In order to keep my sanity and sense, I help lead a personal growth Retreat every six months. This is then. Will return Sunday afternoon, but have no idea when I'll be posting again, as My Chief has Mondays off. Might jump back here then, but might still be dealing with Retreat Headache...just have to wait and see. Hope your weekend is productive and restful.Those affected note the trade winds are blowing the vog towards Oahu, where the state legislature presides. Their hope is that lawmakers will be able to see and smell the problem a little bit more clearly.
Oh, you can bet the 'lawmakers' will smell a problem - a problem "government money" can solve!
Residents remember that, afterall, there wouldn't be a Hawaiian Islands Chain without volcanic activity — it's what formed and shaped the tropical islands.
Kilauea does what Kilauea has always done. And politicians do what politicians have always done.
In reality, everybody and his brother saw it coming and said so — including yours truly in the Wall Street Journal of May 26, 2005. As far away as London, The Economist magazine warned about the danger. So did many American publications and individuals. The problem was that politicians refused to listen.
UPDATE: If you can, please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors in post or headline. MOST times, I know how to write according to the way I was taught by mum, grandmother, and a few assorted teachers...but that doesn't mean that what my brain knows necessarily translates to my fingertips!
13) So far, you have signed a number of bills that no one in Congress has read before they were signed. Do you think a member of Congress is being irresponsible if he signs onto a bill without reading it or at minimum, having a member of his staff read it?
14) Would you be willing to publicly ask your supporters to stop accusing people who disagree with your policies of being racist?
Now remember, finding a 'reporter' in this world of Journalists For Barry Fan Club who would actually ASK the questions is gonna be difficult. Getting the Whiner-In-Chief (changed that - thanks to No Sheeples Here) to ANSWER such questions - given the staging and planting of Q&A sessions we've already seen - may be asking just a bit much of American Media.
One can only 'hope.'
This is an attempt by the Nobel committee to play on Obama's vanity in order to influence his decisions on Iran and Afghanistan. The message is: how could you possibly let Israel attack Iran's nuclear facilities, or how could you send an additional 40,000 troops to "escalate" the war in Afghanistan—after we've just given you the Nobel Peace Prize?
In appealing to Obama's moral vanity, they know their man well—and it will probably work.
The Nobel Committee may have inadvertantly caused the deaths of American Soldiers, but that isn't what's preeminent in their minds...their utopian idea of 'peace' is uppermost in their minds, and they seem to be of the mind that this will help that plan along.
It would be a very amusing joke...if it weren't for the bloodshed they're going to cause.
Navy Midshipmen 63 - Rice Owls 14 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Nine days before speaking in Copenhagen, the president, addressing the United Nations General Assembly, intoned: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." What was the speechwriter thinking when he or she assembled that sentence? The "should" was empty moralizing; the "can" was nonsense redundantly refuted by history. Does our Cicero even glance at his speeches before reading them in public?
Becoming solemn in Copenhagen, Obama said: "No one expects the Games to solve all our collective problems." That's right, no one does. So why say that? Then, shifting into the foggy sentimentalism of standard Olympics blather, he said "peaceful competition between nations represents what's best about our humanity" and "it brings us together" and "it helps us to understand one another."
Actually, sometimes the Olympic Games are a net subtraction from international comity. But Obama quickly returned to speaking about . . . himself:
NOTE: I have something on a more personal level coming up, so link and comments about Thomas Sowell's column will be posted at a later time. Thanks for your consideration!
Navy Midshipmen Football (3-2) | |||
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Shared via AddThis10. Dead people can't vote at IOC meetings.
9. Obama distracted by 25 min meeting with General McChrystal.
8. Who cares if Obama couldn't talk the IOC into Chicago? He'll be able to talk Iran out of nukes.
7. The impediment is Israel still building settlements.
6. Obviously no president would have been able to acomplish it.
5. We've been quite clear and said all along that we didn't want the Olympics.
4. This isn't about the number of Olympics "lost", it's about the number of Olympics "saved" or "created."
3. Clearly not enough wise Latina judges on the committee
2. Because the IOC is racist.
1. It's George Bush's fault.
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His defenders don't care. They are above and beyond bourgeois notions of morality, even legality.
And that's the main reason I am grateful for this controversy. It is a dye marker, "lighting up" a whole archipelago of morally wretched people. With their time, their money and their craft, these very people routinely lecture America about what is right and wrong. It's good to know that at the most fundamental level, they have no idea what they're talking about.
For example, Christina Romer, chief of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, preferred to emphasize that the 216,000 jobs lost in August were about half a million less than six months before. Never mind that the economic strategy hasn't restored any of those 700,000 jobs previously lost. They'd rather distract us by focusing on the slowing rate of loss rather than the losses themselves.
Lord knows these brilliant folks can't be WRONG in their predictions. Of course, I don't give them as much credit as Stossel does. I think they knew what would happen all along and lied. And since "journalism" no longer requires investigating and reporting FACTS, no one catches the lies.
UPDATE: Track-A-'Crat has written about the Road to Hell...of course, he doesn't call it that, and neither do our helpful socialist friends in government bureaurcacy, but it is what it is. Thanks, Track!
Such people have been told all their lives how brilliant they are, until finally they feel forced to admit it, with all due modesty. But they not only tend to over-estimate their own brilliance, more fundamentally they tend to over-estimate how important brilliance itself is when dealing with real world problems.
Many crucial things in life are learned from experience, rather than from clever thoughts or clever words. Indeed, a gift for the clever phrasing so much admired by the media can be a fatal talent, especially for someone chosen to lead a government.
Make no mistake about it - most people, most Americans, for that matter, are not dull or stupid. Eventually, by relying on our God-given instincts and following the principles of the Constitution of the United States, we come around, even when we've been lied to by omission or commission, even when we've been somewhat willfully blind and deaf to Reality.
