You gotta hand it to Rich Lowry…

From the National Review

“For Barack Obama, hope can triumph over anything, except for open trade with a neighboring country with an economy 1/20th the size of ours. Then, all is despair.”

How did this political “newbie” win the Democratic nomination?  Somebody PLEASE explain this one to me.  By the way… I love the irony of Obama’s entire political campaign: hope IN hope… not in hope’s ability to change anything…

Quick… everybody buy a SUV!!!

Once again… it looks as if global warming is not really global ‘warming’ anymore… per dailytech.com

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

I’m sick and tired of this…

you know… I’m sick and tired of time and time again needing to correct the destructive ideological belief system that is the environmentalist movement.  Their words are taken with the utmost seriousness by politician and reporter alike… and they have nothing substantive to show that this “warming” is anything more then a natural, cyclical change in the earth’s environment.  Well, I might as well turn the tables here and call all you environmentalists “global cooling deniers”. 

from Canada’s National Post:

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”

(America) Part 3

I’m too busy to add much of my own commentary.  This is my last installment.

What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic imagry, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short-circuit which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in doind, emphasizes their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness.  This is the special effect of our times.  The ecstasy of the polaroid is of the same order:  to hold the object and its image almost simultaneously as if the conception of light of ancient physics or metaphysics, in which each object was thought to secrete doubles or negatives of itself that we pick up with our eyes, has become reality.  It is a dream.  It is the optical materilization of a magical process.  The polariod photo is a sort of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real object.

Bringing to your attention…

Arts & Letters Daily

The good people over at Arts & Letters Daily (my favorite web resource) have outdone themselves with the creation of a new site designed to highlight the debate over global warming. The articles on the right portion of the climate site are particularly revealing.

Also, If you were not already familiar with aldaily, allow me to introduce you to the best resource for intellectual thought on the internet. Best of all, it’s using the same site design from 2001. We can almost call this a “retro” design. Enjoy!

Cults are soooo 1970′s

Fun reading over at Slate.com 

I know this is going to sound strange, but it’s not you, Barack, it’s me. Really it always was me, but now it’s really, really about me. I don’t know when we started to feel weird supporting you, but: My friend Hanna thinks it started with that “Yes We Can,” video. I mean, last week I was totally crying watching it. Now just thinking about how choked up I got gives me the creeps. I think I felt something at the time, but even if I did, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to feel it anymore. Feeling inspired is soooo early-February.

Or maybe it started when everyone began madly posting last week about how you are not the Messiah. And that got me thinking. Then, when commentators started accusing me of being a venomous drone in a “cult of personality,” I just needed to get out. I mean cults are soooo 1970s.

Good Times.co.uk reading…

Interestingly, I was browsing the times.co.uk website and behold… I was surprised how many really good articles there were.  Here’s one I wanted to bring your attention to:

Al-Qaeda leaders admit: ‘We are in crisis. There is panic and fear’

Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year’s mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group’s security structure suffered “total collapse”.


The Anbar letter conceded that the “crusaders” – Americans – had gained the upper hand by persuading ordinary Sunnis that al-Qaeda was responsible for their suffering and by exploiting their poverty to entice them into the security forces. Al-Qaeda’s “Islamic State of Iraq is faced with an extraordinary crisis, especially in al-Anbar“, the unnamed emir admitted.


In an apparent reference to al-Qaeda’s brutal tactics, he said of the Americans and their Sunni allies: “We helped them to unite against us . . . The Americans and the apostates launched their campaigns against us and we found ourselves in a circle not being able to move, organise or conduct our operations.

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