Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

What he might have looked like if he had actually WANTED to found a "religion of peace".

Beyond Motor City

A while back a friend commented that they didn't want the future to look like a Mad Max movie, and that was why they supported government control of the economy. To prevent global warming, don'tcha know. I suggested that we were FAR more likely to get that kind of outcome FROM government control. It is possible that global warming may do it. Seems unlikely, but possible. It seems MUCH more likely that government control will do it.

Detroit In Ruins

Climate Change Fraud Uncovered

Usually when proprietary data is stolen and published, it is the left attempting to discredit the right. One of the reasons for this is the far left bias of most of the press. But in the last decade a combination of the blogosphere, talk radio, and fox news have broken the strangle hold that the left had on the news. This means that stories that would have been ignored in the past get to see the light of day. And it has happened again.

A hundred odd megabytes of emails and files from one of the centers of man made global warming "research" were stolen and published on the web. The contents are shocking, but not particularly surprising. They show that the people calling themselves climate scientists are actually just big government activists who will lie, cheat, and steal to show a single, biased, inaccurate point of view. Here is one of the many articles discussing the scandal.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/21/AR2009112102186_pf.html

Bottom line, these jokers were caught cherry picking data, using mathematical trickery to provide misleading conclusions, threatening editors of scientific journals for publishing alternate points of view, destroying evidence called for by Freedom of Information Act requests, and generally conspiring to print conclusions not backed up by the data.

Deplorable.

Is the globe warming up? Well, it was for a while, but hasn't for the past decade. Has human activity been responsible for some of the warming that was occurring? Possibly, but the case certainly hasn't been made. Should humans work to reduce pollution? Of course. Do we know how much of a reduction it would take to have an impact on the climate? Clearly not. Have we even established the "best" temperature for human life on this planet? No, not really.

Perhaps, someday, we will have the computing power, programming expertise, and sufficient data collected to truly model our weather and climate. But we aren't there yet. And those guys know we aren't. To me, this scandal demonstrates that climate change legislation is a lot more about politics than science.

I'll believe in anthropogenic global warming when the people who are telling me about anthropogenic global warming start behaving like they believe in anthropogenic global warming.

Hairy

Exciting News from the European Union

This article was quite fascinating and delightful.

It discusses the first President of the European Union. Apparently Europeans don't get to vote for their president. After all, we can't have IMPORTANT positions decided by the LITTLE people. The whole democracy thing. So . . . . common. At last Europe can get back to being ruled by those born to the job.

Herman van Rompuy, a serenely uncontroversial, 63-year-old Belgian centrist, became the EU's first president, but the big winner was Baroness "Cathy" Ashton, an obscure New Labour quangocrat who landed the job of High Representative for Foreign Affairs. From the far corners of the couple's unruly new empire came an encouragingly harmonious chorus of: "Qui?" "Wer?" "Chi?" "Who?"

Ahh, the equivalent of the Secretary of State position for all of Europe. Someone supremely well qualified to lead, probably behind the string pulling Europe's power brokers.

Cathy's curriculum vitae is a spirit-sapping recitation of posts held and causes served, far from the rigours of the real world. Born in Lancashire, she has been a "vice chair" of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, founded an organisation to promote equality in the business world, and served as vice president of the National Council of One-Parent Families. Given a life peerage in 1999 by Tony Blair, she was sent to Brussels last year as a replacement for Peter Mandelson. Married to the former journalist Peter Kellner, now head of a polling organisation, she has two children and three stepchildren.

"Baroness Ashton is ideal for her new role," says Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party. "She has never had a proper job, and has never been elected to public office."

I also read down into the comments section and noticed some interesting observations.

And so we are reduced to the role of the people of the Soviet bloc back in the days of our struggle against totalitarian socialism.

Their role in the political process was not, as in democratic societies, to elect, remove, and hold accountable their leadership, but to READ IN THE NEWSPAPERS THE FOLLOWING DAY what the leadership had decided for them.

and

A very disturbing compromise. It is as clear as crystal that the franco-german axis has got the other 25 states by the balls. Shut UK up by choosing a Briton who does not have a clue about most things political. Satisfy the poor rest of the members by appointing as president somebody for whom certainly no traffic will stop even if he is on a pedestrian crossing. The next step will be to ensure that the economic and financial powerhouses of the EU on the Commission and at ECB will be manned by faithful french and german bankers and politicians. That is the Lisbon treaty for the rest of us.

I know that a lot of progressives think we should be more like europe, and aspire to european governance. Stuff like this shows me just how wrong they are, and lead me further in my belief of American exceptionalism.

Hairy

On the use of the word "terrorism".

So an Army Major named Hasan goes nutjob jihad and kills and maims a bunch of his fellow soldiers. Immediately the partisan divide opens. The left pretends that this is an entirely random act of madness. The right proclaims that the left are being a bunch of weenies, afraid to use the word terrorism. As well as engaging in the same kind of political correctness groupthink that allowed his bizarre behavior to be ignored.

One of the problems with this overall discussion is with the definition of terrorism. To me, terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians to intimidate a population into a particular kind of behavior.

When most people think of the word terrorism, they think about an organized group acting together to complete a plan. 9-11 is a perfect example of that. AQ did planning, fund raising, training, had secret communications and meetings, and executed a successful operation.

That's different from some guy going into his basement, grabbing all the guns he can find, screaming Allah Akbar, and shooting up the people around him.

Sure, there are problems with Muslim leaders preaching "kill the infidels", but they aren't specifically working with the psycho killer. They are just providing an environment that makes the behavior politically or theologically acceptable to some. The two kinds of terrorism are very different.

An organized group of terrorists opening fire on groups of civilians in different cities on the same day is organized terrorism.

Not so much for the Ft. Hood whack job.

I think equating the two does a disservice both to Islam and US Homeland security. It is reasonable to expect Homeland Security to stop an organized, coordinated attack. Not much you can do about a lone gunman attacking a soft target.

It is even questionable whether the Ft. Hood attack can even be considered terrorism. Hasan attacked a military target, not a civilian one.

While I agree Muslim leaders should be much more clear and vocal condemning both the attack and the voices who support the attack, I think it is also reasonable for the media to be restrained and clear about the use of the word "terrorism".

Hairy

Hairy Dreams

I've long been fascinated by the concept of directed dreaming. While I haven't read as much on the subject as I would like, I understand that some folks can control the subject matter of their dreams by concentrating/thinking about in a particular way the subject about which they wish to dream.

Before I had read about the concept I personally experienced it. In grade school I read a TAB book about a kid who found a bottle full of magic liquid. When he rubbed a drop on each shoulder he grew wings. Eventually he used up the bottle, rubbed just a bit of residue off the sides onto his shoulders, and got a single feather to have as a keepsake of the experience.

I REALLY liked the book, and the night I finished it I had a dream about having wings, and flying through a hole to the center of the earth. I woke up distraught that the dream was over. The next night I focused on the dream before going to sleep, and was able to partially recreate the dream. Very satisfying. And I didn't feel a need to experience the dream again.

Perhaps when life slows down a bit I will take the time to experience dreams of my choice.

Hairy

Hypocrisy of the Left on Law and Order

For the past couple of weeks the news has been full of demands from the left that Bush administration legal advisors be tried and jailed for their opinions on enhanced interrogation techniques. Our country was in an apparently novel position.

If we capture a soldier fighting our nation while wearing a uniform, we have rules about how that Prisoner of War is treated. All that the soldier has to provide is his name, rank and serial number. It is our obligation to provide the prisoner with a clean, dry place to stay, and adequate food and medical care.

If we catch a US citizen trying to help an enemy of the US while in this country, then that person receives full rights under the constitution of the United States, and must be proven guilty in a court of law. Once the suspect invokes their Miranda rights they can’t even be questioned without their attorney present.

But suppose some of our soldiers are in Iraq conducting a security sweep. They raid a house that is suspected of being a headquarters of a terror cell. In the house they find bomb making equipment, and a spot on the floor where it is obvious that 5 completed car bombs had just been moved out. We catch a guy in civilian clothes running out of the house, and it turns out he is Abdul bin BadGuy, a known bomb maker from Yemen, and reputed head of the local Al-Qaeda cell.

What rules apply to this guy? He clearly isn’t automatically entitled to POW protection. He was not a soldier in uniform performing a military role. He doesn’t seem to be entitled to a trial in US courts. Heck, there isn’t any evidence you could use in a court of law to convict him. He was just leaving a house that happened to have bombs in it. No actual proof that he was involved in any way.

This is a military operation. It’s part of an act of war in a war zone. So the troops go up through their chain of command and ask for guidance. The prez goes to his legal staff and asks for opinions. His legal staff says – you can question them aggressively, but you can’t torture them. OK, so what is torture? The answer comes back, you can cause them pain. You can make them afraid. You can lie to them. You can’t do any physical damage. Put them in a cold room and let them shiver? OK. No pulling out fingernails. Let them think they are going to drown, but don’t actually deprive them of enough air that they actually pass out. Make ‘em cry, but don’t let ‘em bleed. After all, it is reasoned, these are the things we do to our own troops when we are training them.

The left disagreed with this assessment. Some on the left probably opposed the practice solely because the Bush administration was in favor of it. Doubtless there were many reasons for this. Some believe that this treatment can be defined as torture. Seems to me that this devalues the term. It’s kind of like the bumper sticker “War is terrorism.” For most the difference is obvious. Terror is the deliberate attack of civilian targets. War, at least these days, is an attempt to compel by force, but done in a way to minimize civilian damage and casualties. All civilian death is not ethically equivalent. But that is a side issue. I really don’t want to get into a discussion of the definition of torture. This is going in a different direction.

It seems to me that that this exemplifies one of the more interesting differences between left wing brains and right wing brains. People on the left care less about law and order, are more likely to engage in “ends justify the means” thinking, disobey the law, and even cheat on their taxes. There are lots of studies out there that support this. About a year ago I saw a couple of studies that tracked kids who cheated on tests and adults who stole from work or cheated on taxes. The scofflaws and cheaters were much more likely to come from the left side of the political aisle.

But it’s not just the anti-social acts, it is the attitude toward authority. This was unusually well documented earlier a few months ago when a study was done on the case of Scott v. Harris. I commented on this phenomenon in an earlier post Create a Crisis.

In this case the police were chasing a drunk driver (Harris). The high speed chase was caught by the dash cameras of the police cars. Eventually the police considered this chase too dangerous, and one officer (Scott) attempted to run the drunk off the road. The drunk’s car rolled, and he was paralyzed in the crash. He sued the police officer for using unnecessary force. The Supreme Court watched the dash video and, except for the most liberal member of the bench, found that the police acted lawfully. The drunk could not collect medical expenses, and pain and suffering damages, from the police.

As a generally conservative person, I thought “Right On!” It seemed absolutely obvious to any reasonable, thinking person. But my opinion was not universally shared. A research group asked 1,350 people what they thought of the police actions. The original study can be found here:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1081227

A good summary and analysis of the study can be found here:

http://volokh.powerblogs.com/posts/1199994070.shtml#

To my dismay and amazement lots of people think that the cops were wrong - That they should have just let the dunk keep driving. And the people who felt that way were more likely to be politically on the left and members of racial minorities. They apparently just don’t think breaking the law and running from the police is all that bad. That the criminal’s life should not be put at risk, even when they are putting the lives of others at risk.

Now we get to the tricky bit.

These very same leftists – the ones who oppose three strikes laws, who want felons to be allowed to vote, who think that immigration raids should not be allowed, who think Harris should have gotten big bucks for being run off the road while running from police, who think the bro should NOT have been tazed - want mere THOUGHT with which they disagree criminalized.

And THAT is the hypocrisy of the left that I find so troubling.

I was listening to the Medved show the other day (a conservative radio talk show), and he was talking about how MUCH the left wants to put Bush’s legal advisors in jail. The gave their opinion that aggressive interrogation was legal, but in the eyes of the left, because they believe torture resulted, that the legal scholars are apparently guilty of torture. They were never in the same room as the prisoners. They didn’t pour a teaspoon of water on the face of a terrorist. They didn’t watch it. They didn’t order it. They just said they thought it would be legal. And for this the left wants them tried and jailed.

One caller to the Medved show was just sputtering with outrage. He sounded like a white, gay male. And he was so utterly convinced that the enhanced interrogation techniques were torture, that he believed the legal advisors were deliberately lying about their belief that the interrogation techniques were OK. It was just not possible to him that anyone could have an honest opinion that disagreed with his. So they MUST have been deliberately committing the crime of torture.

And this was almost certainly a guy who fits my liberal “weak-on-law-and-order” profile. Let the criminals go, take power away from the police, but jail those damn right wing Bush administration conservatives for THINKING that waterboarding was not torture.

Ya know, I might find it difficult to fathom how he could possibly be so foolish as to hold his opinions, but I don't want him slammed into prison for having them. Apparently another difference between the left and right. The right is generally more tolerant of alternate opinions.

Diversity on everything except thought. The battle cry of the left.

Pure hypocrisy.

Hairy