I spent about half an hour on the phone last night with Mark Huffman, a UPI writer, who will be doing a story on blogs. It’ll be posted on the UPI Science and Technology desk this Saturday the 18th, in time for papers to pick it up for their Sunday editions if they wish. The web site address may (or may not) appear, so I’m bracing for possibly my biggest traffic day ever sometime this weekend, or perhaps on Monday. 🙂

Mr. Huffman found my blog by going to Blogger.com and noticing on the 10 most recently posted-to blogs. Given that Blogger just registered its 1 millionth user, that list is constantly changing. Having him looking for a blog on that panel at the same moment I posted is akin to…well, let’s just say I’m keeping an eye out for Ed McMahon and the Prize Patrol.

Well, there’s my 15 minutes of fame. Now serving 2,147,483,648!

Sometimes I add entries to Considerettes so that I can find the link again later if I need it. If you find them helpful as well, then bully for you. 🙂

Ann Coulter’s commentary “The Axis of Stupidity” is a great history lesson on the life and times of the North Korean weapons program, who said what in terms of actually believing that Clinton & Carter had pulled a foreign policy win, and why they were wrong. (Main reason: They believed what a dictator said.)

UN Weapons Inspections: Day 44: Hans Blix says that after being in Iraq for some 2 months (well, not quite Hans) they haven’t found a smoking gun. Yup, Saddam had 8 or 9 years to hide the stuff, and Hans is pleased that nothing’s been found in a little over 6 weeks. Golly, they must have covered the whole country by now, eh?

No, not nearly. Frankly I’m quite confident there are things going on in Iraq that violate the UN resolutions, but we may have a real tough time finding them, giving Hussein’s headstart. He kicked out weapons inspectors in violation of the terms of his surrender. Why? Because he had nothing to hide? Doubt it. Seriously. And in the interim neither the UN nor Bill Clinton had the guts to call him on it. And now Bush is having to clean up the mess they left, while the man responsible for the mess has had plenty of time to find out-of-the-way carpets to sweep that mess under.

And somehow Bush is to blame in all of this? Not hardly.

Five years after a “total ban” on guns, how’s Britian doing in the way of murders? Pathetically, notes Mark Steyn of the London Telegraph.

“Now, in the wake of Birmingham’s New Year bloodbath, there are calls for the total ban to be made even more total: if the gangs refuse to obey the existing laws, we’ll just pass more laws for them not to obey. According to a UN survey from last month, England and Wales now have the highest crime rate of the world’s 20 leading nations. One can query the methodology of the survey while still recognizing the peculiar genius by which British crime policy has wound up with every indicator going haywire – draconian gun control plus vastly increased gun violence plus stratospheric property crime.”

Banning guns has not made Britian more civil. It has made it a bigger target. This article is a stunning repudiation of everything the gun-controllers say should happen in theory when guns are restricted. Problem is, it’s only a theory, and it’s not working.

(Note: The London Telegraph requires you to register with them, for free, to read their articles.)

I’ve seen so many political cartoons trying to compare Bush’s response to North Korea to his response to Iraq, and it just goes to prove how little those guys understand the issues, or how willing they are to ignore facts to show their views in the best possible light.

I frequent Daryl Cagel’s Political Cartoon list because I’ve always enjoyed that art form, whether or not I agreed with the viewpoint expressed. It’s interesting to see the imagery cartoonists will use to get their point across. Today, many of the liberal-leaning cartoons (which is the vast majority of them on Cagle’s site) portrayed Bush as overreacting to Iraq via war while simply going through diplomatic channels for North Korea. The overt message is that they both might have nuke programs (and N. Korea has even admitted it), but there’s a disparity in the reaction. The subtext is either simply anti-war or that Bush is blundering through a foreign policy crisis.

What they’re completely missing is that Iraq had already made promises over a decade ago to dismantle and halt production of weapons of mass destruction, and spent the intervening years obstructing anyone from verifying whether or not they had kept to the contract. North Korea, on the other hand, was not known until just a couple months ago to have a nuke program. (Thank you Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter for assuring us that we could trust the word of a dictator while at the same time buying him off. That Nobel committee really show Dubya, eh?) Iraq is reaping the consequences of ignoring UN resolutions. Those consequences were clearly stated, and now the anti-war crowd is complaining that we’re enforcing the very UN resolutions they insisted had to be passed in the first place. I don’t know the terms of our agreement with North Korea, but hey, it’s just an agreement between two countries. The anti-war crowd only considers UN resolutions as carrying any real weight. (Until, of course, the hard choices have to be made about enforcing them.)

Two vastly different situations that liberals are trying to apply overly-simplistic rules to, and doing that would be the real foreign policy blunder.

Here’s a case of protestors just not getting it. Last year, an intramural basketball team at the University of Northern Colorado decided to protest mascots referring to American Indians. They decided to call their team the Fightin’ Whites to protest those names in general and the Fightin’ Reds of Eaton High School in Colorado in particular. The intent was to show how insensitive it must be to have a team mascot that allegedly makes fun of your race.

Well, back in March the AP reported that the “protest” wasn’t having the desired effect. When they decided to sell T-shirts of the “Fightin’ Whites” sales were surprisingly brisk. A member of the team, Jeff Vanlwarden, remarked, “It’s obvious some of the people are taking it the way it’s not supposed to be taken. They think it’s cool and we’re honoring the white man.”

Apparently Mr. Vanlwarden and most of his compatriots, as well as the whole crowd who walk with furrowed brows while pondering the Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins and Atlanta Braves, still have not realized what’s going on. See folks, it’s a mascot! It’s just a mascot. There’s no disrespect in it, and in fact there’s an honor that goes with it when a team wants to be identified with something or someone strong and picks you. Getting all bent out of shape about it is the epitome of hypersensitivity. There is no outrage over the Fightin’ Whites because it’s just a mascot.

And that’s why it’s intellectually dishonest to credit them with playing a part in the mascot changings that occured last year, as yesterday’s Washington Times article does. Liberal hypersensitivity has been sweeping academia, so the 20 high schools and 1 college that changed from American Indian mascots would have done so anyway. The momentum is already there. The Fightin’ Whites could only take credit for swaying people who had no problem with American Indian mascots before, but changed their minds because they thought the White’s mascot was demeaning. That does not appear to be very many at all.

Y’know, “Whites” is actually too generic a term to work up a really good outrage over. If they’d picked something more specific like the “Fighting Irish” or the “Fighting Scots”, then you’d rally folks to your cause, eh?

No, the problem is not a matter of images and symbols. It’s more a case of majoring in the minors at the University of Nothern Colorado, and getting worked up over nothing. There is no outcry over having the Whites mascot changed, and the Time article notes that other schools are considering a similar mascot in “protest”. The lack of outrage over that should be instructive.

Sean Penn’s taking a break from the rigours of playing Saddam’s patsy, and he doesn’t seem to understand that he’s been played that way. People are making fun of him by asking “How’s Iraq?”, but he doesn’t seem to get the joke.

Would someone tell this guy that stumping for a dictator is Bad Press(tm)? (At least among the clear-headed.)

Alternet Update: As of today, still no mention of the propaganda bonanza Hussein picked up from Sean Penn’s visit. And as I read more of their “news” articles, it seems crystal clear that all that section is is a place to expound liberal opinion under the guise of news reporting. (Not that it was ever really unclear that it was all just liberal propaganda, but I’d not done any follow-up before.) This, of course, makes it pretty durn easy to ignore from here on out.

Happy 2003! Had a nice, long vacation, and now Considerettes is back.

So consider this: During my vacation, on Dec. 29, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) suggested that the draft should be started up again. Because we need to ramp up for war? No, in fact his reasoning, if you want to call it that, had nothing to do with numbers. He merely wanted to manipulate public opinion. He feels that war with Iraq would be wrong, and he’s willing to toy with the military to get his way.

We all know that the tax system in this country is more and more used for social and behavorial manipulation and not just revenue raising. Now it seems Rep. Rangel would like to use actual human beings as capital to trade in order to tug at the nation’s heartstrings. This points out a number of things.

• Rangel would rather endanger lives (i.e. water-down the all-volunteer army with conscripts) than make Saddam play by the rules he agreed to.
• He believes that members of Congress determine matters of national security solely on the basis of whether their kids will be involved.
• He apparently can’t appeal to our brains, so he has to resort to emotional manipulation.
• He thinks his ends justify those means.

Rep. Rangel doesn’t seem to be able to trust Americans to act or think on their own, and they must be manipulated by whatever means necessary. And he’s not alone. As I read other blogs, it appears that sentiment is shared.

Christmas vacation has started, and so you probably won’t see much, if anything, of me through the end of the year. Merry Christmas, and a happy New Year!