Recipe for Disaster. In catching up with old email, I found a startling editorial in last Sunday's New York Post that surprised even me, plus a reminder of what the Post used to be.
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The editorial advocated that the United States should summarily execute captured "terrorists" in Iraq.

The capture last week of Shiite insurgent leaders believed responsible for the murder [emphasis supplied] of U.S. soldiers in Karbala last January is good news.

As far as it goes.

But we wonder: Why weren't these savages simply shot on the spot like the rabid dogs they are?

Forget about establishing guilt. To "believe" someone responsible is good enuf. Let's just do away with trials of all criminals, shall we, and dole out punishments, including capital punishment, to people the authority in place at the time "believes" guilty. What fabulous public policy!
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Never mind that treating combatants in a war — any war, be it insurgency, guerrilla war, the clash of uniformed armies — as criminals and killing them summarily would produce perpetual war, since there could never be armistice, never surrender, because the 'moral' need is to kill everyone on the other side or be killed as an inevitability.
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In the context of war, what is "murder" but business-as-usual? The bulk of war is organized murder, by both sides. When we send cruise missiles hundreds of miles to kill 'suspected insurgents', we're not really engaged in a desperate fite in which we have no choice but to kill or be killed. There's no danger to the people who launch a cruise missile, so that's not self-defense. It's murder. When we drop bombs from planes that fly so high that no anti-aircraft gun or missile can reach them, that's not self-defense. It's murder. When we use a cannon or machine gun from inside a tank or send an unmanned drone to shoot at remote targets, that's not self-defense. It's murder. Whenever there is no danger to the individual who kills, that's not self-defense. It's murder. And when you travel 7,000 miles to kill people who never attacked you, that's not self-defense; it's murder. At end, then, the insurgents are more like right than we are in Iraq. So let us not turn up our nose at insurgents as "murderers" but ourselves as "heroes". War makes murderers of us all. As a practical matter, then, can we treat all combatants on both sides as murderers and execute them all?
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What goes around comes around. We kill Iraqi insurgents; they kill us. And whereas we often cannot know, absent some kind of trial, whether people who do not wear uniforms are actual combatants / insurgents / guerrillas / "terrorists" — choose one; they're all the same — the insurgents can know if U.S. troops are combatants / "terrorists" (the same to them), because our soldiers wear uniforms that mark them plainly as The Enemy, and as such, as murderers all of whom deserve to die. So insurgents feel justified in killing them all, every single one. We respond in kind. Round and round we go, and war never stops because the only stop is death to everyone involved. No negotiations. No POWs. No amnesties. Just fite to the death, every time, and war ends only when every "enemy" is dead, on one side or the other — or both.
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What a bunch of morons the editorial board of the New York Post is. It wasn't always so.
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In the very same issue of the Post as that insane editorial appears a book review of a biography of Dolly Schiff, the woman who, in my youth, owned the New York Post and made it the clarion, stentorian voice of liberalism and social justice! That was a Post I was proud of, the New York Post founded by one of the actual heroes of American history, Alexander Hamilton, whose grave I have reverently viewed in Trinity Churchyard at the head of Wall Street. How times change.
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But since times do change, we can hope that the Post will one day be restored to its former glory, as a voice of true civilization, American civilization, which does not shoot captives but renders them into Prisoners of War.
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That does not, however, mean that American civilization cannot designate street gangs as enemy combatants, call out the army, and shoot them down in the streets wholesale if they dare to fite. As long as they've got guns in their hands, we have the right to shoot them. But when they drop those guns and surrender, then the criminal law rather than the law of combat kicks in. There really is a war involving drugs in this country, but not a real war on drugs. The real war has to date been one-sided, a war by druglords and their minions against society, with society refusing to fite back with the force required: military force, against the growers in Afghanistan and Colombia, the meth labs in Mexico and the South, the traffickers in every country. Treat them as active combatants and shoot them, strafe them, napalm them as long as they remain in the field arrayed against us. Only when they surrender and end their warfare do we need to turn generous.
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Savagery begets savagery. Would that it were equally true that civilized behavior begets civilized behavior. But it has always been the case and presumably always will be that it is easier to descend into barbarism than to rise to civilization.
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Maintaining a civilization requires defense, to be sure, but it also requires that we be ever vigilant to temptations to barbarism.
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Moral leaders have their hands full, given the vile nature of the "human" creature. We should hardly be surprised that a predator species, the carnivore Homo sapiens, is often cruel. Carnivores cannot be too sensible of the terror, pain, suffering, and death that they inflict upon prey, or they would be incapable of killing, so would die of starvation. Alas, the distance a carnivore places between itself and its prey is inherently self-generalizing. Only the self is important. The suffering and even death of everything and everyone else is unimportant.
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Empathy has a biological start, close in, including at first only one's procreative mate and progeny. Lack of empathy and care for them would produce auto-extinction. Any such species would not survive. Beyond the immediate family, however, biology takes us only so far in forming identification with and thus extending empathic mercy toward others.
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Sociobiology says that genetic predisposition to bonding that promotes survival will itself survive. In a species each of whose individual members is as relatively weak as 'humans', surrounded by a harsh environment in which larger predators and fast, powerful prey abound, groups of individuals that can cooperate to defend against predators and herd and kill large prey increase the chances for survival of each member. The qualities that enable them to form groups are thus genetically selected for, because more of the individuals who possess them live to reproduce than of individuals who cannot cooperate with others.
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Thus people who can get along with an extended family, then clan, then tribe, then nation survive to pass along the genes that permit empathic groupings. But the genes of bestial, generalized aggression, even against other members of one's own group, also pass, perhaps as recessive traits that are dominant in some individuals. These are the outlaws, the criminals, the deviants who pop up in every large group. They benefit from the protection the group provides, but do not contribute. The group goes on nonetheless, but becomes progressively filled up with these individuals, who in nature would perish but in human societies survive because the mechanisms of survival provided for by the group extend to the bad as well as the good. In a small group, the antisocial deviant would be expelled and have to fend for himself. In a state of nature, many would die without reproducing. As groups get larger, however, expulsion becomes less feasible a way of dealing with violent individuals, and the tenderheartedness that enabled the group to form, self-generalizingly and promiscuously extends compassion to creatures who don't deserve it.
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Society keeps alive predators against the group who should be eliminated, by expulsion or, if they refuse to leave, by death.
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Some ability to attack one's own kind is necessary in tribal societies, as it may be necessary to defend one's territory, and thus your own group's ability to survive, by seeing other human beings as The Enemy and being able to attack or counterattack them. If we can confine those individuals to the military or police, and channel their ability to kill and otherwise inflict violence into a social good, that's fine. What we cannot do is allow them to set social policy. Thus, in the United States, we created the rule that civilian authority is always to be supreme over the military. We are perilously close to abandoning that stance. The United States is becoming progressively militarized every year. The endless blather about our "heroes" and "supporting our troops" is poisonous to our civilization. But not just to our civilization.
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All large societies today have large numbers of biological deviants who do not feel the empathy for other human beings that alone empowered the human species to conquer this planet. Genes that allow them to separate themselves from the group emotionally and view other members of their own group, not just of competing groups, as enemies to be victimized, have spread through the larger group, keeping us ever at the edge of mass barbarism. Thus it is that we are warned by "survivalists" that in a post-apocalyptic age, it isn't the Russians or Chinese we're going to have to worry about, it's our neighbor.
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Seeing the problem is not the same as having a solution. Perhaps there is a partial solution in sterilization of the criminal class. When we find that some 'people' don't have a conscience, an internal compass that tells right from wrong, and everyone is a target of their willfulness and selfishness, we can simply sterilize them so they don't pass on that trait. There is no right to litter the future with children into the infinite future. Even if we don't kill career criminals, the predators in our midst, we can at least reduce the crop of future predators if there is something biologically wrong with them, by using a surgical net to filter such auto-predatory characteristics out of the gene pool.
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We must in any case be ever on guard against the violent beasts among us, and use violence only in retribution for serious wrong. Summary execution of enemy combatants is a terribly dangerous idea that amounts, basically, to tit-for-tat, an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye ... on and on forever. That, as Gandhi warned, would "only end up making the whole world blind".
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When Jesus told us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, he was speaking to empathy, that biological ability of the human race that permitted us to become a successful species and form complicated societies, cultures, technologies, civilizations. "Do to others before they do to you" is the morality of the mob, those antisocial biological deviants in whom empathy has failed. It is a recipe for endless violence. It is not the American Way.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,246 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:06 PM

 
Oprah Goes Over to the Dark Side. (That is not a racial reference.) I spoke yesterday about the sado-masochistic cruelty of filmic media. Today, Oprah Winfrey joined the chorus of sado-masochists reveling in death as entertainment. She showed brutal scene after brutal scene of the monstrousness of nature in living — sorry: dying — color, in praising the Discovery Channel's new series Planet Earth. I had to turn off. You see, I don't glory in death. I'm human. Oprah? I'm not so sure anymore.
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All filmic media, including documentaries, have been taken over by sado-masochists, who inflict death and suffering upon their audience out of a will to cause suffering. This is not education. It is violent death as entertainment. Its purpose is not simply to show us the realities of the monster we insanely call "Mother Nature", because that can be done in statements, without graphic depictions: "The arctic fox must take advantage of the short nesting season of migratory birds to eat as many chicks and store as many eggs as possible in order to survive the long arctic winter." But that's not entertaining enuf for the degenerates of film. They need to show chicks being killed, and mother geese trying desperately to save them. "That's entertainment!"
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Oprah is, alas, not nearly as smart as a woman in her position needs to be. Today, she seemed an outrite-stupid woman, for enlisting in the Discovery Channel's sado-masochistic paean to death, as she has enlisted in the Castration Conspiracy, using her popularity to promote acceptance of "transgendered" individuals who can be saved from a cruel 'mistake' of nature by "sex-change" surgery. Oprah is part of a vast combination instigated by religious nuts and psychotic shrinks who talk confused gay men and lesbian women into believing (a) that they are abnormal, (b) that they would not be abnormal if they were the opposite gender, and (c) that they can change their gender by having surgeons slash off or sew shut what doesn't fit the gender that society says they "should" be, then having 'doctors' — who do not deserve to be called "doctors" because they revile the most basic requirement of the Hippocratic oath: above all, do no harm — pump them full of hormones at levels entirely unnatural to them, in some cases inducing cancer and early death, all so society can pretend that the only 'normal' way people can interact sexually is male-female, in which one partner must always be male and the other must always be female. To preserve that delusional and arbitrary mental construct, it doesn't matter if you have to play games with reality, surgically and chemically mutilate one of the parties and fool the other into thinking he is having sex with a woman when he's really having sex with a mutilated man. We'll just turn a blind eye to the mutilation and pretend that the homosexual sex a straight man or lesbian sex a straight woman is fooled into is heterosexual, and even issue new names and official documents testifying to the false gender "assigned" by Frankensteinian quacks who, alas, have not (yet) been killed by a mob of torchbearing Villagers.
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There is no such thing as "a woman trapped in the body of a man" or vice-versa. No such thing. And anyone who believes himself 'really' the opposite gender of what his body plainly is, is insane. Period. Just as insane as someone who believes himself Napoleon. We do not create lunatics into sane people by dressing them like Napoleon, teaching them French, and issuing official documents that tell the whole world that they are — all of them — in fact Napoleon.
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You are the gender you are, period. Gender is not a choice, any more than is species. Nor can gender be changed, because every cell in the human body is permanently, indelibly, unalterably stamped with either an XX chromosomal configuration (female) or XY (male), save some "intersexes", the bulk of which are retarded and otherwise defective. We're not really talking about genetic intersexes, natural if tragic accidents of nature, when we talk of "sex-reassignment surgery". We're talking about genetically normal people being chopped up and reconfigured by knife and drugs to look like something they're not.
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It is truly grotesque that some people who want the United Nations to declare "female circumcision" a crime against humanity are silent or actually favorably disposed to "sex-change operations". When Josef Mengele castrated Jews, he was seen as a monster. When supposedly reputable surgeons in supposedly reputable hospitals castrate confused homosexuals, they are seen as humanitarians saving "transgendered" people from a life of misery in "the wrong body". No, they're just vicious, vile quacks not one whit less contemptible and monstrous than Josef Mengele. The United Nations needs to shake awake the fools in the West who have been duped into seeing castration as humanitarianism, and declare sex-change operations a crime against humanity, punishable by death.
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You can no more change gender than you can change species. Maybe you wish you could fly like a bird, but you will never be a bird. If someone thought s/he was a refrigerator, would we make him or her into a refrigerator by surgically implanting a lite bulb at the back of their mouth?
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If it were possible for science to use a virus to invade every single cell of a person's body and inject a new chromosome (say, X) and simultaneously kill an old chromosome (Y), then you could argue that you really have changed a person's sex. Science can't do that, not now, and probably not ever. So there is no such thing as a "sex change". Every cell lining a 'vagina' slashed into some demented faggot's crotch bears the XY marker of a man, and every cell of a make-believe 'penis' created from spare tissues elsewhere in a crazed dyke's body bears the XX marker of a woman. There is no such thing as a male vagina or female penis, never will be, never should be.
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Instead of lying to confused gay men and lesbian women that they can be what they cannot possibly ever be — part of the insane motto of our insane and spoiled age, "You can be anything you want to be" — and helping them adjust to their reality and find happiness in it, society instead conspires to slash them to ribbons, issue false documents, and fool people around them into participating in behaviors they would never consent to if they knew what they were really doing.
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Gender doesn't change. Species doesn't change. Not in adults. The old question "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" has an answer: the egg. The parents of the chicken were not chickens. A mutation in the offspring produced the chicken. So the only way a shift in species can occur is during reproduction.
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It doesn't matter how "advanced" science becomes, it will never be able to make an adult human being into, for instance, a bird. And would that be an "advance"?
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Do not for an instant think there aren't "scientists" thinking about such things. Oh, they may not be thinking of surgery on adults to change a human person into a birdperson, but there are geneticists thinking about manipulating genes to create multi-species mixes. Some scientists may think they can "improve" on the current design of the human being: "Wouldn't it be great to have two more arms to get more done? or two more legs so we could run faster and carry more weight?" Perhaps they pose the question in terms of possibility rather than purpose. "Can we create a human being with more than two arms or legs? Is that possible? Can we move bird genes into the human genome to grow wings on people? Is that possible? Let's find out!" No. Let's not.
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I'm sure there are scientists somewhere on this planet right now thinking such things. They must never be permitted to go further than thinking or speculating. If they try, they should be killed, and any techniques they develop to tamper with the fundamental nature of the human creature should be destroyed, with clear warnings to other scientists not ever to try any such thing again, on pain of death.
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Already we have sheep 15% of whose genes are human. Why? Because some scientist thought that would be a good thing to try. There's always some justification for scientific madness. Look at the atom bomb, then hydrogen bomb, then neutron bomb. And there's always some lunatic willing to buy into the rationalization and fund Frankensteinian "science". We are able to do things we just plain shouldn't do.

Artist Eduardo Kac stunned several hundred colleagues last month when he proposed using genetic engineering to create a dog with fluorescent fur.

And what is his justification for that outlandish proposal? "Art".

Kac's work [already done with other animals] is based on recent scientific developments. Scientists at Stanford University, for example, have been creating mice and rats that glow since 1995.

Led by Professor of pediatrics Christopher Contag, the Stanford scientists discovered how to take the gene that causes fireflies to emit a faint yellow glow and splice this gene into the tumor cells of experimental animals.

As the tumor grows, so does this yellow glow that a camera can detect through the skin of the lab animal. Contag designed the process to see how tumors responded to drug treatments without having to kill the lab animals and study their remains. If a test drug shrinks a glowing tumor, the result would be visible through the rodent's skin ... which could lead to faster and cheaper drug testing and spare a lot of lab animals' lives.

So the scientists' rationale is "science", "medical progress", "spar[ing] a lot of lab animals' lives".
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How far will rationalization after rationalization for steps further and further into a world of interspecies freaks take us if society imposes no restrictions? Well, let's think how some geneticist might feel s/he could "improve" on the design of the human creature.
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With Global Warming, the seas are bound to rise, flooding ever larger parts of the continents, right? Maybe we could give gills and flippers to future generations of coastal peoples, in addition to arms and lungs — or instead of arms and lungs, in a new Waterworld. Maybe we could create flippers that end in hands, so we could do everything a dolphin can but also everything a person can. Wouldn't that be grrrrreat!?
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An inventive mind is not necessarily a benign or stable mind. And the march of scientific progress is not beyond our control. Legal standards and rigid prohibitions can and must be set by society, lest "science" become a nitemare and create a world filled with monstrosities of human invention. The ultimate control society has over things going that seriously wrong is control over the most basic of genetic materials, the body: we can impose death upon the offending individual organisms, the Frankensteins among us. Let us treat them as they would treat others, as our property, and chop them up for parts for sane people. How can they complain?
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It's bad enuf when they mutilate people who have been psychologically tormented and manipulated into consenting to mutilation. But it would be even worse if "scientists" are permitted to inflict unnatural conditions upon not just puppies and kittens, but also human babies without their consent. There really are 'people' who would deliberately create babies with flippers and gills, with no thought to whether the babies would want such things for themselves.
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Sensible forms of gene therapy for medical progress do in some measure approach tampering with the fundamental genetics of the human creature, and some gene therapy is sane and morally permissible. But the mere fact that some genetic intervention is defensible does not mean that we must stand aside and let all genetic alterations pass. We can and must draw a line in the sand: this far and no farther. And we can't put this off for some indefinite future someday, because fertile minds are hatching insane plans right now, and the technology to flesh out those plans is being developed very fast.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:25 PM

 
Internet Fixes for Media Problems? A couple of curious things have happened lately.
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On February 19th, in this space, I attacked a bad practice at CNN:

Musical Harassment. CNN Headline News has a segment called "It's Your Money" in which the same few bars of music are played over and over and over and over again in the background, all the while the reporter speaks. Why? The music is not just annoying but also so loud that you have to strain to hear what the presenter is saying. Stupid.

Now background music in that segment is so soft as to be almost imperceptible, and it seems not even to be the same few bars of the same music played before. Moreover, the segment is now called only "Your Money", not "It's Your Money".
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A week ago (March 22nd) I attacked the idea that advisors to the President don't need confidentiality to speak freely:

Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's Daily Show minimized the importance of confidentiality of advice to the President by suggesting that the only thing that would be inhibited was advice to do disgraceful or illegal things. How naive, or dishonest. Would even the writers of the Daily Show want every single thing they considered to go out to everyone? Or might they find themselves in deep trouble if every word they uttered in private was suddenly broadcast to the world?

In last nite's Daily Show (March 28th), regular John Hodgman illustrated the importance of this confidentiality aspect of "executive privilege" by playing a (fake) private conversation between himself and Jon Stewart in which Stewart says a number of things that, if uttered seriously, would damage his reputation and which, therefore, he would not have said if he thought Hodgman would broadcast them to the world.
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I plainly can't take credit for these little changes in media behavior, but perhaps a lot of people complained via the Internet about the same things I complained about, and our cumulative voice was heard. Let me experiment to see if I'm aligned with wider public concerns on some other media matters.
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Fox News Channel's John Gibson denounced "leftist" bloggers for showing little sympathy for White House news secretary Tony Snow's recurrence of cancer. I didn't say anything at the time I heard the story, but was ticked off by Gibson's moronic indignation. Tony Snow is a liar. He speaks the lies the Bush Administration wants him to speak and makes excuses for the Administration's criminal behavior. He is part and parcel of the illegal occupation of Iraq that has killed literally-uncounted tens of thousands, and kills dozens more Iraqis every day. If Joseph Goebbels, Tony Snow's equivalent in the Nazi government of Germany, had suffered a recurrence of cancer, should the world have reacted with sadness and expressions of sympathy? I don't think so.
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Fox News Channel's Neil Cavuto showed Karl Rove's dance to rap music at the Radio-Television Correspondents' Association Dinner as proof that Rove is a great guy! Oh? How about that little triumphal high-step and smile that Hitler did outside the railroad car where he had just forced France to sign a humiliating surrender — the same railcar in which Germany had been forced to sign a humiliating surrender in World War I? Various media manipulated that piece of film and repeated it to make it look as tho Hitler was doing a little jig. Are we to view that dance as a mark that Hitler was a fun guy too? How about his doggie, a German shepherd, beside him and his demure girlfriend Eva Braun on the patio of Berchtesgaden, looking out over the beautiful mountains and valleys of the German Alps? Are we to view that as proof that Hitler was a fine family man who loved animals?
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Jon Stewart on tonite's Daily Show would have none of Cavuto & Company's admiration for the jovial Mr. Rove, but did not compare Rove to Hitler. Instead, he suggested that if Jeffrey Dahmer showed up at a bar mitzvah and was a great dancer, we shouldn't forget that he's still Jeffrey Dahmer. Stewart then launched into his own rap in which he said that Rove spread the rumor that Senator John McCain had a secret black baby. The rap ended with "[Bleep] that guy!"
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Dahmer, Hitler & Rove. Sounds like a law firm, which is what the entire Bush Administration may need some day, at an international war-crimes tribunal.
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Moving on to another media issue, let's consider a major theme in television advertising today: Men Are Morons. Example: A wife asks what happened to the Lean Pockets that were in the freezer. Her husband looks at the pouch snack in his hand, puzzled. "Lean Pockets?" The moral of this little teleplay? Men can't read. Tho the package says plainly "Lean Pockets", the stupid, stupid man didn't know it was a low-calorie food, because it tastes so good. But how would he know it tastes good if he didn't look at the package to see that it was food? And if he looked at the package, did he see only the picture? Or did he see the letters that spelled out "Lean Pockets" but prove incapable of making words out of those letters because he is too damned stupid to have learned how to read? At the end of the commercial, one of the men the husband is playing poker with misinterprets the wife's remark that the guys at the table are 'four of a kind' (fools), by saying, "Four of a kind? I fold." So men are not just fools or morons. They are idiots (stupider than morons in IQ terms).
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Over and over we see commercials with the same theme: men are incompetent, stupid, contemptible fools who can't do anything right and are always embarrassing themselves and the (smart) women around them. Think here of the guy who gets so lost in his Campbell's microwaveable soup that he loses track of everything else in a business conference, and spins a revolving door past the exit and returns the way he came.
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Ad after ad, for product after product, portrays men as useless, worthless, stupid-stupid-stupid losers. Given that women control the bulk of consumer spending, it is vaguely comprehensible that advertisers would seek to flatter women at the expense of men — on the condescending assumption that women are so empty-headed that they will actually be flattered by such bull... cowsh*t.
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Even in media not supported by advertising, as for instance movies, where men presumably have more say about what film a (heterosexual) couple goes to or rents, men are all too often portrayed as weak, stupid creatures, hopelessly inferior to women. One woman is the superior of not one but ten men. Women are smarter than men, faster than men, stronger than men, more violent, more effectively, than men. Men can do nothing right; women can do nothing wrong; any contest between men and women has but one possible outcome, female triumph. What kind of self-despising, sado-masochistic male loser would sit still for such tripe, in a theater or living room? Why is such evil trash made?
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I have explained this in the past, but need to say it again: yes, it is sado-masochists that this stuff is produced for, but not necessarily in the audience. The creatures who create it are sado-masochists, and once you understand that, the vast quantity of violent, antihuman garbage produced by Hollywood finally makes sense. What doesn't make much sense is that such crap can make money. But remember that sado-masochism has two sides. The flip side of the masochism that may impel some men to watch such trash is sadism, and feeling themselves under attack from women justifies hatred of and violence against women. Hollywood scum who have been victimized by the divorce laws vent their hatred of women in hideous antimale films and television programs with the knowing intent of inciting violence against women. And women are too entertained by the insane flattery of viewing all-powerful women onscreen that they don't understand that such things make men homi... womanicidally furious.
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The antimale violence in some films alternates with antifemale violence in others, and just generally antihuman violence in graphic sado-masochistic depravity in still others. Even decent people who would never in a million years watch any such filmic vomit are subjected to grotesque trailers in TV commercials for Disturbia, The Hills Have Eyes, Vacancy, and the video version of Turistas 'too gruesome for theaters'. Seeing this, I can understand why Islamists hate the United States and don't want their own societies debauched by such vile, dehumanizing filth. If Al-Qaeda would limit itself to beheading the monsters who create such poison, Americans would be lining up to turn Hollywood producers over to Islamic saviors.
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One last negative mention of media before a positive mention. Have you seen the Right Guard Sport commercial in which a man and woman are walking in the woods when they spot a deer? The man starts to approach the presumably gentle creature, when it looks up, foam dangling from its chin like a beard and a wild look in its (red?) eyes, then attacks the man, with front hoofs flailing and its mouth at the man's neck? The man succeeds in pushing it away, shakes off the experience — merely checking to see if the struggle made him sweat so much that his deodorant failed (which, since it's Right Guard Sport, it hasn't) — then walks calmly, hand-in-hand with his girlfriend, off into the peaceful woods. Hm. What kind of fool would see a wild animal foaming at the mouth, that is ordinarily peaceful and timid but in this case attacks human beings violently, and not think "Rabies!", then get to a hospital as fast as humanly possible? Oh, that's right: a man, that's what kind of fool. Men are too damned stupid to have heard of rabies or to understand the significance of foaming at the mouth!
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Not all media are incredibly bad. Every now and then something good, sensible, and valuable appears. Unfortunately, it's not always available on U.S. media. I mentioned a British documentary in this space March 16th:

Meanwhile, the debate goes on as to whether people are responsible for such Global Warming as may actually be happening. This has become not an open-minded discussion but a heated debate, politically motivated and tainted by selectively presented data. My colleague in Northern England sent me email to say that Channel 4, a major TV network in Britain, recently broadcast a major documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, that challenges the new orthodoxy that it's all our fault. * * *

Skepticism is alive and well at Channel  4 .... Let's see if any [U.S. broadcaster] picks up that Channel  4 documentary....

To my knowledge, no American broadcaster has chosen to show that British documentary, even tho American public television usually adores all things British. Fortunately, my colleague found a place on the Internet where you can watch the entire 48-minute program:
http://www.archive.org/details/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle_Documentary. I have not yet had time to watch the whole thing, but I certainly shall. Will you?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,244 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:50 PM

 
A Third Bush War? The U.S. is sending a powerful fleet on maneuvers near the coasts of Iran, as the Bush Administration moves to launch a third war for Israel. Astonishingly, the Iranian government seems to be willfully inciting an attack, with its seizure of British sailors in the Persian Gulf. Why would it do that?
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Perhaps Iran thinks a third war at a time when Dems want one of the two present wars, that in Iraq, ended, will produce a furious drive to impeach Bush. The Bushies, however, seem inclined to call the Democrats' bluff, confident that they can launch any war they want and once they put American troops "in harm's way", the Democrats, and general public, will have no choice but to back the troops, and thus the new war, to the hilt.
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Since the Democrats are at least as supinely and slavishly Zionist as the Republicans, when Israel orders the U.S. to attack Iran, who is to stop the attack from proceeding?
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You may think that the two wars we've already got have so overstrained the military that the military itself would urge restraint. You might be wrong. Yesterday's New York Post carries a column by Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow Peter Brookes, described as "a retired Navy Reserve commander and former deputy assistant secretary of defense", in which he says that altho the Army and Marines may be stretched thin, the Navy and Air Force are in fine shape, and an attack upon Iran could take the form of air attacks launched from the sea, with minimal involvement of ground forces.
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But what if Iran retaliates to air attacks with missile attacks upon U.S. forces in Iraq? and on Israel, the real mover behind such an attack? Does Iran have Exocet ship-sinking missiles? How humiliated would the U.S. Navy be if one of its immense aircraft carriers were sunk, with the loss of several hundred sailors' lives?
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What if Iran sends its army into Afghanistan to attack U.S. forces there, being careful not to attack those of other NATO countries except perhaps Britain, the Bush Administration's chief partner in crime? The U.S. is having trouble enuf controlling Taliban forces that are rebounding even without significant outside assistance. Might a massive Iranian intervention in Afghanistan produce a total rout of the U.S. that could be undone only by a massive 'surge' in that backwater, of, yes, ground forces that the Army and Marines just don't have?
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What if Iran has trained thousands of fanatical young Moslems in terror techniques, and sends them out on Iranian-funded missions against U.S. interests abroad and even at home? How difficult, really, would it be to infiltrate paramilitary terrorists across our all-too-easily-penetrated Mexican border? or from Canada? Iran seems to date to have avoided direct involvement in terrorism against U.S. embassies, consulates, and multinational corporations abroad, and against major symbolic targets within the "Homeland" in order to avoid a direct war with the U.S. But if such a war comes to them anyway, ordered by Israel and carried out by Bush with at least passive connivance by Democratic Zionists, why would Iran not try to do as much damage to the United States as possible? Then we'll be talking not about a decentralized organization of sparsely financed volunteers like Al-Qaeda but a carefully coordinated army of state-sponsored terrorists backed by billions of dollars of equipment and training.
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How will Iraq's Shiite majority react to another war for Zionism, against their co-religionists across the border? Shiite areas of Iraq have been relatively quiet. That could change overnite, as 150,000 Americans surrounded by 27 million angry Iraqis find an enemy on every side.
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The Pentagon and Heritage Foundation, White House and Israel may think a 'surgical strike' kind of Shock and Awe campaign would be a quick and one-sided triumph that would not get us bogged down in a third war that goes on for years, but they've been wrong before, haven't they?
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Worse, an attack upon Iran would lead hundreds of millions of Moslems all over the planet to accept what they had hoped was not the case: that the U.S. Government really does want to make war upon the whole of Islam, and they might be next if they don't do something now. Bush says we are fiting in Iraq so we don't have to fite here. Moslem countries might feel the exact same way: fite in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan now so they don't have to fite in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Indonesia later.
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If you don't want a third war, pressure your Representative and Senators now to cut off the drive toward a third Bush war: http://www.house.gov/, http://www.senate.gov/. Ask them to warn the White House that any attack upon Iran will produce an immediate cutoff of all funding for the military and a move to impeach everyone responsible. Tell the President (comments@whitehouse.gov) to step back from yet another potentially disastrous war. You don't even have to be an American to send email to Congress and the President, and it might be salutary for American politicians to hear from people abroad, especially in allied countries, that reckless militarism threatens U.S. interests of all kinds, all around the world.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,242 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:20 PM

 
Is Anybody Out There? For about a year and a half, I endeavored to update this political blog (in my own terms of reference, "polblog") every single day without fail. I hoped to build an audience. After that, I lost some interest, since I had heard from very few readers, some of whom I exchanged email addresses with and then communicated with privately. The service that provides this blog free of charge (why?) does not permit me to keep track of how many readers I have unless I pay a monthly fee, which I'm not about to do. I'm just friggin' cheap/frugal, and don't spend money I don't have on things I don't really need. Being raised in a family of six children helped me appreciate that, as the Rolling Stones' song says, "you can't always get what you want."
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I have another blog, "Newark USA", which is a fotoblog, that is, with pix, not just text. It gives me much more sway for my interests. Newark, NJ, it will astound many people to hear, is an enormously good place to live, and not just because it is within a half hour's drive of Manhattan. Every day I upload to my "Nwk blog" at least one foto, and usually more. (Maybe I should shorten that shorthand reference, as to "Nblog" or "nb", but there are limits to abbreviation. I get irritated, sometimes, at the insistence of some people on insisting upon an arbitrary and unreasonable deadline or restriction, such as two digit country codes, upon things. TV shows like ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (which, by the way, is a beautiful show, spiritually speaking; and Ty Pennington, its host, wouldn't be half bad-looking if he'd comb his hair like a normal human being) make a practice of imposing absolutely arbitrary deadlines upon projects that could perfectly well be completed later. As a society, we tend to impose unreasonable deadlines on things being done by X date. Is there really any significant harm done to society if something is done X + 20 days or X + 136 days? I would rather things be done RIGHT than that they be done "on time", according to the schedule that someone I don't know might set. But, cable channel after cable channel, we hear of this endeavor or that running out of time. Why? Each of us eventually runs out of time, when we die. But why would an expedition to explore the sea floor in a particular location run out of time? Will the sea floor explode if it isn't explored that day? Will the sea over it evaporate and leave the ancient artifacts on the seabed so dried-out that they are too fragile to touch? Does anybody care if the construction of the Great Pyramid in Giza came in over budget and a year late?
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I would rather things be done right than that they be done "on time" according to some arbitrary, and perhaps unreasonable, schedule. Nature does not impose timetables. Things happen, but without some fool insisting "Now, people!" )
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Some things are urgent, however. The U.S. occupation of Iraq has given rise to violence that, absent that source, might not have arisen at all. Think "bar fight". World affairs are not, necessarily, one whit more reasonable than what happens in a bar when two guys, with their own, very personal issues, run into each other while under the influence of alcohol.
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In the largest of connections, I have already stated that Iran, if it wishes to pursue a nuclear-weapons program, need only denounce its accession to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Then the UN would have no basis upon which to impose sanctions. So the artificial emergency we see cannot be real. It is contrived, theater, for various audiences.
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Iran is Persia. The history of Persia dwarfs our own. Persians know that. We NEED to know that, and get a clue.
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In Persian terms, the United States is just the Roman Empre under Justinian: it reaches, but does not grasp, because it does not have the power to grasp. We could impose our will upon an unruly planet, but that would require us to make up our minds about what our role in the world ought to be. Should we be mere observer? Activist? On whose side, of which issue? On what principle(s)?
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People of principle have no problem with any of these questions. Politicians of all parties have serious problems with any of them.
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"The People" is the only restraint upon political parties, but too many of the people know NOTHING about the issues. Or care. The morality of issues must be basic to our actions, but is not. Nor will it be as long as jingoists are allowed to frame everything in their terms: "supporting our troops". The people of Nazi Germany were very proud of their troops. That did not make the behavior of those troops moral.
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Americans must take the highest road, and remove the "US" from U.S., in evaluating the propriety or impropriety of U.S. Government actions. To make matters simplest, let's pose all issues in terms of Nazi Germany: if Nazi Germany ran the Guantanamo internment camp, would that be okay? If Nazi Germany attacked Iraq, on the pretense that it was looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction, would that be okay? If Nazi Germany had to admit, years after it had conquered and occupied Iraq, that there never were Weapons of Mass Destruction, but argued that that didn't matter, would we buy it?
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Americans must always ask, "Does the Nazi model fit us? Are we today's Nazis?"
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And people who value my commentary need to tell me to continue it, because I'm tired of sending words out on the wind and hearing nothing back.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,242 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:06 PM

 
China Poisoning American Pets. For Now. The rat poison that has killed some American pets came into the United States from China! The Government of China is poisoning its own people with horrendous air and water pollution. Now it is poisoning American pets. And there is justified concern that the same kinds of contamination could affect imports of food products for people. Ain't free trade wunnerful?
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The Government of Communist China has aspirations to world domination, and certainly complete supremacy in its part of the world. In such aspirations, the United States is seen as not just rival but enemy. The Pentagon has contemplated a U.S.-China war within 20 years (now closer to 15). But what is to stop China from sneaking poisons into the United States now, thru consumer goods? I imagine there are slow-acting poisons of various kinds that don't take effect until a sufficient quantity has built up in people's tissues. Would the Chinese Government bar even the thought of such poisoning of its enemies? Why would it? It is turning the skies over its own people gray and brown with filth that hundreds of millions must breathe, and the rivers that supply drinking water for the same and different hundreds of millions is contaminated with all kinds of wastes, human and agricultural, including animal wastes, fertilizers, and pesticides. Pesticides. Rat poison is a pesticide. If the Communist Government of China is content to permit hundreds of millions of their own people to be poisoned by filthy air and water, why would they hesitate to poison us?
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Iraq War Financing. The Democratic controlled House of Representatives finally, today, did something meaningful to rein in Dumbya's Reign of Terror, in passing a spending bill that grants Bush's military budget request, but on the condition that the troops be withdrawn by September 2008, 18 months from now. Why so long? How many more Iraqis must die before the U.S. occupation that has produced deadly mass violence ends? The Democrats are cowards and fools, unfit to be a major party. The people of this country and those of Iraq want us OUT, but the Democrats won't simply say, "No 18 months, no 6 months. Now. You've done enuf harm. It's got to stop. We will give you money enuf to move the troops out, but not one cent more!"
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is _ — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:00 PM

 
Dems Wrong on U.S. Attorneys. Much tho I hate to side with Dumbya on anything, he is absolutely right that Congress does not have the right to subpena Presidential advisors and compel them to tell Congress what advice they gave the President. Congress is not superior to the Presidency. Nor is the Supreme Court. And it doesn't matter if the Congress and Supreme Court co-conspire to strip the Presidency of power. They can't do it. The Constitution forbids it. And the President controls the military. If push comes to shove, the President has well over a million men in arms; Congress and the Supreme Court between them have a few hundred security guards. Who is going to win a contest between them?
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Dumbya is completely correct that advisors to the President need to feel that what they say stays within that room, or they will be unable to consider all options, even options that the general public may regard as distasteful. At end, tho, why do we need to inquire into the reasons discussed for a given action or policy if the action or policy itself can be examined and evaluated on its own merits. The notion that we have the right to know every step of the process by which decisions are arrived at is not intellectually defensible. Curiosity does not confer the right to know what other people are doing or thinking. There has to be an express legal grant of authority to invade people's privacy, for good reason. And if someone does something lawful, like firing people he had the right to fire, it doesn't matter what his reasons were.
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This whole issue of privacy of governmental decisions is part of a larger debate, over "open covenants openly arrived at". As a BBC "Letter from America" in 1999 put it:

It [the Sixties era] was ... the high noon of the popular doctrine that the people have a right (not specified in the Constitution) a right to know everything that's going on between statesmen, especially behind closed doors.

The idea that this should ever happen was first sprung, you may recall, by President Woodrow Wilson way back in Paris at the peace treaty meetings in 1919. Discussions of differences between nations should, he said, be aired for all to hear. One of the phrases that Wilson used as a guide to all future diplomacy took on the weight and resonance of a proverb: "Open covenants openly arrived at." In fact, the phrase was spoken and forgotten. It was not, so far as I can recall, every overly berated in any of the allied countries.

I remember with what heat — and he was not a hot-tempered man — the second secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold, with what scorn 30-odd years later he commented on Wilson's prescription. "Open covenants, yes, but they must be secretly arrived at. Publish every twist and turn and argument of a series of negotiations and you'll see the end of diplomacy itself."

We can make other comparisons here, to doctor-patient, lawyer-client, or priest-confessor confidentiality. Would anyone bare their soul to a psychologist if s/he thought everything s/he said could be subpenaed by the Government? Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's Daily Show minimized the importance of confidentiality of advice to the President by suggesting that the only thing that would be inhibited was advice to do disgraceful or illegal things. How naive, or dishonest. Would even the writers of the Daily Show want every single thing they considered to go out to everyone? Or might they find themselves in deep trouble if every word they uttered in private was suddenly broadcast to the world?
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In a highly partisan arena like politics, even relatively innocuous statements can be exploded beyond all reason into a huge brouhaha. A single word in a 2,000-word memo can be blown up into a major controversy, not because it's really important but because someone has an ax to grind and will seize on the tiniest thing to embarrass a political or ideological foe. Then, instead of dealing with the larger issue, we're off on a tangent, talking about the N-word or whether someone was insensitive to "gays" (a word I detest, by the way; "gay" is an adjective, not noun) or women or Latinos. Hell, a person could be criticized for saying "Hispanic" rather than "Latino" in a discussion about arms control, and public attention would be diverted from antimissile defense to whether Anglos are insensitive or Latins are over-sensitive. It's bad enuf when every word of every formal statement is picked apart, but when every word of every discussion leading up to a formal statement is also picked apart, that is much too much.
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Any President must be very careful as to the PRECEDENTS he establishes, to avoid eroding the power of the Presidency. If, as seems the case, Bush is correct that all U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President, and he can thus fire any of them at any time for any reason, Congress need not inquire into his reasons, because any reason, or no reason, will do. Congress has no authority to run the Department of Justice, part of the Executive Branch, any more than the President and his cabinet can vote in Congress. In the British model, from which we deliberately departed, the chief executive and his cabinet do vote in the Legislative Branch. We rejected that idea and separated the Legislative and Executive. That was a good plan, and it has served this Republic well. Why on Earth is Congress attempting to destroy the separation of powers? And who will emerge triumphant from a merged Executive & Legislative Branch? Legislators, or the Commander in Chief of the armed forces?
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Where once we feared an Imperial Presidency, we need now to fear and athletically oppose the creation of an Imperial Congress, Imperial Supreme Court, or any combination of those two branches to reduce the Presidency to impotence. And we have even more to fear a President so furious at attempts to invade his perquisites and strip him of his lawful authority that he carries off a coup, ordering his military to arrest his opponents, or shoot them. It has happened in other places. It can happen here, unless we scrupulously abide by the Constitution's requirement that each branch respect each other branch's perquisites. Many dictators have risen by claiming that they were forced to act to protect the Constitution of their respective countries; some actually meant it. Some presidential-military coup leaders returned society to its normal institutions after a time, when they felt the emergency had passed. Other military or military-backed dictators died in office or were forced to flee the country — usually by another military coup.
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Here, Congress was indignant when an agency of the Executive Branch invaded the office of a Congressman suspected of corruption, and carted off files and computers — as well Congress should have been indignant. It is not for the Presidency to invade Congress any more than it is for Congress to invade the White House or Executive offices. What next? Will the President assert the right to tell the Supreme Court how to rule on cases? Why not?
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Where has this animus between branches come from? The Constitution's separating powers was supposed to set them against each other, yes, but in civil fashion, to preserve the liberties of the people. The present hostility, however, threatens to go beyond checks and balances, to open warfare within the Federal Government. Do we really want that?
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Congress has three legal checks upon Presidential power: (1) passing legislation over Presidential veto; (2) refusing to provide funding for Presidential programs or departments; and (3) impeaching the President and removing him from office altogether. That's it.
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Congress is entitled to cut off funding to any part of the Executive it wishes, but must live with the consequences. That is, if to punish the Department of Justice, Congress cuts funding for the DOJ so much that it can't do its job, and organized crime takes over the streets, white-collar criminals bilk scores of millions of citizens out of their life savings, etc., Congress will be held to account by the electorate — which is the ultimate check on Government power, except, alas, of the Supreme Court, which has no checks, so is unbalanced. We need to fix that.
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But first we need to remind Congress and the President to respect the boundaries set up by the Constitution. Play nice.
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If the new Congress can't stand Bush, it should impeach him, if it can. If it can't, it must abide by the Constitution and bide its time till the next election, then make a case for electing someone completely different from George Bush.
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I, myself, favor impeaching Bush for the high crimes involved in his making an illegal war against Iraq and in lying to Congress to win approval — tho not, curiously, a declaration of war — for that illegal invasion and for the ongoing illegal occupation that is destroying an entire country that never attacked us. But the Democrats won't even try to do that. Hell, they won't even just cut off all funding for that war and force withdrawal. So we are reduced to a proxy war against the President, waged against the Attorney General instead.
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The President should retaliate in like kind, demanding, for instance, that the Senate do away with the filibuster and asserting the right to tell both houses of Congress what its rules should be, who its committee chairpersons should be, etc. Let Congress see how it likes the Executive Branch interfering with its internal workings, and it may get the message. To each branch its own powers, and none of the other branches' powers. Violating that separation of powers can get very messy, and very dangerous, very quickly. And while the branches of Government are squabbling among themselves, what happens to the people's business?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,228 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:59 AM

 
Playing Pattycake with Monsters. A story today in Yahoo news about outside softness in dealing with the Zimbabwean fool and tyrant Robert Mugabe reminds me how easy it is to effect change thru military violence, especially if you don't care about what happens afterward. Robert Mugabe is a dictator who won 're-election' thru electoral fraud. He has been in charge of the government of what used to be known as Southern Rhodesia (while a British colony), then Rhodesia (during a 15-year period of unilaterally declared independence under white-minority rule that was not recognized by the international community), since its independence in 1980, and seems intent on being that poor country's "President-for-Life", no matter how many opponents he has to imprison or beat.
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Land reform, on paper, took the form of staged and reasonable transfer of lands from the hands of the 1% white minority to the great majority, but was never successfully implemented, due in part to white opposition and in part to Mugabe's fecklessness as a governor. After decades of incompetent ineffectiveness, the Mugabe government went into radical-socialist mode, declaring that all lands belong to the government and distributing the best areas to Mugabe supporters. However, since black farmers could only lease land and not own it, they could not get adequate financing (for want of sufficient collateral) for machinery, fertilizer, etc. Many also did not have the agricultural expertise to run modern farms. Moreover, Mugabe has deliberately destroyed "the homes or businesses of 700,000 mostly poor supporters of the opposition". The consequence of Mugabe's incompetent and malicious misrule has been that agricultural output has plummeted, inflation has hit 1,700%, unemployment is in the range of 80%(!), and a region once regarded as "the breadbasket of Southern Africa" has suffered catastrophic food shortages, resulting in malnourishment of 45% of the population, and possible widespread death from famine, altho outside media and international observers have not been permitted free rein to investigate, in order to establish how bad the situation really is.
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I have zero sympathy for displaced white farmers, who should not have resisted sensible and fair land reform. By resisting moderate measures, they produced radical measures. They brought their violent expropriation upon themselves and should be hurting. They hurt others for decades. It's their turn now.
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But the people of Zimbabwe deserve better. They should be able to buy land, as is normal elsewhere, or own it in common in the form of tribal lands or community corporations, with the coop being able to raise funds to purchase machinery and hire agricultural experts to make good use of the best modern techniques to provide income for the owners and food and other agricultural products for the population.
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After years of chaos, repression, and malnutrition if not outrite famine, parts of the outside world may finally be willing to press for change. A very badly written Reuters article today, headlined "West seeks Africa support against Mugabe" on Yahoo, is unclear as to who other than Britain's Prime Minister is trying to influence events. Where is Bush? Where is the European Community? Are outsiders really incapable of doing anything but standing outside, not even looking in, and wringing their hands?
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2,500 miles north of sad Zimbabwe is tragic Darfur, where we know with certitude that mass death from starvation and violence both have occurred and continue to occur. There, too, the outside world does nothing. Is it because the outside world can do nothing? or because it doesn't care?
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One is tempted to say that if these were white children dying of starvation by the tens of thousands, the Western world would act. But the sad fact is that it took 2½ years for the world to act to stop mass slaughter in the Balkans during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Europe didn't act in its own backyard until the United States, under the Clinton Administration, forced the issue. Why have we not forced the issue in Darfur?
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Let us speak now to what the United States can do, acting alone and in concert with the African Union as an organization or with individual African countries, absent an agreement by the AU to act.
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On its own, the United States can bomb Harare and Khartoum (the capitals of Zimbabwe and the Sudan, respectively), killing Mugabe and his inner circle, and the genocidal mass murderers on the Nile in a single day, if we're lucky. If we fail on the first try, we could send sortie after sortie in a "Shock and Awe" campaign until we successfully destroy the entire ruling clique in both capitals. We wouldn't need to do more. We could let the people thus liberated take care of the rest themselves, or give the AU some money to empower them to do the cleanup afterward. An American intervention need not last more than a few weeks, at very longest, in the form of air attacks to destroy the offending members of the two governments. A followup ground occupation by neighboring countries acting individually or under African Union auspices could help locals organize a replacement government.
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A President of the United States with integrity and humanity could go on television, in a satellite feed to the entire planet, to tell Mugabe and the killers in Khartoum:

Your time has run out. The world has given you all too much time to change your ways and do the right thing. You refused. Now you have one week to reverse course, or we will kill you.
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Don't sleep, during the day or at nite. Don't sleep in the same place twice. Don't try to hide, because there is no building in your entire country that can save you from our bunker-buster bombs. Don't think your people will hide you. Most won't let you hide among themselves, because they don't want to be killed with you when the bombs fall. And don't think that we are certain to wait until the full week has expired before we act. We'll track you. We've already started. We have or will cultivate intelligence agents and informers in the field to keep us apprised. We could bomb you today. You won't know until the planes arrive. We can fly day or nite, good weather or bad. You have no antiaircraft measures that can stop us, and we don't even have to send planes. We can send cruise missiles and put no pilot at risk to free your people.
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No one will come to your rescue. You have no friends, you have no defense treaties, you have no alliances capable of stopping us. No major power is going to risk war with the United States to protect you. The United Nations won't protect you. For one thing, they don't like you either. For another, we have an ironclad veto on UN action. So no one will save you. No one. Change or die.
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If you are religious and believe in an afterlife, consider how you will be judged on death. Are you really ready to meet your maker?

He would then press a button to start a countdown clock, shown on a very large digital display behind him, then add:

The countdown has started. You have one week to change your ways and act, decisively, persuasively, to end your tyranny. If you want to stay in power rather than simply resign and leave the country, you must use all the force at your command to change course and undo the harm you have done. We will not accept a make-believe resignation that leaves you as power behind the throne. We have one week to put our forces in striking distance and make sure all systems are go. We are thru playing pattycake with monsters.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,223 — for Israel.)


- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:20 PM

 
ADD and Alzheimer's. Two major stories today related to mental disorders. In the first, a kid with Attention Deficit Disorder got himself lost from a Boy Scout hike. It took four days to find the little moron, who wandered off without telling anyone. ABC News says he had started for home when he saw that the kids he hoped would be on the hike weren't on it. He got as far as one mile in four days. So much for the quality of his troop's Boy Scout training.
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The story of his rescue mentioned that searchers found a candy bar and potato chip bag. Since when do Boy Scouts litter the woods? This kid plainly does not belong in the Boy Scouts — not that anyone does, given that that organization teaches antihomosexual bigotry. Perhaps the kid belongs in an institution for the retarded, or a mental hospital for evaluation as to whether some kind of medication can focus his mind and return him safely to the real world.
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The other big story today was the stark growth (supposedly 10% in the last five years) in the incidence of Alzheimer's "Disease". I count as "diseases" only illnesses caused by microbes, so let's call Alzheimer's a "disorder" or something else.
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Alarmist statistics were all over the tube, in stories the same day on major English-and Spanish-language network news broadcasts. Among them were the statement that 50% of all Americans over 80 years of age have Alzheimer's, and caring for people with Alzheimer's costs $148 billion a year. For what? To keep alive people who scarcely know they're alive?
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We have to consider the hard facts of life, and of death. A friend of mine decades ago said he felt that Alzheimer's is nature's way of easing the end of life. There's something to that, at least philosophically. They don't know they're dying, so need not struggle to heed Dylan Thomas's famous 1952 advice:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My father's mother suffered old-age dementia, or senility, which is what people have called this disorder for centuries. Another friend called it "Oldtimer's", which I like best of all.
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At times, Grandma Amy's senility was a little funny. One day, when she was about 93, she turned to my father, who had moved in with her after her second husband (not my father's biological father) died, and said "Ernest, would you help me answer a letter I got from my mother this morning?" Her mother would have been something like 120 years old but in fact had died decades earlier. Other times it wasn't so funny. My father woke up in mid-winter (in New Jersey) to find the kitchen door wide open. Grandma had gone to call the dog in, then left the door open to the elements. The dog, by the way, had died years before. Fortunately, Grandma did not just sit down in the kitchen and freeze to death but went back to bed, so the only harm was to the heating budget.
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Soon after that, Dad put Grandma in a very nice nursing home. One weekend that I came down for a visit, we found her sitting in the dining room and started to chat. She was perfectly willing to talk to us. I was closer, and after a few minutes of chatting, Grandma leaned forward, looked past me, and asked, "Is that Ernest?" I assured her that yes, that was Ernest, her son. And I was her grandson. We chatted some more. After a few minutes, she leaned forward, looked past me, and said, "Is that Ernest?" Funny, if it's not happening to you. Or your grandmother or grandfather.
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There is an elderly standup comic who does a routine about getting old. One of his jokes is that you're never lonely because you meet new people every day.
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My grandmother became a burden on the family because of senility. Tho we didn't wish her dead — she didn't have some enormous financial estate to settle upon us and we didn't hate her — what exactly was the point of her living after her mind had left? Why should anyone, be it my father, other members of the family, or paid staff at a nursing home, have to clean up after incontinence (front and back) of an elderly woman who has no reason to live?
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After months or years of this nonsense (at best) / ugliness (at worst), the memories the family once had of a vigorous elder are driven out and replaced by images and sounds of a demented wraith of his or her former self. For years thereafter, the last years are all one remembers. Not the sumptuous spreads of brilliantly cooked turkey and all the fixings at Thanksgiving, nor the hard candies put out at Christmas. Not the lafter and toasts, the barbecues and boat outings. Just the sadness of the end.
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We need, as a society, to think very seriously about assisted suicide and euthanasia for the terminally senile. There's no need to be vicious about it. "Grandma, would you like a cup of tea with honey [and a heaping dose of depressant so strong it will stop your breathing or your heart]?" And as Grandma or Grandpa lies down to take a (dirt) nap, you help get them into bed, comb their hair away from their eyes with your fingers, kiss them on the forehead, and say "Have a good sleep" for the last time.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,223 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:27 PM

 
Sticking It to Airports. The European consortium Airbus Industrie is making a huge imposition upon the world's airport authorities to accommodate its huge new double-decker airplane, the A380. The New York Times reports in tomorrow's edition how much it will cost for one airport, New York's JFK International:

At Kennedy, where the runways were laid out in 1948, anticipating the A380 led to a $179 million modernization program. Further changes could raise the tab to around $300 million.

[A] major taxiway at Kennedy from the runway to the terminal had to be moved so that the A380’s wings would not hang over the edge and the plane could turn without hitting the terminal. [In addition, a whole new taxiway had to be built to runway 13.] * * *

Airbus has tried to fend off criticism about the A380 requiring costly airport overhauls. It has issued press releases outlining “myths” about the plane and making the case that the A380 will be more efficient in getting passengers on and off and can, for the most part, use existing runways.

Runways. Not taxiways. Not terminals.
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How many billions of dollars will the airports of the world have to spend to accommodate this one model of airplane, money they would not have to spend for any other airliner? And who will pay for those improvements? Airbus? You can safely bet your ass that the arrogant manufacturer that is inflicting these costs on taxpayers and air passengers (most of whom won't even ride in the A380 but will be charged higher landing fees for every flite into an affected airport, on every plane) will not be paying for the required 'improvements'.
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Some airport administrators are glad to see more passengers on a single plane, as could reduce the number of planes taking off and landing in any given period. Quoting The New York Times again:

While most carriers say they will put 550 or so passengers in the A380, the craft is certified to carry up to 853 [passengers only? or passengers and crew?] — about twice the number carried in the biggest version of the Boeing 747.

What of the dangers? In one horrendous 1977 incident, in the Canary Islands, two Boeing 747s crashed into each other. 583 people were killed in the worst aviation disaster in history — so far. That's only 33 more than a single A380 can carry in its least crowded seat configuration. What happens if two A380s crash into each other? Might the death toll be double the present worst toll, 583? Even more? 853 x 2 is 1,706 — and that's counting only people who were in the planes, not anyone on the ground who might be hit by the crashing planes or by debris cast far and wide by the impact, or burned by the fires all around that might be set off by the fireball such a crash could produce.
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What if even one of these enormous planes crashes? Tho we can certainly hope that there will never be such a crash, there is absolutely no reason on Earth to believe that.
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How many cities can handle hundreds and hundreds of critically injured patients from one incident, at the same time? How many hospitals would that take? How many ambulances? How many people would die before ambulances could even get to them, much less whisk them to such hospitals as might be available within life-saving distance? And if fire is a major element in the injuries sustained, how many cities have burn units big enuf to accommodate more than a tiny fraction of the hundreds who might be severely burned in an A380 crash?
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What if a plane eight stories tall, with a wingspan wider than a football field is long, crashes short of an airport, in one of the major cities that the A380 is designed to "serve"?
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That's an ordinary accident, and accidents do happen. But what if an A380 is hijacked by fanatical terrorists and used as a missile? Is there a building or tite cluster of buildings anywhere in the world that could survive such an impact?
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There are some new creations of technology that we really should "Just Say No" to. The A380 is one. And I will fite any attempt to make my city's airport, Newark International,* spend hundreds of millions of dollars to bring this incredibly dangerous plane roaring over my town. Remember the American Airlines flite 587 crash** in Queens six years ago? We do around here.
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Airbus Go Home!
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* I refuse the moronic addition "Liberty" to the perfectly good name "Newark International".

** 265 dead.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,218 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:02 PM

 
Closer (for the Moment) to Our Closest Ally? The United States went on Daylite Savings Time early this year, a week ago. It occurred to me only today, however, that if Britain (which does adjust to Daylite Savings Time) did not start DST early, the U.S. and Britain would be an hour closer for two weeks. Given that the United Kingdom (Britain) has recently replaced Canada as our closest "foreign" friend, it seems apt that we should be only 4 hours apart rather than the usual 5.
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Or did Britain go on DST at the same time as we? I don't know.
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Meanwhile, Canada, which was estranged from us for several years after Dubya took control of the White House, has become partly reconciled to us by virtue of a change in government following elections that ousted the Liberal-Left "Liberals" for what is in U.S. terms the Liberal-Center "Conservatives". (Canada in general is much further "Left" overall than the U.S. overall, so Canadian "Conservatives" would be regarded by most Americans as Moderate Liberals, and Canadian "Liberals" as members of the "Liberal-Left" — if not Socialists or even Communists.)
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Canada went on DST at the same time as the U.S., despite the inclination of Canadian nationalists that Canada do anything and everything to distinguish itself (artificially) from the U.S. The entire outside world sees Canada as being, for all practical purposes, identical to the U.S. culturally. The legalistic differences that exist by virtue of there being two different national governments in place are discounted as significant culturally by all but a tiny percentage of outside observers. Everyone else understands that those trivial differences are accidents of colonial history, and do not, in any case, amount to much.
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More consequential, but not by much, are Canadian-nationalist efforts to create distinctions to justify a pointless and actually destructive border between our two societies. Thus, tho Canadians had no fondness for the metric system, the chance to make a sharp and visible break from the United States proved irresistible, and, after years of preparation, the Canadian federal government imposed the metric system overnite on national highways. The U.S. Government, persuaded that metric was the way to go in order to integrate the U.S. economy with and make the U.S. competitive as against the rest of the world, tried to impose the metric system suddenly on one test stretch of federal highway, about 30 years ago. The resulting storm of furious rejectionism forced the Feds to back down, nearly instantly. No further attempt has been made to impose the metric system on Americans, and to this day the only measures in some departments of American supermarkets are traditional. Tho we may have two-liter bottles of soda and 1.75 liter bottles of booze, we buy butter and meat only in pounds, milk and ice cream only in quarts.
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The U.S. is a "both-and" kind of place, where we accept all kinds of measures. We have liter bottles alongside 16-ounce bottles; use fluid ounces for drinks but cubic centimeters for medicines. We have a huge panoply of measures, from BTUs for air conditioners to carats for jewels to troy ounces for gold to Kelvin for astronomical temperatures to nautical miles for distances at sea but statute miles on land! We have rid ourselves of some antique measures from our British colonial history, like rods and stones, but retain a few, like furlongs for horseracing courses. To us, our measuring 'system' is at once enormously complicated and emotionally appropriate: different kinds of things have different kinds of measures. Of course. And why not?
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It's like a slite alteration of the famous Byrds' song,* Turn! Turn! Turn!: to everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a measure, turn, turn, turn.
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The United States is like every other place in some measure and unlike every other place in some measure, because we are a both-and society rather than an either-or society. We are comfortable with difference, with some people preferring one thing and others, other things. That kind of freedom, from mental confines as much as legal constraints, is unsettling to hundreds of millions, if not even several billion people. But it doesn't ruffle our own feathers at all.
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We know that everyone is different. That is the individualism in our culture at work. We know that different parts of the planet are different. People speak different languages. They live in different climates and different time zones. They have different skin colors and hair textures, different religions and languages. But at end it doesn't much matter, because they're all human, and thus all more like us than different from us.
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We can deal with different languages thru translation programs; different measures, thru conversion programs. We can even deal with different religions and ethical systems by either comparing them to the closest equivalent in our own value system or by accepting that other people's values don't have to be identical to ours, as long as they aren't inimical to ours.
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What we CANNOT abide is intolerance, an adamant and, to our mind, INSANE insistence that everyone do everything the same.
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There are perhaps 6.6 billion people on Earth. In American terms, that means there are some 6.6 billion different ways of seeing things, and not just from different perspectives on the surface of the Earth, upside-down in Australia or rightside-up in New Jersey; earlier by five hours in Newark or later by five (four?) hours in London or York, England; but also from different ways of viewing the world from our very own, individual, personal nature. Gay men see things differently from straight men, lesbians, or straight women. Geniuses see things differently from morons. Polyglots see things differently from monoglots. Islamic fundamentalists see things differently from pious Orthodox Jews, who in turn see things differently from Christian Liberals. Atheists see things differently from all religious people. And on, and on, and on.
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So how are we to "measure" anything or anyone without imposing values?
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Some people pretend that metric measures are somehow more "scientific" or "accurate" than Americans' traditional measures. That is nonsense. Each and every measuring system is absolutely accurate within itself. It is only when one tries to convert between measures that approximations are employed and mistakes in conversion occur. 10cc is not one whit more accurate a measure of medicine than a 3rd of an ounce. Those two measures are slitely different, and I do not imply that they are exactly comparable. I'm simply saying that if a doctor says to take 1/3 of an ounce or 10cc of a given medication every two hours, neither instruction is more nor less accurate than the other. A physician will state the dosage in whatever measure is available. If the patient has only a teaspoon, and not a gradated syringe, the doctor will prescribe the dosage in terms of a spoonful (or portion of a spoonful) per unit of time. Tho "cc" may have a more scientific ring to it than "spoonful", as a practical matter the markings on a syringe may be so wide and personal perceptions so different that 10cc as actually filled by an observer could be 7cc or 12cc, and a level teaspoon could be actually level or puffed up a bit to the limit of the meniscus — that is, to the point beyond which a liquid theretofore confined to a container will spill over the edge. That may be significantly higher than the level of the top of the container (for instance, spoon) as seen from the side.
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People need to be able to function within their own terms of reference. Knowing other people's terms of reference is not nearly so important. In time terms, we in Newark need to know that it's 10pm — here. We don't necessarily need to know that it is 7pm in California, and we almost never need to know whether it is 5am or 4am in England. The fact that other places have different times showing on their clocks than we have doesn't make all those clocks wrong.
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* Wikipedia, which I do not usually cite to here since it removed the article about me that somebody (I don't know who) wrote, says that Pete Seeger, the pacifist folksinger, wrote Turn! Turn! Turn! But Seeger didn't make it famous. The Byrds did.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,216 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
Snow Foolin'. As I write, it is snowing steadily. The temperature is 27 degrees Fahrenheit. On March 16th in Newark, New Jersey. Expected accumulation here is 5-8 inches. That is practically unheard of around here. But the drumbeat of propaganda about "Global Warming" doesn't skip so much as one beat. Late last nite, as rain was turning to snow, I watched two episodes of Scientific American Frontiers on cable (hereinafter, "SAF"). In the first episode, the beginning of which I missed, the subject was the danger that Global Warming may pose to the "halite circulation" (which is also called the "thermohaline circulation"). A good lay-language explanation of that mechanism appears here.
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The premise that SAF discussed is that Global Warming has so increased rainfall around the Arctic Ocean that the freshwater discharge into the Arctic, mainly from deep in the Russian hinterland, could markedly increase the amount of fresh water in the Arctic. At the same time, high rates of evaporation in the tropics induced by Global Warming could significantly increase the salinity of the sea in equatorial regions. The combined effects of these two paired results from Global Warming might produce insufficient difference in water densities to sustain the vast heat exchanger of ocean currents. Arctic waters would stay in the Arctic, tropic waters would stay in the tropics, with potentially catastrophic consequences for northern regions, which would become hugely colder. Yes, that's the bizarre assertion of some Global Warming "Chicken Littles": Global Warming will produce a new Ice Age in the north.
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There are problems with this whole idea, key among them being that temperature difference in itself, without a difference in salinity, drives currents:

When something is cooler it is more dense and when it is warmer it is less dense. We have already experienced this in many chapters [of the book cited at that website] as we have seen hot magma move upward buoyed by lower density.

The oceans do much the same, warmer water moves upward and cooler water sinks. Coupled with this there is also a salinity difference. Water at any given temperature will have higher density if it contains more salt.

Thus cold saline water will sink further than cold fresh water.

So tho saltier water might sink farther, cold fresh water will still sink. We can see plainly that cold fluids produce currents when they adjoin warm fluids, by simply looking at another fluid body, the "ocean" of air, our global atmosphere. Canadian Arctic air masses do not stay in the Arctic but flow south, to, among other places, Newark. In March. Five days before the start of spring.
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A further moderating factor is that fluids tend not to stay stratified by salinity but mix so that over time, fresh water is invaded by salt and saltier water is invaded by fresh. So there is both heat diffusion and molecular diffusion at work to mix water types, cold with warm, salty with fresh. These are dynamic processes constantly at work.
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We need to be very wary of bald assertions like this one:

Computer modeling indicates that the warming-induced precipitation increase [at high latitudes, affecting Russian rivers' greater output of fresh water] can be traced only to human releases of greenhouse gases, not to natural variations in the rain cycle [Wu, 2005].)

What a bunch of bull! "Computer modeling" is wholly dependent on the assumptions written into the program, famously expressed, "Garbage in, garbage out". It's like computer poker or slot machines. You can get any result you want just by writing the program to do what you want it to do. Computer modeling is not science; it is gaming, electronic fiction.
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Some scientists are not cowed by the attempt of the Global Warming advocates / champions to silence dissent. The New York Post, with whose editorial policy I almost always disagree, on February 26th published something sensible (by mistake, I must assume): "Global Warming: What We Don't Know", by Roy W. Spencer. (It's still online free, but may not be for much longer.) Spencer is "principal research scientist" at a climate institute at the University of Alabama. The website ExxonSecrets.org ("Documenting Exxon-Mobil's funding of climate change skeptics") implies that he can't be trusted. I'll leave that to you. I approach the world by reason. If it sounds right, it probably is right. If it sounds wrong, tho, it probably is wrong. Even if ExxonMobil is funding some scientists, (a) does that mean that those scientists will lie? and (b) might some other interest be funding scientists on the other side, as might impact their stated results?
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Spencer addresses the issue of computer modeling:

[Our view of Global Warming] all depends on [our] level of faith in our understanding of the atmosphere. We put equations into a computer that describe the basics of how we think the atmosphere works, and then we expect the computer to predict how much warming we will get when we turn up the greenhouse gas "knob."

Spencer's major premise is that a balance between evaporation and precipitation regulates worldwide climate and keeps things from getting too far out of whack. For exactly how that works, read his piece. It's less than 1,000 words long (or, little more than 1/3 the length of this blog entry).
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One thing to bear in mind is a little high-school physics: the process of evaporation is endothermic: it absorbs heat. That is the principle behind evaporative air-conditioners. In itself, then, evaporating sea water absorbs some of the excess heat we are supposed to worry about. When that water vapor condenses, an exothermic process, it is high above the surface of the Earth, in a part of the atmosphere that is naturally cold. The amount of warming that condensation that high produces has little effect upon planetary temperature, given how cold the high atmosphere starts out.
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Aside from Spencer's concern, precipitation, let us consider two other factors: albedo and biological removal of carbon dioxide.
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Albedo is the ratio of lite / solar energy absorbed by the planet as against reflected back into space. One of the concerns of climatologists inclined to believe in manmade Global Warming is that as glaciers retreat and icecaps shrink, the reflection of solar radiation drops, because white ice is replaced by exposed rock. But as water evaporates, it forms clouds. Clouds are white. Tho they let some warmth thru, and are conceived of as "holding warmth in", especially at nite, when radiational cooling is damped by clouds, you know from personal experience that as a cloud passes over you on an otherwise sunny day, there is an acute drop in temperature in the area shaded. More evaporation creates more clouds, which produces more shade over more of the planet and more reflection of solar energy. Thus to some considerable extent the process of global warming is self-limiting, if not wholly self-regulating, because 80% of the planet's surface is water (not, for this purpose, counting ice as water).
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Another self-regulating Earth process is biological removal of carbon dioxide. The warmer the planetary climate, the longer the growing season in the temperate zones north and south. The longer the growing season, the more carbon dioxide is removed by plants and converted to carbohydrates and woody biomass. Moreover, carbon dioxide is also used by living creatures to create calcium carbonate, which forms the shells of marine animals and snails, coral reefs, and birds' eggs. This removal can be, for all practical purposes, permanent, since huge quantities of calcium carbonate precipitate out of water to form limestone, which endures for thousands or even millions of years.

Since many sea organisms such as corals, algae and diatoms make their shells out of calcite, they pull carbon dioxide from the sea water to accomplish this .... This is fortuitous for us, as carbon dioxide has been found to be a green house gas and contributes to the so called "green house gas effect". Environmentally then, calcite is very important and may have been quite important to the successful development of our planet in the past. By pulling carbon dioxide out of the sea water, this biological activity allows more of the carbon dioxide in the air to dissolve in the sea water [thru the process of diffusion] and thus acts as a carbon dioxide filter [sink] for [t]he planet. Environmentalists are now actively engaged in determining if this activity can be increase[d] by human intervention to the point of warding off the "green house gas effect". A significant amount of calcite precipitation in sea water is undoubtedly inorganic, but the exact amount that this contributes is not well known.

This biologically moderated regulation of temperature (which works in reverse too: as temperatures drop, growing seasons shorten, and less carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere, which tends to warm things up a bit) is known as the Gaia Theory. Oddly, the guy who came up with the Gaia Theory, British scientist James Lovelock, while he was working for the U.S. Government's space agency NASA, is among the very most pessimistic observers of manmade Global Warming. But why would processes that worked for millions of years stop working now? It's preposterous. Maybe the guy is just getting senile (he's in his 80s).
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One explanation of why biological moderation of planetary temperature might fail is to be found in this passage from a story in the New York Review of Books:

[Lovelock] differs with more conventional forecasts mostly because he thinks they have underestimated both the extent of the self-reinforcing cycles that are causing temperatures to rise and the vulnerability of the planet, which he sees as severely stressed and close to losing equilibrium.

You see, at the same time as carbon dioxide outputs are high, forests are being destroyed and oceans poisoned by silt and chemical wastes that kill algae. Left alone, forests and algae might successfully cope with any slite increase in carbon dioxide. In the industralized world, forests are very healthy, and indeed increasing in size, in part due to tree-farming for paper and wood. The industrial nations have also taken measures to reduce runoff of pesticides and fertilizers that have produced problems for oceanic plankton (phytoplankton convert* carbon dioxide to biomass; some zooplankton convert carbon dioxide to calcium carbonate). So where are forests shrinking and plankton and algae being destroyed? In the Third World.
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Rainforests have been ravaged, and continue to be destroyed at an alarming rate, from Brazil to Indonesia, not by the First World but by the Third World. One consequence of that destruction has been a huge increase in erosion and thus in the discharge of silt from tropical rivers that has devastated reefs by smothering them (and thus destroying or severely reducing the removal of carbon dioxide in the form of coral reefbuilding). Moreover, runoff from these rivers also carries large quantities of (wasted) fertilizer and pesticides into nearby ocean waters, adversely impacting plankton and thus reducing their ability to absorb carbon dioxide. So perhaps the people inclined to blame the First World for Global Warming have it exactly backwards, and it is the Third World that is doing the most harm!
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Still, this planet has remained congenial to life for millions of years, despite the (apparent) fact, as conceded even within the Chicken Little article in the New York Review of Books mentioned above:

the sun, because of its own stellar evolution, has become significantly hotter.

Despite a general trend toward greater energy output over eons, the Sun has occasionally faltered. We have had a series of great Ice Ages, and may still be emerging from a Little Ice Age, which SAF spoke to:

It was only a few hundred years ago that the earth experienced its last ice age. Global temperatures started falling during the 1300s and hit their lowest points in the late 1700s and early 1800s. New Yorkers could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island across a frozen harbor[.]

We need to ask whether we are getting warmer because of human activity or just because the Little Ice Age has ended and we are returning to normal. Emerging from a Little Ice Age might not be sudden, but gradual. We might still be in that emergence, and not yet have hit normal. After all, if the Little Ice Age started in the 1300s but did not hit coldest until the late 1700s and early 1800s, a lapse of 500 years, and we are only 200 years from the coldest part of the Little Ice Age, we could very well simply be emerging, still, from the Little Ice Age. Since the Little Ice Age began in the 1300s, and we didn't have reliable weather records from the 1200s, how are we to know if we are above "normal" or not even back to normal? Ice cores from Greenland may show what was happening in Greenland, but they don't show what was happening in (what is now) Newark, London, Moscow, or Tokyo. (And yes, I care more about Newark than about those other places. Thanks to the Gulf Stream, which the Chicken Littles are worried might stop flowing and which bypasses Greenland (remember that; it could be really meaningful), London is generally milder in winter than Newark, despite being some 745 miles farther north. (To put that in context, Daytona Beach, Florida, is about as far south of Newark as London is farther north.) Unfair! The Gulf of Mexico is in my Hemisphere. Why should the Other Hemisphere get its warmth? I want it here!)
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(There is also a tiny shift in the length of warm versus cold seasons in the Northern Hemisphere: winter is shrinking as regards the number of days of the year it occupies, due to the wobble of our planet.)
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If 99% of any planetary warming that may in truth be going on is the result of increased solar output and other things (e.g., volcanic discharges) that we have absolutely nothing to do with, why should we beat ourselves up over it? And how much can we do, really, to reverse it?
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SAF showed some things that technology can do, from switching from carbon to hydrogen as our prime source of energy, even in cars, to using algae to scrub emissions from power plants — again, biological modulation. Maybe the best we can do to adjust around and fite Global Warming — manmade or not — is to save the rainforests and oceans from human rapacity. To do that, we need to give people in the Third World ways (a) to control population, the base engine behind all forms of devastation the Third World is suffering (one means?: induce all Third World countries to legalize homosexuality, a natural, biological brake on overpopulation); (b) to make a living without destroying the rainforest (land reform, industrialization); and (c) to learn improved agricultural techniques, to slash not rainforest but erosion.
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The First World can also stop suburban sprawl that destroys forests and farms, and indeed re-green areas now plantless. This can be done by a bunch of little things that, combined, produce significant greening: installing window boxes, rooftop gardens, community gardens in vacant lots; "backfilling" (repopulating) older towns and cities that have been partly abandoned for suburbs; planting lots of trees in new suburbs, malls, industrial parks, office campuses — everywhere in the First World; and using things like the biological emission-scrubbing algae that SAF hilited. If we can simultaneously reduce needless production of carbon dioxide and even take up CO₂ we did not produce, so much the better.
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Meanwhile, the debate goes on as to whether people are responsible for such Global Warming as may actually be happening. This has become not an open-minded discussion but a heated debate, politically motivated and tainted by selectively presented data. My colleague in Northern England sent me email to say that Channel 4, a major TV network in Britain, recently broadcast a major documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle, that challenges the new orthodoxy that it's all our fault. Roy Spencer, whose opinion piece in the New York Post I mentioned above, contributed to it. My British colleague wrote:

When I mentioned the documentary 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' (which makes a case against the theory of man-made global warming) to my mother after watching it, her reply was "I bet the Americans were behind it, so they can carry on driving their gas-guzzling cars".

Do you think that one of the principal purposes of alarmist global warming propaganda is to attack the United States?

By the way, a point made during that documentary is that Margaret Thatcher was one of the earliest political leaders to champion man-made global warming theory, because she hoped to use it as an excuse to destroy Britain's coal industry (and with it, the National Union of Mineworkers under their quasi-Communist leader Arthur Scargill).

I replied:

Skepticism is alive and well at Channel 4, I see. That same company broadcast documentaries skeptical of the AIDS-as-HIV premise years ago. Curiously, tho U.S. public-TV stations usually ADORE all things British, none of those documentaries was shown here. Moreover, The Sunday Times ran a major article about reasons to doubt the HIV theory, and that was completely ignored by major media here too. Let's see if anybody here picks up that Channel 4 documentary about global warming.
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Plainly the United States is scapegoated for lots of things it has nothing to do with, or little to do with. "Globalization" itself is seen by many as a plot by U.S.-based corporations to take over the world, as vanguard for a U.S. governmental colonization of the planet. I guess they see this as imperialism on the British model: the flag follows the trading post. All nonsense, of course, and globalization is hurting Americans badly.
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Modernization too is seen as Americanization, because the U.S. not only invented a lot of the things the use of which constitutes modernity but also has taken many useful devices from many other places and popularized them globally. From the Walkman and karaoke (Japan) to food processors (France?), many things have entered the world's modern culture thru the U.S. It has gotten to the point that unless you track them down, you can't know where much of anything originated nowadays. They all get ground up and distributed by the U.S.-influenced global culture. Take the "English" language, for instance, the prime auxiliary language of the entire planet. It's not ours but yours. But that doesn't stop people from charging us with cultural imperialism for spreading your language!
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As will not surprise you, I hate Margaret Thatcher and regard her as proof that the world would NOT be a better place if women had more to say about it.

Whether Global Warming is happening at all, whether people have anything to do with it, and whether human activity can alter it are not settled matters, no matter what you may have heard from major media. "Scientists" are not simply presenting (all) the facts. They are choosing which facts to present and stress, depending on which side they have taken. Make no mistake, scientists, who are just people, are not simply evaluating the data impartially and spitting them out like computerized robots. They are taking sides and manipulating data selectively to make their own side's case while poohpoohing the other side's case. I'm an advocate myself, so yes, I'm making the case for my side, against manmade Global Warming. But you know that I'm an opinionated advocate. And you hear the other side (the wrong side) all the time. You need to consider the right side. That would be mine.
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* Altho some authorities say that "plankton" is singular in form, so takes a singular verb, it doesn't sound right here to me. And I'm an expert in English (if you doubt it, just ask me). "Plankton" is a collective, like "family", and collective nouns can take singular or plural verb or pronoun, depending on how the collectivity is conceived in the particular spot, and how the relevant phrase sounds. "Convert" sounds right. "Converts" would sound wrong. I have spoken.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,210 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:19 PM