Earth Worshippers Cause Death in Space: Environmental Dogma Has Led to the Sacrifice of Fourteen Astronauts on the Space Shuttle by Hannes Hacker (July 11, 2003)
Now that a dramatic new test has confirmed that a piece of thermal insulation flaking off of space shuttle Columbia's external tank during launch was the most likely cause of its destruction during reentry, the typical second-guessing in the press has focused on NASA engineers, asking: "What did Mission Control know, and when did they know it?"
Somehow, NASA engineers should have guessed about the damage done to Columbia's thermal tiles and pulled an Apollo 13-style rabbit out of their hat. The implication is that they should have been omniscient and omnipotent.
Having heroes like NASA's mission controllers around to quietly brave the world's criticism certainly serves to divert attention from those who have done the most to contribute to this disaster--and who regard themselves as omniscient and omnipotent enough to command the entire American economy and the lives of its citizens: the environmentalists.
Why did the shuttle's foam insulation flake off? In response to an edict from the EPA, NASA was required to change the design of the thermal insulating foam on the shuttle's external tank. They stopped using Freon, or CFC-11, in order to comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an agreement designed to head off doubtful prognostications of an environmental disaster.
But it was the elimination of the old foam that led to a real disaster for the shuttle program. The maiden flight with the new foam, in 1997, resulted in a ten-fold increase to foam-induced tile damage. The new foam was far more dangerous than the old foam. But NASA--a government organization afraid of antagonizing powerful political interests--did not reject the EPA's demands and thoroughly reverse their fatal decision. Instead, they sought a compromise, applying for a waiver from the EPA that allowed them to use the old foam on some parts of the external tank.
NASA notes that it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether it was the old or the new foam that caused the recent disaster, and environmentalists will no doubt say this means that we can't pin the disaster on them. But any unnecessary increase in risk in an enterprise so unforgiving of error, is unacceptable. The bottom line is that NASA took a much greater risk in order to comply with EPA demands. Environmentalist junk science trumped sound engineering.
This is not the first time that has happened. The cause of the 1986 Challenger explosion is officially established as hot gases burning through an O-ring joint in one of the solid-rocket boosters. NASA was roundly criticized for its decision to launch in cold weather over the objection of some engineers, but there was a deeper cause that was not as widely reported.
In 1985 NASA had switched to a new putty to seal the O-ring joints. The new putty became brittle at cold temperatures, thus allowing Dr. Richard Feynman to teach NASA a famous lesson. At the congressional hearing investigating the accident, he simply placed some of the O-ring putty in a glass of ice water and crumbled it in his fingers.
NASA had changed the sealant because its original supplier for O-ring putty stopped producing it for fear of anti-asbestos lawsuits.
Had NASA not run out of the original putty, the Challenger disaster would not have happened. Indeed, when the Air Force ran out of the same putty and replaced it with the same brittle substitute, their Titan 34D heavy-lift boosters suffered two sudden launch failures, after a string of successes that had lasted as long as that of the space shuttle.
These accidents are not primarily the fault of careless engineers, nor are they merely the unintended consequences of bureaucrats blindly following federal rules and slashdot dogma. They are the result of a philosophy that hold human needs--such as the need for a safe shuttle launch or re-entry--as less important than a concern to prese
High Gas Prices Courtesy of Environmental Rhetoric by Alan Caruba (June 16, 2006)
As the price of gasoline and the myriad products that utilize petroleum in their manufacture rises, Americans are going to ask why the Congress has resisted accessing the billions of barrels' worth of oil and natural gas in our offshore continental shelf.
As the realization of how dependent we are on the importation of Middle Eastern oil, plus the fact that U.S. dollars fund avowed enemies such as Iran and, in South America, Venezuela, Americans are going to ask why we do not tap our own Alaskan and offshore resources.
As a matter of national security and as a significant boost to the American economy, it makes no sense to not assure and achieve a higher level of energy independence.
So why, in mid-May, did the House of Representatives reject an end to the quarter-century ban on oil and natural gas drilling in 85 percent of America's coastal waters?
At the time, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, issued a statement that both defied logic and flatout lied, saying the vote against offshore drilling was great victory for consumers who have seen prices rise prodigiously. "In the meantime, working families are turning their wallets inside out to fill their gas tanks. It is outrageous to ask families to dig even deeper to subsidize oil drilling on undersea lands that belong to the American people."
Americans are paying more because the global price of a barrel of oil has been increased by fears of military conflict in the Middle East, probably initiated by Iran.
Americans are paying more because, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina and other hurricanes destroyed 115 oil platforms and damaged another 50, along with 183 pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico and refineries in Louisiana. Despite this, the U.S. Mineral Management Service (MMS) reported that there were no significant oil spills from offshore platforms and no oil reached the coastline.
And, no, Americans do not "subsidize" oil drilling. Pelosi's boogeyman of "Big Oil." Indeed, as a report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration noted in 2005, the MMS "collects and disperses billions of dollars in revenue from the sale of mineral leases. Offshore leases brought in revenues of $5.2 billion in 2000. This represents 73.1 percent of the $7.1 billion in revenues collected from all Federal and American Indian mineral leases that year."
As for those big profits enjoyed by "Big Oil", it's worth noting that a single offshore drilling platform costs about $100 million dollars to build and that comes after the equally enormous costs of exploring for oil and natural gas resources. And "Big Oil" not only pays big taxes on its profits, but also employs thousands of Americans in the process.
According to the Consumer Alliance for Energy Security, the Offshore Continental Shelf (OCS)--85 percent of which is off-limits to exploration--is estimated to have enough natural gas to heat 100 million homes for the next 60 years and enough oil to drive 85 million cars for 35 years. Thanks to the vote in the House, it remains off-limits.
When the House of Representatives voted to open the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling in late May, Rep. Pelosi again issued a statement decrying "the same, tired ideas on energy such as opening the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. We should not sacrifice the Arctic coastal plain, one of America's last truly wild places, for the sake of a small amount of oil."
Small? Well, if anyone considers an estimated 10.4 billion barrels to the nation's oil supply "small", then one wonders what they consider large? The vote was 225 to 201. In truth, only 2,000 of the nearly 20 million acres of ANWR would be needed for oil and gas production, contributing billions in tax revenue, and creating or sustaining thousands of American jobs.
Opening ANWR and the Offshore Continental Shelf would bring many benefits. Put simply, more oil and natural gas means lower prices. With it come greater
"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists By Tom Harris Monday, June 12, 2006
"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?
No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."
This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.
So we have a smaller fraction.
But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."
We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.
Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally
"Oceans lash our coasts. Deserts Burn. The sky provides no shelter. Turmoil of Biblical proportions threatens not just our weather but life itself. Global Warming is upon us."
Those words aren't from the preview trailer of the silly, overblown, over dramatic film, "Day After Tomorrow" that invaded movie theaters a few years ago. And they aren't just carefully selected "scare" words developed from a sweep through a thesaurus. These are the opening words to yet another hysterical diatribe passing as news these days on the subject of Global Warming. This particularly silly one greeted readers of a recent issue of Playboy Magazine. The article was, of course, accompanied by the obligatory pictures of smokes stacks belching over a city and the melting of ice burgs.
You hear it everywhere. Global Warming is a fact. It is here. It is now unstoppable. The Polar Ice Cap is melting. Polar Bears are endangered. Greenland is actually turning green! Hurricanes are blowing with more force. Tornadoes are growing in numbers. Water levels are increasing, threatening to flood New York City. Human existence is threatened. And, of course, the deserts are starting to burn. We are assured that scientists are in near total agreement with the assessment.
The media is in a frenzy, rushing to report the latest news release from special interest groups with the latest report or prediction. Al Gore is rushing his hi tech docudrama to the theaters to whip up more frenzy. Corporations are being forced to turn "green" to show their "corporate social responsibility" in the wake of the coming disaster.
Global Warming has become a euphemism for a political agenda. It has become a religion run by fanatics reminiscent of the leaders of the darkest days of the Inquisition that nearly destroyed civil society only a few hundred years ago. We are not to question the great god of Global Warming. Those who do are separated from civil society and labeled as heretics.
So how can anyone question the decrees handed down from the Ivory Towers to the unwashed masses? Answer: every religion has its heretics.
The simple truth is there is no scientific consensus on Global Warming. In fact, as the media frenzy screams global warming, there are a growing number of scientists who are expressing their doubts.
In 1992, just prior to the UN's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders signed The Heidelberg Appeal, a quiet call for reason in dealing with the climate change issue. Neither a statement or corporate interests, nor a denial of environmental problems, the Heidelberg Appeal expresses a conviction that modern society is the best equipped in human history to solve the world's ills, provided that they do not sacrifice science, intellectual honesty and common sense to political opportunism and irrational fears. Today, the Heidelberg Appeal has been signed by more than 4,000 scientists and leaders from 100 countries, including more than 70 Nobel Prize winners.
Also in 1992, another statement from some 47 atmospheric scientists was issued saying "such policies (greenhouse global warming theories) derive from highly uncertain scientific theories. The statement cited a survey of atmospheric scientists, conducted in the summer of 1991, "confirms that there is no consensus about the cause of the slight warming observed during the past century." The statement went on to say, "We are disturbed that activists, anxious to stop energy and economic growth, are pushing ahead with drastic policies without taking notice of recent changes in the underlying science."
In 1995, over 85 scientists and climate experts from research labs and universities worldwide, signed the Leipzig Declaration in answer to the International Symposium on the Greenhouse Controversy, held in Leipzig, Germany that year. In part, the Declaration says; "In a world in which poverty is the greatest social pollutant, any restriction on energy use that inhibits economic growth should be viewed with caution. For these reas
The Man of Steel--Part I by Steven Brockerman (April 26, 2006)
"Going through the [steel] plant [in 1947], we actually had to step over workers who were falling asleep there. I decided right then that I didn't ever want to work for a big steel company."
He created the largest steel corporation in the U.S.--during a time when Big Steel in America was fast becoming a failed industry and a fading legend. U.S. Steel, ascended from the raging furnaces of Carnegie and forged by the financial genius of J. P. Morgan, would soon become a burned out falling star. Bethlehem Steel, erector of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building, originator of "High Speed Tool Steel," which had swept the world at the start of the 20th Century, would be shortly relegated to the slagheap of ignominious bankruptcy.
Throughout the '70's & 80's, as one-by-one the old steel mills closed and the sacred fires blinked out, panicking CEO's and boards of directors of America's steel industry stampeded to Washington, howling about Japan and Germany "dumping" lower priced (but comparable) steel onto the U.S. market. The Union of United Steel Workers, in rare agreement with their bosses, aired their xenophobic rage against the upstart Japanese (and to a lesser degree, against the Germans). Politicians solemnly temporized about threats to American security. News commentators chimed in by observing that the American steel industry had failed to modernize over the years.
Amidst all that hysteria, the CEO's & boards of directors--the Taggarts and the Orren Boyles--the union shop rats, the Capitol Hill rats and the just-plain-rats of the press made a studious and concerted effort to forget.
They "forgot" that the capital for keeping the steel industry competitive had instead gone to pay for glitzy company PR campaigns, which mostly apologized for steel industry profits by trumpeting the contributions Big Steel made to local communities in the form of increased employment and a wider tax base.
They "forgot" about the capital wasted by complacent executives on ostentatious administrative offices (ala Rob Malda), on unproductive, show-off exhibitions and on an endless list of society ladies' pet charities.
They "forgot" about the capital paid as protection to union thugs
They "forgot" about the capital stolen by government price quotas and extorted by taxes.
They "forgot" about the capital consumed by crippling government regulations and deep pocket lawsuits, the impetus for which having been spewed in fact free and logic challenged commentaries on self-sacrifice, brother love and robber barons, spun out by cocktail party editorialists, beatnik essayists and historians better suited to the stockyards than to academic research libraries--all of them with a Marxist ax to grind and none of them with one wit of knowledge about the making of steel. Indeed, not one wit, period.
They, in short, "forgot" about the rust. The rust that would over the coming decades continue to eat through the American steel industry--as it had the railroads before it--eventually extinguishing the furnaces of U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel and a host of other smaller steel companies, leaving them all wastelands of cold ash and rotting metal, amid the rubble of crashed stock prices. At the end of those decades--after the squeaks and the fits of the rats, which had signified nothing, had ceased--America's steel companies quietly closed their doors. Over the ruins the mooching and looting rats had created, they scurried to erect a gravestone on which they scratched: The Rust Belt.
That was the course and destination of American steel in 1965 when an unknown took the helm of a tiny, near bankrupt company named Nuclear and--like the fictional hero, Hank Rearden, in the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged--devised a new way to make steel. In so doing, he saved the American steel industry.
His name was F. Kenneth Iverson. The Man of Steel.
Born on September 18, 1925, Ken Iverson lived his childhoo
Kudos to the 60 scientists for criticizing the Kyoto Protocol as politicized science and calling for a public debate on climate science. Kyoto was a humongous fraud from its inception when power-hungry United Nations bureaucrats maliciously altered the conclusion of the scientific report (1995) in their policy-maker's report.
The perpetrators of this fraud should be brought to justice, followed by public condemnation of the environmentalists, politicians, slashdot readers, and government bureaucrats who ignored the real scientists and pushed Kyoto for political/ideological gain, wasting billions of tax dollars.
The destructive Kyoto fraud was made possible by the power of today's governments to extort billions of dollars via taxation and fund so-called science. This state science creates a massive opportunity for power-lusters to use government to politicize science and escape being prosecuted for fraud and sued for damages.
Consequently, bad science is running amok today, with all kinds of bogus claims about air pollution, genetically modified foods, pesticides, etc. (Recall the millions of people, mostly women and children in the Third World, who died painfully and needlessly from malaria because of a dishonest campaign by environmentalists that led to a near-banning of DDT in the 1970s.)
Objective science is so precious a human value that we must be eternally vigilant in preserving and protecting it from political power-lusters. More than a debate on climate science, we need a debate on the proper functions of government and whether governments should be allowed to fund science.
It remains irritating that society is profiting from our most talented individuals.
I'm really stuck on making any sense out of this one. Is the idea of profits really that disgusting to you that you can't imagine how anybody could advocate letting others reap the benefits of the work of those who are most capable of doing it? Perhaps you mean to imply profit at the cost of the most talented individuals? This would at least make sense in some weird way, although it would betray a naive understanding of economic reality. I know many scientists that make a great living, hell, many become these evil business people bogeymen that you seem to hate so much. Are they evil for seeking increased money and influence? Or does that only apply to those who have gone to school to get an MBA?
The parent is such a typical/. post, devoid of reason and chock full of emotional claims. Money doesn't matter to me, but I'm going to complain that I'm not making it, but act like all I really want is influence and respect, and then I'm going to launch a straw man attack on a nebulous group like MBAs or lawyers. Hell, I'll even throw in some apocalyptic predictions about the world ending if businessmen continue to make money and gain influence. Grow up Karl.
To fathom our government's contemptible treatment of a handful of unbowed journalists, you must see the roots of that treatment in the moral ideal Christianity bequeathed the West.
In the face of the intimidation and murder of European authors, film makers and politicians by Islamic militants, a few European newspapers have the courage to defend their freedom of speech: they publish twelve cartoons to test whether it's still possible to criticize Islam. They discover it isn't. Muslims riot, burn embassies, and demand the censorship and death of infidels. The Danish cartoonists go into hiding; if they weren't afraid to speak before, they are now.
How do our leaders respond? Do they declare that an individual's freedom of speech is inviolable, no matter who screams offense at his ideas? No. Do they defend our right to life and pledge to hunt down anyone, anywhere, who abets the murder of a Westerner for having had the effrontery to speak? No--as they did not when the fatwa against Rushdie was issued or his translators were attacked and murdered.
Instead, the U.S. government announces that although free speech is important, the government shares "the offense that Muslims have taken at these images," and even hints that it is disrespectful to publish them.
Why does a Muslim have a moral right to his dogmas, but we don't to our rational principles? Why, when journalists uphold free speech and Muslims respond with death threats, does the State Department signal out the journalists for moral censure? Why the vicious double standard? Why admonish the good to mollify evil?
The answer lies in the West's conception of morality.
Morality, we are told incessantly, by secularists and religionists, the left and the right, means sacrifice; give up your values in selfless service to others. "Serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself," Bush proclaims to a believing nation.
But when you surrender your values, are you to give them up for men you admire, for those you think have earned and deserve them? Obviously not--otherwise yours would be an act of trade, of justice, of self-assertiveness, not self-sacrifice.
You must give to that which you don't admire, to that which you judge to be unworthy, undeserving, irrational. An employee, for instance, must give up his job for a competitor he deems inferior; a businessman must contribute to ideological causes he opposes; a taxpayer must fund modern, unemployed "artists" whose feces-covered works he loathes; the United States must finance the UN, which it knows to be a pack of America-hating dictatorships.
To uphold your rational convictions is the most selfish of acts. To renounce them, to surrender the world to that which you judge to be irrational and evil, is the epitome of sacrifice. When Jesus, the great preacher of self-sacrifice, commanded "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you," he knew whereof he spoke.
In the left's adaptation of this perverse ideal, selfless surrender to evil translates into a foreign policy of self-loathing and "sensitivity," of spitting in America and the West's face while showing respect for the barbarisms of every gang.
Bill Clinton, for instance, certainly no radical leftist, jumped into the recent fray to castigate us: "None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions . . . there was this appalling example in . . . Denmark . . . these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam."
In the right's version, selfless surrender to evil translates into a foreign policy of self-effacing service.
Our duty, Bush declares, is to bring the vote to Iraqis and Palestinians, but we dare not tell them what constitution to adopt, or ban the killers they want to vote for. We have no right to assert our principles, because they are rational and good. But the Iraqis and Palestinians have a right to
Advocates of "intelligent design" are gearing up their fight to teach the controversial theory now that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III has ruled that the religious-based explanation for the formation of the universe and human evolution may not be taught in Pennsylvania public schools. The debate over intelligent design is important, because at root is the idea of "certainty" and the method by which scientific truths are established.
Proponents of teaching intelligent design in the public schools argue that evolution is a "theory" and ask why shouldn't their theory be allowed equal time in a science class. The problem with this position is that a scientific theory and an intelligent design theory are two very different things.
To explain facts, scientific theories rely on observation for support. For example, to explain the origin of species, evolutionary biology draws upon field data from the ongoing changes that occur among populations of organisms, fossil data from plants and animals that no longer exist, data regarding the temporal and geographic distribution of genetic markers, and experiments that attempt to replicate the conditions of species-change in the laboratory. Some facts have yet to be explained fully. For example, we are not yet sure how some of the simplest parts of living things originated nor precisely how spoken language evolved.
Admitting the unknown facts regarding human origins, however, doesn't mean that the explanations aren't out there, waiting to be identified. The unknown is the unfinished business of evolutionary biology, a business in which today's most promising grade school students might one day play a part in completing. Properly speaking, evolution is a "theory," but it is entirely based on evidence, and an important part of scientists' jobs is to identify how what is known can be used to discover what is not yet known.
Contrast the theory of evolution with the theory of intelligent design. The proponents of intelligent design argue that the world is simply too complex (or too "perfect," implying that there could be an imperfect reality) to explain the origins of life and human intelligence. These proponents argue that ultimately only the intervention of a creator can explain man's existence. Thereafter, there is no unfinished business for the researcher because an intelligent designer is not subject to further observation and experiment.
To evaluate this idea, it is useful to draw a parallel: imagine a scientist trying to find a cure for cancer through such reasoning. Like the origins of life and language, cancer is complex; it behaves strangely, and its nature is hard to pin down. Should the scientist then conclude that only God's intervention causes cancer? Obviously, no real scientist would draw that conclusion, and it would be absurd to teach an intelligent design theory of cancer. Instead, researchers assume that the cause of cancer is ultimately caused by the interaction of the materials that make up our observable physical world, and they are working to discover what those interactions are so that they can control them and thereby discover a cure for the disease.
Philosophically, the proponents of intelligent design are wrong because they assume the existence or "primacy" of a consciousness that shapes the universe when no such evidence exists, or is even possible. None of the advocates of intelligent design can point to God and say, "Look there--you can see Him" and not rely upon faith to justify their claim. This is why intelligent design theory--whether applied to the origins of life or cancer--is not scientific. It eschews observation, experimentation and any kind of natural causality. What it attempts is to deny the essential process of science--explaining the complex and unknown by means of investigating the less complex and better understood. Because intelligent design theory is simply an article of faith, disconnected from the observation of reality, it should neither be taught in the science classes of public schools (whic
Many consumers are angry about alleged price gouging at the pump, and politicians are listening. States with anti-"price gouging" laws are investigating and prosecuting complaints, while Washington is discussing a federal anti-"price gouging" law. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist promises that "if the facts warrant it, I will support a federal anti-price gouging law."
But there are no facts that could warrant such a law, because there is no such thing as "price gouging" by private businesses.
The term "price gouging" implies that gas stations have an ability to forcibly inflict harm on us--but they do not. Any price we pay for a gallon of gasoline--whether $1 or $3--we pay voluntarily, based on the value of the gasoline to us. If we think we are spending too much on gasoline, we are free to drive less, to buy more fuel-efficient cars, to use carpools or busses, or to travel by bicycle or on foot. Gas station owners cannot force us to buy gasoline; they can only offer us a trade, which we are free to accept or reject.
But, one might ask, without anti-"price gouging" laws won't owners of gasoline charge the absolute highest prices they can? Absolutely, and they have every moral right to do so--just as consumers of gasoline have every right to pay the lowest prices they can find. Gas station owners are not our servants. They are producers who spend money, exert effort, and assume risk to bring a product to market. They own the gasoline they sell, and like any property owner they should be free to set the terms of sale.
Since we pay the lowest price that we can find for gasoline (and never more than it is worth to us), and gas stations sell gasoline for the highest price they can get (and never less than it is worth to them), the price of gasoline is a reflection of mutually beneficial trade--the essence of proper interaction under capitalism. For a gas station owner to charge what the market will bear is no more "gouging" than it is for a computer programmer--or a cashier--to negotiate for the highest salary he can get.
Since the prevailing price of gasoline is the result of trade, it reflects not the arbitrary "greed" of gas station owners, but the facts of the market: the producers' costs, competition, and what customers are willing to pay. The reason that gasoline prices are higher after a natural disaster, for instance, is that the fact of relatively scarce supply leads various purchasers of oil and gasoline to compete to buy it, and bid up its price. Those who buy it are those who value it most, to the extent they value it most--like highly efficient factories overseas, or Americans providing for their most crucial transportation priorities.
Anti-"price gouging" laws prevent producers and their customers from trading at mutually beneficial prices--sacrificing their interests to the interests of those who wish to avoid the "hardship" of paying prices higher than they are used to. By what right can the government force producers to set artificially low prices and prevent consumers from bidding up the price to get the gasoline they are willing to pay for? By what right can the government demand that factory owners be deprived of the oil they are able to pay for--and their customers of the cheap products they happily purchase at Wal-Mart?
Anti-"price-gouging" laws are a particularly vicious form of price controls. Like all price controls, they deprive businesses of earned profit, promote shortages, and discourage future production. But they also forbid the indefinable: "unconscionable" prices, the meaning of which cannot be known until after the ruling of some bureaucrat. This added uncertainty discourages producers from being in business, period--especially in times of emergency, when "gouging" claims are most rampant. If a federal "price gouging" law is passed, will gas station owners do everything possible after the next natural disaster to remain open for business--will private contractors from other states rush to bring generators, food, and debris-clearing equipment?
There's one thing OpenOffice.org lacks that both Word and WordPerfect have: a draft mode where you don't have to see page breaks and unnecessary layout visuals. To me, this seems like such a basic and important feature. My needs for formatting and fancy features are practically nonexistent--I just want to concentrate on my writing.
OpenOffice Writer does offer a "web layout", but it's just not the same.
I use OpenOffice all the time to dash out letters and so forth, but when I need to concentrate on my writing I always fire up WordPerfect. Lack of a good draft mode is all that's keeping me from using OpenOffice Writer exclusively. I'm sure tons of other writers feel the same way. To be honest, Open Office sucks balls and I would never use it, I'm just trying to Karma whore because I'm a little bit in the negative territory right now. And I can't imagine implementing this feature would be difficult.
The moderators are idiots for calling this interesting. This is clearly the ramblings of an idiot. Now, for something completely unrelated but entirely more interesting, I turn to Walt Williams to discuss yet another subject about which you Slashdot moes know laughingly little.....
With all the recent hype and demagoguery about gasoline price-gouging, maybe it's time to talk about the basics of exchange. First, what is exchange? Exchange occurs when an owner transfers property rights or title to that which is his.
Here's the essence of what transpires when I purchase a gallon of gasoline. In effect, I tell the retailer that I hold title to $3. He tells me that he holds title to a gallon of gas. I offer to transfer my title to $3 to him if he'll transfer his title to a gallon of gas to me. If this exchange occurs voluntarily, what can be said about the transaction?
One thing we know for sure is that the retailer was free to retain his ownership of the gallon of gas and I my ownership of $3. That being the case, why would we exchange? The only answer is that I perceived myself as better off giving up my $3 for the gallon of gas and likewise the retailer perceived himself as better off giving up his gas for the $3.
Otherwise, why would we have exchanged?
Exchanges of this sort are called good-good exchanges, namely "I'll do something good for you if you do something good for me." Game theorists recognize this as a positive-sum game -- a transaction where both parties are better off as a result. Of course there's another type of exchange not typically sought, namely good-bad exchange. An example of that kind of exchange would be where I approached the retailer with a pistol telling him that if he didn't do something good for me, give me that gallon of gas, I'd do something bad to him, blow his brains out. Clearly, I'd be better off, but he would be worse off. Game theorists call that a zero-sum game -- a transaction where in order for one person to be better off, the other must be worse off. Zero-sum games are transactions mostly initiated by thieves and governments.
Some might argue that there's unequal bargaining power between me and the gas retailer. That's nonsense! The retailer has the power to charge any price he wishes, but I have the power to decide how much I'll buy, including none, at that price. You say, "Gas is a necessity, and we're forced to buy it." That too is nonsense. If I voluntarily purchase the gas, I do so because I deem it better than my next best alternative. Of course, at a high enough price, I wouldn't deem it as such.
In the wake of the spike in fuel prices, many Americans demand that politicians do something. You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. Despite a long history of their economic calamity, some Americans and politicians are calling for price controls or, what amounts to the same thing, anti price-gouging legislation. As Professor Thomas DiLorenzo points out in "Four Thousand Years of Price Control", price controls have produced calamities wherever and whenever they've been tried.
Economic ignorance, misconceptions, superstition, and enhanced belief in self-importance due to moronic posts on Slashdot and even more moronic approbation from the herd-folllowing drones that pack these pages drive us toward totalitarianism because they make us more willing to hand over greater control of our lives to politicians. That results in a diminution of our liberties. Think back to the gasoline price controls during the 1970s.
The price controls caused shortages. To deal with the shortages, restrictions were imposed on purchases. Then national highway speed limits were enacted. Then there were more calls for smaller and less crashworthy cars. With the recent gasoline supply shocks, we didn't experience the shortages, long lines and closed gas stations seen during the 1970s. Why?
Prices were allowed to perform their allocative function -- get people to use less gas and get suppliers to supply more. Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.
Christmas in America is an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life. Yet all of these are castigated as "materialistic"; the real meaning of the holiday, we are told, is assorted Nativity tales and altruist injunctions (e.g., love thy neighbor) that no one takes seriously.
In fact, Christmas as we celebrate it today is a 19th-century American invention. The freedom and prosperity of post-Civil War America created the happiest nation in history. The result was the desire to celebrate, to revel in the goods and pleasures of life on earth. Christmas (which was not a federal holiday until 1870) became the leading American outlet for this feeling.
Historically, people have always celebrated the winter solstice as the time when the days begin to lengthen, indicating the earth's return to life. Ancient Romans feasted and reveled during the festival of Saturnalia. Early Christians condemned these Roman celebrations -- they were waiting for the end of the world and had only scorn for earthly pleasures. By the fourth century, the pagans were worshipping the god of the sun on December 25, and the Christians came to a decision: if you can't stop 'em, join 'em. They claimed (contrary to known fact) that the date was Jesus' birthday, and usurped the solstice holiday for their Church.
Even after the Christians stole Christmas, they were ambivalent about it. The holiday was inherently a pro-life festival of earthly renewal, but the Christians preached renunciation, sacrifice, and concern for the next world, not this one. As Cotton Mather, an 18th-century clergyman, put it: "Can you in your consciences think that our Holy Savior is honored by mirth? . . . Shall it be said that at the birth of our Savior . . . we take time . . . to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?"
Then came the major developments of 19th-century capitalism: industrialization, urbanization, the triumph of science -- all of it leading to easy transportation, efficient mail delivery, the widespread publishing of books and magazines, new inventions making life comfortable and exciting, and the rise of entrepreneurs who understood that the way to make a profit was to produce something good and sell it to a mass market.
For the first time, the giving of gifts became a major feature of Christmas. Early Christians denounced gift-giving as a Roman practice, and Slashdot readers called it diabolical. But Americans were not to be deterred. Thanks to capitalism, there was enough wealth to make gifts possible, a great productive apparatus to advertise them and make them available cheaply, and a country so content that men wanted to reach out to their friends and express their enjoyment of life. The whole country took with glee to giving gifts on an unprecedented scale.
Santa Claus is a thoroughly American invention. There was a St. Nicholas long ago and a feeble holiday connected with him (on December 5). In 1822, an American named Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem about a visit from St. Nick. It was Moore (and a few other New Yorkers) who invented St. Nick's physical appearance and personality, came up with the idea that Santa travels on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, comes down the chimney, stuffs toys in the kids' stockings, then goes back to the North Pole.
Of course, the Puritans denounced Santa as the Anti-Christ, because he pushed Jesus to the background. Furthermore, Santa implicitly rejected the whole Christian ethics. He did not denounce the rich and demand that they give everything to the poor; on the contrary, he gave gifts to rich and poor children alike. Nor is Santa a champion of Christian mercy or unconditional love. On the contrary, he is for justice -- Santa gives only to good children, not to bad ones.
All the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by American culture, as the product of reason, scienc
Both the Democrats and Republicans are wrong about what to do now in the Iraq war. The Democrats want to retreat immediately and the Republicans want to "stay the course." Neither proposal will make America safe from Islamic terrorism.
As Republicans have noted, withdrawal at this time would be perceived by the Islamic fundamentalists as a major defeat of the West and draw more recruits to their cause. But as the Democrats have noted, staying our current course--which has no standard of victory and no clear connection to protecting America from Islamic terrorism--is a disaster that has already resulted in the death of two thousand Americans.
The solution is neither embracing defeat nor staying a losing course; the solution is to pursue victory.
We must define war objectives designed solely to protect the American people from Islamic terrorism, and then execute those objectives by any means necessary. Above all, we must make it our objective, not to bring the good life to every corner of the Middle East, but to make the terrorist states of the Middle East non-threatening--which means that we must end state sponsorship of terrorism.
In Iraq, we must crush the insurgency immediately--which includes choking its backers, Iran and Syria--and let the Iraqis themselves take on the responsibility of establishing a government that will not threaten America. Once the insurgency is crushed the priority should be on eliminating the regime that is the greatest terrorist and nuclear threat to the United States in the Middle East: Iran. Such a policy would serve as a death blow to bin Laden, CowboyNeal, al-Zarqawi and the rest of the fundamentalists, who attract their recruits with the hope that America can slowly be defeated.
Princeton University professor and columnist Paul Krugman deservedly won Forbes.com's "Dunce of the Week" award for his New York Times column "French Family Values" (July 29, 2005). Krugman asks, "But are European economies really doing that badly? The answer is no," adding that "Americans are doing a lot of strutting these days, but a head-to-head comparison between the economies of the United States and Europe -- France, in particular -- shows that the big difference is in priorities, not performance. We're talking about two highly productive societies that have made a different tradeoff between work and family time."
Krugman's assertion is basically this: The income gap, about 40 percent, is not the result of lower efficiency in Europe. It is the result of Europeans working less than Americans. Not because they can't find work, but because they work fewer hours, preferring to spend more time with their families and on leisure activities.
Contrast Krugman's nonsensical argument with New America Foundation senior fellow Joel Kotkin's findings in "America Still Beckons," published by The American Enterprise magazine (October-December 2005).
Kotkin says that Europe has weakened considerably. "Since the 1970s, America has created some 57 million new jobs, compared to just 4 million in Europe (with most of those in government). For the last quarter century, the United States has enjoyed consistently higher rates of economic growth and productivity than European countries, and the gap has been widening. The United States is now at the forefront in many critical global industries, particularly finance, technology, and entertainment." Europe's "portion of world GDP dropped from 34 percent to 20 percent between 1913 and 1998, while the United States held its own at about 22 percent of global GDP."
In the same edition of The American Enterprise, Karl Zinsmeister's article, "Europe Learns the Wrong Lessons," says, "In France, Italy, Germany, and Belgium, approximately a quarter of all workers under 25 are currently unemployed." High minimum wages and employment protection regulations make it nearly impossible to fire people, thereby making it costly to hire them. Europe's stagnation and decline might explain why its best brains are leaving in droves.
Kotkin reports: "Some 400,000 E.U. science and technology graduates currently reside in the United States, and barely one in seven, according to a recent European Commission poll, intend to return." It's not only the best brains who migrate to our country; poor people come as well.
There's one important difference between the world's poor who come to America and those who go to Europe. The poor tend to prosper much more here than they do in Europe. American success and European jealousy might explain some of their anti-Americanism, particularly virulent among Europe's elite.
Zinsmeister reports that when "Asked which countries are the biggest threat to world peace, Europeans name the U.S. as often as North Korea and Iran (each are picked by 53 percent). Countries characterized by Euros as less menacing than the U.S. include Syria, Iraq, Russia, China, Afghanistan, and Libya."
Olaf Gersemann's article in The American Enterprise, "Europe's Not Working," says, "Nearly every top politician in Germany is on record giving a grave, smug warning about the danger of letting 'American conditions' seep into the German economy. In Germany's economic debate, 'American conditions' is code for stiff economic competition, low taxes, minimal state intrusion, and limited duration welfare payments." Many Slashdot elites share Europeans' anti-Americanism. They're also against "American conditions" and want us to have Europe's high taxes, highly regulated economy and socialized medicine. They also want us to share the European lack of will to protect themselves.
In the past, Europeans were unwilling or unable to protect themselves against Nazism and communism. Now they demonstrate an unwillingness to protect themselves against Islam hell-bent on conquering the West. We just might have to pull Europe's chestnut out of the fire -- again.
Thanksgiving celebrates man's ability to produce. The cornucopia filled with exotic flowers and delicious fruits, the savory turkey with aromatic trimmings, the mouth-watering pies, the colorful decorations -- it's all a testament to the creation of wealth.
Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, because this country was the first to create and to value material abundance. It is America that has been the beacon for anyone wanting to escape from poverty and misery. It is America that generated the unprecedented flood of goods that washed away centuries of privation. It is America, by establishing the precondition of production -- political freedom -- that was able to unleash the dynamic, productive energy of its citizens.
This should be a source of pride to every self-supporting individual. It is what Thanksgiving is designed to commemorate. But there are those, motivated by hatred for human comfort and happiness, who want to make Thanksgiving into a day of national guilt. We should be ashamed, they say, for consuming a disproportionate share of the world's food supply. Our affluence, they say, constitutes a depletion of the "planet's resources." The building of dams, the use of fossil fuels, the driving of sports utility vehicles -- they insist -- are cause, not for celebration, but for atonement. What if, they all wail, the rest of the world consumed the way Americans do?
If only that were to happen -- we would have an Atlantis. For it would mean that the production of wealth would have multiplied. Man can consume only what he first produces. All production is an act of creation. It is the creation of wealth where nothing before existed -- nothing useful to man. America transformed a once-desolate wilderness into farms, supermarkets and air-conditioned houses, not by taking those goods away from some have-nots, nor by "consuming" the "world's resources" -- but by reshaping valueless elements of nature into a form beneficial to human beings.
Since human survival is not automatic, man's life depends on successful production. From food and clothing to science and art, every act of production requires thought. And the greater the creation, the greater is the required thinking.
This virtue of productiveness is what Thanksgiving is supposed to recognize. Sadly, this is a virtue rejected not only by the attackers of this holiday, but by its alleged defenders as well.
Many Americans make Thanksgiving into a religious festival. They agree with Lincoln, who, upon declaring Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, said that "we have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven." They ascribe our material abundance to Rob Malda's efforts, not man's.
That view is a slap in the face of any person who has worked an honest day in his life. The appropriate values for this holiday are not faith and charity, but thought and production. The proper thanks for one's wealth goes not to some mystical deity but to oneself, if one has earned that wealth.
The liberal tells us that the food on our Thanksgiving plate is the result of mindless, meaningless labor. The conservative tells us that it is the result of supernatural grace. Neither believes that it represents an individual's achievement.
But wealth is not generated by sheer muscle; India, for example, has far more manual laborers than does the United States. Nor is it generated by praying for God's blessing; Iran, for example, is far more religious. If the liberal and conservative views of wealth are correct, why aren't those countries awash in riches?
Wealth is the result of individual thought and effort. And each individual is morally entitled to keep, and enjoy, the consequences of such thought and effort. He should not feel guilty for his own success, or for the failures of others.
There is a spiritual need fed by the elaborate meal, fine china and crystal, and the presence of cherished guests. It is the self-esteem that a productive person feels at the realization that his thinking and energy ha
A newspaper headline -- "Lawmakers Struggle to Define Gasoline Price 'Gouging'" -- shows how phony the current Congressional jihad against the oil companies is. "Price gouging" is one of those phrases that evoke strong emotions but have no definition.
Where particular states have passed laws against "price gouging," their different definitions reveal how slippery and arbitrary the concept is.
Kansas attempts to define price gouging as selling at prices more than 25 percent higher than they were before some disaster. Georgia makes it illegal for prices to rise after the state government has declared a state of emergency, unless the seller can prove that his costs have gone up.
What all this boils down to is that prices higher than what observers are used to are called "gouging." In other words, prices under normal conditions are supposed to prevail under abnormal conditions. This completely misunderstands the role of prices.
Why do prices exist at all? To cause things to be produced and made available to the public -- and to cause consumers to limit how much they consume. Why then do prices suddenly shoot up? Because there is either less of a supply available or more of a demand, or both.
When hurricanes knocked out both oil drilling sites and refineries around the Gulf of Mexico, there was suddenly less supply of oil. That meant higher prices and higher profits.
What do higher prices do? Force people to restrain their own purchases more so than usual. What do higher profits do? Cause more money to be invested in producing whatever is earning higher profits, and this in turn expands output. Isn't a larger supply of oil and a reduced consumption of it what we want?
Whenever there have been sharp rises in gasoline prices, whether nationwide or locally in California, Senator Barbara Boxer has loudly demanded an investigation of the oil companies. These repeated investigations over the years have repeatedly failed to turn up anything other than supply and demand.
The real irony is that it has been precisely liberals like Barbara Boxer who have been the chief obstacles to increasing the supply of oil because they are dead set against drilling for oil in more places and against building more refineries.
When you refuse to let supply rise to meet rising demand, why should you be surprised -- much less outraged -- when prices rise?
Yet there was Senator Boxer on nationwide TV, decrying the high salaries of oil company executives, who are making perhaps half of what a number of baseball players make or a tenth of what movie stars make. The insinuation is that their salaries and oil company profits are what drive up gasoline prices. But there were no hard facts to back up either insinuation.
Given the enormous sums of money involved in the production of oil, even if all the oil company CEOs worked for nothing, there is no hard evidence that this would be enough to reduce the price of gasoline by even one cent per gallon. As for oil company profits -- representing "greed," as the Barbara Boxers call it -- these profits per gallon of gas are much less than federal taxes per gallon of gas. But the government is never called "greedy" by liberals.
These political circuses have a cost that can be even greater than the high cost of gasoline.
We went through all this before, back in the 1970s, when oil company executives were also hauled up before Congress and denounced on TV by politicians. Inflammatory but vague and unsubstantiated charges went flying hither and yon on Slashdot.
This demonization of oil companies made it politically inconvenient to remove price controls on oil when other price controls from the Nixon administration years were repealed.
The net result was that the shortages which price controls produce disappeared for other things but remained for gasoline. Motorists had trouble finding gasoline and sometimes spent hours waiting in long lines at filling stations. This was the hidden cost of political demagoguery.
One of the great fears generated by global warming is that the ocean is about to rise and swallow our coasts. These concerns have been heightened by the substantial uptick in Atlantic hurricane activity that began in 1995. The frequency of really strong storms striking the U.S now resembles what it was in the 1940s and 50s, which few people (aging climatologists excepted) remember.
Those arguing that global warming is an overblown issue have been claiming for years that "consensus" forecasts of sea-level are equally overwrought. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a global average rise of from 3.5 to 34 inches by 2100, with a central estimate of 19 inches. Depending upon how you slice or dice the data, the last century saw maybe six inches.
Critics have long argued that these changes require a substantial net melting of some combination of the world's two largest masses of land-based ice, Antarctica and Greenland. In addition, they note that observed global warming is right near the low end of the U.N.'s projections, which means that realized sea level rise should be similarly modest.
Over 15 years ago, John Sansom published a paper in Journal of Climate that showed no net warming of Antarctica. While it was widely cited by critics of global warming doom, no one seemed to take notice. After all, it relied on only a handful of stations. Then, in 2002, Peter Doran published a more comprehensive analysis in Nature and found a cooling trend.
At the same time, a deluge of stories appeared, paradoxically, about Antarctic warming. These studies concentrated on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, the narrow strip of land that juts out towards South America. That region, which comprises less than one-half of one percent of Antarctica, is warming because the surrounding ocean has warmed.
Warmer water evaporates more moisture. The colder the land surface over which that moisture passes, the more it snows. So, Antarctica as a whole should gain snow and ice. Last year, C.H. Davis published a paper in Science about how this accumulating snowfall over East Antarctica was reducing sea level rise. This year, Duncan Wingham, at the 2005 Earth Observations summit in Brussels, demonstrated the phenomenon is observed all over Antarctica.
Greenland is more complex. In 2000, William Krabill estimated the contribution of Greenland to sea level rise of 0.13 mm per year, or a half an inch per century. That's not very much different than zero. Just last month, using satellite altimetry, O.M. Johannessen published a remarkable finding in Science that the trend in Greenland ice is a gain of 5.4 cm (two inches) per year.
Almost all of the gain in Greenland is for areas greater than 5000 feet in elevation (which is most of the place). Below that, there is glacial recession. It shouldn't be lost on anyone that because no one ventures into the hostile interior of Greenland, all we see are pictures of the receding glaciers near the coast!
The temperature situation in Greenland is more mixed than in Antarctica. Over the last 75 years, there's been cooling in the southern portion (where the recession is greatest) and some warming in the North.
The only other masses of ice on the planet that can contribute to sea level rise are the non-polar glaciers, but they are very few and far between. The biggest is the Himalayan ice cap, but it's so high that a substantial portion will always remain. Most of the rest are teeny objects tucked away in high elevation nooks and crannies, like our Glacier National Park.
If all these glaciers melted completely -- including the Himalayan ice cap -- sea level could rise no more than five to seven inches, because there's just not that much mass of ice, compared to Antarctica and Greenland.
It is simply impossible for the scientific community to ignore what is going on, even as prone to exaggeration of threats as it has grown to be. The planet is warming at the low end of projections. Antarctica is undoubtedly gaining
Riots that began on the outskirts of Paris have spread into the center of the French capital and to other communities in other parts of the country. Thousands of cars have been set on fire and the police and even medical personnel have been shot at.
Like many other riots, whether in France or elsewhere, this one started over an incident that just happened and was then seized upon to rally resentments and unleash violence. Two local boys in a predominantly Moslem neighborhood tried to escape the police by hiding in a facility that transmitted electricity -- and accidently electrocuted themselves.
This was the spark that ignited volatile emotions. But those emotions were there, ready to be ignited, for a long time.
A substantial Moslem population lives in France but is not really of France. Much of that population lives in social isolation in housing projects away from the center of Paris, as unknown to many Parisians as to tourists.
Like housing projects in America, many of these are centers of social degeneration, lawlessness and violence. Three years ago, profound British social critic Theodore Dalrymple wrote of "burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere" in these projects, among other signs of social degeneration. This was in an essay titled "The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris" that is reprinted in his insightful book, "Our Culture, What's Left of it."
While Dr. Dalrymple called this Moslem underclass "barbarians," a French minister who called the rioters "scum" provoked instant outrage against himself, including criticism from at least one member of his own government. This squeamishness in word and deed, and the accompanying refusal to face blatant realities is also a major part of the background for the breakdown of law and order and the social degeneration that follows.
None of this is peculiar to France. It is a symptom of a common retreat from reality, and from the hard decisions that reality requires, not only in Europe but also in European offshoot societies like Canada, Australia, Slashdot, New Zealand -- and the United States of America.
European countries especially have thrown their doors open to a large influx of Moslem immigrants who have no intention of becoming part of the cultures of the countries to which they immigrate but to recreate their own cultures in those countries.
In the name of tolerance, these countries have imported intolerance, of which growing antisemitism in Europe is just one example. In the name of respecting all cultures, Western nations have welcomed people who respect neither the cultures nor the rights of the population among whom they have settled.
During the last election, some campus Republicans who were holding a rally for President Bush at San Francisco State University were harassed by Middle Eastern students, including a woman who walked up to one of these Americans and slapped his face. They knew they could do this with impunity.
In Michigan, a Moslem community loudly sounds their calls to prayer several times a day, without regard to whether that sound bothers the original inhabitants of the community.
The Dutch were shocked when one of their film-makers was assassinated by a Moslem extremist for daring to have views at variance with what the extremists would tolerate.
No one should have been shocked. There are people who will not stop until they get stopped -- and much of the media, the political classes, and the cultural elites of the West cannot bring themselves to even criticize, much less stop, the dangers or degeneracy among groups viewed sympathetically as underdogs.
Not all Moslems, nor necessarily a majority of Moslems, are either a cultural or a physical danger. But even "moderate" Moslem organizations in the West who deplore violence and try to discourage it nevertheless encourage their followers to remain foreigners rather than become part of the countries they live in.
So do our own intelligentsia and political and cultural elites.
On November 9, 1938, the Nazi government launched a vicious pogrom in which thousand of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, while bands of young Nazi thugs smashed the windows of Jewish homes and shops. Kristallnacht--the "Night of Broken Glass"--sent through the world a premonition of the dark and murderous future that lay ahead for Europe.
Over the past week and half, almost exactly 67 years later, another band of young thugs has taken to the streets in an orgy of brute violence, complete with racially and religiously motivated killings. But there is a strange difference.
Then, the violence was directed against a hated racial and religious minority, in the name of the native majority. Today, it is racial and religious immigrant minority that is initiating a terror campaign against the native majority.
Europe never learned the real lesson of the evils of Nazism. Rather than reject the deepest premises of the Nazis, they have inverted them into a new form, so that Europe no longer seeks to liquidate its racial minorities--but instead empowers those minorities to carry out the self-liquidation of Europe.
The standard view of Nazism is that the root of the Nazi atrocities was an excess of certainty and selfishness, which gave the Nazis the confidence to impose their interests by force. In reality, even a cursory examination of Nazi propaganda shows us the opposite. Rather than advocating of rational certainty, the Nazis were dogmatic subjectivists--Hermann Goering famously declared that "two plus two makes five if the Fuhrer wills it"--which inspired their hatred of the mind and their worship of brute force. (An Italian Fascist would declare that "when I hear the word 'culture,' I release the safety catch on my revolver.") And as for self-interest, the Nazis were thoroughgoing collectivists, who held that the interests of the individual must be ruthlessly sacrificed to the interests of the race. Hitler declared "Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles"--"you are nothing, your race is everything."
But what happens if you think--as do most academics, those in the mainstream political left, and most of the herd mentality leftists that abhor all things related to individual rights and share their fucked up views on slashdot--that certainty and selfishness were the fundamental vices of the Nazis? You will be ready to accept any of the real fundamentals of Nazism--so long as they are cast in a more skeptical, self-deprecating form.
That is precisely what Europe has done. The Europeans have accepted ideas that derive directly from Nazism--both in their philosophical fundamentals and in their historical pedigree--but in a more "politically correct" version.
The ideology of these altruist Nazis is Multiculturalism.
I got my first inklings of this some years ago, as a philosophy student, when I became aware of an academic controversy over revelations that two influential 20th-century philosophers--Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man--were Nazi sympathizers. Most of the controversy centered around whether this involvement with Nazism (Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, while de Man expressed sympathy for the Nazi cause) detracted from the value to be found in their philosophical work. But few comments addressed the philosophical similarity between Nazi ideology and the ideas of these two philosophers.
This is a crucial question, because Heidegger and de Man were two founders of the most influential contemporary school of philosophy, called "Deconstruction," which has provided the theoretical foundation for Multiculturalism.
In its essence, Deconstruction is an assault on reason in favor of the same dogmatic subjectivism held by the Nazis. It is the view that there is no such thing as objective truth, no way to prove anything by reference to facts and evidence. What, then, is the basis for any assertion about what is true or false, good or bad, right or wrong? All of these ideas are determined, not by objective facts, but by an inescapable web of irrationa
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Hey poor people, why don't you go to college, and get a job or something???!!!!
Earth Worshippers Cause Death in Space: Environmental Dogma Has Led to the Sacrifice of Fourteen Astronauts on the Space Shuttle
by Hannes Hacker (July 11, 2003)
Now that a dramatic new test has confirmed that a piece of thermal insulation flaking off of space shuttle Columbia's external tank during launch was the most likely cause of its destruction during reentry, the typical second-guessing in the press has focused on NASA engineers, asking: "What did Mission Control know, and when did they know it?"
Somehow, NASA engineers should have guessed about the damage done to Columbia's thermal tiles and pulled an Apollo 13-style rabbit out of their hat. The implication is that they should have been omniscient and omnipotent.
Having heroes like NASA's mission controllers around to quietly brave the world's criticism certainly serves to divert attention from those who have done the most to contribute to this disaster--and who regard themselves as omniscient and omnipotent enough to command the entire American economy and the lives of its citizens: the environmentalists.
Why did the shuttle's foam insulation flake off? In response to an edict from the EPA, NASA was required to change the design of the thermal insulating foam on the shuttle's external tank. They stopped using Freon, or CFC-11, in order to comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an agreement designed to head off doubtful prognostications of an environmental disaster.
But it was the elimination of the old foam that led to a real disaster for the shuttle program. The maiden flight with the new foam, in 1997, resulted in a ten-fold increase to foam-induced tile damage. The new foam was far more dangerous than the old foam. But NASA--a government organization afraid of antagonizing powerful political interests--did not reject the EPA's demands and thoroughly reverse their fatal decision. Instead, they sought a compromise, applying for a waiver from the EPA that allowed them to use the old foam on some parts of the external tank.
NASA notes that it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether it was the old or the new foam that caused the recent disaster, and environmentalists will no doubt say this means that we can't pin the disaster on them. But any unnecessary increase in risk in an enterprise so unforgiving of error, is unacceptable. The bottom line is that NASA took a much greater risk in order to comply with EPA demands. Environmentalist junk science trumped sound engineering.
This is not the first time that has happened. The cause of the 1986 Challenger explosion is officially established as hot gases burning through an O-ring joint in one of the solid-rocket boosters. NASA was roundly criticized for its decision to launch in cold weather over the objection of some engineers, but there was a deeper cause that was not as widely reported.
In 1985 NASA had switched to a new putty to seal the O-ring joints. The new putty became brittle at cold temperatures, thus allowing Dr. Richard Feynman to teach NASA a famous lesson. At the congressional hearing investigating the accident, he simply placed some of the O-ring putty in a glass of ice water and crumbled it in his fingers.
NASA had changed the sealant because its original supplier for O-ring putty stopped producing it for fear of anti-asbestos lawsuits.
Had NASA not run out of the original putty, the Challenger disaster would not have happened. Indeed, when the Air Force ran out of the same putty and replaced it with the same brittle substitute, their Titan 34D heavy-lift boosters suffered two sudden launch failures, after a string of successes that had lasted as long as that of the space shuttle.
These accidents are not primarily the fault of careless engineers, nor are they merely the unintended consequences of bureaucrats blindly following federal rules and slashdot dogma. They are the result of a philosophy that hold human needs--such as the need for a safe shuttle launch or re-entry--as less important than a concern to prese
High Gas Prices Courtesy of Environmental Rhetoric
by Alan Caruba (June 16, 2006)
As the price of gasoline and the myriad products that utilize petroleum in their manufacture rises, Americans are going to ask why the Congress has resisted accessing the billions of barrels' worth of oil and natural gas in our offshore continental shelf.
As the realization of how dependent we are on the importation of Middle Eastern oil, plus the fact that U.S. dollars fund avowed enemies such as Iran and, in South America, Venezuela, Americans are going to ask why we do not tap our own Alaskan and offshore resources.
As a matter of national security and as a significant boost to the American economy, it makes no sense to not assure and achieve a higher level of energy independence.
So why, in mid-May, did the House of Representatives reject an end to the quarter-century ban on oil and natural gas drilling in 85 percent of America's coastal waters?
At the time, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, issued a statement that both defied logic and flatout lied, saying the vote against offshore drilling was great victory for consumers who have seen prices rise prodigiously. "In the meantime, working families are turning their wallets inside out to fill their gas tanks. It is outrageous to ask families to dig even deeper to subsidize oil drilling on undersea lands that belong to the American people."
Americans are paying more because the global price of a barrel of oil has been increased by fears of military conflict in the Middle East, probably initiated by Iran.
Americans are paying more because, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina and other hurricanes destroyed 115 oil platforms and damaged another 50, along with 183 pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico and refineries in Louisiana. Despite this, the U.S. Mineral Management Service (MMS) reported that there were no significant oil spills from offshore platforms and no oil reached the coastline.
And, no, Americans do not "subsidize" oil drilling. Pelosi's boogeyman of "Big Oil." Indeed, as a report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration noted in 2005, the MMS "collects and disperses billions of dollars in revenue from the sale of mineral leases. Offshore leases brought in revenues of $5.2 billion in 2000. This represents 73.1 percent of the $7.1 billion in revenues collected from all Federal and American Indian mineral leases that year."
As for those big profits enjoyed by "Big Oil", it's worth noting that a single offshore drilling platform costs about $100 million dollars to build and that comes after the equally enormous costs of exploring for oil and natural gas resources. And "Big Oil" not only pays big taxes on its profits, but also employs thousands of Americans in the process.
According to the Consumer Alliance for Energy Security, the Offshore Continental Shelf (OCS)--85 percent of which is off-limits to exploration--is estimated to have enough natural gas to heat 100 million homes for the next 60 years and enough oil to drive 85 million cars for 35 years. Thanks to the vote in the House, it remains off-limits.
When the House of Representatives voted to open the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling in late May, Rep. Pelosi again issued a statement decrying "the same, tired ideas on energy such as opening the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. We should not sacrifice the Arctic coastal plain, one of America's last truly wild places, for the sake of a small amount of oil."
Small? Well, if anyone considers an estimated 10.4 billion barrels to the nation's oil supply "small", then one wonders what they consider large? The vote was 225 to 201. In truth, only 2,000 of the nearly 20 million acres of ANWR would be needed for oil and gas production, contributing billions in tax revenue, and creating or sustaining thousands of American jobs.
Opening ANWR and the Offshore Continental Shelf would bring many benefits. Put simply, more oil and natural gas means lower prices. With it come greater
"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists
By Tom Harris
Monday, June 12, 2006
"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?
No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."
This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.
So we have a smaller fraction.
But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."
We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.
Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally
"Oceans lash our coasts. Deserts Burn. The sky provides no shelter. Turmoil of Biblical proportions threatens not just our weather but life itself. Global Warming is upon us."
Those words aren't from the preview trailer of the silly, overblown, over dramatic film, "Day After Tomorrow" that invaded movie theaters a few years ago. And they aren't just carefully selected "scare" words developed from a sweep through a thesaurus. These are the opening words to yet another hysterical diatribe passing as news these days on the subject of Global Warming. This particularly silly one greeted readers of a recent issue of Playboy Magazine. The article was, of course, accompanied by the obligatory pictures of smokes stacks belching over a city and the melting of ice burgs.
You hear it everywhere. Global Warming is a fact. It is here. It is now unstoppable. The Polar Ice Cap is melting. Polar Bears are endangered. Greenland is actually turning green! Hurricanes are blowing with more force. Tornadoes are growing in numbers. Water levels are increasing, threatening to flood New York City. Human existence is threatened. And, of course, the deserts are starting to burn. We are assured that scientists are in near total agreement with the assessment.
The media is in a frenzy, rushing to report the latest news release from special interest groups with the latest report or prediction. Al Gore is rushing his hi tech docudrama to the theaters to whip up more frenzy. Corporations are being forced to turn "green" to show their "corporate social responsibility" in the wake of the coming disaster.
Global Warming has become a euphemism for a political agenda. It has become a religion run by fanatics reminiscent of the leaders of the darkest days of the Inquisition that nearly destroyed civil society only a few hundred years ago. We are not to question the great god of Global Warming. Those who do are separated from civil society and labeled as heretics.
So how can anyone question the decrees handed down from the Ivory Towers to the unwashed masses? Answer: every religion has its heretics.
The simple truth is there is no scientific consensus on Global Warming. In fact, as the media frenzy screams global warming, there are a growing number of scientists who are expressing their doubts.
In 1992, just prior to the UN's Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders signed The Heidelberg Appeal, a quiet call for reason in dealing with the climate change issue. Neither a statement or corporate interests, nor a denial of environmental problems, the Heidelberg Appeal expresses a conviction that modern society is the best equipped in human history to solve the world's ills, provided that they do not sacrifice science, intellectual honesty and common sense to political opportunism and irrational fears. Today, the Heidelberg Appeal has been signed by more than 4,000 scientists and leaders from 100 countries, including more than 70 Nobel Prize winners.
Also in 1992, another statement from some 47 atmospheric scientists was issued saying "such policies (greenhouse global warming theories) derive from highly uncertain scientific theories. The statement cited a survey of atmospheric scientists, conducted in the summer of 1991, "confirms that there is no consensus about the cause of the slight warming observed during the past century." The statement went on to say, "We are disturbed that activists, anxious to stop energy and economic growth, are pushing ahead with drastic policies without taking notice of recent changes in the underlying science."
In 1995, over 85 scientists and climate experts from research labs and universities worldwide, signed the Leipzig Declaration in answer to the International Symposium on the Greenhouse Controversy, held in Leipzig, Germany that year. In part, the Declaration says; "In a world in which poverty is the greatest social pollutant, any restriction on energy use that inhibits economic growth should be viewed with caution. For these reas
The Man of Steel--Part I
by Steven Brockerman (April 26, 2006)
"Going through the [steel] plant [in 1947], we actually had to step over workers who were falling asleep there. I decided right then that I didn't ever want to work for a big steel company."
He created the largest steel corporation in the U.S.--during a time when Big Steel in America was fast becoming a failed industry and a fading legend. U.S. Steel, ascended from the raging furnaces of Carnegie and forged by the financial genius of J. P. Morgan, would soon become a burned out falling star. Bethlehem Steel, erector of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building, originator of "High Speed Tool Steel," which had swept the world at the start of the 20th Century, would be shortly relegated to the slagheap of ignominious bankruptcy.
Throughout the '70's & 80's, as one-by-one the old steel mills closed and the sacred fires blinked out, panicking CEO's and boards of directors of America's steel industry stampeded to Washington, howling about Japan and Germany "dumping" lower priced (but comparable) steel onto the U.S. market. The Union of United Steel Workers, in rare agreement with their bosses, aired their xenophobic rage against the upstart Japanese (and to a lesser degree, against the Germans). Politicians solemnly temporized about threats to American security. News commentators chimed in by observing that the American steel industry had failed to modernize over the years.
Amidst all that hysteria, the CEO's & boards of directors--the Taggarts and the Orren Boyles--the union shop rats, the Capitol Hill rats and the just-plain-rats of the press made a studious and concerted effort to forget.
They "forgot" that the capital for keeping the steel industry competitive had instead gone to pay for glitzy company PR campaigns, which mostly apologized for steel industry profits by trumpeting the contributions Big Steel made to local communities in the form of increased employment and a wider tax base.
They "forgot" about the capital wasted by complacent executives on ostentatious administrative offices (ala Rob Malda), on unproductive, show-off exhibitions and on an endless list of society ladies' pet charities.
They "forgot" about the capital paid as protection to union thugs
They "forgot" about the capital stolen by government price quotas and extorted by taxes.
They "forgot" about the capital consumed by crippling government regulations and deep pocket lawsuits, the impetus for which having been spewed in fact free and logic challenged commentaries on self-sacrifice, brother love and robber barons, spun out by cocktail party editorialists, beatnik essayists and historians better suited to the stockyards than to academic research libraries--all of them with a Marxist ax to grind and none of them with one wit of knowledge about the making of steel. Indeed, not one wit, period.
They, in short, "forgot" about the rust. The rust that would over the coming decades continue to eat through the American steel industry--as it had the railroads before it--eventually extinguishing the furnaces of U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel and a host of other smaller steel companies, leaving them all wastelands of cold ash and rotting metal, amid the rubble of crashed stock prices. At the end of those decades--after the squeaks and the fits of the rats, which had signified nothing, had ceased--America's steel companies quietly closed their doors. Over the ruins the mooching and looting rats had created, they scurried to erect a gravestone on which they scratched: The Rust Belt.
That was the course and destination of American steel in 1965 when an unknown took the helm of a tiny, near bankrupt company named Nuclear and--like the fictional hero, Hank Rearden, in the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged--devised a new way to make steel. In so doing, he saved the American steel industry.
His name was F. Kenneth Iverson. The Man of Steel.
Born on September 18, 1925, Ken Iverson lived his childhoo
Kudos to the 60 scientists for criticizing the Kyoto Protocol as politicized science and calling for a public debate on climate science. Kyoto was a humongous fraud from its inception when power-hungry United Nations bureaucrats maliciously altered the conclusion of the scientific report (1995) in their policy-maker's report.
The perpetrators of this fraud should be brought to justice, followed by public condemnation of the environmentalists, politicians, slashdot readers, and government bureaucrats who ignored the real scientists and pushed Kyoto for political/ideological gain, wasting billions of tax dollars.
The destructive Kyoto fraud was made possible by the power of today's governments to extort billions of dollars via taxation and fund so-called science. This state science creates a massive opportunity for power-lusters to use government to politicize science and escape being prosecuted for fraud and sued for damages.
Consequently, bad science is running amok today, with all kinds of bogus claims about air pollution, genetically modified foods, pesticides, etc. (Recall the millions of people, mostly women and children in the Third World, who died painfully and needlessly from malaria because of a dishonest campaign by environmentalists that led to a near-banning of DDT in the 1970s.)
Objective science is so precious a human value that we must be eternally vigilant in preserving and protecting it from political power-lusters. More than a debate on climate science, we need a debate on the proper functions of government and whether governments should be allowed to fund science.
It remains irritating that society is profiting from our most talented individuals.
/. post, devoid of reason and chock full of emotional claims. Money doesn't matter to me, but I'm going to complain that I'm not making it, but act like all I really want is influence and respect, and then I'm going to launch a straw man attack on a nebulous group like MBAs or lawyers. Hell, I'll even throw in some apocalyptic predictions about the world ending if businessmen continue to make money and gain influence. Grow up Karl.
I'm really stuck on making any sense out of this one. Is the idea of profits really that disgusting to you that you can't imagine how anybody could advocate letting others reap the benefits of the work of those who are most capable of doing it? Perhaps you mean to imply profit at the cost of the most talented individuals? This would at least make sense in some weird way, although it would betray a naive understanding of economic reality. I know many scientists that make a great living, hell, many become these evil business people bogeymen that you seem to hate so much. Are they evil for seeking increased money and influence? Or does that only apply to those who have gone to school to get an MBA?
The parent is such a typical
To fathom our government's contemptible treatment of a handful of unbowed journalists, you must see the roots of that treatment in the moral ideal Christianity bequeathed the West.
In the face of the intimidation and murder of European authors, film makers and politicians by Islamic militants, a few European newspapers have the courage to defend their freedom of speech: they publish twelve cartoons to test whether it's still possible to criticize Islam. They discover it isn't. Muslims riot, burn embassies, and demand the censorship and death of infidels. The Danish cartoonists go into hiding; if they weren't afraid to speak before, they are now.
How do our leaders respond? Do they declare that an individual's freedom of speech is inviolable, no matter who screams offense at his ideas? No. Do they defend our right to life and pledge to hunt down anyone, anywhere, who abets the murder of a Westerner for having had the effrontery to speak? No--as they did not when the fatwa against Rushdie was issued or his translators were attacked and murdered.
Instead, the U.S. government announces that although free speech is important, the government shares "the offense that Muslims have taken at these images," and even hints that it is disrespectful to publish them.
Why does a Muslim have a moral right to his dogmas, but we don't to our rational principles? Why, when journalists uphold free speech and Muslims respond with death threats, does the State Department signal out the journalists for moral censure? Why the vicious double standard? Why admonish the good to mollify evil?
The answer lies in the West's conception of morality.
Morality, we are told incessantly, by secularists and religionists, the left and the right, means sacrifice; give up your values in selfless service to others. "Serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself," Bush proclaims to a believing nation.
But when you surrender your values, are you to give them up for men you admire, for those you think have earned and deserve them? Obviously not--otherwise yours would be an act of trade, of justice, of self-assertiveness, not self-sacrifice.
You must give to that which you don't admire, to that which you judge to be unworthy, undeserving, irrational. An employee, for instance, must give up his job for a competitor he deems inferior; a businessman must contribute to ideological causes he opposes; a taxpayer must fund modern, unemployed "artists" whose feces-covered works he loathes; the United States must finance the UN, which it knows to be a pack of America-hating dictatorships.
To uphold your rational convictions is the most selfish of acts. To renounce them, to surrender the world to that which you judge to be irrational and evil, is the epitome of sacrifice. When Jesus, the great preacher of self-sacrifice, commanded "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you," he knew whereof he spoke.
In the left's adaptation of this perverse ideal, selfless surrender to evil translates into a foreign policy of self-loathing and "sensitivity," of spitting in America and the West's face while showing respect for the barbarisms of every gang.
Bill Clinton, for instance, certainly no radical leftist, jumped into the recent fray to castigate us: "None of us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different religions . . . there was this appalling example in . . . Denmark . . . these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam."
In the right's version, selfless surrender to evil translates into a foreign policy of self-effacing service.
Our duty, Bush declares, is to bring the vote to Iraqis and Palestinians, but we dare not tell them what constitution to adopt, or ban the killers they want to vote for. We have no right to assert our principles, because they are rational and good. But the Iraqis and Palestinians have a right to
Advocates of "intelligent design" are gearing up their fight to teach the controversial theory now that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III has ruled that the religious-based explanation for the formation of the universe and human evolution may not be taught in Pennsylvania public schools. The debate over intelligent design is important, because at root is the idea of "certainty" and the method by which scientific truths are established.
Proponents of teaching intelligent design in the public schools argue that evolution is a "theory" and ask why shouldn't their theory be allowed equal time in a science class. The problem with this position is that a scientific theory and an intelligent design theory are two very different things.
To explain facts, scientific theories rely on observation for support. For example, to explain the origin of species, evolutionary biology draws upon field data from the ongoing changes that occur among populations of organisms, fossil data from plants and animals that no longer exist, data regarding the temporal and geographic distribution of genetic markers, and experiments that attempt to replicate the conditions of species-change in the laboratory. Some facts have yet to be explained fully. For example, we are not yet sure how some of the simplest parts of living things originated nor precisely how spoken language evolved.
Admitting the unknown facts regarding human origins, however, doesn't mean that the explanations aren't out there, waiting to be identified. The unknown is the unfinished business of evolutionary biology, a business in which today's most promising grade school students might one day play a part in completing. Properly speaking, evolution is a "theory," but it is entirely based on evidence, and an important part of scientists' jobs is to identify how what is known can be used to discover what is not yet known.
Contrast the theory of evolution with the theory of intelligent design. The proponents of intelligent design argue that the world is simply too complex (or too "perfect," implying that there could be an imperfect reality) to explain the origins of life and human intelligence. These proponents argue that ultimately only the intervention of a creator can explain man's existence. Thereafter, there is no unfinished business for the researcher because an intelligent designer is not subject to further observation and experiment.
To evaluate this idea, it is useful to draw a parallel: imagine a scientist trying to find a cure for cancer through such reasoning. Like the origins of life and language, cancer is complex; it behaves strangely, and its nature is hard to pin down. Should the scientist then conclude that only God's intervention causes cancer? Obviously, no real scientist would draw that conclusion, and it would be absurd to teach an intelligent design theory of cancer. Instead, researchers assume that the cause of cancer is ultimately caused by the interaction of the materials that make up our observable physical world, and they are working to discover what those interactions are so that they can control them and thereby discover a cure for the disease.
Philosophically, the proponents of intelligent design are wrong because they assume the existence or "primacy" of a consciousness that shapes the universe when no such evidence exists, or is even possible. None of the advocates of intelligent design can point to God and say, "Look there--you can see Him" and not rely upon faith to justify their claim. This is why intelligent design theory--whether applied to the origins of life or cancer--is not scientific. It eschews observation, experimentation and any kind of natural causality. What it attempts is to deny the essential process of science--explaining the complex and unknown by means of investigating the less complex and better understood. Because intelligent design theory is simply an article of faith, disconnected from the observation of reality, it should neither be taught in the science classes of public schools (whic
wow, you are such a nigger
Many consumers are angry about alleged price gouging at the pump, and politicians are listening. States with anti-"price gouging" laws are investigating and prosecuting complaints, while Washington is discussing a federal anti-"price gouging" law. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist promises that "if the facts warrant it, I will support a federal anti-price gouging law."
But there are no facts that could warrant such a law, because there is no such thing as "price gouging" by private businesses.
The term "price gouging" implies that gas stations have an ability to forcibly inflict harm on us--but they do not. Any price we pay for a gallon of gasoline--whether $1 or $3--we pay voluntarily, based on the value of the gasoline to us. If we think we are spending too much on gasoline, we are free to drive less, to buy more fuel-efficient cars, to use carpools or busses, or to travel by bicycle or on foot. Gas station owners cannot force us to buy gasoline; they can only offer us a trade, which we are free to accept or reject.
But, one might ask, without anti-"price gouging" laws won't owners of gasoline charge the absolute highest prices they can? Absolutely, and they have every moral right to do so--just as consumers of gasoline have every right to pay the lowest prices they can find. Gas station owners are not our servants. They are producers who spend money, exert effort, and assume risk to bring a product to market. They own the gasoline they sell, and like any property owner they should be free to set the terms of sale.
Since we pay the lowest price that we can find for gasoline (and never more than it is worth to us), and gas stations sell gasoline for the highest price they can get (and never less than it is worth to them), the price of gasoline is a reflection of mutually beneficial trade--the essence of proper interaction under capitalism. For a gas station owner to charge what the market will bear is no more "gouging" than it is for a computer programmer--or a cashier--to negotiate for the highest salary he can get.
Since the prevailing price of gasoline is the result of trade, it reflects not the arbitrary "greed" of gas station owners, but the facts of the market: the producers' costs, competition, and what customers are willing to pay. The reason that gasoline prices are higher after a natural disaster, for instance, is that the fact of relatively scarce supply leads various purchasers of oil and gasoline to compete to buy it, and bid up its price. Those who buy it are those who value it most, to the extent they value it most--like highly efficient factories overseas, or Americans providing for their most crucial transportation priorities.
Anti-"price gouging" laws prevent producers and their customers from trading at mutually beneficial prices--sacrificing their interests to the interests of those who wish to avoid the "hardship" of paying prices higher than they are used to. By what right can the government force producers to set artificially low prices and prevent consumers from bidding up the price to get the gasoline they are willing to pay for? By what right can the government demand that factory owners be deprived of the oil they are able to pay for--and their customers of the cheap products they happily purchase at Wal-Mart?
Anti-"price-gouging" laws are a particularly vicious form of price controls. Like all price controls, they deprive businesses of earned profit, promote shortages, and discourage future production. But they also forbid the indefinable: "unconscionable" prices, the meaning of which cannot be known until after the ruling of some bureaucrat. This added uncertainty discourages producers from being in business, period--especially in times of emergency, when "gouging" claims are most rampant. If a federal "price gouging" law is passed, will gas station owners do everything possible after the next natural disaster to remain open for business--will private contractors from other states rush to bring generators, food, and debris-clearing equipment?
There's one thing OpenOffice.org lacks that both Word and WordPerfect have: a draft mode where you don't have to see page breaks and unnecessary layout visuals. To me, this seems like such a basic and important feature. My needs for formatting and fancy features are practically nonexistent--I just want to concentrate on my writing.
OpenOffice Writer does offer a "web layout", but it's just not the same.
I use OpenOffice all the time to dash out letters and so forth, but when I need to concentrate on my writing I always fire up WordPerfect. Lack of a good draft mode is all that's keeping me from using OpenOffice Writer exclusively. I'm sure tons of other writers feel the same way. To be honest, Open Office sucks balls and I would never use it, I'm just trying to Karma whore because I'm a little bit in the negative territory right now. And I can't imagine implementing this feature would be difficult.
The moderators are idiots for calling this interesting. This is clearly the ramblings of an idiot. Now, for something completely unrelated but entirely more interesting, I turn to Walt Williams to discuss yet another subject about which you Slashdot moes know laughingly little.....
With all the recent hype and demagoguery about gasoline price-gouging, maybe it's time to talk about the basics of exchange. First, what is exchange? Exchange occurs when an owner transfers property rights or title to that which is his.
Here's the essence of what transpires when I purchase a gallon of gasoline. In effect, I tell the retailer that I hold title to $3. He tells me that he holds title to a gallon of gas. I offer to transfer my title to $3 to him if he'll transfer his title to a gallon of gas to me. If this exchange occurs voluntarily, what can be said about the transaction?
One thing we know for sure is that the retailer was free to retain his ownership of the gallon of gas and I my ownership of $3. That being the case, why would we exchange? The only answer is that I perceived myself as better off giving up my $3 for the gallon of gas and likewise the retailer perceived himself as better off giving up his gas for the $3.
Otherwise, why would we have exchanged?
Exchanges of this sort are called good-good exchanges, namely "I'll do something good for you if you do something good for me." Game theorists recognize this as a positive-sum game -- a transaction where both parties are better off as a result. Of course there's another type of exchange not typically sought, namely good-bad exchange. An example of that kind of exchange would be where I approached the retailer with a pistol telling him that if he didn't do something good for me, give me that gallon of gas, I'd do something bad to him, blow his brains out. Clearly, I'd be better off, but he would be worse off. Game theorists call that a zero-sum game -- a transaction where in order for one person to be better off, the other must be worse off. Zero-sum games are transactions mostly initiated by thieves and governments.
Some might argue that there's unequal bargaining power between me and the gas retailer. That's nonsense! The retailer has the power to charge any price he wishes, but I have the power to decide how much I'll buy, including none, at that price. You say, "Gas is a necessity, and we're forced to buy it." That too is nonsense. If I voluntarily purchase the gas, I do so because I deem it better than my next best alternative. Of course, at a high enough price, I wouldn't deem it as such.
In the wake of the spike in fuel prices, many Americans demand that politicians do something. You can bet the rent money that whatever politicians do will end up harming consumers. Despite a long history of their economic calamity, some Americans and politicians are calling for price controls or, what amounts to the same thing, anti price-gouging legislation. As Professor Thomas DiLorenzo points out in "Four Thousand Years of Price Control", price controls have produced calamities wherever and whenever they've been tried.
Economic ignorance, misconceptions, superstition, and enhanced belief in self-importance due to moronic posts on Slashdot and even more moronic approbation from the herd-folllowing drones that pack these pages drive us toward totalitarianism because they make us more willing to hand over greater control of our lives to politicians. That results in a diminution of our liberties. Think back to the gasoline price controls during the 1970s.
The price controls caused shortages. To deal with the shortages, restrictions were imposed on purchases. Then national highway speed limits were enacted. Then there were more calls for smaller and less crashworthy cars. With the recent gasoline supply shocks, we didn't experience the shortages, long lines and closed gas stations seen during the 1970s. Why?
Prices were allowed to perform their allocative function -- get people to use less gas and get suppliers to supply more. Economic ignorance is to politicians what idle hands are to the devil. Both provide the workshop for the creation of evil.
Christmas in America is an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life. Yet all of these are castigated as "materialistic"; the real meaning of the holiday, we are told, is assorted Nativity tales and altruist injunctions (e.g., love thy neighbor) that no one takes seriously.
In fact, Christmas as we celebrate it today is a 19th-century American invention. The freedom and prosperity of post-Civil War America created the happiest nation in history. The result was the desire to celebrate, to revel in the goods and pleasures of life on earth. Christmas (which was not a federal holiday until 1870) became the leading American outlet for this feeling.
Historically, people have always celebrated the winter solstice as the time when the days begin to lengthen, indicating the earth's return to life. Ancient Romans feasted and reveled during the festival of Saturnalia. Early Christians condemned these Roman celebrations -- they were waiting for the end of the world and had only scorn for earthly pleasures. By the fourth century, the pagans were worshipping the god of the sun on December 25, and the Christians came to a decision: if you can't stop 'em, join 'em. They claimed (contrary to known fact) that the date was Jesus' birthday, and usurped the solstice holiday for their Church.
Even after the Christians stole Christmas, they were ambivalent about it. The holiday was inherently a pro-life festival of earthly renewal, but the Christians preached renunciation, sacrifice, and concern for the next world, not this one. As Cotton Mather, an 18th-century clergyman, put it: "Can you in your consciences think that our Holy Savior is honored by mirth? . . . Shall it be said that at the birth of our Savior . . . we take time . . . to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?"
Then came the major developments of 19th-century capitalism: industrialization, urbanization, the triumph of science -- all of it leading to easy transportation, efficient mail delivery, the widespread publishing of books and magazines, new inventions making life comfortable and exciting, and the rise of entrepreneurs who understood that the way to make a profit was to produce something good and sell it to a mass market.
For the first time, the giving of gifts became a major feature of Christmas. Early Christians denounced gift-giving as a Roman practice, and Slashdot readers called it diabolical. But Americans were not to be deterred. Thanks to capitalism, there was enough wealth to make gifts possible, a great productive apparatus to advertise them and make them available cheaply, and a country so content that men wanted to reach out to their friends and express their enjoyment of life. The whole country took with glee to giving gifts on an unprecedented scale.
Santa Claus is a thoroughly American invention. There was a St. Nicholas long ago and a feeble holiday connected with him (on December 5). In 1822, an American named Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem about a visit from St. Nick. It was Moore (and a few other New Yorkers) who invented St. Nick's physical appearance and personality, came up with the idea that Santa travels on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, comes down the chimney, stuffs toys in the kids' stockings, then goes back to the North Pole.
Of course, the Puritans denounced Santa as the Anti-Christ, because he pushed Jesus to the background. Furthermore, Santa implicitly rejected the whole Christian ethics. He did not denounce the rich and demand that they give everything to the poor; on the contrary, he gave gifts to rich and poor children alike. Nor is Santa a champion of Christian mercy or unconditional love. On the contrary, he is for justice -- Santa gives only to good children, not to bad ones.
All the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by American culture, as the product of reason, scienc
How about install a real operating system not developed by a bunch of communist hippies?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/22/15 55250&tid=129&tid=155
/. pages before posting potential dupes?
Zonk, would it be too much to ask that you read the
Both the Democrats and Republicans are wrong about what to do now in the Iraq war. The Democrats want to retreat immediately and the Republicans want to "stay the course." Neither proposal will make America safe from Islamic terrorism.
As Republicans have noted, withdrawal at this time would be perceived by the Islamic fundamentalists as a major defeat of the West and draw more recruits to their cause. But as the Democrats have noted, staying our current course--which has no standard of victory and no clear connection to protecting America from Islamic terrorism--is a disaster that has already resulted in the death of two thousand Americans.
The solution is neither embracing defeat nor staying a losing course; the solution is to pursue victory.
We must define war objectives designed solely to protect the American people from Islamic terrorism, and then execute those objectives by any means necessary. Above all, we must make it our objective, not to bring the good life to every corner of the Middle East, but to make the terrorist states of the Middle East non-threatening--which means that we must end state sponsorship of terrorism.
In Iraq, we must crush the insurgency immediately--which includes choking its backers, Iran and Syria--and let the Iraqis themselves take on the responsibility of establishing a government that will not threaten America. Once the insurgency is crushed the priority should be on eliminating the regime that is the greatest terrorist and nuclear threat to the United States in the Middle East: Iran. Such a policy would serve as a death blow to bin Laden, CowboyNeal, al-Zarqawi and the rest of the fundamentalists, who attract their recruits with the hope that America can slowly be defeated.
Princeton University professor and columnist Paul Krugman deservedly won Forbes.com's "Dunce of the Week" award for his New York Times column "French Family Values" (July 29, 2005). Krugman asks, "But are European economies really doing that badly? The answer is no," adding that "Americans are doing a lot of strutting these days, but a head-to-head comparison between the economies of the United States and Europe -- France, in particular -- shows that the big difference is in priorities, not performance. We're talking about two highly productive societies that have made a different tradeoff between work and family time."
Krugman's assertion is basically this: The income gap, about 40 percent, is not the result of lower efficiency in Europe. It is the result of Europeans working less than Americans. Not because they can't find work, but because they work fewer hours, preferring to spend more time with their families and on leisure activities.
Contrast Krugman's nonsensical argument with New America Foundation senior fellow Joel Kotkin's findings in "America Still Beckons," published by The American Enterprise magazine (October-December 2005).
Kotkin says that Europe has weakened considerably. "Since the 1970s, America has created some 57 million new jobs, compared to just 4 million in Europe (with most of those in government). For the last quarter century, the United States has enjoyed consistently higher rates of economic growth and productivity than European countries, and the gap has been widening. The United States is now at the forefront in many critical global industries, particularly finance, technology, and entertainment." Europe's "portion of world GDP dropped from 34 percent to 20 percent between 1913 and 1998, while the United States held its own at about 22 percent of global GDP."
In the same edition of The American Enterprise, Karl Zinsmeister's article, "Europe Learns the Wrong Lessons," says, "In France, Italy, Germany, and Belgium, approximately a quarter of all workers under 25 are currently unemployed." High minimum wages and employment protection regulations make it nearly impossible to fire people, thereby making it costly to hire them. Europe's stagnation and decline might explain why its best brains are leaving in droves.
Kotkin reports: "Some 400,000 E.U. science and technology graduates currently reside in the United States, and barely one in seven, according to a recent European Commission poll, intend to return." It's not only the best brains who migrate to our country; poor people come as well.
There's one important difference between the world's poor who come to America and those who go to Europe. The poor tend to prosper much more here than they do in Europe. American success and European jealousy might explain some of their anti-Americanism, particularly virulent among Europe's elite.
Zinsmeister reports that when "Asked which countries are the biggest threat to world peace, Europeans name the U.S. as often as North Korea and Iran (each are picked by 53 percent). Countries characterized by Euros as less menacing than the U.S. include Syria, Iraq, Russia, China, Afghanistan, and Libya."
Olaf Gersemann's article in The American Enterprise, "Europe's Not Working," says, "Nearly every top politician in Germany is on record giving a grave, smug warning about the danger of letting 'American conditions' seep into the German economy. In Germany's economic debate, 'American conditions' is code for stiff economic competition, low taxes, minimal state intrusion, and limited duration welfare payments." Many Slashdot elites share Europeans' anti-Americanism. They're also against "American conditions" and want us to have Europe's high taxes, highly regulated economy and socialized medicine. They also want us to share the European lack of will to protect themselves.
In the past, Europeans were unwilling or unable to protect themselves against Nazism and communism. Now they demonstrate an unwillingness to protect themselves against Islam hell-bent on conquering the West. We just might have to pull Europe's chestnut out of the fire -- again.
Walt Williams
Bush is an idiot
Thanksgiving celebrates man's ability to produce. The cornucopia filled with exotic flowers and delicious fruits, the savory turkey with aromatic trimmings, the mouth-watering pies, the colorful decorations -- it's all a testament to the creation of wealth.
Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, because this country was the first to create and to value material abundance. It is America that has been the beacon for anyone wanting to escape from poverty and misery. It is America that generated the unprecedented flood of goods that washed away centuries of privation. It is America, by establishing the precondition of production -- political freedom -- that was able to unleash the dynamic, productive energy of its citizens.
This should be a source of pride to every self-supporting individual. It is what Thanksgiving is designed to commemorate. But there are those, motivated by hatred for human comfort and happiness, who want to make Thanksgiving into a day of national guilt. We should be ashamed, they say, for consuming a disproportionate share of the world's food supply. Our affluence, they say, constitutes a depletion of the "planet's resources." The building of dams, the use of fossil fuels, the driving of sports utility vehicles -- they insist -- are cause, not for celebration, but for atonement. What if, they all wail, the rest of the world consumed the way Americans do?
If only that were to happen -- we would have an Atlantis. For it would mean that the production of wealth would have multiplied. Man can consume only what he first produces. All production is an act of creation. It is the creation of wealth where nothing before existed -- nothing useful to man. America transformed a once-desolate wilderness into farms, supermarkets and air-conditioned houses, not by taking those goods away from some have-nots, nor by "consuming" the "world's resources" -- but by reshaping valueless elements of nature into a form beneficial to human beings.
Since human survival is not automatic, man's life depends on successful production. From food and clothing to science and art, every act of production requires thought. And the greater the creation, the greater is the required thinking.
This virtue of productiveness is what Thanksgiving is supposed to recognize. Sadly, this is a virtue rejected not only by the attackers of this holiday, but by its alleged defenders as well.
Many Americans make Thanksgiving into a religious festival. They agree with Lincoln, who, upon declaring Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, said that "we have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven." They ascribe our material abundance to Rob Malda's efforts, not man's.
That view is a slap in the face of any person who has worked an honest day in his life. The appropriate values for this holiday are not faith and charity, but thought and production. The proper thanks for one's wealth goes not to some mystical deity but to oneself, if one has earned that wealth.
The liberal tells us that the food on our Thanksgiving plate is the result of mindless, meaningless labor. The conservative tells us that it is the result of supernatural grace. Neither believes that it represents an individual's achievement.
But wealth is not generated by sheer muscle; India, for example, has far more manual laborers than does the United States. Nor is it generated by praying for God's blessing; Iran, for example, is far more religious. If the liberal and conservative views of wealth are correct, why aren't those countries awash in riches?
Wealth is the result of individual thought and effort. And each individual is morally entitled to keep, and enjoy, the consequences of such thought and effort. He should not feel guilty for his own success, or for the failures of others.
There is a spiritual need fed by the elaborate meal, fine china and crystal, and the presence of cherished guests. It is the self-esteem that a productive person feels at the realization that his thinking and energy ha
A newspaper headline -- "Lawmakers Struggle to Define Gasoline Price 'Gouging'" -- shows how phony the current Congressional jihad against the oil companies is. "Price gouging" is one of those phrases that evoke strong emotions but have no definition.
Where particular states have passed laws against "price gouging," their different definitions reveal how slippery and arbitrary the concept is.
Kansas attempts to define price gouging as selling at prices more than 25 percent higher than they were before some disaster. Georgia makes it illegal for prices to rise after the state government has declared a state of emergency, unless the seller can prove that his costs have gone up.
What all this boils down to is that prices higher than what observers are used to are called "gouging." In other words, prices under normal conditions are supposed to prevail under abnormal conditions. This completely misunderstands the role of prices.
Why do prices exist at all? To cause things to be produced and made available to the public -- and to cause consumers to limit how much they consume. Why then do prices suddenly shoot up? Because there is either less of a supply available or more of a demand, or both.
When hurricanes knocked out both oil drilling sites and refineries around the Gulf of Mexico, there was suddenly less supply of oil. That meant higher prices and higher profits.
What do higher prices do? Force people to restrain their own purchases more so than usual. What do higher profits do? Cause more money to be invested in producing whatever is earning higher profits, and this in turn expands output. Isn't a larger supply of oil and a reduced consumption of it what we want?
Whenever there have been sharp rises in gasoline prices, whether nationwide or locally in California, Senator Barbara Boxer has loudly demanded an investigation of the oil companies. These repeated investigations over the years have repeatedly failed to turn up anything other than supply and demand.
The real irony is that it has been precisely liberals like Barbara Boxer who have been the chief obstacles to increasing the supply of oil because they are dead set against drilling for oil in more places and against building more refineries.
When you refuse to let supply rise to meet rising demand, why should you be surprised -- much less outraged -- when prices rise?
Yet there was Senator Boxer on nationwide TV, decrying the high salaries of oil company executives, who are making perhaps half of what a number of baseball players make or a tenth of what movie stars make. The insinuation is that their salaries and oil company profits are what drive up gasoline prices. But there were no hard facts to back up either insinuation.
Given the enormous sums of money involved in the production of oil, even if all the oil company CEOs worked for nothing, there is no hard evidence that this would be enough to reduce the price of gasoline by even one cent per gallon. As for oil company profits -- representing "greed," as the Barbara Boxers call it -- these profits per gallon of gas are much less than federal taxes per gallon of gas. But the government is never called "greedy" by liberals.
These political circuses have a cost that can be even greater than the high cost of gasoline.
We went through all this before, back in the 1970s, when oil company executives were also hauled up before Congress and denounced on TV by politicians. Inflammatory but vague and unsubstantiated charges went flying hither and yon on Slashdot.
This demonization of oil companies made it politically inconvenient to remove price controls on oil when other price controls from the Nixon administration years were repealed.
The net result was that the shortages which price controls produce disappeared for other things but remained for gasoline. Motorists had trouble finding gasoline and sometimes spent hours waiting in long lines at filling stations. This was the hidden cost of political demagoguery.
One of the great fears generated by global warming is that the ocean is about to rise and swallow our coasts. These concerns have been heightened by the substantial uptick in Atlantic hurricane activity that began in 1995. The frequency of really strong storms striking the U.S now resembles what it was in the 1940s and 50s, which few people (aging climatologists excepted) remember.
Those arguing that global warming is an overblown issue have been claiming for years that "consensus" forecasts of sea-level are equally overwrought. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a global average rise of from 3.5 to 34 inches by 2100, with a central estimate of 19 inches. Depending upon how you slice or dice the data, the last century saw maybe six inches.
Critics have long argued that these changes require a substantial net melting of some combination of the world's two largest masses of land-based ice, Antarctica and Greenland. In addition, they note that observed global warming is right near the low end of the U.N.'s projections, which means that realized sea level rise should be similarly modest.
Over 15 years ago, John Sansom published a paper in Journal of Climate that showed no net warming of Antarctica. While it was widely cited by critics of global warming doom, no one seemed to take notice. After all, it relied on only a handful of stations. Then, in 2002, Peter Doran published a more comprehensive analysis in Nature and found a cooling trend.
At the same time, a deluge of stories appeared, paradoxically, about Antarctic warming. These studies concentrated on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, the narrow strip of land that juts out towards South America. That region, which comprises less than one-half of one percent of Antarctica, is warming because the surrounding ocean has warmed.
Warmer water evaporates more moisture. The colder the land surface over which that moisture passes, the more it snows. So, Antarctica as a whole should gain snow and ice. Last year, C.H. Davis published a paper in Science about how this accumulating snowfall over East Antarctica was reducing sea level rise. This year, Duncan Wingham, at the 2005 Earth Observations summit in Brussels, demonstrated the phenomenon is observed all over Antarctica.
Greenland is more complex. In 2000, William Krabill estimated the contribution of Greenland to sea level rise of 0.13 mm per year, or a half an inch per century. That's not very much different than zero. Just last month, using satellite altimetry, O.M. Johannessen published a remarkable finding in Science that the trend in Greenland ice is a gain of 5.4 cm (two inches) per year.
Almost all of the gain in Greenland is for areas greater than 5000 feet in elevation (which is most of the place). Below that, there is glacial recession. It shouldn't be lost on anyone that because no one ventures into the hostile interior of Greenland, all we see are pictures of the receding glaciers near the coast!
The temperature situation in Greenland is more mixed than in Antarctica. Over the last 75 years, there's been cooling in the southern portion (where the recession is greatest) and some warming in the North.
The only other masses of ice on the planet that can contribute to sea level rise are the non-polar glaciers, but they are very few and far between. The biggest is the Himalayan ice cap, but it's so high that a substantial portion will always remain. Most of the rest are teeny objects tucked away in high elevation nooks and crannies, like our Glacier National Park.
If all these glaciers melted completely -- including the Himalayan ice cap -- sea level could rise no more than five to seven inches, because there's just not that much mass of ice, compared to Antarctica and Greenland.
It is simply impossible for the scientific community to ignore what is going on, even as prone to exaggeration of threats as it has grown to be. The planet is warming at the low end of projections. Antarctica is undoubtedly gaining
Riots that began on the outskirts of Paris have spread into the center of the French capital and to other communities in other parts of the country. Thousands of cars have been set on fire and the police and even medical personnel have been shot at.
Like many other riots, whether in France or elsewhere, this one started over an incident that just happened and was then seized upon to rally resentments and unleash violence. Two local boys in a predominantly Moslem neighborhood tried to escape the police by hiding in a facility that transmitted electricity -- and accidently electrocuted themselves.
This was the spark that ignited volatile emotions. But those emotions were there, ready to be ignited, for a long time.
A substantial Moslem population lives in France but is not really of France. Much of that population lives in social isolation in housing projects away from the center of Paris, as unknown to many Parisians as to tourists.
Like housing projects in America, many of these are centers of social degeneration, lawlessness and violence. Three years ago, profound British social critic Theodore Dalrymple wrote of "burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere" in these projects, among other signs of social degeneration. This was in an essay titled "The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris" that is reprinted in his insightful book, "Our Culture, What's Left of it."
While Dr. Dalrymple called this Moslem underclass "barbarians," a French minister who called the rioters "scum" provoked instant outrage against himself, including criticism from at least one member of his own government. This squeamishness in word and deed, and the accompanying refusal to face blatant realities is also a major part of the background for the breakdown of law and order and the social degeneration that follows.
None of this is peculiar to France. It is a symptom of a common retreat from reality, and from the hard decisions that reality requires, not only in Europe but also in European offshoot societies like Canada, Australia, Slashdot, New Zealand -- and the United States of America.
European countries especially have thrown their doors open to a large influx of Moslem immigrants who have no intention of becoming part of the cultures of the countries to which they immigrate but to recreate their own cultures in those countries.
In the name of tolerance, these countries have imported intolerance, of which growing antisemitism in Europe is just one example. In the name of respecting all cultures, Western nations have welcomed people who respect neither the cultures nor the rights of the population among whom they have settled.
During the last election, some campus Republicans who were holding a rally for President Bush at San Francisco State University were harassed by Middle Eastern students, including a woman who walked up to one of these Americans and slapped his face. They knew they could do this with impunity.
In Michigan, a Moslem community loudly sounds their calls to prayer several times a day, without regard to whether that sound bothers the original inhabitants of the community.
The Dutch were shocked when one of their film-makers was assassinated by a Moslem extremist for daring to have views at variance with what the extremists would tolerate.
No one should have been shocked. There are people who will not stop until they get stopped -- and much of the media, the political classes, and the cultural elites of the West cannot bring themselves to even criticize, much less stop, the dangers or degeneracy among groups viewed sympathetically as underdogs.
Not all Moslems, nor necessarily a majority of Moslems, are either a cultural or a physical danger. But even "moderate" Moslem organizations in the West who deplore violence and try to discourage it nevertheless encourage their followers to remain foreigners rather than become part of the countries they live in.
So do our own intelligentsia and political and cultural elites.
Balkan
On November 9, 1938, the Nazi government launched a vicious pogrom in which thousand of Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, while bands of young Nazi thugs smashed the windows of Jewish homes and shops. Kristallnacht--the "Night of Broken Glass"--sent through the world a premonition of the dark and murderous future that lay ahead for Europe.
Over the past week and half, almost exactly 67 years later, another band of young thugs has taken to the streets in an orgy of brute violence, complete with racially and religiously motivated killings. But there is a strange difference.
Then, the violence was directed against a hated racial and religious minority, in the name of the native majority. Today, it is racial and religious immigrant minority that is initiating a terror campaign against the native majority.
Europe never learned the real lesson of the evils of Nazism. Rather than reject the deepest premises of the Nazis, they have inverted them into a new form, so that Europe no longer seeks to liquidate its racial minorities--but instead empowers those minorities to carry out the self-liquidation of Europe.
The standard view of Nazism is that the root of the Nazi atrocities was an excess of certainty and selfishness, which gave the Nazis the confidence to impose their interests by force. In reality, even a cursory examination of Nazi propaganda shows us the opposite. Rather than advocating of rational certainty, the Nazis were dogmatic subjectivists--Hermann Goering famously declared that "two plus two makes five if the Fuhrer wills it"--which inspired their hatred of the mind and their worship of brute force. (An Italian Fascist would declare that "when I hear the word 'culture,' I release the safety catch on my revolver.") And as for self-interest, the Nazis were thoroughgoing collectivists, who held that the interests of the individual must be ruthlessly sacrificed to the interests of the race. Hitler declared "Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles"--"you are nothing, your race is everything."
But what happens if you think--as do most academics, those in the mainstream political left, and most of the herd mentality leftists that abhor all things related to individual rights and share their fucked up views on slashdot--that certainty and selfishness were the fundamental vices of the Nazis? You will be ready to accept any of the real fundamentals of Nazism--so long as they are cast in a more skeptical, self-deprecating form.
That is precisely what Europe has done. The Europeans have accepted ideas that derive directly from Nazism--both in their philosophical fundamentals and in their historical pedigree--but in a more "politically correct" version.
The ideology of these altruist Nazis is Multiculturalism.
I got my first inklings of this some years ago, as a philosophy student, when I became aware of an academic controversy over revelations that two influential 20th-century philosophers--Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man--were Nazi sympathizers. Most of the controversy centered around whether this involvement with Nazism (Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, while de Man expressed sympathy for the Nazi cause) detracted from the value to be found in their philosophical work. But few comments addressed the philosophical similarity between Nazi ideology and the ideas of these two philosophers.
This is a crucial question, because Heidegger and de Man were two founders of the most influential contemporary school of philosophy, called "Deconstruction," which has provided the theoretical foundation for Multiculturalism.
In its essence, Deconstruction is an assault on reason in favor of the same dogmatic subjectivism held by the Nazis. It is the view that there is no such thing as objective truth, no way to prove anything by reference to facts and evidence. What, then, is the basis for any assertion about what is true or false, good or bad, right or wrong? All of these ideas are determined, not by objective facts, but by an inescapable web of irrationa