I’ve been on a bit of a tear recently about the conceit of our elites, that they think that they should be calling all the shots, from the economy to the culture to the climate.
Then I read this piece on Degrowth at American Spectator. It’s “The New Fad in the Climate Change Movement.” The piece starts with:
Last December, the journal Nature published an article titled “Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help.”
It gets worse from there.
My basic point, here and here, is that any half-brained delta-minus moron should understand by now that Five Year Plans Do Not Work. Because Hayek. OK, you don’t believe Hayek. Then how about famines! Stalin’s 1932 famine and Mao’s 1959 famine.
Anyway, reading the American Spectator piece I wondered: who coined the phrase “ye shall be as gods?”
Oh. It was John Milton.
In Paradise Lost.
And it goes:
The Tempter all impassioned thus began: O sacred, wise, and wisdom-giving plant, Mother of science, now I feel thy power ... Ye eat thereof your eyes, that seem so clear Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then Opened and cleared and ye shall be as gods Knowing both good and evil as they know.
Yeah says the Tempter. Go ahead Joey; go ahead Mao. Go ahead climatistas. Your grand plan can remake the world. Go ahead Barack, you presidency will “fundamentally transform” America.
Go ahead, you twerps at Nature. Combine Degrowth with “science” and you can save the planet!
“Ye shall be as gods!”
Then I read, from the Twitter Files, the the “disinformation” thingy is not just a USG thingy at CISA, but a global effort. Wrties Andrew Lowenthal:
After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally…
I underestimated just how much money is being pumped into think tanks, academia and NGOs under the anti-disinformation front, both from the government and private philanthropy. We’re still calculating, but I had estimated it at hundreds of millions of dollars annually and I’m probably still being naive – Peraton received a USD $1B dollar contract from the Pentagon.
“Ye shall be as gods!”
Then, in another proof of God’s existence, the Zman is descanting on gods today in “The Gods Have Gone Crazy.” Back in the day, the gods could “break the rules” and maybe teach humans how to do it too. But the Christian God said, enough arreddy, Here are the rules and get on with it. I’m not going to break the rules, and neither should you. He goes on:
Human society is based on the idea that the rules apply to everyone, except the sovereign, who is allowed to exempt himself from the rules and make exceptions to the rules.
But it all falls apart “if the king is making exceptions to the rules to the point where the rules are meaningless.” But the problem is that our ruling class presently thinks that the rules don’t apply to them. Because they are special. Because they are creatives that are creating a new world with cool new rules created by the creatives where the old rules don’t apply.
“Ye shall be as gods!”
The Zman finishes up with this:
There will be peace only when there are new rules that are enforced by new men who know they are not gods.
Hel-lo. As they say out West.