Paul Krugman, another Nobel laureate to scoff at, writes that concerns about Obama’s massive spending/borrowing binge will lead to inflation are nonsense.

All of this raises the question: If inflation isn’t a real risk, why all the claims that it is?

Well, as you may have noticed, economists sometimes disagree. And big disagreements are especially likely in weird times like the present, when many of the normal rules no longer apply.

But it’s hard to escape the sense that the current inflation fear-mongering is partly political, coming largely from economists who had no problem with deficits caused by tax cuts but suddenly became fiscal scolds when the government started spending money to rescue the economy. And their goal seems to be to bully the Obama administration into abandoning those rescue efforts.

Cutting taxes puts money into the hands of individuals. This stimulates the economy as millions decide where that money can be put to best use, funding start-ups or just simply letting consumers vote with their pocketbooks.

“Rescuing the economy” means taking more money from those individuals (reducing their free choice), running it through Washington D.C. where a big chunk gets wasted, where politics determines what gets funded and where know-it-alls get to control things.

What’s worse, there’s not enough money to tax today, so Obama is taxing income that we haven’t even earned yet.

Meanwhile, historian Niall Ferguson takes aim at Krugman’s thinking.

On Wednesday last week, yields on 10-year US Treasuries – generally seen as the benchmark for long-term interest rates – rose above 3.73 per cent. Once upon a time that would have been considered rather low. But the financial crisis has changed all that: at the end of last year, the yield on the 10-year fell to 2.06 per cent. In other words, long-term rates have risen by 167 basis points in the space of five months. In relative terms, that represents an 81 per cent jump.

Most commentators were unnerved by this development, coinciding as it did with warnings about the fiscal health of the US. For me, however, it was good news. For it settled a rather public argument between me and the Princeton economist Paul Krugman.

It is a brave or foolhardy man who picks a fight with Mr Krugman, the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. Yet a cat may look at a king, and sometimes a historian can challenge an economist.

A month ago Mr Krugman and I sat on a panel convened in New York to discuss the financial crisis. I made the point that “the running of massive fiscal deficits in excess of 12 per cent of gross domestic product this year, and the issuance therefore of vast quantities of freshly-minted bonds” was likely to push long-term interest rates up, at a time when the Federal Reserve aims at keeping them down. I predicted a “painful tug-of-war between our monetary policy and our fiscal policy, as the markets realise just what a vast quantity of bonds are going to have to be absorbed by the financial system this year”.

De haut en bas came the patronising response: I belonged to a “Dark Age” of economics. It was “really sad” that my knowledge of the dismal science had not even got up to 1937 (the year after Keynes’s General Theory was published), much less its zenith in 2005 (the year Mr Krugman’s macro-economics textbook appeared). Did I not grasp that the key to the crisis was “a vast excess of desired savings over willing investment”? “We have a global savings glut,” explained Mr Krugman, “which is why there is, in fact, no upward pressure on interest rates.”

Now, I do not need lessons about the General Theory . But I think perhaps Mr Krugman would benefit from a refresher course about that work’s historical context. Having reissued his book The Return of Depression Economics, he clearly has an interest in representing the current crisis as a repeat of the 1930s. But it is not. US real GDP is forecast by the International Monetary Fund to fall by 2.8 per cent this year and to stagnate next year. This is a far cry from the early 1930s, when real output collapsed by 30 per cent. So far this is a big recession, comparable in scale with 1973-1975. Nor has globalisation collapsed the way it did in the 1930s.

Credit for averting a second Great Depression should principally go to Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, whose knowledge of the early 1930s banking crisis is second to none, and whose double dose of near-zero short-term rates and quantitative easing – a doubling of the Fed’s balance sheet since September – has averted a pandemic of bank failures. No doubt, too, the $787bn stimulus package is also boosting US GDP this quarter.

But the stimulus package only accounts for a part of the massive deficit the US federal government is projected to run this year. Borrowing is forecast to be $1,8400bn – equivalent to around half of all federal outlays and 13 per cent of GDP. A deficit this size has not been seen in the US since the second world war. A further $10,000bn will need to be borrowed in the decade ahead, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Even if the White House’s over-optimistic growth forecasts are correct, that will still take the gross federal debt above 100 per cent of GDP by 2017. And this ignores the vast off-balance-sheet liabilities of the Medicare and Social Security systems.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the bond market is quailing. For only on Planet Econ-101 (the standard macroeconomics course drummed into every US undergraduate) could such a tidal wave of debt issuance exert “no upward pressure on interest rates”.

Obama cited “empathy” as a criterion for his Supreme Court pick. Law professor John Hasnas writes about the unseen effects of this.

…a good judge must have “an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.” Judicial decision-making involves the application of abstract rules to concrete facts; it is impossible to render a proper judicial decision without understanding its practical effect on both the litigants and the wider community.

But what about compassion and empathy? Compassion is defined as a feeling of deep sympathy for those stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering; empathy is the ability to share in another’s emotions, thoughts and feelings. Hence, a compassionate judge would tend to base his or her decisions on sympathy for the unfortunate; an empathetic judge on how the people directly affected by the decision would think and feel. What could be wrong with that?

Frederic Bastiat answered that question in his famous 1850 essay, “What is Seen and What is Not Seen.” There the economist and member of the French parliament pointed out that law “produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.” Bastiat further noted that “[t]here is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.”

This observation is just as true for judges as it is for economists. As important as compassion and empathy are, one can have these feelings only for people that exist and that one knows about — that is, for those who are “seen.”

One can have compassion for workers who lose their jobs when a plant closes. They can be seen. One cannot have compassion for unknown persons in other industries who do not receive job offers when a compassionate government subsidizes an unprofitable plant. The potential employees not hired are unseen.

One can empathize with innocent children born with birth defects. Such children and the adversity they face can be seen. One cannot empathize with as-yet-unborn children in rural communities who may not have access to pediatricians if a judicial decision based on compassion raises the cost of medical malpractice insurance. These children are unseen.

One can feel for unfortunate homeowners about to lose their homes through foreclosure. One cannot feel for unknown individuals who may not be able to afford a home in the future if the compassionate and empathetic protection of current homeowners increases the cost of a mortgage.

In general, one can feel compassion for and empathize with individual plaintiffs in a lawsuit who are facing hardship. They are visible. One cannot feel compassion for or empathize with impersonal corporate defendants, who, should they incur liability, will pass the costs on to consumers, reduce their output, or cut employment. Those who must pay more for products, or are unable to obtain needed goods or services, or cannot find a job are invisible.

The young man is just a couple weeks away from returning home after sailing around the world.

Zac Sunderland is attempting to be the youngest person in history to sail around the world alone.

Though the goal is simple, achieving it is not.

Sailing around the world is one of the oldest and most difficult adventures of all time. Man has tested himself against this task for over 500 hundred years.

Sailing around the world alone is akin to climbing Mount Everest, sledding across the Arctic, or canoeing the Nile River.. The difficulty and the danger cannot be underestimated.

Out of all the billions and billions of people that live or have lived, more people have gone into space than have sailed alone around the world.

Less than a handful of people have done it under the age of 20.

No one has accomplished this under the age of 18.

His blog, linked off his main site, has plenty to savor.

Ted Bromund in the New Ledger:

On June 4, Great Britain will go to the polls to vote in elections for the European Parliament and for local councils. European elections are normally dull affairs that draw few voters: the European Union may exercise an outsized influence on the governing of Britain, but the European Parliament is a distant, pompous, and irrelevant organization that plays only a minor role in the Union. Local council elections are more exciting – they are the nearest Britain comes to American-style mid-term elections – but in a highly-centralized state like Britain, it has, regrettably, become difficult to take local councils seriously.

Of course, critics might say that that is part of the problem. Indeed, that is precisely what they do say: no less than David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, has called for “a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power. From the state to citizens; from the government to parliament; from Whitehall to communities. From the EU to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy.” This call does not come out of a clear blue sky: indeed, it is a direct response to the scandals that have rocked all the major parties over the past month. Gordon Brown has had problems of his own – a Labour effort to establish a deniable ‘dirty tricks’ team backfired spectacularly – but the main scandal crosses party lines.

In outline, it is simple enough: MPs from all parties have been caught submitting dubious expense receipts. The varieties of alleged misconduct are almost endless, and range from minor claims for travel to more serious questions about the purchase and sale of second homes, and occasionally, for moat cleaning. The amounts in question are, as scandals go, not terribly large, which makes it a very British scandal: only in Britain could a leading member of the Socialist Campaign Group, and a Labour MP, get into hot water for spending 1,100 pounds on up-market wallpaper.

Photographer Martin Waugh shoots water drops and makes art. You can see his portfolio here.

The boys at Time Warp had him over for some fun with this ultra-high speed video camera. Watch below.

by Burt Prelutsky

I have always found it odd that whenever the producers of TV, movies and records, are accused of setting a bad example for the kids, they always insist that their product is simply entertainment and that entertainment in no way influences youthful behavior.  If they really believed it, they’d have to be even stupider than they are.

It’s not just that they’re every bit as aware as the rest of us that advertisers spend billions of dollars a year advertising their merchandise in the media, but additional fortunes are spent on product placement in motion pictures targeted to young people.  They also know that advertisers get into bidding wars for the services of a LeBron James.

But the real proof that these people are lying through their teeth when they tell you that the tube lacks the power to influence kids is to be found on their shelves and their walls.  All you have to do is check out the various plaques and scrolls with which they adorn their offices.  Let a TV show’s young star be seen buckling up when he gets in his car, and the producer is sure to be honored for promoting safe driving.  When years ago, the Fonz was shown to have a library card, librarians all over the country saw the number of young readers spike overnight.  The producers received a ton of commendations for promoting literacy.

 On the reverse side, when such terrible role models as Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears misbehave, the ripples are felt all across teenage America.Some years ago, Charles Barkley, then a star in the NBA, said he didn’t sign on to serve as anybody’s good example.  Instead, he announced that kids should use their parents as role models. 

If only it were that simple.  Unfortunately, a large number of children don’t have fathers in their lives.  But the sad truth is that even when there is a father in the house, kids rarely hold their hard-working dads in the same high regard they do basketball players and rock stars.All in all, I’m glad I’m not young anymore.  I’m even grateful I’m not raising a youngster.  That’s because liberals are doing their best to destroy childhood.

I’m not saying it’s their intention, but it’s certainly how things are working out.  It’s as if they can’t wait to hurry the sprouts through what should be their innocent years.  Trying to turn something as joyful as Christmas into something as barren as the winter solstice is only one sad part of the campaign.

First, we can’t wait to get the tots out of the home and into pre-school.  Then we get them into grammar school and pile on homework, lest they get the idea that childhood is supposed to be fun.  Judging by the test scores, the homework is nothing but punishment for the sin of being young.  It obviously isn’t for the purpose of education or so many teenagers wouldn’t be graduating from high school without math or language skills.

The one area in which young people are well ahead of their ancestors is in sexual matters.  At a tender age or at least what should be a tender age, the girls are learning to put prophylactics on bananas and the boys are learning to swagger like pint-sized pimps.

I would like to lay most of the blame on Bill Clinton, who had parents all over the country being asked by their youngsters to define a blow job.  But those perverted beauty pageants for five-year-olds such as JonBenet Ramsey had tainted the American landscape even before Clinton got around to tainting the Oval Office.

 When I first began to realize how little concern we have for our children, aside from providing them with expensive sneakers and pricey electronic toys, was when I saw the light sentences doled out to pedophiles.  Whenever one of these creatures abducts a youngster, it gets its share of media attention, but not nearly as much as when some college party girl goes missing in Mexico or Bermuda.  Furthermore, nobody has yet explained why a pedophile, once caught and convicted, is ever released from prison or an asylum.  But, then, liberal compassion tends to go to the victimizer and not the victim simply because, being such an abnormality, it allows them to feel extra special about themselves.

What really irks liberals, though, is smoking.  That’s why Camels recently got into legal trouble in Pennsylvania for using a cartoon character in its cigarette advertising.  The company had already suffered dire consequences because of their earlier use of Joe Camel.  Frankly, I never understood why kids would rush out and begin smoking because of an ugly, hump-nosed, cartoon, especially when they already get to see all the cool liberal actors and rock stars smoking in real life.

However, be that as it may, the real war on kids is taking place in the classroom and the movie theater.  That’s where the real terror is lurking these days, just waiting to ruin the dreams of children.  It takes the form of nonstop propaganda about global warming.

When I was a child, the bogyman was an imaginary creature hiding under my bed.  Now, thanks to Al Gore and his ilk, bogymen are lurching across the countryside like the zombies in horror movies, terrifying the kids.  That’s all the kids, including the little sons and daughters of liberals.  According to recent studies, a huge percentage of 10-year-olds believe the earth will be entirely under water before they’re grown-up.  I call it child abuse, and if those parents weren’t a bunch of politically correct, brain-dead, pantywaists, they’d put a stop to it.  Instead, they take their kids to see left-wing pap like “Earth,” and they cheer on people like Gore and Pelosi, who are making millions upon millions of dollars off their investments in this massive hoax.  These self-righteous cretins love green, okay; greenbacks, that is.

Unlike Chicken Little, who insisted the sky was falling, and scared all the critters in the barnyard, these greedy little creeps are screaming that the ice is melting, and scaring all the kids in the schoolyard.

Maggies Farm:

I’m not sure what to say to my Republican friends anymore.

I honestly thought all the pearl clutching paranoids pulled the lever with the D next to it, but I guess I was mistaken. You ran the least attractive candidate possible for President and lost by a little and you’re ready to commit suicide in your Ayn Rand bunker after you’re finished homeschooling your kids.

It’s tiresome stuff. I’m going to try to explain it to you one more time. Obama, and all his accomplices in his co-prosperity sphere, are not “secret” anythings. Not secret muslims, socialists, communists, antichrists or Illuminati. He’d adore it if you spent the next eight years looking for his birth certificate, because he knows it’s a colossal waste of his enemies’ time, and that’s a natural born fact.
It’s a straight plunder economy. Why are you so confused and surprised about this? You keep talking about all sorts of ill effects that are going to appear in decades and verify your wild hypothesis about the guy. But the effects are always immediate and visible. He’s not playing a deep game here.I take that back. Maybe he is. He’s confused a lot of people into thinking he’s confusing.

Poor Rich Moran. He’s all shocked that maybe car dealership closings under the watchful eye of Democrat mandarins are going to fall along party lines, and figures it’s earthshaking.

Very Drudgey, that. Kinda goofy too. It’s goofy because if the car dealer thing is true, you’re just wearing a sandwich board advertising for Obama by harping on it if you’re not in a position to do anything about it. It’s unwise to wound a tyrant. Drudge didn’t get famous by noticing fat interns wear dresses. It was a particular dress that had to be produced.

It’s a straight spoils system, you deep-thinking knuckleheads. You think there was a cabal involved, meeting in a Hyatt deciding this stuff, the way Kos kids think corporations meet once a year to set prices for everything from ramen noodles to gasoline. It’s so much simpler than that. Find a constituency the Democratic Party lords over that isn’t getting direct cash payments in one form or another from a government entity. I’ll wait, but I won’t hold my breath until you get back. (more…)

Intrepid Nan invades China with her global outlook.

…Pelosi linked global warming to environmental justice, saying the right to a clean environment is also a human right.

“I do see this opportunity for climate change to be … a game-changer,” she said at Tsinghua. “It’s a place where human rights — looking out for the needs of the poor in terms of climate change and healthy environment — are a human right.”

China has 1.3 billion people, 900 million of whom live in poverty. Real poverty — not the cell-phone-owning, Food-Stamp-spending variety of poverty capitalism has made possible in the USA.

Seriously, does she think people subsisting on scraps care one bit about scary projections from western computer models?

To achieve this, Pelosi said governments would have to make decisions and choices based on science.

“They also have to do it with openness, transparency and accountability to the people,” she said. “Everyone has to have their situation improved by it.”

Echoes of H.G. Wells and the early Progressives whose faith in science — and a willingness to impose its dictates on everyone, like it or not.

In answering a question from a student about how Pelosi was going to get Americans to cut back on their carbon emissions, the leading Democratic lawmaker said it was important to educate children on how to conserve energy and for citizens to build more environmentally friendly homes.

“We have so much room for improvement,” she said. “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory … of how we are taking responsibility.”

From William Castleman:

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

by J.C. Phillips

The rationale for the “Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009,” otherwise known as Cap and Trade, is that environmental catastrophe awaits us if we do not control the amount of carbon dioxide (co2) flowing into the atmosphere. This hysteria has been propelled by alarmists using computer models to predict (not to prove) that what-used-to-be-called-Global-Warming-before-it-became-clear-that-the-earth-is-cooling-so-it-is-now-called-Climate Change is caused by man made emissions of carbon dioxide.

The scam-ur uhm- I mean the idea works like this: government will set a limit on the amount of co2 companies may produce. Companies will then be forced to purchase emissions permits for every ton of co2 produced. Companies that exceed their limits will be able to purchase or trade for additional permits with companies that emit less than their allotted cap. Waxman-Markey seeks an “80 percent reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050″ and a “100 percent auction to ensure every ton of carbon is paid for.”

While supporters of Cap and Trade attempt to direct our attention to large scale carbon emitters in the coal and oil industries make no mistake; the repercussions from this tax will be felt in every American household.

The Congressional Budget Office noted that cutting carbon emissions just 15% would result in customers facing “persistently higher prices for products such as electricity and gasoline. Those price increases would be regressive in that poorer households would bear a larger burden relative to their income than wealthier households would.” This conclusion is echoed by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, which further determined that Waxman-Markey will reduce GDP by $9.6 trillion, increase the federal debt by 26%, kill 1.1 million jobs, increase peak year unemployment to 2.5 million workers and raise the energy bill paid by a typical family by about $1,500 annually.

Of course what is a little economic hardship if it means saving the sky from falling?

Every day new scientific discoveries emerge calling into question the computer models on which this carbon hysteria is based.

Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Langley Research Center realized the models rely on mathematical equations derived more than 80 years ago. These differential equations ignore proper boundary conditions and assume an atmosphere that is infinitely thick. Miskolczi derived a new solution using the proper boundary conditions (the atmosphere is 65 miles thick) and viola no more global warming.

There is also a new study conducted by the university of Wisconsin and the US National oceanic and atmospheric administration, which concludes that 70% of the sharp temperature rise in the North Atlantic over the last 30 years is due to dust blowing out to sea from the deserts of North Africa – A small detail the computer models failed to account for.

What is more remarkable is that, even assuming some human component, if Waxman-Markey meets all its goals of reducing carbon emissions, the EPA calculates that the impact on world temperature would be no more than two-tenths of a degree Celsius at the end of the century.

That is a lot of pain for very little gain.

But Global warming is not about science it is about politics and this administration’s choice to ignore facts is about a political means to social control. The President’s own lawyers admit as much.

Three weeks ago Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) produced a white house memo to the EPA that, in his words, repeatedly suggests “a lack of scientific support for this proposed finding” [that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health]. Barrasso then quoted directly from the document, “making the decision to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the US economy, including small businesses and small communities.” If that’s not change you can believe in I don’t know what is.

There is an old joke that if the government could it would tax the very air that we breathe. As social commentary Waxman-Markey’s assumption that we can save the planet by taxing co2 – a substance every human being emits with every breath taken- is absurd indeed. It’s also an old joke that is not very funny.

Just because it’s cute.

Rapid climate change is forcing scientists to consider for the first time whether to help wildlife relocate to places where they are not currently found, says a group of international researchers who have created a tool for evaluating such relocations.

Assisted wildlife migration was once a taboo conservation strategy because of its potential for harming ecosystems. It is still highly controversial because it’s not clear that we know enough to predict what will happen.

That’s an understatement.

Relocated species might overpopulate their new habitats, cause extinctions of local species, or clog water pipes as invasive zebra mussels have done in the Great Lakes.

Forbes:

During the U.S. Presidential primaries last year, I had expressed my misgivings that Barack Obama might turn out to be another Jimmy Carter, whose confused thinking and soft image paved the way for the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

The subsequent Iranian defiance of the U.S. and Carter’s inability to deal effectively with the crisis in which Iranian students raided the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and held a number of U.S. diplomats hostage led to disillusionment with him in sections of the U.S. and to his failure to get re-elected in 1980. The strong line taken by him against the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet troops towards the end of 1979 did not help him in wiping out the image of a soft and confused president.

The defiant action of North Korea in testing a long-range missile with military applications last month, and its latest act of defiance in reportedly carrying out an underground nuclear test on May 25, can be attributed–at least partly, if not fully–to its conviction that it will have nothing to fear from the Obama administration for its acts of defiance. It is true that even when George Bush was the president, North Korea had carried out its first underground nuclear test in October 2006. The supposedly strong policy of the Bush administration did not deter it from carrying out its first test.

After Obama assumed office in January, whatever hesitation that existed in North Korea’s policy-making circles regarding the likely response of U.S. administration has disappeared, and its leadership now feels it can defy the U.S. and the international community with impunity.

A series of actions taken by the Obama administration have created an impression in Iran, the “Af-Pak” region, China and North Korea that Obama does not have the political will to retaliate decisively to acts that are detrimental to U.S. interests, and to international peace and security.

Among such actions, one could cite: the soft policy toward Iran: the reluctance to articulate strongly U.S. determination to support the security interests of Israel; the ambivalent attitude toward Pakistan despite its continued support to anti-India terrorist groups and its ineffective action against the sanctuaries of Al-Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistani territory; its silence on the question of the violation of the human rights of the Burmese people and the continued illegal detention of Aung San Suu Kyi by the military regime in Myanmar; and its silence on the Tibetan issue.

Its over-keenness to court Beijing’s support in dealing with the economic crisis, and its anxiety to ensure the continued flow of Chinese money into U.S. Treasury bonds, have also added to the soft image of the U.S.

President Obama cannot blame the problem-states of the world–Iran, Pakistan, Myanmar and North Korea–if they have come to the conclusion that they can take liberties with the present administration in Washington without having to fear any adverse consequences. North Korea’s defiance is only the beginning. One has every reason to apprehend that Iran might be the next to follow.

Meanwhile, Andy Borowitz notes:

One day after North Korea launched a successful test of a nuclear weapon, President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with “the strongest possible adjectives.”

Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test “supercilious and jejune,” leading some in diplomatic circles to worry that the U.S. might be running out of appropriate adjectives with which to craft its response.

But President Obama attempted to calm those fears, saying that the United States was prepared to “scour the thesaurus” to come up with additional adjectives and was “prepared to use adverbs” if necessary.

“Let’s be clear: we are not taking adverbs off the table,” Mr. Obama said.  “If the need arises, we will use them forcefully, aggressively, swiftly, overwhelmingly and commandingly.”

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority of the Supreme Court in 1927. Such was the “enlightened” opinion of intellectual elites of the time.

Read yesterday’s post on H.G. Wells for more.

It debuts on ABC tonight. From the NYT:

…the show feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed. Who really thinks of wind power — an allusion to which is a running visual gag in the show — as mindless, left-wing nonsense anymore?

Oh, plenty of us. That the reviewer thinks otherwise speaks volumes.

H.G. Wells figures prominently in Jonah Goldberg’s excellent (essential reading, actually) Liberal Fascism.

Fred Siegel at City-Journal has more.

Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership. But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at least, by proposing to place power in the hands of scientists, academics, artists, and professionals, a new and truly worthy aristocracy that could govern based on what was good for both leaders and the led.

These antidemocratic and elitist assumptions were nowhere better illustrated than in the extraordinary career of a Briton, H. G. Wells. Wells is best remembered today as the author of such late-nineteenth-century socio-scientific fantasies as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man. But he was much more than that. His political writing achieved extraordinary influence in America, not just through his defense of liberal freedoms such as free speech but through his hostility to population growth, capitalism, and democracy itself.

Herbert George Wells was already a renowned writer of fiction when in 1901 he published the nonfiction work Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. The book’s scientific prescriptions to cure social diseases turned the novelist into a seer, both in England and in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in the North American Review. More than any other intellectual of the time, Wells spoke to two enormous nineteenth-century shifts: the growth of giant industries, which undercut the old assumptions about the sovereignty of the individual; and Darwinism’s concussive reassignment of humanity from the spiritual to the natural world, which begged for prophets of a naturalized humanity.

Numerous fin de siècle writers had looked backward at a century of material and mechanical progress, both to praise its achievements and to condemn its running sore, the seemingly permanent misery of the urban working class. But Wells looked ahead, asserting that the future as well as the past had a pattern. He argued inductively about the nature of what was likely to come, based on the way the telephone, telegraph, and railroad had shrunk the world, and he populated his predictions with a dramatic cast of collective characters. Some he loathed: the idle, parasitic rich; the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” the “People of the Abyss”; and the yapping politicians and yellow journalists whom he considered instruments of patriotism and war.

But if these people were leading the world on the path to hell, there were also the redeemers, the “New Republicans,” the “capable men” of vision who might own the future. These scientist-poets and engineers could, Wells thought, redirect the Darwinian struggle away from a descent into savagery and toward a new and higher ground. Building on the social and sexual ideals of nineteenth-century utopian reformers, Wells generated a complete cosmology, a scientific socialism to compete with Marxism, which, he thought, reduced the complexities of life to simpleminded slogans of class war. Outflanking the Marxists on their own ground, he called for a different kind of struggle, a “revolt of the competent” against the confines of conventional middle-class morality.

Read on.

HT: Tom Bunzel Never borrow one if your friend seems feverish.

Clive Crook gets it half right:

Critics in his own party and Republican opponents are attacking Barack Obama’s emerging stance on national security with equal ferocity. Many Democrats are furious that the president has broken his promise to abandon the Bush administration’s war-powers approach to fighting terrorism. Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, and other conservatives attack him for doing the opposite – for keeping his promise and emasculating the US anti-terror effort.

The left’s complaints make far more sense than Mr Cheney’s. Mr Obama is adjusting the Bush administration’s policies here and there and seeks to put them on a sounder legal footing. This recalibration is significant and wise, but it is by no means the entirely new approach that he led everybody to expect.

Obama is adjusting his positions partly because of the spotlight Cheney is shining on them.

Mr Obama is in the right, in my view, but he owes his supporters an apology for misleading them. He also owes George W. Bush an apology for saying that the last administration’s thinking was an affront to US values, whereas his own policies would be entirely consonant with them. In office he has found that the issue is more complicated. If he was surprised, he should not have been.

He’s inexperienced, so what would you expect?

The signature intellectual defect of the non-compromisers on each side of this debate is an inability to recognise conflicting ends. The Democratic party’s civil libertarians seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects. There can be no trade-off between freedom and security, because the freedoms they prioritise trump everything. To many on the other side, no trampling on the liberty of ordinary citizens, no degree of cruelty to detainees, no outright illegality is too much to contemplate in the effort to stop terrorists. On this view, security trumps everything.

Oh, lord.

Did this man read the “torture” memos?

That Bush felt it necessary to seek a legal opinion on how to interrogate terrorists by itself refutes this nonsense. The actual text of the memos demonstrates how solicitous the Bush administration was of the rights of alleged terrorists.

In the end, the constant jokes were just too much to take for the long-suffering residents of Butt Hole Road.

Groups of youths used to visit the street and bare their backsides for photographs while many delivery firms simply refused to believe it existed.

And coachloads of amused American tourists frequently turned up to view the sign after it appeared in a US book.

And so despairing households in the suburban street in Conisbrough, South Yorkshire, decided that the road’s name simply had to change.

The LA Times, lacking the sense of humor of David Brooks (see the post below) sees a new dawn breaking.

Under bright spring sunshine, the mood at the White House was celebratory last week as President Obama announced an agreement on new rules to force drastic improvements in the fuel efficiency and tailpipe emissions of the nation’s cars and trucks.

But what made the Rose Garden audience unusual was not the environmentalists and liberal Democrats, who have long supported such requirements. The surprise was the presence of executives from the world’s 10 largest automobile makers, most of whom had fought long and hard to avoid tougher standards. Like other businesses, however, they had joined with the Obama administration to help craft new rules for their industry.

The lions-and-lambs quality of the gathering suggested that a new paradigm was developing in the relationship between government and business.

In the space of only a week or so, there was significant movement not only on vehicle fuel efficiency but also on similarly contentious issues including reducing greenhouse gas emissions by factories and power plants, subjecting tobacco to new health and safety supervision, and overhauling healthcare coverage.

In each case, the forward movement took place with significant industry participation and input.

Yeah, because they’re scared of Obama. If he can replace the CEO of GM, no one is safe. And with no significant media scrutiny of his power grabs, who can blame them?

Who knew David Brooks could be so funny?

There is nothing so inspiring as public service, so I’ve been incredibly moved over the past few weeks to watch squads of corporate executives come to the White House so President Obama could announce that he was giving away their money.

A few weeks ago, we were privileged to see a gathering of health care executives standing behind the president as he announced that they would be donating $2 trillion in future revenue to the cause of health care reform.

Recently we were uplifted when the president informed Chrysler’s secured creditors that they had agreed to donate their ownership stake in the company to the United Auto Workers. Just last week, we were enthralled to see a group of auto executives beaming with pride as the president announced that in order to reduce gas consumption, they would henceforth be scaling back on all those car lines that consumers actually want to buy.

These events have heralded a new era of partnership between the White House and private companies, one that calls to mind the wonderful partnership Germany formed with France and the Low Countries at the start of World War II. The press conferences and events marking this new spirit of cooperation have been the emotional highlights of the administration so far.

These events usually begin when the executives gather in the Oval Office, where they experience certain Enhanced Negotiating Techniques. I’m not exactly sure what the president does to inspire the business leaders’ cooperation and sense of public service, though those who remember the disembowelment scene in “Braveheart” will have a general idea.

Then the president leads the executives out onto the White House lawn for the announcement ceremony. Often, the president will still be carrying the riding crop and the pliers used in the private negotiation. He moves to the microphone while the executives take their pre-assigned places behind him, the jingle of their leg shackles blending with the dulcet tones of spring. I thought one hospital executive was so moved by the occasion that he had slipped into catatonic shock, except that he was blinking “Save Me! Save Me!” in Morse code to his shareholders.

“We meet at an exciting moment for our country, a time of unprecedented cooperation between government and private industry,” the president intones, lifting his foot from the trachea of an unconscious pharmaceutical executive. “Many of the business leaders behind me have seized an exciting opportunity to join the nonprofit sector without even switching jobs.”

At this, the C.E.O.’s behind him don frozen smiles, exuding the sort of spontaneous enthusiasm often seen at North Korean pep rallies.

During the press conference with health care executives, I don’t even think Obama meant to give away $2 trillion of their money. He was going to give away just $750 billion, but he got carried away by the Era of Responsibility. “The stakeholders behind me have promised to cut costs by nearly 2 percent a year,” the president riffed. (The executives’ lips were like dead worms stretched across mirthless smiles. Their cheeks were like hardened clumps of concrete.) “They have agreed to support the administration’s reform package.” (Coronaries, epileptic seizures all around.) “They have agreed to donate their kidneys in my office right after this ceremony.” (The executives were now flopping about the stage, like a 3-D version of the Heimlich poster.)

You gotta read the whole thing.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” –George Orwell

The following video link was sent by Susan Gertson, who lost a son in Iraq. Just so you know Susan, I’ve been thinking of him the past few days, and about your family. Thank you.

Anyone who’s made their own furniture appreciated the work of Sam Maloof, who died at age 93. Scratch that — anyone who appreciates fine art appreciated his work, although he refused to call himself an artist.

As he said:

Many of my friends call themselves artists…

I guess if you can’t sit on a chair or can’t eat off of a table or can’t use a set of drawers, it’s art. Today I have a lot of friends who hand you a card and it’s artist in wood or everything but being a woodworker, and I don’t consider myself an artist. I never have. I’m a furniture maker, I’m a woodworker, and I think woodworker’s a very good word, and I like the word, it’s an honest word, and that is what I am, a woodworker.

There is one thing that I remember very vividly as I look back over the years: my wife once said to me, “Sam, God has been very good to us.” I hope somehow, in some way, that I have been able to give some of this blessing to others, perhaps in my writing, or in my lectures and workshops. I have tried to do this in the furniture that I have made for so many who have become my friends. So much of me goes into each piece that I make, how good it is, that in making each new piece, a renewal takes place. So it continues: a renewal in my commitment to my work and what I believe.

Too often we who make objects – and I speak of all media – become quite taken with what we have done. We accept all credit, all praise. We become smug and conceited. I believe no man has ever designed anything that approaches the complexity of the simplest flower or the grandeur of a great redwood tree. God is the Creator of all things, and the beauty He has given us is awesome.

There’s a series of videos with him here.

Shot a couple weeks ago as our maple tree just started leafing out. Image was taken at f/2.5 to render bare branches as ghostly lines.

Charles Krauthammer:

If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths of the entire, allegedly lawless Bush program.

The latest flip-flop is the restoration of military tribunals. During the 2008 campaign, Obama denounced them repeatedly, calling them an “enormous failure.” Obama suspended them upon his swearing-in. Now they’re back.

Of course, Obama will never admit in word what he’s doing in deed. As in his rhetorically brilliant national-security speech yesterday claiming to have undone Bush’s moral travesties, the military commissions flip-flop is accompanied by the usual Obama three-step: (a) excoriate the Bush policy, (b) ostentatiously unveil cosmetic changes, (c) adopt the Bush policy.

Cosmetic changes such as Obama’s declaration that “we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel.” Laughable. High-toned liberal law firms are climbing over each other for the frisson of representing these miscreants in court.

What about disallowing evidence received under coercive interrogation? Hardly new, notes former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy. Under the existing rules, military judges have that authority, and they exercised it under the Bush administration to dismiss charges against al-Qaeda operative Mohammed al-Qahtani on precisely those grounds.

On Guantanamo, it’s Obama’s fellow Democrats who have suddenly discovered the wisdom of Bush’s choice. In open rebellion against Obama’s pledge to shut it down, the Senate voted 90 to 6 to reject appropriating a single penny until the president explains where he intends to put the inmates. Sen. James Webb, the de facto Democratic authority on national defense, wants the closing to be put on hold. And on Tuesday, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said, no Gitmo inmates on American soil — not even in American jails.

That doesn’t leave a lot of places. The home countries won’t take them. Europe is recalcitrant. Saint Helena needs refurbishing. Elba didn’t work out too well the first time. And Devil’s Island is now a tourist destination. Gitmo is starting to look good again.

In 2006, we wrote about Los Angeles Magazine’s long profile of a porn star:

Last month Los Angeles magazine ran a feature story, “A Porn Star is Born,” about Sasha Grey. The moment Sasha turned 18, she drove down from northern California to the San Fernando Valley to pursue her dream of becoming a pornstar, an ambition she’d nursed since age 11.

Sasha got an agent right away, and with her young face and taste for pain (don’t ask) became a hot commodity. The ten page article describes how much she earns depending upon which orifices are involved. Very matter of fact.

Los Angeles is a glossy, upscale magazine, the type that forces you to flip past ten pages of ads for $50,000 watches and other baubles before you locate the table of contents. I was struck by how normal they made Sasha’s career choice sound–it could’ve been about a young girl who always wanted to become an astronaut. I imagined naive teenage girls reading this article and thinking, “Hmm. Good money, easy hours and fame.” They erased any shame that might still attend.

Now Sasha is starring in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, now out in theaters. She came to his attention via the LA mag story.

Meanwhile, the disturbed Mary Kay Letourneau is out of prison and cashing in.

A teacher who became notorious in the 1990s for having an affair with a sixth-grader is hosting a “Hot for Teacher” night at a Seattle bar — along with the former student, now her husband.

Bar owner Mike Morris says Mary Kay Letourneau (leh-TUR’-noh) has served her sentence and it’s OK for the couple to have some fun.

The 47-year-old Letourneau served seven years in prison after pleading guilty in 1997 to raping Vili Fualaau (VEE’-lee foo-ah-LA’-oo), now 26. They met when Fualaau was in second grade and began their affair when he was 12 and she was a 34-year-old married mother of four. They were married in 2005 and have two daughters together.

Morris says Saturday’s event at Fuel Sports Eats & Beats will be their third “Hot for Teacher” night. She greets people and he DJs.

Tigerhawk:

They have all been beaten up, prosecuted, and pilloried by the federal government for taking on obligations originally described as in the national interest.

First, the government twists Bank of America’s arm to bail out Merrill Lynch, then Democratic prosecutors in New York and Democratic Congressmen in Washington tear him a new one. Then the Treasury Department makes even the strong banks a TARP offer they could not refuse, whereupon the government imposes ex post facto restrictions on compensation and hiring that damage their ability to do business and deter other banks that might even need the money from taking it. Then there are the people who continued to work at troubled financial firms because they had been promised to be paid, only to find themselves the target of rifle-shot tax legislation and ad hominum demonstrations by Barack Obama’s fellow “community organizers.” Oh, and do not forget Ed Liddy, who stepped in for free to help the government deal with AIG, only to find himself excoriated in Congressional hearings for bonuses that he had vetted with the same government months before. Not surprisingly, Liddy threw in the towel this week.

Well, the wheels of the federal government’s bus are now rolling over Chrysler’s terminated dealers:

The calls from Chrysler officials were coming nearly every day, sometimes several times a day, right through the final weeks before the company filed for bankruptcy. And the message, said Robert Archer, who runs three Chrysler dealerships in the Houston area, was simple: Take more cars.

“They tell me, ‘The only way that we can survive is if you order cars, and Fiat and the government see money coming in,’ ” Mr. Archer said.

He acquiesced, he said, thinking he was doing his part to save the company. “I’m a team player and I don’t want them to go out of business, so I ordered a ton of cars.”

Then, a week ago, Chrysler told Mr. Archer, a dealer for three decades, that his three stores were among the 789 dealerships the company was eliminating as of June 9. Mr. Archer had 700 new vehicles and $1.7 million in new parts in stock when the letters arrived.

These dealers were going to get terminated one way or the other because Chrysler has been a zombie for months, but the government intervention in the otherwise natural decline of the business — intervention to benefit the United Auto Workers — seems to have incrementally screwed these poor guys. The government conditioned further aid — life support, really — on Chrysler showing “viability,” which meant that Chrysler’s survival and therefore all those union jobs depended on it booking at least some sales to its dealers. Not surprisingly, Chrysler used the government’s condition — that it at least seem viable — to bludgeon these dealers into buying cars they did not need. They acquiesced, because they did not want to be responsible for taking down Chrysler when the government was trying to save it.

There are several things that might be said about this.

First, the government essentially promoted, or at least established conditions that would tend to promote, the fraudulent transfer of wealth from Chrysler’s dealers to Chrysler’s creditors, including particular the UAW. This is not surprising, because unions support Democrats and small businessmen usually do not and the creditors seem to be the bullet-proof constituency for both parties, but it is shocking nonetheless.

Second, if this happened in a purely private context we would regard it as fraudulent inducement. How often have creditors or auditors been held liable because the businesses they validated or certified then defrauded a third party? Even if this is slightly different legally, is it any different morally? Ought not public companies who do business with “bailout” targets have to disclose in their risk factors that the terms of their business might change at any time, without notice, regardless of contracted terms? Do not hold your breath for the SEC to start demanding that disclosure.

Third, what signal does this story and the experience of the banks send to businesses that might otherwise try to support a government program to bail out a company? The obvious answer is that the current federal government is entirely unreliable, and that people and firms who try to help in good faith stand a very good chance of getting run over for their efforts.

This does not seem like the right way to encourage volunteerism.

A photo slide show of images from the wreckage of flight 1549 — the one that landed safely in the Hudson river.

This nitwit doesn’t acknowledge the part the US government played in starting the subprime loan racket, but that’s just a detail. The principle is what is so appalling.