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Blogging Update

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Blogging Update

There’s been a lot going on in the world and I haven’t been commenting on it, at least not on the blog. I’ve been lucky to get one or two (short) posts a day up, and those are pretty much linky, not thinky.

I’m pretty damned busy at work, which is a nice change from the previous several months. I’m working overtime, too, which is eating into my evening hours but funding some stuff that went on hold when I got laid off in December. I’m also trying to catch up on my reading. I’ve got five or six books that were loaned to me literally months ago I need to finish and return, plus I’ve got a stack of my own to plow through, and a LONG list I need to acquire.

Anyway, this is just notice that blogging at TSM will remain light for a bit, and at the moment there is no Überpost stewing in my head (dammit).

Carry on.

Quote of the Day – Back-OFF Edition

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Quote of the Day – Back-OFF Edition


It’s my health, it’s my choice.

— Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams defending his decision to eschew Canada’s much-vaunted single-payer health care system and travel across the border for heart surgery in Florida instead.

But, as Mark Steyn observed, it’s a choice his government doesn’t give him. He had to leave the country to see the doctor he chose.

And the Democrats here can’t seem to (or don’t care to)grasp the cause of the opposition to “health care reform” here. We know what it will lead to, and WE DON’T WANT IT.

Kudos to Obama

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Kudos to Obama

And I mean that seriously.

Fed Loan Guarantees May Boost Nuclear Power Return

$8B loan guarantees for Ga. plants may spur nuclear comeback 30 years after Three Mile Island

More than $8 billion in new federal loan guarantees to build two nuclear reactors in Georgia could be the first step toward a nuclear renaissance in the United States, three decades after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident halted all new reactor orders.

With the nuclear industry poised to begin construction of at least a half dozen plants over the next decade, President Barack Obama announced the first loan guarantees Tuesday, casting them as both economically essential and politically attractive. He called nuclear power a key part of comprehensive energy legislation that assigns a cost to the carbon pollution of fossil fuels, giving utility companies more incentive to turn to cleaner nuclear fuel.

“This is only the beginning,” Obama said in designating the new federal financial backing for a pair of reactors in Burke County, Ga., to be built by Atlanta-based Southern Co. Obama’s budget would triple — to $54.5 billion — loan guarantees available for new nuclear construction.

Of course, he killed the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage program, but . . .

I wanted to wait a couple of days and see what the liberals had to say about Obama’s announcement, and I’ve been surprised. Eminent nuclear physicist Michael Douglas (star of 1979’s The China Syndrome) now supports nuclear power. “(P)ioneering environmentalist Stewart Brand, the founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog” – for years an opponent of nuclear power – is now on board.

Hey, the religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming does have an upside!

But I still want my backyard nuke.

Quote of the Day – PSH Edition

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This one is by email suggestion. Reader “Cormac” sent the link. Jennifer of In Jennifer’s Head brings the snark on the day that concealed-carry in national parks becomes legal. I hope she’ll forgive me, but her post is not excerptable, it’s of a piece and 100% USDA Prime snark, done rare just like I like it:

Today is the day that all law-abiding gun owners will collectively lose their minds and begin shooting the moment they cross the invisible barrier between national parks and everywhere else. As someone who has passed the sheriff’s background check, the OSBI’s (Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation) background check, the FBI’s background check, I intend to avoid any national parks so as to avoid the creeping insanity. I would hate for today to be the day that I break my non-murdering streak.

Thank goodness the law requires me to remove my firearm before entering a school! Just think about the carnage that’s been prevented by limiting the freedoms of all those dastardly permit holders.

Bravo, Jennifer, bravo!

Obama Said

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Obama Said . . .

. . . during his Primary victory speech,

“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow . . .”

And he was RIGHT!

Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels

Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report’s author now says true estimate is still unknown

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.

The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century.

Between 7 and 82cm? Those are the limits of the error bars? And we’re supposed to strangle the economic output of Western nations on data not even good enough to produce results THAT bad?

Character Matters

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Character Matters

John McCain is running for re-election to his Senate seat in 2010. His primary challenger is former Congressman J.D. Hayworth, currently a radio talk-show host in Phoenix.

McCain is spending a lot of money on radio advertising here in Tucson. At least, I hear a lot of his ads, which are read by an almost whispering woman with a sultry voice. A while back he was running an ad about how Hayworth voted to spend money on “snakes in Guam” – an example of pork-barrel spending typical of regular Republicans, while John “Maverick” McCain would never do such a thing! “Character Matters” is his motto in these ads.

Except the legislation that included the funding for researching “snakes in Guam” was HR1588, The National Defense Authorization Act of 2004 (PDF). The wording in this act was as follows:

Subtitle B— Environmental Provisions Reauthorization and modification of title I of the Sikes Act (sec. 311)

The House bill contained a provision (sec. 311) that would amend section 670f of title 16, United States Code, to reauthorize section 108 of the Sikes Act (Public Law 86– 767), by striking, “fiscal years 1998 through 2003,” and in each place it appears inserting “fiscal years 2004 through 2008.” The provision would also express a sense of Congress regarding the Department of Defense (DOD) outsourcing of natural resource manager functions. Finally, the provision would establish a five-year DOD pilot program for management, control, and eradication of invasive species on military installations in Guam.

The Senate amendment contained no similar provision.

The Senate recedes with an amendment that would require the Secretary of Defense, to the extent practicable and after consultation with the Secretary of Interior, to incorporate in an Integrated Natural Resource Management Plan the management, control, and eradication of invasive species that are not native to the ecosystem of a military installation in Guam and may harm readiness, the environment, the economy, or human health and safety.

In other words, the Senate version included the same funding.

McCain voted in favor of the Act.

The “Snakes in Guam” ads aren’t playing anymore.

Now he’s running “French fruit fly” ads. In this one the same sultry-voiced female speaks quietly of how Hayworth voted to fund research into “fruit flys in France.” Same kind of argument, Hayworth is obviously no conservative if he votes in favor of this kind of pork-barrel spending, right?

The problem is McCain’s used this one before, during his presidential campaign. Only he sent Sarah Palin out to do it:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCXqKEs68Xk&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&w=640&h=505]

“Fruit Flies in Paris France” – this came, apparently, from the Citizens Against Government Waste “Pig Book” for fiscal year 2008.

One problem, though. J.D. Hayworth left office January 3, 2007. He wasn’t around to vote on that bill.

Now the sum total of these two pieces of pork was less than $1,000,000.

McCain voted in favor of the $700,000,000,000 BAILOUT bill.

Yes, character matters. And McCain no longer has any. I wouldn’t vote for the guy for dog catcher.

I’m not a big fan of Hayworth, but I hope he wins.

Reasoned Discourse

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Reasoned Discourse

I appear to have offended Markaphasia. Apparently through an act of omission – I haven’t written anything condemning Joseph Stack’s re-enactment of 9/11 on an office building in Austin, Texas earlier this week in his attempt to wreak vengeance upon the Infernal Revenue Service. Since, according to Marxadelphia, Stack was obviously part of the America’s version of “The Base” (aka Al Qaeda), my omission is obviously tacit approval of his act.

I’ve left a comment over at Marxy’s blog, which, BTW, is titled a most martial “Notes from the Front”. Is that the Eastern Front, or the Western Front, I wonder?

Anyway, suspecting that the comments over there might degrade into what we in the Gunblog Community derisively term “Reasoned Discourse,” I’ve decided to print my comment in its entirety here as well:

Once again, Markaphasia, you illustrate just how right I am when I say that you are a perfect an example of the Left in this country. Thanks.

You say that you “have stated previously that it was only a matter of time before people who think like Stack start committing acts of violence.”

I believe I’ve been saying it longer than you have, since 2003 at least. I’ve also said that such acts are the acts of people pushed beyond their thresholds of outrage, and they’re not helpful to my side of the argument.

Now, one thing I’d like to point out is your lack of reading comprehension. You state, in quotation marks (that’s “verbatim” just so you know): “As has been said many times at TSM, ‘the time for reasoned discourse has passed.'”

Really? Please point, by means of a hyperlink, to that phrase in any post I’ve written. You just accused me of wanting to kill you – “As a Holocaust survivor once said, ‘When someone says they want to kill you, believe them.'” – using those words as your evidence.

The closest you will come, I believe, are these words from my recent and oh-so-accurately titled Überpost What We Got Here is . . . Failure to Communicate:

Their vision is an activist vision, while the constrained vision is a largely passive one, intent largely on limiting the power of government to judge or interfere with individuals exercising their individual rights.

It is, indeed, a conflict of visions, and the time for passivity is over.

Which you, apparently, have read as a call to arms for “the base” to rise up and kill . . . you?

And you call us hyperparanoid?

Indeed, the time for reasoned discourse is over. It does not, however, follow logically that the alternate to “reasoned discourse” is violence (except if you’re a Leftist.)

As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, repeatedly, the Left, the Unconstrained Vision, believes that talking and reason is all that’s necessary to prevent violence, but when that fails, all they have left (no pun intended) IS violence. On the Constrained Vision side, we believe in deterrence.

Or as Clint Eastwood once so famously said: “Go ahead. Make my day.” 😉

Quote of the Day – Global Warming Edition

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Quote of the Day – Global Warming Edition

(T)he movement to stop climate change through a Really Big and Comprehensive Grand Global Treaty is dead because there is no political consensus in the US to go forward. It’s dead because the UN process is toppling over from its own excessive ambition and complexity. It’s dead because China and India are having second thoughts about even the smallish steps they put on the table back in Copenhagen.

Doorknob dead.

As the Post story shows, the mainstream media is now coming to terms with the death. Environmentalists are still trying to avoid pulling the plug, but the corpse is already cool to the touch and soon it will begin to smell. As the global greens move from the denial stage of the grief process, brace yourself for some eloquent, petulant and arrogant rage. Tears will be shed and hands will be wrung. The world is stupid, uncaring, unworthy to be saved. Horrible Republicans, evil Chinese, demented know-nothing climate skeptics have ruined the world and condemned our grandchildren to lives of sorrow and pain. Messengers will be shot; skeptics will be blamed for asking questions and the media (and the internet) will be blamed for reporting the answers.

— Walter Russell Mead, How Al Gore Wrecked Planet Earth

Should be fun!