Time magazine's year-end Top 10 lists, this list being,"Top 10 T-shirt Worthy Slogans." Sen. John McCain comes in at number six, above.
— JOHN MCCAIN, Arizona Senator and presidential hopeful, responding jokingly to a high schooler's comment that, at 71, McCain might be too old for the White HouseWell, he is, you know.
In the latest audiotape made by Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda chief vowed to take its terrorism to Israel.
Osama bin Laden vowed to destroy Israel.This declaration is less a statement of actual intention than an attempt to rally the Muslim world appearing sympathetic with the one cause that inflames passions across Islamia - the Palestinian-Israel issue.
The fugitive Al-Qaida leader issued an audio recording Saturday in which he came out against Palestinian and other Arab leaders who have recognized the Jewish state.
"I would like to assure our people in Palestine that we will expand our jihad there," Bin Laden said. "We intend to liberate Palestine, the whole of Palestine, from the river to the sea."
"We will not recognize even one inch for Jews in the land of Palestine as other Muslim leaders have," he said.
Al-Qaida is believed to have set up cells in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but its influence is limited given doctrinal opposition from ruling local groups like Islamist Hamas.
In his message, Bin Laden also mocked Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, over the fact that the U.N. peacekeeper presence has grown in southern Lebanon since last year's war with Israel. The peacekeepers, Bin Laden said, "protect the Jews."
I spent a week in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, which just four months ago was the most violent place in Iraq. Al Qaeda had taken over and ruled the city through a massive murder and intimidation campaign. Even the Marine Corps, arguably the least defeatist institution in America, wrote off Ramadi as irretrievably lost last August.In fact, al Qaeda passed a "grim milestone" late this month: the 20,000th insurgent died in Iraq. Furthermore, most AQI losses have for several months been inflicted by Sunni militias who were formerly allied with AQI. The "Army of Islam" and the "1920 Revolutionary Brigades," both Sunni militias, are credited with killing more than 5,000 al Qaeda terrorists in just the last two months. Iraq's interior ministry announced today that over the last year, "75 percent of Al-Qaeda's networks in the country had been destroyed in 12 months." Ministry spokesman Abdul Karim Khalaf also said that, "Sunni-US alliances against Al-Qaeda had also significantly contributed to the drop in violence" across the country.
Then, local tribal leaders and civilians joined the Americans - and helped purge the city of every last terrorist cell. Violence has dropped to near zero. I have photographs of Iraqis hugging American soldiers and of children greeting us with ecstatic joy, as though they had been rescued from Nazis. The Marines are even considering going on patrols without body armor.
I have directly observed how more and more Iraqis have grown to hate al Qaeda as much as Americans do. Al Qaeda has lost all credibility there, both from a religious standpoint as well as strategically. ...I wrote last month that AQI first started losing the logistics war in Iraq and then began just plain losing the war. Unable to prevail in Iraq, where it enjoyed enormous advantages at the outset, does al Qaeda give Israel any reason to fear? I say no, although it may succeed in a handful of attacks. If it was all that easy to defeat Israel, Hamas, Fatah and Hezbollah would already have done so. Even the violence of Second Intifada (which has not actually ended) did not bring Israel to its knees but resulted in very strict security measures to keep hostiles out of Israel.
Al Qaeda terrorists can continue to murder Iraqis and Americans at the behest of Osama, but their tactics will only backfire. Osama will no more own Iraq than he will own America. His is a lost cause. Not because of decisive military defeats, (although these have helped) but because decent Iraqi people from all quarters, sects and regions of Iraq have had enough of his people cutting off heads of children.
It’s understandable that this turn of events might come as news to Osama, because he cannot set foot in Iraq for fear of his life.
In Algona, Iowa, three German POWs labored a year to make a 60-piece nativity that stretches 40 feet.
The Nativity first went on display at the edge of Camp Algona in 1945 and was left behind as a gift to the town after the end of the war. Six POWs were involved in the construction, which took nearly a year. The effort was headed by Edward Kaib, an architect and noncommissioned officer in the German Army.The POWs donated the nativity to the town when the war ended, stipulating that no admission could be charged to view it. Today, men of Algona First United Methodist Church maintain the display and set it up every year. More at the link.
Canada's National Post reports on the latest scientific research into what makes people happy.
Psychologists and economists have started to bring objective rigour to a field that was once thought frivolous or unscientific. Our sense of well-being is starting to give up its secrets, just like the atom and the genome before it. ...He goes onto say that while a rising tide may indeed lift all boats, it doesn't mean that anyone will consider themselves better off. That is, they won't feel happier. So what does make people happy?
Christopher Barrington-Leigh, an economist at the University of British Columbia, says the initial discoveries in this field have been "revolutionary."
"Income doesn't matter much [to happiness], so that's devastating for economics. And to the degree it does matter, it's relative, which is devastating for economics, because everything in economics is always assumed to be absolute benefits," he said.
What they have found is that, if there is a key to happiness, it is belonging -- to families, clubs, sports teams, churches, the more the better. Belonging, what they call social connectedness, predicts happiness far better than wealth, health or intelligence. It even predicts how well one will recover from a stroke.So is one reason for the rise of blogging that it gives - or at least potentially gives - a wide interconnectedness? Put another way, is what keeps me and others blogging is not so much that we actually add to the sum of human wisdom than that blogging is just an easily attainable form of social connectedness, and the content does not matter except to shape with whom we are connected?
John G. Krenson
The devastating assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday should make Americans aware of many things. One, those who are running for president of the United States must be thankful that they are running for that office in America. Another, we American citizens should be reminded that freedom is costly and that ours is not something to be taken for granted. And yet another is that the Bhutto assassination brings into sharper focus the candidates who are presenting themselves for that office here.
Our world is dangerous and now it is perhaps a bit more dangerous because of this tragic event. Today each US political party has only one candidate who, relative to the rest, is most prepared at noon on Inauguration Day to hit the ground running in this dangerous world. And these two also present a clear and distinct choice to Americans - just as it should be.
On the Democrat side that person is Hillary Clinton. Despite how “indirect” her own experience may be, the fact is that she has years of experience and familiarization around the top levels of state government and the federal government. She has participated directly in the highest elected body in the world – the US Senate. She knows foreign leaders and has faced crisis of immense proportions – both personal and political. She has a team of advisors that have been around her for years and whom she controls, not the other way around. And she has a well developed and defined vision of where she wants to lead our country. Her main competitors are naïve, inexperienced and subject to manipulation by their advisors. Neither has a well developed and defined track record of what they really might do in office.
On the Republican side it is John McCain. The man has the most direct experience in world affairs and domestic politics at the national level than all the rest of the Republican field combined. He has been in the fires of where he will lead young Americans. He too has long and well developed relationships with world leaders – he will need no introductions. He has been tested at the most extreme levels and has demonstrated how he will respond. His character is probably the greatest of any leader who has aspired to this office. Nobody seeks to control McCain (though the media in the past has had success at manipulating him; a lesson he seems to have learned and that also has bought him long term goodwill among the electorate). Alone among the entire presidential candidate field he is most likely to attract heavy independent votes and crossover votes from his rival party.
Not the most consistent conservative (Thompson can claim that mantle) McCain is more reliable than his chief rivals and he has the substance that Huckabee lacks and the traction that Thompson can’t seem to get; and the depth of experience and world network neither of them have . Thompson is my own philosophical favorite but I would follow McCain proudly.
Clinton and McCain. Two distinct choices with clear discernable and distinguishable visions. Both strong-willed. Both tested under pressure. Both with longstanding, well developed international networks and relationships in a dangerous world. Both know where they want to lead and have a track record to back it up. Whether you love one and despise the other, our nation is fortunate to have these two distinct and tested candidates. And we are fortunate that they are not running in the same environment as Pakistani politics.
John G. Krenson is the author of Crossfire: A Time for Peace, War and Love available at www.johnkrenson.com.
When visiting the traditional birthplace of Jesus in Bethlehem, especially at Christmastime, is it best to:
A. Kneel worshipfully at the manger's site and touch it reverently, as millions of people have done through the centuries? (This is a picture of the manger site that I took in October.)
B. Approach the altar of the Church of the Nativity, built over the manger site, and pray or meditate silently.
C. Get into a fistfight with other Christians over the custodianship of the church.
I mean, WWJD, yes?
If you answered, "C," then step to the head of the line.
Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.
For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.
A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.
The Christians themselves are not immune to infighting. Literally every square foot of the Church of the Nativity is battled over by the three sects that share use of the church: Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Orthodox. The holy men of the three denominations bicker over who gets to clean which sacred wall, who can walk in which aisle. The guards in the church, it sometimes seems, are not there to protect tourists but to keep priests from attacking each other. "Apart from Christ," says Father Ibrahim Faltas, a Franciscan friar who served in the Church of the Nativity for 12 years, "there have been few here who would turn the other cheek."Yes, I am sure Jesus is so proud.
At left is a photo of a member of the Israeli Knesset named Nadia Hilou. I met with her in October in the Knesset building during my study trip to Israel and the West Bank. Nadia is a sort of triple minority in the Knesset:
* She's a woman, the Knesset being majority male.
* She's an Arab, the numerical minority among Israelis.
* She is a Christian, a tiny minority among Israeli Arabs.
It's worth noting that she took her seat in 2006 as a member of Israel's Labour party, winning an election for a general-election seat, not a seat set aside for Arab candidates. That means that a great many Jews voted for her. I haven't looked it up, but I think it's safe to say that her opponent was almost certainly Jewish, who didn't appeal to enough Jewish voters to earn their votes over hers. So who'd a-thunk this would happen:
MK Nadia Hilou (Labor) couldn't believe her ears when a new employee she'd hired just a few weeks earlier notified her several days ago that he could no longer work in her office because his fiancé's family had threatened to cancel the union with his bride-to-be because he was employed by an Arab.Just when you think you've read the whole book, someone writes a new page.
The aide explained that once his fiancé's family had discovered who his employer was, they stipulated that they would only agree to his union with their daughter if he immediately resigned his post. He claims he was left little choice but to fulfill their demands. ...
"He told me that they (the family) were ultra-Orthodox and said: 'It's not me. I'm trying to convince them but they firmly believe that I am forbidden from working with you because you're an Arab.'
"He also explained that they were threatening to cancel the marriage. He said that they believed that Arabs are considered impure."
And don't lose your map-reading skills. A GPS won't do your thinking for you.
For 28-year-old Bat Yam resident Amir Ochana flawed GPS navigation nearly proved fatal. Instead of a planned return trip to Jerusalem, Ochana’s GPS system directed him towards the West Bank City of Ramallah.A GPS is just a high-speed mapping moron. It has no common sense. That still has to be user-supplied.
Ochana had just finished work in the Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood of Jerusalem, and wanted to give his secretary a ride home to the Adam settlement northeast of Jerusalem. He plugged in the coordinates for a return trip to Jerusalem into his GPS system and set of on his merry way.
The Bat Yam resident recounts the horror that followed. “I ended up at an army checkpoint…and they let me through even though I was wearing a kippah and had Israeli license plates… I ended up in the center of Ramallah, stuck in traffic and surrounded by Arabs,” he says. “I still didn’t realize where I was because I relied on my GPS.”
Soon, however, Ochana was spotted by the local Arab residents. “One Arab merchant came up to my car and started rapping on my window….He asked me if I was Jewish and I answered ‘yes.' I immediately knew that something was wrong.”
The Arab merchant then entered Ochana’s vehicle through the window, punched him in the testicles and stole his cellular phone. “He began to yell ‘a Jew, a Jew’ and other Arabs soon approached me. They stole my GPS and my other cellular phone,“ said Ochana.
This mugging was soon the least of Ochana’s problems, as a lynching lmost ensued afterwards. “An entire mob approached me and began to throw rocks at my car….they broke both the front and back windows….I began to cry and ask ‘why me?’” Ochana recalled.
Just as Ochana began to fear the worst, however, help came from an unexpected source. “Two Arabs came out of nowhere…One of them pulled me out of the car and asked me if I was insane. They ran with me to the Qalandiya checkpoint while we were chased by rock-pelting Arabs the entire way, and handed me over to Israeli soldiers,” he recounted.
On the same day the following two wire pieces appeared in The Tennessean:
1. "Princesses rule in the movies and at the office - Most workplaces have a narcissist or two who demand the royal treatment."
Half of all offices and workplaces have them — people who feel entitled to special projects, entitled to their own timetable, entitled to almost everything anytime they want it. ...
"You see Workplace Princesses in the C-Suite and on the factory floor," said Canter, a San Francisco executive and career coach.
"The question becomes, 'What's in our culture that enables princesses to thrive?' " Canter said. "To me, the princess, whether male or female, is a narcissist. They think it's all about me. It's always how great am I, and what have you done for me lately."
2. "Younger workers crave praise around the office."
While tech-savvy, independent and well-educated, these young workers revel in, even crave, constant praise. ...
"You used to think that no news was good news," said Kent Crossland, director of information technology for PING, the Phoenix-based golf club maker. "Today, I guess no news is bad news. They need attention and feedback." ...
[The Y generation was] raised in an age of "active parenting" and are overindulged, overprotected and oversupervised.
That's why some Generation Y members crave constant feedback into adulthood.
"One of the ways that this generation got narcissistic is that their parents praised them all the time," said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University.
We are reaping the fruits of the self-esteem movement that began a generation ago. Low self esteem was blamed for all manner of disfunctions, from failing grades to juvenile criminality. If the kids just had a higher opinion of themselves, so we were told, then they'd be happier, better adjusted, as less likely to get into trouble.
It was all baloney, of course, but millions of moms and dads and educators bought into it. They heaped praise on children for the most trivial reasons: "Hey, Andrea, you're doing a great job breathing!" Okay, I exaggerate (but only slightly). The result:
For decades schools have embraced the idea that ... unless the classroom was cozy and thick with "warm fuzzies"--an educational watchword--students wouldn't even try. That led to avariety of policies aimed at protecting children's feelings. It also led to grade inflation, an emphasis on groupwork rather than individual effort, the elimination of valedictorians and even the dearth of spelling bees, critics say.
By the time in the late 1990s that even educators and psychologists realized that the self-esteem emperor had no clothes, it was too late to undo the damage done to millions of kids. And now we see the result.
... Kids born in the '70s and '80s are now coming of age. The colorful ribbons and shiny trophies they earned just for participating made them feel special. But now, in college and the workplace, observers are watching them crumble a bit at the first blush of criticism.
"I often get students in graduate school doing doctorates who made straight A's all their lives, and the first time they get tough feedback, the kind you need to develop skills," says Deborah Stipek, dean of education at Stanford University. "I have a box of Kleenex in my office because they haven't dealt with it before."
Andrea Sobel (same cite) is the "director of recruitment for an entertainment firm" who observes,
"One of the things the managers talked about is an incredible sense of entitlement for people who don't deserve it," she says. "They'll come in right out of college and don't understand why they're not getting promoted in three months."
[Neil] Howe [co-author of Milliennials Rising: The Next Great Generation] blames the attitude on society's high expectations. "We've become a much more child-oriented society around milliennials," he says. "Self-esteem for them meant you're the focus of society's attention."
Dr. Michael Hurd puts the problem this way:
Self-esteem is crucially important, but it's a byproduct of more fundamental factors--the core one being a deeply embedded sense of personal responsibility over one's life. If you act in a personally responsible way and operate continuously on this premise, the sense of control and efficacy associated with self-esteem will largely follow. I have never once met a high self-esteemed individual without this core sense of personal responsibility. I don't expect I ever will.
Dr. Hurd gets it close, but doesn't quite earn the cigar. Self esteem is nothing more than what military leaders call morale. A military unit's high morale does not come from its commander praising them, but from achieving a high level of skill and accomplishment. Praise may then follow, but every commander knows the folly of praising before achievment. It is not really "personal responsibility" that results in high self esteem, but accomplishing things meaningful and difficult. If that gains the respect of peers, so much the better. But first must come accomplishment, then and only then the recognition.
Here's some Thomas Sowell:
... Today, almost everywhere you look, people seem to be putting their efforts into getting attention.
Wild hairdos, huge tattoos, pierced body parts, outlandish clothing, weird statements -- all these have become substitutes for achievements. ...
The problem is not just with people who want to get attention by the way they dress, act, talk, or show off in innumerable other ways. The more fundamental problem is that the society around them pays its attention to such superficial and often childish stuff.
As H.L. Mencken said, "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people."
More than 400 scientists,
... many of whom are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis — cast doubt on the "scientific consensus" that man-made global warming imperils the planet.Highlights:
•"Even if the concentration of 'greenhouse gases' double, man would not perceive the temperature impact."According to the web site of the minority side of the US Senate Committeee on the Environment and Public Works (link),
Oleg Sorochtin of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences
•"I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting — a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] number — entirely without merit. ... I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached."
Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, former research director at the Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute
•"The hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The [greenhouse-gas] hypothesis does not do this. ... The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."
David Wojick, expert reviewer for U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
•"The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming."
Chief Meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart of the MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center in Sao Leopoldo-Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
•"There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate change], but there's no need to be worried."
Anton Uriarte, a professor of physical geography at the University of the Basque Country in Spain
The distinguished scientists featured in this new report are experts in diverse fields, including: climatology; oceanography; geology; biology; glaciology; biogeography; meteorology; oceanography; economics; chemistry; mathematics; environmental sciences; engineering; physics and paleoclimatology. Some of those profiled have won Nobel Prizes for their outstanding contribution to their field of expertise and many shared a portion of the UN IPCC Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Gore.Remember, "consensus" is a political word, not a scientific one. Scientists do not seek consensus, they simply seek results of research. It's also worth remembering that running computer models is not actually doing science - and that the climate models used by the IPCC have been severely inaccuate in predicting even the immediate-future years:
U.N. scientists have relied heavily on computer models to predict future climate change, and these crystal balls are notoriously inaccurate. According to the models, for instance, global temperatures were supposed to have risen in recent years. Yet according to the U.S. National Climate Data Center, the world in 2006 was only 0.03 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 2001--in the range of measurement error and thus not statistically significant.So if these models can't predict just five or so years ahead, why on earth should we believe that they accurately forecast 50 or 100 years ahead?
The models also predicted that sea levels would rise much faster than they actually have. The models didn't predict the significant cooling the oceans have undergone since 2003--which is the opposite of what you'd expect with global warming. Cooler oceans have also put a damper on claims that global warming is the cause of more frequent or intense hurricanes. The models also failed to predict falling concentrations of methane in the atmosphere, another surprise.
Late last month, I wrote,
I'm not willing to trade one kind of alarmism for another, but it's interesting to compare the reports of the effects of the Little Ice Age with those of the Medieval Warm Period.It may not be a merely academic study. As it turns out, "Extreme cold weather is occurring worldwide." Geophysicist David Deming says that 2007 is the "Year of global cooling."
Since the mid-19th century, the mean global temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius. This slight warming is not unusual, and lies well within the range of natural variation. Carbon dioxide continues to build in the atmosphere, but the mean planetary temperature hasn't increased significantly for nearly nine years. Antarctica is getting colder. ...Read the whole thing.
Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered. ...
Recent weeks have seen the return of unusually cold conditions to the Northern Hemisphere. On Dec. 7, St. Cloud, Minn., set a new record low of minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. On the same date, record low temperatures were also recorded in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Extreme cold weather is occurring worldwide. On Dec. 4, in Seoul, Korea, the temperature was a record minus 5 degrees Celsius. Nov. 24, in Meacham, Ore., the minimum temperature was 12 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the previous record low set in 1952. The Canadian government warns that this winter is likely to be the coldest in 15 years. ...
If you think any of the preceding facts can falsify global warming, you're hopelessly naive. Nothing creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of a true believer. In 2005, a Canadian Greenpeace representative explained “global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” In other words, all weather variations are evidence for global warming. I can't make this stuff up.
Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
David Deming is a geophysicist, an adjunct scholar with the National Center for Policy Analysis, and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.
I wrote Monday that despite the violence of the crash on Interstate 40 that totaled my car, I've had roller-coaster rides that were rougher.
Sadly, it was just such a roller-coaster ride that Jeffery Reed took at Walt Disney World Tuesday.
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A 44-year-old man died Tuesday after riding a roller coaster at Walt Disney World that simulates a runaway train ride through the Himalayas, authorities said.Later reports say that an autopsy showed Mr. Reed died of dilated cardiomyopathy, a weakened and enlarged heart that cannot pump blood enough to sustain the body. It was apparently a pre-existing condition.
Jeffery Reed, of Navarre, Fla., was pulled unresponsive from the ride, given CPR and pronounced dead at a hospital. He had no visible signs of injury, the Orange County Sheriff's Office said. ...
The ride, Expedition Everest, made its debut in 2006 and features an 80-foot drop. Before Tuesday's death, at least 15 people had died at Disney's theme parks in Florida and California since 1989, some with previous health conditions.
In light of the events related here, I am reading up on buying cars.
If you're in the market, too, then read, "Confessions of a Car Salesman" at Edmunds.com. Enlightening!
I have not bought a new car in many years. One of the advantages of buying a used car (apart from letting the original buyer get soaked by depreciation) is that it's much harder for a salesman to "bump" you - get you to agree to high-cost extras. The car is what it is. Its options are already installed. All they can do is try to sell you high-profit items such as a used-car warranty, but these are easy to turn down.
Saw a new car in a display in the local mall last week that had $2,500 of dealer-added cost, things like "anti-theft engraving," "paint protection," fabric protection," junk like that.
Walk away from dealers who do that. They'll tell you that so many of their customers ask for it that they always add it to all their cars. Those things are about 90 percent profit. So walk away.
"Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing." Battered pilot Bob Robertson waits in shock for rescuers to cut him free from his plane after it disintegrated around him.
In The Right Stuff, the story of the Mercury 7 astronauts, Tom Wolfe related some stories about jet fighter flight testing in the 1950s. This was the time when the first supersonic fighters were being developed. Not much was known then about the aerodynamics of transonic and supersonic flight. Some of the early designs turned out to be unstable. They oscillated wildy - nose up, nose down - at transonic speeds.
Pilots found that they could not give control inputs in time to counteract the oscillation. By the time they tried to correct an upward oscillation, the plane was already heading down. The control inputs therefore only made the problem worse.
The pilots who lived to tell about it said once they figured out they were not going to be able to control the plane, they used the "Jesus maneuver." They cut the throttle, folded their hands in their lap, took their feet off the pedals and said, "Jesus, it's your airplane."
Sometimes the plane stabilized. Sometimes it didn't. Sometimes the pilots walked away from their landing. More often, they were carried, provided there was anything left to be carried.
Any stop you can walk away from is a good stop. The remains of my 2004 Chevy Malibu after spinning off Interstate 40 at 70 mph, Dec. 15.
Hard rain, a shallow left turn, I-40 West at Tenn. mile marker 171, near Dickson, 1:30 Saturday afternoon. I pretty quickly figured out that my control inputs were not doing any good. Looking through the windshield at other westbound traffic behind me was one clue. (Fortunately, the nearest traffic was 200 yards or so away.)
In one gestalt moment, I realize that I am wrecking at interstate speed and surely will not survive.
"Jesus, it's your automobile."
There were two or three high-speed revolutions on the road surface. All I heard was whizzing of the tires skidding across first the pavement and then the grass. The windshield went opaque from water and thrown mud. I hear two loud bangs and the car suddenly stops. I am surrounded by pine trees. I smell and see smoke. The car's on fire! Seat belt off, pull the door handle. Nothing happens. The door's jammed. I see shattered glass all over me and feel cold air against my face. The driver's side window is shattered. Even if the door worked, it wouldn't open more than two inches because of the trees. Great: I lived through the crash to burn to death.
But the smoke smells different than smoke from burning petroleum or rubber. It smells explosive. Then I see the deflated air bags and realize they are the smoke's source. Relax. I feel no pain. The front of the car is buckled upward. Nothing penetrated the passenger compartment, which did not deform.
I find my Treo 650 phone on the floor and punch 9-1-1. The dispatcher gets a fix on my phone's GPS signal and assures me help is on the way. I hang up. Then I tell God I am thankful I am alive and for whatever he had to do with it. ("In all things give thanks," says the Good Book, so I did, right then.)
A man and a woman appear to the left, unable to come close because of the trees. I assure them I am fine and say I've already called 9-1-1. A very cold rain is falling hard. The man leaves but the woman says it's hard to see the car from the interstate, so she will stay to flag down the police.
I try to call my wife but get her voice mail. So I call my eldest son and tell him what happened. I see blood on my right hand. A glance in the mirror reveals cuts above my left eyebrow. Blood covers my left cheek, but the cuts are very small.
I call a colleague and ask him to call our district superindendent. He doesn't have the number with him (he's traveling, too) so he calls my church's secretary, who quickly calls me. I assure her I am fine.
"Here they come," says the woman. I hear a police siren. The interstate is 30 feet behind my car and about 10 feet higher. A highway patrol car screams by, blue light flashing, siren yelling. It disappears over the far hill.
The woman says, "Chasing a speeder, I guess."
Soon a deputy's car appears, parks, and the deputy walks to my car. The woman says she is leaving now. "I am very grateful," I call to her. Later, I berate myself for never asking for her name. I tell the deputy that, except for the cuts on my face, I am uninjured. He asks for and takes my license and makes a report to his dispatch office. A few minutes later the rescue squad appears. One man come to my window and confirms that I am of sound mind ("What is today's date? What is your full name? Do you know where you are?") and so he believes me when I say I have no injuries.
"Do you want us to take you to a hospital?" he asks. I tell him I want the glass cleaned from the cuts in my face and that my left eye feels like glass dust may have gotten in it. So they put the collar around my neck, ignoring my protestations. I crawl headfirst out the front-passenger door. They say they'll get the stretcher-board to take me to the ambulance. I insist on walking. I should have let them carry me, that way my dress shoes wouldn't have been ruined!
I say I'll sit up in the ambulance for the ride. "Okay," the medic says, "but you'll have to sign all kinds of release forms." So I lie on the board. They strap me down. "What hospital?" Dickson's is nearest, but my wife doesn't know how to get there and I don't want her to learn in the driving rain. "Vanderbilt," I say, in Nashville.
After 40 minutes riding on the board, I almost wish I'd said Dickson, rain or not.
Two X-rays, one eye exam and a face swabbing later, I'm checking out. Not even a headache, not a Band-Aid.
While walking from the car to the ambulance I saw that the car had plunged off the interstate's outer edge, fortunately facing forward, and down the sodded embankment. The Malibu bounced over a small, concreted drainage ditch and then front-first into a stand of pine saplings, plowing over successively larger trees until it hit one that stopped it. The loud bangs I heard were the air bags deploying.
For five seconds - surely the whole event lasted no longer - I expected that I would not celebrate Christmas this year or ever again. But in truth, I've had roller-coaster rides that were rougher.
When the car left the road, it missed by two feet hitting the end of a guard rail head on, which would have been disastrous. Another two or three feet to the left and it would have bounced off the rail back onto the road. Maybe it would have gone across to the median, which was broad and level, but more likely the car would have stopped in the middle of the lane, almost invisible in the pouring rain to oncoming traffic. That would likewise have been disastrous.
Samuel Johnson, one of the leading literary figures of 18th-century England, wrote, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
So does spinning out at high speed in the rain on the interstate. It gives your mind a certain focus.
Today, someone asked me what I want for Christmas. "I've already got it," I answered.
"The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up." - The Song of Hannah, 1 Samuel 2.
Clarity.
It is not really that for five seconds I was dead, and now am alive again. That is God's gift truly, but my life has always been God's gift, even before I acknowledged it.
The clarity is this: I know that for the rest of my life, I am really just a dead man walking. That evokes a certain freedom and a longer view of life. So Saturday night, just before I went to bed, I went alone in the dark to my living room, sat down and thanked God for the clarity.
Let us here remember Den Beste's Law: The job of bureacrats is to regulate, and left to themselves, they will regulate everything they can."
Now consider:
Humanity faces oblivion if it fails to confront global warming, the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon warned today.Nuff said.If we don't all fall into line to do what the UN wants - which is regulate every waking moment of our lives - then humanity will perish from the earth. That's what the man said.
As delegates to the Bali climate conference argued over a new document strengthening a call for deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by rich nations, Ban Ki-moon arrived to preside over its final days.
AP News headline: "Democrats in Debate Urge Taxes on Rich."
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