Global Warming Drought Hysteria

It doesn't take a hyperventilating physicist to figure out that this winter's snowfall was below average in the Sierra Nevada. As one of my friends calculated it, we had exactly 6 powder days. That tells me I picked a good year to sit out the winter and have a child.

Let the fisking begin:

Climate change threatens California water supply

BERKELEY, California (Reuters) - California's tallest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada, may lose nearly all its snowpack by the end of the century, threatening a water crisis in the nation's most populous state, a leading scientist and Nobel laureate said.

Here we are in 2007. We know for a fact that over the course of the next 93 years, we may (or may not) lose nearly all of the Sierra Nevada snowpack. Christmas might be cancelled, too.

California could lose 30 percent to 70 percent of the snowpack to the ills of greenhouse gases and global warming, Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the 1997 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, told Reuters.

A Nobel Prize in Physics is truly impressive. That is something I probably could not hope to achieve in 3 lifetimes. But how does this make him an expert on climate change? In fairness I looked up Dr. Chu's bio, and he is currently pushing his scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to develop technologies to reverse climate change. It seems to me the reverse of climate change must be climate un-change. THAT is truly unprecedented! I am left to believe that Dr. Chu feels that before man came along and started belching C02 the climate was static.
George Orwell was right: some things are so stupid that you have to be an intellectual to believe them.

A "bad scenario" of atmospheric carbon could mean the loss of 70 percent to 93 percent, Chu said in an interview, citing published climate models.

I wonder to which "published climate models" Dr. Chu refers? I hope it's not this one.

Water levels in the snowpack now are at 29 percent of normal, the lowest in 20 years, and water districts are pleading for conservation and more storage to counter future dry years.

I'm definitely in favor of water conservation all the time. I remember the California drought from 1976 to 1978 where we were only allowed to flush the toilet once per day. That was one flush per household. Stinky? You betcha! Back then though I believe the culprit was Global Cooling. But I digress...

I give you the following from an article published in May of 2006. That would be one year ago almost to the day.

MOUNT ROSE -- Two men groaned and gasped Tuesday as they pulled a long, hollow metal pole from the snow near the 10,880-foot summit of Mount Rose, 20 miles southwest of Reno.

While a couple dozen people watched, one of the men measured the depth of the snow, weighed the sample that was pulled up inside the pole and then consulted his charts.

"It's looking good," said Dan Greenlee, the snow survey program manager for the Reno office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. "Seventy-two inches of water. Fifteen feet of snow. I would consider this a drought-buster. Lake Tahoe is going to come close to filling."

The crowd, mainly federal government bureaucrats from Washington, hooted in approval. Greenlee excitedly explained the snowpack is 177 percent of normal for this time of the year and the fourth heaviest since they began measuring snow at the Mount Rose Ski Area site in 1981.

We notice that the snowpack is the fourth heaviest in the past 26 years. That means there were 3 even heavier snowpacks this time of year in the past 26 years. Nevermind that, Dr. Chu wants to focus on the fact that this winter is the lowest in the last 20 years. So we have a year that is 29 percent below normal on the heels of a winter where snowpack was 177 percent above normal. Somehow, this is alarming.

Back to the article.

Climate change may lead to more severe drought and higher flood peaks that could mean the loss of one-fourth of the snowpack by 2050, according to California's Department of Water Resources.

May lead to...could mean...
Let me get this straight. By the end of the century (as cited earlier) the snowpack could be almost completely gone. But by 2050, the snowpack could be 1/4 of what it is today. I wonder if that's 1/4 of 29% below normal, 1/4 of the average over some unmentioned time period, 0r the square root of 1/4 of pi r squared times the box office revenues of "An Inconvenient Truth"? And the Leisure Greenie crowd wonders why people like me refuse to submit to the "scientific community consensus".

"If I were emperor of the world, I would put the pedal to the floor on energy efficiency and conservation for the next decade," Chu said.

Indeed, one need not look too closely at the impetus behind the Green Revolution to see that there are many, many people that feel they should be emperor of the world.

Tackling energy waste in residential and commercial buildings is a high priority for Chu. He said new designs and technologies in that area could go a long way toward improving heating, ventilation and lighting systems and reducing energy consumption.

"Get rid of the wasteful habits and inefficiency and that by far and away will show the biggest gains in the short term," he said.

He's right about that. There's actually a program called LEED that certifies new buildings as environmentally friendly. That's a good thing ultimately. But I thought this article was about melting snowpacks?

Chu will oversee new energy programs at the Berkeley Lab under a program with London-based BP Plc, the third largest Western oil company, which has committed $500 million over 10 years to support a bioscience research institute to develop new biofuels for transportation.

BP is partnering with the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois to develop new energy sources while improving the environment.

So it's about money afterall! Anybody in their right mind has to be in favor of discovering alternative energy sources, and if Big Oil is going to fund it that's fine with me. But it's rather ironic that on the one hand Dr. Chu is hyperventilating about carbon emissions and global warming and melting snowpack and on the other hand accepting money from one of the major contributors to this "catastrophe". Ah well, as long as he can sleep at night.

Here's a fun global warming quiz. Don't get too many right now ya hear? Al Gore might catch you and glue your eyes open and make you watch 100 continuous hours of his powerpoint presentation.

Tony Blair's Curtain Call

Today Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair announced he'd be retiring on June 27th after 10 years of service. He's been called Bush's "lap dog", a "poodle" and a host of other names by the passive/aggressive-utopian/pacifist crowd for stating after the Sept 11th attacks that it was right to, "stand shoulder to shoulder with our oldest ally, and I did so out of belief."

He was a great orator in the British tradition. This speech given in March of 2006 and titled, "Why We Fight On" demonstrates this point aptly.

Here are a few excerpts

On Globalization:

The basic thesis is that the defining characteristic of today's world is its interdependence; that whereas the economics of globalisation are well matured, the politics of globalisation are not; and that unless we articulate a common global policy based on common values, we risk chaos threatening our stability, economic and political, through letting extremism, conflict or injustice go unchecked.

The consequence of this thesis is a policy of engagement not isolation; and one that is active not reactive.

Confusingly, its proponents and opponents come from all sides of the political spectrum. So it is apparently a "neo-conservative" ie right wing view, to be ardently in favour of spreading democracy round the world; whilst others on the right take the view that this is dangerous and deluded - the only thing that matters is an immediate view of national interest. Some progressives see intervention as humanitarian and necessary; others take the view that provided dictators don't threaten our citizens directly, what they do with their own, is up to them.

The debate on world trade has thrown all sides into an orgy of political cross-dressing. Protectionist sentiment is rife on the left; on the right, there are calls for "economic patriotism"; meanwhile some voices left and right, are making the case for free trade not just on grounds of commerce but of justice.

The true division in foreign policy today is between: those who want the shop "open", or those who want it "closed"; those who believe that the long-term interests of a country lie in it being out there, engaged, interactive and those who think the short-term pain of such a policy and its decisions, too great. This division has strong echoes in debates not just over foreign policy and trade but also over immigration.

Progressives may implement policy differently from conservatives, but the fault lines are the same.

Where progressive and conservative policy can differ is that progressives are stronger on the challenges of poverty, climate change and trade justice. I have no doubt at all it is impossible to gain support for our values, unless the demand for justice is as strong as the demand for freedom; and the willingness to work in partnership with others is an avowed preference to going it alone, even if that may sometimes be necessary.

On Global Terrorism:

It is in confronting global terrorism today that the sharpest debate and disagreement is found. Nowhere is the supposed "folly" of the interventionist case so loudly trumpeted as in this case. Here, so it is said, as the third anniversary of the Iraq conflict takes place, is the wreckage of such a world view. Under Saddam Iraq was "stable". Now its stability is in the balance. Ergo, it should never have been done.

This is essentially the product of the conventional view of foreign policy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This view holds that there is no longer a defining issue in foreign policy. Countries should therefore manage their affairs and relationships according to their narrow national interests. The basic posture represented by this view is: not to provoke, to keep all as settled as it can be and cause no tectonic plates to move. It has its soft face in dealing with issues like global warming or Africa; and reserves its hard face only if directly attacked by another state, which is unlikely. It is a view which sees the world as not without challenge but basically calm, with a few nasty things lurking in deep waters, which it is best to avoid; but no major currents that inevitably threaten its placid surface. It believes the storms have been largely self-created.

This is the majority view of a large part of western opinion, certainly in Europe. According to this opinion, the policy of America since 9/11 has been a gross overreaction; George Bush is as much if not more of a threat to world peace as Osama bin Laden; and what is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else in the Middle East, is an entirely understandable consequence of US/UK imperialism or worse, of just plain stupidity. Leave it all alone or at least treat it with sensitivity and it would all resolve itself in time; "it" never quite being defined, but just generally felt as anything that causes disruption.

This world view - which I would characterise as a doctrine of benign inactivity - sits in the commentator's seat, almost as a matter of principle. It has imposed a paradigm on world events that is extraordinary in its attraction and its scope. As we speak, Iraq is facing a crucial moment in its history: to unify and progress, under a government elected by its people for the first time in half a century; or to descend into sectarian strife, bringing a return to certain misery for millions. In Afghanistan, the same life choice for a nation, is being played out. And in many Arab and Muslim states, similar, though less publicised, struggles for democracy dominate their politics.

The effect of this paradigm is to see each setback in Iraq or Afghanistan, each revolting terrorist barbarity, each reverse for the forces of democracy or advance for the forces of tyranny as merely an illustration of the foolishness of our ever being there; as a reason why Saddam should have been left in place or the Taliban free to continue their alliance with Al Qaida. Those who still justify the interventions are treated with scorn.

Then, when terrorists strike in the nations like Britain or Spain, who supported such action, there is a groundswell of opinion formers keen to say, in effect, that it's hardly surprising - after all, if we do this to "their" countries, is it any wonder they do it to "ours"?

So the statement that Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestine or indeed Chechnya, Kashmir or half a dozen other troublespots is seen by extremists as fertile ground for their recruiting - a statement of the obvious - is elided with the notion that we have "caused" such recruitment or made terrorism worse, a notion that, on any sane analysis, has the most profound implications for democracy.

On Domestic Terrorism:

There is an interesting debate going on inside government today about how to counter extremism in British communities. Ministers have been advised never to use the term "Islamist extremist". It will give offence. It is true. It will. There are those - perfectly decent-minded people - who say the extremists who commit these acts of terrorism are not true Muslims. And, of course, they are right. They are no more proper Muslims than the Protestant bigot who murders a Catholic in Northern Ireland is a proper Christian. But, unfortunately, he is still a "Protestant" bigot. To say his religion is irrelevant is both completely to misunderstand his motive and to refuse to face up to the strain of extremism within his religion that has given rise to it.

Yet, in respect of radical Islam, the paradigm insists that to say what is true, is to provoke, to show insensitivity, to demonstrate the same qualities of purblind ignorance that leads us to suppose that Muslims view democracy or liberty in the same way we do.

Just as it lets go unchallenged the frequent refrain that it is to be expected that Muslim opinion will react violently to the invasion of Iraq: after all it is a Muslim country. Thus, the attitude is: we understand your sense of grievance; we acknowledge your anger at the invasion of a Muslim country; but to strike back through terrorism is wrong.

It is a posture of weakness, defeatism and most of all, deeply insulting to every Muslim who believes in freedom ie the majority. Instead of challenging the extremism, this attitude panders to it and therefore instead of choking it, feeds its growth.

None of this means, incidentally, that the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan was right; merely that it is nonsense to suggest it was done because the countries are Muslim.

I recall the video footage of Mohammed Sadiq Khan, the man who was the ringleader of the 7/7 bombers. There he was, complaining about the suppression of Muslims, the wickedness of America and Britain, calling on all fellow Muslims to fight us. And I thought: here is someone, brought up in this country, free to practise his religion, free to speak out, free to vote, with a good standard of living and every chance to raise a family in a decent way of life, talking about "us", the British, when his whole experience of "us" has been the very opposite of the message he is preaching. And in so far as he is angry about Muslims in Iraq or Afghanistan let Iraqi or Afghan Muslims decide whether to be angry or not by ballot.

There was something tragic, terrible but also ridiculous about such a diatribe. He may have been born here. But his ideology wasn't. And that is why it has to be taken on, everywhere.

This terrorism will not be defeated until its ideas, the poison that warps the minds of its adherents, are confronted, head-on, in their essence, at their core. By this I don't mean telling them terrorism is wrong. I mean telling them their attitude to America is absurd; their concept of governance pre-feudal; their positions on women and other faiths, reactionary and regressive; and then since only by Muslims can this be done: standing up for and supporting those within Islam who will tell them all of this but more, namely that the extremist view of Islam is not just theologically backward but completely contrary to the spirit and teaching of the Koran.

But in order to do this, we must reject the thought that somehow we are the authors of our own distress; that if only we altered this decision or that, the extremism would fade away. The only way to win is: to recognise this phenomenon is a global ideology; to see all areas, in which it operates, as linked; and to defeat it by values and ideas set in opposition to those of the terrorists.

On the struggle between democracy and violence:

People look back on the three years since the Iraq conflict; they point to the precarious nature of Iraq today and to those who have died - mainly in terrorist acts - and they say: how can it have been worth it?

But there is a different question to ask: why is it so important to the forces of reaction and violence to halt Iraq in its democratic tracks and tip it into sectarian war? Why do foreign terrorists from Al Qaida and its associates go across the border to kill and maim? Why does Syria not take stronger action to prevent them? Why does Iran meddle so furiously in the stability of Iraq?

Examine the propaganda poured into the minds of Arabs and Muslims. Every abuse at Abu Ghraib is exposed in detail; of course it is unacceptable but it is as if the only absence of due process in that part of the world is in prisons run by the Americans. Every conspiracy theory - from seizing Iraqi oil to imperial domination - is largely dusted down and repeated.

Why? The answer is that the reactionary elements know the importance of victory or defeat in Iraq. Right from the beginning, to them it was obvious. For sure, errors were made on our side. It is arguable that de-Baathification went too quickly and was spread too indiscriminately, especially amongst the armed forces. Though in parenthesis, the real worry, back in 2003 was a humanitarian crisis, which we avoided; and the pressure was all to de-Baathify faster.

On the past, and the future:

What happens in Iraq or Afghanistan today is not just crucial for the people in those countries or even in those regions; but for our security here and round the world. It is a cause that has none of the debatable nature of the decisions to go for regime change; it is an entirely noble one - to help people in need of our help in pursuit of liberty; and a self-interested one, since in their salvation lies our own security.

Naturally, the debate over the wisdom of the original decisions, especially in respect of Iraq will continue. Opponents will say Iraq was never a threat; there were no WMD; the drug trade in Afghanistan continues. I will point out Iraq was indeed a threat as two regional wars, 14 UN resolutions and the final report of the Iraq Survey Group show; that in the aftermath of the Iraq War we secured major advances on WMD not least the new relationship with Libya and the shutting down of the AQ Khan network; and that it was the Taliban who manipulated the drug trade and in any event housed Al Qaida and its training camps.

But whatever the conclusion to this debate, if there ever is one, the fact is that now, whatever the rights and wrongs of how and why Saddam and the Taliban were removed, there is an obvious, clear and overwhelming reason for supporting the people of those countries in their desire for democracy.

There's plenty in this speech to take issue with when read in it's entirety. Afterall, Mr. Blair is still a politican who is capable of speaking out of both sides of his mouth simultaenously. I just think it's a shame that we do not have anybody in our government capable of speaking with such grace and fluidity.

Enjoy your retirement Mr. Blair.

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.

Distinguished Company

The rhetoric is certainly heating up ahead of the U.N. Climate report due out tomorrow.

Today, former Vice-President and current Global Warming ambulance driver Al Gore, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his "wide-reaching efforts to draw the world’s attention to the dangers of global warming." If he wins, he will join the ranks of other olive branch-bearing luminaries such as Mohamed el Baraedi (IAEA) , Jimmy Carter (international conflict resolution), Kofi Annan (UN), Yasser Arafat (PLO) and Betty Williams (peace in Northern Ireland). Although Ms. Williams was deserving of the award at the time, recently she was noted for her comments advocating the murder of George Bush--in the name of peace.

Of course this is only a partial list made up of the less deserving peace prize winners in my opinion. There are several worthy winners, but I note the less deserving ones because if Mr. Gore wins, I believe he will land squarely in the less-deserving category. This does not make Mr. Gore a bad guy, but does he deserve a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for being a global warming pollyanna?

I think not.

I saw his movie, An Inconvienent Truth, ironically on a greenhouse gas-spewing flight to Europe. I had read many of the criticisms of his movie before I saw it, so perhaps I was a little biased against him in the first place, nevertheless I tried to keep an open mind. After seeing the movie though, I agreed with all of the well publicised criticisms and had a few of my own to add. Ultimately though, it boils down to this: Al Gore is a bad spokesman for the Green Revolution.

The reason I think Al Gore is a bad spokesman for the Green Revolution is because he's only politized the issue further by using half truths and junk science (for example, the Mann hockey stick) on which to base many of his conclusions. Dr. Michael Mann refuses to share his methodology so that other scientists can recreate his conclusions. Isn't that the the lynchpin of the scientific method? If the proof is so irrefutible and the "enitre scientific community is in agreement", why the need to distort the truth? Besides, he's singing to the choir. He makes no attempt to be all-inclusive when he takes gratuitous jabs at Bush in his movie, or through his sober, menalcholy reflection on the results of the 2000 elections. These things have no place in a real scientific movie about global warming.

Imagine if George Bush had lost in 2000 and spent the last 5 or 6 years touring the world with a slick multimedia presentation that proved conclusively that the science is in: we need to burn more fossil fuel because the globe is cooling. Now you begin to see the problem with Al Gore being the poster boy for the Green Movement.

For 8 years Al Gore was the Vice President of the United States of America. This is a pretty powerful position with not many official responsibilities. As the leader of the Senate, he was in an optimal position to influence our government's policy on climate change. Specifically, the well-meaning but fatally flawed Kyoto Protocol was introduced in 1997 on Mr. Gore's watch. Though the Bush administration catches endless grief from environmentalists for it's refusal to consider abiding by it, in 1997 the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 to ratify the Byrd-Hagel Resolution which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States".
If Mr. Gore had so much environmental conviction, why did he not use his ample power to convince the Senate of the folly of their vote?

I am not saying Mr. Gore is wrong. I am not saying that the globe is not warming at an alarming rate. However, when somebody can tell me with 100% certainty what the weather is going to be a week from now, I'll start to listen to the people that are telling me what the climate is going to be in 50 years. Think back to the hurricane forecast for last year. Most everybody was in agreement that it was going to be a terrible season for hurricanes. Al Gore certainly believed it; it was a central theme of his movie. There was not one major hurricane. Not even one minor hurricane made landfall. And what was to blame? The often-studied, naturally-occuring and fairly-predictable El Nino pattern. And if you want to quantify the costs--do a little research and see how the now defunct hedge fund Amaranth lost $6 billion dollars which can ultimately be blamed on the hurricane forecast; or look into how much the premium for hurricane insurance went up and apply that to everybody living in a hurricane danger zone.


There are groups of scientists and policy makers that do not believe that global warming is the greatest threat facing mankind at the moment. Bjorn Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus is one such example.

There's a movie out now called Mine Your Own Business.
I've not seen it yet, but it is a Michael Moore-style documentary that exposes the "dark side of environmentalism." Leisure greenies will surely appreciate that style.

Here's the trailer.

The fact is nobody completely understands the complex interactions between the lithosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, atmosphere and the oceans. Anybody who's honest will admit that. All of these interactions influence our short, medium and long term climate and environment in ways we've not even begun to understand. The globe is warming. 30 years ago many of the very same people who are talking about global warming now were wringing their hands over the fact that the globe was cooling.

What will it be 30 years from now?

JROTC follow up

In an earlier post I ranted about the San Francisco Board of Education's decision to phase the JROTC out of the SF Unified School District. Not being content with just blogging about it, I decided I would send a letter to the school board to express my displeasure. I CC'd Mayor Gavin Newsom because I knew he felt the same way I did.

On Nov 16, 2006, at 7:05 AM, Jrod wrote:
Dear SFUSD Board Members,

Your recent decision to phase out the JROTC program is a disgrace to our city, county, state and country.

I am a product of and a believer in California public schools. But as a soon-to-be parent who plans on raising a family within the boundaries of the SFUSD, your decision regarding the JROTC program makes me question your general competency and wisdom, and will surely give me serious reservations about enrolling my children in the SFUSD when the time comes.

You should have listened to Mayor Newsom on this matter. If your goal is to drive SF citizens away from the public school system, consider your mission accomplished.

Sincerely,
(jrod)

I truly did not expect to hear back from anybody, but about 2 weeks later, I had this reply from Dan Kelly, one of the members of the board who voted in favor of the phase out.

Dan Kelly wrote:

Mr Jrod,

Thank you for your comments. and for your interest in our schools. Though the volume of mail on this decision does not allow a detailed response, It might be helpful for you to know that this resolution was introduced in May 2006 and went through very extensive hearings, testimony and fact finding before coming to a vote on November 14th. That the vote was close reflects the mixed feelings that many in our community have about this program's presence in our schools. If Palo Alto or Walnut Creek don't have this military recruitment vehicle might you skip those school systems too?

Thank you for taking the time to write and be heard.

Thanks too for your personal support of JROTC.

Dan Kelly MD

San Francisco Board of Education

I was not sure why he would ask such a silly rhetorical question and thank me for my personal support of the program he'd opposed, and his tone seemed slightly condescending to me, so I replied:

Dr. Kelly,

Thank you for your reply.

I am not sure what Palo Alto and Walnut Creek BofE decisions have to do with the SFUSD decision, but I might skip those school districts as well if I ever put my family within their jurisdiction.

A visceral hatred of the institution charged with defending you and your nation, regardless of how you view their current deployment--or any other deployment for that matter--reveals a fundamental detachment from reality.

Of course, I was not privy to the very extensive testimony, hearings and fact finding missions you say the Board endured before putting it to a vote. As I understand it though, 800 signatures were all that it took to end a program that 1,600 young people chose to participate in on a voluntary basis. Sounds like tyranny of the minority to me. That is not a quality with which I want my children inoculated.

I would wish you good luck in your quest to render this city supine and indefensible; however, that would be suicide for my family and I.

Sincerely,
(Jrod)

It did not take long for him to shoot back the following:

Daniel Kelly wrote:

Well, you should do what you feel best, but your presumptions about my "hatreds" are your own. The decisions of other school boards are not relevant to ours, nor did we consider them. I asked you that question rhetorically because JROTC is distinctly rare in the more suburban, affluent school districts that are regarded as more desireable by some disaffected urbanites. Likewise, private schools costing $25,000+/year won't have such a program either. So the point was: Do they hate our nation too? I don't

DK

I was truly shocked that this sort of thinking was present among the policy makers of the school district where I hope to send my daughter someday.

Dr. Kelly,

Allow me to refresh your memory. The following three quotes were taken from the Chronicle article that drew my attention to the JROTC decision in the first place. If the reporter took anybody out of context, or was biased in any way, or did not capture the proper tone of the meeting, please correct me. After all, you were there.

(The Board's) position was summed up by a former teacher, Nancy Mancias, who said, "We need to teach a curriculum of peace."

"We don't want the military ruining our civilian institutions," said Sandra Schwartz of the American Friends Service Committee, an organization actively opposing JROTC nationwide. "In a healthy democracy ... you contain the military. You must contain the military."

And from you:

"It's basically a branding program, or a recruiting program for the military," Kelly said before the meeting.

These quotes are striking for at least two reasons. First, they reveal a visceral hatred of the U.S. military. Second and even more shocking, they reveal incredible naivety concerning our military's role in our society. Therefore, I stand by my presumption of your feelings toward our military.

Although you may disagree with my conclusion, you seem intent on trying to grant legitimacy to your decision by pointing out the JROTC policy of other school districts and private schools. I believe it is an article of faith amongst those who oppose the military that only poor people and those with no other choice fill the ranks of our armed forces. By that logic, allowing the JROTC in "suburban, affluent school districts that are regarded as more desirable by some disaffected urbanites" would go a long way toward spreading the burden of national defense more evenly across all classes, wouldn't you agree? Private schools, by definition, are free to do whatever they wish. So I am not sure why you bring them into your argument, other than as evidence to the wisdom of your decision.

I never said you, other school districts or private schools that do not allow the JROTC hate our nation, I said they hate our military. Please do not insult my intelligence by playing such silly word games.

The tone of your correspondence seems to be, "like it or leave it" when you say that I should do what I feel is best. I fail to see how that sort of attitude will help stem the outflow of "disaffected urbanites."

However, I do have a vote, and I do have a voice. Activism, being what it is in San Francisco, means these tools count.

Jrod

I have not heard from him since I sent that last email on December 7th.

I sent the exchange above to a local newspaper columnist who I knew would share my dismay at this school board decision:

Ms. Saunders,

No offense to your co-workers, but you seem to be one of the few Chronicle columnists who sees things clearly--that is, you say what I think. ;-)

After the B of E's recent decision to phase out the JROTC from the SFUSD, I wrote each of the board members a letter (below) to express my displeasure with their decision. I received a reply from Dr. Dan Kelly, and a short, civil email exchange followed.

I'm slated to be a first time parent in the next 2 months, so up until now I've not given much thought to the SFUSD or the people that make decisions at the top. After synthesizing what I think Dr. Kelly is telling me, I am quite shocked that such people are in positions that have so much influence over so many children.

I'm not sure why I am sending you this exchange really, other than for the reason that maybe somebody at the Chronicle is keeping a dossier on the lunatic thoughts of SF Board of Ed. members. If so, please pass this along.

I do enjoy your writing, keep up the good work.

Happy Holidays,
Jrod

Here's her reply:

Dear (jrod),

You have been busy. Good for you.

I am waiting for the moment when the board reconsiders the JROTC decision to write on this again. May that day come.

Dr. Kelly, of course, did not win re-election, so he won't be in a position to impose his views on S.F.'s children much longer. And as you note, at least he replied to you.

Thanks for the kind words. Happy holidays to you and yours.

DJS

I though that was pretty cool that she took the time to reply to me. Then a few weeks later I received the following email from the Mayor's office:

Dear (Jrod),

I apologize for the delay in responding to your message. Thank you
for writing me regarding your concerns about the Board of Supervisor's
resolution to abolish the ROTC Program in the San Francisco Unified
School District. I would like to take this opportunity to share
with you my opinion on this important issue. I too share your concerns
and oppose the resolution for the following reasons.

It does a disservice to families in San Francisco to eliminate a
program that benefits students in very practical ways because of an
ideological disagreement with the current leadership in Washington D.C.
Eliminating a program that is popular among many parents and students only
further alienates families from the public school system. The San Francisco
Unified School District does not provide students with sufficient
enrichment programs, and it makes little sense to eliminate an
entire program that receives significant funding from the federal
government.

Furthermore, San Francisco should not be identified with a lack of
respect for the service of men and women in uniform, and this resolution
would do just that. Additionally, this resolution would further
propagate the growing use of San Francisco values as a diminutive term.

Thank you again for sharing your concerns with me.

Sincerely,

Gavin Newsom
Mayor

I couldn't have said it better myself.

File under: Root Causes of Terrorism

Only a terrorist truly knows from where his motivation comes, but that does not stop any number of people from speculating on the "root causes" and such. Here's a reason that not even Al Gore himself considered.

Climate change seen fanning conflict and terrorism

LONDON (Reuters) - Global warming could exacerbate the world's rich-poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected, security and climate experts said on Wednesday.

"We have to reckon with the human propensity for violence," Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations told a London conference on "Climate Change: the Global Security Impact."

"Violence within and between communities and between nation states, we must accept, could possibly increase, because the precedents are all around."

He cited Rwanda and Sudan's Darfur region as two examples where drought and overpopulation, relative to scarce resources, had helped to fuel deadly conflicts.

BIN LADEN ON CLIMATE CHANGE

John Mitchell, chief scientist at Britain's Met Office, noted al Qaeda had already listed environmental damage among its litany of grievances against the United States.

"You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries," al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden wrote in a 2002 "letter to the American people."

So there you have it--conclusive proof of the link between the Environmental Movement and Al Qaeda. If only we would have signed the Kyoto Protocol, the World Trade Center would still be standing.

Can Birkenstock wearing, pachouli-scented, tree-hugging suicide bombers be far behind?

Pelosi's Choice for House Intelligence Chief

This would be embarrassing enough even if you were not going to be on the House Intelligence Committee. But coming from the nominee slated to head the committee?

Words fail me.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Incoming House intelligence chief botches easy intel quiz

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, who incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tapped to head the Intelligence Committee when the Democrats take over in January, failed a quiz of basic questions about al Qaeda and Hezbollah, two of the key terrorist organizations the intelligence community has focused on since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

When asked by CQ National Security Editor Jeff Stein whether al Qaeda is one or the other of the two major branches of Islam -- Sunni or Shiite -- Reyes answered "they are probably both," then ventured "Predominantly -- probably Shiite."

That is wrong. Al Qaeda was founded by Osama bin Laden as a Sunni organization and views Shiites as heretics.

Reyes could also not answer questions put by Stein about Hezbollah, a Shiite group on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations that is based in Southern Lebanon.

Stein's column about Reyes' answers was published on CQ's Web site Friday evening.

In an interview with CNN, Stein said he was "amazed" by Reyes' lack of what he considers basic information about two of the major terrorists organizations.

"If you're the baseball commissioner and you don't know the difference between the Yankees and the Red Sox, you don't know baseball," Stein said. "You're not going to have the respect of the people you work with."

While Stein said Reyes is "not a stupid guy," his lack of knowledge said it could hamper Reyes' ability to provide effective oversight of the intelligence community, Stein believes.

"If you don't have the basics, how do you effectively question the administration?" he asked. "You don't know who is on first."

Stein said Reyes is not the only member of the House Intelligence Committee that he has interviewed that lacked what he considered basic knowledge about terrorist organizations.

"It kind of disgusts you, because these guys are supposed to be tending your knitting," Stein said. "Most people are rightfully appalled."

Pelosi picked Reyes over fellow Californian Rep. Jane Harman, who had been the Intelligence Committee's ranking member, and Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida, who had been impeached as a federal judge after being accused of taking a bribe.

Here's the full story from Congressional Quarterly.

I wonder if Mr. Reyes can even identify the Middle East on a map? Unfortunately, that's a serious question.

President Bush has been rightly criticized for not appearing to have a basic understanding of the micro-dynamics at work shaping the Middle East. It is sad that the Democrats chose to focus their resources for the past few years on the petty politics of Bush-bashing rather than gaining a basic understanding of the same subject for which they've breathlessly criticized him.

I guess Ms. Pelosi was serious when she said, "The gavel of the speaker of the House is in the hands of special interests, and now it will be in the hands of America's children..."

My favorite Canadian pundit

Mark Steyn gave an exellent speech last August in Australia about the dangers of multiculturalism and how it subverts our culture. I find his prose humorous and easy to read which is probably why I like him so much. It's hard to believe he never graduated from high school. That either speaks volumes about Mr. Steyn, or high school. He's a perfect example of Mark Twain's famous dictum, "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."

I found the transcript over at New Sisyphus. I've copied it below so it may be preserved for posterity. Happy reading!

"It's Not 'Them', It's Us: The Need to Regain Confidence in Western Culture

Thank you, thank you very much Janet. I'm honoured to be here on what's beginning to feel a bit like my End of The World Tour. Everywhere I go I just talk about depressing issues like the decline and death of the West, but my End of the World Tour is a bit like Barbara Streisand's Farewell Tour: if the world doesn't end I'll be back to do another End of the World Tour in a couple of years. Let me start with a request, I feel a bit like Kylie Minogue when the crowd call out for all the early hits. I got to Australia a week or so back and people keep asking me to repeat a quote I mentioned in a column a few months ago. We crazed right-wing war mongers are often said to be hot for war and slaughter and so forth. But I'm not. I don't want to make an argument for more war, more bombing, more killing but for more will, more civilisational confidence that's the best way to avoid all the death and destruction.

Here's what I mean, here's the quote I get requests for. It's about a relatively minor imperial administrator. Two hundred years ago, in a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of Sati-that's the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husband. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural. He said: 'You say that it's your custom to burn widows, very well. We also have a custom. When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their neck and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it my carpenters will build a gallows; you may follow your custom, then we will follow ours.' As it happens, my wife's uncle was named after General Napier which I guess makes me a British Imperialist by marriage. But India today is better off without Sati. And what's so strange about the times we live in is that even to say that is to invite accusations of cultural supremacy. If you don't agree that India is better off without Sati, if you think that's just dead white-male-euro-centricism, fine, but I don't think you really do believe that. Non-judgemental multiculturalism, cultural relativism, is an obvious fraud and I think it's subliminally accepted on that basis. I think that, after all, most people, given the choice, don't want to live in anything but an advanced Western society. They think that pretending that all societies are equal is in a sense part of the wallpaper of living in an advanced Western society. And they think you can contain multiculturalism, they think multiculturalism means your kid has to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school holiday concert instead of getting them to sing jingle bells. Or that your holistic masseur uses techniques developed from Native American spirituality. But it doesn't mean that you or anyone that you care about should have to live in an African or Native American society.

I checked into my hotel yesterday and I'd been in the room 10 minutes when I got a call from the Spa asking if I wanted to have a new kind of massage they were offering a special on using techniques I think developed from Buddhist spirituality. And I'm very grateful for that, I think its marvellous and that it adds a lot to the gaiety of life, but it's a quintessential piece of progressive humbug if it goes beyond that. And if you think Sati is just an example of the rich vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your present suburb would be like if 25, 30 or 48% of the people around you really believed in it too. That's the situation that much of the Western world is facing; that we're losing the consensus within our populations on what it means to be a citizen of a pluralist society. Multiculturalism, I believe, was conceived by Western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own and in that sense it's the real suicide bomb. Islam and terrorism would not be a threat to the Western world if the Western world weren't so enervated that it gives the impression that it's basically just dying to keel over and to surrender to somebody.

Sati's gone, nobody in India burns widows, so when Indians immigrate to Sydney, or London or Toronto, they're not building pyres in the front yard for grandma anymore. But there are other cultures where women lack basic rights. Under the Taliban, Afghan women were prevented by law from ever feeling sunlight on their faces; by law. As Ahmed Al-bakar (spelling unclear), an MP from the one of the more progressive Muslim nations, Kuwait, recently put it, mixing the proposal to give women the right to vote, 'God said in the Holy Koran that men are better than women...why can't we settle for that?' Why indeed. Well here's a story from the Associate Press in Multan, Pakistan. Nazeer Ahmed appears calm and unrepentant as he recounts how he slit the throats of his three young daughters and their 25 year-old step-sister to salvage his family's honour. Well, you know, I suppose to a lot of us, Pakistan's a crazy place a long way away. But the honour killings, the murder of Muslim women, punished often for no other reason than that they happened to have been raped by some fella, the honour killings are getting closer. In London last summer, the Metropolitan police announced they were reopening investigations into 120 deaths among British Muslim girls that they'd hitherto declined to look at too closely on grounds of cultural sensitivity. Now think about that. Think about that. One hundred and twenty women are murdered and their murders go uninvestigated because the cops thought it was just some multicultural thing. I believe you had a similar issue here when one of your state police departments announced that it was changing the basis on how spousal abuse and battery of women was investigated according to what cultural community you happened to belong to. So in other words, in parts of Australia, law enforcement takes the view that whether you're allowed to beat up a woman depends on who you are. If I try it, I'll be going to jail; but if other people try it, it's part of their rich cultural tradition. You cannot have a society organised on that basis. I don't want to live in a country where honour killing is regarded as part of the rich tapestry of cultural diversity, like a slightly livelier version of a national dance at the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony. So those are the sorts of things you can make judgements about competing culture, judgements on liberty, on religious freedom, the rule of law, we need to recover the cultural cool that General Napier demonstrated. That's really the word: cool. You don't have to go through a whole lot of excitable talk about nuking Mecca and all this kind of thing; that's all a waste of time. If we knew who we were, we wouldn't have a lot of the problems that we seem to be having and rousing ourselves to defend our society. If we know who we are, if we're secure in our sense of where our society came from, we'll be fine.

Let me give a small example of the wrong way of looking at things. It's not life threatening, but if you don't understand the philosophy that underpins it, it can become life threatening. In your nation and in mine, many people have acknowledged, and indeed even boasted, that immigration changes our country. For example, in Australia, and to a lesser extent in Canada, there are a lot of people who wish to replace the monarchy with a republic and there are respectable arguments for and against the monarchy. But the dangerous argument is the lazy line pedalled by too many politicians that in an Australia or a Canada of evolving immigration patterns, an immigrant from Moldova or China or Brazil or Saudi Arabia can't be expected to relate to the Queen, to the existing constitutional system. Now try this line the next time you're in Saudi Arabia: if you immigrate to Saudi Arabia and say 'hey man, I just can't relate to the House of Saud, and what's with this Wahhabism, can't we get a couple of sports bars with wet t-shirt nights every Thursday'? The Saudis would have a grand old laugh about it and then behead you. So when we accept that argument, in essence we're explicitly promoting the principle of reverse assimilation; that immigration imposes not the obligation that the immigrant assimilate to his new land, but that his new land assimilate to him. And thereby lies great peril, not for the Queen, she'll get by, but for a whole bunch of the rest of us. Multiculturalism makes a nation no more than a holding pen, its whole merely the sum of its parts. And so in the absence of cultural confidence, demography will decide. Or in the superb summation of the American writer James C. Bennett, 'democracy, immigration multiculturalism ... pick any two'.

At the heart of multiculturalism is a lie: that all cultures are equally valid. And to accept that proposition means denying reality; the reality of any objective measure of human freedom, societal health, global population movement. And multiculturalism isn't the first ideology founded on the denial of truth. You recall Herman Goering's memorable assertion that 'two plus two makes five, if the Fuhrer wills it'. Likewise we're asked to accept that the United States' constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation. If a generation of multi-culti theorists in American universities, if the ethnic grievance lobby, and even if a ludicrous resolution of the United States congress so wills it, that's what happened. The United States Congress passed a resolution hailing the Iroquois Confederation as the inspiration for the US Constitution, which would have been news to the dead white euro-centric males who wrote it. Harmless, harmless isn't it!

What's wrong with playing make-believe if it helps us all feel warm and fuzzy about each other. Because it's never helpful to put reality up for grabs; there may come a day where you need it. And today is the day that we do need a shot of reality. We need to understand what it is that is important and vital and rare about our society, because if we don't, then in a thousand, silly, itsy-bitsy, little ways, like removing pork from Australian hospital cafeteria menus, we're giving the very clear message that we lack the will to defend our civilisation. In 1773, one of America's founding fathers Simeon Howard, addressed the ancient and honourable artillery company in Boston, and 'an incautious people' he said, 'may submit to these demands, one after another, till its liberty is irrecoverably gone, before they saw the danger. Injuries small in themselves, may in their consequences be fatal to those who submit to them, especially if they're persisted in.' During the Danish cartoon Jihad, you may recall, over the representations of the prophet Mohammed earlier this year, the New York Times gave one of its routinely pompous explanations as to why it wouldn't be showing readers these offensive cartoons: sensitive news organisations, the editors explained, have the duty to 'refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbol symbols'. The very next day, the Times illustrated the story on the Danish controversy with an illustration of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung ... a piece of New York art from a couple of seasons earlier. They had no problem with gratuitous assaults on religious symbols when it came to a dung-covered Virgin Mary or the Piss-Christ-the crucifix immersed in the artist's urine that was the sensation of the New York art world a couple of seasons back. He was the biggest artist in America for a while, a guy called Andre Serrano. I don't know what he's doing now, haven't heard from him a couple of years, I don't know what he's doing ... maybe he got cystitis or something ... anyway, his career dried up.

A friend of mine did a satirical play in England a couple of years ago, he's an old leftie, very anti-Iraq war, so in his show he had Bush and Blair come out and sing 'we're sending you a cluster bomb from Jesus' ... ha-ha, very funny. Well how about if you have a couple of Imams dancing around singing 'we're sending you a schoolgirl bomb from Allah'. Well oddly enough, my pal was far more reluctant to do that, on the reasonable grounds that unlike insulting Christianity, if you insult certain other faiths, a far more motivated crowd is likely to be waiting for you at the stage door. Multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke, in which the American tells the Soviet that 'in my country, everyone is free to criticise the President' and the Soviet guy replies 'same here! In my country everyone is free to criticise your President'. Under the rules, as understood by the New York Times, the West is free to mock and belittle its Judeo-Christian inheritance, and likewise, the Muslim world is free to mock and belittle the West's Judeo-Christian inheritance. If one had to choose, on balance, Islam's loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than the Western elite's loathing of their own. Now I have a great sympathy for Muslims that face demands that they assimilate; it's on the front pages of all the newspapers in London this weekend. Even if you wanted to, even if you wanted to, how would you assimilate with say, Canadian national identity? You can't assimilate with a nullity, which is what the modern multicultural state boils down to. It's much easier to dismantle a society than put anything new and lasting in it place. And across much of the developed world, that's what's going on right now.

The advantage for the US and for Australia, and to a lesser extent other parts of the English-speaking world, is that Europe, in its civilisational exhaustion, is ahead in the line, and its fate might wake up even the most blinkered on this side of the continent. But it comes down to this: we are the issue. It's about us. We don't understand that the world we've lived in since 1945 is very precious, very unusual, and very rare and is at odds with most of human history. And if we want our world to continue, if we want our children to grow up in the kind of society we've lived in this last half-century, then we have to understand the blessings we enjoy are not an accident. If we don't value it, we won't have it.

Thank you very much.

Burning Man 2006

I've been meaning to put up a post about my Burning Man experience for 2 months now. Well, here goes...

Now that I've been twice, I feel that Burning Man is an event with diminishing returns. That may sound like a criticism, but it's not. There's nothing in the world like the first time you set foot on the playa and turn slowly in a circle while letting your senses absorb as best they can the rich palate of the human creative spirit on display stretching in every direction for as far as you can see. But you only have one cherry--and once it's been popped, it's popped. Oh sure, you can pretend subsequent experiences are just as good as the first time, but you're just deluding yourself. It doesn't mean they're necessarily worse--just different. Like any good, solid, mutually-respectful relationship, Burning Man takes creativity and maintenance to keep it interesting. If you do not put forth the effort, you are left with diminishing returns.

I keep in regular touch with exactly two people from my high school days. Steve is one of them. Coincidently, after about 12 years of being out of touch, he turned up 2 hours down the road in Santa Cruz. I was pleased to learn that one of my best friends in high school, and roommate for 2 years after, was living so close. He owns and operates a tire shop. Every year in August, he is innundated with vehicles getting ready for the pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert. Although he had never been, the experience of helping outfit vehicles for Burning Man made him both familiar with and curious about the event. Not long after my wife and I found out she was pregnant with our first child in June, we decided that 5 days in the desert doing everything that people do out there was probably not the best environment for a mother-to-be. So all of the sudden I had an extra ticket, and Steve said he'd take it before I even finished asking him. As luck would have it, he and a friend had just bought a circa 1970 lime green 20ft long motorhome specifically for tailgating and events such as Burning Man. A plan was coming together.

We had about 12 people in our camp this year, half of which were playa-virgins. I drove up with two of them, all the while dazzling them with stories of what they were getting themselves into. But there's really no way to paint an accurate picture. We arrived at 3am and found our camp pretty quickly; most of our crew had arrived 2 days prior. There's not a bad time to arrive at Black Rock City; this city truly never sleeps. I hurriedly set up my tent and got out to the playa in time to watch the early dawn turn into a glorious sunrise from under the Belgian Wafflehouse.

That morning I got my first taste of what turned out to be my favorite saloon in all of BRC: Tikila Sunrise. Set up in the middle of nowhere, with walls made of the horizon and the sky as a ceiling, this saloon featured a bar and furniture you'd expect to see at at any kitschy Hawaiian bar, a giant tiki statue and 2 swinging saloon doors. We quickly learned that simply wandering up to the bar from the netherlands resulted in a) much ballyhooing from the other patrons, and b) not being served at the bar. However, entering through the saloon doors resulted in a greeting similiar to the one Norm received at Cheers. The hours of operation were 4a to 9a--nothing like starting off the day with a margarita, shot of tequila and a baby carrot chaser. I made it a point to start each day here, and usually ended up staying until "last call." It was entertaining to hang out and observe whatever passed by. Various art cars would park and play great dj sets. One gal had a polaroid camera and took pictures of everybody there and stapled them to the bar. (It was great to see the front of the bar hung on a fence in San Francisco at the decompression party a few weeks ago with all the pictures still attached--brought back great memories!) There was a posse of what must have been stunt-doubles there each morning tossing eachother across the tables and out the door after the slightest provocation. I was disappointed to see on my last morning that the saloon doors had been completely flattened by an art car that was now parked in front of the bar. I though to myself, "how rude!" Maybe I said it outloud, because one of the guys driving it loudly declared, "this is a BAR not a CLUB!" and promptly marched out back to play a game of bocce ball. That art car came in handy later for hauling home a female patron who had finally had enough fun and passed out limp on a table. My friend Dave quickly recovered the beer he had given to her; it was still cold.

Having experienced much exhaustion and fatigue the year prior, this time around I was determined to keep a better pace. I'm a morning person by nature, so getting up at 4am is rarely a problem for me. Besides, sunrise on the playa is my absolute favorite part of the day, so I decided I would try to incorporate my regular home schedule into the Burning Man scene. My up and at 'em hours were roughly 4a to 11p each day which set me at odds with most of the rest of my camp as they were usually rallying when I was going to bed, and going to bed when I was rallying. Truth be told though, I was never wanting for company, as most of the night crew was still going strong at 4am--and by then they had a bead on where all the hot spots were at the moment.

One of the cardinal rules at Burning Man is to leave no trace. It's taken very seriously by the organizers, but not always by all the participants. In an effort to cut down on MOOP (matter out of place, aka: garbage) around camp, we elected to ban those ubiquitous red party cups. Although we still managed to generate a fair amount of trash, it certainly could have been much worse. Next year, we will aspire towards even less.

Speaking of our camp, this year we added another parachute shade structure (one for covering the tents, and one for the "living room") and Dave set up his "mini-mog" in the living room. The mini-mog is a home-built 2 amp, ~800 watt portable dj system thats design is loosely based on Space Cowboy's Unimog. The mini-mog proved to be quite popular with our neighbors; especially during our Pancakes with Harry Belafonte breakfast special.

I could drone on and on about the minute details, but I'd get sick of typing and you'd get sick of reading, so I will return to my original thought about Burning Man being an event with diminishing returns. I can see how each year I will have to put more and more energy into my participation if I want to continue to get anything out of the whole experience. It will always be interesting and fun, because there's not many places and times in your life where you are able to stand over a blank canvas and encouraged to let your mind explode. I went through the trouble of planning, shopping, sewing; completed the roadtrip, helped coordinate, organize camp and cook--I may as well maximize each and every moment.

Burning Man is like life. The older you get, the more energy it takes just to tread water.

P.S. King Tut has more and better pictures here than I could be bothered to take.

Borat Review

Comedy is tricky; one person's joke is another person's offense. While hilarious at times, all told, Borat is mostly offensive.

There were 3 very funny scenes that immediately spring to mind: kids running up to the ice cream truck then being scared away by the bear, the naked wrestling match (an instant classic!) and trying to stuff Pamela Anderson into the wedding sack. The rest of the laughs were mostly cheap shots derrived from stereotyping, and uneven stereotyping at that.

He took the safe route: negative stereotyping of southerners/whites/evangelicals/gunshop owners/patriots/cowboys (not to mention Kazakstan) or any combination thereof, neutral/slightly positive stereotyping of blacks, and excessive hyperbole (i.e. rendering the situation so outlandish as to be unbelievable) when taking jabs at Jews. Muslims? He knows he'd be a dead man walking if he mentioned them in any way, but he thought it okay to insult a preacher's wife at dinner, mock our national anthem at a rodeo, and show a Christ-impersonator being poked with a pitch fork. I would have had more respect for Mr. Cohen had he tried to do something like fake his way into a synagogue kitchen and start butchering a side of pork on the cheeseboard and filmed the reaction of the Rabbi. That's not so outlandish when compared to his other antics.

Mr. Cohen does Jews no service in this movie. The running of the Jews was funny, but only a Jew could get away with doing that. Only a Jew could get away with walking into a gun shop and try to buy a handgun and baiting the shop owner by saying, "it's for killing Jews", thereby making the gunshop owner appear complicit in Jew-killing because he didn't say anything to dissuade him (imagine the outrage if say, Mel Gibson made a scene in one of his movies like that). Only a Jew could get away with throwing money at salbugs and running away because those crafty Jews transformed themselves.

That's all fine really. Self-appropriating the most outlandish myths about a race/group and desensitizing them through comic-hyperbole goes a long way toward removing the venom, but I don't think it necessarily has a place in a movie like Borat.
Everybody gets humiliated except the Jews, and he papers over that with hyperbole which does Jews a disservice. That's why I would have respected him more for butchering a pig in a kosher kitchen, for example. He'd have held his own people to the same standard as those he mocks.

All in all I'm left feeling he's just a punk-ass taking comedy to a new low.

It's things like this that make me want to move to Montana

San Francisco School Board votes to dump JROTC program

After 90 years in San Francisco high schools, the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps must go, the San Francisco school board decided Tuesday night.

The Board of Education voted 4-2 to eliminate the popular program, phasing it out over two years.

90 years of tradition undone in one night.

"We're really shocked,'' said fourth-year Cadet Eric Chu, a senior at Lowell High School, his eyes filling with tears. "It provided me with a place to go."

Of course, the liberal do-gooders know what's best for Mr. Chu.

The proposal approved by the board also creates a task force to develop alternatives to the program that will be tried out next year at various high schools.

OOH! a task force! After hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless, exhaustive studies conducted over many years, I am certain they will come up with something really fabulous.

Their position was summed up by a former teacher, Nancy Mancias, who said, "We need to teach a curriculum of peace."

Because war is, like, really really bad. And like, what if they threw a war, and like, nobody showed up? And ya know, it'll be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the Air Force, like, needs to hold a bakesale to build a bomber.

If I'm not mistaken, the JROTC is an elective. Nevermind that though. What's important is to just imagine peace, and like, it'll happen! honest! But you have to really imagine it--no cheating!

The board's move to dismantle the popular program was led by board members Dan Kelly and Mark Sanchez with support from Sarah Lipson and Eric Mar. Casting votes against it were Jill Wynns and Norman Yee. Board member Eddie Chin was absent.

"I think people should not despair too much," Sanchez said. "I think now the work begins -- to work within the community to develop new programs that will fulfill the needs of our students."

Yeah, I'm sure they're all over realizing those new programs. In the meantime, the kids can help themselves to a nice game of "non-confrontational, no-contact tag", or "please do not smear the practitioner of alternative lifestyles".

About 1,600 San Francisco students participate in JROTC at seven high schools across the district.

Opponents said the armed forces should have no place in public schools, and the military's discriminatory stance on gays makes the presence of JROTC unacceptable.

One-thousand six-hundred young San Francisco adults learning the meaning of honor, duty and discipline. That's not important, what's important is that the military says if you're gay and in the military, if you don't tell anybody you're gay, nobody will ask you if you're gay. I personally think that policy is asinine--who cares if you're gay and you happen to want to serve your country? But what's more asinine are the suicidal-pacifists who use that policy as a point of perpetual outrage with the intent of undermining the same military charged with protecting their sorry, self-righteous, touch-feely asses.

"We don't want the military ruining our civilian institutions," said Sandra Schwartz of the American Friends Service Committee, an organization actively opposing JROTC nationwide. "In a healthy democracy ... you contain the military. You must contain the military."

Contain the all-volunteer military, otherwise they will overrun this nation and control everything. Quiet! I hear the jackboots right outside my door! By the way, it seems that the left is doing a fine job on their own ruining civilian institutions such as public schools.

"This is where the kids feel safe, the one place they feel safe," Robert Powell, a JROTC instructor at Lincoln High School and a retired Army lieutenant colonel, said earlier in the evening. "You're going to take that away from them?"

Apparently, Lt. Col. Powell, that answer is yes. It's better if they're out on the street causing trouble. That way, they can realize the victim status that is rightfully theirs--and the left can come to the rescue with another brilliant scheme paid for by other people's money.

Opponents acknowledged the program is popular and even helps some students stay in school and out of trouble.

Yet they also said the program exists to lure students to sign up for the armed forces.

"It's basically a branding program, or a recruiting program for the military," Kelly said before the meeting.

The JROTC? A recruiting program for the military? get out! who knew? Besides, it's a well-known fact that everybody in the military was duped into signing up. They thought the application was for summer camp, not boot camp.

Earlier, Mayor Gavin Newsom weighed in on the debate, chastising the board for the effort to eliminate JROTC.

"The move sends the wrong message," he said. "It's important for the city not to be identified with disrespecting the sacrifice of men and women in uniform."

Newsom also said he believed the vote would push more city residents away from the public schools.

"You think this is going to help keep families in San Francisco?" the mayor added. "No. It's going to hurt."

BRAVO MR. NEWSOM! Though I can't help but wonder why you didn't lobby against this harder if you had so much conviction. Nevertheless, as somebody who will have a school-aged child in the not-too-distant future, I couldn't agree with you more.

A budget analysis found that the district could hire nine teachers with the money the district now spends on JROTC -- enough to cover the gym and elective courses for the 1,600 students should the program be eliminated.

oh yay! 9 more unmotivated, underpaid teachers. Hey, at least the Teacher's Union will come out ahead.

As Michelle Malkin put it: Cities, like civilizations, die by suicide, not murder.

I really love living in San Francisco, but not enough to commit suicide for her.