carnage and culture: 2013-06-30

Saturday, July 06, 2013

Today's Tune: Feargal Sharkey - A Good Heart

Pro-abortion activists chant 'Hail Satan!' at a Texas rally. Satan doesn't need this kind of bad publicity

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk

4 July 2013

Texas is undergoing a rough, ugly battle about abortion. On Tuesday, activists for and against a proposed abortion law that would prohibit the procedure past the 20th week of pregnancy gathered at the state Capital in Austin for a bizarre shout-down. The prolife side sang Amazing Grace. The pro-abortion side tried to drown them out by shouting “Hail Satan!” I’m not making this up: you can view one of the confrontations on the video above and another via this link. Quite what Satan thinks about it all, we can obviously only speculate. But I'm guessing that even the Horned One would regard association with the US abortion industry as bad PR. More on why in a moment.

The mainstream media has, of course, been in the bag for the opponents of the bill. Embarrassingly so. Last month, State Senator Wendy Davis tried to block the legislation with a filibuster speech in the state house that lasted nearly 11 hours, and since then she’s been treated like a latter-day Joan of Arc by the media. Ross Douthat has transcribed some of the questions that ABC posed to Wendy and they are, to say the least, softball. For example: “Why did you decide to wear your running shoes? Let’s take a look at those … they’ve kind of been rocketing around the internet!” And does Wendy prefer kittens or puppies? There are plenty of other examples of this absurd love-in, but I’d point you to this interview with Anderson Cooper which might as well end in a high-five: “What was it like standing for that long, speaking for that long, not going to the bathroom? What is it like to filibuster for eleven hours?” How do you stay so fit, girlfriend? At no point in the interview does Anderson address the bigger questions about the morality or physical reality of abortion after 20 weeks. No, he’s far more interested in her ability to stand and talk for a very long time.

The abortion bill isn’t that big a deal; it’s already on the books in 12 other states. Charles Cooke has written a brutal take down of opposition to the 20 week ban, pointing out that a baby is pretty much a baby by that point (some studies show it can recognise its mother’s voice) and that a ban is actually supported by a narrow plurality of the American people. Women back it by larger percentages than men, which shoots down Wendy’s claim to speak for her gender. What she does speak for is a profitable industry damaged by bad PR that is desperate for poster-children like Wendy Davis to improve its image after the awful Gosnell case. Remember him? The guy who butchered women and babies through late term abortions carried out in filthy conditions in a surgery that reeked of cat pee? That’s the sordid reality of “safe, legal and rare”.

But back to the happy campers who yelled “Hail Satan!” at the prolife advocates who tried to sing a hymn. Of course those protestors aren’tactual Satanists, but their casual blasphemy reflects the nihilism at the heart of the pro-abortion lobby. They represent an extreme materialist philosophy that is uninterested in subtle debates about when life begins or in genuine attempts to negotiate between the needs of the infant and its vulnerable mother. No. They are only interested in total, unrestrained liberty – in the freedom to do whatever the Hell they want without any regard for ethics or the lives of others. They would do better to chant “Hail Ourselves!” – for they are a movement of the human ego at its most monstrous.

Tags: abortion, prochoice, prolife, Rick Perry, Satanism, Texas

Dr Tim Stanley is a historian of the United States. His biography of Pat Buchanan is out now. His personal website is www.timothystanley.co.ukand you can follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley.

The Top 5 Lies About Fracking

Ronald Bailey|Jul. 5, 2013 1:30 pm

http://reason.com

Gasland Part II, the sequel to director/activist Josh Fox's earlier anti-fracking docudrama Gasland, will run on HBO next Monday. It appears to have rounded up the usual corporate villains and appealing victims of profit-hungry capitalist skullduggery, rather than telling the more substantial story: that fracking combined with horizontal drilling has unleashed a bonanza of cheap natural gas.

Fracking involves injecting pressurized water combined with sand and small amounts of chemicals to crack open shale rocks so that they will release trapped natural gas. Generally, the shale rocks are thousands of feet below the aquifers from which people draw drinking water. No doubt to the dismay of activists, President Barack Obama appears to endorse the process. "Sometimes there are disputes about natural gas," he said at hisclimate change speech last week at Georgetown, "but let me say this: We should strengthen our position as the top natural gas producer because, in the medium term at least, it not only can provide safe, cheap power, but it can also help reduce our carbon emissions."

The president gets it, but a lot of activists don't. To help bring them around, I thought I'd take a look at some of the misleading claims made by opponents of fracking. Fortunately I just got a fundraising letter from fine folks at foodandwaterwatch (FWW) urging me to sign and send in a petition to the president to ban fracking. The letter is a nice compendium of anti-fracking scaremongering.

Falsehood 1: You can light your tap water on fire. Fox made this claim famous in the first Gasland movie when he showed a resident of Colorado striking a match as water came out of his tap; the natural gas dissolved in the water burst into flame. Yet the water was tested by the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, which reported to the resident: "There are no indications of any oil & gas related impacts to your well water." The agency concluded that the natural gas in his water supply was derived from natural sources—the water well penetrated several coal beds that had released the methane into the well.

The FWW letter warns, "When fracking loosens gas, it can cause methane to migrate into nearby household wells and drinking water." It adds, "Your home could explode, like the house that blew up in Pennsylvania and killed three people." This appears to be a reference to the 2004 case of Charles and Dorothy Harper and their grandson Baelee, in which natural gas migrated into their basement from some new nearby wells being drilled by the Snyder Brothers production company.

This artfully constructed section of the letter wants readers to conclude that fracking caused the deaths of the Harpers. Yet the wells in question were conventional gas wells; no fracking was taking place. The Harpers were killed by negligence: The company had not made sure that the casings on the wells were properly sealed with cement. (Cement is poured down around the well's steel piping to prevent gas or fluids from traveling upward and coming in contact with exposed rock along the borehole, where it can leach into drinking water aquifers.) Fracking technology had nothing to do with the tragedy, for which the Snyder Brothers made court-ordered restitution to the Harper family.

Another house exploded—fortunately without significant injury—when natural gas seeped in from a well in Ohio in 2007. In this case, the Ohio Valley Energy Systems Corporation was fracking an old conventional well whose cement casing was inadequate to block new supplies of highly pressurized natural gas from migrating into nearby water wells. Once the company fixed the casing, the problem was solved.

As A. Scott Anderson, a senior policy adviser with the Environmental Defense Fund, told The Wall Street Journal last year, "The groundwater pollution incidents that have come to light to date have all been caused by well construction problems." As the number of wells increase, so too will the chances that some will not be properly cemented, but that's not a problem inherent to fracking. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that the vast majority of natural gas explosions do not involve wells at all.

Falsehood 2: Fracking fluid "could seep into groundwater and poison drinking water." (The underlining is the FWW's.) The letter also asserts that fracking fluid is "full of poisonous chemicals."

Of course, the cabinet underneath your kitchen sink is also likely to be "full of poisonous chemicals." What matters to your health is the amount of exposure you have to them, not the mere fact of their existence.

A new study by researchers at Duke University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June, did find higher concentrations of methane in water wells that were within a kilometer of gas wells. But like earlier reports, the new paper concluded that the two simplest explanations for the higher levels of dissolved gas were faulty steel casings and improper cement sealing of the wells, not fracking. In addition, this study and two earlier ones done by the same team found no indication that well water has been contaminated by fracking fluids. (About 99.5 percent of fracking fluids, I should add, consist of water and sand.)

Is Pavillion, Wyoming, the exception? At the request of the remote community's residents, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) investigated to see if their wells had been contaminated by fracking fluids. The agency's draft report in December 2011 reported that water taken from sampling wells had found "synthetic chemicals, like glycols and alcohols consistent with gas production and hydraulic fracturing fluids." But as the EPA turned over further investigation to the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, the federal agency noted that the source of these "constituents of concern" had "not been determined," and that the EPA's efforts to figure how the contaminants got into the water wells had been "inconclusive."

The Wyoming investigators' report is due next year. Needless to say, if a natural gas producer does contaminate someone's water, the company must be held fully accountable for it.

Falsehood 3: Fracking increases air pollution. The FWW letter warns that fracking "contains high levels of neurotoxins and carcinogens and contains compounds that can create smog."

Almost any industrial activity will involve the production of noxious fumes at least some of the time. So how does the air pollution associated with producing natural gas compare to other industrial processes? A 2013 report from RAND Corporation researchers, published in Environmental Research Letters, calculates the regional air quality damages from gas production in Pennsylvania. Their reckoning of total damages takes into account harms both to physical health and the environment, including mortality, morbidity, crop and timber loss, visibility, and effects on anthropogenic structures and natural ecosystems.

They conclude that air quality damages from all natural gas production in the state amounted to between $7.2 million and $32 million in 2011. By contrast, the four largest coal-fired electricity generation plants in the state were the sources of nearly $1.5 billion in damages in 2008. The whole natural gas industry is responsible for just 2 percent of Pennsylvania's smog-causing volatile organic compounds, 5 percent of its nitrogen oxides, and 1 percent of the small particulates emitted by all industry in the state in 2008. (The RAND researchers could not get comparable 2011 data for the total air-pollution damage, so they used the closest year with available information.) That's not nothing, but converting just one coal-fired plant to burn natural gas would do far more to improve Pennsylvania's air quality than shutting down the state's entire gas industry.

Falsehood 4: Fracking causes cancer. The FWW letter hints at this, but the most incendiary claim along these lines was made by Josh Fox in his short "emergency film," The Sky Is Pink (2012). Fox intones, "In Texas, as throughout the United States, cancer rates fell. Except in one place: in the Barnett Shale. The five counties where there was the most drilling saw a rise in breast cancer throughout the counties."

The claim is entirely specious. Fox apparently based his lightly sourced assertion on a single newspaper article. Even that article garbled the data, reporting that six counties in the western Dallas-Fort Worth area have the highest rates of invasive breast cancer in Texas, rising all the way from 58.7 cases per 100,000 people in 2005 to about 60.7 per 100,000 in 2008. Typically breast cancer rates are reported as per 100,000 women, which would roughly double the rates cited in the article to 117.4 and 121.4. Meanwhile, the incidence of breast cancer among all Texas women hovered around 116 per 100,000 between 2005 and 2009. The U.S. rate was 125.7 per 100,000 women.

To fact-check Fox's claims, the Associated Press turned to two Texas researchers, Simon Craddock Lee, a professor of medical anthropology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and David Risser, an epidemiologist with the Texas Cancer Registry. Both said that there was no evidence of an increase in breast cancer in the counties cited by Fox.

Falsehood 5: Natural gas is worse than coal. This particular claim was launched in 2011 with a hastily cobbled-together study by three anti-fracking researchers at Cornell. Their argument is that leaking methane, whose global warming potential is much greater than that of carbon dioxide, more than entirely offsets whatever reductions in carbon dioxide emissions would be achieved by, for example, switching from coal to gas to generate electricity. The FWW letter claims that calling natural gas "clean" energy is "misleading," but unlike the Cornell researchers the group concedes that burning natural gas "emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal."

The FWW came much closer to the truth than the Cornell crew did. A comprehensive analysis published in November 2012 by researchers associated with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that "the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with electricity generated from Barnett Shale gas extracted in 2009 were found to be very similar to conventional natural gas and less than half those of coal-fired electricity generation." With respect to global warming, producing and burning natural gas from fracked wells is much better than burning coal.

Make no mistake: Any industrial process can go awry, usually through human error. And not everybody is a saint: Venal people will try short cuts that end up harming the innocent. When mistakes are made or short cuts taken, the culprits should be punished and the victims fully compensated for their losses.

But don't assume those villains are the norm. Over 500,000 gas wells are currently operating in the United States. Most of them manage to avoid blowing up houses, poisoning drinking water, making it hard to breathe, causing cancer, or being worse than coal.

C.S. Lewis Reviews 'The Hobbit'

This review was first published in the Times Literary Supplement of October 2, 1937.

Then and Now, 1937

By C.S. Lewis

http://www.the-tls.co.uk

June 28, 2013

The publishers claim that “The Hobbit,” though very unlike “Alice,” resembles it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own – a world that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable for him. Its place is with “Alice,” “Flatland,” “Phantastes,” “The Wind in the Willows.”

To define the world of “The Hobbit” is, of course, impossible, because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone. The author’s admirable illustrations and maps of Mirkwood and Goblingate and Esgaroth give one an inkling – and so do the names of dwarf and dragon that catch our eyes as we first ruffle the pages.

But there are dwarfs and dwarfs, and no common recipe for children’s stories will give you creatures so rooted in their own soil and history as those of Professor Tolkien – who obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale. Still less will the common recipe prepare us for the curious shift from the matter-of-fact beginnings of his story (“hobbits are small people, smaller than dwarfs – and they have no beards – but very much larger than Lilliputians”) to the saga-like tone of the later chapters (“It is in my mind to ask what share of their inheritance you would have paid had you found the hoard unguarded”). You must read for yourself to find out how inevitable the change is and how it keeps pace with the hero’s journey. Though all is marvellous, nothing is arbitrary: all the inhabitants of Wilderland seem to have the same unquestionable right to their existence as those of our own world, though the fortunate child who meets them will have no notion – and his unlearned elders not much more – of the deep sources in our blood and tradition from which they spring.

For it must be understood that this is a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. “Alice” is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown-ups; “The Hobbit,” on the other hand, will be funniest to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or twentieth reading, will they begin to realize what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but “The Hobbit” may well prove a classic.

THE HOBBIT or There and Back Again. By J. R. R. TOLKIEN.
Allen and Unwin. 7s. 6d.

To read more from the TLS archive for free, see this selection from Then and Now.

I GOT 30 MILLION REASONS

By Ann Coulter

http://www.anncoulter.com

July 3, 2013

We keep hearing insistent claims that if Republicans don't pass amnesty yesterday it will be the end of the party.

Can I see the math on that? I can see why bringing in 30 million new Democratic voters would be good for the Democrats, but how does it help Republicans? Maybe conservatives shouldn't blindly trust the calculations of the guy who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy.

If I were a Democrat, I would have tried to sneak this bill past Republicans by proposing amnesty only after reaching some easily rigged benchmarks. But, apparently, Chuck Schumer knows elected Republicans better than I do.

Step One: Everyone's amnestied. Step Two: After they're amnestied, they can bring in all their relatives.

If Hispanics voted 50.1 percent for Democrats, amnesty would be a bad deal for Republicans. But, in fact, they vote 70 percent to 80 percent for Democrats. How did it become an urgent priority for Republicans to bring in 30 million new voters, 80 percent of whom will vote Democratic?

Democrats want 30 million new voters and they will say anything to get there:

-- It's a crisis! Illegal immigrants are "living in the shadows"!

That's not a "crisis." At most -- and this is highly dubious -- it's a crisis for the illegal immigrants. But evidently, "living in the shadows" is at least better than living in Guadalajara. Otherwise, there's an easy solution.

We're told, "You don't know what it's like to live in the shadows!" Yes, you're right, and that proves it's not a crisis.

Sorry to sound legalistic, illegal aliens, but you broke the law and -- look me in the eye -- you know you broke the law. You hid in the backs of trucks, traveled across remote desert locations, ran from U.S. agents and stole American IDs.

It's supposed to be uncomfortable to break the law. We aren't required to grant amnesty to people just because they've put themselves in the awkward position of being here illegally. (Or because the Democrats need 30 million new voters.)

If illegals were Republicans, Chuck Schumer would be a "Minuteman," patrolling the Mexican border 24-7.

-- Oh boy! Are Hispanics ever going to take revenge on Republicans!

The obvious retort is: If these people vote 80 percent against Republicans, how does it hurt Republicans if they can't vote? Is the claim that next time legal Hispanics vote against you, they'll have an angry glint in their eye? Voting machines don't register angry glints.

-- How could any decent person be against granting amnesty to lawbreakers?

In common parlance, "the decent thing to do" is usually defined as "following the law." The fact that Democrats want 30 million new voters is not a good enough reason to ignore the law and screw over the millions of people who have been waiting 20 years to immigrate here legally.

-- We already have "de facto amnesty."

I gather Marco Rubio considers this his big showstopper, since he says it in every interview as if he's announcing the Kochen-Specker theorem. But if we already have de facto amnesty, why is this bill even necessary? Oh, that's right! The Democrats need 30 million new voters.

It's curious that Democrats don't hysterically demand amnesty for other lawbreakers, such as tax-cheats or polluters. Right now -- hold on to your hat, Marco! -- we have "de facto amnesty" for tax-cheats and polluters! (Also rapists and murderers and every other crime that doesn't have 100 percent enforcement.)

And if we won't grant amnesty to tax-cheats and polluters, what about their children? Why punish the children? They did nothing wrong. Their parents told them they had lots of money for houses, clothes and college tuition. How can you put a tax lien on the homes of innocent children? Think of how BP executives' children have suffered -- the divorces, the deferred dreams, the broken families ...

And by the way, polluters are also hard workers. They love their families and want the best for them, too. I bet illegal aliens who rape women and kill people in drunk-driving accidents love their families. Members of MS-13 work very hard at gang activities, such as, for example, when you cross them, they are very dogged about having you killed in a drive-by shooting. That shows a real stick-to-itiveness.

But weirdly, Democrats are obsessed with amnesty only for the lawbreakers that will get them 30 million new voters. (Violent felons come next.)

Republicans don't have to be brave to vote against amnesty. They need to not be idiots.

This isn't a single issue. It's every issue. Presidential elections are decided by a few million votes. Giving the Democrats 30 million new voters means Republicans lose on everything -- Obamacare, public sector unions, big government, abortion, gay marriage, racial preferences, and on and on and on.

In another few years, the whole country will be California and no Republican will win another national election.

Maybe New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie supports amnesty (as he did, via his appointed senator), hoping to be the last Republican ever elected president. There's one for the history books!

But if Christie says he's pro-life while giving the Democrats 30 million new voters, he's a liar. Hispanics favor abortion by 66 percent, compared to 50 percent of other voters.

If he says he opposes Obamacare, court-mandated gay marriage, wants small government and loves his country while voting to give the Democrats 30 million new voters, he's a liar.

Hispanics support Obamacare by 62 percent, gay marriage by 59 percent and big government by 75 percent.

If he says he opposes bloated, expensive public sector unions, he's a liar. Look no farther than California for our future.

Instead of the elites bringing in another flood of low-wage immigrants to clean their homes and manicure their lawns (and vote Democrat!), how about we start getting some immigrants to compete with Florida senators and New Jersey governors?

The Princess and the Brotherhood

For nine decades, Egypt has fled modernity.

By Mark Steyn

http://www.nationalreview.com/

July 5, 2013

A protester used his sandal to beat a crossed-out picture of Egypt’s Islamist President Mohammed Morsi in Cairo. (Reuters)

After midday prayers on Wednesday, just about the time the army were heading over to the presidential palace to evict Mohammed Morsi, the last king of Egypt was laying to rest his aunt, Princess Fawzia, who died in Alexandria on Tuesday at the grand old age of 91. She was born in 1921, a few months before the imperial civil servants of London and Paris invented the modern Middle East and the British protectorate of Egypt was upgraded to a kingdom, and seven years before Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

A long life reminds us of how short history is: Princess Fawzia outlived the Egyptian monarchy, and the Nasserist fascism and pan-Arabism that succeeded it, and the doomed “United Arab Republic” of Egypt and Syria, and the fetid third-of-a-century “stability” of the Mubarak kleptocracy. And she came within 24 hours of outliving the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief, disastrous grip on power. In the days before her death, it was reported that 14 million people took to the streets of Egypt’s cities to protest against Morsi (and Obama and his ambassador Anne Paterson). If so, that’s more than the population of the entire country in the year Princess Fawzia was born. The Mubarak era alone saw the citizenry double from 40 million to 80 million, a majority of which live on less than two dollars a day. The old pharaoh was toppled by his own baby boom, most of whom went for Morsi. The new pharaoh was toppled by his own stupidity. The Muslim Brotherhood waited 85 years for their moment and then blew it in nothing flat.

And so the “Arab Spring” ricochets from one half-witted plot twist to another. Morsi was supposedly “the first democratically elected leader” in Egypt’s history, but he was a one-man-one-vote-one-time guy. Across the Mediterranean in Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan could have advised him “softly softly catchee monkey” — you neuter the army slowly, and Islamize incrementally, as Erdogan has done remorselessly over a decade. But Morsi the “democrat” prosecuted journalists who disrespected him, and now he sits in a military jail cell (next to Mubarak’s?). And so the first army coup in Egypt since King Farouk’s ejection in 1952 is hailed as a restoration of the idealistic goals of the “Facebook revolution,” although General Sisi apparently has plans to charge Morsi with “insulting the presidency.” That’s not a crime any self-respecting society would have on its books — and anyway the Egyptian presidency itself is an insult to presidencies. Morsi’s is the shortest reign of any of the five presidents, shorter even than the first, Mohamed Naguib, who was booted out by Nasser and whose obscurity is nicely caught by the title of his memoir, I Was an Egyptian President.

In the 2011 parliamentary elections, three-quarters of the vote went to either the Muslim Brotherhood or their principal rivals, the Even More Muslim Brotherhood. So, statistically speaking, a fair few of the “broad-based coalition” joining the Coptic Christians and urban secularists out on the streets are former Morsi guys. Are they suddenly Swedish-style social democrats? Human Rights Watch reports that almost 100 women were subjected to violent sexual assault over four days in Tahrir Square, which suggests not. The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick argues that the coalition that’s supplanted the Muslim Brothers will wind up controlled by neo-Nasserite fascists.

For my part, I would bet Egypt’s fate will be largely driven by its fiscal ruin. Morsi is a good example of what happens when full-blown Islamic rule is put into effect in a country without the benefit of oil. He’s your go-to guy when it comes to ramping up the clitoridectomy rate, but he’s not so effective when it comes to jump-starting the economy. In February, the government advised the people to eat less and cut back the food subsidy to about 400 calories a day — which even Nanny Bloomberg might balk at. Amidst all the good news of the Morsi era — the collapse of Western tourism, the ethnic cleansing of Copts, the attacks on the Israeli embassy, sexual assaults on uncovered women, death for apostasy, etc. — amidst all these Morsi-era success stories, even a Muslim Brother has to eat occasionally.

Egyptians learned the hard way that, whatever their cultural preferences, full-strength Islam comes at a price. Egypt has a wheat crisis, and a fuel crisis, and the World Food Program estimates that 40 percent of the population is suffering from “physical or mental” malnutrition. For purposes of comparison, when King Farouk was overthrown in 1952, Egypt and South Korea had more or less the same GDP per capita. Today Egypt’s is about one-eighth of South Korea’s.

Washington has spent six decades getting Egypt wrong, ever since the CIA insouciantly joined the coup against Farouk under the contemptuous name “Operation Fat F***er.” We sank billions into Mubarak’s Swiss bank accounts, and got nothing in return other than Mohammed Atta flying through the office window. Even in a multicultural age, liberal Americans casually assume that “developing countries” want to develop into something like a Western democracy. But Egypt only goes backwards. Princess Fawzia is best remembered in the Middle East as, briefly, the first consort of the late shah of Iran, whom she left in 1946 because she found Tehran hopelessly dull and provincial after bustling, modern, cosmopolitan Cairo. In our time, the notion of Egypt as “modern” is difficult to comprehend: According to the U.N., 91 percent of its women have undergone female genital mutilation — not because the state mandates it, but because the menfolk insist on it. Over half its citizenry subsists on less than two dollars a day. A rural population so inept it has to import its food, Egyptians live on the land, but can’t live off it.

Ninety years ago, Fuad I’s kingdom was a ramshackle Arab approximation of a Westminster constitutional monarchy: Even in its flaws and corruptions, it knew at least what respectable societies were supposed to aspire to. Nasser’s one-party state was worse, Mubarak’s one-man klepto-state worse still, and Morsi’s antidote to his predecessors worst of all — so far. You can measure the decay in a tale of two consorts. After she left the shah, Princess Fawzia served as the principal hostess of the Egyptian court. In tiara and off-the-shoulder gowns, she looks like a screen siren from Hollywood’s golden age — Hedy Lamarr, say, in Her Highness and the Bellboy (1945). Sixty years later, no Egyptian woman could walk through Cairo with bare shoulders without risking assault. President Morsi’s wife, Naglaa Ali Mahmoud, is his first cousin, and covered from head to toe. If you were a visiting foreign minister, you were instructed not to shake hands, or even look at her. If you did, you’d notice that the abaya-clad crone bore an odd resemblance to the mom of the incendiary Tsarnaev brothers. Eschewing the title first lady, she preferred to be known as “first servant.” Egypt’s first couple embodied only the parochial, inbred dead end of Islamic imperialism — what remains when all else is dead or fled.

This week, the Brotherhood was checked — but not by anything recognizable as the forces of freedom. Is it only a temporary respite? Certainly, in the age of what Caroline Glick calls “America’s self-induced smallness,” Western ideas of real liberty have little purchase in Cairo. Egypt will get worse, and, self-induced or not, America is getting smaller.

Friday, July 05, 2013

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Loose Ends (Live, 2012)

Dodgers' Yasiel Puig looks to be Bo Jackson, version 2.0

By Troy E. Renck
The Denver Post

http://www.denverpost.com

July 2, 2013

Yasiel Puig: .430, 8 HR, 19 RBI, 1.174 OPS in 29 games

So often young players are supposed to make history and they only reinforce it. Jason Heyward was considered a blend of Chipper Jones and Hank Aaron after smashing a home run in his debut. Jeff Francoeur was labeled the next Roy Hobbs after two weeks with the Braves. Now his career is on a ventilator.

The sport is littered with cautionary tales, from Super Joe Charboneau to Shane Spencer.

Baseball is hard. Then along comes Yasiel Puig, a Cuban sensation, and the mind wanders. He might be just hot, just good, but everything about his cameo has been great. He didn't start his career with a cup of a coffee. More like two gallons of Red Bull.

Puig makes his first appearance at Coors Field on Tuesday, and there's no denying he's doing things that are very rare.

The Dodgers right fielder had 44 hits in his first month. Only the Yankees' Joe DiMaggio had more, totalling 48 in 1936. Ichiro, by comparison, had 39, in April 2001 for the Mariners.

Puig is playing, if not tangling emotions, stirring the debate about the Dodgers' ability to contend and the mechanics of the All-Star Game.

The Dodgers spent the first two months with shovel in hands, burying themselves. Then Puig was called up — he wasn't Sidd Finch because his teammates were familiar with his talent after his explosive spring. The Dodgers, inspired, sprinted back into the race. They are actively seeking pitching, are close to adding reliever Carlos Marmol — it's debateable that he helps — and are a threat again. Full transparency: I didn't pick the Dodgers to make the playoffs in spring training. I saw them as an 86-win team.

They still could be, and that might be enough to win a division where the combatants currently aspire to mediocrity. The Rockies, of course, are in the hunt. If the price is reasonable, they would be better served to add a reliever (Jesse Crain, Kevin Gregg) or starter (Scott Feldman) now to get an extra month of contribution.

The Rockies are searching for reliability. The Dodgers bring celebrity. Puig (pronounced Pweeg) is a blend of Bryce Harper (high energy, power) and Mike Trout (speed and defense).

Two scouts over the last two weeks have told me the same thing, unsolicited. Puig is the closest thing they have seen to Bo Jackson.

Jackson was a great athlete playing baseball, raw and unpolished, who continued to show improvement. Puig is a great athlete and a good baseball player who is only getting better.

He is 6-foot-3, 245 pounds, and wonderfully unpredictable. You have no idea what Puig will do, but there's a good chance it will be something you have never seen before. He's been thrown out at second base on routine line drives to left field. He's also turned singles into doubles with hustle that would make Michael Cuddyer proud. The other night he mangled a play in the outfield then made a breathtaking throw moments later.

Puig has a missile arm, silly power (he has seven home runs, a .713 slugging percentage and 72 total bases in 26 games) and plus personality that translates in any language.

He has the Dodgers thinking big again, while putting baseball on the spot. Let's not even debate if Cuddyer deserves to be an all-star. He's been one of the NL's three top outfielders. Puig should join him. I am not crazy about the idea, but the All-Star Game is an exhibition already flawed by ballot stuffing encouraged by MLB suits.

There are players who will make it who don't deserve the honor (and don't get me started on why having a representative from every team is hollow, misguided and outdated). Puig is electric. He might be the Dodgers' first write-in candidate to make it since Steve Garvey in 1974. My guess is he is elected as part of the last-man ballot. Or as a convenient injury replacement.

The All-Star Game will be better with Puig. The sport is better with Puig.

Perhaps he will fall short of expectations, but he has captured the imagination. Whether he's good or great, we can't stop watching.

Troy E. Renck: 303-954-1294,trenck@denverpost.comortwitter.com/troyrenck

Read more:Renck: Dodgers' Yasiel Puig looks to be Bo Jackson, version 2.0 - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/renck/ci_23580610/dodgers-yasiel-puig-looks-be-bo-jackson-version#ixzz2YAW0pAsv
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Obama’s global-warming folly

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: July 4, 2013

http://www.washingtonpost.com

The economy stagnates. Syria burns . Scandals lap at his feet. China and Russia mock him , even as a “29-year-old hacker” revealed his nation’s spy secrets to the world. How does President Obama respond? With a grandiloquent speech on climate change .

Climate change? It lies at the very bottom of a list of Americans’ concerns (last of 21 — Pew poll). Which means that Obama’s declaration of unilateral American war on global warming, whatever the cost — and it will be heavy — is either highly visionary or hopelessly solipsistic. You decide:

Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years — a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program.

Now, this inconvenient finding is not dispositive. It doesn’t mean there is no global warming. But it is something that the very complex global warming models that Obama naively claims represent settled science have trouble explaining. It therefore highlights the president’s presumption in dismissing skeptics as flat-earth know-nothings.

On the contrary. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who refuse to acknowledge the problematic nature of contradictory data. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite a recent Alaskan heat wave — a freak event in one place at one time — as presumptive evidence of planetary climate change. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite perennial phenomena such as droughts as cosmic retribution for environmental sinfulness.

For the sake of argument, nonetheless, let’s concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God’s name is his massive newregulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about it?

The United States has already radically cut carbon dioxide emissions — more than any country on earth since 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels.

And yet, at the same time, global emissions have gone up. That’s because — surprise! — we don’t control the energy use of the other 96 percent of humankind.

At the heart of Obama’s program are EPA regulations that will make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants. “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal,” explained one of Obama’s climate advisers. “On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished. This at a time of chronically and crushingly high unemployment, slow growth, jittery markets and deep economic uncertainty.

But that’s not the worst of it. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet. What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won’t. This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have no effect on climate change.

The have-nots are rapidly industrializing. As we speak, China and India together are opening one new coal plant every week. We can kill U.S. coal and devastate coal country all we want, but the industrializing Third World will more than make up for it. The net effect of the Obama plan will simply be dismantling the U.S. coal industry for shipping abroad.

To think we will get these countries to cooperate is sheer fantasy. We’ve been negotiating climate treaties for 20 years and gotten exactly nowhere. China, India and the other rising and modernizing countries point out that the West had a 150-year industrial head start that made it rich. They are still poor. And now, just as they are beginning to get rich, we’re telling them to stop dead in their tracks?

Fat chance. Obama imagines he’s going to cajole China into a greenhouse-gas emissions reduction that will slow its economy, increase energy costs, derail industrialization and risk enormous social unrest. This from a president who couldn’t even get China to turn over one Edward Snowden to U.S. custody.

I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one — and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future — there is no point in America committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise.

For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more on this topic:

Jennifer Rubin: Obama’s climate gift to Republicans

An Obamacare Surrender

Delaying the employer mandate signals massive system failure, not mere incompetence.

By Rich Lowry

http://www.nationalreview.com/

July 5, 2013

Washington is riven by conflict and deep-seated division. It is rare indeed when both sides can agree on anything consequential. Therefore it is incredibly heartening that there is now bipartisan agreement that the implementation of Obamacare is a mess.

Republicans have long maintained this, but now the Obama administration has lent its implicit assent with its astonishing decision to delay by a year the law’s employer mandate. This is what the administration calls, via a blog post by the Treasury Department’s assistant secretary for tax policy that announced the decision, “Continuing to Implement the ACA in a Careful, Thoughtful Manner.”

The Treasury Notes blog can call it whatever it wants, but there is no hiding the embarrassment of a climb-down on a high-profile feature of President Barack Obama’s signature initiative. Although the administration was determined to do all it could to hide it. Obama was apparently planning to announce it on July 3 — only because the day before Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve was too far off.

The purported reason for the delay is incompetence. The administration’s story is that it simply couldn’t find a way to implement the insurance-reporting requirements on employers in the time frame set out in the law. Merely as a side effect, it had to put off the mandate and the $2,000-per-employee fine on employers with more than 50 employees who don’t offer health coverage.

This just happens to be the mandate that is causing howls of pain from businesses and creating perverse incentives for them to limit their hiring or to hire part-time rather than full-time employees. And it just happens that 2015 — the new target for implementation — is after a midterm election year rather than during one.

Explaining the decision, Obama apparatchik Valerie Jarrett issued a stalwart communiqué from Central Command that should take an honored place in the annals of blatant, unembarrassed hackery.

Her message was: All is well. Nothing to see here. Yes, maybe we’ve delayed implementation of the (hilariously euphemistic) “employer responsibility payments,” aka fines, but don’t worry, it’s “full steam ahead” with the health-care exchanges this October.

Jarrett portrayed the decision as about “cutting red tape.” But if you pass a horrendously complicated law placing new burdens on employers, you aren’t cutting red tape, you are adding to it. And a delay doesn’t cut red tape — it delays it.

“As we implement this law,” Jarrett explained, “we have and will continue to make changes as needed.” But the law is supposed to be the law, not optional suggestions from Congress. In Jarrett’s view, Obamacare is little more than a warrant for the Obama administration to decide how it wants to run the American health-care system, one executive decision at a time.

It has become a trope among defenders of the law that its flaws are the fault of Republicans because they don’t want to fix them. They must have seen their own peculiar version of Schoolhouse Rock!: The first step in making a law is jamming a massive bill down the opposition’s throat. The second is whining that the opposition won’t fix problems inherent in the bill jammed down their throats.

Obamacare was sold on the twin, flagrantly false promises that you could keep the insurance you have and that the prices for insurance would drop. But there will be significant dumping of employees onto the exchanges, and the latest indication of the law’s price shock came via the Wall Street Journal this week, which reported that “healthy consumers could see insurance rates double or even triple when they look for individual coverage.”

The delay of the employer mandate may create political pressure to delay the more important individual mandate as well, on grounds that ordinary people shouldn’t face the fines for not buying government-mandated coverage that businesses have been spared. Certainly, the maneuver on the employer mandate is a painful concession and a signal of weakness. Now everyone can agree: Implementation of the president’s proudest achievement is troubled, at best.

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He is also the author of the recently released book Lincoln Unbound. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2013 King Features Syndicate

Thursday, July 04, 2013

Words to transform the world

By Jeff Jacoby

http://www.bostonglobe.com

July 3, 2013

Alexis de Tocqueville

ONE SUMMER morning in Albany in 1831, two young French noblemen traveling through the United States were awakened by a din of gunfire, artillery explosions, and pealing church bells. It was the Fourth of July in New York’s state capital, and the visitors — Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont — were about to see an American community celebrate the nation’s birthday.

In their journals and letters, they wrote of the Independence Day parade, a procession that included political dignitaries, nine companies of firefighters, and a profusion of floats and delegations from all the local trade and professional associations. At the head of the parade rode a few aged Revolutionary War veterans — “whom the city preserves like precious relics,” Beaumont observed — and with great pomp was displayed “an old American flag, bullet torn, which has come down from the War of Independence.”

The parade ended at the Methodist Church, where the minister offered a prayer and the Declaration of Independence was read aloud. Tocqueville was struck by the “electric” intensity of feeling Jefferson’s 55-year-old phrases still evoked.

“This was not, I assure you, a theatrical performance,” he wrote to his sister. “There was in the reading of these promises of independence so well kept, in this return of an entire people toward the memories of its birth . . . something deeply felt and truly great.”

Then came the day’s keynote address, on the theme of freedom in history and how its success in America would eventually be replicated throughout the globe. The ceremony ended with a hymn to liberty, sung to the tune of the “Marseillaise.” It too traced the rocky progress of liberty, which had since antiquity repeatedly succumbed to despotism or social decay, until — as the last stanza proclaimed — it flourished in the United States:

In this proud land, where freemen cherish

Untrammeled thought and action free,

Where tyranny but breathes to perish,

Thy chosen home must ever be!

America was the first nation self-consciously founded as the embodiment of an idea — the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” and endowed by God with an “unalienable” right to life and liberty. In a world that had always connected nationhood and citizenship to blood, soil, and ethnicity, the democratic republic born in 1776 presented a prospect that was revolutionary in the profoundest sense imaginable — and Americans from the outset were certain that their model of self-government was destined to radiate outward, shaping the course of human events.

To Tocqueville, this was more than mere patriotic braggadocio. He could see that the world was ultimately going to be transformed by the enlightened doctrines of democratic liberty and individualism. But in America — remarkably — this great transformation had already “been effected with ease and simplicity.”

In effect Tocqueville was making a case for American exceptionalism, though that phrase wouldn’t be coined until the 1930s. “The emigrants who colonized the shores of America in the beginning of the 17th century somehow separated the democratic principle from all the principles that it had to contend with in the old communities of Europe, and transplanted it alone to the New World,” he would write in the introduction to his great work. “It has there been able to spread in perfect freedom.”

Tocqueville was an analyst, not a cheerleader. As anyone who reads “Democracy in America” is frequently reminded, he was well aware of the shortcomings of the American system. But of the enduring force of those ideas adopted unanimously in Philadelphia in 1776 he had little doubt.

Nearly 16 decades after Tocqueville’s Fourth of July in Albany, as democratic upheaval was shaking the Iron Curtain, protesters in Branik, an industrial section of Prague, joined a general strike.

“Zdenek Janicek, a brewery worker in grimy overalls, rose on a platform and began to speak,” reported The New York Times on Page 1.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he said, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The power of those words to move those who hear them — and to change the world for the better — remains undiminished, 237 years on.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeff_jacoby.