Monday, February 15, 2010

Estonia (and the Other Baltics) Do It Right...

Little Estonia, which I've visited many times, has learned its capitalist lessons better than most.

Better than the clowns in Washington, for sure.  Said clowns should be ashamed of themselves, though I see no evidence of that...

Patterns...

Michael Yon has posted another in his series of outstanding on-the-front-lines reports on the war on terror.  Today he's in Afghanistan with the troops fighting our largest battle to date in that land...

He's doing this wonderful work self-funded.  Please do as I did, and hit his tip jar – we need more of his fine reporting, and we don't get anything even remotely like it from the lamestream media...

Bayh Retiring...

Democratic Senator Evan Bayh is retiring from the Senate, and there's a very good chance that his seat will be filled by a Republican.  He joins a veritable parade of Democratic incumbents who are retiring from both the House and the Senate.  While some have motives unrelated to politics, certainly many of these retirements are motivated by dim prospects in the upcoming elections.  Bayh, for instance, faced a very tough battle this November against Republican Dan Coats in a Republican-leaning state, in the year of Scott Brown.  It seems doubtful that the Democrats will find a candidate who can successfully oppose the very popular and widely recognized Coats.

Even though I've lived through such things before, I'm still somewhat stunned by the rapid turnaround in the fortunes of the Democrats in general and the Obama administration in particular.  At this point, I'd say Obama is going to be lucky to be perceived as well as Jimmy Carter...

America's Cup: USA Wins!

USA 17 (the beautiful hydroplaning trimaran at right, click to enlarge), sponsored by Oracle, has won the America's cup.  Congratulations to all involved!

America, Please Don't Go Here...

The United Kingdom has become the land of politically correct.  Tragic incidents like this one appear in the news there almost daily.  In this case a little girl trapped underwater in a car is left there for almost two hours, even though potential rescuers were on the scene.  Why?  Because safety regulations forbade anyone other than a specialist rescue team from entering the water.  Nobody on the scene even tried to enter the water. 

They'd all been emasculated by the pervasive political correctness in the U.K. today.

I'd really hate to see America go this route.

Since the story linked above was posted, the little girl has died...

Quote of the Day...

Says Nikki Dowling, who has recently started dating other women:
Hats off to you guys who make picking roses look easy. 
Prior to reading this, it never occurred to me that a woman in a relationship with another woman might experience something closely akin to what a heterosexual man does.  Read it...

Could Israel Attack Iran on Her Own?

Retired Israeli General Dan Halutz has some doubts...

Women Cause Big Government...

Read it and think about it.  Does it match your own experience, no matter how uncomfortable being so politically incorrect makes you feel? 

It matches my experience in the aggregate, for sure.  By that I mean that if you took all the women whose political tendencies I'm aware of, and ranked them on a one-dimensional scale from leftish to rightish, the average would be well to the left of center.  Do that with the men whose political tendencies I'm aware of, and the opposite is true.  I can think of plenty of counter-examples on both sides (Anne Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sarah Palin; Barney Frank, Harry Reid, Paul Krugman), but still...the overall gender difference is there, and fairly obvious.

So here's the obvious question raised: should repealing women's suffrage be an objective of the libertarian, conservative or tea parties?

Just sayin'...

Tea Party Report...

Glenn Reynolds (aka InstaPundit) has a nice WSJ piece about the tea party convention.  He's a very sober voice in the generally bizarre lamestream media reporting on the event...

ClimateGate: Roundup...

Sheesh, the dam has truly broken.  Investigative journalists all over the world (but lamentably, darned few in the U.S.) are now tearing into the meat of the story revealed by the ClimateGate emails.  Notable recent events:

Steven Goddard uses tectonics (just as I did) to illustrate how scientific consensus has often been wrong.

Dr. Phil Jones, the disgraced scientist and administrator at the center of the ClimateGate emails, has admitted that there has been no detectable global warming in the past 10 yearsdirectly contradicting one of the central assertions of the IPCC report, and of course the heart of preacher Al Gore's fire-and-brimstone claims.

After errors in the IPCC's claims about Himalayan glaciers, African agriculture, Australian and New Zealand's temperature records, and South American rain forest demise, could there be even more that they screwed up?  Yup, and JoNova has the details (in Scandinavia, this time).  Did these clowns get anything right?

The London Times reports on doubts about modern temperature records, focusing on local factor problems such as the urban heat island effect.  Jeez, it's about time!  For several years now, AGW skeptics have been all over this rather obvious foundational problem for the whole AGW theory...

Brian at Six Meat Buffet has a suggestion for the next angle the British press should investigate: just why in the hell the American press has neglected the whole ClimateGate/AGW story...