Ruminations on music, culture, America and the world stage
The rallying cry of PES (not familiar with the PES? The link will supply you all you need to know, including the addresses of Bill Clinton and Howard Dean to its ranks) and its American counterpart, the Democrat party. They are determined to crush human freedom even though the cat is out of the bag about their means for doing so.
Lobo by a wide margin. This shows such Freedom-Haters as TCM, Chavez, Morales, Ortega and Castro that Western civilization will not just lie down and take its own eviscerating.
Paul Krugman has been widely recognized as very left-leaning for a long time. He’s now demonstrating that he may be just plain stupid. He’s proposing that the federal government provide more aid to profligate and irresponsible states, never mentioning that the source for all this shuffling of funds is us, the taxpayers, and enacting a new public-works jobs program. Yessir, that’s the wealth-generating sector of our great nation. Sheesh. Says that lowering taxes would “only indirectly” stimulate job creation. Someone yank every one of this idiot’s degrees! Admits that his proposal would increase the deficit, but only in the “short term,” as if we can afford additional deficits of any duration. Says the problem with the stimulus was that it wasn’t big enough, which shows you the level of seriousness with which he regards deficits.
If he’s smart enough to see – like the IPCC climate scientists who knew better – that he is putting out sheer garbage, how does he sleep at night?
Recycling is one of those activities for which I’d generally relied on my gut when drawing conclusions rather than wading through reams of studies about landfill space and the like. I’ve always intuited that it was a waste of time and I’ve never kept separate containers for anything.
It’s becoming a big deal in my community, though. The local paper (disclosure: for which I write, on a freelance basis) has had several recent headlines about the City Council’s deliberations over it. One Council member’s push for mandatory curbside recycling, which would involve the citizen shelling out money for three types of containers, was shot down rather quickly, but the whole body is preoccupying itself with inquiries into how other communites around the state and nation are dealing with it.
Since the whole “green” agenda has been shot down in flames by the East Anglia e-mails, which are likely the mere tip of the iceberg, I decided to look into how the concept of recycling fits into the overall push for “green” everything. I offer as a starter for those interested in the subject this video of Novo magazine editor Thomas Deichman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ljrFzvPz-s speaking at the 2007 Battle of Ideas Festival, as well as this 2006 editorial from Machine Design magazine, which references a study by the Franklin Institute that I’m seeing elsewhere in my sniffing around.
Obviously, stats and figures supporting one’s view on a hot subject can quickly lead to pissing matches that convince no one of anything (We’re quite familiar with that phenomenon here, aren’t we, BN commenters?), so it’s important to keep the gist of one’s argument anchored in the core principles one is defending. that’s why I think the money line in the MD editorial comes at the end. It’s a simple yet ringing defense of the free market: “Curbside recycling might make sense someday. You’ll know that day has come when someone knocks on your door and offers to pay you for your paper and plastic.”
I don’t know what it is about this time of year – the obvious, I guess – but no matter how I think I’ve got the ontological cauldron safely enough under a lid that I can focus on work, food-making, card-writing, the wind-up of the Colts season (they’re now 11 and 0 after another grand come-from-behind victory in Houston this afternoon; more on that soon), getting holiday gigs, and social events, I find myself scratching and clawing again about the nature of Jesus and that whole bag of theological snakes.
This year it was in large part jump-started by my having started to hang out with a young Indian man, an engineer at a local manufacturing firm. He’s been in the US a little over a year. He’s immensely curious about American culture, and to that end I included him in Thanksgiving, which he found fascinating and delightful. But he is also endlessly curious about the intersection of the world’s religions. He was raised a Hindu in Hyderabad and still celebrates those holidays, but wants to know about Christianity. He has begun attending Bible study at a local Lutheran church. He wanted to meet me for lunch last Saturday to share how that’s going.
It turns out, and I guess this is no surprise, that he’s asking the pastor, who leads the class, some really uncomfortable questions. He’s also asking them of his personal fitness trainer, a young woman of the Pentecostal faith. In both cases it boils down to their insistence on ascribing a divinity to Jesus that can’t be ascribed to the yogis and advanced beings he was taught about as a youth in India.
Another sticking point for him is the proliferation of denominations within Christianity, and their attendant doctrinal exclusion. He finds it so unlike the panoply of schools within Hinduism, each devoted to a particular form of the ultimate God, but welcoming of all who enter into their various temples.
And while that’s another subject I’d hoped to give a rest for a while, what do I stumble on this evening during a Net-surfing session but this Parchment and Pen post on the recent annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Tales of theological libs looking down their noses as dispensationalists who in turn go to great lengths to show how far their school of thought has advanced.
Then there’s the whole question of why one can go days, weeks, a lifetime in this realm and not bump up against any points at which one must face any such questions.
It may be a long Christmas season.
Iran’s ruling regime announces plans to build ten new industrial-scale uranium enrichment plants.
It’s time to knock off the crap about “closing windows of opportunity” and squeeze this bunch, hard.
Three developments to watch over the weekend:
1.) The pretty-well-confirmed terrorist attack on the high-speed, Moscow-to-St. Petersburg train, and the investigation into who did it
2.) The possiblility that the fiscal meltdown of a nation-state (Dubai) may be contagious
3.) The noises being made by members of Iran’s parliament about pulling out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
This, like the fact that global warming was clearly a deliberate fraud, should be above-the-fold information blaring at the American citizenry from every known information outlet.
49 percent of us rate American health care as good or excellent, up from 29 percent in early 2008.
The best do I’ve achieved in years. I have my routine down now to the point that I don’t need to calculate minutes per pound 0r anything like that. It goes in the oven at 5:30 and it’s done at 12:30. In fact, the problem with Wendy last year was that I thought I ought to go a little longer and the legs basically fell off.
Classic sage and celery stuffing.
Carol Browner says the East Anglia e-mails don’t change anything. Of course she’d say that. She’s too close to achieving the “global governance” she’s envisioned since her days on Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society.
This is really evil. The American people have so many enemies, the most dangerous of which is their own government and the party in control of it.
He’s known for a week, like the rest of us have known for decades, that global warming is a lie, yet he still intends to to this. It’s because he sees his presidency as his big chance to turn America into an economic and spiritual weakling like himself.
In a Washington Examiner essay on the death throes of Newsweek magazine, Noemie Emery perfectly captures the whole aren’t-we-such-chin-rubbingly-judicious-culturally-astute-east-coast-smarty-pants-arbiters-of-what’s-important mindset. By the end of the piece, you are so covered with the odor of that whole CNN/CBS/NBC/NYT/New Yorker/New York Review of Books/Time/New Republic ethos you want to take a shower.
Every generation of Americans in the twentieth century grew up thinking that California was the coolest place on earth. I know I did. The leading edge of cultural developments! Setting the trends in music, literature, politics, food! The world capital of the film industry! Even its agriculture industry was the envy of the world: all the fruits and vegetables one finds in the midwest, plus tropical fruits. An amazingly varied topography, from sandy beaches and palm trees to rugged coastline to snow-capped mountain ranges to dense forests of grand, ancient trees to desert to fertile valleys.
Now I consider it one of those places like Russia: saw what I needed to see and don’t care if I never get back.
The entire state is suicidal.
With one of the worst state economies in the nation – to the point where the government hands out IOUs instead of tax refunds – it is going to enact state-wide cap-and-trade, even after the whole “green” thing has been exposed as a complete lie. If the point is to drive out the last few viable industries, they’ve found the ticket.
Is this the culmination of that sun-drenched carefree, tell-the-teacher-we’re-surfin’ mindset that looked so appealing decades ago? Let us remember that California is the land of cults and weirdo experimental religions as well. Sometimes those wind up with all the adherents dead on the floor of some house on a scenic overlook. Is that what’s happening here?
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert is either idiotic or evil. In either case, he is knowingly advocating the seizure of your hard-earned money in the service of a lie.
His Nov. 23 piece chronicles a visit to a Michigan solar-panel-and-hybrid-car-battery plant. He marvels at the entrepreneurial zeal and efficiency of production on display there. In that slyly disingenous NYT fashion, he does not directly call for the government to subsidize what the Michigan operation is doing. He merely asks why “Washington policy makers” are not giving “support and attention” to it.
Well, Bob, because there hadn’t been anything like a real market for it prior to the dissemination of the East Anglia e-mails, and now there is difinitely no market for it. It’s more expensive than coal, oil and natural gas, as are all “alternative” energy sources. (I wrote an article for a business magazine a couple of months ago on a soybean-oil diesel-fuel operation, and the CEO of that acknowledged that his industry leans on subsidies, incentives and content mandates from state governments.)
Herbert really shows his colors when he says that the actually profitable energy producers “stand obstinately in the way of real progress.” Progress toward what, Bob? Earth is a clean freaking planet now. Certainly clean enough that there’s no overall warming taking place. What Bob and Freedom-Haters in general are after is a dismantling of profit-making industry and a permanently weakened America.
The jig is up. It’s time to knock off all windmill-farm / solar-panel / hybrid-car / smart-thermostat hooey. It’s time to drill for oil and natural gas in Alaska, North Dakota and the Gulf of Mexico. It’s time to tell city councils in the communities of this land that try to enact mandatory recycling to go to Hell. It’s time to get “what-can-I-do-for-our-planet” curricula out of our schools.
The news that the whole climate-change movement has been a fraud must be roared from every rooftop. Like the notion that health care is a right, it must be exposed in the light of truth and common sense as nothing but a vehicle for totalitarianism.
And let’s hope NYT’s circulation declines to the point where slugs posing as human beings like Herbert (and Krugman, Rich, Kristoff and Dowd) are out of a job.
UPDATE: TCM is giving his press conference with Indian PM Singh. He intends to forge ahead with a “comprehensive agreement at Copenhagen.” We can’t take another week, another hour of this evil monster.
A supremely important if depressing and scary Pajamas Media piece by David Solway on how political correctness and its ultimate embodiment, TCM, have probably already turned America into a sunset nation.
Lots of money lines, but one is essential: “If this man is not fristrated in his efforts, the United States will see the end of its tenure as the world’s leading power and may never recover its primacy on the world stage.”
