18 September 2008
MORE PORK !
Senate Passes 3.9% Military Pay Hike
September 16, 2008
Associated Press - by LAURIE KELLMAN
WASHINGTON - Republicans failed Tuesday to block a major defense bill that included a pay raise for military personnel when one of their own, retiring Sen. John Warner, rallied senators to advance the legislation out of respect for U.S. troops at war.
Republican opponents objected to $5 billion in pet projects that Congress added onto the bill. But proponents characterized "no" votes as showing disrespect for military personnel - a charge no candidate wants, especially seven weeks before Election Day.
September 16, 2008
Associated Press - by LAURIE KELLMAN
WASHINGTON - Republicans failed Tuesday to block a major defense bill that included a pay raise for military personnel when one of their own, retiring Sen. John Warner, rallied senators to advance the legislation out of respect for U.S. troops at war.
Republican opponents objected to $5 billion in pet projects that Congress added onto the bill. But proponents characterized "no" votes as showing disrespect for military personnel - a charge no candidate wants, especially seven weeks before Election Day.
Bill Clinton's REAL Legacy!
2008 Deadliest for US in Afghanistan
September 11, 2008
Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan - Militants killed two U.S. soldiers eastern Afghanistan on the anniversary of 9/11, making 2008 the deadliest year yet for American forces in the country that sheltered al-Qaida while it plotted the terror attacks on New York and Washington.
The NATO-led force said one soldier was killed when insurgents attacked a compound. The separate U.S.-led coalition said a second service member died in combat. No other details were released, but a Western military official told The Associated Press that both troops were American.
Thursday's deaths brings to 113 the number of troops who have died in Afghanistan this year, surpassing last year's record toll of 111.
Afghanistan was the launching pad for al-Qaida's terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. In response, U.S. forces invaded in October 2001 and drove the Taliban out of power in a matter of weeks.
At a ceremony in Kabul commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks, Col. Cody Smith said the date is a reminder of the terror experienced by those killed in the U.S. attacks experienced.
"That is what drives me, to fight for freedom all over the world because those people that died were in terror of seeing the fire, of seeing ... their lives being taken from them," Cody said. "We should fight, so that freedom reigns and terror does not."
Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaida network, is believed to be in the lawless tribal belt on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Once derided as a ragtag insurgency after the fall of their regime, Taliban fighters have transformed into a fighting force advanced enough to mount massive conventional attacks. Suicide and roadside bombs have turned bigger and deadlier than ever.
The number of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek militants flowing into the Afghan-Pakistan theater have increased this year, bringing with them command expertise the Taliban had lacked in previous years.
Top U.S. generals, European presidents and analysts say the blame lies to the east, in militant sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan. As long as those areas remain havens where fighters arm, train, recruit and plot increasingly sophisticated ambushes, the Afghan war will continue to sour.
Some 33,000 U.S. troops are now stationed in the country, the highest level since 2001. Overall, more than 65,000 troops from 40 nations are deployed in Afghanistan.
U.S. troops in Afghanistan on Thursday remembered those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks during ceremonies at bases around the country. In Kabul, a top U.S. general said terrorism still remains a threat to the world.
Maj. Gen. Robert Cone told those gathered for the memorial ceremony at Camp Eggers that terrorists have struck in London, Russia and Bali, Indonesia since the 2001 attacks in the United States.
"These attacks are reminders that the threat of terrorism is real and still a danger to the entire world," Cone said.
Cone's command in Kabul trains and equips the fledgling Afghan security forces - the centerpiece of the American strategy of turning Afghanistan into a country that can defend itself and away from the days when bin Laden used it as a safe haven to launch the attacks in New York and Washington.
© Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
September 11, 2008
Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan - Militants killed two U.S. soldiers eastern Afghanistan on the anniversary of 9/11, making 2008 the deadliest year yet for American forces in the country that sheltered al-Qaida while it plotted the terror attacks on New York and Washington.
The NATO-led force said one soldier was killed when insurgents attacked a compound. The separate U.S.-led coalition said a second service member died in combat. No other details were released, but a Western military official told The Associated Press that both troops were American.
Thursday's deaths brings to 113 the number of troops who have died in Afghanistan this year, surpassing last year's record toll of 111.
Afghanistan was the launching pad for al-Qaida's terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. In response, U.S. forces invaded in October 2001 and drove the Taliban out of power in a matter of weeks.
At a ceremony in Kabul commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks, Col. Cody Smith said the date is a reminder of the terror experienced by those killed in the U.S. attacks experienced.
"That is what drives me, to fight for freedom all over the world because those people that died were in terror of seeing the fire, of seeing ... their lives being taken from them," Cody said. "We should fight, so that freedom reigns and terror does not."
Osama bin Laden, leader of the al-Qaida network, is believed to be in the lawless tribal belt on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Once derided as a ragtag insurgency after the fall of their regime, Taliban fighters have transformed into a fighting force advanced enough to mount massive conventional attacks. Suicide and roadside bombs have turned bigger and deadlier than ever.
The number of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek militants flowing into the Afghan-Pakistan theater have increased this year, bringing with them command expertise the Taliban had lacked in previous years.
Top U.S. generals, European presidents and analysts say the blame lies to the east, in militant sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan. As long as those areas remain havens where fighters arm, train, recruit and plot increasingly sophisticated ambushes, the Afghan war will continue to sour.
Some 33,000 U.S. troops are now stationed in the country, the highest level since 2001. Overall, more than 65,000 troops from 40 nations are deployed in Afghanistan.
U.S. troops in Afghanistan on Thursday remembered those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks during ceremonies at bases around the country. In Kabul, a top U.S. general said terrorism still remains a threat to the world.
Maj. Gen. Robert Cone told those gathered for the memorial ceremony at Camp Eggers that terrorists have struck in London, Russia and Bali, Indonesia since the 2001 attacks in the United States.
"These attacks are reminders that the threat of terrorism is real and still a danger to the entire world," Cone said.
Cone's command in Kabul trains and equips the fledgling Afghan security forces - the centerpiece of the American strategy of turning Afghanistan into a country that can defend itself and away from the days when bin Laden used it as a safe haven to launch the attacks in New York and Washington.
© Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
11 September 2008
Global Warming gets the Cold Freeze
Global warming hoax exposed by record global cold
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, April 7, 2008
The media and governmental hype over a danger from global warming that already is allegedly causing the polar icecaps to melt and threaten a global climate catastrophe, looks more and more like the political hype it is. This year to date, snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
According to the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) many American cities and towns have suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was - 0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 average."
China is surviving its most brutal winter in one hundred years. Temperatures in the normally mild south were low for so long that some middle-sized cities went weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has been hurt as home buyers have stayed home. In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, breaking the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in 1950.
Arctic Ice Melt has Reversed
One of the most dramatic results of the record cold over much of the planet is the reversal of the much-reported melt of the icebergs in the Arctic Ocean. Last autumn the world was alarmed to hear from certain climatologists that the ice in the Arctic had melted to its "lowest levels on record.” What was carefully omitted from those scare stories was the fact 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.
Now, as a result of the recent record cold weather, the ice is back. According to Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
What few people know and what the Global Warming lobby seems at pains to keep known is the fact that there is considerable seasonal variation in how much pack ice of the Arctic ice pack covers the Arctic Ocean. Much of the ocean is also covered in snow for about 10 months of the year. The maximum snow cover is in March or April — about 20 to 50 centimeters over the frozen ocean. The thickness is not one of the universal constants, never was.
Admit flawed Climate Model
There is also admission by several intellectually honest climatologists that their predictive models are flawed. 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 very prominent climate modellers, recently admitted that 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 (as in the fictional movie The Day After Tomorrow) are wrong. In a recent interview Russell said, “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 man-made warming on polar ice melt.” Now that’s very interesting.
When professors Toggweiler and Russell reprogrammed their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator, then back towards it again, the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the recent Arctic warming.
Russian climatologists believe recent weather changes around the globe are results of solar activity and not man-made emissions. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, calls the argument for man-made climate change "a drop in the bucket." His research shows that now the recent very active solar activity has entered an inactive phase. He advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
Kenneth Tapping of Canada’s National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon. The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
The Global Warming Geopolitics
The recent Global Warming hysteria is in reality a geopolitical push by leading global elite circles to find a way to get the broader populations to willingly accept drastic cuts in their living standards, something that were it demanded without clear reason by politicians, would spark strikes and protest. The UN’s latest IPCC report on Global Warming calls for diverting a huge 12% of global GDP to “prevent the harmful effects of climate change.” The UN report, for example, estimated that its recommendations to reduce certain manmade emissions would cost about $2,750 per family per year in the price of energy.
Today there are two principal policy options of the Anglo-American power establishment to impose their further control over a world that is rapidly slipping out from under them. We might call them Plan A and Plan B for short.
The first, Plan A, was the option represented by Bush-Cheney and the big oil and military industrial complex behind them. Cheney and his close Houston friend, Matt Simmons, propagated the myth of Peak Oil to lull populations into accepting the inevitability of $100 a barrel or even higher oil prices. In the meantime, the relative strength of the Big Oil and the related US military establishment grew with higher oil prices.
Their global War on Terror provided a cover or pretext to justify military control over the major oil reserves and oil transit passages of the world. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Kosovo, the US and NATO agenda was aimed at future control of the extraordinary economic powers emerging from Russia to China to India to Brazil and Venezuela and beyond. Through China’s effective diplomacy in Africa, many African countries are on the brink of slipping out from under the US or British control into Chinese or more independent status.
If John McCain becomes the next choice of the US power elites to be President, that will signal that that military and oil agenda will escalate.
The second broad faction of maintaining their control over the greater part of the world economy, Plan B, sees Global Warming and “soft power” as embodied in the organs of the United Nations and IMF and World Bank as the more suitable vehicle to convince people to willingly accept drastic reduction in living standards.
Barack Obama, the apparent choice of the same elites as a “breath of change” to allow them to regroup after the debacle of the Bush-Cheney years, would likely opt for the second faction of the global elite—the Global Warming option to lowering general living standards, ‘Plan B’ of the Anglo-American establishment. In a recent campaign speech in Wallingford Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama replied to a question about Al Gore, the hero of Global Warming. As President, Obama said he would consider putting Al Gore in a Cabinet-level position—or higher. He stated, “I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem. He's somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I'm already consulting with him in terms of these issues but climate change is real."
The two major global factions
Today there are two major factions within the Western political power establishment internationally. They cooperate and share broad elitist goals, but differ fundamentally on how to reach these goals. Foremost is their goal of sharply controlling global economic growth and population growth. The first faction is best described as the Rockefeller Faction. It has a global power base and is today best represented by the Bush family faction which got their start, as I document in my book, as hired hands for the powerful Rockefeller machine. The Rockefeller faction has for more than a century based its power and influence on control of oil and on use of the military to secure that control. It is personified in the man who is since 2001 de facto President in terms of decision-making—Dick Cheney. Cheney was former CEO of Halliburton Corp., which is both the world’s largest oilfield services company (now based in Dubai for tax reasons), and the world’s largest military base constructor.
The second faction might be called the Soft Power Faction. Their philosophy might be summed up that they think its “possible to kill more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Their preferred path to global population control and lowering of the growth rates in China and elsewhere is through promoting the fraud of global warming and imminent climate catastrophe. Al Gore is linked to this faction. So is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. They see globalist institutions, especially the United Nations, as the best vehicle to advance their agenda of global austerity.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created by the United Nations Environment Programme. Its reports have been demonstrated to be fundamentally flawed in scientific methodology, yet they are aggressively being promoted as revealed truth by the powerful media behind this faction. Others in the circle include billionaire speculator George Soros, parts of the British Royal family and representatives of European “old money.”
With the meteorological evidence of their claims for global warming dissolving as the ice forms anew, it is not surprising that news of the Arctic refreeze and other contrary evidence to their doomsday thesis are kept from mainline international media.
F. William Engdahl is a Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization and author of the recently-released book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). He also author of ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics,’ Pluto Press Ltd. He may be contacted at his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, April 7, 2008
The media and governmental hype over a danger from global warming that already is allegedly causing the polar icecaps to melt and threaten a global climate catastrophe, looks more and more like the political hype it is. This year to date, snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
According to the US National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) many American cities and towns have suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was - 0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 average."
China is surviving its most brutal winter in one hundred years. Temperatures in the normally mild south were low for so long that some middle-sized cities went weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has been hurt as home buyers have stayed home. In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, breaking the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in 1950.
Arctic Ice Melt has Reversed
One of the most dramatic results of the record cold over much of the planet is the reversal of the much-reported melt of the icebergs in the Arctic Ocean. Last autumn the world was alarmed to hear from certain climatologists that the ice in the Arctic had melted to its "lowest levels on record.” What was carefully omitted from those scare stories was the fact 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.
Now, as a result of the recent record cold weather, the ice is back. According to Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
What few people know and what the Global Warming lobby seems at pains to keep known is the fact that there is considerable seasonal variation in how much pack ice of the Arctic ice pack covers the Arctic Ocean. Much of the ocean is also covered in snow for about 10 months of the year. The maximum snow cover is in March or April — about 20 to 50 centimeters over the frozen ocean. The thickness is not one of the universal constants, never was.
Admit flawed Climate Model
There is also admission by several intellectually honest climatologists that their predictive models are flawed. 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 very prominent climate modellers, recently admitted that 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 (as in the fictional movie The Day After Tomorrow) are wrong. In a recent interview Russell said, “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 man-made warming on polar ice melt.” Now that’s very interesting.
When professors Toggweiler and Russell reprogrammed their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator, then back towards it again, the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the recent Arctic warming.
Russian climatologists believe recent weather changes around the globe are results of solar activity and not man-made emissions. Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, calls the argument for man-made climate change "a drop in the bucket." His research shows that now the recent very active solar activity has entered an inactive phase. He advised people to "stock up on fur coats."
Kenneth Tapping of Canada’s National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon. The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
The Global Warming Geopolitics
The recent Global Warming hysteria is in reality a geopolitical push by leading global elite circles to find a way to get the broader populations to willingly accept drastic cuts in their living standards, something that were it demanded without clear reason by politicians, would spark strikes and protest. The UN’s latest IPCC report on Global Warming calls for diverting a huge 12% of global GDP to “prevent the harmful effects of climate change.” The UN report, for example, estimated that its recommendations to reduce certain manmade emissions would cost about $2,750 per family per year in the price of energy.
Today there are two principal policy options of the Anglo-American power establishment to impose their further control over a world that is rapidly slipping out from under them. We might call them Plan A and Plan B for short.
The first, Plan A, was the option represented by Bush-Cheney and the big oil and military industrial complex behind them. Cheney and his close Houston friend, Matt Simmons, propagated the myth of Peak Oil to lull populations into accepting the inevitability of $100 a barrel or even higher oil prices. In the meantime, the relative strength of the Big Oil and the related US military establishment grew with higher oil prices.
Their global War on Terror provided a cover or pretext to justify military control over the major oil reserves and oil transit passages of the world. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Kosovo, the US and NATO agenda was aimed at future control of the extraordinary economic powers emerging from Russia to China to India to Brazil and Venezuela and beyond. Through China’s effective diplomacy in Africa, many African countries are on the brink of slipping out from under the US or British control into Chinese or more independent status.
If John McCain becomes the next choice of the US power elites to be President, that will signal that that military and oil agenda will escalate.
The second broad faction of maintaining their control over the greater part of the world economy, Plan B, sees Global Warming and “soft power” as embodied in the organs of the United Nations and IMF and World Bank as the more suitable vehicle to convince people to willingly accept drastic reduction in living standards.
Barack Obama, the apparent choice of the same elites as a “breath of change” to allow them to regroup after the debacle of the Bush-Cheney years, would likely opt for the second faction of the global elite—the Global Warming option to lowering general living standards, ‘Plan B’ of the Anglo-American establishment. In a recent campaign speech in Wallingford Pennsylvania, Mr. Obama replied to a question about Al Gore, the hero of Global Warming. As President, Obama said he would consider putting Al Gore in a Cabinet-level position—or higher. He stated, “I will make a commitment that Al Gore will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem. He's somebody I talk to on a regular basis. I'm already consulting with him in terms of these issues but climate change is real."
The two major global factions
Today there are two major factions within the Western political power establishment internationally. They cooperate and share broad elitist goals, but differ fundamentally on how to reach these goals. Foremost is their goal of sharply controlling global economic growth and population growth. The first faction is best described as the Rockefeller Faction. It has a global power base and is today best represented by the Bush family faction which got their start, as I document in my book, as hired hands for the powerful Rockefeller machine. The Rockefeller faction has for more than a century based its power and influence on control of oil and on use of the military to secure that control. It is personified in the man who is since 2001 de facto President in terms of decision-making—Dick Cheney. Cheney was former CEO of Halliburton Corp., which is both the world’s largest oilfield services company (now based in Dubai for tax reasons), and the world’s largest military base constructor.
The second faction might be called the Soft Power Faction. Their philosophy might be summed up that they think its “possible to kill more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Their preferred path to global population control and lowering of the growth rates in China and elsewhere is through promoting the fraud of global warming and imminent climate catastrophe. Al Gore is linked to this faction. So is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. They see globalist institutions, especially the United Nations, as the best vehicle to advance their agenda of global austerity.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created by the United Nations Environment Programme. Its reports have been demonstrated to be fundamentally flawed in scientific methodology, yet they are aggressively being promoted as revealed truth by the powerful media behind this faction. Others in the circle include billionaire speculator George Soros, parts of the British Royal family and representatives of European “old money.”
With the meteorological evidence of their claims for global warming dissolving as the ice forms anew, it is not surprising that news of the Arctic refreeze and other contrary evidence to their doomsday thesis are kept from mainline international media.
F. William Engdahl is a Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization and author of the recently-released book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). He also author of ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics,’ Pluto Press Ltd. He may be contacted at his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
31 August 2008
So Wrong, So Often, For So Long, Yet It's Europe We Want To Copy
By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted Tuesday, June 24, 2008 4:30 PM PT
If anyone suggested that Tiger Woods should try to be more like other golfers, people would question the sanity of whoever made that suggestion.
Why should Tiger Woods try to be more like Phil Mickelson? If Tiger turned around and tried to golf left-handed, like Mickelson, he probably wouldn't be as good as Mickelson, much less as good as he is golfing the way he does right-handed.
Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans.
If Europeans have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, then we should have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, according to such people. If Europeans restrict pharmaceutical companies' patents and profits, then we should do the same.
Some justices of the U.S. Supreme Court even seem to think that they should incorporate ideas from European laws in interpreting American laws.
Before we start imitating someone, we should first find out whether the results that they get are better than the results that we get. Across a very wide spectrum, the U.S. has been doing better than Europe for a very long time.
By comparison with most of the rest of the world, Europe is doing fine. But it is like Phil Mickelson, not Tiger Woods.
Minimum wage laws have the same effects in Europe as they have had in other places around the world. They price many low-skilled and inexperienced workers out of a job.
Because minimum wage laws are more generous in Europe than in the U.S., they lead to chronically higher rates of unemployment in general and longer periods of unemployment than in the U.S. — but especially among younger, less experienced and less skilled workers.
Unemployment rates of 20% or more for young workers are common in a number of European countries.
Among workers who are both younger and minority workers, such as young Muslims in France, unemployment rates are estimated at about 40%.
The American minimum wage laws do enough damage without our imitating European minimum wage laws. The last year in which the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate in the U.S. was 1930. The next year, the first federal minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act, was passed. One of its sponsors explicitly stated that the purpose was to keep blacks from taking jobs from whites.
No one says things like that anymore — which is a shame, because the effect of a minimum wage law does not depend on what anybody says. Blacks in general, and younger blacks in particular, are the biggest losers from such laws, just as younger and minority workers are in Europe.
Those Americans who are pushing us toward the kinds of policies that Europeans impose on pharmaceutical companies show not the slightest interest in what the consequences of such laws have been.
One consequence is that even European pharmaceutical companies do much of their research and development of new medications in the U.S., in order to take advantage of American patent protections and freedom from price controls.
These are the very policies that the European imitators want us to change.
It is not a coincidence that such a high proportion of the major pharmaceutical drugs are developed in the U.S. If we kill the goose that lays the golden egg, as the Europeans have done, both we and the Europeans — as well as the rest of the world — will be worse off, because there are few other places for such medications to be developed.
There are a lot of diseases still waiting for a cure, or even for relief for those suffering from those diseases. People stricken with these diseases will pay the price for blind imitation of Europe.
Underestimating The U.S.
It must be a bitter disappointment to those in the media and in politics who have been dying to use the word "recession" that, for the second quarter in a row, there has been no downturn in the economy, though growth has been slow.
Alarmists have been reduced to quoting other alarmists on the supposedly impending recession, but that is still not the real thing.
The definition of a "recession" is very clear and straightforward: Two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We have not yet had one consecutive quarter of negative growth.
The fault-finding brigades of critics of the American economy and society are among the reasons why there is so much talk about how we ought to do things that are being done in Europe.
We need to understand America first, before we start imitating Europe. The American economy produces the largest output in the world — more than Japan, Germany and Great Britain combined. Measured by purchasing power, output per capita in the U.S. is the highest of any large nation.
There are some very small places such as Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands with higher purchasing power per capita. But as professor Benjamin M. Friedman of Harvard put it, places like Luxembourg are "technically countries but are more like large suburbs." Luxembourg's total population is about the same as that of Long Beach, Calif. Wal-Mart has more employees than the total population of Luxembourg.
Some other small places, like the Cayman Islands, are tax havens that attract the wealth of people who are not really Cayman Islanders.
Among countries at all comparable to the U.S. in size or population, none has achieved as high an output per capita. New Jersey produces more than Egypt. California produces more than Canada or Mexico.
Desperate efforts to depict all the prosperity and progress in the U.S. as being monopolized by "the rich" have led to all kinds of statistical mumbo jumbo, such as comparing the changing ratios between statistical categories over time and ignoring the fact that most of the people in those categories move from one category to another over the years.
Studies that follow given individuals over time show the exact opposite of what is being said in the mainstream media and in politics. That is, most of the working people in the bottom fifth of the income distribution rise into the top half, and the rate of increase of their incomes is greater than that of most of the people initially in the top fifth.
Those individuals in the top 1%, as of a given time, actually have an absolute decline in income over time. As they drop out of the top 1%, they are replaced by others, so that the statistical category can be doing great while the flesh-and-blood people who pass in and out of that category are by no means gaining on those further down the income distribution.
None of this is rocket science. But most people in politics, the media and academia insist on using statistics based on the fate of abstract categories over time — households, families, income brackets — even when other statistics, based on following specific individuals over time, are available.
Households and families vary in size from group to group and are generally declining in size over time, but an individual always means one person. Income per household or family can be stagnant, or even declining, while income per person is rising. That has in fact been a general pattern in recent decades, which may be why the nay-Sayers are forever citing household and family income statistics, while ignoring statistics on income per person.
Amid a general undermining of American economic performance, it is hardly surprising that so many people think we should imitate what the Europeans are doing — whether in the economy, in foreign policy or in other areas.
We can always learn particular things from other countries, whether in Europe, in Asia, or elsewhere. But imitating Europeans when they are not doing as well as Americans makes no sense.
A Not-So-Sophisticated Record
Some of the people who are most adamant against outsourcing economic activity from the U.S. to other countries often seem to think we should outsource our foreign policy to "world opinion" or act only in conjunction "with our NATO allies."
Like so many things that are said when it comes to public policy, there is very little attention paid to the actual track record of "world opinion" or of "our NATO allies."
Often there is a blanket assumption that European countries are just so much more sophisticated than American "cowboys." But there is incredibly little interest in the track record of those European sophisticates whom we are supposed to consult about our own national interests — including, in an age when terrorists may acquire nuclear weapons, our national survival.
In the course of the 20th century, supposedly sophisticated Europeans managed to create some of the most monstrous forms of government on earth — communism, fascism, Nazism — in peacetime, and to start the two World Wars, the bloodiest in all human history. In each of these wars, both the winners and the losers ended up far worse off than they were before these wars were started.
After both World Wars, the U.S. had to step in to save millions of people in Europe from starving amid the wreckage and rubble that their wars had created. These do not seem like people whose sophistication we should defer to.
Between the two World Wars, European intellectuals — more so than ordinary people — completely misread the threat from Nazi Germany, and were urging disarmament in France and England, while Hitler was rapidly building up the most powerful military force on the continent, obviously aimed at neighboring countries.
During the Cold War, many European intellectuals once again misread the threat of a totalitarian dictatorship — in this case, the Soviet Union. When they finally recognized the threat, many saw the question as whether it was "better to be red than dead."
They were no more prepared to stand up to the Soviet Union than they had been ready to stand up to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Worse yet, much of the European intelligentsia objected to America's standing up to the Soviet Union.
Many of them were appalled when Ronald Reagan met the threat of new Soviet missiles aimed at Western Europe by putting more American missiles in Western Europe, aimed at the Soviet Union.
Reagan, in effect, called the Soviet Union and raised them, while many of the European sophisticates — as well as much of the American intelligentsia — said that his policies would lead to war. Instead, it led to the end of the Cold War.
Are we now to blindly imitate those who have been so wrong, so often, over the past hundred years?
Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc
Posted Tuesday, June 24, 2008 4:30 PM PT
If anyone suggested that Tiger Woods should try to be more like other golfers, people would question the sanity of whoever made that suggestion.
Why should Tiger Woods try to be more like Phil Mickelson? If Tiger turned around and tried to golf left-handed, like Mickelson, he probably wouldn't be as good as Mickelson, much less as good as he is golfing the way he does right-handed.
Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans.
If Europeans have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, then we should have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, according to such people. If Europeans restrict pharmaceutical companies' patents and profits, then we should do the same.
Some justices of the U.S. Supreme Court even seem to think that they should incorporate ideas from European laws in interpreting American laws.
Before we start imitating someone, we should first find out whether the results that they get are better than the results that we get. Across a very wide spectrum, the U.S. has been doing better than Europe for a very long time.
By comparison with most of the rest of the world, Europe is doing fine. But it is like Phil Mickelson, not Tiger Woods.
Minimum wage laws have the same effects in Europe as they have had in other places around the world. They price many low-skilled and inexperienced workers out of a job.
Because minimum wage laws are more generous in Europe than in the U.S., they lead to chronically higher rates of unemployment in general and longer periods of unemployment than in the U.S. — but especially among younger, less experienced and less skilled workers.
Unemployment rates of 20% or more for young workers are common in a number of European countries.
Among workers who are both younger and minority workers, such as young Muslims in France, unemployment rates are estimated at about 40%.
The American minimum wage laws do enough damage without our imitating European minimum wage laws. The last year in which the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate in the U.S. was 1930. The next year, the first federal minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act, was passed. One of its sponsors explicitly stated that the purpose was to keep blacks from taking jobs from whites.
No one says things like that anymore — which is a shame, because the effect of a minimum wage law does not depend on what anybody says. Blacks in general, and younger blacks in particular, are the biggest losers from such laws, just as younger and minority workers are in Europe.
Those Americans who are pushing us toward the kinds of policies that Europeans impose on pharmaceutical companies show not the slightest interest in what the consequences of such laws have been.
One consequence is that even European pharmaceutical companies do much of their research and development of new medications in the U.S., in order to take advantage of American patent protections and freedom from price controls.
These are the very policies that the European imitators want us to change.
It is not a coincidence that such a high proportion of the major pharmaceutical drugs are developed in the U.S. If we kill the goose that lays the golden egg, as the Europeans have done, both we and the Europeans — as well as the rest of the world — will be worse off, because there are few other places for such medications to be developed.
There are a lot of diseases still waiting for a cure, or even for relief for those suffering from those diseases. People stricken with these diseases will pay the price for blind imitation of Europe.
Underestimating The U.S.
It must be a bitter disappointment to those in the media and in politics who have been dying to use the word "recession" that, for the second quarter in a row, there has been no downturn in the economy, though growth has been slow.
Alarmists have been reduced to quoting other alarmists on the supposedly impending recession, but that is still not the real thing.
The definition of a "recession" is very clear and straightforward: Two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We have not yet had one consecutive quarter of negative growth.
The fault-finding brigades of critics of the American economy and society are among the reasons why there is so much talk about how we ought to do things that are being done in Europe.
We need to understand America first, before we start imitating Europe. The American economy produces the largest output in the world — more than Japan, Germany and Great Britain combined. Measured by purchasing power, output per capita in the U.S. is the highest of any large nation.
There are some very small places such as Luxembourg or the Cayman Islands with higher purchasing power per capita. But as professor Benjamin M. Friedman of Harvard put it, places like Luxembourg are "technically countries but are more like large suburbs." Luxembourg's total population is about the same as that of Long Beach, Calif. Wal-Mart has more employees than the total population of Luxembourg.
Some other small places, like the Cayman Islands, are tax havens that attract the wealth of people who are not really Cayman Islanders.
Among countries at all comparable to the U.S. in size or population, none has achieved as high an output per capita. New Jersey produces more than Egypt. California produces more than Canada or Mexico.
Desperate efforts to depict all the prosperity and progress in the U.S. as being monopolized by "the rich" have led to all kinds of statistical mumbo jumbo, such as comparing the changing ratios between statistical categories over time and ignoring the fact that most of the people in those categories move from one category to another over the years.
Studies that follow given individuals over time show the exact opposite of what is being said in the mainstream media and in politics. That is, most of the working people in the bottom fifth of the income distribution rise into the top half, and the rate of increase of their incomes is greater than that of most of the people initially in the top fifth.
Those individuals in the top 1%, as of a given time, actually have an absolute decline in income over time. As they drop out of the top 1%, they are replaced by others, so that the statistical category can be doing great while the flesh-and-blood people who pass in and out of that category are by no means gaining on those further down the income distribution.
None of this is rocket science. But most people in politics, the media and academia insist on using statistics based on the fate of abstract categories over time — households, families, income brackets — even when other statistics, based on following specific individuals over time, are available.
Households and families vary in size from group to group and are generally declining in size over time, but an individual always means one person. Income per household or family can be stagnant, or even declining, while income per person is rising. That has in fact been a general pattern in recent decades, which may be why the nay-Sayers are forever citing household and family income statistics, while ignoring statistics on income per person.
Amid a general undermining of American economic performance, it is hardly surprising that so many people think we should imitate what the Europeans are doing — whether in the economy, in foreign policy or in other areas.
We can always learn particular things from other countries, whether in Europe, in Asia, or elsewhere. But imitating Europeans when they are not doing as well as Americans makes no sense.
A Not-So-Sophisticated Record
Some of the people who are most adamant against outsourcing economic activity from the U.S. to other countries often seem to think we should outsource our foreign policy to "world opinion" or act only in conjunction "with our NATO allies."
Like so many things that are said when it comes to public policy, there is very little attention paid to the actual track record of "world opinion" or of "our NATO allies."
Often there is a blanket assumption that European countries are just so much more sophisticated than American "cowboys." But there is incredibly little interest in the track record of those European sophisticates whom we are supposed to consult about our own national interests — including, in an age when terrorists may acquire nuclear weapons, our national survival.
In the course of the 20th century, supposedly sophisticated Europeans managed to create some of the most monstrous forms of government on earth — communism, fascism, Nazism — in peacetime, and to start the two World Wars, the bloodiest in all human history. In each of these wars, both the winners and the losers ended up far worse off than they were before these wars were started.
After both World Wars, the U.S. had to step in to save millions of people in Europe from starving amid the wreckage and rubble that their wars had created. These do not seem like people whose sophistication we should defer to.
Between the two World Wars, European intellectuals — more so than ordinary people — completely misread the threat from Nazi Germany, and were urging disarmament in France and England, while Hitler was rapidly building up the most powerful military force on the continent, obviously aimed at neighboring countries.
During the Cold War, many European intellectuals once again misread the threat of a totalitarian dictatorship — in this case, the Soviet Union. When they finally recognized the threat, many saw the question as whether it was "better to be red than dead."
They were no more prepared to stand up to the Soviet Union than they had been ready to stand up to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Worse yet, much of the European intelligentsia objected to America's standing up to the Soviet Union.
Many of them were appalled when Ronald Reagan met the threat of new Soviet missiles aimed at Western Europe by putting more American missiles in Western Europe, aimed at the Soviet Union.
Reagan, in effect, called the Soviet Union and raised them, while many of the European sophisticates — as well as much of the American intelligentsia — said that his policies would lead to war. Instead, it led to the end of the Cold War.
Are we now to blindly imitate those who have been so wrong, so often, over the past hundred years?
Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc
04 August 2008
24 June 2008
The Imitators
By Thomas Sowell
If anyone suggested that Tiger Woods should try to be more like other golfers, people would question the sanity of whoever made that suggestion.
Why should Tiger Woods try to be more like Phil Mickelson? If Tiger turned around and tried to golf left-handed, like Mickelson, he probably wouldn't be as good as Mickelson, much less as good as he is golfing the way he does right-handed.
Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans.
If Europeans have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, then we should have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, according to such people. If Europeans restrict pharmaceutical companies' patents and profits, then we should do the same.
Some Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court even seem to think that they should incorporate ideas from European laws in interpreting American laws.
Before we start imitating someone, we should first find out whether the results that they get are better than the results that we get. Across a very wide spectrum, the United States has been doing better than Europe for a very long time.
By comparison with most of the rest of the world, Europe is doing fine. But they are like Phil Mickelson, not Tiger Woods.
Minimum wage laws have the same effects in Europe as they have had in other places around the world. They price many low-skilled and inexperienced workers out of a job.
Because minimum wage laws are more generous in Europe than in the United States, they lead to chronically higher rates of unemployment in general and longer periods of unemployment than in the United States-- but especially among younger, less experienced and less skilled workers.
Unemployment rates of 20 percent or more for young workers are common in a number of European countries. Among workers who are both younger and minority workers, such as young Muslims in France, unemployment rates are estimated at about 40 percent.
The American minimum wage laws do enough damage without our imitating European minimum wage laws. The last year in which the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate in the United States was 1930.
The next year, the first federal minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act, was passed. One of its sponsors explicitly stated that the purpose was to keep blacks from taking jobs from whites.
No one says things like that any more-- which is a shame, because the effect of a minimum wage law does not depend on what anybody says. Blacks in general, and younger blacks in particular, are the biggest losers from such laws, just as younger and minority workers are in Europe.
Those Americans who are pushing us toward the kinds of policies that Europeans impose on pharmaceutical companies show not the slightest interest in what the consequences of such laws have been.
One consequence is that even European pharmaceutical companies do much of their research and development of new medications in the United States, in order to take advantage of American patent protections and freedom from price controls.
By Thomas Sowell
These are the very policies that the European imitators want us to change.
It is not a coincidence that such a high proportion of the major pharmaceutical drugs are developed in the United States. If we kill the goose that lays the golden egg, as the Europeans have done, both we and the Europeans-- as well as the rest of the world -- will be worse off, because there are few other places for such medications to be developed.
There are a lot of diseases still waiting for a cure, or even for relief for those suffering from those diseases. People stricken with these diseases will pay the price for blind imitation of Europe.
The United States leads the world in too many areas for us to start imitating those who are trailing behind.
If anyone suggested that Tiger Woods should try to be more like other golfers, people would question the sanity of whoever made that suggestion.
Why should Tiger Woods try to be more like Phil Mickelson? If Tiger turned around and tried to golf left-handed, like Mickelson, he probably wouldn't be as good as Mickelson, much less as good as he is golfing the way he does right-handed.
Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some Americans, it is considered chic to be like Europeans.
If Europeans have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, then we should have higher minimum wage laws and more welfare state benefits, according to such people. If Europeans restrict pharmaceutical companies' patents and profits, then we should do the same.
Some Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court even seem to think that they should incorporate ideas from European laws in interpreting American laws.
Before we start imitating someone, we should first find out whether the results that they get are better than the results that we get. Across a very wide spectrum, the United States has been doing better than Europe for a very long time.
By comparison with most of the rest of the world, Europe is doing fine. But they are like Phil Mickelson, not Tiger Woods.
Minimum wage laws have the same effects in Europe as they have had in other places around the world. They price many low-skilled and inexperienced workers out of a job.
Because minimum wage laws are more generous in Europe than in the United States, they lead to chronically higher rates of unemployment in general and longer periods of unemployment than in the United States-- but especially among younger, less experienced and less skilled workers.
Unemployment rates of 20 percent or more for young workers are common in a number of European countries. Among workers who are both younger and minority workers, such as young Muslims in France, unemployment rates are estimated at about 40 percent.
The American minimum wage laws do enough damage without our imitating European minimum wage laws. The last year in which the black unemployment rate was lower than the white unemployment rate in the United States was 1930.
The next year, the first federal minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act, was passed. One of its sponsors explicitly stated that the purpose was to keep blacks from taking jobs from whites.
No one says things like that any more-- which is a shame, because the effect of a minimum wage law does not depend on what anybody says. Blacks in general, and younger blacks in particular, are the biggest losers from such laws, just as younger and minority workers are in Europe.
Those Americans who are pushing us toward the kinds of policies that Europeans impose on pharmaceutical companies show not the slightest interest in what the consequences of such laws have been.
One consequence is that even European pharmaceutical companies do much of their research and development of new medications in the United States, in order to take advantage of American patent protections and freedom from price controls.
By Thomas Sowell
These are the very policies that the European imitators want us to change.
It is not a coincidence that such a high proportion of the major pharmaceutical drugs are developed in the United States. If we kill the goose that lays the golden egg, as the Europeans have done, both we and the Europeans-- as well as the rest of the world -- will be worse off, because there are few other places for such medications to be developed.
There are a lot of diseases still waiting for a cure, or even for relief for those suffering from those diseases. People stricken with these diseases will pay the price for blind imitation of Europe.
The United States leads the world in too many areas for us to start imitating those who are trailing behind.
An Old Newness
By Thomas Sowell
Many years ago, a great hitter named Paul Waner was nearing the end of his long career. He entered a ballgame with 2,999 hits -- one hit away from the landmark total of 3,000, which so many hitters want to reach, but which relatively few actually do reach.
Waner hit a ball that the fielder did not handle cleanly but the official scorer called it a hit, making it Waner's 3,000th. Paul Waner then sent word to the official scorer that he did not want that questionable hit to be the one that put him over the top.
The official scorer reversed himself and called it an error. Later Paul Waner got a clean hit for number 3,000.
What reminded me of this is the great fervor that many seem to feel over the prospect of the first black President of the United States.
No doubt it is only a matter of time before there is a black president, just as it was only a matter of time before Paul Waner got his 3,000th hit. The issue is whether we want to reach that landmark so badly that we are willing to overlook how questionably that landmark is reached.
Paul Waner had too much pride to accept a scratch hit. Choosing a President of the United States is a lot more momentous than a baseball record. We the voters need to have far more concern about who we put in that office that holds the destiny of a nation and of generations yet unborn.
There is no reason why someone as arrogant, foolishly clever and ultimately dangerous as Barack Obama should become president -- especially not at a time when the threat of international terrorists with nuclear weapons looms over 300 million Americans.
Many people seem to regard elections as occasions for venting emotions, like cheering for your favorite team or choosing a Homecoming Queen.
The three leading candidates for their party's nomination are being discussed in terms of their demographics -- race, sex and age -- as if that is what the job is about.
One of the painful aspects of studying great catastrophes of the past is discovering how many times people were preoccupied with trivialities when they were teetering on the edge of doom. The demographics of the presidency are far less important than the momentous weight of responsibility that office carries.
Just the power to nominate federal judges to trial courts and appellate courts across the country, including the Supreme Court, can have an enormous impact for decades to come. There is no point feeling outraged by things done by federal judges, if you vote on the basis of emotion for those who appoint them.
Barack Obama has already indicated that he wants judges who make social policy instead of just applying the law. He has already tried to stop young violent criminals from being tried as adults.
Although Senator Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things -- using the mantra of "change" endlessly -- the cold fact is that virtually everything has says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s.
Protecting criminals, attacking business, increasing government spending, promoting a sense of envy and grievance, raising taxes on people who are productive and subsidizing those who are not -- all this is a re-run of the 1960s.
We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years that followed, in the form of soaring crime rates, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. During the 1960s, ghettoes across the countries were ravaged by riots from which many have not fully recovered to this day.
The violence and destruction were concentrated not where there was the greatest poverty or injustice but where there were the most liberal politicians, promoting grievances and hamstringing the police.
Internationally, the approach that Senator Obama proposes -- including the media magic of meetings between heads of state -- was tried during the 1930s. That approach, in the name of peace, is what led to the most catastrophic war in human history.
Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history to have heard about it.
Many years ago, a great hitter named Paul Waner was nearing the end of his long career. He entered a ballgame with 2,999 hits -- one hit away from the landmark total of 3,000, which so many hitters want to reach, but which relatively few actually do reach.
Waner hit a ball that the fielder did not handle cleanly but the official scorer called it a hit, making it Waner's 3,000th. Paul Waner then sent word to the official scorer that he did not want that questionable hit to be the one that put him over the top.
The official scorer reversed himself and called it an error. Later Paul Waner got a clean hit for number 3,000.
What reminded me of this is the great fervor that many seem to feel over the prospect of the first black President of the United States.
No doubt it is only a matter of time before there is a black president, just as it was only a matter of time before Paul Waner got his 3,000th hit. The issue is whether we want to reach that landmark so badly that we are willing to overlook how questionably that landmark is reached.
Paul Waner had too much pride to accept a scratch hit. Choosing a President of the United States is a lot more momentous than a baseball record. We the voters need to have far more concern about who we put in that office that holds the destiny of a nation and of generations yet unborn.
There is no reason why someone as arrogant, foolishly clever and ultimately dangerous as Barack Obama should become president -- especially not at a time when the threat of international terrorists with nuclear weapons looms over 300 million Americans.
Many people seem to regard elections as occasions for venting emotions, like cheering for your favorite team or choosing a Homecoming Queen.
The three leading candidates for their party's nomination are being discussed in terms of their demographics -- race, sex and age -- as if that is what the job is about.
One of the painful aspects of studying great catastrophes of the past is discovering how many times people were preoccupied with trivialities when they were teetering on the edge of doom. The demographics of the presidency are far less important than the momentous weight of responsibility that office carries.
Just the power to nominate federal judges to trial courts and appellate courts across the country, including the Supreme Court, can have an enormous impact for decades to come. There is no point feeling outraged by things done by federal judges, if you vote on the basis of emotion for those who appoint them.
Barack Obama has already indicated that he wants judges who make social policy instead of just applying the law. He has already tried to stop young violent criminals from being tried as adults.
Although Senator Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things -- using the mantra of "change" endlessly -- the cold fact is that virtually everything has says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s.
Protecting criminals, attacking business, increasing government spending, promoting a sense of envy and grievance, raising taxes on people who are productive and subsidizing those who are not -- all this is a re-run of the 1960s.
We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years that followed, in the form of soaring crime rates, double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment. During the 1960s, ghettoes across the countries were ravaged by riots from which many have not fully recovered to this day.
The violence and destruction were concentrated not where there was the greatest poverty or injustice but where there were the most liberal politicians, promoting grievances and hamstringing the police.
Internationally, the approach that Senator Obama proposes -- including the media magic of meetings between heads of state -- was tried during the 1930s. That approach, in the name of peace, is what led to the most catastrophic war in human history.
Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history to have heard about it.
28 May 2008
Barack Potatoe Obama?
by L. Brent Bozell III
May 28, 2008
Imagine that John McCain named a young running mate to campaign with him, and this national rookie suggested America had 58 states, repeatedly used the wrong names for the cities he was visiting, and honored a Memorial Day crowd by acknowledging the “fallen heroes” who were present, somehow alive and standing in the audience. How long would it take for the national media to see another Dan Quayle caricature? Let’s raise the stakes. What if it was the GOP presidential candidate making these thoroughly ridiculous comments? This scenario is very real, except it isn’t McCain. It’s the other fellow.
ABC reporter Jake Tapper follows politicians around for a living. On his blog, he suggested Barack Obama has a problem: “The man has been a one-man gaffe machine.”
Just in the last few days, in Sunrise, Florida, Obama said, “How's it going, Sunshine?” He did the same thing in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, calling it “Sioux City.” Some of his geographic struggles seem calculated. When asked why Hillary Clinton trounced him in Kentucky, Obama claimed “I'm not very well known in that part of the country...Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it's not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.” But Obama’s home state of Illinois is more than “near” Kentucky – it borders Kentucky.
In Oregon, there was a doozy. Obama said of his long campaign, “I’ve been in fifty-seven states, I think, one left to go.” No one in the press made much of this. As former ABC political reporter Marc Ambinder, now with the Atlantic Monthly magazine, admitted: “But if John McCain did this — if he mistakenly said he’d visited 57 states — the media would be all up in his grill, accusing him of a senior moment.” If you doubt him, remember how most media outlets noted, then underlined McCain’s error about al-Qaeda being trained and funded by Iran.
In New Mexico, Obama suggested he was like a young Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense,” with the ability to see dead people: “On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.” Fallen heroes in the audience? Is this Barack Potatoe Obama? This is precisely the kind of misstatement that Dan Quayle-bashers would run ad infinitum.
But there have also been gaffes on more serious matters. ABC found that campaigning in Rush Limbaugh’s hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Obama argued that our military’s Arabic translators in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan: “We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan,” he claimed. But Afghans don’t speak Arabic; they speak several other languages. That’s a lot like McCain’s gaffe – except for the degree of media attention, which in the Democrat’s case was virtually nonexistent.
McCain also would have enjoyed more media focus on Obama’s completely muddled analysis of South America last week. He told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday that he would meet with Chavez to discuss “the fermentation of anti-American sentiment in Latin America, his support of FARC in Colombia and other issues he would want to talk about.” But on Friday in Miami, he insisted any country supporting the Marxist guerillas of FARC should suffer “regional isolation.” This left Obama advisers scrambling to suggest that these two opposing statements can somehow be put together, that he can meet Chavez and isolate him at the same time.
Sometimes, Obama invents Bosnia-sniper-style whoppers about his personal history. In Selma, Alabama, Obama claimed that the spirit of hope derived from the civil rights protests in Selma in 1965 inspired his birth – when he was born in 1961. He also has inaccurately claimed that the Kennedys funded his Kenyan father’s trip to America in 1959.
While he was making boo-boos in New Mexico on Memorial Day, Obama also (according to CBS reporter/blogger Maria Gavrilovic) talked about post-traumatic stress disorder by claiming he had an uncle “who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz,” and then came home and spent six months in an attic. Gavrilovic didn’t note that the prisoners at Auschwitz were liberated by the Red Army. Obama earlier made the claim on his campaign site that his grandfather knew American troops who liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka (also liberated by the Red Army).
Everyone should grant these candidates a little room for error in the long slog of presidential campaigning. But what about some balance? The same national media that turned Dan Quayle’s name into an instant joke are now working over time to present Obama as Captain Competent.
May 28, 2008
Imagine that John McCain named a young running mate to campaign with him, and this national rookie suggested America had 58 states, repeatedly used the wrong names for the cities he was visiting, and honored a Memorial Day crowd by acknowledging the “fallen heroes” who were present, somehow alive and standing in the audience. How long would it take for the national media to see another Dan Quayle caricature? Let’s raise the stakes. What if it was the GOP presidential candidate making these thoroughly ridiculous comments? This scenario is very real, except it isn’t McCain. It’s the other fellow.
ABC reporter Jake Tapper follows politicians around for a living. On his blog, he suggested Barack Obama has a problem: “The man has been a one-man gaffe machine.”
Just in the last few days, in Sunrise, Florida, Obama said, “How's it going, Sunshine?” He did the same thing in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, calling it “Sioux City.” Some of his geographic struggles seem calculated. When asked why Hillary Clinton trounced him in Kentucky, Obama claimed “I'm not very well known in that part of the country...Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it's not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.” But Obama’s home state of Illinois is more than “near” Kentucky – it borders Kentucky.
In Oregon, there was a doozy. Obama said of his long campaign, “I’ve been in fifty-seven states, I think, one left to go.” No one in the press made much of this. As former ABC political reporter Marc Ambinder, now with the Atlantic Monthly magazine, admitted: “But if John McCain did this — if he mistakenly said he’d visited 57 states — the media would be all up in his grill, accusing him of a senior moment.” If you doubt him, remember how most media outlets noted, then underlined McCain’s error about al-Qaeda being trained and funded by Iran.
In New Mexico, Obama suggested he was like a young Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense,” with the ability to see dead people: “On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.” Fallen heroes in the audience? Is this Barack Potatoe Obama? This is precisely the kind of misstatement that Dan Quayle-bashers would run ad infinitum.
But there have also been gaffes on more serious matters. ABC found that campaigning in Rush Limbaugh’s hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Obama argued that our military’s Arabic translators in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan: “We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan,” he claimed. But Afghans don’t speak Arabic; they speak several other languages. That’s a lot like McCain’s gaffe – except for the degree of media attention, which in the Democrat’s case was virtually nonexistent.
McCain also would have enjoyed more media focus on Obama’s completely muddled analysis of South America last week. He told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday that he would meet with Chavez to discuss “the fermentation of anti-American sentiment in Latin America, his support of FARC in Colombia and other issues he would want to talk about.” But on Friday in Miami, he insisted any country supporting the Marxist guerillas of FARC should suffer “regional isolation.” This left Obama advisers scrambling to suggest that these two opposing statements can somehow be put together, that he can meet Chavez and isolate him at the same time.
Sometimes, Obama invents Bosnia-sniper-style whoppers about his personal history. In Selma, Alabama, Obama claimed that the spirit of hope derived from the civil rights protests in Selma in 1965 inspired his birth – when he was born in 1961. He also has inaccurately claimed that the Kennedys funded his Kenyan father’s trip to America in 1959.
While he was making boo-boos in New Mexico on Memorial Day, Obama also (according to CBS reporter/blogger Maria Gavrilovic) talked about post-traumatic stress disorder by claiming he had an uncle “who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz,” and then came home and spent six months in an attic. Gavrilovic didn’t note that the prisoners at Auschwitz were liberated by the Red Army. Obama earlier made the claim on his campaign site that his grandfather knew American troops who liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka (also liberated by the Red Army).
Everyone should grant these candidates a little room for error in the long slog of presidential campaigning. But what about some balance? The same national media that turned Dan Quayle’s name into an instant joke are now working over time to present Obama as Captain Competent.
09 May 2008
It's true: Iraq is a quagmire: But the real story is not something you have heard
Sunday, November 18, 2007
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
We're floundering in a quagmire in Iraq. Our strategy is flawed, and it's too late to change it. Our resources have been squandered, our best people killed, we're hated by the natives and our reputation around the world is circling the drain. We must withdraw.
No, I'm not channeling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I'm channeling Osama bin Laden, for whom the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe. Al-Qaida had little presence in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. But once he was toppled, al-Qaida's chieftains decided to make Iraq the central front in the global jihad against the Great Satan.
"The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this third world war, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation," Osama bin Laden said in an audiotape posted on Islamic Web sites in December 2004. " It is raging in the land of the Two Rivers. The world's millstone and pillar is Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate."
Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq. All for naught. Al-Qaida has been driven from every neighborhood in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, the U.S. commander there, said Nov. 7. This follows the expulsion of al-Qaida from two previous "capitals" of its Islamic Republic of Iraq, Ramadi and Baquba.
Al-Qaida is evacuating populated areas and is trying to establish hideouts in the Hamrin mountains in northern Iraq, with U.S. and Iraqi security forces, and former insurgent allies who have turned on them, in hot pursuit. Forty-five al-Qaida leaders were killed or captured in October alone.
Al-Qaida's support in the Muslim world has plummeted, partly because of the terror group's lack of success in Iraq, more because al-Qaida's attacks have mostly killed Muslim civilians.
"Iraq has proved to be the graveyard, not just of many al-Qaida operatives, but of the organization's reputation as a defender of Islam," said StrategyPage.
Canadian columnist David Warren speculated some years ago that enticing al-Qaida to fight there was one of the reasons why President Bush decided to invade Iraq. The administration has made so many egregious mistakes that I doubt the "flypaper" strategy was deliberate. But it has worked out that way. It may have been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Iraq. But it's pretty clear now it was a blunder for al-Qaida to have done so.
You may not be aware of the calamities that have befallen al-Qaida, because our news media have paid scant attention to them.
"The situation has changed so unmistakably and so swiftly that we should be reading proud headlines daily," said Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. "Where are they?"
Richard Benedetto was for many years the White House correspondent for USA Today. Now retired, he teaches journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.
When U.S. troop deaths hit a monthly high in April, that was front-page news in most major newspapers, Mr. Benedetto noted. But when U.S. troop deaths fell in October to their lowest levels in 17 months, that news was buried on page A-14 of The Washington Post and mentioned on Page A-12 in The New York Times. (The Post-Gazette put the story on the front page.)
"I asked the class if burying or ignoring the story indicated an anti-war bias on the part of the editors or their papers," Mr. Benedetto said. "While some students said yes ... most attributed the decision to poor news judgment. They were being generous."
Mr. Peters suspects the paucity of news coverage from Iraq these days is because "things are going annoyingly well."
Rich Lowry agrees. "The United States may be the only country in world history that reverse-propagandizes itself, magnifying its setbacks and ignoring its successes so that nothing can disturb what Sen. Joe Lieberman calls the 'narrative of defeat,' " he wrote in National Review.
If what Mr. Peters, Mr. Benedetto and Mr. Lowry suspect is true, it must have pained The Associated Press to see a correspondent write Wednesday: "The trend toward better security is indisputable." It'll be interesting to see which newspapers run the AP story, and where in the paper they place it.
"We've won the war in the real Iraq, but few people in America are familiar with anything other than its make-believe version," said the Mudville Gazette's "Greyhawk," a soldier currently serving his second tour in Iraq. It's true: Iraq is a quagmire
But the real story is not something you have heard
Sunday, November 18, 2007
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
We're floundering in a quagmire in Iraq. Our strategy is flawed, and it's too late to change it. Our resources have been squandered, our best people killed, we're hated by the natives and our reputation around the world is circling the drain. We must withdraw.
No, I'm not channeling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I'm channeling Osama bin Laden, for whom the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe. Al-Qaida had little presence in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. But once he was toppled, al-Qaida's chieftains decided to make Iraq the central front in the global jihad against the Great Satan.
"The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this third world war, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation," Osama bin Laden said in an audiotape posted on Islamic Web sites in December 2004. " It is raging in the land of the Two Rivers. The world's millstone and pillar is Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate."
Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq. All for naught. Al-Qaida has been driven from every neighborhood in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, the U.S. commander there, said Nov. 7. This follows the expulsion of al-Qaida from two previous "capitals" of its Islamic Republic of Iraq, Ramadi and Baquba.
Al-Qaida is evacuating populated areas and is trying to establish hideouts in the Hamrin mountains in northern Iraq, with U.S. and Iraqi security forces, and former insurgent allies who have turned on them, in hot pursuit. Forty-five al-Qaida leaders were killed or captured in October alone.
Al-Qaida's support in the Muslim world has plummeted, partly because of the terror group's lack of success in Iraq, more because al-Qaida's attacks have mostly killed Muslim civilians.
"Iraq has proved to be the graveyard, not just of many al-Qaida operatives, but of the organization's reputation as a defender of Islam," said StrategyPage.
Canadian columnist David Warren speculated some years ago that enticing al-Qaida to fight there was one of the reasons why President Bush decided to invade Iraq. The administration has made so many egregious mistakes that I doubt the "flypaper" strategy was deliberate. But it has worked out that way. It may have been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Iraq. But it's pretty clear now it was a blunder for al-Qaida to have done so.
You may not be aware of the calamities that have befallen al-Qaida, because our news media have paid scant attention to them.
"The situation has changed so unmistakably and so swiftly that we should be reading proud headlines daily," said Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. "Where are they?"
Richard Benedetto was for many years the White House correspondent for USA Today. Now retired, he teaches journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.
When U.S. troop deaths hit a monthly high in April, that was front-page news in most major newspapers, Mr. Benedetto noted. But when U.S. troop deaths fell in October to their lowest levels in 17 months, that news was buried on page A-14 of The Washington Post and mentioned on Page A-12 in The New York Times. (The Post-Gazette put the story on the front page.)
"I asked the class if burying or ignoring the story indicated an anti-war bias on the part of the editors or their papers," Mr. Benedetto said. "While some students said yes ... most attributed the decision to poor news judgment. They were being generous."
Mr. Peters suspects the paucity of news coverage from Iraq these days is because "things are going annoyingly well."
Rich Lowry agrees. "The United States may be the only country in world history that reverse-propagandizes itself, magnifying its setbacks and ignoring its successes so that nothing can disturb what Sen. Joe Lieberman calls the 'narrative of defeat,' " he wrote in National Review.
If what Mr. Peters, Mr. Benedetto and Mr. Lowry suspect is true, it must have pained The Associated Press to see a correspondent write Wednesday: "The trend toward better security is indisputable." It'll be interesting to see which newspapers run the AP story, and where in the paper they place it.
"We've won the war in the real Iraq, but few people in America are familiar with anything other than its make-believe version," said the Mudville Gazette's "Greyhawk," a soldier currently serving his second tour in Iraq.
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
We're floundering in a quagmire in Iraq. Our strategy is flawed, and it's too late to change it. Our resources have been squandered, our best people killed, we're hated by the natives and our reputation around the world is circling the drain. We must withdraw.
No, I'm not channeling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I'm channeling Osama bin Laden, for whom the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe. Al-Qaida had little presence in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. But once he was toppled, al-Qaida's chieftains decided to make Iraq the central front in the global jihad against the Great Satan.
"The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this third world war, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation," Osama bin Laden said in an audiotape posted on Islamic Web sites in December 2004. " It is raging in the land of the Two Rivers. The world's millstone and pillar is Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate."
Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq. All for naught. Al-Qaida has been driven from every neighborhood in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, the U.S. commander there, said Nov. 7. This follows the expulsion of al-Qaida from two previous "capitals" of its Islamic Republic of Iraq, Ramadi and Baquba.
Al-Qaida is evacuating populated areas and is trying to establish hideouts in the Hamrin mountains in northern Iraq, with U.S. and Iraqi security forces, and former insurgent allies who have turned on them, in hot pursuit. Forty-five al-Qaida leaders were killed or captured in October alone.
Al-Qaida's support in the Muslim world has plummeted, partly because of the terror group's lack of success in Iraq, more because al-Qaida's attacks have mostly killed Muslim civilians.
"Iraq has proved to be the graveyard, not just of many al-Qaida operatives, but of the organization's reputation as a defender of Islam," said StrategyPage.
Canadian columnist David Warren speculated some years ago that enticing al-Qaida to fight there was one of the reasons why President Bush decided to invade Iraq. The administration has made so many egregious mistakes that I doubt the "flypaper" strategy was deliberate. But it has worked out that way. It may have been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Iraq. But it's pretty clear now it was a blunder for al-Qaida to have done so.
You may not be aware of the calamities that have befallen al-Qaida, because our news media have paid scant attention to them.
"The situation has changed so unmistakably and so swiftly that we should be reading proud headlines daily," said Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. "Where are they?"
Richard Benedetto was for many years the White House correspondent for USA Today. Now retired, he teaches journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.
When U.S. troop deaths hit a monthly high in April, that was front-page news in most major newspapers, Mr. Benedetto noted. But when U.S. troop deaths fell in October to their lowest levels in 17 months, that news was buried on page A-14 of The Washington Post and mentioned on Page A-12 in The New York Times. (The Post-Gazette put the story on the front page.)
"I asked the class if burying or ignoring the story indicated an anti-war bias on the part of the editors or their papers," Mr. Benedetto said. "While some students said yes ... most attributed the decision to poor news judgment. They were being generous."
Mr. Peters suspects the paucity of news coverage from Iraq these days is because "things are going annoyingly well."
Rich Lowry agrees. "The United States may be the only country in world history that reverse-propagandizes itself, magnifying its setbacks and ignoring its successes so that nothing can disturb what Sen. Joe Lieberman calls the 'narrative of defeat,' " he wrote in National Review.
If what Mr. Peters, Mr. Benedetto and Mr. Lowry suspect is true, it must have pained The Associated Press to see a correspondent write Wednesday: "The trend toward better security is indisputable." It'll be interesting to see which newspapers run the AP story, and where in the paper they place it.
"We've won the war in the real Iraq, but few people in America are familiar with anything other than its make-believe version," said the Mudville Gazette's "Greyhawk," a soldier currently serving his second tour in Iraq. It's true: Iraq is a quagmire
But the real story is not something you have heard
Sunday, November 18, 2007
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
We're floundering in a quagmire in Iraq. Our strategy is flawed, and it's too late to change it. Our resources have been squandered, our best people killed, we're hated by the natives and our reputation around the world is circling the drain. We must withdraw.
No, I'm not channeling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I'm channeling Osama bin Laden, for whom the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe. Al-Qaida had little presence in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. But once he was toppled, al-Qaida's chieftains decided to make Iraq the central front in the global jihad against the Great Satan.
"The most important and serious issue today for the whole world is this third world war, which the Crusader-Zionist coalition began against the Islamic nation," Osama bin Laden said in an audiotape posted on Islamic Web sites in December 2004. " It is raging in the land of the Two Rivers. The world's millstone and pillar is Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate."
Jihadis, money and weapons were poured into Iraq. All for naught. Al-Qaida has been driven from every neighborhood in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, the U.S. commander there, said Nov. 7. This follows the expulsion of al-Qaida from two previous "capitals" of its Islamic Republic of Iraq, Ramadi and Baquba.
Al-Qaida is evacuating populated areas and is trying to establish hideouts in the Hamrin mountains in northern Iraq, with U.S. and Iraqi security forces, and former insurgent allies who have turned on them, in hot pursuit. Forty-five al-Qaida leaders were killed or captured in October alone.
Al-Qaida's support in the Muslim world has plummeted, partly because of the terror group's lack of success in Iraq, more because al-Qaida's attacks have mostly killed Muslim civilians.
"Iraq has proved to be the graveyard, not just of many al-Qaida operatives, but of the organization's reputation as a defender of Islam," said StrategyPage.
Canadian columnist David Warren speculated some years ago that enticing al-Qaida to fight there was one of the reasons why President Bush decided to invade Iraq. The administration has made so many egregious mistakes that I doubt the "flypaper" strategy was deliberate. But it has worked out that way. It may have been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Iraq. But it's pretty clear now it was a blunder for al-Qaida to have done so.
You may not be aware of the calamities that have befallen al-Qaida, because our news media have paid scant attention to them.
"The situation has changed so unmistakably and so swiftly that we should be reading proud headlines daily," said Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. "Where are they?"
Richard Benedetto was for many years the White House correspondent for USA Today. Now retired, he teaches journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.
When U.S. troop deaths hit a monthly high in April, that was front-page news in most major newspapers, Mr. Benedetto noted. But when U.S. troop deaths fell in October to their lowest levels in 17 months, that news was buried on page A-14 of The Washington Post and mentioned on Page A-12 in The New York Times. (The Post-Gazette put the story on the front page.)
"I asked the class if burying or ignoring the story indicated an anti-war bias on the part of the editors or their papers," Mr. Benedetto said. "While some students said yes ... most attributed the decision to poor news judgment. They were being generous."
Mr. Peters suspects the paucity of news coverage from Iraq these days is because "things are going annoyingly well."
Rich Lowry agrees. "The United States may be the only country in world history that reverse-propagandizes itself, magnifying its setbacks and ignoring its successes so that nothing can disturb what Sen. Joe Lieberman calls the 'narrative of defeat,' " he wrote in National Review.
If what Mr. Peters, Mr. Benedetto and Mr. Lowry suspect is true, it must have pained The Associated Press to see a correspondent write Wednesday: "The trend toward better security is indisputable." It'll be interesting to see which newspapers run the AP story, and where in the paper they place it.
"We've won the war in the real Iraq, but few people in America are familiar with anything other than its make-believe version," said the Mudville Gazette's "Greyhawk," a soldier currently serving his second tour in Iraq.
16 April 2008
TRASH TALK
Gim'me a break!
EVERYONE (!) Dem & Rep wants to "Trash Talk" the ecconomy! Why?
Today, we learn that Retail Sales were UP last month!
BUT, the "Sub-Prime" crap continues . . .
"Sub-Prime" was a "Drug Deal" from the "Get Go".
It didn't stop GREEDY people from taking FULL atvantage of the "program".
Now they are in dire straights . . .
TOO BAD!
U R SCREWED! Get Over it!
Have a Good Day.
But What Do I Know . . .
JD
EVERYONE (!) Dem & Rep wants to "Trash Talk" the ecconomy! Why?
Today, we learn that Retail Sales were UP last month!
BUT, the "Sub-Prime" crap continues . . .
"Sub-Prime" was a "Drug Deal" from the "Get Go".
It didn't stop GREEDY people from taking FULL atvantage of the "program".
Now they are in dire straights . . .
TOO BAD!
U R SCREWED! Get Over it!
Have a Good Day.
But What Do I Know . . .
JD
29 February 2008
Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
Lorne Gunter, National Post - Canada
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008
Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."
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.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
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.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
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.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
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."
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
lgunter@shaw.ca
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008
Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.
The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."
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.
There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.
In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.
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.
Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.
OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.
But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.
And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.
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.
But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.
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."
He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.
The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.
It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.
lgunter@shaw.ca
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