Coral reefs around the world are suffering badly from overfishing and various forms of pollution. Yet many experts argue that the greatest threat to them is the acidification of the oceans from the dissolving of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. The effect of acidification, according to J.E.N. Veron, an Australian coral scientist, will be "nothing less than catastrophic.... What were once thriving coral gardens that supported the greatest biodiversity of the marine realm will become red-black bacterial slime, and they will stay that way." This is a common view. The Natural Resources Defense Council has called ocean acidification "the scariest environmental problem you've never heard of." Sigourney Weaver, who narrated a film about the issue, said that "the scientists are freaked out." The head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls it global warming's "equally evil twin." But do the scientific data support such alarm?

I'm trying to think of good reasons why Rick Santorum did so well in the Iowa caucus, only losing to Romney by 8 votes. So far all I can come up with is: 1. He's not Mitt Romney. 2. He's not Newt Gingrich. 3. Iowans feel more intellectual voting for the only candidate with a surname which sounds like a Latin genitive plural. What this doesn't mean, though, is that we're going to end up with President Santorum. Or, if we do, it will be a disaster. Santorum is the very opposite of what the US wants or needs right now. He's a big government conservative.

Several new polls come as a jolt as they reflect the dismal state of mind of the American people. As USA Today's Susan Page sums up the latest USA Today/Gallup poll: the nation is "more downbeat, more dissatisfied with its political leadership and more concerned about the country's direction than at almost any point in modern times." New Pew Research Center polling shows a whopping 67 percent saying that most members of Congress should not be re-elected. This compared to 51 percent saying this in October 2010 before the last congressional election. From what I see, there are serious reasons why Republicans should be worried.  Some conclude this all means that Republicans must water down the conservative message and nominate a moderate. But Americans crave answers, clarity and leadership. This call will not be answered by ambiguity. Obama is no moderate. If Democrats can nominate a hard core liberal, why can't Republicans offer a clear conservative alternative?

The anti-capitalist of the "Occupy" movement have a point: capitalism is proving unfair. But I would like to try to persuade them that the reason is because it is not free-market enough. The market, when allowed to flourish, tears apart monopoly and generates freedom and fairness better than any other human institution. Today's private sector, by contrast, is increasingly dominated by companies that are privileged by government through cozy contract, soft subsidy, convenient regulation, and crony conversation. That is why it is producing such unfair outcomes. For example, the finance industry upon which the Occupiers focus their fury, are protected from upstart competition by high regulatory barriers to entry, and handles the supply and demand of a good - money - that is priced by government fiat. For doing so, it pockets big bonuses even when arranging the issuance of bonds to pay for the bailing out of itself. It may be called capitalism, but it's not a free market, capitalism for real.

President Obama deserves credit for authorizing the execution of Osama bin Laden and for significantly intensifying the drone campaign against terrorists. He's largely stopped romanticizing the Palestinians; has recognized that Putin made an ass of him; and has even hinted that he might stand up to China on some issues.  But even if he turns into a combination of Ike, Reagan and Carl von Clausewitz in the coming months, his administration's foreign-policy record will forever be defined by his disastrous rush to leave Iraq - then brag about it. Does anybody at the White House look at a map? I realize that, thanks to the left's death-grip on our education system, we've stopped teaching trivial subjects like geography in favor of gender studies, but you don't have to be able to name all 17,000 islands belonging to Indonesia to recognize that simply quitting Iraq opens a terrorist superhighway straight from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, to Lebanon, Hezbollah, northern Israel and the eastern Mediterranean.

After days of vehement denials and indignant claims that NATO's recent attack on Pakistani outposts was unprovoked and deliberate, a "senior Pakistani defense official" has admitted that it was the Pakistanis who started the firefight with "mortar and machine gun fire." His words come a bit too late to stop the firestorm of anti-Americanism and the damage to the Afghan war effort, but may prove useful if they prompt Washington to take a sober look at our "alliance" with Pakistan. The stark reality is that ten years after we forced Islamabad into a shotgun wedding in the aftermath of 9/11, Pakistan is no more of an ally (let alone a "strategic" ally) than before, but an adversary with interests often diametrically opposed to our own. A survey of the Pakistani press in the days since the border incident reveals a society that is in serious trouble. Hysterical anti-Americanism aside, stories included:

"We should do what we can to wake people up, but reality is far more eloquent than we can ever be." -- Dagny on the TTP Forum I'm afraid Dagny is right. America probably won't wake up until the OPM (Other Peoples' Money) suddenly runs out, quite possibly with the dollar blowing up and all the drastic consequences (how do we then import oil?) thereof. Although we don't know yet which candidate will win the Republican nomination or whether that candidate will replace BO, we already know enough to foresee some near future consequences that will occur whoever wins. Whether BO wins another term or one of the plausible Republicans wins, the five most important existentially threatening problems and their outcomes will be the same.  These are the shapes of things to come.

During a workout last weekend, I watched and listened as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan bemoaned our "crumbling schools." Sorry, but it's not our schools that are crumbling, Mr. Secretary: It's our values.  But we can't even discuss the problem honestly and have to trim the conversation to keep it within politically correct patterns. Well, when yet another survey trumpets that the U.S. has fallen to sixth place in teaching math or science, or that we're fifteenth in education overall, my reaction is "Okay, break those scores out by specific school locations."  Generally, our suburban and many small-town schools still deliver competitive (if less than optimal) educations. Our statistics skew sharply downward because of the appalling conditions in the inner-city and barrio holding pens and teacher's-union bunkers we pretend are real schools. The left, for political advantage, has written off poor blacks and browns educationally-confining them in schools that are now about the unionized teachers, not the students.  And let's be honest: Conservatives have made no serious attempts to reform those schools, either.

Until recently, most politicians, pundits and others among the "smart people" insisted that Election 2012 was all about jobs, jobs, jobs. The more broad-minded contended that the related issues of the lousy economy and the imperatives of deficit reduction also might feature. But that was all that mattered, especially in the presidential contest. Then, GOP candidate Herman Cain, a successful businessman who has risen in the polls in no small measure on the strength of his claim to have actually created jobs, gave an interview in which he seemed unaware that Communist China has the bomb. Without skipping a beat, the intelligentsia denounced him as unfit to serve on the grounds that a man who was not proficient in national security and foreign policy matters could never become president. The jobs-jobs-jobs leitmotif gave way, at least for a time, to a new theme: The White House is no place for on-the-job-training about the nation's defense. How quickly they forget. What Barack Hussein Obama knew about U.S. security policy before he became president amounted to little more than the anti-colonialist sentiments of his father and the virulently anti-American agitation of Palestine Liberation Organization flak Rashid Khalidi, terrorist William Ayers, revolutionary Saul Alinsky and radical pastor Jeremiah Wright.

Last Sunday (10/09) in Cairo, some two dozen Coptic Christians were murdered by the Egyptian military egged on by a Moslem street mob. It is but the latest atrocity perpetrated upon Christians in Moslem countries, where they have been systematically persecuted for decades.  Sadly for the Christians of the Islamic world, their cause is not being championed either by Western governments or by Western Christians. Aside from Evangelical Protestants, most Western churches are uninterested in defending the rights of their co-religionists in the East. Instead, these churches and their related international bodies make repeated efforts to attack the only country in the Middle East in which the Christian population has increased in the past 60 years -- Israel.

I wouldn't think it would be worthwhile to draw attention to the Occupy Wall Street "movement," or its list of demands that wouldn't pass muster in an average kindergarten class. But President Obama sees these demonstrations against corporate America as reasonable protest toward "the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this situation to begin with." This should provide perspective to what our most fundamental problem is today. We have an endangered species in America whose loss threatens our future. That species is...