The "Declinism" of the Anglo-sphere

I'm reading a book right now, that points out how futile it is to make predictions about the future. If you liked Malcolm Gladwell's books (The Tipping Point etc.) you might like Future Babble - Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe Them Anyway  by Dan Gardner. Its easy to read, filled with interesting historical tidbits, and offers reams of examples where brilliant people made predictions that had no relation to what actually happened. Predicting the future is a mug's game, rarely will the experts be held to account - people forget.
So when I read Mark Steyn's Dependence Day, On the erosion of personal liberty, (thanks Jeffery), it did not take long to see that Mr. Steyn was predicting the demise of the Anglo-American classical liberal democracy that has dominated the world since the rise of the British Empire.
Mark Steyn's article is long, extremely well written and very distressing if he is indeed right. I'm leaning on Dan Gardner's view that Steyn's predictions will be wrong, no matter how well argued they are. Here's hoping!

Fromage from the cult of anti-humanism

Cheesy!

Do those make you feel hungry....for food? Me neither. Who knew that one of the hottest new trends involves making cheese out of breast milk, ugh. That's right, take a look here. I was totally out-to-lunch on this, so to speak.
The Post article proves that there is no accounting for taste, and superficially I don't see an issue here, until I read this part:
"....PETA, the animal rights organization, which wrote this after a Swiss restaurant added breast-milk to its menu two years ago: "PETA was inspired to ask ice cream giant Ben & Jerry's to switch from unhealthy bovine juice stolen from tormented calves (aka "cow milk") to healthier, humane human breast milk."
PETA thinks it's a good idea, of course they would. Now this may not be fair but I lump PETA in with the 'enviro-mental' movement. You know them, the people that the George Carlin video was satirizing late last week. They are the ones that seek to diminish human value and make us all feel guilty that we are somehow intruders on the Earth, disrupting the ecological-balance of Gaia. We use up resources, polluting as we do, disrupting and destroying habitats, and just plain making a nuisance out of ourselves. We are the parasites of the planet! We stomp around in our huge carbon-footprints, altering the climate, and endangering all other species. You sir or madame, are guilty by virtue of your birth, all 6 billion of us. This makes the Christian idea of original sin look unambitious.

Here is a short old clip from one of my favourite 'enviro-mentalists', who explains how you too may reach the exalted position of second-level maggot.

    

Joule Unlimited: A Potential Game Changer?

Artificial photosynthesis

That is what US Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry calls the technology being developed by Joule Unlimited Inc., a company in his home state of Massachusetts.
The company claims it has developed a method of producing large amounts of cheap liquid hydrocarbon fuel using a "proprietary organism" and freely available inputs like the evil carbon dioxide and water.
Neil Reynolds describes the company in a Globe and Mail column this week. Time magazine recently touted the company as one of its Top 20 Green Tech Ideas of 2010.
Joule Unlimited claims that it uses artificial photosynthesis that it can scale-up to produce large amounts of "fungible diesel fuel" for around $30US per barrel equivalent. Their technique does not use expensive biomass inputs to produce biofuels, such as is done with corn to make ethanol.
Joule Unlimited expects to begin commercial production in 2012. In the meantime I would put off purchasing that hybrid or electric car, the future is impossible to predict.  

Culturally Retarded

Haiti is on the westside of Island of Hispaniola

Is anyone surprised that one year after the earthquake little has happened in Haiti that indicates it is recovering?
What would a Haitian recovery look like anyway? It was a basket case (poorest in Western Hemisphere) before the earthquake, so would it recover to just being a basket case again?
The problems in Haiti exhaust the imagination, it is a situation where sending everyone away and starting over again seems almost sensible. Why is that? Why is it that a nation of 10 million has 10,000 NGO's present in country and it still doesn't help? There is no easy answer of course. There are economic problems that are directly related to property rights as noted in this column. There are political problems that go way back to corrupt leadership and government. But that I think is just part of the problem, the problem is deeper and more entrenched than mere economics. The problem I think is culture.
Over the past several days, even weeks around here, there has been a discussion about Asian students and lately Asian parenting. In November 2010 McLean's magazine published an article titled "Too Asian?", the title has since been retracted but the article remains and it implied that Asian students which represent a small portion of North American society nevertheless make up a large component of the university population because of their work ethic.
More recently an article by Amy Chua in the Wall Street Journal stated that Chinese mothers have superior parenting skills. Another article by Lawrence Solomon in the National Post takes issue with Amy Chua. Whatever the truth, I will testify (as a former teacher) that Chinese children, on the whole, make very good students indeed. Why is that? I think it is engrained in the culture. As Ms. Chua points out, if you expect more you just might get it, with patience and perseverance.
So what does that have to do with Haiti? I think a great deal. Much of the Haitian population is deeply religious (80% Roman Catholic, 16% Protestant) not that this precludes cultural success. Many populations are deeply religious. Haiti has the added burden that fully half the population practices or believes in Voodoo. How voodoo is reconciled with Catholicism or Protestantism is explained, sort of, in the Wikipedia article linked in the last sentence. 
In a column published this past week in the National Post, Dan Gardner takes I believe a courageous stand when he says: "...Haiti has been crippled, at least in part, by certain cultural values — such as the fatalism promoted by voodoo — that discourage initiative, rationality, trust, achievement, and education." Culture can foster greatness or the reverse.