Sarah Palin Resigns

Palin feels a moral responsibility to serve her state. She cannot do that if she has to run around the country making speeches, and writing a book, to pay for legal defense. It makes sense for her to resign, and leave her office to her lieutenant gov., who can then devote the governor's office full time to the business of Alaska. It's the high moral road, and I admire her for it. It's risky, since she's looking to run for Prez, but if she is running for the POTUS, then that makes her resignation even that much more the high road. Alaska, like any state, deserves more than an absentee governor. She's not politics as usual, thank goodness.

Oratory skill versus leadership skill

President Obama has had a bumpy ride so far as President
of the United States. I wish him good luck, and hope that he
will hit his stride and become a great President. I agree with
some of his politics, as I am pro-union, and think the educational system, as well as the health care system needs improving. I also think that in times of recession, there is a need for increased spending.

But there is such a thing as too much spending, and unwise spending, which is what I think is happening. The world faces the threat of war in Asia and the Middle East very soon, and I hope Obama makes the correct choices. I think McCain would have been a better choice for the violent times we face, but he lost. McCain was too old and short. People prefer taller leaders who give good oratory. Not everybody, mind you, as there are people who vote according to issues. But in enough cases to make those few percentage points to swing a close election, the criteria for any Presidential candidate lies in the irrational. As has been demonstrated by Obama's first few weeks as President, a good speaker does not necessarily make a good President. Sadly, human nature is stubborn, and the Republicans should learn the lesson that they need to run good orators.

Excerpts from:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/19/AR2009031903041.html

Bonfire of the Trivialities
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 20, 2009; Page A19


A $14 trillion economy hangs by a thread composed of (a) a comically cynical, pitchfork-wielding Congress, (b) a hopelessly understaffed, stumbling Obama administration, and (c) $165 million. That's $165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built.

For this we are going to poison the well for any further financial rescues, face the prospect of letting AIG go under (which would make the Lehman Brothers collapse look trivial) and risk a run on the entire world financial system?

And there is such a thing as law. The way to break a contract legally is Chapter 11. Short of that, a contract is a contract. The AIG bonuses were agreed to before the government takeover and are perfectly legal. Is the rule now that when public anger is kindled, Congress will summarily cancel contracts?

The shotgun approach - energy transition

Another of my responses from the Don Surber site:

There's something ‘wrong’ with every source of energy. There are people and interests against any and all of them. If you fly across the U.S., you can easily see that it is mostly uninhabited land, and plenty of space for wind, solar, nuclear, various & sundry refineries, mining and drilling. We need them all to reduce our dependency on dictatorial regimes like the House of Saud, the Ayatollah, Chavez and Putin. It’s not only an economic issue (oil ain’t cheap anymore), it’s a national security issue. It’s time the world stop empowering Putin and the rest of those thugs.

In defense of the corn to ethanol refineries

I would argue that the high price of food is due, in part, to the high price of fuel. I have a hunch that when the price of food goes up, so it follows that there develops an incentive to produce more food, because supply and demand is a strong force. Perhaps the Mexican corn farmer who was ruined by U.S. agribusiness and govt. subsidies might find it once again profitable to grow corn. With the slow and painful switch from petroleum to alternative sources of energy, it's a good idea to have these new corn digesting refineries already built, poised to quickly retrofit over to the cellulosic processes, as the local permit process is slow and often political.

Firing Line

The following (in color) is an exchange in a string of responses
concerning William F. Buckley at Lucianne.com

Reply 16 - Posted by: Muggins, 2/29/2008 8:31:45 AM
I've admired Buckley since I watched his Firing Line program
in the 1960's. The Hoover Institute seems to own the Firing Line
programs and offer a few, abbreviated, low-fidelity clips that
can be downloaded in Real Media, as some sort of tease,
as frustrating as that is. They intend to digitalize selected
Firing Line tapes and ask the public to suggest which programs
they should choose to digitalize. Apparently, they intend to
charge money. I feel the conservative message, and what
better than Buckley's Firing Line, should be broadcast over
the TV airwaves, once again, to a much broader audience than
would be the small set of people who would purchase the programs
from the Hoover Institute.

Reply 23 - Posted by: Liberty7, 2/29/2008 9:45:16 AM
Re #16; Firing Line started out on commercial TV but moved to
public broadcasting after about 5 years. I always thought it a
little weird that this conservative icon should be socialist TV star.
But now some appear to want the program nationalized again and
made available to the masses on some subsidized basis. Weird.


Reply 45 - Posted by: Muggins, 2/29/2008 2:14:34 PM
#23
Surely you can recognize the difference between commercial TV
in 1966, and commercial TV now. Not only do we have to pay for
our cable TV programming, nowadays, but we have to watch
commercials. Does that make oldtime commercial TV socialistic
and weird? It seems to me that today's commercial TV is weird,
since we have to pay to watch commercials. Anyhow, I was a teenager
when I first started watching Buckley. There was a wider audience
for his message, something that I'd like to see happen again.
If they want to show that on cable, fine, but if it's to be limited
to a purchase item from Hoover, I think it would limit the scope and
size of the audience. We want to get the word out, not preach to an
exclusive group. I want the conservative movement to grow and Buckley
is just the ticket.

Bobby Fischer R.I.P.

"Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the
things that are God's". Mark 12:17
As an American who has a token understanding of the conflict
between patriotism and the religious life (personified by Cardinal Richielieu's top diplomat, Francois Leclerc du Tremblay, in Aldous Huxley's "Grey Eminence"), I recognize that Fischer refused to
give up what was Caeser's. But perhaps this could be understood
in his troubled upbringing.
He was psychologically unprepared for adult life.
But he was the world's best chess player in his time, possibly
for all time. His games are a must study for any chess player,
and even the slackest among them, myself a strong candidate,
can enjoy the beauty of his genius in his recorded games
we can "click thru" move by move on the internet.
I recommend an interesting DVD by Susan Polgar,
"...Bobby Fischer's Most Brilliant Games".

Benazir Bhutto R.I.P.

Excerpted (in purple) from the NRO online

Thursday, December 27, 2007
Benazir Bhutto [Mark Steyn]

The State Department geniuses thought they had it all figured out. They'd arranged a shotgun marriage between the Bhutto and Sharif factions as a "united" "democratic" "movement" and were pushing Musharraf to reach a deal with them. That's what diplomats do:
They find guys in suits and get 'em round a table. But none of those representatives
represents the rapidly evolving reality of Pakistan.
...she was everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be. We should be
modest enough to acknowledge when reality conflicts with our illusions.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTYyZDM1ZTJiYTEzMzM2ZDZjNTAxZWQ3MzMzODBmOTg=

People think we can talk to these extremist Islamics.
It's naive to think child killing, snuff film making, assassins
can be dealt with like civilized people. As far as Bhutto is
concerned, she was reckless and much was lost with her
assassination. I would hope that the leaders of the world
would scrupulously attend to their personal security in these
times of suicide bombers and assassins.

Sins of the father onto the son

Below (in blue) are excerpts from a particularly well
written article on the Age of Apology, by Gorman Beauchamp

We live amid a veritable tsunami of apology. The Catholic Church,
which, of course, has much to apologize for, has, of late, offered
mea culpas to Galileo, the Jews, the gypsies, Jan Hus, whom it
burned at the stake in 1415, even to Constantinople (now Istanbul)
for its sacking 800 years ago by the knights of the Fourth Crusade,
an event for which the late John Paul II expressed deep regret.
No wonder that a group in England, claiming descent from the
medieval Knights Templars, is asking the Vatican to apologize
for the violent suppression of the order and for torturing to death
its Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314, an apology timed to
commemorate the 700th anniversary of that fell deed.
[...]
The reparations-for-slavery movement in the United States,
inchoate and sputtering as it is, provides a paradigm of our
apologizing-for-history syndrome. Slavery today is, of course,
widely if not universally condemned as an evil practice, its
presence in our nation’s early days a blot on our history.
Americans practiced and profited from slavery for more than
200 years, and so we should, the argument runs, however
belatedly, have to pay for it. But pay whom, and how?
All those who endured slavery are generations dead and
cannot, like the Nazi slave laborers, be compensated.
Does their exploitation, however, constitute something like
a historical IOU? Is their suffering heritable, like property
that can be passed down through generations?
[...]
...but one sees the point: they want a price put on the suffering
of slaves, and they want it paid. To them. And when their
grandchildren raise the issue of slavery and its relevance
to them, what will they be told? See your grandfather.
He cashed the check. The bill’s been paid.

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/au07/apologies-beauchamp.html

Analysis: A Mideast nuclear war?



This brief Middle East Times article speculates in rough
figures the destruction from a nuclear war between Iran
and Israel. Certainly, with Iran capable of making nuclear
weapons and having the ICBMs to deliver them, such a war
would be a constant threat. Even if the world were lucky
enough that this war would be contained in the Middle East,
the economic disaster, worldwide, would be unavoidable.
I reckon that neither the U.S., nor any European powers
will set a serious ultimatum to Iran, and it will be Israel who
will initiate the next Gulf War with air strikes on Iranian
nuclear facilities.

Yet another excerpt from the city-journal.org

The Anti-Neocon Fervor
Parsing the new political discourse
by James Kirchick
6 November 2007

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-11-06jk.html

(excerpt)
The term "neoconservatism" has undergone a number of shifts in meaning.
It was coined in 1973 by the socialist intellectual Michael Harrington to
deride liberal thinkers such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer,
who had begun to criticize the welfare state’s excesses. By the 1980s,
its meaning expanded to include a small group of former liberal intellectuals
who hewed to a strong anti-Soviet line and had defected from the Democratic
Party to support Ronald Reagan. They were motivated in part by an increased
awareness of, and distinctive moral clarity about, human rights in international
affairs, a worthy tradition whose liberal incarnation found embodiment in
figures such as Senator Scoop Jackson, labor leaders George Meaney,
Lane Kirkland, and Al Shanker, and intellectuals Bayard Rustin and Michael
Walzer. None of these people held traditionally movement conservative views
on economics or social issues far from it; some of them were outright socialists.
Neoconservatives had not been content with the détente policies of Richard Nixon,
because they wanted not to coexist with communism, but to end it...a more
ambitious goal that Reagan shared.

After September 11, the "neocon" label, which had fallen into disuse, came
back into vogue as a way to categorize the intellectual godfathers behind
the Bush Doctrine, which of course has advocated both military responses
to terrorist threats and promoting liberty around the world via "regime change"
(not all necessarily through military means). According to the leftist narrative,
the neocons got us into the Iraq war...never mind the widespread assumption
among intelligence services around the world that Saddam Hussein did have
WMDs, or that large segments of the Democratic Party and liberal opinion
leaders supported the invasion of Iraq, etc., etc.

By now, "neocon" has mutated into a political curse word to discredit not just
those who happily accept their status as neoconservatives, but also anyone
who merely believes that the West should respond in muscular fashion to
national security threats, such as those posed by the cooperation of Iran,
Syria, and North Korea on nuclear weapons technology and the equipping of
terrorist groups around the world. The chief purpose of this emergent rhetorical
style is to cast aspersions on anyone who believes, say, that Iran must not attain
nuclear weapons, even if it requires war.

Somalization of the world

The 21st Century's War on Civilians is
explained in this well written article in
the City-Journal.org, entitled...

"From the H-Bomb to the Human Bomb"
by André Glucksmann
translated from the French by
Ralph C. Hancock and John C. Hancock

[Below is an excerpt from that article in black]

What threatens Iraqi society is not Vietnamization but Somalization.
Recall Operation Restore Hope, in which an international force, led
by Americans, disembarked in Mogadishu in 1993, seeking to ensure
the survival of a population that was starving and being massacred
by rival clans. After losing 19 in a horrific trap, the GIs left. The rest
is well known. An angry President Clinton swore never again, and a
year later refused to intervene in Rwanda, where 5,000 blue helmets
would have been enough to interrupt the genocide that wiped out as
many as 1 million Tutsi in three months.

The Somalian model has spread across the planet, from the Congo
to chaotic East Timor to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have violently
resurfaced, to Iraq. Populations are taken hostage, terrorized, and
sacrificed, the spoils of wars by local gangsters. Under various
pretexts religion, ethnicity, makeshift racist or nationalist ideology
commandos contend for power at the point of AK-47s. They fight
against unarmed populations; most of their victims are women and
children. Terrorism is not the prerogative of Islamists alone: the
targeting of civilians has been used by a regular army and by militias
under the command of the Kremlin in Chechnya, where the capital
city of Grozny was razed to the ground. Where the killers appeal to
the Koran, it is still primarily Muslim passersby who suffer. Algeria,
Somalia, and Darfur (at least 200,000 dead and millions of refugees
in just a few years, with the Sudanese government, protected by
China and Russia, acting with impunity) are live laboratories of the
abomination of abominations: war against civilians.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_modern_terrorism.html

Below is an excerpt from an article
by Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com
on China and it's support of heinous regimes.


Maintained in China
BURMA'S FOUL REGIME DEPENDS ON BEIJING
by Christopher Hitchens
[excerpt]
Oct. 1, 2007

I thought President Bush was quite correct
in listing his least favorite regimes during
his address to the United Nations last week
and in trying to ramp up the international
pressure on the goons in Rangoon. The
governments that he singled out were the
uniquely repellent ones that consider the
citizen to be the property of the state and
the uniquely boring ones that have remained
in power until their citizens are positively
screaming for release. I do not need to
specify these senescent gangster systems
individually, except that they all have one
thing in common. They are all defended,
from Cuba to Zimbabwe, by the Chinese
vote at the United Nations.

Those who care or purport to care about
human rights must start to discuss this
problem in plain words. Is there an
initiative to save the un-massacred remains
of the people of Darfur? It will be met by
a Chinese veto. Does anyone care about
Robert Mugabe treating his desperate
population as if it belonged to him personally?
China is always ready to help him out. Are
the North Koreans starved and isolated so
that a demented playboy can posture with
nuclear weapons? Beijing will give the
demented playboy a guarantee. How long
can Southeast Asia bear the shame and
misery of the Burmese junta? As long as
the embrace of China persists.

http://www.slate.com/id/2175047/fr/flyout

The problem with the Left

I watched as Senator Webb (D-VA) stated on Meet the Press
(Sunday, July 15, '07), that there is no war in Iraq, only a
botched occuption.
I realized that right there we have the essential problem of
the Left. They fail to recognize, or refuse to consider, the
ambitions of al Qaeda and the Ayatollah, and why both
are waging war in Iraq. Leftists don't want to hear that
those two orgs intend to unify the Middle East, no matter
who they murder, children included, or how much blood flows.
The terrorists know the West will leave the Middle East soon.
One has only to read what the Democrats are doing.
All the terrorists have to do is play to the well publicized deadlines
the Leftists are pushing. But the Left doesn't realize that Europe
as well as Africa is in the sights of the Islamist extremists.
In 2007, the 2nd most popular baby name in Britain was Mohammed.

Clean coal

source



--------

Below is my email to Charles Krauthammer in response to
his article about Congress' approach to energy efficiency.


letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Re: The Tax-Free Lunch,

Dear Mr. Krauthammer,

I am on your side. as far as the Chinese model for our energy needs goes.
But, I balk at higher gasoline taxes because I'm on a fixed income. I think
there are more than just 2 sides to this topic.

Hi-grade diesel fuel can be made from coal using the Fischer-Tropsch process
which was invented prior to WWII in Germany. It's been used by South Africa
and is slowly venturing out worldwide. It's competitive to petroleum in today's
market, theoretically, but I think distribution, i.e. gas stations, could be a major
hang up. Most stations are owned, or controlled, by Big Oil.

Parallel with this resource, Europe and Asia are producing clean burning, fuel
efficient diesel cars, and have been for years, but these cars are not allowed in
the U.S..

I'm for the free market to solve our energy problems, but the market is not free
if the world can buy fuel efficient diesels, except in the U.S.. Plus, Big Oil was
granted mergers for the last few decades, only to use it's virtual monopoly
to retard the transition to other sources for energy.

-Muggins
San Jose, CA

Media and the war

A short complaint about the media coverage on the war
against the terrorists. Media loves the negative because
it sells.What we won't see in mainstream media is the telling
of the whole story.
For example, they don't ever mention the ultimate aims
of either al Qaeda, or the Ayatollah's Islamic Revolution.
They don't want to remind us how much these groups
hate Jews and admire the Nazis. They don't tell us how
many civilians these 2 groups kill. They don't ask the self-
serving politicians, who are calling for retreat (withdrawal),
just what will happen if the U.S. does retreat.

Rushdie knighthood 'justifies suicide attacks'...?

Earlier today Pakistani MPs demanded Britain
withdraw Rushdie's knighthood.

A government-backed resolution condemning
the author's knighthood was passed unanimously
by the lower house of the Pakistani parliament
amid angry protests across the country.

MPs said the honour was an insult to the religious
sentiments of Muslims. In the eastern city of
Multan, hardline Muslim students burned effigies
of the Queen and Rushdie, chanting "Kill him! Kill him!"
The above is excerpted from the UK Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,2105748,00.html

========


Here's a link to Marc Steyn's article about Rushdie and the Fatwa.


========

Here's my frustration with the situation...

These Pakis wouldn't know religion if it sneaked up and
bit 'em on the caboodle. Being insulted, which ultimately
is a product of fear, is not religious activity. Fear, pride,
and hatred, not to mention murder, are what religion is
to teach against, not encourage.

And certainly this Fatwa business is misguided. How
much of the Islamic world is influenced by profoundly
uninspired leaders & institutions? I don't know, but
it has everything to do with why there is blood running
in the streets in the Middle East and around the world.
These Pakistanis, who combine religion & politics, are
armed with nuclear weapons. Paki politicians might be
posturing for their constituents, but over in Iran,
the Ayatollah is not posturing.

Rogue Special Prosecutor

"This time it was a pro-war Republican caught in the snare,
which is why many liberals are cheering. But what goes
around comes around, and I wonder if my friends would
feel the same way if this technique were used to indict,
convict and imprison one of our friends. As it might have
been, during the Clinton years."


"The whole phenomenon of special prosecutors turns the
usual rules of investigating on their head. Instead of
focusing on crimes, special prosecutors tend to focus
on people themselves. Dig deep enough, ask enough
questions, particularly under oath, and only those most
experienced with the criminal justice system are likely
to escape unscathed. Hardened criminals know enough
to shut up."
source
http://www.creators.com/opinion/susan-estrich.html
------------

Pulitzer Prize winning auther Dorothy Rabinwitz' take on this case, here.

C. Hitchens: the moral eclipse of the secular left

The following is my effort at transcribing
a portion of a YouTube clip, which is itself
just a portion of a debate, from this site:
http://www.zombietime.com/hitchens-hedges_debate/
From the debate between Christopher Hitchens
and Chris Hedges in at Berkeley Univ.:

Hitchens: The decline, not to say the moral eclipse,
of the secular left has just been illustrated on this
very platform by someone, who makes excuses for
suicide murder and tries to trace them to a second-
rate sociology. But, to the hidden agenda to the
question, 'Is George Bush on a Christian Crusade
in Iraq and Afganistan'? Obviously not. Obviously
not. Anyone who's studied what's happening in
either of those two countries now, knows the whole
of American policy...and by the way a lot of your
own future, ladies and gentlemen, is staked on the
hope that federal, secular democrats can emerge
from this terrible combat, and that we can protect
them and offer them help while they do so. I've
met them. I love them. They're our friends.
Every member of the 82nd Airborne Division could be
a snake handling congregationalist, for all I know but,
these men and women, though you sneer and jeer at
them, and snigger when you hear applause and excuses
for suicide bombers and you have to live with the shame
of having done that, these people are guarding you while
you sleep, whether you know it or not. And they're
also creating space for secularism to emerge and you'd
better hope that they are successful.

Hedges: I feel that I should be reading Kipling's "White
Man's Burden."

Hitchens: What you mean is you wish you had read it.
(This) is the exact equivelent of the evil, nonsense talk
by Hedges and friends of his who say the suicide bombers
in Palestine are driven to it by despair. Have you read
the manifestos of these sucide bombers? Have you
seen the videos they make? Have you seen the manifestos
they put out? The propaganda that they generate?
These are not people in despair, these are people in
religious exaltation who are promised everything, who
are in a state of hope, who are in a state of adoration
for their evil mullahs and for their filthy religion.
It's this that makes them think they have the right
to kill others, while taking their own lives. If despair
among Palestinians was enough to creat psychopathic,
criminal behavior, there's been enough despair for a
long time, and enough misery to go around.
It is...it is to excuse the vicious, filthy forces of
Islamic Jihad to offer any other explanation for this,
their own evil preaching, their own vile religion, their
own racism, their own apocalyptic ideology that
makes them think they have the right to kill everyone
in this room and go to paradise as a reward. I won't
listen, nor should you, anyone who euphimizes or excuses
this evil, wicked thing.

Katrina and the press

Pic Source

We recall the female reporter sitting in a rowboat
making her televised report as two men walk past
her in rubber boots in less than a foot of water.
We might also remember the reports of lawlessness,
including rape, that the press quietly acknowledged
later as rumor. Below, in purple, is a an accounting of
what the government got right, which the press missed.

The National Guard had its headquarters for Katrina,
not just a few peacekeeping troops, in what the media
portrayed as the pit of Hell. Hell was one of the safest
places to be in New Orleans, smelly as it was.
The situation was always under control, not surprisingly
because the people in control were always there.

From the Dome, the Louisiana Guard's main command
ran at least 2,500 troops who rode out the storm inside
the city, a dozen emergency shelters, 200-plus boats,
dozens of high-water vehicles, 150 helicopters, and a
triage and medical center that handled up to 5,000
patients (and delivered 7 babies). The Guard command
headquarters also coordinated efforts of the police,
firefighters and scores of volunteers after the storm
knocked out local radio, as well as other regular military
and other state Guard units.

Jack Harrison, a spokesman for the National Guard
Bureau in Arlington, Virginia, cited "10,244 sorties
flown, 88,181 passengers moved, 18,834 cargo tons
hauled, 17,411 saves" by air. Unlike the politicians,
they had a working chain of command that
commandeered more relief aid from other Guard units
outside the state. From day one.

There were problems, true: FEMA melted down.
Political leaders, from the Mayor to Governor to the
White House, showed "A Failure of Initiative", as a
recent House report put it. That report, along with
sharply critical studies by the White House and the
Senate, delve into the myriad of breakdowns, shortages
and miscommunications that hampered relief efforts.

Still, by focusing on the part of the glass that was
half-empty, the national media imposed a near total
blackout on the nerve center of what may have been
the largest, most successful aerial search and rescue
operation in history. Source
------------

Katrina compared to Galvatsten and other storms.