Compassion

Incompetent Buffoon Watch

How’s that “regaining respect for America abroad” thing going, Mr. President?

The Obama administration has managed to open a wide gap between itself and some of America’s most reliable allies, those of Central Europe. In the recent Open Letter to the Obama Administration from Central and Eastern Europe, some of the most magnificent freedom fighters of the region, including former presidents Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Lech Walesa of Poland, have warned that the U.S. should not take their countries and peoples for granted.

Britain Death Watch

Yet another reason why I have no desire to even visit England: It is clearly now a police state, where it’s illegal to even photograph the coppers.

Waylett and his long-term friend John Innis, 20, were stopped under the Terrorism Act in Lodge Road, St John’s Wood, west London, after the actor took a photograph of a police patrol as they drove past.

When that kind of behavior is illegal, there are no meaningful freedoms left.

Would You Buy A Used Czar From This Man?

The Thug-in-Chief, after throwing a few radicals under the bus, reaches into his limitless supply of criminal revolutionaries as he doles out yet another Czar-ship.

Our rallying cry was for justice; our demand was that the System be changed!

Yes, the Great Revolutionary Moment had at long last come. And the time, clearly, was ours!

So we stole stuff.

Y’know, stole stuff. Radios, tennis shoes. Well, not everybody, of course.

Update, and bumped:

How’s that cease-fire in the “war on science” going, Mr. President?

Jones’s Wikipedia entry notes that he is a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Founded by astronaut-turned-parapsychologist Edgar Mitchell, the Institute declares itself in mission statement to be “a nonprofit membership organization located in Northern California that conducts and sponsors leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness.”  It also goes on to say that it “explores phenomena that do not necessarily fit conventional scientific models, while maintaining a commitment to scientific rigor.”  The first part of that statement is correct, but as far as commitment to scientific rigor goes, you won’t find it at this institute.

MSM: Not evil, just dumb

John Stossel pleads for patience with his brethren. This was from a talk he gave last year.

Buy American?

Seems patriotic, doesn’t it? Well, if you listen to socialists, maybe. Remember Smoot-Hawley and what it did to this country? If not, Reason TV has an updated parable for you that asks the musical question, Is your iPod unpatriotic?

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard

How the hard-liners took control of Iran.

“It is not a theocracy anymore,” said Rasool Nafisi, an expert in Iranian affairs and a co-author of an exhaustive study of the corps for the RAND Corporation. “It is a regular military security government with a facade of a Shiite clerical system.”

Evolutionary Insight

A potential mechanism has been found for what seem to be “leaps” in evolution. For example, there is no middle ground on the number of wings on an insect or limbs on a primate. So how is the “jump” made? It could be “partial penetrance.”

“If you take a bunch of cells and grow them in exactly the same environment, they’ll be identical twin brothers in terms of the genes they have, but they may still show substantial differences in their behavior,” says Avigdor Eldar, a postdoctoral scholar in biology at Caltech and the paper’s first author. These sorts of variations—or noise, as the researchers call it—can actually allow a mutation to have an effect in some organisms but not in others. For example, while some genetically variable cells will show the expected effect of the mutation, others may still behave like a normal, or wild type, cell. And still others may do something else entirely.
“These mutant cells don’t only show a different morphology,” Eldar notes. “They show more variability in their behavior. In a population, you can see a mixture of several different behaviors, with some cells doing one thing and others doing something else.”

Remembering Shifty

I’ve already ReTweeted this.

When Powers died, to little fanfare in June, a man named Mark Pfeifer (retired from Dow Jones) was appalled by the disproportionate amount of coverage given to Michael Jackson. He penned an e-mail about a chance encounter he had had with the humble war hero at the Philadelphia airport. The e-mail went viral as friends forwarded to friends.

Take a moment to remember Shifty Powers today.

Great footage of that One Small Step

Here, thanks to Bad Astronomy is some great footage of Neil Armstrong taking that giant leap for mankind.

Update:

You can read the entire mission transcript. A coworker found a nice exchange on page 295:

CAPCOM         Roger. Among the large headlines concerning Apollo this morning there’s one asking that you watch for a lovely girl with a big rabbit. An ancient legend says a beautiful Chinese girl called Chango has been living there for 4,000 years. It seems she was banished to the moon because she stole the pill for immortality from her husband. You might also look for her companion, a large Chinese rabbit, who is easy to spot since he is only standing on his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon tree. The name of the rabbit is not recorded.

SC         Okay, we’ll keep a close eye for the bunny girl.

Iran’s “Suspended” Nuke Program

I’m shocked – shocked – to learn that the 2007 NIE claim that Iran suspended its nuclear program in 2003 has been contradicted.

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, has amassed evidence of a sophisticated Iranian nuclear weapons program that continued beyond 2003. This usually classified information comes courtesy of Germany’s highest state-security court. In a 30-page legal opinion on March 26 and a May 27 press release in a case about possible illegal trading with Iran, a special national security panel of the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe cites from a May 2008 BND report, saying the agency “showed comprehensively” that “development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003.”

Unlikely Savior

Last night I happened to catch part of a History Detectives episode on PBS. It had to do with premature babies being exhibited as part of a sideshow at the 1933 and 1934 Chicago World’s Fair. (PDF transcript here)

At first, of course, the thought of a German doctor putting infants on display between Sally Rand and the freak show seems apalling. How stereotypical, I thought: A German. Fortunately they dug a bit deeper.

Until the middle part of the last century preemies had a very poor life expectancy. Most died in spite of efforts to keep them warm with blankets, hay, or being placed in shoe boxes next to stoves. Dr. Couney knew in the late 19th century that the new technology of incubators could save their lives.

But not only was the technology prohibitively expensive, most parents had their babies at home and didn’t trust them to doctors and nurses. So Couney faced a double challenge: To evangelize the technology and make it affordable. His solution was a brilliant example of how the free market saves lives.

Dr. William Silverman’s “Incubator-Baby Side Shows” Pediatrics 1979; 64:127-141. Dr. Silverman recounts the fascinating history of premature babies in incubators who were exhibited at World’s Fairs beginning in the late 19th century. An aspiring young actor named Archibald Leach worked as a barker outside one of these exhibits (“Don’t pass the babies by!”). He later acheived fame under his stage name — Cary Grant.

At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933-4, the premature baby exhibit was next to the midway where Sally Rand and her fan dancers were performing. When police raided Sally Rand’s show she protested that her girls were wearing much more in the way of clothes than those babies next door. The article has *wonderful* pictures of very tiny preemies with their parents, nurses, doctors; it also shows old incubators, and various caregiving techniques including a very scary picture of “nasal spoon feeding.”

Another interesting article is by Dr. Jeffrey Baker “The Incubator Controversy: Pediatricians and the Origins of Premature Infant Technology in the United States, 1890 to 1910” Pediatrics 1991;87:654-662. Dr. Baker explains why many physicians and parents at first rejected the use of incubators (developed in France) because they considered them to be unhygienic and because most parents (who gave birth at home) were reluctant to entrust their babies to doctors for hospital care.

However, I have an article from the San Francisco Chronicle of 1902 entitled “What Becomes of the Incubator Babies?” that is far more upbeat about the use of incubators. It begins: “Nine years ago one of the curiosities of the World’s Fair at Chicago was a baby incubator in full operation, taking care of a prematurely born baby, one of those helpless little changelings brought into the world alive and breathing, yet before its time. It was exhibited as a curiousity, a thing of wonder. Today, to raise a prematurely born baby without the assistance of an incubator would be like dressing a wound without antiseptic precaution.

While many in the press lambasted Couney’s exhibits, parents and doctors backed him up. Not surprising, when you consider that he saved the lives of hundreds of their children with a technology they could not afford.

Once hospitals caught on, Couney stopped the exhibits. How’s that German Doctor stereotype holding up now?

Kurt Cobain (Rick) Rolling in His Grave

H/T: Mashable.

Chappaquiddick At 40

Some of us remember. Nobody should forget.

This manslaughter might have been forgiven if Kennedy hadn’t decided to evade responsibility for the accident and cover it up by failing to report it, trying to co-opt one of his aides to cop to being the driver, and then leaving them to try and fix it for him for over seven hours.

Worse, Mary Jo Kopechne, whose drowned body was found in a position trying to eke out the last molecules of air within the submerged car, was left to drown by the self-involved Senator, who chose not to seek immediate help.

And here’s a Google Commemorative Logo you won’t see.

Wouldn’t beat this classic anyway:

And That’s The Way It Is

Roger Kimball is completely on-target about all of this Walter Cronkite adulation.

He didn’t research or write the news. He read it. He emitted the same platitudes every other news reader mouthed. He did so, however, with a sort of cardigan authenticity that used car salesmen would climb naked over broken bottles to emulate.

…

Michael Jackson was famous for inventing a dance step called the moonwalk in which the dancer seems to float backwards while walking in place. Walter Cronkite did something similar. He seemed to float above the yapping clamor of common opinion. At bottom, though, he merely reflected it.

When I was a kid I liked Walter Cronkite. By the time I became an adult I knew he was a phony.

When Systemic Corruption Meets Fantasy

Here’s your eye-roller of the day.

Human Rights Deputy Director Craig Mokhiber lamented that even the utopian ideal the United Nations was formed around was considered, by some, science fiction. “We look at it in a different way,” Mokhiber explained. “It’s true that we are an idealistic organization… but we are focused on international law and diplomacy to settle disputes. We don’t see it as utopian, we see it as the only reasonable alternative to what inevitably would be a horrific dystopian society.”

Go on. Pull the other one.

Filthy Regime

Here’s what filthy Sharia Law gets you.

He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so “impressed my superiors” that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.”

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a “wedding” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard – essentially raped by her “husband.”

Update:

Mark Steyn:

“It is illegal to execute a young woman …if she is a virgin”: Must be convenient to have a legal code that obliges all your pathologies.

The Moon We Forgot

Charles Krauthammer laments (and I with him).

Why do it? It’s not for practicality. We didn’t go to the moon to spin off cooling suits and freeze-dried fruit. Any technological return is a bonus, not a reason. We go for the wonder and glory of it. Or, to put it less grandly, for its immense possibilities. We choose to do such things, said JFK, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” And when you do such magnificently hard things — send sailing a Ferdinand Magellan or a Neil Armstrong — you open new human possibility in ways utterly unpredictable.

I’ll See Your Greatest Generation

And raise you one Henry Allingham.

“Henry was always determined to ensure that today’s generation does not forget the sacrifice of those who died on the Western Front,” St. Dunstan’s said in a statement after his death. “Until recently, he regularly visited schools and attended war-based events as an ambassador for his generation.”

Asked once at a memorial ceremony how he would like to be remembered, Allingham brushed off any thought of it, saying people should instead remember those who died in the wars.

“Remember them, not me,” he said.

Ronald Reagan Speaks to Our Day

Every argument is still valid.

There is, of course, an alternative to following the Gipper’s advice.

Update:

Glenn Beck has the good sense to surround himself with two smart, honest guys. Listen to what they have to say.

(I’m still amazed, but grateful, that Stossel has a job at ABC.)

Sarah Palin Declares War?

That’s how David Warren sees it.

Perhaps better terms for the two sides, to replace left and right, might be “martians” and “earthlings.”

It is to the earthlings in this scenario that Ms. Palin is speaking. And when she writes lines like this intentional jaw-dropper in the Washington Post — “We are ripe for economic growth and energy independence if we responsibly tap the resources that God created right underfoot on American soil” — she is quite intentionally signalling that she is ready for war.

Internet Security with the Pros

A coworker found this gem.

Yes sir, you are secure here.

A Reckless Congress

The WSJ on one of the greatest raids on private income in American history.

The article recites an astonishing list of tax increases and concludes:

We could go on, and we will in coming days. But the most remarkable quality of this health-care exercise is its reckless disregard for economic and fiscal reality. With the economy still far from a healthy recovery, and the federal fisc already nearly $2 trillion in deficit, Democrats want to ram through one of the greatest raids on private income and business in American history. The world is looking on, agog, and wondering why the United States seems intent on jumping off this cliff.

Hammer your representatives with the message that we do not want to be driven off that cliff. It would mean the end of the American experiment.

Chuck DeVore’s new campaign strategist

Is Barbara Boxer.

Viva Sonia

Mr. Spielberg, are you listening?

Adding Spice to the Menudo of Justice

Iowahawk is in fine fettle. But he should have used more malapropisms.

Update:

“This woman is Archie Bunker in a dress.”

Sometimes I Wonder

How many blacks support Planned Parenthood? And why?

Planned Parenthood founder and Leftist icon, Margaret Sanger, was not only a eugenicist, but a rather racist one.

In “Woman and the New Race,” Sanger insisted that women create an enormous “debt to society [by] creating slums, filling asylums with the insane, and institutions with other defectives. … Poverty and the large family generally go hand in hand. … The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

Of blacks, Sanger wrote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Gee, ya think?

It just may turn out that current climate models are wrong.

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

Again: I’m old enough to remember overpopulation, global cooling, DDT killing birds and the hole in the ozone. All bogus. Chicken Little has really been quite consistent.

It’s hard to confirm a model when you can’t even be sure of the data.

Did He Say This With A Straight Face?

The One, pontificating in Ghana:

“No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top…. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery. That is not democracy; that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there. And now is the time for that style of governance to end.”

Rush Limbaugh asks the right questions:

“Our government is soon going to be skimming 51 percent off the top of everything we make! What does that make Obama? Obama just kneecapped the auto industry. He just put the United Auto Workers in charge of on the board of directors and made ’em owners. What the hell is that?”

Well, Rush, I’ll explain. President Teleprompter meant to add “Do as I say, not as I do.” I swear that the Thug in Chief, especially with his handling of GM, reminds me more every day of another swell guy from Chicago. (The squeamish will want to stop that clip before the 2:00 mark.)

This One Goes To Eleven

It seems like the blink of an eye to me – albeit a slow blink – but it’s been four decades since Apollo 11. NASA will be observing the event with an audio webcast of the sound of the entire mission, starting at 7:32 EDT tomorrow morning. From their press release:

The audio retrospective will begin at 6:32 a.m.  CDT Thursday, July 16, two hours before the spacecraft launched. The audio  will continue through splashdown of the mission at 11:51 a.m. CDT Friday,  July 24, and recovery of the crew shortly afterward. The Web stream  will feature the communications between the astronauts and ground  teams, and commentary from Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center  in Houston.

Listen here.

More info on Apollo 11 40th anniversary observations here.