US Supreme Court to revisit 2003 decision that race-based discrimination is legal.
Should be interesting.

In the post “Hoffer on Scribes and Bureaucrats“, David Foster of Chicago Boyz excerpts a couple of timely passages from Eric Hoffer’s essay The Ordeal of Change, published about fifty years ago:

The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes…

Hoffer was referring at the time, Foster notes, to “underdeveloped countries” and not to the modern west, but his description is an apt portrayal of our modern-day would-be central planners: bureaucrats, politicians, big-picture leftist pundits, and the chattering class of so-called progressive voters:

…there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate society, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them.

There is a cliché in Washington. There are two things you do not want to see made: sausage and laws. To those we may add a third: Barack Obama’s decisions.
Ron Suskind’s book Confidence Men portrays Barack Obama as being confounded by his duties as president. Some of the scenes depicted by Suskind would be comical if they were not so tragic for America. For example, when Obama’s experts assembled to discuss the scope and intricacies of the stimulus bill, Barack Obama was out of his depth. He was “surprisingly aloof in the conversation” and seemed “disconnected and less in control.” His contributions were rare and consisted of blurting out such gems of wisdom as “There needs to be more inspiration here!” and “What about more smart grids” and — one more that Newt Gingrich would appreciate — “we need more moon shot”.
Even “Pelosi and her staff visibly rolled their eyes.”
Suskind writes:
Members of the team were perplexed…for the first time in the transition, people started to wonder just how prepared the man at the helm was.

Warnings though, are meant to be ignored:

I used to mention that even a marginal increase in summer frosts, or shortening of growing seasons could spell disaster … but no, these guano-for-brains bots of the “green” movement were more concerned about propagating the mythical phenomenon of rising sea levels or increased hurricanes.

Rising sea levels? You mean that people still believe that?

Word was just issued this week in Vancouver that, as an interim guideline, all builders are being told they should raise the level of their land by a metre.

Update: Myths so desperately clung to that trade war may be around the corner.

via

A seven-year-old Brit named Elliot Dearlove recently asked a five-year-old boy on a playground if his skin was brown because he was from Africa.
Whoops:

His mother, Hayley White, 29…received a phone call last month to say her son had been at the centre of a ‘racist incident’….”I was told I would have to sign a form acknowledging my son had made a racist remark which would be submitted to the local education authority for further investigation…”

Elliot: “I was just asking a question. I didn’t mean it to be nasty.”
Nice try, kid. You’re on file now.
Photo of the depraved perp at the link.

From a school textbook (“a comprehensive introduction to the study of Geography”) used by Grade 8 students in NSW, Australia:

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that the planet is warming, there are still people who deny that is a result of human activity. The most vocal of these deniers are conservative political thinktanks (sic) and the right-wing radio ‘shock jocks.’ (emph. mine)

Why, it’s almost as if unionized teachers are using Geography classes to brainwash kids with politically-partisan propaganda:

Fortunately, a new generation of world leaders is taking global warming seriously. In the United States of America, President Barack Obama is working to reduce America’s reliance on fossil fuels and is providing leadership in international efforts to reduce CO2 emissions…In Australia, the Rudd Labor Government is legislating for a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme….

There was a time not that long ago where the expression “sustainable conventional energy” was considered an oxymoron.
I wonder, does hundreds of years of conventional energy in abundance change it to a tautology?

“The message is quite clear, you can produce gas hydrates using conventional techniques,” says Scott Dallimore, a senior scientist at Natural Resources Canada, who co-led the project in the Mackenzie Delta. Over two winters the researchers drilled down more than a kilometre into a 150-metre-thick layer on the edge of the Beaufort Sea at Mallik — the most concentrated known deposit of the frozen fuel in the world.