August 31, 2009

What's Hawaiian for Reconquista?

And how's that multiculti thing working out[1]?

This site tracks the Hawaiian sovereignty issue.

Native Hawaiians can tell a weak horse when they see one:
A Hawaiian Studies professor at the University of Hawaii, Haunani-Kay Trask, is one of the most caustic critics of whites in the islands. In her 1999 book, From A Native Daughter, Trask wrote: "Just as … all exploited peoples are justified in feeling hostile and resentful toward those who exploit them, so we Hawaiians are justified in such feelings toward the haole. This is the legacy of racism, of colonialism."

In a poem titled, "Racist White Woman," Trask wrote: "I could kick/Your face, puncture/Both eyes./You deserve this kind/Of violence./No more vicious/Tongues, obscene/Lies./Just a knife/Slitting your tight/Little heart."
Trask is getting paid by the government to spout this poison?

Turn the islands over to the Japanese or Chinese[2]. Then Prof. Trask will really have something to complain about. Except, of course, she wouldn't dare. Native Hawaiians can also recognize a strong horse. Interesting that the bigotry seems directed toward whites rather than toward the Asian majority...

Btw, where is the healing voice of our Hawaii-born Obamessiah?

Iirc similar things are going on wrt Indian minorities on islands in the Indian Ocean.

(HT: Instapundit.)
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[1] Note that the incident of violence is by youths against an elderly man--and the Hawaiian police hushed it up, saying he couldn't get justice in a Hawaiian court.

[2] In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to see Chinese support for the independence movement. In due course if not right now. For their own purposes, of course.

Audit the Fed?!

Barney Frank, like Ron Paul, wants to audit the Fed.

Given Barney Frank's key role in stopping the Bush administration's attempt[1] to reform Fannie Mae, his political career should be over. Instead he is a shoo-in for reelection. He has become even more arrogant[2] and proposes to do even greater damage.

This bill would take us directly to banana-republic status. The number of co-sponsors is itself a step in that direction.

From a Russian Immigrant

At IBD:
...Critics say that greed is the driving force of capitalism. My answer is that envy is the driving force of socialism...
Well put, even if perhaps not original with her.

The whole thing is worth reading.

I Am No Fan of the Kennedys but...

...this counts with me. David Frum was incensed when Kennedy torpedoed the Bork nomination:
For 15 years thereafter I could hardly bear to hear his name spoken. Nor was my temper much improved by his rough handling of another great conservative legalist, Theodore Olson, at Olson’s confirmation hearings as solicitor general. I was always ready to laugh at the harsh jokes conservatives told about the senator’s legendarily self-indulgent personal life. It seemed a fair judgment on an unfair man.

Then came 9/11. Among the murdered was the brave and brilliant Barbara Olson. Ted asked some friends to help with the deluge of messages of condolence, and my wife Danielle volunteered for the job. Among the letters: a lengthy handwritten note by the senator so elegant and decent, so eloquent and (fascinatingly) written in so beautiful a hand as to revolutionize one’s opinion of the man who wrote it. It did not dishonor by ignoring or denying the political differences between the two families. It fully acknowledged them - and through them expressed a deeper human awareness of shared mortality, pain, and grief. Not all chapters of his life revealed it equally, but the senator was a big soul, and in his last years, he lived his bigness fully...
Addendum. Mark Steyn is less charitable. Ditto for Iowahawk.

August 30, 2009

Damn Japanese, Always Stealing Our Ideas

Oops. And bravo to Fujio Masuoka.

(According to the link, Masuoka is a difficult person. I'll put up with difficult people if I see offsetting brilliance. There is a counterpart to the signal-to-noise ratio or Sharpe ratio: the talent-to-arrogance ratio.)

Olmert Indicted

CNN reports. Israel doesn't need this during a period of gathering, not-quite-overt-yet existential threats.

I could never see Olmert as the leader of an important nation like Israel.

He always reminded me of a crooked Chicago alderman.

They're Only Trees, Lady

A worthy soul is desolated that a wind storm wrecked some of her favorite trees in Central Park.

If the country does itself in, will it be because of our stupidity...or our oversensitivity?

My man Fred sez:
Oh grant me the ease that is granted so free,
The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,
That relish their victuals and rest on their bed
With flint in the bosom and guts in the head.
No doubt with mixed feelings, but I'm sure he knew he had a point.

Afterthought. Compared to some, that NYC lady is a stoical moderate.

August 29, 2009

What Did They Do to Dennis the Menace?

The comic books of the late 1950s described the helter-skelter antics of a blonde hellion.

I recently came across a couple of later, 1970s issues.

The poor kid seems to have been drugged into submission.

Assisted Suicide

I have been livid about the arrests in Georgia. Then I happened to read the story more closely and learn that the witnesses hold the subject's hands for "emotional support":
Mr. Humphry said the network’s protocols were deliberately written to avoid illegality. “The person does everything themselves,” he said. “They don the hood. They tie it around their neck. They reach forward. They turn on the gas.”

Guides often hold a dying person’s hands, he said, but for support, not restraint. [Boldface mine--gs]
I know they mean well, but that is a really really foolish action: unbelievably foolish in this era of aggressive hypocritical theocrats. Why don't they put a hand on the head or shoulder?

Addendum. Now them good ole GBI boys done bagged themselves a pastor. If the religious right concluded that the police are out of control--unlikely, IMO--, something might get done about it.

Btw, I recently watched the Dirty Harry movies again. They reminded me how scared people were during the 70s as criminals were running amok. The solution itself has become a problem.

See this too.

August 28, 2009

Let's Not Do This

We're not the only society that can be incredibly dumb in hindsight:
Fujio Masuoka says that Toshiba tried to demote him after he invented a $76 billion product.

August 25, 2009

Glenn Reynolds Exaggerates

He claims:
The real problem is that we’ve got the worst political class in American history.
Since Reconstruction, anyway.

Addendum 20091004. Seeing the fecklessness of the civilized world as Iran marches toward a nuclear bomb, I have to reconsider whether Reynolds exaggerates. He quotes Victor Davis Hanson:
I am not a fan of the Obama agenda. But I am don’t want an impotent Commander in Chief abroad for three very dangerous years to come. So I am worried that the U.S. will be crippled with a weak, unpopular executive, as happened to Bush (35% approvals) in 2007-8. Our currency is tanking. Our debts are climbing. Our energy needs are breaking us. Our borrowing is out of control. The country is divided in a 1859/1968 mode. And the world is smiling as Obama, now hesitant and without the old messianic confidence, presides over our accepted inevitable decline. The country needs to buck up and meet these challenges head on, since the world smells blood, whether in Iran, Russia, the Mideast, North Korea, or South America, and in a mere 9 months of the reset button.
1859.

The world smells blood.

August 21, 2009

"Court Expected to Send Runaway Teen Home Despite Muslim Honor Killing Fears"

She's 17. The Fox report is here. Unlike the Schiavo case, this might be an matter that calls for high-level intervention.

It's not clear whether the report is complete and accurate. It's not clear that her family will harm or kill her if she is returned.

However, if the worst happens, the people who are forcing her back should be prosecuted as accessories. (I know, fat chance...I wrote "should be prosecuted"...)

August 20, 2009

XKCD's Asteroid

Here. First pane: an asteroid heads toward Earth. Second pane: NASA dispatches a spacecraft to nuke it. Third pane: jubilation at NASA as the spacecraft lands successfully. Fourth panel: standing between a blooming flower and the spacecraft, a humanoid inhabitant of the asteroid watches as the countdown concludes.

My, isn't that intelligent, sensitive, caring and ethical? And, unspoken but above all, superior.

Let's assume the inhabitants of the asteroid are more or less like us. They aren't evil invaders, and they aren't gentle benevolent sages. And let's assume that our only recourse is to blow the asteroid up.

What would the enlightened cartoonists at XKCD have us do? If we had the ruthlessness to kill to survive, would they condemn us or would they decline to do so?
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I view the situation as a potential metaphor for our civilization. Note also that, in the cartoon, the alternative to blowing up the asteroid is letting it crash into our planet, annihilating life on both. That, too, may be a metaphor for the predicament into which our civilization is heading. Hopefully not, but I'm not ruling it out.

The truly challenging dilemma is a them-or-us scenario in which only one civilization must destroy the other in order to survive. XKCD doesn't even try to examine that. Too traumatic for their delicate sensibilities?

August 17, 2009

That Rootin'-Tootin' American Frontier Spirit

From red-state Texas, of all places:
CORPUS CHRISTI — Police can arrest people who don't leave town under mandatory evacuation orders under a new state law that goes into effect in the heart of Texas' hurricane season.
A little more here.

Your home is your castle unless the State decides otherwise.

I don't read Glenn Reynolds much since he changed from being a commentator to being an aggregator, but I chanced on this:
The real problem is that we’ve got the worst political class in American history.
I'm not sure that's hyperbole[1]. And what they're doing to the country in the name of "God" or "social justice" might get them written into history as traitors.

Not that the self-righteous corrupt pharisaical scum care as long as they get their way.
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[1] After further consideration, I think it is hyperbole...somewhat.

August 10, 2009

Interesting Paper

Here. It appears to bring a lot of boundary-of-knowledge fundamental physics within reach of a determined reader with a general technical background.

August 7, 2009

Geoengineering News

The Telegraph reports:
'Cloud ship' scheme to deflect the sun's rays is favourite to cut global warming

The "cloud ships" are favoured among a series of schemes aimed at altering the climate which have been weighed up by a leading think-tank.

The project, which is being worked on by rival US and UK scientists, would see 1,900 wind-powered ships ply the oceans sucking up seawater and spraying minuscule droplets of it out through tall funnels to create large white clouds.
Promising. More like this, please.

But beware of unintended consequences:
Hungry shrimp eat climate change experiment

It is another nail in the coffin of using ocean fertilisation to cool the planet. Early results from the latest field experiment suggest the technique will fail.
Beware defeatist civilizational death wishes too.

And beware of foolishness:
The Met Office has lost its authority on global warming

So much for the “barbecue summer” forecast by our state meteorologists. Not that this is the first time they have been mistaken. Unless my memory is playing tricks, 2007 and 2008 were forecast to be warm and dry summers. In the event, they were nothing of the sort. The Met’s repeated predictions of of temperature rise have, so far, proved demonstrably false.

The chap responsible for the bish was on television just now explaining that his office had only ever predicted a 65 per cent likelihood of warm sunshine. Fair enough. But if his staff can’t accurately forecast the weather two months in advance, why should we let them speak with such sacerdotal authority about what the temperature will be a century from now?
Good grief. Three words: Signal. To. Noise. The more observations you take, the more clearly a long-term signal, i.e. climate, emerges from random noise, i.e weather.

August 4, 2009

More Brit Dhimmitude

LGF commenter zombie notes:
Meanwhile, while you're all being distracted, civilization continues to disintegrate: Three policewomen spend full day dressed in Muslim burkhas in controversial 'In Your Shoes' exercise
And just ten years ago this was shaping up as another American Century... (Yes, we're talking about the UK but we're often not far behind them on this kind of thing.)

1. This kind of thing does not come out of the blue. Where are the ideas coming from? Who gave the order? Cui bono? Why was no effort made to identify them, let alone hold them accountable? Sloppy journalism. Ineffectual opposition.

2. A modest proposal. To really understand Islamic culture, the policewomen should personally experience the mindset of the Muslim males who put women into these costumes. A field trip to Saudi, perhaps?

3. Another modest proposal.
Sergeant Leonard said the experience had given her a greater appreciation of how Muslim women feel when they walk out in public in ‘clothing appropriate to their beliefs’.
Well, Sgt, while you're on that field trip being temporarily adopted into a Saudi family, stroll around in clothing appropriate to your personal beliefs and see what happens.

4. A police spokesman speaks.
‘This exercise is just one of many activities South Yorkshire Police have planned with communities and ethnic minority leaders to secure strong relationships, celebrate diversity and encourage integration, working towards a safer, closer society,’ she added.
I'd like to believe that but I don't. My difficulty is that these oh-so-subtle ploys by the host culture are indistinguishable from gutless rationalizations by spineless elites.

Unless it's the host culture that is supposed to do the integrating.

5. Announcement by the Home Secretary. Effective immediately, in the interests of diversity, social cohesion and multicultural integration, members of the Islamic faith will be referred to as 'The Faithful'. Usage of the term 'Muslim' is left to the discretion of The Faithful. Usage by any others will be considered hate speech. /