On the dog walk this AM I composed in my head a most wordy, commemorative post to both honor those who were lost in the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and those first responders that risked, and for some, gave all to save as many as possible — as well as to lambaste those among us that no longer give a whit. But hey, for those so lost in their own narcissism that they care more about community organizing, punishing American business, depriving US from opportunity or protecting the weak from the likes of the Taliban — why waste words on them.

They HAVE FORGOTTEN!

They have forgotten the sight of their fellow Americans and yes, some from across the globe, making the harrowing choice to plunge to their deaths instead of burning alive. They have forgotten those that listened on their cell phones as loved ones on the doomed flights said their last good byes. They have forgotten the bravery of the resistors on Flight 93 as they forced that jumbo jet into a Pennsylvania field instead of allowing the hijackers to use it as a bomb against the Capital or the White House. They have forgotten those first responders that rushed into the twin towers to rescue as many as possible, but never made it out themselves.

They HAVE FORGOTTEN!

Not everyone has forgotten:

In today’s dead-tree-edition of the LA Times, they remember as best they can, with a single story on page 17 — with no blurb or mention on page one. Now, this current 9/11 has become “the first official National Day of Service and Remembrance,” to honor the spirit of volunteerism or some such parlance.

The Anchoress is remembering this 9/11 in a very different state of mind:

This 9/11 Anniversary, it just feels like too much. Or not enough. This 9/11, the day feels huge, too big for sentimentality, almost.

{…}

That’s kind of what I am feeling on this terrible anniversary – that the Day of the Bully may yet dawn again, but I am not so sure how psyche-scarred America will handle it. I know our first responders, our military, our Protector lads and He-men (and She-ra’s) will do what they always do; they will never let us down. But this is a very different -much more divided and thus weaker- country than we were 8 years ago. Our trust in each other has been shaken. I believe we would weather another attack and come together, as before, but is that simply because I want to believe it?

Michelle Malkin remembers:

Remember: Project 2,996.

Remember: “Let’s roll!”

Remember: The angels on loan from God.

Remember: The 9/11 babies.

Remember: Falling Man.

Remembrance is worthless without resolve. Resolve is useless without action.

Hugh Hewitt puts our struggle with the Islamists that would gladly have another 9/11 happen every day in perspective:

Thanks to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, coast guard, counterterrorism and public safety professionals who have prevented a second attack for eight years.

The enormous cost of the battles in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the world have been made so that there have not had to be more pictures like this one. We remember the victims of 9/11 today, but we also need to salute the thousands killed and tens of thousands wounded in the war with the Islamists, fanatics who would gladly see a 9/11 every day in their war with the West.

Doctor Zero at Hot Air answers those that minimize the importance of that day and our efforts to see it never repeated:

Eight years later, it’s a lot to ask people to think about 9/11 every single day. On this one day, at least, we can remember three thousand people who began an ordinary morning, and ended it by falling through fire. It was not a natural disaster, or a “tragedy,” and by God I am weary in my soul of people who amuse themselves by pretending it was a government conspiracy. It was an attack. It was murder. Across the Middle East tomorrow, there will be people who celebrate the murderers. Don’t turn away from the sight. We cannot afford to allow this enemy to become invisible. We can’t afford to let our heroes become invisible, either. The savages with box cutters were real. So were the men who ran into those collapsing towers. In their name, with love for their memory, and luminous with their spirit, we will prevail.

James Lileks has put together a moving remembrance of that fateful day:

As for me, I can’t forget.

I can’t forget how such a level of EVIL existed eight years ago that 19 men armed with box cutters slaughtered so many of US purely out of their hatred for our society, our freedoms, our faith. I can’t forget that in Pakistan the Taliban is working and fighting night and day to overthrow the ruling government and get their hands on nuclear weapons to use on Israel and on the West. I can’t forget . . . well because to do so would be suicidal. With our current slate of leaders and their misguided policies it will most likely happen again, sooner rather than later.

Unfortunately, next time will be worse . . .

John Holdren — The Obama administration’s eugenics/forced abortion/forced sterilization proponent, a.k.a. their Science Czar, is caught on video stating that a belief in American Exceptionalism is a misguided concept and that we in the US will have to give up a portion of our ability to create wealth so that the poor of the world can have their chance at getting theirs. WTF?

Ace pegs it nicely:

We won’t be producing the excess wealth in the first place, under his plan. Rather, he speaks of redistributing the capacity for wealth production, rather than the produced wealth itself.

It should be noted that never previously has the right to produce wealth been considered a “commodity” that can be regulated/restricted/taken away by the government. Not like this.

The government has long taken wealth itself through taxation, but has not considered the very ability to produce wealth something it could redistribute. Sure, there are some special exceptions — paying farmers not to farm, etc., maximum-hours laws. But it’s not been proposed, hitherto, that the government has the power to generally reduce your wealth-producing ability just for shits and giggles.

The Obama administration does NOT believe in the American Dream — but they do believe in their own version of an American Nightmare . . .

Oh boy — here we go folks, and my own representative, Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee, leads the health-care-bill-panic-parade:

House Democratic leaders, pledging to meet the president’s goal of health care legislation before their August break, are offering a $1.5 trillion plan that for the first time would make health care a right and a responsibility for all Americans. Left to pick up most of the tab were medical providers, employers and the wealthy.

“We cannot allow this issue to be delayed. We cannot put it off again[.] We, quite frankly, cannot go home for a recess unless the House and the Senate both pass bills to reform and restructure our health care system.”

Included in the bill will be “a surtax on millionaires of 5.4 percent”, gotta pay for all this free health care ya know? They’re bettin’ on folks like most of us sayin’, “Screw them millionaires — it’s not like we’ll be one o’ them anytime soon!” What they aren’t gonna tell ya is that a millionaire surtax isn’t going to cover this monster of a program — not even close. The tax implications will go waaaaay down the income chain and that won’t be enough. Only rationing and finally denial of services to the elderly and chronically infirm will make it even remotely feasible — and that’s a stretch. Just try getting treatment for arthritis in the UK!

Thousands of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers face a lifetime of agony because they are not being treated quickly enough, a report says.

Guidelines state that patients should receive treatment within three months of the first symptoms appearing.

But the average wait is nine months – and GPs are not trained well enough to know what help to offer.

That’s what Obamacare will bring to the US. Crunch the numbers — there’s no way around it. There’s no bi-partisan support for this fiasco either, but that isn’t going to stop this most-leftist-in-chief and his Democrat Congressional majority from jammin’ it down our throats or more likely, up our collective wazzoos!

But, why would our newly-minted President Obamessiah want to punish such a large number of his own subjects people? Well, if you consider the track record of the man that he has made the Science Czar, John Holdren — maybe His Majesty President Obama thinks that humans are the biggest problem in the world, a virus that needs to be controlled, contained, eliminated bit by bit — so that Gaia can return to a state of un-human-contaminated grace? Just askin’ . . .

In her syndicated column today Michelle Malkin compares the mainstream media’s shocked reaction to the “evangelical Christian faith of NIH director-designate Francis Collins” with their complete ignoring of John Holdren’s lifelong record of support for eugenics, forced sterilization & abortion, and world-wide draconian measures to control the world’s human population.

If a conservative blogger or Republican political candidate had published such lunatic claptrap, the Department of Homeland Security would have him on a watchlist. Instead, Holdren is Overlord of Science Policy. “Ecoscience” remains on his curriculum vitae. Obama is still perceived as the champion of reason. And the national media, so concerned about the dangers posed by a born-again Christian scientist, have responded to a secular extremist’s wild blueprints for forced abortions and mass sterilizations with a collective shrug. Scary.

Go and spend time with the Malkin piece, and then follow the ZombiTime link to the source documents. All this preoccupation with humans as a curse to the world gets me to thinkin’ about our ol’ University of Texas buddy, Professor Eric R. Pianka, who believes that “90% of humans must die.”

Oh, and the best part, as Malkin also reveals:

Well, I have indeed read one of Holdren’s recent works that reveals his clingy reverence for, and allegiance to, the gurus of population control authoritarianism. He’s just gotten smarter about cloaking it behind global warming hysteria.

Just last Sunday we experienced the out-in-the-open revelation that the Greenies, led by good ol’ Al Gore, will give it their best shot to rule the world for our own good. They’re gonna get loads of help from good ol’ population-control-by-any-and-all-means-possible Obama Science Czar, John Holdren.

Tons of Change — but not much Hope! Elections. Have. Consequences!

Technorati Tags: Henry Waxman, health care legislation, “Ecoscience”, Eric R. Pianka, Obama Science Czar, John Holdren

I’ve had a mental block about Twitter, to the point that I don’t use it, don’t track it, don’t really understand it — kind of like the derivative in Calculus. Thank the heavens that the people of Iran are more Twitter savvy than this ol’ Okie! The Anchoress writes in Twittering Liberty…and Hope.

Emily Dickinson wrote:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words
And never stops at all…

How appropriate then, that the communications tool most responsible for keeping hope alive in shattered Iran is “a thing” called “Twitter,” and that the 140-character dispatches being sent and received by people in desperate straits are called “tweets.”

People are “tweeting” for their lives, and their messages are bold, frightened, determined and unbelievably moving. Students are sending out: “They are trapped in the dorms,” and “I cannot remain; I must participate.” They head off, unsure whether they are headed to a peaceful rally or a massacre, and they are not heard from for 18 hours; and people around the world -strangers- pray and wonder.

Then, miraculously, they are back, tweeting news, stories of destruction, injury, damage, hope; they are passing messages.

{…}

It occurred to me over the weekend, while the MSM was, to their everlasting shame, not reporting on the Iranian uprising, that Twitter had become the pre-eminent tool for breaking news. Blogs immediately receded into the background and became secondary, and the big-time-professional news organizations were somnambulist non-players (perhaps they were unsure how to frame the thing until orders were received from “wherever”).

A CEO that I worked for in the ’90s would opine that the Internet was possibly the spawn of Satan. Tonight I would have said to him, “Perhaps, but in this moment, Twitter appears to be made up of legions of angels soaring high on thermals of the apocalypse.”

The people of Iran are pouring into the streets in protest of last week’s election, which has all the signs of having been stolen by current President/anti-Semitic lunatic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some of the protesters have been shot. News is leaking out of this tightly controlled country via Twitter!

What has been the very late reaction of our own fearful leader, President Barack Hussein Obama?

Mr. Obama said he was deeply troubled by the violence surrounding the election, but stressed it was up to the Iranian people to choose their leadership. He said he would maintain his policy of directly negotiating with Iran’s leaders on its nuclear program, irrespective of the vote.

Way to go, Barry. Give this homicidal A-hole legitimacy while the Mullahs charge the enforcers with the task to put down this protest before it becomes a new revolution. Can’t have freedom breaking out all over the place, now can we.

Especially since our own government is working overtime to abridge ours.

When even WaPo notices, that’s sayin’ something.

My message to the people of Iran?

Viva La Revolución!

Uh Oh! Killer robots and a revolution in warfare:Bernd Debusmann

They have no fear, they never tire, they are not upset when the soldier next to them gets blown to pieces. Their morale doesn’t suffer by having to do, again and again, the jobs known in the military as the Three Ds – dull, dirty and dangerous.

They are military robots and their rapidly increasing numbers and growing sophistication may herald the end of thousands of years of human monopoly on fighting war. “Science fiction is moving to the battlefield. The future is upon us,” as Brookings scholar Peter Singer put it to a conference of experts at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania this month.

Singer just published Wired For War – the Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, a book that traces the rise of the machines and predicts that in future wars they will not only play greater roles in executing missions but also in planning them.

{…}

A recent study prepared for the Office of Naval Research by a team from the California Polytechnic State University said that robot ethics had not received the attention it deserved because of a “rush to market” mentality and the “common misconception” that robots will do only what they have been programmed to do.

“Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to the time when computers were simpler and their programs could be written and understood by a single person,” the study says. “Now programs with millions of lines of code are written by teams of programmers, none of whom knows the entire program; hence, no individual can predict the effect of a given command with absolute certainty since portions of programs may interact in unexpected, untested ways.”

{…}

You need to be an optimist to think that political leaders will opt for negotiation over war once combat casualties come home not in flag-decked coffins but in packing crates destined for the robot repair shop.

From The Daily Galaxy:

Australian astronomers have been studying an intergalactic assassin poised to wipe out life on Earth. Maybe. Observations indicate that cosmological curiosity WR104 may be a killer – and we might be the victim.

{…}

The combination of science and philosophy is a challenging field that many don’t bother with, but this is a strong motivation to start. If you could die tomorrow, how would you like to live today?

Gulp!

On the other hand . . . any one of us could die tomorrow, or for that matter, even today. So the real question is:

How WILL you live today?

Technorati Tags: WR104

You can’t make this stuff up folks. According to Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence [sic] Council, our love of soft toilet tissue is going to wreck our planet. In other words, being kind to your po-po is givin’ Gaia fits.

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public’s insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

“This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous,” said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.

“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution.” Making toilet paper has a significant impact because of chemicals used in pulp manufacture and cutting down forests.

A campaign by Greenpeace seeks to raise consciousness among Americans about the environmental costs of their toilet habits and counter an aggressive new push by the paper industry giants to market so-called luxury brands.

Mercy! Maybe we should all grow a patch of switchgrass in the back yard and weave our own, butt-abrading toilet wipes. Of course, those would not be flushable so they would have to go into landfills — how unsanitary! Gaia would belch forth the methane of decomposing human wipes and that would cause more Globaloney Warming that would sink all the islands on the planet into Atlantis-type oblivion — sorry, I do digress.

Actually, some cagey entrepreneurial folk in Australia have a solution — Wallypop Family Wipes.

Lately, with all the media attention, there’ve been a lot of naysayers talking about the stench. I can honestly say, our wipes don’t stink.

Well, what they are really sayin’ is that they are such good little ‘natural living’ environmentalists that their, well, you know, doesn’t stink either. As Australian blogger Andrew Bold remarks:

Surely it’s time global warming believers marked their houses with some sign, a green pentangle or something, as a warning to visitors to enter at their own risk.

Seriously, we gotta know where these nutters live . . . ’cause they are among us — Yipes!

Technorati Tags: Allen Hershkowitz, toilet paper, Greenpeace

Were it that all debates could go this way . . .

           Poster by Tennyson HayesThe Obama World Tour 2008 has stirred up a lot of opinion, pro and con, on the Left and Right, both here and abroad. Those reading this blog don’t have to wonder what this ol’ Okie thinks about it — CON, as in against and come to think of it, as in CON job, too. For a refreshing, and laugh-out-loud-funny take on Obama’s international folly, check out the Brit’s Times Online columnist Gerard Baker’s skewering of the Chosen One: He ventured forth to bring light to the world Here’s the opener.

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.
Background

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth – for the first time – to bring the light unto all the world.

This it truly classic, and you just have to go and read all of it. Quite a different take than our own near and dear LA Times’ Christian Retzlaff’s response — are we surprised? Phft!

He didn’t break into German, but he spoke of tearing down walls of division, and the crowd loved it.

Tens of thousands of Germans, along with some resident Americans, filled Berlin’s Tiergarten park to hear Barack Obama talk about the U.S., Europe and their shared visions and challenges. {…}

The audience repeatedly interrupted his speech with applause and cheers, and erupted in chants of “Yes, we can!”

A lot of Europeans are hoping Obama will give them a reason to love America again.

“I expect Obama to be a president who makes it possible to be proud of being a fan of the USA,” said Gerda Schulz, a 72-year-old retiree. Schulz has watched historic speeches here by a string of American presidents — John F. Kennedy in 1963, Ronald Reagan in 1987 and Bill Clinton in 1994 — and on Thursday added the Democratic presidential contender to the list.

“In the last seven years, it was rather embarrassing here to say, ‘I like the Americans and I am thankful for what they did for us,’ ” she said.

Better for them to be embarrassed over the fact that we had to beat ‘em down twice in the last century to keep them from destroying the whole world as we knew it, and then had to save their bacon from the Soviet expansion — but little things like that need no mention or gratitude ya know. And, what about American might, ever since the great wars, that has near unilaterally been responsible for keeping a lid on the despots and tyrants of the world, while the Europeans, especially the Germans, enjoy their months-long vacations, 35 hour work weeks and limited calls to duty? Any feelings of appreciation for that? Nah — didn’t think so.

“World Candidate”
[Montage credit: Huffington Post]

In his Berlin speech yesterday, did Barack make any of that perfectly clear? Nah — you didn’t think he would, did you? As Laer at Cheat-Seeking Missiles comments:

Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin today was not given by an American; it was given by a globalist. He may have said he loved America, but his speech was a frightful minimalization of America’s contribution to the world’s security, and it gave made the scoundrels who have sought to be tyranny’s profiteer, not its vanquisher, parity with us.

{…}

His cliche-laden speech – “This is the moment.” “This is our time.” “A new crossroad.” “The road ahead will be long.” – gave Europeans undeserved credit, saying “they are bearing more burdens and taking more responsibility in critical parts of the world.” Show me where. Show me where they are not enjoying the comfort of our defense while complaining about the every minute perceived excess of their defenders.

And spare me a president who derides his own nation in front of a foreign audience[.]

My buddy Laer doesn’t mince many words. That last statement says it all for me. But, what about the rising star that is Barack Obama? As Michelle Malkin comments in her take on Gerard Baker’s satire:

Ever so slowly, the glow is dimming. Better late, than never…

One can only hope so Michelle . . . from your lips to God’s ears.

Technorati Tags: Obama World Tour, Gerard Baker, Tiergarten, Barack Obama