Is it wrong to urge Tiger Woods to convert to Christianity?

That’s what Brit Hume did today. It’s being played as “Tiger must convert to be forgiven”.  What he actually said was, “Buddhism doesn’t offer the forgiveness and redemption Christianity does.”  Anyone who has ever experienced personally the saving grace described in the story of the prodigal son will know, I believe, what Hume was saying. It’s not about the world forgiving you your sins; that’s irrelevant – it’s about being absolved by your God, and going on.

UPDATE: ooh, they’re squaring off: Buddhist response here. In fact, I think they’re both right: go, and sin no more.

The NAR calls them “botched appraisals” – others call it reality

Distress sales drive down appraisals, to agents’ distress. Hey, that’s the market. My clients just paid $1.167 for a house on Linwood Avenue that, in 2005, appraised for $1.8. Which is the correct price? The NAR seems to think the 2005 price is. My clients (and I) disagree.

Glenn Reynolds as Obama speechwriter?

He’s got my vote. And photographer, if that’ll keep Glenn happy.

Peruvians dying from cold – global warming blamed, naturally

Of course it is: that’s the only story line permitted by the main stream media these days. But here’s a thought: one of the peasants interviewed says his two-year-old is dying of tuberculosis contracted by sleeping on the wet ground: build the kid a bed, you dumb f***. Just a suggestion, of course.

A glimmer of sanity!

US travelers will no longer be subjected to the full range of increased security at airports. The usual suspects (ACLU) are howling, but I’ll tell you what: if Obama comes up with a rational response that focuses on the most suspicious and leaves his fellow citizens alone, he could pull a victory from the jaws of defeat. And I hope he does – he’s my president too, and I want him to succeed.

WASHINGTON – Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria who are flying to the United States, will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing plot, Obama administration officials announced Sunday.

But American citizens, and most others who are not flying through those nations on their way to the United States, will no longer automatically face the full-range of intensified security that had been imposed after the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight, officials said.

For Americans, the change represents an easing of the immediate response to the attempting bombing of the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. But the action on Sunday further establishes a global security system that treats people differently based on what country they are from, evoking immediate protests from civil rights groups Sunday.

Does the The New York Times actually believe its bullsh**t?

Global warming forces people from Bangladesh. Oh boo hoo, and oh, horse petooey. This spit of land has been underwater for centuries and has flooded ever since inhabited. I know that, even if the Times does not.

Here’s Wikipedia:

In the 19th century 6 major floods were recorded: 1842, 1858, 1871, 1875, 1885 and 1892. 18 major floods occurred in the 20th century among which those of 1987, 1988 and 1998 were of catastrophic consequence. In the 2007 South Asian floods all the six divisions of Bangladesh were affected resulting in the displacement of five million people and a death toll of 500 ^[1].

It’s not just that anyone can pull up Wikipedia these days and check facts: rather, anyone with even the barest education and knowledge of history knows of this unfortunate land’s geography and elevation. So either they’re teaching nothing at Yale these days – a not implausible situation – or the Times is running pure crap on its pages and hoping its readers have all succumbed to Alzheimer’s. I await its demise with bated breath.

No, General, we can’t do that

You show me a muslim punk, I'll show you a terrorist

(Retired) General: Strip search all muslim youths. Even the Israelis don’t go that far, nor do they need to. I hope this guy wasn’t in charge of missiles when he was active.

Where is Blumenthal?

Protecting our country

Niantic, Connecticut blogger Steven Frishling was attacked by TSA goons last week and had his computer seized by federal government officials embarrassed at the exposure of their silly, weak response to the Captain Underpants bombing attempt. The blogging world rallied around Frishling and late last week the TSA dropped its subpoena, but they still have his computer and his records. I would think that Connecticut’s Attorney General would want to protect one of the citizens he is supposed to serve in an instance like this but so far as I know, he has done nothing – busy skiing in Aspen, perhaps, but is that an excuse? Where is Blumenthal?

UPDATE: We’re in the best of hands. TSA goon drops his super secret, double-probation notebook

Vocational school

Colleges are dropping education for job training courses. What a shame. I was one of those “3.4 philosophy majors” mentioned in this article when my small college decided to drop philosophy as a major, forcing me to transfer to Boston College. So 18-year-olds are going to learn, what? Accounting? Statistics? How dreary and depressing. I think I’m a pretty typical mid 50′s boy in that I’ve gone though five or six “careers” : telephonic switch salesman, when no one was prepared to hire this 23-year-old philosopher, lawyer, editor, teacher, writer and now, salesman. None required my knowledge of philosophy but all were enriched by what I learned in that discipline: the ability to read, assimilate and shape new thoughts and ideas, to write and to think clearly. Had I been trained exclusively in, say, fortran programming, I’d be a dead duck.

Vocational training is just that, and maybe that’s what should be pursued by kids (and their parents) who want immediate job security and the illusion of permanence. A liberal arts education should, perhaps, be reserved for the intellectually curious. That’s a change that will wreck havoc on the current model of higher education, but tech schools can produce the former at far less cost than what we’re using now, and if we’re aiming to produce automatons, why waste the money?

So how come this didn’t happen to me when I was a drinking lad?

New Year’s Eve celebrants stuck for three days in England’s highest pub when snows move in.

iSlate – boom or bust?

It doesn’t matter, although predictions are favorable. The point, as I see it, is that if it does succeed it will generate, like the iPhone,  thousands of jobs. Our government is spending billions producing none. Why? Because, government being government,  backs Ms-Dos – type creations and monopolistic cell phones and would never, and can’t support innovators. Go, Steve!

Paralyzed by stupidity

We’re dragging pillows away from 2-year-olds in an attempt to ensure safety. The only thing saving is us from disaster these days is that Al Qaeda seems to be as incompetent as our own TSA. My money is on Al Qaeda overcoming its stupidity before the TSA does.

BTW: the fear that TSA is responding to today: the last hour of flight, when Captain Underpants attempted to set off his bomb, is related to the flight’s course. The plane left Holland and flew over Canada before dipping into US airspace to land in Detroit. Captain Underwear was instructed to blow himself up when he was over U.S. airspace and so had no choice but to wait until the last minute. Rather than deprive two-year-olds of their pillows, airlines could just adjust the display of the plane’s location, which Captain Underwear was monitoring, and show a flight over water, outside of US territory, until it was safely on the ground.

No need to thank me, guys, I do this kind of smart thinking for free.

And the lights go out

Chavez orders electricity rationed in Venezuela. I blame Cheney.

Who knew?

Brian Williams, NBC

I don’t watch network news, so I’ve missed Brian Williams do his stuff, but I just heard him on NPR’s “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, in a segment devoted to trying to embarrass famous people by exposing what they don’t know about various obscure subjects. Williams was brilliant – 2 out of three right but, more to the point, witty and charming. Not enough to make me watch television news, but I certainly do admire the man for subjecting himself to this foolishness so gracefully.

Joe Biden might want to look for a lobbyist’s job come 2012

Cause he sure won’t be the Messiah’s running mate.

Do tell, Joe

The New York Times and treason

The NY Times editorialists are thumping their puny chests and huffing about “responsibility” over the latest failure of our government (the local citizenry, that despised element of the Times’ editor’s world, did just fine) to prevent a terrorist attack. This from the paper that has been shilling for communists since at least the 1930s, when their reporter Walter Duranty hid Stalin’s murder of 23,000,000 kulaks and won a Pulitzer Prize for doing so.

I don’t know why liberal Jews love dictatorships of the left so much – they’re the first to be executed when the totalitarians  take over and I’d expect some sort of instinct for self-preservation would kick in before that happened, but it doesn’t. I have friends – the late Howard Fast among them – who went to prison rather than betray their fellow reds; I’ve never understood their blindness.

In the late 1960s I attended a Quaker institution, George School, with little Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger and his sisters, who comprised a solipsistic Manhattan clique that quite obviously despised the middle class and boy did they let us know it. Had I any sense of history and a sense of the damage Pinch was determined to achieve in his later career, I might have tossed a bomb into his room a la Gavrilo Princip, but I was a callow youth of 16 – who knew?

Anyway, Pinch and his friends went on to run his daddy’s paper and continue what is now nine decades of aid and comfort to our (not their) enemies. I’m considering doing a more thorough job of researching and documenting this betrayal, but here is a sampling of what Pinch has been up to:

Pointless wiretaps 7/17/09

Disclosed existence of wiretapping program in 2005

Full history of the Times’ involvement here.

Disclosure of secret program tracking terrorist funds June, 2006

Washington power plays

CIA, angry at Obama, leaks damaging details of who knew what,when. They did the same thing to Bush II and, I presume, every president before him. So maybe we should ask who is really in charge here? If these people were truly competent and doing an effective job, I might feel better about this but they aren’t, so I ain’t. The NYT, whore that it is, publishes all these leaks, which makes me wonder whether they’re in bed with the CIA or just clueless naifs. I believe the paper is owned by a traitor, so my vote’s for the former.