Doubt cast over "carbon offset" tree planting

An interesting report from Australia below:

TREE-PLANTING schemes promoted by businesses and rock bands alike to offset carbon emissions do little to combat climate change, according to a think tank. A paper by The Australia Institute released yesterday accuses governments and businesses of exploiting such "fads" to avoid the need for real cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. "By diverting people's funds and attention to projects that are unlikely to reduce emissions significantly in the long term, some offset schemes could ultimately do more harm than good," Christian Downie, the author of the report, said. "Tree-planting is the most popular type of carbon offset promoted in Australia but it is, in fact, the least effective for dealing with climate change. "The evidence indicates that offsets from renewable energy are the most effective, followed by those from energy efficiency projects, with forestry projects ranked last."

The comments are a blow to companies that have supported tree-planting to offset their carbon footprints, including BP, Sainsbury's, British Telecom, Orange, Avis and MTV. British rock band Coldplay bought 10,000 mango trees for villagers in Karnataka, in India, to offset the greenhouse gases released as a result of the production of their album A Rush of Blood to the Head. Dido, Atomic Kitten, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kylie Minogue, Kevin Keegan and the Rolling Stones have also promoted tree-planting schemes.

Mr Downie said Australia needed a compulsory accreditation scheme for carbon offset projects. He said there were strong grounds for excluding forestry-based offsets from an emissions trading system in Australia, or at least restricting their use. "Tree-planting, or forestry, cannot secure real, measurable and permanent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions because sooner or later the forest will be felled, burned or destroyed," Mr Downie said. "When (people) buy offsets from a forestry project with their airline ticket, for example, they are actually buying a promise that the immediate emissions from their flight will be gradually offset over the next 100 years. "There can be very little, if any, guarantee that this will actually happen."

Source


(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

THE DAILY KOS? THE YEARLY KOS? NOPE: THEY'RE THE WAC KOS.

JUST SAYING.

WHO READS THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS?

PEOPLE ALL OVER THE WORLD.

NEW YORK TIMES DEATH WATCH

To save money, Pinch Sulzberger is reducing the page size of the New York Times.

The thickness of the paper has already been reduced by the drastic fall-off in advertising pages.

Last Tuesday, the first news section of the national paper contained 24 pages. Four of those pages were ads. A full-pager for Sprint, a few assorted ads for expensive watches, jewelry, and cancer treatment, and a two-page opinion ad being the ravings of one Paul Kuntzler who took the space to publish a letter to the Washington Post's editor, in which Kuntzler claimed that:

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered by Vice President London [sic] Baines Johnson in a widespread, incredibly complex and brilliantly planned conspiracy [pocketa pocketa pocketa pocketa] that involved the Federal Bureau of Investigations [sic] directed by J. Edgar Hoover, the CIA directed by David Atlee Phillips, the Secret Service, elements of the United States Air Force, including General Curtis LeMay of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the United States Army, the United States Navy, Henry R. Luce's LIFE Magazine, the Ford Motor Company, the Dallas Police, including Dallas Mayor Earle Cabel, big Oil of Midland, Texas, the Texas political establishment, the mafia, the anti-Castro Cubans, Southern racists, including retired General Edwin Walker, and others. President Richard M. Nixon was also involved. [Red items added.]

When your major source of advertising revenue derives from insanity, you need a new business plan.

Pinch Sulzberger has made the Times the most prominent American soapbox for anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, adulation of communist despots anywhere in the world, libertinism, and post-modernist multi-culturalism.

Face it, there just aint much of a market for that crap once you walk off the college campuses and into the real world.

The Times is on a death spiral.

Rupert Murdoch is in a position to make the Wall Street Journal a real national newspaper of record, and consign the New York Times to the dustbin of far left garbage. The sooner, the better.

HILLARY VERSUS OBAMA: WHO CARES!?

THESE TWO FOLKS ARE BOTH INEXPERIENCED LIGHTWEIGHTS.

A FORMER FIRST LADY TO AN IMPEACHED PRESIDENT WHO DID NOTHING TO FIGHT TERROR, AND EVERYTHING TO SOCIALIZE OUR SIXTH LARGEST INDUSTRY - HEALTHCARE.


A FIRST TERM SENATOR - STILL IN HIS FIRST TERM - FROM THE CORRUPT CHICAGO MACHINE.

WHO - LIKE THE REST OF THE CANDIDATES - PANDER TO THE LEFT-WING.

IS THIS WHAT THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS COME TO!?

LIEBERMAN SHUNNED AND OBAMA HAILED!?
THE DLC SHUNNED AND YEARLY KOS HAILED!?

SHEESH.

OBAMA AND GINGRICH BOTH SUFFER FROM MPD

I talked at length yesterday on the radio show about how it appears that Obama and Gingrich both seem to have MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder).

I mean, in one week he went from saying he's going to sit down, you know, for tea, with our enemies, but then he's going to bomb our allies. I mean, he's gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week.--Mitt Romney

OBAMA

As most of you know I'm not that big a fan of Romney but he hit the ball out of the ball park with the above quote. Last week Obama announces that even though he thinks we should appease Al Qaeda in Iraq by cutting and running he would like to attack a country we still consider to be our ally. Huh?

Pakistan definitely has problems right now with Al Qaeda that must be dealt with but his comments are just illogical and irresponsible. Here is just a sample of Pakistan's response to his comments. Musharraf has a big problem on his hands and yet in being an ally of the U.S. he has had to withstand a lot of criticism and has dodged assassination attempts.

I'm not sure what will happen with Pakistan in the future. We may very well have to send in troops to aide Musharraf in dealing with Al Qaeda. But for someone who is against the War in Iraq and who says we should meet with dictators to all of a sudden say we should go to war with an ally just doesn't make any sense.

It is really hard to take Obama and Edwards seriously with some of the absurd things that come out of their mouths. Then you have Hillary, who is corrupt to the core. And we are worried about the Republicans in 08???

GINGRICH

One minute Newt Gingrich is saying something that makes me stand up and cheer and the next minute I'm left scratching my head. When conservative bloggers were first excited about a possible presidential run by Gingrich I couldn't muster much enthusiasm. There is much to like about Newt and when I surveyed the current crop at the time I thought it possible. Now that Fred is likely to enter the fray, not a chance, and thank God for that.

So what is the latest Newt has done to make me not only scratch my head but tick me off? He announced that he thinks the war on terror is phony. Who is he? John Edwards' twin brother. He said in this same speech that, "no one should believe we are winning this war." And this last statement is just completely ridiculous and irresponsible:

He reserved his most pointed criticism for the administration's handling of the global campaign against terrorist groups.

"We've been engaged in a phony war," said Gingrich. "The only people who have been taking this seriously are the combat military.

To imply that George W. Bush doesn't take the war seriously is just a slap in the face and completely un-true.

To be honest, this is the last straw for me. After saying "the Bush administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter Presidency...", attacking numerous Republicans, calling them "a pathetic bunch of pygmies" and then saying that the war on terror is phony, I'm at my limit. I admire and respect him but he has no business being President. He is erratic and unpredictable. This makes it hard to know what principles he really believes in, thus making it hard to trust him.

Like I said earlier, thank God for Fred Thompson!!

ISRAELI GOVERNMENT ISSUES SEVERE WARNING TO ISRAELI TRAVELERS

NYTIMES/AP:

Israeli security officials on Monday warned citizens traveling in Egypt, Jordan and other Muslim countries to leave immediately due to a ''concrete and severe'' threat of terror attacks.

Israelis anywhere in the world should also be alert to the danger of being kidnapped by operatives from Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, according to the announcement from Israel's National Security Council.

Israeli tourists are allowed to visit Egypt and Jordan, which have peace agreements with Israel. But the council said any Israeli citizens in those countries should cut their trips short.

THIS WARNING EXTENDS ONLY TO MUSLIM COUNTRIES.

I WONDER: ARE THEY PROFILING!?

I HOPE SO.

SERIOUSLY: I FEEL LIKE NYC AND DC SHOULD BE ON THE SAME LEVEL OF ALERT.

UPDATE: BTW: DRUDGE is on this story now - an hour after us.

NUKING HIROSHIMA AND NAGASKI: COURAGEOUS, MILITARILY SOUND, AND MORALLY CORRECT

Learn stuff here at HOT AIR.
And HERE, at PJM with Crittenden.

FACT: an invasion would have led to worse losses for the Japanese and for US troops. (Recently declassified data proves that Japan had reinforced the main island with a huge amount of troops and and was prepared to defend it as they had Iwo Jima, but in spades. This would have led to the USA killing more of them, and to destroying more cities in Japan.)

FACT: Proof that we needed to nuke Japanese cities - and not merely invite the Japanese to a demonstration on some isolated unpopulated island - is the fact that the Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb on Hiroshima, or EVEN FOR A WEEK AFTER THE SECOND BOMB WAS DROPPED ON NAGASAKI.

If we had let Stalin take Japan - (some Leftist pseudo-historians have argued that we nuked them to prevent Stalin from taking it, as if that was a bad thing, a hegemonistic thing) - then it would look like North Korea today instead of being one of the richest, freest, healthiest democracies on human history. AND A GREAT USA ALLY!

On Hiroshima Day the Japanese should thank the USA. We taught them a lesson they needed to learn. And spared them a worse end.

THE BOTTOM-LINE ON RUDY'S DAUGHTER, OBAMA AND PATTI DAVIS - (REAGAN'S DAUGHTER)

The MSM is trying to do to Rudy what they tried to do to Reagan: turn typically rebellious children into weapons of political sabotage.

By reporting with BLARING HEADLINES that his daughter supports Obama. (More here.) Sheesh.

IT'S UTTER BS.

Patti Davis did not diminish Reagan as a man or as a politician or a statesman.

Neither will Rudy's daughter. Or his Wife. Or his ex-wives.

Nor can their BS about Jeri Thompson diminish Fred. VANITY FAIR is trying to hurt Fred and conservatism, but most people who don't have BDS can see it for what it is.

All it proves is that the Left-wing dominated/pro-Democrat MSM will stoop to anything: leaking national secrets, suppressing improving news from Iraq, hiding non-PC facts, AND SMEARING CANDIDATES WIVES.

They are scum.

WHY WON'T AL GORE DEBATE AGW WITH SKEPTICAL SCIENTISTS?

BECAUSE HE KNOWS HE WILL LOSE, AND THAT WILL UPSET THE LEFT'S DREAM OF TAXING THE CRAP OUT OF INDUSTRY AND COMMERCE.

FACTS HERE. EXCERPT:

the list of folks challenging soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore to put up or shut up continues to grow, of course, with little notice from an adoring media.

Next up wanting to take shots at the Global Warmingist-in-Chief is best-selling author Dennis Avery.

As reported by PR Newswire Monday (emphasis added throughout):

Mr. Avery is co-author of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years. Both Al Gore and Dennis Avery have New York Times best-selling books on global warming, but with opposite conclusions. […]

Avery joins Lord Christopher Monckton (former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher advisor), Bjorn Lomborg (Danish economist), author Michael Crichton, Prof. S. Fred Singer (former director of the U.S. National Weather Service), Tim Ball, Ph.D. (historical climatologist), Prof. Ian Clark (University of Ottawa), and Prof. Richard Lindzen (MIT) among others.

Of course, the media never report these challenges. After all, why should they? The debate’s over:

NOTE:

NPR SPONSORED AN OXFORD-STYLE DEBATE ON AGW.

IT FEATURED A BEFORE-AND-AFTER POLL OF THE AUDIENCE.

IT WAS BETWEEN A FEW OF THESE SKEPTICS AND A FEW FAMOUS FOLKS FROM THE AGW ECO-NUTSIE CROWD.

THE POLLING INDICATED THAT THE AGW ECO-NUTISES GOT CREAMED:

In this debate, the proposition was: "Global Warming Is Not a Crisis." In a vote before the debate, about 30 percent of the audience agreed with the motion, while 57 percent were against and 13 percent undecided. The debate seemed to affect a number of people: Afterward, about 46 percent agreed with the motion, roughly 42 percent were opposed and about 12 percent were undecided.

IOW: NEARLY HALF THE AGW ECO-NUTSIES IN THE CROWD SWITCHED SIDES AFTER ONE FREAKIN' DEBATE OF ALL THE FACTS.

THERE HASN'T BEEN A SERIOUS DEBATE EVER SINCE.

WONDER WHY?

THE LEFTIST AGW CROWD DOESN'T WANT YOU TO HEAR BOTH SIDES IF THE DEBATE.

IT'S SORT OF LIKE PROSECUTING A PERSON FOR A CRIME WITHOUT LETTING THE JURY HEAR FROM THE DEFENSE.

NOW, THOSE SNEAKY, OBNOXIOUS JEWS ARE INVENTING A GOD DAMNED TIME MACHINE

I'm sorry. I hope you all understand that that title is, to me, is funny as hell. And, I don't, at all, mean it to be anything but satirical.

Anyway, the weird thing is, while I don't actually believe that Jews are sneaky, and obnoxious, there is a Jewish man who is, apparently, on his way, to inventing a time machine. Or, so that is what this article claims. Check it out:

NETANYA, Israel — Researchers at the Technion University (Haifa, Israel) claim they have developed a theoretical model of a time machine that, in the distant future, could enable future generations to travel into the past.

The team's findings were published in the latest issue of Physical Review.

"In order to travel back in time, the spacetime structure must be engineered appropriately," explains Professor Amos Ori of the Technion's Faculty of Physics. "This is what Einstein's theory of general relativity deals with. It says that spacetime can be flat. That is " it has a trivial, simple structure. But it can also be curved with various configurations."

The team stresses the main question is whether — according to the principles of curvature development in the theory of relativity — a time machine can be created. "In other words " can we cause spacetime to curve in such a way as to enable travel back in time? Such a journey requires a significant curvature of spacetime, in a very special form."

The researchers explain that traveling back in time is actually closing time-like curves so we can go back to an event at which we were present in the past. In flat space, it is not possible to close curves and go back in time. In order for closed time-like curves to exist, there has to be a curvature of a specific form on spacetime.

The question Prof. Ori is investigating is whether the laws of gravity permit the development of spacetime with the required curvature (closed time-like curves).

In the past, scientists raised a number of objections to this possibility. Now, Prof. Ori is proposing a theoretical model for spacetime that could develop into a time machine.

The Technion researchers suggest their model overcomes some of the questions, which, until now, scientists have not succeeded in solving. One of the difficult claims against a time machine was that, in order to create a time machine, it would be necessary for it to contain material with negative density. And since as of now we do not have such material — and it is also not clear if the laws of nature enable the existence of such material in the quantities required — it is not possible to build a time machine.

The team's theoretical model does not require material with negative density -- the proposal is essentially a vacuum space that contains a region field with standard positive density material.

"The machine is spacetime itself," Prof. Ori explains. "Today, if we were to create a time machine " an area with a warp like this in space that would enable time lines to close on themselves " it might enable future generations to return to visit our time. We, apparently, cannot return to previous ages because our predecessors did not create this infrastructure for us."

Prof. Ori, one of the few scientists in the world investigating this issue, emphasizes that we still do not have the technology to control gravitational fields at will, despite the fact that the theoretical principles of how to do this exist. "The model that we developed at the Technion is a significant step but there still remains a number of non-trivial open questions," he stresses. "It may be that some of these questions also will not be solved in the future. This is still not clear."

Ok, so here's the thing, if it is possible to build a time machine, it would seem that we would already have been visited by human beings from the future. Now, I am going to have to admit how strange I am, but ok, here goes:

I have considered this possibility.

In other words, it does not seem completely implausible that, indeed, we truly have had our normal course of events interrupted, and helped along by the work of people who actually time-traveled and inserted themselves, with future knowledge, into the our political and artistic structure.

Abraham Lincoln and William Shakespeare stand out as two entirely unprecendented human beings, if you ask me. In other words, if you study their lives, it is my opinion, that they brought knowledge to their time which had no intellectual precendent in history. I have always wondered at this.

I understand a bit about Einstein, and I actually understand where his ideas came from, but, as much as I have studied Lincoln and Shakespeare, I can not fathom how they became who they were.

I know that sounds completely fucking nuts, but, hey, think about it for awhile and get back to me.

Oh man, I can not wait to hear the shit I'm going to get over this post.

:)

An Interesting Question

Commenter Cormac-ballz asks:

What I don't get is: Congress is less popular than Bush because they didn't stop the war/stand up to Bush etc.

But Bush should be less popular because he's the one persecuting the war in first place!

Is there something about U.S. citizens that I fail to grasp? Is it because they don't sympathise with people they view as wimpy (e.g., Congress).

The Democrats won Congress by replacing the Republicans in the South with Blue Dog Democrats.

Those Democrats who won in the South promised not to damage the war effort. This has disgusted 1/2 the Democrats. The Republicans are disgusted to begin with. The other 1/2 of the Democrats are disgusted with the disgusted Democrats and no one is interested in solving the overspending problem.

So you have the Republicans who still support Bush - 24% and no one who supports Congress.

There is also the wimp factor which underlies the attitude of the Southern Democrats. They come from a martial culture. It transcends Republican/Democrat.

In many ways the Republicans won the last election. Southern Democrats are closer to the Republicans than they are to San Francisco liberal Democrats.

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

THE SCANDINAVIAN TREE-RING DATA

"Proxy" data from tree ring and other sources has been much used by Warmists in attempts to prop up their theory. The once prominent "hockeystick" study was allegedly (but not really) based on such data. Proxy data were used in the hockeystick study to give an air of legitimacy to what was in fact a mathematical fraud. So there is no doubt that proxy data has an important, and maybe vital role to play in climate studies.

Some new proxy data has recently emerged from studies of tree rings in Northern Scandinavia. In part because of the cold temperatures there, wood residues from the last 7,000 years have been well preserved at the bottom of muddy lakes. From that, Finnish researchers have been able to reconstuct a temperature record covering that period.

The results of the study are set out via many good graphics in a PDF here so I will depart from my usual practice and refer readers to the site concerned rather than reproducing the material here.

You will see that the temperature record over the period is one of alternating ups and downs with the present situation being well within the range of normal fluctuations. See particularly their figure 6 for that.

Figure 7 is also interesting. The researchers have looked at the cycles in their data and have plotted a projection into the future of where those cycles are leading us. You will see that, based on past climate cycles, we are headed for some global cooling soon.


(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

WHY THE 60s?

Rich Lowry has up an interesting essay in which he contrasts American "liberalism" of the present day with American liberalism in the era up to JFK. The two were of course very different and Lowry sees the death of Kennedy in 1963 as the watershed. At that time the American Left suddenly became anti-American and sympathetic to the Communist bloc and the Kennedy assassination was to blame.

Lowry is however resting far too much on a single event. It is good to see ANYBODY showing an awareness of how radically American Leftism has changed over time but Lowry fails to root his critique deeply enough. He shows no awareness that the pre-WWII American Left was characterized by much that it accuses conservatives of today. It was super-patriotic, interventionist in foreign policy, believed in eugenics and thought blacks and Jews to be obviously inferior. The pre-WWII American Left were less extreme than Hitler but not by much. You can find documentation of all that here.

Hitler's excesses, however, discredited all those ideas I have just mentioned and the Left needed new foci. But most Leftists could not abandon overnight ideas that they had so long and so vigorously advocated. They could not suddenly go from being super-patriots to being internationalists, for instance. And JFK, for one, did not even try. Anyone today who said: "Ask not what your coutry can do for you but ask what you can do for your country" would be regarded as quaint at best by today's Left -- if not "Fascist".

So it actually took the rise of a new generation without any memory of prewar committments and ideology for the Left we know today to arise. And the coming of age of that generation we now know as "The 60s". And that generation rebelled in such a vigorous and attention-getting way that the older quasi-Fascist Left rapidly and gladly changed its tune -- though a few migrated to conservatism.

Meanwhile, conservatives kept on with the moderate attitudes that had always characterized them. They remained patriotic but had no desire for war and conquest. They remained broadly tolerant but not mindlessly so and they remained allergic to tyranny.


(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

Suspicious Lack Of Coverage

Eric at Classical Values is wondering why there is so little coverage of a story about a reporter murdered in Oakland California.

I think the answer is that the press does not wish to call attention to the connections of Barack Hussein Obama with the Nation of Islam's leader or the Nation of Islam itself.

Well it is a theory. Is it testable?

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

Something Is Wrong

Here are some interesting quotes from American Judges who don't like mandatory minimums for drug offenses.

Judge Morris S. Arnold
Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals
Appointed by George H.W. Bush, 1992

"You may say that I said that many of our drug laws are scandalously draconian and the sentences are often savage. You may also quote me as saying the war on drugs has done considerable damage to the Fourth Amendment and that something is very wrong indeed when a person gets a longer sentence for marijuana than for espionage."

That is only one quote. There are more.

The Drug War shreds our Constitution and wastes resources. Apparently there are some folks in government who actually understand that we are in a real war and that the Drug War is a waste.

Taken from a study: Republican Judges Speak

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at Classical Values

THE ART OF HYPOCRISY

VIA POWER LINE.

DEMOCRATS IN HOUSE VOTE TO RAISE TAXES ON PEOPLE THEY THINK ARE BAD GUYS, AND LOWERS THEM FOR PEOPLE THEY THINK ARE GOOD GUYS

NYTIMES:

Declaring a new direction in energy policy, the House on Saturday approved $16 billion in taxes on oil companies, while providing billions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives for renewable energy and conservation efforts.

Republican opponents said the legislation ignored the need to produce more domestic oil, natural gas and coal. One GOP lawmaker bemoaned ''the pure venom ... against the oil and gas industry.''

The House passed the tax provisions by a vote of 221-189. Earlier it had approved, 241-172, a companion energy package aimed at boosting energy efficiency and expanding use of biofuels, wind power and other renewable energy sources.

THE DEMS ARE AT IT AGAIN: RAISING TAXES ON FOLKS THEY THINK ARE THE BAD GUYS.

AND AVOIDING THE BASIC ACTION WHICH WILL HELP EVERYONE: MORE FREEDOM; GIVING COMPANIES IN THE ENERGY BUSINESS MORE FREEDOM TO EXPLORE AND EXPLOIT THE PROVE ENERGY ASSETS WE HAVE RIGHT HERE IN THE USA!

The Left is essentially an elitist bunch of control-freaks who feel they can pick winners and losers better than the marketplace.

This has been proven WRONG time after time after time after time.

Look at Zimbabwe, or Cuba, or North Korea, or Red China or the USSR: their economies under socialism under-performed their economies under freemarkets.

The freemarket doesn't just out-perform socialist markets on the profit-and-loss column; they also produce BETTER QUALITY goods and services.

And they also RESPOND BETTER TO POPULAR NEEDS - REGARDLESS OF WHAT THAT NEED IS.

If free consumers want more solar power, then companies which satisfy that demand will be rewarded by the marketplace.

And this reward far out weighs anything the elitist Socialists can do ON THE POSITIVE SIDE.

All the command-control freaks of the Left do is distort the marketplace; all they are REALLY DOING is rewarding their favorites - their pets. These tax ploys are JUST AS BAD AS PORK PROJECTS.

That's why we need a flat tax or a fair tax.

And we why we need to get rid of as many SOCIALISTIC DEMOCRATS AS POSSIBLE!

WE MUSTN'T LET "BIG BROTHER" (GOVERNMENT) PICKS THE WINNERS AND THE LOSERS, THAT'S WHAT THE FREEMARKET IS FOR.

Brazil: Homosexuals Try Censorship, Fail, and Get Investigated Themselves

More dim-wittedness from Google:

"A recent attempt by Brazilian homosexuals to silence two weblogs failed when Google, the hosting service, restored them after blocking them for several days. Now the contents of the blogs have drawn the attention of Brazilian prosecutors, who are investigating Luiz Mott, the leader of Brazil's homosexual movement, for pedophilia.

The first blog, by the anonymous author Jael Savelli, was blocked for only a few hours several weeks ago, but the second, authored by Brazilian Christian activist Julio Severo and hosted by Google's "Blogger" service at http://juliosevero.blogspot.com, was blocked from July 16 to July 19.

The site's contents were removed and replaced with a statement that read: "This blog is being reviewed for possible violations of the Blogger Terms of Service, and can only be opened by the authors." Although Severo states that Google never informed him of its reasons for blocking the site, the removal occurred after a bitter campaign against him by homosexual activists on Google's partner service, Orkut.com. The service is widely used by Brazilians to socialize and exchange information, and became an organizing point for opposition to Severo and his site.

Three days after Severo's site was suppressed, the eminent Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho blasted the campaign against Severo in his regular column for the newspaper Jornal do Brasil....

Carvalho went on to point out that, if anyone had violated the laws, it was the homosexuals attacking Severo based on his religion: "It is they who committed against him the crimes defined in articles 240 and 251 of the Penal Code: publicly defaming and ridiculing a citizen because of his religious belief. They added to this the crime foreseen in article 138: false imputation of a crime."

De Carvalho encouraged protestant church groups to support and defend Severo. "Julio Severo, as a reprisal against his moral crusade, now has his social and professional life totally destroyed. He is the most discriminated against and persecuted of Brazilians. He cannot confront, alone, a gigantic mass movement subsidized by billionaire foundations, that, having made itself out to be a victim persecuted by a solitary and poor adversary, now shows a monstrous, cynical, and perverse dishonesty."

According to Severo, numerous individuals responded by submitting complaints to Google. The day following Carvalho's article, Google restored Severo's website, again without any explanation.

The actions taken against the two blogs, however, drew attention to information contained in one of the blogs against Luiz Mott, the self-described "dean" of the homosexual movement in Brazil. The blog of "Jael Savelli" (the pseudonym of the blog's anonymous author), had published an article entitled "Pedophilia Now!", containing evidence that Luiz Mott is a pedophile.....

In the backlash against Mott's militant homosexual movement, information from Savelli's site has been given to prosecutors in the states of Bahia (where Mott lives) and Juiz de Fora. The Christian Apologetics Study Center (CACP) reports that a prosecutor in the Federal Attorney General's office in the state of Bahia, responded to their complaint with an assurance that he would initiate procedures to begin a criminal investigation and to remove the offending sites from the internet

Source

H/T Against Red - email me (John Ray) here.)

THAT RIGHTWARD SHIFT

A Leftist tries to cope

There is a book review in the NYT of "Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys". For the reviewing task, the NYT picked Stephen Metcalf -- well-known for vitriol -- and so the review is predictably hostile and, as such, very lightweight. There is no attempt to engage what the writers say at all. He summarizes two of the essays in the book as: "Pig popsicle, bad; babies, good"!

The purpose of the review is not of course scholarship of any kind. It is meant simply to prop up threatened Leftist egos. And the threat that enrages the Left most of all is the way conservatives connect so easily with ordinary mainstream white Americans -- something most vividly seen in the popularity of conservative talkshow hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. So how come? asks our reviewer. Is there some way Leftists can piss on that?

Our reviewer has the answer: Conservatives connect with the workers because conservatives were social failures at college who were marginalized and never got the girl: By experiencing failure conservatives learnt to understand others who are failures in life. The elitism and stereotyping of that explanation is breathtaking, of course. The claim that the ordinary mainstream white American feels a failure shows how little our Leftist reviewer knows about the people concerned. He has obviously lived most of his life in a little like-minded Manhattan social bubble. He seems quite unaware that most ordinary mainstream white Americans are hard-working people who find great joy in their families, their friends, their church, their hobbies and even often in their work. They do NOT consider themselves failures! They look at the "success" they see in places like Hollywood and are thankful for their own more wholesome lives.

I suspect that it is a dim awareness of that happiness which really makes Leftist elitists like Metcalf hate ordinary mainstream white Americans. He has to project feelings of failure onto them to boost his own feelings of superiority. Accepting that they may well be happier than him would be just too intolerable -- though even that he would no doubt be able to dismiss temporarily with some contemptuous adjective such as "bovine".

But all good lies have an element of truth in them and that conservatives often feel alienated and marginalized in their college days is no doubt true. I certainly did. I arrived at university having already read most of the Greek canon, from the miracle of Homer to the bright clarity of Plato, and already knowing such arcane things as what a Pindaric ode was. I met very few others as culturally grounded as that. Babblers like Sartre were what passed for sophistication and culture among most people I met and there were not even many of those -- even though I attended a major university.

But the major reason why conservatives feel alienated at university is the lack of intellectual diversity there. American universities seem to think that a thing as superficial as skin color is the only important sort of diversity. The lockstep Leftism that characterizes most professors (at least in the Humanities) would alienate and marginalize any conservative, no matter how well-adjusted he might be.

Fortunately, however, academe is just one rather deviant bubble within the wider world and conservatives often do well outside it. I myself particularly enjoyed my time in the Army -- where I reached the rank of Sergeant. Bitter elitists like Metcalf no doubt have in their heads a comforting stereotype of the army as a bunch of rockheads but reality is much more complex than that. The army in fact particularly values and rewards the all-round man (e.g. General Petraeus) and in my army unit I was far from alone in my liking for Bach and Palestrina.

That the real reason for the conservative communicative advantage might lie in the fact they do not inhabit the Left's mental cloud-cuckoo land Metcalf cannot of course concede.

(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)

FOILED JIHADI JAIL BREAK IN GOOSE CREEK, SC?

JAWA:

CNN and local news are reporting that a car possibly carrying explosives has been stopped by police outside Charleston, South Carolina. Two men were in the van, both described as Middle Eastern.

The car was stopped in the community of Goose Creek, north of Charleston. The bomb squad and the FBI are on the scene. Highway 176, where the car was found, is said to still be closed.

WIS-tv/ via HOT AIR:

The FBI and the Berkeley County Sheriff's Department are investigating what they think are explosives found in a car in Goose Creek.

Police say part of Highway 176 in Berkeley County is closed, and traffic is limited to local residents around Mount Holly Road.

WIS News 10's sister station in Charleston, WCBD, reports authorities pulled over a suspicious car at around 6:00pm Saturday. Officers asked to search the vehicles, and discovered what investigators say are "possible explosives" located in the trunk.

USA TODAY/AP:

Goose Creek is home to the Naval Weapons Station and the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig, a military prison where enemy combatants have been held.

ME: PERHAPS THEY WERE GONNA TRY TO SPRING SOME ENEMY COMBATANTS?

BTW: I don't really think this was the result of a random car stop, or a traffic violation stop. That's just the cover; I bet they were either tipped of by a double agent, or got the information by EAVESDROPPING!

UPDATE/FLOPPING ACES:

Even more:

According to Lt. Vince Lombardo, deputies discovered the suspicious items in the trunk during a traffic stop. The two men inside the vehicle are detained at the scene. Lombardo also said information from an investigation in another jurisdiction raised the suspicions of the deputies.

A TIP! Like I said...

8/5 UPDATE:

Police have detained two men after finding and detonating a suspicious item found in their car during a routine stop for a speeding violation on a highway near Charleston.

Sources say a four-door sedan was stopped during a routine traffic stop Saturday only to find what was believed to be a bomb inside the vehicle.

The two people in the car were said to be of Middle Eastern decent.

H5N1 bird flu detected in Germany

TVNZ/REUTERS:

Two ducks found dead near Munich in southern Germany tested positive for the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus and a third was contaminated with a milder strain, a state laboratory said.
... Globally, the H5N1 virus has killed nearly 200 people out of over 300 known cases, according to the World Health Organisation.

None of the victims were from Europe.

NOT YET...