I’m out all day today

Early flight out, returning very late. I’ll also be out most of the weekend, and I have a guest coming on Monday. so basically nothing much will be happening here until Tuesday or Wednesday.

Bill Gates reboots

…as a full-time philanthropist. Yes, he’s finally leaving Microsoft and devoting his life to charity work:

Gates is set to step down on Friday from what is now the world’s largest software company to work full-time at the charitable organization — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — built by his vast fortune.

I recall a decade ago, when the media were hounding Gates about his wealth and paltry donations to charitable causes. Liberals and conservatives were battling about it, with conservatives saying that it was none of our business how Gates spent his money, and liberals responding that simple humanity demanded that he spend his absurdly large fortune to assist the less fortunate.

My take was a little different. I believed that the problem was not money or desire, but time. You can’t manage a company that leads the industry, and also have the time to devote to quality philanthropy. Demanding that he reallocate his time to suit the liberal value system was unrealistic and totalitarian.

Now that he’s retiring from Microsoft, the problem is solved. As it likely would have been even without the hue and cry.

Pelosi vs. Conservative Radio

I liked Gateway Pundit’s take on the Fairness Doctrine.

Far-Left Brilliance from Australia

There’s stupidity, and then there’s abysmal, jaw-dropping stupidity. See which category this story falls under:

A SOCIALIST youth organisation has called for a citizen’s arrest of the Pope when he arrives in Sydney for World Youth Day (WYD) next month.

Resistance, a member of the NoToPope Coalition, is advocating the pontiff’s arrest on the basis of his continued stand against contraception.

OK, you ask, so why is the Church’s nearly 2000-year old policy suddenly an issue?

“This short-sighted and dogmatic stance towards both contraception use and education has placed millions of people around the world in great danger of contracting the deadly HIV virus,” she said in a statement.

And that’s when your jaw muscles go completely flaccid. Apparently the spokesperson for this group has never heard of the Church’s stance on other issues. Like extramarital sex.

The Church approves of monogamous, heterosexual sex between married couples. That’s all. The risk factor for sexual transmission of the HIV virus among these couples is zero. Zero. That’s lower than the prevention rate using condoms (somewhere in the neighborhood of 90%).

So these people want to arrest the Pope for spreading AIDS, when in fact their policies would increase the number of AIDS cases. They should do us all a favor and arrest themselves, try themselves, and sentence themselves to shut up.

[There's another defense of the Church's stand here.]

The inevitable abuse of public surveillance

One of my complaints about the installation of public surveillance systems has been that once they’re in place, there’s little to stop them from being used in ways that weren’t originally intended. Take, for instance, the example set by our British friends:

Councils have been urged to stop using controversial surveillance powers for “trivial” offences.
(…)
There has been growing anger about the methods used by councils to probe minor crimes, such as dog fouling.

The point is not necessarily the anger about the expanded scope of the surveillance, but more that the local Councils unilaterally expanded the scope. One can only imagine how the scope would have continued to expand (and may still), or how it has expanded in other ways. For instance, I’m sure the UK”s National Health Service wouldn’t mind using it to identify smokers or people who aren’t keeping up with their jogging, so that they can be dropped from the healthcare system.

Once these surveillance systems are in place, there’s no telling how they will be linked up to other systems, nor how government officials will eventually choose to use them. They are going into our cities today. It would be a good time to stop them before they become a problem here, too.

Once you’ve learned to fake sincerity…

Anne Applebaum manages to ignore the elephant in the room, as she talks about the rampant media stories that serve to make McCain and Obama appear less likable:

The reader is meant to be shocked, shocked, that (…) these two men are not, in fact, very nice people at all!

But why on earth should anyone expect them to be? In its wisdom, America has devised a presidential election system that actively selects for egotistical megalomaniacs: You simply cannot enter the White House if you aren’t one.
(…)
…whatever their many good qualities, both are self-centered, driven, ambitious, calculating, manipulative politicians—because they have to be. That’s what it takes to be president of the United States, and we might as well get used to it now.

I think she’s right, and that those same qualities are very useful to a sitting President. In fact, this is not news to the GOP, who have run Nixon, Dole, and now McCain against much more likable opponents.

But she misses one glaring point: one of the candidates is basically running on his personality – the personality of a nice, caring, friendly guy. The other is running on his record. By her admission, then, the bulk of one of the candidates’ campaigns is a lie. His success has been due to his ability, like Clinton’s before him, to charm and connect with his audiences.

It took liberals 10 years to realize that Bill Clinton’s charm was a sham, and that he was, in fact, half of a very conniving, manipulative couple. Having learned that lesson, you might think they’d be a little more discerning in this race.

Har.

British smokers denied right to fertilization

When government runs the health care system, it can start using health care as a bribe to get what it wants:

Women who smoke are being denied IVF treatment by a third of primary care trusts, it has emerged.

They – and in some cases their partners – are being ordered to stop smoking or be excluded from fertility treatment on the NHS.

But smoking doesn’t affect fertilization:

…it does not affect IVF success rates and government rules do not require patients to stop using tobacco…

…so what incentive could they possibly have to institute this policy?

With each course costing around £2,500, the ban on smokers by 46 of the 149 PCTs in England and Wales has brought accusations that they are simply trying to save money.

About those oil consumption trends

Based on comments on my post of a few days ago, it appears that there’s some confusion about where we are with oil consumption. To help sort things out, I give you my first chart in a while (data is from the EIA):

As you can see, the rest of the world’s petroleum consumption is rising much faster than ours, and this is going to place permanent price pressures on petroleum. And while it is true that US gasoline demand has dropped off a bit, the global demand for gasoline is still rising.

Another point of perspective: In the 1960′s, the US consumed about 35% of the world’s oil production. Today it’s about 24%. The EIA projections show us leveling off at about 23%, but I think that’s optimistic. geoff’s projection: by 2020 we’ll be below 20%.

Russia makes its first play for influence in Africa

China has been giving no-strings aid and cutting big economic deals with African nations, greatly increasing its influence on that continent. Russia, with an eye toward its eventual, inevitable rivalry with China, is now making its first play in Africa:

A 500 million-dollar development assistance package to Africa marks a new move by Russia to catch up with Chinese expansion into Africa.

“During the Cold War the U.S. and the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union) competed for influence in Africa by granting development assistance to ideologically sympathetic clients. When the Soviet Union and its economy collapsed in 1991, that competition came to an end,” Tom Wheeler, research fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs told IPS from Braamfontein in South Africa.

Of course, Russia is a latecomer, and it won’t be easy to break current relationships:

Russia will have to compete for Africa’s resources with Europe, the United States, India, China, Japan and South Korea. There remain questions how far the new moves will take Russia, particularly given the rapid advance by China.

But I think it’s very interesting that they’re trying.

Why are we getting lost so often?

It may be just a temporary flurry of news articles (Ace’s “shark attack”), but I don’t remember seeing people getting lost in the wilderness as often as they do now. Today 2 women were found in Alaska after being lost for 6 days. But look at all these other stories, just from the past month:

• Alicia Borgongo, lost for 3 hours in CA (6/19/08)
• Jeremy Rogers, lost for 1 day in Tennessee (6/17/08)
• Unnamed hiker, lost for 1 day in Utah (6/14/08)
• Richard Lynn, lost for 1 day in Colorado (6/11/08)
• 12-year old boy, lost for afternoon in New York (6/13/08)
• Chad Tabler, lost for 1 day in Oregon (6/9/08)
• Jerome Smith, died in California (6/7/08)
• Humphrey & Faraklas, lost for 5 days in AZ (5/28/08)

It’s gotten so bad that New Hampshire recently passed a law charging negligent hikers who require search and rescue for their rescue costs:

Getting lost in the woods in New Hampshire soon could mean losing driver’s, fishing and hunting licenses under a new law aimed at making negligent hikers pay to be rescued.

So why has this become a problem? I’ve got to believe that it’s due to the casual way we treat the wilderness. With ubiquitous cell phones, services like MapQuest, and GPS navigators, we’ve become accustomed to always being able to find out where we are and where we need to go. We don’t take topographical maps and compasses along on hikes, because in the backs of our minds, we know we can always call for help.

We’ve also become used to being taken care of, with moron-proof signs and instructions wherever we go. If we can’t find a trail, it’s their fault for not marking it well enough, not our fault for being orienteering naifs.

If you nanny your population, your population become helpless and dependent. If you become dependent upon technology, you can’t function without it. That’s the danger of technological reliance and nanny-statism. Unfortunately, neither are imminent dangers. They’re here.

AP & CBS pwned by aura-reading charlatan (Updated)

UPDATE: Commenter Gary tells us that CBS has pulled the story after AP told them they didn’t write it. That is true – the link to the story gives a “Page Not Found” error. Hopefully Gary can keep us apprised of events as they unfold.

I’m kind of an agnostic on global warming, because I think it has been a poster child for bad science. The politicization of the field has corrupted the research so badly that I despair for the ethics of the profession.

But today we have something much, much sillier than bad research. What we have instead is the AP and CBS news being completely duped by a new age guru from Australia:

New research compiled by Australian scientist Dr. Tom Chalko shows that global seismic activity on Earth is now five times more energetic than it was just 20 years ago.

The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of “global warming” is comprehensively and urgently addressed.

You might be wondering how global warming can possibly affect seismic activity. Here’s his explanation:

“NASA measurements from space confirm that Earth as a whole absorbs at least 0.85 Megawatt per square kilometer more energy from the Sun than it is able to radiate back to space. This ‘thermal imbalance’ means that heat generated in the planetary interior cannot escape and that the planetary interior must overheat. Increase in seismic, tectonic and volcanic activities is an unavoidable consequence of the observed thermal imbalance of the planet,” said Dr. Chalko.

The Nonsense. Now, if you know anything about heat transfer, this is complete idiocy. If you don’t, then consider this: the temperature of the top of the Earth’s mantle is about 1600 F, and the temperature at the Earth’s surface is around 100 F. The temperature rise since the 1990′s is about 1 degree Fahrenheit. That will have an immeasurably tiny effect on the heat loss from the mantle to the surface (~0.1%).

Or look at it this way: if his theory were true, we would have many more earthquakes in summer than in winter. But in fact, the opposite is true. And the reason has nothing to do with heat loss – it has to do with water level variations with the seasons.

The Pwnage: I don’t really expect the AP and CBS to know anything about heat transfer. But I do expect them to do a rudimentary background check on their source. A quick Google search reveals one of his biographies, where we find:

He plays classical guitar exceptionally well, enjoys windsurfing (he calls himself a speed addict here), takes time to practice meditation, telepathy and astral travel. His hobbies include challenging paradigms and paradoxes in geophysics, studying puzzling properties of electro-photonic glow (Auras) using Kirlian camera, learning to see human aura, discovering purpose of life, as well as organizing controversial seminars.

His PhD, by the way, is in laser holography. Not climatology, geology, or heat transfer.

The AP and CBS were so eager to jump on the global warming bandwagon that they allowed a telepathic astral-projecting aura reader sell them on some hokum that can’t pass the scientific laugh test.

Layers and layers of fact-checking – wasn’t that the phrase?

UPDATE (Just for DaveinTX): Dave wasn’t happy with the lack of scientific-type knowledge here, so he demanded a real live equation. So here you go, Dave:

For the less erudite and Texans among us, that there is the equation for how much heat gets out of a spherical shell, i.e., how much heat gets through the crust of the Earth.

Just looking at the equation you can see that: given that (T1-T2) is about 1500 F, if T2 (the temperature at the Earth’s surface) changes by one degree, the heat escaping will change by 1/1500 = 0.067%.

Zero blogging advisory

I’m buried at work until Wednesday, so I won’t be posting until then. Thanks for checking in.

HuffPo pads Barack’s resume

The light thinkers at HuffPo are outraged that Tucker Carlson said: “Barack Obama has the thinnest resume of any modern presidential candidate with a shot of actually winning.” They then claim that Obama has had 3 more years of experience than Ronald Reagan. Unfortunately for their argument, it turns out that experience in a state legislature doesn’t really do much to impress on the national stage. And it doesn’t much thicken one’s resume for the Presidency, either.

When we talk about a presidential resume, we’re talking about experience in a capacity as a significant player in national politics. That’s why nominees are always members of Congress, high ranking officials from the Executive Branch, or Governors. Barack Obama began his candidacy after 2 years as a Senator. Reagan served as Governor of California for 8 years. I don’t think Carlson’s claim is in much jeopardy.

The article continues with this idiotic point:

Similarly, 20th century Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had a “shot at winning,” and did, indeed, win the Presidency, despite having thinner resumes than Obama (Wilson, for example, served a single two-year term as the Governor of New Jersey prior to becoming President).

I guess the HuffPo crowd is a little uncertain as to the meaning of “modern.” You see, for most folk, “modern” doesn’t mean “almost 100 years ago.” But he proceeds blithely on to make the typical broadbrush slams against Bush and McCain. They’re as valid as the rest of his arguments, which garnered 5 pages of adoring comments from his readers.

This is what passes for analysis at The Huffington Post?

Britain: a case study in welfare and immigration policy

Britain, my go-to canary in the mine, shows us the happy road ahead:

Britons are out of work because too many of them are lazy and unemployable – not because Eastern Europeans have taken their jobs, an explosive Government report claimed last night.

The Department for Work and Pensions said UK citizens were on the dole because of ‘issues around basic employability skills, incentives and motivation’.
…
Business leaders agreed with the devastating assessment of Britain’s jobless, saying they are suffering from a ‘benefits culture’.

They claimed firms had no option but to turn to migrants because people in the UK did not have the skills for the job.

The welfare reform enacted in the 1990′s in America was successful in reducing welfare rolls, showing the correlation between open-ended benefits and creation of a welfare class. It appear that Britain could use a similar reform in the dole. In the meantime, they are a poster child for conservatives’ worst fear: government intervention creating an ever-expanding sub-society of layabouts.

And on the immigration front itself, we have this startling admission from our feathered friends:

Mass immigration has fuelled social tension in Britain, the Government admitted today.
…
Around 860,000 people have come to Britain from other countries in the last five years.

The figure accounts for half of the population growth.

It has also emerged police and hospitals struggling to cope with an unprecedented influx of migrants will be denied extra Government cash,

But beyond the problem with public services, a problem we obviously share, there is the societal impact which is usually ignored:

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch, said: ‘This speech proves that the Government simply doesn’t get it.

‘It’s not a question of transitional impacts. The Government’s own forecasts show that immigration will add seven million to the population of England in the next 25 years.

‘This will change the whole nature of our society against the will of the public, who have never been consulted.

I’ve struggled with the notion that people should have some sort of right to stability: to not have the lifestyles they’ve worked for overturned due to a massive influx of immigrants. I don’t see how such a right could be codified, but it really bugs me that people have no right to keep things the way they are.

Britain is a shining example of the results of enlightened liberal policies. I hope we can learn their lessons vicariously.

Rising Gas Prices: Not just an American problem

We tend to think that we’re the only people suffering from the rapid increase in oil prices, but the problem is worldwide:

• Europe: “…truckers have disrupted food and fuel supplies in three-day-old nationwide protests over rising fuel prices.”
• Asia: “Protests over soaring fuel prices erupted in Asia on Tuesday as truckers in Hong Kong and tire-burning demonstrators in India and Nepal added their angry voices to protests that began last month in Europe.”
• South America: “In Bolivia and Chile, leftist leaders face similar political headaches, as truck and taxi drivers blockade roads and demand higher government subsidies to offset the higher gas prices.”
• and even the Middle East: “To cover the wage increase in a budget already stretched by burgeoning food subsidies and the skyrocketing price of oil, the government (Egypt) cut into subsidies on petrol, pushing up prices by around a third: to LE 1.75 per liter for 90-Octane, LE 1.85 for 92-Octane, LE 1.1 for diesel and LE 2.75 for 95-Octane, generating an angry response from motorists.”

Oil is now a world issue, as are all other natural resources. OPEC producers claim that the falling dollar is the cause of the price increase, but it’s clear that other countries, with supposedly rising currencies, are also feeling the pinch.

Jiggering the system isn’t going to do much. The bottom line is that oil consumption is rising rapidly, and it’s such a necessity that the richer countries will pretty much pay any price to meet their domestic demands for it.

I suggest telecommuting.