Friday, January 24, 2003

"Old Rumsfeld"
Rumsfeld certainly seems to have got LeMonde's attention by his statement that France and Germany are the "Old Europe" and, impliedly, the "New" and more important Europe supports US aims in Iraq and the war on terror. Despite calling him "brutal in a typically Midwestern way", LeMonde actually agrees with Rummy but protests that France and Germany are still important (pathetic, isn't it?). But the editorial also points out, correctly I think, that Scandinavia still opposes the war and American hegemony. The EU hates to see the potential new members all through Eastern Europe are less afraid of American power than they are. Kind of undermines their whole globalization/socialism world view, doesn't it?
Still no global warming
Fourteen degrees - or was it eleven? - in Tallahassee today and global warming is sinking fast as a respectable topic of discussion. Here's a thorough debunking from several years ago. Like that will make any difference to the natural disaster crisis people whose whole livelihoods and ideologies are driven by the need to find something wrong with the way people are living, something they can be paid to make people feel guilty about, from SUVs to fatty foods to plastic shopping bags to cigarettes. When I lived down by the Kennedy Space Center, old-timers used to say that the thunderstorms were much stronger and more intense since the space shuttles started going off. Right. The global warming article reports that Drake in the 1500s sailing along the Florida coast saw fires everywhere. No doubt wildfires for millions of years have been putting huge amounts of "greenhouse gases" and soot into the atmosphere. In recent decades wildfires have been reduced to a fraction, at least temporarily, of their usual reach and power. Ever hear the global warming geeks talk about that? Not hardly.

Thursday, January 23, 2003

Collin May on Europe, or, at least, "Old Europe"
"Innocents Abroad" has all the dirt you just knew was under the "Axis of Weasels'" carpets. Read the whole blog. You'll love it.
Comment from Mrs. DuToit's blog on the AIDS discussion.

Thanks for the permission. I wonder if you understand that I don't see the relevance of promiscuity to the Duesberg theory, except in that it transmits many other debilitating diseases that could 1) suppress the immune system and 2) kill, without the necessity of HIV doing anything. This would support, not undermine, Duesberg's theory by explaining how AIDS could be restricted to a particular, notoriously promiscuous community. That community is also notably reluctant to be honest about illegal drug use. The enhanced status that goes with being an "HIV-positive" victim rather than a suicidal promiscuous drug user is responsible for a lot of the blindness associated with the AIDS syndrome.

Duesberg and Mullis would probably be interested in statistics about death rates before AIDS was "discovered" in the early '80s among the target groups.

Wednesday, January 22, 2003

More from the Ivory Coast
Those great humanitarian French have been doing their compassionate thing in the Ivory Coast again. I guess they forgot to apply for a UN resolution and find some allies, but, hey, they're socialists so of course THAT doesn't matter. And I notice the UN is on the job there, so the whole situation will be peaceful and the nation will be on its way to health and prosperity in a matter of days.

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Hmmmm.
Does anyone who has seen this story about whites and blacks in the military and the higher proportion of whites in the front-line units think maybe this could be linked to the high proportion of black women in the military? It seems to me that a lot of black women see the military as a way up and out. And black women, like all women, have always been more conventional and achievement- (read: survival-) oriented than black men. Also, with one quarter of black men having criminal records, they must find it harder to get into today's ridiculously zero-tolerant armed forces. But women do not serve in front-line combat units, at least in the infantry. I would be interested to see the proportion of black women as compared to white women in the military. I seem to remember seeing some figures suggesting the figure might be as high as fifty-fifty. This fact could account for the high proportion of blacks in rear echelon units. It also makes sense that black men and women would tend to stay in the military longer, since they don't have as high a rate of education as whites and must therefore find it harder to find worthwhile jobs in civilian life. Spending less time in the military, whites would therefore have less time to rise in the ranks and learn a skill valuable at least to the military. Makes sense to me.

Monday, January 20, 2003

Another UN success story
The Western Sahara mess gets messier. The UN has been monitoring a ceasefire here since 1991, with no movement toward resolving the situation. How are the UN and the IMF the same? They get lots of money, blow it on bureaucrats and conferences and accomplish nothing. Western Sahara used to be owned by Spain, called Spanish Sahara in those days. Rio de Oro and Ifni, ifni I remember right, were two little enclaves on the coast that were considered part of metropolitan Madrid or something. Then in the early Seventies Hassan of Morocco had a Sand Revolution and occupied Spanish Sahara and refused to leave. The Polisario Front has been fighting for "self-determination",(meaning "we get to make the rules") since at least 1976. UN intervention has done, predictably, nothing except put the problem off to the next bureaucrat's tenure. Ah, retirement on an international organization's salary is so nice. The best thing is you never have to go home to the hellhole that gave you birth. Let's see, Cambodia, Suez, Congo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, in no particular order and I've left out dozens. Nothing ever gets accomplished. Hey, now I know where Klintoon's next job is going to be!
Andrew Sullivan, Euroweenie?!
Can Sullivan possibly mean, in his latest column from the Sunday Times, that socialism or Marxism is a "positive element" and a "credible alternative" to capitalism and democracy? Then there's this:

Abandoning Kyoto was forgivable, given what the treaty would have done to the U.S. economy. But proposing no credible alternative wasn't.

Am I reading this wrong, or does he really think global warming is anything other than transparent nonsense designed to destroy economic success? Why does one need a "credible alternative" to dealing with a non-existent threat? Combine all this with his adamant refusal to even consider the possibility that HIV does not cause AIDS, as laid out here and here and I am starting to get a picture of an intolerant, blindered, knee-jerk compromiser. Or maybe he's just been alone too long out there in Provincetown.

Sunday, January 19, 2003

MLK on Zionism
I know most of you have already read this via Instapundit, but I just HAVE to link to it, especially since tomorrow's MLK day.
George W. Bush Day
I had a vision today. Some years in the future, say 2020 or so, the USA will establish a special holiday. Everyone will get September 11 off. It's George W. Bush Day. It's a slam dunk. He freed Iraq in 2003, forced the Palestinians to the negotiating table after the Second Iranian Revolution and the liberation of the Republic of Arabia from the dark and bloody House of Saud, assuring the survival of Israel. After a long but determined diplomatic campaign backed by the threat of military force, he cut the first wire on the Korean Demilitarized Zone and the peninsula was reunited under democratic capitalism in 2004. It took until 2007 for the last remnants of Al Qaeda to be rounded up, headed by one of bin Laden's (ptuh!) sons, who had been pretending to be his father in various audio tapes and videos released every few months to give the illusion he hadn't really died at Tora Bora in December 2001, an event which was finally confirmed in 2006 by DNA matching. The terrorists had managed to severely damage the Eiffel Tower and close the Tower of London for several months, but had never successfully mounted a major attack in the US after Sept. 11, 2001.

The stock market had slowly but surely regained the highest levels of the Clinton years and then moved steadily beyond, helped by the dividend tax cut and continuing reductions in capital gains taxation. GDP, productivity and per capita income all showed healthy yearly increases, with low inflation and almost non-existent unemployment. Europe, meanwhile, had experienced its worst economic decline since the Great Depression and WWII. Bush in 2006 proposed and implemented the Second Marshall Plan, helping European conservatives, who had won major electoral victories, to restructure their economies. By the time of Bush's valedictory speech in 2009, Europe had started to move back toward prosperity. When Bush turned over the reins to the first black president, Condoleeza Rice, on January 20, 2009, he had arguably accomplished more in two terms than any president. He had managed all this without antagonizing any major group, increasing in the 2006 mid-term elections the Republican hold over the Senate by ten seats and the majority in the House by 30, while garnering forty percent of the Hispanic vote nationwide and an amazing twenty percent of the black vote. After his Presidency, Dubya remained active in diplomacy and literature, writing memoirs that established new theories of democratic governance that maximized individual freedom while assuring a strong and compassionate society. Offered the presidency of Harvard, he declined, saying he preferred to stick to his roots in Crawford, Texas.

By 2020, the Democratic Party had been disbanded, replaced by a healthy opposition in the form of Objectivist and Libertarian parties. Remnant Green and Socialist parties were regularly derided in the revamped New York Times. In Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a white-haired but still fit and smiling Dubya, receiving the thanks of the Prime Minister of Sweden, elected recently on a program of tax cuts and smaller government. As he waved to the crowd, another event occurred in Harlem, which would be noted by a surprised obituarist in an obscure article in the Times. He had to look up the history to make sure the facts in the file were right. How come he'd never heard of this guy? A former president who had suffered mental reverses after seeing Dubya's legacy outshine his year after year keeled over from an advanced case of self-pity. William Jefferson Clinton died in the gutter, forgotten and alone.