Ed Morrissey notes an example of government wielding its power in an extortion attempt to provide for the luxury of its bureaucrats. BLM: Say, maybe our demand that Burning Man supply us with on-demand ice cream was a little much.

For almost thirty years organizers have staged the Burning Man festival, starting off on the beaches of San Francisco and then out to the desert in northern Nevada. It’s akin to the Woodstock festival, focusing on both art and music where “radical self expression” meets “radical self-reliance” to form an intentional but temporary community. The use of the desert emphasizes the self-reliance, but it also requires Burning Man to get permits from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Organizers wanted to move the festival to a larger area thanks to its growing popularity, and BLM said, sure — as long as Burning Man builds them a compound for BLM staffers with washers, dryers, and an endless supply of food (via The Hill).
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Burning Man doesn’t sound like my cup of tea, but neither does strong-arming citizens for the use of public land as an excuse to pamper a bunch of public servants. Perhaps this part of radical self-reliance will rub off on BLM officials — and maybe it will prove instructive for those who see government as a solution to everything, especially land management.

When you go out to get in touch with nature, notice who has the best equipment, the newest trucks and toys, the fanciest gear. It is the same group that is always crying about a shortage of funds and charging you exorbitant fees to use public lands. And woe be unto you if you don’t toe the line!

Matt Ridley worries about The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science. Scandals and politics and ideology all wreak havoc.

None of this would matter if it was just scientific inquiry, though that rarely comes cheap in itself. The big difference is that these scientists who insist that we take their word for it, and who get cross if we don’t, are also asking us to make huge, expensive and risky changes to the world economy and to people’s livelihoods. They want us to spend a fortune getting emissions down as soon as possible. And they want us to do that even if it hurts poor people today, because, they say, their grandchildren (who, as Nigel Lawson points out, in The Facts, and their models assume, are going to be very wealthy) matter more.

Yet they are not prepared to debate the science behind their concern. That seems wrong to me.

On the bright side, there is debate based on intellectual integrity and reality. It just isn’t in the usual and normal – old school – methods the establishment still holds dear such as ‘scientific’ journals. The topic is also polluted by a propaganda machine pushed by the MSM and activist groups. Getting through the noise is perhaps a tougher challenge than it has been in the past but that may be that now we can just see the noise a bit better. 

Two comments regarding the Pope’s latest encyclical provide a bit of understanding about weakness and humanity.

Warner Todd Huston thinks that It is Now Indisputable That Pope Francis is a Risible Communist.

From now on, Pope Francis should be utterly dismissed as an important leader of the world. His latest global warming “encyclical” has proven he subscribes to a risible, anti-western and anti-capitalist theology and is less a Catholic than a communist.
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In this message–which lays out this terrible pope’s absurd ideas on his new religion of global warming–says that we need to stop buying things and turn the world back several thousand years to a time when life was brutal, uncomfortable, and short. He is essentially calling for an end to capitalism in this rambling paper.

Pope Francis goes on to claim that wealthy countries need to stop being wealthy and give away everything to the supposedly poorer nations but he doesn’t spend a second coming to term with why they are poor. He just assumes that rich nations are greedy and evil and must stop being so wealthy. This is quite a communistic theme.

On a bit less heated level is Dr. Tim Ball wondering Is The Catholic Church Burned By The Sun Again?.

The distorted headline provides context for disturbing evidence that the Vatican does not know its science, any more than it did 400 years earlier. Their position is a matter of faith not facts, evidence, or science. With great irony, lack of knowledge about the sun is central again. Item 23 of the Encyclical provides all the information we need to show they don’t understand the science and, therefore, cannot understand how it is misused.
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the position of the Vatican set out in the Encyclical is a matter of faith, not science. It appears that they are getting burned again, which sadly suggests they didn’t learn from history.

The matter is that of false witness as described in Exodus 20:16. If you cannot accurately testify to the nature of God’s work, including the progress of man away from poverty and in stewardship of the planet, there is indeed reason to question your motives and ability to serve as a reliable witness.

Gene M. Van Son explains why Francis is not the Left’s Pope.

In fact everything Pope Francis has said regarding marriage, family, divorce, contraception, homosexuality, women’s ordination — and economics — has been perfectly in line with traditional Catholic teaching. And while he is all for helping the poor and is against greed and crony capitalism, he does not support liberation theology, and he is not a socialist or a communist.

The issues have nuance and it is easy to suffer misperceptions if words are used in more of an ideologic manner without appropriate care. For instance:

Regarding economics, in a January interview in the Italian journal La Stampa, Francis — yet again — clarified his views on capitalism, saying, “When money, instead of man, is at the center of the system, when money becomes an idol, men and women are reduced to simple instruments of a social and economic system.” He added that “We need ethics in the economy, and we also need ethics in politics.”

The problem here is that capitalism, as Professor Walter Williams explains, is an economic system based on service to individuals. The very core of the economic system is that man, not money, is at the center of the system. Yes, capital is needed in order to provide the entrepreneur the resources to provide a service or product but, unless that service or product does not serve individuals who make choices one a a time, the capital will not yield any return. You can clarify views on capitalism all you want but unless you make it clear that fundamental basis of the system and its primary reason for its contributions to humanity is service to people and not money gamemanship, one will remain misunderstood.

A capitalist who makes money his idol looses focus on his market. When that happens, the capitalist looses his money as well as his market. He forgets that his business success in based on providing people with something they want or need and that wealth, both financial and otherwise, comes from that service to humans. Confusing the need for funds with the use of those funds is a propaganda tactic often used to malign capitalism. One needs to be careful with how one uses words and associates them with other concepts and it is this area that the Pope has created sufficient worry for articles trying to clarify his point of view.

Victor Davis Hanson on Building the New Dark-Age Mind. “America’s descent into the Dark Ages will not end well. It never has in the past.”

Current popular culture is not empirically grounded, but operates on the premise that truth is socially constructed by race, class, and gender concerns. … Science, logic, probability, evidence — all these cornerstones of the Enlightenment — now mean little in comparison to the race, class, and gender of those who offer narratives deemed socially useful.

Eric Holder called the nation “cowards” for not holding a national conversation on race. But Holder did not wish a freewheeling discussion about the break-up of the black family, the epidemic of violence and drug use, the cult of the macho male, the baleful role of anti-police rhetoric and rap music — in addition to current racism, a sluggish economy, and the wages of past apartheid. Instead, the ground rules of racial discussion were again to be anti-Enlightenment to the core. One must not cite the extraordinary disproportionate crime rate of inner-city black males, or the lack of inspired black leadership at the national level. One most certainly does not suggest that other minority groups either do not promote leaders like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson or do not seem to have a need for national collective spokespeople at all.

In our current Dark Age, logic is ignored in lieu of ideology.

Scary stuff: Toss the Western Civilization we inherited and go for tribal Africa as a model. 

Jazz Shaw finally found it. Something about the Hastert case didn’t feel right but couldn’t pin it down until Connor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic provided the proper analogy. So evading government scrutiny is a crime. Why?.

Let’s toss in one more hypothetical from Friedersdorf just to drive the point home.

What if the government installed surveillance cameras on various streets in a municipality and then made it a crime to walk along a route that skirted those cameras?

That’s it in a nutshell.

This is behind why the extension of the PATRIOT Act caused so much rancor. The telephone records data mining effort is like the surveillance cameras and it bothers people that there is no way to get out of sight, to take another route, to avoid getting hassled for trying to avoid governmental snooping. The abuse of prosecutorial discretion in going after political enemies is a realized fear and the Hastert case is looking to be another example in such efforts. 

Whether it’s Hitler’s Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, or The Little Red Book, the name commonly known in the West for the pocket-size edition of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, there is a guide for the social movements and it purpose is often other than elucidation. Scott Johnson takes on an example in a look at The deep secrets of racial profiling about Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Alexander’s book represents the state of the art in the assault on law enforcement in the name of racial disparities.
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the book comes in a scholarly wrapping. It footnotes assertions of facts and data with citations to sources in the traditional style of legal scholarship, but the footnotes frequently fail to support the text. Moreover, and more to the point, basic scholarship that contradicts her theses goes missing. Following David Harris’s tack in Profiles In Injustice, Alexander’s scholarship is a pretense.
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Alexander’s book is not itself a work of scholarship. it is a polemic. It is, more accurately, a work of obfuscation in the service of political propaganda. As propaganda, it is an unsavory piece of work at that.

Ideology blinds and that wants social acceptance. Little red books are after that ‘pat on the back’ and, all too often, seem to get it. The expense in civility is often huge.

Several cases have surface recently that raise questions about the motivation behind the search for criminal misconduct. Scott Horton describes The Thin Gruel of the Hastert Prosecution — “We should all be concerned about Dennis Hastert’s strange indictment“.

The fundamental problem in the Hastert case is simple: what, exactly, is the crime? As presented, the crime consists of a series of structured withdrawals supposedly designed to avoid a reporting duty, about which Hastert misled federal agents when they questioned him. This is not only extraordinarily thin gruel, it is also ripe for abuse. Keep in mind that the prostitution scandal that was manipulated by a Bush-era prosecutor to end the career of Eliot Spitzer was also triggered by similar bank payment reports.

Another case is described by Armstrong Williams suggesting that a South Dakota ‘voter fraud’ case deserves more attention.

The 43-year-old Sioux Falls physician was accused by State Attorney General Marty Jackley of having committed what is commonly referred to as “voter fraud.” Specifically, she had been indicted for having turned in nominating petitions that include the names of people whose signatures she did not personally witness.

That she did so is not in dispute; how the doctor has been treated very much is. According to ballot access activist Paul Jacob, Mr. Jackley’s “threatened penalty is the most severe any American has ever faced on a petition-related charge,” while “the transgressions alleged against Dr. Bosworth are arguably the least sinister” the activist has ever seen brought to trial.

Then there’s the Oregon case where the allegation is that the prosecution colluded with an LGBT group in going after a $135k discrimination claim. The Orange County disqualification of all of its lawyers in the district attorney’s office in a capital murder case is another problem in this vein.

These prosecutions are only the active half. The other half can be seen in Baltimore, New York, and other places where Police are inhibited in their efforts to tackle crime by political demands. Then there is the judicial front such as in the suit to stop the mainlining illegal immigrants. The war is on many fronts in may different ways.