Patriotic Grace

While Terry Paulson's latest article is largely about how America will become a socialist dystopia if we fail to elect President Trump for a second term, he concludes with a few paragraphs reminding his readers that what unites us as Americans is greater than that which divides us.

I think that “patriotic grace” is there for the taking. We shop together, work together, serve together, worship together, and seem to have no trouble keeping politics in its right perspective. America should not need a war or a terrorist attack to bring us together. At the deepest level, we remain one republic, one people. As we launch into 2020, let’s dial down the attacks and remember how blessed we are to be Americans with opportunities others just dream of. Let’s help President Trump keep expanding those opportunities for more and more Americans.

I would agree with everything except that last part as I don't think President Trumps policies are likely to improve thing at all.

This article didn't get a lot of comments, but the ones that did post were all attacking Democrats, as you would expect.  This one by Momster is perhaps the most striking.

As the swamp sloooowly drains, observe the swamp creatures now exposed to the cleansing sunlight. See them as they writhe in agony. Listen as they snap their increasingly toothless jaws. Hear them as they bellow and hiss out their stream of lies. Watch out for their still dangerous tails as they lash about in desperation!

I don't know - if I thought my political enemies were toothless lashing swamp creatures I probably wouldn't want to work together or serve together with them.   But perhaps I am looking at this the wrong way. 

Grasping at Straws

The Republicans, keen to defend President Trump, will grasp on any excuse to discredit the work the House of Representatives has done in preparing for an Impeachment Trial.  This despite the clear statements by Mitch McConnell that he is a) working with Trump on how to respond, and b) has no intention of treating it as an objective trail.  That's why the opening of Debra J Saunders latest article is such a hoot.

Imagine there is a murder trial that takes months and involves many witnesses, and then, at the end, the prosecutor announces that he's done such a great job of arguing guilt, he's not going to send the case to the jury.

This whole article is built around one key belief of Ms. Saunders - Trump is innocent and the Democrats know it.  That's not fact.  Trump is guilty as hell of what he is accused of (as evidenced by the ever shifting narrative around whether he did what he is accused of doing).  That is simply the core belief of Saunders and her tribe regarding this manner. 

If you start with the theory that he's innocent and Democrats know it than Saunders idiotic article makes sense (she does suffer from temporal confusion, unable to reconcile why Democrats said one thing when it looked like Republicans were going to be objective and something else when it was clear they were all or mostly all partisan hacks.

If Saunders were capable of honesty she would imagine a trial where the defendant consulted with the judge on how best for the judge to throw the case out of court.    That would be crazy - but that's also where we are. 

Into the Filth Part 2 - Happy Holidays and Loosing The Thread

So Dennis Pragers latest article is about how Leftists want to destroy Christmas - what an original idea for an article.  But, as is the point to these Into the Filth articles, lets look at the comments. 

And quickly we see them loosing the thread - moving from a celebration of Christmas to attacking people who don't speak English in public.  This comes from ERIC who certainly makes some calm and reasoned language.

Nope! I for one don't believe any foreigners language should be allowed in AMERICA! First you came here! We didn't go to your country and try to install ENGLISH! SO you should learn English, so you can communicate with AMERICANS CITIZEN. Speak it at home not in public!

I wonder what ERIC would say if he heard some people speaking Navaho - but I feel like I can guess.   At any rate, I find it baffling that this is an extended discussion on an article about how Leftists are destroying Christmas.

Then there is this exchange between Legoge47 and Andy Maxwell.

I like "After Thanksgiving Day Sale" I hope that will catch on rather than "Black Friday." That has a negative connotation to me.

Actually blacks thought it meant that they could freely loot and steal from businesses on the day after Thanksgiving.

OK - now that's pretty blatant.  I should add a disclaimer that although it appears that some hard core conservatives who participate on Townhall are racist or xenophobic - I am sure that there are at least some who aren't racist or xenophobic. 

Death Division and Destruction.

Let's take a look at Jake Hoffman's latest article.

The modern Democratic Party has become the party of death, division and destruction. Presently, Democrats are actively working to divide and destroy our communities, our churches, our children’s innocence, our prosperity, our industry, our culture, our president, our presumption of innocence and expectation of due process, our Constitution and rule of law, and, quite frankly, our entire way of life.

This isn’t hyperbole, it’s reality, and it’s a reality that should sadden every honest, altruistic American to their very core.

But as a Democrat I am guessing that Hoffman doesn't consider me an honest altruistic American.

How do you make peace with someone who believes that?  What sort of truce could we work out?   He's determined that people like me aren't just wrong but are evil - and as such, even if he were willing to make peace on some issues, he's still dedicated to wiping me and people like me out.   I understand disagreeing without being disagreeable, but how do you do that when they are starting from a place of "America would be better off without you."

Fundamental Changes to our Country part 2 or how I learned to despise Dennis Prager

Actually I've always despised Dennis Prager, since I first encountered him, when he was mostly focused on hating Islam and making nonsensical arguments in favor of this belief. 

These day he has a different Jihad - against Leftists, but not Liberals.  So that lets me off the hook right?  I mean I'm a liberal, right?  Not so fast - he quickly includes President Obama and Elizabeth Warren as Leftists which means he probably gets to condemn me too.

The difference between Liberal and Leftist is that Liberals love America and Leftists don't.  Rather because Leftists make common cause with people who are critical of America and are critical of America ourselves (as I certainly have been) - we don't love America.

He then goes into the canard about how we want to fundamentally change America.  Did  Lincoln hate America when he ran as an open abolitionist?  Did FDR when he ran on a new deal?  Did Reagan when he ran on morning in America?   All of these are transformations (two good and one bad in my opinion).  But Prager has a unified theory about what a "real" America is, and it's one that excludes anybody who isn't conservative.

So when Colin Kaepernick knelt during the singing of the National Anthem to protest how many blacks were being shot down by the police in America it shows contempt for America - or his version of America.  Since I want a more racially just America, I thought that what Kaepernick did was admirable.  But wanting a more racially just America shows that I don't love America.  Somehow.

He says that we are critical of America as evidence that we don't love it - but it's a child's argument.  We are critical of what America does wrong because want it to do better.

Also Liberals don't love Christianity or Capitalism so we don't love America - because those two things are the core of America?  Bad luck for members of any other faith in America.

Finally there's this twist of the knife.

Love is, among other things, an emotion. So, here is a question about leftists' emotions: Do any leftists get the chills when the national anthem is played or when they see the American flag waving as the anthem is played? Given their rhetoric, it is most unlikely. 

Well I still do - somehow I'm able to believe in the ideals of America without needing to pretend that it is perfect. 

But then again I'm not a child. 

Bridge to Far

Was sick all last week and this week kind of hammered so short thought today, responding to Scott Morefield's latest article.

Might there be some who want to see him impeached as a sort of punishment or check, but think tearing the country apart by removing a sitting president and essentially undoing the 2016 election is a bridge too far? It’s quite likely, but we won’t find out with any of these polling methods.

The thing is there's an element of truth in his contention.  If it really was a perfect call and there was no quid pro quo than yeah actually bringing Trump to the Senate floor to remove him from office is a bit too much.   But in the calculation of many, there is enough evidence there to justify further investigation, and everything we find out seems to paint the President as more and more guilty. 

Morefield's (and the President's) argument seems to be, if you don't have enough to get a conviction, end the investigation immediately.   Pretty good deal for the President, but let's recall the Starr investigation which started off looking Whitewater and ended up being about the President having sex - if the Morefield investigation policy had been in place then would Clinton have still been impeached? 

Well of course - Clinton's a democrat, and he's surely guilty of something, but Trump is a republican so any investigation is phony baloney.

Can you count?

Mr. Kurt Schlichter over at Townhall quotes the warriors to support his thesis that Trump will win again.  Largely because he can count to 67 - and without 67 votes for impeachment, we won't be able to remove President Trump from office.

And what I count to is a number that is less than 67. That’s the number of traitors to the Constitution you would need in the Senate to convict. 67. But right now, the count is about 50, maybe 49, or even 47 or 48. That’s the number of unAmerican creeps in the Senate who would vote to convict when the garbage Democrats in the house pass their garbage articles of garbage impeachment.

So, liberal elite, until you can count to 67, eat Schiff and die.

Let's take just a moment to reflect that Democrats are the party with no class and Republicans are the more respectable of the two.   "eat Schiff and die."  Oy. 

Anyway the other half of the story, and why Schlichter wants desperately to shut down this impeachment inquiry before it begins is that the more information that comes out about President Trump and his staff's dealing with the Ukraine government, the worse it looks.   So while yes, if the impeachment vote was held today, he'd get another term for sure.  But if its held after several months of investigation with all the facts laid out, the result would certainly change - President Trump can't continue to pretend there was no quid pro quo (well he can, and probably will, but it won't work). 

The real question will end up being how dumb do Republicans who support Trump want to look.   

The Neverending War

David Limgaugh's latest article starts with an interesting statement.

Ever since Trump's presidential announcement, leftists have been plotting and scheming against him.

What makes that so hypocritical is that of course we have - just as Republicans plotted and schemed and broke political norms to take down President Obama.  That's what you do.  From my perspective Republicans and Conservatives have a lot of bad ideas - and I am opposed to them putting those ideas into practice.   Most Republicans and Conservatives would feel the same about my ideas (but just to be clear, I'm right and they are not). 

One key difference between Trump and former Republican Presidents is that Trumps ideas are explicitly racist. 

Of course the big difference between Liberals and Conservatives, as Limbaugh points out, is that Republicans and Conservatives are dedicated to wiping Liberals out. 

In the very beginning of the book, I dispel the myth that the political left and conservatives share the same goals for America but just have different ideas about how to achieve them. If this were ever true before, which I highly doubt, it is demonstrably false now.

So that's that - liberals are dangerous monsters that need to be dealt with.  I can't speak for all Democrats or Liberals but we don't actually want to get rid of Conservatives or Republicans.  You see we actually do believe that Americans with different view points and political philosophies can share a nation. 

If Limbaugh doesn't, maybe that says more about Limbaugh than Liberals. 

Into the Filth Pt 1

Of what will be an ongoing series where I take an article and look through the comments - sometimes this is illuminating, more often its depressing.

Logically there is no way to provide more health care for more people and the resulting more operations, office visits and procedures without the cost going up. You have to be either a mush head or totally dishonest to claim otherwise. I would say Ms Warren is in the liar group.

This is from a poster named Michael Mitchell - and well, I do think I spot a mushhead. His assertion that it is illogical that we could get more healthcare without paying more falls apart when you know (as I do and as anybody should) that the left's contention is that there is a lot of waste created by an inefficient profit-driven health insurance system overlayed on our health care. And if we are going to be this simplistic let's ask an obvious question - the Insurance Companies get your money regardless of whether or not they provide services - so what incentive do they have to provide good services? Rather don't they have a clear motivation to provide the cheapest healthcare they can get away with?

Moderate Democrats ceded control of the Party to sociopaths decades ago; it took the election of Donald Trump to expose this fact to everyone.

That's from TCop19. Sociopaths, eh? The sort of monsters that might put children in cages for example? Or the sort of people that might withhold military aid to an ally in order to force investigation of a political rival? Yep the election of Donald Trump exposed a lot of things.

Democrats are just communists in disguise. They won't call themselves communists because too many people still remember how miserable and murderous communism was in Russia and still is in China and North Korea.

That one from Justdale just depresses me, because it reveals the truth I know but I don't want to accept - that for many on the right they aren't capable of seeing the truth. They have demonized the left so thoroughly that they are only capable of seeing democrats as the enemy who are working to destroy America. How can you share a country with such people. If we say "Democrats want more effective democracy and workers rights and environmental protections" and conservatives say "Democrats want to destroy America because they hate everything about it" what compromise is possible. Do we admit we only want to half destroy America?

A Stroke of Pure Genius

You remember last week when the White House press secretary Mick Mulvaney frankly admitted that there was a quid pro quo between the Ukranian government and the White House, and then scant hours later denied that there was any quid pro quo?   Sure you do - he clearly stated that the White House held up aid money in order to pressure the Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden and the DNC.   And spent the rest of the week and weekend pretending that's not what he did. 

You might have thought that would be pretty embarrassing - but you don't have the deep political understanding of Kevin McCullough.  He notes that most people think that Maculvey really screwed up

Excuse me if I disagree.

It was a stroke of pure genius on the administration’s part. And for the record they would do themselves a huge favor by continuing this practice for the duration of Pelosi’s faux impeachment.

In fairness it appears that McCullough is focusing on the idea that elections have consequences and that corruption of our political processes is fine because the Democrats are way worse.  This goes back to a truly bizarre conspiracy theory that data that proves the Russians were working for Clinton ended up on a server in the Ukraine, and that if the White House had access to that server they could prove that it was Clinton who was the real villain. 

In an election that she lost.  Three years ago. 

President Trump laid out a Quid Pro Quo doing things that he wasn't allowed to do - but he did them anyway.   The unlawful actions of an out of control President who is willing to strong arm or beg other countries to help dig up dirt on his political rivals is despicable.   And if we give him another 4 years in office I would be very afraid of the consequences. 

Unapologetically Totalitarian

Apparently the American Left (of which I am a part) is becoming more totalitarian every day, according to David Limbaugh (Rush Limbaugh's "smarter" brother).  Amazing how that works with us holding one house of congress.   

But let's look at the three sources that he spent literally minutes investigating (he admits as much).  First of all, screenings of Jordan Peterson's latest movie have been cancelled in three cities - Toronto, Brooklyn and Portland because of leftist criticism.  Well those are three pretty liberal cities - should the movie theaters have been required to show a movie they didn't think would attract much of an audience?  Apparently so. 

For the record this goes back to a Canadian rule (An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (Bill C-16, 2016)) which seemingly would require people to not deliberately misgender people - i.e. if someone identifies as a female you shouldn't keep calling them with male pronouns/discriptors.  It's basically considering that a form of harassment - but as is typical for the Limbaugh Clan, he's fine with harassing liberals or people the Left doesn't see as people.  What really matters is protecting the right of Peterson to misgender people as he sees fit. 

There was also an incident involving a teachers assistant showing part of Peterson's lecture to a college class and being reprimanded for doing so - that seems to cross a line to me, and the university has since seemed to back away from that initial decision. 

But the core of it seems to be this - if you are calling people by the wrong gender maliciously to harass than maybe stop doing that. 

Limbaugh doesn't seem that interested in his other two examples.  One is Presidential Candidate Kamela Harris suggesting that Trumps twitter account be taken off line.  I don't think that was a very wise thing to argue, but I sort of see her point in some regards.  He has used his twitter very unwisely.   But I think that Warren is more correct that our goal needs to be to get Trump out of the White House. 

I could be wrong about this one though - it's not hard to imagine a scenario where Trump is going behind in some state so he tweets "West Dakota is trending towards my opponent because of corrupt voters.  I know West Dakota - and I know there are MANY FINE PEOPLE there who will not let this meddling in the election go UNCONTESTED."   Shortly there are people going to voting places to make sure that Trumps suspicions are dealt with. 

Also I know that West Dakota isn't real - made it up to make my point. 

The third one involves Beta O'Rourke's statement that religious institutions should lose their tax exempt status; a statement that nobody is taking seriously, but that Limbaugh is bring up to paint a picture. 

Hating America

Kurt Schlichter's latest article is about why the Elite hates the Trump Doctrine.  Let's get one thing out of the way right off the bat.  The very idea that Trump has any kind of Trump Doctrine is hilarious.  His mind doesn't work that way - he knows what he wants and he wants to trample anything that keeps him from getting what he wants - to pretend that's a doctrine is . . . stretching the definition of a doctrine.

He begins his editorial thus.

Americans are sick of always getting handed the bill for some lame ruling caste priority, whether it’s paying for the privilege of defending Europe on behalf of ungrateful continentals or funding the weird climate religion or letting China get rich off of gutting our industries. Mostly, we are sick of shipping our magnificent warriors off to die in ill-conceived, poorly-planned, ineptly-executed wars where we ended up shedding our boys’ (and girls’) blood refereeing fights that go back a dozen centuries.

This is of course in relation to our abandonment of the Kurds and our willingness to let the Turkish government slaughter them.  The Kurds fought along side us during the recent campaigns against the Taliban and Isis, and many of them gave their lives.  You think that would incur upon us some sort of obligation, but not in Schlichter's mind.  In his mind, the value of America upholding our obligations is very small indeed.

I don't think I'd go to dinner with Schlichter - I feel like I'd be left with the check no matter what he claimed.

He disguises this stark reality with a lot of rhetoric about how much elites hate Trump and hate "real" Americans, and how our real goal is to is to put America last. 

. . .the Trump Doctrine – the notion that American power should be directed toward serving the interests of the American people – is a coherent foreign policy vision of the kind we have not had in the United States for decades.

In case you are wondering Schlichter is no fan of Reagan or Bush.  Here's the thing, this, when it comes to the Kurds, is not serving the interests of the American people.  It is teaching the world that America can't be trusted, that deals with us end in betrayal (something they already suspected).  What happens if everytime you go out to lunch with someone they stick you with the bill?  Eventually you stop going out to lunch with that person.  We might well need allies in the Middle East, and our decision to let the Kurds get wiped out is not in America's best interests. 

Fundamental Changes to Our Country

David Limbaugh, brother to Rush, has an article excoriating Joe Biden that will surely play to those who hate Democrats and Liberals reflexively but won't convince many others. 

It is unbearably rich for any modern Democratic leader to admonish us about threats to the Constitution. One of Obama's central missions was to undermine our system as founded -- to fundamentally transform this nation.

What makes this claim interesting is that a lot of the policies that Democrats and Liberals suggest are pretty popular.  Obama acted within the Constitution - frankly to a fault.  After Sen. McConnel determined he would not hold a vote on any nomination of President Obama, there was an argument to be made that by refusing to hold a vote, they were, in effect, leaving it up to the President.  President Obama could have done that to either force a vote or to get one of his nominees on the bench; but he didn't.  The law wasn't clear so he erred (and I do mean erred) on the side of caution.   That's what Democrats do. 

One way to look at the government is that it is a machine to produce justice, and that it will produce justice if everybody plays by the rules.  Sometimes your policies go through and sometimes they are rejected, but as long as the machine is maintained properly it's fine. 

The other way to look at is that we all basically know what a good society might look like, and if the machine isn't producing a good society, than it must be busted and we should bang on it until it works right (this isn't original, I'm cribbing from ideas in this video from Innuendo Studios). 

Limbaugh doesn't care about a fair system, he cares about a system that gives him what he wants.  Despite the increasing evidence that Trump and his surrogates leaned on the Ukraine, he doesn't care.  What he cares about is defeating liberals and returning America to the happy days of the 1950s (society wise, I doubt he wants to bring back Eisenhower era tax rates). 

The Bit You Don't Say

Scott Morefield's latest article is about how to prevent the loss of gun rights if Congress decides to limit them (in the case of a Democratic congress (and let me take a moment to smile at the thought of a Democratic congress)).   Anyway he outlines three strategies that might come into play.   One of them is Jury Nullification.

In truth, a jury can, in theory, declare someone innocent of a crime regardless of what the law says, regardless of actual guilt or innocence, but simply on the basis that a particular law is unjust.

The establishment doesn’t want you or anyone else to know that, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less true. When it comes down to brass tacks, how many small town red state juries will vote to convict, say, a mother who used her AR-15 to defend herself and her small children from a home invader, or an elderly man for keeping the gun his grandfather passed down to him?

It's a slippery argument - because how many small town red state juries would vote to convict if a white person shot a black man down because he or she was afraid. It is basically an argument in favor of letting people's initial prejudice set the terms for laws.  To take Morefield's own example if a black guy fired a weapon to defend himself from a white man, would red state juries be as likely to nullify as if a white guy fired a weapon to defend himself from a black man? 

Morefield argues that the 10th amendment and State's rights be invoked to protect the right of individual states to allow gun usage, which seems a risky proposition to me, depending on the law in question.  While I agree that allowing Tennessee to be Tennessee is fine; they have to understand that the firearm rights offered by Tennessee only apply to those in Tennessee.

Finally there's this nugget.

It’s easy to think that leftists, when and if they get total control, would resort to the practices of their 20th Century ideological forebears – leftist ‘heroes’ like Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao – and just start killing people willy-nilly, particularly those they disagree with. And don’t get me wrong, they likely would if they could.

This is why democracy doesn't work anymore.  If one side of the aisle believes the other side to be murderers in principle (even if current conditions preclude it) how can you make lasting agreements with them?  All agreements and compromises with the conservative part of our nation have to involve the knowledge that they believe us to be murdering monsters.  And there's no shame in breaking promises to murderous monsters. 

I don't think it's a good idea for us to look at them in the same light (for one thing, Morefield and his ilk aren't all conservatives or all inhabitants of a red state) - but it is worthwhile to remember that all compromises with them have to include the possibility of betrayal. 

Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel are on the Case!

Carlson and Patel are willing to admit that Trump acts in a dumb fashion, but that it doesn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

The key question with Trump's Ukraine call, though, is whether the president's actions, advisable or not, rise to the level of an impeachable offense. It's hard to argue they do. The president did not, as was first reported, offer a quid pro quo to the Ukrainians. He did not condition any U.S. support on a Biden investigation. The Justice Department has already looked at the totality of the call and determined that Trump did not break the law.

Of course that is just a little bit disingenuous. First of all, it pretends that there was no quid pro quo, even though we are learning more about the negotiations the Trump Administration was conducting with Ukraine every day. There's also the question of how committed Bill Barr is to protecting the President (considering his round the world tour to encourage other nations to spy on an American Presidential candidate, I'd guess Barr is pretty committed). Then there is this whopper.

Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy we have in our system of government. A fundamental cornerstone of our entire system is to respect the will of the voters.

Conservatives sure didn't feel that way in the 1990s when they impeached Clinton on his sexual behavior - they were comfortable with it then, but now this is extreme and anti-democratic. And this is the only way we will get to the bottom of the crimes that the Trump Team seems to have committed.

Real nice place you have here

So, we will have to spend a certain amount of time talking about President Trump's meeting with President Zelensky, as it appears that this may lead into an impeachment.  In my mind there are two main questions.

1. Did Joe Biden, then Vice President of the United States, do anything untoward while representing the United States and calling for the resignation of Viktor Shokin serving as Prosecutor General (similar to Attorney General in the USA)?

2. Did President Trump pressure the Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden for political reasons? 

Question number 1 has been investigated thoroughly, and despite the fervent fantasies of our President and his supporters there is lots of evidence that Shokin was corrupt, and little evidence that Biden acted inappropriately. Several other members of the EU were calling for Shokin to resign, given his fairly blatant corruption, which generally manifested in not prosecuting corporate criminal cases brought before him. If Joe Biden were corrupt wouldn't he call for preserving Shokin and pay him off?

Question number 2 depends on the text released by the White House last week. If you choose to interpret the Presidents words as no real threat and as simply wanting to get to the bottom of an issue, than he acted appropriately. You do, of course, have to ignore that the Biden issue had been thoroughly investigated at that point. But setting that aside, and assuming you don't see any threat in withholding earmarked financial support, than yeah, President Trump acted completely honorably. 

And when the mobster says "Real nice place you have here. Hope nothing happens to it." you should just take the compliment.

That may seem a bit naive but it's an blindness the right wing pundits are insisting on. Take Matt Vespa's latest article.

The Trump White House released the transcript of the call and it showed there was no quid pro quo. In fact, it’s one of the most vanilla things from this administration, but the House Democrats decided to get on the impeachment train before even reading the complaint that was declassified and released yesterday morning.

Most of the article is a relatively pathetic attempt to justify Trump by attacking Senator Chris Murphy based on a transcript provided by the Washington Free Beacon - apparently by challenging something that is not in dispute. President Trump had funds he was required to release and he delayed it to put pressure on the Ukraine. Pressure to do what? Well investigate Joe Biden one assumes - since he said that in the call.

Back At It

Haven't done this in a while, so might not be as good as it as I should be. David Harsanyi has written an article about Greta Thunberg - the sixteen year old who spoke out against continuing degradation to our economy. The part I love though comes right near the beginning.

Sixteen-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg lives in the healthiest, wealthiest, safest and most peaceful era humans have ever known. She is one of the luckiest people ever to have lived. In a just world, Thunberg would be at the United Nations thanking capitalist countries for bequeathing her this remarkable inheritance. Instead, she, like millions of other indoctrinated kids her age, act as if they live in a uniquely broken world on the precipice of disaster.

If Climate Scientists are accurate, we may have done damage to our climate that will be difficult to undo - and the ferocity of weather conditions over the past years attests to that. However, I am sure that Harsanyi can point to industry shills who make a good living pretending that the environment is just fine. You have to decide which seems more credible. At the end of the day you can't get something for nothing - as I'm sure Harsanyi would be quick to bring up if we talked about Welfare. We have mortgaged our future with the damage we have done to the environment, and we are like bums who see the bills and set them aside, hoping somehow that things will work out. We can either pay the bills we've incurred by changing our pattern of living, or we can have very rough times as our "remarkable inheritance" is repossessed.