George Rebane

I’ve been away on the NorCal coast where connectivity and even cell phone service ranges between unavailable and being a sometime thing.  With some friends we caravanned up to an RV park near Manchester, and took some day trips up and down the coast to see how folks there were making do.  One thing always strikes me in those parts is how our Agenda21 types have made sure that public lands (and beaches) number as few as possible, and those that do allow non-government human visits are made inconvenient to one and all.

Most ‘coastal access’ sites do not allow dogs for reasons that are completely beyond my ken, but it serves well to project the ascendant power of our econazis.  And all coastal access sites have their parking lots quite a distance from the surf again for reasons I’ll let you figure out.  One access site that did not restrict dogs required you to walk almost a mile on a path of loose sand through row after row of dunes stretching for miles in both directions.  It took about 20 minutes for a one way trip.  None but the hale and hearty, and desperate to have their puppy run on the sand need apply.  The biggest employer there is – you guessed it – the government.  Lots of uniformed people from various agencies are up there to make sure the taxpayer does not stray from his permitted path.  Why not hire fewer bureaucrats and extend the little one lane roads to within 100 yards of the surf?  Let the people who own it have their taxes pay for access so they can enjoy the public beaches.

I noticed the comment stream on the last sandbox has conversations and debates that exceed 250 entries.  One leftwing regular doesn’t understand the use of coal in today’s world; he thinks that this fossil fuel has seen its last days and is on the way out.  Meanwhile others are telling him that the patron saint of socialism George Soros dropped a bundle into coal investments.  Of course our lefty didn’t have clue about that – why would MSNBC report something like that? – and when pressed, made some lame remark about buying low during the recent market dip and then selling high.  Someone else had to remind him that Soros bought way before the markets hiccupped.  But those conversations go nowhere since such corrections and related questions are simply ignored and papered over by yet another question from leftwing news.

The microcosm of such exchanges mirror exactly what is going on nationally with Hillary’s campaign.  She just keeps repeating the same irrelevancies about not handling any emails on her private server that were "marked classified".  And her constituents, starting with Obama’s Josh Earnest, just lap it up and repeat same for the greater unwashed.  Nevertheless, that scandal itself has taken on a life of its own, and it will take Hillary to places she knows not.  Meanwhile fellow Democrats are already sharpening their knives for when the time comes – ‘Et tu, Bidenius?’

[31aug15 update]  Constitutional theorist Philip Bobbitt writes on Stratfor a piece revealing a specious practice of debating that is quite common in the national debates, and even on these pages.  In ‘Fallacies of Argument’ Professor Bobbitt highlights the ‘guise of accountability’ with

President Barack Obama's observation in his American University address last week that "many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran deal." There are two points being made here, and both are insidious.

One is that it is necessary to hold our leaders "accountable" for their alleged mistakes by ignoring their arguments in a current debate in favor of reminding them, and us, of the errors they have made in the past. This is not an argument about the merits — the "arcana" — of a proposed treaty or statute but rather an effort to dispense with such hard work in favor of embarrassing the people with whom one disagrees. Its claim of retribution or payback — "accountability" — for past actions is in fact merely a forensic weapon in a present debate.

You can read the entire article yourself to glean Bobbitt’s second point.  But I just wanted to highlight here that our comment streams are full of “effort(s) to dispense with such hard work in favor of embarrassing the people with whom one disagrees.”  One does not have to look far.