"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and
keep our homes on 72 degrees ... and then just
expect that other countries are going to say OK."

[looks like the 'global test' has moved from warfare to what we chose to drive - and eat.]

Iraqi forces on brink of controlling Sadr City

Iraqi forces aim to be in complete control of Sadr City within 24 hours after some 10,000 troops, backed by tanks, pushed deep into the Baghdad Shia slum in an unprecedented operation.

Militiamen who have clashed with US and Iraqi soldiers over the past few weeks melted away as the Iraqi Army took control of the streets in the impoverished slum for the first time since the 2003 invasion.

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Success in Iraq: A Media Blackout

DO we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there? If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines. Want a real "inconvenient truth?" Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating...

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Democrats and Our Enemies

Wall Street Journal, by Joseph Lieberman

[snip]

"No people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies."

[Recommended >]

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AP: Afghan Women Victims of 'Stern Social Codes;' Not Sharia

The AP's Alisa Tang wrote a horrifying account of the oppression and misogyny that women face in Afghanistan. The April 30 article bucks the post-9/11 trend of the media turning a blind eye to women's issues in Muslim countries.

In parts of Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, where stern social codes prevail, a woman who runs away from home is typically suspected of having taken a lover and can be prosecuted for adultery. Simply leaving her house without her family's permission may be deemed an offense — as in Rukhma's case — although it is not classified as such under Afghanistan's penal code.

What's missing throughout the article are two words—Islam and Sharia.

"If my wife goes to the bazaar without my permission, I will kill her. This is our culture," Abdul Qayum shouted scornfully during an interview in his office in the city of Jalalabad.

[how stern]

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Where Have all the Germans Gone?

... And he does. In essence, Germany does not have enough young people for its old people to lend money to. So its financial institutions went to where the young people are: America. As Spengler says:

There is nothing complicated about finance. It is based on old people lending to young people. Young people invest in homes and businesses; aging people save to acquire assets on which to retire. The new generation supports the old one, and retirement systems simply apportion rights to income between the generations. Never before in human history, though, has a new generation simply failed to appear.

Those who think demography bores such as myself are peddling archaic theories of no relevance are missing the point. Yes, medieval farming communities assume large numbers of children in order to function. But the modern global economy and all advanced societies assume sufficient numbers of children in order to function.

[and the west's populations {which now includes the US 'native' population when immigration is subtracted} are contracting - ]

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Theater of the Absurd

While hundreds of thousands are dying due to the callous indifference of the military junta in Burma and millions are fleeing oppression and hunger in Robert Mugabe’s brutal Zimbabwe, the U.N.’s farcical Human Rights Council (HRC) is focusing its attention elsewhere — the United States, the freest nation on the face of the earth.

This week sees the arrival on U.S. soil of Doudou Diene, the U.N. special rapporteur charged with investigating ''racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance'' in America...

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So much for 'settled science'

You may have heard earlier this month that global warming is now likely to take break for a decade or more. There will be no more warming until 2015, perhaps later. Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U. N.'s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.

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Greens Will Leave us Cold and Hungry

There is always a point in time when reality steps up to remind everyone that bad ideas come with a price to pay. The long history of environmental bad ideas are now beginning to cause food riots around the world with its campaign for biofuels and against the energy that powers great economies and feeds the world.

On May 14, Earthworks, one of the many environmental organizations zealously trying to leave America and the rest of the world cold and hungry released its intention to initiate a “No Dirty Energy” campaign “to alert the public to the climate, ecosystem and community risks associated with mining and burning the world’s dirtiest fuel sources…”

Labeling coal and oil “dirty” is pure PR and ignores the fact that coal, a cheap and abundant energy sources, provides just over fifty percent of America’s electricity, an energy without which the entire nation would cease to function. It ignores the way the Green’s campaign against oil has for four decades thwarted the right of American’s to access and use its own national oil and natural gas reserves and virtually enslaved us to middle eastern nations (as Bush's hat-in-hand trip to Saudi Arabia this week again proved). [snip]

Take away these energy sources and you cripple that nation...

[the voters will need insist in change, as the environmoralists now control a multi-billion dollar industry they've no intention of giving up without a fight. ready?][Recommended >]

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Flawed climate bill will hurt economy

In June, the U.S. Senate will debate Senate Bill 2191, "America's Climate Security Act," sponsored by Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. This badly flawed bill would implement a cap-and-trade policy to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to 4 percent below the 1990 level by 2020, and to 63 percent below the 2005 level by 2050, according to its authors. The bill could cap the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted in America...

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YOUR Senator > http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

It May Be 2008 at Home, But in the Academy It's 1984

Freedom of speech and inquiry have long been cherished principles in America. They are especially important in the world of academia where they have been viewed as the basis of "academic freedom." For years scholars have advanced the proposition that academic freedom is essential to the advancement of knowledge. Only by challenging the prevailing orthodoxy, they maintained, could one open up new vistas of learning and truth.

In our postmodern world, however, many scholars are learning the hard way that "academic freedom" has become an Orwellian term meaning "academic tyranny." Today, in the academy, one is free only to advance notions that are consonant with the prevailing politically correct orthodoxy. Challenges to that orthodoxy are often met with denials of tenure, refusals to renew contracts, or expulsion...

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Vatican: It's OK to believe in aliens

Vatican City - The Vatican's chief astronomer says that believing in aliens does not contradict faith in God. The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, says that the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones. (Snip) Funes said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be like ''putting limits'' on God's creative freedom.

[and there you have it: the Catholic Church is more tolerant of alternative views than is American academia. marvelous]

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Farming for riches

I may surprise some people by saying what few presidential candidates would ever be willing to say out loud in farm country: I'd veto the farm bill—a bloated expansion in federal spending that will do more harm than good. When agricultural commodity prices and exports have reached record highs, we no longer need government-grown farms and mammoth government bureaucracies. As grocery bills soar, food banks go bare and food rationing occurs on a global scale, we must challenge the wisdom of this bill.

[summary: as usual, government intervention only multiplies a problem...]

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Hillary, Barack, want my vote? Just $20 million, please

California

What will it take for a Democratic presidential candidate to win the support of California superdelegate Steven Ybarra? Say, $20 million. The Democratic National Committee member doesn't parse his words when it comes to what he wants from Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton - an ironclad promise to spend that heady amount to register Mexican-American voters and get them to the polls in November...

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Read a Book, Get Charged with Racial Harassment

The May 9 edition of the New York Post carries a short article by an Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis student named Keith John Sampson. He tells a story of how he was charged with "racial harassment" simply because he was "caught" reading an anti-Ku Klux Klan book. I'm not kidding. Sampson tells his story:

The book was Todd Tucker's 'Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan'; I was reading it on break from my campus job as a janitor. The same book is in the university library . . . .

But that didn't stop the Affirmative Action Office of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis from branding me as a detestable Klansman.

They didn't want to hear the truth. The office ruled that my 'repeatedly reading the book . . . constitutes racial harassment in that you demonstrated disdain and insensitivity to your co-workers.'

The affirmative-action officer -- who draws a salary of $106, 000 a year to perform her crucial role and is obviously a woman of inestimable intellect -- neither examined the book nor spoke with Sampson. He wasn't guilty before proven innocent. He was just guilty.

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Texas caught off guard as more seek handgun permits

AUSTIN — Demand for concealed handgun licenses has risen nearly 40 percent in Texas in a year, an increase being attributed to many factors, even presidential politics. Though the exact cause may be unclear, what's certain is that the spike in applications has caught the Department of Public Safety unprepared. The state is taking a month longer than the 60 days allowed by law to process original applications and 80 days longer on renewals.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5762984.html