Unbelievable. But not surprising - Hamilton drove with his balls instead of his brains, which is not a bad thing (think Gilles and Mansell) but it's a trait that doesn't win many championships. But I suspect he'll learn from this and should be proud of finishing his rookie season in second, one point behind the champion; we surely haven't heard the last of Lewis Hamilton. And Alonso... well, fuck him, I hope he rots.
Raikkonen earned this one, he kept his cool all season long, drove with both balls and brains, and took it home by one championship point when almost everyone wrote him off (including me). Well done Kimi.
And about those points - I've been on the record for years arguing that the driver's world championship should be awarded to the one with the most wins in a season, and that points should only be counted for the constructor's title and to break ties between drivers with an equal number of wins (as in 2006, which saw Schumacher and Alonso each with six victories). By this reckoning, Mansell would have been World Champion in 1987 (six wins to Piquet's three), and Senna would have been a 4-time world champion (six wins in 1989 to Prost's four). My way is clearly the best way, but Bernie won't take my calls...
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Nearly half of Americans think the U.S. economy is in a recession — close to 46 percent of those surveyed in a new CNN-Opinion Research Corporation Poll out Thursday morning say the country’s economy is in a recession while 51 percent of those questioned say no.
The poll finds a major difference of opinion between black and white Americans — 69 percent of black Americans questioned in the survey say the country’s in a recession while only 42 percent of white Americans feel the same way.
According to CNN’s Ali Velshi, the National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion. Expansion is the normal state of the economy; most recessions are brief and they have been rare in recent decades.”
The recession numbers may be having an impact on President Bush’s approval rating.
Thanks to CNN for taking the time to define what a recession is. It occurs to me that statistics like GDP, real income, employment rates, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales and the like, are all numbers that economic experts (such as at CNN) would have at their fingertips. If the USA was really in a recession, I'd think they would have published some of these stats to support this vague, nebulous feeling that close to 46% of those polled have. I'm mean, wouldn't that be newsworthy - a full 54% of those polled think we're not in a recession, even though the numbers prove them wrong.
Let's take a look at some of these statistics, courtesy of the US Departments of Commerce and Labor:
GDP: Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the second quarter of 2007, according to final estimates released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP increased 0.6 percent.
Income: Personal income increased $40.2 billion, or 0.3 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $37.2 billion, or 0.4 percent, in August, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $54.8 billion, or 0.6 percent. In July, personal income increased $61.5 billion, or 0.5 percent, DPI increased $60.3 billion, or 0.6 percent, and PCE increased $37.3 billion, or 0.4 percent, based on revised estimates.
Employment:Employment rose in September, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 4.7 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Departmentof Labor reported today. Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 110,000 following increases of 93,000 in July and 89,000 in August (as revised). In September, health care, food services, and professional and technical services continued to add jobs, while employment trended down in manufacturing and construction. Average hourly earnings rose by 7 cents, or 0.4 percent.
Does that sound like a recession to you? I didn't think so.
So, why not report these numbers? Were I a cynic I might surmise it's because they show that we're not in a recession - at least not by any definition of "recession" accepted by a rational person with even the most rudimentary understanding of economics - and the sole reason for this article is to make people, who are either too lazy or too stupid to do their homework, believe we are - and quickly, too, 'cause the 2008 is coming up! Indeed who, other than a cynic, would ever question the motives of a virtuous bastion of journalistic integrity such as CNN?
I first realized the Nobel Peace Prize was nothing more than a left-wing popularity contest in 1991, when the prize was awarded to the man who ended the Cold War and set Eastern Europe on its course to freedom and democracy.
No, stupid - not Ronald Reagan. We're talking about Mikhail Gorbachev.
This, I believe, is when it became clear to me that the Nobel Peace Prize is a fraud, and the committee that selects it's winner each year is simply a bunch of Euroweenies that select whomever will embarrass the United States the most. Hence follow-up winners like Yassir Arafat, Kofi Annan, and Jim E. Carter. Powerline does a nice job of detailing "this subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers, murderers, thieves, and no-accounts going back about twenty years." Carter's win in particular confirmed the notion that the peace prize has little to do with peace, when the head of the selection committee actually had the honesty to come out and say that Carter was chosen in order to slap George W. Bush in the face over Iraq. Any self-respecting American would have told them to shove the award, but then who would ever describe Jim E. as "self-respecting"... or "American", for that matter? Jim E., like all good lefties, surely considers himself a citizen of The World Community™; America just happens to be the place he escaped from. But I digress...
Today we learn that the recipient of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace is none other than Earth's Preeminent Climatologist. What global climate has to do with "peace" escapes me, but there it is. Fortunately, this time the award has nothing to do with politics or embarrassing the Bush administration; I know this because they said so:
"We face a true planetary emergency," Gore said. "The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."
The Nobel committee chairman, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, asserted that the prize was not aimed at the Bush administration, which rejected Kyoto and was widely criticized outside the U.S. for not taking global warming seriously enough.
This explanation leaves me a little confused. One would think"Peace" refers to a state in which two (or more) nations (or tribes, or ethnic groups, or some other type of political entity) get along with one another. That would make "peace" implicitly a political matter. If the alleged climate crisis is "not a political issue," how can it be a matter of peace? Will all wars end once we set the thermostat to a comfy temperature? Are jihadists beheading infidels because the polar ice cap is shrinking? What exactly is the connection between climate and peace? Ah, the answer is all the wat at the bottom of the article:
"It is a question of war and peace," said Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. "We're already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.
You've surely heard of the "climate wars," right? That's why World Community™ hasn't been able to stop the genocide in Darfur - because they've been busy keeping the peace between nomads, herders and farmers in the Sahel belt. Somehow I get the feeling that they actually believe the bullshit they spew.
I'm just an ignorant Global Warming Denier, but I believe that climatology is a scientific field, thus Earth's Preeminent Climatologist would be more apt to win one of the Nobel Prizes for science rather than the overtly political Peace prize. After all, political honors should be bestowed upon politicians, and Al Gore is nothing of the sort. Well, certainly not since the year 2000 when he retired from politics and embarked upon his brilliant climatology career. Still, I can't shake the idea that the reason Gore was not awarded a scientific award, perhaps, was that his assertions of impending doom and catastrophe would then have to hold up under real scientific scrutiny. Why spoil a perfectly good Nobel Prize with inconvenient details like that?
And so it goes to the final race in Brazil! After being handed the championship on a golden platter by Alonso in Japan, Hamilton screws the pooch in China and thus makes it a horse race with Lewis Hamilton (107 pts) just ahead of Fernando Alonso (103 pts) and Kimi Raikkonen (100 pts).
Lewis Hamilton is an incredible talent. Maybe it's the yellow-helmet-in-a-McLaren thing. His performance in Japan was superb, and it really looked like the championship was going to be settled in China... until he parked it in the pit lane sand trap. The Chequered Flag guys commented that it reminded them of Mansell blowing a tire in Adelaide in '86. I disagree, Mansell's was a mechanical failure. To me it was more like Senna hitting the guardrail in Monaco in '88, or Mansell hitting the engine kill switch while waving to the fans during the final lap in Montreal in '91 - both monumental brain-fades much more similar to Lewis'. Fortunately for Senna, he prevailed and won the title; Mansell wasn't as lucky. Will Lewis' fuck-up mirror that of his hero or his countryman? We'll learn on Oct. 21.
As for Alonso... now there's one special type of dickhead. He finds himself challenged by his rookie teammate, so he resorts to extortion. Then he cries about not getting as much love from the team as does Lewis. Memo to Fernando: No one loves you because you're a fucking asshole who blackmails his boss and says shit like, "I brought to the team half a second, six-tenths, whatever, and I don't see anything giving me back." Really? How about the $30M salary they give you to drive the car? Check your Swiss bank account, maybe then you'll see what McLaren has given you back for that half-second. I haven't had a profound hatred for any driver since I started following this sport, until this asshole came along. I hope he rots.
Far worse than Alonso are his sycophant Spanish fans (see the comments on Ed Gorman's blog if you don't know what I'm talking about) who have a penchant for finding conspiracies so bizzare that the 9-11 Truther moonbats would shake their tin foil-covered heads. Outqualified by Lewis? Must be because Ron Dennis messed with his tire pressure. Or ordered more fuel be put in his tank. Or paid one of the backmarkers to block him. Or hired a Native American rainmaker to spoil his fast lap. Or had aliens abduct him just before each Q3 session and replace him with a slightly more retarded and slower Alonso clone. Whatever the reason, it can't possibly be because Hamilton is simply faster. You know, the funny thing about Spanish sports fans is that they elevate their athletes (including girly F1 drivers like little Fernando) to superhero status in order to make up for the fact that their country is pretty much irrelevant in every other regard. They sort of remind me of Red Sox fans. And the venom they spew about Lewis is as completely irrational as MoveOn.org when they blame Haliburton for everything from hurricanes to their dogs' fleas.
I've been pulling for Hamilton all year, but now I almost wish he and that whiny little bitch Alonso take each other out at the first corner and hand it over to Kimi, who has been the only driver out of this trio to act like an adult this entire season. No excuses for his failures; no bitching about his teammate who, until late in the season, was running neck and neck with him; no emotional meltdowns; no finger-pointing at his team, his boss, or some Vast Kimi-Hating Conspiracy. Maybe it's the stoic Finnish way. Maybe he's drunk. Who cares? When he wins, he does so decisively. And when it comes to owning up to his responsibility when things go bad, he's a friggin' role model compared to those spoiled McLaren brats.
The Prince of Wales has told the US Congress of the urgent need to tackle global warming.
A letter he wrote discussing the "serious threat climate change poses to humanity" was read out to the influential House of Representatives' Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.
It told the committee about the work of The Prince's Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change, two members of which appeared at the hearing.
The Prince, who is a renowned environmental campaigner, said the group has demonstrated that "tackling climate change is the way to ensure economic security of the longer term and that it can be done in a way that does not limit the aspirations for growth of rich or poor countries".
He went on: "A challenge of the magnitude of climate change requires a coordinated response, based on actions across every sector of society, and the business community is going to be critical in achieving this."
No. The real challenge is for rich and famous elitists to keep their pie-holes shut and stick to things they know something about - like how to hoodwink the gullible British people into bankrolling the high lifestyle of a bunch of useless, inbred douchebags for 800-odd years, for example. Now bugger off, as they say, and take Al and Leo with you.
Another solemn day for Lefties is upon us - the 40th anniversary of the day this commie cocksucker began to burn in hell after being put down like a vicious dog (which of course he was). In a just world, his corpse would be dug up and killed again. Jay Ambrose will never be a political science professor at any major American university after this bit of blasphemy:
Ernesto "Che" Guevara was executed 40 years ago this week, and the impulse to honor him is bursting out all over.
Celebrations are taking place in such places as Cuba, Bolivia and Ireland, a priest has called him a saint, and hosts of other people are likewise instructing us on what a hero he was, what a moral giant, what a fierce combatant for justice in an imperialist-threatened, inhumane world.
Not to interrupt the hallucinatory hosannas or anything, but it seems worth mentioning that there is another side to this story, the one that says Che was in fact a murderous, evil, obsessed thug who stands convicted of his vicious ideological fanaticism and cruelties by his own words as well as by his damnable deeds.
One paragraph makes me laugh, not because it's funny but because it further exposes the hypocrisy of the neo-retro-psuedo-Marxists that get their panties in a wad over our military's detainment of terrorist scum in Guantanamo:
Following the Castro takeover of Cuba in 1959, Che ran a Havana prison in which he killed, killed and then killed some more, and later helped start the labor camp system in which homosexuals and others considered undesirable were to be confined as nothing more than slaves.
Yeah, maybe. But at least he didn't desecrate any Korans, right?
Unbelievable. But not surprising - Hamilton drove with his balls instead of his brains, which is not a bad thing (think Gilles and Mansell) but it's a trait that doesn't win many championships. But I suspect he'll learn from this and should be proud of finishing his rookie season in second, one point behind the champion; we surely haven't heard the last of Lewis Hamilton. And Alonso... well, fuck him, I hope he rots.
