hugo

I already apologized for that.

Pot pies, leaves to wipe your ass, beans and pork neck bones.

Things were a lot cheaper when Ole Honest Abe was Prez.

The thing to remember is there are only about ten or twelve battleground states. I will vote for the Libertarian, knowing McCain will easily win Texas.

"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." James Madison It was FDR who rendered the constitution void with his New Deal programs. At least most of FDR's programs required people to work for their government check. It was LBJ's Great Society programs that really encouraged sloth and irresponsibility. What is funny is how the Democrats have completely abandoned labor in favor of diversity. Throughout most of the post Civil War era the Democrats were opposed to immigration because it lowered wages by increasing the supply of laborers.

Part of the solution: Air-Powered Car Coming to U.S. in 2009 to 2010 - Zero Pollution Motors - 1000-Mile Range - Popular Mechanics It seems to me autos could also utilize wind power. If you are cruising at 70 there is a bit of energy to capture. http://www.motorauthority.com/news/car-shows/wind-and-solar-powered-venturi-eclectic/ As oil gets more expensive substitutes arrive.

My favorite Winnie quote: ?I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.?

The core problem is supply of basic commodities is lagging behind increased demand caused by China and India's expanding economies. It could be Thomas Malthus is finally right, or it could be temporary until new technologies are developed. Little we can do short of nuking China and India back into the stone age. The good news is globalization is keeping prices under control for manufactured goods.

The dollar bottomed out against the euro in March. It's been going up since.

Tell us how you really feel.

Any individual, or group, who always blames someone else for their problems will never solve their problems.

Cosby Is the Real Prophet, Not Wright By Froma Harrop Jeremiah, you're no Jeremiah. Although Barack Obama's controversial former pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright puts himself at the center of a prophetic tradition of the Afro-American church, he's not much of a prophet. The prophet in the Biblical mode often tells his people what they don't want to hear. Wright only mimics the prophet in his fiery condemnations of America. When it comes to the feelings of those who employ him, he's strictly on tiptoe. Around the time Wright was fluffing his feathers before the national media, a genuine prophet appeared in Newark, N.J., to deliver a tough look-in-the-mirror message to fellow African-Americans. The visionary was entertainer Bill Cosby, and his theme encapsulated in the title of a book he wrote with Harvard professor of psychiatry Alvin Poussaint: "Come on, People! On the Path From Victims to Victors." For his candor, Cosby has been tarred by black and white intellectuals as "blaming the victim." He's been accused of worse things, but that's the lot of the prophet. "A prophet is despised in his own country, and in his own house, and among his own kin," Jesus says in the Book of Mark. The biblical Jeremiah launched invective against priests, kings and, above all, his neighbors. In highly unflattering terms, he tells the Israelites that their own iniquity would bring about their downfall. Purporting to convey the words of God, he says, "Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by My name, and say we are delivered to do all these abominations?" (Jeremiah, 7:9.) The public did not respond warmly to this negative commentary. People in his hometown wanted to get rid of Jeremiah, lest growing anger toward the prophet be turned on them. The princes put Jeremiah in prison following one of his bleak prophecies. And according to some accounts, he was stoned to death. In America, preachers starting with the early New Englanders rained brimstone onto their congregations. One of the most famous no-holds-barred sermons was Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741). "Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure toward hell," Edwards writes, describing the torments there in excruciating detail. This is not feel-good religion. Edwards went so far as to publish the names of some young church members thought to be reading "impure books." The congregation fired him. Jeremiah Wright's congregants are building him a $1.6 million house on a golf course. Cosby may deliver his message in a more supportive manner than the old Hebrew prophets, but he doesn't do much mincing of words. Addressing an NAACP gala in 2004, he famously said: "Fifty percent dropout rate, I'm telling you, and people in jail, and women having children by five, six different men. Under what excuse?" He goes on: "You can't keep asking that God will find a way. God is tired of you." Not surprisingly, Cosby has come under attack -- some pretty vicious -- by black and white intellectuals who prefer the script that places all fault for the plight of black America on white America. His points, however, are being seriously discussed within the African-American community. Last week, Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker introduced Cosby at a conference of community services as follows: "He's speaking to the heart of the matter, and he speaks to the realities of what a lot of folks are experiencing." That's what a prophet does. The real kind.

Don't chase last years profits. The euro is going to head downward.

Thomas Malthus and the Global Food Crisis By Dan Denning • April 18th, 2008 • Related Articles • Filed Under I am almost afraid to say so, but Thomas Robert Malthus, the English economist, is coming back into fashion. As I am the nearest thing there is to being Malthus's publisher, and have a great admiration for his work, I ought to be pleased. However, neo-Malthusianism has a tragic message for the modern world. Thomas Malthus was born in 1766. In 1798, he published "An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society". Subsequent revised editions appeared in 1803, 1806, 1807, 1817, and 1826. The First Edition is indeed an essay, though it contains the outline of the Malthusian argument. Malthus did a great deal of subsequent research for the later editions. The reasons I can claim to be the publisher of Thomas Malthus are that my publishing business, Pickering and Chatto, which was founded by William Pickering in 1820, was the first publisher of a collected edition of Malthus's works, edited by E.A. Wrigley and David Souden. This was the first "Pickering Master" that we published after reviving the Pickering imprint; we published it in 1986, and it remains the only collected edition of Malthus. Thomas Malthus died in 1834. He had already prepared a revised second edition of his "Principles of Political economy" which was published by William Pickering in 1836. It is, however, the Essay on Population, 1798, which first states the Malthusian argument: "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second." The early economists, at the start of the industrial revolution, perfectly understood that the food supply might keep pace with the growth of population for a long time, perhaps even for centuries. In fact, there were serious famines in the nineteenth century, particularly in Ireland and India. There were also wartime disruptions of the food supply in the twentieth century. Yet, by and large, the continued growth of the human population, which is now above six billion, has so far been met by continuing increases in agricultural productivity. The human population has grown very fast, but so has the supply of food. Various factors have shaken the confidence of economists in the future of food supplies, and in the ability to feed a world population which is continuing to grow. The current rise in food prices has caused a Malthusian shudder among the major Governments who feel at least a preliminary fear that they will not be able to feed their populations. A Government which cannot feed its people is not likely to remain in power for long. The present rise in prices seems to have been linked to the rise in the price of oil to more than $100 a barrel. Although there are foodstuffs which have a relatively low dependence on oil, most food stuffs depend on oil for fertiliser, for protection against disease, for farm technologies, for transport and distribution. As oil prices have doubled, food prices have also doubled. Another factor has been the use of biofuels, grown on agricultural land, to replace oil. Governments have been optimistic that this would contribute to the reduction of CO2 gases. Biofuels have been introduced, probably quite wrongly, as one of the renewable answers to global warming. In fact, the loss of food production has contributed to the threat of famine, and to the growing number of food riots in poor countries. More useful is likely to be gene modification which will raise the productivity of agriculture and reduce the need for oil based inputs. It is, however, the social impact of the growth of the Asian economies that is causing the most immediate alarm. India already has a huge middle class, sometimes estimated at 250 to 300 million, or about 30 per cent of the whole Indian population. Chinas has, or will soon have, a middle class of the same size. Many Indians still choose an Indian rather than a Western diet. In China, the preference for a Western diet seems to be spreading. Yet meat can only be reared at the cost of grain. If grain is converted into animal protein and then fed to human populations, about eight times as much grain will be needed. The more the Chinese middle class opt for a Western diet, the less grain will be available for the world's poor. Yet China is a country still growing at around 8 per cent a year. Finally, there is the growing anxiety that global warning will cause a spread of the deserts. For instance, Africa, which one thinks to be a fertile continent, is threatened by the spread of the Sahara Desert. Global warming will certainly change the pattern of the world's water supplies, and is expected to reduce, rather than increase, the acreage of cultivable land. In the wealthy countries of Europe, the birth rate has fallen below replacement level, though there is extensive population movement to make up the shortfall. But the world is not big enough, or productive enough to provide Texas-style T-bone steaks for the peasants of Asia. The famines which were forecast by Thomas Malthus's arithmetic were deferred in the twentieth century, but they may reappear in the twenty-first. William Rees-Mogg for The Daily Reckoning Australia

I think the real answer is a combination of solar, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear H2 fuel cell and other non-hydrocarbon based energy sources.

Ya know there is nothing to the claims of injustice when Rev. Al is involved.

One shot to the nuts would have done the job.

The major reason for the rising price of commodities is the expansionary growth of the economies of China and India. Nearly 2 billion people are now entering an era of meat eating and car driving. Supply cannot keep up with rising demand. It takes seven pounds of grains to produce one pound of meat. Ethanol adds fuel to the fire.

I'm just glad it is corn and not barley.

Muslim Tensions By Tony Blankley Perhaps the greatest secular gift to the world by Judeo-Christian civilization is its seminal concept of the individual, which it raises above the tribe or the collective. In Genesis, we are told that man is made in the image of God. Deuteronomy tells us that "each human by his own sin is to be judged" and "do not punish children for the sins of their fathers." And of course, the biblical life and teachings of Jesus reflect the deep importance of the individual. Thus was planted in the soil of the West our uniquely heightened respect for the individual. It is impossible to imagine Western civilization -- and particularly America -- without the existence in our culture of the instinctive respect for the individual to offset the more general human instinct to be subordinated in the tribe or the group. Conversely, there is no more dangerous incubus inserted into a Western nation than hostility or indifference to the inherent value and rights of the individual. But radicalized Islam places little value on the individual, while holding up for supreme value the interests of the group, particularly their view of the group called Islam. And it is this aggressive, assertive insistence by radicalized Muslims in the West to subordinate our inherent rights to their collective demands that slowly and more or less quietly is forcing Westerners to take sides in the radicals' demands. The resolution of this developing conflict -- if not managed by the elites in Western countries on behalf of indigenous Western rights -- inevitably will result in unnecessary violence. A recent example of such intimidation was reported in The Washington Times Monday: Muneer Fareed, head of the Islamic Society of North America, is "demanding" that Sen. John McCain stop using the word "Islamic" to describe terrorists who are radical Islamists. He insists that McCain (and all others) just call Islamic terrorists "criminals." "That is more acceptable to the Muslim community," Fareed said. McCain, being as tough as nails, has said he has no intention of submitting to Fareed's demand and will continue to use "Islamic" to describe Islamic terrorists. But it will be interesting to see what the two Democratic candidates for president choose to do about this demand. Meanwhile, in Canada, Mark Steyn awaits trial before the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal for the crime of committing hate speech by writing a book and a magazine article that warned against the dangers of Islam overwhelming Europe (No. 1 best-seller in Canada; New York Times best-seller in the United States). These charges were precipitated by demands for Steyn's prosecution by a band of students, who publicly marched to announce their demands. They claimed that as Muslims, they should have the chance to offer a rebuttal when people like Steyn talk about issues that relate directly to Muslims. "When people feel insulted, they should have recourse," Khaled Mouammar, president of the Canadian Arab Federation, said. Amazingly, the culturally feeble, intimidated Canadian officials promptly filed the criminal charges. Similarly, a few months ago, the increasing British Muslim demands for Shariah law were answered in the positive by the archbishop of Canterbury. If the British government ever succumbs to that outrageous demand, not only will Muslim women lose their individual rights but also, pursuant to honor killing, principals could be murdered legally by their fathers, husbands or brothers. Already, non-Muslim British are being banned from public swimming pools during time reserved for Muslims. (No other group can reserve such times.) Forty years ago last weekend, British classicist and politician Enoch Powell warned that if immigrants bringing alien values and customs into Britain are allowed to continue their immigration, a sense of alarm and resentment would develop in the indigenous British population. He was ejected from British politics for giving that warning. But this week, the BBC published a poll taken precisely to measure public attitudes 40 years after Powell's famous warning (and after 40 years of the British ruling class ignoring the growing danger). Seventy percent think there is high tension between the races; 63 percent expect those tensions to result in violence between the races in Britain; and 60 percent think there are too many "immigrants" in Britain. In a similar poll taken for the Davos World Economic Forum, stunning numbers of Europeans fear a "threat" from Muslims with whom they "interact": 79 percent of Danes, 67 percent of Italians, 68 percent of Spaniards, 65 percent of Swedes and 59 percent of Belgians. In my book "The West's Last Chance," published in 2005, I warned that the European people would not be passive in the face of their culture being undercut. Unlike others who wrote on the subject, I did not think Europeans would fail to defend their nations and their cultures. I warned that broad European street violence could be avoided only if their governments took the threat seriously. These disturbing polls from BBC and Davos should constitute another undeniable warning to the gutless, defeatist European leaders. Take action to protect your people and their cherished Western values, or the people will take matters into their own hands. And for us in America, impending European unrest should be seen as a cautionary tale. Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

You can be for or against the death penalty for rape, but ithe death penalty for rape sure as hell ain't unconstitutional. This is a matter that should be decided by state legislators, not the federal judiciary.

Like father like son newsobserver.com | Murder-for-hire plea nets man 21 years

Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America: "The legislators of the United States, who have made almost all the clauses of the penal code milder, punish rape with death, and there are no crimes that public opinion pursues with more inexorable ardor. That is understandable: since the Americans think nothing more precious than the honor of woman, and nothing more deserving of respect than her independence, they consider that there is no punishment too severe for those who take them away from her against her will."

Dead people do not escape and rape again.

This issue should be a state issue. IMO the 1977 decision was wrong. From the dissenting opinion in Coker: That SOB should have been executed. How else do you punish an individual already doing life?