Olbermann = Pwn3d.

At some point I'm going to tire of Captain Integrity as much as everyone else has, but again, since he's responsible for the Essayist coming back from the dead, I am duty bound to report this story to the bitter end.

Apparently the Congressional Black Caucus is unsatisfied with Olbergruppenfuhrer's claim of diversity.

"Big Tent Libertarianism"

Enjoy libertarians accusing each other of heresy. The above phrase appears, seemingly without irony.

Bruce Bartlett: The Money Needs to Come From Somewhere

Bruce Bartlett, formerly of the Reagan administration and recent heretic on Supply Side Economics, makes a couple of serious points:

1. We've probably hit the bottom of the supply-side barrel, lowering taxes is probably not the wisest thing given our current public debt.
2. If the political will to truly reduce spending does not exist, then taxes must be raised to cover them. He suggests a VAT to pay for them.

I rather agree with the first point, and while I see the argument behind the second, I do not agree. Polticial will is not set in stone. In January of 2009 no one could possibly have seen the popularity of a bi-partisan anti-government movement, the election of a Republican to Ted Kennedy's seat. Just because no re-structuring of our public commitments has succeeded doesnt mean it is impossible.

Moreover, to raise taxes to meet public commitments is, in all bluntness, to reward bad behavior. For a century progressives have expanded the role of the state into as many aspects of private life as they could muster the votes for. At this writing, they show no sign of ever stopping that. To pay for a debt that should never have been incurred in the first place without making some effort at preventing this again is only marginally more responsible than endless deficit spending.

So, the dislocations of shutting down the government's massive role in our economy, or the slow starvation of that economy and any pretense of liberty for the sake of feeding the Progressive Leviathan. Place your bets.

Baltimore is Dying.

Last night I was the door man for Investigative Voice's 1-year anniversary party, which featured a six-person panel discussion on the state of the city. Former Mayor Sheila Dixon was on Hand, as well as a scattering of the rest of the commentariat, from police-commissioner-turned-radio-host Ed Norris to the local head of the NAACP. And they said:

Stuff

And the audience asked them keen questions, loaded with

Blah

And after a while it sounded like the same Hot Potato game, like we were looking for someone to blame and drive out of town, loaded with our sins, be it the Police Department, City Hall, or the Media. One gentleman did offer up that the communities really ought to police ourselves, and received applause, but no one picked up the train of thought.

This city is something of a sinking ship, and everyone who can is heading for the lifeboats, and the crew is too busy arguing about who was steering to think of plugging the hole.

Update: One of customers writes of the affair far more thoughtfully than I.

Barack Milhouse Diocletian Steps into the Path of History's Train

Price controls? Really?

Up until this point, he could deflect criticism of the health care plan on the grounds that it wasn't his plan. When he went to talk to the Republicans, he could say that things got into the bill that were contrary to his desires. Now he's gone and put the millstone right around his neck.

I'm so glad we elected the smart guy.

(Hat tip: Insty) 

Update: Reason.com steals my joke. Which is to say, the joke is kind of obvious, and I got my dashed-off tripe in before they could finish their researched article.

Phosphorus and the Poop Problem

In the history of civilization, cities have never been as densely populated as they are now. The reason is twofold: 1) industrialized agriculture spares human labor from needing to be on the farm, and 2) modern sewers cause the rivers of human waste that would otherwise kill everyone in cholera epidemics and the like to be kept away. Food goes into the city, poop comes out of the city, everyone wins.

Except there's a coming resource shortage that may monkey-wrench the whole cycle: Phosphorous. It's what we use to make fertilizer; it's the element that allows farmland to be used again and again. It's the stuff that runs off and causes problems in the Chesapeake. We get it largely from phosphate rock, and our use of it is incredibly innefficient:

Worldwide, according to Cordell and White, five times more phosphorus is being mined than is being consumed. Stated another way, 15 million tons of phosphorus is mined yearly to grow food, but 80 percent never reaches the dinner table: It is lost to inefficiency and waste.

Farmers use too much fertilizer and it runs off the land, polluting streams, lakes and oceans. Industrial agriculture does not plow crop residues back into the soil after the harvest. In some countries, consumers throw away a third of their food, even when much of it is still edible.

The article blames the usual culprits, meat-eating and industry, so I can already see the angle that the enviro-Left is going to take with this. If the Right had guts, they would use this as the wedge against our repulsive, quasi-Soviet agricultural subsidy system, which drives our phosphate-heavy agribusiness practices. I'm not holding my breath.

The solution: poop. Lots and lots of poop. The whole system of waste management may indeed be a waste, and the time may come, and soon, for the ultimate in personal recycling.

Andrea Tantaros on the Next Wingnut Wave

Winning elections is nice. Reforming the government is also nice. But Tantaros makes the larger point that the next pushback is cultural. Not the usual sad Custer's-Last-Stand that conservatives have called a culture war; whining about gay people and rap music is not changing the culture. If we're going to make a mark on the culture, we have to do so by actually competing in the cultural marketplace. That means our books, movies, and everything else we produce needs to not suck more than it needs to be conservative. Let the spoonful of sugar weigh more than the medicine, is my point.

The Iraq War was Won, and There Was Much Rejoicing...

yay. (Hat tip: Insty) Knife point:

Our friends died to secure this day. And here on this road in Diyala, I saw proof that the blood spilled in this backward country had value. It made the cause noble and just. This may not mean much to someone who stands in opposition to our fight, but it is the legacy of our fallen. The honor of their sacrifice. They gave their lives for others like me to come home. They died trying to preserve freedom for this woman. They confronted those who wished to dominate a people in the name of violence and religion, who wished to destroy our culture and way of life.  Even if most Americans may not understand who or what we fight, these men not only believed, many reenlisted to continue the fight until the war was won. I came home in search of that woman’s spirit in the hearts of my fellow Americans.  I came home expecting to find the sacrifice of these brave patriots revered at every turn by those who overwhelmingly sent us to war from Washington.

I’m still looking.

That's the funny thing about democracy, so noble and just in the achievement and so small and vicious in the practice. For the moment, all I can say to David Bellavia is that one day, when the fight over the war is over, and no more "gotchas" can be gotten, the real achievement of he and his comrades will be known, and the shock and awe of it will stand as solemn as the gardens of Arlington.

The Olbermann Soup

Considering it led to this blog's Lazarus-like return from oblivion, it would be remiss of me not to make mention of Daily Caller's We Watch, Because We're Paid To feature. Knife point:

Later, he replayed an old, long clip of himself as a guest on “The David Letterman Show.” Then he recycled a line about Glenn Beck — “He has the long-term memory of a Roomba” — that he had used in identical form last Friday. No one can accuse Keith Olbermann of not being a good liberal: The man loves to recycle.

The line would be better if the word "recycle" were not used twice, but rather saved to the end, but dashed off mockery is no more than this faux-Murrow deserves.

Le Scandal Sestak! Quelle Horreur!

The most scandalous thing about the Sestak Scandal is how scandalous it's not. Breathes there a soul so innocent that knows not the utter normality of such quid-pro-quoing? Deals, compromises, offers, this has been the stuff of politics since Sumer. Despite the promises of whatever Candidate of Change we elect every 16 years, it will remain the stuff of politics. That's why wingnuts like myself prefer that politics has as little stuff as possible.

More interesting than the substance of L'Affair Sestak is the fact of it. A Democratic candidate for Senate is publicly accusing a Democratic President of buying him off, before a primary election? Either Sestak hasn't thought this through, or Obama's in a lot more trouble than he's aware.

If Only the SDS had been Idealists!

For Mark Rudd to admit that the SDS really did evil things (Hat Tip: Insty) is not news, except insofar as it shows a glimmer of honesty in a poltical radical. What rather rises above the usual is the way the Chronicle of Higher Education attempts a demarcation between actions and motives:

The confession, a depressing postscript to the 1960s, solves a four-decade-long mystery. It offers a grim testament to just how mean things got at Columbia, and a sobering reminder that not all student radicals were starry-eyed idealists. In more than a couple of cases, they were power-hungry extremists jostling for control of the student-protest movement.

The naivete staggers: as though idealism never caused extremism and power-struggle. One is one to make of someone who believes that passion and a desire to change the world would stand in the way of cutting a few ethical corners for the greater good? Do they really mean to suggest that Mark Rudd was a cynic in 1968?

 

Starry-eyed Idealist. Murderous Bastard. Goatee Afficionado.

I don't know where people get the idea that utopian idealism and brutal calculation are mutually exclusive.  Even the New Testament advises being innocent as lambs and wise as serpents. Pol Pot did not kill millions for the hell of it. Sure, he enjoyed the exercise of power,  but fundamentally he, and Mao, and Lenin, and Stalin, and Napoleon and you-know-who believed in what they were doing. Believed that it would make the world so much better that the present savageries would be forgotten in the future symphonies of happiness and peace. 

If anything, idealism needs leavening with grim experience and that touch of cynicism that comes with the awareness of how truly broken the world is. Otherwise, one comes to believe that anything that will strengthen your power to act for righteousness' sake is a duty to undertake. And like Lady Macbeth, you will glibly pretend that the blood will not mark you.

Update and Bleg

If I intend to make a go of this, the old format needed to go, and a new format to match The Notion. And the promise of 90% more spittle needed a less sedate color.

And yes, I know the video below doesn't fit. I am a tech dweeb and unsure how to make it fit. Suggestions are of course welcome.

Update: Fixed. Blogger Help really is worth a damn.

Lick 'Em Tommorrow.

General David Petraeus quoting Ulysses S. Grant in the WaPo's On Leadership Video Series:



That's one of my favorite lines from the Civil War. It's vintage Grant, pure unperturbability in the face of chaos. Nor was it bravado: he turned his army right around the next morning and handed the rebels their ass, shoving them out of West Tennessee for the remainder of the war and establishing a safe base of operations against Vicksburg and the rest of the Western Theater. The last thing the Confederates were expecting to see on the morning of April 7, after knocking the Yankees around like tenpins the previous day, was to see those same Yankees pushing after them, full of fight. Not even Lee's masterful display at Chancellorsville the following year beats Shiloh for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

And that is a lesson about war that seems to need re-learning with every passing generation: it's not over until it's over. Afghanistan wasn't over in '03; Iraq wasn't over in '07. They're never over until one side stops fighting.

For The Sake of Clarity and CYA, Here's What I said About Obama then...

These, from my LiveJournal, on the Day After The Election, and the Day After the Inauguration.

So, um...yeah...

I guess this is my other undead blog now. And again, no explanation. I was ranting about Olbermann and it just felt...right.

I'll post some other stuff here later. For the moment, permitt me the intellectual honesty of saying that President Obama did one thing that I do like: he put money down to help build two new nuclear reactors (Hat tip: Insty).

Sure, I'd like it if  he did something about the regulatory mess that delays nuclear plant construction, but the guy is a Democrat. He's going to get garbage from the enviro-left as it is. So two thumbs up for him anyway.

The Essayist #16: Today's Special Comment -- Keith Olbermann is a Racist Swine.

I know, I know, fish in a barrel, cheap shot, giving him attention he doesn't deserve, yadda yadda. Don't care. For reasons passing understanding, while flipping through the channels last night, I left it on MSNBC long enough to catch Olbergruppenfuhrer's Special Comment, all about how anyone and everyone who has any affinity for the Tea Party movement is merely a Klansman in drag.

That means you, honky.