Monthly Archives: March 2014

You’ve been warned

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If you happen to be the kind of person who thinks the global warming is a modern form of the madness of crowds, then the world must indeed look like an insane asylum. The article is titled, Global warming dials up our risks, UN Report says. This, remember, is not science fiction:

If the world doesn’t cut pollution of heat-trapping gases, the already noticeable harms of global warming could spiral “out of control,” the head of a United Nations scientific panel warned Monday.

And he’s not alone. The Obama White House says it is taking this new report as a call for action, with Secretary of State John Kerry saying “the costs of inaction are catastrophic.”

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that issued the 32-volume, 2,610-page report here early Monday, told The Associated Press: “it is a call for action.” Without reductions in emissions, he said, impacts from warming “could get out of control.”

One of the study’s authors, Maarten van Aalst, a top official at the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said, “If we don’t reduce greenhouse gases soon, risks will get out of hand. And the risks have already risen.”

Twenty-first century disasters such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia and deadly flooding in Mozambique, Thailand and Pakistan highlight how vulnerable humanity is to extreme weather, according to the report from the Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists. The dangers are going to worsen as the climate changes even more, the report’s authors said.

“We’re now in an era where climate change isn’t some kind of future hypothetical,” said the overall lead author of the report, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California. “We live in an area where impacts from climate change are already widespread and consequential.”

Nobody is immune.

It was fated to be a hit

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Doris Day’s greatest song. It’s origins are completely unimaginable from the tune or the lyrics. This is from Mark Steyn:

It was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans.

“Que Sera Sera” was a deal-clincher: Alfred Hitchcock wanted Jimmy Stewart for The Man Who Knew Too Much, his 1956 Hollywood remake of one of his early British films. But Stewart’s agency, MCA, told Hitchcock they’d only give him Stewart if he took another of their clients, Doris Day, as co-star. So Hitch agreed. Then Doris demanded a song. So Hitch caved again.

“We had never met him before,” Ray Evans recalled a few years ago. “And Hitchcock said, ‘I don’t know what kind of a song I want, but it’s got to be the kind of song that a mother would sing to a little child.’ The picture takes place in Europe and North Africa. Jimmy Stewart is a diplomat-” Mr Evans’ memory was a little faulty here: Stewart was playing a doctor. “-and Hitchcock said, ‘I’ve written it into the plot because it’s the part when the little boy is kidnapped, when Doris Day finally finds him. She finds him by singing the song and hearing him echo her in the distance and she knows where he is.’ But we got the title ‘Que Sera, Sera’ and wrote it on that basis and then we had to play it for Mr Hitchcock and he said, ‘Gentlemen’ – and Jay could imitate him very well. I can’t do that – he said, ‘Gentlemen, when I first met you, I didn’t know what kind of a song I wanted. That’s the kind of a song I wanted.’ He said, ‘Thank you very much. Goodbye.’ And we never saw him again.”

In the picture, with Doris Day singing to a young child, you can sense the director doesn’t know what he’s got – the artlessness of the song seems to have thrown poor old Hitch. Miss Day didn’t like it. She thought it was a child’s song and would never be a hit, so she did it in one take and said “That’ll do”, and it became the biggest hit of her career.

But aside from the genealogy, there is the philosophy behind the tune which is discussed by Steyn at the end of his piece:

The philosophy is bunk. Whatever will be is not what will be: We have the capacity to shape events and, if we don’t, they may well turn out to be far less congenial for us than they were for Doris Day.

For myself, I am a great believer in trying to steer events in the right direction but looking at how things are going, I’m not sure that Doris Day didn’t get it right after all.

Obama and the creation of a socialist state

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This was a comment on my Delusional Liar post on Obama. I thought I knew about Alinski but if that is a direct quote from somewhere it is a truly explosive find. Even if not a direct quote, it is a quite nice summation of what is going on even if it has happened only opportunistically.

Obama is not delusional at all. He knows exactly what he’s doing. I’d like to single out the first and fifth of these rules but Obama really has them ALL covered.

How to create a social state by Saul Alinsky:

There are eight levels of control that must be obtained before you are able to create a social state. The first is the most important.

1) Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people

2) Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.

3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.

4) Gun Control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.

5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income)

6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.

7) Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools

8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.

Delusional liar

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Here’s a story of the kind you can read every day on the right side of the blog world, Bob Kerrey Calls Obama a Delusional Liar; Renders Himself MSM Nonperson

Ho hum. Obama is a liar. Wrote about it myself just the other day. He is also off with the fairies, completely lacking in a sense of reality. I’ve also written about just this myself. But in this case the person making the accusation actually tried to run for President as a Democrat and is a former Democrat US Senator. But even so, you have to come to the right side blogs to find out. From the article:

Imagine if a former Republican presidential candidate and U.S. senator had called a current Republican president a delusional liar whose programs are wasteful. Would the mainstream media not be all over the story? Such a person would be interviewed at length by Wolf Blitzer on CNN as well as made the rounds of the morning talk shows and the Sunday news programs as well. The media buzz would be red hot on this topic for days extending into weeks.

Well, there is such a person but because he is a Democrat saying these things about President Obama, we can expect him to become an MSM nonperson. Such seems to already be the fate of former presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey. It is no surprise that his extended criticisms of Obama appeared in in a Daily Mail article in Britain, not in America where the shunning seems to have already begun.

It’s the American media that is the black hole for information about Obama. Nothing emerges. What might go in never comes out. But as for Kerrey’s views, which you can only read here or on like-minded blogs, this is what he had to say:

Obama isn’t the first president to make that kind of miscalculation – Kerrey calls it ‘self-delusion’ – while in office.

He joked that geneticists will one day soon ‘find a base pair’ of genes that predisposes people to deception.

And he predicted, half-seriously, that ‘they’ll find another base pair which say that politicians have 25 per cent more capacity for – you call it lying, I call it self-delusion.’

But however much a delusional liar Obama may be, a media that actually did its job would hound a president into less time on the golf course and more effort to get his policies right. It is the far left American media that is at the heart of the problem for which no solution comes to mind, nor can there be until some politician on the right takes up this issue in a seriously determined way.

UPDATE: The horror of Obama in the White House who cannot be removed before January 2017 is beginning to dawn on more and more people. It’s an insanity really. The same dim bulbs who could not wait to see the last of George Bush and who voted for Obama a second time are driving the US and the West into receivership and worse. Same goes for all those fools who chose to stay home because the Republicans nominated someone not exactly to their taste. So here is yet another story of the train wreck coming, this one titled Chickens come home to roost for Obama:

Obama’s sixth year in the White House is shaping up as his worst, and that’s saying something. He’s been in the Oval Office so long that it is obscene to blame his problems on George W. Bush, the weather or racism. Obama owns the world he made, or more accurately, the world he tried to remake.

Nothing important has worked as promised, and there is every reason to believe the worst is yet to come. The president’s casual remark the other day that he worries about “a nuclear weapon ­going off in Manhattan” inadvertently reflected the fear millions of Americans have about his leadership. Not necessarily about a bomb, but about where he is taking the country.

We are racing downhill and he is stepping on the gas. Will he stop before the nation crashes?

Stories of this kind have a global warming sense to me, some kind of thrilling to the horrors to come. Only unlike global warming, this is a genuine tragedy and is happening in real time.

A special kind of stupid

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All this makes perfect sense but he leaves out the role of the media. Nevertheless:

Maybe you were not that excited that 2012 gave you a choice between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. I sympathize — I liked Rick Perry. But how is President Romney vs. President Obama a hard choice? How is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a hard choice? How is Speaker of the House John Boehner vs. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi a hard choice?

It isn’t.

Even if you think that Romney is a squishy RINO Massachusetts technocrat with a secret crush on Obamacare, you have to be on the wrong side of the border between ideologically hardcore and ideologically blinded to conclude that spending four years fighting against the very worst imaginable tendencies of a Romney administration would have been anything other than wine and roses compared with spending four years fighting against the very worst tendencies of an Obama administration, especially when the president is in the position of never having to face another election.

You can tell yourself a just-so story about how the guy you liked who couldn’t beat Romney in the GOP primary would have beaten the mom jeans off of Obama in the general, and maybe you’re right, but it didn’t happen that way. (And maybe you don’t like that the so-called establishment supported Romney. Guess what? You can support candidates, too!) Likewise, if all the senators that conservatives admire weren’t already running for president, one of them might make a majority leader that you’d prefer to McConnell. And Paul Ryan probably would be a more inspiring speaker than Boehner is. Fine, fine, and fine. But that isn’t where we were, and it isn’t where we are.

The question wasn’t “Mitt Romney — yes or no?” It was: “Mitt Romney — compared with what?”

Well, compared with what you have right now today. There are idiots aplenty in every electorate in the world, but it takes a special kind of stupid to vote for Obama twice or not to vote him out when you get the chance. If you are a conservative and sat out the last election then you are as bad as the lowest of the low information voters and then some.

Delusional liar for president

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There are two sides to the Obama phenomenon, one that he always lies and the second that he is a fantasist lost from reality. So here we have Bob Kerry, who ran for President as a Democrat, bringing both thoughts together at once:

He joked that geneticists will one day soon ‘find a base pair’ of genes that predisposes people to deception.

And he predicted, half-seriously, that ‘they’ll find another base pair which say that politicians have 25 per cent more capacity for – you call it lying, I call it self-delusion.’

Everybody knows but no one can do a thing.

Amazingly the book is more plausible than the film

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Went to see Noah last night. Let me put it this way. There was a chap named Noah and he had three sons named Shem, Ham and Japteth. There was a flood. As for the animals trooping in two by two, in over two hours that part might have taken up three minutes of movie time. But at least the film showed how Noah was able to find the labour needed to build a boat big enough to carry two of every kind of animal in the world. I can only think a film like this is possible today because no one any longer actually knows the story. More evidence, as if it were needed, that our Judeo-Christian culture will not hold and something else will be arriving very soon.

Liars and their media enablers

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Part of the interest in following politics in the US is to see just how corrupt it is, with the heart of that corruption in the media reporting. The certainty that the mainstream media will lie at every turn to protect a Democrat, and do the same to harm a Republican, is as plain as day but almost never discussed. Three instances have come up in the past two days of the ways in which the news is suppressed and distorted.

First Obama went to see the Pope, and this is how it turned out:

President Obama’s first meeting with Pope Francis produced a little schism of its own.

The Vatican and White House gave starkly different versions Thursday of Mr. Obama’s meeting with Francis.

Stark indeed. This is the Obama version, just a bit of chit chat really:

“We actually didn’t talk a whole lot about social schisms in my conversations with His Holiness,” Mr. Obama said at a press conference in Rome. “In fact, that really was not a topic of conversation.”

And this is the Vatican version:

The Vatican, however, issued a statement after the meeting saying the president’s discussions with Francis and two other top Vatican officials focused “on questions of particular relevance for the [Catholic] Church in [the United States], such as the exercise of the rights to religious freedom, life and conscientious objection” — issues that have fueled divisions between Mr. Obama and the church.

OK so the Pope says one thing and Obama says another. Just how likely is it that Obama was the one to be telling the gospel truth. But while the media in some sense took note, they left it up in the air about where the truth might be. And then there is this which has also come up at the same time:

The Obama administration now says more than 6 million people have signed up for Obamacare, but critical information is missing, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told Fox News on Friday.

“I think that they are lying to us about who has paid, who has not paid, who is getting subsidies…They don’t want to give us the numbers,” she said. “The way they are surveying this (web)site — you know they are trying to cover things up.”

Of course, Obama has done nothing but lie about the Affordable Care Act so why should now be different? It’s routine for Obama to lie. But as disgusting and despicable as that is, the way this is not a media issue, to be chewed over and discussed, is an important element in what is turning the US into the Argentina of the twenty-first century.

And perhaps most bizarrely of all there is this, At Obama-Putin Phone Call:

While we’ll never know exactly how the phone call went, if you read how the Obama administration described the conversation between Putin and Obama, and how the Russians described it, you’d think they were two completely different phone calls. . . .

When you read the Russian version it sounds like Obama is cooperating to help Putin “protect” the citizens of Ukraine. The White House version has Obama practically berating Putin, while the Russian version has him going along with Putin’s plans.

It is a disastrous business when it is infinitely easier to believe the President of Russia than the President of the United States just as I would find it as likely that I’m being lied to by The New York Times as I am by Pravda. As the article concludes: “Aren’t you glad we have a community organizer in charge of the free world?” Well, tell the truth, aren’t you?

Even the ABC is questioning global warming

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It’s not true, of course. Yet this is not my notion but is from a post at Watt’s Up with That? titled, Now even Australia’s ABC is asking questions about the new IPCC report and why Dr. Richard Tol asked his name to be removed from it. Still, this must represent progress of sorts:

Nicholas Stern is challenged by ABC’s Tony Jones on China/coal/renewables propaganda, and comes out looking very foolish indeed.

I’m not sure I’d go that far but you can see that for a change there is actually some effort made to challenge the facile nonsense that is the preserve of the GWL:

***NICHOLAS STERN: What China is doing is growing rapidly and trying to reduce the fraction of coal in its energy portfolio and it’s succeeding in doing that.

TONY JONES: Sorry, can I interrupt you there. Do you know what it is at the moment? I found it hard to actually find details of this. What is the percentage of power produced by coal?

NICHOLAS STERN: I think it’s around – you’ll have to check this Tony but I think it’s just below 60 per cent coming down from considerably above 60 per cent.
Don’t hold me on those numbers. All I can tell you is that it’s coming down pretty rapidly in China as a result of direct policy and notwithstanding a likely doubling of the economy in 10 years, that they aim, during that period, to find a peak in coal and then bring it on down thereafter…

***TONY JONES: Finally, as scientists meet in Japan to thrash out the final wording on the IPCC’s next assessment report on the impact of climate change, British economist Professor Richard Toll who was one of the lead authors, has asked for his name to be taken off the document, claiming it’s alarmist and has been changed from talking, as he says, about manageable risk to the four horsemen of the apocalypse. How much damage will his departure do to the credibility of the final report?

NICHOLAS STERN: Not much. He’s always been somebody who as argued that the damages from climate change are there but very small. He’s an outlier really and I think his departure won’t make much difference.

Meanwhile it’s Earth Hour tonight so get the Kleig lights out of storage. And re the War on the West and our way of life, I see from Instapundit that this week would have been Norman Borlaug’s 100th birthday. This quote applies to much more than just food, given these same environmentalists aim to cut back on every aspect that makes modern life pleasant:

[Most Western environmentalists] have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.

And just who was Norman Borlaug? The article was written in 1997 when he was 82.

He received the Nobel in 1970, primarily for his work in reversing the food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted — for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine — 1975! The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.

Yet although he has led one of the century’s most accomplished lives, and done so in a meritorious cause, Borlaug has never received much public recognition in the United States, where it is often said that the young lack heroes to look up to. One reason is that Borlaug’s deeds are done in nations remote from the media spotlight: the Western press covers tragedy and strife in poor countries, but has little to say about progress there. Another reason is that Borlaug’s mission — to cause the environment to produce significantly more food—has come to be seen, at least by some securely affluent commentators, as perhaps better left undone. More food sustains human population growth, which they see as antithetical to the natural world.

The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the World Bank, once sponsors of his work, have recently given Borlaug the cold shoulder.

We live in such dark times, Earth Hour or not.