Brietbart has a piece up noting that The DNC Requires IDs to Enter the Convention. The fact that the DNC requires an ID to enter their Convention, but insists that to require a State issued ID to vote is to burden the process too much is rich with irony.
Whenever, and wherever States have tried to put in place minimum standards for proving that a person is who he (or she) says he is, Democrats and the the self appointed people who purport to speak for various minority groups wail, and gnash their teeth, and practially sit in sack cloth and ashes as they claim it will cause too great a burden on some minority groups and suppress their votes. The media seem mighty incurious about who these people are, where they are, how many of them there are, and what their circumstances might be. Perhaps we can make accommodations. But since the only thing anyone will tell us is that these laws will suppress minority votes, one is left to think that they Democrats here are...well...dissembling.
A long established principle in our Republic is the idea of one person, one vote. If someone somewhere gets to vote twice, then his to votes may well disenfranchise the vote of one who followed the rules. Certainly minorities who are eligible to vote should be given access to the voting booth, but neither should anyone else be denied access by virtue of fraudulent votes. If the Democrats really wanted free and fair elections, they would propose an alternative way for voting officials to tell if someone who comes in to vote is indeed the person he says he is. Here is a video from Project Veritas showing numerous cases of voter fraud, illegal aliens voting, people voting more than once, and officials who don't seem to care. Here is a video of Mr. O'Keeffe asking for, and receiving Eric Holder's ballot. It does happen, and results is election fraud on a wide scale.
Interestingly, most States require ID to drink alcohol. Motels require it to check in. Anyone buying a gun has to show ID and not only prove who they are, but that they have no criminal background. The Second Amendment is a Constitutionally protected right. I don't think voting is.
Some people point out that both sides do it. Hmmm. Oh yes, this is the moral equivalency argument. So, if both sides do it, it must be alright, is that it? Well, no, it is not alright. First of all, the purpose of elections is to obtain a actual rendering of the peoples will. As it stands, nobody knows for sure that anybody who is elected to office actually represents the people of the district that elected him, or if instead he represents the will of fraudulent voters.
Of course, voter fraud isn't the only thing we need to ensure free and fair elections. As Fox News has pointed out, we also need to ensure that our voting machines can not be hacked, or at least that it is more difficult than this to do it We should of course do something about our voting machines, but at the same time, we also need to clean up the voting rolls and ensure equal access to the voting booth.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Two from American Thinker on Islam
Two articles today at the American Thinker discuss the dangers Islam poses to our way of life. The first is an article by Janet Levy entitled The Anti-Woman, Anti-Gay Elephant in the Room It is an interesting, no not merely interesting but alarming phenomenon that the Left has become so cozy with Islam, while embracing abortionists and so-called gay rights activists. Janet Levy writes:
The ardent protests against Republicans and the concomitant apocryphal charges that they are anti-woman and anti-gay are par for the course. In actuality, Republicans are merely advocating for the sanctity of life and traditional marriage and do not demonstrate hatred against any group. However, to hold an opinion contrary to the leftist dogma of the day is obviously enough to spur public vilification and rampant allegations of malfeasance.
The anti-woman, anti-gay allegations Democrats use to characterize Republicans are all the more astonishing in light of the tolerance and accommodations that are conferred on Islam. While Islam is given a pass on these issues, Democrats freely malign Republicans who speak out about repressive Islamic doctrine or sharia, an ideology that is truly anti-woman and anti-gay.One's first thought is that they apparently don't realize that if Islam gains the upper hand, the godless Left will be killed before either Jews or Christians. But then I realize that the Left is only cynically embracing the Abortion industry and the gays for their votes. They don't believe in these things, and are as likely to crack down on them as the Muslims are. Just look at Obama's flip-flop on gay marriage for a good example of what I am talking about here. If he can zig one way for votes, I imagine he can zag the other if it became expedient to do so. Levy concludes:
Clearly, the peril with Islam goes far beyond a choice on abortion and the recognition of homosexual marriage. The unlikely alliance the left has cultivated with Islam, not the left's differences with the Republican Party, is the farthest departure from their espoused pro-women, pro-homosexual platform. As such, it represents a danger to all Americans.The second article is entitled Muslim Reformer In Denial by Andrew G. Bostom. Bostom finds shocking Muslim "reformer" Dr. Mohammed Zudhi Jasser's view that Hamas's annihilationist stance against Israel was:
...a tool for Hamas [and Hamas alone] to create a faith-based conflict...Us versus. them...Collectivist thinking which exploits human rights to oppress its own [ i.e., Palestinian Arab Muslim] people.What this ignores is that the majority of Palestinians agree with the statement, and that the Koran sanctions it. Indeed the Koran makes it a duty of Muslims to commit genocide against the Jews wherever they find them. I recommend both articles to you if you want to understand the danger the United States is in from Islam. The forces are lining up against us, and we must be prepared to maintain our way of life.
Monday, September 3, 2012
Book Report: Did Muhammad Exist?
I read a lot, and about a lot of things. One of the things that has continued to bother me, and so I have begun to research it is the nature of Islam and its so-called prophet Muhammad. It has seemed to me all along that if the Koran calls on every Muslim to slay anyone and everyone who is not a Muslim (or isn't Muslim enough) that the person speaking to the people in the Koran is not the same One who speaks to us in the Old and New Testament. The Gospel tells us to love our enemies, and to pray for them. The Koran apparently says to make your enemies blood run in the streets. One of these two books is a lie.
In Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins Robert Spencer takes his audience on a journey back in time to the 7th century to find what evidence there is to support the fact that Muhammad received the Koran from the angel Gabriel. In the process, he of necessity examines the roots of the Koran itself. As Spencer noted, this book is intended for the layman, not the scholar. He presents no new evidence, and the evidence he presents is well documented 19 pages of end notes, and 2 pages of further reading material. I have yet to check out the end notes, though that is on my to do list, and to take advantage of further reading.
The first thing that Spencer notes is that when the Arabs first broke out of the Arabian peninsula and began conquering other people, there was no mention of Islam, of the Koran, of Muslims, or of the prophet who supposedly inspired them, Muhammad. Considering the later centrality of Islam, the Koran and Muhammad to Muslim faith, it does seem strange. The typical Muslim confession is "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet." You would expect them to be waving the Koran in one hand, and carrying a sword in the other. But what writings we do have seem to have come from various Christian priests and bishops. They noted the awful oppressions of the Hagarians, of the Saracens, or the Ishmaelites, but not the Muslims. He also notes that Muhammad could as easily have been a title as a name. Muhammad means in Arabic the "Praised One" or the "Chosen One." But these titles equally apply to Jesus, called the Christ in Greek, the Messiah in Hebrew, which means the "Anointed One," if my recollection is correct. Thus the early inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock could as easily been Christian as Islamic.
It is now necessary to take a side trip to lay out the culture extant at the time of the Arabian conquest. Christianity had, by the 7th century, taken over the Middle East. Most of the people in the area encompassed by Turkey, the Roman Empire, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Persia, as well as outposts in Carthage and India, were one stripe or another of Christian. The Orthodox Church held that Christ was divine, being one of "three persons" or really, one of three manifestations of the One God. The doctrine is known as Trinitarian. If one is a Trinitarian, Christ is not separate from, but a part of the One who was there at the Creation, and after he leaves, he sent his spirit to remain with us and guide us until He comes again. None the less, we do not pray to Jesus, but we pray to God, in Jesus name. But many people in the Middle East were heterodox, believing that Christ was not divine, but a great prophet none the less. They were Unitarian. Up until 325, people who held these various beliefs about the divinity of Christ were constantly fighting among themselves. As you might imagine, each group wrote gospels supporting their particular beliefs. These gospels had Jesus and the disciples saying or doing things that contradicted the Synoptic Gospels, so were declared heterodox.
In 325 AD, Constantine called a Council of priests and bishops to the town of Nicaea to settle the question of the divinity of Christ. Constantine,of course, was not so interested in Church doctrine as we was in establishing a common religion for his entire empire. At the Council of Nicaea, Arius of Alexandria, a priest, was the most vociferous in holding forth for the Unitarian principle. Unfortunately for him, his views were not the majority view, and he was excommunicated. Interestingly, he was eventually re-instated, despite holding a Unitarian view, and his beliefs live on in the Christian community. He and some of his followers fled east to Syria, the Arabian peninsula and to Persia. Interestingly, they were known as Arians. Arian beliefs also spread to Europe where they were held by the elite German princes and aristocrats. We can here see also that many early Syriac speaking Unitarian Christians could as easily confessed to the Islamic confession if they thought Jesus was the Muhammad, the Chosen One. Thus "There is no god but God, and Jesus (Muhammad) is his prophet" could be a shorthand way of confessing their beliefs. We now return to Spencer's telling.
The second thing that Spencer notes is that the dizzying number of Hadiths and their often contradictory content. The Hadiths are the recounting of the sayings and the activities that Muhammad did during his lifetime. Supposedly, the Hadiths are recounting by eye witnesses to the events or the sayings. The Hadiths are, for practical purposes, as important to Muslims as the Koran. The Koran contains almost no context, and says very little about Muhammad. But since Muhammad is the perfect Muslim, other Muslims want to do as Muhammad did. Unfortunately, a number of Hadiths, possibly all of them, are forgeries. We know that some Hadiths were written by one faction against another, since the events and the people mentioned happened long after 632 AD, the date Muhammad supposedly died. This situation has created a cottage industry in Islam to determine which Hadiths are most likely to be accurate, and which are faked. While acknowledging the value of these efforts, none the less Spencer speculates that if so many are forged, they all might be at best third hand accounts. This makes them all suspect. But it is mostly through the Hadiths that we know anything about Muhammad at all, and if the Hadiths are suspect, we know nothing at all.
The third thing Spencer brings up is the Koran itself. The story goes that Muhammad was sitting in a cave on a mountain when the angel Gabriel appeared and began reciting the Koran. Muhammad faithfully regurgitated all he had heard just as it was recited to him to his faithful secretary, who wrote it all down. Since Muhammad spoke Arabic, in the dialect of Mecca, Gabriel evidently recited in Arabic, in the dialect of Arabic used in Mecca, and Arabic was the language in which the Koran was recorded. The Koran was thus the Perfect word of God, faithfully transmitted to mankind in the Perfect Language of God. It has remained unchanged, as to change even one letter of the Sacred Text would possibly change its meaning. As a side note, remember that the printing press was not invented until 1440, so that a the Muslim faith was transmitted by oral means for at least 8 centuries before printed Korans could be made available to a wide audience. There was one copy of the Koran, and the believers had to have faith that what they were told was the truth.
The first effort at collecting the Koran occurred supposedly under Abu Bakr, Muhammad's supposed successor. But then no Koran was distributed. Instead, Uthman, the second successor apparently, was supposedly asked to standardize the Koran because various believers in various regions had varying Korans. How could this be, if there was only one copy? Uthman supposedly directed that the standardized Koranic text be checked against the original, and that it be written in the dialect of Mecca. Again, one wonders that it was not already. At least 3 copies were made and distributed. But four years later, the conquerors at the Battle of Siffin, generally knew the the Koran, a miracle indeed. And all this 8 centuries before the printing press.
Another issue with the Koran is that approximately 20% of it is simply not understandable. No one knows what these verses actually mean. Muslim scholars explain this by noting that some concepts that God may understand may simply be beyond us, as a man's understanding is beyond an ant's. Maybe, but one is left to wonder that the God who created us, and understands our limits better than we do set down a verse that we can not understand. If the Koran is supposed to be His will, and we are to submit to His will, shouldn't we be able to understand what His Will is? Following this line of reasoning leads to the fact that the unchanging Koran has indeed changed!
In the original text of the Koran, the diacritical marks are largely absent. In Arabic, there are no letters for short vowels, and for some consonants. Moreover, without diacritical marks, the dots around various Arabic letters, many consonants would look like other consonants, rendering the reading unclear. Nobody knows when the first diacritical marks were added, but it is thought to be in the first century after the Arabian conquest began, circa 632 to 732. The Muslim collector of Hadiths Abu Nasr Yahya ibn Abi Kathir al Yamami (d. 749) admits this happened to illuminate the Koran. But as one person I was explaining this to exclaimed, "That means you could make it say anything you wanted!" Interestingly, if you take out the diacritical marks you have a text in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. An example is this text, Koran 25:1 which reads "Blessed is He Who has revealed unto His slave the Criterion (of right and wrong) that he maybe a Warner to the peoples" If you take out the diacritical marks the text is rendered as "Blessed is He who sent down the redemption on His servant that he might be a sacrifice for the peoples." This is a Christian statement summarizing text from the Gospel of John (1:1, 1:14) Ephesians 5:1, Hebrews 10:10-14, Ephesians 1:7, and 1 John 2:2.
Interestingly, much of the rest of the nonsensical passages become clear when one takes out the diacritical marks. Spencer concludes that the Koran was originally a Christian, Unitarian lectionary written in Aramaic for use by the Churches that dotted the landscape in the 7th century. The polemics against Orthodox Christians represent the the battles between Unitarians and Trinitarians, taken to the extreme (kill them all wherever you find them.) The fight with the Jews seems to be that they worship, inexplicably, Ezra or something. Slowly, over time, various Muslim rulers and Caliphs worked the text into what it is today. Like the Byzantines before them, they found that their new empire was easier to rule if it had a common religion, and a common language. The emphasis in the Koran on it being in Arabic, and the need to study it in Arabic meant that slowly the other languages would die out.
And what of Muhammad? Spencer concludes that the answer to the title question can not be answered with certainty. Surely Muhammad did not exist as he is presented to the world today. At the same time, if Muhammad did not exist, the Caliphs would have had to invent him. Once invented, he seems to have taken on a life of his own. Competing sides wrote Hadiths forcing Muhammad to take first one side, then the other. Spencer did not say this, but I will. Since Islamic law is based on the Hadiths, one wonders that anyone can see Sharia as any more than the codification and ossification of traditions then extant in the Islamic world. If what I surmise is true, how the world would be different if Arius and his followers had understood that the Trinitarians were trying to reconcile the words of Jesus himself in the Gospels and the events of the first Pentacost. They did not worship three gods, but The God, who made himself known to man in three ways, because He loved us so much.
This book doesn't say it, but I will. It appears that Islam is nothing more than the worm turning. They lost the debate over the divinity of Christ in 325 AD. They took their convictions, and nursed them, slowly turning them into something dark and sinister. When they spilled out again, in the late 630s, what returned was no longer recognizable as the Christianity that went in.
In Did Muhammad Exist? An Inquiry into Islam's Obscure Origins Robert Spencer takes his audience on a journey back in time to the 7th century to find what evidence there is to support the fact that Muhammad received the Koran from the angel Gabriel. In the process, he of necessity examines the roots of the Koran itself. As Spencer noted, this book is intended for the layman, not the scholar. He presents no new evidence, and the evidence he presents is well documented 19 pages of end notes, and 2 pages of further reading material. I have yet to check out the end notes, though that is on my to do list, and to take advantage of further reading.
The first thing that Spencer notes is that when the Arabs first broke out of the Arabian peninsula and began conquering other people, there was no mention of Islam, of the Koran, of Muslims, or of the prophet who supposedly inspired them, Muhammad. Considering the later centrality of Islam, the Koran and Muhammad to Muslim faith, it does seem strange. The typical Muslim confession is "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet." You would expect them to be waving the Koran in one hand, and carrying a sword in the other. But what writings we do have seem to have come from various Christian priests and bishops. They noted the awful oppressions of the Hagarians, of the Saracens, or the Ishmaelites, but not the Muslims. He also notes that Muhammad could as easily have been a title as a name. Muhammad means in Arabic the "Praised One" or the "Chosen One." But these titles equally apply to Jesus, called the Christ in Greek, the Messiah in Hebrew, which means the "Anointed One," if my recollection is correct. Thus the early inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock could as easily been Christian as Islamic.
It is now necessary to take a side trip to lay out the culture extant at the time of the Arabian conquest. Christianity had, by the 7th century, taken over the Middle East. Most of the people in the area encompassed by Turkey, the Roman Empire, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Persia, as well as outposts in Carthage and India, were one stripe or another of Christian. The Orthodox Church held that Christ was divine, being one of "three persons" or really, one of three manifestations of the One God. The doctrine is known as Trinitarian. If one is a Trinitarian, Christ is not separate from, but a part of the One who was there at the Creation, and after he leaves, he sent his spirit to remain with us and guide us until He comes again. None the less, we do not pray to Jesus, but we pray to God, in Jesus name. But many people in the Middle East were heterodox, believing that Christ was not divine, but a great prophet none the less. They were Unitarian. Up until 325, people who held these various beliefs about the divinity of Christ were constantly fighting among themselves. As you might imagine, each group wrote gospels supporting their particular beliefs. These gospels had Jesus and the disciples saying or doing things that contradicted the Synoptic Gospels, so were declared heterodox.
In 325 AD, Constantine called a Council of priests and bishops to the town of Nicaea to settle the question of the divinity of Christ. Constantine,of course, was not so interested in Church doctrine as we was in establishing a common religion for his entire empire. At the Council of Nicaea, Arius of Alexandria, a priest, was the most vociferous in holding forth for the Unitarian principle. Unfortunately for him, his views were not the majority view, and he was excommunicated. Interestingly, he was eventually re-instated, despite holding a Unitarian view, and his beliefs live on in the Christian community. He and some of his followers fled east to Syria, the Arabian peninsula and to Persia. Interestingly, they were known as Arians. Arian beliefs also spread to Europe where they were held by the elite German princes and aristocrats. We can here see also that many early Syriac speaking Unitarian Christians could as easily confessed to the Islamic confession if they thought Jesus was the Muhammad, the Chosen One. Thus "There is no god but God, and Jesus (Muhammad) is his prophet" could be a shorthand way of confessing their beliefs. We now return to Spencer's telling.
The second thing that Spencer notes is that the dizzying number of Hadiths and their often contradictory content. The Hadiths are the recounting of the sayings and the activities that Muhammad did during his lifetime. Supposedly, the Hadiths are recounting by eye witnesses to the events or the sayings. The Hadiths are, for practical purposes, as important to Muslims as the Koran. The Koran contains almost no context, and says very little about Muhammad. But since Muhammad is the perfect Muslim, other Muslims want to do as Muhammad did. Unfortunately, a number of Hadiths, possibly all of them, are forgeries. We know that some Hadiths were written by one faction against another, since the events and the people mentioned happened long after 632 AD, the date Muhammad supposedly died. This situation has created a cottage industry in Islam to determine which Hadiths are most likely to be accurate, and which are faked. While acknowledging the value of these efforts, none the less Spencer speculates that if so many are forged, they all might be at best third hand accounts. This makes them all suspect. But it is mostly through the Hadiths that we know anything about Muhammad at all, and if the Hadiths are suspect, we know nothing at all.
The third thing Spencer brings up is the Koran itself. The story goes that Muhammad was sitting in a cave on a mountain when the angel Gabriel appeared and began reciting the Koran. Muhammad faithfully regurgitated all he had heard just as it was recited to him to his faithful secretary, who wrote it all down. Since Muhammad spoke Arabic, in the dialect of Mecca, Gabriel evidently recited in Arabic, in the dialect of Arabic used in Mecca, and Arabic was the language in which the Koran was recorded. The Koran was thus the Perfect word of God, faithfully transmitted to mankind in the Perfect Language of God. It has remained unchanged, as to change even one letter of the Sacred Text would possibly change its meaning. As a side note, remember that the printing press was not invented until 1440, so that a the Muslim faith was transmitted by oral means for at least 8 centuries before printed Korans could be made available to a wide audience. There was one copy of the Koran, and the believers had to have faith that what they were told was the truth.
The first effort at collecting the Koran occurred supposedly under Abu Bakr, Muhammad's supposed successor. But then no Koran was distributed. Instead, Uthman, the second successor apparently, was supposedly asked to standardize the Koran because various believers in various regions had varying Korans. How could this be, if there was only one copy? Uthman supposedly directed that the standardized Koranic text be checked against the original, and that it be written in the dialect of Mecca. Again, one wonders that it was not already. At least 3 copies were made and distributed. But four years later, the conquerors at the Battle of Siffin, generally knew the the Koran, a miracle indeed. And all this 8 centuries before the printing press.
Another issue with the Koran is that approximately 20% of it is simply not understandable. No one knows what these verses actually mean. Muslim scholars explain this by noting that some concepts that God may understand may simply be beyond us, as a man's understanding is beyond an ant's. Maybe, but one is left to wonder that the God who created us, and understands our limits better than we do set down a verse that we can not understand. If the Koran is supposed to be His will, and we are to submit to His will, shouldn't we be able to understand what His Will is? Following this line of reasoning leads to the fact that the unchanging Koran has indeed changed!
In the original text of the Koran, the diacritical marks are largely absent. In Arabic, there are no letters for short vowels, and for some consonants. Moreover, without diacritical marks, the dots around various Arabic letters, many consonants would look like other consonants, rendering the reading unclear. Nobody knows when the first diacritical marks were added, but it is thought to be in the first century after the Arabian conquest began, circa 632 to 732. The Muslim collector of Hadiths Abu Nasr Yahya ibn Abi Kathir al Yamami (d. 749) admits this happened to illuminate the Koran. But as one person I was explaining this to exclaimed, "That means you could make it say anything you wanted!" Interestingly, if you take out the diacritical marks you have a text in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. An example is this text, Koran 25:1 which reads "Blessed is He Who has revealed unto His slave the Criterion (of right and wrong) that he maybe a Warner to the peoples" If you take out the diacritical marks the text is rendered as "Blessed is He who sent down the redemption on His servant that he might be a sacrifice for the peoples." This is a Christian statement summarizing text from the Gospel of John (1:1, 1:14) Ephesians 5:1, Hebrews 10:10-14, Ephesians 1:7, and 1 John 2:2.
Interestingly, much of the rest of the nonsensical passages become clear when one takes out the diacritical marks. Spencer concludes that the Koran was originally a Christian, Unitarian lectionary written in Aramaic for use by the Churches that dotted the landscape in the 7th century. The polemics against Orthodox Christians represent the the battles between Unitarians and Trinitarians, taken to the extreme (kill them all wherever you find them.) The fight with the Jews seems to be that they worship, inexplicably, Ezra or something. Slowly, over time, various Muslim rulers and Caliphs worked the text into what it is today. Like the Byzantines before them, they found that their new empire was easier to rule if it had a common religion, and a common language. The emphasis in the Koran on it being in Arabic, and the need to study it in Arabic meant that slowly the other languages would die out.
And what of Muhammad? Spencer concludes that the answer to the title question can not be answered with certainty. Surely Muhammad did not exist as he is presented to the world today. At the same time, if Muhammad did not exist, the Caliphs would have had to invent him. Once invented, he seems to have taken on a life of his own. Competing sides wrote Hadiths forcing Muhammad to take first one side, then the other. Spencer did not say this, but I will. Since Islamic law is based on the Hadiths, one wonders that anyone can see Sharia as any more than the codification and ossification of traditions then extant in the Islamic world. If what I surmise is true, how the world would be different if Arius and his followers had understood that the Trinitarians were trying to reconcile the words of Jesus himself in the Gospels and the events of the first Pentacost. They did not worship three gods, but The God, who made himself known to man in three ways, because He loved us so much.
This book doesn't say it, but I will. It appears that Islam is nothing more than the worm turning. They lost the debate over the divinity of Christ in 325 AD. They took their convictions, and nursed them, slowly turning them into something dark and sinister. When they spilled out again, in the late 630s, what returned was no longer recognizable as the Christianity that went in.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
That Squeeze You're Feeling is the Noose Tightening Around your Neck
James G. Long has an article up today at the American Thinker that i worth reading and thinking about entitled The Rise of the Manifestoists: the End of the Democratic Party. I don't think he means that we won't have a party called Democrat in the future, whose mascot is the ass, but that it is not the same party as it once was.
Actually, in my opinion, the old Democrat party, the party of Jefferson and Jackson left years ago, routed by George McGovern and the New Left in 1972. The last adherent of the old regime in my mind was Zell Miller, not Liberman, who gave his farewell address at the Republican Convention in 2004. But the party of old had long disappeared, replaced by people willing to say anything, even make stuff up, to get and keep power.
We have a person at work who epitomizes this sort of say anything, do whatever it takes to win political debates, which he often as not starts himself. I no longer debate him. He starts out on one topic, gets you to comment, changes the subject, and is talking about something else when it become clear you have the facts on your side. Or he will start something, then throw out statistics that are completely wrong (and I often suspect made up on the spot.) He will cite obscure journals nobody has ever heard of, while you are citing mainstream journals. Of course, he believes anything coming out of Fox News Channel is absolutely evil. My co-worker is absolutely harmless, except of course that he votes, but he betrays a mindset that too often is a characteristic of people in office.
Now, you may think the antics of my co-worker above is aberrational, and that most of these people are rational, if misguided. But I watched an episode of Lou Dobbs recently where Lou had two liberals, and one "conservative" on his A-Team. The liberals both displayed the same types of behaviour defending what were indefensible Obama positions. Of course, Lou called them on it, but it did not stop them from running out the clock without answering his actual question. Mr. Long writes:
Mr. Long again:
Actually, in my opinion, the old Democrat party, the party of Jefferson and Jackson left years ago, routed by George McGovern and the New Left in 1972. The last adherent of the old regime in my mind was Zell Miller, not Liberman, who gave his farewell address at the Republican Convention in 2004. But the party of old had long disappeared, replaced by people willing to say anything, even make stuff up, to get and keep power.
We have a person at work who epitomizes this sort of say anything, do whatever it takes to win political debates, which he often as not starts himself. I no longer debate him. He starts out on one topic, gets you to comment, changes the subject, and is talking about something else when it become clear you have the facts on your side. Or he will start something, then throw out statistics that are completely wrong (and I often suspect made up on the spot.) He will cite obscure journals nobody has ever heard of, while you are citing mainstream journals. Of course, he believes anything coming out of Fox News Channel is absolutely evil. My co-worker is absolutely harmless, except of course that he votes, but he betrays a mindset that too often is a characteristic of people in office.
Now, you may think the antics of my co-worker above is aberrational, and that most of these people are rational, if misguided. But I watched an episode of Lou Dobbs recently where Lou had two liberals, and one "conservative" on his A-Team. The liberals both displayed the same types of behaviour defending what were indefensible Obama positions. Of course, Lou called them on it, but it did not stop them from running out the clock without answering his actual question. Mr. Long writes:
Not to put too fine a point on it, Manifestoists win by lying, cheating, and stealing. There are exactly two current major philosophical systems that make a holy sacrament of dishonesty: Marxism and Islamism. Not coincidentally, these and similar traits are characteristic of psychopaths, as listed in Dr. Robert Hare's Psychopathic Check List - Revised...It is bad enough that one side feels it is OK to steal, cheat, and to say anything to get elected, while the other does not. But it is made worse because each side projects its own beliefs on the other. So, for example, because Democrats are lying, cheating and stealing, they figure the other side is too. Because Republicans generally don't do these things, they look at the other side as simply misguided, and therefore don't vociferously counter their opponents attacks.
Mr. Long again:
My thesis is that all dictators and dictator wannabes are psychopaths, requiring power in order to conceal their own inadequacies from themselves. When Grandma no longer serves the dictator's needs, she goes under the bus, joining a long line of five million kulaks under Lenin, more millions of communist party apparatchiks and great chunks of the Soviet military officer corps under Stalin, thirty million peasant farmers starved to death under Mao, millions dead in North Korea, and one third of the Cambodian population dead under Pol Pot. Favored groups become quite expendable when the psychopathic leader's control is threatened. Obama's announced intentions to change the Constitution, control guns, and start a federal government-run domestic police force -- coupled as it all is with new advances in surveillance capabilities and the Gramscian media's relentless bias against the Constitution...bluntly put, this deadly cocktail presents a pointed risk to your freedoms.The sooner the general public wakes up to the danger, the sooner we will begin getting our house in order again. But we have to be willing to kick these people out of power, and never let them near government again. Take a look around you, America, that squeeze you are feeling is the noose tightening around your neck.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
When Was a Child, I Held Childish Ideas
You've no doubt seen them. A kid comes on your televison, is playing on the beach on a sunny day, while explaining to you that solar energy is good for the environment etc. etc. blah, blah, blah. I could not find the specific ad on YouTube, but it hits on all the points that this ad hits. Namely that we could be more environmentally friendly if only we would give up nasty fossil fuels and instead use so-called "renewable" energy.
I really don't like such ads. First of all, a child is not going to know these things on his own, but will have to have been indoctrinated. I don't like using children using children to score political points for an adult's agenda that the children themselves do not yet fully understand. I look upon ads that use children and I see blatant manipulation. After all, who has the guts to call out a child. Even I, a grumpy curmudgeon, will not do that. But I will call out the people who made such an ad. They are cowards using their children as human shields.
First, look at and learn from other countries' mistakes. Every nation doesn't have to stick its metaphorical fingers in the empty lamp socket to learn that it hurts. We can look to Denmark for a good lesson on wind energy production. Go and read the article. Rising electricity prices, depressed property values, noise that prevents people from sleeping at night, huge tax subsidies such that nobody knows the real cost of wind. Then there is this:
In the same vein, the solar energy companies point out that the world receives something like 1 kw/square meter over the earth's surface. It would be all the energy we needed, if we could capture it. But here's the catch: photovoltaic cells are notoriously inefficient. at between 15% and 20%. Factors such as dirt on the panels, snow, cloud cover, and so forth bring that figure even lower. So, now 1kw/sq meter theoretical insolation turns into perhaps 100 watts/square meter. Your average house uses 2000 watts. Of course, solar power is also very expensive compared to fossil fuel, and prices of solar panels are not coming down. Now, solar power is useful in some places, and for some things. But like wind energy, the idea that we can get away from fossil fuels is a children's dream. Adults should put away such ideas, and confront the world we live in.
I really don't like such ads. First of all, a child is not going to know these things on his own, but will have to have been indoctrinated. I don't like using children using children to score political points for an adult's agenda that the children themselves do not yet fully understand. I look upon ads that use children and I see blatant manipulation. After all, who has the guts to call out a child. Even I, a grumpy curmudgeon, will not do that. But I will call out the people who made such an ad. They are cowards using their children as human shields.
First, look at and learn from other countries' mistakes. Every nation doesn't have to stick its metaphorical fingers in the empty lamp socket to learn that it hurts. We can look to Denmark for a good lesson on wind energy production. Go and read the article. Rising electricity prices, depressed property values, noise that prevents people from sleeping at night, huge tax subsidies such that nobody knows the real cost of wind. Then there is this:
Except with hydropower, electricity cannot be stored in large quantities. The power companies have to generate it at the moment you need to use it. But wind's key disadvantage – in Denmark, as elsewhere – is its unpredictability and uncontrollability. Most of the time, the wind does not blow at the right speeds to generate electricity. And even when it does, that is often at times when little electricity is needed – in the middle of the night, for instance.snip...
"I would interpret the [export] data as showing that the Danes rely on their fossil-fuel plants for their everyday needs," says John Constable, research director for the London-based Renewable Energy Foundation, which has commissioned detailed research on the Danish experience. "They don't get 20 per cent of their electricity from wind. The truth is that a much larger unit, consisting of Denmark and Germany, has managed to get about 7 per cent – and that only because of a fortuitous link with Norwegian and Swedish hydropower."You see, the math doesn't work. Yes, the wind blows, and there is a huge amount of power in it that blows by and is lost to entropy. If we could take advantage of it, it would free us from using as much fossil fuel as we do. But nobody has figured out how to get that power out of the wind. I would note, though, that if someone ever does figure it out, others would be claiming that people were changing the climate, because taking power out of the wind would lessen the effects of planetary warming and cooling. But forget I mentioned it, as nobody is likely to discover how to use wind energy soon. For now it is science fiction, the stuff of childrens' dreams. As adults, we should put away childish ideas and embrace the world as it is.
In the same vein, the solar energy companies point out that the world receives something like 1 kw/square meter over the earth's surface. It would be all the energy we needed, if we could capture it. But here's the catch: photovoltaic cells are notoriously inefficient. at between 15% and 20%. Factors such as dirt on the panels, snow, cloud cover, and so forth bring that figure even lower. So, now 1kw/sq meter theoretical insolation turns into perhaps 100 watts/square meter. Your average house uses 2000 watts. Of course, solar power is also very expensive compared to fossil fuel, and prices of solar panels are not coming down. Now, solar power is useful in some places, and for some things. But like wind energy, the idea that we can get away from fossil fuels is a children's dream. Adults should put away such ideas, and confront the world we live in.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Ban Assault Bras?
Story here.
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian investigators say a woman in East Siberia has strangled an elderly neighbor to death with her bra.
Ban Assault Mugs
Please go read the story at ESPN about a US Open Tennis Line Judge who murdered her husband. What, one wonders did she use as a weapon? Perhaps an evil black rifle? An assault handgun? Well...
She was charged with murdering her 80-year-old husband, Alan Goodman, in their home in Woodland Hills, Calif. Prosecutors allege she bludgeoned him to death with a coffee mug on April 17.Perhaps we should ban assault mugs?
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