Month: September 2004

Scientists and policy makers think global warming probably continues unabashed, according to the simulations they run, and as a result, the United States should hobble its industry and become a socialist state like enlightened European failures-in-making:

• Blair to urge US to take tougher action on global warming
  

  Tony Blair will today urge the United States to commit itself to a tougher action to combat global warming and promise that a list of green policies will be included in Labour’s general election manifesto.

  The Prime Minister is to raise the profile of green issues as part of a drive to woo back people disaffected by the Iraq war.

  Labour’s private polling shows that “progressive voters”, many of whom were alienated by Mr Blair’s stance on Iraq, regard the environment as a top priority.

  Speaking to a conference staged by the Prince of Wales’s Business and the Environment Programme, Mr Blair will stop short of a full-frontal attack on President George Bush but make clear Britain will expect America to accept its responsibilities on global warming when it takes over the presidency of the G8 group of leading industrialised nations in January.

  Mr Blair, who believes the Kyoto Treaty does not go far enough, will reiterate his call for the United States to sign it. He will identify climate change as one of the greatest challenges facing the planet, saying that one country acting alone cannot solve the problem.

  Thanks, Tony, for calling for American action while overseas. How about talking to dirty-but-growing industrial Asian companies, who pump out greenhouse gases, soot, and air pollution that blow easterly towards our countries? No? Can’t stop them because they don’t have “enlightened” populations willing to commit seppukku over their unjust strength?

  Why don’t you spend time on possible dreams. Like getting the United States to adopt the Euro.

• SAN FRANCISCO
  ‘Cool gray city’ projected to turn murderously hot
  Temperatures likely to rise by mid-century as a result of global warming, study warns

  San Francisco’s trademark cool summers are likely to heat up dramatically before the century is over, scientists said Monday, bringing frequent heat waves and a big jump in heat-related deaths.

  A new city-by-city analysis of California climate projections suggests that everybody’s favorite “cool gray city of love” may be in for a shock from the local impact of global climate change.

  Critics, however, said that such doomsday global-warming scenarios were highly speculative — designed mostly to sway public opinion and influence policy-makers considering proposals to cut heat-trapping vehicle emissions.

  The latest projections by the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., suggest that in a worst-case scenario, San Francisco can expect 55 heat- wave days — three or more consecutive days of temperatures above 79 degrees — a year by the 2050s and up to 135 such days a year by the 2090s, compared with only 10 to 15 heat-wave days in the 1990s.

  Union of Concerned Scientists? Sounds like they might have an agenda outside of science, but it’s remarkable that anyone can claim the mantle of “scientist” by writing computer simulations of things that might be instead of studying things that are where conclusions need to be repeatable.

  But then again, I’ve never gotten a government grant, so what do I know about real science?

Meanwhile, after a notoriously cool summer:

Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts colder, snowier winter for much of country

Time to break out the long underwear. The Old Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a colder and snowier winter for a wide swath of the country.

The editor-in-chief says it’ll be colder than average from the Rocky Mountains eastward.

The exceptions will be Montana, Wyoming, northern New England and the Appalachians, but even these areas will be very cold toward the end of winter.

More snow than usual is expected from the Great Lakes, across New England and down to the Middle Atlantic states, and from northeastern New Mexico, across northern Texas and Oklahoma, across the Ohio Valley to the Middle Atlantic.

The almanac is the oldest continuously published periodical in North America, making its debut in 1792. It also boasts a weather accuracy rate of 80 percent.

Maybe it’s once again time to switch the unproven longterm meterologipolitical assertion back to global cooling brought on by industrialization.

Pardon me, fellows, but it’s the height of hubris to know that the actions of this single species of man can so easily and irrevocably alter global and even celestial mechanisms of which we have incomplete understanding. I pray we don’t all pay for the hubris of a few “enlightened” despots.

All’s quiet in International Space Stationopolis, when Look! The Cavity Creeps! the oxygen generators fail.

Not to worry, they have undoubtedly have a lifetime service and parts warranty.

The three Elektron units on board the space station are the last of their kind. The company that manufactured them has gone out of business, and the engineer who almost single-handedly made the final adjustments of flight units died several years ago. Reportedly he retained some “trade secret” about the final adjustments of the devices — and it died with him.

Uh oh. I blame the Limited Liability Company business organization.

Hey, cheap land in Florida this year. Sweet!

In the video capture of the MTV interview with John Kerry that’s available at The Daily Recycler, who else noticed the yellow thing flopping around on his arm?

No, kids, if you snap it off, you don’t get a sexual favor. That’s a Lance Armstrong rubber band for cancer, of which Heather has one.

One has to wonder if Johnk paid $1 for the version shared by the proletariat, or if his is a special, titanium mesh, gold-plated version.

Either way, he’s sending us secret code that he’s an active sports participant.

Sorry, honey, that I ruined it for you.

You want a conspiracy theory? Here’s a conspiracy theory:

Osama bin Laden gives himself up next month.

You see, by sacrificing, but not quite martyring himself, bin Laden allows US forces to capture him so that the conspiracy nuts in the United States will throw the election to Kerry.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch likes to milk its previous stories for all they’re worth, flogging horse skeletons to dust. For example, they recently discovered that elected fire protection boards tend to get paid lots of public money and that sometimes firefighters give the candidates whom they want to win money! Not satisfied with a multipart investigation, the Post-Dispatch carried on for weeks about the splash its story made with oversight groups and the state government; in each subsequent article, the Post-Dispatch mentioned, reluctantly and while kicking a toe shyly at the carpet that they originated the story.

But now, riffing off of the Bill McClellan column about how hard a time released felons have making it outside, the Post-Dispatch runs a story on the front page of its Sunday business page with the title Ex-convicts face a Catch-22 in job search.

Here’s the “hook” anecdote that starts the article:

Dava Rogers says she applied at all kinds of jobs for a year, from fast-food restaurants to cleaners, with no success.

On every application, once she checked “yes” to having a criminal record, that was usually the end of it, said Rogers, 42. She served six months at the City Workhouse in St. Louis after being convicted of embezzlement from a former employer. She was released in 2002, but she found work only a year ago as a counselor in transitional housing for the YWCA.

“On the first few applications, I wouldn’t check ‘yes,’ and then they would say if I explained it and didn’t lie, they could’ve hired me,” Rogers said. “When I was truthful, there was never a call back.”

Personally, I have to wonder if it’s not so much the checkbox in her case, but the If so, explain. portion of the question. I would have less trouble hiring a drug offender, a DUI person, a vandal, or any of the numerous other non-threatening felonies which continue to proliferate over someone who steals money from her employer.

I don’t hear the St. Louis Post-Dispatch championing pedophiles who want to return to their birthday party clown jobs, but I didn’t read the whole article. Undoubtedly, it’s in there somewhere.

When a juvenile detention center closed in Tarkio, Missouri, the residents, not the local government, joined their money and are looking to buy a business to move to the town.

Private, not government, action. Thank you, sir, may I have some more like this?

I have a good, but misguided, friend who recently laid the all about oil canard on me when discussing the fact that George W. Bush will invade Iran if re-elected, and it’s all for their oil.

Yeah, that’s a fantastic idea, Chester. Iraq and Iran, all about the oil there. Bush is diabolical enough to fight unpopular-enough wars costing billions of dollars halfway around the world to get whatever oil the freed societies will sell us, which might not be much (for example, Iraq’s oil production ain’t that much these days).

Come on, you naive people. If Bush were that evil, and if he were so Machiavellian to do anything to get his hands on the precioussss, he would:

• Drill in ANWAR, like it or not.
  The nation’s parks and preserves have oil. Bush would just have to jail, shoot, or “disappear” hippies and environmentalist types to get to it. That’s damn cheap.

• Depose Chavez and install a protectorate in Venezuela.
  Venezuela’s right on the other side of the Caribbean. Nice and close, with a convenient dictator-like president-sort-of to depose. Transporting the oil back to the states would be damn easy, and not subject to expensive cross-Atlantic or whatnot travel. But you know how we could make transportation cheaper? A pipeline!

• Secure the southern border, by making it narrower–and with Guatamala and Belize.
  Our friends down south have recently discovered new off-shore oil fields which gives Mexico roughly 102 billion barrels, about as much as Iraq or Iran–and they’re much closer. We could put a couple battle groups off of either coast and push right down from Texas or do some amphibious landings in Acapulco and Cozumel.

  So we seal up the border and take care of cheap foreign labor in our auto plants by making them pay American minimum wage, and Bush gets his precioussss, not to mention retribution for the foosball drubbing Vincente Fox laid on him in early 2001. But why stop there?

• Invade Canada.
  Those “friends” to the north are sitting on the 22nd largest oil reserve in the world and they want to put all their rocks in the sling in get-tough trade negotiations with the American Goliath. You want to talk tough? We’ve got your tough right here.

  In addition to the oil and the easy pipelines, it’s politically expedient. Big Pharma will like the end of the drug reimportation threat, Canadian hockey teams will be saved because they’ll get to charge ticket prices in US dollars, and most of Canada will enjoy our one-language policy that we’ll enforce in Quebec.

• Nuke China.
  To preempt that threat, Bush could reduce China to rubble, thus easing other oil supplies from the burden of the Chinese industrialization and stockpiling.

So quit being lazy, Chesters, and start using your imaginations for your simpleton conspiracy theories, for crying out loud. Any one or several of the above options will provide us all the petroleum we need to ensure that no hotel room will go un-Vasolined into perpetuity.

Iraq, Iran, and our various Middle Eastern expeditions have more at stake than some precioussss oil, and I’m not going to say it again.

Open the journalistic template of local Davids versus Wal-Mart Goliath stories for this story: Small group is fighting big-box store in Mexico. Gist:

A Wal-Mart-owned discount store rising a half-mile from the ancient temples of Teotihuacan has touched off a fight by a small coalition that doesn’t want to see the big, boxy outlet from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun.

But with most people in the area supporting Wal-Mart, the group is waging a lonely battle for what it calls its defense of Mexico’s landscape and culture.

The dispute in Teotihuacan – a town built next to the ruins of the 2,000-year-old metropolis – illustrates how the allure of low prices and U.S. lifestyles often wins out in Mexico, leaving traditionalists struggling to draw a line in rapidly shifting cultural sands.

Apparently, the group wants a return to rule-by-priests, human sacrifice, and war between the tribes in Mexico, because that’s the heritage behind the Pyramid of the Sun and other great historical sites in Mexico.

Or could there be something else?

“We’d rather not have Mickey Mouse on top of the Pyramid of the Moon,” says Emmanuel D’Herrera, a business owner in Teotihuacan, 30 miles north of Mexico City.

He’s a business owner in danger of a little competition, but so are all the traditionalists who stand to lose a little commerce of their own whenever customers have a choice.

He [D’Herrera] contends a tall sign will loom near the huge twin pyramids that draw hundreds of thousands of tourists annually, although a government-appointed archaeologist disputes that.

And while the store is visible from atop the pyramid, so are many other modern businesses and houses.

Probably D’Herrera’s, too, but we notice he’s not offering to raze his business or to spill his blood on the altar of traditionalism.

What does everyone else think about the Yanqui imperialists?

Underlining his group’s lack of support, D’Herrera said probably 70 percent of the town’s mostly poor residents support the new store because it will offer lower prices than the area’s small shops.

Damn the unwashed, uneducated masses and their thirst for civilization over an oppressive past and cheap consumer goods over sustenance farming.

Funny how the papers and media alter their support for the common man when it suits their cognac-sniffing sensibilities, ainna?