Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

William Shakespeare

After reading this article I can only wonder which of these attributes of greatness applies to the esteemed junior Senator from the great State of Minnesota.  Given the times in which we live, given the magnitude and seriousness of so many national and international issues facing our great nation, it is of great comfort to know Stewart Smalley is on the job!

The people from the land of 10,000 lakes must be so proud.

If I were a cartoonist I’d draw Al Gore giving a speech on global warming somewhere outdoors.  In every frame of the cartoon he’d have to pause his speech and put on another layer of clothing as the weather worsened and the temperature dropped.  The last frame would show him so bundled up that he could neither be seen or heard.

…..Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?

UPDATE: I was taken to task over this original post.  Here is an example of one critical comment. There are others.

But your claim that a cold winter is “evidence” against global warming is downright foolish, and shows either a) an interest in misleading people, or b) a blatant misunderstanding of climate change research.

Now watch this archival footage showing a series of Democrat politicians claiming that a warm winter and lack of snow was concrete evidence of global warming.   Which just further underlines the fact that a) a double standard exists, and b) those who think anthropogenic global warming exists do so as a matter of belief rather than of fact.  It’s almost a climate religion.

Thousands of uncatalogued pathogens found at US lab

With three days left in spring cleaning season, a US army lab that works on the world’s deadliest pathogens has turned up uncatalogued vials of Ebola, anthrax, plague and other pathogens – 9220 of them to be precise.

The laboratory is the same one where anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins worked before he committed suicide last year. The US government suspects Ivins was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, and studies showed that the anthrax used in the attack was “directly related” to the batch stored at the lab.

The discovery of the uncatalogued vials raises questions about whether anyone would notice if some of the lab’s pathogens went missing.

“A small number would be a concern; 9200 … at an institution that has been the focus of intense scrutiny on this issue, that’s deeply worrisome. Unacceptable,” Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, told the Washington Post.

If you see some guys in white lab coats selling vials of “special fragrance” at the swap meet, I suggest you find someplace else to shop.  I’m not sure if this is scarier than missing Russian suitcase nukes, but it’s at least competitive on the scare-o-meter.  Does anybody think that the anthrax-spreading misanthrope is the only geek with a big brain and a tiny moral center? 

There are days when I wonder if the human race is just too stupid to live.  Then I’ll buck up a bit, and start feeling less pessimistic.  But not long after that, I’ll hear a bunch of people, who should know better, waxing rhapsodic about the wonderfulness of government mananged healthcare for the future.  It reminds me, as if I needed reminding, that the innumerate and the illiterate have no defenses against technocrats, their natural predators.

If the missing Russian nukes, the Iranian nukes, the North Korean nukes, or the pathogenic terrorists don’t get us, then it’ll be the nanotech that does it, when the first self-replicating machine (originally designed to “eat waste at toxic waste-dumps”) turns the entire Earth into a gigantic orbiting pile of staples — covered, incidentally, with Ebola spores.

I’m sure they’ll be very useful to someone (the staples, that is).  I expect that the Intragalactic Council on Emerging Technology (ICE-T) will have a LOT of reports to fill out.

Environmental issues consistently rate near the bottom of public worry, according to many public opinion polls. A Pew Research Center poll released in January found global warming last among 20 voter concerns; it trailed issues like addressing moral decline and decreasing the influence of lobbyists. “We know why it’s lowest,” said Mr. Perkowitz, a marketer of outdoor clothing and home furnishings before he started ecoAmerica, whose activities are financed by corporations, foundations and individuals. “When someone thinks of global warming, they think of a politicized, polarized argument. When you say ‘global warming,’ a certain group of Americans think that’s a code word for progressive liberals, gay marriage and other such issues.”

The answer, Mr. Perkowitz said in his presentation at the briefing, is to reframe the issue using different language. “Energy efficiency” makes people think of shivering in the dark. Instead, it is more effective to speak of “saving money for a more prosperous future.” In fact, the group’s surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.”

“Another key finding: remember to speak in TALKING POINTS aspirational language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology,” said the e-mail account of the group’s study.

Are Americans really this stupid?

Well, yes.  They elected Obama hoping for unspecified change.  Any old direction will do, it would seem.  They bought Clinton’s “contributions” for taxes, radical feminism’s “pro-choice” for anti-unborn child and pro-abortion, “gun control” for “guns for criminals only”, and “hate speech” for telling the truth, or at least exercising your First Amendment right to speak your mind.

One of the best ways to lie is just to pretend not to hear anyone who’s telling the truth, and keep right on as if they never spoke.  That’s exactly what’s happening in our national conversation, as the Left rules all the media but talk radio, and is gunning for that, too.  So “global warming” has morphed into “climate change” and “carbon taxes” is going to be “anti-pollution fees”, and so on.

In the meantime, if you had to bet, the smart money is that the earth is cooling, overall.  And the smarter money knows that even if it isn’t, the change is very gradual, probably has little to do with human activity, and it isn’t even clear that it will be a bad thing.

And by the way:  there were polar bears around when the earth was so warm that Greenland was verdant farm land, with nary a glacier in sight.  (That’s why it’s called GREENLAND.)   Somehow, the bears survived.

I suspect they will again.

ABC News’ Jake Tapper reports (h/t InstaPundit) that Bill Ayers voted this morning at Chicago’s Shoesmith Elementary School, shortly before another “guy from his neighborhood,” Barack Obama.

I’m sure someone had the job this morning of making sure that they were never in the same room, or otherwise capable of being captured within the same camera viewfinder, at the same time.

Ayers has the legal right to vote only because law enforcement screw-ups prevented him from being prosecuted for and convicted of the multiple felonies to which he’s confessed. He remains, however, a twisted dollop of evil scum — a description that I’m quite proud will be forever associated with his name in major online search engines.

Actually, Ayers didn’t vote for Obama. He is widely believed to have planned to write in Che Guevara, with whom he shares more in common. After all, the graveyard vote is big in Chicago, and we don’t have Barry’s birth certificate, either. And Che was widely reported to have been born in the Argentine American Embassy, legally American ground, so he could qualify, too.