Cheat Seeking Missiles

Sunday Scan items are published as each is completed; most recent at the top, so be sure to click through if you see the “continue reading” note at the bottom of the post. This note will be removed after the last item is posted, so if you’re reading this, please come back for more.

Palin Packs ‘Em In

ere’s the report from Shawn Steele (fomrer Cal. GOP chair) from last night’s Sarah Palin event in SoCal:

Not since Ronald Reagan’s final campaign rally at Orange County’s Mile Square Park on the eve of the 1984 election, have thousands of Californian Republicans gathered. Neither Bush could do it. None of last year’s Republican presidential candidates could fill the Home Depot Tennis Center.

The Center has 13,000 court side seats. All those seats plus the suites were filled to capacity. Still thousands more were slowly streaming into the stadium quickly filled up the court yard. Thousands more found standing room around the rim of the stadium. Over 20,000 people were there to celebrate, shout and scream.

SNL can continue to poke fun at Palin, but real people get her and want to get close to her. If you have any doubts what she’s done to the ticket, check out who introduced her:

Shelly Mandell, the current President of Los Angeles National Organization for Women [NOW] — in the Republican OC suite several of us were scratching our heads— introduced Sarah Palin. It was an awkward introduction. . Mandell, stated she didn’t agree with Sarah on everything, that she is a democrat, that she Mandell supported the failed Equal Rights Amendment campaign but the crowd exercised tolerance. Ms. Mandell will get a lot of angry calls from the hard left, but she embraced the moment and stood with Sarah Palin.

The OC Register also covered the event:

“Electrifying,” “genuine” and “inspiring” were a few of the adjectives that Orange County voters used to describe Sarah Palin after her rally at the Home Depot Center in Carson on Saturday.

The lead of the LA Times story was a bit different:

You can’t say she didn’t warn them.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin introduced herself to the nation with a now-famous joke about lipstick being the only difference between a certain dog breed and a hockey mom. On Saturday, the Republican vice presidential nominee unleashed her inner pit bull, accusing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama of being someone who would “pal around with terrorists.”

The reporter let us know that in her opinion (yes, yes, it was a news story, I know) Palin’s new tone was “abrasive.” That’s a fine alternative for “truthful,” isn’t it?

Rate My Turban

No really, rate my turban.

Poop Power

he two earlier Sunday Scan posts today have to do with eco-sensitivity and human exceptionalism. Continuing that theme, here’s a post on how human exceptionalism leads to new technologies that are so eco-smart they make you proud to be a human:

The world’s largest biomass power plant running exclusively on chicken manure has opened in the Netherlands. The power plant will deliver renewable electricity to 90,000 households. It has a capacity of 36.5 megawatts, and will generate more than 270 million kWh of electricity per year.

The biomass power plant is more than merely “carbon neutral”. If the chicken manure were to be spread out over farm land, it would release not only CO2, but also methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. By using the manure for power generation, the release of methane is avoided.

The biomass power plant will utilize approximately 440,000 tons of chicken manure, roughly one third of the total amount produced each year in the Netherlands. (source)

Of course, if those who condemn human exceptionalism have their way, there wouldn’t be cooped up chickens producing 440,000 tons of easy to gather poop to convert into power.

America Leads The World

ig business going to the politicos and asking them for a bail-out seems to be the sort of business trend-setting for which America has become known. Reports Autoblog:

This week, Detroit got its $25B bailout loan approved by Washington, and according to The Wall Street Journal, European carmakers are making like this is a game of “Simon Says.” The Journal reports that Fiat has proposed the idea of hitting up the European Commission for €40 billion ($55B USD) to help the European auto industry make the move to cleaner, greener cars ahead of the strict new emissions regulations currently being bandied about. Like we said, this rationale is very similar to the one Motown used to get its money.

If the people want cleaner, greener cars, they’ll pay for cleaner, greener cars. The EU has decided the citizens of Europe must want cleaner, greener cars in order to Save The World From Global Warming, but apparently they’re not buying. Such are the failures of state manhandling of the economy.

Fiat and the other manufactures, all of whom apparently are in agreement about how much they’d like a dole, would be better of telling the EU to shove it; they’ll just build the cars people want to buy.

Exceptional Humanity

n the way home from dropping Incredible Daughter #3 off at the train station so she could run up to Disneyland for the day, I was listening to BBC Forum on Sirius when a discussion of human exceptionalism came up - with the guest commenting rather surprisingly that he was fed up with the whole idea that everything humans do somehow worsens life on this planet.

I was driving down the main drive of my community at the time. An orange grove was on the right - one of the really rich guys has hundreds of trees on his estate - and there was a horse trail with a nice white fence. The landscaping along the road was pretty but appropriately SoCal drought friendly. On the other side of the road was a golf course, leading down to a stream where California coastal oaks created a deep green forest. On the other side, attractive homes filled the slopes - but not to the top of the slopes. Those were natural, framing the setting very nicely.

Were it not for human intervention brought on by human exceptionalism, this would be a dry place, the coastal sage scrub scorched by the summer heat and dryness. Coyotes, bobcats and deer would constitute higher species - if we’re allowed to differentiated - with snakes and rabbits and insects by the millions joining the party. With their accumulated brainpower they would do … nothing. They would not bring more water from far away to slake their thirst; they would not develop safer, more comfortable dwelling places; they would not plan ahead by planting crops.

They would not sit in their kitchen nooks, fingers on keyboards, and reflect.

Everything I just said, obvious and true as it is, is heresy to the radical environmental left. They are convinced that humans are not exceptional, and that anyone who thinks they are is a Neanderthal. (If humans aren’t exceptional, by the way, why are there no longer any Neanderthals?) Here’s a sample of that thinking:

Arguably, the distinguishing feature of western culture, and perhaps also the chief mark of its ecological failure, is the idea that humankind is radically different and apart from the rest of nature and from other animals. This idea, sometimes called Human Exceptionalism, has allowed us to exploit nature and people more ruthlessly (some would say more efficiently) than other cultures, and our high-powered, destructive forms of life dominate the planet. Exceptionalism seeks unlimited power over nature, but sometimes having power is not good for you, especially if you do not really know what is going on or what keeps it all together.

Many people mistakenly believe that Human Exceptionalism has been laid to rest with the widespread scientific acceptance of human evolution. Darwin ’s discovery of continuity of life forms affronted older Christian forms of exceptionalism, which saw humans as apart in both body and mind. Creationists, of course, continue to reject bodily continuity with animal ancestors, but otherwise, even the Pope accepts bodily evolution as providing the ground of human/animal continuity, not the human mind or soul, which is separate, God-created and unique to humans. By and large, modern exceptionalism has just shifted the ground, from body to mind. The radical break or discontinuity that characterizes exceptionalist thinking has not been abandoned with modernity, but has been located elsewhere - in the human mind.

Human exceptionalism remains an important force in our culture, providing ideological background conditions for inferiorising animals and for markets and property in animals, and is often behind resistance to sustainability thinking, (as I argued in Environmental culture). Modern exceptionalism has crude forms (Creationism) more like the older forms, but also many more subtle forms, and retains important strongholds in contemporary philosophy and science. Here one of its main symptoms is an obdurate reductionism that resists recognising mind-like qualities in animals, or human-animal continuity in the sphere of mind — which I will call mind discontinuity. Of course mind discontinuity is easily positioned as commonsense, the favoured starting point for onus of proof arguments, because it resonates through thousands of years of exceptionalism in western culture. (source)

The author, Val Plumwood of the Fenner School of Environment and Society at Australian National University, is busy polluting the minds of youngsters with the idea that mankind is a net negative. It’s really shocking that an academician can think this way (that’s a joke), while at the same time condemning exceptionalism as the reason we don’t adopt “sustainability thinking.” Unless you’re human, you have no concept whatsoever of sustainability … or reductionism, mind discontinuity, Darwinism or the Creation or the other highfalutin’ intellectualisms Plumwood tosses about.

Fortunately for us, people who really believe this, while they may not necessarily be exceptional, are the exceptions.

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