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January 3, 2011 - December 27, 2010

Friday, December 04, 2009

RETURN TO THE LOONY BIN. I've been putting this off because there's a lot of tedious work involved in assembling this post, but it's too important to delay any longer. Regular readers here know that we've been biting the ankles of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) set for a long long time. Now it appears that our suspicions of scientific dishonesty on behalf of a political and (of course) financial agenda are being confirmed on a staggering scale.

I want to thank our friend and valued commenter "Lake" for firing the opening shot on ClimateGate at InstaPunk. It's taken me longer than it should have to convert his post from Word to our format, but it's now posted here, and I urge everyone to read it before continuing further with my own post. He does an excellent job of framing the key issues the MSM have been endeavouring mightily to ignore, and he's provided links you might not find anywhere else. His conclusion should inspire all of us to become students of this mess, even if it takes work to get up to speed.


And, God bless him, he's a teacher, with a mission to enlighten his students about the lessons of this imbroglio:


What do I have to add to Lake's excellent digging? A few comments, a few more pertinent links, and some tips on how to follow the unfolding controversy. (Plus, some perhaps amusing InstaPunk flashbacks on this sore toe of a subject.)

First, it cannot be emphasized enough that the mainstream media don't want to cover this story at all. That should scare us to death. This is the 'Pentagon Papers' of the climate science field, which is not to say that it's a lesser story because it originates in academe rather than the much sexier realm of the military. Ultimately, if world governments succeed in persuading us that AGW is real and needs to be addressed, the cost will be in the hundreds of trillions of dollars and the loss of almost everything we conceive of as liberty -- from control over our own thermostats to the demolition of advanced industrial civilization as we know it. All in the name of saving "the planet" from an invented pollution called carbon that also happens to be the largest building block of our own human bodies.

This is by no means a coincidence. Make no mistake. The AGW true believers are in thrall to a post-modern religion masquerading as science that mimics on an existential scale the post-modern American liberal's hatred of America. Where ivory-tower types like Noam Chomsky hate their own country and do everything possible to seek its downfall in the name of social justice, the AGW devotees hate mankind itself and dare to conceive of a kind of "planetary justice" whose morality consists of conspiring in the death of billions of human beings whose lives are somehow synonymous with the carbon pollution they paradoxically celebrate when it takes the form of polar bears and other creatures too 'natural' to be cursed with poisoned self awareness and absurdly arbitrary moral relativism.

What the Kyoto-Copenhagen-cap'n'trade-Al Gore-Obama "climate change" evangelists have always been after is a species-level punishment straight out of the Old Testament. Only with themselves cast in the role of Yahweh, the angry evicting landlord of Eden and the merciless bringer of the Flood. What are they so destructively riled up about? The same thing as the Judeo-Christian God they despise so much: Original Sin. But the original sin of Mankind as they define it is, ironically, even more rudimentary than the one defined by the Creator of Genesis. He sought to punish apostasy and immorality. They seek to punish existence itself. Why? Having rejected the concept of divinity and therefore meaning, they hunger for suicide. They don't have the guts to put their own heads in the oven, though. So they engage in the most absurd megalomaniacal projection in all human history; we -- our entire species -- are convenient stand-ins for a purely personal, malignant narcissist's irredeemable self-hatred. We are them by proxy. And so we deserve to be freed by utter extinction from a consciousness they don't have the courage or will to live with.

Sound overstated? It isn't. Why doesn't the MSM with its legions of highly educated and privileged intellects want to cover a scandal which intimates that AGW is more than just possibly a hoax? If it is a hoax, given the monies and governmental control issues involved, it's far bigger than Watergate. Careers could be made, icons of journalism, fame, fortune, celebrity, and future book contracts galore. (Look at the opportunities afforded Woodward and Bernstein over the years...) More than that, has it occurred to anyone that if AGW is a hoax, it's actually GOOD NEWS FOR EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD? New York and Miami won't be submerged, we won't have to repeal the entire Industrial Revolution, and we won't be confronting the 30-year lifespans of neolithic man that Luddite idiots like Ed Begley, Jr., want to inflict on our children and grandchildren. Think about it. A huge news story that isn't bad news for its potential worldwide audeince of 6 billion souls. Who could resist that?

The mainstream media can resist it. They are resisting it. More proof that we are looking at a faith rather than a fact.

Looking for analogies? Think Galileo. Think Inquisition. Inconvenient truth, indeed. But what's so inconvenient about it? Irrational, unexamined beliefs are involved. It turns out that these are far more important to individual egos than career possibilities and even hope for all mankind. They'd rather be right in their dumbest long-term assumptions than actually achieve something worthwhile. They hate fundamentalists who take the Bible literally? They are the NEW fundamentalists, the ones who take the corrupt affirmations of science literally. Because for them the meaning of life is that there is no meaning, and they'll die to defend that principle against all comers. (I'm wide open to explanations about why Tiger Woods and a flat-chested Redskin cheerleader are headlines while improved odds for the continuation of civilization are not.)

Why I have such utter contempt for sanctimonious atheists.

I was going to produce a list of Instapunk posts about AGW. Beginning with the one from 1997 about "raw data" from the precursor to this website (eerily prescient of the current scandal if I do say so myself). Instead, I'm going to put the ball in your court: you cite the posts you like the most, the ones that pertain most closely to the current controversy (with some juicy quotes included, please), because it's occurred to me, as it probably has to you, that not all the most relevant ones even mention climate change. (A gold star to the first one who finds a working link to The Apunkrypha's Book of Andrew...)

I was going to offer a list of recent news links about how ClimateGate is being handled in the world press. But beyond noting that it's getting more attention in Australia, Canada, and the U.K. than it is here, I won't. (Except for this, I suspect, monumental one.) I'm asking you to hunt down some links. If you find them, I'll post your comments here on the main page.

I think I've given you something to think about. I'll conclude with a link to a site that's a very good way of keeping up with the ClimateGate News. It's Planet Gore at the National Review.

And just so you know that human beings are funny creatures indeed, here's the single most significant MSM coverage of ClimateGate.


Make sense? No. But thank God for it. Despite the silence of CBS, NBC, and ABC news, the libs have heard of it. I'd feel sorry for them if they weren't actively plotting my (and your) death in the name of Gaia.

P.S. Here's Strike One:


Sorry, Anonymous.

Thursday, December 03, 2009

THE WEST POINT SPEECH. I read a lot of the commentary, some from the left, a lot from the right, and I confess to being surprised by the diversity of viewpoints. Libs range from Vietnam paranoia to disapproval of timelines. Many conservatives are disdainful, but others, like Rove and Gingrich, are modestly hopeful and even speak of courage, despite their reservations about a date certain a few months before the 2012 election for beginning the withdrawal.

Frankly, I don't see any courage here. I see a dissembling choice between polar opposites of fear. Fear that if he alienates the hardcore America-hating left, they won't work enthusiastically for his reelection even if they still vote for him. And fear that if  he does what he really wants to do -- abandon Afghanistan just as he has castrated the War on Terror with a "treat terrorists as U.S. citizens" law enforcement strategy -- he will fatally expose his blatant campaign dishonesty to the conservatives, independents, and moderate Democrats who may have their doubts about the war but won't accept a white flag as the new standard of American foreign policy.

Despite all the months of delay, this is still a decision not to decide. Yes, we're surging, but we're also leaving. The president is occupying his usual position -- above it all, mistaking detachment for immunity from responsibility...


...hoping against hope that he won't be lowered into the stark dilemma on the ground -- actually deciding -- that results in real personal consequences. He still believes he can play it all by ear for the next eighteen months, waiting to see which hole to dash to for electoral safety.


But there is no safe hole. He's trapped no matter what happens, because he made the trap for himself a couple years ago. For close to half a century now, ever since Vietnam, Democrats have been opposed to any exercise of American military power that isn't unrelated to American national security. Defending ourselves is somehow immoral, which is not any kind of expression of concern for American troops because it is still okay to send our military into harm's way under U.N. or NATO control on behalf of quixotic causes that appeal to their sense of social justice, like Kosovo or Rwanda. Average Americans have, unfortunately for the Democrats, tumbled to this perverse preference and don't accept it. That's why Democrats running for national office have been compelled to lie -- repeatedly, flagrantly, and sometimes ingeniously -- about their own commitment to national security and the force of American arms. This is the only relevant fact in terms of assessing Obama's paradoxical Afghanistan policy and his fears about the response of his leftist base. Which is why they should and probably will cut him a break.

He opposed the Iraq War from the safe position of not being in Congress in the aftermath of 9/11. That's what ultimately won him the support of the true believers on the left. But since he was running for national office, he couldn't tell the truth -- that of all evils in the world, he, like his most ardent followers, regarded American military might as the worst of them, the likely source of all nasty acts in the second and third worlds. If it weren't for the United States Marines, Navy, and Army, muslims wouldn't be so pissed off and the tinpot dictators of Asia, Africa, South America, China, Russia and even Cuba wouldn't be so cranky and unreasonable and might even treat their own people more decently. But average Americans are far too stupid to understand such global insights and so, come election time, it's necessary to lie to them. You oppose the Iraq War because America, being America, is actually worse than Saddam, somehow, but you can't say that. Therefore, you and your followers agree on the lie that you actually do approve of the Afghanistan War, just so the dopes won't think you hate your own country as much as you really truly do.

Yeah. I know. Sounds like paranoid conspiracy theory, right? Except that the current left-right political considerations everyone concedes Obama is dealing with are the stone cold proof that this is the truth of the matter. If the left is mad at Obama for sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, they are mad at him for NOT lying during his presidential campaign. Everything he ever said about Afghanistan being the GOOD war, they assumed to be a lie, accepted as a lie, and fully expected to be proven a lie. In fact, their support for him was based on their belief that he was lying to the entire American public.

That would be the first half of the trap Obama is now trying to escape.

The second half of the trap is that all the people Obama was lying to in the name of social justice, meaning the, uh, majority of American citizens, don't expect to be lied to the way liberals orgasmically delight in being lied to, and so he discovered that he was, in some sense, stuck with his declaration that there was such a thing as a good war and Afghanistan was it.

Which is worse? Getting backed into the position of telling the truth to the 30 percent who demand to be lied to, or being forced to turn your lies into (some kind of) truth for the 70 percent who actually believed what you told them in the first place? How do you decide? This is the politico-philosophical nub, isn't it? For a social justice obsessive like Obama, the decision turns out to be fairly easy. You tell all the lies everybody on all sides wants to hear -- in a pleasing, rational baritone voice. The way Chavez, Castro, and Mugabe would. You tell conservatives you're committed to escalating the war without ever mentioning victory. You tell the left you're committed to winding down the war without ever mentioning what you mean by "conditions on the ground."

And you're so pleased with your own cagey rhetoric that you forget you're not a community organizer kibbitzing from the outside but the undisputed boss of all the proceedings, ineluctably tied to the specific, real outcomes, whatever they are.

There's no good outcome here for Obama. He can turn the generals loose, watch casualties increase dramatically, and still there will be no milestones of victory because he never defined any. He can exercise his power as Commander-in-Chief and turn the "surge" into a farce, limiting casualties among all those troops he has no interest in seeing succeed and then bringing them home on schedule. But in that case there will also be no milestones of the surge, and people will remember both that Bush's Iraq surge worked and that Obama gave his generals less than they asked for.

The loud blowfly in the ointment is that this situation is NOT really about Obama and his electoral base, his image, his rhetoric, or his quaint notions of social justice. It's about the fact that there's a sizeable percentage of muslims who want to do as much harm to the United States and its citizens as they can. There's absolutely NO sign that Obamouse understands this elemental fact. Which is why he's set himself up for the springing of the trap that will finish him off politically -- a massacre of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a disastrous coup in Pakistan, another 9/11 in America, or any of a dozen other proofs positive that compromise and bowing merely embolden enemies around the world who look at him and laugh. I won't show you this, because Mrs. CP wouldn't like it, but I will remind you of this:


The traps are there, and they will be sprung. I feel sorry for everyone who's trying to see the silver lining of such malevolent clouds.

SQUEAK.

P.S. Two additional notes. Mice can be a problem. Here are 500,000 of them killed in four nights during the plague that hit Victoria and South Australia in 1917.


And here's what Robert Burns had to say about Barack Obama:


Or something like that.

Monday, November 30, 2009

MOOVIES. Mrs. CP and I saw two good movies in the exhausted aftermath of the family Thanksgiving feast, faultlessly cooked and hosted as usual by the pint-sized Irish dynamo of a wife, mother, and peacock-proud grandmother of five in this household who is already amped up for Christmas. (Thanks to all who wished us a Happy Thanksgiving. We had exactly that. And we hope all of you did, too.)

Back to the movies, though. This post is in the mode of "we sort of understand where you're coming from, BUT..." a fine holiday-ish sentiment toward lefties that still merits some skepticism on a rainy Monday after Thanksgiving weekend.

We were absorbed and moved by Matewan, an account of an early (c. 1920) milestone in the unionization of coal miners Mrs. CP confided she had always wanted to see. I agreed because Chris Cooper is one of my favorite actors, not a star but absolutely one of the heirs of the Jimmy Stewart legacy, an actor who never chews scenery but simply lets you watch him thinking. The entire movie is an exercise in one-sided manipulation of your emotions, but sometimes your sense of simple justice enables you to consent in such manipulation. I mean, don't we all agree that West Virginia coal miners were abused by the coal companies? Of course we do. So we tolerate the cartoonish characterizations of good guys and bad guys, and we -- despite our urban, suburban, or comfortable rural experience -- are quick to identify with the hard-scrabble deprivations of Americans today's Democratic oligarchy expresses routine contempt for: Bible-quoting illiterates who apply the same level of logic to economics as they do to the Creation.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the movie. Cooper was as subtly magnetic as he was in Sea Biscuit, the raw, unflinching cinematography was worthy of Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and the cast was not the usual panoply of too-goodlooking actors substituting for real people that undermines most socially conscious films. We had the legitimate dramatic suspense of trying to decide which character would be the obligatory sacrificial Christ figure -- the saintly union organizer, the wise beyond his years 15-year-old coal miner/preacher, or his long-suffering (also saintly) mother. The answer was dramatically inevitable and therefore emotionally satisfying, especially given that it was portended ahead of time by a dimestore plot detour that threatened for a precious 25 minutes to reduce the whole movie to a TV potboiler.

Unless that's all it was, really, the whole time. Or, more accurately, an anti-potboiler that sought to prove its seriousness by evoking without delivering on its references to more expressly 'Hollywood' movies.

The boy preacher was dangled before us throughout as an obvious candidate for innocent death who turned out to be the aged, retroactively wiser narrator -- a la The(anti)Road Warrior.

The racial subplot starring James Earl Jones offered a tantalizing To Kill a Mockingbird possibility of a black man ensnared by his own sterling ideals into a lynching situation. But there's no Gregory Peck here. Only West Virginia hicks. In this case, unemployed union hillbillies who psychically divined the truth and defused the fascist plot in the nick of time. (Which they always do, even now, except when Sarah Palin or the ABCs are involved...)

The climax was the most (anti)Hollywood of all -- a deliberate, visual allusion to the advancing, murderous deputies of Pale Rider, only -- shock and awe of contextual irony -- this isn't the movies (except that it really is), and Clint Eastwood's 'Preacher' won't be showing up to save the day. Just as God is rudely shoved to the side by Preacher Boy in his funeral oration (above) and multiple other scenes. As with its Hollywood references, this is a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it too. Christianity is good when it is an attribute of abused workers versus evil coal company capitalists. Christianity is ridiculed whenever its mercy and forgiveness are placed in the context of the short hard lives of miners whose faith continually sets them up for more exploitation by corporate pharisees. There's a scene, for example, in which the boy preacher turns a gospel parable upside down by declaring that Jesus would have changed his tune if he had only known about labor unions. Israelites under Roman rule obviously experienced none of the privations of Appalachian coal miners.

And then, with ultimate dramatic hypocrisy, the conclusion of the movie identifies the dead (fictional) Communist union organizer hero with the Christian principle of nonviolence, as if, somehow, despite the facts, the ferociously violent and racist John L. Lewis administration of the United Mine Workers Union can somehow be associated with the passive civil disobedience of Ghandi and Martin Luther King. Except that the actual Christianity part is full of shit because the capitalists will shoot you dead without a second thought.

At imdb.com, they love this movie. Read the user comments. One guy even claims to use it as a history lesson for his college students:


Only problem is, the history is incorrect, even according to habitually left-leaning Wikipedia. The Matewan Massacre wasn't an assault by a coal company on coal miners. It was an assault by coal miners on coal company enforcers:


The dead did not include any union organizers, saintly or otherwise. In fact, the only organizer on the scene was "Mother Jones," who appears not to have been injured in the event at all and died in her nineties, with no bullet holes to speak of.

Not saying the miners didn't have their grievances. All I'm saying is that what happened wasn't Hollywood pure. It was more like High Plains Drifter than Pale Rider. All I'm saying. What do you tell your history class when you show this kind of historical fiction? Is it like Rather's Bush memoes -- fake but accurate? I'd love to know.

Which leads me to my second movie, Cinderella Man. The first time I saw it, years ago, I didn't like it. The second, third, and fourth time I liked it more. Initially, I objected to the dominance of the thematic message, that life in the Depression was some kind of quantum superposition of proletarian solidarity and implicit adoration of FDR's aristocratic stooping to help the common man. Yeah, I liked it that Braddock was from Jersey and came back from nowhere to win the heavyweight title, but it rankled that I had never heard anything much good or bad about Max Baer and suddenly here he was, the Mike Tyson sadist of the Thirties. Also, it's almost unheard of that a heavyweight title changes hands without a knockout, and I was suspicious of Ron Howard's cinematography depicting a brutal Rocky-esque title fight without even one knockdown. On subsequent viewings I guess I was charmed by Renee Zellweger. Her performance rang true to me. I could understand a Jersey girl's love of her husband to the point that she was willing to give up a big financial payday to keep her husband alive. And I DO admire James J. Braddock. But as a man, not as a champion like Marciano or Ali. Something about the fight scenes just seems wrong.

Maybe I wouldn't have looked it up without the precedent of Matewan, but I did look it up. And what I found is... interesting. Nothing bad about Braddock. But something good about Max Baer (which kind of rings true to everyone who found his son, Max Baer, Jr., charming in the Beverly Hillbillies):


So now I'm wondering. Really wondering. About several things. (Including all those scenes in the Catholic church with praying parishioners glued to the radio on Braddock's behalf...) Things that resonate all the way back even to Matewan. When the history is complicated, wouldn't a good movie encompass the complications as well as the bumper sticker propaganda that's easiest to convey? And if you're laying a claim to artistic integrity and moral purity of purpose, wouldn't you do your best not to tell an actual lie about people who are now dead and can't defend themselves when you go out of your way to defame their memory? Unless you're just making a cynical buck?

I'll close with a small quest I pursued. I tried to find YouTube of Ron Howard's version of the Braddock-Baer fight. I couldn't find much. I began to suspect he was trying NOT to tell a lie, because the footage I found and remembered was so artfully angled, partially to conceal that Russell Cowe is about 5'7" (which is why there are no level shots of the fight in the movie at all) and partially to conceal the fact that neither actor was really a prizefighter. But then I found two helpful sources on YouTube. I found footage of the actual fight, which was far duller than Ron Howard's cinematic version, verifiication that Baer spent too much time clowning and not enough time actual fighting -- early Ali? More importantly, the actual footage showed a Star of David on Baer's trunks.


Then I found, in the Cinderella Man trailer, a full body shot of 'Max Baer' advancing from his corner.


 No Star of David on his trunks. Fancy that.

I give credit to Ron Howard for depicting the fact that Max Baer graciously conceded Braddock's victory after their fight. I concede that Ron Howard didn't identify Max Baer as a Jew or Jewish advocate. But I can't forgive him for committing an act of libel against someone who, in some other movie, would be a moral hero. At most, Baer was one-quarter Jewish. He stood up, long before it was cool, in exactly the right context, for a group most of the world overlooked. In payment, he is depicted in a movie meant to celebrate the myth of the New Deal as exactly the kind of monstrous killer the Nazis (and contemporary Columbia students) have made the Jews out to be.

I can't wait to hear about the professors who are using Cinderella Man to teach their marxist students about the Great Depression.

Thing is, Mrs. CP and I both, as I said, enjoyed both these movies. They bring tears to the eye. But they're not history or anything like it. They're at best a glimpse of the world the way lefties see the world. One can sympathize, one can even begin to understand, BUT...

We still need Clint Eastwood more than we need dopey pacifist utopians.


Just to be clear. I mean, do we have to be nervously anticipating a Ron Howard baseball movie where Hank Greenberg is the bestial villain? If so, count me out.

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