Actually, I'm from New York

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
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12345

Several times in recent days, most recently at about 9:50 this morning, the Dow was at 12345.

Hat tip: The Honorable Mom.

The UN does it again

Anne Bayefsky:

On November 17, 2006 the UN General Assembly "reconvened" its "Tenth" Emergency Session to condemn Israel. The Tenth Session began in 1997and has now been reconvened 14 times. No other emergency session of the General Assembly has occurred on any other subject in these ten years - not even on Darfur, Sudan with 2.5 million people displaced and over 400,000 dead. And once again, the General Assembly adopted another resolution condemning Israel without mentioning Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran or Syria, which are openly acting to bring about Israel's annihilation. Just seven of the UN member states voted against the resolution – the United States, Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau. The European Union voted in favor.

In the midst of this display of visceral hatred of the Jewish state and the Jewish people, inimical to everything the UN was created to oppose, came a singularly powerful voice for reason, dignity and honesty – Ambassador John Bolton. The crowd assembled in the General Assembly hall was hostile to the man and to the country he represents. But Ambassador Bolton took the podium and spoke with no rancor and no double-talk. Here is part of what he said: "This problem of anti-Israel...is endemic to the culture of the United Nations. It is a decades-old, systemic problem that transcends the whole panoply of UN organizations and agencies...The consequences of this persistent, unconstructive, biased approach are painfully clear - not one single Palestinian is helped and the United Nations continues to be discredited by its inability to confront...the Israel-Palestinian conflict in a serious, responsible manner."

[ CONTINUED ... ]

Nobody clapped – in contrast to the applause which the same crowd had lavished on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez when he referred to President Bush this past September as the devil. John Bolton, however, wasn't looking for accolades. In a room where the US has one vote among 192 states, he simply spoke truth to power. "We believe that the United Nations is ill served when its members seek to transform the organization into a forum that is little more than a self-serving and polemical attack against Israel or the United States."

Gaza terrorists implicitly recognize Israel's moral authority

Did you see yesterday's news about Gaza?

In an effort to reduce or eliminate casualties, Israel alerts a leader of a Palestinean terrorist organization to evacuate the area before commencing air strikes.

The leader of the Palestinean group--which has a history of deliberately targeting Israeli civilians for death--uses Palistinean civilians as human shields.

Can there be any doubt as to where the moral authority lies in this case? The terrorists themselves recognize that Israel respects human life more than they do.

A bit more background: The terrorist organization in question, the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), is a Palestinean group which, among other activities, deliberately and admittedly targets civilians for death. Read background on PRC here, here and here. Recent PRC activities have included lobbing shells into populated Israeli towns.

When Israeli officials decided to take out the home of PRC leader Mohammed Baroud with an air strike, they called a few minutes ahead to alert Baroud to evacuate his house. Instead of evacuating, Baroud headed to his local mosque and rounded up civilians to serve as human shields. The Israelis saw this and cancelled the air strike.

Milton Friedman, RIP

Milton Friedman has died.

President Bush said of Friedman in 2002:

He has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision: the vision of a society where men and women are free, free to choose, but where government is not as free to override their decisions.

That vision has changed America and it is changing the world. All of us owe a tremendous debt to this man's towering intellect and his devotion to liberty.

More tributes here and links here.

Obits:

• FT
• NYT (via IHT)
• BBC.

Quote of the day

The Belmont Club ruminates on the Democrats' newfound legislative power:

There is now a much smaller chance that the terrorist problem can be resolved at a low level of conflict. There is a greater likelihood that it will be allowed by neglect or paralysis to metastacize into a canker which will develop into a catastrophic confrontation in five or ten years time. A likelihood, but not a certainty.

(Hat tip.)

Vindication for the global cooling alarmists?

"All regions near to or below normal temperature." So reads a report on October 2006 weather from the federal government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (via Drudge).

Is this vindication, at last, for those in big media who warned us of the dangers of global cooling? Some may accuse the global-climate-change-will-lead-to-worldwide-catastrophe crowd in big media of being scare-mongerers who selectively and unskeptically repeat questionable scientific conclusions in order to produce sensational stories. But the NOAA data may provide some evidence that the global-climate-change folks were more right than we knew. Did we let their warnings of three decades ago go unheeded?

Here is what big media was writing:

• From a June 24, 1974, article in Time entitled "Another Ice Age?":

  [W]hen meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.
  
  Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F....
  
  Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface could tip the climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred years.

• From a an April 28, 1975, article in Newsweek entitled "The Cooling World":

  There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.... The central fact is that ... the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists... are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. ...resulting famines could be catastrophic....
  
  A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

Update: Apparently my humor is not transparent to everyone. Yes, I understand that one month does not make a trend. And yes, I understand that NOAA essentially believes in global warming. (Here is what NOAA writes on the matter: "Most striking is the fact that each record reveals that the 20th century is the warmest of the entire record, and that warming was most dramatic after 1920.")

Quotes of the day

I'm sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?--Jim Garaghty

Wait a minute. Iraq had WMD programs?!? Iraq was 'on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away'? ... And here I thought Bush lied.

Seems that the New York Times owes Judith Miller an apology. Or at least a hat tip.--TigerHawk