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…

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.

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.”

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.

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!

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.

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.“

Read the rest of this entry »

Sigh… I’m a sucker for those Russian babes… 

Ever Since I posted a link to a Stanford lecture by Alan Dirshowitz, some of my readers have been giving me a, shall I say, hard time about it. In response, these same reader(s) have posted articles critical of Israel. I had the opportunity to read one of the posted articles, and I think that, given the circumstances, that a reasoned discussion of that article would be helpful.

First, let me be clear that this is not a post in support of Israel as a state or in support of the Zionist movement. Instead, this post is an exercise in the use of logical; a foray into the fundamentals of proper debate. In short, I want to examine the statements and position of Mr. Amayrea’s article from a critical standpoint. Let me begin by quoting a rather long passage in a piece by Mr. Amayrea:

Last week, Israel marked the “Holocaust Day” in West Jerusalem amid the usual fanfare of sanctimonious rituals, never-again speeches and glorification of Zionism… The solemn but also highly propagandistic occasion is manipulated to the fullest by Zionist leaders in order to justify the crime against humanity, otherwise known as “the state of Israel.” – This year, too, Zionist leaders preyed on the memories of holocaust victims by seeking to blackmail the collective conscience of the world into recognizing the “uniqueness of Jewish pain” — as if non-Jews were children of a lesser God and their pain was unimportant.

Thus we had the political and ideological gurus of Zionism, from the morbidly sanctimonious Elie Wiesel to the pathologically duplicitous Ehud Olmert berate the world for the “reincarnation of anti-Semitism,” a deliberately twisted reference to legitimate criticisms of nefarious treatment of Palestinians, including the adoption of such policies as apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the use of brutal tactics for the purpose of forcing the victims of Zionism to leave their ancestral homeland.

First, let us ask on the basis of language alone, whether this author has even the slightest hope of an objective argument. The employment of words such as “sanctimonious”, “propagandistic”, “manipul[ation]“, “preyed”, “blackmail”, “morbid[ly]“, “twisted reference”, all expose the author’s insatiable distain of everything Jewish. In every sentence, Mr. Amayrea liberally interjects emotionally-charged, subjective terms into every description of anything Israeli–and in doing so sacrifices the strength of whatever argument he was about to make.

Read the rest of this entry »

No: this is not some ‘vote or die’ political post but is, in fact, the third installment of my series on Baudrillard’s “AMERICA”.  One thing in particular I like about Baudrillard is his ability to interject deep meaning into the mundane.  For example, merely glancing at a piece of graffiti can prompt this response…

‘LIVE OR DIE’: the graffiti message on the pier at Santa Monica is mysterious, because we really have no choice between life and death.  If you live, you live, if you die, you die.  It is like saying ‘be yourself, or don’t be!’  It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic.  You could read it to mean that you should live intensely or else disappear, but that is banal.  Following the model of ‘pay or die!’, ‘your money or your life!’, it would become ‘your life or your life!”.  Stupid again, since you cannot exchange life for itself.  And yet there is poetic force in this implaceable tautollogy, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood.  In the end, the lesson of this graffiti is perhaps: ‘ if you get more stupid than me, you die!’

I like how he doesn’t see a need for some ultimate conclusion on the meaning of the statement… nothing irks me more then philosophers who get caught up in the meaningless questions.  Even so, it seems he contemplates the statement long enough to expose it for what it is–and in doing so causes his reader to view the common and banal with a fresh perspective.  And you wondered why I like this guy so much… 

[Me]: Welcome, today I have the pleasure of interviewing Hilldog on today’s issue of BlogstitutioNBC.  Yesterday, Hilldog wrote a really interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal explaining her vision for the future of the country.  To be quite honest, I thought the article was really well written.   Would you mind if I discuss the article with you, Hilldog?

[Hilldog]:  Of course, Joel.  Thanks for having me on your show.

[Me]:  Ok, let me start by reading portions of your latest op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.  You begin by saying: 

Throughout my campaign, I have been listening to the voices of people across America. 

A great introduction.  The message is clearly that you not, in fact, an ideaologue, but a reasonable person who has been molded by the input of thousands of common Americans.  You continue:

I met one man who told me, “I don’t know what I did wrong.  I got my education and I worked hard.  I’ve been at the same company for 12 years now, but I’ve just been asked to train my successor because my job is moving to another country.”

Before I let you jump in here I must say; what a great followup to a great introduction.  Here we immediately are exposed to the stereotypical plight of the common man in it’s utter horror.   Playing on a reader’s emotions for their common man is a sure-fire way to garnish sympathy for a cause.  

[Hilldog]: Yes, Joel; there are just so many people out there that are hurting because of evil corporations.  I think you would agree with me that the French model forbidding firing is clearly the better model. 

[me]: You continue:

Another woman said to me, “I just can’t make ends meet.  My health care premiums have doubled, college tuition is up.  How am I supposed to make it as a single mom?”

Never forget to include plight of the single mothers out there.  Powerful stuff.  A man loosing his job of 12 years, a mom who’s health care premiums doubled… it’s truely horrible.  

But… dare I ask why this man should be guaranteed a job by his current employer?  (the implication is that the employee is owed more).  Why shouldn’t the woman pay the fair market rate for health care?  Why is she footing the bill for her child’s education when other alternatives such as scholarships, loans, and work-study are available for her daughter?  It’s just that none of these questions are presented for our consideration. 

[Hilldog]:  Well DUH!  Why would I want people thinking beyond the immediate problems in our society?  This kind of stuff doesn’t require my constituients to think, only act on emotion.  I don’t have the highest popularilty among the uneducated by accident, you know.

[me]:  Good point, I hadn’t considered that.  You really know how to appeal to your base, that’s for sure.  Ok, moving on.  You discuss in your article the reasons why you want to be president.  You write: 

I am running for president to bring those voices to the White House and give people a chance to achieve the American Dream: having a good job, owning their own home and living with financial security.  That means tackling our toughest challenges–rising inequality, stagnating wages and a growing sense that too many middle class families are just one pink slip away from financial devastation. 

so, are you saying there are no personal reasons why you are running for office?

[Hilldog]: Re-capturing the power of the oval office?  I resent the implication!  No, it is for your voices to be heard, for the realization of the American dream that I run!  Terrorism, bah!  Iranian Nukes, meh!  9.2 trillion in federal debt, merely a diversion from our real challenges my good fellow!  Yes, I truly believe the hardest thing we can overcome as a nation is our “sense” of impending financial doom.  

Read the rest of this entry »

HELLO global warming.

funny how relevant this was to my LAST global warming post, huh?  It’s all global climate CHANGE now.