Maggie's Farm

Disturbing photos of the Portland peace marchers. Who are all of these people?

They do not seem to understand anything about America. I ask myself how hard I want to work my brain to try to understand how they view the world. I am more inclined to let Dr. Sanity do that dirty job.

Addendum from The Barrister: Some folks are beyond persuasion, and some folks are willing to listen to logical argument and disputation. We all like to think that we are in the latter category, but I do not think I would get too far with that 1960s holdover geezer in the photo. He hates America, and you cannot argue with hatred.

This comment came in over Buddy's transom:

The population of this country is 300 million.

160 million are retired. That leaves 140 million to do the work. There are 85 million in school. Which leaves 55 million to do the work. Of this there are 35 million employed by the federal government. Leaving 15 million to do the work.

2.8 million are in the armed forces Which leaves 12.2 million to do the work. Take from that total the 10.8 million people who work for state and city governments. And that leaves 1.4 million to do the work. At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals. Leaving 1,212,000 to do the work. Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons. That leaves just two people to do the work.

You and me...

and there you are, sitting on your ass, at your computer, reading jokes.

Nice. Real nice. 

He challenges Al Gore to a debate. Bravo to the Viscount. Al would be a fool to agree to it.

It's good to see that neither Viscounts nor gauntlets are entirely obsolete.

On the radio last night, Drudge read the list of questions that he would like to pose to Al. One question that I would like to ask him would be this: If we are simply in a natural cyclical variation, as has happened forever, would it make any difference to him?

Moonbattery summarized Saturday's anti-war march in DC, as well as the much larger counter-protest - which received far less news attention. Here.

The NYT also noted than many of the marchers were puzzled by what the march was really about. Blue Crab. Most of the earnest anti-war folks were unaware that they were allied with communist revolutionaries with larger agendas. Lenin's "useful idiots."

Also, related to the links above and the piece below, Barone on the Blame America First crowd. A quote:

"They always blame America first." That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The "we" can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it's their fault. They always blame America -- or the parts of America they don't like -- first.

Read the whole fine essay. (thanks, Buddy). And read today's preceding piece: The Gospel of John and Yoko.

Image from Michelle's piece on the protests. She has lots of photos.

The bogeyman Christian is gonna getcha. A quote from Sam Harris in the LA Times piece, titled God's Dupes (h/t, Villainous):

Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

Dang. That clever Sam Harris figured out that we Christians really want a theocracy, and want nothing more than to behead all those who will not kneel to Christ and his right-wing mission in America.

It is astonishing how much he understands about the covert machinations of the Christian faith, and our intentions for America. Who spilled the beans? Who was the leaker? Armitage? Rove? Bush himself?

We do indeed hide behind nominal Christians like wolves in sheep's clothing - that is how diabolically sneaky we are. And Bush is our secret Dear leader, but shhhh - don't tell anybody about our ultra, ultra Secret Plan to sneak sharia God's law into the US, like hanging all gays and banning abortion and stoning for adulterers and all that other cool stuff.

Read Sam's brilliantly penetrating, earth-shaking, Pulitzer-worthy expose of the dastardly Christian plot against good, old-fashioned, pagan, communitarian America here. 

My questions: Why doesn't he wonder what we evil ones are waiting for to institute the theocracy we desire? And why haven't we done it already, since we already have Bush as a dictator? And, third, what planet does this dude live on? Is Pluto still a planet? No, I guess not anymore.

Tell me, Dr. Sanity, or Dr. Bliss - does this guy qualify as paranoid? Or just plain ignorant? His lack of tolerance for others seems positively hostile...

"Post-normal science" of climate change. Environmental scientist says: "Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking,..." Piece at Melanie Phillips   

I'd call it "post-modern" science. This is creepy. Help me send her piece around, friends, because I think it exposes an important undercurrent of what is going on in the climate discussion: the idea that the ends justify the means (which Al Gore defended here).

And what are those "ends"? As always (is it coincidence?) more government control of your behavior, your freedom, and your hard-earned cash - as if government were a fount of wisdom instead mostly a bunch of slippery, self-aggrandizing, smooth-talking sleazes who want easy jobs, with no heavy lifting, and with good pensions. (See "The government is endogenous" by Prof. B.)

Yes, in the heart of true Yankees, government is seen as a necessary evil. Dr. Frankenstein's monster - created by us, but then difficult to control, because these folks just want to keep their easy jobs. A big mistake not to put term limits in the American Constitution.

A quote from Melanie:

So the true battleground has now been illuminated for us. The real fight is between scientists who believe in empirical observation and the truth, and ‘post-normal’ scientists who believe in ideology and lies. It’s a battle between Enlightenment values of rationality and those who wish to return us to a pre-rational era where thought was controlled and truth was a heresy. The stakes could not have been delineated more clearly.

Are some things too important for truth? I doubt it. Here is Galileo recanting his heresy.

Image: Jacques Derrida, the now old-hat (and now dead from AIDS - or was that Foucault? Whatever) philospher who taught our young brains full of mush the fallacy that there is no truth but power. Sorry, Jacques, wherever you are, but that was high school bull session material before anyone ever heard of you. We moved past that rebellious fashion long ago.

They already block Maggie's Farm. God knows why.

OK, let's give them a good reason: their idiot, people-fearing, totalitarian government is terrified of free thought. Their people might get ideas - and then what? They might not want to be political slaves.

China contains a great many intelligent, energetic people.

What else do they want to block, besides little ol' us? via Drudge. 

From an important and comprehensive piece by Philip Stott at ABC News, a few quotes:

From the Babylon of Gilgamesh to the post-Eden of Noah, every age has viewed climate change cataclysmically, as retribution for human greed and sinfulness.

and

Extreme weather events are ever present, and there is no evidence of systematic increases. Outside the tropics, variability should decrease in a warmer world. If this is a "crisis," then the world is in permanent "crisis," but will be less prone to "crisis" with warming.

Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age, most rapidly about 12,000 years ago. In recent centuries, the average rate has been relatively uniform. The rate was higher during the first half of the 20th century than during the second. At around a couple of millimeters per year, it is a residual of much larger positive and negative changes locally. The risk from global warming is less than that from other factors (primarily geological).

Read the whole thing.

We try to blogroll interesting sites, whether we agree with them or not. We do it as a favor for you - our readers. And for our convenience too - it's an easy click.

We really enjoy EU Referendum, and they deserve a special plug. Our beloved Europe - our ancestral homeland - is rapidly becoming a bureau-fascist, soviet-style state, and they seem to understand that. Thank God, they are not alone.

We Americans pray that the home of freedom not sink into decadent Euro-socialist neo-fascism, which seems to be all the rage these days - especially eco-facism. 

I do not dislike Mexicans, or anyone else on this earth as a group, except perhaps the French, who are decadent Euro-weenies (but are soon to be a sharia state anyway). 

However, in general I have learned, over many years, from a long series of unfortunate experiences, to not automatically trust people from different cultures. Not to dislike them, because I tend to enjoy humans - but just to distrust them. I think this is an intelligent decision.

Trust is just as basic to relationships as is distrust. Both are worthy of respect and consideration. For me, trust is earned - never assumed. Learned that the hard way. It is the basis for natural, healthy "tribalism."

Department of Black Humor: From MySpace, borrowed from Right Wing News:

Thanks to our Harvard physicist pal Lubos for linking the entire movie of The Great Global Warming Swindle.  So many fine folks who help with the labor on Maggie's Farm - it's a blessing.

I don't know what to watch first, 300 or the Swindle. OK, I am off duty for the evening.

As a counterpoint, how is this for shrill panic-mongering?

Update: OK, I watched the whole thing. Quite engaging. They have some real heavyweights in it. What is most striking is how much money is at stake in promoting the warming scare. And yes, it's all about Mr. Sun and his spots.

The movie does need to be seen, to balance the debate. Send it around. Riehl has some good comments and summary of the points. The big problem is that people are not properly educated in science or scientific thinking, so they are prone to believing anything. The only proper attitude towards research is skepticism. Interest, but skepticism. And never trust "truth" in the world of science, because "truth" does not exist in that world.

In science, facts and theories can be "falsifiable," but Truth is always elusive. This is why most scientists are humble.

Timely indeed, BL: DC Circuit strikes down DC Gun laws. This will get interesting. Instap. has some updated links to other commentators.

A quote from the opinion:

To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Antifederalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment's civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.

Music to my ears. It is the music of the basic human right to self-defence being protected. I think I'll read it again, and then bring out the champagne.

The border war with Mexico - or at least with Mexicans - is heating up, big time.

I think we ought to send this guy down there.

The guys at EU Referendum are working on a book about how scientific scares are generated. They offer this illuminating graph, demonstrating the delinkage of CO2 levels with temperature (and the linkage with sunspot cycles). Sorry - I forget who found this piece, but it reminds us of what was traditionally taught: that CO2 concentration is caused by temp changes.  Oh, now I remember: h/t to Flares.