What can brown do for you?

"Brown jobs," jobs in the fossil fuel and energy industries, are exploding throughout the Midwest and Mountain West in America at the beginning of our new fossil fuel boom. Shale oil and gas deposits under formally forlorn areas of the country -- Ohio, western Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Nebraska, North Dakota -- are creating economic opportunity the likes of which we haven't seen since the heady days of the dot com boom. The main difference, of course, is that the energy boom will be real and lasting.

One of the many probable effects of this new boom is the rise in income with areas that have a lot of brown jobs -- oil rig worker, engineers, mechanics, etc. Three characteristics of these jobs is will be that they are high paying, require significant manual and technical skills, and will not require post-secondary education.  In other words, the factory jobs that were shipped overseas 30 years ago are basically returning. 

Mickey Kaus speculates that those jobs will likely create a more egalitarian social scene much more effectively than any number of Liberal policies have. Unlike the yawning social gap between the (high growth) service sector and the (low growth) finance and information sectors so common on the coasts, where many concerned citizens claim to care about growing social inequalities, brown jobs "produce social equality through the workplace itself, by allowing the uneducated to make a decent living without being anyone’s personal servant."

If true, this might provide an "objective"–in the Marxian sense–explanation for how Republicans convinced the white working class that Democrats were a bunch of elitists, the riddle Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas” tried to solve. Frank blames a form of false consciousness produced by skillful Republican manipulation of cultural issues (like abortion and gay marriage).But is it "false consciousness" if liberals actually, in practice, favor an economy that, however prosperous, is filled with jobs where the booklearned get to boss around the unbooklearned? If what you care about is social equality, not money equality, it doesn’t seem false at all.   [emphasis in original]

Indeed.

Pearls of wisdom from Big Gay Al

Why does life imitate South Park so much?

“Look, I appreciate what you kids did. I really do. But this isn’t what I wanted. I’m proud to be gay. And I’m proud to be in a country where I’m free to express myself. But freedom is a two-way street. If I’m free to express myself, then the scouts have to be free to express themselves too. I know these [scout leaders]. They are good men. They are kind men. They do what they think is best for the kids. No matter how wrong we think they might be, it isn’t right for us to force them to think our way. It’s up to us to persuade and help them see the light, not extort them to. I will continue to persuade them to change their minds, but this is the wrong way to do it. So, I am hereby dropping my case and allowing the scouts their right to not allow gays into their private club."

It is a testament to how hysterically unmoored from the traditions of freedom and decency the gay rights movement has become that Big Gay Al would probably be ridiculed or denounced as a gay Uncle Tom if he spoke these commonsense words in real life.

No matter how wrong we think they might be, it isn’t right for us to force them to think our way.It’s up to us to persuade and help them see the light, not extort them to.

Those words express the wisdom of the Founders' decision to include Article VI in the Constitution. They also identify the folly of those in society -- mostly, but not exclusively, on the Left -- who have no patience with the process of amending the Constitution. That requires years of argument and persuasion to create a shift in society great enough to build a super-majority for change. It's so much easier to convince a handful of judges or Supreme Court justices and have them impose the change you want on unwilling people.

Obama supporter interviews her 2008 self

And she asks, "Was I really this stupid four years ago?"

Ripples at Penn State

I understand the outrage among many at Penn State over the punishment leveled by the NCAA. I get it. It will fall on the backs of the innocent. I'm not so naive as to think that all of that $60 million is coming from the football program. College funds are fungible, after all. I don't know how many extracurricular clubs and academic programs will see their funding cut in order to cushion the blow to the football program (which, let's be honest, built PSU into what it is today; it would probably be even more podunk than Illinois State without Joe Paterno), but it will be more than a few. A lot of innocent people who had nothing to do with this scandal are going to suffer from this punishment leveled at people in leadership. I understand their concerns.

The sad fact of the matter, however is that this is just another feature of evil committed by those in leadership. It is the same with the Catholic Church predatory priest scandals (to which Jerry Sandusky's actions and the CYA actions of Joe Paterno and Penn State bear an uncomfortably keen resemblance). Because the institution itself was corrupted by the scandal, the institution itself will have to bear a large part of the punishment. It would be wonderful if we could act like Arthur in "The Once and Future King" and only go after the ones who gave the orders. Alas, we cannot. There's no way to surgically target lawsuits so they only take money and resources from the people responsible. The effects of sin and evil are rarely limited. They ripple out until they touch and twist thousands upon thousands of lives.

Lake Placid Tolerance

Liberal tolerance is like Lake Placid: a mile wide and one foot deep.Basically, the Left thinks diversity is wonderful ... unless your opinion becomes a little too diverse for them. Then they attack you like zombies from I Am Legend

Think of the hysterical reaction after Prop 8 passed in California: the Stalinist show trials, the lawsuits, the naked bigotry directed at Mormons, the sullen and suppressed bigotry directed at African-Americans. Or think of the hysterical reactions to any non-white, gay, or female conservative. Just take two examples: Sarah Palin and Clarence Thomas.

• Sarah Palin. In 2008, she didn't say or do anything that Mike Huckabee hadn't already said or done in the campaign, but she engendered so much hatred because she wasn't following the script. She was deviating from the Left's tolerant and accepting views for the opinions women should have. When I asked my Liberal friends why they had such visceral loathing for her they said, "Well, she says such stupid stuff." Which isn't true for the most part, but even if it was that's no reason to hate people. Dan Quayle was pegged as an idiot but you saw little loathing for him. No. The hatred was of an existential nature.
• Clarence Thomas. As a conservative, Clarence Thomas gets all kinds of hate from the Left. It's not the kind of "Your opinions are fascist!" hate that his buddy Scalia gets, though. It's more of the "You're a race traitor and a house ni**er!" atomic hatred that only gets leveled at non-whites who "step out of line" and hold opinions that the Left deems unacceptable. At first derided as a second-rate intellect by Liberals, Thomas is now angrily lauded by them as the originalist lodestone on the Court and the one laying the intellectual foundations for conservative jurisprudence for the next generation. And they hate him. Oh my, how they hate him.

Well, now you're seeing more of the Left's Lake Placid Tolerance directed at Chic-Fil-A, an openly religious company whose CEO let it be known that he favors traditional marriage. Well, you'd have thought that he was a convicted child rapist and serial killer or something from the full-throated denunciations by many on the Left. (Well, serial killer, anyway. Liberals seem to be okay with child rapists.) Tom Menino, the mayor of Boston, vowed that Chic-Fil-A would never do business there and denied them a business permit. The Muppets have severed ties with the company. NYU is looking to kick them out of the city.

Homosexual rights are the new frontier of Lake Placid Tolerance in America. The message, as always, is the same: do what we want and we will accept and love you, but do anything else and we will crush you.

To be a Pyrrhic victory, you need an actual victory.

It looked the WI Democrats could at least claim the barest fig leaf in their epic failure of a perpetual campaign to oust the people responsible for returning the state to fiscal sanity -- er, stripping public unions of the right to collectively bargaining for benefits. Sure, they'd blown tens of millions of dollars on failed efforts to oust the state supreme court justice, on a special election to retake the state senate, and -- in their most spectacular failure -- on the recall of Scott Walker. But in that final failed recall, the state senate flipped! Democrats had control of half the legislature ... for the only six months when the legislature doesn't meet ... and they'll probably lose it in the November elections this year. But hey -- they won something for that colossal error in judgment and waste of resources.

Oops. Guess not.

So, to recap, for all their money, effort, expenditure of political capital, and racking up ill will among the electorate, WI Democrats got pretty much nothing: not the state supreme court, not the governor, not even a functioning majority in the state senate. When you think about it, they got even less than that. Every dollar spent in this recall is a dollar that can't be spent for Obama in the general election. Plus, it gave the WI GOP and Tea Party a wonderful test run for their spectacularly successful GOTV (that's "get out the vote" for you non-political nerds) operation. Not only did they aid their opponents by energizing them and allowing them a test run for the general election, they actively harmed the President's campaign by sucking millions of union dollars it looks increasingly like the Obama campaign will desperately need come the fall.

Usually, when you destroy yourself so thoroughly in pursuit of your goal you at least have the benefit of calling your efforts Pyrrhic. But to have a Pyrrhic victory still requires ... you know ... a victory.

This almost works too well

Neo hiding from Lumbergh. Mixing The Matrix with Office Space. It's freaky how well this mishmash scene works.