Monthly Archives: December 2010

Happy New Year!

2010 was in some ways a great year. 2011 promises to be even better. »

Relatively Speaking, It’s Still Cold

Most people, I think, have caught on to the fact that global warming hysteria is a politically-inspired hoax. In that regard, it is helpful to put current temperatures into historical context. At Watts Up With That? Don Easterbrook charts temperatures since the last Ice Age, approximately 10,000 years, based on Greenland ice cores. This is his description of the methodology: One of the best ways to look at long-term temperatures »

Just For Fun

I’m home tonight, supervising a New Year’s Eve party with a group of 14-year-old girls. Since they do not require my constant presence–to put it mildly–there is plenty of time to surf the web. I came across this video at the Sun. It isn’t embeddable, so you have to follow the link to watch it; this is a screen shot: The video is of a guy named Jeb Corliss, who »

The Real War On Christmas, Part II

I wrote here about the real war on Christmas, and Christians, around the world. A postscript, comic and chilling at the same time, comes from the Maldives: “Restaurant apologises after police called over ‘festive’ Christmas menu.” Management at the Jade Bistro cafe on Boduthakurufaanu Magu have apologised to any Maldivians that may have been offended by a “festive” lunch promotion offered over the Christmas period that has since attracted protests »

An optimistic forecast for the new year

Economist Irwin Stelzer finds that the U.S. economy is in much better shape at the end of 2010 than it was 12 months ago. 2010 was a banner year for corporate profits. As Stelzer observes, “third-quarter pre-tax profits topped their 2006 peak, as firms continued the cost cutting that has seen unit labor costs declining at a rate not seen for 50 year.” The problem, of course, has been the »

Uncommon Knowledge with Milton Friedman

Last week we posted Peter Robinson’s interview with Milton Friedman. Given our format, the interview rotated off the site after a few days. We’ll have another installment of Uncommon Knowledge next week. In the meantime, here is the interview with Milton Friedman, once more once, after a brief introduction. To celebrate the holidays, Uncommon Knowledge brings us a blast from the past. Host Peter Robinson rides in on a motorcycle »

My Kind of Conservative

I’m a big tent conservative, and I think that economic, national security and social conservatism go together like ham, eggs and hash browns. So when I see ostensible conservatives whose first priority is to attack or distance themselves from fellow conservatives, I am not impressed. Recently, there has been controversy over this year’s CPAC, because certain social conservative groups have withdrawn from the event rather than share it with GOProud, »

Catching On to the Entitlement Disaster

The Associated Press catches up, belatedly, with some of the basic problems with our welfare state. Those now retiring will find that for them, Social Security was a terrible deal. Medicare, on the other hand, will continue to bleed our children dry: You paid your Medicare taxes all those years and think you deserve your money’s worth: full benefits after you retire. Nearly three out of five people say in »

Time to Rethink Public Employee Unions

In New York, sanitation workers have reported that their union ordered them to sabotage the city’s blizzard cleanup efforts. If that claim is true, the union may be responsible for at least one death. Mayor Bloomberg has vowed to investigate. It remains to be seen what will come of this particular controversy, but the broader point is coming into ever-clearer focus: it is time to ban public employee unions. For »

That Pesky Constitution

Every now and then, someone says something that is astonishingly stupid, but also revealing. That description applies, I think, to this interview on MSNBC–the Democratic Party’s house network–with Ezra Klein, a liberal blogger employed by the Washington Post. Klein expresses the view that the Constitution is “confusing” and really can’t be understood because it was written more than 100 years ago. Therefore, he suggests, it means whatever a particular reader »

Barack Obama and the paradox of progressivism

I encourage those of our readers with a philosophical bent to take the time this weekend (it will require about an hour) to read Peter Berkowitz’s excellent essay “Obama and the State of Progressivism, 2011.” Peter links the political difficulties President Obama has encountered to the “paradox of American progressivism, old and new,” a paradox “rooted in the gap between its professed devotion to democracy. . .and its belief that »

Flayings of Chairman Jim

We have faithfully followed the Sayings of Chairman Jim Leach of the National Endowment for the Humanities since he took the helm of the agency at the dawn of the Age of Obama. In the past few months, thanks to the efforts of Professor Penelope Blake, others such as the editors of the New Criterion and Fox News have begun to take note. Leach combines pomposity and foolishness in a »

Bill Katz: Kodachrome, RIP

Bill Katz is the proprietor of Urgent Agenda and our occasional contributor. Paul Simon having given us the definitive tribute to Kodachrome, today Bill offers the definitive eulogy: An era now ends. No, no, I’m not referring to the closing of 2010. That’s routine stuff. It’s a more important era that ends. Today, December 30, 2010, marks the death of Kodachrome, the Eastman Kodak product that, more than any other, »

Paint It Black

Best of the Web linked to this 2009 London Times article titled “Paint the world white to fight global warming.” The Times reported that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu wants to paint as many of the earth’s surfaces white as reasonably possible, as a means of combating global warming: Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by President Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white. A global »

The late 1970s want their American foreign policy back, Part Two

A few days ago, we noted the strange fact that the Obama administration is pleased with Colombia’s new president for cozying up to Hugo Chavez, the long-time sworn enemy of Colombia. Never mind that the Venezuelan tyrant is also the sworn enemy of the United States. And never mind that he reportedly is now receiving Iranian missiles with which to threaten portions of the Western Hemisphere. For Obama, the friend »

Annals of Government Medicine

If this doesn’t lead to the repeal of Obamacare, nothing will. »

Another Attack On Cartoon Paper Thwarted

An “imminent” terrorist attack on the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in Copenhagen was stopped today, when police arrested five radical Muslims who, authorities say, intended to carry out a Mumbai-type attack on the newspaper’s headquarters by the weekend. The plot was multinational, as three of those arrested are residents of Sweden and the terrorists are originally from Tunisia, Lebanon and Iraq. The suspects are reported to have links to one or more »