Gary's Clever Blog

2011-06-27T22:17:00.000-05:00

Interesting

What happened to The New York Times?

Inheriting the Earth

2010-06-24T22:57:00.001-05:00

Looking into the future, what is doubly astonishing, if Kaufmann is correct, is that the religion dominating the world of our grandchildren will not be the subtle intellectualism of Christian seminaries—of a Tillich, a Niebuhr, a Küng. It will be the literalist-fundamentalist obscurantism of Muslim Salafis, Jewish “Ultras,” Young Earth Creationists, and Mormon splinter sects. In a world dominated by these closed-minded babblers, what place will there be for literature, science, free inquiry, or freedom of any kind?

The Roots of Obama Worship

2010-01-16T14:48:00.001-06:00

Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity finds a 21st-Century savior.

The conflicting demands of the Religion of Humanity and the presidency of the United States have become most apparent in the administration’s approach to dealing with the threat of Islamic terrorism. The Religion of Humanity, by its own reckoning, admits to facing challenges from two quarters: from those who have not yet fully entered the age of Positivism, which includes the terrorists, and from those who are part of the advanced world but who refuse to embrace it, which includes the likes of George W. Bush. In the present situation, these two groups are understood to have a symbiotic relationship. The existence of the terrorists is regrettable, not only because of the physical threat that they pose, but also because, by doing so, they risk strengthening the hand of those in the West who reject the Religion of Humanity. Supporters of the Religion of Humanity therefore believe they have good reason to deny or minimize the danger of terrorism in order to save the world from the even greater danger of the triumph of the retrograde forces. This is the dogmatic basis of political correctness, and Obama and his team have gone to considerable lengths by their policies and by their use of language to hide reality. But reality has a way of asserting itself, and it is becoming clearer by the day that being the leader of Humanity is incompatible with being the president of the United States. No man can serve two masters.

See much more in James Ceaser’s article in The Weekly Standard.

The global-warming priesthood and nuclear power

2009-12-08T21:27:00.001-06:00

Mona Charen makes some interesting points in her column at National Review Online.

Global-warming priests, while sermonizing about the need to spend trillions on new energy sources, almost never have a kind word for nuclear power — casting doubt on their motives. If the goal were really to reduce our carbon output (and not to recast our way of life), clean, efficient, affordable nuclear power would be the obvious choice.

There’s much more.

Robert George Answers Doug Kmiec's Questions on Life Issues

2009-11-05T20:43:00.001-06:00

BuzzNet Tags: abortion,stem cell research

This guy has the answers.

Science has important things to contribute to ethical reflection, but by itself it cannot resolve ethical questions. Science cannot tell us whether there are such things as dignity and rights, or whether all human beings or, for that matter, any human beings have them. Science cannot tell us whether slavery or segregation or rape or torture is right or wrong. It cannot tell us whether mentally retarded individuals or victims of senile dementia have the same fundamental dignity and right to life as the rest of us possess. It cannot tell us whether it is unjust to kill infants or mentally disabled people to harvest their vital organs to use in transplantation surgery. It cannot tell us whether it is wrong to kill blacks to save whites, or Jews to save gentiles, or human beings in early developmental stages to save those at later stages. Science can confirm that blacks, no less than whites, Jews, no less than gentiles, and embryos, fetuses, and infants, no less than adolescents and adults, are living individuals of the human species—human beings. The questions that then must be faced are ethical, not scientific: Do all human beings, or only some, possess inherent dignity?

C. S. Lewis on progressivism

2009-10-26T22:20:00.001-05:00

If you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

What’s wrong with the phrase “the anti-war movement”?

2009-10-23T21:33:00.002-05:00

LOPEZ: What’s wrong with the phrase “the anti-war movement”?
LEAF: All of the most important leaders of the “anti-war” movement — Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Abbie Hoffman, Katherine Boudin, et al. — were very much in favor of violence and war. It’s just that they wanted our Communist enemies to win. Their love for violence was possibly best indicated when Bernadine Dohrn announced at a national SDS convention that the group should adopt a new salute — of forked fingers — to honor the Manson murderers who ate and then stuck their forks into the belly of the dead but pregnant Sharon Tate.

From an interview with Jonathan Leaf about his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties.

I’d like to see a citation of that Bernadine Dohrn comment but I am inclined to believe it.

Technorati Tags: politics,dohrn,left

Jonah Goldberg: American liberals are still Americans

2009-09-05T11:39:00.003-05:00

The latest from Jonah Goldberg from what is becoming his unofficial fan site...

What was it Al Pacino said in Godfather III? "Just when I thought I was out – they pull me back in."

That’s sort of how I feel these days about the current fight over liberals and fascism. In case you haven’t noticed, fascism talk is everywhere. Nancy Pelosi with her Sixth Sense-ish "I see swastikas," Rush Limbaugh fighting back, Glenn Beck pounding the table, town-hallers hauling around pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache: These are good times to be moving a book called Liberal Fascism. And that leaves out the White House’s asking Americans to rat out neighbors who peddle "fishy" e-mail. It overlooks the fact that Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, and one of Obama’s health-care gurus, Ezekiel Emanuel, have written things that would fit nicely into my chapter on eugenics. And – oh yeah – it also leaves out that Obama has essentially nationalized much of the banking and auto industries while vowing to do his darnedest to make us more like European social democracies. The news out of this administration bolsters one argument after another in my book.

But the thing is, I’ve been arguing about fascism and liberalism nonstop for nearly two years now. And it is exhausting. Moreover, the glorious thing about the Obama Moment is that I can just say "look around" to those who thought I was imagining things when I first wrote the book and gave little thought to an obscure Illinois state legislator.

But there’s a problem. Many folks claim to see in Obama the makings of an actual Hitler and in Obamaism a repeat of the National Socialism of the 1930s. Worse, some think my book supports their fears. And maybe it does, though I hope not.

The simple truth is that I do not think it is in the cards for America to go down a Nazi path. I never said otherwise in Liberal Fascism either.

It’s important to keep in mind that, as bad as various other avowedly fascist regimes were, only the Nazis did what they did. Mussolini was a bad man and a dictator, but he was no Hitler. The Italians did bad things, but they don’t amount to a fraction of German crimes. Supposedly fascist Franco wasn’t nearly as bad as Mussolini, and Franco’s complicity in the Holocaust was nil. In other words, fascism brings out things in specific cultures at specific moments. Not only is Obama obviously not interested in being a Hitler, he couldn’t pull Hitlerism out of the American people if he wanted to.

Indeed, while I don’t think it is remotely right or fair to call Obama a crypto-Nazi (if by that you mean to say he’s a would-be Hitler), the real problem with all of this loose Nazi talk is that it slanders the American people. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen may have overstated his case in Hitler’s Willing Executioners, but he was certainly right that the German people were Hitler’s willing enablers. The overwhelming majority of the American people – in their history, culture, bones, hearts, souls, DNA, and carbon molecules – are not like that. That goes for American liberals and leftists too. The extent and depth of liberalism’s obtuseness on the subject of fascism (and much else) stews my bowels, but American liberals are still Americans, and Americans will not goose-step behind a Hitler, period.

As I make clear in Liberal Fascism, the obvious and pressing threat is not from a Hiterlite-Orwellian dictatorship but from a Huxleyan namby-pamby mommy state. That sort of system could seduce American into becoming chestless subjects of the State in exchange for bottomless self-gratification and liberation from the necessity of adult decision-making. Yes, there’s a danger that such as society could then be susceptible to some darker vision that lionizes the lost manhood of a half-forgotten past. But, by that point, this would be America in name only, if even that ("U.N. District 12" has a nice ring to it).

In Praise of Racial Profiling

2009-07-31T19:22:00.000-05:00

Klavan On The Culture » In Praise of Racial Profiling:

Now this takes guts!

I think it’s just an evil-sounding name for basic, normal police work. I
think any cop who doesn’t do it isn’t doing his job properly. If you’re in a
neighborhood or a town or a country where crime is more likely to be committed
by a guy with brown skin, then a guy with brown skin is more suspicious-looking
than other people by definition.

Et Tu, Big Business? by Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online

2009-06-19T00:41:00.000-05:00

Et Tu, Big Business? by Jonah Goldberg on National Review Online: "Once-proud companies like GE have become seduced by global-warming schemes because they recognize that there’s more money to be made selling white elephants to Uncle Sam than there is selling competitive products consumers want. Indeed, cap-and-trade taxes promise to deliver precisely the protectionist industrial policies the Left has dreamed of for decades, only under a “progressive” label."

FOXNews.com - Are 'No-Fail' Grading Systems Hurting or Helping Students? - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News

2009-04-27T14:15:00.000-05:00

FOXNews.com - Are 'No-Fail' Grading Systems Hurting or Helping Students? - Local News News Articles National News US News:

'This is clearly about dumbing down expectations for our students,'
Petrilli told FOXNews.com. 'Some of these children are just a few years away
from being in the workforce, in college or even in the military, and in none of
those environment will they be coddled like they are in these programs.'

Careful with this argument. If the left has its way, they'll be "coddled" there too.

What Obama Brings to Conservatives

2009-01-21T14:08:00.002-06:00

Jonah Goldberg has a characteristically well-balanced and reasoned post at National Review Online today. This is another one to bear in mind as I try to conduct myself for the next four years.

Obama’s personal example is only part of the equation. He has voiced an admirable disdain for the notion that academic excellence is nothing more than “acting white.” His famous Father’s Day speech in 2008 showed that Obama was willing to lend his voice to the effort to fight black illegitimacy and absentee fatherhood.
This puts Obama behind the two most important ingredients for black success, at least according to most conservatives: a rededication to the importance of education at an individual level, and the restoration of the black nuclear family.
At a more political level, a black president surely undermines the argument that American racism is so endemic that a system of racial quotas must remain a permanent fixture of the political and legal landscape.

and his conclusion

If Obama lives up to the dreams of his supporters in writing a new, post-racial chapter for America, he will have at once done more for America than any Democratic president in generations. But he also will have cut the knot holding much of the left together. As an American and as a conservative, I certainly hope that’s the case. He’s already made a good start of it just by getting elected.

Michael Medved on the lies of the American Left

2008-12-08T16:40:00.004-06:00

This episode of C-SPAN's After Words with cultural conservative author Michael Medved is invaluable.

Michael Medved talked about his book The 10 Big Lies About America. The guest interviewer was Mona Charen.
In the book, Mr. Medved argues that 10 commonly held beliefs about the United States - that it committed genocide against the natives, that it was founded as a secular nation, that it is an imperial country, and others - are all myths.

Celebrating Thanksgiving without apology

2008-11-25T11:11:00.003-06:00

Mona Charen in National Review Online today writes Giving Thanks for Genocide? which decries the Seattle public schools administration's warning about how "Thanksgiving can be a particularly difficult time for many of our Native students." She also addresses the odious idea that early white Americans intentionally infected Native people with smallpox, that too many people are ready to believe.

The Thanksgiving story is a strange one to protest. It is recalled, every year, as a time when newly arrived Europeans and Native Americans cooperated and learned from one another and then joined together for a festive meal to celebrate their joint harvest. This week, millions of schoolchildren will don tall paper hats and Indian fringes and feathers. They will recall the peaceful start of the not always peaceful history of the greatest nation on earth. And so they should — without guilt or shame.

Enjoy.

The Reasons for Banning Abortion

2008-11-18T10:58:00.003-06:00

Here's an excellent article by John Londregan from The Witherspoon Institute's Public Discourse site. I especially like the treatment toward the end about the positive possibilities of resensitizing Americans with an incrementalist approach.

Yet one often hears arguments in favor of abortion. A colleague once asserted that most people are both pro-life and pro-choice. To the extent that he is correct, most people have not thought carefully about abortion. How seriously would we take someone who claimed to be against dumping toxic waste into drinking water, but who opposed legislation to prohibit it? What would we think of a person who thought torture was morally abhorrent, but who supported the “sacred” right of police interrogators to freely choose whether to resort to it? And what of the person opposed to murder, who thought that legislation against it was an undesirable interference in a matter that ought to be left to the consciences of potential killers?

The ratchet slips free

2008-11-05T10:29:00.003-06:00

John Derbyshire strikes the right note this morning at National Review Online.

I see that some of my NRO colleagues are scratching around for shards of optimism — of Hope! — in the general wreckage. Good luck to them. I see nothing for conservatives to hope for in an Obama administration. We just have to stick it out. This shallow, ignorant, self-obsessed man, who held an actual job for just one year of his charmed life (low-grade editing for an obscure newsletter — he felt, he tells us in Dreams, “like a spy behind enemy lines,” the enemy of course being capitalism), this red-diaper baby and his wife, will be our First Couple for the next four years and some weeks. It’ll be interesting. Interesting.

UPDATE:

Here's another one by Andrew C. McCarthy from NRO. I hope I can maintain this sense of dignity in opposition in contrast to eight years of BDS.

It is here, though, that Obama, at least for one night, was at his most gracious. He addressed himself directly to us — to conservatives and other skeptical Americans who opposed him, often stridently.

On a night of glorious triumph for him and his ravenous supporters, the message could easily have been: Time for you bitter clingers to get with the program. It wasn’t. Instead, the new president spoke humbly to those whose votes he said he had not yet “earned.” He promised to be our president too — to listen with a heightened attentiveness especially when we disagree, which, to be certain, will be often.

Microsoft Azure in the clouds

2008-10-27T16:18:00.003-05:00

Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie today announced the company's new "Cloud Operating System," Microsoft Azure.

Ray claimed that Windows Azure is "setting the stage for the next 50 years of systems."

Gateway Pundit: Socialist Obama Talks About Redistributing Wealth Back in 2001 (Video)

2008-10-26T23:58:00.000-05:00

Gateway Pundit: Socialist Obama Talks About Redistributing Wealth Back in 2001 (Video)

I wish someone would ask The One to compare and contrast capitalism and socialism, and to explain his view of capitalism's role in the success of America.

Did you see Wanda Sykes' sendup of Michelle Obama on SNL? Me neither.

2008-10-24T09:05:00.004-05:00

Pat Buchanan was at one time one of my favorite pundits. He seems recently to become a little more unhinged but today's column in Human Events seems like old times. I think I've heard some leftwing references to a double standard too, such as "can you imagine if Barack Obama had done [this thing that John McCain did]?" Please post those examples in the comments if you can.

The media cannot get enough of the "Saturday Night Live" impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run them to the merriment of all.
Can one imagine "Saturday Night Live" doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her "I've never been proud" of my country, this "just downright mean" America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent?
"Saturday Night Live" would be facing hate crime charges.

Science and the Left in the age of neo Marxism

2008-10-08T12:28:00.003-05:00

Another fascinating article on science and politics expresses fears for the future of science in the probable coming years of "cultural Marxism." Left-wing politicians are far too eager to shut down recent human science research and findings in favor of their state religion of Political Correctness.

Most people still think of human-science controversies in terms of nature/nurture. As a matter of real scientific dispute, that is all long gone. Nature/nurture arguments were at the heart of the sociobiology wars that roiled the human sciences through the last third of the 20th century. (The 2000 book Defenders of Truth, by the Finnish sociologist of science Ullica Segerstråle gives a full — and so far as I can judge, very fair — account.) The dust of battle has pretty much settled now, in science departments if not in the popular press, and nature is the clear victor. Name any universal characteristic of human nature, including cognitive and personality characteristics. Of all the observed variation in that characteristic, about half is caused by genetic differences. You may say that is only a half victory; but it is a complete shattering of the nurturist absolutism that ruled in the human sciences 40 years ago, and that is still the approved dogma in polite society, including polite political society, today.

and this

Marxism is sociobiology without biology. The strongest opposition to the scientific study of human nature has come from a small number of Marxist biologists and anthropologists who are committed to the view that human behavior arises from a very few unstructured drives. They believe that nothing exists in the untrained human mind that cannot be readily channeled to the purposes of the revolutionary socialist state. When faced with the evidence of greater structure, their response has been to declare human nature off limits to further scientific investigation. A few otherwise very able scholars have gone so far as to suggest that merely to talk about the subject is dangerous.

John Derbyshire goes on to mention the crackdowns on impolitic speech by Canada's human rights commission as an example of how free expression and science can be shut down in a Western society. Read the whole article on National Review Online at Will Obama Kill Science?

Increasing home ownership rates in 1999

2008-09-24T09:40:00.004-05:00

What an amazingly prescient article from the New York Times in 1999.

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials say they hope to make it a nationwide program by next spring.

There's more...

In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980’s.
“From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”

Amazing.

Yay progress!

2008-09-23T13:11:00.003-05:00

On the topic of Progress and Change (I'll do Hope later) I'd like to propose some principles that my lefty friends and I might base some agreement on.

no brainers:

forward to good stuff = good

changing bad stuff to good = good

more controversial:

forward to bad stuff = bad

backward to bad stuff = bad

changing good stuff to better = good

changing good stuff to bad = bad

Most controversial of all (brace yourself):

backward to good stuff = good

stupid:

forward = good

backward = bad

Science doing the work of politics

2008-09-18T13:41:00.004-05:00

I found this fascinating article in the September 2007 Mother Jones. It talks about politicizing science which is a favorite topic and gets an unusually well-reasoned treatment from the Left. It concludes like this:

But medicine, which is what we rely on to tell us what is "healthy," will always seek to change the way people's bodies and minds and hearts work; yesterday's immutable state of nature is tomorrow's disease to be cured. Medical science can only take its cues from the society whose curiosities it satisfies and whose confusions it investigates. It can never do the heavy political lifting required to tell us whether one way of living our lives is better than another. This is exactly why Kertbeny originated the notion of a biologically based sexual orientation, and, to the extent that society is more tolerant of homosexuality now than it was 150 years ago, that idea has been a success. But the ex-gay movement may be the signal that this invention has begun to outlive its usefulness, that sexuality, profoundly mysterious and irrational, will not be contained by our categories, that it is time to find reasons other than medical science to insist that people ought to be able to love whom they love.

Check out the article at Gay by Choice? The Science of Sexual Identity in Mother Jones.

Which is the Forgotten Man?

2008-09-13T14:06:00.003-05:00

FDR gave his speech in 1932 on "the forgotten man," the man at the very botton of the social scale. But Amity Schlaes takes on the conventional wisdom of just who is the man forgotten.

But the phrase also had a special political meaning in the period. In a campaign speech in 1932, Roosevelt spoke of the forgotten man “at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” His speechwriter, Ray Moley, wrote to his sister that he couldn’t remember where he got the phrase. But it did have a provenance.
In the 1880s a Yale philosopher named William Graham Sumner had spoken of another forgotten man. Sumner described his forgotten man algebraically. A, he said, wanted to help X. Nothing wrong with that. B also wanted to help X. The problem occurs when A and B get together and pass a dubious law that coerces C into cofunding their project for X.

She is interviewed in National Review.

Rebecca Johnson: 'I am a liberal, but I'm blown away by Sarah Palin'

2008-09-11T10:47:00.003-05:00

American liberal Rebecca Johnson of Vogue is taking her career and cocktail party social life in her hands.

My liberal friends were outraged when rumours about Barack Obama attending a Madrassa or being a Muslim surfaced on the internet, but all week they have been gleefully trading emails of Sarah Palin distortions.
There was the doctored picture of her carrying a rifle, wearing a stars-and-stripes bikini while a man in the background drank Schlitz beer. Or dopey quotes about God, creationism and moose, all of which have been subsequently debunked.
There have also been snide remarks about Wal-Mart and K-Mart, as if there is something shameful about trying to save money. The week before Palin's nomination was announced, people were talking about John McCain's inability to remember precisely how many houses he and his gazillionaire wife own. A few weeks before that, the news was Cindy McCain's $250,000 American Express bill (those lime-green shifts aren't free).

See the whole article in the London Telegraph.

Fox News facts and other heresy

2008-08-28T13:38:00.005-05:00

One of my friends on the left really has it in for Fox News. He asserts

"Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" [took] 110 minutes to make the
case that Fox management under Murdoch scrapped the idea of reporting the news
in favor of shaping public opinion using propaganda techniques. The "people
say" memos and observation is just a small part of the big picture. I don't
see the point of trying to discuss out of context snippets - that’s the conservative
talk show host gambit, not something I'm willing to do. In any case, a sentient
being can watch the Fox News Channel for an hour and come to the same conclusion
as the documentary, namely that Fox is anything but "fair and balanced". The
documentary just makes the case that the thinly disguised, 98% editorial voice
is deliberate policy, not incompetence.

Being less than sentient early in the morning I've missed this and asked for some dates and specifics on these charges ("context" if you will) and will report back when I get any. He's not the kind of guy that goes in for baseless charges and intellectual laziness. In the meantime, I can offer these facts for anyone who is not afraid of a little lefty-religion heresy.

In Seeking More Viewers, MSNBC Turns Left, The New York Times takes a fair
and balanced position
Fox News, although viewed by many liberals as a bastion of conservative influence, has carefully avoided labeling itself as anything but "fair and balanced." The network features Alan Colmes, a liberal, on “Hannity & Colmes,” and Greta Van Susteren, who rarely espouses political views, at 10 p.m.
And the Huffington Post, in Bill O'Reilly Gets Apology From Scott McClellan (VIDEO), acknowledges the scurrilous lie about Republican Talking Points but takes issue with the Fox personality's being mean when he accepted Scott McClellan's apology for making
it.
Former White House Press Secretary said recently that the Bush administration fed talking points to Fox News. O'Reilly knows for a fact that this can't possibly be true, so he called McClellan a liar. McClellan actually apologized, but O'Reilly stuck to his principles and refused to make nice.
Well. Sorry for that, but poor old Bill can only take so much abuse!

Here's another one from the lefty Huffington Post, Clinton Surrogate Ed Rendell Praises Fox News For "Most Objective," "Balanced" Coverage. I have to give them some credit for publishing these kinds of stories. Go Huffpo!

And some statistics on the audience breakdown of the various cable news networks. It has a link to the complete results which are interesting in a non-conventional-wisdom kind of way. We'll take another look at them after the premiere of The Rachel Maddow Show premiering on MSNBC after Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

Just some facts. I hope they don't disquiet my friend or cause a crisis in his faith. Comments welcome, but I will scan for name-calling!

More than science alone

2008-08-20T10:47:00.002-05:00

The politics of science is of increasing interest to me. Here is a review of a new book that lays out some of the issues.

This attitude, which we should not be surprised to find at the highest levels of the Democratic party in Congress, is among the most serious dangers to American self government in our time. It runs the risk of blinding the left to its responsibilities to public ends no less important than the pursuit of public health, and at the same time of causing the right to overreact in a defensive lurch that could damage American science policy and the scientific enterprise itself. It speaks of a profound loss of perspective all too evident in the science debates of recent years. Science, and especially biomedical science, carries immense promise and potential; but it sometimes also raises some serious ethical challenges and dilemmas, and a democratic society must be able to call upon more than science alone to address them.

See the whole article at National Review Online.

The most peaceful social movement of all time

2008-08-12T14:17:00.003-05:00

Here's an interesting website about the manifestation of violence engendered by the horrendous philosophy of abortion.

We’ve heard endless stories in the mainline media about "anti-choice violence" and an "organized campaign of terror and intimidation against reproductive health centers." But where does the real violence lie when it comes to the abortion issue?
Pro-life groups have emphasized the violence that goes on inside the abortion mills—but what about the violence that pro-abortionists commit against born human beings?
The pro-life movement is unquestionably the most peaceful social movement of all time.

Check out the state-by-state breakdown. Sites linking to this one use a new adjective to describe the human beings that are not OK to kill: "wanted".

Solzhenitsyn — a Rightist?

2008-08-04T16:08:00.002-05:00

This 1975 flashback from National Review on the death of Solzhenitsyn ponders why he was considered a man of the conservative right.

If Solzhenitsyn is a far rightist who appeals to the far right, he goes at it in a most unorthodox way. Having declared that the Russian people are the natural allies of the American workers, he commented in one of his recent speeches about “another alliance — at first glance a strange one, a surprising one — but if you think about it, in fact one which is well-grounded and easy to understand: this is the alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists.”

Bush never lied to us about Iraq

2008-06-17T13:25:00.002-05:00

I love it when someone on the open-minded, tolerant Left bucks the conventional wisdom. What guts this takes. See the whole thing at The Los Angeles Times op-ed by James Kirchick.

Nearly every prominent Democrat in the country has repeated some version of this charge, and the notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.
Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House "manipulation" -- that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.
In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments." The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found "no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

Environmentalists Pick Up Where Communists Left Off

2008-06-04T09:08:00.003-05:00

My friend Steve found this article on precisely what we had discussed. I could never say it better than Charles Krauthammer.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but -- even better -- in the name of Earth itself.

Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. (See Newsweek above.) And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment -- carbon chastity -- they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by, and at what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Read the whole thing here.

FZS Class of 2009 -- I mean 2008

2008-05-24T19:01:00.002-05:00

Some pictures from Graduation Day today.

The Progressive Tuskegee Experiment

2008-05-02T10:03:00.005-05:00

The scholarly Jonah Goldberg just will not let up shattering lefty conventional wisdom. This time it's the Tuskegee Experiment.

The infamous Tuskegee experiment is the Medusa’s head of black left-wing paranoia. Whenever someone laments the fact that anywhere from 10 percent to 33percent of African Americans believe the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill blacks, someone will say, “That’s not so crazy when you consider what happened at Tuskegee.”
But it is crazy. And it's dishonest.
...
Liberals like to invoke Tuskegee as if it’s solely an indictment of what other people did, proof that we need more progressive government. But Tuskegee was in fact the poisoned fruit of progressive government.

Check out all the historical facts in the whole article at National Review Online.

Windows Live Mesh in limited beta

2008-04-28T08:53:00.009-05:00

Here is some amazing stuff from Microsoft. What has Ray Ozzie been working on for 2 years? This is it. Windows Live Mesh. See the exciting developer video.

Here's a quote pulled from a CrunchBase article.

Utilizing elements of AtomPub, Feedsync, the Microsoft Sync Framework, and SSDS, Live Mesh will sync information across computers and devices, and store information in the cloud, accessible from the web. It will resolve conflicts with collaborative syncing, and allow for inviting others to collaborate on mesh folders stored in the cloud. A client installed on local devices will produce “Live Mesh folders”, wrapping them in a way that they can be easily synchronized. Live Mesh will allow remote access to devices in “the mesh”, not only allowing for access to files and folders, but applications as well.

See the whole article complete with screen shots.

Enlightenment Bias

2008-04-09T11:53:00.003-05:00

More brilliance from my new favorite writer, Jonah Goldberg.

Last week, Russia’s lower house of parliament passed a resolution insisting that Josef Stalin’s man-made 1932-33 famine — called the Holodomor in Ukrainian — wasn’t genocide.

Not even the Russians dispute that the Soviet government deliberately starved millions. But the Russian resolution indignantly states: “There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines.” It notes that victims included “different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country.”

Translation: We didn’t kill millions of farmers because they were Ukrainians; we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers.

And that’s all it takes to be acquitted of genocide.

Check it out at National Review Online.

Zimbabwe: What went wrong?

2008-03-28T13:45:00.005-05:00

Here's an interesting article by Greg Houle about a troubled country with an election on Saturday.

Earlier this year, in Kenya, the United States took the lead in brokering a power-sharing agreement between bitter rivals Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga after their heavily contested December election led to a flare-up of brutal, ethnically driven violence. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s personal visit to Nairobi in February has been widely hailed as the difference-maker. It is possible, given the fact that Mugabe will be facing a serious challenge from two formidable foes in Saturday’s poll, and the fact that the economic situation in the country has long since passed the tipping point, that Zimbabwe could face circumstances similar to those Kenya encountered following its election. If that happens, the U.S. must not hesitate to step into the void and help broker a deal that will end Robert Mugabe’s cruel reign and help rekindle hope for the remarkably resilient people of Zimbabwe.

Cream Cheese

2008-03-28T08:19:00.002-05:00

Somebody I know and love just can't get enough cream cheese! This tub of goodness was in the break room at the office.

Long passwords: What are they good for?

2008-03-23T14:27:00.001-05:00

I've been wondering about passwords. At the office I am forced by policy to create a password that contains a minimum number of a mixture of upper-case, lower-case, numeric and even special characters. What threat do such passwords mitigate?

Password guessing. Obviously, passwords made of more than just the 26 lower-case characters are easier to guess. But don't modern authentication systems lock an account that has more than three bad guesses? Do black hat hackers use password-guessing programs anymore? I suppose that some non-professional snooper with physical access to a target computer might sit down in the boss's empty office on a Saturday and try three passwords. If the account gets locked the boss won't even know what hit him after the Help Desk unlocks him on Monday morning.

Social engineering. These is the real, modern threat and I doubt that the long, complicated passwords are any harder to trick out of a person over the telephone. It stands to reason that if he's going to give his password to a con-man, it matters not how long it is.

Passwords that are long and complex I hypothesize are even more often written down on paper in the pencil drawer or on a post-it under the keyboard. This opens a new vulnerability.

So what threats do minimum-length and character mixture passwords alleviate?

Chicago Reader reviews Liberal Fascism

2008-03-23T13:13:00.004-05:00

This review from the non-right-ideologue Chicago Reader will anger many of their conventional-wisdom-believing subscribers.

The most deeply rooted of these popular ideas about fascism is that it’s a phenomenon of the political right; without question, the best thing about Goldberg’s book is the way he turns this on its head. Mussolini, who created the brand, was raised a Marxist, authored one socialist tract after another, and edited a journal called Class War. He admired Lenin, who returned the favor. His support for World War I forced him to break with international socialism, but Goldberg insists this was not a move from left to right; rather, it was from “Workers of the World Unite!” to national socialism, socialism in one country. To achieve this end Mussolini became a maestro of political theater and thuggery, but that doesn’t mean he abandoned his principles. In the first platform of the Fascists we find universal suffrage, repeal of titles of nobility, the eight-hour workday, a minimum wage, workers’ representation in government bodies, reform of old-age pensions, “sequestration” of war profits,
and nationalization of arms manufacturing. Also, to quote the program directly, “a large progressive tax on capital that would amount to a one-time partial expropriation of all riches.” Call him a dictator, a populist, a popinjay—even, if it will make you feel better, a fascist—but you cannot call Il Duce right-wing.

Goldberg reprints the platform of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—yes, that’s the Nazis—in its entirety.

There's lots more at http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/bookreviews/080320/

Richard Kirk Reviews Liberal Fascism

2008-03-23T12:49:00.003-05:00

Here are a couple snips from Richard Kirk's blog-review of a great book. The bolding is mine.

“History is written by the winners.” So goes the discipline-denigrating cliché. A more accurate observation, as Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism, suggests, is that history is written by historians—and especially, in recent decades, by academics whose biases predispose them to serve as useful idiots for Joseph Stalin’s defunct propaganda ministry. Though Goldberg’s well-researched book doesn’t focus minute attention on the culpability of leftist historians, it does provide convenient targets (Richard Hofstadter and William Shirer) who might be blamed for abetting the greatest intellectual ruse of the twentieth century—the absurd designation of fascism as an ideology of the political right.

and another...

As far as Hitler’s left-wing credentials are concerned, Goldberg’s discussion of the Nazi Party Platform does a good job of demonstrating that the word “socialist” in National Socialist wasn’t mere window dressing. After summarizing that ambitious document, Goldberg offers this sarcastic conclusion:

“Ah, yes. Those anti-elitist, stock-market-abolishing, child-labor-ending, public-health-promoting, wealth-confiscating, draft-ending, secularist right-wingers!”

Richard Kirk on Ethics: Musing With A Hammer: LIBERAL FASCISM by Jonah Goldberg

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg. Doubleday, 2007. (487 pages, $27.95, Hardcover)

Keynote Address at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum

2008-01-28T11:50:00.000-06:00

Keynote Address at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum
Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Davos, SwitzerlandJanuary 23, 2008

http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/01/99624.htm

Mark Steyn's troublesome article

2007-12-19T11:25:00.000-06:00

Here is the article by Mark Steyn, adapted from his America Alone book that has him in trouble with Canadian "human-rights" organizations.

Sept. 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that
revealed how much had already changed. On Sept. 10, how many journalists had the
Council of American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the
Muslim Council of Britain in their Rolodexes? If you'd said that whether
something does or does not cause offence to Muslims would be the early 21st
century's principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands,
Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were
crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled
the Twin Towers.

Backyard owl

2007-12-14T19:02:00.000-06:00

Living by the woods can be fun.

Questioning Interrogation

2007-11-05T13:50:00.000-06:00

Rather than cry and run away, yet again, the president, his top advisors, and his spokesmen should explain why Americans should be proud of what U.S. personnel are accomplishing at Guantanamo: Isolating sadistic, homicidal, medieval killers from their potential victims while pumping them successfully for information to prevent their comrades from murdering innocent men, women, and children.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTE5MmVlODZmZTcwZWE3NTUzZDAwNjZlMmVjZWFhMTI=

Dropout rates

2007-11-01T10:21:00.000-05:00

The status dropout rate represents the percentage of an age group that is not enrolled in school and has not earned a high school credential (i.e., diploma or equivalent, such as a General Educational Development [GED] certificate). Status dropout rates are reported for 16- through 24-year-olds. The status dropout rate for this age group declined from 15 percent in 1972 to 9 percent in 2005. A decline was also seen between 2000 and 2005, the more recent years of this time span (11 vs. 9 percent).

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16

Multimedia message

2007-10-29T15:58:00.001-05:00

WordNet - Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory

2007-10-28T13:15:00.000-05:00

WordNet - Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory: "WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing."

Graham Greene - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2007-10-28T13:05:00.000-05:00

Graham Greene - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (October 2, 1904 – April 3, 1991) was an English playwright, novelist, short story writer, travel writer and critic whose works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Greene combined serious literary acclaim with wide popularity. Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a 'Catholic novelist' rather than as a 'novelist who happened to be Catholic', Catholic religious themes are at the root of many of his novels, including Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, Monsignor Quixote, A Burnt-Out Case, and his famous work The Power and the Glory. Works such as The Quiet American also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics."

Like a foreign Legion who fights for a city of which I am no longer a full citizen

Council of Trent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2007-10-28T13:01:00.000-05:00

Council of Trent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Council of Trent was the 19th Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church. It was convened three times between December 13, 1545 and December 4, 1563 in the city of Trent (modern Trento, Trentino) as a response to the theological and ecclesiological challenges of the Protestant Reformation. It is considered one of the most important councils in the history of the Catholic Church, clearly specifying current Catholic doctrines on salvation, the sacraments, and the Biblical canon. The council standardized the Mass throughout the church, largely by abolishing local variations. This became known as the 'Tridentine Mass', from the city's Latin name Tridentum. The council also commissioned the first Catholic catechism, the Roman Catechism. The Council of Trent was a major first step in the Counter-Reformation."

Scarlet Street (1945)

2007-10-28T12:59:00.000-05:00

Scarlet Street (1945) is a good movie with a unique performance by Edward G. Robinson as Christopher Cross.

Pertinent Cromwell

2007-10-25T15:11:00.000-05:00

Somehow or other we must get into the government men who can match our
enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution and in thirst for victory.
It may not be easy to find such men. They can be found only by trial and by
ruthlessly discarding all who fail. But find them we must. For we are fighting
today for our life, for our liberty, for our all.

Oliver Cromwell

Leaving the left / I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity

2007-10-17T07:15:00.001-05:00

Leaving the left / I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity: "I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together. "

Quotations

2007-09-23T12:18:00.000-05:00

I'm going to put these up on my Facebook profile.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will
show themselves great.--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), Essays, First Series:
Prudence, 1841
Treat a man as he appears to be, and you make him worse. But
treat a man as if he were what he potentially could be, and you make him what he
should be.--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If a man does not make new
acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone. A
man should keep his friendships in constant repair.--Samuel Johnson
A love
for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in
their hour of peril.--Sir Winston Churchill

Science arose from poetry--when times change the two can meet again on a
higher level as friends.--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
All great things are
simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, honor,
duty, mercy, hope.--Sir Winston Churchill
Whenever I hear people talking
about "liberal ideas," I am always astounded that men should love to fool
themselves with empty sounds. An idea should never be liberal; it must be
vigorous, positive, and without loose ends so that it may fulfill its divine
mission and be productive. The proper place for liberality is in the realm of
the emotions.--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Venom pic

2007-09-17T16:26:00.001-05:00

Here's a pic I snapped in Borders.

Solitary elk

2007-09-09T12:35:00.001-05:00

We went on a little drive through Lone-Elk Park today and came upon this lone elk.

I can post from my phone

2007-09-09T10:35:00.001-05:00

I am surprised that I can send posts from my phone. These are my feet under the covers on a Sunday morning.

Starting Cassini

2007-09-03T10:06:00.000-05:00

I'm using Expression Blend with my .Net project. Can I use Visual Studio's built-in web server, I believe it used be called Cassini, without running Visual Studio? Can Cassini be started stand-alone?

Cassini Sample Web Server : The Official Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Site

Research Background and Frequently Asked Questions on the Big Five

2007-08-25T01:54:00.000-05:00

Personality psychologists are interested in what differentiates one person from another and why we behave the way that we do. Personality research, like any science, relies on quantifiable concrete data which can be used to examine what people are like. This is where the Big Five plays an important role.

Research Background and Frequently Asked Questions on the Big Five

Laboratory Experiments with Reputation Mechanisms For Electronic Commerce

2007-08-25T01:27:00.000-05:00

This is a pretty cool video
Laboratory Experiments with Reputation Mechanisms For Electronic Commerce