Mark Steyn Makes An Interesting Connection:

The Medical/Jihad link. Socialized medicine may be bad for your health in more ways than you thought.

"Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can't wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No. But government health care does lead to a dependence on medical staff imported from other countries."

Enviro-Hypocrisy - The Live Earth Concerts

Here's another one for the do as I say, not as I do files. Al Gore's famous Live Earth concert series will do plenty of damage to the environment.

At least some rock stars seem to have their heads screwed on straight (and they're from my Dad's hometown too! Sensible lads.) A quote:

"Rock group Arctic Monkeys have become the latest music industry stars to question whether the performers taking part in Live Earth on Saturday are suitable climate change activists.

"It's a bit patronising for us 21 year olds to try to start to change the world," said Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders, explaining why the group is not on the bill at any of Al Gore's charity concerts.

"Especially when we're using enough power for 10 houses just for (stage) lighting. It'd be a bit hypocritical," he told AFP in an interview before a concert in Paris. Bass player Nick O'Malley chimes in:

"And we're always jetting off on aeroplanes!" "

More On Reporting Versus Reality

Powerline has a post up that links to many of the same items I link to in the post below this. It's the update at the bottom of their post that is really telling though. They linked to the same Instapundit post I did and got an email from a journalist as a result. It's quite an admission.

"A journalist whose name you'd recognize emails:

Yon's story doesn't get attention because it is humiliating.

It is humiliating because it is obvious that we media – and our allies in the state department, the legal trade, the NGOs, the Democratic Party, the UN, etc., - can’t do squat about such determined use of force.

Our words, images, arguments and skills can’t stop the killing. Only the rough soldiers and their guns can solve the problem, and we won’t admit that fact because the admission would weaken our influence and our claim to social status.

So we pretend Yon’s massacre – and the North Korean killing fields, the Arab treatment of women, the Arab hatred of Israel, etc. - doesn’t exist, and instead focus our emotions and attention on the somewhat-bad domestic things that we can ‘fix’ with our DC-based allies. Things such as Abu Ghraib, wiretapping, etc. When we ‘fix’ them, then we get status, applause, power, new jobs, ego, etc.

Please don’t be surprised. We media are an interest group not much different from the automakers, the unions, and the farmers."

Michael Yon and Michael Totten - The Anti Tokyo Rose.

In contrast to our own invested-in-defeat press, Michael Yon is a self-funded, independent reporter who gets out with the troops in the field and tells the story of what is going on in Iraq the way it really is. In other words, he gets out of the safety of the Green Zone and sees for himself whereas most of the western press, if they ever go to Iraq at all, report from the hotel and rely on stringers who may or may not be who they say they are and who frequently feed them false reports designed to undermine our cause and our will to see this through. In other words, they work for the enemy. Further, the press makes no effort to independently verify the claims they report, accepting them completely uncritically.

Like Michael Yon, Michael Totten is another independent and self-funded (read donor supported) reporter who covers Iraq and the Middle East and if you want a much better informed perspective on what is happening in Iraq and the wider Middle East, this is the go-to guy. You will not get this quality or depth of reporting from the New York Times, AP, Reuters, CNN or any of the mainstream press outlets that are more interested in the political damage they can inflict on George Bush than they are in the long-term survival of western civilization.

Update: Another example of AP and Reuters passing on unverified rumors as fact. [7/3]
Another update [7/3]: Michael Yon updates his Bless the Beasts and Children post, linked above.

"On this question of media selectivity, the blogosphere has become incensed that big media mostly ignored the murders, especially given that there are reporters currently in Baqubah. Newsbusters and countless others are on it. More disturbing to many bloggers is that major mainstream players were busted (again) by Pajamas Media
just days ago for reporting outright fabrications of a “massacre” that never
occurred."

Why the failure? "Because that might help Bush."

Tokyo Rose

Strategy Page has an interesting observation today. Our own media is fulfilling the role that Tokyo Rose did in the Pacific theater in WWII. If it weren't for the blogosphere, nobody would call them out on it either. Shameful. (via Instapundit)

Product Review: Garmin c340 Portable GPS

I bought this unit, now known as Karen, just before a trip from Phoenix to San Diego and she performed very well. While I didn't get this option, you can also buy an antenna that plugs into the USB port and pay for a subscription to a real-time traffic alert service that will get you around traffic jams.

The c340 provides turn by turn instructions and has enhanced voice commands, i.e., it tells you not only when to turn, but the name of the street as well. You can select from several female or male TTS (text to speech) voices. I've chosen Australian English Karen, hence the choice of name. The c340 also has a database of points of interest, restaurants, gas stations, ATMs, etc and a few strokes on the touch sensitive screen will have you on your way to what you need in a few seconds. The interface is completely intuitive and everything is ready to go right out of the box.

The only drawback I've found with the unit is that the map database is probably several years out of date, at least for the area where I live, in a fast growing area east of Phoenix proper. The unit knows nothing of a new surface arterial near my house that has been open for at least 3 years, since I moved here, and a new freeway that has now been open for one year. The result is that if I want the unit to guide me from home to my destination using those roads, it will be busy announcing constant recalculations of route until it gets back into the known world. I suspect this will be an issue with all Garmin GPS units as they share the same map database. Other than that localized glitch, I'd highly recommend this unit. Garmin apparently has a new version of the map software coming out later this year.

UPDATE 11/25/2007: Above I complained about the map database being out of date and was fearing that I would have to pay for an expensive map update. I just learned that I could get updated map software, the 2008 version of City Navigator for free ( because I registered with Garmin). It took me 30 seconds to order online and it will be shipped to me. The vast tracts of Terra Incognita that started less than a mile from my house are now cognita, er, or something like that.

Mark Steyn Nails It. Again.

Mark Steyn has once again hit the nail on the head with a column on illegal immigration and the "comprehensive" immigration reform bill lately resurrected in the Senate. Maybe it's time we all gathered our pitchforks, a barrel or two of tar and some feathers and ran the bastards out of Washington. They certainly don't seem to be interested in representing us any more (i.e. doing their jobs) but rather trying to outdo each other in excercising "leadership," whatever that means. What do these people not get about what we are telling them:

1. Close the damned border
2. Crack down on the employers that are hiring all the illegals.
3. Fix the legal immigration system so it can cope with people who are willing to follow the rules in a timely fashion.

It isn't that hard to understand.

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.