Here are two items from yesterday’s Washington Post email digest. They both mention, in passing, important things.
First is this:
Failure to stop Paris attacks reveals fatal flaws at heart of European security
We read:
Poor information-sharing among intelligence agencies, a threadbare system for tracking suspects across open borders and an unmanageably long list of homegrown extremists to monitor all gave the Paris plotters an opening to carry out the deadliest attack on French soil in more than half a century.
Note: “an unmanageably long list of homegrown extremists”. And how, pray, did that happen? Was there an “unmanageably long list of homegrown extremists” in the heart of Europe prior to mass Muslim immigration? Will that list now become longer, or shorter, with the admission of hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants?
Second, this:
That’s heavy
Climate-change warnings include rising seas and wild weather shifts. But giant flying boulders?
This item is about boulders atop a Bahamian cliff. They appear to be “erratics”, i.e., they were created elsewhere, then brought to their resting place by some mechanical process.
We read:
The idea is that Earth’s climate went through a warming period just over 100,000 years ago that was similar in many ways to the warming now attributed to the actions of man. And the changes during that period were so catastrophic, they spawned massively powerful superstorms, causing violent ocean waves that simply lifted the boulders from below and deposited them atop this cliff.
Whether this is how those boulders actually got there is far from settled. Nevertheless, if the explanation is correct, as James Hansen thinks it is, the lesson we are meant to absorb is: this is what climate change can do!
Another lesson we might take, though, is this: if these boulders were in fact moved, 100 millennia ago, by storms caused by climate change, then here is further evidence that mighty natural processes, having nothing to do with human activity, have always shaped the Earth’s climate. Yet in our hubris we imagine that we are now in control; that if we can only muster the political will, we can actually pick an average global temperature and “lock it in”, Nature be damned.
What monumental fools we are. In response to a phantasmagorical peril we dream ourselves able to control the oceans, seas and skies, yet we blithely ignore the real and very human peril, now devouring our civilization alive, that was easily within our control all along.
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There’s a well-known joke from back in the day (before the Left invented political correctness), which began with the premise that the Lone Ranger and Tonto were surrounded by a large Indian war party. And the Masked Man says to his Indian companion Tonto, “I think we are in big trouble, Tonto.” To which Tonto replies, “Who’s we, white man?”
“a phantasmagorical peril”
Wow, that sounds serious…….
“What monumental fools we are”
Yes, I was going to point out the same thing, its “them”, not “we”.
As Ed Driscoll wrote this morning:”
Even beyond the Gleichschaltung and crony corporatism (but I repeat myself) aspects of COP-21, it’s tailor-made for a president whose bespoke clothes contain no one within them: As Charles Krauthammer noted last night, Mr. Obama “Lives in His Own ‘Idealistic and Deluded, Undergrad Imagination.’” With governments, it’s about the money. Clothing containing no one within them…that’s pretty much the substance of the Progressive.
Europe has far too many Muslim citizens already buried within their cities. Most cause no trouble while at the same time, offer no help to authorities out of fear or maybe even mild sympathy to the Islamists. The quicker all of Europe can disband and do away with the epicenter of their continent wide threat-Brussels and its rule making machinery- the sooner each country can begin to fight this terror enemy within. Brussels will spend too much time organizing meetings and debating, while Islamists waste no time. If people can be moved within Europe so easily, so can fire arms.
Hey, we’re all about the inclusivity here.
Malcolm, that is part of what is so attractive about this blog…
We also take grammar seriously:
It’s the nominative case “they” not “them”.