Why even bother asking?

Apparently not everyone read the NIE. As a matter of fact, I haven't either--I was too busy with papal encyclicals. According to the report, Iran is no longer developing nuclear weapons; to the best of our knowledge, they ceased development in 2003.

Americans haven't gotten the message:

Just 18% of American voters believe that Iran has halted its nuclear weapons program. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 66% disagree and say Iran has not stopped its nuclear weapons program. Twenty-one percent (21%) of men believe Iran has stopped the weapons development along with 16% of women.

This is what comes from getting one's news via cable. I'm not saying everyone needs to concur with every word included in the report; in fact, a dash of skepticism is always good to apply to government reports. But I find it a bit preposterous that two-thirds of American know that Iran hasn't stopped their program. What's the point of intelligence if we're not going to use it? Don't answer that.

Torturing the Terrorists

Today's first column:

“A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.” - Pope Benedict XVI

Papal encyclicals excite me even more than the latest celebrity gossip. I know, I'm weird. When the present Pope produced the second letter of his pontificate, Spe Salvi—Latin for Saved by Hope—I hesitated little in reading it. Therein, His Holiness writes, “the capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reign supreme. Truth and justice must stand above my comfort and physical well-being, or else my life itself becomes a lie.”

His letters are intended for the one billion Roman Catholics worldwide, but non-Catholics would be prudent to listen carefully to the Bishop of Rome. For Benedict's words have been turned precisely on their head by our President, George W. Bush. To defeat the nebulous ideology of Islamofascism, the Bush administration has explained that certain procedures, such as waterboarding, are not torture; and anyway, they are necessary to prevent the terrorists from winning. To Bush, the safety and well-being of American citizens—or at least his perception thereof—are paramount. Waterboarding a would-be-terrorist is a measure of precaution, probably an evil one, but one that would, according to the tenants of an implausible hypothetical, prevent a still greater evil.

But torture should be rejected for two reasons. First, although it is effective in the sense that it delivers results, the results themselves are ultimately unsound. The Communists of Russia, our old enemies, were tremendously good torturers. A confession could be procured by disallowing the penitent from sleeping; after several days, the victim invariably confessed his sins against the Party; but only a fool would suppose that everyone who was tortured was guilty of the crimes to which he eventually confessed. Sending all and sundry to the gulag provided Stalin and his successors with the slave labor he needed to fuel the economy, but one wonders what it will avail the Bush administration to collect untruths from non-terrorists—or how one would justify torturing the innocent.

There is a better objection to torture—and yes, as even John McCain admits, waterboarding is torture—and that is that it is immoral. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was compiled by the current Pope when he was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, has this to say, “Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.”

Advocating torture furnishes the maxim that the end always justifies the means. Using this rational, it would be inconsistent to oppose any act that would eliminate any threat posed to America. Such acts must not be restrained by traditional morality; thus there is no reason why the jailing of the innocent, the murder of the disreputable, or—to take the flawed principle to its logical extreme—rape and cannibalism may not, at times, be deemed likewise morally acceptable.

It is of especial disappointment that Christians like George W. Bush would advocate such egregious acts. That he is perpetuating evil in order to prevent non-existent threats only adds to the tragedy. Benedict writes, “We can try to limit suffering, to fight against it, but we cannot eliminate it.”

Our attempts to eliminate suffering will fail as they always do. Heaven belongs in the clouds. All attempts to create one on earth fail; worse, they end up creating Hell. If we are to be saved, it will not be through torture. It is far more likely that its use will play a pivotal role in our undoing.

Fiat and the Fed

Today's second column:

In 1933, gold backing was removed from the U.S. dollar, leaving Americans with a fiat currency. Unlike money that is linked to a metal of intrinsic value—usually gold—fiat currency is backed by the word of the government alone, and managed, at least in this country, by the Federal Reserve. The dollars you hold in your wallet cannot be exchanged for gold at the nearest bank; but they do have value, since it is understood that they can be exchanged for goods and services.

Proponents point out that, prior to the Great Depression, recessions occurred about once every twenty years. Since Keynesian theory lifted us from the Great Depression, recessions have been small and manageable. The kindly navigators of the Federal Reserve have steered us clear of economic disasters, the sort which inevitably occur when the currency is tied to gold.

Most people accept the myth of Keynes and agree that fiat currency is generally a good thing. To the contrary, a strong argument can be made for the abolishment of the Federal Reserve, and the re-linking of the currency to gold. The primary objection to the Federal Reserve is that it allows appointed—not elected—bureaucrats to manage much of the economy. It is tremendously unwise to allow for so much power to be vested in so few hands. One of the—alas, largely unlearned—lessons of the twentieth century, is that as government power increases, so too does its temptation to violence. Allowing Bernanke to run the Fed is as stupid as allowing Bush to war on whomever he pleases.

There are also historical objections to fiat currency. Libertarian Murray Rothbard explains, “At the end of 1776, the Continentals were worth $1 to $1.25 in specie [gold]… By the spring of 1781, the Continentals were virtually worthless, exchanging on the market at 168 dollars to one dollar in specie. This collapse of the Continental currency gave rise to the phrase “not worth a Continental.”

The same thing happened in France during their Revolution. After five years of mismanagement, the assignat wasn’t worth a Continental. It is telling that the American dollar has lost ninety-six percent of its value during the last seventy-five years. The Federal Reserve has watered down the value of the currency, just like all micro-managers before them; should we really be excited that they’ve spread out the inflation over a longer period of time?

It is also worth examining the myth of Keynes, whose pernicious doctrine states that government interference is good for the economy. The accepted opinion is that Hoover was a laissez-faire capitalist, who kept us mired in the Great Depression, until the interventionism of FDR extricated us from its deadly grasp. But, as historian Paul Johnson explains, Hoover was as much of an interventionist as FDR. Further, the economy didn't actually recover until ten years into the depression and seven years into FDR's presidency. Johnson notes, “If [economic] interventionism worked, it took nine years and a world war to demonstrate the fact.”

As the dollar continues its free fall, Americans may finally reexamine the value of a micromanaged currency. Ron Paul points out that “Fiat dollars allow us to live beyond our means, but only for so long.” But as students of Keynes know, in the long run, we, like the American currency, are quite dead.

Derb needs some hope

It is always amusing when I lambast someone for their pessimism, but John Derbyshire is none too optimistic about the potential for positive change in his adopted country. Despite his role as a political commentator, he finds himself thoroughly bored with the race. He writes:

What's dragging me down into the swamps of indifference — aside from the fact of having grown up in a nation where election campaigns last two weeks if you're unlucky — is more a generalized feeling of despair about the entire federal government. They can't do anything. They're hopeless. No president could do much with them.

Probably true. But it is especially true if you settle for the gaggle of usual suspects: Rudy McRomney, and, increasingly, and surprisingly, the equally hopeless, though a bit more likable, Mike Huckabee. Regular readers can fill in the rest.

Our financial regulators have let a ghastly credit crisis develop. Our customs controllers have let the country be flooded with poisonous toys and toxic pet food. Our intelligence agencies, we now know beyond any reasonable doubt, have essentially done nothing useful for about half a century. When they've managed to agree on anything, it's been wrong. Our diplomats screw up our relations with other countries so badly we get into wars; then the diplos balk at going to serve in the war zone.

The folk who direct our armed forces have spent four and a half years struggling inconclusively with a rabble of fanatics who have no navy or air force, no armored units, no regular formations at all in fact, and munitions they operate with cell-phones and lengths of string. In three and a half years, our grandfathers turned two mighty, sprawling fascist empires to rubble. What am I missing here?

What Derb is missing is that the enemy we currently face has not been named; it is far more elusive than the Nazis and the Soviets were. For one, the opponents of yesteryear wore uniforms. But the real reason we cannot win against the "rabble of fanatics" is that we've settled on the idiotic notion that victory will only come when we force democracy upon a people that has never known it. Destroying a conventional army is something the United States can do; terminating a nebulous organization, and forcing deeply divided people to play nice is a nice thought, but it is a far more difficult matter. Hence we have failed.

The most elementary function of the federal government — one that, in fact, it jealously guards as its own alone — is the management of immigration and border control. This, as we surely all know by now, is a complete shambles. It's not just illegal immigration; the legal kind is fubar, too — read this. I've been blaming George W. Bush and his predecessor for a lot of this. They didn't give a damn, I've been saying. They're sentimental and clueless about immigration, or hooked up with business interests hungry for cheap labor, I've been saying.

This is the part where I reintroduce Ron Paul. I'm not certain how much good he will be able to do--even if he manages to surpass all expectations and win the presidential election. But I do know this: if Ron Paul can't fix the problem, we're completely hosed. If Derb is right and governmental inertia will prevent any real changes from happening, it doesn't matter who you support. As a matter of fact it doesn't. Unless you decide to support Ron Paul.

Paul's adherence to the Constitution allows him to stand apart in a sea of more-of-the-same. The president, especially one who abides by the Constitution, has limited power; Paul can veto every bill he wants, but he's still going to be liable to an override, and he will be forced to sent the troops to war if Congress demands that he do so. Nonetheless, insofar as there remains a hope to reverse the trend of decades of history; if it is possible to return to a humbler foreign policy, and to call the troops home to defend, not the borders of other countries, but only our own; if we can yet again subsist on a sound currency and balanced budgets--Paul is that hope. My hope is that enough of us realize this before it's too late.

Spe Salvi

In which I include selections from the latest encyclical from Pope Benedict XVI:

[Karl Marx] forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man's freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil. He thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable economic environment...

In the twentieth century, Theodor W. Adorno formulated the problem of faith in progress quite drastically: he said that progress, seen accurately, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb. Now this is certainly an aspect of progress that must not be concealed. To put it another way: the ambiguity of progress becomes evident. Without doubt, it offers new possibilities for good, but it also opens up appalling possibilities for evil—possibilities that formerly did not exist. We have all witnessed the way in which progress, in the wrong hands, can become and has indeed become a terrifying progress in evil. If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16), then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world...

The right state of human affairs, the moral well-being of the world can never be guaranteed simply through structures alone, however good they are. Such structures are not only important, but necessary; yet they cannot and must not marginalize human freedom...

We can try to limit suffering, to fight against it, but we cannot eliminate it. It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater. It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love...

Furthermore, the capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reign supreme. Truth and justice must stand above my comfort and physical well-being, or else my life itself becomes a lie. In the end, even the “yes” to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my “I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love.

Of course, the entire letter gets my hearty recommendation. What are you waiting for?

Fred comes to Camille

No, it's not polite to use first names to refer to better thinkers than oneself, but in land of the ubiquitous dude references, first names are almost formal. Anyway, Fred finds himself agreeing with Paglia's point that: “Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.” He writes:

Writing a Wagnerian score requires (I think) a sense of the transcendent. To write The Lord of the Rings or to paint Leda and the swan, one need not believe in Norse gods raging in battle against chill skies, or a muscled Zeus throwing thunderbolts, or Pan leering from darkling forests. You need a mind that doesn’t smell of electrical insulation. This, few now have. The sciences are remorselessly literal. They do not admit of transcendence, wonder, or magnificence. People today drink this terrible narrowness with their mother’s milk and seldom get beyond it. They do not know what they have lost.

I hesitate to fall back on the pragmatic in defending religion, but it is a fact not easily disparaged. The irreligious society is not only darker, but it is more dull. Patrons of the arts should be wary of casting out all religion. We've only been around a little while, but, at the very least, the post-modern, post-pagan society has demonstrated an inability to create good art. Things bode badly for us.

Why the decline?

Troutsky writes:

I would be curious as to your views on WHAT is causing the decline and WHY? To me, it is no accident or natural trend.

It's not an easy question, and I'm not overly optimistic that I'll be able to give a sufficient answer, but I'll try to post a couple of thoughts anyway.

I guess we can start with the issue of decadence. Pat Buchanan has been proclaiming "The Death of the West" for several years now, and while he's been early to jump on the bandwagon if one considers popular commentators, the signs of our demise have been present for much longer than this.

Fortunately, a growing segment of the population is waking up to the fact that there is something severely wrong with our country and our culture. Witness the Ron Paul campaign. I'm not exactly sure how this fits; a truly decadent culture wouldn't have any reformers because no one would have any hope of change. Then again, I'm not sure how far Paul will be able to go. It would be very decadent of us to ignore his warnings.

I recently picked up an excellent book titled From Dawn to Decadence. I'm only about a quarter in, but I heartily recommend it. Therein, the author, Jacques Barzun writes: “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label.”

That about sums it up. I started writing a piece for the paper, attempting to show how our war on terror is decadent. It was a harder piece to write than I imagined it would be, simply because the whole war on terror is so blatantly absurd--and futile. If you swallow the party line, and rehearse the Sean Hannity talking points, it will probably escape you, but the second you begin to rationally examine the principles of preemptive war, the whole absurdity becomes clear.

For instance, it's absurd to attack countries in the Middle East who haven't threatened us just because they might some day get a bomb and use it on us. Hypotheticals are dangerous pretexts with which to engage in extraordinary measures. Hypothetically, anything could happen. We could just nuke the Middle East to prevent anything unseemly from happening, but most rational people realize that mass murder is the height of immorality. As a country, our prudence is wanting. Our foreign policy is not that of a republic of rational individuals; it is that of a despot, frightened lest his power be threatened.

Or again, it is idiotic to attack the Middle East while leaving the border insecure. Troutsky gets a bit flabbergasted every time I mention the border, but he needn't do so. Whether or not massive migration is good for this country can be debated; so too can the extent of the threat posed by the terrorists. The point here, is that if the terrorists are a threat to our way of life, leaving the border insecure is the height of absurdity. But this policy goes unquestioned, not only by the elites--who have ulterior motives--but by those who support the futile war on terror. Yes, I know that the conservative commentariat clamors about border control, but that won't stop them from supporting an open-borders candidate to attempt to prevent Hillary, another open-borders candidate, from taking power.

The culture is decadent, and in other ways too. But I'm supposed to examine the reasons behind the decadence, so we'll move onto that.

One reason, I would say, is the inability of most people to live rationally. I don't think that thinking has ever been held in such disregard as it is at present. As I noted in today's paper, people don't read books; those who do, often read only garbage. What passes for a logical argument these days is embarrassing. Bill O'Reilly and the conservative clowns make so many groundless assertions that it's impossible to keep up; things aren't any better amongst so-called liberals.

The war on terror is a perfect example of inanities passed along as self-evident, but there is more to the tragedy than the foreign policy of Americans. In fact, the war on terror is a sign of our inability to think; it is not its cause.

Put another way, the acceptance of outrageous principles by a large segment of our population reveals an inability to think properly. Notice, too, that many of those who have changed their minds concerning the validity of the Iraq invasion have done so for strange reasons. Some charge that the war was poorly run, which, though true, is utterly beside the point. The problem, as I have written before, is that the war was immoral because it was an unprovoked act of aggression.

Morality has seeped into the discussion, and it is part of our lapse into decadence. It, too, is tied to the proper use of reason. The just war doctrine, a subset of the natural law theory, is a good example or right reason leading to right action. For man is, above all, a rational creature; when he fails to use his higher faculties, he inevitably goes wrong.

The natural law theory helps us identify what went wrong. As a Catholic, it should come as no surprise when I say that I think that the greatest tragedy of all-time was the reformation. The society of the Middle Ages had, alas, become decadent, and it was unable to reform itself in time. Christendom was cloven, and the modern world is a result of that shipwreck. Hence Barzun starts his book with Luther's theses.

One of the unintended consequences of the Reformation has been the collapse of the higher faculties. It is ironic, perhaps, that the champions of reason have seen their god thrown out the window by their ancestors--here we see Hegel's dialectic at work--but it was almost inevitable. By proclaiming that man, and not the Church, was arbiter of truth, the idea of objective truth became a tenuous one. The Protestant faction saw internal reformations, as sect after sect emerged with the "real" truth. Fast forward, and we have the post-modern society, where not only truth, but reality itself, is relative: mere subjective perception.

The reformers didn't intend for this to happen. Revolutionaries seldom foresee all that will come of their actions; Marx didn't envision the Gulag Archipelago, Rousseau couldn't see the Terror. But happen it did. We are left with the decadent excesses of a revolution gone wrong.

This is where the Church enters in. Whether or not She is right--I contend that She is--She is consistent and authoritative in ways no other aspect of society pretends to be. We ultimately fell into decadence because of rejection of the Church, and the conception of objective Truth which She alone purports to hold. We can no longer think because we have rejected the only Institution which dares to contain Truth; we can only get back to a better society if we return to Her. When people begin to think right, they will start to act right. So long as our thinking is flawed, we haven't a prayer at escaping certain cultural ruin.

The Church has come under fire--no pun intended--for burning heretics. The excesses of the Inquisition have been over-stated--see Henry Kamen's book for an objective account of the Spanish version--but excesses they were. Nonetheless, the Church was right in thinking that heretics are dangerous. Get a wrong idea into a man's head, and he will begin to live immorally. Allowing a man to think that preemptive war is acceptable might cause him to launch wars, willy-nilly, against his neighbors.

With this, I bring my somewhat long-winded, and fairly scattered piece to a close. In brief summation, the world has gone wrong because it cannot think; the Church is the guardian of thought and truth, and a return to Her will allow mankind to think again. Since man is rational, right ordered thought is necessary for right action. If we are to restore our civilization, we must learn to think again, and for that, I present to the reader the Roman Catholic Church.

You really didn't expect anything different, did you?

Who you calling extreme?

Today's first article:

"Where the extreme left and the extreme right meet, you'll find Ron Paul" - Merle Black

One should be careful in taking political commentators literally. As used in this context, extreme has nothing to do with the dictionary definition. Instead, it is merely a pejorative term, used to discredit anyone associated with it—in this case, Dr. Paul.

The ten term representative from Texas is attacked, not because of his views per se, but because such views are, ispo facto, extreme. Tantamount to the ad hominen attack, branding someone as extreme is a useful way to discredit a political opponent, and it is of especial value to the neocons and their cronies. The Paul campaign highlights many things; no doubt his insistence on a “humble foreign policy” sits well with the growing majority of Americans tired of playing Empire. But Paul's consistently conservative fiscal policy hammers home another point: the Republican Party no longer cares for limited government. Dick Cheney once remarked that “deficits don't matter”, and the republican candidates for Presidency—Paul excepted—believe him. Many of the talking heads insist that we must find “the next Reagan”. It bears mentioning that if he did not always deliver on his promises, at least Ronald Reagan believed in small government conservatism. There will be no more Ronald Reagans in a party which has forsaken his ideas.

Castigating Paul as an extremist allows pundits to deflect criticism from their dereliction of duty to the true conservative cause: shrinking the size and scope of the government. Ignoring—for the moment—Paul's foreign policy of non-interventionism, it remains to be seen why fighting the Islamo-bad-guys in the Middle East should preclude trimming the size of the government behemoth. Not for nothing did Randolph Bourne conclude that “war is the health of the state”; still, if defense appropriations must increase, why must discretionary spending? Waging aggressive wars does not—or should not—depend on bridges to nowhere, educational bills to further the enstupidation of the nation's children, or general governmental generosity with the taxpayer's money. Ron Paul's fiscal policies reveal the republican field of presidential candidates to be fake conservatives; hence he must be maligned.

There are alternatives to the extreme theme. Any pejorative adjective will do; the point of the exercise is not to point out the flaws in Paul's reasoning: it is to defame him so that reasoning becomes unnecessary. Listen to Mona Charen of National Review: “Ron Paul is unserious. Suggesting that you will eliminate the IRS, the CIA, the FBI and other government agencies within weeks of taking office is ridiculous. These are bumper stickers, not serious reform proposals.” Instead, we must tolerate serious candidates like Rudy Giuliani, who propose to do nothing about the size of the government, but do swear to win the War on Terror. How eminently serious of him to promise to defeat an idea!

Speaking of Giuliani, the game works well in regards to foreign policy, too. Promising that one will not tolerate a nuclear Iran is a sign of seriousness, and, apparently, moderation. The fact that technological monopoly is impossible to retain in perpetuity is, evidently, a thought best left to unserious minds. Meanwhile, advocating a return to the foreign policy of the Founders, saying that we ought to mind our own business—this is extreme. Refusing to remove the nuclear option from the table is a sign of moderation; promising restraint, a sign of extremism.

Ron Paul and his growing band of supporters—he's polling at eight percent in New Hampshire—disagree. Bankrupting the country through aggressive wars, suspending habeas corpus, running massive deficits and ruining the currency, threatening countries which haven't attacked us—these are signs of extremism. But in the Orwellian world we now live in, black is white, up is down, extreme is the new moderate; and warmongers are more fit for the presidency than kindly pediatricians with the sorts of unserious ideas that just might save this country from total disaster.

As English Lay Dying

Today's second article:

Although he is a sometimes a bit of a crank, Fred Reed is a wonderful writer. In a column bemoaning the decline of the English language, he remarks, “Good English… depends on a cultivated elite to preserve it. A pride in language is needed to prevent degradation from seeping upward from the lower classes, and only careful schooling instills the fine distinctions that make the difference between the literate and those who recognize words vaguely, like half-forgotten relatives.”

Few of us receive such schooling. We at Tech do not even have an English department. The dearth of good writing, especially on this campus, isn’t exactly news. With this in mind, a friend and I decided to spend this semester discussing The Lode on our weekly radio show. For those interested—shameless plug—our show runs from 12-2pm on Fridays on 91.9 WMTU FM Houghton.

We discovered that if you lowered your standards, the campus paper isn’t so bad. There’s nothing really resembling good writing, but most articles manage to express themselves in something akin to English. Sure, subjects and verbs don’t always match up, and prepositions are occasionally AWOL, but how much can really be demanded from a bunch of college students in present day America? One in four adults didn’t read a single book last year. Judging from the rubbish atop the New York Times bestseller’s list, those of us who do manage to stumble through a book or two have terrible taste.

There's really no excuse for such intellectual indifference. Never before in human history have we had such tremendous access to information. Most works that have been out of print for seventy years or more—stupid, draconian copyright laws—are available for free on the Internet. Classics are readily available for a few dollars at any used bookstore.

It would be an overstatement to conclude that I am a good writer, but I am a competent one. During my waning weeks at Tech, the only advice I can offer to my fellow scribblers is to do what I have done. First, voraciously devour books of all kinds, especially the classics. Second, write often, revise, and write some more. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson completely out of context, this has always worked for me.

But this may not be enough. The will to write is not always concomitant with the ability to do so. While almost everyone wants to write, most people can’t. Meanwhile, the degradation of the language continues apace. Writers who delve deep to discover the true meanings of words, so as to use them correctly, will find that the populace is incapable of appreciating such subtleties. A slouching toward Idiocracy we go.

It is at once a relief and a disappointment that the problems faced by expand beyond the Keweenaw. On one hand, how can a handful of students, mired in a culture whose language is in precipitous decline, be expected to speak and write like their ancestors? On the other, if The Lode is representative of the best Tech can offer in the way of writers, how long until the newspaper succumbs to post-literate society and ceases to be entirely?

I don’t offer any solutions. Lowering one’s standards only perpetuates the problem, but there doesn’t seem to be an alternative. How can one write well if one cannot differentiate between good and bad writing?

The meanings of words in a dead language are forever fixed, and the unwashed masses can do nothing to degenerate them. Worse than dead, English is dying. It had a good run.

Back to the Dark Ages

I've never found the hysteria about global warming to be convincing. But if the science is sketchy, the methods to reverse the trends are doubly so. And, of course, such methods are idiotic, which means only the government would be stupid enough to insist upon enacting them.

The scare over global warming, and our politicians' response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.

This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.

I keep hearing that the science has settled this: the globe is warming. No one, I am told, doubts the facts; we only differ in what drastic actions we must take to prevent certain doom. Then I read something like the above, and wonder if the so-called scientists have their so-called facts straight.

Look, for all I know, the above data could be rubbish. But so could all of the data that the global warming crowd likes to cite. I'm agnostic about whether or not the the earth is warming; but I'm downright skeptical when I'm told that the internal combustion engine--and by extension human beings, especially those darn Westerners--which has been around for about a century, has caused chaos on a four and a half billion year old planet.

As always, my libertarian blood begins to boil when the government gets involved. The EU, the prototype for the North American Union, is enacting some downright draconian measures. If all goes well, the economy will grind to a halt, and all the human beings will starve to death. After all, humans are bad for the planet.

Few people have yet really taken on board the mind-blowing scale of all the "planet-saving" measures to which we are now committed by the European Union.

By 2020 we will have to generate 20 per cent of our electricity from "renewables". At present the figure is four per cent (most of it generated by hydro-electric schemes and methane gas from landfill)...

Another EU directive commits us to deriving 10 per cent of our transport fuel from "biofuels" by 2020. This would take up pretty well all the farmland we currently use to grow food (at a time when world grain prices have doubled in six months and we are already face a global food shortage).

Then by 2009, thanks to a mad gesture by Mr Blair and his EU colleagues last March, we also face the prospect of a total ban on incandescent light bulbs.

The author, Christopher Booker, concludes:

This year will be remembered for two things.

First, it was the year when the scientific data showed that the cosmic scare over global warming may well turn out to be just that - yet another vastly inflated scare.

Second, it was the year when the hysteria generated by all the bogus science behind this scare finally drove those who rule over us, including Gordon "Plastic Bags" Brown, wholly out of their wits.

Ideally, we would sit back and watch the EU. If these measures somehow don't manage to drive their economy into the ground, we can let one or two of our crazy states follow. Of course, since we haven't managed to learn anything from their senseless immigration policies and their embrace of feminism and the culture of death--or at least no more babies--it's unlikely we'll learn anything here. If anyone writes the Decline and Fall of the American Republic, I hope they highlight all of the times we willingly brought about our own death.