We like victims best of all . . .

Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.

That’s Peter Collier in Wall St. [Opinion] Journal, who takes us through three wars and heroism in moving accounts.

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It seemed a good idea at the time

What if carbon dioxide didn’t cause global warming but it was the other way around?  What a fine kettle of carp that would be.  But that’s how the world has worked, to judge by one of the trusted recorders that led to our present panic-stricken state.

The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved [since the late 90s]. By 2004 we knew that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the direction I had assumed in 1999 — it runs the opposite way!

Oops.  This is part of a most interesting, concise debunking by mathematician David Evans, a computer and electrical engineer, in his “I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train.”

This [late 90s] evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions.

“Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit.”

The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too.

And thereby hangs a tale.  Follow the politics, follow the money.

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Dario wins, Ashley and we like it

Evidence here that the world is not COMPLETELY filled with celebrity jerks:

 INDIANAPOLIS — Have you seen the trailers for Ashley Judd’s latest performance? They’ve been all over TV.

She’s a race driver’s wife, running barefoot in a pouring rain down the pit lane at Indy, soaking wet, hair and dress stuck to her skin, shivering more with joy than cold—just ecstatic.

Credible performance, by her, him (nice guy not finishing last as Leo Durocher generalized), and Chi Trib’s Ed Hinton, whose byline this reader will be looking for.

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Chi Trib breaks ranks three times, digs in a 4th

Chi Trib surprises this morning, with p-1 story about oil-drilling from a “big oil” company’s point of view.  It even gives a nod towards supply shortage leading to demand increase causing price rise — an elementary piece of economics that seems mostly to escape criers after corporate scalps.

Another story worth noting is James Janega on the Anbar Province success, including J’s scepticism about its meaning, which is fair enough as long as it’s presented that way openly, and from someone who’s been there, to boot. 

Finally, the long piece on the all-boys prep school in Englewood is inspiring as sign of what can be done to arrest the “cycle of violence” and all-around ghetto failure.  It features a young man whose mother feared the worst from the culture in which they were living.  Quite thought-provoking.

However, the Perspective section is back to its old left-wing ways with a takeout on the horrors of war focusing on bereaved family of dead GI.  This is vintage anti-war stuff in which editors and writers depict sorrow and grief, period.  No heroism here, no cause worth dying for.  Leaves one to presume they think there ain’t no such thing.  A Memorial Day dirge from the pacifist camp.

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Secret story leaks out

Time Mag’s Joe Klein wandered from the anti-war, anti-Bush reservation long enough to report what embedded “warbloggers” such as Michael Yon have been telling us about Anbar province.  Instapundit here is a good place to start with this secret story that can’t quite make it to our Mainstream Media friends.

The good news is success being achieved.  It will kill Pelosi and friends, already reeling as they see themselves losing two wars right now, on Bush and corruption, about which look here.

The bad news is a yawner by now.  MSM is slow, clumsy, and wedded to its prejudices.  Something’s got to give.

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No moderate Muslims?

Wow.  Why didn’t I think of this?  Sensible Muslims are not silent about Mad Muslims, says Stephen Schwartz.  They just aren’t being reported.

The problem is more that of “MSM silence” than of “Muslim silence.” . . .  MSM silence about moderate Islam discourages the recruitment of moderates to anti-terrorist activism, but also deters the solidarity of non-Muslims who could otherwise assist moderate Muslims.

For instance, the Fort Dix Six, four of whom are ethnic Albanians, stimulated an anti-Albanian binge (though with no mention of Mother Teresa, of course).  Not reported was this from “the Presidency of the Albanian Muslim Community in the U.S. and Canada”:

We condemn all acts of terrorism. …  [We] fully support United States Government efforts to end terror. . . .  We are against all those ‘so-called Muslims’ who misuse and humiliate Islam and create ugly images of the Muslim people… We pray to Almighty God to save and protect the United States.”


Does stuff like that not pass the fit-to-print test?

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Blair Catholic?

The long arm of Rome, Cardinal Newman alert:

Tony Blair is preparing to convert to Roman Catholicism after he steps down as Prime Minister, according to a leading cleric.

His long- awaited formal switch to the faith of his wife and family will come shortly after he surrenders office, it is claimed.

Mr Blair’s decision to formalise his Catholic beliefs was revealed by Father Michael Seed, who is regarded as unofficial chaplain to Westminster and is a regular visitor to Number Ten.  . . . .

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Dem talking points in Trib

Discussing specialized business weeklies with an expert, I learned recently that reporters for one such chain are paid more than those for the dailies in the same cities.  Was not surprised, I said: they are better qualified and more sophisticated, writing as they do for a more discriminating audience.

Think Bay Fang in today’s Chi Trib, with her piece on Washington’s “Vulcans,” who find themselves on the hot seat in these days of the Democrat majority.  It’s foreign-policy coverage for dummies, rehearsing the rehearsed.

And for a certain kind of dummy at that.  What is there about the story that the “senior Democratic congressional aide” quoted anonymously would not like?  He who framed the story for Fang:

“There is a real sense among Hill investigators that, after six years with a Republican Congress, administration officials became accustomed to having their explanations accepted at face value,” said one senior Democratic congressional aide. “Many of the prior inquiries pulled punches, failing to ask the hardest questions, and now that’s coming back to haunt them.”

Moreover, whose idea was the story, Fang’s or the aide’s? 

Also, where in the story is “Democrats claimed” or “alleged,” to go with generic Republican objections — “Republicans called it a fishing expedition . . .  . have accused [Rep.] Waxman [chief interrogator] of partisan pettiness . . . “

Nothing so story-framing available from a senior Republican aide?

And how about this one? 

Vice President Dick Cheney, a charter member of the group, is still in office, but he has some of the lowest popularity ratings of anyone in the administration.

Charter member?  This is columnist’s language, not news writer’s.  Still in office, is he?  I wondered why he keeps turning up on Fox.  Popularity down the toilet?  Ah-hah, Waxman’s revenge.

One more carping criticism of this column-article.  “Prewar claims, later discredited, that Iraq sought uranium from Niger,” tossed off as easy as can be: That’s how WashPost’s Pincus said it in July, 2003, going with “a senior administration official.”  It’s how we say it these days in all the best noosepapers.

However, Bush’s claim was that Iraq tried to buy uranium in “Africa,” citing British intel that named Congo, Somalia, and Niger.  British press then focused on Congo, for what that’s worth, and the famous (infamous) Joseph Wilson reported that “a sale couldn’t likely be completed in Niger,” never disproving the attempt, according to DailyHowler.com.

By now in any other context but interest in the Democrat zeal to interrogate, it would be inside baseball.  Good enough for dummies, however.

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Logo lacka-daisy

Lewis Lazare is the first (I think) to see the emperor’s nudity in the matter of that pesky Olympics logo that has to be removed, and along the way cites mayoral-office heavy-handedness in public relations:

So, Chicago, how does it feel? We’re still nearly nine years way from possibly hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics, and already we have a huge gob of egg to wipe off our collective faces.

On Wednesday, the powerful International Olympic Committee reminded the Chicago 2016 Olympic Committee what it should have known: that cities bidding for the Olympics may not use Olympic colors or symbols (the torch) in their logos

The mayoral clumsiness?

Do [Pat] Ryan and Daley need to shake up their staff after this logo setback? And before going any further, perhaps these two 2016 committee leaders, if indeed that is their role, should rethink the fascistic (how very Richard M. Daley, right?), hamfisted approach to public relations that has characterized the committee’s efforts so far.

It’s the Second City way, I fear.  Some years back, doing an advertorial for Forbes, I was instructed by the Hall apparatchik, eager to burnish her credentials, to interview Bill Daley, then pres. of Amalgamated Bank.  I was happy to do, having taught him all he knows (I bet) about creative writing at Ignatius a long time ago.  But the Forbes contact was appalled.

“The mayor’s brother?  Why?”

In due time Chicago and New York went head to head on the whole tone of the piece — hamfisted, you see — and NY/Forbes knuckled under, at the expense of readability and credibility.

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There they go again . . .

The Masters of Stereotype were at it again in saying the pope blasts capitalism in his new book.  If he did, it was in code that only a mainstream editor can decipher.  Reading news accounts, Fr. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute had to wonder:

Could Benedict XVI really be departing from the teachings of John Paul II that economic freedom is but a part of a larger system of freedom and rights that is embraced by the Church?

Then he read the book and found in it no mention of capitalism.  Rather, it’s a meditation, says Sirico, “on human solidarity and the centrality of God in human life, including aid to poor people.”

There is no mention here of economics, politics or specific programs of redistribution, much less any ringing criticism of the free economy. 

The book is

explicitly a spiritual reflection on our own interior disposition toward those who are “neighbors” to us and for whom we have some moral responsibility – not an economic screed.

This ain’t the story editors see, however.  It’s not part of “the agenda of journalists and editorial writers.” 

Rather, the pope

is calling on us to care for the poor in every possible way: materially and spiritually. The science of economics informs us that the free economy is the best possible foundations for growing wealth.

The free economy, yes.  It’s the best way to raise the poor from poverty, regardless of “the highly politicized and often deeply inaccurate reports of journalists looking for headlines.”

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