Today is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. What amazes me is that, whenever a world-changing event like this happens, we always hear people saying, “We must never forget. We will never forget.” We saw the same thing after the 9/11 attacks.

And yet, we always do forget. In other times, it took at least a generation for the forgetting to begin. It took the cultural hand-off to the children of the people who had actually been there for the amnesia to set in, and for the lessons to be unlearned.

Today, it only takes a few years. “Move on,” we’re told. “Mere historical events can teach us nothing. The writings of Howard Zinn, though—there we may find wisdom.”

That doesn’t mean the wisdom is lost.

We’ll learn the lesson again.

But it will cost a lot of human lives. Continue reading Who moved my gap? →

Frank Wilson links to a fascinating interview of one of the U.N.’s expert reviewers for the climatology information and reports. It’s 30 minutes and there’s a transcript. Aynsley Kellow is what I wish all scientists would be, at least in the humble, honest way he presents himself here.

I find this statement remarkable:

Just by way of an interesting example, Garth Paltridge, who is in Hobart here and has now retired, did a paper looking at all the weather balloon data which is available for about 50 years and couldn’t find much evidence that as the Earth had warmed slightly that vital increase in water vapour was there. He eventually had it published but when it was first submitted for publication it was rejected on the basis that the message that it would send would give too much encouragement to sceptics, which really just draws attention to the need to open up the scientific process, to deal with this kind of attempt to politicise it, to suppress views that are inconvenient, because unless we very quickly establish and re-establish some quality assurance mechanisms in the conduct of climate science then we’re heading for a potentially very costly…either way a very costly set of policy responses based on some science in which we can have much less faith now than we had in the past.

I guess I’m naive enough to still be shocked at new stories of government-funded propaganda. Maybe somewhere in the back o’ me head I think we’re arguing opposing points o’ view or sum’it. But in the post from World’s Mindy Belz, I see that Michael Mann, one of the guys in the current climate research scandal, has been shown to be an undisciplined quack for many years, and yet he got some of the economic stimulus money. This is just one more thing to show what many say is true of most of Washington D.C., that solid data isn’t valued as much as the pre-approved conclusion.

It reminds me of one of the points Dr. Hunter brings up in his book, The End of Secularism. When describing Martin Luther’s view on the roles of government and the church, he emphasized the duty Christians have to their nations. Christians should involved themselves with government at many levels in order to apply biblical principles to those areas, simple ideas like honesty, charity, respect for and understanding of human nature. Christians in government office should understand they have been put there by God to work for equal justice, like Lars wrote about in the previous post, and proper treatment of the weak and needy among us. Without God-fearing men in government, we end up with the abuse we have been seeing all this year, as well as other abuses we have heard about throughout the years. I’m thinking of how congress is not subject to the laws it passes and how congressional leaders don’t want all of their members to read a bill, but only to read the prepared summary and vote with the party. (Those are two systematic abuses. The fact that Barney Frank continues to be reelected is another abuse entirely. Thomas Sowell has a related article.)

I got into a discussion in comments on the Threedonia blog today. Their open thread featured a picture of the Andy Griffith Show cast.

I expressed my personal dislike for the show, based on my (wholly insecurity-based) allergy to all those 1960s shows set in rural or small town settings. I found them condescending in the extreme, and resented them (the rest of my family, for the record, liked the shows just fine).

Later I discussed the pilot for the show, which I remember clearly, as I saw it on its first broadcast. It was actually an episode of The Danny Thomas Show. Continue reading In which I badmouth one of the most beloved TV shows in history →

Yesterday, 150 years ago, John Brown was hanged. He took justice in his own hands and killed several people during the 1850s in an attempt to end slavery in America. Obit magazine has a report. “Even though devotees flocked for decades to his grave as if it were the shrine of a saint,” St. John Barned-Smith writes, “the dispassionate massacre of people is the work of a bloodthirsty gangster, not a noble redeemer.”

Tom Naughton goes to a doctor who trained with climate researchers on how to conduct medicine. “Man-made body enlarging. . . . If this keeps up, you’ll weigh 650 pounds by the year 2030. It’s a looming disaster.”

“The environment should compete with religion as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity,” claims a paper on the United Nations Environmental Program and its need to be at the center of political and economic decisions at the U.N. and around the world. Reported in a Fox News exclusive, the author of the paper, Mark Halle believes:

there are signs that the hugely ambitious role he and his fellow-thinkers sketched for UNEP as religion’s main competitor are “beginning to happen.” Halle pointed to UNEP’s espousal this year of a so-called Green Economy Initiative, a proposal to radically redesign the global economy and transfer trillions of dollars in investment to the world’s poorest developing countries, but one that is couched in terms of providing new green jobs, an end to old, unfair carbon-based energy subsidies, and greater global fairness and opportunity. Halle called the development “quite exciting.”

I’m sure the U.N. will do its best to keep all of that money out of corrupt hands in various African governments, just like they did with the Iraq Oil for Food program.

It was a good Thanksgiving break. In spite of my fears, I got the house (adequately) cleaned, and the turkey (more than adequately) roasted by the time the family showed up. As always we were crowded but cheerful, and everybody seemed to have a good time.

We gathered on Saturday, and by Sunday the cold I’d been flirting with ravished me entire, and I spent the day in bed with it. And a book, which I’ll be reviewing shortly.

The interview with the Christian Authors Show, which I mentioned in an earlier posting, has finally appeared on their schedule. It will be the featured interview on Dec. 9 and 10, and selectable after that. (Unfortunately, I can’t link to the section I’m in. You have to select “The Christian Authors Show” from the menu.)

In case nobody’s mentioned it to you, Christmas is coming. West Oversea is the perfect gift for every person on your list! Even if they don’t read books, the guilt your gift will engender will be salutary for their characters. And it’s the one gift you know they won’t exchange—because we don’t do returns.

In fact, you should buy two copies for everybody. It will make Christmas truly magical.

For me and my publisher, anyway.

There’s an ordering link on the sidebar.

Terry Teachout on artists who have and have not dried up.

You may still be thinking about food this holiday weekend (holiday, btw, comes from an older word, holy day, which in Old English read this way: háligdæg), so let me give you a food story.

Vinegar is good for dissolving hard water deposits. The manufacturer of my coffee maker instructs me to run a full pot of vinegar through the machine to clear it of calcium build-up which wear it down over time. I don’t think our water in North Georgia is very hard, but it’s hard enough to leave a residue behind which you can see after a while. Leaving water sitting in the kettle causes plates of calcium to form on the bottom.

So one time a while back, I filled the kettle half full of vinegar to clean off those plates. Heating the vinegar seems to work well, but I don’t know if it’s necessary for cleaning. After I let the vinegar work on the kettle (I think it was the next day), I made myself a cup of tea. I think I used a bag of herbal tea we had had for too long, and it must have gone bad because it had a strong acrid taste. It was the worst tea I’d ever made.

But you are likely way ahead of where I was at the time, and you already see that I had steep my tea leaves in boiled vinegar, which is why I entitled this post as I did. If you make your tea with vinegar, friends, you will cap off your beverage’s sweetness at the root. There’s probably an old Chinese proverb about that, maybe “Better to be deprived of food for three days than to drink tea steeped in vinegar.”

Or “As tea in vinegar sours the stomach, so does living with a contentious woman.”