Applied Indifference

Earthquakes in California.

Hurricanes and Floods in Florida and the Southeastern U.S.

Volcanoes in Washington State.

Meanwhile, we get a bit of rain from the remnants of Hurricanes Ivan and Jeanne. Come winter, we’ll get snow. But we won’t get snow like the Great Lakes region of New York or Chicago. Plus, we get one hell of a show come October when the trees change colors.

Every place has some advantage to living in it, I suppose. I prefer the relative lack of massively destructive weather here in CT. Say what you will, but 2 feet of snow doesn’t do near the damage of a category 3 hurricane. And snow looks better when it’s falling than rain.

Given the tradeoffs to move somewhere else, I’ll stay here, thanks. At least I’m used to what Mother Nature throws at me. I kinda like the variety.

Tags: Randomness by Brian Corbino
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John Kerry has officially joined the ranks of the non-serious. His foreign policy is now more laughable than that of Pat Buchanan or Michael Badnarik.

Follow along with me on these memorable John Kerry quotes. The Vietnam era quote is merely for flavor, as I am willing to accept the possibility that someone can change completely in 30 years.

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake” - John Kerry, speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 22, 1971.

“It’s the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time” - John Kerry, Cleveland, September 6, 2004.

Kerry has referred to the present coalition in Iraq as the “coalition of the bribed and intimidated”.

Kerry’s own sister is in Australia telling Australians that PM John Howard has put them in danger by supporting the US in Iraq.

Kerry’s chief advisor Joe Lockhart has even gone so far as to imply that Iyad Allawi (the PM of the provisional government of Iraq) is a puppet of the U.S.

So, given all this, how can we take John Kerry seriously when he tells us he will bring allies on board? After he has essentially called the allies we do have cowards? After he has told the people of countries that support us that their support has put them in harm’s way?

The question for Mr. Kerry is now this: How do you bribe a Frenchman to endanger his homeland for the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time?

As I said, not serious.

Tags: Politics by Brian Corbino
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Apologies to Norman Vincent Peale
Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry advisor, had this to say about Iraqi PM Allawi.

Money Shot:

“The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips,” said Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry adviser.

How, exactly, does Kerry expect to improve our relations with our “allies” abroad when he and his surrogates are spending their time and treasure tearing those allies down?

hat tip: Little Green Footballs
YAMM: 100th post!

Tags: Politics by Brian Corbino
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This is the nature of the enemy we face.

On January 15, 2002, Arafat himself, during a PA televised message to children, told them, “Is it not the greatest message to the world, when a child dies for Allah?”

I hope that you’ve just spent the past minute staring at the screen, slack-jawed and unable to think, just as I did when I first read that. Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, Sting wrote a song called “Russians”, in which he hoped there wouldn’t be a nuclear war. His argument was “It’s such an ignorant thing to do, if the Russians love their children too.”

And he was right. That doesn’t apply this time. If the Islamists love their children, it is a perverted and disgusting type of love that would rather see the child blown to bits instead of growing up.

I don’t even know if there is an antidote for this poison.

Tags: Politics by Brian Corbino
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Judith Miller, ace reporter for The New York Times is willing to go to jail rather than reveal her sources in the outing of Valerie Plame.

I say let her rot then. She is a member of the chattering classes that were horrified, HORRIFIED that someone would compromise the integrity of an agent in that way, and demanded that the Bush administration get to the bottom of who the leaker was. The media KNOW WHO THE LEAKER WAS, and they are playing this silly game of “we’re not telling” with the government. The only conclusion a rational person can draw, especially given the bias in the press against Bush personally, is that the leaker is NOT from the administration, but in fact from the outside somewhere. Possibly even affiliated with the DNC or Democratic Party itself.

I have long postulated that the “leak” came from the left, and possibly from Joe Wilson himself. Mr. Wilson, you’ll remember, is famous for having stated “I’d like to see if we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs”. Wilson has a major axe to grind. His wife hooked him up and got him sent to Niger to investigate a very serious matter involving uranium and Iraq. He came back and gave the CIA no more information than they already had, and certainly not an emphatic denial. He then wrote a highly critical op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the administration for not taking him seriously. Then his wife’s name ends up in a Bob Novak column. The rest is, as they say, history.

Tags: Politics by Brian Corbino
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It’s done. An interesting experiment in regulated monopolies is coming to a close. I find it moderately amusing that in an open capitalist society, we have no competing sports leagues. There is one baseball league (MLB), one football league (NFL), one basketball league (NBA), one hockey league (NHL). Sure, there are the various farm leagues, and college sports, but I’m talking about top-level professional sports here.

So, in order to keep a league healthy, and attracting audiences, something needs to be done to keep competition between the teams. And what is done? Socialism! Why? Because competition in the stratified world of team sports would cause the best funded teams to totally OWN the least well funded. Of course, socialism in this context is perfectly acceptable, but it’s probably the least efficient way to run a business.

The NHL players and owners are unable to compromise on some form of redistribution that would keep all the teams of the league relatively level, thereby maintaining competition between them, and tension. Who wants to watch Hockey every year if the Stanley Cup champion is always the same?

So, the lack of REAL competition, combined with the whiny cry-baby attitudes of a bunch of people who are compensated entirely too richly for PLAYING A FREAKIN’ GAME, has led to this.

Oh, well. I guess there will be other things to watch this winter.

Tags: Sports by Brian Corbino
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Anyhow - I’m in LA this week, taking care of a customer. I’ve got a Mustang convertible. I just got back from meeting a bunch of online friends at El Cholo in Santa Monica (which was a total blast, by the way), and the drive back was fantastic.

70 mph on the 10, top down, radio blaring (Boston - Foreplay/Long Time) - I don’t think I’ve ever felt better behind the wheel. I need one of these.

Tags: Randomness by Brian Corbino
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The latest flap over possibly forged documents, along with the recent fabricated AP stories and poorly editied quotes has led me to a theory about the mainstream media and the blogosphere.

As many people have noted before, there are no real qualifications that one must meet in order to be a journalist. At some point, journalism students stopped going to J-school to learn how to “get at the truth”, and started going to “change the world”. This has led them to slant hard news stories with their own biases, and even fabricate news altogether.

The Internet was always a repository of knowledge. It started as a military project, and was quickly adopted by scientific academia as a way for minds to share their thoughts. Put succinctly, the Internet is the largest gathering of subject matter experts there is. It is nearly impossible for something incorrect to be put on the Internet without it being corrected almost immediately.

The advent of the weblog has amplified this a thousand times. Places like Power Line, Little Green Footballs, Instapundit and more than I have the storage space to name are individual or community blogs of experts in various fields.

Basically, there now exists a repository of expertise on nearly every subject of human endeavor that is instanly accessible, always available, and paying attention. The mainstream media no longer have a monopoly on the dissemination and analysis of events. This is a Good Thing.

As proof of my theory, I commend to you these entries at Power Line, and Little Green Footballs.

Tags: News by Brian Corbino
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I’ve been going over the Beslan massacre in my mind. I can’t help but think, given history, that Russia is going to do something either incompetent or genocidal. I can’t believe that it will be helpful in the grand scheme of things.

My biggest fear is that Putin will decide that the time for nuclear reaction is now. That would be a very bad thing.

Tags: Politics by Brian Corbino
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It’s the end of the world as we know it. And I don’t feel fine.

Shooting children in the back.

This is what they’ve come to. Planning for months to take over a school on the first day of the school year, when the place will be loaded with students, teachers and parents. Then, in a bout of incompetence, one of their bombs falls off of whatever it had been taped to, exploding. One of the terrorists then blows herself up. Some of the hostages take this as their cue to exit, and the monsters shoot them in the back.

What kind of monster shoots a child IN THE FUCKING BACK?

I can’t come up with a word that describes what I’m feeling right now. But I suspect that this incident will be a trip-wire for the clash of civilizations that I and many others have predicted for some time now. The Islamists have clearly shown that they will stop at nothing to destroy all who stand in the way of their dreams of world conquest.

Tags: Politics by Brian Corbino
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