Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Georgia: Europe wins a gold medal for defeatism
Sarkozy's ‘peace in our time' deal is a reminder of what could happen if the EU wins more clout
Once again, the Europeans, and their friends in the pusillanimous wing of the US Left, have demonstrated that, when it come to those postmodern Olympian sports of synchronized self-loathing, team hand-wringing and lightweight posturing, they know how to sweep gold, silver and bronze... [snip]
... the one-sided ceasefire that he [Sarkozy] 'negotiated' was more or less dictated to him by Mr Putin. It not only left the Russian military in place in the disputed enclaves. It allowed them free rein to continue operations inside the rest of Georgia... [snip]
... we should never forget what Mr Sarkozy and his EU officials got up to this week. There can be no clearer indication of the perils that threaten the West if the EU gets its way and wins more clout in the world.
This, remember, is the same EU that wants to take over foreign and security policy from member states, an institution that is always eager to pump itself up at the expense of democratic institutions in those member states, but which crumbles into puny submission when faced with authoritarian bullying overseas...
[I find myself having to remind my politicos that Europe chose to sell of its militaries over the years to pay for their welfare states. Only a handful could put up more than a token resistance if invaded, and none - not one - can project power above Falklands-level. America stands alone, capability wise, as defensible in the free world - we best take that fact seriously: China and Russia are rising, and Europe is worthless]
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Russian general says Poland open to nuclear strike
Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces"
A senior Russian general warned Poland today that it was leaving itself open to retaliation - and possibly even a nuclear strike - by agreeing to host a US missile base.
General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the Russian armed forces' deputy chief of staff, issued the extraordinary threat in an interview with Interfax, a Russian news agency.
“Poland, by deploying [the system] is exposing itself to a strike - 100 per cent,” he was quoted as saying, before explaining that Russian military doctrine sanctioned the use of nuclear weapons “against the allies of countries having nuclear weapons if they in some way help them”. [snip]
Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, hinted that the US had pledged to back Warsaw in the event of Russian aggression towards Poland. He said that he only agreed to host the US defence shield on the condition that the US agreed to help augment Poland’s defences with Patriot missiles, which are intended to ward off any threat from Russia.
“We have crossed the Rubicon,” he said after agreeing the landmark deal after more than 18 months of negotiations. In the past few days, Polish leaders told a domestic audience that the fighting in Georgia has justified Warsaw’s willingness to form such a significant alliance with the US.
[this is only the latest threat to go nuclear: last year Russia threatened to re-target it's ICBM on Europe should a missile defense system be deployed {again, a system, designed to defend against 'rogue players' {say: Iran}, which is unquestionably incapable of thwarting mass flights of missiles such as Russia is capable}
Q: if Europe is willing not to stand on this point, how can anyone expect anything meaningful go come from them re: anything else? ]
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Ukraine offers West radar warning
Ukraine has said it is ready to make its missile early warning systems available to European nations following Russia's conflict with Georgia. The foreign ministry said Moscow's abrogation earlier this year of an accord involving two tracking stations allowed it to co-operate with others.
President Viktor Yushchenko said his country could ensure its sovereignty only through collective security...
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The Olympics mess
[HT:MD].
It is hard to avoid the role of spoilsport when talking about the Beijing Olympics. We all love to hear the National Anthem played as American athletes step up onto the middle podium to receive their gold medals.
Then the knowledge of where this is all taking place intrudes and undercuts much of the pride. From there, thoughts then drift, or at least should drift in any morally developed soul, to all the brave Chinese dissidents who are languishing in dungeons as a result of the Chinese government’s pre-Olympics cleanup or simply its broader, routine beastliness.
For only the third time, the Olympic games are being held in a nation governed by a brutal dictatorship. This time might be the worst for a number of reasons... [snip]
... the Chinese government has killed somewhere between 50 million and 60 million of its own people since coming to power nearly 60 years ago, making it by almost any reckoning the most bloodthirsty in history. While it is true that most of that body count could be laid at the feet of the gruesome Mao Zedong, it staggers the mind to realize that the party and regime that he created are the same ones hosting our athletes in Beijing today.
Imagine that the Nazi Party had somehow survived World War II intact and that as a consequence Hitler’s acolytes were still running things in Germany. One needn’t go very far to intermix the policies at play, or that morality should have prevented the Olympic games from being presided over by thugs who can too smoothly trace their lineage back to the likes of Josef Stalin, Hitler or Mao...
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Kassam rocket lands in western Israel
A Kassam rocket landed in the western Negev Wednesday evening, near a greenhouse of one of the Gaza periphery kibbutzim. No damage or casualties were reported. On Saturday, during clashes between Hamas gunmen and members of the Fatah-linked Hilles clan, several mortar shells were fired into Israel.
(Snip) The Kassam fired Wednesday was not the first instance of Hamas breaking the ceasefire with Israel...
[just another day of cease fire in Israel]
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Muslim rebels leave a trail of bloodied corpses in Philippines
Iligan, Philippines - Muslim separatist rebels left a string of corpses and burning homes after a series of pre-dawn attacks yesterday on towns in the southern Philippines. Agence France-Presse reporters saw nine bloodied bodies lying by a roadside in one village as black smoke billowed from houses burning in the background. Five other civilians were killed in another village by marauding guerillas from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
[GWOT]
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NBC's Andrea Mitchell Floats Idea McCain Cheated
[HT:LW]
Think John McCain did pretty well in last evening's Saddleback Civil Forum on Presidency hosted by the Rev. Rick Warren? You're not the only one. The Obama campaign thinks he did well too -- so good, in fact, that they think he might have cheated. And on this morning's "Meet the Press," Andrea Mitchell wasted no time floating the Obama campaign's "private" concern (Videotape) :
MS. ANDREA MITCHELL: The Obama people must feel that he didn't do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because that -- what they're putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.Full video of today's "Meet the Press" can be seen here. Relevant segment begins at approx. 33:50.
MR. GREGORY: Right. [?]
MS. MITCHELL: He seemed so well prepared.
Wow. Somehow, John McCain can't do well on his own -- that being "so well prepared" means that he heard Obama's answers and then immediately formulated revised responses to what he originally had planned.
I wonder what the Obama campaign's reaction (and Andrea Mitchell's for that matter) would have been had the situation been reversed -- if the McCain campaign implied that Obama had "seemed so well prepared" and therefore Obama must have cheated.
No doubt such an accusation against Obama would have been proof positive of racism...
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Polls: Public Dislikes Bias, Dems Want 'Fairness'
[HT:GI]
"The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 55% believe media bias is more of a problem than big campaign contributions." As Tom Blumer pointed out when first reporting on this poll on Monday,
This latest survey adds credence to an earlier Rasmussen poll that showed that "49% believe most reporters are trying to help Barack Obama win the election this year," while "just 14% believe they’re trying to help McCain."
Every new poll released shows a public increasingly disenchanted with news coverage and unwilling to suspend their disbelief while watching the liberal news. This is why, as Matthew Sheffield pointed out yesterday, they consume more and more of their news on the internet.
There are two other points revealed collectively by the three polls which we all already intuitively know:
Conservatives believe bias in the media is a bigger problem than liberals.
Liberals favor government regulation of the media in far larger numbers than conservatives.
Besides pointing out the obvious, I raise this issue for another reason: the added context of the Presidential election.
If Obama is elected in November, you can bet the Fairness Doctrine (or whatever other euphemism they decide to use) will be high on the agenda of Barack Obama and his MSM enablers.
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The inconvenient lies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
.
The following is a plot of actual temperature observations with their trend line (purple) set against the predictions for temperatures over the same period made by IPCC (orange line). The result is not surprising because the IPCC models are programmed to assume that an increase in CO2 will result in an increase in temperature.
There is not a single case for any period of any duration where CO2 increase precedes temperature increase. All records show temperature increase precedes CO2 increase. But the IPCC have ‘proved’ with computer models they are 90% certain that the current warming is due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, namely CO2.
This is pre-determined because the computer model is programmed to have an increase in temperature if CO2 increases. By their own definitive statements, temperatures cannot go down as long as CO2 increases. Trouble is CO2 has continued to increase but temperatures have declined and many scientists expect them to go lower until at least 2030.
It didn’t take long for nature to show the IPCC was wrong....
[straight and to the point - Recommended > ]
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ABC's Gibson Attempts Guilt Trip on Exxon CEO
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Maybe it was a stab by Charles Gibson to provide a national group therapy session, but the ABC "World News" anchor aggressively questioned ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson on the August 14 broadcast for "obscene" profits and asked him to "justify" the company's success.
But Tillerson explained to Gibson it was the nature of a large business that performs an incredible amount of transactions:
"Everything we do, the numbers are very large," Tillerson replied. "I saw someone characterize our profits the other day, in terms of $1,400 in profit per second. Well, they also need to understand we paid $4,000 a second in taxes. And we spent $15,000 a second in costs. We spend $1 billion a day just running our business. So, this is a business where large numbers are just characteristic of it."
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Giant solar project in California rivals coal plant
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- SunPower Corp. shares rallied 18% Friday after the solar-panel maker announced its participation in a giant 800-megawatt, photovoltaic project from Pacific Gas & Electric Corp., hailed by industry insiders as the first major utility-scale endeavor of its kind in the United States. Analysts cheered the project's news as a positive move for the solar stocks, hit by concerns tied to a slowing economy and oversupply, as well as uncertainty over federal tax $ub$idies for alternative energy...
[Pop Quiz: can anyone spot what makes this 'technology' so green...?]
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Let go of the past and allow offshore oil drilling
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Like a lot of Californians, however, when the drilling platform fouled our beaches, I became a NIMBY. Get those leaking monstrosities out of our waters. No more drilling.
That was nearly 40 years ago.
At that point, America was importing only 24% of its oil. Today, it's up to nearly 70% and rising, a ludicrous transfer of American wealth to other countries - many not our friends... [snip]
California is the nation's biggest consumer of gasoline -- 45 million gallons a day, plus 10 million gallons of diesel. That makes us the third-biggest petroleum-consuming entity in the world, behind only the United States and China
So there's a gusher of hypocrisy here: The state that is the biggest consumer of gasoline in the nation is opposed to drilling for more oil off its shores. We're slackers not pulling our weight
Anyway, the important thing is to produce the fuel ourselves, not be shaping our foreign policy to assure a steady supply from shifty overseas sellers.
It's time to let go of the past -- the past 40 years -- and allow offshore drilling. It's about the principle as much as the production...
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Texas school district lets teachers, staff pack pistols
To deter and protect against school shootings, trustees have altered district policy to allow employees to carry concealed weapons if they have a state permit and permission from the administration."When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started," Thweatt said. "Why would you put it out there that a group of people can’t defend themselves? That’s like saying 'sic ’em’ to a dog.
Superintendent David Thweatt said a main concern was that the small community is a 30-minute drive from the sheriff’s office, leaving students and teachers without protection."The naysayers think [a shooting] won’t happen here," he said. "If something were to happen here, I’d much rather be calling a parent to tell them that their child is OK because we were able to protect them."
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Aussie mayor urges unattractive women to move into town
The mayor of an Australian outback mining town has come under fire for urging unattractive women to move in, assuring them they will find a man because there is a shortage of women. John Moloney, mayor of Mount Isa in northwestern Queensland, told a newspaper his town was a place for "ugly ducklings to flourish into beautiful swans" and called on the "beauty-disadvantaged" to flock there.
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