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Earl Aagaard’s opinions about everything that interests him. Og also enjoys gardening, travel, reading, woodbutchery, and lots of other stuff.

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Monday, February 21, 2005

FOX-HUNTING APPEARS TO HAVE A FUTURE, DESPITE THE BAN!

Almost 100 foxes were reported killed by hunts across Britain yesterday during a mass show of defiance by foxhunters against the Government ban on their sport….each (hunt) insisted that they had done so in accordance with the new law permitting foxes to be flushed out by no more than two hounds and shot….At the Duke of Beaufort’s in Gloucestershire, the atmosphere was one of noisy exuberance. The hunt master, Capt Ian Farquhar, told a large crowd that he had wept for his hounds at breakfast. He concluded by borrowing words from Winston Churchill: “He said, ‘We must keep buggering on.’ I intend to keep buggering on.”

Looks like there’ll always be an England!  Tally Ho!

  Read the whole article…

Posted by Earl on 02/21 at 10:38 PM
Miscellany • Politics • International • Comments •

A BIT OF GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ - SUNNIS NOW *WANT* TO BE INVOLVED!

“As the Shiite majority prepared to take control of the country’s first freely elected government, tribal chiefs representing Sunni Arabs in six provinces issued a list of demands — including participation in the government and drafting a new constitution — after previously refusing to acknowledge the vote’s legitimacy.

“We made a big mistake when we didn’t vote,” said Sheik Hathal Younis Yahiya, 49, a representative from northern Nineveh. “Our votes were very important.”

Since al-Sistani of the Shia is reaching out to the Sunni, this looks like very good news, indeed.  Via cigarsinthesand     Read the rest….

Posted by Earl on 02/21 at 09:53 PM
Politics • Iraq • Comments •

NOW THEY TELL US!!  “RAISING CHILDREN AS VEGANS ‘UNETHICAL’”

A leading US nutritionist today claimed that vegetarian and vegan parents are damaging their children’s health by denying them meat….Prof Allen conducted a study of impoverished children in Kenya, and found that adding as little as two spoonfuls of meat a day to their starch-based diets dramatically improved muscle development and mental skills….Allen added. “Had these children received these foods earlier in life, or their mothers received them when they had been pregnant, or people could receive them throughout their lives, we think that the improvements in human capital development would be even more dramatic.”

Makes you wonder why some of that US$15 Billion for condoms isn’t spent on two   daily spoonfuls of meat for pregnant Moms and their children, doesn’t it?

  Read the whole article…

Posted by Earl on 02/21 at 09:46 PM
Science • Health • Politics • International • Comments •

THE BEST REVIEW SO FAR OF “MILLION DOLLAR BABY” (AND ITS AFTERMATH)

To me, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby is just routine Hollywood product but with a much higher-than-usual schmaltz content. It’s not even worth a review.

Of course, he DOES review the film, and it’s not pretty.  Then, he takes on the really important issue for our culture - what has come after….

Yet the extraordinary thing about the critical commentary on the film, including Eastwood’s own, has been the denial that the movie has any political point at all….In fact, (Maureen Dowd) is the one who appears not to understand art, since it is as stupid to say that Romeo and Juliet promotes suicide as it is to say that Million Dollar Baby does not—at least assisted suicide for the severely disabled. It’s not a point of view with which I agree, but it’s a legitimate point of view. Why doesn’t Maureen Dowd defend it?.... I can only conclude that (she) and others on the cultural left have grown so accustomed to disingenuousness in such matters that they prefer here as in so many other areas—the question of media bias, for instance—to keep up the pretense of their own political non-partisanship for the sake of the imagined extra authority it confers on their obviously partisan views.

  Read the whole review…. 

Posted by Earl on 02/21 at 02:36 PM
Miscellany • Comments •

SOME GOOD SENSE ON GLOBAL WARMING OUT OF GERMANY

The polar ice caps are disappearing! The Gulf Stream is soon to reverse! Right? Well, maybe. But calling such apocalyptic theories into question is becoming more and more difficult for skeptical scientists. Meanwhile, the public is getting tired of being fed a diet of fear.

The two scientists who authored this article recently published - in Science, the world’s pre-eminent scientific journal - a refutation of the “hockey stick” beloved of the global warming extremists.  What was the result?  They were personally attacked.

Prominent members of the climate research community did not respond to the article by engaging use in a dispute over the facts. Instead, they were concerned that the worthy cause of climate protection had been harmed.

Other scientists are succumbing to a form of fanaticism almost reminiscent of the McCarthy era. In their minds, criticism of methodology is nothing but the monstrous product of “conservative think-tanks and misinformation campaigns by the oil and coal lobby,” which they believe is their duty to expose. In contrast, dramatization of climate shift is defended as being useful from the standpoint of educating the public.

  Read the whole article…..

Posted by Earl on 02/21 at 01:19 PM
Science • Environment • Comments •

Thursday, February 17, 2005

DEFEATING ISLAMISTS WITH LOGIC?  YEMEN GIVES IT A TRY…....

When Judge Hamoud al-Hitar announced that he and four other Islamic scholars would challenge Yemen’s Al Qaeda prisoners to a theological contest, Western antiterrorism experts warned that this high-stakes gamble would end in disaster.

Nervous as he faced five captured, yet defiant, Al Qaeda members in a Sanaa prison, Judge Hitar was inclined to agree. But banishing his doubts, the youthful cleric threw down the gauntlet, in the hope of bringing peace to his troubled homeland….

“It’s only logical to tackle these people through their brains and heart,” says Faris Sanabani, a former adviser to President Abdullah Saleh and editor-in-chief of the Yemen Observer, a weekly English-language newspaper. “If you beat these people up they become more stubborn. If you hit them, they will enjoy the pain and find something good in it - it is a part of their ideology. Instead, what we must do is erase what they have been taught and explain to them that terrorism will only harm Yemenis’ jobs and prospects. Once they understand this they become fighters for freedom and democracy, and fighters for the true Islam,” he says.

  Read the rest….

Posted by Earl on 02/17 at 01:51 PM
Miscellany • Religion • Politics • Iraq • Comments •

NEW YORK LIBERALS ARE IN A SERIOUS BIND.  THE ONLY WAY OUT IS TO ROOT FOR BUSH

After the blizzard and before the fashion shows, you may have heard, the elections in Iraq went off extremely well. Remember? Or, like most New Yorkers, perhaps you let that fact slide from your consciousness as quickly as possible . . . Hey, speaking of Fashion Week, what is it with this renaissance in corseting?

Seriously: The success of the elections poses a major intellectual-moral-political problem for people in this city. The cognitive dissonance is palpable….

Each of us has a Hobbesian choice concerning Iraq; either we hope for the vindication of Bush’s risky, very possibly reckless policy, or we are in a de facto alliance with the killers of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. We can be angry with Bush for bringing us to this nasty ethical crossroads, but here we are nonetheless.

  Read the rest….

Posted by Earl on 02/17 at 12:06 PM
Politics • Iraq • Comments •
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