Going Rogue

Her memoir, Going Rogue, will have a first printing run of 1.5 million.  To put things in perspective, The Audacity of Hope, sold 200,000 copies in 2007.  By the time Obama was elected each of his books had finally sold a million copies.  Regardless of how you feel about Sarah Palin, her faux memoir is probably going to sell more copies in 3 months than Obama’s 2 books have sold in 3 years.

Selling a lot of books, however, isn’t the only indication of Palin’s rise.  Unlike Obama, when she speaks, results follow.  For example, how long have we been listening to Obama speak about healthcare.  Has it only been 6 short months of incessant, ubiquitous, incomprehensible speeches?  What are the results?  We have 5?  Or is it 6? bills?  How many thousands of pages?  How many speeches?  And where are we?

Palin on the other hand, posts a microblog, and the world listens.  Palin gets David Letterman to apologize to her daughter, a feat only matched by his cuckolded wife.  And most lately, Palin is determining who wins political elections.  Dede Scozzafava was comfortably winning her congressional race in the 23rd district of New York.  Then Palin endorsed her rival from the conservative party, Dan Hoffman.  Not less than two weeks later, Scozzafava is backing out of the race and throwing her support to Hoffman.  Whether you like Palin or not, with her we can at least get a glimpse of what leadership looks like.  Barack Obama, on the other hand is throwing the Democrat gubernatorial candidate in Virginia under the bus.

Republican critics from within the party and from outside, have complained for a while now that the party has lost its way, and has therefore become an obstructionist party with no solutions of their own.  By going rogue, Sarah Palin might be playing a crucial role in helping the party find its new face, and here it is:

The Bean Counter

I haven’t been following this race very closely, but on the surface I can tell you one reason why Hoffman is a great candidate: He is an ACCOUNTANT.  If the trend of replacing Washington’s career politicians and lawyers with practiced and principled accountants can be replicated 100 times across the country, conservatives might have something to look forward to next year.  Every district in the country needs a nerdy, conservative, bean counter running with the simple message, “We can’t afford this.”

The fact that Sarah Palin is the one who gets this tells me that Obama better watch out, or we might get a new Messiah in Chief.

The idea of anthropogenic global warming is more like a liberal’s wet dream than it is a liberal conspiracy.  To understand this claim, you have to understand the paradigm through which I view environmentalism.  Most Americans seem to view environmentalism this way:  Liberals are environmental crusaders that want to save the planet from the ravages of markets and industry vs. Conservatives who want to completely ignore the environmental impact of markets and industry as they greedily pursue profit.  This misrepresentation of the debate over environmentalism has atrophied the conservative side of the debate.

However, the modern environmentalist movement was started by a conservative, and despite the fact that conservative environmentalism seems to be an oxymoron to most, conservative environmentalism most likely has the best answers to today’s environmental problems than most liberal envirowackos.

Peter Huber’s book, Hard Green is probably the best book for laying out the conservative’s environmental sensibilities. For an example of how Huber thinks about environmental issues, you can read Bound to Burn. Here are some good quotes:
“Green jobs” means Americans paying other Americans to chase carbon while the rest of the world builds new power plants and factories.

Computer models demonstrated that [nuclear] meltdowns were highly unlikely and that the costs of a meltdown, should one occur, would be manageable—but greens scoffed: huge computer models couldn’t be trusted. So we ended up burning much more coal. The software shoe is on the other foot now; the machines that said nukes wouldn’t melt now say that the ice caps will.

We don’t control the global supply of carbon.

You can read the rest of the article to see the basic conclusion that I will also make.  Even if humans are contributing to an increase in carbon emissions, there is little that those who adhere to liberal ideologies can do to stop this.  Whether you call it a conspiracy or a wet dream, the reason why liberals cling to global warmingism and their regulatory guns is because liberalism wants to micromanage everything it possibly can.  From car companies, to banks, to molecules, modern liberalism is waxing quite confident that it can effectively manage just anything where markets have “failed.”  However, to the modern liberal, real results matter less than perceived ones, which makes global warming a perfect tool for psychological exploitation.  It is easy to see how labeling something that intends to control things as ephemeral as molecules and emotions as a conspiracy isn’t too far-fetched.  However, I’ll stick with my stance, that controlling the climate of the planet is just too juicy of an opportunity for the average liberal to pass up.

Meanwhile, the liberal’s solutions to prevent global warming does more to discredit the theory than any discussion of scientific evidence.

Notice the Windmill

It is probably time for us to all revisit junior high and break out a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  I couldn’t help but think of the basic outline of the Animal Farm plot the more that I learn the details of what Obama is doing to the auto industry in America.  The forced exit of Rick Wagoner from GM echoes the animals running Farmer Jones off of Manor Farm.  This week we find that as part of the Chrysler restructuring, UAW is going to own 55% of Chrysler.  Indeed, the pigs are taking over the farm.

On another note, one familiar with the plot of Animal Farm knows that the animals rally around the Utopian project of creating a windmill that will generate electricity.  The windmill is an interesting symbol to analyze.  It is a symbol of industry.  It is a symbol of capital.  Above all, it produces power out of thin air.  In theory this ancient form of alternative energy should produce perpetual energy and therefore perpetual wealth.

Like all Utopian projects, the windmill ends up being a dismal failure for the animals.  They can’t construct one that doesn’t collapse.  Of course this is because labor without capital is pretty much worthless.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the pigs in the UAW will team up with the pigs in washington to embark on building a 21st century windmill: an automobile that doesn’t burn fossil fuels.  We also shouldn’t be surprised when this project, which makes no sense from the perspective of capital, turns out to be an abysmal failure.  

This quote from the sparknotes analysis, is a good one to end with: “ForAnimal Farm serves not so much to condemn tyranny or despotism as to indict the horrifying hypocrisy of tyrannies that base themselves on, and owe their initial power to, ideologies of liberation and equality.”

Also, as we watch Obama corp. divy up the car companies, we can also remember the quote from Animal Farm, “Some animals are more equal than others.”

The World is Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman

or

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

Thomas Friedman

I am normally a fan of Thomas Friedman, but I couldn’t even finish The World is Hot, Flat, and Crowded.  He is so sold down the river of Global Warming Alarmism, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to take him seriously anymore.  In his latest columns he has been trying his hardest to blame the current economic crisis on our inability to prevent climate change.  Friedman would do better to use his astute ability to analogize, to explore how the pending failure of the New York Times is related to global warming.

George Friedman, on the other hand, has written a brilliant book, that illustrates how America will be a dominant superpower for at least the next century.  Chapter by chapter he lays out how he thinks the next century will unfold.  Aside from the book being one of the best books I’ve read in a while, Friedman seems to be on the forefront of an entrepreneurial publishing movement that will probably replace dying publication businesses such as newspapers.

The New York Times commissions writers like Friedman to write books and attract readers (in the past these used to be subscribers) to the newspaper, so that they can sell advertising.  It has been pretty common knowledge that the internet, with its abundant free information, and armies of bloggers who realized that writing your opinion isn’t really that hard, is putting newspapers out of business.

George Friedman, on the other hand, wrote his book as a means to publicize his website, Stratfor.  This is a site that provides exellent geopolitical analysis of current events.  If you like what this site has to offer, they have a subscription service to exclusive articles and reports that costs $300 per year.  The quality of content on his site should humiliate publications like the New York Times.  I predict that Friedman and his site, are what we have to look forward to when the newspapers go out of business.  I am personally looking forward to this day.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjQddAAjk9M

Followers of this blog know that I am a big fan of radical activism.  It is no surprise that I am therefore a big fan of the new show on Animal Planet called Whale Wars.  At first one might think that this show might be like a glorified version of a cockfight, where you watch sperm whales fight against killer whales.  Unfortunately, it is about a group of mostly Canadian and Australian animal rights activists who wander around the Antarctic oceans in search of Japanese whaling ships.  When they find Japanese whaling ships, a bunch of hooligan activists jump in a zodiac boat and go throw bottles of rancid butter onto the decks of the ships.  Sometimes they sneak onto the whaling ships, put a bag of burning dog crap outside the door, knock, and run away.

Where I agree that we need to stop the Japanese from whaling, I also believe that chasing them around in zodiac rafts and throwing rancid butter at them is pretty stupid.  However, it does make for some good t.v.  After all, if we don’t stop the Japanese from whaling what will be our back-up plan for when we run out of oil.  However, like all radical activist, the crew of the Steve Irwin (yep that’s their boat) pick pretty weak targets.  If Animal Planet wants to see their ratings go through the roof, they should send these noble activists to try and deter killer whales from eating the babies of gray whales.  The show also might be a little irrelevant since the following video seems to be evidence that the whales are taking things into their own hands, or flippers.  The voice on this video definitely sounds Japanese:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=f18nqm_f7CE

Anyway, since this turns out to be a pretty good t.v. show in that it points out how stupid environmental activists can be, I figured why not translate the same formula into other shows.  For example, wouldn’t Man vs. Wild be much better if animal rights activists were sent to follow Bear Grylls and try to scare away the animals that he captures for food?  Not only would we see if Bear Grylls can outwit nature, he would need to outwit the ideologues first before he could capture animals and eat them.  If I were an advertiser, I would pay big bucks to promote a show where Steve Irwin’s Second-Mate, Peter Hammarstedt pairs off against Bear Grylls in various ecosystems in a Darwinistic duel.  Will Bear Grylls be able to ensnare Peter, so that he can have his way eating the wildlife in the area, or will the wily Hammarstedt occupy Grylls with his activist tactics and save the unsuspecting fauna from being devoured?

Peter Hammarstedt

Bear Grylls

To see a killer whale training camp, watch the following video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWsN63PRCW8

Okies from the Great Depression

Where the first Great Depression was epitomized by the migration of Dustbowl ihabitants to California, the not-so-great depression that is unfolding before our eyes will probably be characterized by bankrupt Californians relocating to states that haven’t been so improvident.  I am tempted to go buy an orchard, so that I can have some work for the previous real-estate flippers to do as they arrive to my state en masse with their BMWs and bindle staffs.

I think a bright young literary mind will probably document the travails of the participants of this great migration of “Fornies” into the heartland in the form of a novel, or perhaps a reality TV show.  The Grapes of Wrath, starts with Tom Joad being released from jail from a manslaughter conviction.  Where much of the Californian population that hasn’t left yet is incarcerated, it would be easy to imagine an echo protagonist of Tom Joad who is released from the current California penitentiary system early because of overcrowding.  Where the okies in The Grapes of Wrath typically did agricultural work and pretty much all starved to death, Fornies will migrate across the land in search of solvent states with government entitlement programs.  The Fornies that aren’t anorexic will complain that there are no In n’ Out Burgers in their new home states.

Where the Grapes of Wrath is a narrative that explores the explosion and consolidation of the extended family, the modern day sequel will consist of Fornies fleeing the familial and marital bonds that they see as financial liabilities.  The Grapes of Wrath ends with Rose of Sharon nursing a dying old man after giving birth to a still-born baby.  The sequel will end with a female character with breast implants aborting a fetus somewhere in the heartland of America.

I know that there are some gaps to fill in, but I think the overall premise of a novel such as this would lead to a classic. I was speaking with an acquaintance in Callfornia the other day who is trying to start a business. To start an LLC in California costs $800 a year on top of the registration costs. I think the same thing costs like $50 in Utah. This seems like a pretty stifling barrier to entrepreneurship.  No wonder businesses are fleeing California in droves. It is also no surprise that the state is clunking like an old jalopy towards bankruptcy.  As California drives its business tax base to states with less prohibitive taxes, the state’s budget problems will only become worse.  We can expect to see the great migration of bankrupt Californians accelerate in the coming months.

If you are a Californian, you should get some help.

7 books in the Harry Potter series + 4 books in the Twilight series = 11 books

It sounds like if we really want the Arab muslims to become literate, we need to introduce them to Stephanie Meyer or J.K Rowling.  These two should team up and write a steamy, fantastical sequel to Scheherzade’s 1001 Arabian Nights.

1. The masterful use of language – Cormac McCarthy is a master of the English language.  Writers like Stephanie Meyer flood their pages with filler and drivel.
2. Rather than entertain you, The Road, will force you to ask hard questions to yourself.  Ultimately McCarthy will transport you to a world where a previously existing moral order has completely unraveled.  The book forces you to examine your own moral universe.  The book deconstructs morality and moral relativism and identifies the possibility of transcendental truth in an apocalyptic abyss.  At some point we all make a conscious decision about what constitutes morality, The Road helps us evaluate how we reach this decision.
3. The examination of the father/son relationship contains symbolism of Biblical proportions.  The book reminds us that moral and spiritual renewal is a multi-generational task.  Life is Beautiful is a film that explores similar themes in different ways.  The New Testament is another book that explores similar themes.
4. It is being made into film with Viggo Mortensen in the lead role.  This is a movie that will probabaly sweep the Academy Awards like No Country for Old Men did.  Since McCarthy has a knack for writing very adaptable novels, you should read this book just to see how he is able to write a book almost as if he were writing a handbook for a film director.  Instead of being divided into chapters, the book is divided into little sections that I would call scenes.
5. It ‘s probably an easier and shorter read than most books by Rowling or Meyer.
   

   The Road by Cormac McCarth

Now that the book is in paperback in promotion for the film, you should be able to pick this up for a decent price.  However, you can’t afford to not read it.  This book would also be a great gift for Christmas.  Like I said, this book will make you think about the ideas of spiritual renewal that are presented in the New Testament in enlightening and intersting ways.  Best of all, you can buy The Road from The Bloghorn Bookstore.