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Morning rant #9, bet on America

The past year points to a bright future for America. The country has been sick for decades, maybe since Calvin Coolidge. Its sickness is the enormous government tapeworm digesting enterprise into the whole crap sandwich of debt, tax codes, bought votes of public employees and welfare dependents, affirmative action and and and. Kill that tapeworm then America will thrive. But the worm is deeply entwined and it takes maximum pissed-offness for the productive voters to get angry enough to yank it out.

If Obama had been a cleverer politician like Tony Blair, say, then liberalism would persist maybe to the point of killing its host. In Britain the ‘Conservative’, David Cameron, will probably be PM by May. He sees himself as the heir to Blair. He personifies the triumph of liberalism. He is a soi-disant conservative who buys into the liberal theology of EU membership, Warmism, imposed ‘diversity’, nationalised health and most of the other bollocks. Cameron probably doesn’t believe that stuff any more than he believed the conservatism he used to espouse. He just thinks he’s more likely to get elected by the BBC/Guardian brainwashed swing voter. Meanwhile many ideological conservatives are likely to vote for the UK Independence Party (UKIP), both from principle and in dreams of a hung Parliament where call-me-Dave is dragged to a populist anti-EU stance.

Anyhoot Obama’s move to control the last remaining facets of free enterprise has provoked America’s immune system to produce antibodies sufficient to fight the underlying sickness. And it only took 12 months. That says America’s immune system is in good shape and that says America has the best political culture providing it’s sufficiently provoked and providing there exists the internet. Indeed the internet may be as big factor in America’s recovery as Obama’s provocations. I’ve been saying for a while “Better Obamanism then renaissance than McCainism then decline.”

What this rant is rambling up to is that America will boom in the near future. The strongest indicator of health is how a body deals with sickness and these 12 months show that America is the healthiest kid on the block. Try hosting a Tea Party in China. So roll up, roll up, fill your boots with the Dow Jones Index at 10,000!

Pre-socializing America

I’ve written in favour of George Bush for his personal quality and his political bravery. The hobgoblins of the left invented a demon called Bush for a scapegoat, so its a public service to defend him,

BUT

I must link to Michelle Malkin’s “Things I don’t miss about George W. Bush” for a cold shower. The phrase “pre-socialized the economy for Obama” will linger.

The other Superbowl ad

I rented this product for a week last year and thought it was wonderful.

“I’d rather be ruled by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone directory than the Harvard faculty"

In a recent post, Bah! Humbug! for buddhists, I wrote:

This has been a low, dishonest year in American politics. To Nile Gardiner’s neat ranking of Obama’s 10 worst foreign policy blunders, I’d add this shining turd of appeasement – cancelling his meeting with the Dalai Lama ‘to keep China happy’.

Obama appeased China ahead of the Copenhagen Global Warming Jamboree and got America predictably dissed there. Now that the Chinese know for sure that the assistant-law-lecturer-in-chief is weak, they’re raising the stakes against the next scheduled meeting with the Dalai Lama so when it takes place, there will be a breach with real consequences instead of a merely diplomatic breach if Obama had adopted Bush’s practice from the off.

This stuff is so elementary. But not trying the 9/11 mastermind in downturn Manhattan is a no-brainer, you’d think; saying ‘corpsman’ instead of ‘corpseman’; ’57 states’; bowing to foreign kings; endless self-reference…..look, can anyone think of one smart thing this guy’s initiated? One?

The cod psychology of a weak leader is that after rejection by tyrants they’ve hugged and purred to, then he over-compensates. That’s the danger with Obama. He’ll get into a tactical stand-off when it’s much harder for an adversary to back down without loss of face. Result, the tactical stand-off ends as strategic defeat for America led by a poseur.

Quiz time

As US/China relations implode, name a single country with which America has better relations than under Bush. Sudan, maybe? Ok name 2. Note, the UN is not a country.

Damn Photo Competitions!

I compare the winning shot and runner up shot in last week’s Daily Telegraph photo competition, theme ‘Bridges’,  with images found by a quick search on Flickr to show that the winning shots are familiar treatments of famous scenes:

My shot of London Bridge that should have won!

I did win a couple of weeks ago to my surprise with the theme ‘Tall’.

Dissing Las Vegas

The remarks of the Las Vegas Mayor, Oscar Goodman, should be heeded. He’s a defense lawyer who represented the most notorious mobsters in Vegas and appeared as himself in Casino. I’ve just ordered his biography, Of Rats And Men. If he says “You’re a real slow learner”, a wise man will take notes:

The Reality Distortion Field

Fly me to the moon

The moon from our garden in NJ a couple of days ago:

JFK told Congress in 1961:

Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.

Toby Young writes:

A couple of years ago, my best friend Sean Langan was kidnapped by the Taliban while making a documentary for Channel 4 in Pakistan. During his three-month ordeal he was interrogated by his captors many times and he was often surprised by what they wanted him to confess to. One subject they kept returning to were the moon landings. They refused to believe that America had put men on the moon and, again and again, they tried to browbeat him into admitting that NASA’s programme of manned space flight had been an elaborate hoax.
Why did this matter to them? Sean’s theory is that the moon landings are clear evidence of the superiority of everything the Taliban are opposed to — of reason over revelation, of democracy over theocracy, of science over superstition. In its original conception, NASA’s Apollo Programme was supposed to be an advertisement for the superiority of America to the Soviet Union — a Cold War propaganda exercise — but in the eyes of these Islamist terrorists it also served to discredit America’s current enemies. Their response was to insist the moon landings hadn’t happened.

The Constellation Programme could have been all that and more. Yet Obama, in his wisdom, doesn’t see the point of it. To me, this encapsulates the difference between JFK and Obama. When it comes to putting men on the moon, JFK said, “Yes we can.” Obama, in yesterday’s budget proposal, said, “No we can’t.”

The Business of America is Government

h/t Powerline.

Another chart:

Postgraduate men and women are Obama’s greatest supporters among gender and educational groups. Obama fares especially well among women with postgraduate education (64%). Whereas postgraduates are the only educational group among men that shows at least 50% approval for Obama, all four educational groups among women do. Also, there are essentially no gender differences among those with a high school education or less, but notable gender gaps at higher education levels.

So after 1 year’s experience of Obama, almost 2/3 of post-graduate women approve.

The news from London

I’m not in London but I’ll post this clip because:

  • When I see this face on a Guardian columnist, I recoil a little, so I’d never before read or watched anything by Charlie Brooker, hence I was curious to see the clip via Hot Air.
  •  The clip has some nice shots of my part of London.
  •  It’s struck a chord in the US, tho British in sensibility.

It’s not about me

Obama is a joke. I would say that, wouldn’t I? I’ve always thought him ludicrous. But even the hyenas are getting the joke:

Stewart:

Dowd on The One:

Someone who’s always game for a game of pickup basketball, loves talking sports and even boasts beefcake photos. A pro-choice phenom propelled into higher office by conservatives, independents and Democrats, a surprise winner with a magical aura.

The New One is the shimmering vessel that we are pouring all our hopes and dreams into after the grave disappointment of the Last One, Barack Obama.

The only question left is: Why isn’t Scott Brown delivering the State of the Union? He’s the Epic One we want to hear from. All that inexperience can really be put to good use here.

Trouble is, truth trumps satire:

And now for something completely different

There are certain phrases that once heard compel one to commit them to memory. One such is “the transformation of 2 stellated rhombic dodecahedrons from a cube”:

The road to serfdom

The squillion dollar stimulus is Obama’s sophomoric tribute to Keynes. The Obamans are so incompetent that much of it won’t get spent, yet much will get squandered on Democrat-friendly bullshit. When you think that 40% of the Federal budget is borrowed money, it’s like watching the biggest binge in history….big government, big wages, big pensions, big public employee voting bloc, big vampire squid on the face of America, big hangover; same in Britain. Keynes was a great thinker…..he was also wrong as this video proves:

Oh well, I may as well add a clip of one of Hayek’s followers. This is from her last speech in the House of Commons. She’d been betrayed by her own party after leading it to 3 successive General Election victories and turning Britain from a dosshouse into a powerhouse. But in defeat she was clad in truth:

UPDATE:

Thatcher’s biggest mark domestically came in economic policy, when she rejected the ideas of the Keynesian social democratic consensus which had informed policy since 1945 in favour of monetarism, inspired by Milton Friedman and FA Hayek. The papers reveal little about the opposition to these heterodox views from the Treasury and other civil servants. Just two weeks after the general election, she was writing to Hayek: “I am very proud to have learnt so much from you over the past few years. […] As one of your keenest supporters, I am determined that we should succeed. If we do so, your contribution to our ultimate victory will have been immense.”

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Now I’m enjoying the lamentations of the Democrats as much as the next man, especially the lamentations of their women, but as I scan down the headlines and the commentary it seems like the Executive Branch has no authority left. This is getting serious.

Reflections on a good week

I had a drink with my neighbour yesterday belatedly to celebrate Chris Christie’s win in New Jersey. On top of that was the Massachusetts win, the apparent death of Obamacare and the Supreme Court re-instatment of free speech for corporations other than media corporations. Some week.

It’s good that Obama is president. Better Obamanism then renaissance than McCainism then decline. The growth of giant government has been sapping the West all my lifetime. Maybe Obama is the culmination of the sickness which provokes America’s immune system, ie its culture and Constitution, to kick in hard and inoculate the body politic against socialism.

For the time being it’s good that the right has no leader; better that the true character of the country should emerge spontaneously. A leader like Gingrich of old or Palin of the future would be a target to distract the aim of the Democrat circular firing squad. For the time being the hobgoblins are mumbling ‘Bush did it’ and ‘teabaggers’ as tho obscenity were argument, which I suppose it is in their circles.

I foresee that blacks who presently vote as a bloc of serfs will move away from mono-politics as they see that Obamanism is a dead-end. Plenty of decent blacks get it that abortion and absent fathers are their modern holocaust not racism. Maybe someone like Allen West will show the way.

As the whiskey kicked in I orated that the NJ Governor needs a vision beyond a tax freeze. NJ is almost the worst state in the Union to do business in thanks to the cancer of big government and big tax, but its natural setting is top-notch; great beaches, 4 seasons, lots of open space, NYC, strong communities outside the statist dependency hatcheries, hours from Britain and Europe, major international airport, entrepot potential thanks to the deeper, wider Panama Canal….
The vision should be a special economic zone something like Shenzen next door to Hong Kong or Eire minus the Euro. The emphasis should be on tax incentives for foreign capital and when I say ‘foreign’ I mean flight capital from California especially. Cutting tax collects more tax; cutting government cuts corruption. Anyway Nj should be thinking like a young ambitious far eastern mercenary state not like a Californian government apparatchik or a tenured academic. Go East, young man, they’ll say in Silicon Valley.

The cherry on the top of last week was a climate change for Anthropogenic Global Scamming. There were grotesque exposés of the shoddiness and bias of the IPCC UN report to the point where there’s talk of taking back its Nobel Prize. Glancing at the comments threads of Warmist organs like the Guardian and the BBC, it seems that hardly anyone defends Warmism any more. Instead of priests intoning ‘settled science’, ‘overwhelming consensus’ and ‘peer review’ there’s an overwhelming consensus that climate scientists and climate journalists were driven by:

  • Peer pressure
  • Fear of ostracism
  • Politics
  • Groupthink
  • Biased models
  • Selective data
  • Superstition
  • Religious impulse
  • Scientism
  • Misanthrope
  • Refusal to admit error
  • It’s where the money is
  • Disinterested enquiry, not so much.

A parliament of scarecrows

Working for the American people

The stock market has dropped 5% in the last 3 days, confounding expectations that Tuesday’s GOP win in Massachusetts would send stocks up. I’m unfazed at the down move anyway as a species of ‘buy the rumour, sell the confirmation’, but the drop is generally blamed on Obama’s Wednesday announcement of a hot war on Wall Street banks. The specifics aren’t there yet, but the general drift is to prevent proprietary trading by banks and to spend time between now and election day in November demonizing bankers. I’ll pass over Obama’s economic illiteracy, but here’s one take in the FT:

Worse, most people do not think Mr Obama can even command unity within his own administration on the Wall Street proposals amid growing speculation about whether Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, can survive in his job. Mr Geithner was conspicuously sidelined during Thursday’s announcement by the presence of Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, who lent his name to the push to rein in Wall Street banks.

The speculation about Mr Geithner is only likely to grow. “The Obama proposals were clearly politically motivated and came from the White House not the Treasury,” says a Democratic adviser to the administration, who withheld his name.

My favourite speculator:

Morning rant #8, Friday news dump – Cancel Peak Oil!

The US Geological Survey has re-assessed Venezuela’s recoverable oil reserves in the Orinoco Belt. Apparently they’re twice as high as we thought and total more than Saudi Arabia. This is heavy oil that’s expensive to produce and treat, but so what? Orinoco oil has much better recovery rates than Canadian heavy oil which is flowing profitably, it’s shallow, it’s onshore and the USGS review uses current technology and geo-knowledge. At the present price of $75/barrel it’s highly economic. If prices drop to make it uneconomic, then by definition we have plenty of oil anyway and the lower prices tend to incentivise cheaper processes. Such vast reserves in America’s backyard can be added to Canada, Brazil and the terrific potential for deep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico + other dramatic oil and gas discoveries in recent years. You could cut the USGS figure by 2/3 and still have ABUNDANCE.

So what could go wrong? There’s Chavez, there’s Latin-American disfunctional nationalism like Mexico’s woeful underperformance since nationalising it’s oil industry in 1938, or the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming might proscribe heavy oil or just oil in general, above all there’s the stupidity and cowardice of the Harvard Faculty Club junta in America.

Meanwhile Iran’s nukes are imminent and Venezuela would be the ideal first stop to proliferate and test American will. While Obama is preening about his base’s right to ‘health care’ and abjectly begging China and Russia for sanctions on Iran and N.Korea as a fig leaf for an actual defence policy, the world’s political tectonic plates are shifting. There’s an earthquake coming and America’s unpreparedness and lack of spine will kill a lot of people. What will happen when Chavez announces he has a nuke and Obama had better shape up? Will the Director of National Intelligence go ‘Duh!‘ and smack his forehead? ‘We’ll do better next time.’ Odd’s bodikins, what a shower of fuckwits!

Anyway price and politics will determine feasibility of extraction…just like on the Alaskan North Slope….and remember, ‘peak oil = peak technology‘.

RIP Marine Sgt Chris Hrbek

Yesterday we all went into town to wave flags at the procession bringing home Chris Hrbek, killed in Afghanistan.

Fallen Marine gets hero’s welcome in his hometown

Massachusetts a day later

The GOP win in Massachusetts is worth a ‘wow!’ now, but in 2 weeks it’ll be worth a ‘wow,wow,wow!’ Scott Brown can be the representative of the ‘independent’, ie decisive, American voter. The big drama isn’t even ‘health care’, it’s that Obama’s authority is shot. Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Virginia, New Jersey, Masssachusetts. At this point he’s an electoral liability. Moreover he can’t get his nominees and he can’t get his legislation and he’s almost universally seen as weak on security. His mannerisms are all he’s got and they look old. Even the MSM is edging away from him or contrasting his legislative nous with GW Bush who got plenty done without Obama’s supermajority. Obama’s past his shelf life after 1 year. Can he pivot like Clinton? Unlikely as he lacks Clinton’s executive experience, comeback experience, common touch and raw intelligence. The best scenario is that he abdicates leadership to a much more conservative Congress post November 2010 and sits in the corner like an elderly relative who’s lost his clout. More probably he’ll wreak havoc with America’s friends and embolden America’s enemies over the next 3 years like Carter.

Oh well, at least let’s enjoy these scoundrels twisting in the wind:

Wherein I clear my spindle

I know what ‘clearing my spindle’ means as a metaphor, but I haven’t found its literal meaning. It sounds healthy tho, so let’s go:

Fake data buries
Science settled like the snow
Outside my window.

I was beaten to 2nd honourable mention by a haiku that will grace anthologies:
      

Fox’s Glacier Mints
Don’t contain real glaciers.
Tossers.

  • While I’ve been hibernating in New Jersey a seal has been cavorting near my apartment in London, 20 miles up the Thames from the sea. This is a big deal and emphasizes how relatively healthy this once toxic river is these days. As Britain’s become richer, the environment’s got cleaner. Who’d a thunk it? Well apart from thee and me, who’d a thunk it?
  • I really liked the action sequences and photography in The Hurt Locker,  a film about a bomb disposal team in Iraq, and the leading character (Jeremy Renner) is sometimes terrific, but this review in Variety pinpoints its weakness:
  • War may be hell, but watching war movies can also be hell, especially when they don’t get to the point. Often gripping at a straight thriller level, but increasingly weakened by its fuzzy (and hardly original) psychology.

    • We’re a day away from the Massachusetts election for US Senate and there’s good hopes for a Republican win. My forecast is Brown (R) +12, higher than the polls which are sample skewed and don’t purport to project momentum. The more one sees and learns of Coakley (D), the worse she looks, and the converse for Brown (aka Hottie McAwesome).



    • Since there hasn’t been a Republican senator for Mass since 1972 and since Obama won Mass +26 and since Coakley was showing +30 in November and since this is a referendum on Obama Year 1 and Obamacare, the Democrats have already lost, even if they win by single low single digits. Such a shift in Mass portends a political earthquake such that ObamaReidPelosi won’t be able to cram their unpolished legislative turds down the throats of their terrified troops in Congress. The least worst thing that can happen to Obama is to lose in Mass and re-tool Obamacare with whatever RINO’s he can bribe. It may too late tho, his authority is so compromised. 
    • I read somewhere that this has been ‘the coldest winter since Global Warming began.’ The whole house of cards of this Scientistic superstition is trembling now, but it’s been a damn close run thing as Wellington said of Waterloo. You could say the same about Obamacare, Obama’s Waterloo….1 senate vote.
    • Dont forget, Massachusettsians, Martin Luther King was Republican. I’m not, but he was, and today is his day, so all you inessential government workers who unaccountably are allowed to vote to tax the rest of us, stay home today and stay home tomorrow. It’s cold out there.

    A tea party for the well-connected and me

    A few shots from the Reclaim American Liberty conference I attended in NYC recently: the speaker in this shot is Andy McCarthy – unanswerable on the upcoming off-Broadway Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Show; far left is General Richard Myers, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – I found his speech and demeanour bureaucratic; second left is Colonel Allen West, congressional candidate – outstanding, succinct, historically literate, an anti-Obama.

    The speaker below is Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General – sharp mind, dry wit, impressive; far left is Claudia Rosett who spoke hilariously about the long-running off-Broadway black comedy called ‘The United Nations’; Mark Steyn is second left.

    I trust that John Bolton’s moustache will be secretary of state in the next Republican administration:
    Mark Steyn is so familiar to me that his tropes might wear thin, but he just gets funnier. The Henry VIII look suits him:

    A good time was had by all. There was a palpable sense of camaraderie and shared purpose. Finally I’ll stress that Col Allen West may be the real deal. If so, watch out:

    Reclaim America Conference – lunchbreak

    More later, but I want to give an instant reaction. Col.Allen West was terrific just now on a range of Nat.Sec. issues. He’s the star so far and I predict that we’ve seen a major political figure of the future. Oh and I’m a couple of chairs away from Steyn!

    Reclaim America Conference

    It’s 8.30am in chilly NYC. I’m sitting in the tony Union League Club on E 37th. Being warned about the dress code, I bought a tie late last night! I wheedled a coveted invite from The Hudson Institute for this conference where the speakers include Mark Steyn, Andrew McCarthy, Michael Mukasey (ex AG), Gen Richard Myers (ex Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff) and other luminaries. As a Briton I’d thought this was about a movement to reclaim our western territories and replace Obama with Elizabeth II. Now, reading the program, I’m not so sure. More later.

    No-fly profile?

    Would you board a plane with this man?

    Subject is:

    • Male
    • Well-educated
    • Islamic name
    • Close association with US domestic terrorist
    • Suppresses basic biographical documents
    • Refuses to wear US flag accessory after 9/11
    • 20 years attending services by radical preacher, motif – ‘God Damn America.’
    • Representative quotes:
    • “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation” *
    • “If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” *
    • “Part of my responsibility .. is to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”

    Review subject’s motives and background.

    * From a 2008 American Religious Identification Survey 76% of Americans self-identify as Christian and 0.6% (1.35 million) as Muslim.

    Idiot’s guide to universal bodyscanning at airports

    1. No terrorist will be caught or deterred.

    2. Air travel will plummet.

    Anthropogenic Global Warming – a word from on high

    ‘Cool’

    The Climate Research Unit, East Anglia, is under a cloud.

    You can download a decent resolution file of this from http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/
    Keywords ‘snow across Great Britain’
    Select 1 pixel = 250m
    I just printed it at A3+ and I’m thrilled.

    Olden but golden

    and now…




    Say what?!

    Your tax dollars at work on NPR:

    The finger


    The Twin Towers (1368ft) were once the tallest buildings. Islamic terrorists destroyed them early in this decade. Today, near the decade’s end, the Burj Dubai (2716ft) is opened. It’s height equals the Twin Towers combined. The symbolism of height and global status is obvious, but unremarked in the West.  


    Burj Dubai is funded by high oil prices, paid by the West to the Arabs. Oil prices are high because Western governments have prevented domestic exploration and production. So there is less oil, more dependence on our enemies and more pollution in the world. The only practical response has been expansion of bio-fuel production at taxpayer expense; hence food shortages because of misallocated land. It’s nice that liberals get to feel virtuous tho. Would that self-approval were an alternative energy source.

    Burj Dubai, a finger in the sky.

    Film of the year, of 2009

    Man of the year 2009

    For repaying insult with silence:

    America, year zero

    Obama reviews 2009:

    Nobel Peace Prize – I feel very humble.

    Copenhagen Global Warming – social democratic police clubbed eco-fascists in a freezing blizzard. How to frame that? Try ‘China dazzled by America’s first black President.’

    Copenhagen Olympics – I was selling Chicago bull.

    Afghanistan – the US military now has a clearly defined objective: do not embarrass me. The Taleban now has a clearly defined objective: wait for 18 months.

    War on Terror – re-branded as ‘lawsuits against mysteriously motivated mass murderers’. Nice alliteration. Somebody tell the Fort Hood guy and the underpants guy and KSM and Dick Cheney.

    Israel – 4 per cent of Israelis think I’m on their side, but the religion of American Jews is Liberalism, so nuts to you, Netanyahu.

    The Poles – I cancelled missile defence in Poland and Putin agreed to spend more on missile offence. We save, they spend. That’s called ‘finesse’ in Harvard.

    The Polls – things change… like voting registers, boundaries, subsidies to the MSM, votes for aliens, votes for convicts, votes for Mickey Mouse.

    The Pols – sing it with gusto: “They can all be bought, tralala.”

    Speaking of Health Care – we bribed our own side’s senators with money borrowed from China to be re-paid by our children so that they can buy compulsory health insurance or go to jail like it says in a penumbra to the Constitution. Yes we can.

    TARP – Bush did it. Wait, it kindasorta looks as tho it worked. I did it.

    The Economy – fuzzy math fixes all.

    Iran – I ran.

    Bah! Humbug! for buddhists

    This has been a low, dishonest year in American politics. To Nile Gardiner’s neat ranking of Obama’s 10 worst foreign policy blunders, I’d add this shining turd of appeasement – cancelling his meeting with the Dalai Lama ‘to keep China happy’.

    Why? 10 reasons:

    1. Appeasement doesn’t work.
    2. Weakness is provocative.
    3. DL has the Congressional Gold Medal, America’s highest civilian award.
    4. In 2008 candidate Obama told President Bush to boycott the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony to protest China’s repression in Tibet.
    5. So did Hillary Clinton, the current SecState.
    6. Nine other Presidents met the DL.
    7. Tibetan patriots in Chinese jails are betrayed.
    8. Iran’s tyrants are emboldened and Iran’s dissidents weakened.
    9. It’s a disgrace to America.
    10 The DL has the Nobel Peace Prize.

    When I was researching for a little talk about Sherpas which I gave this afternoon to my daughter’s 3rd grade class in NJ, I came across this 1950′s shot of the DL (on the right) with Mao before the 1959 clamp down and the DL’s flight from Tibet.

    ‘Arbeit macht frei’

    The sign at the entrance to Auschwitz has been stolen. I took these photos of the bars of a cell window in the punishment block, almost the last sight of many, and of Israeli students leaving through the entrance.

    Prisoners in Auschwitz ridiculed the German cynicism of the slogan by saying Arbeit Macht Frei durch den Schornstein (Work brings freedom through the chimney).

    Negotiating master class

    P121809PS-0285 by The White House.

    “Look, I know we owe you $2 trillion dollars, but we need another couple of t and here’s the hit I need you to take on Global Warming. The world is watching and I need to leave now to beat the blizzard in Washington. Do our DVD’s work in China? Oh, you make them, great. Well contact my office for a box set of my speeches. Sovereignty is so 20th century, don’t you agree?”

    Wen’s loss of face was rewarded by face-time with a flunky:

    The day’s most remarkable feature was a direct and unprecedented personal clash between the US President, Barack Obama, and the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, in which Mr Wen took deep offence at Mr Obama’s insistence – in public – that the Chinese should allow their promised cuts in greenhouse gases to be internationally verified. When the President, in an unyielding speech, said that without international verification “any agreement would be empty words on a page”, that was too much for Mr Wen. He left the conference in Copenhagen’s Bella Centre, returned to his hotel in the city, and responded with a direct snub of his own – he sent low-level delegates to take his place in the talks.

    Popcorn time

    Normally I skip the turgid prose, turgid minds, turgid souls and turgid politics of liberal websites like Huffpo and Kos. There’s a Newspeak dishonesty about them too which soils by association – “Abortion is a woman’s right to choose”; AGW sceptics are “Climate Change deniers”. They usually argue in bad faith and state what they want to be true as tho it were true – dull, dirty stuff that stinks up public discourse. But when liberals start knifing each other it can be entertaining:

    Pour some more butter on the popcorn . . .

    Liberal disillusion with Obama is seeping in and the contrast with the Tea-Parties’ authenticity and the life force of Sarah Palin is painful. Imagine Palin were an insurgent liberal facing a cold fish conservative president. HuffKos would be punching the sky with joy. But the left is stuck with a coool President, but cool as in ‘frigid’, and stuck with cadaverous leaders in Reid and Pelosi. Reid looks and stoops like an undertaker. Pelosi can do “Night of the Living Dead” without make-up. Palin oozes energy, health, fertility and the future. Who ya gonna vote for? Superwoman or Cool Stiff and the Zombies? Couple of clips:

    Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

    But it ain’t my soothsaying:

    Obama, the hero of Chicago’s Round 1 elimination from the Olympics on his last visit to Copenhagen, will jet in as a deus ex machina. We may confidently expect his flight to be diverted by blizzards.

    Guess what:

    World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.

    “Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.”…….Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years, under the DMI’s definition, and only had seven last century

    UPDATE, FURTHER TRAVEL ADVISORY FOR THE PRESIDENT:

    Washington Snowstorm May Snarl Weekend Holiday Shopping, Travel

    Chilly is it? Oh the humanity!

    There is a god and he has a sense of humour. As the Cold, the Bad and the Ugly riot outside the Copenhagen Global Warming summit, some vignettes:

    - Danish police are merrily clubbing the eco-socialist mob, probably grateful for some action to ward off the chill and snow.
    - Gordon Brown is trapped at the conference centre by the protestors.
    - Happy-clappy Warmist enviro-journalists are freezing to death in the queues to get in out of the cold.
    - The Global Scamming Association of backward African kleptocracies has almost given up posturing for “Climate Justice” in the form of squillions of Western taxpayers’ money as reparations for, well, everything. Their walkouts are just pissing everyone off.
    - The global murmuring against the whoring of science grows louder like a train bearing down on a car stuck on a railroad crossing. The Warmist nomenklatura are in that car, probably a stretch limo.
    - And Obama, the hero of Chicago’s Round 1 elimination from the Olympics on his last visit to Copenhagen, will jet in as a deus ex machina. We may confidently expect his flight to be diverted by blizzards.

    This is fast becoming Obama’s role on the world stage: managing disappointment.

    What a hoot!

    Born in the USA…

    ObamaSpringsteenNorway.png

    Meanwhile:

    The Norwegian Nobel committee, which awards the peace prize, dismissed the criticism. “We always knew that there were too many events in the programme. Obama has to govern the US and we were told early on that he could not commit to all of them,” 

    Be careful what you wish for

    Under the Bush yoke, goes the old story, Europe was disrespected by that crass cowboy and America’s better angels hung their heads in shame. Then came the One:

    “It’s very sad,” said Nobel Peace Center Director Bente Erichsen of the news that Obama would skip the peace center exhibit. Prize winners traditionally open the exhibitions about their work that accompany the Nobel festivities. “I totally understand why the Norwegian public is upset. If I could get a few minutes with the president, I’d say, ‘To walk through the exhibition wouldn’t take long, and I’m sure you would love the show. You have no idea what you are missing.’”
    Meanwhile, the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet is reporting that the president has declined an invitation to lunch with King Harald V, an event every prize winner from the Dalai Lama to Al Gore has attended. (The newspaper’s headline: “Obama disses lunch with King Harald.”)
    ….
    “The American president is acting like an elephant in a porcelain shop,” said Norwegian public-relations expert Rune Morck-Wergeland. “In Norwegian culture, it’s very important to keep an agreement. We’re religious about that, and Obama’s actions have been clumsy. You just don’t say no to an invitation from a European king. Maybe Obama’s advisers are not very educated about European culture, but he is coming off as rude, even if he doesn’t mean to.”
    Indeed, judging by statements surrounding the president’s trip to Europe this week, it is beginning to appear as if the European love affair with Obama—which culminated in giving him the Nobel Prize—is over.

    It would be tragic, if it weren’t so funny.
    bush.JPG.jpeg

    The Inaugural Al Gore Poetry Prize

    Here’s a haiku for the Telegraph’s Al Gore Poetry Prize:

    Fake data buries
    Science, settled like the snow
    Outside my window.

    church dees





    Climate Change Denial





    Palling around with journalists

    To echo Mick, ‘my guy’ is Romney – competent, conservative, telegenic, tested, calm under fire But Palin reaches parts other products don’t reach; she embodies the America I respect and she’s the Cross that repels vampires. Palin’s knockout act at the Gridiron Club was a revelation to the Beltway journos. Apart from the dynamism of her life force in contrast to the stasis of Obama, the hacks need Palin to spice up their product. Obama was the anointed One, but he’s languished limp as arugula. Palin can take a punch or a hundred punches and rise up stronger. She is the one people want to read and write about, whether it’s slander or praise. A prospective title fight between Palin and Obama could sell political journalism for the next 3 years. Carville gets it:

    By the way Mary Matalin’s Letters to my Daughters is excellent.

    "Man made" is right

    Anthropogenic Global Scamming – a simple model:



    Hmmm…for ‘honest’ read ‘culpably gullible and intellectually disgraced‘.

    Nigel and the dragon

    What is the big theme binding these political phenomena of 2009?

    Tea Parties
    Palin’s resurgence
    Obama’s shrinkage
    The fightback against Anthropogenic Global Scamming
    The electoral success of UKIP, UK Independence Party, principle policy-leave the EU.

    The theme is that those, the governed, who haven’t been bought off by Big Government and who still have folk memories of freedom and citizenship, are saying “Enough, too much.”

    In the UK we have many repellent, parasitic bosses, but probably the most repellent is the EU….one of the most successful scams in history. Talk about “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” This EU squid wears a t-shirt that reads “we’re sucking you dry for your own good.” Imagine a supra-national constitution imposed on 27 nations by 27 governments without a single referendum. Oh, there was one in Ireland, but it gave the wrong answer, so there was re-run after suitable pressure points had been pushed. Into this swamp wades Nigel Farage, until recently the leader of UKIP. an elected MEP, to taunt the Vampire Squid in its chamber on the matter of the new EU President and Foreign Minister, 2 unelected nobodies:

    Being Barack

    You’ve just given a major speech at West Point. The military audience were stony-faced or asleep, quite unresponsive to the Commander-In-Chief’s outline of a new doctrine of war – fight and run. Is that in Clausewitz? Sun Tzu maybe? Being called “the enemy camp” by Chris Matthews won’t help the mood in West Point and beyond. What’s next? Copenhagen. A friendly camp. You can jerk-off with the Greens and the bien pensant euro-trash bureaucrats who make up your most committed base. Too bad everyone’s snickering behind their hands now that the words “Global Warming Scam” light up the sky like an aurora borealis. Good job it’s long been re-branded “Climate Change”. The dummies will never figure that out. Well maybe a few in Congress. Still your flacks can blame Australia and you can polish your halo. Then what? The Nobel Peace Prize. Ugh. You would have rejected it, but you got the call at 3am and it sounded good at the time. Every day there’s new negative poll. Aren’t these pollsters patriotic? They used to be. And why won’t the Iranians make nice? Don’t they see you’re their friend? Who loves you, Barack? Hillary? Bill? Sarkozy? Brown? Zelaya? Jesse Jackson? The gays? The jews? The gay jews? Auntie Obama? Sure, she has a vote or two. Chavez loves you. And Castro. And Ghadaffy. Maybe the media will love you again if you send them money…tax breaks, ads, exemption from anti-trust. Sounds like a plan. Damn! Health care! Like that British climate scientist said in the email “Oh MAN! Will this crap never end?”

    I’d feel sorry for you. Being Barack can be a bitch. Then I recall your agency in preventing a mandate to help babies who survive abortion. Then I don’t feel sorry for you.

    West Point – the enemy camp

    For the avoidance of doubt:

    Family guy

    Who said this?

    I loved President Bush. He is my No. 1 man in my life because he helped me when I really needed that help.

    It was Auntie Obama, arrived in USA in 2000, ordered out in 2002, ordered deported in 2004, now awaiting a re-hearing of her already adjudicated plea for political asylum from Kenya while living in public housing in Boston. She used to visit state senator Obama who must have been studiedly incurious about how come she lives in America. I don’t blame him really, but it gives me pause on his frame of mind for immigration law.

    Who said this?

    I am a Christian.

    It was Grandma Obama, now in Mecca on the Hajj paid for by Saudi King Abdullah.

    I like Obama’s Auntie and Grandma. They seem feisty, decent people, albeit protective of the family’s black sheep.

    Obiter dicta

    1. I was sent this Newt Gingrich quote today:

    I am not so shocked that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize without any accomplishments to his name, but that America gave him the White House based on the same credentials.

    2. From the Telegraph blogsite a comment from ‘sunnysocal’:

    Wow, you guys are my new favorite News website. I haven’t heard or read a thing about this Manhattan Declaration. I was also reading the posts by James Delingpole regarding global warming. Time and time again I have to read the English news websites for information regarding things that the MSM in the US don’t want us to know about.

    I do agree and the Telegraph blog home is a good pointer to a lot of good stuff. Matt Drudge is an avid Daily Mail linker and the Delingpole post referred to in the Telegraph is today’s top left link on Drudgereport, tho it was linked on Anatreptic 3 days ago. Journalism school hardly exists in Britain. Go figure.

    This weekend, the end of an affair

    Who wrote this?

    If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama’s presidency so far, it would read:

    Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.

    Answer.

    And who’s less than thrilled?

    And mordant satire, no less, as the Chinese premier adopts the position familiar to Saturday Night Live:

    So, what is going on? Dowd, Matthews, Saturday Night Live are liberal curs, but they are curs even before they are liberal and they can tell when the wind has turned and they can turn with the wind:

    Anthropogenic Global Scamming – today’s crib sheet

    Upton Sinclair:

    It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.

    Powerline:

    A CEO is going to hire a new accountant and summons a series of candidates. He asks each applicant, “What is two plus two?” The first two candidates answer, “Four.” They don’t get the job. The third responds, “What do you want it to be?” He gets hired.

    James Delingpole: The final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

    Popular Technology: 450 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of “Man-Made” Global Warming.

    9/11 – the director’s cut

    The perverted decision to try the illegal combatant, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, in a civil court in New York City is such an Obaman blunder that little further comment is necessary:

    I speculate that the DoJ left-wing lawyers from Holder down foresaw an opportunity to put Bush and Cheney on trial using KSM as their tool. Waterboarding could be criticized for excluding evidence and Obaman respect for due process a la Harvard Law School contrasted with cowboy justice. But they didn’t think it thru, did they? Bush and Cheney now shine thru as resolute, effective defenders of America, while the Obamans look like agenda-driven political mice, squeaking about DoJ protocols to justify the unjustifiable.

    Bear in mind that most of the Obamans have no experience running anything, so decision-taking is something they make up on the fly. When the decision looks bad have Holder say he didn’t consult Obama, just told him, then Obama say he told Holder to decide and add that he takes responsibility for everything when pressed. Wouldn’t it be nice to say “It’s above my pay grade” again?

    Another day, another ludicrous decision. Meanwhile Obama’s “very close to a decision” on Afghanistan – in or out? win or retreat? God help the poor grunts who have to implement this naif’s decisions. God help us all who have this fraud-for-President deciding how to cope with a nuclear Iran.

    Toxic asses

    In the UK the socialist/opportunist Labour government has stunk up the country for the last 12 years and now smells of death itself. Even its apparatchiks in the media are sick of it. A General Election must be held by May 2010 and the Conservatives seem threatened only from the right by the anti-EU UK Independence Party and from the far left by the British National Party, a semi-fascist outfit with racist roots which taps into valid concerns about immigration, Islamism, multiculturalism and political correctness. Under such stress it’s only natural for Gordon Brown to revert to his core instinct – envy. So the centre-piece of Labour’s programme is…wait for it…a jihad against bankers’ bonuses with overt threats to legislate to tear up existing contracts. This is self-evidently monstrous in a free society, but so now are other laws on stuff like ‘hate-speech’ and shutting down adoption agencies which refuse to collaborate with homosexual adoption.

    Anyway let me use the bankers’ bonus hook to hang up a concise statement of what just happened:

    The financial debacle was due to the generation of toxic assets, presided over in the UK by those toxic asses – Chancellor Gordon Brown and Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

    The toxic assets were derivatives of mortgages. The mortgage bubble in America was generated by racist left-wing legislation and blackmail plus government mandated underpricing of risk via artificially cheap credit. The whole crap sandwich is wrapped in a depraved level of government debt which essentially funds the pensions of today’s government workers and bribes Democratic and Labour voters with money borrowed from China to be repaid by future generations. It’s like Saturn devouring his children. In the UK Saturn is Brown. In the US Saturn is Obama. The children are our children.

    Lachrymose ‘gay’ Chicago liberals for Bush

    ..and Cheney! If appreciation of Bush, especially in contrast to Obama, becomes ‘gay’ liturgy, then the ground is moving. The comments here are as revealing as this post:

    robert c Says:

    November 11, 2009 at 9:03 am
    Well stated guys. I am growing ever fonder of old W the longer Bean Pole and Ms. Bitchy occupy his old Pennsylvannia Ave. diggs. It was pretty disturbing to watch how the MSM and the uber liberal banshees would malign W every chance they got. Now to watch them disembowel themselves every time someone criticizes the latest zOmbie policy makes me quiver with laughter. GWB had the courage of his convictions. We may not have always agreed with everything he did, but here was a president who didn’t gauge his every move by opinion polls or party politics. He was unfairly blamed for many things not under his control. I lived in New Orleans during Katrina and know full well most of the inaction and stupidity that caused widespread heartache could definitvely be laid on the doorstep of Blanco and Nagin. ( two matching pieces of wet toast if there ever was a set ) W has been nothing but a class act especially since his retirement. I roared with approval over a recent article entitled “What if George Bush had done this”. OMG talk about hitting the ole nail squarely on its head. Made me want to glue a copy of the article onto closet case Anderson Cooper’s forehead and give him some real 360. Thank you Mr. President & Laura for the visit to Ft. Hood, for your caring, concern and constant nobility.

    Reply
    Barbara Says:

    November 11, 2009 at 9:25 am
    What a great article you have written. When Bush grabbed the bullhorn and made those comments at the WTO, with his arm around the fireman…it was a great moment.

    The Fireman actually teared up too.

    I had differences with Bush on somethings, and I believe our soldiers gave him much respect…something I doubt is happening now with Obama.

    I truly believe Obama doesn’t like the military and you don’t see any emotion from him when he talks about them….the only emotion you see from him, is when he speaks to ACORN & SEIU!

    I feel for those soldiers that have to fight under him!

    Bush & Laura actually showed their compassion, without having cameras around all the time.

    I join you in thanking them.

    Reply
    ssmith Says:

    November 11, 2009 at 9:28 am
    After loathing George Bush and Dick Cheney for so long, I am realising how wrong I was about this man, especially when compared to the America-loathing Marxist-in-chief in the WH now.
    Same for Dick Cheney, couldn’t stand the man, now I realise he did everything he had to do to keep this country safe.

    I cannot believe how the MSM misrepresents everything, I used to listen to them, watch them… here idiots like charlie gibson and george stenospous spout their opinions.. now, it has NO impact on my opinions of anything.
    I saw this utter-bias reporting against Hillary and then against Sarah Palin. F U Brian williams and the rest of the MSM!! No one believes a word you say anymore!

    Thank you to the Bushes for their caring, these are genuine Americans who love their country and the US military. God Bless them both.

    Another comment:

    It’s a mystery

    As Obama scrupulously suspends judgement over the possible motive of the Fort Hood mass murderer, another enigma, the DC sniper, John Allen Muhammad, was gently put to sleep last night. He died peacefully, “calm and stoic, defiant to the end.” His motives are a mystery too:

    Answers to why he and a teenage accomplice methodically hunted people going about their daily chores, why he chose his victims, including a middle schooler on his way to class, and how many there were went to the grave with him.

    Maybe there’s a clue in the drawings of Muhammad’s pupil assassin:


    Muhammad was a member of Nation of Islam, whose head, Minister Louis Farrakhan points out:

    if it were in fact a Black-White hate thing, why would he shoot five persons of color–one an Indian and four Blacks and one a child?

    Ok, irony aside, let’s re-state the bleeding obvious:

    1. A principle motive was “Jihad”, Islamist war on infidels. His accomplice says so and there’s ample evidence in Muhammad’s history.
    2. Most of the media are lying about it thru suppressio veri, partly from motives of avoiding a backlash against innocent muslims, partly as reflexive propaganda to support a “social justice” narrative about who is victim, who is oppressor.
    3. The US government, whose first duty is the safety of America, is lying about it to avoid having to discriminate against a thought system that wants to overthrow Western, Christian, Enlightenment inspired society in favour of Islam. That was so with Bush as well as Obama.
    4. Obama is a special case. Tho he is a conscious socialist, his affinity to Islam is less direct. He is acculturated to Islam, the son of a muslim, the stepson of a muslim, educated in an Islamic school, fiercely supported by American muslims, especially Louis Farrakhan. Furthermore Obama is a product of the Frankfurt/Alinsky/Gramsci school of re-modelling human society. Islam and the Left apparently are antithetical, but actually are natural allies embodied in Barack Hussein Obama. They have the same goal – to command speech, thought and family life; and the same enemy – us.

    More Ralph Peters – “At some point you just need to knock off the BS”:

    "And I am ready to puke"

    Muslim shouts ‘Allahu Akbar’, guns down 44 soldiers in Texas; President Obama says motive is uncertain:

    We don’t know all the answers yet and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.

    White policeman arrests black Harvard professor on a rant: President Obama says:

    I think it’s fair to say, No. 1, any of us would be pretty angry.No. 2, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And No. 3 — what I think we know separate and apart from this incident — is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.

    These people are just wired differently from me

    In making his concession speech, Democratic governor Jon Corzine was consoling his followers when he said, “My mother is probably the only one that’s happy tonight. She’s a Republican. She’s 93 years old so, we’re not going to worry too much about that.”

    The line got a big laugh.

    h/t Stephanie Guttman

    Slapdash thoughts from London at 7am on Christie winning NJ

    Thank God! Maybe Christie is wishywashy on policy, but Obama/Corzine is toast. I’ll celebrate in NJ with friends and family in a couple of weeks. This will hasten the exodus from NY to NJ. Above all I want the state-dependent black cities in NJ to get their funding withdrawn. It simply pays them to be peons and underperform their whole lives in return for a tainted vote. By geography and talent NJ should be one of the most dynamic, attractive places in the world. Great beaches, lots of open space, family friendly towns, urbanity, international access, interesting weather but not too interesting. Instead NJ’s been stuck with a vicious corruptocracy, keeping the middle-class on life support. Hope and change…we’ll see. Christie’s number 1 job should be to make stealing elections harder. Next de-fund government and attract investment. That means cutting taxes and getting a head start in the competition with the rest of the USA, especially the North-Eastern socialist states.

    BTW Mick’s quite right in his characterization of brainwashed attitudes to the National Health Service in the UK. This is no exaggeration:

    In other western democracies like Canada and the UK, government-run health care is a very, very sacred cow, no matter how obviously dysfunctional the system is and no matter how many people have to die to keep every bureaucrat in their job.

    I’d add that NJ’s health care is pretty disfunctional too. The abstract answer is to get government out of health care. Result – plenty of liberal sob stories, personal responsibility, better health, richer people, voluntary charity.

    Anyway down with thieves and liars and let me have men around me who are fat!

    Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look

    CAESAR
    Let me have men about me that are fat;
    Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights:
    Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
    He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
    ANTONY
    Fear him not, Caesar; he’s not dangerous;
    He is a noble Roman and well given.
    CAESAR
    Would he were fatter!

    CANDIDATUS CHRISTIE
    At least man up and say I’m fat.

    Make my day

    We quite often see famous people in my part of London. I’ve snapped David Blaine, Mike Myers (Austin Powers), Cameron Diaz and others. One evening I left my apartment to be confronted by packed-up plain-clothes guarding the Clintons and Blairs who were dining across the street when the men were both in power. I’m usually blasé about celebrities unless it’s Margaret Thatcher. I’m forever in mourning that I wasn’t Shakespeare’s contemporary and amanuensis. He lived, wrote and acted in these parts. But the news that Clint Eastwood was rumoured to be shooting in the area sent a thrill up my leg. He’s been filming at Elephant and Castle, London, SE1, next to where I play football. I wasn’t around but here’s a couple of shots I found:

    I wonder if Clint knows that he was shooting on the ground where Charlie Chaplin grew up. I have a lead that he’ll be a couple of minutes from my apartment in a few days. If I can shoot him with my 300mm it will make my day! Woohoo!

    New Jersey fashion

    This takes a minute to download.

    Englewood, NJ, is one of the most copacetic suburbs I know. If Christie beats Corzine in a couple of weeks then northern New Jersey may be flooded with boat people from NYC, fleeing Big Tax. The NJ coastguard will be rescuing raft people from the West River and returning them weeping to the West Side Highway where Bloomberg and Paterson will be waiting with greedy grins.

    The guy in the striped shorts is a star, but Poncho Lady at 2.20 has a smile from Central Casting in the sky.




    "Libtard" is a euphemism


    The headline in Reuters is:

    U.S. healthcare system wastes up to $800 billion a year

    The story starts:

    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday.

    Ok, pass over the artificial, incestuous foundation of this specimen of government propaganda. Take it at face value; only community organizers and journalists would see waste elimination as an argument for new spending. Waste is what you eliminate, spending other people’s money is what you have to justify. Duh.

    The “study” omits how much of the waste arises from government healthcare now. So let’s decide on a show of hands….Lots?….. I see a sea of hands. So the libtards argue that the answer to a chronically wasteful system is to giantize that system. “Retards”, I don’t think so. “Fuckwits”, is the working term. In truth that’s too kind. It’s not only fuckwittedness that’s driving Obama (tho that does apply to most of his voters), it’s a wish to tear America down and re-build it in a way that elites and victim groups can boss productive individuals.

    What was Sarkozy’s mistake?

    Good piece on Sarkozy’s disillusionment with Obama:

    “There is room for the two of us,” he said, expecting his enthusiastic embrace of American values, which carries political risks at home, to pay dividends in Washington.

    Let’s do a quick check on how America’s relations with the world have improved since Obama:

    France – Ignored. Ignored! You may dislike a Frog, but you may not ignore him. Amour propre and all that; Obama should understand. Hear what the French say about US policy towards Iran:

    singes mangeurs de fromage

    UK – Special relationship no more. Churchill bust returned immediately. DVD of Hollywood movies doesn’t work. British military heroism in Afghanistan counts the same as that of US military heroism in the Administration’s reckoning. That may not be a good thing.

    Canada – Stephen Harper, Uncle Sam needs you. Please invade.

    Czech Republic, Poland – Small far away countries of which we know little. Call them at midnight to abandon land-based missile defence.

    Flyover America – Far away country of which we know little.

    Italy – Run by a bogeyman. Don’t shake his hand.

    Iranian democrats facing torture and murder- Don’t meddle.

    Honduran democrats – Meddle.

    Israel – Yes, Israel. We need to talk about Israel.

    Ok, I’m being flippant, but truth is flippanter than fiction. The flipped finger, the smirk, the absent handshakes, the body language, the insulting gifts…all the graceless details point the same way; the longer a country has been allied to the USA, the less the Obamans like that country.

    But look on the bright side. The USA is much, much closer to Ghadaffy, Chavez, Castro, the 12th Imamists in Iran, the Sudanese terrorist government, the Nobel Peace Prize committee, the UN.

    Reality is beyond satire. Americans who still support Obama because he’s charming or because he’s black or because he’s not George Bush (who of course had excellent personal relations with Blair, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Harper and America’s traditional allies), or because he’s improved America’s standing in the world, those Americans don’t need therapy, they need a metaphorical slap round the head. If history is a guide that’s what they’ll get, but it won’t be so metaphorical.

    As Obama dithers about Afghanistan let me cite a finer Hamlet:

    It is not nor it will not come to good.

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

    Superlatively bad:

    -A narcissistic liar is President.
    -The US military risk their lives under the command of a dithering political coward who empathizes with America’s enemies.
    -Corrupt elitists command the levers of power and can gerrymander elections, media coverage and corporate behaviour.

    Superlatively good:

    -The toxic nature of liberalism is apparent.
    -What is left of America’s political immune system is at action stations.
    -Polls are trending right.
    -Obama’s fairy dust has turned into buffoon dust. He’s less feared than ridiculed.
    -This is fun.

    Would you risk your life on the say-so of this Commander-In-Chief?

    Gates:

    It’s just a matter now of getting the time with the president when we can sort through these options and then tee them up for him to make a decision

    Weakness is provocative

    The USA is represented by Obama and Clinton, the weakest, most appeasing American politicians in my lifetime. They betray America’s allies, humiliate America to Russia and in return:

    Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Kremlin’s security council, said the new doctrine offers “different options to allow the use of nuclear weapons, depending on a certain situation and intentions of a would-be enemy. In critical national security situations, one should also not exclude a preventive nuclear strike against the aggressor.”

    What’s more, Patrushev said, Russia is revising the rules for the employment of nukes to repel conventionally armed attackers, “not only in large-scale, but also in a regional and even a local war.”

    Make them pay for breathing

    Ryanair is the most successful airline in the world. Here’s why:

    Wag The Dog

    I’ll keep this short. Maybe the crescendo of failures by Obama, topped by this very public humiliation by the IOC, calls for a script rewrite if he wants to avoid being a joke figure for the rest of his presidency. The obvious plot twist is to hit Iran. I don’t think Obama has the guts to order the the USAF into battle alone, but he’d let Israel take most of the risk and try to claim some glory from a logistical support role for the USA.

    Chicago is out!? Chicago is out!?

    I’ll refrain from joyful comment except for this I just read:

    Obama thinks America sucks, and now the IOC agrees with him.

    Too good to check

    Tehran, 22 Sep 2009:

    Iran’s sole Simorgh AWACS aircraft was lost during a military parade Sept. 22, one of two Iranian military aircraft that crashed in Tehran while participating in a display to mark the anniversary of the start of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.

    The Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force operated a single Simorgh, a former Iraqi Air Force Adnan. The Adnan AWACS was in turn a modification of a Soviet-built Ilyushin Il-76 transport.
    The Simorgh collided with one of the Air Force’s Northrop F-5E Tiger II fighters over the area of the Imam Khomeyni Shrine, southern Tehran.

    As well as the poetry of the Iranian airforce taking a nosedive onto Ayatollah Khomeini’s mausoleum, it’s noteworthy that Israel is up against 34 year old fighter planes, unless, that is, Obama orders the USAF to intercept Israeli bombers en route to Iran. I wouldn’t put it past him. If you were Netanyahu, how much notice would you give the Obamans of an impending strike on Iranian nukes?

    Obaman exceptionalism

    I’ve long been disgusted by everything on Planet Obama, but the videos of Acorn officers conspiring to abet the rape of children made me sit up. When you pile it up… the Black Panthers, Rev Wright, Acorn running the Census, preventing the treatment of babies that survive abortion, palling with terrorists, no birth certificate, few primary source documents, Van Jones, Auntie Obama, Charlie Rangel, donations from ‘A.Hitler’, pervasive tax evasion, pervasive racism, und und und…I don’t conclude that this government is the winner in a culture war.

    I conclude that it’s a criminal racket.

    Script rewrite


    Rumours of conservatism’s death have been exaggerated

    Also of The New York Times hardback, non-fiction bestseller list, numbers 1,3,4,5,7 are by conservatives. There are no liberal books in the top 15.  Glenn Beck is top of the paperback list. 

    H/t Hotair.

    I, "Birther"

    ‘Birther’ is the name given to someone who wants Presidential candidates to show that they are ‘natural born citizens’ as required under the Constitution. The name is meant to carry the connotation of ‘Truther’, someone who understands that the Truth about 9/11 is that Bush and Cheney bombed the Pentagon. In the same way “Climate Change Denier” carries a bad smell across from “Holocaust Denier.”

    Conservative opinion formers like NRO, Powerline, John Hawkins have reflexively dissociated themselves from the audacious idea that Obama is not a natural born citizen, but the tenor of rational commentary by the readers of these articles is that something smells bad. Perhaps the readers feel less peer pressure on this charged subject.

    Now the esteemed Andrew McCarthy has revised his stance in a must-read article, “Suborned in the USA.” The point of McCarthy’s article is that Obama is acting like he’s ineligible.

    He is shown to have lied materially in his autobiography and to have produced a certification of live birth which means nothing.

    He is asked to permit Hawaii to release a routine document often required for business throughout US life in order to show that he is a legitimate President under the Constitution – the certificate of live birth.

    In McCain’s case there was full discovery and Congressional hearings.

    He spends serious money to avoid doing that and to avoid producing other elementary primary biographical documents. It seems he’s covering something up, tho not necessarily his place of birth.

    There’s an anxiety to corral the issue as a tin-foil hat or racist fantasy – ie to make it unrespectable to require that the President show his birth certificate. Bill Maher in the LA Times:

    it’s so important that we the few, the proud, the reality-based attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This isn’t a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It’s sentient beings versus the lizard people, and it is to them I offer this deal: I’ll show you Obama’s birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin’s high school diploma.

    For this purpose it doesn’t matter what Obama’s politics are and I’d say the same were it Romney or Palin or Ron Paul. There’s an incipient move in Congress to require this elementary qualifying documentation for future candidates. This matters for the 2012 election as well as the deeper Constitutional principle.

    Hope, change, race – all irrelevant.

    UPDATE: see also.

    Down from slavery

    The parallel lives of 2 mixed race Americans, Barack Obama and Booker T. Washington, show how degraded has become the once honourable cause of racial equality. President Obama be-clowned himself over the arrest of his Irish-Yoruba friend, Harvard professor “Skip” Gates, “the nation’s most famous black scholar”, “public intellectual”.

    Booker T. wrote 100 years ago:

    There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs-partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

    Update h/t Powerline: Cambridge Police Profiling Still A Grim Reality for Harvard Faculty Assholes

    Because it pays

    Spread that wealth around:

    “Mr Brown was the first black man ever to stand for Mayor of Alligator and it took Mr Obama’s election to galvanise him into action….After 30 years, I didn’t think an African-American would be able to be mayor. I didn’t think the position was open to me. When he won, I decided that I knew the changes that needed to be made here and I thought that I could make those changes.
    “If we don’t look after our youth, what do we have? The population is dying out and I want more people here. I want better living conditions.
    I just want the people to be comfortable. Small towns like this depend on government funding and that’s what we’re seeking.
    “I mingle with a lot of the young kids here in the community because if you deal with the people and their problems you understand more what’s going on if you’re out with them.”
    The town’s facilities were substandard, he said, gesturing towards the humble town hall, where a “No Loitering” sign is nailed next to the door. “There isn’t even a phone or a fax machine in there. How can we communicate with the outside world and ask for things?”

    European anti-Americanism in the Age of Obama

    Some thoughts on a Powerline post:

    Writing as a Briton with American children who have both Jewish and ‘aryan’ German antecedents, I think that anti-Americanism is strongest in Germany (looking outside America, that is) and motivated by inferiority complex and unexpiated shame. The main attraction of Obama is that he is weakening America and apologizing for America’s sheer rottenness, as he sees it. That brings America much closer to Germany. America’s alleged war-crimes are totemic to Germans for the same reason. The mood music from Obama on the moral equivalence of Israel to the Palestinians is music to Teutons too.

    Britons (I prefer that to ‘Brits’ which rhymes with ‘shits’) don’t have a complex about this stuff. Once there may have been a slight inferiority complex, but we solved that when all we snaggle-toothed, snaggle-brained charmers took your most beautiful women. The BBC is a problem. It has it’s own vast, childish, depraved agenda and over the decades that has infected the British middle-class…..but we have a robust press compared to America and even The Guardian is more heterogeneous than the New York Times. Moreover there’s just too much mingling between the USA and the UK for false stereotypes to fool most of the people most of the time unless those caricatures pervade the US media as with Bush and Palin. The mother lode of anti-Americanism is to be found in America.

    An example of the mingling is British accents on American ads when there’s no British association. It’s as tho British accents, even regional British accents, were just regional American accents. We’re starting to speak the same sports language too as soccer sweeps America (I know, I know, it’s hardly on tv, but in Houston, NYC and NJ where I’ve lived it’s by far the most played sport). If the USA were playing England today, the USA would be favourite to win.

    I also have high hopes for the reported friendship between our Queen and your First Lady. Despite Mrs Obama’s affirmative action background, life changes people and the simple friendship of an older and younger mother can be a mighty force in this naughty world. Obama and Prince Philip next?

    The French, I detect, are actually pro-American, but even more strongly pro-French and need to be assured of their own importance. Obama really should have dined with the Sarkozys at the top of the Eiffel Tower. There’s never been a bigger bang for a diplomatic buck than that chance to butter up the President of France and Obama frivolously threw it away. Quel dommage!

    We could take it country by country….Russia, India….but the rule is that most elites want a weaker America in order to raise their own self-esteem. Obama’s really effective at that, so he’s the man. As America switches from hyper-power to has-been and aborts and apologizes and borrows it’s way out of history, so the anti-Americanism will become disdain and mockery. But Osama is right..men back the strong horse and Islam looks like that. My guess is that the Islamic power will not be Middle Eastern, but will be France or Germany or Russia. They won’t be apologizing.

    Palin post-resignation

    Sarah Palin generates more emotion than any American politician. That’s because it’s hard to invent a character more threatening to modern liberals and their faux-conservative pets like Colin Powell. She’s authentic, they’re cosmetic; she’s fertile, they’re sterile; she’s brave, they have bravado; she smiles, they sneer; she hunts, they snare; she has natural intelligence, they have a law degree; she believes in God, they believe in Obama. Look at her experience – from nothing to mayor to governor to vp nominee; mother of a soldier, mother of an unwed mother, mother of a Down’s baby, grandmother, beauty queen, hoopster, hunter, journalist, wife, businesswoman, icon. She overshadows Obama even when he’s meeting Putin – ok I’ll sling in the obvious on auto-pilot: suppose Palin had said “President Putin”.

    The woman is a rebuke to everything that modern liberals cherish and they know it and loath it as they loath the truth about themselves. Their religion is growth through gratification and approval; she embodies duty, service and parental love; she’s a follower of Christ, damn it. She believes that stuff. She has a servant’s heart.

    The most telling meme against her isn’t that she’s a quitter. Her whole life refutes that. It’s her supposed inadequacy in the politics of the wider world. Well her understanding of economics is as complete as it needs to be:

    “President Obama is growing government outrageously, and it’s immoral and it’s uneconomic, his plan that he tries to sell America. His plan to “put America on the right track” economically, incurring the debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we’re passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn’t even make economic sense.”

    The rest is detail. Apart from getting elected Obama has shown himself mega-wrong about strategy, tactics and morality in everything he’s touched – a clown as vp, a tax evader running tax, a racialist to the Supreme Court, even-handedness between murderers and democrats in Iran, meddling in Honduras, palling around with Chavez, equivocating between Israel and the demonic gangsters who ruin the Palestinians, showing weakness to Russia, undermining allies…it’s endless. Obama is the worst President, but may be necessary to provoke America to throw off its sickness. Meanwhile Europe and Britain are turning right.

    Let us now praise famous men

    The be-medalled one on the right has never seen combat. The lapel-pinned one on the left, saluting like a pro, has never been in the military, but he has been a community organizer and commander-in-chief. He has views on lapel pins like the one he’s wearing today at the D-Day celebrations:

    Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security. I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.

    These folk are phonies of course, but there was one real person who wasn’t invited, someone who did serve in WWII, Queen Elizabeth II. She wasn’t invited because Sarkozy wanted the D-Day anniversary to be a Sarkozy-Obama event and Brown didn’t want to be upstaged. Prince Charles was a last minute insertion as the British public became scandalized. This phoney-fest was memorable however. British veterans booed Gordon Brown:

    The veterans booed him because it is thought that Downing Street encouraged Sarkozy to not invite the Queen so that he could get another photo-op with Obama. The Obama obsession seems evidenced by the Prime Mentalist’s renaming of ‘Omaha beach’ to ‘Obama beach’

    Gordon Brown is a dead man walking in British politics and it’s possible that today will be the last straw for the cowardly, callow, careerists who have been running my country for the last 12 years, so that they finally defenestrate him.

    Scatalogical humour

    Click on London-SE1 for a tableau in front of Tower Bridge and St Paul’s:

    Lies,damned lies,statistics and Hope and Change

    In the last few days the yield on US government debt has risen dramatically. Lenders are reluctant. Today the decline in the value of the dollar accelerates as gold, oil and Sterling surge up. The US has 4-8-12 more years of Harvard Law School economics to endure, whereas the UK government will be replaced within a year by the Conservatives. So while the credit agencies put the UK on credit watch with negative implications but re-affirm the US as triple-A, the markets realize that in the UK there’s hope for change whereas in the US there’s Hope and Change. Some difference.

    I’ve queried America’s credit worthiness for a while, eg “A trillion here, a trillion there…” , but I’m not as polite as the Chinese:

    Another global financial crisis triggered by a loss of confidence in the dollar may be inevitable unless the U.S. saves more, said Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank adviser.

    It’s “very natural” for the world to be concerned about the U.S. government’s spending and planned record fiscal deficit, Yu said in e-mailed comments yesterday relating to a visit to Beijing by U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

    The Obama administration aims to reduce the fiscal deficit to “roughly” 3 percent of gross domestic product from a projected 12.9 percent this year, Geithner reaffirmed today. The treasury secretary added that China’s investments in U.S. financial assets are very safe, and that the Obama administration is committed to a strong dollar.

    It may be helpful if “Geithner can show us some arithmetic,” said Yu. “We need to know how the U.S. government can achieve this objective.”

    The deficit is projected to reach $1.75 trillion in the year ending Sept. 30 from last year’s $455 billion shortfall, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

    By happy chance today GM files for bankruptcy, but will be kept afloat with money borrowed from China to be repaid by our children to the advantage of the UAW and the disadvantage of Americans who work for Ford, Honda, Toyota.

    Black is white

    Would Obama have been ok with this from Hillary Clinton?

    “I would hope that a wise Latina white woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white mixed race male who hasn’t lived that life.”

    No.

    Stack that with Sotomayor’s perfunctory denial of equality under the law to whites in Ricci v. DeStefano and her tittering affirmation that policy is made in Appeal Courts and her leadership role in La Raza (The Race) and it seems that she’s either a racist, a chauvinist or a pc hack or all of the above. Everyone knows that there’s no way a conservative could overcome such a record to be appointed to The Supreme Court and no Senator who puts country before politics should approve this awful nomination.

    Ironically liberals have their doubts too since no-one knows her view on Roe v. Wade. As a betting man I’m happy to take long odds against this nomination succeeding. Note that The Supreme Court will probably rule on Ricci v. Destefano before Senate hearings are complete. Whatever the ruling, it will include excoriating commentary upon the injustice of Sotomayor’s judgement from judges who believe in equality before the law. Just one memorable phrase in that commentary can sink the nomination of this casual racist. Chief Justice Roberts was definitive in 2007:

    The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race

    I do have mixed feelings since something tells me that Sotomayor, once appointed, might decide that Roe v. Wade was a mistake. She is Catholic after all and would make 6 Roman Candles out of the 9. But I nominate another Puerto Rican from the South Bronx, Judge José Cabranes, who wrote of Sotomayor’s judgement in Ricci:

    This per curiam opinion adopted in toto the reasoning of the District Court, without further elaboration or substantive comment, and thereby converted a lengthy, unpublished district court opinion, grappling with significant constitutional and statutory claims of first impression, into the law of this Circuit. It did so, moreover, in an opinion that lacks a clear statement of either the claims raised by the plaintiffs or the issues on appeal. Indeed, the opinion contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at he core of this case, and a casual reader of the opinion could be excused for wondering whether a learning disability played at least as much a role in this case as the alleged racial discrimination. This perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal.

    Altogether now sing “Fuhgeddaboudit, he ain’t a broad.” Well, this is my judgement:

    The way to stop discrimination on the basis of gender is to stop discriminating on the basis of gender

    Jonathan Miller

    Here’s the pitch: English intellectual speaks nearly non-stop for half an hour – 15 minutes on Shakespeare, 15 minutes on stammering, also waves his arms. Lap it up:

    I threw in the last clip as an afterthought. In it Miller, a famous atheist, draws from Dudley Moore a model of deep Intelligent Design.

    Worse than a crime, a blunder

    Obama’s Press Secretary tweaks the tail of a big bad wolf he thinks has the measure of:

    “You’re not going to find very many of these newspapers and truth within 25 words of each other,” Gibbs continued.

    The British Press is more adept at telling truth to power than the lapdogs whom he’s addressing. The particular story denied by Gibbs has a named source with impressive credentials. Moreover it’s carefully written. It may not be true, I hope it isn’t, but the reporting looks responsible compared to plenty in the NYT or the W.Post or the LA Times, regular sources of plagiarism, unsourced half-truths and outright lies. The British Press is more streetwise, more diverse, more hungry, more competitive AND it has a sense of humour. When stories are made up, the rest of the pack will tear into the fabrication and editors get fired – Piers Morgan memorably so.

    Gibbs didn’t need to set this up. The UK Press now has a vested interest in contrasting the truth of their stories with the truth of his. He will lose.

    UPDATE – from The Daily Telegraph’s response:

    Can you imagine Gibbs making these remarks about The New York Times or The Washington Post, or NBC, ABC or CBS? This would never happen. The British press, especially the Telegraph, has been singled out because they frequently publish articles critical of the Obama administration and are not afraid to take on the status quo in Washington. Increasingly, millions of Americans are turning to online UK news websites for cutting edge reports on American politics and U.S. foreign policy that the mainstream media refuses to cover in the States, especially if it is unflattering to the Obama White House.

    Robert Gibbs’ completely unwarranted rant against the British press is an absolute disgrace, and the President should disown his views. An unreserved apology by Gibbs is also in order.

    For all its talk of “raising America’s standing” in the world after the Bush years, the Obama administration is doing a spectacularly bad job of reaching out to its allies. Unfortunately this is the new face of America’s public diplomacy, which will only serve to alienate public opinion across the Atlantic. Congratulations Gibbs – you’ve just made an enemy out of the entire British media, quite an achievement for the man in charge of selling the President’s message.

    “The entire British media” is hyperbole only if you think of the BBC as British.

    The Aid Virus

    DanHan:

    Socialists….emphasise motive over outcome…. the key thing, for Lefties, is to show that you’re a caring person.

    I’ve just been talking to a very clever man. He’s called Thompson Ayodele, he’s from Nigeria and he thinks that overseas aid is making African countries poorer.

    Foreign aid, he suggests, isn’t useless; it’s actively harmful. It discourages enterprise, fosters dependency and bolsters corrupt regimes.

    As Thompson puts it: “The British Treasury is empty. So you are going to be borrowing money in order to give it away. And the countries that get it will be poorer as a result”. Yup: but at least we’ll have shown everyone how nice we are.

    I’d quibble with this last; the government isn’t “borrowing other people’s money”, it’s stealing it from other people’s children and their own at the point of a gun, the gun to be paid for by those children. And The Aid Virus doesn’t just corrupt Africa, it corrupts the mass of Obama voters in America: government workers, aid recipients, professional victims and elites.

    The Decline of the West

    Michael Savage is a lucky man. Not only does he have the publicity of being banned from the UK for being a right-wing talk-show host, but the politician who banned him is such an easy target. He should Google “Jacqui Smith expenses porno” to see how my tax pounds are spent.

    Oppositional headbanging

    These are dark days in American politics. Disgusting people run the country with disgusting deeds and disgusting words. Nothing I can do about it and I don’t have much that’s fresh to say, so concentrate on other things. But permit a small cry of pain on the subject of ‘torture’. I wholly approve what the Bush administration did in relation to Al Quaeda detainees, except that they may not have done enough of it. This thought suffices: imagine you’re Pinch Sulzberger, who runs the New York Times. The government believes a detainee may have actionable intelligence of a suicide attack against your skyscraper in Manhattan. But the detainee won’t talk. He sniggers. So each day you watch your employees come to work and you know and they don’t know that each day may be their last. You see their family photos on their desks, you talk about the future. So Obama rings you up and the call goes like this:

    Obama: Hey thanks for all the help. I know you endorsed Hillary, but I understand the ethnic scene in NYT. Hey, Pinch, my people can lean on the terrorist COO a little. Maybe we can tickle him bad enough to to make him squawk. No bruises, we’ll call it “processing”. But we might save hundreds of lives, your people.

    Pinch : It’s torture, sir. It’s unAmerican. Banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions.

    Obama: The CIA tells me that we averted a specific attack on an LA building by waterboarding a terrorist COO. My DNI says we obtained valuable intelligence by scaring the bejesus out of a couple of these guys. What should I do?

    Pinch: Sir, it’s better that my staff die than that we ‘torture’ people who want to destroy America. We are men of principle, aren’t we?

    Obama: Fine. Let’s see how that plays. I’ll leave open the possibility of prosecuting the lawyers who justified the waterboarding. So long and tell your staff how much this administration values them.

    Me: Among all the disgusting, luxurious, infantile attitudes adopted by liberals these days, this attitudinizing about coercion is the most depraved. It’s good that the real effects of voting liberal are being so starkly played out. It’s clarifying. Now back to escapism.

    Update: I add Liz Cheney’s fine refutation of the liberal mythology:

    Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

    Escapism


    I’m collating a book of images from around Shad Thames in London. In a converted warehouse nearby called Hay’s Galleria there’s a statue called The Navigators by artist David Kemp. I was composing a shot of this work when a tourist came into the frame and wouldn’t budge. Eventually I took the snap with him in it. When I saw the image on screen I realised that the interloper resembled the sculpture, so I conversed a little with David Kemp about it. During the banter we discovered a certain shared affinity for cormorants and he drew my attention to this ditty by Christopher Isherwood, also attributed to Edward Lear:

    The Common Cormorant
    The common cormorant (or shag)
    Lays eggs inside a paper bag,
    You follow the idea, no doubt?
    It’s to keep the lightning out.

    But what these unobservant birds
    Have never thought of, is that herds
    Of wandering bears might come with buns
    And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.

    If you want war, prepare for peace

    The new basic data on Israel-Iran are these:

    1.”The peace process is based on three false basic assumptions; that Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main cause of instability in the Middle East, that the conflict is territorial and not ideological, and that the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders will end the conflict.” Avigdor Lieberman, 2006.

    2. “Past prime ministers were prepared to make wide-ranging concessions and the result of the Olmert-Livni government was the second Lebanon war, the operation in Gaza, severance of relations with Qatar and Mauritania, Gilad Schalit still in captivity and the peace process at a dead end..” Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli Foreign Minister, 2009.

    3. Iran now has the techniques to make and deliver a nuclear warhead within 2 years.

    4. Obama is at least conciliatory to formerly outlaw states like Cuba, Venezuela and Iran.

    5. Obama has a special relationship with Islam unlike any US President.

    6. Influential Obama supporters include noted anti-semites and noted Hamas fellow-travellers.

    7. Joe Biden says Israel will be “ill-advised” to attack Iran.

    8. The US told Netanyahu that Obama will be “out of town” when the Israeli PM visits Washington in May.

    9. Ahmadinejad is strong favourite to be re-elected in June.

    10. The countries of the Arabian peninsula fear a nuclear Iran.

    11. I doubt anyone exists who thinks Obama will undertake a pre-emptive strike against Iran. It’s possible, but nobody thinks it.

    12. Israel may need to cross Iraq to get to Iran.

    13. The chance of a successful attack is much greater if the USA helps Israel.

    14. Israel probably has far better intelligence than the USA.

    If I were Israeli, especially an Israeli with Netanyahu and Barak’s military background, I would not tolerate a nuclear Iran if it were in my power to prevent it. The Times’ foreign editor:

    What is significant is not their political affiliations but their military background. Mr Barak, the most decorated soldier in the Israeli army, once headed Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s equivalent of the SAS before becoming the army chief. One soldier serving under him was Mr Netanyahu. Another veteran of this elite unit was Moshe Yaalon, also in the Cabinet. These men have taken part in assassination operations against Palestinian leaders and commanded daring raids deep inside enemy territory. In short, they have the experience and the confidence to plan and execute an attack on Iran.

    Indeed, Mr Barak was Defence Minister in the previous Government when Israel carried out its latest secret raid in January – on a weapons convoy in Sudan. According to details released this week, Israeli F16 bombers, protected by F15 fighters, attacked targets in Sudan. Pilotless drones then filmed the wreckage, relaying back images which revealed that some vehicles were undamaged. The jets then flew a second sortie. The aircraft, which were refuelled in mid-air, flew 1,750 miles from Israel to Sudan and back. The distance from Israel to Natanz, the uranium enrichment centre in Iran, is 900 miles one way.

    A factor in any Israeli calculation will be Iran’s air defences, which are far more daunting than Sudan’s. Here too there is good reason to believe that Israel may act sooner rather than later. Russia has sold Iran the sophisticated S300 surface-to-air system. Israel would want to launch an attack before these missiles are in place.

    These military imperatives might make sense to soldiers, but surely the political cost of a pre-emptive raid – not to mention the risk of plunging the Middle East into another big war – would rule out an attack.

    This argument might make sense from Europe but in the Middle East quite another logic is at work. Many Arab states, particularly in the Gulf, are more afraid of a nuclear-armed Iran than Israel is. A military strike that delayed that threat would be welcomed in some Arab capitals. The Israelis know that they would face a huge international outcry. But that happened after the raid on Iraq and many countries later thanked them privately. More recently they were widely attacked after the offensive against Gaza in January, but over time that criticism has died down.

    Today the only serious obstacle to this battle is Barack Obama.

    I’d deal with the opposition of this US administration rather than stake my children’s lives on Iran’s mercy or rationality, so I do think that Israel will attack with or without the USA because it makes sense, but unlike the surprise attack on the Osirak reactor in 1981, this time the USA has the chance pre-emptively to threaten Israel. Would the USA shoot down Israeli aircraft? Would the USA threaten to interdict Israeli aircraft? Obama will leave that possibility as an unspoken deterrent against Israel. Taste those words..”as a deterrent against Israel.” How did we get here? You, Jewish-American liberals, how did we get here? We got here because your religion is liberalism.

    Would Congress stand for an American President obstructing Israel to protect Islamo-fascists? Would Americans? That is the question for America. For Israel it’s to be or not to be, that is the question.

    Manhattan discovers Utah


    The New York Times has a piece on southern Utah, specifically the Escalante area. The writer takes a few risks to bring back an account of the fearsome Peek-a-Boo slot canyon:

    I had lost sight of the first stone cairns almost immediately, as I stumbled down to the dry river wash at the bottom of the ravine. (“Water is scarce,” the printout helpfully noted.) After a few false leads, I made it to Peek-a-Boo Canyon, whose hard-to-spot entrance was surrounded by what looked like a shallow pool: I took a step in and sank straight up to my thighs in thick mud. As the sun continued to climb in the sky, I wished for my own Ute guide — or at least a GPS tracking system.

    Hugging the canyon wall for shade, I pressed on heroically and found Spooky Canyon, named for its otherworldly atmosphere. It was only an 18-inch-wide crack in the rock, but to me it yawned like the gateway to Shangri-La.

    As I squeezed inside, the air was immediately cool and fragrant. The sky appeared to be an electric blue sliver far above, and the reflected light made the golden sandstone seem to glow from within. I remained utterly still, in a lizardlike state, knowing that I couldn’t hide in there forever.

    Finally, I drank the last of my water and staggered across the rock like a sun-struck character out of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” I was parched, scratched, encrusted with mud — but triumphant.

    Well, the esteemed proprietor of Anatreptic.com, Mick Stockinger, and I and my brother-in-law strolled down to Peek-a-Boo Canyon and Spooky Gulch a while ago. It’s great but we missed the dramatics. It really is tempting to scoff at the Manhattan pantywaist, but the truth is that the difference between a stroll in the park and a scary adventure is very little. A wrong turn, a twisted ankle, disorientation, demoralisation, dark – and that’s just Central Park let alone the wildest part of the contiguous USA.

    Another difference tho is experience. There’s a discreet gap between hiking and mountaineering apart from technique. Mountaineering is much tougher physically and calls for judgement under stress as well as a likelihood of spending nights in a bivouac. So on a trek, however tough, a mountaineer tends to be confident that he has something in hand. That can lead to comic mistakes of course. “Hey I thought you brought the compass.”

    There’s an obvious political moral here, but I’ll let that lie.

    Scoops and scalps: the MSM gets shivved

    Janet Daley, Brown apologist and Daily Telegraph columnist with a grudge, attempts to belittle Guido Fawkes:

    In the US, the power of the political blog was transformed when Matt Drudge made Monica Lewinsky the most famous intern in White House history, and nearly brought about the impeachment of a president, by publishing his sensational story on the Drudge Report. Why did Mr Staines not follow his example? Perhaps he would like to tell us.

    He replies in the third comment:

    Perhaps I will eventually. Not to the Telegraph though. Your paper has behaved reprehensibly. To breach a confidence, reveal a source, tip off Downing Street and break a signed non-disclosure agreement is hardly honourable. The bitterness you and Pierce demonstrate is manifest to all your readers.

    Claiming today that the Telegraph discovered that Draper lunched at Chequers days after setting up the Red Rag site without attributing that “scoop” to me two days earlier is revealing.

    You have one of the weakest political teams around. The paper has lost its way and is reduced to taking scraps from my blog for its front page, day after day.

    I trust this is all a big deal in Utah. It seems positively Jacobean to me. Delicious.

    A milestone

    Further to ‘Scoops and scalps‘ below, Daniel Hannan well expresses how the smeargate scandal here in the UK has crystallized the plight of the elite media:

    A blog has just done something that I thought no one could do: elicited an apology (or as close as we’ll ever get to an apology) from Gordon Brown. Indeed, according to The Guardian, the McBride-Draper scandal might cost Labour the next election. If so, Guido Fawkes would have succeeded where his baleful namesake failed 404 years ago: he would have brought down a government. Even if you think the Guardian story is a bit de trop, the idea that one man with a laptop could do so much damage would, until very recently, have seemed risible.

    Yet, even now, a number of print and broadcast journalists dismiss, disdain and depreciate internet-based news. Read the Guardian’s own Michael White responding to the way my attack on Gordon Brown spread online. Read Peter Wilby’s reedy complaint that the internet “lacks quality control”. It is difficult not to sympathise with journalists of their generation. They can see local newspapers dropping all around them, and know that some nationals will soon follow. Every newsdesk is shedding staff, and journalists’ are having to work longer hours for lower salaries. The Whites and Wilbies perceive, even if they do not properly understand, that amateurs are driving out professionals. It makes them frightened and bilious.

    What irks them most of all is that bloggers refuse to apply Leftist filters. Until very recently, few people could watch a politician’s speech or read his statement in full. They relied, instead, on the Whites and Wilbies to select, précis and interpret stories for them. Now, the masses can make up their own minds without bien-pensant intellectuals telling them what to think.

    Scoops and scalps: a postcard from London


    The lead story here has been the resignation of a key aide to Gordon Brown. The aide has been outed concocting a sex and drugs and mental health smear campaign against the Conservative leadership and their wives. So far, so sordid, but the big point is that this is a terrific scoop and scalp for blogger, Guido Fawkes, who obtained the smoking gun emails and skilfully played the quiet Easter news cycle to maximum effect. (Guy Fawkes, by the way, tried to blow up the House of Lords and King James I in 1605 as part of a Roman Catholic plot. His effigy is burnt every November the 5th on Bonfire Night).

    The story is rife with British comic detail and vendettas all around, not least the envy and treachery of Guido Fawkes’ MSM competitors, up to and including a pre-emptive betrayal of Guido’s scoop by the supposedly conservative Daily Telegraph. An irony is that anyone can open a blog on the Telegraph site and Guido Fawkes himself has done just that – to embarrassing effect, writing:

    Telegraph Has Behaved Terribly Over Smeargate

    Sunday, April 12, 2009, 01:38 PM GMT [General]

    There are a lot of bitter, jealous journalists at the Telegraph and you have behaved shamefully over the McBride story. You even tipped off Downing Street in advance as to exactly what I was up to. It reflects on you a lot more than it does on me.
    You revealed sources, broke a confidence, breached a signed non-disclosure agreement and behaved like patsys for McBride.

    You still failed to spoil the story. Your political team is about as weak as it gets, that is why you sucked up to Downing Street.
    The Telegraph was once run by gentlemen for gentlemen. This would never have happened under Deedes or Charles Moore.
    Do your worst.

    This is manna from heaven for the Tories. No one thinks Gordon Brown was involved,*** but he certainly turns a blind eye (he actually does have a blind eye) to the poisonous shenanigans of his entourage as long as there’s political advantage. For many years the Brownian poison has been directed at rivals on his own side. This is a different game with different rules. Gordon Brown has never been elected by any non-politician outside his constituency of Fife in Scotland, since he famously bottled out of calling a General Election soon after he took over from Tony Blair. He lacks legitimacy, moreover he’s accident prone. He flourished alongside Blair, whom he was constantly plotting to unseat, but since moving to centre stage has had a run of ferocious bad luck which he attracts like a mountain massif attracts its own weather.

    So politics in both London and Washington would be tragic were it not so funny. Look on the bright side. Things change.

    ***Update: uh-oh.

    Update 2: Today is Guy Fawkes’ birthday, 13th April 1570. This all brings back happy memories when my brothers and I would take a stuffed guy in a wheelbarrow from house to house calling ‘penny for the guy’. The pennies were spent on fireworks. 

    Three chords and the truth

    That’s Harlan Howard’s description of country music. Clint Black plays in this clip from the farewell episode of The Larry Sanders Show. I love that show. It’s all on YouTube and when I’m alone I watch it on my laptop in bed. Start this clip at 3:40. For afficionados the incidental action during the song is just exquisite:

    Go with the glow – photo notes from around Shad Thames

    Shad Thames is a small neighbourhood by the south side of Tower Bridge in London. This post is parochial, but it gives me the chance to publicise my photography.

    These notes are illustrated in this gallery

    In Shad Thames the sloping balconies stack up at mad angles to sensational effect. Still, it’s not trivial to make a decent image. The light is typically unyielding, either overcast and undifferentiated or high contrast such that the dynamic range from the dark, narrow canyon to the bright,white top of Butlers Wharf exceeds what a camera can handle without High Dynamic Range techniques which look surreal. Go with the glow; shoot backlit effects with light seeping round the metal balconies. This is effective while the morning sun casts long shadows of the balconies onto the side walls of the canyon, first one wall then the other. In between the sun shines straight down the canyon, floodlighting the balconies and some of the street furniture. There’s often a cluster of Biffa bins at the Curlew Street corner at that time. They’re incandescent in the sun. When a trashtruck moves up the street, it slots in nicely beneath the stacked up balconies. Don’t forget the brightly coloured jackets of the parking wardens.

    Tower Bridge is a visual cliché, dramatic skies notwithstanding. Stepping down onto the shingle by the river at low tide helps. The scaffolding on the bridge while it’s being cleaned gives new possibilities. Moving towards Rotherhithe yields busy images which appeal to me. Or buy an upper floor flat for a million quid for a less usual viewpoint. Interesting boats pass through the raised road often enough – timetable here.

    Birds are good round here; swans, grebes, coots, ducks, gulls, geese, even a Harris hawk to amaze the pigeons. Cormorants may look black, but they’re black and white and irridescent when you get a good view and they have strange heads. They often present themselves perched on a highly textured beam or a yellow buoy, drying their wings like laundry on a line since they lack oil on their feathers. You can catch them juxtaposed with City Hall or the bridge or a police launch or some other artefact which they sneer at or harangue. Pigeons are more handsome than you might think – bright eyes, handsome feathers, fluffed up for sex or bathing or both. It helps their interesting personalities that they are the next stage up from humans on the re-incarnation ladder; like us, but less litter.

    More London estate has a reputation for harrassing photographers shooting the world-famous icons around, but I think it’s unfair to call the security staff ‘Morons’ just because it sounds apt. Some of them, often African, are perfectly polite and smiley. Others, unfortunately, start citing laws they know nothing about and which don’t apply and that makes it harder to kowtow to what amounts to a breach of the peace when they try to obstruct innocent photography. One might simply snap one of these surly actors if they refuse to get out of the frame; instead of the standard Tower Bridge shot, Tower Bridge + surly security guard.

    ‘Hell is other people’ may apply now that Shad Thames is so busy. You can aim high or crop out specks of lumpen humanity from the bottom of the frame. It often works to include the odd person for scale or clothing or as an objet trouvé. My shot of The Navigator in Hays Galleria was enhanced by the intrusion of a tourist who looked like the model for the nasally endowed sculpture. A winter shot of the anchor by The Cantina was enhanced by a bloke giving scale alongside. A few seconds later a man in a top hat came striding through the snow and gave me a striking image looking back to the bridge.

    Reflections are a treat around the More estate. It can be a puzzle finding just the right spot to optimise a multiple image of City Hall. That’s when I look most like a terrorist casing the joint. Don’t forget that rain begets reflections. La Strada has fascinating reflections of City Hall and the bridge combined with the restaurant’s signage and the big red lampshades inside.

    Again here’s a link to a gallery of mine which shows several of these points.I’ve posted smallish files for faster download, so the images have a slightly stressed quality rather than the more ‘liquid’ surface I prefer.

    G20 protests in London


    It’s 1am in London and I can hear a police helicopter hovering around Tower Bridge to monitor any G20 malarkey. The protests so far are trivial, incentivised and amplified 100x by the media; a couple of broken windows in a bank and some City-workers mocking the protesters by waving banknotes from windows. If there were proportionate coverage, there’d be almost no aggro. There’s symbiosis between the statists who want to use the Credit Crunch as a vehicle to get them to socialism and the pot-pourri of useful idiots who provide the media images. It’s laughable close-up and sinister as part of the bigger project to subordinate liberty to corporatists.
    The view from above:

    A lion sandwich

    You have run out of our money – the sequel

    Real politics:


    Engrossing stuff, but Hannan misreads Obama’s effect on America’s brand. The multi-racial President as talisman stuff is fluff. Putin, Khameini, Chavez don’t make decisions on that. Obama’s brand is weakness and inexperience. There’s real doubt whether he’s Presidential timber at all. Hannan’s right that the Obama victory is forcing the GOP to re-think the fundamentals – boy, do they need to – and the amazing thing is that Hannan, despite being ignored by the BBC and the rest, now has an influence on that. Isn’t the internet wonderful?

    Bonus track – “Please defect”: