22 December 2006, a sunny Friday morning
A beautiful morning, too, where the New York Times is only a distant while...
An analysis says the PATH tunnels under the Hudson River are more vulnerable than previously thought.
They're working night and day on the public's right to know.
Does the NYT think anyone would try to damage them? Why?
In other news the NYT thinks American oil businesses are getting too good of a deal because...well, because other countries do things differently.
In the United States, the federal government’s take — royalties as well as corporate taxes — is about 40 percent of revenue from oil and gas produced on federal property, according to Van Meurs Associates, an industry consulting firm that compares the taxes of all oil-producing countries.
By contrast, according to Van Meurs, the worldwide average “government take” is about 60 to 65 percent. And that figure, of course, excludes countries that do not allow any private ownership in oil production.
Obviously, then, the best deal increasing the "government take" (remember that term for a few more seconds) would be to disallow private ownership, that should be even a better "take" for the government than 60 to 65 percent! Take it all!
Of course, under the current system the oil companies take all the risk of discovery costs, no discovery and they've spent a few billions for exploration with nothing to show for it...
“Royalty relief is the gift that keeps on giving,” said Representative Nick J. Rahall, Democrat of West Virginia, who will become chairman of the House Resources Committee. “It seems painfully obvious that when the government gives tax breaks in the form of royalty relief to Big Oil, the American people are footing the bill.”
Did you get that? When you "take" only 40% instead of 60-65% you are GIVING them a tax BREAK! It's Royalty Relief. And the American people, because they didn't take more, are "footing the bill".
The Democrats in the tax business have a language all their own. See, they really figure they should be taking at a 100% rate and therefore anything they leave for business is a gift, a break being granted by the American people.
New York Times headline:
Iran's President Says Bush 'Most Hated'
Ahmadinejad vows to work harder to capture title.
Bush says what a good deal this is. If I do nothing to or about Iran in order to increase their liking for me over there then I'm going to be blamed by the American people for Iran's future actions even after I leave office. If I do something about Iran now they'll hate me more...but so will the American people not like what I'll have to do...
Here's a good NYT item:
An influx from California helped make Arizona the fastest-growing state, displacing Nevada for the first time in nearly two decades, according to census figures released yesterday.
And after nine years in the top spot, New York is no longer losing more people to migration than any other state. This past year, more people moved from California and Louisiana than from New York. Nonetheless, a continued exodus of young people upstate produced New York State’s first population loss over all since the 1970s, 9,538 people. Rhode Island and Michigan also suffered losses, but, like New York’s, each was well under 1 percent.
In the one year covered by the latest estimates, from July 1, 2005, to July 1, 2006, Texas gained 579,275 residents, more people than live in either Boston or Washington.
More people moved to Texas from elsewhere in the United States than moved to any other state.
Arizona’s estimated population grew by 213,311 to 6.2 million, an increase of 3.6 percent. Most of the increase was driven by more people moving in from other states than leaving — most from California.
Measured by rate of growth, Arizona was first, followed by Nevada, Idaho, Georgia and Texas, Utah, North Carolina, Colorado, Florida and South Carolina.
Interestingly enough, Arizona and Utah are the only two states I would even consider, myself, with Utah having the edge.
Raul Castro Urges Open Debate
Cuba's interim president tells students they should debate "fearlessly," bring concerns directly to him.
Welcome mat placed, sign-up sheets, photo-ops, free driver's license to be given away to participants (with fingerprints). Raul says he is going to follow the Biblical injunction for students who show up: suffer, ye children who come unto me.
Excerpt from a Mother Jones piece by Jack Hitt regarding Hillary:
"To the right, she stayed not for any principle or for Chelsea but because she's a clawing shrew who will suffer any ignominy to attain power. To the left, she had a chance to take a stand for all the women who've been humiliated, and she didn't."
One of the few times both right and left were correct.
When people judge Hillary I think they have to do it by first recognizing who she decided to be from the beginning, and who she became: a professional politician. You simply cannot apply the same standards to those people that you do to the general population, if for no other reason than because that is not how they see themselves. Every time a politician says that he is "one of you", what is he actually revealing? Uh huh, he's revealing the fact that there might be a question, a reason why it wasn't an assumption so basic that it didn't need to be stated.
Hillary and Bill got together originally for reasons we cannot understand, perhaps, but we can grasp at least one of them: they aspired to the pinnacle of political power from the very beginning. This didn't happen to them by accident, but by planning.
Professional politicians do some things and don't do others quite differently than the rest of us because their internal value-system had been adjusted differently. Thus, for Hillary, who has always wanted to be president from her girlhood, Bill Clinton was simply too valuable a political asset, especially after he became president, to be discarded because of her personal feelings either for or against him. Professional politicians don't let their personal feelings get in the way of working together if need be...they'll even tell you that openly, proudly, so why should anyone expect Hillary to be different?
She's also shrewd enough to recognize that the feminists don't really care all that much about women, because if they really had considered women to be important then they would have cheered Bush for even the imperfect liberation women have achieved in Afghanistan and Iraq. No matter what she does or doesn't do, Hillary will not lose the feminist vote, and she's smart enough to know that.
Thus, in the Hiatt observation, what the right thinks is correct but also immaterial, ditto for the left. Both are right and neither matters.
Neither does this, but it is interesting:
Monica Lewinsky, meanwhile, has graduated from the London School of Economics.
And this, via Howard Kurtz:
Stanley Crouch says in his New York Daily News column:
"When black Americans refer to Obama as 'one of us,' I do not know what they are talking about. In his new book, 'The Audacity of Hope,' Obama makes it clear that, while he has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own -- nor has he lived the life of a black American.
"Will this matter in the end? Probably not. Obama is being greeted with the same kind of public affection that Colin Powell had when he seemed ready to knock Bill Clinton out of the Oval Office. For many reasons, most of them personal, Powell did not become the first black American to be a serious presidential contender.
"I doubt Obama will share Powell's fate, but if he throws his hat in the ring, he will have to run as the son of a white woman and an African immigrant.
Which, at least, would make him only one generation away from actually being an African-American and thus a lot closer than most.
Not being black, myself, I find the whole "not black enough to be one of us" argument amusing. In the Ol' Souf, a single drop of black blood was considered enough to kick you out of white society, now even one parent from Africa isn't enough to be considered 'really' black.
Who was it, Faulkner, maybe, who became persona non grata with white southerners by pointing out that if they had lived in the south for several generations they could be almost certain of having a black ancestor somewhere in their blood line.
I was, at one time, married to a Mormon girl. The Mormons, as you may know, are VERY BIG on genealogy. They construct family trees in detail and store the records in a mountain redoubt capable of withstanding an atomic bomb strike, that's how serious they are about their lineage.
My wife told me that in her family tree, back around the time of the Civil War, there was one male ancestor identified solely as "soldier craft". They did not know if he was a soldier named Craft, or if soldiercraft was his occupation, or, indeed, any more about him.
For a group so preoccupied with genealogy, this complete lack of information seemed strange to her. Of course, in those days the Mormons believed that black people were not just inferior but actually colored black by God for a reason, a punishment for an earlier transgression, which would represent even more of an embarrassment if a black person were actually found in one's heritage. Still, you can't just leave a spot blank...
So I find it amusing that blacks should look at Obama as not being really one of them...not like Jesse, or Al.
More via Howard:
Betsy's Page also chides the press:
"More news has come out about Sandy Berger's theft of national security documents from the National Archives. And it's even clearer now than it was earlier that he was deliberately stealing certain documents. When he was first caught, he had a story about how he was inadvertently removing documents, but now that more of the information has been revealed, it's clear that he got off way too easily . . .
"This story seemed to go nowhere in the media. Bill Clinton laughed about it and said that it sounded just like the type of thing a sloppy guy like Sandy would do. The excuse that all the Clinton guys had for Berger was that his desk was always a mess so it was no jump in the imagination to think that he put national security documents in his briefcase. Yeah, right. And I guess it was just typical of the National Security Adviser to just place classified documents in a construction site.
"Shouldn't the media have been more interested in knowing why he took such a risk in stealing classified documents?
The media would just as soon have not even known this much. They'd like the who question to go away.
And a final item from Media Notes:
Some on the liberal side of the spectrum, such as Matthew Yglesias, aren't rushing to Berger's defense:
"With what I consider a great deal of justification, I tried to rigorously ignore the story of Sandy Berger poaching documents when it was first being pushed by conservatives who wanted to use it as a lever to continue grossly failed foreign and domestic policies. That said, it's a long way from Election Day and, seriously, a new Inspector General report says he 'removed classified documents from the National Archives, hid them under a construction trailer and later tried to find the trash collector to retrieve them, the agency's internal watchdog said Wednesday.' Hid them under a trash collector!
"One assumes this will make it difficult for Berger to obtain any high-level executive branch appointments in the future."
One assumes.
Are you kidding? Nancy Pelosi has him in mind for a chairmanship! His only weakness is that the Black Caucus won't automatically support him because he's, well, not one of them...
Charles Krauthammer turned to simply being amusing for today's column:
Americans abroad have long been accused of such blinging arrogance and display. I find the charge generally unfair. Arrogance is incorrectly ascribed to what is really the cultural clumsiness of an insular (if continental) people less exposed to foreign ways and languages than most other people on Earth.
True, America as a nation is not very good at humility. But it would be completely unnatural for the dominant military, cultural and technological power on the planet to adopt the demeanor of, say, Liechtenstein. The ensuing criticism is particularly grating when it comes from the likes of the French, British, Spanish, Dutch (there are many others) who just yesterday claimed dominion over every land and people their Captain Cooks ever stumbled upon.
This part tickles me, because every time you hear a scream about American imperialism it is typically from some former imperial power now in decline...and I include the Russians and the Muslims, who preferred the term 'caliphate' but it still was enforced by military dominance. I chalk it all up to sour grapes.
My beef with American arrogance is not that we act like a traditional great power, occasionally knocking off foreign bad guys who richly deserve it. My problem is that we don't know where to stop -- the trivial victories we insist on having in arenas that are quite superfluous. Like that women's hockey game in the 2002 Winter Olympics. Did the U.S. team really have to beat China 12-1? Can't we get the coaches -- there's gotta be some provision in the Patriot Act authorizing the CIA to engineer this -- to throw a game or two, or at least make it close? We're trying to contain China. Why, then, gratuitously crush them in something Americans don't even care about? Why not throw them a bone?
I say we keep the big ones for ourselves -- laser-guided munitions, Google, Warren Buffett -- and let the rest of the world have ice hockey, ballroom dancing and every Nobel Peace Prize. And throw in the Ryder Cup. I always root for the Europeans in that one. They lost entire empires, for God's sake; let them have golf supremacy for one weekend.
Horribly condescending, of course, but still funny. Well, maybe not to them, of course, because it implies that they would feel the same sense of accomplishment if we simply allowed them to win as it would if they actually deserved the victory due to merit.
Since I am once again engaged in new fatherhood, albeit with a 35-year gap during which I learned a few new things (even if not enough), and trying to do better with my Aries little boy.
I don't know what you think about Sun Signs (I would recommend Linda Goodman's book of the same title for some interesting reading, although not her other books) but I find sun sign correlation with the people I know well (the better you know the person, the more appropriate they seem to become) to be amazingly on target. Even more interestingly, trying to deliberately apply an incorrect sun sign becomes difficult, so it's not simply a matter of seeing what you want to see, there's something more to it than that.
Huh? What did you say? No, I don't know what. Or why. Or how. I feel like Alfred Wegner trying to explain to the great scientists of his day why the odd similarities he detected in the geology (not to mention the shape) of South America and Africa should indicate that the two widely-separate continents were once connected together. Impossible, they said, how could that conceivably be true? Uh, I dunno, he answered. Not good enough, they thundered, if you cannot explain this scientifically then you are a fool and a charlatan, gedouddaheah!
I'm in a similar situation when it comes to sun signs...I just don't know why they seem to fit so well, the whole idea is clearly impossible and ridiculous and silly and unscientific and...well, I should go back and copy the words from the same scientists who trashed Wegner so thoroughly. There is no known scientific principle which would explain it.
Still, here are some excerpts from Linda on my little Aries boy, this taken from the section about infanthood:
Who's the boss around here, anyway? ... He'll never tease you or be subtle about his preferred diet. There's not a subtle bone in his strong, active, broad-shouldered little body.
Dead on target. Tony, with his lineage, is probably going to be small in stature compared with North Americans. But he is strong, active, and broad-shouldered...I enjoy just looking at him after he gets out of the tub, he's so compact and so solid. When we come home from the grocery store and bring the groceries inside, he'll wrestle the big sack of dog food into the house, even though it weighs about half as much as he does.
He won't be easy to control. Say "no, no" to an Aries toddler and he'll shake his chubby little finger right back at you in defiance. Discipline should be started early. ... When he gets a little older, you may get the breath squeezed out of you with one of his loving bear hugs. ... You'll notice that he or she can be most unreasonable when thwarted but the anger won't last long. After a periodic explosion, a large, bright and winning smile will beam your way.
Boy, is that ever Tony. He is tough-minded and certain and tough to discipline, he has to be certain that in this instance you are the boss. I'm always surprise at how quickly he can go from defiance to loving acceptance, and boy does he ever have a charming smile. And "unreasonable when thwarted" is a perfect description...reason simply isn't possible with him in those instances.
No, these are NOT the same traits as a Scorpio child, I wasn't like that at all. Stubborn, sure, but I didn't openly defy authority, as a rule, I quietly went around it. Nor do I get over arguments or conflicts easily. Nor did I give bear hugs, like Tony does.
Anyhow, here's the one that I started in mind with when I began this section:
Don't give him orders, always ask him to do things with a cheerful smile and he'll knock himself out to please you. Never destroy his confidence.
I started down this road while thinking about the business of letting others win and also helping my little strong-headed boy to learn how to do things. We "race" occasionally, and he usually wins, of course, but I make him work a little bit at it. (For one thing, he knows how some people cheat.) The same with showing him how to do things...once he decides that he knows how to do it himself, stand back. I don't try to help him again until he figures he is ready for help...which he will sometimes do, I almost get the impression, just to please ME! Let's make old dad feel good, like he can still make a contribution.
Ironically, we just finished playing that role with my own Dad, who wanted to feel like he had something to contribute right up to the very end.
Disciplining Tony is a challenge because you can't let it turn into a confrontation. He will accept direction from a superior, but not if he thinks it's just a power struggle.
It's been some time ago now, to be sure, but I can't remember either one of my two Sagittarius children or my Leo being the way Tony is.
Take a good look at your little Sagittarius girl. There she is waving her heart at you, like a friendly sheepdog. Your little Sagittarius son waves his heart just as enthusiastically. The Sagittarius boy shows his happy-go-lucky nature...
How true of those two kids, how untrue of Tony.
Rob, I always thought, was difficult to figure out as being a Leo, although he remained sunny in disposition even in tough times, he was just not very outgoing, I didn't think. All the adult Leos I have know well have been very outgoing. But then I read:
There are two kinds of Leo boys and girls. The first kind are the extroverts...the others are quieter, almost timid on the surface...
That was more my young Robert. When we moved to the Bay Area from Bakersfield and the young kids were all making adjustments to the new neighborhood, Rob came to me one time and said he has having trouble making new friends. Why is that, I asked him, when Bill seems to be getting along okay?
Rob was almost disgusted as he explained. Bill just walks up to them and sticks out his hand and says hi, I'm Bill and I want to be your friend. I can't do that, he told me, as if it should have been obvious to me all along. If I had known more, it would have been. And of course he was right, that wasn't the way he was wired. Bill, on the other hand, probably couldn't have imagined doing it any differently.
Anyhow, what I like about Linda Goodman's book is the fact that she makes more sense than anyone else I have previously read about why people don't fall into only 12 sun-sign categories, which would make the human race seemingly much more capable of categorization and we know from experience it isn't. She further explains characteristics of the sun sign as they apply to children, parents, husbands, wives, lovers, bosses, and employees, illustrating the differences to be found among the similarities. In all the cases where I knew the people in my own family and friends from close personal experience (that is, more than merely superficially) the fit was remarkably appropriate.
Like Alfred Wegner, I don't quite know what to make of it or how to explain what I think I can see. I haven't the foggiest notion how those gigantic continents could have gotten so far apart that they became separated by the entire Atlantic Ocean, but it sure does make for some interesting reading.
The Washington Times has the spoiler for those who argue Bush has decided to increase the military:
President Bush only acceded to a jump in the number of U.S. Army and Marine Corps ground troops after intense pressure from senior officers, active and retired, including the Joint Chiefs, defense sources said. .
..the deal-clincher came when he traveled to the Pentagon and met with the six-member Joint Chiefs inside the super-secret "tank." There, the commander in chief listened to a request for more combat forces from Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, and Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine commandant, said defense sources briefed on the meeting.
Of course, even though Bush has always said he will take the advice of his generals, here's how the headline writer decided the item should appear:
Bush caved to pressure on troops
Taking the advice of your top generals is now called caving in.! If they had begged him for more troops and he refused, a la Rumsfeld, what would the headline have read?
Here's something that will prove to be a problem for some:
Mr. Bush's decision to ask Congress for a bigger Army and Marine Corps is a break from the policy of Mr. Rumsfeld.
Those who called loudly for Rumsfeld's head are going to have to swallow hard and figure out a new argument if they want to turn this idea down at the same time they are claiming they support the troops.
Only one false note for me in this item:
Gen. Schoomaker told a blue-ribbon commission on the Guard and Reserve that the Army "will break" unless the active force is bumped up. He suggested 6,000 more soldiers per year.
Are we to seriously accept that a 512,000-man army is about to break, but an increase of a bit more than 1% per year will make things just dandy?
How about this? What was going on here, anyhow, somebody looking for a big payday? I haven't been following this case and I suppose I assumed the guys were probably guilty of the event. Another Washington Times item:
Prosecutors dropped rape charges
Friday against three Duke University lacrosse players accused of attacking a
stripper at a team party, but the three still face kidnapping and sexual
offense charges.
According to court papers filed Friday by District Attorney Mike Nifong,
the accuser told a prosecution investigator on Thursday that she now does
not know if she was penetrated during the alleged attack.
Nifong had previously said he would rely on the woman's account because of a lack of DNA evidence against the players.
The defense attorneys have
repeatedly cited a lack of DNA evidence in the case as proof of their
clients' innocence, while Nifong had said he didn't need DNA evidence to win
convictions.
"It's highly coincidental," said defense attorney Joseph Cheshire, that
the charges are being dropped a week after the director of a private DNA
testing lab acknowledged that he initially, with Nifong's knowledge,
withheld from the defense test results showing none of the players' DNA was
found on or in the accuser's body.
The defense also has argued that the woman misidentified her alleged attackers in a photo lineup...
What in the world was this prosecutor doing? No identification, hiding the DNA results, an unsubstantiated charge...there goes his career. Durham taxpayers, brace yourselves to pay for him.
And what are we doing with all these people who know things and still keep mum, hoping to do harm rather than good? From editor Wes Pruden:
Mzz Pelosi's troops didn't try very
hard to make a big deal of the Foley follies. They didn't want to stir up
the lavender lobby in the House, and they figured if Mr. Hastert and the
Republican leadership turned a blind eye the voters would punish the
Republicans on Nov. 7. They reckoned correctly. If the Republicans had cut
their losses and forced resignations of the guilty House leadership when the
scandal first came to light, the president's party would have retained
control of Congress.
Now it turns out that the Democrats were as guilty as the Republicans in
the ultimate Washington crime, the cover-up. The House ethics committee
concluded that the Democrats also received copies of the e-mails written by
Mr. Foley.
So much for the spic-and-span Democrats, but will their supporters be humiliated? (No.)
The high crimes and misdemeanors of
William Jefferson, the Louisiana Democratic congressman who cools hot money
in his food freezer, fall into a different category. Mzz Pelosi stiffed his
bid to remain on the House Ways and Means Committee, which wasted his talent
for managing money. Louisiana has a high tolerance for crooks, particularly
colorful crooks, and if his home folks want to treat the congressman as an
extravagant joke, who are his Democratic colleagues to argue? Besides, he
hasn't been indicted or convicted of anything, and probably won't be.
So Mzz Pelosi is in a bit of a pickle because the Black Congressional
Caucus thinks there's a double standard at play. Rep. Alan Mollohan of West
Virginia, another Democrat, is under FBI scrutiny to see whether he violated
the law in steering millions of federal dollars, none of it cooling in the
freezer, to nonprofit groups connected to him. He's keeping his seat on the
House Appropriations Committee and is even in line to become the chairman of
a subcommittee that oversees the Justice Department budget. What a wee
world.
But congressmen, like the rich they aspire to become, are very different
from you and me. (Apologies to Scott Fitzgerald.)
One other difference: the Republican malefactors (including Tom DeLay) are out, the Democrats are not only still in office but they are probably being promoted!
Even funnier is the fact that Foley left in disgrace because of the same charge for which it was argued that the other William Jefferson, Clinton, should have excused him from being punished...because it was only about sex!
Hypocrisy, anyone?
What's that? In the Foley case it was child molestation, whereas Monica was above the age of consent? Oh, yeah?
Washington D.C. - Age of Consent Laws
The following information was taken from the Online Source for the District of Columbia at http://government.westlaw.com/linkedslice/default.asp?SP=DCC-1000
Subchapter I. General Provisions. (Refs & Annos) § 22-3001. Definitions.
(3) "Child" means a person who has not yet attained the age of 16 years.
(4) "Consent" means words or overt actions indicating a freely given agreement to the sexual act or contact in question. Lack of verbal or physical resistance or submission by the victim, resulting from the use of force, threats, or coercion by the defendant shall not constitute consent.
The pages in question were not under 16 and they not only accepted but willingly engaged in the email correspondence. So, you Clinton defenders, go ahead and now argue that Foley was worse because it was, ah, gay sex. What's that...you don't want to make that argument? I thought not.
R. Emmett Tyrrell (my all-time champion of double-lettered names such that I hope his first name is Ranndall rather than a more prosaic Robert or something) has his own new strategy for war:
The Democrats' abandonment of this
war makes it apparent that an entirely new strategy is necessary if our
military is to be used to achieve our diplomatic goals. The military has
demonstrated it is powerful enough to smash any aggressor anywhere on Earth,
but American public opinion is not sufficiently resolute to sustain a
commitment of U.S. troops in hostile environs. Thus we must adopt a strategy
that recognizes the impatience of public opinion, as well as public
opinion's enthusiasm during the initial stages of combat.
My suggestion is that the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White
House adopt what might be called the Strategy of the Bar Room Brawler
(SBRB). According to SBRB, if a foreign government is not amenable to our
diplomatic requests, we simply bust up the joint. Photographs of what we
accomplished in Serbia merely with air power and in Iraq with air power and
armor ought to persuade even a stubborn fellow like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that
if he continues to displease us his office will be a wreck. And if he plans
to drive home or even take public transportation, forget it. Tehran's
infrastructure will be a mess overnight. Within a few months our
lightning-quick military could turn much of Iran into a ruin, and according
to the SBRB protocols our troops would be home in no time.
Actually, Israel recently demonstrated this technique in Lebanon. Hezbollah, to my amusement, initially proclaimed that they 'won' the war. Then they looked at the rubble and said if they had known this was what winning was like (it was a first time for them), they wouldn't have started the war. It's a serious subject, but, really, I couldn't help laughing.
I've never figured out these people who keep telling us that we cannot possibly stop Iran's nuclear program with bombs and rockets because it is too diversified, spread out all over the countryside. Uh huh. Does this mean every separated facility is redundant, or will taking out any one critical part make the other pieces not fit together? And what about when it comes time for assembling and fueling a nuclear-tipped rocket...don't all the parts have to be brought together somewhere, now all in one spot? And by what means will the components be brought together if the transportation infrastructure has been destroyed?
New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would still be in her
cheering stage as our troops headed home. And with our troops safely home
from Iran we would not even have to clean up the place. Leave that thankless
task to the French and the Germans. With the money we save we could get on
with busting up Syria.
The Cold War had the strategy of Containment. For a while Washington
talked up other strategies, "Brinkmanship" and "Roll Back." The demands of
history change. The Cold War was not as dominated by instant gratification
as the present. The mentality of many Americans and the enormous capacity
for destruction of our military can be wedded for a very effective and
exciting strategic doctrine. "Bust the place up and be gone"...
I like it. Bush should have looked at Clinton's Public Law and decided he liked all of it but the replacement of Saddam's regime with some kind of democracy. Too impractical, he should have said, let's just kill him and then come home. Democracy in Iraq is impractical, they're too used to tribes and clans and religious leaders.
At least he would have reminded the Democrats what their principles used to be.
Thinking more of Tyrrell's name...of course it has to be the prosaic single-lettered 'Robert', otherwise he wouldn't have abbrevviatted it.
Patrick J. Michaels on global warming in The American Spectator:
If you could take the boredom, you could have read hundreds of news stories on this since An Inconvenient Truth debuted on May 25. But you'll find very little mention of a paper that appeared a mere six weeks later, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which should have stopped the whole show cold. The work is by Brenda Hall from the University of Maine and several co-authors.
(The) giant Elephant Seals (Mirounga leonine)
... generally hang out a long distance form Antarctica. Most of their
breeding rookeries are a good 2,000 miles away on islands in the open ocean,
where they feed. Most of the Antarctic coast is hemmed by huge ice shelves
that prevent them from finding food.
But that wasn't always the case. According to Hall's paper, a large area of
the Antarctic coast was ice-free between 1,100 and 2,300 years ago. Elephant
seals established multiple rookeries on the continent. Temperatures had to
be much warmer than they are today, for at least 1,200 years, and yet
there was no disintegration of the large ice shelves. Hall et al. then noted
another similar period, almost twice as long, from 4,000 to 6,000 years ago.
The warm millennium ended as the world's temperature descended from what
scientists call the "Medieval Warm Period" into the "Little Ice Age."
Antarctica has yet to fully recover from this last period, as temperatures
averaged across the continent actually showed a net cooling in the last
three decades.
The good thing Algore is actually doing, while making a scientific fool of himself, is finally making people aware that there are natural trends of warming and cooling which have gone through many cycles before Daryl Hannah ever appeared on the scene to quest for fire and other things necessitating the invention of hair spray.
Not, you understand, that I'm not enjoying the Algore show immensely.
I'm a fan of Jay Nordlinger, and I appreciate this tip, but I still can't help myself:
Look, as far as I’m concerned, you can say “Shiite” or you can say “Shia.” (I prefer “Shiite,” mainly because that’s what I grew up with, and I’ve always thought of “Shia” as a more British expression.) But you must not say “Shiite” and “Shia” in the same article! Choose ye!
Uh, Jay...can you use 'you' and 'ye' in the same article?
Ever wondered why with all of this deficit spending and the trade deficit talk that the world hasn't come crashing down? Thomas E. Nugent in NRO on balancing liabilities with assets, some good points:
...the boogeyman strategy of scaring the American public about how deficit spending is eroding the future for our children ignores all of the assets that have been built with increased government spending and, when necessary, borrowing. Such assets add to our future well being. To say that deficit spending simply detracts from our potential is like a homeowner viewing the liability of his mortgage without considering the asset value of his home.
Politicians veer down this wrong path when they ignore the two-handed impact of such deficits. For example, when an American buys a Toyota, he exchanges one asset with his Japanese counterpart, who in turn gets the equivalent of an I.O.U. for future purchases of U.S. goods and services. And when the counterparty decides to convert future goods into current goods, the transaction will create job demand and increase economic activity here at home. Liabilities? These deficits are valuable.
There is a timing element to all this. Current trade deficits create future economic growth. By ignoring the value of the demand for future goods, politicians try to scare Americans into believing that the foreign creditor will pull the plug on our financial credibility and the dollar will come crashing down. If that expectation were true, foreigners who fear a declining dollar would begin to convert those dollars into goods and services quickly, thereby accelerating U.S. economic activity. Since economic strength contributes to a stronger currency, the increased economic activity would reverse any dollar decline. And if foreigners decide not to buy those goods and services from the U.S. and the dollar falls in value, foreign holders of these dollars would be penalized — not U.S. individuals.
If the liabilities implied by much of today’s deficit analysis were matched with the assets (both tangible and intangible) created by the government and foreign spending, wrongheaded rhetoric would quickly be replaced by responsible and balanced discussion.
I've always been amused at the idea that the foreign holders of our treasury bills were going to "dump" them and that would somehow be harmful to the United States. Look, let's say China buys a $1000 t-bill, giving the US treasury the money in return for the piece of paper. After a while, China decides the declining dollar has made that t-bill worth less than face value so it decides to "dump" it off to some subsequent purchaser for less than $1000. How does this affect the U.S. treasury? It doesn't, because the treasury is still obliged to redeem the bill when it's due, no matter who holds it, for the face amount. If China "dumps" the bill off to someone else for fewer dollars then China is the one who takes the loss. If China wants to "dump" it back to the US treasury for fewer dollars, the treasury would be delighted to accommodate them.
The US may rightly worry about China's willingness to make future purchases, but that's a different ballgame.
But people buy and sell discounted notes all the time, it's quite normal practice. When they do, both buyer and seller have an economic reason for doing so.
Similarly, the talk about the "cost" of the war in Iraq isn't meaningful unless you can differentiate what costs are actually over and above what would normally be spent. For instance, if you have a 500,000 person army then you have to make that payroll whether those troops are in Iraq or Iowa. So first you have to figure what the over-and-above costs are, the difference between them being in Iraq rather than Iowa.
Another thing that seems to get overlooked in figuring the cost of the war in Iraq is the money we were spending just maintaining the no-fly zones that are no longer required. We spent many millions of dollars a year for a dozen years just patrolling the Iraqi skies and dodging Saddam's missiles, and that amount has to be taken into consideration. We wore out planes and pilots and burned billions of gallons of jet fuel, plus fired off quite a few rockets of our own during that time.
Nugent makes a good point: the politicians are using the numbers to manipulate the voters, not making them reconcile on any kind of balance sheet by matching assets with liabilities.
Americans (including myself) are woefully ignorant about economics, anyhow. For instance, if a thousand of us each took $1000 in cash and got together and formed a bank, that $1 million would represent the bank's assets, right? Wrong. That would be the amount of the bank's liabilities.
See what I mean? It gets worse...if our newly-formed bank loaned our former money to Zambibwistan, that note promising to repay it someday would be our bank's asset!
Funny, huh? Now, do you want to talk about trade 'deficits'? Okay, let's say I buy $1 billion more from China than they do from me, meaning they have $1 billion dollars coming back here some day to buy stuff from me. Does it make rational business sense, from my point of view, for those dollars to appreciate in value (i.e., grow 'stronger') in the meantime? No, not from my point of view.
People who want a 'stronger' dollar often think they should want this because it is, well, better to be strong than to be weak, don'tcha know?
The fact is that the question has a different answer depending on the circumstances at the time. There is no single answer that fits all situations, past, present and future.
Well, enough of trying to understand world economics.
I was amused at this Newsweek item by Fareed Zakariah:
"For all his intellectual shortcomings, Bush recognized that the roots of Islamic terror lie in the dysfunctions of the Arab world. Over the last 40 years, as the rest of the globe progressed economically and politically, the Arabs moved backward. Decades of tyranny and stagnation—mostly under the auspices of secular, Westernized regimes like those in Egypt and Syria—have produced an opposition that is extreme, religiously oriented and, in some cases, violent. Its ideology is now global, and it has small bands of recruits from London to Jakarta. But at its heart it is an Arab phenomenon, born in the failures of that region. And it is likely only to be cured by a more open and liberal Arab culture that has made its peace with modernity. Look for example at two non-Arab countries, Malaysia and Turkey, whose people are conservative and religious Muslims. Both places are also reasonably successful economies, open societies and functioning democracies. As a result, they don't produce swarms of suicide bombers. Iraq after Saddam presented a unique opportunity to steer history on a new course."
It's been rather amusing to me (and apparently to Bush, too, who appreciates being misunderestimated) how Bush has all of these intellectual shortcomings, is a moron if not actually an idiot (characterized by people who typically do not know the difference) yet still manages to fool people his intellectual superior as well as recognize some things that, well, just can't be explained.
I'm still impressed at the ability of anyone able to look at a graduate of both Yale and Harvard as well as someone capable of flying a military fighter jet solo and still describe them as having intellectual shortcomings, despite which they still somehow succeed. What do they call that...chutzpah?
I can't help but wonder if Zacariah thinks that he, himself, has any intellectual shortcomings?
evening
My internet service has slowed to a crawl, I might as well do the same. Tony got to do some Christmas shopping today, first with Carol and then with me, but it didn't wear him out any, he spent most if not all of his nap time awake. Whatever, he stayed in his bed and Carol wrapped some small presents for putting under the tree. When he discovered them he yelled excitedly upstairs for me to come down and see what had happened. Surprisingly enough, he isn't hot to open them immediately.
He's quite a shopper, that kid...he wants one of everything he sees!
Christmas season begins tomorrow as we go to one of our neighbor's houses for brunch. Sunday afternoon we are invited to another's plus church afterwards, should be interesting.
One of these days I suppose we have to come to some kind of terms with Tony's, ah, religious faith. I mean, his mother's a Catholic, at least superficially, as is much of the country, but Carol and I are rather like refugees from various Protestant flavors, so what to do? What culture will he live in, after all? I think an appreciation for religious belief is a good thing, in general, but I'd also prefer that he didn't find himself uncomfortable with having it forced upon him, like we did.
I well remember the time I gave up on churches, if not religion...and actually we often wrongly confuse the two as being the same thing. Churches are political organizations composed of religious people. When I got out of the Marine Corps and went back to college I was very lonely, 21-year-old without a girlfriend, hadn't had any teen-age dating experience to speak of, a real misfit, so I started attending the "youth services" portion of my parents' Presbyterian Church in Salt Lake City, simply to meet some young women my age.
It worked fairly well until one Sunday, after our Bible study was over, I suggested we all go down to the bowling alley (still the word used, in those days) and continue getting acquainted. They were taken aback...not by the thought of bowling but by the idea of doing it ON SUNDAY. I realized then and there that I was not going to fit in with this group. Bowling on Monday was okay but not on Sunday, after you had already been to a whole day of worship services and study? I failed to see the logic...if bowling was 'bad' then no day would be appropriate, but if it was okay then why not on Sunday evening?
Well, that's religious organizations for you, some Presbyterian bigwig decided that, it wasn't a case of religious belief but political belief.
My favorite comment about churches was made by Ann Landers, who was Jewish, if I recall. When I was a kid people always went to church in their "Sunday best" and everybody was on their best behavior. Whenever the town drunk showed up the righteous people were scandalized that he dared to appear. What a hypocrite, they complained.
Ann said that churches were not museums for saints but hospitals for sinners. She put it more in perspective for me than anyone ever has.
Nearly eleven and somebody in the neighborhood has decided to fire off their fireworks, sparkling rocks which fortunately do not detonate, on an otherwise quiet Friday night. Poco is upset and wants to come in and huddle under my feet at the same time I am ready to give up and get to sleep. A bit more than a week of this left to go...
Looking forward to Christmas morning for the first time in many years, however! Christmas is really for kids and the parents who have them, that's all there is to it. The night before, after Tony goes to bed, we will move in all of the bigger boxes from the garage for him to find the next morning.
It isn't obvious what the playhouse is, right now it's some big pieces of plastic all taped together, so he won't figure that out until we start putting it together. I expect that with each piece he will get more and more excited...and that, of course, is OUR Christmas present, watching him. This was an idea I had not planned, it cost more than I wanted to spend, but when I saw it I realized it was perfect. Even though stoutly constructed of study plastic, it will do well to last the year, I think, although I might be surprised.
I figure it will be indoors until such time as Luis and I get the outdoor platform built, at least a couple of months with him working one day a week, and after that who knows? Carol is already complaining that what I want to build is too high off the ground ("he'll fall off and break his neck"), but I try to look back at what I did (and avoid shuddering) and what I did away from home if that was what it took, and I figure that between 6-8 feet will be a good compromise height.
Putting the playhouse together on Christmas morning is going to be the main event. He won't have any idea what it is when he sees the parts all taped together now, he'll figure it out bit by bit as it takes shape. And I'll let him run the electric screwdriver putting it together, once I show him how...this kid is really a champion, I could not be prouder of him if he was my own flesh and blood.
This is a learning experience for me, too. I had a semi-adoption experience several decades earlier with my wife's kids by another husband, then we added our two to the group. I put forth a lot of effort not to differentiate between the children but only they can tell you how well I succeeded. Tony, though, comes all by himself and alone, he doesn't have any idea who our other kids are, the concept is still beyond him, and somewhat to my surprise I do not have to make any effort at all now to find myself considering him to be my boy, my son.
True, I fought a hard fight to get here. With Carol's support, I took on the state of Costa Rica for Tony. (It might be more fair to say that she was the instigator and I did it as a result of her pushing me. Actually WE took on the state of Costa Rica and, in fairness, I probably would not have done it without her urging.)
I find myself looking at him and thinking what a beautiful child he is, as ga-ga as any father could be. (Ladies: you would KILL to have his eyelashes!) His brown little body is the perfect color, I'd trade mine for it any day. He's bright, he's opinionated, he's tough, he's a survivor...and he loves his Papá.
What a kid.
Three more days until Christmas morning.
Hurry up!