Who said he wasn’t funny? Here are a bunch of Obama light-bulb jokes.
[Update a while later]
And now, knock-knock jokes.
Asymmetry
Some follow-up thoughts on Lileks’ bleat today. If people aren’t aware, this is what Kuntar did, as described by the remaining family member, the wife and mother:
As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.
But the next part is the most tragic, and it illustrates the point I made the other day with regard to shouting out to the universe:
By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.
In any event, had an Israeli, soldier or civilian, deliberately shot an Arab parent to death in front of his young child, and then smashed in her skull with a rifle butt, in front of eyewitnesses, he would have been arrested, tried, and probably sentenced to life in prison, by the Israeli government. He would have also been condemned by Israeli society as a vicious monster. In contrast, this bloodthirsty psychopath was welcomed as a hero in Lebanon.
As long as this asymmetry of attitude toward wanton and deliberate murder, and worship of death and those who brutally bring it persists in the Arab world, there will be no peace in the Middle East, regardless of how much we appease them, even if we allow them their only true goal, which is the destruction of the state of Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. As someone once said, Arabia has always had bloody borders.
[Update in the afternoon]
“Bodies’ abuse made ID difficult.”
Rabbi Yisrael Weiss, former Chief Rabbi of the IDF, who was present during the transfer of the fallen soldiers yesterday, said that “the verification process yesterday was very slow, because, if we thought the enemy was cruel to the living and the dead, we were surprised, when we opened the caskets, to discover just how cruel. And I’ll leave it at that.”
What is he complaining about? It’s not like they had women’s panties on their heads, or a Torah was flushed down a toilet.
What Happened To The Consensus?
The American Physical Society admits that a significant number of its membership are heretics:
In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,”There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”
The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton’s paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors.”
Have the deniers arrested, tried and punished. They must confess their sins.
Rewriting History
Rick Moran, on the Obama campaign’s counterfactuals. It’s hard to imagine the press letting a Republican get away with this kind of thing.
The Science Of Batman
How plausible is he? Alan Boyle has done some research.
I agree that the getting-knocked-out-all-the-time thing is a problem. But no more so for Bruce Wayne than almost every teevee detective I watched when I was young. It seems like Mannix or Jim Rockford should have been sitting around drooling with all of the concussions they took almost every episode.
The Land Of Inversion
Lileks is on a roll today:
I heard more interviews with learned politicians informing me that “drilling for oil” will not affect anything, least of all the quantity of oil. We must apparently wait until 2015, when a magic engine that runs on unicorn flatulence is invented. I have to ask: why is anyone investing in unicorn flatulence today, when it won’t make any difference for several years? The answer’s simple: the engine will Appear at the chosen moment, borne from the clouds by starlings, but only if we have repented of our foul ways, and the last of the sinners has left the cul-de-sac to reside in a home located a sustainable distance from his or her place of employment. When the last suburban outlying development is empty, when the homes of whose size we disapprove has been abandoned, when the last citizen has been gathered unto the bosom of the urban center, where his profligate ways are sneered upon and the measure of his yard shall be no greater than the standard lot size decreed in 1902, then shall the magic engine appear. Until then, the wind and the sun will bear us onward.
Honestly, it’s like FDR coming into power promising “bold, persistent experimentation – except for any sort of government involvement in the economy. That’s off the table.”
No, in the Land of Inversion, we’ve decided to do things that run completely counter to human nature – at least to the nature we perceive in our domestic opponents. Don’t give an inch to your domestic foes; they’ll read it as weakness! To everyone else, though, it’s olive branches strewn like ticker-tape at an astronaut parade. In Israel, for example, this horrible prisoner swap – child-killer exchanged for murdered soldiers. The fellow is welcomed home as a hero by Hezbollah and Lebanon’s Prime Minister and President, because in the Land of Inversion, heads of state clear their calendar when child-killers breathe the sweet air of freedom again. It’s all relative, really. One man’s child-killer is another man’s freedom fighter, and if you point out that the “another man” is a Jew-hating idiot fanatic who’d be proud to blow up the Holocaust Museum in DC and take out a busload of Iowa tourists, you’re ignoring the significant impact this exchange had on the Climate of Trust that will lead to peace. I mean, it’s not like the entire cabinet turned out to meet the guy. In the delicate calculations of the region, that counts for something.
There are some tart words about the Archbishop of Canterbury as well.
Defending Milton Friedman
…against leftist idiots. This always seemed like a strange thesis to me:
Perhaps even more bizarrely, a few people in the comments are citing China as an example of how capitalism undermined democracy. Apparently I missed the section in history class where we covered the vibrant democracy that existed in China prior to pro-market reforms. Because in the history I learned, the openness and transparency required to support the market reforms have enabled what little movement towards liberalization China has had.
I think that a lot stronger case can be made that democracy undermines capitalism than the reverse. Once people get the ability to vote to take wealth from one and give to another, capitalism, which consists of voluntary exchange, is severely weakened and diminished.
Not to imply, of course, that either thesis is an argument against either democracy or capitalism.
A Pioneer, Not Forgotten
Here’s the obit at the WaPo for Len Cormier.
As a staffer with the Academy in 1957, Mr. Cormier was in attendance at the International Geophysical Year proceedings when the Soviets surprised the world with the launch of Sputnik.
The event made a tremendous impression on him, his family said. He decided then to pursue better access to space through affordable, reusable space vehicles.
He was an early visionary. Others will have to pick up his torch now.
Fortunately, a lot of other people now recognize the need:
The National Coalition for CATS, working with leading figures across the space community, will collaborate over the next twelve weeks to develop a “National Declaration for Cheap and reliable Access to Space (CATS).” The CEOs of non-profit and for-profit companies will be invited to sign the Declaration, and will deliver this declaration to the next President of the U.S. after the November election.
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend NewSpace, which starts tomorrow in Washington, and where this will be announced, due to financial constraints. It will be the first conference I’ve missed in a while.
Not That It’s The Only Reason
But I agree with Instapundit that it’s a good one:
Obama is humorless, and full of himself. That would make him a great target for satire, except that his followers take the position that any mockery or criticism is racist. The prospect of four years of that sort of thing is the best reason I can think of not to vote for him.
I don’t think that the Obama worshipers have any sense of what a turn-off he is to the rest of us.
Not That It’s The Only Reason
But I agree with Instapundit that it’s a good one:
Obama is humorless, and full of himself. That would make him a great target for satire, except that his followers take the position that any mockery or criticism is racist. The prospect of four years of that sort of thing is the best reason I can think of not to vote for him.
I don’t think that the Obama worshipers have any sense of what a turn-off he is to the rest of us.