Cinco de Mayo

Charge of the Mexican Cavalry at the Battle of Puebla (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Today is Cinco de Mayo, or the Fifth or May. Contrary to what is commonly believed, (including myself), Cinco de Mayo is actually more of an American, or at least a Mexican-American, holiday than a Mexican one. Cinco de Mayo is only celebrated regionally in Mexico, Primarily in the state of Puebla and Vera Cruz. Schools are closed on this day, but it is not an official national holiday in Mexico.

 

Cinco de Mayo celebrates the Mexican victory over the French at the Battle of  Puebla on May 5, 1862. In 1861, the Mexican government was bankrupt and President Benito Juarez suspended payments on Mexico’s foreign debt. In response Britain, France, and Spain sent naval forces to occupy the city of Vera Cruz and demand payment on the debts Mexico owed them. Juarez managed to come to an arraignment with Britain and Spain, but the French, ruled by Emperor Napoleon III had other ideas.

 

Louis Napoleon III was the nephew of Napoleon I Bonaparte. He had somehow managed to get himself elected as president of the Second Republic of  France in 1848, but he decided that president was not a grand enough title for a Bonaparte and in 1851 he seized dictatorial power in France and named himself Emperor. In spite of being the nephew of Napoleon I, Napoleon III was not a particularly aggressive Emperor and was mostly content to have France at peace with other European powers. With the crisis in Mexico, however, Napoleon III saw an opportunity for France to gain an empire in Latin America. The United States was involved in the Civil War and was in no position to try to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. In fact, an additional benefit to French occupation of Mexico would be to give France a base with which to send aid to the Confederate States, keeping the nation divided and unable to resist the French conquest.

 

The French army invaded Mexico with 8000 men under the command of General Charles de Lorencez late in 1861. This army marched from Vera Cruz in April of 1862 and defeated Mexican forces led by Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin on April 28. Seguin retreated to the city of Puebla where the Mexicans had two forts. Seguin had only 4500 badly armed and trained men to defend the city. It seemed likely that the French would crush the Mexicans and march on to Mexico City without and further resistance.

 

On May 5, Lorencez attacked the forts with 6500 men. Against all odds the Mexicans successfully defended the forts against three assaults. By the third assault, the French artillery had run out of ammunition, so the infantry had to attack without artillery support. They were driven back and the French had to fall back. Then, Seguin attacked with his cavalry while the Mexican infantry outflanked the French on both sides of their positions. The French were routed with 462 men killed, while the Mexicans only suffered 83 dead. This unlikely victory has been an inspiration for Mexican patriots ever since.

 

The victory was a short-lived one. Napoleon III sent reinforcements to Mexico and the French were able to conquer the country. Napoleon III placed the Austrian Hapsburg Maximilian as the first Emperor of the Mexican Empire. He was also the last Emperor, since as soon as the United States was finished with the Civil War, the U S government made it clear to Napoleon III that it would not tolerate a French colony on the southern border. Since Napoleon III did not want to fight a war against battle hardened Civil War veterans, he removed the French troops. Maximilian, despite the fact that he sincerely tried to govern Mexico well, was quickly overthrown and executed.

 

Although Benito Juarez declared that the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla would be a national holiday, Cinco de Mayo was first celebrated by Mexicans in the American Southwest, the territories the US gained in the Mexican War. The former Mexicans began to celebrate Cinco de Mayo both as a way to express their Mexican identity and to show their support for the North in the Civil War. It may seem odd that these unwilling Americans would care about a war half a continent away, but the Mexicans were against slavery and Hispanics insisted that California enter the United States as a free state. Cinco de Mayo gained in popularity in the 1960s with the rise of Latino activism and still more in the 1980s when beer companies realized that the celebratory nature of the holiday would be a good marketing tool to sell more beer.

 

So happy Cinco de Mayo, or should I say feliz Cinco de Mayo!

 

 

 

Related articles

 

• Turning Cinco de Mayo into a teachable moment (nbclatino.com)
• Do You Know Why We Celebrate Cinco de Mayo? (blogher.com)
• A Cinco De Mayo Celebration! (bluemountain.com)

 

Fusion Breakthrough

 

If we had anything like a reasonable energy policy in this country, the government would be doing its best to remove regulatory obstacles and excessive costs to building nuclear power plants. Most people think of nuclear power as being much more dangerous than other forms of producing energy and incidents at places like Chernobyl and Fukushima have not helped nuclear power’s image. Still nuclear power is cleaner than any fossil fuel in terms of pollution and waste products and safer in terms of lives lost at all stages of production. In the United States alone, over 100,000 coal miners have been killed in accidents in the past century. The worst nuclear accident in history, at Chernobyl, may have been responsible for 4000 deaths. Even some environmentalists are coming around to the idea that nuclear power is not so bad.

 

Still, nuclear power is not without its drawbacks. So far, when we have spoken of nuclear power, we have meant power obtained by nuclear fission, that is power obtained from the breakup of radioactive atoms, usually uranium. Nuclear fission reactions can yield millions of times more energy than any chemical reaction, which includes burning fossil fuels. There is another type of nuclear reaction which yields even more energy than fission and does not leave any radioactive waste. This is nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the opposite of fission. Instead of a relatively large atomic nucleus breaking apart, fusion occurs when smaller nuclei smash together, forming a larger nucleus, the most common reaction would be hydrogen atoms fusing together to create helium. The actual steps involved are a little more complicated than that, but the details are not important.

 

Every star in the universe is powered by fusion power. We have managed to produce fusion reactions here on Earth in the form of hydrogen or thermonuclear bombs. While these weapons are very destructive, they are not very useful in production the power we need. For that, we need to learn how to produce a controlled fusion reaction. The trouble is that atomic nuclei, being positively charged, are mutually repelled by the electro-magnetic force. Protons and neutrons inside a nucleus are held together by the strong nuclear force, which is far stronger than the electromagnetic force but has an extremely short range.

In order for nuclei to to pushed close enough for the strong force to work, the temperature has to be very high, the core of the Sun is 15.7 million Kelvin or 28 million degrees Fahrenheit. This is a problem.

We can get temperatures that high on Earth, in a nuclear explosion.

 

We can even get temperatures that high in the lab. The problem is that the plasma heated to such a high temperature must be contained, somehow, or it will disperse before any useful reactions take place. There is no substance on Earth that would not be instantly vaporized at that temperature.

 

Which leads me at last to the article in the Independent on the latest progress in making fusion power a reality.

 

An idyllic hilltop setting in the Cadarache forest of Provence in the south of France has become the site of an ambitious attempt to harness the nuclear power of the sun and stars.

It is the place where 34 nations representing more than half the world’s population have joined forces in the biggest scientific collaboration on the planet – only the International Space Station is bigger.

The international nuclear fusion project – known as Iter, meaning “the way” in Latin – is designed to demonstrate a new kind of nuclear reactor capable of producing unlimited supplies of cheap, clean, safe and sustainable electricity from atomic fusion.

If Iter demonstrates that it is possible to build commercially-viable fusion reactors then it could become the experiment that saved the world in a century threatened by climate change and an expected three-fold increase in global energy demand.

 

Nothing is left to chance in a project that has defied potential Babel-like misunderstandings between the collaborating nations. The design, development and construction of a machine that will attempt to emulate the nuclear fusion reactions of the Sun is proving to be a triumph of diplomacy, as well as science and engineering.

“It is the largest scientific collaboration in the world. In fact, the project is so complex we even had to invent our own currency – known as the Iter Unit of Account – to decide how each country pays its share,” says Carlos Alejaldre, Iter’s deputy director responsible for safety.

“We’ve passed from the design stage to being a construction project. We will have to show it is safe. If we cannot convince the public that this is safe, I don’t think nuclear fusion will be developed anywhere in the world,” Dr Alejaldre said.

“A Fukushima-like accident is impossible at Iter because the fusion reaction is fundamentally safe. Any disturbance from ideal conditions and the reaction will stop. A runaway nuclear reaction and a core meltdown are simply not possible,” he said.

Conventional nuclear power produces energy by atomic fission – the splitting of the heavy atoms of uranium fuel. This experimental reactor attempts to fuse together the light atoms of hydrogen isotopes and, in the process, to liberate virtually unlimited supplies of clean, safe and sustainable energy.

Nuclear fusion has been a dream since the start of the atomic age. Unlike conventional nuclear-fission power plants, fusion reactors do not produce high-level radioactive waste, cannot be used for military purposes and essentially burn non-toxic fuel derived from water.

 

The roots of the Iter project go back to 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the former Soviet Union, offered his country’s prowess in nuclear fusion as a bargaining chip in the nuclear disarmament talks with the US, which at that time was pursuing its “Stars Wars” defence system.

Gorbachev and President Reagan, with the support of Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterand, signed an agreement to cooperate on nuclear fusion using the Russian “tokamak” reactor. This was a revolutionary device that could hold the super-hot fusion fuel by creating a “magnetic bottle” within the reactor’s doughnut-shaped vacuum vessel.

Several experimental tokamak reactors around the world, including one at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, have shown nuclear fusion is theoretically possible, but the giant tokamak at Iter will be the first to generate more power than it needs to attain the very high temperatures required for nuclear fusion.

The Iter tokamak machine, which is twice the linear size and 10 times the volume of its nearest rival at Culham, will produce temperatures of well over 100 million C – many times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

It is the first experimental fusion reactor to receive a nuclear operating licence because of its power-generating capacity. For every 50 megawatts of electricity it uses, it should generate up to 500mw of power output in the form of heat.

 

A critical phase of the project will be the injection of plasma – the superhot, electrically-charged gases of the atomic fuel – into the reactor’s vacuum chamber. This plasma, a mix of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, will drive the nuclear-fusion reaction.

The plasma will be heated to temperatures as high as 300 million C to force the atomic nuclei close enough together to cause them to fuse into helium, a harmless and inert waste product that could be recycled as an important industrial raw material. Giant electromagnets powerful enough to trap an aircraft carrier will contain the plasma within a spinning vortex held by the magnetic bottle of the tokamak reactor.

 

There is more to read there. All I can say is hurry up, the sooner fusion power is practical for the large scale production of electricity, the better.

 

 

Related articles

 

• Project Makes NUCLEAR FUSION BREAKTHROUGH! [W/ VIDEO] (secretsofthefed.com)
• One giant leap for mankind: £13bn Iter project makes breakthrough in quest for nuclear fusion, a solution to climate change and an age of clean, unlimited energy – Independent (independent.co.uk)
• Will Humanity ever stop getting an “F” on Nuclear Fusion? (ctg2012alk.wordpress.com)
• Fusion: it’s really hard (mqallen.com)
• Bad science writing 101 (breitbart.com) Well yes, I think there is some sort of regulation to mention climate change in every science article.
• Atomic Structure (onlinechemistry.wordpress.com)

 

Good News

There has been good news lately. First, the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing has been captured alive.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was discovered by a homeowner lying in a boat in the man’s backyard around 7 p.m. The man noticed blood on the boat, spotted a body inside the boat and called 911, according to Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis.

According to police, a helicopter with infrared technology then located Tsarnaev in the boat and noted that he was moving about within it. The helicopter directed officers on the ground to the boat, where they briefly exchanged gunfire shortly before 7 p.m.

Police halted their gunfire and sent hostage negotiators to try and talk Tsarnaev out of the boat Davis said.

But the suspect was not responsive, and after about an hour and 45 minutes, officers went to the boat and took Tsarnaev into custody.

His arrest sparked a spontaneous celebration in Watertown with people high fiving police, chanting Boston strong and USA.

“We got him,” Boston Mayor Tom Menino tweeted immediately after Tsarnaev was arrested. “I have never loved this city & its people more than I do today. Nothing can defeat the heart of this city .. nothing.”

The Boston police department also sent out a tweet in the aftermath trumpeting, “CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody.”

Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, are believed to be behind the bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday that killed three individuals and injured more than 170.

Tsarnaev was then transported away from the scene in an ambulance, as law enforcement officials and onlookers clapped and cheered.

The alleged bomber had been shot by police during gunfire nearly 24 hours earlier, when he and his brother allegedly shot and killed an MIT police officer and then engaged in a shootout with cops.

Police said tonight that there were some 200 rounds of ammunition, as well as improvised explosive devices and homemade hand grenades found at the scene of the shooting. Tamerlan was killed in the gunfire, but Dzhokhar fled on foot into Watertown.

Police locked down a 20-block section of Watertown today and searched door-to-door with heavily armed SWAT team members.

But police said at a press conference after the standoff ended that Tsarnaev had escaped their manhunt and hid himself in the boat just one block outside of the perimeter they were searching.

“We know he didn’t go straight to the boat,” said Watertown police chief Edward P. Deveau. “We found blood in the car he abandoned and we found blood in a house inside the perimeter. We had no information that he had gotten outside the perimeter, but it was very chaotic this morning. We had a police officer who was shot and bleeding.”

“We had a perimeter that we thought was solid and we did that but we were about one block away,” Deveau said.

Tsarnaev is in “serious” condition at a hospital tonight, Davis said.

A senior Justice Department official told ABC News that federal law enforcement officials are invoking the public safety exception to the Miranda rights, so that Tsarnaev will be questioned immediately without having Miranda rights issued to him.

The federal government’s high value detainee interrogation group will be responsible for questioning him.

The Miranda exemption exists to protect the public safety from another attack, according to the official.

The capture was quickly followed by a press conference with a host of law enforcement officials, ranging from the Boston police commissioner to the FBI and the U.S. Attorney who will ultimately prosecute the case, all of whom praised the work of officers and the public.

President Obama condemned the actions of the bombers today, though he warned the public not to jump to conclusions about motivations.

“In this day of instant reporting, tweets, and blogs, there is a temptation to latch onto any bit of information, sometimes to jump to conclusions, but when a tragedy like this happens, with the public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it important to do this right,” Obama said. “That’s why have an investigation, that’s why we relentlessly gather the facts, that’s why we have courts.”

“Whatever hateful agenda drove these men cannot, will not prevail,” he said, “and whatever they thought they could achieve failed because the people of Boston refuse to be intimidated, and we as Americans refuse to be terrorized.”

I am not sure if it would have been better if Tsarnaev had been killed. I hate for him to have the publicity of a trial, but on the other hand it must surely be worth interrogating him. I like what the president said about not jumping to conclusions about his motives. I take it, he does not want us to speculate on whether the Tsarnaev brothers might possibly have been inspired by the teachings of the Religion of Peace. If the bombers had been anti-government Tea Party/militia fanatics, as so many of the left wished, President Obama wouldn’t hesitate to speculate on their motives, and blame the Republicans, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and whoever else was even remotely conservative.

The other good news was earlier this week. The Senate easily defeated Obama’s gun control proposals, marking a clear victory for the cause of liberty. This report from the Washington Post seems to be even more biased than usual.

President Obama’s ambitious effort to overhaul the nation’s gun laws in response to December’s school massacre in Connecticut suffered a resounding defeat Wednesday, when every major proposal he championed fell apart on the Senate floor.

It was a stunning collapse for gun-control advocates just four months after the deaths of 20 children and six adults in Newtown led the president and many others to believe that the political climate on guns had been altered in their favor.

The national drive for laws that might prevent another mass shooting unraveled under intense pressure from the gun rights lobby, which used regional and cultural differences among senators to prevent new firearms restrictions.

One by one, the Senate blocked or defeated proposals that would ban certain military-style assault rifles and limit the size of ammunition magazines.

But the biggest setback for the White House was the defeat of a measure to expand background checks to most gun sales. The Senate defied polls showing that nine in 10 Americans support the idea, which was designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.

“All in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington,” a visibly angry Obama said as he delivered his response to the nation.

The president was flanked by Newtown families, a scowling Vice President Biden and former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was shot in 2011 in Tucson and limped from the Oval Office to join Obama in the Rose Garden.

Anytime Barack Obama is upset and angry is a good day for America. The president and his minions in the media are confused by this defeat, but the matter is not really very complicated. There never was any strong ground swell in public opinion for stricter gun control despite the efforts of Organizing for America and the New York Times. Most Americans have more important things to worry about at the moment, like whether the economy is ever going to get any better or whether they will have a job.

Even when Americans do think about gun control, they are far less likely to support the idea than in past decades. There has been a real change in American public opinion, at least since 9/11 and probably before that. Americans are less likely these days to passively sit back and let the authorities and the experts take care of things. In part this change is the result of a growing realization that the experts don’t really know what they are doing. Compare how many attempts at terrorism have been foiled by Homeland Security as opposed to private citizens paying attention to their surroundings.

Walter Russel Mead has similar thoughts and has manged to tie together these two seemingly separate news items.

Millions of Americans listening to the bulletins on the developing manhunt were either glad they had guns in their homes or thought seriously about getting them. Yet for many professional journalists, and maybe especially those in the Acela corridor in the Northeast, this reaction is incomprehensible.

Put simply, millions of Americans don’t want to depend only on the police for protection. They think about the inevitable interval between calling 911 and the arrival of the cops, and they don’t want to wait helplessly for the good guys to arrive. Events like this one reinforce deeply held public beliefs about the dangerous world we live in and the limits of the state’s ability to protect the people from the bad guys.

This may not strike enlightened and well credentialed Acela liberals as sensible or rational, but that’s not the point. Without understanding the visceral belief that many Americans have, that their “right to bear arms” is about self defense and the right to take care of your own when the State fails you, it’s impossible to understand the politics of gun control in the United States.

The chances of getting 60 votes in the Senate for serious gun control remain slim to none.

I think this is a good thing. The police and Homeland Security cannot be everywhere and as the Tsarnaev brothers, and 9/11, has shown in the War on Terrorism everywhere is potentially a front and everyone is potentially a front line soldier. Rather than trying to take guns away from people, Obama and company would do better to encourage more Americans to be armed.

 

Related articles

• Boston bombing suspect in serious condition after dramatic capture (ctvnews.ca)
• No immediate Miranda rights for Tsarnaev (bluegrasspundit.com) I think it might have been better to read him his rights.
• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Wounded So Bad, Might Not Have Lived If Not Found (boston.cbslocal.com)
• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Under Heavy Guard, Unable To Speak Yet (boston.cbslocal.com)
• Boston Bomb Suspect Captured Alive in Backyard Boat (americansforcommonsenseblog.wordpress.com)
• Dzhokar Tsarnaev, Boston bombings suspect, captured in backyard boat in Watertown (newsday.com)
• Boston bombing suspect — and victims — in same hospital (usnews.nbcnews.com)

Warsaw Uprising

Seventy years ago today the Jews trapped in the Warsaw ghetto rose up against their Nazi tormenters in a rebellion that they knew could only end in defeat. Since their knew they were bound for the death camps, they made the decision to die fighting rather than passively submit to torture and death. In a world in which evil, all too often has its way, it is good to remember great acts of heroism. I read about the commemoration ceremonies they are holding in Poland from Yahoo News.

Sirens wailed and church bells tolled in Warsaw as largely Roman Catholic Poland paid homage Friday to the Jewish fighters who rose up 70 years ago against German Nazi forces in the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

The mournful sounds marked the start of state ceremonies that were led by Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski at the iconic Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. The president was joined by officials from Poland, Israel and elsewhere as well as a survivor of the fighting, Simha Rotem, to honor the first large-scale rebellion against the Germans during World War II.

About 750 Jews with few arms and no military training made their opening attack on April 19, 1943, on a much larger and well-equipped German force. The attack came after most of the nearly half a million inhabitants of the ghetto had already been sent to die at Treblinka.

The insurgency came when it was clear the Nazis were about to send the remaining residents of the ghetto to die too. The revolt was crushed the following month, and the ghetto was razed to the ground, most of its residents killed.

“We knew that the end would be the same for everyone. The thought of waging an uprising was dictated by our determination. We wanted to choose the kind of death we would die,” said Rotem, an 88-year-old who is among a tiny number of surviving fighters and was the key figure at the ceremony. “But to this day I have doubts as to whether we had the right to carry out the uprising and shorten the lives of people by a day, a week, or two weeks. No one gave us that right and I have to live with my doubts.”

Rotem’s uncertainty is in stark contrast to how the world remembers the revolt. Though a clear military defeat, it is hailed as a moral victory for the Jewish fighters, who refused to go without a fight to the gas chambers. It is prominently commemorated in Israel, part of a never-again ethos that stresses the importance of self-defense.

“The Nazi Germans made a hell on earth of the ghetto,” Komorowski said in a speech. “Persecuting the Jews appealed to the lowest of human instincts.”

During the ceremonies, Komorowski bestowed one of the country’s highest honors on Rotem — the Grand Cross of the Order of the Rebirth of Poland. Later the two of them, along with Israeli Education Minister Shai Piron and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a Polish Auschwitz survivor who helped rescue Jews during the war, walked side-by-side to the monument and bowed before it as soldiers laid a wreath for them.

To a military drum, other dignitaries followed them in paying their respects at the dark memorial to suffering and struggle, including Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, members of Poland’s Jewish community and U.S. Ambassador Stephen Mull along with an American survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Estelle Laughlin.

Poland’s chief rabbi and a cantor also recited mournful Hebrew prayers as they were joined by three Polish army chaplains, one Catholic, one Eastern Orthodox and one Protestant. Psalm 130, which starts, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! …” was recited in Hebrew and Polish.

Though the Warsaw ghetto uprising is well-known worldwide, it hasn’t received the same level of attention among Poles, for whom a separate city-wide revolt in 1944 plays a much more critical role in national memory.

Authorities, however, have been trying to change this and to convince Poles that the ghetto uprising is a key moment not just in Jewish but also in broader Polish history.

Newspaper articles in recent days have stressed the Polishness of the Jewish revolt, while officials have encouraged Warsaw residents to get involved in a month of commemorations that ends on May 16. That is the day in 1943 when the Nazis blew up the Great Synagogue, a jewel of 19th-century architecture, to symbolize their crushing of the revolt.

I don’t want to be too hard on the Poles since they suffered almost as much as the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, but I get the impression that exterminating the Jews was the one item on the Nazi agenda that many Poles would have agreed with. That makes the heroism of any Poles who helped the Jews all the more remarkable since they would have been dealing with the anti-Semitism of their neighbors as much as the Nazi authorities.

I suppose that the Ghetto uprising made little or no difference to the German war effort.  It did take the Germans a whole month to crush the revolt and maybe the units used to destroy the ghetto might have made some difference on the Russian front. We will never know. At least these Jews taught the world that the Jews could learn to fight and that oppressed peoples need not passively submit to tyranny.

 

Related articles

• Poland marks 70th anniversary of Jewish Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazis (euronews.com)
• Warsaw marks 70th anniversary of ghetto uprising (timesofisrael.com)
• To sirens and church bells, Poland marks 70th anniversary of Warsaw ghetto uprising (theglobeandmail.com)
• Warsaw marks 70 years since uprising in ghetto (seattletimes.com)
• Warsaw Marks 70 Years Since Uprising in Ghetto (abcnews.go.com)
• Warsaw marks 70 years since uprising in ghetto (kansascity.com)
• Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: 70th anniversary marked in Poland (telegraph.co.uk)
• Remembering those who fought back (thejc.com)
• The ultimate emblem of resistance: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (timesofisrael.com)
• Warsaw ghetto survivor carries out 70-year-old mission (timesofisrael.com)

 

RIP Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, one of Britain’s greatest Prime Ministers died of a stroke today. She took control of a nation in decline and turned things around, at least temporarily, giving Britain one last moment of glory. Unfortunately none of her successors have seen fit to continue her policies, even her own Conservative Party, and so Britain is on the way down again. On the international stage, she was a stalwart supporter of freedom and a friend to America. She, along with President Reagan was instrumental in winning the Cold War and ending Soviet tyranny. She will be greatly missed.

 

Related articles

• Margaret Thatcher Dies (fox17online.com)
• Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dead after stroke (pix11.com)
• Margaret Thatcher Dies of Stroke at 87 (theepochtimes.com)
• Margaret Thatcher dies following stroke – BBC News (bbc.co.uk)
• Rest in peace: Margaret Thatcher has died following a stroke; Update: Twitter mourns (twitchy.com)

 

Dr. Paul Goes to Washington

I don’t have much to say about Rand Paul‘s filibuster that hasn’t already been said, though I can recommend an article from Reason.com: Three Takeaways from Rand Paul’s Filibuster. Here are some excerpts.

Yet since showing up in D.C., Paul has been exactly what Reason dubbed him: “The most intersting man in the Senate” who has offered specific legislation and made extended arguments for a unified vision of limited government that is not only fully within some great lines of American political tradition but urgently needed in the current moment. Senators who pride themselves on their foreign policy expertise and have free-loaded for decades in D.C. haven’t made a speech as thoughtful and out-front as the one he delivered a while back at The Heritage Foundation, for god’s sake.

Make no mistake: Despite the presence of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), yesterday’s filibuster was a GOP-conducted orchestra. But what was most bracing and ultimately powerful thing about the filibuster was that none of the speakers exempted the Republican Party or former President George W. Bush, whose aggrandized view of executive power still roils the sleep of the Founding Fathers, from withering criticism and scrutiny. How else to explain that hard-left groups such as Code Pink were proud to #standwithrand yesterday on Twitter? The same with reliable Rand and GOP critic Eugene Robinson and many others who up until yesterday thought little of Rand Paul.

The filibuster succeeded precisely because it wasn’t a cheap partisan ploy but because the substance under discussion – why won’t the president of the United States, his attorney general, and his nominee to head the CIA explain their views on limits to their power? – transcends anything so banal or ephemeral as party affiliation or ideological score-settling.

The chills started early in the filibuster as Paul said things along the lines of, “If you’re gonna kill people in America [as terrorists], you need rules and we need to know your rules,” and “To be bombed in your sleep – there’s nothing American, nothing constitutional, about that” (these quotes are paraphrases). Those are not the words of a career politician trying to gain an advantage during the next round of horse-trading over a pork-barrel project. They are the words of a patriot who puts his country first and they inspire accordingly.

A year or so ago, we were debating whether the government had the right to force its citizens to engage in particular economic activity – that was the heart of the fight over the mandate to buy insurance in Obamacare. That overreach – and the fear that a government that can make you buy something can also theoretically make you eat broccoli – was at the heart of Rand Paul’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court ruled that in fact, the federal government not only has the right to regulate commercial transactions that take place anywhere in these United States, it has the right to force them to take place.

And now, we’re arguing over whether the president of the United States in his role as commander in chief in an ill-defined, barely articulated “global war on terror” has the right to kill U.S. citizens without presenting any sort of charges to any sort of court. In fact, it’s worse than that, since the president won’t even share his rationale for what he may or may not believe with the country’s legislature.

By foregounding the issues of limited government, transparency, and oversight as they relate specifically to the most obvious and brazen threat to civil liberties imaginable, Rand Paul and his filibuster have also tied a direct line to a far more wide-ranging and urgently needed conversation about what sort of government we have in America – and what sort of government we should have.

I am glad to see that somebody in Washington is doing his job. There needs to be some sort of discussion about when and where it is appropriate to use drones to assassinate suspected terrorists, not just their potential use against American citizens in the United States, but our general strategy abroad. I fear we have been too ready to trust the executive with these sort of life and death decisions. We might have had good cause in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, but perhaps it is time to step back and reconsider what we are trying to accomplish in the War on Terror and how we should go about it. This needs to be a bi-partisan discussion, if possible.

Meanwhile, I am starting to like Rand Paul. I understand that John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and some of the other establishment Republicans aren’t too happy with Paul. Well, they are the ones who have been running the GOP into the ground by not standing for much of anything.

Related articles

• 3 Takeaways from Rand Paul’s #StandwithRand #Filibuster About Drone Strikes (reason.com)
• Rand Paul Filibusters Brennan Nomination (thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Rush to Rand: ‘You’re a hero’ (wnd.com)
• Rand Paul’s filibuster (digbysblog.blogspot.com)
• Rand Paul’s Very Long, Totally Awesome Speech: Reax (dish.andrewsullivan.com)
• Rand Paul’s Moment of Glory (commentarymagazine.com)

 

Pope Benedict XVI to Resign

I was a little surprised to learn that the Pope is planning to resign at the end of the month. Here are some details from the Wall Street Journal.

VATICAN CITY— Pope Benedict XVI said Monday he planned to step down at the end of this month because of his deteriorating physical strength, a move that hasn’t happened in the Roman Catholic Church in centuries and that is likely to pave the way for a new pontiff by Easter.

In a speech in Latin to cardinals, the 85-year-old German pontiff, who has been in office since April 2005, said that leading the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics was a job that required strength of both mind and body. But the pope said his strength had “deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”

A papal spokesman added during a briefing with reporters that Pope Benedict had been thinking about the move for some time, saying it wasn’t due to an illness. Father Lombardi, the spokesman, said the pope would retire to a life of prayer and writing. He also said the pontiff had “no fear” of any potential schism in the church as a consequence of the pope’s resignation.

The resignation, which the Vatican said would take place as of 8 p.m. on Feb. 28, will give way to a conclave, a gathering of cardinals who will elect the new pope. Normally, after a pope dies, there is a nine-day mourning period before the selection his successor. This time, the process can begin right away, said Greg Burke, the Vatican’s media adviser. “This means we’ll have a new pope by Easter,” he added. The holiday falls on March 31 this year.

That’s too bad, though I thought he was too old for the job when he was first selected to be pope. Even though I am no longer Catholic, I always rather like Benedict XVI aka Joseph Ratzinger, if only because the liberals and the secularists hated him.  I hope the next pope is a younger, more dynamic man who is up to defending the faith in an increasingly hostile world.

I didn’t know that a pope was allowed to resign and it certainly isn’t common. The last pope to resign was Gregory XII, in order to end the Great Schism in which two or more men claimed to be the legitimate pope. From 1378 until 1414, there were rival popes at Rome and Avignon, with eventually a third pope at Pisa. All of Europe was divided between allegiance to one or the other pope until the issue was finally resolved by the Council of Constance, after which all of the popes were made to resign in favor of a new pope, Martin V who became pope in 1417.

That was a completely different situation, of course, and I don’t imagine there will be any trouble of that sort today. In fact, I would imagine that by resigning, Benedict will have more influence in the selection of his successor than he otherwise might have had.

Related articles

• Pope Benedict XVI announces his resignation (charlotte.news14.com)
• Pope Benedict XVI to resign, Vatican confirms (metro.co.uk)
• TEXT & VIDEO OF POPE BENEDICT XVI’s RESIGNATION | WORLD SHOCKED (shanepedia.wordpress.com)
• Pope Benedict XVI’s service, previous papal resignations and what happens now (telegraph.co.uk)

What He Said

I haven’t been following Rand Paul‘s career in the Senate very closely, even though he represents our neighboring state, Kentucky. If this video is any indication, he might have a brilliant career ahead of him.

This is great! I’ve been wanting to ask someone these kinds of questions for years. Why can’t I decide what kind of lightbulb or toilet to use. It’s my life.

But, of course it is not about conserving energy of saving the Earth. It is, and always has been, about power. Maybe if we can get a few more Rand Pauls into the Senate, things will change.

Related articles

• Rand Paul: “I’m a realist, not a neoconservative, nor an isolationist” (thebrennerbrief.com) And he is not as stupid as his father, bonus!

Bill Gates Doesn’t Need Money

According to this interview published in the Telegraph, Bill Gates doesn’t need his money. If that is the case he is welcome to send some of it to me.

William Henry “Bill” Gates is a rich man. His estimated wealth, some 65  billion measured in US dollars, equals the annual GDP of Ecuador, and maybe a bit more than that of Croatia. By this rather crude criterion, the founder of Microsoft is worth two Kenyas, three Trinidads and a dozen or so Montenegros. Not bad for a university dropout.

Gates is also mortal, although some of his admirers may find that hard to believe, and as they say, there are no pockets in shrouds. So he is now engaged in the process of ridding himself of all that money in the hope of extending the lives of others less fortunate than himself.

“I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes,” he says, redundantly. “Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. Its utility is entirely in building an organisation and getting the resources out to the poorest in the world.”

That “certain point” is set a little higher than for the rest of us – Gates owns a lakeside estate in Washington State worth about $150 million (£94  million) and boasting a swimming pool equipped with an underwater music system – but one gets the point. Being rich, even on the cosmic scale attained by Bill Gates, is no guarantee of an enduring place in history. The projection of the personal computer into daily life should do the trick for him, but even at the age of 57 he is a restless man and wants something more. The “more” is the eradication of a disease that has blighted untold numbers of lives: polio.

He emphasises that the foundation’s effort is part of a global campaign in which governments must play the lead role.

“The scale of the (foundation’s) wealth compared to government budgets is actually not that large, and compared to the scale of some of these problems. But I do feel lucky that substantial resources are going back to make the world a more habitable place.”

In 1990 some 12 million children under the age of five died. The figure today is about seven million, or 19,000 per day. According to the United Nations, the leading causes of death are pneumonia (18 per cent), pre-birth complications (14 per cent), diarrhoea (11 per cent), complications during birth (nine per cent) and malaria (seven per cent). For Gates, though, polio is a totem. The abolition of the disease will be a headline-grabber, spurring countries on to greater efforts. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will spend $1.8 billion in the next six years to accomplish that goal, almost a third of the global effort.

“All you need is over 90 per cent of children to have the vaccine drop three times and the disease stops spreading. The number of cases eventually goes to zero. When we started, we had over 400,000 children a year being paralysed and we are now down to under 1,000 cases a year. The great thing about finishing polio is that we’ll have resources to get going on malaria and measles.”

The children of Bill and Melinda Gates will never know poverty. They may not become multibillionaires but even the loss to charity of the vast bulk of their parents’ fortune should leave them with a billion or so each.

Gates explains: “The vast majority of the wealth, over 95 per cent, goes to the foundation, which will spend all that money within 20 years after neither of us are around any more.

Bill Gates is not the first tycoon to attempt to give away all, or really just most, of his money. In this he seems to be following the example of Andrew Carnegie, who said,

The day is not far distant when the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was free for him to administer during life, will pass away unwept, unhonored, and unsung, no matter to what uses he leave the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these the public verdict will then be: The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. Such, in my opinion, is the true gospel concerning wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the rich and the poor.

I hope that Gates is successful. I do hope that he is careful about how the money he gives away is being spent. It does no good if the money ends up in some dictator’s bank account. For this reason I hope that he does not let governments play a lead role in the effort to eradicate polio.

Related articles

• I have no use for money, says Bill Gates (ndtv.com)
• ‘Money no use to me’ says Bill Gates (91live.in)
• Gates to fight polio in Africa (bigpondnews.com)

NORAD Santa Tracker

Once again NORAD is tracking Santa Claus as he makes his yearly trip around the world delivering presents. Right now he is in the Balkans. He’s already covered all of Asia and Australia.

Here is a story on NORAD’s Santa tracking facilities. There seem to be quite a few grinches (or trolls) in the comments section.

Update 5:45 The jolly elf is on his way to Poland.

Update 6:30 Santa has just left Paris..

Update 7:30 Santa is in Senegal right now. I think he is getting ready to make the jump across the Atlantic.

Update 7:45 He’s going through the Sahara. It looks like he hasn’t reached Spain or Britain yet, so we still have some time here in America.

Update 8:10 I was right. Santa is over Spain now.

Update 9:00 Santa is flying over Greenland now. I had better get to bed.

Related articles

• Google and Bing battle to track Santa’s sleigh after Norad switches sides (telegraph.co.uk)
• Track Santa with NORAD on December 24 (southgatearc.org)
• NORAD Tracking Santa’s Annual Christmas Journey (pittsburgh.cbslocal.com)
• How To Track Santa’s Sleigh? NORAD or Google? (americanlivewire.com)
• Google and NORAD battle it out with rival Santa Trackers (geek.com)