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LONDON — Seaborne raiders in a high-speed skiff tried again on Wednesday to commandeer the Maersk Alabama, the American-flagged ship seized by pirates in April, the United States Navy said. In a separate episode, the captain of a hijacked chemical tanker was reported to have died of gunshot wounds inflicted when pirates seized the MV Theresa with 28 North Korean crew members northwest of the Seychelles on Monday. The spate of attacks reflected the increasing boldness of pirates roaming far from their bases in Somalia to seize vessels and sailors to hold for ransom. The United States Navy Central Command said four suspected pirates in a skiff came within 300 yards of the Maersk Alabama at 6.30 a.m. Wednesday about 600 miles off the northeast coast of Somalia as it headed for the Kenyan port of Mombasa. But a security team on board the Maersk Alabama responded with small-arms fire, long-range acoustical devices painful to the human ear and evasive maneuvers to thwart the attack, the Navy said in a statement. “Due to Maersk Alabama following maritime industry’s best practices such as embarking security teams, the ship was able to prevent being successfully attacked by pirates,” said Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, the commander of the Central Command. “This is a great example of how merchant mariners can take pro-active action to prevent being attacked.” Labels: gun self-defense Labels: gun rights Labels: telescopes Nazi Germany celebrated Christmas without Christ with the help of swastika tree baubles, 'Germanic' cookies and a host of manufactured traditions, a new exhibition has shown. The way the celebration was gradually taken over and exploited for propaganda purposes by Hitler's Nazis is detailed in a new exhibition. Rita Breuer has spent years scouring flea markets for old German Christmas ornaments. She and her daughter Judith developed a fascination with the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration. Selected objects from the family's enormous collection have gone on show at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne. 'Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis - after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child,' Judith Breuer told the German newspaper Spiegel. 'The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian.' The exhibition includes swastika-shaped cookie-cutters and Christmas tree baubles shaped like Iron Cross medals. The Nazis attempted to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of swastikas, and they replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on December 6, with the Norse god Odin. Labels: history With current Fed policy, gold is headed rapidly toward $2,000 per ounce, probably within six months. The forecasters who see such a price, but suggest it would take four to five years to get there, are ignoring history. Since gold was able to get from $185 to $850 in 18 months in 1978-80, there is no reason why it cannot get from $1,100 to $2,000 in six months now. What's more, although 1980's peak seemed madness at the time, and was equivalent to nearly $2,400 today, there is no reason why gold cannot go much higher if it is given another year or so to get there. The supply of gold from new mining is around 1 million ounces per year LESS than in 1980 and the supply of speculative capital that could flow into gold is many times greater. Hence, a $5,000 gold price is possible though not certain, if present monetary policy is continued or only modestly modified – and that price could be reached by the end of 2010. As was demonstrated by the housing bubble of 2004-06, modest rises in interest rates are not sufficient to stop a bubble once it is well under way. Given the Fed's recent track record, it is most unlikely that we will get any more than modest and very reluctant interest-rate rises. Even if inflation is moving at a brisk pace by the latter part of next year, the price rises will be explained away, or possibly massaged out of the figures as happened in the early part of 2008. Hence the bubble will inexorably move to its denouement, at which point gold will probably be north of $3,000 an ounce and oil well north of $150 per barrel. Even though there will be no supply/demand reason why oil should get to those levels, and gold has almost no genuine demand at all, the weight of money behind those commodities in a speculative situation will push their prices inexorably upwards, beyond all reason until something intervenes to stop it. At some point, probably before the end of 2010, the bubble will burst. The deflationary effect on the U.S. economy of $150 plus oil will overwhelm the modest forces of genuine economic expansion. The Treasury bond market will collapse, overwhelmed by the weight of deficit financing. Once again, the banking system will be in deep trouble. The industrial sector, beyond the largest and most liquid companies and the extractive industries, will in any case have remained in recession – it is notable that, in spite of the Fed's frenzy of activity, bank lending has fallen $600 billion in the last year. Unemployment, which will probably enter the second downturn at around current levels, will spike further upwards. The dollar will probably not collapse, but only because it will have been declining inexorably in the intervening year, to give a euro value of $2 and a yen value of 60 to 65 yen to the dollar. Labels: economics Labels: history Labels: global warming Labels: terrorism Labels: terrorism Labels: cars Labels: enviromental lunacy Labels: global warming Labels: terrorism
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Maersk Alabama Attacked By Pirates Again
It didn't go so well this time for the pirates; the victims returned fire. From the November 18, 2009 New York Times:
Yes, it is rather amazing how turning a low-risk activity (piracy) into a high-risk activity seems to help, doesn't it? Into the 19th century, American merchant ships were generally armed--and not just with small arms--to deal with the problem of piracy. But the prevailing sentiment elsewhere seems to be to pay ransom instead.
Finishing Final Edits on the Academics for the Second Amendment Amicus Brief
It is, of course, complementary to the briefs filed by other parties, so it's a bit of a struggle to make sure that it stands on its own--but doesn't unnecessarily duplicate what the other parties in McDonald v. Chicago are doing.
In any case, Academics for the Second Amendment has exhausted its treasure chest (in the loosest, smallest definition of "treasure") so if you want to assist with this effort--even just a couple of bucks--go to their blog, and hit the PayPal button on the right side of the screen. Or send a check to:
Academics for the Second Amendment
Post Office Box 131254
St. Paul, MN 55113
Things To Stop Forwarding
The claim about the nature of the states that voted for Obama in 2008 ascribed to Professor Joe Olson: he didn't write it after the 2000 election, after the 2004 election, or the 2008 election. The data contained therein might be true, but the fact that it keeps coming around with a new election year, new Democratic candidate for president, and attributed to someone who didn't write it, should make you very skeptical.
The claim that Dr. David E. Cole of the Center for Automotive Research met with Obama appointees to the car task force, and when he told them that certain automobile designs would require repeal of the laws of physics, they said that they would have Congress repeal those laws? Nope. Cole does say that some years ago, he did talk with members of Congress that thought they could repeal laws of physics ("2 + 2 = whatever the Party says it does," to paraphrase Orwell). But Cole hasn't meant with the Obama car task force.
Clear Skies
Last night was something of a rarity: a crisp clear night. And let me emphasize how crisp it was.
I rolled Big Bertha 2.0 out a bit late--around 8:30 PM--and by then, the target that I had originally planned to go after, M101 had dipped too low in the sky for a decent view. After spending some time collimating the mirror, I decided, "It is just too cold out here!" and went back inside.
I am pleased to report that the diagonal mirror holder and mirror cell that I made for Big Bertha 2.0 are very easy to adjust for perfect collimation.
Taking Christ Out of Christmas
A friend pointed me to this interesting article in the November 17, 2009 Daily Mail about a new exhibit in Germany:
This doesn't surprise me particularly. I recently finished reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. He makes the claim that the Nazis removed prayer from German public schools in 1935, for a similar reason. I have not had a chance to spot check Goldberg's claims, but I this does generally fit. National Socialism was derived from progressivism, and shared many of its most obnoxious traits: hostility towards religion, and especially Judeo-Christian beliefs; support for eugenics; government control over the economy; hostility towards free market capitalism.
UPDATE: It does appear that Goldberg was largely right, although perhaps a little oversimplified. Richard Grunberger's The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 pp. 289-290 indicates that in 1935, religion was removed from the school leaving exams, and religion classes were made optional. The time when religion classes were offered was moved to encourage students to miss classes, religious instruction was reduced to one day a week in the over-12 age group, and completely stopped for the over-14 age group once the war started. In Bavaria, parents were strongly encouraged to take their kids out of Catholic schools. What remained of what we might call chapel was replaced with entirely patriotic activities.
(While not relevant to religion, not surprisingly, the Nazis also encouraged students to think of themselves as smarter than their teachers and other educated people, since most of these in many villages were clergy.)
How Much More Gloomy Can A Prediction Get?
A friend pointed me to this depressing prediction, based on how the price of gold has burst through the $1,100 per ounce ceiling:For 18 months, the gold price had been in a trading range topping out around $1,000. It has now broken out decisively from that range. The opportunity for the world's central banks to change policy and affect the economic outcome has been lost. The world economy is now locked on to an undeviating track towards another train wreck.
And then it gets really bad. I have held off on buying bonds. Some friends are buying commodities--which really aren't an investment, but they can be a good hedge against inflation--and especially hyperinflation.
...
If the Democrats had an opposition party, there could be a very good opportunity for that opposition party to win decisive control of Congress next year. But there is no opposition party anymore. And even getting in control of Congress, isn't going to be able to clean up this mess as long as the Democrats control the White House. And that's assuming that this mythical opposition political party actually had the courage to do something.
Maybe it's time to stockpile canned food and ammunition.
UPDATE: A reader tells me that the $850 peak around 1980 didn't last very long--a day or two, before falling back. My recollection is that when my wife and I went out to buy wedding rings in early 1980, gold was at about $1000 an ounce, and our wedding rings are proportionately skinny as a direct result. I also notice that the "buy gold now!" advertising seems to be getting more intense--almost like someone wants to dump their inventory while the price is high. This is not at all what you would expect if there was a realistic chance of gold going a lot higher. On the other hand, the deficit is going to definitely cause inflation at some point.
Sure Enough, Idaho Just Gained A Bunch New Congressional Districts!
Idaho Freedom Foundation reports that along with all the other states that have acquired a bunch of new House districts because of the stimulus, so has Idaho! When I asked Recovery.org for a list of Idaho Congressional districts that were benefiting from the creation of new jobs, it showed details about jobs created in Idaho Congresional districts (in order of number of jobs created or saved): 2, 1, 5, 4, 8, 9, 35, 3, 0, 16, 19, and 28! And all this time I thought there were only two Idaho Congressional Districts! (And who represents the 0th district?)
What is this? Did Chicago voting "vote early, vote often" suddenly get applied to stimulus spending? No wonder it was so expensive--they had to spend money in Congressional districts we didn't even know existed!
Real Snow
This was more than just a dusting of snow. I fear it is time to wash and cover the Corvette for the winter, and turn off collision insurance until spring. It is also very cold--21 degrees when my wife and I returned home this evening from watching our granddaughter. It is probably below 20 degrees by now.
Squanto: A Warrior's Tale (1994)
And "tale" is the right word. I saw this yesterday while using the treadmill--and while I have learned not to expect much historical accuracy from films, I was still disappointed at how "creative" this one was. Squanto was indeed kidnapped on the New England coast by Englishmen. But he was sold into slavery in Spain, not in England. The battle with the bear for a paying audience? Completely invented. He did not escape his tormentors, and fall by accident into an English monastery. after an heroic escape by boat. Squanto was rescued from slavery in Spain by monks, who arranged for his travel to England, where he was treated quite well, and eventually returned home to New England.
What's sad about this is the movie falls into the absurd trap that turns every historical event involving race into some sort of heroic struggle by the oppressed to overcome his oppressors. Squanto's sale in slavery was definitely oppression--but his rescue from it was an act of decency by Christian monks who saw the evil of slavery. His decent treatment in England is doubtless part of why Squanto was so helpful to the Pilgrims when they arrived on the Massachusetts shore--a certainly more plausible response to good treatment than what this movie portrays.
It just drives me crazy to see so many films falsify history--and not even because the real history is boring, or complicated. It is almost like someone, somewhere, is terrified that an accurate portrayal of history wouldn't fit into the mindless ideological framework that seems to drive those idiots in Hollywood.
Save The Maldives!
Before they go under water! But there is a little problem with the "rising sea levels will drown sea level countries." From the March 28, 2009 London Telegraph:But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.
Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.
The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".
When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.
Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.
One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".
When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.
The Death Lovers
I mentioned the line in Dr. Hasan's Power Point presentation about how Muslims love death more than we love life--a statement that I have seen Muslims make in other contexts. A reader points to this account in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire of the rise of Islam. (Why is this in a book about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? Think Eastern Roman Empire, which persisted for a thousand years after the fall of Rome.)The son of Abu Sophian was sent with five thousand Arabs to try the first experiment of surprise or treaty ; but on the eleventh day, the town was invested by the whole force of Abu Obeidah. He addressed the customary summons to the chief commanders and people of Aelia:
This notion that Muslims love death more than non-Muslims love life is apparently not a modern construct. The solution, of course, is not to become like our enemies, and love death, but to love life enough to persuade those who wish the Islamic martyrs' death of the error of their ways, or alternatively to assist them towards what they love so much.
"Health and happiness to every one that follows the right way ! We require of you to testify that there is but one God, and that Mahomet is his apostle. If you refuse this, consent to pay tribute, and be under us forthwith. Otherwise I shall bring men against you who love death better than you do the drinking of wine or eating hog's flesh."
I Think The Economy Is Improving (At Least Locally)
I have another job interview on Monday with a Boise company.
At this point, I am pleased to report that even if a full-time job doesn't open up, the three classes that I have for certain (perhaps four), and the four classes that my wife is teaching in the spring, is sufficient to cover all of our bills.
The "We Love Death" Statement
I've seen several times where Palestinians have claimed that they will win because, "We love death more than the Jews love life." Now I see a similar statement attributed to Dr. Hasan's Power Point presentation made to fellow Army psychiatrists in 2007. You can actually see the entire presentation here. And indeed, on one of the later slides, he does write:We love death more then [sic] you love life!
It is possible, read in context, that he was articulating the view of Islamic extremists, and not necessarily his own view. But what I find really worrisome is that he was supposed to be discussing a medical topic in his presentation--and the rough equivalent would be if an evangelical Christian put together a presentation about the religious conflicts that a Christian soldier might experience--and then spent at dozens of slides explaining fine details of Christian belief in a way that seems intended to proselytize. In a private company, a presentation like this would have made a lot of people very uncomfortable--if someone in charge didn't just say, "Just a moment, Dr. Hasan, I think you have gotten off topic here."
Percussive Maintenance Again
I mentioned the problem that I had with the air conditioning display on the Corvette requiring "percussive maintenance." It turns out that this is a sufficiently common problem that there is a detailed description of how to fix it at Corvette Forum. It involves removing several parts, and then resoldering the contacts on the printed circuit board. It doesn't look all that hard, but I suppose until tapping the display doesn't fix the problem anymore, I'm not going to put this much effort into it.
Another Monstrously Long Bill
Passed the House also. H.R. 2454: American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 is 1427 pages long. There is some rather upset email going around about sections 202 and 204 imposing mandatory retrofit of existing houses for energy efficiency. I don't see anything mandatory in those sections. I do see an enormous amount of bureaucracy being created that serves no good purpose. If the cost of energy increase that this pig creates isn't enough to make you upgrade your insulation, then you are probably a Democrat with more money than you know what to do with, anyway.
Just the health care reform bill: there may well be some mildly good, or at least incredibly destructive stuff contained in H.R. 2454 that wouldn't be controversial. So why do we have to throw it all into a single incomprehensible bill, along with stuff that really is controversial? I'm sure that at least some of this bill is stuff to further enrich those who are already obscenely rich.
3rd Coldest October on Record
NOAA is reporting that October was nationally the 3rd coldest October since national records start in 1895:Temperature Highlights - October
Now, Alaska was warmer than average, with the 10th highest temperature since records there start in 1918. But it turns out that you can plot national temperature averages for year to date here. There's definitely a warming trend from 1895 to the 1930s, then cooling until 1970, then warming until 1998--and now cooling again. If greenhouse gases were the major determinant of global temperatures, it is a bit odd that they fell for forty years--at a time when industrialization was dramatic, and have started to fall again--in spite of no successful effort to control greenhouse gases.
It could well be that manmade greenhouse gases are contributing to warming, but that other phenomena are playing a larger role. Those other phenomena would seem to be considerably more powerful than manmade greenhouse gases, if they successfully overwhelmed manmade greenhouse gases 1930-70, and 2000-09. That doesn't mean that manmade greenhouse gases aren't a factor, and perhaps even a serious concern. But the popular attempts to overstate the criticality of manmade greenhouse gases smell more like an attempt at justifying control and enriching the already obscenely rich (like Al Gore) than something that requires immediate action.
Imagine This Happening in the Bush Administration
The Department of Justice is using authority under the PATRIOT Act to gather information about visitors to a hard left "news" organization. From November 10, 2009 CBS News:In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.
The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.
Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department's subpoena. (The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their principles of unity and mission statement – work toward "promoting social and economic justice" and "social change.")
The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.
"I didn't think anything we were doing was worthy of any (federal) attention," Clair said in a telephone interview with CBSNews.com on Monday. After talking to other Indymedia volunteers, Clair ended up calling the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which represented her at no cost.
Under long-standing Justice Department guidelines, subpoenas to members of the news media are supposed to receive special treatment. One portion of the guidelines, for instance, says that "no subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media" without "the express authorization of the attorney general" – that would be current attorney general Eric Holder – and subpoenas should be "directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter."
I am quite prepared to believe that Holder's Department of Justice has a legitimate terrorism case that it is pursuing. I just find it amusing that the same crowd that thought "Bushitler" was clever aren't making this news story a 24/7 event. But I guess as long as this is being done by the Zero, it's not a problem.
