For my summer holidays I have been mostly reading Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand has her faults but, boy, was she prescient.  She wrote it back in the 1950s.

One of the things she foresaw was the current nonsensical, dishonest, canting campaign against shale gas. In Atlas, it takes the form of Rearden Metal, the miracle technology which is going to transform the US economy if only the progressives will let it. But of course, Rand's fictional progressives don't want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed.

Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous scare-mongering reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it's unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous.

As they are attempting to do now in Britain's West Sussex, and have succeeded in doing in New York.

Here's a relevant excerpt from Rand.

There's really no more doubt about it, the US government is a Surveillance State, far beyond any East German autocrat's wildest dreams. And it is far, far more dangerous to us than Al Qaeda.

We all come from a background that taught us that the Soviet Union and its totalitarian empire was horrifying (which it was), and that the USA was good, noble and pristine. That makes it hard for us to accept that the US has now become what East Germany once was. We keep looking for reasons to not to believe it.

So what now?  Your first move is to protect yourself. There's no use in saying much against a surveillance state while they're listening to your every word.  There are two ways to protect yourself:

That didn't take long, did it?  That's the way it is with frenzies, whether they're dotcom bubbles or phony messiahs.  A few moments of "the madness of crowds," then it's down the rabbit hole of history.

So there goes another Great Black Hope, the Great Liberal Dream of absolution from America's racist sins dashed yet again.  Better luck in 2012 or 2112, O ye liberal sinners, because it's over in 2008.  Obama is toast.

You know he's toast when Chris Matthews, who poses as a tough-guy bully but is really just a liberal pussy wallowing in white guilt, goes apoplectically over the top proclaiming Obama's speech in Philly today to be "one of the great speeches in American history," surpassing Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream and "worthy of Abraham Lincoln."

To see the total absurdity of this, try imagining Martin Luther King's reaction to a Jeremiah Wright sermon.  You can be quite confident he would publicly denounce it as the most vile racism and walk out of the church.  Obambi and his not-proud-of-her-country wife stayed for 20 years.

This smooth-talking charismatic con man is lying through his teeth when he said he wasn't really aware of his pastor sermonizing "God Damn America."  God Damn America?  No, God Damn Barack Obama. 

Everyone "knows" that DDT -  Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane - is a terrible poison.  It isn't, of course (see, for example, the Harvard Nurses Health Study).  Yet because everyone is so sure it is, some folks on the Republican National Committee figure it might as well be used to poison the Democrats.

So don't be surprised if you hear the party of Lost Harry Reid and Pelosi Galore, of Shrillary and Barack Hussein being called The DDT Party - the party of Defeat, Death, and Taxes.

Defeat - as in surrender, wanting America to lose, waving a white flag at America's enemies.

Death - as in promoting a culture of death, of the murder of millions of unborn children, of hysterically opposing any attempt to prevent their murder.

Taxes - as in always advocating more and higher taxes as the answer to any problem.