Australia Poised to Reject Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax!

The Wall Street Journal today has the latest state of the Waxman-Markey Bill which threatens to be an example of dogma suppressing both science and economics in the Democrat hysteria to "CAP AND TAX" the income of the American citizen for merely emitting carbon dioxide, an act committed "every breath you take," according to the famous Police lyric by Sting.

And a "Sting" is a great definition of the preposterous hodge-podge of flimflammery the Waxman-Markey Bill piles onto a pliant American Sheeple trusting in Obama's "Hope and Change" pixie dust. But a more serious country, unlike the sad Dominion to the north of the USA, is Australia, which retains a non-frivolous attitude toward the latest fashionable excesses in science fiction such as Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Ian Plimer is Australia's most respected "Earth Scientist" and the publication of his new book, Heaven and Earth, so effectively demolishes the superficial computer modelling and ridiculous Gore-bot hyperbolic hysteria that have characterized much of the AGW debate around the planet that Australia's Senate is poised to reject some "Cap-and-Trade" legislation along the lines of the Waxman gibberish now making its way through the legislative charades overseen & supervised by the Twin Terrors, Pelosi and Dingy Harry Reid. Here's a sum-up of our Australian betters on this issue:

Andrew Bolt, who has been leading the charge against the global warming hysteria for years, notes that Fielding's investigation "could blow apart the great global warming scare."

Fielding went to the US to assess the American evidence for global warming at close quarters. As Melbourne's Age reported on June 4:

Senator Fielding said he was impressed by some of the data presented at the [US Heartland Institute's] climate change skeptics' conference: namely that, although carbon emissions had increased in the last 10 years, global temperature had not.

He said scientists at the conference had advanced other explanations, such as the relationship between solar activity and solar energy hitting the Earth to explain climate change.

Fielding has issued a challenge to the Obama White House to rebut the data. It will be a novel experience for them, as Fielding is an engineer and has an Australian's disregard for self-important government officials.[edit. note: Sadly, most Americans are now afflicted by the Sheeple gene and bow like Obama to self-important apodictic anti-American dictators, be they foreign heads-of-state or in House & Senate Committees] Here is how The Age described his challenge:

Senator Fielding emailed graphs that claim the globe had not warmed for a decade to Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, after a meeting on Thursday…. Senator Fielding said he found that Dr. Aldy and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science.

Telling an Australian you're not interested in the legitimacy of your position is a red rag to a bull. So here is what Fielding concluded:

Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive…. As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.

What Fielding's questioning represents is just the tip of the kangaroo's tail. He speaks for a growing number of Australians who will no longer take green propaganda on trust.

And that's what makes Plimer so influential—not just his credibility as a scientist, but the righteous certainty with which he dismisses man-made global warming as an unscientific dogma. He writes: "The Emissions Trading Scheme legislation poises Australia to make the biggest economic decision in its history"—Australia generates 80% of its electricity from coal, which would essentially be outlawed—"yet there has been no scientific due diligence. There has never been a climate change debate in Australia. Only dogma."

Plimer is not a "skeptic," a term which would imply that he merely has a few doubts about the global warming claims. Instead, he rejects the whole myth outright, and this seems to have emboldened and liberated a great many Australians who were already chafing under global warming conformity. As Plimer puts it:

[T]here are a large number of punters [Australian for "customers" or "gamblers"—in this case, skeptical customers who may or may not buy what the government's selling] who object to being treated dismissively as stupid, who do not like being told what to think, who value independence, who resile from personal attacks and have life experiences very different from the urban environmental atheists attempting to impose a new fundamentalist religion. Green politics have taken the place of failed socialism and Western Christianity and impose fear, guilt, penance, and indulgences onto a society with little scientific literacy.

Australia is not that different from America. If a shift in public opinion against the global warming dogma can happen on one side of the earth, it can happen on the other—especially when the US edition of Plimer's book, scheduled for July 1, hits the stands.

His role, Plimer says, is to show "that the emperor has no clothes." After three decades of relentless global warming propaganda, it's about time.

[emphases above my own]
Plimer's book comes out on my birthday and I will move heaven and earth to get my hands on it for a birthday present.

Hopefully, American religious dogmatism on Climate Hysteria will be outed as a complete hoax, along with other Obama con-games, such as his Health Care hyperbolic hysteria.

One can hope and pray, and only wish.....

The Revolution Shall Be Tweeted. Nobel Prize for Twitter Founders?

A GWB Dep NatSec Advisor named Pfeiffe suggests that Twitter technology is bypassing the isolated fossil government in Tehran and reporting on the suppression of protests of the rigged elections. The Iranian Revolution for the Easily Overwhelmed is a Twitter filter with updates every fifteen minutes or so. Iran.tweetmeme is another up-to-the-minute follow-up.

Yesterday I was on a radio talkshow talking to Todd Schnitt, who is very good on AGW & Iran & Energy in general. I mentioned that the phenomenon of Neda's murder in broad daylight has twitched the martyrdom gene in the Shi'ite DNA of Iran and that there will be three-day, seven-day, and forty-day commemorations of Neda's cowardly murder. If the script of the Iranian rev of '79 holds to narrative, the suppression of these mourning periods will spark new murders, which in turn will generate more martyrdom commemorations. It's a Shi'ite thing, and in '79 caused the downfall of the Shah over a year's period of asymmetrical punctuated equilibriums, as an economist or evolutionary scientist might put it.

Iran is sui generis to the nth degree and when Iran comes to a fork in the road, it takes it, in Yogi-talk. If a critical mass of the clerical elite decide that Khamenei and Ahmedinejad are worse than Rafsanjani/Khatami/Mousavi, then some serious change might occur, but not without the usual syncopation that Iranian politics always follows in its strange idiosyncratic way.

The one thing which might push the regime off its tottering throne is the application of much stronger UN and EU sanctions, but even these would be bypassed by Russian and Chinese rushing to pick up market share from petro-rich Iran. Remember that Marc Rich was prosecuted for trading with Iran by refining its oil offshore in Rumania, and most of Iran's gasoline is refined outside the country, with the corrupt "Religious Foundations" skimming off enormous profits which finance some elements of the Basiji and Revolutionary Guards. Because Iran has always been a trading nation, an effective boycott might do the trick. However, as Niall Ferguson notes in his book The Colossus, the UN has become a completely anarchic and ineffective organization. So unless the sanctions have some real bite, Iran will continue to develop a nuke, and the smoldering resentment of the cities will be offset by young Basiji zealots from the countryside---guided by cynical IRGC politically-connected goons like the one who was photographed on a motorbike who may have shot Neda. [See my earlier blog with this link.] And Iran will continue to lurch towards nuclear status and the Gulf Arabs will in turn be terrified and perhaps ask for American protection.

As it happens, some of her LA friends say that ironically, Neda and her father were stuck in Tehran's notoriously horrible traffic and got out of their stalled car to get some air, went to gape at the protesters, and Neda was arbitrarily shot from a coward on a motorbike, according to friends in LA. A YouTube of the purported killer taking out his pistol is up online.

Hope the links above help anyone seeking updates frequently on the anarchy in the streets of Tehran, Tabriz, and other major Iranian cities.

When Pictures are Worth a Million Words.

The LA Times has a photo gallery of Neda Agha Soltan, who had a lot of friends in the expat Iranian LA community and who aspired to be a tour guide as well as a musician.

A beautiful woman is transformed by death into something "rich and strange, those are pearls that were her eyes..."

For what it's worth, YouTube has a series of graphic cellphone images both of the poor young woman and a woman-hating creep on a motorcycle pulling out a pistol who also appears in photos with high-ranking politicos in the Mullocracy hierarchy. This was a contract killing of sorts....

Make an example out of a beautiful young woman in western dress. Ahnedinejad himself was one of the terrorists holding US Embassy prisoners hostage under Jimmy Carter's feckless POTUS shambles of a tenure. This fellow is probably an aspiring politician in the murderous security apparatus worthy of a Stalin or a Hitler. Stalin was a bank robber, Hitler was a vagabond...., Ahmedinejad was a terrorist.

And it looks like Obambi is going to give him the bomb, while looking like a deer in the headlights.

Persian Paranoia or Paranoia Across the Board?

Christopher Hitchens probably remembers sitting in that mosque listening to the Ayatollah Khamenei shout his "two-minute hate" with such vividness because it might have been one of the few times CH didn't have a morning hangover, given the dearth of hard liquor in The Islamic Republic. But Christopher has a point about Marg to the English as well as to the Great and Little Satans.

The British were seen as bad guys in the days that British Petroleum ran both Iran and Iraq as corporate subsidiaries back around 1910 and Winston Church as First Lord of the Admiralty was partly responsible for the bad rep that Anglos had in Iran. But Christopher, with whom I shared many a dram of Dewar's with back in the day, also is aware that the chief goal of the Iranian Mullahs is to dominate the "Persian" Gulf [which the Arabs call the "Arabian" Gulf] and that their object, at least in the competing paranoia of the Sunnis, is to push back Sunni interests in neutral places like Bahrain & the Emirates where Shi'ites reside, but Sunnis rule. The Tunbs and other islands in the Persian Gulf are much more important than one thinks, as the gigantic natural gas reserves of Qatar, third in the world after Russia and Iran, would revert to Iran if the Mullahs could dominate both sides of the Gulf.

The biggest paranoia in the Middle East is that of the Sunnis toward the Shi'ite Iranian Mullahcracy.

And Christopher does score a point against Obama by pointing out that Obambi missed his "Martin Luther King moment" by kinda sorta watching while he weasel-worded some uncourageous twaddle about "not meddling."

I guess he's Jimmy Carter all over again, but not brave enough to try to rescue the hostages, badly as that turned out....

But at least Jimmy got rid of a weasel named Cyrus Vance who quit because of the daring it took to decide to do SOMETHING...!

Not exact "Tear Down That Wall, Mr. Gorbachev," but Jimmy did try to man up.

Why Immigration Matters and Why Europe is Rapidly Becoming Islamicized

Mark Steyn had an NRO piece a while back in which he spanked Andrew Sullivan [who presumably enjoyed it] while doing a nice bit of statistical speculation that Gene Expression expands upon employing The World Values Survey.

Immigration control is becoming more important because NATO in twenty-five years will either be extinct or subject to Sharia law in a majority of its member nations [of which only the UK actually keeps a census count of the breeding numbers of indigenous versus Islamic live births].

[If you click on the map of The World Values box, however, you might notice that Ronald Ingelhardt's Ingelhardt Welzel Cultural Map of the World has Uruguay in Catholic Europe and Portugal in Latin America....tricky, those composite statistical boxes, eh?

ABC Nightly News Says Miami hit 105 Degrees [Actually it was 97!]

Again and again we are reminded that in the last 11-12 years, since 1998 at any rate, temperatures on average are going steadily downward, yet we see airhead "weather reporters" like Anne Thompson of NBC say exactly the opposite is happening on network news, after in Anne's case a breathless introduction by Bowin' Brian Williams concerning a pronunciamento by the Obama White House on curtailing the "global warming" hoax.

Tonight, the ABC-TV 2AM news broke with a breathless story on weather across the USA wreaking havoc in an unprecedented fashion, and among its temperatures was a verbally-announced 105 degrees for Miami.

Living in Boca, the temp was around 95 peak this afternoon, the hottest day of the year so far. The temp in Miami never is more than one or two degrees hotter as it is only 40 miles south of Boca Raton.

My guess is that the resident room-temp IQ "meteorologist," a blonde prettyboy named "Sam Champion" [possibly a pseudonym as David Letterman's was when he started out as a weatherboy?], has got the talking-head "anchors" on the After Late Night News trained to just read what the AP or whatever national news source ups the temp in Miami 8 degrees.

Lying about the local temps almost 10% upward sure gives the MSM another rung on the ladder to weather mystification 101, the BIG LIE needed to sell the "Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax" to millions of mouth-breathing slackjaw libtards out there in TV land. Almost all with a public school education, so their critical thinking faculties are completely undeveloped.

EuroModel Rejected by Voters---in Europe!!

The Wall Street Journal notes the trend in Europe towards center-right politicos continues. Of course, here in the USA, a foam-at-the-mouth press and nutjob House & Senate temporarily with a minute Democrat majority are heaving leftward while Republicans/Conservatives/Libertarians regroup and clamber up the masts to reset the sails in 2010.

I first noticed the Euro-right trend a couple of years back when Sweden, of all countries, elected its first non-socialist government in more than 50 years. Something to do with immigrants assassinating their Prime Minister? [Which happened in the last Millenium, but the Swedes are pretty slow to catch up].

More seriously, the Left is still firmly in the driver's seat, except in small jurisdictions, because the Left institutionalizes its "reforms" which rapidly turn into new and less accountable centers of corruption. Had the French an oil-based energy system rather than wisely centering its largest resources into hydro and nuke energy, the economy would be worse off than it is with over 50% of personal "income" diverted to taxes, pre-emptively in France since no one actually files honest returns, so VATs and other imposts on lower income folks are the order of business. And the elites make their money [Lyon in the '70s had the highest per capita ownership pct. of any city in the world, all hidden in garages in the chateaux-suburbs and rarely seen on the streets of the grande ville] and avoid their taxes as they do in other countries with political elites largely serving a dirigiste model.

The Statists already control the EU and the individual countries, so the current reversion might be more of a death kick on a populace suspended on a gallows rather than a complete turnaround.

Meanwhile, in the USA the Democrat hangmen & ladies are preparing our population for the same suspension of liberties that the Euro-pendus have suffered for decades....

Were Cheney/Halliburton as Corrupt as LBJ/RMN were in Vietnam?

I recently had a discussion with someone who claimed that the Iraq War was bungled through corruption by US government outsourced responsibilities that companies like Halliburton infamously made much money off of. I recall in my Vietnam years that Pacific Architecture & Engineering [PA & E] had a large interest in the company held by Lady Bird Johnson, a fact which got little or no press coverage at the time. PA & E and another Texas firm, Brown & Root, got huge contracts to build bases at Hoa Binh and Nha Trang in Vietnam, with nary a peep from the MSM of the time, the Cronkites and others who were such moral heroes, as E.R. Murrow was supposed to have been.

After RMN won the election in '68, Dem contributors like Bucyrus-Erie and such were replaced by Republican contributors like P&H, for example, but the largest share of the contractual booty had been amassed by the LBJ consortium.

It's worthy of interest that Robert Caro has interviewed every one of LBJ's inner circle except one, a little Baptist preacher named Bill Moyers, who inexplicably won't talk to Caro.

Could the reason be that Caro has a few skeletons in Moyers' relationship with LBJ that the phony PBS "guru" doesn't want to confront. Besides being arrested for DUI, perhaps Moyers has other reasons for not being interviewed by Caro.

Not that the MSM would ever abandon one of its favorite mantras, the evils of Republic corporate malfeasance.

Obama a Deer in Headlights as Iran, North Korea Resemble "Axis of Evil" All over Again

Obama is showing his sophomoric foreign policy skills as he sends out nitwits like Time's Joe Klein to argue that doing nothing is better than "interfering" and "meddling" which suck-up Klein claims that "all Iranians" think the US would be doing if it offered moral support to the dissidents after a manifestly stolen election.

Henry Meyer's article above is the best short analysis of the consequences that The Supreme Leader faces after prematurely ordering the Election Commission to throw the vote to Ahmedinejad, who now thrashes about claiming "foreign interference" is behind the outrage Khamenei spurred by not waiting the necessary three days to actually count the vote.

Now that Rafsanjani, head of the Council of Guardians, the only body that could possibly evict The Supreme Leader, has thrown down the gauntlet on Moussavi's behalf after Khamenei, who is an ancient enemy of Moussavi's, panicked & soiled his underwear after preliminary returns had Moussavi, an ethnic Azeri, running far ahead in various parts of the country, including Tehran.

The constitutional structures of the so-called Islamic Republic, in reality a theocracy supported by Brownshirt thuggish paramilitary goons called Basiji, the young rural religious militia that also serves as Ahmedinejad's power base, are still supporting The Supreme Leader. The armed and nasty Basiji resemble the Hamas zealots in Gaza and the Hezbollah nutjobs in Lebanon, recently thwarted in relatively fair elections largely overlooked by the western press [except for an absurd state-media hack named Hertzberg in The New Yorker, who credited Obama, of all people, for inspiring Lebanon's heartfelt rejection of religious thuggery.]

Sadly, Nicolas Sarkozy is demonstrating true testicular and spinal vigor in his support of the forces of democracy and freedom. France is now led by a Ronald Reagan while the USA has a re-run of the dithering indecisive Jimmy Carter in the Rose Garden.

My guess is that he's plucking the petals from a daisy to discover which way US foreign policy should lean in Iran.

And of course, in the meantime, Kim Jung Mentally-Il is sending an armed missile ship to attack Hawaii on the Fourth of July.

Sharks in the water always respond to the thrashing about of weak and wounded prey.

And Kim Jung Mentally-Il still thanks Jimmy Carter for supporting him versus Bill Clinton in the 1990's, while he was starving 2 million NorK slave-serfs to death in his tiny abbreviated Gulag Archipelago of a country.
UPDATE: The New York Times has an interesting Op-Ed that refutes enemies of US interests in Iran such as Hertzberg and Klein. Klein parachutes into Iran & is an instant expert?

Foreign Policy Mag has a list of the wonderful leadership guys like Hertzberg & Klein believe Obama shouldn't "meddle" with.

Carlos Slim: [Relatively] Uncorrupt Businessman Buys a Corrupt NYT

The New Yorker has a sideways report on Carlos Slim, the quiet Mexican multi-billionaire. CS is a man of simple and frugal habits and tastes---he owns no home in the USA, unlike the other nine Mexican billionaires, and does not even know how to use a computer.

Carlos is of Lebanese Catholic [Maronite] origin and like many Maronites, has made a fortune after emigrating [via his father in the early 20th c.] to the New World. V.S. Naipaul has written a sympathetic novel, A Bend in the River, about Lebanese [or rather Levantine] merchants in Africa. Carlos is a mathematical genius and taught his fellow students linear programming at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Linear programming is often used to calculate the optimum allocation of resources---which, like Warren Buffett, Slim employed to grow an autonomous personal empire.

The article goes on to speculate why Carlos wants to buy the NYT, which the current publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr, has effectively almost destroyed through disastrous business moves [buying back stock in the early 2000s at forty bucks which is now worth about four bucks, buying the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion & refusing to sell it for half that price & now having effectively been forced to close it down.] The otiose Sulzberger clan has ironclad control over the Class B and the incompetent Pinch is the captain of the Titanic as the NYT appears to have hit a financial iceberg.

Lawrence Wright of The Leaning Tower is the author, so suck-ups like Tom Friedman and Frank Rich, the failed Broadway critic who is fancied to have insights on American political processes, both kiss up to Pinch Sulzberger, the tiny midget standing on the shoulders on his giant forebears who built a great journalistic institution which he is demolishing through reckless editorial and business decisions.

A Mexican competitor to Slim's Telmex, Spanish Telefonica, headed by Francisco Gil Diaz whom I was acquainted with back in my Amoco years, calls Slim a "crony capitalist" and all the other bad things that the Statist political elites call successful businessmen.

But CS is much like another refugee from Lebanon, former culture-hero Ralph Nader, who made the mistake of being the difference between a POTUS named Gore and GWB, hence the MSM holds him now in its Groupthink Penalty Box. Nader, whose home was near Suq Al Gharb in the foothills above Beirut where I lived for a year studying Arabic, came from that legacy of Syrian genius destroyed by the advent of "The Religion of Peace" which corrupts everything it touches. The Lebanon and anti-Lebanon still retain clans of cultural brilliance not tainted by the crazed first-cousin marriages favored by Muslims. And of course, "honor killings," which are as murderous as abortion in the USA.

Slim may impose a premium or surcharge on his Telmex operations and other successful businesses, but he too is a refugee from the disastrous 60 years of PRI socialism which corrupted Mexico's economy to the point that the disasters of the early '80s were almost a foregone conclusion.

Interestingly, Slim considers the US's current economic problems more like the Dot-Com Bust of 2000 than the ginormous catastrophe Democrats are calling it---to impose the same socialism that led to the PRI's economic backwardness in Mexico.

Is the USA retreating from economic heights to dwell in the miasmal swamps of socialist uniform economic illness? Looks like Obambi and his henchboys Rahm & Axelgrease are intent on turning the US into a Chicago of today, a political facsimile of the PRI during most of 20th c. Mexico.

Chicago Rules, NBA Crook as Mayor, and Obama The Hypocrite

The Wall Street Journal notes that Inspectors General get fired if they cross Obama nowadays, especially if they persecute his political allies by exposing official malfeasance and sheer corruption.

Monkeyshines prevailed when Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player, was caught using public funds in a program he wangled from his ol' buddy Obama---nothing unusual about that, as Chicago is the ethical template for Obama and his crew of moral lepers named Rahm, Axelrod, et al.

Read the link and find out how a mental cripple like Johnson managed to parlay $850K from Obama into the job of mayor of Sacramento. The capital of a Latino republic which is reverting back to bananas as its chief product---and mental state.

Panetta Should Stay Out of Politics, Especially Partisan Politics

Leon Panetta won respect on Capitol Hill for his decades of service as a Congressman, and his recent appointment to head the CIA seemed a well-earned end-of-career reward.
He started out well by defending the Agency from the absurd and twisted lies of Speaker of the House Pelosi, whose assertions that she was "lied to" by the Agency about waterboarding were contradicted by contemporaneous reports back when she was briefed in 2002-3.

However, Panetta is now venturing into dangerous waters, as he is leaving the realm of intelligence and analysis in order to score political points against a Republican speaking out on serious national security issues. Had Cheney made reckless unsubstantiated attacks against the Agency, I could understand Panetta's attack on him in The New Yorker, a fanatically partisan tabloid which has descended from journalism to hack yellow screeds against Republicans, period.

To extrapolate from Cheney's remarks that Obama's policies are putting American national security in jeopardy to the absurd conclusion that Cheney WANTS the US to be attacked is an absurd egregious solecism and unworthy of a man whose public service up to now has been unmarred by partisan fanaticism. He should be reminded that his job is to offer advice on intelligence and analysis to the POTUS, not engage in partisan brickbats with a politician of an opposition party.

And perhaps Panetta was put up to this by Obama as Cheney's speech [which Obama tried to pre-empt by subsequently scheduling a prequel prebuttal] garnered a lot of interest and respect.

This goes against the nasty agenda Rahm and Axelrod have concocted to demonize Cheney, Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck for being so popular in the national media.

Let Obama do his own dirty work, and leave Panetta to the professional responsibilities of a very important function.

Has Iran Now Crossed the Rubicon of no Looking Back?

Barry Rubin may have summed up the significance of Ahmadinejad's having to justify his lack of votes with an early, even premature, declaration of victory by the Ayatollissimo Khamenei. Rubin writes:

I certainly expected Ahmadinjad to win but figured the regime would play out the game. He'd either genuinely gain victory in the second round or they'd change just enough votes to ensure his victory. What no one expected is that the regime would tear up the whole process like this. Their brazen way of doing so--if you don't like it you can go to hell, we're going to do whatever we want, and we don't care what anyone thinks--signals to me that this ruling group is even more risk-taking and irresponsible than it previously appeared.

This is the key point: the problem with Iran's regime isn't just that it is a dictatorship, it's that it is such an extremist, aggressive dictatorship.

The only logical explanation for why the regime did this is that Ahmadinejad's opponents got so many votes that it frightened the regime. It also shows that the regime is wedded to Ahmadinejad and his approach.

Is a regime that just committed itself irrevocably to the most extreme faction, most radical ideology, and most repressive control over the country going to compromise with the West on nuclear weapons or anything else?

Of course not, like Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s, Syria's rulers in the 1970s, and Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (and many examples elsewhere in the world) it is going to use foreign adventurism and mobilizing hatred against the West and Israel to consolidate its hold on the country.

Remember all those people who've said that Iran can be entrusted with nuclear weapons because the regime was so cautious in practice and its rhetoric should be disregarded?

And there's more. It isn't just a stolen election but the imposition by the ruling group of the most extreme, adventurist, nuclear-weapon waving, Holocaust-denying candidate. I would have been pleased if either of the two less radical candidates had won, not because they are super-moderate but that would have signalled a government less likely to go (or blunder) into war or use nuclear weapons.

Again, though, the significance of events in Tehran is the triumph of both the most extreme elements of the regime and of the advocate of the most far-out policy. Can any sane person think this group--intoxicated in the belief they are winning victories everywhere and will win more in future--is going to compromise with America and Europe?

Remember, too, before taking this step, the regime's leaders calculated they had nothing to lose internationally. What could that mean except that they hadn't planned on making nice with the West in the first place and also that they don't take Western pressure--at a time when there's so much talk of engagement, apology, and appeasement in the air--as a serious threat?

So now are we going to see an all-out effort to conciliate with the Islamist regime which has just signalled its intentions in the clearest possible terms? For goodness sake, is there truly no limit?

We can be sure the Eurotard cowards will continue to dawdle and pussyfoot with these out-and-out rogue criminals. Will Obama also follow the Juan Cole simper and hem-of-robe-plucking that a James Earl ["Jimmy"] Carter took with North Korea, with such notable success during the ClyntOOn regime?

Is Obama an Obambi? Keep tuned, won't take long to find out....

Tabriz Demonstrates Fraud in Iran Election.

The New York Times is on the side of the forces of light, but CNN is totally silent, comparatively speaking, as Iran teeters on the brink of a mini-Tienanmen Square moment.

Not hard to figure out why CNN is eyeless and clueless on Iran. Christiane Amanpour wants to preserve her access to the autocratic theocrats and doesn't want her colleagues at CNN to undermine her own personal career. And the clueless eff-up named J. Klein running the CNN third-rate operation goes along with his Iranian "expert" in ignoring what might be a huge story. The fact that the so-called "Election Commission" gave Ahmadinnerjacket a 50% victory in Tabriz, capital of Azeri Iran [Moussavi is an Azeri] shows that these anti-democratic functionaries don't even know how to steal an election! Tabriz has been a center against anti-hardline Ahma-dinnerjacket for years and I wonder if the whole city is not ready to defect to its northern neighbor whose capital is Baku.

Stalin annexed Tabriz after WWII and was only with difficulty forced to disgorge this ethnic enclave of Azerbaijan. Why not make a move to go northward? I know this is pie-in-the-sky, but it possibly represents a majority of the Tabriz population's inner wishes.

UPDATE: Sunday afternoon at the gym, I did notice Amanpour reporting on the violent aftermath of the stolen election, so perhaps it was logistics rather than an editorial decision that CNN was late out of the starter's box.

Phony LeBron/Kobe Ads Scored by Los Angeles Times

Nike's ads with ridiculous puppets obviously influenced by retarded over-the-hill Spike Lee celebrate LeBron with a little kid puppet asking him for tickets to the Finals.

Does Nike have even a quarter of a brain? Doesn't this premature ejaculation of a campaign stink like Sh*T, based on a faulty Cleveland Cavs team and a spoiled-brat entitlement fraud of a superstar who stalked off the court and whined about being "beaten up" after having basked in adulation for months by a fawning press?

LeBron is now officially outed as a creepy spoiled p.o.s.

Even the Los Angeles Times kinda hints at it, though the fact that this town can't even support an NFL franchise demonstrates its truly second-rate status in the world of professional sports.

Temps Plunge as Sunspots Disappear & CO2 Along with Them

Statist Political Elites are notoriously out of touch with reality, and this Spring, the "Mother of Parliaments" in Westminster was busy adding more inclusive amendments to a drastic Anthropomorphic Global Warming Bill while in early April [or was it late March?] there was VERY unseasonal snow falling outside muffling Big Ben's tones! Since then, we've seen that besides being out of touch, the Brit Parliament is notoriously in love with perks & benefits, but hopefully Cameron & the Tories might diminish that quirk of libtards and also lessen the climate nonsense as Scotland still freezes this June. [Proleptic thought: Gordon Brown is still PM busy destroying any vestige of Tony Blair's New Labour heritage.]

Ironically, the Brits have been the greatest astronomers when it comes to sunspots, although I believe it might have been a Dutch dude who first spotted them. Maunder noted that a lack of sunspots for 70 years led to a "Little Ice Age" just before the Industrial Revolution's dark Satanic mills blighted the atmosphere and turned Victorian London into a smoggy haze for a century-plus. No sunspots for more than a half-century meant that six 11-year cycles in a row were responsible for famines among which were the terrible crop failures that caused the French Revolution in 1789. Sunspots or the lack of them have political consequences, [and volcanic eruptions such as the horrific one in Iceland in 1785 contributed to said crop failures, I might add.] The summerless year of 1816 had snow on the Fourth of July, as Jefferson noted in his diary. But soon after, the solar cycles began producing more spots. Carrington, who was instrumental in discovering the different types of stars recorded a tremendous flare-up in 1859 that bears his eponymous moniker. So the "recent" 150 years [or more precisely around thirteen 11-year solar cycles up to the year 1998] had plenteous sunspots and a soaring world temperature, aided marginally by Industrial smoke and pollution. But the most recent 11 years leading to 2009 was the 23rd recorded cycle and relatively deficient in sunspot activity with a concomitant decrease in world temps. The Telegraph notes recent weather and food problems:

...... midsummer snow not just in Norway and the Cairngorms, but even in Saudi Arabia. At least in the southern hemisphere it is winter, but snowfalls in New Zealand and Australia have been abnormal. There have been frosts in Brazil, elsewhere in South America they have had prolonged droughts, while in China they have had to cope with abnormal rain and freak hailstorms, which in one province killed 20 people.

None of this has given much cheer to farmers. In Canada and northern America summer planting of corn and soybeans has been way behind schedule, with the prospect of reduced yields and lower quality. Grain stocks are predicted to be down 15 per cent next year. US reserves of soya – used in animal feed and in many processed foods – are expected to fall to a 32-year low.
In China, the world's largest wheat grower, they have been battling against the atrocious weather to bring in the harvest. (In one province they even fired chemical shells into the clouds to turn freezing hailstones into rain.) In north-west China drought has devastated crops with a plague of pests and blight. In countries such as Argentina and Brazil droughts have caused such havoc that a veteran US grain expert said last week: "In 43 years I've never seen anything like the decline we're looking at in South America."
In Europe, the weather has been a factor in well-below average predicted crop yields in eastern Europe and Ukraine. In Britain this year's oilseed rape crop is likely to be 30 per cent below its 2008 level. And although it may be too early to predict a repeat of last year's food shortage, which provoked riots from west Africa to Egypt and Yemen, it seems possible that world food stocks may next year again be under severe strain, threatening to repeat the steep rises which, in 2008, saw prices double what they had been two years before.

All this in the face of Statist Political Elites [led in the US by clueless nerds like Waxman & Pelosi] & Eurotards placing impossible targets for biofuels [which if made from corn and wheat often consume more energy to produce than they emit while used as car fuels]: The Telegraph has a good summary of the self-serving agenda of the control-seeking Eurocrats:

It is appropriate that another contributory factor to the world's food shortage should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the world warming, Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU's biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe. But that didn't persuade them to change their policy. They would rather we starved than did that. And the EU, we must always remember, is now our government – the one most of us didn't vote for last week

.
However, the current cold snap lasting since 1998 more or less has even NASA predicting that Solar Cycle 24 might be another low-sunspot cycle as was Cycle 23. Ironic, since it is their spurious meteorologist, who in cahoots with a Stanford politicized prof, began the AGW nonsense in the late '80s, after the Global Cooling scare of the '70s had flared up and then disappeared. Maybe this time, NASA has gotten it right.

Why Democrat Hypocrisy Never Ends: Example 1001 [Alf Layla wa Layl]

Jim Gordon comments on a pinhead reader's dumb comment that Bush sold us a bill of goods on WMD. Here is Jim's "reality check" on the relentless humdrum lies that the MSM purveys on an hourly basis:

"Saddam's goal ... is to achieve the lifting of U.N. sanctions while retaining and enhancing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. We cannot, we must not and we will not let him succeed." -- Madeline Albright, 1998

"(Saddam) will rebuild his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and some day, some way, I am certain he will use that arsenal again, as he has 10 times since 1983" -- National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Feb 18, 1998

"Iraq made commitments after the Gulf War to completely dismantle all weapons of mass destruction, and unfortunately, Iraq has not lived up to its agreement." -- Barbara Boxer, November 8, 2002

"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retained some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capability. Intelligence reports also indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons, but has not yet achieved nuclear capability." -- Robert Byrd, October 2002

"There's no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat... Yes, he has chemical and biological weapons. He's had those for a long time. But the United States right now is on a very much different defensive posture than we were before September 11th of 2001... He is, as far as we know, actively pursuing nuclear capabilities, though he doesn't have nuclear warheads yet. If he were to acquire nuclear weapons, I think our friends in the region would face greatly increased risks as would we." -- Wesley Clark on September 26, 2002

"The community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now: a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. If we fail to respond today, Saddam and all those who would follow in his footsteps will be emboldened tomorrow." -- Bill Clinton in 1998

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security." -- Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002

"I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons...I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out." -- Clinton's Secretary of Defense William Cohen in April of 2003

"Iraq is not the only nation in the world to possess weapons of mass destruction, but it is the only nation with a leader who has used them against his own people." -- Tom Daschle in 1998

"Saddam Hussein's regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies, including our vital ally, Israel. For more than two decades, Saddam Hussein has sought weapons of mass destruction through every available means. We know that he has chemical and biological weapons. He has already used them against his neighbors and his own people, and is trying to build more. We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons, and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal." -- John Edwards, Oct 10, 2002

"The debate over Iraq is not about politics. It is about national security. It should be clear that our national security requires Congress to send a clear message to Iraq and the world: America is united in its determination to eliminate forever the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." -- John Edwards, Oct 10, 2002

"I share the administration's goals in dealing with Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction." -- Dick Gephardt in September of 2002

"Iraq does pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf and we should organize an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." -- Al Gore, 2002

"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." -- Ted Kennedy, September 27, 2002

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a serious danger, that he is a tyrant, and that his pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated. He must be disarmed." -- Ted Kennedy, Sept 27, 2002

"I will be voting to give the president of the United States the authority to use force - if necessary - to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." -- John F. Kerry, Oct 2002

"The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation." -- John Kerry, October 9, 2002

"(W)e need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. We all know the litany of his offenses. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. ...And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction. That is why the world, through the United Nations Security Council, has spoken with one voice, demanding that Iraq disclose its weapons programs and disarm. So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but it is not new. It has been with us since the end of the Persian Gulf War." -- John Kerry, Jan 23, 2003

"As a member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am keenly aware that the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is an issue of grave importance to all nations. Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process." -- Nancy Pelosi, December 16, 1998

From Nancy Pelosi in 1998 - to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry et al - there were a LOT of liberal dems who sold us those goods - LOOOOONG before the eeeeeevil BOOOOOOSH!

Dutch Treat for Taliban While Yglesias Thinks NorKs equal Abu Gharaib

"Dumb Dutchman" is a byword in my home state in the upper Midwest, but Joanie van Rijke is the dumbest Dutchwoman walking the earth today.

American Renaissance calls the Dutch Girl's behavior indicative of the "Pre-Captivity Stockholm Syndrome" psychosis afflicting the Eurotard Left.

Joanie is just an undereducated ditz who expands the meaning of the term "Dutch Treat" to its outer limits and beyond.

Her story is pitiful. After letting them know that she would write friendly articles, this naive nymphette was kidnapped after seeking out the Taliban, held in a cave for six months, raped repeatedly by a fellow who had three wives already and suggested that she join his harem. She was released only after a ransom of 100K Euros was paid to her captors. Coming out of her seclusion, this sad little nympho claims the Taliban treated her "with respect and are not monstors." [GWB in Gitmo, I suspect, would be this mental case's definition of a monstor.]

Matt Yglesias has a Harvard education, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, and represents how corrupt are the impostors in the American "intellectual class," formerly called the intelligentsia before that got eliminated by Yglesias allies like Joe Stalin & Mao & Pol Pot et al...

These JournoList cabal boys are simply undereducated in the liberal arts, except in those arts of disinformation & conveying leftist propaganda which suit their obvious agenda. Apparently they have no sense of values outside their narrow slice of the political spectrum which is infrared on the European red for left, blue for right color scale [or ultraviolet on the US inverted scale, which happened with the connivance of the Rather/Jennings/Brokaw troika of leftist droogs in the network nineties before cable squashed the nets.] Comparing North Korea and Abu Gharaib is comparing the Holocaust with one of those atrocity stories of a unit gone temporarily amok as happened frequently during World War II. Indeed, in WWII, armed partisans without uniforms were summarily shot, not incarcerated in prison camps and given lawyers as the US has done at Gitmo.

Yglesias is one more example of how the left simply allows murderous socialists like Mugabe, Castro, Kim Jung Il, [formerly] Saddam, and Chavez to run free and clear of any moral scrutiny by the "gatekeepers" who micromanage the American political elites' perspective on foreign policy. The JournoList cabal hates Israel because of the Likud & likes Iran & Syria because of the statist controls these ruthless anti-democracies maintain over their populations.

It's what these Fifth Column JournoList types would like to do to American capitalism---destroy it by a thousand cuts. Yglesias is a perfect product of the mental fudge factory that turns out libtards by the thousands.

The Leftist Elitist Flimflam Factory is represented in part by the NYT, JournoList bloggers, and the Obamaniacs in the NBC/CBS Groupthink Mental Deathcage. [Bowin' Brian Williams e.g., but Katie also scrapes & plucks the hem of The Won's robe. Has-been Evan Thomas suffers from progeria of the brain when he calls Obama "God," apparently believing himself dead and gone to socialist heaven].

Any comparison between Abu Gharaib and the slaughter by famine of two million Koreans while Billy Jeff Clinton flirted with NorKs using Madeleine Albright's twaddle and waddle to seduce them in person---that is as delusional as Jimmy Carter's 1994 free-lance diplomacy with the NorKs which forced Billy Jeff to strike a horrible bargain, paying them to shut down a plutonium plant they no longer used and would be shut down anyway. Madeleine was the worst Sec'y of State ever, and that includes Warren Christopher.

James Earl Carter defines the outer limits of delusion---though Yglesias & his JournoList crew are urging Obama to inch toward that precipice that the Carter legacy has plunged from and Jimmy's cred continues to plummet as he concocts new anti-Semitic versions of his hatred for Israel.

Amb. Bolton once again predicted that this is what would happen.

Finally, I suggest we send Fat Al Gore whose network foolishly sent the two women to NorK over to negotiate. Fat Al could use several years of manual labor to work off his own enormous delusions and a bit of avoirdupois at the same time.

Lenin observed that useful idiots come in all shapes, sizes and genders, but even he probably couldn't have imagined the mental gymnastics that Global Citizens like Yglesias, van Rijke, and Gore perform to advance the destruction of individualism and freedom of thought.

Snow in June in NDakota & Kofi "Rwanda" Annan Lies to us all

Kofi Annan rose to the top of the UN hierarchy after causing the genocide in Rwanda to worsen due to his absolute incompetence as UN Chief of African operations, making him primus inter pares among the faineants at the top of this International Joke---plus he was black so he would be next in the entitlement queue that passes for promotion in this diseased NGO.

An ICCC meeting in DC had no press coverage as it promoted the skeptics' point of view on Anthropogenic Global Warming, the one that the official UN version calls "deniers" in the new religion of what Richard Feynman called "Cargo Cult Science." You remember Feynman, the fellow who told NASA that its estimate that the Space Shuttle would fail every 100,000 trips was off by many orders of magnitude. Feynman predicted one in every 50 launches and so far is right on target with 2 in the first 100 Space Shuttle launches. Of course, the UN IRCC was behind Political Impostor Kofi's bogus publication.

By coincidence, NASA is the chief progenitor of the AGW hoax currently infecting a diseased and corrupt political religious sect called the Democrat Party. Al Gore, whose highest mark in college in science was a D+ is the high priest of the political side of which astronaut-killing NASA is the scientific guru.

Get the connection???
UPDATE re El Buffo Gordo Gore: "Two points:1. Money and 2. Power.

Money: Who stands to profit from the new "Global Warming Religion"? When Al Gore left office he had a net worth of around two million dollars. Now he is worth over $100 million! Its time for everyone to wake up and see this fantasy for what it is; a new source of tax advantaged money for the Leftist Political Class.

Power: If the Socialist can replace our Private Sector controlled Petroleum Based Energy Economy with a Government Based "Green Energy" based economy, they will pretty much control all our lives from cradle to grave.

This is what they want: Money and Power."

[From Comment on the

Pickled-brain Russian Colonel Blames Poland for WWII

Maybe it's the vodka, but Russian strategic thinking often verges on the phantasmagoric when it comes to bizarre out-of-the-box thinking. Col. K. published one of these wild and crazy apologies for the Molotov/Ribbentrop Treaty of August 1939 thusly:

The paper, titled "Fictions and Falsifications in Evaluating the USSR's Role On the Eve of World War II," recounts how in the run-up to Germany's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler demanded that Poland turn over control of the city of Danzig as well as a land corridor between Germany and the territory now known as Kaliningrad.

"Everyone who has studied the history of World War II without bias knows that the war began because of Poland's refusal to satisfy Germany's claims," he writes.

Kovalyov called the demands "quite reasonable." He observed: "The overwhelming majority of residents of Danzig, cut off from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, were Germans who sincerely wished for reunification with their historical homeland."

Of course, there is a method to this loony-tune history, part of Tiny Vlad The Empoisoner's Rehab of Soviet history so we can all fantasize once again along Comintern lines:

The Kremlin presses a campaign to recast Russia's 20th century history in a more favorable light, [and] a research paper published Thursday on the Defense Ministry's Web site blamed Poland for starting World War II.

The unorthodox reading of history appears to be the latest effort by Russian historians to defend the Soviet Union and its leaders, especially their role in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Poland condemned the research paper.

Russia has angrily rejected claims that a Stalin-era famine in Ukraine amounted to genocide, and Russia's Supreme Court recently turned down an appeal to reopen an investigation into the massacre by Soviet secret police of Polish military officers and intellectuals in Russia's Katyn forest during World War II.

The generally accepted view is that Poland was a victim rather than the aggressor in the conflict, and that Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland marked the start of the war.

The fact that this factitious counterfactual appeared on the Defense Ministry website makes it a semi-official expression of what passes for "strategic thinking" at the highest rungs of the neo-Soviet madhouse being reconstructed by tiny Vlad. Although the Colonel in the Poland-bashing article can't hold a candle to Igor Panarin who predicts civil war and subsequent martial law across the US later this year [2009], a breakup of the USA into six "rump-states" by 2011, and the happy occurrence of a Russia/China "New World Disorder" shortly thereafter.

Panarin [is] a former spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency and reportedly an ex-KGB analyst, [whose thinking] meshes with the negative view of the U.S. that has been flowing from the Kremlin in recent years, in particular from Vladimir Putin.
Putin, the former president who is now prime minister, has likened the United States to Nazi Germany's Third Reich and blames Washington for the global financial crisis that has pounded the Russian economy.

Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources. He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now.

But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End"—when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control. Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men.

Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed.

"I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream."

I suggest that Igor and Col. K lay off the "little water" for a while and detox enuf to get off Mini-me Vlad's alternate-universe for a short breather before sloshing back into Vlad's vodka & fish roe hallucinations.

Gallup Shows Cheney more Favorable Votes than Pelosi

Pelosi is becoming a byword for empty-headed chronic ditzy moves. My personal favorite was a couple of years ago when this Italian-American actually thought the Democratic slogan for the national elections should be "Contract On America." Yeah, and that's coming true so far as herself, Reid, and Obama are destroying the fabric of American life as surely as a mafia hit man makes his bones.

Perhaps this is a signal that the American people are now beginning to pay attention to what lies behind the unceasing propaganda of the liberal left, which includes the networks, especially Bowing Brian & Kiss-Up Katie, bashing Cheney at every turn for lies and insinuations about attacks on the Constitution. Compared to standard-issue methods of interrogation in the Middle East, waterboarding is NOT torture. And if it was done on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and personal murderer of Daniel Pearl, I personally would like to administer it myself.

More to the point, Cheney has been the object of ceaseless attacks which are dishonest and unmerited. Nancy Pelosi on the other hand has been idolized by the knuckle-dragging morons on the non-Fox cable networks and the Bowing Brian/Kiss-Up Katie networks.

So it's beginning to sink in that Nancy is really way above her skill set in the House, and Harry Reid parenthetically is a total joke in the Senate. Obama's IQ is probably the equal of both of his colleagues, but his moves so far to improve the economy are going to result in Carter-style 10& inflation and 20% interest rates before long.

Hopefully by 2010, so we can have a realignment of forces in the House and Senate to remove the current clowns from endangering our way of life any further.

Obama in Cairo: Welcome Back, Carter?

Obama made a decent enough speech in Cairo, though projecting a false equivalence between Israeli democracy and Arab cowardly autocratic regimes on the West Bank, which he claims has seen Israel holding Arabs "hostage," whereas it was the Arab cowardly autocratic regimes which held the Palestinians in refugee camps after their humiliating defeats in the '47-48 wars.

Threatening Israel with destruction--or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews--is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.
On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people--Muslims and Christians--have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations--large and small--that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

Taranto's followup in the WSJ is appropriate:

Obama presents a false choice: between seeing the conflict "only from one side or the other" and treating Palestinian complaints about "the displacement brought by Israel's founding" and Israeli ones about "the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond" as equivalent and offsetting.

In truth, Israel's founding was not sufficient to bring about Palestinian displacement. Also necessary for the latter was the Arab states' violent rejection of the former. And the perpetuation of the Palestinians' plight is far more the fault of the Arab states (joined recently by Iran), not only for refusing to permit Palestinian immigration but also for giving both material and rhetorical support to Palestinian terrorism against Israel.

Probably it would have been diplomatically unwise for Obama in Cairo to put the matter as bluntly as we have done here. But no real resolution of the conflict is possible so long as the Arab states remain major players and are held to no standard of responsibility for their own actions.

The Arabs always prefer the Jacques Shh-Iraq stiletto/vendetta route, the craven stab-in-the-back that cowardly nations perform when they are too weak or lacking in male prowess to do the job on the battlefield. Roula Khalaf of the FT lauds Obama for avoiding the "terror" word. Comically, the Dems won't allow any use of the word "terror attack" on the cowardly murder of US Army Recruiter Long in Little Rock, and Obambi wouldn't want to spoil his debutante's ball in the Middle East with confronting terror in his own homeland.

Yep, James Earl Carter tried it once and failed resoundingly. Getting conned at Camp David. Maybe now that Terrorist Arafat is gone, the Palestinians will be more sensible. Oops, there's Hamas, guess not.

This little boy pretending to be President might make the same mistakes, though unlike Carter, he does have charm and an articulate way of putting things.

Maybe that makes him more dangerous than one-term Jimmy.

NPR & Obambi Ignore Terrorist Jihadist Murder of US Army Recruiter

Obama is too busy talking about Iran's right to go nuclear [despite having the world's largest natural gas reserves and no energy need for atomic energy] to notice or comment on the murder of a Little Rock Army recruiter by a jihadist Yemen-trained terrorist.

Nor does NPR think the religious "orientation" of the Islamist terrorist important.

At the same time, a creampie-fanny buffoon rants about "Christianist" murder of an infanticide mass murderer, supported by a nasty beotch recently named Sec of HEALTH!

Jeffrey Goldberg calls it "Death by Euphemism." I'd call it moral [political] cowardice by Obambi and the death of journalism by a statist socialist publically-owned propaganda network.

Saad Ibrahim Pleads for Real Democracy in Egypt

Sa'ad Ibrahim was a professor at American U. of Cairo in the mid-90s when I was at Amoco, the foreign company at the time with the largest assets in Egypt, second only to the Suez Canal Organization, a state-owned entity. I visited him at his Cairo suburb Ma'adi residence several times----the Amoco HQ was in Ma'adi just down the road [and the tallest building in the suburb, where I was on the top floor when a big earthquake hit in '92]. Sa'ad reflected the plight of educated westernized Egyptians faced with a choice between an autocratic praetorian regime and an Islamist Ikhwan party more vicious and misogynist than most Taliban-type Sunni zealots. Think of Zawahiri and Qutb.

As a US State Dept Arabist in the '70's, I was an "Israel Basher" of the first order, and much later became good friends with Chas Freeman, US Amb. to Saudi during the First Gulf War [I see the two GW's like episodes in a Hundred Years War]. Although I do know and am aware of the Israeli Lobby's strength [after leaving State, I was John Anderson's MidEast Advisor in the "80 Campaign & discovered most of JA's funding was from "Jewish" organizations], I am now glad the Lobby helped excise the Carter wart from the US govt's nether regions. Carter was a serial eff-up and now hates Israel because between Teddy K. & John A., their lobby spearheaded his loss to Reagan, whom they saw as more compliant & pro-Israel in the fundamental sense of pro-democratic.

As an Amoco Strategic Planner, I got invited by Shimon Peres to a three-hour "lunch" on the Dead Sea & I was strongly rebuked the next day by the Israeli Oil Minister Chacal, who doubled as the Police Minister & had bugged Peres's hotel room on the Dead Sea Riviera!!! I was escorted by the head of Shin Bet because the Israelis were mad about getting their own oil & gas from Amoco in the middle of the biggest oil patch on Earth.

It took a long time for me to understand the essential difference between a democracy, untidy as it is, like Israel, and the brutal misogynist oligarchies in the Islamic crescent surrounding the small island of semi-sanity called Israel.

9/11 sealed the deal for me, and since then I regard well-meaning guys like Chas Freeman as a "Fifth Columnist" in a campaign to justify the unjustifiable aggressive nature of "The Straight Path." War & Aggression are built in the DNA of Islam, and my long stays in both India & Pakistan also convinced my of the almost unviable nature of "Islamic Democracy." The Indian elections last week again proved that a sloppy democracy is better than a clan-dominated praetorian Islamic hodge-podge like Pakistan.

Or even the relatively docile Egyptians, whose age-old collective wisdom and significant Shi'ite and Coptic minorities have long been respected more or less in the political spectrum, though not given much leeway in the public forums available to them.

Mutatis mutandis, the same holds true for the "Fertile Crescent," which Egypt anchors on its southwest arc. The murder of the US recruiter in Little Rock is another indication that Islamic violence and terrorism, invented by "The Old Man of the Mountain" in the twelfth century, still employs assassination as its normal method of operation.

Another "Maunder Minimum" Mini-Ice Age in Store?

NASA proves again that there is science and then there are scientists and finally there are NASA "meteorologists," who evidently do their dartboard predictions after a few pints of Guinness. And here is a cogent argument from Canada's only sane newspaper east of the Rockies.

Not until the end of the usual boring bureaucratese BS do the NASA frauds get to kinda sorta the point:

From a research point of view, that's good news because solar minimum has proven to be more interesting than anyone imagined. Low solar activity has a profound effect on Earth’s atmosphere, allowing it to cool and contract. Space junk accumulates in Earth orbit because there is less aerodynamic drag. The becalmed solar wind whips up fewer magnetic storms around Earth's poles. Cosmic rays that are normally pushed back by solar wind instead intrude on the near-Earth environment. There are other side-effects, too, that can be studied only so long as the sun remains quiet. Meanwhile, the sun pays little heed to human committees. There could be more surprises, panelists acknowledge, and more revisions to the forecast.

For more on the "Maunder Minimum" and the possibilities, check out more ata non-bureaufudge version of the above. Here's an anecdotal tidbit:
During the Maunder Minimum

During the Great Frost of (1683–1684) in England, the River Thames was completely frozen for
two months, the ice was 11 inches thick at London. Sea ice was reported along the coasts of
southeast England, and ice prevented the use of many harbors. The sea froze, so that ice
formed for a time between Dover and Calais, joining England and France. (It is more likely that
the shorelines froze and a great mass of densely packed icebergs, some 11 feet thick, built up
along the coastlines fusing into a semi-rigid structure that may have connected the two
shorelines together.) The Thames was recorded to have frozen over at London during the
years: 1649, 1655, 1663, 1666, 1667, 1684, 1695, 1709, and 1716. [Sources: River Thames
Frost Fairs and Historical Weather Events 1650-1699] [See also: The Great Frost of 1683-4 and
Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide]

Not that Samuel Pepys or other highly-literate observers can tell the NASA Anthropogenic Global Warming Cabal about quack science. As Richard Feynman predicted in his famous talk on "Cargo Cult Science," the NASA quacks are now in control and have Nibelungs like Frank, Waxman, and other genetic freaks toiling on their behalf.