Pope leads eco-friendly festival — BBC News, Sunday 2 September 2007

Who could ask for better evidence that Michael Crichton was right?

Update: I can recommend Crichton’s other speeches.

What a great comment thread for the item pictured alongide: Flux Capacitor + FREE SHIPPING!

More seriously, what a nifty marketing idea for Neo, the online shop in the UK that sells this widget.

For those of you who don’t know what a flux capacitor is, may I refer you to Wikipedia. Yes, I know what I said tomorrow on Thought Leader about citing Wikipedia. I’ll find a more authoritative source last week.

(Hat tip: Graeme Scala)

Pity the farmer in a bureaucratic state who spends his every waking hour stepping in steaming piles of regulation and law. Joel Salatin is just such a man. He writes:

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.

And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

I should note that I disagree with four out of every five words on the web site that hosts this piece. In fact, the only words I won’t quibble with are “are” and “and”.

The site, mindfully.org, is a eco-leftists fever swamp, though it seems to have been abandoned now. It defends, for example, a precautionary principle that logically precludes its own application. It also notes with glee that Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, was found guilty of “scientific dishonesty” by the Orwellian-sounding “Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty”. It fails to note that a superior authority cleared Lømborg, directing a scathing rebuke at the Committee about the lack of evidence it presented, its failure to even refer to Lømborg’s own text to establish the facts in the case, its use solely of published criticisms by others of Lømborg’s work, and its use of “condescending and emotional” language. It fails to note other studies which similarly found that the criticism of Lømborg was largely unsubstantiated and constituted an abuse of authority on the part of the Danish commission. A review in the Journal of Information Ethics found: “The inevitable overall impression of the debate is, not that Lomborg has deliberately been twisting arguments, but many of his opponents have. This is somewhat more than embarrassing.”¹ This indicates a deliberate bias on the part of mindfully.org. Some of the other material on the site borders on tinfoil-hat paranoia, and might present a problem for the authors if the men in white coats were to come across it.

With that disclaimer, do read the farmer’s lament. It offers a disturbing insight into what happens — even to citizens like Salatin who in principle fully agree — when governments use law and regulation to enforce on a powerless population its own politically-correct notions about food, health and living.

1. For more details, see A Critical Consideration… by Arthur Rörsch (inexplicably in Microsoft Word format) and When Scientists Politicize Science by Roger A. Pielke Jr. (in PDF). [↩]