Several recent news items that fuel the global warming debate-that-isn’t:
A new study concludes that if anything, global warming may be hindering the formation of hurricanes, rather than causing them.
A top hurricane forecaster blames global warming on ocean currents, not man-made CO2 emissions. Furthermore, he predicts we will soon enter a period of global cooling.
NASA scientists report that Mars is heating up so fast, it could lose its southern ice cap. In a remarkable stroke of genius, the reporter offers: “Since there is no known life on Mars it suggests rapid changes in planetary climates could be natural phenomena.” But wait — do we have scientific consensus on that??
Even scientists who believe that global warming is a threat are concerned that the media’s tendency to use alarmist rhetoric (“catastrophe,” “crisis,” “disaster,” etc.) in describing the problem is counterproductive. The public may be concluding that the threat is beyond our ability to manage, and lose any interest in trying to manage it.
A fitting conclusion to this round-up: Global warming skeptics claim they are being silenced by a powerful alliance of environmentalists, politicians, and scientists who stifle any dissenting views on the subject. “Einstein could not have got funding under the present system.”
For all their self-righteous blather about promoting tolerance and diversity, the mainstream media is unwittingly creating a groundswell of anomosity against all Muslims and Middle-Easterners, according to Victor Davis Hanson.
Their target is the Bush administration’s policies, but the media’s constant drumbeat of news from the Middle East featuring mindless killings, bombings, executions, screams of “Death to America!”, and acts of irrational stupidity instead lead Americans to despise the entire Muslim culture.
When the liberal Left says of the war, “It isn’t worth it,” that message resonates, as the American public rightly suspects that it really means “They aren’t worth it.”
The solution to this growing bigotry is for the MSM to start reporting the whole story from Iraq and the Middle East, including all the Iraqis who appreciate our presence there, and are supporting our efforts with their own blood.
Recently we noted the work that local Sunni sheiks were doing in Anbar province to root out al-Qaida and restore order in their domain. That article focused on the shady side of their law-and-order campaign.
But the MSM is now beginning to pick up on their police recruiting and its positive results.
At a news conference in Washington on Thursday, the U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, hailed Abu Risha and other Sunni tribal leaders.
He said the Sunni Arab tribes were “helping transform Anbar province and other areas from being assessed as lost as little as six months ago to being relatively heartening.”
Penelope Trunk has a superb piece on why perfectionists are usually the least productive people — and how to break the power of perfectionism in your life. Her description of a study involving a ceramics class is a, well, perfect illustration of how our obsession to get all the details just right usually ends up hurting us.
It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of clay.
Think about this in your own life, even if you’re not using clay. The more you practice, the better you’ll get. But you can’t practice if you think only of perfection. Practice is about making mistakes; perfection comes from imperfection.
If you want a well-rounded summary of the complexities at work in the Iraq conflict — the key players, the strategies, the current trends — read this offering from the Belmont Club.
Harry Reid believes the U.S. has already lost the war in Iraq. But as Amir Taheri asks, if we lost, who won?
By any objective measure, the U.S. clearly has the upper hand in this conflict. Every enemy element in this war is either dead, on the run, or lurking in the shadows. The only thing that keeps them clinging to hope is the outrageous comments of people like Harry Reid.
The terrorists, the insurgents, the criminal gangs and the chauvinists of all ilk are still killing many people. But they cannot translate those killings into political gains. Their constituencies are shrinking, and the pockets of territory where they hide are becoming increasingly exposed. They certainly cannot drive the Americans out. No power on earth can. Unless, of course, Harry Reid does it for them.
Call me a country hick, but I have never understood the whole “carbon credits” thing. The industry has all the earmarks of an elaborate swindle, one that makes money by granting rich liberals the right to maintain their elegant lifestyle with a clean conscience. I don’t get it.
Apparently, investigators at the Financial Times don’t get it either. The article suggests the possibility that some of this unregulated business may not be entirely scrupulous.
Anthropologists point to evidence that Neandertals were eventually absorbed into the lineage of modern humans, and that “the behavioral difference between the groups were small. They saw each other as social equals.”
Of course, a lot of women would argue that Neandertals are still very much with us today.
Finally, an “impartial” authority takes the mainstream media to task for their despicable performance in last year’s war between Israel and Hezbollah.
According to a report just released by the Harvard Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy — and authored by Marvin Kalb, a former reporter for NBC and CBS, hardly a right-wing blowhard — the media’s willingness to be manipulated and used by Hezbollah contributed to “a definitive propaganda victory” by Hezbollah.
The Harvard paper shows the need for journalists to brace themselves and remain vigilant when they cover conflicts between open societies on one side, and media-controlling militias on the other. These conflicts, which we will undoubtedly continue to see, demand that journalists make a greater effort to provide context and to keep from become willing collaborators with one side. Islamic militant groups, such as al-Qaida and others, have openly described their strategy of manipulating the media and winning on the “information battlefield.” Hezbollah, too, had a well crafted, and ultimately successful media plan.
The challenge to keep from being used will be greatest for journalists in the field, but editors back in the newsroom also must look closely at what their organizations produce. They must be aware that their reporters on the ground are the target of media campaigns by those they cover, and that reporters can become emotionally allied with one side, as we saw last summer in Lebanon.
(Via Charles Johnson at LittleGreenFootballs, who played an early role in calling attention to the media’s shameful performance during the war.)
Despite what some have claimed, the war in Iraq is not yet lost. In fact, there is a simple strategy that would probably be more effective than anything our troops on the ground are doing to ensure a solid victory there.
Suppose that while Gen. Petraeus is in town, the entire leadership of the Senate and House — both Republican and Democrat — scheduled a joint news conference with President Bush and the General. The conference begins with a joint announcement from the assembled politicians, directed at the insurgents in Iraq.
Their message is a simple one: “We’re coming after you.” No more half-measures. No more dickering. No more hand-wringing waiting for the Europeans to get in the game. If the General needs 100,000 more troops, he will get them, immediately. We will spare no expense, and leave no stone unturned in our determination to win. Every insurgent, every terrorist, every criminal thug who seeks to profit from the mayhem will be ruthlessly hunted down and destroyed.
Reid, Pelosi, and Bush would stand together and look the camera straight in the eye, and declare that whatever their differences might be at home, they are united in their goal of achieving a real and lasting peace for the Iraqi people. Take it to the bank, al-Qaida: However long it will take, we will win. We will not be intimidated. We will not be divided. We will not lose.
That news conference would be worth an additional 20,000 troops by itself. Such a declaration of united strength would demoralize the enemy more than any military defeat. With no prospect of wearing down the U.S., the spirit that drives this insurgency would wither, and the democratic seed that struggles there now would take root and flourish. With every noticeable improvement in their condition, Iraqis in increasing numbers would come to the support of their fledgling government, strengthening the institutions that would preserve its long-term viability — the military, the judiciary, the universities, public services, business.
Beyond the borders of Iraq, such a news conference and its aftermath would send shock waves through a host of other nations who were counting on a weakened U.S. to tuck tail and run. The word is out: These guys mean business.
There was a time when our nation’s politicians understood the value of this kind of bold leadership. Where are they now?
A coalition of tribal forces around Fallujah, known as the Anbar Salvation Front, has had enough of al-Qaida’s butchery, and have started taking matters into their own hands.
The group does not hand over captured al-Qa’ida suspects to the Iraqi police or even to the US military. When a group has concluded that any captive works with the al-Qa’ida militias, the suspect is executed with a bullet to the head. . . .
Residents of Falluja report finding bodies of people known to have worked with armed groups lying in the streets each morning, in an attempt to intimidate those who work with the armed groups of the area, including the al-Qa’ida-linked forces . . . .
I know, I know, civil rights and all that. But civil wars are always a bloody mess. At least these fellas are using a weapon the enemy understands: brute force.
Sheryl Crow and pal Laurie David have drawn laughs over their insistence that we should use less toilet paper, for the good of the planet. Liberals are always chiding conservatives to stay out of other people’s bedrooms; but now they’re wanting to force their way into our bathrooms. Gimme a break!
Ms. David’s brand of environmentalism is nothing more than a facade, a distraction from the financially secure yet intellectually boring life of the fabulously wealthy. But this hobby has dire consequences for the rest of us. By transforming her politics into a religion, and by demonizing all who question her positions, including the author Michael Crichton, who actually is a Harvard trained scientist and physician, Laurie David makes the environmental movement seem bizarre and more than a bit ridiculous.
My advice to Crow, David, and the others: Keep talking! Especially in joint appearances with Democratic candidates! This kind of crackpot radicalism will only help conservatives in ‘08.
Kathleen Parker, in her usual incisive manner, illustrates the duplicity of the abortion proponents who use obtuse medical terminology to describe a partial birth abortion.
When a man murders his wife, we don’t say, “Mr. X rendered his wife unalive by efficiently evacuating her cranial cavity with an instrument customarily associated with construction.” We say, “He bashed her brains out in a brutal attack with a claw hammer.”
Likewise, let’s just call PBA what it is: sucking the brains out of a live, fully-formed baby’s head, or cutting off its head entirely.
Whatever legal battles lie ahead, Wednesday’s high court decision seems a civilizing step forward, affirming as it does that the state has a substantial interest in protecting and preserving life.
Lawrence J. Haas is a Democrat who worked for both Clinton and Gore during the Clinton years. He is also a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, a non-partisan group that is committed to educating Americans on the seriousness of the threat that Islamic fascism poses to our nation.
For Democrats, that means a wholly new mind-set, one that elevates national security rather than changes the subject and that eagerly tackles issues that touch upon America’s role in the world, its responsibilities as (in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) the world’s “indispensable nation,” and the threats and challenges that it faces.
This is no small thing. It requires not just a change in rhetoric, but in gut feeling.
But when your campaign is driven by focus groups and special interest pandering, “guts” are not in the mix. That’s why I think that, despite the poor job Bush has done in prosecuting the war, Republicans still have a decent shot at retaining the White House in ‘08.
I’m tired of painting masonite siding every few years, so some day, I’m going vinyl. Should I do it myself? Surely, it can’t be all that difficult, can it?
Then again, I’m a grandpa. Do I have any business taking on something that big?
In order to make a case for global warming, scientists have to somehow come up with an “average” temperature for the planet. But according to a recent report published by a trio of professors, coming up with any kind of meaningful temperature for an ecosystem as complex as the earth is impossible.
While it is possible to treat temperature statistically locally, it is meaningless to talk about a a global temperature for Earth. The Globe consists of a huge number of components which one cannot just add up and average. That would correspond to calculating the average phone number in the phone book. That is meaningless. Or talking about economics, it does make sense to compare the currency exchange rate of two countries, whereas there is no point in talking about an average ‘global exchange rate’.
The professors’ thesis has come under attack, of course, but at least it adds another topic for discussion to the debate — which is still ongoing, despite rumors to the contrary.
For all the horror of the killings at Virginia Tech, there have been several incidents in the past where the death toll from a deranged gunman could have been just as high or higher — except for citizens who were also armed and fought back. Read a great summary of these incidents here.
As the author notes, in most of these stories, the media was conspicuously silent about the role of firearms in preventing further killing. Now, why, do you suppose, they would leave out a little detail like that? Hmmm?
Sunday’s presidential election in France produced two candidates who will now compete head-to-head in a runoff election on May 6. The two candidates — conservative Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Segolene Royal — provide French voters with two very different visions of the future:
Both Royal and Sarkozy have promised to get France back on its feet — but offer starkly different paths for doing that.
Sarkozy would loosen labor laws and cut taxes to invigorate the sluggish economy, while Royal would hike government spending and preserve the country’s generous worker protections.
I suspect this election will also serve as a bellwether of Europe’s future direction.
First, there were airplanes, then dirigibles, then helicopters. Make way for the next completely different kind of aircraft: the Aeroscraft. So far, this fourth-generation craft is more conceptual than real, but if the science and the economics work out, this could revolutionize air travel.
To get a sense of the enormous size of this behemoth, check out this animated video of an Aeroscraft cruiser. (It’s a big file, so be patient.)
About a hundred boats are trapped in thick ice off the coast of Newfoundland, some in danger of sinking. The boats were returning from the annual seal hunt when they got trapped in a massive ice floe. According to the executive director of the Canadian Sealers Association, “Ice conditions are some of the most severe we’ve seen in 25 to 30 years.”
Conveniently, the news here is the protests against the practice of hunting seals.
Neo-Neocon has a good summary of the candidates — including a front-runner with strong pro-American tendencies — in this Sunday’s national elections in France.
This could be a bellwether election for all of Europe. Keep an eye on this one.
According to a survey of personal assistants in the UK, the avalanche of emails choking our inboxes may actually be hurting productivity in the work place.
I have come to the same conclusion in my own work, as I struggle to manage a growing flood of email. It’s ironic that the convenience of electronic communication — which was supposed to make our jobs more productive — may actually have the opposite effect.
It’s not the medium itself that is at fault. It’s our misuse of it, as we rely on email to document the most trivial exchanges. Whatever happened to just picking up the phone and chatting? Or using instant messaging, which does not leave behind a trail of worthless messages to dispose of.
Participants at a Brussels conference complained that scientists who are skeptical about the alarmist warnings of global warming have trouble getting heard by the public.
Scientists who doubt the scope and cause of climate change have trouble getting funding and academic posts unless they conform to an “alarmist scenario,” said Roger Helmer, a British member of the European Parliament.
Read more of Helmer’s view here. Meanwhile, back at the conference,
Benny Peiser, a professor at Liverpool John Moores University, questioned the methods used by climate scientists. He said many were recognizing that using computer modeling to predict an “inherently unpredictable future” was illogical.
“Today’s scientific consensus very often turns out to be tomorrow’s redundant theory,” he said. He said that scientific journals refused to take papers from scientists who doubted climate change.
But if the skeptics are not being heard, it’s not for lack of effort. Consider the work of Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist for theUniversity of Alabama in Huntsville, and former chief meterologist for NASA. He has written a terrific primer on the whole global warming issue.
Never fear. The “consensus of scientific opinion” once insisted that the earth was the center of the universe, but they eventually got over that. This, too, shall pass.
I was already thinking along these lines, but Michelle Malkin, as usual expresses it so much better than I could have:
American colleges and universities have become coddle industries. Big Nanny administrators oversee speech codes, segregated dorms, politically correct academic departments and designated “safe spaces” to protect students selectively from hurtful (conservative) opinions — while allowing mob rule for approved leftist positions (textbook case: Columbia University’s anti-Minuteman Project protesters).
Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.
And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.
There were a few students at VT who somehow overcame this culture of passivity, and fought back with what they had at hand, thus saving lives.
Yet more evidence that our universities do not adquately prepare young people for the real world.
It’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.
I recently mentioned the role that the battle of Kokoda Track plays in Australian history. Kokoda Track has now played a role in turning around the life of a young rebel who once burned the Australian flag. After walking the grueling Track himself, the young man sees life through different eyes: “I’m here to change my life around . . . the only thing I can do from now on is to try and make it better and try and do things that would help instead.”
Getting close to history has a way of changing one’s perspective on the world, and one’s role in it.
One VT student takes his university, and his state, to task for depriving him of his right to defend himself on campus, despite the fact that he is licensed to carry a concealed weapon.
Of all of the emotions and thoughts that were running through my head that morning, the most overwhelming one was of helplessness.
That feeling of helplessness has been difficult to reconcile because I knew I would have been safer with a proper means to defend myself.
I would also like to point out that when I mentioned to a professor that I would feel safer with my gun, this is what she said to me, “I would feel safer if you had your gun.”
But no one had guns. So a crazed gunman could roam freely, killing at will, stopped only by the limits of his own deranged mind.
UPDATE: Jacob Sullum takes a closer look at the folly of disarming the victims, and offers examples of killing sprees in which an armed citizenry actually reduced the body count.
UPDATE #2: And a similarly fine read from Glenn Reynolds:
Police can’t be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it’s usually too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. Only if they’re armed, they may wind up not being victims at all.
The worst killing spree in modern history was perpetrated by another Korean, Woo Bum-Kon, in 1982. Woo was more creative in his killing, using a rifle and hand grenades. He was a policeman, with access to a whole arsenal.
There, too, keeping guns out of the hands of the populace only turned them into defenseless sheep.
Guns are not the problem, either here, in Korea, or anywhere else they’ve been used to slaughter people. The problem is darkness in the human heart. As long as there is evil in the world, there will be killings — and a need for decent people to have the means to protect themselves and their loved ones from that evil.
Bronze made it easier. The broadsword made it easier. The crossbow. The musket ball, the bullet. The revolver, the Winchester, the Gatling, the Maxim, the Browning. Brass and powder and lead, packaged and propelled so rapidly by physics and man’s inventiveness.
But whether the tool is a rock or a 9mm. pistol, the “easier” part comes from a man’s heart.
Technology will always make it ever easier to live and die. And its “proper control” will continue to be the first refuge of those who find it difficult to believe, let alone deal with, the truth of an evil or demented mind, a dark heart, a hellishly bent soul and its capacity to surprise, horrify and confound us.
What does the terrible Virginia Tech shooting today have in common with Columbine and 9/11? Every one of these monstrous evils was perpetrated upon people who, by law, were forbidden to defend themselves with armed force. Schools are “gun-free zones” now — and so much safer, right? Airplanes are such rich targets precisely because passengers are not allowed to carry anything with which they can fight back against a hijacker.
This is why concealed carry weapons laws are so necessary. Texas passed a CCW law in 1995, following a similar massacre at a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen. Since then, the law’s deterrent effect on crime has won the praise even of the law’s early opponents. The Kansas legislature passed a concealed carry law last year, but over the governor’s veto (Democrat, natch).
If just one professor or student in one of those rooms at VT had been armed, this tragedy might have been cut short and lives saved. Unfortunately for those 32 victims today, we’ll never know.
Instead, we’ll be treated to lots of media hysteria over why “guns are bad,” with renewed attempts to outlaw all firearms.
For more reading on Second Amendment rights, go here.
UPDATE: This is eerie. A couple of years ago, a VT student was disciplined for bringing a firearm to class, despite having a concealed carry permit. The incident sparked a debate in the Virginia House of Delegates over whether or not universities could override the permit. A proposal to prohibit such restrictions died in committee.
I wonder if those Delegates are second-guessing their decision now.
Here’s what a VT spokesman said when the bill was killed (Jan. ‘06): “I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.” I dare him to speak those words at the funerals of the slain students.
UPDATE #2: Confederate Yankee has a blistering review of an early ABC News hit job that plays fast and loose with gun facts.
