Catching Fireballs

The U.N. press pool includes reporters from papers that don't even bother pretending to be sources of objective news, which results in some interesting questions at the daily press briefing at Turtle Bay. When the subject turns to Israel, the questions can be quite enlightening, as seen during today’s UN press daily briefing:

Question: Does the Secretary-General subscribe to the point of view of Mr. ElBaradei that any threat by Israel to Iran could really bring about a fireball in the whole region?

Spokesperson: I don’t have any information about that. The Secretary-General is certainly aware of what Mr. ElBaradei has been saying, but I don’t have any specific statement to make at this point.

The spokesperson might want to consider this alternative response:

Fantasy Spokesperson: Please explain what you mean by “a fireball.” My understanding is that Iran has threatened to place nuclear fireballs throughout Israel so as to, in Mr. Ahmedinejad’s own words, wipe Israel off the map. Are you talking about those threatened fireballs or some other fireballs?

We continue with the Q&A from the briefing:

Question: Why is the Secretary-General always slow to react to any threats by Israel?

Spokesperson: Well, we don’t react to threats; there are so many of them all around the world and all over the planet. If we reacted to threats and not to actual, physical, proven danger, I think the Secretary-General would be busy 24 hours a day issuing statements.

You know, I think ol' Spokesperson could have done better. How about:

Fantasy Spokesperson: It could be because then, in all fairness, he would have to respond to threats to Israel. Do you really want him to get into all the surrounding nations and entities that have called for the elimination of Israel’s right to exist? Would you like him to discuss the threat of the proposed genocide of the Israeli people?

OK now, last question! Let's see if Spokesperson learned from the valued free coaching:

Question: But here you have a situation that is really escalating, especially on the vocal level. And the Middle East is not just any area. It is a very inflammable area, as we all know. Does that not concern Mr. Ban Ki-moon?

Spokesperson: It concerns him, definitely. It does concern him. Several times he has appealed for calm and for people to refrain from threats.

Will the need for coaching ever end?

Fantasy Spokesperson: It concerns him, definitely. It does concern him. He would particularly like to see the day when the inflammatory anti-Israel media decide to cool down the rhetoric, stop running every trumped-up Palestinian charge verbatim, and also stop ignoring Israel’s position in its entirety. But Mr. Ki-moon is a realist and he understand there’s about as much a chance of that as there is a free and fair election under Robert Mugabe or the free practice of religion in China.

I remain, as always, available to the U.N. staff to help them with their messaging and media training.

Zimbabwe: The Case For No U.N.

Here I thought the United Nations was supposed to protect the world's downtrodden, but, Holy Cow, it appears they are too busy quibbling over the wording of documents on human rights and passing resolutions condemning Israel for wanting to continue to exist to actually care about people.

Why do we even bother to have a U.N. when one day's news brings these two stories?

The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro (pictured), head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.

An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window. (Times of London)

And this:

Zimbabwean authorities confiscated a truck loaded with 20 tons of American food aid for poor schoolchildren and ordered that the wheat and pinto beans aboard be handed out to supporters of President Robert Mugabe at a political rally instead, the American ambassador said Wednesday. (Times of New York)

Robert Mugabe has given the world more than enough lessons in why he should not be allowed to remain in power in Zimbabwe. By his hand, his country lies in ruin, thousands of graves are filled with people whose only crime was to question his government, and hunger for hope competes with hunger for food as the national past-time. But the U.N. lets him rule, pretending that the recent toss-up election was somehow fair and Mugabe somehow has a continuing right to leadership.

As evidence, Sec Gen Ban Ki-moon met with Mugabe recently in Rome for a little chat (Obama supporters take note), and now is dispatching a senior emissary to the country:

Haile Menkerios, Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs, is expected to visit Zimbabwe from next Monday until 20 June, a spokesperson for Mr. Ban announced today.

Mr. Menkerios will discuss the political situation and the upcoming presidential election – which is scheduled to take place on 27 June – while in the Southern African country. (UN News)

And what will come of that? Another report that says things are bad in Zimbabwe? Great. Try to find room for it on the shelf. How about this for an alternative?

Prior to the election, Banki can get behind the mikes and say that if Mugabe is re-elected or otherwise continues to hold onto power, he will push for Zimbabwe to be expelled from the United Nations as a "worthless state." So much for aid and assistance.

Then all the UN Peacekeepers in the area can be re-routed to Zimbabwe temporarily (giving the local populations of young girls and boys in the countries the Peacekeepers come from some blessed relief), in order to present an armed presence at the polls -- with shoot to kill orders for anyone attempting to disrupt the election.

Then, the UN could collect all the ballots and with international oversight, count them.

Then, the results in hand, they could arrest Robert Mugabe and his henchmen and ferry them off to The Hague for their trial as criminals against humanity.

In my dreams. The Mugabes of the world exist because the UN exists, giving them a legitimacy they don't deserve ... which is pretty easy to do, since the UN steeps in legitimacy it doesn't deserve.

Sunday Scan

Triple Crown

Jockey Kent Desormeaux summed up yesterday's Belmont Stakes pretty well, saying of Triple Crown contender Big Brown, "I had no horse." Big Brown finished a distant, distant last, and another year goes by without a Triple Crown winner.

I didn't even watch the race because I've soured on all forms of gambling, but it reminded me of 1977 and Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew, who I saw very up-close at the Kentucky Derby.

The not so incredible ex-wife was a photographer at the Louisville Courier Journal and I was her Derby photo assistant. She buried an auto-drive Nikon so the lens was at dirt level under the rail about 10 yards past the finish line. She focused it on the finish line, and handed me a cable remote.

"Push it when they reach the last pole before the finish and hold it down until the last horse is past you," she said. And that's what I did.

As the pack tore past me, I heard the jockeys yelling and the leather creaking and the whips slapping, I felt a hot rush of air, and was spattered with horse sweat. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life. After they blew past, I let the shutter button go and remembered to start breathing again.

In the process, I took an image of Seattle Slew crossing the finish line, all four feet in the air. It became somewhat famous; in fact, when a commemorative plate company selected one image of Seattle Slew for a series of plates on Triple Crown winners, they selected my Derby picture. Here it is:

I can't claim it as mine; it's credited to my ex-wife. But it's a heck of a lot better than the crummy one of the Belmont at the top of the post, isn't it?

Those Racist Clintons

"Sometimes your opponent just runs a good campaign," lamented Hillary's campaign chief Mark Penn in an NYT op/ed today.

I thought you paid geniuses like Penn millions of dollars, as Hillary did, so that your candidate would run a better campaign.

Penn raises many excuses for Hillary's failure, boiling it down mostly to money -- another responsibility of the campaign chief -- but the most interesting paragraph in the piece is this one:

The Clintons have spent their lives fighting as much as any leaders in their generation for greater equality across racial and gender lines. I believe nothing they said was ever intended to divide the country by race. Any suggestion to the contrary was perhaps the greatest injustice done to them in this campaign.

All in all, I have to agree with him, even though I can't stand it, and even with the famous Bill-ism about the only reason why Obama is running a fairy-tale campaign is because he's black, and the famously misinterpreted Hil-ism about Bobby Kennedy's assassination.

Back in February, I wrote a post titled In A PC Nation, How Will The GOP Run? that raised the issue of hyper-sensitivity on race issues:

Even if there were a line fine enough to appease the keepers of political correctness in the black, feminist and media communities, and there's not, the GOP will be charged with crossing it. There is no way the GOP can get to November without being called every "ist" in the book.

Still true, more true, today. As it turns out, even the Clintons couldn't pass this test in the face of the Obamaniacs who are found in high positions in the media and the DNC. The challenge for that old white guy with his blond cutie-pie of a wife has not gotten any easier.

China, The Nation That Keeps On Giving

Toys with lead paint, tainted dog food, and of course who can forget bird flu? China is such a generous nation! So giving! And since bird flu was such a hit last time around, it's now time for bird flu redux:

HONG KONG (WSJ) -- Hong Kong authorities slaughtered 2,700 birds and banned live poultry imports from mainland China for up to 21 days, after a routine inspection Saturday found chickens in one of the city's poultry markets infected with the dangerous H5N1 bird-flu virus.

While there's little immediate threat to humans from the infected birds, the discovery revives fears that the disease could still be a problem with poultry flocks in southern China -- although it isn't yet clear whether the infected birds came from local or mainland Chinese farms."

And what does the generous, giving People's Republic have to say about all this? Ever the humble gift-giver, they deferred:

An official with the General Administration of Quality, Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said the agency needed to consider questions about the matter before responding.

Can you say "chicken?"

Those Pesky Thermometers

Yesterday I wrote about NASA cooking the books on its US temperature data, a story Warmie cultists would no doubt reject as tales of denial by Warmie heretics. Well, if they had pipes and if they burned those little bowls of carbon-based plant material, I'd tell them to put this in their pipes and smoke it:

A perfect illustration is found when comparing the USHCN (U.S. Historical Climatology Network) temperature records from Central Park in New York City to those taken a mere 55 miles away at West Point. Readings in Central Park have been regularly measured since 1835 when the city's population had just surpassed 200,000. Today, surrounded by a metropolis of eight million people filled with some of the world's tallest buildings, a massive underground subway system, an extensive sewer system, power generation facilities, and millions of cars, buses, and taxis, the Central Park temperatures have been greatly altered by urbanization. And, as one might expect, the Central Park historical temperature plot illustrates an incredible warming increase of nearly 4øF.

The West Point readings have also been meticulously maintained since 1835, but the environment surrounding the thermometer shelter has experienced significantly less manmade interference then the one in Central Park. The West Point readings illustrate a significantly lower warming increase of only about 0.6øF over the same 170-year period. This is remarkable given that the year 1835 is considered to be the last gasp of the Little Ice Age -- a significant period of global cooling that stretched back several hundred years.

Cries of out of control global warming become more dubious when one looks at the hottest decade in modern history, the 1930s. The summer of 1930 marked the beginning of the longest drought of the 20th Century. From June 1 to August 3, Washington, D.C. experienced twenty-one days of high temperatures of at least 100ø. During that record-shattering heat wave, there were maximum temperatures set on nine different days that remain unbroken more than three-quarters-of-a-century later. (emphasis added; source)

How long can the global warming myth stand up to the temperature facts? It's an unanswerable question because global warming is the science of hysterics and hypnotism, and is therefore outside the realm of rational deduction.

hat-tip: Greenie Watch

Forever Reuters

No one can slip subjectivity into journalistic objectivity like Reuters. Here they are again, reporting on the meeting of G8 energy chiefs in Japan:

Japan, the United States, China, India and South Korea -- who together guzzle nearly half the world's oil -- said that they had agreed on the need for greater transparency in energy markets and more investment by consumers and producers both, while stopping short of calling on OPEC to pump more crude today. (source)

"Guzzle" is defined as "to drink especially liquor greedily, continually, or habitually." The U.S. and Japan should not be included with the guzzlers; we are more and more merely consumers. Greed simply isn't a part of our oil consumption; efficient output is. We consume ever more efficiently, investing billions in ways to make our automotive fleet, our homes and our industrial operations more efficient.

An objective Reuters (oxymoron) would have used the word consume. If it wants to look for oil-guzzling whipping boys, it should have stopped the list at China and Inda, which have put economic growth far ahead of environmental protection, and have put the acquisition of oil ahead of the efficient consumption of oil. In fact, both countries still subsidize the price of fuel to their populations, and refused reasoned calls to stop the practice in the name of greater fuel conservation.

Excitable Electrons

Confession time: I never understood this Mohamed ElBardei guy, and could no see the top UN nuke monitoring guy as a Nobel Prize winner than ... say ... Al Gore.

His mini-interview in Spiegel (the full interview publishes on Tuesday) gives me no further insights.

On Iran:

"The readiness on Iran's side to cooperate leaves a lot to be desired," he said. "We have pressing questions." Iran's leadership, he said, is sending "a message to the entire world: We can build a bomb in relatively short time."

On Syria:

But the general director of the International Atomic Energy Agency also said he expected "absolute transparency" from Syria.

On stopping proliferation by military action:

"With unilateral military actions, countries are undermining international agreements, and we are at a historic turning point."

What's difference between Iran and Syria might explain why ElBardei expects complete transparency from Syria, but not Iran? The only thing that comes to my mind is that there's been military action against Syria's nukes but not Iran's.

Hyper-Hysteria

Fear is rising with a bullet on the list of global motivators. Plastic baby bottles, genetically engineered food, cell phones ... all feed the hysteria machine, ultimately producing stories like this:

South Korean politics are on the brink of meltdown after spiralling public hysteria over “mad cow” disease in American beef unleashed a weekend of mass protests and pitched battles between demonstrators and riot police.

Police vehicles were today attacked by angry mobs armed with sticks and police lines were reportedly charged after the 40,000-strong crowd of peaceful protesters thinned-out to leave a smaller group of activists.

With the violence threatening to continue for another week, and the calls for his resignation being screamed by students on the streets of Seoul, President Lee Myung Bak now faces a series of potentially crippling departures from his immediate circle of allies. (Times of London)

How many recent cases of BSE have there been in the US? One.

How many recent cases of BSE in the US were discovered before the cow was slaughtered for beef? One.

How many humans have been infected from BSE in US beef? None.

Frankly, being in that crowd of angry Koreans looks far more dangerous to one's health than eating U.S. beef.

IAEA, NIE And The MMFNI

I'm not sure if I've got that third acronym right -- Mad Mullahs For Nuking Israel, right? -- but the first one sure undercut the second one yesterday, much to the detriment of the third one.

The NIE, National Intelligence Estimate, gave the MMFNI a bunch of breathing room when it came out last December, claiming that to the best of the combined knowledge of the U.S. intelligence community, Iran was not currently pursuing a nuclear weapon. Or at least we were "moderately confident" that was the case.

Israel, for whom mere "moderate confidence" could spell death, was not so sure.

Now it turns out that the IAEA, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, isn't so sure either. Its report, released yesterday goes way beyond "moderate confidence" to say Iran's nuclear weapons program is "a matter of serious concern" because of:

• Willful lack of cooperation
• 18 documents that indicate the Iranians are working on explosives, uranium processing and warhead design — activities the NYT bravely reports "could be associated with constructing nuclear weapons." Duh.
• Failure to report R&D activities on faster, more productive centrifuges
• Iranian denial of access to sites where centrifuge components were being manufactured and where research of uranium enrichment was being conducted

In short:

“The Iranians are certainly being confronted with some pretty strong evidence of a nuclear weapons program, and they are being petulant and defensive,” said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who now runs the Institute for Science and International Security. “The report lays out what the agency knows, and it is very damning. I’ve never seen it laid out quite like this.”

To which Baghdad Bob Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the atomic energy agency, responded

... that the report vindicated Iran’s nuclear activities. It “is another document that shows Iran’s entire nuclear activities are peaceful,” the semi-official Fars News Agency quoted him as saying.

Anyone who still believes the NIE presented an honest assessment of Iran's nuke-quest has two choices when confronting the IAEA's actions: They can admit they were wrong, and that at a minimum we can be "moderately confident" that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, or they can align themselves with the MMFNI.

Peacekeepers Raping Children ... Again

The Peacekeepers are back at it again -- "piece-seeking,"' not peacekeeping -- with their disgusting focus on the children they are sent to protect in war-torn nations. BBC reports on a report from Save The Children:

Save the Children says the most shocking aspect of child sex abuse is that most of it goes unreported and unpunished, with children too scared to speak out.

A 13-year-old girl, "Elizabeth" (pictured here) described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home.

"They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me... I tried to escape but there were 10 of them and I could do nothing," she said.

"I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding."

No action has been taken against the soldiers.

Don't let that last sentence pass you by, because it's the standard operating procedure. Under current Peacekeeping protocols, the UN has no criminal jurisdiction over Peacekeepers; it must rely on the offending Peacekeeper's home country to prosecute. That's the excuse, anyway. The UN could conduct a prosecutorial investigation of each alleged crime, forward the file to the Peacekeeper's home judicial system, and pressure for prosecution. But it rarely does.

You can read the Save The Children report here and the organization's press release on the report here. Some excerpts from the release:

A new report released today by Save the Children UK shows that children living in conflict-affected countries fear to report sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeeping troops and humanitarian aid workers.

Despite recent political commitments by governments and international organisations to tackle this problem, the report exposes the chronic under-reporting of such abuse, which leaves many children around the world suffering in silence. ...

Save the Children UK's research in Ivory Coast, Southern Sudan and Haiti shows that children as young as six are being abused by adults working for the international community. The children interviewed highlighted many different types of abuse, including trading food for sex, rape, child prostitution, pornography, indecent sexual assault and trafficking of children for sex.

"People don't report it because they are worried that the agency will stop working here, and we need them", explained a teenage boy in Southern Sudan....

The report reveals that the perpetrators of sexual abuse of children can be found in every type of humanitarian, peace and security organisation, at every grade of staff, and among both locally recruited and international staff.

For its part, the UN (shown here, looking the other way) said it "welcomed" the report ... as it has welcomed numerous reports in the past, dutifully commissioning studies and investigations, all of which have been beautifully bound and carefully set on shelves, but all of which have failed to stop the rapes. Claudia Rosette gets it right:

Oh, great. The UN can add this report to its research collection of previous reports on UN peacekeeper rape in Liberia and Sierra Leone and the Congo and so forth; and we can look forward to more UN statements on the issue, such as Kofi Annan’s “zero tolerance” policy of 2005, or his zero-zero tolerance policy of 2006 (when he “strengthened” the zero tolerance of 2005), and Assistant-Secretary-General Jane Holl Lute’s zero-zero-zero “zero tolerance” promises of 2007 …

Here are the 18 stories I've written previously on this topic. Outside of the blogsophere, good luck finding this level of reporting on the Peacekeeper rape crisis.

Imagine, if you will, the press coverage there would be if the abusers at Abu Ghraib kept coming back year after year, with ever more horrific abuse of the prisoners in their care. Even though Abu Ghraib is full of hardened terrorist fighters, not innocent under-age children, the press would be covering it in dozens of front-page stories.

But you don't see that. You won't see that. This latest report will slip beneath they tide of type because the media has more important things to do than protecting children from UN Peacekeepers. Yes, it's a full-time job denigrating America -- who has time for anything else?

Let Them Eat (Low-Carbon) Cake!

In yesterday's UN press briefing, the word "food" appeared twelve times, in keeping with the launch of a UN initiative against a growing "food crisis" -- real? made up? who knows? It's the UN, after all.

Marie Okabe, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General, mentioned food crisis issuesin her comments , including specific references to Haiti and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, others in the UN press office cranked out a news release on Ban Ki-moon's big food initiative.

4 April 2008 – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today called for both immediate and long-term measures to tackle the growing global food crisis, warning that it could not only push millions of people deeper into poverty but also have larger political and security implications.

“The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions,” he told a joint meeting in New York of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

The release provides no statistical verification of the crisis, nor, for that matter, does it include any proof that all the billions we've spent on prior UN food crisis appeals have resulted in anything but short-term benefits.

("Short-term benefits" translates in part as "lives saved," so I'm all for them. But I'm also for the UN getting out of its "give us money for this crisis, and get ready to give us money for that crisis" mode of operating. If it would come out firmly and decisively for democracy and free markets, it would do more to increase food production than anything else it could do ... but as long as despots rule the General Assembly, that's not going to happen.)

But let's say there is a big new food crisis. If that's true, then it's undeniable that the push for less energy-efficient biofuels over good ol' petro-fuels is a big part of the problem. And it's equally true that the elitist snobs of the EU could care less if their feel-good Warmie attitudes result in hungry people in locales less fortunate than Europe.

BRUSSELS (AFP) - The EU Commission on Monday rejected claims that producing biofuels is a "crime against humanity" that threatens food supplies, and vowed to stick to its goals as part of a climate change package.

"There is no question for now of suspending the target fixed for biofuels," said Barbara Helfferich, spokeswoman for EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.

"You can't change a political objective without risking a debate on all the other objectives," which could see the EU landmark climate change and energy package disintegrate, an EU official said.

Their comments came amid growing unease over the planting of biofuel crops as food prices rocket and riots against poverty and hunger multiply worldwide.

You've got that right. On balance, the EU would rather have non-Europeans go hungry than have to open the debate on Europe's global warming package. Having to figure out whether to keep their goal of 10% biofuel reliance by 2020 is just too big a headache; let the Haitians, Africans and Afghans eat cake.

It's not like the EU bureau-czars made their decision in a vacuum:

The European Environment Agency, advisors to the European Commission, on Friday recommended that the EU suspend its 10 percent biofuels target.

It argued that the target would require large amounts of additional imports of biofuels leading to the accelerated destruction of rain forests. The agency also questioned the environmental benefits of biofuels.

Also in a recent report the World Bank said bluntly "biofuel production has pushed up feedstock prices".

Meanhwile Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, head of Nestle, the world's biggest food and beverage company, last month argued that "to grant enormous subsidies for biofuel production is morally unacceptable and irresponsible".

"There will be nothing left to eat," he added.

Why listen to your advisors, leading financiers or captains of the food industry? The EU is predicated on the belief that bureaucrats are better suited to run the world than real people, and the bureaucrats have determined that they don't want to re-open the EU's global warming program for debate.

So be it. They can offset their stupidity by giving money to a number of stupid UN food programs, thereby making everything all better.

Remember, remember, remember: Clinton and Obama want America to be more like Europe.

When Islamists Try To Rule

Does anyone remember happy days in Somalia? Didn't think so.

There was a brief moment of hope in December 2006 when Ethiopian forces, backed by US air power, drove out the Islamists, but this is an enemy that doesn't go away when driven out. It's a cockroach that needs to be squashed flat to keep it from coming back.

The Union of Islamist Courts has been coming back, as witnessed yesterday when the UIC raided the town of Jowhar, held it briefly until they could free UIC prisoners (read: terrorists) held there, and withdrew, leaving 5 soldiers and 2 civilians dead.

In their drive to push Somalia into a totalitarian Islamist state, the Islamists have cared little about the humanitarian consequences, and it shows, according to BBC:

"It continues to deteriorate by the day," the UN refugee agency's Guillermo Bettocchi told the BBC.

"There are no signs of improvement on the ground, and those who are suffering the brunt of the conflict are the civilians, who are being either killed or displaced, and are in the middle of suffering that is unacceptable," he said.

"In terms of child malnutrition, access to education, lack of access to clean water and sanitation facilities, indeed the situation in Somalia is the worst in the world... to be a child in Somalia today is something that means lots of suffering and a grim future."

Record food prices, hyper-inflation and drought in many parts of the country have made the situation worse and seasonal rains due to start soon are also predicted to fail.

"For too long, the needs of ordinary Somalis have been forgotten," the agencies said.

Our commitments in Iraq make our intervention in Somalia difficult, but the real stumbling block to use involvement is Clinton's disastrous handling of Somalia, in which he timidly fled the country at the first sign of difficulty (and in the process doomed our fallen fighting men there to dying for nothing). No route remains for re-entry.

Now the UN is considering stepping in, as a proposal to send 27,000 peacekeepers there (Mothers, guard your children!). Wishful thinking, probably. The African Union has only been able to muster 2,400 troops after promising 8,000, and given the dismal progress of peacekeepers in other African war venues, approval and recruitment will be a tough slog.

Of course, the Islamists could turn the whole thing around by simply embracing other's opinions and allowing some sort of representative government to be formed.

When pigs fly ... to the mosque.

A Movie Star With A Brain

Do read Angelina Jolie's piece, Staying to Help in Iraq, in WaPo today. You would think that a high-profile star who's tied at the hip to the UN would return from Iraq with a scathing report on the US effort, but think again.

Her subject, as you probably know, is displaced Iraqis in Syria and Jordan, so she has plenty of oportunity to blame the US for their condition, but she does not. She recounts pledges she got out of Gen. David Petraeus and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and makes a plea for increased funding for the UN's humanitarian efforts with the refugees.

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and thought it was about to at the end, when I read:

As for the question of whether the surge is working ...

But she went on:

... I can only state what I witnessed: U.N. staff and those of non-governmental
organizations seem to feel they have the right set of circumstances to attempt
to scale up their programs. And when I asked the troops if they wanted to go
home as soon as possible, they said that they miss home but feel invested in
Iraq. They have lost many friends and want to be a part of the humanitarian
progress they now feel is possible.

Jolie's language is careful and deliberate. Surrounded as she is by those who blithely say "withdraw now" as if there would be nothing but positive consequences of such action, she looks at the refugee situation and says:

Can the United States afford to gamble that 4 million or more poor and displaced
people, in the heart of Middle East, won't explode in violent desperation,
sending the whole region into further disorder?

This is a realistic acknowledgement of the fact that poverty, lack of opportunity and disenfranchisement are the engines that feed jihad -- a simple notion for most of us, but one lost on the Hollywood Leftist Elite.

Jolie has removed herself from that crowd and proved herself not just a figurehead (despite, as we see, having both quite a figure and quite a head) ambassador, but a smart and powerful spokesperson.

Do you think the GOP could talk her into running for Prez in 2012?

Google Bans UN Critic

Google -- which happily and profitably brings us porn, violence, pasteurized news from China and a wealth of other World Wide Wackiness -- has decided to off (electronically at least) a vocal critic of UN corruption.

The world's largest Internet conglomerate has decided to drop Matthew Lee's Inner City Press from Google News, citing -- apparently -- "user complaints." According to Fox News, Lee received this email from Google on Feb. 8:

"We periodically review news sources, particularly following user complaints, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users. When we reviewed your site we've found that we can no longer include it in Google News."

He was cut on Feb. 13. Lee has been tenacious in his reporting on corruption at the UN, especially at the UN Development Programme, UNDP, which is also scrutinized regularly by Claudia Rosette and and is the only focus of a dedicated blog, UNDP Watch -- indicative of juicy scandal aplenty.

Lee explains the cut:

Google, after being publicly questioned at the UN about not signing on to the human rights and anti-censorship principles of the Global Compact, responded not by joining the Compact and foreswearing from censorship but by moving to de-list from its Google News service the media organization which raised the question. More than two years after Inner City Press was included into Google News, in a February 8 message referring to the receipt of a complaint, Google said it would be removing Inner City Press from the news database. (Read the balance of his comprehensive post here.)

Fox describes Lee's writing as "clunky," his methods as "unorthodox (and often highly annoying)" and his news judgment as "sometimes more than a little off the mark," but admits that "Lee has hit his share of bull's-eyes and became an outlet for whistleblowers inside the U.N."

Indeed, he appears to have a solid grip on the UN's jugular as the lead stories on the site indicate today:

• Lockheed Rep on US Committee for UNDP, like UNICEF Germany, Raises Conflict Questions
  
  
• On Kosovo, UN's Ban Takes Only Two Questions, then Rostrum Taken from Serbia Too
  
  
• Woman's Death on UN Lawn Leaves Questions Unanswered, Photos Unexplained

Lee is trying to find out the source of the complaint against him (good luck!), and Google promises ICP will be back with Google News later this month -- but if that's so, why was it cut in the first place? It either "offers a high quality experience" for Google users, or it doesn't.

A few words come to mind: Bullying, shot across the bow, warning. Oh, and unseemly, corrupt and corporate patsy to the UN, since Google has a contract with UNDP for mapping the UN's anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals.

hat-tip: Jim

Iraq Safety Test

How can you tell Iraq is getting safer? Just apply the "quaking diplomat" test:

AMMAN, Feb 18 (Reuters) - The U.N. refugee agency said on Monday it would send its first representative to Baghdad since 2003, when 22 people including U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello died in a bomb attack on its office in the Iraqi capital.

Antonio Guterres, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said the move was part of a "stepped up mobilisation of efforts" to allow the U.N. aid agency to better help Iraqis, either displaced or fleeing the country.

"Our representative now sits in Amman and I have decided to move this post immediately into Baghdad. I will be presenting in the next two weeks a new name to the Iraqi authorities (for their agreement)," Guterres said.

If the UN will go there, then not only must it be safe ... there must be pretty good restaurants and caterers, too.

This just might be the best proof to date that General Petraeus' surge strategy is working, and al-Qaeda and related Islamofascists are on the run in Mesopotamia.

Sunday Scan

A Curious Endorsement

Ed Morrisey, skipper of Captain's Quarters has decided who he's going to vote for and has published an endorsement. It's Mitt Romney, and his thinking is much like mine, as I approach finality in my decision-making. (I need to decide by California's Feb. 5 primary unless I vote absentee.)

No one's the perfect conservative, but Mitt'll do. Check. Executive leadership and experience. Check. The guy we want if the economy turns south. Check.

What is telling, very, very telling, is that the war against Islamic jihadists and Iraq is not mentioned once in Morissey's endorsement. How could such a thoroughly exceptional an observer of our times make so monumental oversight?

In part, it's because when looking at McCain, Romney and Giuliani, there's strong confidence that any of them have the ability to faithfully and forcefully guide the mission.

And in part, it's because we have a general and senior staff in the field who are getting the job done, taking the pressure off the president.

And that is also, perhaps, the reason for Morrissey's oversight. With the war going well, one of the keenest observers of the war on terror simply forgot to mention it.

A Kennedy Endorsement

There's news today that Ted Kennedy has come out of his fog long enough to endorse Obama tomorrow. Could I care any less? Checking .... No.

But who can't take note, as I wrote last night, that Caroline Kennedy is endorsing Obama? That is golden; that has value; that has magic.

I still think of Caroline Kennedy as a little girl in a pretty coat standing by her mother as little John saluted. That image in our mind gives her a very special place in the American consciousness, as does how she has lived her life since: quietly and pretty darn normally.

So when this 40-year-old mother of teens who works in New York City's' schools writes of Obama in today's NYT ...

There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility. ...

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

... it is a powerful thing for Obama, indeed.

I was Boy Scout age when Kennedy was killed, so I admit that some youthful romanticism is affecting my thinking. That said, I still think this endorsement is huge, and may have just iced Obama as the Dem nominee.

And we were so hoping to be able to take on Hillary.

Throwing Stones At Greenhouses

In case your copy of the journal from the Institut für Mathematische Physik at Germany's Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina has been sitting around unread since last summer, here's what you're missing:

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896 and is still supported in global climatology essentially describes a fictitious mechanism in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation. In this paper the popular conjecture is analyzed and the underlying physical principles are clarified. By showing that (a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 °C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

A hat-tip Bubba who led me to the post by Van Helsing at Moonbattery, who comments, "Someone get this to Al Gore quickly, before he makes a fool of himself. Whoops, too late."

Russia Pumped Oil-for-Food For Bucks

Just when you thought the Oil-for-Food scandal was past its last outrage, just when you thought Putin's Russia couldn't get any more troubling, there's always another story that shouts, "You ain't seen nuthin' yet!" And this new one, from Sky News, is a doozey:

A former Russian spymaster has said his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500m (£252m) from the UN's oil-for-food programme in Iraq.

Sergei Tretyakov says he helped Saddam Hussein's regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the programme.

The scheme was set up to ease the suffering of ordinary Iraqis under UN sanctions imposed after Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

It allowed Iraq to sell oil provided the bulk of the proceeds were used to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian goods and to pay war reparations.

However, a UN investigation has accused 2,200 companies from 40 countries of cheating the scheme out of some $1.8bn (about £908m).

The former spy, who defected to the US in 2000 as a double agent, said this allowed Russia to skim profits on the scheme.

Of the UN, Tretyakov says,

"It's an international spy nest. Inside the UN, we were fishing for knowledgeable diplomats who could give us first of all anti-American information."

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing: Why do we pay to keep the UN alive when it's used against us, when it steals from and rapes those it is supposed to help, and when it's designed primarily to benefit our enemies?

Putin's New Man At NATO

And while we're on the subject of Putinville, let's pause to consider Vlad the Tiny's new appointment to represent Russia at NATO, Dmitri Rogozin. It's an appointment, says Andreus Umland at History News Network, that should be seen as "a slap in the face of the West."

The new NATO envoy is an infamous nationalist with manifold links to racist and antisemitic circles throughout his political career. From the beginning of his rise, Rogozin’s image has been that of a “protector” of ethnic Russians in and outside the Russian Federation, as well as of a rabidly anti-Western pan-Slavist. He was founder and co-founder of various nationalist groupings one of which openly demanded, among other things, to make homosexualism a criminal offense.

At a session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Rogozin made Europe responsible for the horrors of Soviet communism - in as far as Marxism was imported to Russia from the West.

Just Putin's type, eh?

Bans And Lifting Bans

Spiegel has a couple interesting stories today on bans -- one on a busybody secularist ban that forces a change in many folks' lifestyle, all to aggrandize the Nanny State, and one a ban that's being lifted in order to squelch secularism -- an action that makes me nervous.

First, from Germany, the nation that brought us stern bauhaus avant guarde denizens, always with a cigarette dangling, there's this:

Helmut Schmidt, former German chancellor, former minister of defense and co-publisher of the influential weekly newspaper Die Zeit, is being accused of breaking the law -- for violating Germany's new ban on smoking in public places.

Committed smokers Helmut Schmidt and his wife Loki -- aged a lung-cancer-defying 89 and 88, respectively -- are being investigated by Hamburg public prosecutors under suspicion of breaking the smoking ban and endangering public health, the mass-circulation daily Bild reported Friday. The complaint was brought by the Wiesbaden Non-Smokers Initiative, an anti-smoking organization based in the town of Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt.

If you're almost 90 and you want to light up, and you're the guest of honor at the event, shouldn't you be able to? Of course not!

The Nanny Staters saw in Schmidt a target to publicize campaign to control our lives, so he and Loki are now potentially common criminals, all in the name of people who know what's good for us (and not smoking is definitely good for us) telling us what to do.

Then, from Turkey, there's this:

Women at Turkish universities could soon show up in class wearing traditional Islamic head scarves, as the government moves towards lifting a ban on the practice.

Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has its root in an Islamist religious movement, reached an agreement with an opposition nationalist party on Thursday to cooperate on legislation to lift the two decade-old ban.

"Agreement has been reached ... the issue of the head scarf was evaluated in terms of rights and freedoms," read a joint statement released by the AKP and the opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). The two parties control enough seats in parliament to end the ban with a vote that could be held as early as next week.

A lift on the ban would anger Turkey's secular elite, who view the wearing of head scarves as a political statement aimed at undermining the nation's secular principles.

Anyone following Turkish politics could see this coming. Fundamentally (bad choice of words?), my response should be "good," because government shouldn't be setting dress codes for schools. If a Muslim girl wants to wear a scarf, then why shouldn't she be able to?

But things are never simple in Turkey, or with Islam. The ban is more like a social dike, keeping all the harsh and restrictive tenants of Islam from overtaking the university. It's a symbol that there's a place where free thought is still allowed -- even as banning the scarves is a symbol that there's a place where free thought is not allowed.

Big picture: Turkey is on its way to losing its important symbolic role as the world's foremost secular Islamic nation. I fear that once scarves are allowed on campus, any girl trying to go to school without one will become the victim of Islamist thugs, and Islam will grab the nation's free spirit in its chilling, vice-like grip.

Sunday Scan

Cloverfield, Nevada Style

The film Cloverfield has used viral internet marketing to become quite a sensation -- but at its heart, it's just a Godzilla movie, with a big mean monster wreaking havoc in New York.

And yesterday, a little, pale monster wreaked havoc in the glitter gulches and dusty desert towns of Nevada. And today, just as I predicted, we are suffering through the media coverage of it:

Boy, oh, boy! Hidden behind all the hoopla, headlines and the Nevada caucus victories of Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton is one little-noticed but stunning political development and number:

Ron Paul, the one-time Libertarian candidate and 10-term Republican congressman from Texas, was in second place. That's right, Second Place. The 72-year-old ob-gyn who's always on the end of the line at GOP debates or barred altogether, was running ahead of John McCain, Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, in fact, ahead of....

all other Republicans except Romney, who easily captured his second state in a week after Michigan.

Uh-huh. But let's keep our heads on straight. It was Romney with 51% of the votes (all 22,659 of them!) followed by the pale imp with 14%, attracting a whopping 6,087 to his cause -- a full 436 more people than John McCain attracted.

Photo clipped from: Dino's Forum

Marking History

They laid an historical marker outside a house in Port Arthur, Texas today. Here's the story.

In that house there once lived a little four-year-old girl who grew up to live far too short a life as Summer of Love diva Janis Joplin. There was another house she lived in earlier, but it's gone now, so this is her official childhood home.

The marker was placed today as opposed to any other day you might think of because it marks what would have been Joplin's 65th birthday.

Whoa, am I feeling old.

I was 17, I think, when I first put Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills on my little stereo and heard her gravely voice. And I'm still 17 in my head when I think about her ... how could she have been born 65 years ago?

New Euro-Islamist Threat

This is not something I'm quite prepared to think about:

The source implied that the [Spanish intelligence agency] CNI had specific information on itinerant terrorists heading for the UK, France and Portugal.

The squib, from a London Times article, troubles me not just because Incredible Daughter #1 is in Paris, but because I've never seen the words "itinerant terrorists" before. We have in America a tradition of itinerant preachers and judges; from sick Islam, we get itinerant terrorists, travelling from place to place, killing innocents in the name of Allah.

Terrorists Get 72 Raisins?

Amidst a lengthy and interesting story at Act! For America covering the suppression of ancient Islamic texts in Germany, so anyone interested in a revisionist view of the Koran cannot get access to them, was this interesting tidbit:

According to an Islam tradition, Muslim martyrs will go to paradise and marry 72 black-eyed virgins. But some Koran scholars point to a less sexy paradise. While beautifully written, Islamic texts are often obscure. The Arabic language was born as a written language with the Koran, and growing evidence suggests that many of the words were Syriac or Aramaic.

Specifically, the Koran says martyrs going to heaven will get "hur," and the word was taken by early commentators to mean "virgins," hence those 72 concubines. But in Aramaic, hur actually meant "white" and was commonly used to specifically mean "white grapes."

It's easy to crack a joke over this, but if there's any question at all about the nature of so critical a text -- a text that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents a year -- why does the keeper of the archive, Angelika Neuwirth, protect them from anyone other than pro-Islamist researchers?

For more on this fascinating story, see Andrew Higgins' WSJ article, The Lost Archives.

hat-tip: What Bubba Knows

Pulling The Plug On Terrorists

Just wait 'til some Palestinians start crying about having to eat cold falafels in the dark -- oh, how the anti-Israeli press will rain an ink-storm on Israel. Here's the story, from Sky News:

Large parts of the Gaza Strip have been plunged into darkness after its main power plant shut down.

It comes after Israel blocked fuel supplies to the Hamas-run territory and closed its borders.

Israel says the blocklade is a response to rocket attacks by militants.

It claims 230 rockets have been fired at border towns in a new wave of aggression.

"It claims?" I don't suppose we can expect the media to actually report that rockets are falling like locusts on Israel.

Already, the Palestinian PR machine is busy maximizing the impact:

"The catastrophe will affect hospitals, medical clinics, water wells, houses, factories, all aspects of life."

Oh, boo hoo. First, stop sending rockets into civilian neighborhoods, especially when there's no war going on. And second, get your act together, Palestine. You've had 60 years to provide for yourself, but here you are, dependent on Israel for your power ... with fuel purchased by Europe.

How these people garner so much sympathy and so little criticism amazes me.

Human-Animal Embryo Research

Two research companies in England have been granted licenses to mix up human and animal embryos, reports Science Daily.

One is going to take the genetic matter out of cow embryos and mix 'em up with human embryos, in a quest for better human stem cells.

The scientists would attempt to extract stem cells from the blastocyst after six days. Stem cells are building blocks that can grow into any type of tissue such as liver, heart and muscle cells. The quality and the viability of stem cells would then be checked to see if nuclear transfer technique has worked. The scientists would also be observing the way that the cells are reprogrammed after fusion to see if there are useful processes they could replicate in the laboratory. The embryo would have to be destroyed at 14 days old in accordance with the licence.

I have to admit, this all goes way, way over my head. I understand that there's nothing about this license that will allow any intermingled animal/human embryonic material to (1) live or (2) get into humans, but the research is taking the science to another new level, and after that will be another new level.

At some time, a mistake will occur or a license will be granted that shouldn't have been. That's just the way it goes with us inquisitive humans. All this going too far will make a great novel ... and it's one work of nonfiction I hope I never read.

George Clooney, Messenger Of Peace

Position to fill: International shell game operator needs good looking individual with real swoon-power, a hard-left orientation and a history of supporting the wrong side in global causes to cover up organization's myriad global failures.

Position filled! The Rosett Report reports:

As Hollywood buffs and UN money-raisers already know, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has just named actor George Clooney as the UN’s newest Messenger of Peace, with a “special focus on UN peacekeeping.” Clooney, currently visiting Sudan, is expected to “receive his designation” Jan. 31st at UN headquarters in New York.

Oh, great. We get to see even more of Clooney opening his mouth and letting his politics spew out. Rosett's not expecting much good of it to come, either:

This would all be great if UN peacekeeping actually produced peace. But the illusion that the UN is a grand force for good in this world deserves to be catalogued somewhere between World’s Most Amazing Scams and Believe It-Or-Not Best-in-Special-Effects. The reality of today’s UN is more like a cross between “Animal House” (the movie, with John Belushi) and “Animal Farm” (the book, by George Orwell).

Her post is a gem. Do read the whole thing.

Soviet Watch: Russia Threatens Kosovo

Vladamir Putin is still the president of Russia, and Russia remains the world's biggest bully:

Russia warned Kosovo's leaders Wednesday that if they declare independence the territory will never become a member of the United Nations or other international political institutions.

Kosovo, which is run by the UN (what a nightmare that must be!), is hoping to declare its independence from Serbia in February -- but Russia intends to veto such a move. America and England support Kosovo's independence, of course, but it really gets Moscow's goat:

"Going down the way of unilateral moves, Kosovo is not going to join the ranks of fully recognized members of the international community," [Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin] said. "It may get some recognitions, regrettably ... but it's not going to come to this building as full-fledged member of the international community. It's not going to be able to join other political international institutions."

Maybe this photo of Kosovo students demonstrating for independence has something to do with Russia's pro-Serbia, anti-freedom stand:

Could it be that Russia is afraid of too much independence in the Balkan states?

100 Scientists Attack IPCC, Bali

The Warmie bureaucrats are boarding their jetliners by the hundreds and flying home frm Bali, their carbon footprints trailing behind them like so many size 14s.

Behind them, mounds of paper spell out the paths the UN negotiations will follow as they lead to a replacement for the soon-defunct Kyoto treaty. Basically the US won, knocking off an EU proposal to hit specific greenhouse gas reductions by 25 to 40 percent by 2040.

In the global media's haste to cover these shenanigans left largely uncovered was a letter from 100 scientists to UN Sec Gen Ban Ki-Moon that calls the UN's effort to prevent global climate change "futile" and "a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems."

The letter accuses UN policy-makers of buy-in to a political, not a scientific, thesis:

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by ­government ­representatives. The great ­majority of IPCC contributors and ­reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts. (emphasis added)

Signatories make these points about these fallacies of the current UN global warming group-think:

• Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.
  

• The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.
  

• Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.

Does it matter to the charging lemmings at the UN that the debate on global warming is definitely not over? Definitely not! Perhaps they see in global warming a threat to the world, perhaps not. But they definitely know a grand bureaucratic reason for being when they see one, with regulations and confabs and reports galore, easily enough to sustain even the youngest of them through the rest of their careers.

hat-tip: Greenie Watch

Sunday Scan

Tell Me If This Hurts

This hurts, Doc. From an op/ed on health care solutions in today's OC Register:

Many more doctors and nurses have been hired [by Britain's National Health Service]. Unfortunately, their productivity has declined, as the number of patients seen by each physician has declined over the same period.

Britain has imported more than 20,000 physicians from Third World countries in the past three years, as after 60 years of experience the NHS has failed to attract and retain British physicians. Most of the imports are undoubtedly well-qualified, even those few who blow up cars and airports in their spare time.

The author, Richard Ralston, a health care advocate, notes that the NHS is a model for many who would reform America's health system along Socialist lines. Cou-Hillary!-gh. He highlights for us some elements of the model:

• No knee replacements for women weighing more than 180 pounds and men more than 218 pounds.
• Heart bypasses denied for smokers.
• "Patients 80 years and older have been denied treatment for stroke because, after all, what is the point?"
• No longer changing sheets between patients -- just turning the sheets over, instead. Staph, anyone?
  
• British patients taking "surgery vacations" so they don't need to wait for surgery at home.
  

Feeling Insignificant

An anonymous LAT editorial took a swipe at those who would stand up to the secularization of American culture. Writing on the SCOTUS decision not to take up the forced removal of a cross from LA County's seal, the ever-tolerant LAT scathed:

The county offered up a new cross-less seal that also banished the Roman goddess Pomona (we can't show favoritism to pagans, you know) and replaced oil derricks with a cross-less view of Mission San Gabriel. People went berserk. The deaths of inmates in county custody, or patients at county hospitals, or children in county-supervised foster homes attract only a fraction of the invective that the change to the ridiculously insignificant county seal brought.

No criticism was directed the ACLU's way for bringing the lawsuit, even though if the seal were "ridiculously insignificant," criticism is certainly due. Instead, the LAT reduces to "ridiculously insignificant"' the concerns of those of us who see a very real threat in the ACLU's efforts to remove God from the public square, and paints us as a "berserk" bunch who would put this trifling concerns above whatever issue du jour concerns the godless heathens editorial writers at the Lost Angels Times.

The Trouble With Mormons

Now that the NYT has stopped forcing us to pay to get angry at Maureen Doud, I'm reading her again. Good thing. She's clarified what's so wrong about Mormons. Here's what she wrote today about the Mormon temple near her hometown:

It did seem like an alien world, an impression that was enhanced when we took a tour of the temple and saw all the women wearing white outfits and light pink lipstick.

Ooooh. There goes my vote for Mitt.

To ice her case, Doud turns to Jon Krakauer, who's Under the Banner of Heaven was not a kind portrayal of Mormon history. He delivers for her this line:

“J.F.K.’s speech was to reassure Americans that he wasn’t a religious fanatic,. Mitt’s was to tell evangelical Christians, ‘I’m a religious fanatic just like you.’”

Doud then jumps on the "religious fanatic" theme:

The world is globalizing, nuclear weapons are proliferating, the Middle East is seething, but Republicans are still arguing the Scopes trial.

Sure we are, Mo. Just a bunch of fanatics stuck in a time warp; not that different from the Mohammed Teddy bunch in Sudan.

Ignorance and intolerance has found a Petri dish it loves to fester in at the NYT.

Edwards Answers Oprah

Yeah, this should work:

Democrat John Edwards announced Sunday that actors Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins will join him on Iowa's frigid campaign trail.

Edwards' announcement came as media mogul Oprah Winfrey stumped here for Barack Obama during the weekend ...

Just last week, Edwards was joined on the stump by actresses Jean Smart, who plays the first lady on the popular FOX series "24," and Madeleine Stowe, who has appeared in such films as "The Last of the Mohicans" and "Twelve Monkeys." Last month, performers Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne campaigned in Iowa for Edwards.

Bacon, Robbins, Smart,Stowe, Raitt and Browne between them have the drawing power of Oprah's little toenail.

And perhaps someone should remind Pretty Boy that the entertainment industry has done oh so much for politics, proving its worth with Al Gore, then re-proving it with John Kerry.

Academics (Snark!) For Ron Paul

Twenty-one, count 'em, twenty-one academics have signed an Academics for Ron Paul statement as of this writing.

These are an illustrious bunch. Netz Katz. Ivan Pongracic, Jr. Ralph Raico. Aeon J. Skoble. Household names all.

And darn good grammarians, too:

Paul is the only presidential candidate with a proven record of defending academic freedom across-the-board.

That would be "defending academic freedom across the board."

Pass the Methane, Mom!

Gee willikers, there's less then 10 years left to deal with global warming!

Does that mean -- puleeeze, God! -- that by 2018 we won't have to listen to this tripe anymore?

Probably not, but it's a good enough intro to this story:

A new species of bacteria discovered living in one of the most extreme environments on Earth could yield a tool in the fight against global warming.

University of Calgary biology professor Peter Dunfield and colleagues discovered a methane-eating microorganism in the geothermal field known as Hell's Gate, near the city of Rotorua in New Zealand. It is the hardiest "methanotrophic" bacterium yet discovered, which makes it a likely candidate for use in reducing methane gas emissions from landfills, mines, industrial wastes, geothermal power plants and other sources.

"This is a really tough methane-consuming organism that lives in a much more acidic environment than any we've seen before," said Dunfield, who is the lead author of the paper. "It belongs to a rather mysterious family of bacteria (called Verrucomicrobia) that are found everywhere but are very difficult to grow in the laboratory."

Methanotrophic bacteria consume methane as their only source of energy and convert it to carbon dioxide during their digestive process. Methane (commonly known as natural gas) is 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and is largely produced by decaying organic matter.

Set if we let these little guys go free in methane-rich environments like landfills, they'll convert the methane into CO2, screwing up every single global warming model the Warmies have created.

Ironic, isn't it, that all these big believers in anthropomorphic global warming believe we've screwed everything up, but can't imagine that we can actually fix things. So they don't factor human ingenuity into their models, just assuming we'll go roasting off to oblivion, like so many overheated lemmings.

U.N. Solves Global Warming!

Not content to deal with pursue practical approaches like methane-eating microbes, the UN jet-setted 8,000 Warmie bureaucrats to Bali to emit hot air endlessly.

The UN is big on symbolism, and they've done a magnificent job of being symbolic in Bali:

Further rigors, according to a report from China’s Xinhua News Agency, include the demand that all motor vehicles entering the beach area surrounding Bali’s Nusa Dua conference complex run on biofuels.

Claudia Rosette harumphs:

That sounds problematic, if the Xinhua report is accurate that only a few gas stations in Indonesia routinely sell biofuels, and they not on Bali, but are clustered around the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, on the island of Java, more than 500 miles from the UN conference.

The UN is nothing if not a good source of comedy.

The Gyers Are Gimbling In The Waves

Lewis Carroll might have thought all his Jabberwocky words were made up, but gyre has a meaning: a giant circular ocean current. Now scientists are finding possible answers to ocean level increases in the gyres in the waves:

Now, evidence gathered by Laury Miller of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Bruce Douglas, of the Laboratory for Coastal Research in Florida, US, suggests that this [recent ocean level] change may be partly explained by the pressure-related movement of gigantic amounts of water. The researchers studied atmospheric pressure records for the late 19th and 20th centuries and used these records to try and work out how rising sea levels may be been affected by shifting ocean peaks, known as "gyres", in the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. These ocean peaks are produced by water swirling in a circular direction around the ocean as a result of atmospheric pressure, wind and heating. The movement, combined with the turning of the Earth, causes water at the centre of the circle to rise upwards, forming a peak, or gyre. The North Atlantic and Pacific gyres are each about 1 metre taller at the centre than at the edge.

But atmospheric records suggest that the gyres in both oceans sank during the 1920s, releasing water held in the centre and allowing it to flow towards the coasts. This would explain the sudden change in the rate at which sea levels changed at this time, measured by coastal instruments. Since tidal gauges only measure sea-levels along the coasts, they could not have detected the drop in levels towards the oceans' centres.

If the researchers are correct, this means the overall sea levels were in fact rising more slowly at the time. This, in turn, implies that the rise of sea levels accelerated faster over the 20th century than previously thought. However as measurements have only recently become sufficiently accurate, it may take some time before the full picture will be known. (source)

Against this evidence against anthropogenic global warming, we have this today from Bankie:

"Only urgent, global action will do," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, calling on the United States and China — the world's two biggest polluters — to do more to slow global climate change.

"World's biggest polluters" can alternatively be defined as "world's biggest producers of goods the world wants and needs," something Bankie fails to deal with in his calls for us to dial back our industry.

Before we blame ourselves for every single change in our ever-changing planet's weather and shut down the industries that bring us better lives, we'd best slow down and become more aware -- without anti-Industrial bias -- of what's going on.

hat-tip: Greenie Watch

Bankie's New Show: Lies On Ice

Ban Ki-Moon will go to the ends of the early, quite literally, to mislead the climate change lemmings.

Ban Ki-moon today became the first United Nations Secretary-General to make an official visit to Antarctica as he travelled to the frozen continent to see first-hand the effects of climate change on its melting glaciers. (source)

Is Bankie deliberately misleading, or is he just not privy to what all serious aficionados of global warming hysteria know: That the ice pack of Antarctica is growing, and that the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts far up to the north into warmer ocean waters, is the only part of the continent experiencing glacier melt?

No problemo, my warm today, chilly tomorrow friend -- the SecGen's job pretty much is full-time deception. The U.N. is accomplishing something. There's no corruption here, folks. The Human Rights Council is made up of humanitarians. Antarctica is melting.