Chocolate in My Peanut Butter

Deep holes and weak leaders are a bad combination.

-Friedman

Au motherfucking contraire.

The Moral Dimension of Sweat

Is it just me, or is The New York Times trolling?  OMG megaLULZ welcome my son welcome to the machine!  2003 is gonna be the Best YR evar!!!!1!  There is hope for us yet.

Sighence

As it dawns on liberal America that Obama may not be the queen bee in charge of all the drones in perpetuity, the level of hysteria on the leeward side of the hive is cranking up to full buzz.  Liberals are immensely fond of science; like evangelicals with Christianity, the thing in which they believe bears preciously little resemblance to the belief that bore it; the result is a charming bowdlerization with all the offending content replaced with, like, the MSNBC logo.  For instance, it has now been scientifically proven--scientifically, I tell you--that Republicans are, literallyJoeBiden, the greater evil.  They're a political party that's gone of the rails.

That's an interesting metaphor, isn't it?  Being both a literal and a literary type, I'm always amused to break a figure of speech into its component images and consider what precisely it says.  What would it mean for political parties, like trains, to be on the rails, endlessly moving from fixed point to fixed point along a rigidly predetermined path?  It certainly appeals to the technological teleology of the liberal state, whereby the greatest threat to society is any sort of departure from the efficiency-tested mean of the means.

As technocrats, liberals are very concerned about the broadest possible social acceptance of the conclusions of science.  After all, they believe that their worldview is validated by some set of geometric postulates.  Evolution is a popular bugaboo.  Another is climate change, and if you follow the first link above, you'll see that after scientifically proving that Republicans Are the Worst, this recent story about the North Carolina legislature doing a King Canute routine In Re the matter of rising sea levels gets trotted out as a valedictory anecdote.  (Poor Canute, by the way: he was really trying to demonstrate quite the opposite of what his story's come to mean.)

Republicans don't believe in climate change!  They're trying to outlaw science!  This, if nothing else, is supposed to send you scurrying into the Obama camp.  He may be a mass murderer of wedding parties, but at least he can read a global average temperature chart and see the slope of the regression line.  But climate change isn't a scientific theory; it's a political slogan.  Remember when it was global warming, until that became unpalatable to some strategic communications types?  To liberals, it is very important to believe in climate change.  They'd tell you that it's necessary as a precursor to doing something about climate change, but that's not really the case, except in the religious sense--I tell you the truth, those who listen to my message and believe in God who sent me have eternal life.

Living creatures change the environment and sometimes affect the whole of the global climate and it is perfectly plain that we billions of viral mammals are in the process of fucking Brother Earth without so much as the courtesy of a reach around . . . but okay, unless the liberal program involves rapid depopulation, consider me under-impressed.  No "environmental" political position is anything more than a social signifier, about as meaningful as opposition to gay marriage.  Do you support wind farms and renewable energy?  Good for you, but even if the world converts to 100% solar tomorrow, we'll still be cracking nitrogen and running industrial ag to feed our ever-more-gaping human maw; we'll still be stripping the top layer off of Western China to make components for your computer, etc.  

It's gonna take a hell of a lot more hellfire missiles to inoculate Gaea against human-caused climate change.  Obama and his deck of most-wanted baseball cards just won't cut it.  The drones may actually have to take matters into their own hands.