Adam Kirsch, in the New Republic, warns of the rise of another philosophic defender of bad causes, one who has perfected the technique of using a soupçon of wit to disguise the real flavor of the Communism.

The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror—especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose “lost causes” Zizek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes—the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult. A glance at the blurbs on his books provides a vivid illustration of the power of repressive tolerance. In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek claims, “Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy”; but on the back cover of the book we are told that Zizek is “a stimulating writer” who “will entertain and offend, but never bore.” In The Fragile Absolute, he writes that “the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance; on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred”; but this is an example of his “typical brio and boldness.” And In Defense of Lost Causes, where Zizek remarks that “Heidegger is ‘great’ not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement,” and that “crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not ‘essential’ enough”; but this book, its publisher informs us, is “a witty, adrenalinfueled manifesto for universal values.”

In the same witty book Zizek laments that “this is how the establishment likes its ‘subversive’ theorists: harmless gadflies who sting us and thus awaken us to the inconsistencies and imperfections of our democratic enterprise—God forbid that they might take the project seriously and try to live it.” How is it, then, that Slavoj Zizek, who wants not to correct democracy but to destroy it, has been turned into one of the establishment’s pet subversives, who “tries to live” the revolution most completely as a jet-setting professor at the European Graduate School, a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Institute of Sociology, and the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities?

A part of the answer has to do with Zizek’s enthusiasm for American popular culture. Despite the best attempts of critical theory to demystify American mass entertainment, to lay bare the political subtext of our movies and pulp fiction and television shows, pop culture remains for most Americans apolitical and anti-political—a frivolous zone of entertainment and distraction. So when the theory-drenched Zizek illustrates his arcane notions with examples from Nip/ Tuck and Titanic, he seems to be signaling a suspension of earnestness. The effect is quite deliberate. In The Metastases of Enjoyment, for instance, he writes that “Jurassic Park is a chamber drama about the trauma of fatherhood in the style of the early Antonioni or Bergman.” Elsewhere he asks, “Is Parsifal not a model for Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, with Laurence Fishburne in the role of Gurnemanz?” Those are laugh lines, and they cunningly disarm the anxious or baffled reader with their playfulness. They relieve his reader with an expectation of comic hyperbole, and this expectation is then carried over to Zizek’s political proclamations, which are certainly hyperbolic but not at all comic.

When, in 1994, during the siege of Sarajevo, Zizek wrote that “there is no difference” between life in that city and life in any American or Western European city, that “it is no longer possible to draw a clear and unambiguous line of separation between us who live in a ‘true’ peace and the residents of Sarajevo”—well, it was only natural for readers to think that he did not really mean it, just as he did not really mean that Jurassic Park is like a Bergman movie. This intellectual promiscuity is the privilege of the licensed jester, of the man whom The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed “the Elvis of cultural theory.”

In person, too, Zizek plays the jester with practiced skill. Every journalist who sits down to interview him comes away with a smile on his face. Robert Boynton, writing in Lingua Franca in 1998, found Zizek “bearded, disheveled, and loud … like central casting’s pick for the role of Eastern European Intellectual.” Boynton was amused to see the manic, ranting philosopher order mint tea and sugar cookies: “’Oh, I can’t drink anything stronger than herbal tea in the afternoon,’ he says meekly. ‘Caffeine makes me too nervous.’” The intellectual parallel is quite clear: in life, as in his writing, Zizek is all bark and no bite. Like a naughty child who flashes an irresistible grin, it is impossible to stay angry at him for long.

I witnessed the same deception a few weeks ago, when Zizek appeared with Bernard-Henri Lévy at the New York Public Library. The two philosopher-celebrities came on stage to the theme music from Superman, and their personae were so perfectly opposed that they did indeed nudge each other into cartoonishness: Lévy was all the more Gallic and debonair next to Zizek, who seemed all the more wild-eyed and Slavic next to Lévy. Thus it was perfectly natural for the audience to erupt in laughter when Zizek, at one point in the generally unacrimonious evening, told Lévy: “Don’t be afraid—when we take over you will not go to the Gulag, just two years of reeducation camp.” Solzhenitsyn had died only a few weeks earlier, but it would have been a kind of betise to identify Zizek’s Gulag with Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. When the audience laughed, it was playing into his hands, and hewing to the standard line on Zizek, which Rebecca Mead laid down in a profile of him in The New Yorker a few years ago: “Always to take Slavoj Zizek seriously would be to make a category mistake.”

Whether or not it would be always a mistake to take Slavoj Zizek seriously, surely it would not be a mistake to take him seriously just once. He is, after all, a famous and influential thinker. So it might be worthwhile to consider Zizek’s work as if he means it—to ask what his ideas really are, and what sort of effects they are likely to have.

Zizek is a believer in the Revolution at a time when almost nobody, not even on the left, thinks that such a cataclysm is any longer possible or even desirable. This is his big problem, and also his big opportunity. While “socialism” remains a favorite hate-word for the Republican right, the prospect of communism overthrowing capitalism is now so remote, so fantastic, that nobody feels strongly moved to oppose it, as conservatives and liberal anticommunists opposed it in the 1930s, the 1950s, and even the 1980s. When Zizek turns up speaking the classical language of Marxism-Leninism, he profits from the assumption that the return of ideas that were once the cause of tragedy can now occur only in the form of farce. In the visual arts, the denaturing of what were once passionate and dangerous icons has become commonplace, so that emblems of evil are transformed into perverse fun, harmless but very profitable statements of post-ideological camp. ...

Christopher Booker expresses well-justified alarm at President-Elect Obama’s continuing expressions of commitment to the Global Warming fantasy.

If the holder of the most powerful office in the world proposed a policy guaranteed to inflict untold damage on his own country and many others, on the basis of claims so demonstrably fallacious that they amount to a string of self-deluding lies, we might well be concerned. The relevance of this is not to President Bush, as some might imagine, but to a recent policy statement by President-elect Obama.

Tomorrow, delegates from 190 countries will meet in Poznan, Poland, to pave the way for next year’s UN conference in Copenhagen at which the world will agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. They will see a video of Mr Obama, in only his second major policy commitment, pledging that America is now about to play the leading role in the fight to “save the planet” from global warming.

Mr Obama begins by saying that “the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”. “Sea levels,” he claims, “are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Far from the science being “beyond dispute”, we can only deduce from this that Mr Obama has believed all he was told by Al Gore’s wondrously batty film An Inconvenient Truth without bothering to check the facts. Each of these four statements is so wildly at odds with the truth that on this score alone we should be seriously worried. ...

Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a “federal cap and trade system”, a massive “carbon tax”, designed to reduce America’s CO2 emissions “to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050”. Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.

Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage “clean energy” sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing “18 gigawatts of installed capacity”, only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.

He talks blithely of allowing only “clean” coal-fired power plants, using “carbon capture” – burying the CO2 in holes in the ground – which would double the price of electricity, but the technology for which hasn’t even yet been developed. He then babbles on about “generating five million new green jobs”. This will presumably consist of hiring millions of Americans to generate power by running around on treadmills, to replace all those “dirty” coal-fired power stations which currently supply the US with half its electricity.

If this sounds like an elaborate economic suicide note, for what is still the earth’s richest nation, it is still not enough for many environmentalists. Positively foaming at the mouth in The Guardian last week, George Monbiot claimed that the plight of the planet is now so grave that even “sensible programmes of the kind Obama proposes are now irrelevant”. The only way to avert the “collapse of human civilisation”, according to the Great Moonbat, would be “the complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050”.

For 300 years science helped to turn Western civilisation into the richest and most comfortable the world has ever seen. Now it seems we have suddenly been plunged into a new age of superstition, where scientific evidence no longer counts for anything. The fact that America will soon be ruled by a man wholly under the spell of this post-scientific hysteria may leave us in wondering despair.

Read the whole thing.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a high percentage of the small number of pardons issued by George W. Bush so far have gone to ordinary people eager to regain the right to own firearms for sport or recreation.

On the surface, the list of the 14 people pardoned by the president this week shows few common denominators in terms of time served, geographic location or even type of crime, except that the felonies were non-violent. But a closer look at some of the newly pardoned shows many of them are church-going, blue-collar workers from rural areas (and ardent Bush supporters) who had little trouble finding jobs after their convictions. There is another common thread: the important role firearms once played in their lives.

President Bush has pardoned fewer people—171—than any president since World War II, with the exception of his father, who pardoned 74. Presidents don’t discuss their reasons for issuing pardons, with few exceptions. Nor do they tell petitioners why their wish was granted. The Justice Department’s “pardon attorney,” who reviews hundreds of petitions a year and recommends candidates to the president, had no comment.

Coincidentally or not, at least seven of the 14 pardoned on Monday are former hunters or shooting enthusiasts. In interviews, five of them said they wrote in their petitions to the government that a desire to win back the right to bear arms was a chief reason for wanting a pardon.

Joseph Epstein has taught for too many years to believe that conspicuous success in today’s elite universities is commonly a testament to good character. Au contraire, Epstein argues: “Some of the worst people in the United States have gone to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools.”

Last week the excellent David Brooks, in one of his columns in the New York Times, exulted over the high quality of people President-elect Barack Obama was enlisting in his new cabinet and onto his staff. The chief evidence for these people being so impressive, it turns out, is they all went to what the world—”that ignorant ninny,” as Henry James called it—thinks superior schools. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the London School of Economics; like dead flies on flypaper, the names of the schools Obama’s new appointees attended dotted Brooks’s column.

Here is the column’s first paragraph:

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

This administration will be, as Brooks writes, “a valedictocracy.” The assumption here is that having all these good students—many of them possibly “toll-frees,” as high-school students who get 800s on their SATs used to be known in admissions offices—running the country is obviously a pretty good thing. Brooks’s one jokey line in the column has it that “if a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.” Since my appreciation of David Brooks is considerable, and since I agree with him on so many things, why don’t I agree with him here?

The reason is that, after teaching at a university for 30 years, I have come to distrust the type I think of as “the good student.” ...

Read the whole thing.

Staff members of the Taj Motel Palace Hotel saved the lives of many guests, sometimes shielding them from bullets with their own bodies.

London Times:

They were heroes in cummerbunds and overalls. The staff of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel saved hundreds of wealthy guests as heavily armed gunmen roamed the building, firing indiscriminately, leaving a trail of corpses behind them.

Among the workers there were some whose bravery and sense of duty led them to sacrifice their own lives, witnesses said.

Prashant Mangeshikar, a guest, said that a hotel worker, identified only as Mr Rajan, had put himself between one of the gunmen and Mr Mangeshikar, his wife and two daughters.

“The man in front of my wife shielded us,” Mr Mangeshikar said. “He was a maintenance section staff member. He took the bullets.” For the next 12 hours, before Mr Rajan was finally taken out of the hotel, guests battled to stop the bleeding from a gaping bullet wound in his abdomen. It is not known if he lived.

Read the whole thing.

In the newly published Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, the authors argue that identifying cultural inferiority is not racism. Race and culture are not the same thing.

Joseph Quesnel, Winnipeg Sun:

Frances Widdowson, a political scientist, and Albert Howard, a former government and aboriginal group consultant, suggest that indigenous peoples did not exist at the same level of social and cultural development as Europeans when they first encountered each other. Even more controversially, they suggest many pre-modern characteristics of indigenous societies still exist in First Nation communities today and prevent them from integrating into modern society and succeeding.

This, they argue, is the problem confronting First Nations today: they need to catch up culturally.

Before one assumes this is a “racist” argument, one must understand there is a big difference between race and culture. All societies, including European ones, passed through periods of cultural evolution, which is determined by environmental factors, not biology. At one point, European societies were small, kinship-based societies just like indigenous peoples. Because they lacked surplus food production, First Nation societies did not enjoy the division of labour that European civilizations had at the time and did not have the sophisticated, literate society that grew out of that.

The failure to see obvious differences in civilizations, they argue, is part of the “post-modern” thinking dominating academia.

The problem as they see it is that well-intentioned academics, seeing the disadvantages First Nations face, feel guilty and as a result, never criticize First Nations, no matter how problematic some aspects of their cultures are for modern life.

“Alleged gunman” holding perfectly visible gun

John Hinderaker of Power-Line loses patience with the mealy-mouthed political correctness of the mainstream media.

The very same media which gleefully lynches opponents to the right, like George W. Bush or Sarah Palin, on the basis of its own trumped up charges has no enemies to the left, so any terrorist (even one captured in a photograph holding an automatic weapon in the midst of a murderous mass attack) is always only a potential suspect, someone whose status requires a full-scale courtroom procedure, and a complete professional defense, before it can possibly be pejoratively characterized.

Reuters’ caption for the photo begins: “A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station in Mumbai November 26, 2008.”

Notice the object the terrorist is holding in his hands. It’s a gun. He isn’t a “suspected gunman,” he’s a “gunman.”

José Guardia is blog-tracking events and has the best collected news links.

Day 3

First link collection

Everyone else is getting a bailout from Bushobama, why not Scrooge & Marley? The firm’s dramatic salary raises, benefit expansions, and a sudden wave of charitable contributions beginning just after the holidays last year have placed a serious strain on profitability just at the time mortgage securities came into question and world financial markets collapsed.

DOTPenn.com:

Officials from the Bush administration and members of president-elect Barack Obama’s economic team are finishing up a proposal to bail out the world’s biggest counting house, Scrooge & Marley.

Once a financial powerhouse with a sterling balance sheet, the firm has reportedly fallen into wasteful spending practices, heaping money on extra lumps of coal for the employee’s personal heater and providing a luxurious medical plan for the family of Scrooge & Marley’s number two man, Bob Cratchit.

Scrooge & Marley’s CEO and co-founder, Ebeneezer Scrooge, who oversaw a phenomenal runnup in the company’s worth, has seen his personal wealth and influence diminish following recent dismal business practices.

Derwood Umple, a financial analyst for CNBC’s Dickensian desk, said that while rents have lapsed, Scrooge also reportedly bet heavily in global sub-prime markets.

“He has several properties in the seedier sections of town,” Umple said. “Word on the street says his management practices have been minimal, at best, and he is either unable or unwilling to collect on loans and rents.”

In addition, Umple said federal authorities had been looking at Scrooge & Marley’s charitable contributions.

“It’s obviously a tax-reduction scam,” said Umple. “He was tossing money at every request from chubby charity men while government prisons and work houses have fallen into considerable state of disrepair.”

The top hat-wearing CEO hasn’t missed too much on the party scene, though. He was seen attending a holiday party at his nephew’s home shortly before the bailout announcement and making quite merry, paparazzi suggested.

Assyrian News Agency:

One thousand Christians were today (11/26) trapped inside the Coptic Orthodox Church of the Virgin Mary in West Ain Shams,Cairo, after more than twenty thousand Muslims attacked them with stones and butane gas cylinders. The Church’s priest Father Antonious said that the situation is extremely dangerous.

The Muslim mob that attacked the church blocked both sides of the street and encircled the church building, broke its doors and demolished its entire first floor. The mob were chanting Jihad verses as well as slogans saying “we will demolish the church” and “We sacrifice our blood and souls, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Islam”, while the entrapped Christians chanted “Lord have mercy”.

The incident started on the occasion of the inauguration of the Church today, when the Muslims hastily established a Mosque in the early hours of this morning, by taking over the first floor of a newly-built building facing the Church and started praying there.

When the security forces tried to disperse the mob, they went to nearby homes and shops owned by Christians, and were armed with sticks, butane, knives and other sharp objects. Witnesses said the mob included children from as young as 8-years old to men of over 50-years old, in addition to women.

The Church building was originally a factory that was adapted into its present state, the matter which took over five years to complete and to get the necessary permissions from the authorities to have a Church established.

Human rights organizations and lawyers were refused entry into the besieged Church.

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In response to all this, the head of the Coptic Church ordered Christians to stop praying in the converted site.

Christian Post:

The Coptic Pope Shenuda III barred Egyptian Christians from praying in a church building in Cairo Tuesday after sectarian violence broke out this past weekend over the building’s use as a Christian prayer hall.

At least eight men were arrested on Sunday night when Muslims clashed with Coptic Christians in the neighborhood of Ein Shams to protest the use of the property for prayer, according to state news agency MENA.

Muslims reportedly threw stones and burned two cars during the riot.

In response to the clash, Pope Shenuda III ordered Copts to cease praying in the church-owned building that was previously an unused factory.

Following the clash, Copts complained about the unfair law that requires them to be granted presidential permission before building a church or expanding an existing church. The authorization is difficult to near impossible to get and many Christians feel the law exists only to oppress the Christian minority community in a country where 90 percent or more of the population is Muslim.

A contemporary reenactment portrays Reverend Robert Hunt leading the first settlers in prayers after coming ashore on May 13, 1607.

The Christian Broadcasting Network relocates the holiday’s origin to a more deserving locale.

In 1619, two years before the colonists arrived in Massachusetts, a band of English settlers landed in Virginia, at what is now known as the Berkeley plantation. History says the travelers immediately fell to their knees to thank God for their safe arrival. Here is a closer look at the role these settlers had in shaping what we know today as Thanksgiving.

Most people think of the Pilgrims on Thanksgiving day: 1622, the Mayflower, Squanto and his tribe sharing a feast with the Puritans at Plymouth Rock.

But the children at Stonebridge School in Virginia present a different picture. With colonial hats and feathered headbands, these children re-enact what it must have been like back in the 1600s, marking the events surrounding the first Thanksgiving at a very different time and place.

It all began on the shores of Cape Henry in Virginia. In 1607, the first English colonists arrived: 105 English men and boys, and 39 sailors, among them the Reverend Robert Hunt. He was the first minister in America. According to Jamestown site historian, Dianne Stallings, he was instrumental in establishing the protestant faith in the new world.

Following a mandate from the king of England, Hunt pitched a cross and led the men in prayer on the beaches of Cape Henry.

“Reverend Hunt would have had the Book of Common Prayer as well as the Bible,” says Stallings. “And this would be a general prayer of thanksgiving that would have been read at that period of time.”

Titled simply, the “General Thanksgiving”, this prayer, in one of it’s various versions , reads as follows:

“Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men.

We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.”

For two weeks the men combed the shores of the James River, scouting out the perfect place for their new settlement. Finally they decided on Jamestown.

And according to Stallings, the settlers came for three reasons: God, glory, and gold.

“England was very concerned that the protestant faith be established in the new world, and, of course, they were dedicated to the fact that they wanted to Christianize the Indians,” she says.

Perhaps the most famous Indian at the settlement was Pocahontas. Through her the Powhatan Indians and the colonists made peace. She would bring the colonists food, and some historical accounts say she even saved Captain John Smith’s life from her own people. Eventually, Pocahontas was held hostage by the colonists. It was then that she converted to Christianity and married one of the Jamestown leaders, John Rolfe. She was baptized into the Christian name, Rebecca.

Through Pocahontas, the settlers saw their goal of spreading the protestant faith begin to come to fruition. Years later she returned to England with her husband. Sadly, at just 22 years old, she died. It was two years after Pocahontas’ death that another group of English colonists landed in Virginia. After ten weeks at sea, they finally landed here at the Berkeley Plantation. Virginia Historians claim that this is where the real first Thanksgiving took place. The plantation sits just a few miles from the original Jamestown settlement.

“The Virginia Company had directives given to the settlers and the directives were that upon landing, they were to give thanks and every year thereafter make it an annual celebration in thanks to the Lord for a safe passage,” says Barbara Awad, president of the Virginia Thanksgiving Festival.

This was about seventeen months before the pilgrims landed in Plymouth. And while the Pilgrims celebrated with a feast, much like the traditional meal Americans eat on Thanksgiving, the settlers at Berkeley Plantation had a meager meal.

“It wasn’t quite the abundant festival, the cornucopia that we usually see on Thanksgiving,” says Awad.

Historians say their feast included bacon, peas, cornmeal cakes, and cinnamon water. But regardless of the menu, to these settlers, the first Thanksgiving was much more than turkey and pumpkin pie. It was all about prayer.

Mike Franc, at Human Events in 2005, identified the real reason for celebration at the first Thanksgiving.

Writing in his diary of the dire economic straits and self-destructive behavior that consumed his fellow Puritans shortly after their arrival, Governor William Bradford painted a picture of destitute settlers selling their clothes and bed coverings for food while others “became servants to the Indians,” cutting wood and fetching water in exchange for “a capful of corn.” The most desperate among them starved, with Bradford recounting how one settler, in gathering shellfish along the shore, “was so weak … he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.”

The colony’s leaders identified the source of their problem as a particularly vile form of what Bradford called “communism.” Property in Plymouth Colony, he observed, was communally owned and cultivated. This system (“taking away of property and bringing [it] into a commonwealth”) bred “confusion and discontent” and “retarded much employment that would have been to [the settlers’] benefit and comfort.”

Just how did the Pilgrims solve the problem of famine? In addition to receiving help from the local Indians in farming, they decided allow the private ownership of individual plots of land.

On the brink of extermination, the Colony’s leaders changed course and allotted a parcel of land to each settler, hoping the private ownership of farmland would encourage self-sufficiency and lead to the cultivation of more corn and other foodstuffs.

As Adam Smith would have predicted, this new system worked famously. “This had very good success,” Bradford reported, “for it made all hands very industrious.” In fact, “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been” and productivity increased. “Women,” for example, “went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn.”

The famine that nearly wiped out the Pilgrims in 1623 gave way to a period of agricultural abundance that enabled the Massachusetts settlers to set down permanent roots in the New World, prosper, and play an indispensable role in the ultimate success of the American experiment.

A profoundly religious man, Bradford saw the hand of God in the Pilgrims’ economic recovery. Their success, he observed, “may well evince the vanity of that conceit…that the taking away of property… would make [men] happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.” Bradford surmised, “God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

The real story of Thanksgiving is the triumph of capitalism and individualism over collectivism and socialism, which is the summation of the story of America.

Where Massachusetts goes, California follows.

KABC-TV:

There is a costume controversy in Claremont. The school board changed a decades-long tradition of students dressing up to celebrate Thanksgiving, and some parents are outraged.

The tradition involves kindergarten students at Mountain View and Condit elementary schools. The kids usually dress up in costumes. Each school takes turns dressing up as pilgrims and Indians, and then join together for a Thanksgiving feast.

This year, however, there is a big change. The school board decided to continue holding the feast, but they are not allowing the students to dress up. The board is concerned the Indian costumes may have negative connotations.

“Out of respect for the native American heritage, we have made the decision to ask the children not to dress up,” said Devon Freitas, assistant superintendent for human services, Claremont Unified School District.

That decision has infuriated many parents. Some of them have ignored the school board and dressed their kids up anyway.

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Wilson Bradshaw, President of Florida Gulf Coast University, evidently did not like being the subject of nationwide negative news coverage, so he is explaining, that though the problem is that we misunderstood his noble purposes, he feels obliged to bow to our confusion and reverse his decision.

My Fox Tampa Bay

FGCU’s president reversed his decision to ban Christmas decorations.

In an e-mail message sent to the campus Wednesday, university president Wilson Bradshaw, Ph.D. acknowledged the “overwhelming negative response” to his original letter banning all holiday and seasonal decorations from the school’s common areas, citing “legal limitations.”

“It is now clear to me that we have erred in our attempt to find a balance between how best to observe the season in ways that honor all traditions – while also allowing employees to express their individual beliefs during the upcoming holiday season,” Dr. Bradshaw wrote. “As stated in my earlier message, there was no attempt to suppress expression of the holiday spirit. However, the message was received differently, and for this, I am sorry.”

Original story

“Plimoth” Plantation advertises itself as portraying:

Plymouth as it was in the 17th century

Native Wampanoag and Colonial English men and women living their lives, as if it were the 1620s. It is living off the land. It is cooking over the fire. It is managing conflict and navigating political relations in an uncertain time. See it, smell it, hear it and experience it here.

That experience is complete with 21st century political correctness doled out by professional “Native Americans,” the kind of people who leave suburban split levels, not wikiyups, get into automobiles, not onto ponies, and go out to work as administrators in non-profit organizations equipped with degrees from state universities, rather than hoeing corn.

The guy who used to mow my yard in Connecticut also had three hundred year old New England descent, but he didn’t make his living on the strength of it or parade grievances about the cruel Episcopalians whose remote ancestors made England disagreeable enough for his Puritan forbears to feel obliged to emigrate to the New England wilderness.

CNS News:

A nine-year-old girl was recently asked to remove her “Indian” costume before entering the Wampanoag Homesite of the Plimoth Plantation, a historical site that allows visitors to experience Plymouth, Mass., as it was in the 17th century.

The outdoor museum features a 1627 English village beside a Wampanoag home site. The purpose of the museum is to educate visitors (school-children and adults) about what happened between the Native Americans and the colonists, especially during the first Thanksgiving.

The nine-year-old was one of thousands who flock to the colonial museum during the Thanksgiving season. She dressed as an Indian and her friend dressed as a pilgrim to celebrate the occasion.

Linda Coombs, associate director of the Wampanoag Indigenous Program, asked the girl to remove her homemade beaded costume before visiting the site, reducing the child to tears and upsetting her mother, the Boston Globe reported on Nov. 24.

“Native people find it offensive when they see a non-native person dressed up and playing Indian. It’s perceived as us being made fun of,” Coombs told CNSNews.com.

Coombs said she understands it was not the girl’s intention to be offensive – that she was only trying to “honor the Indians.”

“I could see that she’d put a lot of effort into making this dress and that it meant something to her … I could see by taking this dress off, I was dashing this whole thing that was going on in her mind,” Coombs said.

So she gave her a necklace from the gift shop in exchange.

“I wanted to acknowledge that she was giving up something that meant something to her and that I could appreciate everything she was feeling,” said Coombs. “Typically, in our culture, you give something away to show you appreciate what someone else has given up. And I wanted to mark that moment with her.”

Coombs said good intentions do not matter because she and the other Native staff members perceive the costumes as mockery before the wearer has a chance to explain his or her intent.

“Costumes are offensive because of what has happened in history – the Hollywood pseudo Indians, the Italian actors playing Indians, the crappy dress they put them in, the Halloween costumes. When other people dress up as Native people it’s offensive, period,” Coombs said.

She compared people wearing Native American costumes to white entertainers who put on blackface in old minstrel shows.

The first episode of the classic first person shooter game can be played via browser. The old game software won’t run on the operating systems we use today.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Demonstrating once again the American propensity to entrust the education of the young to society’s biggest fools, the eminent Wilson G. Bradshaw, president of Florida Gulf Coast University, struck a blow recently for “diversity” by issuing a proclamation banning public acknowledgment of Christmas.

Fort Myers News-Press:

Christmas is just 30 days away, but Santa Claus won’t be stopping by Florida Gulf Coast University this holiday.

He’s not allowed on campus.

FGCU administration has banned all holiday decorations from common spaces on campus and canceled a popular greeting card design contest, which is being replaced by an ugly sweater competition. In Griffin Hall, the university’s giving tree for needy preschoolers has been transformed into a “giving garden.”

The moves boil down to political correctness.

“Public institutions, including FGCU, often struggle with how best to observe the season in ways that honor and respect all traditions,” President Wilson Bradshaw wrote in a memo to faculty and staff Thursday. “This is a challenging issue each year at FGCU, and 2008 is no exception. While it may appear at times that a vocal majority of opinion is the only view that is held, this is not always the case.”

The ineffable Wilson G. Bradshaw’s Holiday proclamation. .pdf
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UPDATE

11/27: Policy reversed.

Dick Morris still bears a major animus toward the Clintons as the result of his inglorious and involuntary departure from Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign (in connection with an indiscretion on Morris’s part involving a prostitute), so he is not at all pleased to see Obama cozying up to the Clintons and loading up his administration with former Clinton staffers. Good vituperation.

Having upended the Democratic Party, largely over his different views on foreign policy and the war in Iraq, he now turns to the leader of the ancient regime he ousted, derided, mocked, and criticized to take over the top international-affairs position in his administration.

No longer, apparently, does he distrust Hillary’s “judgment,” as he did during the debates when he denounced her vote on the Iraq war resolution. Now, all is forgiven. After everything Obama says he stood for, the only change he apparently truly believes in is a fait accompli.

Apart from the breathtaking cynicism of the appointment lies the total lack of foreign-policy experience in the new partnership. Neither Clinton nor Obama has spent five minutes conducting any aspect of foreign policy in the past.

Neither has ever negotiated anything or dealt with diplomatic issues. It is the blonde leading the blind.

And then there is the question of whether we want a secretary of state who is compromised, in advance, by her husband’s dealings with repressive regimes in Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Dubai, the U.A.E., Morocco, and governments about which we know nothing.

These foreign leaders have paid the Clinton family millions of dollars — directly and through the Clintons’ library and/or foundation — funds they can and have used as personal income.

How do we know that she can conduct foreign policy independently even if it means biting those who have fed her and her husband? But the most galling aspect of the appointment is that it puts Obama in the midst of an administration that, while he appointed it, is not his own.

Rather, he has now created a government staffed by Clinton people, headed by Clinton appointees, and dominated by Hillary herself. He has willingly created the same untenable situation as that into which Lyndon Johnson stepped when JFK was assassinated in 1963.

Johnson inherited a Cabinet wholly staffed by Kennedy intimates with Bobby himself as attorney general.

LBJ had no choice and had to spend two years making the government his own. But Obama had all the options in the world and chose to fence himself in by appointing Hillary as secretary of state, Clinton Cabinet member Bill Richardson for Commerce, Clinton staffer Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff, Clinton buddy (and top lobbyist) Tom Daschle to HHS, and Bill’s deputy attorney general, Eric Holder, to Justice. ...

Not since William Jennings Bryan in the 1910s have we had a defeated nominee named as secretary. Obama will not be able to control Hillary nor will he be able to control his own administration with Emanuel as chief of staff. He will find that his appointees will march to the beat of their own drummer — if he is lucky — and Hillary’s if he is not.

Either Obama has chosen to put himself in this untenable situation because he is not wise in the ways of Washington or because he plans to be little more than a figurehead. Given his campaign, neither seems likely. But his promise of change has proven so bankrupt that maybe the rest of his candidacy is too.

The Telegraph reports a continental example of the kind of robust European racial humor that would be completely unacceptable in the politically correct United States.

In an episode that could potentially strain relations between Warsaw and Washington, Radek Sikorski, an Oxford-educated politician who has lived in the US, was reported to have made the jibe by an opposition politician, Ryszard Czarnecki.

Writing in his blog, Mr Czarnecki, an MEP, quoted the foreign minister as saying: “Have you heard that Obama may have a Polish connection? His grandfather ate a Polish missionary.”

A Nokia commercial.

1:16 video

Stratfor’s George Friedman notes Obama’s moves toward the center, admires the duplicity with with Obama campaigned, and argues that Obama is safe moving toward the right in hope of building a larger coalition of support, because, after all, his radical leftist base has nowhere else to go.

I would say that Friedman is right, but only up to a very limited point and for only a very limited period of time. It doesn’t matter that the radical leftwing base has nowhere else to go. If Obama seriously disappoints them, if they conclude that he isn’t really on their side, if they decide that he has betrayed some crucial ideological test or shibboleth, they will turn on him in exactly the way the left turned on Lyndon Johnson.

Over the past two weeks, Obama has begun to reveal his appointments. It will be Hillary Clinton at State and Timothy Geithner at Treasury. According to persistent rumors, current Defense Secretary Robert Gates might be asked to stay on. The national security adviser has not been announced, but rumors have the post going to former Clinton administration appointees or to former military people. Interestingly and revealingly, it was made very public that Obama has met with Brent Scowcroft to discuss foreign policy. Scowcroft was national security adviser under President George H.W. Bush, and while a critic of the younger Bush’s policies in Iraq from the beginning, he is very much part of the foreign policy establishment and on the non-neoconservative right. That Obama met with Scowcroft, and that this was deliberately publicized, is a signal — and Obama understands political signals — that he will be conducting foreign policy from the center. ...

This does not surprise us. As we have written previously, when Obama’s precise statements and position papers were examined with care, the distance between his policies and John McCain’s actually was minimal. McCain tacked with the Bush administration’s position on Iraq — which had shifted, by the summer of this year, to withdrawal at the earliest possible moment but without a public guarantee of the date. Obama’s position was a complete withdrawal by the summer of 2010, with the proviso that unexpected changes in the situation on the ground could make that date flexible.

Obama supporters believed that Obama’s position on Iraq was profoundly at odds with the Bush administration’s. We could never clearly locate the difference. The brilliance of Obama’s presidential campaign was that he convinced his hard-core supporters that he intended to make a radical shift in policies across the board, without ever specifying what policies he was planning to shift, and never locking out the possibility of a flexible interpretation of his commitments. His supporters heard what they wanted to hear while a careful reading of the language, written and spoken, gave Obama extensive room for maneuver. Obama’s campaign was a master class on mobilizing support in an election without locking oneself into specific policies. ...

Presidents are not as powerful as they are often imagined to be. Apart from institutional constraints, presidents must constantly deal with public opinion. Congress is watching the polls, as all of the representatives and a third of the senators will be running for re-election in two years. No matter how many Democrats are in Congress, their first loyalty is to their own careers, and collapsing public opinion polls for a Democratic president can destroy them. Knowing this, they have a strong incentive to oppose an unpopular president — even one from their own party — or they might be replaced with others who will oppose him. If Obama wants to be powerful, he must keep Congress on his side, and that means he must keep his numbers up. He is undoubtedly getting the honeymoon bounce now. He needs to hold that.

Obama appears to understand this problem clearly. It would take a very small shift in public opinion polls after the election to put him on the defensive, and any substantial mistakes could sink his approval rating into the low 40s. George W. Bush’s basic political mistake in 2004 was not understanding how thin his margin was. He took his election as vindication of his Iraq policy, without understanding how rapidly his mandate could transform itself in a profound reversal of public opinion. Having very little margin in his public opinion polls, Bush doubled down on his Iraq policy. When that failed to pay off, he ended up with a failed presidency.

Bush was not expecting that to happen, and Obama does not expect it for himself. Obama, however, has drawn the obvious conclusion that what he expects and what might happen are two different things. Therefore, unlike Bush, he appears to be trying to expand his approval ratings as his first priority, in order to give himself room for maneuver later. Everything we see in his first two weeks of shaping his presidency seems to be designed two do two things: increase his standing in the Democratic Party, and try to bring some of those who voted against him into his coalition.

In looking at Obama’s supporters, we can divide them into two blocs. The first and largest comprises those who were won over by his persona; they supported Obama because of who he was, rather than because of any particular policy position or because of his ideology in anything more than a general sense. There was then a smaller group of supporters who backed Obama for ideological reasons, built around specific policies they believed he advocated. Obama seems to think, reasonably in our view, that the first group will remain faithful for an extended period of time so long as he maintains the aura he cultivated during his campaign, regardless of his early policy moves. The second group, as is usually the case with the ideological/policy faction in a party, will stay with Obama because they have nowhere else to go — or if they turn away, they will not be able to form a faction that threatens his position.

Read the whole thing.

Military.com:

Farah Province, Afghanistan — In the city of Shewan, approximately 250 insurgents ambushed 30 Marines and paid a heavy price for it.

Shewan has historically been a safe haven for insurgents, who used to plan and stage attacks against Coalition Forces in the Bala Baluk district. ...

“The day started out with a 10-kilometer patrol with elements mounted and dismounted, so by the time we got to Shewan, we were pretty beat,” said a designated marksman who requested to remain unidentified. “Our vehicles came under a barrage of enemy RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) and machine gun fire. One of our ‘humvees’ was disabled from RPG fire, and the Marines inside dismounted and laid down suppression fire so they could evacuate a Marine who was knocked unconscious from the blast.”

The vicious attack that left the humvee destroyed and several of the Marines pinned down in the kill zone sparked an intense eight-hour battle as the platoon desperately fought to recover their comrades. After recovering the Marines trapped in the kill zone, another platoon sergeant personally led numerous attacks on enemy fortified positions while the platoon fought house to house and trench to trench in order to clear through the enemy ambush site.

“The biggest thing to take from that day is what Marines can accomplish when they’re given the opportunity to fight,” the sniper said. “A small group of Marines met a numerically superior force and embarrassed them in their own backyard. The insurgents told the townspeople that they were stronger than the Americans, and that day we showed them they were wrong.”

During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy fighters with his devastatingly accurate precision fire. He selflessly exposed himself time and again to intense enemy fire during a critical point in the eight-hour battle for Shewan in order to kill any enemy combatants who attempted to engage or maneuver on the Marines in the kill zone. What made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn’t miss any shots, despite the enemies’ rounds impacting within a foot of his fighting position.

“I was in my own little world,” the young corporal said. “I wasn’t even aware of a lot of the rounds impacting near my position, because I was concentrating so hard on making sure my rounds were on target.”

After calling for close-air support, the small group of Marines pushed forward and broke the enemies’ spirit as many of them dropped their weapons and fled the battlefield. At the end of the battle, the Marines had reduced an enemy stronghold, killed more than 50 insurgents and wounded several more.

“I didn’t realize how many bad guys there were until we had broken through the enemies’ lines and forced them to retreat. It was roughly 250 insurgents against 30 of us,” the corporal said. “It was a good day for the Marine Corps. We killed a lot of bad guys, and none of our guys were seriously injured.”

Let’s see, Bush’s war policy was wrong, because sophisticated people knew that al Qaeda is a Sunni organization, and neither secular Ba’athists, like Saddam Hussein, nor Shiites, like the mullahs controlling Iran, would ever under any circumstance cooperate with or assist al Qaeda.

The Telegraph:

Fresh links between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and al-Qaeda have been uncovered following interception of a letter from the terrorist leadership that hails Tehran’s support for a recent attack on the American embassy in Yemen, which killed 16 people.

Delivery of the letter exposed the rising role of Saad bin Laden, son of the al-Qaeda leader, Osama as an intermediary between the organisation and Iran. Saad bin Laden has been living in Iran since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, apparently under house arrest.

The letter, which was signed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second in command, was written after the American embassy in Yemen was attacked by simultaneous suicide car bombs in September.

Western security officials said the missive thanked the leadership of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards for providing assistance to al-Qaeda to set up its terrorist network in Yemen, which has suffered ten al-Qaeda-related terror attacks in the past year, including two bomb attacks against the American embassy.

In the letter al-Qaeda’s leadership pays tribute to Iran’s generosity, stating that without its “monetary and infrastructure assistance” it would have not been possible for the group to carry out the terror attacks. It also thanked Iran for having the “vision” to help the terror organisation establish new bases in Yemen after al-Qaeda was forced to abandon much of its terrorist infrastructure in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

There has been intense speculation about the level of Iranian support for al-Qaeda since the 9/11 Commission report into al-Qaeda’s terror attacks against the U.S. in 2001 concluded that Iran had provided safe passage for many of the 9/11 hijackers travelling between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia prior to the attacks.

Scores of senior al Qaeda activists – including Saad bin Laden – sought sanctuary in Iran following the overthrow of the Taliban, and have remained in Tehran ever since. The activities of Saad bin Laden, 29, have been a source of Western concern despite Tehran’s assurances that he is under official confinement.

But Iran was a key transit route for al Qaeda loyalists moving between battlefields in the Middle East and Asia. Western security officials have also concluded Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have supported al-Qaeda terror cells, despite religious divisions between Iran’s Shia Muslim revolutionaries and the Sunni Muslim terrorists.

Rather than toning the bitter partisanship that divides the nation as he promised during the campaign, Barack Obama is issuing a new mobilization order to the activist faithful. The obvious conclusion is that the new administration’s legislative agenda will be backed by organized campaigns of activist agitation at state and local levels throughout the country.

McClatchy:

President-elect Barack Obama’s 3 million campaign volunteers got re-enlistment notices this week.

Campaign manager David Plouffe, in a mass e-mail sent Wednesday to former workers, asked how much time they can spare for four missions integral to Obama’s effort to transform his victory into a broader political movement. ...

“Obama’s building a political machine,” said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington research group.

Built in 1901, and currently in considerable disrepair, this walkway, called El Caminito del Rey, serves as an entrance to Makinodromo, the famous climbing sector of El Chorro in Spanish Andalusia.

Wikipedia:

The walkway has now gone many years without maintenance, and is in a highly deteriorated and dangerous state. It is one meter (3 feet and 3 inches) in width, and is over 200 meters (700 feet) above the river. Nearly all of the path has no handrail. Some parts of the concrete walkway have completely collapsed and all that is remaining is the steel beam originally in place to hold it up and the wire that follows most of the path. One can latch onto a safety-wire to keep from falling. Several people have lost their lives on the walkway in recent years; after four people died in two accidents in 1999 and 2000, the local government closed the entrances. However, adventurous tourists still find their way onto the walkway to explore it.

The regional government of Andalusia budgeted in 2006 for a restoration plan estimated at € 7 million.

6:26 video.

The NRA’s Armed Citizen column in American Rifleman has for many years published accounts of successful cases of self defense with firearms. But how often do you read a story of someone defending his home with a samurai sword?

Muncie Star Press:

Muncie man is in jail with samurai sword injuries after allegedly breaking into another man’s home to get his wife back.

Joseph M. Hartman, 28, and his friends Bobby Joe Overbay, 18, and Matthew Michail Wilson, 23, all from Muncie, broke into the home of Jessy Mann, 26, 1910 S. May Ave., early Saturday morning to “take Hartman’s estranged wife by force,” according to the Muncie Police Department.

In a telephone interview on Saturday, Mann gave this version of the incident:

The three men knocked at the door and refused to leave when Mann asked them to do so. Then they entered the home and began throwing objects at him, including an alarm clock and furniture. Mann grabbed a collectible sword to defend himself and swung at the three men, hitting Hartman in the head and chest and Overbay in the forehead.

“It was crazy,” Mann said. “It was like something you would see in a movie.”

At one point, Mann said Hartman found his wife, from whom he is separated, in the bedroom calling the police, and he grabbed her by the hair.

“They were saying ‘Just let us take her, just let us take her.’ I was like ‘You ain’t taking nobody from my house,” Mann said.

Hartman and his friends left the home without his wife. Before fleeing, they got into a Jeep Cherokee and ran into the house three times and then drove away.

The police arrested the suspects and took them to Ball Memorial Hospital before booking them into the Delaware County Jail with no bond. ...

Mann said he never intended to use the sword as a weapon and he was glad no one was killed.

“I just like swords,” he said. “I just have them around for novelty. I never expected I’d have to do some crazy stuff like that.”

It’s sad that we had to lose this year, but conservatives and Republicans can console themselves with Barack Obama’s unhappy prospects based upon the irreconcilable dilemma facing his presidency.

If he takes a thoroughly “progressive” course, agreeable to the democrat party’s leftwing base, he will assuredly produce economic calamity domestically and US humiliation in foreign affairs à la Carter, and he will then have a snowball’s chance in Hell of being re-elected.

On the other hand, if he tacks to the center, he will bitterly disappoint that extremist and highly volatile leftist base, which will turn upon him like the Furies, ultimately over time bringing into active and hostile opposition both the media and the community of fashion. In that case, like Lyndon Johnson, he will become a discredited, failed, and reviled president, unable to defeat primary challenges from the left, and not even able to run for a second term.

Will it be Door 1 or Door 2, President Obama?

As the Telegraph reports, his appointments of supporters of the war in Iraq signal a centrist direction, and the natives at Daily Kos are already becoming restless.

Mr Obama has moved quickly in the last 48 hours to get his cabinet team in place, unveiling a raft of heavyweight appointments, in addition to Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State.

But his preference for General James Jones, a former Nato commander who backed John McCain, as his National Security Adviser and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a supporter of the war, to run the Homeland Security department has dismayed many of his earliest supporters.

The likelihood that Mr Obama will retain George W Bush’s Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, has reinforced the notion that he will not aggressively pursue the radical withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq over the next 16 months and engagement with rogue states that he has pledged.

Chris Bowers of the influential OpenLeft.com blog complained: “That is, over all, a centre-right foreign policy team. I feel incredibly frustrated. Progressives are being entirely left out of Obama’s major appointments so far.”

Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos site, the in-house talking shop for the anti-war Left, warned that Democrats risk sounding “tone deaf” to the views of “the American electorate that voted in overwhelming numbers for change from the discredited Bush policies.”

A spokesman for the President-elect was forced to confirm that Mr Obama holds to his previous views. “His position on Iraq has not changed and will not change.”

But the growing disillusionment underlines the fine line Mr Obama must walk between appearing to reach out to former opponents and keeping his grassroot supporters happy.

Libertarian Randall Hoven, at American Thinker, sticks up for the social conservative trads.

I agree with him. The threat to liberty these days is not coming from bible thumpers. It’s coming from bien pensant liberals.

Social conservatism is taking a beating lately. Not only did it lose in the recent elections, it is being blamed for the Republican losses. If only the religious right would get off the Republican party’s back, the GOP could win like it is supposed to again. I beg to differ.

I’m anything but a social conservative. In nine presidential elections, I voted Libertarian in six. I am a hard core “limited government” conservative/libertarian; I want government out of my pocket-book and out of my bedroom. Concerning my religion, it’s none of your business, but I’m somewhere in the lapsed-Catholic-deist-agnostic-atheist spectrum; let’s just call it agnostic.

Having said all that, I have no problem with “social conservatives” or the “religious right” and their supposed influence on the Republican party. I base this not on the Bible or historical authority, but on the love of liberty and the evidence of my own eyes.

Who are the true liberty killers?

The most obvious point to me is that it is the do-gooding liberals who are telling us all what we can and can’t do. The religious right usually just wants to be left alone, either to home school, pray in public or not get their children vaccinated with who-knows-what. Inasmuch as the “religious right” wants some things outlawed, they have failed miserably for at least the last 50 years. Abortion, sodomy, and pornography are now all Constitutional rights. However, praying in public school is outlawed, based on that same Constitution.

Just think for a moment about the things you are actually forced to do or are prevented from doing. Seat belts. Motorcycle helmets. Bicycle helmets. Smoking. Gun purchase and ownership restrictions. Mandatory vaccines for your children. Car emissions inspections. Campaign ad and contribution restrictions. Saying a prayer at a public school graduation or football game. Trash separation and recycling. Keeping the money you earned. Gas tax. Telephone tax. Income tax. FICA withholding. Fill in this form. Provide ID.

For the most part, the list just cited is post-1960. Neither Pat Robertson nor James Dobson ever forced any of that on us.

General Kevin Chilton, in the Wall Street Journal, has alarming news about the state of America’s nuclear arsenal. Two American presidential administrations have responded to the end of the Cold War by completely abandoning the modernization and replenishment of the US stockpile of nuclear weapons.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. nuclear weapons program has suffered from neglect. Warheads are old. There’s been no new warhead design since the 1980s, and the last time one was tested was 1992, when the U.S. unilaterally stopped testing. Gen. Chilton, who heads U.S. Strategic Command, has been sounding the alarm, as has Defense Secretary Robert Gates. So far few seem to be listening.

The U.S. is alone among the five declared nuclear nations in not modernizing its arsenal. The U.K. and France are both doing so. Ditto China and Russia. “We’re the only ones who aren’t,” Gen. Chilton says. Congress has refused to fund the Department of Energy’s Reliable Replacement Warhead program beyond the concept stage and this year it cut funding even for that. ...

“We’ve done a pretty good job of maintaining our delivery platforms,” the general says, by which he means submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles and intercontinental bombers. But nuclear warheads are a different story. They are Cold War legacies, he says, “designed for about a 15- to 20-year life.” That worked fine back when “we had a very robust infrastructure . . . that replenished those families of weapons at regular intervals.” Now, however, “they’re all older than 20 years . . . . The analogy would be trying to extend the life of your ‘57 Chevrolet into the 21st century.”

Gen. Chilton pulls out a prop to illustrate his point: a glass bulb about two inches high. “This is a component of a V-61” nuclear warhead, he says. It was in “one of our gravity weapons”—a weapon from the 1950s and ‘60s that is still in the U.S. arsenal. He pauses to look around the Journal’s conference table. “I remember what these things were for. I bet you don’t. It’s a vacuum tube. My father used to take these out of the television set in the 1950s and ‘60s down to the local supermarket to test them and replace them.”

And here comes the punch line: “This is the technology that we have . . . today.” ...

The general stresses the need to “revitalize” the infrastructure for producing nuclear weapons. The U.S. hasn’t built a nuclear weapon in more than two decades and the manufacturing infrastructure has disappeared. The U.S. today “has no nuclear weapon production capacity,” he says flatly. “We can produce a handful of weapons in a laboratory but we’ve taken down the manufacturing capability.” At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. produced 3,000 weapons a year. ...

these already-old weapons aren’t going to last forever, and part of the general’s job is to prepare for their refurbishing or replacement. “Think about what it’s going to take to recapitalize or replace those 2,000 weapons over a period of time. . . . If you could do 10 a year, it takes you 200 years. If you build an infrastructure that would allow you to do 100 a year, then you could envision recapitalizing that over a 20-year-period.”

There’s also the issue of human capital, which is graying. It’s “every bit as important as the aging of the weapon systems,” the general says. “The last individual to have worked on an actual nuclear test in this country, the last scientist or engineer, will have retired or passed on in the next five years.” The younger generation has no practical experience with designing or building nuclear warheads.

Read the whole thing.

Socialized medicine is just like heroin: it creates a dependency that’s very difficult to give up. James Pethokoukis explains that Tom Daschle and the democrat party want to be your connection.

As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of “Marxist thought,” puts it: “After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments.”

Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: “Blocking Obama’s health plan is key to the GOP’s survival.”

Michael Lewis, author of the Wall Street memoir Liar’s Poker, tells the story of some hedge fund guys who saw the handwriting on the subprime mortgage bond wall in time to bet on the side of reality, and how the investment banks even helped them place those bets.

There’s a simple measure of sanity in housing prices: the ratio of median home price to income. Historically, it runs around 3 to 1; by late 2004, it had risen nationally to 4 to 1. “All these people were saying it was nearly as high in some other countries,” Zelman (housing-market analyst at Credit Suisse), says. “But the problem wasn’t just that it was 4 to 1. In Los Angeles, it was 10 to 1, and in Miami, 8.5 to 1. And then you coupled that with the buyers. They weren’t real buyers. They were speculators.”...

By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds. Eisman couldn’t understand who was making all these loans or why. He had a from-the-ground-up understanding of both the U.S. housing market and Wall Street. But he’d spent his life in the stock market, and it was clear that the stock market was, in this story, largely irrelevant. “What most people don’t realize is that the fixed-income world dwarfs the equity world,” he says. “The equity world is like a fucking zit compared with the bond market.” He shorted companies that originated subprime loans, like New Century and Indy Mac, and companies that built the houses bought with the loans, such as Toll Brothers. Smart as these trades proved to be, they weren’t entirely satisfying. These companies paid high dividends, and their shares were often expensive to borrow; selling them short was a costly proposition.

Enter Greg Lippman, a mortgage-bond trader at Deutsche Bank. He arrived at FrontPoint bearing a 66-page presentation that described a better way for the fund to put its view of both Wall Street and the U.S. housing market into action. The smart trade, Lippman argued, was to sell short not New Century’s stock but its bonds that were backed by the subprime loans it had made. Eisman hadn’t known this was even possible—because until recently, it hadn’t been. But Lippman, along with traders at other Wall Street investment banks, had created a way to short the subprime bond market with precision. ...

The big Wall Street firms had just made it possible to short even the tiniest and most obscure subprime-mortgage-backed bond by creating, in effect, a market of side bets. Instead of shorting the actual BBB bond, you could now enter into an agreement for a credit-default swap with Deutsche Bank or Goldman Sachs. It cost money to make this side bet, but nothing like what it cost to short the stocks, and the upside was far greater.

The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy football bears to the N.F.L. Eisman was perplexed in particular about why Wall Street firms would be coming to him and asking him to sell short. “What Lippman did, to his credit, was he came around several times to me and said, ‘Short this market,’ ” Eisman says. “In my entire life, I never saw a sell-side guy come in and say, ‘Short my market.’” ...

Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

Essentially, it was in nobody’s interest, except for FrontPoint Partners, of course, to look at the subprime lending business realistically. So no one did.

Read the whole thing.
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Hat tip to Karen l. Myers.

Jamie Whyte, in the London Times, explains to liberals that, no, there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

Children are selfish. Not because they are unkind (though many are) but because they believe in cost-free transfers. They do not understand that providing the toys and other amusements they demand imposes a cost on their parents. Children live in a fantastical world where Barbie dolls and trips to the zoo can be delivered without depriving their parents of something they might have enjoyed, such as a bottle of wine or a few extra hours off work.

Learning that cost-free transfers are impossible is an important part of growing up, and parents usually make sure it happens quickly. Most of us learn that there is no such thing as a free lunch long before we have ever picked up a bill.

Except when it comes to public policy. Encouraged by politicians, many adults indulge the infantile fantasy that the Government can bestow gifts on us while imposing costs on no one.

Read the whole thing.

Obama’s new Attorney General Eric Holder has always supported “reasonable regulation” of firearms. Guess what? As Deputy Attorney General, he also favored “reasonable restrictions… reasonable regulations on how people interact on the Internet.”

0:39 video

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Office worker burning the midnight oil finds an amazing opportunity at the copier machine.

2:49 video

Fox News:

The Pentagon has suffered from a cyber attack so alarming that it has taken the unprecedented step of banning the use of external hardware devices, such as flash drives and DVD’s, FOX News has learned.

The attack came in the form of a global virus or worm that is spreading rapidly throughout a number of military networks.

“We have detected a global virus for which there has been alerts, and we have seen some of this on our networks,” a Pentagon official told FOX News. “We are now taking steps to mitigate the virus.”

The official could not reveal the source of the attack because that information remains classified.

News.com.au:

The US military has banned the use of flash drives and DVDs on its computers as it tries to combat a virus spreading rapidly through its networks.

The Pentagon ordered an unprecedented ban on all external hardware but refused to comment on the source of the attack, saying such information was classified.

“We have detected a global virus for which there has been alerts, and we have seen some of this on our networks,” a Pentagon official told Fox News.

“We are now taking steps to mitigate the virus.” ...

An email sent to military personnel identified the problem as being caused by a virus called Agent.btz, Wired.com reports.

The virus is a variation of the “SillyFDC” worm, which has been around since about 2005 and spreads by copying itself to flash drives and then replicates onto any computer that device is plugged into.

Agent.btz originated in China, according to ThreatExpert. Spyware Doctor is reported to be capable of eliminating it.

The Irish Times reports an Estonian mole working for the Russian Intelligence services probably represents the most damaging penetration of Western security since Aldrich Ames.

Echoes of the Cold War have returned to Nato headquarters in Brussels after an Estonian general was unmasked as a “sleeper” spy who passed top secret alliance information to Moscow.

Herman Simm (61), a retired official in Estonia’s defence ministry, has been arrested along with his wife on suspicion that they were recruited by KGB officers before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After Estonia’s independence in 1991, state prosecutors believe Mr Simm made contact with the KGB’s successor foreign intelligence agency, the SVR.

The former police chief was the perfectly placed mole: between 1995 and 2006 he helped set up the high-security system for handling all sensitive Nato documents ahead of Estonia’s accession to the alliance in 2004.

That has alarmed Estonia’s Nato allies, who are talking about the greatest intelligence breach since the CIA counter-intelligence chief Aldrich Ames was exposed as a Soviet mole in 1994.

Mr Jaanus Rahumägi, chairman of the Estonian parliament’s security watchdog, admits that the spy has caused “historic damage” to the alliance.

It snowed on Tuesday here atop the Blue Ridge in Northern Virginia. We received an inch of accumulation, and it remained on the ground until yesterday afternoon. I remember the balmy weather of last year’s November and December with affection.

Wesley Prudden, in the Washington Times, notes that, as it gets colder, the case for trillions of dollars of expenditure to fight Global Warming, Excuse me! “Climate Change,” gets weaker and weaker.

Turn up the heat, somebody. The globe is freezing. Even Al Gore is looking for an extra blanket. Winter has barely come to the northern latitudes and already we’ve got bigger goosebumps than usual. So far the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports 63 record snowfalls in the United States, 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month. Only 44 Octobers over the past 114 years have been cooler than this last one.

The polar ice is accumulating faster than usual, and some of the experts now concede that the globe hasn’t warmed since 1995. You may have noticed, in fact, that Al and his pals, having given up on the sun, no longer even warn of global warming. Now it’s “climate change.” The marketing men enlisted by Al and the doom criers to come up with a flexible “brand” took a cue from the country philosopher who observed, correctly, that “if you’ve got one foot in the fire and the other in a bucket of ice, on average you’re warm.” On average, “climate change” covers every possibility.

Read the whole thing.

“Civil Rights,” n. fabricated and supposititious rights claims, purportedly entitling liberals to use state power to compel individuals and businesses to comply with liberal moral opinions within their own private spheres.

The moral status of homosexuality, homosexuality’s social and political status, to what degree participation in certain kinds of sexual activities constitutes a natural and legitimate identity and whether homosexual inclinations are a product of psychological pathology are all matters of opinion.

There is every reason to expect that large numbers of Americans, on natural and legitimate grounds, would hold 180 degree opposite opinions in this area.

Social and religious conservatives have long since abandoned claims that the state should enforce traditional Judeo-Christian sexual morality on consenting adults with regard to private acts. Today, “the enforcement of morals” (the title of a famous essay on the question of tolerance of homosexuality by Lord Devlin) is, on the contrary, actively, and frequently successfully, pursued by the left.

If right now, at the present time, in which Gay Marriage is only the law of the land in a couple of ultra-liberal states, this kind of claim can be successfully enforced on a business, just imagine what kind of Civil Rights claims will be enforceable in an environment where Gay Marriage is the rule, not the rare aberration. You’ll have lawsuits demanding that Catholic Churches, Mormon Temples, and Jewish Orthodox synagogues solemnize sexually perverted unions, and, I daresay, some of them will prove successful.

LA Times:

The Pasadena-based dating website, heavily promoted by Christian evangelical leaders when it was founded, has agreed in a civil rights settlement to give up its heterosexuals-only policy and offer same-sex matches.

EHarmony was started by psychologist Neil Clark Warren, who is known for his mild-mannered television and radio advertisements. It must not only implement the new policy by March 31 but also give the first 10,000 same-sex registrants a free six-month subscription.

“That was one of the things I asked for,” said Eric McKinley, 46, who complained to New Jersey’s Division on Civil Rights after being turned down for a subscription in 2005.

The company said that Warren was not giving interviews on the settlement. But attorney Theodore Olson, who issued a statement on the company’s behalf, made clear that it did not agree to offer gay matches willingly.

“Even though we believed that the complaint resulted from an unfair characterization of our business,” Olson said, “we ultimately decided it was best to settle this case with the attorney general since litigation outcomes can be unpredictable.”

The settlement, which did not find that EHarmony broke any laws, calls for the company to either offer the gay matches …

... on its current venue or create a new site for them. EHarmony has opted to create a site called Compatiblepartners.net.

Warren had said in past interviews that he didn’t want to feature same-sex services on EHarmony—which matches people based on long questionnaires concerning personality traits, relationship history and interests—because he felt he didn’t know enough about gay relationships.

McKinley, who works at a nonprofit in New Jersey he declined to identify, said that he had originally heard of EHarmony through its radio ads. “You hear these wonderful people saying, ‘I met my soul mate on EHarmony.’ I thought, I could do that too,” he said.

But he couldn’t. When he tried to enter the site, the pull-down menus had categories only for a man seeking a woman or a woman seeking a man. “I felt the whole range of emotions,” McKinley said. “Anger, that I was a second-class citizen.”

But instead of just surfing over to a dating site that admits gay lonely hearts, he contacted the New Jersey civil rights division to file a complaint.

The settlement also calls for EHarmony to pay $50,000 to the state for administrative costs and $5,000 to McKinley.

Heck, Declan McCullagh suggests, why not bail out everybody?

The Honorable Henry Paulson
U.S. Department of the Treasury
1500 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20220

Dear Secretary Paulson:

I understand that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are urging you to hand $25 billion or more to Detroit’s nearly bankrupt automakers. While President-elect Obama indicated on 60 Minutes that he likes the idea, the Bush administration has been skeptical.

That is unfortunate. Bailing out companies that lose money on every vehicle they manufacture and cannot adapt to changing market conditions is not merely necessary in today’s economic climate—it’s the American way.

It would be shortsighted to stop at GM, Ford, and Chrysler. My modest proposal is that plenty of other nondeserving companies could use a helping hand.

Mervyn’s department store can’t compete with its rivals on price, selection, and locations. But its stores are a fixture of local neighborhoods across California and the West, and the federal government surely has an obligation to prop up this failed company—even if it means everyone else pays more in taxes. This is the price we pay for keeping part of the American dream alive. ...

Read the whole thing.

The latest anti-crime crusade in liberal San Francisco is focused on people lighting fireplaces on the wrong day. It’s important to have the right priorities about these things, after all.

SF Chronicle reports.

For the first time ever, residential fires are illegal under a new law, passed in July, that bans home burning on winter season Spare the Air days.

The first such ban took effect at noon. Seventy inspectors from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District planned to spend the day and evening patrolling residential neighborhoods, looking for telltale chimney wisps.

Violators will get warnings by mail. Repeat offenders face fines of as much as $2,000.

The fireplace police say they are determined to keep law and order in the living room.

“We’re serious,” said district spokeswoman Kristine Roselius. “This is a major health threat. The weather conditions are such that smoke is trapped closer to the ground and anyone with respiratory problems will have a hard time breathing.”

With 1.4 million fireplaces in the Bay Area, Roselius said the district is hoping for voluntary compliance. It notes that wood burning produces about one-third of the particulate pollution on a typical winter night.

The district predicts as many as 20 Spare the Air days during the winter season, which air quality officials define as Nov. 1 through Feb. 28. That means it could be illegal to fire up the fireplace as often as one day in every six.

Similar bans have been in place in the San Joaquin Valley and in the Pacific Northwest for several years.

After the initial warning, repeat violators will face fines, some as high as four figures. In other no-burn districts, offenders have been permitted to do penance by attending “smoke school,” similar to traffic school. But the Bay Area is a no-school zone.

Ever been wondering why that network printer doesn’t work?

1:03 video

Hat tip to Karen Myers and Anthony H. Mirra.

Jake Tapper tells us he helped Janet Reno cry over sending jack-booted stormtroopers to take Elian Gonzales from his family and ship him home to Uncle Fidel.

In April 2000, then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder appeared on “Good Morning America” where he discussed the controversial raid on the home of Elian Gonzalez’s Miami relatives to seize the child and return him to Cuba.

And he told Diane Sawyer about an unusual behind-the-scenes moment he shared with Attorney General Janet Reno.

“At the conclusion of this, I closed the door, at the time of the raid, and I held the attorney general in my arms, and she wept,” Holder said. “She did not want this to happen. She cares a great deal about that community, and hoped and prayed that there was a way in which this thing could have been worked out, short of the enforcement action that she very reluctantly had to order.”

UK’s Daily Mash reports that, even in this lagging economy, investors are able to identify one hot new sector.

Venture capitalists in New York and London are pumping millions of dollars into Somalia’s booming pirate sector.

The sharp-eyed investors say Indian Ocean piracy has replaced Bangladeshi t-shirt factories as the developing world’s strongest source of high-growth revenue streams.

Julian Cook, head of strategy at Porter, Pinkney and Turner (PPT), said: “The margins are very impressive. These guys can board a Chinese freighter or Saudi oil tanker and turn it around in less than a week. Usually without killing anyone.

“The staff are well-trained and they operate a structured bonus system involving the daughters of nomadic tribal chiefs and as much hallucinogenic tree bark as they can eat.

“The tax position is also very favourable given that Somalia isn’t really what you would describe as a ‘country’ with ‘laws’ and a ‘government’.”

PPT has paid £25.7 million for a 32% stake in Captain Ahmed’s Crazee Bastards with the initial tranche used for capital purchases including new speed boats, 200 yards of very strong rope and a gun the size of a cow.

Shelby Steele, who shares with Barack Obama a multiracial ancestry, discusses the difficulties of dealing with that kind of bifurcated identity, comparing his own experiences and responses to those of the president elect.

7:50 video

This 9:54 video looks at the impact of media coverage on average voters’ knowledge of the candidates.

Malcolm Gladwell, in the New Yorker, contemplates the history of the famous firm laid out in Charles Ellis’s The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs, and connects the current Wall Street debacle to the wrong kind of leadership.

The rags-to-riches story—that staple of American biography—has over the years been given two very different interpretations. The nineteenth-century version stressed the value of compensating for disadvantage. If you wanted to end up on top, the thinking went, it was better to start at the bottom, because it was there that you learned the discipline and motivation essential for success. “New York merchants preferred to hire country boys, on the theory that they worked harder, and were more resolute, obedient, and cheerful than native New Yorkers,” Irvin G. Wyllie wrote in his 1954 study “The Self-Made Man in America.” Andrew Carnegie, whose personal history was the defining self-made-man narrative of the nineteenth century, insisted that there was an advantage to being “cradled, nursed and reared in the stimulating school of poverty.” According to Carnegie, “It is not from the sons of the millionaire or the noble that the world receives its teachers, its martyrs, its inventors, its statesmen, its poets, or even its men of affairs. It is from the cottage of the poor that all these spring.”

Today, that interpretation has been reversed. Success is seen as a matter of capitalizing on socioeconomic advantage, not compensating for disadvantage. The mechanisms of social mobility—scholarships, affirmative action, housing vouchers, Head Start—all involve attempts to convert the poor from chronic outsiders to insiders, to rescue them from what is assumed to be a hopeless state. Nowadays, we don’t learn from poverty, we escape from poverty, and a book like Ellis’s history of Goldman Sachs is an almost perfect case study of how we have come to believe social mobility operates. Six hundred pages of Ellis’s book are devoted to the modern-day Goldman, the firm that symbolized the golden era of Wall Street. From the boom years of the nineteen-eighties through the great banking bubble of the past decade, Goldman brought impeccably credentialled members of the cognitive and socioeconomic élite to Wall Street, where they conjured up fantastically complex deals and made enormous fortunes. The opening seventy-two pages of the book, however, the chapters covering the Sidney Weinberg years, seem as though they belong to a different era. The man who created what we know as Goldman Sachs was a poor, uneducated member of a despised minority—and his story is so remarkable that perhaps only Andrew Carnegie could make sense of it.

Read the whole thing.

Pursued by screaming homosexuals, San Francisco Police last Friday had to escort a Christian group, which regularly prays and sings hymns at the corner of Castro and 18th for the conversion of homosexuals, out of the district.

KTVU disingenuously portrays the police as “keeping the peace” between two groups of demonstrators. One group numbering about ten or twelve confronted by a hostile and threatening crowd large enough to fill the street for more than a block isn’t my idea of equivalence.

4:45 video

Mark Stinson, in the Chatham (North Carolina) Journal Weekly, laments the invasion, and take-over, of Siler City by intolerant representatives of the contemporary community of fashion.

We have a certain number of people that are transplanted here because they wanted some space. We have others that have money that wanted space too; that like the city life but want to live in the country. These people use their wealth to force the rest of us to do what they want. ...

Bobby Smith of S&W Speed Shop in Siler City has occupied the same corner lot for almost 40 years. He has been a constant tax paying citizen and local fixture around this area. ...

This brings me to the invasion of the jug making pot heads that want to turn Siler City into a smaller version of Chapel Hill. You see the arts incubator has grabbed a chunk of mid down town Siler City and proceeded to start transforming the town into a Chapel Hill / Carrboro clone. Bobby never in 40 years had one complaint about a vehicle sitting in his parking spots beside his shop or parts of vehicles stored in his lot behind his shop until the artsy bunch cleaned up town (as they put it) and located a pottery next to him. They have constantly whined and complained to the town forcing Bobby to move just about everything off his property to accommodate their desires to make downtown visually pleasing to them.

Recently they sent a police officer because Bobby had his truck. which he is repairing sitting in his parking spot “turned the wrong way” and they didn’t like the looks of that truck so they wanted it gone. ...

Kenny Clark is feeling the effects of their constant complaints as well and Clapp Brothers will be next on the hit list if something isn’t done to balance things out again. They have already complained about things such as shipping crates temporarily stored in Clapps lot.

I personally love arts n crafts. I enjoy learning new ways to be creative but not at anyone else’s expense. If I want to see pottery I go to Jug Town where it is done the right way. I may be wrong, but in my opinion anyone can learn to make a pot. Not everyone can fix a bull dozer, build engines or repair a truck that helps members of our community make an honest living. ...

does it make sense to bully the small established businesses out just because you want to make pots? The Arts incubator could never draw the kind of money some of these business have and never will. People involved with the Arts Incubator may have millions but that money isn’t being spread around the community. I was all excited about the arts incubator coming to Siler City until I saw how it grew to push people aside and trample those that are established in the community just to add “culture” to Chatham. ...

I went through town to see a naked blue lady on top of a building, a half a naked man and a naked anatomically correct statue of a man on a street corner and honestly was upset. I don’t want my children to see such things in what is supposed to be a public place. I find it offensive. Is it better to be offended by art or annoyed with an eyesore of machine parts that are supposed to be outside a garage anyway?

In one respect, Obama would be lucky if the Keyes and other lawsuits proved him ineligible: presidents evidently are not allowed to use email.

The Times reports that they would be confiscating his Blackberry and shutting down his email account.

Before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, there is the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A final decision has not been made on whether Obama could go against precedent and become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that was unlikely.

But would he be allowed to play on-line RPGs?