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Tuesday, December 15, 2009More Accumulated Thoughts (Less Turkey)Doubts about Afghanistan. Fiscal hypocrisy. Climate change hypocrisy. Something silly in the state of Denmark. Very little mention of Tiger Woods. Football and the Commerce Clause. Afghanistan I read President Obama's speech on Afghanistan. I thought I was going to get all the way through it without seeing the word freedom, but it turns up three times near the end. Does that make freedom an afterthought? And what am I to make of the fact that he didn't use the word victory (or victor or win) a single time in a lengthy speech about a war? In any case, it would make sense to me to send more troops to Afghanistan, if I didn't suspect that their rules of engagement are already crippling and currently tending toward insane -- not to mention deadly to troops. "Stop, or I'll Mirandize you"? Well, maybe it's not quite that bad, but this report, among others, doesn't make it sound good. True Believers? Really? In What? If the Washington majority's promises of fiscal responsibility and their related hand-wringing were sincere, they wouldn't be raising the debt ceiling another trillion dollars or two this week -- and for the second time this year. We must look for their true beliefs and their motives elsewhere. If the sages and gurus of the just-barely-secular religion of anthropogenic climate change were really really serious about their beliefs on a personal level, most of them would have flown on commercial airliners to Copenhagen, or "planepooled" at the very least, instead of flying in on hundreds of private jets. People who are serious about their faith or other moral system may or may not attempt (tyrannically or otherwise) to impose it on the rest of us, as the Copenhagen crowd proposes to do. But they definitely practice it personally. Come to think of it, we have the technology to make it a virtual meeting, but that didn't happen, either. So if they don't really believe in what some call warmism, in what do they really believe? It must be something else. Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright (and Related Matters) (Warning! PG-rated discussion of adult themes ahead!) On a not necessarily related matter, there was a funny story out of Copenhagen in advance of the big climate conference, courtesy of Der Spiegel. "Sex workers" are legal there, apparently. A little economic battle ensued . . .
With our basic understanding of Economics 101, which offers its own view of human nature, we can safely assume what the story did not report: That there was instantly a spike in the value and the production of counterfeit delegate credentials and counterfeit "offending postcards." Supply and demand, you know. Not changing the subject very much, the Tiger Woods saga of late tells us more about the Big Media Acronyms than it does about the world's greatest golfer or society in general, for that matter. Certainly, for some it's also a convenient distraction from dastardly political deeds happening on a larger scale elsewhere, including some already mentioned herein. I have no other comment on the [descriptive phrase tastefully deleted] golfer, except to note that today's Doonesbury is very funny. Football Last and probably least, it turns out that I'm not the only one who wishes some of our elected servants on Capitol Hill would get back to serious work and stop trying to regulate college football. George Will concurs and adds some salient thoughts about a lack of constitutional authority and the misuse of the Commerce Clause (not that that's new). Lately, I found myself rooting for Texas and Cincinnati to lose, so BCS-busting TCU could go to the national championship game, not just some ordinary BCS bowl. Both Texas and Cincinnati very nearly complied. Alas. Copyright 2009 by David Rodeback. |
