BLASKA BLOG

Golly gee, Dave. You refer to this "On Message organization" as though you're not aware that it's essentially the campaign and advertising wing of the Republican National Committee. Its founder recently had this to say about Sarah Palin: "She has gotten a raw deal from the media, the pundits, campaign handlers, and even from many self-professed Republican strategists. Everyone assumes she is running for President. Maybe so. But it is also possible that she is not running."

I wonder if he has any vested interest in pumping up the candidacy of T. Wall? Let me spell it out: If Wall is seen as credible, he'll be able to raise more cash and, in turn, hire Anderson's firm to make commercials (if he hasn't already).

In other words, that "poll" is about as reliable as asking Bucky Badger if Wisconsin is going to beat Arizona tonight.

For some ideas about what totalitarianism is actually like, I suggest you read, oh, just about anything about totalitarianism. (Hint: Piles of corpses.)

Kenneth, I'd prefer to sound the klaxon before we get to that, if you don't mind. 

Your baseless and screamingly ignorant slandering of science would be hilarious if it weren't so sad, Dave.

I can play your game, too: You know who else was virulently anti-intellectual? I'll give you a hint: Those various -ists you think you know so much about and you would get along mighty well on this count, at least.

Oh and me, "precocious?" You're really not that old, are you?

David,

Ok, so after your friends at the DCPAC sent out the misleading leaflets, and you energized your blog readers with unsubstantiated claims that "PD is taking away your property rights", do you really expect anybody to take the numbers of registrants as an indication of anything except how good you conservatives are at playing on the paranoia of your base?

"Elitists" is a great shibboleth, but you aren't really challenging the scientists on any grounds other that the numbers of folks you whipped into a frenzy last week.  We can all agree you did a wonderful job of that, but that is not the issue: striking the balance between private property rights and shared environmental quality is.

Let me suggest an approach that is both scientific _and_ reflects our democratic values:  How about we determine how the public feels about the tradeoffs between preserving water quality and property rights, and then send the experts off to create a plan that reflects the values of the community.

This way the people set the goals, the experts find a way to get us there. 

People 498, Experts 14, Logan 0. 

[ The United Kingdom’s Telegraph*: Climategate]

*Torygraph

Those e-mails do not demonstrate any conspiracy at all. They show scientific debate and criticism. (And maybe that scientists don't always like each other).

For some ideas about what totalitarianism is actually like, I suggest you read, oh, just about anything about totalitarianism. (Hint: Piles of corpses.)

Well you know Kenneth, in Blaska-world first people try to protect water quality and then millions of people are dead. So Mr. Blaska is merely trying to protect the community from the totalitarian dangers of clean water. I imagine Blaska-world is a very interesting place.

Lukas,

I am not sure how you draw the conclusion that the exposed emails show scientific debate.  They demonstrate how to shut debate down and silence criticism.

They must of learned that from China.

David,

Is this your strategy?

""'The organizer's first job is to create the issues or problems,' and 'organizations must be based on many issues.' The organizer 'must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. . . . An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.'"

The reason Blaska won't actually talk about this issue is that the issue is irrelevant - stirring up hostilities is his goal.  He is going to stir and stir and stir people to the point of overt expression.  Of course, at some point those people may realize they are being played and all Blaska is accomplishing is raising their blood pressure and shortening their lives.

Yes, Steve Peterson, exactly. 

As for you liberals, anyone care to address the central question? That being, to rephrase WI Supreme Court Justice Edward Ryan: "Who shall rule, the scientific elites or the People?

Logan, you, of course, are excused.

I say let the people rule!

Let the people fulfill their civic duty to be informed voters by asking the experts about the facts surrounding the issue.  Then let the people, after becoming sufficiently informed, make clear their desire about the balance of personal environmental responsibilites versus property rights, then set the experts and our elected officials to the task of realizing the will of the people!

"Eventually, Old Joe Stalin determined what was scientific and what was treasonable"

Stalin's establishment of Lysenkoism as "undisputable truth" is a prime example of what happens when politicians have the last word on scientific issues, instead of those "elitist" scientists.  But how is that different from what Blaska advocates?  Stalin imposed a genetic theory that met his ideological needs.  Blaska wants to do the same for climate science and water quality, and any other subject where he has an axe to grind.  Of course, he can't send his opponents to the gulag -- yet -- but anyone who calls Franco a "freedom fighter" obviously has a problem with open debate.

Quite the opposite, Mr. Nussbaum. Blaska is NOT going to determine the science. But he does reserve the right to help decide, as one citizen, the public policy with or without regard to whatever scientific case is made.

But as the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit indicate, scientists do need the cleansing sunlight and fresh air of public scrutiny. 

That involves the "sifting and winnowing" that is the motto of our great state university. This means that, ultimately, the people decide -- not a coterie determined by the Matt Logan standard of it's all too complicated for "anyone except a PhD level expert."

But ultimately, whatever the science proves to be -- and, of course, there is proven science as opposed to the hypotheses -- it is up to the public, the electorate to determine their public policies. Even if the science behind the policy is unassailable, voters may decide that the price is not worth the benefit. 

An injury trial lawyer in Madison tried to show the jury how his paralyzed client could have been saved if only the negligent motorcycle manufacturer had built a cage around the rider. The jury laughed ... but that was before Obama.

David,

I think you have yet to publicly admit the nature of my argument, but your last point makes a great starting place to hammer my point home yet again:

"An injury trial lawyer in Madison tried to show the jury how his paralyzed client could have been saved if only the negligent motorcycle manufacturer had built a cage around the rider. The jury laughed"

I am in full agreement with the jury in this case.   I am also in full agreement with the process that led to the jury's decision.  And that is the problem with the way the case was laid out to the folks who registered an opinion against shore land zoning last week: theirs was a process led by folks interested in emulating Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals, rather than the exposition of facts surrounding the issue.

Your quote of a previous post of mine (where you falsely state I am affiliated with Progressive Dane) totally misses the point and demonstrates the problem clearly:  Instead of talking about whatever flaws in the science may be, you are playing on resentments of scientists and progressive Dane.  The end of the message you cite posits what I would consider to be the fundamental question that should be considered, but that is of no use to a blowhard blogger looking to radicalize local conservatives in order to mobilize voters from their ranks in the next election.  That fundamental question shall now be repeated for the third time:

How much damage should the average person be allowed to cause to our shared environment before they need to apply some personal accountability to mitigate further impacts?

How odd that Logan should now resent the Right's use of a tool (Alinsky) that until now has been the exclusive property of his friends on the Far Left.

His final (pray let it be so!) sentence  (I.E. "How much damage should the average person be allowed ...") comes close to paraphrasing the question that I have already posed but misses the critical element, that being: Who decides "how much damage should the average person be allowed ..."

Blaska the small d believer in democracy answers: "the average person decides through the electoral process, which was in evidence Tuesday last week in Verona and Thursday in Sun Prairie." Democracy in action!

Logan the Elitist answers: "PhD level experts" who know better than "the average high school graduate." Presumably, experts such as those at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit who (I again presume) Logan would not regard as "the average person."

i further suspect he has a similarly inflated view of himself.

David,

Shibboleths abound!   Alinsky is proud of you.

I do not believe that PhD level experts should have the final say.  I also do not believe it is wise for the voters to walk into a decision without the best information in hand to help inform that decision.  Part of that information should include the views of the framers that individual property rights are not absolute, but governed by certain principles of envorinmental stewardship:

http://www.conlaw.org/Intergenerational-II-2-3.htm

Which contains more of the Jefferson quote I cited earlier:

"The question [w]hether one generation of men has a right to bind another. . . is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also among the fundamental principles of every government. . . . I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, 'that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living' . . .."

This quote comes from a letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison written during their discussions on the makeup of the Bill of Rights.

David,

You better come up with a better qoute than the one you just deleted, otherwise I am going to have to post what I happened to capture before you removed it!  Is there a constitutional crisis in progress at stately Blaska manner?

Matt, I withdrew from this debate because your weapon is tedium. You are one boring fellow.

I have no truck with proving that T. Jefferson was a rapacious despoiler of the land. He was not and neither are the good citizens of Dane County, despite your disdain.

Your quotation in no way supports the view that a democracy gives up its rights to your PhD experts who, you hold, must rule over "the average high school graduate."

Jefferson was talking about the ability of succeeding generations to amend the Constitution -- unlike the supposedly inflexible monarchies and high church orthodoxies. As these quotations demonstrate;

The generations of men may be considered as bodies or corporations. Each generation has the usufruct  of the earth during the period of its continuance. When it ceases to exist, the usufruct passes on to the succeeding generation free and unencumbered and so on successively from one generation to another forever. We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country." --Thomas Jefferson to John Wayles Eppes, 1813. 

"Can one generation bind another and all others in succession forever? I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter unendowed with will." --Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824.

"A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man." --Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824.

David,

Yours is but one example of how Jefferson applied the concept of "the Earth belongs in usufruct to the living."  I think it is plain to see from the entirety of the letter I cited that in the 1789 letter Jefferson was introducing the concept to Madison and spinning out various consequences thereof.  Your citations, which I might note are from 24+ years after mine, are clearly derived from the same line of thinking.

It is also clear from the definition of usufruct that Jefferson did not consider the Earth to belong to the occupant:

USUFRUCT:

–noun Roman and Civil Law.

Jefferson's use of the term "occupied" in the letter to Madison rather than "owned" is also telling:

"Then no man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the paiment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living, which would be the reverse of our principle."

There is also a fair case to be made that this whole concept had its origins in Jefferson's agrarian ethic of preserving the topsoil of his plantation for future generations.  And isn't that really what the shore line zoning issue is all about - preserving the topsoil of a property undergoing construction and preventing its eroded sediments from adversely impacting common properties?

The George W. Bush Memorial Library here at the Stately Manor features the 21-volume set put out by Encyclopedia Britannica called "Annals of America," which consists of the actual source documents for the American experiment. Volume 3 contains the entirety of Jefferson's Sept. 6, 1789 letter to Madison and the latter's Feb. 4, 1790 response.

The editors' summary and analysis says this:

"Though Thomas Jefferson profoundly believed in the principles of the Revolution of 1776 and of the Constitution, he did not insist that they were immutable. He believed that every man and every generation must think in relation to conditions of the times and not hold the laws, constitutions, or contracts of the past as sacred." 

Jefferson himself writes: "... it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They man manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. ... It may be said that the succeeding generation exercising in fact the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to 19 years only."

In other words, you are inflating the analogy Jefferson used to make his larger point into the point itself.

BTW: Madison disagreed with Jefferson, writing: "On the contrary, it would give me singular pleasure to see it first announced to the world in a law of the U.S., and always kept in view as a salutary restraint on living generations from unjust and unnecessary burdens on their successors."

Now, Logan, I expect you to satisfy your addiction to having the last word but I won't see it. The slogan here at the Policy Research Center and Experimental Work Farm is this: "Blaska's Blog can be bought but it cannot be bored."