Lies that feel good

John Hinderaker writes:

It is the luxury of knowing they are bullshitting that allows American liberals to claim that their freedoms are going up in smoke and that dissent is being suppressed, when in fact, "dissent" is socially mandated in polite society from Manhattan to Marin County.

I would add this parallel: any survey of Europeans you look at will say that they think the United States is the biggest danger to world peace, worse than North Korea or the Islamofascists. But they don't mean it. If they did, they would be clamoring for their own countries to re-arm. But the very people who claim to believe that the U.S. is bent on world domination are the same ones who don't want their own governments to spend a dollar on defense. They are entirely content to let us keep the peace. Which means that what they tell pollsters about threats to world peace, like what liberals say about threats to their civil liberties, is, to put it politely, disingenuous.

2007: Lowest hurricane activity in 30 years

According to the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University:

Unless a dramatic and perhaps historical flurry of activity occurs in the next 9 weeks, 2007 will rank as a historically inactive TC year for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole. During the past 30 years, only 1977, 1981, and 1983 have had less activity to date (January-TODAY, Accumulated Cyclone Energy). However, the year is not over...

In An inconvenient Truth, Al Gore blamed Hurricane Katrina on global warming which was supposed to cause ever increasing hurricane activity. How long do you think it will be before the media is promoting a new story about lack of hurricances being proof of global warming? Or will they simply switch to global warming causing Santa Ana wind induced fires instead?

In government we trust

HillaryCare update from the UK Telegraph:

Record numbers of Britons are flying abroad for medical treatment to escape NHS waiting lists and the rising threat of hospital superbugs.

Thousands of "health tourists" are going as far as India, Malaysia and South Africa for major operations – such is their despair over the quality of health services.

The first survey of Britons opting for treatment overseas shows that fears of hospital infections and frustration with NHS waiting lists are fuelling the increasing trend.

More than 70,000 Britons will have treatment abroad this year – a figure that is forecast to rise to almost 200,000 by the end of the decade.

Hat tip Bookworm Room.

The possibilities are endless

On Air America, Randi Rhodes proposes that maybe Blackwater is behind the San Diego arson. She is not alone in this belief.

Why do we pay taxes?

According to the Washington Post, some environmentalists are upset at some of the cost of fighting fires in southern California:

Some of the areas hit hardest by this week's fires are near Lake Arrowhead in San Bernardino County. The area is thick with vacation homes, a sore spot for environmentalists who complain that federal taxpayers foot the bill for protecting houses near national forests.

"These smoke jumpers drop out of the sky miraculously to fight the fire for you, so there's incentive for county commissioners and land use departments to withhold the permitting of homes," said Ray Rasker of Headwaters Economics. He was reached in Washington, where he was presenting a study showing that 50 to 95 percent of Forest Service firefighting costs went to protect private property. [emphasis added]

Taxes should be raised, Democrats say, because the government "needs" the money to provide us with services such as police and fire. It turns out, though, that, while Democrats are always enthusiastic about higher taxes, they resent the fact, here anyway, that a portion of the money is spent providing services for taxpayers.

They might be happy, however, if more money were spent preventing either the government or private homeowners from building firebreaks or otherwise managing the fire risk around their homes.

Liberal racism

Democrats just can't help themselves but to see everything in racial terms as Sen. Biden does here as reported by the Washington Post:

After a lengthy critique of Bush administration education policies, Biden attempted to explain why some schools perform better than others -- in Iowa, for instance, compared with the District. "There's less than 1 percent of the population of Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you're dealing with," Biden said.

The Biden campaign clarified this saying that by "what you're dealing with," the good senator meant "nutrition" and "pre-K," not race.

Is BDS worth paying for?

Don Surber speculates on whether the New York Times might be up for sale. One of his commenters, "Yorick," captures what I think it the problem with the current MSM business model:

I usually bought a NYT Sunday edition, which would supply bathroom reads for the week. I did this even though I was quite aware of the bias and seldom read the editorial page. Then I needed to know the dynamics behind the sub prime thing and real estate bubble on account of I own a property and need to make an informed decision. I went to buy the Times and then realized that whatever was written there would be slanted to game the ‘08 election and was therefore worthless. Haven’t even been tempted to buy a copy since.

Opinions, bias, and BDS are cheap. If newspapers are going to convince people to pay for subscriptions over the long run, they need, in my opinion, to provide news that is reliable enough to bank on.

The spin keeps turning

The New York Times' Healthy Living blog says that ketchup is a vegetable:

Switching to organic is tough for many families who don’t want to pay higher prices or give up their favorite foods. But by choosing organic versions of just a few foods that you eat often, you can increase the percentage of organic food in your diet without big changes to your shopping cart or your spending. ....

4. Ketchup: For some families, ketchup accounts for a large part of the household vegetable intake. About 75 percent of tomato consumption is in the form of processed tomatoes, including juice, tomato paste and ketchup. Notably, recent research has shown organic ketchup has about double the antioxidants of conventional ketchup.

25 years ago, the Times claimed that only evil Reagan-Republicans would think such "heartless foolishness."

Big brother wants to watch you

Italy's Council of Ministers approved a draft of the Levi-Prodi law which would require "anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they[sic.] provide information without any intention to make money." The law will not take effect unless/until it is approved by Italy's parliament.

Risk assessment and the human mind

Bruce Schneier, a computer security consultant, finds that people do a poor job of assessing computer security risks. Rather than blaming the problem on poor training that computer users received from computer consultants, he blames it on human nature. He writes:

• People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks. They worry more about earthquakes than they do about slipping on the bathroom floor, even though the latter kills far more people than the former. ....
• People have trouble estimating risks for anything not exactly like their normal situation. Americans worry more about the risk of mugging in a foreign city, no matter how much safer it might be than where they live back home. ....
• Personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks. Joseph Stalin said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” ....
• People underestimate risks they willingly take and overestimate risks in situations they can’t control. When people voluntarily take a risk, they tend to underestimate it. When they have no choice but to take the risk, they tend to overestimate it. Terrorists are scary because they attack arbitrarily, and from nowhere. Commercial airplanes are perceived as riskier than automobiles, because the controls are in someone else’s hands -- even though they’re much safer per passenger mile. ....
• Last, people overestimate risks that are being talked about and remain an object of public scrutiny. News, by definition, is about anomalies. Endless numbers of automobile crashes hardly make news like one airplane crash does. The West Nile virus outbreak in 2002 killed very few people, but it worried many more because it was in the news day after day.

He has some valid points. I think that he misses a subtlety on personified threats: Conservatives tend to focus on personified threats (Hitler, Stalin, bin Laden, Pol Pot) which liberals tend to minimize. On the other hand, liberals focus on unseen/anonymous threats (global warming, the coming ice age, acid rain) of which conservatives tend to be skeptical.

On some points, he appears to miss the boat. For example, he writes:

The final death toll from 9/11 was less than half of the initial estimates, but that didn’t make people feel less at risk.

The reason to take the terrorist threat seriously is not the death toll of 9-11. Rather, it is the possibility that similarly determined terrorists may sneak a nuclear bomb across our borders.

It's 6pm: Do you know where your talk show host is?

Air America host Randi Rhodes explains (hat tip: MM; story background here.) what happened to her last Sunday at 6pm:

I was watching football at an Irish Pub and I went out to smoke a cigarette and the next thing I knew I was on the cement face-down.... I hadn't eaten anything all day.

Drinking on an empty stomach and she ends up face down? That may be painful but it is not necessarily mysterious or surprising. (Aside: why is she still smoking? The Surgeon General's report came out four decades ago.) Why did she initially claim that she was mugged? She had to e-mail her employer that she wouldn't be at work Monday:

I didn't know how to explain finding myself in this position after a beautiful day in NYC so went I wrote what I thought was the best explanation

So she decided to blame someone else, a "mugger." How liberal not to take responsibility. One thing about this episode and the media coverage bothered her:

The saddest part to me was no one ask me if I was alright.

A strange complaint coming from someone who has done her part to coarsen public discourse: she is the recipient of a complaint from the Anti-Defamation League that she belittled the holocaust. She is also the one who claimed that Pres. Bush "gets joy out of the [Hurricane Katrina victims] dying, because they are Democrat voters." Her complaints about the media continue:

The fact that some of you were so rude to my building staff who loves me is just disgraceful.

Yes, Ms. Rhodes' building staff loves her. To her credit, her claim is much more modest than Evita Peron's or Hillary Clinton's more all encompassing claims to be "grateful for the love of the people."

Unintended consequences

According to the Wall Street Journal, the passage of McCain-Feingold somehow didn't remove money from politics:

WASHINGTON -- The bundling of political donations once was an innocuous play in the game book of Washington political operatives. Now, the fund-raising practice has grown so widespread, and some of its practitioners so brazen, that bundling has become the chief source of abuse in the American campaign-finance system.

The strange case of Norman Hsu, the textile-importer-turned-fugitive who cobbled together $800,000 in contributions for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign, is the tip of the iceberg. Candidates for offices from county commissioner to U.S. president are increasingly turning to bundlers -- individuals who ask friends, family and business associates for contributions to their candidate of choice -- to help bring in the tremendous amounts of cash now needed to wage political campaigns.....

In this high-pressure, low-disclosure environment, the practice has increasingly evolved into a method for disguising illegal donations. In several cases already this year, campaign bundlers have admitted to making contributions in the names of others to get around caps, or coercing employees to give.

The natural result of passing a complex new law is the creation of complex new ways to get around that law.

Is the environment is only harmed by things that are 'scary'?

The LA Times writes that, according to the UN, livestock contribute more to global warming than all transportation put together:

A report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization identified livestock as one of the two or three top contributors to the world's most serious environmental problems, including water pollution and species loss. In terms of climate change, livestock are a threat not only because of the gases coming from their stomachs and manure but because of deforestation, as land is cleared to make way for pastures, and the amount of energy needed to produce the crops that feed the animals.

All told, livestock are responsible for 18% of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide, according to the U.N. -- more than all the planes, trains and automobiles on the planet. And it's going to get a lot worse. As living standards rise in the developing world, so does its fondness for meat and dairy.

Will world governments take action? I doubt it. Enviro-disaster scenarios that excite the popular imagination are usually related to industrial machinery and particularly power conversion machinery. Examples include nuclear power, acid rain, fluorocarbon-ozone and, most recently, global warming. Food-scares usually involve the food as poison with the poison part usually due to industrialization, such as "fast food" or the use of alar on apples. Scare mongers are unlikely to get excited about cow effluents, no matter how real or important, as long as the out-gassing is "natural." If cow-belching could be blamed, say, on an industrial chemical additive to their feed, then the scare mongers just might take it seriously.

Those who love to hate, II

Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) comments on Pres. Bush's support of funding for the military:

But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if he can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement....

The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up in Iraq, ....

The idea that US soldiers are killed in Iraq "for the President’s amusement" is pure fantasy. The psychology of it seems strikingly similar to Tuesday's outburst by Air America host Jon Elliott who invented a fantasy about his co-host being attacked and injured by "right-wing, hate machine" muggers. I submit that imagining/fantasizing that their political opponents to be pure evil makes liberals, such as Stark and Elliott, feel better about themselves. In such a fantasy world, the liberal's cause is just and he need have no self-doubts. This makes him free to ignore all the complicated issues and nagging questions that occur when issues are addressed in a serious adult manner.

Some answers are best left unknown

James Taranto notes "the liberal war on science" (scroll down) both in the opposition to academic research on the effects of affirmative action and in its treatment of global warming.

Nationalized dentistry

The Guardian (UK) reports on the state of socialized dentistry in Britain:

Large numbers of people are going without dental treatment and some even report extracting their own teeth because they cannot find an NHS dentist in their area, a survey reveals today.

The survey found some innovative self-treatments:

6% of the respondents said they were self-treating, which often included pulling out their own troublesome teeth. "Fourteen teeth have had to be removed by myself using pliers," said one Lancashire respondent. ....

Some of the respondents show considerable ingenuity. "Filled own teeth - clove oil and Polyfilla," said one in Essex. Another fixed a crown with Superglue and a third used a screwdriver to scrape off plaque.

When will Sen. Clinton expand her plan to include dentistry like our betters have across the Atlantic?

Those who love to hate

Air America host Randi Rhodes didn't show up for work today:

Fellow host Jon Elliott claimed on the liberal radio network that Rhodes had been mugged while walking her dog, Simon, on Sunday night. Elliot, who said Rhodes lost several teeth in the attack, waxed about a possible conspiracy.

"Is this an attempt by the right-wing, hate machine to silence one of our own?" he asked on the air, according to Talking Radio, a blog. "Are we threatening them? Are they afraid that we’re winning? Are they trying to silence intimidate us?"

The problem with Elliott's story is that Ms. Rhodes was not mugged: she fell:

Rhodes' lawyer told the Daily News she was injured in a fall while walking her dog. He said she's not sure what happened, and only knows that she fell down and is in a lot of pain. The lawyer said Rhodes expects to be back on the air Thursday. He stressed there is no indication she was targeted or that she was the victim of a "hate crime."

So what explains Mr. Elliott's outburst? He was not alone in his paranoid fantasies of persecution. Liberals across the internet had the same reaction.

One explanation is projection. Throwing pies at conservative speakers is a popular way for liberals to express themselves. Just last Thursday, Barnes and Noble reportedly had to call security because the intellectuals on New York's Upper West Side couldn't handle listening to a neo-conservative talk. It is natural for them to imagine (`project') that conservatives would express themselves the same way.

Having watched the faces of people who express such fantasies, an additional factor appears to me to be more important. When they imagine their opponents as pure evil, they feel better about themselves. It improves their self-esteem to believe that the other half of America is filled with hate.

PREVIOUSLY, we have discussed psychological projection in relation to Islamism, The New Republic, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), and Alec Baldwin. The comfort that liberals derive from imagining the worst in those who disagree with them was discussed previously here.

UPDATE: Reportedly, Randi Rhodes, initially uncertain about what happened, told Air America that she was mugged. Elliott still appears to be the author of the fantasy about the right-wing hate-machine attack. Ms. Rhodes statement is quite interesting, worth a listen.

Domestic spying revealed

Don Van Natta Jr and Jeff Gerth, both veteran New York Times reporters, claim that Hillary Clinton was monitoring domestic phone calls without a warrant:

Hillary’s defense activities ranged from the inspirational to the microscopic to the down and dirty. She received memos about the status of various press inquiries; she vetted senior campaign aides; and she listened to a secretly recorded audiotape of a phone conversation of Clinton critics plotting their next attack.

The tape contained discussions of another woman who might surface with allegations about an affair with Bill. Bill’s supporters monitored frequencies used by cell phones, and the tape was made during one of those monitoring sessions.”

Van Natta and Gerth are hawking a book, an activity that tends to lead to questionable assertions. It will be interesting to see if they have any facts or on-the-record sources to support their claims.

TNR's Projector-in-chief

Marty Peretz of Editor-in-Chief of The New Republic comments on Al Gore's Nobel:

Yes, the prize is rightly his. No one has devoted himself with such dedication and intellectual probity to a cause as important as this one. No one. So he deserves the Nobel. And the country deserves Al Gore to make another run at the presidency, he having lost his last try through chicanery and the arrogance of a party for which lying is second nature. Or maybe first.

It was The New Republic which published dishonest stories by Stephen Glass and Scott Beauchamp. When Editor-in-Chief Peretz talks of parties for whom lying is second or first nature, it appears to be a case of psychological projection.

Special prosecutors have the law on their side

Prof. Tim Wu of the Columbia Law School explains the arbitrary nature of the US's ossified legal system:

At the federal prosecutor's office in the Southern District of New York, the staff, over beer and pretzels, used to play a darkly humorous game. Junior and senior prosecutors would sit around, and someone would name a random celebrity—say, Mother Theresa or John Lennon.

It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you'd see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like "false statements" (a felony, up to five years), "obstructing the mails" (five years), or "false pretenses on the high seas" (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: "prison time."

We have seen this played out practice when special prosecutors have been appointed.