UN Gun Grabbers Update

Good News From the NRA

Like all UN efforts, the gun grabber initiative is sputtering, but we must stay vigilant.  Here's an excerpt from the NRA web site:

The UN and International Treaties:  Over the last few weeks, we have received many inquiries regarding the UN and the impact of international treaties on our Second Amendment freedom.

The current issue under discussion, the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), is in the early stages of the negotiation process.  There is no actual draft text at this time.  Work on the ATT is scheduled to continue by a consensus process between now and 2012.  It should be noted that any treaty must be approved by two thirds of the U.S. Senate for ratification. 

 Read the whole NRA Report Here

Finally, if you own a weapon and do not belong to the NRA or GOA, you need to have your head examined.  These good organizations fight for your God-given right to keep and bear arms. 

If Women Controlled the World

Got these in an e-mail. OK, they're sexist, but they're funny!

Obama and Palin: Two sides of the same coin?

Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.  Both are young, attractive and relatively inexperienced.  Both engender a fervid dedication among devotees and bitter bile in their critics.  And Sarah is catching up to him in the polls. 

Jack Cashill, heroic slayer of liberal myths, has written a brilliant piece comparing and contrasting the trajectories of Sarah Palin and Barack Obama.  No good soundbites, just a solid comparison that leaves the current president wanting while putting Palin in a very good light.

A Neutral View

Chris Good in an Atlantic article asks, How Popular is Palin?  It's standard boilerplate, but I liked this reader post, who offered a less flattering, but probably standard non-partisan comparison:

Jennis Psycho said:
She's about as popular as Obama, and slightly less divisive. Both are in the mid 40s in the reputable polls. 

She's really just Obama's mirror image in a sense, both are largely ignorant and inexperienced politicians with penchants to say ridiculous and divisive things, and what you think about them largely says more about you than them.

Just like if Palin was ugly, if Obama wasn't an attractive African-American he would be Jimmy Carter, and about as popular.

That's bound to make Palinites mad, but they need to take a deep breath and realize that everyone doesn't share their devotion, and all criticism is not a hateful attack.

Kinda like W, I look to The Bible for a bit of political advice:  Test the Spirits

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
-- 1 John 4:1

Palin has entered the arena, so she's fair game.  And if she's as tough and sincere as she seems, she has nothing to worry about.  I like my candidates tested in the crucible of political battle. 

Rick Moran at Pajamas Media had the temerity to write an article critical of Palin, and her fans went nuts, calling this conservative all kinds of names!

Here is my comment:

OK Palinites, political hero worship is what has brought our country to the brink of disaster.

Sarah Palin is a fine woman and has a great record to stand on in Alaska politics. Like any politician in the public arena, she needs to be debated over and tested. It’s called the marketplace of ideas.

If you get testy because someone dares to question some aspect of her, you are no better than an Obamabot.

Lighten up! If Palin is the real deal she will withstand the criticism and prove a formidable candidate in 2012. If she can’t stand the heat, I’d rather find out now.

And screaming RINO! at everyone who disagrees with you is getting old. Scozzafava is a RINO. Rick Moran is a conservative who believes in “testing the spirits” by evaluating arguments and ideas.

If that’s not for you, stop trolling blogs where serious discussion takes place and instead spend your time at fan club sites where everybody agrees with you 100% of the time.

Let her speak

Although I have not made up my mind on this woman, I do get PO'd at the GOP Elitists.  An Ivy League education is no substitute for common sense and strong values.  Just ask the "best and brightest" who crashed our economy or who got us into Vietnam and then stabbed out troops in the back getting out.

This best sums up how I feel about the whole Sarah Palin phenomenon:

"Personally, I'm not sure she's ready to be president, but this is a person who has resonant voice for many Americans who are engaged in our political life and who deserve to have someone speaking for them," said Wilfred McClay, a professor at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy.

"Anyone who tries to shut that down, particularly by a relentless campaign of personal abuse, is really an enemy of our political system," he said. "They are trying to suppress discourse at a time when we need more of it and not less."  (Washington Times)

Time will tell...

Obama's Afghanistan

The President has made his decision.  Now it's up to the generals to make the most of it before the liberal dems sound retreat, and you know they're just itching for that bugle. 

A lot of ink has been spilled on the speech, here and around the world.  The men at Blackfive and Ralph Peters at The NY Post have the best take.

As always when I want the straight gouge, I head over to Blackfive, one of the best military commentary sites, imho.  They didn't disappoint...

MCQ had this to say:

if I'm the Taliban I'm absolutely exultant about what I've heard. And I'm immediately into planning a disinformation campaign that will paint the rosiest possible picture in 18 months time.

Meanwhile, my forces are basically on R&R for duration (or concentrating in Pakistan) while I sit back and wait out the withdrawal. And when that last C-17 is wheels up out of Bagram, I'm headed into Afghanistan in force.

Given that speech last night, they must finally believe that Allah truly is on their side now.

Uncle Jimbo, another Blackfive writer, chimed in:

While Grim and I were watching last night this was the best laugh line.

And going forward, the Pakistan people must know America will remain a strong supporter of Pakistan’s security and prosperity long after the guns have fallen silent, so that the great potential of its people can be unleashed.

After the guns have fallen silent? Oh that is rich. These people have been shooting at each other since guns were invented, before that they were stabbing each other, before that bashing each other with rocks. After the guns have fallen silent? I’m not holding my breath.

Those are our soldiers out there; let's pray for a good outcome.  Inshallah...

More Reading:
Ralph Peters (He Flames Obama!)
Der Speigel (German Doubts)
Der Spiegel (More German Doubts)

Liberalism Kills

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent
-- Adam Smith

Mike Huckabee is in the news. Back when he was Arkansas governor, his misguided bleeding Christian heart led him to release a criminal who showed his gratitude by killing four police officers in cold blood.  

Blame everybody but the criminal...
The brutal gang rape last month of a young woman at a high school dance evoked the expected response from the San Fran Sicko Cornicle. It's society's fault, poverty, white people, bla bla bla... Blame everyone and everything but the dirty bastards who committed the crime.

Their claptrap is not even worth repeating here. Michele Catalano at Pajamas Media provides welcome disinfectant for this liberal BS. But somebody has to be at fault, starting with the young men who perpetrated the crime.

The culprits are not video games and desensitization. It’s partly the fault of poverty and partly the fault of parents who have lost control of their kids and their own lives. It’s a school district that didn’t provide its students with the security and safety precautions necessary given the circumstances.

Liberalism Frees the Prisoners and Imprisons the Innocent  
Liberalism has failed our society in so many ways, especially when it comes to crime. Dreamy criminal coddling programs of the 60's launched an explosion of criminality that has destroyed whole communities.  

Good people, mostly poor minorities, are prisoners in their homes and schools. Social mores are dictated by the false machismo of street thugs. Young boys want to be like them. Young girls want to be liked by them. It's twisted, in that stockholm syndrome way that abused spouses and children struggle to please the abuser.  

One way to reliably bring down the crime rate 

Zero tolerance. You go Eliot Ness on their asses and haul them off to jail. If they refuse to go you gun them down in the street like the rabid dogs they are. In prison, you take away all exercise equipment and put them on a subsistence diet. You should be walking out of prison a 98 pound weakling, not Mike Tyson. 

If the young wanna-be sees that the path to glory he contemplates is not so glorious after all, he is much more likely to look for something more productive. The specter of death or a stint in prison that makes you not a returning hero but an emaciated loser can be a strong motivator.

Lock 'em Up
Thomas Sowell reminds us that nothing is more effective at reducing criminal activity than locking them up. Dr. Sowell is an expert in statistical analysis, and he points out the obvious: The higher the criminal incarceration rate, the lower the crime rate.  

This is too simple for liberals. Especially the ones rich enough to wall themselves off from the consequences of the dangerous stupidities they foist upon the rest of us.

The Fudge-inci Code: Behind The Global Warming Conspiracy

1) Collect Raw Data  >>  2) "Correct" the Data >> 3) Model/Share the "Corrected" Data >> 4) Trash the Raw Data

The leaked e-mails from the Global Warming Swindlers are titillating, but the tangle of manipulated data and computer code is where the real fraud takes place

It took some mighty creative human intervention to fudge out the desired results.  (Watts Up With That - Hide the Decline Codified)

Charlie Martin, a computer scientist from Colorado has written a highly entertaining piece describing the travails of one poor programmer's unsuccessful attempt to untangle the code and reconstruct the data to suit his mendacious masters.

Poor Harry is in the first circle of programmer hell: the program runs fine; the output is wrong.

To make it worse yet, Times Online reports that...

"scientists" admit they threw away "much of the raw temperature data," making independent verification impossible. 

How convenient.

Secrecy is For Mad Scientists
As  London Imperial College and MIT researcher Michael Schrage tells us, secrecy and science do not go hand in hand, unless you're a mad scientist plotting to fleece the world.  Sounds like a James Bond movie, doesn't it? (FT - Secrecy in Science)

Here are comments from two readers:

dxbecker wrote:

I am a scientist and it astonishes me that respected journals would accept submissions, much less publish works, from scientists who refused to disclose their raw data and computer codes to other scientists who want to evaluate their work. [...]

This is one of the many real scandals in this whole affair. A lot of journal editors should be fired and peer reviewers removed from their positions as neutral arbiters of the quality of scientific work.

johnbowman said:
The real fraud is that "scientists" are passing off correlation as evidence, and manipulating the data to show correlation, when it is a basic principle of science that correlation is NOT evidence of causal link.

Manipulating the data is even more important now because observed data over the past 11 years has shown no correlation between global mean temperatures and rise in CO2, and, non-correlation IS accepted as scientific evidence of NO causal link.

This is the real scandal of that "scientists" have so easily deceived a target audience apparently easily, if not wittingly, deceived.

A Shared, Flawed Premise
The fudged data is the source of all further study, so it's a flawed premise.  When warmists argue that it's all been reviewed, yeah, it has, but "it" is the "adjusted" data.  The underlying raw data is gone.  They all start from this manipulated "adjusted" data set, and then all reach the same flawed conclusion.     

Peer review means you hand over the raw data and allow other researchers to attempt to verify or refute your conclusion.  That didn't happen, so there was no peer review per accepted scientific standards.  This is a fraud of global dimensions. 

For more explanation read:  American Thinker - Marc Sheppard

Real Hope

Liberal bureaucracies are crumbling worldwide, their promises as empty as the people who defend them
 
Obama's magic spell is broken, the hopium smoke is dissipating...  Presidential approval has cracked 50%, going down.

Support for Obama and the Pelosicrats' Soviet Style Health Care Monstrosity is sinking fast.  Only 35% support this monument to lying and irresponsibility.

Economic suicide upon the altar of Gaia looks less and less likely.  Only 35% of Americans support Senator Boxer's Cap and Trade lunacy.

Millionaire mushy middler Mort Zuckermann elucidates the national mood:

In a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, Americans were asked which economic issue facing the country concerns them the most. Deficit reduction ruled over health care. Half were prepared to defer spending or to spend less, even if it meant extending the recession.

CAN THE GOP CAPITALIZE?

Europeans are making painful decisions and slashing spending. 
Lefties in America love pointing to some European program and asking why we aren't doing it.  Now it's the GOP's turn.  Republicans should ask, "Why aren't we reducing government budgets like our European friends? 

'Kill Bill' and start from scratch on Health Reform

Charles Krauthammer provides clarity, as usual:

The fundamental problem with the 2,074-page Senate health-care bill (as with its 2,014-page House counterpart) is that it wildly compounds the complexity by adding hundreds of new provisions, regulations, mandates, committees and other arbitrary bureaucratic inventions.

The better choice is targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one -- tort reform, interstate purchasing and taxing employee benefits. It would take 20 pages to write such a bill, not 2,000 -- and provide the funds to cover the uninsured without wrecking both U.S. health care and the U.S. Treasury.

Keep asking, "How are you going to pay for it?"

The GOP needs candidates who are not afraid to crap in the DC punchbowl.  McCain should have done it it 2008; at the time, he was the only one crusty enough to credibly pull it off.

Now, one year and trillions of dollars later, every Republican politicians should be focusing on fiscal sanity like a laser beam.   

Stand with the heroes, Fight the Zeros!

Hide The Decline

Liberals are so entertaining, what with their beliefs in fairy tales like global warming...  

Minnesotans for Global Warming give the e-mailing science scammers a royal roasting in this parody "Hide the Decline," a takeoff of Tommy James and the Shondell's "Draggin the Line."

Climategate: Believers in Denial

The Warmists are circling the medicine show wagons.  A plucky digital Toto pulled back the curtain to reveal The Global Warming Wizards as just another cabal of fudging humbugs.

James Delingpole has a great summary of the fallout so far.  Here's a snark sample, where he lampoons one of the guilty scientist's excuse:

“The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste,”

Which does make you wonder how the sentence would have read had he just had a little longer to type it correctly. “Hiding the sausage?” “Heeding the decline?”

Go read the whole piece Here.

Gerald Warner also has a good update in The Telegraph.  Conservative and libertarian Brits, so tired of being dictated to for so long, are relishing this scandal even more that conservative Americans are:

Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, is now on the case, trampling all over Al Gore’s organic vegetable patch and breaking the White House windows.

At the more domestic level, the proposed ban on incandescent light bulbs, so supinely accepted in this servile state of Britain, is now provoking a huge backlash in America.

US citizens do not like the government coming into their houses and putting their lights out. Voters may not understand the cut and thrust of climate debate at the technical level, but they know when the Man from Washington has crossed their threshold uninvited.

Go read Warner's short article here. Check out the reader comments as well. They are entertaining and heartening. Many Europeans still look to the US and take hope from the heroic resistance of common sense conservative and libertarian Americans.

Attention Angry Shoppers!

Another Thanxmas shopping season, another collection of news stories about social retards who don't know how to behave in public...

People in other parts of the world fight over food, water or religious freedoms; we fight over DVD players and toys

Store employees are to blame when two women get in a fight over a pair of discounted pajamas.  Just like...

... Teachers are to blame because our kids behave like spoiled brats, little sluts, and junior gangbangers.

... George Bush is to blame when people too benumbed by corrupt liberal governance don't know how to get out of the way of a hurricane

... People who dis Islam are to blame when wild-eyed radicals slash, bomb and burn

It's called personal responsibility.  People who don't know how to behave should be jailed or cast out beyond the pale of civilized society.