Lakefront Winter

Sorry it took so long

I'm back.

Back in the city where I was born. Back in the place where I belong. Back where I've been before. And this time I'm here to stay.

For a long time I was elsewhere. Not far away, mind you, but still outside the city limits in a place that I didn't really choose as much as accept. And I've wanted to come back for a long while, but I didn't have much control over that. Sometimes events have a way of exerting their own timetable on us and we have to wait until we are in a position to do what we want to do. Life has a way of throwing those red lights in front of us. Waiting for them to change can take some patience.

But this year the lights finally turned green and it was time to move. And so I found a place I could afford in an area of the city that I like and I bought it. Everything fell into place. No more renting. No more landlords. Ownership baby. Ownership.

I'm home.

And now, as I look out the front window, a gentle snow is falling from a gray midwestern sky to cover the streets and branches with a dusting of white. Cars roll by and people in jackets and hats walk their dogs along the city sidewalks, newly covered with a thin layer of snow, stopping here and there and then continuing on. The blue snow plows make their appearance. In the park, across the way, kids run and play; making snowballs to throw at each other and the sky grows lighter with the morning.

And I think of how lucky I am to be here. Lucky to have a home. Lucky to be in this city. Lucky to be back after all this time. And to enjoy the first of many more seasons here in this city of my birth.

And to see another lakefront winter.

A Nation of Dim Bulbs

Ban Everything Because lefties said so

Andrew Ferguson writes at The Weekly Standard about the new energy bill that takes away more of your freedom. In addition to the obvious decision to destroy what's left of Detroit by requiring them to manufacture only hemp-powered Yugos, there is that pesky ban on the light bulb that you may have grown accustom to having when the sun goes down.

On December 19, President Bush signed an energy bill that will, among many, many other things, force you to buy a new kind of light bulb. He did this because environmental enthusiasts don't like the light bulbs you're using now. He and they reason, therefore, that you shouldn't be allowed to have them. So now you can't.

Ordinary consumers may be surprised, once they understand what's happened. They probably haven't known that the traditional incandescent light bulb, that happy little globe shining so innocently from the lamp in the corner, has been a scourge of environmentalists for many years. With their stern and unrelenting moralism, the warriors of Greenpeace have even branded lightbulb manufacturers "climate criminals" for making incandescents, which are, they say, a "silent killer." In Europe and in a few individual states in the U.S., professional environmentalists have managed to persuade their colleagues in government to ban the bulbs altogether, on the grounds that incandescents use energy inefficiently.

Ninety percent of the energy a traditional light bulb uses, for example, is thrown off as heat rather than light. This waste contributes to the overproduction of energy from coal-fired power plants, which contributes to the emission of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. Professional environmentalists prefer a different kind of bulb, the compact fluorescent light (CFL), which is much more expensive to make and to buy but also much more efficient in its use of energy.

American environmental groups have long called for an outright national ban on the old-fashioned bulbs. But then they came to the realization, as a spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council told the New York Times this spring, that such a ban might "anger consumers." "We've given up a sound bite, 'ban the incandescent,'" the spokesman said.

Instead the groups joined with the Bush administration this year in advocating a steady increase in federally mandated efficiency standards for light bulbs. The effect of the tightened standards is to make it illegal to manufacture or sell the inefficient incandescent bulb by 2014. So it's not a ban, see. It's just higher standards. Which have the same effect as a ban--a slow-motion ban that's not really a ban. Not surprisingly, in long, self-congratulatory remarks at the bill signing last week, Bush neglected to mention that he and Congress have just done away with the incandescent light bulb. Maybe most of us won't notice until he's back in Crawford.

The whole point of course is that it is none of the government's business whether you have incandescent bulbs, an SUV or a large toilet.

IT IS NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS. This cannot be stressed enough.

There is nothing in the constitution that allows any of this. The reality is that politicians and activists are slowing taking away our freedom bit by bit and ignoring the fact that they have no constitutional authority to do so. They are simply doing it.

The best way to allocate resources is the market. And the left hates the market. That is what this is about, not energy independence. If they wanted us to be energy independent, they would be in favor of nuclear power generation. We have enough domestic uranium to last for thousands of years. And breeder technology would extend that so far as to be practically without limit. But they are against that too.

What this is really about is control. They want control over all of us pesky Americans who keep voting against them when they offer to run our lives for us because they can do such a better job at it than we can. And since we have, for the most part, kept them out of power and refused their kind offer to run things, they have gone around us in order to get their agenda in place whether we like it or not.

It is just a pity that so few Republicans today, including the President, seem to understand the agenda here.

Sorry for the Light Blogging

Because I am in the middle of a major project I have not been able to blog nearly as much as I like, to say nothing about how busy we have been at work, but if all goes well, I should be back on track soon. In the meantime I will try to put up a post or two if I can. And perhaps I will even get a chance to write about what I have been doing lately, even though I generally don't write much about personal stuff.

It's Not Just Scott Beauchamp

At The American Thinker Randall Hoven puts together a pretty long list of Main Stream Media "journalists" who have been responsible for some of the most outrageous mistakes and outright fabrications that we have seen from MSM in the recent past. As Hoven points out, it has gotten to the point where you really need a scorecard when it comes to malfeasance from the Elite Media. Just as one scandal has started to fade from memory, another rises up to take its place. This fact motivated Hoven to put together a comprehensive list of the worst offences. And it is a long one.

Pajamas Media also has a good follow up on the meltdown at The New Republic.

Zimbabwe Faces Anarchy

This article in the London Telegraph tells the sad tale of just what happens when you put a power hungry leftist in charge of you country. Robert Mugabe put socialist style political and economic control into place when he took power in Zimbabwe and the results have been predictably horrific. A country that was once considered the breadbasket of Africa is now on the verge of starvation and civil war. Everywhere socialism has been tried it has been a failure, and the more dedicated the socialist, the worse the horrors that the people are forced to suffer.

For a historical look at how Mugabe came to power and how little jimmy peanut helped to hand over the population to this butcher, check out this article from The Weekly Standard.

New York Times to Iraq, "Drop Dead"

Victor Davis Hanson uses this essay in The City Journal to refute, point by point, the hysterical surrender monkeys at the New York Times who are all pining for the defeat of America at the hands of the Islamic Fascists. Make no mistake; the Times has come out on the side of the enemies, even going so far as to accept a genocide in Iraq, as long as George Bush is humiliated in the process.

Blank Out

In this article from The Washington Times, Diana West writes about the peculiar evasions that western elites must go through to avoid acknowledging that the terrorist jihad we face has anything to do with Islam. The Kabuki dance that they must perform is interesting to watch as a spectacle of amusement, but the reality of Islamic Fascism is a deadly serious business. Unfortunately, just as in the past, the aristocracy have shown that we cannot count on them for much of anything. And insofar as this is a war of ideas, those who value the history, traditions and freedoms of the West will have to take it upon themselves to do the heavy lifting that our more sensitive "intellectuals" are incabable of doing.

With the departure of Tony Blair from 10 Downing Street, we have lost one of the most visible leaders who has both a clear grasp of the nature of the problem as well as the ability to speak in clear and understandable terms about it. His replacement, Gordon Brown, is already demonstrating the jelly spined weakness that has come to dominate the intelligentsia in the West and against which the Loud People will have to fight. Ms. West describes the ways in which Mr. Brown has signaled his unwillingness to even name the problem or even recognize that it exists.

Indeed, the British government, under its new, more politically correct leadership, will be prohibited, as a mater of official policy, from even mentioning the words "terrorism" and "Islamic" in the same sentence, if they are mentioned at all.

The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, has directed ministers to omit "Muslim" when discussing (Muslim) terrorism. And forget the generic "war on terror"; even that pathetic phrase is off limits. (This has absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Brown's unctuously stated goal to make Britain "the gateway for Islamic finance.") The new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith (love that "i" ending) refers to British Muslims as "communities" — maybe a prelude to not mentioning them at all. Both have done the "perversion of a great faith" dance to enlightened applause, taking cues from the unpublished "EU Lexicon," which reportedly nixes such "offensive" phrases as "Islamic terrorism."

British literary lions couldn't agree more. Philosopher John Gray and historian Eric Hobsbawm recently said on British television that even the word "Islamist" was "unfair" because "it implied a strong link to Islam." Never mind the link is doctrinally accurate. Better to accommodate mortal threat without identifying its Islamic roots. Instead of defending their nations — for starters, stopping Islamic immigration and, with it, the progression of Islamic law into Western societies — our elites have decided to pretend Islam isn't there at all.

In the media, the effort is misleading to the point of farce. Joel Mowbray, writing at the Powerline blog, noted that the New York Times has identified Britain's Muslim terrorists as "South Asian people" — which, considering Britain's largest South Asian population is Hindu, is beyond absurd. "Diverse group allegedly in British plot," the Associated Press reported, missing that unifying Islamic thread. "All 8 detainees have ties to health service," wrote the Toronto Star, "but genesis of terror scheme still eludes investigators."

Ayn Rand identified this peculiar habit of the left years ago as the "Blank Out". It is the deliberate intellectual evasion of facts which are clearly available to anyone with eyes to see and a functioning mind. The average person cannot help but notice the obvious here; namely that there is a cause and effect relationship between Islam and terrorism in the world today. Thus we can only conclude that the failure to see or to name it that is typical of our media and government elites is the result of that deliberate refusal to come to terms with the facts. It is a mental "Blank Out"; the conscious decision to not see that which is true in the hope that by refusing to name it, the existence of the problem will somehow go away.

Because They Can

Muslims continue to bully the West because we let them

Mark Steyn writes in this column on the way in which elites in the West, who are blinded by their leftist ideology of multi-culturalism, are unable to respond to Muslim mobs who demand the death of our civilization and put out hits on authors deemed un-Islamic. The Brits gave Rushdie a knighthood for his service to literature without understanding that he represents the deep divide in today's Arab world. Much of that world wants to stay in the 7th century and is willing to kill and conquer to stay there. On the other hand the rest of us kind of like having a modern life, but because we have been infected with the sickness of multi-culturalism, we just don't take the murderers all that seriously. Mark Steyn tells us that it is time to take the bad guys very seriously if we want to keep our own civilization.

Middle East Temper Tantrum

Victor Davis Hanson writes with his usual authority in this essay in which he looks at some of the root causes of Arab societal failure in the Middle East.

Failed societies don't end up that way by chance. Just as there are laws of physics, chemistry and electromagnetism, so are there laws of societal organization and human action. We humans did not invent these laws. Rather, they are ingrained in the universe in which we live. They are part of the fabric of the world and they are no more under our control than the weather. The success of the West can be explained by the fact that over the centuries we have learned more and more about how these laws work. Thus we have been able to order our society and culture to take advantage of these laws for our own benefit. Freedom, individualism and capitalism are not just lifestyle choices; they are how a human society must be organized if it is to function and move forward.

But the Arabs, and much of the rest of the world have yet to adopt these underlying principles that allow development and progress. Until they do, they are doomed to live lives which are poor, nasty, brutish and short.

Here's why much of the region is so unhinged - and it's not because of our policy in Palestine or our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

First, thanks to Western inventions and Chinese manufactured goods, Middle Easterners can now access the non-Muslim world cheaply and vicariously. To millions of Muslims, the planet appears - on the Internet, DVDs and satellite television - to be growing rich as most of their world stays poor.

Second, the Middle East either will not or cannot make the changes necessary to catch up with what they see in the rest of the world. Tribalism - loyalty only to kin rather than to society at large - impedes merit and thus progress. So does gender apartheid. Who knows how many would-be Margaret Thatchers or Sandra Day O'Connors remain veiled in the kitchen?

Religious fundamentalism translates into rote prayers in madrassas while those outside the Middle East master science and engineering. Without a transparent capitalist system - antithetical to both sharia (Muslim law) and state-run economies - initiative is never rewarded. Corruption is.

Meanwhile, mere discussion in much of the region of what is wrong can mean execution by a militia, government thug or religious vigilante.

So, Middle Easterners are left with the old frustration of wanting the good life of Western society but lacking either the ability or willingness to change the status quo to get it.

Instead, we get monotonous scapegoating. Blaming America or Israel - "Those sneaky Jews did it!" - has become a regional pastime.