Renowned hunter, frontiersman, Indian fighter, and Congressman David Crockett of Tennessee, who died fighting for the Liberty of Texas at the Alamo in 1836, was reputed to have begun his hunting exploits by killing a bear at the age of 3.

Davy Crockett’s hunting prowess as a toddler is usually thought to have been only a legend, but as ABC7 News reports:

Dewitt, Ark. A 5-year-old Arkansas County boy killed a black bear Sunday weighing more than 400 pounds.

Tre Merritt, a descendant of Davy Crockett, was hunting with his grandfather Mike Merritt when a black bear happened upon their stand.

“His 10th great-grandfather was Davy Crockett,” Mike Merritt said. “And Davy supposedly killed him a bear when he was three. And Tre is five and really killed a bear. I really doubt if Davy killed one when he was three.”

Mike Merritt was in the stand at the time but said Tre did it all by himself.

“He came in about 40 to 50 yards,” Mike Merritt said of the black bear, “and when he got in the open, I whistled at him and he stopped and I said, ‘Shoot Tre.'”

Tre confirmed his grandfather’s account.

“I was up in the stand and I seen the bear,” Tre Merritt said. “It came from the thicket and it was beside the road and I shot it.”

At first, Mike Merritt didn’t think Tre had hit the bear with his youth rifle.

“I said, ‘Tre, you missed the bear,’ ” Mike Merritt said. “He said, ‘Paw-paw I squeezed the trigger and I didn’t close my eyes. I killed him.”‘

The bear turned out to be 445 pounds; 12 times the weight of Tre. Mike Merritt said tears rolled down his cheeks when he found out his grandson killed the enormous bear.

Tre Merritt’s father said he began teaching his son to shoot when he was just 2 .5 years old, and said Tre killed three deer last year.

The family plans to get a life-sized mount of the bear, but where they will put has yet to be determined.

DeWitt is in rural eastern Arkansas, close to the Mississippi River bottoms and near Stuttgart, the Duck Hunting Capitol of the World.

2:15 KATV video

Let’s hope the kid runs for Congress someday.

How do experts and activists battle Global Warming? They jet off to Bali for a two-week UN conference focussed on how best to tax and regulate the rest of us.

But the good times were spoiled this year, it seems, by the intrusion of a number of prominent scientist skeptics, as Senator James Inhofe reports via the US Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works:

An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to “have the courage to do nothing” in response to UN demands.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, had a blunt message for UN climate conference participants on Monday.

“Climate change is a non-problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing,” Monckton told participants.

“The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)” Monckton added. (LINK)

Monckton also noted that the UN has not been overly welcoming to the group of skeptical scientists.

“UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I should not come to this conference. They have also made several attempts to interfere with our public meetings,” Monckton explained.

“It is a circus here,” agreed Australian scientist Dr. David Evans. Evans is making scientific presentations to delegates and journalists at the conference revealing the latest peer-reviewed studies that refute the UN’s climate claims.

“This is the most lavish conference I have ever been to, but I am only a scientist and I actually only go to the science conferences,” Evans said, noting the luxury of the tropical resort. (Note: An analysis by Bloomberg News on December 6 found: “Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year.”

Evans, a mathematician who did carbon accounting for the Australian government, recently converted to a skeptical scientist about man-made global warming after reviewing the new scientific studies. (LINK)

“We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don’t cause global warming. We have the missing [human] signature [in the atmosphere], we have the IPCC models being wrong and we have the lack of a temperature going up the last 5 years,” Evans said in an interview with the Inhofe EPW Press Blog. Evans authored a November 28 2007 paper “Carbon Emissions Don’t Cause Global Warming.” (LINK)

Evans touted a new peer-reviewed study by a team of scientists appearing in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society which found “Warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence.” (LINK)

“Most of the people here have jobs that are very well paid and they depend on the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. They are not going to be very receptive to the idea that well actually the science has gone off in a different direction,” Evans explained. …

UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports since its inception going back to 1990, had a clear message to UN participants.

“There is no evidence that carbon dioxide increases are having any effect whatsoever on the climate,” Gray, who shares in the Nobel Prize awarded to the UN IPCC, explained. (LINK)

“All the science of the IPCC is unsound. I have come to this conclusion after a very long time. If you examine every single proposition of the IPCC thoroughly, you find that the science somewhere fails,” Gray, who wrote the book “The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of “Climate Change 2001,” said.

“It fails not only from the data, but it fails in the statistics, and the mathematics,” he added.

Evans, who believes the UN has heavily politicized science, warned there is going to be a “dangerous time for science” ahead.

“We have a split here. Official science driven by politics, money and power, goes in one direction. Unofficial science, which is more determined by what is actually happening with the [climate] data, has now started to move off in a different direction” away from fears of a man-made climate crisis, Evans explained.

“The two are splitting. This is always a dangerous time for science and a dangerous time for politics. Historically science always wins these battles but there can be a lot of causalities and a lot of time in between,” he concluded.

New Zealander Bryan Leland of the International Climate Science Coalition warned participants that all the UN promoted discussions of “carbon trading” should be viewed with suspicion.

“I am an energy engineer and I know something about electricity trading and I know enough about carbon trading and the inaccuracies of carbon trading to know that carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else,” Leland said.

“We should probably ask why we have 10,000 people here [in Bali] in a futile attempt to ‘solve’ a [climate] problem that probably does not exist,” Leland added.

And as the Daily Mail reports, the Vatican has begun to recognize that Environmentalism constitutes a religious competitor and Global Warming its dogma, and Pope Benedict himself is going on the offensive against them.

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

Christopher Hitchens says it’s time to abolish the CIA, because someone destroyed videotapes which could be used by the Agency’s adversaries to attack it.

He has the right idea, but he has the wrong reasons. The chap who destroyed those tapes did exactly the right thing.

Ex-Spook Charles McCarry identifies why the CIA needs to be abolished far more accurately in in his 1992 espionage thriller Second Sight.

—————————————————————
A description of the Agency’s earlier days:

The Outfit had no headquarters. Its employees, whose numbers cost, and true identities were kept secret from everyone except the O.G. (“the Old Gentleman,” the head of the Outfit), were scattered around Washington in gimcrack temporary government buildings left over the First World War, or in offices with the names of fictitious organizations painted on the doors, or in private houses in discreet residential neighborhoods. This milieu, in which daring undertakings were planned and spacious ideas were discussed in mean little rooms by ardently ambitious men who were mostly very young, preserved a wartime atmosphere long after WWII was over. This was exactly what the O.G. wanted.

“Nooks and crannies, visibility zero — that’s the ticket,” he said. “The day we move into a big beautiful building with landscaped grounds and start hanging portraits of our founders is the day we begin to die.”

The sentence that Patchen murmured to the O.G. over their inedible dinner at the Club was this: “If (Patchen were captured and fully debriefed by the enemy), we could start all over again.”

But, more recently:

There was no need for him to explain his idea. The O.G. grasped its perfection and simplicity as soon as the words were spoken. If Patchen’s memory were emptied by the enemy like
those of the others who had been kidnapped, the Outfit could not continue to exist. There could be no going back to what had existed before; something new would have to be created to take the Outfit’s place — something that would recapture the energy, the patriotism, the audacity, the sheer fun of the Outfit in its youth.

Both Patchen and the O.G. had believed for a long time that a way must be found for American espionage to start over again. The Cold War was over. Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism (always, as the O.G. liked to say, “a lie wrapped in a sham surrounded by a delusion”) had collapsed under the weight of its own pathology. The old secret alliances against the Russian Communists, built up over half a century by the O.G. and Patchen and their operatives, had outlived their usefulness. A new world was in the making. A new intelligence service was required to study it, to discover America’s real enemies and to help her real friends.

The Outfit in its present form could not do the job. Its methods were outdated, its purposes irrelevant. Its best people, the brilliant, intrepid eccentrics recruited by the O.G. were gone, having grown old in the service or having been driven out of it by wave after wave of exposés in the press, investigations in Congress, reforms by the Executive Branch, and mutilating internal reorganizations imposed from above. The combined effect of all these assaults had been to render it almost incapable of operating as a secret intelligence service. Its agents in the field could no longer behave as spies must behave — with duplicity, ruthlessness, cold logic, and unquestioning devotion to their cause (that is to say, like idealists) — without fearing that they might be called home, frog-marched through the media, and indicted on felony charges.

This state of affairs was a triumph for the Outfit’s foes, foreign and domestic. Some of the Outfit’s own former officials had gone so far as to testify before Congress or talk to the press about “legalizing” the Outfit’s activities. This was an absurd notion on the face of it — the very purpose of a secret intelligence service is to carry out illegal actions with the unacknowledged blessing of its government — but it was eagerly taken up by good-hearted, patriotic people as well as by others,… who instinctively loved their country’s enemies better than they loved their country. Little by little, the Outfit had been robbed of its reputation and its élan, and of all but a few of the tools it needed to carry out its mission.

A political attack ad which makes some very sound points from a candidate who has long enjoyed a good deal of support from certain elements of the Right.

0:56 video

Hat tip to Daniel Lowenstein.

Matthew Murray, 24, evidently was acting on a grudge based upon being expelled “for health reasons” three years ago from a 12-week missionary training program conducted by Youth With a Mission (YWAM), a non-denominational evangelical organization founded in 1960. Murray had been sending hate mail to officials of WYAM for some time.

On Sunday night, Murray appeared and demanded a room at the dormitory for missionary trainees at the program center he had previously attended at Arvada, Colorado. When Tiffany Johnson, 26, told him he could not stay there, and tried suggesting alternatives, he produced a pistol and opened fired, killing Johnson and Phillip Crouse, 24, and wounding two other staff members.

WorldNetDaily

The following morning, Murray arrived at the Colorado Springs New Life Church wearing a trench coat and carrying two handguns, the kind of semi-uto the press usually refers to as an assault rifle and over 1,000 rounds of ammunition. He set off smoke cannisters at several entrances to the church complex, and launched his attack. Murray began firing at vehicles in the church parking lot, killing two teenage girls Stephanie and Rachel Works, 18 and 16, and wounding their father David Works, 51. He then entered the church vestibule, and wounded Larry Bourbonnais, a 59-year-old Vietnam veteran.

At that point, 42-year-old Jeanne Assam, a former Minneapolis police officer, one of a dozen volunteer security guards at the church complex licensed to carry a concealed firearm, had been attending the just concluded service and intervened. She drew her own pistol, and advanced upon Murray, demanding that he surrender. Murray shot at her three times with his own handgun, but Assam then walked directly toward him, squeezing off round after round. Murray fell.

Brady Boyd, the church’s pastor, observed that Jeanne Assam’s actions saved the lives of 50 to 100 people.

Bourbonnais’ account

Jeanne Assam interview 12:30 video

Roger Kimball describes how Western courts are being successfully used to suppress criticism of Islamic extremism.

Last summer, Cambridge University Press announced that it would pulp all unsold copies of its 2006 book Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World by Robert O. Collins, a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, and J. Millard Burr, a retired employee of the State Department. Why? Because Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi banker, filed a libel claim to quash the book. According to a story in The Chronicle for Higher Education [reg req’d], Cambridge instantly capitulated, paid “substantial damages” to Mr. Mahfouz, and even went so far as to contact university libraries worldwide to ask them to remove the book from their shelves. They seem to have been successful in their request: I have searched high and low for the book in academic libraries and public libraries and have found that, although it is listed as “not checked out,” it is nowhere to be found.

Suppressing books he doesn’t like seems to be a hobby of Mr. Mahfouz’s. His web site lists successful actions against three other books Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden and Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed—and How to Stop It. As Robert Spencer explained in The Washington Times, one notable feature of Mr. Mahfouz’s legal actions is that he has sued various American authors in Britain, where libel laws favor the plaintiff.

Glenn Reynolds catches Maureen Dowd lying about her age.

Robert Maranto, associate professor of political science at Villanova University, reports, in the Washington Post, on the chasm separating the gauchist monoculture of the contemporary academical clerisy from the American political mainsteam.

At a Harvard symposium in October, former Harvard president and Clinton Treasury secretary Larry Summers argued that among liberal arts and social science professors at elite graduate universities, Republicans are “the third group,” far behind Democrats and even Ralph Nader supporters. Summers mused that in Washington he was “the right half of the left,” while at Harvard he found himself “on the right half of the right.”

I know how he feels. I spent four years in the 1990s working at the centrist Brookings Institution and for the Clinton administration and felt right at home ideologically. Yet during much of my two decades in academia, I’ve been on the “far right” as one who thinks that welfare reform helped the poor, that the United States was right to fight and win the Cold War, and that environmental regulations should be balanced against property rights.

All these views — commonplace in American society and among the political class — are practically verboten in much of academia. At many of the colleges I’ve taught at or consulted for, a perusal of the speakers list and the required readings in the campus bookstore convinced me that a student could probably go through four years without ever encountering a right-of-center view portrayed in a positive light.

A sociologist I know recalls that his decision to become a registered Republican caused “a sensation” at his university. “It was as if I had become a child molester,” he said. He eventually quit academia to join a think tank because “you don’t want to be in a department where everyone hates your guts.”

I think my political views hurt my career some years back when I was interviewing for a job at a prestigious research university. Everything seemed to be going well until I mentioned, in a casual conversation with department members over dinner, that I planned to vote Republican in the upcoming presidential election. Conversation came to a halt, and someone quickly changed the subject. The next day, I thought my final interview went fairly well. But the department ended up hiring someone who had published far less, but apparently “fit” better than I did. At least that’s what I was told when I called a month later to learn the outcome of the job search, having never received any further communication from the school. (A friend at the same university later told me he didn’t believe that particular department would ever hire a Republican.) …

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors’ political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans. …

I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.

Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

Marlene Todd of Deadwood, South Dakota nearly shared hers with an unwelcome visitor.

Rapid City Journal:

Despite sitting in a hot, bubbling Jacuzzi on her deck Thursday morning, Marlene Todd froze.

She had just eased into in the hot tub a little after 7 a.m. on the deck of her Spring Street home when she heard some rustling beside her.

There was a mountain lion, crouching less than a foot away.

The lion must have been equally surprised. It was cornered somewhat because the deck stairs blocked its retreat. It would have to go up and over the hot tub.

“It just took a leap. It jumped on the side of the hot tub,” Todd said. “We locked eyes, and it kicked off of the hot tub and ran away. When it jumped, it flipped my robe into the hot tub.”

Todd immediately cut short her soak and wrapped herself in her wet robe, slipped on her shoes, secured the lid on the hot tub and went inside her house.

She summoned Deadwood police, who surmised that the lion was stalking some deer that were in the neighborhood. Police also speculated that the mountain lion was staying near the warmth of the hot tub on the frosty morning.

“I didn’t need caffeine this morning, I know that,” Todd said.

Scientists in France are reporting for the first time that sculptors from the fantastically wealthy ancient Empire of Mali — once the source of almost half the world’s gold — used blood to form the beautiful patina, or coating, on their works of art.

Yossi Klein Halevi provides the Israeli perspective in the New Republic.

The sense of betrayal within the Israeli security system is deep. After all, Israel’s great achievement in its struggle against Iran was in convincing the international community that the nuclear threat was real; now that victory has been undone–not by Russia or the European Union, but by Israel’s closest ally.

What makes Israeli security officials especially furious is that the report casts doubt on Iranian determination to attain nuclear weapons. There is a sense of incredulity here: Do we really need to argue the urgency of the threat all over again? The Israeli strategists I heard from ridicule the report’s contention that “Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.” Is it, asks one Israeli analyst sarcastically, a cost-benefit approach for one of the world’s largest oil exporters to risk international sanctions and economic ruin for the sake of a peaceful nuclear program?

No one with whom I’ve spoken believes that professional considerations, such as new intelligence, were decisive in changing the American assessment on Iran. What has been widely hailed in the American media as an expression of intelligence sobriety, even courage, is seen in the Israeli strategic community as precisely the opposite: an expression of political machination and cowardice. “The Americans often accuse us of tailoring our intelligence to suit our political needs,” notes a former top security official. “But isn’t this report a case study of doing precisely that?”

Adds a key security analyst: “The report didn’t surprise me. The [American intelligence] system isn’t healthy. It has been thoroughly politicized.

And today’s Telegraph reports that British Intelligence also is questioning the bases for the NIE’s conclusions.

British spy chiefs have grave doubts that Iran has mothballed its nuclear weapons programme, as a US intelligence report claimed last week, and believe the CIA has been hoodwinked by Teheran.

Analysts believe that Iranian staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation

The timing of the CIA report has also provoked fury in the British Government, where officials believe it has undermined efforts to impose tough new sanctions on Iran and made an Israeli attack on its nuclear facilities more likely.

The security services in London want concrete evidence to allay concerns that the Islamic state has fed disinformation to the CIA.

The report used new evidence – including human sources, wireless intercepts and evidence from an Iranian defector – to conclude that Teheran suspended the bomb-making side of its nuclear programme in 2003. But British intelligence is concerned that US spy chiefs were so determined to avoid giving President Bush a reason to go to war – as their reports on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes did in Iraq – that they got it wrong this time.

A senior British official delivered a withering assessment of US intelligence-gathering abilities in the Middle East and revealed that British spies shared the concerns of Israeli defence chiefs that Iran was still pursuing nuclear weapons.

The source said British analysts believed that Iranian nuclear staff, knowing their phones were tapped, deliberately gave misinformation.

Stephen Peter Rosen, of Middle East Strategy at Harvard, draws rather different conclusions from the NIE Report from those its authors probably intended.

In my view, the Iran program halted in 2003 because of the massive and initially successful American use of military power in Iraq. The United States offered no “carrots” to Iran, but only wielded an enormous stick. This increased the Iranians’ desire to minimize the risks to themselves, and so they halted programs that could unambiguously be identified as a nuclear weapons program. They were guarding themselves against the exposure of a weapons program by US or Israeli clandestine intelligence collection, and were not trying to signal the United States that they were looking to negotiate. They did not publicly announce this halt because if they did so, they would be perceived as weak within Iran, and within the region. By continuing the enrichment program, they kept the weapon option open.

If this is true, the Iranian government responds to imminent threats of force, not economic sanctions or diplomatic concessions. If that is the case, as the threat of US use of force goes down, the likelihood that Iran restarts its program goes up. Since the threat of US use of force went down in 2007, it is likely that the program restarted in that time frame. The threat of Israeli use of force, however, remained high, and went up after the attack on Syria. The NIE, however, ensured that there would be no US or Israeli use of force for the foreseeable future. So the prediction is that warhead production activity has restarted, and will produce a useable gun-type design quickly. Given observable uranium enrichment activity, enough uranium will be available for one bomb in one year. It does not makes sense for a country to test its first and only weapon when it has none in reserve to deter attacks. So the first test is not likely before two years from now or late 2009.

What will Iranian behavior be after the first test? All countries, with the exception of India, that have developed their own nuclear weapon, have transferred that technology to other countries.