Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly on FAFO

    Here.

    Megyn Kelly, being relatively young, may be forgiven for referring to Elliot Ness as Elliot Nest (ouch!), but Steve Bannon, whose superannuation shows, and who ought to know better, either missed her mistake or let it pass, being the gentleman that he is.  

    In all other particulars, however, the short video is delightfully on target.

    As for the man himself, what Kennedy said about Nixon could also be said about Trump: "The man has no class."

    But what is more important, both domestically and internationally, class or the ability to kick ass?* We conservative quill-drivers do some good, I suppose, but none of us are positioned to bring about decisive, world-shaking, change. While we sit at our ink wells and drive our quills, great men stand at the ramparts and drive history.

    But we the people must keep an eye on them. It is not that power corrupts; it does not. It is that we who are all morally defective and susceptible to the blandishments of power, abuse it.  Power itself, however, is good. If it were not, why would all-power count among the omni-attributes of deity?

    The Founders understood how easily fallen natures are suborned by the possession of power. So they designed a constitution-based republic with built-in safeguards to check and balance the executive's power lest it issue in tyranny.

    Long live the Republic, the republic our political enemies aim to tear down.  They will not succeed. The right man came along at the right time, whether or not by divine design.

    But one thing troubles me. Government by executive orders cannot be what the Founders had in mind. Given our current predicament, however, such orders are a necessary evil. If Congress did its job, they would not be necessary.

    An executive order is an edict. 'Edict' and 'dictator' share the PIE root, deik-. And so, true to his word, Donald Trump was a dictator on Day One, reversing the pernicious edicts of his corrupt predecessor, Joseph Biden who on his first day, playing the dictator, viciously and stupidly reversed Trump's  wise  2017  border policies.  Biden ought to have been impeached and removed from office on the grounds of dereliction of duty and failure to uphold the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect.  But so divided have we become, that Biden's removal could not be brought about.

    And so here we are. If in the unlikely event that the Dems take back the White House in 2028, the cycle of reversing and promulgating edicts will begin again.  A suboptimal outcome, that.

    One more thing. We need an opposition party as part of the system of checks and balances. The Dems would do just fine if they could be restored to sanity, the Camelot sanity of the early 'sixties, say.  But that is a big 'if.' Kamalot would be a disaster. If the Dems persist in their subversive ways, however, serious thought will have to be given to the question whether their party should be outlawed. 

    I'm serious. The CPUSA was never outlawed, as far as I know.** There was no need to, because of their relative lack of political clout. Outlawing them would only have given them attention and brought them supporters. But the transmogrification over the last decades of the Dems into a hard-Left subversive outfit with real chances of winning puts a different complexion on the matter.

    Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism.  But toleration has limits: it negates itself when extended unto political suicide. 

    ____________

    *To put it politely and allusively, 'kick donkey.'

    **I'm not an historian, so correct me if I am wrong or omitting pertinent facts.

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly on FAFO”

  • Is Illegal Immigration a Crime?

    Over at the Stack.

    It is. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats lied to us about this. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime.

    Read it all.  Very short.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ramblin’ Charles Adnopoz

    David Dalton, Who is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion, 2012, p. 65:

    As Dave van Ronk pointed out in his autobiography, many of the people involved in the first folk revival of the 1930s and '40s were Jewish — as were the folkies of the '60s. Van Ronk reasoned that for Jews, belonging to a movement centered on American traditional music was a form of belonging and assimilation.

    [. . .]

    "The revelation that Jack [Elliot] was Jewish was vouchsafed unto Bobby one afternoon at the Figaro," Van Ronk recalled.  "We were sitting around shooting the bull with Barry Kornfeld and maybe a couple of other people and somehow it came out that Jack had grown up in Ocean Parkway and was named Elliot Adnopoz.  Bobby literally fell off his chair; he was rolling around on the floor, and it took him a couple of minutes to pull himself together and get up again.  Then Barry, who can be diabolical in things like this, leaned over to him and just whispered the word 'Adnopoz' and back he went under the table."

    Lacking as it does the proper American cowboy resonance, 'Elliot Charles Adnopoz' was ditched by its bearer who came to call himself 'Ramblin' Jack Elliot.'  Born in 1931 in Brooklyn to Jewish parents who wanted him to become a doctor, young Adnopoz rebelled, ran away, and became a protégé of Woody Guthrie.  If it weren't for Ramblin' Jack, Guthrie would be nowhere near as well-known as he is today.  

    Pretty Boy Floyd.  "As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam/You'll never see an outlaw drive a family from their home."  No?  An example of the  tendency of lefties invariably to  take the side of the underdog regardless of whether right or wrong.  

    Ramblin' Jack does a haunting version of Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.  It grows on you. Give it a chance.  

    Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Woman.  

    Soul of a Man. 

    Dylan's unforgettable,  Don't Think Twice. 

    Here he is with Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte Marie singing the beautiful, Passing Through.

    Addendum:  A correspondent sends us to an article by Peter Hitchens on Dylan. Tell me what you think of it.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Dumb Dems and the Hitler Card

    Having been dealt a stinging rebuke on 5 November 2024, you might think the Democrats would learn something, for example, that playing the 'Hitler card,' like playing the 'race card,' will henceforth give them a losing hand. But no! The knuckleheads double down! 

    Elon Musk is an exuberant fellow at the top of his game. And he is, like all sane people, very happy with the outcome of the November election. His heart goes out to all who brought the Orange Man to a second term. And so he jumps around and cuts loose with idiosyncratic arm-hand gestures. He puts his hand on his heart and then extends his arm. A neutral observer might call it a 'heart-felt thank-you' salute. See here for a video of his antics.

    But of course the Musk gesture is a Nazi salute to our political enemies. Out comes the 'Hitler card'! Typical.

    And then they amalgamate this piece of scurrilous stupidity with a display of their penchant for double standards. (An old saying has it that if you strip a leftist of his double standards he will be left with no standards at all.) After all, "Tampon Tim" (Tim Walz) and "Fauxcahontas" (Elizabeth Warren) have been known to engage in similar arm extensions.  Are they too Nazis?

    What these fools don't understand is that they will continue to lose as long as they continue to slander we us the people.  

    Should people this stupid be let anywhere near the levers of power?

    That is a rhetorical question, as is the one that preceded it.

    Addendum (1/26)

    A commenter points out that Elon's gesture was the Bellamy salute.

    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “Dumb Dems and the Hitler Card”

  • Enforcement of Borders is neither ‘Draconian’ nor ‘Xenophobic’

    I just heard a Democrat politician refer to the The Trump-Homan border crackdown as 'draconian' and 'xenophobic.' It is neither.

    It is not cruel or severe. Although you may think that 'severe' is  etymologically related to 'sever,' it is not. To witness a penology that includes beheading and limb amputation you will have to take a trip to the Middle East. Iran and Saudi Arabia are go-to locales for draconian punishments. If there are any draconian punishments in the USA at the present time, they are inflicted by leftists. J-6 trespassers and abortion protesters are good examples of inflictees. 

    As for 'xenophobic,' it it is the adjectival form of 'xenophobia.'  Now a phobia is an irrational fear.  But we who stand for the rule of law, have no irrational fear of foreigners or of things foreign.  If we did, why would we freely travel abroad and indeed freely live for extended periods in foreign lands? ('Freely' as opposed to 'by military order.') I myself have lived two and a half years abroad: six months in Salzburg, Austria, a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and a year in Ankara, Turkey, and I have intensively studied the native languages, cultures, religions, and histories of these countries.

    What's more, I entered legally, did not overstay my visa, obeyed the local laws, ate their food, observed their customs, and dressed appropriately. I did not, for example, walk around Turkey Arizona-style in short pants. I showed respect for Muslim ways. I entered legally in the way my ancestors entered the USA, legally. And like them, I studied the native languages and did my best to assimilate.  

    You can always count on a leftist to misuse language. Language abuse is as it were inscribed into their DNA.  Show me a leftist and I'll show you a linguistic hijacker.  The scumbaggery of our subversive political enemies has many sources, but the mother of them all, and the mother of all subversion,  straight from the pit of hell and the Father of Lies, is the subversion of language.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The ‘Gordian’ Solution to the World-Knot

    If the mind-body problem is the world-knot, as Schopenhauer is supposed to have said, then eliminative materialism is the 'Gordian' solution.  

    Bill Vallicella

  • Memo to Zennists

    You can't get beyond the discursive intellect until you get to it.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Integration, Free Association, Open Immigration

    An addendum to The Integrationist Fantasy.

    Forced integration violates the right to free association. To add to both the irony and the outrage, the integrators refuse to integrate with the integrated.

    Open immigration is not only in open defiance of the rule of law, it also leads to a particularly offensive form of forced integration, as when illegal aliens are shipped to various locales to the detriment of the citizens who live there, citizens who lack the political clout to prevent the invasion.

    It is no surprise why Trump garnered such strong support from the the black, Hispanic, and working class demographics.

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Integration, Free Association, Open Immigration”

  • Hats Off to Huntington Beach, California

    It was the summer of '65. I was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California listening to the Beach Boys, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, sing about hot rods, surfing, boy-girl relations and such when a song came on that "blew my mind" in the parlance of the day. But what I want to say, today, is that the city so-named 

    . . . voted to approve the initiative brought by Mayor Pat Burns to Declare the City of Huntington Beach a “Non-Sanctuary City for Illegal Immigration for the Prevention of Crime.” As the City Council Members commented, the intent of this Resolution is to deliberately sidestep the Governor’s efforts to subvert the good work of federal immigration authorities and to announce the City’s cooperation with the federal government, the Trump Administration, and Border Czar Tom Homan’s work. This new City policy and Declaration are common sense, supports our law enforcement, and advances public safety throughout the City. What the Governor is doing does not.

    Read it all. (HT: Fellow native-Californian, Ingvarius Maximus of Alhambra)

    Bill Vallicella

  • Scott Johnson on Richie Havens

    Powerline:

    Havens grew up in Brooklyn singing with a choir in church and with doo wop groups on street corners. He crossed the river to figure out how to make a go of it in Greenwich Village as a performer. He recorded two albums on Douglas Records before he signed a contract with Verve Forecast in 1967. He seemed to materialize out of nowhere that year with Mixed Bag, a beautiful album of folk covers and original compositions. The album was full of striking performances, but none more so than Havens’s interpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like A Woman.” By the way, I may need to take a break from what is meant to be an occasional series until we celebrate Bob’s birthday next May with our traditional Bobfest.

    By the way, did you catch Amy Klobuchar's oblique reference to Dylan at the Trump Inaugural? And what a speech our boy gave! He can turn on the gravitas when he wants to and needs to.  

    Bill Vallicella

    8 responses to “Scott Johnson on Richie Havens”

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Remembering Suze Rotolo and the Songs She Inspired

    Bob_Dylan_-_The_Freewheelin'_Bob_Dylan
    Suze Rotolo, depicted above, died on 25 February 2011 at 67 years of age. Dylanologists usually refer to the following as songs she inspired:

    Don't Think Twice.  This Peter, Paul, and Mary rendition may well be the best.  It moves me as much as it did 62 years ago in 1963 when it first came out.  It was via this song that I discovered Dylan.  The 45 rpm record I had and still have showed one 'B. Dylan' as the song's author.  I pronounced it as 'Dial-in' and wondered who he was.  I soon found out.

    One Too Many Mornings

    Tomorrow is a Long Time

    Boots of Spanish Leather (Nancy Griffith) Joan Baez version.

    There is some irony, of course, in Baez's renditions of songs inspired by Rotolo: Dylan's affair with Baez was a factor in his break up with Rotolo.

    Ballad in Plain 'D.' Analysis. The song. This song is only indirectly inspired by Suze; it is 'inspired' by Suze's sister, Carla Rotolo, the "parasite sister" in Dylan's song. The link below that references their mother Mary Rotolo will also bring you to pages about Suze and Carla.  The commie character of the Village folk scene as represented by the Rotolos, Pete Seeger, and so many others  is a good part of the backstory to Dylan's My Back Pages. "Ah, but I was so much older them, I'm younger than that now."

    Finally a great song by Baez inspired by and about Dylan: Diamonds and Rust

    In her memoir, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway Books, 2008, p. 277-8), Suze Rotolo says this about her mother Mary Rotolo:

    I remember her informing me that the career army man an older cousin was married to had lost out on a promotion that involved security clearance because of my appearance on the cover of Bob's album.  I was astounded.

    True, the times they were troubled.  Protest against the escalating war in Vietnam was on the rise, draft cards were being burned, and colleges were erupting with discontent.  Blues, bluegrass, and ballads no longer defined folk music, since so many folksingers were now writing songs that spoke to current events.  Bob Dylan was labeled a "protest singer."  But the absurdity of my mother, Marxist Mary, trying to make me feel responsible for a military man's losing a security clearance because I am on an album cover with Bob Dylan, a rebel with a cause, left me speechless.  And that was all she said to me about the cover or the album in general. 

    It Ain’t Me, Babe Today on TAP: When biopics get it wrong—and occasionally get it just right

    Bill Vallicella

    4 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Remembering Suze Rotolo and the Songs She Inspired”

  • On Anselmian or ‘Perfect Being’ Theology

    Tom O. writes,
    I was wondering if you have time to weigh in on the following problem. I take it you subscribe to perfect being theology as a constraint on our theorizing about God’s nature. For example, you write, “God is the absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is a contingent being. No absolute just happens to exist. it is built into the divine job description that God be a necessary being…”. Here, it looks to me like you’re endorsing a prior conception of what God must be like (‘absolute’) in order to infer that God must be a necessary being. 
     
    Actually, Tom, I do not subscribe to 'perfect being' theology, as I explain below.   I do, however, have a prior conception of what God must be like to be 'worth his salt,' i.e., to satisfy the exigencies built into our concept of God.  God is the Absolute, and nothing could be the Absolute if it merely happened to exist. So God, if he exists, exists of absolute metaphysical necessity, and he has this necessity from himself, and not from another, a se non ab alio. It follows that if God does not exist, then he is impossible. Thus  what we should not say is that God necessarily exists, for this way of putting it implies that he does exist. We should say that God is necessarily non-contingent, i.e. necessarily such that, if he exists, he exists  necessarily (in all possible worlds in the Leibnizian patois), and if he does not exist, then he is impossible (exists in no possible world in the same façon de parler.) 
     
    Now, suppose someone endorses a conception of God as a limited being. Maybe God is not all powerful, or he is dependent in some way (and so not a se in a strong sense- think pantheism) or he is contingent in some way. This view of God obviously parts ways with perfect being theology. But I want to know how the proponent of perfect being theology will argue that conceptions of God as a limited being are deficient. The very conception of God (as limited or absolute/perfect) is at issue here. So, the proponent of perfect being theology can’t assume God is the absolute to then argue a limited God is deficient. What criterion could he possibly appeal to in order to sort ‘genuine’ conceptions of God from ‘deficient’ conceptions?
     

    In the context of this discussion there are three approaches to God that we ought to distinguish: the limited being approach, the perfect being approach, and  the beyond-perfect-being approach of Aquinas, Barry Miller, and myself, et al.  As for the limited being approach, I will just say for now that there might be one or more limited gods, but that they don't interest me. What interests me is whether there is an unsourced Source of the being, intelligibility, and value of everything other than it, a being of limitless perfection, return to which or fellowship with which, or participation in the being of which, would bring the ultimate in human felicity.  That is my concept of God, and not just mine.  My question then becomes: does anything in reality answer to that concept?  

    I have no interest in limited gods. I have no interest in affirming them or denying them. There might even be one or more in addition to the unlimited God; they might serve as emissaries between the unlimited God and us.  But they would not be worthy of worship or worthy of my ultimate concern because my ultimate beatitude and need for final meaning could not be secured  by them.

    My interest is whether we need to go beyond perfect being theology.  I say we do and that PBT is a limited approach to the divine.

    The anthropomorphism of perfect being (Anselmian) theology

    One approach to God and his attributes is Anselmian: God is "that that which no greater can be conceived."  God is the greatest conceivable being, the most perfect of all beings, the being possessing all perfections.  But what is a perfection?  A perfection is not just any old (positive, non-Cambridge) property, but a great-making property. Some of these properties admit of degrees while some do not. To say of God that he is the ens perfectissimum, the most perfect of all beings, is to say that he possesses all great- making properties, and of those that admit of degrees, he possesses them to the highest degree.

    For example, power admits of degrees; so while Socrates and God are both powerful, only God is maximally powerful.  Wisdom too admits of degrees; so while both Socrates and God are both wise, only God is maximally wise.  And the same holds for love and mercy and moral goodness.  Many of the divine attributes, then, are maxima of attributes possessed by humans.

    Are Socrates and God wise in the same sense of 'wise'?  This follows if wisdom in God is just the highest degree of the same attribute that is found in some humans.  Accordingly, the predicate 'wise' is being used univocally in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' despite the fact that God but not Socrates is all-wise.  Bear in mind that the sense of a predicate is not to be confused with the property (attribute) the predicate is used to express. Suppose we distinguish three 'planes': the linguistic, the semantic, and the ontic. Predicates inhabit the linguistic plane, senses the semantic plane, and properties the ontic plane. 

    Thus a commitment to univocity appears to be entailed by the Anselmian or perfect-being approach.  The predicate 'wise' is being used in the very same sense when applied to Socrates and when applied to God. 

    The polar opposite of univocity is equivocity.  The phenomenon of equivocity is illustrated by this pair of sentences: 'Socrates is wise,' 'Kamala is in no wise fit to be president.'  The meaning or sense of 'wise' is totally different across the two sentences.  Midway between univocity and equivocity there is analogicity.  Perhaps an example of an analogical use of 'wise' would be in application to Guido the mafioso.  He's a wise guy; he knows the score; but he is not a wise man like Socrates, though he is like the latter in being knowledgeable about some things.   But I mention analogy only to set it aside.

    My thesis: an Anselmian approach to God and his attributes such as we find in Alvin Plantinga and T. V. Morris and the rest of the 'perfect being' theists is anthropomorphic. One takes God to have the very same great-making attributes or properties that (some) humans have, but to the maximal degree.  Socrates is benevolent and merciful; God is omnibenevolent and all-merciful.  And so on.  We could say that God is omni-qualified or omni-propertied with respect to the great-making properties. If we take this tack, we approach God from the side of man, assimilating God to man.  God is 'made' (conceptualized) in the image and likeness of man, as a sort of superman, but with defects removed and attributes maximized. 

    This anthropomorphism is very different from the God-is-an-anthropomorphic-projection thesis of Ludwig Feuerbach.  Feuerbach's thesis entails the nonexistence of God. Perfect being anthropomorphism does not. 

    Well, what is wrong with anthropomorphism?  The problem with it is that it fails to do justice to God's absolute transcendence and ineffability.  If the difference between creatures and God is only a matter of degree, then God would not be worthy of worship. He would be "the greatest thing around" and no doubt an object of wonder and admiration, but not an appropriate object of worship. (See Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God, U. of  Notre Dame Press, 1996, p. 3)

    God is the Absolute.  I take that to be axiomatic. That God is the Absolute is built into the very concept of God whether or not anything in reality answers to that concept.  Starting from the concept, one cannot prove (demonstrate) that God exists. Kant is surely right that the ontological argument "from mere concepts" (aus blosser Begriffen) is not valid. To understand what I just wrote you must understand that the concept of X is not to be confused with the nature of X. Natures (quiddities, essences) are situated on the ontic plane mentioned above; concepts are either finite-mind-dependent in which case they cannot exist in themselves but only in minds, or else,they exist in themselves on the semantic plane, which I distinguished above from the ontic plane. One could say that  the nature of God entails (or rather is) the existence of God.  That, I believe, is true. But that truth does not help us prove the existence of God unless we have a rationally coercive reason to think that our concept of God is an adequate concept, i.e., one that captures the essence or nature of God. But we have no such concept. The doctor angelicus will back me up on this.  In God, essence and existence are one. To capture God's essence in a concept, therefore, would require squeezing God himself into a concept. That would be like emptying the Pacific Ocean, or any ocean, into a hole in the sand at the seashore.

    God is radically other than creatures.  His attributes cannot be 'in series' with human degreed attributes even if at the limits of these series.  God is not just another thing that exists  and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties.   

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “On Anselmian or ‘Perfect Being’ Theology”

  • Bergoglio on Borders

    What a hypocrite this guy is! You can 'migrate' anywhere, just not into the Vatican.

    Don't you love that word 'migrate'? Its use manages to elide two important distinctions in one fell swoop: the distinction between legal and illegal immigration, and that between immigration and emigration.  A worthy addition to the lexicon of the Left.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Move Over IRS: Make Way for the External Revenue Service

    I kid you not. 

    Donald J. Trump
    @realDonaldTrump
     
    For far too long, we have relied on taxing our Great People using the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Through soft and pathetically weak Trade agreements, the American Economy has delivered growth and prosperity to the World, while taxing ourselves. It is time for that to change. I am today announcing that I will create the EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE to collect our Tariffs, Duties, and all Revenue that come from Foreign sources. We will begin charging those that make money off of us with Trade, and they will start paying, FINALLY, their fair share. January 20, 2025, will be the birth date of the External Revenue Service. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
     
     
    Good riddance to Biden, his bromides, and his bullshit. Finally a leader with ideas and the cojones to execute them.
     
    How would a journo (my term of disapprobation for a leftist pseudo-journalistic shill for the despicable Dems) respond to this?  By willfully ignoring the main point and drawing attention to Trump's odd capitalizations and less-than-elegant use of the English language. That tactic comports well with their inability to look past style to substance.  You will by now have noticed their fascination with empty celebrities and such narcissistic pretty boys as Gavin Newsom and  Justin Trudeau not to mention such airheads as the overgrown teenage girl, AOC, and that hilarious birdbrain Kamala. 
     
    If Trump accomplishes 10% of what he has planned, that will be 100% more than Kamala could do. (Riff adapted from Michael Savage, the wittiest pundit on our side.)
    Bill Vallicella

  • What is Fueling the L. A. Fires?

    The obvious answer in terms of tinder-dry flammable materials, the Santa Ana winds, etc. does not cut deep enough. Ideologically, nature idolatry plays a major role in the ferocity, force, and human impact of the L. A. fires.  Their source is in radical environmentalism. Radical environmentalism, as opposed to a wise stewardship of nature, is an anti-humanism. This species of wokery issues in extreme misanthropy.  By radical environmentalism I mean positions like that of David Foreman, founder of Earth First.  His extremism is displayed in the following quotations:

    • “Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We’re not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.”
    • “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”
    • “Humanity is the cancer of nature.”
    • “I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today” and, “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.”
    • “The optimum human population of earth is zero.”

    This AI-generated list may be verified at AZ Quotes.

    Quote-the-optimum-human-population-of-earth-is-zero-david-foreman-78-94-43

    Now not every environmentalist on the Left embraces the late Foreman's absurdities. But the mitigated forms of leftist environmentalism are also objectionable.  Here is a paradox worth thinking about. A sane environmentalism cannot be anti-human. It must promote human flourishing. But this will require various violent interventions in nature including drilling, mining, farming, dam-building, tunneling, road-building, and the like.  These are anti-environmental actions. To refuse to manage nature for the sake of human flourishing by engaging in these anti-environmental actions will lead, as it has in the case of the California conflagration, to a worse environmental outcome.

    That is the paradox. A sound environmentalism must be in some measure anti-environmental.  But a paradox is not a contradiction, and this is one that must be accepted.

    So, even apart from arson, the L. A. inferno is in large part man-made by the likes of Governor Hair-Style and Mayor Dumbass. (Those choice epithets courtesy of Kurt Schlichter.) Wildfires there will always be. Their benighted policies, however,  have made things worse than they had to be.

    Bill Vallicella

    6 responses to “What is Fueling the L. A. Fires?”

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