"Crisis management in advanced democracies"

I like it when someone takes something I've sort of known for a long time and states it tersely and pungently. Mark Steyn's reader Ezra Marsh just did that, with this:

My experience is that most people, and all democracies, manage time in the following way:

Phase 1) A crisis is coming, but we still have time. There's no need to act yet.
Phase 2) Yes, a crisis is coming, but we still have time. There's no need to act yet.
Phase 3) We're out of time. There's no reason to act, because it's too late.

How often do we see this scenario? Seems like daily. Democrats are particularly good at it. They like to talk about vigilance as if it were paranoia, prudence as a culture of fear. But Republicans sweep things under the rug now and then, too. Thanks to Mark Steyn at The Corner.

Japan catastrophe

Received in email from Bud Tyler, the Old Marshal of Frontiertown, who claims not to have written it.

10 Things to learn from Japan--

1. THE CALM
Not a single visual of chest-beating or wild grief. Sorrow itself has been elevated.

2. THE DIGNITY
Disciplined queues for water and groceries. Not a rough word or a crude gesture.

3. THE ABILITY
The incredible architects, for instance. Buildings swayed but didn't fall. (?????)

4. THE GRACE
People bought only what they needed for the present, so everybody could get something.

5. THE ORDER
No looting in shops. No honking and no overtaking on the roads. Just understanding.

6. THE SACRIFICE
Fifty workers stayed back to pump sea water in the N-reactors. How will they ever be repaid?

7. THE TENDERNESS
Restaurants cut prices. An unguarded ATM is left alone. The strong cared for the weak.

8. THE TRAINING
The old and the children, everyone knew exactly what to do. And they did just that.

9. THE MEDIA
They showed magnificent restraint in the bulletins. No silly reporters. Only calm reportage.

10. THE CONSCIENCE
When the power went off in a store, people put things back on the shelves and left quietly.

I think number 3 has a lot to do with building codes, but the architects and contractors need to be willing and able to follow them.

The whole thing says something about media. Someone said something recently about how different real catastrophes are from Hollywood catastrophes. In movies, we always see panicked mobs. In real life, we more often see this kind of cooperative and often selfless behavior. Compare news coverage, largely fictitious, of what was supposedly happening in New Orleans when Katrina hit, with the reports that came later, when real witnesses began speaking up.

Tattoo news

At Reason. Katherine Mangu-Ward seems to have a series going on about

underworld tattoos—those useful inkblots that indicate to those in the know who you were in prison with, and why, and what kind of employment you might be seeking, all without the trouble of taking out an ad in the classified section.

Follow up with mad scientists.

Morgan Freeberg makes one of those non-obvious connections

Warning to Young People. Go, listen, read. And get off my lawn!

Rich people, big houses, no smiles

Unhappy hipsters.

And their somewhat happier pets.

Related: Look at this hipster.

Memory and reminiscence

A few days ago I mentioned an article about the tricks memory plays. Here's a reminiscence of Navy days from Ron at Grouchy Old Cripple in Atlanta. The first paragraph is relevant to the memory tricks topic:

Before you get all up in my face 'bout what I'm 'bout to ramble on about, lemme first say that I know the human memory tends to heavily discriminate the stuff it stores, cataloguing things the way it wants to and reserving special places for certain select events, sounds, sights, smells, and scenes. And not only does it selectively edit things in and out, but it tends to embellish events with its individualized set of filters, ethics, morals, priorities, and tastes, magnifying some episodes and minimizing others.

Read the whole thing for comparisons of the Navy of fifty years ago with the Navy of today. Via Glenn Reynolds, who says, "Nostalgia aside, though, the new Navy seems awfully good at its job."

Useful idiots of AGW to demonstrate on Saturday

Full details at 350 dot org.

Don't get comfortable in your own home, in Virginia

You never know who might be looking in the window.

Coffee-making naked guy rebuffed by exposure charge

It happened at 5:30 a.m. Monday.

Channel 5 reports the woman and 7-year-old boy who saw him naked apparently had cut through Williamson's front yard from a nearby path.

Williamson, 29, says he didn't know anyone could see him.

"If I stood and seemed comfortable in my kitchen, it's natural. It's my kitchen," Williamson tells Channel 5.

Williamson says his roommates were not home when he came into the kitchen and made his coffee.

Fairfax County Police say they believed Williamson wanted to be seen naked by the public.

Williamson, a father of a 5-year old girl, said he plans to fight the charge.

Maybe a countercharge of trespassing or unlawful entry would be in order.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Update. Another update.

And the verdict: Convicted! Wrongly, IMHO, FWIW.

I hope the final update, April 7, 2010: Not guilty! Story, via Althouse. Looks like it cost him plenty, though: his lawyer "said Williamson's legal bills would probably wind up being between $10,000 and $15,000."

Hey there, First Amendment!

How are you feeling this week? Weak, you say? Somewhat undermined?

Let's see what Jeff Jarvis has to say about this idea that the FTC should start regulating what bloggers have to say.

The Federal Trade Commission just released rules to regulate product endorsements not just in advertisements but also on blogs. (PDF here; the regs don’t start until page 55.)

It is a monument to unintended consequence, hidden dangers, and dangerous assumptions.

Mind you, I hate one of its apparent targets: Pay Per Post and its ilk, which attempt to co-opt the voice of bloggers. But I hate government regulation of speech more.

And mind you, I am all in favor of transparency; I disclose to a comic fault here. I think that openness is the best fix for questions of trust and advise companies and politicians and certainly governments to become transparent by default as enlightened self-interest. But mandating this for anyone who dares speak online? Foolish.

There are so many bad assumptions inherent in the FTC’s rules.

First, Pay Per Post et al, as I realized late to the game, are not aimed at fooling consumers. Who would read the boring, sycophantic drivel its people write? No, they are aimed at fooling Google and its algorithms. It’s human spam. And it’s Google’s job to regulate that.

Second, the FTC assumes – as media people do – that the internet is a medium. It’s not. It’s a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don’t think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism. I imagine that virtually no one on Facebook thinks they’re making media. They’re connecting. They’re talking. So for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed.

Insanity and inanity. And danger.

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Hector Owen! Danger, Glenn Reynolds, and everybody else.

It's not just bloggers, either: This will also apply to Facebook pages and even Twitter.

All this unregulated speech is a danger to someone who would rather it were silenced. Didn't you ever think to yourself, "How long will 'they' let this go on? All this freedom of speech on the Internet?" Lefties have their hands on the levers of power in Washington, now. So hold on to your hats, and think about scrubbing your archives. Like this, see: Acorn Scrubs Its Website to Eliminate SEIU Links. <sarcasm>That worked really well for them.</sarcasm> So don't imagine it will work any better for you, Miss Blogger Grrl, Mister Blogman.

Here earlier: Federal Marshals will be coming in to clean up this town. Or, Yes we can stop the signal. A recent comment here.

Garrison Keillor: old, grumpy, no longer charming

Or, Why I have not listened to "Prairie Home Companion" for years. I'm old and grumpy, and far from charming, but Keillor's got me beat all hollow. (Would they say "all hollow" in Lake Wobegon? I dunno.)

When an entire major party has excused itself from meaningful debate and a thoughtful U.S. senator like Orrin Hatch no longer finds it important to make sense and an up-and-comer like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty attacks the president for giving a speech telling schoolchildren to work hard in school and get good grades, one starts to wonder if the country wouldn't be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the health-care system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off health care to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.

It's time to dump the dead-end issues that have wasted too much time already. Old men shouldn't be allowed to doze off at the switch and muck up the works for the young who will have to repair the damage. Get over yourselves. Your replacements have arrived, and you should think about them now and then. Enough with the shrieking. Pass health-care reform.

"If we cut off health care to them." We? Them? Cut off? Health care isn't run by the government yet. He's a little ahead of schedule with this wish-fulfillment fantasy.

He is five years older than I am. Check back with me five years from now, and see if I am advocating that 32% of the population be cut off from health care. So that there will be more left for me. Yet this old grump is trying to identify himself with "the young." "Your replacements have arrived …" What's this, but Bob Dylan from 1964.

I have to wonder how well he would have recovered from his recent stroke if it had occurred in some other country. One with government health care. How nice for him that he was able to be transferred from United Hospital in St. Paul to the Mayo Clinic's St. Mary's Hospital, "simply because they know so much more about me down there." <sarcasm>The fact that he is a wealthy celebrity could not have had anything to do with that</sarcasm>.

This gets a "humor" tag only because Keillor is widely regarded as a humorist. For a while, I thought he might be capable of taking up the mantle of Jean Shepherd as a humorous Midwest memoirist. But to be bittersweet, you need to use care in mixing the bitter with the sweet. Keillor's all bitter, now.

Via Surber, via Reynolds. Reynolds says, "with this gang in charge who would be surprised to find that under ObamaCare your chances of a liver transplant really will depend on your politics? Not me." It's the Chicago Way.

Bit his finger off

That's some rational debate. Or national conversation about health care.

The way to demonstrate the superiority of your argument is to bite off appendages of your opponent. This serves to elevate the level of discourse. If you're a lobster!

Dammit, we used to be mammals. Have 8 months of Obama reduced some of his supporters to the level of arthropods?

Sweet bird of youth, you must be laughing

The song. (First version is the one from the album, second from a live performance, sort of eerie.)

The play, which the song is referring to.

The bird.

The bird.

Up at the mountains, we watched the old Studio One production of "The Trial of John Peter Zenger," from this set of movies. We had a pretty good conversation about the importance of the Zenger verdict to American jurisprudence. I think I said, "This was the case that established freedom of the press in America, even before America existed." I thought there should have been a few more minutes to it, to give some attention to the jury's deliberations. The way it was presented made it look like Andrew Hamilton simply won Zenger's case, but the way the jury reached their verdict was just about as important as the verdict itself. The film skipped over that entirely.

But much more conversation resulted from the fact that this old TV show included three Westinghouse commercials, with Betty Furness selling a refrigerator, of course, and a TV, and something else, an air conditioner, it might have been.

So the daughter said, of Betty Furness, "When was it that people stopped wanting to look like that?" Like adults, she went on to explain. Which I thought was a good question, and we went down a winding conversational path having to do with neotenic behavior among baby-boomers.

Now I'm back in the world which includes an Internet, and I see that Morgan Freeberg has done some redecorating at The House of Eratosthenes, and that he has a post there with a clip from the late night Scot, dealing with this very issue. So check it out.

Working towards happiness

Here's an interesting idea, taking form as a blog, on the way to becoming a book: The Happiness Project. Gretchen Rubin is a lawyer with top credentials, having been editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal and clerk for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Her goal with this is to test ideas about what leads to happiness, or, here, I'll quote her:

I'm working on a book, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT--a memoir about the year I spent test-driving every principle, tip, theory, and scientific study I could find, whether from Aristotle or St. Therese or Martin Seligman or Oprah. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT will gather these rules for living and report on what works and what doesn’t. On this daily blog, I recount some of my adventures and insights as I grapple with the challenge of being happier.

Post that caught my eye:

How Do You Remember to Count to Ten?

I'm quick-tempered, and one of my greatest happiness-project challenges is to bite my tongue; an excellent way to boost my happiness is to keep my resolution to "Leave things unsaid." In the end, I'm always happier when I don't make some angry or snarky comment. But easier said than done.

I'm all in favor of increasing the general level of happiness, one person at a time. (That lets out such government-type measures as culling the unhappy, or soma for the masses.)

Federal Marshals will be coming in to clean up this town

Or, Yes we can stop the signal.

The wild and wooly Internet, it's a wonderful place. No restrictions, freedom everywhere you look. Pretty much. Some of that pr0n might be a problem. But at least as far as speech is concerned, or writing, really, anything goes. I don't like using cusswords on this site, because I keep hoping my daughter will read it, and once in a while she does. But I could if I wanted to. So that's OK. My choice.

But now comes Cass Sunstein, Harvard law prof and head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (I think — I have been poking around the dot gov website and can't find any names), to say that what is said on the web needs policing. Not so much for cusswords or naked pictures, but for "falsehoods." Falsity of those "falsehoods" to be determined by Prof. Sunstein, or someone much like him. First Amendment, I loved you — but they took you away!

Sunstein is a likely Supreme Court nominee.

Read this, by Kathy Shaidle at PJ Media, and then this, by Kyle Smith at the NY Post. The days of Wild West anarchy and, you know, freedom, on the Internet, are under more serious threat than they have been since the Great Opening of the Doors back in 1992. The doors will be closing again, if these Democrats have anything to say about it. And you know they will.

These are the good old days.

Update: I could not find Sunstein's name at that site at the time that I wrote this, because he had not been confirmed yet. He was confirmed on September 10.

Which way to Skid Road?

Or, In praise of slumlords. Qualified praise, you understand.

A post at American Digest (No More Bums in America: Noted in Passing on the Streets) reminded me of a song, Larimer Street by Bruce "U. Utah" Phillips. Sorry, no Youtube, but you can hear it at Rhapsody. And a little about it, too. Now go read and listen, and come back when you're done. Van der Leun is in Swiftian satirical mode in this one, so mind the sharp edges.

OK then, we're back here now.

"Urban renewal" and "blight eradication" sound like good ideas. But what they amount to, usually, is the destruction of cheap places to live. That would be unsubsidized, free enterprise cheap, not officially designated "affordable." Old people on pensions need cheap places to live. Young people starting out need cheap places to live. Misers need cheap places to live. The demolition is usually done by city governments under the influence of developers. So the government tears down acres of slums, cheap houses owned by many different individuals, which then are gentrified into luxury housing or shopping malls, and might build a housing project, which will be run by the government, presumably for the benefit of the people who were displaced. But it's a government project, so there will be restrictions and regulations about who can live there, and what the residents can do there, and if it's one of those high-rise projects it will probably be taken over by criminal gangs. Everybody has the same landlord, and the landlord's not even a person, but a bureaucracy.

An analogy comes to mind. Think of a forest, call it Hundred-Acre Wood. Every creature that lives there has worked out its own individual modus vivendi. Now the local government has been persuaded that this area would be better used as luxury condos, so the Wood is declared "blighted." After all, it contains no fine homes, though the residents may like their nests and burrows well enough. So the government and the developer will build a clean, modern zoo for them, with all the amenities. (I'm not comparing slum-dwellers to animals in any real sense, any more than Orwell was comparing citizens to animals in Animal Farm. Don't get distracted.) But that distressing hunny habit that Pooh Bear has … it leads him to do all sorts of foolish and dangerous things. Bears suffering from hunny addiction certainly should not be permitted in this clean, modern facility. That stuff is sticky. It will mess up the tile-work. He muddled along all right when he was living under the name of "Sanders," but this sort of thing is right out, now. And by the way, what's with the alias? Register under your real name and social security number, Mr. Bear, or go live in the street. No, you can't live in the woods any more, there are no woods, where the woods were there are condos.

I won't beat that to death, you get the idea.

[Sidenote on Bruce "U. Utah" Phillips: He was a great storyteller and songwriter, a social activist, anarcho-pacifist, and one of the last of the "Wobblies" (the IWW has been effectively out of business for a long time). He did considerable good by writing beautiful songs, and towards the end of his life ran a homeless shelter. Like all adherents of the labor theory of value, he failed to consciously understand the importance of capital.]

One reason why Van der Leun can say

Nowhere in today's brighter and more-caring American cities will you see those terrible social wrecks on the streets. Yes, no longer will you find "Bums," "Junkies," "Drunks," "Bull-Goose Raving Lunatics," or "The Hard Core Unemployed" on our sidewalks. They are all gone, a fading memory.

is that the city of Seattle has public housing for drunks. Only for 75 of them, though. Better than nothing, but compared to a living Skid Road, not so much. Ain't it great? Back when there was a skid road, these guys could have worked sweeping out a bar, and found a $20 a week room somewhere nearby. Now, they are housed at the public expense, and

benefit from 24-hour, seven day a week supportive services including:

• State-licensed mental health and chemical dependency treatment
• On-site health care services
  
• Daily meals and weekly outings to food banks
• Case management and payee services
• Medication monitoring
• Weekly community building activities

Sort of like what happened to Pooh, in the zoo. Of course there are more than 75 homeless drunks in the city of Seattle. And what about the homeless non-drunks? They can't find those $20 a week rooms any more, and employers are forbidden by law from paying less than the minimum wage. There was a time when poverty did not mean being dependent on government. Now it seems that sleeping on the sidewalk is the only alternative to welfare for the drunks or those who would be called eccentric if they had money. Or for ones who can't make it in the 9-to-5 world, but are too proud, have too much self-respect, to take a dole. It almost looks like the government is trying to create a dependent class.

I'm veering, as Horace Larkin would say, and haven't managed to make my point. When the cheap parts of town disappear, what happens to the people who lived there? No more boarding houses, flophouses, SRO hotels. From Phillips's lyric, "Where will I go, and where will I stay? You've knocked down the skid road and hauled it away."

(Did you find the chicken in this post? The bear was easy.)

Who is Van Jones?

He is the "Green Jobs Czar." We did not use to have czars in the US. I wonder what happened that we now have so many of them.

He's a self-admitted Communist.

Update: Jones elevates the level of discourse. Republicans are assholes, "some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama are gonna have to start gettin' a little bit uppity." Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Another update: Jones signed a 9/11 Truther petition, and is now scrambling to deny that he knew what he was doing at the time. Most charitable interpretation to put on this: high as a kite.

Much, much more on Jones at Gateway Pundit.

Update: Jones has resigned, at midnight Saturday night or Sunday morning of Labor Day weekend. The entire controversy has existed only on Fox News and the Internet, so NY Times readers will be baffled.

Will another "green jobs czar" be appointed? "Green jobs czar" is not a position like postmaster general or secretary of state. It may have been, I suspect it was, created ad hoc to provide a way to get Van Jones into the government. Obama still has not filled many of the structural positions that need appointments, but he is creating new positions outside the structure.

Nothing deliberate about Obama's speed

I have mentioned several times here that Obama is moving his programs as fast as he possibly can, to get them through before opposition can muster. Here is Neo-neocon, with an excellent group of commenters, on this topic: Captain Obama: full speed ahead. Gramsci is mentioned in the comments, with a link to the same Eric S. Raymond post that I linked a while back, Gramscian damage.

So many have forgotten, or never learned, that the level of peace, prosperity, and, particularly, freedom, that we in the US enjoy, is not the natural condition of humanity. It's not a ground state, to which we will revert if something goes wrong. It's metastable and dynamic, and enormous changes at the last minute, undertaken with little consideration, are more likely to wreck it than to enhance it. In every discussion of global warming, climate change, or whatever it's called today, lefties invoke the "precautionary principle." They never mention it when the subject is economics.

And from Van der Leun: Checklist for the Next 4 Years. Hyperbole? Humor? History will answer.

Grumpy old men sitting around talking

Talking about the state of the British Nanny State.

Professor Bainbridge calls this "Grumpy Old Men Speaking Truth to Power." But Power, you know, is not listening.

America is headed down the same path, but the UK has gone on ahead. We hear voices drifting back from over the water, crying "Turn back, turn back!"

Three videos, about half an hour. Funny and bitter at the same time; a nostalgic eulogy for freedom.

Obama's chief energy regulator tells us to prepare to freeze in the dark

In the NY Times:

Energy Regulatory Chief Says New Coal, Nuclear Plants May Be Unnecessary

No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said today.

"We may not need any, ever," Jon Wellinghoff told reporters at a U.S. Energy Association forum.

He's very blithe.

Wellinghoff said renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.

"I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism," he said. "Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind's going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you'll dispatch that first."

He added, "People talk about, 'Oh, we need baseload.' It's like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don't need mainframes, we have distributed computing."

The technology for renewable energies has come far enough to allow his vision to move forward, he said. For instance, there are systems now available for concentrated solar plants that can provide 15 hours of storage.

"What you have to do, is you have to be able to shape it," he added. "And if you can shape wind and you can effectively get capacity available for you for all your loads.

"So if you can shape your renewables, you don't need fossil fuel or nuclear plants to run all the time. And, in fact, most plants running all the time in your system are an impediment because they're very inflexible. You can't ramp up and ramp down a nuclear plant. And if you have instead the ability to ramp up and ramp down loads in ways that can shape the entire system, then the old concept of baseload becomes an anachronism."

How modern the thinking! How very cutting-edge. How very senseless.

Wellinghoff has never worked for an energy company. He is a lawyer who has spent most of his life as a regulator and/or "consumer advocate," i.e., one who afflicts energy companies.

In the sidebar of this 2001 interview, he lists two favorite books. The first: Ecological Democracy by Roy Morrison. This one has no Amazon reviews, but here's an approving review. An excerpt:

As industrial civilization spins into crisis, neo-fascist demagogues (Buchanan, Zhirinovsky, for example) offer a return to hierarchical order as the way out. Such alternatives must, of course, be resisted. The third path is ecological democracy, arising "from popular ferment, aspiration for a better life, intolerance of the abuse of power, and collective and personal determination to build a just and enduring community." Only community-based, democratically managed associations have the potential to reconcile human needs for both community and freedom, and to erode the power of industrialism.

That part about the "popular ferment" sounds a lot like the French Revolution, and we all know how well that went.

The second book is Steady-State Economics by Herman Daly. This has one Amazon review, a 5-star that's pure gush, but contains the line, "We live in a finite world with few renewable resouces." You can read what appears to be Chapter 5 at a website with the charming URL of dieoff dot org. Here's something that's more of a précis than a review, at the Negative Population Growth site. Excerpt:

Our first task, Daly persuasively argues, is to stop growth. Only after we have stabilized the economy at or near its present size should we determine, and move to, an optimum scale. For one thing, since our survival depends on stopping growth, it is imperative that we do so as soon as possible. Besides, settling such issues as the optimal levels of population and per capita resource use will be difficult, as it will entail searching public debate over such fundamental questions as the present generation's obligations to posterity and reproductive freedom. Achieving consensus on them will be time-consuming. Meanwhile the economy would still be growing and further damaging the ecosystem. Also, making the economy smaller can't be done without halting growth first.

In order to accomplish the goal of negative population growth and a smaller economy, three "institutional arrangements" will be needed:

(1) Maximum and minimum limits on personal income, and a ceiling on personal wealth. If growing inequality in income and wealth is not reversed, Daly argues, private property and markets will become morally dubious. This will make extending the market to include birth licenses and depletion quotas politically difficult. Moreover, curbing these inequalities would make for more modest, and environmentally supportable, consumption. Daly is committed to social justice as well as sustainability, and income and wealth limits obviously serve that goal.²⁴

Since Daly made this proposal, income and wealth inequalities have exploded. Many large incomes were acquired by gaming the system, e.g., corporation executives paying themselves opulently. This threatens to delegitimize our economic system. What's more, such rapacity sets the wrong kind of example in a limited world.

(2) Transferable birth licenses. Obviously, population growth is a major force driving resource depletion and waste generation. Stabilizing population is therefore crucial. Daly's suggestion, first propounded by economist Kenneth Boulding in 1964, is to issue each person, or perhaps each woman, a quantity of reproduction licenses equal to the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman. Each woman would get 2.1 licenses, which she could buy or sell depending on how many children she wants to have.²⁵

Daly acknowledged that the directness of the birth license plan might put people off. "It frankly recognizes that reproduction must henceforth be considered a scarce right and logically faces the issue of how best to distribute that right and whether and how to permit voluntary reallocation." Because limiting reproduction is a forbidden subject for many people, they prefer indirect discouragement of reproduction through expanding women's social roles, encouraging consumption of commodities over having more children, and so on. Birth licenses, however, are more efficient. What's more, in his view, "the direct approach requires clarity of purpose and frank objectives, which are politically inconvenient when commitment to the objective is halfhearted to begin with."²⁶

(3) Depletion quotas for resources. The best way to control throughput, Daly argues, is to control the rate at which resources, especially nonrenewables such as fossil fuels, are depleted. Limiting the quantity of resources that enters the economy necessarily also limits how much waste and pollution leaves it. Moreover, since the stock of manmade capital is made from resources, and since the human population depends on resources, controlling the rate of depletion necessarily controls how big the population and capital stock can get.

If these are his favorite books, that says a lot. The man is an Ehrlichite, like Holdren. He wants negative population growth for the US and a smaller economy. When the economy gets smaller, we call that a recession. When it doesn't start growing again, it's a Depression. Jerry Pournelle says,

Low cost energy is the key to economic growth, and nothing the government is doing would have as great an effect as a huge nuclear power program. The TVA was the best investment of the New Deal. It may be that private power would have done as well, but the cheap energy from TVA brought energy to the South. Cheap power is the key to growth; and clearly that will not happen under the Change that we can believe in.

Hold on to your hats, wallets, kids, and groceries — the Deep Greens are taking over. There will be sustainable and fashionable poverty for all, except the Nomenklatura, who will just have to keep on using those jets and living in those big houses, because their work is so important!

Ledeen on Obama's Holocaust Day speech

At PJ Media. Obama gets the meaning of "never again" wrong:

He then gave his version of “never again,” and it’s a very odd version indeed. First, he draws hope from the survivors of the Holocaust. Those who came to America had a higher birthrate than the Jews who were already living here, and those members of “a chosen people” who created Israel. These, he says, chose life and asserted it despite the horrors they had endured. And then he goes on:

We find cause for hope as well in Protestant and Catholic children attending school together in Northern Ireland; in Hutus and Tutsis living side-by-side, forgiving neighbors who have done the unforgivable; in a movement to save Darfur that has thousands of high school and college chapters in 25 countries and brought 70,000 people to the Washington Mall, people of every age and faith and background and race united in common cause with suffering brothers and sisters halfway around the world.

Those numbers can be our future, our fellow citizens of the world showing us how to make the journey from oppression to survival, from witness to resistance and ultimately to reconciliation. That is what we mean when we say “never again.”

So “never again” means that we learn from others how to forgive and forget, and ultimately live happily with one another. But that is not what “never again” means, at least for the generation of the Holocaust and for most of those who followed. For them, “never again” means that we will destroy the next would-be Fuhrer.

It's not a civil rights march. If Gandhi had faced Nazis rather than the British, Gandhi would have died young.

In the history of modern times, the United States has done more than anyone else, perhaps more than the rest of the world combined, to defeat evil, and we are still doing it. Yet Obama says that we must “learn from others” how to move on, forgive and forget, and live happily ever after. But these are just words, they are not policies, or even actions. And the meanings he gives to his words show that he has no real intention of doing anything to thwart evil, any more than he had any concrete actions to propose to punish North Korea.

Significantly, Barack Obama is a lot tougher on his domestic American opponents than on tyrants who threaten our values and America itself. He tells the Republicans that they’d better stop listening to Rush Limbaugh, but he doesn’t criticize Palestinians who raise their children to hate the Jews. He bows to the Saudi monarch, but humiliates the prime minister of Great Britain. He expresses astonishment that anyone can worry about a national security threat from Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela, even as Chavez solidifies an alliance with Iran that brings plane loads of terror masters, weapons and explosives into our hemisphere from Tehran via Damascus, fuels terrorists and narcotics traffic, and offers military facilities to Russian warships and aircraft. He is seemingly unconcerned by radical Islam and a resurgent Communism in Latin America, even as his Department of Homeland Security fires a warning shot at veterans–the best of America–returning from the Middle East. He seeks warm relations with Iran and Syria–who are up to their necks in American blood–while warning Israel of dire consequences if she should attempt to preempt a threatened Iranian nuclear attack.

Thus far, at least, the one clear message from President Obama is that he is not prepared to fight…our international enemies.

The United States is being destroyed before our eyes. I do not think this is what Schumpeter had in mind by "creative destruction." Or as the President said during the campaign, nice country you have here; let's change it.

Lots of comments over there. Commenter Harry Truman (name rings a bell; St. Louis, wasn't it?) recommends the Collectivist Quote Quiz at The People's Cube. Hilarious, in that throw-up-in-your-mouth-a-little kind of way.

Update: More on this speech at Power Line.

And: Follow-ups by Ledeen, Steyn, and Ledeen again, at The Corner.