Glassman: Exploiting Disasters for Political Gain Is "Disgusting"

In today’s edition of TechCentralStation (a site for which this author writes regularly), James Glassman, who lived in New Orleans for several years and has strong ties to the community (including family members living there), writes about the efforts of some writers and public advocates to tie Hurricane Katrina to their political agenda:

[T]he response of environmental extremists fills me with what only can be called disgust. They have decided to exploit the death and devastation to win support for the failed Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive cutbacks in energy use to reduce, by a few tenths of a degree, surface warming projected 100 years from now.

Katrina has nothing to do with global warming. Nothing. It has everything to do with the immense forces of nature that have been unleashed many, many times before and the inability of humans, even the most brilliant engineers, to tame these forces.

After recounting some of the activists’ statements, which have received much attention in the news, Glassman addresses their claims directly:

The Kyoto advocates point to warmer ocean temperatures, but they ought to read their own favorite newspaper, The New York Times, which reported yesterday:

“Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming. But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught ‘is very much natural,’ said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.’”

Finally, Glassman points out that the very premise that tropical storms are increasing in intensity is entirely unsupported:

[T]here is no evidence that hurricanes are intensifying anyway. For the North Atlantic as a whole, according to the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Organization: “Reliable data…since the 1940s indicate that the peak strength of the strongest hurricanes has not changed, and the mean maximum intensity of all hurricanes has decreased.”

Yes, decreased.

Not only has the intensity of hurricanes fallen, but, as George H. Taylor, the state climatologist of Oregon has pointed out, so has the frequency of hailstorms in the U.S. (see Changnon and Changnon) and cyclones throughout the world (Gulev, et al.).

Glassman makes a powerful case. Read it here.

Jude the Not So Obscure

Jude Wanniski has died. He was one of the great names of modern conservatism and will be remembered in the canon of that movement as long as it exists. I didn’t know him, but our Alan Reynolds did and apparently quite well according to this article by James Glassman.

The Rev. RFK, Jr.

According to RFK, Jr.: God Hates Haley Barbour

You see, because Haley was insufficiently invested in environmental regulation, the Lord redirected Katrina from New Orleans and decided to slam Mississippi.

Look out, Haley. Greenpeace has a direct line to heaven.

Because the politician in question’s last name is Kennedy (and you know that’s not as in D. James Kennedy), he will receive somewhat different treatment for this pithy statement than he would have if he were surnamed Falwell or Robertson.

I Am Speechless Still

Sigh. Do we really need to teach Economics 1 here at Reform Club University Graduate School? Well, I see that indeed we do, as certain of our stalwarts seem to have swallowed various versions of the Broken Window fallacy (see my post below) whole, washed down with the old “planned obsolescence” chestnut.

Disasters cannot yield economic growth (that is, a bigger economy, or to say the same thing, greater aggregate wealth) because the resources used to repair the attendant physical damage—put aside the human suffering that cannot be redeemed at all—otherwise would have been used to produce other goods valued by individuals. Accordingly: Disasters must make the economy smaller in the aggregate. Yes, certain sectors (e.g., construction) will be bigger, and owners of inputs (labor and capital) in those sectors will be wealthier than otherwise would have been the case; but other sectors will be smaller, owners of inputs in those sectors will be poorer, and it is unambiguously the case that the losses exceed the gains, because in the absence of the disaster we would have both the housing and other physical capital as well as the other goods. Period. And please note that while owners of inputs in such sectors as construction might become wealthier, that does not mean that they are made better off (or happier) by the disaster, in that they might lose loved ones as well.

The “planned obsolescence” argument—as old as it is silly—assumes away the marginal cost of added quality, in this case added longevity. Consider the simple case of a razor blade that lasts forever; if we ignore such irrelevant complications as present value calculations (more on this below), risk aversion, and the like, consumers would be willing to pay for an infinite-life razor blade the expected lifetime purchase cost of ordinary razor blades. If the marginal (“extra”) cost of producing such a blade is less than (or in the simple case, equal to) the added value of the blade to consumers, then profit-maximizing firms will produce the blade. If it is not, then the firms will not produce it, and that outcome is wholly efficient, that is, consistent with the interests of consumers, because the extra resources needed to produce the infinite-life blade would yield greater value for consumers in the production of other goods.

Only if the discount rate used by producers to calculate present values is higher than that applied by consumers might some version of the planned obsolescence argument make any sense at all, and that outcome would not necessarily be inefficient. And, anyway, I rather doubt that the “planned obsolescence” crowd has anything quite so sophisticated in mind; their goal is to attack capitalism, however mindlessly. Precisely why would producers discount the future more heavily than consumers (on the margin)? The only plausible argument is the corporation income tax, which in a nutshell forces the corporate sector to discount the future more heavily than other sectors. Is the “planned obsolescence” argument really a left-wing call for fundamental tax reform? Please…

I Am Speechless

Well, not literally speechless; that would be so not Zycher. But in today’s Wall Street Journal we are informed by some poor soul—oops, a journalist—writing about Hurricane Katrina that “amid the grief and heartbreak, it should be noted that growth often follows such catastrophe. Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Floyd in 1999, for example, both ended up boosting local and national growth rates as rebuilding efforts created jobs and increased spending.”

If this is not the classic manifestation of the old broken-window fallacy, I know not what is. Why not nuke the whole eastern seaboard—I’d say California, but I live there—so that we can expand employment and spending in a rebuilding effort? Is this guy a moron? Or does he merely need to fill up twenty column inches with, well, whatever? That modern journalists are the political equivalent of hurricanes destroying public discourse everywhere they set foot would be amusing were their ignorance not so appalling.

The Political Usefulness of Disasters

One of the major techniques of modern politics is to take every important event and tie it to the back of one’s own particular hobby horse. One of the more ludicrous examples was the utterly absurd claims that the Asian tsunami was caused by global warming. Hence it was inevitable that we would begin to see articles today with titles such as “Brace for more Katrinas, say experts,” from today’s edition of Agence Press France. The anonymous author correctly observes that hurricane activity has intensified and looks likely to remain so for a while:

“Earlier this month, Tropical Storm Risk, a London-based consortium of experts, predicted that the region would see 22 tropical storms during the six-month June-November season, the most ever recorded and more than twice the average annual tally since records began in 1851.”

The piece also notes,

“Already, 2004 and 2003 were exceptional years: they marked the highest two-year totals ever recorded for overall hurricane activity in the North Atlantic.”

That is all quite true. Then the article moves on to consider a possible relationship to global warming, as has been posited by advocates of controls over greenhouse gas emissions:

“This increase has also coincided with a big rise in Earth’s surface temperature in recent years, driven by greenhouse gases that cause the Sun’s heat to be stored in the sea, land and air rather than radiate back out to space.”

The characterization of the rise in the planet’s surface temperature in recent years as “big” is certainly an exaggeration. However, the article does go on to point out that hurricane activity is cyclical and almost certainly always has been:

“But experts are cautious, also noting that hurricane numbers seem to undergo swings, over decades.

“About 90 tropical storms — a term that includes hurricanes and their Asian counterparts, typhoons — occur each year.

“The global total seems to be stable, although regional tallies vary a lot, and in particular seem to be influenced by the El Nino weather pattern in the Western Pacific.”

These are very important observations. The article then outlines, at some length, the arguments of global-warming advocates who claim that g.w. is creating more intense hurricanes, if not more such storms overall:

“On the other hand, more and more scientists estimate that global warming, while not necessarily making hurricanes more frequent or likelier to make landfall, is making them more vicious.”

The evidence the article adduces for this argument is coincidental and not causal, however, and is clearly highly speculative at this point. The piece says, for example, “‘The intensity of and rainfalls from hurricanes are probably increasing, even if this increase cannot yet be proven with a formal statistical test,’ Trenberth wrote in the US journal Science in June. He said computer models ‘suggest a shift’ toward the extreme in in hurricane intensities.” That is to say, Trenberth believes it although there is no statistical evidence for it.

The article ends on that note, which is a pity because there is more to the story than that. Readers are not told, for example, that as an article in the forthcoming October issue of Environment and Climate News mentions, a group of prominent climatologists and other experts on climate change has noted, “according to a century of National Hurricane Center reports, the decade with the largest number of hurricanes to come ashore in the United States was the 1940s, and that hurricane frequency has declined since then. They also cited data from the United Nations Environment Programme of the World Meteorological Association that hurricane frequency has declined since the the 1940s.”

The ECN story, unlike the APF one, quotes the environmental scientists as observing that “centuries-old evidence, as well as computer models, suggest warmer periods may actually generate a decline in the number or severity of such storms.”

The ECN story quotes James J. O’Brien, director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University, as arguing that “the more likely cause of hurricane frequency might be found in variations in the Atlantic Ocean Conveyer, the movement of the warm Gulf Stream whose waters, taken from the South Atlantic, replace the cooler, sinking water in the North Atlantic.

“When the Conveyer is strong, O’Brien said, historic records have shown an increase in Atlantic hurricanes; when it is weak, so are the hurricane seasons. For a hurricane to grow stronger, it must keep moving over waters warmer than 80 degrees F, which leads some people to link global warming and the storms. But, he said, there’s no scientific evidence to show that such areas of warm water are increasing in size.”

Casting a Spell

Hoosiers cannot win for losing with the mainstream press. The Washington Post et al. have been making fun of Dan Quayle for thirteen years because he can’t spell. Now the New York Times is making fun of John Roberts because he spells too well.

And just in case being a Grammar Nazi isn’t enough to derail the Roberts nomination, the Washington Post has decoded a 20-year-old first draft to conclude that Roberts is a crypto-secessionist (Hat Tip: Bench Memos.) You could stand in rebel territory and hit the Washington Post Building with a well-pitched rock, so I’m surprised I have to inform the staffers that Southerners do not call the Civil War The War Between the States, they call it The War of Northern Aggression.

Store My Article

For those cavemen (and women) whose club is Reform, here is a preview of my man-on-the-spot report on Katrina’s Florida vacation.

Here Comes the Real News

The Cindy Sheehan story reached its official terminus a few hours ago.

I remember Krugman saying Enron would be a bigger story than Sept. 11. Enron is going to be a footnote compared to Hurricane Katrina.

The Dictatorship of the Enlightened

Now listen up. This is some major league B.S. censorship nanny-state crapola.

The University of California system is refusing to take students from a Christian high school that teaches unorthodox views of biology and history. They say the students will be “unprepared.”

I’m not sure when I’ve heard anything quite so insincere. It doesn’t matter whether you slept through biology in high school, you will be aware of Darwin. In fact, these Christian students will have heard of Darwin and his theory, if only in the manner of refutation. Having been taught the “correct” version of the theory of origins has zero to do with one’s eventual performance at the university.

Imagine this scenario: Benighted, fundamentalist Christian student goes to a school teaching a highly Christocentric version of history, science, etc. He also happens to be quite intelligent and trots out an SAT score around 1450.

Question: Will this young man have any trouble putting up A’s in the University of Californa institutions? Noooooooooooooooooooooo.

Given that is the case, there can be only one reason for the policy recently announced. Intimidation. Welcome to secular totalitarianism lite.

(HT: Ted Olsen at Christianity Today on the web)

Thought of the Day

I think it’s time Matthew Broderick considered playing a cool guy again. He’s played so many milquetoasts since Ferris, he can probably not worry about getting typecast.

The Continuing Burden of Bad Philosophy

“They have been so nice, I would hate to break it to them that I really prefer Nietzsche to the Bible.”

– Convicted murderer Eric Rudolph, sometimes called a “Christian terrorist” for his attacks on two abortion clinics, a gay nightclub, and the 1996 Summer Olympics, on “good people … mostly born-again Christians looking to save my soul.”

NCAA Stands Down from Battle with FSU

FSU’s in the clear! Now, we can get back to hating Gators, instead of the useless bureaucrats of the NCAA.

I’m pasting in the statement and you can ask yourself whether any of the below would constitute new info for the NCAA:

Statement by NCAA Senior Vice-President for Governance and Membership Bernard Franklin on Florida State University Review

“The NCAA staff review committee has removed Florida State University from the list of colleges and universities subject to restrictions on the use of Native American mascots, names and imagery at NCAA championships.

“The NCAA Executive Committee continues to believe the stereotyping of Native Americans is wrong. However, in its review of the particular circumstances regarding Florida State, the staff review committee noted the unique relationship between the university and the Seminole Tribe of Florida as a significant factor. The NCAA recognizes the many different points of view on this matter, particularly within the Native American community. The decision of a namesake sovereign tribe, regarding when and how its name and imagery can be used, must be respected even when others may not agree.

“The NCAA position on the use of Native American mascots, names and imagery has not changed, and the NCAA remains committed to ensuring an atmosphere of respect and sensitivity for all who participate in and attend our championships. This decision applies to the unique relationship Florida State University has with the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Requests for reviews from other institutions will be handled on a case-by-case basis.”

Straw Man

Internet Electoral Data Demigod Patrick Ruffini has just posted his 2008 GOP straw poll. He provides lots of interesting ways to break down the poll data (by state, region, even by referring blog!) that make data nuts like me want to hug him and squeeze him and call him George. Go vote, and then take a look at the overwhelming popularity of one “fantasy” candidate.

Conceptual Illiteracy: Public Intellectuals and Intelligent Design

I just read an interesting post by a brilliant legal mind, Richard Posner, on the Ten Commandments decisions. His comments were interesting and worth your time. However, I stopped short when he made a side remark about intelligent design being nothing more than thinly veiled biblical inerrancy.

That’s a seriously uninformed perspective and I’m surprised to see it from a thinking machine like Posner. I can only conclude he has failed to investigate ID for himself and trusts the characterizations of ID set out by opponents.

Intelligent design is primarily a critique of the neo-Darwinian synthesis. It looks at things like statistical probabilities and irreducible complexity to sharply question whether Darwinian evolution could have occurred as postulated. There is NOTHING. Read NOTHING in ID theory to harmonize with the content of the Bible with the exception of an agreement about likely creation of the complicated life on the planet. ID does not reference Genesis or any other book of the Bible to make its case. It has a real intellectual content to it that can be debated without reference to revelation of any kind. In short, it is absurd to describe intelligent design as “thinly veiled biblical inerrancy.”

Now, I have no idea whether ID theorists are ultimately correct. I have read some of the books and articles and certainly do know that Posner’s characterization is ridiculous, irresponsible, and unusually slothful in his case.

When the NCAA Profited From the Seminole Image . . .

Not so long ago.

Walker Percy on Bourbon

Do savor this marvelous essay by the master of alienated existentialism. Don’t be scared by the fancy words. Here’s a sample to convince you:

I can hardly tell one Bourbon from another, unless the other is very bad. Some bad Bourbons are even more memorable than good ones. For example, I can recall being broke with some friends in Tennessee and deciding to have a party and being able to afford only two-fifths of a $1.75 Bourbon called Two Natural, whose label showed dice coming up 5 and 2. Its taste was memorable. The psychological effect was also notable. After knocking back two or three shots over a period of half an hour, the three male drinkers looked at each other and said in a single voice: ‘Where are the women?’ I have not been able to locate this remarkable Bourbon since.

G.K. Chesterton and Columbo?

I went on a G.K. Chesterton tear a few years back and thought I’d seen his best stuff.

I hadn’t.

Please take my recommendation seriously. If you like G.K. Chesterton and you haven’t read any of his Father Brown detective stories, you must partake. I picked up a collection on a whim recently and have been richly rewarded.

In Father Brown, I think I see some of the original source material for Columbo. He’s underestimated by everyone, but is, in fact, hugely gifted. A lot of it has to do with his underwhelming appearance, but the bigger issue is the poor esteem in which the reason of clergy is held. The simple priest blows that bugbear out the window. He is mighty in the art of detection and much of it has to do with his theologically informed knowledge of man.

Follow-Up on Planned Parenthood Cartoon

Joe Manzari offers an important observation on the Planned-Parenthood Golden Gate cartoon controversy that really tells you all you need to know about media bias. It’s really this simple:

Imagine if Focus on the Family published a cartoon depicting their chairman, James Dobson, as a superhero blowing up non-violent Planned Parenthood protestors. Do you think the liberal media would just shrug it off? How about if that same cartoon depicted pro-choice demonstrators being decapitated and drowned in sex-lubricant? Can you imaging that slipping through the cracks of the New York Times editing room? I think not.

Manzari is right. There is simply no question that this story would have been covered differently if it had been, oh say, the Washington state branch of Christian Coalition in its heyday.

On another front, Manzari is wrong. He characterizes Planned Parenthood Golden Gate as an organization that advocates violence because of their cartoon. Let’s be serious for a moment. We know that what they are really trying to do is satirize pro-lifers so potently as to make them seem completely unworthy of being heard. Still quite an unsavory tactic, but not quite in the realm of advocating violence.

Roger Ebert Goes Postal

Check out his least favorite films. Wonderful, killer-critic stuff.

An excerpt:

“Freddy Got Fingered” This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

Family Matters

I hope everybody caught Jay Homnick’s check-yourself-before-you-wreck-yourself JWR piece about the racism that still, unfortunately, remains buried only about an inch deep in America.

Now, a look around the world shows that aside from the rare righteous country like Denmark, the rest of the planet is looking out for number one, foremost, first, and last. World civilization is being held together by the English-speaking peoples, the “Anglosphere”: the US, UK, and our underappreciated friends, the Australians.

But also underappreciated is that after decades of partner-changing in the geopolitical dance, the Anglosphere may finally be embracing as its own the world’s largest democracy, and it’s high time. President Bush recently met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and a leading American Sikh, Satjiv Chahil, gushed, “It marked a turning point in US Foreign Policy and was an acknowledgement of the potential for India to become an invaluable strategic partner of the US from a global, political, economic and social perspective.”

I hope so, because Dr. Singh followed with these remarks at Oxford while on a state visit to the UK:

Every time terrorists strike anywhere all of us who believe in democracy and the rule of law must stand together and affirm our firm commitment to fight this scourge resolutely and unitedly. I sincerely hope that all of those who cherish and value open and free societies will join hands in the war against terrorism wherever it is fought. I wish the people of London well. I pray that their lives will soon return to normal and they can resume their celebrations for having been chosen the venue for the 2012 Olympics…

Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian Prime Minister to assert that India’s experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age old civilisation met the dominant Empire of the day…

It used to be said that the sun never sets on the British Empire. I am afraid we were partly responsible for sending that adage out of fashion! But, if there is one phenomenon on which the sun cannot set, it is the world of the English speaking people, in which the people of Indian origin are the single largest component.

Of all the legacies of the Raj, none is more important than the English language and the modern school system. That is, if you leave out cricket!

More on cricket some other time mebbe, but India gets it, and maybe now so will we.

Next time you’re tempted to play The Ugly American on an incompetent and/or incomprehensible voice from the subcontinent, blame the outsourcing corporation if you want, but not the person on the other end. They are feeding their families, and helping a great nation and a great people rise out of their heartbreaking poverty with education, a lot of hard work and a bit of Adam Smith.

I admit it’s sure tempting to be rude, because overseas service lines are the pits and the frustration is nigh-unbearable. But we should ask ourselves honestly if our tempers would be so quick if we imagined a pasty-faced Irishman on the other end. We should ask ourselves if that’s how we treat family.

When I next find myself consigned to the seventh circle of international call-center hell, I’ll try to be patient. And if I think of it, I’ll take a minute to welcome the heavily-accented voice on the other end to the family. We Anglosphere types gotta stick together. The future of civilization depends on it.

Nero Wolfe: Too Many Cooks

Last time I wrote, I panned The Black Mountain, which disrupted the Wolfe formula by taking him away from his famed New York brownstone. I thought the break in the formula was the problem. Too Many Cooks proves me wrong. This time Wolfe and Archie go to a spa in West Virginia where the world’s 15 greatest chefs are gathering for fellowship. One of them is hated and ends up assuming room temperature. Wolfe doesn’t want to figure it out, but circumstances force him into it. Wonderful story. Pick it up.

But the point of this post is not so much to review the book as it is to note the interesting perspective on race. The book was published in 1938. At various points I was horrified by the references to the black men working at the spa. They are called boys, niggers, shines, etc. One black man’s wife is said to have left him to raise three “pickaninnies.” Local law enforcement is clearly racist (which plays a part in the way the facts develop) and Archie is not much better. Because author Stout chooses to speak primarily through Archie, I began to wonder about Stout. Not to worry. Once Wolfe goes into action we finally see a man who has his head on straight about race. He dispenses with racist language and attitude and is rewarded with a frank relationship with the black men who are very relevant to the story.

The longer one thinks about the book, the more one reflects on race and the times. I continue to be haunted by the way Wolfe tells the black waiters and cooks that he is told blacks and whites have a certain way of dealing with one another in a place like West Virginia, but then demolishes the notion by proving that individuals matter much more than race.

When did that strain of civil rights cease to be a mainstay of the discourse?

Science And/Or Philosophy

So George Will thinks that intelligent design is worth talking about, just not in science class. I don’t agree, but not for a reason I’ve seen anyone else mention. Intelligent design belongs in the science classroom not because it’s science, but because it’s philosophy.

I’ve had this gripe for a long time. Considerations of how a discipline is pursued, and its basic epistomological underpinnings, should not be put off until graduate school. It’s a glaring weakness of secondary and undergraduate college education in the United States that it so often is. I’m not claiming the hard sciences are particularly bad in this regard; in fact, they’re probably better than history and some of the social sciences.

I came to realize how ill prepared undergraduates were to make basic process critiques when I started teaching History of Economic Thought at the UT/Dallas. (Yes, this is an odd course to relegate to a teaching assistant. But until I offered to teach it, it had been in the catalog for ten years and taught once.) You have to start somewhere in a survey course like this; I started with the Scholastics. But you can’t understand anything about how the Scholastics approached economic questions unless you know something about the philosophical structure they used, and in particular the ways they thought it was permissible to argue from individual observation to general theory. Then, when we moved on to the early French and English mercantilists, I realized that my students were no better prepared to understand their epistomology than they were with Aquinas. Most of them had picked up what the mercantilists believed in other classes; none of them had the foggiest notion why they believed it. And so it went, on up into Marshall and Keynes and the standard supply-demand and IS-LM analyses they’d all been suckling since they were freshmen.

And it’s just the same in other disciplines. A student who majors in history spends his entire undergraduate career taking courses that teach him what happened when. They teach nothing about why historians think that happened then, how historians work, how evidence is weighed, how contradictions are reconciled. And students of evolutionary biology learn the evolutionary theories that are currently in vogue. They learn nothing about how those theories are formed and tested. They learn nothing about how one would challenge a standing theory, what constitutes a meaningful challenge, how a priori assumptions focus attention on some evidence and blind us to other evidence.

That is why students of biology should be introduced to intelligent design in the science classroom. I hold no brief for or against intelligent design. I don’t know enough about it to have an informed opinion. But the little I do know seems to place it squarely in the Kuhnian tradition. Evolutionary biology as it currently stands, while it has significant explanatory power and a body of solid physical evidence, has unexplained mechanisms, apparent contradictions. Intelligent design is one approach to correcting those problems. There is nothing unscientific about the process that sometimes lead to scientific revolutions.

Life’s Ups And Downs

Speaking of Irwin Shaw, ponder this:

“An American, starting at any given point, believes that his career must go from success to success. In the American artist, of any kind, it is the equivalent of the optimistic businessman’s creed of the continually expanding economy. The intermittent failure, the cadenced rise and fall of the level of a man’s work, which is accepted and understood by the European artist, is fiercely rejected as a normal picture of the process of creation. A dip is not a dip to an American artist, it is a descent into an abyss, an offence against his native moeurs and his compatriots’ most dearly held beliefs. In America, the normal incidence of failure, either real or imagined, private or public, which must be expected in such a chancy and elusive endeavor as writing novels or putting on plays or directing motion pictures is regarded, even by the artist himself, as evidence of guilt, as self-betrayal.” (from Two Weeks in Another Town)

Parenthood and Skydiving

Sometimes NRO is more like feminine-RO, but I like it anyway.

I always enjoy the columns by Myrna Blyth. This little excerpt is worth noting:

At the wedding, my son told his guy friends that they had not been invited to a wild and crazy bachelor party because there had not been one. Jonathan explained that his brother, the best man, had come up with lots of suggestions for ending his bachelorhood in amusing, even spectacular, ways. He had suggested, for example, that they go skydiving together. Jonathan reported, “I said to him, ‘You must be kidding. I don’t want to go skydiving.’ And then I realized my brother has been married four years and has a baby. Does he know something I don’t know?”

Yes.I’m kidding. Kidding, I say. (I’ve been married ten years and have two kids under 3.5 years of age.)

I’m going skydiving next week with an outfit named Cooter’s Budget Skydive. The motto is “Y’all pack yer own parachute now, y’hear?”

Defending Dobson on Stem Cells

Watch me do it at The American Spectator. I’m dealing with two issues in this piece.

1. Is Dobson totally out to lunch on the Nazi comparison? (Nope.)

2. Is David Gelernter correct to say Dobson doesn’t belong in the major leagues of public discourse? (Nope again.)

Holding Corporate Boards Accountable

The limited-liability status of corporations allows them greater latitude in decision-making, by taking away the risk that corporate owners and decision makers will be held personally responsible for their actions. It also makes corporations less likely to respond wisely and decently to concerns raised by people outside the main circle of decision makers. As a result, it invites government to step in and regulate corporate behavior directly.

Recent corporate scandals have place increased pressure on management and boards to institute more effective ethical self-policing. Without the incentives of real liability, however, such actions are not likely to have much effect.

Hence the recent court decision regarding Disney’s $140 million payoff to former Disney president Michael Ovitz, who served in that capacity for all of 14 months, has greater implications than just the relief it brings the Disney board, whose actions in hiring, firing, and paying off Ovitz “did not violate duties to shareholders,” according to the judge’s ruling.

The judge, however, was highly critical of the Disney board’s behavior, writing in his opinion, “Many lessons of what not to do can be learned from defendants’ conduct here.” Today’s New York Times story on the matter noted that even though Disney won the case, scrutiny over corporate boards and management will increase:

[B]oard members have good reason to adopt a more conservative stance in compensation matters and avoid second-guessing, said Charles M. Elson, head of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware’s Lerner College of Business and Economics.

Although the judge ultimately found that the Disney board did not breach its duties, he discussed a tough standard for the diligence required of board members, Mr. Elson said. The standard has been clarified, and directors at other times and at other companies could be held accountable under it.

“It means that you can’t just make a decision with a devil-may-care attitude,” Mr. Elson said, adding, “it has altered director behavior forever.”

Bono as EveryChristian . . .

Because we are a multi-faith weblog, I generally try to stay away from straight-out proselytizing. However, since I can peg this to a celebrity, a major world rockstar (who is very newsworthy in his activities), I’ll proceed with a humble spirit and ask that co-bloggers grant me a little latitude.

I was reading an excerpt from a new book made up of extensive interviews between a journalist and Bono, the lead singer and songwriter for the band U2 and came across this segment that could speak for virtually any Christian you know. You think I sometimes get overly aggressive with a commenter or am maybe too sarcastic or uncharitable in a post? Believe me, I know that and much worse about who I am. Bono puts his finger on what all of us (Christians) are counting on:

Bono: You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “as you reap, so you will sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.

When asked to make his confession by the journalist, Bono replies:

That’s between me and God. But I’d be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I’d be in deep s—. It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity.

Picture Perfect: Wlady P. on Peter Jennings

Longtime American Spectator editor Wlady Pleszczynski strikes just the right note in summing up Jennings career and legacy. Check it out here.

Planned Parenthood’s Cartoon Fantasyland

You have simply got to drop everything and read this amazing post by Dawn Eden at The Dawn Patrol. She’s got a scene by scene analysis of an animated feature Planned Parenthood uses for agitprop purposes (actually, it can’t be agitprop when you’re the establishment).

Go see it here. You will not be disappointed. (Hat tip: Southern Appeal)