Thoughts on Peter Jackson’s latest movie, from Wretchard.
I haven’t read the Hobbit since I was a teenager. I’ve read so many mixed reviews that I haven’t decided whether or not to see it in the theater yet, though I am tempted just by the thought of the high-speed high-res film.
…and the sugar content of Trix. An eclectic Bleat today.
I have no recollection of the Bugs/Trix interaction. But it’s amazing in retrospect how much sugar I ate in cereal as a kid, and didn’t get fat. Though I think we were more active than a lot of kids today.
We’re betting that this news won’t dent greens’ self-confidence. They will still insist that unless they are put in charge of the entire world economy we face disaster. The sad truth is that the more power they get, the more damage they do.
They don’t care about poor people. They don’t care about people at all, except themselves.
…and yes, we are stupid (at least those of us who voted for Obama):
Since World War II, the world has survived and prospered to a remarkable degree under U.S. leadership. Nazism was defeated, followed by the downfall or reformation of equally murderous communist regimes.
Barack Obama’s deepest intention — emotionally and ideologically — is to change all that.
Forget objective reality. As Dinesh D’Souza demonstrated in his book and film, Obama’s psychological makeup — his heart — is influenced to a significant degree by a belief that America is a dangerous colonial power, that world leadership must be shared.
Yet “leading from behind” is a euphemism. There is no such leading.
Our near-certain next secretary of State, John Kerry, our only slightly less certain next secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, and our next CIA director, John Brennan, hold the same views as Obama, or are close enough to those views to be easily manipulated.
Besides the obvious expected policies, such as pushing Israel to make self-destructive concessions for a two-state solution the Palestinians have shown no evidence of wanting, this triumvirate will support Obama in undercutting numerous formerly bipartisan policies. Including, perhaps most significantly, the gutting of the defense budget.
They also will continue the administration’s bizarre Middle East policy that has resulted in the rise of Islamism everywhere from Mali to Egypt and beyond. And no matter the rhetoric we will most likely hear at confirmation hearings, Iran will get the message that serious American power is in actuality “off the table” when it comes to interdicting the mullahs’ march to nuclear weapons.
Outside of the usual Middle East hotspots, Russia and China are watching.
It’s feeling a lot like the thirties in ways other than the continuing sick economy.
[Update a couple minutes later]
…our concerns in respect of Senator Hagel aren’t about his views on the Jews. And we appreciate the fact that he served as an enlisted man in Vietnam, an experience we tend to credit (although neither is it dispositive). But we’ve been covering his antics for years, and where we’ve come out is that he’s just over his head in terms of policy. So he’s emerged as a shill for Israel’s most implacable foes. It doesn’t take a genius to comprehend what the mullahs in Iran are going to make of this nomination.
The same thing they made of Obama’s reelection. Plus this:
It looks like Mr. Hagel’s anti-Israel record is the very raison d’etre of the nomination. It looks like the nomination is about the President’s determination to block Israel from going to its own defense against a regime that, in Iran, is preparing, by its own account, an attempt to annihilate the Jewish state. Imagine what Mr. Hagel would be like if he actually did have a problem with the Jews.
Yes, imagine.
…since the Republic was founded. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that it accelerated about the time we abandoned the Constitution.
[Update a few minutes later]
Paul Krugman, economic soopergenius.
…and he still drove away.
It is not the government’s decision how we should defend ourselves from criminals. There is no more fundamental human right than the right to self defense.
Stop abandoning and abusing boys:
For boys, the road to successful manhood has crumbled. In many boys’ journey from a fatherless family to an almost all-female staff elementary school such as Sandy Hook, there is no constructive male role model.
Adam Lanza is reported to have gone downhill when divorce separated him from his dad. Children of divorce without enough father contact are prone to have poor social skills; to struggle with the five D’s (depression, drugs, drinking, discipline and delinquency); be suicidal; be less able to concentrate; and to be aggressive but not assertive. Perhaps most important, these boys are less empathetic.
When I mentioned after the shooting that it might have been prevented with more male teachers and school employees, it wasn’t just about whether or not they’d be better able to defend — it was also about the terrible atmosphere and war on boys in the schools, in which the mostly-female education establishment tries to make them act like girls, to the point of drugging them to change their behavior. Particularly if you have a son, it seems that more and more, sending kids to public schools is a form of child abuse.
I’m willing to bet that this issue won’t even be discussed in Biden’s post-Newtown recommendations, though. Doesn’t fit the anti-gun narrative.
This is amusing.
Charles Radley subscribed me to the Space-Based Solar Power Facebook group some time ago (not at my request, but there’s not enough traffic on it that I really care). Apparently, like his climate “scientist” heroes, he will brook no dissent from the creed — he seems to have banned me. Here are the screen shots of the exchange, in case he decides to delete my posts as well.
These are all interesting stories, but articles like this contribute to public confusion about what is science and what is not. Curiosity landing on Mars was a great technological achievement, but it wasn’t science, though it may (in fact will, and already has) produce some. Even less science are the Dragon flights to the ISS — again, this is about engineering, not science. And ending invasive research on chimps is a moral breakthrough, perhaps, but it’s not science. In some sense, in fact, it’s anti-science, if one removes ethics from the definition of science.
It looks as though the White House wants to pick a fight for the sake of picking a fight:
On the Democratic side there is no reason at all other than pressure from the White House to support Hagel. In fact political opponents, especially in 2014 Senate races in swing and red states, will be happy to use any support for Hagel as fodder. Democrats’ other agenda items (e.g., gun control) and their fight to prevent entitlement reform will get sidetracked, at least for some time, to engage in a high-visibility fight none of them want.
On the other hand, Hagel’s nomination is energizing pro-Israel conservatives (which are an overwhelming percentage of conservatives).
…it is clear that there is no voice of restraint or common sense in the White House that could restrain the president from an inexplicably dumb political misstep. As the rest of the grown-ups depart the stage (Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner), the president will be surrounded by fewer people willing to give him honest advice and more enablers with extreme political views and rotten judgment. In other words, Hagel is a symptom of the unchecked arrogance of the president as he enters his second term.
Mickey Kaus can’t figure it out, either:
Can’t Obama find a
“anti-Israel”… Likud-skeptical figure who didn’t flamboyantly and self-righteously get wrong the most important military decision since the original 2003 Iraq invasion (which Hagel, by the way, voted to authorize)? Sure, Hillary and Kerry opposed the surge too. But not everyone did–not even everyone who opposed the war. Gen. Anthony Zinni, for example, isn’t someone likely to please Bill Kristol and AIPAC–but after opposing Bush’s invasion he had the balls to say that a surge was worth trying.Have Hagel – or John Kerry – shown that kind of ability to transcend their own media images and biases? The journalist Elizabeth Drew asked for a phrase to describe the troika of Hagel, Kerry and Biden, a phrase better than “the three amigos.” How about “Three guys who voted for the Iraq War when that was the safe thing to do, flipped when everyone around them flipped and then were wrong about the surge”?
If you thought there was buyers’ remorse last year, wait until the next four.