Contributed by: filbert Monday, May 24 2010 @ 07:49 AM CST
Security systems could be more effective if officials looked at how organisms deal with threats in the natural world, University of Arizona researchers suggest in the May 20 edition of the journal Nature. The authors are working with security and disaster management officials to help put some of their recommendations -- such as decentralizing forces and forming alliances -- into practice.
The past is a treasure easily lost in the callous obsessions of the present. We are the custodians of memory, passing the wisdom and courage of our parents along to our children. We can hold those memories dear and polish them to a radiant glow, as Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and the rest of the team behind The Pacific did… or we can indulge Seth McFarlane treating them like garbage, heaping one more insult onto a generation of great American soldiers, who have been expected to quietly suffer the contempt of lesser men for too damned long.
We have nothing to apologize for. If Administration officials want to apologize to anyone, apologize to the American people for the fact that after a year and a half in office, they still haven’t done anything to secure our borders, and they join our President in making false suggestions about Arizona’s effort.
The American people are tired of being lied to. We’re tired of being defrauded. We’ve had it with fabulously expensive programs that do nothing but enhance the power of those who administer them. We reject the tired excuse that government only fails when it’s not big enough. We know the romance of the State is a lie. The evidence of its failure is piling up around us, at a rapidly accelerating pace.
It’s not just a matter of high taxes and choking regulation. That’s part of it, of course, but Kinsley’s caricature of the Tea Party as a mob of grouchy old men complaining about their tax returns is far from the truth – as anyone who actually attends Tea Party gatherings could tell you. Those gatherings are full of young people protesting their indentured servitude to the appetites of today’s politicians, and the future collapse of a ridiculously unsustainable system.
Americans are a generous people, unwilling to tolerate the poor dying of hunger or disease in the streets. The acolytes of Big Government insult both our intelligence and character, when they insist trillion-dollar deficits are the only alternative to despair. The energy roaring beneath the surface of the Tea Party movement springs from the growing realization that expensive government never works. The entire concept is a fraud. It doesn’t matter who tries it, or how noble their intentions are. The entrenched political elite would be much better off if their fantasies of surly voters driven by personal animosity toward President Obama, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi were true. This movement is powerful precisely because it’snot shallow.
The most interesting question is how the Powers of Old Washington will react to the primary results. Will they double down? The Francisco Chronicle[*6] says the five important lessons from Tuesday’s elections are: Organized labor is still organized. Pete Sessions is on a serious losing streak at the House GOP’s campaign committee. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is in a heap of trouble — at home and at work. Democrats still can successfully woo working-class whites in the industrial heartland. It just might be a good year to be a geek.
The next few years are likely to be an extraordinarily nonlinear time, when outcomes cannot be predicted accurately by reference to historical norms and success cannot be extrapolated too far into the future. We are truly at the edge of shadowy plain and it’s a case of no guts, no glory. In that circumstance those with a faster OODA loop and greater reserves will be a natural advantage.
Once Muslim clerics had made the publication of the cartoons punishable by physical violence it became obligatory to defy it. The matter had ceased to be a matter of religious dispute and became a sovereign issue, which was exactly how some Islamists saw it: Islam in their view, had always been sovereign in principle, charged with dominion over the world. What remained was the practical matter of enforcement. Some members of the Western public understood this, and while they might not have cared a fig for their countries or for nationalism in recent years, the realization that some cleric sitting in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia was claiming dominion over them, at once reminded them of why nations exist. They are there to keep just anyone from ruling over you. From the beginning of history man has stumbled under the yoke of his rulers; about all he asks for now is the privilege to be ruled by those who a t least speak the same language and watch the same sporting events as he does. It is a minimal, almost pathetic request. So when the man who has to pay taxes, pick up his dog’s poop, dump his trash in the right bins, use Green Bags at shopping centers, endure public hectoring by NGOs and stop at painted lines that appear anywhere and everywhere on the road is suddenly told that to top it all, he has to obey the dictates of somebody whose name he cannot even pronounce about a subject on which he is ignorant, then something can snap.
Faced by the linked yet separate crises in the Middle East and in Northeast Asia the Obama administration is acting like it was shot through the central nervous system, acting in uncoordinated jerks. The alliances with Korea and Japan and the special relationships with Israel and Britain lie almost forgotten like neglected toys on the floor of a spoiled child distracted by his latest bauble. Gone are the heady prospects of Grand Bargains with the Muslim world kicked off by dramatic speeches in Cairo. Gone is the idea of a swift drawdown from Iraq; or of a comprehensive solution in the Middle East. Gone is the promise of catching Osama Bin Laden. Gone is the notion that Europe, which once hated America because of George Bush, would turn like a blossoming rose to Obama. In their place are half-finished begun threads without closure: a growing Hezbollah menace in Lebanon; a defiant Iran; a belligerent North Korea; a buffoonish but menacing Chavez; a drug war on the southern border; an Eastern Europe with the shadow of the Russian bear growing ever longer across it.
Famous for staging the violent shutdown of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 – and for helping Cindy “Peace Mom” Sheehan get chewed up and spit out by the anti-war movement - Fithian serves on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, that enlightened coalition of wealthy, white self-hatemongers who want the US to become a lawless, nuke-free, Communist Cuba country club, no Jews allowed.
A Spanish economics professor said attempts by his country to create a green economy would fail. Now a Spanish government report confirms his findings, blunting claims that the professor's report was biased.
The professor, Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of Juan Carlos University in Madrid, produced a 41-page study last year on the European experiment of going full bore on the conservation front. He found that "the Spanish/EU-style 'green jobs' agenda now being promoted in the U.S. in fact destroys jobs."
For every green job created by the Spanish government, Alvarez found that 2.2 jobs were destroyed elsewhere in the economy because resources were directed politically and not rationally, as in a market economy.
"The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices," the professor told the press.
Alvarez's findings, of course, were rejected by the environmental left, which tried to smear him as a stooge of the oil industry.
But inconveniently for the eco-conscious, his results have been backed up by Carlo Stagnaro and Luciano Lavecchia, a couple of researchers from the Italian think tank Istituto Bruno Leoni.
Remember Barack Obama’s infamous conversation with Joe the Plumber, in which he said, “It’s not that I want to punish your success; I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you that they’ve got a chance to success, too. I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody?” This was not merely a watery expression of Marxist principles. It was a damnable lie. Obama has no intention of spreading wealth around for the good of everybody. His objective is to transfer your wealth to the SEIU and other powerful collective organizations, to fund their lavish benefits. He even bought a car company as a gift to the United Auto Workers. The American taxpayer has pumped over $17 billion into GMAC, so it can continue to provide the UAW with wages and benefits far beyond anything those taxpayers enjoy… a wealth transfer hidden behind shell games and media manipulation.
. . .
Desperation ignites hatred into violence. The American middle class holds the power to write a different ending than the fiery death spiral twisting through the streets of Athens. That fate is only inevitable if we listen to the people who tell us we don’t have any other choices. We are a nation blessed with millions of clever minds, willing hands, and radiant hearts. There’s no problem we cannot solve, once we dismantle the failed State telling us it’s illegal to try. We can work together as free men and women, or depend on the State to loot individuals for the benefit of the collective, until they have nothing worth stealing. There are no other choices. There never were.
No one has really duplicated the success of Babylon 5, whose four main seasons told a densely plotted, tightly scripted tale of war and peace, legacy and revenge, on a galactic scale. It had ancient, inhuman beings who spoke in riddles… but there were answers to the riddles, and it was worth taking the ride to learn them. The show’s weakest moments came during its self-conscious Lord of the Rings references, especially the very Gandalf-like fall and resurrection of Babylon 5’s commander, who returned to glory with a spare Gandalf in tow. Leave these indulgences aside, and forget the unnecessary fifth season, and you have a science-fiction epic that Asimov might have endorsed. It made sense, it didn’t play its audience for fools, and it rewarded time invested in puzzling over its plot twists.
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