Jason Hayes - Musing

After reverse-engineering the spam-producing Kraken botnet, researchers at TippingPoint Technologies’ Digital Vaccine Laboratories have actually found a way to direct infected computers away from the server(s) that send them on their way to produce the next round of spam email. They have also found a way to remove the infection from those computers.

However, before they did that, the ethical questions of whether they have the right to disinfect another person’s computer stopped them from actually doing the deed.

Interesting article, check it out here.

Jimmy Carter, perhaps better than any person alive today, personifies the term “useful idiot.”

The man has spent the last several weeks forcing himself into a situation where he was essentially unwanted and where his only accomplishment will be to reinforce the bloody and brutal leadership of a group of terrorists who are willing to commit any act of barbarism, no matter how vile and subhuman, to achieve their goal of wiping the state of Israel off of the planet.

What made Carter’s trip all the more pathetic was his (apparently honest) belief that he had managed to convince the leaders of Hamas to “recognize Isreal” as a legitimate state. The group has in its founding documents and charter the commitment to “obliterate” Israel, but Carter believes that he can simply waltz in, sit down with the leaders of Hamas and Syria, and convince them in a few hours of negotiations that they should give up on that goal.

Hamas, apparently, is now ready to live at peace with Israel if a peace agreement is signed and ratified by the Palestinians, which would assure that the Palestinian state would be established in the areas taken by Israel in the 1967 war. Carter made his statement at the Israel Council of Foreign Relations at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on Monday, following his extensive visits with Hamas terror leaders in Gaza, Egypt and Syria.

Not surprisingly, Hamas didn’t get the same read from their negotiations with former president Carter.

It didn’t take long for Hamas to clarify their intentions. Two hours after Carter’s speech was broadcast on Israel radio, Hamas leader Khaled Maschal, who had held extensive meetings with Carter in Damascus, denied that any such assurance had been made. Maschal, who had overseen Carter’s talks with other Hamas leaders in Egypt and in Gaza, once again reaffirmed the Hamas commitment to liquidate the Jewish state. Not for the first time, the ex-president was left looking like a dupe of the terrorists.

It is truly sad to see a former President being this eager a participant in a terrorist group’s attempts to use him as one of their pawns. The man has become a laughingstock and an international embarrassment and his actions — like Nancy Pelosi’s before him — only serve to prop up these terrorists and their activities. By doing that, they make the real work of international diplomacy that much more confusing and difficult.

It is unfortunate, but it may be time for the Carter family to have the former president restrained. If it takes a court order, a changing of legal guardianship, whatever … they cannot allow him to continue on like this. He is damaging a whole lot more than just his reputation and it really … seriously … needs to be stopped.

This story is straight out of science fiction,

With the help of an experimental powder, a man’s severed finger has regrown to its original length in just four weeks, reports London’s Daily Mail. …

Lee Spievack, of Cincinnati, who sliced almost half an inch off the top of one of his fingers, described the powder as “pixie dust,” according to the newspaper.

The “pixie dust” is actually extra-cellular matrix, bursting with collagen and is made from a dried pig’s bladder, the newspaper reports.

The story notes that the regrowth is completely normal and actually has a fingerprint. Amazing stuff!

Nearly half of Democrats (48 percent) think Hillary Clinton has a better chance of beating John McCain in November — 10 percentage points higher than the 38 percent who think Barack Obama can win, according to a FOX News poll released Wednesday. This represents a significant shift from March, when Democrats said Obama was the candidate more likely to beat McCain.

And this is surprising?

For a guy who has closely aligned himself with a racist, anti-American pastor for over 20 years, as well as having “friendly” relationships with a self-admitted terrorist** (even the people on Huffington Post are hoping that Obama will distance himself from Ayers and his talk of “armed revolution” against the country), I’m actually surprised that it took him this long to fall out of favor with Democratic voters.

Add to that list of problems Obama’s issues with respecting the flag, the fact that his wife has been ashamed of the country for her entire life (until only just recently) , the fact that Obama’s name keeps coming up in the Rezko trial, as well as his stunning arrogance and elitism, and you have a fellow who looks just as bad as any of the other career politicians out there.

When you also consider that Obama was supposed to be the next Messiah, the ‘clean and pure as the driven snow’ politician who would ride into DC on his white horse and sweep away the division, corruption, and partisanship, you begin to see that Obama is nothing new at all. He had a good spin machine for the first little while, but now his past is catching up with him and overtaking the hype. (That is amazing in itself because his “past” is as limited and ambiguous as I have seen in a long time. Despite that, he has a walk in closet full of skeletons to deal with.)

** This Power Line blog post has several audio recordings of Ayers and Dorhm, two people that the Obama campaign describes as “respectable” and “mainstream” members of Chicago society. If this is what Obama considers “mainstream,” its no wonder he spends so much time on the campaign trail beating up on people who believe in little things like the First and Second Amendments.

This BBC News article is perhaps one of the best examples of an unwarranted prejudice being demolished by the simple truth. America is not the “wild west” and firearms do not cause violence.

In the article, the author lists off the standard misperceptions many people have about life in the U.S.A. He repeats the oft heard refrain of the average American city being awash in crime and Americans having to dodge a hail of bullets every time they leave their homes. He struggles to match his smug knowledge that, in America, muggers, rapist, and thugs hide behind every tree and and that the so-called “gun culture” ensures that no one is safe, with the reality that he has seen every day for the past six years that he has lived here. That reality is that the stories aren’t true and you can almost hear his carefully nurtured prejudices being ripped away from their shaky foundations as he says,

Despite the fact there are more than 200 million guns in circulation, there is a certain tranquility and civility about American life.

If you listen, you could probably hear him scratching his head and muttering as he tries to reconcile these words coming from his own keyboard.

Why is it then that so many Americans - and foreigners who come here - feel that the place is so, well, safe?

I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place

A British man I met in Colorado recently told me he used to live in Kent but he moved to the American state of New Jersey and will not go home because it is, as he put it, “a gentler environment for bringing the kids up.”

This is New Jersey. Home of the Sopranos.

Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.

I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns.

“It seems so nice here,” they quaver.

Well, it is! …

And this is Manhattan.

Wait till you get to London Texas, or Glasgow Montana, or Oxford Mississippi or Virgin Utah, for that matter, where every household is required by local ordinance to possess a gun.

Folks will have guns in all of these places and if you break into their homes they will probably kill you.

They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London.

It is a paradox. Along with the guns there is a tranquillity and civility about American life of which most British people can only dream.

What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.

Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken.

It is amusing to see how quickly the hysteria and hype shatter against the rock of reality and it is good to see an obviously proud ex-pat Brit admitting that things are worse — far worse — in London than they are in Manhattan.

People can try to deny it and they can cling to their wrongheaded beliefs about the violence in America. However, the reality is that you’re probably safer here than pretty much any where else on the planet.

Hugh Fitzgerald prepared a remarkably well-reasoned and intelligent response to a question that was posed on Jihad Watch. The questioner asked,

“If the Israel/Palestinian conflict were exactly the same as it is, only the roles of the two warring parties were exactly reversed, would you then switch allegiances to the Palestinian side?”

I really wanted to cut and paste the entire reply, but my respect of copyright kept me from doing so.

The post is about a month old, but it’s still well worth your time to head over to Dhimmi Watch to read Fitzgerald’s reply. He cuts through a lot of the emotional baggage that is hanging around the issue and gets to the basics of what is (or should be) driving people’s support of Israel.

This is a very revealing interview between the late CBC reporter, Barbara Frum and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) founder Paul Watson. In his comments, Watson admits openly that environmental groups purposefully target the image of a baby harp seal as a money making machine.

Despite the fact that the harp seal is not an endangered species and the hunting of “white coat” (baby) harp seals has been illegal for over two decades, animal rights and environmental groups continuously use pictures of the white coat harp seals to “turn a profit” and to drive donations from the $2 to $5 donors — the grandmothers who are conned into giving by the pictures of tear-filled seal eyes. As the text at the end of this YouTube clip describes, this deception has been a multi-million dollar windfall for these groups for decades now.

What makes the deception even worse is the fact that other animals — like the sea turtle — which are on the endangered species list have often been ignored by these groups, simply because they don’t tend to bring in as much money.

Listen to the clip and then ask yourself if you’ve ever been duped into supporting this lie.

Nod to Darcey

We’ve all read the hysterical headlines and the apocalyptic predictions of death, mayhem, and hell on earth that global climate change will cause as it increases the number, intensity, and severity of hurricanes around the globe.

National Geographic writers eagerly parroted warnings that,

More heat could “generate more storms and more intense hurricanes” (and) … a new study in the journal Nature found that hurricanes and typhoons have become stronger and longer-lasting over the past 30 years. These upswings correlate with a rise in sea surface temperatures.

The duration and strength of hurricanes have increased by about 50 percent over the last three decades, according to study author Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

From the RealClimate blog — which bills itself as a source of “climate science from climate scientists” — we are instructed that in the real world there is “no way to prove” that climate change will impact on either the frequency or severity of hurricanes. We are also told that,

due to the semi-random nature of weather, it is wrong to blame any one event such as Katrina specifically on global warming

All that aside, the climate scientists then move on to show how it is possible to employ arcane and confusing statistical analyses and complex computer modeling to move beyond the real world and actual research findings. Using those statistics and climate models, scientists can input data that helps suggest that climate change will strengthen already forming hurricanes.

Yet this is not the right way to frame the question. As we have also pointed out in previous posts, we can indeed draw some important conclusions about the links between hurricane activity and global warming in a statistical sense. The situation is analogous to rolling loaded dice: one could, if one was so inclined, construct a set of dice where sixes occur twice as often as normal. But if you were to roll a six using these dice, you could not blame it specifically on the fact that the dice had been loaded. Half of the sixes would have occurred anyway, even with normal dice. Loading the dice simply doubled the odds. In the same manner, while we cannot draw firm conclusions about one single hurricane, we can draw some conclusions about hurricanes more generally. In particular, the available scientific evidence indicates that it is likely that global warming will make - and possibly already is making - those hurricanes that form more destructive than they otherwise would have been. …

Hurricane forecast models (the same ones that were used to predict Katrina’s path) indicate a tendency for more intense (but not overall more frequent) hurricanes when they are run for climate change scenarios (Fig. 1).

In the particular simulation shown above, the frequency of the strongest (category 5) hurricanes roughly triples in the anthropogenic climate change scenario relative to the control. This suggests that hurricanes may indeed become more destructive (1) as tropical SSTs warm due to anthropogenic impacts.

Very interesting.

Moving forward, we can also find the hard-working journalists at Time magazine working to build fear of the next big hurricane that will inevitably strike the Gulf Coast. They instruct us that the people of New Orleans are,

mostly thinking about the savage rains and 140 mph winds that have driven them from their homes. But it’s that meteorological arcana that’s made such a mess of the bayou, and to hear a lot of people tell it, we have only ourselves—and our global-warming ways—to blame. …

So is global warming making the problem worse? Superficially, the numbers say yes—or at least they seem to if you live in the U.S. From 1995 to 1999, a record 33 hurricanes struck the Atlantic basin, and that doesn’t include 1992’s horrific Hurricane Andrew, which clawed its way across south Florida in 1992, causing $27 billion dollars worth of damage. More-frequent hurricanes are part of most global warming models, and as mean temperatures rise worldwide, it’s hard not to make a connection between the two. …

One especially sobering study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that hurricane wind speeds have increased about 50% in the past 50 years. And since warm oceans are such a critical ingredient in hurricane formation, anything that gets the water warming more could get the storms growing worse. Global warming, in theory at least, would be more than sufficient to do that. While the people of New Orleans may not see another hurricane for years, the next one they do see could make even Katrina look mild.

Spooky, isn’t it? But that’s not all. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change continues by invoking the name and research findings of the all-knowing, all-seeing IPCC

Intensity: According to the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR4), it is “more likely than not” (better than even odds) that there is a human contribution to the observed trend of hurricane intensification since the 1970s. In the future, “it is likely [better than 2 to 1 odds] that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense, with larger peak wind speeds and more heavy precipitation associated with ongoing increases of tropical [sea surface temperatures].”

Frequency: According to the IPCC-AR4, on a global scale, “[t]here is no clear trend in the annual numbers [i.e. frequency] of tropical cyclones.” As discussed above, however, the frequency of tropical storms has increased dramatically in the North Atlantic. Reasons for this increase are currently subject to intense debate among climate scientists. At least two recent peer-reviewed scientific studies indicate a significant statistical link between the increased frequency and global warming, but research to identify a mechanism explaining this link is ongoing.

Clearly, the links are there. Too strong to deny and too numerous to question. Right? You’re continued use of the internal combustion engine, your “addiction” to oil, your new Blackberry, and your general western, imperialist brand of capitalist over-consumption ARE causing more and stronger tropical storms and hurricanes. Admit it and be frightened, very very frightened.

Or not. You see, all those reports and links and statistical games and pretend worlds that we build in our climate models might just be wrong. Or so says new research that has been published in Nature magazine.

A new method for modelling hurricanes suggests that a warmer climate might not increase storm intensity as much as was previously believed.

The results came as a surprise to lead author Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who had previously argued that global warming was behind an estimated 75% increase in category 4 and 5 hurricanes since 1970. …

He suggests one of two explanations: either the recent increase is not due primarily to global warming, or the current generation of global climate models is not effectively capturing the effects of global warming in the future. Others say that it could be a combination of the two.
Stormy history

“Those are two interpretations, and they could both be true to a certain degree,” says Gabriel Vecchi, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. “I think their paper really highlights the subtlety of the question: depending on which models they use, depending on which metrics they use, they can get different answers.”

Did you read that? Read it again

“I think their paper really highlights the subtlety of the question: depending on which models they use, depending on which metrics they use, they can get different answers.”

That’s the climate scientist’s way to say the well-known computer and modeling phrase, “garbage in … garbage out.” In other words, they can tweak their modeling findings to suit their world view. If they happen to believe in anthropogenic global climate change (or need to support that theory as a means of ensuring a continued stream of research dollars), they can fiddle around in the guts of their models (subtly of course) and — SHAZAM!!!! — the models show that anthropogenic global climate change is happening and is changing the frequency and severity of tropical storms. If, however, they need to try and come up with a reason for why their dire predictions of massively destructive hurricanes throughout the 2006 and 2007 hurricane season never appeared, they just

spontaneously ’seeds’ storms within global climate models, rather than initiating small storms in certain areas on the basis of historical observations.

Then they press < Enter > on the big ol’ computer model and … chugga chugga chugga … ding! Out pops the answer.

This method was able to reproduce the increase in major storms seen in recent decades fairly well. Projecting forwards by almost two centuries, to the period 2181–2200, the model suggests that, overall, global storm frequency decreases. Storm intensity increases modestly in certain regions, including the northern Atlantic Ocean.

So now some in the scientific fraternity appear to have moved beyond the notion that,

“more likely than not” (better than even odds) that there is a human contribution to the observed trend of hurricane intensification since the 1970s.

to admitting that,

In particular, climate models systematically fail to reproduce the kinds of major storm observed in the tropics owing to the way they handle heat convection, he says. “Climate models have certain inherent flaws that may prejudice the results somewhat, and my suggestion is that they may prejudice them in the direction of fewer major storms.”

In the mean-time, you should keep your heartbeat and stress levels elevated and continue to reassure yourself that there is a large, potentially devastating (something) that is waiting out there, ready to pounce and inflict grievous damage on you, your family, your belongings, and everything you hold near and dear. You should also remember that whatever that great and terrible something is, it’s your fault and most likely due to the fact that you bought your kid the XBOX 360 for Christmas last year.

Just upgraded to Mandriva 2008.1 (Spring) Powerpack edition. So far, so good.

I had a bit of an issue with trying to upgrade my 2008.0 install; the system would not load the post-install configuration, so I had to shut down and try again. Two tries and nothing, I kept getting a config error. I had all of my information backed up, so I was feeling a bit brave and just re-ran the installation DVD and did a clean install (without formatting my /home directory) and that seemed to fix whatever the problem was. I was able to enter the post install config setup and get everything wrapped up. Even with that trouble, the whole installation process is much faster than the typical Windows XP or Vista install.

In about 30 minutes, I was back into my /home/jth directory and had all of my old settings, email, Firefox bookmarks, etc.

As I was getting my VirtualBox install up and running again, I ran into another issue. New kernel with the latest version of Mandriva, so the VirtualBox driver (vboxdrv) was not installed and the program gave the following error;

VirtualBox kernel driver not installed. The virtual kernel module was either not loaded or /dev/vboxdrv was not created for some reason. Re-Setup the kernel module by ‘/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup’ as root

VBox status code: -1908 (VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED),

No big deal, I can manage that. So I opened a terminal, logged in as “su” and proceeded to type out
/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup:, hit enter and …

bash: /etc/init.d/vboxdrv start: No such file or directory

Hmmmmmmm. Ok, “cd /etc/init.d” and “ls” and, the machine was right. No “vboxdrv”

There was a “virtualbox*” listed, however. So, on a whim, I tried

./virtualbox start

Worked like a charm.

Not sure what the specifics of the issue were. However, I was using a Mandriva rpm, not the source code for Virtualbox, so it was clear that the Mandriva people have changed some settings in the program.

I went to my Mandriva “Control Center” and made sure that the VirtualBox service was set to “start on boot” and tried again. From the terminal

/usr/bin/VirtualBox

No more error and now my saved Windows XP virtual machine is happily humming along.

Hope that helps you if you happen to encounter an issue with your Mandriva and VirtualBox installs.

No heating since 1998 - but when you admit that, the true believers jump on you with both feet and demand that you cease all debate. If you don’t snap to attention and do their bidding, they’ll threaten you with a ruined career and much more. You will accept their views and you will do as they say, or else.

Here’s a classic bit of wisdom from the great and powerful members of the Ontario Human Rights Commission as they dismissed the Mark Steyn/Macleans magazine case and pronounced their guilty ruling all in the same paragraph. You really have to read it in their own words to comprehend the outrageous arrogance of this group.

While freedom of expression must be recognized as a cornerstone of a functioning democracy, the Commission strongly condemns the Islamophobic portrayal of Muslims, Arabs, South Asians and indeed any racialized community in the media, such as the Maclean’s article and others like them, as being inconsistent with the values enshrined in our human rights codes. Media has a responsibility to engage in fair and unbiased journalism.

So, as Steyn notes in his post on the ruling, they don’t have the intestinal fortitude to deal with the case in an actual court of law (or even in their own kangaroo court for that matter) — they apparently are aware that even a Canadian judge wouldn’t be able to convict either Steyn or Macleans.

So they simply forego all that trial silliness now and just pronounce people guilty.

I suppose its much easier that way.

For those who might have dropped by, looking for updates and new thoughts, apologies for letting you down. I have been busy with several projects at work and other volunteer efforts.

I just wrapped up the grunt work for one volunteer project — the redesign of ibimi.com — a website for Independent Baptist Indian Mission, Inc. They’re a solid group of committed independent Baptists who have a burden for seeing the gospel shared with Native-Americans.

After reading through some of the missionary’s prayer letters and monthly updates, you begin to get a good idea just how insulated our lives are. The day-to-day challenges that many of the people living on North American reservations and reserves face are often hair-raising and heart-breaking. I won’t go into the details — you can always check the site and letters out yourself. However, if you ever looked for a group of people who deserve our help, here they are. Head over to ibimi.com and think of them next time you’re feeling charitable.

Just finished the upgrade to WordPress 2.5.

It looks like they have spent a lot of time adding new features and trying to make the blogging effort a whole lot easier for those who may not be well acquainted with creating web content. I’m not convinced that I like the placing of the categories now, as you have to scroll down to that section and then scroll through a long list of categories to choose the pertinent ones. That may be correctable — not sure yet.

Apart from that little annoyance, this latest update looks like they’re making the whole blogging ‘thing’ a lot easier.

If you haven’t upgraded your own site, you should - download WordPress 2.5

Stahl just can’t get close enough to her hero

On Sunday’s 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl delivered a fawning piece on Al Gore’s environmental crusade, teasing: “Since he lost the election, Al Gore has become a certified celebrity, a popular prophet of global warming.” In the introduction to the subsequent segment, she proclaimed: “When Al Gore ran for President in 2000, he was often ridiculed as inauthentic and wooden. Today, he is passionate and animated, a man transformed.” Stahl began the interview by asking Gore about the Democratic presidential race and the possibility of him brokering a deal between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. However, as Stahl observed: “He’s not ruling it out, but he says he already has a job — as he puts it, P.R. agent for the planet.”

I’m not at all surprised to see Lesley Stahl’s obsequious fawning and her worshipful recounting of just how wonderful she believes the Goracle to be. CBS has a multi-decadal history of pandering to the left and the green movement. I just wish that they would once and for all quit pretending that they are still producing “news” in their programs. They are a no different than any other wing of the Democratic or Green Parties, or any department in a Greenpeace’s office.

The last thing that CBS could ever be accused of is producing objective journalism.

I’m also not surprised that Gore is now trying to sell himself as the “PR agent for the planet.” Where else could one go after inventing the Internet? It must be truly hellish to have to deal with Gore now. The guy’s head is so inflated with his own PR that its a wonder he can lift it off his pillow in the morning. How he fits that head through the average doorway is beyond me.

Here’s what you seem to get when you mix a hard core, fundamentalist view of Islam with government.

Police issued written orders for three Algerian churches to cease activity this week, bringing to 19 the number of congregations told to shut down since November, an Algerian Protestant leader said.

In addition to the three churches, registered under the Protestant Church of Algeria (EPA), two independent congregations were verbally ordered to close their doors, EPA President Mustapha Krim said.

The church closures come amid a flurry of antagonistic media articles warning of campaigns by Protestants to “Christianize” Algeria.

“Muslims do not accept seeing their holy symbols attacked,” Religious Affairs Minister Bu’Abdallah Ghoulamullah said this week in reference to a “Christianization campaign” targeting the country. …

In addition to restrictions on church building and worship locations, the 2006 religion law also bans evangelistic material and attempts to convert Muslims to other religions. As most Algerian Christians are converts from Islam, the law could be interpreted to make nearly all Christian churches in the country illegal.

Police detained two Algerian Christians traveling by public bus from Tizi Ouzou to Bejaia the evening of March 21 for carrying 11 Bibles.

Authorities held the two men for “proselytism” after finding the Bibles while searching their bags at a routine check-point in Beni Ksila, collectifalgerie.free.fr website reported. One Christian was carrying a personal Bible, while the other, a church council member in Bejaia, was carrying 10 Bibles. …

“I equate evangelism with terrorism,” Religious Affairs Minister Ghoulamullah said in an article in L’Expression on February 12.

“I’ve asked the imams to remind the people that pastors don’t come to Algeria because they love the country, or because they love Christianity,” news service France24 reported Ghoulamullah as saying. “They come here to create minorities, which would give foreign countries a pretext to interfere in our internal affairs.”

What ever happened to all the stories that we read about civilization flourishing in Muslim countries? Whatever happened to the reasonable, rational discourse and the free-flow of ideas?

What this tells me more than anything is that the leaders and imams in Algeria (and other countries that attack other religions in this fashion) are afraid of the strength and power of the Christian religion. They hold their people in thrall by outlawing ideas and keeping them ignorant of options. Those people who have a strong faith and who are convinced of the truth of their beliefs don’t need to make it illegal to think.

The truth of the matter is that Ghoulamullah and the other bullies like him know that if they allowed Christianity to stay, it would flourish and many Muslims would be converted.

Of four Marines charged with “crimes” in the Haditha incident, only one is still facing prosecution. The government just dropped all charges against Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum. This Newsmax.com article says that the government was seeking Tatum’s testimony in the case against his squad leader, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, but Tatum’s lawyer says that no deals were made with the government and that, if he does testify, it will be as a neutral witness — not a government witness.

So, one by one, the cases against these Marines are falling. After all of the media hype and all of Murtha’s smears, we’re learning that it was a lie. If they could make charges stick against these men, they would. However, they keep dropping the cases.

The battle’s not over though. These men still need help.

No doubt you’ve heard of the recent eulogy that Jeremiah Wright wrote for Asa Hilliard. In the eulogy, Wright referred to Italians as having “garlic noses” and called the crucifixion of Jesus Christ “a public lynching Italian-style.” That latest bit of bigotry would be just one more reason to question Obama’s judgment — the very trait that he claims sets him apart from the other candidates. He “judged” Wright as a friend and mentor for over 20 years, despite his clear racist tendencies.

Unfortunately, we now have even more to question Obama’s judgment as well as his own views on “white folks” thanks to Hugh Hewitt doing something that should have been done a while ago.

In his March 26 radio show, Hewitt played some audio from Obama’s book. Dreams of My Father. In this portion of the book, Obama describes what he heard during his FIRST sermon at Trinity United Church. As you read the quote think on the fact that Obama not only knew about Wright’s racist tendencies from the first time he attended the church, he actually used them as fodder for his books. (Via Slate.com and the American Pundit)

[T]he pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting title Hope.

“The painting depicts a harpist,” Revernd Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a great mountaintop. Untill you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags, the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below, where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.

It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere … That’s the world! On which hope sits.”

And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend Wright spoke of Sharpesville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House. …

Obama clearly sat through Wright’s racist, anti-American rants, he clearly heard them, and he clearly agreed with them for over twenty years. If he had not agreed, he would not have featured them in his books. However, Obama has repeatedly distanced himself from these sermons, claiming that if he had known about them, he would have said something or left the church.

When Hillary lies about Bosnia, she gets headlines all over the news (and rightly so). When Obama lies about his ties to his minister and his own tendency to use racist phraseology, he gets a pass.

And don’t mistake my meaning here; I’m not stuttering. Obama tosses around racial epithets without ever having to answer for it. In fact, members of the media gush when he does it; they refer to him as the next Abe Lincoln and suggest that he possesses messianic qualities. Yet, in his speeches, he throws his white grandmother under the bus by calling her a “typical white person” and describing her immediate fear of African-Americans that she passes on the street. If we are to believe what Obama said, then the majority of whites (i.e.: the “typical” ones) are afraid to walk past African-Americans in a store or office. Additionally, he claims the fears that those “typical” “white folk” hold is morally equivalent to the hate-filled “sermons” that Wright spews out against “garlic nosed” Italians, and the white society that apparently created an AIDS virus to kill African-Americans.

Stop for a minute and question how much longer would McCain be a viable candidate for the presidency if he had ever referred to a “typical black person,” or “typical Asian person,” or a “typical Jewish person,” or a “typical gay person” for any reason.

When you start adding the things that Obama has said/wrote together and then you add them to the things that his wife has said, and then you add them to the views and beliefs of the advisers and mentors that he has sought out through his life, you begin to see that he holds a clear and long-term animus toward whites for what he sees as their harboring fears of African-Americans and for their alleged “greed” that is “running the world in need.”

The more Obama opens his mouth, the more I see clearly that he holds racist, anti-white views and that he has repeatedly and openly lied to the American people about his knowledge of Wright’s racist and anti-American views. Others clearly see the same thing, but this guy is still the leading candidate for the Democratic Party.

Reasonable people should be asking, “why?”

Thank you to Steven Milloy for taking the time to set straight the media’s deceptive smear campaign against an eminent and respected scientist - Dr. S. Fred Singer. Although Dr. Singer has recently been targeted by the mainstream media for his work in the area of climate science, Milloy’s article reveals that Singer and his work have been well known for several decades.

Rather than employing cowardly, anonymous attacks from “climate scientists from NASA, from Stanford University and from Princeton” and inflammatory quotes from NGO activists as ABC News reporter Dan Harris did in his unimaginative hit piece on Dr. Singer, Milloy actually took a few minutes to look into Dr. Singer’s career.

Armed with a doctorate from Princeton University, Dr. Singer played a key role in the U.S. Navy’s development of countermeasures for mine warfare during World War II. From there, Dr. Singer went on to achieve fame in space science.

Some of his major accomplishments include: using rockets to make the first measurements of cosmic radiation in space along with James A. Van Allen (1947-50); design of the first instrument for measuring stratospheric ozone (1956); developing the capture theory for the origin of the Moon and Martian satellites (1966); calculating the increase in methane emissions due to population growth which is not key to global warming and ozone depletion theories (1971); and discovering orbital debris clouds with satellite instruments (1990).

Dr. Singer is exceedingly modest about his career. Although I have personally known him for more than decade, I only inadvertently learned of his earlier achievements last year while reading “Sputnik: The Shock of the Century” (Walker & Company, 2007) which chronicles the development of the U.S. Space Program.

The book described Dr. Singer, along with Van Allen, as a “pioneer of space science.” The author also wrote, “America’s journey into space can arguably be traced to a gathering at James Van Allen’s house in Silver Spring, Maryland on April 5, 1950. The guest of honor was the eminent British geophysicist Sydney Chapman… The other guests were S. Fred Singer…”

Among his many prominent positions, Dr. Singer was the first director of the National Weather Satellite Center and the first dean of the University of Miami’s School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences. He’s also held many senior administrative positions at federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Transportation and Department of Interior.

Despite all of this work, the best attributed information that Harris’ journalistic training appears able to uncover is a Greenpeace employee, trying to pass themselves off as a “global warming specialist,” thinks Dr. Singer is “kind of a career skeptic.” The rest of Harris’ work is anonymous attacks and editorialized rhetoric - real top drawer stuff.

And journalists wonder why the vast majority of the public no longer trusts their work.

Have you seen this site? Take a look and then come back and tell me if you find it even a teeny bit unnerving.

It looks like the media was only momentarily set back by the Saturday Night Live skits and they’re right back at deifying Obama. Some of the quotes from this site are positively creepy.

“… a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany … and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama” - Barack Obama Lebanon, New Hampshire. January 7, 2008. …

———————-

What he is offering is an agreement between struggles and a covenant for perfection, in that nothing is impossible if one begins with hope and the assurance of faith

What he is offering is a contract between the old and the young, black and white, citizens and immigrants, rich and poor, priviledged and the impoverished

What he is offering is beyond what we think could happen, it is what will happen someday, though the opportunity is one that we can grasp …

———————-

Obama’s myth is a tried-and-true one. The late folklorist Joseph Campbell called it “the hero’s journey,” and it’s found in every culture, from Moses, David and Odysseus to Luke Skywalker, Frodo and Harry Potter. …

At the end of the journey, armed with enhanced power and self-knowledge, the hero returns home and saves the world.

———————-

The Obama campaign uses a religious calling as its central rhetorical trope: “I’m asking you to believe,” reads the banner across the top of barackobama.com. His appeal to voters is an archetype of religious conversion: instead of being asked for support, Americans are exhorted to “join the movement”.

In Georgia, he directly equated his supporters with God’s people: “God had a plan for his people. He told them to stand together and march together around the city… and when the horn sounded and a chorus of voices cried out together, the mighty walls of Jericho came tumbling down.”

Later in the speech, he asked the congregation to “walk with me, march with me… and if enough of our voices join together, we can bring those walls tumbling down.”

Obama has created the impression that Clinton supporters, like the Pharisees in the temple, are obstacles to change: “I want to speak directly to all those Americans who have yet to join this movement but still hunger for change. They know it in their gut… But they’re afraid. They’ve been taught to be cynical.”

It’s not an argument for better government; it’s an exhortation to see the light. It’s not a plan for the Presidency, but a leap of faith.

———————–

Biblical hope is similar. Like Obamian hope, it speaks to the matter of the future being pulled into the present in the Kingdom of God. In a real sense, the Kingdom of God respects but moves beyond the past and, in the present, it realises the future, in a preliminary sense. Biblical hope also, in a sense, propels the one in whom it is found toward the future consummation of this kingdom. Like Obamian hope, biblical hope knows that the present is just a platform on which the future is being built and experienced. This is powerful.

————————

“Even in the conversations we have as colleagues, there is a sense of trying especially hard not to drink the Kool-Aid,” Mr. Cowan added. “It’s so rapturous, everything around him. All these huge rallies.”

————————

My musician friends and I are writing songs to inspire people and couples all over America are making love again and shouting “yes we can” as they climax!

Like I said, these people are positively creepy. I understand that the last quote was taken from the Huffington Post, so you can expect it to be waaaay off the wall. But do Obama supporters think about ol’ Barry and his campaign while they’re in bed with their spouse/significant other? Are you people really that twisted? Are you really that lonely? Are your lives really that bereft of meaning that you need that to keep yourselves aroused?

Some of the photos on the site are even more revealing of what is going through the media’s mind. These are not accidents, magazine and newspaper designers don’t sell millions by just tossing any old photo into the mix and hoping that it turns out ok. This picture was clearly a deliberate attempt to present Obama as some sort of guiding light, a demi-god, with people massing at his feet and gazing lovingly into his shining face.

Via obamamessiah.blogspot.com. Originally published in New York Mag April 16, 2007 photo by Michael Edwards

Now consider an artist’s representation of the original

Via St. Peter the Apostile Catholic Diocese for Chaldeans and Assyrians USA

This is insane people. You need to stop it.

Amidst all the rhetoric we keep hearing about the 20 million+ illegals that are in the country and how we need “comprehensive” legislation that will grant them amnesty, we hear insane stories like these. The government refuses to raise the number of H-1B visas that would allow educated professionals to enter the country, but gives a green card to a drug-addicted, prostitute because she claimed to have information on Elliot Spitzer’s involvement with hookers.

It’s hard for educated people with valuable skills, like doctors and scientists, to immigrate because Congress won’t lift the unrealistically low cap on H-1B visas, notes the Washington Post. “H-1B visas are reserved for the world’s best and brightest, and barring their entry is economic self-sabotage. The cap keeps out doctors, engineers and other specialists — people who save lives and often create jobs for others in America.” The result is that high-tech operations set up shop abroad rather than in America, costing our country jobs and economic growth.

Meanwhile, a drug-dealing hooker and convict who would have been deported is being given permanent residency (a green card) just for telling prosecutors what she knew about Eliot Spitzer after his role in a prostitution scandal broke.

So the people that we should be encouraging to come to the country — productive, educated, professionals — are being locked out, while drug-addicted hookers are not only not be deported, they’re actually being hurried through the immigration maze and given their permanent residence card.

There’s more here, and, yes, it does get worse.