Archive for April, 2008
By Alan Caruba
I was suspicious when the Department of the Interior announced it was considering the listing of polar bears as an “endangered species”, particularly since the designation has nothing to do with the current, thriving population, but a computer model projection that in fifty years they might be endangered. Since polar bears have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, the notion they might suddenly go missing in fifty years is questionable.
The fact is polar bears operate in waters around Alaska where geologists believe there are major reserves of undiscovered oil and natural gas. As you may recall, Alaska is also a place where there are vast known reserves of oil in the ANWR area. The refuge is huge. Only the 1.5 million acre or 8% on the northern coast of ANWR is being considered for development. The remaining 17.5 million acres or 92% of ANWR will remain permanently closed to any kind of development. If oil is discovered, less than 2000 acres of the over 1.5 million acres of the Coastal Plain would be affected. That's less than half of one percent of ANWR that would be affected by production activity.
So my suspicions were aroused when I received a March 26 news release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration saying that NOAA’s Fisheries Service had accepted a petition from “a California environmental group seeking protection under the Endangered Species Act for an ice seal called the ‘ribbon seal’ that inhabits Alaska’s Bering Sea.”
By Thomas E. Brewton
Go to your room, sonny boy, and stay there!
Much counter-evidence to the man-made global warming hypothesis has come to light.
- Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age
- Temperature Monitors Report Widespread Global Cooling
- Measuring the Phoenix Urban Heat Island
- Global warming skeptics buoyed by record cold
- UA prof challenges one of central beliefs about global warming
- Ocean circulation in a warming climate
- Chilling Effect
- Global Warming: Experts’ Opinions versus Scientific Forecasts
- Kilimanjaro’s ice set to linger
- The Sun Also Sets
- Read the sunspots
- The real costs of climate change
Since the Renaissance, considerable human energy and ingenuity in the Western world has been applied to improving and increasing food production and the results of manual labor. Aiding the resulting elevation of living standards was the rise of mathematics and the physical sciences. People came increasingly to understand the workings of the physical world and the God-given laws of science governing nature.
In the 19th century, however, scientific progress became infused with nonsensical political theory, the atheistic and materialistic socialism of the French Revolution. From this came the idea of progress toward conquest of nature. It was not sufficient merely to understand the processes of nature. Man had to become godlike and to control the forces of nature.
As C. S. Lewis warned us in The Abolition of Man,
At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual man, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’ – to their irrational impulses. Nature untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of man.
Our current-day obsession with the hypothesis of global warming as a man-made phenomenon, rather than a normal cycle of God’s nature, is one result.
Its impetus is to transfer all individual freedom to a single, universal control board whose chairman presumably would be Al Gore. The Kyoto Protocol, don’t forget, was a product of the UN and collectivist bodies like the EU.
Individuals are no longer to be free to make decisions about how to heat their homes, what automobiles to drive, even what foods to eat. Liberal-progressive-socialist councils will tell us what we are required to want and how we are required to conduct our daily lives.
Gore, the man who would be God, is unsatisfied with continuing an open scientific investigation of natural phenomena. He has, once and for all time, selected his hypothesis and strives mightily to achieve the earthly power to impose its sanctions upon us all.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
New Media Alliance Television (www.nmatv.com)
New Media Alliance Blogs (www.thenma.org/blogs)
www.therealitycheck.org
David Barton of WallBuilders reports on the following legislation pending in Congress (more information is available through the WallBuilders):
In the latter months of 2007, there was a flurry of incidents attempting to censor America's religious heritage (e.g., the capstone at the Washington Monument, the flag folding ceremony in the Veterans' Department, the flag certificates from the Architect of the Capitol, etc.). In each case, citizens learned of the incidents and in large numbers made their feelings known; each policy was promptly reversed.
In response to those (and other) incidents, Congressman Randy Forbes of Virginia has 
introduced a Congressional Resolution affirming America's Godly heritage through dozens of documented historic examples.That measure,
H.Res.888, declares its two-fold purpose:
Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation's founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as "American Religious History Week" for the appreciation of and education on America's history of religious faith.
The House has agreed to consider and debate this excellent resolution. There are three things you can do to help:
Call your Member of Congress and ask him or her to co-sponsor H.Res.888
Call Randy's office (202.225.6365) and thank him for standing up for our religious heritage. (All folks appreciate encouragement, but especially those on the front lines of battle.)
It will remind Americans what God has done for them and instruct the next generation about God's hand in America's history.
By Warner Todd Huston 
On the 25th, the Washington Post served up a lament for Hollywood’s dismal box office returns for the many Iraq war pictures it has churned out over the last several years, wondering why they have all failed so spectacularly? The whole article amounts to the Post just not understanding why moviegoers have stayed away in droves from these dark and dismal movies. But with the anti-Military, anti-American point of view depicted in every single one of these movies, it is no surprise that Americans have ignored these self-denigrating flicks. After all, with soldiers really taking casualties on the battlefield, who wants to see a film that tells us all it’s OUR fault?
Still, the Washington Post is mystified.
After five years of conflict in Iraq, Hollywood seems to have learned a sobering lesson: The only things less popular than the war itself are dramatic films and television shows about the conflict… A spate of Iraq-themed movies and TV shows haven’t just failed at the box office. They’ve usually failed spectacularly, despite big stars, big budgets and serious intentions.
The Post then goes on to wonder if audiences are “turned off by the war, or are they simply voting against the way filmmakers have depicted it?” As the post asks that question, you’d think they are on the verge of understanding. But, this question is dropped right away as the story details one flop after another. Ridiculously, the Post seems puzzled by the fact that audiences have not just mindlessly followed into the theater the “big stars, big budgets and serious intentions” of these failed flicks and no further attempt is made in this story to explore the public’s disinterest.
The Post quotes TV legend Steven Bochco who imagines that his TV series “Over There,” which failed after only 13 episodes, was not well received because Americans felt “a certain sense of powerlessness” about the war. The Post also quotes film historian Jonathan Kuntz of UCLA that the whole thing is just a “bummer.”
By Alan Caruba
Seven years passed 9/11 and five years passed the invasion of Iraq, Americans are still trying to figure out what makes Arabs behave the way they do. There is a vast cultural difference between those in the West and those in an Arab world that fills the Middle East and stretches across the northern tier of Africa. Indeed, military conflict with Arabs goes back to the days of Thomas Jefferson.
In writing about Arabs, it must be acknowledged that one must use generalizations. No group is unanimous in all respects. All have their conservatives, their moderates, and starry-eyed liberals. Every group, however, has widely shared cultural and religious views, and as history teaches us, it is the silence of good people that permits the bad actors among them to dominate events.
In her new book, Sandra Mackey uses the calamity that is Lebanon to provide some useful insights to the Arab world she knows well. “Mirror of the Arab World” is well worth reading with the caveat that Mackey has bought into the view that Israel does not have any right to exist. For her it is always “Zionist” Israel in much the same way Arab news media always refers to “occupied Jerusalem.”