Silflay Hraka

That speaks to me.

Via Powerline

“I am here by the blunders of the Democrats. If instead of resolving that the war was a failure, they had resolved that I was a failure and denounced me for not more vigorously prosecuting it, I should not have been reelected, and I reckon you would not have been Secretary of the Treasury.”

Answer below the fold. No googling!

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Odd Pandora segues I have seen;

Louis Armstrong to Cheap Trick.
The Bevis Frond to Jill Scott
Angie Stone to Neil Young
R.E.M. to Waylon Jennings
Lorrie And Larry Collins to Goldfinger

Carbon offsets versus carbon-based lifeforms.

Six years ago Danish scholar Bjorn Lomborg’s “The Skeptical Environmentalist” took a look at the global-warming data and found it to be far less threatening than the Gore globalists were claiming. Mr. Lomborg’s new book “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide To Global Warming,” makes the case that while “global warming is real and man-made,” the Kyoto approach is the wrong way to improve the lives of the world’s people.

So global warming will save human lives. “While cutting CO2 will save some people from dying from heat,” Mr. Lomborg concludes, “it will simultaneously cause more people to die from cold.”

Up over at Dodgeblogium. Number #251 for those keeping count.

In Civics.

via the Corner

Yep.

“As soon as one predicted disaster doesn’t occur, the doomsayers skip to another,” Simon complains. “There’s nothing wrong with worrying about new problems — we need problems so we can come up with solutions that leave us better off than if they’d never come up in the first place. But why don’t the doomsayers see that, in the aggregate, things are getting better? Why do they always think we’re at a turning point — or at the end of the road? They deny our creative powers for solutions. It’s only because we used those powers so well in the past that we can afford to worry about things like losing species and wetlands. Until we got so rich and healthy and productive at agriculture, a wetland was a swamp with malarial mosquitoes that you had to drain so you could have cropland to feed your family.”

Simon’s fiercest battle has been against Paul Ehrlich’s idea that the world has too many people. The two have never debated directly — Ehrlich has always refused, saying that Simon is a “fringe character” — but they have lambasted each other in scholarly journal articles with titles like “An Economist in Wonderland” and “Paul Ehrlich Saying It Is So Doesn’t Make It So.” Simon acknowledges that rising population causes short-term problems, because it means more children to feed and raise. But he maintains that there are long-term benefits when those children become productive, resourceful adults.

Also, Oui!

Even the revered oceanographer Jacques Cousteau was not above exaggerating.

“Why did Cousteau feel he had to lie to such a degree? Was it that he did not know that he was lying, that he did not know that the oceans were not going to be black goo within 10 years or even 20 years? No, Jacques Cousteau was part of a movement that feels they have a right to lie and they have a right to frighten people, because they have a higher calling; their higher calling is to save the environment.”

From Michael Totten.

I was poleaxed. Without even realizing it, I had taken off my body armor and helmet. I took my gear off as casually as I do when I take it off after returning to the safety of the base after patrolling. We were not in the safety of the base and the wire. We were safe because we were in Ramadi.

…
“We’re like the Peace Corps with muscles here,” one Solider told me. That seems about right. And they’ve cleared a relatively safe space for civilian aid workers to move in and help, too.

Thomas Barnett will like the sound of that.

Some of us enjoy professional sports.

Some of us do not.

Scotty M. has learned to maintain a Zen-like calm in the face of all recriminations.

Ngnat explains how to tell the sex of a garter snake to the children from up the street.