http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/11/12/scoring-the-cbsnjdebate/?print=1 CBS wins the epic fail of the week award for first choosing to broadcast only an hour of the debate nationally, and then botching the live video feed of the CBS/National Journal debate on the Internet. Most viewers, myself included, only got to see the first 60 minutes of a 90 minute debate. We […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/somalia-palestine-and-france-ghost-countries-for-ghost-countries/ Ex-state Somalia gets to vote for non-state Palestine at UNESCO. So does declining state France. On October 31, Somalia supported Palestine’s accession to full member of UNESCO. In other words, a state that vanished from the map twenty years ago and survives only as a diplomatic fiction was allowed to cast a vote for […]
Failing to Deal, Dealing to FailUS Response to Iran Aggression Fumbling, Tepid Co-authored by K.D.M. Jensen http://bigpeace.com/rehrenfeld/2011/11/12/failing-to-deal-dealing-to-fail-us-response-to-iran-aggression-fumbling-tepid/#more-177008 The past few days have seen yet another round in the “last straw” dithering about Iran. This time the huffing seems heavier. The IAEA has suddenly woken up and finds that Stuxnet wasn’t much of a setback to […]
A True World War II Spy Adventure on this Veterans Day URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-true-world-war-ii-spy-adventure-on-this-veterans-day/ Most of us think we know all about soldiers and spies because we follow the actors who play such roles on television and in the movies. Thus, we see actors engaging in a lot of “action,” and we—at least those of […]
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/11/naomi-kleins-crippling-problem-with-numbers/
“Reading Klein is like visiting a parallel universe — her religious devotion to her ideology means nearly every sentence is the exact opposite of the truth. More’s the pity that The Nation has no editors who recognise innumerate drivel and an ideological rant based on a logical black hole.Bad mannered bluster, blind assumptions, and religious rationalization have always been the tool of witchdoctors and con artists.Naomi Klein: Nice writing, shame she can’t think.”
Naomi Klein was the wrong person to send to a heavy-weight science conference — in “Capitalism vs Climate” she notices hundreds of details, but they’re all the wrong ones.
Naomi can tell you the colour of the speakers hair, what row they sat in, and the expression on their face — it adds such an authentic flavor to the words, but she’s blind to the details that count. She can explain the atmosphere of the room, but not the atmosphere of the Earth. One of these things matters, and Klein has picked the wrong one.
Her long attack on the Heartland ICCC conference this year, is all color and style, and nothing of consequence — the lights are on and no brain is home. Unpack the loquacious pen-craft and we wallow in innumerate arguments that confuse cause and effect, peppered with petulant name-calling. She can throw stones, but she can’t count past “one”.
Her aversion to numbers is crippling
Consider how she reduces planetary dynamics to a Yes or No answer. She thinks each skeptical scientist contradicts the next: “Is there no warming, or is there warming but it’s not a problem? And if there is no warming, then what’s all this talk about sunspots causing temperatures to rise?” But oops, Naomi, the numbers matter, numbers like how much warming, and how many years are we talking about.
http://www.thenation.com/print/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate
Capitalism vs. the Climate Naomi Klein |
THIS IS AN EFFORT TO SLANDER THE RESPECTED HEARTLAND INSTITUTE WHICH CHALLENGES THE CULT OF CLIMATE CHANGE…….PLEASE READ THE SPLENDID REBUTTAL BY JOANNE NOVA WHICH FOLLOWS THIS LEFTISTS ANTI CAPITALIST TRIPE….RSK
There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”
Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”
Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).
Shouting “Allahu Akbar,” Issa Islam “did not stop, but rather stepped on the gas and continued his killing spree” — his lawyer says it was an “accident”
http://www.jihadwatch.org/
Automobile accidents, jihadi style: “Killing rampage suspect goes on trial,” by Naama Cohen-Friedman for Ynet News, November 10 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
The trial of Issa Ibrahim Islam, a truck driver who went on a killing rampage on Nakba Day, opened at the Tel Aviv District Court on Thursday.
The Kfar Kassem resident is accused of killing 29 year-old Aviv Morag and injuring 17 others while recklessly driving a truck along Bar-Lev Street in Tel Aviv last May. The driver also ran over several vehicles during the rampage.
A psychiatric evaluation submitted by the prosecution found Islam fit to stand trial, and determined that the defendant was lucid while he committed the act.
During the hearing, eyewitness recounted the horrors of that Sunday morning, as they were commuting to work and school: “He screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ and then threw the traffic light on my head,” recalled Shani Oz, one of the witnesses.
“The truck collided into my car and the back windshield shattered to pieces,” said Amitai Asif, “People were scared. I had blood all over my face even after being taken into the ambulance,” he noted.
According to the indictment, Islam carried on with his rampage even after colliding into several vehicles. “The defendant did not stop, but rather stepped on the gas and continued his killing spree,” the indictment read.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ What’s the real danger of Islamophobia? Think of it as a license to kill. the most pernicious thing about the Islamophobia myth is that once it is used to legitimize Muslim grievances, it is then used to legitimize the violent Muslim response to those grievances. Once you accept that Islamophobia is a serious problem, […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/283018
The President, the Constitution, and National Security
A response to Lindsey Graham
Position One: The president has the authority to launch war unilaterally — without any authorization from Congress — in the absence of an attack, or even a threat of aggression, against the United States; and he may do so by invading a country with which the United States is not only at peace but in alliance — a counterterrorism alliance subsidized by American taxpayers.
Position Two (and this one is worth quoting): “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
So which is the right stance? It’s a salient question for Republican presidential contenders, who often claim the mantle of “constitutional conservative” — fidelity to our founding law being a worthy litmus test of conservative bona fides. It is also a pressing question: The GOP candidates are preparing for a November 22 debate that will focus on foreign policy.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/282998
Have you been following this so-called Supercommittee? They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multi-trillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry), and many other warriors for truth, justice, and the American way of debt. The Supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.
I had cynically assumed that the Superfriends would address America’s imminent debt catastrophe with some radical reform — such as, say, slowing the increase in spending by raising the age for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 47 to 49 by the year 2137, after which triumph we could all go back to sleep until total societal collapse.
But I underestimated the genius of the Superfriends’ Supercommittee. It turns out that a committee created to reduce the deficit is instead going to increase it. As The Hill reported:
Democrats on the supercommittee have proposed that the savings from the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be used to pay for a new stimulus package, according to a summary of the $2.3 trillion plan obtained by The Hill.
Do you follow that? Let the Congressional Budget Office explain it to you:
The budget savings from ending the wars are estimated to total around $1 trillion over a decade, according to an estimate in July from the Congressional Budget Office.
Let us note in passing that, according to the official CBO estimates, a whole decade’s worth of war in both Iraq and Afghanistan adds up to little more than Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. But, aside from that, in what sense are these “savings”? The Iraq War is ended — or, at any rate, “ended,” at least as far as U.S. participation in it is concerned. How then can congressional accountants claim to be able to measure “savings” in 2021 from a war that ended a decade earlier? And why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by 2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus package, wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t cost us anything because it would all be “savings.”
