All posts by Chief

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R.I.P. – “Romney in Peace”

Speaking before a favorable audience at the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) meeting earlier today, GOP Presidential wanna-be Mitt Romney in effect declared peace in his contest with Arizona Senator McCain.

Romney Suspends Presidential Campaign

Mitt Romney suspended his faltering presidential campaign on Thursday, effectively sealing the Republican presidential nomination for John McCain. “I must now stand aside, for our party and our country,” Romney told conservatives.

“If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror,” Romney told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

The big question left on the table at this point is how much of the true conservative core of the GOP (including the Chief!) will be able to hold their nose and support the Candidate-apparent McCain. Time will tell. Far be it from this humble blogger to venture a guess on THAT one, given that he doesn’t even know yet her HE stands on the question.

At any event, Romney’s exit remarks can do nothing but reinforce a positive position for him in the party, and may be a (hopeful) indication that he’s keeping thoughts of the future on the back burner. Frankly, the Chief hopes that this is the case, especially after reading the full text of his CPAC statement. Check it out for yourself.

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CTU, Jack Bauer – R.I.P.

Reinventing ’24’

Looks to the Chief that they’ve figured out a really effective way to finally get rid of Jack Bauer, once and for all: denature the show “24” to such an extent (in the name of political correctness) that it will lose its character, and become just another case of gratuitous TV “action”…not worth investing the time to watch.

Read it and weep!

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Election Notes: Romney or No One?

This is all just off the top of my head, for whatever it’s worth.

The Donk contest boiled down to NY Senator Mrs. Bubba, vs. B. Hussein Obama. Hmmmmm. Sort of like trying to choose between Stalin and Trotsky: both with the same ultimate goal, just a slightly different flavor to the means used to get there. Yech!

The big flap in the media about the GOP side is focused on the Darling of the MSM – Sen. John “The Manchurian Candidate” McCainiac. The Chief has real question about whether he would be worth a vote in the crunch. He is fatally flawed…a RINO at best, flying a false-flag of Reaganism, with a record of repeated blows to constitutional principles and policies more at home on a ticket with Kerry…who he admitted to be considering running with for V.P. And THAT is supposed to be the best the GOP can do, according to the MSM and the Country-club Establishment?

Ron Paul; very attractive on some issues, but he is totally (and fatally) bereft of situational awareness concerning foriegn affairs in general, and the Islamofascist threat in general. Not ready for the big leagues.

The Arkansas Traveler, the inimitable Huckster’s Baptist-based hatred of Mormon Romney is keeping his effort going…with the very possible effect of splitting the conservative evangelical vote so much that McCainiac is guaranteed a coronation. Interesting that this Republican version of Bill Clinton also hails originally from Hope, Arkansas. One has to wonder if there is something wierd in the water there!

Unless Romney can pull the rabbit out of the hat tomorrow, this may be the first election since the Chief could vote, that he will refrain from casting a vote at the top of the ticket, and then in the words of a Warren Zevon song “…I’m going to run and throw myself against a wall, because I’d rather feel bad than feel nothing at all.”

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Blognote

Been busier than a one-armed paper hanger with a number of different things going on all at once: result, an involuntary, circumstantial blog hiatus.

Hey, but guess what? It’s past!

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Fed Branch Pres Spills the Beans…and there’s too many of ’em to count!

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Passing the buck

The Chief REALLY, REALLY wants to comment on this offering from the feared and esteemed Mogambo Guru, but words fail…this is truly indescribable…it stands on its own…but is enough to alarm anyone rational to notice that the financial emperor – The Federal Reserve – has no clothes.

To quote an applicable song title from Warren Zevon: “It ain’t that pretty at all”

If you want to know the reason why America is freaking doomed, it is because of lowlife losers like St Louis Federal Reserve president William Poole, who is being quoted at MarketWatch.com as saying that nothing is his fault, as, “Investment professionals’ ‘shortsightedness’ led them to make fundamental errors that led to the mortgage crisis and credit meltdown.” Hahaha!

MarketWatch.com reports that, “In a speech to financial planners, Poole detailed five key mistakes that borrowers and lenders made that have pushed the economy to the brink of recession.” These “mistakes” were, according to Poole, that “Borrowers took on mortgages they could not afford,” which sidesteps the issue that nobody would have taken out a mortgage if the damnable Federal Reserve, of which he was a part, had not created all the money. Which created inflation, as it always does, in housing.

After detailing the sorry circumstances of the above mentioned “mistakes”, (which is well worth reading) things get worse…

Poole is obviously implying that everyone should know by now that the Federal Reserve and its banking system is a stupid, lying pit of vipers who cannot be trusted, and that the ratings agencies are even worse, and that only an idiot would trust either of these despicable organizations to tell you the correct time of day, much less rely on them to know what they are doing in establishing risk or telling you the truth about it when they are all raking in the big bucks by being incompetent.

…and still worse yet…

Mr Poole, obviously embarrassed by my rude comments, says that, “A reach for yield with inadequate attention to risk is another basic lesson that apparently cannot be relearned often enough,” when he actually means, “To never, ever trust the word or competence of the Federal Reserve is a lesson that cannot be relearned often enough.”

And not only is the Fed a bunch of laughably incompetent morons, but they never learn, and in Poole’s own words, “There are no new lessons here. The mistakes that brought us to this point have been made before.” Indeed they have! And that is why the US constitution has the requirement that money be only of gold and silver; to keep bank morons and government morons from creating so much money that they produce inflation and busts!

…but wait! There’s more:

…the government’s promises for future benefits payable under the Social Security and Medicare programs are now estimated to be at $53 trillion, in current dollars. This is up from about $20 trillion in 2000. Naturally, I whip out the old HP12C calculator, and in a matter of just a few moments I had produced several contradictory answers to the question, “What in the hell is the hyperinflationary horror, in percentage terms, of liabilities increasing from $20 trillion to $53 trillion in 7 years?”, most of them clustering around 15%, which is so terrifying a number that I instinctively repeat the calculations, hoping I am wrong. But I am not.

So a LOT of money has to be created, and for those who wish to know the eventual outcome of a central bank constantly creating excess money and credit over the long term, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (the worst of the worst) calculates that their inflation in consumer prices was 24,059% (!) in 2007. In other words, if a loaf of bread cost $.01 in January, it now costs $240.59 in December.

Actually, it is Much, Much Worse (MMW) than that, as the Voice of America reported that “Recent estimates of Zimbabwean inflation by independent economists have tended to run quite a bit higher, ranging from 50,000% to 100,000%”, and “Zimbabwe’s Central Statistical Office stopped providing data on inflation in September, saying it could not find prices for key goods because they were not on store shelves.” Hahaha!

In America (the place where lying with statistics achieved official government status, thanks to the loathsome Alan Greenspan, the worst central banker in the history of central banking, and the despicable Michael Boskin of Stanford University, his willing henchman), a complete absence of goods on store shelves means that “everything costs zero”! And then Greenspan and Boskin could, with their new method, claim that this proves that inflation is falling! Hahaha! Time for a rate cut! Hahahaha!

Read the whole thing and weep!

Defense Matters!, National Insecurity

State of the War: More (or Less) than Meets the Eye

A couple of long, specifically detailed, and clearly stated proposition that the situation with the US military is NOT all it’s cracked up to be these days.

US MILITARY BREAKS RANKS, Part 1 – A salvo at the White House

US MILITARY BREAKS RANKS, Part 2 – Troops felled by a ‘trust gap’

The Chief has heard it stated that “the difference between the US Navy (and also the rest of the military apparently) and the Boy Scouts, is that the Scouts operate under adult supervision.

This two-part series of articles (unfortunately) would seem to confirm this proposition.

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Towards an Islamic Reformation? – Update, with Nazi connections!

Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci Code

The Chief previously noted a potentially significant re-discovery of information relating to the historic development of the Koran as the keystone of Islam.

Here’s some more commentary on the situation from Asia Times’ Spengler – one of the Chief’s favorite commentators.

Andrew Higgins’ Wall Street Journal report that the photographic record of Koranic manuscripts, supposedly destroyed during World War II but occulted by a scholar of alleged Nazi sympathies, reads like a conflation of the Da Vinci Code with Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail.

The Da Vinci Code offered a silly fantasy in which Opus Dei, homicidal monks and twisted billionaires chased after proof that Christianity is a hoax. But the story of the photographic archive of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, now ensconced in a Berlin vault, is a case of life imitating truly dreadful art. It even has Nazis. “I hate those guys!” as Indiana Jones said.

No one is going to produce proof that Jesus Christ did not rise from the grave three days after the Crucifixion, of course. Humankind will choose to believe or not that God revealed Himself in this fashion. But Islam stands at risk of a Da Vinci Code effect, for in Islam, God’s self-revelation took the form not of the Exodus, nor the revelation at Mount Sinai, nor the Resurrection, but rather a book, namely the Koran. The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1982) observes, “The closest analogue in Christian belief to the role of the Koran in Muslim belief is not the Bible, but Christ.” The Koran alone is the revelatory event in Islam.

What if scholars can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Koran was not dictated by the Archangel Gabriel to the Prophet Mohammad during the 7th century, but rather was redacted by later writers drawing on a variety of extant Christian and Jewish sources? That would be the precise equivalent of proving that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels really was a composite of several individuals, some of whom lived a century or two apart.

Why was the survival of the manuscript microfilms concealed after the war? (Hint: Can you say Sieg Heil?)

“The whole period after 1945 was poisoned by the Nazis,” says Gunter Luling, a scholar who was drummed out of his university in the 1970s after he put forward heterodox theories about the Koran’s origins. His doctoral thesis argued that the Koran was lifted in part from Christian hymns. Blackballed by Spitaler, Luling lost his teaching job and launched a fruitless six-year court battle to be reinstated. Feuding over the Koran, he says, “ruined my life”. He wrote books and articles at home, funded by his wife, who took a job in a pharmacy. Asked by a French journal to write a paper on German Arabists, Luling went to Berlin to examine wartime records. Germany’s prominent postwar Arabic scholars, he says, “were all connected to the Nazis”.

Why were the Nazis so eager to suppress Koranic criticism? Most likely, the answer lies in their alliance with Islamist leaders, who shared their hatred of the Jews and also sought leverage against the British in the Middle East. The most recent of many books on this subject, Matthias Kuntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred, was reviewed January 13 in the New York Times by Jeffrey Goldberg, who reports:

Kuntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

There’s yet more in this piece…take a look for yourself.

Space Patrol

Obama Lost in Space.com

The Chief noticed ads for B. Hussein Obama’s campaign over on Space.com.

This particular bit of ad placement seems akin to say…David Duke running a campaign spot on Black Entertainment Television.

Based on Obama’s stated priorities, one has to wonder:  how much investment he would be willing to commit to any serious space efforts, given the Euro/Ingsoc  direction of most of his campaign rhetoric?

The best bet is not much!  Hopefully most of the readers there, who presumably have some interest in space development, realize this – and that B.H.O.’s ad placement there is little more than a money sink, and a true act of moonbattery bereft of situational awareness.

Space Patrol

Branson’s Private Spaceflight: Update

Virgin Galactic Unveils Suborbital Spaceliner Design

The Chief has previously noted with interest, Sir Richard Branson has been developing plans, and more to the point, technology to press ahead with Virgin Galactic – a venture into private suborbital spaceflight.

The SpaceShipTwo spacecraft and its WhiteKnightTwo carrier will begin initial tests this summer to shakedown the novel spaceflight system designed by aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan and his firm Scaled Composites. “2008 really will be the year of the spaceship,” said British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, who unveiled a 1/16th-scale model of the new spacecraft here at the American Museum of Natural History. “We’re truly excited about our new system and what our new system will be able to do.”

Virgin Galactic’s Spaceship-2

The idea seems to be proceeding nicely.

While the initial round of tests is slated for sometime this summer and the first spaceflights pegged for 2009, Whitehorn stressed that safety is paramount. “We’re in a race with nobody, apart from a race with safety,” Whitehorn said.

Rutan said he is targeting a safety factor akin to that of the earlier airliners of the 1920s, which should still be 100 times better than the safety of today’s manned spacecraft used by large governments today. “Don’t believe anyone who tells you that the safety level of new spacecraft is as safe as a modern airliner,” Rutan said.

I STILL think it’s way cool – given the money, I would fly in it in a second! It also seems good enough for the FAA:

Patricia Grace Smith, the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation, lauded the commitment of Virgin Galactic and Scaled to safety after SpaceShipTwo’s unveiling. “It is the entrepreneurial spirit that will take this country forward,” Smith said. “This is going to catch like a wild fire we have never seen.”

Hear, hear!

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Towards an Islamic Reformation?

The Lost Archive
Missing for a half century, a cache of photos
spurs sensitive research on Islam’s holy text

On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo archive of ancient manuscripts of the Quran.

The 450 rolls of film had been assembled before the war for a bold venture: a study of the evolution of the Quran, the text Muslims view as the verbatim transcript of God’s word. The wartime destruction made the project “outright impossible,” Mr. Spitaler wrote in the 1970s. Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars — and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

OK. And the point is…?

According to Islamic orthodoxy, the Quran is a verbatim record of direct revelation. No changes. No editing. No revisions. Pristine, from Allah to Mohammed to the book.

Evidence of an evolutionary progression of ancient texts into the current book directly undermines the claims of Islam to absolute and unchangeable truth. Too bad, reality is a bitch!

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Yeah, sure – NOT.

Bin Laden Son Wants to Be Peace Activist

This is one that you can beleive as much as you want to, but the Chief will maintain a HIGH degree of skepticism here, thank you!

Omar Osama bin Laden bears a striking resemblance to his notorious father—except for the dreadlocks that dangle halfway down his back. Then there’s the black leather biker jacket.

The 26-year-old does not renounce his father, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, but in an interview with The Associated Press, he said there is better way to defend Islam than militancy: Omar wants to be an “ambassador for peace” between Muslims and the West.

omar-bin-laden.jpg

Can you say T-A-Q-I-Y-Y-A? It’s the Koranic authorization for disinformation, and dissimulation to infidels in order to protect and further the cause of jihad, and protect those who practive it. For a rather more complete discussion of the reality of jihad and taqiyya, go here.

Meanwhile, dealing with the younger generation bin Laden could well prove to be a case of tyring to make a pet out of a scorpion.

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Archeology Find Matches Nehemiah Account

First Temple seal found in Jerusalem

A stone seal bearing the name of one of the families who acted as servants in the First Temple and then returned to Jerusalem after being exiled to Babylonia has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem’s City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said Wednesday.

Photo: Edwin Trebels courtesy of Dr. Eilat Mazar

The 2,500-year-old black stone seal, which has the name “Temech” engraved on it, was found earlier this week amid stratified debris in the excavation under way just outside the Old City walls near the Dung Gate, said archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who is leading the dig.

According to the Book of Nehemiah, the Temech family were servants of the First Temple and were sent into exile to Babylon following its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BCE.

The relevant citation:

“These are the children of the province, that went up out of the captivity, of those that had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away, and came again to Jerusalem and to Judah, every one unto his city.” [Nehemiah 7:6]… “The Nethinim [7:46]”… The children of Temech.” [7:55].

Way cool!

SD Politics

Pierre Nannyism Strikes Again!

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When heard on the radio this morning driving to the school where the Chief currently teaches, there was a sudden need to focus on not driving off the road! Somebody up at Pierre needs a good sharp whack upside the head with a cluebat.

Nanny State alert: SB 67 – Mandatory applications for college

PP at Dakota War College has it all laid out for dissection, starting with this:

But now there’s been a bill doing just that – telling people what they HAVE to do – which has been submitted to the SD Legislature.

SB 67 is a brand new bill that will “require high school students to submit at least one application to a postsecondary educational institution.” (It’s so new, the text hasn’t been posted.)

UPDATE: The bill text is now HERE.

PP goes on with more comments on this one…which I COULD repeat…but go read his post, & consider my own point to be made.

THis is SOOOOOOOOOO far out of reality, further description would be futile.

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California: Big Brother Alive and Well!

State proposes to take control of home temps

The California NAZI’s are at it again!

California utilities would control the temperature of new homes and commercial buildings in emergencies with a radio-controlled thermostat, under a proposed state update to building energy efficiency standards.

Customers could not override the thermostats during “emergency events,” according to the proposal, part of a 236-page revision to building standards. The document is scheduled to be considered by the California Energy Commission, a state agency, on Jan. 30.

The description does not provide any exception for health or safety concerns. It also does not define what are “emergency events.”

They go on to make the point, that although all the details are not spelled out in the proposal, that based on their experience they can be relied on to make the right decisions.

Yeah, right! (“Trust me. I’m from the government. I’m here to help you.”)

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B. Hussein Obama Update

Confirmed: Barack Obama Practiced Islam

This is the latest in a tit-for-tat argument between Daniel Pipes, and Media Matters for America.

Based on the prima facie evidence, Pipes has the point, which raises an interesting point that he passes on:

All this matters, for if Obama once was a Muslim, he is now what Islamic law calls a murtadd (apostate), an ex-Muslim converted to another religion who must be executed. Were he elected president of the United States, this status, clearly, would have large potential implications for his relationship with the Muslim world.

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Glowbull Warming Notes

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THere’s been more and more coming out…from the scientific world…in the nature of inconvenient truths that, contrary to AlGor et al, climate is being driven by the sun…and, global temperature seems to have peaked in 1998!

SOMEBODY…ANYBODY…

    PLEASE

HIT ALGORE WITH A CLUEBAT & SHUT HIM UP!

Firstly, from the Boston Globe (not exactly a bastion of right-wing anti-enviros):

Br-r-r! Where did global warming go?

The stark headline appeared just over a year ago. “2007 to be ‘warmest on record,’ ” BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government’s Meteorological Office, the story announced that “the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007,” surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.

The piece goes on to cite the actual record for ’07, both for the southern and northern hemispheres. (Guess what? It was NOT warmer!)

OPEN LETTER to UN SECRETARY-GENERAL

This came out last month, but is still well worth noting…it was signed by 100 scientists from the much ballyhooed IPCC, who take great exception to the IPCC’s conclusions, insomuch as they would affect policies. Swing that cluebat!

Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables. We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC’s conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.

That last sentence there puts it into proper perspective as to where the rubber actually meets the road.

Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:

• Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.

• The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.

• Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today’s computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.

You get the drift…

If it isn’t CO2, then what DOES drive climate? THE SUN! (What a concept!)

Even Russia is weighing in on this. Writing for Novosti, is Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute.

A cold spell soon to replace global warming

Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

There’s more…check it out.

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San Fransicko Gun Ban Shot Down

Municipalities can’t ban people from owning handguns, court rules

San Francisco’s ban on handguns, blocked by a legal challenge since voters approved it in November 2005, suffered a possibly fatal blow Wednesday when a state appeals court ruled that local governments have no authority under California law to prevent people from owning pistols.

The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco agreed with a June 2006 ruling by Superior Court Judge James Warren, who said state laws regulating gun sales, permits and safety leave no room for a city or county to forbid handgun possession.

Maybe California isn’t totally bereft of hope, yet!

China Watch

Possible ChiCom Olympic Spectacle?

Animals torn to pieces by lions in front of baying crowds: the spectator sport China DOESN’T want you to see

You’ve got to read this to believe it. Great shades of the Roman Circus!

The smiling children giggled as they patted the young goat on its head and tickled it behind the ears.

Some of the more boisterous ones tried to clamber onto the animal’s back but were soon shaken off with a quick wiggle of its bottom. It could have been a happy scene from a family zoo anywhere in the world but for what happened next.

A man hoisted up the goat and nonchalantly threw it over a wall into a pit full of hungry lions. The poor goat tried to run for its life, but it didn’t stand a chance. The lions quickly surrounded it and started tearing at its flesh.

“Oohs” and “aahs” filled the air as the children watched the goat being ripped limb from limb. Some started to clap silently with a look of wonder in their eyes.

The scenes witnessed at Badaltearing Safari Park in China are rapidly becoming a normal day out for many Chinese families.

Check out the full piece from the UK Daily Mail…but be warned, there ARE graphic photos included, but they aren’t any worse than you’re likely to see on the Discovery channel.

Any motion to change the situation? Judge for yourself:

In 2004, Beijing proposed animal welfare legislation which stipulated that “no one should harass, mistreat or hurt animals”. It would also have banned animal fights and live feeding shows. The laws would have been a huge step forward. But the proposals were scrapped following stiff opposition from vested interests and those who felt China had more pressing concerns.

And this is the central problem for animal welfare in China: its ruling elite is brutally repressive and cares little for animals.

Hey, they don’t treat people very good either, so why should they treat animals any better?

Centuries of rule by tyrannical emperors and bloody dictators have all but eradicated the Buddhist and Confucian respect for life and nature.

As a result, welfare groups are urging people not to go to Chinese zoos if they should visit the Olympics, as virtually every single one inflicts terrible suffering on its animals “They should tell the Chinese Embassy why they are refusing to visit these zoos,’ says Carol McKenna of OneVoice. “If a nation is great enough to host the Olympic Games then it is great enough to be able to protect its animals.”

Why should this interfere with their Olympic status? I mean it didn’t bother the IOC to stage the games in the midst of the Third Reich, did it?
(What’s a few goats compared to the Jews, anyway?)

For the record, the Chief subscribes to PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals! But, he also believes that animals should be respected…if an animal is shedding it’s life for me, then the least I can do is render due respect…the traditional Native American attitude is instructive here.

What will the ChiComs think of next, using condemned prisoners for the shows? Wow, they could put it on a YouTube type service, with a subscription fee…you just KNOW some people would pay for it: live death!

This is the ultimate destination of any society that deliberately denies the intrinsic dignity of any life, and reduces humanity to a “national resource” only valuable inasmuch as it contributes to building the glory of the new, Communist paradise (Remember? They ARE the ChiComs!)

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ELECTION NOTE

Yada yada yada. Choose your own talking head, and you can hear all you want (and more) about the Hawkeye Cauci, and the NH primary. What to say?

Nothing CAN be said that hasn’t already been said.

The Chief favors Gov. Romney, but ANY of the GOP is preferable to B. Hussein Obama, or another cycle of Clinton Inc, or the Carolina ambulance chaser.

Why not the others besides Romney?

Ron Paul is totally bereft of reason concerning the situation with Islamofascism, which has to be the primary concern…without national security, nothing else will matter. Too bad. Otherwise he’s pretty good.

McCain? Two things are fatal: the Kennedy-McCain attempted immigration “reform” act, as well as the McCain-Feingold First Amendment Abridgment Act, otherwise called “Campaign Finance Reform”.

Thompson? Another anti-tort reform trial lawyer, proving that the species isn’t restricted to the Donks. Also favored the above noted McCain -Fiengold anti-Constitutional exercise.

Giuliani? Talking the talk NOW, but essentially a real RINO. Better than today’s Donks, but not even close to being a substantive conservative.

As far as the Arkansas Huckster is concerned, at least he isn’t in favor of abortion. His record from Arkansas does NOTHING to inspire confidence in his conservatism…more taxes, more spending, more government activism. No thanks.

The Chief is impressed by Romney’s proven performance as an executive problem solver, in a number of diverse settings, over a long period of time. Just maybe, D.C. could use a real touch of managerial leadership, expertise, and experience, d’ya think?

With South Dakota being a “late adopter” in the presidential sweepstakes, it seems like a rather remote set of events…something to watch, but basically out of action, although it WAS interesting to hear ads broadcast for some of the candidates from Sioux Falls, aimed across the nearby border with Iowa.

It’ll all shake out…then we’ll really see what’s on the platter for November.

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Britain Off-limits – to the Brits!

Bishop warns of no-go zones for non-Muslims

Somehow this cannot be what they fought for in “their finest hour”.

Islamic extremists have created “no-go” areas across Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter, one of the Church of England’s most senior bishops warns today. The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester and the Church’s only Asian bishop, says that people of a different race or faith face physical attack if they live or work in communities dominated by a strict Muslim ideology.

Also worth noting is that today’s Church of England is not noted as being a nest of rabble-rousing radical racists, as is already being charged by some Moslem “Britons”.

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Huckabee Finn Tries Tom Sawyer Maneuver

Huckabee’s Nutty Flip-Flop

One of the most vivid incidents in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer was the inimitable fence-painting incident (commemorated annually in Twain’s boyhood home of Hannibal, MO – but I digress) in which Tom managed to present the job in such a light to his passing friends that they ended up “bribing” him to do his work for him.

After telegraphing his intent to punch out Romney for having the nerve to actually go to the political historical record to see what policies had actually been followed in the Huckabee administration (IMHO, this record is anything BUT conservative), the Arkansas Huckster called a major presser to announce that he had “suddenly changed his mind”, and would NOT use the attack ad against Romney, that will now be shown to you all to broadcast for me as “news”. Thank you very much!

The reporters were NOT impressed – and generally refrained from turning themselves into so many Tom Sawyers willing to wield the political paintbrush for Huckabee’s campaign.

Despite changing his mind, Huckabee still wanted to show the press one of the negative ads he wasn’t going to run. A transcript of the event will show this response from the press corps:

“Bwahahahahaha!” [sound of reporters falling out of chairs, doubled over in laughter]

Reporters saw the spectacle as a transparent charade to get them to run Huckabee’s ad for him while allowing him to maintain the high road. The ad was a standard attack ad with pictures of Romney and claims about his record on taxes, the death penalty, and the deficit he left in Massachusetts after his term as governor. Despite Huckabee’s switcheroo, the room was also filled with easels displaying Romney distortions, which Huckabee and aides said couldn’t be pulled down because the candidate had made his decision so recently.

The “whooosh” sound coming from this quick-change may well be a signal of implosion.

The Chief only hopes so.

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Blognote

Blogging has been off lately – yeah, of course, the holidays, right?

That hasn’t been too bad…but the touch of pneumonia has been another story.

Things are on the upswing…and hopefully will continue to be so.

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More Holiday Cheer!

Crisis may make 1929 look a ‘walk in the park’
This piece from The London Telegraph’s ace reporter/commentator Ambrose Evans-Pritchard will do nothing to calm your economic nerves, but then again, it looks more and more like it’s time to be as alarmed as we have sense to be. This is only the latest in a series of unsettling observations on the current state of the financial system.

As the credit paralysis stretches through its fifth month, a chorus of economists has begun to warn that the world’s central banks are fighting the wrong war, and perhaps risk a policy error of epochal proportions.

“Liquidity doesn’t do anything in this situation,” says Anna Schwartz, the doyenne of US monetarism and life-time student (with Milton Friedman) of the Great Depression. “It cannot deal with the underlying fear that lots of firms are going bankrupt. The banks and the hedge funds have not fully acknowledged who is in trouble. That is the critical issue,” she adds.

But wait…there’s more:

York (UK) professor Peter Spencer, chief economist for the ITEM Club, says the global authorities have just weeks to get this right, or trigger disaster. “The central banks are rapidly losing control. By not cutting interest rates nearly far enough or fast enough, they are allowing the money markets to dictate policy. We are long past worrying about moral hazard,” he says. “They still have another couple of months before this starts imploding. Things are very unstable and can move incredibly fast. I don’t think the central banks are going to make a major policy error, but if they do, this could make 1929 look like a walk in the park,” he adds.

and more:

“The kind of upheaval observed in the international money markets over the past few months has never been witnessed in history,” says Thomas Jordan, a Swiss central bank governor.

Not only is this article well worth noting…the accompanying comments in the Telegraph are too. This one, unfortunately seems to succinctly summarize the situation:

“The Central Bank’s choices are simple: let the banks fail or let the money fail. A US 1929 style depression or a German 1922 style hyperinflation.”

Merry Christmas!

China Watch, Defense Matters!, National Insecurity

WSJ: The importance of a strong Navy

Why T.R. Claimed the Sea

This relates to our current and future circumstances, as well as to an earlier posting concerning the sad decline of the Royal Navy.

On Dec. 16, 1907, the 16 battleships of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet sailed from Hampton Roads, Va., on a 43,000-mile journey around the world. The occasion was immediately understood as Teddy Roosevelt’s way of declaring that the United States, already an economic superpower, was also a military one. Unnoticed by most Americans, this past Sunday marked its centennial.

There is an enduring, bipartisan strain in American politics (think Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich) that wishes to forgo the military role. As wonderfully recounted by Jim Rasenberger in “America 1908,” the voyage of the Great White Fleet, as it was popularly known, was energetically opposed by members of Congress, who sought to cut off its funding when it was halfway around the world. Sound familiar?

Even as many in Congress (and elsewhere) would like to repeal the need for us to be actively engaged and capable of militarily maintaining our proper interests in the world, nothing in our history has repealed the truths noted by Adm. A.T. Mahan and which were known to T.R. as we built and deployed the White Fleet.

Whatever the procurement problems or tactical issues, a supremely powerful Navy is not a luxury the U.S. can safely dispense with. In September, ships of the People’s Liberation Army Navy made their first-ever port calls in Germany, France, Britain and Italy, and Chinese admirals are frequent guests on American warships. “The Chinese Great White Fleet is not too far off on the horizon,” says a senior Navy official in a recent conversation.

China’s current rise, like America’s a century ago, is not something anyone can stop. It can be steered. Making sure our vision for the Navy stays true to Teddy Roosevelt’s is one way of ensuring the Chinese don’t make the mistake of steering it our way.

We ignore our history and current situation at our mortal peril.

National Insecurity

Intel Report Status

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Iran says U.S. report a “declaration of surrender”

Washington’s bureaucratic establishment contradicted iteself with the much ballyhooed N.I.E. (National Intel. Estimate) concerning Iran’s nuclear status. The Chief was, and is of the opinion that said report constituted prima facie evidence of treason within a bureaucracy out to politically emasculate the administration policies at all cost – including that of harm to the national security of the United States, by rendering aid and comfort to a self-proclaimed enemy of the United States: the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Now comes said Ahmadinejad giving HIS evaluation of the report.

Iran’s president said on Sunday the publication of a U.S. intelligence report saying Iran had halted a nuclear weapons program in 2003 amounted to a “declaration of surrender” by Washington in its row with Tehran.

Now, what part of “aid and comfort” is so hard to understand?

Meanwhile, the validity of the N.I.E. itself may well have minimal credibility.

An exiled opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), last week said Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 but said restarted it a year later, dispersing equipment to thwart international inspectors.

This does NOT give the Chief a warm glow, other than heartburn.

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Bankers: Recession in the Offing

Morgan Stanley issues full US recession alert

Morgan Stanley has issued a full recession alert for the US economy, warning of a sharp slowdown in business investment and a “perfect storm” for consumers as the housing slump spreads.

In a report “Recession Coming” released today, the bank’s US team said the credit crunch had started to inflict serious damage on US companies. “Slipping sales and tightening credit are pushing companies into liquidation mode, especially in motor vehicles,” it said.

Avast! Batten down the hatches!

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Clean up our act, or more inflation? Inflation wins!

Bank of England and Fed act to ease crisis

The Bank of England this afternoon announced it is clubbing together with its fellow central banks to conduct a major rescue operation for the world’s stricken money markets. In an unprecedented move, the Bank said it and the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank were taking measures to “address elevated pressures in short-term funding markets.”

It comes amid growing concern for the fate of the money markets and stock markets in London and New York, after interest rate cuts by the Fed and the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee failed to improve the increasingly negative mood

Heaven fordid that BANKERS should have to lose any money!