The Magic Of The Theater

I thought that Yale Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg was, well, nuts, when she demanded that student theatrical groups remove all prop weapons from their productions. In fact, I had fun with that whole incident. Little did I realize that Trachtenberg was actually a little ahead of the curve on that particular bit of madness. Because the British government have taken it a step further.

They are demanding gun lockers for plastic weaponry.

A village amateur dramatic group performing Robinson Crusoe has had to tell police about the use of plastic swords because of health and safety fears.

The Carnon Downs Drama Group, at Perranwell, Cornwall, must lock up its two plastic cutlasses, six wooden swords and a toy gun when they are not in use and appoint a "responsible guardian" for them.

The group said it informed police about the use of replica weapons after studying new health and safety guidelines and new legislation to crack down on violent crime. Later this month, about 700 people are due to attend six performances of the group's pantomime, featuring several swashbuckling sword fights.

Seriously, seriously demented, folks. This is PC on steroids. And this is exactly why British men are rebelling against the tyranny of the forces of the Politically Correct by building ever more lethal rubber band weaponry:

(H/T to Lars Walker over at Brandywine books for that gem of a video. In the credits at the end of the video, I'd only offer one small correction: "I am become death, the destroyer of floppies.")

And We’ve Arrived

I riffed off of Mark Steyn's latest column in The Orange County Register just yesterday. While he examined the particular level of insanity of those who refuse to breed to save the planet, I asked how long it would be until some of them went further. Steyn found on already today. No, it is not retroactive birth control yet. But it's getting close.

Here's one for Jonah's Liberal Fascism files. Bigshot eco-panjandrum lays down the law:

Hillman, senior fellow emeritus at the Policy Studies Institute, says carbon rationing is the only way to ensure that the world avoids the worst effects of climate change. And he says that the problems caused by burning fossil fuels are so serious that governments might have to implement rationing against the will of the people.

"When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it," he says. "This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not."

That item comes from Kate at Small Dead Animals. Who also posts this gem of a video. Back in April, Naomi Wolf, crying her name as it were, explained how to get a fascist America in ten easy steps. I countered that using the example of global warming. I think I was all too right.

UPDATE: Rich Horton isn't even sure it takes ten steps.

The Plot(s) Sicken

Good lord. The New York Post reports some poll results that should make thinking people very nervous.

November 24, 2007 — Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found.

And that's not the only conspiracy theory with a huge number of true believers in the United States.

The poll found that more than one out of three Americans believe Washington is concealing the truth about UFOs and the Kennedy assassination - and most everyone is sure the rise in gas prices is one vast oil-industry conspiracy.

Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Only 30 percent said the 9/11 theory was "not likely," according to the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

I cannot find the poll itself. I'm hoping that the poll is just plain wrong here. It was bad last year, but this shows an enormous deterioration. This is madness writ large. Without the raw data from the poll, it is impossible to judge how good the poll results are or how much overlap there is in the groups of conspiracy theorists. I would like to see all that before I write anything further on this matter.

American Victim Idol

On October 30th I asked what was wrong with George Washington University. That was in response to a report that swastikas had been drawn around campus - particularly in front of the dormitory doors of Jewish students. Recall also that only a short while before the swastika incidents that a leftist group had tried to smear campus conservatives by posting hoax anti-Muslim fliers around campus. It turns out that the latter incident has rather a lot in common with the former. Because what is wrong with George Washington University is beginning to look like an episode of a new reality television show, American Victim Idol.

A student at George Washington University has admitted drawing swastikas on her own door, university officials say:

After evaluating evidence from a hidden camera positioned in response to the swastika postings in Mitchell Hall, University Police have linked the student who filed the complaints to several of the incidents.

Following a final interview with investigators today, the student admitted responsibility for those incidents.

The student in question is an 18-year-old freshman. The GW Hatchet reports:

Using footage from a hidden video camera, the University Police Department linked freshman Sarah Marshak with the vandalism. She will now appear before Student Judicial Services and could face federal and District charges, a spokesperson announced Monday afternoon.

In an interview with The Hatchet Monday afternoon, Marshak, who had been a reporter for this newspaper, categorically denied drawing the swastikas on her residence hall door.

Marshak saw six swastikas on her residence hall door, where she lived alone.

GWU failed to take action against seven students who perpetrated an anti-Muslim hoax against Young America's Foundation last month. Marshak's hate hoax began Oct. 23, and FBI agents were called to assist in the investigation.

Robert Stacy McCain points out that it is a longing for fame on the part of the "victim" - and the quickest route to that 15 minutes is by being lauded in the press as a victim of "hate crimes". Even if you have to inflict them on yourself to make it happen. What's also going wrong at GWU is an administration that fails to stomp - hard - on cretinous people who have been caught red-handed faking hate and trying to smear others with their actions. You reap what you sow, folks. The administration of GWU failed to take action against the real purveyors of hate and have, as a result, promoted faked hate as a means to publicity and fame.

Welcome to American Victim Idol.

Moonbats Over The Peacock

Rosie O’Donnell in Talks to Join MSNBC

Rosie O’Donnell, who abruptly left “The View” on ABC last spring after drawing attention and ratings for her opinions on everything from the Iraq war to her co-hosts, is in serious discussions to return to television atop a new soapbox: a prime-time show on the cable news channel MSNBC, according to executives on both sides of the negotiations who have been briefed directly.

Under one scenario, Ms. O’Donnell would be given the 9 p.m. slot each weeknight on MSNBC, where she would go head-to-head with two heavyweights of cable talk: “Larry King Live” on CNN and “Hannity & Colmes” on Fox News. Her show would replace “Live with Dan Abrams,” a relatively low-rated program that only recently replaced “Scarborough Country,” which was also little-watched.

The Melted Steely Knoll Troll and the Mouth That Roared Lies together at last. Obviously, MSNBC is trying to corner the moonbat market.

Replacing BDS With RDS

Philip Klein notes the rapidly increasing level of hate being directed at Rudy Giuliani by the American Left. It shows all of the signs of a new variant of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Call it Rudy Derangement Syndrome or RDS. The left is going bonkers on Giuliani lately even to the extent of Keith Olbermann and Arianna Huffington flat out lying about something Giuliani said - despite having a video clip that showed exactly what Giuliani actually said. That's pretty deranged.

The Giuliani hate fest has also infiltrated the airwaves, where Keith Olbermann has made bashing Rudy a daily feature on his show. Last Monday, an Olbermann segment entitled "Rudy Giuliani: The next Dick Cheney?" was about Mr. Giuliani's penchant for "secrecy" and "proclivity for executive power…"

This was followed up on Tuesday with a segment that began with a graphic featuring Mr. Giuliani, President Bush in the background and the words "Bush on Steroids"–a reference to John Edwards's comment that Mr. Giuliani shares Mr. Bush's love of "crony capitalism."

The segment revealed, just as with Mr. Bush, the media have no problem broadcasting factual errors when targeting Mr. Giuliani. Mr. Olbermann misquoted Mr. Giuliani as saying that Democrats wanted to invite Osama bin Laden to the White House. In actuality, Mr. Giuliani didn't say Osama, he said Assad, as in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, one of the leaders whom Barack Obama did in fact say he would be willing to meet with in Washington with no preconditions within the first year of his administration. Making the incident even more absurd, Mr. Olbermann ran the video clip of Mr. Giuliani's remarks on his show, and it was clear that Mr. Giuliani said "Assad." How clear? The transcript appearing on the official MSNBC Web site for Mr. Olbermann's show had Mr. Giuliani saying "Assad" in the video clip.

Nevertheless, Mr. Olbermann asked his guest Arianna Huffington to comment on whether the former mayor was being hyperbolic or lying.

"Well, he's lying and also every day he reveals more and more of himself," Ms. Huffington said. "And you can see that he really has the soul of a thug and the disposition of a tyrant."

Ms. Huffington repeated the false Giuliani-Osama quote, and later in the interview, she added: "He's kind of channeling Rush Limbaugh. He's making the lunatic fringe mainstream."

And Mr. Olbermann wondered, "Has it reached a level yet where we should be considering examining whether or not this is compulsive lying that there is something endemic to [Giuliani]? Or [is] this specific purpose-driven lies?"

One might ask the same about Mr. Olbermann. Even though the Associated Press issued a correction to its story that misquoted Mr. Giuliani following a report on AmSpecBlog, as of this writing, Mr. Olbermann has not corrected his erroneous segment. His spokeswoman did not return three calls or an email sent from The American Spectator asking whether the news channel planned to correct the error, and if not, to explain its corrections policy.

Accusing someone of lying by telling a lie doesn't exactly prove your point, does it? There are many other examples of the left's suddenly frenzied Rudy hate-a-thon. As Klein points out, the steady spew of hate actually helps Giuliani square things with the Republican base. So the tactic is highly counterproductive for the left.

Hate Monger Goes Bananas

Jay over at Stop the ACLU alerted me to this one - it is an amazing clip. Fred Phelps goes totally bonkers on CNN after losing the lawsuit today.

This is a narrow but very important distinction. This is not about Fred Phelps and his family members right to free speech. They intentionally, very deliberately, inflicted emotional distress on a family not in the public sector. (Slightly different rules apply to public figures.) I probably would have gone after them for libel/slander - but the use of "intentionally inflicting emotional distress" may have been even better. You may have a right to swing your fist in the air, but that right stops at another person's nose. I think (hope) the appeal by Phelps will fail because of the very narrow scope of what the plaintiff used to go after Phelps. But enjoy Phelps' meltdown. (Jay has some good comments going over at his place as well.)

Chet Culver And The Pumpkin Harvest

In search of the rivers of revenue that a pumpkin tax will bring in, Governor Chet Culver of Iowa visits a pumpkin patch.

The Not-So-Great pumpkin

Step Away From The Pumpkin

In one of the most blatant "squeeze the peasants" move by a state bureaucracy that I have ever seen, the Iowa Department of Revenue has decided to begin charging sales tax on pumpkins. Until September, the orange squash was considered - well - a squash - and was exempt from sales tax as a food item. Enter the bureaucrats:

DES MOINES, Iowa - The Iowa Department of Revenue is taxing jack-o'-lanterns this Halloween. The new department policy was implemented after officials decided that pumpkins are used primarily for Halloween decorations, not food, and should be taxed, said Renee Mulvey, the department's spokeswoman.

"We made the change because we wanted the sales tax law to match what we thought the predominant use was," Mulvey said. "We thought the predominant use was for decorations or jack-o'-lanterns."

Previously, pumpkins had been considered an edible squash and exempted from the tax. The department ruled this year that pumpkins are taxable — with some exceptions — if they are advertised for use as jack-'o-lanterns or decorations.

Iowans planning to eat pumpkins can still get a tax exemption if they fill out a form.

How nice. I'm sure this will be a revenue bonanza for the government of Iowa, well worth the damage to the gazillions of pumpkin growers and sellers in the state. Why, I'll bet they'll raise enough money to fully fund a pumpkin enforcement officer or two to keep the flood of money coursing into the state coffers. Which will lead to the hiring of more pumpkin enforcement officers. Soon they will have a fully staffed pumpkin enforcement division, complete with bright orange uniforms with jackboots.

You have got to be kidding me. Lord, I wish they were.

Flying Saucer, Meet Kettle

"I seriously believe we have to start asking questions about his mental health. There's something wrong. He does not seem to understand his words have real impact." Dennis Kucinich in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial board on Tuesday.

"Dennis found his encounter extremely moving," MacLaine writes. "The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him.

"It hovered, soundless, for 10 minutes or so, and sped away with a speed he couldn't comprehend. He said he felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind." Actress Shirley MacLaine in her latest book describing an encounter Dennis Kucinich had with a UFO.

Yeah. Good call, Denny.

UPDATE: Oh, this is funny. Koo koo ka Kucinich was actually asked about seeing UFOs in last night's debate.

Asked about the statement by actress Shirley MacLaine that Kucinich had seen a UFO at her house, Kucinich said that he had. He quickly sought to clarify — an "unidentified flying object" he said holding up his hand — but man oh man.

“The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse”

That is Mark Steyn's name for the film loop that circles endlessly through the minds of many of the people trying to make sense of the world around them. Riffing off the same topic that Peggy Noonan did a few days ago, Steyn points out that many people in America relate not to how the world is, but how they think it is based on their movie and pop culture frame of reference. His starting point is a recent opinion piece written by Christopher Dickey in Newsweek entitled War and Deliverance. In it, Dickey makes a rather tortured metaphor about Dick Cheney as a wannabe hero, a la the Burt Reynolds character in the movie Deliverance. Everyone else is the Jon Voight character, just trying to make sense out of everything. Steyn is having none of it.

Christopher Dickey paints with a broad brush: "On a grand scale they [the administration] could reinterpret the Constitution until it became meaningless." (Monitoring jihadist phone logs being the reinterpretation into meaninglessness, unlike, say, partial-birth abortion, which is merely an ancient constitutional right the founders had cannily anticipated a need for.) So one's first reaction to this is a faint flicker of surprise that Dickey doesn't see Cheney as the mountain man and the Constitution as his rape victim. One's second reaction is that the metaphor is dishonest. When it comes to "closet fantasies" about toppling Saddam, it's not Dick Cheney versus "the rest of us." Throughout the 1990s and all the way up to the Iraq war resolution, there were a lot of folks auditioning for the Burt Reynolds role: Bill Clinton, Al Gore and almost every other prominent Democrat indulged in just as much "ersatz fortitude" about Iraq and its WMD as Dick Cheney ever did.

But the third and bigger point is that, enjoyable as they are, pop-culture metaphors aren't really of much use, especially when you're up against cultures where life is still defined by how you live as opposed to what you experience via media. It seems to me, for example, that when anti-war types bemoan Iraq as this generation's Vietnam "quagmire," older folks are thinking of the real Vietnam – the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and whatnot – but most anybody under 50 is thinking of Vietnam movies: some vague video-store mélange of "The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse."

Take the Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle at the New Republic, in which the magazine ran an atrocity-a-go-go Baghdad diary piece by a serving soldier about dehumanized troops desecrating graves, abusing disfigured women, etc. It smelled phony from the get-go – except to the professional media class from whose ranks the New Republic's editors are drawn: To them, it smelled great, because it aligned reality with the movie looping endlessly through the windmills of their mind, a nonstop Coppola-Stone retrospective in which ill-educated conscripts are the dupes of a nutso officer class.

If Steyn is harsh with Dickey and the folks endlessly watching The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse running in their heads, he is utterly merciless with the 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

It's the same with all those guys driving around with "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers. That aligns reality with every conspiracy movie from the past three decades: It's always the government who did it – sometimes it's some supersecret agency working deep within the bureaucracy from behind an unassuming nameplate on a Washington street; and sometimes it's the president himself – but when poor Joe Schmoe on the lam from the Feds eventually unravels it, the cunning conspiracy is always the work of a ruthlessly efficient all-powerful state. So Iraq is Vietnam. And 9/11 is the Kennedy assassination, with ever higher percentages of the American people gathering on the melted steely knoll.

Every day the government manages to prove exactly how incompetent it can be yet the troofers believe that some sinister force was able to carry out a gargantuan demolition job - and keep it secret.  Never mind that such a powerful, ruthless organization would have long ago silenced the troofers, in their mental film loop they are the little guy who brings down the evil empire. Such drama. Such heroism. So little understanding of the real world and the real threats. So easily manipulated and led.

The sleazier politicians like Ron Paul and now Bill Richardson are trying to cater to those people that only have those pop-culture conspiracy theory frames of reference. Several other candidates kowtow to those who think all problems can be solved merely by wishing it to be so. So they campaign for more ethanol, even though using 510 pounds of corn to produce 13 gallons of fuel isn't a smart use of limited resources. Other failed politicians turn to Hollywood and produce a film full of lies and exaggerations, bypassing the mental film loops and supplying a new one directly. Leading the easily led into thinking that they are thinking for themselves as an art form.

Steyn closes with a powerful truth for the pop-culture types: "Life is not a movie, especially when your enemies don't watch the same movies, and don't buy into the same tired narratives."

(Idiotic Dickey piece here.)

He Shook Some (Moon) Dust Out Of His Tin Foil Hat

Just to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen. Bill Richardson demonstrated rather clearly that he is not ready for prime time - not that there was any question that he ever was. Yesterday, he landed firmly on the side of the mother of all conspiracy theories. If elected, Richardson will get to the bottom of the Roswell Incident.

ROUND ROCK, Texas — If he wins his bid for the White House, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson may be just the man to get to the bottom of the 60-year-old Roswell UFO mystery.

Answering questions at a townhall meeting Friday, a Dell employee asked Richardson about the 1947 incident in which many people still believe a flying saucer landed near the eastern New Mexico town.

"I've been in government a long time, I've been in the cabinet, I've been in the Congress and I've always felt that the government doesn't tell the truth as much as it should on a lot of issues," said Richardson, who is governor of New Mexico.

"When I was in Congress I said (to the) Department of Defense … 'What is the data? What is the data you have?' "

He was told that the records were classified.

"That ticked me off," he said, as the crowd laughed.

"What do you want me to do? You want me to open up all those files?" he asked the alien enthusiast, who answered that he did.

"I'll work with you on that."

Roswell has become a Mecca for conspiracy theorists in the years since a July 8, 1947, press release sent from Roswell Army Air Base disclosed the recovery of "a flying disk" at a ranch near Roswell.

You go, Billy! Just what the government of the United States needs, a full-blown conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office. Ron Paul would be proud! He's only working the smaller conspiracy theory of the 9/11 troofers. You're going for the mother lode. Have fun at the autopsy, Billy.

UPDATE: Others: Jules Crittenden, Outside The Beltway, QandO, Eunomia, Weasel Zippers, Pirate's Cove, Oxford Medievalist,

At Last

Something I can actually agree with Bill Clinton about. A 9/11 troofer yelled out that 9/11 was an "inside job" at a speech Clinton was giving. UPDATE: You'll have to click the link, LiveLeak's embed code is seriously hosed up. Second update: Got a YouTube embed.

And just a quick reminder of the sort of inside jobs the troofers can expect in their future employment endeavors.

When “Zero Tolerance” = Zero Sense

Jay over at STACLU noticed this bit of politically correct total insanity. A second grader from New Jersey was suspended from school for drawing a crude stick-figure drawing of a gun. No, really, he was.

When did the First Amendment stop applying to 7 year olds?

A second-grader’s drawing of a stick figure shooting a gun earned him a one-day school suspension.

Kyle Walker, 7, was suspended last week for violating Dennis Township Primary School’s zero-tolerance policy on guns, the boy’s mother, Shirley McDevitt, told The Press of Atlantic City.

Kyle gave the picture to another child on the school bus, and that child’s parents complained about it to school officials, McDevitt said. Her son told her the drawing was of a water gun, she said.

A photocopy of the picture provided by McDevitt showed two stick figures with one pointing a crude-looking gun at the other, the newspaper said. What appeared to be the word “me” was written above the shooter, with another name scribbled above the other figure.

What has happened to this Country! They’d thrown me in jail for some of the things I drew as a kid if this is worthy of suspension. Our schools have lost their minds! Zero tolerance on guns equals suspension over a piece of notebook paper? More like zero common sense. I wonder if they would charge him with possession of a deadly weapon if he folded it up into a paper airplane? Meanwhile they want to hand out BIRTH CONTROL to eleven year olds!

A seven-year old boy now stigmatized in the school district he is unfortunate enough to live in over a crude sketch. The world has gone insane. I suppose I had better warn my son not to tell anyone at school that I handed him one of these just today to take a look at. (That is a true story, incidentally, I was looking at one of these today, handed it to him and asked him what he thought of it.)

The Last Prairie Meets King Corn

Guess who loses? The Independent - not a media source I generally link to - has an article that looks at the impact of the ethanol craze on the last of the native prairie in the United States. It is a bleak picture, indeed.

And now almost unnoticed by urban America, one of the great ecological disasters of modern times is unfolding as an ethanol-fuelled gold rush engulfs the Great Plains and risks destroying what is left of North America's most endangered ecosystem, the native prairie. The last 35 million acres of prairie, deliberately left alone to preserve a precious ecology, is being ploughed up to produce ethanol from corn.

The tiny Beaumont hotel is famous (among aviators at least) for having three different guest registers: one each for pilots, motorcyclists and other guests. Pete the rancher came striding in, wearing jeans and cowboy shirt and sat down in the small café overhung by aircraft memorabilia to tell his and Beaumont's story.

For over 100 years his family has been fattening cattle on rich Kansas Bluestem prairie grass, among the last remaining stands of original prairie. Most of the tallgrass that once covered millions of acres of the Great Plains has been ploughed under. Only isolated pockets remain, some preserved by conservation grants.

Now, even in the Flint Hills, what is left of the prairie is under threat as farmers race to cash in on a bonanza created by planting corn for ethanol production in order to ease America's worries about future fuel supplies. The corn economy is nothing short of a disaster for the environment, for the farm economy and potentially for the Flint Hills, in Mr Ferrell's view.

The prairie is some of the most fertile and productive land on the planet. Nowadays it has become the corn-and-soybean belt, with only remnants of the short-grass prairie providing grazing for livestock. A typical section of prairie grass shelters nearly 800 types of birds, mammals and reptiles. It also thrives on being heavily grazed and then left fallow. Prairie grasses hide nearly two-thirds of their buds and mass beneath the ground and when Native Americans set fire to it to burn off brush, the fresh growth lured back the buffalo they depended on……..

………Driving across the plains of Kansas to its geographical centre, I watched its farmers bring in their biggest corn harvest since World War II. Corn now completely dominates the landscape. Bruce Babbitt, like Al Gore, is a nearly man of US presidential politics. Like Al Gore he is an environmentalist who ran for the White House and failed. Babbitt fell at the first hurdle, in Iowa, in the heart of America's Corn Belt although later became US Secretary of the Interior in charge of its national parks and is now chairman of the WWF(US).

"Riding across the Iowa landscape at dawn is a beautiful experience," Mr Babbitt said. "You can almost hear the corn growing." It is only when you stop to think that the beauty starts to fade, there is just one crop, no wildlife, the skies are empty and the creeks run muddy. It is an industrial landscape stripped of its diversity, an American tragedy.'

As I have said many times: it has never been easier to rape the planet. Just say you're fighting global warming and any ecological depravity you want to indulge in is perfectly ok with the Al Gore crowd. Ethanol has an energy overhead that approaches unity: it uses close to one unit of energy to produce one unit of ethanol energy. It is using critical water resources, it is driving up - rapidly - the cost of food. It is dramatically lessening the amount of food aid available to the rest of the world.

And now it is killing what little is left of the prairie.