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The Corner of National Review Online William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008)
[Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died this morning in his study in Stamford, Connecticut.He died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it. At home, still devoted to the war of ideas.
As you might expect, we’ll have much more to say here and in NR in the coming days and weeks and months. For now: Thank you, Bill. God bless you, now with your dear Pat. Our deepest condolences to Christopher and the rest of the Buckley family. And our fervent prayer that we continue to do WFB’s life’s work justice.
Daily Tech with an article on global cooling. Now we have some numbers to go along with anecdotal evidence.
Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts compiled the results of all the sources. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C — a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year time. For all sources, it’s the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down. …
Mark Steyn wonders why the NOW nags can’t focus on the real problems for women.
… Yet there is something not just boring but grotesque in Western feminists’ inability to prioritize. They seem implicitly to have accepted a two-tier sisterhood, in which white, upscale, liberal women twitter about NR columnists’ appalling misogyny in criticizing a female Bush-administration official, while simultaneously the women of the fastest-growing population group in the Western world are forced into clitoridectomies, forced into burqas, forced into marriage, forced into psychiatric wards, forced into hiding — and, if all else fails, forced off the apartment balcony by their brothers and fathers to fall to their deaths, as has happened to at least seven Muslim girls in Sweden recently. This is the real “war against women†being waged across the Western world, but, like so much of the Left, a pampered and privileged sisterhood would rather fight pseudo-battles over long-vanquished enemies.
Denver Post’s David Harsanyi points to McCain’s big hurdle.
Political observers have questioned whether Americans are “ready” to elect a woman or an African-American to the presidency. A more pertinent question, actually, is whether Americans are ready to elect a grouchy old white guy.
According to a Gallup poll, only 5 percent of Americans would never vote for an African-American, while 11 percent claim they would never vote for a woman. Believe it or not, comparatively, those are optimistic numbers — if you believe in polls that solidify your world view, like I do.
Republican candidate John McCain is hamstrung by a more worrisome factor. He will be 72 by the time the November election rolls around. …
Roger Simon on Obama and NAFTA.
VodkaPundit takes a look at the electoral college numbers.
General Patton would not understand. France is about to send troops to Afghanistan. The Captain has details. He also posts on McCain and Clinton tactics.
… The Clintons never got the message this cycle. They won in 1992 with James Carville fist-in-face tactics, but in sixteen years, people have tired of it. They want candidates who focus on themselves, not on their opponents. Both Barack Obama and John McCain managed to figure this much out, as did Mike Huckabee to a certain extent. They talked about their own narratives, while their opponents floundered by talking about others.
Hillary should have stuck with her own narrative. When she did that, she controlled the race. Only after she panicked after that disastrous November 2nd debate, in which she flip-flopped on drivers licenses for illegal aliens, did she come out hard against Obama. That’s when her campaign started discussing his kindergarten essays as evidence of his supposedly overweening ambition. …
Eugene Volokh points out the problems coming from yet another stupid law. Compact fluorescents this time.
John Stossel on gun laws.
It’s all too predictable. A day after a gunman killed six people and wounded 18 others at Northern Illinois University, The New York Times criticized the U.S. Interior Department for preparing to rethink its ban on guns in national parks.
The editorial board wants “the 51 senators who like the thought of guns in the parks — and everywhere else, it seems — to realize that the innocence of Americans is better protected by carefully controlling guns than it is by arming everyone to the teeth.”
As usual, the Times editors seem unaware of how silly their argument is. To them, the choice is between “carefully controlling guns” and “arming everyone to the teeth.” But no one favors “arming everyone to the teeth” (whatever that means). Instead, gun advocates favor freedom, choice and self-responsibility. If someone wishes to be prepared to defend himself, he should be free to do so. No one has the right to deprive others of the means of effective self-defense, like a handgun.
As for the first option, “carefully controlling guns,” how many shootings at schools or malls will it take before we understand that people who intend to kill are not deterred by gun laws? Last I checked, murder is against the law everywhere. No one intent on murder will be stopped by the prospect of committing a lesser crime like illegal possession of a firearm. The intellectuals and politicians who make pious declarations about controlling guns should explain how their gunless utopia is to be realized.
While they search for — excuse me — their magic bullet, innocent people are dying defenseless. …