Maggie's Farm

Brits don't want to upset Iran. WTF? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Can't they see that they are being toyed with?  Meanwhile, a show of force.  

Update: Andrew Sullivan (who we no longer read) proposes the theory that the prisoner-taking is the fault of the US. Gay Patriot hits him hard with sarcasm.

Update: This production via MEMRI, via Iran TV - a quote:

"Creating a fuss in order to pressure the Iranian people in this [nuclear] issue, using the U.N. Security Council as a tool, will only harm the forces confronting the Iranian people. I must say this. If they want to use the Security Council as a tool, thus ignoring this indisputable right... So far, we have done everything in accordance with international law, but if they want to violate these laws, we too can and will violate these laws."

Crowd chanting: "Allah Akbar Allah Akbar. Allah Akbar. Khamenei is the leader. Death to America. Oh noble leader, we are prepared. Oh noble leader, we are prepared. Oh noble leader, we are prepared. Oh noble leader, we are prepared."

From a global warming hysteric (with a large, very comfortable home): "How could my wood stove be adding to global warming? It's not oil. It's natural. What would we do without it? It's our pleasure and comfort."

She thinks that as long as it isn't oil, it's good. Wrong. Oil and coal are simply old wood.

You cannot be culturally literate - or an educated person - in Western Civilization without knowing the Bible. It's our culture's taproot. It's therefore interesting to see that public school courses in the Bible are growing in popularity.

David van Biema has a very fine piece in the usually-disappointing Time Magazine discussing this new trend, and the issues around it.

It begins thus:

Miss Kendrick came ready, with props. The day's topic was the Gospel of Matthew. "You can divide all the Beatitudes into two parts," Jennifer Kendrick explained to her teenage audience. "The 'Blessed are the whatevers,' like 'the meek,' and then the reward they will get. So I've made some puzzle pieces here." She passed out construction-paper sheets, each bearing either the name of a virtuous group or its reward, in black marker. "And you've got to find the person who has the other half. What's the first one in the Bible?"

"The poor in spirit," mumbled a crew-cut boy.

"O.K. What goes with the poor in spirit?"

A girl in the front of the room replied, reading from her sheet, "For they will see God."

"Nope," chirped Kendrick. "O.K., find the person that matches yours. I'll take the roll."

Read the whole thing (4 pages).

Thanks for the fun pic, Loyal Reader. Remind me - how many millions did she and her hubbie make in real estate? 20? Gotta love the generosity of limo libs with OPM.  Now gotta get them peas planted, so there will be food for the babies when the Revolution comes. The seeds have soaked overnight, as recommended.

I'll vote for the guy. He is a sane and multi-talented heavyweight for whom politics has been only one of many interests and pursuits. Latest, via Instapundit.

And if he recants, and humbly apologizes for his McCain-Feingold vote, I might do more than just vote for him.  There is no valid defence for supporting McCain-Feingold, which I believe is both un-American and unconstitutional. (We like Rudy, and others, too, but Fred should be in the mix. Lots of good candidates. As long as you can express conservative principles - or anything -  better than our current Pres, we'll like ya.)

The ever-wise retired psychiatrist Ted Dalrymple takes a look at three books which document the decline of Britain, as their nanny-state government attempts to take over more and more of everyone's daily life. A quote from his piece, which focuses on education and policing:

Two of the books are by men who work in the front line of the public service, one in law enforcement and the other in education. Like me, they write pseudonymously. By describing their day-to-day routine, Police Constable David Copperfield and teacher Frank Chalk show how the British state now works, or rather operates, with devastating effect on the British character.

Copperfield, whose website is so annoying to politicians in power that they feel obliged to denigrate it in Parliament, and whose book is titled Wasting Police Time, is an ordinary constable in an ordinary British town. As he makes clear in his book, very little of his time at work is spent in activity that could deter crime, discover those who commit it, or bring them to justice. His induction into the culture of politically correct bureaucratic incompetence was immediate on joining up: he had naively supposed that the main purpose of his job was the protection of the public by the suppression of malefaction, instead of which he discovered that it was to “set about changing the racist, homophobic and male-dominated world in which we lived.” The first three days of his training were about prejudice and discrimination—in short, “diversity training.” There never was to be any training in the mere investigation of crimes, a minor and secondary part of modern police work in Britain.

The message seems to be that if you try to do everything, you do nothing right. Blair has been an utter disaster for the UK. Dalrymple's whole piece at City Journal here. Those of us for whom Britain is our ancestral homeland read such things and weep for the Brits, who seem determined to commit cultural suicide.

A case for plug-in hybrid cars, with the history of automobile power, by Andrew Frank at American Scientist. My question: If the plug-in power comes from gas- and oil-fueled power plants, what's the difference? Except that it might be easier to control emissions at the plants.

He begins thus:

The idea of a hybrid vehicle—one that propels itself using both a conventional engine and an electric motor—is not new. Indeed, some hybrid automobiles were produced more than a century ago, when the internal combustion engine was still in its infancy. These cars were designed to address the limited range of existing electric vehicles and the difficulty of starting the early engines, which had to be cranked by hand (a procedure that resulted in not a few broken arms). The early hybrid vehicles, and the purely electric cars that dominated the fledgling automobile industry early in the 20th century, eventually gave way to a proliferation of cars based on the now-ubiquitous internal combustion engine, a development made possible by the relatively low cost and widespread availability of gasoline.

Read the whole thing - link above.

As quoted by Rick Moran in his piece on the House vote:

“You really have two options here: One is that you can vote for a change of course here and say we’re going to find a way out of Iraq, or, two, you can vote against it and hand George Bush a victory,” said Jon Soltz, a veteran of the Iraq war and co-founder of VoteVets.org, a group that opposes the war.

I think that quote sums it up. There is an interesting ambiguity in Soltz's statement, though: does he mean deprive Bush of a victory in the House, or a victory in the Middle East? Or both?

Roger Simon reports on the hate-filled mood in DC these days.

We try not to worry too much about keeping up with day-to-day news, but the House vote today was shameful.

With 20-20 hindsight, we can all have our own opinions on Iraq, but turning one's back on one's country in a time of war is contemptible. I don't think this has ever happened in American history - with or without peanut storage and spinach farmer subsidies and the whatever billions of vote-buying (with your hard-earned money and mine) required to produce a plan for defeat.

Why not put the energy into helping figure out how to be successful? 

It makes me sad. I can't imagine how soldiers and their families must feel to have half of their government rooting for their failure. No wonder people hate politics and politicians.

And, to be a bit self-revealing, the idea that Osama and Al Quaida in Iraq are popping champagne tonight with the Dems sickens me.

There is something non-serious and high-school-ish about all of this. 

h/t, No Pasaran:

Our blog friend and Physics Prof Lubos Motl on Al Gore:

This Gentleman is a mad megalomaniac and it is surprising to see what kind of a special treatment such an insane person can get in the Parliament of the most powerful and advanced country in the world.

Read the whole thing. I agree with Lubos. In the clips I saw of his testimony to Congress, his tone had that eerily calm, certain tone you hear from psychotics about their alien abductions. The absence of any self-doubt or humility is the tell.

What happened to this guy?

From the always-interesting Edward Luttwak in Harper's. It begins:

Modern armed forces continue to be structured for large-scale war, but advanced societies whose small families lack expendable children have a very low tolerance for casualties. Even supposedly warlike Americans gravely count casualties in Iraq that in three years have yet to reach 3,000—fewer than were lost in many a single day of battle in past wars. Fortunately, this refusal to spill the blood needed to fuel battles diminishes the likelihood that advanced societies will deliberately set out to fight one another (pas des enfants, pas des Suisses, pas de guerre) unless they are somehow able to convince themselves that a war could be entirely or very largely aerial and naval. Such wars, however, are difficult to imagine, except when islands are involved, as in a China-Taiwan war, which is very improbable for its own reasons. Air and naval forces can certainly be employed advantageously against any less advanced enemy incautious enough to rely on a conventional defense, conducted by regular forces, but in that context as well there must be severe doubts about the continued usefulness of the ground forces of advanced countries that are intolerant of casualties. It is easy enough to blockade the enemy, to successfully bomb all the right nodal points and shut down electrical, transportation, and communications networks. Air strikes can disable runways and destroy both sheltered and unsheltered aircraft, ballistic missiles, and nuclear installations. Air power can also sink warships, or rout any mechanized forces deployed in the open, as the United States did with Iraq in 1991 and partly in 2003, and as it could do with Iran. No real role would remain for ground forces except to dislodge the enemy from any territory he had occupied, or to occupy his own territory. That, however, is bound to cost casualties that might not be tolerated; it is also bound to provoke an insurgency.

Insurgencies understand this very well. A thoughtful piece. Read the whole thing. As we always say at Maggie's Farm, "Hope is not a plan." Neither is hopelessness, of course.

We are great admirers of Bernard Lewis. A quote from his speech this week:

I mentioned earlier the important difference in what one means by religion. For Muslims, it covers a whole range of different things–marriage, divorce, and inheritance are the most obvious examples. Since antiquity in the Western world, the Christian world, these have been secular matters. The distinction of church and state, spiritual and temporal, lay and ecclesiastical is a Christian distinction which has no place in Islamic history and therefore is difficult to explain to Muslims, even in the present day. Until very recently they did not even have a vocabulary to express it. They have one now.

What are the European responses to this situation? In Europe, as in the United States, a frequent response is what is variously known as multiculturalism and political correctness. In the Muslim world there are no such inhibitions. They are very conscious of their identity. They know who they are and what they are and what they want, a quality which we seem to have lost to a very large extent. This is a source of strength in the one, of weakness in the other…

More of his speech at Dinocrat.

Re the war and the protesters, from Vanderleun (h/t, Flares). It begins:

Four years in. An inch of time. Four years in and the foolish and credulous among us yearn to get out. Their feelings require it. The power of their Holy Gospel of "Imagine" compels them. Their overflowing pools of compassion for the enslavers of women, the killers of homosexuals, the beheaders of reporters, and the incinerators of men and women working quietly at their desks, rise and flood their minds until their eyes flow with crocodile tears while their mouths emit slogans made of cardboard. They believe the world is run on wishes and that they will always have three more.

Like savages shambling about some campfire where all there is to eat are a few singed tubers, they paint their faces with the tatterdemalion symbols of a summer long sent down to riot with the worms. They clasp hands and sing songs whose lyrics are ash. "We shall... over... come." Overcome what, overcome who? Overcome their nation? Is that their dream? It is the lifelong dream of those that lead them that much is certain.

Read the whole thing. Would someone please give this guy a columnist job?

Image: Photo of this slim young exhibitionist and deep thinker about international affairs borrowed from Ace.

Betsy makes a good point when she asks why the Dems are not pushing for the US signing Kyoto, now that they control congress. Is it possible that they don't really believe it? Or that they know it's a political loser?

Bjorn Lomborg, who is clearly an anthropogenic warming believer, notes in the Daily Star re the EU emission goals:

But nobody sees fit to reveal the agreement's dirty little secret: It will do next to no good - and again at very high cost. According to one well-established and peer-reviewed model, the effect of the EU cutting emissions by 20 percent will postpone warming in the 21st century by just two years, yet the cost will be about $90 billion annually. It will be costly, because Europe is a costly place to cut carbon-dioxide, and it will be inconsequential, because the EU will account for only about 6 percent of all emissions in the 21st century. So the new treaty will be an even less efficient use of our resources than the old Kyoto Protocol.

His whole piece here. Indeed, even if there is real climate change, and even if it is partly man-made, nothing that is done will do anything more than raise taxes, raise prices, and raise government control over people and the economy. But effect the earth's climate? Not possible.