Month: August 2011

From Austin, Texas.

What’s on your mind?

Today (or yesterday, I guess – Monday Aug 29) I went out to run a few errands around town. It didn’t really occur to me to be on the lookout for hippies and gypsies. But our favorite guests are back in town again and I didn’t even think to notice it was time for them yet.

For background, I live in Reno, Nevada. We are the closest REALLY BIG city to the dried lakebed in the middle of the desert where “Burning Man” occurs every year.

Burning man is a long tradition of the Northern California Hippies and newer generations of young open-minded kids. I’ve never been but I would love to go sometime. They get together in the middle of the desert, owned by the US Bureau of Land Management, as much of Nevada is. The BLM has some tough requirements for them. And the attendees are very good conservationist liberals so they all respect the rules. But they do run around in funniy outfits or no outfits at all. Boys in Tutus? Girls in Speedo’s? Yup. Many just ride their bicycles around naked. And the drugs are a-plenty. Oh to be young again. I used to be invited to come along every year when I lived in Northern California. I really wish, now, that I had taken them up on it.

Anyhoo, I didn’t realize it was all starting up today and I went out to run some errands. One of them was to drop by the Wal-Mart and pick up a few items, since it was nearby to my other tasks. When I got there, I was shocked at how busy the parking lot was. There were at least 20, maybe 30 RV’s and many rental trucks, vans, flatbed trucks, everything.

I went in wondering just what’s going on. When I got inside I realized. Gypsies and hippies everywhere. Scantily clad ladies – and hot, lightly-clothed men that haven’t shaved in days. So hot. And all just floating around so happily.

This is when I realized that Burning Man must be starting up today. They were stopping in to buy some additional supplies before going over the hill and down the long dirt road to get to their destination. Most of them already had their plans all set and had bought most of their stuff for meals and such, as they tend to plan these as shared community meals and each individual is only responsible for one meal (for a large group) out of the week and a half, if they’re in big enough a group.

This Burning Man thing is not just a small event anymore. something like 40,000 people go each year now and probably double that number wish to go but can’t. There are restrictions on how many are allowed by the BLM. So it’s gotten expensive (like $300 per person bought directly. Scalped tickets go for $1500+ once those sell out.) People from all around the world fly in now to attend this event. It is now Reno/Tahoe Airport’s busiest time of year, just accommodating all of the “Burners.” Local casinos market to them to spend a day or two either before or after their venture into the desert. Many take them up on it and it’s great for business.

Back to the Wal-Mart experience, though. I only needed a few items: French Bread, Bananas, Limes, V-8 Juice, Tonic Water, Gin and Beer. Produce Department and bakery, no problem. Most of the other stuff, no problem. But then I get to the liquor department for the Gin. Nothing. Normally that 50 yard aisle has many thousands of bottles of liquor but today, basically – nothing. 95% of everything I would normally see was raided. Gone. They had some beer, but not the brand I wanted to buy. And so I checked the next aisle where they keep the wine. Almost all gone and a guy from the wine distributor desperately trying to restock it with no luck. The gypsies just kept taking it all as fast as he put it out. Apparently the beer distributor had this figured out (as they should) and they had guys re-building the pyramids of (warm) beer in the aises as fast as people loaded into their carts.

It seems insane but if you’re gonna party in the middle of the desert for a week and a half, unable to leave,  you need alot of party favors – of various varieties – and it’s alot less expensive buying your alcohol in Nevada than in California, where most of the Burners come from.

However, I heard a few different European languages being spoken amongst the shoppers at Wal-Mart today. They really do come from everywhere. I felt sorry for them not finding their preferred liquors in the liquor department and thought about telling them where else to go to buy them. But I realized that’s more trouble than it’s worth. Giving directions to out-of the-way liquor stores is a bit much when dealing with foreigners.

When I got to the check-out stand, I asked the cashier how her day has been serving the Burners. She said it’s been great, but she’s had some strange ones. Just before me, there was a guy buying nothing but beer, wine and liquor – $1400 worth. That’s it.

Wow. Just wow.

Seriously though. Reno/Sparks/Tahoe just loves our “Burners” every year. They rent up all of our RV’s and travel trailers. They buy thousands of bicycles for their desert visit, and many donate them back to charity at the end of their stay. They buy all of our bottled water. They buy millions of dollars in liquor, wine and beer. And many of them stop in for the big national rib cook-off competition and stay in a hotel/casino for a day or two surrounding their trip. Our airport is jam-packed and many extra flights are added to accommodate them. Who could ask for more?

Burning Man is awesome for the economy and also for the  event itself.

By the way, I had to go to my little neighborhood grocery store in order to buy my Gin and Tonic, as there was none of either left at Wal-Mart.

I was pointed to this three-year old book excerpt from Yuval Levin’s Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy by a post at America’s Shittiest Website. Surprisingly, the excerpt turned out to be quite interesting, even though the introduction and conclusion are badly flawed. Mr. Levin is a deeper thinker than you normally find at The Corner.

He starts out his piece by stipulating that the left, or liberals, or progressives, or Democrats, or whatever you want to call them, are indeed the Party of Science. And he lays out the philosophical and political history, placing a belief in progress, human and societal perfectibility, etc., as a foundational belief of the left. It’s good that he does this, because defending the right as natural allies of science would be as absurd as saying that King Louis XVI believed in voting rights.

I won’t bore you with his whole history of the intellectual movement, except to say that he presents a fair and reasonable recounting of philosophical currents up until at least the early 20th-Century.

What’s interesting about this piece is that he has convinced himself that environmentalism is fundamentally an illiberal movement that places a brake on the left’s belief in human progress. Here’s how he sets up this conflict. He starts with Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) original vision.

Nature, moreover, is the chief constraint on human power and human comfort, and the extension of the empire of man over nature is a noble and necessary goal. For too long, they thought, human beings had been subject to the whims of nature and chance, but by coming to know the workings of nature, we could master it, both removing natural obstacles and constructing artificial advantages for ourselves. “Nature, to be commanded,” Bacon wrote, “must be obeyed,” so the purpose of the new natural science was to learn nature’s ways so as to overcome them. This desire for knowledge of and power over nature was not power-hunger, it was humanitarianism. Nature, cold and cruel, oppresses man at every turn, and bold human action is needed in response. Science arose to meet that need.

And then he contrasts this optimistic progressivism with modern environmentalism:

If you had to devise a complete opposite to this scientific view of nature, a mirror image in essentially every respect, you would probably end up with roughly the notion of nature that gives shape to the modern environmentalist ethic. Nature in this view is, to begin with, a complete and ordered system, to be understood in whole and not in part. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” wrote John Muir, a founder of modern environmentalism. Far from conquering and manipulating nature for his benefit, moreover, man must be careful and humble enough to tread gently upon it, and respect the integrity (and even the beauty) of its wholeness. We are to stand in awe before nature, and never to overestimate our ability to overcome it or underestimate our ability to harm it (and with it ourselves)…

…Taken to the extreme, this approach turns the scientific view of nature on its head, and looks at man as an oppressor of the natural world instead of the other way around.

It’s actually an incisive and rather beautiful point, but it doesn’t do the work that Mr. Levin wants it to do. It might not be clear from the above excerpts, but Levin has attached progressivism to
the wrong sail. Progressivism is dedicated not to the belief in a straight-line road of ever-increasing mastery over nature, but to a commitment to empiricism. I mean ’empiricism’ in the sense of testing theories and following the facts, not as a commitment to the purely philosophical meaning of that term.

Just because 16th to 19th-Century liberals were extremely optimistic about science’s ability to improve the human condition doesn’t mean that the hard lessons of the 20th-Century didn’t provide us with some sense of caution and limitation. Mechanized warfare, mechanized genocide, unleashing the power of the atom, and increased awareness of societal sustainability are all the results of scientific activity. The evidence tells us that we must learn to avoid war and limit it when it breaks out. It tells us that we must put individual human rights above any impulse to perfect mankind. It tells us that we cannot go on living the same way we do now because our lifestyles are radically changing the climate we’ve evolved to live in. It’s true that the environmentalist movement is less optimistic than the traditional liberal view, but it’s based in an empirically-based realism and humility.

Think about these problems this way. The left reacted to the horrors of the World Wars by attempting to prevent a repeat. First the League of Nations was created, and then the United Nations. Within the United Nations’ umbrella we set up the International Atomic Energy Agency to limit the use and spread of nuclear weapons. After the Holocaust, all ideas about eugenics were abandoned on the left in favor of a robust assertion of individual rights and dignity, and the Civil Rights Movement followed inexorably from there.

However, the right prevented the ratification of the League of Nations in the U.S. Senate, constantly complains about the United Nations, has historically played around with using nuclear weapons (in Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, for example), and opposed the Civil Rights Movement with fury. As for the problem of climate change, the right now simply takes a check from Exxon/Mobil and convinces itself that it isn’t happening.

So, the fundamental core of liberalism or progressivism isn’t a pollyannish belief that we’ll move in a straight line towards a better world. The fundamental core is to follow the facts and respect them, come what may.

The right’s response to this is to accuse us of ignoring what science has to say (or doesn’t say) about equality. In the simplest terms, the argument goes that science tells us that we are not equal in either physical or mental abilities, and it makes no value judgment on whether we ought to be equal in other ways. If liberals are so respectful of science, why are they so upset by inequality?

It’s not uncommon for this argument to have heavy racial undertones. In fact, that is the norm. Mr. Levin is careful to avoid broaching that subject. Still, there is a distinction between egalitarian equality and basic fairness. I think at some level, every child thinks there’s something wrong with the fact that some people live in mansions and some people are starving to death. Why do some people have more than others, and why is that fair? Shouldn’t Daddy Warbucks give the starving baby some food from his pantry? The only questions are how far you’re willing to go and how are you going to organize a redistribution of wealth? Evidently, there are plenty of adults who overcome this impulse to fairness and convince themselves that giving to the poor only encourages them to remain poor. It’s true that you can set up a system that will have that effect on some people, but you can also use scientific methods to fine-tune such programs and improve them.

In any case, while there is a certain impulse towards equality of outcomes in almost all humans, and it is true that this manifests itself on the far left of the political spectrum, mainstream liberal thought only seeks equality of opportunity combined with a social safety net to protect the unfortunate and unlucky, and to provide us all with at least minimal and meaningful access to health care. This is not based mainly on egalitarianism, but on basic decency and fairness. We never said people are all the same or could all be made to be the same, but they shouldn’t be denied opportunities because they had poor nutrition in the womb or as an infant, or because of the color of their skin, or their religion, or their gender, or their sexual orientation, or because their parents were too poor to provide them with an education. We can minimize and even prevent some of these things from standing in people’s way. Science doesn’t tell us to let a child go without food, or that it’s imperative that people go to lousy schools. A commitment to fairness is not touched by the scientific realization that people are not, in fact, equal in any measurable way.

There is no conflict between progressivism and environmentalism, and there is no conflict between a belief in science and a commitment to equality. Mr. Levin’s critique of the modern left fails. And his defense of the right never materializes. He opens by saying, “The American right has no desire to declare a war on science, and nothing it has done in recent years could reasonably suggest otherwise.” But he does nothing to back up his claim. In fairness, this is an excerpt, so it’s possible that he provides a defense elsewhere in his book. The end of the excerpt looks at the debate over abortion and stem-cell research and claims that this, too, presents and example of the left having a conflict between equality and commitment to science. But that whole argument is based on the idiosyncratic view that an embryo is protected by the Declaration of Independence, and so it is not worthy of my time.

Once Labor Day is over and Congress is reconvened, the president is going to unleash an ambitious economic program aimed at reducing unemployment. We don’t know what the details will be, yet, by Congress is going to have to react to it and take some kind of action. However, the Republican leadership of the House has already mapped out their agenda for the fall, and it’s filled with nothing but anti-labor and anti-environmental legislation that will never pass the Senate or escape the president’s veto-pen even if it did.

House Republicans are planning votes for almost every week this fall in an effort to repeal environmental and labor requirements on business that they say have hampered job growth.

With everyone from President Obama to his Republican challengers in the 2012 campaign focusing on ways to spur economic growth, House Republicans will roll out plans Monday to fight regulations from the National Labor Relations Board, pollution rules handed down by the Environmental Protection Agency and regulations that affect health plans for small businesses. In addition, the lawmakers plan to urge a 20 percent tax deduction for small businesses.

I don’t know how stupid the Republicans think the American people are, but no one reasonably expects a Democratic Senate or a Democratic administration to buy into a jobs program based on weakening unions and poisoning the environment. It’s more bad faith time-wasting, and it’s precisely why this is the most unpopular Congress in living memory.

The Republicans need to stop fostering the delusion among their base that owning the House means that you get to pass your agenda. It gives you a seat at the table, not an excuse to do absolutely nothing but pose and posture. There are some things that both sides should be able to agree to, including some compromises on orthodoxy, to create some damn jobs. Wasting weeks of debate on bills that are going nowhere and accomplishing nothing is going to push Congressional approval levels below ten percent.

I’m pretty sure that Kevin Held is the worst person in the world. You’ll have to read the article to get the full flavor, but this guy set up a charity in 2003 to raise funds to make an enormous multiple football-field size quilt made up of king size sheets. It was supposed to be a 9/11 memorial. He succeeded in raising over $700,000 but he did not succeed in creating the quilt. Instead, he just paid himself and his brothers.

The $713,000 that Held raised from students, school fundraising campaigns, T-shirt sales and other donations is gone. More than $270,000 of that went to Held and family members, records show.

In a July interview, Held said he hoped to finish the quilt in a few months. But he changed his mind a few weeks after the AP began asking questions, abruptly shutting the project because of “tough economic times.”

Held has done an impressive job raising money, persuading students to hold “penny drives” and police officers to buy T-shirts promoting the quilt for $20 or more. But he’s spent a lot in doing so.

Since 2004, Held paid himself $175,000 in salary, health insurance, other benefits and a weekly car allowance he received for most of that time. He’s owed another $63,820 in deferred salary, according to the charity’s most recent tax filing. Held argues that he’s actually owed closer to $420,000, because he was supposed to receive $60,000 annually since 2003, and has received far less.

He told the AP in July that more than $50,000 paid in 2005 to satisfy a loan never reported by the charity went to his mother to repay “an accumulation of a bunch of small loans.” But when pressed last week – after the AP pointed out that his mother died that year – Held said he paid himself more than $45,000 to repay the loan. He said he couldn’t explain the other $5,000 without researching it.

He said he paid another $12,000 to his brothers, Dave and John, as consulting fees.

Held also charged the charity more than $37,000 for office rent, utilities and other related expenses, according to the group’s tax forms. But the addresses reported by the charity for most years were Held’s home and private mail boxes at PostNet and UPS stores in Arizona and south Texas.

Held said he received much of the office payments to cover the cost of working out of his home.

Held spent more than $170,000 on travel since 2004 to promote the quilt. He rarely traveled without his two Alaskan Malamute dogs, one at 120 pounds and the other 200 pounds. He also listed $36,691 in credit card and bank charges since 2005 and $10,460 for an expense listed as “petty” in 2009.

“I loved going out and traveling,” he said. “I loved going to the police departments.”

I’d say that he should be making at least one more visit to a police station. Here’s the best part.

Still, he’s come a long way since serving a few days in a Tampa jail in 1993 for misdemeanor theft and battery. With his wife, he’s moving into a $660,000, five-bedroom house overlooking a lake in Chandler, Ariz…

…He insists he has accounted for every dime spent by the charity, even if he can’t justify all the expenses.

“It doesn’t mean I’m a bad person,” Held said. “It just means I made a mistake.”

So far, he’s gotten away with it. The article details several other 9/11 charity scams. It makes you wonder why anyone plays by the rules.

K-Thug finds an acorn:

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

I don’t know. I think we just experienced eight years of this kind of rule, and I was terrified the entire goddamn time. It took years off my life. It radicalized me. It literally changed my life and all my priorities. It was a thing I felt compelled to fight every single day. That didn’t change for me when we won back the House and Senate, and it didn’t change for me when we won back the White House. Why? Because I know that one of these years, these yahoos will gain total control of our government unless we have people willing to fight them every single day.

I think Krugman knows this, and I think he does his part. But I also think he employs his own form of magical thinking a lot of the time. Namely, he acts like the world will conform to what reason dictates and that rational decisions will be made if only someone makes a rational argument. No. This is a knife-fight. Reason plays a part, but it isn’t decisive.

Michele Bachmann thinks that God sent us an earthquake and a hurricane to tell Congress that we’re Taxed Enough Already and we need to realize that our federal government is on a “morbid obesity diet.” That’s kind of funny because I was thinking that God decided to do what Congress refuses to do and create some construction jobs. I guess Michele and I just have different ways of reading the tea leaves.

I kid.

Bachmann was talking to a Tampa, Florida megachurch audience, so they are probably accustomed to hearing that God is actively intervening in our national affairs. Normally, these messages occur when God has witnessed too much sodomy, but apparently social issues are taking second place to fiscal concerns in this election cycle.

Here’s what Bachmann actually said:

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’ Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we’ve got to rein in the spending.”

It’s less offensive than Jerry Falwell’s take on 9/11, but it isn’t different in kind. I admit that is it highly unusual to have a large earthquake on the east coast or to have a hurricane ravage the Mid-Atlantic and New England. But, just because something is highly unusual doesn’t mean that God is trying to talk to us. Remember, God is all-powerful. If he wants to talk to us he can speak directly to us from the clouds and tell us exactly what our budget priorities should be, down to the last subclause. He has no reason to risk being misinterpreted and no compelling reason to rely solely on cryptic communications.

Steve Benen thinks that Bachmann’s comments should be treated as so scandalous that the press ought to declare her candidacy all but over. But to attack Bachmann’s reasoning is to attack the magical thinking behind it, not just her particular interpretation of that magical thinking. And the press is not going to do that. In this country, magical thinking is the norm, and only a fool would run for office by making a frontal attack on the idea that God might send cryptic messages in the form of extreme weather events.

“What is God trying to tell us?” is probably the most commonly asked question in America, and the press isn’t going to declare the question out of bounds.

I’m not reading Dick Cheney’s new memoir (I’m not paying for it, anyway) but I know from George Will that the 565- page book contains no apologies for anything. My first thought is that, at 565 pages, no conservatives are going to read it either. If there’s one thing the health care debate taught me, it’s that the Republicans do not like to read anything longer than three pages. George Will thinks the former vice-president should apologize for sending our country to war under false pretenses. This is a small degree of progress. This isn’t some b.s. about ‘everyone thought he had W.M.D.’ as if that were the reason we invaded Iraq. This is much closer to the ‘Cheney Lied, People Died’ truth of the matter.

“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason [for invading Iraq],” [Paul] Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.

The truth is that Dick Cheney convinced George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had to go. I don’t think Dubya needed a whole lot of convincing. Those two made that one simple decision and then ran into the problem that they had no legal basis for waging a war of aggression. No legal basis meant no allies. The “reasonable” people in the Bush administration were successful in driving this point home, with a healthy assist from the Blair Government in London. Cheney counseled ignoring the United Nations and eschewing any allies. We didn’t need any excuses to kick some ass. Bush finally ruled against him and agreed that we would need some justification beyond hurt pride to invade a large oil-rich nation on the other side of the world. This is when everyone got together and decided to say that Saddam had a buttload of weapons of mass destruction and no qualms about handing them out to al-Qaeda. The Big Lie used to sell the war wasn’t a lie Dick Cheney originally wanted to tell. He just wanted to say Saddam Hussein was directly implicated in the 9/11 attacks, continued to mean to do us harm, and be done with it. George Will was perfectly willing to go along with that.

GEORGE WILL (ABC 10/28/01): The administration knows he’s vowed, Hussein has vowed revenge, he has anthrax, he loves biological weapons, he has terrorist training camps, including 747’s to practice on…

It was Cheney (and/or Cheney’s guys) who told George Will all that baloney. Did he buy it because he believed it (useful idiot) or because he’s a witting agent (as guilty as anyone)? I don’t know. All I know is that now he wants an apology.

WILL: Five hundred and sixty five pages and a simple apology would have been in order in some of them. Which is to say, the great fact of those eight years is we went to war—big war, costly war—under false pretenses. And…to write a memoir in which you say essentially nothing seriously went wrong…if I wrote a memoir of my last week, I would have things to apologize for.

George Will is right. He has plenty to apologize for. One of those things is acting like we’re stupid and irresponsible for not believing a word Dick Cheney has to say. How many people have died and how much money has been burned because Dick Cheney convinced the president that we had to do yet another land invasion in Asia? George Will should contemplate the magnitude of this error and compare it to the kind of small-ball bullshit he dedicates most of time to complaining about. He should also do a personal inventory over what mistakes he’s made and start making some amends. Dick Cheney made him look bad. He can start by apologizing to America for parroting Cheney’s talking points.

If Rick Perry isn’t going to back off his claim that Social Security is unconstitutional, I have to wonder if any of the other candidates have the balls to aggressively defend Social Security and point out what a liability it will be next year to have a candidate who won’t preserve and defend the program. Perry’s position is incredibly unpopular. It would be far harder to overcome than any position I can even imagine a Democratic taking. I don’t even think running on a strong gun control platform would be nearly as debilitating as running against Social Security. What do you think?