20 May 2008 @ 8:52AM >> In yesterday’s, “The Coming Nanny State Fat Camp,” I mentioned two excuses Nanny Statists will use to get government to restrict people’s food intake and force them to exercise.

If this comment is any clue, those Nanny Statists have a friend in Barack Obama:

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.

Millions around the globe have starved to death in recent years thanks to petty dictators and corrupt governments. But to Senator Obama, “leadership” means letting the rest of the world know that he blames the United States first.

America exports more food that any other nation on Earth, yet accounts for less than 5% of the world’s population.

When it comes to our net contribution to the world’s food supply, we are not the planet’s biggest problem.

But rather than implore, say, North Korea to abandon the bankrupt ideology that’s led to numerous mass starvations, a President Obama would prefer to subject the food intake of our private citizens to the approval of other countries.

Now that the senator seems to be preening for the job of Counselor-in-Chief of the Nanny State Fat Camp, his wife’s odd comments from earlier in the year suddenly make more sense:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

17 September 2007 @ 10:16AM >> Did nuclear material make it from North Korea to Syria, destined for detonation in Israel?

An article published in London’s Sunday Times yesterday makes it seem like a distinct possibility:

IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way.

At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.

Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea.

[...]

“This was supposed to be a devastating Syrian surprise for Israel,” said an Israeli source. “We’ve known for a long time that Syria has deadly chemical warheads on its Scuds, but Israel can’t live with a nuclear warhead.”

An expert on the Middle East, who has spoken to Israeli participants in the raid, told yesterday’s Washington Post that the timing of the raid on September 6 appeared to be linked to the arrival three days earlier of a ship carrying North Korean material labelled as cement but suspected of concealing nuclear equipment.

The target was identified as a northern Syrian facility that purported to be an agricultural research centre on the Euphrates river. Israel had been monitoring it for some time, concerned that it was being used to extract uranium from phosphates.

[...]

Washington was rife with speculation last week about the precise nature of the operation. One source said the air strikes were a diversion for a daring Israeli commando raid, in which nuclear materials were intercepted en route to Iran and hauled to Israel. Others claimed they were destroyed in the attack.

There is no doubt, however, that North Korea is accused of nuclear cooperation with Syria, helped by AQ Khan’s network. John Bolton, who was undersecretary for arms control at the State Department, told the United Nations in 2004 the Pakistani nuclear scientist had “several other” customers besides Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Some of his evidence came from the CIA, which had reported to Congress that it viewed “Syrian nuclear intentions with growing concern”.

“I’ve been worried for some time about North Korea and Iran outsourcing their nuclear programmes,” Bolton said last week. Syria, he added, was a member of a “junior axis of evil”, with a well-established ambition to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The links between Syria and North Korea date back to the rule of Kim Il-sung and President Hafez al-Assad in the last century. In recent months, their sons have quietly ordered an increase in military and technical cooperation.

20 January 2007 >> From the Wall Street Journal:

Saddam Hussein managed to pull off the $100 billion Oil for Food scam right under the noses of the United Nations officials charged with administering it. Now another dictator with nuclear ambitions has succeeded in a similar trick, this time manipulating the United Nations Development Program in North Korea.

The United Nations long ago devolved into a speaking society whose prime purpose seems to be providing a forum for petty tyrants to denounce the United States. More recently, the U.N. has become one giant slush fund for some of the worst dictators in the world.

All the while, American taxpayers foot the bill for 22% of the U.N.’s budget, despite the fact that the U.S. is only one of 192 members of the U.N.

It’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to wonder why we allow this abomination to occupy some of the most valuable real estate in the world...