Is the Earth running out of oil? A post at Fabius Maximus (via IP) and an article by Vasko Kohlmayer at FrontPage both advise holding off on the doomsday preparations.

Global warmists are scrambling to explain recent cooling and its projected continuation...at American Thinker.

At Contentions, thoughts on the presidential race by Peter Wehner, Daniel Casse, and Abe Greenwald.

Gateway Pundit has a graphic image of "The No Zone", a map of the U.S. territories and coastline ruled off limits to oil exploration and drilling by Democrats in Congress. McCain would be wise to make this a signature issue in the campaign.

The tens of thousands of dead in Burma are not even in the ground yet, and Al Gore is already exploiting the carnage for his own self-enriching crusade. (Via EU Referendum) UPDATE 5/9: More from Marc Sheppard at American Thinker

The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.

There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia."

Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called "a chilling effect" on our exercise of free speech.

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The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious apology. (via LGF)

It brings to mind recent work by Bruce Bawer and Andy McCarthy

Well, it’s early days, to be fair, but so far the Great Depression 2008 is shaping up to be a Great Disappointment. Not so much The Grapes of Wrath as Raisins of Mild Inconvenience.

The evidence is starting to accumulate that the economic downturn may have bottomed out sometime in the first quarter.

UPDATE 5/8: Larry Elder weighs in. And here's Tom Blumer's piece at PJM...plus a week-old article from Tom on the same theme.

White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen might have been able to survive saying this about the owner of the club he works for as part of a profanity-laced tirade on a radio show Sunday...

"We are the [bleep] of Chicago. We're the Chicago [bleep]. We have the worst owner [Jerry Reinsdorf]. The guy's got seven [bleeping] rings, and he's the [bleeping] horse[bleep] owner."

(hey, it was taken out of context...)

...but he probably can't also call a well-known reporter "a (bleeping) fag" and keep his job these days, even if, as Ozzie explained, "In my country, you call someone something like that and it is not the same as it is in this country."

For some time now it has seemed like Ozzie Guillen was trying to get fired. This should do it.

Now I wonder if some curious journalist will walk up to Victor Martinez or Miguel Cabrera and ask him what it means when someone calls him "a (bleeping) fag" in Venezuela.

UPDATE 5/6: Guillen soldiers on. Another day, another embarrassing episode. Reinsdorf does allow that he'd like Ozzie to clean up the language....in order to better communicate his message. But already way too much energy spent here on the White Sox.

You just knew it was coming: At the request of the Swiss government, an ethics panel has weighed in on the "dignity" of plants and opined that the arbitrary killing of flora is morally wrong. This is no hoax. The concept of what could be called "plant rights" is being seriously debated.

A few years ago the Swiss added to their national constitution a provision requiring "account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms." No one knew exactly what it meant, so they asked the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology to figure it out. The resulting report, "The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants," is enough to short circuit the brain.

A "clear majority" of the panel adopted what it called a "biocentric" moral view, meaning that "living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive." Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim "absolute ownership" over plants and, moreover, that "individual plants have an inherent worth." This means that "we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily."

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...Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

Smith says the immorality is in worrying about "plants rights" while people are malnourished or starving in great numbers. This biocentrism also threatens genetic engineering of crops, undertaken to help prevent that starving and malnutrition. Which doesn't trouble you in the slightest if you're of the "humans are the AIDS of the Earth" school.

I'm wondering what the ethics panel makes of the determined global effort to cut down on the plant kingdom's naturally occurring, life sustaining gas. Where's the plant dignity there?

Hitchens on his visit to Cuba:

Cuba was an unusually good vantage point for the 1968 phenomenon since it advertised itself as a new beginning for socialism that would avoid the drabness and conformity of the Eastern bloc. I was able to test this proposition in practice and in two ways. At a “cultural seminar,” I heard the distinguished Cuban film director Santiago Álvarez say that any form of criticism was allowed in Cuba, except direct criticism of Fidel Castro. This seemed a rather large exception, but when I tried to be funny about it (so often a mistake in revolutionary circles), I had my first experience of being denounced, in unsmiling tones, for “counterrevolutionary” tendencies. It was a slight surprise to find that people really talked like that.

Guy Sorman:

What did it mean to be 20 in May ’68? First and foremost, it meant rejecting all forms of authority—teachers, parents, bosses, those who governed, the older generation. Apart from a few personal targets—General Charles de Gaulle and the pope—we directed our recriminations against the abstract principle of authority and those who legitimized it. Political parties, the state (personified by the grandfatherly figure of de Gaulle), the army, the unions, the church, the university: all were put in the dock.

Some historical precedents haunted us. We remembered that the French Revolution was the work of 20-year-old boys. So, too, were the Romanticism of the 1820s and the surrealist revolution of the 1920s. History does repeat itself. After long periods of confinement under tight social, economic, and military strictures, a new generation gets up and says: “Enough! No more!” Just as in 1789 and 1830, the young in 1968 didn’t want the same life that their parents had. For one thing, we wanted to work less.

Stefan Kanfer on the protests at Columbia:

The time was right for rebellion: it was a benign spring, and there were “issues.” The students made the most of them, breaking windows, trampling any flowers within reach of their sneakers—jackboots would have been too warm for the weather—occupying offices, destroying papers, and, in general, making a major ruckus. So major, in fact, that Columbia authorities summoned the police. Hordes of outsiders began to arrive, among them leftist critic Dwight MacDonald, who announced that a friend had beseeched him, “You must come up right away. It’s a revolution. You may never get another chance to see one.” Like many another superannuated radical, MacDonald was unable to distinguish a revolt from a tantrum.

Now Barack Obama and a growing chorus of others are proposing to tax the "excess profits" of the oil companies. What is especially galling is that they suggest this will help to reduce gasoline prices. As usual, history offers these people no guide to formulating policy. And the WSJ reminds us that we've been here before...

You may also be wondering how a higher tax on energy will lower gas prices. Normally, when you tax something, you get less of it, but Mr. Obama seems to think he can repeal the laws of economics. We tried this windfall profits scheme in 1980. It backfired. The Congressional Research Service found in a 1990 analysis that the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3% to 6% and increased oil imports from OPEC by 8% to 16%. Mr. Obama nonetheless pledges to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, which he says "costs America $800 million a day." Someone should tell him that oil imports would soar if his tax plan becomes law. The biggest beneficiaries would be OPEC oil ministers.

There's another policy contradiction here. Exxon is now under attack for buying back $2 billion of its own stock rather than adding to the more than $21 billion it is likely to invest in energy research and exploration this year. But hold on. If oil companies believe their earnings from exploring for new oil will be expropriated by government – and an excise tax on profits is pure expropriation – they will surely invest less, not more. A profits tax is a sure formula to keep the future price of gas higher.

Exxon's profits are soaring with the recent oil price spike, but the energy industry's earnings aren't as outsized as the politicians seem to think. Thomson Financial calculates that profits from the oil and natural gas industry over the past year were 8.3% of investment, while the all-industry average is 7.8%. And this was a boom year for oil. An analysis by the Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor finds that between 1970 and 2003 (which includes peak and valley years for earnings) the oil and gas business was "less profitable than the rest of the U.S. economy." These are hardly robber barons.

This tiff over gas and oil taxes only highlights the intellectual policy confusion – or perhaps we should say cynicism – of our politicians. They want lower prices but don't want more production to increase supply. They want oil "independence" but they've declared off limits most of the big sources of domestic oil that could replace foreign imports. They want Americans to use less oil to reduce greenhouse gases but they protest higher oil prices that reduce demand. They want more oil company investment but they want to confiscate the profits from that investment. And these folks want to be President?

MCCARTHY: We're taking it less seriously. I think there was a time right after 9/11, probably I put it at about 18 months -- probably into the Iraq operation, so longer than that -- that I think we really were taking it seriously. We certainly changed our enforcement methods. The Justice Department still had a role, but it was much more subordinate. The military was out front, which it needed to be in that phase, but there was a realization that it needed to be a wholesale government approach. But when I read things like what we've heard in the last few days about how we're getting guidance inside the government about purging our lexicon and saying things like jihadism and mujahideen and the like and --

RUSH: Wait. Wait, wait, wait! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Who's getting what? Guidance? Who in the government is sending this out to who?

MCCARTHY: Well, the reporting that's come out since -- I guess it was about April 24th -- is that the internal syncing at least in parts of the administration -- and this is something the State Department's pushed for a long time -- is that we make a mistake call jihadism, jihadism; because there are all kinds of jihad, not just forceable jihad. This is how the thinking goes. And, by the way, while there may be all kinds of jihad, jihad is a military concept. That's how it grew up. That's the reason there is a Muslim world in the first place. But secondly the idea is that when you call them jihadists, you are somehow emboldening them as if what they were relying on is how we regard them rather than how they see themselves. And that you also --

RUSH: So what are we supposed to call 'em?

MCCARTHY: Well, I'm down to thinking -- as I wrote in a piece in National Review a couple years ago, I think maybe -- we should just call it "Mabel" or something. Because it seems like everything that you say that touches on this... We're so intimidated by the idea that there's a religious label on this and everybody is so afraid of their shadow to talk about it, that whenever you say what is obvious -- which is that you can't take the "Islam" out of Islamic terror and that the main cause of this is not democracy or lack of democracy; or, you know, ancient hatreds or the economy, poverty, or whatever our excuse is this week. This is driven by doctrine. You know, we have poor people all over the world. They're not all committing terrorism.

In a related piece, McCarthy takes issue with the New York Sun's choice of Laurie Mylroie to review Willful Blindness. Much of Mylroie's thinking about Islamic terror has been publicly discredited, and McCarthy calls her "studiously uninformed about the jihadist threat."

UPDATE 5/6: Laurie Mylroie replies to McCarthy

The 2009 Buckeye recruiting class is about half full, and I have a piece up today at TheClevelandFan.com on how it's going.

Guess it's time to disown Granny...

As part of the celebration, the company is launching their new domain at tkg.com as of 4/30, and they're also using their web migration as a teaching moment for other businesses facing similar challenges......(cause teaching businesses about the web is what these guys do, see?)

It was news to me, but apparently getting a three-letter domain is a pretty big deal, since all possible three-letter combination domains were spoken for a while ago. So Geoff K. and his team are pretty pumped about landing tkg.com, even though it didn't come cheap. So best of luck for the next ten years, Geoff. Maybe I'll have you guys upgrade me from the MT defaults one of these days.

Karsh sets out to recount in detail the background and history of the exodus of Arab Palestinians from their homeland. It's a useful corrective for the common perception that they were "dispossessed" by the Jews in the years leading up to Israel's founding in 1948, and in the war that ensued. Do read it all.

Joseph Klein

Planning for the “Durban II” conference against racism, scheduled for 2009, is proceeding right along. Following a number of procedural meetings, the first “substantive” session of the Durban Review Preparatory Committee commenced in Geneva on April 21, 2008. The world’s leading human rights abusing countries are running rough-shod over the agenda. They are planning to set up Israel in particular for non-stop blood libel. They also intend to hold the Western democracies publicly accountable for what the planners brand as the twin ‘crimes’ of Islamophobic racism and religious defamation.

So far, the United States, Canada and Israel have announced their intention to boycott the conference, except in the unlikely event that the Durban II planners shift course in a far more positive direction. The U.S. will also withhold a portion of its funding for the United Nations budget, equivalent to its share of the budget going to pay for the conference planning.

Anne Bayefsky:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference has spent years dominating U.N. proceedings, and Durban II — the centerpiece of the U.N.’s alleged “anti-racism” crusade — is their progeny. By the end of the week, it was with genuine exasperation that the Egyptian representative coined a new word: “Durbanophobia.” A couple of days ago he came up with Arabophobia. And we already know about the worldwide plot hatched in the Oval Office, Downing Street, and the basements of evil Danish publishers, called Islamophobia. Now there is a plot against a harmless group of diplomats who just want to hang out together and shmooze about human rights.

In contrast to attempts to speak about anti-Semitism, nobody thought to interrupt Iran’s declaration that it plays a leadership role in the battle against discrimination. Did you know that the state whose president has advocated modern-day genocide by wiping out Israel “is fully committed to eradicate any policy based on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and has actively struggled against this phenomena at national, regional and international levels”? In fact, “in order to promote access of all people to social justice and to eliminate discrimination” Iran has just created “a special committee to deal with cases of discrimination.” Presumably, the women stoned for alleged adultery, and the homosexuals hanged and strung up on cranes in public places need not apply.