Arctic Cold Blasts Midsection Of US

A wave of bitterly cold air is sweeping through the midsection of the nation, touching off snow and ice storms from the southwest to the northeast. It does not look like it is going to improve much for some time. The jet stream has made a huge loop to the south, dipping down as far as Texas and bringing a barrage of Arctic cold with it.

The jet stream is set up in such a manner that it will continue to draw messy weather over the same corridor of the nation through the first half of the week. The setup will continue to be a large dip in the jet stream over the West with a series of storms riding along the jet from the Southwest to the Northeast, spreading wintry weather east.

The Severe Weather Center displays the widespread winter weather-related warnings, watches and advisories currently covering areas from the southern Plains to New England. Some freezing rain advisories are also in effect from northeastern Pennsylvania to southern Connecticut.

On Saturday, freezing rain that spread from the central Plains to the lower Great Lakes caused more treacherous traveling conditions than heavy bands of snow that spread east farther north in the Plains. An icy glaze built on city streets and secondary roads in Salina, Kan., due to freezing rain. Numerous accidents were reported on the interstates and throughout Saline County with parts of Kansas seeing widespread power outages due to more than an inch of ice in some areas.

They call these events "Blue northers". A very apt name. It is very, very cold out there right now.

Two Shooting Incidents In Colorado

There have been two shooting incidents in Colorado, two people are dead at a missionary training facility and two others wounded. Twelve hours later, a gunman opened fire at a mega-church located about 65 miles from the first incident. Four people are reported to have been shot. It is not known if the two incidents are related.

ARVADA, Colo. - A gunman killed two staff members at a missionary training center early Sunday after being told he couldn't spend the night, and about 12 hours later four people were shot outside a megachurch in Colorado Springs.

Colorado Springs police Lt. Fletcher Howard said a suspect had been detained in the shootings there. Authorities in Arvada, a Denver suburb about 65 miles north, said no one had been captured in the shootings there.

It was not immediately known whether the shootings were related, but Arvada authorities said they were sharing information with Colorado Springs investigators.

Howard declined to say whether the Colorado Springs suspect had been shot. The shooting there was reported shortly after 1 p.m. Police sealed off the church, but it was not clear whether any parishioners were still inside.

The conditions of the four people shot Sunday afternoon in Colorado Springs, in the parking lot of the New Life Church, was not immediately known, El Paso County Sheriff's Lt. Lari Sevene said.

The first shooting happened at about 12:30 a.m. at the Youth With a Mission center in Arvada, a Denver suburb, police spokeswoman Susan Medina said.

A man and a woman were killed and two men were wounded, Medina said. All four were staff members with the center, said Paul Filidis, a Colorado Springs-based spokesman with Youth With a Mission.

The gunman came to the door of the Arvada dormitory seeking shelter, asking whether he could spend the night, said Peter Warren, director of Youth With a Mission Denver.

When he was refused, he forced his way in and began shooting. They have not located the first shooter - unless it is the one in custody in Colorado Springs. More as it develops.

UPDATE: Another person was killed at the church before a security guard killed the gunman. There still isn't much detail yet.

UPDATE: The chief of police in Colorado Springs is publicly crediting the security guard for probably saving many lives. The shooter was armed with a "high powered" rifle according to the AP. 

"There was a courageous staff member who probably saved many lives here today," (police chief Richard) Myers said.

There is a report that the gunman also hurled some sort of bomb or grenade in the Denver Post. They also report that bombs or devices of some sort were found around the campus.

Police found various devices on the church grounds, authorities say.

Three people were taken to Penrose Community Hospital in Colorado Springs, where they were listed in critical, fair and good condition, said hospital spokeswoman Amy Sufak.

Earlier today, two youth missionary staff workers were killed and two others were injured when a man seeking shelter opened fire at a missionary dorm in Arvada.

The Colorado Springs shooting was reported shortly after 1 p.m. The church's 11 a.m. service had recently ended, and hundreds of people were milling about when the gunman opened fire.

Police sealed off the church andwere searching the three main buildings of the New Life complex, said Sgt. Mark Stevens, Colorado Springs police spokesman.

Mario Garcia was waiting outside the church property in his Chevrolet Suburban for his three children, ages 14 to 18, who were in the basement with 50 other people for two hours, he said.

His children had attended a meeting that started at 10:30 a.m., and were walking out of the service at about 1 p.m. when they saw a man throwing "some sort of bomb," Garcia said.

"It is a very sad day today," Garcia said. "We like to believe churches are one of the safest places but times are changing. It's surreal to be sitting here waiting for my kids to be released."

That guard likely did save a lot of people today.

Diminishing The Universities

Robert Maranto, an associate professor of political science at Villanova University, writes an op-ed in Today's Washington Post that exposes, yet again, the decidedly leftist bias in academia today. He points out, quite reasonably, that the impact of this institutional bias diminishes the universities themselves. He starts out stating plenty of figures showing that there is, in fact, a bias then hits his real point.

Despite that bad job-hunting experience I had, I doubt that legions of leftist professors have set out to purge academia of Republican dissenters. I believe that for the most part the biases conservative academics face are subtle, even unintentional. When making hiring decisions and confronted with several good candidates, we college professors, like anyone else, tend to select people like ourselves.

Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

There are numerous examples of this ideological isolation from society. As political scientist Steven Teles showed in his book "Whose Welfare?," the public had determined by the 1970s that welfare wasn't working — yet many sociology professors even now deny that '70s-style welfare programs were bad for their recipients. Similarly, despite New York City's 15-year-long decline in crime, most criminologists still struggle to attribute the increased safety to demographic shifts or even random statistical variations (which apparently skipped other cities) rather than more effective policing.

In my own area, public administration, it took years for bureaucracy-defending professors to realize that then-Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review (aka Reinventing Government) was not a reactionary attempt to destroy government agencies, but rather a centrist attempt to revitalize them. Most of the critics of the academy are conservatives or libertarians, but even the left-of-center E.D. Hirsch argues in "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them" that academics in schools of education have harmed young people by promoting progressive dogma rather than examining what works in real classrooms.

All this is bad for society because academics' ideological blinders make it more difficult to solve domestic problems and to understand foreign challenges. Moreover, a leftist ideological monoculture is bad for universities, rendering them intellectually dull places imbued with careerism rather than the energy of contending ideas, a point made by academic critics across the ideological spectrum from Russell Jacoby on the left to Josiah Bunting III on the right.

He's got this exactly right. The existence of a monoculture presents students with only one point of view. Education becomes indoctrination and the intellectual rigor of the universities suffer. We've seen how awful it can get at the University of Delaware just recently. Maranto may be a little on the optimistic side, though. Some of the bias against conservatives and or Republicans is, I think, quite intentional. Look at how imbued the left is with a driving need to silence critics and stifle dissent (all the while screaming that they are being oppressed). They learned that somewhere, don't you think?

Dissecting The Energy Bill

Bruce "McQ" McQuain from QandO, guesting over at Right Wing News, takes apart the energy bill that just passed the House of Representatives and examines the real impacts it will have on Americans. It isn't pretty, not at all.

Let's parse this a little, shall we?

It would raise vehicle fuel efficiency (Cafe) standards for the first time in over 30 years, by 40%, to 35 miles per gallon for both cars and light trucks and SUVs.

And that will do what? Increase the price of automobiles. As usual, it's a mandate for which you, not anyone else, get to pay.

Of course loopholes do survive - big loopholes. Dan Becker, an environmental consultant and lawyer and former official with the Sierra Club explains:

“If I am G.M., God forbid, and I produce a certain number of flexible-fuel vehicles capable of running on E85 ethanol, they will be assumed to be running on ethanol 50 percent of the time. So the fuel economy of a 20 m.p.g. truck that is technically capable of running on E85 will essentially be 30 m.p.g.

“Because the auto companies are not as stupid as they look, they have chosen to make most of their flexible-fuel vehicles their least-efficient vehicles. So they get the maximum fuel economy benefit.”

Why aren’t these vehicles running on E85 all the time? Because E85 is hard to find in many states. There are only about 1,200 stations selling E85 nationwide and only nine in New York, according to the Energy Department. Even if you can find E85 the mileage is often about 30 percent worse than with gasoline, because ethanol contains less energy per gallon.

Nevertheless, for more than a decade the federal government has joined the auto industry in what amounts to make-believe. That fantasy continues in this bill. No wonder Mr. Becker calls it the “Energizer bunny of auto industry loopholes.”

Indeed. Flexible-fuel Hummers, oh my.

There is quite a lot more, including a link to the same Smithsonian Magazine article I cited yesterday. The end result of this bill will be enormous increases in the cost of pretty much everything for people in this country. It will also deepen rather than improve the energy problems in this country. The price of energy is about to skyrocket - just as food prices are already. The energy bill is nothing more than a gargantuan tax hike on Americans which will funnel enormous amounts of money to special interests.

Increased Corn Production = Increased Water Pollution

So says the Washington Post in an article today discussing the amount of Atrazine found in water. Atrazine is the second most widely used weedkiller in the US and is widely used by corn farmers. Atrazine has also been banned in the European Union because of negative impacts on wildlife when high concentrations reach the watersheds.

Atrazine, the second most widely used weedkiller in the country, is showing up in some streams and rivers at levels high enough to potentially harm amphibians, fish and aquatic ecosystems, according to the findings of an extensive Environmental Protection Agency database that has not been made public.

The analysis — conducted by the chemical's manufacturer, Syngenta Crop Protection — suggests that atrazine has entered streams and rivers in the Midwest at a rate that could harm those ecosystems, several scientific experts said. In two Missouri watersheds, the level of atrazine spiked to reach a "level of concern" in both 2004 and 2005, according to the EPA, and an Indiana watershed exceeded the threshold in 2005.

Much of the data on atrazine levels has remained private because Syngenta's survey of 40 U.S. watersheds was done in connection with the EPA's 2006 decision to renew its approval of the pesticide. The Washington Post obtained the documents from the Natural Resources News Service, a District-based nonprofit group focused on environmental issues……

……The federal government first approved atrazine in the 1950s, but it came under increased scrutiny in the late 1990s after Tyrone B. Hayes, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley, did a series of studies — first for chemical companies and then on his own — that indicated that tiny amounts of the pesticide de-masculinized tadpoles of African clawed frogs. The European Union declared it a harmful "endocrine disrupter" and banned it as of 2005, but the EPA decided to allow its continued use after determining that the agency lacked a standard test for measuring the hormone-disrupting effects of chemicals…..

…..Nancy Golden, a biologist and toxicologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who studies how chemicals affect aquatic creatures, said fish exposed to as little as 0.5 parts per billion of atrazine in the lab demonstrate behavioral problems. At higher levels, they experience stunted growth. The levels of atrazine in 2004 in the two Missouri sites were more than 100 times the 0.5 parts per billion concentration, the Syngenta data show. (Emphasis added)

An awful lot of this stuff is reaching the water and an awful lot of people get their drinking water from those water sources. Cheerful thought, isn't it? Another ecological problem that increases the negative impact of ethanol.

Santa’s In The Air And The Sap Is Running

The Washington Post points out that despite the hard boiled, bah humbug attitudes many people affect at Christmas time, the mushy, sentimental films and television shows that are played over and over each year continue to gather astonishingly large audiences. Year after year.

On Friday, the American Film Institute will begin its Christmas Classics series, with repeated showings of "It's a Wonderful Life" and "A Christmas Story." The recent ABC telecast of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" won its time slot — and not just among children, but among adults as well. "Shrek the Halls" had nearly 21 million viewers. "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" had almost 19 million.

These holiday standbys poke through the tough exterior, past the belligerent blogger in us all, to tap into the warm, mushy core that people try to deny. Viewers simply cannot turn their backs on Charlie and the Grinch. Each year, audiences return to Bedford Falls to be reminded, just like George Bailey, that lives led with simple kindness and good intentions can have significant influence. They want to encourage Ralphie Parker as he makes his pitch — to his teacher, to his parents, to Santa Claus himself — for a Red Ryder BB gun.

Every Christmas, people return to the sap.

The draw, to some degree, must be attributed to habit. It's what they do every year, just as they might bake the same cookies, hang the lights in precisely the same way and put the Christmas tree in its usual location. But television and movie traditions offer a kind of continuity and reassurance that other traditions can't. The cookies burn. The lights break. The pine needles start falling off the tree too soon. But the Grinch and his little dog remain the same.

The Christmas classics are a special kind of entertainment. They're available only for a short time. They are both familiar and rare. "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is TV's equivalent of a good tomato: a true seasonal affair.

The story lines that made viewers turn teary-eyed the first 10 times they saw these Christmas classics will most likely continue to do so. They strum a chord that is ignored or denied all year long. We are not as detached and cynical as we would like to think. We are not as angry.

I dunno how true that is, I personally would not watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or A Charlie Brown Christmas at gunpoint. Well, okay, I would, but I wouldn't enjoy it. But that may be because, for years, those were the only thing to watch at Christmas! They have a short compilation of clips from some of the classics.