Crowhill Weblog

… how will the left manage to blame Cheney and Big Oil?

Sun Makes History: First Spotless Month in a Century

The sun seems to be going through a phase of inactivity.

In the past 1000 years, three previous such events — the Dalton, Maunder, and Spörer Minimums, have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called a “mini ice age”. For a society dependent on agriculture, cold is more damaging than heat. The growing season shortens, yields drop, and the occurrence of crop-destroying frosts increases.

I’m not making any predictions here. Just pointing out that the sun has a huge impact on earth’s climate.

(But note that others are saying sea level will rise more than was previously predicted.)

Politics is not the world of the ideal, it’s the world of the possible.

Whatever the reason, the presidency doesn’t attract our best and brightest. We have to make do with what we get.

In a choice between McCain and Obama, the choice is clear: McCain.

Obama is a self-obsessed liberal who would be a disaster for the country. He would weaken the United States and embolden our enemies. And his policies at home would make government bigger and more intrusive.

Worse than that, he’s a cult figure. He would encourage the “government as savior” attitude that’s so prevalent among the left, and is so dangerous to liberty and prosperity.

But that doesn’t mean I’m excited about McCain. I’m not. He’s simply the best choice between two bad choices.

This column makes an interesting point: Want Real Change? Quit Nominating Lawyers!

I respect The Washington Post about the way I respect a dead rat. My gut reaction is to stay away from it so I don’t catch anything.

So you might guess it’s hard for me to be surprised when they do something that showcases their lack of credibility. But this one did, in fact, surprise me a little bit.

Evangelicals surprise the media is a rather long post that includes some interesting information on Sally Quinn, “the atheist who professed knowing ‘practically nothing about religion or the internet’ when she started the Washington Post/Newsweek religion site On Faith.”

If the Post/Newsweek gang want to put an atheist in charge of a site on religion, that’s fine. Atheists can know the subject and, although very few people are ever fair about religion, I suppose an atheist has as good a shot as anybody.

But to put somebody in that position who admits she doesn’t know the topic?

That says a whole heck of a lot about The Washington Post.

She delivered an amazing speech.

This is going to be a very interesting election.

From the WSJ: Why Obama Can’t Close the Sale

According to the columnists, Americans aren’t responding to Obama the way … somebody, not sure who … expected.

Articles like this annoy me because I would expect it to be based on some polls or some real information. But I don’t know if the statement, “Voters know that a tax hike won’t help the economy” is based on real data (e.g., a poll), or the columnist’s opinion.

Or again — “Americans have heard the refrain for government-provided health care before and know an expensive government giveaway when they see it.” — Do they? I’m not sure Americans know a Buick when they see it. I’m not that confident they know an “expensive government giveaway” when they see it.

But it all gets clear later on: “The economic wisdom of Americans should not be doubted.”

Ah. Now I know it’s just political opinion.

You’ve got to watch Fred Thompson’s speech from the Republican National Convention. It was really good, and made me wonder why he didn’t talk with such passion when he was running for president.

I assume the speech will be available on Youtube or something.

O’Rourke is often a delightful writer. He can be funny and witty and irreverent and has a way of cutting complicated issues down to very simple and usually hilarious summaries.

Sometimes.

Other times he tried too hard to be witty and it doesn’t do much for me.

In this mostly uninteresting essay, P.J. O’Rourke on God, he shows that he’s utterly clueless about science, but he also makes one very good point.

“But science can be proved,” a scientist would say. “The whole point of science is experimental proof.” Yet we non-scientists have to take that experimental proof on faith because we don’t know what the scientists are talking about.

I would add that scientists have to take experimental proof on faith as well, since the botanists don’t understand the quantum physicists any better than I do, and, since most fields are horrendously complicated, botanists often don’t understand what the botanists are doing. (It’s the whole “learn everything about nothing” phenomenon.)

Here’s where we have a problem, because “believing in science” really means believing in a method and a process — i.e., that opinions should be founded upon evidence that can be verified experimentally, and that ideas can be corrected with new discoveries — but sometimes it’s used to mean belief in a result. I.e., if Bob doesn’t accept _____ (pick your favorite theory) Joe might reply “don’t you believe in science?”

When Joe insists that Bob accepts a certain result, he’s acting like a bishop.

HT: Mark Shea.

Obama on Palin

The overly cynical will believe that the candidate takes the high road while his surrogates go out and play dirty, but I would rather take Obama at his word on this one. It’s the nasty blogosphere that’s making this mess about Palin’s family issues.

I don’t know how the left gets away with it.

They call the right intolerant, but the exact opposite is the truth, time after time — e.g., when conservative speakers are shouted down and protested on university campuses.

The left says the right is greedy, but when it comes to spending their own money, conservatives out-give liberals.

The left tries to tag “the politics of personal destruction” on the right, but who invented “Borking”?

And now — this. Phony accusations that Sarah Palin’s youngest really isn’t her child. (HT Gordon) (You have to wonder why, knowing that this sort of thing is going to happen, anybody would ever run for public office.)

Of course the players and circumstances are different, but remember that the press didn’t think it mattered that John Edwards cheated on his wife.

Oh — one other thing on that perception vs. reality issue. The left likes to caricature the right as sexist. Funny how excited everybody is about Palin, isn’t it?

I was watching a political commentary/video on Youtube that was mostly making fun of the new genre of rock concert / political convention, but then the guy said something that really grabbed me.

He gave some advice about something or other and then said, “Unless you’re one of those foreign folks, in which case just go play soccer and measure things in the metric system.”

Proverbs 26 says …

“Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.”

In college my logic textbook listed this as an example of a logical error, but I think they were missing Solomon’s point, which I’ve always taken to mean that you can’t win with a fool.

Tonight John and I were talking about Vox Day’s book, The Irrational Atheist.

There are lots of things to praise and criticize about that book, but my general attitude is that it’s precisely the response that Dawkins, Hitchens et al. deserve. It’s a case of “answering a fool according to his folly.”

And, of course, you can’t win with a fool.

Day can be just as rude, superficial, and questionably fair (to put it politely) as the Dawkins crowd. IOW, if Dawkins et al. are matter, Day is their anti-matter. Or, IOW, Day’s book isn’t an intellectual masterpiece, it’s an equivalent work of wild-eyed rhetoric.

In “Definitely, Maybe” (which is a lousy movie, BTW — and not just because it’s a chick flick) the Abigail Breslin character asks her dad “What’s the male version of ’slut’?,” to which her dad replies, “They haven’t invented that one yet.”

I’ve heard that sort of comment before. We’re supposed to think, “Oh the injustice of it!” The great patriarchal board of word creators that sits in their leather hunting lodge smoking cigars, watching ESPN and inventing words to further the patriarchy has simply hasn’t missed that one. It’s so unfair!

But there are a couple words that come pretty close. There’s “cad”. And “masher” comes close as well. They’re just not popular words.

And why is that?

If you plug “Cad” into the thesaurus there are plenty of other words for male miscreants: “boor, bounder, creep, cur, dastard, heel, louse, lout, rascal, rotter, scoundrel, villain, worm,” and if you follow some of these you get plenty more, including “clod, goon, bumpkin, oaf,” etc. So there’s no reluctance to criticize men for falling short. The question is just what we criticize them for.

When the offended feminist asks why a man isn’t called a ’slut’ we might ask why a woman isn’t called an ‘oaf.’

The feminist will complain that the disproportionate usage is because it’s “okay” for men to be promiscuous, but when a woman is promiscuous she’s called bad names.

I don’t think that’s quite the point.

It’s not “okay” for women to be clumsy (”oafish”) and it’s not “okay” for men to be promiscuous (”slutty”). Rather, women are expected to be reserved and modest in their sexuality. When they fail they’re sluts. Men are expected to be reserved and coordinated with their strength. When they fail they’re oafs.

We use words differently because we have different expectations for men and women. But this isn’t some conspiracy by the men. Women haven’t invented the male version of slut either. And nobody’s stopping them. I don’t think the patriarchy has managed to get a member on the Cosmo editorial board yet (but we’re trying).

Someone will say this is a “double standard” (as if that’s a bad thing), and … of course it is.

We all have different expectations for women than we have for men. That’s why there is no common word for “male version of slut” — because even if the patriarchal word committee invented one, nobody would use it.

… “Our less-experienced candidate is on the bottom of the ticket — yours is on the top”?

The economy is consistently better under Democrats than under Republicans. Income grows faster for all income levels and job creation is better. Far from being a drain on the economy, taxation and government programs were actually essential in creating the most profitable US industries of the last few decades.

The history of today’s economy demonstrates that … governmental activism has been indispensable to the growth of many of our most prosperous industries and well-paying jobs in the United States.

Voodoo economics is and always has been a failure. The last 30 years, with the exception of the Clinton years, demonstrates this clearly.