Vox Popoli

John J. Miller on Gaia Day:

The promoter of the event is holding an umbrella as she’s being interviewed. Water is running off its edge. She’s probably standing in a pool of mud. Yet she urges people to come on down for the concert today. “It’s beautiful down here!” she insists.

Uh, no it’s not.

I have some sympathy for those who plan big outdoor events only to have the weather ruin them. But how are we supposed to trust these people on climate change if they can’t even tell the truth about what’s happening right on their own heads?

Beelzebub almost gets his wish:

I can’t hide my intense curiosity to see this blog review a serious work on socialism and then witness the purely biased outrage that would ensue.

I was so tempted to choose Kapital, except that it would be over the heads of the economically handicapped and those who understand it would be bored to death. Now, I’m not saying I’ll abide by the vote – you know my opinion of democracy – but I am interested in getting a general sense for how everyone feels about the book study. I’ll give people a week to get their hands on the selected text one way or another, and we’ll do a chapter per week with discussions beginning on the weekends.

A Voice From the Herd moos about the end justifying the means… because it’s for the children, of course:

I went at Vox Day for his inhuman attitude towards a phone call from an abused teenager. It appears that the call could be a hoax, even so I think the authorities had to err on the side of caution and Vox’s “christian” attitude still sucked ass…. Once more if that is what libertarianism is.. fuck it, if that is what your christian god deems moral fuck him too.

The idea that the authorities “had to err on the side of caution” by kidnapping 416 children on the basis of a single anonymous phone call that increasingly appears to be a hoax is a clear demonstration of how most women and not a few men really do want to be slaves. Freedom always comes at a price. If you’re not willing to pay it, then you will sell yourself into slavery. Hareball doesn’t realize that it is not libertarianism or the Christian God that she is rejecting here, but the freedom offered by both. The shame is that so many like her are so willing to force others into the same fearful servitude that they themselves crave.

One wonders what my religious faith has to do with the obvious violations of due process and the rule of law on the part of the Texas CPS agents responsible for kidnapping the children. As for the terrible “horror” that the women and children have supposedly endured prior to the kidnappings, I note that every single woman has preferred to return to her “abusers” than remain safe in the supposedly protective arms of the Texas government. The children, on the other hand, have been permitted no such freedom of choice by those who claim to have “rescued” them.

UPDATE – The evidence mounts and the self-proclaimed “child protection” advocates are “stunned”:

Texas authorities say Swinton is a person of interest in their search for the girl whose call prompted them to raid the Yearning for Zion Ranch. Department of Public Safety officials declined to discuss the case as part of an ongoing investigation, but issued a statement Friday saying the Rangers accompanied Colorado Springs police to search Swinton’s home for items related to previous false reports to authorities. Officers found several items indicating a possible connection between Swinton and calls regarding FLDS compounds in Colorado City, Arizona, and the one near Eldorado. The Rangers are “actively pursuing Rozita Swinton as a person of interest regarding telephone calls placed to a crisis center hotline in San Angelo,” the DPS said…

“The Texas Rangers told us she was obsessed with the FLDS. They confiscated tons of material on the FLDS (in the search of Swinton’s home). She even gave real addresses and real names of FLDS people.”

If you don’t see a very serious problem with this system, which supporters of the kidnappings claim worked precisely as it was supposed to, well, just send me your address and we’ll arrange to have some children make a few frightened phone calls. Perhaps you’ll feel differently about it then. And would you be just as fine with the mass kidnapping if she’d been a black woman obsessed with Jews instead of Mormons?

UPDATE II – Now they’re taking the little kids away too:

Adult mothers who have been allowed to stay with their young children since they were taken from a polygamous sect will be separated from them after DNA sampling is completed next week, a child welfare official said Saturday.

I wonder how long this judge and the responsible investigators will survive taking 416 children away from their parents:

Hundreds of children who were taken from a polygamist ranch by Texas child welfare authorities will remain in state custody, a judge ruled Friday night…. Walther made her ruling after two days of testimony at a hearing to determine whether the children were properly removed by child welfare authorities. Walther said she found sufficient evidence for Texas Child Protective Services to keep custody of the children.

History shows that religious people will tolerate an awful lot of persecution, but I find it hard to believe that a group of Texans will meekly accept the loss of their children because a few women in positions of government power don’t like their religious beliefs. Do you really think it’s a coincidence that incidents of government abuse justified by “for the children” claims are usually directed by someone named Janet, Barbara, or Angie?

I have criticized David Frum numerous times in the past, but he definitely nails it here:

Surging prices, collapsing returns, ending in a crash — housing? Yes, but the pattern may equally apply to another area of middle-class aspiration — college education. And as high school seniors receive their fat or thin acceptance or rejection letters this month, maybe we should all take a closer look at what their money buys.

Over the past decade the cost of college tuition has approximately doubled, faster at private colleges. This rapidly inflating investment is yielding a declining return. The earnings of bachelor-degree holders have been dropping this decade. After inflation, B.A. holders earned more than $54,000 in 2000. That dropped 5 percent over the next four years.

This is not a sustainable situation; politicians and parents have long mistaken the mere possession of a degree with a genuinely valuable education. As those of us with degrees from expensive universities well know, they simply aren’t worth anywhere near the price that was charged for them.

One can learn far more from reading on one’s own than sitting in a crowded room being talked at. Frum’s Bookshelf is a good example of this, although I’m interested in the idea of taking his concept even further by making use of the Web 2.0 user-generated aspects of this blog. What would you make of a regularly scheduled Voxiversity feature in which I’ll select a serious book related to a particular subject and those interested will go methodically through it with weekly discussions of each chapter? I could invite various experts to lead the discussions; those who aren’t regulars already might be willing to participate if they knew that people were buying their books for this purpose. For example, I am currently reading The Landmark Thucydides to which VDH contributed the forward and perhaps he would be interested in participating, particularly if he knew that a certain number of people had bought the book for this purpose. Actually, he’d probably be more interested if we chose A War Like No Other, but you get the point.

Anyhow, let me know if this might be of enough interest for you to participate and what would be the first books you’d be interested in reading and discussing. History, literature, economics and military classics are the subjects I’m interested in; please don’t even THINK about suggesting anything related to atheism, theology, evolution, biology or intelligent design.

MDS explodes the oft-heard draft legend:

Mike Mamula’s name is thrown around every year at draft time as the simple shorthand for a player whom N.F.L. general managers fall in love with based solely on the athleticism he displays at the scouting combine, and who then goes on to have a terrible N.F.L. career.

There are just two problems with that perception of Mamula:
1. The Eagles didn’t make him the seventh pick in the 1995 draft based solely on his combine performance.
2. His N.F.L. career wasn’t terrible.

WorldNetDaily is running a survey and I’d appreciate it if you’d consider taking it. It’s only 20 checkbox-style questions and it requires no registration or email address. It’s a nice opportunity to give them some feedback on where you’d like things to go in the future… and among the questions happens to be one about letting them know who your favorite WND columnists are.

How can you not harbor much love for KG? The Sports Guy does:

He transformed the culture of the team. He taught everyone to care about defense, to care about practice, to care about being a professional, to care about leaving everything they had on the court, to stop caring about stats and start caring about wins. He single-handedly transformed the careers of three young players (Rajon Rondo, Leon Powe and Kendrick Perkins), one veteran (Pierce) and one coach (Doc Rivers), all five of whom could have gone the other way. He played every exhibition game like it was the seventh game of the Finals. During blowouts, he stood on the sidelines and cheered on his teammates like it was a tight game; because of that, the bench guys did the same thing for the starters and basically turned into a bunch of giddy scrubs on a 14-seed in a March Madness upset during every game.

The best word for him would either be “contagious” or “selfless.” By Thanksgiving, the entire team was emulating him. Every time a young player got carried away with himself during a game — like the time Perkins started going for his own stats or the time Rondo snapped at his coach — KG was there to set him straight and scare the living hell out him. Every time one of his teammates was intimidated, KG had his back. Every time one of his teammates got knocked down, KG rushed over to pick him up; eventually, four teammates were rushing over to help that fifth guy up, and that’s just the way it goes with the team now. Every time an opponent kept going for a shot after a whistle, KG defiantly blocked the shot just out of principle. Eventually, everyone started doing it. No shots after the whistle against the Celtics. That was the rule. It was a series of little things, baby steps if you will, but they added up to something much bigger.

I don’t think there’s a Minnesotan who doesn’t wish KG well. Even if you don’t care about basketball, you can’t help but admire a player who has always shunned playing superstar in favor of being a great teammate. It’s probably part of why he’s never been the endgame assassin that MJ was and Kobe and Lebron are, but it’s also why he’s so well-loved everywhere he goes.

Spacebunny and I once saw him at a steakhouse, and while it’s not exactly possible for a 7-foot tall All-Star to be unassuming, that’s how he carried himself. KG is a competitor – he wants to win and he wants to win very badly indeed – but he clearly doesn’t think the world revolves around him.

That their scare meme is outdated:

Time managing editor Richard Stengel appeared on MSNBC April 17 and said the United States needed to make a major effort to fight climate change, and that the cover’s purpose was to liken global warming to World War II. “[O]ne of the things we do in the story is we say there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change,” Stengel said. “It seems to me that this is an issue that is very popular with the voters, makes a lot of sense to them and a candidate who can actually bundle it up in some grand way and say, ‘Look, we need a national and international Manhattan Project to solve this problem and my candidacy involves that.’ I don’t understand why they don’t do that.”

I imagine because they have been paying attention to the reports of the climatologists that disprove all of the calamitous computer climate models by pointing out how there hasn’t been any global warming over the last ten years. That’s the nice thing about journalism. You don’t actually have to know anything, you only have to really believe you do.

Some might decry Stengel’s open admittance of bias, but you won’t hear me complaining about it. Everyone is biased one way or another, so it’s much better to have it all out in the open rather than hidden behind a shallow pretense of a nonexistent objectivity.

It appears increasingly likely that the Texas government’s mass arrest of Mormon adults and kidnapping of Mormon children was based on a fraudulent phone call, possibly by a woman with a history of making false accusations:

A 33-year-old Colorado Springs woman has been questioned about a telephone call that sparked a raid at the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints compound in western Texas two weeks ago. Rozita Swinton was arrested at her home Wednesday night by Colorado Springs police for an incident that occurred in February. Members of the Texas Rangers were also in Colorado Springs as part of their investigation….

Texas authorities launched their raid on the compound after receiving a warrant based on a phone call from a girl named “Sarah” who called for help, claiming she was pregnant and living inside the compound with her 49-year-old abusive husband. Flora Jessop, an outspoken ex-member of the FLDS group, told KUSA-TV she believes Swinton may have been the person she spoke with by phone, who claimed to be Sarah’s twin sister. She said the woman she believes is Rozita Swinton called again Thursday morning after Swinton bailed out of the El Paso County Jail.

It will be interesting to watch the gyrations of government agents attempting to retroactively justify their outrageous actions once the details of the fraud becomes apparent to all and sundry. I don’t know if it’s actually Swinton who is responsible, but since the accused man is known to have been living in a different state than the caller reported, it’s already fairly clear that the justification for the arrests and kidnappings is based on a false foundation.