Thursday, April 5. 2007
I hate to see the US going in the direction of the UK, with government nannies all over the place telling us what to do and how to live. It is not dignified, for adult humans, to put up with such nonsense from politicians, who are the last people on the planet we want or need advice from. Scolding the scolds, from Dick Meyer at CBS News. (h/t, Anchoress, who advises reading the comments too.)
 Right now, in Hartford, CT, it is snowing. Fairly heavily, too. What's up, Al?
And here's news to me: Al Gore gets paid $125,000 for showing up to speak about the warming crisis. Small Dead Polar Bears. Good gig for a huckster. Somebody call me. I'll do it for half of his fee - and I will explain to you why mankind should pray for a return to warming to fend off the next ice age. And, whoa. Al Gore's offset company spends only 25% of the money on offsets. The debate is over on Al Gore. Guess what? This guy is a greedy capitalist pig! Somebody remind me how he got all of that pre-IPO Google stock. I forget. I tried, but I could not get any from my stockbroker. The VIPs hogged it all, and made out like bandits. Al Gore is into the real Green now, I suspect. What is his net worth, without ever holding a real job?
Wednesday, April 4. 2007
 A darn good summary. I do not have a date for this briefing, but it's fairly up-to-date, and meaty. We all tend to get caught up in seeing the trees and missing the forest.
(Herb Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. In these positions, he managed production of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates and other top-secret projections for the President and his national security advisers. Meyer is widely credited with being the first senior U.S. Government official to forecast the Soviet Union's collapse, for which he later was awarded the U.S. National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the intelligence community's highest honor. Formerly an associate editor of FORTUNE, he is also the author of several books.”) . The Four Transformations: Militant Islam, China, Demographics, and Business Restructuring . Currently, there are four major transformations that are shaping political, economic and world events. These transformations have profound implications for American business owners, our culture and our way of life. There are three major monotheistic religions in the world: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In the 16th century, Judaism and Christianity reconciled with the modern world. The rabbis, priests and scholars found a way to settle up and pave the way forward. Religion remained at the center of life, church and state became separate. Rule of law, idea of economic liberty, individual rights, human rights all these are defining points of modern Western civilization. These concepts started with the Greeks but didn't take off until the 15th and 16th century when Judaism and Christianity found a way to reconcile with the modern world. When that happened, it unleashed the scientific revolution and the greatest outpouring of art, literature and music the world has ever known. Islam, which developed in the 7th century, counts millions of Moslems around the world who are normal people. However, there is a radical streak within Islam. When the radicals are in charge, Islam attacks Western civilization. Islam first attacked Western civilization in the 7th century, and later in the 16th and 17th centuries. By 1683, the Moslems (Turks from the Ottoman Empire) were literally at the gates of Vienna. It was in Vienna that the climatic battle between Islam and Western civilization took place. The West won and went forward. Islam lost and went backward Interestingly, the date of that battle was September 11. Since them, Islam has not found a way to reconcile with the modern world. Today, terrorism is the third attack on Western civilization by radical Islam. To deal with terrorism, the U.S. is doing two things. First, units of our armed forces are in 30 countries around the world hunting down terrorist groups and dealing with them. This gets very little publicity. Second we are taking military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are covered relentlessly by the media. People can argue about whether the war in Iraq is right or wrong. However, the underlying strategy behind the war is to use our military to remove the radicals from power and give the moderates a chance. Our hope is that, over time, the moderates will find a way to bring Islam forward into the 21st century. That's what our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is all about.
Continue reading "Best Essays of 2007: Herb Meyer's Global Intelligence Briefing for CEOs - The Four Transformations"
Update: Ahmadinejab says they will free them "as a gift." I guess there was a deal. Iran 1, Brits 0. VDH says the hostage incident reveals the meaningless of the "alphabet" organizations: This "incident" has proved a multilateral trifecta: a patrol sanctioned by the U.N. gets no support from the U.N., a member of the EU is left hanging in the interest of EU trade, a NATO member finds no NATO allies, other than the U.S., to offer support. So what is the purpose of these alphabetic organizations? Perhaps Ahmadinejad should start holding seminars, Henry Kissinger style, to instruct the Islamic world on how to deal with the West, given his instincts that Western rhetoric is in inverse proportion to Western willingness to stand up for a principle.
"What on earth has happened to the English?" asks Derbyshire. His answer is that multiculturalism has destroyed love of country. Maybe. His piece here at New English Review. (h/t, Small Dead Baby Seals). I agree. When they come home, these sailors deserve to be charged with something, like cooperating with their captors or whatever the Brit Naval Code contains. Gagdad Bob calls them EUnuchs. Dinocrat thinks the entire episode was designed as a "time-waster" and a distraction from Iran's nuke program.
Tuesday, April 3. 2007
 ...and foolishness. Pelosi and company visiting Syria reveals a break with reality, whether Dem or Repub. Who do they think they are?
I am not saying that diplomacy should not try to deal with enemies or adversaries, but it is not the job of Congress to do the work of the State Dept. and the Administration. Bush has been slow on the uptake for the past year, and so it may appear that there is a power vacuum but, even so, you don't become part of a rogue foreign policy - especially with a nation which supports Hezbollah. Leave it to the pros at State, such as they are. Image borrowed from Powerline's photo piece on the subject. There is some sort of insanity going on. By the way, where's Condi these days?
I am re-posting this essay because I think it got a bit lost in the mix over the weekend. Why so important? Because it makes clear that our civilization and our culture - including our religion - are what we have going for us. These things are precious, and more fragile than we'd like to think. The noble savage is a child's dream.
World violence is diminishing. A History of Violence - a speech by Steven Pinker. A sample: In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion. Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light. At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood"). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.
Read the whole thing (link above). Sounds like Freud's Civilization and its Discontents wasn't too far off. Civilization has its challenges, but the alternatives aren't so hot. Image: Mor's Feast of Attila the Hun
The Unchained Goddess, from Bell Telephone Hour on TV, in 1958. Video at Evangelical Outpost. Makes Al Gore sound positively tame. Remember, this show was before the global cooling hysteria of the 1970s.
A comparison of proposed taxes over the next five years, stolen from a good piece at the King of Graphs, Willisms. The Dem leadership graph (yellow) would constitute the largest tax increase in American history, exceeding Clinton's. May I ask what this new tax money is supposed to be for? No matter - they'll find some way to spend it, and the very rich will find some way not to pay it. 
Don Surber is right. That line above is a joke headline of the New York Times. They use it so often that I suspect they hit one button to print it, then fill in the blank after it. Global warming? Yup. Grandaddy Long Legs reminds me that the actual joke line was "World to end tomorrow. Women and minorities hardest hit."
I would not want to be president without Kissinger's advice. Right or wrong, he always makes good sense. He says victory, in the usual sense of the word, is impossible. Quote from the piece in the Int'l Herald Tribune: Kissinger said the best way forward is to reconcile the differences between Iraq's warring sects with help from other countries. He applauded efforts to host an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Iraq's neighbors — including Iran, Washington's longtime rival in the region. "That is the sort of framework out of which it is conceivable that an agreement should emerge," Kissinger said. "One needs to be prepared to negotiate with adversaries."
Surely he is right. Iraq is beginning to feel like a giant game of Whack a Mole.
Monday, April 2. 2007
 Dr. Sanity has a piece today - Showdown at the OK Corral - which perfectly captures the current Moslem-West showdown which is happening at this very moment.
She is absolutely correct that weakness and doubt in the face of Moslem hostility only brings on more. It's like blood in the water. As she says, "They aren't like us." No, they are in a different culture with different rules - if you want to call them rules. We call them dishonorable and uncivilized, but they do not see it that way. I am not going to quote it. Just do me a favor and read her piece.
Sunday, April 1. 2007
 In a surprise announcement yesterday, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks held a press conference at Spielberg's office to urge Fred Thompson to run for president.
"We in Hollywood need to support our own," Spielberg said, to the surprise of assembled reporters. "Fred's screen resume is one anyone could be proud of. Fred may be a traditional, uptight American with bourgeois values, so we may not always agree with him on political matters, but loyalty comes first. We supported Schwartzenegger too, remember?" "Admiral Joshua Painter is our man." Spielberg's comments were taken as a message of permission, from the heart of Hollywood, for the influential entertainment industry to step outside the confines of the Democratic Party. Should Thompson decide to run, he will find the checkbooks of Hollywood opening for him. Hanks commented "Running is good. Now you wouldn't believe me if I told you, but I could run like the wind blows. From that day on, if I was ever going somewhere, I was running!!" While we were unable to reach actor Sean Penn for a reaction, we were able to reach his agent who told us that Mr. Penn was in Darfur distributing funds and arms to the oppressed Janjaweed freedom fighters. He predicted that "Sean will follow the fashion - that's what he's all about." He added "I'd be amazed if Sean wouldn't courageously follow our very, very dear close friends Stevie and Tommy's lead on this."
Saturday, March 31. 2007
If you didn't take the time to listen to this short speech by Evan Kayet, do it. He is smart. He gets it. I have promised to buy dinner for all of my lib friends who will listen to it.
Friday, March 30. 2007
 The Feinstein Scandal is the biggest we've seen in a long time. We are looking at billions in an obvious conflict-of-interest case - and all that has happened is that she resigned from a subcommittee after she got caught.
Will the magic "D" after her name protect her? If she were an "R", how big would this story be?
Thursday, March 29. 2007
Have you paid your taxes yet?!?! 18 million illegal aliens are depending on you
We missed this report, by Paul Hollrah from The New Media Journal:
Tuning in to C-Span recently, I found myself listening to a speech by Senator Barrack Hussein Obama, Jr. He was standing in the pulpit of a black church in Selma, Alabama, and as I studied the body language of the dozen or so black ministers standing behind the senator, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the little head-bobbing dolls that people used to place in the rear windows of their 1957 Chevrolets. If their reactions are any indication, the new Schlickmeister of the Democrat Party is actually a pretty accomplished public speaker. However, as he spoke, I found my bull_ _ alarm going off, repeatedly. But I couldn’t quite figure out why until I actually read excerpts of his speech several days later. Here’s part of what he said:
Continue reading ""Say what, Barrack?""
The newest Jib Jab. Not their best.
 The Envy Patrol at the NYT is always on the job: "The top 10% of Americans collected 48.5% of all reported income in 2005."
Since neither wealth nor income are zero sum games (although the NYT tends to make it sound otherwise - as if money were an Easter Egg hunt), I see no reason why anyone should care - other than envy. And besides, the top 10% pays most of the taxes, too, for the benefit of the rest of us. My feeling is this: If I had the talent, drive, and personality traits to be a Hollywood star, a major league pitcher, a sought-after CEO, a genius investor, a clever entrepreneur, a neurosurgeon, or a Wall Street lawyer - or the luck to be a fortunate heir - I'd get a big kick out of it. But it's not all that bad a thing to be a regular American. In fact, it's the best thing to be on earth.
Wednesday, March 28. 2007
Poverty, "relative poverty", and opportunity. Clearly as long as you define poverty as the lowest 10% of income, you will always have darn close to 10% poverty, right? Stumbling and Mumbling points out that the above logic is in error. Providing benefits to bring everyone up to 61% of the median income would solve that statistical issue by eliminating the bottom. Of course, the disincentives to work provided by those benefits, and the disincentives to work which would be required via taxes, would make everyone far poorer in the end. Take a look at his piece, and read the comments. The problem, of course, lies in not defining poverty by standard of living.
Now that the Brits have decided to dismantle the Royal Navy, I suppose any questions about it are moot. Still, I do not understand why, during the apparent ambush of the Brit inflatables by several Iranian gunboats, the Iranians were not picked up on the Cornwall's radar. I understand that the Cornwall was ordered not to defend with fire, but surely the closer presence of the Cornwall, plus recalling her helo, could have been discouraging to the Iranians and driven them away. (Of course, the notion that a warship could be forbidden to defend their ship and crew verges on insanity.) Iran today: "Brits must admit trespass." It's the mullahs playing the same games with the Brits that they do inside the UK. Will the Brits ever learn that the Moslems play according to different rules than the West? The next demand will be that Blair himself come to Tehran and bend over his backside to Al Khameini.
Re this video, a quote from Cato's David Boaz, at TCS: And what about that giant screen? Even when the government doesn't step in to take children from their parents, Clinton sees it constantly advising, nagging, hectoring parents: "Videos with scenes of commonsense baby care -- how to burp an infant, what to do when soap gets in his eyes, how to make a baby with an earache comfortable -- could be running continuously in doctors' offices, clinics, hospitals, motor vehicle offices, or any other place where people gather and have to wait," she writes. The childcare videos could alternate with videos on the Food Pyramid, the evils of smoking and drugs, the need for recycling, the techniques of safe sex, the joys of physical fitness, and all the other things the responsible adult citizens of a complex modern society need to know. Sort of like the telescreen in Orwell's 1984 -- or the YouTube video.
His whole piece here.
Auster says what many people think silently. A quote from his latest on the dangers of uncontrolled immigration: Indeed, if someone as smart and as critical of left-wing nuttiness as Badillo could sound the racial-socialist note at this stage of the game, after so many disasters have already resulted in the past from the same egalitarian assumptions, and the lessons had presumably been learned, then we have a bitter taste of the future. America is filling up with a vast population of people who, let us be frank, have no interest in education, no interest in reading, and an average IQ of 90, and, residing as cultural outsiders in a country with a still dominant and successful though ebbing white majority, and also fueled by their own ethnic chauvinism, those people will naturally and increasingly blame their inferiority of accomplishment and income on the whites and seek to appropriate as much from them in the form of government transfers as they can. As their numbers increase, their political power and their will to express their resentments politically will also increase, as will the perverted anti-white passions of the white left.
The whole thing here.
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