One of those liberal European bishops thinks he has the answer for mollifying intolerant Muslims.

AP:

A Roman Catholic Bishop in the Netherlands has proposed people of all faiths refer to God as Allah to foster understanding, stoking an already heated debate on religious tolerance in a country with one million Muslims.

Bishop Tiny Muskens, from the southern diocese of Breda, told Dutch television on Monday that God did not mind what he was named and that in Indonesia, where Muskens spent eight years, priests used the word “Allah” while celebrating Mass.

“Allah is a very beautiful word for God. Shouldn’t we all say that from now on we will name God Allah? … What does God care what we call him? It is our problem.”

Like certain other liberals in the past, perhaps a man this friendly to Islam could be transferred to one of those inactive North African dioceses, abandoned to the desert or overrun by the Saracens long centuries ago.

Karl Rove’s recently announced intention of riding off into the sunset at the end of the month has provoked a veritable tsunami of reaction by the left, which has been going on for days.

Some of today’s funnier examples:

James Carville says that ok, so what if Rove won a lot of elections? Bush is down in the polls late in his second term, and that means Rove really lost a generation of Republicans to the democrats.

Harold Meyerson thinks that simpleton Rove overlooked the nation’s basic need for socialism.

Best of all, Monica Hesse fumes indignantly in the Washington Post on behalf of the mortally offended mass of Rove adversaries and opponents dismissed by the great man himself in a Wall Street Journal interview as “the mob.” How dare he use the language of social condescension? Doesn’t he realize how politically incorrect it is to use “the mob” as a pejorative?

Personally, I think it is all really very simple. George W. Bush isn’t running for anything in 2008, so he doesn’t really need his political strategist on daily call anymore. That makes it a good time for Karl Rove to take some time off, and go off and crank out a book and make a ton of cash, while quite possibly looking over the GOP field of candidates. I wouldn’t be surprised myself if old Karl reappears next year, refreshed by a nice vacation (and a considerably wealthier man), all ready to help kick some more democrat butt.

You’ve played this one, too, we know. Why not waste some time watching the movie?

1:58 video

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Hat tip to Miranda Dobbs.

If you are old enough to have used a computer in the late 1970s, you must have played Adventure. Who knew that the game’s inventor was Will Crowther, or that Adventure was based upon the real Bedquilt Section of Colossal Cave in Kentucky’s Flint Mammoth Cave System?

Adventure is now a topic for scholarship, see: Dennis Jerz’s study in Digital Humanities Quarterly.

More here.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Arthur C. Brooks argues quite trenchantly that what America needs is mobility and opportunity, not equalization of income.

those left behind, it’s important to note, will almost certainly not become happier if we redistribute more income. Indeed, they will probably become less happy. Policies designed to lower economic inequality tend to change the incentives of both the haves and the have-nots in a way that particularly harms the have-nots. Reductions in the incentives to prosper mean fewer jobs created, less economic growth, less in tax revenues, and less charitable giving—all to the detriment of those left behind. And redistribution can, as the American welfare system has shown, turn beneficiaries into demoralized long-term dependents. …

policies to redress economic inequality hardly affect true inequality at all. Policymakers and economists rarely denounce the scandal of inequality in work effort, creativity, talent, or enthusiasm. …

Finally, arguments against inequality legitimize envy. Americans may indeed have strong concerns about their relative incomes and may seek status as reflected in their economic circumstances. But to base our policies on the anxieties of those at the back of the status race is to bow before Invidia. A deadly sin is not, in my view, a smart blueprint for policymaking.

A more accurate vision of America sees a land of both inequality and opportunity, in which hard work and perseverance are the keys to jumping from the ranks of the have-nots to those of the haves. If we can solve problems of absolute deprivation, such as hunger and homelessness, then rewarding hard work will continue to serve as a positive stimulant to achievement. Redistribution and taxation, beyond what’s necessary to pay for key services, weaken America’s willingness and ability to thrive.

This vision promotes policies focused not on wiping out economic inequality, but rather on enhancing economic mobility. They include improving educational opportunities, aggressively addressing cultural impediments to success, enhancing the fluidity of labor markets, searching for ways to include all citizens in America’s investing revolution, and protecting the climate of American entrepreneurship.

Placidity about income inequality, and opposition to income redistribution, are evidence of a light heart, not a hard one. If happiness is our goal, those who promote opportunity over economic equality have no apologies to make.

Read the whole thing.

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Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Last week’s Newsweek featured a true believer attack on Climate Change skeptics accusing anyone indisposed to believe in a crisis situation resulting from human agency of being part of a “denial machine” funded as part of a sinister corporate conspiracy against the public good.

Newsweek’s own business columnist Robert J, Samuelson thinks last week’s article was not an example his own publication’s reporting at its best.

We in the news business often enlist in moral crusades. Global warming is among the latest. Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism. Last week’s Newsweek cover story on global warming is a sobering reminder. It’s an object lesson of how viewing the world as “good guys vs. bad guys” can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story.

It’s always refreshing to see criticism by actual journalists of bad, brain-damaged liberal journalism. Such criticism, of course, almost invariably comes from the business reporting side. All the responsible adults in that profession seem to work in one particular area.

Hat tip to Scott Drum.

Amy Proctor (via Scott Malensik) offers this August 2005 video from Iraqi television featuring captured Al Qaeda terrorist Ramzi Hashem Abed testifying about his group’s repulsive and blood-curdling activities. (The interrogator indignantly asks him if he thinks kidnapping, raping, and then murdering college students is really jihad.)

What is most significant though is Abed’s frank account of being part of the radical Islamist Ansar al Islam group, connected with Al Qaeda, which seized several Kurdish villages near Halabja and imposed Sharia rule in 2001. Their training area was in Falluja, he recalls, in the time of the former Iraqi regime.

9:49 video

At American Thinker, James Lewis has an essay on the fundamental similarity of all those noxious and irrational revolutionary ideologies spawned in the 19th century by representatives of the new class of cafe intellectual bohemians, what Russell Kirk liked to refer to as “spoiled priests.”

Everything must be different!” or “Alles muss anders sein!” was a slogan of the Nazi Party. It is also the heart’s desire of every Leftist since Karl Marx. Nazism was a deeply revolutionary creed, a fact that is always denied by the Left; but it’s true.

Read the whole thing.

Dick Morris claims that Fred Thompson’s candidacy is in eclipse, and is bragging that nativists like himself got Thompson to fire Spencer Abraham because he was too pro-immigration.

Gosh, maybe there’s a moral here, could circumstance A possibly be related to circumstance B?

But Thompson’s problems go beyond fund raising. Yet to announce his candidacy, he has already fired two campaign managers. His first choice, Tom Collamore, former vice president of Altria, the new name for Phillip Morris, fell to pressure from Fred’s wife Jeri, a self-styled political consultant. Then, the luckless candidate turned to former Michigan Senator and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. But just as bloggers — including us — began to unload on Abraham for his exceedingly pro-immigration record and to cast doubts on his firmness as a backer of Israel, Fred got rid of him, too.

More than anything else, however, it is Fred’s indecision about running that, combined with speculation that he may not want it badly enough, is cooling GOP ardor. After tying with Rudy Giuliani in Scott Rasmussen’s daily tracking polls, he has now fallen seven points back.

Dick Morris thinks we should all support Newt Gingrich instead.

Lots of luck. Newt came out in support of Global Warming back in April. I doubt he is really stupid enough to believe in that kind of nonsense, so I expect it was just a cynical ploy to appeal to wider constituencies of the Great Unwashed. Politicians have to win elections, I know, but there are limits. Global Warming is an especially objectionable sort of popular delusion which intelligent people have a universal duty to oppose. Real conservatives (of which I am one) do not support candidates who truckle to stupidity and pander on such a scale in order to get votes. Newt can go jump in the lake.

Washington Times:

Companies seeking to cut rising health care costs are starting to dock the pay of overweight and unhealthy workers.

Clarian Health, an Indiana hospital chain, will require workers who smoke to pay $5 out of each paycheck starting in 2009. For workers deemed obese, as much as $30 will be taken out each paycheck until they meet certain weight, cholesterol and blood pressure standards.

Clarian employees will also be required to take part in a health risk appraisal that will inform the company which employees smoke.

Such appraisals are becoming a popular tool for businesses to determine the health of their work force. The type of health benefit program Clarian is setting up could become a model for businesses in coming years, analysts say.

On the one hand, one can argue that smokers and the obese can justly be assessed higher insurance rates because they are statistically more likely to have health problems resulting in claims. But, on the other hand, the precision of the statistical basis for those extra assessments may well be doubted, and Clarian Health’s policy seems more obviously based on the biases of the community of fashion than upon actual eagled-eyed bottom-line accounting.

I would support this kind of discrimination against groups I belong to myself if it were really based on cold, hard accounting, but the inclination of businesses to set up in operation as petty governments reaching out to regulate and improve the outside-the-workplace private lives of employees on the basis of pure busybody-ism demands resistance.

The Telegraph:

Few hotels can offer their guests a view that boasts a sunrise 18 times in a day, but a new space tourism company is promising just that by building the first hotel in space.

Galactic Suite, a private space tourism company, is planning to build a three-bedroom hotel using pods joined together in orbit. They hope to be open for business by 2012.

But tickets for a trip aboard the Galactic Suite will not be cheap, with a three-day stay costing about £2 million.

For that price, the company claims it will train customers for their space flight on a tropical island before flying them to the hotel. Once there, they will be able to enjoy spectacular views of the Earth and experience life in zero gravity. The hotel is expected to make a complete orbit of the Earth every 80 minutes, so in 24 hours the sun will rise and set behind our planet 18 times.

Xavier Claramunt, a director with the Barcelona-based company, says they have already achieved substantial financial backing for the £3 billion project from a wealthy space enthusiast and a series of other companies.

I was watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) (something I do for laughs) just the other day, and as usual I broke up when Gore got to the part where he claims temperature record since 1880 show that the ten hottest years ever measured in the atmospheric record all occurred in the last fourteen years, and that 2005 was the warmest year on record.

Some of Gore’s claims about temperature records were rejected even by scientists supporting Anthropogenic Global Warming theories when the movie came out, but as Mark Steyn notes, the status of those temperature records is getting worse.

Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA’s Web site and look at the “U.S. surface air temperature” rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.

Then again, you might not. They’re not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The “hottest year on record” is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 – plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America’s Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone’s ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn’t have a word to say about it.

And yet we survived.

So why is 1998 no longer America’s record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow named Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com (sic -should be .org) labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA’s handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an “oversight” that would be corrected in the next “data refresh.” The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.

Climateaudit.org has been down since early this month due to denial of service attacks.