Quote of the week

The ideologies of "self-esteem" and "multiculturalism" are two sides of the same nihilistic coin. "Self-esteem" devalues achievement and responsibility, which are the sources of genuine self-respect. And "multiculturalism" it is merely a pose of opposition to one's own culture; it entails no real regard for different cultures. -- James Taranto

Malice or stupidity?

I'm normally extremely skeptical of conspiracy theories, but when I think about the Daylight Savings Time I have a hard time resisting the temptation of thinking about it as a grand experiment of governments to see how far they could go in pushing harebrained schemes on their subjects without eliciting massive protests. I'm sorry, but I just can't see any other benefits to this massive disruption of all things that depend on time as measureb by clocks. Energy savings? There might be some, but they probably pale in comparison to time, money, and energy wasted in preparation and response to the time shift.

This year provides an especially egregious example of that waste. A small handful of countries including USA and Canada, decided to extend the DST by several weeks at the beginning and end of that period. Since almost all aspects of our lives are now heavily dependent on computers, and those in turn depend on their clocks, the impact of that decision is enormous. I run a small IT shop in a relatively small part of a large university, but our group already spent many hours dealing with the change in DST: learning about the implications and steps we needed to take; obtaining, testing and applying patches; informing users; dealing with computer problems that arouse due to the patches, etc... I'm sure there will be more disruption and time wasted when the DST rolls in this weekend... I just pray that at least a few congressmen will miss a few very important events due to the havoc they unleashed, but I'm afraid that the diligence and hard work of their IT people will shield them from the consequences of their stupidity.

I'm not an economist and don't have hard data, but if someone were to calculate the economic cost of the change in the DST, I suspect it would be staggering, even in the IT-related costs alone. It may well be more costly and disruptive than the infamous "Y2K bug", because that one affected mostly older, large-scale systems, while the current problem will impact all kinds of devices, including personal PCs, PDAs, phones, etc. So why isn't it getting the same level of media attention as Y2K? Why is the IT industry swallowing this bitter and costly pill without so much as a whine? I think that this is at least in part due to the out-of-proportion frenzy that was whipped up the last time around. The Y2K bug, which was supposed to bring the post-industrial nations to their knees (remember the stories about seemingly intelligent people stacking up supplies and moving out of cities and into primitive cabins so as to avoid the mayhem that was to follow?), fizzled, and so both the media and the IT people are now afraid to even bring up the subject of DST, so as not to be seen as Chicken Littles yet again. That's why the US Congress will get away with making the stupidest and costliest mistake since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The real tragedy is: that'll only encourage them.

A masterpiece of a con

I wanted to write a post about how I hate hypocrisy and hypocrites, and point to this story about Al Gore, the Oscar-winning crusader for the environment, whose Knoxville, Tennessee, mansion consumes 20 times more electricity than an average American household. However, the more information about this gets uncovered by inquisitive bloggers, the harder it becomes not to admire Gore for his devilish cleverness. Get this:

1. Gore's mansion used so much natural gas and electricity in 2006, that his energy bill for that year was $30,000


2. Gore buys "carbon offsets" (a modern form of indulgencies) to compensate for his use of carbon-based energy sources


3. He buys those offsets from a company called Generation Investment Management


4. Gore is a chairman of that company and owns its stock


5. In other words, it is like me issuing a speeding ticket every time I go 100 mph on a highway, and writing a check to myself.

If that isn't a clever, clever scheme, I don't know what is. Gore may still be a hypocrite, but he's also much more than that: he's a brilliant con man. There is nothing particularly impressive about profiting from any public fad or hysteria of the moment. What is impressive is double-dipping: profiting from whipping up that hysteria (e.g. by making a blokbuster "documentary", getting an Oscar, being paid for speeches), and then positioning yourself to make tons of money from the gullible public. In some sense it's akin to a dishonest stockbroker talking up some worthless stock in some chat rooms, and then making a killing by selling it to the suckers. It is however, much more elaborate and intelligent a con - it is a masterpiece of the genre. I've always had a soft pot for mastery. If I could be assured that Gore would use his considerable skill for the benefit of the United States and not merely for personal enrichment and aggrandizement, I'd vote for him in a heartbeat.

Selective sensitivity

Some Polish people are pretty upset about a relatively unfunny cartoon that recently appeared in The New Yorker: one boy says to another, "My parents named me Zbigniew because they were drunk." I'm guessing that what the author of this cartoon found funny was this hard to pronounce name - obviously, someone must have been off their rocker to give that name to a child. The trouble is, that's a fairly popular Polish name, so the Polish equivalent of this cartoon would (in translation) read something like, "My parents named me Sean, because they were drunk." Funny? You decide.

The thing wouldn't be worth two seconds of attention, if it weren't for the selective sensitivity adopted by the Western media of late. Do you think the editors of The New Yorker would have published the cartoon, if the name being made fun of was "Obama?" Or "Shlomo?" Or "Mohammed"? Or "Kfume"? I seriously doubt it. Especially, if the cartoon would even so little as hint at something that might be objectionable to the "perpetually offended", i.e. muslims.

It's not the joke itself, but the context of cowardice surrounding it, that is so offensive. This is what happens when you start sacrificing the right of free speech and free expression on the altar of "sensitivity" (read: "fear"). You can't say anything disparaging or funny about women, because it's "sexist". Racial minorities will accuse you of "racism", if you dare to make fun of them. Then come the various ethnic groups. Pretty soon you find that the only people you can make fun of are abstract white men with no religious or ethnic affilliation. That's the world we're already living in. Do you find that funny?

"Terrifying political correctness"

Here is Vaclav Klaus again, commenting on the responses to his interview:

I am getting a lot of reactions from the U.S. to my Friday interview in "Hospodářské noviny" where I talked about the global warming, among other things. Someone has distributed the interview to many internet servers and I have pleased many American non-Al-Gores by my statements because they feel as a minority that is under the pressure of a terrifying political correctness in the U.S. It is crucial to call things by the right name.

The phrase "terrifying political correctness" has struck a nerve with me, because it is terrifying indeed. How it emasculates people! In all my 27 years of living in the socialist Poland I did not see people as afraid to say what's on their minds as I am witnessing in the United States, a country that seems attached to the idea of "free speech" as no other country in the world. On the one hand, you can of course openly curse and vilify this country not only with impunity, but to the applause of many "progressive" Americans. On the other hand, stating that women may be less genetically predisposed for interest in science than men may spell the end of your career, even if you're a president of Harvard, unless you hurry and apologize profusely. Political correctness is worse than secret police, because it gets internalized, so you always carry it with you - the police at least leave you alone from time to time.

Vaclav Klaus on the myth of global warming

Being from Eastern Europe it is impossible not to feel a sense of pride when hearing leaders like Vaclav Klaus bluntly say things that no politician in the West would dare to say. Here is Klaus in a recent interview, speaking about "global warming":

Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses. This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians. If the European Commission is instantly going to buy such a trick, we have another very good reason to think that the countries themselves, not the Commission, should be deciding about similar issues.

One can only hope that a decade in the EU will not turn all of of them into spineless worms like so many of their Western counterparts.

War dividends

I know it is going to sound cynical, because there is a lot of human tragedy underneath all this, but the war in Iraq and the mess in the Middle East have produced a number of benefits for the United States (and for the rest of the world, to some extent). To name just the big ones:

1. Re-igniting the ancient feud between the Shia and the Sunni. As long as they keep duking it out amongst themselves, they will have less energy and resources left to dish it out to the Great Satan. Similarly with the other various factions: Hamas vs. Fatah in Palestine, Hizbollah in Lebabon. The rest of the world is much better off when the murderous attention of muslims is focused inward.


2. With Iran now scaring its Sunni neighbors shiiteless (or should it be "shiiteful"?), they are looking to the US as the only stabilizing force capable of keeping the deranged Iranian leadership in check. The Europeans have proved (yet again) completely helpless, and Bush is sending signal after signal that he's not going to lift a finger against Iran - one can only imagine the sense of vulnerability of countries like Saudi Arabia.


3. The fairly dramatic rise in oil prices apparently had negligible effect on the US economy, which is remarkably strong. While the higher prices were a huge windfall to the oil-producing countries, they also - and more importantly - demonstrated that the global economy is not as vulnerable to disruption coming from the Middle East as it appeared to be in the seventies. If the interest in alternative energy sources is sustained and leads to technological innovation and consumer adoption, this vulnerability will be reduced even further, to the point when (as Spengler points out in his piece), sudden disappearance of the entire Middle East may well go unnoticed.


4. If Abu Ghraib was such a public relations nightmare for the United States, imagine what the relentless carnage unleashed on innocent civilians by assorted islamic fanatics must be doing to their image in the world, including the so-called "Arab street". One would have to be completely brain dead not to feel a profound cognitive and emotional distress upon being relentlessly bombarded by news of muslims slaughtering other muslims by busload, while the "infidels" are emerging relatively unscathed from the bloodbath.


5. The power that the United States now solely wields on the global stage only increased, with many countries - including the enemies of the US - now realizing what mayhem would be unleashed if the only superpower were to disengage from the world. If we withdrew from Iraq next week, the brutal slaughter that would engulf that country would be on par with the Rwandan genocide.