Randy Alfred relates the fascinating history of Halley’s Comet, including why Edmond Halley’s name came to be attached to it.
But the best part of the story is how to pronounce the guy’s name. It’s not Hailey, nor does it rhyme with valley. Rather, it’s pronounced Hawley, which rhymes with folly.
Now you know!
Knowing that churchgoers have so many options should keep pastors and preachers on their toes. In that sense, church shopping transfers a bit of power from the pulpit to the pews. And keeping a check on the power of church leaders is never a bad idea.
Categories: Religion
The Obama administration asked Rick Wagoner, the chairman and CEO of General Motors, to step down and he agreed, a White House official said.
As Obama continues to wriggle his way into the operations of American private enterprise, he is increasingly setting himself up for responsibility for the outcome.
Americans will rue the day they elected this man as President.
UPDATE: Mickey Kaus calls Wagoner Obama’s Ngo Dinh Diem. For the uninformed, Diem was the corrupt President of South Vietnam, who was assassinated in 1963, alledgedly with tacit CIA help. Diem’s removal marked a turning point in the war, with the U. S. increasingly responsible for the conduct — and eventual outcome — of the war.
South-central Kansas is getting pounded by an early spring blizzard. We had over two inches of sleet fall between Friday afternoon and dawn Saturday. Now it is snowing furiously. And it is cooooold. Check out a photo gallery here.
Without doubt, this is solid evidence that global warming is a myth. (Hey, if the GW alarmists can play that game, so can I.)
Proponents of programs to fight anthropogenic global warming wrap themselves in the mantle of “scientific consensus” to advance their agenda.
But as Cal Thomas points out, this “consensus” is achieved only by cherry-picking the scientists. There are plenty of fully qualified climatologists and other experts who strongly question the prevailing theory, but their voices are being deliberately ignored in order to promote a pre-determined outcome. This is not how true science works.
Some religious fundamentalists impose various codes of behavior and dress on their adherents and threaten expulsion (if not death) for those who fail to acquiesce to their dictates. Is it not fundamentalist science to ignore any evidence that casts doubt on global warming?
The current approach to the global warming issue will someday be taught in universities as a good example of how not to do science.
Categories: Global Warming · Science
Earth Hour 2009 is a global campaign to “do something” about the dangers of global warming. The campaign asks everyone to turn off all their lights for one hour on Saturday, March 28, beginning at 8:30 p.m. (local time). It’s another exercise in liberal tokenism — it won’t do a thing for global warming, but everyone will feel so much better.
James Taranto is organizing a counter-protest. He is asking everyone with a brain to turn on their lights at 8:30, and leave them on until bedtime.
If no one will listen to the silent majority, let’s at least make sure they see us.
I feel better already.
(Note: Taranto’s column mentions Sunday as the protest day. I think he meant Saturday.)
UPDATE: Viv Forbes of the Carbon Sense Coalition has an even better idea: Rename it “Blackout Night” and conduct it all night, outdoors, on the coldest night of winter.
Spending just one night in the cold and the dark, with no hot coffee or beef on the barbecue, using no light, heat or vehicle energy from coal, gas, petrol or diesel, and without protection from metal or concrete structures, would be good practice for the blackouts and shortages to come if world rationing of carbon products and carbon energy is achieved.
Categories: Global Warming
Because that’s how a loyal media serves its Party masters. The objective is not truth, but advancement of the Party agenda.
There are rules about how a Leninist press works – its operational code. When reading People’s Daily and Pravda with these rules in mind, the controlled press made perfect sense. What’s the point here? Troublingly, these same rules fit today’s American mainstream media – and the media’s relationship to the Democratic Party – nearly to a T.
Brent Bozell argues that if the the Fairness Doctrine is applied to conservative talk radio, it ought to apply equally to NPR.
Liberals would like to “crush Rush” and his conservative compatriots by demanding each station balance its lineup ideologically. But since when has NPR ever felt any pressure to be balanced, even when a majority of taxpayers being forced to subsidize it are center-right?
Why no Fairness Doctrine attention to NPR? It is because those preaching “fairness” on the radio are hypocrites.
Categories: Free speech · Media · Politics
An IBD editorial excoriates Rep. Barney Frank and his fellow politicians, who are agitating for more control over the engines of capital in a bid to “save” them.
Frank, one of the chief architects of the housing mess that’s brought us so low, isn’t satisfied merely with pretending he and his Democratic pals aren’t to blame for all this. No, exploiting voter anger over the now-infamous AIG bonuses, he also wants to dictate to American capitalism what it can earn and what it can’t.
This is the kind of thing that normally happens in Third World countries ruled by tinhorn dictators, or in fascist states, where the democratic rule of law has collapsed. Not the U.S.
Yet, that’s where we find ourselves today, isn’t it? Democrats in Congress, who steadfastly rejected virtually all efforts to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they went on the wildest, most irresponsible lending binge in the history of finance, now pose themselves as the saviors of fallen capitalism.
The hypocrisy is nothing short of stunning.
Categories: Congress · Economics · Government · Politics
Who’s in charge of Obama’s foreign policy?
Now our esteemed President has sent a letter to Jacques Chirac — the former President of France — informing him that he is looking forward to working with him over the next four years. Naturally, the current French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, is miffed.
If Bush had committed such a blunder, I wonder what the MSM would have done with it?
Categories: Obama
Baghdad Bob has resurfaced, just in time to help Obama craft his message. (Via Jules Crittendon)
Michael Malone polishes his crystal ball and peers beyond the end of this economic downturn, to find out what the next “big ideas” will be in high tech. He likes what he sees.
For me, what is most exciting is the knowledge that, between e-Books, smart phones, cheaper and more ubiquitous data centers, and even greater access to the world’s information stores, it will soon be possible for even the poorest people in the world to join in the global marketplace, obtain any level of education they desire, and have access to the investment capital they need to realize their dreams.
Put all of those things together and, as dire as matters seem right now, we may well be on the brink of the greatest explosion in intellectual capital – new ideas, new inventions, new lifestyles, new institutions, new discoveries, new products and services – than the world has ever seen.
All we need to do is get out of our current doldrums and get back into the fight.
Categories: Technology
Thomas Friedman comments on the current clown parade in D. C., quoting Dov Seidman, a corporate ethics consultant:
What makes a company or a government “sustainable,” he added, is not when it adds more coercive rules and regulations to control behaviors. “It is when its employees or citizens are propelled by values and principles to do the right things, no matter how difficult the situation,” said Seidman. “Laws tell you what you can do. Values inspire in you what you should do. It’s a leader’s job to inspire in us those values.”
Right now we have an absence of inspirational leadership.
And most of the country senses it.
Categories: Congress · Economics · Government · Obama · Taxes
Modern global warming alarmists have much in common with the Aztec priests who practiced human sacrifice:
Back in 1500, we learn from a Princeton professor, the Aztecs figured the climate debate was over, and that if you wanted rain and sunshine and other such blessings, it was simple enough what you had to do — sacrifice 20,000 lives a year to the right gods.
In the year 2009, it’s an equally sure thing in the minds of some that carbon in the atmosphere is going to fry us unless we put the welfare of millions on the line . . . .
Categories: Global Warming
This week Congress responded to public anger over the AIG bonuses by passing a law imposing a 90 percent tax explicitly on the AIG execs. But as an editorial at Investors Business Daily notes, such a a law violates the bill of attainder prohibition in the Constitution (Article I, Section 9). This shocking disregard for plain constitutional limits bodes ill for the republic.
You don’t have to like or agree with the AIG bonuses to understand that Congress is doing something it shouldn’t under the Constitution. Once a precedent is set, Congress will be able to go after anyone or any group, at any time, for any reason.
Categories: Congress · Economics · Government · Law · Politics · Taxes
At age 62, Unni Haskell decided to take up golf. So she hired a pro to give her golf lessons for a couple of months. Finally, the day came when she felt she was ready to take on a real golf course, the nine-hole Cypress Links course in St. Petersburg, FL.
Boy, was she ever.
On her very first swing on the very first hole, Ms. Haskell nailed a hole-in-one. Her pro, standing next to her, went nuts, but Ms. Haskell was a little bewildered. She had no idea what she had just accomplished.
I’m thinking Ms. Haskell missed an opportunity here. After she hit that shot, she should have dropped her clubs and walked away from the game, retiring as The Greatest Golfer In The History of the Universe. Nobody could ever top that.
Categories: Something Different · Sports
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is ceasing publication, becoming the second major daily to expire in recent weeks, following the Rocky Mountain News.
I expect this is only the beginning of what will become a torrent of newspaper closings. Like the dinosaurs, their time has come and gone.
Categories: Media
Congress may not be very good with numbers, but they’ve taken the time to honor one number that everybody can appreciate: pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, usually rounded to 3.14. Naturally, Pi Day is today, 3/14.
Categories: Something Different
You know you’re in trouble when they start making jokes about you. And right now, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is the butt of a lot of jokes.
The fundamental problem, of course, is that Geithner hasn’t come up with a financial rescue plan. There is nearly unanimous agreement among economists and policymakers that the single most important thing the Secretary of the Treasury should do now is develop a plan to deal with the “toxic assets” that threaten the survival of financial institutions. But Geithner, who has been acutely aware of this problem for months, doesn’t have such a plan. If he had, the comedians wouldn’t be talking about 1-800-IDEAS.
Categories: Economics · Government · Money · Obama
One of the symptoms of anthropogenic global warming, we have been lectured, is a rise in the number and intensity of hurricanes. Remember all the wailing following Katrina?
Unfortunately for the alarmists, that scenario is not holding up.
Tropical cyclone (TC) activity worldwide has completely and utterly collapsed during the past 2 to 3 years with TC energy levels sinking to levels not seen since the late 1970s.
The trend is so undeniably obvious that “Al Gore has dropped the related slide in his PowerPoint.”
Nevertheless, the Obaminator is determined to press forward with his mission to save the earth from those terrible humans.
Categories: Global Warming · Science
Al Gore dodged an opportunity to meet with Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a leading global warming skeptic, at a recent conference in Santa Barbara, California.
The former vice president loves to lecture others on the need to address global warming, but usually insists on appearing alone and largely unchallenged at conferences.
If the science is settled, why not appear on the same stage with a credible skeptic and demolish his position in direct debate? Unless, of course, the skeptic’s position is stronger than Gore wants the public to know . . .
Categories: Global Warming
The Obama administration couldn’t resist the temptation to cover bad economic news with a cheap political trick.
In the face of our enormous economic challenges, top White House aides decided to pee on Mr. Limbaugh’s leg.
In the process, they only made themselves look trivial and inconsequential.
Atheists have been working overtime lately trying to portray religion as the primary source of much of the world’s suffering and evil. Convince people to abandon religion, they say, and our lives would be a lot better.
But the evidence doesn’t support that view. John Tierney quotes one researcher, Michael McCullough, who has been studying the coorelation between religion and self-control:
I’m not claiming that religion is a panacea, but the scientific support for the idea that religiosity is associated with many benefits for health, well-being, and social adjustment is now quite overwhelming.
Which is what the Bible has been claiming for over 2,000 years.
Wichita city leaders have issued a formal invitation to President Obama to come to Wichita, “to see the aircraft industry firsthand and to recognize that corporate jets are ‘an essential part of our economy.’”
This follows Obama’s earlier remarks denigrating corporate executives who fly on small business jets.
Wichita is home to several major aircraft manufacturers: Boeing, Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft, and Bombardier, as well as hundreds of smaller suppliers. These operations employ tens of thousands of workers. Business jets are a critical part of what these companies do. So the President trashing business jets didn’t set well with folks in these parts.
Will Obama accept the invitation? I doubt it. In fact, given his administration’s record of extremely poor accessibility, I doubt that he will even hear of this invitation.
Small business owner Jim Prevor puts a human face on the suffering caused by Obama’s ignorance of economics.
In the midst of horrible downturn, the president seems inept, and perhaps even worse, he seems to neither understand nor care about the real life of real people.
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) (the D stands for Democrat, in case you’re wondering) is seeking prosecutions against those responsible for the financial crisis. Good call, Barney. An IBD editorial suggests that he start by looking in a mirror.
His conflicts are obvious and outrageous, and his refusal to countenance reforms of Fannie and Freddie contributed mightily to today’s meltdown.
Categories: Democrats · Economics · Government · Politics
Doug Ross has put together a compendium of links consisting of mostly pictures and very brief text that explains how we got in the current financial mess. The presentation reads like a children’s book (a la Dick and Jane), so anybody with a third-grade education can understand it. Which is probably necessary these days, given the electorate’s inability to grasp even the most basic principles of economic and political reality.
(via Instapundit)
Categories: Democrats · Economics · Government · Politics
Obama promised that America would once again be respected across the globe after he became President. And to reinforce that theme, he appointed the most qualified person he could find to be his Secretary of State — Hillary Clinton.
She is off to a smashing start in her efforts to rebuild our credibility:
With performances like this, America will be respected alright — just like Rodney Dangerfield.
The other night Melissa and I were eating at Spangles, a local retro burger restaurant, listening to the oldies music they play. A song came on that I hadn’t heard in a long time: “I’ll Never Find Another You” by the Seekers. This song is a classic example of the kind of folk music that was popular back in the 60s, when I was coming of age. The song brought back a lot of pleasant memories.
The Seekers were an Australian group that had several big hits, then disbanded, and over the years has reappeared in various forms. This YouTube clip is from their farewell concert in London in 1968.
