***UPDATE***
Welcome friends of Maryaville - Here's a link to the full short story by Dan Simmons...

Read the story here.

 
Author Dan Simmons has penned an astonishing and riveting future history that is must reading for anyone concerned with the ill-named “War on Terror”, and that should be REQUIRED reading for those that are not yet concerned.

An excerpt:

The Time Traveler laughed again, but with more edge this time. "Yes, I know," he said. "We all know . . . up there in the future which some of you will survive to see as free people. Civil liberties. In 2006 you still fear yourselves and your own institutions first, out of old habit. A not unworthy – if fatally misguided and terminally masochistic – paranoia. I will tell you right now, and this is not a prediction but a history lesson, some of your grandchildren will live in dhimmitude."

"Zimmi . . . what?" I said.

He spelled it out. What had sounded like a 'z' was the 'dh.' I’d never heard the word and I told him so.

"Then get off your ass and Google it," said the Time Traveler, his one working eye glinting with something like fury. "Dhimmitude. You can also look up the word dhimmi, because that’s what two of your three grandchildren will be called. Dhimmis. Dhimmitude is the system of separate and subordinate laws and rules they will live under. Look up the word sharia while you’re Googling dhimmi, because that is the only law they will answer to as dhimmis, the only justice they can hope for . . . they and tens and hundreds of millions more now who are worried in your time about invisible abridgements of their 'civil liberties' by their 'oppressive' American and European democratically elected governments."

Read the rest.

You can't make this stuff up, folks.  The left IS beyond parody.  Truth is stranger than fiction, and the left is stranger than you can possibly imagine...

A Nobel Peace Prize winner (and a real 'winner' she is!) while speaking to a group of schoolchildren in Brisbane, Australia declared that "Right now, I would love to kill George Bush."

Delegates at the event - the Earth Dialogues forum - agreed to a 26-point action plan that included the following statements:

"There can be no sustainable peace while the majority of the world's population lives in poverty," they said.

"There can be no sustainable peace if we fail to rise to the global challenge presented by climate change.

"There can be no sustainable peace while military spending takes precedence over human development."

Read the whole, sad thing here.  If there weren't so many of these scary clowns, it would be funny.  But it's not. 

****SCROLL FOR UPDATE****
 
More plain speaking from White House spokesman Tony Snow on the promised Presidential Veto of expanded funding for Embryonic Stem Cell research…

"The simple answer is he thinks murder's wrong," said White House spokesman Tony Snow. "The president is not going to get on the slippery slope of taking something living and making it dead for the purposes of scientific research."

Here, at last, is an exact parallel to the actions of the government of Nazi Germany, that ultimate evil cited so often by those on the left to bash the President, his staff, our military and government in toto.  But it is President Bush that is resisting the siren call of a mythical panacea that costs nothing more than – depending on your point of view – either your immortal soul,  the ethical foundation of human society, or the termination of the 'potential' lives of 'discarded' or cloned fetuses.  Can its advocates really be suggesting that it is acceptable to sacrifice these less than human 'clumps of cells' to advance the knowledge of our 'advanced' culture?

I understand the attraction.  Just as some men on the Titanic were desperate enough to seek a place on a lifeboat at the expense of a woman or child, so many today seem willing to sacrifice untold numbers embryonic humans for the possibility of a life free from the threat of some diseases.  Throughout history many have been tempted to throw the weak to the wolves, that the strong might live another day.  But it isn't right, it isn't noble, and contrary to the rhetoric of proponents, no lives will be saved.  Not even Stem Cells promise immortality.


___UPDATE___

President Bush today delivered his promised Veto, and the AP, ignoring his consistent record of opposition to funding of Embryonic Stem Cell research in the nearly 5 years since his Aug. 9, 2001 speech on the subject, has editorialized their 'news report' to proclaim the veto just an example of political opportunism pandering to conservatives alienated by his stance on immigration.  It is truly amazing that Republicans are able to win any elections with the full weight of the MSM working against them.

So I can play this again. 

So I got to wondering - our watermelon* friends (including actress Daryl Hannah whom I can almost forgive for her politics) would have us solve the high cost of gas, the mid-east crisis, global warming, and probably world hunger too, by simply burning used cooking oil in our cars instead of gasoline - how much used cooking oil is available?

Now, the EIA lists the United States annual gasoline usage for the year 2005 as 383.3 million gallons/day.  I know we’re a nation of obese, fried food addicts, but do we generate anywhere near that much used cooking oil? 

 

Here are my (rough!) calculations…

 

Start with

Q?        How many McDonalds are there?  

A.         Over 30,000 worldwide

 

Ok, I’m going to assume that 25,000 of those are in the United States.  I was going to guess that for every McDonalds in the USA there are 200 other restaurants that use a similar quantity of cooking oil, but research shows that the National Restaurant Association reports 925,000 locations. This yields the shocking fact that more than 1 in 40 restaurants in the United States is a McDonalds!

 

For the oil usage, I found anecdotal evidence that a typical fast food restaurant generates about 100 gallons a month of waste cooking oil – I’m willing to triple that to be on the safe side, to 300 gallons a month – or 10 gallons a day. 

 

So we have 925,000 restaurants generating 10 gallons of used cooking oil each day, or 9.25 million gallons per day.  Compare this to the 383.3 million gallons of gasoline used each day, and we find that perfect recycling of every drop of cooking oil used in America’s restaurants would supply – tada – 2.4% of our fuel requirement! 

 

Save the Planet – Supersize your Fries!

 

 

* Watermelons – Socialists masquerading as environmentalists, Green on the outside and Red on the inside.

I decided to put this post in the Faith & Family topic because my visit to this Oasis in the Desert - Indian Canyons on the land of the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians in Palm Springs, California - was a spiritual experience.

I did several easy hikes there, and then stepped up for a 4 mile hike up Murray Canyon to see the Seven Sisters waterfall.  I was as prepared as I could be and brought 3 liters of water, but still, making that last 1/2 mile across the open desert towards the Andreas Canyon (seen in the distance below) where my car A/C and a cooler with more water awaited, I had the phrase "God-Forsaken desert" float through my head.  Even as it did, though, it was apparent to me that it didn't apply here.  The life - the stunning vitality, beauty, and variety - supported by the canyon streams gainsayed any possibility that God had forsaken this part of the desert.  Indeed, this seemed his summer home.

From an Interview with Ehud Barak earlier today on Fox News :

On negotiating with Hezbullah...

"It's like you negotiating with bin Laden. These guys are getting orders from heaven; what exactly are you going to negotiate?"

I find this candor refreshing, in light of the disingenuous calls for "a proportionate response" from the very same people who decry the "cycle of violence" that a tit-for-tat response perpetuates.  What do you negotiate with people whose only goal is to kill you? 

Would that our statesmen had such clarity.

 

Newt says...

"We need to have the militancy that says 'We're not going to lose a city,' "

Gingrich said in the coming days he plans to speak out publicly, and to the Administration, about the need to recognize that America is in World War III.

He lists wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, this week's bomb attacks in India, North Korean nuclear threats, terrorist arrests and investigations in Florida, Canada and Britain, and violence in Israel and Lebanon as evidence of World War III. He said Bush needs to deliver a speech to Congress and "connect all the dots" for Americans.

He said the reluctance to put those pieces together and see one global conflict is hurting America's interests. He said people, including some in the Bush Administration, who urge a restrained response from Israel are wrong "because they haven't crossed the bridge of realizing this is a war."

"This is World War III," Gingrich said. And once that's accepted, he said calls for restraint would fall away:

"Israel wouldn't leave southern Lebanon as long as there was a single missile there. I would go in and clean them all out and I would announce that any Iranian airplane trying to bring missiles to re-supply them would be shot down. This idea that we have this one-sided war where the other team gets to plan how to kill us and we get to talk, is nuts."

There is a public relations value, too. Gingrich said that public opinion can change "the minute you use the language" of World War III. The message then, he said, is "'OK, if we're in the third world war, which side do you think should win?"


From a Seattle Times blog wherein Gingrich's statements are ridiculed by a lefty 'journalist'.
http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/davidpostman/archives/2006/07/gingrich_says_its_world_war_iii.html

The democrats’ new motto is "A new direction for America."

I think I’d prefer "A Newt Direction for America!"

Newt 2008