Environmentalism and its contradictions

The EPA must now decide how to make nature stop polluting itself. The publication of Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" in 1962 inspired the growth of an environmental movement that claimed that the natural state is ideal and man pollutes it. However, new case studies show that the majority of "pollution" now comes from "nature." In the Potomac river, for example, 59% of bacteria comes from wildlife and while merely 16% comes from humans. Potty-training the wildlife is not option, so what is an enviromentalist to do? Kill wildlife? Yes. The Washington Post reports that "Maryland does kill a few hundred geese annually to reduce water pollution."

This all makes clear a problem with the ideology: Nature is not "pure" and not "ideal."

15% of the Potomac's bacteria comes from pets. Will back-to-nature environmentalists insist on taking our pets away from us?

Deterrence works

The law in High Point, NC, tried a new approach when dealing with street-level drug dealers. From the WSJ, they didn't actually prosecute the dealers. Instead, they explained to the drug dealer and his parents a new policy:

The district attorney promised to seek the maximum possible sentences, and the assistant U.S. attorney threatened to bring federal charges, which, he stressed, don't allow for parole. Police from surrounding areas warned them against trying to relocate operations, noting that their names were flagged on statewide law-enforcement computers.

Rev. Stevenson recalls that the alleged dealers "seemed to be paying a lot more attention."

The West End street drug market closed "overnight" and hasn't reopened in more than two years, says Chief Fealy, who was "shocked" at the success.

Clintons continue blame game

From the San Jose Mercury News:

"I'm certain that if my husband and his national security team had been shown a classified report entitled `Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,' he would have taken it more seriously than history suggests it was taken by our current president and his national security team," Hillary Clinton said.

So if, as the Senator claims, the Clinton team would have taken a classified report "seriously," why didn't they take the 1993 WTC bombing "seriously"? After that strike was there any doubt that terrorists were determined to "attack inside the United States"?

If the Clintons don't want to be faulted (see below), they should stop making rediculous claims.

UPDATE: Apparently Bill Clinton not only saw such a document, he signed it.

Civil vs. Uncivil

Discussing people who disagree with his Iraq policy, Pres. Bush today said:

....And those are good, decent, patriotic people who believe that way -- I just happen to believe they're absolutely wrong.

Contrast that with a Democrat discussing the same topic (as reported by the Guardian):

Al Gore has made his sharpest attack yet on the George Bush presidency, describing the current US administration as "a renegade band of rightwing extremists".

The Anchoress has noticed the same thing. She remembers viewing one of the Bush-Gore presidential debates:

At the time of that debate, I was no longer calling myself a “liberal democrat” but I still had not gone over to “the dark side” and pulled a lever for a Republican. But I was struck by Dubya in this debate, both by his amused look at Gore, and by a response he made to a woman in the audience. She got up with a little bit of an attitude, doing the “powerful woman and angry Dem” thing. I don’t recall the question, but Dubya’s answer made me pick my head up from my needlework. He said, simply, “well, this is just a difference of opinion…”

A difference of opinion…after 8 years of the Clintonistas turning every issue into a morality play with the Democrats always on the side of the angels against the “morally reprehensible” Republicans, after listening to Al Gore declare that the 2000 election was “a fight between good and evil…” I was more than relieved to hear “this is just a difference of opinion…”

While the MSM contempt for Republicans long preceded Clinton, I think she is right that Clinton's approach of replacing rational debates with name-calling does seem to have been widely adopted by establishment Democratic politicians. While Hubert Humphrey strongly disagreed with Richard Nixon, it is hard to imagine him referring to Republicans as "renegade right-wing extremists."

History of climate change scares

Sen. Inhofe, chairman of the senate environment and public works committee, has produced a summary of global warming/climate change issues that is, coming from a politician, surprisingly good. For example, he outlines a history of media scares about climate change going back over a century:

Here is a quote form the New York Times reporting on fears of an approaching ice age.

“Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again.”

That sentence appeared over 100 years ago in the February 24, 1895 edition of the New York Times.

Let me repeat. 1895, not 1995.

A front page article in the October 7, 1912 New York Times, just a few months after the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, declared that a prominent professor “Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age.”

The very same day in 1912, the Los Angeles Times ran an article warning that the “Human race will have to fight for its existence against cold.” An August 10, 1923 Washington Post article declared: “Ice Age Coming Here.”

By the 1930’s, the media took a break from reporting on the coming ice age and instead switched gears to promoting global warming:

“America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise” stated an article in the New York Times on March 27, 1933. The media of yesteryear was also not above injecting large amounts of fear and alarmism into their climate articles.

An August 9, 1923 front page article in the Chicago Tribune declared:

“Scientist Says Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out Canada.” The article quoted a Yale University professor who predicted that large parts of Europe and Asia would be “wiped out” and Switzerland would be “entirely obliterated.”

A December 29, 1974 New York Times article on global cooling reported that climatologists believed “the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade.”

The article also warned that unless government officials reacted to the coming catastrophe, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence” would result. In 1975, the New York Times reported that “A major cooling [was] widely considered to be inevitable.” These past predictions of doom have a familiar ring, don’t they? They sound strikingly similar to our modern media promotion of former Vice president’s brand of climate alarmism.

The whole thing is worth reading.

UPDATE: The senator responds to his critics at CNN here.

AP as propaganda

Usually when the press talks about the press, they talk about their high standards, unbiased reporting, and many layers of fact-checkers. In other words, they are in deep denial. That makes it interesting when the Boston Herald's City Editor writes honestly about the problems with wire services:

The Associated Press, the reliable just-the-facts news agency you and I once knew, no longer exists. Amoral propagandists have taken over.

Previously: an NBC correspondent explains the problems with foreign news.

UPDATE: More MSM admissions of bias are here (scroll to "Pope Is Catholic, Media Are Liberal").

CIA war on Bush Administration Continues

The New York Times-CIA alliance continues with another attack on the Bush administration with a story entitled "Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat." In the text of the article, the source for this allegation is "one American intelligence official." So the headline is based on a single anonymous source. The source says his claim backed merely a "passing mention" of Iraq in a larger report. So the NY Times makes a single anonymous source's claim of a passing mention of something into a headline.

UPDATE: In From The Cold has more info from the full report and concludes, not surprisingly, that the NY Times coveraged was biased.

Newsmedia Perfidy

Pham Xuan An died Wednesday. He spent 15 years working as a reporter for AP, Reuters, and Time. He went to off-the-record briefings by US military in South Vietnam and then transferred all he learned to the North Vietnamese. As the NY Times writes:

Mr. An proved invaluable to his spy masters. “I had access to all the Vietnamese bases and their commanders,” he is quoted as telling Mr. [Morley] Safer.... “My superiors wanted to know the strengths of various units. They wanted estimates of the capabilities of commanders — who was corrupt and who was corruptible. They wanted all the political stuff, the same stuff you guys wanted.”

When someone says the press is working for the other side, history shows it might be literally true.

The Blame game works both ways

For years, Democrats have pretended that 9-11 was all Pres. Bush's fault. Remember all the hopes that were placed on a presidential daily briefing that was to prove that Bush knew. Bill Clinton is now red-faced and outraged that anyone could blame him. This seems to be part of Clinton's reaction to the "Path to 9-11" docudrama. The docudrama, using 20/20 hindsight, makes both the Clinton and Bush administrations look stuck on political correctness rather than public safety. The truth is likely that presidents face many priorities and, before 9-11, no one envisioned al Queda as a critically important one.

Helping the poor, not

AP reports on Hugo Chavez's plan to help the poor in the US:

Accusing Bush of neglecting the poor, Chavez started a program last winter for Venezuela's U.S.-based oil company Citgo to sell discounted heating oil to poor American families. It distributed more than 40 million gallons of oil last winter to low-income Americans, and Chavez announced a doubling of that this winter.

The GDP per capital is $40,100 in the US while it is merely $5,800 in Venezuela. If Chavez was interested in helping the truly poor, as opposed to scoring political points, he would be providing his aid to the people of Venezuela. Since Chavez assumed office, the income in Venezuela has not only remained low, it has dropped sharply (contrast with US): If he truly cared about the poor, Chavez would let someone more competent run Venezuela.

California sues laws of physics

California has filed suit against Ford, GM, Toyota, DaimlerChrysler, Honda, and Nissan, "charging that greenhouse gases [CO2] from their vehicles have cost the state millions of dollars."

Pause for a moment and reflect a moment of the nature of fossil fuel (hydrocarbon) combustion and why the "global warming" gas CO2 is produced. When combustion is done, the carbon doesn't disappear. It has to go somewhere. Further, the amount of energy released by combustion (which controls gas mileage) is highest if the carbon ends up as CO2 (which is the lowest energy form of carbon available). So, when a car that burns gasoline produces CO2, it is working at its best. The same, by the way, is true for fossil fuel power plants, whether oil, natural gas, or coal: they all produce CO2 when working properly.

If man-made activities are responsible for global warming, then governments should set policies and enact laws regulating the burning of fuels. California Attorney General Lockyer's lawsuit, however, is merely a political stunt.

A How-to on civilized conversation

Do muslims have a right to be annoyed with Pope Benedict's remarks not violent, just annoyed)? The Anchoress has an answer:

In our house, we have a rule: You have the right to disagree with and be annoyed by anything someone else says, just as soon as you can accurately repeat back to your opponent the thing they said.

I would say that holds true for these fundamentalist Muslims, too. Can they first repeat Benedict’s arguement back to him, accurately? It means reading the speech though, with an honest attempt to comprehend his meaning, and then saying, “this is what you said, Benedict - do we have the right of it?”

If they can do that, then yes..they have a right to be annoyed, if they like. Annoyed. Just like Catholics get “annoyed” when they feel they have been treated obnoxiously at the hands of, say, Hollywood. Annoyed does not mean killing, burning, calling for blood and death or converting people under a sword.

Of course, few will take her suggestion. For many people, outrage seems to be a pleasurable emotion.

The party of hate

I discussed anti-semitism in the Connecticut Democratic primary below. Today, Powerline has a summary of anti-semitism on the part of the Democrats in the Virginia senate race.

Government lost 1,100 laptops

Since 2001, the US Commerce Dept. has lost over 1,100 laptops, including 246 laptops from the Census Bureau which contained personal data on US citizens.

Newspapers continue committing suicide

The Miami Herald attacks Cuban-Americans and, reportedly, loses 1,200 subscriptions. This is reminiscent of the LA Times in 2003 which did a partisan attack on Arnold Schwarzenegger and reportedly lost 1,000 subscriptions.

Newspaper circulation has been declining anyway. They shouldn't be chasing their customers away.

When is a freedom not a freedom?

In Turkey, the government is considering a petition to arrest the Pope when he arrives for violating "freedom of belief and thought":

They said the pontiff had violated Turkish laws upholding freedom of belief and thought by "insulting" Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.

So, how did "freedom of belief and thought" turn into freedom from hearing "insults"?

Proponents of modern multi-culturalism often want to ban insults. Since "insults" are in the mind of the beholder and, for any statement, there is likely to be somebody in this wide world who finds it "insulting," banning "insults" the same is nearly the same as banning speech.

UPDATE: The laws against insulting Turkey will be enforced tomorrow as a novelist is put on trial for having fictional characters in the novel mention the alleged Armenian massacre.

A Democrat discovers supply side economics

Reuters reports:

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore on Monday suggested taxing carbon dioxide emissions instead of employees' pay in a bid to stem global warming.

"Penalizing pollution instead of penalizing employment will work to reduce that pollution," Gore said in a speech at New York University School of Law. ....

"Instead of discouraging businesses from hiring more employees it would discourage business from producing more pollution," Gore said.

This is the opposite of the usual Democratric claim, loudly advocated when tax reduction legislation is before Congress, that taxes would cause no one to change behavior.

The thought of taxing pollution instead of employment is interesting, worthy of consideration if a concrete plan is developed.

France advocates pre-emptive surrender

From today's Independent:

President Jacques Chirac has broken ranks with the US and Britain by calling for the suspension of UN Security Council action against Iran during negotiations over its nuclear programme.....

The concession to Iran seems to be linked to events in Lebanon, where there had been concern that French soldiers may be targeted by Iran's proxy militia, Hizbollah, over France's previously hardline stance in the nuclear negotiations.

Sen. Clinton dissents

While art and movies on the assassination of Pres. Bush are popular on the left, Sen. Clinton stakes out a contrary opinion:

"I think it's despicable," Clinton said of "Death of a President," a fictional film that features a staged assassination of the president in 2007. "I think it's absolutely outrageous. That anyone would even attempt to profit on such a horrible scenario makes me sick."

It will be interesting to see if this hurts her in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

UPDATE: 'Death of a President' wins the Fipresci prize at the Toronto film festival with the jury praising its telling a "larger truth."

UPDATE: Dr. Sanity comments on the "larger truth" angle of this movie:

When people "distort reality" and have the delusion that by doing so they are revealing a "larger truth"--we tend to refer to them as mentally ill; and, in general do not give them awards for such behavior....

More on tolerance, San Francisco style

Apropos of the meaning of tolerance in Pakistan (see below), TORiSF has an excellent collection of posts on the meaning of tolerance in San Francisco: see here, here, and here.

In both cases (San Francisco and Pakistan), an appeal to 'tolerance' appears to be a one-sided request meaning "you are instructed to do nothing which I might find offensive." This, of course, is the opposite of the dictionary definition: "indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own."