Just terrible news:

Early details coming in, some say it’s 8.5, others say it’s 8.3. [Update as of midnight Pacific time, now apparently mag. 8.8] Either way, that’s potentially devastating:

SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) – A massive magnitude-8.3 earthquake struck near Concepcion, Chile early on Saturday, USGS reported, shaking buildings and causing blackouts in parts of the capital of Santiago.

A Reuters witness reported shaking buildings and loss of electricity in Santiago.

Reuters is also reporting a “Tsunami warning in effect for Chile and Peru, Tsunami watch for Ecuador”, according to the MSNBC-affiliated Breaking News on Twitter.

Nothing we can do except pray, wait for details and gear up for relief efforts.

According to USGS, it struck offshore near Maule, Chile – a province with a population of a bit more than 900,000. The good news is that the depth of the quake was nearly 22 miles down (contrast to the recent Haiti quake of 5 miles down); the bad news is that the Haiti quake was 7.0 – meaning, I think, that this quake would be something like nearly 20 times more powerful. An 8.8 is rated as a quake which can cause serious damage across hundreds of miles.

UPDATE: Tsunami set to hit Hawaii about 4:19 pm Eastern, a little more than an hour from now. This is quite distant, and it may end up being nothing much, but maybe otherwise.

The sad story:

Various Iraqi bishops have issued a joint message denouncing the continual wave of Islamic violence against Christians in the country, which has left five people dead in the past week. The bishops are demanding that the government take concrete steps to stop the slaughter.

In an interview with the Fides News Agency, Syrian Catholic Archbishop Georges Casmouusa of Mosul called for authorities to “fully assume responsibility for protecting the Christian presence in Mosul. International intervention is necessary to force the central and local governments to act immediately.”

The fifth and most recent victim, a 57-year-old Christian orthodox man, was found dead two days ago.

This surge in violence moved the bishops to call for greater intervention by the local government. Archbishop Casmouusa provided Fides with a copy of the message which he signed together with Syrian Orthodox Archbishop Gregorios Saliba, and Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Emile Nona. The message denounced the violence against “our Christian sons and daughters in the city of Mosul,” with the killing of innocent and peaceful people, thus revealing “a premeditated plan to pressure the Christian Churches to carry out a particular agenda.”

It happens wherever there is an open, Christian community in the Moslem world – and there will be no peace between Islam and the West until it stops.

It is hoped that it will stop of its own accord – that as democratic government spreads around the Moslem world it will take away the ability of rabble rousers to work up anti-Christian pogroms (they would also do anti-Jewish pogroms, if they hadn’t already forced out all the Jews decades ago). First and foremost, Moslem leaders must emerge who will cease to consider Christians to be a pollution.

Of course, there is the fear – the Moslem leaders know that they’d lose a great deal of their adherents if a free choice was given, and such would have to be given, if Christians are to enjoy true tolerance in Islam. But if this change does not happen, then there will be war between Islam and the West, and eventually one or the other will have to succumb.

And rather overwhelmingly:

The House of Representatives reauthorized the Patriot Act for one year Thursday.

The vote was 315-97 .

Many liberals in the House opposed the controversial act, saying it tramps Constitutional protections and civil liberties.

Congress adopted the Patriot Act shortly after September 11th.

Many lawmakers wanted to rewrite or even kill some of the most controversial provisions in the act. But Congressional leaders didn’t have the appetite for a major battle with the economy and health care reform swinging in the balance.

Didn’t you liberals say the PATRIOT Act was shredding the US Constitution and was a tool of Bush’s horrific dictatorship?

Was that all just a talking point?

So says someone who is almost certain to be a liberal – who may even be an atheist, for all we know:

The March issue of the peer-reviewed Social Psychology Quarterly, a journal of the American Sociological Association, will contain an article entitled “Why Liberals and Atheists are More Intelligent.” Though certain to cause some outrage, the investigator has collected some statistically significant IQ evidence that supports his theory.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, poses the theory that the more intelligent people are, the more likely it is for them to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values in response to the challenges of the times.

Kanazawa says that humans are evolutionarily programmed to be conservative – to care mostly about family and friends, to believe in a supernatural power or God because of their paranoia about what they perceive as “unnatural” phenomenon, and, for men, to be polygamous.

“General intelligence, the ability to think and reason, endowed our ancestors with advantages in solving evolutionarily novel problems for which they did not have innate solutions,” says Kanazawa. “As a result, more intelligent people are more likely to recognize and understand such novel entities and situations than less intelligent people, and some of these entities and situations are preferences, values, and lifestyles.”

Peer reviewed? More like pin-head reviewed. There are two false assumptions which you first have to accept as true before you can even start to think liberals and atheists are smarter:

1. That not believing in God is evidence of advanced thinking.

2. That the solutions proposed by liberals were in actual response to novel circumstances and that the solutions were beneficial.

Not believing in God is does not mean you get to allow your mind free range – you have to constrict your thought in various ways lest an invalid thought about God or anything supernatural upsets the whole atheist apple cart. Not believing in God also cuts a person off from the most widespread human activity – worshiping God and subordinating our personal desires to the service of God and our fellow men.

Now, taking a look at some of the solutions to problems:

Governments getting hidebound and corrupt as time goes on? Not a novel problem – but liberals treated it as such. Solution proposed? Revolution not just overthrowing the government, but the entire social structure (France 1789, Russia 1917, eg), leading directly to massive slaughter, war and crime such as was never seen before.

Overpopulation? Never was a problem, but liberals thought it was…and thought it novel in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and still consider it a novel problem in the 21st. Solution? Early on it was to allow poor people to starve – later, as it became known that poor people can vote the concept changed to preventing the poor from having children and murdering the unborn.

Teen pregnancy? Could almost be considered a novel problem in that we used to marry off teenagers but then stopped doing it as more and more people left the farm for the city. Child-bearing and rearing is part of becoming a full adult, and the problem was how to give teens adult responsibilities in a changed environment. The liberal solution? Pretend that teens having sex unmarried in the city in the 1960’s was the same as teens having married sex on the farm in the 1920’s – then teach the kids to have sex at an ever younger age, provide them with birth control and abortion.

A small minority of the people in charge of most business enterprises? While not novel, liberals keep pretending there is an “aha!” moment in this – give them a new set of stats showing this or that alleged disparity between rich and poor, and they go “aha!” and try to convince us this horrible thing, just discovered, must be remedied. Solution? Switch from having a small minority of private individuals running the economic show to having a smaller minority of government individuals. Changing a million mean, old capitalists for a hundred thousand bureaucrats, as it were.

On and on it goes – it either isn’t novel, isn’t a solution or a combination of both…and yet here comes a study purporting to show that liberals are smarter and the evidence for this is their ability to take on novel problems. Just plain and simple stupid.

The world needs more like him:

The son of one of Hamas’s founding members was a spy in the service of Israel for more than a decade, helping to prevent dozens of Islamist suicide bombers from finding their targets, it emerged yesterday.

Codenamed the “Green Prince” by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of the Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, supplied key intelligence almost daily from 1996…

…Mr Yousef, 32, a convert to Christianity who now lives in California, has revealed the intrigues of his years as a spy in a new book called Son of Hamas…

The man just painted a huge target on his back – not only betraying the terrorists of Hamas, but becoming an apostate of Islam. People will be displeased – including, no doubt, his former bosses in Shin Bet, given that spy agencies never like it when someone talks, no matter what the reason.

But we need people in this world who can see what is right and what is wrong and then have the courage to act on that conviction. Mr. Yousef is probably not the perfect man, but he is someone who helped to thwart terrorist attacks, even though his own family was involved in them. That takes rare courage – and it may end up costing him his life.

The toothless Ethics Committee has stated the obvious:

Democrat Charles Rangel, the top tax writer in the U.S. Congress, was admonished on Thursday by a congressional ethics committee for taking corporate-funded trips to the Caribbean, a finding he said defied “common sense.”

The House of Representatives ethics committee concluded that Rangel broke the chamber’s gift rules in taking the trips but it did not immediately release its report. Rangel called a news conference after news accounts disclosed the findings.

Quoting from his copy of the report, Rangel said it found he did not know the trips in 2007 and 2008 were underwritten by corporations, but that two of his staffers did.

“Common sense dictates that members of Congress should not be held responsible for what could be the wrongdoing or errors of staff, unless there’s reason to believe that the member knew or should have known — and there’s nothing in the record to indicate the latter,” Rangel told reporters on Capitol Hill.

“I think right now I have to let the general community make its own judgment,” Rangel said.

Rangel now wants to pretend he’s been vindicated – its just his stupid staffers who messed up! Problem is that the people are on to this scam – and the longer barnacles like Rangel hang around, the worse it will be for Democrats, as a whole.

Rangel, himself, is almost certainly going to be re-elected – and re-elected by a rather thumping margin, in to the bargain. But the odor of corruption around the Democrats grows stronger by the day and it is going to poison the well for other Democrats not in such safe districts.

If the Democrats were smart, they’d dump Rangel – force him off Ways and Means and gin up a primary challenger for him, if he refused to quit. They won’t do it, though, because for decades they’ve gotten away with it and think they’ll get away with it, again.

November will come as quite a rude shock…

It was unexpected by the idiots who think the “stimulus” is working:

The number of new claims for unemployment benefits jumped unexpectedly last week as heavy snows caused layoffs to rise.

In addition, many state agencies in the mid-Atlantic and New England regions that process the claims were closed due to the storms and are now clearing out backlogs, a Labor Department analyst said.

The department said Thursday that first-time claims for unemployment insurance rose by 22,000 to a seasonally adjusted 496,000. Wall Street analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected a drop to 455,000.

Bad weather can cause job losses in construction and other industries sensitive to weather.

Economists closely watch initial claims, which are considered a gauge of the pace of layoffs and an indication of companies’ willingness to hire new workers.

The four-week average, which smooths volatility, rose by 6,000 to 473,750.

Yep, that’s it – blame the snow. Two or three days of snow – in mid-winter – is what caused there to be 41,000 more new claims than expected. In other economic news, Unicorn Ranchers are expecting the new “Cash for Centaurs” program to boost sales in Oz…

Smoke and mirrors, boys and girls; that is all it is…

Only 234 years late, but better late than never:

The inaugural British Tea Party will take place on Saturday in my home town of Brighton, and I’ll be speaking….

Labour has raised more than a trillion pounds in additional taxation since 1997. Yet, unbelievably, Gordon Brown has still managed to run up a deficit of 12.6 per cent of GDP (Greece’s is 12.7 per cent). A far lower level of taxation brought Americans out in spontaneous protest last year.

If you happen to be coming to the Conservative Spring Conference, do please pop in: the Tea Party is five minutes’ walk from the conference venue. It is, however, outside the security zone, and anyone is welcome to come. Oh, and this being England, we’ll be serving actual, you know, tea. I hope to see some of this blog’s readers there.

The Revolution continues to spread – people have had it with government and the pathetic whiners who live off of it.

Its time to clear out the crooks and then get back to work – no more free rides and no more fairy tales from the left telling us how they’ll make it all better…

I don’t know if you are watching the Health Care Reform Summit today…  But, just to show you how much of a sham it is, I’d like to bring up how Obama suggested he cut Republicans “some slack” by allowing  Senator Alexander to apparently go over his allotted time for his opening remarks. Obama said, “Both I and Lamar went a little bit over our original allocated time. I — not wanting to be a hypocrite — wanted to give you some slack.”

Let’s see just how much of a hypocrite Obama is…

Senator Alexander’s opening remarks lasted 13 mins, 10 seconds
Barack Obama’s lasted 14 mins, 36 seconds                        
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lasted 7 mins, 57 seconds
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s  lasted 8 mins, 13 seconds

So Democrats’ opening remarks lasted 30 mins, 46 seconds compared to the GOP’s 13 minutes, 10 seconds. Democrats needed more than double the time to grandstand about a bill that the American people don’t want.

For Lamar Alexander’s remarks, see the extended entry: Continue reading →