Rants of a Fuzzy Curmudgeon

I can’t believe it took so long to nail this guy. It only goes to show that we already have enough home-grown religious loons in this country without a bunch of towel-headed Wahhabis to worry about.

Kunz was Green’s stepdaughter before their “spiritual” marriage. A Utah court declared the two legally married as part of Green’s earlier bigamy trial.

On the other hand, the girl (who is now 30) seems pretty loony herself:

“I do not consider myself a victim,” Kunz said, sobbing as she begged Judge Donald Eyre for leniency. “I’m a 30-year-old woman who has seven children.”
“It was me who pursued him. It was me who fell in love,” Kunz said.

Terrible.

Green never imagined the consequences of his lifestyle could be so harsh, the attorney said.
“It’s all hit him like a ton of bricks,” he said. “He’s very depressed about it.”

My heart bleeds.
Not.

and I must go meet my lovely wife for dinner. She went to a bris and I opted to stay away, so we’re meeting at Applebee’s. I’m not comfortable around wild rabbis with knives.
More bloggage later perhaps.

Via LGF, we present Grand Mosque No Thanks.
Hate to tell you, Europe, but you are looking at the response to the Reconquest. (Wonder what took the Arabs so long?) The infidels are back knocking on your doors in the guise of your friendly Koran-toting, sharia-quoting neighbors.
If you’re smart, you’ll deport every last one of them before they outbreed you and take over by default.

But not the kind of wall you want to go down between them. The WaPo has an article today talking about how a wall holding up the southeast corner of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem is bulging out 35 feet and is in imminent danger of collapse. Well, that’s what the Jews say. The Arabs say the Jews just want more control of the area, there’s nothing wrong with the wall.
Somebody is being really stupid, here.

In the environmentalists vs. sane humans wars, who really has the fate of humankind at heart? Not this woman.

“The very chemicals Vandana Shiva condemns, along with the development of new ‘Green Revolution’ plants, have allowed Indian farmers to quadruple the production of food grains since independence from Britain without bringing any more forest land under the plow,” says C. S. Prakash, a Tuskegee University plant genetics professor and founder and president of AgBioWorld Foundation.
“Biotechnology now offers the ability to produce more food and better quality food under demanding conditions and with fewer chemicals,” he says. “Vandana has made a career in fighting this technology.”

God save us from blithering greens.

We’re already at war. Why not just admit it?

Cheney doesn’t give us the intelligence sources of his information, and can’t be expected to. But it is inconceivable that he should be speaking in that high pitch of resolution unless he has the evidence on which he frames his analysis. We assume that he is justified in the evidence he has, and right in the course recommended, and that the acquiescence of Congress is implicit. Which means: The American people should now be told that we are at war against Saddam Hussein.

Love it.

Many annoyances, starting with a bit of illness on my part and a lot of stupidity on our customers’ parts. I’ll try to get a few rants in tonight for anyone who cares.

Over at NRO, Jerry Taylor weighs in on why it will be cheaper to keep your cool in the summertime, thanks to Bush (and no thanks to Clinton).

In an op-ed in the NYT, Bjorn Lomborg slices and dices through the fog of “sustainability” and says that development is better for us in the long run.

Why does the developed world worry so much about sustainability? Because we constantly hear a litany of how the environment is in poor shape. Natural resources are running out. Population is growing, leaving less and less to eat. Species are becoming extinct in vast numbers. Forests are disappearing. The planet’s air and water are getting ever more polluted. Human activity is, in short, defiling the earth — and as it does so, humanity may end up killing itself.
There is, however, one problem: this litany is not supported by the evidence. Energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so. More food is now produced per capita than at any time in the world’s history. Fewer people are starving. Species are, it is true, becoming extinct. But only about 0.7 percent of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not the 20 percent to 50 percent that some have predicted. Most forms of environmental pollution look as though they have either been exaggerated or are transient — associated with the early phases of industrialization. They are best cured not by restricting economic growth but by accelerating it….
The United States has a unique opportunity in Johannesburg to call attention to development. Many Europeans chastised the the Bush administration for not caring enough about sustainability, especially in its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol. They are probably correct that the United States decision was made on the basis of economic self-interest rather than out of some principled belief in world development. But in Johannesburg the administration can recast its decision as an attempt to focus on the most important and fundamental issues on the global agenda: clean drinking water, better sanitation and health care and the fight against poverty.
Such move would regain for the United States the moral high ground. When United States rejected the Kyoto treaty last year, Europeans talked endlessly about how it was left to them to “save the world.” But if the United States is willing to commit the resources to ensure development, it could emerge as the savior.

I read Lomborg’s book. Moreover, I understood it. And he’s right. Specious and unsupportable handwringing over the environment needs to stop, and we need to put the stop to it and MOVE ON. The “brown cloud” in SE Asia wouldn’t be there if people there had an advanced (preferably nuclear-powered) civilization. And it’s interesting to note that there ain’t no brown cloud over the US.
First thing we need to do is kill all the lawyers bring back nuclear power.

…and yet there’s still this little matter of the secret FISA court that doesn’t appear to bother him one little bit, as long as it constrains the Justice Department. [Intrusive and annoying registration required to read the article]
WHY is this court secret? I can understand why its deliberations and decisions would have to be under seal. What I don’t understand is why its membership is secret. And don’t give me this “protection from possible retribution” argument that seems to work in Columbia. There should also be a sunset limitation on how long its records can be kept sealed, eg, 10 years or conviction of the guilty, whichever comes first.
I still maintain that there is a war on, and in this war it’s completely and entirely possible that we have cells of the enemy acting on our own soil. When the first nuke goes off in one of our cities, we’ll know where to point at least one finger of blame. The FISA court was set up in reaction to Richard Nixon’s illegal spying on Americans for political reasons, but long after he left office, therefore being akin to closing the barn door after the horse gets out. There is no reason to believe that any other president (well, except maybe Clinton) would do such things.
There is a point at which we have to get serious and root out the al-Qaeda in our midst, and use every weapon in the intelligence arsenal to do that. We haven’t reached that point yet, apparently. The continued existence of the FISA court and its decision not to allow the Justice Department to do its job is symptomatic of our attitude. We’ll beat up on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but horrors await should we give up, even temporarily, an iota of our personal freedom to beat up on them here.
I am depressed.