Put Your Money Where Your Greenhouse Gas-Exhaling Mouth Is

I wonder what Al Gore thinks of these odds?

Online Gambling on Global Warming

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) - Think global warming will raise the oceans enough to submerge Cape Hatteras? Want to bet on it?

An online gambling service has started taking bets on global warming, including whether it can submerge some of the East Coast's top vacation spots.

The odds that Virginia's Cape Henry will be under water by 2015—200- to-1 at BetUs.com. Its odds for Cape Hatteras flooding by the same date—300-to-1.

Don't bet on it, says Phil Roehrs, a coastal engineer for the city of Virginia Beach. Roehrs said although sea levels are rising along the East Coast, scientists are not predicting anywhere near the levels and dates provided by the gambling service.

"No wonder the odds are so good," Roehrs said.

That hasn't stopped bettors from taking a chance. About 3,000 placed bets during the first three days on online booking, said Reed Richards, a spokesman for BetUs.com.

Most gamblers on the site have put down money that Manhattan will be submerged before New Year's Eve 2011.

"Don't ask me why," Richards said.

Should be easy money for the Global Warming doomsdayers. They could purchase so many carbon credits with their winnings that maybe Toyota would name a hybrid model after them.

The Green Side of the Sub-Prime Meltdown

Equifax recently announced the latest mortgage default levels: a record 2.87% nationally in the first quarter, with deliquency rates up in 44 of 50 states. Yet somehow, I don't think these particular sub-prime borrowers were in any danger of not meeting their mortgage obligations:

California is in the midst of a major boom in large-scale marijuana cultivation operations run from inside homes, with authorities confiscating more than $100 million worth of pot in the last year alone, including in a series of recent raids in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

Officials with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration say the number of indoor marijuana plants seized by federal, state and local authorities in California has quadrupled in just the last three years, from at least 54,000 plants to nearly 200,000 in 2006.

Many of those seizures have occurred in middle-class and upscale suburbs, where the pot growers took advantage of cheap home financing — and minimal credit checks — to purchase homes and remodel them into sophisticated farms, authorities said.

Our government may be engaged in any number of pointless wars at any period in time. Many would argue that Iraq is the most pointless at the moment, though I would argue that distinction should go to the War on Drugs, specifically the war on marijuana. Aside from the billions spent each year trying to eradicate a weed that grows just about anywhere, think of the ecological damage done by growers who have no regard for the land that produces their bounty:

The discovery of 22,740 marijuana plants growing in and around Point Reyes National Seashore last week wasn't only the biggest pot seizure ever made in Marin County. It was an environmental mess that will take several months and tens of thousands of dollars to clean up.

The crops seized on the steep hillsides overlooking Highway 1 were planted by sophisticated growers who cleared vegetation, terraced land, drew water from streams through miles of irrigation hoses and doused acres of land with hundreds of pounds of fertilizer and pesticides.

Such operations are turning up in greater numbers within state and national parks throughout California. Federal officials estimate the state produces half of all the marijuana seized on public lands nationwide.

Officials at Point Reyes National Seashore have only begun to assess the resulting damage to an area that is habitat for the spotted owl, steelhead trout and coho salmon, and they said it could be months before they know the long-term implications for the ecosystem.

The District Attorney of Mendocino County has it right:

The District Attorney has determined that the following guidelines will be used when making a decision to file charges: 1) Each person so qualified will be allowed to cultivate a one-hundred (100) square foot canopy of mature female cannabis plants, regardless of the number of marijuana plants; 2) Each person so qualified will be allowed two pounds of processed marijuana in their possession. Persons exceeding these guidelines will not necessarily be prosecuted but will receive close review.

Legalize it, tax it, and pour the resources into real problems that don't involve what an adult chooses to put into their body by their own free will.

The Trouble With Islam

Here's an excellent piece written by a former member of the Indonesian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiya.

The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods.

These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name--Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.

The Western Left does not realize the extent to which they enable and encourage those that would destroy the very civilization that supports their right to destroy their own civilization.

So you wanna party like a Rockstar, do ya?

Do you have what it takes?

LONDON (AP) - Keith Richards has acknowledged consuming a raft of illegal substances in his time, but this may top them all.

In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Richards' father, Bert, died in 2002, at 84.

Richards, one of rock's legendary wild men, told the magazine that his survival was the result of luck, and advised young musicians against trying to emulate him.

"I did it because that was the way I did it. Now people think it's a way of life," he was quoted as saying.

"I've no pretensions about immortality," he added. "I'm the same as everyone ... just kind of lucky.

"I was No. 1 on the `who's likely to die' list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list," Richards said.

And that, friends, is why the Rolling Stones are in a class all by themselves.

10 Reasons You Are Not Rich...

Unless you are, then you can please disregard this post and get back to livin' la vida loca...!

link

The reason why you aren't a millionaire (or on your way to becoming one) is really quite simple. You probably assume it's because you aren't earning enough money, but the truth is that for most people, whether or not you become a millionaire has very little to do with the amount of money you make. It's the way that you treat money in your daily life.

Here are 10 possible reasons you aren't a millionaire:

1. You Care What Your Neighbors Think: If you're competing against them and their material possessions, you're wasting your hard-earned money on toys to impress them instead of building your wealth.

2. You Aren't Patient: Until the era of credit cards, it was difficult to spend more than you had. That is not the case today. If you have credit card debt because you couldn't wait until you had enough money to purchase something in cash, you are making others wealthy while keeping yourself in debt.

3. You Have Bad Habits: Whether it's smoking, drinking, gambling or some other bad habit, the habit is using up a lot of money that could go toward building wealth. Most people don't realize that the cost of their bad habits extends far beyond the immediate cost. Take smoking, for example: It costs a lot more than the pack of cigarettes purchased. It also negatively affects your wealth in the form of higher insurance rates and decreased value of your home.

4. You Have No Goals: It's difficult to build wealth if you haven't taken the time to know what you want. If you haven't set wealth goals, you aren't likely to attain them. You need to do more than state, "I want to be a millionaire." You need to take the time to set saving and investing goals on a yearly basis and come up with a plan for how to achieve those goals.

5. You Haven't Prepared: Bad things happen to the best of people from time to time, and if you haven't prepared for such a thing to happen to you through insurance, any wealth that you might have built can be gone in an instant.

6. You Try to Make a Quick Buck: For the vast majority of us, wealth doesn't come instantly. You may believe that people winning the lottery are a dime a dozen, but the truth is you're far more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery. This desire to get rich quickly likely extends into the way you invest, with similar results.

7. You Rely on Others to Take Care of Your Money: You believe that others have more knowledge about money matters, and you rely exclusively on their judgment when deciding where you should invest your money. Unfortunately, most people want to make money themselves, and this is their primary objective when they tell you how to invest your money. Listen to other people's advice to get new ideas, but in the end you should know enough to make your own investing decisions.

8. You Invest in Things You Don't Understand: Your hear that Bob has made a lot of money doing it, and you want to get in on the gravy train. If Bob really did make money, he did so because he understood how the investment worked. Throwing in your money because someone else has made money without fully understanding how the investment works will keep you from being wealthy.

9. You're Financially Afraid: You are so scared of risk that you keep all your money in a savings account that is actually losing money when inflation is put into the equation, yet you refuse to move it to a place where higher rates of return are possible because you're afraid that you will lose money.

10. You Ignore Your Finances: You take the attitude that if you make enough, the finances will take care of themselves. If you currently have debt, it will somehow resolve itself in the future. Unfortunately, it takes planning to become wealthy. It doesn't magically happen to the vast majority of people.

In reality, it is probably not just one of the above bad habits that has kept you from becoming a millionaire, but a combination of a few of them. Take a hard look at the list, and do some reflecting. If you want to be a millionaire, it's well within your power, but you'll have to face the issues that are currently keeping you from creating that wealth before you will have a chance to call yourself one.