Much has been written about playwright David Mamet’s coming-out as a conservative and his reasons for so doing, but there is still much gold to be mined from Mamet’s mind.

Today’s National Review Online revisits Mamet in this stellar piece by Matthew Shaffer that contains this one gem that perfectly encapsulates some of the alphabetized mindsets encountered and challenged on this blog:

“But liberalism, Mamet thinks, is dismantling culture. The problem is that “the Left today is essentially an elitist movement, and it has invested a lot of time and money in the idea that they know better.” Elites have been led to think “by getting the grades, and getting into good schools and think-tanks and government positions that they are fit” to reorder society more rationally. But this requires first demolishing the order produced by the organic processes of tradition, democracy, and markets — the culture. Why are some so susceptible to this fatal conceit? “They get out of elite schools being told nothing but, ‘You’re the best.’” Hubris — a dramatist’s area of expertise. (The liberalism of his own elite group, the literati, he blames on “devotion to fantasy — this sort of Manichean view.”)

You can read the entire article here: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/270190/david-mamet-s-exodus-matthew-shaffer

Keep this in mind when considering the role that the Maryland school system has now openly assumed for itself as an indoctrination center for Liberal elitist belief systems, by requiring that all students must pass an “environmental literacy” test before being allowed to graduate.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-board-of-education-approves-environmental-literacy-graduation-requirement/2011/06/21/AGW53xeH_story.html

To reiterate what I’ve posted before, there is nothing scientific about “environmentalism” or “environmental sciences”, just as there is nothing scientific about “political science”. It is indoctrination, pure and simple, targeted toward the destruction of prevailing belief systems and culture.

I think that this will backfire. Eventually forced to confront reality in the age of the internet, students will eventually realize when they have been corrupted and degraded by Leftwing ideologues and I predict that their reaction will be harsh. In the end, it is this narcissistic hubris of the Leftwing elites that will destroy them. I have no doubt that the students that today provide such ready fodder for indoctrination today will eventually turn on their teachers with the retribution of nemesis. It will be a cultural revolution.

Cheap fuel is an important key to peace, human welfare and prosperity. We have the key.

The world can’t do without fuel and the scramble for world fuel resources lies at the root of most of our current geopolitical problems. The high price of fuel affects the environment (e.g., 3rd world deforestation) and the price and availability of food for those that can least afford it.

The scramble for fuel lies behind Arabia’s, Iran’s, Russia’s and China’s geopolitical manipulations – in Arabia and Russia’s cases, to keep the availability low and the price high, in China’s case to exploit reliable fuel sources in many of the most political and economically vulnerable parts of the world, notably in Africa. We in the U.S., meanwhile, are forced to maintain hugely expensive military commitments to keep world fuel supply lines open in the interest of protecting a world economy upon which we depend. Demand for high-priced oil keeps Europe in dhimmitude to an increasing subversive Islamicist influence while, in the Middle East, oil revenues fuel subversive jihadi movements worldwide, further tying down our military resources and our economic infrastructures.

Fuel’s impact on food production and prices is one of the factors stoking popular revolts from Mexico to Egypt. Fuel protects human lives by keeping people warm in the winter and cool in the summer. It’s no accident that some of the most strident, anti-oil environmentalism derives from a narrow cafe latte strip of our Pacific coast that enjoys temperate climate year-round and no worries about food prices and availability. Climate “I-got-mine”ers, I guess we could call them.

Cheap oil, coal and gas, in short, would resolve many of our world’s problems. However, there are ideological obstacles that must be overcome, the biggest one being America’s environmental movement, which increasingly takes on the trappings of a fundamentalist religion. Ask most Americans today and I propose that the large majority believes profoundly that a) we are running out of fossil fuels; b) there are practical alternatives to fossil fuel energy and c) fossil fuels contribute to global warming, ergo, fossil fuels are bad. Besides, people say, oil derricks despoil the view…even in areas where nobody ventures.

Let’s just focus on (a) for now: it’s a false premise!

A November, 2010 report by the Congressional Research Service highlights just how rich in fossil fuels the United States is – richer, in fact, than any other country in the world…even without considering the huge potentials of shale oil and methane resources. You can find an excellent summary of the report, with a link to the original CRS report, here:

http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/6933/US-Has-Earths-Largest-Energy-Resources

The U.S. has more than enough safe and reliable energy resources to meet our needs and those of other nations until practical alternatives inevitably come on-line. We’ve had a petroleum based culture for a little over 100 years. We have enough for another 100 years. Making those resources (and other under-developed global resources) available to the U.S. and the global marketplace will drop the price of energy worldwide. That’s just simple economics: increasing supplies reduces prices. It would also boost domestic jobs development, improve our trade deficits, and reduce the costs of domestic manufacturing. Added fossil fuel supplies will help defund our enemies and relieve pressures on our allies.

The obstacles to its development are ideological and enviro-religious, not economic or environmental. As long as these resources remained unavailable, the U.S. and much of the rest of the world will continue to pay huge costs…not just in terms of imported energy and high prices, but also in terms of lost jobs and a dangerously unstable world.

The world desperately needs cheap energy. That’s a hard fact. For the world’s richest resource of fossil fuel energy to withhold its resources from the world in the interest of the self-satisfied, comfortable bourgeoisie of the environmental left is not just irresponsible, it’s immoral. You can’t be against “Big Oil” and “Big Coal” and in favor of “World Peace”.

Oh, and one more thing: while this author benefits greatly from fossil fuels, he does not work or benefit directly from the fossil fuels industry, although his retirement savings and pension fund assets in all likelihood depend upon the success of an incentivized and profitable energy sector to fund his retirement, social security, medical care and all other government and private industry benefits. In that, he’s probably just like you.

Here’s a good example of American imperialism, whereby rich and greedy American billionaires fund the sabotage of democratic institutions in foreign countries to further their own ideological and economic interests.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via: smalldeadanimals.com.

There’s a new bad guy in town in West Texas.  He’s called the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard.  He’s actually kind of cute, as lizards go.  He’s about three inches long, a nice tan color, and has a vaguely Winston Churchill-esque expression.  He seems harmless enough, but he comes packing a huge, powerful weapon:  the federal government.

It turns out that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is contemplating putting this little lizard on the endangered species list, not because he’s being hunted, but because his habitat might be threatened.  And what is his habitat:  Oil country.  Not just oil, but cattle and other agriculture too.  If the government goes forward with this plan, everything in little lizard’s neighborhood comes to a grinding halt:

“We are very concerned about the Fish and Wildlife Service listing,” said Ben Shepperd, president of the PBPA, noting the service also has proposed listing the Lesser Prairie Chicken next year. “The wolf at the door is the lizard; we’re concerned listing it would shut down drilling activity for a minimum of two years and as many as five years while the service determines what habitat is needed for the lizard. That means no drilling, no seismic surveys, no roads built, no electric lines.”

The move would impact activity in Andrews, Crane, Gaines, Ward and Winkler counties in Texas and Chaves, Eddy, Lea and Roosevelt counties in New Mexico.

Not only would the move impact oil and gas operations but agriculture, Shepperd noted, shutting down agricultural activities like grazing and farming — “anything that disturbs the habitat.” While the industry is perfectly willing to undertake conservation measures to protect the lizard’s habitat, he said, naming it an endangered species “would shut down activity and be devastating not only to Permian Basin economies but to the national economy. We are the one bright spot month after month; in our economic turnaround, the main driver is the oil and gas industry.”

As seems to be the case with these government fiats, the government is going off half-cocked:

The concern is, he said, that the Fish and Wildlife Service lacks enough data to conclude that the tiny lizard is endangered and is basing its action on flawed methodology. “They didn’t spend enough time looking for them or the right technique to find them,” he said.

In New Mexico, where the lizard can be found on both private and public lands, Shepperd said a number of companies have entered into voluntary agreements to help conserve the lizard’s habitat, mitigate threats to the lizard and remediate any damage while continuing to operate. He said he wants the same to happen in Texas. The association favors such joint agreements between the federal government and landowners to protect the lizard’s habitat while allowing drilling operations to continue responsibly.

When I ran this story by Don Quixote, he found it interesting, but suggested that it couldn’t happen, because the level of public outrage about shutting down drilling would make the decision suicidal.  I disagree.  Exhibit A is the spotted owl, up in northwestern logging country.  The logging community made a huge uproar, but the spotted owl won.  By 2000, thousands of acres of land that formerly provided wood to Americans and jobs to Oregonians were put out of play.  Much of the land was private property, so there was some serious government taking involved too.  The Clinton government survived.  Oregon continued to vote Democrat.

Exhibit B is the delta smelt, the protection of which has decimated large parts of California’s Central Valley.  The Central Valley used to be America’s bread basket.  If you drove down I-5 from the North Bay to L.A., once you got past the Altamont Pass and before you reached the grapevine, it was farm land and grazing land all the way.  Now, large parts of it look exactly like the Oklahoma dust bowl, circa 1930.  Both the Bush and the Obama government have survived this assault on America’s food supply.  California Democrats, comfortably sequestered in ultra urban Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, didn’t blink as the state’s agriculture infrastructure started to be destroyed.  Food prices have gone up, but they’ve stayed within tolerable levels.

Obama has already positioned himself with a narrative for rising oil prices, and it’s not the fact that he’s shut down Gulf oil drilling, or that he’s refusing to allow new drilling or even investigation into potential future drilling.  Instead, the prices are being driven by evil “speculators.”  Well, he’s right about the speculators.  If I had any market sechel (Yiddish for “smarts”), I’d be one too.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, with the Middle East roiling with violent upheavals, and with the federal government trying to make drilling illegal, oil prices are going to go up and up and up.  The speculators are simply able to take advantage of the fact that, if demand remains roughly the same, but supplies diminish, prices go up.  Even a socialist president cannot change that reality.

As for the outrage –Americans are all out of outraged.  The Obama administration has attacked America’s economy and security and functionality at every single level.  As my teen says, “Whoa!  Too Much Information.”  Why contemplate the most recent administrative agency attack on America’s way of life, when you can watch American Idol or Oprah or whatever happens to be on ESPN?  As long as the economic and social fabric in your area looks as if it’s holding together, ignore the frays around the edges and the random holes in the middle.

I like animals.  I do not believe that humans can abuse and destroy them at will.  As I often say, we are stewards of this earth and of all its bounty.  But if we wish to survive, Mother Nature (or God, take your pick) mandates that, in any given environment, animals compete for resources.  Sometimes, one animal overdoes the competition, destroying other animals in the region.  Sometimes this is a disaster, as was the case with the protein deficit that led to Mayan cannibalism.  Sometimes, it doesn’t matter at all.  I’m sorry to say that, but it’s true.  The world ecosystem has survived without the wooly mammoth or the dodo.  The answer is balance.

The problem, always, is that government is a sledge hammer, when a ball peen would do.  It’s draconian power makes any situation unbalanced.  The oil men in New Mexico have worked with the Fish and Wildlife Department, and the oil men in Texas will too.  There is the potential for balance there, but that balance is not met by shutting down a whole region.

One can only hope that the Fish & Wildlife Service is playing a game of chicken in West Texas, hoping to bully the oil men into more accommodations than they’re currently willing to make.  But it was no game of chicken in Oregon nor in Central California, so I’ll be convinced that this is a negotiating tactic only when both sides reach an agreement.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land,
available in e-format for $4.99 at Amazon or Smashwords.

I have to say that this video actually made me giggle, because having all of Al Gore’s doom-and-gloom compressed to less than 2 minutes, and then playing Pomp & Circumstance in the background, is more like a cartoon than anything else.

Then again I didn’t have to listen to the whole blather, and I wasn’t a student who has spent my life being indoctrinated by the Chicken Little crowd.  For those students, watching this pompous boor go on and on about the imminent end of the world must have been a most disheartening end to their educational experience:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You get the message:  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Hat tip:  Hot Air

In the movie Wall-E, the little robot had a task, and it did the task, long after the task’s necessity had passed.  Like a funded bureaucrat, Wall-E just kept going and going and going.

In California, the Department of Transportation was given a mandate and a task, and now, long after the money has gone and the efforts proven fruitless, it’s still going and going and going, sucking up nonexistent funds and making expensive and pointless changes (emphasis mine):

In hopes of luring the endangered steelhead trout into the Santa Monica Mountains, California’s transportation agency is planning to spend $935,000 to pave over part of a popular beach with cement and boulders to build a freeway of sorts for fish.

The project is the latest, yet far from the most unusual, steelhead recovery attempt by government agencies that have spent millions of dollars on concrete fish ladders, cameras, fishways and other contraptions to allow seagoing trout to spawn in Southern California streams.

The problem, even some conservationists say, is that there is little evidence construction efforts since the 1980s have done anything except absorb taxpayer dollars. The work to save the species has led to about a dozen concrete fishways at a cost of more than $16.7 million.

A $1 million fish ladder — a structure designed to allow fish to migrate upstream over a barrier — may cost $7.5 million in stimulus funds to rebuild. Another fish ladder would require fish to leap 8 feet to reach it. Studies alone for replacing a third ladder have cost an estimated $3 million.

Read the rest here. Taxpayers and steelheads alike are weeping.

The above is a perfect example of the problems inherent in vesting too much power in government.  I’m perfectly sure that the various individuals involved in the project are good people.  Nevertheless, the bureaucracy for which they work has taken on a life of its own.  For these people to secure their jobs, they have to just keep working.  As long as they “look busy,”* they’ll keep getting funding, regardless of the fact that their task is pointless and costly.  Government never shrinks; it just grows.

How much better it would have been to have created a goal, and then tasked the marketplace with achieving that goal.

_____________________

*In my family, the phrase “looka busy” ties in to a very bad old joke my Dad used to tell, which is why I put “look busy” in quotation marks.  Here’s the joke, and please pardon the pathetic 1960s Italian-style accent that’s a part of the joke:

On a hot summer’s day, two Italian monks are working in desultory fashion along the roadside, pulling weeks.  Suddenly, the first monk gets a look of wonderment on his face.  “Hey!  Looka there.  Itsa Jesus Christ himself, a-walking to us.”  The second monk grabs his hoe and replies.  “Don’t just standa there.  Looka busy.”

See, I told you it was bad.  I was a little girl when I first remember Daddy telling it, and he spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to me the whole principle of looking busy around the boss.  I think that’s why the joke stuck in my brain.

I’m all for reducing pollution, but we don’t need a trumped-up excuse like “climate change” in order to achieve a cleaner environment. Minimizing pollution is a legitimate goal which stands on its own merits; concocting hysterical disaster scenarios (such as those shown in An Inconvenient Truth) only serves to undermine any credibility the environmental and conservation movements once had.

That’s Zombie speaking, in the first of a four chapter journey through a day of protests in San Francisco.  Zombie covers environmentalists protesting environmentalists, madcaps trying to crash a Tea Party, the Tea Party itself and an SEIU Immigration Amnesty protest.  One can say many things about the City (and I often do), but it’s certainly never boring.  Find out for yourself.  Pull up a comfortable chair in front of your computer, and let Zombie do the walking.

P.S.  If you’d like more visuals and some audio of the SF Tea Party, check out Fund 47.

Oh, my gosh!  Have I got good stuff here for all of you.

Rush.  Need I say more?  Actually, just so you know what you’re linking too, Rush manages to combine into one lucid post American exceptionalism and Clintonian hypocrisy.  Whew!  [UPDATE:  Soccer Dad, every bit as wise as Rush, but lacking the scope, made much the same point here.]

I think we have a moral obligation to support conservative Bay Area bloggers, since we are a very fragile species in a hostile ecosystem.  (Did I get that environmentalist language right?)  Of course, it’s always easier to provide this support when the blog is good, and Fund47 is good.  You’ll find here a slide show of the San Francisco Tea Party as well as audio tape of the superb speech my friend Sally Zelikovsky made.  The one thing I can tell you with absolute certainty is that this is no astroturf movement.  Every last one of the people you see and hear is the real deal, fed up with vast government overreach.

Obama is working hard to make sure we can’t rely on traditional energy sources, but the fact remains that “renewable” energy is too expensive and risky for sensible people to take on.  This explains why a Marin town has opted out of a clean energy program (in which several counties refused to join).  It also answers the New York Times‘ perplexed wonderment about the absence of solar power in California.  As to that, I can tell you that, yes, solar power does reduce PG&E bills.  Sounds good, but it’s not really.  If you’re lucky, in 15-20 years, you might break even on your solar system.  As for the taxpayers who subsidized your purchase . . . well, they’ll never see that money again.  Oh, by the way, unless you want your bill to go through the roof, try not to use any but the most necessary energy during peak hours.  During the summer, peak hours are all day, which pretty much puts the kybosh on basic functionality.

There was one person who understand what was really going on with environmentalism, and that was the late George Carlin.  If you don’t mind blue language, you want to listen to this.

Muslims, 1; Military/American Christianity, 0:  Franklin Graham was disinvited, after he dared to speak slightingly of Islam.  Oh, while I’m on the topic of Islam (and why Graham might have spoken slightingly of the religion that can no longer be named), Reason magazine has not one, but three, posts about the disgraceful, quisling censorship of South Park (again, blue language warning).  [UPDATE:  Red State makes sure to point the finger of blame in the proper direction.]

Of course, all that scary stuff may explain why, in addition to its fear of the long arm of Obama, the L.A. Times is assiduously refusing to release the tape it received showing an evening at which, existent stories hint, Obama cheerfully participated in Israel bashing with leading Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi.  I don’t think the Times is showing journalistic backbone, because it’s never indicated that it has any; I think it’s showing outright fear.

A point about which I frequently blog here is the fact that I find many liberals inarticulate, verging on incoherent, when it comes to explaining their viewpoint.  Fortunately, American Digest is here to help.

I think it’s pretty clear that Audi meant to show that its car is so environmentally pure, it can withstand any scrutiny.  (Michelle Malkin shows just how committed to environmental “purity” Audi purports to be.)  However, its Superbowl commercial very effectively (and probably inadvertently) managed to show precisely what life will be like in a totalitarian environmentalist dictatorship:

Click here to view the embedded video.

My strong suspicion is that some creative type at the ad agency is working as a double agent:  pretending to be ultra green as a way of exposing the ultimate danger of environmental fanaticism, especially when it is our government that becomes fanatic.

The law of unintended consequences is a fascinating one.  I blogged the other day about the tax on restaurant food that’s eaten “here” as opposed to “to go.”  In cafes, smart people order food “to go,” and then consumer it here.  The result is garbage cans filled with food containers.  Oy, the pollution!

Here’s another, and much more fatal, example of the law of unintended consequences:

Cities around the country that have installed energy-efficient traffic lights are discovering a hazardous downside: The bulbs don’t burn hot enough to melt snow and can become crusted over in a storm — a problem blamed for dozens of accidents and at least one death.

“I’ve never had to put up with this in the past,” said Duane Kassens, a driver from West Bend who got into a fender-bender recently because he couldn’t see the lights. “The police officer told me the new lights weren’t melting the snow. How is that safe?”

As reader Lulu says, it is important for conservatives to be stewards of our beautiful earth.  There is no excuse for unnecessary waste, and we don’t need to pollute simply because the greenies’ hysteria is driving us nuts.  Nevertheless, greenie hysteria leads to a thoughtlessness that is scary dangerous.  As for me, I’m expecting a rash of decisions in coming years describing situations in which women are raped in parking lots and stairwells as a result of the darkness created by landlords trying to be green.

(On the other hand, apparently there are some pleasurable aspects to being green.)