A couple columns about America and energy

Rich Lowry, on why preaching less driving to Americans is a fool's errand:

Americans have arrived at an answer to high gas prices and concerns about global warming — buy more cars. According to a report in the New York Times, households with a small, gas-efficient car own, on average, almost three cars.

They are just adding the small car to their driveway fleet.

...The automobile is an inevitability of modern American life. For good reason, the average American loves his cars — each and every one of them.

We're Americans. We drive.

And William F. Buckley, Jr., on the same thing:

...because some Americans would forgo their children before their car.

And I didn't even know that was an option!

Hillary Climbing Everest

Within an AP story published on Newsmax.com, Senator Hillary Clinton envisions the future requirements of the American Village:

"There is no greater force for economic growth than free markets. But markets work best with rules that promote our values, protect our workers and give all people a chance to succeed," she said. "Fairness doesn't just happen. It requires the right government policies."

Senator Clinton has obviously been studying Grandpa John's- The blog dedicated to fairness. What we can expect, therefore, from Mrs. Clinton is an early flurry of progressive speech followed by a lengthy domination and guidance by Conservative and Evangelical sherpas. I can support that plan.

Leftist Scholarship

Ann Coulter summarizes the immense intellectual barrios that we must overcome in order to make progress as Conservatives in an article titled 'A Green Card in Every Pot' on Townhall.com:

[...] In 1993 -- long before 9/11, before the USS Cole bombing, before the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania -- the eminent Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington predicted that the greatest threat to Western civilization would come from a clash of civilizations, noting with particular concern the "bloody borders" of the Muslim world.

So it ought to be of some interest that Huntington is now predicting, in his book "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity," that America cannot survive the cultural onslaught from Latin America.

American Hispanics responded to Huntington's book with a flurry of scholarly papers and academic debates to counter his thesis that Mexicans were not assimilating.

Just kidding! They called for national protests against Huntington, his publisher and Harvard University.

Hell hath no fury like a Liberal offended.

'Congress shall make no law abridging the right to throw tantrums and be stupid.' Governor Doyle is considering a per-head protest tax. The concentration of methane produced as a byproduct of frijoles refartas raises Earth's temperature significantly.

Get a Second Opinion

Listening to the radio today, I heard a commercial by a Madison area jeweler. In response to a claim by another local jeweler, he exclaimed, "Get me some oxygen, I'm hyperventilating!"

Call me picky, but he might have well just said, "Get me a Snickers bar, I'm slipping into a diabetic coma!" Or, "Get me another shot and a beer, I'm too drunk to drive just now!"

Cindy Sheehan Impeached

Susan Jones reports in CNS News:

Cindy Sheehan says she is resigning as the "face" of the American anti-war movement. [...]

Sheehan is a co-founder of the anti-war organization Gold Star Families for Peace, and for two years, she has campaigned for the impeachment and conviction of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. But not any more:

"I am going to take whatever I have left and go home," Sheehan wrote on Monday. [...]

Sheehan said Camp Casey in Crawford, Tex., is for sale. "I will consider any reasonable offer," she wrote.

Inside scuttlebutt has it that the latest polling data shows Grandpa John is the leading candidate to take over the 'face' of the movement. Cindy only lost one son, Grandpa John has lost two; one to the Libertarian ether and, worstest of all, one to the Conservatives & Evangelicals.

"The stars at night are big and bright... deep in the heart of Texas."

Remember Lot's Wife, but Don't Forget About Job's or Adam's

Paul Edwards writes in an article titled 'Jerry Falwell was a Theophobe' in Townhall.com:

Rev. Dr. Mel White... After working with Dr. Falwell on his autobiography Mr. White announced to his family that he was gay. He soon left his wife for his male lover. He had “come out.” He now leads a pro-homosexual, anti-evangelical activist group of college kids who purport to be both Christian and homosexual...

Mel blames Dr. Falwell’s message in part for his own lifelong battle to overcome same-sex attraction. He told me:

I went through 35 years of electric shock, and aversive therapy and exorcism trying to get rid of the demon of homosexuality. I finally slit my wrists and went to the hospital, and my wife said, “You know, Mel, you’re a good person, but you’re gay and you need to accept that.” And in accepting that I began a new kind of life; my whole life changed, and I became a person who loved Christ in a whole new way, I felt His Holy Spirit working in a whole new way.

"...Mel, you’re a good person, but you’re gay and you need to accept that.” It would have been wise for Mel White to follow Job's example concerning certain suggestions from his wife...

So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.

His wife said to him, "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!" (Job 2:7-9, NIV)

Mr. White needed to mimic Job's reply:

He replied, "You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?" In all this, Job did not sin in what he said. (Job 2:10, NIV)

Job was apparently familiar with the account of Adam and Eve in Genesis concerning the result of a similar circumstance:

To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, `You must not eat of it,'
"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are and to dust you will return." (Genesis 3:17-19, NIV)

Paul Edwards:

There is no question that there was fear inherent in the words spoken by Jerry Falwell on the moral issues confronting our nation. But it wasn’t Dr. Falwell’s fear of homosexuality (or any other sin) that fueled his passion to call this nation to repentance, but rather his fear of God. Jerry Falwell spoke the words of Christ to the nation. Jesus said, “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they would not have sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin” (John 15:22). Jerry Falwell was a voice crying in the wilderness of the moral decline of late 20th century America. He lifted up his voice like a trumpet, boldly confronting his generation with Christ’s words. The voice of the prophet may be silenced, but the word of our God shall stand forever.

The fear of the LORD versus the fear of PMS or PMDD. We preach, you decide.

George Will

In 1986, when there probably were 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants, Americans accepted an amnesty because they were promised that border control would promptly follow. Today the 12 million illegal immigrants, 60 percent of whom have been here five or more years, are as numerous as Pennsylvanians; 44 states have populations smaller than 12 million. Deporting the 12 million would require police resources and methods from which the nation would rightly flinch. So, why not leave bad enough alone?

Concentrate on border control, and workplace enforcement facilitated by a biometric identification card issued to immigrants who are or will arrive here legally. Treat the problem of the 12 million with benign neglect. Their children born here are American citizens; the parents of these children will pass away.

I've been touting a compromise much like the one he cites from 1986, which is why historical perspective is a valuable thing to have. Bring on the border control!

Sunday's Indy 500

On Sunday the Indianapolis 500 will be run for the 91st time. I'll probably keep an eye on it, but my real interest in it ended in the 1995 race.

Janesville's Stan Fox, a good childhood friend, was starting in the 11th position. Previously he had finished as high as seventh. I was excited in expectation for his greater success in this one. But then came turn one on the very first lap:






Stan survived serious head injuries but was not able to return successfully. He later died in a passenger car accident in New Zealand in 2000.

The Nitty Gritty

Some of you may recall the 'incident' between two super powers that nearly launched the globe into World War III.

ZURICH, Switzerland - What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers from the neutral country wandered more than a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back. [...]

Just this morning more information has been released concerning the precursor to the invasion. Four days previous, a tourist from Liechtenstein was arrested for kicking sand on Christa Rigozzi, a Swiss sunbather, at a beach on Lake Geneva. The perpetrator was released due to diplomatic immunity.

The evidence:



Christa was made stronger by the incident, however. She is Switzerland's entry in the 2007 Miss Universe Pageant.

The bully is now the Liechtenstein ambassador to Sudan. Peace has been restored.

Lab Recommends Estrogen

My lab researchers are industrious professionals. The data that we collect and the conclusions drawn have proven to be valuable aids in areas outside of their original applications. Therefore, most of these scientists also contract as consultants to a wide ranging variety of organizations. In reality, it has been the largest single economic support for the work that we do here.

Our most lucrative client thus far has been a man named Karlos Roveno, a bespectacled Mexican-American with a long mustache, goatee, a very bad toupee, sombrero, serape, and ammo belts slung over both shoulders. Some of the most conspiratorial theorists among us think this persona may be a ruse.

Karlos' latest consulting request was to find a possible way to get George W. Bush elected in 2008 by getting around certain troublesome Constitutional idiocyncrasies and still garnering enough votes from a disgruntled conservative populace. While working on this problem for Senor Roveno the lab's coffee consumption sorely tested its budget. I also suspect that the lab's store of certain botanicals, mycological samples, and exotic chemicals have also been somewhat depleted.

Since we suspected that Karlos had some connection with government we produced a 1,673 page report, in triplicate. It basically suggested that George W. Bush get a psuedo-sex change operation and run in 2008 as Georgetta Walkerina Bush. Our studies show that this would be Constitutionally acceptable, but more importantly, would receive the 'pro-same sex marriage' vote and the 'we want a woman for president' vote. Statistical analysis proved that this was more than enough of a boost to overcome any Conservative voter malaise.

When receiving the report and its abstract, Karlos Roveno exclaimed, "Ay, caramba!... La cucaracha!... Que Pelosiosa*!" "I can't wait to tell Ricardo Cheniquez!" Our accountant took our cheque grande to el banco.

Shortly after leaving, Senor Rovero returned with another check. He told us that it was a tip for the results of our work for him on subliminal suggestion. He said that our machine that produced alpha-omega rays worked exactly as our research had shown that it would. This device was designed to overcome the protective effects of tinfoil hats and actually instill in their wearers ideas so irrational that only moonbats could think or speak them with serious, anger contorted faces. He presented a short list of targets; Rosie O'Donnell, Harry Reid, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, and John Edwards were on the list.

As he left a second time, he said in his best Ahnold impersonation, "I'll be bach, y'all are doing el trabajo de Dios!"


Image by Lugosi

(*We were not familiar enough with the word to translate Pelosiosa. Through parsing our best understanding of this little used word was 'Pelosi, the sow bear'.)

Indonesian fisherman nets ancient fish

MANADO, Indonesia (Reuters) - An Indonesian fisherman has caught a coelacanth, an ancient fish once thought to have become extinct at the time of the dinosaurs, a fishery expert said on Monday.

Yustinus Lahama and his son caught the fish on Saturday in the sea off North Sulawesi province and kept it at their house for an hour, said Grevo Gerung, a professor at the fisheries faculty at the Sam Ratulangi University.

After being told by neighbours it was a rare fish he took it back to the sea and kept it in a quarantine pool for about 17 hours before it died.

Well, now for sure it's extinct.

Question: what did they do with the carcass? The guy's a fisherman - he fishes for food, right?

How do you decide how to prepare something like that? If it doesn't grill well, for example, you're not likely to get a second chance.

Dunn on Falwell

Here are some excerpts from an article by J.R. Dunn posted on American Thinker, 'Why the Left Hated Jerry Falwell So Much':

[...] But of course, none of that is what it's really about. Falwell was despised and loathed for a very simple reason: he defied the leftist consensus, and he won. He made them back down. He frightened them terribly, by confronting them with clear evidence that the country was not what they insisted it was, and that their utopian dreams would never come to pass. That was his crime, one for which he could never be forgiven.

It was in the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter, having rescued the economy, tamed communism, chastised the Sandinistas, and humiliated the mullahs, looked out over the country in search of more work for his restless farmer's hands. What he found sore displeased him. For it seemed that down South, his very own people, the blood of his blood, worshiping the God of his fathers, had opened private schools for the education of their young ones. And Jimmy was made wroth by what he beheld, because their purpose was racist; those schools had been founded for the sole purpose of keeping blacks out. It could be naught else. You couldn't fool Jimmy. He knew what those crackers were like. [...]

That's how Moral Majority was born. Not as an American Taliban, not as a vigilance committee targeting gays, abortionists, and feminists, not as a reactionary political cult, but as an organization to protect a despised religious minority from an overreaching government. [...]

It was Jerry Falwell who gave those people a voice, who created the religious right out of whole cloth, and made it into a force that moves the country to this day. That was his achievement, and that is why he's so hated, and why the tolerant, life-affirming left has cheered so loudly at his demise. Because nothing was the same after the Moral Majority appeared.

Before the Moral Majority, liberalism went where it willed and did what it pleased. You took up against liberalism at your peril, and few carried it off successfully or for very long. It was the religious right that revealed the country's bedrock, the fact that its basic nature remained unchanged despite forty-odd years of effort to the contrary. The Evangelicals were the reef against which the left broke itself. It's impossible to imagine the conservative counter reformation that began with Ronald Reagan, one of the crucial events of our time, ever occurring if the religious right had not led the way.

That's how the history will read, after all the missteps and gaucheries are forgotten, all the lies and disinformation cleared away. That's how Jerry Falwell will at last be seen. [...]

Among all the Leftist dancing and pissing on Falwell's grave there was one 'odd man out':

The Reverend Jerry Falwell and I were arch enemies for fifteen years. We became involved in a lawsuit concerning First Amendment rights and Hustler magazine. Without question, this was my most important battle - the l988 Hustler Magazine, Inc., v. Jerry Falwell case,where after millions of dollars and much deliberation, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in my favor.

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.- Larry Flynt statement on CBS5.com

I Assume Ramirez is Not an Illegal Immigrant

Lance: Now a Member of the MSM?

Back in May, over on the Badger Blog Alliance, Lance wrote:

...the Miami Dwayne Wades having already been knocked out of the NBA playoffs, the Dallas Devin Harrises face the same prospect tonight at the hands of the Golden State Don Nelsons:

Much like the MSM, Lance prints all negativity... neglecting the good Wisconsin things that are happening in the NBA, regardless of its 'New Falluja' image.

Lance failed to report that the San Antonio Michael Finleys are now up on the Utah Jazz, 1-0, in the Western Conference Finals.

C'mon, Lance, report the full story, not just the bad news.

And while you're at it, go to the keyboard and type 100 times, "Dwyane, Dwyane,..." until you learn to spell it correctly.

We wonder what's next for Lance... Is he going to switch parties?

Beloit Blew Laws

1964 - Drinking on Sunday Approved in Beloit

On this date the Beloit City Council unanimously approved Sunday sales of alcohol by bowling alleys and restaurants. Bars and packaged good stores were still banned from selling any alcohol on Sundays. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

Someone should tell Beloiters that this was only an approval for sales, not a requirement to drink it in excess and that crack was not included in the Sunday approved sales.

The resident historians in my secret basement laboratory have discovered some interesting details about Beloit's beginnings:

In the later part of 1836, Henry Janes, a Rock River ferry operator and after whom Janesville was named, was doing a number 2 from a limb overhanging the river. A Kickapoo Indian was watching nearby. As the substance passed from rectum to river, it produced the sound, 'B'loit!'.

As the Indian wandered south, he met Caleb Blodgett, the new owner of a good portion of southern Rock County. While not totally able to understand the Indian's animated speech, he was intrigued by the term, 'B'loit' and decided to name his new town Beloit. [Source: Secret basement lab bathroom stall]

Henry Janes was so traumatized by this happenstance that in 1839 he felt compelled to flee the entire area. On October 18, 1866, the Janesville Gazette printed a letter that it received from Janes. It read, in summary:

On the 28th day of August, 1839, I bade adieu to Wisconsin, and in the fall of '49 the Pacific coast put an end to my progress toward the setting sun, and as I have never varied much from North to South my wanderings are at an end.

I have managed to keep ahead of all railroads and telegraphs, and now in my 63rd year, have never yet seen a railroad or telegraph.

Yours with respect,
H.F. Janes

All We Are Saying...
Is Give Progressives a Chance

Ezra Klein laments in an L.A. Times.com article:

[...] What's so wrong, in other words, with hollowing out the public sector and replacing it with a pay-as-you-go society? It is the natural endpoint, after all, of the privatization craze, of the gospel of tax cuts and of the smaller-government-is-better-government mentality that has been on the ascendancy in the U.S. for nearly 25 years. [...]

How has this come to pass? As the old adage goes, when the gods want to punish you, they give you what you want. Conservatives talk a lot about government failure, but over the last few years, it's really we who have failed government, depriving it of the revenue, the conscientious management and the attention needed for it to succeed. Undercapitalize a pizza joint and your customers will taste the poor ingredients, become frustrated by the long waits and grow repulsed by the grimy environs. Staff it with your unmotivated drinking buddies and the service will falter, as will the quality of the product. It's no way to run a pizza place, and it's certainly no way to run a government.

But that's exactly what we've done. With Proposition 13 and the famous California tax revolt, and with presidents whose entire domestic programs amounted to mindless tax-cutting, and with Congresses that have been happy to pass cuts and stack deficits, we have systematically deprived the government of the revenues it needs to provide basic services, even as we've come to need it to do so much more. [...]

And during all this, tax cuts have robbed the Treasury of $200 billion in revenue; the need for a two-thirds majority in the Legislature impeded the flexibility of California to raise state taxes to compensate, while Proposition 13 continued to handicap our municipalities. All that money has to come from somewhere. And the "where" isn't the high-profile initiatives that the media is watching — the Medicares and Social Securities (although they may suffer too) — but from the smaller, less-noticed, but critically important programs and departments that millions rely on. [...]

Such unhappy outcomes are not merely morally unsettling, they're often economically inefficient. Government spending can be more than necessary, it can be desirable. It can step in, for instance, when the market fails to deliver public goods that society desires but private entities haven't figured out how to fund. (It's useful having a national military, right?) And it can use its regulatory power to ensure that competition works to increase well-being rather than to simply amp up industry profits.

Economic conservatives rob hard working pizza joint delivery drivers. Now there's a Bush Derangement Syndrome manifestation that I hadn't anticipated.

It...is...

...alive!

Now that's a metaphor

Cut the Cheese and Blame the Other Guy - The Stench of Washington Politics

Good joke. Read the whole thing.

Ramirez

You know the old saying, "A cartoon is worth
a thousand sound bites."

Pegged It!

Peggy Noonan mirrors my thoughts:

It comes as a relief to admire France again, and not only or even primarily for the comparative wisdom of its choosing the conservative. It's how they did it. A short and intense campaign between candidates who were impressive, interesting. Historic voter turnout. And the great debate, watched by 20 million people, who learned. In all this, France showed style, in the deepest sense of a manner, a spirit, an approach, revealing of character and aspirations.

I'm rootin' fer em.

Gotta Pay Closer Attention

I hear a lot of news stories out of the corner of my ear as I am working on something else. For a short time I thought that the news about the 'Dix Six' was really a report about the Dixie Chicks shooting off their mouths again.

Progress

May 11, 1931:

On this date Clifford Conn of Crandon was apprehended by Janesville police officers with 90 gallons of moonshine in his car. This was the largest single seizure of illegal alcohol by local law enforcement to this date. For the offense, Crandon was fined $700 and sentenced to two months in jail. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

May 11. 2007:

The United Ethanol Plant in nearby Milton, WI, is soon expected to be producing 50 million gallons of moonshine per year.

For Clifford Conn of Crandon, WI, that would equate roughly to a $38.9 million in fines and 92,592.6 years in jail. [Source: Breakroom bulletin board in secret basement lab]

Utterly Disappointing

Some time ago, I googled 'Stephen Burri' and found one prominently listed. He's a lawyer in Vancouver, B.C. We exchanged e-mails for some time. His father had immigrated to Canada from Switzerland and Stephen was raised there. He had a serious medical problem that needed repair.

After that my computer crashed and I lost track. I decided to Google him again to remake contact. His medical problem had been resolved and things were going well. As I was able to deduce from other google entries, he was a gay man and a prominent gay cause activist. I was told that he and his family were soon to be the subject of a documentary; a gay man living with his children and former wife and her female companion.

Hoping to continue our conversation, I e-mailed back:

Hey, Stephen,

Very glad to hear about ... and that all is going well in the post-surgery department. As I may have already told you, polycystic kidney disease runs in this part of the Burri family. My sister and two older brothers have all been so diagnosed, as was our late father. My younger brother and I just assume that we also have it, but have not been checked. All are asymptomatic, however. It must be a Burri thing. Our grandfather, Alfred, the original immigrant from Switzerland, lived until the age of 98.

I will be looking for your documentary. Keep me posted on its development and possible dates and stations when and where it might be shown.

Ironically, I have a confession to make as well. I am an economic and social conservative Evangelical Christian! Don't that just beat all?

Other than kidney problems, I am banking on the hope that you have a somewhat similar Burri sense of humor. The next paragraph or two will be parody/satire. If you think you may be offended, please skip down to the e-mail's closing!

**********

Dear Stephen,

I was horrified to learn that someone with my same name was gay, a gay advocate, and making a documentary titled 'Fatherhood Dreams' that showed the life and trials of his family. What would happen if someone in my milieu were to confuse me for him? These redneck, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic bigots would drum me right out of the clan. As a mind-numbed robotoid, unable to think for myself, I would be totally lost and unable to fend for myself. I would have to be institutionalized.

To head 'em off at the pass, I, too, have commissioned a documentarian to produce a film about my life. It will show me placing a 'Yes to Wisconsin Marriage Amendment' yard sign in my front lawn and teaching my step-children to shoot handguns. It will show me dusting off the rifle rack inside my pickup truck and when I smile it will show all three teeth prominently as I spit my chaw with the dribble running down my chin and shirt.

The title will be 'I am not THAT Stephen Burri'!

Then I got to thinkin'... what will happen if someone in Vancouver or British Columbia confuses you for me? Oh, man... we are in a pickle!

Go, brain... think! Aha! Stephen, we must always use our middle initials. Mine's 'F', what's yours?

With conservative sincerity,

Stephen F. Burri

**********

I hope you were able to enjoy that.

Take care and I will be waiting for news and the developments in your documentary.

Sincerely,

Steve

Unfortunately, he has not e-mailed back, so I assume communication is closed. That's disappointing.

Devolution of Democrats

Our mother, who passed away in 2002, was a lifelong Democrat. She claimed that F.D.R.'s policies 'saved the family farm'. Since those olden days, however, the Democrat Party has devolved and Mom didn't keep up with the changes. To this day I am still getting mailings from the Party requesting her support. But, Mom's support was based on the character of the old Party and its leaders. These were the leaders who would say things like this:

"The basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. If we don't have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a... government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the state."1

The modern Democrat Party has devolved from, "The buck stops here" to, "It's George Bush's (or Janet Reno's) fault." Mom's Democrat heroes, such as Truman, Scoop Jackson, and J.F.K., would today be politically to the right of even many modern Republicans.

1. Quote by Harry S. Truman, documented by David Barton in The Myth of Separation, 1989, p. 200.

Yesterday was Truman's birthday. He would have been 123 years old.

Not in Kansas Anymore, Kathy?

Tim Schieferecke, a Western Kansas scarecrow, has the audacity to question the wicked witch of the East who has complained that Bush's policies are inhibiting recovery from the latest tornado disaster:

...I do know what rural folks from anywhere in Kansas are like. Apparently my current leftist Governor Kathleen Sebelius doesn't though, nor does she comprehend the availability of heavy equipment assets. [...]

Western Kansas is wheat country, and where there's wheat there's wheat trucks. [...]

You can't spit without hitting a tractor, spit a little harder and you'll hit one that has a handy scoop.[...]

They will not wait for the government to do this or that, because in the country people still know what it means to be a good neighbor. [...]

Neighbors in the country take care of each other. [...]

Also, I'd like the Governor to explain just how many National Guard troops it takes to seal off a little town of 1500 from looters?[...]

How could ANYTHING have been done differently. Oh yeah, I forgot, Bush created global warming by colluding with big oil, that created the perfect F-5 tornado, and if only he had signed Kyoto this tragedy never would have happened.

Dang sod-bustin' scarecrow! He proves that wheat straw conducts neural impulses much more effectively than politically motivated neurons.

Some of us have latent nerdish tendencies.

Others of us, not so latent.

Page down through the comments. You'll find it.

The French 'Cozy Up

Mark Steyn discusses the meaning of Nicolas Sarkozy's as French Grand Poobwah and its likelyhood of national course change. Could Sarkozy become France's Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan?

...one of those small anecdotes that seems almost too perfect a distillation of Continental politics. It was a news item from 2005: A fellow in Marseilles was charged with fraud because he lived with the dead body of his mother for five years in order to continue receiving her pension of 700 euros a month.

She was 94 when she croaked, so she'd presumably been enjoying the old government check for a good three decades or so, but her son figured he might as well keep the money rolling in until her second century and, with her corpse tucked away under a pile of rubbish in the living room, the female telephone voice he put on for the benefit of the social services office was apparently convincing enough. As the Reuters headline put it: "Frenchman Lived With Dead Mother To Keep Pension."

Think of France as that flat in Marseilles, and its economy as the dead mother, and the country's many state benefits as monsieur's deceased mom's benefits. To the outside observer, the French give the impression they can live with the stench of death as long as the government benefits keep coming. If that's the case, the new president will have the shortest of honeymoons.

Obviously, Steyn predicts that Nicolas Sarkozy will not be allowed to be a Thatcher or Reagan, but instead an Angela Merkel:

[...] Just as Frau Merkel proved not to be Germany's Thatcher, I would be surprised if Nicolas Sarkozy turned out to be France's Reagan. Not because he doesn't have Reaganite tendencies but because the French electorate, like the Germans, aren't there yet.

Steyn is probably right, although I would hope that his election would at least prove to be baby steps forward in French rehabilitation.

John Fund: "With Mr. Sarkozy's victory, France's government looks like it will finally have some energetic adult supervision."

Green is the New Red

Jeffrey Osonitsch makes some good points in an American Thinker article, 'The Paradox of Secular Scientism':

[...] When science lost its moral foundation through hostility to religion, it became preyed upon by another corrupting influence: politics. And once infected thus, science slowly transmogrified into scientism, or the religious advocacy (by elites within the scientific, academic, journalistic, and government communities) of consensus-based theories whereby a majority-rule mentality takes the place of the traditional scientific method. Under this system theories need not be proven, only agreed upon, and once agreed upon, these dogmatic beliefs become the stuff of enforced orthodoxy and woe to anyone who dissents from the majority.

This new scientism is then used as a means to justify extreme and dangerous political orthodoxies. It is how the dubious and scientifically unsupported claims (namely that the use of pesticides to control mosquito populations have a catastrophic ripple effect across the food chain) of an obscure writer named Rachel Carson led to the ban on the use of DDT as an insecticide, which in turn resulted in the loss of tens of millions of lives to a disease (malaria) which had been all but eradicated by Western science. The human cost, particularly in Africa, was disregarded by a preening elite of self-satisfied Western secularists who abused science to institute a new and infinitely more insidious form of imperialism affecting mostly poor, third world people. One wonders how long the ban would have lasted had it been Europeans dropping dead by the thousands daily.

Similarly dubious scientific claims are made to oppose such things as over-population, man-made climate change, the use of bio-engineered foods, and nuclear power. These are clearly political movements dressed up as science and have had some truly bizarre results. For example, some proponents of secular scientism are in the weird position of rejecting the consumption by humans of bio-engineered foods while supporting efforts (through cloning, selective abortion, euthanasia, DNA manipulation, embryonic stem-cell cultivation, etc.) to bio-engineer human beings themselves! They then propose to mitigate the unproven harmful effects of the consumption of bio-engineered foods by increasing the malnutrition and starvation which inevitably result from its ban. [...]

They then seek, in spite of the potential cost of millions of lives through the likely increase in poverty caused by the implementation of such radical eco-political policies as the Kyoto Protocols, to limit the potential for global economic growth through their opposition to the use of such technologies as nuclear power and the burning of fossil fuels needed by modern economies by overstating their harmful effects. These restrictions will impact worst those in the developing world least able to withstand the economic repercussions. This is not a magnanimous or moral application of science for the betterment of mankind, this is raw power politics. The cosmopolitan proponents of centralized, global power here seek to use science not to serve, but to control. Coincidence or not, Earth Day is celebrated on the anniversary of the birth of Communist pioneer Vladimir Lenin. It appears green is the new red. [...]

Francis Schaeffer called this paradigm shift of science to scientism, modern science to modern modern science, science within a closed material system.

Rats!

The Kentucky Derby was run today. As you may know, I bet the farm on Crap Daddy...er, I mean Scat Daddy. Scat Daddy was nosed out in a photo finish, ending up 18th out of 20.

All of my soybeans, as well as their futures are presumably somewhere in Kentucky. And the kids were hungry. I trapped a few rats out in the graveyard this afternoon and cooked up one of Grandpa Jerry's old recipes; rat, acorn, and bark stew. After we all ate our fill, surprisingly the kids told me that my secret chewy stewy surprise was much better than our usual tofu and rutabaga dishes. They begged me to tell them what the secret ingredient was. I finally told them that it was penguins that didn't have happy feet. The kids wanted to know if we could have it again tomorrow and I assured them that I would find some more despondent penguins. They skipped off to play and I loaded my rat traps into the pickup.

What really annoys me is that I thought the 'Scat' of Scat Daddy referred to his ability to move quickly, but after the Derby was over, I found out that it really was a reference to the substance of defecation. Rats!

Here's something I didn't know:

What does Cinco de Mayo celebrate?

It's commonly thought that Cinco de Mayo ("The fifth of May" in Spanish) is Mexico's Independence Day, but the day actually commemorates the Battle of Puebla. On May 5, 1861, Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza conquered the French occupation forces near the city of Puebla. It's this victory that's celebrated every May 5 throughout Mexico and the U.S, while Mexico's Independence Day is celebrated September 16.

Count me among those who thought it was the Mexican Independence Day.

Fuller story here, if Wikipedia can be trusted.

Power to the (Indignant) People!

Wicked Dox publishes an article written by Tom Wolfe that originally appeared in Harper's Monthly in June, 2000.

An excerpt:

[...] The new hero, the intellectual, didn't need to burden himself with the irksome toil of reporting or research. For that matter, he needed no particular education, no scholarly training, no philosophical grounding, no conceptual frameworks, no knowledge of academic or scientific developments other than the sort of stuff you might pick up in Section 9 of the Sunday newspaper. Indignation about the powers that be and the bourgeois fools who did their bidding-that was all you needed. Bango! You were an intellectual.

From the very outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseparable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down at the rest of humanity. And it hadn't cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: "Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity." Precisely which intellectuals of the twentieth century were or were not idiots is a debatable point, but it is hard to argue with the definition I once heard a French diplomat offer at a dinner party: "An intellectual is a person knowledgable in one field who speaks out only in others." [...]

It's quite a long article, but well worth the read.

Shori Nuff

Mark Krikorian declares in a short piece titled 'Chutzpah' on NRO's The Corner:

The head of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, is complaining about Nigerian Anglican bishops coming to Virginia this weekend to formally install the head of the conservative breakaway denomination in this country. Here's what she said: "Such action would violate the ancient customs of the church."

I kid you not. The female head of a church with a practicing homosexual bishop planning to "marry" his lover, a church that could accept into seminary the adulterous homosexual governor of New Jersey, a church that embraces splitting open babies' skulls and vacuuming their brains out, is complaining about violating ancient customs? Wow.

What Krikorian seemingly does not understand is that this really isn't the Episcopal Church he's talking about, but all three of its straying offgrowths, the Impailoscopal, the Episcopulatal, and the Obtuse Anglican branches.

Turn Over Those Letters, Vanna!

Pat Sajak has discovered some teachers to parents letter from yesteryear and writes documents them here.

To the parents of Harry Reid,

We’re afraid we must ban Harry from all school sporting events. Every time one of our teams falls behind, he starts yelling, “It’s over! The game is lost!” It really is harming the morale of our players. I hope we can count on your cooperation.

To the parents of Katie Couric,

Katie is back to normal following her suspension. Again, we apologize, but passing off an essay written by someone else as your own is a serious offense. You should also be aware that we continue to measure and compare the test scores of the three classes in her grade, and, unfortunately, her numbers are down.

To the parents of Bill Clinton,

As Bill approaches his graduation from grammar school, he seems to be unduly concerned about how classes in the future will think of him. I’ve tried explaining that his fixation on a “legacy” is unhealthy for a 13-year-old. I’ll talk about it again with him when he takes me to dinner tonight.

To the parents of John Edwards,

Sadly, we have no choice but to remove John from the school’s baseball team. His play is satisfactory, but his refusal to wear a cap or helmet gives us no choice.

Then, there's this shocker:

To the parents of Pat Sajak,

Your son continues to demonstrate outstanding abilities in all his classes. He will no doubt be hugely successful in whatever literary or scholarly pursuits he chooses. You should be very proud to have a future man of letters in your family.

It's gotta be true. I found it on the internet.

Battin' the Farm

Although I am not normally a gamblin' man, I have done a 180 for this weekend. I have some friends that are attending the Kentucky Derby and I've sent the deed to the farm along with them to bet. All of it on Scat Daddy... all of it. Granted, as a gentleman farmer, it only amounts to about 1/7th of a bushel of soybeans, but if the odds don't change and Scat Daddy wins, I will wallow in 2 full bushels of soybeans.

As a youth, my brothers and I had only one standing order in the summertime... pull weeds in the soybean fields. I still have nightmares inhabited by thistles, velvet weed, cockleburs, milkweed, and stray corn plants. I still wish that Hillary would have sent the migrant kids up from Illinois to help us while she babysat the little migrant children.

But we had our fun, too. We would stick a water hose down a rat hole under the cement slab leading up to the chickenhouse and wait on the other side. It must have been quite a sight with us boys, a dog or two, and some cats all waiting like vultures for some fresh meat to emerge. When the soaking wet rat emerged and fled we would pummel him with our Louisville sluggers. It may sound cruel, but the dogs and cats needed to eat and the soybeans and weeds needed fertilizer. And we soon discovered that rat is greasy and didn't really taste like chicken. We were pretty lucky that we didn't whack each other or one of the farm critters. I laugh at the kids nowadays that vicariouly play the violent and bloody video games.

Liberal Woman

Cousin Red 'splains some things about his new lady friend:

Now, since this lady has got some kids … none of them mine. I don't think.

anywasy, she has some kids. There's Joey Jr, Donnie Jr, and John Jr, and Bertram Jr, and Little Julio, and Jack Jr, and Demarqus Jr, and Lee Ping Jr, and Running Bear Jr, and Joey III.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. (Nonjudgmental PC disclaimer)

I'm just glad to see that there's no Lance, Jr., Todd, Jr., or Little Stevie. But I am somewhat concerned that there is a John, Jr., AND a Jack, Jr.

(H.T. Don Surber.)

The Consensus of the Committee

J.R. Dunn writes his thoughts on the efficacy of bureaucracies in action in three news stories of late; the Iranian capture of the British sailors, the Virginia Tech massacre, and the War on Terror. The article is titled 'Bureaucratic Failures' and published in American Thinker.

[...]The reason bureaucracies fail, (Robin) Fox tells us, is "...because they are, in some sense, inhuman." By this he doesn't that they are vicious or cruel (although they can be), but that they are, by their very nature, at odds with human nature as it exists. Bureaucracies operate according to a certain fixed set of procedures. They are an attempt - heroic or otherwise - to force the world to conform to a rational system. But human beings, much as we pride ourselves on our rational thinking, are actually a grab-bag of instincts, intuition, and habit, with a handful of rationality thrown in to pull everything else together. This serves us well because it matches how the universe actually works, but it also means that there will always be a conflict between bureaucracies and human beings. The relationship starts out on the wrong foot and gets worse as it goes along. [...]

'... at odds with human nature...'; a seeming attempt to categorize Man as a machine. It stifles individual creativity and talents, especially leadership. It promotes mediocrity, squelching exceptionalism into conformity. Participation is not attractive to the 'best and the brightest', but to the mediocre. Its results are the same... in triplicate.

High Noonan

Peggy Noonan opines on the Republican Presidential candidates and the debate:

This is a piece about Thursday night's Republican presidential debates, but first I would like to note that the media's fixation with which Republican is the most like Reagan, and who is the next Reagan, and who parts his hair like Reagan, is absurd, and subtly undermining of Republicans, which is why they do it. Reagan was Reagan, a particular man at a particular point in history. [...]

They should stop it already, and Republicans should stop playing along. They should try instead a pleasant. "You know I don't think I'm Reagan, but I do think John Edwards may be Jimmy Carter, and I'm fairly certain Hillary is Walter Mondale."

Good advice.

Fred Thompson Info

Many conservative voters are looking closely at Fred Thompson as a possible Republican candidate for the 2008 Presidential election. However, many really don't know too much about him. I.M.A.O. has become a repository for information about the former Senator/actor. Here are some telling tidbits of information about Fred Thompson:

Fred Thompson eats shotgun shells for breakfast and craps 44 magnum bullets in the afternoon.

Does a bear @#$% in the woods? Only with signed notarized permission in triplicate from Fred Thompson.

When Fred Thompson empties his pistol at the firing range, it reloads itself out of respect.

Fred Thompson uses a .357 Magnum as a remote control.

Fred Thompson once opened a stuck jar of pickles by winking at it.

Nuclear reactor coolant fills Fred Thompson's hot tub.

If you play Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" backwards, you will hear Fred Thompson loading his shotgun.

Waldo is hiding because of Fred Thompson.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship is based on Fred Thompson's playground history.

You can safely view Fred Thompson using a shoe box with a pin-sized hole in one end.

To save tax money, for a while Tennessee reduced it's police force to just Fred Thompson armed with a claw hammer. During that time, there was no crime in Tennessee or any contiguous state.

Fred Thompson is a prime number.

According to Sura 8 verse 65 of the Koran, Allah told the Prophet Muhammad, "O Prophet! Urge the believers to war; if there are twenty patient ones of you they shall overcome two hundred, and if there are a hundred of you they shall overcome a thousand of those who disbelieve... but if you're up against Fred Thompson, you're totally screwed and I can't help you."

Every night before going to sleep, Osama bin Laden checks under his bed for Fred Thompson.

These are just a few biographical facts about Fred Thompson. If he runs for President I will vote for him. I'd be afraid not to.

Contrasting Truths to Contrasting Powers

Alan Sears writes in an article on Townhall.com:

[...]Leftists are especially fond of citing that old Quaker quote about “speaking truth to power.” It makes them feel brave – standing up to a gracious, polite society, calling for the decimation of the spiritual foundations of Western civilization – with no one to back them up but an omnipresent mass media, a posse of increasingly activist judges, and the glittery Hollywood Thought Police.

The irony, though, is that public prayer is the ultimate venue for speaking truth to power.

Mother Teresa understood that. Invited to share a few words the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast, she responded with some stabbingly plain truths about abortion:

“Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love one another but to use any violence to get what they want,” she said. “This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

Those words brought hundreds to their feet, but not President Bill Clinton – or Mrs. Clinton, or Vice President Al Gore. Seats planted, faces set like stone, that potent trio gazed, dazed, on the wizened old face of wisdom…and sat powerless, for a moment, in the face of the truth. [...]

The National Day of Prayer was established as an annual event in 1952 by a joint resolution of the United States Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman.

The A.C.L.U. is considering the exhumation of Harry Truman and all members of the 1952 U.S. Congress in order to sue them for violating the Constitution.

Today is the 56th annual National Day of Prayer.

"If you abide in My word, then you are truly disciples of mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:31b,32)

Speak truth to power.

Whenever I start thinking I'm smart...

...which is pretty often, I go read Victor Davis Hanson, and that makes me humble again*:

...we are left in the end with the verdict of the battlefield. The war will be won or lost, like it or not, fairly or unjustly, in the next six months in Baghdad. Either Gen. Petraeus quells the violence to a level that even the media cannot exaggerate, or the enterprise fails, and we withdraw.

* I sure can't count on anybody around here to do that.

They Handle the English Language
Like Al Qaeda Handles Infidels

Wicked Thoughts posts a list of high schooler's metaphors and similies compiled by teachers. Here's a partial list:

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a thigh Master.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

I'll have to learn more of this technique so that Lance can more easily understand my writing.

Science: Rosie in the Mainstream

Excerpts from a Daily Telegraph article:

Lesbians are twice as likely as heterosexual women to be overweight or obese, which puts them at greater risk for obesity-related health problems and death, US researchers said.

The report, published in the American Journal of Public Health, is one of the first large studies to look at obesity among lesbians.

Ulrike Boehmer of the Boston University School of Public Health and colleagues looked at a 2002 national survey of almost 6000 women, and found that lesbians were 2.69 times more likely to be overweight and 2.47 times more likely to be obese. [...]

“The results of these studies indicate that lesbian women have a better body image than do heterosexual women,” they wrote.

No results were given on I.Q.'s or rational thought or speech.

Hippocrates' Conscience

Daniel Clark posts 'Uncool Ghouls: Why Abortionists are Dying Out' on Intellectual Conservative.

Excerpts:

According to the April 14th London Evening Standard, abortion industry insiders are blaming the decline in the number of abortionists on "the lack of 'glamour' involved in the work." That's the opinion of a spokesman for England's largest chain of abortion clinics, who explains, "It's not glamorous work for doctors, which may partly explain the increasing difficulty in recruitment over the last five or six years."

The chief executive of the spookily titled British Pregnancy Advisory Service agrees that "it may not be the most glamorous medical specialty on the face of it." A spokeswoman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists adds, "It is not a sexy area." [...]

There are plenty of legitimate fields of medicine that are not glamorous either, but we don't read news articles bemoaning the dearth of urologists and proctologists, for example. For that matter, there are few jobs in the world less glamorous than telemarketing, but no sane person would argue that there are not enough telemarketers in the world. There must, therefore, be some less superficial explanation for the dwindling number of abortionists.

Maybe a pro-abortion activist can successfully hide from the truth behind soothing euphemisms like "choice" and "reproductive freedom," but the person who physically carries out the act cannot. While he's destroying and disposing of the tiny human bodies, he can't escape the reality of it by shutting his eyes, clasping his hands over his ears and singing Alexander's Ragtime Band. Unlike his celebrity supporters from the land of make-believe, he has no happy place to which he can escape.

It's no great mystery that talented young doctors would rather use their skills to heal rather than slaughter. This is the natural result of a common human characteristic, known to those of us outside the pro-abortion movement as a "conscience," and known within feminist circles as a devious mind-control device designed to perpetuate patriarchal tyranny.

It wouldn't surprise me if the most inept of medical school graduates had the highest representation in the abortion industry as well.

Well, duh.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Drinking coffee can help ward off type 2 diabetes and may even help prevent certain cancers, according to panelists discussing the benefits -- and risks -- of the beverage at a scientific meeting.

RINO Think Tank

Bruce Bartlett posts Conservatives for Hillary? on Townhall.com:

Introductory paragraph:

As each day passes, it becomes increasingly clear that the Democrats will win the White House next year. It’s not quite 1932, but it’s getting close to a sure thing. All the energy is on their side, they are raising more money from more contributors, and there is little if any enthusiasm for any of the Republican candidates—even among Republicans. [...]

Concluding paragraph:

At some point, politically sophisticated conservatives will have to recognize that no Republican can win in 2008 and that their only choice is to support the most conservative Democrat for the nomination. Call me crazy, but I think that person is Hillary Clinton.

I especially like the way he uses the word 'sophisticated'.

So... what's next for Bartlett?

"As each day passes, it becomes increasingly clear that the terrorists will win the Global War on Terror next year." [...]

"At some point, spiritually sophisticated Westerners will have to recognize that Western Civilization can't win and that their only choice is to support the most liberal Islamofascist available. Call me crazy, but I think that person is Osama bin Laden."

(To be clear, I am not equating Hillary with Osama. I am just paralleling Bartlett's rhetorical technique.)