After Terror With Its Pants On Fire...

http://biggovernment.com/2009/12/28/monday-open-thread-vacay-edition/

...Does anybody else get the impression that this guy wants to 'be PRESIDENT!', but doesn't really want to 'BE president'?

Iran

Irony could be defined, I think, by those caught by surprise by history.

The protesters in Iran -- where almost 70% of the population is under the age of 35 (meaning they don't remember the relationship between the U.S. and the Shah from personal experience) -- are at least in the game toward overthrowing the current, hierarchical, theocratic regime:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-27/could-the-mullahs-fall-this-time/full

 

(Frankly, I'll feel more confident when Michael Ledeen predicts it.)

The irony comes from the fact that Iran's theocracy hates us today because we opted to support -- or, at least, not oppose -- the Shah when Khomeini returned from exile in the late-'70s. Today, any future Iranian government might choose to hate us because we did nothing to promote the Islamists' fall outside of empty rhetoric and belated condemnation.

Coincidences are useless; I'm suspicious...

Call me a conspiracist, if you will, but I find it disturbing that yet another Nigerian (Muslim? Will they tell us?) passenger -- deemed harmless this time -- on the exact, same flight that the Christmas-Day bomber targeted from Amsterdam to Detroit, was arrested upon arrival for being 'unruly':

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/report_flight_crew_requests_emergency_j9ZlOCtnHrNePzruDQfxoI

It sure sounds a lot like testing responses, to me. I'd assume al-Qaida is about to step up suicide missions directly against the U.S., if I were the Obama Administration (and I wanted to remain relevant!).

And, please -- let's not pull more Grandmas from the security line for pat-downs, okay? Again, it ain't coincidence that all these actual and would-be bombers are Muslims from, you know, Muslim countries!

We all chuckle at and tut-tut cliches, too. But cliches become such because they have been so often true! Stop treating 'profiling' like a distasteful cliche -- it works!

Update: Uh-huh!

http://www.620wtmj.com/news/local/80201152.html

What would be the point of videotaping the 'performance' if the guy was going to kill the videotaper, too, anyway? As noted above, seems like an effort to gauge response via a trial run.

This ain't over yet:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2785733.ece

Is Janet Napolitano the new "Brownie"?

Just wondering...

...why, even if the CBO figure of $132 billion over 10 years is accurate (which it most assuredly is NOT -- most of the savings figured in won't actually materialize) from our soon-to-be-new, nationalized health care, it's such a big victory? In a year which has seen c. trillion-dollar programs such as TARP and the pseudo-stimulus, that works out to $13.2 billion a year. In other words, it's piffle!

That's more than a little like dropping a penny in a child's piggy bank while you sneak a 10-dollar bill out the bottom, and expecting to be congratulated for your generosity as a 'giver'!

The REAL Global-Warming Agenda

Today's 'watermelon' environmentalist (you know: green on the outside, but red on the inside!) is virtually always an anti-capitalist, anti-democratic statist (and Al Gore is a Democrat which, more and more, amounts to the same thing). This is not coincidence, but consequence: the Modern Left has adopted environmentalism, global warming and climate change as the vehicles by which to destroy Western democracy, and redistribute wealth to the so-called developing world (we call 'development' in an egg something else: rotting!).

They are beyond parody, and out of the reach of irony, in their belief that the West's wealth will remain and continue once they've achieved that goal. Because, of course, the failed history of Soviet-style collectivism that has died almost everywhere it's been tried -- and continues to fail even where it has survived, a la Cuba -- demonstrates with clarity that ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit suffocates without the motive and goal of personal profit. Now, that profit can come in the form of money, acclaim, or personal satisfaction, but it's beyond proven that those benefits accrue in the West's capitalist societies, and wither where the state claims all those benefits to itself.

On the other hand, how can one blame Bangladesh, Nigeria, et al, from seeking the shortcut of rescue by the forced distribution of someone else's assets after failing to husband any of their own virtually since existence? Pretty hard to figure, though, how turning the West into another Russia is going to result in anything but a disastrous and petty, universal plutocracy. I guess that would be a good thing for the would-be plutocrats, though. Hence, the efforts in the West to subdue populist democracy before the citizenry identifies their statist goasl.

Climate Change (Sigh!)

A couple of thoughts about global-warm(onger)ing, which seem obvious to anyone with a lick of sense -- which seems to leave out the modern, liberal anarchist:

• It's not secret that 'global warming' has been going on for some time, or the Ice Age glaciers, for example, would still be covering half of North America. And, of course, some global cooling must have occurred before that to form those glaciers. All of which would seem to point to the fact that (drum roll, please!) EARTH'S CLIMATE CHANGES. Naturally. I lived through the "New Ice Age" warnings of the mid-'70s, so am amused that many of the same alarmists now are alarmists again, but at 180 degrees.
• Is all of this -- or any of this -- man-made, and therefore man-preventable? That IS, of course, the Kyoto/Copenhagen argument. Obviously, the folks who think they know this for sure sure don't want to compare analyses with anyone who expresses any doubt. Again, this is emblematic of today's modern, liberal mind-set: "If we can't persuade you with our arguments, you must be a small-minded idiot incapable of reason, because if you won't simply accept our conclusions, you're being unreasonable. Don't be so stupid I have to explain things to you!" Because, you know, they can't. It's all Post-Modern emotionalism internalized, with nothing to do with rational thought. 
• Finally, even if we were to conclude that humanity has caused the ice caps to melt, how does one predict the consequences -- particularly the unintended ones -- of returning our 'carbon footprint' to early-20th Century levels (and, understand, that IS what the stated goals amount to!)? Have we learned nothing about unintended consequences from all the centuries of recovering from them? I think there's an awfully good chance that even should we get the diagnosis right, we'd foul up the treatment. We're not nearly as smart as we are conceited. That's another symptom of the modern Left!

Zero Population Growth, blah, blah!..

Well, since Canada's National Post won't let me post this in their comments about single-child, one-world regulation because it's too long, I'll post it here instead:

This isn't even an old argument, but an ancient one. It wasn't all that many decades ago that 6 billion people were considered 'unsustainable' for Earth by the so-called experts. But then, you know, along come the Norman Borlaugs and his like. It's ironic to think that you also cut in half the likelihood of such genius, too, when you cut the population in half.
It takes only a single flight over the western half of the North American continent to realize the world is nowhere near over-populated. And I'm not talking about supplanting food-producing regions with people, either. I'm thinking of all the absolutely empty, unused space. Is the National Post suggesting that we can dream of colonizing the moon or Mars, but not the Rocky Mountains?
At least until we take the profit motive away from entrepreneurs -- which DOES seem to be the latest trend, however stupid it is! -- I'm pretty confident that we'll figure out how to feed/water/house/employ the growing millions, even at current population growth, for a fair spell yet.