Wil Wirtanen forwards this for our consideration:

Tim,

I have always said that the path to the future mantra of the Dimocrats was nothing but warmed over failed New Deal economics.

As the saying goes is that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting new results.

I would not let the Dims run a lemonade stand let alone national defense.

 
The New Deal Jobs Myth
By AMITY SHLAES
December 31, 2007

Is a public-sector job really as good as a job created in the private sector? I've been wondering about this a lot lately, in part because I just finished a book about the period of the first great American experiment in public job creation, the New Deal. Critics have written that I failed to appreciate the value of New Deal emergency jobs. But the quality of government-paid jobs is also relevant because of the Democratic presidential candidates' interest in that 1930s experiment.

To hear the candidates talk, a repeat of 1930s-scale government job creation is dangerously overdue. John Edwards has proposed that government take the lead in creating types of jobs -- "green collar" and "stepping stone" -- to serve the two goals of protecting the environment and giving lower earners new skills. Dennis Kucinich is calling for a new green version of FDR's Works Progress Administration.

A structural disaster -- the collapse of the levies in New Orleans or the bridge in Minnesota last summer -- adds a sense of moral urgency to the debate. Hillary Clinton is warning that "We're trying to build our children's future with our grandparents' infrastructure." Republican Mike Huckabee's talk about domestic infrastructure investment as crucial to our "economic viability" sounds similar.

Academics are backing the politicians up. Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution recently suggested that intelligent planning is the key to success: "smart policies and investments on infrastructure can foster productive growth in our economy, sustainable growth."

Given this Edifice Complex, the actual quality of New Deal spending, job creation and growth are worth a second look. The record is less impressive than the rhetoric implies.

The New Deal government indeed spent a lot. Nowadays Congress considers a 1% increase in the budget tantamount to treason, or nirvana, or both. President Roosevelt had no time for paltry 1% changes. He nearly doubled the federal budget in his first term. The WPA that Mr. Kucinich mentions spent several billion all by itself. The idea, as the New York Times put it, was for Washington to do work that could "not be undertaken by private industry." A second multibillion-dollar project, the Public Works Administration (PWA), was headed by Harold Ickes, the father of the Clinton adviser. PWA schools, swimming pools or town halls went up in nearly every county of the U.S.

The New Deal also created a lot of jobs -- millions. And the New Deal did cause significant business activity. Industrial production -- factory activity, basically -- came back to 1929 levels around the time of Roosevelt's re-election. All of these outcomes are taken as evidence of public spending's success.

But what really stands out when you step back from the picture is not how much the public works achieved. It is how little. Notwithstanding the largest peacetime appropriation in the history of the world, the New Deal recovery remained incomplete. From 1934 on -- the period when the spending ramped up -- monetary troubles were subsiding, and could no longer be blamed alone for the Depression. The story of the mid-1930s is the story of a heroic economy struggling to recuperate but failing to do so because lawmakers' preoccupation with public works rather got in the way of allowing productive businesses to expand and pull the rest forward.

What was wrong with those public works jobs? Many created enduring edifices -- New York's Triborough Bridge, for example, the Mountain Theater of Mount Tamalpais State Park outside San Francisco, the Texas Post Office murals, which were funded by Henry Morgenthau's Treasury. But the public jobs did their work inefficiently. That was because the jobs were scripted to serve political ends, not economic ones.

One of the saddest accounts of the public-works job culture I came across involved a model government farm in Casa Grande, Ariz. The men were poor -- close to "Grapes of Wrath" poor -- but sophisticated. They knew that the government wanted them to share jobs. But they saw that the only way for the farm to get profits was to increase output and to stop milking by hand. Five dairy crew men approached the manager to propose purchasing milking machines to increase output. They even documented their plea with a shorthand memo:

"Milking machine would save two men's labor at five dollars per day . . . Beginning in September would save three men's wages or $7.50 on account of new heifers coming in."

The men were willing to strike if they didn't get the machines, though they feared they might lose their precious places on the farm if they did strike. Their fears proved justified. "You're fired," the workers later recalled the manager replying when he saw their careful plan. The government man was horrified at the idea of killing the jobs he was supposed to create. "You're jeopardizing a loan of the U.S. government, and it's my job to protect that loan. You're through, everyone of you, get out."

A related problem was that the New Deal's emergency jobs were short term, lasting months, not years, so people could not settle into them. This led to further disruption. In the very best years of Roosevelt's first two terms, unemployment still stood above 9%. Nine percent is better than horrendous, but it hardly is a figure that induces hope.

One could interject that such arguments do not take into account the context -- the paucity of other jobs, the dust storms, the deflations, the homelessness, the incomprehensible real privation of the period. But in the later part of the 1930s, the same model infrastructure projects did their part to prolong that privation. The private sector, desperate, was incredibly productive -- those who did have a job worked hard, just as our grandparents told us. But the government was taking all the air in the room. Utilities are a prime example. In the 1920s electricity was a miracle industry. There was every expectation that growth in utilities might pull the country through hard times in the future.

And the industry might have indeed done that, if the government had not supplanted it. Roosevelt believed in public utilities, not private companies. He created his own highly ambitious infrastructure project -- the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA commandeered the utility business in the South, notwithstanding the vehement protests of the private utilities that served that area.

Washington sucked up much of the available capital by selling bonds and collecting taxes to pay for the TVA or municipal power plants in towns. In order to justify their own claim that public utilities were necessary, New Dealers also undermined private utilities directly, through laws -- not only the TVA law but also the infamous Public Utilities Holding Company Act, which legislated many companies out of existence. Other industries saw their work curtailed or pre-empted by government as well.

What about that oft-cited rising industrial production figure? The boom in industrial production of the 1930s did signal growth, but not necessarily growth of a higher quality than that, say, of a Soviet factory running three shifts. Another datum that we hear about less than industrial production was actually more important: net private investment, the number that captures how many capital goods companies were buying relative to what they already had. At many points during the New Deal, net private investment was not merely low, but negative. Companies were using more capital goods than they were investing in.

All this tells us that while some companies were gunning their engines for the moment -- the industrial production -- they had little hope for productivity gains in the years ahead. Business no longer believed in business. Five years into the New Deal, companies across the country were mounting what Roosevelt himself described as a "capital strike."

People became accustomed to a sort of calculus of frustration. The closer the country got to the prosperity of 1929, the more impossible reaching such prosperity seemed. The 1930s came to be known as the always recovering but never recovered decade. The Dow itself confirmed this pessimistic assessment by stubbornly remaining below 1929 levels through World War II and into the 1950s.

The relevant points for today are simple. The famous "multiplier effect" of public spending may exist. U.S. cities do indeed need new highways, new buildings and new roads, maybe even from government. But these needs should be weighed against damage that comes when officials create projects and jobs for political reasons.

An emergency such as a Great Depression, a Sept. 11, a Katrina, can serve as a catalyst for an infrastructure project and for job creation too. But the dire moral quality of that emergency does not guarantee that the project undertaken in its name will be more efficient than your standard earmark.

In other words, candidates may want to be careful as they climb onto FDR's shoulders. The New Deal edifice may look solid, but it doesn't form a good basis for the American future.

Ms. Shlaes is author of "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperCollins, 2007).

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:58 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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 Tim,

Chelsea Clinton Guards Her Words

By BETH FOUHY | Associated Press Writer

8:02 PM EST, December 30, 2007

"I'm sorry, I don't talk to the press and that applies to you, unfortunately. Even though I think you're cute," Chelsea told the pint-sized journalist.

Such is the paradox of Chelsea as she campaigns across Iowa in the closing days before the state's caucuses Jan. 3.

Tall and attractive, Chelsea cuts an impressive figure on the campaign trail; she plunges enthusiastically into the crowd after her mother's speeches, shaking hands and posing for pictures while asking, "Are you going to caucus for my mom?"

But onstage, Chelsea never speaks; she stands next to her mother and applauds but utters not a single sentence and doesn't even say hello. And reporters covering the campaign have been put on notice that Chelsea is not available to speak to them. An aide follows the former first daughter as she works the crowd, shushing reporters who approach her and try to ask any questions.

Famously protective of their daughter's privacy, Bill and Hillary Clinton have taken pains to shield Chelsea from the harsh glare and rough edges of presidential politics. She stayed largely absent from her mother's campaign until December, when she made her first visit to Iowa.

For her part, Sydney looked a bit crestfallen after Chelsea turned her away. But luckily for Hillary Clinton, Sydney's mother has made up her mind to caucus for the former first lady.

"I like her position on family values and health care. And I think it's time we have a female president," Robyn Rieckoff said.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:51 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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More on Hillary`s lack of fitness to lead, courtesy of Jack Kemp:

 
From Newsday, a Long Island, NY, newspaper:
 
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ny-ushill305519568dec30,0,1049812.story
 
"CLINTON, Iowa - Hillary Rodham Clinton waded into Pakistan's volatile internal political situation yesterday, raising the possibility the country's military might have assassinated Benazir Bhutto because the killing took place in the garrison city of Rawalpindi."
END OF QUOTE
 
Yes and Oliver Stone may want to interview her for ideas for a movie script, but with no proof at hand behind her conjecture, this is a very inflamitory statement at difficult time in Pakistan's history. Is she trying to start a coup? Sol Alinsky would be proud of her, but I don't believe too many of us in America, including Democrats, are proud of this inflamitory statement.
 
Then, to top it off, Mrs. Clinton offered this opinion, reported in the same article:
 
"During a question-and-answer session at an elementary school here, Clinton offered a detailed prescription for the troubled country, suggesting that the U.S divert aid away from its military to social welfare programs."
END OF QUOTE
 
Does Mrs. Clinton propose to fight the Taliban, which would not cut its' military budget, by sending social workers to the front to talk about Taliban members' troubled childhoods?
 
This woman is not fit to run for president. Woe unto us if she were to get that office.
 
Jack

Her new campaign slogan should be ``plays well with others``.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 241 words, total size 2 kb.

My brother is eternally at war with the ST. Louis Past Disgrace, er, Post Dispatch.  It is a poorly written mainstream paper with little news and untalented hacks pumping out a mass of offal, and I stopped reading it literally 20 years ago.  For reasons that completely escape me, Brian continues to aggravate himself with this rag, and he`s always writing angry letters to these losers.  He took umbrage with this column:

 
Moviegoers tell Hollywood: Wake me when the war is over
By Joe Williams
POST-DISPATCH MOVIE CRITIC
12/28/2007

Angelina Jolie can toss out her acceptance speech. Paul Haggis won't be needing a tuxedo. Jimmy Carter will not be the new Al Gore.

The year-end polls that will culminate in the Academy Awards are confirming what was heard at the box office: 2007 will not be remembered for films about the Middle East.

Its been 3 1/2 years since "Fahrenheit 9/11" energized the anti-war movement and became the highest-grossing documentary in history. Now, with two-thirds of the country opposing the war in Iraq, movies about geopolitical turmoil are attracting big stars but few award nominations or paying customers.

The latest casualty may be "Charlie Wilson's War," a dark comedy that stars Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts in the true story of a Texas congressman and a Houston socialite who meddled in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Despite the star power and positive reviews, its opening-weekend gross was a middling $9.6 million.

Granted, that's better than the opening weekends of such recent dramas as "A Mighty Heart" (in which Jolie played the widow of a reporter slain by terrorists), and "In the Valley of Elah" (in which Haggis told the story of a soldier killed by his comrades). And it's more than 100 times the total earned by "Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains," the documentary in which the former president discusses peace in Palestine.

But it was less than a quarter of the weekend haul for "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," an adventure sequel that treats history as something to trespass on, not learn from.

"Charlie Wilson's War" still could make a profit. Like a lot of the war movies, it's rated R and is targeted at an over-30 audience, which tends to build slowly. And with Hanks as a boozy womanizer, the movie is much more entertaining than a recent flop with a similar theme, "Lions for Lambs," starring Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.

Another potential advantage for "Charlie Wilson's War" is that, like "The Kingdom," the most lucrative of the recent Middle East movies, it ends with an American success: Wilson's covert campaign to fund the Afghan insurgency drives the mighty Soviet army out of the country.

Yet in real life, the flood of American money and weapons opened the door for the Taliban and al Qaida in Afghanistan. After terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, Wilson admitted on Fox News, "This was as much my fault as anybody's."

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin included some of this information in his original version of the script. But it was stricken from the final draft. A source at Hanks' production company was quoted as saying, "We just can't deal with this 9/11 thing. Does it have to be so political?"

It seems that implicating the United States in the Mideast mess is not good for business or for peace of mind.

In "Rendition," an October release that earned less than $10 million at the domestic box office, an intelligence operative played by Jake Gyllenhaal starts to crack up when the realizes that he's morally responsible for the torture he sees inflicted on an Egyptian prisoner.

The blood on our collective hands is even more clear in a little-seen documentary called "Taxi to the Dark Side," which confronts us with images of torture that the mainstream press has been unwilling to show. In a paternal sense, the CIA might have been doing us a favor when it destroyed the tapes of prisoners being waterboarded. If we knew what was being done in our names, we might go mad.

Yet uncomfortable truths have a life of their own, and the evolving public response to the war resembles the classic seven stages of grief.

First there was shock (the invasion), then denial ("Mission Accomplished"), bargaining (the protest movement), guilt (the Abu Ghraib scandal) and anger (the '06 elections).

Now the target audience for topical films seems to be at Stage 6: depression. Just ask any theater owner who booked Brian DePalma's "Redacted," an American war crimes docudrama that earned $65,000.

There's one more stage to go. Some psychologists call it acceptance; others call it hope. All agree that it takes time.

Except for the flag-waver "The Green Berets," the first films about Vietnam didn't emerge until years after the end of the war — which wasn't even mentioned in such ostensibly rebellious movies as "The Graduate" and "Easy Rider."

But someday after the bills come due and the documents are released, good-hearted Americans will see a film about Iraq and say, "This was as much my fault as anybody's."

*********************************end article*************************
 
 
 
Brian fired off the following angry letter:

Dear Mr. Williams,

P.S.  When you went through your fantasia on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross you listed "Shock" and equated that with" the invasion" presumably of Iraq.  It might interest you to consider that for many Americans the "Shock" came on the morning of September 11, 2001.  I know most liberals have forgotten about that unpleasantness, but it still resides in the memory banks of normal Americans.

**********************End Piece***********************

Mr. Williams responded:

Thank you for writing. Having seen the movies in question, I would not characterize them as "anti-American screeds."  Have you seen "In the Valley of Elah"? The main character is based on a gentleman who is every bit as patriot as you, a 30-year Army veteran from St. Charles whom I had the privilege of interviewing. It's hardly unpatriotic to express opinions in a national debate. And in this one, most Americans now oppose the war. I would not label you unpatriotic just because you disagree with the majority.

Joe W.

**************************end*************************

To which Brian responded in turn:

Mr. Williams,
I will point out to you that your original column freely mixed Afghanistan & Iraq references.  I wondered when you would fall back on the liberal position that the two things have nothing to do with each other.  I now have my answer!

With Kindest Regards,
Brian E. Birdnow

*************************end***************************

Joe W. Responds:

I equated "the public response to the war" with the seven stages of grief. Clearly the war I was talking about was the war in Iraq (as in "Mission Accomplished," which I mentioned.) As a response my sentence on Iraq, you brought up 9/11--and then accused me of a typical liberal position. I'm sure that changing the subject and then labeling the other party ("typical liberal") wouldn't fly in a classroom discussion, Dr. Birdnow, so I'll assume you have a personal investment in the subject matter that excuses your incivility. In which case, I'll simply wish you and our country all the best.

Joe W.

and finally from Brian:

Mr. Williams,
I reread your article and counted two references to the 9/11 attacks and a reference to the war in Afghanistan.  Your mention of Michael Moore's "Farenheit 911" also shows a tendency to mix the isssues together, your side insists that they aren't related but freely juxtaposes Moore's lampooning of the response to the 9/11 attacks with your own criticism of the Iraq War.  This proves that the two issues are inextricably bound together although, once again, your side will deny this when it suits yor purposes. 
  I do have a personal investment in the subject matter in the sense that a personal acquaintance of mine was killed at the World Trade Center.  In a previous career I also formally participated in Operation Desert Storm and in Operation Southern Watch and so I follow these events with keen interest.  I beg your pardon for my supposed "incivillity", but question whether our correspondence amounts to a "classroom discussion".  I am surprised, however, to see that you have done your homework, and apparently searched out some information on me.  I do not claim any expertise in this discussion based on academic credentials, but thank you for the courtesy nonetheless! 

Happy New Year,
Brian E. Birdnow

***************************end**************************

So, there you have it; a liberal cannot understand that the war is only unpopular because we weren`t trying to win, not because we are having a  fit of moral outrage, and that the public does not like America portrayed as a bunch of jerks by a collection of sanctimonious Hollywood elites. 

Is it any wonder that print journalism is dying on the vine?

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 05:38 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 1945 words, total size 13 kb.

Jack Kemp forwards this interesting story for our consideration:

Tim, although the writers tried to put an environmentalist slant on this story, I don't think energy hungry Japan is gonna give a damn about some undersea herring's (or whale's) neighborhood if they can then go and tell the Middle East to go stuff their oil.
 
Jack
 
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aiUsVKaqDA7g&refer=japan
 
Japan Mines `Flammable Ice,' Flirts With Environmental Disaster

By Shigeru Sato

 Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Fifty-five million years ago the world's climate was catastrophically changed when volcanoes melted natural gas frozen in the seabed. Now Japan plans to drill for the same icy crystals to end its reliance on imported energy.

Billions of tons of methane hydrate, frozen chunks of chemical-laced water buried in sediment some 3,000 feet under the Pacific Ocean floor, may help Japan win energy independence from the Middle East and Indonesia. Japanese engineers have found enough ``flammable ice'' to meet its gas use demands for 14 years. The trick is extracting it without damaging the environment.

Japan is joining the U.S. and Canada in test drilling for methane even as scientists express concerns about any uncontrolled release of the frozen chemical. Some researchers blame the greenhouse gas for triggering a global firestorm that helped wipe out the dinosaurs.

``Methane hydrate was a key cause of the global warming that led to one of the largest extinctions in the earth's history,'' says Ryo Matsumoto, a University of Tokyo scientist who has studied frozen gas since 1987. ``By making the best use of our wisdom, knowledge and technology, we should be able to utilize this wisely as a new energy.''

If successful, the gas drilling project could help Japan reduce a liquefied natural gas import bill that last year was 2.66 trillion yen ($23.3 billion). The country's LNG imports totaled 62.2 million metric tons, equivalent to 3.03 trillion cubic feet, according to the Ministry of Finance's trade report.

``We are closely watching the government's methane hydrate project, expecting some day to start receiving gas via pipelines from the continental shelf,'' says Toshiharu Okui, deputy general manager of gas resources at Tokyo Gas Co., the country's largest distributor of natural gas.

500 Meters Thick

Trapped within sheets of ice up to 500 meters (1,640 feet) thick is an estimated 40 trillion cubic feet of crystalline methane encased in an ocean trench called the Nankai Trough, 30 miles (50 kilometers) off the coast of the main Honshu Island.

``Reserves aren't as much as Saudi Arabia's or Russia's, but they will contribute to us cutting our heavy dependence on imports,'' says Yoshifumi Hashiba, deputy director of the trade ministry's petroleum and natural gas division.

Exploiting the Nankai Trough depends on developing technical know-how through a test project in Canada's frozen north, says Kenichi Yokoi, team leader of the methane hydrate research project at state-controlled Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp., known as Jogmec.

``Test production in Canada's permafrost is the key to provide clues and determine how methane hydrate can be tapped for mass production,'' says Yokoi. ``Conventional drilling technologies won't be applied for methane hydrate exploitation.''

Test Drilling Results

The most efficient method has proved ``depressurizing,'' which requires deep bore holes being drilled into the ice sheets. Pressure within the chamber is reduced by a pump, causing gaseous methane to separate from the water and ascend to the well head.

A first round of drilling was completed in April by Jogmec and the Canadian government and a second set of tests are scheduled for early 2008. The two governments won't disclose results due to a confidentiality agreement, Jogmec's Yokoi says.

Commercial exploitation of methane hydrate is economically viable when oil trades above $54 a barrel, Japan's government estimated two years ago. The trade ministry is targeting 2016 to start production, corresponding with the scheduled completion of the 16-year government-led test project.

While governments are attracted to an abundant clean fuel, drilling risks disturbing the seabed and triggering an uncontrolled release, says Matsumoto of the University of Tokyo.

``A mass release of methane into the sea and the atmosphere is a risk for global warming,'' he says. ``Massive landslides at the ocean floor must be avoided when drilling at the Nankai Trough.''

Undersea Landslides

Undersea landsides triggered by volcanoes that occurred more than fifty million years ago resulted in the release of methane hydrate, contributing to global warming that lasted tens of thousands of years, says Matsumoto.

Japan's government is promising rigorous environmental controls with gas-leakage detectors and monitoring systems in place before the scheduled test drilling in as early as 2009.

``Energy security and environment protection cannot be apart from each other,'' says the trade ministry's Hashiba. ``We need a comprehensive assessment.''

Among other concerns are that the separation of sea water and colder fresh water will cause ocean temperatures in the Nankai Trough to fall, says Hashiba. The area is a habitat for red sea bream, a fish delicacy.

Fishing Bank Threat

``We're worried that drilling work might harm our fishing banks out there and eventually reduce our catches of red sea bream,'' says Hironori Watanabe at the Katsuura City fishery association.

A bigger worry is evidence that the undersea ice may already be melting. In September, Matsumoto joined a research party in the Sea of Japan to follow up on a 2006 discovery by his university colleagues of methane gas bubbles rising from the ocean floor.

``It's ironically recurring,'' Matsumoto says. ``Extinction of living organisms has repeatedly taken place in the earth's history, and dead bodies were accumulated in soil and under the sea bed, and turned to oil and natural gas.''

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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As promised, Jack Kemp has more on technological innovatons developed as a result of Church initiative:

Tim,
 
I received my copy of the companion book to James Burke's Connections 1978 television series on PBS today and found two different cases proven for Church involvement in very significant technology, despite what atheist writers claim is the anti-science prejudice of Western religion. But as to my specific earlier claim, I found no written basis for a churchman (or Pope?) wanting to calculate the Second Coming of Christ. Proving or disproving that claim would take the purchase of DVD set for the entire television series, with a $150 price tag. That's not in my blogging budget.
 
What the "Connections" book stated on page 28 was that experiments by Peter of Maricourt with a "dry pointer," an early compass, lead to nobleman Alphonso the Wise to decree after the year 1270 "that all sailors should carry the needle." Mr. Burke calls Peter of Marincourt a "peripatetic divine." But the online Encyclopedia Britannica calls him by his Latin name, Petrus Peregrinus de Maharncuria, and states that:

 
"Almost nothing is known about Peregrinus' life, except that he wrote his famous treatise while serving as an engineer in the army of Charles I of Anjou that was besieging Lucera (in Italy) in August 1269 in a `crusade` sanctioned by the pope."
END OF QUOTE
 
So what type of atheist scientist goes on an intra-European crusade, sanctioned by the Pope? I ask that rhetorically.
 
As for the Church's need for modern clocks, reading on pages 128-131 of "Connections," it states that:
 
"Interest in knowing the exact hour had begun with the foundation of the Benedictine Order in the fifth century, when, in his Rule, St. Benedict had specified certain activities at certain times of the day and night: at midnight, 3 a.m., dawn, sunrise, tertia (halfway between sunrise and midday), sexta (midday), nona (mid-afternoon), vespers (an hour before sunset) and 9 p.m. These hours, associated with prayer and ritual, he called 'canonical' hours."
END OF QUOTE
 
This lead to the invention in Europe of a water clock, an adaptation from ancient Egyptian irrigation methods (predating Islam). Even a type of alarm water clock was created. But in Europe, at the many cold climate Benedictine Order locations such as in the Pyrenees, they found the need to overcome the water clock's freezing in winter. The demand from the Church urged clock makers to create, in the thirteenth century, what is essentially the 1950s mechanical wind-up clock. I would add that the geared wheels and clockworks can be seen arguably as the basis for later technology, such as the adding machine and even Charles Babbage's design for a mechanical computer in the early 1800s.
 
Getting back to "Connections," the use of clocks spread from churches to commerce and home life, changing the Western World.
 
Many of us who went to high school in an earlier time when the inventions of Dead White Males weren't disparaged can recall that Gutenberg invented a movable type printing press to disseminate the best seller of that time, the Holy Bible. In fact, page 104 of "Connections" states that:
 
"The earliest dated example of the new technology in action is the Mainz Psalter, printed a the order of the Archbishop in 1457...The introduction displays the pride felt by the printers at their achievement. It reads: 'This volume of the Psalms, adorned with a magnificence of capital letters and clearly divided by rubrics, has been fashioned by a mechanical process of printing and producing characters, without use of a pen, and it was laboriously completed, for God's Holiness, by Joachim Fust, citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schoeffer of Gersheim, on Assumption Eve in the year of Our Lord, 1457.'
END OF QUOTE
 
Mr. Burke, in his television series companion book, is clearly stating that the developers of the printing press were believers in God. In fact, Gutenberg's father was also a goldsmith and official in the local Bishop's mint.
 
It is no exaggeration to state that Christopher Hitchens owes the development of the printing and book businesses, where he makes his living, to these religious men.
 
Sir Isaac Newton modestly stated that, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." At least Sir Isaac didn't chose to disparage his predecessors' cultural and spiritual legacy.
 
Jack Kemp

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:49 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 731 words, total size 5 kb.

Remember, you read it here first, folks!

A heads-up from Jack Kemp:

Tim, the American Thinker editor is friends with these people. He even once had a guest editorial in Investor's Business Daily. Congratulations, your concept has been copied at a major press outlet without being plagerized. It has happened to me 2 or 3 times over the last 3 years. No copyrights on concepts or ideas, just the wording.

Jack

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=283737476837642

Underestimating Tehran And Moscow
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, December 28, 2007 4:20 PM PT

Axis Of Evil: If Iran has suspended its nuclear weapons program, what are the Russians shipping advanced air defense systems to protect? The National Intelligence Estimate didn't predict the Cuban missile crisis, either.

 
Earlier this month, in a move oddly hailed by the Bush administration, Russia announced that it had delivered the first of 80 tons of enriched uranium to fuel the soon-to-be-completed nuclear reactor at the Iranian port city of Bushehr. Iran also announced it was building a second, 360-megawatt nuclear plant.

Putting the best light on the Russian sale, President Bush made the point that if the Iranians are buying enriched uranium from Russia, they don't need to enrich it themselves.

But the fact that they are doing both should raise red flags, particularly with respect to the recent National Intelligence estimate that said Tehran had shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Another red flag should be raised by a statement Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najar read on state radio last Wednesday. Though Moscow has since denied it, Najar said Tehran had contracted for the purchase of Russia's state-of-the-art S-300 air defense system.

The S-300 is a much more powerful and versatile weapon than the Tor-M1 missile systems that Moscow supplied earlier this year and which are capable of hitting airborne targets at altitudes up to 20,000 feet. The S-300 is capable of downing aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles at a distance up to 95 miles and at altitudes up to 90,000 feet.

Russia completed delivery of 29 mobile Tor-M1 (SA-15 Gauntlet) short-range surface-to-air missiles in January, part of an arms deal worth $700 million. The Tor-M1 is part of a nationwide air defense system clearly designed to prevent a repeat of Israel's 1981 strike against Iraq's French-built Osirak reactor. That's an awful lot of firepower to protect a peaceful nuclear power program.

The Bushehr deal supposedly has safeguards: Iran would return spent fuel rods to Russia, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has surveillance cameras at various Iranian nuclear facilities. But as noted by Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center who served under Bush 41, the deal brings Tehran frighteningly close to a nuclear warhead.

"At any time while it is loading the fuel," he told the Washington Times, "Tehran could seize it and have enough uranium to fuel its centrifuges at Natanz to make up to 150 crude nuclear weapons."

A year after Bushehr is brought on line, a third of its fuel in the form of near-weapons-grade plutonium is scheduled to be removed from the reactor  enough to make 20 nukes. For a single bomb, Iran would simply have to divert just 5% of the spent fuel.

Along with its continued large purchases of Russian air defense systems, Iran continues with a robust missile program that is probably not meant to put an ayatollah on the moon. While everyone made nice concerning Middle East peace at the recent Annapolis conference, Iran tested a new missile, the Ashoura.

The Ashoura uses solid fuel, meaning it has an easier and quicker launch sequence that is harder to detect. Its 2,000-kilometer range is capable of reaching Israel, U.S. bases in the Middle East and eastern Europe. Oddly enough, that's where we plan to deploy 10 missile defense interceptors and a tracking radar  in Poland and the Czech Republic, respectively  over strenuous Russian objections.

As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger noted in a Washington Post op-ed, the NIE focused narrowly on the building of warheads, perhaps the easiest and shortest part of developing a nuclear capability. Clearly Tehran has continued with the other two parts: production and acquisition of fissile material and development of missile delivery systems.

National Intelligence Estimates have been wrong before. On Sept. 19, 1962, a NIE reassured us that while it would give the Soviets a military advantage, "the establishment of Soviet medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba . . . would be incompatible with Soviet practice to date and with Soviet policy as we presently estimate it."

Let's not underestimate either Moscow's intentions or Iran's.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Jack Kemp wades in on the atheism discussion:

Tim, that was a great essay you wrote on Dec. 18th. I just now read it. A similar discussion is being raised at AT, motivated by Dinesh D'Souza's new book "What's so great about Christianity" - and the spate of athiest books like "God is not great" by Christopher Hitchens. I don't recall if I mentioned this to you before, but was at an interview and dinner for Mr. Hitchens given by Frontpage Magazine.com last spring in New York. In front of a bunch of people, sitting 5 feet from David Horowitz and within earshot of John Fund of the Wall St. Journal (who I later talked to), Mr. Hitchens volunteered to admit that he sent his young daughter to a Quaker School because of the better educational environment and the fact that he didn't want to raise his daughter as a Western (Christian) cultural illiterate.
 
I recently read Mr. D'Souza new book where he wrote that if you meet a moral relativist, you should punch them in the nose several times until they reconsider their position on moral relativism and right vs. wrong. This echoes what I wrote about two years ago at American Thinker, that if you meet a moral relativist who thinks there is no right and wrong, you should ask them for the address of their grandmother so you can beat her up and steal her Social Security check on the first of the month. I also noted that moral relativist professors might have a problem with university computer programmers who would take their advice and thus have no qualms about stealing university funds or the actual professor's pay check. I am not accusing Mr. D'Souza of anything, merely stating that I made a similar argument earlier, as did Dennis Prager when he used to end his 1990s television program with this question: "Anyone who thinks religion has no place in society today, should ask themselves: who would they rather meet on a dark street at night - three tall young men who came from a lecture where they heard that America is unfair and no one has a chance to get ahead or three young men coming from a Bible study class?"
 
I also recently recalled that the 1978 PBS television series by James Burke, "Connections," stated that the first Western technology, a mechanical clock, was invented to help calculate when the Christian Messiah, Jesus, would be returning to earth. This week, I sent for the companion book for "Connections" to refresh my memory of Mr. Burke's arguments about Western technological beginnings and their cultural/religious motivations.
 
Jack

***********************************************

Below is the American Thinker piece Jack wrote:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/01/moral_relativism.html

Moral relativism
January 16th, 2005

In these days of liberals attacking Jesusland, and advocating moral relativism with its no right and wrong philosophy, I always hark back to the words of Barbra Streisand. Yes, for real. Actually, they were the words of Neil Simon, spoken by Barbra, in the 1970 comedy movie The Owl and The Pussycat. Streisand played a prostitute who eventually marries. In a scene with her new boyfriend, she explains how she overcame her guilt feelings about being a prostitute by visiting a psychologist. The psychologist told her that her guilt was just a leftover bourgeois emotion, a tired and outdated concept that she shouldn't believe in. She felt so good about her session that she stopped payment on the check to the good doctor! Apparently her character understood logical implications and conclusions of philosophies better than the shrink did.

We should ask the "with it," anti-establishment college professors, who believe there is no right and wrong, what would happen if the payroll clerks and computer programmer at their university absconded with the instructors' salaries, and all of their payroll checks bounced. Or, if there is no right and wrong, what would happen if the maintenance crew were to steal the college's brass and copper plumbing and buy drugs with the money gotten for selling the pipes? Apparently what the professors really mean is that only the privileged youngsters in the classroom - and the professor - can entertain the idea (illusion is more accurate) that one can advocate we should be in a society with no "old fashioned" moral standards. I wonder if the professors saying this owned any Enron stock.

One writer I know, Dennis Prager, used to end his television show by saying that anyone who thinks religion has no place in the modern world should ask themselves, "who would you rather meet on a dark street at night? A group of young men who came from a meeting saying the world is no good and no one gets a fair chance at things; or young men who just came from a Bible study class?" In fact, a few years after this was said, an unemployed computer programmer tried to start a firebomb in a New York subway (after writing blackmail letters to the City). He was stopped by a young black man who was coming home on the subway from a Bible study class.

You see, if we are all God, as Shirley McLaine and others have said, and no one's (or the Bible's) morality is worth anything, then the only thing stopping me from beating up an old lady on her way to deposit her Social Security check on the first of the month is the strength of my legs or the speed of my car to get away from the scene before any police arrive. This is not the interpretation most readers here would make from such a pro-moral relativism hypothetical argument, but it IS the interpretation a lot of cocky 18 year olds would make, particularly young males, who already act like they're God.

Jack Kemp is a frequent contributor. He is not a former politician.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 03:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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In 1933 a startling idea occurred to a transplanted Hungarian at a traffic light at Southampton Row in London.  This physics professor and former student of Albert Einstein had once read H.G. Wells` 1913 ``The World Set Free`` in which ``atomic disintegration`` was used as a superweapon to destroy the industrial world.  Our young physicist, a Hungarian born gentleman by the name of Leo Szilard, knew about the research of Ernest Rutherford in which the great man had discovered the inner structure of atomic nuclei.  Daydreaming while at the stoplight, the thought occurred to Szilard that it should be possible to hit atoms with fast moving neutrons and thus split them.  At this time there was not a name for such a thing, and it was not even considered theoretically possible.  Szilard imagined a superweapon, Wells` ``atomic disintegration`` which would utilize a chain reaction, neutrons striking atoms, splitting off more neutrons that would strike more atoms, etc.

He went with this to see Rutherford, who summarily tossed him out of his office as a crank.

Szilard began searching for an element that would react as he envisioned.  He would have to search for 5 years.

It was the purest of chance.  In 1938 Dr. Lise Meitner, a  physicist and Jewish woman who had once been at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin but had fled to Sweden to escape the rising anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany, received a letter from an old friend.  Dr. Otto Hahn, a longtime collaborator and former student of Rutherford had bombarded uranium with neutrons, and some of the uranium seemed to have turned into barium.  He scribbled out a letter to Meitner, realizing that he was about to either make a total fool of himself or go down in scientific history. Meitner`s nephew, Viennese born Dr. Otto Frisch, happened to be visiting as she was reading the remarkable letter from her old friend.  Frisch discussed the matter with a friend who happened to be a biologist, and dubbed the new phenomenon ``nuclear fission``  naming it after the process of cell division.. 

Frisch was a staff member of the great Niels Bohr, and he casually related this story to the famous professor.  Bohrs was going to Princeton to spend several months at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he leaked the word of Hahn`s discovery to some of the members of the Institute.  On January 25 he was made a last-minute speaker at the fifth annual Washington Conference, where he gave the details of nuclear fission.  The conference exploded.

Still, the matter was considered only of intellectual interest.  Szilard and his friend, fellow Hungarian Edward Teller (later to be known as the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb) began agitating for the Roosevelt Administration to fund a project to develop this point of intellectual interest into a superweapon.  Nazi Germany had been systematically gobbling up Europe, and the Thousand Year Reich was better positioned to develop such a weapon.  They had the scientific firepower, the uranium, and the will to do it.  Szilard understood that  whoever possessed such a weapon could dominate the world.

But the Roosevelt Administration did not grasp this fact, and they offered lukewarm support, even after Albert Einstein wrote his famous letter (at Szilard`s request) advocating the development of an atomic bomb. (He ended up writing a second letter since the first drew virtually no response.)

It would take pressure from the British government and Hitler`s amazing early success in Russia before the Roosevelt government would get serious about the effort.  Even then, the ``Uranium Committee`` was given a small budget, and unclear goals. They did not even invite Szilard, Teller, or Enrico Fermi to sit on the committee, since they were immigrants and not considered reliable! The idea of using nuclear power for submarines seemed more promising than building a bomb.

The project was not given full support by Roosevelt until a meeting on October 9, 1941; fully two years after Einstein sent his letter.

On August 6, 1945 the city of Hiroshima disappeared in a mushroom cloud and hellfire.  Nearly 140,000 people perished.

This most lethal of weapons was developed entirely from scratch in under 4 years, just 7 years after the uranium atom was first split, 12 years after the vaguest idea that such a thing was even remotely possible occurred to Szilard. Here is a timeline of events. Go here and for more on the Manhattan Project.

Recently our intelligence community put out a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which stated ``with moderate confidence`` that Iran could not be capable of producing enough Highly Enriched Uranium (HEW, at or above 20% U235, as opposed to Low Enriched Uranium LEW below 20%) to produce an atomic bomb before 2009, and they believe it unlikely before 2013, although they admit that Iran has been running an enrichment program and is currently seeking to purchase more centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium. They judge with ``high confidence``that Iran is incapable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before 2015.

They say that Iran had suspended it`s nuclear program in 2003.

Huh?  They have an enrichment program, but that does not constitute a nuclear weapons program?  Somebody please explain to me the difference; enrichment of uranium IS the nuclear weapons program!

Iran does not need to work out any technical details.  They could obtain design blueprints from North Korea, or purchase them from the Russians or Chinese, or could have gotten them from A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, before his little cottage industry was broken in 2003 (interesting year, wasn`t it?). The myriad details that were worked out by the Manhattan Project in less than four years are of no concern to the terror masters in Iran.  For that matter, they could probably download a schematic from the Internet.

The crucial issue is the procurement of nuclear material; a nuclear weapons program requires little more than that.

Granted, that is not an easy thing to do.  One must either obtain material already processed (something that would be difficult, but not necessarily impossible since the collapse of the old Soviet Union has left materials scattered about and there is no reason to believe that the Chinese would not sell a little on the side-or North Korea) or do the processing ones-self.

To make weapons-grade uranium, it is necessary to separate out the highly fissionable U235 from the unrefined ore. (U235 constitutes just .72% of most ore.)  This can be accomplished either through electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS), the method first used at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in which electromagnets separate uranium ions. Another early technique requires that the uranium be processed into uranium hexafloride gas and then passed through a filter which allows more of the U235 to penetrate.  Rinse, lather, then repeat until you reach 95% U235.  Perhaps the most efficient method is to whirl the uranium hexafloride in centrifuges; the heavier isotopes tend to settle to the outside (just like processing sugar).  This technique requires far less energy, but necessitates rather sophisticated centrifuge technology; the Manhattan Project could not make this method work, for example.  A really high-tech method is to use lasers to selectively excite atoms. The Iranians experimented with this, but abandoned it because it would not allow them to produce what they needed in abundance. Here is a website explaining the enrichment process.

Making plutonium requires a nuclear reactor; U238 is bombarded with neutrons inside a ``breeder`` reactor to produce U239, which then decays into Neptunium239. The highly radioactive Neptunium then decays into Plutonium 239 which can be ``harvested`` and used in atomic weapons.  The technicians had best be careful; plutonium is highly poisonous, and will kill anyone who is accidentally exposed to it. Should a terrorist try to build a bomb from purchased plutonium he will likely wipe out his entire cell by mishandling the material. Go here to learn more about plutonium production.

In both cases, it is difficult to hide a clandestine nuke program; the enrichment process generally requires a large amount of space and energy, things, which can often be detected.  Plutonium requires running a nuclear reactor-something we should not miss.

But difficult is not impossible, and North Korea developed their atomic weapons right under our noses. This from a nation under intense scrutiny and with extremely limited resources.  Of course, the Chinese likely assisted them in their quest, but they still managed to catch the intelligence community by complete surprise.  It should be pointed out that they have been partnering with Iran, and had been assisting the Syrians to build a reactor for plutonium production.

The conclusions of the latest NIE not only contradict their own report from `05, but disagree with aspects of this Congressional Research Services report from September of `06. 

Here is a list of Iranian enrichment sites.

Iran has had a nuclear program since before the Revolution, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, coupled with the proliferation of nuclear technology, has made it much easier to advance these programs.  Why do our intelligence people think it will take 6 years or more for Iran to develop a nuclear device, when the United States was able to do from scratch in just 4, using Second World War technology? They have a clandestine network assisting them.  They have all the blueprints and schematics necessary.  They have merely to acquire enough fissile material, and they may well have that supplied to them.  Granted, their centrifuge technology may require more time to complete, but where there`s a will there`s a way.  This report takes the Iranians at their word, something extraordinarily foolish in such a dangerous world. I wouldn`t be surprised if they already have a bomb; they won`t test it until they have more than one. Despite what the culprits responsible for this report (Donald Kerr, Van Vann Diepen, etc.) may believe, closing an official office hardly means shutting down the entire operation.  As long as Iran continues to enrich uranium, they continue to have a nuclear program.

The thought occurs to me that perhaps this is some sort of ruse; we may be preparing some sort of action and want to catch the Iranians by surprise?  It would be a very sound strategy, but President Bush simply does not operate in such a devious realm, and the political fallout would be very damaging if the public were not prepared. 

No, it seems far more likely that the loose cannons in the CIA and at State have taken it upon themselves to undermine the President and our national policy.  They have effectively removed the stick from our diplomatic position, and this will allow Iran to openly flaunt what they are doing, without fear of our response. 

The idea that it will take Iran considerably longer to COMPLETE their program than it took America to develop one from scratch with inferior technology is ludicrous.  A casual glance at history should tell us otherwise.

The clock is ticking, and time may be shorter than we think.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 03:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Arguing with the Darwin/atheist crowd can be quite wearisome, in that they challenge everything and one must maintain a vast library of information to back up any comment made.  Take for example the comment I made during the great Darwin battle where I asked ``why did all the dynosaurs become birds`` and His Holiness P.Z. Myers snottily replied ``they didn`t BECOME birds, they already were!``. Now, of course I understood that, and he knew I did, but he was splitting hairs to undermine my ``canards`` (these guys LOVE that word!)  He also objected to my characterization of DNA as ``composed`` of RNA, despite the fact that it is regularly modified into RNA in cells.  One must dot every I and cross every t when arguing with these people, because they are more interested in victory than in ascertaining the truth.  People of Faith can sometimes be like that...

At any rate, in my recent post ``The Error of Atheism`` I was pleasantly surprised at some thoughtful, courteous commentors-people I would welcome back warmly.  Our discussions were civil, and it was a pleasure to disagree with them.  Unfortunately, the last commentor was one of my old friends, who called me a liar the first pop out of the box.

He objected to my comment that the Supreme Court said Secular Humanism was a religion, and cited a 1994 ruling by the 9th Circuit Court which denied the Sups had made the claim.  Of course, I could show the pertinent passages in their rulings which disagreed with the Left`s favorite Appelate Court (and the most overturned court, at that!) and pointed out that the Supreme Court did not take this case because it did not speak to the Establishment Clause.  The ruling he cited, Pelozi v Capistrano Unified School District, involved a challenge to teaching Darwinism by a Christian schoolteacher on the grounds that Secular Humanism is a religion, and his being forced to teach religious doctrine is a violation of the Establishment Clause.  Now, this was a weak case in that Darwinism may be superstition in my book but it is an established scientific theory which, rightly or wrongly, the school district is requiring be taught.  (I would say rightly, but it should not be taught as absolutely established TRUTH.)  Granted, the Darwinist crowd has flipped matters on their heads; the Scopes trial was to allow the teaching of Darwin in schools, and Scopes lost; the court ruled the school district had the right to choose educational criteria.  If they are to be loyal to their own principle, the Darwinists should allow, nay insist, that Intelligent Design be taught along with their theory. The reverse holds true, and this case overreached by bringing in the Establishment Clause.  Had I been on the Supreme Court I would have declined to hear the case also.  This does not mean that the Court agreed with all of the 9th`s reasoning, or that the 9th was telling the truth about what the Supremes have themselves ruled.

At any rate, this point being dispatched, our interlocutor then called my a Fundamentalist liar for saying that Darwin called Christianity ``a damnable doctrine`` and so I pulled the quote from his autobiography. Now here is where we often come to a sticky point; the autobiography was written after Mr. Darwin developed his theory, and the sharper Darwinists will argue that he was persuaded by the science into atheism. 

Now, I`ve seen quotes here and there which suggest otherwise, and I furthermore know that Darwinism is no barrier to Faith, and in fact the guy who discovered it at the same time-Alfred Russell Wallace-never walked the path that Charles Darwin trod.  (Both men, it should be pointed out, hit upon the idea after reading Thomas Malthus.) Yet Darwin insisted he was a reluctant atheist.

But Darwin was certainly politically cagy; he denied Karl Marx`s request to dedicate Das Kapital to him (Marx modeled his theory in part on Darwinian Natural Selection, who in turn modeled his theory on Malthus` economic views.) It is obvious that Darwin had his eye on legitimatizing his theory, not sullying it with anything that could be used to scandalize or politicize. 

Yet here and there are small evidences that Darwin actually put the cart before the horse, that his atheism came earlier than he claims and that this influenced his science. 

That is why this piece posted at Uncommon Descent (the I.D. site) caught my eye; the writer, a person named Flannery, does a decent job of collecting data based on Darwin`s personal logs-not his published autobiography-and notes the atheistic tendencies of the good Mr. Darwin.  I think this essay goes a bit too far in attributing Darwin`s poor health in later life to psychosomatic illness resulting from his living a lie, but it does go a long way nonetheless in demythifying Darwin. 

It`s interesting to note Darwin`s interest in David Hume; Hume was a very good friend of Thomas Malthus` father, and this is an interesting intersection of influences.

At any rate, this essay offers a nice rebuttal to the endless claim that Darwin turned atheist because of the science.  A worthy read!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:20 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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Welcome American Thinker readers!

I have a blogpost there this morning about Russia`s military and nuclear assistance to Iran.  Included is a link to Jack Kemp`s piece here at Birdblog about the clandestine Iranian movements in Nicaragua and Venezuela, as well as comments about the Russian sale of SS-300 anti-missile systems to the Terror Masters. 

For AT readers, please enjoy yourselves here at my site!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:31 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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A modest proposal from Jack Kemp:

Tim,
 
Earlier, during my attendance of the John Bolton appearance at Barnes & Noble in New York, I suggested that if the UN believes their own report about global warming and the seas rising (presumably from six to eighteen feet), then we should call their bluff and propose the UN move its' headquarters to Pittsburgh.
 
It just occured to me that this argument can be used against liberal supporters of Al Gore's theories with reference to American institutions as well.
 
If some liberal proposes that global warming will soon cause the seas will rise, engulfing all our coastal cities, tell them you agree with their premise - and the next logical step is to move the US Capital from Washington, DC to Kansas City, Missouri - or Branson!. And since New York would also be in danger from rising seas, we should move the US government bond trading center from New York's Wall Street area to Oklahoma City. And, for good measure, we should move the San Francisco Mint to Orem, Utah and the Philadelphia Mint (too near the Delaware River which leads directly to the Atlantic) to a safer location, such as Dayton, Ohio.
 
See what you get for a response from liberals. After they stop turning purple.
 
Jack

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 06:54 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The recent stupidity with the National Intelligence Estimate has tied the President`s hands, making diplomacy more difficult by claiming that Iran does not have a nuclear program.  Before the NIE came out the Admininistration had the stick as well as the carrot, and the example of Iraq loomed large over the Mullahs.  The doves of the State Department, by issuing what can only be described as a ridiculous statement that Iran somehow ``stopped`` their military nuclear program (while continuing to enrich uranium; something which has only one purpose) have made effective diplomacy impossible by assuring the Iranians that we will not act.  This in turn makes war MORE likely, since there aren`t many diplomatic cards in the deck.

Jack Kemp has reported that Iran is in Venezuela and Nicaragua, something that should scare our defense people to death.  (Iran has missile technology that could strike the U.S. from Nicaragua; Managua is just a little over 1,500 from Dallas, Texas and the Shahabob 5-not their most powerful missile-has a range of 2,000 miles. Furthermore, Central and South America would make a fine staging ground for terrorist attacks-somethings at which the Iranians excel.)

Now the Russians are fanning the fires of war; they have decided to sell SS-300 missiles to Iran.

These surface-to-air missiles will allow Iran to defend itself against U.S. airstrikes, thus making a cruise missile attack on clandestine nuclear plants much more difficult, and perhaps forcing us to launch a full-scale invasion.  These are long range anti-ballistic missiles were designed specifically to defend against an American air assault. 

If an airstrike option is made chancy, and with diplomacy shot down by the State Department/CIA black op against the Administration, we are left with either accepting a nuclear-armed Iran or launching a full scale invasion.  We are inexorably marching toward full scale war. We simply cannot allow the Revolutionary Islamic Republic, with it`s official hatred of the ``Great Satan`` and a long, dark history of supporting terrorism worldwide, to develop atomic weapons.

Make no mistake about it; the NIE`s conclusions are ridiculous.  Even if Iran has stopped it`s program, they tried to assist North Korea in building enrichment facilities in Syria, and there are ways to obtain U235 or Plutonium.  The Russians could well sell the material to them on the black market, or China may do so.  North Korea may smuggle it to them as well.  The fact is, it is not impossible, given where they are, for Iran to get nuclear weapons. They do not need to develop the technical details, since blueprints for a bomb could be obtained from N. Korea, and had probably been purchased already from A.Q. Khan.  All that is needed is enough material to make the bomb. 

What I suspect is happening is that Iran already has one or more nuclear devices, and they are quietly putting a ``containment`` system of bases and missile sites into place.  Once everything is ready they will test a bomb (shocking the Atomic Energy Commission and our brilliant thinkers at the CIA and State Departments-just as North Korea`s bomb caught them with their pants around their ankles) thus announcing to the world they have it and then showing the ``Great Satan`` that they can hit us in our homeland.  Will we nuke Latin America?  Will we be prepared to go after the rabble that is aiding and abetting this?  Are we prepared to fight Russia?  These are not idle questions.  The road grows increasingly narrow, and as our options constrict the likelihood of such unpleasantries looms large before us. This could escalate into a world war. 

The current era reminds me of the runup to the American Civil War; politics, bitter rancor, and selfish interests trumped statesmanship, and what could have been solved by compromise and negotiation ended with innumerable coffins.  The American public was too divided, and more interested in hurting the other side of the debate than in solving anything.  The same holds true today, and we have witnessed a ``loyal opposition`` invest in national defeat rather than hand a victory to a President they consider a usurper.  We have a party of crybabies and cutthroat partisans unwilling to ever put the welfare of the Republic first, and holdovers from the hyperpartisan Clinton Administration has taken steps to torpedo President Bush`s efforts.  For that matter, Mr. Bush resembles the great luminaries of the antebellum period, those Presidents who fumbled around in the dark while the situation continued to slide into chaos. Bush should have cleaned house, but wanted to ``be a uniter, not a divider`` and left his enemies to reside in his house. His naivete` has been his undoing, and we are fast approaching a crisis from which America may not be able to recover.  Our ruling class is fiddling while the atomic fires burn.

Will we awaken from our slumber in time, or will America pay the bitter price for her stupidity?  That price will be dear, indeed!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:56 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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It appears that political correctness is preventing the use of DNA to determine the race of a criminal, according to this piece by Jack Kemp:

Wired Magazine has an article this month about a DNA test that determines the race of a suspect and how past tests ran away from testing that factor for fear of being considered racist. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/10/dnaprint
 
 'But non-scientific considerations also factored into how the system was established. When the national DNA Advisory Board selected the gene markers, or DNA sequences which have a known location on a chromosome, for CODIS, they deliberately chose not to include markers associated with ancestral geographic origins to avoid any political maelstrom.'
END OF QUOTE
 
But a test exists to identify a criminal's race that is highly accurate:
 'There is tremendous genetic diversity among other species of animals but not among humans because our common history is so recent," he explains. "We're 99.9 percent identical at the level of our DNA. It's the .1 percent that makes us different and about 1 percent of that .1 percent is different as a function of our differing history." Frudakis mines that .001 percent to find distinctive differences that determine genetic ancestry.

 Using essentially the same science, DNAPrint helped Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Quincy Jones and Chris Tucker trace their lineage back to Africa for the four-part PBS series, African American Lives. It's also how, days after the body of 26-year-old Carrie Lynn Yoder was found at Whiskey Bay, Frudakis was able to conclude to a statistical certainty that the killer was black.'

END OF QUOTE

But now political correctness enters the picture. It seems that government buracracy doesn't want a racial determination DNA test:

 'Nevertheless, DNAPrint is still floundering. He says the National Institutes for Justice denied his grant application because it believed that this is work that should be left to the government. It's not clear that the company will be in business a year from now, or even six months.'

END OF QUOTE

Even a police chief who used the DNAPrint test to determine the race of a murderer and thus catch him prefers political correctness to public safety:

 'But even the people one might think should be his biggest allies aren't supporting that, including Tony Clayton, the special prosecutor who tried one of the Baton Rouge murder cases. Clayton, who is black, admits that he initially dismissed Frudakis as some white guy trying to substantiate his racist views. He no longer believes that and says "had it not been for Frudakis, we would still be looking for the white guy in the white pick-up truck." But then he adds, "We've been taught that we're all the same, that we bleed the same blood. If you subscribe to the (Frudakis) theory, you're saying we are inherently unequal."

He continues: "If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would." '

Apparently it politically correct to look for a black suspect based on eyewitness accounts, but politically incorrect to look for one based on DNA samples. This sounds like something a policy from a government run by Michael Moore and Rob Reiner. We are going backwards, not forwards.

Jack

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:09 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Lo, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the Day of the Lord comes, the great and terrible Day.

To turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers,

Lest I come and strike the land with doom.
(Malachi3:24-25)

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And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.

(And this taxing was first made when Cy-re`-ni-us was governor of Syria.)

And all went to be taxed, everyone to his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilea, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David)

To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

And so it was that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the Angel said unto them Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you: ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the Heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
(Luke2:1-14)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we behelt his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
(John1:1-2 and 14-15)

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: when as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.

Then Joseph her husband, being a just man and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily.

But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.

And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.

Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying,

behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Em-man`-u-el, which being interpreted is, God is with us.

Then Joseph, being raised from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife.

And knew her not until she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name Jesus.
(Matthew1: 18-25)

MERRY CHRISTMAS

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Jack Kemp jumps into the atheism/theism fray:

Tim,
 
If the athiests say religion is stupid, tell them you are just being influenced by Democratic Party traditions. Then explain further.
 
When I attended a New York City public high school back in the 1960s, they had an Economics/history class where I learned about Democratic Presidential Candidate William Jennings Bryan giving a speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention entitled "The Cross of Gold Speech." http://www.tntech.edu/history/crosgold.html . In it, he advocated a silver standard for the dollar which would be easier for farmers repaying debt, rather than the more rigid gold standard. I recall my teacher quoting from the speech, repeating Mr. Bryan's concluding words, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Could you imagine such a speech being given at a current Democratic Party national convention? It sounds like something Pat Buchanan would deliver. And it still is one of the most famous speeches in American History - for those who study history.
 
If that weren't enough, Williams Jennings Bryan, after being a three-time Democratic candidate for President, was a member of the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial prosecuting team that tried to stop a Tennessee teacher from teaching evolution in the schools, fearing that it would lead to an acceptence of eugenics and the killing of poor children. He was more than right if you spell "eugenics" as "a-b-o-r-t-i-o-n." http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/evolut.htm .
This is the same trial shown in the movie "Inheret the Wind." 

So if a liberal athiest tells you religion's influence in society is too large, tell them they only have their own political party to blame for championing religion into the Twentieth Century. FDR also included references to God in some of his major speeches. And then you can ask your liberal associates - rhetorically - who will be delivering the "Cross of Gold" Speech at next year's Democratic Convention. Michael Moore? Sean Penn? Hillary's Sunday School teacher?
 
Jack

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One more piece on atheism, dovetailing with my posts here and here.

There is a terrific analysis of naturalism, scientism, and atheism at Intellectual Conservative entitled The Scientific Leftists of the Center for Inquiry which hits on many of the points I have been making of late. He does a much better job of explaining a point I was trying to make, what he refers to as ``intuition``; knowledge which does not rely on inductive reasoning, experimentation, and observation. It`s rather lengthy, but extraordinarily worthwhile.

Below is a portion of the case being made by author Alan Roebuck:

And this assumption of naturalism, coupled with your beliefs about the superiority of science as a way of knowing, produces another example of irrationality:  Naturalism cannot be proved scientifically, because the scientific method can only examine physical entities, not abstract claims about ultimate reality.  Naturalism could only be proved by using non-scientific arguments that, according to your worldview, are less certain than science.  And therefore making naturalism a part of science would weaken science, not strengthen it.  

Therefore the most satisfactory explanation of the source of morality is God.  More specifically, God's moral principles are a person telling another person what to do. Or, to put it in a way appropriate to this letter, the naturalist's explanation of morality's source is radically inadequate; with no personal God, it can only be 1 or 2 above.

*****************************end excerpt*******************

A couple of notes from Tim:

1.Indeed, the scientific method can not be used with abstract concepts but merely with observable phonomenon, a point I made about emotions and ideas.  These are things taken by faith, and connot be quantified or analyzed.  The concept of universal truths is inescapable to our existence, yet the devotee of naturalism dismisses these as unenlightened, when the reality is that we have a great many things which guide us that have no scientific basis whatsoever. In fact, the whole notion of rational is something that cannot be scientifically validated; take a look at quantum physics, where one particle can be in two places at the same time!  That would be considered irrational by normal standards.  Science has shown this to be the case, so our entire view of rational versus irrational should, logically, be thrown out the window.  The science tells us what is happening, but gives us no guidance as to the why.  We have other ways of understanding the why, yet many attack those methods as ridiculous, all the while their own science can`t explain why they think it is ridiculous-a conundrum. That is why many atheists do not believe in a concrete reality, but that all truth is subjective.  Subjective truth, subjective reality to those who believe that observation and induction are the definitions of truth? The center cannot hold.

2.The concept of justice is completely bogus, under naturalistic terms. As people like Dawkins are fond of pointing out, the Universe is horribly hostile, and evolution should have bred any hope for justice out of all life long ago.  Success is to the sharp of tooth and swift of claw, yet every child has an instinctive understanding of what is fair and unfair, and they demand justice be served very early in life.  Pre-teens are often the most vociferous, and get involved in many causes in the interest of fairness.  Yet there is no reason to believe in fairness, or to expect it.  All of biological history has been against it, yet we carry it with us all the same.  Science simply cannot explain this sense, and I am certain most atheists would be quick to demand justice for themselves and others, yet this shoots their entire worldview down. Ditto mercy.  Ditto agape love.

I have no children, yet I worry about the future of America and the world.  Why?  It`s surely no skin off my nose.  Altruism may be explainable using Darwin to a degree, but it is assuredly a weak proposition and logically should not be there.  I`ve read many attempts to square altruism with evolutionary thinking, and the answers given seem rather lame to me. 

The insistence on observation and induction as the only criterion applicable to rationality is quite absurd, as these points illustrate. We hold truths to be self-evident, as the Founding Fathers in America held that all men endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.  These rights were not discovered by observation and experimentation; on the contrary, men have oppressed those rights through all of history. They were ``self evident`` meaning that they were simply obvious, and the source attributed to them was God.  Anyone who tries to claim that Liberal Democracy stems from an atheistic worldview does not know their history-or understand it. 

At any rate, be sure to read the entire essay-it is exceptional.

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Tom Joseph makes an astute observation about ``Big Oil``:

Hi Tim,
 
Over the years, I have been amazed how few people understand the fact that Jimmy Carter nationalized the oil industry when he seized control of and, point in fact, nationalized the entire energy sector of the U.S. economy.  It's called the Department of Energy!  The legislation was signed by Carter on August 4, 1977.  Take a close look at the policies and regulations establish by and through this department and you will discover why the national energy sector is heading towards collapse. 
 
The U.S. Department of Energy is, and should be used as, an example why big government cannot be trusted with further control over our lives.  When the politicians and bureaucrats start talking about socialized medicine, we should point out, decision by decision, year by year, what happened when we allowed our big government to control all of our energy resources. 
 
Have Merry Christmas,
 
tom

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Tim,

I didn't realize Hillary was such a fan of Fox News.

Jack

From the Wall St. Journal Online story about a "troll," a guy who constantly posts negative stories on her website:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119845369610047739.html?mod=blogs

When he returns to his one-bedroom apartment, Mr. O'Neill flips on the computer and checks Mrs. Clinton's Web site. His comment on her stock portfolio is already gone. His brief disappointment gives way almost immediately to elation. "Wait a second!" he says, jumping to his feet, "I still have the little piece of paper." He retrieves the notes from his backpack near the door. "We'll just rewrite it."

He recrafts the post, and titles it "Hillary Clinton, the Oil, War and Fox News Profiteer." He lists Mrs. Clinton's ownership in BP PLC, Chevron Corp., Boeing Co. and News Corp., despite the fact that the candidate and her husband liquidated their blind trust in April to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest. "So the truth comes out," Mr. O'Neill concludes, "if she is elected, looks like we may spent a couple more years in Iraq, so someone can make more money on there stock dividends and guess what, its not Bush."

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