Regruntled.com

Here we are, on Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, in one of the most Special countries in the modern world.  That’s Special as in Special Education and Special Olympics.  Look at the chart above.  Spain, Italy, Ireland, Austria… extremely Catholic, historically.  Or Denmark, Sweden, Norway…  extremely Lutheran.  Can you say Protestant Work Ethic?  I knew you could.   The Catholics and Lutherans have this stuff figured out. 

And Muslim Turkey… I don’t even know what Turkey’s doing on this list, unless it’s to keep the USA from being in last place.  I suppose one can argue that most of Istanbul is in Europe, and therefore Turkey has one foot in the modern world.  Hurray!  An arguably modern country that’s even more Special than we are!

Yuval Levin’s article in Commentary,  The Meaning of Sarah Palin contains this nugget:

The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism.

This immediately reminded me of the Nolan Chart, shown above, a part of Libertarian folklore.  Has Levin rediscovered the Nolan Chart in different terms?  Or has he invented something new?

First of all, “cultural” and “personal” are really the same thing.  Both refer to lifestyle issues.  Libertarians, with their focus on the individual, are naturally going to prefer “personal”.

Next, is the populism-to-elitism spectrum the same as the freedom spectrum?  Elites, by definition, are minorities, outliers on the normal curve, so there is a natural tendency for elites to prefer more freedom, to avoid the tyranny of the majority.  Libertarians do tend to be elitists, or at least wannabe elitists.  So far, so good.

Let’s look at a couple of deficiencies of the the Nolan Chart.  The Left is often willing to censor politically incorrect speech, which is inconsistent with personal freedom of speech.  Elites, however, don’t have to be philosophically consistent, so censoring politically incorrect speech is fully consistent with cultural elitism.  On the other side, the Right is often willing to engage in tax-supported corporate welfare, which is inconsistent with individual economic freedom, but fully consistent with economic elitism.

So, all in all, I think Levin’s formulation is an improvement over the Nolan Chart.  In a representative democracy, almost by definition, we have opposing elites using populist arguments to contest power.  There is a certain symmetry to all of this.

Thanks to reader TTB for nudging me onto this path.  By all means, read Levin’s article if you’re interested in the Sarah Palin phenomenon, but it’s really about much more than Sarah Palin.  I’ll repeat Levin’s words in a larger context:

In American politics, the distinction between populism and elitism is further subdivided into cultural and economic populism and elitism. And for at least the last forty years, the two parties have broken down distinctly along this double axis. The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. Republicans tend to identify with the traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursue an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. Democrats identify with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked, crushed-by-the-corporation “people against the powerful,” but tend to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. Republicans tend to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive; Democrats tend to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

I’m reading my historical novels about the Saxons and the Danes, and every once in a while the protagonist muses about fate.  He’s a pagan, so he talks about fate in terms of the Norns, one spinning, one measuring, one cutting.  Life is a thread, yada yada yada.  The Greeks have a similar myth, which suggests a common origin in the mists of prehistory.  On the other hand, the metaphor only makes sense to cultures who have mastered spinning, so one wonders what the earlier explanation might have been.  But I digress.

It occurs to me that the modern equivalent of the Norns is… writers.  Novelists.  Script-writers.  Press secretaries.  Life is a story, a story is a tapestry, writing is weaving.  If the protagonist of the historical novels could have an out-of-book experience, he might say:

Forget the Norns!  Bernard Cornwell controls my fate.  Things are pretty quiet right now, but there are four more chapters to go.  Either something totally unexpected is going to happen, or I’m going to do something really stupid.  He’s not going to kill me off, because then there’s no sequel, but I’m probably going to get jerked around for the next couple of chapters.

But these are Saxons and Danes.  Postmodernism is a thousand years in the future.  We preserve the Norns’ metaphor in our language every time we hold a press conferences in a “spin room”.   

Pastor Rick Warren’s selection for the Inaugural Invocation makes him fair game for ridicule.  From The Purpose-driven Life:

… Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the Flood, God irrigated the earth from the ground up.

Right.  There’s no such thing as physics.  Evaporation and condensation are just theories.  Water molecules do whatever God tells them to do.  Teach the controversy!

Mark Bauerlein thinks that young Americans are the dumbest generation ever, and he blames it all on the internet.  Specifically, he thinks teenagers are using the internet to communicate with other teenagers, as opposed to learning something.

I suspect that every generation thinks the next generation is a bunch of idiots, and blames it on something recent.  The internet, television, rock and roll, comic books… the technology changes but the story remains the same.

Phil Gramm’s recent remark:

“This is a mental recession. We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet… We have sort of become a nation of whiners.”

is the perfect bookend to Obama’s comment:

“You go into these small towns … and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

And wasn’t the reaction just too perfect?  A nation of whiners bitterly whining about being called a nation of whiners.

The common element is dissatisfaction, the motive force of modern civilization.  Obama and McCain both want us to be dissatisfied, in different ways, dissatisfied enough to vote.  The media want us to be dissatisfied enough to watch endless coverage of this, the most important election since the beginning of time.

Of course, the problems never get solved, there’s always someone pointing out the urgency of change, and every election is the most important election since the beginning of time.

T. Boone Pickens is putting together a movement… buying TV ads… building a web site… without ever actually saying what he wants.  So what does T. Boone want?  A little help from the taxpayer, suggests a Wall Street Journal article.  Pickens has gone into the wind power business.  There are lots of places to put up windmills from Texas up through North Dakota.  The problem is that to sell the electricity, you need transmission lines.  Big, ugly, high-voltage power lines going through somebody’s back yard.

Washington has to act, Mr. Pickens said, by tackling prickly questions like eminent domain and right-of-way across big swathes of federal land.

Or perhaps more plainly in this editorial:

The government must mandate the formation of wind and solar transmission corridors, and renew the subsidies for economic and alternative energy development in areas where the wind and sun are abundant.

“Subsidy” means moving money from the taxpayers’ pockets to Mr. Pickens’ pockets.

While we’re on the subject of T. Boone Pickens, you might be interested in Wikipedia’s article on Pickens’ involvement with the Swift Boat smear campaign in the 2004 election.

The BBC reports that “Martian soil could support life”.

“It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard - you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well.”

There are a number of problems with this.

First, Mars doesn’t have soil.  Mars has dirt.  If you don’t know the difference, ask a gardener.

Second, you don’t need soil to grow plants.  You don’t even need dirt.  You can grow plants hydroponically on any number of substrates.

Third, there’s no news here.  We have rocks from the Moon.  We even have a few Mars rocks from Antarctica.  Rocks are rocks.  It’s not like we thought Mars might be made out of red cheese.

The morning paper had another of those full-page ads.  You know, the ones that look like newspaper articles but have “advertisement” in tiny print somewhere on the page.  According to the Cool Surge website:

The Cool Surge eco-friendly air cooler is a work of engineering genius from the China coast so advanced that no windows, vents or freon are required. It is as easy to use as a baby’s vaporizer and even includes the four hour extra cooling power of the glacier ice blocks. It uses the same electricity as a 60 watt light bulb, yet it blasts out ice cooled air. The hi-efficiency motor cools the air around the unit up to ten degrees so you’ll instantly feel cool and refreshed. The 3 cooling levels and auto shut off function put all the comfort controls right at your finger tips. It’s so impressive that it even comes with a full year Money Back Guarantee.

A 60-watt ventless air conditioner?  Yeah, right.  It’s a fan that blows air over “glacier ice blocks” which you have to freeze in your freezer.  The freezer uses all the electricity, not the fan.  And since the whole system (fan + refrigerator) is ventless, it makes your house WARMER, not cooler.  That is, the fan blows cool air in your face, while your refrigerator makes the kitchen warmer.  On average, the house gets warmer.

See also: Cool Surge update: May 8, 2009

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that 21% of atheists believe in God.  According to the Washington Post:

A belief in God or a higher spirit is pervasive. Even Americans who describe themselves as atheist or agnostic have a robust sense of a higher power: Twenty-one percent of those who describe themselves as atheists expressed a belief in God or a universal spirit, and more than half of those who call themselves agnostic expressed a similar conviction.

What’s really going on here?  Pew is interviewing people who aren’t very smart.  These are people who don’t understand the questions but answer anyway, or who label themselves without understanding what the labels mean.  People who aren’t qualified to have opinions on whether it’s raining, much less the Big Questions. 

Remember, their votes count just as much as yours..