tuesday, october 31 2006
more on kerry
Senator Waffles blows smoke to convince people he didn't insult the military (scroll four posts down). He blames others:
I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have…
Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men…”
Real man? Kerry? Pfft.
Bill Frist retorts:
Senator Kerry clearly owes an apology to our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines serving in Iraq. But Mr. Kerry has refused to do so. Instead, he’s claiming that Republicans are “desperately distorting” his comments. Watch the video yourself … it is perfectly clear what Mr. Kerry said … what’s unclear is whether Mr. Kerry ever means what he says. Perhaps he was against his comments before he actually made them.
Lots of video clips at Hot Air.
the horse's mouth
Hugh Hewitt interviewed Mark Halperin, ABC's political director, and asked him if any conservatives have ever won a Pulitzer. Halperin says yes and Hugh asked him to name some.
MH: I’d rather not name them, because they’re privately conservative, and I’m trying to get away from a world in which…I’ll say it again, because I don’t want anyone who tuned in late to misunderstand. The old media is filled with liberals. There are a few conservatives, but they’re just as entitled to their privacy as I am, but there are some.
HH: And these liberals…you know, Terry Moran on this program said…Terry Moran on this program from ABC, your colleague…
MH: Right.
HH: …said that the media hates the military, has a deep suspicion of it. Do you agree with that?
MH: I totally agree. It’s one of the huge biases, along with gays, guns, abortion, and many other things.
So Halperin would not "out" any reporter as conservative because that would harm their careers. Says a lot, doesn't it?
Then there's this:
MH: I never say MSM, because I don’t believe the old media is mainstream. They’re out of the mainstream on most of the issues I’ve been referring to. So I don’t use that phrase. I believe that as I’ve said several times, happy to say again, that anyone who’s conservative in this country has every justification to be skeptical about anything, an internal memo, or product that goes on the air, from the old media, because of a forty year or more history of liberal bias on a range of issues. And after what CBS News did in 2004, regarding the President’s National Guard record, I would be…I am thankful that any conservative looks to us every for news and information, given how outrageous what they did was.
the road to condemning gitmo
black comedy
A female Musliam school teacher, at a Church of England school no less, gets fired for wearing the hijab in class. Video of her interview here.
john kerry, creep
JFK Lite was at Pasadena City College yesterday for a Democrat pep rally, where:
You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.
Volunteering for military service makes you a loser, eh? And he wanted to be commander-in-chief.
For a different perspective, watch this video.
Come to think of it, I do question Kerry's patriotism.
hillary tells another lie
Dick Morris explains how Hillary, trying to get on the right left side of the gay marriage issue, is rewriting history.
Her statement dismissed her support of her husband's Defense of Marriage Act as "a strategic decision to help derail a constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage."
Nonsense. I was in the room at the White House strategy meeting and was sitting next to the president when he decided to promote and sign the bill. Nobody was even talking about a constitutional amendment back then - 1995-96 - and no one in the meeting so much as mentioned the possibility.
His decision to sign the bill closely followed my announcement of polling data that suggested overwhelming support for the legislation. His announcement to his staff and advisers that he would sign the bill was, indeed, a strategic decision, but one that related to his re-election prospects rather than to any push for a constitutional amendment.
man of steele
Micheal Steele busts his opponent for using testimonials from phony "average Joes." Watch the two commercials here.
does porn reduce rape?
Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.
First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.
The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.
readers voting with feet: la times drops 8%
Among big-city newspapers, only the Miami Herald (8.8%) lost a bigger percentage of its daily readers than the Los Angeles Times (8%) in today's new numbers. The Times, of course, led in raw numbers of readers lost with a daily circulation now of 775,766.
Remember that it's only since Tribune took over that the daily count fell below a million, and the last pre-Tribune CEO, Mark Willes, even talked boldly (some might say insanely) about going for two million. Instead, daily circulation is now far below the national big boys: Wall Street Journal, USA Today and New York Times. The Sunday count at the LAT dropped 6% to 1,172,005, for the six-months ending in September.
monday, october 30 2006
it's jihad, charlie brown
A video to make some people angry.
getting served lunch
A blogger reminds us how/why the lunch counter sculpture in Wichita, Kansas came to be.
HT Instapundit
msm nancy boys
Say what you will about Pelosi, but it is a matter of record that she’s far left of the center of American politics — her rating from the liberal lobbying group Americans for Democratic Action is routinely a 100 percent; that she enforces party loyalty — her Democrats voted along party lines 88 percent of the time last year, a record for the past 50 years; that she has primarily occupied herself with blocking legislation in the House — she has tried to kill practically every Republican initiative, no matter how small; that she uses tough rhetoric — Republicans are, according to Pelosi, “corrupt,” “incompetent” and running a “criminal enterprise.”
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Politicians should have deep convictions, and they should work to organize their party around them and to defeat the opposition. Nor is there anything wrong with sharp rhetorical elbows. But the press usually professes to like none of these qualities, and typically dubs someone exhibiting them as “radical,” “partisan,” “obstructionist,” and “mean-spirited.”
Instead, in a typical media treatment, the Washington Post finds Pelosi a “tough-minded tactician.” She has “kept the fractious House Democrats in line.” She has “thwarted many GOP initiatives” by getting the Democrats to “hang together.” Yes, Republicans accuse her of being an obstructionist, but that’s just the sort of name-calling Republicans always engage in, now isn’t it?
dead men don't wear plaid vote democrat
A new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.
The Journal's analysis of New York's 3-month-old database is the first to determine the potential for errors and fraud in voting. It matched names, dates of birth and ZIP codes in the state's database of 11.7 million voter registration records against the same information in the Social Security Administration's "Death Master File." That database has 77 million records of deaths dating back to 1937.
- There were dead people on the voter rolls in all of New York's 62 counties and people in as many as 45 counties who had votes recorded after they had died.
- One Bronx address was listed as the home for as many as 191 registered voters who had died. The address is 5901 Palisade Ave., in Riverdale, site of the Hebrew Home for the Aged.
- Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than 4 to 1. The reason: Most of them came from Democrat-dominated New York City, where the higher population produced more matches.
the big fibber loses his touch
Bill Clinton used to lie with grace, panache and insouciance. Shoot, you'd watch him lie to your face and almost want to say, "Thank you, you bad boy."
But his fastball is missing the plate these days, and getting past the catcher. He's been shilling for California Prop 87, which claims it will reduce California's reliance on foreign oil by imposing heavy taxes on California's oil producers.
Why, of course, making X more costly to produce always results in more of X. Sure. Uh huh.
"Imagine if we stop being dependent on foreign oil. Brazil did it. They made a simple switch to their cars. Switched to ethanol, grown from their own crops. And it's 33% cheaper than gas."
"With Proposition 87, we can switch to cleaner fuels, wind and solar power and free ourselves from foreign oil. If Brazil can do it, so can California."
What's this "ourselves?" Clinton doesn't live here. Plus it's not true.
But as a matter of fact, that's not what Brazil did.
It launched a crash program of offshore oil drilling in the late 1990s, working with a Manhattan Project-like determination to develop its own natural resources.
In 1997, Brazil opened its oil sector to foreign competition, encouraging companies like Royal Dutch Shell to explore and drill for oil in its offshore waters for the first time. It offered incentives — like tax cuts. It also turned its inefficient state oil company, Petrobras, into a for-profit company run like a real business instead of a government cash cow, forcing it to compete on an international-standard level. In short, it got out of the way.
Net result, lots more oil for Brazil — enough to enable the once-oil-dependent country to actually export some, all from fewer energy reserves than the U.S.
Brazil's new P-50 rig has boosted output to an average 1.9 million barrels of oil a day, a bit more than the 1.85 million Brazil consumes.
By contrast, ethanol output in Brazil, the world's biggest producer, is only a small share of its energy consumption.
Last year, the country squeezed out just 282,000 barrels a day mostly using sugar, a more efficient and clean-burning energy source than the corn-based stuff produced in the U.S. But sugar-based ethanol still isn't as efficient as gasoline.
sunday, october 29 2006
more on le intifada
Muslim youths tossed a Molotov cocktail into a bus in Marseilles Saturday night. A young female passenger was seriously burned. As No Pasaran reports:
A bus torching in Marseille with intent to kill, 46 arrests nationwide along with 2 policemen hurt and 200 automobiles torched, street battles with police in Gigny, and a bus torched in Trappes. The evening's activity is being classified as "relatively calm" (which is why the Prime Minister is springing into action with a previously unscheduled Monday morning meeting).
Other events from yesterday include a bus being pelted with rocks in Seine-Saint-Denis. The City Hall in Stains was also pelted as were policemen in Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil.
In Vitry-sur-Seine, 3 youths were arrested for carrying Molotov cocktails. Police were attacked in Goussainville. Other "incidents", without further precision, took place in Fleury-Mérogis and Toulouse. In Vaux-en-Velin a "runaway" car ran into 2 policemen. A Molotov cocktail was used to set alight a library next door to a police station in Vannes.
Police sources claim that the situation is "under control".
malcolm gladwell on degrees of difficulty
We can see all the things that someone, in a different profession than us, does. What we cannot know is the relative difficulty of those tasks. I know a reverse slam is harder than a simple dunk. But how much harder? And how much harder again would a slam be if you had a defender drapped all over you?
...One more example. My sister-in-law works as a chaplain in a nursing home. Every few weeks, someone who she has gotten to know dies. Can anyone who has never been in the situation of experiencing death with that regularity possible know what that feels like? My sister-in-law doesn't work long hours. She's doesn't get paid a lot of money. And she doesn't have a fancy doctorate. But I venture to say that only one in a 1000 people could do her job with any degree of diligence or sensitivity. In a way that you would have to do that job to appreciate, it's really really hard.
jolly ole england
Multiculturism runs amok. A 14-year old school girl gets arrested for racism, spends time in a cell, all for asking to be assigned to a group of students who speak her language. But there's a backlash forming.
de-fence
Demonstrators in Oaxhaca set busses afire.
Most of the discussion about the Mexican border fence has focused on illegals coming into the US to work, the impertinent expression of Reconquista, etc.
But suppose Mexico became politically unstable? Suppose our incompetent and corrupt southern neighbor suddenly fell sway to a radical change in government?
The recent election was a squeaker and the loser, like Al Gore after his manners wore off, insists he wuz robbed. Radical groups are active in Oaxaca. And they have guns. Mexico is a country where the have-nots have a righteous case.
Couple that with Hugo Chavez playing footsie with Hezbollah in the Guajira Peninsula and the notion of "south of the border" loses its benign connotation.
UPDATE: Pat Dollard emails us:
Just an interesting tidbit. Brad Will, the journalist shot in Oaxaca was a left-wing radical who had allied himself with the protesters, in this video calls for violence against the police. He tries to be surreptitious about it, but it's quite clear what he's calling for. It looks like he got what he was preaching.
saturday, october 28 2006
sheep in wolf's clothing
From Pajamas media.
CHENEY: Right, but what is CNN doing? Running terrorist tape of terrorists shooting Americans. I mean, I thought [Rep.] Duncan Hunter asked you a very good question, and you didn’t answer it. Do you want us to win?
WOLF: The answer of course is we want the United States to win. We are Americans. There’s no doubt about that.
CHENEY: Then why are you running terrorist propaganda?
WOLF: With all due respect, this is not terrorist propaganda.
CHENEY: Oh, Wolf.
where's the beef?
U.S. chicken producers face a challenge: cut production or watch breast meat prices fall even further than the seven-year lows notched this week in the wholesale markets, analysts said. The problem, according to Aho and others, is that there is too much meat, be it chicken, beef or pork.
This can't be. After all, that darling of Green Scare mongers, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, predicted in 1968 in his bestseller, "The Population Bomb"
"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death."
You might expect that Dr. Ehrlich would have been ridiculed into obscurity. But no, the self-described "reality-based" community still holds him in high esteem.
fun-house mirror
Some group calling itself Reporters without Borders released a report card on global press freedom, ranking the USA 53rd.
Ahead of the USA are Belgium, where blogger Paul Belien of Brussels Journal has been harassed by the police for writings critical of the government. Also ahead are Austria, which sentenced a Holocaust-denier to prison and Italy, which criminally prosecuted Orianna Fallachi for statements she made in a book.
And why the low ranking for the USA, with its First Amendment?
Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.
sixty-acre spider web
wombs will win
"One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.”
So spoke Algerian President Boumedienne in 1974. Not in some secret gathering, but standing before the UN General Assembly.
french calm
Things are looking up according to French media:
The night of Friday to Saturday turned out to be an ordinary weekend, according to the police: in the entire départment of Seine-Saint-Denis, by the early hours of Saturday, one counted little more than twenty cases of arson on cars. Specific incidents however took place in spite of the 4000 police officers and gendarmes deployed to head off possible turmoil.
Wow, that's defining progress down. Put 4000 cops on the beat and only 20 cars get torched in a night.
tigerhawk on steyn
Tigerhawk reviews Mark Steyn's new book and adds his perspective.
Steyn sets forth the options at the end of the book in particularly stark terms:
There are three possible resolutions to the present struggle:
1. Submit to Islam
2. Destroy Islam
3. Reform Islam
It's number three that it is possible, which leads to Tigerhawk's essay from this summer, "Wither the 'democratization strategy'? Read it.
For those who believe Bush is a blundering, foolish idealist because of his emphasis on bringing Democracy to the mideast, look at option #3. Tigerhawk quotes Cliff May:
...while freedom and democracy are not the antidote for terrorism, they are part of the long-term treatment. Right now, if you live in the Arab Middle East you have a choice only between dead-end dictatorship and Militant Islamism. There is no third option—indeed, the dead-end dictators collude with the Militant Islamists against any sprouting of liberal democracy.
It's been a mere five months since the elected Iraqi government took over, and the so-called smart people in the US (mostly Democrats and media people, but not all) have declared Iraq a failure.
On what basis? Bush is maligned for his supposed lack of critical thinking. But it seems he's the one with an eye on the big picture.
the worst political websites
Compiled by C|NET. These are bad.
friday, october 27 2006
true stifling of dissent
For those two young (or dense) to remember the black days of Iron Curtain communism, which murdered millions and condemned millions more to shabby lives, John Fund remembers the Hungarian uprising.
pentagon pushes back at NY Times
Little Pinch's newspaper hears from the Department of Defense:
The New York Times has once again repeated a popular myth to mislead its readers about Secretary Rumsfeld. We ask for an immediate correction.
Today’s editorial claims: “There have never been enough troops, the result of Mr. Rumsfeld’s negligent decision to use Iraq as a proving ground for his pet military theories, rather than listen to his generals.” Whether or not the Times believes there were enough troops in Iraq, the claim that any troop level in Iraq is the result of Secretary Rumsfeld “not listening to his generals” is demonstrably untrue.
Generals involved in troop level decisions have been abundantly clear on this matter:
- General Tommy Franks, Commander, U.S. Central Command during the opening of Operation Iraqi Freedom: “Don Rumsfeld was a hard task master -- but he never tried to control the tactics of our war-fight [Franks, “American Soldier, “ pg 313]
Rather than advancing Secretary Rumsfeld’s alleged “pet theories,” General Franks wrote that he based his troop level recommendations on the following: “Building up a Desert Storm-size force in Kuwait would have taken months of effort - very visible effort - and would have sacrificed the crucial element of operational surprise we now enjoyed. . . . And if operational surprise had been sacrificed, I suspected that the Iraqis would have repositioned their Republican Guard and regular army units, making for an attrition slugfest that would cost thousands of lives.”
Read it all.
Then read the DoD's point-by-point rebuttal of Newsweek's cover story about how we're losing Afghanistan
nancy pelosi's voting record
From Maggie's Farm:
NO on the Border Security Bill
NO on making the Republican tax cuts permanent
NO on eliminating the marriage penalty
NO on eliminating the death tax
NO on creating Health Savings Accounts
NO on the Defense of Marriage Act
NO on the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (and NO on its reauthorization)
NO on protecting the Pledge of Allegiance
NO on banning partial-birth abortion
NO on requiring a photo I.D. to ensure only legal voters vote
NO on the Patriot Act
NO on authorizing domestic tracking of terrorists
NO on military tribunals and new interrogation rules for terrorist detainees
i was once a tour guide
...but I never did this. Video.
a scary halloween read
At Burt's book signing Sunday, I spoke with a fellow named Michael Canzano who had just finished reading Mark Steyn's, "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" and told me it scared him.
Rightly so. Steyn makes the inarguable case that Europe as we know it is disappearing. Inarguable because his case is based on demographic data.
...you have basically the entire collapse of the birth rates of most of the Western world and alongside that you have this, effectively, this successive population that’s moving into a lot of those countries. That’s a huge, unprecedented, demographic transformation that is taking place in our lifetime.
...
Basically the European nations are dying and the populations in them are turning into relatively hostile Muslim populations, not all of them terrorists, but all of them, almost all of those people not sympathetic to America and American interests.
And I feel that the great assumption that we all have, that the present tense is somehow permanent, or that it’s like technological progress. You know, it’s like, cars don’t go backwards. You don’t suddenly have a Cadillac Escalade and you go out into the yard one morning and it’s turned into a Ford Model T and it’s got a rumble seat and all kinds of other stuff in it.
You take the view that—we think that social progress is like technological progress, that it can never be reversed, but I think it can be reversed and I think a lot of the world is going to be re-primitivized in the decades ahead and America has to change.
elephant in a black hole
Something to chew on this weekend:
What happens when you throw an elephant into a black hole? It sounds like a bad joke, but it's a question that has been weighing heavily on Leonard Susskind's mind. Susskind, a physicist at Stanford University in California, has been trying to save that elephant for decades. He has finally found a way to do it, but the consequences shake the foundations of what we thought we knew about space and time. If his calculations are correct, the elephant must be in more than one place at the same time.
In everyday life, of course, locality is a given. You're over there, I'm over here; neither of us is anywhere else. Even in Einstein's theory of relativity, where distances and timescales can change depending on an observer's reference frame, an object's location in space-time is precisely defined. What Susskind is saying, however, is that locality in this classical sense is a myth. Nothing is what, or rather, where it seems.
This is more than just a mind-bending curiosity. It tells us something new about the fundamental workings of the universe. Strange as it may sound, the fate of an elephant in a black hole has deep implications for a "theory of everything" called quantum gravity, which strives to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, the twin pillars of modern physics. Because of their enormous gravity and other unique properties, black holes have been fertile ground for researchers developing these ideas.
it was a quagmire before it wasn't a quagmire
On "60 Minutes" last Sunday night, aspiring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced the war in Iraq as not "part of the war on terror." The war on terror, she said "is the war in Afghanistan."
So that's it. The one part of the war on terror -- or "so-called war on terror," as New York Times so-called columnist Bob Herbert calls it -- Democrats even pretend to support is the war in Afghanistan.
...
If Bush had gone to war with Iraq immediately after 9/11 and waited to attack Afghanistan, Democrats would now be pretending to support the Iraq war while pointlessly carping about Afghanistan. Afghanistan didn't attack us on 9/11! The Taliban didn't attack us! What's our exit strategy? How do you define "victory" in Afghanistan, anyway? It's a quagmire -- aahhhhh!
The beauty of Democrats' pretending to be hawks on Afghanistan is that most people can't remember what liberals said five minutes after they said it, much less five years later.
In fact, during the brief five weeks it took American forces to take Kabul and send the Taliban scurrying, liberals were not the flag-waving patriots they would have us believe.
In October 2001, Sen. Joe Biden gave a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations saying that America's air war in Afghanistan made the United States look like "this high-tech bully that thinks from the air we can do whatever we want to do."
Four weeks before U.S. troops completely vanquished the Taliban, Kim Jong Il's pal, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, said on CNN's "Capital Gang" that the Taliban would not soon be toppled. He cited his experience with the Taliban, saying: "I think they can hold on for a while. They were very resilient."
Howard Dean joined Michael Moore in arguing that Osama bin Laden was innocent until proved guilty.
Except for a few idiots like Biden, Richardson and Dean, most politicians -- who have to run for election -- duly voted in favor of the war in Afghanistan and let their mouthpieces in the media bash it for them. (Remember: A lot of them voted for war in Iraq, too.)
Democrats who would not have to face voters -- we call them "reporters" -- were calling Afghanistan a "quagmire" approximately six minutes after we invaded.
Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post reporter who currently has a book out saying the war in Iraq is not succeeding, also said the war in Afghanistan was not succeeding.
thursday, october 26 2006
hear bush on home turf
Michael Barone and others spent an hour with Bush in the Oval Office. You can hear the whole thing.
On the stakes:
It is conceivable that 20 or 30 years from now the world will see a Middle East in which violent forms of – extreme forms of Islam compete for power, moderate governments will be toppled, oil will be used to extract concessions, and Iran will have a nuclear weapon, and writers such as yourself would say, what happened to them? How come they couldn't see the great conflict taking place in front of their very eyes? Why did they lose their nerve? Why did they not support moderate people who yearn for something better than the vision of the extremists?
And my answer to it is, I see the threat, and will use American power to protect ourselves, and at the same time, try to create the first victory in this ideological – the first victories – in the ideological war of the 21st century.
On the upcoming election:
I understand the conventional wisdom, that it's over. You've got people who are dancing in the end zones and they're measuring their drapes in their new offices. It's not over. We've got the issues on our side.
On causes of terrorism:
...these guys want to kill. And again, my frame of mind is this: We will press and press and press to protect ourselves. And this stuff about how Iraq is causing the enemy – whatever excuse they need, they have made up their mind to attack, and they grab on to things to kind of justify. But if it's not Iraq, it's Israel. If it's not Israel, it's the Crusades. If it's not the Crusades, it is the cartoon. I'm not kidding you. I'm not kidding you. (Laughter from reporters.) They are cold-blooded killers.
goalie science
Scientists in Canada have discovered the exact spots hockey goalies need to watch to successfully block shots. The researchers say these findings could help goalies improve even if they are already playing at an elite level.
During a hockey game, goalies face shots that zip at up to 100 mph, faster than the eye can track [batters in baseball face the same problem]. Still, professional goaltenders can on average stop 90 percent of all shots they face. To do so, the best athletes rely on what researcher Joan Vickers at the University of Calgary dubbed "the quiet eye," the critical moment of focus prior to action.
french toast
Did you see this story in your newspaper? See no evil, etc.
Last night French Muslim youths torched four busses.
The most spectacular incident took place at 1AM between Bagnolet and Montreuil. A gang of 10 pistol wielding hooded youths boarded the bus. One of the assailants placed his gun on the side of the bus driver's head and ordered him to get out of his seat. The gang commandeered the bus, drove it a short distance and torched it in a neighboring suburb.
One passenger had to break a window to escape the burning bus. Much more from GatewayPundit.
the science of procrastination
There's a study for everything. What a country!
scratch my black, i'll scratch yours
Democrats cannot survive as a party without the vast majority of blacks voting Democrat, thus they shamelessly pick the racial scab (Katrina comes to mind) to keep blacks in a state of grievous dependency.
Something similar is happening with Nancy Pelosi, who fancies herself the next Speaker of the House. She can't get the speaker's job without support of the Congressional Black Caucus.
But they're ticked off about how Nancy dumped black Congressman William Jefferson, the accused bribe taking Democrat from New Orleans, from a key committee position. If Jefferson's name doesn't ring a bell, he was the one caught with $90,000 in cash in his freezer.
So here's where it gets really ugly. Pelosi plans to boot Democrat Jane Harman from the House Intelligence and replace her (a moderate Democrat) with one Alcee Hastings.
Hastings is black. He's also a convicted crook, having been impeached by a Democrat-controlled Senate for taking bribes and was removed as a federal judge in Florida in 1989. The man was dirty. I lived in Miami at the time and remember Hastings playing the race card.
It worked. Like crackhead Mayor Marion Berry in Washington DC who was reelected, being a crook was no problem for the voters in Hastings's Florida district. He's been in Congress ever since.
Hastings's constituents get what they deserve. But what about the United States?
Do we deserve a crook overseeing national security in the House just so Nancy can wield the speaker's gavel?
JB
paris? oh, it was a riot.
As America prepares for Halloween, France is girding for a wave of attacks from Muslim youths—a reprise of the deadly French riots of last year.
As America prepares for Halloween, France is girding for a wave of attacks from Muslim youths—a reprise of the deadly French riots of last year. A leaked French intelligence report warns that during the first week of November, a school holiday (Nov. 1 or All Saint’s Day), Muslim riots could convulse the country.
On Monday, Le Figaro, the leading center-right newspaper in the country, quoted a confidential report written by the Renseignements Généraux (RG), the French equivalent of the FBI. The 17-page RG report, dated 11 October, states that the root causes of last year’s riots are still in place.
The authorities are especially concerned All Saints Day when “many urban youths are left to their own and have more time to cause unrest.” Not that France has been a peace since last year’s riots. In the past few weeks alone, several policemen were ambushed by youths who seemed intent on killing them. In response, the French Interior Ministry asked the police to keep a low profile and not to show themselves in the Muslim suburbs in order to avoid tension. Since appeasement alone is not a strategy. French authorities are keeping a force of some 50,000 riot police in permanent stand-by.
Now we know why the French wussed out on Iraq: they needed the troops at home. Relative to population, this is equivalent to 250,000 American troops, or approximately 100,000 more than we have deployed in Iraq.
Too bad the "Muslim youths" won't be mollified by Halloween candy. Trick!
wednesday, october 25 2006
hate missing calls when swimming?
Another solution in search of a problem? The G'zOne is the first phone that you can dunk without fear.
HT: Tom Bunzel
eight reasons to vote republican
#2 The only way to win wars is to convince your adversaries that further resistance is useless. Democratic victories in the House and/or Senate would help persuade Islamo-Nazi terrorists that they are, in fact, winning the war for US public opinion. No one questions that the jihadists closely monitor our domestic politics. Why else would they so conspicuously intensify their violent attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan just weeks before a crucial election?
Read all 8 reasons.
the secret language of men
An Aussie writer meets an American classical violinist backstage and things get familiar.
Now here's a guy who doesn't know me from Jack and inhabits a world I've always perceived as cultured and dignified, yet within five minutes of meeting me, he's dropping sexist one-liners.
For the record, I'm not criticising the guy because I know exactly what he was doing – establishing his blokey credentials using the social shorthand of hangin' crap on women.
I also know when most guys tell jokes like this, they're doing just that: joking. So I don't think for a second the violinist thought domestic abuse was truly funny.
sound familiar?
Lincoln [had] political problem with antiwar opponents, whose objections to the war included, among other things: opposition to the changing reasons for its prosecution, doubt that it could be won, negative reaction to the cost of the war in both blood and treasure, their belief in the zealotry or 'fanatisism' of the war's proponents, and their willingness to use hyperbole about the 'despotism' of the president, and so on.
Vallandingham professed himself a better unionist than the Republicans whose fanatisism had provoked this ruinous war. These same Republicans, he continued, were now fighting not for Union but for abolition. And what had they accomplished? "Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer." The South could never be conquered; the only trophies of this war were "defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchers ... and the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation ... of freedom of the press and of speech ... which have made this country one of the worst despotisms on earth for the past twenty months." What was the solution? "Stop fighting. Make an armistace ... Withdraw your army from the seceeded States." Start negotiations for reunion.
why john mccain is a fool
Look at the cover of Newsweek. There, looking dashing, is Harold Ford Jr., a Democrat running in a very tight race for the Senate in Tennessee.
Three weeks before the election, Newsweek, which is owned by the Washington Post, gives one candidate millions of dollars of free exposure. John McCain wanted to get the money out of politics and pushed his campaign finance crusade. It's a law that never should have written and Bush never sould have signed.
Did McCain ever consider the millions it takes for Republican candidates to break through the smoke screen put up by the mainstream media? Just to get even? I hope not, because then he's not just a fool but a traitor to his party.
Meanwhile, because of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act, American citizens cannot pool their money and advertise to counter Newsweek, cannot exercise their First Amendment rights.
John McCain has ceded power to the mainstream media.
oh oh Obama
Richard Cohen writes in the Washington Post about Barak Obama as president:
I cheer also because Obama is an African American -- an African father, an American mother. For someone like him to be a presidential candidate -- maybe even president -- says oodles about this country.
That blacks serve as CEOs of the USA's largest media company (TimeWarner) and the USA's largest financial services company (American Express), or that Oprah can rise from nothing to become a billionaire and would-be king maker apparently says nothing.
After eight years of George W. Bush and his narcissistic foreign policy -- me, me, us, us -- it would be great to have a president who presents a different message just by his complexion and who compensates, if anything can, for how Iraq has tarnished America's reputation, particularly in the Third World.
"Me, me?" Sorry, that's not Bush, that's former narcissist-in-chief, Bill Clinton.
As for "us, us" is Cohen suggesting we elect presidents who do not put America first? Does he believe that any leader does not put his country's interests first? (Oh yeah, Jimmy Carter.)
But mostly I want Obama to run because he would come into the race with no baggage on Iraq. Not from him would we hear excuses about how he was misled by the Bush administration into thinking there were weapons of mass destruction there.
Obama not only was against the war when he ran for the Senate but he can claim -- as could the 21 Democratic senators who voted against the war resolution -- that it was possible to accept the "facts" at the time and still see that the war was unnecessary, if not downright stupid. It just makes me wince every time I hear John Kerry or John Edwards or Joe Biden or Chris Dodd or Hillary Clinton say they were misled, fooled, lied to or some other version of seduced and abandoned -- otherwise they would have voted the right way. This is disingenuous.
Not "disingenuous," it is lying. Honest politicans would admit everyone was fooled by Saddam regarding WMD (including his own generals) and go from there. But no, they backpedaled and concocted "Bush lied."
So just how was Obama, a state legislator at the time, able to know so much about Iraq? Turns out even after two years in the Senate, he still doesn't know much about Iraq. As we noted Monday, Obama said this:
And, I think we also have to start sending a message to the region and some of the powers there, including Iran and Syria that it makes sense for us at this point to pull back, to make sure that they are engaged and have a stake in creating some semblance of order there because right now they’re just sitting back I think and watching us flounder but they’re not investing in any kind of way to make sure that Iraq has a decent outcome.
What's next? Insist that Khartoum become engaged in restoring order in Darfur? Or that Robert Mugabe bring order to Zimbabwe? Or how about having the KKK bring order to the south after Reconstruction?
Obama's statement is so egregiously idiotic he should be laughed off the national stage.
During a presidential debate, Gerald Ford made a slip of the tongue that suggested he didn't know that Poland was in Europe. Everyone knew better, but the media ran the gaffe as if it were big news.
Here we have presidential hopeful Barak Obama confusing the cause of disorder in Iraq (Syria and Iran) with the solution. This is more than a gaffe, it's a chance to see a pretty face, with a complexion that pleases Richard Cohen, masking a shallow mind.
tuesday, october 24 2006
message to the n.y. times' ombudsman
...Byron, you may consider launching a soul-searching campaign at the New York Times.I’d encourage a look at the decision to report on the National Security Agency’s warrantless electronic monitoring of emails and phone calls between the United States and suspect individual overseas.The outrage your paper and others stirred up over a program that falls well within the law and harms no law-abiding American citizen, and the notice you served to terrorists and their supporters of its existence, constitute aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war.
But don’t stop there.You have been greatly privileged -- beyond your merit -- to hold a lofty and influential position overseeing the morality and ethics of our newsgathering profession.
The American media is morally and ethically adrift, and in need of guidance.You could be the one, based on this revelation, to provide some. Faced with a spreading threat to our fundamental values and freedoms by Islamic fascists, the media in the United States is predominantly of the view, and encourages the belief, that the United States government in its execution of conventional and unconventional war against clearly demonstrated threats poses the greater threat to our way of life.
Our media has repeatedly propagated falsehoods about what the administration and the president have said, about what was known and about what in some cases has been borne out about the threats we have faced from al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and others. This has been done to such an extent that reasonable people cannot be blamed for believing their president lied to them before committing troops to battle. To the extent that some seemingly responsible people now question whether we face any threat at all. The history leading up to the conflicts and crises we face has been repeatedly misrepresented, in a manner that undercuts the authority of a wartime president and threatens the credibility of our nation in the world -- the single most important nation in maintaining stability in the world.
Read it all.
another funny political ad
This one in the Tennessee senate race.
no first amendment in france
Lurçat, 39, a Jerusalem resident and president of an association called Liberty, Democracy and Judaism, was sued because he is the leader of an organization listed as the legal operator of a Web site, www.liguededefensejuive.com, that urged readers to attend a planned demonstration against France2 in 2002: "Come demonstrate against the lies of France2," it said, "and the gross manipulation with an award for disinformation to France2 and Charles Enderlin."
Those of you who are used to the free-for-all that is the internet are probably more than a bit perplexed as to what the big deal is here. That this sort of statement could be a cause of action in any court in a country that considers itself to be a modern, developed, progressive nation--not to mention a bastion of liberty--is ludicrous.
Let's put aside for the moment the question of whether the accusations this defendant made against France2 and Enderlin are true, as blogger and historian Richard Landes (and, in the interests of full disclosure, acquaintance and friend of mine) has suggested at his website Second Draft and his blog Augean Stables.
grow your own home
From Popular Science.
iran threatens europe
From Kobayashi Maru:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at a rally last Friday in Iran said:
"You imposed a group of terrorists [Israel]... on the region. It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals... This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow... We have advised the Europeans that the Americans are far away, but you are the neighbours of the nations in this region... We inform you that the nations are like an ocean that is welling up, and if a storm begins, the dimensions will not stay limited to Palestine, and you may get hurt... Nations will take revenge."
peanuts' schroeder was smarter
To push the sales of his new book, former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder - now with Gazprom Inc. - made a number of interviews with German media outlets.
He calls Putin "a flawless democrat", draws a link between the policies of President Bush and the faith based political system of Islamic states and describes as "pre-democratic" criticism of his decision to start working for a foreign company immediately after his departure from German politics.
His chancellorship resulted in a deeply disturbed relationship between the U.S. and Germany, left the German state finances in shambles, and made Germany dependent on Russian energy. For this, he definitely deserved praise from Putin and a contract from Russia.
car insurance must cost a fortune in france
...as the one year anniversary of three weeks of rioting across France in which more than 10,000 cars were set alight and 300 buildings attacked in the worst civil unrest for 40 years.
Two teenagers were being questioned last night after cars and a bus were torched and police attacked in a rundown Paris suburb amid fears of growing tension in the run-up to the anniversary of last autumn's riots.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right interior minister who hopes his tough stance on law and order will win him the presidency next year, was accused by opposition politicians of stoking further violence to boost his election campaign.
Of course: the violence is a campaign tactic and has nothing to do with Muslim immigrants who are marginalized by French society and unemployed because of French socialist economic policies.
Manuel Valls, the socialist mayor of Evry, told Le Parisien nothing had changed on the estates. Tower blocks were decayed, unemployment in some areas stood at 40% and people on the estate where the bus was attacked on Sunday lived in "frightening misery", stigmatised for their postcode. "Let's be realistic, we are still sitting on a powderkeg," he said.
Samir Mihi, a youth worker in Clichy sous Bois, said: "We feel let down. Nothing has changed here since last year."
No kidding.
monday, october 23 2006
french drive some japanese nuts
PARIS (Reuters) - Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
"A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses," Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.
bbc: we are biased
It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.
A leaked account of an 'impartiality summit' called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.
It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC's 'diversity tsar', wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.
stem cell update
The progress of science is paved with stories of high hopes and heartbreaks. But in a busy lab at the University of Rochester the two extremes have met in one dazzling yet devastating experiment.
Researchers there have for the first time essentially cured rats of a Parkinson's-like disease using human embryonic stem cells. But 10 weeks into the trial, they discovered brain tumours had begun to grow in every animal treated.
"Here we have this method that works so well to reverse the symptoms of Parkinson's," said lead investigator Steven Goldman, "But no matter how you look at it, it's an expanding mass and that's bad news."
None of the cells growing out of control were cancerous tumours. But as Dr. Goldman pointed out, "In the brain, nothing's benign."
The work, published today in the journal of Nature Medicine, is a sobering setback for plans to use stem cells from human embryos to grow tissues for human transplant.
"My hopes are still high, but I think this injects real caution," said Dr. Goldman, who spent four years on the experiment and a 23-year career building up to it. "Some folks are portraying this as imminently useful and it's not. There's still a lot that has to be sorted out."
europe's immigration quagmire
The overrepresentation of migrants in all the wrong statistics — such as unemployment, unfinished education and crime — is to the ostrich merely a temporary affair. It's a phase that all groups from underprivileged backgrounds go through, and it will be short, as long as there is economic growth.
According to the ostrich, the wealthy natives should stop whining about the backwardness of immigrants and concentrate on the benefits. The ostrich points to the nurses, nannies, construction workers, grocers, bag carriers, cleaners, factory workers and a host of other jobs natives won't do but are necessary to keep the economy going.
The ostrich is not worried about the flow of migrants transforming the culture and society of Europe in any negative way. He sees only one thing as a setback: the xenophobia of native Europeans. If only the inherently racist white society could overcome its fear of what is alien, it would notice how migrants have improved the cuisine, the music, the arts and the economy of Europe.
Then there's the owl, which is a night bird and gets, more often, a glimpse of the dark side of things. Europe is healthy and wealthy, but the owl worries that it may not be so wise.
The shadow side of the free movement of people, for instance, is the trade in women and children for the ruthless sex industry. Also, weapons go unnoticed from hand to hand, from country to country. Some of these weapons could be biological, chemical or worse.
obaminable thinking, or the fool on the hill
Barak Obama said yesterday he might run for president in 2008. He also said this to Larry King:
And, I think we also have to start sending a message to the region and some of the powers there, including Iran and Syria that it makes sense for us at this point to pull back, to make sure that they are engaged and have a stake in creating some semblance of order there because right now they’re just sitting back I think and watching us flounder but they’re not investing in any kind of way to make sure that Iraq has a decent outcome.
Send a message to Syria and Iran that we can't take it anymore, and we want them to engage to create order?
Democracy in Iraq -- order -- scares these tyrants shitless. Which is why Iran is behind much of the disorder in Iraq.
Does Obama not know that Syria and Iran are fighting us by proxy? This he calls "sitting back and watching us flounder."
Does he not remember that Syrian "order" meant the assassination of Lebanese leaders and journalists and occupying Lebanon for 22 years?
This man is the best hope for the Democrat party?
"I think he's a very interesting and very powerful communicator with a great deal of skill," said Sen. Kerry. "I wouldn't have picked him if he didn't. And I'm really pleased to see the way in which the country is ratifying my judgment on that."
sunday, october 22 2006
burt's book signing today
A beautiful day in Brentwood. Great turnout, great fun, great chance to get Burt's book. You can get your here: Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from San Francisco: 101 Reasons I'm Happy I Left the Left.
Some pals who came include actors Dick Van Patten and Jamie Farr.
don't repeat mistake of 1974
In early 1973, the Dow approached new highs in a booming economy. In the 1972 election, the new left was rejected in almost every state. The Paris Peace Treaty was concluded with North Vietnam memorializing its pledge not to interfere militarily in the affairs of South Vietnam. The nation was prosperous and at peace.
Within a short time, the mainstream media were able to dismember and destroy the Nixon Administration, using as their sword the Watergate affair. In the congressional elections of 1974, Republican candidates were pounded, losing 48 House seats and five Senate seats.
Until the 1990s, the so-called “Watergate Babies” (i.e. left-wing Democrats) ruled Congress. As its first act after the 1974 election, the new Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam. Within a short period of time, this led to Communist conquest of all of Indochina, the massacre of at least 4 million of our friends in the killing fields of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, and the displacement of millions of “boat people.”
In 1976, the left wing captured the White House with the worst President of modern times—Jimmy Carter. By 1979, the U.S. economy was in shambles with 12% inflation, 11% unemployment, and vast deficits. Our military was reduced to a shadow. With even our embassy officials held hostage in Tehran, the United States became a powerless joke to the world. It may be fairly said that but for Ronald Reagan the days of our democracy might well have been numbered by the consequences of the 1974 election.
america's 300 millionth bundle of joy
Across the country, the grim milestone prompted this reaction from a somber Dowell Myers. "At 300 million," noted the professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California, "we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation."
I, on the other hand, was feeling pretty chipper about the birth of the cute l'il quality-of-life degrader. The previous day, my new book was published. You'll find it in all good bookstores -- it's propping up the slightly wonky rear left leg of the front table groaning under the weight of unsold copies of Peace Mom by Cindy Sheehan. Anyway, the book -- mine, not Cindy's -- deals in part with the geopolitical implications of demography -- i.e., birth rates. That's an easy subject to get all dry and statistical about, so I gotta hand it to my publicist: arranging for the birth of the 300 millionth American is about as good a promotional tie-in as you could get and well worth the 75 bucks he bribed the guy at the Census Bureau. But, even if you haven't got a book to plug, the arrival of Junior 300 Mil is something everyone should celebrate.
So why don't we? The answer is that too many people who should know better are still peddling the same old 40-year-old guff about "overpopulation." What does Professor Myers mean by "quality-of-life degradation"? America is the 172nd least densely populated country on Earth.
If you think it's crowded here, try living in the Netherlands or Belgium, which have, respectively, 1,015 and 883 inhabitants per square mile compared with 80 folks per square mile in the United States. To be sure, somewhere such as, say, Newark, N.J., is a lot less bucolic than it was in 1798. But why is that? No doubt Myers would say it's urban sprawl. But that's the point: you can only sprawl if you've got plenty of space. As the British writer Adam Nicholson once wrote of America, "There is too much room in the vast continental spaces of the country for a great deal of care to be taken with the immediate details."
...
Everywhere else, for the most part, they've taken the advice of Myers and that think tank in Vermont. In America, there are 2.1 live births per woman. In 17 European countries, it's 1.3 or below -- that's what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility, a rate from which no society has ever recovered. Spain's population is halving with every generation. These nations are doing what Myers and the Vermont "sustainability" junkies would regard as the socially responsible thing, and having fewer babies. And as a result their countries are dying demographically and (more immediately) economically: They don't have enough young people to pay for the generous social programs the ever more geriatric Europeans have come to expect.
stifling of dissent
In Seattle, two teachers are suing the affluent Lakeside prep school for illegal racial discrimination and the creation of a hostile work environment. ``Among the plaintiffs' complaints," reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, ``was Lakeside's invitation to conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza to speak as part of a distinguished lecture series." But D'Souza, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a veteran of the Reagan White House, never gave the lecture: Faculty members opposed to his views howled when he was invited, and the school's headmaster, bowing to the censors, rescinded the invitation.
Asked about the campaign against him, D'Souza had said: ``I am coming to speak on one day. If they think what I am saying is so awful, they have the rest of the year to refute it." But that isn't enough for the enemies of free speech. They insist not only that speakers with politically incorrect opinions be shunned, but that anyone offering them a platform be punished as well.
saddam's plans for attacking american assets
For those who still care, Saddam had evil designs on us.
bulldozed by naivete
Politics makes artists stupid. Take "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the one-woman play cobbled together from the diaries, emails and miscellaneous scribblings of the 23-year-old left-wing activist who was run over by an Israeli Army bulldozer in 2003 while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian house in the Gaza Strip.
Co-written and directed by Alan Rickman, one of England's best actors, "Rachel Corrie" just opened off-Broadway after a successful London run. It's an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop--yet it's being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like Mr. Rickman himself, ought to know better.
So why don't they? Because Palestine is the new Cuba, a political cause whose invocation has the effect of instantaneously anesthetizing the upper brain functions of those who believe in it. Take Mr. Rickman, who evidently intended "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" to be a pro-Palestinian equivalent of "The Diary of Anne Frank."
Or perhaps politics just reveals how stupid artists already are.
saturday, october 21 2006
french intifada
..discovered by the New York Times. It's brutal.
smart crows
Video clip from David Attenborough shows crows using tools (us).
dust art
Mona Lisa sketched on a dusty car window, and more.
harry reid can't bleed
In January on PBS, Jim Lehrer asked Sen. Reid why lobbying reform was moving so slowly. Reid replied, "Jim, it's taken a while for this culture of corruption the Republicans have developed to come into the fore." Aspiring "Speaker Pelosi" just gave a speech at Georgetown University pledging to "drain the swamp" of GOP corruption on Capitol Hill. The Democratic National Committee even had a page on their Website devoted to the "Republican Culture of Corruption."
But that "Culture of Corruption" page on the DNC home page has disappeared. Something funny happened on the way to the polls this year. The Democrats have shown they have their own contemporary ethical problems. Luckily for them, it probably won't matter much on Nov. 7. The national news media have decided to ignore them.
Look no further than Reid himself. Associated Press reporters John Solomon and Kathleen Hennessy reported that Reid scored a windfall of $700,000, turning a $400,000 real-estate investment in Las Vegas in 1998 to a $1.1 million land deal in 2004 -- even though he apparently had sold the property to a casino lobbyist buddy in 2001. He did not report the facts on his Senate financial disclosure forms -- while he served on the Senate Ethics Committee.
When the AP called Reid for comment, he hung up on them. You would think that an aggressive, fair and balanced media would have been incensed and activated. But we don't have a fair and balanced national media.
No, they're too busy fixating on Mark Foley.
friday, october 20 2006
internal rot
Students and their parents go into deep debt to attend college led by liberal group thinkers who teach their students how to hate America:
- Almost one-third of professors cite the United States as among the top two greatest threats to international stability -- more than cited Iran, China, or Iraq.
- Fifty-four percent of professors say U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is partially responsible for the growth of Islamic militancy.
- Sixty-four percent say the government's powers under the USA Patriot Act should be weakened.
- Professors are three times as likely to call themselves "liberal" as "conservative." In the 2004 presidential election, 72 percent of those surveyed voted for John Kerry.
Professors, says the report, are at the "forefront of the political divide" over U.S. foreign policy that has developed since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Faculty members have "aligned themselves in direct opposition to the political philosophy of the conservative base voting for the prevailing political power" in America, it says. Unlike most Americans, it adds, faculty members "blame America for world problems" and regard U.S. policies as "suspect."
As Glenn Reynolds says, "sounds like a diversity problem." Indeed. And since college suckle on the federal teat, why are they allowed to get away with this? Perhaps we need a "fairness doctrine" in academia.
he was against him before he was for him
James Webb in the American Enterprise magazine in 1997: "I cannot conjure up an ounce of respect for Bill Clinton when it comes to the military. Every time I see him salute a Marine, it infuriates me. I don't think Bill Clinton cares on iota about what happens in a military unit."
James Webb on Clinton's presidency, in 2000: "the most corrupt administration in modern memory."
James Webb, yesterday: Accepting the fundraising support of a man he has considered corrupt and unworthy of his respect. He said that things had changed.
democrat leaker
WASHINGTON - House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra has suspended a Democratic staff member because of concerns he may have leaked a high-level intelligence assessment to The New York Times last month.
Democrats politicizing the war? No!
No wonder Bush tries to keep Congress out of the loop: he's fighting a war on terror while Democrats are waging a war against him.
clint eastwood makes history
The adage that the victors write the history no longer applies.
One, we have a cadre of Leftist academics who write American victories as defeats and American virtues as sins (Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky etc.) and two, Hollywood provides its own version. Millions of people understand the JFK assassination through Oliver Stone's warped mind.
A movie about the battle for Iwo Jima, "Flags of Our Fathers" premieres today. In the LA Daily News, film critic Glenn Whipp engages Clint Eastwood in a Q&A which included this:
Q. Because, obviously, the Japanese wanted to live and get back home to their families, too.
A. And there really wasn't an option for these men. There were 22,000 Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima. Nearly 21,000 were killed or killed themselves. They had the same desire not to die. Many of the men fighting each other probably could have been friends.
Amazing: men with a "desire not to die" killed themselves.
Like most liberals, Whipp projects rationality into irrational places. The casualties in the Pacific theater were so high because the Japanese forced the issue.
European armies surrendered when there was no hope of winning. The Japanese fought to the death. Those who might want to surrender were killed by their own troops.
One 15-year old boy, drafted in the Japanese army, remembered years later:
Although Okinawans could not openly say it at that time, it is a fact that they were more afraid of Japanese soldiers than American soldiers at the end of the war. After they lost in the last organized military operations at the Yaese Hill, the Japanese soldiers were desperate, and committed extreme acts of aggression.
Japan was a death cult run by the Emperor and his military. Soldiers and civilians were brainwashed into believing that dying for the Emperor gained them a seat in the afterlife. Surrender was a disgrace.
This is the song suicide bombers (Kamikaze) sang before taking off:
If I go away to sea.
I shall return a corpse awash;If duty calls me to the mountain,
A verdant sward will be my pall;Thus for the sake of the Emperor
I will not die peacefully at home.
In the American Experience documentary "Victory in the Pacific" we see footage of Japanese civilians jumping off a cliff to their deaths because their island had fallen to the Marines. It's chilling.
One five year old survived the leap because he got snagged on a branch.
My father usually tell me, you know, "American people going to kill you, someday, somehow. It's better off dying than caught by American soldier." My father told me so I just follow people, people, and lot of people jump the cliff. So everybody jumping, so I just jump myself. I find I was hanging on a tree. Branch caught me, save me.
Anyway, I can laugh now because I'm here. I was just hanging there over the cliff. Then few minutes later other people jumping. Whole families jumping. Some people say "hamnohaim banzai". "Banzai".
A Japanese woman recalls:
"We were taught that the Americans and the British were kichiku, or 'ogre-beasts.' The Americans were monsters and beasts, and not humans. So, if you were caught by them, you would have your ears and nose cut off, be blinded, and be run over by the tanks. If you were a woman, you would be raped."
So, no, Glenn and Clint, the Japanese did not have the same desire not to die. It's not a trivial matter.
Why obsess over "ancient history?"
- Today we face an insane enemy that has turned Islam into a death cult (no, not all Muslims are part of it). Engagement with insane, homicidal people does not work.
- Fighting evil is ugly and brutal and takes backbone, not whining about exit strategies.
- The US dropped two atom bombs on Japan before it surrendered. One was not enough. That should tell you something.
- The Japanese military and Emperor were planning a long, bloody defense (turning their own people into cannon fodder) of the mainland to demoralize Americans. They hoped war weary Americans would force Truman to negotiate, and end the war on terms that would leave their regime in power. Had we made that mistake, we would not have the democratic ally that Japan has become.
The past informs the future.
Glenn Whipp: Much of "Flags" focuses on the flag-raisers going on a bond-raising tour and how the U.S. government suppressed the truth about the photo in order to sell their heroism, sell bonds and sell the war. It's not a huge leap to see some current relevance, given that all wars have their public relations battles.
Clint Eastwood: All wars have to be sold. It's just easier to justify the hypocrisy sometimes. The day after 9/11, it wasn't hard to sell any idea. The day after Pearl Harbor, it wasn't hard to sell it.
The war we're in now is different. It's smaller. It's far off. There's less agreement on it. I must say, I was probably not one of those people who was excited about going into Iraq.
I love democracy. But I'm not sure that you can sell it to just anybody.
I don't believe we are trying to "sell" democracy to anyone. We are trying to enable Iraqis to have it. Remember the 11 million purple thumbs, Clint?
As for "just anybody" do you think Americans in 1944 would have believed the Japanese people to be capable of democracy?
thursday, october 19 2006
theo-panic
Rich Lowry on the fear of theocracy.
For such self-professed advocates of reasoned discourse, they show an appalling tendency to want to shut down the other side with their swear word of "theocracy." They are emotional, self-righteous and close-minded. They are, in short, everything they accuse Christian conservatives of being. When the theo-panic passes, maybe a few of them will regret their hysteria.
it's the homos, stupid!
Iowahawk channels Howard Dean:
An Open Letter to the Conservative-American Community
by Dr. Howard Dean
Chairman, Democratic National CommitteeDear Valued Potential Customer:
As the leader of one of America's premier political parties, I know firsthand the importance of building bridges to the various communities and constituencies we serve. Unfortunately, when serving as many diverse communities as we do at the DNC, sometimes an important relationship can inadvertently fall through the cracks. Frankly, I realize we have not always brought our "A Game" when it comes to the concerns of conservative-Americans. That's why we would like to take this opportunity to start a dialog with you, the conservative "values voter," by addressing an issue of vital importance to all of us -- the growing Republican homo menace.
Despite what you may have heard on Fox News, we Democrats know what issues are on the minds of heartland conservatives like you. We know that your number one concern of is the safety of your children -- whether they are plucking their banjos on the back porch, speaking tongues to snakes at Jesus Camp, or torching crosses at your local Nascar racing contest. We also know that the number one threat to your children's safety is the scourge of international homo-ism. That's why we at the DNC have created "The Contract With American Hillbillies," a new multipoint investigation program to identify and root out conservative stealth homoism before it threatens you or your precious little inbreeds.
Read every hilarious word of it.
lefty fascist teacher
Larry Elder tells the frightening story of a public school teacher in LA harassing a student for his political views. (The schools district needs to screen for Bush Derangement Syndrome.)
A new "super" liberal English teacher has been indoctrinating and not educating -- always calling President Bush names, claiming the war in Iraq was illegal and Bush should be put in jail. My son for the most part has stood up to this tyrant, as this teacher claimed he "welcomes" healthy debate.
The first sign of trouble came after my son stood up to his "liberal claims" and promptly received an "F" on a paper in which the teacher wrote in red "sloppy Republican" at the top of the paper. (I have a copy of this paper if you would like to see it.)
Unbelieveable -- read it all.
economic hypochondria
Recently Bill Clinton, at the British Labour Party's annual conference, delivered what the Times of London described as a "relaxed, almost rambling" and "easy anecdotal" speech to an enthralled audience of leftists eager for evidence of American disappointments. Never a connoisseur of understatement, Clinton said America is "now outsourcing college-education jobs to India."
But Clinton-as-Cassandra should not persuade college students to abandon their quest for diplomas: The unemployment rate among college graduates is 2 percent.
Clinton is always a leading indicator of "progressive" fashions in rhetoric. And every election year -- meaning every other year -- brings an epidemic of dubious economic analysis, as members of the party out of power discern lead linings on silver clouds.
"Worst economy since Herbert Hoover," said John Kerry in 2004, while that year's growth (3.9 percent) was adding to America's GDP the equivalent of the GDP of Taiwan (the 19th-largest economy).
Nancy Pelosi vows that if Democrats capture Congress they will "jump-start our economy." A "jump-start " is administered to a stalled vehicle. But since the Bush tax cuts went into effect in 2003, the economy's growth rate (3.5 percent) has been better than the average for the 1980s (3.1) and 1990s (3.3). Today's unemployment rate (4.6 percent) is lower than the average for the 1990s (5.8) -- lower, in fact, than the average for the last 40 years (6.0). Some stall.
These very same Democrats whined in 2000 about Bush "talking down the economy" before he took office. Bush, of course, was noting the recession he was inheriting.
was izzy dirty?
The first I ever heard of I.F. Stone was at an anti-war rally at the Washington monument in 1971. It was a typical rally: good weed, good music and tiresome spreaches (no, that's not a typo) in between.
Stone, the so-called iconoclastic publisher of I.F. Stone's Weekly, made a speech. Like most of those in attendance, I heard little of it. We regarded the political talk like commercials on TV -- something you endured until the show returned.
Izzy, as he was called, came to mind while reading Tim Rutten's review of ""All Governments Lie! The Best of I.F. Stone."
AS a young editor, I had the privilege of working with three authentic heroes of American journalism: One was Phil Kerby, a champion of civil liberties who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials against government secrecy and judicial censorship; another was Carey McWilliams, the radical journalist and historian who edited the Nation for so many years; the third was I.F. Stone. Of the three, his contribution was the widest and most consequential.
So Rutten, an acolyte of the biography's subject, gets to review the book.
One of MacPherson's singular contributions in her book is to reconnect Stone to the indigenous American tradition of radical journalism that begins with muckrakers. As a boy, he distributed copies of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" to relatives, and throughout his life, Stone was amused by the fact that Sinclair's exposé of the Chicago packinghouses was supposed to ignite sympathy for oppressed workers but resulted in passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Stone liked to quote Sinclair's rueful observation that "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Stone was similarly misunderstood from time to time. His break with the Soviet Union cost the Weekly 400 paying subscribers he could ill afford to lose at that point in life.
If a loss of 400 readers meant that much his subscriber base must have been slim.
Whether the book touches on Stone's relationship with Soviet agents is unclear; Rutten never says. But to discuss Upton Sinclair and Stone without a look at their roles in Stalin's PR and spy efforts earns a big incomplete.
First, Upton Sinclair was an unwitting part of a plan by Stalin to stain the reputation of the United States by turning the Sacco and Vanzetti case into an international cause celebre, a plan that worked brilliantly. People here and abroad were convinced that the two men had been railroaded by a racist, xenophobic America.
They were guilty. And Upton Sinclair knew it and said nothing because it would tarnish his standing with fellow radicals. A letter Sinclair wrote to his attorney proves this point:
During his research for "Boston," [a novel about Sacco Vanzetti] Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.
"Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. " … He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."
"I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point," he wrote to his attorney. "I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case."
Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America's most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself.
"My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book," Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927.
He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. "It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public," he wrote to Minor.
So big, fearless muckraking Upton Sinclair, hero to the Left, "indigenous radical" in Rutten's eyes, buried the truth out of fear and self interest.
On the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed anti-American demonstrations took place all over the world. (Yes, anti-Americanism predates George W. Bush.)
Back to Izzy Stone. At a minimum, Stone flirted with acting as a Soviet Spy. From Wikipedia:
The remarks of Oleg Kalugin, a former major general in the KGB, shortly after Stone's death set off months of speculation about Stone's alleged collaboration with that espionage agency, with one columnist going as far to call Stone "the KGB's front man in American journalism." Romerstein claimed that Kalugin, who had worked as a press officer at the Soviet embassy in Washington, had verified his accusations.[3] Kalugin later wrote in The First Directorate (1994) that KGB headquarters had cabled him to re-establish contact with Stone because "he was a man with whom we had regular contact".
He goes on to describe Stone as a "fellow traveler who made no secret of his admiration for the Soviet system." Kalugin later elaborated on his relationship with Stone, explaining that Stone was not a paid agent of the KGB, only that he was a friendly contact who regularly had lunch with him.[4]
According to Kalugin, Stone sought to sever his ties with the KGB after his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1956 and hearing Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin and the tyranny of his regime. Stone returned home and wrote "Whatever the consequences, I have to say what I really feel after seeing the Soviet Union and carefully studying the statements of its leading officials. This is not a good society and it is not led by honest men." Stone's conclusion that "nothing has happened in Russia to justify cooperation abroad between the independent left and the Communists" cost him over 400 subscribers to the Weekly. Kalugin stated that while Stone sought to sever ties in 1956, Kalugin eventually persuaded Stone to maintain his ties to the Soviets after the 1968 Czechoslovakian uprising and subsequent quelling of the revolt.
Okay, you probably skimmed that. The gist is that Stone was, at the very least, enamored of the Soviet Union until 1956. If nothing else, that indicts his common sense. Stalin's mass murder was clearly known to anyone with an open mind by then.
To things round off, read Lying for the truth: Münzenberg & the Comintern that tells of one Willi Munzenberg, Stalin's master of disinformation who played dozens of America's leading artists and intellectuals for saps.
Tim Rutten would never bring any of this up. To do so would let history spoil his hero worship.
wednesday, october 18 2006
crackpot or spy?
From American Spectator:
My first venture into punditry dealt with the arrest of Susan Lindauer on various charges, amounting to her acting as a paid agent for Saddam's intelligence service.
Lindauer worked for several Democratic lawmakers, including Representatives Zoe Lofgren and Peter DeFazio, and Senators Ron Wyden and Carol Moseley-Braun, and also wrote for Fortune and U.S. News & World Report.
According to her indictment, Lindauer worked with Iraqi agents based in New York starting in 1999, and even met them in Manhattan on September 19, 2001. That's right: eight days after the atrocity of September 11, Lindauer was allegedly meeting with enemy intelligence agents somewhere near the ruins of the World Trade Center. (According to the New York Times, her last job with Congress ceased in 2002, so she was allegedly working for both the Iraqi government and ours at the same time.)
Lindauer was ruled mentally incompetent and unfit for trial. Now out of the hatch, she's being used as an expert source on stories about domestic terror threats.
Read the whole thing.
pseudo histories of the iraq war
Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian of good repute, does not think much of the scholarly standards of the three latest books on Iraq, including Bob Woodward's latest:
There are a number of other things wrong with all this gossip.
First, note the disturbing pattern in this resorting to anonymity. Usually the unidentified source supports the author's critique — and thus is almost always critical of the present policy in Iraq. Rarely do these journalists quote unnamed sources who dissent from their own views, although there are surely pro-U.S. Iraq policy candid voices among the thousands of retired generals.
Second, here is the cardinal rule for anonymous sources in this new genre of pseudo-history: Talk to reporters as soon as possible "off the record" in hopes that they will be sympathetic. If you keep quiet, some of your loudmouth enemies might unload on you from the safety of anonymity, ensuring their narrative, not yours, will become authoritative.
Third, we are not reading accounts of golf or fashion but the most important event since the end of the Cold War as it unfolds. When one writes military history in the middle of a war, there is a responsibility to be extra careful. Real-time interpretations don't just offer lessons about the past but may change the very course of events as they happen.
These past couple of weeks, current and former officials have been protesting that they were unfairly characterized in Woodward's book — and have argued that conditions in Iraq are not as bad as alleged by anonymous sources. And while there have been on-the-record critics of all three books, none of the unnamed accusers cited in them has come forward.
These virtual histories all allege a "state of denial" and lack of accountability on the part of government officials. Perhaps — but how odd then that the authors of Cobra II, Fiasco and State of Denial have used the very secrecy and subterfuge they claim to deplore in their targets.
french politics go populist
For years, the private lives of French politicians remained just that. Even sex scandals at the highest levels were hushed up. No longer. Both Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal have opened up in the hopes of winning the presidency.
Marc Dolisi sits at his desk, triumphantly holding up a cover image depicting a woman in a turquoise bikini. "This is our best-selling cover in three years," he says. Dolisi, the deputy editor of French tabloid VSD, is beaming.
The woman on the cover is Ségolène Royal. She is 53 -- though she doesn't look it in the photo -- a socialist and a mother of four, and she wants to be France's first female president. She is clearly doing whatever she can to further that aim. Holding a blue pool noodle in her slender hands, Royal could almost pass for Demi Moore at the beach.
why dogs bite
With Halloween just around the corner, it's costume party season again. In the US at least. And that doesn't just mean dragging your 20-year old Scooby-Doo Underoos out of the closet and throwing a pumpkin carving party. It's time to get your whole family into the spirit, including your furry, four-legged friends.
hillary fesses up
Hillary Clinton is almost 60 years old and for years, she's told people that she was named after Sir Edumnd Hillary because her mother was so impressed when Hillary climbed Mt. Everest. Despite people pointing out that Clinton, born in 1947, was probably not named after an event that took place in 1953, it has taken until 2006 for Clinton to acknowledge that this was just a made-up story.
...
If you had been told you were named after someone famous, wouldn't you have read about that person at some time in your life? And wouldn't you have noticed the discrepancy in the dates? Just asking.
And, as my husband pointed out, soon she'll admit that she never tried to enlist in the army, wasn't a lifelong Yankees fan, and didn't get beaten up every day on her way to school in the nice middle class suburb where she lived. All stories that she has peddled at one time or another in career.
Oh, and don't forget that she could make $100,000 on cattle futures just by reading the Wall Street Journal. It's hard to keep track of all these stories.
don't join the stupid party
John Stuart Mill once famously called the British Tories "The Stupid Party." From time to time since then, the Tory's American cousin, the Republican Party, has also earned that moniker. Now may be one of those moments. If current polls and anecdotes are to be believed, there may be a million or two conservative Republicans who are planning to not vote this November.
Of course, Mill also said, "A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but also by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury."
Apparently, these anticipated conservative non-voters are annoyed with Republican imperfection. They are disheartened, disappointed, disillusioned, distempered, and dismal -- and thus plan to dis the party that better advances conservative principles in government.
They appear to have fallen victim to the false syllogism: 1) Something must be done; 2) not voting is something; therefore, 3) I will not vote. Of course the fallacy of the syllogism is that the second category could be anything. For example, No. 2 could as well read "eating dog excrement is something."
...
Here are some telltale signs of the sort of person who would vote (or not vote) to cause the election of a party that would act to defeat every value and interest he holds dear (merely because the party that will at least try to advance most of those issues has not done as well as he might have hoped):
1) When offered by a car dealer 25 percent off on a car, he insists on paying the full factory-recommended retail sticker price -- because he is damned if he will accept 25 percent when he deserves 30 percent off.
2) When the prettiest cheerleader asks the nerd to take her to the prom, he turns her down -- just because he can.
3) When stopped for doing 70 in a 65 zone, he tells the trooper that's not possible because he had the cruise control set on 90 -- he just resents being falsely charged.
4) When diagnosed with a serious illness, he promptly cancels his medical insurance -- in order to save the cost of premium payments to help pay for the upcoming hospital stay.
A conservative would have to be just that stupid to stay home on Nov. 7. I have heard it put around that the Republicans need a couple of years in the wilderness to regain their conservative bearings.
Read it all.
tuesday, october 17 2006
big daddy byrd brags about spending your tax dollars
Yeah, man. See video here.
selective outrage in germany
From David's Medienkritik:
Putin is visiting Germany. He is visiting Dresden, the city where he served as a KGB agent with the express purpose of keeping an oppressive dictatorship up and running. He is visiting shortly after the brutal murder of yet another independent journalist who dared to question his regime. He is visiting in the midst of a protracted, bloody military campaign in Chechnya, in which tens of thousands have died or simply "disappeared."
And where are the throngs of angry protesters??? The media reports that Mr. Putin was confronted by a heckler or two and a few "uncomfortable" questions from journalists and politicians. Where are the masses of drum-thumping, flag-waving, dreadlock wearing, morally superior protesters who gathered by the thousands when Bush was in country?
We've said it before and we will say it again. The professional protester class, the Angry Left, the eternally self-righteous, indignant marchers who pose as saviors of the world as their rainbow flags flutter in the wind are nothing but a pack of morally and intellectually bankrupt hypocrites. The latest Putin visit proves it yet again. See no evil, hear no evil. Enough said?
they don't know shiite
A few weeks ago, I wrote that I didn’t care what the then-controversial National Intelligence Estimate said because the level of analysis that emanates from our intelligence community is uniformly wretched.I realized there was a possibility that our intelligence analysts might inadvertently stumble onto an insight.
My point nonetheless was that if you really wanted to know what was going on in the world of Islamic Fascism, you’d be better of reading analysts like Walid Phares and the intrepid Steve Emerson who, unlike the intelligence community, know what they’re talking about and have been right on these matters for more than a decade.
He quotes a New York Times story:
A few weeks ago, I took the F.B.I.’s temperature again. At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau’s new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”
That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”
O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,” I prompted. “Which are they?”
He took a stab: “Sunni.”
Wrong.
GEORGE W. BUSH, DONALD RUMSFELD AND DICK CHENEY are routinely excoriated for not taking every pronouncement from our intelligence community as if it were wisdom handed down directly from Mt. Ararat. I go in the other direction – if the people actually making the decisions of life and death actually care what these clueless intelligence analysts are saying, shame on them.
oh, the humanity!
The font of wisdom hath spoken:
Actress Julia Roberts has added her name to a growing list of celebrities and politicians supporting a California ballot measure that would tax oil to fund alternative energy research.
"We're all victims of this state's tragically poor air quality," she said. "California has the worst air pollution in the nation."
And the most airhead celebrities. There must be a connection.
sit here
During my brief stint selling real estate in the '70s, I took sales training classes. One thing I remember was the importance of taking control of your customers. For example, when meeting a couple at their home to get a listing, if they say, "Why don't we sit in the living room. It's more comfortable" you reply, "I'd rather we sit at the dining room table so we can spread out our papers."
If they offered the dining room, you'd insist on the living room. Where you sat didn't matter, who made the choice did. By going along, the couple took one of many baby steps toward doing what I really wanted: signing the listing contract.
This has come to mind many times in the past few years watching certain Muslims living in the west. Like expert salesmen, they get the dominant culture to make baby step concessions. In England, banks and government offices forbade the display of pig figures (gone is Piglet, gone are piggy banks) because Islam declares pigs unclean. The Brits thought they were being righteously tolerant by acceding to the intolerance of certain Muslims.
Daniel Pipes wrote last week:
A minor issue at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) has potentially major implications for the future of Islam in the United States.
Starting about a decade ago, some Muslim taxi drivers serving the airport declared that they would not transport passengers visibly carrying alcohol, in transparent duty-free shopping bags, for example. This stance stemmed from their understanding of the Koran's ban on alcohol. A driver named Fuad Omar explained: "This is our religion. We could be punished in the afterlife if we agree to [transport alcohol]. This is a Koran issue. This came from heaven." Another driver, Muhamed Mursal, echoed his words: "It is forbidden in Islam to carry alcohol."
The issue emerged publicly in 2000. On one occasion, 16 drivers in a row refused a passenger with bottles of alcohol. This left the passenger - who had done nothing legally wrong - feeling like a criminal. For their part, the 16 cabbies lost income. As Josh L. Dickey of the Associated Press put it, when drivers at MSP refuse a fare for any reason, "they go to the back of the line. Waaaay back. Past the terminal, down a long service road, and into a sprawling parking lot jammed with cabs in Bloomington, where drivers sit idle for hours, waiting to be called again."
To avoid this predicament, Muslim taxi drivers asked the Metropolitan Airports Commission for permission to refuse passengers carrying liquor - or even suspected of carrying liquor - without being banished to the end of the line. MAC rejected this appeal, worried that drivers might offer religion as an excuse to refuse short-distance passengers.
Well, suppose my religion says I shouldn't comport with black people or gays? Should I be allowed to refuse them rides or an apartment in my building? No. We have laws about that.
Since taxi drivers operate by license, the solution is simple: carry everyone, booze or not, or get another job. Tolerance cuts both ways.
And by the way, we shall sit in the living room, papers or not.
JB
monday, october 16 2006
wobbly
Hat tip to Koboyashi Maru:
LONDON (Reuters) - Wobbles or variations in the Earth's orbit and tilt are associated with extinctions of rodent and mammalian species, Dutch scientists said on Wednesday.
They studied rodent fossil records in central Spain dating back 22 million years and found that the rise and fall of mammal species was linked to changes in the Earth's behavior which caused cooling periods.
"Extinctions in rodent species occur in pulses which are spaced by intervals controlled by astronomical variations and their effects on climate change," Dr Jan van Dam, of the Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said.
...At the moment, the Earth is at the beginning of a cycle but the planet's climate system has changed so much in the past 3 million years that it is difficult to predict what will happen in the future.
Just ask Al Gore. He has all the answers.
scalia debates aclu's stroessen
Find the clip under Recent Programs.
la times gets desperate
From American Thinker:
The Los Angeles Times, reeling from some of the worst circulation declines in the newspaper industry, and just having fired its publisher, says that it is turning over a new leaf, and has assigned crack investigative reporters to the topic. Rather awkwardly, they call it the “Manhattan Project,” after the race to develop the nuclear bomb. What on earth are they thinking?
They call it “re-engaging” readers. Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters is following the story and has some sensible suggestions.
Yet today, the paper feeds us the same old liberal/left claptrap. A Clintonite Think Tank gets op-ed space and declares, Bush unleashes Nuclear Blast,” asking
“If the administration won’t abide by time-tested nuclear treaties, why should anyone else?” This gives you a flavor of the piece from the senior vice-president of the Center for American Progress – a “think tank” established by Clinton cadres to promote the Clinton legacy and boost support for Hillary Clinton when she runs. Of course, it is funded by well-known anti-Bush, anti-Republican activists George Soros and Herb and Marion Sandler.*
Yet it is run as an op-ed in the LA Times, giving free “advertising” along with the patina of neutrality. Unfair? Yes. Increasing as a tactic? Yes. Does the op-ed mention that the North Koreans were cheating on the supposed Agreed Framework signed by Clinton and had a secret nuclear weapons development program operating throughout the Clinton Presidency ? No.
curse of the greaseball
The Boston Red Sox supposedly suffered from the curse of the Bambino for having traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees way back when. The curse was lifted, somehow, when the Sox won the World Series in 2004.
Now the once great Oakland Raiders have opened the season 0-5. They stink. They've stunk for a while. I enjoy watching every loss, every stupid offside or false start penalty. I think they are cursed to stink until part-owner Al Davis leaves. It's because of how he mistreated Marcus Allen.
Despite the team slogan "Commitment to Excellence" Davis's relationship with star running back Allen (now in the Hall of Fame) seemed like a commitment to pettiness. Marcus, one of the most dignified athletes in the NFL, somehow got on Al's bad side and endured several seasons, during his prime, being relegated to a back up role. While the team needed Marcus's excellence, they got something else.
Marcus was eventually traded to the Kansas City Chiefs, where he excelled in the last years of his career. Whenever the Chiefs and Raiders played, after Allen scored a touchdown he'd make a point of looking toward the Raider's owner's box. Marcus never said anything, he just looked.
And the camera would cut to Davis with his glasses hanging from granny chains and his hair Jiffy Lubed into submission, arms folded and stone faced.
0-5. Cursed.
sunday, october 15 2006
homosexual congressmen, then and now
Republican Mark Foley sent gay sexual emails to a page, resigned his seat and is being excoriated. Democrats are demanding a full investigation and using the issue to win GOP seats. That's now.
Today's obits for gay Democrat Gerry Stubbs takes a different stance. This from CNN:
“He gave people of his generation, or my generation, of future generations, the courage to do whatever they wanted to do,” he said.
Studds was first elected in 1972 and represented Cape Cod and the Islands, New Bedford, and the South Shore for 12 Congressional terms. He retired from Congress in 1997.
In 1983, Studds acknowledged his homosexuality after a former Congressional page revealed he’d had a relationship with Studds a decade earlier.
Studds was censured by the House for having sexual relations with the page. He acknowledged having sex with a 17-year-old male page in 1973 and making sexual advances to two others and admitted an error in judgment, but did not apologize.
And...
Gerry Studds, a liberal Massachusetts Democrat, described his activity with a male page a decade earlier as “a mutually voluntary private relationship between adults,” despite evidence he plied the 17-year-old boy with alcohol before initiating sex. The House Ethics Committee also charged Mr. Studds unsuccessfully solicited sex from two other male pages.
So Studds got the underage kid drink and sodomized him, didn't resign his seat or apologize and is being fondly remembered today in the MSM.
nobel laureate explains microfinance
Microfinance is one of the biggest success stories of the developing world, and proponents like me believe it could be just as successful in helping the poor in wealthy countries such as the U.S. The basic philosophy behind microfinance is that the poor, although spurned by traditional banks because they can't provide collateral, are actually a great investment: No one works harder than someone who is striving to achieve life's basic necessities, particularly a woman with children to support. Sadly, it is also true that in catastrophic circumstances, very little of the cash so generously given ever gets all the way down to the very poor. There are too many "professionals" ahead of them in line, highly skilled at diverting funds into their own pockets. This is particularly regrettable because very poor people need only a little money to set up a business that can make a dramatic difference in the quality of their lives.
I started the Grameen Bank 30 years ago by distributing about $27 (no typo here!) worth of loans among 40 extremely poor Bangladeshis. Since the bank officially opened in 1983, it has loaned $5.7 billion in microfinance. Today, Grameen has 6.6 million borrowers in Bangladesh alone, borrowing $500 million a year in loans that average just over $100 each. The loans are entirely financed by borrowers' deposits and the bank recovers 98.85% of all money loaned. Notably, Grameen Bank has been profitable in all but three years since its launch. Our largely poor customers save $1.008 for every dollar they borrow, so the poor are truly funding the poor.
The bank supports businesses such as small services, stores, direct sales, furniture-making, cell phone stations and milling, all of which support the local economy. And it works. More than half of our borrowers have moved out of poverty, mainly through their own efforts. Most importantly, when you lend money to disadvantaged people, it gives them a sense of pride, rather than the humiliation they may feel over a handout. And just as helpful as the money is the guidance they get from the bank. Training and connecting poor, inexperienced workers to a reliable and ethical lending and savings service is a huge advantage for them that only gets stronger after a disaster. This is particularly true of women, who are often constrained by social and financial barriers. Grameen communities have also made tremendous strides on health and social issues, such as sanitation, and pushed aside discriminatory practices such as bridal dowries.
Read it all.
the rich did better under clinton
The facts here.
patterico: la times cheers violence
College Leftists behave like thugs and get praised by an LA Times columnist, who calls a former Weatherman for learned insight. Patterico has a few words of his own.
See for yourself how the Columbia students behaved when Jim Gilchrist of the Minutemen Project tried to speak:
"pre-googlian liars"
A Pre-Googleian liar is one who doesn't realize how easy it is in the post-Google age to verify the truth or falsity of a statement.
John Kerry's hot words have barely cooled in the crisp autumn air of New Hampshire before an average citizen such as me is sitting at my keyboard posting a link to the source that proves his lie.
iowahawk goes nuclear
To the impotent yappings of the neighboring gangster devils, Iowahawk responds: howl away, bourgeois traitors of Lakewood Mobile Home Court! Your pitious lamentations and cowardly 911-callings will never stop Iowahawk from the great leap forward into great and powerful prosperity, using his mighty quiver of nuclear-tipped cherry bombs and fully-fissionable bottle rockets for peaceful unity purposes!
Let it now be known that testings were conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology 100 percent. The Central Defense Committee of Iowahawk, Chuck, and Julio are to be congratulated for their ingenious creation of nuclear defense technology from glow-lite sticks and high-quality Missouri fireworks. Also to be honored is Chuck's ex-wife Rhonda, who drove the Central Defense Committee to Missouri to obtain firework materials, low-price smokes and PowerBall tickets.
So who "lost the midwest?" Who do we blame?
department of "deep concern"
That would be one Kofi Annan. How many times was Kofi "deeply concerned?" A couple screens worth.
how finches deal with ugly chicks
From Live Science:
Often in life, fate depends on which family one is born into. Baby finches with ugly fathers lose out on the good genes and get little food brought home by dad. So Mom has developed a clever coping strategy to compensate for this nutritional deficit, a new study finds.
Male house finches range from bright red to drab yellow. The color of their plumage is a result of dietary pigments called cartenoids, which are consumed in the wild. Coloring is therefore a good indicator of a male finch’s foraging abilities.
steyn interview
NRO editor Kathryn Lopez about America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: How is America Alone? Didn’t we have a coalition of the willing? Aren’t we always talking and meeting and have allies?
Mark Steyn: Well, the short answer to that is that after 9/11 the president told the world you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists and some of our “allies” (i.e., Belgium) checked the neither-of-the-above box and some of our “allies” (i.e., Saudi Arabia) checked the both-of-the-above box, and in neither case did it make any difference. “Ally” is largely a post-modern term these days meaning (a) duplicitous backstabber who puts you through months of negotiations to water down your U.N. Security Council resolution to utter meaninglessness or (b) NATO military comrade who requires months of schmoozing and black-tie photo-ops in order for you to crowbar out of him a token commitment of a couple of hundred troops he’s willing to deploy in-theatre as long as it’s in a non-combat role and preferably three provinces away from where the fighting’s taking place.Even “supportive” allies are deploying less than the Vermont National Guard and for a much bigger diplomatic effort. There are real allies, of course: Australia is the most level-headed nation on the international scene; Canada is at last behaving like a grown-up nation again, though its military is terribly underfunded; and the United Kingdom did a grand job holding down the southern third of Iraq in the invasion. But one of the sub-plots of my book is “Who lost Britain?”, and I find it hard to believe current trends in U.K. and European politics augur well for the Anglo-American relationship.
So who does that leave? The Russians and the Chinese face down the road Muslim problems of their own, but figure that for the moment the jihad is America’s problem and it’s in their interest to keep it that way. As for India and other well-disposed nations who in essence share America’s view of the Islamist threat, you hear increasingly doubts about Washington’s will to see this thing through.
If you’re watching John Kerry and Harry Reid and Jack Murtha and Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin on CNN International all week long, you can’t blame Indians and Singaporeans and Danes and Dutch for questioning American credibility. At some stage, that will reach a kind of tipping point, and even friendly nations will feel inclined to reach their accommodations with alternative forces. America has to use its moment, or lose it.
Lopez: Why is it significant that the median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8?
Steyn: Because the best measure of how a state will behave is the people who comprise that state. For the last 30 years, the same bespoke figures have touted the Palestinian cause on the western TV networks — Saeb Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi — and they seem terribly urbane and reasonable. But they are not Palestine. The Gaza Strip has one of the highest birth rates in the world. It has an almost endless supply of teenage boys. If you say “Well, what would you rather have? An economy and a highway system a home in the suburbs? Or waste another three generations trying to take out the Zionist Entity?”, you can make that argument to a middle-aged fellow like Saeb Erekat, but it has no appeal to most 15-year old guys raised in a death-cult society like Gaza. Jihad is way cooler. It’s like a geopolitical version of gangsta pathologies, but with unlimited manpower.
saturday, october 14 2006
manufactured beauty
Wonder why you can't ever measure up? This video shows you why.
missed cinema: "autumn spring" and "Divine intervention"
One of the great pleasure of Netflix is watching movies from all over the world, and seeing them without the slightest what they are about. Last night we visited some friends and they asked us to bring a movie.
We had two from Netflix, one set in China and one set in the Czech Republic. Both were around 90 minutes, my favorite running time. "What are you in the mood for, Chinese or Czech?" Someone said Czech, so we watched Autumn Spring.
We had no idea if it was a period piece, a comedy or whatever. It turns out to be a gem, a character comedy about an impish 80-year old man who refuses to grow up. I'll say no more other than rent it. The performances are wonderful and seeing Prague on film is always a pleasure.
Another film to check out is Divine Intervention an odd comedy by Palestinian director Elia Suleiman, set in Nazareth. This is a love-it or hate-it kind of movie. Suleiman uses a lot of static camera shots where small things happen that build to great comic effects, but require patience.
But where else are you going to see a movie open with teenage thugs chasing a man wearing a Santa Claus suit, complete with sack of gifts, up a stoney hillside in Nazareth?
a computer boots and a light goes on
I read the Guardian from front to back almost every day from early 1982 until the Spring just gone. I also listened to BBC Radio 4 – to the virtual exclusion of all else, including television – every day for those same years. Every day I listened to one of Today, World at One, PM, Six o-Clock News, News at Ten, News at Midnight, and occasionally all six. I must be well-informed, I convinced myself, because these are two of the world’s premier media organisations; if there was anything to report, they would have reported it. Maybe I am just paranoid after all, I thought, because nothing I read or listened to confirmed the suspicion that led me to ask the question. And through all this listening to Politically Correct journalists and politicians, I had become as politically correct as the best of them. Or, perhaps I should say: worst of them.
Then, a little under six months ago, I bought a computer …
To smugly consider yourself exceptionally well-informed about current affairs – despite this sneaking suspicion about Islam – and then to discover that you have been in fact – one can only suppose deliberately - kept in utter ignorance is truly a shock to the system. The Guardian and the BBC, and all who work for them, have lost themselves a good friend and staunch defender. As has the rest of the mainstream media I should add, along with most of our political and social elites – undifferentiated by party or profession.
Read it all.
"as long as we're talking, we're not shooting each other"
Rightwing Nuthouse lets past reveal the present:
If we’ve heard that saying once over the last century, we’ve heard it a million times...
[WWI] so horrified civilized people everywhere that new diplomatic paradigms were invented to deal with conflicts. International organizations were constituted in order to give belligerents a forum to air their grievances. A blizzard of treaties were agreed to outlawing war itself, placing limits on naval tonnage, establishing uniform methods of dealing with POW’s, chemical weapons, and a host of other war related issues.
A fat lot of good it all did. Almost exactly 20 years after the Versailles Treaty was signed ending the first World War, Adolph Hitler deliberately launched the second.
But Hitler’s actions prior to the war were unique in history. He used diplomacy not for the purposes of conflict resolution, but to legitimize his power grabs...
And yet, even as evidence of Hitler’s use of diplomacy as another kind of warfare piled up before their eyes, both Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier convinced themselves that as long as they were talking, Hitler wouldn’t go to war. This use of negotiations not to solve problems but simply to carry on with the diplomatic niceties – negotiations for the sake of negotiating – led directly to World War II.
Excellent essay; read it all.
friday, october 13 2006
angry words from omar
Over the latest political hitjob from the Lancet, which claims 665,000 have died in Iraq since 2003:
Among the things I cannot accept is exploiting the suffering of people to make gains that are not the least related to easing the suffering of those people. I’m talking here about those researchers who used the transparency and open doors of the new Iraq to come and count the drops of blood we shed.
Human flesh is abundant and all they have to do is call this hospital or that office to get the count of casualties, even more they can knock on doors and ask us one by one and we would answer because we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.
We believe in what we’re struggling for and we are proud of our sacrifices.
I wonder if that research team was willing to go to North Korea or Libya and I think they wouldn’t have the guts to dare ask Saddam to let them in and investigate deaths under his regime.
No, they would’ve shit their pants the moment they set foot in Iraq and they would find themselves surrounded by the Mukhabarat men counting their breaths. However, maybe they would have the chance to receive a gift from the tyrant in exchange for painting a rosy picture about his rule....
To me their motives are clear, all they want is to prove that our struggle for freedom was the wrong thing to do. And they shamelessly use lies to do this…when they did not find the death they wanted to see on the ground, they faked it on paper! They disgust me…
This fake research is an insult to every man, woman and child who lost their lives.
Behind every drop of blood is a noble story of sacrifice for a just cause that is struggling for living safe in freedom and prosperity.
Let those fools know that nothing will stop us from walking this road and nothing will stop our friends and allies from helping us reach safe shores. There’s simply no going back even if it cost us more and their fake statistics will not frighten us…our sacrifices, like I said, make us proud because our bloods are not digits in those ugly papers. Our sacrifices are paving the way for future generations to live the better life we couldn’t live.
the sandy scissorhands mystery
Next time you hear a Lefty claim that Bush has installed a police state in America, point out the Sandy Berger/Scooter Libby prosecutions.
Berger, NSC Director under President Clinton, admitted to stealing and destroying classified documents from the national archives. For this he pled to a misdemeanor.
Scotty Libby, chief of staff to the Vice President, faces felony charges and financial ruin over testimony given to an FBI agent investigating a crime was never even a crime.
So treatment from the Republican administration: Democrat gets slapped on wrist for serious crime, Republican gets ruined over nothing.
Former Clinton administration National Security Advisor and John Kerry campaign advisor Sandy Berger is back in the news. The Congress has finally gotten curious about the classified documents that he smuggled out of the National Archives and shredded, presumably so the 9/11 Commission wouldn't see them. Andy McCarthy's column this morning raises a lot of questions about the media's utter lack of interest in the story, especially compared to the indictment of Scooter Libby. How he managed to avoid using the word "pantload" even once is beyond me, and a tribute to Andy's professionalism.
Andy, like others, wonders about Berger's lenient treatment, especially compared to the prosecution of Scooter Libby:Sandy Berger needn’t worry about ten-year penalties, though. He needn’t concern himself with a prosecution for false statements or obstruction of justice. He needn’t sweat for two years over whether he will be charged with multiple black-and-white classified information violations.
No, Berger is home-free. Next year, when Scooter Libby starts trial on false-statement and obstruction-of-justice allegations that carry potential decades of jail time, Sandy Berger will be starting the second half of his two-year term of probation.
You see, for misconduct orders of magnitude more weighty than what Libby stands accused of, Berger was permitted by the Justice Department to plead guilty to misdemeanor mishandling of classified information. No jail time. He was fined $50,000 — and that was only because the outraged sentencing judge quintupled the $10,000 fine proposed by Berger and (astoundingly) the Justice Department.
And by 2008 — when Libby, if he were convicted, would probably start any sentence of imprisonment — Berger will even be getting his security clearance back … just in time to offer his unique skills to a prospective new Democratic administration.
What documents did Berger destroy and why?
...Berger was permitted access to the national archives to prepare for his commission testimony (and to help prepare President Clinton for his). He used that public trust as an opportunity to filch, on at least two occasions, highly classified information — stuffing some of it into his clothing to avoid detection.
This bizarre behavior caused authorities to investigate and discover the theft. In the ensuing investigation, Berger brazenly lied. He told the government that his undeniable removal of the intelligence was an honest mistake … only to admit later (as the Washington Times reported) that he had quite intentionally stuffed the documents into his pants, jacket and a leather portfolio.
That’s not the end of the story — not by a long-shot. Berger did not take just any documents. As recounted by National Review’s Byron York, among others, he took various drafts of a so-called “after-action report” prepared by top Clinton counterterrorism officials. The purpose of the report was to assess the Clinton administration’s 1999 performance in connection with terrorist threats that riddled the run-up to the millennium observance. Annotated on some of those copies is believed to be reactive commentary by some high-ranking Clinton officials. The report and the manner in which it was finalized were patently germane to the commission’s investigation.
In public testimony and statements, top Clinton officials have repeatedly portrayed this period as the administration’s finest hour — barely veiling the contrast of themselves to Bush officials who, in this telling, were purportedly asleep at the switch in the months before 9/11. Indeed, Berger himself told the 9/11 Commission:In late 1999, as we approached the Millennium celebrations, the CIA warned of five to fifteen plots against American targets. This was the most serious threat spike of our time in office. My judgment was that it required ongoing attention at the highest levels of government. Accordingly, I convened national security principals, including the Director of Central Intelligence, the Attorney General, and top FBI, State and Defense officials at the White House virtually every single day for a month. I am convinced that our sustained attention and the rigorous actions that resulted prevented significant losses of life. [Emphasis supplied.]
Does the after-action report support this heroic version of events? Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has seen the report, says no — that the assessment indicates dumb luck was behind the foiling of, for example, the plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. But we can’t judge for ourselves because we have never seen the report.
countering wapo disinformation
Just a few weeks before the midterm elections, any news that can depress Republican turnout gets frontpage treatment. Thus the Washington Post:
In a story headlined “In Border Fence's Path, Congressional Roadblocks,” the Post reported that as soon as Congress had authorized construction of a 700-mile border fence last week, members “rushed to approve separate legislation that ensures it will never be built, at least not as advertised, according to Republican lawmakers and immigration experts.”
Some conservative talk show hosts swallowed the bait and got worked up about it, on air. But Michael Reagan writes:
If they wanted to get the real story – and not the misleading one they read in the October 6 edition of the Post – they could easily have done what I did and called Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-CA, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the man who wrote the bill mandating the building of the 700-mile border fence.
Chairman Hunter knows what he is talking about. He also wrote a bill in the 1990s during the Clinton administration that created the 14-mile-long double fence in San Diego.
The new bill, he told me, uses the same language as his first bill and will have the same effect – the fence will be built despite the Post’s insistence that it won’t. The bill doesn’t say the fence will be built or may be built – it says flatly that it shall be built.
thursday, october 12 2006
3-d jack-o-lanterns
Great pictures and a tutorial to help you find your inner Michelangelo.
Take that, ted
"I know the speaker didn't go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water, and then have a press conference the next day," said Shays, R-4th District, referring to the 1969 incident in which the Massachusetts Democrat drove a car that plunged into the water and a young campaign worker died.
"Dennis Hastert didn't kill anybody," he added.
Shays' words were emblematic of the increasing bitterness over the fallout from the conduct of former Florida Rep. Mark Foley, a scandal that may not be helping Democrats as much as they had hoped.
Nor did Hastert fondle Kathleen Willey in the White House. Nor was he accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick.
dirty harry
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn't personally owned the property for three years, property deeds show.
In the process, Reid did not disclose to Congress an earlier sale in which he transferred his land to a company created by a friend and took a financial stake in that company, according to records and interviews.
The Nevada Democrat's deal was engineered by Jay Brown, a longtime friend and former casino lawyer whose name surfaced in a major political bribery trial this summer and in other prior organized crime investigations. He's never been charged with wrongdoing _ except for a 1981 federal securities complaint that was settled out of court.
Ah yes, the culture of corruption. Let's see...the ranking Democrat in the Senate looking dirty--you'd expect the media to be all over this story like Mark Foley on a Page. Right?
reuters can't spell
As noted in Best of the Web, this was in a Reuters story on Monday :
Pakistan's President Perez Mascara and Afghan President Humid Kara clashed during a visit to the United States in September, criticizing each other's efforts to fight al Qaeda and the Taliban.
how now, dow?
NEW YORK (AP) -- Stocks advanced Thursday, with the Dow Jones industrial average crossing 11,900 for the first time, after big consumer names like McDonald's Corp. gave investors hope that earnings would be strong despite a slowing economy.
The widely followed Dow index rose as high as 11,917.68 Thursday, topping a previous intraday high of 11,872.94. On Tuesday, the Dow closed at 11,867.17, its fourth record close in two weeks. Also Thursday, the Standard & Poor's 500 index reached a 52-week intraday high.
Notice how they work in "slowing economy" into a good news story. As we noted a couple days ago:
The Labor Department released its September jobs report on Friday, and some wags are calling it the "whoops" report. The "whoops" is a reference to the upward revision of 810,000 previously undetected jobs that Labor now says were created in the U.S. economy in the 12 months through March 2006.
So instead of 5.8 million new jobs over the past three years, the U.S. economy has created 6.6 million. That's a lot more than a rounding error, more than the number of workers in the entire state of New Hampshire. What's going on here?
remember those "record" deficits?
Bush's spending habits do not warm the hearts of conservatives, but the incessant whine about record deficits by Democrats, amplified by the news media, were always bogus because they were expressed in absolute terms.
Consider this: my first house cost $27,500 in 1977. As a percentage of our income, that seemed like a lot. Today, an average car costs that much. So the only meaningful measure of deficits or surpluses, is relative to the size of the whole economy.
...the actual 2006 deficit is down to 1.9 percent of the gross domestic product. They said that is below the 40-year average deficit of about 2.3percent of the GDP, which measures the value of all U.S. goods and services.
Democrats counter:
Democrats say the narrowing of the deficit will be temporary because when 78 million baby boomers retire, the cost of Social Security and the Medicare health care program for the elderly will soar.
No kidding. But blame for that belongs to FDR who structured Social Security like a Ponzi scheme.
President Bush was the first president with the guts to try to fix the Social Security mess and met with unified Democrat resistance. To bitch about the problem is cheeky in the extreme.
Senator Dick Durbin asks the rally: "Do you want to turn your retirement security over to Wall Street?" I want shout, "If by Wall Street do mean you would I rather put my FICA money into a Vanguard index fund, then the answer is oh, lord, please yes, yes yes!"
Next time you get a statement from Social Security outlining your predicted benefits, read this:
*Your estimated benefits are based on current law. Congress has made changes to the law in the past and can do so at any time. The law governing benefit amounts may change because, by 2040, the payroll taxes collected will be enough to pay only about 74 percent of scheduled benefits.
In other words, you are guaranteed nothing. Congress can change the deal at any time. Durbin counts this as "retirement security."
IRAs invested in index mutual funds are as secure as the nation's economy because you are buying a slice of thousands of companies. The transaction and administrative costs are minimal (big bad Wall Street let's you escape) and YOU OWN YOUR INVESTMENT.
Chile switched from a Ponzi system to one where individuals own their retirement accounts. Why can't we?
Just look at the dancing fools in the video.
wednesday, october 11 2006
hysteria from reality-based community threatens public health
An iron lung ward filled with polio victims in 1953.
A few years ago hysterical liberal nitwits started fretting about the side effects of vaccinations, going on TV chat shows and scaring mothers into not immunizing their children.
The fact is that vaccinations are imperfect. Every year a very small number of children are harmed by the polio vaccine; some die. But this is outweighed by the massive public good done by the vaccine. Before Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, every year thousands of Americans contracted the crippling disease.
Liberals define themselves as communitarians. What can be more so that vaccinating your child, even at a miniscule risk, to support the health of the greater public?
Now whooping cough is making a comeback because parents are opting out of vaccinating their kids.
faith-based physics: a great ball of string
String theory posits a universe comprised of vibrating strings of energy or “tiny one-dimensional rips in the smooth fabric of space.” It's a complicated idea few can grasp:
...for string theory to make mathematical sense the world must have nine spatial dimensions. Why don’t we notice the six extra dimensions? Because, according to string theory, they are curled up into some microgeometry that makes them invisible.
It's been the hot theory in physics for nearly 35 years, as the New Yorker notes. So hot that anyone who disbelieves in string theory ("deniers"?) have little future in physics.
At the Institute for Advanced Study, the director and nearly all of the particle physicists with permanent positions are string theorists. Eight of the nine MacArthur fellowships awarded to particle physicists over the years have gone to string theorists.
Every year, around eighty people receive Ph.D.s in particle physics, but only around ten of them can expect to get permanent jobs in the field. In this hypercompetitive environment, the only hope for a young theoretical physicist is to curry favor by solving a set problem in string theory.
String theory is under attack as being untestable and so ungainly:
"it has repeatedly had to be jury-rigged in the face of new difficulties, so that it has become a Rube Goldberg machine—or, rather, a vast landscape of them."
This spotlights the group-think and politics that pervade science, just like in corporate boardrooms and political parties. And it reminds us once again to mistrust "consensus" in science, whether it be about vibrating strings or global warming.
tivo's "self destruct" button
Customers are not happy.
bruxellabad
From Brussels Journal:
Since last Sunday’s local elections in Belgium more than one fifth (21.8%) of the municipal councillors in Brussels, the capital of Europe, are immigrants of non-European origin. Most of them are Muslims, and most of them have been elected as Socialists.
The non-European immigrants vote overwhelmingly Socialist, owing to the fact that many of them are rentseekers who migrated to Western Europe attracted by the subsidies of its generous welfare states. The immigrants have become the electoral life insurance of European Socialism.
hysterical video
Madeleine Albright won't like this. Rumor has it that this was made by David Zucker ("Airplane") for the GOP but they rejected it.
On a more serious note:
... the [Democrat] critique of the Bush Administration boils down to three points. First, as former Sen. Sam Nunn told the New York Times, "we started at the wrong end of the 'axis of evil,'" his point being the Administration should have somehow "dealt with" Pyongyang first and Baghdad later.
Next, say the critics, the Bush Administration has wrongly tried to engage North Korea diplomatically through the "six party" framework, when only the bilateral talks demanded by Kim Jong-Il will do. "Bush aided and abetted the outsourcing of American jobs," says Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean in one of his cheaper jabs, "and now he's outsourced our diplomacy as well." Finally, the President is said to have actually provoked North Korea into building a bomb by naming it to the axis of evil.
But since when does the Democratic Party, to say nothing of Dr. Dean, advocate U.S. unilateralism when unending multilateral approaches are available? And how does Mr. Nunn's suggestion that President Bush should have dealt with North Korea first among the axis of evil square with the idea that it was terribly bad form to describe such an "axis" in the first place?
In fact, the more closely one examines these claims the more disingenuous they become. The CIA strongly suspected North Korea had developed nuclear weapons as far back as the early 1990s. Gordon Corera, the security correspondent for BBC News, has amassed significant evidence that North Korea may have already tested a nuclear device--in 1998, as the sixth in a set of Pakistani tests that year.
As for the idea that direct talks between Washington and Pyongyang might open the way toward a settlement, this flatly ignores North Korea's cheating on the last such settlement, the so-called "Yongbyong Agreed Framework" of 1994. American diplomats have never lacked for opportunities to talk to the North Koreans, formally or privately. What they lack are interlocutors who can be trusted to honor their commitments or cajoled into abandoning their weapons.
tuesday, october 10 2006
yes, but gay bashing?
Politics is a back-alley knife fight. That will never change. Consider this, from Political Diary:
Politics is all about timing. Apparently, the liberals behind Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the group that received information about Mark Foley's sexual instant messages as far back as April, originally planned to unleash its blockbuster a bit later in the 2008 election cycle.
The American Spectator reports that a political consultant with ties to the Democratic National Committee told the magazine: "I'm hearing the Foley story wasn't supposed to drop until about ten days out of the election. It was supposed to be the coup de grace, not the first shot."
But as another Democratic operative told the magazine, the political climate at the end of September was suddenly turning ominous. "Bush's national security speeches were getting traction beyond the base, gas prices were dropping, economic outlook surveys were positive. Republicans were back to [holding enough House] seats for a 15-seat majority.
In the Senate, it looked like a wash." All that may have played a role in prompting Democratic partisans to speed up the use of opposition research on Mr. Foley that had been put aside for later in the campaign. "Republicans had to have known we'd be looking to change the national debate," says a House Democrat leadership aide.
So a gay sex scandal trumps matters of life, death and national security in the national debate? Aren't liberals sensitive to gay bashing? Some are:
"And yet when I watch the liberal punsters on television, I can't help suspecting that they're taking advantage of the homophobia in the culture in order to make slightly more of this episode than it may in fact turn out to be worth.
When I watch the Democratic politicians smack their lips, I can't help wondering whether they've forgotten that this is the sort of scandal that can happen to either party, and there's no evidence that Democrats would have handled it any better. In short, I can't help thinking that the homophobia is catching" -- Hollywood screenwriter and liberal activist Nora Ephron, commenting at HuffingtonPost.com on the Foley scandal.
Now it's time to change the "national debate" back with "97 Reasons Democrats Are Weak On Defense And Can't Be Trusted To Govern In Wartime."
Today's Democrats are nothing like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, who with courage and decisive action kept on top of their jobs and aggressively confronted one national defense crisis after another.
Jimmy Carter, elected during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and (1) believing Americans had an inordinate fear of communism, (2) lifted U.S. citizens' travel bans to Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia and (3) pardoned draft evaders.
President Carter (4) also stopped B-1 bomber production, (5) gave away our strategically located Panama Canal and (6) made human rights the central focus of his foreign policy.
That led Carter, a Democrat, (7) to make a monumental miscalculation and withdraw U.S. support for our long-standing Mideast military ally, the Shah of Iran. (8) Carter simply didn't like the Shah's alleged mistreatment of imprisoned Soviet spies.
The Soviets, (9) with close military ties to Iraq, a 1,500-mile border with Iran and eyes on Afghanistan, aggressively tried to encircle, infiltrate, subvert and overthrow Iran's government for its oil deposits and warm-water ports several times after Russian troops attempted to stay there at the end of WWII. These were all communist threats to Iran that Carter never understood.
Carter (10) thought Ayatollah Khomeini, a Muslim exile in Paris, would make a fairer Iranian leader than the Shah because he was a religious man. (11) With U.S. support withdrawn, the Shah was overthrown, and (12) the ayatollah returned and promptly proclaimed Iran an Islamic nation. (13) Executions followed. Palestinian hit men were hired to secretly eliminate the opposition so the religious mullahs couldn't be blamed.
crazy like a fox
A survey of the Washington press corps found that 89 percent voted for Bill Clinton in 1992. It's true, most reporters do their level best to tell a story straight and present both sides. To use Fox-speak, most reporters I know strive to be "fair and balanced."
But they can't escape the presumptions that underlie their stories, and they are likely not to notice the presumptions when all the newsroom management thinks alike. That's how illegal immigrants became "undocumented workers" and global warming became a certainty.
New York Times court reporter Linda Greenhouse provided a perfect example last month when NPR broadcast remarks she made during a Harvard speech. Ignoring a Times rule that prohibits reporters from publicly stating personal views that could not run in stories, Greenhouse bemoaned the Bush administration's creation of "law-free zones" at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Haditha, "the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism" and the "ridiculous" proposed fence on the Mexican border.
Some might argue that the Times policy is silly, as all reporters have opinions. The paper's public editor, Byron Calame, argues that the rule demonstrates "a determination to be an impartial observer by keeping personal opinions separate and private -- not pretending they don't exist."
I am struck by the fact that Greenhouse, who parses Supreme Court decisions for America's paper of record, told Calame the Harvard remarks were not her opinion, but "statements of fact." If Greenhouse cannot distinguish between fact and opinion, why should I trust her reportage on court decisions?
bada bing
That's rich kid Steve Bing, one argument for confisicatory inheritance taxes (other arguments being Ted Kennedy and Jay Rockefeller.) Steve has lotsa dough, which has made him a player in Hollywood and liberal Democrat circles.
Bing is wont to spread his seed, then deny the deed. Actress Elizabeth Hurley had to bring a paternity suit to get him to claim their bastard. God knows, we need his guidance on public policy matters.
So Mr. Bing has contributed $40 million to promote his latest bastard, Prop. 87 in California. Yesterday a commercials starring Al Gore began running here:
"Here is the truth the oil companies won't tell you," Gore says in the 30-second spot, which started airing Monday. "Half of the foreign oil they're importing to California is from the Middle East. As a result, California is dangerously dependent on foreign oil."
Okaaay, but California exports a whole lot of food. Doesn't that make consumers of California produce "dangerously dependent" on foreign salad?
And what of Prop 87?
Proposition 87 would tax companies drilling for oil in California until it has generated $4 billion. The money would be set aside for loans, grants and subsidies to promote alternative fuels and more energy-efficient vehicles.
That is, tax those who produce oil in California, to fund a bureaucracy to fund fad energy projects (wind, solar*) all because of foreign oil from the mideast? Chasing off local production will increase the demand for imported oil. Where's the logic?
Naturally, oil companies are spending big to defeat the measure. And naturally, the Left paints them as villains.
But oil companies have plenty of good company on the Left's Shit List: pharmaceutical companies that produce drugs to save their lives, developers who build the places they work and live, the military that keeps the country safe, the police that keep their neigbhorhoods secure, the retailers who bring low priced goods to the middle class etc.
* Which can't find funding in capital markets because people are not stupid with their money.
talk it to death
Nancy Pelosi in 1994:
“The United States does not need a multi-billion-dollar national missile defense against the possibility of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile.
“What we need is a strong nonproliferation policy with other nations to combat the most serious threat to our national security and to the safety of the world – weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists who would smuggle them into our cities.
“In order to succeed, we must be consistent. We must stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction at its source, as well as dealing with its end users.
Policy. Just write up some papers and get people to sign. Walk away feeling good. No one gets hurt. At least not right away.
Clinton signed a deal with North Korea and they promptly violated it.
how one dead patient saved millions...
In 1984 physician George Lopez was working in an intensive care unit when a patient arrived with an infection that impairs the heart's ability to pump blood. Lopez began giving medication intravenously and told the patient's wife, "He's coming home soon." But later a nurse called to say that the patient's IV tube had slipped out of the needle port, pouring medicine onto the bed. "I worked for hours," Lopez says, "but he died."
Lopez went to make a difficult phone call to the patient's wife and, noticing the phone jack in the wall, gave the cord a tug. "This is crazy," Lopez thought. "If this comes out, all I lose is a call, yet it's more secure than the IV." That night he sketched out a new system with a locking device to keep the tube in place. After raising $1 million from doctors and nurses, he launched ICU Medical in San Clemente, Calif., in 1986.
...and a doctor let millions die
Millions of women and their babies died in childbirth for a century after the invention of forceps. As Atul Gawande writes in the New Yorker:
The story of the forceps is both extraordinary and disturbing, because it is the story of a life-saving idea that was kept secret for more than a century. The instrument was developed in the seventeenth century by Peter Chamberlen (1560-1631), the first of a long line of French Huguenots who delivered babies in London. It looked like a pair of big metal salad tongs, with two blades shaped to fit snugly around a baby’s head and handles that locked together with a single screw in the middle.
It let doctors more or less yank stuck babies out and, carefully applied, was the first technique that could save both the baby and the mother. The Chamberlens knew that they were onto something, and they resolved to keep the device a family secret. Whenever they were called in to help a mother in obstructed labor, they ushered everyone else out of the room and covered the mother’s lower half with a sheet or a blanket so that even she couldn’t see what was going on. They kept the secret of the forceps for three generations.
In 1670, Hugh Chamberlen, in the third generation, tried and failed to sell it to the French government. Late in his life, he divulged it to an Amsterdam-based surgeon, Roger van Roonhuysen, who kept the technique within his own family for sixty more years. The secret did not get out until the mid-eighteenth century. Once it did, it gained wide acceptance. At the time of Princess Charlotte’s failed delivery, in 1817, her obstetrician, Sir Richard Croft, was widely reviled for failing to use forceps. He shot himself to death not long afterward.
"whoops"
The Labor Department released its September jobs report on Friday, and some wags are calling it the "whoops" report. The "whoops" is a reference to the upward revision of 810,000 previously undetected jobs that Labor now says were created in the U.S. economy in the 12 months through March 2006.
So instead of 5.8 million new jobs over the past three years, the U.S. economy has created 6.6 million. That's a lot more than a rounding error, more than the number of workers in the entire state of New Hampshire. What's going on here?
Our hypothesis has been that, due to the changing nature of the U.S. economy, the Labor Department's business establishment survey has been undercounting job creation from small businesses and self-employed entrepreneurs. That job growth has been better captured in Labor's companion household survey, which reported 271,000 new jobs in September after 250,000 new jobs in August, and a very healthy total of 2.54 million new jobs in the past year.
monday, october 9 2006
a disturbing thought
From Oak Leaf at Polipundit:
Right now there is considerable debate as to how “big” the nuclear device was but that should not be the concern. The real question is to why there would be a test at this moment in time.
There are two well known facts concerning North Korea. They are in an economic vise and they are an arms merchant.
The larger concern amongst my circles is that this was a “small test” instead of a larger test. Was this a test of a small portable device?
This “small test” was simply an advertisment to buyers that North Korea has a viable nuclear device. Buyers would never purchase a device that “works” on paper. They want a device that the world verifies.
Sadly a naval blockade can not block the transfer of knowledge inside the human mind.
So, who's doing the oppressing?
THE vast majority of people in Britain are officially oppressed, according to a report that claims we have become a “nation of victims”.
The study calculates that 73 per cent of Britons are members of officially recognised “victim groups”, including the disabled, women, ethnic minorities and homosexuals. Each group is given government support, including protective legislation.
The report, We’re (Nearly) All Victims Now, by the socially conservative think- tank Civitas, gives warning that the rise of a “victimocracy” undermines democracy because people are no longer considered equal under law.
This recalls a statement by a Miami politician in the '80s, who declared the majority of people living in Miami were minorities.
hugo, hugo got to go
Thousands rally against Hugo Chavez in Caracas.
big dig fiasco: big gas tax increase
A special state [Massachusetts] commission is expected to call for a 9-cent-agallon increase in the gas tax and reinstatement of tolls that had been eliminated in Western Massachusetts and in West Newton, according to two panel members.
the man behind the tigers
Detroit Tigers, that is.
Meanwhile, someone posits a Curse of the Carpetbagger for the Yankees. (Her name rhymes with pillory.)
broken string
The most ambitious idea ever outlined by scientists has suffered a remarkable setback. It has been dismissed as a theoretical cul-de-sac that has wasted the academic lives of hundreds of the world's cleverest men and women.
This startling accusation has been made by frustrated physicists, including several Nobel prize winners, who say that string theory - which seeks to outline the entire structure of the universe in a few brief equations - is an intellectual dead end.
As one scientist put it: 'The uncritical promotion of string theory is now damaging science.'
bad taste kerry
American Thinker watched Bill Maher interview Sen. John Kerry:
After telling Maher that he and Te-RAY-zuh went to Vermont to celebrate her birthday, Kerry and the condescending comic had the following exchange:
Maher: “You could have went [sic] to New Hampshire and killed 2 birds with one stone.”
Kerry: “I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” [delighted applause and laughter from the crowd]
Clearly this offensive statement has one thing going for it. For once Mr. Long-Story-Longer said something in less than five minutes, the meaning of which was crystal clear. It was designed to appeal to the people of the ilk of the silly passel of goofs who created the embarrassment that is Ned Lamont. It echoes the crazed musings of Cindy Sheehan.
In her book Peace Mom, released last month, she writes of traveling back in time to kill the infant George W. Bush. Others on the left speak, write, and even make a film about the assasination of George W. Bush. Floating the fantasy of assasinating him plants the suggestion in the minds of millions. Just like seeing a school shooting on TV seems to trigger others to act out their own fantasy, so, too, this indulgence in sending out the message of assasination could have unfortunate consequences.
If dissent is so stifled in this country, why does a senator, and onetime presidential candidate, find it so easy to joke about assassinating the president?
sunday, october 8 2006
dixie twits
willam safire on the language of war
...Islamofascism treats the opening Islam as the specifying modifier for the dominant noun, the repugnant ideology of fascism.
What’s a fascist? In 1922, the Italian politician Benito Mussolini turned to a symbol of the ancient Roman imperium, the fasces, which the Penn State professor of classics Daniel Berman informs me was “a bundle” of birch rods and an ax standing for penal authority.
Il Duce’s Partito Nazionale Fascista stood for militarism, social elitism and fierce nationalism, combined with contempt for democracy and anger at the rise of Communism. In Germany soon afterward, Adolf Hitler’s version of fascism — his party was called National Socialism, or Nazi — added to that menacing bundle of sticks a fury against “decadence” represented by the despised weak and intellectual, demanding the replacement of “feminine lamentation” with “virile hatred” of Marxists and, above all, Jews.
But in current usage, fascism is remembered less as an ideology than as a dictatorship employing violent repression at home and military aggression abroad. Because of its anti-Communist beginnings and despite early socialist pretensions, the intolerant “axis” of Rome and Berlin, and later Tokyo, is semantically associated with ultraconservativism. The imprecation fascist has been more often flung at the far right by the extreme left than vice versa.
That’s been changing in recent years. Fascism is not so much taken to be a left or right political ideology; rather, it has become a word defining hate-based practices employed by a totalitarian regime or movement — bundling such punishing birch-whip words as “dictatorial,” “bigoted,” “jack-booted,” “racist,” “sexist,” “power-famished.”
go ahead, say it
With the Dodgers getting swept, USC and UCLA playing football and the weather great, not many people watched the one and only gubanatorial debate between Arnold and what's-his-name. There was this:
"You have been so far for every single tax increase since you have been in public office," Schwarzenegger told Angelides.
At one point, smiling across the stage at his rival, the governor taunted: "I can tell by the joy you see in your eyes when you talk about taxes, you just love to increase taxes…. Look out there right now and just say, 'I love increasing your taxes.' "
air america plunders boys and girls club
The liberal radio network gets a slap on the wrist.
the man who saved us $800 million a year
Refrigerators used to consume 2000 kilowatt-hours per year, now they use 450 kwh. Windows used to let in every ounce of heat that hit them, now the reflect the majority of infra-red light. Light bulbs used to be made of white-hot tungsten, now they're made of cool fluorescent gasses.
All of these innovations, added together, have saved the America $800 billion dollars since the 1950's. All of these innovations were contributed to or created by the laboratory of one man: Dr. Arthur Rosenfeld, an 80 year old particle physicist, who has worked on the physics and policy of energy efficiency in the United States for longer than just about anyone.From 90% efficient motors to low-emissivity windows to compact flourescent light bulbs, Rosenfeld worked on it all. In 1975, during the first oil crisis, he persuaded the U.S. government to create (and place him in charge of) the Center for Building Science, quite possibly making him the world's first EcoGeek. In the next thirty years, hundreds of innovations would spring from the
mother russia is very ill
The LA Times paints a depressing picture of Russia, where annual abortions outpace births by 100,000, AIDS is wiping out people in their prime and alcoholism is rampant. The life expectancy for a Russian man born in 2004 is 59 years.
Although the problems are surfacing in the post-Soviet period, some argue that their cause can be found in communism's willful destruction of generations of the country's most capable and adaptable people.
"Seventy-five years of Bolshevik life in this country led to the formation of a tribe of people which was cultivated to listen to orders, and fulfill them," said Alexander Gorelik, a St. Petersburg physician. Stalinism, he said, aimed for "the planned and gradual physical destruction of the most moral, the most creative group of the population."
"There is such a thing as a will for life. And the whole trouble is that the Russian public in general, and especially the male population, has a big deficiency in this area."
Vyacheslav Pushkarev, a Russian Orthodox priest who oversees several congregations in Siberian villages now too small to have a full-time cleric, said the Soviet system destroyed bodies and spirits in equal proportion.
"We are left with this infection in us, this sickness of degradation in everything around us because we were all part of it," he said. "We're living in a huge bowl here, and we're all getting boiled together."
If things don't change:
Sergei Mironov, chairman of the upper house of Russia's parliament, said last year that if the trend didn't change, the population would fall to 52 million by 2080.
"There will no longer be a great Russia," he said. "It will be torn apart piece by piece, and finally cease to exist."
saturday, october 7 2006
sure to give that sinking feeling
Floor of elevator painted to drop the bottom out. See here.
And check out this time lapse photo of a 767 at night. Good thing it's taking off, not landing.
old movies, new technology
An odd mix of computer technology and old movies combined in a 13-minute video.
vote and win a million
From the Department of Dumb Ideas comes an initiative before Arizona voters that would turn elections into a lottery. By voting, you get a chance at $1 million.
The purpose of this law is to dramatically increase voter turn out in Arizona's elections. This will be done by offering an incentive of possibly winning $1 million to Arizona citizens who vote in the every two years statewide elections.
Some people assume that low voter turnout is a problem. Bill Clinton's Motor Voter law made it simple to register at the DMV, which, by artificially boosting the number of registered voters (many of whom never intended to vote) reduced the percentage of voter turnout. Sumpin' has to be done!
Here's a question for Mark Osterloh MD, the man behind this idiotic notion: Have you ever watched the Jerry Springer Show or Maury Povich? Good. Have you seen the people in the audience? Would you allow any one of them, or all of them as a group, make decisions about your family finances?
No, of course not. There are millions of Americans who cannot name the three branches of government. Thank god most of them do not vote. Bribing them with a chance at a million will not help.
guilt by association
While living in Miami during the '80s, it was amusing to watch Cuban Americans campaign for local office, say dog catcher, by slinging a particular kind of mud. Three days before the election, photographs would circulate showing the candidate having dinner with a man who knew somebody who was a friend of Fidel Castro's maid. Aha! Ruination.
Here in California, Arnold is running for a second term as governor. The Democrats have dug out video of Arnold and Bush campaigning in 2004 and are using it in commercials. Presumably, that's supposed to terminate the Terminator. Not likely.
speaking goof to power
Get this, from the LA Times entertainment section:
In the wake of 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war, it was taboo for a celebrity to criticize President Bush in public. (Look what happened to the Dixie Chicks, who were ostracized when lead singer Natalie Maines made critical comments about the president at a London concert in 2003.)
Ostracize means to be exiled. Last I heard, the Chicks were selling CDs and touring.
But these days, it's become de rigueur among the far left-leaning members of the Hollywood set to bash Bush — in the strongest terms possible.
These days? The taboo lasted about two weeks.
Consider how speaking out destroyed the careers of George Clooney, Neil Young, Harry Belafonte, Chevy Chase (his career was already dead), Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O'Donnell, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, etc.
Sean Penn takes the cake with this bundle of non-sequiturs:
"This is an administration where in the year of Katrina, Exxon Mobil claimed the highest profit margin in the history of world business. It is an administration that belittles, demeans, deceives and indeed kills our brothers, our sisters, our sons and our daughters."
Actually, Exxon Mobil earned record profits, not record margins. Coca-Cola earns higher margins selling sugar water. The profits set a record on record demand for oil, which stands to reason: if you sell a lot of something, you make lots of money.
In the "year of Katrina," a crappy Stars Wars movie grossed $380,262,555 in the USA. Is that Bush's fault, too?
As for belittling, demeaning etc. does "sisters" include the women of Afghanistan who are going to school, holding jobs, voting and holding office because of Bush?
friday, october 6 2006
diagnosis: c.y.a.
Diagnostic errors remain the leading reason - or excuse - for medical malpractice lawsuits by the swarms of hungry sharks which parasitize American's fine physicians - the best physicians in the world. Kevin, MD.
All the more reason for us docs to be irrational - or rationally irrational - in our habits of spending your money (either yours directly, or the insurance company's money - which was your money).
If you have a headache, I am going to order an MRI of your head which will cost you between $700-1100 in my area. I know darn well that you don't have a tumor, but I could be wrong 0.3% of the time. So I'll order the MRI, because you will want me to, and my law suit defensiveness will want me to. Still, I will know that it is poor medicine.
Indeed, I know that your particular pattern of headache, and your exam shows it to be a Common Migraine, and not a tumor, not an aneurysm, not a stroke or subdural, etc. And I know that all sorts of guidelines have been constructed, such as these. Well, you can toss the guidelines for all I care.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article in 2004 about the difficulty of reading mammograms, and making diagnoses.
Joann Elmore, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Washington Harborview Medical Center, once asked ten board-certified radiologists to look at a hundred and fifty mammograms--of which twenty-seven had come from women who developed breast cancer, and a hundred and twenty-three from women who were known to have been healthy.
One radiologist caught eighty-five per cent of the cancers the first time around. Another caught only thirty-seven per cent. One looked at the same X-rays and saw suspicious masses in seventy-eight per cent of the cases.
Another doctor saw "focal asymmetric density" in half of the cancer cases; yet another saw no "focal asymmetric density" at all. There was one particularly perplexing mammogram that three radiologists thought was normal, two thought was abnormal but probably benign, four couldn't make up their minds about, and one was convinced was cancer. (The patient was fine.)
religious nut story of the week
A mother in Georgia wants Harry Potter books banned from schools:
Laura Mallory, a mother of four, told a hearing officer for the Gwinnett County Board of Education on Tuesday that the popular fiction books are an "evil" attempt to indoctrinate children in the Wicca religion.
Okay, we can all chuckle, cluck and feel superior. MSM loves these stories because they reinforce the liberal narrative that religious people are somehow dangerous, an "American Taliban" just itching to take over.
School boards and bias and sensitivity committees review, abridge, and modify texts to delete potentially offensive words, topics, and imagery. Publishers practice self-censorship to sell books in big states.
- Women cannot be depicted as caregivers or doing household chores.
- Men cannot be lawyers or doctors or plumbers. They must be nurturing helpmates.
- Old people cannot be feeble or dependent; they must jog or repair the roof.
- A story that is set in the mountains discriminates against students from flatlands.
- Children cannot be shown as disobedient or in conflict with adults.
- Cake cannot appear in a story because it is not nutritious.
Answer: no one. Behind the scenes politically correct committees (serving both conservatives and liberals) have slowly bled the life out of school text books and curricula.
This is never mocked on the news. The Georgia woman made headlines, but she won't make a difference. The PC police rarely make headlines and make a big, bad difference.
Read for yourself in Diane Ravitch's The Language Police.
2500 casualties in one year -- in france
Radical Muslims in France's housing estates are waging an undeclared "intifada" against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day.
As the interior ministry said that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were "in a state of civil war" with Muslims in the most depressed "banlieue" estates which are heavily populated by unemployed youths of north African origin.
It said the situation was so grave that it had asked the government to provide police with armoured cars to protect officers in the estates, which are becoming no-go zones.
..."We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists. This is not a question of urban violence any more, it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails. You no longer see two or three youths confronting police, you see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their 'comrades' free when they are arrested."
He added: "We need armoured vehicles and water cannon. They are the only things that can disperse crowds of hundreds of people who are trying to kill police and burn their vehicles."
On a positive note, France is considering controlling cigarette smoking in public areas.
thursday, october 5 2006
talk about counter-intuitive
The active ingredient of marijuana could be considerably better at suppressing the abnormal clumping of malformed proteins that is a hallmark of Alzheimer's than any currently approved drugs prescribed for the treatment of the disease.
this never happened to the dixie chicks
Watch genuine supression of free speech as lefty idiots charge the stage at Columbia University to prevent David Gilchrist from being heard. See video here.
Ryan Fukumori, a Columbia junior who took part in the protest, told The New York Sun. "They have no right to be able to speak here."
the democrats' war against the war
Two news items from last week speak volumes about the Democratic Party’s priorities on national security. First, Democratic majorities in the House and Senate -- including all the presidential aspirants -- voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which authorized military tribunals to try terrorist suspects and established guidelines for their aggressive interrogation. Then, late last Thursday, 177 House Democrats voted to thwart the passage of the Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act, which expanded electronic surveillance of terrorists on foreign soil.
Civil liberties dogmatists like the ACLU applauded these obstructionist efforts, but they came to naught. Both pieces of legislation ended up passing -- though the latter act awaits approval by the Senate -- and the only political defeat was borne by the Democratic Party, which was left looking, not for the first time, like a calculating horde of anti-Bush partisans more concerned with frustrating the War on Terror for political gain than fighting it.
Democrats are marshalling their energy for wars against Big Oil, Big Tobacco and Big Pharma, meanwhile getting their regular pre-election boost (sex scandal!) from Big Baloney.
star effluence
Just whose waste is befouling the most celebrity-saturated stretch of California coast? The suspects: Malibu residents whose septic tanks might let what gets flushed down the toilet flow down the hills and into the Pacific.
The strategy: DNA testing and a pledge, if need be, to get court warrants to inspect leaky tanks buried beneath the backyards of Hollywood stars.
new website "rolls"
David Beamer, father of Todd Beamer, who died on United 93 after uttering the words "let's roll," has launched a new website, United to Defeat Terrorism.
bueno fences make bueno neighbors
Mexico's EcoAlberto amusement park lets the well heeled play illegal alien for a day. "Burla a la Migra"
roughly translates to "fool the border patrol." Such is their respect for the United States.
Things are getting goofy south of the border down Mexico way. After President Bush signed the bill authorizing a 700-mile border fence, the Mexican pols popped a cork:
The Mexican government said Wednesday it may go the United Nations to challenge U.S. plans to build hundreds of miles of fences on its southern border.
Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez told a news conference the proposal to put up what he called a wall was an "offense."
Asked if he would take the issue up with the United Nations, an action some Mexican lawmakers have asked for, Derbez replied, "Without a doubt, we are examining with the foreign relations legal team what options are open at an international level and we will take them."
The UN cannot stop genocide in Darfur, much less intrude on a sovereign nation's right to enforce its borders.
Outgoing President Vicente Fox has called the fence plan "shameful" and compared it to the Berlin Wall.
No, Vicente, the Berlin Wall was built to keep people inside, like a prison wall. The East German commies shot their fellow citizens who tried to flee in the back.
The border fence is meant to keep people out, like the door to su casa. Do you leave your front door unlocked, señor?
Instead of freaking out, Mexico's ruling class should fix their corrupt country (of course, that would mean themselves). But no, they regard sending their people north an entitlement -- and a source of amusement.
Mexico has an amusement park in Hildalgo state called EcoAlberto where well-heeled Mexicans pay $15 admission to play illegal alien for an evening. The park is run by ex-illegal immigrants and partially funded by the government.
Getting down and dirty, Mexican tourists act out crossing the Rio Grande, dodging the Border Patrol, jumping over walls, running through tunnels, hopping onto pickup trucks and hiding in the weeds. Organizers say it's supposed to be an "uplifting" experience, but highway billboards around Mexico advertise it a little differently. "Make fun of the Border Patrol" and "Cross the border as an extreme sport," they advertise.
This reflects something else in the culture: Well-off Mexicans are leaving good jobs to cross illegally for the fun of it. It's an unreported trend in the wake of the Mexican government's long-running wink at illegal immigration, as it berates the U.S. for its insensitivity.
Illegal Mexican immigrants risk their lives and leave behind loved ones because of their desperate straits. Instead of fixing the problems that cause that desperation, Mexico's well-heeled turn that desperation into a source of fun.
Can you imagine "Ghetto World" in the US? A place where Todd and Nancy from Omaha get to role play as pimps, bitches and ho's, smoking crack, capping pigs and doing drive-bys? Nope, neither can I.
JB
speaking of mexico
...RedState busts MSM for making Justice Scalia sound insensitive.
wednesday, october 4 2006
bob woodward told me
...that publishing a book one month before elections with concocted quotes that damn President Bush for (fill in the blank) would guarantee him broad, fawning coverage in the mainstream media -- Charlie Rose, 60 Minutes, Fresh Air etc. -- and that would sell a lot of books. And make Bob feel important, too.
Meanwhile, Brent Scowcroft, a subject of Woodward's latest bestseller said:
"I have spoken to Bob Woodward a number of times about a variety of subjects over the years, but I did not agree to be interviewed for his latest book. Further, there are statements in the book, directly or implicitly attributed to me, that did not and never could have come from me. I never discuss any personal conversations that I may have with President George H.W. Bush, and he never discusses with me any conversations that he has with President George W. Bush."
just about sex
The furor over Republican Congressman (now-ex Congressman) Mark Foley and his randy gay emails to former Congressional pages has Democrats smelling blood a month before election day. They want heads to roll and safe seats to be vacated. It's perfectly disgusting, all of it.
Which reminds us of another disgusting episode involving a gay Congressman, one Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts.
Frank, one of two openly gay members of Congress, confirmed Friday that he paid Gobie for sex, hired him with personal funds as an aide and wrote letters on congressional stationery on his behalf to Virginia probation officials, but Frank said he fired Gobie when he learned that clients were visiting the apartment.
Frank, a leading House liberal, likened himself to Henry Higgins, who in "Pygmalion" tries to transform a cockney waif into a member of English society. Gobie dismissed that as "garbage." "This is not the case of the poor waif who is being sheltered," Gobie said. "This was the first time he felt good in a relationship. Here's a guy who didn't have a social life until he was 45."
They met on April Fool's Day 1985. [Frank] answered a classified ad in the Washington Blade, the local gay weekly. "Exceptionally good-looking, personable, muscular athlete is available. Hot bottom plus large endowment equals a good time."
Then in his third term, the 45-year-old representative had not yet stated his homosexuality publicly. He paid Gobie $80 in cash for sex.
Gobie ran a call boy operation from Barney's townhouse.
"He knew exactly what I was doing," Gobie said. "It was pretty obvious. If he had to come home early {from work}, he would call home to be sure the coast was clear . . . . He was living vicariously through me. He said it was kind of a thrill, and if he had been 20 years younger he might be doing the same thing."
Was Frank forced to resign? No, he was reprimanded by the House. A few years hence, during the debate over impeaching Bill Clinton, Frank argued for censure instead:
"I would tell you that having been reprimanded by this House of Representatives, where I'm so proud to serve, was no triviality. It is something that, when people write about me, they still write about. It is not something that's a matter of pride. I wish I could go back and undo it."
Ah yes, the pain of censure stung so badly he reminded everyone about it. And, like an actor who confesses drug addiction on Oprah and receives applause for bravery, Barney Frank was applauded for being brave enough to remind everyone of his deep shame.
Surreal.
senator home breaker
It's not just men in Washington behaving badly. Democrat Senator Maria Cantwell apparently is no saint, either. Blogger Sound Politics dug deep into public records for an extensive report.
The Seattle Times has recently reported on the close ties between Sen. Maria Cantwell and former boyfriend, boss and campaign consultant, lobbyist Ron Dotzauer. Begging explanation is a $15,000-$50,000 personal loan to Dotzauer reported in Cantwell's financial disclosures since 2001. (See Times articles here, here and here).
The loan was apparently extended to help Dotzauer through messy divorce litigation. The Times didn't mention that the court file, oddly, was entirely sealed. I had the file unsealed last Thursday. Cantwell is identified as the "other woman".
There's much more.
new york democrat billed taxpayers for phone sex
nobel for rna technique
Stanford Professor Andrew Fire and colleague Craig Mello of the University of Massachusetts were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of how tiny molecules of RNA can turn off genes like a switch -- creating a powerful tool for molecular biologists and blazing a trail toward new kinds of drugs to treat diseases as diverse as cancer and AIDS.
If you want to understand what they discovered and how it works, PBS's Nova Science Now has a wonderful video explaining it all. This is public television at its best, explaining esoteric concepts in informative, funny way.
For some reason, the high-bandwith Windows Media version distorts the image. Choose Quicktime or Real instead.
tuesday, october 3 2006
perky comes in third
CBS's Katie Couric-anchored newscast has fallen to third place in a three-way race for viewers among the broadcast evening newscasts, triggering an exuberant news release from CBS News marveling at Couric's unprecedented double-digit, across-the-board gains in her first month and celebrating her victory over the decades-old ratings curse that has plagued new anchors.
Give CBS an Emmy for spin.
wind-shaped pavilion
A design proposal for a structure that changes shape with the wind. See other images here.
hugo chavez's gashose of lies
Panic has set in at Venezuela’s state oil company with the spectacular exit of 7-Eleven from the Citgo gasoline-station label. The PR damage is so bad that the entire brand may be a total loss. Indy gas station after indy gas station are yanking ties to the Venezuelan dictator-controlled oil company.
This follows 7-Eleven’s verbally spectacular pullout, a U.S. consumer boycott, as well as Citgo’s own of pulling of the Citgo label from about 1800 stations that the Venezuelan energy company could no longer supply due to crumbling productive capacity. Which is a shame, because it was a good company and it had a superior product. Chavez threw it all away. He never knew the corporate - or any other - meaning of the word ‘goodwill.’
deutsche propaganda
File this one away next time you're fretting about "what the world thinks of us" (hey, it happens to some people). German television is telling its viewers that the US is so desperate for soldiers, it is sending convicts to Iraq.
quick: don't think of a black elephant
The new racism in America stinks. The whole revolting "little George Allen maybe said the "N" word 30-odd years in the past" pile of crap pushed out by his political rival over the last few days has filled me with a new found revulsion for our politics.
It seems that every time I think I've seen the bottom of American politics today, that bottom drops away revealing whole new stygian depths lurking deeper below. Hence, I've decided to opt out of my quest to be elected President for one week -- wherein I'd get some needful things done before resigning to let my veep and party take the heat. And just to make sure I never get elected, please excuse me while I commit a racial crime.
My crime is this: by writing out the following word, "nigger," I have just committed a social crime more heinous than smoking a cigarette within three miles of a day-care center. But what is done, sigh, is done.
I've done many thing in my life that have made me potentially unelectable to any office in the United States.
...
It is not, mind you, that "The N-Word" is forbidden or never heard in this fair land at this time. On the contrary, "nigger" is spoken, sung, shouted and roared from the rooftops of our culture to an extent I have never witnessed in all my decades.
The word is blasted across the blank forebrain of our culture every minute of every hour of every day. Not only can it be bought in huge quantities at every on and offline record/DVD store in the country, it is also blasted into our city streets by large vehicles mounting sound systems that can drop a charging rhino at 100 yards and cause small dogs to implode in penthouses high above our boulevards. At vast nocturnal gatherings of our most vital and hyper-sexual young people, the word is drummed out in endless celebratory chants as all assembled shake, shake, shake their money makers to the non-stop N-chants of our perpetually preening princes of pop.
Read it all.
dead white european men not happy
The second European Enlightenment of the late 18th century followed from the earlier spirit of the Renaissance. For all the excesses and arrogance in its thinking that pure reason might itself dethrone religion — as if science could explain all the mysteries of the human condition — the Enlightenment nevertheless established the Western blueprint for a humane and ordered society.
But now all that hard-won effort of some 2,500 years is at risk. The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation.
What would a Socrates, Galileo, Descartes, or Locke believe of the present decay in Europe — that all their bold and courageous thinking, won at such a great cost, would have devolved into such cheap surrender to fanaticism?Just think: Put on an opera in today’s Germany, and have it shut down, not by Nazis, Communists, or kings, but by the simple fear of Islamic fanatics.
Write a novel deemed critical of the Prophet Mohammed, as did Salman Rushdie, and face years of ostracism and death threats — in the heart of Europe no less.
Compose a film, as did Theo Van Gogh, and find your throat cut in “liberal” Holland.
Or better yet, sketch a cartoon in postmodern Denmark, and then go into hiding.
tip: don't sit behind roach guy on coaster
Here's one for the annals of PR:
Customers willing to eat a live 3-inch-long Madagascar hissing cockroach will be escorted to the front of the line at both the Tatsu roller coaster and Brutal Planet attraction during opening weekend of Fright Fest at the same Six Flags California park that is trying to change its image to attract a family crowd.
"We have 10 cockroaches per ride for anyone willing to try it," said park spokeswoman Connie Lujan.
Six Flags is hoping eager guests will bite at the new promotion offered at several of its theme parks across the nation - including Magic Mountain - despite protests from animal-rights groups.
So Magic Mountain has 1) gotten it's name in the paper (and here) and 2) reminded everyone who reads the story how freakin' long you have to stand in line.
Will there be stories about the folks in the row behind getting recycled roach blown back at them?
monday, october 2 2006
tighten up
As baseball begins its playoffs, the award for twitchiest batter of MLB goes to the Dodger's Nomar Garciaparra. As a Dodger fan I had a choice between being bothered by his twitches or amused. I chose the latter.
The LA Times Column One article on Saturday described it thus (remember, this is for each pitch):
Adjust red arm band on right arm. Tap home plate with bat. Then, quickly touch helmet bill, end of bat, then back to helmet bill. Sometimes, especially if it's his first time at bat in the game, he'll make the sign of the cross across his jersey.
Next comes a synchronized dance of glove pulling and cleat digging. While balancing his bat on his right shoulder, he yanks his batting glove with his left hand. Then, the right hand crosses over his left and it tugs on the left-hand glove. Repeat four times at least.
Meanwhile, like a cat kneading its claws into the carpet, he twists and sinks his cleats into the box while rotating his bat in tight counterclockwise circles.
Then, he's ready to hit.
He insists it is routine, not superstition, that makes him do it. And he won't even address whether his tics are a symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder, as some fans have wondered. (Even Wikipedia, the user-generated online encyclopedia, speculates, "Supposedly his strange pre-pitch routine is caused by Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.")
"I'm just doing it to get everything tight," Garciaparra said during batting practice on a recent afternoon at Dodger Stadium. "I like everything tight, that's all it is, really."
encouraging signs
Saudi Arabian TV show mocks religious extremists:
In Wednesday night's installment, a man was shown going to a police station in search of his missing nephew, only to be told that the youth had joined a terror organization. The uncle leaves shocked and tearful.
The scene then shifts to a fundamentalist academy where gullible young men are being trained. The nephew is shown learning how to disguise himself in women's robes and adapt feminine mannerisms, despite a burgeoning mustache.
Later, he chats with a peer who says he has used a suicide belt nine times — and reassures the gullible nephew that he didn't feel much pain when it exploded.
The scene then shifts to a graduation ceremony where bearded and robed militants are shown chanting "God is Great" as they take their seats. Meanwhile, a chorus of white robed men draped in ammunition belts and brandishing rifles take the stage while chanting that religion will protect them.
A smiling, long-haired blond beauty in a gauzy evening gown was MC-ing the event. "We won her in an attack," explained the chief militant to his scandalized colleague.
discovery hd atlas: china
Discovery's high definition channel has quickly become a favorite of ours, with documentary series such as Extreme Engineering and more. Last night debuted an ambitious series called Discovery Atlas, which features two-hour shows about a given country. They began with China.
The visuals are gorgeous -- if you have high def, this channel makes the most of it. The content of the show recalls the text inside National Geographic: adequate and avoiding controversy.
A report on the "new" China calls for historical context. When visiting rice growing peasants in south China, they mention the famine that killed millions in 1959. One farmer spoke of her grandmother starving to death.
No mention was made of how the famine came about. Bad weather? No, bad economics by Chairman Mao and his commie thugs.
The Great Leap Forward was initiated and led by Mao, and carried out by the Communist Party of China from 1958 to early 1962. Mao believed that progress and its resulting abundance of goods, if implemented fearlessly, could come in great leaps and bounds. The plan is generally agreed to have failed in its intentions, leading to millions of deaths plus widespread economic dislocation, and is widely regarded both in and out of China as an unmitigated policy disaster.
Disaster indeed. How else to describe 30-40 million dead?
The show visited Hong Kong but never noted it had been a prosperous British colony until 1997 and a bastion of unfettered, free-market capitalism. When Hong Kong was turned over to the Chinese, many feared it would be turned into an economic backwater like the mainland. Instead, the mainland is coming to resemble Hong Kong.
The commies, who still rule without public consent, were smart enough (eventually) to realize that "great leaps" were possible when individuals were given the freedom to pursue personal wealth. The sudden unleashing of human initiative and entrepreneurship on this grand scale (1.3 billion people) is an amazing story, maybe one unique in history.
Astute observers might note that China for 40 years was a vast economic experiment. First, try a central government that dictates every economic detail of the country. When that produces poverty, misery and mass death, let the free market choose economic choices. That produces a dynamic economy and vast amounts of new wealth.
Alas, busybody liberals the world over fail to see the lessons learned.
rain, sweet rain
When it doesn't rain for five or six months straight, the first wet stuff of the season is an event. In southern California, October is the first month when rain is theoretically possible, usually in the latter part of the month. Sometimes the first rains are in January.
But yesterday, Oct.1, we got rain, and not just drizzle, but a downpour. Like kids rushing out to greet the season's first snowflake, we all grabbed our rain jackets and went for a walk, soaking up the smell of clean air.
Our dogs were not so impressed. Miles took three steps outside, gave a what-the-@#^!! look and scrambled back indoors.
Firefighters rejoiced.
sunday, october 1 2006
burt's book publishes today
A new edition of Burt Prelutsky's Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from San Francisco is being published today.
Amazon writes: "For years," Burt Prelutsky says, "the ranks of the Right were so bereft of amusing people they had to point to William F. Buckley Jr. as their token funnyman. Finally, thank God, P. J. O'Rourke came along. Now he was really funny. I mean, on purpose.
So begins the man who invented political incorrectness. In this delightful social commentary and on just about everything the Left does that offends him, he brings a biting wit."
Burt will be doing a book signing in the LA area this month. Email us for details.
such a sad fellow, this jimmy carter
Jimmy Carter, the subject of the last blog, almost immediately was back in the news claiming that the United States was one of the world’s great abusers of civil rights (I wonder how our internecine body count in Plains, Georgia stacks up with that in Rwanda, Kosovo, or Dafur?). He adds that all Presidents—except the current one—have been supporters of human rights.
In his dotage, Carter is proving once again that he is as malicious and mean-spirited a public figure as he is historically ignorant. And for all his sanctimonious Christian veneer, and fly-fishing, ‘aw shucks blue-jeans image, he can’t hide an essentially ungracious and unkind soul.
Does he have any idea of Lincoln and Andrew Johnson suspending habeas corpus and shutting down newspapers, Woodrow Wilson jailing political dissidents, FDR interning American citizens and executing German agents in secret military tribunals? Do we have currently a Nixon’s enemies list? And can Carter point to just one aspect of current American life where civil liberties are materially curtailed, in which an American can’t do what he wants? Getting on a plane without shampoo doesn’t count—or not having your family at the gate when you land either: all thanks to al Qaeda, not George Bush.
We are not free?
We are in a war at a time when Alfred A. Knopf freely published a novel exploring the idea of killing the Commander-in-Chief. A movie wins accolades for filming the same leftist dream of shooting George Bush. Bush as a “Nazi” is standard stuff these days in the media.
All such venom is voiced freely and without restrictions. Contrast our enemies: the pope, an opera, a novel, a cartoon, a film—all either muzzled or intimidated by the mere fear of Islamic violence. Carter should reread Aristotle’s Ethics and learn what true morality is: action to combat evil, not sermonizing from the Carter Center or campaigning for a Nobel Prize at a time of war by trashing his own government.
If he can’t name an example of federal overreach, I surely can: the current political indictment of Scooter Libby, who, we know now, was not the leaker of the supposedly “classified” status of the much public Ms. Plame. That hit job seems to be a very dangerous abuse of federal prosecutorial power, especially when we learn that it was long recognized that Richard Armitage was the font of the “leak”.
The Golden Years: 1976-1980?
There is another disturbing element to Cartesian maliciousness. He asks us to forget all the dilemmas of being President, the necessity of making bad choices when the alternative is usually worse. And, of course, he seems to have amnesia about his own failings that put this country in grave jeopardy. He sanctimoniously lectured us on our Cold War fixation on communism—and got a murderous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He talked of a post-Vietnam reappraisal in the midst of the Cambodian Holocaust. “Human Rights” was an admirable banner, but did not include any such audit of Sandinista Communists.
He wept for the middle class, but adopted policies that led to double-digit interest rates and inflation, ensuring that only the upscale could borrow for a house or ensure their salaries would keep up with the cost of living. No need to mention his energy policy or gas lines.
Remember the genesis of the Great Satan?
Carter’s Waterloo, of course was the Iranian hostage crisis. It was not just that his gutting of the military helped to explain the rescue disaster. Far more importantly, we can chart the rise of radical political Islam with the storming of the American embassy in Teheran and the impotent response of Jimmy Carter.
Long before George Bush was elected to anything, crowds in Teheran gave us the genesis of the Great Satan and “Death to Carter”. Does he remember that so great was the Iranian Islamist hatred of him, that Iran deliberately delayed the brokered release of the hostages until he was out of office—a lesson that appeasement wins contempt as the additional wage of its failure.
steyn goes to gitmo
...and finds the baklava is delicious. (Who knows, maybe the food police will be complaining about the average 18 pound weight gain of the detainees. Oh, the humanity!)
'This is not just a bad bill," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. ''This is truly a dangerous bill." And it's not just a dangerous bill. It's also "unconstitutional" and "unconscionable" and represents the loss of the nation's "moral compass."
Wow! That's quite a lot for a humble bill on military trials for terrorist (OK, "alleged terrorist") detainees. But Vermont's lefty colossus wasn't done yet in his excoriation of the Bush administration. "Even they cannot dismiss the practices at Guantanamo as the actions of a few bad people," he continued. "Before they just did it quietly, and against the law, on their own say-so, but now they are obtaining license to engage in additional harsh techniques that the rest of the world will see as abusive, as cruel, as degrading and even as torture."
Hmm. I should say a word about "the practices at Guantanamo." As it happens, I've just got back from Gitmo. (That glitch on my green card was finally straightened out.) I've visited several prisons in several countries over the years and never seen anything like this one. Granted, most of what I know about enemy detainee camps comes from what Rear Adm. Harry Harris, who runs Guantanamo, calls "bad movies and worse TV shows," and from a distance very little seems to have changed: the basic look -- barbed wire and watch towers -- would be recognizable to any World War II POWs. But, close up, pretty much everything else has been flushed down the toilet of history. Indeed, even the toilet has been flushed down the toilet of history: In the interests of cultural sensitivity, Gitmo cells were fitted with "Asian-style toilets," because "that's what the detainees prefer." Given that much of the matter that should be going down there ends up being flung over the guards, it seems that this sensitivity over choice of bathroom fixtures is not always appreciated.
When visitors like yours truly swing by, the camp likes to serve them the same meal the prisoners get. This being Ramadan, Adm. Harris was particularly proud of the fresh-baked traditional pastries his team had made for the holy month. And he was right: The baklava was delicious. "Baklava" is said by some linguists to come from the Arabic for "nuts" -- and, indeed, in that sense this entire war can sometimes seem like one giant baklava. There was a film out earlier this year called ''The Road To Guantanamo,'' and the poster showed the usual emaciated prisoner hung by shackles against a dungeon wall. No doubt the actor in question did the full Robert De Niro and lost 40 pounds to get himself looking that cadaverous.
Photo-Roses
This is a site selling art-quality photographs of roses.
These are suitable for framing, as they say, and work nicely in home or office. Some favorites include this yellow rose photograph with a single drop of milk, this photograph of a white rose half-submerged in chocolate or this Cherry Parfait rose photographed in closeup and given a heavenly glow.