Mao Zedong or Sun-tzu? Perhaps to White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, they’re just a bunch of Chinese and they all look sound pretty much alike.
Mickey Kaus thinks that may be the animating factor behind Dunn’s excuse for touting Mao Zedong as her favorite philosopher. Dunn said she was merely parroting Lee Atwater, the late Republican election guru:
“My source for the Mao quote was actually the late Lee Atwater, either in an article or bio I read after the 1988 election. Now that I’ve revealed this I hope I don’t get Keith Olbermann angry with me,” she wrote, noting that she had also quoted Mother Teresa.
But Atwater was a big fan of 
Sun-tzu, a military strategist whose writing predates Mao Zedong by about two and a half millennia. Kaus can’t find anything in the record suggesting that Atwater was a fan of Mao Zedong, but notes that he regularly carried a copy of Sun-tzu’s Art of War with him.
But hey! No biggy. Can’t we just agree with Dunn that one Chinaman is pretty much the same as another, even if one of them is credited with the deaths of 50 to 70 million people and the other one isn’t?
Just keep telling yourself that Bush was stupid and Obama is smart, so the fact that Obama has surrounded himself with idiots can be overlooked.
October 29th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Ammo, Politics |
no comments
The evidence that global warming hysteria is . . . well, hysterical, continues to accumulate. The latest correction to the data used to justify that hysteria concerns the benefits of using biofuels to cut carbon emissions.
The study, published this week in Science, says that biofuels, marketed as a low-carbon alternative, will actually emit more carbon dioxide than burning gasoline over the coming decades. . . .
The problem stems from a basic error in the Kyoto Protocol - and subsequently copied into European and US environmental legislation - which calculates emissions without taking the source of the fuel into account. . . .
“It literally means you can chip up the world’s forests and burn them for fuel without noting the effect on the world’s greenhouse gases,” adds Timothy Searchinger, a research fellow at Princeton University.
Will this news do anything to dampen the current obsession with enacting new, sweeping regulations based on the old data? Silly question. It’s full steam ahead for the political class.
Like doomsayers throughout history, Gordon Brown says the upcoming Copenhagen summit is our last chance.
“We can’t afford to fail. If we fail, we pay a heavy price,” he warned. “For the planet, there is no plan B.”
Al Gore sees hope in Brown’s hysteria, and says it is swinging public opinion and business leaders his way.
They’re seeing the writing on every wall they look at. They’re seeing the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps right before their eyes in just a few years.
(Is anything melting faster than Gordon Brown’s political career?)
Pew Research reports that Gore is wrong, finding that the gap in public opinion between Americans who support cap and trade and those who don’t has narrowed from 60% in 2006 to 24%.
That shift still leaves a decided majority in favor of environmental policies that can only be justified by spurious data like the Kyoto snafu on carbon emissions. A significant chunk of the population believes the debate is over.
So a lot of people still consider it logical to burn the world’s food stores in our gas tanks while leaving the oil underground.
October 24th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Commerce, Politics |
no comments
Leave it to the French. Agence-France reports that the testosterone levels of McCain voters dropped significantly when Obama won the election.
Yes, and the country’s collective testosterone level has dropped significantly since Obama’s inauguration.
The good news, for the French at least, is that Sarkozy has stepped into the void, and the level of French testoserone is on the rise.
October 22nd, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics |
no comments
The U.N. Human Rights Council is doing its best to stifle human rights, and we helped. Jonathan Turley writes:
While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any “negative racial and religious stereotyping.” The exception was made as part of a resolution supporting free speech that passed this month, but it is the exception, not the rule that worries civil libertarians.
This comes shortly after the Obama Administration reversed the decision of the Bush Administration not to participate on the council.
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said: “Those who suffer from abuse and oppression around the world, as well as those who dedicate their lives to advancing human rights, need the council to be balanced and credible.” She said the United States seeks election to the body “because we believe that working from within, we can make the council a more effective forum to promote and protect human rights.”
Nice work, Susan. What’s the next step? Perhaps the starry-eyed advocates of “international law” (a group that includes certain members of the Supreme Court) will argue that this resolution should be honored in our courts, notwithstanding our parochial and outmoded First Amendment.
Turley concludes:
The public and private curtailment on religious criticism threatens religious and secular speakers alike. However, the fear is that, when speech becomes sacrilegious, only the religious will have true free speech. It is a danger that has become all the more real after the decision of the Obama administration to join in the effort to craft a new faith-based speech standard. It is now up to Congress and the public to be heard before the world leaves free speech with little more than a hope and a prayer.
The Obama Administration is convinced we can solve all problems if we just sit down and talk. Only watch what you say.
October 21st, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Law, Politics, Religion |
no comments
Melanie Phillips notes the terrible dilemma of global warming hawks as the weather just keeps getting colder.
What to do to save their reputations and glittering careers as Chief Scientists, Presidents of the Royal Society, Government Ministers for Climate Change, Failed US Presidential Candidates Turned Nobel Prize-Winners, Journalistic Would-Be Stringers-Up of AGW-Deniers, green NGO empire-builders and professors whose entire livelihoods and academic status have accrued from more than two decades of peddling the biggest anti-science scam of all time but which is now threatening to expose them all to ridicule on an epic scale as global temperatures cool?
October 17th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics |
no comments
The Archbishop of Canterbury is not satisfied with presiding over the disintegration of the Anglican Communion. Last year, he famously endorsed the notion of Sharia law in Britain as inevitable. Now he has called for an end to economic growth.
‘We cannot grow indefinitely in economic terms without moving towards the death of what is most distinctively human, the death of the habits that make sense in a shared world where life has to be sustained by co-operation not only between humans but between humans and their material world,’ he said. . . .
He has attacked belief in market forces as ‘idolatry’; praised the contempt of Marxists for ‘unbridled capitalism’, and, last month, condemned the City because no-one has said sorry for the excesses that ended in recession.
How ironic. Economic growth stops and the Archbishop complains? One has to conclude that it is the excesses that have Dr. Williams’ chasuble in a twist, not the recession that he would hope to achieve by other means.
Like the servant to whom only one talent was given, Dr. Williams advocates merely preserving the status quo. But Williams won’t even do that. Praising anti-capitalist Marxists, endorsing the demise of democracy, dithering as the Anglican Communion unravels, it seems the Archbishop is preserving nothing he was entrusted with.
October 15th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Religion |
one comment
This item arrived in my email. A quick Internet search confirms the essential facts, for example here and here. It says a lot about our times where the media systematically elevate the frivolous and make-believe over real accomplishment. But then Irena Sendler did not seek the Nobel Prize. No doubt she had better motives for doing what she did, and doing it was its own reward.
There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena Sendler. During WWII, Irena got 
permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive. Being German, she KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews. Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack for larger kids. She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises. During her time doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2,500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.
Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. . . . She was not selected.
Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.
October 13th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Reflections |
2 comments
Haydn, call your office. That creation oratorio needs some updating. It is, according to Prof. Ellen van Wolde, “untenable now.”
You see, the good professor has done a fresh textual analysis of the Hebrew text of Genesis and concludes that it merely credits God with “separating” the Heavens and the Earth. First Things has the story.
A spokesman for the Radboud University said: “The new interpretation is a complete shake up of the story of the Creation as we know it.” Prof. Van Wolde added: “The traditional view of God the Creator is untenable now.”
So Jewish history and scholarship is based on a misunderstanding of a single verb? Christianity and Islam foolishly forgot to do some fact-checking at the outset before sweeping across the world?
Where was Professor van Wolde when we needed her, and why did God (still a very clever fellow to have separated the Heavens and the Earth) wait so long to send a new a prophet to issue this retraction? I nominate van Wolde to chair the inquiry into this massive fraud. What did God know, and when did He know it?
First Things, however, has doubts about the professor’s textual analysis of English:
For instance, she seems to think the word “untenable” means “can’t be defended since I settled the issue” and that “fresh textual analysis” is synonymous with “stuff I just made up.”
Exactly. But take comfort. The traditional view of academic arrogance remains as tenable as ever.
October 12th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Education, Religion |
no comments
Could anything be more absurd than Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?
Well, yes. Al Gore receiving the prize (2007) was more absurd, and giving the award to Yasser Arafat (1994) was beyond absurd.
But we should take some comfort. Giving the prize to Obama (2009) will be good for the arts. The event lies almost beyond parody, but not quite, and I predict that skilled parodists and rising young talent will struggle to give the Nobel committee its due. We have before us the perfect test for winnowing the hacks from the truly inspired. The cream will rise and usher in a golden age of parody.
You see, there’s nothing funny about Al Gore or Yasser Arafat. The revolutionary Le Duc Tho (1973) whose “peace” efforts were crowned with a holocaust in Southeast Asia deserves faint praise (and obvious disqualification) for refusing the award. Jimmy Carter (2002) is simply too boring in his spitefulness to inspire anything approaching art.
Obama, however, has comedic potential. So far, potential has defined Obama: hope, change, ideals, rhetoric, resets, a nuke-free world, yada yada. The Nobel committee admits it awarded him the prize based purely on this potential. Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said,
We hope this can contribute a little bit to enhance what he is trying to do.
But give the frequently unfunny Saturday Night Live credit for recognizing early the one area in which Obama’s potential has been realized: his comedy value. That is the one item missing from Fred Armisen’s checklist but implicit throughout. Thanks to the Nobel committee, Obama can check it off as “Done” and no one can argue.
October 9th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics |
no comments
Bill Ayers confirmed rumors that he helped Obama with his book Dreams From My Father. How? By writing it.
No, not editing or contributing or co-authoring. According to Dennis Byrne:
In a chance meeting with conservative blogger Anne Leary, Bill Ayers makes a stunning claim that he wrote–not just edited–President Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from my Father.
Now go back and read what FactCheck.org had to say during the campaign:
Obama never said Ayers was “just” a guy in the neighborhood. The quote is from a Democratic primary debate on April 16 in Philadelphia, and Obama actually was more forthcoming than McCain lets on. . . .
Instead, Obama said this:
This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. . . .
So, I guess Obama didn’t even collaborate with Ayers on Dreams From My Father.
And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.
FactCheck.org concluded with this:
Voters may differ in how they see Ayers, or how they see Obama’s interactions with him. We’re making no judgment calls on those matters. What we object to are the McCain-Palin campaign’s attempts to sway voters – in ads and on the stump – with false and misleading statements about the relationship, which was never very close. Obama never “lied” about this, just as he never bragged about it. The foundation they both worked with was hardly “radical.” And Ayers is more than a former “terrorist,” he’s also a well-known figure in the field of education.
“More than a terrorist”? Wow. There’s an accolade. Nice work FactCheck.org.
October 7th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Media, Politics |
no comments
