Don Singleton

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Alaska Drilling

NYT House Republican leaders were forced to jettison a plan for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska on Wednesday night to save a sweeping spending bill

That sounds like Republicans today; throw away a needed part of the country's energy survival for an opportunity to spend more money. Actually it was not quite that bad, because they were trying to save spending cuts, but still why could we not have both.

.... In dropping the drilling plan and a second provision, on coastal exploration, the leadership was trying to win over moderates in the party to enhance the chances of winning initial approval on Thursday of more than $50 billion in spending cuts demanded by House conservatives.

Let us not have drilling OR $50B in spending cuts. Let us instead have drilling AND $150B in spending cuts. And if the moderates can't accept that, then settle for drilling AND $100B in cuts.

But the decision is likely to meet objections from the Senate, where senior lawmakers are insisting on the drilling plan, a priority for President Bush.

France Must Respond

NYT reports France must draw the consequences of two weeks of riots and respond quickly to the problems raised by the rioters

You should have drawn the consequences of the riots when they first started, and you should have called out the army immediately. To cowtow to the demands of the rioters just shows your weakness that much more, and increases the probability that the Jihadists will target France.

, President Jacques Chirac said on Thursday as a police chief warned of possible unrest in the heart of Paris. Violence in urban areas around France dropped for the third straight night following the adoption of emergency powers that allowed local officials to impose night curfews on youths behind a wave of firebomb attacks. The riots began two weeks ago after the accidental deaths of two youths apparently fleeing police, but grew into protests by poor white youths and youngsters of North African and African origin against police treatment, racism and poor job prospects. Speaking after talks with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in Paris, Chirac said the government must do more to ensure all citizens received equal treatment.

That is just not going to happen. As Richard Chesnoff wrote in The Arrogance of the French "it was French, not English or German, that was the language spoken by all of the ruling families across Europe" and the French just can't stand people who do not speak French, and speak it correctly. And the Muslims from former French colonies in North Africa and Black Africa are not interested in learning French or becoming French. They don't want to go home to Africa, because they like living off the dole in Socialized France.

``We will have to draw all the consequences of this crisis, once the time comes and order has been restored, and with a lot of courage and lucidity,'' Chirac, who has said little about the crisis in public, told a joint news conference with Zapatero.

As Jack Kelly wrote in JWR As the French intifada spreads into its second week and across the country, the French government has a dilemma. To whom does it surrender?

A very good question. Surrender is all the French know. But I suspect they will learn that as bad as things might have been when the Nazis took over in WWII, living under Sharia Law will be much less pleasant.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin — whose name may one day be as synonymous with appeasement as Petain's is with collaboration — would like to make a deal.

His problem is finding Muslim "community leaders" who can stop the rioting. In communities where law and order are absent, it is thugs with guns who are in charge, not the voices of moderation, such as they are.... The news media have gone to considerable lengths to avoid mentioning the rioters are mostly Muslim, or to report that there is an anti-Western component to the violence. The rioters typically have been described as "French youths" who are upset by high unemployment and racial discrimination. But these youths are French only in the sense that most were born there. Many don't even speak French. Their alienation from the culture and mores of the country in which they live could hardly be greater.

Unemployment is high in France. At ten percent, it is double what it is in the United States, and is especially high among young people with little education who speak French with difficulty. This would seem to suggest that France's welfare state model is less desirable to follow than many American liberals believe.... "Some are even calling for areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the millet system of the Ottoman Empire," wrote Amir Taheri, who lives in Paris. "Each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs."

But they would still want all of the freebies of the Socialist French economy.

A de facto millet system already is in place in parts of France, Taheri noted: "In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized Islamist hijab while most men grow their beards to the lengths prescribed by the sheiks." Unless the invertebrates in charge can grow spines, France seems poised to become what Spain was before Ferdinand and Isabella, a patchwork of principalities where Moors ruled some communities, Christians others, with constant tension between them.

The difference is that France is very secular. They are not quite as antagonistic toward Christianity as the ACLU is here, but it is close, and I can't imagine them yielding major parts of their country to an Islamic rule.

It seems inconceivable that a civilized Western nation would bargain away to a handful of thugs its democratic principles and sovereignty over much of its territory. But the Islamists may well succeed. For though what the Islamists believe in is vile and reactionary, it is something. The French believe in nothing.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Happy Two-Year Blogiversary

Happy Two-Year Blogiversary to La Shawn Barber

Happy Million

Happy millionth visitor to The Politburo Diktat

Blair defeated over terror laws

BBCreported Tony Blair says his authority is intact despite suffering his first House of Commons defeat as prime minister. He said he hoped MPs "do not rue the day" they rejected his call to allow police to detain terror suspects for up to 90 days without charging them.

That is a very valid concern. The immediate problems in France and elsewhere in Europe are caused by failures of socialism, not jihadism, but as the jihadists see how week France and the others are in suppressing the riots they will quickly become emboldened to attack there as well, and the bombs in Jordan, and the discovered plot in Australia are certainly jihad, and they will exploit any percieved weakness.

MPs voted against by 322 votes to 291, with 49 Labour MPs rebelling. Tory leader Michael Howard said Mr Blair should resign. Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy warned Mr Blair could become a "lame duck" leader.

Gee, things in Britain are not that different from in the US. Power hungry people in the leaders own party are prepared to stab him in the back to get more power for themselves, and the opposition party is even more interested in doing him in. Hope Britain survives these long knives trying to stab Blair and the country at the same time.

Following the defeat MPs backed by 323 to 290 votes a Labour backbench MP's proposal to extend the detention time limit to 28 days, from the current 14 days.

So they recognize that they need more than 14 days, the question is only how long. I wonder if they are tieing Blairs hands on how he can treat the jihadists during the 28 days, since he does not have 90 days to sweat them.

Busy Saturday Ahead

Boy when you are away for a few days (I was in the hospital) things pile up. I finally got the November issue of the I/O Port Newsletter posted, I am getting close to getting caught up with news items for my Bush Supporter website, and Saturday there will be four people from another Computer Refurbishing project in Nebraska here to work with HelpingTulsa. If you want to see what we will be working on, click here. Additional background information is here, here, and here. If you are interested in meeting the people from Sudan, they should be at my house Saturday by 9am, and will be here all day Saturday, and probably Sunday morning.

I hope to be back in the blogosphere later today, although it will probably be Monday before my level is back to normal.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Unrest in France

Mehrnews reports Iran’s Association of Muslim Journalists (AMJ) issued a statement on Sunday condemning the violation of Muslims’ civil rights in France and calling on the French government to cooperate with them in establishing a fact-finding commission in order to investigate the conditions of French Muslims.

That is the last thing the French need. Having the Iranians tell them how they are mistreating Black French Muslims

The AMJ said that the mistreatment of Black French Muslims over the past two weeks has deeply influenced Iranian public opinion.

“We suppose that the French government has carried out the recent discriminatory and anti-human rights acts under the influence of the Zionist lobby in France

As if there was a Zionist lobby in very anti-semetic France.

to limit the social and personal freedoms of the Muslims residing in the country,

Their social and personal freedoms are limited because they don't want to be French. They want to continue drawing all of the free social services France provides, but they are not interested in learning to speak French, and the French will not have anything to do with you unless you speak French perfectly. They don't even accept a bad accent.

which is quite unacceptable on the part of a country that claims to be democratic

Iran certainly should know about democracy. Not!!!

,” part of the statement read.

Right now, the problem in France does not seem to be Jihadist related (unlike the bombing attempt in Australia), but I would not be surprised of the Jihadists try to take advantage of the French situation.

Monday, November 07, 2005

Thanks for all of the good wishes

I am still at home, but it is taking me longer than expected to document everything that happened to me in the hospital (I am working on a letter which will go to at least ten people in the top administration of the hospital on a variety of points), and then I need to get out the November issue of the TCS I/O Port (which is now a week late)

I have been trying to get at least one blog item posted each day, and will get back to my normal rate in just a few more days.

Thanks to my good friends Amy, Michael, Greta, Danny, and the others in the Blogosphere that have sent their good wishes.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands

Mark Steyn wrote in Sun Times Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February.

Very smart. But they don't want to wait.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.''

''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

And the true French better react quickly and forceably, because they will find the Arabs will not be as nice to live under as the Germans were.

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest.

After all, many French are Anti-Semetic.

They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness. The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D. -- as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground ''like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass,'' as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname ''Martel'' -- or ''the Hammer.''

Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they'd won, they'd have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. ''Perhaps,'' wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, ''the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.'' There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was ''an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.''

Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by ''French youths'' since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. ''There's a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,'' said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes' trade union Action Police CFTC. ''We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.''

Send some troops to Iraq; they can be trained quickly there. Perhaps not as quickly as the Iraqi army, because they are not as likely to give up as the French surrender monkeys

What to do? In Paris, while ''youths'' fired on the gendarmerie, burned down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the ''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as ''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He called for ''a spirit of dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the political class, they seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy's presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.

A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.

If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages.

Saturday, November 05, 2005

I'm Back - I think

Sorry for my disappearance from the blogosphere for a week, but I have been in the hospital.

I have a LOT of things to get caught up with, but I should be back full force tomorrow or at least by Monday. I hope

Monday, October 31, 2005

Monday, October 31

This Day In History

1517 Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Palace church, marking the start of the Protestant Reformation in Germany.
1795 English poet John Keats was born in London.
1864 Nevada became the 36th state.
1926 Magician Harry Houdini died of complications from a ruptured appendix.
1938 The day after his ''War of the Worlds'' broadcast had panicked radio listeners, Orson Welles expressed ''deep regret'' but also bewilderment that anyone had thought the simulated Martian invasion was real.
1956 Rear Admiral G.J. Dufek became the first person to land an airplane at the South Pole.
1968 President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a halt to all U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, saying he hoped for fruitful peace negotiations.
1991 Theatrical producer Joseph Papp died in New York at age 70.
1992 It was announced that five American nuns in Liberia had been shot to death near the capital Monrovia; the killings were blamed on rebels loyal to Charles Taylor.
1993 Movie director Federico Fellini died in Rome at age 73.
1999 EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed off the Massachusetts coast, killing all 217 people aboard.
2001 A 61-year-old New York hospital worker became the fourth person to die from inhalation anthrax.
2001 Microsoft and the Justice Department reached a tentative agreement to settle the historic antitrust case against the software giant.
2002 The Securities and Exchange Commission ordered an investigation into allegations that Chairman Harvey Pitt had concealed information on the corporate ties of William Webster, his choice to head a new accounting oversight board.

Happy Birthday To

1795 John Keats (poet: On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, Endymion: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”, On a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale, On Melancholy, To Autumn; died Feb 23, 1821)
1860 Juliette Low (youth group founder: Girl Scouts; died Jan 17, 1927)
1887 Chiang Kai-shek (1st constitutional President of the Republic of China; Chinese army general; died Apr 5, 1975)
1912 Dale Evans (Frances Butts) (singer, songwriter: Happy Trails to You; actress: The Roy Rogers Show, Roy Rogers movies; wife of ‘King of the Cowboys’ Roy Rogers; died Feb 7, 2001)
1927 Lee Grant (Lyova Rosenthal) (Academy Award-winning actress)
1931 Michael Collins (NASA astronaut: Apollo 11 command module pilot on first moon landing mission [he remained in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on lunar surface]; author: Apollo 11 First Moon Landing [Countdown to Space])
1936 Michael Landon (Eugene Orowitz) (actor: Bonanza, actor, writer, producer, director: Little House on the Prairie, Highway to Heaven; died July 1, 1991)
1943 Brian Piccolo (football: Chicago Bears RB; subject of movie: Brian’s Song; died of cancer at age 26 [June 16, 1970])
1950 John (Franklin) Candy (comedian, actor)
1950 Jane Pauley (TV host: news anchor; married to cartoonist, Gary Trudeau)
1963 Rob Schneider (actor)

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Protect the Constitution from the Supreme Court

Ben Shapiro wrote in Townhall In 1866, when members of the 39th Congress of the United States submitted the Constitution's 14th Amendment to state legislatures for ratification, they would have been stunned to learn that they had just written a provision mandating that homosexual sex be treated on the same moral plane as heterosexual sex. On Friday, Oct. 21, the Kansas Supreme Court, ruling under the Supreme Court precedent of Lawrence v. Texas (2003), decided that the 39th Congress meant just that. A Kansas law penalizing statutory homosexual rape more severely than statutory heterosexual rape was struck down under the 14th Amendment's "equal protection" clause.

This is not the only clause that activist courts, both at the state and federal level, have used to create laws.

The 14th Amendment states, "No State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The amendment was specifically designed to protect freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War. In particular, the amendment was designed to prevent states from refusing to enforce criminal and civil laws when the victim was black. The 14th Amendment did not abolish segregation in any way, shape or form: Many Northern states, after ratifying the amendment, continued to segregate their public schools.

Over time, the Supreme Court broadened the scope of the "equal protection" clause of the 14th Amendment. The original meaning of the clause was discarded in favor of more expansive interpretations, most notably in Brown v. Board of Education. In ruling state-sponsored segregation unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court disconnected the "equal protection" clause from its history and context. In Brown, the outcome (desegregation) was morally unassailable. But by moving above and beyond the Constitution in favor of a higher moral goal, the Supreme Court allotted itself ultimate power: final lawmaking authority. In doing so, the Supreme Court stomped on the most important right for all Americans: their right to vote for duly elected representatives, and the right of those representatives to legislate under the Constitution.... "Equal protection" is no longer a simple bar against racist law enforcement; it is no longer even restricted to race itself. "Equal protection" now means that any law classifying groups differently must meet the Supreme Court's moral standards. Of course, all laws inherently classify groups differently. Murder laws will classify murderers differently than law-abiding citizens. Such laws have always been constitutional. But members of the Supreme Court must now personally agree that legal classifications meet their own moral standards.

If they want to create laws, they should resign from the bench, and run for the legislature, because that is the body the Constitution says should make laws.

Nothing gives the Supreme Court power to overrule popular legislation wherever it pleases. The Constitution does not grant unlimited power to the Supreme Court. We live in a republic, not an oligarchy. No matter whether the Court considers the law in Kansas abhorrent or praiseworthy, it is none of its business under the Constitution. We must trust the people more than we trust tyrants. Anything less is tyranny.

E-Mail Time Capsule

Forbes.com reported From Oct. 24, 2005 to Nov. 30, 2005, Forbes.com will collect thousands of letters that our readers have written to themselves. And we'll deliver them up to 20 years later.

Specifically you can ask for the message in 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years.

Preserving a physical time capsule is simple: just shove it in the dirt and forget about it. But the process gets a lot more complicated when you're trying to store something digitally. Simply scheduling an e-mail for future delivery is pretty easy--just a matter of writing it and setting a send date in the future. Some e-mail clients will do it for you, and small Web sites like futureme.org will take over the task as well. But once your message is written and waiting to be sent, all kinds of things can happen to prevent delivery, particularly if you're going to be waiting for decades. Obviously we can’t 100% guarantee that our program will work, but we vastly increased the odds by using the same strategy that helps keep the Internet up and running--lots of redundancy.

Even though Forbes Magazine has been around for 85 years, and Forbes.com for a decade, we can't just assume that the company will be around in another 20 years--or that a database and application will be safe sitting on our servers for that long. But we can be fairly certain that if several different entities are charged with storing and potentially sending our e-mails, at least one of them will come through. So we decided to recruit two very different kinds of partners to help with this effort.

The first, Codefix Consulting, is a small technology consultancy based in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. Its president, Garrison Hoffman, wrote the e-mail time capsule application and designed the database that will store the messages, so we know he has the expertise to keep it running. He can also adapt the software to work on any new networks and computers that might come online in the future. By asking him to contribute, we're vesting our hopes in the entrepreneurial model of getting things done--by making the time capsule one individual's personal project, they'll be less likely to forget about it or abandon it.

For our second partner, we decided to go in the opposite direction, and choose a multi-billion dollar international corporation. The hope here is that a huge business can provide the support and expertise needed to keep our project going, and that it will survive in institutional memory--even if the employee in charge of it today drops the ball, someone else will pick it up.

That is a big gamble

We chose Internet giant Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) to take over the responsibility. Yahoo! has the savvy to shepherd our time capsule through whatever technological changes occur over the next 20 years. And their business is big enough and strong enough that we feel they're probably going to be around for a long time to come.

I suspect Yahoo, or some company that purchases Yahoo, will be around, but whether there will be email in 20 years is a questions.

On Nov. 30, 2005 we seal the time capsule, and copies of the application and data will be saved here at Forbes.com, at Yahoo! and at Codefix Consulting.

But the job's not over then. We don't want you to get three copies of your e-mail if all three applications stay up and running. So we've designed the software to keep the partners in touch with each other over the Internet. Once a year, a few days before that year's messages are set to go out, the application running on Forbes' servers will send a message to Yahoo! and Codefix, letting them know it's up and running, and that it's ready to send the e-mails. Once they get that message, Yahoo! and Codefix will stand down, and won't send duplicates.

But if something happens to the Forbes' server and that message doesn't get sent, the other two partners know something is wrong. Codefix Consulting's will then take over the year's mailings--and will send a message to Yahoo! to let it know the job is underway. In turn, if both Forbes and Codefix are down, Yahoo! won't get any messages at all, and that server will know it has to take over the mailings. All this happens automatically, so human intervention isn't needed.

There's still one weak link in the equation: What if you're using a different e-mail address in five, ten, or 20 years? Well, if that happens, you're not getting your message. But you can help improve the chances of delivery success by e-mailing yourself at a personal account, one operated by a major Internet company, or a job you expect to hold for a while. Don't send the message to your work address if you're planning to leave in a few months.

Will the entrepreneur, the media company, and the Internet giant be able to pull this project off? Send yourself an e-mail, and you'll find out the answer…in 20 years.

School orders students to remove blogs

AP reported A Roman Catholic high school has ordered its students to remove their online diaries from the Internet, citing a threat from cyberpredators.

I believe the real threat is that students may criticized the school administration.

Students at Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta appear to be heeding a directive from the principal, the Rev. Kieran McHugh. McHugh told them in an assembly earlier this month to remove any personal journals they might have or risk suspension. Web sites popular with teens include myspace.com and xanga.com.

Officials with the Diocese of Paterson say the directive is a matter of safety, not censorship. No one has been disciplined yet, said Marianna Thompson, a diocesan spokeswoman. She said the ban has been on the books for five years but is only now being strictly enforced.

I don't think there were blogs five years ago. Websites, yes, but not blogs. Are they also outlawing websites? Can the students comment on a blog run by someone else?

Thompson said students aren't being silenced but rather told that they cannot post online writings about school or their personal lives.

Aha. They admit it. They don't want the students posting about the school and possibly criticizing their teachers or the school administration.

That could dilute the students' free speech claims somewhat, acknowledged Ed Barocas, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

I can't believe it but I think I agree with the ACLU on this point.

"The rights of students at private schools are far different than those of public schools because administrators at public schools are agents of government," he said. "That's not the case here."

Dwight blogged Sounds like what the students really need is protection from clueless school administrators.

Owlish Mutterings blogged Maybe they should protect the students from priests, instead. Ok, cheap shot. But eventually we need to understand the concept that we are much more likely to be killed or raped by someone we know than by a random stranger. The whole trust no adult message aimed at kids and parents has got to be doing untold harm, while not making the kid much safer.

Energy

Ross Mackenzie wrote in Townhall Where are we on energy? In a hole of our own digging. Think about it. For most of his five years in office, President Bush has been begging Congress to move on energy - and he long was stymied by the congressional left. Out of one side of its mouth the left acknowledges our need for energy independence. Out of the other side it gives an endless litany of "reasons" we cannot do precisely the things we must to move us along the independence road.

The Left has no idea where to go, they just know it is whereever the Republicans don't want to go.

Finally, in August, the president signed an energy bill full of congressional compromise. For instance, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 provides neither for oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge nor for setting higher fuel-efficiency standards in cars and trucks - two provisions the administration vigorously has sought. Yet the energy act does sanction (a) expanded federal risk insurance for new nuclear plants, (b) funds to encourage the development of hydrogen-fuel-cell technology, (c) tax incentives for clean-coal technology, (d) $15 billion in federal funds for new, alternative and renewable resources, and (e) a new inventory of oil and gas resources on the Outer Continental Shelf. Nice - sort of.

I really think it was foolish to give up on ANWAR. I dont see a need for governmental intervention in fuel-efficiency; the free market should take care of that.

Then came Katrina and Rita to remind us that the energy bill crucially did not address the nation's limited refining and pipeline capacity. The hurricanes shut down dozens of refineries, disrupted one-fifth of the country's gasoline supply (resulting in correspondingly higher prices at the pump), and helped double natural gas prices from year-ago levels - a datum that come winter could devastate the bank accounts of the 70 million U.S. households heated with gas (or about 57 percent of all U.S. households).

Federal policy has assisted in multiple ways the developing crises in refined petroleum and natural gas. Regarding natural gas, easy-to-reach gas is tapping out, while federal policy long has discouraged - and still does - incentives for accessing the hard-to-reach. Regarding refining capacity, federal policy has hugely contributed - through environmental demands and requirements for boutique fuels - to a plunge from 324 refineries in 1981 (daily processing 18.6 million barrels of crude), to 149 in 2004 (daily processing 16.8 million barrels), and all while domestic demand for refined petroleum goes up.

I believe we should do additional work on natural gas, but it is absolutely vital to build a number of new refineries, and to build them somewhere other than the gulf coast, so that all of our eggs are not in the same basket.

What about Big Oil's rip-off prices and obscene profits, such fashionable topics for bashing over on the left? In the 10 years beginning in 1994, the refining industry spent $47 billion not on new refineries, but on revamping existing ones to comply with federal environmental requirements.

To hear the left tell it, in the words of, e.g., Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, "Major oil companies haven't even tried to build one single new refinery in this country in 30 years . . . .(They) do not really want to expand refinery capacity because it would cut into their record-setting profits."

Then force them to build some. Or let the Federal Government build some.

The nation's newest refinery - in Garyville, La. - opened in 1976. Licensing of a new refinery today would require (please sit down for this) 800 permits, most of them federal.

Remove 90% of the required permits.

But there's hope in this bleak picture, hope deriving from ever-improving technology. Investor's Business Daily writes of a Rand Corp. report about extraction of oil from shale. Per-barrel oil prices currently are in the low $60s. At prices between $70 and $95, available technology renders shale-oil extraction profitable; developing technology would make it profitable at about $25 per barrel of crude (in today's dollars).

Then while the prices are high, get started extracting oil from shale, and use the profits from that to improve technology.

The U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of coal, and at higher per-barrel oil prices we profitably can extract oil from coal. But do we have any oil-extractable shale? Again, please take a seat. In Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming alone the U.S. has perhaps 1 trillion barrels of oil in extractable shale - an amount capable of meeting the nation's anticipated oil needs for about 400 years. (For comparison, untapped Saudi oil reserves are estimated at 261 billion barrels.)

So: We're not running out of oil, as Cassandras relentlessly insist. At slightly higher per-barrel oil prices, existing technology can give us abundant oil from shale, and experimental technology could extract it far more economically. And then there's the oil in coal. Yet the nation still needs expanded refining capacity; it still needs to find more natural gas. And the feds and the congressional left - ever standing there, ready to help? Let them greatly maximize incentives and tax credits for new technologies and alternative fuels, and greatly minimize crippling regulation. Oh - and then they should throw down their shovels and get out of the way.

Kashmir Border to Be Opened for Quake Aid

NYT reported Pakistan and India agreed early on Sunday to open the disputed frontier in earthquake-stricken Kashmir for the first time in their embittered 58-year history, officials said. Starting on Nov. 7, Kashmiris from divided families will be allowed to cross on foot at five points on the Line of Control, the military line that divides parts of the Himalayan region that is claimed in its entirety by both India and Pakistan. Officials from both countries met in the Pakistani capital Islamabad on Saturday in an effort to reach an agreement, and the talks ran well past midnight.

This is very good news, and may lead to a solution to the dispute between these two nuclear-armed countries.

Hurricane Bends Landfill Rules

WaPo reported New Orleans is building a mountain, a heap of broken concrete and soiled mattresses and shredded curtains plopped out on the edge of a swampy road that routinely draws comparisons to a hellish scene from Dante's "Inferno." This place is called the Old Gentilly Landfill, an ancient dump that was shut down after being identified by federal regulators as a possible hazardous waste site nearly a quarter-century ago and that taxpayers have spent millions to clean up. The rebirth after Hurricane Katrina of Old Gentilly -- designated as a disposal site for "clean waste" from construction and demolition operations -- is the starkest example of how Louisiana is relaxing environmental laws to deal with the immensity of the storm's residue. Debris, such as soggy carpeting and plastic furniture that before the storm could never have gone into this kind of landfill, has been cleared by state environmental regulators to be dumped here in the open air. The state is allowing dumping at unlined Old Gentilly, even though more-modern landfills are nearby.

Why dump this stuff in any landfill? They should turn the land that is 7 to 15 feet below sea level into one huge landfill.

Terror cell 'smuggled missiles into Europe'

Telegraph reported An Islamic terror cell has smuggled two surface-to-air missiles into Europe in a plot to shoot down planes at one of France's main airports, it was claimed yesterday.

Wakeup Europe. The Islamofascists are out to get you. France does not have any troops in Iraq, and in fact they were bought and paid for by Saddam, and yet that does not protect them from these Islamofascists.

French and Algerian extremists with links to al-Qa'eda bought the Russian SA-18 Grouse missiles from Chechens in 2002 and smuggled them via Georgia and Turkey, according to French anti-terror sources quoted in Le Figaro. Both missiles and several of the extremists are reportedly still at large.... According to Abu Atiya, one such group, the so-called "Chechen network", returned to France with the missiles and chemical and biological agents such as botulin, ricin and cyanide.

I wonder of Prince Charles was aware of this when he said he was going to lecture George Bush on how nice the Muslims are.

CQ blogged One has to wonder, when seeing Sadik's list of chemical and biological materiel he admits to sending into Europe, where al-Qaeda managed to get it. He told the Jordanians that he sent ricin, botulin, and cyanide with the SAMs. All three will kill with great efficiency, but ricin is especially deadly and not exactly difficult to produce. However, it seems unlikely that AQ has a stable enough shelter system to have its own production facilities. If it doesn't, the WMD had to come from somewhere -- either the Russians, who deny having any, or one of the countries which AQ has infiltrated, perhaps even Iraq.

California Yankee blogged It's not just America the evildoers hate, they seek to conquer all freedom loving people. Appeasement is perceived as the weakness it is and only encourages the terrorists.

Bluto blogged My opinion is that an attack on French soil will goad the Gauls into action. Too many of them view Islamic terrorism in merely academic terms right now, but a plane shot down over Orly, or some ricin in le Métro will expose the bankruptcy of appeasement. They shouldn't need such a ghastly event to nudge them in the right direction, but...the French are the French.

blogged If true, both these stories could have some amazing geopolitical implications...

Prince Charles to plead Islam's cause to Bush

Telegraph reported The Prince of Wales will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam this week because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11.

Exactly the opposite is true; President Bush has gone overboard saying Islam is a Religion of Peace, and cowtowing to CAIR. Both the US and Britain need to clamp down on Islamoterrorists.

The Prince, who leaves on Tuesday for an eight-day tour of the US, has voiced private concerns over America's "confrontational" approach to Muslim countries and its failure to appreciate Islam's strengths. The Prince raised his concerns when he met senior Muslims in London in November 2001. The gathering took place just two months after the attacks on New York and Washington. "I find the language and rhetoric coming from America too confrontational,"

Thank God the Queen recognizes what a fool her son is, and I hope she is working on a way for the succession to pass over this wimp and go instead to Prince William.

the Prince said, according to one leader at the meeting.

CQ blogged May I suggest that if the Prince wants to kiss the rear ends of imams that he continue to do so in his own country. We're not beating Muslims in the streets here. We understand that moderate, law-abiding Muslims don't represent any problem; we have many here who contribute to our society when they assimilate and accept religious tolerance. If Charles wants to debate traditions of religious freedom, perhaps he would like to bone up on a little bit of British history -- including the debacle the British created in Northern Ireland, which continues to this day.

Our problem lies with Muslims who don't accept Western values of religious tolerance -- those Islamists who demand that infidels have no rights except for those of servants of Islamist masters, who consider the stoning of women to be justice for exercising some sexual and cultural freedom, who behead teenagers for going to Catholic school -- that's where the problem lies. Instead of coming to the one nation that has traditionally led the world in promoting the peaceful practice of all religions within a single culture, perhaps Charles should travel to places like Saudi Arabia and Iran to defend Christianity. Better yet, travel to any Arabic nation and defend Judaism. After all, Charles says he wants to be the Defender of All Faiths. Why not start in places where those who practice their faiths get murdered for it with their government's blessings?

Anchoress blogged Being as how the man has never had to take a subway in his life, I guess the bombings in the London tubes didn’t quite register on his chukka-damaged brain, either. I wonder if he realizes that those bombings, and the ones in Indonesia, and in Bali, and in Turkey, and all the rest, were not being carried out by “other religions, even Christians”…I wonder if he has any problem at all with Christian Girls being Beheaded in Indonesia. Carried out by…Methodists? Hmmm? Church of England? Hmmm? Jews????.... In any case, I think before he dares lecture the American President or the American People he should perhaps spend a little time with some people who have lost limbs or loved ones because of those “19 hijackers,” (no, they were TERRORISTS) - and find out what it’s like to live under a threat he will never, himself, face. Putz. What a putz!

Doug blogged Here's where the unemployed gentlement from Windsor gets it wrong from the beginning. We are not at war against Islam, we are at war against Islamofacsism, an ideology that is as much political as it is religious and which is dedicated to violent confrontation with the Western world. Talk all you want about Western Civilization's debt to Islam, we are not dealing with the Islam that preserved the works of Aristotle, we are dealing with people who would prefer to burn the works of Aristotle, and any other infidel philosopher they can get their hands on. Making peace with people such as this is impossible.

Marc blogged Would he feel that way had Muslim terrorists been successful in crashing a plane into Parliament on that same day? Would he still feel that way had Muslim terrorists been successful in their planned Sarin gas attack on Parliament. If Charles thinks we're the ones that are "intolerant" how does he explain all these Muslim crimes against Christians?

Sunday, October 30

This Day In History

1735 John Adams, the second president of the United States, was born in Braintree, Mass.
1885 Poet Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho.
1938 The radio play ''The War of the Worlds,'' starring Orson Welles, aired on CBS. The live drama, which employed fake news reports, panicked some listeners who thought its portrayal of a Martian invasion was true.
1952 Dr. Albert Schweitzer, missionary surgeon and founder of Lambaréné leper Hospital in République du Gabon, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work. Schweitzer donated his prize to the hospital.
1953 Gen. George C. Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
1961 The Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb.
1961 The Soviet Party Congress unanimously approved a resolution ordering the removal of Josef Stalin's body from Lenin's tomb.
1975 The New York Daily News ran the headline ''Ford to City: Drop Dead'' a day after President Gerald R. Ford said he would veto any proposed federal bailout of New York City.
1989 Mitsubishi Estate Co., a major Japanese real estate concern, announced it was buying 51 percent of Rockefeller Group Inc. of New York.
1997 A jury in Cambridge, Mass., convicted British au pair Louise Woodward of second-degree murder in the death of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen. The judge later reduced the verdict to manslaughter and set Woodward free.
1998 In Nicaragua, a mudslide caused by Hurricane Mitch killed at least 2,000 people.
2000 Comedian, TV host, author and composer Steve Allen died at age 78.
2002 Walter Mondale returned to politics as Minnesota Democrats tapped the former vice president to run for the seat of the late Sen. Paul Wellstone less than a week before the election.
2002 Rapper Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC was killed in a shooting in New York; he was 37.

Happy Birthday To

1735 John Adams (2nd U.S. President [1797-1801], 1st Vice President; married to Abigail Smith [two sons, three daughters]; nickname: Atlas of Independence; father of John Quincy Adams [6th U.S. President]; died July 4, 1826)
1882 William ‘Bull’ (Frederick) Halsey Jr. (U.S. Naval Commander and Admiral: WWII: South Pacific arena; his flagship: USS Missouri; died Aug 16, 1959)
1893 Charles Atlas (Angelo Siciliano) (bodybuilder: 97-lb. weakling who had sand kicked in his face advertisement; died Dec 24, 1972)
1896 Ruth Gordon (Jones) (Academy Award-winning actress)
1915 Fred Friendly (broadcast journalist; TV producer: CBS, PBS; died Mar 3, 1998)
1945 Henry Winkler (actor: Happy Days)

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