[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

This time at a military recruitment center in the greater Baltimore area:

A man was arrested Wednesday for plotting to blow up a military recruitment center in the Baltimore area, authorities said.

Antonio Martinez, a Muslim convert who called himself Muhammed Hussain, was arrested and is expected to appear later Wednesday in federal court, Fox News confirms.

Martinez, a U.S. citizen, was caught in a sting operation as he tried to detonate a phony bomb at an Armed Forces recruiting station in Catonsville, just outside Baltimore, officials said.

“A Baltimore man has been arrested this morning in connection with a scheme to attack an Armed Forces recruiting station in Catonsville, Maryland, with what he believed to be vehicle bomb,” U.S. Department of Justice spokesman Dean Boyd said in a statement sent to Fox News. “There was no actual danger to the public as the explosives were inert and the suspect had been carefully monitored by law enforcement for months.”

(Source.)  Yep that’s another sting.  So expect some liberal idiot to cry “entrapment” in 3… 2… 1…

And in case you are wondering:

There was no evidence the plot was linked to recent shootings at military installations in the Washington area, authorities said. Baltimore is about 40 miles (65 kilometers) north of Washington.

Incidentally, there doesn’t seem to have been any more of those shootings—at least not for a while.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

This is an area where I respectfully disagree with our host.  My default is that the government cannot take away our freedom until and unless they prove that it is justified.  Environmental laws inevitably take away our freedom.  So the government as a matter of practice should not impose such regulations unless it can prove that the dangers it is guarding against are real.

And for me, the most damning fact is that over and over again, climate “scientists” make predictions and those predictions prove to be wrong:

A year ago tomorrow [December 6], just before the opening of the UN Copenhagen world climate summit, the British Meteorological Office issued a confident prediction. The mean world temperature for 2010, it announced, ‘is expected to be 14.58C, the warmest on record’ – a deeply worrying 0.58C above the 1961-1990 average.

World temperatures, it went on, were locked inexorably into an everrising trend: ‘Our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010-2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far – 1998.’…

But though it was still successfully trying to influence media headlines during Cancun last week by saying that 2010 might yet end up as the warmest year, the small print reveals the Met Office climbdown. Last year it predicted that the 2010 average would be 14.58C. Last week, this had been reduced to 14.52C.

That may not sound like much. But when one considers that by the Met Office’s own account, the total rise in world temperatures since the 1850s has been less than 0.8 degrees, it is quite a big deal. Above all, it means the trend stays flat.

As they say, read the whole thing, but the takeaway here is that once again, they have made predictions about the climate with much fanfare.  No one stands up and contradicts them, except for those tarred as deniers of our impending environmental holocaust.  And then once again, they turn out to be wrong.

I mean I would understand if the scientists said, “look, we just can’t predict what the global temperature will be with that much accuracy.”  I wouldn’t fault them from staying out of the prediction game.  But they make that prediction and turn out to be wrong, time and again.  They claim to know what the future will be, and are proven wrong, again and again.  They can’t predict two weeks from now.  They can’t predict the climate one year from now.  But we are supposed to trust their predictions into the next century?

Further, the fact that no other scientist contradicts them is damning, too.  For instance, the other day NASA unveiled a claim that they discovered a new form of bacteria that uses arsenic in its DNA.  This was a tremendous deal, if true.  And now we are seeing that assertion questioned, as scientists come out questioning the science behind the claims.  Now I won’t pretend to know who is right in that food fight, but this is what you expect to see when science is operating properly—that when scientists hold a press conference and start getting things wrong, that other scientists speak up and tell us this.  The fact that these climate scientists very publicly make a string of clearly erroneous predictions, and no one contradicts them (except the so-called deniers) says to me that the scientific process has been corrupted.

Now for all I know, the Global Warmmongers might very well be right.  But at this point, it would be coincidental if they were.  The scientific process has been hopelessly corrupted.

I would add that it doesn’t help matters when liberals environmentalists make fascist proposals like this:

Mr. [Ted] Turner – a long-time advocate of population control – said the environmental stress on the Earth requires radical solutions, suggesting countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. He added that fertility rights could be sold so that poor people could profit from their decision not to reproduce.

“If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people,” Mr. Turner said.

(emphasis added.)  Ted you are a frightening idiot.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]

[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here.]

That’s the takeaway I am getting if this AP report is accurate (big “if” there):

A federal judge on Tuesday threw out a lawsuit aimed at preventing the United States from targeting U.S.-born anti-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki for death.

U.S. District Judge John Bates said in a written opinion that al-Awlaki’s father does not have the authority to sue to stop the United States from killing his son. But Bates also said the “unique and extraordinary case” raises serious issues about whether the United States can plan to kill one of its own citizens without judicial review.

And of course the ACLU revealed its usual hard-nosed and practical approach to the powers of war:

The cleric’s father, Nasser al-Awlaki of Yemen, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, argued that international law and the Constitution prevented the administration from unilaterally targeting his son for death unless he presents a specific imminent threat to life or physical safety and there are no other means to stop him.

War is the arbitrary application of force.  A battle is thousands of American agents going out and issuing the death penalty to anyone they think might be the enemy.  The arbitrariness is demonstrated by the persistent tragedy of “friendly fire”—that is, killings so arbitrary that if we knew who we were about to kill, our agents (soldiers, etc.) would have refrained from killing.

And the ACLU and this terrorist’s father want to do away with that.  They would have us storm the beaches at Normandy and then arrest the German soldiers.  And read them their rights, I suppose.

I am sure our government will try to capture him.  He is probably more valuable to us alive than dead.  But if he wants to guarantee his live capture, he has a very simple solution: turn himself in.

[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]