PA Legislator Vitali Puts Guts On Back Burner, Supports Economic Fascism

I don’t often stick up for a politician but I had all the respect in the world for PA House member Greg Vitali when he exposed and fought in court the heinous Act 44 of 2005 which lavished pay raises on legislators and judges in the middle of the night.

But poor Greg, once a beacon of truth and justice in the eyes of taxpayers here in PA has finally caught his stride and has put political expediency before virtue.

Vitali, who sits on the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, has taken the mantle on environmental issues in the state House and has easily been the biggest proponent for legislation on climate change.

“Climate change is the most serious environmental problem facing the planet,” he said. “Right now, the state … is in the process of enacting measures which will result in greenhouse-gas reduction, but we’re not doing it in sort of a systematic fashion. We haven’t set goals and we’re not working toward pre-set goals in a planned-out fashion, and I think that’s what we’re trying to accomplish here, and that’s really what the bill is doing … This piece of legislation really provides a planning mechanism.”

The bill – the first of its kind to pass on the state level – will allow businesses and industries to track their emissions voluntarily through a registry, require an annual inventory of the sources and amounts of global-warming pollution from business, agriculture and residences, and create a 21-member stakeholder group to draft a report from that inventory for use by the Department of Environmental Protection and Legislature to develop a state plan on greenhouse-gas reduction.

Besides being a little late to the game (the religion of global warming is starting to implode), this is so wrong on so many levels. The most apparent stems from the overuse of the word “plan” reminiscent of the failed Soviet Union. The next is the word “voluntarily” as in “we voluntarily submit tax returns each year.” We all know what happen with voluntary programs. The scariest is the talk of the “21-member stakeholder group.” Something tells me I will never be invited to be part of this group. But like every other government-business partnership, the end result will be New Deal-type protectionism.

Please Tell Me The World’s "Leaders" Are Not Really This Stupid

On the upcoming G8 summit in Japan:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the G8 leaders would agree on steps to fight the soaring price of food and to guarantee supplies.

The steps will provide short-term relief to the crisis and a long-term strategy to increase world agricultural production.

Rising food prices have pushed 100 million people below the poverty line, the World Bank estimates, and have sparked street riots around the world.

I know it’s too early to celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day but, “Arrr, shiver me timbers!” No one is even talking about how price supports for dumb initiatives such as biofuels are causing market distortions, raising food costs and dropping the world’s poorest people into starvation. I will go out on a limb here, though, and predict that the only “solution” they can up with is a more uniform scheme of economic fascism instead of simply disbanding the G8 which does nothing other than to guarantee that the world’s most economically influential countries inflate their money supplies at approximately the same rate.

Disney Pixar’s “WALL-E”; Breathtaking, Maddening

Disney Pixar's WALL-E

Gennady Stolyarov over on the Mises site blogs about the latest feat of filmmaking from Disney Pixar, “WALL-E”. He’s really up in arms about it due to it’s heavy-handed environmental and anti-capitalist messages, and I agree with him as far as it goes. But he misses the fundamentally anti-state, pro-freedom heart of the film.

The Bad
The film opens on a scene of literally unbelievable environmental devastation caused, we are left no doubt, by humans, particularly those patronizing and working for a giant mega-retailer “Buy N Large”, which actions have apparently filled the spaces in between city skyscrapers with stupendous piles of refuse. There is no life apparent here, and no movement at all except the busy movements of a small, solitary trash-compacting robot.

The scene is literally thousands of times worse than the direst man-made global warming predictions we have heard, which is to say the planet in camera, obviously Earth, has degraded so completely that there is not only no life, but no water and, as we see later, no weather of any kind save for periodic apocalyptic dust storms.

For the first third of the movie, the filmgoer is constantly bombarded with evidence of how the hubristically-operated WalTargCostCo proxy destroyed the earth, without any clue whatsoever about how such a thing could have got so much power as to not only evade existing environmental law (itself an abrogation of property rights), but the universal, longstanding moral repulsiveness of resource waste of such a magnitude. The filmmakers want us to believe that somehow, between now and the time that anthropogenic global warming manifests itself, mankind will suddenly abandon its native environmentalism and go off the deep end, prior to abandoning the planet entirely for B-N-L’s gigantic interstellar cruise ship.

The Good

Having condemned the message of the opening scenes, we are dumbstruck by the sheer visual majesty of the film. Earth might be a despoiled wasteland, but here Pixar renders it in magnificent, visually-stunning, realistic detail. When we are shown the blasted landscape and the terrifying dust storms, we can almost believe what we are seeing is real, quite a feat and another giant leap for Pixar, and digital filmmaking in general.

We observe the robot moving about the city performing his obviously programmed task, curiously selecting random discarded objects and saving them prior to gathering up, compacting, and stacking the surrounding dross into piles bigger than the biggest skyscrapers. The robot, WALL-E is seen later to be collecting not just objects at random, but useful spares, and, establishing that he possesses artificial intelligence, objects he values subjectively. One particularly pivotal object he finds, inside an old refrigerator, is a plant seedling of some kind, which he carefully excavates and preserves.

When a huge spaceship lands in WALL-E’s neighborhood, his curiosity overcomes his rudimentary sense of prudence and he observes the disembarking of a gleaming white levitating ovoid robot with intense interest. He is almost obliterated seconds later when the newcomer discharges its extremely powerful sidearm (Hooray Second Amendment!) upon observing movement at a distance it interprets as a threat. Several discharges later, WALL-E manages to convince the newcomer that he is no threat.

Subsequently, the two robots engage in what I would describe as a “testing – learning” interaction, where one engages in a symbolic movement or makes a sound, then waits for a response (anyone who has interacted with small children will immediately understand this). The testing and responses lead to each of them telling the other their name, the newcomer is called Eve, which WALL-E pronounces “Eve-a”.

WALL-E invites Eve to his home, which appears to be the immobile, rusted hulk of a much larger model of his type (apparently WALL-E has wired up the access door to some solar panels). When he shows her the plant, she immediately puts it in an inner storage compartment and shuts down, clearly she has been sent to earth for this purpose, since a green plant icon begins to grow on her smooth surface. WALL-E tries to communicate with the now-dormant newcomer, until her ship returns to pick her up. WALL-E hitches a ride, and we discover that Eve was indeed a probe, sent out by the B-N-L mega-cruiser to determine whether Earth is habitable again

Without giving the entire plot away, WALL-E and Eve, along with the titular captain of the mega-liner Axiom discover that something is amiss with the ostensible plan to recolonize the earth, and overcome their programming to do what is right, versus what is their “duty”.

The Maddening
The plot, particularly near the end of the film lurches wildly between heroic and ridiculous. The doughy, decalcified denizens of the Axiom are completely detached from reality, their relationships all virtual, their needs all attended to by specialized robots (one is left to wonder how the doughy, decalcified offspring depicted are produced). This is particularly maddening because the overwhelming tendency of humans whose economic needs are met is to seek more direct contact with others, not less. The captain, as indolent as the rest, has somehow not previously even had a little bit of curiousity about the Earth and the past.

Ultimately, however, it is a brilliant and satisfying film, with a fundamentally anti-state, pro-liberty message, and I recommend it highly, particularly younger ones (my 2 1/2 year old daughter and 4 year old son were enthralled the entire time, perfect angels). If you take a child over 5 years old, however, PLEASE discuss these points with them afterward!

Red Ink Superman, Indeed

(From 2004)

Several commentators have referred to Norman Podhoretz’ recent 30,000-word manifesto “WW IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win.” I have actually read the thing, and frankly, it’s scary. If you think the neverending carnage in Iraq is bad, just wait until we expand it into Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon. Just the kind of fun new program to look forward to in a second Bush (or, frankly, a first Kerry) term.

This is the kind of delusional thinking you can afford to engage in when you are just a commentator, and you don’t have to deal with the real costs of neverending war for empire – the dead, maimed, missing, the orphaned, the dislocated, and the moral and financial ruin to the nation that is caused by wars waged for resources rather than self-defense. It’s almost as if those making policy for the Bush administration have been watching too much “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior”.

Paul Craig Roberts observed;

Podhoretz begins by alleging that “the malignant force of radical Islamism” has as its objective “to conquer our land” and to destroy “everything good for which America stands.

If Muslims intend to conquer America, then they are every bit as delusional as Podhoretz, who intends for America to conquer the Middle East.

 Frankly, I think people like Podhoretz are the ones destroying “everything good for which America stands.”, by urging our vague Republican president into spilling even more blood and more red ink in more commercial wars.

Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices has written a song that didn’t make sense to me until now called “Red Ink Superman”, in which the penultimate lyric, shouted, is;

“We’ll even the score / In World War IV!”

Pollard clearly has read Podhoretz.

It’s clear to me that the score being “evened” here is with the Muslims of the Middle East for having the audacity to want to hold onto their own land and control their own destinies.

Given the unprecedented, immoral increase in Federal debt, and the destruction of the dollar wrought by The Decider-In Chief, it isn’t at all clear we will be able to do either one.