The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Heh.

The Real World Consequences of Environmentalism and "Social Consciousness"

.....Are summed up nicely here. (Via Instapundit)

The Carbon Credits Scam

It didn't take nearly as long as I thought it might for the nascent cottage industry of carbon offset trading to be exposed as yet another scam. The Guardian (yes, they do occasionally produce some good journalism) has an article today headlined: "Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved". For a program run under the auspices of the UN and the European Commission it's really to be expected that the thing should turn out to be incompetently administered (at best), massively corrupt and not just ineffective but totaly counterproductive in trying to achive its purported goals. Read the whole article (h/t: Instapundit).

I have a degree in Geography which included some course work in Climatology. When I was in college, the environmental Chicken Littles were running around yelling about an imminent ice age. Now it's global warming or climate change. They act as if climate change is something new. Well, it's not. If I took anything away from that course it's that climate change is constant. It always has been. It always will be. Even if global average temperatures are rising, and there's plenty of evidence they aren't, it is not necessarily true that the causes are anthropogenic and before we embark on economically ruinous regimes such as Kyoto to try and reverse it we need to understand our ability, if any to influence it.

One of the things often cited as evidence of global warming is the retreat of the Greenland ice caps yet from 1940 until today they grew enough to cover a Lockheed P-38 in ice to a depth of 260 feet to cite just one example.

There is a lot of misinformation out there about climate change and one of the best sources to cut through the clutter is probably The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) by Christopher Horner. I read it a couple of months back and highly recommend it as a reference sourcebook on the subject. For all the assertions the environmentalists make, Horner has the counter evidence. Don't let anybody try to tell you "the debate is over". Read this, then decide for yourself which side to believe.

The Great Immigration Debate

The Big Immigration Reform Debate continues to roll on in Washington. By most estimates there are something like 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States and because we have what is effectively an open border that number continues to rise. The debate over what to do breaks down into three major areas:

1. What do we do about closing the border;


2. What do we do about the illegals that are already here and;


3. How do we allow for orderly legal immigration in the future

Closing the border will take two things. Physically preventing illegal border crossing is one, but not necessarily the first or only step to take. I would submit that the first thing we have to do is dry up the source of jobs that is attracting illegals in the first place and that means cracking down on the employers that are hiring them. We have laws to deal with this already. We need to get serious about enforcing them. If there are no jobs to come for, we will have removed an incentive for people to risk their lives crossing the desert on foot. The second, or actually concurrent step is to build a border fence and beef up the Border Patrol. to interdict the illegal crossers. There are also some very good reasons to do this from a national security point of view. It isn't just poor Mexicans that might use this route to get into the country. There are people from further afield that don't especially like us and have stated that they would like to do us harm.



Now to the part of the debate revolves around what to do about those that are already here. For one faction in the debate the gut reaction is "round'em up and deport them." The other extreme says that's impractical so we should just give up and hand them citizenship. It's true that neither extreme is practical, but why does the solution have to be either/or? We should make it known that if a person is here illegally, they will be deported and then we have to follow through. This may make a person who is here illegally a trifle nervous. If we have accomplished our first step of drying up jobs and are working on closing the border some number of people, maybe a few, maybe a lot, may just opt to go home on their own. The bottom line is that we don't have to set out with the stated goal of rounding up 12 million people and showing them the door. Without jobs to support themselves and the knowledge that they are certain to get sent home anyway if caught a lot will leave and a lot will be deterred from trying to get here in the first place.

[Update May 27, 2007: Even as I am in the middle of writing this, Mark Steyn's weekly column makes much the same point:

OK. But whatever happened to non-mass deportation? Not long after Sept. 11 I chanced to be heading north on I-87 between Plattsburgh and Montreal. At the border crossing from Champlain, N.Y., to Lacolle, Quebec, I noticed that what appeared to be a mini-refugee camp had sprung up. It's not often that you see teeming hordes lining up to get into Canada, so I asked the immigration officer what was going on. He rolled his eyes and did a bit of boy-those-crazy-Yanks stuff and then explained that most of the guys waiting to get in were from Pakistan. In the wake of 9/11, the authorities had rounded up various persons of interest in the New York City area. Whether or not they were terrorists, they'd certainly violated immigration law, overstaying visas and so forth. And as a result, many other illegal immigrants from Muslim countries had concluded it was time to liquidate their assets and break for the border. In other words, the roundup of a relatively small number of persons sent thousands more fleeing to Canada. As that Missouri grandma would say, don't look on it as losing a Pakistani illegal but as gaining a Canadian neighbor. (empahsis mine: JB) ]

The final question is how do we fix the legal system of immigration? We need to do this not just for those that want to get here but because we need them. The system as it stands now is completely overwhelmed. For those who want to do it the right way, the process can take a decade or more. That is not an insignificant chunk of a person's life. We need their energy and their talent. This means raising the number of legal immigrants we allow into the country and and overhaul of the immigration bureaucracy, including increased staffing, to handle the volume of applications. Reducing the wait time will also reduce incentives to try to come here illegally. I need to give more thought to how to accomplish this and perhaps I should save it for another post. One thing I am sure of is that I am not in favor of rewarding the people who came here illegally by granting them any sort of legal status. They can leave or continue to "live in the shadows." My bet is that if living here illegally becomes difficult enough they'll do the former.

Another Government School Success Story

It's the morning after graduation night in the East Valley. It looks like someone needs to give his or her diploma back......



I took this with my phone on the way to work this morning (please pardon the bug splat). If you're having difficulty reading it, it says "Trasporting a 2007 Graduate"

Where My Blog Got It's Name......

If any of you (of the very few who read this) have ever wondered what the hell I was thinking when I named my blog, a bit of explanation may be in order. I'm a great fan of absurdist humor and Douglas Adams was a master of the genre. He was really a satirist writing under the guise of science fiction and he was a keen observer of politics and politicians.

I pride myself on having voted in every election I've been eligible to vote in since I was old enough to vote. I do it not because I feel it really does any good but because I feel that if I don't at least try to affect the outcome, I have no right to complain about it. I complain a lot these days.

When I chose my blog name I had in mind a particular passage in Douglas Adams' book, "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish," the fourth book in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" series, the begining of Chapter 36 to be specific:

[A spaceship carrying a 100 foot tall silver robot had just landed in, or more accurately, on, a rather expensive chunk of London real estate, specifically Knightsbridge and more particularly, Harrod’s:...]

"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further
grinding, "take me to your Lizard."

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said Ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard
might get in. Got any gin?"

And that pretty accurately sums up the state of our democracy (or should I say Democratic Republic) nowadays. Thanks to the fact that our political class gets to draw the boundaries of voting districts ( better known as gerrymandering) they also get to choose the voters that put and keep them in office, not the other way around. Couple with that the fact that we have a mainstream media ( the old MSM again) that is, at worst, more or less completely in the tank for one side or else, at best, too damned lazy to check facts and just fully report them without bias, the average voter is too poorly informed to make rational choices. And they vote anyway. Bill Whittle described the way it works best in his essay "Magic." What results from the creation of lies from truth he describes is what he further describes in "Seeing the Unseen" Part 1 and Part 2, a people that will believe nearly anything. I still hold out hope that my fellow citizens will figure it out ( I have to to remain sane) but time is getting short for them to do it without dire consequences.

The Open Borders/Amnesty Crowd Should Read This...

Mark Steyn's weekly column in the Chicago Sun Times is particulary on point this week. It's about the practical consequences of not doing anything about our porous borders. The Democrats see illegal immigrants as a source of future votes, businesses as cheap labor and the politicians of both parties want to pander to both. But now we have a case of three Kosovar Albanian brothers, smuggled into the country as young children, brought up in America, turned jihadi and now they've been arrested for plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix, NJ along with three other radical(ized) muslims.

We were lucky (again) this time. How many cases like this will it take before we get a clue and get serious about locking down our borders? I fear that once again, fear of being labled a racist stops too many from getting serious about this. It is not racist to want to control your borders and know who you are letting in. Quite the contrary, when you are dealing with people whose professed aim is to kill as many of us non-believers as they possibly can, we'd better damn well know who and where they are.

Bill Whittle Decides to Become a Regular

One of the most eloquent, moving and thought provoking writers the blogosphere has produced over the last few years is Bill Whittle. You'll see that he's over in my sidebar. He doesn't post often but when he does you'd better make sure you have some time to read because his posts are long and you won't want to stop.

Bill has just announced that he is going to become a regular poster. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that it's true. Frequent posting is a hard thing to keep up with. Just look at my post frequency. Like Bill, I always think that by the time I am ready to opine on something, I feel like someone else has already said it and said it better than I can. So where's the value add to me piling on? Unlike me, Bill is a prolific and thoughtful writer. His work connects with me, and a lot of other people on a very visceral level. As more than one person has put it (to paraphrase), "until Bill came along and said it, I thought I was alone in feeling it." Well no more. Bill's unique voice speaks for and to a lot of us.

Killers and Guns.

I found this post at Clasically Liberal (via Instapundit). It details several cases where armed civilians stopped a guy on a shooting rampage and the media have conveniently forgotten to mention the fact. I knew about several of these myself. In fact the incident at Appalachian Law School came to my mind almost immediately after I heard the news about Cho Seung-Hui's killing rampage last week.

There's also this link to a video of Penn & Teller on gun control. It's 28 minutes long but, hay, it's Penn & Teller. Watch it. You won't be sorry.

The central point both of these items make is that in every case where one of these psychos has killed a lot of people, gun control was in effect, in the form of "gun-free zones." All they do is reassure a would-be killer that his intended victims will be defenseless, in fact they seem to choose the venue for that very reason.

Robert Heinlein once said that "an armed society is a polite society." There's a reason for that.

The Flying Imams - Are They Trying to Set Us Up?

I've been following the story of the "Flying Imams" since the incident at the Minneapolis airport on November 20. I thought at the time that their behavior was odd and had a sneaking suspicion that they were trying to draw attention to themselves, not just innocently praying, as they claimed in the aftermath. I wasn't sure if it was a ploy to create a lawsuit for money (and let's not forget sensitivity training for all involved - shame on you!) or something more sinister. As more and more details come to light I am convinced it was the latter case.

These guys are trying to raise a big stink, trying to embarass US Airways, the crew of the aircraft and the other passengers by invoking those terrible twins, the R-word, racism and the B-word, bigotry. They are calculating that if a similar incident occurs in the near future the next group of passengers or crew will hesitate to say anything for fear of having the dreaded labels of racist or bigot attached to them. This is a cynical manipulation of most American's basic decency and desire to get along with everybody. We see this tactic from grievance mongers all the time. Don't buy it.

It seems like my suspicions are shared by quite a few people. Richard Miniter has a post at Pajamas Media today with lots of detail about the incident, including links to the police report of the incident and to a letter written by one of the passengers to US Airways. Powerline has also been following the story with posts here, here, here and here.

If someone tries to stick you with the label of bigot or racist, and you know damn well you aren't, ignore it and do what you think is right. I'd rather be falsely accused than dead. The Flying Imams are counting on you to appease their faked outrage by backing down or not speaking up in the first place. In other words, call "bullshit" on them with a clear conscience.

UPDATE: Debra Burlingame, the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame, pilot of American Airliens Flight 77 that was crashed into the Pentagon by the 9/11 hijackers, has a column in the December 6 Wall Street Journal. She is quite unequivocal about what she thinks is going on here and really nails the situation perfectly.

My Favorite Holiday Recipe

The holiday season is coming around again (wasn't it just here!???) so it's time to pull out the old recipe file and start cooking. My favorite is Chestnut Soup. I posted it here last year. Unfortunately, Williams-Sonoma didn't have any pre-peeled chestnuts on sale after last year's holidays so I'm going to have to do it the hard way, but it's worth it.

Update: Trader Joe's has frozin peeled chestnuts for thos lucky enough to live near one.

A Loss We Needed

As disappointed as I am that Republicans lost the House and as seems increasingly likely, the Senate, perhaps the loss will provide a much needed corrective to a complacent Republican Party, as long as it takes away the right message. From what I've seen so far, it seems to be doing that. Representative Mike Pence, Chair of the Republican Study Committee said:

"while the scandals of the 109th Congress harmed our cause, the greatest scandal in Washington D.C. is runaway federal spending." He noted that pork-barrel earmarks, midnight votes to pass entitlement programs and lack of Congressional oversight were "not in the Contract with America back in 1994 and Republican voters said 'enough is enough.'"

Senator Tom Coburn had similar remarks (via Instapundit) so I'm feeling reasonably good that some good can come out of all this.

Finally, Bill Whittle also has some wise words. I think he's probably right. This isn't the end of the world. The Democrats have the keys to the car back for the time being. It remains to be seen whether they can drive responsibly. The Republicans have about a year to undertake some introspection and to bring in new leadership that can steer the party back to core principals before the next election cycle gets underway in earnest. If the Democrats give in to their worst impulses a suitably chastened Republican Party has a good shot at coming back in 2008. Here's hoping the lessons of 2006 take.

New Bill Whittle Essay

Fresh on the heels of another great Mark Steyn column, we have another great Bill Whittle essay (does he write any other kind?). What can I say? Go read it. As always, it's long but worth your time.

Mark Steyn on Democrat Unseriousness

Mark Steyn has another great column (does he write any other kind?) about John Kerry and the Democrats attempts to have it both ways on the war in Iraq.

So their [Democrats] "support" is objectively worthless. The indignant protest that "of course" "we support our troops" isn't support, it's a straddle, and one that emphasizes the Democrats' frivolousness in the post-9/11 world. A serious party would have seen the jihad as a profound foreign-policy challenge they needed to address credibly. They could have found a Tony Blair -- a big mushy-leftie pantywaist on health and education and all the other sissy stuff, but a man at ease with the projection of military force in the national interest. But we saw in Connecticut what happens to Democrats who run as Blairites: You get bounced from the ticket. In the 2004 election, instead of coming to terms with it as a national security question, the Democrats looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue they needed to neutralize.

I wonder if they really think we're stupid enough to believe them when they say they support the troops [you know they do - Ed]. The best way to support the troops is to get behind the mission and see it all the way through. If we don't, the resulting defeat will be worse than a dozen Vietnams.

Read the whole thing of couse.

World's Biggest Windbags Thinkers

SMASH has a great post up about a conference of "the world's biggest thinkers" to be held in Berlin where 112 conferees will sit around a table and atttempt to come up with answers to 100 questions distilled down from a list of 10,000 questions submitted by people around the world. SMASH has taken the liberty of giving them a good head start by answering the first 20 (individuals do, after all, work far more efficiently than committees) for them with his trademark humor, accuracy and conciseness. Some of his commenters also have some good answers. I particularly like this from Tantor:

U.S.A.: If all the world's current goods were evenly distributed, what would we each have?

Not much. We'd have even less the day afterwards when everyone realized they couldn't keep what they earned and the rest learned they could get free stuff from the people who worked.

Go read the whole thing.