(Click on the above image to see a larger version, in which the caption is more easily readable. From the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC; photo by the author, last month.)

Have a happy, relaxing, confident, robust 4th….

Mr. President, you’ve made quite a thing of late of running around the world “apologizing” for one perceived past sin of America after another.

But it does no credit to a man – nor to his native manliness – to continually apologize for things in which he was not involved.

It’s long past time for you and your Administration to own up to any spur-of-the-moment misunderstandings, and correct what was done wrong.

In 1989, it would have been unfathomable for any American in a position of political leadership to call for the reinstatement in power in Romania of the dreadful Nikolai Ceausescu (and his equally-dreadful wife Elena).

You need to face up to the situation in Honduras – right now – and not inflict that sort of travesty on the Honduran people.

More below the fold.

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After a little thought about today’s nobody-showed-up-to-see-Joe-Biden-in-Erie-PA fiasco….

“Rural broadband build-out” has become a new Golden Calf of Liberalism….

(Note that it says “a” not “the” – it’s just one of them, but a relatively new one….)

Default here to Open Thread….

Some watershed events in history are generally well-known, while others remain obscure, perhaps known only in a particular geographic region. However, some of these seemingly-obscure events deserve more attention – as much of the present situation in many parts of the world owes a great deal to those events.

Today happens to be the 300th anniversary of one of those little-known watersheds – the Battle of Poltava.

Poltava represents a critical breakpoint in the history of eastern Europe; it shattered forever the power of Sweden, marked the rise of Russia as a major power, provided a poignant note that Poland was in terminal decline, and sparked the rise of Prussia that would eventually lead to the emergence of Germany as the other major power in eastern Europe.

But getting to Poltava…. that was the culmination of an accumulation of events over a number of centuries – one of history’s more chaotic stories.

We’ll tell that story below the fold.

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Happy St. Jean-Baptiste Day!

Joyeuse-Fête St. Jean-Baptiste!

French-stuff-in-North-America open thread….

We’re almost done with my series of reports on the International Conference on Climate Change, which was organized by the Heartland Institute and held in Washington DC earlier this month.

I’ve ended up serializing this into a series of reports, and this is the final one in the series; you can find Parts I, II, III, and IV here, here, here, and here.

As foreshadowed at the end of Part IV, this final installment contains some comments on remarks by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), Ben Liebermann of the Heritage Foundation…. and a “closer” of the caliber of Jonathan Papelbon – Lord Christopher Monckton.

More below the fold.

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Here’s a picture that’s worth many thousands of words:

That’s what I call “A Convenient Truth”….

(H/T – Tim Blair and his international band of minions….)

I wanted to revisit this item that I noted yesterday:

The bronze frog will appear towards the Independence Day in Kyiv. It is planned to place on Peizazhnaya alley. Author of frog, sculptor Oleg Pynchuk has nearly completed plaster copy of amphibian. The frog will weight 6 tons!

Okay, here’s the TGIF Happy Hour Challenge:

Find some way to blame this on “Global Warming”….

First prize: Dinner-for-two with the RedState muckety-muck of your choice.

Have at it….

Yikes:

The bronze frog will appear towards the Independence Day in Kyiv. It is planned to place on Peizazhnaya alley. Author of frog, sculptor Oleg Pynchuk has nearly completed plaster copy of amphibian. The frog will weight 6 tons!

The-FP-has-been-too-quiet-for-too-long open thread….

Well:

Wind Requires Human Sacrifice

Ah, now I understand – Quetzalcoatl returns, as the god of “alternative energy.”

(And do click on that link – it’s a darn fine Letter to the Editor.)

We’re still rumbling along with the stories that came out of the International Conference on Climate Change, which was organized by the Heartland Institute and held in Washington DC a couple weeks back.

Given the volume of material, I’ve ended up serializing this into a series of reports. This is Part IV; you can find Parts I, II, and III here, here, and here.

As noted in Part III last Friday, Part IV contains the thoughts of University of Alabama/Huntsville climatologist Prof. Roy Spencer, some comments from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), and (a RedState exclusive!) a few items from my interview and conversation with Steve Milloy – founder of junkscience.com and the author of the recently-issued book, “Green Hell.”

More below the fold.

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Your humble correspondent was in Washington last week to cover the most recent (Third) International Conference on Climate Change, which was organized by the Heartland Institute.

This is the second in what will be a series of reports on the event; you can find Part I here, and Part II here.

As foreshadowed on Wednesday, in this part we’ll look at economic issues – with comments from Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), David Tuerck of the Beacon Hill Institute, and Prof. Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University in Spain.

More below the fold….

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Further to Moe’s diary on this subject….

I’ve been dealing (heavily and directly) with “Silicon Valley” for nearly two decades now – that allowed me to see the tail-end of the salad days of the place…. followed by a long slide into (grossly over-priced) enfeeblement and irrelevance that events like this are now making more visibly-apparent.

There was a time when Silicon Valley was solid and sober – they had a wonderful operating model in which ideas, opportunities, finance, and expertise all came together in a crucible that created incredible amounts of innovation and economic value, for what were minor amounts of resources.

Unfortunately, the ethos of Silicon Valley was destroyed (sadly, it appears, for good) by the dot-com bubble.

Tangibly, this transformed Silicon Valley from a realm of sober business-building into a flamboyant “get rich quick” scheme. This should have been undone by the collapse of the “tech bubble” (dot-com bubble) back in 2000; however, the psychological damage had been done. Instead of returning to its roots, the reaction to this implosion was not that the dot-com bubble had been a fluke – but that instead it represented the new reality – and thus the same “get rich quick” dot-com game would be back again…. soon…. some day…. really….

Strangely, this has transformed Silicon Valley into a cargo cult. If anyone isn’t familiar with that term and its origins, I leave it as an exercise to search around and see why I say that.

I long ago figured out that Silicon Valley is overloaded with effete screw-ups who still think very highly of themselves. There are plenty of fools in the Valley, and they’ve been played for that by politicians before.

Back in 1992, Bill Clinton was supposedly young and hip (vs. that old low-tech geezer GHWB) and conned them into pushing him – simply on the notion that by being young and hip, he’d “get” tech industry issues (vs. “old economy” emphasis) and would push “the new” forward. Somewhat strangely, President Clinton did break with much of the traditional anti-business fixations of his own party – and when that was combined with a divided government, a benign Congress, and no major troubles on the world stage, the environment for the Valley wasn’t that bad.

However, some early supporters quickly realized that they had been “played” by the Clinton/Gore team – “played” for Valley support so as to appear to be representative of a turnover of generations in leadership to those conversant with what was then called “the new economy.” Larry Ellison wised up quickly and backed away; asked after the 2000 election what he thought of Al Gore, all he said was, “Thank God for the butterfly ballot.”

The same fools got conned again this time in the same way. I believe that Mr. Malone published that piece somewhere else (at least in part) a few weeks back, and I think that what I say here will at least indirectly flow from that earlier piece. The Obama team played Silicon Valley in the same way, and conned them into believing that they (Team O) would be hip to the new tech world – unlike the oilmen who supposedly ran Washington in an old-economy way for the prior eight years. Team Obama would usher in a new era of focus on nanotechnology, and biotechnology, and bandwidth, and “science,” and all manner of nouveau things; instead, Team Obama has been putting all its interests into old, decrepit, and often heavily-unionized sectors of the economy – most notably the automotive industry, but also the eastern (and often western-hostile) money-center financial institutions.

However, one caveat needs to be mentioned here. In recent years, Silicon Valley has bought lock, stock, and barrel into this meaningless, mindless “green” nonsense (which I’ll discuss more fully in my ICCC Part III post, which should appear a little later this afternoon). The legendary John Doerr is acting like he’s been getting estrogen shots; when such a previously successful and accomplished man starts to act like he could get a second job as a wet nurse, it’s probably time for him to hang it up – or to at least take a long vacation (perhaps even at a remote monastery) to get his bearings back. But in the meantime, he has even brought in Al Gore as a full partner in Kleiner, Perkins. Hmm. Why?

The bottom line now in Silicon Valley is that a lot of the big-time money players have sunk boatloads of cash into “green” investments – and without government mandates and subsidies those are going to effectively be worthless. (WITH mandates and subsidies, they might pay off quite well.)

Tragically, Silicon Valley is now a very pale and decrepit shadow of what it once was – it is no longer about innovation, creating new winning businesses (and industries), and using scarce resources to enormous effect.

This is why I keep banging-on about the dearth (and death) of innovation – and the consequences that will (and are) flowing from that. We need to recreate “Silicon Valley” with new people – and likely even a new location.

Your humble correspondent was in Washington last week to cover the most recent (Third) International Conference on Climate Change, which was organized by the Heartland Institute.

This is the second in what will be a series of reports on the event; you can find Part I here.

As promised last Friday, in this part we’ll discuss the release of the massive report by the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), and get some gems of wisdom from Anthony Watts, Fred Singer, Willie Soon, and Harrison Schmitt.

More below the fold….

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Lost amid today’s clutter, here’s some good news.

The pro-Western coalition has won an upset victory in the Lebanese parliamentary elections, defeating a Hezbollah-led alliance:

Lebanese election: Hizbollah fails to win majority as pro-Western coalition wins narrow margin.

Hizbollah suffered a rebuff in its efforts to gain an overall majority in Lebanon’s parliament on Sunday after a high turnout upset predictions in a peaceful general election.

The television station owned by Saad Hariri, the majority leader, said his camp expected to win 70 seats in the parliament against 58 for the Hizbollah alliance.

I’d rate this as very, very good news….

(Click on the above image to see a larger version, in which the caption is more easily readable. From the World War II Memorial on the National Mall; photo by the author, this past Monday.)

‘Nuf said?

As has been noted in a few other spots during this week, your humble correspondent was in Washington earlier this week to cover the most recent (Third) International Conference on Climate Change, which was organized by the Heartland Institute.

For those of you who have asked, “The last one was in March – are these quarterly now?”…. the answer is, no. Given the recent effort to steamroller “cap-and-trade” legislation through Congress at flank speed – on the grounds that “climate change” is accelerating catastrophically (sic) – a decision was made to quickly have an event in Washington to get some other views onto the table, literally within sight of the Capitol dome.

In contrast to its two-day predecessors, this was a one-day event that ran on one single track (rather than multiple tracks). The content was also more strongly oriented toward the political aspects of the issue – which was the intent given the venue and recent happenings.

My notes are rather extensive, so I thought I’d adopt the strategy that Jay Nordlinger uses when he covers events like Davos for NRO – a serialization in reasonably-sized parts until the supply of material runs out.

So that’s what I’ll do – and Part I begins below the fold.

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The second conference call of the day was a regularly roughly-bi-weekly hosted by Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).

Today’s topic was the ongoing swirl surrounding the Waxman-Markey “cap-and-trade” legislation, and the special guests were Congressman Lee Terry (R-NB) and Congressman Bob Latta (R-OH).

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Despite returning home from Washington Wednesday evening and being grossly overloaded with (real!) work, I had to make time today to join a few other folks for a couple of conference calls.

I’ll cover the first of the two in this posting – a conversation mainly about the situation surrounding the Guantanamo Bay detention facility with Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS).

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(I first published this essay in here two years ago – and republished it last year with a few upgrades. Since I’m now a Contributing Editor, it gets the Front Page (with a few more upgrades) this year. — Skan)

When early June rolls around each year, June 6th is accorded a great deal of reverence for the well-known events of the Normandy landings of 1944. On the decadal anniversary years, there are major ceremonies and there is extensive news coverage.

Sadly, an equally (at least) important anniversary on June 4th goes largely neglected. On June 4th 1942, an outnumbered American fleet won a staggering upset victory over the Imperial Japanese Navy in the waters near Midway Island. This battle was arguably the single most important military action by the United States during the entire 20th century.

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