The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Non sequitur – (Latin) a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement.
See if you can spot it in the following excerpt from this Modern Farmer article, Salad, Inc.:
After an earthquake and tsunami decimated northeast Japan in 2011 — an unexpected weather incident that scientists are still struggling to understand — the Japanese government built Sanriku Fukko National Park.
According to Wikipedia:
Kabuki is a classical Japanese dance-drama. Kabuki theatre is known for the stylization of its drama and for the elaborate make-up worn by some of its performers.
The individual kanji, from left to right, mean sing, dance, and skill. Kabuki is therefore sometimes translated as “the art of singing and dancing”. These are, however, ateji characters which do not reflect actual etymology. The kanji of ‘skill’ generally refers to a performer in kabuki theatre. Since the word kabuki is believed to derive from the verb kabuku, meaning “to lean” or “to be out of the ordinary”, kabuki can be interpreted as “avant-garde” or “bizarre” theatre.
Apparently, it can also mean “Senate Democrats Trying Desperately to Change the Subject.”
In the summer of 2010, it was Harry Reid, the Senate’s Democratic leader, who squelched his party’s efforts to pass a climate change bill, declaring it could never attract enough votes to pass. In the years since, he has rarely spoken publicly about the issue.
But on Monday night, an impassioned Mr. Reid took to the Senate floor to kick off a nearly 15-hour climate-change talkathon by about 30 Senate Democrats, part of a campaign by a new Senate “climate caucus” to make it a politically urgent issue.
Yeah, it’s “politically urgent,” all right. Getting Obamacare off the front page is their FIRST priority.
Edited to add:
I stumbled across something that fits this post perfectly. From James Lileks a while back:
If everyone in America had been tied to a chair and forced to watch the debate Clockwork-Orange style, we’d all realize that the Senate is just a holding tank for people whose self-regard and cretinous reasoning is matched only by their demonstrable contempt for the idiots they think will lap this crap up.
Reader Phil B., expatriate Brit now living in New Zedland, sent me a link to a Salon.com op-ed with the note:
This is why trying to reason with left wing, right on, politically correct groupthinkers is a bit like trying to wallpaper fog. And, incidentally, why I firmly believe we are deep within an era of anti-Renaissance where such idiocy is published and taken seriously.
Billy Beck calls it “The Endarkenment.” And I am fully in agreement with Phil on his “wallpapering fog” assessment.
This thing is so full of WTF? that I can’t even fisk it. My brain boggles.
If you’ve got a few brain cells you’re not too happy with and are willing, nay eager to sacrifice, go read Why the Right Hates Detroit, written by the biggest case of white-guilt I think I’ve ever seen.
I’m amazed this man hasn’t offed himself due to his own self-loathing. I guess he’s found a way to project it onto anyone to the political right of Mao.
At least the commenters appear sane, though I didn’t read many of those. I have to wonder about Salon’s editors.
Repeat after me:
Amonix ($5.9M)
Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3M)
Nordic Windpower ($16M)
Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20M)
Evergreen Solar ($25M)
Raser Technologies ($33m)
Beacon Power ($43M)
Range Fuels ($80M)
Ener1 ($118.5M)
A123 Systems ($279M)
Abound Solar ($400M)
Not to mention the $535 million lost with Solyndra’s bankruptcy. And, as I said before, “This list is not complete.”
Given yesterday’s announcement that the Obama administration needs to engage in a “War on Coal,” I was amused by an Instapundit reader’s comment:
Given the success of the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, if I’m Big Coal, I’m praying for a War on Coal.
This goes well with yesterday’s QotD, which concluded:
…in government, failure is an exciting excuse to ask for more funding or more power.
Can I get an “AMEN!”?
Yeah, we had a little bit of winter here in the Old Pueblo yesterday.
From Dale at Mostly Cajun:
I worked for a company refurbishing a SONATRACH liquifaction plant that took that gas and liquified it and sold it to, among other places, the US, shipping it to the facility that sits behind my office, where we turn the liquid back into gas and pump it into the pipelines that spread that energy all over the country. When we were buying gas from overseas, it was thirteen bucks for a thousand cubic feet. Now it’s a bit over three. The reason for the difference is one word, ‘FRACKING’. Yeah, the same word that’s joining global warming as the word of the week for the envirowhacko movement. And make no bones about it, under the present regime, envirowhackos are at the highest levels of the government.
So let’s see if we can put a couple of things on the table: Our own government wants to shut down OUR gas production. No sweat, huh? We can still buy gas from overseas, right? AT five times the cost of what we can suck it out of the ground here. Since gas is the energy for electricity, heating, and a million other uses in modern life, prices across the board will go up. Oh, wait! That overseas gas? Under control of all manner of people that the obama regime seems to empower. OPEC? They’re one of the more stable and benign. And how’s OPEC gonna fare as one ‘stable’ government after another falls to the obama-endorsed ‘Arab Spring’?
I watched the documentary FrackNation that I helped fund last night when it aired on AXS. It is a takedown of the previous crockumentary Gasland, and the opposition to fracking both here and around the world using, you know, facts.
The central focus of the film is the town of Dimock, PA and the people there who have been fighting against the anti-fracking forces, and one thing that struck me in particular was a montage of residents decrying the incredibly slanted media coverage of the topic without, as one person put it, any attempt at balance at all.
I was reminded of The Narrative – an excerpt from a Stephen Hunter novel I posted here a while back:
You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything.
—
The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide “These are the lies we will tell today.” No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama is a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up…. Cheney’s a devil. Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.
—
And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin’-stroy anybody who makes them question that….
And the media knows that fracking is a horrible thing that destroys ground water and air quality and must be stopped at all costs because it will contribute to Global Warming.
Yes, let’s politicize children again. (And they keep telling me that kids aren’t being propagandized these days.)
Here’s a little video that on the YouTube page says:
Re-electing President Obama is a momentous decision that will require every single voter.
What would the children of the future say if we let them down this November?
At the time of this writing the video has 135 ‘likes’ and 1425 ‘dislikes’. Here it is:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwlW4lx6TTo?rel=0]
UPDATE: Oops! Looks like it was SO unpopular, they made it “private,” but I saved a copy. Here you go:
http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
And here are the lyrics:
Imagine an America
Where strip mines are fun and free
Where gays can be fixed
And sick people just die
And oil fills the seaWe don’t have to pay for freeways!
Our schools are good enough
Give us endless wars
On foreign shores
And lots of Chinese stuffWe’re the children of the future
American through and through
But something happened to our country
And we’re kinda blaming youWe haven’t killed all the polar bears
But it’s not for lack of trying
Big Bird is sacked
The Earth is cracked
And the atmosphere is fryingCongress went home early
They did their best we know
You can’t cut spending
With elections pending
Unless it’s welfare doughWe’re the children of the future
American through and through
But something happened to our country
And we’re kinda blaming youFind a park that is still open
And take a breath of poison air
They foreclosed your place
To build a weapon in space
But you can write off your au pairIt’s a little awkward to tell you
But you left us holding the bag
When we look around
The place is all dumbed down
And the long term’s kind of a dragWe’re the children of the future
American through and through
But something happened to our country
And yeah, we’re blaming youYou did your best
You failed the testMom and Dad
We’re blaming you!
I’m still reminded of this video, though.
http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
UPDATE – 10/29/12: What the upper video represents is a chorus of kids like this, from 2007:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY7875_rv1s?rel=0]
Except he doesn’t think that adults “did (our) best.”
UPDATE: 11/4/12 – a comment left in the AR15.com thread on this topic wins One Internet:
We are the children of the future.
You are the hippies of the past.
You voted for Obama.
And he fucked us up the a**.