Mommies and the Nanny State

Much has been made in recent years about the marginalization of feminism in the United States. It seems that the same thing is happening over in the socialist fantasyland that is Europe. Der Spiegel reports that Eva Herman's book, "The Eva Principle" has become a sensation by challenging the central tenets of modern feminism.

In print, on TV and in public appearances Mrs. Herman has been advocating

a series of tenets so old-fashioned they seem almost revolutionary again: Motherhood instead of emancipation, child-rearing instead of career-climbing, devoted marriage instead of egoistic self-fulfillment.

....

"Let's just say it loud," Herman writes. "We women have overburdened ourselves -- we allowed ourselves to be too easily seduced by career opportunities." She recommends women exchange the cold sphere of work for the "colorful world of children" and discover their "destiny of nurturing the home environment."

Not surprising, she has become,

the target of scorn from all sides of the political spectrum. Critics accused her of sending women back to the 1950s and said that she, as someone who successfully combines her career with child-rearing, was guilty of hypocrisy. Several German women have written their own books in response, damning Herman's thesis.

There have been prominent converts, though, including

Christa Müller, the wife of the left-wing former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine. Just five years ago, the economist and left-wing politician lectured the public that she was unsuited for the role of the ornamental wife. But now she, like Herman, has radically changed her mind.

Of course, this being a socialist state, government subsidies are involved.

Minister for Family Affairs Ursula von der Leyen has proposed,

that the government increases the number of nursery places for children below the age of three to 750,000 by 2013, three times more than at the moment. Her argument is that better childcare provisions make it easier for mothers to return to work -- as well as encouraging German women to have more children...

Coupled with proposed state welfare subsidies for stay-at-home mothers, this proposal has raised a huge storm of protest from those who feel that the state should refrain from interfering in family affairs. And, of course, the proposal for state subsidies for women has been followed by similar proposals for men. The idea seems to be that the state will pay mothers and fathers to stay home and have children, and then the state itself will assume the burden of raising the offspring. Essentially this would turn families into baby factories and little more.

Oh my!

See what happens when personal choices become the subject of social science investigation and state policy recommendations?

"Braveheart" for Our Times

Mona Charen has a nice piece on one of the most courageous women in the world -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Read it here.

Thinking Like Canute

From my LA correspondent comes a link to yet another critique of the global warming hysteria.

Philip Stott, Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London, notes several salient points:

1) The problem of measurement:

Measurement of temperatures is a complex problem that can lead to erroneous conclusions. For instance:

[C]omparing modern temperature measurements with older measurements can be misleading. Measuring stations where temperatures have been recorded over many years may no longer have the same local environment, due to increased urbanisation and the urban 'heat-island' effect...

Moreover:

[M]odern thermistor- and thyristor- based instruments react very quickly, and are likely to record more extreme transitory temperature highs and lows than the older mercury-in-glass thermometers. So current temperature measurements are probably exaggerated relative to the older measurements....

2) The problem of complexity:

Temperature trends show no clear pattern over time or space. There are periods of warming and of cooling on different continents that don't coalesce into a coherent trend. The most that can be said is:

Overall, temperatures have risen by a mere 0.6 degrees C over the past 150 years - which is unexceptional given that we are moving away from a Little Ice Age.

Episodes of extreme weather tell us next to nothing about global warming.

For the past 15 years, green pressure groups with vested interests have worked hard to persuade us that all such climatic phenomena are evidence of human-induced warming. But we must be wary of trying to link naturally varying weather events like fires and floods to simplistic ideas like 'global warming'. As the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) pointed out earlier in August, 'We need more than just one or two events'.... After all, it remains impossible to forecast weather more than 10 days in advance!

And "climate change" is not the same as "global warming."

Climate change is a truism; it happens all the time. It would be extraordinary if climate were not changing. 'Global warming', by contrast, is a 1990s apocalyptic construct that climate change is primarily driven by human emissions of so-called 'greenhouse gases', like carbon dioxide and methane, and that these will cause a massive rise in temperature....

So what we have is a large, dynamic, complex set of systems that are always in flux, the interactions of which are only partially understood.

And even if we did discern a clear pattern in all of this we are incompetent to manage a system so large and complex as climate.

[C]limate, and our weather, is governed by thousands of interacting factors, from erupting volcanoes to the cycles of the sun. Sorting these out, and predicting what might ultimately happen, is like trying to control a million drunks on a Saturday evening, all chaos and non-linear activity.

3) Attempts to control climate change are futile and a waste of valuable resources. Here I quote at length because his argument is so damn powerful.

[T]he very concept of a 'sustainable' climate does not make sense. Even if we junked every car, closed down every factory, and shut down every power station, climate would still change....

The sooner we admit that we have no predictable control over climate, the better. This is what is wrong with the ill-fated Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Not only are the national targets it set for cutting 'greenhouse gas' emissions impossible in the face of economic growth, particularly in the developing world like China and India - they would not work in pure climate terms. Fiddling at the edges of this mighty Wurlitzer of a system will accomplish nothing and may make things worse.

But the real human danger of Kyoto is that aid finance is being deflected from much more practical ways of improving environmental performance and welfare, especially in developing countries. While billions are being squandered on a quixotic climatic adventure, millions die for want of clean water, sufficient food, basic medicines and a reliable modern energy supply.

The way to cope with climate extremes, hot or cold, real or imaginary, is to maintain strong flexible economies that can adapt to change....

Read the whole thing here.

And that last is the great tragedy of modern environmentalism. Transhumanist world savers are quite willing to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of men, women, and children in order to pursue the fantasy of "sustainable" climate. The global warming activists are not benefactors of humanity, they are profoundly anti-humanist; dangerous zealots and fools who must be opposed and fought at every turn.

It's Over!

Aggies 68 -- Penn Quakers 52.

Once more the valiant Quaker warriors have succumbed to a vastly superior force, but they went down with honor. They even held a lead early in the second half.

Go tell the Quakers, stranger passing by,
that here, obedient to their laws, we Men of Pennsylvania lie.

Lileks Considers the Transhumanists

You know who they are..., the kind of people who

think of when they think of the accomplishments of mankind. Not a space probe carrying Bach into the black or in-utero surgery that saves babies. Polar bears. I swear, when some people hear that civilization is over, a small voice deep in the dark cranny of their heart surely whispers: good.

It's always good when James is cranky. That's when he's at the top of his game. Go here and witness the pitiless dismemberment of hack editorialists.

Sadr City

This is what we are up against in Baghdad:

UNITED States soldiers sent to Baghdad's notorious Shiite stronghold of Sadr City arrived ready for a fight with the al-Mahdi Army militia.

Yet instead of violence, they are facing an even bigger problem - a vast, crowded slum where years of misery and government neglect have created conditions for the militias to thrive.

....

In a capital where public services barely function and five straight hours of electricity is a cause for celebration, Sadr City stands out. Some 2.5 million people, nearly all of them Shiites, live in the northeastern Baghdad community. Many of them lack running water and proper sewerage. Hundreds of thousands have no jobs and subsist on monthly food rations, a throwback to the international sanctions of the Saddam Hussein era.

Streets in some parts of Sadr City run black with sludge. Damaged power lines provide, at best, only four hours of electricity a day.

Many US soldiers were unprepared for what they found. During a patrol last week, troops brushed flies from their faces as they drove through rotting heaps of refuse and excrement that were piled outside houses. One soldier opened his Humvee's door and vomited.

Read it here.

Ed Morrissey at the Captain's Quarters thinks this is a terrific opportunity for US forces to change Iraqi attitudes. [here] I do too.

Right now the locals are not openly anti-US.

For now, the atmosphere in the neighbourhood is not openly hostile. Posters of Muqtada al-Sadr, who led two uprisings against coalition forces in 2004, no longer appear on billboards and walls. Even some anti-American graffiti have been covered. But how long this will last is anyone's guess.

And the US forces are being careful.

Instead of kicking in doors, soldiers knock first. Aggressive behaviour could provoke an uprising, soldiers say. "It's not so much ideology that the people flock to here, it's whoever can provide them with their basic needs...."

And that is where the opportunity lies -- in the provision of basic needs. It seems that the military commanders understand this. Let us hope that the politicians follow through.

DeLay on Gingrich

Tom DeLay explains why Newt Gingrich, while he might make an exciting candidate, would be a lousy President:

In describing Gingrich as an "ineffective Speaker," DeLay writes: "He knew nothing about running meetings and nothing about driving an agenda." He adds: "Nearly every other day he had a new agenda, a new direction he wanted us to take. It was impossible to follow him."

Great idea man -- lousy administrator. Pretty much my take on the former Speaker, too.

Read it here.

The Collapse of the Environmental "Consensus"

From the NYT [!!!]:

[P]art of [Gore's] scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,” Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data.”

Wow! And in the New York Times too!!

There's more:

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists....

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration.
....

And there's more:

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios.” But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years.”

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign” that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.

“Hardly a week goes by,” Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,” including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this” threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century.”

....

Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.

Now, tell me again about that "scientific consensus." If even so biased a source as the New York Times is beginning to realize that Al Gore is so full of something that he is emitting noxious fumes, the party is over. This is what you get when you mix science and politics -- bad science, and even worse politics.

Read the article here.

Journalistic Incompetence

Once again ignorant journalists screw up a science story. Newsweek has a feature article on human evolution. It's a cover article, so you would think that they would try to get it right, but you would be wrong.

John Hawks systematically dismantles the Newsweek story, showing that it contains a number of basic errors both of fact and interpretation.

You might think that the editors would catch some of these, but apparently they are just as ignorant as the staffers who wrote the story.

Read it here. It's devastating!

Here's the point. There is a continuing controversy, much of it focusing specifically on the subject of human evolution, as to the reliability of scientific authority. But how is the public to be informed on this matter if mainstream organs like Newsweek cannot be bothered to get basic facts and interpretations right? And, if the magazine screws up this badly on this subject, how can it be trusted on other, more important, matters?

"Bush Lied" is a Lie

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the mainstream press over the lack of civility in today's politics. Dinesh D'Souza correctly notes that such incivility usually results when the values and rhetoric of fringe groups enter the mainstream of political discourse. This is what happened when the Left's charge that "Bush lied" was adopted by mainstream Democrats.

If you want to know how the Iraq debate got so acrimonious, the tipping point was when mainstream Democrats went from accusing Bush of bungling the Iraq war to accusing him of lying to get America into that war. His crime, at this point, became not merely one of error but one of deliberate deception. The basic liberal reasoning is that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, therefore Bush has been misleading the American people all along.

At one time these charges of lying were restricted to the political left. In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, The Nation claimed that Bush went to war based on “falsehoods and deceptions.” Al Franken took the charge a step further, alleging that “the President loves to lie.” Activist Cindy Sheehan insisted, “My son died for lies. George Bush lied to us and he knew he was lying.”

But of late even mainstream Democrats have started to talk this way.

Read it here.

Dinesh has a point, a good one. Accusations that "Bush lied" are unfounded and poison the political atmosphere. Like many other presidents before him, Bush made a tough decision based in part on information that turned out to be wrong, but there is no evidence to support any contention that he acted in bad faith. To argue that he did so is itself a despicable lie promulgated by left-wing loons.

The willingness of main-stream Democrats to engage, as a matter of political expediency, in such calumny is not only disappointing. It undermines the entire political process and promotes the kind of vitriolic discourse that so many decry.

Mugabe Strikes Again

Mad Bobby Mugabe is up to his old tricks again.

The Times reports:

The leader of Zimbabwe’s main opposition party needed hospital treatment for severe head injuries after police beat him following his arrest at a prayer rally on Sunday, his party said.

Morgan Tsvangirai required surgery to his wounds at Parirenyatwa Hospital in Harare early yesterday, said an official from his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

The MDC leader was arrested in the impoverished township of Highfields where he had gone to attend a prayer rally. Dozens of opposition officials, rights activists and churchmen were also detained.

Read about it here.

Ted Koppel Gets It!

On Sunday's Meet the Press, Ted Koppel decided to break with the MSM party line and voiced some honest opinions on the war.

He opined:

1) The US cannot withdraw from Iraq and from the Gulf region.

2) Iraq is only the most recent phase of a war that has been going on for nearly a quarter of a century.

3) The War on Terror will be going on for long after the Iraq phase is concluded. It is our children's children's war.

4) Democrat opposition to the war today will place them in a very difficult position if they ever take the Presidency because the war won't stop and they will have to fight it.

5) This scale of warfare requires the mobilization of society, something that we have been unwilling to do so far.

Newsbusters has a roundup and a link to the broadcast here.

Telling Truth on the Environment

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, had a few interesting things to say when he addressed the Cato Institute Friday.

Environmentalism is a religion that is based more on political ambitions than science, the president of the Czech Republic warned Friday.

Speaking at the Cato Institute, a public policy think-tank, President Vaclav Klaus said that environmentalists who clamor for policy change to combat global warming "only pretend" to be promoting environmental protection, and are actually being driven by a political agenda.

"Environmentalism should belong in the social sciences," much like the idea of communism or other "-isms" such as feminism, Klaus said, adding that "environmentalism is a religion" that seeks to reorganize the world order as well as social behavior and value systems worldwide.

As for government spending on global warming studies, the former finance minister of the Eastern European nation and trained economist said that such efforts were a "waste of money," adding that there was already sufficient scientific evidence for those seeking policy change to back up their proposals.

Read it here.

All I can say is "amen!"

The Rick Haters

Dr. Paul Kengor marvels at the visceral hatred Rick Santorum evokes in many people. He concludes that it is a matter of personality more than ideology. Rick is perceived by a relativist, and hypocritical, public as being a moral absolutist.

Nice piece.

Check out "Hating Rick" here.

Best Political Ad Ever?

Jonah Goldberg calls this "the best political ad" he has ever seen. I report, you decide.

Check it out here.

More Polar Bearishness

Well, is the polar bear population declining or growing? There are "scientists" on both sides of the question. American politicians side with the declinists, while the people who actually live in polar bear territory claim to be seeing more and more of the nasty critters.

This article in the Nunatsiaq News fairly describes the controversy and who is lining up where. All sides seem to be engaging in ad hominem attacks rather than objective scientific study.

Typical.

Read it here [thanks to my LA corresponent].

Demolition Job

Robert Fulford demolishes one of the more absurd practitioners of Gallic obscurity.

Jean Baudrillard, who died on Tuesday in Paris at the age of 77, was a French intellectual in the most sinister meaning of that term.

He was intoxicated by hastily concocted theories and drunk on incomprehensible explanations of world affairs. He could make any subject more obscure just by briefly visiting it. Many of his readers eventually discovered that his work, some 50 books in all, usually wasn't about what it claimed to be about. His real concern was always Baudrillard and the passionate drama of his daydreams.

His way of thinking involved intense snobbery on his part and great tolerance on the reader's. To the public and his students he said, in effect: "You poor fools are deluded by all your ideals, your dreams, your accomplishments. You think that's reality? It's a fraud, all of it. I know better."

Strange as it seems, in the 1970s much of the Western world was ready to embrace him....

I remember..., I remember all too well. Those were the seventies, a dark and disturbing time from which we are now only beginning to recover.

Read the whole thing here. It's devastating.

The Worst Film Review of the Year!

Let me say right off, I do not expect “300” to be a particularly good or interesting film. Visually, we’ve seen it all before in “Sin City.” The history is bonkers. The acting and characterization are no better than you would expect in a comic book adaptation. The narrative is often silly. It’s a movie made for fourteen year old boys who spend far too much time playing video games.

In essence “300” is little more than an extended piece of battle porn. Under normal circumstances I would have little interest in seeing it.

But then I read Dana Stevens’ review of the film. She has written, and Slate published, what is perhaps the worst film review ever. [here] http://slate.com/id/2161450/fr/rss

Ms. Stevens thinks even less of “300” than do I. But it is the reasons she gives for disliking the film that make her review such an obnoxious piece of tripe.

She starts with the obligatory Nazi reference. If “300” had been produced in Nazi Germany, she avers, it would serve “as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.” She compares it to “The Eternal Jew.”

Having gotten the mandatory Jewish Holocaust stuff out of the way, she plunges ahead into frenzied fit of racist, sexist, homophiliac, anti-Bush PC nonsense. She finds it “maddening” [her word, not mine] that the film-makers do not deign to insert denunciatory references to America’s Iraq campaign or, for that matter, engage in any anti-war propaganda. It offends her that the good guys are white, in good physical shape, and filled with esprit de corps [which to her bizarre sensibilities seems “fratty.”] while their opponents are an assemblage of grotesque monsters.

Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

“Club fag” – I was unfamiliar with that term. Perhaps Ann Coulter can use it in her next column. Note that by lumping these all together she is suggesting that the film-makers are so racist and homophobic that they cannot distinguish between non-white or homosexual humans, and exotic monsters.

She despairs that the film dwells on themes of “freedom,” “honor,” and “glory” without emphasizing the historical Spartan practice of slavery and infanticide. She seems to be completely ignorant of the meaning of the term “ethnic cleansing,” adding it to her indictment of Spartan society. She seems throughout to unaware of the fact that this movie is an adaptation from a comic book, not a historical treatise.

I could go on, but what’s the use? Ms. Stevens has gone so far over into the Bizarro world of PC silliness that she’s become as much a grotesque caricature as the film she is reviewing. She, no less than Frank Miller’s creatures, inhabits a phantasmagoric world of exotic monsters that must be defeated at any cost, and her perception of reality is no more accurate than his.

I feel sorry for her.

Read her screed here.

UPDATE: Fortunately the general public doesn't pay any attention to the grotesque opinions of PC scolds like Dana Stevens. "300" is turning out to be a huge popular triumph for Warner Bros.
Looks like I'm gonna have to actually go and see this thing, if only to show solidarity with the public against the Ms. Danas of the world.

ANOTHER UPDATE:

"Libertas" explains why "300" broke the all-time March opening record and took in 70 million dollars [more than its production costs] on its first weekend.

So, what was it about 300? It had no stars, a fairly unknown director, was just another comic adaptation, and R-rated?

Sin City came from the same source material, starred Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Josh Hartnett, Brittany Murphy, Elijah Wood, and Jessica Alba. It had a name director, and even boasted of scenes directed by Tarantino. And yet, 300 will pass Sin City’s total domestic take tomorrow.

Hopefully Hollywood is watching. 300 is successful for the very reason it’s being hammered by close-minded left-wing critics: It’s something new. It’s something refreshing. It’s about something.

It’s about heroes, honor, good versus evil, and fighting for something bigger than one’s self. It’s rousing and larger than life. It’s not just another one of those old-fashioned, ‘nuanced,’ nihilistic, anti-hero, thin-line-between-good-and-evil, tired, old cliched movies that have been around for decades.

Read it here.

Stereograms

Can you see the hidden image? If not, go here to read some tips on how to do so and to find lots more stereograms.

Hope for Zimbabwe? Perhaps

The International Crisis Group released a report last week suggesting that Mad Bobby Mugabe's long reign of terror in Zimbabwe may at last be coming to an end due to pressure from the US and EU.

The economic meltdown, as well as the bite of European Union (EU) and U.S. targeted sanctions, is pushing ZANU-PF [Mugabe's party] towards change, since business interests of key officials are suffering. The party is split over the succession issue but Mugabe’s long successful divide-and-rule tactics have started to backfire as the two main factions are coming together to try to prevent him from staying beyond the expiration of his present term in March 2008. They showed their strength by blocking his proposed constitutional amendment at the party’s annual conference in December 2006 and will seek to do so again at the central committee in March so they can explore a deal resulting in his retirement to make way for moderate leaders who could negotiate with the MDC and civil society on transitional mechanisms, seek SADC endorsement and reengage with the West and foreign investors.....

The desire to remove Mugabe within the year provides a rare rallying point that cuts across partisan affiliations, and ethnic and regional identities.

Will they get rid of the old monster? We shall see, we shall see.

But, as the report reminds us:

A deal that merely removed Mugabe while in effect maintaining the political status quo by keeping ZANU-PF in power would be no change at all.

Read it here.

ZANU-PF had its origins as an anti-colonial Maoist revolutionary group, but under Mugabe's leadership has degenerated into a gang of thugs. It is very unlikely that they will relinquish any of their power or privileges willingly. At this point the most likely outcome of Mugabe's removal will be a power struggle that could easily turn into civil war.

We shall see, we shall see.