Starting tomorrow I will be going on active duty for the next four months. That means that my posts will probably be less frequent and will certainly be less partisan. When I come back in September I will return with a fresh up-close perspective on the European economy, Middle East politics, and Defense Department waste, as well as the upcoming presidential election.
And if I’m real lucky, I’ll be able to talk with you about a book.
BTW, this might be a good opportunity to reiterate that whatever opinions you read on this site are mine alone and are not to be construed as the opinions of the Department of Defense.
“We buy organic food, put E10 in our gas tanks and switch to green electricity. Our roofs are covered in solar panels and our walls plastered with insulation. This makes us feel good about ourselves. The only question is: What exactly does the environment get out of all this?”
I have a more than 20-year history with Germany dating to about 1988, back when toxic chemicals in Germany meant nerve gas or sarin. From my perspective as a sometime resident of Deutschland for about six of those twenty years, there has been a real evolution (apparently the word of the week) of thought about the environment there.
Twenty years ago consumers sent everything out to the recycling bins. They still do. Twenty years ago some of the things they brought to their recycling centers just accumulated; it wasn’t economically feasible to recycle things like plastics. Twenty years later they no longer accumulate, but it still isn’t feasible:
My yoghurt container, which I’ve carefully rinsed and sorted, isn’t recycled at all. In fact, it’s dumped into an incinerator with all the rest of the garbage and burned.
Yes, this is allowed. By law, the dual system is required to recycle exactly 36 percent of plastic waste. Waste disposal companies can do what they want — and what is most cost-effective for them — with the remaining 64 percent. As a result, much of it ends up in waste incinerators for what’s called “thermal recycling,” bringing the cycle to a sudden end.
The economics there aren’t any different than they are here: except for aluminum, glass, and paper, recycling most waste materials doesn’t make sense. When I was in Germany, I did what I was supposed to do. In America I do what makes sense; we have three recycle bins in our pantry for only those materials.
Water is another interesting environmental bugaboo for Germans. I’ve lived in places where water is in short supply and comes therefore with a high cost: Texas, the Mojave Desert, Kuwait, Iraq. There you learn how to conserve water. Thirty-second showers are necessary when you live in the driest deserts. Germany is not that kind of place. Water is abundant; so it surprises me that so many Germans strive to save H2O. You’re not even allowed to wash your own car. In a land blessed with frequent rain throughout the year, saving water makes as much sense as eating your vegetables in Kansas because there are starving children in Africa. It’s a national non sequitur.
Speaking of rain . . . because it rains so often, and because it is so far north, I was surprised to find so many solar panels when I returned to Germany in 2010 after a 15-year absence. Frankfurt is further north than Winnipeg. It’s not exactly Phoenix, and even there–in the desert southwest with more than 300 sun-filled days a year, solar still isn’t economical. Plus, houses covered in dysfunctional black panels happen to be ugly as sin, which is quite the shame in a land whose villages were formerly celebrated for houses festooned with red tile roofs. Visual pollution is on the rise, unfortunately not counterbalanced by much solar power.
My latest time in Germany made me think that environmentalism there is less about saving the planet than it is about making Germans feel good about themselves. Apparently I’m not alone in that thought. So let me leave the last word to Herr Neubacher:
It would be nice if we would occasionally subject our certainties to a reality check. . . No one should be forced to bring toxic mercury-containing light bulbs into the house. It doesn’t make sense to shut down more nuclear power plants if it just makes us dependent on imported nuclear electricity from France. And as long as a disposal paper bag is worse for the environment than a plastic bag, the green morals police should think about whether it’s the plastic bag that they should be banning.
People who shop in organic grocery stores, eat a vegan diet or drive an electric car are free to do so. But this should not give them the right to lecture others on the environmentally correct way to live their lives. Things are sometimes more complicated than they seem at first glance.
I’m not Mitt Romney, so I don’t have to focus solely on jobs, jobs, jobs. (But fear not; if you stay with me to the end, there’s a jobs angle to this story too.)
To mark this historic occasion–the 24 hour anniversary of Barack Obama’s evolution wherein he catches up to the position where Dick Cheney was two years ago–let’s talk about people who hate people who aren’t like them.
No, I’m not talking about these people. I’m talking about mommy bloggers who want to punch people in the throat. That’s actually the name of the blog “People I want to Punch in the throat.” And just in case that was too nuanced for you, she adds in a subtitle: “I think the title sums it up. If you can’t figure it out, then go away before I punch you in the throat.”
The homophobic rants at this site are the work of the pseudonymous mommy blogger Jen Fisher, who advises her readers that she is a “funny, negative, bitchy type of person,” and adds that “If you can’t handle that . . . don’t waste your time flaming me for being a grouch.” While she is unlike another mommy blogger I know and like, who is funny without being negative and bitchy, I can see how that persona could be humorous . . . if your idea of funny is a female Archie Bunker with a blog.
Actually her rants aren’t homophobic. At least none that I’ve read. But they might as well be, because they heap scorn, ridicule, and virtual violence on “people not like me.”
Let me give you an example from the post that I found via a link from an old friend. Jen wants to punch “Douchey Dads” in the throat. She never quite defines ”Douchey Dad,” but apparently it is a young, well-dressed member of a country club. They are guilty of taking Tuesdays off to golf, wearing expensive shirts, and “yukking”–whatever that is. In short they are “people not like me.”
Jen met the DDs when she was setting up at a country club for a charity auction and immediately took a dislike to them, those people not like her. Why? I don’t know. Apparently being affluent, well-dressed, and comfortable is somehow wrong. (Methinks I detect jealousy.) Why do people take an instant disliking to someone, lump them all into a category and pillory them on the web for others to mock?
Here’s a little exercise I like to engage in: turn the story around 180-degrees and see if it’s still the same. If instead of making fun of idle white wealthy fathers, this was a post advocating a punch in the throat for unemployed black impoverished mothers, would we act the same? No. At the very least it would be labeled “hate speech.” And it wouldn’t be funny to anyone . . . anyone except Archie Bunker, perhaps. (When did Meathead turn into Archie? That’s a subject for another day.) So why is this funny to Jen and her hundreds of commenters?
Why is it that society feels comfortable mocking one group, when we would never tolerate the same treatment of another? Why is it that those very people who dislike people they don’t even know (church-goers, rednecks, Kansans) often think of themselves as being so tolerant? Just how little introspection does it take to have such a bipolar view of the world?
I’m probably too hard on Jen. I’m sure that she’s a nice person in real life and is mean only as a means to amuse. But then again, maybe I’m not too hard on her. “Mean only as a means to amuse” is pretty much the definition of a bully. (Or at least that’s what we’d call it if Jen was ridiculing a protected class.) Maybe it just takes having the contrast exposed for her to see the point. Plus, it’s hard to heap too much blame on a mere blogger, when we have a President who likes to divide people, label them, and engage in ridicule. So much for unity.
Finally, since I promised a jobs angle to the story . . . it isn’t clear from Jen’s post whether she was at the country club as an employee, vendor, or to help the charity hosting the auction there. It doesn’t matter, because in some small way the presence of the “douchey dads” she found so objectionable, contributed to her cause. Even if they weren’t at the charity auction themselves, they help fund the country club so that it can offer reasonable prices to charities wishing to host an event. It amazes me how often I hear scorn from employees, clients, and benificiaries directed at those who provide them cash. People might want to keep that in mind lest they again make the mistake of engaging in covetous tax policies that put a bunch of shipyard workers out of work.
P.S. Don’t misconstrue this post as advocacy for a world free from mockery. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s more fun to live in a Blazing Saddles world:
I suppose I ought to say something about President Obama’s flip-flop on gay marriage. Instead, I’ll tell you what I wish Mitt Romney had said when he was asked about the President’s stance:
“That’s nice; now what about jobs?“
In fact, that should be Mitt Romney’s response every time he is asked about gay marriage, immigration, guns, Trayvon Martin, global warming, eating dogs . . .
Pretty much everything except the economy, taxes, and spending is a distraction from the issues that are really important. Mitt Romney should drive the point home that everything else is secondary and frivolous and that he is not going to allow the debate to come off that point.
P.S. If you’re really interested in what I think about gay marriage, here’s a couple recentposts that shed some light on that. But rather than expect you to read them, here’s a two-word summation: Don’t care.
“The issue is a sideshow intended to distract. If our country goes the way of Greece – and writing this from the City of Los Angeles, it’s not so hard to imagine – you can forget any issue, whatever your favorite one is. You won’t be living in America anymore.”
UPDATE: Thanks to Ed at Insty’s Place for the links. While you’re here, this is a story that’s not directly about jobs, but I bring it around to that point: She deserves pity, not a punch in the throat. (There’s a bonus Blazing Saddles clip at the end.)
1/32 Indian Elizabeth Warren is also 1/32nd descended from a Tennessee militiaman who marched the Cherokee away on the “Trail of Tears.”
Does this mean that she would have to pay restitution to herself?
Again, this just demonstrates the idiocy of affirmative action. If it is meant to overcome past prejudice at the expense of those who acquired past benefits, then Elizabeth Warren sits on both sides of the equation. That’s true of a lot of Americans, including President Obama. Actually, that’s not even true in his case, as his black half is second-generation African and was never subject to slavery in North America.
If anything good can come from this farce, it is a growing recognition that affirmative action’s days need to end.
The Krumm family occasionally engages in a little dinnertime entertainment. The last couple weeks the kids have had us play the “telephone game,” wherein one person says something secretly to another, who in turn relays the message to a third, and so on, and so on, until the fifth person announces out loud what he heard, only to be answered by ruckus laughter because the transmitted message bears little resemblance to the original.
When recounting what each said, the individual relayed misquotations are explicable, even logical. However, the compounded effect of misheard words and forgotten phrases, over time results in a completely different message at the end. And because our family includes two boys ages 8 and 11, there is the added surprise resulting from the fact that so many of the re-re-transmitted messages inevitably contain the words “fart” and “poop.”
Via law prof Elizabeth Foley (who, btw, is part of a great cast of Instapundit impersonators) I learned of Jennifer Rubin’s remarks about last weekend’s Peter Berkowitz column expressing surprise that elite law schools do not teach the Federalist Papers as part of their ConLaw curriculum. Rubin asserts that today’s law ”students study precedent” instead of contemporaneous documents, and are therefore shocked when “they encounter constitutional arguments apparently foreign to them but well-rooted in constitutional text, structure and history.”
Studying precedent is all well and good, however, as in the telephone game, it is to be expected that judgments rendered on the fourth or fifth re-transmission end up being garbled versions of the founder’s intent. It might also explain a lot of the poop.
Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 115,000 in April, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 8.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services, retail trade, and health care, but declined in transportation and warehousing.
Household Survey Data
Both the number of unemployed persons (12.5 million) and the unemployment rate (8.1 percent) changed little in April. (See table A-1.)
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (7.5 percent), adult women (7.4 percent), teenagers (24.9 percent), whites (7.4 percent), and Hispanics (10.3 percent) showed little or no change in April, while the rate for blacks (13.0 percent) declined over the month. The jobless rate for Asians was 5.2 percent in April (not seasonally adjusted), little changed from a year earlier. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was little changed at 5.1 million in April. These individuals made up 41.3 percent of the unemployed. Over the year, the number of long-term unemployedhas fallen by 759,000. (See table A-12.)
The civilian labor force participation rate declined in April to 63.6 percent, while the employment-population ratio, at 58.4 percent, changed little. (See table A-1.)
The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was essentially unchanged in April at 7.9 million. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. (See table A-8.)
In April, 2.4 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)
Among the marginally attached, there were 968,000 discouraged workers in April, about the same as a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.4 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in April had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. (See table A-16.) [Emphasis added.]
This is what a stagnant economy looks like. The gain of 115,000 jobs is less than enough to keep up with population increases, and was below the median economic forecast for April. The only reason that the unemployment rate “fell” to 8.1% is because the labor force participation rate keeps dropping. If you stop looking for work, you aren’t unemployed. But you’re not employed either. You’re just “missing.” You don’t count.
Welcome to the country we now live in: the Stag-Nation.
UPDATE:
Thanks to Glenn and Bruce for the links. While you’re here, check out the Obama Re-elect campaign’s latest ad: The Life of Brian.
Labor force participation rate drops by a staggering 522,000 to the lowest level since 1981. That, btw, was two years before Mr. Mom, a movie about the entry of women into the workforce, forced there by the bad economy. This economy is so bad that women are kicked out of the workforce to a rate not seen in over 30 years.
I just got my hands on a copy on the soon-to-be-released Obama-Biden web advertising that will follow the Life of Julia montage. This is the “Life of Brian” and looks at Brian through the years to see how the Obama-Biden policies help his life. Below are stills of the pictures that I’m being told are right now being added to the President’s re-election website. You saw it here first!
UPDATE: Thanks to Glenn and Alex for the links. While you’re here, check out the Stag-Nation where Brian lives.
Alert commenter Graham has informed me that the release of the “Life of Brian” Re-Elect ad is being held up because the Obama-Biden campaign is negotiating the rights for the use of this as a theme song for 2012.
MORE: Based on the huge success of this series, the Obama-Biden Re-Elect campaign has hired Iowahawk to update Julia’s life.
If you can’t handle the fact that an openly gay man might have an informed conservative opinion, then please get out of the Republican Party. If you try to take over the GOP, I guarantee you that you will lose, not just in November, but forever after that. Idiots.
I’m one-sixteenth Bastard. Those who know me well would probably claim that it’s a higher percentage. But technically, I’m only one-sixteenth.
That’s because my grandfather’s grandfather was born just a couple short months after his mother’s 1832 wedding to a man who may or may not have been his biological father and shortly before the couple and their infant child beat a hasty exit to the New World.
Why is my lineage relevant? It’s not. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Except that, apparently, if you can trace 1/32nd of your ancestry to somebody who today would enjoy protected status, you too can enjoy that same protection. At least that’s what Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat running for US Senate in Massachusetts, claims. She used her 1/32nd drop of Cherokee Indian blood to bolster her resume so that she could advance through law schools all the way to a tenured post at Harvard as a minority applicant. (Sadly for me, bastards are not a minority.)
Now if this all seems preposterous to you, you’re right. If Elizabeth Warren, by virtue of her great-great-great-grandmother is entitled to protected status, are my children also minorities as a result of their Powhatan Indian ancestry that dates to the 17th century? As my eldest is applying for colleges next year, that would be awesome news! And if her 1/512th Indian ancestry doesn’t qualify, where is the breakpoint? Is it 1/64th? Or 1/128th? Or 1/256th? Exactly how many drops of minority blood makes one a minority?
Mark Twain exposed the folly of this system of racial discrimination in Pudd’nhead Wilson way back in 1893. The story is set in the antebellum South and involves a baby, born (coincidentally) 1/32nd black, but who was white enough that his mother switched the infant with a white baby so that her son could be raised free from the stain of her race. Twain originally started the story as a comedic interpretation of the mixed up social mores of his day, but as his writing continued the story evolved into a tragedy.
That’s how I view the Elizabeth Warren story too: farce that obscures tragedy. The real issue is not Elizabeth Warren’s gaming of the system to her advantage; it is that this system of racial discrimination even exists. Here we are in the 21st century arguing about how many drops of blood makes a white man black. That’s a tragedy.
Mark Twain is mocking us from the grave.
UPDATE: Thanks to Glenn for the link. While you’re here, please take a look around.
It’s getting bad for President Obama. His poll numbers are anemic–well under the magic 50% mark an incumbent needs. Swing voters have deserted him and don’t seem to be inclined to come back. Youth, Hispanics, and white women–demographics that strongly favored him in 2008 have fallen away, if not in the percentage that support him, in the percentage that is excited about actually voting. His fundraising is way down, his biggest backers are silent, his party’s elected officials increasingly are against him on his two biggest achievements: Obamacare and stopping domestic energy production. Even support from the media, his last holdout, is crumbling. Sure, there is a lot of time left, but the trends are not in his favor. Obama is in big trouble. He knows it and it shows.
Democrats, both behind the scenes, and in down-ticket races are scared. Sen. Manchin, who is up for re-election in a dark red state, has openly broken with him. He won’t be the last, as most of the swing states where the President will spend most of the next 200 days are represented by incumbent Democratic senators running for re-election. If they sense that Obama is a drag on them, they will throw him under the bus. A few more bad weeks is all that it will take for the open revolt to be apparent to all.
So how do Democrats save themselves? In 1980, they put Ted Kennedy up against Carter in the primary. Conventional Wisdom is that the intra-party contest hurt Carter. It didn’t. Carter was already mortally wounded when Kennedy struck his blows. His loss was pre-ordained by the economy and abroad, just as Obama’s loss is a fait accompli absent some remarkable and unforeseen outside force. But Democrats don’t have another option this year. Or do they?
Hillary Clinton is the logical choice, and I suspect that in quiet introspective moments when the lights are off and they’re along with their thoughts, that most Democrats wish that she were president now. They know that she would not have made Obama’s mistakes of incompetence.
So how do they pull it off? How do they make her the nominee without losing the almost one-quarter of the party that is black and will revolt at the attempted coup?
First, they have to plant the idea that President Obama is sick. Drudge helped them out a few weeks ago when he posted a series of photos showing the President looking unhealthy and gaunt. Then they have to let it be known that Hillary Clinton is done with politics. She has to be seen as Cincinnatus, and not as a usurper. Then, there has to be an announcement: something serious is wrong with the president; sympathy is the goal. Then there has to be the ask by the President himself, followed by reluctant acceptance and outreach, and the best way to achieve that is for Hillary Clinton to put Michelle Obama on the ticket with her. Blacks, women, and progressives. It’s an unbeatable combination that Mitt Romney could not overcome.
Is it a crazy plan? Yes. But it would work. And you know what they say: if it sounds crazy and it works, it isn’t crazy. After a few more bad weeks for the President, it won’t even sound crazy.
