HOT5 Daily 7/14/2009

1. "Killing or capturing al Qaeda leaders discussed; liberal Democrats OUTRAGED!" Maybe the CIA should restrict its activities to writing strongly-worded memos. Then Democrats might be happy.

Representative Sample: We can all rest a lot easier now that America’s defense is in the hands of these über-partisan assclowns. Playing politics with national security? It’s what they are. It’s what they do.

2. "Obama's Science Czar John Holdren, Wrong Now and in 1977"Another bad appointment by Obama? You might think he was an inexperienced amateur who has no idea what he's doing.

Representative Sample: this guy has also advocated denying part of the population basic rights based on their level of education and lifestyle. I think that part of his past needs to be probed just as much as the suggestions he has made in the past. Because his current views are relevant especially considering how unacceptable his past views are.

3. "Krugman best taken in reverse" Links to an excellent article about Paul Krugman & Keynesians.

Representative Sample: If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion. - George Bernard Shaw There are numerous versions of Shaw's dictum, boiling down to one thing - no matter how many economists one consults, the actual answer is almost never found, not even one that can be worked with profitably.

4. "Walking the High Frontier" Why we need space exploration.

Representative Sample:The exploration and eventual colonization of space provides a new goal, and a new American mythos. It ties into those American values of exploration and innovation (with a touch of rebellion- what’s more rebellious than leaving your home planet?).

5. "The Electric Car: Environmental Menace" It wouldn't be if we had a power grid supplied by nuclear energy. But we don't, thanks largely to the same environmentalists who are interested in things like electric cars.

Representative Sample: A plug-in electric car may not emit any carbon dioxide from the tailpipe. But the electricity has to come from somewhere, and typically grid electricity is generated by burning coal. Because gasoline is a much more energy-rich fuel than coal, a low-mileage gasoline car is much better for the environment.

To submit a blog post for HOT5 Daily, please e-mail me at unrright@NOSPAMgmail.com. Put HOT5 in the subject.

Diversity Doesn't Apply to Conservative Views

There's an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor by Dan Lawton, a journalism student at the University of Oregon. Anyone who has ever had much contact with academia knows that diversity is preached like a religion at most colleges. But of course diversity of thought, when it comes to expressing conservative views, is frowned upon. Lawton, who isn't even a conservative, noted that conservatives professors were in short supply at his university. He had the temerity to  suggest the following:

In my column, published in the campus newspaper The Oregon Daily Emerald June 1, I suggested that such a disparity hurt UO. I argued that the lifeblood of higher education was subjecting students to diverse viewpoints and the university needed to work on attracting more conservative professors.

His account of reactions by leftist professors will surprise no one on the right. For example,

I was shocked by such a comment, which seemed an attempt to link Republicans with racist orthodoxy. When I wrote back expressing my offense, he neither apologized nor clarified his remarks.  Instead, he reiterated them on the record.

When aren't leftists accusing Republicans of racism? That's just standard practice, as he found out. He writes of another professor,

From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.

Again, nothing surprising. Many on the left are shocked and horrified that anyone would dare disagree with their deeply-held assumptions and world-view. Those who do are treated as evil, labelled as fascists, Nazis, or whatever other term they feel like using. The old saying, conservatives think liberals are stupid, and liberals think conservatives are evil actually applies in many cases. As Lawton points out, he wasn't even advocating conservative or Republican ideas, but merely argued that diversity wasn't being well-served by the absence of conservative thought in the faculty. Imagine the hostility he would have faced if he were an actual conservative trying to advocate right-wing positions on campus.

Good Article on the Torture Issue

Roger Scruton has an excellent piece in the American Spectator called, "Facing Torture." I've written extensively about the issue, which has been brought back to the forefront with the renewed speculation about possible investigation and prosecutions -- something the left and its clueless terrorist rights supporting allies have been screaming for without let-up. Read the whole article, but I'll highlight a few passages.

policies that run counter to this or that UN convention are not necessarily crimes within the jurisdiction of a state, and when these policies are adopted by the organs of government after due deliberation and with sincere regard to the public interest it is only in exceptional circumstances that those who execute them could be regarded as criminal.

I know that kind of opinion will come as a shock to those who have an unfounded & unwarranted mystical reverence for international law. But the national interests of the U.S. -- which include avoiding frivolous prosecutions of our past administrations over policy differences -- are far more important than any UN convention.  

just about every government in the world today could be charged with crimes, and each administration could be hauled before the courts by its successor. This would lead to a breakdown of trust between the parties and the first steps toward civil war

Exactly. Criminal investigations of outgoing administrations by the opposition would do far more damage and set a worse precedent for the U.S. than any supposed harm caused by the policies that supposedly need to be investigated.

Scruton points out the difference in law between acceptable treatment of the guilty & the innocent, something I've written about in the past. Many torture opponents ignore the difference entirely and pretend that torturing a terrorist is somehow morally equivalent to torturing the innocent.

Some people think that utilitarian reasoning is never sufficient to override an individual right. Such people would have to conclude, not merely that we should not torture, but that we should not imprison or harshly interrogate the people captured in the course of the “war on terror.”

And such people are moral absolutists who tend to live in their own little worlds where nothing unpleasant is ever justifiable. Hopefully no one with that sort of narrow extremist view will ever be in a top position of power within the U.S.

torture has been pushed to the top of the political agenda only now, when a shared sense of security makes the moral high ground safe. It is only because of the success of the war on terror that Americans can take a principled stance in opposition to it, safely expressing sentiments that, in the wake of 9/11, would have seemed as selfindulgent to liberals as they seem to conservatives today.

Now that it is politically convenient, Democrats are terribly concerned about the rights of terrorists. That concern was lacking right after 9/11 for obvious reasons. But now that the threat has seemed to recede, 9/11 is safely in the past, and no other major attacks have struck the U.S., Democrats and their allies feel free to use the issue as a club against Republicans. But any responsible member of government faced with a crisis such as 9/11, whether Democrat or Republican, would probably have made many of the same decisions in an attempt to protect the country. 

HOT5 Daily 7/13/2009

1. "Cheney Tried To Keep Secret Stuff Secret" And we can't have that. More on the continuation of the BDS epidemic. Will it ever subside?

Representative Sample: It’s yet another a big scandal revolving around our Dark Lord Cheney, evil be his name. Maybe he didn’t want Congress to blab about it, or the New York Times to tell al-Qaeda about it

2. "there’s a reason why we call it evidence…" Arguing science with the religious whose beliefs conflict with science. 

Representative Sample: Take note my fellow heathens and heretics. If we don’t believe in his ideology, we’re all unreasonable fools. If only we were blessed with sufficient intellect, only then we would realize that it makes perfect sense that we’re all in communion with a creature we can’t see, hear, smell or taste and who’s effects we can’t detect with even the slightest bit of certainty. Evidence? Proof? Confirmation? Foolish mortals!

3. "Genie sued for harassment in Saudi-Arabia; honest, no kidding!" At least they aren't abusing some rape victim for a change. As stories from Saudi Arabia go, this is an amusing story of backwardness & superstition instead of a disgusting one.

Representative Sample: The incredible backwardness of Islamic thought and customs is extremely well illuminated by a recent case in Saudi-Arabia where a family is taking a case to local court where the culprit is a genie or a djinn, which is in fact a evil spirit.

4. "Maldives: Woman given 100 lashes for having sex" Jimmy Carter thinks their interpretation of Islam is incorrect. Sharia law disagrees.

Representative Sample: The woman received 100 lashes after confessing to having extra-marital sex with two men on separate occasions earlier this year.

5. "THE FARCE OF “PEACEKEEPING”"African peacekeeping operations? Useless.

Representative Sample: It appears that the true winners are those who partake in these so-called peacekeeping operations and judging by their results, they really couldn’t care less about “peace” and the civilians they are supposedly there to protect. Poorly-trained and inadequately-led peacekeeping troops lead to more instability.

To submit a blog post for HOT5 Daily, please e-mail me at unrright@NOSPAMgmail.com. Put HOT5 in the subject.

Jimmy Carter on Religion as it Affects Women

Former President Jimmy Carter has an article in the Guardian called, "The words of God do not justify cruelty to women." It's a fascinating look at how liberal Christians prefer to deceive themselves about their own religion. Carter essentially argues that religious doctrine advocating subjection of women is based on incorrect interpretation of scripture and "a few carefully selected Bible verses."

This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries. The male interpretations of religious texts and the way they interact with, and reinforce, traditional practices justify some of the most pervasive, persistent, flagrant and damaging examples of human rights abuses.

There's one big problem with Carter's argument -- he has things exactly backward. One doesn't need to rely on selective interpretation to understand that women have second-class status in the Bible.  Instead, creative interpretation is necessary to pretend otherwise. This is typical of liberal Christians. Rather than accept that their religion, the scriptures, and their God are horribly flawed, and that the Bible promotes many things that are repulsive to moral and ethical people, they just pick and choose which parts of the Bible they want to accept. The rest is dismissed out of hand or interpreted away as no longer relevant.

In some ways this is similar to liberal interpretations of the Constitution. The Constitution doesn't really mean what it says; it means whatever they think it should mean. But with Christianity the Bible is supposedly the holy word of God. If it means whatever you think it should mean, and you can discard any unpleasant parts, what good is it? Why not just admit that it isn't the word of God, just a collection of ancient writings that you are cynically using to support your own particular ideas?

HOT5 Daily 7/12/2009

1. "Obama’s Kidding, Right?" Or he could just be blatantly lying.

Representative Sample: It doesn’t resemble the truth. When he pushed the bill, he said, at various times, that it would create either 3,000,000 new jobs, 3,500,000 new jobs or 4,000,000 new jobs. I don’t recall the Senate holding the vote open for Sherrod Brown so he could cast the deciding vote so they could extend unemployment and Medicaid benefits.

2. "“You’d better get used to it”" Iraqi government acting aginst U.S. interests.

Representative Sample: five Iranian Qods operatives are being released from US detention, despite the misgivings of US intelligence

3. "The Neo-Nazi Boogyman" A good debunking of the left's irrational fear of "right-wing extremists." 

Representative Sample: The need of leftists to inflate their own sense of self-righteousness and self-importance leads them to magnify a tiny, highly marginalized, wacky subculture of racist socialists into this great threat to the republic which only the noble Left can stop. They also like to stigmatize the military whenever possible, so they absolutely believe that such people are common in the military. They see an ice cube floating by and imagine an iceberg.

4. "Are American scientists getting more religious?" If so, why?

Representative Sample: There's one statistic that is rather unexpected, however. As you can see in this table, younger scientists are more likely to be religious than older ones. That's the reverse of what you see in the general population.

5. "Ugliest Space ?" Space travel and the human body. 

Representative Sample: extended space travel could actually leave astronauts a gross, bloated, unattractive mess.

To submit a blog post for HOT5 Daily, please e-mail me at unrright@NOSPAMgmail.com. Put HOT5 in the subject.

BDS & The CIA

The crowd still suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome is all over the story about the CIA concealing the existence of some unspecified program from Congress, supposedly at the order of Dick Cheney. Here's the reliably laughable John Cole at Balloon Juice,

guess the extent of the criminality and the confirmation of Bush as puppet President is news...one analyst stated that the reason Washington is terrified to investigate this is because they know that so many laws were broken so flagrantly that any investigation will lead to the indictment of Bush and Cheney, and that, for obvious reasons, terrifies the Democrats (you can listen to that piece here). It would simply consume Washington and destroy Obama’s agenda

Left-wingers actually believe this stuff. But those not infected with BDS might point out a couple of problems with that sort of "analysis."

First off, the Bush administration did nothing clearly illegal. They had a legal argument for everything they did. You would never know that from reading anything on the left. Leftists and other Bush-haters love to pretend that the Bush administration committed all sorts of illegalities. They believe this so fervently that, as usual, they confuse their opinion for fact. But in actual fact, although the Bush adminstration operated in many legal gray areas and made various borderline decisions, there was no single action that was unquestionably illegal. That's why there won't be any prosecution of Bush or Cheney. Rational people understand that there just isn't any clearcut evidence of criminal actions, regardless of the screeching of the hysterical left.

Second, the CIA story in question clearly illustrates how BDS removes any ability to logically analyze things related to the Bush administration -- as if we needed another example. Right in the article, apparently ignored by BDS cases like Cole, we find the following:  

the language of the statute, the amended National Security Act of 1947, leaves some leeway for judgment, saying such briefings should be done “to the extent consistent with due regard for the protection from unauthorized disclosure of classified information relating to sensitive intelligence sources and methods or other exceptionally sensitive matters.”

For people who don't believe conspiracy theories about Dick Cheney being a criminal mastermind controlling a puppet president, the above quote seems to indicate that the failure to report a CIA program was not in fact illegal. Once again you have a statute with leeway for interpretation. Disagreeing with the judgment of the Bush administration, or hating Cheney with fanatical intensity doesn't make something illegal.