I just responded to a comment on my “10 reasons to reject global warming” post, and since I often get variations on these questions, I thought I’d turn that response, with minor edits and additions, into a separate post.

Here are the questions:

1) Would you risk the Earth for your carefree lifestyle?

2) I’m pretty sure you’ve seen heavily industrialized areas before (such as Beijing)…I promise you that that smog was not there before we humans got around to letting out excess carbon all the time. How do you propose cleaning up our mess? By sitting around watching TV all day? (Not that I’m saying that’s what you do, but you get my drift.)

Both questions involve fallacies of various kinds, so I’ll address them in some detail.

1) I’m not risking anything. Rejecting global warming orthodoxy — and a government-imposed “solution” to the “crisis” — doesn’t constitute a “carefree lifestyle”. It simply means a different view of the environment, and a different view on how to solve environmental problems. I don’t believe that the Earth is being risked. The Earth will be just fine. The environment has proven to be a pretty robust system, with a tendency to return to stable equilibrium, rather than a fragile system whose unstable equilibrium is easily disturbed for good. Besides which, there’s risk in anything, whether it’s planting a field of wheat, drilling a borehole shaft, building a house, taking a job, crossing the road. There’s also risk in not doing any of those things.

Surely one doesn’t go around asking people, “Would you risk your life to cross the road? Is it really worth your life to get to the other side?” Surely one doesn’t advocate laws that restrict road crossing only to people who can demonstrate that they have no alternative, have paid their road-crossing tax, have undertaken at their own cost a documented study of traffic conditions in the area so their road-crossing has the minimum possible impact, and undertake not to cross the road more than three times a day? (Insert gratuitous chicken joke here.)

2) Environmental pollution and global warming orthodoxy are not the same thing. Saying that carbon emissions cause smog is not the same as saying they cause global warming. Smog can be tolerated, dissipated, or minimised. Global warming, by contrast, is supposedly an irreversible catastrophe making life on Earth hard or impossible.

Not believing that global warming is a catastrophic crisis, or rejecting a government-imposed tax-and-regulate approach to it, does not mean one favours pollution, slash-and-burn agriculture, or not caring about the environment. There’s a difference between opposing modern environmentalism and opposing a healthy, sustainable environment or sensible nature conservation.

If I said the war on drugs isn’t working, would you ask me whether I favour mainlining kids on heroin? If I said I’m opposed to banning alcohol, would you ask me whether I want to die of cirrhosis of the liver and heart disease? Would you ask how I propose to deal with drunken bar fights and marital violence while alcohol remains legal? This question on pollution is just as absurd. The “drift” is irrelevant, and does not address any of the reasons why I claimed I don’t believe the orthodox dogma about global warming, its causes, and its solutions.

But let me address pollution, since it often comes up as a convenient way to change the subject from arguments about climate change. Pollution is something that people won’t tolerate when they can afford not to tolerate it. Look around the world: pollution is inversely correlated with prosperity. The richer people get, the less pollution they are willing to accept, and the more they care about the environment. They can’t get prosperous without some measure of pollution or environmental damage, but they also can’t get prosperous without giving some care to the sustainability of their economic growth. This is why the best way to ensure both health and prosperity, to ensure both economic growth and environmental sustainability, is to grant private property rights that ensure people will consider their land and environmental resources as assets to be wisely exploited for long-term gain.

London is a classic example. During the Industrial Revolution, Londeners bore the burden of air and water pollution, in return for remarkable economic development. Today, London’s air is cleaner than it has been at any time in the last four centuries, the streets are no longer covered in ankle-deep manure, starvation and plague are unheard of, and the average citizen lives three times as long and many times as well. Pollution was a temporary cost, which is not tolerated in a prosperous, successful society. In fact, the pollution peak came 120 years ago. It was since then, the most prosperous time of all, which saw the introduction of the fossil-fuel-burning motor vehicle, in which the majority of historic smog was eliminated.

Part of the reason is that our predominant fuels have contained progressively less carbon. We used to burn straw and wood. Then we burnt coal. Then oil. Then natural gas. Each contains less carbon than its predecessor, and there’s no reason to believe that this trend will stop.

It is also instructive to note that the most filthy industrial areas of all have been in regions where governments run industrial production on behalf of the people, instead of companies producing for private profit. Examples are common in former Soviet regions, for example — and indeed in China, to a considerable extent. Where there aren’t any property rights, or people are not free to wield power over their government or industrial organisations, that’s where things go badly wrong. That’s where people are unable to take care of their own wellbeing, and where people with no stake in society and the environment get to mismanage it however they please. To this day, the most serious environmental problems occur in regions where there aren’t any private property rights, and the tragedy of the commons is the rule. Think fishing, logging, hunting, for example.

So in short:

1) Irrelevant question, because both assumptions — that the Earth is at risk, or that the alternative to global warmism is a “carefree lifestyle” — are false.

2) I propose that people get rich enough to sit around watching TV all day. That way, they won’t tolerate pollution, will want a healthy environment, and can afford to invest in cleaner, more sustainable environmental resources.

“What developing countries need is to develop, not to have their present conditions of life and work preserved like a museum exhibit,” writes Janet Daley in a column prompted by a report that finds “fair trade” to be fundamentally unfair. Thanks to Alex Matthews, over at the excellent classical liberal blog AfroDissident, for alerting me to his own post on the subject. (Granted, he did so two weeks ago, but I have been very patchily connected, thanks to the electronic-frying power of blackouts.)

As you glide along the supermarket aisle past the smartly packaged Fairtrade coffee and guiltily slip the cheaper arabica into your trolley instead, you may ask yourself how much good your overpriced purchase of the Fairtrade stuff would have done anyway.

Well, now you know. Today’s report from the Adam Smith Institute [summary here, or full report in PDF here] will probably confirm your suspicion: Fairtrade labelling is largely a marketing ploy, which makes clever use of the almost infinite capacity for guilt harboured by the residents of wealthy countries over the condition of those in poorer ones, even though that condition is, in no rational sense, their fault.

But rational thinking does not come into this: you and your heaped shopping trolley represent wealth and security, which you have a vague but pretty firm notion that the people who harvest the coffee beans do not have. So maybe you are persuaded to make a gesture: a small strike against “exploitation” and global greed and (if you are old enough to remember this epithet) “corporate capitalism”. And you feel better about yourself.

It transpires that a very small number of farmers are getting a subsidised fixed price for their produce under Fairtrade franchises and that this is at the expense of most other farmers in their regions, who are actually worse off as a result.

But even more serious, the Fairtrade operation helps to keep poor countries and undeveloped economies exactly that — poor and undeveloped.

By sustaining agricultural activity that would not otherwise be sustainable in the global marketplace, it keeps backward populations from developing other forms of modern economic activity that might help them climb out of their backwardness. In order to permit wealthy people to indulge in a bit of sentimental largesse, it effectively preserves an anachronism that locks some of the poorest people in the world in backwaters of primitive economic existence.

What developing countries need is to develop, not to have their present conditions of life and work preserved like a museum exhibit. And the greatest aid to real development — and the proven route out of mass poverty — is through free trade, not Fairtrade.

All of which should cause us to reflect on the various misuses of the word “fair”, and its even more pernicious noun form “fairness”, as it is bandied about in political discourse. As received opinion has it, “fair” means “equal” - in the strict literal sense of the word. Distribution of wealth in a society is “fair” if nobody has much more than anybody else - however much harder they may have worked, or however singular and disciplined their talents may be.

The corollary of this is that taxation helps to ensure “fairness” by seeing to it that those who earn more than others have more of their income confiscated. On this formulation, disparities of wealth are inherently wicked. This is a moral philosophy that you may or may not find attractive. But if you do, you will have to accept that it is fundamentally totalitarian. Disparities of wealth are a sign of a dynamic free-market economy in which some sectors are invariably expanding while others contract: at any given moment, some people’s lot will be improving ahead of others’.

[…]

It is ironic that the very same people who are committed to the idea that “fair” must mean “the same” talk endlessly about “opportunity”. Nothing is a greater killer of opportunities than uniformity.

[…]

How have we come to accept such vindictive uses of the word “fair”?

Of course it was initially the fault of the Left and its special pleading lobbies, which — like some Fairtrade promoters — had a lot to gain. But the Right has been complicit: it has surrendered words like “fairness” and “opportunity” — and accepted caricatures of other words such as “selfish” and “greedy” — with scarcely a murmur of dissent.

Romantic notions of the noble savage, of the beauty of the supposedly traditional pursuits of poor people, are very common. Many developing countries actively play into this misguided view Westerners have of them. I cannot count how often I’ve seen beadcraft workshops in South Africa, as if this is the route out of poverty, or wire sculptures in museums, as if simple crafts are thereby ennobled. The only effect of indulging this romantic, condescending image of Africa is to create an industry that produces singularly uniform curios that delight clueless rich people. Absurdly tall wooden giraffes may be a wonderful way to part a fat prat from his dollars, but it is hardly the best route out of poverty.

Do read the full report (PDF), it’s worth it.

In fairness, here’s the rebuttal by the Fairtrade Foundation. It may not surprise you that it finds the report to be utter rubbish, motivated by evil agendas.

It says, “Releasing this report when thousands of people are trying to make a difference to global poverty by promoting Fairtrade products, is an insult to the effort and commitment of Fairtrade producers and their supporters in the UK.” Ag shame. Good intentions are so, well, good.

“Moreover, the opinions in this report will be rebutted by the producers themselves during Fairtrade Fortnight…” Well sure, but those producers are of “the very small number” cited in the Adam Smith Institute report. Besides, they comment on only a very limited fact: that they get paid more for their coffee. Of course they’re going to say that’s a good thing. They’re hardly likely to consider their personal windfall in the context of the macro-economic impact on development.

“Those of us who have had the privilege of seeing and hearing at first hand the difference that Fairtrade makes to poor communities are not going to be persuaded otherwise by the rehashing of simplistic economic theories.” Indeed. Economic theory has seldom stood in the way of socialist, statist, collectivist or protectionist preachers. Especially not when there’s money to be made from gullible saps.

Update:A fellow calling himself Angry African posted this link to his own post about Fairtrade as a comment to this piece over at the Mail & Guardian Online’s blog site.

It’s well worth a read, especially since it claims Fairtrade not only charges consumers more for the label, but charges participating farmers for the priviledge of being Fairtrade certified. If true, Fairtrade starts to sound more like a protectionist cartel — no, worse: a protection racket — in the Proudly South Africa vein.

“Pay us and we’ll put our label on your products, mark it up sky-high, and give you a small kickback,” then comes to mean, “Pay us, or we’ll guilt-trip people into not buying your products, so you can be sure you won’t get your products to market in our rich countries.”

By “global warming”, I mean the wider orthodoxy not only that warming is happening, but that it is caused by human activity, that it will lead to catastrophic consequences, that action to change the climate is urgent, that said action consists largely of limiting CO2 emissions and reducing energy use, that such action will be effective, that such action is required of developed and developing countries alike, and that it can only be achieved by using taxation, legislation or other forcible, government-imposed means to make people comply.

A while ago, I listed ten reasons to reject global warming. I’d have to be wrong on all of them before I could rationally consider measures such as cap-and-trade, carbon-tax or other elaborate, invasive and expensive government measures to combat climate change.

A comment by a retired geology Ph.D. on this well-considered piece on the irrationality of the climate change debate (from the felicitously named Rightwing Nuthouse) lists ten more reasons to be skeptical of anthropogenic global warming:

1. It has all the marks of a religion; skeptics are treated like heretics and the spokesman is a Baptist lay preacher.
2. Global warming is now called climate change so it can embrace global cooling, also.
3. It is anti-American since America is biggest producer of CO2.
4. I’ve been through this before in the 1970’s with Global Cooling.
5. As I geologist I know that climate changes take a long time since the earth has a very large thermal mass.
6. Humans have adapted to colder and warmer conditions. Manhattan’s average temperature has increased 7°F in the last 50 years but New Yorkers are not wilting.
7. The data for the earth’s temperature for more than 100 years in the past are very sparse and unreliable.
8. The data for the earth’s temperature for the last 100 years is not much better and practically all of it has to be compensated for the urban heat island effect, vide Manhattan.
9. Other measurements of the earth’s thermal condition, for example, shrinking growing season lengths, are not consistent with global warming.
10. Concomitance is not causation.

I don’t agree with all of them. Point three, for example, should in my opinion read, “It’s anti-development, since development, poverty reduction and prosperity growth are big producers of CO2,” but it makes some good points, especially about the quality of the climate record, the selectivity of factors considered in the overall models, the assumption that correlation implies causation, and the failure to adjust correctly for urban heat islands.

Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit site has been documenting many of these data and statistical problems, prompting in some cases corrections to the official records. See this post on urban heat island adjustments, and see these posts on temperature record errors and corrections, for example. (I covered some of his work inter alia here and here.)

So while Rick Moran makes some good points about our ability to evaluate the scientific basis for climate change theory, even the notion that we just don’t know enough suggests that expensive programmes of enforced action are imprudent, at best. Not to mention that they’re philosophically repulsive to anyone who values individual freedom and bases their views of how best to minimise poverty and maximise prosperity on the vitality of free markets and innovation.

Here’s a fascinating story. Inspired by Nickel and Dimed, a book by Barbara Ehrenreich that told of her experiment of living a lower-class life and how hard it was to escape poverty and pursue the American Dream, Adam Shepard decided to repeat the experiment. Denouncing his former life as a well-off college graduate, he entered a homeless shelter with $25 and the clothes on his back. His goal was to have a furnished apartment, a car and $2 500 in savings within a year, without calling on his former contacts or education. Ten months later, when he had to quit the experiment, he had a pickup truck, a job, and $5 000 in savings. He wrote a book about the experience.

CSM’s interview with him suggests that the left-wing generalisations about class structures, the accident of birth, and poverty traps don’t always stand up to real-life experience. Shepard’s story suggests that character, responsibility and self-discipline have a great deal to do with how “privileged” you end up being. He not only shows this from his own experience, but also from his characterisation of some of the people with which he shared his poverty and life on the street, some of whom were upwardly mobile, and others not.

It confirms the notion that few people are doomed to poverty by the rigid dictates of a cruel society dominated by uncaring capitalists. In fact, especially in more prosperous countries with a well-established middle class and healthy economy, there’s a lot of churn in the ranks of the poor. Some people rise out of poverty, and others fall into it. The poor of today aren’t the poor of five years ago, nor the poor of five years hence. One estimate I read a while ago said that the small percentage of Americans who earn minimum wage on average do so for only two or three years. The churn is high, yet the percentage remains stable, suggesting that the class of minimum wage earners consists of a combination of first-time employees who soon step up the ladder, and people who fall into low-wage jobs, but soon work their way back out of their relative poverty.

Shepard’s story offers yet more support for a society in which individual freedom trumps social engineering. Not only is such a society able to build higher average prosperity and quality of life, but it offers a better chance to its poor and unemployed, too.

(Hat tip: GeekPress)

It’s unnerving how often one is faced with declarations about the desirability of fewer people on earth, in response to criticisms of environmentalist politicking. Fewer of us, so the reasoning goes, would improve quality of life, and would be good for the environment.

Forgive me for not joining this little death cult. Forty years ago almost to the day, an obscure lapidopterist named Paul Ehrlich generalised Malthusian theories about population growth in butterflies, and published a book which essentially replaced all occurrences of the word “insect” with “human”. The Population Bomb exploded (sorry) upon the world. It made hysterical predictions of exponential population growth that would inevitably lead to catastrophic resource depletion and mass starvation in the 1970s. As if the coming ice age didn’t cause enough stress. Ehrlich’s book advocated radical population control measures. The apocalyptic over-population vision was reinforced by a best-selling book published by the Club of Rome in 1972, entitled The Limits to Growth, in which the collapse of human development and population was predicted as a result of exponential growth in demand for limited resources. The failure of these prophesies of doom hasn’t changed the authors’ minds. They went on to write further books, renewing their end-of-the-world predictions, the most amusing being Beyond the Limits, published in 1993.

Yet resources stubbornly refused to be exhausted. In 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed economist Julian Simon a cheque for $576.07, as a result of a 1980 futures contract on five metals of Ehrlich’s choosing. Both agreed that market prices were an adequate proxy for scarcity, and since Ehrlich predicted more scarcity, he would have made a profit on the $1 000 futures contract had prices risen. Instead, all declined, by an average of more than 50%, and Ehrlich spectacularly lost his bet.

Likewise, people stubbornly refused to starve en masse. Not only has the proportion of people suffering malnourishment declined to a third of the 1970 level of 35%, but the absolute number is down from over 900 million to 400 million, despite the inconvenient truth that the world’s population doubled over the same period, and despite the fact that this population growth was heavily biased towards to the poor world to boot.

Thanks to the consistent and often spectacular failure of such predictions of developmental disaster, it has become clear that the earth can sustain rather more people than expected. Why is this so? Because population growth isn’t exponential after all. It doesn’t simply grow until resources are depleted, at which point Gaia takes Mathusian revenge and decimates the parasite that is homo sapiens. (This suggests that terms like “parasite”, “virus” and “cancer”, which are habitually used by Gaia’s death cultists to describe you and me and humanity in general, might not be entirely fair either.)

In fact, global human population is likely to stabilise over time. Already, global population growth is slowing, both in relative and absolute terms, and the UNDP estimates that the total population of Earth will reach a plateau of around 11 billion people, ca. 2200. Why is this so? Because as more people get more prosperous, life expectancy increases and mortality rates decline. As a result, people tend to have fewer children, and the children they do have contribute to this prosperity, rather than detract from it.

And why can the earth sustain this? Why have resources become less scarce rather than more scarce? Because Earth is pretty large, for one, and because production isn’t a zero-sum game that simply depletes resources in a one-to-one relationship with population size. What Julian Simon understood is that the price mechanism militates against the uncontrolled exploitation environmentalists fear, because scarcity is priced into our ability to use resources productively. And again, the more prosperous we get, the more we invest in sustainability, the more sophisticated and technically skilled we get at resource management, the more we care about a healthy and productive environment, and the more we value future sustainability over present consumption. And the fewer children we have.

As the rich world amply demonstrates, successful economic development is not the problem, it’s the solution to uncontrolled population growth and unmanaged resource exploitation. There’s no reason why the same would not hold true for the developing world. Opposing their development, on mistaken sustainability grounds, is not only a selfish type of neo-colonialism on the part of the rich world’s environmentalists, but it strikes me as pretty misanthropic.

Yet Gaia’s suicide cultists sound like they would consider a culling spree desirable. They sound like they want to stop the developing world from either developing or growing. Not to say that industrial development is desirable at any cost. That’s clearly not true. But the Gaiists are always willing to sacrifice any industrialisation, development or human activity in favour of environmental protection, no matter how necessary the development is, or how tenuous the environmental danger is. Many of them stand ready to use any means — vandalism, legislative force, high seas piracy, emotional blackmail, outright lies — to achieve their anti-social aims.

Even assuming that one can handle the rather sociopathic notion of reducing the earth’s population by a few billion and leaving the remainder poorer than they are today, such a situation would be unlikely to relieve the pressure on animal populations and environmental resources that really are deserving of protection.

On the contrary. Some of the worst historical environmental damage was caused on a planet peopled by only a fraction of today’s population, at only a fraction of today’s living standards. The evidence simply doesn’t bear out the theory. With fewer people around, well-meaning do-gooders would still be fretting about some messianic mission of “saving” the planet, but ironically, they’d have a harder time doing so.

The environment turns out to be pretty robust. In general (as opposed to localised exceptions) the image of a fragile, super-sensitive system that could be tipped into disaster by the slightest human (as opposed to natural) disturbance, is simply false.

The environment is, of course, very much worth caring about and investing in, even if only for purely selfish reasons of maintaining a productive resource base. One doesn’t, however, achieve this by getting hysterical about human population and its use of natural resources. One doesn’t save, say, the tiger, by discrediting endangered species protection with ill-conceived, politically-motivated and unnecessary listings of emotional-appeal icons such as the polar bear. One doesn’t achieve a better world by activist obstructionism, designed solely to limit the economic development the world, and halt the modern world’s remarkable progress towards longer, healthier and more prosperous lives for all.

And one certainly doesn’t earn the buy-in of other people when you’re telling them that the world would be better off without them.

The other day, I encountered a new mother, who was all apologetic for having contributed to the population. I told her that her kid would either produce more than it would consume, or die. Therefore, it would be a net benefit to the world. How tragic that she couldn’t conceive of her child being anything other than a burden to humanity.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service is considering listing the polar bear as a threatened species, under that country’s Endangered Species Act.

Before blasting this idea as an underhanded ploy by evil environmentalists, it is worth considering the exact meaning of the terms in question. The US criteria are not quite consistent with those of the World Conservation Union (which the cognoscenti abbreviate as IUCN). The latter maintains the famous (or infamous, considering how few of its members have actually gone extinct) Red List of Threatened Species, in which “critically endangered”, “endangered” and “vulnerable”, describing an extremely high, very high or high risk of extinction respectively, are collectively known as “threatened”. By contrast, a “threatened” species under the US law means any species which is “likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range”, and an “endangered” species is one “which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range”. Also, there is much more scope for discretion under the US rules, while the IUCN criteria for the different categories are very specific.

So, on what grounds should the polar bear be listed as threatened? Among the US agency’s own research, a population forecast says much depends on 45-, 75- or 100-year predictions of the extent of Arctic sea ice, and even then, there’s much uncertainty. Besides, that analysis (PDF) has come under attack (PDF) for serious flaws in its methods and analysis. Turns out that after a few years of slight decline in Arctic sea ice coverage, this winter’s Arctic ice is back to normal levels. (Via Anthony Watts, who links to the useful University of Illinois Cryosphere Today site. It also has a cute story about a stolen polar bear photo, reproduced above, which Al Gore and the media used to tell yet another lie: “They cling precariously to the top of what is left of the ice floe, their fragile grip the perfect symbol of the tragedy of global warming.” Sob sob. Hat-tip: Hard Rain.)

What about polar bear population? Well, it’s pretty much stable, it appears. A National Center for Policy Analysis report entitled Polar Bears on Thin Ice? Not Really!, says that only two of the twenty or so population groups are in decline, which hardly gels with “throughout all or a significant portion of its range”. There’s a picture alongside. The chart illustrates the polar bear populations that are growing, declining, stable and unknown. Hardly looks like a threatened species, does it?

In fact, although the Red List includes the polar bear (and the hippo, which is responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other large animal), I can’t see which of the criteria it actually meets. The Inuit around Hudson Bay are saying more need to be hunted, because their population is increasing, and in an amusingly headlined article, “Advertisers urged to kill off polar bears,” James Murray reports on a study that finds advertisers should eschew cute pictures of polar bears to burnish their green image.

Listing a species that isn’t actually endangered is likely to do as much harm to noble conservation efforts as did Norman Myers’s 1979 statement, based on supposition alone, that 40 000 species would go extinct per year until 2000. Didn’t happen. Yet it was repeated in Al Gore’s 1993 book, Earth in the Balance, and is only one among many hyperbolic prophesies of mass extinction, which simply have not come true, and don’t look likely to happen in the foreseeable future either. They’re a bit like the cults who predict the end of the world. They’ve never been right, but of course, that only strengthens their faith that they have to be right sometime soon.

Despite the lack of evidence that the polar bear is, in fact, threatened, Brendon Frazier of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, says it should be listed not as threatened, but as endangered. In this AFP article, he explains the reason why:

“An endangered listing can affect the sell-off of the oil drilling rights,” Brandon Frazier, a spokesman for global animal welfare group International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said. “The authorities would have to get approval through the Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct drilling if there is an endangered species that inhabits the area.” […]

US lawmakers have proposed listing the polar bear as “threatened”, but IFAW said that did not go far enough. “A ‘threatened’ listing leaves open the possibility for exemptions and doesn’t shut loopholes, such as the one that allows Americans to trophy-hunt for polar bears in Canada and bring their heads and hides back to the US,” Frazier told AFP.

So there’s your reason. Anything to stop the big, bad oil companies from drilling. If the polar bear is under threat, the reason is climate change, which in turn is caused by evil humans, who dare pursue industrial development, scientific advance and economic progress.

That’s what they’re fighting for. If the polar bear gets listed as threatened, this can be used to stop almost any new industrial development, anywhere. Even if the impact is so tenuous nothing but global warming alarmism can rationalise it. If the polar bear gets listed as endangered, then so is the growth in prosperity that has fueled the rising quality of life among rich and poor alike. It’s not about the polar bear. It’s about us. It is, to quote William F. Buckley, about standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!”.

Now who’s the conservative?

A road sign in Newberry, South Carolina.

(Hat tip:  Kevin, over at Wizbang.)