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Thomas Sowell thinks it distorts history to treat slavery as America’s original sin.
… today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.
It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history, in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.
Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.
An ancient adage says: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” But apparently that is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.
Nile Gardiner compiles a list of Obama’s top ten insults towards Israel.
Last week Israel celebrated its 62nd year as a nation, but there was major cause for concern amid the festivities as the Israeli people faced the looming menace of a nuclear-armed Iran, as well as the prospect of a rapidly deteriorating relationship with Washington. The Israel-bashing of the Obama administration has become so bad that even leading Democrats are now speaking out against the White House. New York Senator Chuck Schumer blasted Barack Obama’s stance towards Israel in a radio interview last week, stating his “counter-productive” Israel policy “has to stop”.
At the same time a poll was released by Quinnipiac University which showed that US voters disapproved of the president’s Israel policy by a margin of 44 to 35 percent. According to the poll, “American voters say 57 – 13 percent that their sympathies lie with Israel and say 66 – 19 percent that the president of the United States should be a strong supporter of Israel.”
I recently compiled a list of Barack Obama’s top ten insults against Britain, America’s closest ally in the world. This is a sequel of sorts, a list of major insults by the Obama administration against America’s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel. …
Abe Greenwald does a nice job on Obama’s ”let’s pretend” summits.
Yesterday’s kick-off of the “Entrepreneurship Summit” in Washington DC, intended, according to Jake Tapper, “to help deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world” is the fourth hollow and stage-managed “summit” organized by Barack Obama.
First there was the Beer Summit, during which we watched the president, the professor, and the policeman pretend to resolve what the president and the professor pretended was a problem. Next up, the Health-Care Summit, during which we watched the president and his Democratic friends pretend to listen to hours of suggested solutions to a real problem. This was followed by the Nuclear Security Summit, during which participants pretended that the real problem of nuclear security could be tackled without even mentioning the problem’s main source, Iran.
These make-believe endeavors have all the effective heft of Model-UN confabs.
Yet for Barack Obama, there is no issue – be it as insignificant as a localized grievance or as towering as nuclear war – that cannot be addressed with a pantomime summit.
Noemie Emery says not to expect the willfully ignorant media to understand the tea parties.
… The Tea Party is a popular, not a populist, movement, a grass-roots uprising against the cost and expansion of government power. It fears that the debt has become unsustainable. Do not expect Dionne or Beinart to recognize this.
Don’t expect from New York magazine’s John Heilemann either, who told a panel on Chris Matthews’ program that the protesters’ motives were all Greek to him. “What is the focus, what is the cause of this? You think back to 1994, there was Ruby Ridge. There was Waco. There were triggering incidents. There’s been nothing like that.
“The only thing that’s changed in the past 15 months is the election of Barack Obama. As far as I can see, in terms of the policies that Obama has implemented, there’s nothing,” he said.
Under the heading of “nothing” would be debt in the trillions, Greece going bankrupt, California tanking under the weight of public service unions and their extravagant benefits, other states foundering, and massive entitlements being added on in the midst of a recession.
Other than that, of course, there’s nothing to see here. Nothing. Nothing at all.
The UN’s IPCC gets caught with more global warming fraud. IBD editors have the latest.
Another shoe has dropped from the IPCC centipede as scientists in Bangladesh say their country will not disappear below the waves. As usual, the U.N.’s climate charlatans forgot one tiny detail.
It keeps getting worse for the much-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which seems to have built its collapsing house of climate cards on sand or, more specifically, river sediment.
After fraudulent claims about Himalayan glaciers, African crop harvests and Amazon rain forests, plus a 2007 assessment report based on anecdotal evidence, student term papers and nonpeer-reviewed magazine articles, the panel’s doomsday forecast for Bangladesh has been exposed as its latest hoax. …
Barron’s Op-Ed warns of a second leg down if the Bush tax cuts are allowed to expire.
… Among Milton Friedman’s greatest contributions to economics was his Permanent Income Hypothesis, which found that people, by and large, weren’t drunken sailors. Their spending depends on their long-term income prospects, so a one-shot boost has little impact on the economy.
Conversely, the coming tax hikes are permanent and are likely to have lasting effects. Even if the hikes are confined to couples making over $250,000, who comprise just 5% of the population, this cohort accounts for 30% of personal income, Wieting and D’Antonio point out.
“Also note that the highest income brackets represent a preponderance of small businesses, and account for a disproportionably large share of spending. So, sharply raising tax rates in the top brackets should have a quite measurable, large effect on the economy, far in excess of the population share. This then affects employment and income more broadly,” they write.
As for the impact from the increases on taxes on capital, the question is how negative they will be. There’s no telling, given that nobody knows what future taxes on dividends and capital gains are likely to be.
That uncertainty alone has a cost, the Citi economists say. The worst case — dividends taxed as high as 39.6% and a 3.8% additional Medicare tax on top earners starting in 2012 — would reduce the present value of the U.S. stock market by 10%-15%, they estimate.
None of this takes into account the impact of monetary policy. …
Democracy in America, written in the early 1800′s by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, is part of the American Canon. Slate recently had a snarky review of one of the many books about the book. Jillian Melchior reviews the review for Contentions. Jillian happened to graduate last year from one of the few schools that provide a course on de Tocqueville’s classic. I allude to Hillsdale College.
… Furstenberg’s criticism centers on class and race, both of which Tocqueville treats at length. He repeatedly takes out of context Tocqueville’s writings on race relations. “[Tocqueville] bumped into Native Americans being expelled from the eastern states on the infamous Trail of Tears. But he didn’t make much of it, failing to connect that experience to his own reflections on the danger of the tyranny of the majority,” writes Furstenberg.
He must have somehow missed Tocqueville’s lengthy analysis of the injustices committed against the Native Americans, to be found in Volume 1, where he describes how, through trickery and coercion, American settlers “obtain, at a very low price, whole provinces, which the richest sovereigns of Europe could not purchase. … These are great evils; and it must be added that they appear to me to be irremediable.” In fact, Tocqueville portrays the Native Americans as the last remnants of the noble warrior-aristocracy, and he bemoans their degradation and the loss of their civilization.
Yet Furstenberg continues with his race-based criticism. He wrongly implies that slavery was not a big issue for Tocqueville:
“Clearly Tocqueville, unlike Beaumont, believed that slavery and racism did not touch on “the essential nature of democracy,” as Damrosch puts it. … When he did turn his mind to the subjects [of race and slavery], moreover, Tocqueville was exceedingly gloomy, convinced that a multiracial democracy was impossible. If slaves ever gained their freedom, he predicted a genocidal war: ‘the most horrible of all civil wars, and perhaps the destruction of one of the two races.’ … One of the most striking features of emancipation, as it actually happened a generation later, was the lack of violence foreseen by Tocqueville and many others.”
But Democracy in America clearly outlines Tocqueville’s strong concern about slavery and its consequences for the future of American democracy. He describes slavery as a “permanent evil,” a “calamity,” and a “wound thus inflicted on humanity.” The consequences of slavery would be even more far-reaching and disastrous, Tocqueville supposes, because “the abstract and transient fact of slavery is fatally united with the physical and permanent fact of color.” He expects that “the moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack, and far less easy to conquer than the mere fact of servitude, — the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color.” …
Now that the Cape Wind project has been approved by the Feds, there’ll be more interest in windmills. Slate had a piece on windmill design.
The federal government has green-lighted the nation’s first offshore wind farm, to be built off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass. Opponents claim that 130 white, three-bladed turbines will detract from the natural beauty of Nantucket Sound. Why do all modern windmills look the same?
So they’re unobtrusive. A windmill’s noise is directly proportional to the speed of its rotor tips. Two-bladed turbines have to spin faster than their three-bladed competitors to generate the same amount of energy. As a result, the whooshing sound they emit is somewhat louder. Two-bladed windmills would be a sensible choice for a remote, offshore wind farm like the one in Cape Cod, since they’re just as efficient as the three-bladed models and cheaper to produce. But manufacturers—who cater to the densely populated and wind-power-oriented countries of Europe—have switched almost exclusively to producing the latter. …
The approval of Cape Wind reminds of a Instapundit post from two years ago.
Okay, we’ve heard a lot about the greenhouse effect, etc., but I’m reading Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb’s Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics, and the Battle for Our Energy Future on Nantucket Sound and I’m beginning to doubt the political class’s serious commitment to this cause. The book’s a treasure trove, but here’s a description of how what was supposed to be a wide-open democratic town meeting on the Nantucket Sound wind power project was taken over by the astroturf brigades of the project’s well-heeled opponents: …
The Economist has the story of a Persian carpet that measures 5 feet by 11 and 1/2 feet. It sold at auction for $9,500,000.
THERE is nothing that excites a professional art dealer more than the thought that he may have found a lost work that has slipped through the auction-house system, misidentified, misattributed or simply misunderstood.
Second to that is buying a work on a hunch that it might be much rarer and more special than the vendor realises—and making a killing once a little additional research proves it to be a piece of exceptional importance.
At the beginning of this year Christie’s received a call from a European dealer. He had a suspicion that a carpet he had recently bought was no ordinary Persian rug, but one of the famed “vase” carpets from Kirman. Made in the city that dominated the rug-making industry of south-eastern Iran for centuries, “vase” carpets are easily identifiable by a pattern of swirling branches, foliage and flowers arranged in vases.
This particular carpet, though, had no vase on it; only a continuing pattern of intricately joined leaves that gave the design an unusual energy and charm. But it was the weaving technique that alerted the dealer to the fact that it might be a “vase” carpet all the same. …
New Scientist says whale poop is important. Really!
Saving endangered baleen whales could boost the carbon storage capacity of the Southern Ocean, suggests a new study of whale faeces. Whale faeces once provided huge quantities of iron to a now anaemic Southern Ocean, boosting the growth of carbon-sequestering phytoplankton.
So says Stephen Nicol of the Australian Antarctic Division, based in Kingston, Tasmania, who has found “huge amounts of iron in whale poo”. He believes that before commercial whaling, baleen whale faeces may have accounted for some 12 per cent of the iron on the surface of the Southern Ocean.
Previous studies have shown that iron is crucial to ocean health because plankton need it to grow. “If you add soluble iron to the ocean, you get instant phytoplankton growth,” says Nicol. The amount of iron in whale faeces means that protecting Antarctic whales could swell populations of phytoplankton, which absorb carbon dioxide.
As further proof Pickerhead will read anything, we have some information from Wikipedia on coprolites – fossilized animal dung. We’re doing this for the cartoon we snagged.