Rosa Parks, Robert Graetz, Liberty And Justice

Today is the anniversary of the day that Rosa Parks made waves in Montgomery Alabama in 1955 by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man.  What Rosa did that day sparked a movement resulting from pressure that had been building for almost 100 years.

African Americans, who had been freed from slavery by Abraham Lincoln, were forced to endure a century of contempt, disdain and abuse from white Americans.  Our society, although founded by men who rejected the concept of social classes, was maintaining a dual class existence and legally forcing people of color to live a servile existence.

This was wrong.

By the power and grace of God, this finally changed in America as a result of the boycotts, rallies, legal wranglings, and efforts of the Federal Courts and finally Congress.  Although one may believe strongly in the sovereignty of the states, clearly the rights of United States citizens was being abridged by the actions and/or inaction of many of those states, and the Federal government needed to act.

When I contemplate these events, it always amazes me that human beings can be so incredibly dysfunctional.  It certainly makes greater sense to me to see an individual here or there who is so stupid that they actually think they are superior to others.  But to think that large swathes of our society would actually continue to look down on others because of a history that is over two generations old, and especially in a time following the horrors of Nazi Germany, that they could continue to look upon other humans as just wild cattle that had been let loose and whose status as free men and women had to be tolerated.  How could our country reach this point?

I think the answer to that question is somewhat complicated, but part of the answer come when people take a “not my problem” attitude to the issues surrounding us.  We have a tendency to try to insulate ourselves from the problems in the world, especially if they do not impact us directly. It may come as a big shock, but we are selfish.

When in comes to injustice, one must consider two important points.  One is that injustice, left unabated, will grow like a sore and devour us.  A trivial wrong will lead to greater and greater wrongs until any of us might find ourselves in a class of people whose liberties are stripped from us and where radical evil imposing itself unabated in the name of the “needs of society”.  Any of us could end up metaphorically segregated.

The second is more important than the first.  Our prime directive, so to speak, should be to do what is right.  Allowing anyone or any class of people to suffer injustice or to relinquish their liberty without due process is just wrong.  “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” (believed to be Edmond Burke, 18th century), is a mantra for understanding both the easy growth of evil and the key to resisting its continued advance, that is, we must stand in its way.  One white man (a Lutheran pastor named Robert Graetz) in Montgomery helped the black leaders in their efforts.  He didn’t need to, but he knew it was right.

Rosa and Robert both set an amazing standard for us in the midst of a dangerous time and set an unprecedented set of events in motion that dramatically changed our country for the better.  We should not have had to learn this lesson.  We should already have known that we cannot stand idly by and allow injustice to foment… we must be vigilant, and we must act to protect our rights and the rights of everyone in our great country.  Anything less is cowardly.  Anything less is dishonorable.  Anything less will end the American experiment.

Welcome, one and all to the most Intense Nightly read anywhere on the sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

• BY THEIR ACTS YE SHALL KNOW THEM: So, now, AG Eric Holder says it’s OK for ACORN to be funded by the Federal Government.  Well, gee, does this shock anyone, this outcome? Holder needs to be gone.  I see a few Republicans have gotten up on their hind legs over this one. Their trouble is, that as Eric Blair would have put it, it’s hard to tell the pigs from the humans, just now.
• GIVE THEM CREDIT FOR A FIRM GRIP ON THE BLOODY OBVIOUS: The Wall Street Journal says that the evidence on the climate crisis is that the whole thing was rigged and a sham. They’re right, of course.  We’ve been saying that along.  But it now looks like the rest of the world is starting to catch on.  Observe, for example, what’s going on in Australia. make no mistake here; and this is all closely tide to Copenhagen.  Whatever else all these incidents are doing, it certainly negates the illusion that Copenhagen is occurring with anything resembling unity on the validity of the “science”.  in this country, particularly, cap and trade appears to be dead if we take the words of a certain Oklahoma senator as given.  By the way, a side note to Josh Marshall ;  go ahead and charge that Republicans and their increasing disbelief of the religion of manmade global warming is all partisanship. It certainly fits in with your myopic worldview.    But please spare us the double standard that socialist partisanship isn’t behind the spread of that myth. I’m with Don Surber, who says:
  

  

  Don Surber

  It is not up to the skeptics to disprove this theory but rather proponents to prove in a clean and dispassionate way their theory.

  The high-pressure sales pitch and the ad hominem attacks on skeptics are tell-tale signs that the facts are not on the liberal side.
  Again.

• THERE ARE HOLIDAYS AND HOLIDAYS: Who, among even the experts, really understands what drives happenings like this? I wonder at the damage caused the people left behind.
• MAGNIFICENTLY MORONIC: Yet more proof exists that any relationship between Helen Thomas and a sane person is accidental at best.  The only question outstanding is why in the blink anyone takes are seriously, anymore.
• HAIL THE SWISS: for their ban on Minarets. There are many, I’m quite sure, who will consider this an end to the long touted Swiss tolerance of religions.  However, there’s a difference between tolerating religions and tolerating the takeover of a culture.  As has been demonstrated many times over, the latter is what Islam is about.

There’s an issue with the comment editor plug I won’t have time to address until this afternoon.

You’re down to the regular text editor for a while. Sorry.

If you got into a minor traffic accident, the police tried to interview you, and you blew the cops for three times in a row, where would you be?   It seems by Byron York’s reporting that their is one standard of justice for you and me, and another one for the rich and famous, from the Washington Examiner:

Rachel Uchitel

When he informed the Florida Highway Patrol that he was canceling a scheduled interview for a third time Sunday, golfer Tiger Woods did so through Orlando attorney Mark NeJame, who told authorities he is now representing Woods.  Officers want to question Woods about the incident in which the SUV he was driving hit a fire hydrant and a tree outside his home at 2:25 a.m. Friday, leaving him bleeding and temporarily unconscious.

Hat tip photo:  Doug Ross.

So apparently we have the tale of two putters.    It would seem that Mr. Woods was putting his putter where Mrs. Woods did not apprechiate.   So in turn, Mrs. Woods put Tiger’s other puttter through his car window.

From The Telegraph:

The reason why even the Guardian‘s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Quite.

Even more shocking is the level of deception that these key people involved themselves with in pursuit of their specified political goal:

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Even more disturbing is the similarity between this story and the story that we all saw, out of New Zealand a couple of days ago, where the activity there was quite similarly flawed, and fabricated. it goes directly to a pattern which we have been alluding to here at BitsBlog the since we came online back in 2000.

And now we find, that the scientists at east anglia have admitted throwing away a good deal of their raw temperature date on which their predictions of global annihilation if we didn’t spend billions of dollars following their political agenda, were based. Which means that we are down to  no chance whatsoever that the data can be analyzed by scientists untainted by the global warming religion.  Rather convenient, that.

Given the lack cooperation, both historically and currently, of the so called “science community” does anybody really think we’re going to get a better indication of the level of deception that we’ve been operating under with these people for so long, than the internal documents recently leaked?

And I’m sure, that I’m going to see at least one comment wondering whether not the emails that were publicized, were forged, if I don’t address the question, thus:

If those emails were forged in those leaked documents, does anybody really suppose that the denials wouldn’t have been forthcoming by now?

The fact is, we were lied to.  That was proven by their own words .

“The “Dubai vision,” which has suffered a crushing blow from the freewheeling Gulf emirate’s sudden debt crisis, is the creation of one man who failed to apply the rules of open governance.  The city state’s rapid growth revolved around the ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who outlined his ideas in a book, “My Vision,” where he suggested other Arab countries could replicate Dubai’s success. Now the model — always controversial among Gulf Arabs since it involved building shining cities in the desert at breakneck speed through the import of foreign residents, finance and labor — is on the ropes.  Questions will surface over what went wrong.”  Read more at Reuters!

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — “At most colleges, marijuana is very much an extracurricular matter. But at Med Grow Cannabis College, marijuana is the curriculum: the history, the horticulture and the legal how-to’s of Michigan’s new medical marijuana program….The only required reading: “Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower’s Bible” by Jorge Cervantes.”  Read more at NY Times Education!

“Two years ago, Congress ordered the nation’s gasoline refiners to do something that is turning out to be mathematically impossible.  To please the farm lobby and to help wean the nation off oil, Congress mandated that refiners blend a rising volume of ethanol and other biofuels into gasoline. They are supposed to use at least 15 billion gallons of biofuels by 2012, up from less than seven billion gallons in 2007.

“But nobody at the time counted on fuel demand falling in the United States, which is what has happened during the recession. And that decline could well continue, as cars become more efficient under other recent government mandates.”  Read more at NY Times Business

Doctor Charles Krauthammer, National Review, on the Obama/Pelosi/Reid health care bills:

The bill is irredeemable. It should not only be defeated. It should be immolated, its ashes scattered over the Senate swimming pool.

Doctor Howard Dean, via DRJ,  Patterico’s Pontifications:

This is a harmful bill to the nation without a public option because it’s going to take trillions of dollars, billions … well, trillions over several decades from our kids.

So we have two medical doctors, turned pundits, one from the left and one from the right, and both agree that the Obama/Pelosi/Reid healthcare bill is bad medicine for the American piublic.   Kill the Bill

Some time ago, David blogged about Nadya Suleman:

I suppose after delivering fourteen children, posing for Christie Hefner is out of the question.   Suleman is going  have busy changing nappies and will be hard pressed to pay for a dipper service after her fifteen minutes of fame expire, in fourteen and a half minutes.

Well, look who shows up in my scan of the news this morning,  by way of The NY Daily News and why…

Brace yourselves: Octomom Nadya Suleman, who already has 14 children including a set of infant octuplets, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” she may have more kids.

“If I wanted to do it the traditional way and get married, that’s like another chapter,” she said, although the 34-year-old mom laughed at the idea of having more kids right now.

Octomom’s most recent project is a documentary series, in which she let a camera crew follow her around while she cared for her 14 children. The first television special has already aired in the United Kingdom.

Well, maybe. I mean there’s always osmeone who will be crazy enough to get involved with this woman. As David says:

In a better world, women think about who will support their children before they concieve then, not after.    A husband would come in nice but what man wants an instant familyof fourteen children with mentally deranged mother?

What we have here, people, is a mental illness being supported as a “lifestyle”, and the results of that support.

Octomom says she spends $1000 in food per week, 4.5 gallons of milk a day, and $10,000 for five nannies for $10,000 a month, in addition to other expenses.

She made perhaps a quarter million for that recent project for British TV. Apparently she plans to do the same thing for American TV, and is shopping the project around as you read this. I find fascinating that so called “reality television” should end up focusing on the absolutely surreal.

I agree, certainly, that the payment for the excessive offspring is severe.  She’s got herself a problem.  The thing is, it’s a self made problem.  At least, insofar as she’s the one who went in for the procedure fourteen times. And I wonder how much of the cost of those procedures was also supported by taxpayer funding.

Look,  I’m certainly not going to encourage the government to become involved in limiting the number of children per couple, or for that matter, per individual.   That way for example, lies China and it’s strict two child policy. If you can pay for the kids, fine.  Yet,  not paying for such children out of governmental largess seems to be a natural limit on such excess that has been removed by political correctness.  . The funny thing is, that we don’t even consider that option , because we are told paying for those children out of governmental largess is the humane thing to do. it’s just conservative meanies who consider the matter any other way.  Or, so we’re told.

Perhaps the biggest part of all of this, (and I note with irony the one part of the story that’s being missed)  is the vanishingly small chance that any of these children are going to come out of all of this with anything even remotely  resembling a normal life.   Funny how the “child welfare” people so interested in paying for tehse kids, never bothered to raise that question very loudly.

I suppose verbally beating up on mental midgets like George Monbiot, is all too easy.  Thing is, somebody’s got to do it. He’s still trying to minimize the damage of the global warming theorists and their deception , their outright lies, being revealed as such. (And lest we forget, he’s been the one out on the front lines pushing their deception as science fact for years, now.) Observe:

George Monbiot, Global Warming Alarmist

I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.

The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people’s denial. Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We’ll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

As Bugs Bunny used to say, what a maroon.  The “wild claims” that he mentions here are the fact of the matter.

So what we have here is a double irony.  Georgie’s busy remarking about the irony of Global Warming Alarmists and their denial as to how damaging this leak is, at East Anglia, while he himself goes into denial with them, complainig it’s not as bad as it looks. I am reminded once again of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where King Arthur defeats the Black Knight by cutting off all his limbs, and the Black Knight response “it’s only a flesh wound” . Watching Monbiot squirm would be nearly as funny, were it not so damnably serious a subject. He’s trying to appear reasonable,  sure, but let’s face it, he comes off here as being nothing more than stupid and partisan, when he insists that there’s anything of credibility at all in the AGW theory.

And notice, please that from the first line, he makes it all very personal. His biggest concern is written first and then the chief place.   Monbiot has every ounce of his personal reputation on the line here.  After years of spreading nonsense as fact, he’s now in the scramble of his life to try and minimize the damage of that nonsense, and those lies, being revealed as such.  And he fails, miserably.

This is a pattern which has gone on for a generation and more.  We’ve been told since 1970 and slightly before that man was screwing up his own environment.  Funny thing is, the facts once revealed always seem to come out the opposite direction from the environmentalist Chicken Littles like Monbiot..  Not that it stops the global warming theorists from expounding on the matter and using their overcooked theories to try to push us back to the fourteenth century, insofar as technology goes.  They have never been daunted by facts, and have always been supported by the facts that they have made up for the purpose.

Monbiot is quite correct, that this is damaging to the global warming crowd.  Then again, as we’ve seen so often in the past, facts generally are. And as with most of the AGW crowd, (irony abounds) Monbiot’s  denial is palpable.

If you really want to dive into the level of deception going on here from these global warming alarmists, I would suggest strongly that you observe Marc Shepherd’s article in the The American Thinker day before yesterday. I’ll bet that Monbiot won’t ever address that column.

Mind you, that’s only one instance.  Again, I point to the new Zealand government’s climate advisory unit and its own bending of the figures .  I’ve mentioned it here the other day, but I will also mention that Bruce McQuain has a decent writeup of it, along with the charts to give it some bite. Monbiot won’t address that, either.

The only fraud going on here is those who are trying to tell us that the earth is dangerously warming up, and worse, that we had anything to do with it, or even that we could.  The facts are revealed now, and show that the only indication that we have of any kind of global warming whatsoever is generated by means of outright fraud. Global warming is manmade, in computer models.  Not in reality as we’ve been told and told. Monbiot has been at the head of the global warming alarmist parade for some years now.  You’ll forgive me if I’m less than sympathetic what happens when reality rears it’s head as it has here.

Addendum:(Eric) I note Lorrie Goldstein in the Toronto Sun:

If you’re wondering how the robot-like march of the world’s politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed “climategate,” it’s because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don’t give a s*** about “the science.”

They never have.

What “climategate” suggests is many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.

Now they and their media shills — who sneered that all who questioned their phony “consensus” were despicable “deniers,” the moral equivalent of those who deny the Holocaust — are the ones in denial about the enormity of the scandal enveloping them.

…

The problem, however, is those who hijacked science to predict a looming Armageddon unless we do exactly as they say, have already done their damage.

The moment they convinced politicians the way to avert the End of Days was to put a price on emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the unholy alliance of Big Government, Big Business and Big Green was forged.

Big Government wants more of your taxes. Big Business wants more of your income. Big Green wants you and your children to bow down to its agenda of enforced austerity.

What about saving the planet, you ask? This was never about saving the planet. This is about money and power. Your money. Their power.

Amen and Amen. This is exactly what we at BitsBlog have been saying for years.

Over at Watts Up With That? they’ve reposted a story from TBR, which says in part:

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

Fears? Ummm  no.  “Understanding” would be a better word for it.   Global Warming, we are now beginning to understand,  IS in fact man made, insofar as it was created by “scientists” who manipulated numbers in their pursuit of a political agenda.

That house of cards built on a foundation of lies is now beginning to fall apart.

One of the chief reasons that Obama has sought Biden’s advice on a range of pressing foreign-policy questions — most notably, in recent months, on policy in Afghanistan — is that Biden has a deep knowledge of, and an intuitive feel for, people and places still new to the president. He appears to have judged right on Iraq, where the coming elections should constitute a major success both for the Iraqis and for the Obama administration. But that’s only if they actually occur.  Read more at NYTimes Mag

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

• POLS AS PROBLEM SOLVERS: You should read Thomas Sowell’s column today. A taste:
  

  No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems– of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.

  Time was, when Republicans understood this relationship better.  They seem to be getting an education on the subject just now, however. With the exposure of the electorate to what the Democrats have done under the guise of “helping us”, the mood of the electorate is decidedly swinging toward the reduction of the role of government in each of our lives.  The Democrats, who despite the evidence in front of all of us still think government is the way to solve our problems, Wilmer understand that mode, nor react properly to it, and therefore will never be able to capitalize on it.  The Republicans, on the other hand, have a somewhat better chance than zero of being swept back into power on the wave that’s coming through here in 2010 and 2012 .  How well they do these two election cycles is, I suggest, precisely commensurate with how well they understand that government is not the friend of the individual, nor, in the end, of the collective.  Then, too, understanding it, and reacting appropriately, are two different things , also.

• INSANITY? So, I see Nidal Hassan will plead insanity , as regards the charges of murder at Fort Hood.  I suppose, that from our perspective, his actions could very easily be labeled as signs of insanity. To my mind, however, the question that needs to be asked revolves around an awful lot of Islamic terrorists, anymore.  I submit that Hassan is one of these, at least.  And I wonder how many other terrorists will use insanity as a legal defense, once they are brought to the shores to stand trial?
• IT’S BAAAAAACCCCKKKKK….. once Eliot Spitzer officially became “client number nine” the trooper gates Kendall was pretty much forgotten about.  However these days that scandal is still being investigated.  Now, though  Spitzer himself is busy giving lectures on ethics.  That seems to me rather like Don Imus giving lectures on sobriety.
• BUSTED AGAIN: The New York Times is known for it’s leftie staff… and Founding Bloggers has one on the hook apparently. I’ll toss the link, but since Founding Bloggers seems to be under attack, I’ll post the whole of the post, at least for now.
  

  A few minutes ago, we received the following comment attacking Glenn Reynolds for his observation that “every promise has an expiration date” (Emphasis added in red):

  “Regardless, Glenn Reynolds is correct when he says, “every promise has an expiration date.”

  Say what? Didn’t you mean to say, Glenn Reynolds is taking a false cheap shot at Obama, today like every day?

  What kind of idiot didn’t notice that Obama campaigned on escalating the war in Afghanistan?

  Did the same idiots not notice that Obama has already DOUBLED the number of troops in Afghanistan since taking office?

  If you don’t know what in blazes you are talking about, then by all means, STFU, Glenn Reynolds.

  Sometimes when we receive a comment or email that contains a personal attack, or unwarranted vulgarity, we run the IP address of the commenter to see where the comment might be coming from.

  Imagine our surprise when the IP address for the above comment (IP: 170.149.100.10) resolved to the New York Times!

  NetRange:   170.149.0.0 - 170.149.255.255
  CIDR:       170.149.0.0/16
  NetName:    NYTCO
  NetHandle:  NET-170-149-0-0-1
  Parent:     NET-170-0-0-0-0
  NetType:    Direct Assignment
  NameServer: NS1T.NYTIMES.COM
  NameServer: NYDNS1.ABOUT.COM
  NameServer: NYDNS2.ABOUT.COM
  Comment:
  RegDate:    1994-05-18
  Updated:    2008-06-03
  
  RTechHandle: ZT84-ARIN
  RTechName:   The New York Times
  RTechPhone:  +1-212-556-1234
  RTechEmail:  [email protected]

  OrgName:    The New York Times
  OrgID:      NYT-1
  Address:    229 West 43rd Street
  City:       New York
  StateProv:  NY
  PostalCode: 10036
  Country:    US

  Our question… is this an intern or a staff member who is trolling blogs, sticking up for Progressive ideologues and telling Glenn Reynolds to “STFU?”

  At a way to keep it real classy NYT!

  (Shrug) Yeah, well, given the site is nigh on inaccessible now I have to wonder if someone isn’t playing the protector of all things left.

• MORE ON SPARKMAN: What I didn’t mention about Sparkman yesterday I didn’t know myself… he rigged his death to look like a lynching. Insurance money, being the reason. So far no comment from the leftards… and certainly nothing resembling a retraction.