Sunday, April 27, 2008

random thought...

If the left is accurate in their criticisms that Bush is some sort of totalitarian who silences the dissenters, then why is it that the dissenters are all I hear, see and read?

If Bush was successfully silencing them, wouldn't they be... silent?

Real silencing of dissent results in things like Saddam's mass graves.

Where are the Bush mass graves? Where are the 'showers'? Where are the lists of the desaparados? Where are the Killing Fields? Where are the Bush gulags full of brave honorable journalists eating gruel and whispering to each other about First Amendment rights?

Anyone who lived in the 20th century is familiar with names like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot. People who literally ordered the deaths of millions of their own citizens, to eliminate political opposition, to reduce the number of hungry mouths the state must feed, or simply because the millions are of the wrong racial background. Pol Pot in particular included Cambodians with eyeglasses on his to-be-slain list, on the grounds that they were intellectuals and could make a more effective political opposition.

Casual stupidity such as this is often the mark of the true dictatorship.

Real totalitarianism, real silencing of dissent, is easy to spot. It leaves a long bloody trail of corpses, empty homes, shattered families. The mark of a well-silenced dissent is that you NEVER HEAR IT.

Even if Bush was not a good, kind, loving and decent man, humbled by his knowledge of God and determined to do the right thing even when it is the hardest thing, I would never believe he was a totalitarian dissent-silencer without at least a couple of pits full of dead journalists or Democrats.

I disagree with Dubya on a number of important issues. I do not expect to end up in a pit.

The proof that the lefties are wrong about Bush being an evil silencer of dissent can be found in the sheer constant grating LOUDNESS of the complaints themselves. Reminds me of the Monty Python sketch in which the peasants bring a woman to the wise man of the village shouting 'a witch! A witch!' When the man asks how they know, one peasant shouts "She turned me into a newt!"

Long pause during which all realize he is in fact a human being.

Flustered, he claims "I got better."

Journalists claim to be silenced, Democrats claim to be repressed and smothered by the evil Bush machine, and yet, somehow, through all the repression and silencing by the evil Bush, we can still hear them loud and clear on every cable channel all day all night. They were silenced, but they got better.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Stupid Celebrities stupid headline

I was randomly following links this morning and was startled to see the headline, "John Travolta Nearly Escapes Death".

First thought-- Travolta is dead!

Immediate second thought-- stupid web journalists don't know the English language.

Second thought was the right one. "Narrowly" would have worked, or "barely". But "nearly" made the sentence say the opposite of what it was intended to say.

The one thing that actually works in the favor of the dinosaur journalists' argument for expertise and training and experience is that they actually do go to college and specifically learn the use of the language for their trade. When just anyone can start writing without that preparation, the weakness of the normative American education is put in the spotlight.

I know it's silly, but this sort of thing annoys me. :-)

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Black men I'd support for President

I've been challenged on several occasions to produce this list, so I figure now's as good a time as any.

In no particular order:

Herman Cain
. A non-privileged childhood, but with good parents who taught him the value of work and set good examples. Herman Cain was the executive who 'turned around' Godfather's Pizza and earned national acclaim and awards for inspired leadership and good business management, and is now a motivational speaker and author, and fills in on conservative and libertarian talk radio from time to time.

Walter Williams
. Professor of Economics at George Mason University, a free markets guy with an incredible understanding of human nature and transactional ethics. This guy would make FOOLS of the 'world leaders' who hold America in such sniffing intellectual disdain.

Michael Steele. Almost won the contested Senate seat in Maryland in 2006, normally the bluest of blue states. Former Maryland Lt. Governor, Republican spokesman and now chairman of GOPAC.

Thomas Sowell. Academic and author with a circumspect view of people, life, politics and race, immensely wise and personally humble and understated. Sometimes the best of leaders begin with these traits.

Allen West. While on duty in Iraq, Lt. Colonel West needed to know some critical information which a detainee in his control knew but was not telling. It was about an ambush point, and West was trying to keep his men alive. During the questioning, West held a pistol close to the head of the terrorist and fired it. The tactic worked, and the man told what he knew. West subsequently got in a lot of trouble with the Army over this, but eventually was allowed to retire cleanly. He is now running for Congress in Florida, a black conservative military veteran with an unambiguous love of his country and the achievement-oriented attitude we need in Congress. I would not vote for the brass who wanted to give him grief, but I would most definitely vote for and support Allen West. My kind of guy. He's got a beautiful wife and daughters, and a lot to be proud of and to fight for.

More to come...

Friday, April 18, 2008

Sign of the Times...

The New York Times reports a drop of over 10% year on year in its primary revenue source, advertising on the web and in its newspaper.

The Times blames two things-- the downturn in the economy and the continuing shift of readers and advertisers to the web.

And of course two things came to my mind as well--

One, don't they have a website? They admitted as much when they included it as part of the ad revenue that's being lost. So they can't really blame the 'shift to the internet'; they ARE the internet. Their problem is that readers are shifting to sites OTHER than the NYT site.

Two, do they have any share of the blame for this shift?

Could it be that their content drives away readers, who then go to the web in search of something they like BETTER?

Sans doute, mon ami. The Times is driving away its audience, and the advertisers know it and are looking for that audience somewhere else.

As we have learned this week after Obama's candid slip in Billionaire's Row, America is not a great fan of the hard left view of the world. Obama revealed his contempt for the common man and for what that man holds dear, and Obama is being held to account for this contempt.

So, over a longer haul, is the New York Times. A long history of undermining the President of the United States in wartime with treasonous acts is not exactly meat and potatoes for the common man.

George Bernard Shaw once opined that the working class does not deserve to live, and that nothing would make him happier than if his generation of working class people died off and were not replaced. He led opinion during the heyday of English leftism, anti-religious intellectualism which spawned the Kim Philbys and Anthony Blunts-- the men who would betray their country, also at war, in acts of treasonous espionage which continued over decades.

One should not doubt that, if not quite to the level of wishing them extinction, nonetheless the left in this country holds the working class American in the same general contempt. They are only good for what they do; they have no inherent dignity or humanity. They're just too stupid and superstitious.

They're for being manipulated to gain their votes, and for taxing. That's all they're good for.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

While we're talking about it

As Barbara Boxer today embarrasses our nation by altering the language of a Senate resolution to welcome the Pope-- in order to remove any semblance of language that might be interpreted as opposition to abortion-- I'm reminded that I should make this effort now and then. So here goes:

When does a human being become a human being? Forget the ambiguous 'life', I want to know when it's a PERSON.

Because it's illegal to kill a person.

Nobody has ever positively identified the moment, day, week even, when a tissue mass becomes a human being. That 'scientific discovery' has yet to be made. There is much negatively identified, as in "it doesn't even have eyes, how could it be human? It doesn't even have a brain, how could it be a person?"

But no positive ID. No medical statement saying "in the third week of the third month, at midnight on the 78th day, a tissue mass is officially, or medically, or reasonably, a human being."

Yes, it is impossible to know, to agree. We don't even agree on what a human being IS. What is a soul? Does the soul define a human being? Or is humanity only Darwinian randomness, an accidental conglomeration of DNA and goop, something that could just as well have looked like an octopus or an amoeba, breathed helium or CO2?

Is it possible that we are no more than a cosmic accident?

And yet murder is not only against the Commandments ('Thou shalt not kill' in the original language is contextual and means 'don't murder anyone'), it's also against the law.

When the constitutional right to life was established and laws were made against murder, of course, abortion was not even on the horizon of possibility. That particular level of depravity was not among the dreadful things our founding fathers considered when crafting the documents intended to limit government's ability to tyrannize. The "right to life" was not added to the founding documents in order to prevent abortion, but it does argue against that practice if the personhood, the humanity, of the unborn child is agreed.

And of course American law was not the first to proscribe murder; it was generally illegal and almost universally wrong for thousands of years, even among societies which had not the benefit of the Old Testament. For example, in ancient Egypt the Book of the Dead lists the claims to a righteous life that a man might make before the Gods on his judgment day, and one is "I have not slain men."

So forget about the far end of the argument; mankind more or less universally recognizes that we shouldn't just arbitrarily or for personal benefit take the life of another person. And you can't claim an actual human being isn't a human being-- even though some proponents of abortion recognize this particular tension and actually try to go that direction, saying infants shouldn't be declared human until they've lived six months, or nine months, outside the womb. They want to not only have the right to kill the unborn child, but to retain that right for months after the birth. Sickening.

Fortunately that bloodthirsty subset of the far left has yet to gain any real influence, not that they're not trying.

No, the issue is this and only this-- IS AN UNBORN CHILD A HUMAN BEING?

And if not, at what point does the 'tissue mass' assume 'personhood'?

One would think this was dreadfully important, given the emotional commitment to the pro abortion side; how could they even make the case for abortion without first assuring themselves and the nation that in fact they were not advocating the killing of human beings?

Of course they knew this problem well, but were never willing to address it.

This is why the argument was, from the beginning, framed as 'women's rights'. It could never be about the BABY. Because the practice of abortion is indefensible without a national agreement on whether or not an unborn child is a person.

So they made it about 'a woman's right to do as she wants with her own body'. I'm told that when the meetings were held to agree on this deception, some participants actually had a laugh about how easy it would be to fool the public. Call that story apocryphal for now, as I cannot confirm or link it. But I know I have both heard and read this.

Logic demands we reject this 'women's rights' argument on the grounds that it begs the question. The question is 'what is a human being? When does it become human? How do we know?' The 'woman's right to choose' argument is simply a sidestep of the principal objection to the 'choice', that it is possibly the choice to murder someone. If an unborn child is a person, the proper comparison to a pregnant woman is that of a homeowner with a guest, a minor guest whose needs the homeowner is obliged to meet until such time as the guest leaves the house. If you're pregnant and an unborn child is a person, you are not the only one with a claim to rights related to your body. Your 'guest' is subject to the decisions you make about your own health, and you are obliged to meet the guest's basic needs.

And to anyone who makes the claim that an unborn child is not a person, I simply say prove it.

There is no argument presented by the left that conclusively, medically, logically, rationally proves that an unborn child is somehow not yet a human being, especially an argument that shows rationally at what point in the timeline 'humanity' somehow establishes itself within the tissue mass.

If they had such an argument, you can bet it would be universally known and extensively repeated in the media. The fact that even now, more than thirty years after the Supreme Court finding, they still speak of it in terms of 'a woman's right to choose' reveals the dishonesty inherent in the argument of the left.

A woman does not have the right to 'choose' to murder someone, any more than a man has it. If an unborn child is nothing more than a tumor, no rational person would try to prevent her from choosing to have it removed-- but the left does not make any attempt to prove that the tissue mass has no personhood.

They stand on the 'woman's right to choose'.

So rational thought here makes a sensible stand; given mankind is more or less universally opposed to murder and has been from earliest history, if we cannot know, for certain, sufficient to dismiss the question, that an unborn child is not a person, shouldn't we extend the benefit of the doubt to this little would-be person? At least temporarily, until such time as society might agree on what a person is and when it is?

If you were hunting in a field and saw something that might be a deer and might also be a person, would you say "I have the right to hunt!" and pull the trigger?

If you were driving at night and saw a lump ahead in the road, and it might be a trash bag but might also be a person, would you simply hold your course because you have the right to choose what lane you're in?

Society has, regrettably, chosen to blind itself to this, chosen to charge ahead and run over whatever's there, to pull that trigger even though the thing in its sights may be a person.

Because nobody is capable of making a genuine argument that an unborn child is NOT a person.

The Judeo-Christian view is that God, who has always existed and who created all things, also created us. The Bible teaches that God invented each of us first as an idea, a personality, a soul, and then later as a human being with a physical body. "I knew you before you were born", Jesus said. Each person is, therefore, complete and finished eternally, meaning certainly before sperm meets egg. We have always been persons, and we are still persons before we are born and afterward. We are born in the infinitely creative mind of God, who imagined the universe and then said "BE!" and it was.

We are created by God, and he made us like Him, according to Moses. In His image and likeness. That's why man has morality, a knowledge of right and wrong, and is the only creature on earth who has this. God said he made animals like animals and man like Himself. This, if you can make yourself believe there is a God, answers all the questions science cannot answer, about what and who we are, how we came to be this way.

And when God took the opportunity to answer mankind's deep questions about who He was and what He wanted from us, one of the first instructions given was that we shouldn't murder each other.

In this light, we who understand and accept the JudeoChristian version of events know from the beginning that abortion is murder, that it is wrong.

The other side, the activists, the liberals, have nothing but contempt for this set of beliefs. But they also have nothing to offer as counterbalance; they cannot explain what a human being is, when it becomes a human being, cannot answer the questions that ought to be settled before any more abortions are done.

Instead they talk of women's rights, forgetting even the words of the founding fathers concerning such things, that we are 'endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them LIFE, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

If God did not grant us rights, we don't have them, according to the founding documents of this nation. Where do rights come from if not the Constitution? And the Constitution says they come from God.

So where does that leave the pro abortion side, many of whom reject God entirely and all of whom are disinterested in whether God sees abortion as the murder of a human being?

If there is a God (and there is), if there is a judgment for every human being (and there is), I pity the fool who selfishly supports abortion because it's a convenient way to avoid the consequences of bad decisions. Or because performing abortions makes him or her a good living. Or because people in need of abortions vote for the people who support them.

Over forty million abortions have been performed in this country since the early 1970's.

If you wonder why we are moving toward a welfare state imbalance, toward having too few workers and too many retired, think about forty million more people in this nation who would be working now, for the most part. More than forty million, since enough time has passed for them to have had children who would now be joining the workforce. It is the left and their determination to continue and increase abortions which has robbed this nation of millions upon millions of citizens in these current generations, a colossal loss of human capital whose contributions cannot be overestimated.

Or see it as God does, as a tragic display of casual selfish brutality, another in an endless line of proofs that man has a sinful nature and indulges it, and that Christ's sacrifice was necessary to absolve them of a universe of sins.

And if you can't get past this business of women's rights, think for a moment of all the women who chose abortion as 22 year olds or 18 year olds, or 14, and then had to spend the rest of their lives seeing children of various ages and crying silently to themselves, "my son or daughter would have been this age now". I have known more than one woman in this terrible position; there is massive guilt over the choice to end that life, longing for the child that should have lived, regret at a selfish and foolish decision made at a young and naive stage of life. They never recover fully; the guilt and shame and anguish are lasting. And these are only the women who admitted it to me. Imagine how many cases of depression and illness and suffering for middle aged and older women can be properly blamed on this incredible guilt and shame, unspoken, unadmitted.

Some women I've known still defend it even as they suffer. They are not willing to speak the truth plainly; "I killed my child". But they know. And some say it outright, through tears.

I cannot imagine their plight. But one thing is certain; the moral responsibility for what they've done is shared in great measure by the people who defended abortion, argued for it, convinced them to abort. Told them it was their right. Made it seem like a simple medical procedure, a wart removed, or a cyst. A tissue mass.

Those people are in God's crosshairs. Now or later.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

We're changing our position, but we're still right

Kerry Emmanuel is a scientist. He's not just any scientist; he's an MIT scientist. He does the math that shows the world is going to cook and we're all going to die from global warmening.

Kerry Emmanuel is one of the jokers who predicted in 2005 (after Katrina) that 2006 would be even more dreadful. Then, after 2006 was considerably less dreadful than 2005, Emmanuel predicted that 2007 would be the ultimate dreadful hurricane season.

Now that 2007 has shown itself to have been similarly undramatic, it's time for the expert to explain himself.

So Kerry Emmanuel has changed his tune, now saying that even though global warmening is actually happening and we're all going to die, nevertheless hurricanes aren't going to get stronger and more numerous for a while.

He has invented a 'novel' formula to predict this, and he espouses it with great confidence; it is the same great confidence with which he espoused the previous failed formulas.

Rather than reconsider the larger picture, he set about creating a formula that would still prove his previous preexisting conclusion while taking into account the data which argues for the opposite conclusion.

Only a scientist could manage this, but don't worry-- K.E. is one of the best. Heh heh.

Remember, the most recent actual global temperature measurements tell us we haven't seen actual warming since 2004, and that the recent ten year period is either flat or cooling in trend, with the warmest weather in 1998. This ten year non-warming trend has actually leveled the charts for the previous 100 years, putting us at current temperatures which do NOT support the whole global warmening thing.

Coincidentally, the sun has been dead quiet in terms of sunspots since 2005, and the latest cycle of sunspots is now two years late and counting. Sunspots are the cause of increased solar radiation striking earth, and when sunspots are at a minimum, the weather historically has been cold.

But rather than incorporate THIS data and reach different conclusions, these 'scientists' approach their work with conclusions already formed and then create the math to explain their preexisting conclusions.

This does not fill ME with confidence about their work.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Err Amerika actually has standards

In addition to being stunned at the fact that Air America, the left wing radio network that can't make a buck the honest way, is still actually broadcasting, I am now stunned to find that this bunch actually has standards.

They've fired Randi Rhodes, the jockette with the checkered present. She not only has faked a mugging (told people she was mugged when the truth was something wierder, involving a fall, possibly a drunken stupor or worse), she has recently used filthy language to describe the Obama non-supporters among the Democrat party. Hillary is a 'f***ing whore', Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary are both 'f***ing bitc**s', you get the picture. Randi Rhodes in top form.

OF course she immediately went back to her old job-- at Green 960 radio in San Francisco.

Where she was publicly welcomed. They're glad to have her back.

So what does Err Amerika do when it's missing a marquis name? They take a dip in the talent pool-- Hollywood actors. Richard Belzer will fill her timeslot on a temporary basis, probably trying to earn it permanently.

Yep, Richard Belzer from Law and Order. Used to be a comic, now a deadpan dramatic actor.

I wonder how Billary are taking this. The hardcore left were always in the bag for the Klintoons way back when. Now they seem to not only have lost their appetite for Klintommunism, they actually seem to hate the both of them. With a f**ing passion.

:-)

Stormy weather....


I woke up at 3:30 this morning to a sound I've heard about but never heard-- the sound of a train passing right by the front of my house.

Since there are no tracks, it occurred to me that I might be in the middle of some real trouble... I woke up, looked out the front window and saw my big oak tree doing impossible things, twisting, leaping, looking like it wanted to vacate the yard and come join me in the master bedroom.

To my great good fortune it did not. Others in my neighborhood did that, and on almost every block of my 1200 home subdivision there is at least one mature tree split down the middle or missing half its limbs or snapped off at its base. Many homes have lost shingles, and at least a dozen have had big strong fences come down.

My fence bent but did not break. My electric security gate, which is a part of the fence when it is closed, was not so fortunate.

It was pushed off its rail (not easy, as it has a very big metal clasp that was designed to hold the unattached end in place when closed) and twisted outward into the alley. More than half the fencing wood was torn off it and the rest is splintered and loose. The drive chain, of course, snapped.
The gate was only partially blocking the alley, but pieces of wood bristling with nails were everywhere, and it took a while to collect them.

Then the more arduous task of heaving the gate back onto its rails began. It has an iron frame, the wood was soaked, and it weighed several hundred pounds.

I finally figured out that my floor jack has castered wheels and I was able to use it to lift and move the gate back where it belonged, after prying the splintered beam out of the guide area.

With thanks sent heavenward for our comparative blessings, and prayers for the less fortunate around here who had roofs off and cars crushed by carports and so on, I now set about finding a repair guy who can do this job before September.


Those guys are booked pretty solid after this little adventure.

After one year in Dallas, I've concluded the weather here is very much more adventurous than in Houston. The TV people continue to insist that this was 'straight line winds', but I've been in some very strong winds that did not make this particular sound. It is just as they say, a train coming past the house at good speed, a rumbling and roaring. I can't help but believe a little funneling was going on.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Michele unplugged

Here's what's in store for our great nation if and when it becomes an Obama-nation--

From the Charlotte Observer:

**Obama, like her husband a Harvard-trained lawyer, listened and then spoke off the cuff.

Most Americans, she said, don't want much.

"They don't want the whole pie," she told the women. "There are some who do, but most Americans feel blessed just being able to thrive a little bit. But that is becoming even more out of reach."

After law school, she and Barack were beset by loans they'd still be paying had her husband not written two best-sellers, "The Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams From My Father."

Those debts early in their marriage, she said, equips her husband to better understand the problems many Americans face.

Should she become first lady, she said she'd focus on family issues.

"If we don't wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership...for how we want this country to work, then we won't get universal health care," she said.

"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."**


There you go, America. Because she 'had it tough', which is to say she and her husband used student loans to become Harvard-trained lawyers, she's convinced that someone has to give up a piece of the pie so others can have more.

My first difficulty is probably yours too; how does a Harvard lawyer with a Harvard lawyer husband lay claim to anything like a tough life? I have several doctor friends who are still paying student loans well into their forties. It's how you pay for enormously expensive educations that reap enormously large results. If your results come slow and your loans are hard to pay, why is that someone else's problem? Why does someone else have to hand over a slice of the pie, probably a pie they earned by going to school and paying off some student loans THEMSELVES?

My second, and larger, difficulty is of course with socialism itself.

History shows that, when you use government to decide how much of a person's productivity they are allowed to keep for themselves and how much should be given to those who did not earn it, you put a MAJOR damper on future productivity. People rightly ask why they should work so hard if it's only to put money in the pocket of someone who DOESN'T.

Human beings are consistent in that they work hardest and achieve the most when they are in a position to benefit from their own work. When they find they're instead in charge of paying for everyone else's expenses, they tend to slack off, sometimes in a big way.

And this is the rub with socialism; lower productivity per person, especially when you factor in the very high achievers who now have these targets on their backs, results in less wealth, less to redistribute, LESS FOR EVERYONE.

Socialism does NOT alleviate poverty; it spreads poverty UP the income ladder by reducing incomes in the higher rungs.

Naturally, government will get around to solving the problem of decreased productivity by becoming the agency of decision for who will do what job, where, how much of the time-- in other words, de facto slavery will be the result. It was in the Soviet Union. And of course it would be the result under HillaryCare, in which we all know doctors would have to submit to the State as to what specialty they pursue and where in America they will locate.

Folks, when government is that much in charge of your life, you're either in the military or you're a slave. Military is voluntary service; the rest is mandatory. That's the difference.

Socialism does NOT work. It's been tried enough, in enough historical times and places, for the conclusion to be obvious to all but the most determinedly blind.

But it's always the SMART people, the morally superior people, the 'wisest ones' (as Sheryl Crow's new song would have it), who think that it will work this time because this time the SMART people will be in charge.

And socialism is just communism without the 'nationalizing' of industry. The corporations are still nominally owned by stockholders and run by boards, and it's only the cash flow that's 'nationalized'. In communism, they stop pretending and actually make the corporations state-owned enterprises to be run by Central Planning Kommittee. But the principle is the same; all wealth belongs to the state to distribute as it sees fit, and anyone with moreof anything than another person is morally culpable for that wrongful state of affairs.

Like mom used to say, 'eat your dinner, there are people starving in Ethiopia". I never managed to understand how eating my Brussels sprouts helped anyone in Ethiopia, but there you are.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

I knew it...

I was hearing the Dancing with the Stars TV show in the other room a moment ago (the other room being the kitchen, where something wonderful was happening), and Sheryl Crow came on as the guest performer.

She began singing, and I began to suspect that the snippets of words I was hearing belonged to some new happy meaningless spiritualistic sort of liberal anthem. Something like "We are the World".

It was worse than that.

Me and my morbid curiousity. I didn't hear much of the song, but I had to go and Google the lyrics. Here's a sample--

"Losing babies to genocide,
oh, where's the meaning in that plight.
Can't you see we've really bought into
Every word they proclaimed and every lie.."

Once again our cruel and ignorant society has left it to the pop singers to bring morality and goodness back to the public square.

Who is "they"? She doesn't say. And clearly she doesn't mean herself when she says "we've" bought into the lies "they" proclaimed. Smart people like Sheryl Crow knew 'they' were lying all along.

Interestingly, in the chorus she pleads with 'children of Abraham' to lay down their fears and swallow their tears, yada yada. Children of Abraham. Jews and Arabs. Carter couldn't do it. Clinton couldn't do it. Arafat and Rabin couldn't do it. But now Sheryl Crow has solved the middle east crisis. Lay down your fears, Palestinians (?). Swallow your tears, Israelis (like they haven't already been doing this for sixty years).

Later she intones, "every man is his own prophet, every prophet just a man"

It's an insult to Islam and Mohammed (bravo Cheryl, brave stuff) and to Christianity (same old junk, yada yada). The Jews, apparently, do not appear on her theological radar screen. Lucky them.

Christians, as usual, will yawn and ignore her.

Muslims will issue a fatwa and set about killing her for blaspheming the holiness of their proph-- wait. Sheryl Crow is a liberal, an activist, anti-Bush, anti-evangelical.

They can always kill her later.

Blasphemically speaking, though, 'every prophet just a man' is a traditional Christian blasphemy too, the kind that used to be illegal in England and the empire. She has gone to the trouble here to deny the supernatural aspect of Christ in specific terms.

Pretty bold for a pop singer.

"Let every man bow to the best in himself-
We're not killing anymore.
We're the wisest ones, everybody listen
'cause you can't fight this feeling any more."

Gawd this is crap. Mindless leftist drivel, presumptive moral superiority on NO grounds whatsoever. It's secular humanist dreck, this constant hope and dream of human perfection and peace and love and world harmony. Sorry Sheryl-- not this planet, not this race, not this universe. Not gonna happen.

"We're the wisest ones"? Staggering arrogance disguised (thinly) as moral superiority. How does a pop singer and her 17 - 34 yr. old CD-buying demographic, mostly women, assume the mantle of wisdom? Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Edwards, Qutb and Zawahiri and bin Laden, all those who have been held by various parts of the world at various times to be wise, all now take a back seat to Sheryl Crow and her 'me' generation; they are 'the wisest ones'. I know of a few mullahs who might be rankled.

This song is another droplet in a Niagara Falls of evidence that liberals aren't serious, don't recognize evil or have any plan for dealing with it, can't come to terms with the fact that human beings are imperfect and some of us are downright evil and nasty.

Wait-- she knows we rightwing nutjobs are evil and nasty, but fortunately she hasn't elucidated any plan to rid the world of US-- at least not in this song.

They still think, just like in the '60's, that if they can just enlighten the dim, kill the killers with kindness and elevate the human race with that last lunge for the exact right kind of knowledge and wisdom, then THIS time, THIS century, THIS world can be overflowing with peace, love and harmony.

Children of Abraham, lay down your fears. Sheryl the psychoanalyst has concluded that fear, not anger, drives radical Islam, and that fear, not sensible self-defense, drives the IDF.

Dreck and drivel.

The lead line in the chorus says it best..

'if we could only get out of our heads and into our hearts'.

This world needs less thinking and more feeling. THAT will solve all the problems of humanity.

Tell it to Islamic Rage Boy.

As I was saying....

It seems the curtain might have its corner pulled back, for a tantalizing peek at the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that Saddam never had.

American media utterly ignored a book published in early 2006 by Georges Sada, a former Air Vice Marshal under Saddam Hussein. "Saddam's Secrets" told the story of how Saddam did not trust his military and instead commandeered Iraq Airlines planes and had all the seats taken out.

Sada says what came on board the newly created air transport fleet was dozens or hundreds of canisters of yellowcake. "Barrels, yellow barrels, with skulls and crossbones on them", he says.

Sada supervised the transport of this material to Syria after the collapse of a dam there made the transports plausible as construction aid and materials.

It's all in the book. A bit of it is on Melanie Phillips' blog.

And it's related to the recent Israeli bombing of that site in remote western Syria.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

It was a matter of time..

"Bond. James Bond."

Daniel Craig was tough, edgy, understated, athletic to a fault, convincing entirely without the sort of "overacted underacting" the character has become famous for. I enjoyed his first Bond film, Casino Royale, immensely.

But in the end even the British version of Hollywood is what it is.

The new Bond film will be written 'in the context of global warming'.

The new villain, a French actor named Amalric, says "It's so difficult to know who are the villains today. ... Maybe they're in banks, maybe they are the insurance companies, maybe they're in labs, even in the subprime crisis".

Uh, yeah.

Then again, maybe they're Islamic terrorists. Maybe they're trying to FUND or ARM Islamic terrorists. Maybe they're in the UN and they're trying to skim billions from world charity or trying to stamp out Israel, a UN member in good standing.

One can hardly recognize the villains these days....

The plot apparently involves money interests trying to reinstate a dictator in return for shares of the natural resources. They don't even see the irony here-- dictators passing out natural resources in return for unethical support and for ignoring little problems like their mass graves and suffering people, well, that was exactly the problem Bush was trying to SOLVE.

They've done it. They've put me off James Bond movies.

These are sad times.

Friday, April 4, 2008

The real question is....

Here's a great story about another front in the Dem crack-up, in which leftist radio personalities are censured for using filthy language to describe Dem candidates.

Err Amerika's Randi Rhodes made insulting remarks about Hillary recently, beyond even the soft parameters applied by management to that sort of personality, and was disinvited to work for a few days....

The greater question, of course, went unanswered--

Are they still on the AIR?

I thought Err Amerika folded months ago, after having illicitly drained the coffers of a publicly funded school in a scam to keep themselves afloat. I thought Err disk jockeys were quitting due to lack of paychecks.

I thought the new Err Amerika building was a tombstone. Really. And I do want to know how they managed to keep it going, and if taxpayer money is involved, well by all that is holy and good and decent, I want MY SHARE BACK.

It was an earmark that left a big red mark on my left ear, nasty stuff.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Teds are goofy

About 20 years ago, Ted Danson famously started his environmental activist group, something about oceans, with a quote to the effect that within ten or twenty years our oceans would boil, or freeze, or just die of pollution or something. No fish, no survivors of any kind.

Unless we, the evil American public, change.

Danson is still giving interviews about the oceans, proving the press does NO fact checking these days.

But now another Ted is proving how silly Teds are, this time one named Turner.

He says there are too many people in this world, and within 40 years we're going to be starving and will turn to eating each other. Yes, fellow non-Teds, we are going to become cannibals. Dr. Lecter will doubtless be at the forefront with a chain of restaurants, if indeed Ted and Ted's excellent future adventures come to pass.

Me, I always wonder why the guys who complain that there are too many people on earth don't set a good example and off themselves.

Ted? Ted?

new thinking about an old problem

The problem is poverty.

The reason, when you boil it right down to essentials, is human behavior.

People mostly don't do what it takes to get out of poverty. Make moves, take chances, apply for jobs, clean up, stop drinking and drugging, follow better examples. Most poor people just don't do what it takes.

For whatever reason. Dems have long said it's because of right wing racism, but that doesn't explain the majority of the poor who are not black. There are also a large number of people who cycle in and out of poverty, sometimes doing what it takes and sometimes slumping back into misery and depression and inactivity.

The human spirit is complex and difficult to understand, but there are some market responses which are consistent and timeless.

Penalize a behavior and it will decrease; reward (or subsidize) a behavior and it will increase.

Somewhere in the obscure metaphorical arguments made in this article linked on Instapundit is the absolute gem of a solution--

SUBSIDIZE WORK.

For people who get jobs, give government payments related to the earnings from the job. The harder they work, the more then earn, the more 'welfare' payments they receive. In this way the taxpayer dollars are blending with actual human productivity and thus, for once, have the potential to actually be an economic net plus for everyone-- rather than the temporary and ultimately wet-blanket 'fix' for the economy that taxpayer funded relief so often turns out to be.

Poverty is real, poor people need help, and I do not pretend otherwise. But I've always been rankled by the certainty that the vast majority of those receiving government subsidies are able to care for themselves but choose not to, for whatever reason. Maybe it's depression, perhaps it's a lack of hope rooted in their particular realities of crime and danger and addiction, and of course maybe they're just taking the easy way out, as is human nature.

I am deeply, fundamentally opposed to this 'taking the easy way out', this lazy acceptance of other people's money, and have long demanded that government find a way to separate the needy from the lazy.

While this idea I've linked to does not inherently do this, it does work around it by incentives to work-- which will leave only the needy and the TRULY lazy in the position of receiving subsidies for doing nothing, and which perhaps actually stands a chance of at least offsetting the wasted taxpayer dollars which support the lazy with a real productivity gain that stimulates economic activity and lifts a community up.

We have 4.8% unemployment in this country, a .1% increase from the past several years due to the recent speculative foolishness in the property market. An English newspaper has proposed that we are now in a depression.

But of course, in the real Depression the unemployment rate was almost 25%, a rate five times higher than today. In fact anything under 5%, historically, is magnificent, and means employees can be selective and find the best job.

English leftists are no less dedicated to the end of America than our own; they trumpet disaster in the press as a way of convincing people that disaster is what we have, so we'll start behaving like victims and their prophecies will be self-fulfilling. Radical change is what they want, and massive public dissatisfaction is their means of getting it. If capitalism breeds failure and misery, the public will want socialism. It's their standard assault tactic.

But the reality in America is so, so different. And the world still wants that American life for itself, even as it claims to be anti-American.

There is no country in the world more receptive of people who want to work.

So if incentives to work are not effective here, they won't be effective anywhere.