schachterrific!

The editorials of Investor’s Business Daily are some of the finest op-ed pieces you will see coming out of the Fourth Estate. In one of today’s pieces, IDB takes a close look at Bibi Netanyahu, and sees a man with a very sharpened sense of history:

Speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Netanyahu cautioned that economic woes are distracting the West from a far greater danger. The former finance minister said that while global economic woes are reversible, “the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a fanatic radical regime” is not.

“We have never had, since the dawn of the nuclear age, nuclear weapons in the hands of such a fanatical regime,” Netanyahu added. Stopping Tehran “remains the greatest challenge facing the leaders of the 21st century at the beginning of the 21st century.”

Its worth the read. Take it or leave it.

From the Associated Press’ crack investigative team, via Yahoo, a great piece of investigative journalism about a captured terrorist who has remained a mystery since 1973. And is about to be released:

In 1973, a young terrorist named Khalid Duhham Al-Jawary entered the United States and quickly began plotting an audacious attack in New York City.

He built three powerful bombs — bombs powerful enough to kill, maim and destroy — and put them in rental cars scattered around town, near Israeli targets.

The plot failed. The explosive devices did not detonate, and Al-Jawary fled the country, escaping prosecution for nearly two decades — until he was convicted of terrorism charges in Brooklyn and sentenced to 30 years in federal penitentiary.

But his time is up.

Read it. This is a definite must read!

From trendwatching.com:

Flickr, the photo sharing site, now boasts more than 33 million users, more than 3 billion images, and was handling 3,087(!) new uploads per minute.

Thirteen hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, while 1 billion videos are watched. A day. And that was LAST year.

TripAdvisor.com hosts over 20 million interviews.

I’m starting a new section called Trains of Thought. These will be links to a series of articles that I think everyone should read, really do not want to lose, but have no logical reason to bookmark them on my browser. So here, immortalized on the internet (provided the articles themselves are not removed), you and I will be able to find them.

Jews in Genes

Just What is Genetically Coded in the History of Judaism?
Crypto-Supersessionism
Why Can’t Muslims Take a Joke?
Why are there so many Jews in comedy?

Take it or leave it.

You know you’re getting old when you see some of your show-biz favorites ringing down that last curtain. And today, two actors I greatly respected for their talents passed away.

Rich Corinthian Leather….

Ricardo Montalban, the suave leading man who was one of the first Mexican-born actors to make it big in Hollywood and who was best known for his role as Mr. Roarke on ABC’s “Fantasy Island,” has died. He was 88.

Of course, my favorite Montalban role was that of Khan Singh in the StarTrek film, Wrath of Khan. The man was definitely creepy. And he was definitely a great choice as Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island. Read the Obit here.

I am not a number, I am a free man!

“I am not a number, I am a free man!” Patrick McGoohan’s character Number Six shouted at the panoptic eye in the sky at the beginning of every episode of the revolutionary ’60s sci-fi TV series The Prisoner. And although the character would come to dominate McGoohan’s life and even chase him out of London following the series’ controversial 1968 finale, “Fall Out,” McGoohan is a prisoner no longer.

Probably one of the all-time great sci-fi tv series, The Prisoner added to McGoohan’s fame after he won American hearts with Secret Agent Man. If you haven’t seen his work, find it, grab some popcorn, and turn off the phone. You can read his obit here.

According to the English edition of Pravda, the Earth is on the brink of a new Ice Age. According to compiled data, we are living at the end of a 12,000 year warming period, and the Earth will now begin to cool down and return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

The theory of ‘anthropogenic (man-made) global warming’, or AGW took a swift kick in the butt this past year as temperatures around the globa fell, bringing us one of the colder winters in a while:

The central piece of evidence that is cited in support of the AGW theory is the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph which was presented by Al Gore in his 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth.” The ‘hockey stick’ graph shows an acute upward spike in global temperatures which began during the 1970s and continued through the winter of 2006/07. However, this warming trend was interrupted when the winter of 2007/8 delivered the deepest snow cover to the Northern Hemisphere since 1966 and the coldest temperatures since 2001. It now appears that the current Northern Hemisphere winter of 2008/09 will probably equal or surpass the winter of 2007/08 for both snow depth and cold temperatures.

The main flaw in the AGW theory is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past one thousand years at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years — evidence which is essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more credible explanation for the recent global temperature spike, based on the natural cycle of Ice Age maximums and interglacials.

Read the 3-page article here. Sorry, Al.

Take it or leave it.

It’s interesting to note how some mainstream media organization subtly attempt to spin the news, and instead of factually reporting events, choose to leave out parts of the story, or use a carefully nuanced adjective or adverb to subliminally overlay the story with threads of directed meaning.

Case in point: This morning’s Gaza Conflict news from Reuters and the AP.

Here is the Reuters head and first paragraph:

Israel rebuffs U.N. resolution and pursues Gaza war

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – Israel rejected a U.N. resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza on Friday and, as jets and tanks again pounded the Palestinian enclave, announced no decision on whether to step up its two-week-old war on Hamas guerrillas.

And here is the same story from the Associated Press:

Israel, Hamas defy UN call for cease-fire

By Matti Friedman and Ibrahim Barzak

JERUSALEM – Israeli jets and helicopters bombarded Gaza Friday and Hamas responded with a barrage of rockets on two cities as both sides defied a U.N. call for an immediate cease-fire.

Interesting difference. But, to me, the best part is in the Reuters paragraph. “Israel… announced no decision….” Isn’t that really non-news? When the speed of news becomes insanely frenetic, suddenly, at this moment, having not made a decision is suddenly newsworthy? And if they decide in an hour? Two? A day? Well, then it becomes news.

Spare me the hype.