I’m barely functioning tonight. Last night I needed sleep and wanted sleep, but my brain (which hates me. With some justification) wouldn’t let me sleep. So just a few links.

My new novel, West Oversea, was just reviewed at The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, a journal for homeschooling families. Nice review, too.

One of my favorite blogs, Mitch Berg’s Shot In the Dark, has begun a series of hard-hitting exposes of the true, never-before-revealed roots of organized crime in America — the Norwegian mob. Mitch calls the Capo di tutti capi De Godenfar, but I prefer the name we used (in hushed whispers) back home — The Codfather.

Part One here.

Part Two here.

Part Three here.

More to come.

Also some scintillating comments from one of America’s finest young novelists.

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.”