21 December 2006, and a happy winter solstice to you all

And to Karen, a very happy birthday on this special day made even more special by her arrival in my life.

Later this evening the sun resumes its journey back northward and the days start getting longer once more.  To me, when I lived in cold northern climates, that represented not the beginning of winter but the beginning of the end of winter, because summer couldn't even start on its way until after the sun began heading back again.  Thus the actual beginning of summer was initiated on December 21st, so I was happy to see that day arrive.

My only daughter's birth just added to that happiness, and thus every year celebrates the return of the daughter as well as the sun.

Yes...the glass is always half-full, never half-empty.

Down here, of course, the solstice doesn't matter as much, even though the position of the morning sun has quite an effect upon my northeast corner window location, even though most of the time the mornings have sufficient low clouds to mitigate the glare. 

The odd thing to get used to down here is that during the 'summer' the sun is actually NORTH of us.  People in North America don't ever have this happen to them.  This is also something to take into consideration with regard to sunburn, too.

Thus, also, the moss doesn't grow on the north side of the trees, so that won't help you if you are lost in the woods.  Here the moss grows on all sides of the trees, actually.  And you can't get lost in the woods...in the jungle, maybe, but not in the woods.

Otherwise, though, summer and winter are words which have little meaning to me anymore, and I'm just as glad.  Occasionally, while watching television, I'll be struck by the sight of winter blizzards and remember that December used to be not such a great time...but no longer.  On another occasion Carol's aunt in Texas will write about the terrible heat in August and I'll dimly recall 100°+ days...but no longer.

On my list of reasons why I wanted to move to Costa Rica, those are number one and number two.

Speaking of moving, here's today's NYTimes front-page item for you:

Three Sisters

For Divided Family, Border Is Sorrowful Barrier

By MIREYA NAVARRO

All Irma has to show for her migration to the United States, she said, is the heartache of separation.

Dear Irma.  Move back.  If that's all you have to show, it isn't worth it.  Love, Gregg

Ah, this is even better!  I just LOVE this article about global warming!

QUZHOU, China — Foreign businesses have embraced an obscure United Nations-backed program as a favored approach to limiting global warming. But the early efforts have revealed some hidden problems.

Under the program, businesses in wealthier nations of Europe and in Japan help pay to reduce pollution in poorer ones as a way of staying within government limits for emitting climate-changing gases like carbon dioxide, as part of the Kyoto Protocol.

Among their targets is a large rusting chemical factory here in southeastern China. Its emissions of just one waste gas contribute as much to global warming each year as the emissions from a million American cars, each driven 12,000 miles.

Sorry, but I just can't help laughing my head off.  For a couple of reasons.

One is how smart the Chinese are.  Not only are they exempt from the Kyoto Protocol but they have figured out a way to get others to pay to clean up their act.

And, on a familiar refrain for some of you, if one plant in China can do that much, what effect does my tiny volcano just a few miles away from me have as it fumes away 24 hours a day?  That isn't oxygen coming out of the top.

But wait, this article gets even more amusing as the author perhaps inadvertently reveals some, ah, how to they put it, inconvenient truths?

Cleaning up this factory will require an incinerator that costs $5 million — far less than the cost of cleaning up so many cars, or other sources of pollution in Europe and Japan.

Yet the foreign companies will pay roughly $500 million for the incinerator — 100 times what it cost. The high price is set in a European-based market in carbon dioxide emissions. Because the waste gas has a far more powerful effect on global warming than carbon dioxide emissions, the foreign businesses must pay a premium far beyond the cost of the actual cleanup.

Bolding mine, of course, in both instances.  Something has a far more powerful effect than carbon dioxide?  Yes.  In fact, the real scientists, the ones who let the answers dictate rather than the questions, now are expressing some serious reservations about the extent of the effect increasing levels of carbon dioxide actually has.  Not that you'll ever learn that from listening to Algore, and especially not if the "other scientists" manage to keep dissenters from speaking out.

The huge profits from that will be divided by the chemical factory’s owners, a Chinese government energy fund, and the consultants and bankers who put together the deal from a mansion in the wealthy Mayfair district of London.

But critics of the fast-growing program, through which European and Japanese companies are paying roughly $3 billion for credits this year, complain that it mostly enriches a few bankers, consultants and factory owners.

Don't forget the "scientists" feeding at the global warming warning trough!  More money, they cry...we need more money for research!  I think that is a really big boffo line, since they've already made up their minds!

Algore will tell you the nature of the problem right now, today.  He doesn't need any more research, so why are we giving research money to people who have already identified the problem?

What's that?  Yes, of course...Puck was right.

Despite the unintentional humor (from at least my point of view) the article is interesting and contains quite a few things about developing China and India that are worth knowing.

Among them is the important fact that if man is actually causing global warming then start getting rid of your winter clothes.  India and China are set to surpass the US in only a couple of years, and if China will not spend it's huge surplus of dollars to clean up their own country then don't count on the rest of the world doing it for them. 

Canada has already said they're getting out of the payola business, and I found the notion of the "wealthier nations of Europe" rather amusing.  Which welfare-state nations with rising unemployment and Muslim population levels would those be?

This is amazing!  Just yesterday on this page I wrote a letter to George Bush telling him to stop acting like Neville Chamberlain where Iran was concerned or else he'd find McCain playing the Churchill role.  Today this:

Iran President Facing Revival of Students’ Ire

U.S. and Britain to Add Ships to Persian Gulf in Signal to Iran

That was fast work, George.  Keep it up.

Aw, jeez, this from the Washington Post:

The debate over sending more U.S. troops to Iraq intensified yesterday as President Bush signaled that he will listen but not necessarily defer to balky military officers, while Gen. John P. Abizaid, his top Middle East commander and a leading skeptic of a so-called surge, announced his retirement.

At an end-of-the-year news conference, Bush said he agrees with generals "that there's got to be a specific mission that can be accomplished" before he decides to dispatch an additional 15,000 to 30,000 troops to the war zone. But he declined to repeat his usual formulation that he will heed his commanders on the ground when it comes to troop levels.

Dammit, George, remember what Margaret Thatcher told your dad?  This is no time to go wobbly.

Ah, yes, here it is...

Denver Blizzard Snarls Travel

Powerful storm dumps two feet of snow in Colorado, shutting airport, stranding thousands.

A couple of interesting items from Howard Kurtz in Media Notes as east coast meets west coast:

NYT: "after a month in which he has been under intense pressure to change course in Iraq...the president showed no indication that he is inclined toward such a shift."

LAT: "With Bush reassessing his Iraq policy and expecting to announce changes early next month, his statements reflected a new willingness to acknowledge that ..."

No change in New York, a reassessment and willingness to acknowledge change in Los Angeles.  Then this one made me laugh out loud...well, at least snort out loud...

Slate's John Dickerson notes an inconvenient truth:

"It is progress of a kind for the president to talk about the need to examine past failures--there was a time when he didn't even admit them--but the answer still failed."

Why am I not surprised, John?  Why is it I suspect that no matter which way the president goes in either direction you will decide it is a failure?

This guy is already figuring out his spin:

American Prospect's Spencer Ackerman wants to ensure that the Dems aren't held responsible:

"I don't want to see the right succeed at hoisting the albatross of the lost Iraq war around the left's neck. That will get us two, three, many Iraqs.

"It goes a little something like this (hit it): Democrats take over Congress in 2007. Bush begins a troop increase, allegedly in the name of bringing the war to a desirable conclusion. It has all sorts of anticipated ill effects: increased deaths, increased chaos, mounting strain on the military.

I got that far and had to quit.  You see, it is the Democrats who have been calling for the troop increase, and yesterday the Washington Post reported that Democrats were now applauding Bush for now considering it...he still hasn't said he will.

Now in Ackerman's spin world under construction, Bush is the one making the decision to increase the troops and the Democrats aren't even involved.  Why read the rest of his scenario when he has ignored the true facts at the beginning?

What's that?  Yeah...I know...true Liberals won't care.  Remember the guy a few days ago who wrote about the huge military defeat the US troops suffered in Vietnam in 1975, with helicopters lifting the military remnants off of the rooftops in Saigon?

Yeah, I know that didn't happen...but his editors published it without saying nary a word about the actual truth.  Why was that?  Because they liked it written that way, that's why.

Thus Ackerman writes a scenario that fails to mention the months of Democrat bitching because Bush won't send more troops to Iraq, during which time Bush insists he is listening to his generals and they are saying they don't need or even want more troops right now.  Instead, Ackerman creates a new world, one where Bush unilaterally decides to increase the troops, with ill effects that now Ackerman can only anticipate...

Whew.  With a beginning like that, who knows where he'll end up in his Brave New World?

In the New Republic, Conor Clarke deconstructs the land deal with an indicted fundraiser for which Barack Obama has apologized:

I think that's a silly complaint, too, but it wasn't what caught my eye.  What did was this later paragraph:

"The role of the press in all this should be to put perceptions in line with the facts as they stand, not inflate the perceptions and raise the distant possibility that the facts might line up behind them . . .

Now tie this back with the charge that Scooter Libby 'outed' a secret CIA agent, Valerie Plame, which later turned out not to be true, someone else confessed to the crime, but for which Scooter is nevertheless defending charges of perjury.

At what point did the press inflate (and possibly Conor Clark along with them, I don't know) the perceptions with the possibility, even indistinct, that the facts might line up behind them?

Oh, only about a couple of years' worth.

"It really does matter how the press treats these things. In March of 1992, The New York Times published an article that was critical of the Clintons' Whitewater real-estate dealings--the first time most people had heard of the issue. It would not be the last. Eight years and 80 million public dollars later, we had a pornographic novel masquerading as the Starr Report, 'insufficient' evidence to prove any presidential wrongdoing, and 15 convictions unrelated to the original investigation."

And the parallel, once again, would be?  I guess it depends on whether or not you are defending Clinton or attacking the current administration and Libby was all you could manage to net.  And they haven't managed to convict him yet.

And what is he telling us...that 15 convictions shouldn't count?  Fifteen convictions even though nothing at all happened?

Salon picked this up:  "Is Dick Morris calling Hillary Clinton out?

"In an appearance on Fox News' 'Hannity & Colmes,' the political strategist turned pundit vowed he'd flee the country if Sen. Clinton wins the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, with Barack Obama as her running mate."

If all of the people who vowed the leave the country after so-and-so was nominated or elected actually did, the country would be a better place for it.

George Will is getting to be a grumpy old fart, I think, and he's quite unhappy with Time Magazine:

Richard Stengel, Time's managing editor, says, "Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger" and "Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, 'Poor Richard's Almanack.' " Not exactly.

Franklin's extraordinary persona informed what he wrote but was not the subject of what he wrote. Paine was perhaps history's most consequential pamphleteer. There are expected to be 100 million bloggers worldwide by the middle of 2007, which is why none will be like Franklin or Paine. Both were geniuses; genius is scarce. Both had a revolutionary civic purpose, which they accomplished by amazing exertions. Most bloggers have the private purpose of expressing themselves for their own satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with that, but there is nothing demanding or especially admirable about it, either. They do it successfully because there is nothing singular about it, and each is the judge of his or her own success.

A freshman logic student would point out that arguing because genius is rare and bloggers number 100 million, therefore it follows that none of them can be geniuses, fails miserably.  George is upset enough to lose his mental equilibrium here, I think.

Much of what he says about bloggers is true--certainly he is right about me--but I also doubt if Tom Paine was willing to let others sit in judgment about his own success...gee whiz, Farmer Brown, you're right, I failed.  I'll sit down and quit straightaway.

If I were to write George Will and tell him he had not succeeded, would he trust me or would he judge his own success for himself according to his own standards?  Or maybe he'd turn to a majority vote and point out to me how many people judged him to be a success, therefore he was?  One hundred million Frenchmen can't be wrong?

George Will as Tom Friedman?  Literary elitism as an infectious disease?  Bloggers in pajamas cannot possibly contain any geniuses among their ranks because, well, because there are so MANY of them?

George III would have preferred dealing with 100 million bloggers rather than one Paine.

Perhaps so, but that was when the 100 million were unable to be heard.  Today our own George II would prefer only one pamphleteering pain to 100 million bloggers.

So would George Will, who ultimately complains about, well,

...what 99.9 percent of the Web's content lacks: seriousness.

Which, of course, Tom Paine had.  And, oh yes, also George Will.

Memo to GW: if 0.1% of the web bloggers contain seriousness, why is it they cannot possibly contain among them the genius equivalent of Franklin and Paine?

Department of Oops!

Radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has agreed to allow supporters to rejoin the Iraqi government after a three-week boycott, officials close to the militia leader said Thursday, as political rivals pushed to form a coalition without him.

Shiites from parliament's largest bloc met Thursday in their holy city of Najaf to try to forge a new coalition across sectarian lines - one that won't include al-Sadr's supporters.

Sorry, Muq old boy, you'll have to wait until after the next election to get back in.  If you do.

That's what they should say, even if they will not.

Former National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger, fined $50,000 for taking classified documents from the National Archives, hid the papers under a construction trailer where they later could easily be retrieved, a report yesterday said.
    The National Archives Office of Inspector General said that during a 2003 visit to the facility, Mr. Berger left the building unescorted for a break, during which time he "placed the documents under a trailer in an accessible construction area outside Archives 1 (the main Archives building)."
    The report said Mr. Berger acknowledged that he later retrieved the documents from the construction area and brought them to his office.
    Mr. Berger, who served as national security adviser under President Clinton from 1997 to 2000, pleaded guilty in April 2005 to a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material. The material included documents outlining the government's knowledge of terrorist threats in the United States during the 2000 New Year's celebration.
    He was fined $50,000 by a federal judge, ordered to perform 100 hours of community service and barred from access to classified material for three years. The top Clinton adviser had faced a year in prison and a $100,000 fine, but a plea agreement in the case reduced the fine and kept him out of jail.

Meanwhile, anyone want to care to guess what penalty Scooter Libby faces?

Mr. Berger initially claimed he took the documents as the result of an "honest mistake," but later admitted that he placed the classified records in his pants and jacket and put other classified documents in a leather portfolio.
    In October, several top House Republicans asked for an investigation and committee hearings to determine which documents were "destroyed, removed or are missing" as a result of Mr. Berger's admitted theft.
        Democrats will assume control of Congress next month, and the request for an investigation is expected to be shelved.

The Republicans are the party of corruption, they explained.

Can you just imagine what would be happening now if one of THEM had done this?

What's wrong with the CIA Department:

The CIA this month conducted a simulation of how the Iraq war affects the global jihadist movement, and one conclusion was that a U.S. loss would embolden al Qaeda to expand its ranks of terrorists as well as pick new strategic targets, according to sources familiar with the two-day exercise.

Anybody picked at random could have told them this in about two seconds, not two days.

Richard W. Rahn is certain he's had the solution all along in Iraq:

…it is not too late to make some of the changes (we suggested previously), given that the distribution of oil revenues still has not been decided in Iraq. The Iraq Study Group concluded that: "Oil revenues should accrue to the central government and be shared on the basis of population." Even more preferable would be to privatize the entire oil industry and make all Iraqis stockholders, thereby putting the whole population behind expanded output and making them hostile to those who blow up pipelines. (If dividend checks were distributed regularly, most citizens would oppose having their incomes reduced by the radicals.)

There's just one wee problem.  Iraq is a sovereign country and it's their oil, their decision now.  About the biggest mistake the U.S. could make would be to step in now and think they could tell the Iraqi government what to do with their oil revenues.  Rahn is delusional.  So was the Iraq Study Group.

I guess I should but I don't know how the Alaska plan works…how do they keep the wise guys from accumulating the shares of the dumb guys?

Tried to call Karen tonight on Skype but she wasn't home, probably out celebrating.  This was a big deal for me because I have developed a real dislike for the telephone in my old age.  I can't explain it, maybe it was all of those years in the real estate business where the phone was in my ear constantly, maybe it's just my reduced hearing capacity that makes it less enjoyable, but the fact is that I find myself to be just really, really reluctant to pick up the phone and I don't enjoy talking on the phone.

Some of this, I now realize, thinking about how inexpensive Skype is for us, here in Costa Rica, might have been the cost.  When I grew up, telephone calls were expensive.  We didn't even have a phone until I was in college, at which point it became a battle ground because I loved to talk to my girlfriend on the phone, for hours and hours, and my mother was on my case about it all the time. 

Once I was in the real estate business and got into office management, paying the phone bill was always one of the biggest headaches of the month.    Essentially you live by the phone and die by the phone, I guess that's what finally turned me off.

Once we moved down here and international phone calls became REALLY expensive, we just quit making them.  And with the internet and e-mail and now with instant messaging, who needs them? 

Recently, though, Carol (at Dee Dee's urging, thank you, kiddo) got us on Skype and the cost to a land line in the U.S. is something like 2 cents a minute…computer to computer, as with Chrissie in Holland, costs nothing.

So far only Carol's phone is hooked up, but I guess now I'm going to have to change my ways and get my computer hooked to Skype, too, and get reconnected with people.

Carol and I are really kind of antisocial these days…well, no, it's more a case of being asocial.  We have enough to do to occupy ourselves without leaving home except for necessary errands.  Some of our friends decided on an intervention tonight, I guess…Celin's wife and mother and sister and daughter all showed up at the gate to wish us Merry Christmas, come in and have a tour of the house, and invite us to two family get-togethers tomorrow and Sunday, ending up at the church on Christmas Eve.

This is a good thing for us and for Tony, it's sure nice to be living in a friendly community where people worry about their neighbors .  Our life has to change, anyhow, as Tony grows up.

We met two new North American friends a couple days ago, Louis and Robert, who live in nearby El Tanque.  Our local doctor had told us about them and wondered if we'd be interested in meeting them, I wasn't sure but he said he liked them, so I agreed that one day he could introduce us.  Anyhow, Dr. Randall does so very, very much for us, and did for Dad especially during his last year or so, that we owe him more than we can ever repay, so when I stopped by his office earlier this week on our way to Ciudad Quesada I asked if he needed anything from there.  No, he said, but Robert needed some insulin he needed to get to him, maybe I could drop that off…

So we met Louis (Robert had caught a bus to La Fortuna to pick up the insulin, we passed each other) and got a tour of their house, met their dogs and cats, later talked to Robert on the phone.  They're both really nice guys, and now we're going to their place for dinner on the 29th. 

Family events this week, adult event next week, affordable international phone calls…we're getting blasted out of the rut, ready or not.