THE FATUOUS NONSENSE OF CRITICIZING EGYPT’S MILITARY
Barack Hussein Obama interrupted his presidential vacation briefly last week to deplore the bloody crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. To show his displeasure, he cancelled a joint military exercise scheduled for next month -- but said nothing about the $1.3 billion in aid the U.S. gives to Egypt each year. He should have suspended aid, said Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, Carl Levin, D-Mich, John McCain, R-Ariz, Ted Cruz, R-Tex, and Rand Paul, R-Ky, and many others. The editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post agree. So do pundits from left to right. Rarely in politics these days has there been so broad a consensus. But it's as shallow as it is broad, thinks columnist Charles Krauthammer. "Anything John McCain and Rand Paul agree on has to be wrong," he said. Mr. Krauthammer is right. Here's why.
WANT LOWER PRICES? SLASH THE BUDGET OF THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT!
Why does the Obama administration claim it wants you to pay less for your airline ticket, but more for the shrimp you buy? One reason the economy keeps stumbling along is that businessmen, consumers and taxpayers are having a hard time planning because of endlessly inconsistent and often lawless policy directives from the Obama White House. On the same day last week, the administration announced that it was seeking to block the proposed American Airlines-US Airways merger, allegedly to protect consumers against higher prices - and that it might impose higher duties (taxes) on shrimp from foreign competitors to protect U.S. shrimpers, meaning that all who eat shrimp will have to pay more. The Justice Department, under the leadership of ethically and intellectually challenged Eric H. Holder Jr., came up with a study that concluded that airline ticket prices would be higher and service worse if American Airlines and US Airways merged. The conclusion was immediately challenged by affected parties (the companies and the unions) and many transportation economists. I do not know, as a frequent flier, whether I will be better or worse off with the proposed merger. I do know, however, that the folks at the Justice Department also do not know - but trying to block the merger massages their egos and their lust for power.
AYN RAND IN DETROIT
You thought Atlas Shrugged was fiction? Look at this description of Detroit from the London Guardian:
What isn't dumped is stolen. Factories and homes have largely been stripped of anything of value, so thieves now target cars' catalytic converters. Illiteracy runs at around 47%; half the adults in some areas are unemployed. In many neighborhoods, the only sign of activity is a slow trudge to the liquor store.(Of course, as the Guardian is hopelessly Left, it makes hallucinogenic claims that the city will "rise again" to be a "creative alternative to LA or NY.) Now have a look at the uncannily prophetic description of Starnesville, a Mid-Western town in Ayn Rand's dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged. Starnesville had been home to the great Twentieth Century Motor Company, but declined as a result of socialism:
SHALE GAS IS REARDEN METAL
For my summer holidays I have been mostly reading Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand has her faults but, boy, was she prescient. She wrote it back in the 1950s. One of the things she foresaw was the current nonsensical, dishonest, canting campaign against shale gas. In Atlas, it takes the form of Rearden Metal, the miracle technology which is going to transform the US economy if only the progressives will let it. But of course, Rand's fictional progressives don't want Reardon Metal to succeed any more than their modern, real-life equivalents want shale gas to succeed. Why not? For the same rag-bag of made-up, disingenuous scare-mongering reasons which progressives have used to justify their war on progress since time immemorial: it's unfair, it uses up scarce resources, it might be dangerous. As they are attempting to do now in Britain's West Sussex, and have succeeded in doing in New York. Here's a relevant excerpt from Rand.
THE FANATICS’ FIVE LIES ABOUT FRACKING
It was US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who once said: "You are entitled to your opinions, but not to your own facts." In the debate over shale gas - I refuse to call it the fracking debate since fracking has been happening in Britain for 50 years - the opponents do seem to be astonishingly cavalier with the facts. Here are five things they keep saying which are just not true: First, that shale gas production has polluted aquifers in the United States. Second, that it releases more methane than other forms of gas production. Third, that it uses a worryingly large amount of water. Fourth, that it uses hundreds of toxic chemicals. Fifth, that it causes damaging earthquakes. Here are the facts for each:
HALF-FULL REPORT 08/16/13
Zurich, Switzerland. I'm here speaking at a conference and having a great time. I'm sure you've heard of the Oprah-in-Zurich media frenzy with headlines all over the world, almost all of which assumed Oprah was the victim of racist bigotry. As did the Swiss Tourism Office, cravenly apologizing without even bothering to determine the truth or defend the salesgirl. Oprah Gets Apology for Racist Diss in Handbag Shop is how ABC News so objectively put it. So it was up to the salesgirl to defend herself - and she did, saying Oprah lied straight out. As one headline put it: Oprah ‘Cannibalized' Me: Shop Clerk in Zurich Handbag Scandal Says TV Host Is Lying About Alleged Racist Incident. Good for her - and good for her boss, Tres Pommes owner Trudi Goetz, who supported her employee's side of the story and called Oprah's accusation "absurd." Speaking of unspeakably tiresome phony libtard frenzies about racism, we were subjected to a second one this week. This time over a rodeo in Missouri. We need to notice what these two "Libtards Crying Racism" spasms have in common besides hysterically using the only card they have left in their deck now. It's what they both have in common with the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman debacle.
THIS BLOOD IS ON THE HANDS OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
What do we want the future Egypt to look like? A flawed, hybrid democracy, or a Sunni Muslim version of Iran? Based on his bluster yesterday (8/14) about events on the Nile, Secretary of State John Kerry prefers the latter. And Kerry's remarks must have had White House approval. In full outrage mode, America's most famous windsurfer castigated the Egyptian authorities, insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood had a right to "peaceful protests." Apparently, "peaceful" means armed with Kalashnikovs, killing policemen, kidnapping and torturing opponents, turning mosques into prisons, attacking Christians and burning Coptic churches. The Brotherhood protesters rejected all offers of compromise and all demands to disperse. The interim government's response was heavy-handed, but the Muslim Brothers chose violent resistance - using women and children as shields (a tactic typical of Islamist terrorists). Do we really need to have sympathy for the devil?
THE LEVIN SOLUTION
Equality before the law is the fundamental principle that undergirds democratic government. Remove it, and there is just the arbitrary exercise of power. Lincoln understood this. Barack Hussein Obama doesn't. If a law is inconvenient for him, he ignores it. The president's scofflaw behavior culminates a century long assault on the Constitution. It's ironic those making it style themselves "Progressives," for theirs is a return to the ways of Pharoahs and Caesars. The combination of the Supreme Court's arrogated power of judicial review with life tenure for federal judges has made it possible. The federal government can do what the Constitution forbids because, said Justice Charles Evans Hughes, "the Constitution is what the judges say it is." To restore the Constitution our Founders wrote, Mark Levin, chief of staff to Attorney General Ed Meese during the Reagan administration, proposes 11 amendments to it in his new book, "The Liberty Amendments." Let's talk about The Levin Solution.
HOW GREENPEACE MURDERS MILLIONS OF CHILDREN
It was over harlequin ducks that we bonded. Ten years ago, at a meeting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA in Monterey, California, I bumped into the German biologist Ingo Potrykus watching harlequin ducks in the harbor before breakfast. Shared enthusiasm for bird watching broke the ice. I knew of him, of course. He had been on the cover of Time magazine for potentially solving one of the world's great humanitarian challenges. Four years before, with his colleague Peter Beyer, he had added three genes to the 30,000 in rice to help to prevent Vitamin A Deficiency or VAD, one of the most preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in poor countries with rice-dominated diets. Had Ingo or I known that ten years later this rice would still not be available to the poor, that a systematic campaign of denigration against it by the behemoths of the environmental movement, especially Greenpeace, would be consuming lawyers' fees while perhaps 20 million children had died in the meantime through vitamin A deficiency, he and I would have felt sick with horror that morning. Here's the awful story, and why the leaders of Greenpeace should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity like war criminals.
SLEEP FOR YOUR LIFE
Try to live a less stressful life, and you will sleep better. Be willing to lose some sleep once in awhile; it's not a life-threatening problem, and if your mind keeps racing it is probably telling you to slow down. --- Ernest Callenbach, from Living Cheaply with Style Last week I lost a friend and a teammate. We played together in college, and more recently at the Masters level this summer. He had been having severe problems sleeping well for nearly a year, and it was hurting him badly. Finally he came to the point where he couldn't take it anymore, and he took his own life. He was a good man, a monster of a water polo player, and a well-loved husband and father. I don't know what kind of help he had for this. I didn't have any idea what he was going through until after it was too late. Unfortunately he didn't feel that he had any options left. I'm writing this week's column in his honor, and in the hopes that maybe what I say here might save somebody else the kind of torment he went through - and the kind of grief and agony his family will be going through for a long, long time to come. There are some nutritional things that I'm sure somebody could suggest here in the forum (or see the note by Jack below), but that is not my expertise. If you're not sleeping well, here are some things that you can do behaviorally that can help: