant women languishing in their hellish maternity wards.

To provide maximum access to high-quality health care, or a high quality supply of anything else, society needs a system of allocating its resources efficiently. It needs a way to measure the value of a billion working hours each day. It must find the best method of encouraging talented people to spend those hours in jobs that take advantage of their talents. In the realm of medicine, there must be a swift and accurate system for routing the desperately ill into hospitals, outpatients into clinics, and people with headcolds into corner pharmacies. It’s absurd to devote the same medical resources to a healthy teenager, a reasonably fit retiree, and a cancer patient.

The most efficient tool for allocating these resources is money. It is vastly superior to complex and fraudulent government programs, cobbled together by squabbling senators, and passed with votes purchased with billions in taxpayer loot. If doctors followed Kirsten Powers’ beliefs, and allowed “moral imperatives” to completely over-ride practical considerations, our hospitals would be filled with weeping physicians and dead patients. To assert that something must be done “at any cost” is to speak the language of tyrants, because it summarily dismisses the objections of those who must bear the costs. A rapidly swelling number of Americans reserve the right to express those objections, because we are not prepared to relinquish control over one-seventh of our economy to children.

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