Europe in decline

This is another great article by Mark Steyn for National Review magazine he names "Lethal Leisure"....

In 1853 or thereabouts, Czar Nicholas I described Turkey as the sick man of Europe. A century and a half later, Turkey is increasingly the strong man of the Middle East, and the sick man of Europe is Europe — or, rather, “Europe.” The transformation of a geographical patchwork of nation-states into a single political entity has been the dominant Big Idea of the post-war era, the Big Idea the Continent’s elites turned to after all the other Big Ideas — Fascism, Nazism, and eventually Communism — failed, spectacularly. The West’s last Big Idea is now dying in the eurozone debt crisis. Although less obviously malign than the big totalitarian -isms, this particular idea has proved so insinuating and debilitating that the only question is whether most of the West dies with it.

“Europe” has a basic identity crisis: As the Germans have begun to figure out, just because the Greeks live in the same general neighborhood is no reason to open a joint checking account. And yet a decade ago, when it counted, everyone who mattered on the Continent assumed a common currency for nations with nothing in common was so obviously brilliant an idea it was barely worth explaining to the masses. In the absence of ethnic or cultural compatibility, the European Union offered Big Government as a substitute: The project was propped up by two pillars — social welfare and defense welfare. The former regulated Europe into economic sloth even as India, China, and Brazil began figuring out how this capitalism thing worked. The latter meant that the U.S. defense umbrella ensured once-lavish budgets for hussars and lancers could be reallocated to government health care and other lollipops — and it still wasn’t enough. Whatever the individual merits of ever-more-leisurely education, 30-hour work weeks, six weeks’ vacation, retirement at 50, the cumulative impact is that not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. And once large numbers of people acquire the habits of a leisured class, there are not many easy ways back to reality.

Defense welfare does the same at a geopolitical level. In absolving the Continent of responsibility for its own defense, the United States not only enabled Europe to beat its swords into Ponzi shares but, in a subtle and profound way, helped enervate the survival instincts of some of the oldest nation-states on the planet. I tend to agree with John Keegan, the great military historian and my old Telegraph colleague, that a nation without a military is in a sense no longer a nation. One of the few remaining serious second-tier powers is now joining their ranks: Under the “Conservative” premiership of David Cameron, a nation that within living memory governed a fifth of the earth’s surface and a quarter of its population and provided what global order there was for much of the rest will have a military incapable of independent force projection. Were the Argies to seize the Falklands today, Her Majesty’s Government would have to content itself with going to the U.N. and getting a strong resolution. Were the toppling of Saddam to be attempted today, Britain would be incapable of reprising the role it played eight years ago — of holding down the lower third of Iraq all but singlehanded while the Yanks pressed on to Baghdad. But beyond that, in a more general sense, nations that abandon their militaries tend also to abandon their national interests: Increasingly, instead of policies, they have attitudes. “Global warming” — “saving” the planet — is the perfect preoccupation for the ever-more-refined sensibilities of the post-national nation.

While Europe slept in and slept around, new powers emerged. China and India, on course to be the world’s top two economies within a couple of decades, both act as more or less conventional nation-states. So too do Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey — and many lesser players. We live on a planet in which the wealthiest societies in history, from Norway to New Zealand, are incapable of defending their own borders while basket cases like North Korea and Pakistan have gone nuclear, and Sudan and Somalia are anxious to follow. Whatever supple lies it may tell itself, a rich nation that cannot bother keeping up an army is retreating not only from imperialism and conquest but also from greatness. Continentals enjoy more paid leisure time than anybody else, yet they produce less and less great art, music, literature. A land of universal welfare invariably universalizes mediocrity.

Whether Greece defaults or gets bailed out one mo’ time doesn’t really matter: It’s insolvent, and there isn’t enough money in Germany to obscure that fact indefinitely. The longer “political reality” tries to dodge real reality, the bloodier the eventual reacquaintance will be. Europeans are going to have to relearn impulses three generations of Continentals have learned to regard as hopelessly vulgar. Can they do that? A land of 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees has so thoroughly diverted the great stream of life that it barely comprehends what’s at stake. “Europe” as a geopolitical rather than geographical concept has been for half a century the most conventional of conventional wisdom. Those, like Britain’s Euroskeptics, who dissented from it were derided as “swivel-eyed” “loony tunes.” The loons were right, and the smart set — the political class, the universities, the BBC, Le Monde — were wrong. “Europe” was a blueprint for sclerosis and decline, and then a sudden, devastating fall. As the “loony tunes” could have told them, it ends with, “That’s all, folks.”

Conservatism per Timothy Geoglein

Timothy Goeglein, longtime deputy director of public liason for George W. Bush sums up what conservatism means to him:

"The essential nature of 21st century American conservatism is a view that the federal government is too large and should be relimited; that governments, like families, should live within their budgets; that the market economy is the road to prosperity and is consistent with human nature; that our defense budget must be robust in defense of our liberty; that above all we need to preoccupy ourselves with the moral framework of our freedom; and that we need to preserve the values of Western civilization in the Greco-Roman but especially the Judeo-Christian traditions as the bulwark of virtue that nurtures freedom."

No Taxation without Representation

A message from the future

BY KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON and NATIONAL REVIEW MAGAZINE

Hey, Grover Norquist — I have a message from Mason and Emma, two adorable little newborn Americans still in diapers: “Pay your own goddamned taxes.”

Mr. Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, is the Republican party’s self-appointed policeman working the beat against tax hikes — for us. In effect, he’s working for tax hikes on those Americans being born today and in the next several years, Americans who have no say in our current fiscal policies but will end up paying a heavy price for our indiscipline.

Most Republicans in Congress have signed a well-meaning but destructive pledge to Mr. Norquist’s organization that they will not vote for any tax increase. This includes not only increases in tax rates but also ending special-interest tax subsidies, such as the ridiculous ethanol handout that lately renewed the war of words between Mr. Norquist and his chief Republican antagonist, Sen. Tom Coburn. Senator Coburn, to his credit, has been pushing to get rid of part of our embarrassing corn-gas program, specifically, the part composed of special tax credits for the ethanol emirate. Mr. Norquist, to his discredit, insists that any reduction in the ethanol tax subsidy be accompanied by an equal reduction in other taxes, lest the maneuver constitute a net tax increase and thereby start transforming United States into Germany or Canada or some other country not running Godzilla-sized deficits and spending its children into future penury.

Senator Coburn, Mr. Norquist argues, is an absolute fiend for tax increases: “He’s trying to screw the rest of the Republican party because he is so mad at the world,” Norquist told National Review Online. “He didn’t want to get rid of the ethanol tax credit without raising taxes. The important thing in his life was raising taxes.” Senator Coburn has his shortcomings, to be sure, but it is plainly absurd to claim that “the important thing in his life” is “raising taxes.” Mr. Norquist’s rhetoric then took a sharp turn from the absurd to the perverse as he characterized Senator Coburn’s tactics thus: “He said, ‘Ha, ha, popped your cherry, lost your virginity. Now give me $2 trillion in tax increases.’ As soon as they voted, he turned around and called them sluts. Guys like that didn’t get second dates in high school.” As tempting as it is to apply psychoanalysis here, I’ll stick to fiscal analysis.

The original Americans for Tax Reform were the Boston Harbor renegades and the musket-toting revolutionaries of 1776, and they marched under the banner of “No Taxation without Representation.” The Crown had argued that the American colonists enjoyed “virtual representation” in a parliament in which they had no vote. The Americans didn’t buy it, and neither did William Pitt, whose fine English nose detected a distinctly bovine aroma about the “virtual representation” argument: “The idea of a virtual representation of America in this House is the most contemptible that ever entered into the head of a man,” he proclaimed. “It does not deserve a serious refutation. The Commons of America, represented in their several assemblies, have ever been in possession of the exercise of this, their constitutional right, of giving and granting their own money. They would have been slaves if they had not enjoyed it.”

Roman Genn

Slaves, the man said. But the Stamp Act and the tea tax, odious though they were, are the lightest of yokes compared with the burdens the American Congress is laying upon the shoulders of American citizens not yet born, who have absolutely no say in the matter. If tradition is the democracy of the dead, as G. K. Chesterton put it, then thrift is the liberty of the unborn, who ought not to be encumbered with massive debts that will fundamentally alter the very nature of the American enterprise without their ever having been given the courtesy of a vote. They should not be indentured under a social contract they never signed and would not sign if they had a lick of sense about them.

Your average Age of Obama trillion or so in annual deficits? Chump change next to where our entitlement programs are going. Children being born today might expect to retire around 2075. Unless we take serious action in the very near future to reduce the size of our public debt, those newborn Americans will almost certainly spend their working lives encumbered by much higher taxes — 88 percent higher to accommodate present spending, according to an International Monetary Fund working paper, “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” You can imagine what such a tax increase would do to economic growth, investment, innovation, and the prospects for satisfying employment. (If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on your paycheck — forever.) The middle-of-the-road version from the IMF crew is a mere 35 percent hike in every federal tax, combined with a 35 percent cut in benefits, just to maintain basic national solvency.

And national solvency is a real concern. To get an idea of the size and heft of the millstone we’re hoisting around the necks of little Mason and Emma (the most popular names in 2011 for boys and girls, respectively, inexplicably), take a panicky gander at the annual report of the trustees of Social Security and Medicare. By the time today’s little curtain-climbers get ready to hit the shuffleboard decks or the holodeck or whatever it is retirees end up doing for low-impact kicks in 2075, the two big-boy entitlements will be leaving annual craters in the American economy about the size of the one left by the meteor that sent T. Rex & Co. into the evolutionary version of Chapter 11. Left on its current course, Social Security — Social Security alone — will run a deficit of $3.758 trillion in 2075. (Those are 2011 dollars, not inflated spaceman dollars from 2075, when a loaf of bread will cost $20 or so, if inflation in the next 65 years equals inflation in the past 65 years.) Add in Medicare hospital insurance (which the Social Security trustees also estimate) and you have a one-year deficit of $4.802 trillion — for two programs. That’s under the “intermediate” scenario. The trustees also calculate a “high-cost” run-for-the-hills scenario, under which that 2075 deficit hits $19.3 trillion — which then jumps to $30.5 trillion in 2085. That’s not the whole federal deficit — that’s just the deficit from two programs in one year.

Admittedly, the high-cost scenario is unlikely, which is not to say implausible; fiscal forecasting is hardly an exact science. And, sure, Pollyanna says, those numbers look shocking today, when our GDP is only about $15 trillion or so. But in 65 years our economy will be a heck of a lot bigger, and $30 trillion or whatever won’t be such a big bad wolf of a terrifying deal. About that, I have some bad news for you, Sunshine: If our economy grows for the next 65 years at the same rate it grew for the last 65 years — and that may be optimistic — that gets us only to about $100 trillion, meaning that we’d be spending about 24 percent of GDP on two entitlement programs, and about 5 percent of GDP on deficits in those two programs. Currently, all federal spending amounts to just over 25 percent of GDP — and that’s nearly an all-time high, exceeded only during the war years of 1943–45.

What if we don’t grow as fast as we did for the past half century? If GDP growth looks more like the 1.9 percent it has averaged since 2000 and outlays stay on track, then we’ll be spending about half of GDP on those two programs, which will be running a combined deficit equal to 10 percent of GDP. Which is to say, we’ll be spending about twice as much on Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance as we spend on the entire federal government today.

It is hard to tell a believable story in which a nation remains thriving and competitive — or even solvent and functional — while spending half of its GDP on two entitlement programs. Not when the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that, barring some real reform, our publicly held national debt will hit 200 percent of GDP around the time Mason and Emma are getting out of college. (That’s under CBO’s “Alternative Fiscal Scenario,” which is not a worst-case projection, but one “incorporating some changes in policy that are widely expected to occur and that policymakers have regularly made in the past,” as CBO puts it.)

Everybody but Grover Norquist and the majority of our elected representatives is starting to get the picture. Even AARP, which for years has been to Social Security reform what Americans for Tax Reform is to tax reform — a pig-headed obstacle — has quietly conceded that some cuts in benefits are inevitable, if not desirable. ATR and its allies have been adamantine on taxes but have been in effect AWOL on the real issue, which is spending. Incredibly, the Republicans’ favorite line of attack against Obamacare is that it entails Medicare spending cuts. When Democrats proposed cutting Medicare, Sen. Mitch McConnell denounced them. When Rep. Paul Ryan proposed cutting Medicare, Newt Gingrich denounced him. Granted, the Democrats’ Medicare cuts almost certainly are fictional, but Republicans ran against the very idea of cuts — the one thing they should be championing. If you can’t cut spending and won’t raise taxes, you are, in effect, one half of the Bipartisan Coalition for Eternal Deficits, haunted by the Ghost of Taxes Future.

You think Mason and Emma would, given a choice, vote themselves higher taxes in order to help Newt Gingrich come in third in Iowa instead of fifth? Hard choices have to be made. We demand premium Canadian levels of government spending at discount Colombian levels of taxation. We are demanding that our children pay our taxes so that we don’t have to pay them ourselves. Cutting spending would be a lot easier, and there would be a greater constituency for it, if we paid our own taxes.

King George III, like any self-respecting power-mad colonial potentate, taxed the unrepresented to lard up his treasury and keep himself in wig powder. Our forefathers showed his generals the door at the point of a bayonet. To what end? We’re all Hanovers now, practicing a form of inter-temporal colonialism, a particularly nasty variety of taxation without representation, pillaging our own children and grandchildren to put off unpleasantness now. The longer we wait to fire both barrels at the deficit and debt, the bigger the tax increase we’re passing on to Mason and Emma, and the lower the standard of living we’re leaving them. No taxation without representation — not for us, not for them.

Violence and mental illness

This is a great article by E. Fuller Torrey for National Review in 2011 titled "Let Them Take Pills": misguided civil-liberties concerns hurt the mentally ill and the public. 

 For many years it has been politically correct to claim that people with schizophrenia or other forms of mental illness are no more dangerous than the general population. Even after the recent homicides in Arizona attributed to Jared Lee Loughner, an obviously mentally ill young man, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law stated: “Studies show that having a mental illness, in itself, does not increase one’s propensity to commit serious violence.” Likewise, Mental Health America, previously known as the National Mental Health Association, publicly claimed that “people with mental health conditions are no more likely to be violent than the rest of the population.” Advocates for the mentally ill seem to think that if they repeat this often enough, it will become true. The facts are otherwise, as shown by several studies over the past two decades. It’s true that most individuals with mental illnesses, including all those taking the medication needed to control their symptoms, are not more dangerous than the general population. However, among the 4 million individuals with serious mental illnesses, primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, a small number are clearly more dangerous — and, as happened to Jared Loughner, they become headlines when their delusional thinking and auditory hallucinations lead them to commit some heinous act. Since 1990, eight major studies have been carried out in the United States assessing violent acts by individuals with serious mental illnesses. The 1998 MacArthur Foundation–funded study, which is usually cited by mental-health advocates as proving that these individuals are not more violent, actually proves the opposite. The study followed 951 patients who were discharged from psychiatric hospitals. Although many patients had refused to participate in the MacArthur study, thus removing some of the most paranoid members from the sample, in a one-year period the 951 individuals committed a total of 608 acts of serious violence (physical injury, threat or assault with a weapon, or sexual assault). The violent acts included six homicides. Overall, 18 percent of the patients who were not substance abusers, and 31 percent of those who were, committed an act of serious violence. These rates were 25 percent higher than the rates among other residents of the high-crime neighborhood in which the study was carried out. 

An alternative means of measuring violence is to question those who have a mentally ill family member. In 1992 the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill asked more than 1,400 of its members whether their mentally ill family member had physically injured anyone or threatened to do so in the previous year. Eleven percent responded that their family member had harmed someone, and an additional 19 percent said their family member had threatened to do so. Given such studies, it should not be surprising to find that approximately 10 percent of all homicides in this country are committed by individuals with serious mental illnesses, a figure that was reported in two small studies in California and New York and a recent large study in Indiana. Can we predict which mentally ill people are most likely to become violent? The two strongest predictors of violence in all individuals, mentally ill or not, are a history of violence and the abuse of alcohol or drugs. 

For those who are mentally ill, however, there are additional predictors. The strongest is a failure to take their medication. Virtually every high-profile violent act committed by a mentally ill person was done by someone not taking medication. 

Another factor that increases the risk of violence is the presence of certain kinds of psychiatric symptoms, especially paranoid delusions or a belief that someone is trying to control your mind. Jared Loughner had both of these risk factors, according to those who knew him. Given the prevalence of such episodes of violence, what should we do? The real tragedy is that they continue to occur even though serious mental diseases are treatable in most cases. We have a variety of effective anti-psychotic medications that control a patient’s symptoms and let him live a reasonably normal life, even if they don’t cure him. If Jared Loughner had been properly treated, he would probably now be finishing community college and able to hold a job, rather than facing the probability of life in prison. But medications are, of course, effective only if the person takes them. And there’s the rub. Approximately half of all people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are aware of their illness and thus competent to make an informed decision about whether to take medication. The other half, however, are not aware of their illness. The disease impairs the part of the brain that we use to think about ourselves, much as Alzheimer’s disease does. Such people deny they are sick or need medication, and most of them will not take medication unless it is mandated. Out of this dilemma emerged laws requiring some mentally ill individuals to take medication involuntarily. Such laws, often called assisted outpatient treatment (AOT), basically say to the person: You can live in the community as long as you take your medication, but if you do not, we have the legal right to bring you back to the hospital. In states where it has been studied, AOT has been shown to be remarkably effective in decreasing rehospitalization, homelessness, incarceration, and violence. In a North Carolina study of subjects with a history of serious mental illness and serious violence, the proportion who committed further acts of violence declined from 42 percent to 27 percent when AOT was continued for at least six months. In New York, AOT reduced the proportion of individuals who “physically harmed others” from 15 percent to 8 percent. Unfortunately, however, AOT is little used by most states, including Arizona. Six states — Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Nevada — do not even have a provision for AOT. And neither AOT nor any other psychiatric services will be effective if they are not available. Arizona and most other states have markedly reduced the number of psychiatric beds and outpatient services they provide, so it is extremely difficult to get treatment, even for someone who is severely mentally ill. The states have done this under the illusion that they are saving money. It is now clear, however, that the costs of untreated serious mental illness show up in other ways, such as social services, court costs, the expense of keeping mentally ill individuals in jails and prisons, and of course homicides. The most important reason many seriously mentally ill people do not get treated is the opposition of groups that place civil liberties above all other considerations. 

But in protecting a person’s right to remain psychotic, are we really doing that person a favor? Being seriously mentally ill and homeless or in jail is unpleasant on some days and a living hell on others. 

And what about the civil rights of those who must endure the consequences of this non-treatment? Shouldn’t citizens going to talk to their congresswoman be considered as well? In the Tucson killings, six people were deprived of their lives as well as their civil rights. The ultimate duty to fix the mental-illness mess rests with the states. For two centuries, they had the primary responsibility for overseeing treatment of the mentally ill, but in recent years much of the funding for mental-health services has been shifted to federal sources. Given the publicity surrounding the Arizona tragedy, maybe this would be a good time to experiment with alternative ways to deliver mental-health services. For example, in two or three states, all federal funds now going to support mentally ill individuals, including Medicare, Medicaid, SSI, and SSDI, could be block-granted, with the states free to devise a better treatment system and spend the money accordingly. The results would be carefully assessed prior to, and three years after, the block grant. We can’t do any worse than we are presently doing. 

 Mr. Torrey, a psychiatrist, is the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center (www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org) and the author of The Insanity Offense: How America’s Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens (W. W. Norton, 2008).

The alternative to Obamacare

In light of all of the exemptions (waivers) being doled out by the democrat administration to their friends in the business world and their friends in the labor unions (companies, non-profits, and unions would have to otherwise drop their health insurance plans without the waivers due to the high cost of the required changes forced upon them by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or "Obamacare"), there is much talk of repealing the law and starting over with healthcare reform. The more reliable republican alternative was offered during the McCain campaign but was not well defended by the candidate and therefore ignored by most of the voting population. What is the alternative for improving (reforming) our healthcare system:

• End the tax preference/benefit for employer-provided health insurance gradually over the course of several years. This will encourage the growth of the market for individually purchased insurance (I actually have such a plan) that gives individuals or families more control over their plan and its costs, and make it possible for them to take it from job to job.



• The tax break should be converted into a flat credit so the most expensive insurance plans (used for high wage employees) lose the incentive to overspend. Employees should be able to use the credit toward their company plans OR allowed to use them for self-purchased plans.



• Allow individuals and families to buy insurance across state lines. The competition among insurers would reduce premiums, and the regulations of individual states would arguably have less impact on one's costs.



• With individual plans purchased on the open market, people would be able to select renewable policies instead of relying on an employer's plan that terminates when they quit or get laid off and causes great difficulty to those with chronic illness in getting a new policy (the pre-existing condition problem). Although younger people can lock in renewable policies right now on open market plans, people with pre-existing conditions right now would still be unserved, so republicans support creating a government "high-risk pool" subsidized program for the uninsurable today that would be weened away after several generations.



• The federal government should cap (establish maximum not to exceed funding level) Medicaid and let the states run the program to provide aid to only the most needy in each state.



• Medicare must be converted to a voucher program with the budget for each person established using reasonable formulas or criteria. The alternative is provided in Obamacare: tax increases and healthcare rationing.

The healthcare system pre-obamacare was not a free market system, it was over-regulated and therefore an excessively government manipulated system. It was not a market failure, but a failure to have free markets that has caused many of the problems.

Earth Hour

This is a great article by James Lileks of National Review, i had to post it:

"This year's 'Earth Hour' came and went without much hoorah. A few cities turned off their lights downtown for 60 minutes to show how glorious the world could be if we were all kickin' it Pyongyang-style, and people swooned. The objections are obvious: it's symbolic. It accomplished nothing. It flatters those who believe they are better people because they fret about carbon, compost their fair-trade coffee grounds, and lecture people who use superglue when they could use Himalayan yak spittle (seriously, you can find it at any co-op). If Freud were around these days, he's reduce their psyche to the Id and the Super-eco.

Here's the problem with Earth Hour: how do you know when it's over without consulting some carbon-powered instrument? I know, I'll check the sundial, like the wise old carbon-neutral Greeks! Someone light a candle so i can see what time it is. But candles give off the CO2, the Devil's Breath. One candle, it is estimated, gives off 0.00000001 PBs of carbon, with 1 PB being the amount it takes to melt a glacier and strand a photogenic polar bear on a floe. So no wicks, no tapers. Better to curse a candle than to light the darkness.

Perhaps one could use a wind-up timer to know when Earth Hour's done. That would have a symbolic message possibly lost on the celebrants: civilization, like and egg-timer, winds down unless maintained and resupplied with energy. The problem with our current energy situation, though, is that we won't hear the ding! when time is up. Things will just grind down until the economy is on blocks in the front yard because gas is six bucks a gallon, inflation is galloping like a stagecoach horse, and the entitlement state has become so enormous the only thing Congress can do is meet twice a year to turn it over so it doesn't get bedsores. We're supposed to be panicked about unsustainable fuels and switch to putt-putt plastic cars that run on hemp, but we could sustain ourselves for osme time with the oil we have and nuclear plants we could have. Might give us some breathing room, so skylines need not be darkened to divert the last precious watts to a hospital's ICU.

In the high holy holidays of the ecology movement, Earth Hour is the precursor to Earth Day, the annual reminder that despite 4 decades of laws and regulations, the planet is still precariously imperiled. Grade-school students will spend the day writing letters to Congress so the Koch brothers don't interject plutonium into the earth's core as part of their "mwah hah hah, die everyone die" initiative. But just as Earth Hour has lost steam, Earth Day has challenges. The latest Gallup poll indicates that Americans are caring less about global warming than before. The care most about 'contamination of soil and water by toxic waste,' which will surely spur the moribund EPA to fight all those laws that permit American Cadmium and Lead to pour their industrial waste into ponds by the elementary school. Most people also worry 'a great deal' about 'air pollution', 28% don't give it much thought at all, but they're sitting in boardrooms lighting cigars with $100 bills to kick off National Belching Smokestack Week. A majority of people, 57%, are worried about 'urban sprawl and loss of open spaces.' That is also the percentage of people who have never flown across the Midwest and looked out the window.

Bottom of the list: global warming. 51% "worry" about it "a great deal or a fair amount." The poll didn't dig into specifics, alas, one would love to know how the people who worry a great deal go about their day. [...]

The beauty of Earth Hour: it's predictable, it's voluntary, it happens at night, and it doesn't interrupt anyone's dentist appointment. Countries that have their own unscheduled "earth hours" several times a day must look at the West like a starving person regards a trencherman who announces he will abjure oysters once a year between 3 and 4 PM. We can give it up because we don't have to. Yet. If the grid goes down for good, and the human infestation on aching Gaia is reduced to hominids huddled in huts, children may ask toothless gramps to tell them what it was like when the great dark towers shone at night, when the night was banished by the proud gleam of our hasty and tireless servant, electricity. But if gramps was a green, he might well scoff: "twas a vain boast that man could outmatch the stars, and what did we get out of it? Besides a century of unparalleled prosperity? A 0.5 degree rise in global temperatures. Or so some say. The instruments that compute such things had to be plugged in to work. Anyhow, stop your fussin' and go to bed, sun's down, day's done."

NPR: National Progressive Radio

In October 2010 NPR accepted $1,800,000 from George Soros' leftist "Open Society Foundations". NPR president at the time Vivian Schiller soon fired Juan Williams arguably for his affiliation with the Fox News channel. Although the democrat controlled media outlets do not discuss Mr. Soros and his associations, his views are shared by those at NPR. Matthew Shaffer collected evidence of the political sympathies of board members of NPR Inc. and its fundraising entity the NPR Foundation in November 2010. Almost every board member has demonstrably liberal/democrat political leanings (support for democrat candidates, pro-abortion groups, and environmental activism for example). NPR Foundation chairman Antoine W. Van Agtmael was a trustee at the leftist Brookings Institution. Jane Katcher gave Democrats and Emily's List more than $64,000. Sukey Garcetti was also director of the Roth Family Foundation ("progressive" PAC). 50 such examples were collected by Mr. Shaffer. The content of NPR programming is one issue, but as to who runs the partially taxpayer funded operation, there is no argument, it is run by the democrat/liberal side of our country's 2-party ideological split and has no business being granted taxpayer money.

Stages of adulthood

I had to chuckle at a comment by James Lileks (National Review writer). He wrote this in an article poking fun at the observation today that people in their 20's are taking longer to grow up (i.e. government taking care of you, parents acting like friends with money instead of parents, etc).

What are the 5 stages of adulthood:

1. Finishing up school
2. Not sponging off the parents
3. Getting a job
4. Swapping rings with someone who will put up with you
5. Turning out replacement units

I have completed the 5 stages so i guess i am entering my mid-life crisis :)