Article Links for Tuesday 4-8-2008

Good science isn't about consensus By Don Aitkin

AUSTRALIA is faced, over the next generation at least and almost certainly much longer, with two environmental problems of great significance. They are, first, how to manage water and, second, how to find acceptable alternatives to oil-based energy. Global warming is not one of those two issues, at least for me, and I see it as a distraction.

I am going against conventional wisdom in doing so. But Western societies have the standard of living, the longevity and the creativity we have because we have learned that conventional wisdom has no absolute status and that progress often comes when it is successfully challenged. ...

The Club of Tyranny :: Spectator UK

The UN has once again negated any claim it can make to representing freedom and justice in the world and protecting human rights. Last week, the whimsically named UN Human Rights Council turned freedom of expression into its extinction and in so doing removed the last vestiges of its own credibility. ...

The New Pyramid Builders By Edward Cline

A mile-high tower will rise in a desert port town, and Americans will be helping to finance its £5 billion construction cost. It will rise in the town Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, halfway up the length of the Red Sea.
At 5,250 feet, it will be twice the height of another tower being erected in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on the Persian Gulf. A few miles north up the Sea from Jeddah is Rabigh, where about 40,000 workers are constructing the world's largest petrochemical plant as part of King Abdullah Economic City, itself part of a $500 billion plan to turn Saudi Arabia into a "powerhouse" industrial giant. Other massive construction projects are underway in Kuwait and other Persian Gulf countries. ...

Obama's Global Poverty Act by Edward Cline

I rarely write commentary from anger, preferring a properly objective, psuedo-dispassionate approach to a subject deserving my attention. But news of the details, nature and scope of pending legislation in the U.S. Senate has caused me to make an exception to that rule.
As though Americans were not already burdened with:

• Extortionate and confiscatory taxes wherever they turn on virtually everything they earn, purchase, or do, from the local level on up to the federal level;
• Myriad regulations, controls and arbitrary rules that hamper or obstruct their productivity and their lives; ...

Biofuel Madness: Environmentalism exploited for political purposes By Dr. Tim Ball

The rush towards biofuels is threatening world food production and the lives of billions of people, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser said yesterday. Professor John Beddington put himself at odds with ministers who have committed Britain to large increases in the use of biofuels over the coming decades. In his first important public speech since he was appointed, he described the potential impacts of food shortages as the “elephant in the room” and a problem which rivaled that of climate change. ...

Polls Show Students Rejecting Conservatism—Except For National Question By Kevin Carter

Anyone who has paid any attention to the MSM’s election coverage in recent weeks is familiar with the spin:  Republicans (and Hillary Clinton supporters for that matter) are old, boring, overwhelmingly white, and destined to be swept off the stage of history by a rising tide of multicultural-minded young people, led by their hero and savior Barack Obama.

The same spin appears in immigration coverage: young people are accepting and welcoming of immigration, those opposed are old and out of touch. ...

Making Big Bucks Through Abortion by Jonathan Falwell

Question: Does the federal government have the right to utilize your tax dollars to fund organizations whose core values completely differ from your own?
Answer: Absolutely. In fact, just this week it was revealed that Planned Parenthood, the nation’s most prominent abortion provider, received an astounding $336 million in government (both federal and state) grants. But get this: Planned Parenthood took in more than $1 billion last fiscal year, according to its own annual report, for the first time in its history. ...

'Abortion is not healthy' By Joseph Farah

Anyone who reads my column regularly knows I am an ardent opponent of abortion.

Frankly, I don't know how any civilized person could justify the murder of the most innocent form of human life – preborn babies in the womb.

Yet, today in America, and throughout the world, killing unwanted, unborn babies is the norm. It is widely accepted. It is often subsidized by governments. It is a ritual practice of sacrifice like in the biblical days of Baal. ...

Doublethink and the Liberal Mind By Ed Kaitz

Recent polls are showing that by a good 60% margin, Barack Obama is seen as a candidate who can "unify" the nation.  This may be the most brilliant example of what George Orwell called "doublethink" in the recent history of the Democratic Party.  Think about it: for over thirty, maybe forty years the American public has been variously sermonized and threatened by crusaders in Obama's same party into embracing not unity, but "diversity."  Call it what you will - brilliant or duplicitous - it is still a masterful political achievement.

...

Mark Penn's Transgression  By George Will

Hillary Clinton's campaign, which is a guttering candle, has suffered a perhaps extinguishing gust of ill wind. Her principal strategist has been forced to resign from that role.

Mark Penn's sin was to be caught doing something sensible, surreptitiously. That is the only way Democrats can do sensible things regarding trade when their party is pandering to organized labor. Penn's downfall makes him a member of a species which many Democrats insist is large and about which Democrats theatrically grieve: Penn is a casualty of free trade. ...

America’s Fifth Column By JB Williams

America has a growing enemy within. This enemy is referred to by experts as America’s Fifth Column. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the term Fifth Column refers to “A clandestine group or faction of subversive agents who attempt to undermine a nation’s solidarity [unity] by any means at their disposal.”

As Britannica notes, the term is credited to Emilio Mola Vidal, a Nationalist general during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). As four of his army columns moved on Madrid, the general referred to his militant supporters within the capital as his “fifth column,” intent on undermining the loyalist government from within.

To Seek a Newer World Mark Silverberg By Mark Silverberg

On September 11, 2001, this nation was attacked by an enemy whose vision of the future, whose culture and value system, and whose concepts of life and death are a universe apart from ours. In Gaza City earlier this month, an Israeli air strike killed two Hamas terrorists who were about to launch missiles at the Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon. One of those killed was a son of senior Hamas leader Khalil al-Haya. At the funeral of his son, al-Haya said, "I thank God for this gift. This is the 10th member of my family to be martyred". And in Pakistan, a jihadist wrapped a baby in an explosive belt and detonated it killing scores of Muslims. ...

Obama's Extreme Liberalism Still Under the Radar by Sean P. Trende

The thing that drives Republicans craziest about Barack Obama is that they can see it coming. They know that behind the dulcet intonations of togetherness and unanimity lies a politician whose beliefs are uniformly liberal. Over time, they suspect, the smooth talk will give way to everyday politicking. But will it be before Barack the President will shows himself to be something entirely unlike Barack the Candidate? ...

Pinocchiobama by Erick Erickson

Barack Obama seeks to portray himself as a new type of politician. He wants to lead us, he says, with hope for the future, change in the present and repudiation of the past eight years so that America can exchange the failed policies of the last eight years for those of the past one hundred years, He seeks, if you will, to transcend politics. ...

The UN's Attack On Our Freedoms By Joseph Klein

Al Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, just recently declared on one of the websites al Qaeda uses to spread its propaganda that “the United Nations is an enemy of Islam and Muslims.”

Strange that Zawahri would kick a gift horse in the mouth. In fact, the UN is one of the best friends that Zawahri and his Islamic cohorts have today on the world stage. It has become the enemy of Israel and of Western democratic values. Dominated by the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), the UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council in particular provide political cover for virtually every crime against humanity that the Islamists commit. ...

Will Leftist Evangelicals Demand Believers Get On Obama Bandwagon? By Frederick Meekins

Just because some white liberals are going out of their way to vote for Barack Obama for no other reason than that he happens to be half-black, some within the Evangelical leadership are once again beating on their drums about congregations being too split along racial and ethnic lines. ...

Doctor Kissinger Is Wrong Again by DJ Drummond

When I was growing up, I was taught to respect the assumed intellect and genius of Henry Kissinger. It was only later that I began to see his limits and failings as a strategist. Granted, all humans make mistakes and we all have limits, and frankly the difference between a wise man and a foolish one, often comes down to the wise man knowing his limits. Which reminds me, I don't see any evidence that Dr. Kissinger ever admitted making mistakes or failing as a strategist. ...

Horror and humiliation and Chicago By Spengler

What causes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to imagine that "the government gives [young black men] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, [and] passes a three strikes law" to incarcerate them? It is the same kind of unbearable grief that still causes white Southerners to believe that their ancestors fought the Civil War for a noble cause? It is too humiliating to think that the miscreants had it coming. ...

Europeans funding anti-Israel hate and violence :: Israel Today

Various reports published last week showed that European governments and mainstream media are funding Palestinian Arab individuals and organizations that encourage hatred of Israel and perpetuate the Middle East conflict. ...

Expert: "We're brainwashing our children" about global warming By Bob Swanson and Doyle Rice

Another post from guest blogger Rick Neale of Florida Today, from the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando:

William Gray, the well-known Colorado State University hurricane forecaster, routinely uses the annual National Hurricane Conference as a platform to bash global warming. In a statement to Florida Today, Gray argued that the scientific consensus on global warming is bogus — and "a mild form of McCarthyism has developed toward those scientists who do not agree" that mankind is in danger. ...

2008: The year the world will cool down :: Daily Mail

The world will experience global cooling this year, according a leading climate scientist.

The head of the World Meteorological Organisation said La Nina - the weather phenomenon which is cooling the Pacific - is likely to trigger a small drop in average global temperatures compared with last year. ...

Obama’s Red Mentor Praised Red Army By Cliff Kincaid

Barack Obama’s childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, wrote a poem dedicated to the Soviet Red Army. “Smash on, victory-eating Red Army,” he declared. He also wrote poems attacking traditional Christianity and the work of Christian missionaries. ...

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