AJStrata has a good word to say for George W. Bush and the Conservatism of the Bush Administration, and urges the rest of us to refrain from jumping ship.

Let me describe what I think is an attractive conservative vision. It begins with supporting and respecting our President and all his accomplishments. And since I and many others still have unflinching support and admiration for the man, I decided to steal some from the commenters here and dub this conservative view “Bush Conservatives”.

Bush Conservatives not only believe in Reagan’s 11th commandment to not speak ill of fellow conservatives – we live it. From the Gang of 14, to Harriet Miers, to Dubai Ports World and to the immigration issue – there has been a brand of Republican which eschewed the 11th commandment. So let the Republicans be defined by that group – Bush Conservatives will be defined by their antithesis. Bush conservatives are not afraid of the word ‘compromise’. They despise the word ‘failure’. If there is a good idea, we do not care what party gets credit – we care that the good ideas get enacted. It is not Party uber America anymore.

Read the whole thing.

Beth agrees with him, and takes a firmer line with the Paleocons:

I’m still very, very angry at the Buchanan Conservatives/neo-right/cannibals/whatever you wanna call ‘em. It is THEY who I blame more than anyone for the GOP/conservative loss in the election. I suppose it’s irrational to blame them first, but they are the ones with whom I have the most contact, if you will, or at least the most in common (in that we are bloggers). They worked for over two years, slandering everyone on their own side whenever there was a point of disagreement. How the hell did they think the media wouldn’t lap that up? Dissension within the conservative ranks? A gift to the liberal media! And as a result, rather than putting real pressure on those who needed it, they simply allowed the left’s sound-bite slogans, “culture of corruption” and “pork-loving Republicans” to penetrate the usually-disengaged voters’ minds.

You or I would never be permitted to snare, dart, and study examples of the rare Amur leopard, Panthera pardus orientalis, but some moonbat with Ph.D. affiliated with an impressive sounding organization like the Wildlife Conservation Society can jet over to Siberia to reduce one of the rarest critters out there to possession with a snare, shoot it with a tranquillizer dart, then sexually molest the sleeping tabby in order to establish “scientifically” its capacity to reproduce.

Then, you see, the sort of person photographed with the leopard can inform us authoritatively that “only 30 individual Amur leopards remain in the wild,” and go home armed with all the information needed to enable a tiny group of self-appointed academics “to determine appropriate conservation actions,” i.e., to regulate the interactions of the rest of the 6.5 billion human residents of the earth with wildlife. Bah, humbug!

Innovations Report (Germany)

National Geographic

Jeffrey Gedmin explains the European perspective on American political figures.

When some Europeans say they like Americans,they tend to mean those Americans who seem most like European Social Democrats, and even then they airbrush out inconvenient details like the fact that Bill Clinton favoured the death penalty, that Hillary voted for the Iraq war, or that John F. Kennedy, that suave and promiscuous East coast liberal was also a staunch anti-communist, who frequently quoted from the bible. George W. Bush is the full package of everything that makes Europe squirm. He is anti-elitism. He’s religion. He’s morality and muscle. He’s patriotism and self-confidence. He is very un-European. (…)

When European commentators say they are yearning for an end to American unilateralism, our moral crusades and the influence of those dreaded “fundamentalist evangelicals,” what they really mean is that they are longing for the United States to become more like Europe: secular, post-national, consensus-seeking and Social Democratic. So on to the next disappointment. Even with the Democrats, it ain’t gonna happen.”

Quantum computers, unlimited supplies of transplantable human organs, mechanical explanations of mental life and the functioning of the cell, unified field theory, aliens, and the missing link are among the breakthroughs and discoveries predicted to be made over the next 50 years by 70 scientists.

New Scientist 50th Anniversary forum.

The Evening Standard has news of Britain’s Labour Government’s latest crime fighting initiative.

Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes, a minister said.

Those who fail to read stories or sing to their youngsters threaten their children’s future and the state must put them right, Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes said.

Their children’s well-being is at risk ‘unless we act’, she declared.

And Mrs Hughes said the state would train a new ‘parenting workforce’ to ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and ‘supported’.

The call for state intervention in the minute details of family life followed a series of Labour efforts to reduce anti-social behaviour and improve educational standards by imposing rigorous controls on the lives of the youngest children.

Mrs Hughes has established a national curriculum to set down how babies are taught to speak in childcare from the age of three months.

Her efforts have gone alongside a push by other ministers to determine exactly how parents treat their children down to how they should brush their teeth…

This autumn is likely to see an extension of parenting orders that can force parents to attend parenting classes so that they can be used on the say so of local councils against parents.

For the first time, parenting orders are likely to be directed against parents whose children have committed no criminal offence.

The threat of action against parents who fail to sing nursery rhymes was unveiled by Mrs Hughes as she gave the first details of Mr Blair’s ‘national parenting academy’, a body that will train teachers, psychologists and social workers to intervene in the lives of families and become the ‘parenting workforce’.

We’ve all heard of “the nanny-state,” but really!

Milton Friedman died today at the age of 94. There is an excellent obituary by Samuel Brittan in the Financial Times.

Milton Friedman played an exceptionally prominent role in the intellectual revolution which occurred in the later years of the last century, when the 19th century “Progressive” ideals of centralized economic planning, socialism, and collectivism were finally discredited.

It is almost impossible to imagine today the uniformity of leftwing opinion on politics and economics that prevailed in Europe and the United States right up until around 1980. Paul Samuelson’s orthodox Keynesian “neoclassicism” was the bible of Economics study at US universities. But, suddenly and unexpectedly, the consensus of professional economists was perceived virtually overnight to be both impotent and wrong.

No one played a more prominent role in articulating the case for the economic advantage of Freedom over Coercion, of spontaneous order over central planning, than Milton Friedman. In both the most rigorous learned academic publications and in popular books, Milton Friedman made an irrefutable case in favor of Freedom.

I remember when his 10-part television serious Free to Choose ran on PBS. It was in a time of national malaise, when recession and high unemployment was combined with double-digit inflation. Inflation had persisted for mre than a decade. From the conventional liberal point of view, the problem was intractable. In one of the episodes of Free to Choose, Milton Friedman walked through a government monetary printing plant. As he approached the gigantic press turning out US currency, Friedman reached out and hit the red emergency STOP button. The press’s operation instantly came to a halt. Milton Friedman twinkled at the camera, and announced: “I have just stopped Inflation.” And the viewing audience understood that he was perfectly right.

He died at age 94 covered with honors for a lifetime devoted to fighting for human liberty. There should be commissioned a painting after Girodet of the Spirit of Ayn Rand Welcoming Milton Friedman Into Valhalla.

Friedman Foundation announcement.

New York Times

Wikipedia entry

Ralph Kinney Bennett played tennis with Friedman.

We slept at our new house for the first time last night. My satellite Internet has been installed. I’ve got my PC set up. It is pouring rain, and we’re waiting for the second moving truck to get pulled out of the mire, so that they can deliver about 500 more boxes of books.

We’re located on the first ridge of the Blue Ridge mountains at the western edge of Loudoun County in Virginia. Trees block most of the view, but you can see Virginia to the East, and the Shenandoah Valley in West Virginia from even the first floor.

17th century shamshir by Assad Ullah

Nature reports that scientists studying the technology of Damascus steel believe the material used in Arabic Medieval weapons may deserve to be regarded as an early form of nanotechnology.

Unfortunately, they seem to be unaware of the similar technology used in the Indonesian keris, or of the far more complex metallurgy of Japanese swords. And they are evidently unfortunately also unaware of the revival of Damascus steel-making by the late American knifemaker William F. Moran.

Think carbon nanotubes are new-fangled? Think again. The Crusaders felt the might of the tube when they fought against the Muslims and their distinctive, patterned Damascus blades.

Sabres from Damascus, now in Syria, date back as far as 900 AD. Strong and sharp, they are made from a type of steel called wootz.

Their blades bear a banded pattern thought to have been created as the sword was annealed and forged. But the secret of the swords’ manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century.

Materials researcher Peter Paufler and his colleagues at Dresden University, Germany, have taken electron-microscope pictures of the swords and found that wootz has a microstructure of nano-metre-sized tubes, just like carbon nanotubes used in modern technologies for their lightweight strength.

Read the whole thing.

Chemistry World

The Australian.

A significant factor in the democrats’ capture of control of Congress was the public’s perception of a Republican “culture of corruption.” Voters forgot all about the pre-1994 democrat Congressional culture of corruption. That was a real culture of corruption featuring the resignation of Speaker of the House Jim Wright and House Majority Whip Tony Coelho.

But Nancy Pelosi is already providing a quick refresher course. John Murtha proved very useful to the democrat left as front man in legitimizing opposition to war. A decorated Marine veteran denouncing the war came in handy by providing crucial patriotic cover for radical leftist war opponents. Nancy Pelosi was born the daughter of a democrat big city machine boss, and she knows the importance of paying off for favors, so she is supporting John Murtha for Majority Leader.

What kind of congressman is John Murtha really? Well, he’s a very slippery one, who narrowly escaped getting nailed by the 1980 FBI Abscam Investigation. Watch the videos, and make up your own mind about Murtha.

Key excerpts:

Abscam video 1– 6:51

Abscam video 2 – 6:15

Full 54 minute video at American Spectator with article.

Murtha and ABSCAM: What Really Happened

Reuters reports:

Two lost paintings by Italian Renaissance master Fra Angelico have turned up in a modest house in central England in a discovery hailed as one of the most exciting art finds for a generation.

The works — two panels each painted with the standing figure of a Dominican saint in tempera on a gold background — are expected to fetch more than $1.9 million at auction.

They were discovered behind a bedroom door in a terraced house in Oxford, central England, when art auctioneer Guy Schwinge was called in to carry out a valuation after the owner of the house, British librarian Jean Preston, died in July.

Read the whole thing.

Telegraph

They were purchased in California in the 1960s for $380. 570News

Jim Kouri discusses Nancy Pelosi’s possible House Intelligence Chairman appointee Alcee Hastings’ past and notes the silence of the MSM.

The fact that Hastings is being seriously considered for such a sensitive position and the mainstream news media don’t appear outraged adds to the enormous amount of evidence that the MSM are lapdogs for the Democrats. Imagine if Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert appointed an impeached judge to a key committee chairmanship. Would not that be tied into the mantra “a culture of corruption” by the elite news media?

Read the whole thing.

Sony is upset over the leak of a rejected trailer for its upcoming release Spiderman 3.

Defamer has a link.