Month: February 2011

Scott Walker, the Koch Brothers, and State of Wisconsin Owned Power Plants

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I am trying to put together the new lefty meme of the day. Let me see if I can do it.

1) Koch Brothers give money to Scott Walker’s campaign
2) Koch Brothers are in the energy business
3) Scott Walker folds a no bid process to sell the state owned power plants into the budget repair bill
4) Koch Brothers get sweet deal on said power plants as payback for campaign contributions
5) ?

This is what I am gathering from my facebook friends and demonstrators and some articles I have read. Most of the usual suspects are trumpeting this black helicopter theory as the real deal. Many in the Wisconsin state assembly brought up this in the debate that finally ended on Friday morning.

So what is the deal, really? What about this Koch Brothers connection? Why on earth would they want the Wisconsin owned plants? Do they? Lets do a little digging and try to come up with some answers.

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The End Game In Madison

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After a marathon session (the longest ever, iirc), the State of Wisconsin Assembly has passed Scott Walker’s budget repair bill. The Senate is unable to debate the bill since a quorum cannot be met on matters financial with our state senators having fled the state. In an interesting twist, an Illinois representative has said that the senators should pay Illinois tax on their salary, akin to a football player getting paid for playing the Bears in Chicago. He has a pretty good point, and has pointed to some of our senators on TV saying that they are “working” while in Illinois.

Meanwhile the state senate has debated voter ID, but there is a cost associated with that so they can’t pass that either. I am sure they will pass everything they can while the Democrat senators are away. I sincerely hope that someone can trace the resources that the Wisconsin Senators are being provided in Illinois to find out if they are accepting illegal monies.

Walker isn’t moving. I think he will shut down the state. He is holding all the cards. I think he will win.

Leftists and the Pierian Spring

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Victor David Hanson’s has a good post on”The Rise of the Adolescent Mind” which discusses how much of the public discourse seems driven by an adolescent mind set of “I want it, why won’t you give it to me?”. It inspired me to write a comment that turned out unusually well so I thought I would repost it here:

I think the problem with adolescents and Leftists in general is best summed up by Pope:
 

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again

 
When the mind starts to flower in late adolescence we feel empowered and wise because we compare our new found level of knowledge not with the sum of all knowledge but only relative to that which we personally knew a few months or years before. We feel that since we know so much more than we did, we must know all we truly need to know. This trait in youths has been noted since classical times. Usually, we only lose that arrogance when we graduate to life’s only true school, the school of hard knocks. The teachers in the school of hard knocks shove our heads under the water of the Pierian spring and force us drink or drown.
 
Unfortunately, many people never attend the school of hard knocks and never take those very vital deep draughts of experience. For those who spend their entire lives in government, activism or academia, inescapable physical reality never intrudes to disrupt the intellectual elegance of their fanciful hypothesis. Facts and physical limitations become strange mythological things spoken of only by the ignorant pagans in business, technology or the military. We grow up only when we have to. These people’s intellects and emotion freeze in late adolescence because they are never challenged to grow up.
 
A true education teaches humility. In a real education, every new thing we learn only expands the radius of our ignorance allowing to see how much more of the world actually exist and how very little of it our personal real knowledge covers.
 
A failed education, an indoctrination, teaches arrogance. It teaches that all that one needs to know lies within the circumference of the ideology. Anything outside the circumference is trivial. That is what we see in various collectivist ideologies. “Our knowledge is so vast and so encompassing that we have right, even the duty, to impose our will on everyone for the collective good.”
 
Perhaps we could find the Perian spring, bottle the water and market as something rich people drink to help the environment. Only then can we force our hoards of adolescents to imbibe the wisdom they truly need.

Israel, the Middle East, the Left, and Obama

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Brendan O’Neill quotes journalist John Pilger:

“Until the Palestinians are given back their rights we’re going to have instability throughout the Middle East,” declared John Pilger on ABC1’s Q&A last night. “That is central to everything.”

O’Neill responds:

Yet, one of the most striking things about the uprising in Egypt was the lack of pro-Palestine placards. As Egypt-watcher Amr Hamzawy put it, in Tahrir Square and elsewhere there were no signs saying “death to Israel, America and global imperialism” or “together to free Palestine.” Instead, this revolt was about Egyptian people’s own freedom and living conditions.

Yet on the pro-Egypt demonstration in London on Saturday, there was a sea of Palestine placards. “Free Palestine,” they said, and “End the Israeli occupation.” The speakers had trouble getting the audience excited about events in Egypt, having to say on more than one occasion: “Come on London, you can shout louder than that!” Yet every mention of the word Palestine induced a kind of Pavlovian excitability among the attendees. They cheered when the P-word was uttered, chanting: “Free, free Palestine!”

This reveals something important about the Palestine issue. . . . [It] has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time.

I’m not so sure O’Neill is right about the lack of anti-Israel sentiment among the Egyptian revolutionaries and elsewhere in the Arab world—I certainly hope so, but have seen several items pointing in the opposite direction. For example, USA Today reported that “the top leaders of the protest movement that toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak” have demanded that the government cut off the flow of natural gas to Israel, on grounds that “the Zionist entity” is mistreating those same Palestinians. I’m not all that positive that USA Today or anyone else can clearly identify “the top leaders of the protest movement” so clearly at this point in time, but this report is surely grounds for serious concern about the attitude of the emerging Egyptian government toward Israel. And here is a very disturbing report about anti-Semitism in Tunisia. Again, I hope O’Neill is right about declining anti-Israel sentiment in the Arab world, but I have my doubts.

O’Neill is clearly correct, though, about his other point: the absolute centrality of the anti-Israel (“pro-Palestinian”) cause to the leftist movement throughout the western world.

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