Pretty interesting. Two possible conclusions:

1) Eco-ninnies just suck.

2) Eco-ninnies are effectively buying post-modern papal indulgences, they believe, by paying for their sins with minor changes in their consumer purchasing patterns. By buying this supposedly eco-friendly soup, they've saved the environment a little, and satisfied their own (apparently low) threshold of moral and upright behavior, and have a great deal of wiggle room when it comes to other areas of their lives.

I sort of buy both but especially that Number Two. I have long, and long-windedly, argued that liberals indulge themselves with a great many of Ostentatious, Conspicuous Pseudo-Moral Gestures, no different than the judgmental prig they take as representative of a "Christian," a stereotype they know almost exclusively from movies like Footloose.

The gestures are directed both outward and inward, outward to convince others of one's superior morality, but more importantly inward, to convince themselves.

Anyone who's ever talked to such a person comes away thinking, "Good Lord, you have fashioned yourself a real crazy-quilt of ad hoc, made-up, superstitious neo-pagan rules to live by! How do you keep up with all these restrictions and blather?"

It seems like a patchwork super-structure of ersatz, faddish morality designed with only one conceivable purpose: To supplant the conventional morality taught by traditional institutions. Apparently the soul still craves the feeling of living a just and righteous life, even after traditional notions of the just and righteous have been abandoned. The entire code of forbidden foods and rituals of eating in Leviticus is overwritten, line by line and jot by tittle, by some new equally oddball code: Pork is not precisely forbidden, but you can't eat pork that was acquired from a farm more than 60 miles away; and Thou Shall Not Eat Chilean Sea Bass, at least not if it has been caught by a commercial net.

In some cases it might make a lick of sense (okay, maybe the sea bass is being overfished and we hardly want that) and in other cases it's purely a neo-pagan gesture to the new gods. I really do not believe the trivial "carbon costs" of shipping some pork in by railway car are anything more than a rounding error in the carbon costs of feeding that pig and sustaining a farm in the first place.

Oh, and carbon costs are jive in the first place.

Net result? One's sense of place in the universe is affirmed, and one is given the fulfillment of knowing one is doing Gods' work (plural intended) in making rather trivial shopping adjustments. And, even better than that: One gets that crucially-important rush of feeling superior to someone else.

And one more bonus: If you're doing right by Mother Earth, it frees you up to cut corners with your fellow man.

. In their study (described in a paper now in press at Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat and steal.

In an experiment, participants were randomly assigned to select items they wanted to buy in one of two online stores. One store sold predominantly green products, the other mostly conventional items. Then, in a supposedly unrelated game, all of the participants were allocated $6, to share as they saw fit with an anonymous (and unbeknownst to them, imaginary) recipient. Subjects who had chosen items from the green store coughed up less money, on average, than their counterparts. In a second experiment, participants were again assigned to shop in either a green or conventional store. Then they performed a computer task that involved earning small sums of cash. The setup offered the opportunity to cheat and steal with impunity. The eco-shoppers were more likely to do both.

It would be foolish to draw conclusions about the real world from just one paper and from such an artificial scenario. But the findings add to a growing body of research into a phenomenon known among social psychologists as "moral credentials" or "moral licensing.

Yeah I just said that before reading it so shut up, I don't need social psychologists to give it a name for me. "Indulgences" works fine.

A few years ago (or ten years ago -- how the years flash by) I read some magazine article about "compassion fatigue," liberals basically growing fatigued by the long list of restrictions urged upon them, grapes this week, apples the next, coffee now, now sea bass. And it discussed just a general weariness about the whole regime.

It is probably the case that people only have a limited capacity to restrict their wants and desires according to moral stricture. And that you can not simply keep adding and adding to the pile of requirements and forbiddances. Because at some point, someone just gives up on it, and starts observing rules more sporadically, or not at all, because he's overwhelmed by the sheer number of demands for self-denial and cannot deny himself any further.

And if that's the case -- which seems rather plausible -- it is in fact dangerous to continuously add to this list of moral strictures, clogging up one's limited self-denial machinery with trivial matter, because the ultimate effect may be that the truly important stuff starts getting ignored in favor of the meaningless, or frankly, the flat-out idiotic.

Afterthought: Religions impose a lot of rules about two broad areas: Sex, and food.

It seems that a lot of liberals are getting their religion in at Whole Foods. Sure, they have generally shed some of the rules about sex they find arbitrary and too restrictive, but day-um, are they ever making up for that additional freedom in the Sex Sector by adding a huge list of Thou Shall Nots in the Food Sector.

I don't know -- if you've shed the guilt for a licentious blow-jay you're going to get maybe twice a year if you're lucky, but on the other hand, you have to worry and gnash your teeth every single meal fretting that your pastrami-on-rye isn't free range enough to be eco-kosher, what have you really gained as far as freedom of action?

Seems to me you'd be better served to just chuck your worries about the sinful sandwiches and just feel guilty twice a year when you hook up with someone.

Corrected: The study was about the eco-conscious, not liberals, exactly; liberalish pseudo-conservatives like David Brooks and Rod "Captain Crunch" Dreher fall into this category too, I guess. So do some readers, who aren't liberal (and who I just realized I insulted with whatever term I use; sorry).

So, in the beginning of the post, I've changed liberals to "eco-ninnies." After that I let stand the slip into "liberals," because while the studies may be about eco-ninnies, the rest of my post is about liberals who buy into eco-ninnyhood.

Thanks to Artorious.

Posted by: Ace at 05:14 PM | Comments (211)
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Just a draft? Well, maybe. But it jibes with previous reports.

There are obviously two problems here: The first, more important problem is that these people should not be held in American prisons, where they are then vested with additional rights, and may wind up petitioning for release. At Gitmo, they have less such rights (although damn do those courts keep finding they have more).

The second problem was more of a tactic, a way to block this without having to prevail on this first point: The NIMBY question, where we kept asking, rhetorically, "Well, do you want these terrorists living by you?" This was always a fairly minor objection, relatively speaking, compared to the first, but it was used because it generates a visceral reaction.

Well, since Obama's able to sell the politicians in his home state's political machine on accepting these guys (who are, in fact, dangerous, as are the brothers-in-arms who might be tempted to come by and say hello), that second objection is mooted, except for the citizens of Illinois, I guess, and what are they going to do about it?

But the first objection remains powerful. And we still have no good answer from Obama on this point, except that it somehow makes us safer to be nice to terrorists.

Posted by: Ace at 04:46 PM | Comments (60)
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Iowahawk has a very ambitious idea for a post: Not only will he explain to you what the hockey stick is, and how it came to be, he will actually take you step-by-step through Mann's (et al.) process in crunching the numbers and explain to you how to produce your own temperature reconstruction graph.

This isn't a joke or parody; he's really teaching you basic statistical modeling and telling you exactly how to produce your own graph (and how Mann et al. produced theirs).

I admit, my brain doesn't want to go here: A man's got to know his limitations.

But I imagine quite a few of you have brains hooked up to handle this sort of thing, and may be pretty intrigued at the idea of running your own temperature reconstructions.

DIY CRU AGW.

Hmmm... I guess if I am going to be hawking this issue, I really do have to try this at some point.

The thing is, it's one thing to talk about this sort of thing vague, but when you really understand something, obviously you really understand it.

It's not that forbidding. It's pretty accessible, really.

Posted by: Ace at 04:12 PM | Comments (102)
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A Clinton-appointed judge, I'm told. Here is a PDF of the decision.

ACORN has claimed the cutoff constitutes a Bill of Attainder, which is frankly silly, I think (although I think the Volokh guys argued, somewhat persuasively, this was a plausible finding).

The judge claims, weirdly, that there is a separation of powers issue that somehow restrains Congress from exercising its constitutionally-specified power to raise and spend money. Huh? The judge claims some sort of finding of guilt by a court or an executive administrative magistrate is required before Congress can exercise its major constitutionally-specified power. Odd, it seems, but I suppose not so odd if you start out with the idea this is a Bill of Attainder.

I'll get some quotes but for now I'm just posting it.

Interesting quote:

At first blush, the idea that the deprivation of the ability to apply for discretionary federal funds is "punitive" within the meaning of the bill of attainder clause seems implausible.

With all due respect, Geinus: It seems that way at first blush, at second blush, at seventh blush, and at eighty-eighth blush too.

This judge is effectively stating that Congress has no right to decide how it directs discretionary funding to organizations, and that once an organization is on the federal teat, it has the right to continue suckling in perpetuity until some finding of "guilty" is made against it by some other branch of the government.

By the Way: If you don't know, an injunction is not, in theory, the court's last word on the matter. Rather it is is a form of temporary relief, a temporary injunction against the action until the court can consider the matter fully.

But the bases for granting injunctive relief includes the idea that "the plaintiff is likely to win on the merits at full trial," so very often, a granting of injunctive relief indicates how the judge is going to come down in the end.

Link Problems: I was sent the PDF of the decision. I just stupidly "linked" that, which doesn't work, since you can't read a PDF in my email. I will try to find the decision somewhere on the web.

LINK: Okay, here is the file. PDF of Order on Injunction.

Judge Nina Gershon... about whom Rep. Darryl Issa says:

This left-wing activist Judge is setting a dangerous precedent that left-wing political organizations plagued by criminal accusations have a constitutional entitlement to taxpayer dollars. The Obama Administration should immediately move to appeal this injunction.

You know what's ridiculous here? Obama is pressing this suit, supposedly, against his ally, his creature, ACORN. It is entirely within his power to tank the case and deliberately lose it.

Weak: The judge relies on a previous case in which Congress had stripped funding from 39 specified federal employees. The court there found the stripping of funding for their jobs to be a bill of attainder because the workers already had a vested property interest in their jobs.

Plus, and this isn't mentioned, but let's face it, those are individuals. A corporation is legally, fictively a "person" too, but not really. I don't know what principle of law this is, but surely there's Oh come on with that nonsense caveat somewhere.

Anyway, this particular judge looks at that case and relies on it. She notes the problem -- in that case, the employees were already found to have a vested right in their jobs, which could not be stripped away without some due-process type finding of guilt. But in this case, ACORN has "no right" (emphasis in original) to these funds.

So doesn't that mean, immediately, the two cases are different?

No, the judge claims, because ACORN is being denied the right to offer its services to the government in the future.

Um: So what? They also have "no right" to demand the government do business with them in the future. They simply have no right to demand any money at all. It is entirely an at-will employment situation, and the government has fired ACORN.

But the judge spins this into a cotton-candy confection that's really tasty for ACORN. Apparently you can't prohibit any organization from receiving federal funds -- and that means the KKK can start petitioning the government for its own "community outreach" efforts.

It cannot be stressed enough that these funds are entirely discretionary, entirely by whim of Congress. This is not a case of someone who qualifies for some federal cash according to the letter of the law spelling out the entitlement being wrongly denied the money -- in that case, the person can point to the law and say "According to that law, I qualify; give me that money."

In that sort of case, there exists -- if only arguably -- a right of the person to claim the money and thus a right to challenge the government's refusal to pay it.

In this case, ACORN has the same right to millions of dollars from the government that I do: Namely, none whatsoever. And yet Congress' finding that it may exercise its discretion and end funding of ACORN is treated as if, well, not within its discretion at all.

If the government cannot deny millions to ACORN, then it cannot also simply deny the money to me, and I too would like to enjoin the government from its continuing refusal to pay me money.

Posted by: Ace at 03:48 PM | Comments (112)
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No, he didn't say hookers. And I don't really think he was with hookers. But hookers is a damn funny word and it's hard to pass up the opportunity.

(Someone observed that any word with a "k" sound in its middle is somehow inherently funny: Pickles. Monkeys. Kookoo. Funky. Knockers. Hookers. "Pookie."

Is it really that simple? There does seem to be something to that.)

But he is suspending his golf career "indefinitely." Which means "until my sponsors and corporate-crisis people tell me it's okay to play again."

Here's his full statement, once again thanks to Red Eye's Andy Levy.

Posted by: Ace at 03:00 PM | Comments (173)
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Now, before reading too much into this, take into account the teller of this tale is a madam. A procuress. A whoremonger, or, I guess, a whoremistress.

That's not to say she's definitely lying. But it is to say she's a criminal (prostitution is criminal in California, right?), and, one can hazard to guess, somewhat mercenary in her motivations and probably not someone whose integrity and honesty are indisputably solid.

One might also guess that for some people, the chance to grab a bit of notoriety on the tails of a big story would be an attractive proposition.

That said, she claims Woods spent $60,000 on hookers. Big cheesecake picture of one of his alleged favorites at the link.

PS: Sorry about all this fluff! I can't seem to motivate to get on to real news stories.

Posted by: Ace at 01:34 PM | Comments (162)
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Well!

Seems people's suspicions here were spot-on.

The political import of Avatar -- and there's no waving this aspect away because it's right in your face start to finish, and especially in the third act -- is ardently left. It is pro-indigenous native, anti-corporate, anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. Iraq War effort, anti-U.S.-in-Afghanistan (and anti-troop-surge-in-that-country, or strongly against the thinking of President Barack Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal), anti-rightie, anti-Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld, etc.

Yes, it's very teenaged adolescent in its super-imaginative wacko visions and exuberant energy levels, but politically it's pure Che Guevara (more the Motorcycle Diaries or Che-in-Cuba version than Che in Bolivia), Naom Chomsky, Hugo Chavez, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Oliver Stone, etc. Cameron is an earth-hugging lefty from way back (the flagrant despise-the-arrogant-rich current in Titanic being but one example) so this should come as no surprise to anyone. I for one am cheered and heartened.

If Sarah Palin sees Avatar and then sits down and actually thinks about what it's saying (which is always a dicey proposition, I admit), she'll hate this movie. Because Avatar hates her and her kind. Some righties will pretend to like it ("great popcorn flick! took my kids!"), but they'd have to be in major denial mode not to recognize that Avatar is much more MSNBC than Fox News. It really spits on the Fox News philosophy/worldview. If Cameron had for some inane reason put a Fox News-type character in the film, he/she would end up with a Na'vi arrow through his/her chest, trust me.

Call it the most flamboyant, costliest, grandest left-liberal super-movie anyone's ever seen -- a political tract that cost Rupert Murdoch God knows how many hundreds of millions to make and yet is totally pro-loincloth, pro-native, despise-the-greedy, hug-the-earth, worship-the-earth, down with the soulless short-end, down with the us-first, masters-of-the-universe thinking behind the Goldman Sachs/Timothy Geithner culture and up with the eternal/spiritual in all cultures and all corners of the globe. The tragedy of the Vietnam War echoes all through this film. Somewhere Ho Chi Minh is smiling.

He also says there's some kind of "reverse 9/11" metaphor in it.

Thanks to Dave @ Garfield Ridge.

Titanic Hypocrite? The Deceiver wants to know the size of James Cameron's carbon footprint.

And No I'm Not Giving Up On This Joke, Why Do You Ask? Nightcrawler of the X-Men just emailed me to say "LIESS! ALL LIESSS! It ist the most wunderbar movie ever made!"

John "Dirty Harry" Nolte: Yeah, That's About Right! Not a fan.

Absent from the big screen for over a decade now, Oscar-winning director James Cameron returns armed with a reported half-billion dollars, a story he’s been desperate to tell for 15 years, and the very latest in cutting-edge visual technology. The result is “Avatar,” a sanctimonious thud of a movie so infested with one-dimensional characters and PC clichés that not a single plot turn – small or large – surprises. I call it the “liberal tell,” where the early and obvious politics of the film gives away the entire story before the second act begins, and “Avatar” might be the sorriest example of this yet. For all the time and money and technology that went into its making, the thing that matters most – character and story – are strictly Afterschool Special.
What a crushing disappointment from one of our most original and imaginative filmmakers.

Set in 2154, “Avatar” is a thinly disguised, heavy-handed and simplistic sci-fi fantasy/allegory critical of America from our founding straight through to the Iraq War.

Nightcrawler just wrote to tell me he's planning on rapier-murdering John Nolte later tonight. Bamf!

Whoops: John Nolte, not Nolan, as I wrote.

Posted by: Ace at 12:30 PM | Comments (351)
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(A series of daily-ish roundups of the day's Climate news and commentary.)

This is by no means a comprehensive recap. The stories come from a variety of sources, and I highly recommend exploring the linked sites for more breaking news.

A little early today, but it's Friday and I've got an extra hobo-tag.

(after the break...) more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 12:27 PM | Comments (23)
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I have never heard of this story before I got the tip. It seems like a big cable story. I'm just catching up.

Some background:

Raffaele Sollecito, who was convicted with Knox last week by an Italian jury of murdering British student Meredith Kercher, said from his jail cell that "Amanda is a very dear person to me even if we were only together for a short while," according to the report.

Kercher, a 21-year-old Leeds University student, was stabbed to death in Perugia, Italy, in November 2007.

Knox, 22, of Seattle, was sentenced to 26 years; Sollecito, 25, got 25 years.

"She is also living a nightmare — we both find ourselves in a tremendous situation," Sollecito told the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero through his attorney.

"I am not in love with Amanda but I feel close to her as she is my companion in a misadventure," he said. "Amanda is not capable of killing anyone — it's impossible and absurd. She is such a sweet girl."

Apparently there is some agitation that while Knox's boyfriend is guilty, Amanda Knox herself is innocent as sugar pie.

Ann Coulter says no, no way, uh-uh.

Even though this story doesn't really have too much political juice, it's interesting. An Ann Coulter makes it political -- "liberals always want to defend the guilty and prosecute the innocent," she says.

Bill O'Reilly, interviewing her, interjects that a reporter, "not an ideologue," says Knox is innocent and he's not a liberal, to which Ann Coulter says, "He's a reporter, he's a liberal."

She does cut to the chase.

The evidence she mentions seems very damning, and it's hard to understand how this other reporter can maintain there's "no" evidence against the woman.

Thanknks to EdwardR.

Posted by: Ace at 12:24 PM | Comments (67)
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Congratulations Abu Yahya al-Libi, you're the latest winner in the CIA's 72 Virgins Sweepstakes!

Abu Yahya al-Libi is the spiritual successor to Palestinian philosopher Abu Azzam - and the inspiration for much of Bin Laden's beliefs, according to CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan. He is very powerful and believed by some to be the natural successor to Bin Laden.

Intelligence officials have confirmed that the pace of attacks by armed unmanned aerial vehicles has increased during the Obama administration.

Poor bastard, he just missed out on being captured which would have meant an all expense paid trip to NYC, which is lovely this time of year.

It's still unconfirmed but it's being reported by Lara Logan who, despite the fact she is pumping out kids like a rabbit these days, is still hot so I believe her.

BTW-Follow the link to the bottom for some very funny snark.

*Yes, I'm forgoing the "killed by this and that but mostly that" formulation because Ace did it last night.

Posted by: DrewM at 12:20 PM | Comments (39)
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