Global Warming Update
When the Global Warming debate was mostly between scientists with long range predictions and politicians trying to scare me about One World Order types I was mostly a MMGW skeptic.
No more.
The science is more robust and the consequences are already evident. The PPM goal to avoid was 350 and we have blown through that to 400 while experiencing the hottest year on record, where every month was the hottest month on record. The mythical Northwest Passage is no longer mythical and we are doing so much damage on so many fronts that we now live in the Anthropocene Era. Holy crap.
This changes the debate a good bit for me. The problem, as usual, is that my politics don't line up with a binary left/right position.
If I thought this was some disaster that was both so imminent and so huge that a One World Order style of "let's all pull together and defeat the aliens/blow up the asteroid/cure the Mega Plague/whatever" then I'd be looking for a political solution. But I'm not convinced we're there on either count, of size or time.
Certain things are already inevitable, but they are not catastrophic, not in any global sense. (There are those who are experiencing a personal catastrophe, but while their individual situation is tragic it is insufficient to marshal global resources wielded by the state.)
A little guy named Amory Lovins, a Mighty Mouse, has come to save the day, and he's bringing the market with him. In
Reinventing Fire he has proposed a pragmatic solution to MMGW that involves no new laws or taxes, gets us almost completely off fossil fuels (as fuel, we still need petro products for a ton of other things, thus guaranteeing job security for my Petro E kid) and grows the economy by $5 trillion. With a 't'. And it requires no new tech, no new discoveries, although any such innovations will either speed up the solution or improve the economics of it.
What I really like about this is how egalitarian it is. In the binary debate we either pass a bunch of laws and effectively deny third world countries access to all the living standards of the first world, or we ignore the science and put a few billion more cars on the road with gas engines. Reinventing Fire proposes a sustainable future where economic progress benefits everybody, not just the rich or the privileged. There are profits in this for the private sector and new jobs for private sector workers.
Capitalism recently got credit for raising a billion people out of poverty, all across the planet. Let's see what else it can do.
What did Bradley Manning do to justify the conditions of his confinement?
He is in solitary, gets the one hour exercise room to walk around in every day, has to respond "yes" every 5 minutes to his guards from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m., is awakened if he turns towards the wall or covers his face, cannot converse with his guards or other prisoners, and was denied sheets and pillows. This despite not being on suicide watch.
He is an accused, not a convict. I cannot imagine what contact with other prisoners would do to jeopardize him or his security unless I am unaware of threats, which is possible.
Unless his safety is threatened he belongs in the general population. He was not suicidal when he went in, but the very conditions of his confinement have caused a deterioration in his mental condition.
And what he did was illegal. I don't like his Gen Y attitude towards all information being free. But I detest the way a journalist can get a story exactly right only to hear Obama's spokesman call it false, and then have to rely on a guy like Manning to show that the Obama administration is lying. I remember Nixon telling us there were no US military actions in Cambodia.
But I also detest the NYT trying to distinguish what they do from what Wikileaks does. The bright line is supposedly "troop movements", and yet the NYT pushes that line around pretty robustly. See this story from just last week:
"The proposal, described by American officials in Washington and Afghanistan, would escalate military activities inside Pakistan, where the movement of American forces has been largely prohibited because of fears of provoking a backlash."
Personally I approve of this type of reporting; it exposes a secret policy proposal that was being pursued without public debate even though most Americans are probably not in favor of opening a new front in an unpopular war that is supposed to be a on a timetable to end soon. It's like giving your landlord two weeks notice and then adding on a sunroom one night. But this type of reporting is crucial, it makes the public debate not only more informed but actually possible.
Manning released info of what happened in the past. While it has surely compromised intelligence sources it has not outed any specific future missions the way the NYT did. Now the mission outed by the Times has not even been approved yet, so no troops on the ground are in danger. But the distinction between past and future is the key one for judging damage. So far I have not seen evidence that Manning's acts caused specific casualties. Grousing about it, but no evidence of it.
Labels: manning, NYT, wikileaks
Update to Feb '07 post: Climategate.
I have been a man made global warming skeptic for several years. It began when I found out that if you read news pieces carefully regarding the IPCC report you would sometimes find a reference to the summary instead of the report. So I began to look around and found that only the summary had been released. So I dug into that. Turns out the summary is written by policy makers, not scientists. In fact, one by one many scientists were asking that their name be removed from the IPCC report.
Not surprising. Even though most MMGW scientists were reviled as "deniers" (to link them to Holocaust deniers and all the lovely taint of Nazism) the fact is that science works by having one scientist question anothers data/tests/methodology/
results. Some of the IPCC scientists were not comfortable with the broad conclusions drawn from their narrow data sets. No scientist appreciates having his work misrepresented. The typical formula was:
scientist: under the hypothetical conditions of our model, if this then that.
Summary: under current conditions this will happen.
At least that is what I got from reading around.
Turns out it was worse. Much
worse. Think Haeckel's embryos.
Somebody hacked the email server of the Hockey Team, the guys who support Mann and his hockey stick chart that shows how MMGW has changed the climate game. Turns out they changed the numbers. And hid the numbers. And discussed how to delete the numbers.
If the cap and trade folks find out they were hoaxed by the cap and gown folks, expect to see public and private funding dry up.
Since the media have been riding the Prius built by the Hockey Team, I wonder who will drive this story?
Don't get me wrong: I try to buy, live, drive and consume green. It makes sense for a variety of reasons. But MMGW may no longer be one of the reasons. And the real shame is that all the new green jobs and whatever could only exist if we thought global catastrophe was at stake. Apparently we'll tolerate particulate pollution and increased arsenic levels in our water, but if you want us to act on anything you have go all 2012 on us. Say goodbye to the Green Economy.
At least until the Next Big Scare.
Stimulus/banking/mortgage crisis
Trying to blame this mess on either party is obtuse. Both parties had a small hand.
I'm a firm believer in the market, but the market requires good information to allow two parties to exchange value.
Some 3 or 4 years ago I recall listening to an NPR story about odd doings in the mortgage business. The Community Reinvestment Act was being used by bank regulators to encourage banks to lend outside their normal zone (comfort, geographic, whatever). This was done by refusing new branches to banks who didn't play ball. So if the Bank of North Pudunk wants to open a branch in South Podunk, they need to loan ol' Southside Joe money for new home.
Joe only makes $40,000 a year. But, lucky for BoNP, Joe's loan was brought in by a mortgage broker, Dickie Flatt. Dickie, without telling BoNP, has put Joe onto a nifty website called
www.confirmmyincome.com I'm not making that up, it was in the NPR story.
Joe can augment his loan by paying a small fee to confirmmyincome.com and they'll snail mail a real piece of paper that says Joe is one of their consultants and that he made $92,000 last year. BoNP makes the loan. Then they sell it on the secondary loan market. Do they know it's trash? They suspect, but they are counting on the home's value increasing enough that by the time they foreclose they don't lose any money.
If markets go up forever, then nobody is really hurt. But the market likes to know what it's getting, and these mortgage backed securities started to stink the moment the first west coast real estate market stalled. Y'all may recall about a year ago, maybe April, when one French bank said "We can no longer trust packages of US mortgages"
That was the market saying that the info was no longer good enough to guarantee an honest exchange of value. Poof went a couple of trillion.
The website closed down shortly after the NPR story, but I'm not naive enough to believe there was only one. But I have never heard that anybody connected with false income confirmation has ever been prosecuted.
Dickie Flatt got his commission. Joe got his house. For a while. BoNP maybe got their branch in S. Podunk. But some financial institution bought a batch of loans like that, and with the credit market frozen and foreclosures up 81% that batch of loans is selling way below it's face value. And that financial institution saw its capital reserves dang near disappear.
The CRA is decades old. Both parties flubbed chances to fix it.
At the moment our solution is to move closer to Euro style govt. Meanwhile bankruptcy proceedings would have been a great way to separate the wheat from the chaff, but it looks like the govt is going to just buy the chaff instead.
Yay. :p
Put me down as 37% in favor of the stimulus package. That's the tax cut portion. Another 8 or 9 bucks per paycheck will get spent; a one time check will get saved. Consumer spending is what drives our market. Especially when our savings accounts are in the Bank of North Podunk.
I think the GOP has pushed the "Poor Sara" button too hard, to the point where she looks weak. A strong woman can stand on her own two feet. Hey, she called out the press, and she self labeled as a bulldog. Let's quit the sexist big brother routine and see if she can take the heat.
First question: Hey Sara, how's that' abstinence only' working out fer ya?
Second question: Did your daughter get a choice? Can anybody else's get one?
Third one: Just how self-centered does one have to be to try to conceive a fifth child at 44? While a governor?
Fourth: You fired the librarian who wouldn't burn, I mean ban, books. Did you decide to rehire her before or after the town held a recall meeting?
Fifth: If your executive experience is really all that and a Snickers, does it make your running mate nervous that you have more than him, too?
Sixth: Teach ID in public schools? Seriously? Will that be before or after the chapter on Pastafarianism?
Seventh: Since you told Congress you didn't need that Bridge to Nowhere you campaigned on when you went to Ketchikan, isn't it true that Alaska got to keep the money, just without the earmark? In fact, Alaska gets more federal money per capita than the average state. Sara, is it still by a factor of ten? And didn't you spend $38 million in federal transportation funds building a road to the Bridge to Nowhere?
Eighth: Got any pics of the Runner Up to Miss Wasilla?
Couldn't resist that last one.
Ok, one more: Hey Hockey Mom, how many games you gonna catch this season? Aw, bummer.
State's rights in light of Jesse Helms death
Apparently "state's rights" is code for racism. With the passing of Jesse Helms a whole lot is being written about whether Helms was merely politically incorrect (The National Review) or just plain racist (The New Republic). Actually The New Republic covers, as usual, a variety of opinions.
I have no doubt that many white southerners were glad to have some constitutional issue to provide cover for refusing civil rights to blacks. I also have no doubt that some southerners were horrified to find racism hitching its wagon to a sound constitutional principle.
Or is it? There appears to be a view that state's rights will always and forever be a code word and not a principle.
In a Claremont Review of Books essay by William Voegeli on race and American conservatism, he says:
"The constitutional principles at the heart of this project were—are—ones that liberals find laughable, fantastic, and bizarre. Because they cannot take them seriously they reject the possibility that conservatives do. Thus, liberals dismiss "states' rights" as nothing more than a code word for racism. There is no point in conservatives even asking what the code word for states' rights is, because liberals cannot imagine anyone believes this to be a legitimate political concern. "
Well, I happen to like states rights. The guy that taught me consitutional law at BU seemed to make a good case for states as innovators, trying out systems and approaches that might end up working for the nation as a whole. I also think that the federal constitution provides a floor beneath which a state cannot go; this is why we passed theVoting Rights Act, among others.
So.
How much states rights are y'all in favor of? Medicinal marijuana, abortion restrictions, gay marriage, school vouchers, speed limits, drinking age? The list can get pretty long. Are you all in or just for your pet projects?
Apparently Earth Day was yesterday, so I'm a day late and 13.5 acres short. Update: Ah ha! I'm early, it's
April 22.
Faded in and out of some serious nappage while
FSTV ran a program on ecological footprints. Keep an eye on
Footprint Network for a footprint calculator for the US, right now they only have one for Australia.
Meanwhile I did the
Earth Day Footprint Quiz.
By looking at how you live it tells you roughly how much acreage it takes to support your specific lifestyle. For me, that is 18 acres. In a world with only enough footprint room for 4.5 acres per person, it would take 3.9 earths to support our world population if they all lived like me. So I feel bad.
But, it takes 24 acres to support the average American, and I'd like to think I could knock a few acres off since I support a kid inside my lifestyle. And it least I'm not a shopping center, it takes acreage equal 1600 shopping centers to support that beast. Wow.
Anyway, think local. World food prices are shooting up right now and transportation costs are one important ingredient. Support your local farmer or farmers market. Unless yours, like mine, sells produce shipped from California :p
OK, so I've been away awhile but I have excuses, I ran for the state legislature, got divorced, broke my ankle...
"Wait, wait! Dude, you ran for office?"
Hey, I don't call this "all politics is local" for nada. Yes, I ran for the Texas lege as a Libertarian candidate. To be more accurate I was one of four Lib candidates who filed for the same slot. Since I only filed because at the 11th hour the slot appeared to be open, I quickly withdrew (well, I waited a bit) to let the other 3 slug it out.
Withdrawing also allowed me to leave the Lib Party fold briefly and do something I hadn't done since 1984 or so: vote in a GOP primary. Then I went back that night and was selected as a delegate to the county convention (along with everyone else who showed up) where I was supposed to go and put forth Ron Paul approved platform requests. See, I am part of the Ron Paul Revolution: we're gonna starve the Beast and restore the 9th and 10th Amendments. I'm not on board with all the RP positions (abortion, gold standard, for two) but his number one goal is to shrink the fed govt and restore some state power, Founder style. Good on him for that, as the late Progressive Molly Ivins would say.
I'd like to think the strain of my campaign did not cost me my marriage. And I'd be right. The ankle, however...
Barry Bonds: Icon of Civil Liberty
Sorta.
Going back a couple of years we have the feds issuing a 42 count indictment in the BALCO scandal. What as the longest term served by the BALCO defendants? The fourteen months served by Barry Bonds' personal trainer Greg Anderson. Not for anything having to do with steroids, though. After he served three months for conspiracy (thought police) he was hauled back in for contempt for failing to testify before a grand jury regarding Bonds.
When Bonds was finally indicted Anderson was released. Nothing, nada, in the Bonds' indictment came from Anderson, his fourteen months was a waste. And possibly a fraud, merely punitive.
As is so often the case in fed cases, the harshest punishments are reserved for those who fail to cooperate, not those who, I dunno, actually break the law. And it's about high profile indictments, along with TV and photo ops, while the dismissals and wrist slaps are announced by defense lawyers. To their family and staff.
Sic 'em Barry!
Plamegate: does it still have any legs?
The guy who first bitched, properly, that Novak was out of line to name Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent has patiently waited for this day. Now that VPW has published her
book "
Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House", David Corn, the Washington editor of
The Nation magazine can finally get his "
I told you so".
VPW is making the talk show rounds and there can no longer be any doubt that outing her did damage to an important, ongoing covert operation. And not just any operation, but one that should have been dear enough to neocon hearts to have left her alone.
Mrs. Wilson's job was to keep the bad guys from getting WMDs. You'd think that anybody in the Bush administration who slowed or hindered that effort would get canned at least, and likely prosecuted. Scooter Libbey was nominally thrown to the wolves, but fortunately he was wearing a Bush Bungee Cord, and was miraculously yanked back/commuted to safety.
This was a mean-spirited, personal political attack of the lowest kind. And damaging to our national interests. Regarding bad guys and WMDs. I don't expect Republicans to apologize (the CYA spinning is well under way) and I have to say that I really don't expect the Dems to do much either.
This leaves it to the very media which helped sell the WMDs in Iraq story to make the effort to hold the Bush administration accountable.
I'm not holding my breath.
There's a word for that
And it's "demonym". On first glance it looks slightly diabolical, but it's really just the word for when we
label people by their town or state. Thus I'm a New Mexican Texan, by birth and residence. Some demonyms are pejorative, like Okie or, at least around here, yankee.
So now ya know.
But I need suggestions for a demonym for Tool, TX. Some possibilities: Toolite, Toolian, Tool-American, and the sublime "tool". Ha, yer a tool.
So, the US signed a new deal with Israel to provide $30 billion over the next ten years in military aid. Interesting catch: $20 billion of that has to be bought from US defense suppliers. Other countries getting deals are Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf allies, mostly weapons deals.
Making our allies stronger is a good deal so long as they stay allies. It would be nice if each gadget were equipped with a remote "kill" switch to prevent blowback, but we're gonna take our chances.
In any event, what I really see here is some big time corporate welfare, and I hope it gets reported as such. Let's say you're a US company, Consolidated Army Gizmos. CAG is having a down year, somehow cut out of the Iraq deal. But CAG has a long history of dealing with Israel, on a limited basis. Suddenly, Israel has a bucket of money, and most of that bucket has to be poured into the US.
This is how it looks:
US policy destabilizes a region. Destability boosts military hardware purchases. US government can't pay CAG et al to simply deliver military hardware. US pays other countries to buy it. Middleman Israel gets $10 billion for funneling the $20 billion to US companies. CAG pays dividends and exec bonuses!!
Meanwhile, the
math and science money for education stays stuck in "authorization" mode, not "appropriation". That's the difference between a goverment promise and a government check.
Four nice days in Queretaro. Only checked email once (trying to sell a jon boat) and the only TV I saw were the soccer games involving Mexico, but there were three of those, they won two.
Queretaro is around 450 years old; Dallas, not so much. I spent all my time in the Centro Historico. I generally think of Mexico as fairly traditional, but with a couple of revolutions under it's belt it has seen some upheaval.
The historic district reflects the changes that have occurred. There are churches and convetns and monasteries every few blocks. Qro was the center for missionary education in the Americas, sending priests and friars from California to Argentina. So, as the town grew the streets had religious names (Calle de la Natividad, etc.)
Eventually, however, Qro became a central player in the rebellion against the vice royalty. (Short version: most of the descendants of the Conquistadors were happy being top dog. Some weren't, and so Spain sent an Emperor type guy. He and his friends became top dog. The rest became nationalists and overthrew the Vice Regent.) The revolution, lead by libs like Juarez and others, separated church and state. As a result, the convents etc. had to give up lots of land under La Reforma, and Qro got a bunch of nice plazas that used to be church grounds and orchards.
The new guys also renamed the streets, so that after 250 years the town was suddenly crisscrossed by Cinco de Mayo St and Juarez Ave. and Calle 16 de Septiembre .
Kinda like changing streets to JFK and MLK. History gets written by the winners, what else is new.
Hot Button Revenge woohoo!
I wanted to pass this along --a chance to see some
very funny political cartoons on my favorite topic: politicization of science.
On issues from air quality to global warming, government science is being censored, manipulated, and distorted on an unprecedented scale. To draw attention to this problem and have a little fun, the Union of Concerned Scientists is hosting Science Idol: the Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest.
These are funnier one at a time, seeing a bunch on the same topic dilutes them some. And so it goes.
Update, Bush moves presidency out of executive branch.
Joining Cheney in the exemption from an executive order that was supposed to cover the executive branch, the White House is now saying that the order was sposed to mean some are more equal than others, like those named Bush or Cheney. As
reported in the LA Times:
"An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 — amending an existing order — requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn't specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the vice president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman said." The oversight mentioned deals with national security issues. Like, say, when a CIA agent gets outed. More specifically: "The order aimed to create a uniform system for classifying, declassifying and otherwise safeguarding national security information. "
This has been a problem for years. Today I was reading some of the recently declassified CIA files on
National Security Agency Declassified. In particular I was reading about the USS Liberty, an American spy ship shot up by the Israelis during the Six Day War. There is considerable controversy over whether Israeli force knew they were firing on a US flagged ship. Anyway, the
declassified report talks about how misuse of classification labels interfered with the US Sixth Fleet response to the tragedy. The EO amended by Bush aims to fix this ongoing problem. But Bush and Cheney are now refusing to cooperate. Not surprising given this administration's penchant for classifying damn near everything as too secret for us to know.
If I could get Dubya to exempt us from the law of gravity, we might finally get those cool personal jet packs I've been promised all my life :p
Cheney rewrites the Constitution to move VP out of the executive branch.
Amazingly Cheney has claims
not to be covered by an executive order signed by President Bush regarding national secrets. Tried to eliminate the very department charged with enforcing the E.O.
Darfur update: I like this idea.
I joined up with Amnesty International about 20 years ago, have always liked their reports and the way they helped members write to politicos to accomplish real results.
Today, however, they opened a new, 21st century fight on genocide on Darfur. Called
Eyes On Darfur, it utilizes satellite monitoring of small towns threatened by the conflict in Sudan and Chad. They haven't abandoned their tried and true practice of confronting leaders by mail/fax/email, butthis new layer of info allows people to see what has happened, watch towns under threat of violence, and feel more of a connection.
I highly recommend a new bookmark.
U. S. Torture policy: I can't say it any better, or more succinctly, than
Andrew Sullivan. Go read.
UN still defines genocide out of Darfur
It has been over two years since the UN study of Sudan found no genocide, merely "counter insurgency".
See, according to the
Genocide Convention of 1948 if the UN
finds genocide, it has to do something about genocide. But the UN sees driving people from their homes and killing hundreds of thousands along the way as counter-insurgency measures. Thus, when someone resists having their child tossed into the air and being speared on a bayonet, they are an insurgent, not a victim of genocide. Clearly.
This is one of those "blame the individuals, don't blame the group" dynamics so familiar to frats and cheerleader squads. This is from the UN report: “in some instances individuals, including government officials, may commit acts with genocidal intent.” But that is not genocide, at least not until... what? How many individual acts by the government of Sudan or it's right hand, the Janjaweed militias, does it take to add up to genocide?
Eco-indulgences
The
TerraPass seemed like a good idea at first. Offset your carbon output by purchasing your way to zero emissions. Sounded good to my market loving brain. We already get our electricity from
Green Mountain, an electrical provider that uses wind energy.
But the more I thought about TerraPass the more I thought about Martin Luther.
A popular saying in Luther's time was : "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs". You could buy indulgences not only for past sins, but future ones as well. So, a Cross Country Pass could eradicate all the liberal guilt a Hummer driver might have. But would it do any good?
A little guilt is a good thing. While still awaiting better science on global warming, we can do some things about more obvious harms (particulates/asthma e.g.). The Terra Pass just seems like a Free Pass: for the right amount I get to ignore multiple problems I may, or may not, be contributing to, and I may even get to gloat about it. I prefer Playpumps.
And last, the carbon neutral bunch may have some legitimacy probs.
The Revolution Will Be Televised
Finally, an update to the
Josh Wolf story: he's been released without having to identify the protesters he filmed.
I don't advocate fed law very often, but this country needs a shield law for journalists.
Global warming debate heats up
This issue is driving me nuts.
The UN report released yesterday says "
Global warming is "very likely" a human-caused problem that will last for centuries and require concerted international action to reduce its potentially devastating impacts."
Meanwhile, over a thousand scientists have signed a petition stating: " We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
So which is it?
Like most issues causing a ton of media spewage, the answer is probably in the middle, but I can't find a site willing to claim the middle ground. Indeed, there are
those who are claiming victory now: "The world's scientists have spoken," said Timothy E. Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation. "It is time now to hear from the world's policymakers. The so-called and long-overstated 'debate' about global warming is now over."
I don't buy it. Greenhouse gases, those that absorb heat in the infrared spectrum, are almost always listed as carbon, methane and anything else man can produce. But
water vapor and clouds make up 98% of the greenhouse effect after you remove man-made greenhouse gases. And if you want to look at long term temperatures, really long term, we're actually in a
gradually deepening ice age. Weird, huh.
On the other hand we are plainly contributing to an increase in greenhouse gases and that increases global warming. I just have a hard time getting worked up over studies that only look back 200 years or so. It's like sitting on the beach and the first time a wave washes over your toes you run for the high ground because "the tide's coming in!" Big chunks of land have been exposed during ice ages and flooded during warm periods. Texas has oil because it used to be a sea basin. If Waco turns into the Third Coast surf capital, well, that's long term weather for ya.
So the one side says there is no evidence of global catastrophe (and they can be right because global catastrophe is kinda huge) and the other says that man is causing planetary climate change (and they can be right because man is causing really small planetary change).
Would anyone be surprised if it turned on money? Some 25 billion dollars has been spent on studies related to global warming since 1990. If your university hasn't found a way to tap into that, I bet you've seen some pretty big tuition increases. Science follows the money, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. I suspect that scientists on both sides could sit in a room and find ten things to agree on, and politicians from both sides would walk out claiming victory.
Last note: all of this has a smelly whiff of colonialism to it. The developed countries, with nice high standards of living, want to impose some pretty serious economic restraints. On themselves, sure, but also on the third world. I'm fairly certain it is not intended, but there's a real plain statement to Chindia et al: "We got ours. You can get yours, but you can't use the technology we used, it's banned now. So sorry."
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...
Batman??
So I'm still waiting for the personal jet pack the Space Age was supposed to bring us, but meanwhile Jet-Man is pretty amazing. He needs a better source for comic book heroes and soundtracks, but can't fault a thing with his flying. Dude flies fast, low and close to mountains in clouds, so I hope he lives long enough to work this sucker out.
And lemme know if I ever get my Crank-o-meter ratcheted up
this high. But I'm feeling him.
And no,
this Cody Banks thingy doesn't count. It certainly has all the functionality of a personal jetpack, but none of the coolness :p
Update: Woohoo! Cool new PBS series, Wired Science, and the first episode had a
segment of particular interest.
So "happy" now means "gay", even though "gay" no longer means "happy". Right.
Saw "Happy Feet" Tuesday with my kid. Spoilers ahead, but nothing you won't figure out 5 minutes into the movie.
Fox and the Religious Right are pissed. This movie is pushing the Gay Agenda onto kids again. See, the lead character is different (he dances rather than sings, like any other good Elvis-loving penguin) and he is eventually accepted despite his differences. And over the objections of the clan elders.
Somebody needs to look up the psychology term "projection".
The authority figures in this movie were far more pagan than evangelical Christian. Far. Authoritarians always look a bit fundamentalist: both rely on absolutes. Big deal, doesn't make every absolutist a Christian. Unless he's in a Hollywood movie, huh?
And I guess Gloria, who never paired off but taught the kids of others was just a lesbian? And I thought the movie was fantasy for the way Mumbles goes from the zoo to hero. How in the world did his feet make people see the connection between commercial fish harvesting and the plight of those Emperors? No way. None.
Final thought: picking battles over imaginary slights is going to be one of the main reasons You People lose the Culture War. Looking at you Medved.
Update to Josh Wolf story
The guy in jail for refusing to turn over videotapes he made at the G8? Still in jail. He just set the record for the longest jail term by an American journalist in an American jail for refusing to divulge his source or materials. The feds say the tapes are evidence of a crime, despite the fact that no one has been charged with a crime related to the events shown on the tape.
May we suggest waterboarding?
Not cuz I heard Led Zep "Immigrant Song" yesterday :P
Cuz I read Molly Ivins and she and I agree on this. First, I love Molly Ivins, but she's a progressive and that's pretty far to the left of even my left of center Libertarian views. Not that Libertarians are left of center, but because this Two Party World only has 2 dimensions Libertarians are all over the line. Molly defends the left end, and quite well.
Immigrant rights, remember that phrase.
So on this one point Molly and I agree: we have to bust the employers. Note: this is a pragmatic point of agreement as I really think that anybody who can fill a job in America should get their butt over here, but if we're gonna have a policy of limits then lets enforce them. Right now employers can get around enforcement due to the great variety of documents that pass for "well damn, maybe he IS legal". As Molly points out, even if we did build The Great Wall of America, we'd give Halliburton a no-bid contract and they'd just hire illegals anyway.
As a Libertarian I think the way to keep (by one Border Patrol estimate) a thousand people a month from dying in our border deserts is to tell them to Go Greyhound. Just get on a bus to North Carolina or Wisconsin and get a job. If you think I'm authorizing a bazillion dollar wealth transfer to Mexico, then think this through with me.
Immigrant rights.
Rights should be about fairness, and right now our broke-ass system is unfair, and not to the millions of Mexicans and Central Americans already here, although that is the group sounding off about immigrant rights. Our system is unfair to those in the Caribbean and India and Ireland, those who are on waiting lists for the few available slots given to citizens of their countries. They are playing by the rules; those in our country illegally are not. Some of the illegals here are from the Caribbean and India and Ireland, many by overstaying the expiration of their student visas. When we open the borders it won't just be the low end jobs that will be competitive, but across the board. Some damn fine doctors think our screwed up health care system beats the hell outta the one they're in. And the flyers constantly left on my front door would be left by Dominicans and Bahamians, not just Salvadorans and Guatemalans. (BTW: I've heard one can stop this flow of flyers, but apparently it involves mowing the front lawn, so that's out.)
Yeah, this Libertarian dream would cause some temporary social and economic upheaval, but in the end we'd attract the best and brightest, and not just the most desperate. And we'd stop the deaths in the desert. Flat. Immigrant rights for all, and no bitching about "illegals".
But the dream ain't gonna happen, and since Bush's plan for earned citizenship ain't gonna happen either look for Karl Rove to guide the White House to the right again. And watch this debate get meaner than ever.
Or, as Molly sez: " I don't see why we should stop blaming newcomers for our troubles just because they're not in charge of anything."
A school district in Burleson takes a novel approach to school shootings: prepare to fight
back.
On balance, and not by a lot, I prefer this approach.
First, it will probably never happen in Burleson. Just like it will probably never happen in 99% of the nation's schools.
Second, it offers a better chance of survival than doing nothing. Even in a worst case scenario I would think less kids get shot. Any parent that sues will have to prove that kid A got shot during a rush, whereas otherwise it would be kid B
who got shot. Impossible to do.
Third, doing something allows you to get over it. The guilt of doing nothing and surviving is hard on survivors. At least they'll know they tried.
But, on the other hand, Conan never succumbed to such tactics by a group of warriors, much less 95 pound art teachers :p
UPDATE: Burleson bagged the program. Was run by a Burleson cop, hubby to a school principal, not a lot of good research behind it.
There they go again.
As I've mentioned before, my big Hot Button Issue is science being trumped by ideology.
Well it's happening again: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060926/ap_on_sc/hurricane_report_4
The journal Nature is reporting that the White House has blocked a report by NOAA that was to have said that many NOAA scientists think that hurricanes may be increasing in strength and number due to higher ocean temps; higher temps that may be caused by global warming.
This is not a big leap, nor even a big point of contention in the global warming debate, it all sounds fairly conditional, not unusual for a science piece. Got squelched nonetheless :p
For a solid and objective look at global warming and hurricanes, as well as a great discusiion of the inherent problems associated with reporting on this issue, click
here
So, it's not just science that gets trumped by ideology.
While Michael Powell was still running the FCC he commissioned a study to show that consolidation of media ownership wasn't harmful to local programming. Ooops. Turns out locally owned stations produced 5 and half minutes more per half hour than did stations owned by Big Media. An attorney named Adam Candeub, who was with the FCC at the time and is now a law professor at Mich State, said that senior managers ordered that “every last piece” of the report be destroyed.
If you want to send a comment to the FCC go
here.
Remind them that local news broadcasts should be just that: local news.
In a side note: Belo Corp, owner of Dallas' Last Remaining Daily, has laid off staff in an attempt to refocus on local news. Good.
Because I know I'll forget this later.
From The Detroit Free Press:
"According to the dress code, students are allowed to wear school-sanctioned clothing, such as T-shirts bearing the school's mascot or clothing that supports school organizations.
This, according to the ACLU of Michigan, may violate the students' rights, particularly because it allows students to wear clothing that encourages school spirit but bans other forms of expression. ACLU officials have said that they plan to look into the constitutionality of the dress code."
As a Libertarian I share stances with both liberals and conservatives and so I read both types of blogs and get emails from riled up members of both camps. The ACLU is frequently mentioned in disgust by my right-leaning correspondents, ostensibly for living up to the "L" in their name. Never have figured out why right-wingers are agin liberty.
Anyway, I never seem to have anything to retort with except the ACLU defense of the KKK in their desire to march in Skokie over a decade ago. Standing up for the rights of the KKK seems to me like a perfect example of 'defending your right to say that which offends me'. As is this story.
Here, a few patriotic kids (and that's a good conservative thing, yes?) got bounced for wearing T-shirts on 9-11 that included words or pictures, in violation of the dress code. Looks like the ACLU angle is that if school words and images are OK then all bets are off. I don't know if they'll prevail, but at least they get props from me for standing up for conservatives. Under the liberal guise of free speech anyway.
Nice bridge. Set over a river leading into a bay. Nice setting.
Dallas wants to spend big bucks for some Calatrava bridges.
Over a a not so nice river in a not so nice setting. The first proposed bridge came in about three times over budget, and no private citizen jumped forward with a $100 million donation to make up the difference.
Dallas wanted a signature bridge, like this one.
We may end up with initials :p
Guy filmed a G8 protest in 2005. Feds say they want his tape. Feds? Well, the SFPD car was partly paid for with fed funds, and
if the video shows smoke around the car it
might be arson and then it
might be a fed offense.
Local cops are investigating three people in matters relating to the protest. None of hte matters have anything to do with a squad car.
Give a Man a Fish
..and you feed him for a day. He gets a free meal, you paid for it. Teach a man to fish and you can charge him for access to the river.
As a general rule I'm in favor of free trade, NAFTA etc. But you have to play fair. Lately I've become concerned that our farm subsidies are doing more than propping up ADM and other agribusinesses. And making corn into a Cult of Monoculture.
NAFTA has had a devastating effect on small farmers in Mexico, among others. It has delivered a third strike at a crucial time: union corruption and federal government politics have lead to a serious deterioration of education.
The Mexican constitution guarantees a free public education to every citizen. Because of political unrest in Chiapas and Tampico etc. the government has stopped funding some public schools. In some instances the government bulldozed the dorm facilities and classrooms to limit public access. Teachers in Mexico have a long tradition of being leaders in popular social movements, thus the government crackdown.
Teachers work 2 and sometimes 3 jobs to support their families. Parents pay for school repairs, textbooks etc., effectively paying tuition. Meanwhile, the federal government is using standardized testing and defunding to force the increased privatization of Mexican education.
What little income farmers could get from excess corn (excess meaning after feeding their families) is now almost completely gone, as subsidized American corn floods the Mexican market.
I don't want my taxes to pay to keep a Mexican kid out of school. It's not fair to either of us.
Attempt to get AI stuff on here...
I was born at the beginning of The Space Age, a term you almost never hear anymore, a few weeks after Sputnik scared the shit out of all good anti-communists. Growing up in Houston with NASA just down the road and Astrodomes and Astroturf and Astro Arena, hell I played little league baseball on the Astros, you just had a sense of the adventure of space. Our elementary school classes would wheel in a black and white TV for launches, and when Apollo 1 burned we named schools for Grissom, White and Chaffey. Even in law school our Civil Procedure prof let us out early to watch the landing of the first Shuttle mission. I figure my kid is about the right age to be on the first manned mission to Mars. Last year I was at Oshkosh when Global Surveyor and Spaceship One were there, heard the announcement by Branson for Virgin Galactic. And when they announced that VG would build it's launch facility in New Mexico, well damn, I was born there.
There's not much chance I'll ever go for a ride on VG, but it is definitely on my post-Lotto win list....
