Sen. Dodd -- ignorant or mendacious?

Pick one. From Back Talk:

Here is what Senator Christopher Dodd said about this last Sunday:

Again, this is a civil war going on in Iraq. This is not the United States versus Al Qaida. It's Shia versus Sunnis tearing each other apart. It's gone on for centuries, but particularly here right now.

Dodd is clearly not being truthful about what he knows. He says "This is not the United States versus Al Qaida," but he surely knows all about this:

Al-Qaida group claims killing of 9 GIs in Iraq

MSNBC News Services
Updated: 4:54 p.m. PT April 24, 2007

BAGHDAD - An al-Qaida-linked group posted a Web statement Tuesday claiming responsibility for a suicide car bombing that killed nine U.S. paratroopers and wounded 20 in the worst attack on American ground forces in Iraq in more than a year.

That looks like the United States versus Al Qaeda to me. What does it look like to you?

But let's take a more systematic tour through the evidence concerning the critical role played by al Qaeda in Iraq. In response to the senator's claim, I am going to overwhelm you with compelling evidence from multiple sources showing that al Qaeda is the main enemy we are fighting in Iraq. In light of that evidence (none of which is top secret), I am suggesting that Senator Christopher Dodd is being deliberately misleading. And I am challenging you to prove me wrong.

Much more at the link. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds.

Decoding "Code Monkey"

Clive Thompson, who showed us the Dana octopus squid a while back, has a piece in the NY Times Magazine about Jonathan Coulton. "Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog" is the title; it is not just about Jonathan Coulton, it's more of a look at how MySpace and the Internet in general are changing the relationship between pop artists and their audiences.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Making Light, a musician himself, linked this indirectly, through the video it contains, as one of his sidebar "Sidelights."

World's oldest family business sold

1428 years is a pretty good run.

The world's oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive run last year. Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders' descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.… Two factors were primarily responsible. First, during the 1980s bubble economy in Japan, the company borrowed heavily to invest in real estate. After the bubble burst in the 1992-93 recession, the assets secured by Kongo Gumi's debt shrank in value. Second, social changes in Japan brought about declining contributions to temples. As a result, demand for Kongo Gumi's temple-building services dropped sharply beginning in 1998.

Just another real estate bubble victim.
From Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Songs you didn't know were covers

A list of some of them at Blender. Thanks to Karol Sheinin. Who as a child was closer to the Ft. Dix-terror-plotting Duka brothers than she would have liked.

Canada still affected by the last ice age

In an article titled "Canada's odd low gravity a relic of the ice age," Dawn Walton writes about the Canadian gravitational anomalies. You'd weigh less in parts of Canada than you would in New York or Moscow, though not much.

In 2002, NASA and the German Aerospace Center launched a pair of satellites to circle the planet from 500 kilometres above to map changes in mass and gravity.… The satellites found that the Earth's crust over Canada has not completed what scientists call the "post-glacial rebound." Now, it's clear that the ice age is still affecting the planet.

Like a hangover, and Earth is still a little unsteady from all that ice. This means that Gore and the AGW promoters are like bad friends who won't let a drunk sober up.

Update: And another thing: All this rebounding means that previously glacier-covered land is rising, and previously unglaciated land is sinking, relative to some level, which might be sea level. The water is rising on the southern shores of the Great Lakes, for instance, while sinking on the northern shores, or so it appears. Scotland rising means England is sinking, so the Thames will flood more, but it not the CO2 that's doing it at all. That Globe & Mail article has gone behind a pay wall, so here is Wikipedia on post-glacial rebound, and a New Scientist article, Satellites solve mystery of low gravity over Canada, on the GRACE mapping satellites.

Support the Troops — Let them Win!

Support the troops bumper sticker. There now, that's a little more Google-juice for this item. It's not my Cafe Press shop; the idea was mentioned at Outside the Wire on Feb. 16, and by Feb. 19, it was something you could buy. I guess that was JD Johannes writing, though the posts are not signed. It looks very nice on my white car.

Then again, contributions for projects in Iraq and Afghanistan could be sent to Spirit of America.
Which will do more good than a bumper sticker will do. And then there's Soldiers' Angels, who do not seem to have a cute graphic button, but who do a lot of good for individual members of the armed forces. Project Valour-IT is just one of their projects.

Deep Greens

There's an Anne Rice novel in which the villain is a Deep Green who wants to wipe out the majority of the human race to save the planet -- Servant of the Bones, I think. A horror story, of course. It's been a long time since I read it. Every now and then one of the Deep Greens in the leadership of the movement will come out in public with revelatory statements of the real program. Glenn Reynolds spotted a couple today. Here's one, Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society:

We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.… Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career.… There is, of course, a complexity of problems in adjusting to a new design that will simply allow us to survive the consequences of our past ecological folly. Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach. It won’t be easy but then it’s better than the alternative.

Getting rid of approximately 5,710,000,000 human beings = "a complexity of problems?" There is a new understatement champ in town. But it's all for Gaia, so it's all good.

I won't link to this editorial. But I did take a screenshot.

Update: Can't find the screenshot. I thought some sense of decency or shame would have led to this being taken down. It's still up as of November 2008, so I guess they are actually proud of it. Here's the link to the whole rancid thing.

Sarkozy gagne

Looks like a good margin. Adieu Chirac!

The end is nigh

No more fooling around, now. This is it. The debate is over, and it's time to do something. A massive dose of regulation administered by UN bureaucrats would be a really good place to start.

Global Warmers Give Us 8 Months to Live.

Really, stop that fooling around. You want to live, don't you? Don't make me come down there.

Glenn Beck on warming

CNN has a transcript.

Global clearcutting saves .3°C

In Trees--what about them? I mentioned that not all trees are created equal in their ability to promote or discourage warming. The Economist writes about a daring computer modeler who has taken on the question, "What if we just get rid of all of them?" The assumption by many AGW promoters

that planting trees will make the world cooler than it would otherwise be, is the subject of a newly published study by Govindasamy Bala, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, and his colleagues. Dr Bala has found, rather counter-intuitively, that removing all of the world's trees might actually cool the planet down. Conversely, adding trees everywhere might warm it up.

Dr Bala's model can be told to replace all the world's forests with shrubby grasslands, and left alone to work out how such a change would alter greenhouse-gas concentrations and how that, in turn, would influence the temperature in different places.

When Dr Bala ordered global clearcutting, the model calculated that the atmosphere's carbon-dioxide levels would roughly double by 2100. This is a much greater increase than happens in a business-as-usual simulation, but it would, paradoxically, make for a colder planet. That is because brighter high latitudes would reflect more sunlight in winter, cooling the local environment by as much as 6°C. The tropics would warm up, since they would be less cloudy, but not by enough to produce a net global heat gain. Overall, Dr Bala's model suggests that complete deforestation would cause an additional 1.3°C temperature rise compared with business as usual, because of the higher carbon-dioxide levels that would result. However, the additional reflectivity of the planet would cause 1.6°C of cooling. A treeless world would thus, as he reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, be 0.3°C cooler than otherwise.

If indeed the fate of civilization depends on fractions of a degree, we had better sharpen up the axes and get rid of all those trees. If higher carbon dioxide levels are important only because they lead to warming, but we can have less warming and more CO2 at the same time, that would lead to better crop yields in the regions that are currently under cultivation. Unless the crops were apples. Or timber. But you wouldn't need to harvest any more timber, because you would already have harvested it all. But there would never be any more.

I like trees pretty well. I think we should keep them. Some, at least. The good ones. Treebeard has a list.

Seen at The Unsettled.

Hitchens on Tenet

Chewy and delicious.

[N]ow comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"

Got to break it before you can fix it

Once again Ed Driscoll ties together a number of threads, including an article by Tim Blair called "The Left's love of disaster," which title serves for a summary. It was doctrine of the Marxists, we heard this in the '60's from the Weather Underground and the like, that it was the duty of the revolutionaries to make conditions worse for the common people, so that they, the common people, would rise against their oppressive rulers. Because the conditions had not been oppressive enough before the revolutionary cadres, in their wisdom, proceeded to make things intolerable.

It's this kind of thinking that leads the Democrats to believe that, as I said before, to tank the economy and lose the war quickly, before the election, so that they can blame these things on the current administration and thereby gain political advantage, is actually a good thing to do. And we should not question their patriotism. In their wisdom, they know that worse is better. Eventually.

If you studied Latin long enough, the first sentence of the second paragraph above would seem elegantly periodic. If not, then not so much.

Update, January 24, 2009: Added "Ayers" tag.

Reid says we have lost. So who won?

A commenter at LGF points to this by Salim Mansur:

[…]The war in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, to bring regime change was swift. The post-war effort to help put in place the basic requirements for democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, however, was met -- not surprisingly -- with stiff resistance from both within and outside of Iraq.

Al-Qaida killers and their local supporters learned that indiscriminate violence against fellow Arabs and Muslims could weaken Americans in their commitment to the making of a free and modern Iraq.

Al-Qaida's strategy is seemingly working. Harry Reid, the U.S. Democratic Senate Majority Leader, has declared the war in Iraq is lost. Hence, the winners would be the terrorists -- the barbarian marauders from the 7th century taking full measure of the greatest Western power of the 21st century and its inability to stomach the cost of defeating them.[…]

More on this later. The losing side in a war customarily is required by the winner to pay reparations to the victor. What does Reid have in mind that we should pay to Al Qaeda for reparations? The lives of losing leaders are often forfeit; since Reid has declared the loss, does that make him the loser? Or does he have someone else in mind?

[Update, June 9, 2007: The original link to the Winnipeg Sun for the Salim Mansur article has gone behind a pay wall, so I have changed it to what appears to be the same article at the Toronto Sun.]

Also: At Villainous Company, Cassandra tears Harry Reid a new one and sets off a comment storm.

This from Ramirez at Investors Business Daily:

Flood-Ravaged Ireland

John Derbyshire has a picture of the devastation.

Cho, Che, what's the difference

Once again, Glenn Reynolds catches the creator of the The People's Cube in a somewhat more serious mood.

Che had killed many more “rich kids” than Cho - yet his deeds are glorified by Hollywood, his writings are published worldwide, and his pictures are plastered over the t-shirts of a new generation of “rich kids” - the faceless class enemy whom Che would not hesitate to shoot given the chance. Both Che’s and Cho’s speeches are equally delusional - so why does Che get a pass and Cho doesn’t? Because Cho had only killed 33 “rich kids” instead of 33,000? Or because Cho’s mental disorder was documented by a professional psychiatrist?

[…]

Besides acting as a catalyst on a depressed mind, “progressive” education is also a major cause of depression in itself. Imagine growing up while believing that yours is the worst country on the planet, guilty of death and suffering of millions of poor people worldwide, who are being wantonly killed, robbed, enslaved, raped, and tortured so that your mom could shop at the mall and your dad could fill up the tank. The species are dying, the rainforest is dwindling, the ozone hole is growing, and the globe is warming. If it is frightful enough to turn a sensitive adult into a guilt-ridden neurotic, think about a ten-year-old who, in addition, lives with the fear that if we all don’t die of skin cancer by the age of thirty, global warming and raising sea levels will finish everyone off anyway.

The whole thing is worth reading, and it ties in to the idea of old Soviet psyops having become memes perpetuating themselves in the academic and info-spheres, mentioned below.

Natural history of TV

in the Marlin Perkins or Steve Irwin sense. The strip is "Lio" by Mark Tatulli; click to see it bigger.

"I found Saddam's WMD bunkers"

No, not me, I didn't find them. Dave Gaubatz found them. Melanie Phillips has the story. Thanks again to the indefatigable Instapundit. This is a story that needs investigation or debunking. The fact that neither side will talk about it gives it more credibility. And besides, it's what I have thought all along, based only on news reports. Now comes one who claims to have been there. His claims deserve more attention than they are receiving. It sounds like a coverup by all parties.

AP6 may be turning 7

Seven countries, that is.

In a somewhat surprising development, Canada, a long-time supporter of the Kyoto Protocol, announced that it may want to join the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6), a six-nation coalition focusing on voluntary emission-reduction steps and technology transfers. Many environmentalists oppose AP6 out of a fear that it may undermine political support for the legally binding Kyoto treaty.

The partnership, launched in mid-2005, is an agreement among six countries -- Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and the United States -- to develop and share greenhouse-gas reduction technology to combat climate change. According to the AP6 Web site, the six partner countries "represent about half of the world's economy, population and energy use, and they produce about 65% of the world's coal, 48% of the world's steel, 37% of world's aluminum, and 61% of the world's cement." The countries also account for half the world's greenhouse-gas emissions.

I had not heard of the AP6 group before seeing Glenn Reynolds's item this morning. It seems like a much more sensible approach than Kyoto, especially since China and India are included. Two caveats: (1) GR's headline says "Canada joins …" but the story says "may join." (2) Is an ice age on the way? if so, we need more warming to fend it off. Just sayin'.

They are not kids

College students are adults by most measures. Treating them as children only serves to keep them silly. In a way, it's like foot-binding, or as the Bible hath it, twig-bending. Dave Kopel on respect and responsibility.

And Charles Johnson points to this by Mark Steyn, "A Culture of Passivity."

Arma Virumque

is where the following comes from, by way of Jerry Pournelle's mail:

Then and now, or 8 (more) reasons the 1950s are unfairly maligned

A friend in Chicago sent these 8 scenarios comparing life in 1956 and today. We are always told how repressive, staid, homogenizing, and uncreative the 1950s were. These comparisons suggest how far off-base that stereotype is.

1. Scenario: Jack pulls into school parking lot with rifle in gun rack.

1956 - Vice Principal comes over, takes a look at Jack's rifle, goes to his car and gets his to show Jack.

2006 - School goes into lockdown, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.

2. Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fist fight after school.

1956 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up best friends. Nobody goes to jail, nobody arrested, nobody expelled.

2006 - Police called, SWAT team arrives, arrests Johnny and Mark. Charge them with assault, both expelled even though Johnny started it.

There are more. Go read.

Trees -- what about them?

I thought the forests were our friends. Now comes this article by Steven Milloy about a new study showing

that while tropical forests exert a cooling influence on global climate, forests in northern regions exert a warming influence — and it’s not just a trivial climatic effect.

Based on the researchers’ computer modeling, forests above 20 degrees latitude in the Northern Hemisphere — that is, north of the line of latitude running through Southern Mexico, Saharan Africa, central India and the southernmost Chinese island of Hainan — will warm surface temperatures in those regions by an estimated 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100.

Most of the warming is predicted to occur north of 50 degrees latitude — that is, north of the line of latitude running just north of the U.S. border with Canada, through Northern France, Northern Mongolia and Southern Siberia.

Now you could say that the warming and the cooling are both good. That the higher latitudes need a little more warmth and the tropics a little less, so that works out. Will the countries in the North start clearcutting? Hmm, if Canada, Russia, Norway, and so on, lose the warming effect of their forests, they'll need to keep warm somehow. How handy to have a big pile of firewood right there! Oh, wait, burning it would give off CO2, can't do that. Oh dear, oh dear.

Update: Russell Seitz has this in the Wall Street Journal: An Inconvenient Tree.

Otters and Chavez and snow, oh my!

Fausta asks, "Where's my global warming?" A roundup including this story:

An unbudging sheet of sea ice has blocked off the waters where the Alaska Peninsula's sea otters forage, forcing the starving animals inland on a search for food and making them easy prey for wolves and humans, according to a report.

If AGW is the only thing staving off the next Ice Age, I'm all for it.

Inconstant constant

Einstein postulated the cosmological constant, but didn't like it. It seemed to be returning, in the form of dark energy; maybe the dark energy is not there after all. Science: it's not a consensus!

Barbecue tax in Belgium (update: April Fool!)

Belgians have barbecues? They certainly need to be taxed.

Update: Novosti seems to be the only news agency that has this, and they are now saying it was an April Fool's gag. Though they don't say who was the joker.