We are happy to announce that we have been added to the blogroll of the excellent PajamasMedia.

We regard it as an honor.

You will see their button on our front page. 

Our readers will find their videos a great source of information, and opinion well worth hearing. 

 Our reader, ‘Libertarian Conservative’, sent us this ‘What-should-be-done’ list. We don’t disagree with any of it. 

1. Elections. Vote the Democrats out.

2. The Economy. Reduce all income tax to a low flat rate. Let failed firms go bankrupt.

3. The Environment. Keep your yard and neighborhood clean, forget the rest.

4. Energy. Drill everywhere in and off-shore America for oil and gas, keep mining and burning coal, build as many nuclear power stations as necessary, scrap the wind-farms. As soon as possible stop importing oil.  

5. Health. Let people pay for their medical treatment. Doctors can charge no more than the market will bear.  

6. Education. Teach literacy, numeracy, math,  science, history, languages, the traditional best of the culture. Not sex. And forget about self-esteem. 

7. Foreign policy. Increase defense expenditure. Modernize the US arsenal. Stop the yackety-yack with Iran and use military force to disable its  nuclear processing installations. Ditto North Korea. Extend the missile shield over all European states subject to Russia’s actual and potential aggression. Pressure the 22 Arab states to absorb and assimilate the ‘Palestinians’; persuade Israel to annex Judea, Jordan or Israel to annex Samaria,  Egypt or Israel to annex a depopulated Gaza. Support Israel in every possible way in the measures it takes to ensure its own survival. Withdraw from the UN and let it die. 

The following is an email by Mark Litvak which is going round America today, forwarded from one recipient to another, informing people about a hugely significant judgment that we otherwise would not hear about since the mainstream media chose not to report it. (Or if they did, not prominently enough for anyone to remember.) Why do they not want us to know about it? Are they for terrorism? Are they against freedom? Do they ask themselves these questions? What are their answers?  

Remember the guy who got on a plane with a bomb built into his shoe and tried to

light it?

       Did you know his trial is over?

      Did you know he was sentenced?

      Did you see/hear any of the judge’s comments on TV or Radio?

       Didn’t think so.!!!

    Everyone should hear what the judge had to say.

  ————————————————————————–

         Ruling by Judge William Young, US District Court.

     Prior to sentencing, the Judge asked the defendant if he had anything to

say..  His response: After admitting his guilt to the court for the record, Reid

also admitted his ‘allegiance to Osama bin Laden, to Islam, and to the

religion of Allah,’ defiantly stating, ‘I think I will not apologize for

my actions,’ and told the court ‘I am at war with your country.’

     Judge Young then delivered the statement quoted below:

 

     January 30, 2003, United States vs. Reid.

     Judge Young:   ‘Mr. Richard C. Reid, hearken now to the sentence the

Court imposes upon you.

     On counts 1, 5 and 6 the Court sentences you to life in prison in the

custody of the United States Attorney General.  On counts 2, 3, 4 and 7, the

Court sentences you to 20 years in prison on each count, the sentence on each

count to run consecutively.  (That’s 80 years.)

     On count 8 the Court sentences you to the mandatory 30 years again, to be

served consecutively to the 80 years just imposed.  The Court imposes upon you

for each of the eight counts a fine of $250,000 that’s an aggregate fine of

$2 million.  The Court accepts the government’s recommendation with respect

to restitution and orders restitution in the amount of $298.17 to Andre Bousquet

and $5,784 to American Airlines.

     The Court imposes upon you an $800 special assessment. The Court imposes

upon you five years supervised release simply because the law requires it. But

the life sentences are real life sentences so I need go no further.

     This is the sentence that is provided for by our statutes.  It is a fair

and just sentence.  It is a righteous sentence.

     Now, let me explain this to you.  We are not afraid of you or any of your

terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid.  We are Americans.  We have been through

the fire before.  There is too much war talk here and I say that to everyone

with the utmost respect.  Here in this court, we deal with individuals as

individuals and care for individuals as individuals.  As human beings, we reach

out for justice.

     You are not an enemy combatant.  You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier

in any war.  You are a terrorist.  To give you that reference, to call you a

soldier, gives you far too much stature. Whether the officers of government do

it or your attorney does it, or if you think you are a soldier.  You are

not—– you are a terrorist.  And we do not negotiate with terrorists.  We do

not meet with terrorists.  We do not sign documents with terrorists.  We hunt

them down one by one and bring them to justice.

     So war talk is way out of line in this court.  You are a big fellow. But

you are not that big.  You’re no warrior.  I’ve known warriors. You are

a terrorist.  A species of criminal that is guilty of multiple attempted

murders.  In a very real sense, State Trooper Santiago had it right when you

first were taken off that plane and into custody and you wondered where the

press and the TV crews were, and he said: ‘You’re no big deal.’

     You are no big deal.

     What your able counsel and what the equally able United States attorneys

have grappled with and what I have as honestly as I know how tried to grapple

with, is why you did something so horrific.  What was it that led you here to

this courtroom today?

     I have listened respectfully to what you have to say. And I ask you to

search your heart and ask yourself what sort of unfathomable hate led you to do

what you are guilty and admit you are guilty of doing?  And, I have an answer

for you.  It may not satisfy you, but as I search this entire record, it comes

as close to understanding as I know.

     It seems to me you hate the one thing that to us is most precious. You hate

our freedom.  Our individual freedom.  Our individual freedom to live as we

choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we

individually choose.  Here, in this society, the very wind carries freedom. It

carries it everywhere from sea to shining sea.  It is because we prize

individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So

that everyone can see, truly see, that justice is administered fairly,

individually, and discretely.  It is for freedom’s sake that your lawyers

are striving so vigorously on your behalf, have filed appeals, will go on in

their representation of you before other judges.

     We Americans are all about freedom.  Because we all know that the way we

treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties.  Make no mistake

though.  It is yet true that we will bear any burden; pay any price, to preserve

our freedoms.  Look around this courtroom.  Mark it well.  The world is not

going to long remember what you or I say here.  The day after tomorrow, it will

be forgotten, but this, however, will long endure.

     Here in this courtroom and courtrooms all across America , the American

people will gather to see that justice, individual justice, justice, not war,

individual justice is in fact being done.  The very President of the United

States through his officers will have to come into courtrooms and lay out

evidence on which specific matters can be judged and juries of citizens will

gather to sit and judge that evidence democratically, to mold and shape and

refine our sense of justice.

     See that flag, Mr. Reid?  That’s the flag of the United States of

America .  That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag

stands for freedom.  And it always will.

     Mr. Custody Officer.  Stand him down.

 

     So, how much of this Judge’s comments did we hear on our TV sets?  We

need more judges like Judge Young, but that’s another subject.  Pass this

around.  Everyone should and needs to hear what this fine judge had to say.

Powerful words that strike home…  

From the (pretty far left) Guardian: 

Nick Robinson: "A question for you both, if I may. The prime minister has repeatedly blamed the United States of America for causing this crisis. France and Germany both blame Britain and America for causing this crisis. Who is right? And isn’t the debate about that at the heart of the debate about what to do now?" Brown immediately swivels to leave Obama in pole position. There is a four-second delay before Obama starts speaking [THANKS FOR NOTHING, GORDY BABY. REMIND ME TO HANG YOU OUT TO DRY ONE DAY.] Barack Obama: "I, I, would say that, er … pause [I HAVEN’T A CLUE] … if you look at … pause[WHO IS THIS NICK ROBINSON JERK?] … the, the sources of this crisis … pause [JUST KEEP GOING, BUDDY] … the United States certainly has some accounting to do with respect to … pause [I’M IN WAY TOO DEEP HERE] … a regulatory system that was inadequate to the massive changes that have taken place in the global financial system … pause, close eyes [THIS IS GOING TO GO DOWN LIKE A CROCK OF SHIT BACK HOME. HELP]. I think what is also true is that … pause[I WANT NICK ROBINSON TO DISAPPEAR] … here in Great Britain …pause [SHIT, GORDY’S THE HOST, DON’T LAND HIM IN IT] … here in continental Europe … pause [DAMN IT, BLAME EVERYONE.] … around the world. We were seeing the same mismatch between the regulatory regimes that were in place and er … pause [I’VE LOST MY TRAIN OF THOUGHT AGAIN] … the highly integrated, er, global capital markets that have emerged … pause [I’M REALLY WINGING IT NOW]. So at this point, I’m less interested in … pause [YOU] … identifying blame than fixing the problem. I think we’ve taken some very aggressive steps in the United States to do so, n
ot just responding to the immediate crisis, ensuring banks are adequately capitalised, er, dealing with the enormous, er … pause [WHY DIDN’T I QUIT WHILE I WAS AHEAD?] … drop-off in demand and contraction that has taken place. More importantly, for the long term, making sure that we’ve got a set of, er, er, regulations that are up to the task, er, and that includes, er, a number that will be discussed at this summit. I think there’s a lot of convergence between all the parties involved about the need, for example, to focus not on the legal form that a particular financial product takes or the institution it emerges from, but rather what’s the risk involved, what’s the function of this product and how do we regulate that adequately, much more effective coordination, er, between countries so we can, er, anticipate the risks that are involved there. Dealing with the, er, problem of derivatives markets, making sure we have set up systems, er, that can reduce some of the risks there. So, I actually think … pause[FANTASTIC. I’VE LOST EVERYONE, INCLUDING MYSELF] … there’s enormous consensus that has emerged in terms of what we need to do now and, er … pause [I’M OUTTA HERE. TIME FOR THE USUAL CLOSING BOLLOCKS] … I’m a great believer in looking forwards than looking backwards.

 From Power Line: 

 Earlier this month, the Heartland Institute sponsored the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York. The Conference differed from most such events in that it was devoted to science, not politics or propaganda. Heartland has now made the materials presented at the conference available online, here. You can review the agenda, watch videos of the keynote presentations, read transcripts of some of the speeches, and see the Power Points that were presented by the speakers. More information will be posted as it becomes available.

These are a few of the many slides that I found interesting. This one, by Dennis Avery, puts the climate swings of the last 12,000 years (i.e., since the last Ice Age) in perspective; click to enlarge:

This one, by Syun Akasofu, also takes a long-term view, and compares the politically-driven prediction by the UN’s IPCC with the historical trend as the earth has recovered from the Little Ice Age:

Don Easterbrook makes the basic point that, contrary to the hysterical predictions of the alarmists, the earth is cooling, not warming:

This one by Dennis Avery shows the lack of any correlation between atmospheric CO2 and temperatures in the atmosphere:

Don Easterbrook compares the correlations of solar activity and CO2 concentration to temperature. It seems pretty obvious where the explanation for fluctuations in temperature lies:

Due to the efforts of Heartland and others, the public is beginning to catch on to the cosmic scam that Al Gore, James Hansen and others–mostly not scientists–have been perpetrating. Meanwhile, the Obama administration, seemingly determined to inflict the maximum possible damage on the economy in the shortest time, is trying to ram a cap-and-trade carbon tax through Congress before opposition can be mobilized. It’s easier to do that, of course, when you know that Congressmen won’t read the statute before they vote on it. So our only hope is an informed citizenry.

More about the British National Health Service. A cautionary tale.

Dear Americans,

You may have read my article in January which urged you not to emulate our National Health Service.  I described how it doesn’t work, it is too expensive (100 billion pounds a year), too big, it allows the state to exercise unacceptable power over the individual, it bribes the medical profession to collude,  it makes the individual patient powerless and small and guilty for being sick, it abandons the sick and old, it is filthy beyond description, it is run on a target performance model that distorts patient care, it is the church of Socialists who use it to preach class war. The sermon goes like this: the goal is equal treatment for all.  The original aim – a minimum not an equal standard – has been forgotten. All this is combined with an old fashioned paternalism which treats the patient with yet more disdain. And on top of all this, the service is expansionist, planning to control other aspects of our lives and behaviour with the excuse that this will improve our health.

Well if you didn’t read it; that was a fair summary. And now a postscript: I told you so.

This week a report was published about Stafford Hospital by the Healthcare Commission. The Commission described the hospital as “appalling and chaotic”.  When you allow for official British understatement on top of this, your jaws should be dropping.  Up to 1200 patients may have died because of the failures pointed out in this report.   Patients were left hungry and thirsty for days.  They drank the flower water.  They were not given pain-killers as they lay dying.   There was neglect, according to the report, at “virtually every stage” of treatment.  Wards were filthy with blood and excrement.  People had to sit in soiled bedding. Nurses turned off heart monitors because they did not know how to use the equipment.  Receptionists with no medical training decided the order of treatment for arrivals in Accident and Emergency.  One patient with a bone sticking out of his elbow waited for hours for treatment with no pain relief.

Patients were ‘dumped’ in “clinical decision units” for days in order to avoid breaking the performance targets.  Operations were postponed for four days and patients starved for those four days.  

A wonderful woman,  Julie Bailey, who slept in a chair next to her mother as the mother died over eight weeks, set up the campaign group which has shed light on this terrible hell of ‘care’.  However, it all took time because the organisation running the hospital said that anomalies in the death rate were the result of  “problems with recording data not problems with quality of care”.  

The man in charge of the place while all this happened is still receiving his full pay.   May he get old and sick and sent to the loving embrace of Stafford Hospital!

 M. Westrop.

Some of us are old enough to remember the horrors perpetrated in the Communist Russian Empire. But those born since the USSR was destroyed (chiefly by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher winning the Cold War) need to learn what happened under Lenin, Stalin, and their successors; and as they are unlikely to be taught about this in their ‘politically correct’  left-leaning history courses, they should have informative books  brought to their attention in the hope that some at least will read them. 

These extracts come from a review of Inside the Stalin Archives by Jonathan Brent, in The New Criterion: 

The first volume in the series, The Secret World of American Communism, caused shock waves by demonstrating that the American Communist Party was not a group of home-grown idealists, as so many apologists claimed, but, from the start, conducted espionage and took orders directly from Moscow. Despite decades of leftist mockery and vilification, the basic picture provided by Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley of Alger Hiss and many others was correct. The Comintern, too, was from day one directed by Moscow as a tool of Russian foreign policy. And despite the desperate strategy of throwing all blame on Stalin so as to excuse Lenin, The Unknown Lenin, which reproduces a selection from some six thousand Lenin documents never before released, reveals bloodthirstiness that surprised even anti-Communists. During a famine, Lenin ordered his followers not to alleviate but to take advantage of mass starvation:

It is precisely now and only now when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy.

“can (and therefore must)”: Leninist and Soviet ideology held not just that the end justifies any means, but also that it was immoral not to use the utmost cruelty if that would help. And it was bound to help in at least one way—intimidating the population. From the beginning, terror was not just an expedient but a defining feature of Soviet Communism. In Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky was simply voicing a Bolshevik truism when he rejected “the bourgeois theory of the sanctity of human life.” In fact, Soviet ethics utterly rejected human rights, universal justice, or even basic human decency, for all concepts that apply to everyone might lead one to show mercy to a class enemy. In Bolshevism, there is no abstract justice, only “proletarian justice,” as defined by the Party. ..

Stalinism was idealist in another, even more terrifying sense: it aimed at controlling from within the very thoughts we think. In a toast delivered on November 7, 1937, at the height of the Terror, the Great Helmsman swore to destroy every enemy:

            Even if he was an old Bolshevik, we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!

        Even the worst of the tsars never thought of punishing relatives for a criminal’s acts. But what is truly remarkable about this toast is the promise to murder people and their kin for thoughts. One must live in continual fear of one’s own mind.

Brent begins his book with a memorandum written by Andrei Vishinsky, Stalin’s chief prosecutor, to Nikolai Yezhov, the secret-police chief, about what he had seen in a tour of the Gulag. There were prisoners, Vishinsky explained, who had “deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human beings.” An interrogator during the doctors’ plot wrote that, after one torture session, the elderly Dr. Vasilenko “lost his entire human aspect.” Perhaps the most important lesson to come from the Stalin archives is that any ideology that does not admit the existence of human nature winds up destroying not only countless lives but also the human soul.

How much better is Russia now? The answer is – a lot, but it’s still pretty bloody awful. 

Under Putin, Russia has turned away from a fleeting opportunity to embrace legality. A sort of mafia rules without breaking the law—because there is no real law. And yet, by comparison with the Soviet period, Russia is free and humane. To be sure, any journalist or businessman who displeases the regime is likely to be imprisoned, maimed, or killed. But millions are not arrested at random.

           Solzhenitsyn once asked why the bloodthirsty Macbeth killed only a few people while Lenin and Stalin murdered millions. He answered: Macbeth had no ideology. So far as we can tell, neither does Putin. Today no one tries to remake human nature. For the time being, and however precariously, the human spirit survives.

 We are proud and happy to tell our readers that yesterday we were cited by, and linked to, that great website LITTLE GREEN FOOTBALLS as a blog that consistently speaks for evolution and against the nonsense of creationism:  

Some Anti-Creationism Bloggers

BLOGOSPHERE | Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 9:35:50 pm PST

Earlier I mentioned in passing that I’d link to any bloggers who aren’t down with the “intelligent design” creationist movement — conservative/liberal/other. Here are some of the bloggers who’ve responded so far, and it’s not the usual geeks from ScienceBlogs:

Defining “Creationism” Down

Noblesse Oblige » Which Controversy? Discovery Institute vs Science

Daimnation!: Darwin’s next fight

The Atheist Conservative : If I saw an angel or if man was made of brass

Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Darwin

Well That’s Just Dandy….: I Don’t Know Why This Is So Hard To Understand….

Kerplunk – Common sense from Down Under: The Discovery Institute’s willful destruction of Christian values

sisu: ‘Why can’t we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia?’

An old friend and philosophy geek: Blog Here Now 

Thank you, Charles Johnson!

In the post below, we explained that the revolutionary left has claimed to act in the name of aims and ends that most people agree with. To do this was one of the tactics taught by SAUL ALINSKY, the left revolutionary whose disciples, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, are now President and Secretary of State respectively. His instructions required them to work their way to power through the institutions, not to flaunt their radicalism but to ‘cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within’; to start with ‘community organizing’, the role of the organizer ‘or master manipulator’ being supremely important.

A full account of his ‘blueprint for revolution’, which ‘he and his disciples euphemistically refer to as "change”’, can be found here.

President Obama now has a very big community to organize, the entire United States of America. Its citizens can only benefit by being informed about their organizer’s master and his theories.