If you wondered about cable news lately —don’t. It’s dead. Pushing up the daisies. Six feet under. Today, for example, these news nincompoops were in Utah and Aruba (I’m told Greta Van Susteren has moved there), when they ought to have been in, say, “Eyeraq” (it’s “Iraq,” pronounced eeraq! If you’re going to champion razing a country, at least have the courtesy to say it right), documenting how ordinary Iraqis are faring under “democracy.”
In any case, the Aruba story is not news. There has been no news from Aruba since, well, since shortly after the girl vanished and the arrests were made. A half-decent newsman would mention it again only if there were developments in the case. The unfortunate disappearance of Natalee Holloway, however, should never be dominating news broadcasts.
And why are we still hearing about the bug-eyed run-away bride? What kind of a market would support a book detailing her hoaxes and histrionics? “If you find a box labeled American Dry Goods, you can be reasonably sure it will contain nothing but their books,” said Oscar Wilde about an industry that has only worsened since. (For heaven’s sake, someone give Jennifer Wilbanks thyroid medication. Those eyes!)
Utah: Some brainy American parents warned their kid to the point of paranoia not to speak to strangers. They forgot, however, to tell him not to stray from his Boy-Scouts group during an excursion to the Utah Mountains. Consequently, the boy wandered off into the wilderness, but when search-and-rescue came looking, he hid from them for fear of… strangers. If you don’t believe me, here’s proud mama: “We’ve [sic] also told him don’t talk to strangers. … When an ATV or horse came by, he got off the trail. … When they left, he got back on the trail.” And here’s proud papa: “Brennan continues to amaze us.” He amazes me too. My sources tell me the boy abandoned the camp because there were too many strangers around.
Murderers As Libertarian Role Models?
I can think of quite a few ordinary and not-so ordinary individuals who exemplify brave resistance to government tyranny. The Iraqi insurgents are not among them. In contrast, some libertarians feel (for they can’t be thinking) that these cold-blooded murderers ought to inspire Americans in their quest to reclaim lost liberties. “The-Iraqi-resistance” is how these libertarians refer to the ragtag entity that is purported to have hitherto, intentionally, taken the lives of 12,000 Iraqis over the past 18 months.
One such libertarian urges (in long compound sentences) “patriotic Americans” at home to “take a lesson from the growing Iraqi insurgency and the response of that nation nearly destroyed by our pretext-laden invasion and the American neo-Jacobin possession of that country.”
Note how the distinction between Iraqis in general and Iraqi insurgents—the murdered and the murderers—is collapsed. Once she messily conflates the Iraqi nation (is there such an entity?) with the insurgents and their offensive, the writer leads her readers, in a text suffused with moral confusion and Lawrenthian romanticism, to conclude that these interchangeable entities are united in common purpose—resisting the occupier under a benevolent, all-encompassing faith.
No doubt there are points of intersection: some Iraqis support the insurgency; and some insurgents don’t support the slaughter of innocent Iraqis. But if Iraqis are united in a decision to “pursue one or more of the countless paths of resistance to the state, why are ordinary Iraqis being slaughtered by the underground they purportedly support? Have they consented to supply the blood that soaks the streets? Or does the writer simply agree with the creed that innocents can be sacrificed in a greater cause?
Next, the writer holds up the falsely equated Iraqis-cum-insurgents as inspiring role models of resistance to government tyranny. American patriots: meet your new heroes!
Have Libertarians allowed righteous rage against an unjust invation to turn into fawning admiration for killers of innocents? This misplaced deference an interlocutor of mine has characterized perceptively as typical of the Left’s “Rousseauian sympathy for the Symbolic Savage, any savage, wherever he may be, whom they fantasize as fighting nobly against the stifling strictures of Civil (and civilizing) Authority.”
Ludwig von Mises, a great classical liberal, considered romanticism, which is what this moral miasma reflects, to be man’s revolt against reason.
Gaga For Gaia
Two bears have been prowling my neighborhood —out and about, high-spirited after hibernation, looking to have a Teddy Bear’s Picnic. Or so you’d believe if you dropped by from deep space and heard the well-coached mantras people repeat like automatons: “We have encroached on their habitat; they mean us no harm; don’t be such a speciesist; let them feast in peace; let’s live in harmony with nature.”
The problem is that the bears haven’t heard of these theories. Neither has the robust cougar population. The managerial state and its wild-life emissaries are responsible for breeding out healthy human habits—self defense, for one. But the hooey-spreading propagandists have failed to achieve similar results with the wild-animal population, now out of control. The proverbial wolf doesn’t yet dwell with the lamb nor does the leopard lie down with the kid. While Western man works to rid himself of the most basic ethical and sensible instincts, like defending his kinfolk, animals remain true to their nature. As surprising as it may seem, wild beasts still believe their pointy teeth and sharp claws are meant for ripping flesh—any flesh, the easier the better.
It makes perfect animal sense to attack a thing that is docile, slow, and passive, like the not very sapient Homo sapiens. It’s been decades since animals were aggressively repelled from human habitat, and they now “brazenly make themselves at home in manicured suburbs.” An unafraid animal is a dangerous animal; an unafraid human is an endangered fool.
And so, the casualties of animal attacks are shrugged off. There is nothing to learn. The only lessons learned, ala the odious Oprah, are a victim’s lessons of survival: plaudits to you for living to tell how you lost half your face. What a hero you are for curling up in the fetal position and pretending to be a porcupine! You punched Ursus americanus with your powder puff?! You go girl! A real man who greets a bear on the balcony with blazing guns is investigated. Did he Mirandize the bear? Was it a justified “homicide”?
Honest experts admit attacks are up because pinko policies—the kind that have placed animals and their haunts above humans and their habitat—have bred fearless critters. It used to be that men killed and hunted encroaching creatures. Thanks to decades of cultural queering and legal emasculation, men no longer have the urge to protect home and hearth. Instead, they now robotically spew the Sierra Club’s subliminal propaganda: as the true homesteaders of the planet, animals should inherit the earth. Humans come second.
Human beings should care for and be kind to animals. That’s ethical. But people’s safety and survival must always precede that of animals. A society that reverses this ethical order is philosophically primitive, base, and immoral. Indeed the antediluvian, wild-animal worship is thoroughly pagan, down to its human sacrifice.
Although our local wild-life officials admit that “there are increasing problems related to cougar and bear,” and that they “need to meet the increased calls for service,” they will not be preempting a bear attack in my neighborhood any time soon. Pulverizing far-away lands is the closest government comes to fulfilling its obligation to protect the people.
On Flakes And Fetuses
Bush, Constitution, Ethics, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Morality, The Courts
It’s on the White House’s website for the world to witness: “The President Discusses Embryo Adoption at a gathering (or coven, rather) that honored representatives of the “Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Agency.
But let the POTUS explain: “I have just met with 21 remarkable families … The families here today have either adopted or given up for adoption frozen embryos that remained after fertility treatments. Rather than discard these embryos created during in vitro fertilization, or turn them over for research that destroys them, these families have chosen a life-affirming alternative. Twenty-one children here today found a chance for life with loving parents.”
The Adopt an Embryo spectacle was the White House’s display of displeasure at a vote in the House to ease restrictions on federal financing for embryonic stem cell research. These undifferentiated embryonic cells can grow into any kind of cell —heart, brain, etc., —hence their therapeutic potential. The proposed bill would allow under federal auspices the use of stem cells derived from “unadopted” embryos. Explained the president: “Research on stem cells derived from human embryos may offer great promise, but the way those cells are derived today destroys the embryo.”
Would that the ferment over fetuses —and “the culture of life’ —extended to the many, fully formed, innocent human beings dying daily in Iraq. (I can’t imagine why the land of chaos and carnage comes to mind as a synonym for the administration’s contempt for life.)
The bill is historic, if only because it’ll occasion the president’s first ever veto. Finally a spending bill he can’t get behind. But don’t rejoice; it’s premature. The president is pushing a similar, $79-million bill, one that’ll be spent on harvesting the less versatile umbilical cord stem cells.
As is the case with a Congress and Executive that operate outside the Constitution (the judiciary is a partner in this knavish confederacy), the debate is framed deceptively. Over to the hysterical Carolyn B. Maloney, a New-York Democrat: “How many more lives must be ended or ravaged? How much more unimaginable suffering must be endured until government gives researchers the wherewithal to simply do their jobs?”
Silly me, I guess government-giving-researchers-the-wherewithal-to-do-their-jobs was what the Founders had in mind when they bequeathed a central government of delegated and enumerated powers. Intellectual property laws are the only constitutional means at Congress’s disposal with which to “promote the Progress of Science. (About their merit Thomas Jefferson, himself an inventor, was unconvinced). Research and development (R&D) spending is nowhere among Congress’s constitutional legislative powers.
(A word about the Constitution is in order here, considering the tendentious criticism it receives from libertarians: to the extent the Constitution is compatible with the natural law, it’s good; to the extent it isn’t, it’s not good. Murray Rothbard’s preference for the Articles of Confederation, usurped in favor of the Constitution at the Philadelphia convention, is well taken. Still, the case for liberty is better made with reference to the American Revolutionaries, the followers of John Locke, than with reference to tribal Africans (who’ve always existed in a murderous state of nature), or Medieval, Viking-Age, Icelandic people. Why adopt a stark, un-American —and in that sense, ahistoric —philosophical framework? I thought that was the neoconservatives’ bailiwick.)
In any case, there is no warrant in the Constitution for most of what the Federal Frankenstein does. Social Security, (“Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much “free stuff as the political system will permit them to extract, said Justice Janice Rogers Brown), civil rights, predicated as they are on grotesque violations of property rights, Medicare, Medicaid, elaborate public works sprung from the general welfare and Interstate Commerce Clauses —you name it, it’s likely unconstitutional.
Implied, moreover, in Maloney’s petit mal is that if the House didn’t mulct taxpayers of R&D money, there’d be no R&D. Not according to the United States Department of Health & Human Services:
“Based on 2002 data, one study reports that private sector research and development in stem cells was being conducted by approximately 1000 scientists in over 30 firms. Aggregate spending was estimated at $208 million. Geron Corporation alone reported that it spent more than $70 million on stem cell research by September 2003. In the Stem Cell Business News Guide to Stem Cell Companies (Feb 2003), 61 U.S. and international companies are listed as pursuing some form of research or therapeutic product development involving stem cells.
What do you know? The private sector has already been beavering away, for some time now, exploring the promise —or lack thereof —of stem cells.