William Graham Sumner

Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner was one of the most influential American thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While Sumner could be considered the founder of sociology as an academic discipline, his ideas ranged much farther. An intellectual ally of Englishman Herbert Spencer and American president Grover Cleveland, he was an outspoken advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, minimum government, personal responsibility and sound money. He wrote biographies of Andrew Jackson, Alexander Hamilton and Robert Morris as well as the popular Folkways and The Forgotten Man.

Some quotes of William Graham Sumner:

A proposition to give everybody an existence worthy of a human being, without a specification of the measures by which it is proposed to do it, is like a proposition to make everybody handsome. . . . Our analysis has . . . shown this noble sentiment is simply a bathos.

The question . . . arises, if it is proposed to reorganize the the social system on the principles of American democracy, whether the institutions of industrialism will be retained. If so, all the virus of capitalism will be retained. It is forgotten, in many schemes of social reformation in which it is proposed to mix what we like with what we do not like, in order to extirpate the latter, that each must undergo a reaction from the other, and that what we like may be extirpated by what we do not like. We may find that instead of democratizing capitalism we have capitalized democracy--that is, have brought in plutocracy.

Who are those who assume to put hard questions to other people and to demand a solution of them? How did they acquire the right to demand that others should solve their world problems for them? Who are they who are held to consider and solve all questions, and how did they fall under this duty?

We groan about monopolies and talk about more laws to prevent the wrongs done by chartered corporations. Who made the charters? Our representatives. Who elected such representatives? We did. How can we get bad law-makers to make a law which shall prevent bad law-makers from making a bad law? That is, really, what we are trying to do. If we are a free, self-governing people, all our misfortunes come right home to ourselves and we can blame nobody else.

(The abolition of poverty) When we turn to examine the means which we are invited to employ for this purpose, we find that it is only the same old proposal once more in a new disguise; we are to abolish poverty by abolishing wealth. We are to go back, in fact, to the primitive barbarism, to the bliss which rests on ignorance, and the contentment which comes from savage stupidity; and the net final gain will be that our envy will no longer be excited by seeing anybody else better off than we. . . . The philosophizing which goes on about these things is one of the marks of the literature of our time. Most of it is as idle as it would be to write essays about the distress of excessive heat.

The robbery of a merchant by a robber baron, the robbery of an investor by a railroad wrecker and the robbery of a capitalist by a collectivist, are all one.

Nearly all, when they say that they want equality only use another form of expression to say that they want more welfare than they have, because they take as a standard all which any one has and they find many who have more than themselves.

The Evolution of American Journalism

Three of the most significant figures in the history of American journalism never attended any college. H.L. Mencken, outspoken editorialist for the Baltimore Sun, editor of The American Mercury and The Smart Set, and author of the multi-volume classic, The American Language, learned the newspaper business by working at a newspaper. Much despised by leftists of the thirties, Westbrook Pegler dropped out of high school to cover sports for a Chicago paper and eventually became one of the most influential columnists of the century. But the journalist that set the standard for all that followed was Will Rogers.

Will Rogers neglected to graduate from high school, became a cow hand and then a vaudeville and circus performer and then a Broadway headliner in the Ziegfeld Follies. Transferring his stage political monologue to a newspaper column read by more than 40 million, Rogers parlayed his Oklahoma rural wit into a career that included 71 movies, a radio show, travels around the world and a personal relationship with the most powerful politicians in the country. He was probably the most famous American in the world at the time of his death in a plane crash near Barrow, Alaska in 1935. No American journalist has been able to match his record, but it's not for lack of effort.

These three all achieved their success with opinion pieces. Nuts and bolts news reporters, even with regular by-lines, remained anonymous to all but their contemporaries in the business. This changed in 1972 when a group of Republican operatives were apprehended inside the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, through contacts with "Deep Throat", an informant that may have been FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, wrote a series of articles investigating that event and others connected to the Nixon White House. Trials and hearings were held, with television coverage that enthralled the nation, and a US president was forced to resign. Woodward and Bernstein became media rock stars, wrote highly successful books about the affair and were the subjects of books themselves as well as a Hollywood movie. Their road to acclaim and attendant financial success was noticed by others who took advantage of the later expanding footprint of television.

Foremost of the next generation of journalist/media stars were Dan Rather and Geraldo Rivera. Beginning with live television coverage of a hurricane on the Galveston waterfront followed by a break-through performance following the Kennedy assassination and later in native clothing in Afghanistan, Rather took over the position once held by the more conventional Walter Cronkite as America's pre-eminent television news figure. He relinquished this spot in 2004 with the promotion of an easily-exposed bogus expose' of George W. Bush's National Guard career. Nonetheless, his success changed the face of television news coverage to a form over substance, personality-driven configuration.

Rivera took a somewhat different path, relying on a more "news as entertainment and titillation" format that also involved him in the very events, sometimes manufactured, that he was supposedly covering, such as the "Capone's Tomb" episode. As a pioneer of the "trash TV" genre, Rivera has managed to maintain visibility through the years despite failures and embarrassments. Financially, if not critically, he continues to be a success.

A fact-based reportorial process meant to enlighten as well as inform has changed to what is basically entertainment with a personality focus. Money is the major factor in this transition. Ratings that drive advertising rates are perceived to hinge on the popularity of television news "stars". Katy Couric is the leading current example, with her $15 million+ contract with CBS.

Aside from a liberal/progressive slant on the news, the leading media outlets have adopted a feeding-frenzy approach featuring their stars giving breathless accounts of tragedies with interpretations and analysis by insider experts. The Giffords shooting in Tucson is an example of this phenomenon. The competitive nature of the media business has encouraged outlets to broadcast and publish conjecture before determining the basics of the event. The rewards for "scoops", even fallacious ones, both to individuals and the industry as a whole, so far outweigh the risks of failure, that we will continue to be wise to view with skepticism anything the media reports.

Obama Administration Gives a Boost to Domestic Energy Production and Employment

First there's this:

Shell receives air permits for Chukchi drilling
by Dan Joling / The Associated Press Fairbanks Daily News Miner


ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Shell Oil has crossed another hurdle in its plans to drill three exploratory petroleum wells in the Arctic Ocean.

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday it had approved a clean air permit for Shell to operate its drilling ship in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast.

The permit requires the Frontier Discover to burn ultra low-sulfur diesel fuel. That and other conditions, including restrictions on operating hours, will reduce particulate emissions by 72 percent and sulfur dioxide emissions by 99 percent, from 181 tons per year to 2 tons, said Janis Hastings, deputy director of EPA's air quality program.

Short-term exposures to sulfur dioxide is linked to adverse respiratory effects and increased asthma symptoms.

The fuel requirement also covers Shell's support vessels when they operate within 25 miles of the drill ship.

Shell wants to drill three exploratory wells on the Arctic Ocean acreage it leased in a 2008 sale. The company also awaits an air quality permit for proposed drilling in the Beaufort Sea; a decision will be made later this month, Hastings said.

The announcement came one day after President Barack Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a revised outer continental shelf leasing program.

The revision was in part a response to a lawsuit by three environmental groups and an Inupiat Eskimo community. A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., a year ago agreed that the Interior Department did not properly study the environmental impact of expanding oil and gas drilling off Alaska's coast before issuing its five-year leasing program.

Salazar on Wednesday announced the agency had considered nearly 50 studies for its revised leasing program. For the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, Salazar said, lease sales would be suspended for at least two years so that additional scientific studies could be conducted and because the estimated benefit is outweighed by potential environmental damage.

However, he retained the 2008 Chukchi lease sale, in which Shell paid $2.1 billion for leases. Information from lease holders' scientific studies, including whether an oil spill can be cleaned up in broken ice, will help him determine whether additional lease sales are needed in the 2012-2017 lease program, Salazar said.

Shell spokesman Curtis Smith said Thursday delivery of the final Chukchi Sea air permit on the heels of Wednesday's news that the company would continue to have access to offshore acreage obtained in 2008 was excellent news. However, he noted the permit must be listed for 30 days before it becomes usable, and it could be appealed to the Environmental Appeals Board.

Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, called the EPA's approval great news for the state.

"I'm hopeful we're poised for a renaissance in Alaska's oil patch, with this permit for Chukchi development and the Obama administration's support for OCS development," Begich said.

The Minerals Management Service estimates the Chukchi could hold recoverable reserves of 15 billion barrels of oil and 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Brendan Cummings, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, called the air permit "highly problematic and likely illegal."

"While Shell's drilling operations would contribute significant amounts of conventional pollutants to the atmosphere, perhaps our biggest concern is that large amounts of black carbon, which directly contributes to Arctic warming, will be released, yet EPA failed to perform any real analysis of such impacts," he said.

The Clean Air Act requires EPA to impose conditions related to greenhouse gas emissions, he said, and Shell's drilling will likely contribute upward of 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

"There was no analysis, much less attempt at regulation of this pollutant," he said.

Shell faces other hurdles before its drilling ship heads north.

The Minerals Management Service has a court appearance next month in a lawsuit challenging its approval of Shell's Chukchi exploration plan. The 2008 lease sale also is being challenged in Alaska District Court.


Then there's this:

Feds pull Shell's Arctic air permits after challenges
by Mary Pemberton / Associated Press Fairbanks Daily News Miner

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Alaska Native and conservation groups have succeeded in challenging clean air permits granted to Shell Oil to drill exploration wells in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.

Numerous groups alleged that Shell's permits granted by the Environmental Protection Agency would allow Shell to emit tons of pollutants into the Arctic environment from a drill ship and support vessels.

The Environmental Appeals Board reviewed the permits. It found that the analysis of the impact of nitrogen dioxide emissions from the ships on Alaska Native communities was too limited, and remanded the permits.

The groups challenging the permits say pollutants resulting from Shell's exploration drilling will harm Inupiat people and wildlife while contributing to climate change.

Shell did not immediately return a call for comment.

On the other end of the continent, a previously approved coal mining project in West Virginia gets the EPA axe.

We had to kill him to save him

The St. Cloud Times reports that an unfortunate individual with suicidal tendencies and a shotgun did not survive an encounter with 4 officers.

December 30, 2010

Officers shoot, kill man holding shotgun in Little Falls

By Kari Petrie
kpetrie@stcloudtimes.com

LITTLE FALLS — Officers shot and killed a man early this morning who they say was suicidal.

The Morrison County Sheriff’s Office was called at 12:22 a.m. about a man who was suicidal and in possession of a gun, Sheriff Michel Wetzel said.

Morrison County deputies and Little Falls police located the man as he was leaving the home of an acquaintance in northeast Little Falls. When officers tried to stop the vehicle, the driver pulled into a nearby driveway and stopped, Wetzel said.

The 37-year-old man got out of the vehicle with a shotgun, Wetzel said. After repeated attempts to order the man to put the gun down, two Little Falls officers and two Morrison County deputies fired their weapons.

The man was pronounced dead at the scene. His name has not been released.

The names of the officers involved have not been released.

The investigation has been turned over to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

We will never know the details of this incident but we do know that this person, for whatever reason, was given the death penalty by firing squad by 4 highly-trained peace officers without the benefit of any judicial process. We're all much safer now.

The End of Innocence

Roosevelt listening to Daniels.

After Woodrow Wilson won the US Presidency in 1912 he appointed Josephus Daniels, the editor and publisher of the Raleigh News-Observer, Secretary of the Navy. A dedicated Democrat, Daniels had previously served in the Interior Department under Grover Cleveland. After assuming his Naval duties, he chose a tall, lanky New York patrician as his first assistant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "The End of Innocence" is meant to be an account of the relationship of these two men as interpreted by Daniels' son, Jonathon, an eyewitness to many of the events of the era and later an editor of the News-Observer himself. In addition to his own personal recollections, the younger Daniels gleaned material from the diaries and journals of prominent figures from that era and even the local scandal sheet, Town Topics.

Fortunately, "The End of Innocence" is much more than the story of the two public figures and their connection. It is a vivid portrait of Washington society, a national but still provincial capital with a permanent population of wealthy, influential residents surrounded by transient officeseekers and lobbyists, all concerned with the maintenance and acquisition of wealth and prestige through proximity to government. His chatty gossip gives us an inside look at not only important figures like William Jennings Bryan, Henry Adams, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson himself, but also lesser known and remembered personalities like Wilson's closest advisor, Colonel House, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the amazing Col. Charles L. McCawley and his wife and many others.

Josephus Daniels had a blustery cruise as Secretary of the Navy. A committed prohibitionist, alchohol was banned on ships during his tenure. In charge of the expansion and moderization of the fleet, his ideas of nationalizing shipyards and insulating sailors from immoral influences met with fierce opposition. Eventually his ambitious second became the vice-presidential candidate to James M. Cox on the Democratic ticket in the 1920. Their loss meant that Daniels temporarily returned to his editor's chair in North Carolina. When FDR won the Presidency Daniels was made the ambassador to Mexico.

"The End of Innocence" doesn't tell us much about how government is supposed to function or if it even does. But it tells us a lot about people, the people that make up the political class and how they function. It's not altogether a flattering tale but it's very entertaining.

"The End of Innocence", Jonathon Daniels, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1954.

Bad News for the Welfare State

The Nov.-Dec. issue of Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, contains the article "American Profligacy and American Power: The Consequences of Fiscal Irresponsibility" by Richard Haas and Roger Altman, two very high-powered establishment guys. It's worth your time to pedal down to the local library and read this essay rather than put down $12.95+tax at Barnes & Noble for the whole magazine. However, if the tires on your bike are flat, I can give you a synopsis of what they're trying to get across. It's over. The US congressional strategy of purchasing votes with the future production of the country has resulted in a state rapidly descending into irreversible financial disaster. US commitments to virtually unlimited defence spending and geometrically expanding entitlement programs financed by treasury bonds are unsustainable. The country is rapidly approaching a situation where a huge percentage of the GDP will be required just pay the interest on these bonds. It is inevitable that government services will be curtailed and that taxes will be increased. This isn't the raving of a radio talk show host. The first is the president of the CFR and a Phd. from Oxford and the second is a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, an adviser to presidents and presidential candidates, and a fixture in the world of finance and its academic auxiliaries. So what does that mean for you and me?

First of all, the celebrated US standard of living is going to take a slide. We are seeing evidence of this already. Discretionary spending will shrink in predictable ways. Luxury items like sophisticated fishing boats, high-buck motorcycles, expensive furniture, etc. will no longer be options for middle class consumers. Home buyers will be forced to look at smaller houses. Food choices for many will be less exotic.

Second, and most important, the relatively new social safety net will be re-configured because there will be no money to pay for it. It's always seemed strange that while the state could require that parents are responsible for their children, there's never been a push by the government to make these children responsible for the later welfare of their parents. You could say that the parents SHOULD HAVE made provisions for their declining years and if they did so, great. But if they didn't, why does society as a whole assume that responsibility? Sure, social security was supposed to provide some help in that line but the payroll deductions have been dwarfed by the escalating benefits and inflation. Realistically, those deductions were just another tax, they've been poured into the general tax receipts. There won't be any security provided by social security.

Defined benefit public employee pension plans, the black hole that states like California, Illinois and New York stare into now along with many profligate municipalities, will become a thing of the past. And those states and communities faced with the impossible task of guaranteeing these pensions will need some creative thinking to escape their financial responsibility. Escape they must, as dunning the general population into penury to accomodate retired firemen and cops will open the gates to political demagoguery unique in our history.

The US operates under a paradigm of education borrowed from 19th century Germany and relatively unchanged since that time. The educational bureaucracy, from the small local level to the federal pinnacle, exists not to further student knowledge but to perpetuate itself and produce docile citizens with prescribed beliefs. The country can no longer afford an expensive but ineffective system that half-heartedly embraces technological advances that should make it cheaper and better.

How long will the population be able to afford a law enforcement, judicial and penal structure that dominates society? The "war on drugs" for instance, devours tax payer funds in a losing battle with black market entrepeneurs that supply a product to willing customers while encouraging disregard of important laws throughout society. Can we really afford to spend $40,000 a year to incarcerate those convicted of supplying common vegetable matter to happy consumers?

The US military establishment, larger than that of the rest of the entire world, must be shrunk dramatically. The 2011 US Navy budget request is for $160.6 billion.


"The FY 2011 budget supports a deployable battle force of 284 ships including 11 aircraft carriers and 29 large amphibious ships. It also reflects a shift to support irregular warfare and includes funds for the littoral combat ship (LCS), expeditionary E/A-18G aircraft supporting national electronic warfare requirements, P-8 Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance aircraft supporting increased emphasis on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles."

No other country has more than one carrier. The US has over seven hundred overseas bases. Those in Afghanistan and Iraq are often in the news but we hear less about installations in Bulgaria, Italy, Serbia, Israel, and Greece. In the very near future American military presence will be reduced both at home and overseas, purely for financial reasons. The concept that the US should be an increasingly ineffective policeman for the world will no longer be valid, if indeed it ever was. Other countries, especially the Europeans, will be forced to finance their own military protection in reduced form or forego it entirely.

The days of federally-financed earmark projects, the John J. Murtha Airport in Pennsylvania, anything in West Virginia with Robert Byrd's name on it and obscenely expensive rail and highway projects are numbered, even as "stimulus" efforts.

In the decades to come, the gigantic statist experiment will fail. And that's a good thing.

Tool or Weapon? Who Cares?

The New York Times brings up a topic of marginal interest to many but of great importance to us 19th century fellas. I really can't remember ever leaving the house without a knife, even as a youngster. In fact, a jack knife was a common Christmas present or birthday gift for a boy when and where I grew up. A quality knife was a prized possession and the ability to keep one razor sharp was a talent envied by those who never acquired it. Try butchering a moose with a bad knife. Or doing a good job of sharpening a pencil.

The knife was probably the second tool developed by man, after a primitive stone bludgeon or handle-less hammer. It's only logical that the first knives were chipped from flint many thousands of years ago, before even arrow heads or spear points. Through the centuries improvements in metallurgy were generally initially put to use in edged weapons and tools. Swords evolved over time from the short broad swords of the Greek phalanx to French epees to cavalry sabers. Every advanced culture around the world developed some form of edged weapon. When the victorious continental rebels decided to augment their new constitution with a Bill of Rights, they didn't specify in the second amendment that the right to keep and bear arms was limited to FIREARMS. Firearms in that era were expensive, fragile, unreliable luxuries while edged weapons were arms that were common and available to everyone. Restricting their possession or use would have been considered nonsense then and until the post-war emergence of the nanny state and the spineless acquiescence of the citizenry to futile government efforts to create a risk-free society. Put out that cigarette. Buckle your seat belt.