Tuesday, February 6. 2007
"Pre-posterous." Literally, the front following; that is, the cart before the horse. Chundering - barfing Chuntering - bitching
12% of Americans hunted last year. Other hunting stats and data here. One quote from the article: Show Cornell University researchers a young hunter, and they'll show you a future environmentalist. A 2006 study shows that children who hunt, fish or play in the wild before age 11 are more likely to grow up with deeper understanding and respect for nature.
"Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society." Dr. Timothy Ball
 It's all about anti-capitalism. I think so, too. Polipundit. We love capitalism. It offers the freedom to pursue whatever you want in life, as best you can. As Rudy said, historically nobody emigrated to America for freebies. Freedom means a lot to people. I always am reminded that no-one emigrated to the Soviet Union or Cuba for their wonderful free stuff. Space for the human spirit to range free, take risks, and be free to fail, is what lively people want. The principle of freedom is what separates the Conservatives from the Left.
The ACLU has abandoned the First Amendment. Flopping Aces. We gave up on them years ago. Just another leftist interest group. It's a shame they get govt money. Guiliani is in. I wish I could spell his name. The use of biofuels is moving backwards, not forwards; it represents a move back towards high-carbon rather than towards high-hydrogen. Sugar cane, corn, etc. - all bad ideas. Now look what happened with palm oil. What you do on Sunday morning tells what you worship? Asst. Village Idiot. Well, it might be a clue, but it depends. Maligning the Global Warming Religion can bring threats and reprisals. One climatologist's story. Why I Turned Right. Powerline discusses the new book. These people sound like me - only smarter. Like beating a dead horse. No matter how often these things are said, it seems to make no difference. A quote from Dr. Sanity: What matters most to the minions of the political left is not truth, or reality, or even "peace" and "brotherhood"; what matters is how effective is the language used to manipulate others. Lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks; attempts to silence opposing views--all are strategies that are perfectly satisfactory if they achieve the desired effect. Ideas and reason must make way for reification of feelings; and freedom is replaced by the thought control of the compassionately totalitarian concept of political correctness.
The postmodern assault as it is used by the new totalitarian alliance of the 21st century, is a four-pronged attack to undermine
- Objective reality
- Reason and the rational debate of ideas
- Individual freedom and freedom of thought and speech
- Progress and capitalism
The strategies used in this assault are:
- The distortion of language and meaning to undermine the individual's perception of reality;
- The use of direct or threatened physical violence to suppress speech and individual freedom;
- Politically "correct" thought control and cultural relativism to undermine reason and rational debate;
- The promotion of environmental hysteria to undermine progress, industrialization and capitalism
By averaging them out, there is much distortion. For example, the relatively small but conspicuous numbers of Wall Street types with 1-50 million incomes get lost in the averages. (average always eliminate bi-modal and tri-modal distributions). Still, these numbers probably hold in most of the country.
 Sonia Szajnberg is the daughter of our (recently truant) Aliyah Diary author. I remember when she was born. She looks like her mother.
She's a jazz singer now in NYC. Try I Remember April. Absolutely lovely.
From an interview with Bob Fass on New York's WBAI in 1966: Fass: Your music is great, but you'd be greater if you could kinda sing a little bit better. Dylan: I appreciate that. A good rock-bottom foundational criticism and that just sinks right in. Not everybody has the courage to sing like I do.
It was clear to me that the point Michael Crichton made in his speech we linked was that linear thinking does not accurately describe the world, or predict events. Indeed it does not. Linear thinking is the domain of dangerous oversimplification and distortion - if not superstitious and magical thinking - most of the time. And especially when organisms are involved. I am referring to linear thinking of the type that A leads to B. As an example that Crichton might have used, I recently read a medical piece about the illusion that germs cause disease. We know they don't -germs tend to be a necessary but not sufficient cause for infection. It requires the alignment of many stars to get a lung infection with pneumococcus, a germ which is everywhere. Thus the "fallacy of the single cause." We love simplicity so we don't blow up our brains' hard drives, but simplicity (linearity) renders us vulnerable to all sorts of irrationality, such as the temptations of the fallacy of the single cause, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, and, everyone's favorite, post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking. The Global Warming fans are especially prone to the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, probably because they know nothing about statistics and graph-creation - leaving them also subject to the ipse dixit fallacy. The Cherry Picking fallacy is another one prefered by those who are more agenda-driven than fact-driven. All of this is boob bait, like that Polar Bear photo. As we quoted Edward Murrow last week, "Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation." Update: Working on those links that don't work - a bug in the system.
The Iranian news service offers this gem of a news article. How dumb do they think people are?
Monday, February 5. 2007
This is for real: One thing I vow here and now–you motherfuckers who want to ban birth control will never sleep. I will fuck without making children day in and out and you will know it and you won’t be able to stop it. Toss and turn, you mean, jealous motherfuckers. I’m not going to be “punished” with babies. Which makes all your efforts a failure. Some non-procreating women escaped. So give up now. You’ll never catch all of us. Give up now.
Piece at Michelle. Who is she talking to? And what is her problem? And why did Edwards view her as a good choice? Sheesh. Pure Bedlam. In need of anger management?
“The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.” David Brinckley
 The Crusaders are coming to Baghdad, and they are not looking for a "sanitary fight." It's about time. This should be good, and a lot rests on its success. Meanwhile, two of our favorites, VDH and Max Boot, discuss Iraq at Contentions. We also learn that our stupid, loser soldiers who are stuck in Iraq have PhDs, making them easily smarter and better educated than Jon Cary. Iraq the Model is eager: Surge Soon Please.
If you really want to understand Iraq politics, try this Video of Iraq traffic. Hilarious. London's proposed 17-acre mosque - details and video at LGF. It would hold more people than Giant Stadium. This was not immigration - this was invasion. Nader may run. Good. The more, the merrier. Apparently he detests Hillary. They deserve eachother. Dershowitz on Jimmy Carter For Sale. Ever get the feeling that Dershowitz does not care for Jimmah? Full India update, at BBC. If they had a work ethic, they would be or will be amazing. And more on India: Internet marriages in Bangalore. Lebanon update. Excellent piece, at Totten. h/t, Instap.
 This came in over the transom:
Hi everyone.
I'm still alive but freezing my tail off. We got 8 inches of snow last week and it reached 5 degrees below zero that night. That's not why I'm e-mailing though. You may have heard about a suicide car bomb attack in Kabul last Thursday. It was at one of our FOB's (Forward Observation Bases) about 27 miles from here.But the real story is why no one was killed.
We employ several thousand Afghans on our various bases. Not to mention the economy that is fed by the money these locals are making.Some are laborers and builders, but some are skilled workers. We even have one Afghan that just became OSHA qualified, the first ever. Some are skilled HVAC workers.
Anyway, there is this one Afghan that we call Rambo. We have actually given him a couple of sets of the new ACU uniforms (the new Army digital camouflage) with the name tag RAMBO on it. His entire family was killed by the Taliban and his home was where our base currently resides. So this guy really had nowhere else to go. He has reached such a level of trust with US Forces that his job is to stand at the front gate and basically be the first security screening. Since he can't have a weapon, he found a big red pipe. So he stands there at the front gate in his US Army ACU uniform with his red pipe. If a vehicle approaches the gate too fast or fails to stop he slams his pipe down on their hood. Then once the gate is lifted the vehicle moves on the 2nd gate where the US Army MP's are. So he's like the first line of defense.
Last Thursday at 0930 hrs a Toyota Corolla packed with explosives and some Jack Ass that thinks he has 72 Virgins waiting for him approached the gate. When he saw Rambo he must have recognized him and known the gig was up. But he needed to get to that 2nd gate to detonate and take American lives. So he slams his foot on the gas which almost causes the metal gate to go up but mostly catches on the now broken windshield.
Rambo fearlessly ran to the vehicle, reached thru the window and jerked the suicide bomber out of the vehicle before he could detonate and commenced to putting some red pipe to his heathen ass he detained the guy until the MP got there. The vehicle only exploded when they tried to push it off base with a robot but know one was hurt. I'm still waiting for someone to give this guy a medal or something. Nothing less than instant US citizenship or something. A hat was passed around and a lot of money was given to him in thanks by both soldiers and civilians that are working over here.
I guess I just wanted to share this because I want people to know that it's working over here. They have tasted freedom. This makes it worth it to me.
JOHN W. HUNT, CPT, US ARMY
Operations Officer
Bagram, Afghanistan
 Note that we post pieces on climate under Politics, not Conservation and Natural History. We place it where it belongs.
MIT Climate scientist calls warming fears "silly," in debate with Bill Nye. h/t, Junk Science. Bill Nye cannot stand up to an MIT Climatologist. Nye drank the Kool-Aid, but has no facts. From November, Lord Monckton wrote Apocalypse Cancelled for The Telegraph. He goes over the issues in detail. h/t, Small Dead Polar Bears. And, speaking of Polar Bears, they seem to be thriving in all of the sweltering heat. Also, about those famous bears on the ice floe: that's what Polar Bears do. They hang out on ice floes. They aren't stranded - it's normal for them. Althouse
Roger Scruton wrote this in 1999, at the time of the war in Kosovo, and it applies well to today. A couple of quotes: In effect, the war in Serbia is an exercise in sanitized aggression -- force without the risk of force, violence without tears, destruction from a place of safety. Not only is this cowardly: It is profoundly counter-productive, as we are beginning to see. Courage is a higher value than safety, and a life without risk diminishes the gift of freedom. And part of the value of courage over hesitation lies in the fact that it moves more decisively, more economically, and with less catastrophic destruction, to its goal. Courage is not just intrinsically admirable; it is also the most efficient means to achieve what we want.
and It is not only in war that the liberal priorities are dangerous. The obsession with health is profoundly unhealthy, and the pursuit of safety unsafe. If we believe that the state is there to cushion us from misfortune, to compensate every loss and make up for every suffering, then we automatically relinquish control over our lives, while drastically narrowing the sphere of human action. Regulations of a mind-numbing complexity now govern activities, consumer products, and employment, with the aim of ensuring that the citizen can amble through a risk-free world, picking his pleasures from shelves loaded with packaged and sanitized products, waddling onwards in a state of moral obesity. As a result, the citizen lives longer than he might. But his life is less completely his own. We have suffered an enormous diminution in the value of human existence, because we have removed risk from the heart of it. It is only by staking your life, that you fully possess it.
The whole essay is fully Scrutonic. Read it. (h/t, Reader)
Ah, higher education. Video at Volokh. A college applicant tour. My Dad always said that, when Dartmouth came down to Cambridge for sports, you were well advised to get your car off the street. A bunch of wild Indians up there.
The double standard: black-on-white hate crime just doesn't fit "the narrative." Ace  The Mossad will just kill 'em. There's an excellent solution. Gateway. A few more, please.
The LA Times wants to teach his bloggers how to blog. Hello? Hewitt Brit teacher fired for imagining that "most suicide bombers are Moslem." Everyone know the are mainly Mormons. Multiculturalism: What if white folks said some of this? Blue Crab Bill Roggio notes the regrouping of the Courts groups in Somalia A reader is trying to save open space around the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Go for it, y'all. The battle never ends. Yes, we know that area rather well. Royal Marines with balls. Winds of Change Please do not feed the bums. In Orlando French climate hypocrisy. What a joke. No Pasaran John Edward's blogger needs to take her medication. "Laughing all the way to the bank." Who coined that? Liberace. (h/t, Tangled Web) Adding to the blogroll: Attack Machine, Don Surber From VDH, as quoted by Dr. Sanity: We are in a rare period in American political history, in which the battlefield alone will determine the next election, perhaps not seen since 1864. The economy, scandal, social issues, domestic spending, jobs, all these usual criteria and more pale in comparison to what happens in Iraq, where a few thousand brave American soldiers will determine our collective future.
Re yesterday's post on Secular Culture (work done by Roger, of course): 
Sunday, February 4. 2007
Here are some dynamite short stories. Commentary's Contentions.
 The gals are back from this year's Vision New England, in Boston. They learned that 1% of New England men are evangelical Christians. I think that's pretty good, really. Many are called, etc.
Among other things, they loved a group that sang for them - Confirmations. Blues/gospel. Gritty, not sweet, and not old-fashioned. I will buy one or two.
 Why is this day different from all other days? I'll go for the Colts +4, but I'd be just as happy to see Chicago win.
As Seinfeld said: "You are rooting for laundry." Watching TV is not sport...well, I guess getting to the bean dip after 14 Coors Lights is a bit of a sport. Anyway, for real sport, try Tucks - Tuckerman Ravine on Mt. Washington. No lifts. You hike up the trail, and ski down the natural snow (or ice). Image: Tuckerman Ravine skiiers in 1937. Same as today. Not for yuppies. For other old-timey skiing (but with lifts) we recommend Mad River Glen ("Ski it if you can"), and the Dartmouth Skiway. Yes, we love Stowe, - the home town of our webmeister Chris - but it's not really fully old-timey anymore.
Gian Carlo Menotti has died, at 95. (h/t, Villainous)
 From stem-cell harvesting, to abortion on demand, to triage (as in the UK: "too expensive to bother treating"), to physician-assisted suicide for the terminally-ill, we see the steady march of a soul-less scientific rationalism.
I believe it is fear of that march which energizes the "crazy fundamentalists" who are not comfortable with treating human life as a disposable object. Now we see the practical Swiss planning to add mental illness to the list of diseases which will have physician-assisted suicide available. "Suicidally depressed? Hey - we can help!" Who's next on their list? Diabetics? Drug addicts? The unemployed? Sometimes a slippery slope is a slippery slope. How soon until Denmark and Holland have suicide teams roaming the hospitals (now often called "Death Services"), urging ill people to unburden society of their expensive and inconvenient problems? I can even see the ads: "Do it for the greater good", with some sort of happy, serene image of a smiling middle-aged lady floating on a fluffy cloud. Harp music, of course.
Well, the bad guys returned, which is why you've had trouble getting to Maggie's. We will fight them off as best we can.
|
