HunterByrd

Global Warming takes a Breather

Bing’s dream a reality

I recall DC shutting down because of a blizzard. In fact, heavy snowfall is not at all unusual in many parts of the country. Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, and Colorado come to mind. However, these parts of America take this type of weather in stride. Granted, it is a large stride, but tolerable. Not so in these parts.

Where I come from, bitter cold, high winds, and copious amounts of stinging ice and drifting snow are relatively rare in combination. We have just experienced an intense storm which has left hundreds of stranded motorists along a forty-mile stretch of Interstate 24 (from mile 25 in Marshall Co, Kentucky to mile 65 in Trigg Co, KY). Several counties have been declared to be disaster areas! ‘Civil emergency’ is the catch-phrase of the day. Carlisle Co has called for backhoe operators to clear roads. SUV and tow-truck operators have been asked to search for stranded motorists along highways and byways. People are running out of gas and growing cold. State Police have issued a plea to all moving motorists to seek out and rescue any stranded drivers they come across. And the folks from Duluth are knowingly smiling.

At my place, I’m seeing things not seen since childhood. Two and three foot drifts on flat terrain. Three inches of snow atop hay stacked inside my old dirt barn. The barn has no batten boards, so for that amount of snow to uniformly cover a surface through ½ inch cracks takes some driving wind. The wind chill was ferocious.

My son decided not to make his way home from university on Tuesday. Like many skeptical west Kentuckians, he did not heed the weather warnings. We always hear this sort of thing, and the worst of it seems to blow by. Now he’s stuck in his apartment, a mere 36 miles away. It might as well be 360.

At times like this, we rural dwellers always turn our thoughts to the power lines. Loss of electricity could be devastating. Kerosene’s value far exceeds its 2.29/gal price. Bathtubs become receptacles for flush water.

Anyway, I won’t be playing my favorite, secular Christmas tune today. Stay warm.

Capitol Rotunda - Frankfort KY

The Captain's Belief ain't so red as blood red

We can barely muster the Democrats to go after terrorists and to eliminate the environments that produce terrorists after 9/11. I don't see them leaping towards a war with China simply because we signed a paper decades ago promising to protect Taiwan.

OK.

I believe our resolve is somewhat more stiff, if that's alright with you, mighty blogger. Times might be hard, but America is, in the end, America still.

Why is Kim Jong Il the only fat man in North Korea?

Here is a sweet travelogue about the third prong of W's 'axis of evil'.

"Under North Korean law, every male must spend 10 years in the military. Women spend seven."

Now that sounds like something to look forward to.

While in the country, I desperately tried to talk to some actual North Koreans. But all outsiders travel in a virtual bubble, as a way to just about eliminate contact between North Koreans and outsiders. Except for the hotel's doormen, all the staff we encountered were recruited from ethnic Korean communities in China - and they are rotated back to China every three months.

Say that again? Quick, how do you spell p-a-r-a-n-o-i-a?

The flow of liberal bias in American academia

Not so good ... we fear...merely more of the same.

Ah, The Economist. A center of center bastion from across the sea...in Britain. Read this article, which includes generous reference to Tom Wolfe's latest novel.

Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies”. Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities' ability to influence the wider intellectual culture.

This is true, and such shill is regularly disseminated to the larger, consuming culture. Just today, I witness a perfect example of the above statement. I watched the film Igby Falls Down. Igby is a younger, emotional, free-spirited (albeit aimless) sibling to his Ivy-league brother who majors in economics. The older, toe-haired brother is freely and derogatively referred to as a neo-fascist, young Republican.

Evidence of the atypical uniformity of American universities grows by the week. The Centre for Responsive Politics notes that this year two universities—the University of California and Harvard—occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et al. Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as to George Bush. Meanwhile, a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics by Daniel Klein, of Santa Clara University, shows that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. And things are likely to get less balanced, because younger professors are more liberal. For instance, at Berkeley and Stanford, where Democrats overall outnumber Republicans by a mere nine to one, the ratio rises above 30 to one among assistant and associate professors.

Oh, well, keep writing to the contrary. Perhaps tomorrow's students will, to our collective intellectual, idealogical benefit, find words like these to plagiarize.

Boone's Bones - Frankfort, KY

The Story of this Century

It's here. More and more people are paying attention to it. It has only just begun. A generation will be weaned on it.

The great Muslim migration to Europe ripens and comes of age. Sorry, but there are no melting pot analogies in this story. Why, then, don't we try 'good and evil' on for size? Too complex -- far too many loose (politically correct) ends for coherent minds? Well, then, let's accept an 'us versus them' approach. That will work, no matter which level the reader ascends -- or descends -- to.

The other day, Politickal Animal spoke of how well suited Tolkien's trilogy was to the day. Prescient man, Politickal! No less an internet presence than Victor Davis Hanson has chosen to elaborate upon your thoughts (mine, too, but you captured your keystrokes first!).

True, for a variety of reasons, Amsterdam may be a case study of how wrong Rousseau was about natural man, but for a Muslim immigrant the country was about as hospitable a foreign host as one can imagine. Thus, it was far safer for radical Islamic fascists to damn the West openly from a mosque in Rotterdam than for a moderate Christian to quietly worship in a church in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Algeria. And yet we learn not just that the Netherlands has fostered a radical sect of Muslims who will kill and bomb, but, far more importantly, that they will do so after years of residency among, and indeed in utter contempt of, their Western hosts.

VDH is a deep thinker and meticulous observer; I heed his words. Like when he puts the pox of Judas upon the entire of Kerry-supporting Frankreich:

Things are no less humiliating — or dangerous — in France. Thousands of unassimilated Muslims mock French society. Yet their fury shapes its foreign policy to the degree that Jacques Chirac sent a government plane to sweep up a dying Arafat. But then what do we expect from a country that enriched Hamas, let Mrs. Arafat spend her husband's embezzled millions under its nose, gave Khomeini the sanctuary needed to destroy Iran, sold a nuclear reactor to Saddam, is at the heart of the Oil-for-Food scandal, and revs up the Muslim world against the United States?

These islamists...what a deck of cards they are. What IS this picture we are staring at and into? I am confused to the depths. All of these people (obviously) ran away from something...we can only surmise that it was misery incarnate. They ran away to the west...to that great Satan and enemy of Allah. From cultural misery to license and liberty...but these people couldn't let go of the dark side.

It is almost as if the killers in Amsterdam said, "I want your cell phones, unfettered Internet access, and free-spirited girls, but hate the very system that alone can create them all. So please let me stay here to destroy what I want."

. . . .

Europe is also trapped in its own utopian race/class/gender rhetoric. It cannot openly question the wisdom of making the "other" coequal to itself, since one does not by any abstract standard judge, much less censure, customs, religions, or values.

I can't write --unfettered-- with curse words, but I want to insert them here for response, in the very same way these people strike at Western civilization. I am not the most eclectic of individuals, nor the most erudite, but I have been around long enough to draw a very firm conclusion with regards to western civ. It's the best that's ever been...its very weakness is its greatest intellectual strength...but when it gets down to the nut-cutting...rhetoric is a limp weapon indeed. Europe is awash in rhetoric, as is blue America.

We have three distinct traditions here in the West, according to James Kurth: (1) the classical culture of Greece and Rome (i.e., liberty and law); (2) the Christian religion (separation of powers); and (3) the Enlightenment of the modern era (liberal democracy, free market, reason and science). Which of these three (or any combination thereof) have you heard the Mullahs espouse recently?

But gut-check time is coming for Europe, with its own rising unassimilated immigrant populations, rogue mosques entirely bent on destroying the West, declining birth rate and rising entitlements, the Turkish question, and a foreign policy whose appeasement of Arab regimes won it only a brief lull and plenty of humiliation. The radical Muslim world of the madrassas hates the United States because it is liberal and powerful; but it utterly despises Europe because it is even more liberal and far weaker, earning the continent not fear, but contempt.

The real question is whether there is any Demosthenes left in Europe, who will soberly but firmly demand assimilation and integration of all immigrants, an end to mosque radicalism, even-handedness in the Middle East, no more subsidies to terrorists like Hamas, a toughness rather than opportunist profiteering with the likes of Assad and the Iranian theocracy — and make it clear that states that aid and abet terrorists in Europe due so to their great peril.

So will the old Ents awaken, or will they slumber on, muttering nonsense to themselves, lost in past grandeur and utterly clueless about the dangers on their borders?

Stay tuned — it is one of the most fascinating sagas of our time.

As my new-found friend, Politickal Animal, said the other day: "Even so, in the larger world the shadow is lengthening, just as it did in Middle Earth (one of my fav metaphors for the challenge of evil before us)."

Radical Islam must be tempered. If we are to see an end to this madness within our lifetimes, the force from without this sickness (i.e., the West's) will not be enough. Islamists adhering to the highest tenants of their belief must force positive change from within.

Lower Broadway - Nashville

An Anecdote concerning Security within the Homeland

Harrassment

The Transportation Safety Authority has an awful responsibility. The TSA must stop hijackings and terrorist bombers. They have their collective self between a rock and a hard place. Everyone knows what the rock is. The hard place is the 99.999% of innocent travellers who fill the planes.

Readers will know I recently left the ‘Lower 48' for holiday in the Yucatan Peninsula. Being a generally unobservant person, I missed out upon confirmation of what we have all heard the past three years concerning airport security. It was right under my nose, within my senses, and I let the moment pass...until today.

The ACLU is concerned that women, more than men, are targeted for pat-downs. If so, that raises questions whether the Transportation Security Administration is discriminating on the basis of gender, said Barry Steinhardt, of the ACLU's New York office. ''What they're doing is subjecting women to very aggressive, intrusive searches,'' he said. ''We're worried that this is, in fact, sexual harassment.''

David Beecroft, federal aviation director for the Nashville International Airport, said the searches were ''absolutely necessary'' and said few people had complained. ''We have 2 million passengers who pass through our airports a day, and only 266 have filed complaints since August.''

My mother (who probably filed the 267th such report) and father were with me and my wife on this trip. Mother is a world traveler, having moved extensively across the globe for the better part of 20 years. She is no stranger to airport security, including the beefed-up, federally-implemented measures within the last three years. She complained of her status before we ever left. "What do you mean?" I asked. "So, they have to pass a wand across your knees," I said, not waiting for her reply. My mother has prosthetic, titanium knees. "They single me out," she said. "They single me out for the treatment."

I first saw security work her over in Nashville International Airport, on our way out of the country. They did single her out. Made her move to a ‘special area’, replete with those painted footprints where you stand. Most people with athletic shoes were excepted from the requirement to remove one’s footgear. Not my 68-year old mother. She had to take them off. Oh well, no big deal.

Upon our return the states in the port of Atlanta, Ga., my mother got it good. Even after she removed her tennis shoes and her loose-knit sweater, after she removed every other loose item on her person, she was subjected to the routine. Only this time, the responsible Federal security ‘expert’ must have taken this grandmother for a major terrorist threat, because that female agent in Atlanta Hartsfield subjected my mother to a full-body pat-down. Legs, mid-section, crotch, buttocks, and breast areas! Hats off to the TSA. So meticulous are they to search out crotch, butt, and boob bombs. Can’t be too careful (only that, since she was first wanded). To be fair, the two Russian airliners recently brought down were at the hands (or boobs) of Chechen women who had attached explovise beneath their undergarments.

Today, weeks later, my mother is traumatized. A veteran of countless long-distance, inter-continental flights, she has told my father they will drive to Albuquerque, NM, this spring rather than fly. She does not want to be felt up again. She is no fragile flower, so I suspect a lot of it may have been to do with the way in which the search was conducted...

If we were all subjected to this treatment, there can be no room to complain. Thoroughness is self-contained, as they say. On the trip, it did not happen once to me, my wife, or my father...the only other people (very few) I witnessed who received this level of security were...profile-types...I saw several other individuals escape scrutiny that I would have checked had I been a TSA authority. Then again, I am no expert. For all I know, grandmothers are, in fact, included on some generic, meticulously researched list of potential terrorists.

In any event, my mother now has ‘issues’ which may require professional help. She is an innocent traveler, far from the profile, who has been repeatedly traumatized by the cloak of authority (she has made an official complaint -- about a dozen are now filed each week).

My mother isn’t alone. As stated, there are loads of anecdotes floating around out there. I recently heard a Sean Hannity diatribe on the subject, which included one airline stewardess grown tired of the routine.

Being felt up by total strangers on a regular basis probably gets worse, not easier. Folks, this has to be thought through. It is human instinct to take the path of least resistance in any given task, and that includes the work of security personnel, but grandmother-searches are a security cop-out.

Two bells and a banner in the wind

A Wild, Wild Ride

So went the election cycle. We were all caught up in it, like Toto in the witch’s bicycle basket, the tornadic vortex of the season gone rabidly wild. In its aftermath, the storm has grown silent. The black clouds have pitched away toward the horizon. These days, old epithets are strewn across the landscape, covered in the mud, debris, and thatch of the gyrating spin machines, which have all whirred to a halt for the time being.

I believe we witnessed history. Saw it being made. We watched the minute hands move and knew it to be so. A conservative President was elected when so many took it as a given that he should not have been. As a consequence, we watched the tides of societal shifts and momentum buck off course. ‘Course’, of course, is what has been seen and said in Europe. There, polite society has steadily pushed toward the Marxian ideal: cradle to grave government oversight and care. From the wide perspective, it’s much the same in the USA. But on the ground, we ‘red’s’ said NO, and stopped the devil at the gate.

Many say what happened was an ugly aberration that could have come only from America. What we saw was, to put it simply, a logical extension of the forces which made (and continue to make) America the singular power for good in this world that it is. Common sense prevailed in the face of Chiracian-creep. In spite of a so-called ‘world consensus’ to the contrary, in spite of know-it-all Canadian, Lincolnshirian, and otherwise ‘continental’ meddling by the likes of George Soros "& Co.", good, old American fly-over values and sentimentality stood in the face of erudite, whining, faithless rhetoric.

In the end, America carried the day, for another day. International leadership comes at a great price in the white-hot forge of history. Leadership, in reality, is a painful position to take. It is not unlike the example of an unsuccessful parent versus a successful one. The parent who attempts to be friend to the child will inevitably fail in the business of parenthood. Feel goodism is paramount (vain). Only the parent who truly acts on the best interests of the child will foster that child’s success in the long run. Feelings of hurt and resentment by the child are inevitably shortsighted and vacuuous. My prayer of thanks is one of tough love for the world at large.

My apologies for the silence of the days, but it cannot be helped.