The WSJ has an article by Dorothy Rabinovitch describing several CNN interviews of the noted Indian GI tract expert who points to the USA as the cause of the bloodshed in Mumbai.

......commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that "If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules."

In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that "our policies, our foreign policies" had alienated the Muslim population, that we had "gone after the wrong people" and inflamed moderates. And "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay."

All this was a bit too much, evidently, for CNN interviewer Jonathan Mann, who interrupted to note that there were other things going on -- matters like the ongoing bitter Pakistan-India struggle over Kashmir -- which had caused so much terror and so much violence. "That's not Washington's fault," he pointed out.

Given an argument, the guest, ever a conciliator, agreed: The Mumbai catastrophe was not Washington's fault, it was everybody's fault. [my emph] Which didn't prevent Dr. Chopra from returning soon to his central theme -- the grave offense posed to Muslims by the United States' war on terror, a point accompanied by consistent emphatic reminders that Muslims are the world's fastest growing population -- 25% of the globe's inhabitants -- and that the U.S. had better heed that fact. In Dr. Chopra's moral universe, numbers are apparently central. It's tempting to imagine his view of offenses against a much smaller sliver of the world's inhabitants -- not so offensive, perhaps?

Of course, Dr. Chopra has long ago abandoned complicated thought processes like "cause and effect" and of course, examining the fanatical religious woman-bashers and fundamentalist fascisms they adhere to. Perps' complaints and demands are never subjected by Deepak to the light of cold historical reasoning---that tedious obstacle to simplicity and reductionist Oprahfications on the road to Nirvana. Logic and reasoning hamper the good Doctor's serene reduction of complexities to a single unity. Larry King has already arrived at Deepak's end zone of continuous contemplation of the clash of opposites, always reducing such disturbances to the world's one and only source of evil, located in Washington D.C.

I for one believe Deepak should stick to cleansing bowels and ingesting garlic and ginger to facilitate our journey ere we shuffle off this mortal coil! Or perhaps he could be given a seat on Nobel Laureate Al Gore's meteorological Global Warming Cte. in the Obama Green Cabinet to help ward off the inevitable melting of the polar icecaps. Al needs all the advice and help he can get.

Niall Ferguson gives a lucid enlightening excursion through "Planet Finance" and halfway through manages to unearth the culprits in the "subprime market meltdown." The article is a follow-on to his brilliant Empire Falls piece in Vanity Fair in 2006. Here is a punchline from his latest view from Mt. Olympus:

Significantly, a disproportionate number of subprime borrowers belonged to ethnic minorities. Indeed, I found myself wondering, as I drove around Detroit, if “subprime” was in fact a new financial euphemism for “black.” This was no idle supposition. According to a joint study by, among others, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, 55 percent of black and Latino borrowers in Boston who had obtained loans for single-family homes in 2005 had been given subprime mortgages; the figure for white borrowers was just 13 percent. More than three-quarters of black and Latino borrowers from Washington Mutual were classed as subprime, whereas only 17 percent of white borrowers were. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, minority ownership increased by 3.1 million between 2002 and 2007.

He also lays the original idea for low-cost mortgages at the door of the clueless eff-up Jimmy Carter, though there is a lot of blame---Barney Frank and his "husband" at Fannie Mae in the early 90's making the country assume the position for their perv gyrations in the housing market are left unmentioned.

In addition, derivatives and hedges based on math models that conveniently omitted the Crash of '87 and the Great Depression were employed to create another "Extraordinary Delusion [due to] The Madness of Crowds," as Ferguson quotes Mackay's 19th c. perennial classic which the tabloids and their ink-stained wretches perennially neglect. Sadly, many half-dead branches have been pruned and the proligate USA no longer will have China supporting its ridiculous spending habits.

The whole article is extremely clear and devoid of the PR-hack journalism of tabloids like the NYT. And Detroit is a human sewer that deserves Iverson and the Lions!

Canada appears to be sliding into the Bureaucratic Authoritarianism that ensues when a critical mass of bureaucrats, lawyers, and the perpetually offended [insert other fanatical interested parties] combine to become an indigestible block of cement in the national GI tract.

Hopefully, the US will not be taken over by an Oprah-nanny army of little old ladies/shemales in tennis shoes with acute PMS of the mind.

The Wall Street Journal asks at the end of its editorial why Condi Rice agreed to a second term for this obvious eff-up. Here's the gist of the editorial:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed last week that it had discovered a "significant number" of chemically processed uranium particles at a suspected Syrian nuclear site destroyed last year by Israel. The IAEA also reported that satellite images of the site taken prior to its destruction had the markings of a nuclear reactor.

"People and countries are innocent until proven guilty," the Egyptian told an IAEA committee studying the request, according to a transcript of his comments obtained by Agence-France Presse. "Technical cooperation programs to any member states should not be blocked, delayed or otherwise hindered for mere suspicion or unproven allegations."

Mr. ElBaradei has an interesting idea of what "mere suspicion" amounts to. Syria bulldozed the wreckage of the destroyed reactor -- the existence of which it has always denied -- shortly after the Israeli raid. It later limited IAEA inspectors to a single visit to the area, and has ruled out an IAEA request to inspect three other sites suspected of being part of a covert nuclear program. Those three sites were also landscaped by the Syrians after the IAEA requested visits, according to the agency's chief investigator.

By its own admission, the IAEA knew nothing about the Syrian reactor, much less of North Korea's involvement in it, until it was destroyed. For an agency charged with enforcing the nonproliferation regime, that's bad enough, if not altogether surprising. That Mr. ElBaradei should now abet Syria's nuclear ambitions -- even as it obstructs his own inspectors -- is astonishing.

It's obvious that the Terrorism-Abetting Arm of the UN named IAEA & its Al Qaeda Fellow Traveller Mohamed El-Baradei are dangers to international security as is the United Nation. Although the UN remains useful in keeping some failed states from spilling their murderous barbarism abroad, it actually aids terror states like Syria and Iran in achieving their goals. The obviously recessive product of generations of inbreeding named El Baradei simply wants Muslims to be able to build a bomb and the feckless spineless bureaucratic elites, including Ms. Rice, are content to allow the inbred Muslim degenerates a chance at building a bomb.

Russian Tech lags far behind the West's for many reasons, but lack of safety measures is a major factor. When I was in Baku, I was warned not to eat the local Caspian Sea seafood because a sunken USSR nuke sub was on the bottom 18 miles offshore and leaking toxic nuke materials into the surrounding eco-systems.

Not to mention the problems with the Kursk and other Russian-model eff-ups over the decades [I just saw among the "destroyed in seconds" Discovery Channel show a couple of Soviet Air Show disasters, sparkiing this admonitory blog].

Perhaps rather than a military threat, the chief Russian menace to the region is to Venezuela as a public health threat!

Slate has a nice piece describing the "volte face" that Murdoch's NY Post has done vis-a-vis Obama. Nowhere, of course, does Slate ever avert to the newly-converted ultra-lib opportunists like Arianna Huffington [nee Stassinopoulos] who once upon a time in the nineties strutted around posing at that time as a Republican-oriented conservative. Nor the tranny-in-training emo-boy Andrew Sullivan who formerly posed as a Catholic Irish homo conservative, but now is a senior bitch-boy on the gay-friendly far left.

Interesting how Palinomania continues on the far left's party line blog-vibe while she is now being treated more civilly by the serious media. And how rapidly rat-bitches like K. Parker jump ship when confronted with a job at the Washington Post.

No whores like old whores.....

The NYT notes that a recent study concludes that people who describe themselves as "happy," one of the three basic rights as Americans we all have [life, liberty and the pursuit of......], watch less TV. After watching UMiami get slaughtered on ESPN last night, I can see why.

Seriously, the NYT naturally downplays the concomitant conclusion, that people who "socialize, go to church, volunteer..." are happier. Except for football and other sports, I watch little TV nowadays. The advent of High Def has made that more pleasurable, but my distaste for everything except Man From Mars and Gossip Girl remains strong, except for Jeopardy.

Maybe I'm happier than most....?

Theodore Dalrymple watches our society totter and crumble just as he observed the Brits disintegrate under the pressure of social engineering to produce social justice, which is an ever-receding target which will never be attained:

The Sunday before the American election, the Observer in London published an assessment of President Bush’s legacy by several well-known American writers. One of them, Tobias Wolff, wrote: “When I see someone being rude to a waiter, or blocking the road in a Ford Expedition, or yakking loudly on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, I naturally assume they voted for George W. Bush.”

Now, President Bush’s credentials as a conservative might well be questioned; but I take it nevertheless that he was elected preponderantly by conservative voters. Is there, in fact, a connection between being a conservative and having the selfish thoughtlessness (of the kind with which we are all familiar) that Wolff describes?

My guess is that there is no such connection, but rather the reverse. Modern conservatives tend to see the locus of appropriate moral concern more in personal behavior than in social structure (I am not here concerned with whether they are right or wrong). They believe in personal responsibility rather than causation by abstract social forces. They do not believe in entitlement, their own or anyone else’s, or in an indefinite extension of rights. They do not believe in perfection, and they think that even improvement usually comes at a cost.

Modern liberals, by contrast, tend to focus their moral concern more distantly from themselves, on the more abstract political and economic sphere. For example, the personal sexual code does not concern or worry them much unless it is restrictive. They believe that bad behavior finds its origin in social forces rather than in man’s soul. They believe in everyone’s entitlements, which are never met quite sufficiently and need to be extended endlessly. For them, the perfect society will result in perfect people.

Which outlook is more conducive to good manners? It seems to me, a priori, the conservative rather than the liberal: for what can the daily personal conduct of a single man add to or subtract from the sum of human goodness or evil, happiness or misery?

Wolff himself supplies evidence in favor of my thesis. Acknowledging the meanness of what he is about to say, he writes, “When a tornado tears off a few roofs in Texas, I think, serves you right!” This reminded me of something I once heard from a man who organized international intellectual conferences in Amsterdam: the only people who ever complained to him about their lodgings were those who were most publicly concerned with social justice.

“That’s some of what the last seven years have done to this writer,” Wolff adds. So it’s not really his fault that he sees fit to express this ignoble thought to an audience of hundreds of thousands. It’s the last seven years that did it. If they had been fat instead of lean, he would have been sweetness and light, and would have taken the Texans to his heart.

Frauds and mountebanks like Tobias Wolff will always claim they became monsters because "someone turned them into one..." This entitlement monkey will probably thrive in the sewage of a society vulgar enough because of liberal pretensions and lack of boundaries to turn him into an affluent monster in the next four years.

"Qualis artifex perior" is what Wolff really means....

The RICO Crime Spree known as the Democrat Party continues its election fraud---presumably employing non-existent Repub "fraud" to justify their high crimes and low-life political methods.

Minnesota is following the state of Washington which managed to steal a governorship in the 2004 election through massive "discovery" of missing ballots. The reason Dems commit these election crimes is that government to the Dems is everything----Repubs have the sensible attitude that it is a necessary evil, Dems believe it must grow until government dominates the economy and public life through Bureaucratic Authoritarianism, a creeping unaccountable power-grab by judges, "administrative law," and other ways to avoid the Constitution, which the Dems regard as an unnecessary evil.

Obama even admitted in a candid interview while he was a State Senator that "redistributive" social and economic justice should replace private property and that the Constitution was a flexible document that even the hyper-liberal Warren Court [Ike called appointing Earl Warren as Chief Justice "the biggest mistake I ever made"] had not gone far enough to wrest property from those who owned it to "redistribute" property to those who deserve it, i.e., coincidentally traditional Dem constituencies!

The repulsive porn "comedian" Franken is even more ridiculous than Gov. Gregoire of Washington, who stole the governorate with the assistance of entrenched bureaucrats and criminal Dem operatives across the state. The Repubs have ignored gigantic voter fraud in states like Missouri and Wisconsin [the latter in both 2000 & 2004] simply because they won the presidency nation-wide. In the meantime, Dems like the execrable Bobo Boxer of CA were making fools of themselves by claiming that Ohio was not legally won.

The Dems will continue to use illegal and extra-legal means to circumvent the public will, as in the recent votes banning gay marriage, simply because these arrogant political commissars KNOW BETTER than the poor benighted voters! Prepare yourself for mysterious bureaucratic manipulations and more electoral fraud as the Red Star Tribune cheers on the vote stealers in MN to give that state a Senator as silly and stupid as the average inhabitant [I lived the worst four years of my life in MN].