Obamacare Disastrous to the Radical Right? I think not. A colleague in northern England emailed me to pass along the observations of an American blogger that passage of the Obama Administration's healthcare legislation will produce massive change in this Nation's political landscape.

The economics blogger Brad DeLong has suggested that Obama's plan for health care reform (despite not going as far as public-healthcare supporters want) will still be enough to destroy the American conservative movement. This is why back in 1993, neocon Bill Kristol called for killing health care reform at all costs.

The plan for mandatory insurance purchase which you have condemned is a bone which Obama is throwing to the insurance companies, while the actual reforms are a ban on insurers refusing to take people on due to pre-existing conditions, federal spending on Medicaid (currently the responsibility of the states) and rebates for Americans with incomes less than 400% above the poverty line.

The Republicans cannot oppose the insurance purchase mandates, as this would turn the hugely wealthy health insurers against them.

They cannot oppose the ban on rejecting those with pre-existing conditions, as this would be suicide at the polls.

They cannot oppose the federal Medicaid funding because much of this is expected to go to Red states (so opposing it would create a conflict between the Republicans in DC and those in the states).

They cannot oppose the rebates for working Americans as this would again be political suicide. It would also destroy right-wing anti-taxation politics, because health care subsidy increases in future would benefit ordinary Americans far more than tax cuts for a given amount of additional deficit (because right-wing tax cuts are generally modest for the middle class but huge for the rich).

I don't buy any such argument. Altho it is hardly surprising that a professor of economics should regard economic issues as paramount, the reality is that the Republican Right has been able to do active and ongoing injury to the economic interests of their constituents for a generation yet keep getting re-elected, because it is not economics but "values" and the "culture wars" that produce Republican triumph at the polls in the parts of the country where Republicans are in charge. So I replied:

To require everyone to buy health insurance from private companies but forbid insurers from refusing insurance to people with pre-existing [conditions] and from cutting off insurance to people who exceed the company's standards, leaves insurers with the option of raising insurance premiums for EVERYONE as high as they want, without any limitation, because there is no limit in the legislation, as far as I have heard, on insurer profits. If everyone has to buy from private insurers, and insurers can charge anything they want, the benefit is primarily to the insurers. How much of a subsidy can the Government provide, especially when insurers can charge anything they want? When some large fraction of Americans are going further into debt each month, they cannot afford even 2 cents on health insurance, but are required to buy it anyway, or pay a fine that they also cannot afford. Will a subsidy cover every cent of the cost of their insurance? If so, then somebody else is paying for it, and the unfair cost-shifting that is the argument against permitting some people who don't want health insurance to refuse to buy it still exists, just in a different form.
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Since taxes are NOT being raised on the rich by any significant rate, that means that the costs will come from the middle class and working poor, twice. First, they have to buy insurance they can't afford; second, they have to pay higher taxes to subsidize such people as the Government chooses to subsidize, to the extent the Government chooses to subsidize them. And if it is not 100%, the people who are now going into debt every month will go even DEEPER into debt every month because they cannot escape health-insurance premiums.
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The current plans are not to go into effect for YEARS, so could be revoked or eviscerated before so much as a single person is helped. Tens of thousands will die who shouldn't, all because Congress and Obama are gutless and useless.
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As for what the Republican Party can get away with, the policies of that party have been hostile to the poor and lower middle class for decades, but they have somehow managed to persuade the poorer people of the Red States — which are poorer than the Blue States — that they are on their side because they want to keep the faggots, atheists, and pinkos down! Because the poor white trash who vote for them despite what should be obvious harm to them from Republican policies, will continue to vote on "values", not economics, the Republicans can continue to win elections by appealing to tribalism, and poor white trash will continue to be poor and uneducated. Indeed, if healthcare reform actually works to reduce the harm that Republican policies have done in producing a massive outflow of jobs to China et al., the inclination of white trash to vote Republican will increase, because they will be partially shielded from the worst effects of Republican policies.
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In no way will universal health insurance from private insurers damage the Republican Right Wing. [It will just prove that private enterprise, the "free market", works! Because the essence of "free enterprise" is private ownership of the enterprises that provide goods and services, not freedom from compulsion to do business with privately-owned enterprises. So a corporatist state that forces people to do business with privately-owned companies is NOT providing "Government healthcare" but PRIVATE healthcare.] If anything, it will strengthen the Right — unless it fails so horribly that the economy is destroyed by uncontrolled health spending and by massive bankruptcy and foreclosure rates brought on by inadequate subsidies. The export of jobs will likely not just continue, [but] actually accelerate if corporations [that operate here rather than move production overseas] are compelled to pay for health insurance they do not now provide.
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No matter how you look at it, it's a catastrophe in the making. Either the whole Government is brought low by catastrophic spending on healthcare that makes a disastrous deficit a calamitous deficit, or the people oust the Democrats from majorities in both houses and Republicans refuse to fund the system. They don't have to repeal the legislation. They can simply refuse to fund.
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I can't see things working under any scenario if the Senate version is what is finally enacted. If the House version, with a public option, is what passes and is signed, things might not be such a disaster. But the courts may very well rule the individual mandate an unconstitutional seizure of property for transfer to private corporations, which is forbidden by the Fifth Amendment. The current Supreme Court might rule that the Government can force people to buy from private insurers, but if this proves ruinous, as it must, there may be a revolt, violent in nature, against Congress, the President, and the Court. Bullets have played a major role in U.S. history, and could again.

In short, the Radical Right does not represent so much as use the constituency they claim to be concerned about. The Radical Right is indeed about money, but not the economic well-being of the many, only that of the few. They dangle hot-button issues in front of rednecks to distract them while the policies of the Radical Right pick their pocket. And the rednecks they rob are so stupid that they don't even notice that their wallets, which are put back in their pocket after the cash has been extracted, are thinner than they should be. They are actually happy to see that "we" are doing so well, with our mansions and yachts, and delude themselves that the rich really care about them and are fiting for them against those godless Commie pinko faggots of the Liberal Northeast. They never had much, but at least the Good Old Boys of the Republican Party are fiting to keep what little they do have: their God, their guns, their 'manhood' (meaning "heterosexuality", and not just for themselves, but for everyone else, whether they want it or not). As long as they can look down their nose at faggots and put "In God We Trust" on the money, it doesn't matter to them that they are poor as dirt. They've still got their dignity. Good thing, because the Radical Right ruling class has everything else.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:42 AM

 
Keystone Kops of the Air. The Christmas Day attempted bombing of a U.S. passenger airliner shows that the Federal Government has still not, more than 8 years after 9/11, gotten its act together. A news story hilited on AOL today says:

Abdulmutallab appeared on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database maintained by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, said a U.S. official who received a briefing and spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation. Containing some 550,000 names, the database includes people with known or suspected ties to a terrorist organization. However, it is not a list that would prohibit a person from boarding a U.S.-bound airplane.

What exactly is the purpose of the TIDE database if not to alert security agents at airports and such to pay special attention to people on that list? Even if a person is not on a "no-fly list" as such, shouldn't the TIDE list produce an automatic intense search, even strip-search (if not even a body-cavity search)? The Nigerian loon who set himself on fire in trying to kill hundreds of people — how can Islam smile upon mass murder? — had put a prefabricated bomb into his underpants. Are all air travelers now to be forced to take their underwear off, as they are (still?) required to take their shoes off because one other loon tried to kill hundreds of people with a shoe bomb made of the same explosive substance?
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It's one thing not to have information upon which to act, and quite another to have the information but not use it. Do airports and airlines running flites into the U.S. not have access to the TIDE database? Are there no computer systems in place to check the TIDE database for every air passenger, or even just every international air passenger?
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The news story quoted above states further:

U.S. authorities told The Associated Press that in November, his father, a prominent banking official in Nigeria, went to the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, to discuss his concerns about his son's religious beliefs.

One U.S. government official said the father did not have any specific information that would put his son on the "no-fly list" or on the list for additional security checks at the airport.

Wasn't it clear to U.S. embassy personnel that if a father felt so strongly about dangers that his son might pose to the United States that he made an in-person trip to the embassy, that this was a report to be taken very seriously, and the son's name, foto, etc., put into some kind of system that would cause him to be searched extra rigorously if he tried to board an airplane bound for the United States?
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What kind of incompetents do we have in U.S. embassies and security services that this could have happened?
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One of the main concerns after 9/11 was that the Government's left hand doesn't know what the Government's right hand is doing. That was supposed to have been fixed. Plainly it has not been. The people of the United States, and other potential targets of anti-Western Islamist violence, need to demand of their governments, FIX THIS!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,371 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:47 PM

 
Delusions R UN. At 8:40am today, the temperature in my city, Newark, NJ, was reported by AOL to be 17°F — 3 days (and a bit) before winter even begins, and 12° below the normal low — yet there is a UN-sponsored world conference underway in Copenhagen about global warming! I had to laff out loud, but it's really not funny when so many people, so highly placed, are completely out of touch with reality. Their premise is that we need to be colder. No, we really don't.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,371 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:57 AM

 
Dubious Premise, Wrong Culprit. The "science" of "anthropogenic"/man-made global warming is at best questionable and at worst fraudulent. Data are not reliable, nor even available for much of the world for the period before weather satellites were put in place in the 1960s; the temperature differences in densely populated areas for which we have good data going back decades or even centuries are too slite to be meaningful; the (assertedly) greatest temperature increases are where there are the fewest people; and one entire side of the climate equation is being completely ignored.
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As a UN climate-change conference deliberates in Denmark, 2/3 of the United States, the world's third-largest country, spanning climes from the Arctic to the tropics, is subnormally cold, and by a lot. In the Northeast, which is not nearly as hard-hit as some other regions, the temperature today did not quite reach (going up from overnite frigidity) freezing (32°) in my city, Newark, NJ, when the normal high temperature for December 11th is 44°. The normal low is 31°, which was instead the high today. Last nite, temperatures dropped to about 21°, 10° below normal. And winter isn't even here yet!
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In Copenhagen, where the conference is being held, today's high was 41°, but only very briefly, in a day whose average was 39°. The average temperatures in Denmark overall in December are 39 high, 33 low, and that is an average of early and late December. So today was absolutely typical, if not even warmer because this is only 1/3 thru December, and late December is colder than early. The Copenhagen forecast for the next nine days is for slitely subnormal temperatures. But the delegates to a conference in Copenhagen are expected to ignore the actual temperatures and their relation to norms, and believe instead that the planet is burning to a crisp. What do you call it when people insist on believing conditions contrary to fact? "Delusion" is the nice word. "Madness" isn't so nice, but it fits.
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A quick Internet check for Denmark's average temperatures for December and January overall shows two different sets of figures. One source says December temps are 39 high, 33 low, and January's, 36 and 28. Another source says 39/32 for December, 37/30 for January. This 1° to 2° discrepancy in current averages from one source to another is comparable to the entire extent of "global warming" on the planet overall — and Denmark is a place where we have had good records for a long time. So the base issue is, whose data do you believe? Do ALL records from all observers agree absolutely? If not, is the discrepancy smaller than the asserted change in climate, equal to that asserted change, or greater than the asserted change? Either of the latter two data alternatives would completely void the assertion that the world's temperature is rising.
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The National Geographic Society's website says:

Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Do all observers agree with the Goddard Institute's figures?
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Even if they do, and there is reason to believe they do not, huge projections are being asserted, based upon tiny temperature changes, which could be wholly explained by differences in data-gathering. In much of the planet — oceans, Antarctica, backward countries — reliable weather records do not exist for any period prior to the orbiting of weather satellites. The first weather satellite wasn't launched until 1959, and lasted only 78 days. Competent weather satellites didn't start orbiting until 1964. So in fact we have significant amounts of data about large swaths of the planet only since 1964, not 1880.
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National Geographic goes on to say:

The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.

Why would that be, if people are responsible for planetary warming? There are very few people in the Arctic, only about 2 million within the Arctic Circle, and almost none of them are in Alaska and western Canada. Alaska has less than 300,000 people overall, and almost all of them are south of the Arctic Circle. If human activity is responsible for planetary warming, shouldn't there be a temperature gradient, in which the most densely populated areas, or those that emit the most CO2, are most affected and the areas with the lowest density of population and least emission of CO2 would be least affected? The idea that the Earth is a closed system, so causes of warming do not remain in the areas they first affect, sounds reasonable, until you realize that the tropics are hot and the poles are cold, so heat is not uniformly distributed within this "closed system". Tropical heat remains largely within the tropics, with some spillover into the temperate zone, but none of it gets to the poles. So why are the poles, empty of people, MORE affected by "man-made" global warming than are the areas of the world with the bulk of the world's population?
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One website, of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming of the U.S. House of Representatives, claims:

Over the past 50 years average temperatures in the Arctic have increased as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit. ... In the record-breaking year of 2005, parts of Greenland melted that have never melted during the 26-year long satellite record. A complete melting of Greenland would result in over a 20 foot rise in global sea level, presenting catastrophic consequences to coastal regions around the world.

I have boldfaced mutually contradictory passages within this single paragraph. No source is given for the assertion about a 7° increase. And it does not accord with the National Geographic statements that planetary temperature has risen by 1.4° and Arctic temperature at "twice the global average", which would be 2.8°, not 7°. So we can't even get consistent data about the extent of the so-called "problem". Yet we are to embark on drastic measures when we don't even know exactly how much temperatures have changed, if at all, nor why.
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Further, that (undated) Congressional webpage implicitly concedes that the entire climatological record for the area they are pronouncing upon is 26 years, that is, back to perhaps 1983, not 1880 — not even the 50 years that that webpage itself mentions! Or are we to believe we had excellent records of every other part of the Arctic except the Greenland ice cap — even the ice cap that covers much of the Arctic Ocean 8 months or so each year?
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Alarms about "climate change" and "global warming" speak of a historic shift from a century and more ago, but we just don't have records from that long ago for most of the planet: the oceans, icecaps, deserts, high mountains, and a large portion of the African continent. Heck, we didn't even have good MAPS of parts of the planet in 1880. (See a map of Africa from 1873 here and a map of the Arctic from 1885 here, which contains a large area marked "Unexplored".)
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The House Committee webpage also makes this astonishing claim:

Warming induced changes in tundra vegetation and plant life threaten caribou, reindeer and migratory bird populations. Loss of sea ice and wildlife also makes indigenous life in the Arctic increasingly difficult, endangering an entire way of life.

We are supposed to believe that vegetation flourishes with freezing but dies with (relative) warmth. That is exactly contrary to all human experience and botanical knowledge. No, gentlemen, vegetation does BETTER with warmth — we are not, after all, talking about tundra plants being suddenly subjected to temperatures of 135°F, but of temperature changes of only a few degrees — so vegetation should grow faster and remain productive longer with increased warmth, and herbivores, which depend on vegetation, should THRIVE, not die, if Arctic temperatures rise.
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Now, let's consider whom to blame and whom to require to change their behavior. In the matter of the buildup or reduction of CO2, there are two sides to the equation: output and uptake. If output increases but uptake does not also increase, CO2 can build up. If output stays the same and uptake diminishes, CO2 can increase. If output increases and uptake decreases, CO2 can build up, at a higher rate. But if output increases and uptake also increases, stasis may occur, or CO2 may actually decrease. And, finally, worst, if output decreases but uptake decreases more, CO2 can still build up! So it doesn't necessarily matter how much the advanced countries decrease CO2 emissions (and talk of eliminating 100% of CO2 emissions is utter nonsense — you couldn't burn even a single candle without producing CO2), if the natural mechanisms that destroy CO2 (mainly photosynthesis by green plants, of any size from giant sequoia to tiny photoplankton) are rendered inoperative, CO2 emissions, even tho much reduced, will still produce an increase in atmospheric CO2.
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The First World (industrialized nations) produces a lot of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels in various fashions (automobiles burning gasoline, homes and businesses burning oil and natural gas for heating, power plants burning coal, oil, and other fossil fuels or renewable biomass to generate electricity). The forests, farms, grasslands, and coastal waters of the industrial countries are in very good shape, however, so large and tiny green plants in the First World are doing a very good job of taking up CO2 and producing oxygen and biomass from it.
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Some parts of the Third World, however, are pouring out massive amounts of CO2 while simultaneously destroying forests and so badly contaminating coastal waters that the amount of CO2 that was once broken down by natural processes in the Third World has been drastically reduced, and is each day reduced further by rapacious and ultimately self-destructive practices by idiot barbarians. This is, in short, a case of savages destroying the portions of the planet they control, but civilized people being blamed for it.
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(There is no longer a linguistic "Second World". The Communist bloc, which was the Second World, no longer exists. Mind you, there are still some countries dominated by at least political Communism (totalitarian dictatorship), but they no longer constitute a bloc.)
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There is now a vast outpouring of "global-warming" claptrap from major media and free-agent Internet loons, blatantly dishonest nonsense about "climate refugees" and sea level rises that no one has quantified. For instance, NBC Nightly News today suggested that Egypt's coastal waters are "predicted to rise 3 feet in as little as three decades", and that 3 billion people are at risk from climate change!
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You have to think about these things to see the absurdities. Moments after the nonsense about coastal waters rising 3 feet, NBC's Jim Maceda in that same report gives some information that bears on what is really happening. The Nile's flow has been drastically reduced, not just by the High Aswan Dam, which many viewers will have known about, but also by further, more recent damming by the Sudan upriver, which has further reduced both the water and the silt that the Nile used to deliver to the Nile Delta at the Mediterranean coast. Coastal waters are not rising; the Delta is being worn away by natural processes of erosion, at the Nile as at the Mississippi, because of human restrictions placed upon those rivers' deposition of silt downstream.
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No such reality check can be made for the preposterous claim, by some organization nobody ever heard of, "the peace group Alert International", whom Maceda quotes without doing any independent checking, that "almost 3 billion people are at risk from environmental wars". And never mind that those "environmental wars" may take the form of old-fashioned squabbles over water diversion by one group of people that adversely affects other groups. There is nothing new about conflicts over water diversion. Some Egyptians consider the building of dams by the Sudan to be an act of war against Egypt. The Palestinians regard the diversion of the waters of the Jordan River to Israeli farms as yet another crime against Palestinians. None of that has anything to do with "global warming".
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To the extent that human activities could affect planetary climate, it is only because the Third World is destroying the forests that would flourish with increased CO2, which is literally plant food, and become even lusher and more extensive with more carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures, at least where there is adequate rainfall or periodic river flooding, were it not for the deliberate, massive destruction of forests by ignorant savages.
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The notion that we cannot condemn nor do anything about the savagery of savages is preposterous. Will it hurt the feelings of uneducated Indonesian and Brazilian slash-and-burn farmers to tell them that they are behaving extremely stupidly? Tuf. Facts are facts, and savage is as savage does. The people destroying the world's rainforest and other CO2-uptake mechanisms are indeed ignorant of the effects of what they are doing, and their behavior is indeed savage. They must be called to account and STOPPED.
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The outrageous nerve of some of these Third World countries is astonishing. Communist China is indignant that the United States says it does not want any U.S. global-warming money to be sent to China, because China can (damned well) take care of its own needs because it is sitting on $2 trillion in currency reserves. Without denying that fact, China nonetheless says it is entitled to international aid. No, it's really not.
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China's severe ecological problems are its own doing. The Chinese Government has destroyed vast tracts of forests and catastrophically polluted hundreds of thousands of square miles of their territory thru ill-considered projects that valued rapid economic development over safety. We had nothing to do with it, so have no responsibility for undoing it.
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In like fashion, we haven't destroyed tropical rainforests (our one tropical rainforest, in Hawaii, is doing splendidly), so have no obligation to try to compensate economically for the environmental devastation caused by ignorant, stupid savages. It is for the wise people in Third World countries to impose sensible environmental standards upon their own countries, and civilize their savages.
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If the premise that the buildup of CO2 could cause worldwide calamity were true, we would have to think about fundamental political change, whereby the responsible countries of the First World end the catastrophically bad mismanagement of the territories of the Third World by ending their independence and subjecting them to external controls. Call it "colonialism" if you like, but if the only way to end ecological destruction by savages is to take control of their lands away from people who have proved incapable of governing themselves, then it just has to be done.
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This could be done in the form of "mandates" given by the United Nations to responsible powers, which have as their purpose to put things in good order at the same time as the mandatory (for this purpose, pronounced maan.dáe.ta.rèe) power educates the local people on environmental issues and the responsibilities of democratic government. The areas subjected to mandates could have local autonomy within strict limits to prevent continuation of the insanely self-destructive practices, like slash-and-burn agriculture, that they have permitted for decades.
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With regard to areas close to the United States, the obvious mandatory power would be the United States. But the worst offenders in the Western Hemisphere may not be anything like the worst offenders on the planet. The European Union as a whole might be a better (and is certainly a closer) potential mandatory administrator than the U.S. for those parts of Africa being destroyed by their own people, and Japan the mandatory power for Indonesia, Malaysia, and any other country of Southeast Asia that may be willfully destroying the rainforest.
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Mandates would be regarded as temporary, pegged to specific accomplishments in environmental protection, democratization, and elimination of kleptocracy (the theft of a country's wealth by a self-interested governmental and business elite). The UN would periodically review progress to see if more self-government could be permitted — or would have to be rescinded if a territory regresses to unacceptable behavior.
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We cannot speak of "spaceship Earth" or "global warming" because this planet is a "closed system" without accepting that practices that are hugely destructive have to be stopped, and thus political and economic mechanisms have to be established to accomplish that.
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In the Western Hemisphere, we have a pre-existing provision in law to admit new States into the United States. If preserving the Amazon rainforest were understood to require the permanent addition of that rainforest's entire extent to the U.S. realm, we can offer statehood to sensibly-sized areas throughout the Amazon Basin. In similar fashion in the Eastern Hemisphere, the European Union could broaden its conception to admit key African territories into a politico-economic union in which all members are compelled to adhere to various standards, including environmental standards. If the EU were not willing to change its identity — and racial compelexion — by admitting African members, the EU, U.S., and UN could work with the so-called "African Union" to give that body real power to enforce sensible environmental standards, either after or in lieu of the creation of mandates in crucial habitats.
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What we need, in short, to think about is more than "global warming". Environmental devastation, whether it affects climate or not, is something we must all be concerned about and work to slow, then stop. In the widest view, the matter most basic to every issue of this sort is POPULATION. If the population of the Earth were to shrink to 5 billion (its size in 1987), the CO2 output would also shrink, and deforestation and desertification caused by overpopulation in the Third World would also shrink starkly. If the population of the planet were reduced to 4 billion, which it was in 1974, the bulk of problems caused by overpopulation would simply vanish, without more. When I was born, at the end of 1944, the population of the planet was only about 2.4 billion, which today is only about the size of the combined population of the two most populous countries, China and India, alone. If we had only the population we had in 1944, no one would be talking about climate change or an environmental catastrophe. So what we really ARE talking about is overpopulation, except no one will say it aloud. Overpopulation is the base cause of all the ugly and destuctive problems we are now asked to attack with extraordinary measures. We could reduce planetary population with far less drastic measures, which would have enormous, positive effects, but no one in power in the First World dares even to suggest that it is only the excessive human population of the Third World that is producing the most severe environmental difficulties. No, they'd rather spend $20 TRILLION and risk impoverishing the First World, all the while not solving ANY of the problems that that money is supposed to address, than spend a tiny fraction of that to bring the world's population down, which would solve ALL the problems. Boys and girls, can you say "morons"?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,370 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:24 AM

 
Eroding Reality. I watched with disgust as Bob Woodruff of ABC News asserted today, in knowing falsehood, that an Amerindian tribe is being forced to evacuate a small Louisiana island because it is being destroyed by a rising sea level produced by global warming. In the video, tho not in the text version that also appears on the ABC News website, Woodruff expressly asks the tribe's chief what is happening:

Woodruff: Is the water rising or just spreading out over the land?

Chief Albert Naquin: It's spreading. This used to be real narrow.

In Woodruff's closing summary of that story, however, he claimed the island was being submerged by rising seas. Nowhere did he produce so much as one iota of science to support that assertion.
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I wanted to email him directly to reproach him for his fraudulent misrepresentation, but couldn't find an email address. So I'll make this an open letter to him and his bosses at ABC.

Mr. Woodruff:

You willfully misstated the facts in your report on Amerindians who have to move from southern Louisiana, as their being forced out by climate change and rising seas. Within the report itself, the chief you spoke with expressly rejected your assertion.

What has really happened is that southern Louisiana was, geologically, formerly part of the Mississippi Delta, land created by the regular flooding of the Mississippi out of its banks and far out into first the ocean and then the low wetlands that regular deposition of Mississippi silt had theretofore produced. But then people canalized the Mississippi, hemming it in with levees. That ended the deposition of silt away from the axis of the river, instead out directly into the Gulf of Mexico. The Delta, to the extent it is growing at all now, does so only at the terminus of the river. Everywhere else, the former Delta is being washed into the sea by EROSION. There was always erosion, but it was overbalanced in prior eras by deposition. Now there's no deposition, only erosion, so of course the land, which was formed by lite silts, is washing away. It would do so if sea level remained the same or even fell, and whether the climate were getting warmer, getting colder, or staying the same. YOU LIED, and I have lost all respect for you.

It is this kind of arrant distortion of reality that has produced the public misunderstanding that somehow human activity is producing climate change that in turn is producing dire consequences for humanity. But it's all lies.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,367 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM

 
No Private Right of Adultery. Tiger Woods is indignant that his 'private' conduct has become a matter of public controversy. Oh? Marriage is a PUBLIC contract, a matter of LAW. In many countries, to this day, adultery could get him imprisoned, beaten, or KILLED. He should regard himself as very lucky that most people in this country, where marriage is nearly meaningless now, regard adultery as a civil, not criminal matter. Is the public entitled to know that someone who has been held up as a role model — one TV commentator said Tiger Woods was felt to be "superhuman" before this scandal reduced him to merely "human" — is a sleazebag? You bet your, um, bippie it is. Cheaters like Woods are the real threat to (heterosexual) marriage, not gay men who want to get married to each other — and be faithful. We have had a lot of casual sex, and know that, pleasant tho it may be, it does not begin to rival a loving, committed relationship. We know what we stand to lose if we can't keep our (male-male) marriage together. We even have an expression for it: "Nobody loves you when you're old and gay." Straights have been led to believe that there is no end to serial monogamy. You can always lose this marriage, because there's another one right around the corner, and you won't die alone. Oh? You're sure about that, are you?
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Tiger Woods is an adulterer, a cheat, a scumbag, a sleaze. He was put up on a pedestal, and now he is, like that statue of Saddam Hussein, being pulled down from it. Good. He should lose all his existing endorsements, which were based on a wholesome persona. Let him do commercials for condoms. What better spokesman for condoms than a scumbag? — Trojan Woods!
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Cheating the Poor. An ABC News story this evening about creating jobs featured another scumbag, a CEO whose name and company I didn't get, who advocates that the minimum wage be cut as a way to produce more jobs! How about we keep the minimum wage where it is, and reduce his income to it. Hm. Actually, he thinks the minimum wage is too high. So let's cut his pay to 50¢ less than the minimum wage, and see what a rewarding life he can enjoy at such a wage. Yes, CEO's are paid fairly, at hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year, but minimum-wage workers are overpaid. Of course. I suspect a lot of people working at minimum wage would like to see his throat slit, then his body chopped up for parts for minimum-wage people waiting for organ transplants, his entire estate redistributed to people struggling on minimum wage, such parts of his body as can't be used for decent people, burned, and the ashes scattered in a forest so that living beings of his own intelligence can benefit in some way from his otherwise worthless life.
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How About a Little Sense on Afghanistan? Some members of Congress, mainly, of all things, Democrats, are claiming that "the American people" want out of Afghanistan. Bull. The American people are not as stupid as some members of Congress. We know full well that withdrawal of U.S. and other NATO forces will almost certainly produce a quick triumph for the Taliban, which will then triumphantly reopen training camps and supply all needed assistance to al-Qaeda in attacking U.S. interests everywhere on this planet, including, pointedly, what is now Nazistically referred to as "the homeland". We already had that happen once, and didn't like it. We are not about to have civilians die to protect military VOLUNTEERS.
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Nor do Democrats in general want to see the return of the mass-murderous Taliban to control of Afghanistan even if it were not able to launch attacks upon the U.S. "homeland", because Taliban is a regressive, oppressive monster that would force women back 1,000 years. Do American women, of any party, want the women of Afghanistan to be forced to wear the veil, even a burqa that leaves only the eyes and hands uncovered, be denied an education, be permitted to work in the paid economy only with the permission of their husband, be compelled to stay at home and go out only with a chaperone, and even be killed with impunity if their husband decides the wife has somehow "dishonored" the family? No, American women want no such fate for Afghan women; and were a U.S. withdrawal to produce such a result — which it would, and probably with lethal retribution against women who used the temporary U.S. occupation to do seriously disapproved things like open schools for girls — American women would be horrified at what they have permitted to be done in their name.
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If there is any country we should be withdrawing military forces from, it is PLAINLY Iraq. That is what Obama pledged during his election campaign. It's time for him to fulfil that campaign promise. Withdrawal from Iraq would simultaneously provide more than adequate forces for Afghanistan and free up more than enuf money to pay for Afghanistan without raising anyone's taxes (for that; taxes on the rich should rise ENORMOUSLY to pay all Government expenses generally). The Iraq war has produced 4,367 U.S. deaths. The Afghan war, 930. So which war do these members of Congress want us to end (in defeat)? The Afghanistan war, even tho Iraq was never involved in terrorism against us but Afghanistan's Taliban was. Why might that be? Oh, right. Iraq is a danger to Israel, and Congress is faithful to Israel, not the United States.
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Idiotic Credulity on "AIDS". ABC News did a followup today about reaction to a stupid story yesterday about four kids in South Africa supposedly "orphaned by AIDS". I turned off yesterday's report shortly after it began, once I heard enuf to know what really happened. The setting: a 'poverty-ridden township with no electricity or running water'. Hm. Well, that certainly shouldn't have caused any challenges to health. Nobody needs, say, refrigeration or safe drinking water or sewers to carry away fecal matter to sewage-treatment plants in order to stay healthy. And of course, such a neighborhood surely has fully functional hospitals, clinics, and private doctors' offices to provide the very best of medical care, right? Oh, no. That's wrong. Such neighborhoods have NO hospitals and NO clinics and NO private doctors' offices. And even if someone in such an abysmal slum should somehow manage to be seen by a doctor, South Africa has no publicly-funded universal healthcare nor prescription-drug programs, so a poor family could not afford regular doctor visits nor the medications a doctor would prescribe for any of the uncountable serous afflictions common in Africa.
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What killed those children's parents was what has killed poor people in Africa for millennia, and will continue to kill them for the foreseeable future: poverty and social injustice. The one thing that might make a difference, modern medicine, isn't available to the poor of Africa. It's barely available to the poor of the United States. Walk thru any old graveyard in the United States and read the birth and death dates on tombstones from, say, the 1700s or even late 1800s. Americans were dying at age 46, leaving orphans behind, due to cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, etc. In New Orleans, recurring epidemics of yellow fever killed thousands of Americans and recent Irish immigrants in their youth and middle years. You don't need any mysterious new "pandemic" to explain early death of poor people in Africa. You especially don't need a virus that supposedly destroys the immune system in ways that no one on Earth has been able to explain. Every methodology put forward has proved false. "HIV", the misnamed "Human Immunodeficiency Virus", is misnamed because that retrovirus has absolutely nothing to do with human immunodeficiency, except possibly as an indicator. But just as a themometer indicates a fever but does not cause it, the presence of antibodies to HIV (which is the most that the standard HIV tests can detect, and some of those results are false positives) in people with depressed immunity does not prove that "HIV" caused that deficiency. We don't call thermometers HFI ("Human Fever Instruments") or HFP ("Human Fever Producers"), and must never confuse an indicator with a cause.
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Magic Johnson was on the Jimmy Kimmel show last nite, on "World AIDS Day". He was diagnosed with "HIV" in November 1991. Why isn't he dead if, as he himself said, HIV is a "deadly disease"? Plainly, HIV does NOT kill. But people continue to die from AIDS, even after they have been given drugs that are supposed to be effective against HIV. How can that be, if HIV causes AIDS but is suppressed by drugs? It can't.
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The reality is that Magic Johnson never had a "deadly disease". He tested positive for antibodies to HIV. His wife didn't get it. His child didn't. He hasn't died from it. But other people supposedly die from it, even after getting the same drugs as Johnson. Is he actually "Magic"? Or was he never in danger from HIV? Media don't ever wonder about such things, but merely trumpet every nonsensical claim of the HIV-causes-AIDS cabal. Even media that are deeply suspicious of the U.S. Government on dozens of other matters believe every SYLLABLE that same Government says about HIV and AIDS. Every syllable. What a bunch of morons.
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Microsoft's Wondrous Word 2007. My brother recently bought a new computer that came with Windows 7 and Word 2007 installed. In case you haven't seen it, Word 2007 works entirely differently from earlier versions. That is, in place of the familiar Windows menus (File, Edit, View, Insert, etc.) at the top of the screen, you see a crazy jumble of things that are not in the slitest self-explanatory, and you have no idea how to get to features you once mastered. Think about that. Microsoft goes to the trouble of establishing a standard look to all Windows applications so people can move easily from one to another, then DESTROYS that in its own core word-processor. That is truly astounding in its stupidity.
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I have a 60-day free trial version on my own laptop, purchased several months ago, but I have absolutely no desire to use it or pay for it after the trial period, so could not advise my brother as to features he'd like to use (such as cross-references with page numbers). I suggested that he look for built-in tutorials or online tutorials.
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So he found some things that were supposed to be tutorials, and said that, so far, the materials he had found seemed like 90% advertising and self-promotion about how wonderful Word 2007 is, but very little helpful information. I've seen some MS puffery about how Microsoft can make your life easier and do all kinds of wonderful things (whether you want it to or not). So I composed and sent this satirical email.

Let me tell you about a program I recently heard about, friend. Afraid your words just aren't making an impact? Suspect people aren't paying attention? I have the solution, my friend. With Word 2007, you can add some spice, some dash, some excitement and sizzle to your dreary, flat text. GRAB your audience and MAKE them read! And keep it brief, to hold today's busy and distracted audience. With Microsoft Slasher™, you can trim the fat and replace dull adjectives with fireworks! Microsoft Slasher™ analyzes your text and cuts all the flab. That ungainly thousand-word presentation is automatically reduced to 75 action words! Passive verbs are changed to active! Ho-hum adjectives are changed to grabbers that speak to today's readers! And once Microsoft Slasher™ has punched-up your text, Microsoft Dazzler™ will apply just the right fonts, colors, bolding and italics to make your text POP! And best of all, both Microsoft Slasher™ and Microsoft Dazzler™ are yours FREE! In Word 2007! Don't delay! Microsoft will come out with a new Office Suite any day now, and we can't guarantee that Slasher™ and Dazzler™ will be in the next version. Microsoft Word 2007: The Writer's Rewriter™! Act now!

P.S. I didn't notice until this post, but my last post was the 1,000th of this blog.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,367 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:53 PM