Mark Bossingham

Obama right on the money on Israel defense

IN JULY, in Israel, Barack Obama said:

    "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing."

Let's go outside!

How screwed up is Britain?

THIS SCREWED up: Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinehad will be delivering the annual “alternative” Christmas message for Britain’s Channel 4. (As in alternative to the Queen's traditional message).

Obama's crackpot science adviser

HERE'S AN editorial from IBD that sort of boggles the mind. Obama actually appointed this guy to a position of responsibility. Good luck, USA.

   
Personnel is policy, the political cliche goes, and on Saturday the Obama administration's policy on global warming became clear.
He nominated Harvard physicist John Holden to be his science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, and marine biologist Jane Lubchenco to head to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Both are global warming true believers. "Global warming is a misnomer," Holden said a year ago in a speech at Harvard. "It implies something gradual, something uniform, something quite possibly benign, and what we're experiencing is none of those. There is already widespread harm . . . occurring from climate change. This is not just a problem for our children and grandchildren."
There is indeed widespread harm being done by changes in the weather as the nation is gripped by subzero cold and record snowfalls that have reached spots like Las Vegas and Malibu, Calif. The earth is cooling and has been for the last decade due to a decline in solar activity and changes in Pacific Ocean currents.
Holden's proposed cures to warming are, well, interesting. In that Harvard speech last November, he presented a "top 10" list of options. No. 1 was "limiting population," as if man was a plague upon the Earth, a major tenet of green dogma.
Never mind that with more bodies come more minds and more ideas for cleaner and more efficient technology. He does not say how we would do that. Adopt China's one-child policy perhaps?
Second on his list was reducing per capita GDP. Holden's long term goal is "equal per-capita emissions rights," meaning that a country may only emit an amount of carbon commensurate to the number of its persons, not on the basis of its production.
For example, the U.S. would be allowed to release only about 20 times as much carbon as Ecuador, although the U.S. produces 144 times the goods and services.
Interestingly, he puts nuclear power at No. 7, calling it a risky waste-producing option that includes the danger of proliferation. Never mind that here and around the world nuclear power has reduced the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by billions of tons. France gets 80% of its electricity from the atom, recycles its waste, and no one in the City of Lights glows in the dark.
And after the U.S. economy tanks, he says America and the rest of the developed world must pay "the up-front costs, offering assistance to developing countries," as they move to the new, green economy. This would be a global redistribution of wealth, but we have to spread the green around.
As for Lubchenco, she has warned that even if the world abruptly shifts away from fossil fuels, the oceans will continue to soak up carbon dioxide and become more acidic. She recommends protecting marine life by reducing overfishing, cutting back on nutrient runoff and creating marine reserves to protect marine ecosystems.
The irony here is that offshore oil platforms have been demonstrably good for marine life by serving as artificial reefs. Louisiana fishing tours head right for the offshore rigs where fish feed and congregate.
Much of the nutrient runoff she mentions is caused by the increased planting of crops for biofuels such as ethanol to replace petroleum. This has created dead zones for marine life in places like Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico while raising food prices around the globe.
This is change and advice we'd be wise to ignore.

Mark Steyn on newspapers' whingeing irrelevancy

IN A hilarious end of the year column, Mark Steyn includes a paragraph on my profession. The Free Press' new delivery scheme is actually kind of funny.

So many areas of endeavor that once embodied the youth and energy of this great land are now old and sclerotic. I include, naturally, my own industry. I loved the American newsrooms you saw in movies like "The Front Page," full of hard-boiled, hard-livin' newspapermen. By the time I got there myself, there were no hard-boiled newspapermen, just bland, anemic newspaperpersons turning out politically correct snooze sheets of torpid portentousness. The owner of The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune recently filed for bankruptcy protection. The New York Times is mortgaging its office to fund debt repayment. The Detroit Free Press is cutting out home delivery except on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, thereby further depressing sales of delivery trucks in the Motor City.

The Iceman Cometh!

IT'S THE heaviest snowfall in more than a century, a sure sign that global warming is getting worse (if you are either off your rocker or getting paid to perpetuate the fraud).

SPOKANE, Wash. – Road crews worked around the clock to remove 2 feet of snow from Spokane streets early Friday as the winter storm that set records in the West moved through the Great Lakes region and bore down on the Northeast.
The 19.4 inches of snow that had fallen at Spokane International Airport Thursday morning was the most in a 24-hour period since record keeping began in 1881. Another 4 inches had fallen by Thursday afternoon.
Records were similarly smashed in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, with 25 inches of snow. The past record was 16 inches in 1955.
"It has eclipsed any previous records by a significant amount," said John Livingston, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in eastern Washington.

Global warming!—Snow in Vegas!

IT'S SNOWING in Las Vegas and Malibu, confirming that the ever-so fragile Planet is about to burn up from "global warming" any day now. Now that we are here, let's take a little test, shall we? You are a meteorologist aka a climate scientist. The best you can hope for is a tenured gig at a university or if you get really lucky you can do the weather on TV. Problem is there are not many of these jobs to go around. However, if you lie and help create a bullshit crisis, the government will throw billions of dollars at your once-ignored specialty and you will be treated like a rock star. Which scenario do you prefer?

World temperatures drop

IT'S GETTING colder so, uhh, global warming must be getting worse, right?

 
* Global thermometers stubbornly refused to rise after 1998, and have plummeted in the past two years by more than 0.5 degree C. The world is now colder than in 1940, when the Post-WWII Industrial Revolution started spewing lots of man-made CO 2 in the first place.

* On October 29, the U.S. beat or tied 115 low-temperature records for the date. Alaska, which was unusually warm last year, recorded 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit that night--beating the previous low by 4 degrees F.

* London had snow in October for the first time in more than 70 years.

* The 2007-08 temperature drop wasn't predicted by the global climate models, but it had been predicted by the sunspots since 2000. Both the absent sunspots and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation now predict a 25-30-year global cooling.

Bush to continue welfare payments UAW 'workers'

I AM spitting mad that Bush is going to do an end-run around Congress and bail out GM and Chrysler using TARP funds. I am not even sure this is legal and it sure isn't right. We hear excuses like "Congress failed to act" (Treasury spokesman) and "Congressional gridlock" (AP). Bullshit. Congress did act. It said NO. This is nothing less than theft. The most disgusting part of all this is that the UAW could bluff because it knew Bush would ultimately cave and stab his fellow Republicans in the back. Some legacy.

Mumbai: Eyes wide shut

MARK STEYN nails the AP's and the rest of the media's criminal blindness on the Mumbai religious massacre in his latest NRO column. As usual, read it all.

Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”
Indeed. And so it goes. This time round — Bombay — it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims “found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion.”
Oh, I don’t know about that. In fact, you’d be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was “linked” to any religion, least of all one beginning with “I-“ and ending in “-slam.” In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations — “Islamic terrorists,” “Muslim extremists” — and by the time of the assault on Bombay found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators “militants” or “gunmen” or “teenage gunmen,” as in the opening line of this report in the Australian: “An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok…”
Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.
(...)
I wrote in my book, "America Alone," that “reforming” Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Koran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there’ll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there’ll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Bombay in the name of Allah, and that’s just business as usual. And, if it is somehow “understandable” that for the first time in history it’s no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, “worry about image.” Not enough.