Manning Up

I'm not sure about this idea of college kids having kids, but if you're going to it's important to man up and be a parent to the kid. I'm not sure that includes introducing your daughter to 12,414 people in a basketball arena on Senior Day, but if it floats your boat... How can you not love that little red and black cheerleader outfit?

Malcom Thomas is more than just a good basketball player.

Faster and Faster

Every time we find out that climate change predictions are in error, what we find is that change is happening faster than predicted, often much faster.

We know that melting ice adds to a rising sea level, and that the greatest contributor to that rise is polar ice sheets on land – Greenland and Antarctica. A study lasting 20 years and released by NASA shows that these land mass ice sheets are “losing mass at an accelerating pace” and that they are now predicted to “become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.”

Nothing to see here folks, just fill up that SUV and move on.

Subverting Government

Wisconsin Democrats continue to subvert the legislative process and, while accusing the governor of “refusing to negotiate,” are angry at him for offering compromise that they say does not go far enough to persuade them. Offering concession does not constitute “negotiation” unless the person offering that compromise surrenders completely to the minority position.

Whether you agree with the majority or not, and as it happens I don’t, Democrats in Wisconsin are corrupting the process of government to prevent the majority from prevailing. They are accusing the Republican governor of refusing to negotiate even though he has offered to meet a portion of their demands, and are demanding that he and the majority of the legislature accede to their position in its entirety.

Rachel Maddow, Ed Shultz, Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris Matthews are hailing the Wisconsin Democrats as heroes and are cheering them on while, in the very same news broadcasts, condemning and castigating Republicans in the United States Congress for doing exactly and precisely the same thing in every detail and respect.

Nothing could more perfectly illustrate the corrupt nature of our media than this. These broadcasters do not credit conservatives, Republicans, with any principles or belief systems. Their presentation is that Republicans do not actually believe anything, but are merely evil and corrupt bastards who have no goal in life other than to prevent the good, pure and wonderful things that Democrats believe in deeply and work tirelessly to implement.

When Democrats disrupt and bring to a halt the process of governance it is praiseworthy because they are doing it in the cause of noble and worthy issues; when Republicans do so it is because they hate the process itself and are trying to destroy the government and inflict chaos upon the governed.

Liberal "Values"

For the past four years Democrats and other liberals have been horrified by the manner in which the Republican minority in Congress has impeded that body’s ability to do business. They have accused the minority party of acting in bad faith, they have accused them of “hostage holding” and have made threats to revise parliamentary procedures in order to render the minority powerless and irrelevant.

But when a Republican governor introduces a bill which the Democratic minority in Wisconsin does not like they obstruct the function of that legislative body not by any parliamentary process, but by leaving the state. Democrats and liberals regard them as heroes. Don’t defend their action by the crowds protesting outside the capitol; that came later and as a result of their action. They did precisely what Republicans in Washington had been doing, only they did it by extra-legal means.

In both cases the minority blocked the will of the majority within a legislative body, and liberals condemned the action when done by Republicans, cheered it when done by Democrats.

President George W. Bush declared that this nation had the right to hold persons in prison indefinitely without trial, and liberals howled in outrage. The closing of Guantanamo was demanded as a “blot on the nation’s honor,” and liberals demanded that persons held in prison either be given legitimate trials or released.

President Barack Obama now declares that this nation has the right to hold persons in prison indefinitely without trial if they “present a danger to our nation” and that Guantanamo is unlikely to be closed, and liberals have absolutely no objection to his declaration.

Liberals object to indefinite detention and the presence of Guantanamo when declared by a Republican president, but they remain silent in the face of the same issues declared by a Democratic president.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from these things is that “liberals” have no actual values; that “liberal” is just another word for Democrat and that they care only about the preservation of their own political party’s hold on power.

"Last Gasp" Again

I don't recall the exact details that provoked the comment, but at one point during the heavy fighting in Iraq Rumsfeld referred to the upsurge in violence as the "last gasp" of the insurgency, and assured us that victory was just around the corner. As I recall, things got seriously worse after that.

Now we are being told that the failure of the Taliban to quit fighting for the winter, the fact that they have kept up their attacks on us during a time when they usually retreat to Pakistan to rest up, is actually good news.

Afghanistan has seen an unusual amount of military activity for the winter, a fact that International Security Assistance Force officials attribute to a greater number of insurgents who stayed in the country to fight, rather than spending the winter resting in Pakistan or elsewhere outside Afghanistan. ISAF officials say that they believe this may give them the upper hand this spring and summer.

(emphasis mine) Not exactly the same thing as a "last gasp," but...

Well, This is Exciting

Kilauea is having something of a hissy fit. The image is linked to the movie, but visit the main images site for many images & more movies of the latest eruption. Very cool hot stuff.

Redefining War

Robert Gates is being widely praised for the sanity of saying at West Point that this nation should avoid going to war in the future. Unfortunately, he didn’t say that. He spoke about the manner in which we should not go to war, but he did not even border on suggesting that we should stop doing it. Gates is a much of a war cheerleader as anyone in Washington, he just believes we should do it with airplanes, preferably unmanned airplanes called drones, ships, rockets, robots, and other as yet uninvented high-tech machinery. He does not think we should do it with “boots on the ground.”

What got less recognition in the media was the latter part of that. Gates has cancelled some large military projects, which has caused the media to credit him with “trying to reduce the military budget,” but such is not really the case. He is merely diverting funding from projects which support ground forces, which he believes are obsolete, into high tech projects which he believes will win future wars in a manner that does not require foot soldiers.

Gates has redefined war. Future war no longer consists of engaging in conflict over territory, it now is a matter of just blowing shit up big time. Think “Independence Day” or “War of the Worlds.”

He pretty much told the Army cadets they had picked the wrong branch, actually, and the Navy and Air Force are thrilled pink. Well, the Air Force has mixed feelings, because he is redefining their role to basically that of a big ass video game. Not much glory to be had sitting at a video console in Nevada.

Tom Englehardt has a piece at Tom Dispatch which goes into this subject in greater detail. It is titled “Never Again” and is subtitled “Old Secretaries of Defense Never Die, They Just Write Bestselling Memoirs,” and I encourage you to read it. I had been considering what to say about Mr. Gates when Tom said most of it for me.

I’ve been critical of a couple of unnamed liberal sites lately; Tom Dispatch is a site that one can count on as being unfailingly reasonable and free of demagoguery and insult. A few of his guest writers become a bit hyperbolic at times, but at their most extreme they are espousing positive causes and advocating for ideas rather than bashing those who disagree with them.

Anyway, I’m with the implication of Tom’s piece. We should discard the whole idea of going to war, cut military spending by 80% and balance our budget without emasculating social programs.