Wingnut and notoriously lazy blogger Confederate Yankee posts another gem.

In Conserva-circles, a “gem” appears to be a chunk of somebody else’s work that you mis-read, mis-interpret and then put up as your own opinion. Come to think of it, that’s also “rank stupidity” and “Conservative punditry,” something of a Norton Utility for right-wing internettia. If only “Norton” were “Kristolbennetto’reilly.” Anyway, it must be an especially useful practice when your own weak-backed analysis can’t manage more than 20 or 30 words of ricocheting irony.

This one’s a howler. In a post he titled “Governed by Fools” (*cough*), he bracketed the cut-and-paste job with the only effort he muscled up for the affair, two sentences:

They mismanage wars, economies, and even disasters:

[...]

Why, why do liberals place such blind trust in legendary incompetence of government bureaucrats, instead of the ingenuity of the people?

Why, oh why, my Jeebus? Governments and arrogance and fascism and bureaucrats and statism and socialism, oh lordy. When will you collectivist a-holes finally look to the individual? (In this case, by Yankee link, to a gritty American entrepreneur by the name of “Kevin Costner.”) When?!

Anyway, here’s the point, or someone else’s, so vital that he had to copy it onto his site:

The Dutch know how to handle maritime emergencies. In the event of an oil spill, The Netherlands government, which owns its own ships and high-tech skimmers, gives an oil company 12 hours to demonstrate it has the spill in hand. If the company shows signs of unpreparedness, the government dispatches its own ships at the oil company’s expense. “If there’s a country that’s experienced with building dikes and managing water, it’s the Netherlands,” says Geert Visser, the Dutch consul general in Houston.

That socialist Dutch government: there go a pile of bad-asses. No kidding, see for yourself.

Help me! Here in Real America, I can’t help having the same, fruitless dicussions. Too often it’s with a Glenn Beck groupie and starts off cordially enough. Efforts to calmly explain that ‘No, it was not ACORN, but Wall Street bankers and their predatory buddies in the mortgage lending biz that did the real damage to our 401Ks’ normally just end up with suspicious glares and familiar screeds about the evils of redistributionism and hippies.

Taking pains to help them understand that losing your wallet and a bridge collapsing under a passenger train are both bad things, but one is very much worse than the other, just seems to lead to bitter acrimony and hard feelings.

This reminds me of a very old bad joke ..

Walking along a downtown street late at night a man encountered a drunk crawling around on the ground on his hands and knees, obviously searching for something.

“Lose something, buddy?” he asked.

“Yeah, I dropped a quarter up the block there, and I’m trying to find it.”

“Well, if you lost it a block away .. why aren’t you searching there?”

“Light’s better here.”

Dumb as it sounds, I think that’s a pretty apt metaphor for why the Fox News cocoon crowd insist on blaming the most helpless of the poor for screwing the country into the ground. It’s less bothersome to search under Beck’s lamppost, nodding along with simple-minded rants at minorities they already fear, than it is to grope through the dark,  complicated stories like this one by McClatchy:

In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers that it also was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting. A five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose those secret bets may have violated securities laws.

I suppose it’s fair to question just how many Beck or Hannity fans could be drunk all the time. Probably not many, but seeing they can be cold sober and that idiotic at the same time isn’t helping my cheerful outlook.

Hey, Bill, why not make the case that Global Warming is a crock of bull? Because you can’t. You’re not a scientist. But you are totally more smarter than that: you’re a government-hating Libertarian. Well, that settles it.

And it’s your turn, your time to blow it all out of the water. So you’ll post a gawdawful boring, long-ass children’s story about the polar bears who are tired of hearing lies and being harassed by a government that now oppresses them. Ooh, edgy.

The White Ones know and can prove that Global Warming’s a mountain of hooey. Why, how? I just told you, they’re polar bears, duh. And they say that the worst winter ever is coming. And, look, it’s happening! Brrrr–see? Well, that should do it. Freedom, anyone?

It’s a familiar Libertarian gambit: indictment by epic fairy tale. Just buy their crock of bull, and ours will make no sense.

G.P. Bear Goes to Washington: The True Story of a Freedom-Loving Carnivore
by Bill Steigerwald

“…because of global climate change, polar bears are suffering population losses and may soon become extinct. Rising temperatures are melting the sea ice earlier and earlier each summer, leaving the bears less time to hunt for their primary food – ringed seals. If we don’t reduce our burning of fossil fuels soon, scientists say the only place our children will be able to see these magnificent creatures will be in a zoo or in a Walt Disney movie. For CNN, I’m Anderson Cooper.”

“Extinct!?” Grandpa roared, slapping the arms of his leather chair with his huge paws. “Melting sea ice!? Shrinking bear populations? Who writes this junk science, Al Gore?”

“Don’t get upset, Dad,” said Mother, looking up from her latest copy of Reason magazine. “It’s CNN. What do you expect? Fairness? Balance?”

“What were they saying about polar bears dying, Grandpa?” asked Junior, looking worried as he came in from the kitchen with a bottle of Coke.

“Nothing, Junior. Nothing,” Grandpa grumbled. “Just a lot of make-believe.”

After dinner, Grandpa read Junior a bedtime story. As Grandpa was about to turn off the nightlight, Junior asked, “Grandpa, why do you yell at the TV? The people in it can’t hear you.”

“I know,” Grandpa said with a smile. “They live far away in New York and Washington. That’s why they don’t know anything about polar bears or the Arctic.”

Junior looked anxiously at Grandpa. “Mother said your heart will get attacked if you keep yelling at the news.”

“Don’t you worry,” Grandpa chuckled. “I just get mad when humans make us look like sissies who can’t handle a little change in the weather. We’re polar bears, for Pete’s sake. We’re not helpless victims. We don’t need the government, Keith Olbermann, Greenpeace, Leonardo DiCaprio or anyone else to protect us from Mother Nature.”

Tell that to the Brontosaurus Libertarians. Hmm, already the Arctic wisdom has run into a ditch: 99.9% of all the species that ever existed got murdered by that bitch, Mother Nature, regardless of their ideology. And extinction rates are now way up, thanks to Modern Forces You May Be Aware Of.

Fast forward:

Grandpa and Mother raced to Junior’s bedside. Junior was crying in his sleep. “Help me, Grandpa,” he pleaded mournfully. “I’m too young to melt.”

“Junior, wake up,” Grandpa said, shaking him. “You’re dreaming.”

Junior’s eyes popped open. “Grandpa! Mother! The ice was all gone! We were stuck on a tiny iceberg. The ocean was boiling!”

“It was just a silly nightmare, Junior,” soothed Mother. “The ice isn’t melting. See?” she said, patting the rock-hard wall of their cave.

Grandpa was fuming. He gritted his big teeth and looked Junior straight in his teary eyes.

“Boy,” he said firmly, “I’m going to tell you something I want you to remember for the rest of your life. We are polar bears. We are the largest land carnivores on Earth. We are the species ursus maritimus – ‘bears of the sea.’ We can swim 200 miles. We can walk 100 miles a day.

“We learned how to live on this frozen wasteland at the top of the world thousands of years before humans discovered fire. There are 25,000 of us alive today – twice as many as 50 years ago. We are not going to become extinct – no matter what Principal Hansen and her computers say. Now go to sleep – and no more silly nightmares.”

I imagine the Mammoth was a pretty rugged beast, too. And the Saber-Toothed Tiger. How many millions and millions of Buffalo used to roam the American plains 150 years ago? I tell you what, if polar bears aren’t any more intelligent than this, Bill Steigerwald’s gonna look bad.

…Senator Boxer added, her voice cracking with emotion. “Our irresponsible burning of oil, coal and gas is melting the Arctic paradise of the polar bear. Without our help they will starve and soon become extinct. When our bill becomes law, however, the polar bear will be protected forever from man-made global warming by the Endangered Species Act.”

Grandpa stood up. “Listen up, all of you,” he yelled. Everyone quickly gathered around the wise and widely respected old bear…

“An army of nature scientists, government bureaucrats and pushy celebrities will invade our land. They’re all part of what I call ‘The Axis of Environmentalism,’ ” Grandpa explained.

“They will say they are coming to protect us from global warming and to do us good. But what they will really do is slowly take away our freedoms and take over our lives. They’ll force us to change how we live, what we eat and where we can travel. It’ll be just like we’re being kept in a federal zoo.”…

“Who will tell those humans in Washington we don’t need their help?” someone asked. “And don’t want it, either,” added someone else.

The 100 polar bears had forgotten all about the football game. An uneasy silence fell over the bar. Then Grandpa spoke. “I’ll do it,” he said in a quiet but confident voice. “I’ll explain how tomorrow night at the town meeting.”

Are you still with Bill, here? Yeah, wow.

So Grandpa decides to go to Washington to tell everybody they’re idiots. How? By riding an iceberg. “Icebergs make it as far south as New York City all the time,” Grandpa replied, stabbing the map with his pointer. Oookay.

Continue Reading »

If you’ve ever wondered how a conservative Christian could claim to “know” Jesus and, at the same time, love the philosophy of that virtual prototype of amoral atheism,  Ayn Rand, you’ve probably been as frustrated as I have at the lack of coherent explanations.  They can enthusiastically back ghastly ideas like privatized prisons for Christian evangelism without the slightest glimmer that this would probably horrify Jesus AND Madison.  How can they stomach such an abomination (assuming for the moment they’re not just barefaced hypocrites or too dumb to notice the problem)?

It’s embarrassing enough for a Cato Institute slide whistle like Stephen Moore to fawn over her, — now that he’s supposed to be doing his patented thinking for the grown-ups — but the mental leaps and lapses necessary for an Objectivist to be born again just don’t seem to add up in the material universe. 

At least until now.  Hallelujah,  Newsweek has somehow coaxed mad, impetuous romantic, Jesus’ Family member, and still South Carolina governor  Mark Sanford into revealing all exploring addressing writing about the paradox in an essay humorously(?) entitled Atlas Hugged.  Though it starts off as a review of a new book about Rand, given Sanford’s dominionist Christianity, some sort of attempt at reconciliation could be expected.  Actually, an attack should be expected, but Sanford barely gives a whiff of his theistic faith, never mentioning Jesus or Christianity by name, and preaches for Rand’s cult instead.

Like apologists for all untestable faiths, he treats us to a stew of flowery words and bold statements that somehow manage (yet again) to add nothing that helps us understand anything.  The Answer, as always, stays just out of reach.

But I suppose if I’ve gone this far, I might as well hit a couple of the low lights.  The intro:

In my experience, people who’ve read Ayn Rand’s books either love them or hate them. I’m one of the few who fall somewhere in between. When I first read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in the 1980s, I was blown away. Those books portray the power of the free individual in ways I had never thought about before. Since then, I’ve grown more critical of Rand’s outlook because it doesn’t include the human needs we have for grace, love, faith, or any form of social compact. Yet I still believe firmly that her books deserve attention, and in that regard, Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made provides important and meaningful insight into the evolution of Rand’s world view.

Since I don’t know Sanford’s second birthday, let’s just note that he was at least in his twenties when he was “blown away” by Rand and move along:

The Fountainhead is a stunning evocation of the individual and what he can achieve when unhindered by government or society.

Oh yeah. Think how much better off we’d all be without those interstates, libraries and sewage plants getting in the way. It was probably his collectivist mailman that forced him (at registered gunpoint) to thwart his own dynamism and become a parasitic governor.

What strikes me as still relevant is its central insight—that it isn’t “collective action” that makes this nation prosperous and secure; it’s the initiative and creativity of the individual.

**slapping forehead** That is an astounding insight — that these two items are actually mutually exclusive! Why didn’t I notice before that they cannot possibly co-exist?  No way both of those things can be valid and useful.

Let’s just skip over the insights and go straight to his summary of Atlas Shrugged:

“Who is John Galt?” is the first line of Rand’s 1,000-page book, and by the end it’s clear she wants everyone to think, and act, as if they were him. Galt had been, as we discover only as the plot unfolds, head engineer at the Twentieth Century Motor Company, which had produced a motor powered by static electricity. His superiors, however, had decided to restructure the company along Marxist or “collectivist” lines, and Galt had left the company.

Just have to interrupt to note that this would have been a great point for Sanford to discuss the parallels here of his two favorite fables. First, “a motor powered by static electricity” is every bit as miraculous (preposterous) as the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection, and the part about the big corporation deciding to pass up huge profits for the greater good of humanity is a parallel to the account of the rich young man of Mark 10:21, and, by parallel, of course, I mean they are exactly the fucking opposite.

The plot thickens, like cold oatmeal:

He leads an effort to get the nation’s greatest business leaders to go on a kind of strike. One by one, they disappear, making their way to a hidden valley in Colorado and leaving the now increasingly collectivist U.S. government to try and preserve the country on its own, with no help from these giants of industry. What happens, of course, is that the government collapses, and Galt emerges to reorder society along strictly free-market lines [compare to Romans 13:1 -- ed]

And everyone lives happily ever after. Of course. Lots more dreck about the brilliance of Rand’s philosophy, and how the nation would be better off if we followed her .. blah, blah.  Let’s jump to the end to see how Sanford reconciles his dual philosophies of total altruism and total selfishness.  He does finally try to draw a distinction between Christianity and Randism but, perhaps unsurprisingly, ignores myriad theological problems while making no sense at all.  The shocking conclusion:

There is one more major flaw in Rand’s thinking. She believed that man is perfectible—a view she shared with the Soviet collectivists she hated. The geniuses and industrial titans who retire to Galt’s hidden valley create a perfect society based on reason and pure individualism; and Galt himself, in the 57-page speech near the book’s end, explicitly denies the existence of original sin*. The idea that man is perfectible has been disproved by 10,000 years of history. Men and women are imperfect, or “fallen,” which is why I believe* … [in] limited government.

Oh, come on! Man’s fallen nature? This may be the only point where the priests of both faiths agree. The one thing they have in common is their position that people just suck. Always have sucked, always will suck,  and (aside from a chosen few) have no chance of ever not sucking.  In truth, Rand’s “philosophy” wasn’t nearly as groundbreaking as she imagined.  It was really just a romanticized rehash of already discredited Social Darwinism that claimed it was natural and right that an elite ruled over a permanent underclass.   It is ironic (and irritating) that the same Christian extremists who would ban scientific evolution from public schools tacitly support these soulless pseudo-scientific/philosophical justifications for selfishness.  Then again, consistency and intellectual honesty have never been prized by fundamentalists.

* emphasis mine