oil for blood or blood for oil?

via BoingBoing: Or, as George Will would have it: blood for society's "constantly adjusting...balance between freedom and equality," or something like that. BTW, George: 6X more caribou is as bad an indicator of environmental impact as 6 times fewer caribou. But there is some good news today, and it's not limited to the kind that the 101st keyboarder brigade has been poppin' a woody about all day. Pombo got screwed out of handing over public lands to his family! "The controversy stirred by the Gibbons-Pombo maneuver has been so great that there is even reason to hope that proposals for real reform of the antiquated mining law will at last receive a respectable hearing." Teh, indeedy.

Finally, on account of all that yummy pseudoephedrine I needed to take to get through the day, this will be the only post today. But before crawling into a warm, dark place to sleep away my cold, I'd like to shout out a 'thank you' to Coturnix, for the Koufax nomination!

update: OK, too early to sleep. Back to George Will's piece. His over-simplified case that environmentalism is collectivism in disguise disregards the consequences of his argument led to its full conclusion. It's in vogue nowadays to trash policies aimed at protecting the environment for the sole purpose of protecting the environment. Somehow, there always needs to be a financial value to the act of protecting the environment, otherwise we might all collectively slip into that deep, dark vortex of collectivism where people are reduced to apathetic drones wandering in grey overcoats through dank, dark, cold and empty streets. It all comes back to the least common denominator--financial value--our society has to define the worth of any action taken. Ironic for a society seemingly obsessed with "values" such as democracy in foreign lands and prudity over public airwaves. Taken to its extreme, this definition of what is right and wrong leads to only one end-point: anything done to protect the environment is bad, even if it may accidentally enhance personal freedom. 'The environment' has become irrelevant, replaced with this pseudo-common-good notion of financial incentive. You would prefer to hike and camp in an area slated for development? hey, give it up for the collective good of business interests. The argument--environmentalism is collectivism in disguise--in effect becomes its own counterargument: singlemindedly pursuing only financial interests becomes a quasi-collectivism in disguise.