Friday, May 23, 2008

Obama Says Experience Not Necessary - Judgment Enough

Kimberly Strassel's weekly Potomac Watch column in the Wall Street Journal points to a claim frequently made by Barack Obama that his superior judgement makes up for his lack of experience;
"And so it goes, as Mr. Obama shifts and shambles, all the while telling audiences that when voting for president they should look beyond "experience" to "judgment." In this case, whatever his particular judgment on Iran is on any particular day."

It reminds me of an old adage, attributed by many to Jim Horning: "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." Horning modestly disavows coming up with this himself, pointing to a Sufi sage, Mulla Nasrudin. Whoever came up with it, it's spot-on
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Things Get Dangerous Over at Tim Blair's New Site.....

....according to this post at his old one. Moderator Tran sounds like a force to be reckoned with.

But Tran is absolutely terrifying. The other day, down in the moderation pit, he got into a fight with one of Joe Hildebrand’s night shift moderators over possessive apostrophes. The ambulance guys said they’d never before seen such elaborate knife wounds.


Thing is, Tran was armed only with a thesaurus. Sharpened, admittedly, but still just a thesaurus.


I hope I got that possessive apostrophe in the post title right. I shudder to think what Tran might do to me if I didn't...........
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Saturday, May 17, 2008

Obama the Self-Absorbed Adolescent

Mark Steyn's column in this week's Orange County Register really rips the Democrats and Obama in particular for objecting to Presidnet Bush's speech to the Knesset on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel. One particular passage appears to have particularly irked them. Even though the speech makes no reference to any living Democrat Obama has decided it's all about him. Isn't that just like an adolescent to think that everythng is all about him? As usual, Steyn nails it:

"Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here's what the president said:


"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."


It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they're talking about me. Actually, he wasn't – or, to be more precise, he wasn't talking only about you


In fact the senator who uttered those words in 1939 was William Borah of Idaho, a Republican. The Democrats should really take to heart the old adage; "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." Plus, it's harder to get your foot in there when your piehole is shut.

Read the whole thing, of course.
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Monday, May 12, 2008

Tim Blair Has a New Home....

....at the Daily Telegraph and a great Global Warmening post in the form of a letter from climate researcher David Archibald. The Global Warm-mongers won't like this:

"John Connor of The Climate Institute says that my boat, my car and I are destroying the environment. My work says the opposite. The more carbon dioxide you put into the atmosphere, the more you are helping all plants on the planet to grow, and of course that makes you a better person. Virtue is in direct proportion to your carbon dioxide output. What of the temperature, you ask? Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but the effect is strongly logarithmic. The first 20 ppm achieves 1.5 degrees of heating, but it takes more than another 400 ppm to equal that. By the time we get to the current level of 384 ppm, carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. From here, every 100 ppm extra may be worth 0.1 of a degree.


So how does the IPCC achieve 5 degrees of heating from a doubling of the pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide to 560 ppm? They do it by cheating. Their computer models are written so that a little bit of carbon dioxide-caused heating puts more water vapour in the air. Water vapour is the major greenhouse gas, so they have the heating compounding away until they get a number that will melt icecaps, kill polar bears and all the other effects of their apocalyptic visions. Their view of the Earth’s climate is that it is tremendously unstable, prone to thermal runaway at the slightest provocation. In fact it is the opposite, a buffered system that dampens disturbances. Tropical seas can’t get warmer than 31 degrees because they start evaporating too rapidly to get any hotter. Similarly, high level tropical clouds part to vent radiation to space. The Earth is just about perfect for sustaining equable living conditions over a good proportion of its surface."



Read the whole thing of course.
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