harmonicminer

Here’s an excerpt of an email from my mom, a smart lady who watches CSPAN, keeps up with the news, but is not a “political junkie” like some of us. She was watching the news today, which featured dueling senators on who was at fault for high oil prices, and the Democratic success at forbidding drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf. Her questions follow:

I am puzzled about drilling for oil. Democrats and Republicans seem to
be arguing only about Alaska situation. I heard that there are 80 some
offshore drilling possibilities in the country. Is that true and if
so, why do they always use Alaska as example? Do you know other places?

And herewith, my reply.
_______________________________________

Hi Mom,

Actually, today the Senate Democrats stopped a plan to drill off shore in the “outer continental shelf”, also.

Essentially, the outer continental shelf is within 200 miles of land. The oil pumping platforms that could be put up would mostly not be visible from the coast.

China will be drilling not far from Florida, and sharing the product with Cuba.

The potential is simply enormous, if we get started now. The common Left statement that drilling wouldn’t make a significant difference is simply a lie, a breathtakingly large one.

Bottom line: Democrats are in thrall to the environmental movement, which hates ALL drilling ANYWHERE.

For example, in Alaska, the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) is about the size of South Carolina, and the area where the oil companies want to search and drill is about the size of Dulles International Airport.. Admittedly a big airport, but a very tiny part of the whole.

As you can see, the area where exploration/drilling would occur is very small. It’s the tiny red square in the left side of the green area, which itself is only a small part of ANWR. Try to imagine 3 square miles taken out of the state of South Carolina, and you get the idea.

Yet, we hear constantly from the Left that drilling will “destroy the pristine wilderness”… Which no one ever SEES, because no one goes there. It’s pure radical environmentalist ideology, and nothing but. This is not a cruise ship destination. No class of school children will ever visit on a “nature field trip”.

We are not talking about drilling in the middle of a widely visited national park, disrupting vacationing campers, despoiling nature, destroying irreplaceable habitat, or any of the lies told by the left to deflect attention from the simple map above.

Yes, we hear people on the Left say that oil companies already have lots of places to explore and drill. From the same story:

Congressional Democrats were quick to reject the push for lifting the
drilling moratorium, saying oil companies already have 68 million acres
offshore waters under lease that are not being developed.

The problem is that those are places with low probability of turning up anything useful (so it would probably be wasted money to look), or places where fossil fuels are known to exist, but would be very expensive to recover. Can anyone take seriously the notion that, with prices as they are now, a US oil company that thought it had access to a gusher wouldn’t be pumping as fast as it could and selling it?

So when people say that the oil companies already have lots of places to look/drill, they’re just blowing smoke to confuse the situation. Oil companies lease federal lands for oil exploration, without automatically knowing first what can be found. In many cases, the oil companies have already looked, determined that it would cost too much to get the oil, and are going to let the lease expire in a few years. Yet the Left will report those areas as “places the oil companies could already drill”. That’s simply a distortion of the situation… About what we’ve come to expect from the enviro-Left.

We know where the easily available oil is, generally. We have to get it. We need it.

Here is what the Left doesn’t seem to understand. We are going to drill, sooner or later, in every single place they are blocking it now. It’s only a matter of time, and public desperation. On my more bitter days, I hope the Left stalls even longer… So that maybe the public memory will pin the blame on the Left for making them suffer for so long. But given the short public memory, that’s probably a forlorn hope.

To return a common pleading of the Left right back at them: Let’s do it for the children. The ones who are 8 now will be 18 when we see significant return on drilling we do now, according to the Left’s naysayers. (It won’t really take that long.) All that amounts to is an argument to start NOW. And there are a lot of unborn kids who are going to need a ride to school in a few years, and are going to be wondering why mom is pulling them in a rickshaw.

Extremist groups continue to seek nuclear weapons: US official

Extremist groups continue to actively seek nuclear weapons, a senior US official said Tuesday during a meeting in Spain of a US-Russian initiative to fight nuclear terrorism.

“Combating nuclear terrorism is especially important today,” US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Rood told a news conference.

“Regretably we continue to see indications in the United States from information we collect of the very terrorist groups we are most concerned about making concerted efforts to acquire nuclear capabilities with the express intent to use them against our peoples,” he added.

Read the whole thing.

I note that there are two nations we are no longer concerned about getting nuclear weapons which could be “leaked” to terrorists, or used in a terrorist manner to threaten regional neighbors.

Libya is the first.

Iraq is the second.

A similar headline could have been written in 1999, and the news report could have been published almost unchanged, other than the dates of the conference. But those two nations would definitely have been high on the list of concern of nations that are actively engaged in developing nuclear weapons, or are doing the ground work and making plans, and biding their time.

Libya gave up its plans in direct response to the the US invasion of Iraq. Qadaffyduck (Saturday Night Live’s term about 25 years ago) decided he’d rather stay in power in a non-nuclear nation. And, of course, regardless of the actual state of Sadaam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program, his intent was very clear, just as soon as UN sanctions were lifted… which was coming soon, and he knew it, having paid off major Russian, French and German players to sabotage any UN effort to do otherwise, with the “oil for food” kickbacks.

Some will say that Iran’s program is a result of the Iraq invasion. Some might even believe it. I’m not one of them, tending to take the Iranian government at its word. It intends to kill Israel, one way or the other. After that, it will consider its options.

We live in very serious times. The presidency is not for dilettantes. Do you want Obama sitting across the table from Ahmadinejad, or John McCain, with all his flaws?

Oil executive on upcoming TV show

During the past four decades or so, people in the oil business usually have been shown as greedy, manipulative, opportunistic villains who value money over conscience. From J.R. Ewing on TV’s Dallas to Daniel Plainview in the recent film There Will be Blood, it is easy to find examples of stereotypical oilmen.

It is true that the oil industry, just like any other business, has those who exploit others for personal gain. In my 30 years of experience in the oil patch, however, I have found that 99 percent of those who work in the business are hard-working, values-minded, patriotic people who just want to make a living.

Television and movies rarely show the thousands of people in the industry who lose their fortunes — or even lives — in the search for crude oil. Beyond Hollywood, elected officials at all levels often attack the industry, using partial facts or incomplete knowledge of the industry.

Read the whole thing.

Generally, only the military and religious folk are more likely than the oil industry to be vilified by Hollyweird. I hope this man’s hopes aren’t dashed on the cutting room floor.

Israel’s Vice Premier Haim Ramon says the Truce with Hamas is a ‘triumph for radical Islam’

“I am against a truce, because it is another triumph for radical Islam. It won in Lebanon and now it is about to win in Gaza. So what is the point of being moderate? Why would Hamas be interested in a resolution?” said Ramon at a Haifa University conference.

Ramon, together with Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz and Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann, abstained from a cabinet vote last Wednesday to refrain from embarking on a large-scale military operation in Gaza and instead to give more time to Egyptian-mediated truce efforts, although none of the ministers voted against the decision.

Ramon said that the Gaza truce deal must be brought to for a referendum. “The government must reach the framework of an agreement and then bring to a vote,” he said. “Any significant agreement with the Palestinians requires a referendum.”

National Religious Party MK Zevulun Orlev called the agreement “a balloon that will burst” and added that “A ceasefire agreement without Gilad Schalit is a moral crime that conveys the message of abandoning the kidnapped soldier to his fate.”

MK Arye Eldad of the National Union/National Religious Party said that “Because of a corrupt prime minister and an insecure defense minister Israel is capitulating to Hamas and accepting upon itself a cease-fire that will allow Hamas to hit Ashdod and Kiryat Gat later on. The residents of Israel will take note today of who is to blame when the entire center of the country turns into a war zone because of Olmert and Barak.”

Pray that the nay-sayers are wrong… but they probably aren’t.

I just finished reading Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg.

A particularly thoughtful review from a critical friend of the author, historian Michael Ledeen, can be found here. Ledeen, while sympathetic with Goldberg, has many more or less scholarly reservations about this aspect or that of the book, while not denying the essential validity of Goldberg’s thesis. Sometimes, I think Ledeen misses the main point over an academic disagreement about the definitions of terms, but he is someone whose opinion is worth knowing.

Essentially, Goldberg is tired of the “F______ bomb” being dropped on conservatives and the “right”. (So am I.) It’s very common for the Left to call anyone they don’t like on the Right a fascist.

Goldberg’s project is to show that while fascism may be hard to define, if the term means anything other than “the people you don’t like”, it applies more to the Left (European and American) than to the American Right, especially the Right since the 1950s (and following) conservative movement in the USA.

I confess that I have always been confused by the assignment of “left” to Soviet Communism, and “right” to German national socialism, when both were revolutionary, statist, dictatorial, war-like and socialist (in different ways). In NAZI socialism, the state did not own all the means of production, but it surely dictated what the “owners” could and could not do (not vice versa), and central planning was the order of the day in either case. For two systems called “left” and “right”, they seemed to have much more in common than in opposition.

If you have wondered about this, and don’t think you know the answer now, you probably need to read this book. If you haven’t wondered about it, you may be too incurious or too hide-bound to benefit from it. If you think you already know the answer, blessed are you. Go write your own book. Send me the link.

Some people say that, in regard to fascism in the USA, “It can’t happen here.” Some on the Left will say that it might, and if it does, it will come from the Right.

Goldberg says it (fascism) already happened here, under the Wilson Administration during the run-up to World War I and shortly following, under “war socialism”, sedition laws (something like 150,000 arrests of people who spoke against the war, even in the privacy of their own homes), economic central planning, the first large, professional, national propaganda ministry, etc. And, Goldberg traces the lines from Wilson and Progressivism to Mussolini and, to a lesser extent, Hitler, both of whom admired Wilson’s programs and approach, which was also a major influence on Franklin Delano Roosevelt a generation later.

Finally, his main point is that the modern Left in the USA wants to practice “nice” fascism, that is, mostly non-violent, but still statist, authoritarian, and centrally directed by a ruling elite who possess wisdom superior to the rest of us, as well as better motives. This immediately forces out-of-bounds a criticism of the book that implies he is saying the modern Left is composed of “Nazis”. He is saying that the modern Left and classical fascists had many similar aims and philosophies about the relation of the state to the governed, and similar concepts about the more-or-less infinite plasticity and perfectability of humans, if only the proper social and governmental context was present. That’s why the book cover has a “smiley face Fuhrer”.

One of the very best aspects of the book, whether or not you agree with its central thesis, is the enormous number of quotations in it. There are a lot of sources, including quotes I never saw in a school or university history text.

Goldberg quotes from some authors whose work I have read, and for those, at least, I can testify that he uses them fairly.

One thing to watch as you read the book is how he uses the word “liberal”. It has two meanings in the USA: “classical liberalism” (more or less the founding fathers’ vision expressed in the Declaration and the Constitution, personal liberty, minimal state intrusion into most aspects of life, Locke, Burke, Smith, etc., more or less the vision of the American Right since the 1950s or so) and modern “left liberalism”, the lineal descendant of the Progressive movement of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, itself a descendant of Rousseau via the 19th Century socialists/marxists. Mostly, his use of the term is clear in context, but occasionally you’ll need to reread a sentence to be sure which he’s discussing. (Lately, since many liberals hate to be called that, they’ve begun using the term progressive for themselves.. again. Maybe, if we’re lucky, in a couple of decades we can have the word “liberal” back, and use it as it was meant to be used.)

Some of the most negative reviews of the book on the web are by people who admit to not having read it, and to people who seem to have read half of it, based on the accusation of omissions of items that are in fact present in the book, if you actually read it. And, there are some who seem deliberately to misunderstand which use of the term “liberal” is meant in a given place, in order to construct a logical flaw where there is none.

At the very least, it’s time to stop hurling the epithet “fascist” at every person, idea or institution you don’t like. In future, use of that term against an opponent should probably be viewed as being as far out of bounds, and silly, as calling someone Hitlerian, the “reductio ad hitlerum”, also a fond tactic of the Left. The exception: it is intellectually acceptable to apply the term if you can define it first. VERY few should try, since some serious scholars seem to struggle with it.

Sadly, some of the reviewers do call him a fascist, simply for writing the book and saying what he says.

Statists everywhere, look out: we’re coming for you. (Sorry… couldn’t resist.)

UPDATE:  ANOTHER INTERESTING REVIEW

Here is a series of youtube presentations by Goldberg at the Heritage Foundation. There’s more if you search youtube for “Jonah Goldberg”, including 3 question/answer segments. If you find any of this interesting, the book is better, but, as always, video is relatively painless as a quick intro to something.

Liberal Fascism (1) — Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

Liberal Fascism (2) — Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

Liberal Fascism (3) – Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

Liberal Fascism (4) – Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **

Liberal Fascism (5) – Jonah Goldberg ** UNEDITED **