Shannon Love

The Leftists’ Doomsday Machine

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startrekdoomsday

Commenter Mike on this Hit&Run post on California [h/t Instapundit] observes:

First the once-great city of Detroit, then California, and soon the entire country if we don’t come to our senses, and fast.

 

Saul Alinsky’s new leftism combined with old-style Tammany Hall democratic party corruption is the political version of the Star Trek Doomsday Machine, devouring and destroying everything in its path. [links added]

 Heh. Here’s a video if you don’t remember the episode.  

Can’t say he’s wrong. Leftists have progressively destroyed the economic vitality of every region they dominated for more than a few decades. They do seem  inexorable  at times but I think we need to remember that things looked equally bleak back in the ’70s after leftists trashed everything. But the nation as a whole recovered and prospered.

Our diversity and compartmentalization remain our great national strength. If one region destroys itself with foolish policies, others can still prosper.  California and the Northeast are failing but Texas and other similar states are prospering.  

Perhaps this crisis will prove to be the end of the doomsday machine. Perhaps, like the Star Trek doomsday machine, their greedy, selfish overreach in this time of crisis will cause them to choke to death on the cream of their own runaway spending. This happened in the ’70s and led to the rebirth of the ’80s. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take as long this time.

Benji Saves the Universe Bad

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My spouse and I used to read the  Bloom County comic strip religiously. Reading the comics sitting together side by side was one of the rituals of our courtship. We read in specific order, snaking our way up the page and back down again until we ended up at Bloom County. We bought all the Bloom County books.  

As a  consequence, our speech is laced with allusions to the comic strip. I keep finding myself wanting to use these allusions in my writings but I can’t because most people won’t know what I’m talking about. One allusion I like in particular is saying something is, “Benji saves the universe bad,” so I’ve decided to post the strip so I can link to it in the future.  

benji-saves-the-universe

(Click the image to view in at full size.)

Transcript:

Panel 1: “George Phglat’s new film “Benji saves the Universe” has brought the word ‘Bad” to new levels of badness.”

Panel 2: “Bad acting. Bad effects. Bad everything. This bad film just oozed rottenness from every bad scene… simply bad beyond  beyond  all  infinite  dimensions of possible badness.”

Panel 3: [Opus pauses for a moment of contemplation.]

Panel 4: “Well, maybe not that bad, but lord, it wasn’t good.”

A lot of things are Benji-saves-the-universe bad. The Iraqi Mortality Survey springs to mind.

We the People, In Order to Form a More Perfect Union…

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Over at Reason’s Hit&Run, Jesse Walker plays the longstanding game of asking what song we should replace the Star Spangled Banner with should we ever decide to retire that old warhorse. I seriously suggested we use the refrain from School House Rock’s “The Preamble”

The refrain is just the preamble of the U.S. Constitution put to music. I like it as an anthem because it puts the emphasis on the Constitution where it should be. Of course, it may lack gravitas.  

As long as we’re at it, I think we should replace the socialist originated “Pledge of  Allegiance” with a recitation of the key paragraph of the  Declaration  of  Independence. It should run something like this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident,
 
that all men are created equal,
 
that they are endowed by their Creator
 
with certain unalienable Rights,
 
that among these are
 
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
 
That to secure these rights,
 
Governments are instituted among Men,
 
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
 
So say we all!

We could call it the “American Affirmation”. (That last line comes from the New England town-meeting tradition and would be particularly fun at sporting events.)

I’ve always found the Pledge of Allegiance to be a little too creepily  authoritarian. I think it a little too European for my taste. One of the key facets of American exceptionalism is that we are bound together by ideas and principles instead of  territory  or ethnicity. Swearing  allegiance  to a particular government represented by a particular flag doesn’t  really  represent our true bond.

Changing both the anthem and the pledge wouldn’t be a major break from tradition. The pledge was only made official in 1942 and The Star Spangled Banner in 1931.

Vocabulary Bleg

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Okay, this is driving me nuts.

A joint venture between Russia’s Gazpom and Nigeria’s NNPC resulted in a company named “Nigaz.”  [h/t Instapundit] They got into this trouble due to the Russian style of making acronyms using the  syllables  of words instead of the first letter. This style was very popular in socialist movements prior to WWII, which is were we got Nazi, Gestopo and Checka. This style remain popular in formally communist countries and in Asia whose ideographic languages do not lend themselves to initialisms e.g. the Pokemon children’s game comes from the romanized Japanese POket MONster.  

This style of acronym has a specific name but I can’t remember it and I find it in any online or offline reference. This will bug me  all day!

If you know the word I’m am looking for pitch in and save my sanity!

[Update: Wikipedia suggest either a “portmanteau word”  or “syllabic abbreviation” but I can’t shake the feeling that their is a specific word with latin or greek roots. *Sigh*]

My Solar-Powered Flashlight and My Wind-Powered Fan

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While reading  this story about changes in the water rights laws of western states, [h/t Instapundit] this bit at the end caught my eye.

Ms. Fitzgerald, an associate professor of sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, still lives the unwired life with her own family now, growing most of her own food and drinking and bathing in filtered rainwater.
 
Rain dependency has its ups and downs, Ms. Fitzgerald said. Her home is also completely solar-powered, which means that the pumps to push water from the rain tanks are solar-powered, too. A cloudy, rainy spring this year was good for tanks, bad for pumps.

*Sigh* Somebody actually  designed  a solar powered system to pump water out of a rain filled system. Somebody voted for Obama.  

The entire point of energy systems is to shift work in time and space to when and where we need it. Weather-dependent energy sources can’t shift work in time and space. Instead, the work happens when and where the weather wants it to happen. Weather-dependent energy systems cannot perform this most basic task of shifting work and that is why they are worthless for any large-scale use.  

I mean, if weather-dependent power can’t meet the needs of a hippy college professor, why do people think we can run factories, transportation and hospitals with it?  

[By the way, the water rights laws of the American West might seem  bizarre  but they do make sense in the context of the region’s historical development.]