Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Dear Patriotic American,
This Thanksgiving thousands of severely burned, blinded or paralyzed troops will be struggling to put food on the table.
By clicking here you can make a tax-deductible donation to the "Thanksgiving Thank You" meals project, sponsored by the Coalition to Salute America's Heroes. Our "Thanksgiving Thank You" project was created to provide meals for our wounded heroes and their families over Thanksgiving weekend.As long as we receive your donation by midnight on Tuesday, we'll be able to use it to help a severely wounded G.I. over Thanksgiving weekend.
And by clicking here you can send a special Thanksgiving THANK YOU and GET WELL card to a disabled serviceman or woman. A THANK YOU and GET WELL card from you can help in their healing and let them know you're thankful for the sacrifices they've made. (You can even type in a personal greeting if you like!)
[ and Thank You for your support ]
U.S. troop surge for Afghanistan to start January
Cornwallis, N.S. -- The United States will send about 20,000 more soldiers into Afghanistan next year in a bid to make the country secure enough for elections expected there in the fall, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Friday following a meeting with Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay and other allied governments. The troop surge -- one of the largest single reinforcements of coalition armies since the ouster of the Taliban in 2001 -- has already begun...
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China rejects sending troops to Afghanistan
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told New York's Council on Foreign Relations on Friday that China should send troops because there was a global consensus that Afghanistan is [now, due to the success in Iraq] the ''the front line'' in the battle against terrorism.
China said Tuesday it would not send any troops to Afghanistan.
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ElBaradei clashes with US over Syria's bid for nuclear power
Vienna, Austria - The chief UN nuclear inspector said Monday that Syria had a right to his agency's help in planning a power-producing atomic reactor, in what diplomats described as a rejection of US-led efforts to block the aid.
The clash reflected tensions between Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN nuclear agency, and key Western nations over whether Syria should be given potentially sensitive nuclear guidance...
[FLASHBACKS re: this imbecile:
[context: nowhere in the article does the AP remind readers that this is the person who seriously called for the West to destroy all in nukes as an example to others - and we're supposed to listen to his definitions of 'madness'?]
"Many countries in the Mideast have expressed interest in developing peaceful atomic energy programs in response to rising domestic energy consumption and possibly to counter Iran's nuclear activities. "["and possibly to counter Iran's nuclear activities. " - nobody's talking about peaceful uses - we're being insulted by the suggestion]
re: Syria:
"Moscow announced the Syrian port of Tartus would be renovated to provide Russia with its first Mediterranean naval base. Sources interpret Friday’s events as indicating that Russia’s leaders have determined to open a second anti-Western front in the Middle East..."
]
The Great Global Warming Swindle
[HT:JK]
CO2 is a very small gas in the atmosphere. It is vital of course – without it we wouldn’t be here. But it’s small. It’s not at all the most important greenhouse gas, and greenhouse gases themselves, and the ‘greenhouse effect’, form only one small part of the earth’s climate system (and not a very well understood part either). There is no correlation between CO2 and temperature on any significant timescale, except where you find, in ice core data, CO2 levels being influenced by temperature levels (there’s a time lag between the two phenomena). Even global warmers admit that, for CO2 to make any difference, there would need to be some mechanism to amplify its effect in the atmosphere. No such amplifier has been shown to exist. They haven’t even been able to demonstrate how one might work in theory (the trouble is the only conceivable amplifier would be water vapour, and water vapour makes clouds, which are rather famous for their cooling effect – at least the low level ones).
So what are we left with? Temperature has risen, slightly, falteringly and gradually for about 150 years or so (even ‘warmer’ scientists can’t claim that this started because of us). The period before this rise has long been known as a ‘Little Ice Age’, from which we are evidently making a welcome recovery. We only started pumping out CO2 properly in the postwar boom, but what did temperatures do? In the postwar period they fell, till about the mid-70s. Then they went up again (just like they did at the beginning of the 20th Century, and then for the past ten years they’ve more or less flat-lined, decreasing slightly.
Where is the evidence that humans are changing the climate? This is nothing but prejudice. It is not serious science.
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Green market risk
To the layers of confusion that now exist in our financial markets we are about to add another, as opaque and volatile as the others, and as unhinged from the real world — a carbon currency. President-elect Barack Obama wants it, Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants it and their European counterparts, to some extent, already have it.
Europe’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) is the world’s largest trading exchange for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If ambitious Kyoto-style plans come to fruition, ETS will morph to account for, among other things, the carbon content of all industrial and biological processes, and the carbon carrying capacity of all the real estate on our planet.
Because carbon is a building block of life, and because we live in a carbon-based planet, carbon prices will become more ubiquitous than the U.S. dollar. It would become, in effect, a globally traded currency tied to gaseous commodities that until recently were nowhere traded.
Carbon offsets, credits, allowances sinks and other instruments attempt to create pricing for something that no one wants, can’t be seen, is entirely a creature of government and that may prove to benefit rather than harm the environment. They are obscure and opaque, instruments both green and toxic.
[so? it's a mechanism to government power and revenue - who's going to stop them - you?]
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NO CONFIDENCE IN CONGRESS
... How can we tell if Congress understands its role in causing the problem and what it must do to help solve it? Here are some signs:
- If Congress passes a stimulus package that simply gives people money, they don't get it; rebates will not stimulate the economy and will not solve the underlying problem.
- If Congress tries to "help" the people who cannot afford the house they are in, be assured that we are wasting money and delaying the recovery; Banks can decide better whether to foreclose or make a deal far better than any governmental entity.
- If Congress forces the Treasury to provide cheap equity to companies which are solvent, or to automobile companies because of the debt owed unions in a politically important state, or if it continues with politically motivated spending, all of us will suffer a long and deep recession.
- If Congress raises marginal tax rates and erects trade barriers, and makes it easier for unions to organize without secret ballot through "card check" legislation, then the recession will be even longer and deeper.
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Colombia warns on US trade deal
Colombia's ties with the US could be severely damaged if Congress does not approve a planned free trade deal, the country's vice-president has warned. Francisco Santos-Calderon told the BBC that a US failure to sign the pact would be a "slap in the face" to a strong ally.
[it is, our congress is embarrassing us {ok, not exactly 'news' - but we've got to get off the dime here, like everyone else...}]
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Colombia’s Uribe, Canada’s Harper to Sign Free Trade Agreement
Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will sign a free trade accord today on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Lima, Uribe’s office said in a statement.
The accord, which eases access to markets for C$1.14 billion ($890 million) in annual bilateral trade, was announced in June after less than a year of negotiations.
President George W. Bush, who arrives to Lima today, has also made approving a free trade agreement with Colombia, a top ally in the fight against drugs, a priority before leaving office in January. U.S. President-elect Barack Obama, echoing concerns about Colombia’s human-rights record raised by labor unions, opposed the agreement during his campaign for president.
“This is another example of the hemisphere moving ahead without us,” Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the New York- based Council of the Americas, said in an interview in Lima.
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Mein Kampus
... The professor's written instructions harangue students to rely upon facts, not political opinions, in writing the paper and to use at least fifteen different sources. All sources, however, were not equal. Three of those fifteen sources were required to come out of the New York Times; five of those sources were required to come out of the Washington Post; two of those sources had to be the Guardian. Ten of the fifteen mandatory sources, in other words, had to come from periodicals rabidly hostile to President Bush. Three of the citations had to come from articles by Dana Priest of the Washington Post. But that was not all. No credit at all would be given for using sources that "have a reputation within the news industry for distributing their own political views at the expense of the facts, e.g. Fox News."
The shocking thing about all this is that no one reading it is probably shocked at all. The creeping Leftist totalitarianism in academia is so ubiquitous and so mundane that when it appears in a discipline not thought to be overflowing with nutty Leftists, like Criminal Justice, we yawn. We students are told to do a "research paper" which explicitly directs them to sources that they must use and sources that they must not use, we shrug in indifferent despair. [snip]
Is Mein Kampus a more descriptive term for many colleges in America today? Once politically correct thinking was limited to those disciplines which deal directly with politics. Today biologists must have politically correct views on Darwinism, geologists must have politically correct views on global warming, and criminal justice professors must have politically correct views on President Bush...
[we need an internet alternative to the indoctrination centers most of our colleges have become - Recommended > ]
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[see also:
Indoctrinate U is one of the most important documentaries of the year. But it might also be the most important documentary you aren't able to see this year...
See the trailer at their website:
.
OK To Be Patriotic. Now.
For years, little would upset liberals more than the suggestion they were less patriotic than other Americans. The crowd spewing "Bush- Hitler- Genghis- Khan- baby-killers- AmeriKKKa- Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh"? Great patriots, all. Bill Ayers trampling a flag? Dissent is patriotic, dude.
But now that Barack Obama has been elected, comes an admission, unintended as it may be. Yeah, maybe we weren't so much before, but it's cool to be patriotic. Now. Such can be seen in Derrick Z. Jackson's Boston Globe column of today, "It's OK to be an American now." From Jackson's opening paragraph [emphasis added]:Before Obama's victory speech in Chicago, the crowd of 125,000 people said the Pledge of Allegiance. In my 53 years I have never heard such a multicultural throng recite the pledge with such determined enunciation, expelling it from the heart in a treble soaring to the skies and a bass drumming through the soil to vibrate my feet.
Jackson cites a University of Washington professor [what were the odds] who gave the columnist his headline, telling him "I guess it's OK to be an American now." So it wasn't before, apparently.
Are these folks inspired by patriotism, or are they akin to fans of the winning football team chanting "We Are The Champions"? If you only really love your country when your side is in power, what are you?
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