Monday, January 31, 2011

The Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt---Short Course

Even in the event that some sort of peaceful denouement might be engendered with or without Mubarak or his VP still in the picture, the Everest-sized obstacle to the US 's acceptance of the Ikhwan's legitimacy remains its rejection to this day of the Camp David Accords. As noted above, other long-standing MB positions based on religious rather than political beliefs are significant speed bumps, as in Muslim Brotherhood’s intolerant policies toward the Coptic Christians, women’s rights, its application of shari’a in a constitutional context and which school of shari’a thought might prevail.

And what about international conventions Egypt has signed concerning racial discrimination [1967], discrimination against women [1981], civil and political rights [1982], economic, social and cultural rights [1982], elimination of torture and other cruel and degrading treatment [1986], rights of the child [1990]. Of course, the current Mubarak regime often fails to observe many of these conventions, but the MB would be examined much more closely, perhaps, for infractions than Mubarak.

In the words of an old British saw, accepting the Ikhwan would be like swallowing a camel while rejecting Mubarak might be straining at a gnat.

Reflections on American Self-Deception

As an exercise in humility, we might ask how America has been so consistently gobsmacked by Islamists in the Middle East. Richard Bulliet's observation made in the early ‘90s puts the problem this way: “the reassertion of Islam in the social and political sphere came to world attention as one of the most unpredicted movements of modern times……eviscerat(ing) the models used by a confident America to predict the future in the aftermath of victory in Word War II… (This) is attested to by the fact that between the end of World War II and the onset of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978-79, a bare handful of books about contemporary Islam were written by Americans….[here Bulliet cites Richard Mitchell and Morroe Berger as exceptions]…..Muslim assertiveness did not develop out of sight of non-Muslim observers; the observers simply failed to see.” Perhaps the problem stems from the passing of an era. After two hundred years of rationalist ideology where ideas held sway and its independence and constitution derived from high principles of government, America is suddenly discovering that the default mode for much of international and domestic politics is religion and ethnicity. “Tribes with flags” in the words of Egyptian diplomat Tahseen Bashir are the result of the failure of humanitarian ideals from 1789 through 1991 and the fall of the USSR. Gilles Kepel says much the same thing when he rejects the shallow politicized sociology of Marxism in its relegation of religion to a “banner” or a “mask,” a reductionist critical exercise of accenting the social dimensions of religion which he calls “dropping it through the trapdoor of ideology.” God may have died at the end of the nineteenth century by Nietzsche’s lights, but He’s resurrected Himself at the end of the twentieth!

Therefore, the overall problem of American accommodation with Islamists is far more complex than mere adjustments in American policy. A total adjustment of attitude and mindset in formulating that policy is also in order. And a willingness to admit that getting into the political ring with some very bad characters and getting American hands dirty in messy little sideshows might be part of the adjustment process, if only in a transition mode. Such as dealing with Hezbollah who killed the Marines in Beirut, for example. How will that go down in proverbial Peoria? Sadat’s assassination in 1981 was portrayed by its perpetrators as a being caused by Camp David, but probably had its proximate causes from Sadat’s unpopularity by putting on airs of a pharaoh as well as to a harsh crackdown on religious and political dissidents only months prior to his assassination. And in a parallel manner, perhaps, the murder of 241 Marines in Beirut by Hezbollah were manifestations of a Syrian/Hezbollah joint operation with control of Lebanon as its larger aim rather than related to Israel, at least as a primary goal. Ditto the assassinaton of President Hariri by Hezbollah terrorists.

Nowadays, the internet and more recently, the Palestinian staffers at Al Jazeera’s 24/7 TV coverage of news has projected a drumbeat of pounding the Israeli will-of-the-wisp into Arab consciousness daily, making what Egyptian columnist Mona Eltahawy call “the opium of the Arabs, an intoxicating way for them to forget their own failings, or at least blame them on someone else.” And Israel has long been the pretext used by Arab leaders for maintaining “states of emergency” at home and postponing reform.[Economist, July 23, 2009]. Just when everyone else is leaving the era of ideology, the Arabs in the short term remain mesmerized by past wrongs. India and China and the globalizing Tigers are bursting out of post-colonial cocoons while the Arabs remain in a permanent pity party of irredentist dreams and lost horizons, as Fouad Ajami notes in his book, Dream Palace of the Arabs.

Gaming this scenario forward in real time, American support of the MB would run into a proverbial brick wall over Camp David Accords, which even Al Azhar’s Ulema rubber stamped, but the MB remains against. With this iron bar in the House of Cards of MB/US rapprochement, is there any wormhole between their parallel universes? The US should remember Mubarak’s stubborn jailing of US citizen Sa’d Eddin Ibrahim, a noted Egyptian-born sociologist, against strong US official remonstrations. Perhaps the conundrum is a three-cornered rock, paper, scissors exercise where someone would inevitably get the short end of the stick among the US, MB, and Mubarak. Mubarak now looks to be sitting in an unenviable penalty box, bui In the unlikely event that all three actually did pull the rabbit out of a hat, then Israel would feel free to make mischief were its interests overlooked.

Indeed, the diplomatic dance this sort of triangular three-dimensional chess game among Mubarak, Obama, & the MB requires would see more than Israel just trying to call the tune for the US and Egypt. Hamas and Hezbollah and many other Arab and other Muslim players would be exerting public and perhaps even violent pressure on the MB not to surrender vis-à-vis Israel, that trusty shibboleth that keeps Islamists’ blood at a steady boil. Mubarak's hand might be forced, but he could only recognize MB as a legal player if there were offsetting immediate gains so humongous that he does an about face on MB legal status. Survival of his regime, or at least a follow-on caretaker until real elections might be a face-saving compromise. That would take lots of American military goodies and dollar-aid, but the US is now preoccupied with its own faltering domestic politics and my guess is that nothing imaginative or daring will happen in the near future.

The proverb of the Scorpion and the Frog remains operational in the Middle East. Sometimes the scorpion will sting the frog even thought it is being carried on its back in the middle of the river and both will die. In the Middle East, the depth of sectarian enmity and ethnic hatred is such that a truce is often broken even if it is to the trucebreaker’s disadvantage. Sometimes it seems they can’t help themselves. The kamikaze corps in the Muslim world flies on a daily basis.

Egypt Must Work Its Way Out of Insurrection by Itself---Fingerpointing & Victimization will only Disrupt its Healing Process

Consultation, not Confrontation

Ross Douthat has an Op-Ed column in the NYT which is surprisingly sane and sober, as that paper seldom is nowadays, concerning the disorder in Egypt. He quotes Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower which
raises the possibility that “America’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt.” By visiting imprisonment, torture and exile upon Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Mubarak foreclosed any possibility of an Islamic revolution in his own country. But he also helped radicalize and internationalize his country’s Islamists, pushing men like Ayman Al-Zawahiri — Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, and arguably the real brains behind Al Qaeda — out of Egyptian politics and into the global jihad.


Actually, the WTC tragedy may well have been born in the strange brain of Mohammed Qutb, who visited Boulder CO and Greeley CO and decided that western women were too free and that Egypt and Islam must perform deeper religious immersion, making him the spiritual successor to Hassan al-Banna, killed by King Farouk's thugs in the late '40s. Or perhaps it was born in The Free Officers' Movement itself, with its goal of arab socialism contradicting Egypt's Islamic traditions and imprisoning religious fanatics. Or perhaps it was Sadat's reaction to the food riots of '77 which made him throw a bunch of religious & other suspects in jail in a rictus of reaction, thus energizing his own murder as a "Pharaoh," leading the way to Mubarak's reaction of a state of Emergency and more jailings of religious suspects, among them Ayman al-Zawahiri, et al. Perhaps a certain mindset of Islam is completely at odds with modernity and spawns anarchy if strongmen don't clamp harshly down on unruly crowds because the 'Arab temperament' does not lend itself to compromise through calm reflection. Perhaps the Shariah is fundamentally incompatible with a free modern mentality which gives equality to both genders and minorities like the Copts or the Muslim non-Arabs in the Sudan.

I know that most of the signers of the IPA letter to Obama calling for 'new approaches' to the Middle East mean well, but UNDP has two massive studies [1990 & 2008] which look long and hard at why Arab and Muslim societies have such endemic problems with erecting an industrial infrastructure on a group of societies emerging from a medieval mentality. Why has there been no Arab enlightenment or Muslim Renaissance? These are serious questions and no manifesto signed by Noam Chomsky and even an imprisoned fighter for Egyptian freedom like Saad Eddin Ibrahim will show Obama and other well-meaning westerners any new way to confront the problems of confronting modern technological social and economic realities in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. The Egyptians and Tunisians and Sudanese and Yemenis must confront their own realities without resorting to terrorism and other international criminal practices such as Hezbollah, which has assassinated its way to power in Lebanon, has perpetrated, just for one example.

The United States is no more responsible for Egypt's present situation than a lot of other contingent variables in the foreign equation impinging on Egypt at the moment. And the fundamental problems with Egypt's political and economic inadequacies rest with Egyptian history, including that long cavalcade of foreign rulers which in the 2500 years since the end of the New Kingdom has inflicted themselves on what in ancient times was the richest country in the world with the most well-ordered religious and social conditions of any 'nation' existing in the First Millenium, B.C. The Free Officers were the first native Egyptians to rule Egypt since the Pharoahs and, let's face it, they've made quite a hash of it since 1952, and often blamed foreigners for what in fact were their own all-too-obvious shortcomings.

So let's not pretend that America is the world's arbiter or policeman, and let's also realize that the United Nations should not impose itself on this society which must sooner or later right itself by itself, and grapple with its problems without pointing fingers and playing any victim cards. The Muslim Brotherhood has had a large role in Egyptian society since the early decades of the twentieth century and can no longer be shut out of the political process. But the Ikhwan must itself assume a leadership role if the situation warrants which allows Egyptian society to heal itself---Egypt should avoid the excesses of the Iranian and French and other revolutions which ended up harming the inhabitants of the lands they intended to reform and exchanging one set of jailers for another.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Ajami: When the Pharoah Falls

Which curb do you want me to kick you to?

Fouad Ajami asked me in 1981 when Sadat had been murdered whether he should go to Cairo for the funeral and be the NBC commentator. At the time I was working as an NBC Asst. Producer and I told him by all means yes. But Fouad demurred, and later became a commentator for another network, and perhaps the best respected expert on Egypt in the US media.

Mubarak's reign in Egypt has lasted as long as the State of Emergency declared back when Sadat was assassinated. Back then, the Emergency was supposed to last for just a couple of weeks and Mubarak was to name his Vice President and putative successor within a short time. The running joke back then in Egypt was that it took Nasser a long time to name Sadat as his VP because he was looking for someone dumber than himself. Ditto for Sadat, who after Nasser's death in 1970 took many years to name Mubarak because HE was looking for someone stupider than himself. And Mubarak after twenty-- years is still looking for THE SAME REASON...!

Now Omar Suleiman is the new VP and an imposter like El Baradei, a puppet of the Iranian mullahs and someone with little political standing in Egypt itself and with a bogus Nobel PP, is linking up with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose most distinguished graduate is Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden's right-hand hit man. The Muslim Brotherhood is the godfather of Hamas, a terrorist organization much more murderous and unsavory than the PLO. The Ikhwan will employ El-Baradei and then throw him away like a used Kleenex.

Hopefully, some sort of agreement can be reached whereby Mubarak agrees to leave his perch at the Presidency, as he was up for "re-election" this year anyway. If Omar Suleiman is not the Army's choice, then a new sort of constitution has to be worked out to give the people some sort of REAL participation in electing its leaders. As it is, Egypt's "democracy" vies with Iran's version as to how difficult it is to be on the ballet for the National Assembly. In Iran, the Council of Guardians assures doctrinal purity. In Egypt, real opposition is winnowed out by sheer political and military heft. Here is Ajami's story of Mubarak:
It is hard to know with precision when Hosni Mubarak, the son of middle peasantry, lost the warrant of his people. It had started out well for this most cautious of men. He had been there on the reviewing stand on Oct. 6, 1981 when a small band of young men from the army struck down Sadat as the flamboyant ruler was reviewing his troops and celebrating the eighth anniversary of the October War of 1973.

The new man had risen by grace of his predecessor's will. He had had no political past. The people of Egypt had not known of him. He was the antidote to two great and ambitious figures—Nasser and Sadat. His promise was modesty. He would tranquilize the realm after three decades of tumult and wars and heartbreaking bids to re-make the country.

A deceased friend of mine, an army general of Mr. Mubarak's class and generation, spoke of the man with familiarity: He was a civil servant with the rank of president, he said of his fellow officer. Mr. Mubarak put the word out that he would serve two six-year terms and be gone. But the appetite grew with the eating. The humble officer would undergo a transformation. A presidency-for-life announced itself. And in an astounding change, where Nasser and Sadat feared the will and the changing moods of their countrymen, Mr. Mubarak grew imperious and dismissive.

Egypt bent to his will. A country with a vibrant parliamentary tradition in the 1920s and 1930s became a sterile tyranny. A land that had opened onto Europe in the course of the 19th century, that had given rise to professional syndicates and associations, to an independent judiciary, was brought low.

There has always been an Egyptian pride in their country—even as Egypt tried and failed to modernize, even as its Sisyphean struggle broke its heart and engendered a deep sense of disappointment—and Mr. Mubarak came to offend that sense of national pride.

In the annals of Muslim dynasties and kingdoms, wives and children have figured prominently in the undoing of rulers. An ambitious wife, Suzanne, with haughty manners, and a taste for wealth and power (a variation on the hairdresser Leila Trabelsi, the wife of the deposed Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali) and a favored son who, by all indications, was preparing to inherit his father's power, deepened the estrangement between Mr. Mubarak and his people.

Fouad leaves out Sadat's deeply unpopular wife in this tale, but the stories are always made into jokes on the street---invariably the President's wife is easy to find after dark, because she's standing under a bright streetlight...! [Many variations of the unfaithful spouse are repeated in the Arab world. Jokes are the poor man's revenge against power.]

My guess is that any successor to Mubarak will be bad [a variation of the present praetorian regime] or worse [an Ikhwan that flexes its Islamic muscle all across the Islamic world.]

Here's hoping that a miracle will occur and that the status quo ante will return without undue pain and bloodshed.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Another IPCC Global Warming Hoax Exposed---Glaciers GROWING in Himalayas, not Melting!

Dr Rajendra Pachauri is a former Indian Railways engineer and as skillful in propounding a hoax as Bernie Madoff, indeed, more skilled as Pachauri has yet to be fully unmasked and exposed as an imposter. He happens because of his railroading talent, obviously key to the study of worldwide climate, to head the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] which has predicting that the seas will begin to boil over this century, ending the existence of all littoral cities such as Mumbai in India, NYC in the USA & even Sydney in Oz-land. Polar bears are doomed, among many of God's creatures, because his wrath will not abide man's sinful...... oops, wrong religion......because human industry is warming up the earth with CO2, a naturally occurring gas which has now been declared a tool of Satan's children, the evil corporate execs planning our doom as we sit here.

A great many scientists have invested much time and effort to secure funding for grants to study this oncoming catastrophe, outlined in the IPCC, and a "study" in 2007 supervised by railwayman Pachauri said that Himalayan glaciers will melt and swamp the Indian subcontinent with disastrous floods by the year 2035, just 24 short years to doomsday.

But, hark, a new study by the Universities of California and Potsdam conclude that a reprieve from doom is at hand:
...more than 50 per cent of observed glaciers in the Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are advancing or stable.
"Our study shows that there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover for understanding glacier retreat, an effect that has so far been neglected in predictions of future water availability or global sea level," the authors concluded.
Dr Bookhagen said their report had shown "there is no stereotypical Himalayan glacier" in contrast to the UN's climate change report which, he said, "lumps all Himalayan glaciers together."
Dr Pachauri, head of the Nobel prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has remained silent on the matter since he was forced to admit his report's claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was an error and had not been sourced from a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It came from a World Wildlife Fund report.
He angered India's environment minister and the country's leading glaciologist when he attacked those who questioned his claim as purveyors of "voodoo science".
The environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had cited research indicating some Himalayan glaciers were advancing in the face of the UN's claim.

Of course, voodoo science and voodoo economics always get you disqualified from Nobel Prizes, as the wealthy Pachauri, who benefits from several carbon credit scams and now counts himself a millionaire [and not in rupees!].

Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, IAEA hero El-Baradei, Barack Obama, the list of Nobel heroes is long and Pachauri can always point to the five Norwegian women on the panel and thank them for making him even richer.

Friday, January 28, 2011

From the Tree of Malice: USSR's Lies and how the American Lamestream Media keeps Propagating Soviet Lies.

Korean Air 007 Ha Ha Ha I laughed Myself to Sleep

Claire Berlinski has a great article on newly-released or rather smuggled [around in 2003 ALMOST A DECADE AGO] materials from the late, unlamented USSR's secret files.
Berlinski's earlier article on the secret Soviet files, many of them containing dynamite revelations on how Andropov and Gorbachev aided and abetted TERRORISM and indiscriminate murder while arming the insurrection in El Salvador in the seventies and eighties, the one that Nicaraguan dictator Ortega, who recently lectured tyro Proglodyte Obama who meekly took blame for US crimes which didn't exist, was pulling off while Col North and the valiant CIA spies like George Cave were helping resist the Commie murderers. Here's evidence of Gorby's CRIMINAL MIND at work:
Stroilov claims that his documents “tell a completely new story about the end of the Cold War. The ‘commonly accepted’ version of history of that period consists of myths almost entirely. These documents are capable of ruining each of those myths.” Is this so? I couldn’t say. I don’t read Russian. Of Stroilov’s documents, I have seen only the few that have been translated into English. Certainly, they shouldn’t be taken at face value; they were, after all, written by Communists. But the possibility that Stroilov is right should surely compel keen curiosity.

For instance, the documents cast Gorbachev in a far darker light than the one in which he is generally regarded. In one document, he laughs with the Politburo about the USSR’s downing of Korean Airlines flight 007 in 1983—a crime that was not only monstrous but brought the world very near to nuclear Armageddon. These minutes from a Politburo meeting on October 4, 1989, are similarly disturbing:

Lukyanov reports that the real number of casualties on Tiananmen Square was 3,000.

Gorbachev: We must be realists. They, like us, have to defend themselves. Three thousands . . . So what?

And a transcript of Gorbachev’s conversation with Hans-Jochen Vogel, the leader of West Germany’s Social Democratic Party, shows Gorbachev defending Soviet troops’ April 9, 1989, massacre of peaceful protesters in Tbilisi.

Stroilov’s documents also contain transcripts of Gorbachev’s discussions with many Middle Eastern leaders. These suggest interesting connections between Soviet policy and contemporary trends in Russian foreign policy. Here is a fragment from a conversation reported to have taken place with Syrian president Hafez al-Assad on April 28, 1990:

H. ASSAD. To put pressure on Israel, Baghdad would need to get closer to Damascus, because Iraq has no common borders with Israel. . . .

M. S. GORBACHEV. I think so, too. . . .

H. ASSAD. Israel’s approach is different, because the Judaic religion itself states: the land of Israel spreads from Nile to Euphrates and its return is a divine predestination.

M. S. GORBACHEV. But this is racism, combined with Messianism!

H. ASSAD. This is the most dangerous form of racism.

One doesn’t need to be a fantasist to wonder whether these discussions might be relevant to our understanding of contemporary Russian policy in a region of some enduring strategic significance.


Berlinski's Hidden History of Evil also finds fingerprints from Joe Biden's hero, a traitor named Neil Kinnock, now a Lord, who tried to get Gorby's help in scuttling the Brit's Trident Missile program. Plagiarist Joe also figures in the traitor chronicles.
And what of Zagladin’s description of his dealings with our own current vice president in 1979? Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.
Remarkably, the world has shown little interest in the unread Soviet archives. That paragraph about Biden is a good example. Stroilov and Bukovsky coauthored a piece about it for the online magazine FrontPage on October 10, 2008; it passed without remark. Americans considered the episode so uninteresting that even Biden’s political opponents didn’t try to turn it into political capital. Imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to have spent the prime of your life in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, to know that Joe Biden is now vice president of the United States, and to know that no one gives a damn.


Lugar is the chief RINO moral leper, but Bukovsky has a lot of pain in his background, having spent 12 years as Gorbachev's unwilling guest, among others, in a Psychiatric Hospital. The left in the USA in the rabid blogosphere always claims Palin and Beck and other Republican icons have a mental disease. In their socialist workers' paradise, these politicos would be hospitalized for a mental problem.
Bukovsky’s book about the story that these documents tell, Jugement à Moscou, has been published in French, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, but not in English. Random House bought the manuscript and, in Bukovsky’s words, tried “to force me to rewrite the whole book from the liberal left political perspective.” Bukovsky replied that “due to certain peculiarities of my biography I am allergic to political censorship.” The contract was canceled, the book was never published in English, and no other publisher has shown interest in it. Neither has anyone wanted to publish EUSSR, a pamphlet by Stroilov and Bukovsky about the Soviet roots of European integration. In 2004, a very small British publisher did print an abbreviated version of the pamphlet; it, too, passed unnoticed.

Stroilov has a long list of complaints about journalists who have initially shown interest in the documents, only to tell him later that their editors have declared the story insignificant. In advance of Gorbachev’s visit to Germany for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stroilov says, he offered the German press the documents depicting Gorbachev unflatteringly. There were no takers. In France, news about the documents showing Mitterrand’s and Gorbachev’s plans to turn Germany into a dependent socialist state prompted a few murmurs of curiosity, nothing more. Bukovsky’s vast collection about Soviet sponsorship of terrorism, Palestinian and otherwise, remains largely unpublished.


Berlinski's list of the current leftist retards in the EU hierarchy is sobering:
Baroness Catherine Ashton, who is now the European Union’s foreign minister, was treasurer of Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from 1980 to 1982. The papers offer evidence that this organization received “unidentified income” from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Stroilov’s papers suggest as well that the government of the current Spanish EU commissioner for economic and monetary affairs, Joaquín Almunia, enthusiastically supported the Soviet project of gradually unifying Germany and Europe into a socialist “common European home” and strongly opposed the independence of the Baltic states and then of Ukraine.

Perhaps it doesn’t surprise you to read that prominent European politicians held these views. But why doesn’t it? It is impossible to imagine that figures who had enjoyed such close ties to the Nazi Party—or, for that matter, to the Ku Klux Klan or to South Africa’s apartheid regime—would enjoy top positions in Europe today. The rules are different, apparently, for Communist fellow travelers. “We now have the EU unelected socialist party running Europe,” Stroilov said to me. “Bet the KGB can’t believe it.”


Berlinski doesn't mention the KGB documents which mention Jimmy Carter's covert visit to Moscow in 1983 to try to cajole the Soviets to support the Dem candidate for the Presidency [Comsymp Mondale had yet to be nominated] in return for unspecified cutbacks in American foreign policy pressures. Teddy Kennedy, another Demonrat traitor, also was in on getting the Soviets on board later, after Mondale had been nominated. These come from KGB documents which reached the US---somehow the lamestream media in the States never deigned to give this Soviet evidence which came to light after Yeltsin opened the Archives much credence or even lip service. The treasonous MSM works hand in hand with DNC traitors, and we can expect Berlinski's latest crusade to uncover Soviet crimes go again unheeded. Here's how she ended her piece last year:
Stroilov says that he and Bukovsky approached Jonathan Brent of Yale University Press, which is leading a publishing project on the history of the Cold War. He claims that initially Brent was enthusiastic and asked him to write a book, based on the documents, about the first Gulf War. Stroilov says that he wrote the first six chapters, sent them off, and never heard from Brent again, despite sending him e-mail after e-mail. “I can only speculate what so much frightened him in that book,” Stroilov wrote to me.

I’ve also asked Brent and received no reply. This doesn’t mean anything; people are busy. I am less inclined to believe in complex attempts to suppress the truth than I am in indifference and preoccupation with other things. Stroilov sees in these events “a kind of a taboo, the vague common understanding in the Establishment that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie, not to throw stones in a house of glass, and not to mention a rope in the house of a hanged man.” I suspect it is something even more disturbing: no one much cares.

“I know the time will come,” Stroilov says, “when the world has to look at those documents very carefully. We just cannot escape this. We have no way forward until we face the truth about what happened to us in the twentieth century. Even now, no matter how hard we try to ignore history, all these questions come back to us time and again.”

The questions come back time and again, it is true, but few remember that they have been asked before, and few remember what the answer looked like. No one talks much about the victims of Communism. No one erects memorials to the throngs of people murdered by the Soviet state. (In his widely ignored book, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of perestroika under Gorbachev, puts the number at 30 to 35 million.)

Indeed, many still subscribe to the essential tenets of Communist ideology. Politicians, academics, students, even the occasional autodidact taxi driver still stand opposed to private property. Many remain enthralled by schemes for central economic planning. Stalin, according to polls, is one of Russia’s most popular historical figures. No small number of young people in Istanbul, where I live, proudly describe themselves as Communists; I have met such people around the world, from Seattle to Calcutta.

We rightly insisted upon total denazification; we rightly excoriate those who now attempt to revive the Nazis’ ideology. But the world exhibits a perilous failure to acknowledge the monstrous history of Communism. These documents should be translated. They should be housed in a reputable library, properly cataloged, and carefully assessed by scholars. Above all, they should be well-known to a public that seems to have forgotten what the Soviet Union was really about. If they contain what Stroilov and Bukovsky say—and all the evidence I’ve seen suggests that they do—this is the obligation of anyone who gives a damn about history, foreign policy, and the scores of millions dead.

Stalin, Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Andropov and other Soviet leaders killed 50 million SOVIET CITIZENS over the seventy-three years that the Communist Party ruled the Soviet Union, and millions of foreigners as well.

Evidently the EU criminal elites have given Russia a pass since Baronness Ashton may still be grateful for that start-up cash her Soviet mentors gave her organization back in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Maybe she's still paying the current brutal Russian regime for previous Soviet emoluments with all sorts of barter-type goodies in the shape of information and other tips.

And the eternally somnolent Germans should thank Berlinski for reminding them that during the reunification days, Mitterand and Gorbachev never were able to strangle their economy with a socialist noose.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

How Many Verses in a Multiverse?

Brian Greene's new book is called The Hidden Reality because, like all string theory, it can only be proven mathematically. I am awaiting its arrival today as I ordered it last week for half-price---having read and enjoyed Greene's previous exertions on the subject of string theory. Here's a snippet of a review:
Mr. Greene, though, does a valiant job of making the arcane world of what is known as string theory at least semi-intelligible. Briefly, string theory asserts that interactions between objects called "strings," occurring in multiple dimensions, cause the phenomena that we observe in our universe of three space dimensions and one time dimension. As readers of his earlier books will be aware, string theory is meat and drink to Mr. Greene. Yet his buildup to the sensational meat of this book—in which he proposes a system that uses string theory to explain and argue for multiverse theory—is cautious, perhaps in the hope of not frightening his readers with too much too soon.

Like many familiar accounts of our universe, Mr. Greene's begins with the Big Bang. Along the way he presents one of the best explanations that I have seen of the idea of inflation—a rapid early phase of expansion in the first split-second of the life of the universe, thought to explain the nature of the Big Bang itself. "Inflationary cosmology is a key chapter in our story," the author explains, "because scientists have gradually realized over the last few decades that the most convincing versions of the theory yield a vast collection of parallel universes, radically transforming the complexion of reality."

Following the edict that "in an infinite universe anything is possible," Mr. Greene introduces the idea of an infinite number of almost identical copies of our universe, infinitely far away from us, and the idea of universes that follow one another in time, like beads on a string. The "parallel worlds" of quantum physics, which are different from the many dimensions of string theory, make an appearance (along with Schrödinger's famous cat). There is also an all-too-brief discussion of the possibility that either our universe has been manufactured by beings in another universe or we are living in a computer simulation like that of the "Matrix" series of movies.

It's been noted before that science fiction "intuits" physical reality on a sometimes surprisingly consistent basis. However absurd a matrix universe might appear, there remains the intriguing possiblility that it does define our "reality" better than alternatives. Here's more of the review:
The laws of physics do, indeed, allow for the existence of different kinds of universe, and no fundamental reason has yet been discovered why the world we see around us should have been singled out by those laws.

To take a simple example, if the force of gravity were stronger than it is in our universe, but all other properties remained the same, stars would have to burn more fiercely to hold themselves up against the pull of gravity. They would use up their fuel more quickly and burn out in a few million years, not allowing time for life forms like us to evolve on planets orbiting those stars. So why should gravity, and the other properties of our universe, be "just right" for us to exist?

There are two possibilities, often expressed in terms of an analogy with a man who buys a suit that is a perfect fit. Either the suit has been specifically tailored for the client—made to measure—or he has visited a large store with an array of suits in all possible sizes, choosing the one right for him off the peg. The best interpretation of the laws of physics as we understand them is that we live in an off-the-peg universe. A vast array of universes exist in the multiverse, many (perhaps most) of them sterile, but since life forms like us can only exist in universes like ours, it is no surprise that we live in such a universe.

Sadly, the book contains many equations, which will hinder my understanding. Happily, it contains Schroedinger's cat, my favorite feline in the entire spectrum of science and science fiction.

Hypocritical Common Cause Libtards Attack Scalia and Thomas

Marxist morons at the left-wing hit squad named "common cause," as sadly misnamed as the "Fairness Doctrine" or the "People for the American Way," are attacking Scalia and Thomas for ethical lapses so ridiculous that the clamoring cretins in the blamestream media cannot examine the facts without laughing at themselves.

In the meantime, two Jews named Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker and Stephen Breyer who masquerades as a Justice on the SCOTUS, had a long conversation on how Breyer can help the Obama regime attain its goal of socialism, or any other sort of Marxist tyranny by a statist absolutist bureaucracy.

I can't find the article Toobin had in The New Yorker, but it is a prime offense against the separation of powers the Founding Fathers had in mind, unaware that Jewish pukes like Toobin and Breyer would infect our body politic with their social diseases.

WSJ Does Slamdown on KeithO Bitch-boy's Abrupt Exit

Bret Stephens has a counter-intuitive article for conservatives to consider now that KeithO has self-destructed for the fourth [and possibly not the last] time in his spew-studded career.
In 1950, the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote that "Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition." Conservatives, by contrast, didn't have ideas, only "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." But then came William F. Buckley and the National Review, and then Irving Kristol and the Public Interest, and then Robert Bartley of this editorial page.

And then came Fox News, and Fox Sports, and Fox Business, and Fox Everything.

With each new iteration of conservative thought, every new conservative encroachment on a previously placid domain, the liberal reaction began to evolve, from indifference to condescension to irritation to tantrum. By the time Mr. Olbermann got into the business, the tantrum had given way to something stronger. Intellectual eclampsia. His genius was to embody it.

That's something conservatives can applaud, even if they aren't exactly grateful for it. At least until the last couple of years, when President Bush's retirement deprived Mr. Olbermann of his premier foil, "Countdown" consistently passed the market test. He served his audience. He put MSNBC on the map. He pushed CNN into third place. He earned his $30 million contract.

Nor was Mr. Olbermann only good for capitalism. For a long time, the dominant mode of liberal argument was to ironize, or tut-tut, or dissemble, or manipulate the terms of discourse, or stack the deck in debates that are supposed to be balanced. The "Countdown" host did away with the old-fashioned liberal snigger and replaced it with a full-frontal snarl.

Put simply, Mr. Olbermann had a genuine faith in populism, something liberals more often preach than practice. Say what you will about his on-air rants, I'll take them any day over the subterfuges used by NPR to fire Juan Williams.

So the smug condescension of cryto-Jew Trilling gives way to "Special Comments" which call Michelle Malkin a "racist" forgetting her Asian heritage and KeithO's other affronts using ad hominem to the point of ad nauseum. Stephens points out that the real enemy is the bland silliness of 'civility' which is punctuated by Demonrats with accusations of Nazi tactics on the floor of the House while Sarah Palin gets crucified for shooting a moose.
All this matters in an era in which the greatest threat to public discourse isn't "incivility," as was so preposterously claimed after Tucson. Just compare the tedium of U.S. congressional debate with the rapier exchanges in Britain's House of Commons, the catcalling in Israel's Knesset, or the fist-fights in Taiwan's parliament.

Rather, the real threat is Good Morning America-style niceness, USA Today-style consensus-seeking, all-round squeamishness when it comes to words like "Islam," the political masquerade of "news analysis" from papers like the New York Times, and so on. In today's media landscape, audiences are being presented with a choice between voices who are honest (at least about their biases) but not objective, and those who claim to be objective but are rarely honest. Not surprisingly, Americans increasingly prefer the former.

So far, conservatives have gotten the better of liberals in the new media world. But Mr. Olbermann has given conservatives, if not quite a run for their money, at least some honest competition. It'll be a rare person who can match Mr. Olbermann for ego, pomposity, volume, self-righteousness, monomania and sheer obnoxiousness. Should MSNBC ever find that person (and Lawrence O'Donnell he ain't), I'll make a point of tuning in.

Sadly, WSJ is chock-full of nerds like John Fund and sillyboys like Moore who really have problems projecting anything except intellectual nausea at the Demonrats' persistent corrupt practices. Henninger and other forgettable spokespeople, including Gigot, simply personify white-bread middlebrow to the nth degree.

Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin do personify the objective rage and serious Tea-Party rebelliousness over the usual RINO equivocations of dinosaurs like Lugar and even McCain which make Republicans want to spit the lukewarm sillyboys out of their mouths.

Tim Pawlenty is another example of Minnesota-nice who simply may have good ideas, but could not last a minute in a hothouse atmosphere of a national campaign. Jon Stewart deconstructed Pawlenty because Timmy-boy was so afraid to say something bad about the degenerate left. Who needs gutless wonders like him and Mitch Daniels, both as sexy as kissing your sister.

Egypt Totters as Lebanon Goes to the Dark Side

The New York Times must miss its erstwhile correspondent Chris Hedges, who called out every fortnight that Egypt was ready to collapse back in the eighties and early nineties. Like Paul Krugman with recessions, Hedges knew that sooner or later, he was going to actually predict an insurrection that occurred and that the liberal cacophony that masquerades as a marketplace of ideas would finally crown him a prescient seer. Unlike preening ninny Krugman, Hedges day in the sun, however belated, hasn't arrived yet.

However, not even the uprisings and disturbances in Tahrir Square have approached a real threat to the strange pharaonic regime that Mubarak has erected upon the ruins of the Sadat era---the state of emergency declared in 1981 at Sadat's assassination still remains in force and will likely stay in force until the ancient Pharoah dies. Mubarak, it must be remembered, had the constitution of a draft horse and used to play squash every day, a sport at which the Egyptians have traditionally excelled. He could remain alive another ten years, given his iron constitution.

Also, bear in mind that the Egyptian Army is the giant 800-pound gorilla in the room. Its tentacles reach everywhere in Egyptian society and its clannish officer septs are often very loyal to each other, much more so than to the Egyptian people whose daily bread they eat and whose blood they metaphorically suck. Also, the mukhabarat or secret police are everywhere, in unmarked cars and with weapons readily available to quell any unrest. The Muslim Brotherhood, long suppressed, remains a special object of the secret police's solicitude, and is watched incessantly for any signs of "illegal" activities.

However, the wheels of change in the Middle East, like a tectonic fault, often remain rigidly locked, then unbuckle in an earthquake of sudden unpredictable change. Nasser's Officer's Rebellion in the fifties is one example. The insane morphing of Hamas from an Israeli-fostered counterweight against the PLO into the main threat to Israeli daily peace is another.

Lebanon's descent one more time into the lower circles of political hell was more predictable, as one after another Christian politician and journalist was killed by Hezbollah-sponsored terrorism. Now, when the UN Inquiry into Hariri's assassination was about to reveal the complicity of Hezbollah [rather than Syria, the previous suspect] in the monstrous crime, Hezbollah blithely overturns the Lebanese government and now terrorism reigns in Lebanon. Hillarious Clinton and the sillyboy in the Oval Office are left to bleat once more as their feckless incompetence, first revealed by giving Iran an orange light to develop a nuke, is once again open for all the world to see.

Rather than the world's policeman, the US is reduced to a nanny-like hectoring of terrorists---oops, pardon the PC venial sin---liberation movements. Of an Islamic sort. That practice terrorist tactics and have a strategy of nuclear blackmail against Israel.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

George Washington's First War

Ron Chernow has written a huge and brilliant biography of our First and Greatest POTUS that I am slogging through, mainly because of my own immersion in the downside of the Revolutionary War. It is clear to me that, although Lincoln may have saved the Republic, Washington's incredible bravery and steadfast stubbornness with occasional bouts of brilliant daring make him by far our greatest president, for the simple and obvious reason [except to historians] that he was absolutely indispensible to the founding of our nation.

The silly polls conducted recently by tiny schools in upstate New York state that have FDR and Teddy Roosevelt as our two greatest presidents indicate only the deadening provincialism of American historians---whose bias is so transparent that their professionalism is in grave doubt.

Clueless Corrupt Demonrats Controlled by AFSCME & SEIU

Demonrats are now the party of unions, liberals, trial lawyers and other special interest groups. "Liberals" are a tiny and diminishing minority of voters with less than 20% of American voters calling themselves liberals or Proglodytes. Here's a disillusioned Dem who believes that the death knell may be close to sounding if the party of cancerously-growing Big Government refuses to stop its addiction to taxing and spending:
If the Democrats want to be competitive in 2012, they must move decisively back to the center. And unless they're able to break the stranglehold that government-employee unions have on the party on policy, as well as in financial and political support, it will be virtually impossible for Democrats to restore fiscal health to states like New York and California.

Working-class families are fleeing the Democratic Party en masse, a trend that is likely to continue if their own economic situation remains weak in the face of ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt. These working-class voters see that public employees are continuing to receive more generous benefits and enjoy greater job security than they are. Support for the Democratic Party is now well below 40% with working-class voters who are unionized, and as low as 33% with whites who are not college educated.

Bureaucratic Authoritarianism is the sort of loose definition when the Nomenklatura of a country are high-level government functionaries appointed by a centralizing leader, as with Putin's attempt to modernize Russia and the South Korean experience as well as Chile, Argentina and Brazil. The petty functionaries of the country are given such complete control of a country's economic development through grants of exclusivity and alternatively the grandfathering of special interest industries that the country becomes a corporatist collectivity along the lines of Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany. The unions' "mission creep" has now silently become a tumorous growth on the body politic:
By providing Democratic candidates the bulk of their campaign funding, public unions have essentially bought control of the party. This is particularly true when it comes to the politicians who control union contracts and pensions at the state and municipal level.

At the national level, public-employee unions spent more than $200 million to defeat Republican candidates during the 2010 midterm election. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—the main union of state employees—spent over $90 million during the campaign, and it was the top donor to the Democrats' efforts to win gubernatorial and state-legislative races.

In California, public-employee unions spent about $25 million to elect Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown. And they've seeded California's state legislature with union operatives from the highest levels on down. One union leader was caught on tape telling elected officials: "We helped to get you into office, and we got a good memory. Come November, if you don't back our program, we'll get you out of office."

In New York, public-employee unions effectively run their own political party dedicated to defeating measures such as wage freezes, benefit cuts and tougher work rules. The Working Families Party, an alliance of labor unions, community groups and politicians, has disproportionate influence in the state assembly. A majority of members were endorsed by and appeared on the Working Families Party ballot line. So far, assembly speaker Sheldon Silver has resisted all efforts to make the kind of cuts in public-employee benefits that would make a meaningful dent in the state's $9 billion deficit.

Democratic leaders are going to have to make hard choices in these states and others where public-employee pension systems are directly responsible for bringing treasuries to the brink of bankruptcy after years of reckless spending.

Now that the Lower House of US Congress and its power of the purse is in the hands of the GOP, the automatic underwriting of the states' profligacy of union benefits and pensions put in place by corrupt Dem politicians will predictably cease, and the states will have to seek financing for their growing deficits from elsewhere than the Fed govt. New York and California are both on the verge of fiscal collapse:
Mr. Brown in California and Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York both spoke in their inaugural addresses about the need for public-employee unions to compromise and make some sacrifices. But talk is not enough. These governors, and the Democratic Party more generally, must develop and implement a new reform agenda that includes furloughs, layoffs, wage freezes and reductions in pension benefits—certainly for new workers, if not those currently in the system. This is not only essential public policy, it is essential politically for the Democrats to maintain their credibility.

Mr. Brown—who first gave California's public employees the right to bargain collectively during his first term as governor—promised during his inaugural speech last week to review the benefits received by government workers. But he has said nothing about the specific steps he plans on taking to close California's $28 billion budget gap or to address the growing labor contracts and swelling pensions of public employees. It remains unclear whether he will be able to negotiate the give-backs necessary to avoid bankruptcy. It's more likely that he'll push for a tax increase that will be unpalatable to voters if proposed and choke growth if enacted.

Mr. Cuomo has outlined a comprehensive plan to close New York's $10 billion budget gap with specific proposals such as a property tax cap and a freeze on state salaries. While Mr. Cuomo has demonstrated the will to take on both the state-employee unions and Mr. Silver—who have rejected any compromise that would reduce public-employee pay—it remains to be seen whether he has the political heft to succeed where his predecessor David Paterson failed. Mr. Paterson was unable to negotiate give-backs, such as reductions in scheduled raises and an extended pay lag for public employees, with New York's powerful labor unions, most notably the 1199/SEIU.

Mr. Schoen notes the precedent of Gov; Hugh Carey in New York, a powerful man of great moral character able to resist the siren song of the public unions, as a hopeful sign that resistence by the Dems is possible in that state. The weak and semi-moronic Brown of California was the originator of empowerment of public unions and his backbone is as flexible as a drunk on his third or fourth try at AA. Schoen ends on an ominous note for the spineless corrupt Dems:
Republicans are already making hard choices around the country: reducing union benefits, weakening their influence and limiting their right to strike and even their right to bargain collectively. Unless the Democrats engage in similar efforts, there will be a powerful new campaign issue for the Republicans to rally around going in 2012 and beyond.

The corrupt union thugs are attempting to strong-arm the country with their Brownshirt bully boys into some sort of socialist corporatist fascism. The American people must resist bureaucratic authoritarianism and not let the US fall into the Russian Slough of Despond, where public officials unelected and unresponsive to public will are allowed a free hand to pillage and rape the economic resources of the country under the guiding hand of an immensely 'popular' elected dictator.

Taranto Smacks Down Palinoia

James Taranto is the wittiest GED I've ever run across. Here's his masterly takedown of the obnoxious women who are full of hate and derision for Sarah Palin:

Professional jealousy and intellectual snobbery, however, only scratch the surface of the left's bizarre attitude toward Palin. They explain the intensity of the disdain, but not the outright hatred--not why some people whose grasp of reality is sufficient to function in society made the insane inference that she was to blame for a madman's attempt to murder Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

This unhinged hatred of Palin comes mostly from women. That is an awkward observation for us to offer, because a man risks sounding sexist or unchivalrous when he makes unflattering generalizations about women. Therefore, we are going to hide behind the skirts of our friend Jessica Faller, a New Yorker in her 30s of generally liberal politics. Over the weekend, she wrote us this analysis of Palin-hatred, which she has generously given us permission to quote:

I am starting out with a guess that this stems from her abrupt appearance on the national scene during the McCain-Obama race. She appeared out of nowhere and landed squarely in a position of extreme attention and media power. Her sex appeal might not have been as much of an issue had she been a known entity with a tremendous, watertight political résumé.
Even lacking that, her sex appeal might not have been such an issue if her demeanor on the campaign trail had been more, well, conservative. But here is this comely woman, in a curvy red suit, giving "shout-outs" during the debate with Joe Biden, giving controversial interviews without apology, basically driving in there, parking the car, and walking in like she owned the place.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing. But she couldn't have pulled it off if she were a gray mouse in a pantsuit, and because the devil in the red dress wasn't orating like a professor, it roused an unquenchable forest fire of rage and loathing in the breasts of many women, perhaps of the toiling gray mouse variety, who projected onto her their own career resentments and personal frustrations.
I am amazed at how people still abhor her. I personally do not. I don't feel she would be a good choice to run this country, but she does not deserve the horrific treatment she gets. I can tell you, being privy to the endless, incendiary rants this past week about her, coming from hordes of liberal women--age demo 25 to 45--they rip her to pieces, they blame her for everything, and the jealousy/resentment factor is so clear and primal. I've never seen anything like it.
We'd say this goes beyond mere jealousy. For many liberal women, Palin threatens their sexual identity, which is bound up with their politics in a way that it is not for any other group (possibly excepting gays, though that is unrelated to today's topic).


An important strand of contemporary liberalism is feminism. As a label, "feminist" is passé; outside the academic fever swamps, you will find few women below Social Security age who embrace it.

That is because what used to be called feminism--the proposition that women deserve equality before the law and protection from discrimination--is almost universally accepted today. Politically speaking, a woman is the equal of a man. No woman in public life better symbolizes this than Sarah Palin--especially not Hillary Clinton, the left's favorite icon. No one can deny Mrs. Clinton's accomplishments, but neither can one escape crediting them in substantial part to her role as the wife of a powerful man.

But there is more to feminism than political and legal equality. Men and women are intrinsically unequal in ways that are ultimately beyond the power of government to remediate. That is because nature is unfair. Sexual reproduction is far more demanding, both physically and temporally, for women than for men. Men simply do not face the sort of children-or-career conundrums that vex women in an era of workplace equality.

Except for the small minority of women with no interest in having children, this is an inescapable problem, one that cannot be obviated by political means. Aspects of it can, however, be ameliorated by technology--most notably contraception, which at least gives women considerable control over the timing of reproduction.

As a political matter, contraception is essentially uncontroversial today, which is to say that any suggestion that adult women be legally prevented from using birth control is outside the realm of serious debate. The same cannot be said of abortion, and that is at the root of Palinoia.

To the extent that "feminism" remains controversial, it is because of the position it takes on abortion: not just that a woman should have the "right to choose," but that this is a matter over which reasonable people cannot disagree--that to favor any limitations on the right to abortion, or even to acknowledge that abortion is morally problematic, is to deny the basic dignity of women.

To a woman who has internalized this point of view, Sarah Palin's opposition to abortion rights is a personal affront, and a deep one. It doesn't help that Palin lives by her beliefs. To the contrary, it intensifies the offense.

It used to be a trope for liberal interviewers to try to unmask hypocrisy by asking antiabortion politicians--male ones, of course--what they would do if their single teen daughters got pregnant. It's a rude question, but Palin, whose 17-year-old daughter's pregnancy coincided with Mom's introduction to the nation, answered it in real life.

Recently we were at a party where a woman in her 60s, a self-described feminist, called Palin a "moron" for having encouraged her daughter to carry her child to term and "to marry the sperm donor." Even apart from the gross language, this was a completely irrational thing to say. First, that Palin's values are different in no way reflects on her intelligence.

More important, why is Bristol Palin's decision to carry her child to term any of this lady's business? Those who claim to be champions of privacy and choice need to do some serious soul-searching if they have so much trouble tolerating the private choices of others.

What about male Palin-hatred? It seems to us that it is of decidedly secondary importance. Liberal men put down Palin as a cheap way to score points with the women in their lives, or they use her as an outlet for more-general misogynistic impulses that would otherwise be socially unacceptable to express.

Liberal women are the active, driving force behind hatred of Sarah Palin, while liberal men's behavior is passive and manipulative. In this respect, feminism has succeeded in reversing the traditional sexual stereotypes. If this is the result, you have to wonder why anyone would have bothered.

A very successful women who is now Senior Vice President of Shell Oil once confided in me that professional women are the single worst creatures in the entire corporate landscape, and their incredibly nasty backbiting and devious scheming make men look like choir boys or boy scouts in comparison.

Another former girl friend recently went ballistic online concerning Palin and I told her that no more emails until the next decade, because this woman's apoplexy over Palin was splenetic and atrabilious to an irrational degree. I'll be contacting her in 2021, God willing.

Finally, I believe that Sarah's decision to have young Trig despite the Down syndrome diagnosis has imposed a huge shadow of gulit on the murdering mom's of the liberal left, whose inability to confront their own moral leprosy over abortion is tearing out their moral intestines inch by inch.

I'm not voting for her at the top of the ticket, but I admire a fighter and someone who reloads. And brings a gun to a gun fight---just like the jug-eared hypocrat in the Oval Office.

AAAS Recalls Faulty Climate Change Release, but Horse is Out of Barn

The American Association for the Advancement of Science belatedly withdrew its support for a faulty IRCC paper on Anthropogenic Global Warming after silly errors were found in the outrageously inflated numbers saying that the world temp would rise 2.4 degrees Celsius over the next decade.
A climate change study that projected a 2.4 degree Celsius increase in temperature and massive worldwide food shortages in the next decade was seriously flawed, scientists said Wednesday.
The study was posted on the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was written about by numerous international news agencies, including AFP.
But AAAS later retracted the study as experts cited numerous errors in its approach.
"A reporter with The Guardian alerted us yesterday to concerns about the news release submitted by Hoffman & Hoffman public relations," said AAAS spokeswoman Ginger Pinholster in an email to AFP.
"We immediately contacted a climate change expert, who confirmed that the information raised many questions in his mind, too. We swiftly removed the news release from our Web site and contacted the submitting organization."
Scientist Osvaldo Canziani, who was part of the 2007 Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was listed as the scientific advisor to the report.
The IPCC, whose figures were cited as the basis for the study's projections, and Al Gore jointly won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007 "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change," the prize committee said at the time.
Canziani's spokesman said Tuesday he was ill and was unavailable for interviews.

Osvaldo is rumored to be under close observation in an Argentine penitentiary for the criminally insane.
EurekAlert has a longer version of the story.
The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. published a reaction piece to the study. The paper said it had interviewed climate scientists who told them that rapid global warming at the rates projected by the study was impossible.

"2.4 C by 2020 (which is 1.4C in the next 10 years – something like six to seven times the projected rate of warming) has no basis in fact," NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt told the newspaper in an email.

Indeed, the hoax report originated in Buenos Aires, being put out by a bogus organization called the "Universal Ecological Fund" and the paper's "lead author" was a skank named Liliana Hisas:
...climate scientist Rey Weymann told AFP that the "study contains a significant error in that it confuses 'equilibrium' temperature rise with 'transient temperature rise.'"
He also noted that study author Hisas was told of the problems in advance of the report's release.
"The author of the study was told by several of us about this error but she said it was too late to change it," said Weymann.

Hisas is not only dumber than a bucket of hair, but has balls of brass, noting that the UEF is standing by its bogus paper filled with non-facts which reach an erroneous conclusion. What kind of "scientist" reaches a conclusion, is apprised of its completely erroneous contents, and then says "it's too late to change it?"

What Richard Feynman would call a practitioner of CARGO CULT SCIENCE, which looks for a desired conclusion by inventing the "data" to support them, or at the very least obnoxious scenario, cherry-picks only that data which supports the desired conclusion.

Maurice Strong and the IRCC are working with the UN for world government through taxation of rich countries to beggar them into Obummer-type humility and complacency.

Insaniacs like Osvaldo and skanks like Hisas are simply in it for the money, as is his robust rotundity, Al Gore.

CLIMATE DEPOT has more on the various scams and subsequent retractions the AGW folks are committing and being forced to comply with once their chicanery is discovered.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Loughner a "Left-Wing Pothead"

Hi, I'm Just a Right-Wing Nut, Ask the New York Times


The Lemmingstream Media continues to portray Loughner as some sort of a righty, but his obsessionj with Zeitgeist, a strange flick that was a Truther classic and which won a Proglodyte Film Award, as well as his former friends and girlie pal attesting that he was a fuckwit libtard make this just one more attempt by NPR and PBS and the NYT to play Pravda with the truth.

Monday, January 17, 2011

FAQ on Denisova Hominin Fossil Found in s. Siberian Cave

Denisovian is the description of a hominin who has some Neanderthal characteristics, but at 40K BP is too new to be close to the Neanderthal genome, yet comprises its own niche in the pathway from mitochondrial Eve to ourselves. Or rather to about 4% of Melanesian DNA. Evidently, the Denisova tribe or clan or whatever was swept south before the final great glaciations to the South Asian islands. PNG and Bougainville specimens have a larger amount of their DNA in their genome than any other known group, including Australian aborigines.

Tunisian Prez Flees with $50million in gold

The Daily Telegraph demonstrates one more reason why the Arabs are nowhere near ready for self-government. Like their sub-Saharan cousins, the Tunisian ruling elite simply lives off the people it purports to rule. Too bad Qaddafi, whose name is 'camel vomit' in Libyan slang dialect, isn't overthrown at the same time, but Libya has too much oil.

Egypt and Algeria appear to be two more African dominoes teetering on the edge of anarchy, and Morocco is also experiencing civil disorder.

Lebanese Terrorist Kingpin Nasrallah is trying to overthrow Lebanese democracy as the UN tribunal finds his terrorist organization guilty of murdering President Hariri---confession: I met Hariri back in DC in the early '80s when he was based there during the worst days of the civil war and I thought him the only person able to help Lebanon out of its ashes, which is why Hezbollah killed him.

Meanwhile, Obummer is so hammered by economic reality that the US is losing whatever economic and political foreign heft it used to have in the Middle East. Having established a democracy in Iraq, the cretin Al-Maliki demands the US leave. He probably has a deal with Iran in the works, but don't look to pacificist Obummer to bleat any complaints. He's too busy fingerpointing the USA as the source of the world's ills, and since the all-female Nobel Peace Committee already gave him an unearned Peace Prize, slacker Obummer is in no mood to actually go out and EARN one on his own.

He's too busy being a symbol of hope [whistling Dixie] and change [for the worse].

TNY Posts Supercilious Attack on the Constitution

Fake "scholar" Jill LaPore has a long and condescending piece in the New Yorker about how unimportant the Constitution is and how misguided those who believe it is a blueprint for a Republic that contains Democratic principles are simpletons.

LaPore is a poster-person for the constant condescension that victims of academicide have for denizens of the real world. Back to your Tower of Ivory, LaPore, and stop interfering with people who have real lives.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Taranto Bowls a 300 With Smackdown of NYT, Krugboy

James Taranto grows in stature daily as he puts the Tucson hysteria in context:
The campaign of vilification against the right, led by the New York Times, is really about competition in the media industry--not commercial competition but competition for authority. When Bob Schieffer and Steny Hoyer were growing up, the New York Times had unrivaled authority to set the media's agenda, with the three major TV networks following its lead.

The ensuing decades have seen a proliferation of alternative media outlets, most notably talk radio and Fox News Channel, and a corresponding diminution of the so-called mainstream media's ability to set the boundaries of political debate.

Its authority dwindling, the New York Times is resorting to authoritarian tactics--slandering its competitors in the hope of tearing them down. Hoyer is right. Too many news outlets are busy "inciting people . . . to anger, to thinking the other side is less than moral." The worst offender, because it is the leader, is the New York Times. Decent people of whatever political stripe must say enough is enough.

Bravissimo...!

The way the New York Times is hemorrhaging paid circulation and the Wall Street Journal is gaining paid circ, the NYT will be sinking beneath the waves in this decade.

A Titanic Ship of Fools sailing into the sunset. Bon Voyage.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

ABC's Brian Ross Says It's a Murder for Fame Motive

Jared Loughner is what forensics types call a "lone wolf," a person who is almost a solitary hermit, but wants his name in lights. I had that thought for a moment, as Loughner didn't fit the profile of a terrorist, like Major Hasan at Ft. Hood, or any other normal political assassin. Even Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK because he thought the Palestinians were getting mistreated by Israel with Bobby's aid and comfort. Here's the ABC theory:
...while some observers want to blame Saturday's bloodshed on lax gun laws or heated political rhetoric, experts say there is nothing more American than a loner who wants to be famous.

"If we feel that civility in public discourse is going to take away mass shootings we are mistaken," said Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist at New York University and an ABC News consultant. "Because the one common threat in mass shooting is, what does the shooter get out of it? And the shooter recognizes that if you assassinate a political figure you will be notorious."

"I think John Lennon had more to do with this than Sarah Palin," said Welner.

America has been plagued for decades by acts of violence attributed to lone wolves. The assassinations of the 1960's made household names of the men responsible.

The number of men, mostly young, who have sought similar notoriety since then only seems to have increased, up to this weekend's accused murderer, Jared Loughner.

"Most of them are very socially uncomfortable," said Brad Garrett, a former FBI profiler and special agent, "and so as a result they tend to withdraw and become more and more isolated and that is the reason I think we call them lone wolves because it's like they can't work in the pack, in other words they can't work in society."

Garrett, now an ABC News consultant, said he believes "there are thousands of people in this country like Mr. Loughner."

Too bad he didn't choose Michael Moore for martyrdom.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Why did the NYT cover up Pigford and the Holodomor?

VerumSerum has another wonderful piece on the NYT's coverup of the Pigford scam where black hustlers and scammers tried to outdo Charlie Rangel. One reader named Zilla complained that the NYT tradition of cover-ups dates back to Stalin's own version of the Holocaust on the Ukrainians, when he systematically starved over 3 million in the winter/spring of 1933 in an organized ethnic cleansing called the Holodomor in the Ukrainian dialect.

Bravissimo or -ma as the case may be. I am just finishing BloodLands and the incredible duplicity of the NYT and Walter Duranty beggars description. To double the bad karma, the Terror of the Purges was also painted over as a minor readjustment while in realities, over a million were killed just to meet quotas—and instead of innocent kulaks and Ukes and Poles and White Russians, the victims of the Purges were Party stalwarts who were often denounced for career-advancing reasons.

And the purge of the Red Army’s generals made carving up the gigantic swathes of European Russia a cakewalk until General Winter, Russia’s only competent military leader, stepped in just in time to save Moscow.

The NYT continues its legacies of lies, manipulation and deliberate deceit without a single opponent willing to take them on—except the much-reviled Rupert Murdoch, who has pushed paid circ of the WSJ past two million while the NYT has been hemmorhaging at 10% paid circ per annum the last few years.

Bye bye…NYT. Sic semper Tyrannis!

Read more to see how Eric Holder and his henchboy Obama have covered up Pigford and its greedy ACORN-type rip-off artists, blacks on a legal crime spree...!

John Sexton Slaps Krugman and Van Hollen SILLY!!!

VerumSerum has the goods on the stupendously silly Demonrat crusade to paint nutter Loughner, who if anything was a leftie pothead, as a Palinbot. They both cite Palin's map of 2010 with surveyors' symbols, [which the Demonrat constituency is too STUPID to understand] as bullseyes inciting to assassination fantasies in the minds of her unthinking rightist zombie hordes.

But Sexton then shows the Demonrat map with crosshairs on Republicans they want to disappear from the House, with actual bullseyes AND photographs of the perp.

If the Demonrats didn't have a double standard, they'd have no standard at all.

The Pack Defeather Eagles---Falcons Next for Fledging

Aaron Rogers and Clay Matthews led the potent Packer attack with the help of a young Buffalo Bull [sic] grad named Starks who rushed over 120 yards as the Pack proved to be as good as the prognosticators who last week picked them over the Eagles said they would be. However, no one could predict that Akers would miss two makeable field goals that would have given the Philly phenoms the game.

Remember after the midseason shellackings the Eagles gave the Redskins and Cowboys and the last second win over the Giants, after which all the pundits predicted the Eagles couldn't be stopped? About as realistic as pre-season musings about the invincibility of the Cowboys and how San Diego would romp.

Folks, that's why they play the game. I for one want the Bears to win and the Pack to face them for the third time in Soldier Field for the NFC championship, the one Favre threw away years ago on the 4th & 26 pass to Freddie Mitchell in a previous NFC championship game with the Eagles.

Saturday, January 08, 2011

William Daley New White House COS

Bill Daley reminds me of my one encounter with this political hatchet man a fellow who as Commerce Sec'y removed the ethnic count from the census [German, Irish, English extraction] while piling on racial background information, displaying like a lot of Irish hack pols that he has no loyalty for kith and kin, just a slave to the Sassenach.

Back in the day when I was an executive with Amoco, a mutual friend set me up with a half-hour colloquy with William Daley. I explained to Daley how I'd managed to persuade Amoco CEO and Chmn to donate a half-million to get NAFTA out of a slough of despond that it was wallowing in early in '93. We managed to use my CSIS buddies to set up a huge colloquium in DC to tout NAFTA with Sen. Bradley and Cong. Richardson, a personal friend, speaking among others to boost the chances. As it happened, the ball started rolling again and within three months or so, NAFTA finally made it through and my bosses at Amoco, who were about to enter the Mexican market, were happy.

But Bill Daley interrupted me and said "I don't think NAFTA was a very good idea." He bluntly told me that Clinton had lost a lot of labor friends and other allies with NAFTA and was brusque throughout the interview. I hope he treats Jarrett and Axelrod the same way he's treating Baghdad Bob. Plouffe might be a little less jarring, but Obama and Daley might make a strong move toward the middle, as Obama's slavery to Trumpka and Big Labor are well-known.

Jarrett is an ideologue and will be foisted on the State Dept. along with other females to add to Hillary's harem.

Friday, January 07, 2011

NYT: If the Gray Lady Didn't Have a Double Standard, It wouldn't have any

The NYT no longer prints the news that's fit to print, but only the slices of the news which support its statist socialist agenda, Here's the Persian version:
The budget office estimated that the health care law, including education provisions, would reduce deficits over 10 years by $143 billion. Tax increases and cuts in projected Medicare spending would more than offset the cost of extending health insurance to millions of Americans. The budget office projected that the law would result in even bigger savings beyond 2019.

The ignorant sods reading the NYT wouldn't know that these "savings" are based on extremely optimistic readings of the follow-on steps it believes necessary that the law suggests and that the numbers have embedded in them, several instances of 'double-counting' which make the calculation of 'reduced deficits' nugatory because the actual law dishonestly has been poisoned with several accounting tricks.

Rep. Paul Ryan is the head of the new 112th Congress budget committee and he in turn asked Elmendork what the numbers looked like if the fictitious double-counting of savings and the omission of several necessary expenditures were factored into the calculations...

The REVISED CALCULATIONS with the dishonest silliness excluded and the double-accounting taken into account and rejected?

A DEFICIT OF $701 BILLION DOLLARS OVER THE NEXT TEN YEARS.

Now that's news that's fit to print.

And ETERNAL SHAME on the Gray Hooker for omitting it from the misleading and delusionary article above. Commissars David M. Herszenhorn and Robert Pear are commended, however, by the DNC for misleading the American people by a sin of omission. Go to hell, you creepy marxist assholes...!

Packers Over Eagles---This Time for Real

I still remember the '60 NFL championship game and Bednarik hanging on to Taylor to run out the clock for what would be a penalty and a rewind of the clock in today's more "civilized" NFL rulebook.

I also remember in the mid-'00s, the Eagles/Packer playoff when in the waning minutes of the Fourth Quarter, the Eagles had a fourth down and 26 yards and MADE IT to go on to win---with Brett Favre throwing a pass that looked like he wanted it to be intercepted being the final nail in the Packer coffin. The next year, the Packers played the Giants and lost a playoff game at Lambeau they were favored to win by 2 TDs. The Giants went on improbably to win the Super Bowl on the weirdest catch I've ever seen to finalize a score. Even so, Brady should have pulled off a last-second TD, but now the Giants are in the dirt this year where I always want them to be.

I'll take Rogers over Vick as a long-term QB bet any day, despite Mike's speed and agility.

Finally, way back in the day, when I did bad things, I did a few lines of Bolivian Marching Powder with a linebacker for the Eagles. And I remember meeting the Packer black choir with Bobby Kennedy in Watts the week before he was assassinated in LA back in 1968---Herb Adderly was a huge RFK fan. Bobby asked me to join his campaign after seeing my McCarthy Staff badge, but despite the Packers in the back of his truck, I demurred. The nite he was killed, I was invited to the Ambassador by a McCarthy dude who was planning to defect, but I loyally went to the Beverly Hills Hilton to commiserate---where I learned of RFK's death while chatting with the head of California's "Brown Caucus." Eva Marie Saint began sobbing right next to me and some dude put his arm around her. I wasn't quick enough. Those were the days.

Gallup Poll: Honest in Spite of Its Bias Left

Gallup has come out with a headline: "In U.S., 46% Favor, 40% Oppose Repealing Healthcare Law."

The next sentences tell you of the arrogance of the ruling elites---don't believe them lyin' figures because :
Americans do not strongly endorse the new Republican House majority's efforts to repeal the landmark healthcare legislation passed last year. A new Gallup poll finds that 46% of Americans want their representative in Congress to vote to repeal the healthcare law, 40% want their representative to vote to let the law stand, and 14% have no opinion. [emphasis mine]

This manipulation of headlines versus the actual facts as the illuminati attempt to explain to the Great Unwashed that they know better will echo through the lamestream media as a dying art ossifies into total irrelevance. Journalism and PR and their attendant pilot fish and remoras will continue to block the attempts by American voters to forestall the installation of a statist regime incapable of being thwarted by the mere democratic use of voting and petitioning and referenda and other ways for the people to let their will be known.

In California, referenda on homosexual marriages can be overruled by a faggot Federal Judge without comment by the media. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...!!!

Thursday, January 06, 2011

ObamaCare not Bad Public Relations, but Bad Policy

The Dems have perpetuated the myth that once Americans get to know ObamaCare, this bill passed in the dead of night unread by anybody with over 2000 pages of indigestible and self-contradicting gibberish will somehow become popular. Reputable half-wits like Harkin of Iowa and Shumer of NY say so, and now it will come before the GOP Congress and be voted down.
Given that the latest Rasmussen poll shows that 60 percent of likely voters support repeal, Democrats might have an only slightly harder time convincing the public to pardon Osama bin Laden, and they continue to labor under the delusion that the problem with health-care reform isn’t policy, but public relations. Americans oppose the health-care program because they don’t understand it. Sooner or later, the thinking goes, they will find the magic words that will convince the public of how right the Democrats have been all along.

But given two years of almost continuous debate on the issue, it is far more likely that the public really does understand the bill. They know, for example, that, despite the president’s reassurances, they are not going to be able to keep their current health insurance, even if they like it. They understand that outside experts now predict that Obamacare will cost at least $2.7 trillion over its first ten years of actual operation, not the $950 billion originally predicted, adding more than $350 billion to the deficit over that period, despite massive new taxes. They’ve seen their insurance premiums skyrocket in response to the law’s new mandates and regulations. Their common sense tells them that imposing the employer mandate will increase the cost of hiring workers and mean fewer jobs at a time when unemployment is still a national crisis. They oppose the unconstitutional individual mandate as an assault on their personal liberty. And they are rightfully concerned over how the law will affect the quality of the care they receive.

Finally, the experience of national health care in other countries shows that massive malfeasance and virtual death sentences by faceless bureaucrats make "death panels" a reality.

And anyone who believes Obama on any issue is simply too stupid to listen to for long. Even half of the Dems are against this very one-term dude. I expect a Teddy Kennedy move from the left any day as the Fat moral leper did with Jimmy Carter as the spoiled brat nitwits throw tantrums about not getting their way, as Obama sidles to the middle.

Time to smother this abortion in its crib....!

Young Republicans Oust Aged Demonrats From House

Michael Barone has an interesting article in the Washington Examiner on the changing of the guard the 112th Congress represents.
Democrats like to think of themselves as the young party, the party of new ideas. And in 2010 they remained the choice of the youngest voters, though by only half the margin in 2008.

But when you look at the top Democrats in the House, you don't see young faces. The ages of the ranking Democrats on the Appropriations, Ways and Means, Education, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Foreign Affairs, and Judiciary committees are 70, 79, 65, 71, 70, 69 and 81. The three party leaders are 70, 71 and 70.

Just about all these members are competent at pushing bills through the House, thanks to the fact that the House Democratic Caucus chooses the chairmen and ranking members by secret-ballot vote. Less competent members get weeded out.

And because House Democrats, unlike House Republicans, don't limit most of their chairmen to three two-year terms, competent chairmen can stay on and on. All those referred to above stayed in the House during 12 long years of Republican control, waiting for their party to win control again. House Republican chairmen, in contrast, have often chosen to retire after their three terms.

You get a similar picture when you look at leading politicians in the nation's largest and one of its most Democratic states, California. Jerry Brown, elected governor at 36 and 40, has now won that office again at 72. The state's two U.S. senators are 77 and 70. They began their political careers, as did the leading House Democrats, way back in the 1960s or 1970s.

So if the Democratic electorate is tilted toward the young, the Democrats' leaders are tilted toward the old. And I think this matters at a time when, as scholar Walter Russell Mead writes in the American Interest, "The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don't work anymore, and the gaps between the social system we've inherited and the system we need today are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper them over or ignore them."

Barone doesn't get too deeply into the fact that many more young Demonrats were defeated last November because they were so-called Blue Dogs in districts that are more-or-less 50-50 between the two parties. The ancient fossils now remaining on the left side of the aisle are those Demonrats in the super-secure gerrymandered districts that are 70% or more Dem because of the rough-and-ready slide rule of reapportionment that takes every ten years tending to split districts into sure-GOP and sure-Dem districts with a moderate middle in those districts that can go either way. In 2010, if a district could go either way, it almost certainly went Republican, just as in 2006 & '08, these middle districts went Demonrat. Hence the swing of 63 seats going to the GOP, leaving the Dems with 30 Black Caucus and a few Hispanic-majority districts plus the largely two Left Coasts.
[
During]...the America of World War II and the postwar decades, when American life was dominated by the leaders of what I have called the Big Units -- big government, big business, big labor. The assumption was that these units would grow ever bigger, to the benefit of ordinary people.

That assumption was shared by the Democratic leaders of the just-departed 111th Congress, who grew up in Big Unit America. They passed a $787 billion stimulus package on the assumption that big government would put people to work. They passed the health care bill on the assumption that centralized experts in big government could provide better care at lower costs.

The voters in November 2010 rejected those assumptions. It's not clear whether congressional Republicans can advance policies more in line with the changed character of our society. And it's an open question whether they can reach agreement on any important issues with Barack Obama, who is a generation younger than most of his party's leaders in Congress.

The Democrats' congressional leaders will defend the Obama agenda to the extent possible. But can they take their party in a somewhat different direction than the one voters rejected in November?

The rejection of the "Bigness" of the segments of the American political pie may be an important re-evaluation of the American voter which will lead to local issues being front-and-center in their windshield, rather than the panoramic one-size-fits-all of a national top-down installed and administered health program or any other "Big" program.

Voters can look at Europe and other countries where top-down has only led to sloppily administered statist programs run by indifferent functionaries not interested in doing their job particularly well because they're not being paid well nor are they being stimulated to improve the programs they administer.

Why should America worship 'a God that failed' instead of applying the old Yankee can-do spirit, if that sort of initiative hasn't been drained out of our popular culture by ceaseless calls to conformity and relentless education toward the politically correct mindset that will help us 'all get along together' without ever really seeking a quest or working for personal achievement?

Short answer: It shouldn't worship any system except the constitutional framework which has succeeded for over 220 years in making America the greatest nation in world history.

Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Texas Snuffs California in One-on-One Census Duel

The LA Times has a momentary lurch into sane assessment of its own state's insane budgetary crevasse. Natural Fake rushes in to confirm that the LAT is indeed sane and that Texas, by inference, is sane compared to the continuing devolution of California into the decomposing parts of a dead corpse.

And, Texas emerges victorious! Mainly, due to low taxes.

But sad, slow, lumbering California does win in one area:

In what respects, then, does California “excel”? California’s state and local government employees were the best compensated in America, according to the Census Bureau data for 2006. And the latest posting on the website of the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility shows 9,223 former civil servants and educators receiving pensions worth more than $100,000 a year from California’s public retirement funds. The “dues” paid by taxpayers in order to belong to Club California purchase benefits that, increasingly, are enjoyed by the staff instead of the members.

The reason? Taxpayer abuse like this at all levels of California government:

And no government worker should receive permanent taxpayer-funded pensions that allow them to retire at the ripe young age of 50, with 90 percent of the final year’s pay guaranteed forever (and that’s before the worker taps into any number of dubious pension-spiking schemes that allows many employees to retire with pay well above their final year’s salary).

Always remember,

Unions exist for one reason and one reason only:

TO GET MORE MONEY AND BENEFITS FOR LESS WORK

Which is the exact reverse of what you want in either teachers or government workers.

Unions killed the American auto industry. Now they’re killing the states.

In the recent assessment of the US census, Texas will gain four House seats while CA stays at the same number, this because CA's free-spending and high-tax economic policies are driving the citizens into bankruptcy unless they leave the state before the last bits of clothing and portable chattels are wrenched from them by the elitist statist dieseldorks running the State's bureaucratic apparatus, which is now giving pensions to its employees retiring at age fifty which are way into six figures. Every day 3000 more people leave CA than enter it, while Texas GAINS about 1700 citizens per day. Soon the Lone Star State will pass the Golden State in population unless the libtard ascendancy is voted out of office, hardly in the cards while they run all the organs of public communication. The only thing keeping CA's population [relatively] level are the hordes of illegal aliens which are turning the San Joaquin Valley into Alta California while the LA & San Diego coastal regions doze in their dope shops. Watch Entourage and find out the mechanisms of degenerate paraphilia at work in the moral sewer of Southern Cal.