I'd chalk this one up to "illustrating absurdity by being absurd", but in the crazy bizarro world of Washington with Harry "Oil Makes Us Sick" Reid and Nancy of the Pelosi Premium, who knows? Stranger things have happened:

On Thursday, I wrote about the ongoing efforts--from a variety of sources--to reframe World War II, in an effort to cast the Allies' efforts in a much more cynical light than history currently remembers them.

But Matthew Yglesias sets the Wayback Machine way, way back, in an effort to reframe not 1945, but 1776.

"And for chrissakes: STOP JUST QUOTING Pastor Niemoller about "doing nothing" -- and DO SOMETHING next time -- the VERY next time -- you hesitate to express your opinion because you're afraid of the thought police."

David Harsanyi writes:

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson writes that individuals are endowed with unalienable rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

There is nothing in there about state-sponsored "public" service and nothing about having to listen to politicians lecture us about what we "must" do to satisfy patriotic obligation. I checked.

Yet, a hobbyhorse of presidential hopefuls is government service. The duo is under the impression that public service trumps your own selfish existence. After all, you only make a living, give to charities of your choice, take care of your own children, buy your own junk and, hopefully, mind your own business.

"Loving your country shouldn't just mean watching fireworks on the Fourth of July," Barack Obama explained to a crowd in Colorado Springs this week. "Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it."

Yes. He said must.

Ironically, in most places, Americans are prohibited from lighting fireworks on Independence Day — naturally, we "must" not hurt ourselves. And there are increasingly more "musts" being handed down. (Reason Magazine recently named Chicago, Obama's hometown, the city with the least amount of individual freedom in the nation.)

What we definitely "must" be is selfless — like Obama, who often recounts his own righteous journey. Spurning high-paying gigs on Wall Street, Obama hit the Chicago pavement as a crusading community organizer . . . and then, in meticulous detail, wrote a book about his awesome sacrifice and raked in millions.

Obama claims this experience also opened his eyes to a "citizenship that was meaningful." (Unlike yours.) Imagine if everyone wanted a "meaningful" job? Who would support these quixotic crusaders? Doesn't someone need to produce wealth?

What---and ride the New Rochelle train every day?

Meanwhile, Roger Kimball notes that Obama's vision of public works turns JFK's aphorism on its head: "Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do to you:"

It’s a long way to Lent yet, but I guess I am going to have to start reading Barack Hussein Obama’s speeches. I caught his latest musings on “national service” thanks to Instapundit, but that came via Jonah Goldberg from PrestoPundit. How is he going to back away, triangulate, move to the center on this?

when I’m President, I will set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year. This means that by the time you graduate college, you’ll have done 17 weeks of service. We’ll reach this goal in several ways. At the middle and high school level, we’ll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs, and give schools resources to offer new service opportunities.

The real name for this, as PrestoPundit noted, is a return to serfdom, i.e., the intrusion of the coercive arm of the state into everyday life.

Properly defined by its original meaning, there's another name for it as well.

Isolationism you can believe in: Obama/Smoot in '08!

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant thrill of corrupt governmental grifters on multiple continents, "it's Elitist, Do-Nothing, Civic Parasite Day at Hot Air"--complete with video!

"The obvious question: will they look at us in 70 years with the same mixture of amusement, indulgence, respect and outright hilarity? the obvious answer: that's how we regard webpages from 1997. Of course they will."

Ezra Levant writes, "The Canadian Human Rights Commission, like any petty tyranny, has a strong instinct for survival":

As I predicted last week on the Michael Coren Show, that instinct would cause them to drop the complaint against Mark Steyn and Maclean's. And so they did.

With an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation and a pending Parliamentary investigation, they're already fighting a multi-front P.R. war, and losing badly. Not a day goes by when the CHRC isn't pummelled in the media. Holding a show trial of Maclean's and Steyn, like the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal did earlier this month, would be writing their own political death sentence.

So they blinked. Against everything in their DNA, they let Maclean's go. That's the first smart thing they've done; because the sooner they can get the public scrutiny to go away, the sooner they can go about prosecuting their less well-heeled targets, people who can't afford Canada's best lawyers and command the attention and affection of the country's literati.

While this is a victory of a sorts, as David Warren wrote last December, the process itself is a form of punishment:

For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant's right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgements on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers -- for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.

And if you haven't heard it yet, click here for my recent XM interview with Jonah Goldberg and Kathy Shaidle on the topic.

Update: "Isn't it funny how we're having more fun than the asshats trying to **** with us?"

We've previously linked to responses from James Lileks and James Pethokoukis, but found via Tim Blair, this is the perfect rebuttal to AP's Doomsday rhetoric:

I had meaning to comment on that ridiculous AP doomsday story that Drudge linked to recently, but there's no way I can top the fine demolition that James Lileks performs:

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL.

That’s the headline. First line:

Is everything spinning out of control?

No. But they go on:

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

Previous generations rolled up their sleeves and swam out there and saved those polar bears. As for “abysmal” home values, it depends where you are; I’ll admit that people who sank everything in Miami condo markets are finding their psyches chipped and dinged, but A) lower home prices mean people who want to buy one but couldn’t afford it now are sitting better – B) the authors can take heart in this story about San Francisco being unaffordable for the middle class. Thank God! There’s hope!

Cue the obligatory heartland can’t-do fella with busted bootstraps:

"It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change.

Rochester has had zero tornados this year, if I recall correctly. Even if they do get one, it probably won't be as bad as the 1883 example, which was bad enough to have its own wikipedia page. But again: what has happened to America that your optimism is insufficient to turn away rotating clouds? In the old days, by jiminey-crackers, we’d hold up pictures of Roosevelt and the twisters would just melt away.

The guy’s 64 years old, and he hasn’t figured out that some things get better, some things get worse, some things stay the same, and some things to which no one’s paying attention will shape the news much more than the panic du jour in the news today? He’s 64, and can’t figure out that grown men don’t say “scary” unless describing how they felt about the Wolfman when they were nine?

It is amusing, really – after sticking people’s heads in the muck every day for years, promoting every faddish scare, fluffing the pillow beneath every yuppie worry, swapping the straight-forward adult approach to news with presenters who emote the copy with the sad face of a day-care worker telling the children that Barney is dead – in short, after decades of presenting the world through the peculiar prism that finds in every day more evidence of our rot and our failures, they wonder why people are depressed. Hang the banner, guys: Mission Accomplished.

Of course, not everyone feels this way; I’d guess that people who watch television news are more inclined to pessimism. But there’s another side to this: the pessimism among some may not stem from some impotent feeling that one is a cork toss’d in a sea of cruel destiny, that you can’t do anything, that nothing will get better – no, the pessimism may arise from the suspicion that there’s something abroad in the land that’s had a good hardy larf about “Horatio Alger” and all the other manifestations of individual initiative for 30 years. The cool kids and the clever set have always smirked at that sort of stuff. You can get them going if you make a speech about our ability to solve things, but you’d better phrase it in the form of a government initiative, or brows furrow: well, then, how do you propose to do it?

The bottom of the page says “Average rating: two out of five stars.” Our confidence in the media to undermine our happiness is being chipped away, too. We’re in worse shape than we thought.

Remember when AP helped its readers make sense of the news, instead of describing life as one long unfathomable horror? Of course, that was when AP was actually in business to report, instead of "changing the world", or these days, sending dunning notices to bloggers.

Of course, one reason why wire services might be shaking down the Blogosphere is that they could use the money:

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

Sort of like a Red Queen's Race, you might say.

But then, as Michael Crichton wrote 15 years ago, the newspapers brought a lot of this upon themselves:

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

Just read the AP story at the of the post. And the media is cranking out that junk during a period when they can least afford to, as a technological sea change is devouring them:

And as I said, fortunately, their own Jurassic Park awaits:

Glenn Reynolds links to San Francisco Chronicle staff writer James Temple, who describes "urban flight flipped on its head":

The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells, a trend most experts attribute to the city's exorbitant housing costs.

Many worry it's increasingly turning San Francisco into an enclave of the rich, where nurses, firefighters, cops, teachers and other professionals aspiring toward homeownership or in need of cheaper rent can no longer afford to stay.

"A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies," said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. "There is a legitimate public policy concern when a city that many people have lived in for many years and regard as their homes becomes so expensive they can't afford to live there anymore."

Last year, USA Today noted, “San Francisco Hopes To Reverse Black Flight”, but it's part of a much larger trend, as I noted earlier in 2007:

As a city, San Francisco has had its share of problems in the 21st century, among them: declining population, declining economy, declining children, contempt of the US military, a large and often militant vagrant class, and declining tourism.

Fortunately, when it comes to making an effort to solve those problems, local government has its priorities firmly in order.

But it's not just San Francisco--when I interviewed Steven Malanga of City Journal a couple of years ago, he noted the same trend of the middle class being squeezed out, leaving only the wealthy and poor occurring in New Jersey as well. And I imagine anywhere there are punitive liberal policies simultaneously raising taxes and making a difficult environment for new housing and entrepreneurship, this trend will occur, but San Francisco's certainly had a multiple-decade head start. If it's entered the endgame, perhaps it will serve as a warning to other locales, and not as a prototype.

As Mark Steyn wrote last year, "The ecochondriacs mean it: This'd be a pretty nice planet if we didn't live here."

Which is the theme of M. Night Shyamalan's new film, The Happening. The center-left New Republic and center-right Wall Street Journal don't always agree on the issues of the day, but neither publication is in doubt about how the repugnant that theme looks when it's played out on a 30-foot high screen at the local shopping mall's multiplex.

In TNR, James Kirchick, the author of headline quoted above writes, "the mere existence of the human race is a cause for great shame" in Shyamalan's film:

As with most of Shyamalan's films, The Happening has an intriguing plot: centuries of human pollution has prompted nature to retaliate against us by form of a noxious gas released from trees, plants, grass -- it's never really clear. The toxin is first emitted in Central Park, smack dab in the middle of one of the most densly populated places in the United States. First, victims lose their critical faculties. Then they freeze. Then they killl themselves. From New York City "The Happening" spreads all along the east coast, from Boston to Washington. Shyamalan leaves little to the imagination in depicting man's nature-inflicted suicide. We see a woman stab herself in the neck with a hair pin. A man runs himself over with a lawnmower. On can't help but leave the theater thinking that Shyamalan derives a sick, masochistic pleasure in showing the deaths of all his bit characters, hopeless rubes are these human beings. They drove their SUVs for too long and had a big carbon footprint and now they're going to pay.

After 90 minutes of this, the culling of humanity ends. We catch a brief television news segment in which a scientist warns us that what the Northeast just experienced was akin to a terrestrial occurrence of oceanic "red tides." The earth warned us, but thankfully we get another chance to amend the errors of our ways. Like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, we're left with some hope that environmental catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. Buy a plug-in car. Use public transportation when available. Turn off the light when you leave a room. An unoffensive, and indeed positive message. The second to last scene depicts the female lead waiting nervously in her bathroom to read the results of a home pregnancy test. To her delight, she is with child. Her husband comes home, they embrace. Humanity soldiers on. What a warm feeling after so many scenes of horrific death.

But Shyamalan is obsessed with conceits at the expense of every other aspect -- the script, character development, and most importantly, good taste. He lives by the conceit, and, in this case, dies by it. After the pregnancy scene, the screen goes dark and we find ourselves in Paris, the Jardin des Tuileries to be exact. It's eerily reminiscent of the film's opening, with two men walking, engaged in pleasant conversation about their plans for the evening. A gust of wind! One of the men starts to stutter. People freeze. Screams. Mon Dieu!. Roll credits.

This isn't just radical environemntalist fare; it's perverse and anti-human. Shyamalan cuts immediately from the natural joy of pregnancy to its consequence: mass, nature-inflicted murder. It's not carbon output, styrofoam cups or the clearing of the rain forests that so angers Mother Earth and, thus, her self-appointed human spokesman. It's us.

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, (found via Dirty Harry's new film blog) Joseph Rago notes, "We have arrived at a strange moment in American pop culture when movie-goers spend two hours in the theater being informed that we all deserve to die":

In a recent interview, Mr. Shyamalan, best known for "The Sixth Sense" (1999), said that "The Happening" is intended to "wake everybody up" and "get back to the correct relationship with nature."

Obviously it isn't Hollywood's first environmental disaster flick. Think of 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," where all it takes is the CO2-induced obliteration of the East Coast for Dennis Quaid to learn how to be a better dad. But catastrophic climate change in that movie was a simple plot device that could be replaced easily enough with, say, space aliens. "The Happening" is honest-to-Gaia green agitprop: Like the Lorax, Mr. Shyamalan is speaking for the trees.

Environmentalism's seam of misanthropy traces back to John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and probably to Thoreau. We're just another species, the thinking goes, or would be had our iniquities not made us unworthy of a place in the ecosystem. The existence of Homo sapiens is an affliction and cause for profound shame.

Today the position persists along the fringes of the "deep ecology" movement, where adherents can still be found chanting, "Four legs good! Two legs bad!" But the message also has some mainstream appeal: A best-selling book last summer was "The World Without Us," in which science journalist Alan Weisman gleefully imagined how nature would respond if man abruptly went extinct and how great it would be for the planet. "The Happening" merely takes this misanthropy to its logical extreme.

Of course, most mainstream greens limit themselves to nagging on behalf of Mommy Nature. Yet amid the much ado about global warming, the people problem is asserting itself with a neo-Malthusian vengeance. Almost every element of modern life is reducible to carbon. Like it or not, a higher population leads inexorably to more anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ranks demographic proliferation as a "driver for emissions." British environmental minister Hilary Benn -- most recently spotted endorsing carbon rationing cards as a set of new sumptuary laws -- notes with approval that "family planning is the ultimate carbon offsetting scheme." Even though Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" has been defused again and again, Jeffrey Sachs, Jared Diamond, Bill McKibben and others have come to similar conclusions.

Since population control led to such PR disasters of the late 20th century as mass forced sterilizations under Indira Gandhi and China's one-child policy, it makes people queasy. Instead, the greens, when not plumping for massive carbon tax-and-regulation schemes, focus on behavioral alterations -- like taking public transit or installing the correct light bulbs. The weight given to consumer-driven change, however, means that the people problem can't help but seep out into the culture at large. Having kids is the most carbon-intensive choice most people will ever make.

Not surprisingly, more than a few of the recent handbooks for "green living" recommend thinking seriously about children. The Sierra Club says that the ideal number is two. Messrs. Weisman and McKibben say it's one. Mr. Shyamalan seems to think it's zero. It can't be long before we're being offered another helpful "tip": Kill yourself.

But that's already occurred. In mid-2006, Tammy Bruce, amongst other pundits and bloggers, reported a speech given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, a University of Texas evolutionary ecologist named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. In mid-2006, the academy enthusiastically cheered upon the conclusion of this speech:

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets.

AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.

After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said, “We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that.”

With his slide of human skulls towering on the screen behind him, Professor Pianka was deadly serious. The audience that had been applauding some of his statements now sat silent.

After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.

“And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.” So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third's of the world's population.

How soon must the mass dying begin if Earth is to be saved? Apparently fairly soon, for Pianka suggested he might be around when the killer disease goes to work. He was born in 1939, and his lengthy obituary appears on his web site.

When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.

Pianka's Wikipedia entry notes:

The host of the speech, the Texas Academy of Sciences, has released a statement stating that "many of Dr. Pianka's statements have been severely misconstrued and sensationalized."

Much like Reverend Wright would later be, it seems. This is a variation on the "botched joke" do-over the left claims for themselves whenever a Kinsley-esque gaffe of an unusually potent nature occurs. But as Tammy Bruce noted at the time, two years before Shyamalan's new movie, such eco-doomsday thinking isn't all that unusual:

I have been arguing for years now that the destruction of humanity, literally, is the actual agenda, conscious and unconscious, of Leftists worldwide. They have become progressively ugly and hateful politically and otherwise because they hate themselves and consequently project that hate, as Malignant Narcissists do, back onto humanity as a whole. Their frustration at the rejection of their agenda (history at least has taught us something) that they bother less and less with sugar-coating their nihilistic rage.

Now playing at a theater near you!

Related: "Phil Bowermaster On Fear Of The Future." And Rand Simberg adds:

Hey, how about if we save the earth by migrating into space?

Somehow, I don't think they'll like that, either.

Maybe that explains this.

Recently, I linked to Jack Shafer's article in Slate, declaring Advantage: Michael Crichton:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances—"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"—swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *

As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Ever since dreaming up the "Silicon Graffiti" series last year, I had wanted to do a segment on Alvin & Heidi Toffler's "Third Wave" thesis; particularly since I had taped their segment on C-Span's Booknotes program in 1995. As I attempt to illustrate in the above video, the clashing of a Second Wave, industrial-era institution like Big Media with the Blogosphere, a purely Third Wave phenomenon, is one of the reasons why Old Media are slowly going the way the dinosaurs (and this is but one of many death rattles).

Fortunately, as I noted in an earlier segment, they've already built their own Jurassic Park!

(And speaking of earlier segments, click here for older editions of the show.)

Just as the San Francisco Chronicle op-ed writer who dubbed him a "Lightworker" also previous admitted (and he's not the only media figure to do so), Obama is also for higher gas prices. He just wishes they arrived more slowly than the Pelosi Premium did.

As John Steele Gordon noted in Commentary a few days ago, "This would seem to be an opening the size of the Grand Canyon for McCain, and Republican candidates for Congress, to exploit this year."

The latter group already has. McCain? Don't bet on it, sadly.

Update: More more at Ace of Spades.

More: Mike Bloomberg, Manhattan's favorite nanny who has been named as a potential veep to both candidates, is also cool with higher gas prices. Note this bit of Orwellian doubletalk from the mayor and his aide:

"Reducing taxes on energy consumption is the wrong way to go. We should be raising taxes on energy consumption dramatically because it's the only way you're going to force people to use less."

An aide said Bloomberg's comments shouldn't be taken as "a call to action to increase gas taxes," which would be politically explosive.

On the other hand, WWCD?

Dianne Feinstein, bold senatorial leadership at work! Jonah Goldberg writes:

As befits a government-run commissary, the Senate cafeteria has a decidedly Soviet attitude toward variety. It has averaged only two new menu items a year over the last decade. The food is so bad, every lunch hour Senate staffers rush to the House side of the Capitol like starving New Yorkers of the future storming the last Soylent Green vendor.

According to auditors, the chain of restaurants run by the Senate food service, including the snooty Senate Dining Room, has almost never been in the black. It’s lost more than $18 million since 1993 and has dropped about $2 million this year alone. If the food service doesn’t get an emergency bridge loan of a quarter-million dollars, it won’t be able to make payroll.

So how will the Senate fix the problem? Well, with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein taking the lead, the Democrats — that’s right, the Democrats — have called a classic Republican play: Privatize it.

The House of Representatives made the switch in the 1980s, and its food service is now better. And profitable: The House has made $1.2 million in commissions since 2003. True to the Founders’ vision of the Senate as the more slow-moving branch of government, the Senate has taken 20 years to follow suit.

This was a painful decision for many Democrats who believe that privatization cannot be justified simply because it delivers better service and higher quality for less money. “What about the workers?” they cried. Apparently, some Democrats feel that the top priority in the restaurant business is to generate paychecks for people who are bad at their jobs.

Feinstein, head of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, was forced to deal with reality. “It’s cratering,” the Washington Post quoted Feinstein as saying. “Candidly, I don’t think the taxpayers should be subsidizing something that doesn’t need to be. There are parts of government that can be run like a business and should be run like businesses.”

Yes, yes, go on, Dianne. Run with that thought. Explore it, as the therapists say.

Meanwhile, while Dianne has privatized the nation's most exclusive restaurant, John McCain has bigger fish to fry, Megan McArdle writes:

The campaign policy blogging starts now: apparently, McCain wants to shut down Amtrak. Liberals are predictibly (and understandably) outraged. I'm not sure, however, that this is such a terrible idea, even environmentally. The lines that actually run at a profit--those in the Virginia-Massachussetts corridor--would still be profitable, and presumably operated by some private company. The other lines are a mixed bag, environmentally; it isn't really good for the environment to run trains at low capacity. And the federal government, because of the EIS process, other procedural barriers, and a great deal of logrolling, has so far not succeeded in making sensible upgrades to the system. The Acela was announced in 1994, actually went live six years later despite the really rather minor infrastructure improvements required, and at lavish expense now gets passengers to Boston one half-hour quicker in slightly comfier seats.

Moreover, if oil prices stay high, the math changes substantially for passenger rail, making new routes more profitable. People will probably never take the train en masse from New York to Los Angeles, but a direct train from New York to Chicago could start looking good, particularly when you factor in the drive to out-of-the way airports, delays, and time spent removing your shoes in security lines.

America's freight rail system, while it needs a lot of work, is world-class. Its passenger rail should be too. But it's so far proven pretty much impossible for the government to make it that way--and not merely because we don't have enough liberal politicians who like rail. Most politicians like rail. But they like a lot of other things better, like getting re-elected.

It will never happen (if the Congressional GOP couldn't privatize PBS at the height of their powers in the mid-'90s, I doubt this will), but McCain's heart, or at least his campaign rhetoric, is certainly in the right place.

“[Inside the windowless courtroom] there’s no link with the outside world except a clock, which is stuck at 8:00. And that’s government bureaucracy for you. You know, in British Columbia, it claims to be able to eradicate hate, but it can’t get someone in to restart the clock.”

--Mark Steyn on The Hugh Hewitt Show, as quoted by Kathy Shaidle, who goes through the looking glass of his Kafkaesque Show Trial at Pajamas Media.

Meanwhile, reader Joseph Somsel emails:

Seems to me that some of the defendants from the Canadian Human Rights Commission trials could legitimately seek asylum in the US as victims of persecution.

I wonder if Canada's chilling of free speech makes it a more or less desirable destination for leftwing Americans?

In London's Telegraph, Janet Daley explores a few of England's myriad woes (the same sort of territory that Theodore Dalrymple has explored in depth), before concluding, "What we are living through is nothing other than the death throes of 20th-century ideology: the idea that the state is the only repository of civic virtue and moral authority":

The notion that Big Government (whether in the central or the local form) could solve all social problems, and through its interventions achieve absolute justice and harmony, is collapsing. And in its last moments, in its disbelief and agony at its own failure, it is lashing out in every direction: if the earlier measures haven't dealt with crime/public disorder/anti-social behaviour/under-performing hospitals/insufficient recycling, we must add yet more layers of official interference.

If government fails to achieve its objectives, it must be because it isn't doing enough, isn't being sufficiently pro-active - so let's pass another law, bring in a further layer of intrusion, take away another dimension of personal responsibility from community life.

But somehow, everything that government does makes things worse: leads to more perverse consequences and unforeseen complications. And the panic increases and the desperation grows and we get yet more laws and rules and targets and misapplied regulations.

Because they have taken so much power over our lives, we feel free to blame the governing classes for everything that goes wrong. And they feel they must address our every difficulty because everything is their fault. (Indeed, their interventions so frequently exacerbate our problems that we are actually quite right to blame them much of the time.)

When there is a real crisis - not just dog poo or over-loaded wheelie bins - the solution always follows the same formula: take more power away from the people.

For example, the price of home-heating is now a serious problem, so what does the Government suggest? A return to zero VAT for heating fuel, which would lower the price instantly and significantly for everyone? Nope. What they propose is a hugely intrusive programme (at present illegal under data protection laws) in which private financial information about the poor would be handed to power companies, in the hope that the disadvantaged might be given more leeway in paying their bills.

So somewhere in the corridors of Whitehall, someone could have the power to decide which of us is deserving enough to have the confidential details of our hardship handed over to some anonymous manager at British Gas or Npower for their compassionate consideration. (Why not medical records, too? Surely the chronic sick could be given heating privileges?)

This madness is not all Gordon Brown's fault. He just happens to be the man presiding over the final moments of a political philosophy that has reached a dead end.

As Robert Conquest recently wrote, in the Soviet Union's last decade of existence, "came the realization by some in Moscow that the whole regime had become nonviable economically, ecologically, intellectually— and even militarily—largely because of its rejection of reality." Will the Anglosphere's left reach a similar tipping point within the foreseeable future?

(Via Theo Spark's Last of the Few. What--doesn't everyone read it for the articles...?)

Somehow I don't think Oswald Spengler (the one who wasn't a Ghostbuster) quite expected western civilization to enter its death rattles quite like this:

Some of the comments expressed the familiar desire to leave America for Canada. O Canada. Land of sweet reason and freedom.

You mean the place where a Human Rights Commission can haul up anyone for a show trial and cast out the rule of law and fine them for saying things that made people sad, then force them to recant their beliefs in public?

This ruling is just astonishing – a pastor has been barred for life from ever speaking his mind on a particular issue in any form – newspapers, radio, TV, the internet, semaphore signals. I doubt any halfway serious gay person would applaud it (update: proof.) The pastor in the dock said LGBT people “perverse, self-centered and morally deprived,” which seems a rather broad net to cast, no? It’s a self-refuting statement for anyone who knows anyone who’s gay, and if it had been leveled against straights by someone from the ranty fringe of, oh, I don’t know, Leather Bear Kluxers for Zoroaster, I wouldn’t have felt particularly wounded. You could argue with the fellow if you like, but the idea of bringing him up on charges for talking doubleplus ungood harmthink is absurd.

I know some believe that dissent has been crushed and driven to the margins in this country, but try to imagine a government agency charging Rev. Jeremiah Wright with hate speech for a sermon, and forcing him to disavow key elements of his church’s theology. It’s impossible, isn’t it? It would be different if he said those things on the radio, in which case the government agency responsible for determining Fairness would be required to enforce the airing of alternate opinions. And now, for the response to today's sermon.

It’s a messy world full of messy minds and loose tongues. Words can hurt, and we can’t have that.

It's not the only case before the Canadian HRC system, as noted; Mark Steyn and the magazione that runs his work is facing judgment from this pinhead star-chamber as well. But by all means: pop in your copy of "V For Vendetta" and pretend the dark Christian fascists will surge to power any minute now and use the surveillance infrastructure to justify limits on acceptable headgear. Any minute now. Any minute.

As Natalie Solent writes, "Canada is no longer a free country." How long before we can say that about about the rest of the Anglosphere?

Update: Not long indeed: "Great Britain’s Free Speech Breakdown".

The Canadian Press notes, "The man whose controversial writing is at the centre of a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal complaint is daring the tribunal to rule against him":

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress filed the complaint with the tribunal over an excerpt of Mark Steyn's book published in Maclean's magazine in 2006, saying it was hateful and showed contempt for Muslims.

"We want to lose," Steyn said Friday.

"We want to lose so we can take it to a real court and if necessary up to the Supreme Court of Canada and we can get the ancient liberties of free-born Canadian citizens that have been taken away from them by tribunals like this.

"We want those ancient civil liberties restored."

Steyn, who did not address the tribunal but was in the hearing room for some of the submissions, said he's "terrified" that the issue will be dismissed by the tribunal because the lawyer for the congress "put on such a staggeringly inept case."

Though not present for the entire five-day hearing, Steyn was not shy about how he feels towards the tribunal. He's called its members "pretend judges" and the system a joke.

"I think this court shames the province of British Columbia and is simply incompatible with the traditions of a great free society with a long, legal inheritance," he said outside the hearing room.

* * *

The hearing has been closely followed by members of the Muslim community.

Tarek Ramadan of Vancouver said that while hurtful things are often written about Muslims in the media, he was most offended by how Maclean's magazine dealt with the controversy.

"They're being a little difficult about giving the Muslim community a chance to rebut the article," he said. "Ideology should be faced with ideology."

Fellas, your soapbox awaits--write as many words as you like on the topic, as often as you like, whenever you like, and totally free of charge.

(Via Steyn Online.)

Update: Video added above found via Feet Of Fury.

It sounds like Dr. Melissa Clouthier has a very similar take to my recent posts regarding what's in store in America in the next ten years or so:

Europeans are supposed to be enlightened. Yeah, I know. Whatever. But still, on the one hand they're turning into frigging Eurabia with all the conservative Muslims running around in burqas and on the other you've got thumbs that look like penises in public advertising aimed at children [in a new Playstation 3 ad running in Europe--Ed]. One of those philosophies is going to win, right? And which winner leaves Western Civilization the winner? The correct answer boys and girls is neither.

That seems to be the choices. Either nothing goes or everything does. Both ways lead to depravity and sexual dysfunction, ironically enough. One way leads to the objectification of women as vessels for male dominance or child bearing--underneath the black cover there's a vagina. The other way leads to the objectification of women and men and children as sex objects--no black sheet needed.

Americans, take note. This dichotomy, these two paths to destruction, is coming to a city near you.

Read the whole thing.

Kate of the Canadian Small Dead Animals blog, who is actually vacationing in Beijing this week, writes that "Watching CCTV coverage of the massive Chinese quake aftermath (as best I can, considering the language gap) one can't help but notice how 'sanitary' the images are":

While there's plenty of footage showing collapsed buildings and roadways, crushed cars and landslides, the "rescued" quake victims dragged from the rubble before Chinese television cameras are uniformly limp, dazed, and amazingly clean. If one were of a suspicious nature, one might suspect there was some staging going on.

There also seems to be a lot of footage of soldiers moving supplies around in an orderly, efficient manner.

It seems all very reassuring, as I'm sure was intended. There is no question that the death toll will be both staggering and under-reported.

A totalitarian regime papering over its country's ongoing crises during an Olympic year? Maybe I should have called this post, "Recreate '38".

Mark Steyn's onboard, but not the folks that Zombie photographed this weekend in San Francisco:

The Palestinian community of the Bay Area "celebrated" Israel's 60th anniversary on May 10 by holding the "Nakba-60" festival, which mourned the founding of Israel as a "catastrophe" and called for the creation of a unified Palestinian state where Israel now stands -- in other words, demanding an end to Israel's existence. About 600 people attended the event in San Francisco's Civic Center Park.


* * *

There was a deep but unspoken rift apparent at the event, between the young radicalized Palestinians who wore American-style "urban" clothing and expressed in-your-face Palestinian nationalism that had little or nothing to do with religion or old-fashioned tribal culture; and the older, more conservative Palestinians who seemed quite uncomfortable with all the emphasis on sexuality and Westernized political ideologies.

Like I said, the next chapter in the culture war awaits.

Father Coughlin could not be reached for comment:

"All we're doing is going into the basket and saying, 'Damn, what did they do in '32, what did they do in '34, what did they do in '36,' and we're pulling them out, dusting them off, giving them a paint job, correcting the fenders a bit, and we're using them," Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) said. "To get us through the horrendous problems we may have over the next several years, we've got to make these old programs work, and we've got to be as inventive as hell."

Nice to know that with the Dow Jones about 12,700 points higher than it was in 1932, the left still sees nothing but Hoovervilles into eternity.

Keeping wide swatches of nearby sources of oil off-limits to drilling only ensures that Americans will be paying the Pelosi Premium for some time to come.

As Jim Geraghty writes, this would be a slam-dunk issue for John McCain to exploit--so naturally, don't hold your breath waiting for him to take it on.

Good question. Let's ask Bill Ayers next time we see him, or any of these folks.

(H/T: IP)

Extreme Mortman has some thoughts on--to coin a phrase--democracy, whiskey, sexy:

Happy 60th birthday, Israel!

Democracy. Military might. Strong, reliable ally of America. Front-lines in the global war on terror.

But more important, as CNN put it, “Israel is hip, sexy, and fun.”

Or as P.J. O'Rourke once wrote:

"We're not being sexist here," my friend insisted. "It's not that looks matter per se. It's just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? n the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed."

All of which makes quite a contrast to the original No Fun League.

In the Atlantic, Ross Douthat writes, "the GOP is now a working-class party":

There are two important points to be made about these numbers, and the deeper reality they reflect. The first, which you hear around these parts a lot, is that the GOP is now a working-class party (with class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics), and that it needs to start acting like one if it's going to rebuild its shattered majority.

If the first half of that equation sounds familiar, it should: it's a theme that we wrote about four years ago when the GOP, and its incumbent president were riding high. After the midterms--and with more trouble potentially on the way--Douthat adds:

The second is that the GOP can't only be a working-class party; just as the famous Judis-Texeira emerging Democratic majority is built around the mass upper class and the poor but depends on winning some working-class votes to put it over the top, so any future "Party of Sam's Club" Republican majority is going to need to win back at least some of the mass-upper-class votes that the party has hemorrhaged during the Bush years.

Hopefully it won't take another Carter-esque extended economic malaise this time.

"1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us":

Last week, we mentioned the strange op-ed by Paul Auster that the New York Times published. The author of the Weekly Standard's Scrapbook column follows up with this:

Readers with long memories will recall the spectacle of Columbia undergraduates--children of privilege enrolled at a distinguished Ivy League institution founded when New York was still a British colony--invading classrooms and administrative offices, manhandling deans, professors, and fellow students, stealing and destroying books and documents, vandalizing chambers devoted to learning, roaming corridors in search of fodder to burn. The Columbia strike of 1968 made a temporary celebrity of a student named Mark Rudd, and publicized the episode's emblematic slogan: "Up against the wall, motherf--r!"

It also unleashed something instructive in Paul Auster:

Speech followed tempestuous speech, the enraged crowd roared with approval, and then someone suggested that we all go to the construction site and tear down the chain-link fence. .  .  . The crowd thought that was an excellent idea, and so off it went, a throng of crazy, shouting students charging off the Columbia campus toward Morningside Park. Much to my astonishment, I was with them. What had happened to the gentle boy who planned to spend the rest of his life sitting alone in a room writing books? He was helping to tear down the fence. He tugged and pulled and pushed along with several dozen -others and, truth be told, found much satisfaction in this crazy, destructive act.

One of the great parlor games of modern scholarship is pondering how the German people--citizens of the land of Bach, Kant, and Goethe--could find themselves marching in step behind Adolf Hitler. Well, Paul Auster and his Boomer companions at Columbia offer a clue. Here is as plain and startling a description of the mob mentality--together with the attendant hysteria and romanticized violence--as you are likely to find in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, nicely camouflaged in the language of nostalgia and social protest.

If, in this presidential election year, anyone wonders how the political left grew estranged from the American mainstream, yielding the politics of the past four decades, they need only read Paul Auster's tribute to the Columbia strike, written "alone in this room with a pen in my hand" as "I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."

The writer of the Scrapbook adds that every now and then, he's "seized with the thought that the last, best hope of mankind--or at any rate, for our peace of mind--will be the death of the last surviving member of the Baby Boom generation."

Of course, he's far from alone in that department--and for those keeping score at home, just follow along with this easy-to-use toteboard!

Jeff Jarvis spots an interesting stat:

Pew said that in 2007, 53 million Americans “have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online.”

Only 50 million Americans now buy daily newspapers.

The writers are starting to outnumber the readers.

And the readers are reading something else. Pew says that in 2006, 57 million Americans read blogs, more than read newspapers.

More signposts on the road to 2014.

Standard & Poor's cuts the bond ratings of the New York Times:

Credit-ratings agency Standard & Poor's Ratings Services on Tuesday cut its long-term rating on newspaper publisher The New York Times Co., as its advertising revenue continues to fall.

S&P cut its corporate credit rating and senior unsecured debt rating to "BBB-" from "BBB."

"BBB-" is one notch above "junk bond" status. The ratings were removed from CreditWatch, but the outlook is negative, meaning another downgrade could occur.

"The rating downgrade reflects a worsening pace of decline in advertising revenue at the company's newspaper publications," said S&P credit analyst Emile Courtney in a statement.

Despite weakening ad revenue, The New York Times has a diversified and quickly growing online revenue base. S&P expects online revenue will begin to offset print revenue declines over the next few years.

Shares fell 35 cents to $19.96 during midday trading.

In 2002, NYT stock was worth over $50 a share.

And I as mentioned in a recent video, just wait until 2014...

Ezra Levant explores the strange case of Montreal's "Bar Le Stud":

Pete Vere sends me this interesting case study of the wild animal biting madly. A Montreal gay bar, Bar Le Stud, told a woman named Audrey Vachon that she wasn't allowed in -- it was a men-only establishment, and had been happily operating that way for eleven years. Then the human rights commissions got involved, and Bar Le Stud has copped a plea bargain. We don't know the details of how much money Vachon got paid or -- and you know this was part of the deal, it usually is -- the kind of "sensitivity training" that Bar Le Stud's staff have to undergo.

A gay bar -- like a straight bar, like a Christian church -- has age-old rights that long pre-date our fads of "human rights". Bar Le Stud has property rights, which include the right to exclude people. They have freedom of association. They have contractual rights. Strangers have no "right not to be offended" by them. They have no "right" to come onto their property, to change the purpose of Bar Le Stud, and to interfere with its peaceful practices. But now they do.

Misguided gay rights activists -- like Darren Lund, and even Richard Warman -- have used the bludgeon of human rights commissions to batter down the real rights of others. But they have laid down precedents that, in this case at least, are being used against gays.

It doesn't happen often, because conservatives, and straights, and Christians, aren't as active as their opponents in the grievance culture that Canada's HRCs foment. And, of course, even if they were, the grievance-activist bias of HRC staff would probably dismiss those complaints.

But that can only last so long. As Mark Steyn pointed out in his last Maclean's column, Adolf Hitler didn't invent Germany's censorship laws, nor did he write the emergency powers provisions that the Nazis abused. They were all written by the liberal Weimar Republic.

Leftist and ethnic-identity activists have loved the HRCs because they have usually picked on those groups' enemies. But the dangerous precedents have been set, and everyone's rights are at risk, as Bar Le Stud has found out.

What we accept as the current