Sunday, February 21, 2010

"The Green Death"

I remember reading Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", and taking it's warnings to heart.  It was back in the 70's, when "teach-ins" and Earth Day were being used by the fledgling environmental movement.  I confess, without any qualms, I became a True Believer.

Since then, life has changed.  I've taken college-level science courses, and taught science for over 20 years.  In that time, I've found that much of what is written about science in popular media is:
  • Wrong
  • Not scientifically-based
  • Blatant lies
  • With a small basis of reality, but wrong conclusions being made about the results of the studies
During those years, although I've examined (and rejected) many of my former beliefs about nuclear power, global warming, environmental scares, and medical hoo-doo, I hadn't looked at the forerunner of the environmental leaders, and her seminal work.

This article does.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.
The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost immediately. The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.
There's a huge difference between what you WANT to happen, and what actually DOES happen.  Rachel, perhaps unwittingly, unleashed a lethal political firestorm on the world, as detailed in this article.

Further reading here.

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Saturday, February 20, 2010

Obama As Nixon

I found this picture of Obama on the web

and it reminded me of this man.

 

Both arrogant, suspicious, and standoffish men.

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The Difference Between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd World Countries

I was reading the archives of Mark Steyn, and found this quote:
Insofar as the “brutal Afghan winter” has any objective reality at all, all it means is that the key highway to Pakistan runs through some pretty high elevations, and has a tendency to get snowbound and impassable. Whether it needs to get quite so impassable is another matter. I like the Afghans, God bless ‘em, but honestly it doesn’t speak well for a culture to have lived in the same place for thousands of years and never got around to inventing the snowplow.


During the Afghan campaign, an Internet wag, Glenn Crawford, deftly summed up the different cultural approaches to unpromising climate - in this instance between the bleak Afghan plain and Nevada. Third World solution: eke a living out of the desert. American solution: “Viva Las Vegas!” One wouldn’t commend a den of gambling and fornication to every spot on earth, but, driving through the Sunni Triangle, I couldn’t help feeling the history of the Middle East would have been a little different if smack in the middle of the Arabian desert you could have seen Wayne Newton with full supporting orchestra. It would be to Afghanistan’s benefit if someone opened a ski resort, and made the brutal Afghan winter pay its way.


That’s what the Thais did: they made Phuket and Phi Phi Island the preferred vacation resorts for millions of westerners. Economic reality dictates that poor people wind up providing services for richer people: in Mississippi, they work in Wal-Mart; in China, they manufacture stuff for Wal-Mart; in Sri Lanka, they make the brassieres for virtually every breast in the United Kingdom; in Thailand, they pour your banana daquiris; in Afghanistan, they grow poppies. There are worse things than luxury tourism. To demand, as Mr Ferrando does, that Thai beaches remain free of “commercialism” is to demand that the Thai people stay poor and dependent.

I have to look at that as the step that takes a country from 3rd to 2nd status:  the idea that we don't have to passively accept what we have, but can, through hard work and determination, decide on our own fate.  And the fateful step towards 1st world status comes when the people decide to extend that opportunity to ALL who want to try, along with the political power to enforce that right to opportunity.

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The Dali Lama

Much has been made of this picture of the Dali Lama exiting the White House.  From the Christian Science Monitor:



Many media outlets are taking it as an accidental breach of protocol, or as evidence of ineptitude.

I disagree.  Obama didn't want to meet with the Dali Lama; he finally did so, but wanted to signal China that he did so as an obligation, not a choice.  Obama is the master of the deliberate insult, delivered without speech.  Who can forget his signal of disrespect to Hillary Clinton (April 17, 2008)?



Or, to John McCain (November 3, 2008)?



Obama is a mean, petty, classless man.

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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Will the Radicals Win?

I can be heartened by this vignette from Mark Rudd:
During the presidential campaign, just ended, editorials and letters in the student newspaper complained about “radical” or “leftist” faculty who bring their political views into the classroom. The clincher for me was when a young female student, a working secretary at the local airbase, sweetly told me that my crack about Bush’s never having read a book only increased her desire to vote for him. After that I professionally shut up during class.
If only he extended that courtesy to the rest of the day.
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Understanding Obama

I found this fascinating site  via Kathy Shaidle's Hippies: Still Not Dead Enough provides some background to events of the 1960's.  How does that relate to Obama?
Andy Cornell, in a letter to the movement that first radicalized him, “Dear Punk Rock Activism,” criticizes the conflation of the terms “activism” and “organizing.”  He writes, “activists are individuals who dedicate their time and energy to various efforts they hope will contribute to social, political, or economic change.  Organizers are activists who, in addition to their own participation, work to move other people to take action and help them develop skills, political analysis and confidence within the context of organizations.  Organizing is a process—creating long-term campaigns that mobilize a certain constituency to press for specific demands from a particular target, using a defined strategy and escalating tactics.”  In other words, it’s not enough for punks to continually express their contempt for mainstream values through their alternate identity; they’ve got to move toward “organizing masses of people.” 
Aha!  Activism = self-expression; organizing = movement-building.
Until recently I’d rarely heard young people call themselves “organizers.”  The common term for years has been “activists.”  Organizing was reduced to the behind-the scenes nuts-and-bolts work needed to pull off a specific event, such as a concert or demonstration.  But forty years ago, we only used the word “activist” to mock our enemies’ view of us, as when a university administrator or newspaper editorial writer would call us “mindless activists.”  We were organizers, our work was building a mass movement, and that took constant discussion of goals, strategy, and tactics (and later, contributing to our downfall, ideology).
Thinking back over my own experience, I realized that I had inherited this organizer’s identity from the red diaper babies I fell in with at the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS.  Raised by parents in the labor and civil rights and communist or socialist movements, they had naturally learned the organizing method as other kids learned how to throw footballs or bake pineapple upside-down cakes.  ”Build the base!” was the constant strategy of Columbia SDS for years.
Yet young activists I met were surprised to learn that major events such as the Columbia rebellion of April, 1968, did not happen spontaneously, that they took years of prior education, relationship building, reconsideration on the part of individuals of their role in the institution.  I.e., organizing.  It seemed to me that they believed that movements happen as a sort of dramatic or spectator sport:  after a small group of people express themselves, large numbers of by-standers see the truth in what they’re saying and join in.  The mass anti-war mobilization of the Spring, 2003, which failed to stop the war, was the only model they knew.   
 Now you know, straight from the horse's ASS.
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Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Private Internet

I've recently hooked up a wireless broadband connection to the internet - haven't yet managed to make it a wireless hookup for 5 people, as promised at the store.  While not totally easy to set up, it isn't that bad, either.

Why did we spend money on this, especially in these days, when the goal is to cut down on monthly expenses?
  1. Den is taking 2 online courses, and needs access to the internet regularly.
  2. The internet at school is heavily censored; they block even sites we could use that are harmless.  Further, the tech people don't keep the JAVA and Flash downloads up-to-date; we can't use many educational sites because of that.
  3. The house we are staying in during the week has 2 TV channels, and we don't want to go to the trouble of setting up a cable/satellite account.
  4. I'm an internet junkie.\
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Saturday, February 06, 2010

Surviving the Week

It was a tough week; about Wednesday, I was unbelievably fatigued for no apparent reason.  I doubled my vitamins, got more sleep, and toughed it out.

By Friday, I was feeling on top of things, at least at work.  What can I say?  Due to the demands of my job (teaching two classes with a high-stakes test at the end), I'm having to spend inordinate amounts of time planning, assessing, managing behavior, and providing tutoring to those who are in danger of not passing.   It takes more time than you would think, hence the bone-tired feeling at the end of the day.  Most days, I walk more than 5 miles around my classroom - I've been tracking with my pedometer for some time.  Most days, I'm juggling all the demands on my time non-stop for 8-10 hours minimum.  Kids think I'm difficult about releasing them for bathroom breaks; they have 7 minutes between each block to take care of stuff, and 35 minutes at lunch.  I don't have the time between blocks, I'm manning the hallways (per administration rule); that leaves only lunch.  So, yeah, I think, if I can hold it, so can you.

At home (or, I should say, HOMES), I have the usual maintenance issues; right now, I have to scrounge up underwear, as most of it is in the OTHER home.   It leads to a constant irritation - much of what I need at a given time is either in the other home, or somewhere in the van.  Confusion about just where it is causes some brain fog.

My sister is half-way through radiation for her cancer; she's tired, in pain, and suffering a variety of side effects, but she's hanging in there.  She's got a good attitude, and she has family around; I think she will be fine, in the end.  I've been crocheting her a chemo cap, to provide some soft cover, and some warmth - unfortunately, in 3 weeks, it's still on the ground floor - barely an inch and a half done, so far.  I'm going to cart it around with me everywhere, and hope to be able to say that I've made progress by the next time I post.

Scott Brown has been sworn in; I think the Republic is safe, for now.

In some respects, no news is good news.  Major disasters haven't surfaced in some days, so I'm taking that as good.

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Lies of the Left

This COULD be a lengthy post. But, I'll try to winnow it down to a reasonable length. The CA Parent Bribery 'Scandal' - the 1...