tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-252386672024-03-13T20:29:59.134-04:00The Editorial Times.ca"The Thorn of Dissent is the Flower of Democracy"<small>©</small> <br><br>
<small>or, if you'd rather...</small><br>"Its my blog and I'll pry if I want to, pry if I want to"<br>
<small> with apologies to Leslie Gore</small>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger203125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-46438881345398218132010-02-21T14:01:00.003-05:002010-02-21T14:27:28.188-05:00Editorial Times.ca is moving...Blogger is reaching the end of its useful life, I believe. Always a bit slow, it is not keeping pace with other blogging formats, such as Wordpress. <br /><br />Therefore, I've made the decision to begin the process of moving "Ed Times" over to the wordpress engine. While there is merit in Blogger allowing access to the theme code for modification, especially where special features like Chris Muir's superb Day By Day cartoon series are easily added, there are many technological ways in which the blogger format is becoming harder to use (Chris' cartoons will find their way to the new wordpress format somehow, I promise). <br /><br />The new wordpress format is crisper and cleaner, and fits better where I want the blog to go for the next while. Shortly,<span style="font-style: italic;"> www.editorialtimes.ca</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">www.editorialtimes.com</span> will point to the new site. This site will remain for a while as its base url: <span style="font-style: italic;">editorialtimes.blogspot.com</span>- I haven't yet made the decision as to how much of the old content will be moved over. This is a labour intensive and slow process, and there is a fair bit of structural work to be done yet on the new site.<br /><br />The new site is hosted as <span style="font-style: italic;">editorialtimes.wordpress.com</span>, but as mentioned above, will eventually be simply <span style="font-style: italic;">Editorialtimes.ca </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Editorialtimes.com</span>.<br /><br />Editorial Times.ca originally started in 2003, as an html site that required laborious creation of new html pages for each post entry. Its original purpose remains, to provide selected editorial content concerning issues of the day, with a particular emphasis on Canadian issues, and like many blogs, it ebbs and flows with the interests of its owner and of the issues and topics of the day.<br /><br />I'm open to adding regular guest contributors, if anyone wants to be a participant. While I am "predominantly" conservative politically, I value considered contrary opinion. This shouldn't be interpreted as providing a forum for "nutroots" of either persuasion, but even they provide a standard on which to compare and contrast. As my tagline says, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Thorn of Dissent is the Flower of Democracy - </span>one can't exist without the other.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-38723821172059332142010-02-21T10:15:00.002-05:002010-02-21T10:18:24.623-05:00Steyn:Iran will go nuclear and formally inaugurate the post-American era.<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NmViMTg2MGQzMDQ4NTExZjlmODE1M2Q0ZGU3ZTdiYjc=">Keeping You Safe</a><br /><br />by Mark Steyn, February 20, 2010 8:00 A.M.<br /><br />In Britain, it is traditional on Shrove Tuesday to hold pancake races, in which contestants run while flipping a pancake in a frying pan. The appeal of the event depends on the potential pitfalls in attempting simultaneous rapid forward propulsion and pancake tossing. But, in St. Albans, England, competitors were informed by Health & Safety officials that they were “banned from running due to fears they would slip over in the rain.” Watching a man walk up the main street with a skillet is not the most riveting event, even in St. Albans. In the heat of the white-knuckle thrills, team captain David Emery momentarily forgot the new rules. “I have been disqualified from a running race for running,” he explained afterwards.<br /><br />In Canada, Karen Selick told readers of the <em>Ottawa Citizen</em> about her winter vacation in Arizona last month: “The resort suite I rented via the Internet promised a private patio with hot tub,” she wrote. “Upon arrival, I found the door to my patio bolted shut. ‘Entry prohibited by federal law,’ read the sign. Hotel management explained that the drains in all the resort’s hot tubs had recently been found not to comply with new safety regulations. Compliance costs would be astronomical. Dozens of hot-tubs would instead be cemented over permanently.” In the meantime, her suite had an attractive view of the federally prohibited patio.<br /><br />Anything else? Oh, yeah. In Iran, the self-declared nuclear regime announced that it was now enriching uranium to 20 percent. When President Obama took office, the Islamic Republic had 400 centrifuges enriching up to 3.5 percent. A year later, it has 8,000 centrifuges enriching to 20 percent. The CIA director, Leon Panetta, now cautiously concedes that Iran’s nuclear ambitions may have a military purpose. Which is odd, because the lavishly funded geniuses behind America’s National Intelligence Estimate told us only two years ago that Tehran had ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Is that estimate no longer operative? And, if so, could we taxpayers get a refund?<br /><br />This is a perfect snapshot of the West at twilight. On the one hand, governments of developed nations micro-regulate every aspect of your life in the interests of “keeping you safe.” If you’re minded to flip a pancake at speeds of more than four miles per hour, the state will step in and act decisively: It’s for your own good. If you’re a tourist from Moose Jaw, Washington will take preemptive action to shield you from the potential dangers of your patio in Arizona.<br /><br />On the other hand, when it comes to “keeping you safe” from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing. There aren’t going to be any sanctions, because China and Russia don’t want them. That means military action, which would have to be done without U.N. backing — which, as Greg Sheridan of the <em>Australian</em> puts it, “would be foreign to every instinct of the Obama administration.” Indeed. Nonetheless, Washington is (all together now) “losing patience” with the mullahs. The <em>New York Daily News</em> reports the latest get-tough move: “Secretary of State Clinton dared Iran on Monday to let her hold a town-hall meeting in Tehran.”<br /><br />That’s telling <span style="">’</span><span style="">em. If the ayatollahs had a sense of humor, they’d call her bluff.<br /><br />The average Canadian can survive an Arizona hot tub merely compliant with 2009 safety standards rather than 2010. The average Englishman can survive stumbling with his frying pan: You may get a nasty graze on your kneecap, but rub in some soothing pancake syrup and you’ll soon feel right as rain. Whether they — or at any rate their pampered, complacent societies in which hot-tub regulation is the most pressing issue of the day — can survive a nuclear Iran is a more open question.<br /><br />It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s. It is far worse than Pakistan going nuclear, which, after all, was just another thing the CIA failed to see coming. In this case, the slow-motion nuclearization conducted in full view and through years of tortuous diplomatic charades and endlessly rescheduled looming deadlines is not just a victory for Iran but a decisive defeat for the United States. It confirms the Islamo-Sino-Russo-everybody-else diagnosis of Washington as a hollow superpower that no longer has the will or sense of purpose to enforce the global order.<br /><br />What does it mean? That a year or two down the line Iran will be nuking Israel? Not necessarily, although the destruction of not just the Zionist Entity but the broader West remains an explicit priority. Maybe they mean it. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they’ll do it directly. Maybe they’ll just get one of their terrorist subcontractors to weaponize the St. Albans pancake batter. But, when you’ve authorized successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie’s publishers and translators, when you’ve blown up Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, when you’ve acted extraterritorially to the full extent of your abilities for 30 years, it seems prudent for the rest of us to assume that when your abilities go nuclear, you’ll be acting to an even fuller extent.<br /><br />But even without launching a single missile, Iran will at a stroke have transformed much of the map — and not just in the Middle East, where the Sunni dictatorships face a choice between an unsought nuclear arms race and a future as Iranian client states. In Eastern Europe, a nuclear Iran will vastly advance Russia’s plans for a de facto reconstitution of its old empire: In an unstable world, Putin will offer himself as the protection racket you can rely on. And you’d be surprised how far west “Eastern” Europe extends: Moscow’s strategic view is of a continent not only energy-dependent on Russia but also security-dependent. And, when every European city is within range of Tehran and other psycho states, there’ll be plenty of takers for that when the alternative is an effete and feckless Washington.<br /><br />It’s a mistake to think that the infantilization of once-free peoples represented by the micro-regulatory nanny state can be confined to pancakes and hot tubs. Consider, for example, the incisive analysis of Scott Gration, the U.S. special envoy to the mass murderers of Sudan: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies,</span><span style="">”</span><span style=""> said Gration a few months back. “Kids, countries — they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.”<br /><br />Actually, there’s not a lot of evidence “smiley faces” have much impact on kids in the Bronx, never mind genocidal machete-wielders in Darfur. So much for the sophistication of “soft power,” smiling through a hard-faced world.<br /><br />So Iran will go nuclear and formally inaugurate the post-American era. The Left and the isolationist right reckon that’s no big deal. They think of the planet as that Arizona patio and America as the hotel room. There may be an incendiary hot tub out there, but you can lock the door and hang a sign, and life will go on, albeit a little more cramped and constrained than before. I think not.<br /><br /></span><span class="bioline"><em>— </em></span><span class="bioline"><em><a href="http://www.marksteyn.com/">Mark Steyn</a>, a <span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><span style="font-style: normal; font-variant: small-caps;">National Review</span></span> columnist, is author of </em><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1596985275">America Alone</a><em>. © 2010 Mark Steyn</em></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-68607486667534939982010-01-30T16:03:00.000-05:002010-01-30T16:04:14.803-05:00VideoJournalism 101<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/YtGSXMuWMR4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/YtGSXMuWMR4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-49964296192690814152010-01-23T19:19:00.003-05:002010-01-23T19:38:53.810-05:00Too Much of a Bad Thing, by My Hero, Mark Steyn, sigh:)<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><br /><span class='articledate'>January 23, 2010, 0:07 a.m.</span><br/><br/><span class='articletitle'><a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MThlOTBiN2QwNDgzNTk0MDBkZjNhYzM2MWQyODUyOWY=">Too Much of a Bad Thing</a></span><br/><span class='articlesubtitle'>Who’s panting for Obama speech number 412? Exactly no one.</span><br/><br/><span class='articlesubtitle'>By Mark Steyn</span><br/><br/><p style='margin: 0in 0in 0pt;' class='MsoNormal'><span style=''>So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”<br/><br/>But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is<br />determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people.”<br/><br/>Wait, wait! Come back! Don’t all stampede for the hills! He only gave (according to CBS News’s Mark Knoller) 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year. That’s more than any previous president </span><span style=''>—</span><span style=''> and maybe more than all of them put together. But there may still be some show out there that didn’t get its exclusive Obama interview </span><span style=''>—</span><span style=''> I believe the top-rated <em>Grain & Livestock Prices Report </em></span><em><span style=''>—</span></em><em><span style=''> 4 <span style='font-variant: small-caps;'>a.m.</span> Update with Herb Torpormeister</span></em><span style=''> on WZZZ-AM Dead Buzzard Gulch Junction’s Newstalk Leader is still waiting to hear back from the White House.<br/></span></p><p><span style=''>But what will the president be saying in all these extra interviews? In that interview about how he hadn’t given enough interviews, he also explained to George Stephanopoulos what that wacky Massachusetts election was all about:<br/><br/>“The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”<br/><br/>Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can’t wait for that 159th interview.<br/><br/>Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it.<br/><br/>So who’s panting for that 412th speech? Not the American Left. As Paul Krugman, the <em>New York Times</em>’s “Conscience of a Liberal,” put it: “He Wasn’t The One We’ve Been Waiting For.”<br/><br/>Not the once-delirious Europeans, either. As the headline in <em>Der Spiegel</em> put it: “The World Bids Farewell to Obama.”<br/><br/>And not any beleaguered Democratic candidates trying to turn things around in volatile swing states like, er, Massachusetts. The Barack Obama who showed up last Sunday to help out Martha Coakley was a sad and diminished figure from the colossus of a year ago. He had nothing to say, but he said it anyway. As he did with his Copenhagen pitch for the Olympics, he put his personal prestige on the line, raised the stakes, and then failed to deliver. All those cool kids on his speech-writing team bogged him down in the usual leaden sludge. He went to the troubleof flying in to phone it in.<br/><br/>The most striking aspect of his performance was how unhappy he looked, as if he doesn’t enjoy the job. You can understand why. He ran as something he’s not, and never has been: a post-partisan, centrist, transformative healer. That’d be a difficult trick to pull off even for somebody with any prior executive experience, someone who’d actually run something, like a state, or even a town, or even a commercial fishing operation, like that poor chillbilly boob Sarah Palin. At one point late in the 2008 campaign, when someone suggested that if Governor Palin was “unqualified” then surely he was too, Obama pointed out as evidence to the contrary his ability to run such an effective campaign. In other words, running for president was his main qualification for being president.<br/><br/>That was the story of his life: Wow! Look at this guy! Wouldn’t it be great to have him . . . as community organizer, as state representative, as state senator, as United States senator. He was wafted ever upwards, staying just long enough in each “job” to get another notch on the escutcheon, but never long enough to leave any trace.<br/><br/>The defining moment of his doomed attempt to prop up Martha Coakley was his peculiar obsession with Scott Brown’s five-year-old pickup:<br/><br/>“Forget the ads. Everybody can run slick ads,” the president told an audience of out-of-state students at a private school. “Forget the truck. Everybody can buy a truck.”<br/><br/>How they laughed! But what was striking was the thinking behind Obama’s line: that anyone can buy a truck for a slick ad, that Brown’s pickup was a prop </span><span style=''>—</span><span style=''> like the herd of cows Al Gore rented for a pastoral backdrop when he launched his first presidential campaign. Or the <em>Iron Chef</em> TV episode featuring delicious, healthy recipes made with produce direct from Michelle Obama’s “kitchen garden”: The cameras filmed the various chefs meeting the first lady and then picking choice organic delicacies from the White House crop, and then for the actual cooking the show sent out for stunt-double vegetables from a grocery back in New York. Viewed from Obama’s perspective, why wouldn’t you assume the truck’s just part of the set? "In his world,” wrote <em>The Weekly Standard</em>’s Stephen Hayes, “everything is political and everything is about appearances.”<br/><br/>Howard Fineman, the increasingly loopy editor of the increasingly doomed <em>Newsweek</em>, took it a step further. The truck wasn’t just any old prop but a very particular kind: “In some places, there are codes, there are images,” he told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. “You know, there are pickup trucks, you could say there was a racial aspect to it one way or another.”<br/><br/>Ah, yes. Scott Brown has over 200,000 miles on his odometer. Man, he’s racked up a lot of coded racism on that rig. But that’s easy to do in notorious cross-burning KKK swamps like suburban Massachusetts.<br/><br/>Whenever aspiring writers ask me for advice, I usually tell ’em this:<br/> <br/>Don’t just write there, <em>do</em> something. Learn how to shingle a roof, or tap-dance, or raise sled dogs. Because if you don’t do anything, you wind up like Obama and Fineman </span><span style=''>—</span><span style=''> men for whom words are props and codes and metaphors but no longer expressive of anything real.<br/><br/>America is becoming a bilingual society, divided between those who think a pickup is a rugged vehicle useful for transporting heavy-duty items from A to B and those who think a pickup is coded racism.<br/><br/>Unfortunately, the latter group forms most of the Democrat-media one-party state currently running the country. Can you imagine Bill Clinton being so stupid as to put down pickup trucks while standing next to John Kerry? And what’s even more extraordinary is that those lines were <em>written</em> for Obama by paid professionals.<br/><br/>But fine, have it your way. Tuesday’s vote was really a plea by a desperate people for even more Obama. We’re going to need even more Obama teleprompters, even more Obama speeches, even more sonorous banalities unrelated to action, even more “Let me be clears” prefacing even more tinny generalities, on even more reams of even more double-spaced paper. And we’re gonna need a really heavy-duty rig to carry all that verbiage.<br/><br/>Maybe Scott Brown can sell ’em his truck.</span></p><br/><span class='bioline'><em> — <span class='bioline'><em><a href='http://www.marksteyn.com/'>Mark Steyn</a>, a <span style='font-family: Times New Roman; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);'><span style='font-style: normal; font-variant: small-caps;'>National Review</span></span> columnist, is author of </em><a href='http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1596985275'>America Alone</a><em>. © 2010 Mark Steyn</em></span></em></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-69208570698919441922010-01-01T22:23:00.002-05:002010-01-01T22:28:50.018-05:00"Sarah Palin, Man of the Year"<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Greetings and best wishes for a new year, new decade... :)<br/><br/><a href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/6511'>Sarah Palin, Man of the Year</a>, By Don Surber<br/><br/> <p><span id='more-6511'/></p> <p style='text-align: center;'><img alt='' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVYCU7-YEiCKV3K3BqhVRDE8ckF4vhiZLBPy87gqdUKyOlYrgLLBt0p44InlfXmI-5AxFKOiu-VAO-mJIaGIO9LwwelK9g8I6atMydEIHDTkkZDNWaA4PhMxVS0sZPYslePYJl/s1600/palin2.jpg' class='aligncenter' width='450'/></p> <p style='text-align: left;'></span>2009 was an extraordinary year in which ordinary people did extraordinary things not because they were the easy things to do, but because they were the right thing to do. The people ranged from young Hannah Giles who jump-started her journalism career by donning a hooker’s garb to bring down the racketeer influenced corrupt organization known as ACORN, to Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III, who culminated the decades of his life that he worked toward airline safety simply by landing an engineless plane on the Hudson River.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Michael Paul Mizzone, a carpenter’s business representative, pulled Josef R. Bruckuf, 82, out of a burning house, severely burning himself in the rescue. Police Sergeant James Crowley refused to buckle under presidential pressure and apologize for arresting a belligerent man. Economist Douglas W. Elmendorf refused to buckle under presidential pressure to cook the books for Obamacare.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>The list of such candidates was long as the United States and Canada are nations that still celebrate and nurture rugged individualism. We still produce people like Stephen McIntyre who demand proof before they sign onto the global warming fad.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>And lest we forget, the Netherlands gave us Jasper Schuringa, who saved Flight 253. The Dutch have our gratitude.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>While each of the finalists was deserving, there can be only one man of the year — Sarah Palin. In the pantheon of people who stood up this year for that which is right, no one else stood taller or looked better.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>She endured the most and came to symbolize the majority of American citizens who are stunned by the attempt to rapidly dismantle this great nation of ours and transform it into another Euro-weenie socialist country that apologizes for trying to save the rest of the world over the years.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>The cynic in me said I should honor the person most responsible for reviving the conservative movement — Barack Obama. His arrogance and over-reach gave people pause. The plunder of the treasury in February caused even apolitical people to question his true motives. His slide to 44% approval among voters came lightning quick and we all know that thunder follows lightning.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>But conservatives make lousy cynics. Skeptics yes. We refuse to act now, think later. This is why so many of us were cool to the theory of global warming. Climategate proved us correct. We may be suspicious, but being conservative means never saying things will not get better someday. Usually tomorrow. Conservatives are patient. Wait till next year became the battle cry by August. We shall see how that works out in November.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>This post originally was written as the runner-up slot. Most readers thought Sarah Palin would be the first Man of the Year of the Don Surber blog, but I had other plans. Just as in the Miss Alaska contest a quarter-century ago, she would be the runner-up. Rush Limbaugh’s CPAC speech was a magical moment in American history and so he would win.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that while Rush Limbaugh deserved the award, Mrs. Palin did even more for the conservative movement, and therefore for America, this year than even he did. In the final days, they switched places.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Naming Sarah Palin as Man of the Year is the only logical conclusion to a year when Americans who petitioned their government for a redress of grievances were smeared as “un-American” by the people who are temporarily in charge.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>And still the people rose up.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Mrs. Palin has endured more slings and more arrows than any other politician in America. She may not have gone into any burning buildings, but she was singed nonetheless. Had Obama’s mansion deal received one-tenth the scrutiny that her shopping for clothes received, we conservatives would be grousing today about President Hillary. All things considered, Mrs. Clinton would have been the better president than this one.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>The personal attacks on Mrs. Palin this year were so vile that if she were the Rutgers women’s basketball team, David Letterman would have lost his job. But CBS put profits above decency. Letterman had no problem calling her a slut and her daughter a slut on national TV; it upped his ratings as liberal misogyny is alive and well and profitable.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>His offer of a half-assed apology with an invitation to come on his show and boost his ratings was met with an the iciest No of the year, so cold that it actually shocked him into giving a real apology.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Mrs. Palin moved on, marching to the beat of the American drummer. She caught hell from the left for another year, and began firing back. Her Facebook posts are well-written and thought out. Tagging Obamacare as having “death panels” rattled the lefty cages and woke up Americans to the rationing of health care that was right around the bend.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Not all the criticisms of her were without substance. Many of us remain puzzled by her decision to resign abruptly as the governor of Alaska. But her campaign for the 2012 presidency continues despite this misstep. She stood up for what is right and held her head high as she marched forward — ever forward.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Half the people of the United States love her for hanging in there. They love her for sharing their values of home, hearth and country. They love her for being of the the people, by the people and for the people.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Oh, not the elites and the elitist wannabes. The little potty-mouthed drones on the left think they are so sophisticated as they mock 14-year-old girls, babies with Down syndrome and people who shop at Wal-Mart. The Washington Post’s book reviewer bragged that she did not read Sarah Palin’s book. Ignorance is now a status symbol for the left.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Ordinary people did read her book and they were impressed. The people who shop at Wal-Mart bought 1 million copies of her autobiography in just 2 weeks. Thousands of them stood in line by the thousands in the freezing nights of November and December just to get her autograph. She is of them — a hockey mom who is naive, unsophisticated and learning just how rotted from within America’s political system has become. She beat corruption in Wasilla. She beat corruption in Alaska. And well, she finished 2009 with a higher approval rating than The Won.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>She did this despite nearly universal adulation in the press for him and nearly universal condemnation in the press for her.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>The people know the elites hate her. Dumping on her has gone beyond the point of reason. The Tina Feying of her backfires anymore. We get it already. The more they mock her, the deeper the resolve of her fans. The odd thing is, her detractors slam her because Sarah Palin boosts ratings. They are trying to stop the hurricane with a beach umbrella.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Her appearance on Oprah Winfrey pushed Oprah’s ratings — which have sagged since Oprah publicly endorsed Obama — up by 68%. Mrs. Palin gave Oprah her highest ratings in 2 years, easily topping the appearances by anyone named Obama.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>She is genuine. Her beliefs in freedom, in independence and in community service reflect how she was raised. She does not hide who she is. There are no ulterior motives. There is no one underneath her bus.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>The question anymore is not whether she is ready for the presidency — unlike our current president, she has had her mettle tested in fire several times now and passed with quite more than a gentleman’s B+ — but rather the question is whether she is too pretty to be president.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Sarah Palin, Man of the Year of the Don Surber blog for 2009.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>The other finalists:</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Rush Limbaugh, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/6612'>Man of the Year Runner-up</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Kenneth Gladney, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/6381'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 3</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Glenn Beck, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/6383'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 4</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Douglas W. Elmendorf, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/6501'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 5</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Jim Justice, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/6344'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 6</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>23 Carnegie Medal heroes, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/6078'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 7</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/5934'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 8</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Chesley Burnett “Sully” Sullenberger III, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/6002'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 9</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Hannah Giles, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/5931'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 10</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Stephen McIntyre, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/5929'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 11</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Rick Santelli, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/5959'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 12</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>James Crowley, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/5951'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 13</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Andrew Breitbart, <a target='_blank' href='http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/5946'>Man of the Year Finalist No. 14</a>.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>Jasper Schuringa, Man of the Year Finalist No. 15.</p> <p style='text-align: left;'>UPDATE: That photo at the top is not a beach photo of Mrs. Palin but rather from a military photo taken when she visited the troops. She looks good anywhere. The uncropped photo:</p> <p><img alt='' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPM8aMVHPMkWfEljsJjIplMw5y30NhZkOSspBP5aVzrw3mSqD9y7Q6Wzuhqc2gQSV5VBs0uU0Xt4cwMyKcuNloBeNCX6S4U5FNNHl86Dy1KVORI53fQwIddZt7OfZBL0PQjenI/s320/palin2.jpg'/></p> <p style='text-align: left;'><br/></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-34206243389521662622009-12-27T10:37:00.000-05:002009-12-27T10:38:01.561-05:00Cross the River, Burn the Bridge<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><span class='articlesubtitle'><a href='http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YjU5OTJmODE4MGM5YmNiZDEyZDU5ZWU3NThhYjdmNGY='>Obamacare is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture.</a> </span><br/><br/><span class='articlesubtitle'>By Mark Steyn</span>, December 26, 2009<br/><br/><span class='drop'>L</span>ast week, during a bit of banter on Fox News, my colleague Jonah Goldberg reminded me of something I’d all but forgotten. Last September, during his address to Congress on health care, Barack Obama declared: “I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”<br/><br/> Dream on. The monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve is not the last word in “health” “care,” but the first. It ensures that this is all we’ll be talking about, now and forever. <br/><br/>Government can’t just annex “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” (i.e., the equivalent of annexing the entire British or French economy, or annexing the entire Indian economy twice over) and then just say: “Okay, what’s next? On to cap-and-trade . . . ” Nations that governmentalize health care soon find themselves talking about little else.<br/><br/> In Canada, once the wait times for MRIs and hip surgery start creeping up over two years, the government distracts the citizenry with a Royal Commission appointed to study possible “reforms” which reports back a couple of years later usually with recommendations to “strengthen” the government’s “commitment” to every Canadian’s “right” to health care by renaming the Department of Health the Department of Health Services and abolishing the Agency of Health Administration and replacing it with a new Agency of Administrative Health Operations which would report to a reformed Council of Health Policy Administrative Coordination to be supervised by a streamlined Public Health Operations & Administration Assessment Bureau. This package of “reforms” would cost a mere 12.3 gazillion dollars and usually keeps the lid on the pot until the wait times for MRIs start creeping up over three years.<br/><br/>The other alternative is what the British did earlier this year: They created an exciting new “Patient’s Bill of Rights,” promising every Briton the “right” to hospital treatment within 18 weeks. Believe it or not, that distant deadline shimmering woozily in the languid desert haze can be oddly reassuring if you’ve ever visited a Scottish emergency room on a holiday weekend. And, if the four-and-a-half months go by and you still haven’t been treated, you get your (tax) money back? Ah, no. But there is a free helpline you can call which will give you continuously updated estimates on which month your operation has been rescheduled for. I mention these not as a preview of the horrors to come, but because I’ve come to the bleak conclusion that U.S.-style “health” “reform” is going to be far worse. <br/><br/>We were told we had to do it because of the however many millions of uninsured, yet this bill will leave some 25 million Americans uninsured. On the other hand, millions of young fit healthy Americans in their first jobs who currently take the entirely reasonable view that they do not require health insurance at this stage in their lives will be forced to pay for coverage they neither want nor need. On the other other hand, those Americans who’ve done the boring responsible grown-up thing and have health plans Harry Reid determines to be excessively “generous” will be subject to punitive taxes up to 40 percent. On the other other other hand, if you’re the member of a union which enjoys privileged relations with Commissar Reid you’ll be exempt from that 40 percent shakedown. On the other other other other hand, if you’re already enjoying government health care, well, you’re 83 years old and, let’s face it, it’s hardly worth us giving you that surgery for the minimal contribution you make to society, so in the cause of extending government health care to millions of people who don’t currently get it we’re going to ration it for those currently entitled to it. <br/><br/>Looking at the millions of Americans it leaves uninsured, and the millions it leaves with worse treatment and reduced access, and the millions it makes pay significantly more for their current health care, one can only marvel at Harry Reid’s genius: government health care turns out to be all government and no health care. Adding up the zillions of new taxes and bureaucracies and regulations it imposes on the citizenry, one might almost think that was the only point of the exercise.<br/><br/>That’s why I believe America’s belated embrace of government health care is going to be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one’s philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you’re a cabinet minister or a bigtime hockey player, you’ll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does. But, even before it’s up-and-running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs, and arbitrary shakedowns.<br/><br/>That’s why Nebraska’s grotesque zombie senator Ben Nelson is the perfect poster boy for the new arrangements, and not just another so-called Blue Dog Democrat spayed into compliance by a massive cash injection. There is no reason on earth why Nebraska should be the only state in this Union to have every dime of its increased Medicare tab picked up by the 49 others. So either that privilege will be extended to all, or to favored others, or its asymmetry will be balanced by other precisely targeted lollipops hither and yon. Whatever happens, it’s a dagger at the heart of American federalism, just as the bill’s magisterial proclamation that the Independent Medicare Advisory Board can only be abolished by a two-thirds vote of the Senate strikes at one of the most basic principles of a free society — that no parliament can bind its successors.<br/><br/>These details are obnoxious not merely in and of themselves but because they tell us the truth about where we’re headed: Think of the way almost every Big Government project bursts its bodice and winds up bigger and more bloated than its creators allegedly foresaw. In this instance, the stays come pre-loosened, and studded with loopholes. Because the Democrat operators — the Nancy Pelosis and Barney Franks — know that what matters is to get something, anything across the river, and then burn the bridge behind you. <br/><br/>My Republican friends often seem to miss the point in this debate: The so-called “public option” is not Page 3,079, Section (f), Clause VII. The entire bill is a public option — because that’s where it leads, remorselessly. The so-called “death panel” is not Page 2,721, Paragraph 19, Sub-section (d), but again the entire bill — because it inserts the power of the state between you and your doctor, and in effect assumes jurisdiction over your body. As the savvier Dems have always known, once you’ve crossed the Rubicon, you can endlessly re-reform your health reform until the end of time, and all the stuff you didn’t get this go-round will fall into place, and very quickly.<br/><br/>As I’ve been saying for over a year now, “health care” is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture. The unlovely Democrats on public display in the week before Christmas may seem like just a bunch of jelly-spined opportunists, grubby wardheelers and rapacious kleptocrats, but the smarter ones are showing great strategic clarity. Alas for the rest of us, Euro-style government on a Harry Reid/Chris Dodd/Ben Nelson scale will lead to ruin.<br/><br/><span class='bioline'>— <span class='bioline'><em><a href='http://www.marksteyn.com/'>Mark Steyn</a>, a </em>National Review<em> columnist, is author of </em><a href='http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1596985275'>America Alone</a><em>. © 2009 Mark Steyn</em></span></span><p><br/></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-15373056913894711352009-12-03T18:18:00.002-05:002009-12-03T18:26:32.295-05:00The Bottle Genie<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Reprinted from <a href='http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012796.html'>Small Dead Animals</a>.<br/><br/>By Kate McMillan, December 3, 2009.<br/><br/><p>"Well, it finally happened. Much of Canadian media broke radio silence on Climategate today. There really wasn't much choice but to report it, now that Environment Minister Jim Prentice had officially described the allegations as "serious", coupled with the day-old news that CRU head Phil Jones was "stepping aside" in preparation for his encounter with a double-decker. </p><p>As of this evening, there are 23,100,000 Google results for "climategate" - and exactly <em>one</em> on-air report from the CBC. </p><p>It's been 14 days since the cork was pulled from <a href='http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/leaked-foia-files-62-mb-of-gold/'>FOIA 2009.zip</a> </p><p>And as it turns out, the concerted efforts of a protective mainstream media to ignore the scandal turned out to be worst possible course of events for the University of Anglia's motley CRU and their supporters in the wealth distribution industry.</p> <p>They gave us something very powerful - 14 days of <em>time</em>. Time, while scores of bloggers and thousands of readers put in <a href='http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/11/20/climate-cuttings-33.html'>uncountable man hours of dissection and analysis</a>. </p> <p>Time for <a href='http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/comment-on-the-hacking-of-the-cru-website/'>those</a> who'd been <a href='http://camirror.wordpress.com '>discussed</a> and copied in the leaked emails to confirm that there was no evidence of tampering. </p><p>Time for programmers to sift through <a href='http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=com.ubuntu%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=ioP&q=harry_read_me.txt&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq='>Harry's now famous code</a> line by line, to <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/'>test it</a> for themselves. </p> <p>Time for members of the academic community to get <a href='http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012763.html'>their outrage and condemnation</a> on the record, and on their own terms. Time for those who'd been targeted to <a href='http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/1324/'>retell their stories</a>.</p> <p>Time for opinion columnists and talk radio to break ranks and take on the job their news editors refused to do, to disseminate the facts <em>gathered, checked and analyzed by bloggers</em> to a wider audience.</p> <p>Time for the comments sections of every online newspaper in the western world to fill with angry demands from their readers to <em>cover the damned story</em>. Not because they were needed anymore, but because we wanted the stupid charade to end.</p> <p>So when Peter Mansbridge went on the <em>National</em> tonight to admit what he had surely known for days, we didn't watch to find out what's contained in FOIA 2009.zip, for we'd read it for ourselves. </p> <p><em>We only watched to see if he had.</em></p> <p>For perhaps the first time in the history of mass media, the gatekeepers broke a major scandal to an audience fully 10 days ahead of them. </p> <p>It's a spin doctor's worst nightmare. </p> <p>As I've been saying from the beginning, they're hearing the sound of all hell breaking loose. And as much as it's being directed at the research institutions and the policy makers following along like so many imprinted penguins, the bulk of public rage has focused on the media.</p> <p>I don't think my friends in traditional news gathering truly appreciate what it is they've done. I don't believe they fully comprehend how gravely they have injured themselves, and how they're driving home the razor into an industry already struggling for survival with abbreviated, dismissive, misleading reports and <a href='http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/denialists '>"denier" and "conspiracy nut" slurs</a>.</p> <p>The bloggers tried to warn them. The opinion columnists tried to warn them, the talk hosts tried to warn them. Their readers, viewers and listeners tried to warn them.</p> <p>The news media perfected the business of bombshells. They wind them up, drop them, film the explosion, and move on. </p> <p>They're just learning now that we're in the business of bottle genies."</p><br/><br/></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-42931561578153128892009-11-29T10:35:00.001-05:002009-11-29T10:35:59.912-05:00Finally, the beginning of the end of the global warming fraud. XV. The Future of Scence.<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><a href='http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/global_warming_fraud_and_the_f.html'><b>Global Warming Fraud and the Future of Science</b> </a> By <a href='http://www.americanthinker.com/jr_dunn/'>J.R. Dunn</a> <span class='home_blog_date'>November 29, 2009</span><br/><br/><div class='article_body'> The East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) revelations come as no real surprise to anyone who has closely followed the global-warming saga. The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) thesis, to give it its semi-official name, is no stranger to fraud. It would be no real exaggeration to state that it was fertilized with fraud, marinated in fraud, stewed in fraud, and at last served up to the world as prime grade-A fraud with nice side orders of fakery and disingenuousness. Damning as they may be, the CRU e-mails are merely the climactic element in an exhaustively long line. <br/><br/><div>A short tour of previous AGW highlights would include:</div><br/><div><strong><em>The Y2K Glitch.</em></strong> This <a href='http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+in+NASA+Climate+Data/article8383.htm'>episode</a> involved the NASA/GISS team led by James Hansen, possibly the most fanatical and unrelenting of all warmists, a man who makes Al Gore look like a skeptic. (Among other things, Hansen has demanded that warming "deniers" be tried for "crimes against humanity".) While examining a series of NASA temperature graphs, Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, himself not so much a skeptic as an anti-warming Van Helsing, uncovered a discontinuity occurring in January 2000 that raised temperatures gathered over widespread areas by 1-2 degrees Fahrenheit. McIntyre had no easy time of it, since Hansen refused to reveal what algorithm he'd used to process the data, forcing McIntyre to perform some very abstruse calculations to figure it out.</div><br/><div>Once notified, Hansen's team promised to correct the error, stating that it was an "oversight". When the corrected figures were at last released, they rocked the church of warming from bingo hall to steeple. Vanished was the claim that the past few years were "the warmest on record". Now 1934 took precedence. A full half of the top ten warmest years occurred before WW II, well prior to any massive CO2 buildup. </div><br/><div>No explanation has ever been offered. We have a Y2K glitch that behaves like no other computer glitch ever encountered, uniformly affecting a large number of sources distributed almost nationwide. Although the incident trashed all recent data and raised uncomfortable questions about the warming thesis as a whole, NASA itself made no effort at an investigation or inquiry. All that we're ever going to hear is "oversight". I guess that's how they do things at NASA/GISS. </div><br/><div><strong><em>The Arctic Ice Melt</em></strong>. We've been informed for the better part of a decade that Arctic ice was melting at an unprecedented rate, and that the North Pole would be ice-free in twenty, thirty, or forty years, depending in the hysteria level of the media platform in question. In truth, ice thinning was due to a cyclical weather pattern in which winds blow ice floes south into warmer water. Everybody involved knew that this cycle occurred, everyone had seen it happen previously time out of mind. But it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Worse yet, when the weather returned to its normal pattern <a href='http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/spread-of-thicker-arctic-ice-seen-last-summer/?emc=eta1'>two years ago</a>, large numbers of scientists put in considerable effort to suggest that the "new" ice was thinner than usual and would vanish in a flash as soon as the temperatures went back up. The media went along with the joke. The Germans have a phrase to cover such eventualities: this crew should be stripped of their trade. (Several expeditions setting out for the Pole to "call attention" to the coming Arctic catastrophe had to stop short due to icy conditions. In one case, both women involved suffered serious frostbite.) <br/><strong><em><br/>The Poor Polar Bears</em></strong>. Closely related is the saga of the polar bears, staring extinction in the face due to warming while, somewhere beyond the aurora, Gaia weeps bitter tears. This was evidently inspired by a single photograph (you've seen it -- the entire world has at this point) of a woebegone polar bear crouched on a melting iceberg. That bear had to be sulking over allowing a nice juicy seal to escape, because it was in no danger. Out of the twenty major polar bear populations only two are known to be decreasing. Estimates of bear population (there are no exact figures) have increased over the past forty years, from 17,000 to19,000 to the current number of 22,000 to 27,000. The bears are becoming pests in municipalities such as Churchill and Point Barrow. (As clearly shown <a href='http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1102347/Chilling-game-hide-seek-hungry-polar-bear.html'>here</a>.) Despite all this, last year the bear was put on the U.S. "endangered" list. </div><br/><div><strong><em>The Hockey Stick That Wasn't.</em></strong> The "hockey stick" is a nickname for a chart prepared by Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania professor and leading warmist. The chart purports to show temperature levels for the past millennium, and consists of a straight line until it reaches the late 20<sup>th</sup> century, when it suddenly shoots upward, creating the "hockey stick" profile. This chart was a major feature of International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports on global warming and is a commonly-used media graphic.</div><br/><div>This chart creates immediate doubt in anyone knowledgeable about the climate of the past millennium, which more resembles a roller coaster than a straight line. It developed -- in yet another <a href='http://www.uoguelph.ca/%7Ermckitri/research/MM-W05-background.pdf'>impressive McIntyre takedown</a>, this time with an assist from Ross McKitrick -- that Mann was utilizing an algorithm that would produce hockey sticks if you fed it telephone numbers. (Mann is the "Mike" mentioned in the CRU e-mails, and this is one of his "tricks".) Despite this disclosure, Mann has never withdrawn the chart, offered an explanation, or made a correction. The chart remains an accepted piece of evidence among warmists. </div><br/><div><strong><em>Tree-Ring Circus. </em></strong>Due to the fact that direct temperature measures for past epochs are lacking, climatologists utilize "proxy measures", such as tree rings, glacial moraines, and lake sediments. Tree rings have played an important part in the warming controversy, as evidence backing the claim that temperatures have been consistently lower worldwide until recently. A crucial series of <a href='http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/page2.html'>measurements</a>, utilized by Mann among others, involves trees located on the Yamal peninsula in Siberia. How many trees were measured, you ask? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? </div><br/><div>The answer is twelve. A number perfectly adequate to trigger international panic, overthrow the capitalist system, establish a Green totalitarianism, and completely turn Western culture on its head. </div><br/><div>But it turns out that further measurements were in fact made in the area, involving at least thirty-four other trees. And when this data is added to the original twelve, then the warming evidence disappears into the same branch of the Twilight Zone as the blade of Mann's hockey stick. Another "oversight", you understand.</div><br/><div>We could go on to mention the automated U.S. weather stations chronicled by the tireless <a href='http://www.surfacestations.org/'>Anthony Watts</a>, which were conscientiously placed next to air-con vents, atop sewage plants, in parking lots, and in one case, in a swamp (as many as 90% may be giving spurious high readings). The glaciers that are vanishing worldwide except where they aren't. The endless papers demonstrating that the coral reefs, along with various birds, animals, insects, and plants, are facing extinction even though no warming whatsoever has occurred for twelve years. (And in the thirty years before that, the total rise was 1.25 degrees Fahrenheit, easily within normal variation.) Powerful stuff, this warming -- it maims and destroys even when it's not happening. </div><br/><div>It's within this context that the East Anglia e-mails must be judged. The vanishingly small number of legacy media writers who are paying attention behave as if the messages comprise some kind of puzzling anomaly, with no relation to anything that came before. In truth, they stand as the internal memos from the East Anglia branch of the Nigerian National Bank, which can save us from the horrors of global warming after payment of a small up-front fee. </div><br/><div>There is always a deeper level to the damage caused by fraud. It strains social relationships, generates cynicism, and debases standing institutions. What has suffered the most damage from AGW is faith in the scientific method, the basic set of procedures -- it could be called an algorithm -- governing scientific investigation. These procedures embody simplicity itself: you examine a phenomenon. You gather data. You construct a hypothesis to explain that phenomenon. And then... </div><br/><div>Well, first, let's cover what you <em>don't</em> do.</div><br/><ul class='unIndentedList'><li>You don't manipulate data. (As CRU chief scientist Phil Jones stated he was doing in the now-famous "Mike's trick" e-mail, not to mention throughout the now-famous <a href='http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/crus_source_code_climategate_r.html'>source code</a>.) </li></ul><ul class='unIndentedList'><li>You don't fabricate data. (As one CRU scientist did while compiling weather-station data. Running into problems, he states, "I can make it up. So I did." He adds an evil smiley face. This e-mail has gone under radar up until now. It can be found in the <a href='http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017451/climategate-how-the-msm-reported-the-greatest-scandal-in-modern-science/'>comments on James Delingpole's blog.</a> </li></ul><ul class='unIndentedList'><li>You don't deny data to other investigators. (As Hansen, Jones, and, it appears, everybody else in the warming community has done at one time or another.) </li></ul><ul class='unIndentedList'><li>You don't destroy evidence. (As the members of the CRU did following a Freedom of Information request.) </li></ul><ul class='unIndentedList'><li>You don't bury contradictory data. (As Jones and several colleagues did in an attempt to undercut the impact of the Medieval Warming Period.)</li></ul><ul class='unIndentedList'><li>You don't secretly manipulate the argument from behind the scenes. (As the CRU staff did with the website Realclimate.org., screening comments to allow only those that supported the warming thesis.)</li></ul><ul class='unIndentedList'><li>You don't secretly undercut your critics. (As Mann advised the CRU to do concerning the scientific journal, <em>Climate Researh:</em> "I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.")</li></ul><ul class='unIndentedList'><li>You don't try to get a journal editor critical of your case fired. (As the CRU staff evidently succeeded in doing with an editor for <em>Geophysical Research Letters</em>.) </li></ul><br/><div>What you do, if you are a serious scientist operating according to the established method, is attempt to falsify your hypothesis. Test it to destruction; carry out serious attacks on its weakest points to see if they hold up. If they do -- and the vast majority of hypotheses suffer the indignity embodied in a phrase attributed variously to Thomas Huxley and Lord Kelvin: "a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact" -- then you have a theory that can be published, and tested, and verified by other scientists. If you don't, you throw it out. </div><br/><div>None of this, amidst all the chicanery, fabrications, and manipulations, appears to have been done by anyone active in global warming research, the CRU least of all. From which point we are forced to conclude that AGW is not science, and that any "consensus" that can drawn from it is a consensus of fraud. </div><br/><div>(The late-breaking revelations of <a href='http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017977/climategate-the-scandal-spreads-the-plot-thickens-the-shame-deepens/'>temperature manipulations</a> at New Zealand's NiWA institute -- another one of Mike's tricks? -- merely underlines the lesson of CRU. Now that the dam has busted, we'll be hearing dozens of stories like this over the weeks and months to come.)</div><br/><div>The West is a technological society. Science is as responsible for making us what we have become as any other factor, including the democratic system of government. The two are in fact complementary, each supporting and encouraging the other across the decades since this country was established. (And yes, I am aware that Britain and Germany were both centers of scientific progress, both of them nations liberalized by the example of the United States. Even the utterly authoritarian Bismarck was forced to heed the voice of the people despite his inclination to do anything but.)</div><br/><div>The technology developed from scientific research has created a world that would be unrecognizable to our forebears of even a century ago. Technology has transformed diet, health, communications, and transportation. It has doubled lifespans in advanced countries. Prior to the modern epoch, few ever caught a glimpse of the world past their own farming fields. India, China, and Africa were wild myths, the Pacific and Antarctica utterly unknown, the planets and stars merely pretty lights in the sky. Technology opened the world, not just for everyday men and women, but for invalids, the disabled, and the subnormal, who once lived lives of almost incomprehensible deprivation. Technology was a crucial factor in the dissolution of the ancient empires, the humbling of the aristocracies. </div><br/><div>As Paul Johnson has pointed out, a technological breakout appeared imminent at a number of points in the past millennium. Consider the anonymous Hussite engineer of the 15<sup>th</sup> century who left a notebook even more breathtaking than that of Leonardo, or the revolutionary English Levelers of the 17<sup>th</sup> century who dreamed of flying machines and factories. If a breakout had occurred at those times, the consequences would have been unimaginable. But the Hussites were destroyed by the German princes, the Levelers by the reestablishment of the English crown. It required the birth of a true democratic republic in the late 18<sup>th</sup> century to provide the setting for a serious scientific-technical takeoff, one that after 200 years has brought us to where we stand today, gazing out at the galaxies beyond the galaxies with the secret of life itself within reach. </div><br/><div>It is this, and no less, that scientific fraud threatens. This is no trivial matter; it involves one of the basic elements of modern Western life. When scientific figures lie, they lie to all of us. If they foment serious distrust of the scientific endeavor -- as they are doing -- they are creating a schism in the heart of our culture, a wound that in the long run could prove even more deadly than the Jihadi terrorists. </div><br/><div>Such failings are not relegated only to climatology. With the apparent success of the climate hustlers, it has infected all areas of research. Over the past decade, stem-cell studies have proven a hotbed of fraud. Recall <a href='http://www.nature.com/news/specials/hwang/index.html'>Dr. Hwang Woo Suk</a>, the South Korean biologist who claimed to have cloned various higher animals and isolated new stem cell lines, to worldwide applause. Suk was discovered to have faked all his research, prompting the South Korean government to ban him from taking part in any further work. Nor was he alone. Researchers throughout the field have been caught fabricating and manipulating data, and at least one large biotech company has developed the habit of announcing grand breakthroughs to goose its stock prices. </div><br/><div>A number of factors are responsible, among them the grant-making process, which rewards extravagant claims and demands matching results, and the superstar factor, in which media adulation creates a sense of intellectual arrogance -- as in the case of Dr. Suk -- unmatched since Galileo's heyday. But the major problem lies in politics, specifically as involves ideology. </div><br/><div>In both major recent cases of fraud, science had become entwined and infected with ideology to a point where its very nature had been transformed. It was no longer science in the classic mold, boldly asking basic questions without fear or favor. It had become an ideological tool, carrying out only such research as met with the approval of political elites. Stem-cell research had become enmeshed with the abortion question. Embryonic stem cells, obtained by "processing" aborted babies, received the lion's share of funding and attention despite its showing no potential whatsoever. Adult stem cells, obtainable from bone marrow, skin cells, or virtually any other part of the body, were shunted aside despite extraordinarily promising research results. This bias permeated the entire field and distorted all perceptions of it -- one of the reasons Dr. Suk was so wildly overpraised was his willingness to attack Pres. George W. Bush for limiting embryonic stem-cell exploitation.</div><br/><div>The climatology story is little different. Environmentalist Greens needed a threat, one that menaced not only technological civilization but life on earth itself. They had promoted an endless parade of such threats since the 1960s -- overpopulation, pollution, runaway nuclear power, and global cooling -- only to see them shrivel like popped balloons. They required a menace that was overwhelming, long-term, and not easily disproven. With warming, the climatologists gave them one. In exchange for sky-high funding, millennial scientists, the heirs of Bacon, Copernicus, and Einstein, men who bled and suffered for the sake of their work, continually inflated the nature and extent of the CO2 threat, using, as we now know, the sleaziest methods available. The result has been complete intellectual degradation. </div><br/><div>Scientists were once among the most trusted figures in Western public life, similar to bankers, priests, and doctors, but in a real sense standing above them all. Scientists were honored as truth-tellers, aware that their reputation for veracity and seriousness was their only real asset. And while exceptions existed (read the story of <a href='http://skepdic.com/blondlot.html'>Blondlot and his N-rays</a>, <a href='http://skepdic.com/blondlot.html'> </a> for one example), the public took them at their own valuation.</div><br/><div>That is ended, one with the scholastic monasteries and the academy at Athens. Scientists today are well on their way to becoming an amalgam of the cheap politician and the three-card monte dealer. They are viewed by the less educated as a privileged class making alarming and impudent claims for their own benefit. The better informed find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being unable to defend something we once admired. </div><br/><div>The next set of questions in physics cannot be answered without equipment costing billions at the very least, and possibly much more. Will a disbelieving public pay for that? We are facing serious dilemmas concerning breakthroughs in biology, not only in stem-cell technology but also in neurology and synthetic biology, breakthroughs that threaten to distort the very nature of humanity itself. Should we leave the solutions up to people who want us to pick a card, any card? </div><br/><div>The collaboration between science and democracy is one of the great achievements of human history. It is now threatened by the behavior of people at the very heart of that collaboration. If it is destroyed, something of unparalleled value will have vanished, something that will be nearly impossible to replace. If the Western world wishes to continue its magnificent upward journey, we will have to save science from itself. An errant and corrupt climatology is the place to start.<br/><br/><br/></div> </div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-31248545546927968122009-11-29T08:38:00.002-05:002009-11-29T08:44:13.707-05:00Finally, the beginning of the end of the global warming fraud. XIV. Steyn on peer review.<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><span class='articletitle'><a href='http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=YjAxYzA3NmI0N2Y1MDVhYzdmM2JkZGIyMjE5ZWU2OTI='>CRU’s Tree-Ring Circus</a></span><br/><span class='articlesubtitle'>Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewers?</span><br/><br/><span class='articlesubtitle'>By Mark Steyn. November 28, 2009, 7:00 a.m.</span><br/><br/><span class='drop'>M</span>y favorite moment in the Climategate/Climaquiddick scandal currently roiling the “climate change” racket was <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIl2gdDtbCg">Stuart Varney’s interview</a> on Fox News with the actor Ed Begley Jr. — star of the 1980s medical drama <em>St. Elsewhere</em> but latterly better known, as is the fashion with members of the thespian community, as an “activist.” He’s currently in a competition with Bill Nye (“the Science Guy”) to see who can have the lowest “carbon footprint.” Pistols at dawn would seem the quickest way of resolving that one, but presumably you couldn’t get a reality series out of it. Anyway, Ed was relaxed about the mountain of documents recently leaked from Britain’s Climate Research Unit in which the world’s leading climate-change warm-mongers e-mail each other back and forth on how to “hide the decline” and other interesting matters. <br/><br/>Nothing to worry about, folks. “We’ll go down the path and see what happens in peer-reviewed studies,” said Ed airily. “Those are the key words here, Stuart. ‘Peer-reviewed studies.’”<br/><br/>Hang on. Could you say that again more slowly so I can write it down? Not to worry. Ed said it every 12 seconds, as if it were the magic charm that could make all the bad publicity go away. He wore an open-necked shirt, and, although I don’t have a 76” inch HDTV, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a talismanic peer-reviewed amulet nestling in his chest hair for additional protection. “If these scientists have done something wrong, it will be found out and their peers will determine it,” insisted Ed. “Don’t get your information from me, folks, or any newscaster. Get it from people with Ph.D. after their names. ‘Peer-reviewed studies is the key words. And if it comes out in peer-reviewed studies . . . ”<br/> <br/>Got it: Pier-reviewed studies. You stand on the pier and you notice the tide seems to be coming in a little higher than it used to and you wonder if it’s something to do with incandescent light bulbs killing the polar bears? Is that how it works? <br/><br/>No, no, <em>peer</em>-reviewed studies. “Peer-reviewed studies. Go to <em>Science</em> magazine, folks. Go to <em>Nature</em>,” babbled Ed. “Read peer-reviewed studies. That’s all you need to do. Don’t get it from you or me.”<br/><br/>Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you! <br/><br/>The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it’s that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the “peer-review” process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse, the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The “science” of the CRU dominates the “science” behind the UN’s IPCC, which dominates the “science” behind the Congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it’s President Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.<br/><br/>But don’t worry, it’s all “peer-reviewed.”<br/><br/>Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review.” When <em>Climate Research </em>published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers.”<br/><br/>So much for <em>Climate Research</em>. When <em>Geophysical Research Letters</em> also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (“one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”<br/><br/>Which in essence is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the <em>Wall Street Journal Europe</em> is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style. <br/><br/><br/>The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the “peer-reviewed” “consensus.” And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the <em>New York Times</em> fell for it hook, line, and tree-ring. The e-mails of “Andy” (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose <em><a href='http://www.climateaudit.org/'>Climate Audit</a> </em>website exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann’s global-warming “hockey stick” graph), “Andy” writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he’s going to “cover” the story from a more oblique angle: <blockquote> <p>I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks.<br/><br/>peer review, for all its imperfections, is where the herky-jerky process of knowledge building happens, would you agree?</p> </blockquote> <p>And, amazingly, Dr. Mann does! “Re, your point at the end — you’ve taken the words out of my mouth.” <br/><br/>And that’s what Andrew Revkin did, week in, week out: He took the words out of Michael Mann’s mouth and served them up to impressionable readers of the <em>New York Times</em> and opportunist politicians around the world champing at the bit to inaugurate a vast global regulatory body to confiscate trillions of dollars of your hard-earned wealth in the cause of “saving the planet” from an imaginary crisis concocted by a few dozen thuggish ideologues. If you fall for this after the revelations of the last week, you’re as big a dupe as Begley or Revkin. <br/><br/>“<em>Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?</em>” wondered Juvenal: Who watches the watchmen? But the beauty of the climate-change tree-ring circus is that you never need to ask “Who peer-reviews the peer-reviewers?” Mann peer-reviewed Jones, and Jones peer-reviewed Mann, and anyone who questioned their theories got exiled to the unwarmed wastes of Siberia. The “consensus” warm-mongers could have declared it only counts as “peer-reviewed” if it’s published in <em>Peer-Reviewed Studies</em> published by Mann & Jones Publishing Inc (Peermate of the Month: Al Gore, reclining naked, draped in dead polar-bear fur, on a melting ice floe), and Ed Begley Jr. and “Andy” Revkin would still have wandered out glassy-eyed into the streets droning “Peer-reviewed studies. Cannot question. Peer-reviewed studies. The science is settled . . . ” <br/><br/>Looking forward to Copenhagen, Herman Van Rumpoy, the new president of the European Union and an eager proponent of the ecopalypse, says 2009 is “the first year of global governance.” Global government, huh? I wonder where you go to vote them out of office. <br/><br/>Hey, but don’t worry, it’ll all be “peer-reviewed.”</p><br/><span class='bioline'><em> — <span class='bioline'><em><a href='http://www.marksteyn.com/'>Mark Steyn</a>, a </em>National Review<em> columnist, is author of </em><a href='http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1596985275'>America Alone</a><em>. © 2009 Mark Steyn</em></span></em></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-11837079977396710572009-11-29T08:01:00.002-05:002009-11-29T08:43:01.091-05:00Finally, the beginning of the end of the global warming fraud. XIII. Britain and the flat earthers.<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><div class='storyHead'> <a href='http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html'><b>Climate Change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation</b></a><br/><br/>Our hopelessly compromised scientific stablishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker. Published: 6:10PM GMT 28 Nov 2009<br/><br/><p> "A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his <i>Telegraph</i> blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed. </p> <p> The reason why even the <i>Guardian</i>'s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). </p><div class='related_links_inline'> <div class='headerOne'> Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it. </div></div> <p> Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.</p> <p> Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement. </p> <p> Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case. </p> <p> The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself. </p> <p> There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws. </p> <p> They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based. </p> <p> This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence. </p> <p> But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand. </p> <p> In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU. </p> <p> What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results. </p> <p> The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports. </p> <p> Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU. </p> <p> The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age."</p><p><br/></p><p><br/></p><br/></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-23354077022556499022009-11-28T13:20:00.002-05:002009-11-30T07:54:18.078-05:00Finally, the beginning of the end of the global warming fraud. XII. The Cast.<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><br/><br/><center><div class='youtube-video'><object height='360' width='445'><param value='http://www.youtube.com/v/Cu_ok37HDuE&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1' name='movie'> </param><param value='true' name='allowFullScreen'> </param><param value='always' name='allowscriptaccess'> </param><embed height='360' width='445' allowfullscreen='true' allowscriptaccess='always' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://www.youtube.com/v/Cu_ok37HDuE&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1'> </embed></object></div></center></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-79612889977500278182009-11-25T16:23:00.001-05:002009-11-25T16:23:33.476-05:00Finally, the beginning of the end of the global warming fraud. XI.<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>US Senator James Imhofe(R, Ok), minority leader of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has announced today that an investigation will be launched into ClimateGate emails. He has advised that letters have been sent out to many government departments and also to many of the scientists named in the emails. Committee activity should be interesting as Imhofe's co-chair is America's sweetheart, Barbara Boxer(D, Ca). <br /><br /><br /><center><div class='youtube-video'><object height='354' width='445'><param value='http://www.youtube.com/v/deiOUtn5Gh8&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1' name='movie'> </param><param value='true' name='allowFullScreen'> </param><param value='always' name='allowscriptaccess'> </param><embed height='354' width='445' allowfullscreen='true' allowscriptaccess='always' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://www.youtube.com/v/deiOUtn5Gh8&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1'> </embed></object></div></center></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-70499811047459595772009-11-25T11:09:00.006-05:002009-11-25T11:16:46.909-05:00The First SockPuppet will continue to sell-out and diminish his nation at Copenhagen<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>The <a href='http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2009/11/breaking-obama-going-to-copenhagen.html'>LA Times</a> is breaking the story this morning that Obama will go to Copenhagen after all:<br /><br /><blockquote>President Obama will attend the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month, according to a senior administration official, a sign of the president’s increasing confidence that the talks will yield a meaningful agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.<br /><br />The White House will also announce today that the United States will commit, in the talks, to reduce its emissions of the heat-trapping gases scientists blame for global warming “in the range of” 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, the official said. That’s the target set out in the climate bill the House passed in June.<br /><br />The president will address negotiators on Dec. 9, just after the opening of the two-week summit, on his way to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize in nearby Sweden. His speech will come ahead of planned visits by prominent heads of state from Europe and around the world, and before the talks are expected to reach their most frenzied pitch.</blockquote><br /><br />In light of the revelations surrounding ClimateGate, the controversy that pegs anthropogenic global warming as an out-and-out fraud, the wise course for the US would be a wait-and-see. For a president whose popularity is dropping faster than global temperatures, standing up at Copenhagen and announcing draconian tax grab commitments in the face of the collapse of the AGW meme (on his way to pick up a dubious Nobel prize, no less), will clearly signal to the American people that he is either too narcissistic to see past the teleprompter, never had any intention of implementing policy based on rational science or economics, or as many suspect, wishes to continue his path of Socializing the US regardless of the cost to the nation, both on a personal level, and as the competitive and surviving democratic entity in the world. <br /><br />In the face of the aspirations of China, the "new" Russia, and the Orwellian machinations of the European Union, the US cannot afford a president who is rapidly becoming the world's rent-seeker.</div><br/><br/>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-72465782186076861522009-11-25T09:36:00.005-05:002009-11-30T07:53:55.396-05:00Finally, the beginning of the end of the global warming fraud. X.<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">BBC wobble on Climate Change: the Corporation and the dead-tree media have lost the war</span></div><br /><div class="headerOne"><span class="byAuthor">By <a title="Posts by Gerald Warner" href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/geraldwarner/">Gerald Warner</a></span> <span class="lastUpdated bylineCategory"><a rel="category tag" title="View all posts in UK" href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/category/uk/">UK</a></span> Telegraph.co.uk <span class="lastUpdated">Last updated: November 24th, 2009</span></div><p>Call it the Domino Effect. After Monday’s Newsnight item on the Climategate scandal it is evident that the leaked e-mails allegedly from the University of East Anglia’s manmade global warming propaganda unit are threatening to bring down more than just the IPCC/Al Gore axis. Themuch-derided mainstream media are waking up to the fact that their owncredibility and hence commercial viability are imminently threatened bytheir clinging to the climate change superstition.</p> <p>Do not misunderstand me. The Newsnight package was in no sense a mea culpa by the BBC; nor was it a resiling from the Corporation’s fanatical attachment to the global warming legend. Many of the familiarfeatures were in evidence: Paxman’s scepticism of scepticism; the interviewing of a sceptic scientist in his overcoat, outdoors, somewhere in central London, while Professor Bob Watson, from the University of East Anglia, lorded it comfortably in the studio.</p><p>Yet there was something new. BBC Kremlinologists could not fail to notice just a scintilla of unease, reflected in Susan Watts’ relatively open-minded presentation of the issue; above all, the fact that the BBC felt compelled to address the matter at all. Clearly, someone at the BBC realised that this is a global scoop in which the blogosphere has left the Corporation and all the dead-tree media standing. Those media are already facing increasing marginalisation without marginalising themselves by refusing to report news that is viral on the Internet.</p><p>Is it even just possible that some trillionaire BBC executive,somewhere in the depths of Broadcasting House, retained just enough ofhis youthful news-hound instincts to feel a hollow pit in his stomachand to ask himself: “Ohmigod, what if it is all a crock and we are left looking like a bunch of complete self-abusers when Al Gore takes his place alongside Titus Oates and other great false witnesses in history?”</p><p>Is there just the dawning of a self-preservation instinct at the BBC to hedge the odd bet on AGW? Possibly. It is more likely that the establishment consensus will prevail and years from now Paxman, shivering in his woolly combinations (we have his own testimony he has problems with his underpinnings) in mid-July will still be proclaiming global warming as cooling reaches brass-monkey levels.</p><p>But it is surely not beyond the realms of possibility that one or two of Auntie’s servitors look at e-mails exchanged within a supposedly scientific community in which the death of a sceptical scientist is greeted as “cheering news”; the suggestion is made that “Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline”[in warming] should be employed; the removal of a sceptical writer froma journal is triumphantly reported; and colleagues are urged to delete material subject to Freedom of Information law – and asked themselves is this the language and methodology of Einstein? </p><p>From Professor Bob Watson, on Newsnight, we learned that the scientists’ only offence was “looseness of language”: their command of climate science was unquestionable, but their handling of the English language had been inept. We further learned that the term “trick” refers to a mathematical process; this interview was more educational than the Open University. The clowns at Hadley CRU know that they are blown; that one of the four legs on which the great IPCC imposture stands has been broken and will never be repaired.</p><p>Manmade global warming is not science, but a religious cult. It is the 21st century’s equivalent of the Fifth Monarchy Men and the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion. Only a massive collaborationbetween governments anxious to extend state power, scientists with their mouths clamped to the IPCC teat and entrepreneurs eager to make billions has enabled a superstition to be imposed on the world that will wreck developed nations’ economies, impoverish developing countries and kill their populations and rape the landscape of Europe.</p><p>The majority of people now reject this nonsense. Media organisations like the BBC have betrayed truth and objectivity on this, as so many other issues, so should not be surprised if the public abandons them for open debate online.</p><br/>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-11129936772027474492009-11-25T08:52:00.003-05:002009-11-25T09:01:06.835-05:00Finally, the beginning of the end of the global warming fraud. IX.<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><i> The excerpt below is from a recent <a href='http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/24/the-people-vs-the-cru-freedom-of-information-my-okole%e2%80%a6/#comment-234179'>post on wattsupwiththat</a> , detailing the chronology of the CRU email fiasco and the duplicity of CRU members, and indeed, of the office of the British Information Commissioner itself. There can no doubt in any right thinking person's mind, about the worthlessness of the global warming temperature conclusions as presented by the East Anglia Climate Research Unit. Eschenbach tightly chronicles the unfolding controversy, from his perspective of one of the major antagonists. The post is a long one, but should be read in its entirely, including the comments. This is a hugely significant developing story.</i> <br/><br/>[...]<br/><br/>[By Willis Eschenbach]<br/><br/>"People seem to be missing the real issue in the CRU emails. Gavin over at realclimate keeps distracting people by saying the issue is the scientists being nasty to each other, and what Trenberth said, and the Nature “trick”, and the like. Those are side trails. To me, the main issue is the frontal attack on the heart of science, which is transparency.<br/><br/>Science works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists then attack the claim by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand. So blocking the FOIA allowed Phil Jones to claim that his temperature record (HadCRUT3) was valid science.<br/><br/>This is not just trivial gamesmanship, this is central to the very idea of scientific inquiry. This is an attack on the heart of science, by keeping people who disagree with you from ever checking your work and seeing if your math is correct.<br/><br/>As far as I know, I am the person who made the original Freedom Of Information Act to CRU that started getting all this stirred up. I was trying to get access to the taxpayer funded raw data out of which they built the global temperature record. I was not representing anybody, or trying to prove a point. I am not funded by Mobil, I’m an amateur scientist with a lifelong interest in the weather and climate. I’m not “directed” by anyone, I’m not a member of a right-wing conspiracy. I’m just a guy trying to move science forwards.<br/><br/>The recent release of the hacked emails from CRU has provided me with an amazing insight into the attempt by myself, Steve McIntyre, and others from CA and elsewhere to obtain the raw station data from Phil Jones at the CRU. We wanted the data that was used to make the global temperature record that is relied on to claim “unprecedented” global warming. I want to give a chronological account of the interactions. While we don’t know if all of these emails are valid, the researchers involved such as Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann that clearly indicate that they think they are authentic They certainly fit with my experience. I have only included the relevant parts of emails, and indicated where I have snipped by an ellipsis (…)."<br /><br />Mr. Eschenbach has detailed his brief <a href="http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fhomepage.mac.com%2Fwilliseschenbach%2F.Public%2FThe_People_Versus_the_CRU.doc"> here</a>, in addition to what's in the WUWT post, and indicates this will be a work-in-progress as more analysis of the FOIA dump is done. <br/><br/>[...]</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-75664188406370253902009-11-24T20:27:00.001-05:002009-11-24T20:30:28.745-05:00Finally, the beginning of the end of the global warming fraud. VIII.<center><object height="360" width="445"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nEiLgbBGKVk&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nEiLgbBGKVk&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="360" width="445"></embed></object></center>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-44110477908602267892009-11-23T19:28:00.002-05:002009-11-23T19:32:23.907-05:00Finally, the beginning of the end of the global warming fraud. VII.<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704888404574547730924988354.html#printMode">Global Warming With the Lid Off</a><br /><br />Wall Street Journal * OPINION EUROPE * NOVEMBER 23, 2009, 7:22 P.M. ET<br /><br />The emails that reveal an effort to hide the truth about climate science.<br /> <br />'The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."<br /><br />So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world's leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to "Mike." Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU's servers were hacked and messages among some of the world's most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.<br /><br />The "two MMs" are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions—a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service. Mr. Jones did not return requests for comment and the university said it could not confirm that all the emails were authentic, though it acknowledged its servers were hacked.<br /><br />Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a "unified" view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the "common cause"; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to "hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data.<br /><br />Some of those mentioned in the emails have responded to our requests for comment by saying they must first chat with their lawyers. Others have offered legal threats and personal invective. Still others have said nothing at all. Those who have responded have insisted that the emails reveal nothing more than trivial data discrepancies and procedural debates.<br /><br />Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn't have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.<br /><br />Consider the following note that appears to have been sent by Mr. Jones to Mr. Mann in May 2008: "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. . . . Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?" AR4 is shorthand for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, presented in 2007 as the consensus view on how bad man-made climate change has supposedly become.<br /><br />In another email that seems to have been sent in September 2007 to Eugene Wahl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Paleoclimatology Program and to Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Climate and Global Dynamics Division, Mr. Jones writes: "[T]ry and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with."<br /><br />When deleting, doctoring or withholding information didn't work, Mr. Jones suggested an alternative in an August 2008 email to Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, copied to Mr. Mann. "The FOI [Freedom of Information] line we're all using is this," he wrote. "IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI—the skeptics have been told this. Even though we . . . possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part of our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don't have an obligation to pass it on."<br /><br />It also seems Mr. Mann and his friends weren't averse to blacklisting scientists who disputed some of their contentions, or journals that published their work. "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal," goes one email, apparently written by Mr. Mann to several recipients in March 2003. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."<br /><br />Mr. Mann's main beef was that the journal had published several articles challenging aspects of the anthropogenic theory of global warming.<br /><br />For the record, when we've asked Mr. Mann in the past about the charge that he and his colleagues suppress opposing views, he has said he "won't dignify that question with a response." Regarding our most recent queries about the hacked emails, he says he "did not manipulate any data in any conceivable way," but he otherwise refuses to answer specific questions. For the record, too, our purpose isn't to gainsay the probity of Mr. Mann's work, much less his right to remain silent.<br /><br />However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.<br /><br />Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-21165720928370824582009-11-22T21:48:00.006-05:002009-11-22T21:54:54.288-05:00Finally, the beginning of the end of the global warming fraud. VI.<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><br/><br/>"<a href='http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/19/breaking-news-story-hadley-cru-has-apparently-been-hacked-hundreds-of-files-released/'><span style="font-weight:bold;">The Scarlet Emails<span style="font-weight:bold;"></span></span></a>"<br /><br /><center><object width="445" height="364"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ydo2Mwnwpac&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Ydo2Mwnwpac&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="445" height="364" ></embed></object></center></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-51214718700456514162009-11-18T07:00:00.000-05:002009-11-18T07:00:02.741-05:00"I reject your reality..."<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p>By Dafydd Ab Hugh, November 12, 2009</p> <b>“…And substitute my own!”</b> <p>So reads a t-shirt often worn by Adam Savage, one of the two original starts of the Discovery Channel’s series <em>Mythbusters,</em> which I have slavishly watched since the very first episode (I think that was the episode where they busted the myth of the rocket-propelled car launching into the air).</p> <p>The tee commemorates a pithy summary Adam Savage delivered on the show, I can even remember whether he meant it optimistically or sarcastically: “<em>I reject your reality and substitute my own</em>!” I remember Adam saying that, but I can’t recall now what precipitated the remark. But after today, I suggest he send his wonderful t-shirt to another fellow who now has a greater claim to it: President Barack H. Obama.</p> <p>Take a look and <a href='http://apnews.excite.com/article/20091112/D9BU4AHO1.html'>tell me I’m exaggerating</a>:</p> <blockquote><p>"President Barack Obama rejected the Afghanistan war options before him and asked for revisions", his defense secretary said Thursday, after the U.S. ambassador in Kabul argued that a significant U.S. troop increase would only prop up a weak, corruption-tainted government.</p></blockquote> <p>“I’m not happy with the options reality has offered me; I demand you produce new <em>fantasy options</em> more to my liking!”</p> <p>Let’s take an Eikenberry detour. Yes indeed, he was once a military commander in Afghanistan; but he’s not the commander <em>now</em>, and he hasn’t been for well over two years — during which time the situation has changed dramatically. Note that he also left <em>before</em> Gen. David Petraeus achieved such a thorough and remarkable victory in Iraq using a very similar strategy.</p> <p>In 2007, as the Iraq COIN was picking up, Eikenberry was named Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, and NATO was not officially involved in the Iraq War (as they are in Afghanistan). Thus I see no evidence that Eikenberry has spent any significant time studying the Iraq COIN — or even talking to David Petraeus, who, as Commander of CENTCOM, is now McChrystal’s boss.</p> <p>Nor was Ambassador Eikenberry a COIN specialist when he wore a uniform instead of a suit. So why should his advice trump McChrystal’s in the Obamacle’s mind? (Except for the obvious explanation: Because what Eikenberry says, by happenstance or design, precisely matches <em>what Obama wants to hear</em>.)</p> <p>Eikenberry’s argument for why we should abandon Afghanistan is not exactly subtle; I think it boils down to the peculiar idea that the purpose of a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy is to “prop-up” the existing government, whatever it may be; therefore, since we don’t like the fellow that Afghan voters elected, Hamid Karzai, we shouldn’t prop it up by implementing a COIN strategy. Instead, we should focus on “training” the indiginous Afghan troops.</p> <p>Most others experts on the subject I’ve read — I’m certainly not an expert, so I must rely on others, such as Fred Kagen or David Petraeus— who seem to believe the purpose of COIN is to improve civilian security throughout the country, thus to enlist civilian support for the war effort against the insurgents and deny the latter the chaos and collapse they need to seize the government.</p> <p>It needn’t incorporate any support for the specific civilian government at all, just for the concept of democratic voting. All we need from Karzai is that he not interfere with Afghan troops’ participation in COIN-related joint patrols and operations… which is, incidentally, <em>exactly how</em> we go about training the local forces, both military and tribal militia, in the first place. No joint ops — no training.</p> <p>Here is the Eikenberry thesis on display:</p> <blockquote><p>Obama’s ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, who is also a former commander in Afghanistan, twice in the last week voiced strong dissent against sending large numbers of new forces, according to an administration official. That puts him at odds with the current war commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who is seeking thousands more troops.</p> <p>Eikenberry’s misgivings, expressed in classified cables to Washington, highlight administration concerns that bolstering the American presence in Afghanistan could make the country more reliant on the U.S., not less. He expressed his objections just ahead of Obama’s latest war meeting Wednesday.</p></blockquote> <p>But there is an even more disturbing possibility: If AP is accurately recounting Eikenberry’s objections (and I don’t know that to be the case), then he, too, believes that Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recommendations consist of nothing but “<em>send 40,000 more troops</em>” — rather than “implement a COIN strategy, then decide how many troops we need.” (McChrystal adds, “Psst… it turns out to be about 40,000 more than we have right now”). This would put the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in the same conceptual box as <a href='http://biglizards.net/blog/archives/2009/11/a_coin_flip.html'>the elite news media</a>.</p> <p>It’s hard to swallow the contention that a former lieutenant general (that’s a 3-banger) in the United States Army would be blissfully unaware of what counterinsurgency strategy is, and how it differs from a counter-<em>terrorism</em> strategy… where we “fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt”. I hope that’s not the problem. But if not, then what makes Eikenberry think he’s more fit to opine on Afghanistan than the general that Barack Obama himself hand-picked to do just that? (And who is, as I understand it, an expert on COIN strategy.)</p> <p>(There is a third, even more disturbing possibility: That Eikenberry knows very well that McChrystal is right, that a COIN strategy is the only one that leads to victory; but the ambassador believes that victory is the last thing Obama wants. In that case, Eikenberry may be quietly conspiring to lose the war, either to give Obama’s leftist supporters the terrible American defeat they demand, or to deny President Bush the victory he earned. Or both. I certainly hope this is not what’s going through Eikenberry’s mind!)</p> <p>But back to the One, who is ultimately calling the shots here. His philosophy of “I reject your reality and substitute my own” is, in fact, the standard modus vivendi of liberalism. As in:</p> <ul><li>“I reject the reality that one must work hard, or at least smart, to live well; I substitute the reality where I can sit around and smoke pot all day but still receive a national income (big enough to pay for my dope).”</li><li>“I reject the reality that says the best remedy for bad speech is more good speech; I substitute the reality where we can simply <em>outlaw or ban</em> bad speech, and then all that will be left is good speech.”</li><li>“I reject the reality that increasing health-insurance demand (via mandate) while decreasing supply (by driving companies out of business) will result in much more expensive insurance; I substitute the reality where a complete government takeover will lower costs, improve care, and expand the pool of those covered.”</li><li>“I reject the reality that we need cheap energy; I substitute the reality where we can tax the hell out of it, raise energy costs through the roof (as Obama himself gleefully predicted), declare more and more energy sources off-limits, and therefore make America stronger and more prosperous.”</li><li>“I reject the reality that doubling taxation of the average Joe will leave him with less money to spend; I substitute the reality where doubling taxation results in an explosion of new economic growth, causing the economy to take off like a rocket.”</li><li>“I reject the reality that Israel needs the ability to defend itself, or it will be destroyed; I substitute the reality where, if Israel will only give the Palestinians everything they want, while demanding nothing in return, the latter will be so grateful they will become fast friends with the Jewish state.” (Alternatively: “I reject the reality that Jews should be allowed to have a state; I substitute the reality where Jews are <em>so uniquely evil</em> that they are the only “race” who should be barely-tolerated strangers wherever they live.”)</li></ul> <p>To the liberal, reality is infinitely malleable: If you don’t like it, just hold your breath, close your eyes, strain really hard, and <em>intensely visualize</em> the new reality. When you open your eyes and gasp in a lungful, the new reality will miraculously have been subbed in!</p> <p>This seems to work in some environments but not others. It works great in Hollywood; and it works reasonably well in two-party politics — averaging out to being successful about <em>half the time</em>. However, it doesn’t seem to work much at all in warfare, where the default reality has a depressing way of contradicting the happy-facers, rudely and abruptly.</p> <p>Alas, even that catastrophe could play into the hand of Barack Obama and his incompetocracy; after bargaining down the number of troops we need — and implementing Slow Joe Biden’s counter-<em>terrorism</em> strategy, rather than a COIN strategy — we might be handed a signal, Vietnam-style defeat. Then B.O. could declare:</p> <ol><li type='a'>“Clearly this means the war was unwinnable from the beginning, and my predecessor should never have invaded Afghanistan in the first place.”</li><li type='a'>“I gave the policy of the previous administration every opportunity; I even sent more troops — not once, but twice! It’s time to admit that the whole adventure was a terrible miscalculation, pull out, accept that defeat was inevitable, and MoveOn.”</li><li type='a'> <p>“Now the whole country understands why I have embarked upon a new era of <a href='http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/11/024930.php'>Strategic Reassurance</a>, talking to our enemies without preconditions, instead of the “cowboy militarism” of the Republican Party.</p> <p>“We’re going to <em>redouble our efforts</em> to talk Iran and North Korea into doing what’s best for America, rather than what’s best for themselves. I know we’ve tried it again and again, and it’s never worked yet; but by the Law of Averages, that means we’re due to hit the jackpot really soon now!” </p></li></ol> <p>In the long run, I don’t think a strategy of denying reality is a military winner; and a long-run strategy of hoping for American defeat will not be a political winner in 2010 or 2012. But as John Maynard Keynes is reputed to have said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”</p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-58097148912579434862009-11-17T07:00:00.000-05:002009-11-17T07:00:00.684-05:00A jihadist hiding in plain sight<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><br /><br /><div><b><i>Orange County Register: </i>"How many deaths are acceptable for the sake of diversity?"</b></div><br /><br /> <div id='articledate'><a href='mailto:letters@ocregister.com'>By MARK STEYN</a> 2009-11-13 11:55:01</div> <p>Shortly after 9/11, there was a lot of talk about how no one would ever hijack an American airliner ever again – not because of new security arrangements but because an alert citizenry was on the case: We were hip to their jive. The point appeared to be proved three months later on a U.S.-bound Air France flight. The "Shoebomber" attempted to light his footwear, and the flight attendants and passengers pounced. As the more boorish commentators could not resist pointing out, even the French guys walloped him.</p> <p>But the years go by, and the mood shifts. You didn't have to be "alert" to spot Maj. Nidal Hasan. He'd spent most of the past half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying "JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK." But we (that's to say, almost all of us; and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign. Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.</p> <p>Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Maj. Hasan was in regular e-mail contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Maj. Hasan's "research interests," so there was no need to worry. That's America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two "joint terrorism task forces" stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken.</p> <p>On the other hand, who needs surveillance operations and intelligence budgets? Maj. Hasan was entirely upfront about who he was. He put it on his business card: "SOA." As in "Soldier of Allah" – which seems a tad ungrateful to the American taxpayers who ponied up half a million bucks or thereabouts in elite medical school education to train him to be a Soldier of Uncle Sam. In a series of meetings during 2008, officials from both Walter Reed and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences considered the question of whether then-Capt. Hasan was psychotic. But, according to at least one bigwig at Walter Reed, members of the policy committee wondered "how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents." So he got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood, Texas.</p> <p>And 13 men and women and an unborn baby are dead.</p> <p>Well, like they say, it's easy to be wise after the event. I'm not so sure. These days, it's easier to be even more stupid after the event. "Apparently, he tried to contact al-Qaida," mused MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "That's not a crime to call up al-Qaida, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?" Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?</p> <p>The truth is, we're not prepared to draw a line even after he's gone ahead and committed mass murder. "What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy," said Gen. Casey, the Army's chief of staff, "but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here." A "greater tragedy" than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army chief of staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the "tragedy" must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish "Troubles", "an acceptable level of violence." Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we'll find out.</p> <p>"Diversity" is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in "multiculturalism" doesn't require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing "Muslim" garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn't until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He is an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress – that's to say, a "Punjabi suit," as they call it in Britain, or the "shalwar kameez," to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about "diversity" across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up – with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaida. In other words, Maj. Hasan's outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.</p> <p>Mr. Fatah would seem to be a genuine "multiculturalist": That's to say, he's attuned to often very subtle "diversities" between cultures. Whereas the professional multiculturalist sees the 7-Eleven video and coos, "Aw, look. He's wearing ... well, something exotic and colorful, let's not get hung up on details. Celebrate diversity, right? Can we get him in the front row for the group shot? We may be eligible for a grant."</p> <p>The brain-addled "diversity" of Gen. Casey will get some of us killed, and keep all of us cowed. In the days since the killings, the news reports have seemed increasingly like a satirical novel that the author's not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch-22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you're openly in favor of pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put down your e-mails to foreign jihadists as mere confirmation of your long-established "research interests." If you're psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there's no terrorism angle, because, in our over-credentialized society, it doesn't count unless you're found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.</p> <p>Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core Western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this past week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a "tragedy" but a national scandal, already fading from view.</p> <p>©MARK STEYN</p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-90160503770508303842009-11-16T07:00:00.000-05:002009-11-16T07:00:09.258-05:00Bringing al-Qaeda to New York<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><span class='articletitle'><b>EDITORIAL: </b><a href='http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ODlkMzE3MDQzZjQ3OWIxN2FjYWI0Zjk2NDZmYWZkYTc='>Bringing al-Qaeda to New York</a></span><br /><br /><span class='articlesubtitle'>By the Editors, National Review Online</span><br /><br /><div align='justify' class='article'><span style=''><span class='drop'>C</span>andidate Barack Obama urged a return to pre-9/11 counterterrorism-by-courts. President Obama’s Justice Department overflows with lawyers who spent the last eight years representing America’s enemies. Thus, Friday’s announcement that top al-Qaeda terrorists will be brought to New York City for a civilian trial is no surprise. That doesn’t make it any less inexcusable.<br /><br />The treatment of jihadist terror as a mere law-enforcement issue, fit for civilian courts, was among the worst of the national-security derelictions of the Nineties. While the champions of this approach stress that prosecutors scored a 100 percent conviction rate, they conveniently omit mention of the paltry number of cases (less than three dozen, mostly against low-level terrorists, over an eight-year period, despite numerous attacks), as well as the rigorous due-process burdens that made prosecution of many terrorists impossible, the daunting disclosure and witness-confrontation rules that required government to disclose mountains of intelligence, the gargantuan expense of “hardening” courthouses and prisons to protect juries and judges, and the terrorists’ exploitation of legal privileges to plot additional attacks and escape attempts.<br /><br />In placing the nation on a war footing after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration invoked the laws of war to detain terrorists as enemy combatants and to try those who had committed provable war crimes by military commission — measures that were endorsed by Congress despite being challenged in the courts by some of the lawyers now working in Obama’s Justice Department. This military-commission system provided due-process protections that were unprecedented for wartime enemies, including the right to appellate review in the civilian courts. But they protected national-defense information from disclosure. <br /><br />This commission system is tailor-made for the 9/11 plotters, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suicide-hijacking mastermind who is brazen in taking credit for that and numerous other attacks against the United States. In fact, last December, KSM and his four co-defendants indicated to the military judge that they wanted to plead guilty and move on to execution. But then the Obama administration swept into power and undertook to repudiate many of Bush’s counterterrorism practices, declaring its intention to close Gitmo within a year and forcing a moratorium on military commissions so the process could be “studied.” Friday’s announcement that KSM and the other 9/11 plotters will be sent to federal court in New York for a civilian trial is the most significant step to date in Obama’s determination to turn back the clock to the time when government believed subpoenas rather than Marines were the answer to jihadist murder and mayhem. <br /><br />It is difficult to quantify how dangerously foolish this course is. As they demonstrated in offering to plead guilty while bragging about their atrocities, KSM and his cohorts don’t want a trial so much as they want a soapbox to press their grievances against the United States and the West. With no real defense to the charges, they will endeavor to put America on trial, pressing the court for expansive discovery of government intelligence files. Having gratuitously exposed classified information on interrogation tactics and other sensitive matters in order to pander to Obama’s base, the Justice Department will be in a poor position to argue against broad disclosure, even if it were so inclined. As the court orders more and more revelations, potential intelligence sources and foreign spy services will develop even graver doubts about our capacity to keep secrets. They will reduce their intelligence cooperation accordingly, and the nation will be dramatically more vulnerable.<br /><br />Moreover, the transfer of the worst al-Qaeda prisoners into the U.S. will grease the skids for many, if not most, of the remaining 200-plus Gitmo terrorists to be moved here. This will be the worst of all possible outcomes. These are trained terrorists who have been detained under the laws of war, but most of whom cannot be tried because the intelligence on them cannot be used in court. We are still holding them because they are deadly dangerous and because no other country is willing to take them off our hands. Once inside the United States, they will indisputably be within the jurisdiction of the federal courts — which are staffed by judges predisposed against wartime detention without trial. As long as the terrorists were at Gitmo, those judges were reluctant to order them released into the U.S. — a transfer that would violate federal law. If the terrorists are already here, though, judges will not be as gun-shy. Inevitably, some will be freed to live and plot among us.<br /><br />The Obama Left delusionally argues that running these risks will make us safer. The international community will see how enlightened we are, the fable goes. The hostility of America’s enemies will melt away. They’ll lay down their bombs and stop attacking us. As observed by former attorney general Michael Mukasey — who presided over terrorism cases as a federal judge — “We did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.” </span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-11123427016776992612009-11-15T07:36:00.002-05:002009-11-15T07:42:00.961-05:00Embellishing The First Person<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><b>Obama's swelling ego</b><br/>By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, <a href='http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/11/14/obamas_swelling_ego/'>November 14, 2009</a><br/><br/><p>PRESIDENT OBAMA was too busy to attend the celebrations in Germany this week marking the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago. <a href='http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/potus-berlin-wall'>But he did appear by video</a>, delivering a few brief and bloodless remarks about how the wall was “a painful barrier between family and friends’’ that symbolized “a system that denied people the freedoms that should be the right of every human being.’’ He referred to “tyranny,’’ but never identified the tyrants - he never uttered the words “Soviet Union’’ or “communism,’’ for example. He said nothing about the men and women who died trying to cross the wall. Nor did he mention Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan - or even Mikhail Gorbachev.<br/></p><div class='articlePluckHidden'><div id='articleEmbed' style='display: block;'><div id='relatedContent' class='embed'><div style='padding-bottom: 4px;' class='relatedBox'><p>He did, however, talk about Barack Obama.</p><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>“Few would have foreseen,’’ declared the president, “that a united Germany would be led by a woman from [the former East German state of] Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it.’’</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>As presidential rhetoric goes, this was hardly a match for <a href='http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/berliner.htm'>“Ich bin ein Berliner,’’</a> still less another <a href='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjWDrTXMgF8'>“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’’</a> But as a specimen of presidential narcissism, it is hard to beat. Obama couldn’t be troubled to visit Berlin to commemorate a momentous milestone in the history of human liberty. But he was glad to explain to <em>those who were there</em> why reflections on that milestone should inspire appreciation for the self-made “destiny’’ of his own rise to power.</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>Was there ever a president as deeply enamored of himself as Barack Obama?</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>The first President Bush, taught from childhood to shun what his mother called <a href='http://www.usnews.com/blogs/mary-kate-cary/2009/06/09/barack-obama-journeys-from-yes-we-can-to-the-imperial-i.html'>“The Great I Am,’’</a> regularly instructed his speechwriters not to include too many “I’s’’ in his prepared remarks. Reagan maintained that there was no limit to what someone could achieve <a href='http://www.aei.org/article/20657'>if he didn’t mind who got the credit</a>. George Washington, one of the most accomplished men of his day, said with characteristic modesty on becoming president that he was “peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.’’</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>Obama, on the other hand, positively revels in The Great I Am.</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,’’ <a href='http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_lizza?printable=true#ixzz0WkZg4skq'>he told campaign aides</a> when he was running for the White House. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that . . . I’m a better political director than my political director.’’</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>At the start of his presidency, Obama seemed to content himself with the royal “we’’ - “We will build the roads and bridges. . . . We will restore science to its rightful place. . . . We will harness the sun and winds,’’ he declaimed at his inauguration.</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>But as the literary theorist <a href='http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/yes-i-can/?pagemode=print'>Stanley Fish points out</a>, “By the time of the <a href='http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/25/us/politics/20090225-OBAMA-CONGRESS.html'>address to the Congress on Feb. 24</a>, the royal we [had] flowered into the naked ‘I’: ‘As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress.’ ‘I called for action.’ ‘I pushed for quick action.’ ‘I have told each of my Cabinet.’ ‘I’ve appointed a proven and aggressive inspector general.’ ’I refuse to let that happen.’ ’’ In his speech on the federal takeover of <org value='GBM;GM;GMH;GMW;GXM;HGM;RGM;XGM' idsrc='NYSE'>General Motors</org>, Obama likewise found it necessary to use the first-person singular pronoun <a href='http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/49056'>34 times</a>. (“Congress’’ he mentioned just once.)</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>At this rate, it won’t be long before the president’s ego is so inflated that it will require a ZIP code of its own.</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>Then again, how modest would any of us be if we were as magnificent as Obama knows himself to be? “I am well aware,’’ <a href='http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/09/23/obama_united_nations_general_assembly_transcript_98429.html'>he told the UN General Assembly</a> in September, “of the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world.’’</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>In 1860, writes Doris Kearns Goodwin in her celebrated biography <a href='http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743270754?ie=UTF8&tag=jeffjaccom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0743270754'>“Team of Rivals,’’</a> an author wishing to dedicate his forthcoming work to Abraham Lincoln received <a href='http://www.myloc.gov/Exhibitions/lincoln/rise/TheRunforPresident/FrontPorchCampaign/ExhibitObjects/NomineeShowsHumility.aspx'>this answer</a>: “I give the leave, begging only that the inscription may be in modest terms, not representing me as a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect.’’</p></div><div class='articlePluckHidden'><p>Obama has often claimed <a href='http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=825&catID=17'>Lincoln as a role model</a>, but apparently it only goes so far.</p></div><em>Jeff Jacoby can be reached at <a href='mailto:jacoby@globe.com'>jacoby@globe.com</a>.</em></div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-91328994413273471802009-11-12T09:00:00.002-05:002009-11-12T09:00:03.320-05:00Sarah Palin and the Dysfunctional Political Class<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><br /> by <a href='http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/author/jamesvdelong/'>James V. DeLong</a><br /><div><br /><p>The frenetic hostility to Sarah Palin, even by many on the Republican side, is unnerving, because her qualifications to be president are objectively better than those of almost anyone who has been on the national ticket over the past decade.</p> <p>A reasonable conclusion is that these qualifications are precisely the cause of the hostility. To admit to the reality that the dominant political class, including the MSM and the punditocracy of both parties, has been giving us abysmal presidential candidates, to accept that a hockey mom plucked from small-town Alaska is better than the best that the political class can come up with, would require recognition of the terrible truth that the system has become deeply dysfunctional. Doing this would force our political elites to look into an abyss of serious questions about the functioning of our democracy. Palin creates a cognitive dissonance so intense that it simply cannot be accepted.</p> <p>To start, compare her experience as a person, mayor, and state leader with George W. Bush’s pre-presidential career as an alcoholic, baseball executive, and ornamental governor. Whatever one thinks of his performance as president — and like most conservatives my views are complex — he was not promising material as of 2000.</p> <p>Al Gore would be disqualified by knowledge of his academic career and by a reading of <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_in_the_Balance'><em>Earth in the Balance</em></a>, an exercise in messianic ignorance. His subsequent career getting rich from climate change subsidies would reinforce this opinion. John Kerry had a Senate career of unbroken mediocrity, compounded by his unapologized-for <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_Soldier_Investigation'>Winter Soldier exercise</a> and the still-unanswered <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Vets_and_POWs_for_Truth'>Swift Boat questions</a>.</p> <p>John Edwards had no shadow of a qualification, and again the judgment is confirmed by subsequent events.</p> <p>Obama’s qualifications were will-o-the-wisp. His supporters cited his “potential,” as they had to, because his only actual feat was his first book — and the claims that this was ghosted have been met by non-denial. The <a href='http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KJ20Ak03.html'><em>Asia Times</em> characterizes these rumors</a> as “well-established,” which tells one something about current foreign assessments of Obama. The president’s long-standing ties to the radical left should have tipped the balance to the negative.</p> <p>Vice President Joe Biden has a long history of blurring the line between fantasy and reality to a degree that one wonders if he sees any distinction, but 36 years of this is enough to make him “qualified.” This, too, tells a lot about the mental processes of the dominant political class.</p> <p>One can deeply respect John McCain’s courage and service. But he is an erratic senator, with a tendency to reach decisions on a whim and then excoriate anyone who disagrees. As demonstrated by <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipartisan_Campaign_Reform_Act'>McCain-Feingold</a> — which hamstrings the middle-class base of the Republicans while leaving intact the power of unions and public employees, the media, the rich, and Native American tribes — McCain does not, or cannot, think even two moves ahead.</p> <p>This leaves Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney as the only candidates with any weight, and Palin’s executive experience gives her an edge over Lieberman.</p> <p>The list may not be impressive, but being number two is not bad.</p> <p>The biases of the political class also explain why Palin got sandbagged at the outset. Anyone familiar with the world of Washington private schools knows that they are experts at resume building — creating scads of extracurricular activities and awards so that every student can shine for the college of his or her choice. Well, the kids learned it from their parents, who are also experts at blowing air into the CV.</p> <p>Palin was called inexperienced because she had never gone on a five-photo-ops-with-foreign-leaders-in-four-days tour, held show hearings on the topic <em>du jour</em>, introduced meaningless legislation, or had her staff give her a list of the publications she should say she was currently reading.</p><p>In fact — and of course — negotiating with Exxon is better preparation for negotiating with Putin than is a foreign photo op. And running a town is a miles-better education than warming a Senate seat. But again, it is not in the interests of the political class to acknowledge this.</p> <p>So her handlers tried to cram her into a D.C. frame of reference by stuffing her with facts on national and international issues that could withstand grilling from a gotcha! press, something that was neither possible nor the right game.</p> <p>Palin should instead have conceded that of course she would not be ready to be president on day one, but that:</p> <blockquote><p>1. What she had turned her hand to, she had quickly learned to do successfully — and this ability, based on her solid grounding in the realities of American life, was and is the real test.</p> <p>2. If she were called upon on day one, she would be the head of a government, not a lone individual, and she had the experience in handling people that would be necessary to tap into the collective intelligence of the nation.</p></blockquote> <p>Those are called real qualifications!</p> <p>Since the election, Palin has learned her lesson about the political handlers and she has followed Mao’s advice, as channeled through Anita Dunn — “you fight your war and I’ll fight mine.”</p> <p>Her resignation from the governorship, which was mostly condemned by the pundits, was dead-on shrewd. Why let herself be tied down defending perjured ethics charges from people with infinite money, whose only desire is to shut her up or bankrupt her? Her willingness to be herself and pursue her own ideas without regard to whether or not they could lead to future office is a source of great political strength. Her public pronouncements, <a href='http://www.myfreedompost.com/2009/09/excerpts-from-sarah-palins-hong-kong.html'>such as the Hong Kong speech</a>, are serious and adult, unlike most of the vapidity produced by politicians, especially Obama. And Palin is mastering the art of short, sharp statements.</p> <p>None of this is winning over the political class. Indeed, Palin’s refusal to fulfill their desires that she be a clown or take a proper role in the kabuki theater of Washington is making them angrier than ever and more determined to marginalize her. But the disillusionment with government among the tea-partying middle class is so great that every attack on her builds her stature on Main Street.</p> <p>Is Palin going to be nominated? Hard to tell, even assuming she wants it. The unrelenting hostility of the media does have an insidious effect. She also needs to achieve the discipline in speaking that she displays with her written pronouncements — more brevity and less nattering — but this is doable.</p> <p>The cultural issues are more important. There is a middle ground of people who are against the increasing bipartisan kleptocracy but not conservative on cultural matters — personally, I am pro-choice (but with reasonable caveats about the exercise of that choice), utterly indifferent to gay marriage, pro-gun, pro-decriminalization of marijuana, in favor of a forward strategy towards the terrorist wing of Islam and with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sympathetic to China’s extraordinary effort to remake itself economically and politically.</p> <p>Ultimately, this may or may not make me into a Palin supporter. But either way, our most fundamental current crisis is the inability of the political class to produce plausible leaders, and its hostility to anyone, such as Palin, who threatens the system. The election of Obama was a symptom of our current dysfunctional politics, not a cause.</p> <p>We need more Palins, not fewer.</p><p><em><small>James V. DeLong is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and a former Book Review Editor of the Harvard Law Review. Recent articles include <a href='http://www.american.com/archive/2009/april-2009/the-coming-of-the-fourth-american-republic/?searchterm=delong'>The Coming of the Fourth American Republic</a> and <a href='http://www.american.com/archive/2009/october/rhett-butler-comes-to-washington/?searchterm=delong'>Rhett Butler Comes to Washington</a>.</small></em></p></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-90612632416329266072009-11-11T11:00:00.000-05:002009-11-11T08:30:16.587-05:00Remembrance Day 2009<br/><br /><br /><object width="445" height="364"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/MB98cgBjOtk&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/MB98cgBjOtk&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="445" height="364"></embed></object><br /><br /><object height="364" width="445"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2MIet3s0BUU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2MIet3s0BUU&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="364" width="445"></embed></object><br/>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25238667.post-6155626236058694602009-11-07T12:35:00.001-05:002009-11-07T12:35:18.776-05:00The Hole at the Heart of Our Strategy<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><span class='articletitle'><a href='http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjVmN2E4MjQwZTZkMDgyNTZiMTIxNzhjYzcxZTAxNzI='>The Hole at the Heart of Our Strategy</a></span><br /><span class='articlesubtitle'>We’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives terrorism.</span><br /><br /><span class='articlesubtitle'>By Mark Steyn</span><br /><br /><span style=''><span class='drop'>T</span>hirteen dead and 31 wounded would be a bad day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a “tragedy” (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the “War on Terror.” Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America’s enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy — a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does.<br /><br />And he’s a U.S. Army major.<br /><br />And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity — as if believing that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively <em>supporting the other side</em> in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base.<br /><br />When it emerged early on Thursday afternoon that the shooter was Nidal Malik Hasan, there appeared shortly thereafter on Twitter a flurry of posts with the striking formulation: “Please judge Major Malik Nadal [<em>sic</em>] by his actions and not by his name.”<br /><br />Concerned Tweeters can relax: There was never really any danger of that — and not just in the sense that the <em>New York Times</em>’s first report on Major Hasan never mentioned the words “Muslim” or “Islam,” or that ABC’s Martha Raddatz’s only observation on his name was that “as for the suspect, Nadal Hasan, as one officer’s wife told me, ‘I wish his name was Smith.’”<br /><br />What a strange reaction. I suppose what she means is that, if his name were Smith, we could all retreat back into the same comforting illusions that allowed the bureaucracy to advance Nidal Malik Hasan to major and into the heart of Fort Hood while ignoring everything that mattered about the essence of this man.<br /><br />Since 9/11, we have, as the Twitterers recommend, judged people by their actions — flying planes into skyscrapers, blowing themselves up in Bali nightclubs or London Tube trains, planting IEDs by the roadside in Baghdad or Tikrit. And on the whole we’re effective at responding with action of our own — taking out training camps in Afghanistan, rolling up insurgency networks in Fallujah and Ramadi, intercepting terror plots in London and Toronto and Dearborn.<br /><br />But we’re scrupulously non-judgmental about the ideology that drives a man to fly into a building or self-detonate on the subway, and thus we have a hole at the heart of our strategy. We use rhetorical conveniences like “radical Islam” or, if that seems a wee bit Islamophobic, just plain old “radical extremism.” But we never make any effort to delineate the line which separates “radical Islam” from non-radical Islam. Indeed, we go to great lengths to make it even fuzzier. And somewhere in that woozy blur the pathologies of a Nidal Malik Hasan incubate. An army psychiatrist, Major Hasan was an American, born and raised, who graduated from Viriginia Tech and then received his doctorate from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, which works out to the best part of half a million dollars’ worth of elite education. But he opposed America’s actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and made approving remarks about jihadists on American soil. “You need to lock it up, Major,” cautioned his superior officer, Col. Terry Lee.<br /><br /><br />But he didn’t really need to “lock it up” at all. He could pretty much say anything he liked, and if any “red flags” were raised they were quickly mothballed. Lots of people are “anti-war.” Some of them are objectively on the other side — that’s to say, they encourage and support attacks on American troops and civilians. But not many of those in that latter category are U.S. Army majors. Or so one would hope. Yet why be surprised? Azad Ali, a man who approvingly quotes such observations as “If I saw an American or British man wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq I would kill him because that is my obligation” is an adviser to Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (the equivalent of the U.S. attorneys). In Toronto this week, the brave ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish mentioned en passant<em> </em>that, on flying from the U.S. to Canada, she was questioned at length about the purpose of her visit by an apparently Muslim border official. When she revealed that she was giving a speech about Islamic law, he rebuked her: “We are <em>not</em> to question sharia.”<br /><br />That’s the guy manning the airport-security desk.<br /><br />In the <em>New York Times</em>, Maria Newman touched on Hasan’s faith only obliquely: “He was single, according to the records, and he listed no religious preference.” Thank goodness for that, eh? A neighbor in Texas says the major had “Allah” and “another word” pinned up in Arabic on his door. “Akbar” maybe? On Thursday morning he is said to have passed out copies of the Koran to his neighbors. He shouted in Arabic as he fired. But don’t worry: As the FBI spokesman assured us in nothing flat, there’s no terrorism angle.<br /><br />That’s true, in a very narrow sense: Major Hasan is not a card-carrying member of the Texas branch of al-Qaeda reporting to a control officer in Yemen or Waziristan. If he were, things would be a lot easier. But the pathologies that drive al-Qaeda beat within Major Hasan too, and in the end his Islamic impulses trumped his expensive Western education, his psychiatric training, his military discipline — his entire American identity. One might say the same about Faleh Hassan Almaleki of Glendale, Ariz., arrested last week after fatally running over his “too Westernized” daughter Noor in the latest American honor killing. Or the two U.S. residents — one American, one Canadian — arrested a few days earlier for plotting to fly to Denmark for the purposes of murdering the editor who commissioned the famous Mohammed cartoons. But Noor Almaleki’s brother shrugs that’s just the way it is. “One thing to one culture doesn’t make sense to another culture,” he says.<br /><br />Indeed. To infidels, Islam is in a certain sense unknowable, and most of us are content to leave it at that. The vast majority of Muslims don’t conspire to kill cartoonists or murder their daughters or shoot dozens of their fellow soldiers. But Islam inspires enough of this behavior to make it a legitimate topic of analysis. Don’t hold your breath. We’d rather talk about anything else — even in the Army.<br /><br />What happened to those men and women at Fort Hood had a horrible symbolism: Members of the best trained, best equipped fighting force on the planet gunned down by a guy who said a few goofy things no one took seriously. And that’s the problem: America has the best troops and fiercest firepower, but no strategy for throttling the ideology that drives the enemy — in Afghanistan and in Texas.<br /><br /></span><br /><span class='bioline'><em> — <span class='bioline'><em><a href='http://www.marksteyn.com/'>Mark Steyn</a>, a </em>National Review<em> columnist, is author of </em><a href='http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=1596985275'>America Alone</a><em>. © 2009 Mark Steyn</em></span></em></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1