HANGING UP ON ALGORE
To say the earth is as warm as its ever been since the invention of the thermometer isn't as scary as alarmists think. The mercury thermometer was invented by Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1714. That was in the middle of the Little Ice Age (AD 1350-1900). Of course temperatures are warmer now than they were then. Dr. Bob Carter, a paleoclimate researcher at James Cook University in Australia, notes that for most of the last six million years, average global temperatures were as much as five degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. As each new piece of evidence weakens their argument, global warming alarmists try to shut off debate. They claim a consensus which does not exist. The National Registry of Environmental Professionals took a survey last November, which indicated two thirds of its members think global warming is a serious problem. That means a third do not. So much for consensus. Skeptics are, global warming alarmists say, a "fringe" who are paid by CO2-spewing corporations to express doubt. But numbered among the skeptics are some of the world's most renowned climatologists, such as Richard Lindzen of MIT and Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia. All have better credentials than does the divinity school dropout who invented the Internet and from whom alarmists take their cues.
HEDGED IN BY BUREAUCRATS
What is a "hedge fund"? If you have trouble answering the question, you are not alone, because the term is commonly used to describe many types of pooled investments that may have little in common with each other. Yet despite the lack of agreement about what exactly are hedge funds, a host of politicians, commentators and financial regulators now advocate more regulation of them. I am sure you are just so surprised.
REGIME CHANGE IN KOREA
Note that neither "North" nor "South" is prefixed to Korea, for we are talking about coming regime change in both. The current ruling anti-American, anti-capitalist, pro-appeasement party ruling South Korea is about to be replaced by its opposite: pro-American, pro-capitalist, anti-appeasement. Its leaders are determined to precipitate the collapse of North Korea's communist tyranny. They plan to do it with the help of the Communist Chinese. And George Bush.
THE REAL SURGE AND THE PHONY CIVIL WAR
The Traitor Media and their Democrat allies are so fond of chanting the mantra of "the civil war in Iraq." Google "civil war" plus "Iraq" and you'll get 3,800,000 hits. Barack Hussein "The Apostate" Obama and other lefty Senators condemn Bush for sending Americans to "die in someone else's civil war." The truth is that there is no civil war in Iraq. A real civil war is two armies or armed militias fighting each other for control of a government or country. They fight each other. This is exactly what Sunni and Shia terrorists are not doing. They are engaged in committing terrorist atrocities upon each other's civilian population. What is going on in Iraq is terrorism, pure and unadulterated. You can call it "sectarian" terrorism and violence, but it's not civil war. Neither Sunni-Baathist-AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) terrorists nor Shia-Moqtada terrorists are fighting to topple the elected Maliki government and seize governmental power. Neither is fighting the other. Meanwhile, Senators and Congressistas and the Media are all blathering on about the 21,000 extra troops to be positioned mostly in downtown Baghdad. But that's really a diversion, a small part of the real surge.
STILL HOPE FOR EUROPE
For those doom-and-gloom pessimists convinced of the inevitability of the Islamization of Europe, here's a wonderfully cheery news bulletin: Moslem imams are fleeing Holland in droves. Of course, the BBC reports this as proof of Dutch Islamophobia. The tuth is that the Dutch are finally waking up to the threat of Islamofascism in their midst. There are over one million Moslems in Holland now, and in cities like Rotterdam, well over a third of the children are Moslem. Now, if the Dutch could just get regular Moslem immigrants to follow their imams out of the country... Yet there is far better news in France. The fate of Europe will be decided there in the presidential election on April 22, with a runoff if necessary on May 6. The "Sego-Sarko" race is the most important political event in the world for 2007.
A COMMUNITY OF VALUES
Wow. That's my and everybody else's reaction to our first To The Point Rendezvous in Las Vegas last weekend (1/26-28). The abundantly clear lesson we learned was: members of To The Point really get along with each other! At every get together, I was so hesitant to begin speaking as I didn't want to interrupt folks who were having such an obvious good time together. Then again, I had such a good time. Another thing I learned is that TTPers are a curious bunch. I can't begin to remember all the topics we discussed. Countries all over the world. The Washington circus. How politicians exemplify a Hyper-Peter Principle. The Peter Principle, that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, applies to companies. Politicians (and bureaucrats in general) shoot way beyond it, into hyper-incompetence. The just-elected governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons, is a perfect example. He is an absolute fool, and is wife Dawn is an even greater ditz. Sad to say, he's a Republican. Yet a neighbor Democrat governor, Bill Richardson, is...
THE FRAGILITY OF ISLAMOFASCISM
[This is the text of a speech I am giving to the Council for National Policy at Amelia Island, Florida, Friday, February 2.] It has been my good fortune to experience a great deal of the world and get to know people from close to 200 countries. There is a common humanity shared by most folks around the globe. The fact that there has never been a war between two genuine democracies clearly shows that most people prefer peace to war, and simply want a decent life for their families and children. Yet as we all know, history is full of examples of people going berserk, falling victim to some frenzied hysteria. It can be a frenzy of paranoia, such as the lunacy we are currently experiencing over "global warming." It can be a frenzy of greed, like the dotcom bubble or the Tulip Craze. The worst are frenzies of criminal insanity, like the Gulag Communism of the Soviet Union, the National Socialism of Hitler's Germany, or the barbaric imperialism of Tojo's Japan. An entire people like the Germans or Japanese can go criminally, murderously nuts. Such mass criminality has to be ended by whatever means necessary. But once the frenzy is over, the people crazed by it can become normal human beings again. Just such a mass criminal insanity has today taken over the minds of a substantial fraction of the world's Moslems. Today, we're going to talk about how to put an end to it.
THE SUICIDE OF SHARIA
Some two years ago Saudi clerics issued fatwas forbidding Moslems to play soccer unless its rules were replaced by "Islamic rules," or it was used as physical training for jihad. To the extent that anybody noticed that in the West, they were promptly dismissed as the inconsequential ravings of misguided fanatics. This is not likely to be the fate of recent promises by British chancellor and prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, to make Britain "a key hub for facilitating Islamic finance" and to turn London into "a major enabling and structuring center for global Islamic finance." Yet, completely different as these two cases appear to be at first blush, they are both part of a concerted effort by radical Islamists to make the rest of us accept their reactionary worldview as legitimate in the name of multiculturalism and diversity.
PARIAH JOHN: TRAITOR IN VIETNAM, NOW TRAITOR IN IRAQ
On January 20, Iranian agents kidnapped five US soldiers in Karbala, Iraq. They killed one immediately. The bodies of the four other Americans were found later. President Bush's subsequent decision to permit U.S. troops to kill Iranians who are trying to kill them came shortly after the Karbala attack, which in earlier times would have been recognized by one and all for the act of war that it was. But as evidence mounted over the weekend of Iranian involvement in the terror in Iraq, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, describing his country as an "international pariah" for fighting it. Sen. Kerry followed to the podium former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami, whose speech he praised. Sen. Kerry's remarks were front page news in Iranian newspapers. In the "War Crimes" museum in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), there is a photo of Sen. Kerry greeting the general secretary of the Vietnamese Communist party. Perhaps Sen. Kerry is angling for similar recognition in Tehran.
GLO-BULL WARMING
For the last two weeks the weather in Pittsburgh has been typical for January -- it's snowed almost every day. And for the first time this winter I've heard complaints about the weather at work. I heard none during our unseasonably warm December. I note this to put in perspective the latest scare report on global warming from the United Nations: Hypothetical piled upon hypothetical, based on computer models which cannot duplicate the actual climate of the present or the recent past. Alarmists attribute warming to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But CO2 accounts for only about 0.03 percent of the earth's atmosphere, and less than 10 percent of the greenhouse effect. Only about 14 percent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from burning fossil fuels. That means all of Algore's hysteria, all the economy-destroying restrictions of the Kyoto Treaty, are about stopping carbon emissions responsible for 1.4% of the greenhouse effect.