Dr. Chu has no Clu, or: The Death of Intellectualism

Barack Obama has added another member of Mensa to his Cabinet, Dr. Stephen Chu, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (and yes, it is OK to quiver at the sight of the phrase "Berkeley"). Dr. Chu will head the Department of Energy. Just one problem - he hates energy:

Big Coal won’t be very happy if Dr. Chu gets confirmed as head of the DOE—he’s really, really not a big fan. “Coal is my worst nightmare,” he said repeatedly in a speech earlier this year outlining his lab’s alternative-energy approaches.

If coal is to stay part of the world’s energy mix, he says, clean-coal technologies must be developed. B ut he’s not very optimistic: “It’s not guaranteed we have a solution for coal,” he concluded, given the sheer scope of the challenge of economically storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions underground.

Worried about radioactivity? Coal’s still your bogeyman. Dr. Chu says a typical coal plant emits 100 times more radiation than a nuclear plant, given the flyash emissions of radioactive particles.

That doesn’t mean nuclear power is much better. “The waste and proliferation issues [surrounding nuclear power] still haven’t been completely solved,” he said. A big part of the Department of Energy’s job is to oversee nuclear weapons and waste storage. And the Obama campaign made clear that increased reliance on nuclear power will require finding a “safe” way to dispose of radioactive waste.

Will Chu be America's worst nightmare, a man who, by dint of having spent his whole life thinking - and not actually doing - has no idea what actually keeps the lights on? A man who - having spent most of his life at a University - has no idea about how much cash "energy" already takes out of a working person's paycheck, and thus feels free to raise its price exponentially?

God, save us from these intellectuals. And speaking of which - John Hawkins reports on why liberals - who all fancy themselves as so more intelligent than the average American, and thus ordained to rule over us - believe so many ridiculous things.

He starts by quoting Theodore Dalrymple:

Intellectuals need to say things that are not immediately obvious or do not occur to the man in the street. The man in the street instinctively sympathizes with the victim of crime; therefore, to distinguish himself from the man in the street, the intellectual has to sympathize with the criminal, by turning him into a victim of forces which only he, the intellectual, has sufficient sophistication to see.

Now we're getting somewhere!

It is difficult to overestimate how much this way of thinking drives the liberal view of the world.

It doesn't matter whether they're dumb, smart, successful, failures, good, bad, you name it, liberals view themselves as better, smarter, and more compassionate than the average person by virtue of the fact that they're liberals.

Finally, Thomas Sowell weighs in:

"The charge is often made against the intelligentsia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense. But the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else?"

Right. And now we have Stephen Chu, intellectual elitist personified, running the Department of Energy. How many bright ideas will he have that seem insanely stupid to the rest of us, and yet will have liberal politicians and the media sagely nodding their head in agreement?

Well, when it all goes to hell, they can blame George Bush, I guess...