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EPA Administrator Still Maintains Man-Made Global Warming “Endangers Public Health and Welfare” — Plus, A Dipole Moment for Reflection

February 4, 2011
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EPA Administrator Still Maintains Man-Made Global Warming “Endangers Public Health and Welfare” — Plus, A Dipole Moment for Reflection

By Mike Gray At a press conference, the administrator of the EPA performed the Obama Shuffle when asked about so-called “global warming”: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson has again evaded answering a question about whether she agrees with one of the world’s most prominent climate scientists that there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995. On Capitol Hill today, CNSNews.com asked Jackson, “Do you agree with Phil Jones of East Anglia University that there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995?” Jackson said, “I agree with the scientists who have reviewed and re-reviewed the e-mails and data and made a determination—several well-respected bodies, including the national academies, including independent groups— put together that the information that came to be known as Climate Gate has not changed the fact that man-made emissions are changing and degrading our atmosphere, piling up carbon in our atmosphere, and if left unaddressed leaves us—endangers public health and welfare—and puts us, once again, behind the ball in trying to deal with, in trying to move into the clean energy economy.” Evidently, “the clean energy economy” overrides logic, facts, and all other considerations. Read the entire CNSNews article, with a one-minute video

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A Prediction about Reading and E-Books

February 3, 2011
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A Prediction about Reading and E-Books

I am a serious reader.  Books have been my constant companion for as long as I could read.  It is now becoming clear to me that books and publishing are about to change very soon.  Here’s what I predict: The notion of a book as a distinct entity from an article or an essay is going to diminish dramatically.  It really is all going to be content.  You will pay for a book what an author thinks he can get for it, not what the length of it might dictate.  The folks at 37 Signals did a nice job demonstrating that with their short, but pithy book ReWork. Thomas Nelson CEO Michael Hyatt disputes the notion that half of all book sales will be e-books by 2014.  If we include free/cheap public domain content, I suspect the amount will actually be quite a bit higher than half.  Certainly, that is likely to be the case in the United States.  Hyatt is a publisher and by all rights knows more than I do as a new-ish author, but I still think he’s off on this one. That leads me to my next point.  Publishers are toast.  I don’t know how long it will

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NYC: the Empire Nanny State

February 2, 2011
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NYC: the Empire Nanny State

Pretty soon you’ll have to go to New Jersey if you live in New York City and want to smoke, or at least over the Tappen Zee Bridge. At the Daily Caller: The New York City Council is preparing to ban smoking in all parks, beaches, boardwalks, and even Times Square, reports The Wall Street Journal. “When this legislation is passed, all New Yorkers will be able to enjoy a walk in the park or a day at the beach without having to inhale secondhand smoke,” said Council Speaker Christine Quinn when she and Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled the proposed bill last year. ”This bill will save lives and make New York City a healthier place to live.” Yeah, and a place of increasingly diminished liberties. According to the city health commissioner “Cigarettes kill some 7,500 New Yorkers every year.” Really? I’d like him to prove it. In a conversation with a liberal in good standing recently I was told in passing that “cigarettes kill 100,000 people a year.” I’ve heard 400,000, but whatever. Is smoking cigarettes a premature death sentence? To question that is to be looked at in polite society as one with two heads. But according to The

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Forgotten Lore: ‘The Forever War’

January 31, 2011
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Forgotten Lore: ‘The Forever War’

By Mike Gray The Forever War — by Joe W. Haldeman — Del Rey Books — 1976 (first published 1975) — Originally serialized in Analog magazine, 1972, 1973, and 1974 — Paperback — 218 pages. William Mandella, the child of hippie parents, gets caught up in events way beyond his control. Just before a battle he pauses to reflect: Then what the hell are you, we, am I answered the other side .  A peace-loving vacuum-welding specialist cum physics teacher snatched up by the Elite Conscription Act and reprogrammed to be a killing machine. You, I have killed and liked it. Like all draftees, William didn’t ask for this, but now that he’s in it he knows it’s kill or be killed. Such is the way with all wars. High-flown rhetoric about “why we fight” sells newspapers, but when you get right down to it, you fight for your life and your buddies’ lives—and not necessarily in that order. From all reports, an alien race known as the Taurans (what they call themselves is anybody’s guess) have attacked an Earth transport without provocation and a state of war now exists. So it should be a simple matter to

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Elton John Reveals the True “Gay” Agenda

January 30, 2011
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Elton John Reveals the True “Gay” Agenda

At a concert recently to raise money to overturn Proposition 8 in California, Elton John let it be known how he feels about those who believe marriage (i.e., everyone for all of recorded history until now) is exclusively between one man and one woman (even polygamists believe marriage is about children): “As a gay man, I think I have it all,” he said. “I have a wonderful career. A wonderful life. I have my health. I have a partner of 17 years and I have a son. And you know what, I don’t have everything, because I don’t have the respect of people like the church, and people like politicians who tell me that I’m not worthy or that I am ‘less than’ because I am gay. Well, fuck you….” The hundreds in the crowd stood and cheered wildly, before he went on: “We deserve the respect, equality, the right to be recognized as a human being. Until we are, then we have to do these kind of events. We have to fight the good fight and we will win this fight.” Why don’t you really tell us how you feel, Elton. The tortured logic here is something to behold.

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TNT Apologizes for Morgan’s Palin Comment

January 28, 2011
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TNT Apologizes for Morgan’s Palin Comment

Turner Network Television has issued an apology for a comment made by comedian Tracy Morgan in an interview before last night’s NBA game broadcast. Asked about the appeal of former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and invited to compare her with comedienne Tina Fay (his costar on the NBC comedy 30 Rock), Morgan said that Palin is “good masturbation material,” making sure to repeat the phrase for emphasis, calling her “great masturbation material.” TNT apologized publicly. “It’s unfortunate Mr. Morgan showed a lack of judgment on our air with his inappropriate comments,” said Turner representative Jeff Pomeroy in a press statement. I happened to be watching at the time, and I found the exchange rather startling but, well, also rather charming and amusing, given what one has come to expect from Tracy Morgan as a comedian and public figure. Too bad there were probably a good many pre-adolescent boys watching that pregame show and wondering what Morgan’s phrase meant. It will undoubtedly open up a whole new world for them, but one that the culture would have shoved them into in due course anyway.

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Metheny’s ‘Orchestrion’ Is Truly a Tour de Force

January 27, 2011
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Metheny’s ‘Orchestrion’ Is Truly a Tour de Force

I’ve just gotten around to listening to Orchestrion, the latest album by the jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, and I’m extremely impressed. It’s one of the best new jazz albums I’ve heard in quite some time, and it’s a highlight of Metheny’s distinguished career of more than three decades. The album is an ambitious endeavor in the process used for composing and arranging the songs: Metheny employs an orchestrion, an update of a nineteenth-century gizmo that enabled a keyboard or piano roll to control several musical instruments and even a wind orchestra, simultaneously. Metheny uses one controlled by his guitar, and the results are stunning. These are brilliant, complex songs that don’t sound gimmicky at all, thanks to Metheny’s skill as both a guitarist and a composer. The result is a compositional style that combines elements of jazz and classical chamber music in a truly exciting and replicable way. The title song is largely allegro and dominated by quick arpeggios on piano and other keyboards and tuned percussion. It features a very distinctive melody theme which is introduced by guitar and piano, leading then to a long passage featuring a rhythmic foundation of intricate, staccato arpeggios led by piano and tuned

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Interview: Mark Goldblatt, Author of ‘Sloth’

January 26, 2011
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Interview: Mark Goldblatt, Author of ‘Sloth’

Larry Kaufmann interviews Mark Goldblatt about his novel Sloth, a fascinating, genre-bending book that blends comedy, detection, identity theft, perverse romance, and other elements in a Nabokovian, postmodern love(ish) story that satirizes our relativistic, postmodern, media-obsessed society of today. Click here to listen.

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Forgotten Lore: ‘The Revenge of the Hound’

January 25, 2011
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Forgotten Lore: ‘The Revenge of the Hound’

By Mike Gray The Revenge of the Hound — by Michael Hardwick — Villard Books — 1987 — Hardcover — 310 pages It is Coronation Summer 1902, and there has been such a lull in criminal activity that Sherlock Holmes is thinking about retiring. The fact that Dr. Watson has become engaged to a young American heiress also plays no small part in Holmes’s thinking—without his “Boswell,” The Great Detective’s ego is threatened as well. But soon come reports of a spectral hound haunting, not Grimpen Mire, but Hampstead Heath, the commons just north of London. The press goes crazy, the police are clueless, the public is just short of panic—yet Holmes is completely unimpressed and dismisses the whole thing as a hoax. Soon enough his plate is full again: Lady Frances Carfax has disappeared on the Continent, an indiscreet letter with embarrassing potential for the new king (Edward VII) needs to be retrieved, the bones of Oliver Cromwell have just been disinterred (the Lord Protector’s corpse had been decapitated, a fact of keen professional interest to Holmes), and Holmes and Watson narrowly miss witnessing a murder on a cross-Channel ferry. All in all, enough to consume the detective duo’s

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Olbermann Blame Game to Serve Push for More Speech, Telecom Regulations

January 24, 2011
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Olbermann Blame Game to Serve Push for More Speech, Telecom Regulations

Talk-show host Keith Olbermann abruptly announced that he was leaving his position as host of the MSNBC show Countdown at the end of last Friday night’s show. Olbermann had hosted the program since 2003 and had more than a year remaining on his contract. A buyout of his contract was done, he said, by mutual agreement between him and MSNBC. Olbermann gave no specific reason for his decision to leave MSNBC at this time. The blogosphere, however,  immediately lit up with posts blaming cable giant Comcast, which is planning to merge with MSNBC parent corporation NBC/Universal in a matter of days. Comcast issued a statement noting that it does not yet own NBCU and that it had “pledged from the day the deal was announced that we would not interfere with NBC Universal’s news operations. We have not and we will not.” This move in the blame game was to be expected, of course, given that the progressive left has been portraying the proposed Comcast/NBCU merger as a test case of how fully the Obama administration would regulate the telecommunications media, with the progressives hoping for a move to extremely intensive regulation. Current indications are that the Obama administration’s Federal

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This Week in Prose and Poetry

January 24, 2011
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This Week in Prose and Poetry

Short Fiction The Quiet Man by Maurice Walsh  “Shawn Kelvin, a blithe young lad of 20, went to the States to seek his fortune. And 15 years thereafter he returned to his native Kerry, his blitheness sobered and his youth dried to the core, and whether he had made his fortune or whether he had not no one could be knowing for certain. For he was a quiet man, not given to talking about himself and the things he had done.” Why Can’t He Be You by Eve Tushnet / From the journal Dappled Thing’s Fifth Anniversary Issue “Oh, Nina, you haven’t signed up yet-can you take one of the,” and Dorrie was turning the clipboard toward me with her usual unhappy smile, “morning slots?” “Sure. Where is this place?” Cigarette. Cigarette. Cigarette!” “It’s a Planned Parenthood on 17th Street. There’ll be a carpool if you want.” Reviews & Interviews Lars Walker reviews I, Sniper by Stephen Hunter “Yet another Bob Lee Swagger novel from Stephen Hunter, and let me tell you, this one’s a dandy.” Madeline Goes to Washington “Meghan Cox Gurdon reviews four illustrated books for

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Atheist Alert: Do NOT Read This Book! “Unbroken”

January 21, 2011
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Atheist Alert: Do NOT Read This Book! “Unbroken”

Spoiler Alert: If you have heard of and plan to read the best seller, “Unbroken,” and if you don’t want to know details of how the story ends, you will not want to read any further. And it really is a worthwhile read. Literally everyone likes it. So if you want to read it, bookmark this and come back after you’ve finished it. Actually, this would be a fantastic book for atheists to read, because it would challenge some of their cherished assumptions about Christianity. Lauren Hillenbrand’s second best seller (the other being Seabiscuit) is about Louis Zamperini, a world class miler (he was in the 1936 German Olympics) who fought in WWII, was captured by the Japanese and endure several years of hell on earth. As the title implies, he remained unbroken, but to endure the kind of pain and torture he did at the hands of maniacal sadists deeply affects a person, and for a time he was definitely broken. Hillenbrand is a good story teller with a direct, non-flowery style. She brings this man and his world alive, and in a way that’s so much more powerful for her somewhat sparse approach. Zamperini was an incorrigible boy

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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