harmonicminer

Once again, Charles Krauthammer connects the dots.   While the Washington Post is as reliably liberal/left as the New York Times, I don’t think this editorial would have appeared in “the newspaper of record.”  Kudos to the Post for publishing it.  Now, if only it required its staff to read it.

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

— Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

— Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

— Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

— Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

via Power Line More at the link.

We missed an important moment at the Miss Universe pageant on Saturday night. The outgoing Miss Universe made a little political statement on her final catwalk that was visible to Venezuelans but probably no one else, holding up an obsolete seven star pre-Chavez era flag. She did it to signal distress in her country, and nowhere is that move evident than in Venezuela’s violent crime. This week the news came out that Caracas is the most violent city in the world, a distinction it holds over Kabul, Baghdad, Sao Paulo and Ciudad Juarez.

As we age, we get smaller, we get wrinkles, and we get shaky. So, apparently, does the moon, as lunar scientists say that a Shrinking moon may explain lunar quakes.

Thomas Watters of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and colleagues say the wrinkles likely formed as the moon cooled and contracted.

The features are surprisingly recent, having formed no more than 1 billion years ago. That estimate is based on the fact that they partly destroyed some pre-existing small craters that seem to be no more than 1 billion years old. “The moon may still be geologically and tectonically active and still shrinking today,” Watters said in a teleconference with reporters on Thursday.

What a nice way to say it. The next time someone points out that I don’t look as young as I used to, I’ll just say, “That’s because I’m still tectonically active.”

That’s a continental plate on top of my head.  It only LOOKS like the surface of the moon.

Obama has become famous for his international apology tours, in which he seems to apologize for everything under the sun, as if America is the most brutal and vicious regime in history, as if we’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting, as if we’re solely responsible for global warming and hunger around the world, in addition to being rude to all the other nice nations. Truthfully, he’s apologizing just for America being America… but here’s a national leader who knows when its time to apologize, as Japanese P.M. apologizes on anniversary of WWII end

Japan’s new liberal prime minister shunned a visit to a shrine that has outraged Asian neighbors for honoring war criminals, breaking from past governments’ tradition and instead apologizing Sunday for the suffering World War II caused.

Members of the now-opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which ruled Japan nearly continuously since the end of the war, made a point by carrying out their own trip to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo on the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The Shinto shrine, a spectacular building with sweeping roofs and a museum in its grounds that glorifies kamikaze pilots, has set off controversy by honoring the 2.5 million Japanese war dead, including Class A war criminals such as Hideki Tojo, Japan’s war-time prime minister who was executed in 1948.

“We caused great damage and suffering to many nations during the war, especially to the people of Asia,” Kan told a crowd of about 6,000 at an annual memorial service for the war dead at Budokan hall in Tokyo.

“We feel a deep regret, and we offer our sincere feelings of condolence to those who suffered and their families,” he said. “We renew our promise to never wage war, and we promise to do our utmost to achieve eternal world peace and to never repeat again the mistake of war.”

Among those listening to Kan’s words were Emperor Akihito, whose father Hirohito announced the surrender 65 years ago in a radio broadcast, the first time the Japanese public had heard the real voice of the emperor, who had been revered as a living god to justify imperial expansion.

Last week, <Kan> apologized to South Korea for its 1910-45 colonial rule. Imperialist Japan committed atrocities in Asia, including forcing Koreans to fight as front-line soldiers, work in slave-labor conditions and serve as prostitutes in military-run brothels.

In Seouln President Lee Myung-bak, speaking Sunday before a crowd packing a plaza near the former royal palace, said history should not be forgotten but urged Japan and his nation to work together for a new future.

“I have taken note of Japan’s effort, which represents one step forward,” Lee said of Kan’s apology.

How does what Japan has to apologize for compare to what America has to apologize for? Your answer to that will inform your response to Obama’s apology tours.

In no particular order:

A lot less narcissism on Facebook.

Church worship leaders behaving like worship leaders and not stage performers.

A professional sports star that cares more about the community in which they play than their “brand”.

A politician retire without having become wealthy while in office.

Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams in the president’s cabinet.

Some common courtesy on the freeway.

A government “by the people and for the people” not “against the people” or “at the people”.

A hero’s welcome for every soldier when they come home.

Students who are willing to do what it takes.

A manned mission to Mars.

The view from the top of Mt. Everest.

The 49ers back in the Superbowl.

An emerald flash.

Satchel Paige in his prime.

A cure for cancer.

The earth from outer space.

A long stretch of open road through the windshield of a Shelby Cobra.

The return of the Helms Bakery truck.

Vin Scully live forever.

Federal Judge Overturns California’s Same-Sex Marriage Ban

A federal judge on Wednesday overturned a California ban on same-sex marriage, ruling that the Proposition 8 ballot initiative was unconstitutional.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Vaugh Walker, one of three openly gay federal judges in the country, gave opponents of the controversial Proposition 8 ballot a major victory.

Gay couples waving rainbow and American flags outside the courthouse cheered, hugged and kissed as word of the ruling spread.

Despite the favorable ruling for same-sex couples, gay marriage will not be allowed to resume. That’s because the judge said he wants to decide whether his order should be suspended while the proponents pursue their appeal in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The judge ordered both sides to submit written arguments by Aug. 6 on the issue.

Supporters argued the ban was necessary to safeguard the traditional understanding of marriage and to encourage responsible childbearing.

California voters passed the ban as Proposition 8 in November 2008, five months after the state Supreme Court legalized gay marriage.

“Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples,” the judge wrote in a 136-page ruling that laid out in precise detail why the ban does not pass constitutional muster.

The judge found that the gay marriage ban violates the Constitution’s due process and equal protection clauses.

“Because Proposition 8 disadvantages gays and lesbians without any rational justification, Proposition 8 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the judge ruled.

Presumably current law also disadvantages polygamists and polyandrists, not to mention people who want to live in “group marriages”, “without any rational justification.”
Some comments from others:

Power Line

Conservatives have long said that the day would come when liberal judges declare the Constitution unconstitutional. That happened today, when a gay federal judge in San Francisco, relying on the opinions of mostly-gay “expert” witnesses, ruled that an amendment to the California constitution, which was adopted in perfectly proper fashion by a substantial majority of voters, is “unconstitutional.” In this context, unconstitutional means “unpopular with me and my friends.”

The “Who Decides” Election

August is off to an interesting start, with liberal elites telling large majorities of Americans that they are bigots if they oppose a mosque at Ground Zero or same sex marriage in California. These edicts to the cultural surfs from their betters in New York and San Francisco only add to the growing sense that November really is a show-down election, a conviction that was strengthened by the amazing verdict on Obamacare from the Show Me State on Tuesday.

The debates over the mosque and marriage are both being carried on at two levels.

In both cases there is a complicated legal debate underway, as there is in the case of Arizona’s 1070 and Virginia’s challenge to Obamacare. Each of these four disputes could make for wonderful hypotheticals on a final exam in any Con Law class in the country, so not surprisingly the non-lawyers in pundit land are making a hash of it. (For an example of careful analysis of the marriage decision, see Orin Kerr’s take on one small portion of Judge Walker’s opinion at The Volokh Conspiracy, which demonstrates the complexity of the arguments and why almost all non-lawyers and most lawyers are going to have as tough a time with the legal issues here as they have with the preemption and Commerce Clause issues in the Arizona and Virginia cases and the Free Exercise arguments regarding GZM.)

Here’s the all-purpose, all-weather analysis for all four controversies: Eventually Anthony Kennedy will tell us what the law is. Until then, it is all just so much dorm-room chatter. The Supreme Court is narrowly divided between “living Constitution” justices and “originalist” justices, and the four in each camp will be pretty predictable on the marriage, preemption, and Commerce Clause issues, though less so on the Free Exercise issue which would be at the heart of the case should the GZM ever reach the Court (which the Court almost certainly does not want it to do.)

This is exactly right, I think. If the words of the Constitution don’t mean what they meant to the founders, then they don’t mean much of anything other than the personal preferences of the judges making the decisions now.

What, you say that you don’t see anything in the Constitution or history to suggest that the founders (or anyone else for the first two centuries of the republic) believed that same sex marriage was/is protected by the Constitution?

Then stop voting for Democrats, who have for decades reliably (meaning almost ALWAYS) appointed judges who think that their opinion about what the constitution really means is more important than the opinions of, say James Madison, or Thomas Jefferson, or Alexander Hamilton, or, for that matter, John Jay.

Today, it seems we can forget what the Constitution actually meant to the people who wrote it and approved it, because we have Anthony Kennedy to divide the waters for us.

Pray he gets it right.

Modern physics has for decades assumed that we know of the basic four forces in the universe, and that there are only those four, gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear and strong nuclear forces. The problem is that some observed aspects of the universe seem not to be explainable in terms of only those four forces, notably the continued expansion of the universe, and the way galaxies stay together without (apparently) enough mass to produce the gravitic effects that are observed.  So called “dark energy” and “dark matter” is the scientific community’s way of saying, “We don’t have a fuzzy clue what’s out there or why it behaves that way.”  Dark energy and dark matter are believed to be 95% of everything in the universe, with what we see and can directly measure being 5% or less. So some scientists are asking, Is a cosmic chameleon driving galaxies apart?

The basic idea for this fifth force was hatched in 2004 by Justin Khoury and Amanda Weltman, then members of a team led by well-known string theorist Brian Greene at Columbia University in New York City. String theory is the favoured route to unifying gravity, the odd one out among the four forces, with the other three under the umbrella of quantum mechanics. It is a great playground for devising new fields and forces. The theory is formulated in 11 dimensions, seven of which are assumed to be curled up so small that we cannot see them. Disturbances in those curled-up dimensions might make themselves felt as “extra” forces in the four dimensions of space and time we do see.

For this picture to make sense, the effects in the visible dimensions must match our observations of the universe. Khoury and Weltman proposed one way of doing this: an extra force could be transmitted by particles whose mass depends on the density of the matter around them. That way, its effects could remained veiled on Earth.

How would that work? Well, in quantum mechanics, the range of influence of a force depends largely on the mass of the particles produced by the associated force field: the lighter the particle, the longer the force’s range. Electromagnetic fields, for example, produce photons that have no mass whatsoever, so the range of the electromagnetic force is infinite. The particles that transmit the weak nuclear force, on the other hand, are extremely heavy and do not travel very far, confining the force to the tiny scales of the atomic nucleus. With the strong nuclear force, things are slightly more complex: the associated particles, called gluons, are massless but also have the ability to interact with themselves, preventing the force from operating over large distances.

Khoury and Weltman started from the observation that the average density of matter in Earth’s vicinity is very high in cosmic terms, at about 0.5 grams per cubic centimetre. Under these circumstances, they proposed, the particle that transmits the chameleon force would be about a billion times lighter than the electron. The force itself would then have a range of not more than a millimetre – small enough for its effects to have remained undetected in the lab so far.

In the wide open spaces of the cosmos, however, where a cubic centimetre contains just 10-29 grams of matter on average, the mass of the chameleon particle plummets by something like 22 orders of magnitude, producing a muscular force that could act over millions of light years. The lost mass is picked up as energy by the chameleon field.

You’ll pardon me… but I’m excited by the idea that there is still plenty of physics left undiscovered, and the universe is still a very mysterious place. And, by that same token, I suggest that all the scientists in the room be relatively circumspect, or maybe even downright humble, in their conjectures about the possibility that all this happened more or less “by accident”, and did not require a Designer.

You’ll need your cellphone to take and send pictures of yourself as you lay neglected, like this young woman who texted pics of herself dying to her family.  NHS is Britain’s National Health Service:

A DESPERATE woman texted photos of herself slowly DYING to her mum as she lay suffering on a hospital bed – being ignored by NHS doctors.

Tragic Jo Dowling, 25, sent over forty messages to her mother and best friend including pictures of a deadly rash spreading across her body as her life ebbed away.

The pretty youngster was diagnosed by her family GP with suspected Meningococcal Septicaemia after developing a purple skin rash and low blood pressure last November.

She was rushed to Milton Keynes Hospital where A&E doctors rejected the diagnosis believing instead her illness was a mild infection caused by her Cystic Fibrosis.

Doctors abandoned Jo on a observation ward and gave her headache tablets and fluids as they failed to spot the purple rash spread over her arms, hands and legs.

As the hours passed terrified Jo took photos of her rash on her mobile phone and sent them to her mum and best friend describing her condition as “getting worse”.

The meningitis bug left her in septic shock choking and coughing as fluid filled her lungs and she died four hours after her last text message – just 14 hours after arriving at hospital.

It seems that the hospital was understaffed AND incompetent:

The inquest heard there were only two doctors on duty to cover the entire hospital the night Jo died.

Devastated mum Sue Christie, 48, of Milton Keynes, a distribution worker, said: “Our doctor knew it was meningitis but when we got to hospital all the care seemed to stop.

“They didn’t seem to know what they were meant to do or what meningococcal septicaemia was.

“The hospital was saying it was just an infection. She had a lot of infections with Cystic Fibrosis but never a rash like this.

“I saw her picture messages and the rash was really bad. You couldn’t miss them but the nurses did. I thought she was in hospital and with the best people.

“She wasn’t given a chance and was left to die without being given any treatment.

“It is so sad as Jo had got through everything with her Cystic Fibrosis and was such a strong girl.”

I give blood regularly, and the donor center always asks me if I’ve been to Britain lately.  I suspect that if I said yes, the next question would be, “Did you have any medical care in Britain?”

Word gets around.

h/t: Powerline

U.S. Authorities Shut Down WordPress Host With 73,000 Blogs

After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.

They say it’s because of copyright infringement, but is it really? From reading the article here, it would seem that only sites/blogs which were streaming movies and TV shows were shut down initially, but upon further perusal, it seems like the Feds just arbitrarily shut down a server with several tens of thousands of bloggers on it without due process as is usual with this administration. How soon before they find some reason to shut down other servers or networks? What’s probably infuriating to the bloggers who were shut down is that they have no recourse. They have no idea why the server was shut down. And the Feds are mum about it. Also, if the bloggers can even get a hold of the server admin, they’re refused any explanation of why.

Perhaps this is just a “test case” for the FCC to see if or what they can get by with.

Doesn’t it just make you feel all warm and fuzzy towards the Obama administration to know that they’re watching out for you?

By the way: WordPress is the engine that runs this blog.

Even giving full credence to the notion of “copyright infringement” happening, causing the feds to crack down, it is beyond belief that 73,000 blogs were all the targets of federal investigations.

I suppose we’re supposed to just accept that as collateral damage.

If you blog, may I suggest you frequently back up ALL your data?  And maybe be prepared to put up a mirror site if the feds decide someone in your cyber-neighborhood is hosting too many Seinfeld episodes?

Just a thought.

I’m pretty sure that that if the Bush administration had done this, the media and web would have been full of accusations that Bush was “protecting his big business friends” (who else owns big money copyrights?) and taking the opportunity to “shut down free speech” for all the lefty blogs on the same servers.  There would be individual sob stories of people who lost their access to pictures of grandma, and small business sites selling energy efficiency products that were now out of business, and so on.

You know how it would go:  Bush lied, servers died.

I’m guessing you probably haven’t even heard of this story much of anywhere else.  Apparently, the muzzling of free speech is only worth reporting when Republicans do it.