Global warming is not mentioned once in this article, What-sup?
Climate change could cause global conflicts as large as the two world wars but lasting for centuries unless the problem is controlled, a leading defence think tank has warned. The Royal United Services Institute said a tenfold increase in energy research spending to around £10 billion a year would be needed if the world were to avoid the worst effects of changing temperatures. What is defined as a changing temperature, inquiring minds want to know? Governments should be preparing for the worst
However the group said that the response to threats posed by climate change, such as rising sea levels and migration, had so far been "slow and inadequate," because nations had failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario. Migration? With rising sea levels it could be fish, whales or even ducks.
"We're preparing for a car bomb, not for 9/11," said Nick Mabey, the author of the report who was a former senior member of the Prime Minister's strategy unit.
Last week Lord Stern, who compiled an economic assessment of climate change for the Government, said that he had underestimated the possible economic consequences.
Mr Mabey said leading economies should be preparing for what would happen if climate change turned out to be at the top of the predicted temperature range. "Top of the predicted temperature range" is close to saying Global Warming.
His report said: "If climate change is not slowed and critical environmental thresholds are exceeded, it will become a primary driver of conflicts between and within states."
It added: "Our energy and climate security will increasingly depend on stronger alliances with other large energy consumers, such as China, to develop and deploy new energy technologies, and less on relations with oil producing states." Ah, now we're getting to the net/net, Global Climate Security.
#2
Isn't the world already at war and has been since the beginning of time? I see climate change less responsible for war and more the high cost of energy since that adds to food cost (both transport and production) and wars coming from that rather than climate change.
#3
IIRC, the Guinness Book of Records once listed that in the four thousand years of history [Egypt 2000 BC - Today], there's only been around 200 years of peace in the 'civilized' world.
#5
I think it's absolutely absurd when some "educated idiot" like this tells us we've got to control climate. Man is not capable of changing the climate at this time, and all thought to the contrary is charlatinship. Climate has changed ever since the earth was formed, and like the Chinese proverb, "this, too, will change". We have scientific evidence that average temperatures were higher during the Roman Warming, the Midieval Warm Period, and dozens of times throughout the past 3 or 4 billion years. To state that today's climate is the "average" or "ideal" is a statement of overwhelming conceit. Anyone spouting such nonsense should be jailed for fraud.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
04/23/2008 14:29 Comments ||
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#6
If the world is going to war it's good to be the country with the biggest military (or close allies with) isn't it.
#8
yep, Kirk it will. In fact, I've become more worried about "Global cooling" than warming, as that can cause *real* chaos (via food/crop failure, cold deaths, etc.)
Posted by: BA ||
04/23/2008 20:25 Comments ||
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#1
belief that government institutions, the bigger and more multilateral the better, are the cures for what ails us
That, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with the Left. And it's why the US Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms.
#2
His belief is in the State, or government. Free men's beliefs are in themselves. Which is why the State believers will try to crush the free men and the free will rise up against the State.
John McCain may not have a completely spotless record in the eyes of economic conservatives, but boy, I hope they appreciate his guts. How many other politicians would try to pitch the benefits of free trade in Youngstown, Ohio?
"Here, in Youngstown and across America, obviously the answer to our problems is not the siren song of protectionism," McCain said during a stop at Fabart, a rusting steel-fabricating plant that has only five remaining workers. "Protectionism and isolation has never worked in America's history."
According to USA Today, a former AFL-CIO official told McCain that in that region, NAFTA is a "four letter word."
McCain's response? "Jack, I am prone on occasion to make mistakes, but the last time I checked, NAFTA is five letters."
I'm originally from Youngstown, and the local culture is definitely hostile to free trade. Back in 1985, I bought a Honda Civic, and I got more than a little guff from UAW-types (and my sister!) about my supposed lack of patriotism for not buying a domestic nameplate. My father was in politics, and I remember he rejected a whole press run of campaign literature because the printer had forgotten to put a printer's union "bug" (logo) at the bottom--had people started thinking he was using a non-union shop, he'd have lost the election.
Posted by: Mike ||
04/23/2008 14:12 ||
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#1
Barry Goldwater had guts when he went to Tennessee and told them the TVA was a bad deal. Since the TVA had pulled central Tennessee from the abyss of starvation it didn't sell to well.
This must be a Arizonian trait to go to the Lion and tell him Gazelles are not for him.
#3
Ideally, protectionism probably should be avoided. But we're not living in an ideal world.
There's China. Never mind the expansionist ambitions of the communists who run that country. With their complete disregard for the environment and human rights they've made sure that we're not playing on a level field. I think a little protectionism might help to compensate for that.
Then there's Mexico and NAFTA enabling American corporations to leave places like Youngstown to rust. And if importing goods from Mexico that used to be made in places like Youngstown isn't bad enough, McCain condones the import of workers from Mexico, legal or otherwise, just to make sure that US wages will be depressed and living conditions will deteriorate.
Unrealistic union demands have certainly helped to convince a lot of manufacturers to flee the US. If McCain had real guts maybe he would say that. Then he might try to come up with solutions that would be better than just turning the US into a Third World country.
Instead he makes a wise crack about NAFTA having five letters and ignores some very real problems.
I don't credit McCain with any guts at all on this issue because he knows the donks aren't facing up to it either so he has nothing to lose.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/23/2008 16:23 Comments ||
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#4
They have no problem with free trade when they're at Walmart.
Apparently memories of the economic disaster brought to the world by Smoot-Hawley are too faint to prevent cynical opportunists like Hillary, Obama, Pelosi, et al from exploiting naive and dangerous anti-trade sentiments. Pathetic.
#6
While we currently have trade deficits with both Canada and Mexico, I suspect it has more to do with them being oil exporters and us oil importers than anything to do with manufacturing. The big consumer manufacturing black hole is a country that isn't part of NAFTA.
And I don't think throwing Colombia under Chavez's bus is gonna help save anyone's job up here; in fact I kinda suspect the exact opposite is true.
#7
Compare wid REDDIT > MCCAIN WAS SUBJECTED TO OVER FIVE YEARS OF SOVIET "MIND/THOUGHT PERVERSION" TECHNIQUES AS A PRISONER OF WAR IN HANOI HILTON -IS HE STILL FIT TO BE PRESIDENT OR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF?
Whew - Gawd, 'twas a long 'un Titlin to r 'member.
Also from REDDIT > PAUL AND HUCKABEE GOT 27% OF PA VOTE - HOW COME THERE ARE NO NEWS STORIES ON GOP SPLIT?
Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do--voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half gallon of Dewar's. . . .
A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lifelong lesson in conservatism. The ship is immense, going seven decks down from the flight deck and ten levels up in the tower. But it's full, with some 5,500 people aboard. Living space is as cramped as steerage on the way to Ellis Island. Even the pilots live in three-bunk cabins as small and windowless as hall closets. A warship is a sort of giant Sherman tank upon the water. Once below deck you're sealed inside. There are no cheery portholes to wave from.
McCain could hardly escape understanding the limits of something huge but hermetic, like a government is, and packed with a madding crowd. It requires organization, needs hierarchies, demands meritocracy, insists upon delegation of authority. An intricate, time-tested system replete with checks and balances is not a plaything to be moved around in a doll house of ideology. It is not a toy bunny serving imaginary sweets at a make-believe political tea party. The captain commands, but his whims do not. He answers to the nation.
And yet an aircraft carrier is more an example of what people can do than what government can't. Scores of people are all over the flight deck during takeoffs and landings. They wear color-coded T-shirts--yellow for flight-directing, purple for fueling, blue for chocking and tying-down, red for weapon-loading, brown for I-know-not-what, and so on. These people can't hear each other. They use hand signals. And, come night ops, they can't do that. Really, they communicate by "training telepathy." They have absorbed their responsibilities to the point that each knows exactly where to be and when and doing what.
These are supremely dangerous jobs. And most of the flight deck crew members are only 19 or 20. Indeed the whole ship is run by youngsters. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
04/23/2008 10:59 ||
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#1
PBS has been promoting an upcoming program titled "Carrier". I believe it starts Sunday night. I look forward to it. Yeah, I know, it's PBS money that put it together so I'll reserve judgment. At least it's not produced by Bill Moyers. Anyway, we'll see...
#2
Actually, the PBS series on various aspects of the Long War (by Frontline?) has been pretty good. They did one on the Pakistani border territories that I found fascinating, including getting a glimpse through the crowd of that famously handsome but invisible Taliban leader with the curly black locks.
I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There's Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there's the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: "Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?"
Supposedly the "youth vote" is all for Obama. But it's John McCain who actually has put his life in the hands of adolescents on a carrier deck. Supposedly the "women's vote" is . . . well, let's not go too far with this. I can speak to John's honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I'm not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he'd been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was. At least John likes women, which is more than we can say about Hillary's attitude toward, for instance, the women in Bill's life, who at this point may constitute nearly the majority of the "women's vote."
#7
Before I started reading PJ, I was pretty wishy-washy about politics - he opened my eyes and moved me over towards the libertarian side. The key takeaway quote I got from one of his books was something to the effect of "Giving money to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to a teenage boy"
Posted by: Rambler in California ||
04/23/2008 15:20 Comments ||
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#8
Would have liked to have this story to pass on to my Dad; the boat schedules and his infrequent visits to us never coincided so he never understood what we did.
And yes, the 'kids' run the show and are damn good at it. us khakis just sat back and gave a gentle nudge when needed ( insert your own definition of 'nudge' here)
If he becomes the Democratic Party's nominee for President, Sen. Barack Obama will lose the general election for this reason: When the smiles and platitudes are set aside, Obama's campaign and the philosophy of his cadre amount to one big put-down of America.
Anomalous among Western leaders, the president of the United States serves as head of both state and government. Moreover, he is elected directly by the voters, unlike in a parliamentary system whereby a leader attains power through the success of his party. As such, the president represents something very personal to Americans. He is, for four or more years, the personification of their country, embodying the aspirations and goodness of the land that they love. A president may disappoint after assuming office, but America is not in the habit of electing candidates who hold their country in contempt.
Not only have the comments of Obama's wife, Michelle (who has referred to America as "downright mean" and stated that she was not proud of her country until her husband started winning primaries) and his minister, Jeremiah Wright (whose hateful, anti-white, anti-American diatribes are available for sale in Obama's church, or for free on YouTube) revealed the tired, leftist scorn for America that Obama represents -- the Senator's own remarks have exposed this ugly, unelectable side.
Speaking to a fundraiser in San Francisco, Obama attempted to explain his persistent deficit in Pennsylvania primary polls by describing small-town Americans as "bitter" people who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." This is hard stuff, and patronizing, besides. Add to this Obama's characterizations of the "typical white person" (in the context of describing his grandmother, whom he had originally tossed under the campaign bus in order to create a false equivalence with Wright's racism), and one finds something far more damaging than a simple series of gaffes --it is a window into how the Senator sees his countrymen.
Obama's associations, even beyond Wright, speak to this unappealing point of view. William Ayers, a domestic terrorist of Weathermen infamy, enjoys a friendly relationship with the Obamas. As general-election voters will learn, Ayers bombed the Pentagon on May 19, 1972, and fondly recalls, "The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them." Ayers and his accomplices also bombed the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, as well as banks, police stations and courthouses.
In one's associations, as in other aspects of life, mistakes are made. But a hallmark of a leader is the willingness to make them right. For this, Obama has shown little talent or enthusiasm.
Obama has defended Wright by insisting that he merely represents the convention of "Black Liberation Theology," as though this were just some quaint offshoot of traditional Christianity. One need not pore over the tenets of Black Liberation Theology or its founder, James Hal Cone -- although a Google search of either would provide a world of clarity to the undecided voter -- to recognize that a would-be President who cannot utterly disassociate himself from such racist, anti-American rubbish lacks sufficient character and affinity for his country's ideals to be its leader.
The bumper-sticker slogan "dissent is patriotic" has for decades been employed to legitimize any insult to America, no matter how hateful or moronic. But Americans understand that their president's instinct ought to be to defend the nation against unfair invective, not embrace those who purvey it -- or, in the case of Ayers, seek to blow it up altogether.
With his demonstrable view of America, and considering his cohorts, Obama would be wise to make himself very comfortable in the Senate.
Out Damn Spot
By Nidra Poller
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Its been called the mother of all fauxtography, the biggest media hoax of our times, the most damaging image ever attached to Israel, an icon of hatred, blood libel on an international scale: the shooting of Mohamed al Dura, a 12 year-old Palestinian boy allegedly gunned down by murderous Israeli soldiers on September 30, 2000 at Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip.
The incident, fortuitously filmed by France 2 cameraman Talal Abu Rahma, has been at the center of debate ever since. Al Dura, the poster boy of the al Aqsa intifada, has served as justification for some of the most atrocious crimes of this decadetwo Israeli reservists massacred by an enraged mob in Ramallah to avenge Mohamed al Dura; the Palestinian boys shooting spliced into the beheading video of WSJs Daniel Pearl. Echoes of the hatred generated by the al Dura image resound to this day. The murder of eight students at Jerusalems Mercaz Harav yeshiva is the latest in a long series of savage attacks against civilians in Israel and Jews worldwide, in revenge for some Ur-crime committed against Palestinians.
Despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, France 2 Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin has never withdrawn the accusation that the boy was killed and his father wounded by gunfire from the Israeli positions. The origin of that hypothetical gunfire is a moot question to observers who claim the whole scene was staged.
While Israeli authorities hunkered down, hoping the al Dura accusations would fade away, France 2 correspondent Charles Enderlin has staked his reputation on keeping them blood red. French media closed ranks and stifled the controversy on their home turf but it kept bouncing back internationally. Determined to silence enemies once and for all, France 2/Enderlin brought defamation suits against three websites that had posted critical examinations of the al Dura report, losing one on a technicality and winning two on generalities.
But one of the defendants, Media-Ratings director Philippe Karsenty, appealed and Enderlins slam-dunk litigation is looking more like a boomerang. Whereas the court of first resort had avoided questions that might have embarrassed the state-owned television network, Laurence Trébucq, the no-nonsense president of the three-judge Appellate Court panel, lifted the lid to see whats cooking and ordered France 2 to turn over the raw footage. The court got a stingy 18-minute excerpt, but it was enough to confirm the initial observation that France 2 stringer Talal Abu Rahma did indeed film fake battles, simulated injuries, and comical ambulance evacuations that fateful day. And the al Dura shooting? Also staged? Or paradoxically authentic?
Evidence and closing arguments were heard at a marathon session on February 27th. Initially convicted of defaming France 2/Enderlin without conducting a proper investigation, Philippe Karsenty presented bushels of evidence that the judge observed with rapt attention. France 2/Enderlin brought in its Big Bertha in the person of Maître François Szpiner, former president Chiracs personal counsel. Szpiner defended the Paris Mosque in the Charlie Hebdo-Danish cartoons case (he lost) and was literally dispatched to represent Ruth Halimi whose son Ilan was tortured to death by the anti-Semitic Gang of Barbarians in February 2005.
The aggressive, abusive, sarcastic Szpiner did not attempt to defend the facts on the ground, obviously a lost cause. He saved his ammunition for underhand blows and snide remarks about The Jew who gives money to a second Jew who gives it to the third Jew who fights to the last drop of Israeli blood. Karsenty, described with a snarl as a cross between the Shoah negationist Faurisson and the 9/11 revisionist Meyssan, has it in for Enderlin, says Szpiner, because the France 2 correspondent covers the hotheaded Mideast conflict with consummate fairness and not, as some would wish, as a fight between the good guys and the bad guys. Enderlin, in turn, vouched for his trusted Palestinian cameraman, assuring the court that if Talal had engaged in crooked reporting, the Israelis would have revoked his accreditation.
In fact, Abu Rahmas accreditation has not been renewed since 2002 because, according to Government Press Office director Daniel Seaman, he was filming staged scenes. Invited to react to this information, news director Chabot relayed the request to Enderlin who shot back with a half dozen insulting e-mails including one in Englishaddressed to the Foreign Press Associationidentifying me as that lady. You are a militant, wrote Enderlin, I expect nothing from you. You wont even mention that we won four libel suits and the Avocat Général recommended confirmation of Karsentys initial conviction. In the midst of the bluster, Enderlin confirmed that the GPO withdrew accreditation from all Gaza and West Bank journalists, including Abu Rahma, at the end of 2001. Any other explanation, he threatened, is a lie.
Caught off guard during a brief recess during the trial, Arlette Chabot let off steam. I just want this shitty affair over and done with. I want Karsenty to lose! This nutty case has been bugging me since day one. Implying that her people have no idea where the murderous gunfire came from, she assured the gentleman who had buttonholed her that she was willing to investigate everything and everyone if she could only get this shitty case off her back. What about the fact that the dead child identified as Mohamed al Dura was brought into the hospital between noon and 1 PM while the alleged shooting occurred at 3PM? Making the motions of someone who turns back a clock, madame Chabot explained there was some kind of time change that day in Gaza.
Chabot had already left the premises when Philippe Karsenty stood before the court and replied soberly to the ultimate question: Why are you doing this?
I will not give up. I owe it to the father of Daniel Pearl, beheaded with the image of Mohamed al-Dura incrusted in the video. I owe it to my parents, who taught me to respect the truth. I owe it to the Jewish people, victim of lies, I owe it to France, I owe it to history.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
If he becomes the Democratic Party's nominee for President, Sen. Barack Obama will lose the general election for this reason: When the smiles and platitudes are set aside, Obama's campaign and the philosophy of his cadre amount to one big put-down of America.
