In This Time Of "Hope And Change", There's So Little For Us To Hope We'll Ever Change In Time

Singers aren’t supposed to have dairy before a show, but we all know I’m a rule breaker.

--Justin Bieber - convincing himself he's on the cutting edge because he eats pizza - in Spiked Magazine.

Victor Davis Hanson has a nice screed, about all of those who "rage against reality", while those of us who were raging for a reality-based outlook have been called "crazy".

It is a insane fact, of these insane times, that anyone who points out insanity will be labeled insane themselves.

Matt Drudge links to a "Top Psychic" (what are the qualifications for that designation?) making us wonder - in the year 2011 - what the difference is between those who believe in such NewAge mystical powers and the Haitians killing one another because they're convinced sorcerers are spreading cholera?

Does Matt Drudge also "rage against reality"?

We pointed you to Oleg Atbashian's "What to Ask Progressives" already. But did we mention that's only it's subtitle? It's real title is "Question Insanity".

If you hold such views, could you be said to "rage against reality"?

And how are you different from those Americans The Wall Street Journal covered who rely on "Hoodoo"?

Can't it be said they, too, "rage against reality"?

Spiked Magazine calls this "Our Brave New World of Malthusian Madmen" but no one enamored with Malthusian ideas will willingly call themselves "mad", just as we can't get Tom Cruise or John Travolta to admit they're in "a dangerous cult".

And, even worse, in all these cases there is hardly anyone willing to talk sense into any else's head - to make them "not crazy".

It's not even considered a goal.

Because, if you try to do that, you, too, will be labeled "crazy".

Sheesh. And we wonder how the Nazis ever got around to killing the Jews,...

Hippies, Mermaids, And Dolphins: CULLLLLLLT!!!

"The Cove unwittingly shines a light on what lies behind today’s cult of the dolphin: a discomfort with humanity itself and with the gains of modernity. Dolphins are the favoured beast of the animal rights lobby because they are presumed to be as intelligent as human beings, possibly even more intelligent says one contributor to the film. They are more spiritual, at peace and caring than we human beings (well, not hippy human beings, but the other kind, over there). As one of the many, many recent books on the wonders of ‘dolphin culture’ argues: ‘While we humans have devoted our creativity to the technological achievements possible when one has chosen thumb over flipper, they [dolphins] have devoted their vast intelligence to the realms of the heart: community, pleasure, play, touch.’

It is this that motivates the animal-rights people who made The Cove: an estrangement from humanity; a belief that we have corrupted ourselves and our souls and our capacity to deal with the ‘realms of the heart’ through our soulless modernisation of society. Like a crazy updated version of the mermaid myth, they see in dolphins the ‘lost ideals’ of the simple life they would like human beings still to be living. So the contrast in The Cove is not a terribly crude one between civilised white people and uncivilised yellow people, but rather is between feeling, emotionally intelligent dolphins (and their human champions) and overly-modern, too-speedy, light-flickering Japan. Dolphins play the role of the simple life; Japan is set up as the bad guy of modernity. The truth however is that those supposedly weird fishermen in Taiji do not stab and chop up dolphins for fun – they do it to make food, to make things, to make a living, to provide for their families. There is infinitely more humanity in their slaughter of the dolphins than there is in a film which depicts a species of animal as being superior to a nation of human beings."

-- Brendan O’Neill, disgusted at how far afield contemporary thinking can go - "They are more spiritual, at peace and caring than we" - he can't help but belch it up for Spiked!

Sunny And Share (I Got You, Babe)

"[Climate Change is] a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious.

But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening — you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth — that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don’t think that’s going to happen."

-- Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize-winning economist - and liberal: don't forget liberal - wishing the best for his country because, heck, a Nobel Prize-winning economist - and liberal: don't forget liberal - would never allow his adherence to a delusional ideology trump his patriotism, right? (because, y'know, that would be like, y'know, bad) especially if they printed it, out in the open where everyone could see it, like, in The Atlantic.

So, like, really, what was Hillary just apologizing to India - about America - for again?

I swear, I can't make this stuff up,...I really can't. It's just too insane for words.

Fine: Start With The Greens (It Was Their Idea)

"JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society."

-- Jonathan Leake and Brendan Montague, bringing us news of an idea that's already occurred to TMR, sort of, in The Times Online.

TMR Is Searching For An Honest Man

"Why, since President Obama promised to 'restore science to its rightful place' in Washington, do some things feel not quite right?

First there was Steven Chu, the physicist and new energy secretary, warning The Los Angeles Times that climate change could make water so scarce by century’s end that 'there’s no more agriculture in California' and no way to keep the state’s cities going, either.

Then there was the hearing in the Senate to confirm another physicist, John Holdren, to be the president’s science adviser. Dr. Holdren was asked about some of his gloomy neo-Malthusian warnings in the past, like his calculation in the 1980s that famines due to climate change could leave a billion people dead by 2020. Did he still believe that?

'I think it is unlikely to happen,' Dr. Holdren told the senators, but he insisted that it was still 'a possibility' that 'we should work energetically to avoid.'

Well, I suppose it never hurts to go on the record in opposition to a billion imaginary deaths."

-- James Tierney, chronicling the NewAge stupidity (and outright lies) coming out of Barack Obama's science advisors, in The New York Times.

Don't Worry: They'll Be Gentle

"Malthusianism, the one-eyed belief that all of the Earth's problems are caused by over-breeding, is making a comeback in polite circles.

Following the discrediting of eugenics during the Second World War, Malthusians had been rather shamefaced about their beliefs. They continually invented new PC terms with which they might dress up their angst about "too many people".

In Africa in particular, measures to tackle overpopulation were promoted in the deceitful language of "choice" and "autonomy", by charities keen to avoid being accused of pursuing that far uglier-sounding goal: population control."

-- Brendan O'Neill, on the NewAge tendency to dream like nazis, on The First Post.

Greens: So Damned Stupid They're Dangerous

"It is the same every time the price of oil rises. Television news editors send camera crews off to garner driver rage at the pumps. Green activists rant about capitalist fat cats. Government ministers - convenient amnesiacs when it comes to who takes almost 70 pence in the pound at the pumps - make dark mutterings about windfall taxes. All because of the erroneous belief the oil companies need 'reining in'.

But anyone with an understanding of basic supply and demand economics knows well enough that Big Oil is not the big player in the energy market. More often than not the oil majors are just as helpless in the face of global market forces as any other consumer.

But who said the oil was running out? The truth is that potentially massive reserves, literally trillions of barrels of oil, are lying around waiting to be tapped.

Russia's flag-planting PR stunt on the Arctic seabed last year was not about some new-found concern to protect the environment - it was about oil. Then there's the vast potential in Alaska and generally off the Americas. That's before we get to the prospect of extracting the black stuff from enormous reserves of Canadian oil sands.

This is where Big Oil's profits do have an upside. They make all of these previously non-viable hydrocarbon reserves - at least another 200-300 years' worth - a far more viable proposition.

If governments decide to plunder these profits through windfall taxes, we all lose. After all, it is pension funds and stockholder investment portfolios that 'own' Big Oil. We cannot possibly expect the oil companies to pay stockholder dividends, swell our personal pension funds and re-invest in the improved technology needed to tap these new reserves if they are artificially over-taxed.

So is the $200-plus barrel inevitable? Possibly. But the reality is that we in the West are far from helpless, unless we choose to be. An energy fix would undoubtedly take time and involve not a little pain. But, first, we should let Big Oil make its mega-bucks, re-invest in new drilling techniques and pursue formerly difficult-to-extract oil reserves.

Second, we should stop worrying quite so much about the habitat of the lesser-spotted Greenback and start drilling off Greenland, the Antarctic, Alaska and the US coast where massive reserves undoubtedly exist. Nature's Greenback will do what it has always done: adapt, moving elsewhere until the derricks are dismantled.

Third, we should turn to the world's vast natural gas reserves and, with coal-fired (Europe and America are awash with the cheap stuff) and nuclear power, let them take more of the energy strain. Opec would soon get the message and increase capacity."

-- Peter Glover, speaking common sense - and stating the (non-green) obvious - for The First Post Daily

I'm telling you, people: you get too carried away, with those goodie-goodie green dreams, when you're only hurting your silly selves,...

My, How Things Change,...

"They have a philosophy,...they believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves."

- Alun Rees, quoting the words of Garrod Harker, on what '70s "hippie idealists" saw as our future - which, amazingly, is the exact same post-acid future so-called "progressives" are currently brow-beating us to believe in - it's not just Serendipity.