Just not the one the idiot teachers thought they were going to teach.
13 June, 2008
Wrong Questions
Megan McArdle has some very good points.
Brutality is pretty much the norm for most of human history; as we’ve gotten richer, we’ve gotten less violent in all sorts of ways–we’ve stamped out (mostly) once common practices like infanticide, torture, wife beating, and the stoning of adulterers. Hunter gatherers are vastly more likely to die from homicide than people living in the developed world. Goodness is, in some sense, a luxury good. The most valuable luxury good we have.
12 June, 2008
The PODS People
Melanie Phillips on Princess Obama Derangement Syndrome.
First, it is quite clear that any questioning at all of Obama’s background is entirely off-limits. Next, the posters fail totally to grasp that the real point isn’t what faith he professed or was brought up in as a child – it is the fact that he has not told the truth about his early background. Then, some even compare such questioning with the ‘truthers’ who allege that 9/11 was perpetrated by a conspiracy between America and Israel. They thus demonstrate that they cannot tell the difference between rationality and lunacy, evidence and fantasy, failing to grasp that the sole reason for the questions about Obama is the many discrepancies in the accounts of his early life — including his own accounts — plus his many questionable associations.
All the hubbub started with this.
We are entitled therefore to ask whether the Muslim world supports him because it believes he is still a Muslim. We are entitled to ask precisely when he stopped being a Muslim, and why. Did Obama embrace Christianity as a tactical manoeuvre to get himself elected? Why indeed has he dissembled about his family background if not for that end?
These multiple known deceptions by someone who may become President of the United States are deeply alarming. The concealment is the issue. To dismiss such concerns and the related questions they provoke as a smear campaign is to attempt to browbeat into silence those who legitimately raise them and require urgent answers as a matter of the most acute public interest.
Why Judges Matter
I’m afraid of who McCain would pick, because he says he’ll pick judges who disagree with his own policies.
I’m terrified of who Obama would pick.
Update:
If you’re looking for comfort from John McCain I have concerning news.
Portland Used to Be Literate
This reminded me of a joke my dad used to tell. Back in the 50’s, long before it became Berkeley North, Portland, Oregon had quite the reputation for literacy. Dad was part of an active group of freelance writers. The story is of a man who arrived from Boston and hailed a cab at the airport. Feeling peckish he asked the cabbie, “Where can I get scrod?”
After a thoughtful pause, the driver replied, “I’ve had that request many times, but this is the first in the pluperfect subjunctive.”
11 June, 2008
Oh, Canada
Kathy Shaidle has a roundup of the latest on Mark Steyn’s Kafkaesque Kangaroo Court experience.
Update:
A “serene” CHRC employee sends hired muscle to harass Ezra Levant’s parents in their home.
10 June, 2008
Woo Hoo Indeed
This entry is here so there’ll be another link to these questions when someone looks up WaMu or Washington Mutual on the web.
Open Carry
This strikes me as a good idea even though I can’t, of course, do it here in the PRK. Amazingly enough these guys got a sympathetic write-up in the Chicago Tribune.
The Wheels on the Bus
go thump, thump, thump.
I think the most crowded place in America has to be under Barak Obama’s bus. This is so pathetic I nearly feel sorry for the guy:
It makes me hear Vizzini’s voice saying, “Do my ears decieve me, or did the word judgment just escape your lips?”
Update:
Sympathy gone. Sowell has summed up Obama pithily: Cocky Ignorance.
Vaccinate!
When your first child is born you feel very protective. It is, frankly, a vulnerable time. I feel like an idiot for ever having been (partially) taken in by the anti-vaccine crowd. At first it sounded reasonable. Fortunately I only grumbled, but let my daughter have all the vaccinations. And I’ve totally repented of my error.
Read this long, but vital, post on a wonderful blog called Science-Based Medicine. Everybody should read it – especially anybody harboring doubts about vaccinating their kids.
(Among the great surprises: Jim Carrey is a raving moron. Who would have guessed?)
The irresponsibility of the luddites fighting against the greatest life-saving technology in history is nothing short of criminal. Don’t be taken in.
Vaccinate your kids.
Marxism in the Senate
A breathtaking failure of Econ 101 is being discussed in the Senate. Not satisfied with mere socialism, Marxist Barak Obama also wants to send “stimulus checks” to help us pay for gas.
I’d love to be able to ask these morons in a public setting just where they think the money comes from.
9 June, 2008
Was this supposed to happen?
Doesn’t seem to fit the narrative. I somehow doubt it makes a splash in that other New York newspaper.
“Al Qaeda is an ideology,” Sheik Ahmad said. “We can defeat them inside Iraq and we can defeat them in any country.” The tribal leader arrived in Washington last week. All of his meetings, including an audience with President Bush, have been closed to the public, in part because the Anbari sheiks, while likely to win future electoral contests, are not themselves part of Iraq’s elected government.
It’s a question of competence
Michelle Malkin on why the MyBO moonbat blogs matter.
There’s so much going on over there that I suggest you keep reloading LGF for a day or two. Charles is finding all kinds of stuff, and I can’t hope to keep up with it on this blog.
This Guy Just Has To Win
This year’s Darwin Awards would seem to be a shoo-in.
Update:
I suppose suicide makes it a DQ. Wonder what his coworkers answered.
Update 2:
Not even original.
8 June, 2008
When Guns Are Outlawed
Guess what happens.
Score another one for people who can’t tell weapons from violence.
A Home for Jew-Haters
Update:
Charles Johnson at LGF seems to have kicked over a rock. Look here, here, here, and here.
Update 2:
Now it’s just getting silly. And the response is even sillier, albeit predictable.
Heh:
Over at Instapundit a reader writes:
The Community Blogs at Obama 08 are no more “official” than the rantings of BDS sufferers at an Obama rally. I have a blog there, just to prove how easy it is to get one, and Senator Obama has ZERO chance of getting my vote. You could have one. It’s as simple as signing up. There’s no vetting process of any kind.
Any nut with an axe to grind can post any offensive material on the Community Blogs, and the Obama campaign will be unaware unless someone raises a stink. In fact, it’s entirely possible that a McCain operative could go on the site, create a blog, post offensive material, and then leak the URL to LGF to “prove” how disreputable the Senator’s supporters are. Shades of Dan Rather!
Granted, it’s possible. I suspect the number of McCain operatives who think that way is pretty low. (I wouldn’t put it past some Hillary people right about now.) But isn’t offering your presidential campaign web site as a wide-open, un-moderated blogging host, you know, a bad idea?
I’m waiting to see a first sign of good judgment from this young man. But I’m not holding my breath.
Update 3:
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
Blind to our Enemies
Michael Ledeen has a must-read column on WSJ.
By now, there is very little we do not know about such regimes, and such movements. Some of our greatest scholars have described them, analyzed the reasons for their success, and chronicled the wars we fought to defeat them. Our understanding is considerable, as is the honesty and intensity of our desire that such things must be prevented.
Yet they are with us again, and we are acting as we did in the last century. The world is simmering in the familiar rhetoric and actions of movements and regimes – from Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the Iranian Khomeinists and the Saudi Wahhabis – who swear to destroy us and others like us. Like their 20th-century predecessors, they openly proclaim their intentions, and carry them out whenever and wherever they can. Like our own 20th-century predecessors, we rarely take them seriously or act accordingly. More often than not, we downplay the consequences of their words, as if they were some Islamic or Arab version of “politics,” intended for internal consumption, and designed to accomplish domestic objectives.
7 June, 2008
Michael Fumento
Those of us who read Fumento’s book a decade fifteen years ago already knew that the pandemic never existed, and was never likely to. Indeed, all AIDS statistics coming from Africa are highly suspect.
“They start it, we finish it.”
So say the British paratroopers in Afghanistan who made good on their taunt that the Taliban fight like women.
Major Loden said the battle showed that “contrary to popular belief this confirms that the Taliban are not mythical warriors”.
“This shows they cannot match us force on force. When they try and take us on they always lose. They start it we finish it.”
He added: “The ethos of the Parachute Regiment is all about being deep in enemy territory surrounded and destroying them regardless of everything they throw at us. So morale is exceptionally high.”
Remember that line in Band of Brothers? “We’re paratroopers. We’re supposed to be surrounded.”
We’re Doomed
Not only is the vast majority of legislators in Sacramento as crazy as loons, so is the vast majority of California voters.
The Forces of Evil got their counterfeit eminent domain measure passed, and the good one failed.
We’re so hosed.
5 June, 2008
War on Photographers
Instapundit linked to an article by Bruce Schneier about clueless “authorities” unable to distinguish photographers from terrorists.
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.
Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.
Watch this video, at least to the point where the Amtrak spokesman is being interviewed about how i’ts just fine to photograph the Union Station.
A friend who works here reported being seriously harassed by Rodeo (the city, not the livestock-taming activity) police and told to “get out and stay out” for merely photographing the refinery there. I told him that next time he shouldn’t shoot pictures while wearing a kaffiyeh and chanting “allahu akbar”. Seriously, the cop is just way out of line here unless, maybe, the photographer is a Middle Eastern male of military age.
It turns out that a former coworker, Kevin Bjorke, has a site dedicated to fighting back. Check out PhotoPermit.org.
Schooling Obama
The clear-eyed John Bolton takes a stab at it.
Consider his facile observations about President Kennedy’s first meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, in Vienna in 1961. Obama saw it as a meeting that helped win the Cold War, when in fact it was an embarrassment for the American side. The inexperienced Kennedy performed so poorly that Khrushchev may well have been encouraged to position Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, thus precipitating one of the Cold War’s most dangerous crises.
