The Ten O'Clock Scholar

AP: You're Miserable, Vote Obama!

2008-07-06T19:47:00.002-04:00

As predicted, a slew of negative editorials masquerading as news are being pumped out by the AP, telling us how miserable and depressed we all are, but how voting Obama will make it all better.

Back then I wrote:

This is part of a pattern: make everyone miserable from a diet of negative reporting, then dangle salvation, the Obamamessiah who will make everyone love us again.

But what follows is hardly even "reporting"!

What makes it even more pathetic is The Onion wrote the same stories months ago that the AP is now publishing!

For example, for the 4th of July celebration of Independence Day, we were treated to this headline:

Americans' unhappy birthday: 'Too much wrong'

Happy birthday, America? This year, we're not so sure.

The nation's psyche is battered and bruised, the sense of pessimism palpable. Young or old, Republican or Democrat, economically stable or struggling, Americans are questioning where they are and where they are going. And they wonder who or what might ride to their rescue.

Why Obama of course!

The report is full of a litany of complaints and anecdotal quotes of doom, such as:

"There is a sense of helplessness everywhere you look. It's like you're stuck in one spot, and you can't do anything about it."

A previous AP "report" from June 21 on an identical theme provided more direct "advice" on how to fight the despair, with the laughably alarmist headline:

Everything seemingly is spinning out of control

WASHINGTON - Is everything spinning out of control?

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault.

Helpfully, the report continues,

American University historian Allan J. Lichtman notes that the U.S. has endured comparable periods and worse, including the economic stagflation (stagnant growth combined with inflation) and Iran hostage crisis of 1980; the dawn of the Cold War, the Korean War and the hysterical hunts for domestic Communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and the Depression of the 1930s.

"All those periods were followed by much more optimistic periods in which the American people had their confidence restored," he said. "Of course, that doesn't mean it will happen again."

Each period also was followed by a change in the party controlling the White House.

Otherwise, unless the Democrats are put in charge, expect a Great Unraveling:

Surely people know how to fix problems now.

Maybe. And maybe this is what the 21st century will be about — a great unraveling of some things long taken for granted.

This might be taken more seriously if not for a piece by parody news site The Onion, which back on May 14 wrote:

Everything Falling Apart, Reports Institute For Somehow Managing To Hold It All Together

WASHINGTON—Officials from the Institute for Somehow Managing to Hold It All Together warned that, despite their best efforts, everything appears to be falling completely apart and "getting way out of hand," according to a strongly worded report characterized by panic, frustration, and numerous typographical errors that was released to the American public Monday.

"The country today faces a number of pressing issues, including potential economic collapse, the continued threat of global warming, and the decaying national infrastructure," ISMHIAT chairman Kenneth Branowicz said during a press conference to announce the study's findings. "And we just can't keep it together anymore."
...
The report outlines a number of disturbing trends, such as a steadily weakening dollar, skyrocketing national debt, the car still being in the shop after three whole weeks, a polarized electorate that remains divided across ideological lines, and the fact that the wife is staying at her sister's and for all they know may not ever be coming back.

"In summary, we have no choice but to accept that managing these complex and varied crises may be untenable at this time," the report concludes. "We're in way over our heads here, people. Oh God. God. What are we going to do?"

The institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank formed in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of his Depression-era For God's Sake, Somebody Do Something Initiative, has issued similarly dramatic warnings in the past. In 1953, ISMHIAT released the now-historic findings on how they had talked and talked until they were blue in the face but they'd had it with these damn teenagers today. And historians still cite its famous 1968 report, a rambling, semi-coherent study titled "The Hell If We Know," recommending the immediate nationwide throwing up of hands.

This latest warning, however, could be the most alarming and desperate to date.
...
Dr. Thomas Dyers, of the National Blame Allocation Council, echoed Klemper's statements, stating that if the ISMHIAT cannot handle its responsibilities, its duties should be turned over to another organization, such as the Federal Fall Guy Bureau, under the supervision of Ed Haversham, the national Scapegoat Czar.

AP, stop plagiarizing The Onion!

Sites For Movie Lovers

2008-06-28T00:08:00.002-04:00

They Shoot Pictures is a website devoted to listing the 1000 greatest films of all time.

An impressive task!

Even more interesting is the site it inspired, Shooting Down Pictures, in which a film devotee has decided to watch every film on that list and write an essay for you, the reader. These typically include clips of the films from youtube to illustrate various points.

It's the sheer volume attempted that is interesting.

And, that some of my favorite films are discussed!

Such as, Evil Dead II, Inferno, and Night of the Demon, as video essays.

Fusion Moving Forward

2008-06-23T20:50:00.002-04:00

FUSION QUEST GOES FORWARD

The Emc2 team has been ramping up its tests over the past few months, with the aim of using WB-7 to verify Bussard's WB-6 results. Today, Nebel said he's confident that the answers will be forthcoming, one way or the other.

"We're fully operational and we're getting data," Nebel said. "The machine runs like a top. You can just sit there and take data all afternoon."

So was Bussard correct? Will it be worth putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a larger-scale demonstration project, to show that Bussard's Polywell concept could be a viable route to fusion power?

Nebel said it's way too early to talk about the answers to those questions. For one thing, it's up to the project's funders to assess the data. Toward that end, an independent panel of experts will be coming to Santa Fe this summer to review the WB-7 experiment, Nebel said.

The [other] really interesting thing about this news item is the interactive nature of the online world.

A skeptic who knows enough about fusion to speak intelligently left the following comment below the story:

It's fun to daydream, isn't it? And it's easy, too, as long as you don't know too much.

There's more reasons than you can shake a stick at that this won't work. For starters, you can forget about aneutronic fusion. It's not just the temperature, Bremstrahlung is almost to certain radiate more energy than you produce by fusion no matter how good your confinement is. Even if you somehow manage to get a decent power balance, for a given plasma pressure and fusion power, a p-B11 reactor would have to be about 1000 times bigger (and more expensive) than a corresponding D-T reactor.

The next thing to worry about is the electrons. The magnetic configuration has not only lines of radial field from the center to the edge, which is bad enough judging from the experience with mirror machines, it also has lines of *zero* field along which the electrons will gush out. The idea of recycling electrons lost through the cusps won't work because they will come out almost parallel to the field but hit the return cusp with a large perpendicular velocity component they picked up going around the bend.

And the ions? The device is conceived to utilize a bi-modal velocity distribution, which will be destroyed very quickly by the two-stream instability. The anisotropy of the velocity distribution is also know to be a big problem, again from experience in the mirror program.

We haven't even started to talk about energy loss to the grids, the consequences of tiny field misalignments, charge-exchange ion losses, energy coupling between electrons and ions, and whether the potential distribution envisioned is even possible at a non-trivial ion density.

Since they managed to sweet talk somebody into giving them money, let them finish and publish their results, but let's not stop looking for ways to save energy and trying to develop other, less sexy but more reliable energy sources.

Art Carlson, Munich, Germany

But the even cooler thing is Dr. Nebel who is running the experiment was able to post a reply! Talk about getting the inside story in near real-time!

Just a few comments for Mr. Carlson

1. The theory says that you can beat Bremstrahlung, but it's a challenge. The key is to keep the Boron concentration low compared the proton concentration so Z isn’t too bad. You pay for it in power density, but there is an optimum which works. You also gain because the electron energies are low in the high density regions.

2. The size arguments apply for machines where confinement is limited by cross-field diffusion like Tokamaks. They don't apply for electrostatic machines.

3. The Polywell doesn't have any lines of zero field. Take a look at the original papers on the configuration. See :
Bussard R.W., FusionTechnology, Vol. 19, 273, (1991) .
or
Krall N.A., Fusion Technology. Vol. 22, 42 (1992).

Furthermore, one expects adiabatic behavior along the field lines external to the device. Thus, what goes out comes back in. Phase space scattering is small because the density is small external to the device.

4. The machine does not use a bi-modal velocity distribution. We have looked at two-stream in detail, and it is not an issue for this machine. The most definitive treatise on the ions is : L. Chacon, G. H. Miley, D. C. Barnes, D. A. Knoll, Phys. Plasmas 7, 4547 (2000) which concluded partially relaxed ion distributions work just fine. Furthermore, the Polywell doesn’t even require ion convergence to work (unlike most other electrostatic devices). It helps, but it isn’t a requirement.

5. The system doesn’t have grids. It has magnetically insulated coil cases to provide the electrostatic acceleration. That’s what keeps the losses tolerable.

6. The electrostatic potential well is an issue. Maintaining it depends on the detailed particle balance. The “knobs” that affect it are the electron confinement time, the ion confinement time, and the electron injection current. There are methods of controlling all of these knobs.

rnebel

We'll know more soon.

Drill Here. Drill Now!

2008-06-13T22:27:00.002-04:00

Sign the petition to Drill Here, Drill Now, and Pay Less!

What are we hoarding our resources for? A rainy day?

If not here, where?

If not now, when?

Manufactured Messiah

2008-06-12T00:41:00.002-04:00

Today's example of a steady stream of reports designed to demoralize:

Iraq, perceived hypocrisy fuel record anti-Americanism: report

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Anti-Americanism is at record levels thanks to US policies such as the war in Iraq, and Washington's perceived hypocrisy in abiding by its own democratic values, US lawmakers said Wednesday.

A House of Representatives committee report based on expert testimony and polling data reveals US approval ratings have fallen to record lows across the world since 2002, particularly in Muslim countries and Latin America.

It says the problem arises not from a rejection of US culture, values and power but primarily from its policies, such as backing authoritarian regimes while promoting democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

Never mind the contradiction that the Iraq war was to remove an authoritarian regime...

This is part of a pattern: make everyone miserable from a diet of negative reporting, then dangle salvation, the Obamamessiah who will make everyone love us again.

All laid out in this comprehensive essay:

There was a pre-Lewinsky time, before moral relativism blurred America's vision, when associating with people like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers would have automatically excluded someone from attaining the highest office in the land. Back then, anyone with well known connections to such America-averse personalities would have been rejected by a super-majority of the electorate during primary season and almost certainly blocked by the Democratic Party before they could have gotten to within a mile of the White House.
...
Until recently in our history, a President Barack Obama would have been an impossibility. But given the political and ideological climate that exists today in America, the ascension of a leftist like Barack Obama into presidential politics makes perfect sense. Beliefs like domestic terrorist William Ayers's and racist, anti-US preacher Jeremiah Wright's are no longer met with utter scorn or a trip to behind the woodshed, but are embraced, promoted and defended by many Americans.
...
The Democratic Party has devolved into a club for the illegitimately aggrieved, the self-absorbed, the self-hating and the perpetually pissed-off.
...
So what does all of that have to do with the propulsion of Barack Obama to within a whisker of the Presidency? Everything. It could not have happened without the existence of a substantial, organized, internal anti-US Left and the approval and guidance of the Democratic leadership I describe.
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The opening event setting the stage for Obama's ascension was the contentious 2000 election. When Bush was declared its winner, Democrats fumed that the election had been stolen by the Republicans. The promotion of that canard within leftwing and media circles and the personal quality of the resentment of Bush it provoked within the Democratic Party is important to mention, since a similar canard that morphed from it and became popularized -- "Bush Stole the Election," -- became the base justification for the future blizzard of untruths used to disparage the President.
...
Whatever patriotism was stoked within the hearts of Democratic Party leaders by that September Day of Infamy was likely tempered by an unsettling reality: If America stayed united behind George W. Bush and the Republicans during the coming military response to 911, the Democratic Party would be out of power for a long time.
...
As the Democrats weighed their narrow, post-911 political options and saw a grim future, at least a few of them might have considered Jimmy Carter's triumph on the heels of Vietnam and Watergate, and felt a flicker of hope.

A Vietnam strategy develops

Soon after 911, as America shifted into a wartime footing, leftists in academia and in the Legal Left began testing the waters of dissent by deconstructing Bush and the Republicans and blaming American foreign policy for the 911 attacks. Several professors at major Universities openly proclaimed their wishes to see America defeated and disgraced.
...
Deliberately or not, the Democratic Party and the leftwing media, with their endless criticisms of the Iraq conflict, and their endless public comparisons of that war to Vietnam, sent a direct message to the rag-tag army of ultra-violent terrorists in Iraq who were detonating car bombs in crowded marketplaces, beheading and mutilating civilians and killing American and Coalition soldiers: "Keep the violence up just a bit longer. We'll take care of wearing down America's will to win from within, just like during Vietnam."

Even violent, under-equipped sociopaths facing the most powerful military on earth know a gift horse when they see one, and react accordingly.

On the other hand, nearly every bit of positive war news was whispered in quiet sentences or totally ignored. Today, with the Iraq venture steadily closing in on success, the amount of news about Iraq has slowed to barely a drip. That is quite telling.
...
"Bush lied us into war" became the catch-phrase of almost the entire Democratic Party leadership, even though before the war had commenced many of those same Democrats had access to the same information that the Bush Administration used to justify it.

Power at any cost indeed, even at the defeat and humiliation of one's own country.

***

Now the 2008 election is upon us. Whether it is Iraq or Afghanistan, the economy or the overblown dangers of anthropogenic global warming, the Democratic Party and its media shills continue crafting and pounding home messages telling us that our national problems, real and imagined, are caused by Bush and the Republicans, They tell us that due to Bush and his policies, our nation is an evil one, our nation is hated by the world, our nation is fractured into pieces, our nation is murdering innocents, our nation is the world's biggest polluter, our nation is a den of racism, our nation is stingy, our citizens are impoverished, our economy has been destroyed. Collectively, this endless stream of buckshot propaganda adds up to a single, powerful and demoralizing statement: America has come apart at the seams - and George W. Bush and the Republicans are to blame for it.

Though the Democrats and their media shills are responsible for creating that illusion, Bush and the Republicans are to blame for generally ignoring or responding weakly to the Left's relentless assault on America's war-time morale.
...
It is no wonder the American electorate has slipped into a foul mood -- little wonder why it seems that its heart is not in the fight against the totalitarian theocrats who threaten it. For seven years Americans have been pounded with messages that their country and its leaders are unjust, warmongering, and evil and hated by all -- it deserves whatever evil it gets.

America now has serious doubts about itself. Its citizens have been pummeled with those terrible messages for so long now, that many of them believe them to be true. They are vulnerable to the Democratic Party's sudden mantra of Hope and Change and Progress.
...
It is truly audacious of the Democrats to entice us with their slick-tongued messiah, one who appears out of nowhere and graciously offers to scrape clean and sanitize the same plate of defeat he, his party and their assistants in the media served to America for nearly eight years in the middle of a war. Soon we will see if a majority of the American electorate accepts that offer, or if it rejects it, sending the Democratic Party back to confront the same irrelevance it risked the safety and security of our nation to avoid.

Don't be fooled!

No Starvation For Biofuel!

2008-04-24T22:43:00.003-04:00

Temperatures aren't rising, they're falling -- as CO2 rises!

Note even then, the scale of CO2 on the right doesn't start at zero, so what looks like a "tripling" in CO2 is really more like a 6% rise. But still there's obviously no correlation between temperature and CO2.

A roundup of stories about eco-vanity leading to people starving to death, such as this one:

And frankly, to hear people who are so wealthy that they’re clinically obese from excess food and leisure time yammering on about what kind of light-bulbs they use, while other people are literally starving to death… It’s beyond bizarre. It speaks to a frightening level of self-deception that seemingly intelligent folks engage in en masse.

More good points from that original story:

Most global warming activists don't really care about people being fed or preventing malaria. If that's what they were concerned about they would focus on that. Trying to address world hunger by worrying about CO2 levels is about as direct as trying to become a famous actor by waiting tables in a Hollywood restaurant, (actually that may be a little too pessimistic but you get the picture).

The "science" of global warming is nothing more than a cover for their irrational emotional needs. It's religion for people who are too cool to go to church. All that yearning, the need for something bigger, transcendent: Hey the planet's heating up and I've been placed here to save it!

When Al Gore says, "The Earth has a fever," no one calls him on his cartoon personification -- as if the Earth has a temperature it prefers.
...
To borrow a phrase, (as I have liberally in this post), from the brilliant statistician and eco-philosopher, Bjorn Lomborg, visualize the people living on Earth 100 years from now. Let's imagine that they can reach back in time and speak to us, give us some feedback on the world we'll be leaving them. What do you think they'd ask us to focus on? Where would they have us concentrate our scarce time and energy?

A world in which hunger and AIDS have been eradicated or a world where the sea level is 6 inches lower?

A world free of Jihad where everyone lives under some form of representative democracy, or a world that is 2.1 degrees cooler in the months between October and March?

A world with 10% more polar bear habitat or a world where even the poorest or the poor have clean water and a sanitary place to go to the bathroom?

These are our choices.

And in a scathing indictment of green vanity,

"No Blood for Oil” is a spurious rallying cry on the left, but apparently it is acceptable for the poor in the third world to starve so that American Eco-activists can feel self-righteous about driving “flex-fuel” vehicles. According to the WORLD BANK:

“almost all of the increase in global maize production from 2004 to 2007 (the period when grain prices rose sharply) went for biofuels production in the U.S."

Insanity!

By the way, speaking of the Greens, it was little noted that the center-right coalition party of Silvio Berlusconi, ousted in 2006 but coming back to power due to new elections earlier this month, takes control of both Houses of Parliamant in which ZERO seats were won by either the Socialist Party or the Left Rainbow Party, which is a coalition of communists and Greens.

The Greens (or Verdi) alone had 15 seats in 2006, but in 2008, their coalition

The Rainbow gained a disastrous 3.1% of the vote (down from 10.2%, combined result of the three parties in 2006 general election) and failed to gain any seats in the Italian Parliament. Since then the future of the federation is unclear as each party, or rather each faction of each of the parties, holds a different view about the defeat and the future of the left in Italy.

Now it's just time to back out of the Euro!

The Singing Revolution

2008-04-24T22:16:00.004-04:00

The Singing Revolution is a limited-release documentary movie telling the story of how national unity through traditional singing led Estonia to free itself from the Soviet Union:

The Singing Revolution is the name given to the step-by-step process that led to the reestablishment of Estonian independence in 1991. This was a non-violent revolution that overthrew a very violent occupation.

It was called the Singing Revolution because of the role singing played in the protests of the mid-1980s. But singing had always been a major unifying force for Estonians while they endured fifty years of Soviet rule.
...
Music has been central to Estonian culture for centuries. Although Estonia is one of the smallest countries in the world, it nonetheless has one of the largest collections of folk songs.

But Estonians have historically used music as a political weapon as well. It is said that song was used in protest of the German invaders of the 13th century, and also in resistance to the Russian occupation under Peter the Great in the 18th century.

In the 19th century, Estonians started a song festival tradition called Laulupidu, where choirs from around the country come together to sing for days. 25,000 to 30,000 people sing on stage at the same time. But the founding of Laulupidu was as much an expression of the desire for self-determination and independence as about song.
...
“The young people, without any political party, and without any politicians, just came together ... not only tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands ... to gather and to sing and to give this nation a new spirit,” remarks Mart Laar, a Singing Revolution leader featured in the film and the first post-Soviet Prime Minister of Estonia. “This was the idea of the Singing Revolution.”

James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty’s "The Singing Revolution" tells the moving story of how the Estonian people peacefully regained their freedom--and helped topple an empire along the way.

The reviewer from the New York Times says,

Imagine the scene in 'Casablanca' in which the French patrons sing 'La Marseillaise' in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and you've only begun to imagine the force of 'The Singing Revolution'.

I haven't seen it, but it sounds good!

Petition for a screening in a theater near you here.

Icecap

2008-04-24T21:52:00.002-04:00

ICECAP, theInternational Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project,

is the portal to all things climate for elected officials and staffers, journalists, scientists, educators and the public. It provides access to a new and growing global society of respected scientists and journalists that are not deniers that our climate is dynamic (the only constant in nature is change) and that man plays a role in climate change through urbanization, land use changes and the introduction of greenhouse gases and aerosols, but who also believe that natural cycles such as those in the sun and oceans are also important contributors to the global changes in our climate and weather. We worry the sole focus on greenhouse gases and the unwise reliance on imperfect climate models while ignoring real data may leave civilization unprepared for a sudden climate shift that history tells us will occur again, very possibly soon. [i.e., rapid Global Cooling! --ed.]
...
We spotlight new findings in peer-review papers and reports and rapidly respond to fallacies or exaggerations in papers, stories or programs and any misinformation efforts by the media, politicians and advocacy groups.

ICECAP is not funded by large corporations that might benefit from the status quo but by private investors who believe in the need for free exchange of ideas on this and other important issues of the day. Our working group is comprised of members from all ends of the political spectrum. This is not about politics but about science.

The tide is turning as scientists speak out.

For example, Scientist Who voted for Gore in 2000 Now Debunks warming Fears:

We’ve been warming up about a degree per century since the Little Ice Age in about 1600. We’ve been warming for 400 years, long before human-generated CO2 could have anything to do with the climate. If we project the previous century into the coming one, my projection is that we will have about a half-a-degree of cooling from 2007 (plus or minus three to five years) to about 2040. Then it will start getting warmer as we enter the next warm cycle, followed by cooling again.

For a number of interviews, especially in the national news media, they ask ‘Are you a Republican?’ and I say ‘No, I'm not, as a matter of fact, I voted for Al Gore. I don't want to pick on him because he's not a scientist.’ The nonsense he spews comes from the IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], so in a sense I don’t condemn him as much as I do the so-called climatologists like [James] Hansen, who says things that are idiotic. They’re the ones giving him all this stuff.

Al Gore makes a hundred-million dollars? He has five-billion in his slush fund? Look at [U.S. Senator] Barbara Boxer, she sponsored a bill for carbon cap and trade [Sanders/Boxer Global Warming Bill S.309]. Who will benefit from hundreds of billions of dollars for administering a scheme like that? The other thing is research funding. The U.S. spends about two-billion dollars a year on research. Right now, if you submit anything that says CO2 is not the bad guy, you won't have a chance of getting funding. It all goes to the CO2 people who build little fiefdoms; they have grant money coming out of their ears. They mimic Al Gore and say the debate is over. The last I heard, the U.S. plans to increase its research spending to 3.5 billion dollars, virtually all of which goes into CO2 research.

The last part of this equation is the news media and money being made by people like National Geographic who recently put out a show called Six Degrees of Global Warming [Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas] and how many people watched that and watched the ads that went with it? How much money did they make doing it? How much money would they have made if they’d said ‘Oh, it’s not CO2, it’s solar?’ Doom and gloom is easy to sell.

Also,

Hundreds Sign Climate Realist Declaration - “Global Warming is not a Global Crisis”

International Climate Science Coalition

The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) today released the names of over 500 endorsers of the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change that calls on world leaders to “reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth"." All taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) should “be abandoned forthwith”, declaration signatories conclude.

Here is a list of 150 Manhattan Declaration endorsers who are climate science specialists or scientists in closely related fields.

One of the signers is Freeman J. Dyson, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A., which puts stamp of seriousness on it.

Global Warming Over

2008-03-25T20:31:00.002-04:00

Inconvenient Truth: Global Warming Ended Ten Years Ago

Despite the more hysterical predictions we've heard of late, the evidence continues to mount that if the earth was warming, it stopped quite some time ago.

Of course, don't expect this fact to be widely reported, if it indeed even makes it into any U.S. newspapers or television broadcasts.

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth still warming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."
...
Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."

Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn't support their case. "People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?"

Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

"There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."

Al Gore? Any reaction? Hello? Anyone home?

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.
...
I wonder what those who called the truth-tellers deniers will have to say?

How about those who characterized skeptics as being on par with Holocaust deniers?

What will they have to say?

Likely nothing. In fact, we'll still see apocalyptic stories of impending doom, with reports how global warming is hastening the arrival of spring, despite cool temperatures across much of the United States.
...
The cost to the public may be even greater as a result of legislation forcing overly ambitious controls over carbon dioxide emissions which in the end may do little or nothing.

The race between government policy, which is just getting up to speed on dealing with "carbon dioxide" to address "global warming", and the new data refuting the predictive ability of the climate models, will be an interesting one to watch.

And by interesting, I mean nail-bitingly exhausting! The EPA is this close (now that the Supreme Court has given them the green light) to regulating harmless carbon dioxide gas, which is a natural biological product we produce by breathing, as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act! They have already found its emission to be "harmful to welfare", and it is apparently only the White House and DOT directing the career bureacrats to not act on their finding...

Some background:

The most worrisome regulation now under consideration is a declaration by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles endanger public health. The so-called endangerment finding would spark many costly measures with the potential to harm the U.S. economy and intrude on citizens' daily activities. The EPA should refrain from initiating any regulation that would jump ahead of Congress on global warming.

In April 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision against the EPA over its refusal to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from motor vehicles. However, Massachusetts v. EPA did not require the agency to change its position; it required only that the agency demonstrate that whatever it chooses to do complies with the requirements of the Clean Air Act. In the Court's words, "[w]e need not and do not reach the question whether on remand EPA must make an endangerment finding," and "[w]e hold only that EPA must ground its reasons for action or inaction in the statute."

Nonetheless, it appears that some people in the Administration and the EPA want to read this case as a mandate to begin cracking down on carbon dioxide. But doing so is not required under the law.

Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring component of air that is created by breathing and other natural processes. It is also the ubiquitous and unavoidable byproduct of fossil fuel combustion, which currently provides 85 percent of America's energy. Thus, any effort to substantially curtail such emissions would have extremely costly and disruptive effects on the economy and on living standards.

To hear some in Congress and elsewhere, the administration is breaking the law by not moving forward with regulation, but that is a falsehood.

But unfortunately the Court's four level-headed justices weren't enough to squelch the whole issue by declaring CO2 is not a pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act of 1990.

No News

2008-03-25T20:26:00.002-04:00

The New York Times is, of course, puzzled:

The War Endures, but Where’s the Media?

Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet.

Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

But why?

The article cites many possibilities for this conundrum, including vague loss of interest by readers, as well as:

Experts offer many other explanations for the declining media focus, like the danger and expense in covering Iraq, and shrinking newsroom budgets. In the last year, a flagging economy and the most competitive presidential campaign in memory have diverted attention and resources.

Though harping on the danger and expense of reporting from Iraq, near the end of the article this line is slipped in:

Americans against the war are less interested now that the news is better.

Good news is no news, apparently!

Fire With Fire

2008-03-25T20:17:00.002-04:00

Coptic priest Zakaria Botros fights fire with fire.

Though he is little known in the West, Coptic priest Zakaria Botros — named Islam’s “Public Enemy #1” by the Arabic newspaper, al-Insan al-Jadid — has been making waves in the Islamic world. Along with fellow missionaries — mostly Muslim converts — he appears frequently on the Arabic channel al-Hayat (i.e., “Life TV”). There, he addresses controversial topics of theological significance — free from the censorship imposed by Islamic authorities or self-imposed through fear of the zealous mobs who fulminated against the infamous cartoons of Mohammed. Botros’s excurses on little-known but embarrassing aspects of Islamic law and tradition have become a thorn in the side of Islamic leaders throughout the Middle East.

Botros is an unusual figure onscreen: robed, with a huge cross around his neck, he sits with both the Koran and the Bible in easy reach. Egypt’s Copts — members of one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East — have in many respects come to personify the demeaning Islamic institution of “dhimmitude” (which demands submissiveness from non-Muslims, in accordance with Koran 9:29). But the fiery Botros does not submit, and minces no words. He has famously made of Islam “ten demands,” whose radical nature he uses to highlight Islam’s own radical demands on non-Muslims.

The result? Mass conversions to Christianity — if clandestine ones. The very public conversion of high-profile Italian journalist Magdi Allam — who was baptized by Pope Benedict in Rome on Saturday — is only the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, Islamic cleric Ahmad al-Qatani stated on al-Jazeera TV a while back that some six million Muslims convert to Christianity annually, many of them persuaded by Botros’s public ministry.
...
A third reason for Botros’s success is that his polemical technique has proven irrefutable. Each of his episodes has a theme — from the pressing to the esoteric — often expressed as a question (e.g., “Is jihad an obligation for all Muslims?”; “Are women inferior to men in Islam?”; “Did Mohammed say that adulterous female monkeys should be stoned?” “Is drinking the urine of prophets salutary according to sharia?”). To answer the question, Botros meticulously quotes — always careful to give sources and reference numbers — from authoritative Islamic texts on the subject, starting from the Koran; then from the canonical sayings of the prophet — the Hadith; and finally from the words of prominent Muslim theologians past and present — the illustrious ulema.

Typically, Botros’s presentation of the Islamic material is sufficiently detailed that the controversial topic is shown to be an airtight aspect of Islam.
...
Botros spent three years bringing to broad public attention a scandalous — and authentic — hadith stating that women should “breastfeed” strange men with whom they must spend any amount of time. A leading hadith scholar, Abd al-Muhdi, was confronted with this issue on the live talk show of popular Arabic host Hala Sirhan. Opting to be truthful, al-Muhdi confirmed that going through the motions of breastfeeding adult males is, according to sharia, a legitimate way of making married women “forbidden” to the men with whom they are forced into contact — the logic being that, by being “breastfed,” the men become like “sons” to the women and therefore can no longer have sexual designs on them.

To make matters worse, Ezzat Atiyya, head of the Hadith department at al-Azhar University — Sunni Islam’s most authoritative institution — went so far as to issue a fatwa legitimatizing “Rida’ al-Kibir” (sharia’s term for “breastfeeding the adult”), which prompted such outrage in the Islamic world that it was subsequently recanted.
...
Incapable of rebutting Botros, the only strategy left to the ulema (aside from a rumored $5-million bounty on his head) is to ignore him. When his name is brought up, they dismiss him as a troublemaking liar who is backed by — who else? — international “Jewry.” They could easily refute his points, they insist, but will not deign to do so. That strategy may satisfy some Muslims, but others are demanding straightforward responses from the ulema.

The most dramatic example of this occurred on another famous show on the international station, Iqra. The host, Basma — a conservative Muslim woman in full hijab — asked two prominent ulema, including Sheikh Gamal Qutb, one-time grand mufti of al-Azhar University, to explain the legality of the Koranic verse (4:24) that permits men to freely copulate with captive women. She repeatedly asked: “According to sharia, is slave-sex still applicable?” The two ulema would give no clear answer — dissembling here, going off on tangents there. Basma remained adamant: Muslim youth were confused, and needed a response, since “there is a certain channel and a certain man who has discussed this issue over twenty times and has received no response from you.”

The flustered Sheikh Qutb roared, “low-life people like that must be totally ignored!” and stormed off the set.
...
Botros’s motive is not to incite the West against Islam, promote “Israeli interests,” or “demonize” Muslims, but to draw Muslims away from the dead legalism of sharia to the spirituality of Christianity. Many Western critics fail to appreciate that, to disempower radical Islam, something theocentric and spiritually satisfying — not secularism, democracy, capitalism, materialism, feminism, etc. — must be offered in its place. The truths of one religion can only be challenged and supplanted by the truths of another. And so Father Zakaria Botros has been fighting fire with fire.

Not taking any religion seriously is a key weakness in contemporary liberalism's approach to confronting radical islam.

Ann Coulter's "convert them to Christianity" prescription is more on target!

Cobb

2008-03-25T20:12:00.002-04:00

Came across this interesting blog, Cobb:

Michael David Cobb Bowen is the political & cultural blogger 'Cobb'. He writes from the perspective of a moderate conservative Republican representing the 'Old School' of African American culture and values. In his 15 year career of writing as a poet and essayist he has been called the Ralph Ellison of his generation.

What is "Old School"?

The Old School is a somewhat mythical orientation of conservative black culture and politics. You know it when you see it. The Old School is Christian, it is family oriented, it is unapologetic and bold, it is organic and self-sufficient. It takes little for granted and is ready to go down swinging. It is deeply American and deeply black. It is strong and proud, stubborn and graceful. I think of it engrained in the values and person of my grandparents who beat polio and got optimistically married during the Great Depression.

From a collection of itme about Cobb's philosophy, I enjoyed reading this description:

The Mercedes Birthright

Every American inherits a Mercedes Benz at birth. It is the infrastructure of the American system. However, it is up on blocks, the wheels are off, and there is no gas in the tank. You can sit behind the wheel in comfort and pretend that you are driving. You can fall asleep in the back seat, roll up the windows and ignore the world. But you have no idea about the real experience of America until you figure out how to get some wheels and mount them, get that car off the blocks and figure out how to get some gas into that engine. If you figure that out, you'll be able to drive 100 miles per hour. But if you don't bother, you walk like everyone else.

Let Them In!

2008-03-23T18:12:00.002-04:00

Few Iraqi refugees allowed into U.S.

WASHINGTON — The United States admitted 68 Iraqi refugees in the six months through March, a tiny percentage of those fleeing their homes because of the war, State Department figures show.

The United States has been unable to accept more Iraqis in part because of the time needed for background checks, which have become more stringent since 9/11, Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of State, told USA TODAY.

There's definitely a need for security, but I'd take such arguments more seriously if we had actually secured our borders by now.

Yet, from October through March, the United States gave refuge to far more Somalis, Iranians, Burmese and Cubans than Iraqis, according to the State Department.

Will the Iraqis who helped us, such as the translators, be as shamefully treated as the Hmong?

In the early 1960s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began to recruit the indigenous Hmong people in Laos to join fighting the Vietnam War, named as a Special Guerrilla Unit led by General Vang Pao. Over 80% of the Hmong men in Laos were recruited by the CIA to join fighting for the "Secret War" in Laos. The CIA used the Special Guerrilla Unit as the counter attack unit to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main military supply route from the north to the south. Hmong soldiers put their lives at risk in the frontline fighting for the United States to block the supply line and to rescue downed American pilots. As a result, the Hmong suffered a very high casualty rate; more than 40,000 Hmong were killed in the frontline, countless men were missing in action, thousands more were injured and disabled.
...
Following the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, the Lao kingdom was overthrown by the communists and the Hmong people became targets of retaliation and persecution. While some Hmong people returned to their villages and attempted to resume life under the new regime, thousands more made the trek to and across the Mekong River into Thailand, often under attack. This marked the beginning of a mass exodus of Hmong people from Laos.
...
Of those Hmong who did not flee Laos, somewhere between two and three thousand were sent to re-education camps where political prisoners served terms of 3-5 years. Many Hmong died in these camps, after being subjected to hard physical labor and harsh conditions.[24] Thousands more Hmong people, mainly former soldiers and their families, escaped to remote mountain regions - particularly Phou Bia, the highest (and thus least accessible) mountain peak in Laos.
...
Small groups of Hmong people, many of them second or third generation descendants of former CIA soldiers, remain internally displaced in remote parts of Laos, in fear of government reprisals. Faced with continuing military operations against them by the government and a scarcity of food, some groups have begun coming out of hiding, while others have sought asylum in Thailand and other countries.[26]
...
Many Hmong/Mong war refugees resettled in the United States after the Vietnam War. Beginning in December 1975, the first Hmong/Mong refugees arrived in the U.S., mainly from refugee camps in Thailand; however, only 3,466 were granted asylum at this time under the Refugee Assistance Act of 1975. In May of 1976, another 11,000 were allowed to enter the United States, and by 1978 some 30,000 Hmong/Mong people had immigrated. This first wave was made up predominantly of men directly associated with General Vang Pao's secret army. It was not until the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980 that families were able to come in the U.S., becoming the second-wave of Hmong/Mong immigrants. Today, approximately 270,000 Hmong/Mong people reside in the United States, the majority of whom live in California (65,095 according to the 2000 U.S. census), Minnesota (41,800), and Wisconsin (33,791).

Here, a US Army soldier who served in Iraq, drives the issue home:

I found out that the interpreter our team had used for almost six months is dead. As I write this, I have no idea how he died. It could have been an IED (improvised explosive device), a sniper or one of the local death squads. I do know, though, that his death is just another in a countless chain of young men passing before their prime, both American and Iraqi.

His real name was Haydar but his nome-de-guerre was Zee. There were many occasions Zee put himself directly in danger to help us gather intelligence or uncover weapons caches, among other things. There is no way to tell how many U.S. lives Zee saved. Note I didn't say "may have saved." Zee's actions saved lives. Period. His payback was to watch our plane taxi down the runway at Baghdad International Airport and lift off bound for the states.
...
His goal was to come to the United States and enlist in either the Army or the Marine Corps. He admired our troops and I know it hurt Zee to watch our guys kick in a door or engage the enemy while he had to sit it out. He longed for the action. But more than that, he wanted his country back. So much, in fact, he risked his life by working with us.

Could we have helped him reach his goal? Sure, if a better system had existed. Of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Iraqis who risk death on behalf for our troops, only a handful have the opportunity to come to the United States each year, and our government does nothing to make it easy.

Why? Why aren't we doing more to help those who have helped us? Why do we fly nameless Iraqi citizens to the United States for taxpayer-funded surgery yet show none of the same compassion toward those who have an active role in our combat operations? Somebody somewhere has to recognize this.

There are several million people south of Texas who decide annually to disregard our laws, disrespect our culture and cross into our country illegally solely for their own selfish goals. Our government ignores it. Meanwhile, thousands of Iraqis are willing to stand in line, fill out paperwork and jump through countless hoops to get here and start over. And our government makes every effort to discourage it. Guess common sense is another casualty of war.

My heart was hard prior to serving in Iraq. It is harder still since my return. But there is still room for humanity, a space that allows me to feel for those in need. I'm not a human rights shill nor am I grinding a political ax. I'm just a guy who knows right from wrong, and the way our government treats our Iraqi friends is just wrong. We give them hope, then tear it away. We ask them to give all, then tell them we have little to give in return.

Why indeed?

This is not a rational policy.

Obama's Theology

2008-03-23T17:29:00.003-04:00

Liberation Theology was dreamed up by commies to subvert Christianity to its Marxist aims.

Black Liberation Theology goes a step further. It is clearly racist and non-Christian.

This is the theology of Obama's chosen church, Trinity United Church of Christ, and his chosen spiritual mentor, its former pastor Rev. Wright.

Find all about it here:

Spengler at the Asia Times takes a serious look at the theology of Jeremiah Wright, and indirectly at that of Barack Obama. The religious ideas taught at Wright's Trinity Church are derived from those of the "black liberation" theologians James Cone and Dwight Hopkins. During an interview with Sean Hannity, Wright chastised Hannity for his ignorance of the works of these two theologians, who basically argue that since God must take the part of the oppressed, He is essentially "black". And any God who isn't "black" is therefore an agency of the devil.

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.

The McClatchy Newspapers has a comparable piece on Wright's theology by Margaret Talev, who situates the roots of Cone's book, Black Theology and Black Power in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. "Cone wrote that the United States was a white racist nation and the white church was the Antichrist for having supported slavery and segregation." But even after the 60s the ideas of Black Theology lived on, in Trinity Church most especially.

In an interview, Cone said that when he was asked which church most embodied his message, "I would point to that church (Trinity) first." Cone also said he thought that Wright's successor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, would continue the tradition. Obama, 46, who's biracial, joined Trinity in his late twenties when he worked as a community organizer. He says he'll continue to worship there.

Thus Jeremiah Wright's widely publicized soundbites are not the incoherent 'rants' and ramblings of an "angry old man" or of slightly senile "old uncle" but the deliberate and vigorous exposition of a systematic point of view which the congregants have every intention of acting upon. Wright's words are not just vocalizations, but 'words that have meaning' in social, personal and foreign affairs. And one of those ideas is apparently the implicit recognition of the right of other oppressed races to create Gods in their own shade of blackness.

For example, the 8,000-member congregation embraces the idea that Jesus was black. It's historically supported left-wing social and foreign policies, from South Africa to Latin America to the Middle East. ... Wright, who hasn't been giving interviews since the controversy broke, told conservative TV talk-show host Sean Hannity last year that Trinity's black value system also had parallels to the liberation theology of laypeople in Nicaragua three decades ago. There, liberation theology became associated with Marxist revolution and the Sandinistas, and split the Roman Catholic Church.

I think Spengler is wrong when he says that Jeremiah Wright's racial theology "is as silly as the 'Aryan Christianity' popular in Nazi Germany, which claimed that Jesus was not a Jew at all but an Aryan Galilean". Aryan Christianity was a mere provincial vanity; a straightforward claim that a particular race was "chosen". Wright's theology is more subtle. Membership in his elect is defined by which race you don't belong to. The doors to heaven are open to everyone except members of the white race, whose burden, in contrast to Kipling's idea of responsibility, is actually inexpiable guilt. Upon the whites a curse of evil is laid that may not be lifted until the world's end or its change. An indio, Arab and black Jesus are all possible. It is the white Jesus that is inadmissible.
...
While Trinity Church is ostensibly Christian, perhaps its real sister church is the Nation of Islam. Compare Cone's assertion that "black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy", and Jeremiah Wright's sermon claiming that Jesus was a poor black man crucified by rich white people with Farrakhan's argument that whites are subhumans who through some demonic assistance have enslaved the world.
...
If there is anything worse than being white in liberation theology it is being Jewish. While the pulpits of Chicago and Egypt may be thousands of miles apart their themes can be quite similar. "In his weekly sermon the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Muhammad Sayyid Al-Tantawi, the most senior authority in the Sunni Muslim world, described the Jews as 'the enemies of Allah, sons of pigs and apes.'"
...
Hell is populated with whites and Jews while heaven is thronged with blacks and Muslims. And remarkably this theology is not only allegorical but literal. The idea that God might actually have a skin with pigmentation or a passport was to be found not only in Nazi Germany, Wright's church [and Obama's! -- ed.], Farrakhan's mosque or in the universities of the Middle East. It was also present even a few decades ago in apartheid South Africa.

Rejecting God's love and creating a new black one?

Thou shalt not have other gods before me.

So ironically, Obama may not be a muslim as some charge, but he sure isn't Judeo-Christian either!

The attempted dodge is to state that most people don't agree with "everything their pastor says", but this is so extreme and so fundamental to Trinity Church, that argument just doesn't fly.

Obama didn't attend for 20 years by accident.

Obamamessiah!

2008-03-23T16:20:00.003-04:00

Now that Obama has thrown Grandma under the bus (82,200 Google hits!) some of the lustre is lost, but it is instructive to observe just how disturbingly far this Obama as Messiah movement has progressed -- on pure rhetoric!

As an aside, for the claim that Obama is actually a lightweight empty suit, Belmont Club notes:

Obama besides hype has nothing.

True but not true. True in the sense he has no voting record or administrative experience. Untrue in that he has shown a remarkable instinct for finding his advantage. A lot of guys from his Alinsky days would have been stuck in the "community organizing", outsider groove. That was Ralph Nader's mistake and why Nader will never amount to anything.

But Obama knew how to get inside from Day One. Farrkahan. Rezko. Daley. Soros. Kerry. Kennedy. AIPAC. Look at how he went after the Latinos, how he's gotten the Hoffa imprimatur. He knows how to find the right buttons to push and is not inhibited in pushing them.

A lot of less talented politicians -- Nader comes to mind -- wouldn't touch those guys out of a kind of scrupulousness. Obama has no such scruples. He'll bridge to anyone. He says so up front, just like he said he did dope. He'll go right up to Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong Il, probably Osama himself if Bin Laden were still alive and consented to meet.

He'll go up to anyone because at the center of everything is Obama. Don't think I'm criticizing him. That's his genius. He makes his own rules. Like Napoleon or Nelson he is beyond the Fighting Instructions. Lesser mortals are constrained by convention. He's beyond convention. And his freedom, I think, stems at one level from a persona which only comes alive when it is on the public stage. Read Spengler carefully. Obama the private man is smaller than Obama the Man of Destiny. But Obama the Man of Destiny is an emergent phenomenon larger than the man himself.

Therefore I don't think it is a safe bet to write him off as a Milli Vanilli nonentity. Obama is at least an order of magnitude a better politician than Hillary Clinton.

Actually he's quite dangerous.

Here is the Obamamessiah site, which ~~actually isn't a parody but seriously~~ [UPDATE: On further review I'm not sure the site's owner isn't just enjoying a big joke, but the items it aggregates seem to be genuine products of messianic fervor] asks, Is Barack Obama the Messiah?

"... a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany ... and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama" - Barack Obama Lebanon, New Hampshire. January 7, 2008.

One hopes Obama spoke that in jest...

Just scroll through that marvelous site, finding gems like this:

... there is no other like Obama. Absolutely none. ...

What he is offering is not for the naive, nor the fainted-hearted, its not for the uncourageous, nor the unchanging.

What he is offering is for the courageous, for those who have the heart to move beyond just dreams, and into realms never experienced in American history.
...
What he is offering is an agreement between struggles and a covenant for perfection, in that nothing is impossible if one begins with hope and the assurance of faith.

What he is offering is a contract between the old and the young, black and white, citizens and immigrants, rich and poor, priviledged and the impoverished.
...
Fundamentally, the similarities between Obamian hope and biblical hope are extraordinary, striking and intriguing.
...
My musician friends and I are writing songs to inspire people and couples all over America are making love again and shouting "yes we can" as they climax!
...
They were awaiting the messianic figure of a presidential candidate who had just added two more wins to his victory column and who the night before had ignited a crowd of about 20,000 in Houston.

Barack Obama was coming to town. . . .

Inside the arena, the unprompted crowd was yelling, "O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A! O-BAM-A!" a full 90 minutes before the candidate would appear. And just like at sporting events there in days gone by, one section spontaneously led the others in the "wave."
...
Parents had taken their children out of school because they were keenly aware this was a special moment in history. Some high school kids from Fort Worth had skipped classes and taken the early train to Dallas.

When finally taking the stage, Obama basked in the outpouring of affection as his followers stood in awe of the man whom they had waited so long to behold. He was well into his speech when he thought to remind the crowd that it was all right for them to sit down as he delivered the rest of his comments.

To get a feel for the fanaticism, see this tribute video with its rousing chants of "O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!"

I love some of the statements by Obama supporters in that video, like "basically, I just want the war to end!" and "I believe in Obama, because he believes in us!", and the plea for the "rest of the world to think highly" of our country again, to explain their Obamaphilia.

But is this really all that new?

Has there truly been nobody like Obama before?

Here's another speaker who also rallied a rapturous youth, speaking of "unity", of "a youth that knows no class distinction", and of a youth that "is the epitome of altruism." This youth was exhorted to be "peaceloving and also courageous. You must be peacable and courageous at the same time."

You'll get the point quickly so you don't have to sit through all seven minutes of this:

O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!!

O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA!!

Tomorrow belongs to us!

This one is worth watching all the way through; not so hard to understand now, is it?

"You still think you can control them?"

Does Obama's "covenant for perfection" allow for the Liberty to say "No I Won't" instead of "Yes I Can" at every turn?

(not sure where I first saw that question posed, perhaps in the comments at Belmont Club...)

The Anger of the Obamas

2008-03-23T15:38:00.004-04:00

Ed Kaitz reflects on Obama's anger:

In Bayou country I lived on boats and in doublewide trailers, and like the rest of the Vietnamese refugees, I shopped at Wal-Mart and ate a lot of rice. When they arrived in Louisiana the refugees had no money (the money that they had was used to bribe their way out of Vietnam and into refugee camps in Thailand), few friends, and a mostly unfriendly and suspicious local population.

They did however have strong families, a strong work ethic, and the "Audacity of Hope." Within a generation, with little or no knowledge of English, the Vietnamese had achieved dominance in the fishing industry there and their children were already achieving the top SAT scores in the state.

While I had been fishing my new black friend had been working as a prison psychologist in Missouri, and he was pursuing a higher degree in psychology. He was interested in my story, and after about an hour getting to know each other I asked him point blank why these Vietnamese refugees, with no money, friends, or knowledge of the language could be, within a generation, so successful. I also asked him why it was so difficult to convince young black men to abandon the streets and take advantage of the same kinds of opportunities that the Vietnamese had recently embraced.

His answer, only a few words, not only floored me but became sort of a razor that has allowed me ever since to slice through all of the rhetoric regarding race relations that Democrats shovel our way during election season:

"We're owed and they aren't."

In short, he concluded, "they're hungry and we think we're owed. It's crushing us, and as long as we think we're owed we're going nowhere."
...
I managed to get a job on campus teaching expository writing to minority students who had been accepted provisionally into the university on an affirmative action program. And although I never met him, Ward Churchill, in addition to teaching in the ethnic studies department, helped to develop and organize the minority writing program.

The job paid most of my bills, but what I witnessed there was absolutely horrifying. The students were encouraged to write essays attacking the white establishment from every conceivable angle and in addition to defend affirmative action and other government programs. Of the hundreds of papers that I read, there was not one original contribution to the problem of black mobility that strayed from the party line.

The irony of it all however is that the "white establishment" managed to get them into the college and pay their entire tuition. Instead of being encouraged to study international affairs, classical or modern languages, philosophy or art, most of these students became ethnic studies or sociology majors because it allowed them to remain in disciplines whose orientation justified their existence at the university. In short, it became a vicious cycle.

There was a student there I'll never forget. He was plucked out of the projects in Denver and given a free ride to the university. One day in my office he told me that his mother had said the following to him: "M.J., they owe you this. White people at that university owe you this." M.J.'s experience at the university was a glorious fulfillment of his mother's angst.

There were black student organizations and other clubs that "facilitated" the minority student's experience on the majority white and "racist" campus, in addition to a plethora of faculty members, both white and black, who encouraged the same animus toward the white establishment. While adding to their own bona fides as part of the trendy Left, these "facilitators" supplied M.J. with everything he needed to quench his and his mother's anger, but nothing in the way of advice about how to succeed in college. No one, in short, had told M.J. that he needed to study. But since he was "owed" everything, why put out any effort on his own?
...
During my time teaching in the writing program, I watched Asians get transformed via leftist doublespeak from "minorities" to "model minorities" to "they're not minorities" in precise rhythm to their fortunes in business and education. Asians were "minorities" when they were struggling in this country, but they became "model minorities" when they achieved success. Keep in mind "model minority" did not mean what most of us think it means, i.e., something to emulate. "Model minority" meant that Asians had certain cultural advantages, such as a strong family tradition and a culture of scholarship that the black community lacked.

To suggest that intact families and a philosophy of self-reliance could be the ticket to success would have undermined the entire angst establishment. Because of this it was improper to use Asian success as a model. The contortions the left exercised in order to defend this ridiculous thesis helped to pave the way for the elimination of Asians altogether from the status of "minority."

This whole process took only a few years.

It is instructive to look to Michelle Obama's Princeton Thesis. As I was entering Princeton not long after she left it, I can attest that the campus bent over backwards to accomodate every whim and need of every student, and was especially sensitive to making minority students feel welcome. And yet, she wrote:

"My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before," the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

If anything, this is an indictment of affirmative action programs, because then no matter how well a minority student does, they will always feel like just part of a quota.

However I will also add that I'm not sure what she expected, as I also feel like a "visitor" on campus, though I wasn't a minority! This feeling has to do with the fact that as a student, one feels like a temporary 4-year visitor compared with the seemingly tradition-entrenched alums, but then as an alum, one feels a visitor to a campus "owned" 24/7 by the current crop of undergrads!

The 1985 thesis provides a trove of Michelle Obama's thoughts as a young woman, with many of the paper's statements describing the student's world as seen through a race-based prism.

"In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community," the Princeton student wrote, "I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture." Other thesis statements specifically pointed to what was seen by the future Mrs. Obama as racially insensitive practices in a university system populated with mostly Caucasian educators and students: "Predominately white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments."

Now that's pure nonsense! As a white student, I have no idea what special "white" needs I had that the university catered to.

To research her thesis, the future Mrs. Obama sent an 18-question survey to a sampling of 400 black Princeton graduates...

Just under 90 alums responded to the questionnaires (for a response rate of approximately 22 percent) and the conclusions were not what she expected. "I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility."

So in other words, unlike the Obamas, most of the other black alumni of Princeton did not leave university feeling angry and alienated -- they did not see everything through the prism of race.

Obama writes that the path she chose by attending Princeton would likely lead to her "further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant."

Interestingly, while remaining on the periphery,

According to the couple’s 2006 income tax return, Michelle's salary was $273,618 from the University of Chicago Hospitals, while he had a salary of $157,082 from the United States Senate. The total Obama income, however, was $991,296 including $51,200 she earned as a member of the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods, plus investments and royalties from his books.

Wretched whining ingrates!

Mamet Evolves

2008-03-23T15:16:00.003-04:00

In the Village Voice, noted playwright and author David Mamet explains Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal':

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life.
...
I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.
...
I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
...
The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant.
...
And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view [Has Mamet been rading his Victor Hanson? --ed.], the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.
...
I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

As an interesting aside, George McGovern also this month came out in favor of free markets in the Wall Street Journal:

When the Democratic Party moves too far left for George McGovern, you know they’re in trouble. The former Senator and presidential aspirant writes about the dangers of economic paternalism in a free society, specifically about the impulse among both Democrats and Republicans to protect adults from the consequences of their own free choices. Expect a lot less choice in the future, McGovern warns, if the nanny-state succeeds:

Since leaving office I’ve written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I’ve come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.

Obama's Patriotism

2008-03-04T21:16:00.003-05:00

Here President-wannabe Obama displays his respect for the National Anthem:

Maybe he could be President of Cuba, but that is simply unacceptable behavior for a potential President of the United States of America.

Obama Hates America

2008-03-02T17:09:00.004-05:00

Barack Hussein Obama hates America and seeks to punish it.

His swooning supporters embrace this punishment to redeem their guilt.

His motivations are kept hidden, but by his actions in unguarded moments and by his associates, we can find important clues.

Here we see Obama standing with other Democratic Presidential hopefuls during the National Anthem; he can't bring himself to correctly show respect by putting his hand on his heart like the others are doing, so instead he cups his crotch and sways around.

Watch Obama disrespect the National Anthem.

What kind of President doesn't make the proper a salute at the anthem in public??? One who hates this country, that's who!

He won't wear the American Flag lapel pin either.

Here is Obama, in 52 seconds, making strong unequivocal campaign
statements in his own video to seriously cripple our National Defense.

Here we learn about the driving hatreds of the women in his life.

There's much more, like his "Afrocentric" racist church (Trinity United Church of Christ) and its Farrakhan and Gadaffi and terrorist-supporting pastor. Obama chose to join and support this church, and still does.

Not to mention Obama's ties to and advice and money received from William Ayers, the unrepentant domestic terrorist from the Weather Underground who bombed the Pentagon.

'Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon."

This excerpt from William Ayers' memoir appeared in the New York Times on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 -- a few hours before Al Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Ayers, once a leader in the Weather Underground -- the group that declared "war" on the U.S. government in 1970 -- told the Times, "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough."

Ayers recently reappeared in the news because Politico.com reported Friday that Barack Obama has loose ties to him. Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is apparently a left-wing institution in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, and Obama visited Ayers' home as a rite of passage when launching his political career in the mid-1990s.
...
Why is it only conservative "cranks" who think it's relevant that Obama's campaign headquarters in Houston had a Che Guevara-emblazoned Cuban flag hanging on the wall? Indeed, why is love of Che still radically chic at all? A murderer who believed that "the U.S. is the great enemy of mankind" shouldn't be anyone's romantic hero. Why are Fidel Castro's apologists progressive and enlightened but apologists for Augusto Pinochet frightening and authoritarian? Why was Sen. Trent Lott's kindness to former segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond a scandal but Obama's acquaintance with an unrepentant terrorist a triviality?

These kinds of people from San Francisco who hate America support Obama -- I wonder why? [Warning -- images may damage your eyes! Not work safe!]

Mystery-lanche

2008-02-10T03:15:00.000-05:00

This, my 900th posting in what will be exactly three and a half years of blogging one week from today, will simply remark upon a mystery.

Or "mystery-lanche"!

I recently saw from my traffic counter that on January 30th, I got about 500 visits and 800 page views -- about ten times normal daily traffic!

I didn't notice that, however, until several days went by, and the free statcounter only keeps info on the last 100 visits, so I have no idea where they came from and what they were reading! And nobody left any comments to give a clue what they were reading. I wish I knew who posted a link here, and to what.

Or maybe, but less likely, everyone just was interested in the electoral college and found me by googling about it (one of my perrenial high-traffic google-search postings), because of Super Tuesday perhaps?

Oddly, the same thing happened about a year ago in December 2006 -- the reason also still a mystery!

Bolton?

2008-02-10T03:06:00.000-05:00

This piece at Huffpo speculates Bolton may be in line to be Secretary of State in a possible McCain administration.

Would embattled former UN ambassador John Bolton have a place in John McCain's presidential cabinet?

The idea was brewing beneath the veneer of Bolton's address to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.

Revealing information that he said had never before been made public, Bolton discussed how McCain secretly tried to shepherd his nomination to the United Nations -- a nomination that was held up in Congress over Bolton's controversial anti-UN statements and policies.

"He was very active behind the scenes," said Bolton, who was ultimately sent to the UN via a presidential recess appointment. "He thought I was the type of ambassador that ought to represent the United States at the United Nations."

Addressing an audience already skeptical of McCain's presidential nomination, Bolton offered a defense of the senator.

Of course, I think that would be AWESOME to have Bolton back! And with Rudy as Attorney General...well I can dream!

Of course, Huffpo was presenting this as something dreadful and scary! I was amused by the comments left be readers. This criticism in particular is telling:

Bolton is supposed to be a smart guy. Apparently he did well at a top school. It is really difficult to tell how smart these ideologues are because they so rarely seem to think for themselves. Bolton's opinions, as are Scalia's, are always highly predictable and show little influence by real world events.

So funny!

So apparently, thinking for yourself means changing your views to conform with popular opinion which is swept along in knee-jerk response to "real world events", i.e. MSM news headlines!

Having "highly predictable" views couldn't possibly be due to having a well-developed personal philosophy, could it now?

DEVO 1978

2008-02-10T02:41:00.001-05:00

October 14, 1978.

Watching Saturday Night Live, of all things, changed my life that night!

First Devo performed this:

Tight!

As an 11-year-old, I was very impressed.

And then they topped it off with this -- remember spuds, this is 1978!!!

When the music charts were dominated by Andy Gibb and the Bee Gees with hits like Stayin' Alive. Barry Manilow, Olivia Newton John, Debbie Boone!

This SNL appearance includes a short film intro:

Are We Not Men?