Dennis Prager explains why liberals are more prone to believe in, and fear, Global Warming.

— The Left is prone to hysteria. The belief that global warming will destroy the world is but one of many hysterical notions held on the Left. As noted in a previous column devoted to the Left and hysteria, many on the Left have been hysterical about the dangers of the PATRIOT Act and the NSA surveillance of phone numbers (incipient fascism); secondhand smoke (killing vast numbers of people); drilling in the remotest area of Alaska (major environmental despoliation); and opposition to same-sex marriage (imminent Christian theocracy).

— The Left believes that if The New York Times and other liberal news sources report something, it is true. If the cover of Time magazine says, “Global Warming: Be Worried, Very Worried,” liberals get worried, very worried, about global warming.

It is noteworthy that liberals, one of whose mottos is “question authority,” so rarely question the authority of the mainstream media. Now, of course, conservatives, too, often believe mainstream media. But conservatives have other sources of news that enable them to achieve the liberal ideal of questioning authority. Whereas few liberals ever read non-liberal sources of information or listen to conservative talk radio, the great majority of conservatives are regularly exposed to liberal news, liberal editorials and liberal films, and they have also received many years of liberal education.

— The Left believes in experts. Of course, every rational person, liberal or conservative, trusts the expertise of experts — such as when experts in biology explain the workings of mitochondria, or when experts in astronomy describe the moons of Jupiter. But for liberals, “expert” has come to mean far more than greater knowledge in a given area. It now means two additional things: One is that non-experts should defer to experts not only on matters of knowledge, but on matters of policy, as well. The second is that experts possess greater wisdom about life, not merely greater knowledge in their area of expertise.

That is why liberals are far more likely to be impressed when a Nobel Prize winner in, let us say, physics signs an ad against war or against capital punishment. The liberal is bowled over by the title “Nobel laureate.” The conservative is more likely to wonder why a Nobel laureate in physics has anything more meaningful to say about war than, let us say, a taxi driver.

— People who don’t confront the greatest evils will confront far lesser ones. Most humans know the world is morally disordered — and socially conscious humans therefore try to fight what they deem to be most responsible for that disorder. The Right tends to fight human evil such as communism and Islamic totalitarianism. The Left avoids confronting such evils and concentrates its attention instead on socioeconomic inequality, environmental problems and capitalism. Global warming meets all three of these criteria of evil. By burning fossil fuels, rich countries pollute more, the environment is being despoiled and big business increases its profits.

— The Left is far more likely to revere, even worship, nature. A threat to the environment is regarded by many on the Left as a threat to what is most sacred to them, and therefore deemed to be the greatest threat humanity faces. The cover of Vanity Fair’s recent “Special Green Issue” declared: “A Graver Threat Than Terrorism: Global Warming.” Conservatives, more concerned with human evil, hold the very opposite view: Islamic terror is a far graver threat than global warming.

— Leftists tend to fear dying more. That is one reason they are more exercised about our waging war against evil than about the evils committed by those we fight. The number of Iraqis and others Saddam Hussein murdered troubles the Left considerably less than even the remote possibility than they may one day die of global warming (or secondhand smoke).

One day, our grandchildren may ask us what we did when Islamic fascism threatened the free world. Some of us will say we were preoccupied with fighting that threat wherever possible; others will be able to say they fought carbon dioxide emissions. One of us will look bad.

La Belle France’s answer to Dagny Taggart, glamorous libertarian Sabine Herold, is running for a seat in the French Assembly, and the libertarian and the right side of the Blogosphere is justifiably echoing with expressions of admiration for both the lady’s political soundness and the lady’s charms.

If the French fail to support her, they deserve to wind up like those folks having a problem in the train tunnel.

Glenn Reynolds

Captain Ed

Publius Pundit

The Telegraph

Occidentality remains pessimistic on the fate of France.

Our own earlier posting.

Eugène Delacroix, La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty leading the People), 1830
oil on canvas, 260 Ãu2014 325 cm, Musée du Louvre

Pyongyang: old houses hidden behind high-rises. Note highway traffic: pedestrians.

Here’s something we don’t see every day. Photographs of North Korea taken by visiting Russian web-designer Artemii Lebedev.

The original version (in Russian) is here. Use CONTROL + arrow keys to move forward and back through the photo pages here.

You will be amused at this romance feature from the Sunday Times Style section. Sophia Raday, a typical Berkeley peacenik devoted to everything trendy leftie, recounts the story of how she fell for a West Point graduate, Oakland cop, and National Guard colonel.

MY husband is like the Lone Ranger: he leaves a trail of bullets in his wake. Not silver bullets, but gold 9 millimeters, orange “simunitions” and menacing hollow-points with bronze tips.

I find them at the bottom of the washing machine, next to the pile of mail in our front hall or mixed in a heap of change. He is a police officer in nearby Oakland, Calif., a former SWAT team member, and a colonel in the Army Reserve. Sometimes when I gather the cool bullets in my palm, I stare at them and wonder: How did I, a Berkeley resident, a former peace activist, someone with a “Bread, not bombs” button, end up married to The Man?

I like to tell people we met because he pulled me over, and I avoided the ticket with my feminine wiles. It’s not true, but our partnership is almost that unlikely. After all, I’ve been arrested several times in political protests and once for possession of marijuana. I’ve even trespassed onto a naval base to spray-paint protest messages over the sloganeering billboards.

My husband, on the other hand, subscribes to a magazine about wound ballistics, calls people he doesn’t like “communists” and distrusts anyone with a beard. He gets his hair cut at least twice a month. He loves to rub my hand over his spiky scalp while bragging about how especially “high and tight” it is this time.

The truth is, I met my husband on a blind date set up by a cousin who had gone to West Point with him. It amused me that on Tuesday night I was going out with a motorcycle-riding lesbian while on Wednesday I had a date with a soldier/cop. I wore a short skirt that showed off my long legs. When he arrived, I was charmed by his old-fashioned formality, how he called me “Miss Sophia” and pulled out my chair.

It was on our third date that I discovered he never left the house without a firearm. We went to see “Heat,” a crime drama with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, and when we were driving home, I asked, “So when you’re off-duty, do you ever carry a gun?”

He laughed. “Always. Got one on my hip right now.”

I was delighted. This was high adventure. I liked having covert awareness of hidden things under his clothes. Dangerous things. And I liked the idea that I would try to tame him, that I would be the one to put a daisy in his gun.

———————————–

I mentioned this story to my wife, particularly noting the detail of the husband referring to people he doesn’t like as “communists.” My wife sniffed, and said, “That’s exactly what you do!”

(with the aid of some very clever editing) U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Hat tip to Mr. Right.

Blatant violation of traditional Anglo-American liberties, and of the US Constitution, by police and prosecutors simply seizing (without process) the property of persons suspected of a crime is one of the most appalling fruits of the War on Drugs. Horror stories of local cops in Florida driving around in Ferraris and Porsches added to the constabulary fleet after seizure from wealthy tourists, of a Vermont granny losing her home because a visiting grandson was caught with pot, of the Hispanic cleaning woman who had her live savings taken “on suspicion” (what, other than drug dealing, could a Hispanic woman possibly be doing with a large sum of cash?), and so on have been showing up in news columns for the last few decades.

But, now the same highly dubious principle has been extended by Mayor Bloomberg, and the New York City Police Department, to new levels of legal and moral absurdity: for use in enforcing NYC’s Safety Nazi anti-fireworks laws far outside the borders and legitimate jurisdiction of the Cesspool on the Hudson. The Pennsylvania State Police ought to arrest the lot of them for criminal trespass and car theft.

NY Post story

Cato Institute History of American Forfeiture Law

The ACLU is not content with censoring and then pulling the plug on high school graduation speeches in Nevada.

Officials and a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union said Friday that administrators followed federal law when they cut the microphone on Foothill High School valedictorian Brittany McComb as she began deviating from a preapproved speech and reading from a version that mentioned God and contained biblical references.

“There should be no controversy here,” ACLU lawyer Allen Lichtenstein said. “It’s important for people to understand that a student was given a school-sponsored forum by a school and therefore, in essence, it was a school-sponsored speech.”

They are also hard at work on prohibiting the expression of dissent by their own board members.

Several board members of the American Civil Liberties Union expressed concerns at a meeting yesterday over proposed standards that would prohibit board members from publicly criticizing the organization’s policies and internal operations.

“I cannot vote for these proposals, as I have violated them nearly every time I have written an op-ed piece or spoken to the press,” said Mary Ellen Gale, an at-large member.

Bennett Hammer, a board member representing the organization’s New Mexico affiliate, cited examples of decisions in the last few years that he said had embarrassed the A.C.L.U. and contended that adopting the proposals would be yet another of “the things that have made us a laughingstock with the public.”

The board nonetheless voted against motions to strike the controversial provisions from the proposals and instead opted for further discussion.

Emily Whitfield, an A.C.L.U. spokeswoman, said the failure of the motions was not an endorsement of the proposals. “A vote at this early stage would have been a departure from the board’s deliberative process, and to suggest otherwise would be unfair and misleading,” she wrote in an e-mail message.

One of the provisions said, “a director may publicly disagree with an A.C.L.U. policy position, but may not criticize the A.C.L.U. board and staff.”

Another said, “Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement.”

Shouldn’t these guys change their name already?

The BBC collects fight songs from Ireland, Nigeria, South Korea, France, England, China, Cameroon, Argentina, Spain, and Italy.

Hat tip to PJM.

The Gulfnews reveals that Abu Musab al Zarqawi, while an full-time employee (Jihad Executive Director and Emir) of Al Qaeda working in Iraq, was collecting unemployment benefits in India.

Lucknow: Iraq’s deceased Al Qaida leader, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, was registered for unemployment benefits in India, a recent report suggests.

A query has been ordered to certify how Al Zarqawi, who was killed in a US air strike in Iraq last week, came to be registered as an Indian resident.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Secretary, N C Bajpai, is particularly concerned about reports that the late Al Qaida leader, who was registered under the name of Ama Zarqawi, was made eligible for unemployment benefits by the Lucknow district administration.

Disciplinary action has been ordered by the principal secretary and district administration against those responsible for the lapse.

Better check the US Social Security beneficiaries list.

History professor Joyce Lee Malcolm discusses, in the Weekend edition of the Journal, the unwillingness of the British government to defend its subjects against crime rising comcomitantly with its determination to prevent their defending themselves.

With Great Britain now the world’s most violent developed country, the British government has hit upon a way to reduce the number of cases before the courts: Police have been instructed to let off with a caution burglars and those who admit responsibility for some 60 other crimes ranging from assault and arson to sex with an underage girl. That is, no jail time, no fine, no community service, no court appearance. It’s cheap, quick, saves time and money, and best of all the offenders won’t tax an already overcrowded jail system.

Not everyone will be treated so leniently. A new surveillance system promises to hunt down anyone exceeding the speed limit. Using excessive force against a burglar or mugger will earn you a conviction for assault or, if you seriously harm him, a long sentence. Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer jailed for killing one burglar and wounding another during the seventh break-in at his rural home, was denied parole because he posed a threat to burglars. The career burglar whom Mr. Martin wounded got out early.

Using a cap pistol, as an elderly woman did to scare off a gang of youths, will bring you to court for putting someone in fear. Recently, police tried to stop David Collinson from entering his burning home to rescue his asthmatic wife. He refused to obey and, brandishing a toy pistol, dashed into the blaze. Minutes later he returned with his wife and dog and apologized to the police. Not good enough. In April Mr. Collinson was sentenced to a year in prison for being aggressive towards the officers and brandishing the toy pistol. Still, at least he won’t be sharing his cell with an arsonist or thief.

How did things come to a pass where law-abiding citizens are treated as criminals and criminals as victims? A giant step was the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act, making it illegal to carry any article for an offensive purpose; any item carried for self-defense was automatically an offensive weapon and the carrier is guilty until proven innocent. At the time a parliamentarian protested that “The object of a weapon was to assist weakness to cope with strength and it is this ability that the bill was framed to destroy.” The government countered that the public should be discouraged “from going about with offensive weapons in their pockets; it is the duty of society to protect them.”

The trouble is that society cannot and does not protect them. Yet successive governments have insisted protection be left to the professionals, meanwhile banning all sorts of weapons, from firearms to chemical sprays. They hope to add toy or replica guns to the list along with kitchen knives with points. Other legislation has limited self-defense to what seems reasonable to a court much later.

Although British governments insist upon sole responsibility for protecting individuals, for ideological and economic reasons they have adopted a lenient approach toward offenders. Because prisons are expensive and don’t reform their residents, fewer offenders are incarcerated. Those who are get sharply reduced sentences, and serve just half of these. Still, with crime rates rising, prisons are overcrowded and additional jail space will not be available anytime soon. The public learned in April that among convicts released early to ease overcrowding were violent or sex offenders serving mandatory life sentences who were freed after as little as 15 months.

And the slackening of law enforcement continues to stimulate the Labour Government’s erosion of the ancient liberties which were always England’s pride.

…a host of actions have been initiated to bring about more convictions. At the end of its 2003 session Parliament repealed the 800-year-old guarantee against double jeopardy. Now anyone acquitted of a serious crime can be retried if “new and compelling evidence” is brought forward. Parliament tinkered with the definition of “new” to make that burden easier to meet. The test for “new” in these criminal cases, Lord Neill pointed out, will be lower than “is used habitually in civil cases. In a civil case, one would have to show that the new evidence was not reasonably available on the previous occasion. There is no such requirement here.”

Parliament was so excited by the benefits of chucking the ancient prohibition that it extended the repeal of double jeopardy from murder to cases of rape, manslaughter, kidnapping, drug-trafficking and some 20 other serious crimes. For good measure it made the new act retroactive. Henceforth, no one who has been, or will be, tried and acquitted of a serious crime can feel confident he will not be tried again, and again.

To make the prosecutor’s task still easier, he is now permitted to use hearsay evidence — goodbye to confronting witnesses — to introduce a defendant’s prior record, and the number of jury trials is to be reduced. Still, the government has helped the homeowner by sponsoring a law “to prevent homeowners being sued by intruders who injure themselves while breaking in.”

It may be crass to point out that the British people, stripped of their ability to protect themselves and of other ancient rights and left to the mercy of criminals, have gotten the worst of both worlds. Still, as one citizen, referring to the new policy of letting criminals off with a caution, suggested: “Perhaps it would be easier and safer for the honest citizens of the U.K. to move into the prisons and the criminals to be let out.”

Just last week, the BBC was reporting on the success of a “knife amnesty.”

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
–Adam Smith

Brian Carney interviews Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster in the Weekend Wall Street Journal, and finds a man operating a sensationally successful business operation based on an atypical, casting one’s bread upon the waters, model of customer service.

I put the question to Mr. Buckmaster: Google has turned unobtrusive text ads into a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. And posting a Google-type ad or two next to its search results wouldn’t cost Craigslist users one thin dime. So why not cash in?

“In the big Internet boom, thousands of companies were set up,” explains Mr. Buckmaster, who also counts himself as CFO and COO of the company. “With the exception of us, pretty much all of them were set up with the primary objective being to make a lot of money.” And yet, he continues, “Almost all of those businesses went under and never made any money. Even businesses like Amazon still haven’t made any money. They are still, over their entire lifetime, net negative. Here we are, we’ve been in the black since 1999 — six or seven years.”…

Mr. Buckmaster figures that Craigslist employs 21 people, and starts to count them on his fingers. It never brought in venture capitalists with their grand designs and exit strategies. “We didn’t want to have those voices at the table,” he says. So Craigslist has remained beholden to no one — except, as Mr. Buckmaster constantly intones, its “users,” who pay nothing for the privilege of posting or searching the millions of pages of apartment listings, moving sales and personal ads that make up the Craigslist ecosystem. “If it’s not something that users are asking for,” he says, “we don’t consider it.” The money that does come in comes from businesses posting in just two categories of classifieds in three cities — job listings in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles and, this week for the first time, brokered apartment rentals in New York…

We’re much more comfortable charging companies than charging individuals,” Mr. Buckmaster says. “Businesses are better equipped to afford a small fee and businesses can pay for fees out of pre-tax dollars where on average users are less able to pay a fee and they have to pay in post-tax dollars.” Giving users something free and denying money to the government at the same time? This man is no commie. What’s more, he runs a lean outfit. “There are big advantages to focusing exclusively on user wants and needs as we do, and blocking out everything else. That’s one of the ways we keep our staff small and our operations simple.”

As for the banner ads, “It’s not something our users have asked us for,” Mr. Buckmaster deadpans, his 6-foot-8-inch frame slumped in a leather chair in his living room and his eyes fixed on some distant point out the window. It turns out this is something of a mantra for Mr. Buckmaster; what Craigslist’s users want, they tend to get. No more and no less…

When asked whether there’s a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: “It’s unrealistic to say, but — imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?”

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. “Now, there’s something wrong in the reasoning there,” he admits. “You can’t run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company” — more points for understatement. “But still, it’s a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible.” As an end-user, I suppose I do, too.

Buckmaster’s approach to capitalism as an exercise in serendipity clearly works for Craigslist. It could be argued that this sort of business model in which adversarial friction is minimized, and the delivery of value is maximixed, is closer to the original free market ideal than today’s more commonly encountered vastly regimented and hierarchical bean-counting organizations.

The old Andrew Sullivan came back yesterday, when Sullivan expressed shock at the firing by Governor Robert L. Erlich Jr. of Maryland of a Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority board member, Robert J. Smith, for expressing the opinion during a television talk-show discussion of Gay Marriage that there should not be a “special place of entitlement within the laws of the United States for persons of sexual deviancy.”

Sullivan defended Smith’s freedom of speech and opinion vigorously.

Reading this story upset me. A man is fired by the Maryland governor from his job as a member of the state’s Metro transit authority board. His sin? Speaking his mind about homosexuality, in a context which in no way affects his ability to do his job. I deeply disagree with his views and they could have been expressed more civilly, but he has every right to them, and they are indeed intrinsic to his understanding of his own religious liberty. Words hurt no one. Firing him for his views is an act of profound intolerance – by governor Ehrlich, and by my own city councilman, Jim Graham. The gay rights movement needs to practise the same tolerance it is asking for. Leave orthodox Catholics – and Protestants – alone in the expression of their own faith, and their own politics.

Sullivan’s principled libertarianism shows particularly well by contrast with the stance taken by Ilya Somin, one of the commentators at the Volokh Conspiracy, who equates the conventional religious view of homosexuality as “deviant” with racism, and thinks Smith’s firing was justified as:

The DC area has a large gay population and many of them presumably take Metro “trains and buses.” There is good reason to assume that a Metro Board member with Smith’s views would be less likely to enforce policies against antigay discrimination in public transport than one who is not a homophobe. At any rate, since there is unlikely to be a shortage of nonbigoted people willing to take this cushy patronage appointment, Governor Ehrlich was right not to take a risk on Smith.

Hat tip to PJM.