The View From 1776

A New Way for Democrats
By Jack G. Gilbert

I want to say a useful word to the Democrats.  Will they listen to me if I come to Washington with my 95-year-old mother?  She suffers from congestive heart failure, from being nearly 96 and from having a son who is pretty old himself, 72.  We are the kind of people the Democrats like to help, but it would help most if they listened to me for a minute. 

The Democrats present the fullest development of political pity, or making people feel sorry for themselves in order to get their votes. 

The Democrat suffering group my mother and I belong to is old people, supposed to be living with endless miseries like bills and inadequate medical care.  Consider the delicious pleasure of telling a group of “seniors” about the injustices they suffer. Then assuring them that though God and their children may have left the scene, the Democrat party loves them.  Relish the thought: elder care and the four seasons by a Democrat Congress. 

Implicit in this pity is that we old people cannot think of anything but ourselves. 

We would never consider the public good, the commonweal. 

We would never be grateful for the comforts of our age, such comforts that never existed before: wonder drugs, pain killers, tight warm houses, tight cool houses, blissfully comfortable shoes, ultra-light eyeglasses, quiet cars, movies, telephone, internet, cheap flights--in general, the bonuses of living in a time of inventiveness and plenty. 

Is there a cure for the partisan addiction to helping victims--whether they need it or not, whether the help really helps, whether it makes anyone happy at all?  Reality sometimes intrudes.  The supply of big groups of victims is running out. 

In desperate times a new idea may not hurt, a program of Democratic Mega-Pity.  The goods of this world are poorly distributed, and too much is had by too few. The goods include money, health, intelligence, good looks.  The evils of this world are likewise poorly distributed.  These include poverty, disease, disabilities, lack of intelligence, ugliness.  Too much is had by too few.

So the next liberal social policy must move past “victimization.” Invariably divisive, it annoys the advantaged and teaches the disadvantaged to feel aggrieved.  The goal is an Equalization of Good and Evil by means of a Calculus of Mega-Pity. 

This would work on the national level as follows: an annual census
evaluates each person in terms of (a) income, (b) general health (c) other personal advantages (good looks, talents in painting, music, writing,
dexterity, cunning).  The government assigns a number (0-100, expressive
of his or her relative advantages) to each person, who will be
taxed on the basis of his or her position above 50 on the scale. Those highest will pay most. 

The fluidity of money makes it the easiest factor to adjust; anyway “it is written” that the poor are not healthy and not talented because they do not have enough money.  Ways of reducing one’s position in health and talents will predictably show up, like smoking, overeating, reckless sex and disfigurement of person (as in tattooing).  There will be a dynamic social movement, up and down the scale from year to year, as individuals seek the relative position most satisfactory to themselves. 

Those below 50 will receive compensation based on their relative lowness, the lowest receiving most.  Thus 1’s would be recompensed roughly as much as 100’s are taxed.  (I say “roughly” because all transfers would be reduced by the cost of the government doing business both ways, up and down.) 51’s would give to 49’s.  50’s would make do with what they have. 

And the US would push to have this replicated on a Universal Basis by the UN for all countries, each likewise assigned its place, annually, on a scale of income, general health, and other personal advantages.  Fortunate nations would contribute according to their rank above 50; unfortunates would receive according to their rank below 50.  Disasters like floods, tidal waves, monsoons, hurricanes would of course be factored in, so that there would be an even painting across the globe of good things and miseries. 

Emigration would not disrupt the scheme.  An influx of rich into poor changes the relative position of the country.  Likewise an influx of poor into a rich.  Every country would perceive that an advantage lies in losing position on the scale.  Eventually the result would be that the spread formerly expressed as 0-100 would become 49.999999 to 50.000001. 

Who would then be an aggressor?  The lions would not lie down with the lambs, rather lamblike lions would lie down with leonine lambs.  The first would be nearly last, the last would be nearly first.

Senator Ted Kennedy has never encountered a socialist, micro-managing cause that could not command his support.  Pagan worship of the environment has always attracted him.

Perhaps that’s why he so notoriously joined local environmentalists to stop construction of a wind farm to generate sufficient electric power for most of Cape Cod.  It would, no doubt, be unfair to denounce him for hypocrisy just because the proposed site lay in the waters of Nantucket Sound, offshore from the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port.

Thomas Segel, in the essay below, tells us that environmental paganism is not confined to the Peoples Republic of Massachusetts.

More Than Energy in the Wind
By Thomas D. Segel
Tom@thomasdsegel.com
http://www.thomasdsegel.com

Harlingen, Texas, May 3, 2008:

A renewable source of energy that requires no coal, gas or oil, has no waste product and creates no greenhouse gases would seem to be the magical solution everyone is seeking. As gasoline tops $4.00 a gallon in many regions, Americans are screaming for a solution to the national attack on family budgets. With almost uncountable restrictive federal regulations, most of our available resources remain untapped. These same politically oriented restrictions have even stopped the construction of new refineries. In fact, the only resource our left-leaning Political Kings and their Environmental Jesters have not managed to completely regulate is the wind.

This does not mean they are ignoring attacks on wind power energy. From lamenting the possible death of birds and bats, to threats of damage to the ecology, charges and counter charges related to wind energy unfold in our newspapers and across television screens. In many regions of the country, these naysayers have managed to influence political bodies and regulations relative to permits and locale have been adopted. One of the few barriers to even more regulatory moves has been the fact that wind farms are constructed on private property.

However, the NIMBY (not in my back yard) crowd and environmental activists are now on the attack in Texas, just as they have been with every other attempt to increase energy across the United States. The latest of these attacks is taking place along the Gulf Coast where PPM Energy of Portland, Oregon is attempting to erect 240 wind-powered turbines on the Kenedy Ranch. This is the first of two planned farms on the 400,000-acre South Texas ranch. It is the start of an $800 million project that will eventually provide electricity for more than 100,000 homes, and have no negative emissions. According to a company spokesman, even before construction started it had completed three years of comprehensive wildlife studies. The conclusion of these studies was the farm would be outside the main migratory flight path and no endangered species or birds would be harmed. This failed to satisfy those opposed to the construction.

The first to attack the project was neighboring King Ranch President Jack Hunt. He claims the turbines will create an eyesore, even though the nearest highway is more than twenty miles away and there is little population to view the operation. He also claims the wind farm will harm wildlife and kill migrating birds. A coalition of state and local environmental activist groups started filing complaints early in 2007 making claims that birds migrating to the south flew on a path that led directly into the planned 200 to 400 feet tall wind- turbines. They predicted massive kills.

State courts and agencies have dismissed all attempted actions saying the King Ranch and the Coastal Habitat Alliance have no standing for action in a case that requires no permits and is on private land. Still the group persists and in December 2007 filed state and federal lawsuits to halt construction. If they fail to stop the building of the wind farm, they at least want to gain input in the project.

According to those involved in the Kenedy Ranch project, the litigation is completely without merit and will only serve to delay construction. In the event these law suits fail, Hunt, with his King Ranch clout, is contacting Texas state lawmakers in an attempt to convince them to pass legislation regulating and licensing the construction of wind farms.

The State of Texas leads the nation in wind-generated energy. Wind farms provide almost 4% of the state’s electricity. A total of 4,356 megawatts of electricity are produced in the Lone Star State from 40 different projects. This is more than one third of the current 11,600 megawatts being produced in the United States. California holds national second place with wind farms that generate 2438 megawatts. Texas is well suited to developing wind energy due to its size, availability of open land and ample winds. Farmers and ranchers have found wind farms a good source of supplemental income. Some large landowners are considering the development of their own wind farms, while others are content to lease their land.

One of the very important benefits to having wind farms on any site are the use of land is very minimal. Only about 42 by 42 feet of actual space is used for any single wind turbine, allowing farmers to plant right up to the base of the construction. Because some of these turbines are very high, between 100 and 400 feet, there is little noise, allowing normal conversation right at the base of the unit. There is also wide separation of units, with each one situated on about a forty-acre plot of land.

To better understand just what a megawatt provides, think of it in these terms?a megawatt is a million watts. If you turn on a 100-watt light bulb, it will burn 100 watts of electricity in one hour. So, a megawatt would provide one hour of electricity for ten thousand 100- watt light bulbs.

Texas has a renewable energy objective of 5,000 new megawatts of electricity by 2015. The Kenedy Ranch projects will provide a major portion of the target megawatt goal. However, just as in the case of oil and gas exploration, hydro-electric and nuclear power plants, more electric generators or refineries for fossil fuel, the self serving few do everything in their power to impede progress that is all in the national interest.

Who are Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers?  And why would Senator Obama wish to associate his political beliefs with those of Dohrn and Ayers? 

Might his friendship with these Weatherman terrorists of the 1960s and 70s be a clue to the voting record that led National Journal to rate Mr. Obama the most liberal member of the Senate?

The New York Times reported on September 11, 2001, ironically, the day the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were bombed:

Life With the Weathermen: No Regrets for a Love of Explosives
By Dinitia Smith

“I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. “I feel we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings.

...[Mr. Ayers] writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972.

...Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at,” is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago…

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her “the most dangerous woman in America” and “la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.” Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

In his book Mr. Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a “whirlpool of violence.”

“Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,” he writes… He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was extensive.

Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, Mr. Ayers writes, and also helped spring Timothy Leary (sentenced on marijuana charges) from jail.

Today, Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn, 59, who is director of the Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University, seem like typical baby boomers, caring for aging parents, suffering the empty-nest syndrome.

To understand Senator Obama, and Senator Clinton as well, it’s necessary to revisit the radicalism, exemplified by Ayers and Dohrn, that formed their philosophical and political orientation in the 1960s and 1970s.  That orientation can be traced back to the European revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848, and to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Implementing social justice necessitated rooting out religion and morality from public life.  And that is what intellectuals in the United States set about doing at the end of the 1800s.  The process gained momentum after World War I, then the Depression in 1932 brought us Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, dedicated to implementing socialist state-planning.  But the partial results of the New Deal were not enough to satisfy the radicalized Baby Boomers who became the student activists in the late 1960s.

Radicals were a fairly small part of the Baby Boomer generation, but their influence radiated widely and deeply, because American society was already prepared to accept at least the superficialities of their message.  Not everyone passionately believed that American society was a tyrannical conspiracy to oppress the blacks, Third-World peoples, and college students.  But American intellectuals had been preaching since the 1880s that our Constitution had to be changed in order to bring about social justice.  Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Weatherman, SDS’s more radical offshoot, just struck a match and lit the fuse already connected to the dynamite.

Student radicals were recycling the anarchism in the United States of the 1890s to 1920s that had preached the virtues of dynamite, killing and wounding hundreds of innocent people across the nation.

In addition to dynamite, anarchists and socialist advocates of social justce historically have favored any behavior, such as sexual promiscuity and indulgence in drugs, that challenged accepted standards of social and political conduct.

After the riots, burnings, lootings, and bombings of that period, the Boomer ethos metamorphasized from terrorist action into self-absorbed sensual gratification.  Dropping out and doing drugs became a replacement for dynamite in the war to destroy old ideas of civic virtue. 

Today those radicals of the 60s and 70s are passionately ready to follow a new leader who promises to change everything. 

The alarming question is what hidden agenda for change does he represent?

Many commentators have observed that “teaching students to think” is little more than brain-washing them to hate America by inculcating the atheistic, and materialistic religion of socialism.  That program, also known as diversity, brooks no questioning and no opposition.

At a wedding reception dinner some years ago, for example, I was seated next to Thomas Roos, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth.  Dartmouth’s hostility to the conservative views editorialized by the Dartmouth Review was then much in the news.  In answer to my question, Professor Roos stated simply that the opinions of the Review editors didn’t deserve to be heard in a liberal democracy.

American so-called higher education is following the path defined by Vladimir Lenin, who told the Soviet commissars of education that their job was to teach students to hate their parents and any non-liberal-progressive beliefs held by their parents.  Only communist doctrine deserved to be heard in a “good socialist society.”

For a bizarre example of this genre of “education,” read Dartmouth’s ‘Hostile’ Environment.

Black liberation theology, the theology of the church attended by Senator Obama and his family for two decades, may reflect justifiable resentments by black citizens.  But its hateful rhetoric towards outsiders sounds alarmingly similar to that of Islamic jihad.

Squaring black liberation theology with the Senator’s campaign rhetoric about “bringing us together” is simply impossible.  Either Senator Obama hates white America and wishes God to destroy whites, or he is a hypocrite who panders to blacks without believing what he professes.

See Senator Obama and the Transformation of Human Nature and read Obama and Black Liberation Theology.

A key quote:

Why does Barack Obama belong to a church known to be a leader in a seemingly radical, black-centric, movement known as black liberation theology? And the follow-up question is this: How will Mr. Obama’s association with this movement influence his beliefs, ideas, and actions as president of the United States?

Mr. Obama has said that he has not heard many of the statements made by Mr. Wright. But it is likely that Mr. Obama knows about the philosophy, principles, values and teachings of black liberation theology, which is the foundation of his church — the wellspring from which Mr. Wright’s divisive rhetoric flows. Mr. Obama’s veracity and integrity, or at least his judgment, will be subject to question if he denies having detailed knowledge of black liberation theology. And if he knows about the movement, why would he align himself and his family with such a theology for some 20 years?