Flight from Trantor

Now who do we trust?

The Climategate scandal puts all of Western civilization at peril.  J.R. Dunn wrote on the American Thinker blog

There is always a deeper level to the damage caused by fraud. It strains social relationships, generates cynicism, and debases standing institutions. What has suffered the most damage from AGW is faith in the scientific method, the basic set of procedures -- it could be called an algorithm -- governing scientific investigation. These procedures embody simplicity itself: you examine a phenomenon. You gather data. You construct a hypothesis to explain that phenomenon. [...]

The technology developed from scientific research has created a world that would be unrecognizable to our forebears of even a century ago. Technology has transformed diet, health, communications, and transportation. It has doubled lifespans in advanced countries. Prior to the modern epoch, few ever caught a glimpse of the world past their own farming fields. India, China, and Africa were wild myths, the Pacific and Antarctica utterly unknown, the planets and stars merely pretty lights in the sky. Technology opened the world -- not just for everyday men and women, but for invalids, the disabled, and the subnormal, who once lived lives of almost incomprehensible deprivation. Technology was a crucial factor in the dissolution of ancient empires and the humbling of aristocracies.

I cannot help but think of the fable of the Boy who cried Wolf.  I am close to the point where if a scientist tells me the sky is blue, I feel I have to look for myself.  That is pretty simple.  How do you handle a situation where there is something so complicated that it is beyond the ken of non-scientists, maybe even beyond scientists outside the specialty involved?  Let's hope it never requires a quick reaction.  It is going to be tough to look at initial claims of scientific knowledge with more confidence than you would give a diet-pill huckster.

Traditions

In times past certain traditions were enough to define enough of a common bond between  most of us as Americans to render unthinkable that the republic could fly apart at the seams.  Not so much today.  The biggest detractor of America, the idea and the reality, is its President.  He is surrounded by a coterie of like minded souls with the same objective:  Take the US down a peg or two so we can be like everyone else - intellectually incurious, morally lethargic, materially overindulged.  A steady assault on the facts and meaning behind Thanksgiving and Christmas, not to mention patriots and Christians, has taken a toll.  Our defenses to the allure of the "servile temptation" are weakened.

Yet I will be thankful this season that for the first time in decades there are more people reexamining the underlying principles of the Founding and taking a sober look at the history and enduring promise of America.  If the Republic still fails, there should be more than enough people left to know where and how to continue on.

Now we should really start to worry

The Fort Hood shooting laid bare some ugly truths about the sorry state of Western Civilization and the extent to which the disease and fraud of multiculturalism has infected the defenders of Civilization, the United States Armed Forces.

Mark Steyn observes:

Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core Western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this last week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a “tragedy” but a national scandal, already fading from view.

I trusted that the Army was free of this rot. I was wrong, and now I am worried.

[UPDATE] I would like to think that Andy McCarthy is wrong, but I cannot:

The post-9/11 era was supposed to be about knocking down walls that obstructed effective counterterrorism. But behold the new wall, more insidious than its suicidal Nineties forerunner: the arbitrary barrier separating terrorism from “protected” incitement — the cagey, generalized, non-specific jihadist rhetoric that is the Islamist cleric’s stock-in-trade. Aside from not being required by law, this new wall will usually mean you can't go after the worst actors (the Islamic authorities and the terrorists they inspire) until after an attack has happened and Americans have been killed.

In other words, be prepared for more Fort Hoods. We’re not in September 10 America. We’ve managed to land in a much more dangerous place.

"What cowards we are"

Eric Holder?  Nope. Not talking about us.  Talking about the President, the Media, and the Army.

Ralph Peters in the Post:

Political correctness killed those patriotic Americans at Ft. Hood as surely as the Islamist gunman did. And the media treat it like a case of non-denominational shoplifting.

[...]

Get ready for the apologias. We’ve already heard from the terrorist’s family that "he’s a good American." In their world, maybe he is.

But when do we, the American public, knock off the PC nonsense?

A disgruntled Muslim soldier murdered his officers way back in 2003, in Kuwait, on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Recently? An American mullah shoots it out with the feds in Detroit. A Muslim fanatic attacks an Arkansas recruiting station. A Muslim media owner, after playing the peace card, beheads his wife. A Muslim father runs over his daughter because she’s becoming too Westernized.

Muslim terrorist wannabes are busted again and again. And we’re assured that "Islam’s a religion of peace."

I guarantee you that the Obama administration’s non-response to the Ft. Hood attack will mock the memory of our dead.

He is right.  And if we allow this to pass, he may as well have been talking about us, too.

Unemployment and Health

Via Instapundit I came across this link to Robert Reich's blog, wherein Reich gently chides the Obama administration for misplaced priorities vis-a-vis ObamaCare and Unemployment, now at 10.2%. 

The remarks got me to thinking, "isn't employment conducive to better health?".  Indeed, a quick search on Bing for "employed people healthier than unemployed" turned up a number of links that seem to bear this out. 

So I am  tempted to advise the Dems to "kill two birds with one stone":  Improve the health of the republic by improving the economy.  The problem of course is that their policies don't "kill" unemployment.  Anything they are likely to try will "kill" employment.  And on the Health care front... well you get the point.

The President Who Couldn't Care Less

A mass shooting on a US Army base perpetrated by a self-described devout muslim.  Yeah, OK, I'll get to that in a minute, but first let me give a shout out.....

This kind of stuff is shocking only to those who have not been paying attention.  I guarantee you that any number of lefty-liberal acquaintances are shrugging their shoulders with a "who cares, a few less baby killers" attitude.  I know this sounds hyperbolic, but I know a lot of people like this.  They are real.

I do not know whether Obama is this callous (it would not surprise me) but if anything this should be a reminder of how tightly wrapped the lefties are in their cultural cocoon.  And how annoyed this president is when anything or anyone threatens to interfere with his agenda.