As noted on the welcome page of this website, Dan Huffman and I have both endorsed Bernie Reeves in the runoff.  Please vote for Bernie! 

Thanks a million for your votes and encouragement.  Please check this page at least once per week between now and the 22 June runoff.  I'll be analyzing Bernie's and Bill's stated positions and backgrounds.  My goal will be to determine who would most successfully pound home our views on illegal immigration and other issues in the general election campaign against Brad Miller.  Frank.  

"Volcanic Vent Found Three Miles Undersea" says the title of a current newspaper story.  A colleague of mine a couple of years ago co-authored a scientific journal publication showing that about half of the claimed global warming can be attributed to variances in solar intensity alone.  It's occurred to many of us that there could be numerous other natural factors, for example volcanic activity levels.  The vent in the referenced article is pouring tremendous quantities of heat energy into the ocean, and inasmuch as we've just discovered it, we have no idea how that flow has varied over the years as the tectonic plates have shifted around.  Volcanoes above sea level could change temperatures in either direction.  For example, the explosion of Krakatoa in the Dutch East Indies in 1883 discharged so much sun-blocking ash and fine debris into the circulating atmosphere that Boston didn't have summer the following year.  Perhaps the good news is that if warming (no matter what the cause) were actually to become a worldwide climate problem, the United States could effect a cool-down through a few explosions in sandy regions of the globe.

It's incredibly ironic that Poland's government leadership and military brass should have perished on the way to a commemoration of the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish Army officers by the Soviet NKVD.  For almost half a century, the Russians had claimed that the perpetrators were the German SS.  It was certainly plausible that the deed could have been one of the Nazis' atrocities, but in this case the evidence indicated that the SS were nowhere around at the time.  American anti-communists correctly attributed the crime to the Reds, but many American liberals parroted the Soviet line and routinely characterized dissenters as closet fascists.  Similarly, these anti-anti-communists denied Stalin's designed starvation of the Ukrainians, denied the guilt of numerous spies that had been caught red-handed, and denied the killing fields of Cambodia.  The root problem of course was that such liberals did not believe that freedom was better than socialist totalitarianism, and did not believe that the United States was better than the Soviet Union.  Today, their political descendants do not believe that Christianity is better than radical Islam, do not believe that the American system of government is better than the kleptocracy of Mexico, and do not believe that United States is better than its adversaries.  (So what else is new?)
            

Having enrolled in a somwhat unusual five-year undergraduate program, I was dragged kicking and screaming through four semesters of college German.  But gee, it's come in handy, and I don't mean only during graduate school.  I usually skim through the German-language weekly "Amerika Woche," for it sometimes includes interesting items that don't get coverage in our standard media.  The 01-08 March edition contains an article that describes the ongoing mohammedan persecution of Christians in Mosul, Iraq.  During the previous week, four were murdered.  Roughly a dozen families are leaving the city each day, and only a fraction of the estimated 2003 population of 5,000 remain.  The Obama administration has had much to say about Shiite-Sunni reconciliation in an imagined democratic Iraq, and nary a word about the human rights of Christians.  (Fourteen centuries of uninterrupted warfare, and counting, since the inventing of the religion of peace.)      

In a political campaign, the challenger's usual role is to "view with alarm," while the incumbent looks for grounds to "point with pride."  Concerning the events in Vancouver however, all Americans have abundant reason to be in a point-with-pride mode for the next couple of years at least.  Not only did the United States team win the most medals, it won more medals than ANY country has EVER won in ANY winter olympics.  Way to go, guys and gals! 

A 15 February wire services report on the NATO (American) military operation at Marjah notes:  "Some troops complained that the strict rules issued by [General] McChrystal to spare civilians were making their job more difficult and dangerous.  Under the rules, troops cannot fire at people unless they commit a hostile act or show hostile intent.  U.S. soldiers operating near Marjah said the Taliban can fire on them, then set aside their weapon and walk freely out of a compound, possibly toward a weapons cache in another location."

Well, it's hard to comment on such a handicap without using some really hurtful words to describe it and the folks who dreamed it up.  As usual, our soldiers are better than our leaders.

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