sisu

Who's afraid of Virginia Postrel?

We can see the salt of the earth from our front porch in Chelsea-by-the-Sea.

Here we thought it was a brilliant, pithy (140-or-fewer characters) philosophical insight into the way of the world, but intellectual icon Virginia Postrel was not amused with our twitter response to her intriguing demise-of-The-New-Republic question:

Now that articles float free of their publications, can magazines still play the role in catalyzing sensibilities that @CoreyRobin suggests?

— Virginia Postrel (@vpostrel) December 8, 2014

Our first response was harmless, bloodless:

@vpostrel @CoreyRobin Online it’s individual great minds, rather than publications as a whole, that develop followings, I think.

— Sissy Willis (@SissyWillis) December 8, 2014

 Then we stepped in it:

@LeroyWhitby @vpostrel @CoreyRobin Increasingly dishonorable means used to justify increasingly discredited ends #leftproject

— Sissy Willis (@SissyWillis) December 8, 2014

"Increasingly dishonorabble means used to justify increasingy discredited ends." That little tweet expresses the world view of a lifetime of observation and analysis in 140 or fewer, but Postrel was not amused:

@sissywillis @leroywhitby @coreyrobin Please spare me these general rants about politics in a discussion about what magazines do.

— Virginia Postrel (@vpostrel) December 8, 2014

A touch of elitism there? Our reply:

@vpostrel @leroywhitby @coreyrobin Consider yourself spared from here on in ~ General Rant pic.twitter.com/s5sRdJvz29

— Sissy Willis (@SissyWillis) December 8, 2014

Update: Our sincere apologies to the divine Miss Postrel, who clarifies:

@sissywillis You & your pal still hijacked the thread. That someone would was entirely predictable. Sorry it was you.

— Virginia Postrel (@vpostrel) December 9, 2014

A momentary flash of insight into that great abyss, the "progressive" mind

"I don't think you know it yet, but you have won," Glenn Beck tells viewers this afternoon, understandably gloating a bit at the collectivist navel-gazing left's continuing incomprehension of this "predominantly white" "Restoring America" thing that went off without a hitch — not a scrap of litter left behind for others to pick up — on Saturday (above). "They believe in the Liberation Theology of oppressor and victim. You don't. You don't have self-pity," he added. "The top GOP leaders in Washington need to prove that they are worthy of it. The Third Great Awakening is what it's all about, and you are living history."

"From within her effete elitist bubble Arianna Huffington preaches open-mindedness," we twittered awhile ago in a momentary flash of insight into that great abyss, the "progressive" mind. The words of Yale President Rick Levin's welcome speech to her daughter's class of incoming freshmen —  boilerplate to this tragic-view tea partier's tempered ears — had touched something deep within the dense utopian thicket of Mrs. Huffington's narrative-spinning apparatus, leading her to conflate Glenn Beck and President Obama in a grand unified theory about "the Hunger for Purpose in Times of Transition." Apparently unaware that "diversity" on campus is code for color of skin rather than content of character, she gushed:

Levin pointed out how the students "come from all 50 states and 58 nations" and urged them (and their parents) to go "entirely outside the range of your past experience," and "stretch yourself." "If the friends you make here are exclusively those who come from backgrounds just like your own and went to high schools just like your own," he said, "you will have forfeited half the value of a Yale education. Seek out friends with different histories and different interests; you will find that you learn the most from the people least like you."

As long as you toe the pc party line, of course. Diversity of world views need not apply. From there the HuffPo poobah-ette stumbled unwittingly into an embryonic if inchoate premonition of subsidiarian federalism:

"It's becoming clearer by the day that whatever 'good life' the country is going to have in the future, it's not going to be delivered by consumption — and, in the foreseeable future, it is unlikely to be delivered by Washington. The new "good life" will have to be "reasoned together" by all of us and forged together in our own communities and in our own families. As Obama said in 2006, "solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds."

That's where the rest of the country — Obama's "backwoods" tribes of bitter losers who "cling to guns or religion … as a way to explain their frustrations" — have been forever. You just weren't listening, Arianna & Company, including the Northeast Corridor fuddy-duddies of the establishment GOP, who still don't seem to get it. That's why it's a revelation for Arianna to have once been blind but now she sees:

"The challenge is to imagine a politics that takes moral and spiritual questions seriously," says Sandel, "but brings them to bear on broad economic and civic concerns, not only on sex and abortion." Justice, he writes, "is not only about the right way to distribute things. It is also about the right way to value things."

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Have you noticed what superb writers we have on the Tea Party side of the aisle?

The invasion of Smooth Crabgrass (Digitaria ischaemum) amidst the carefully-laid bricks of the terrace metaphorically evokes the part of human nature that lurks in the darkness beyond the Shining City Upon a Hill. Ben Franklin's attributed answer to a query as he left Independence Hall on the final day of deliberation comes to mind: "A Republic, if you can keep it."

"Britain's Home Secretary has decided Islamic terrorism should be renamed 'anti-Islamic activity,'" reports Dale Hurd of CBN News from London. Twitter friend The Right Scoop of Right Scoop TV calls it "your wakeup call America!":

CBN News is really doing great reporting these days. In this report, CBN News details how political correctness and multiculturalism run amuck are allowing Islam to take over Britain to the detriment of those who are living there. It is very eye opening.

Listen to the full, hair-raising CBN report here. Meanwhile stateside the NAACP is trying to rename peaceful Tea-Party dissent "violent racism." Fortunately, on this side of the pond "we're mad as hell, and we're not going to take this anymore!" Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft, blogging about the St. Louis Tea Party's nipping the toxic racist weed in the bud, speaks for us all in a rousing Tea Party Moment:

We will not be silenced.

We shocked the elites. We shocked the radicals and extremists. They knew they had to react and they lashed out at us. They called us mobsters, Nazis, radicals, and racists. They wanted us to pipe down; to be good little drones as they continued to wreak havoc across this great nation with their radical agenda. But, we gathered on street corners and met them at town halls.

We will not be silenced.In January they rammed through their nationalized health care plan. They lied to us. They said it would save us money. It won’t. They said it would not cover abortion. It did. They said your insurance plan won’t change. It will. We met them in Washington. And their state-run media lied about us and made up stories that we were racists. Despite the proof they continue this lie still today. But …

We will not be silenced.

Today they reach a new low. They publicly ridicule us as racists at their far left NAACP annual convention. We are hurt. We are angry. We are upset with this horrible lie.

We will not be silenced.

"The Tea Party's principles are simple and clear, explains Bill Hennessy, co-founder — along with our own intrepid Dana Loesch — of the St. Louis Tea Party:

Smaller federal government
Lower taxes
Fiscal responsibility
National defense
Federalism

Those are precisely the tools to lift all Americans out of poverty. They’ve worked every time they’ve been tried. In America, we just haven’t tried them in awhile, due in large part to the NAACP’s advancement of socialism.

Each of these First Principles protects the rights of every American—the rights inherent in our humanity, not phony “rights” invented by a bureaucrat. We stand for rights given by God that no man, no government, can justifiably deny or diminish. Our principles are the very same principles that the NAACP stood for in 1909 but has wandered away from since the 1970s.

Have you noticed what superb writers — and thinkers! — we have on the Tea Party side of the aisle? Compare the heartfelt, luminous prose exerpted above with the false narrative approach of "One Nation," the left's latest lame attempt to mount a top-down challenge to the bottom-up tsunami that is the Tea Party. The WaPo reports:

"They promise to "counter the tea party narrative" and help the progressive movement find its voice again after 18 months of floundering …

"The groups involved represent the core of the first-time voters who backed President Obama -- including the National Council of La Raza, NAACP, AFL-CIO, SEIU and the United States Student Association. (The effort is separate from the Democratic Party's plan to spend $50 million trying to reach those same voters.)

Good luck. In high school English back in the good old days, we were taught that muddy writing reflects muddy thinking, and to become a good writer you studied good writing. Must be all that Glenn Beck Book Club stuff, from Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers to Friedrich Hayek and Lucianne Goldberg's boy Jonah. Eat your heart out, Oprah!

Update: Michelle Malkin Buzzworthy link!

Update II: Memeorandum Top Items discussion.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Cedra Crenshaw vs King Samir Shabazz: The hand that rocks the cradle?

"I am up against the same machine that put Barack Obama in office. The machine came in, they wiped all of his competitors off the ballot, just like they're trying to do to me," grassroots Illinois state senate candidate Cedra Crenshaw told an Independence Day audience Saturday," drawing her secret weapon: "They can't call me a  racist, white, evil man." You can donate to her legal defense fund here.

"You hear so much about conservative women leading this conservative movement in this country, and I really believe that conservative women are the most persecuted figures in politics right now," says Dana Loesch in a refreshingly candid Dana Show radio interview — crossposted at BreitbartTV — with "mama grizzly" Cedra Crenshaw. Does the hand that rocks the cradle still rule the world? More about that in a moment, but first a few excerpts from the interview:

She's a wife, she's a stay-at-home mom, she's an education reformer, she's an accountant, and she was fed up, and so she threw her hat in the ring.

She has enormous support from the grassroots movement, and she has terrified the Chicago Machine, who is trying to move heaven and earth to get her off the ticket.

The Tea Partiers love her. Listen to the Dana Show interview and her Independence Day speech, and you will understand the smart, common-sense appeal of this authentic American voice. Fellow Illinois Republican Adam Andrzejewski at Big Government has more:

Why is the machine afraid? Because a new class of leadership is starting to develop. These new leaders threaten to end the shell game of taxes, politics, and patronage. Cedra Crenshaw is one of those new leaders, and she’s is running for state senate against one of the Chicago Machine’s rubber-stamp apparatchiks.

She’s an accountant who wants to spearhead a forensic audit of Illinois state government. A former auditor at Deloitte and Touche, Cedra supports an audit of the half a trillion dollars of Democrat-controlled state spending during the blow-off historic corruption of Blagojevich/Quinn. The Democrat Machine — contractors, politicians, and patronage army — stand in naked fear of the result that such an audit would bring.

"The mainstream media is completely ignoring you," Loesch notes, "because you defy their narrative of what conservatism is." Crenshaw agrees, but with new-media avenues like the Dana Show itself, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, fire-breathing bloggers and twitterers and Tea Party energizers, she's been able to disintermediate the media powers-that-be to get her narrative across loud and clear:

People in this state, they want jobs. They want economic growth. They're not interested in more handouts and more promises … My opponent, he's got no solutions except more tax increases.

While uniters like Cedra Crenshaw are pursuing the American Dream, dividers like New Black Panther Party Philadelphia chapter leader "King Samir Shabazz" (at 2009 street festival above) pursue the nightmare part of Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare: "I hate white people. All of them! Every last iota of a cracker, I hate him! You want freedom? You're going to have to kill some crackers! You're going to have to kill some of their babies." Whatever gets you on the evening news. Shabazz was caught on tape intimidating voters at the polls in November of 2008, but in his infinite and inscrutable wisdom, Attorney General Eric Holder is dropping charges.

Contrasting the public faces of Cedra Crenshaw and King Samir Shabazz, the words of William Blake's The Tyger" come to mind: Did he who made the Lamb make thee? We found a timely interpretation of the riddle in Juliette Akinye's provocative and insightful blogpost "Scarred Souls: More About Abortion" (h/t twitter buddy King Shamus of Blog de KingShamus), where the blogger AKA Baldilocks casts the old-fashioned notion of women as civilizers of men in a contemporary light:

There might be a little preaching. That's an essential part of me. He's a part of me…

All women should stop creating the exterior and — more importantly — the interior conditions under which abortion is an option. And by that I mean that all women should stop giving themselves to men who they are not sure will love, cherish and protect them and any prospective offspring they may create by having sex with each other …

You see, there’s this thing about women, a thing that makes us different from men, aside from the physical aspects. When we lie down with a man, we are giving him more than physical pleasure and doing more than gaining physical pleasure for ourselves.

When a woman has sex with a man, she joins her soul with him [For those of a more scientific bent, it's a matter of chemistry — oxytocin, the "cuddle hormone"] …

Think about all the illegitimate black children there are in America and think about the fact that black women have the highest rate of abortion of any women in America. That statistic says that there are very many black women who are giving themselves to men who don’t care about them.

Here's the kicker that illuminates the disjunct between Cedra Crenshaw's and King Samir Shabazz's American dreams:

And, on top of that, we can take these effects and mirror them onto black men, too many of whom are angry at the world, angry at black women, and angry at themselves (black-on-black crime). That anger almost always stems from observing or experiencing the spiritual, moral and worldly failure of their mothers.

It's the nanny state, stupid! The unintended consequences of the debilitating dependency fostered by those handouts Cedra Crenshaw's supporters want no more of.

Update: Related thoughts and video from Ed Morrissey:

“Mama grizzlies” actually fits better in the Tea Party movement, which I’ve argued is driven in the main by activist women. These are women with families who aren’t focused on what government can do for them, but what government should be doing, period. They’re defending their turf rather than looking for handouts, and defending their children from expansionist government and the massive spending that their children’s children will have to repay. It’s a good brand to stake out for Palin, but she’s been doing that all along with the Tea Party movement (as has Michele Bachmann). This just puts a label on it, and one that sounds much more assertive than “soccer moms” did.

Crossposted at Riehl World View, Cloven Not Crested and Liberty Pundits.

Cass Sunstein's "libertarian paternalism": Czar is "crazy" without the "y"

Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein is making us sick to our stomach, but Dr. Helen is on the case.

Dr. Helen is creeped out by Obama "nudge" czar Cass Sunstein's delusions of grandeur:

Glenn and I interviewed Cass Sunstein, the author of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness two years ago. Sunstein is now the Obama administration's regulatory czar. I remember as I listened to him talk about "libertarian paternalism" (isn't that an oxymoron?) that I felt sick to my stomach. In Sunstein's opinion, it seems that justifying the notion that people do not have free will gives license to bureaucrats and politicians to "nudge" people in the direction that they desire them to go. A nudge is often not noticed until it becomes a shove and by then, it is often too late.

Cass Sunstein makes us sick to our stomach too. He's the one who called for "mandatory government propaganda on political websites" last May:

Cass Sunstein, who wrote a white paper calling for “conspiracy theories” to be banned, wants to legally force Americans to “do what’s best for our society” and dilute their own free speech.

Behavioral scientist Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge, unwittingly revealed the cluelessness of brilliant crusaders with no grounding in how the world works in a July 2008 London Times interview gushing about how "libertarian paternalism" had "caught the imagination of top politicians" including Barack Obama:

So why the political interest? Because you can influence people's choices without being accused of "nannying" and it is cheap. Or, as the authors put it: "If incentives and nudges replace requirements and bans, government will be both smaller and more modest … In short, libertarian paternalism is neither left nor right, neither Democratic nor Republican. In many areas, the most thoughtful Democrats are going beyond their enthusiasm for choice-eliminating programs. In many areas, the most thoughtful Republicans are abandoning their knee-jerk opposition to constructive governmental initiatives."

As we wrote in one of our Cass Sunstein rants reasoned arguments recently, "We're smart enough to think for ourselves, Mr. President," and we have no intention of surrendering our free will, such as it is, to the dictates of an ivory-tower-muddled mind capable of getting it so wrong about his future boss in a July 2004 guest post at Glenn Reynolds's old MSNBC blog:

Obama is a genuinely independent thinker; you can't pigeonhole him. Like many Republican leaders, he's centrally concerned about economic growth. He knows the importance of free enterprise, and he has the courage to speak bluntly to union members about the benefits of free trade. Like the most sophisticated Democrats, he seeks ways of providing jobs and opportunities without busting the federal budget. Far from demonizing his political opponents, he compromises with them and is willing to learn from them. He's also someone of unquestioned integrity and good will.

Czar is "crazy" without the 'y."

Update: Cubachi links. Thanks, gorgeous girl!

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Gaza Blockade: UN interference with the natural order of things is perpetual war among tribes on steroids

 

 

 

Geography is destiny, and UN interference with the natural order of things is perpetual war among tribes on steroids. From our July 2006 blogpost "The Mother of All Root Causes": The partition plan for Palestine adopted by the UN in 1947 "took on a checkerboard appearance," writes Mitchell Bard in the Jewish Virtual Library. "These boundaries were based solely on demographics. The borders of the Jewish State were arranged with no consideration of security; hence, the new state's frontiers were virtually indefensible." Even then, the UN was worse than clueless.

"Oh, blah blah blah," twitters spot the dog, our favorite AmerAussie engineer, cutting through all the politically correct, keening condemnation of Israel for pre-empting the progress of that flotilla of self-proclaimed "peace" activitists trying the other day — in Charles Krauthammer's words — "to provoke an incident and weaken Israel’s blockade of Gaza." A babel of voices are trying to get at the truth or truthiness of the incident, but not even Krauthammer said it better than spot:

Sorry, but nothing makes me want to support Israel more than endless headlines reading "UN condemns Israel …"

Tim Blair — who has floated our boat since those heady days of "fake-but-accurate" plastic-turkey glory of yore — first among equals of Aussie opinionators, has rightfully named our own spot the dog "Best of Breed" on his list of "24-carat, 140-character characters you might enjoy." We often meet the doggie on Twitter on the cusp of the International Dateline at the crack of dawn here in coastal New England as we are just getting out of bed at Tiny's nose-biting insistence and spot in Western Australia is winding down to head off for the mattresses down under. Twitter makes for strange bedfellows.

Now, having pre-emptively made up our mind about what's going on in the waters west of Gaza, we're off to sub rosa blogfriends Solomonia, Richard Landes of Augean Stables, Professors Reynolds and Jacobson and other kahunas to bone up on what's really happening on the ground. The MSM — do they still have that? — having chowed down the Palestinian bowl of dog food in a single gulp, has nothing to offer but mischief and obfuscation.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Thad McCotter: The Time Greg Gutfeld Ate Reagan's Chicken at Bob Tyrrell's House

"The political libido of a liberal is utterly unrestrained. It's the political libido of a nymphomaniac, at times the political libido of a sex offender, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. told a giddy Greg Gutfeld & Co. on Red Eye in the wee hours this morning, explaining with customary brio the premise of his new book, After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery:

"… whereas the political libido of a conservative is much more restrained, almost gentlemanly and ladylike, and that's the problem. They need to learn a little bit about activism in politics."

Enter stage right the ladies and gentlemen that take tea:

I like the Tea Party movement …They love freedom, they love limited government, and they're my kind of people.

'Wonder what kind of political libido Mr. Tyrrell would attribute to us Tea Partiers. Hmmm. When it comes to core conservative principles — fiscal responsibility, limited government, free markets — we take no prisoners. But we're partial to persuasion and the power of the ballot box. Brute force isn't our thing, despite the best efforts of Rules-for-Radicals types with the "political libido of a sex offender" like SEIU President and Obama BFF Andy Stern to project their own modus operandi onto us:

We're trying to use the power of persuasion, and if that doesn't work, we're going to use the persuasion of power.

The hangover in the book's title refers to the last several years of the Bush Administration, when Republican politicians spent money "like drunken sailors, and I mean no offense to drunken sailors." The author expanded on the topic in a Washington Times column a few weeks back:

The Bush years witnessed the arrival of the conservative hustler. Sometimes the hustlers were crooks, such as Jack Abramoff. Other times they were the intellectual opportunists who thought they could advance in the kultursmog by tut-tutting established members of the conservative movement. I have in mind such reformed conservatives as the Davidians, David Brooks and David Frum(p).

The Davidians are members in good standing of the effete old guard we call the Northeast Corridor Conservatives, flogged here from time to time. As we wrote in "Freedom Vigil: The keyboard is my pitchfork" recently:

We aren't taking marching orders from inside the Beltway anymore — if we ever did. They're working for us, not the other way around, and if they still don't get it, we're going to make sure they do come November. That's the real story, but the Pauline-Kael bubblers, including Northeast Corridor "Conservatives" like David Frum, lately of AEI, are stuck in the amber of their echo chamber of addiction to power and contempt for extraordinary Americans.

Tyrrell's prescription, from the Red Eye interview, is a breath of fresh air:

In the book I'm talking about the conservatives who snipe at each other, the conservatives who are opportunistic, and those people, they're just doing it to advance themselves, whereas we do have a model of conservatives who've had a productive give and take that in my opinion is kind of a template for the future for conservatives, and that is the way Mark Levin, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh relate to each other. That's the way conservatives should relate to each other. A good-natured give and take. You don't always have to agree, but take an interest in each other, and don't diminish each other.

A final important point from the Washington Times article:

Talk radio, cable talk shows, the Internet, the established conservative think tanks and the magazines of the conservative movement are all flourishing and summoning compelling personalities armed with the tried-and-true ideas of the conservative movement.

The new breed of tried-and-true types is answering the summons. Independent Scott Brown's "surprise" victory restoring the "Kennedy Seat" to the people January 19 was famously the first shot heard. Now a small army of intelligent, articulate, authentically conservative candidates is on the march. We encourage our readers to support the candidates of their choice. We're putting our money and mouth behind three whose victories would, like Brown's win, restore currently stuffed seats to the people:

Sean Bielat for MA District 4 Barney Frank Seat. "Boston Tea Party Fallout: Retire Barney Frank?"

Tim Burns for PA District 12 the late John Murtha Seat. Sisu posts on Tim Burns.

Chuck DeVore for CA District 6 Barbara Boxer Seat. Check out Devore's answer to Sarah Palin's endorsement of primary rival Carly Fiorina.

Term limits by other means. Click on the links to read about the candidates and contribute, and may the best man win.

Note. As President of the Chelsea-by-the-Sea Thad McCotter Fan Club, we are, of course supporting the Michican District 11 incumbent's re-election bid. His twittering leaves all others' in the dust. This from last night:

One for the roadhog: AmSpec -The Time Greg Gutfeld Ate Reagan's Chicken at Bob Tyrrell's House

If we hadn't already fallen hard for Thad when we first set eyes on him on Red Eye just after Valentine's Day, this little rant from something calling itself "Mad At Thad" would have done the trick:

Thad McCotter has became a darling of the extreme right in recent weeks. Whether it be his participation in the Plymouth Township Tea Party or his consistent stops on Fox News, Thad McCotter is aligning himself with the most extreme elements of the Republican Party. He has aligned himself with supply-side, trickle-down economics even as their disastrous effects come to light. He joined a protest that saw venomous hate speech against the President, and, indeed, the whole government of the United States.

Align at will.

Crossposted at Liberty Pundits.

Thad McCotter: We fit our mind to the world, not the world to our mind.

"Congressman, does this make marriage more or less appealing? More marriages where you toss the 'I'll be faithful' vow?" Greg Gutfeld teased an impassive, pink-tied Thaddeus McCotter on Red Eye a couple of weeks back. The MIchigan Congressman's answer nonplussed the assembled guests of Fox News's fast-moving NSFW wee-hour gabfest.

"Love is a very ephemeral, it is a very delicate flower, and you never know when it's going to bloom, not," deadpan comic/philosopher king Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter shocked Greg Gutfeld's bleeding-edge irregulars on Red Eye the other night with an unexpectedly thoughtful and drawn-out answer to the host's toss-away question about celebrity marriage vows in Fox News's wee-hour theater of the absurd. The topic was what possible effects dropping the fidelity vow might have on marriage. McCotter expostulated:

And so I would think when you go into this, you go into it with your eyes open, and you take the person as they are, and you try to go from there …

In many ways we've become a generation or a nation that has traded romance for relationships, and this goes down the way where this is some scientific equilibrium you can keep between two people, and that's not how human beings work. And I think that the removal of that type of vow is an indication that somehow you have less than realistic expectations about [whether] human beings, sentient beings with hearts and with dreams and aspirations, can bond together or not."

McCotter's like that. Stands out in a crowd. He has a quiet, almost introspective way of public speaking that makes listeners lean in to hear what he has to say, the total opposite of the hand-pumping, in-your-face Mayor-Shinn-like bombast of old-fashioned rhetoricians like President Obama. Take McCotter's CPAC speech yesterday, where he expressed the same idea about our effanineffable human nature — those "sentient beings with hearts and with dreams and aspirations" — in a larger context:

Now the question is, what is the state of the movement, even post the election of Senator Brown?

I would argue it is strong, it is healthy. I would argue that we remain philosophical, not ideological because as those who've read Russell Kirk understand, conservatism is the negation of ideology. We fit our mind to the world, not the world to our mind.

It's the tragic view of human nature vs the utopian, the very foundation of this Shining City Upon a Hill, flogged here early and often.

Update: Maggie's links:

Our favorite Congressman, Thad McCotter, on love and sex.

See also the Congressman's interview at Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, with thanks to Yehudit in the comments.

EPA Cult of Death would "reap the profits of doom"

"We believe deeply that the denial of 'life's dark side in ourselves' is the key to what's wrong with the utopianist left world view," we wrote the first time we featured Max Ernst's 'L'Ange du Foyeur ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme' (1937. Oil on canvas. Private collection) back in April of 2004. The second time it accompanied our skeptical appreciation of NYT token conservative David Brooks's assertion in a column of that title, that "The darker view of human evolution is gaining clout." Third time, "the unthinkable. Self-described 'brain-dead liberal' playwright David Mamet has seen the light." Now individual revelations like Mamet's have cascaded into a tsunami of rediscovery of our nation's roots in the tragic view of human  nature.

"There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom," writes Shannon L. Goessling in a clear-eyed exposition of the stealth motives behind Obama's international progressivist Environmental Protection Agency ruling last April that carbon dioxide — the very stuff of life — is a dangerous pollutant that threatens the public and therefore must be regulated under the 1970 Clean Air Act. But the truly dangerous pollutant that threatens the public is the the soul-deadening pc propaganda of the decades-long Gramscian march through the institutions that has allowed these vulturous vested interests to get a seat at the head of the table of the body politic. More on that below, but first a few facts. As the WSJ reported in April:

This so-called "endangerment finding" sets the clock ticking on a vast array of taxes and regulation that EPA will have the power to impose across the economy, and all with little or no political debate. 

"The science is ultimately what should carry the day for public policy on climate change," declares Goessling, whose Southeastern Legal Foundation is taking 'em to court: 

There are many vested interests hoping to reap the profits of doom …

With huge vested interests pursuing a globalist agenda, it's been a Galileo-like effort to make the "skeptic" view known to the American people. Yet we are winning.

The best news is that the American people are beginning to wake up to the reality that they've been had, and they're mad as hell. Even as word of climate-science fraud and attempts to stifle skeptics began to break through the legacy media's "tribal filter on green news" last fall, a majority of our fellow citizens were telling pollsters they didn't see "global warming" as a crisis. Like the energizing spirit of the Tea Party movement itself, voters' growing recognition of Al Gore & Company's great con is "part of something bigger," as Glenn Reynolds wrote the other day in "Nashville Shows Tea Party Is America's Third Great Awakening," one of Instapundit's great distillations of what's "happening here."

Ron Futrell at Big Journalism puts it even more succinctly in a rollicking cogitation on the "Democrats and their activist old media … running in circles and working themselves into pretzels trying to define the 'Tea Party' movement":

It's the Constitution, stupid.

Exceptionalist America's brand of environmentalism used to be about individual initiative and stewardship of the earth in the trandscendentalist John Muir sense, most lyrically expressed in our all-time favorite quotation from Henry David Thoreau:

The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Compare and contrast nature red in tooth and claw — that part of our own human nature the "why-can't-we'all-just-get-along" left can't abide — with the totalitarianesque Green-Police Utopia of what Jonah Goldberg calls "Audi's Gorewellian Super Bowl ad." Recognition of nature and human nature is life-affirming. Green fantasies of sacrificing human freedom in the name of "saving the planet" embody a cult of death.

Boston Globe readers agree with Scott Brown!

Click here or on image to help send Mr. Brown to Washington!

"This gives hope," writes fellow tea partier Amy Kane of Amy Kane Online Journal in the comments to our previous post, with overwhelming evidence that the people of Massachusetts agree with Scott Brown that It's not the Kennedy seat, it's the people's seat:

Late yesterday afternoon The Globe posted its endorsement of, surprise, Coakley and the comments section exploded in favor of Brown. This morning they re-posted the same lame editorial with a different URL and brand new comments section, and the comments section is once again leaning heavily Brown.

As the all-seeing, all-knowing Glenn Reynolds wrote way back in 1999, "The powers-that-be aren’t anymore":

Without talk radio and the Internet, Tennessee would probably have an income tax now.

The major media were almost all pro-tax, and anti-tax groups got little publicity, most of it negative and condescending. Used to the old way of doing things, state politicians (many of whom barely use e-mail) missed the groundswell of opposition until it was too late. Tax opponents, meanwhile, simply bypassed the traditional gatekeepers in the media and took their case directly to the people. The people responded.

Be sure to read the whole thing, a concise, early analysis of how the old-boy-networks are being "disintermediated via the Internet"  As Tennessee goes, so goes the nation?

Update: Heading into downtown Boston shortly to do some more phone banking.

Update: Weekly Standard links. Thanks, Mary Katharine!