Echoes in Eternity

Today's article on Zeal for Truth is pretty good, so you should read it.

Global warming is perhaps the most discussed “global” issue in news media today. Turn on the radio, television, or hop onto the internet and somehow the issue of global warming is waiting to be debated or touted as the impending crisis of the 21st century. However, the real crisis behind the issue of global warming is freedom.

Never mind that global warming proponents would like to control your car, where and how often you drive, how much energy you consume, where you live, and all things livestock related, society nods their head and tips their hat to such notions. After all, no one really minds as long as these are suggestions or “encouragements.” Enthusiasts discuss their ideas and most people replace at least one light bulb in their house.
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Stop to consider for a moment what would happen if these aforementioned “encouragements” became law. How these laws would be enforced? The only way to enforce climate change laws is to restrict the freedom of individuals. Once a suggestion becomes law, the choice to comply is removed or rather, it is becomes a non-choice of compliance or penalty. Perhaps many people would not mind small penalties for using non-incandescent bulbs in their homes. In fact, most people don’t mind that cars are mandated to be more fuel efficient. Yet, the philosophy behind global climate change legislation is dangerous. The implication behind the “need” for such laws is that of removing the choice from individuals and giving control to governing authorities.

It grows immediately more concerning when such ideas potentially impact entire families on a personal level. Recently, politicians and professors in both Australia and Britain suggested that population control and baby carbon taxes should be strongly considered.
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The viewpoint of regulating individual actions is based on the idea that others have the right and responsibility to control your choices and penalize you accordingly. It goes beyond choosing to calculate your carbon footprint to deciding who has a right to reproduce and breathe air. It assumes that life is owned by a collective group of strangers rather than one’s self.

“While every individual should be cherished, mankind’s reproduction is akin to the replication of a virus. We are swamping the planet and devouring its resources.”-North West England MEP, Chris Davies

The first loss of personal freedom may just be a light bulb, or car, however it when carried further it will inevitably lead to the marginalization of the natural rights to life and liberty and possibly the loss of both.

So, it appears that as the number of pirates has dropped in the last 200 years, global temperatures have risen. Hmm, this is truly an inconvenient truth. Arr, Matey!

The marvelous Mark Steyn...

The holiday season is here, and that means it's time to engage in the time-honored Christmas tradition of objecting to every time-honored Christmas tradition. Australia is a gazillion time zones ahead of the United States – it may even be Boxing Day there already – so they got in first this year with a truly fantastic headline:

"Santas Warned 'Ho Ho Ho' Offensive To Women."
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If I were a female resident of Sydney, I think I'd be more offended by the assumption that Australian women and U.S. prostitutes are that easily confused.
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But the point is that the right not to be offended is now the most sacred right in the world. The right to freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, all are as nothing compared with the universal right to freedom from offense. It's surely only a matter of time before "sensitivity training" is matched by equally rigorous "inoffensiveness training" courses.
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For example, when I said the right not to be offended is now the most "sacred" right in the world, I certainly didn't mean to offend persons of a nontheistic persuasion. In Hanover, N.H., home to Dartmouth College, an atheist and an agnostic known only as "Jan and Pat Doe" (which is which is hard to say) are suing because their three schoolchildren are forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Well, OK, they're not forced to say it. The pledge is voluntary. You're allowed to sit down, or, more discreetly, stand silently, which is what the taciturn Yankee menfolk who think it's uncool to sing do during the hymns at my local church. But that's not enough for "the Does." Because the pledge mentions God, their children are forced, as it were, not to say it. And, as "Mr. and Mrs. Doe" put it in their complaint, having to opt out of participation in a voluntary act exposes their children to potential "peer pressure" from the other students.
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Let us now cross from the New Hampshire school system to the Sudanese school system. Or as The Associated Press headline put it:

"Thousands In Sudan Call For British Teddy Bear Teacher's Execution."

Last week, Gillian Gibbons, a British schoolteacher working in Khartoum, one of the crumbiest basket-case dumps on the planet – whoops, I mean one of the most lively and vibrant strands in the rich tapestry of our multicultural world – anyway, Mrs. Gibbons was sentenced last week to 15 days in jail because she was guilty of, er, allowing a teddy bear to be named "Mohammed." She wasn't so foolish as to name the teddy Mohammed herself. But, in an ill-advised Sudanese foray into democracy, she'd let her grade-school students vote on what name they wanted to give the classroom teddy, and being good Muslims they voted for their favorite name: Mohammed.

Big mistake. There's apparently a whole section in the Quran about how, if you name cuddly toys after the Prophet you have to be decapitated. Well, actually there isn't. But why let theological pedantry deprive you of the opportunity to stick it to the infidel? Mrs. Gibbons is regarded as lucky to get 15 days in jail, when the court could have imposed six months and 40 lashes. But even that wouldn't have been good enough for the mob in Khartoum. The protesters shouted "No tolerance. Execution" and "Kill her. Kill her by firing squad" and "Shame, shame to the U.K." – which persists in sending out imperialist schoolmarms to impose idolatrous teddy bears on the youth of Sudan.
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Still, at exactly the time Gillian Gibbons caught the eye of the Sudanese authorities, a 19-year-old Saudi woman was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail. Her crime? She'd been abducted and gang-raped by seven men. Originally, she'd been sentenced to 90 lashes, but her lawyer had appealed and so the court increased it to 200 and jail time. Anybody on the streets in Sudan or anywhere else in the Muslim world who wants to protest that?

East is east, and west is west, and in both we take offense at anything: Santas saying "Ho ho ho," teddy bears called Mohammed. And yet the difference is very telling: The now-annual Santa lawsuits in the "war on Christmas" and the determination to abolish even such anodyne expressions of faith as the Pledge of Allegiance are assaults on the very possibility of a common culture. By contrast, the teddy bear rubbish is a crude demonstration of cultural muscle intended to cow and intimidate. When east meets west, when offended Muslims find themselves operating in Western nations, they discover that both techniques are useful: Some march in the streets, Khartoum-style, calling for the pope to be beheaded, others use the mechanisms of the West's litigious, perpetual grievance culture to harass opponents into silence.

Perhaps somewhere in Sydney there's a woman who's genuinely offended by hearing Santa say "ho ho ho" just as those New Hampshire atheists claim to be genuinely offended by the Pledge of Allegiance. But their complaints are frivolous and decadent, and more determined groups are using the patterns they've established to shut down debate on things we should be talking about. The ability to give and take offense is what separates free societies from Sudan.

It was a long (and short) night for Favre.

I'm traveling to Indy a lot now (every other week), and the project is coming along nicely.

Mark Steyn writes today on the crime epidemic in Britain, specifically in the metal department. It seems that anything metal (especially made of lead or copper) is being stolen, right down to the door knockers and number plates on people's homes.

But “crime prevention” measures cannot in and of themselves prevent crime. When I lived in England, not so long ago, one of the minor pleasures of rural life was walking across a couple of fields, along a public footpath through a copse, discovering a small medieval country church, and going inside to contemplate the divine for a few minutes. In those days, the churches were unlocked. They’re not anymore. Presumably there were local lads who would steal from the Lord even then, but not a significant segment of the population who targeted houses of worship. So today there’s wire mesh over the beautiful (one assumes) stained glass to stop thieves pinching the lead from the windows. It’s a small loss, but a telling one. The police have no leads, and the buildings have no lead. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it was stolen last Thursday.

Back in the Seventies, it was discovered that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were illegally burning the barns of Quebec separatists. And the then Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, remarked with his customary glibness that if people were upset by the illegal barn-burning perhaps he’d make it legal for the Mounties to burn barns. As George Jonas observed, M. Trudeau had missed the point: barn-burning wasn’t wrong because it was illegal; it was illegal because it was wrong. Once that distinction is lost, civil society becomes all but impossible – because a broadly agreed morality plays a big role in social cohesion. Today in the western world, more and more things are illegal but we’re less and less clear what’s wrong. And everywhere but America, where any metal thief who attempts to steal your doorknob risks staggering away with at least as much metal lodged in his vital organs as in his swag bag, the state doesn’t trust its citizens to defend their property and in doing so uphold what’s right.

Britain’s metal crime is a poignant image of social disintegration: The very infrastructure of society – the manhole covers, the pipes, the cables on the transportation system, the fittings of the courthouse – is being cannibalized and melted down. When there’s no longer a sufficiently strong moral consensus and when the state actively disapproves of a self-reliant citizenry, what’s left is the law. And law detached from any other social pillars is not enough, and never can be.

Here is a good and serious discussion regarding the question "who would Jesus bomb?"

I have just begun reading From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, a compilation by Paul Hollander of "personal accounts of political violence and repression in communist states." I actually am still in the introduction, since the intro totals about 50 pages. I am looking forward to this book, as my knowledge of the full ugliness of communism is really quite minimal (much of this due to the fact that the Western world doesn't promote such knowledge). I just came across an overwhelmingly horrible fact in the introduction that I had to share and perhaps tie back to one of my past posts. According to records, possibly 1 in every 10 Hungarian women were raped by Soviet troops during World War II. TEN PERCENT! A few months ago, I linked to a map of Europe which showed the extremely high (20% or higher in some countries) abortion rates in those countries which used to be under Soviet rule. After reading what Soviet troops did to so many of those women, is it any wonder that abortion is so prevalent there today? All their dignity, value, and worth (both for themselves and the generations to come) was destroyed in those couple years of war. How many children were born from those ghastly crimes that felt only disdain from their mothers for the crimes of their fathers? And in turn, how many of those children grew to believe that kids were a curse? When asked whether anything should be done about the rapes and murders, Stalin replied that the troops should be allowed to have their "fun."

America's premier political pastor and some white evangelicals' answer to Al Sharpton, Pat Robertson, today endorsed Rudy Giuliani for President. This from the man who blamed the 9/11 attacks on our abortion-crazed, decadent society. He endorses the Republican candidate LEAST likely to do anything positive on the cultural front. Then again, Pat Robertson long ago put himself on a pedestal higher than God. God is merely his puppet, whose name he invokes to gather support for his personal crusades. He used to be a faith healer, much like the disgusting Benny Hinn. He called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez (an adolescent tyrant, but that is beside the point). Robertson also claimed to be able to leg press 2,000 pounds so he could sell his energy drink.

He also has made many TRULY racist, hateful ("[Homosexuals] want to come into churches and disrupt church services and throw blood all around and try to give people AIDS and spit in the face of ministers."), and generally un-Christian comments ("Presbyterians are the spirit of the Antichrist."). The man is a charlatan and a pig and is the main reason why so many people think that a person's faith should be removed from his political beliefs. Pat Robertson has no idea what the work of the Holy Spirit looks like, or what loving one's neighbor means. For this reason, he will be barely remembered ten years past his burial.

Many people claimed Jerry Falwell was the same hateful man that Robertson is, but they are wrong. He did have his moments where the power and prestige of his political position got to his head, but in general, he knew how to love.

Last week, I posted on Theodore Dalrymple's atheism essay. This week, he has followed that writing with a related piece entitled "A Strange Alliance." In it, he further discusses religion and atheism, as well as his speculation on the reason behind the significant number of popular atheistic screeds.

I haven’t written much about religion, but I have been surprised by the vehemence, not to say the violence, of the response to that little that I have written. This vehemence has been provoked by the fact that, though not religious myself, I am no longer anti-religious as I was when it occurred to me as a child and then a teenager that God might not or did not exist. Indeed, I can see many advantages, both personal and social, to a religious outlook. The usefulness of religious claims is not evidence of their truth, of course, though that usefulness probably depends upon a belief in their truth.

Probably, but not certainly. Gibbon tells us that in Rome, religious observance, highly syncretic in nature, was adhered to by people who did not accept the truth of the beliefs that supposedly underlay their observance. They continued with their observance because of the social value of religion: in other words, truth was less important to them than social coherence. Before we denounce those Romans as hypocrites and liars, we should remember how often, for the sake of social ease and convenience, we say and do things that are neither true nor convenient to us personally. Show me a man who is sincere all the time, and I will show you an insufferable boor.

A young and cultivated Dutchman of my acquaintance, appalled by the thinness and superficiality of modern culture and its deliberate disconnection from the glories of the past of our civilisation, recently told me that he was going to convert to Catholicism. He was far from a believer but, rightly or wrongly, he saw the church as the only possible bastion against the tide of cultural barbarism that is engulfing most of Europe.

He told me also that he played the music of Bach (one of the supreme artistic achievements of our civilisation) on the piano every day, and hoped to do so until he died; and this led me to suppose that he did not altogether exclude as a possibility the existence of God, for Bach’s music, which he loved, was surely inspired in very large part by the belief in God, and indeed is inconceivable without that belief. The connection between the music and belief in God was a psychological one rather than a logical one, but was a strong one nonetheless; and, as Pascal said, the heart hath its reasons which reason knows not of. This, after all, is true of most of us most of the time.

And once my young Dutch acquaintance was open to the possibility of the existence of God, I suggested, it was also possible that the belief would come with the observance rather than the other way around. If it did, I could see only advantages to him. It seems to me that a sense of a transcendent meaning or purpose to existence is a great comfort, and something that is sorely lacking for the great majority of young Europeans.

This is not at all the same thing as wishing to live under a theocracy, in which conformity to the outward observances of belief are enforced. But some of the responses I received to an article I wrote recently for The City Journal, in which I suggested that the best-selling books by militant atheists, that have appeared with the suddenness of a change of hemlines in the fashion world, did not advance any new arguments against the existence of God (indeed, you would have by now to be a very great philosopher to advance a new argument either for or against), and that used a historiography of religion that was fundamentally flawed and dishonest, were so vehement that you might have supposed that I was Torquemada or Khomenei rather than a mere scribbler expressing an opinion that was, in effect, a plea for greater subtlety of understanding.

I do not want to repeat my arguments here. Instead, I ask the question why these books... have appeared all of a sudden, and sold so well, when...they say little that is new.

Fashions are not unknown in publishing, of course.
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Still, something more than fashion needs to be invoked, I suspect, to explain not only the appearance but the success of the new atheistic books.
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Let me here say, to avoid the charge of resorting to ad hominem arguments, that the reasons for the appearance and success of these books is evidence neither of the validity nor of the invalidity of their arguments, which must be assessed by quite other means and on quite other grounds. But this does not mean that the question of the reason for their appearance and success now, at this conjuncture, is unimportant or uninteresting. My speculations are not susceptible to rigorous proof, but if we were allowed to think about only those things susceptible to such proof, our minds would soon be empty.

I think there are two conjunctures, one mainly American, and one global, that explain the appearance and success of these books.

The rise of evangelical Christianity as a political force in America has provoked a reaction by the freethinking intelligentsia that sees in that rise a threat of theocracy. Whether this threat is real and genuinely feared I rather doubt; surely the American political tradition and the Constitution itself are strong enough to prevent a theocracy from ever arising in America. But all intellectuals love bogeymen to shadow-box: I do so myself on occasion.

It is true that the evangelicals exert a strong influence; but that is what democracy is about. There are, after all, a lot of them in the country and they cannot be disenfranchised. No doubt they have a moral vision that they wish to impose on the country, but so does everybody else. To argue that a woman has a right to an abortion because she is sovereign over her own body is no less a moral position than that to kill a conceptus is ethically equivalent to shooting a man in cold blood in the street. Personally I think that both these positions are wrong, and that so long as the debate is posed in these terms it will remain crude and generate a lot of hatred. But evangelical Christian political influence in a democracy in which there are millions of evangelicals is perfectly normal, and implies no slide into theocracy; and it is worth remembering that the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

The second conjuncture is, of course, the rise of Islam as a global force for a new totalitarianism.
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Islamism is a real threat, made far worse by the cowardly response to it by most western governments, including that of the United States. From the European perspective, the war in Iraq is but a trivial sideshow by comparison with the Danish cartoon crisis, which was much more significant for our civilisation and way of life in the long run. There the British and American governments failed the test miserably; de facto, they gave aid and succour to the Islamists.

The new atheists are quite right to see the threat of theocracy in Islamism. But in attacking all religion, they are like the French government which banned not only the wearing of the headscarf in schools, but the wearing of all religious insignia whatsoever, despite the fact that wearing a Star of David or a crucifix has and had a completely different social signification from wearing a headscarf. In the name of non-discrimination, the French government failed to discriminate properly: and proper discrimination is, or ought to be, practically the whole business of life. If there were large numbers of Christians or Jews who were in favour of establishing a theocracy in France, who had a recent record of terrorism, and who terrorised each other into the wearing of crucifixes and Stars of David, then the banning of those insignia would have been justified too. The wearing of the headscarf should be permitted again when Islam has become merely one personal confession among others, without the political significance that it has now.

In attacking all religion so indiscriminately, the atheist authors are, I am sure inadvertently and unintentionally, strengthening the hand of the Islamists. In arguing, for example, that for parents to bring up a child in any religious tradition, even the mildest of Anglicanism, is to abuse a child, with the natural corollary that the law should forbid it (for how can the law permit child abuse?), some of the authors are giving ammunition to the Islamists, who will be able with justice to say to their fellow-religionists, See, it is all or nothing. If you give the secularists an inch, they will take a mile. No compromise with secularism is possible, therefore; cleave unto us.

Islamism is a worthy target, of course, but by now one that has been pretty well aimed at... To suggest, however, that all forms of religion are equal, that they are all murderous and dangerous, is not to serve the cause of freedom and tolerance. It is to play into the hands of the very people we should most detest; it is to hand them the rhetorical tools with which they can tell the gullible that our freedoms are not genuine and that our tolerance is a masquerade. It is to do what I should previously have thought was impossible, namely in this respect to put them in the right.

Theodore Dalrymple, possibly THE best writer of our time, recently wrote a piece in the City Journal entitled "What the New Atheists Don't See." In it, he reviews some of the recent books that have come out in praise of atheism (or in disdain of God, ironically enough). Dalrymple is himself not a believer, but does tend to be very gracious toward religions, especially Christianity. Mr. Dalrymple is at his best when he's dissecting another's arguments and refuting them. And here is no exception, tackling "Breaking the Spell," "The God Delusion," and "The End of Faith;" written by Dennett, Dawkins, and Harris, respectively. Since this column is quite long, I will let you read it for yourself in its entirety at the link above. However, I did want to point out a passage that Dalrymple quotes from Joseph Hall, a Christian bishop of Norwich in the 17th century. Hall's writing is titled "Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted," and it entails an eloquent meditation on the spirit behind Christ's statement that the one without sin should cast the first stone.

With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamours. Every one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more. . . . Public sins have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others rejoice, in these public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be humbled under the sense of my own.

May I be as gracious toward others and their sin as the Bishop Hall reminded himself to be nearly 400 years ago.

John Leo has a nice short essay regarding free speech and the lack thereof on college campuses.

Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo "mental health evaluation" before being allowed to return to school.

Punishment for expressing an opinion is not unusual on the modern campus. Neither is the lack of protest among faculty and students for the kind of treatment Scheffler got. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is defending the student, reports that it has failed to find a single Hamline student or faculty member who has spoken out in favor of Scheffler's right to free speech. So far, no protest from has been reported in the student newspaper or in outside internet outlets such as Myspace.
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Free speech has a very small constituency on the modern campus, particularly if the speaker under attack is conservative. Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, is certainly no conservative, but he had run afoul of the campus left on many issues, not just the heavily publicized one of women in science (suggesting more campus respect for patriotism and the return of ROTC to Harvard, warning the "coastal elites" that they have drifted too far from the American mainstream). So when feminists managed to cancel Summers as a speaker before the University of California board of regents, there was scarcely a peep of protest.
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A similar silence greeted the cancellation of a speech by Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist at Columbia University. Gilchrist and a colleague were driven off the stage at Columbia last year by angry radicals. Gilchrist was reinvited a month ago, but when the speech was announced, campus Hispanics, who consider him racist for opposing the flood of illegals into the country, pressured the relevant student authorities to ban him. The campus chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union thought about protesting but decided not to. Again, I was able to find only one professor willing to say that silencing Gilchrist was a bad idea. I asked Gilchrist if there were more. He said he knows of no other instructor who spoke out. The campus joke is that Gilchrist should have come out in favor killing gays and nuking Israel. Then he would have been as welcome as Mahoud Amadinejad.

The campus rule of thumb is that if someone on the liberal side is disinvited or punished for speech, the left will howl - and the right will usually howl too. This is what happened when the University of St. Thomas disinvited Archbishop Desmond Tutu for making remarks critical of Israel. After protests from across the political spectrum, he was reinvited. A better example is the hiring and almost immediate firing of liberal Duke law professor Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of a new law school at the University of California, Irvine. A huge number of conservatives protested, including professors and virtually the whole first string of nationally known conservative and libertarian bloggers. Chemerinsky was rehired.

The process doesn't work in reverse - with liberals protesting the silencing of a conservative. It's one of the most obvious flaws of the modern PC university.

I was going to grab some lunch this Wednesday, and I caught Dennis Prager introducing his guest, Dr. William Gray. This is the same guy that I've mentioned before who is THE premier hurricane forecaster in the world, and is an anthropogenic global warming skeptic. Here is the interview.

In response to the announcement that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize (joining such past noted winners as Yasser Arafat, Kofi Annan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Le Duc Tho, Anwar al Sadat, and Jimmy Carter), Mark Steyn wrote this column:

A COUPLE of days before Al Gore was awarded his Nobel Peace prize, Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al's Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to "alarmism and exaggeration" and identified nine major factual errors.

For example, the former vice-president predicts a rise in sea levels of 6m "in the near future". "The Armageddon scenario he predicts," declared Burton, "is not in line with the scientific consensus."

I'll say. The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere between 15cm and 60cm, with about 30cm being most likely. An Inconvenient Truth insouciantly adds a zero to the worst-case scenario.
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A schoolkid in Ontario was complaining the other day that, whatever subject you do, you have to sit through Gore's movie: It turns up in biology class, in geography, in physics, in history, in English.

Whatever you're studying, it's all you need to know. It fulfils the same role in the schoolhouses of the guilt-ridden developed world that the Koran does in Pakistani madrassas. Gore's rise is as remorseless as those sea levels. I assumed Gore's clammy embrace would do for the environmental movement what his belated endorsement had done for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential candidacy: kill it stone dead. But governor Dean was constrained by actual humdrum prosaic vote tallies in Iowa and New Hampshire. The ecochondriacs, by contrast, seem happiest when they're most unmoored from reality.

That's where Gore comes in. No matter how you raise the stakes ("It might take another 30 Kyotos", says Jerry Mahlman of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research), Saint Al of the Ecopalypse can raise them higher. Climate change, he says, is the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced. Ever. And not just humankind, but alienkind, too. "We are," warns Gore, "altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe".

Wow. It's not just the Maldive Islands, but the balance of energy between Earth and the rest of the universe. You wouldn't happen to have the stats on that, would you? Universal "balance of energy" graphs for 1940 and 1873? Gore is the logical reductio of what the popular Australian blogger Tim Blair calls global warm-mongering: Worst-case scenario, with all the zeroes you want on the end, and then a few more for holes in the ozone layer as yet undreamt of. Anyone can, as the environmentalists advise, think globally and act locally, but only Gore thinks cosmically and acts not at all.

One can forgive youthful indiscretions, like his 1988 presidential candidacy, when he became the first and only politician in US history to hire a herd of cows for the launch of his campaign, positioning them attractively around him for the photo op at the supposed Gore "family farm". The contribution to global warming from increased methane from bovine flatulence in the Gore neighbourhood was no doubt "offset" by reduced flatulent emissions from whichever farm he'd hired the cows from: it was, in that sense, a "carbon-neutral" event.

But since then there's been a pronounced pattern of behaviour. In 2000, it was revealed that his tenant, Tracy Mayberry, has asked her distinguished landlord to fix the plumbing. The toilet overflowed and the tank was held together by bread bag ties. This was after Gore had inflicted federal toilet regulations on the rest of the country in the interest of water conservancy, yet he let his own tenant's lavatory overflow for months on end. Americans have to make do with cisterns that hold less than a supersized cup at McDonald's, but Environmental Boy had a Niagara-sized torrent running through his tenants' bathroom and down the stairs 24 hours a day.
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An isolated incident? Well, the average US household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours of electricity. In 2006, the Gores wolfed down nearly 221,000kWh.

221,000kWh? What's he doing in there? As his spokesperson explained it, his high energy usage derives from his brave calls for low energy usage. He's burning up all that electricity by sending out faxes every couple of minutes urging you wastrels to use less electricity. Insofar as he's made any contribution to global peace, it's in persuading large swaths of a narcissistic Western world to busy itself with non-solutions to pseudo-crises to such a distracting degree that al-Qa'ida may wind up imposing the global caliphate without having to fire a shot.
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Meanwhile, Gore is now being urged to jump into the presidential race and save Democrats from the allegedly too-hawkish Hillary Clinton. I doubt he will.

But you'll know he's considering it if he starts slimming down faster than the Antarctic shelf. When Al Gore starts getting carb-neutral, we're really in trouble.

It's been awhile since I posted, but I noticed this nice short piece by Nathanael Blake discussing Al Gore's recent Nobel Prize win.