Man of Wood

I saw the movie SuperJesus Man of Steel on 3D Blu-Ray.  It wasn’t a bad movie, necessarily.  The action was pretty good, although I’m pretty sure it exhausted the ways a superhero can be thrown into (and through) a building.

The movie opens with the debate over Krypton’s impending demise.  Evidently, the Kryptonians had been addressing their energy crisis by drawing energy from “deep in the planet’s core” causing it to eventually, um, explode.  (Don’t think too hard about this; the takeaway is Fracking-Is-Bad.)  To save the Kryptonian race, Jor-El wants access to the “Codex”, apparently the database in which all Kryptonian genetic information is kept.  Zod, the antagonist from Superman II, accepts these premises, but Jor-El accuses him of wanting to “only save the bloodlines you deem worthy” – this in a civilization that had been genetically engineering itself for hundreds of years.  (Don’t think too hard about it; the takeaway is that Eugenics-Is-Raciss’.)  Jor-El and his wife had apparently defied this social norm by secretly conceiving and bearing a child the old fashion way “to reintroduce the element of chance” in procreation – and onto whose DNA they eventually fuse the Codex.  (Don’t think too hard about this; your head will explode.  Like Krypton.  Because Fracking.)

Henry Cavill (Clark Kent / Kal-El / Superman) is 30 years old; Amy Adams (Lois Lane) is 39.  This difference is distracting.  Amy Adams is still lovely, but she may be past the point of holding up well under Blu-Ray’s resolution.  Something about her face looked . . . off.  It could be aging, or it could be the make-up or post-production efforts to hide the aging.  It’s interesting, however, that while Margot Kidder was 30 when Superman came out, Christopher Reeve was only 26.

Watching this reboot made me ponder how impressionable young children are.  I remember upon seeing S’78 that Superman looked exactly like I had imagined a real-life version of Superman would look like based on the TV series.  I never got that feeling with Cavill, even though Cavill’s body is developed to modern standards of fitness.

The Protocols of Heartland

Contra Megan, I'm not especially upset by Peter Gleik's phishing Heartland's tax returns. I mean, I don't think liberal bloggers should get any breaks that conservative bloggers don't get, I'm just saying that my admittedly weak ethical intuition isn't as mortified as Megan's is.

Megan uses the term "wire fraud" to potentially describe Gleik's activities. Personally, I would reserve that term, both legally and ethically, for stealing actual money, or something of value the theft of which deprives the victim of the use of the thing being stolen. I will say parenthetically that I'm not trying to articulate a full-blown property rights metaphysic here, nor am I trying to piggyback this matter onto the debate over IP protection generally. I am saying that it's a Public Good for the Public to know more rather than less about a Public Organization. This doesn't justify anything and everything. But it justifies some things.

Gleik's alleged fabrication of a Heartland "climate strategy" memo, in contrast, is a Public Harm, and AGW enthusiasts deserve all the opprobrium now being heaped upon them for, basically, doing what Dan Rather did when confronted with evidence that his famous Bush National Guard memo was fake: keep pushing the lie.

It occurs to me how difficult it is to pass off a fake -- or cover your tracks -- in the internet age. Think of all the typeface experts that emerged to take on Dan Rather, or in the present case, to recover the pdf metadata pointing to dubious origins.

Religion and its Malcontents

Bret Stephens (via Mangan) writes:

As with religion, [global warming enthusiasm] is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers."

And more in like vein.  This is, of course, a riff on Michael Crighton’s famous “Environmentalism as Religion” speech in which he blames the AGW hoax (among others) on the religious impulse.

As I have written before, I believe this to be misleading.  It is precisely at the point where people stop believing in the God of the Bible that they became susceptible to all manner of nonsense in an effort to fill the religion-shaped hole in their psyches.  Stephens, et. al are correct to criticize religious approaches to what should be empirical questions, but it never seems to occur to them that the continued effort at undermining true devotional religion is actually exacerbating the problem.

This reminds me how, post-1991, atheists, when confronted with Soviet brutality, claimed that Russian communism was actually a religious movement, official statements to the contrary.  (They never seemed to realize this before 1991.)

Similarly, Calvinism has become the go-to whipping boy at Ferdinand’s site on any number of issues as the writers blame if for all that is wrong with the world.  Never mind that no observant Calvinist, then or now, actually believes or advocates anything Ferd is attacking; it’s Calvin’s fault anyway because . . . well, I’m not sure, but something about how anything that Ferd doesn’t like is logically consistent with Calvinism by Ferd’s reckoning, and that’s enough.

Yet another example:  I’m pretty sure that any reasonable observer would agree that Christianity, especially the fundamental variety, stands foursquare against drunken orgies.  Yet, when those orgies turn out badly, sure enough we can find people who blame them on Christianity anyway.

Φ’s First Law:  Anything bad is going to be blamed on Christianity and Christians, notwithstanding any amount of actual Christian opposition to the bad thing.

“Gloves with fingertips cut out”

Passed without comment:

The use of electric space heaters and all other heat creating devices is discouraged on [military installation X].  These units and devices are a safety hazard and extremely expensive to run.  Approved space heaters may be used as a temporary measure with concurrence of the Chief of Civil Engineer Operations and Maintenance Division due to improper functioning of existing heating systems.  All government owned space heaters should be turned into the Civil Engineer Logistics Branch at XXX-XXXX.

The Occupational Medicine Service (OMS) has been asked to confirm the need for a space heater for individuals on many occasions.  Sometimes there is a valid need, other times there isn't.  The procedure for space heater and other heating devices approval shall be for the individual to bring a note from his or her doctor to the OMS clinic in Building XXX to request their opinion.  If a reasonable medical need is identified (e.g. a circulatory disorder like white finger syndrome, CREST, a cold agglutinin disorder etc.) they will endorse the use of a space heater or recommend another corrective action.  In some cases, warmer clothing, gloves with fingertips cut out, etc may be adequate.  When CE receives OMS clinic endorsement, the [installation] Maintenance Engineer will provide a certificate of approval for the individual that can be shown to the Fire Department in the event of an inspection.  At the time of certificate issuance, CE will also provide a recommendation as to the type of space heater or other heating device to use and any special instructions.

No Pressure

Making the rounds is an environmentalist propaganda video demonstrating the extent to which environmentalists are now resorting to outright threats of violence against people who have competing priorities.  (The environmentalists now realize the public relations disaster they have created for themselves and are now trying to squelch the video on YouTube, which is why I can’t embed it.)

I don’t remember the connection, but the PajamasMedia post linking this video also, for reasons I cannot fathom, linked to what I consider simply an awful article in a 1941 edition of Harpers:  “Who Goes Nazi?”  Now, keep in mind, this was before we had declared war or the future extent of the holocaust could have been known.  Yet Dorothy Thompson feels free to speculate about what kind of people, classes, professions, and personality types would by Nazis or Nazi sympathizers.  (Hint:  it’s people she already doesn’t like.)

Hilton Hawaiian Village: Good news if you like getting bent over with your pants around your ankles.

Here are some of the prices you can expect to pay if you ever stay at the Hilton Hawaiian Village:

• $24/day for parking.  ($30/day for valet parking).
• $15/day for internet service.  (You can buy a week for $65 for the “basic” service and $85 for the “premium” service.
• $5.95 for a bowl of cold cereal.
• $6.25 for a 12oz. can of coke.

But the extortionate pricing was just the beginning of my complaints.  The HHV was crowded.  The common areas of the hotel were inadequate to give a peaceful experience to the people who wanted to use them.  Good luck getting a chair at the swimming pool, especially the swimming pool with the water slide.  Speaking of which, the requirement that my nine-year-old. has to wear water wings on their itty bitty water slide is absurd.  For one thing, she’s a good swimmer; for another, she’s ridden all but one of the slides at Blizzard Beach without water wings; why water wings on these? 

It’s the middle of Asia’s summer traveling season and most of the guests were foreigners.  I’m pretty sure the staff at the hotel were all LEPs.  Frankly, people spoke better English in Iceland.

To its credit, a lot of the detailing in the rooms was well done.  But the beds we had were doubles, not queens – and try sharing a room with a six and nine year-old with jet lag who don’t like sleeping together.  The balcony was especially pleasant, giving us a great view of . . . well, of that $24/day parking garage actually, but from the 26th floor or so it was a nice place to get some quiet.

All told, the experience was so unpleasant that we actually did something we had never done in the middle of a vacation:  changed hotels.  We walked over the Hotel Across the Street and found a world apart:  quiet, spacious common areas; reasonably-priced restaurants, queen beds in the rooms.  It was everything the HHV wasn’t.  Mrs. Φ and I looked at each other and said, “Why are we not staying here?”  Fortunately, they had space, so we packed up and spent the second half of the week at the HATS.

Change the Numbers: Green Space

I have to agree with Steve's post on this subject: a would-be environmentalist's attitude towards immigration is a test of his good faith. Anyone who is pro-immigration but pretends to care about the environment is lying. His advocacy of the environment is merely a cover for the growth of government for its own sake.

Dumbest Smart Thing I’ve Read in a While

Robin quotes Matt Yglesias:

In the spectrum debate, a commons is considered a “left-wing” position, while property rights are considered “right-wing.” In contrast, in the carbon debate you find right-wingers advocating a “carbon commons” while left-wingers advocate a property-like regime called cap and trade.

… To borrow an idea from Robin Hanson, I think it’s useful to think about political conflict in terms of valorized figures. On the right, you see a lot of valorization of businessmen. On the left, you see a lot of valorization of pushy activists who want to do something businessmen don’t like. Formally, the right is committed to ideas about free markets and the left is committed to ideas about economic equality. But in practice, political conflict much more commonly breaks down around “some stuff some businessmen want to do” vs “some stuff businessmen hate” rather than anything about markets or property rights per se.

Where to begin?

First, while I can’t speak for them, I’m pretty sure that the Left identifies with specific activists, not activists in general. Just ask them for their opinion of the NRA or the Tea Party.

Second, Yglesias is being disingenuous when he suggests the Right tries to valorize businessmen. The elite economic Right along the National Review – Megan McArdle axis is much more interested in maximizing both freedom and utility than they are in privileging one class of people over another.

It may be true that the popular Right sometimes sound as if they “valorize” businessmen, but even here the exceptions quickly accumulate.  There is outrage aplenty among the Tea Party activists over tricksy banksters carting off the national wealth, for instance.   In any case, while their economic anecdotes may echo the frustration of many businessmen, the focus is on jobs destroyed and/or not created in response to the government, oh, say, capping carbon emissions.

Turning to Yglesias’ charge that the Right behaves inconsistently in opposing cap-and-trade, I am willing to concede him half a point: his example illustrates that property rights don’t always have the power to resolve conflict that the Right often claims on their behalf.  But this limitations specifically occurs when there is a dispute as to the extent of one person’s property interest in another’s activity.

At one extreme is the property owner who decides to construct an oil derrick on his front lawn in a residential neighborhood.  Does his activity materially impact his neighbors’ quality of life?  I am reasonably certain that anybody who thinks the neighbors don’t have a property interest in their neighborhood’s quality of life is not a resident of that neighborhood.

At the other extreme would be a cap-and-trade scheme on the world’s stock of, say, iPods: no new iPods can be manufactured except to replace an existing iPod, and the current holders of iPods are given an “iLicense” that can be freely traded.  Would such a scheme be “free market”?  Again, I am reasonably certain that any actual “free marketer” would say that the “commons” has nothing to do with it:  the world’s iPod carrying capacity is essentially unlimited.

The fundamental issue separating the Left and Right on the subject of carbon emissions is whether they are more like the first case or more like the second.  Is there a limit to the ability of the earth’s organic life to convert CO2 into O2?  The Right may be right or wrong about this, but this is the issue, not a sudden preference for commons over property.

How to Destroy an Economy

From the Washington Times:

Since February, the EPA has placed 175 surface coal mining projects under review and halted 79 of them because of their effects on surface water. For 30 years, the agency did not object to the air pollution caused when miners blast dirt into the air to expose coal deposits. Now, invoking the Clean Water Act, the agency is moving to block, at least for now, the projects when they sully nearby streams with the same pollutant.

The agency also has, for the first time, revoked a permit for a surface mine because the project in West Virginia could violate the Clean Water Act.

More broadly, the agency has announced there could be a link between greenhouse gas emissions and public health and welfare - a prelude to new mandates for corporations to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. The agency also agreed to allow California to regulate tailpipe emissions, increased fuel efficiency standards for cars for the first time in more than 25 years and won White House approval to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from the nation's largest polluters.

And that's just the beginning.

I remember a magazine article from long ago about Vietnamese refugees stuck for years in Thai refugee camps. The Thais had no use for them, and they were rightly afraid to move back to Vietnam. (Are there still such camps in Thailand?) One line from the article I remember crystalized the damage that this kind of dislocation could do. It said that there were working-age young men, born in exile, that had "never seen a water buffalo."

There are many skills that, once lost, are very difficult to recover. They are the kind of skills that are passed from journeymen to apprentices, not the kind learned from books and academic journals, and therefore not the kind with which Obama's minions have any experience. Once the opportunity to practice the skill is suppressed (or regulated away), the skill rapidly decays.

The EPA is almost certainly costing a lot of coal miners their jobs. These miners are not suddenly going to put on a shirt-and-tie and start doing office work; they will likely be stuck in the economic equivalent of a refugee camp. Further, they will lose the opportunity to pass their skills to the next generation of miners. And I'm pretty sure this is not the way of growing the economy out of the recession.

And what for? I've never lived anywhere in the U.S. (and I've lived a lot of places) where I couldn't drink the water or breathe the air. For whose benefit, exactly, is the EPA undertaking these regulations?

Tuesday Roundup

The Washington Times this morning was an exceptionally fruitful source of material:

Justice concludes black voters need Democratic Party

KINSTON, N.C. | Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

The Justice Department's ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their "candidates of choice" - identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters' right to elect the candidates they want.

So can we count this as official legal recognition of black voting tribalism? I'm sympathetic to the complaint: party identification often saves even me the hard work of learning about candidates in advance. But the voters of Kinston ought to have the power to make this decision for themselves, and the DOJ is stretching its mandate under the Voting Rights Act to the breaking point.

Climate bill aids authors' states

A little noticed Environmental Protection Agency analysis shows that the pending climate-change bill in Congress would particularly benefit the states represented by its primary authors.

The analysis, obtained by The Washington Times, shows that the states that would benefit most from the climate legislation that passed the House in June include California and Massachusetts. The bill was co-authored by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, and Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat.

As I predicted, "global warming" is just another frontier in government rent-seeking.

U.S. scientist Charged with Spying; Accused of dealing with Israel

An acclaimed former NASA scientist was arrested Monday on charges that he attempted to sell sensitive defense secrets to a person he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer.

Stewart David Nozette, 52, worked in top government jobs from 1989 to 2000 and had access to military satellite programs and nuclear weapons programs, according to court papers that were unsealed Monday after the scientist was arrested at his Chevy Chase home.

I remember having some sympathy for Jonathan Pollard when he received a life sentence for spying for an "allied" country. But then I found out that the Israelis traded some of Pollard's product to the Soviets, which may have cost the lives of several CIA east-bloc operatives. So I'm inclined to throw the book at any foreign spy.

Things That Don't Change

Half Sigma quotes an article from the Vancouver Sun:

Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But [Ian Pilmer, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University in Australia] shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming.

. . .

Plimer presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety.

Half Sigma, himself a global warming skeptic, points approvingly to this passage:

Plimer, by the way, is also a vehement anti-creationist and has been hauled into court for disrupting meetings by religious leaders and evangelists who claim the Bible is literal truth.

Back when the old Bobvis blog was still going, a frequent (and frequently obstreperous) commenter asserted that global warming denialism was a tool of the Religious Right. Not so, as I exhaustively documented at the time. But I called attention to the equally absurd link, asserted by the late Michael Crichton (and evidently by Ian Plimer and Half Sigma), between global warming alarmism and Christianity.

So here is the situation as I understand it: if you believe that global warming is going to destroy the planet, then the failure to stop it is the Christians' fault. If you believe that regulating carbon emissions in the name of global warming is going to destroy the economy, then this policy is also the Christians' fault.

Like I said over at Bobvis, no matter what happens, Christians are going to get blamed for it.

Some things never change.

New Links from FreedomWorks, NRA

New links to the left:

• Get a free National Rifle Association membership!

• Help FreedomWorks stop cap and trade.

Farmers vs Fish

In a series of posts, Megan put me on to this story about how how the evil Dick Cheney, having ruthlessly obtained power by a majority vote in the electoral college, set about advancing the venal interests of toothless Oregonian rubes (called "farmers" by Republican shills) by subverting the virtuous but overpowered bureacuracy, which had been democratically elected by . . . um, well, nobody actually, but anyway, they were valiantly standing up for the rights of the . . . fish.

What's wrong with this picture?

Here is the story: In 2001, there was a drought along the Klamath River in Oregon. This river is used for several purposes: irrigation for farmers, and commercial fishing. But in 2001, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had determined that there was not enough water for both the fish and the farmers, so the farmers were on their own. The Washington Post article is pretty straightforward about the consequences to the farmers: their crop would be destroyed by the drought.

Enter Dick Cheney [cue Toccata and Fugue in D minor]. He invited the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to review the FWS finding. The NAS said, well, maybe the fish would be okay if the farmers took some water. (Yeah, I know: it's more complicated than that. Read the article.) The farmers got their water, and the fish duly perished: some 77,000 of them by one estimate.

Did I miss anything? Note to trolls: I hadn't heard of the Klamath until last week, and everything I pretend to know I read in the Washington Post. So if there are additional facts about this case, please point them out, but spare me your wrath as if I'm trying to make something up, becauase I am not.

It seems to me that what you find here depends on what you bring with you. [Hat tip: Yoda] Not being predisposed to believe that something is evil just because Dick Cheney is in favor of it, and being neither a farmer nor a fisherman, I think that the competing economic interests should be weighed against each other, with a view toward minimizing the damage as much as a bad situation allows.

But of course, that was never going to happen. One of the fish in Klamath had the good fortune of being on the endangered species list. So by the terms of the Endangered Species Act, the FWS put the interest of the fish above any other consideration. The Greens applaud this reasoning, since farmers are a scourge on Mother Earth, and are Repubicans to boot, so they deserve whatever happens to them.

Cheney's intervention, together with the NAS' well-meaning but ultimately wrong finding) meant that the farmers were saved, but the commercial fisherman lost the bulk of their livelihood for several years. (They were ultimately indemnified by the taxpayer, just as the farmers no doubt would have been.) No word in the article on how many of the endangered fish survived, but the silence susggests that some probably did. No word on how big the Klamath commercial fishing industry is, or was, only that the bailout cost $60 million last year. I wonder what the bailout for the farmers would have been, but this seems to be the important question on evaluating the impact of the decision.

Megan brings to this story a wealth of background knowledge on both water management and the inner workings of the federal bureacracy. But ultimately, she (1) hates Cheney for all manner of reasons far beyond her understanding, and (2) is incensed that the elected executive should have the temerity to, you know, govern the country, that being the province of federal bureaucrats, Green groups, and the judiciary.

The Post article makes a big to-do over the electoral politics involved in motivating Cheney's involvement. One might argue that the job of the executive is to enforce the law, even if the law in question was passed 34 years ago to protect bald eagles and has morphed since then into an engine of economic mayhem in the service of critters few of us ever heard of. The usual suspects would have us believe that, in the abstract, yup, that's what it should do. And because Cheney tweaked the enforcement of the law and created an environmental problem, no matter how containable, he's evil and we're going to have Congressional hearings on it.

Compare this too . . . the 1986 Immigration Reform, the enforcement of which, with the full cooperation of the bureaucracy, has been utterly and completely ignored for twenty years, creating hundreds of billions of dollars in externalities, a huge hispanic criminal underclass, the ethnic cleansing of whites and even blacks from several major cities . . . .

So you'll pardon me if I don't take liberal protestations about the integrity of government at face value.

On Fact-Free Bigotry

[Ed. note: Having put a lot of trouble into finding out some actual facts, I thought I should re-post my rebuttal to Her-We-Don't-Speak-Of on the subject of Global Warming.]

I should probably let this go, but:

and GOD said blah too

. . . invites some examination. The implication is that Christianity (and I'm assuming here that the accusation is leveled specifically at the Christian Right) is led by people claiming that the Bible says something about Global Warming.

Let's look at the usual suspects:

Rick Warren

Sorry, no hits.

James Dobson

Only other people's accusations about Christianity, not about what Dobson actually says. But let's check the grand Poobah himself:

Jerry Falwell

BINGO, we have a winner! Except . . . when you read the statement, it's all about the science. Nothing about what God says or doesn't say about global warming, only that it's not part of the Great Commission.

Let's check the news at a centrist clearing house of what's happening in American Protestantism:

Christianity Today

Mmmm . . . this is interesting. Notice how all the editorializing is in favor of "doing something" to prevent global warming.

The articles give us some backstory. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) is on the global warming bandwagaon. Falwell and Dobson both have criticized the NAE leadership for this on the apparent grounds that the issue is outside of the NAE's mission. But still no word on what God says.

There is an organization called the Evangelical Climate Initiative, also on the bandwagon. Rick Warren is a member.

There is an organization called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance that says that we ". . . should focus on helping the poor create wealth and providing them with clean drinking water and medical care. Efforts to fight global warming could ultimately harm the poor more than help them." But no claims that God sez there's no global warming.

But why check the facts? When you haven't darkened a church door since your early teens, and you hear somebody say, "THOSE people, they said that God said blah," and this happens to line up nicely with all your dearest prejudices . . . why spoil a good thing?

Ironically, at least one global warming skeptic blames the hysteria on religion: Michael Crichton. So it seems that no matter which way we go, Christians are going to get blamed.

I'm starting to see a pattern here . . .

Nature is Trying to Kill You!

Civilization--every civilization worthy of the name--is built and maintained by making war against nature.

I was talking to my daughters about this the other day. I can be screedy that way. At six and three, they probably only have the vaguest idea of what I am talking about half the time. But this is why I think its important: most children go through a period of being sentimental about nature. By "sentimental", I mean that in the child's imagination the birds, flowers, trees, and sundry critters are more benign, more authentic than the houses, cars, streets, clothes and food from which they obtain their actual sustenance. Our food, even our pets, are the product of thousands of years of selective breeding, breeding undertaken by human beings to make them safe for our use and companionship.

I'm guessing this is a product of the post-modern age. It springs from the combination of (1) taking the fruits of civilization for granted, and (2) the decadence of a culture unwilling to do the work of preserving the gains it has made.

Most children outgrow this. But some do not: as a boy, my own brother had what started as an above average sentimentality about nature. My parents treated it indulgently, and it eventually metastasized into the pseudo-religion of environmentalism. Everything, including his actual religion, was eventually jettisoned in favor of this new faith.

Here is somebody else who didn't outgrow it: Timothy Treadwell, who wandered off into the Alaskan outback to make friends with the Grizzly Bears. This worked for a while, but one year he arrived at his bear camp a couple of weeks early, when it was still feeding season. He and his girlfriend were promptly eaten. Ross Douthat put it best:

Grizzly Man [about Treadwell] is a film about religious experience, among many other things, but not a form of religious experience that's familiar to most people in the still-Christ-haunted West. Human beings are caught between the animal world and the spiritual world, bound by fleshly requirements, but able to imagine themselves as immortal, freed from bodily concerns, quasi-divine - and in response to this problem, Christianity (and most other mainstream faiths) tells people that the way out is up, and that to escape the conflicts and miseries that come with being half angel and half ape, you need to become more like an angel, and less like an ape.

But the imitatio Dei isn't the only possible solution to the dilemma of being made a little lower than the angels. You could also go in the other direction, and give up on human reason, human self-awareness, in the hopes of returning to a pre-rational, pre-spiritual, entirely animal state . . . But Nature won't take us back.

So . . . what? What are the consequences of allowing our sentimentality to slide into decadence? I shall never tire of telling my children the story of Detroit: Once upon a time, there was a mighty city, the capital of the industrial heartland. But [lots of economic theory skipped over here] all the people that could take care of this city left, and the people that remained had neither the means nor the inclination to preserve and protect what they had been given. The result? Not but a few decades later, the natural world is reclaiming the city! Parking lots turning to fields. Trees growing right through the buildings. This is how the world ends: not with a bang, but a wimper.

So, children, the moral of today's lesson is: nature is trying to kill you. You do not need to be afraid of nature. Human beings are the smartest ones on the planet, and there is great adventure to be had testing ourselves against the rest of it. So go ahead: enjoy the hunting, fishing, hiking, rock-climbing, and white-water rafting. I've enjoyed all these myself. But be smart, because if you are stupid, nature will eliminate you from the gene pool.

Link Love:

this post was inspired by Bobvis who wrote an excellent post on a similiar issue rather more scientifically.