November 30, 1997
The White House has hotly denied selling Arlington Cemetery waivers to DNC donors. In today's currency of credibility, how much is their denial worth? Would you wager a cup of coffee on it?
In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
... Alfred North Whitehead
Nothing will dispel enthusiasm like a small admission fee.
... Kin Hubbard
Lani Guinier, that icon of civil liberty, has proposed that college admissions be granted to a pool of minimally qualified candidates on the basis of a lottery. No SAT, no stacking, in fact, no merit. Appalling. Why even give grades?
Whispers are circulating that the decline in collections from my state's stupidity tax, the Texas Lottery, could mean bankruptcy. But how can that be? The Texas Lottery has been an exemplary system, much ballyhooed in the circles that care for such state-sponsored swindles, much copied (I'm told), extremely effective (no doubt, for recapturing excess AFDC). Are not the lottery prizes awarded from the cash flow, which may always be assumed, apart from running expenses, to be positive? Surprise: lottery prizes are allocated from future earnings in order to maximize the return to the state. If the liabilities from future awards exceed the current assets and income, less expenses, guess what: the lottery is bankrupt. It turns out that not only the players were swindled, but the voters were, too.
Of course.
In what modern astronomers would regard as an event greatly exceeding their capacities to anticipate, the gods of the calendar have decreed that World AIDS Day and start of the Earth Summit shall fall upon the same day, tomorrow, December 1. Having been blissfully unaware of this signal conjunction until I received the information yesterday, so suddenly did the news fall upon me, and with such force did it impress me, that I have resolved to go immediately tomorrow and sacrifice two pigeons and a ewe.
Hard upon the heels of both the land mine nonsense and the National Mourn-the-Loss-of-Our-Innocence Day, on the 22nd past, with only Thanksgiving to provide any kind of buffer, these celebrations come at a time when we are all vulnerable. Having experienced one sample of post-prandial satisfaction, we are keen to pursue the next. We are heading for our annual retreat into familial pleasure and not a little spirituality, and so we do not appreciate these shots whizzing over our shoulders as we duck into Macy's for a bit of spiritual fixing-up.
Truth be told, we should not get all worked up about these things. The World AIDS Day is not about AIDS, but about politics. If these fiestas had anything to do with curing AIDS, it would have long since vanished from the earth. Indeed, if World AIDS Day had anything to do with the clinical prospect for AIDS patients, or the effective prevention of the spread of AIDS, I would be the first in line, carrying my politically correct banner. But it does not. World AIDS Day is about two things: how much the World Health Organization can squeeze from the industrial nations with stories about how AIDS infection rates have doubled (they have not, by the way; only their estimate of them has doubled; for "estimate" read whatever guesswork they believe will help their cause); and about how much money, attention, set-asides, and special rights that homosexual rights organizations can terrorize out of Christian nations (Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist nations are simply inaccessible on this point). Fortunately, the celebrants will gather together, hurl invective at the rest of us, and each other to a certain extent, and return to their homes, satisfied that they have done their bit to rub our noses in their contempt for our supposed prudery.
During all these festivities, not one word will be said about the possibility that human behavior contributes in any way to the AIDS epidemic. Nor will anyone raise any questions about the official account and explanation of AIDS. This is probably not the correct place, nor am I the right critic, to bring up all the absurdities that have followed upon the determination that HIV causes AIDS. This hypothesis is the result of statistical correlation, nothing more. There is no scientific publication describing the means and manner by which HIV induces AIDS in terms that the scientific community can regard as factual. There are, of course, many theories, but theory is not the same as fact.
This hypothesis, swallowed whole by the U.S. and world health establishments, has resulted in a preposterous goose- chase that has almost certainly cost many thousands of lives, as well as expending a shipload of treasure. The critics of the HIV-AIDS hypothesis, including well-known virologists and at least one Nobel prize winner, cannot get a hearing, because the U.S. AIDS bureaucracy has already committed its funding and its considerable prestige to the other view, because after such expenditures, it cannot afford to be wrong, and because the politics of AIDS will not permit it. For those with the stomach to read about Mengele's disciples in the health establishment, more on this subject is available at http://www.duesberg.com/.
The Earth Summit is a different kind of swindle. There, the subject is not politics. The politics of the Earth Summit were settled long ago; they are purely authoritarian. The true subject of this festival of the greenhouse-gas-god is more practical: how to obtain the money, power, and authority to subject the industrialized nations, the U.S. in particular, to emission standards proportional to a third world country. Their plan, naturally, is to obtain the funding from the only people that have such wealth, the industrialized nations themselves, and specifically, the U.S.
Far worse than the AIDS folks, who have only been the victims of a statistical fallacy, the Earth Summit folks are operating on the level of purest superstition, fueled by a Luddite hatred of American technology that the Unabomber would be proud of. Even the statistics of global warming are debated amongst those who know anything worth mentioning about the subject. The horrific thing is that the appeasement currently offered by the President and his staff of tree-huggers, though it would impose a crippling load on the U.S. economy, is widely regarded as inadequate.
The President can play this two ways: he can give the Earth Summit a schedule that will play fairly well with the eco-Nazis, and then let Congress take the heat for revoking it. Or, what is more likely, he can present a more conservative schedule, force the Earth Summiteers to swallow it, and come back to the American people with an account of how he has saved them from the more extreme demands of the environmentalists, justified though they may be, and ask Congress to enact it, lest a worse thing happen.
Virtually the whole environmentalist movement, particularly the global warming establishment, is financed by the U.S. taxpayers, so the Earth Summit gang will have to go along. But they dare not tolerate any doubt amongst the true believers. Of course, there is no unambiguous evidence that industrialization makes any contribution to global warming. Many scientists flatly deny the global warming thesis, and thus, there is no assurance even that there is any global warming. It is not even clear that a bit of global warming is bad, let alone that we can influence it. Against all of these objections, the global warming whoopers, in a kind of double bind because they cannot debate the issue on the merits, offer only the justification that, by the time we find the answers to these questions, it might be too late to do anything. Of course, on the basis of that sophistry, we could justify any kind of sky-is-falling, disaster-is-just-around-the-corner idiocy that anyone wants to propose.
The safest thing to do is to stay indoors, vote NO, change TV channels, get plenty of sleep, and reflect on how dangerous a notion statistical correlation is. Maybe this stuff will just go away of its own accord.
The incessant drumbeat for campaign finance reform exhibits the same passion for treating consequences instead of causes as does the gun control nonsense. The attempt to regulate campaign contributions has serious Constitutional implications, and the idea that the legislation for adequate controls can be expected from the politicians themselves reveals a staggering naivete. They may whoop it up, but we should suspect their every move.
Of course, the real problem is not campaign contributions, but illegal campaign contributions, especially those that can be considered to be a bribe. My campaign contributions have corrupted no one (probably because of their size). But then, I am not trying to buy anything. But if I were, I would know right where to go. This is the thing that needs reform: the Congress has the power to regulate and tax the production of any given industry. If it is so minded, it can grant tax breaks for a given industry; it can set aside that industry from labor laws, technology export controls, and anti-trust laws. It can even protect a particular domestic industry from competition with foreign manufacturers.
This is the root of the problem. The President and Congress should not have the power to give special tax breaks or any other form of special consideration for a particular industry or industry segment. Once this power is dispensed with, the problem of illegal campaign contributions will largely disappear. Of course, the President and Congress will no longer have anything to sell.
How about that for a naive expectation?
If I find that I do not like Bruckner as well as I used to, I have to put it down as a character flaw. But try as I might, I could not get Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, as performed by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Gunther Herbig, of happy memory, to reach me. I sat in my favorite seat in the whole building; I composed myself to listen and appreciate; I warmed my inner psyche for a rich feast of Anton Bruckner's musical thoughts; and it did not happen.
I am more inclined to regard such failures to be the result of some distemper gnawing at my being, a bad egg or some sour milk, or reflection on a bit of untreated athlete's foot. Or perhaps it was the nagging thought of twenty million morons worshipping the unintelligible perjury that pours ceaselessly, like the swill for a million pigs, out of MTV.
As C. S. Lewis Commemoration Day has already crept past us, on November 22, let us revel in the following excerpt, as he gives the reader "both barrels."
The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-mannered scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means, in the long run, just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be "debunked" and mankind is to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in the one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent "ideologies" at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere... specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men; now we "liquidate unsocial elements." Virtue has become "integration," and diligence "dynamism;" and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are "potential officer material." Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance -- and even of ordinary intelligence -- are "sales resistance."
... C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
All contents © Copyright 1995, 1996 by Redmon Barbry ¶ 11:32 PM
