"All of the Above" Obamas done oil production no favors

The Tesoro Refinery at Anacortes, Washington. By Walter Siegmund, license C.C. a.s.a 3.0 unported

Before I continue, I must admit a certain amount of shock in having to write this. Then again, perhaps I shouldn't be shocked. Democrat presidents have a long and proud history of taking credit for things they didn't actually do: Clinton gets credit for balancing the budget, something Newt Gingrich achieved and earned himself "resignation in disgrace" at the hands of the House Ethics committee for doing, perhaps why it hasn't been done since. FDR gets credit for New Deal projects that had already begun under Hoover - the most famous of which is the Hoover Dam. LBJ gets credit for desegregation, which was really an achievement of Eisenhower that continued through the time of LBJ. All throughout this century, Democrats have earned credit for doing things they didn't actually do (to be fair, this also includes bailing out "Government Motors" and the big banks.) I really shouldn't have been shocked to see it happen once more, this time with Obama and oil.

But there's a difference: all those other things that Democrats earned credit for, they either only slightly opposed, or even slightly supported. Never has something been so vehemently and destructively harmed directly by a president, not even through Congress with him only behind it, only to end up to his credit when it works against his plans. "Obamacare" was far more the product of Reid and Pelosi then Obama directly, but Obamas conduct with the Bureau of Land Management, and the abusive EPA that Obama himself presides over, comes from him directly. No one but the Chief Executive of the United States Federal Government is responsible for them before the American people, or should be.

Noting that, lets look over the track record of precisely what he's actually done, pertaining to oil production, as Chief Executive:

• Cancelled oil leases in the largest shale deposit of them all, at the excuse of "we don't understand how much water and energy it would use." The result of such policies is that oil and gas production on BLM lands is down 40%. In most western states, BLM lands make up 30-90% of the states land area.
  
• Purposefully delayed the decision on the Keystone Pipeline for years without any attempt to gather information to make a decision, or any clear rationale for why a decision could not be made in a reasonable time frame.
  
• Issued a moratorium on offshore drilling without any real effort to fix the underlying problems (namely, the lack of proper response networks on the Gulf.)
• Since the moratorium ended, Obama's Department of the Interior has only permitted one offshore lease sale. In other words, the moratorium never truly ended - Obama just made it look like it is over.

In North Dakota, 1574 miles from the Oval Office, oil production doubled from 2008 to 2010. North Dakota is one of only three states west of the Mississippi river to not have any BLM lands, the other two being Texas and Washington state. The section of the same oil shale formation in Montana has not been similarly developed, and the BLM owns that land.

Although North Dakotas unemployment is a boom time 3.3%, Montana remains average for the country, despite containing the western third of the Bakken formation. In Texas, the other non-BLM oil containing state, a much smaller shale deposit has been massively developed, helping to stabilize unemployment there to a reasonable five. Lastly, the largest of all the shale deposits, equivalent to seven Middle Easts, contained in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Nevada (all heavily BLM states, with around 40-90% of land area owned by Federal Government as BLM lands) is totally off limits, and even permits issued under Bush are cancelled and replaced with "research leases."

North Dakota, with no BLM lands, would never be directly affected by the Presidents pen, although the pipeline that leads from North Dakota to the Gulf refineries would, and has. In states near North Dakota, especially Wyoming, Iowa, South Dakota and Missouri, manufacturing jobs making the equipment for oil fracking are reasonably abundant, but the amount of equipment coming out of the facilities cannot keep up with demand. Investment to build new fracking equipment factories has been scarce, since with a Federal Government that seems out to get them, and Obama testing the limits of how much a President can do to hurt it, the future of such technology seems uncertain. Just what will Mister President manage to do next? The reality is that the growth of Americas oil industry in spite of Obama proves nothing except that the Presidents powers are, thankfully, limited.

Yet Mr. President has the supreme audacity to claim credit for the doubling in oil in a state he has less authority in, while reducing production by 40% on what he does have authority over and harming the infrastructure. Not directly of course, that would be too obvious, instead he quotes the oil output nationwide, where the progress in North Dakota and Texas outpaces everything else. Than he tells us he wants "all of the above."

A quick note to readers: If you want to know my sources, click on the gray text.

State of the primaries

Our most recent primary, South Carolina. counties won by Romney in orange, Gingrich in purple. Released in to public domain

New Hampshire primary by town. Orange is Romney, Gold is Paul, Crimson Huntsman. Public Domain

Iowa caucus by county. Orange is Romney, gold is Paul, dark green Santorum, dark blue Perry. Public Domain

At this point in the Primary season, all three primaries thus far were won by separate candidates. Iowa was taken by Santorum, New Hampshire by Romney in a landslide, and South Carolina by Gingrich in a landslide. The number of delegates so far per candidate is 31 Mitt Romney, 26 Newt Gingrich, 10 for Ron Paul and 8 for Santorum. 2nd placers include Romney in South Carolina and Iowa, and Paul in New Hampshire.

Prior to this point, there were a whole bunch of shooting star candidates, starting with Michelle Bachmann at the beginning of the year and continuing with Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and then Newt Gingrich. All of them followed nearly the same trajectory, a steep graphed chart for the RCP Polling Average in all 50 states, reaching a peak, and then coming down with the same velocity that they arose, like a little boy throwing a ball. Then, Gingrich took South Carolina, by a landslide, and all the sudden everything changed. What's more, the very last of these trajectory candidates, Santorum, is still on the map and is looking strong in the Florida Panhandle.

Even before this surprising result of three states in three hands, we should've known we would be in for a very different primary season. The historic nature of this election had forced turnout way up. The Tea Party had greatly changed the Republican Party in the last 2 years. Several major candidates (including Gingrich and Santorum) failed to make the ballot in a couple states. Lastly, RNC rule changes made all early primary states proportional representation out to at least 3rd place, bringing the traditional early state landslide to an end. Now, at this moment, we see not a short primary season of the 2004 or 2000 variety effectively ending on Super Tuesday but a protacted 50 state duel between Gingrich, Romney, Santorum and Paul. Paul inevitably wins Virginia, as he is the only candidate on the ballot besides Romney and 60% of Republicans will not vote for Romney under any condition, and so then Paul too shall be right up there with the victors of our three early states.

So what precisely brought us to this point? There is a growing sense in both parties that the same puppet masters control both, and yet there was always a percentage that either refused to accept this conclusion or was comfortable with it. Add in a few Mormons and a few New England moderates, and you have Mitt Romney, the inevitable one.

But this time around, too much had been done, and the Tea Party was too fully aware that it had rescued the GOP from the dustbin of history. Revenge was desired. Many candidates came forward, and the GOP being a new movement with few experienced members, most of them were of fairly low caliber. As a result, they were catapulted with vengeance, recognized, and then forgotten. Eventually they even took on a member of the establishment who sympathized with them, I believe you the reader can figure out who that is. Then something happened with the very last two, Santorum and Gingrich.

In the case of Gingrich, it was finding his old fire as the glorious speaker of the House of Represntatives from 1994-1998. We saw him, in those last days of the election, command the respect that had made him palatable to the Tea Party to begin with. See, Gingrich was never a natural choice, he had BEEN a member of the establishment, and as a result of this fact had to prove himself. Having proved himself, the voters knew how he had proved himself, and when he proved himself once again, he returned.

In the case of Santorum, many people still did not accept Gingrich. He was still dirty, and lets face it, he made many questionable decisions and pseudo-decisions, including support for the Individual Mandate at the federal level, which he calls "a tactical decision against HillaryCare" [divide and conquer?], his decision to support TARP, which is probably more then anything else his university professor side coming out, and his decision to continue supporting social conservatives despite hardly being a role model for them, which, in Georgia, is called winning your election. Being a real politician, he doesn't come out looking real clean. For these malcontents, Santorum and Paul were the remaining choices, and Paul is considered by many to be of questionable judgement and temperament, leading to a vote by elimination for Santorum. Combine some social conservatives and Iowa farmers, and you have Santorum.

Ron Paul voters, of the typical kind, are simply too unique to be explained in this small space. However, in addition to his regular supporters, Ron Paul has received an edge from both malcontents of the kind that supported Santorum, and states where, in this remarkable election, two of the major candidates did not make the ballot, and Romney is still not accepted.

But aside from all of this there is the simple fact that the election is now on. The trajectory candidates were around when there was still time to find someone new - that time is gone. We, the Tea Party, can't replace shooting stars anymore. We are at our last chance. The time is now, the election has begun.

Pipelines and Spoiled Brats

Obamas decision to reject the Keystone Pipeline was very disturbing in two ways: first, because it was precisely what was not needed right now here in America, and second because it shows our President to have no understanding what he is doing or why. At a time when the number one issue should be jobs, and the Keystone would not only provide these jobs in terms of construction and further development of the new oil shale fields that are Americas fastest growing industry right now, but also provide demand for manufactured goods like steel and foundry items from the suffering East and Midwest, our President, already facing a potentially difficult reelection, has decided that he will give up the last chance he has to make his reelection a cakewalk. If the economy booms, then none of the assorted clowns currently running for GOP candidate will even have a chance against him, but alas for Obama, this is one boat he has missed. His reason for this dismal choice for both himself and his country: the claims of some environmentalists.

Now the ball is in Canadas court. An alternate pipeline could run from the same locations in Alberta westward to a small, undeveloped port on an inlet 70 miles long called Kitimat in British Columbia. Not only would it carry oil to China, but it would also carry oil along the well developed Inside Passage seaway to the Puget Sound for refining at Anacortes, WA and the American market. But here, again, the Greens are not satisfied.

So why, precisely, are they not satisfied? The biggest reason they are not satisfied, though it is not the only reason, is because it will "delay the development of non-carbon energy sources." Now for environmentalists in America today, this means wind and solar. Wind is extremely unreliable, and solar is astronomically expensive. What's more, the fact that solar can operate off-grid gives it a natural niche market outside of the regular electric grid, so if it can't be successful with substantial government subsidies plus a niche market, then you know it really stinks. Wind, of course, is unreliable, and a smart grid that would make it more reliable by sharing power from different geographic points would also be so susceptible to electromagnetic storms from space as to naturally be completely destroyed and take months to rebuild every 8-10 years. The alternative proposition of battery farms would be outlandishly expensive and require constant maintenance. How precisely something that requires constant input of material resources can be "sustainable" is quite beyond me.

Another reason they're not satisfied is because extracting tar sands is energy intensive. This charge is true. However, extracting oil from shale by current methods is not energy intensive, and as shale drilling becomes more and more common (tar sands is slightly older technology) the less expensive energy cost will be a deciding factor in terms of switching away from tar sands production to shale production. Right now, the massive expansion of shale drilling, especially in North Dakota where unemployment is only 3.5% (and lower near Williston) as a result, has driven up the cost of purchasing equipment for shale drilling. This is a good thing in the long run as it means more capacity will be available in the future, but in the short run means that shale is unlikely to replace any existing production until this bottleneck is widened. In the long run, this capital cost will be gone and shale will replace tar sands, especially since just the (much smaller far southern tail) of the Bakken Formation in North Dakota contains at least 3.65 billion barrels of oil, and I suspect that this analysis by the USGS was understated partially by pressure from the Obama administration and paritally by laziness, or as the report puts it: "They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates." The first rule of engineering is if you want to be lazy, always understate your result so that nobody cares.

Then there is simply the old environmentalist hatred of economic development. This is somewhat connected to the very last concern of environmentalists to be listed here, but this really is where I begin doubting the character of environmentalists as people. The reality is that, far from being some Garden of Eden, the third world is a place where illegal loggers destroy rainforests, poachers with machine guns kill off endangered species, massive sprawling cities come up over night and coal plants put mercury and radiation in to the air by the bucket full. It is also a place where in Monrovia, Liberia, the people poop on the beach, allowing untreated human sewage to go straight in to an aquifer while also stinking up the air and despoiling a beautiful 5-mile strip of pristine sand. The problem with environmentalists is they expect the full regulatory ability of a first-world country without the society or, frankly, resources, that made it possible. In short, they are spoiled brats.

And that brings us to our final environmentalist objection: locality. I shall begin by discussing the Canadian pipeline, as it is simply their most egregious abuse. All throughout the internet and journalism, we find various environmentalists and journalists, who know nothing about how development takes place, put up pictures of this pristine, perfect wilderness of tremendous natural beauty (that is, for the record, almost completely contained in an archipelago of Canadian National Parks and Provincial Parks) that supposedly will be completely destroyed by the pipeline and economic development.

To put it bluntly, no it won't. People only think it will because they don't live there. If they did live there, they would know that mountains rise straight out of the sea on both sides of the Kitimat Inlet, making any kind of construction enormously expensive, and that Kitimat is at the eastern end of that inlet and the beginning of a long, and nowhere near as pristine or beautiful, flat typical river valley. It also is located SEVENTY MILES EAST of where most of the wilderness is. In fact, this is why the pipeline is sent so far north instead of simply going to Vancouver - to avoid those eternally annoying in the sense that only an engineer can understand mountains. They would also know that if there's one thing the coastline of British Columbia has an overabundance of, its beautiful, pristine, undeveloped coastline. There are no roads on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska running North-South from the Vancouver Suburbs to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of 800 miles, the reason why the most common accidental death in Alaska is plane crashes. It also won't because these areas are already protected as parks, both at the provincial and Canadian federal level, and there are far too many flatter, more valuable, riverside pieces of real estate nearer to Kitimat and the pipeline for lobbying by the businesses to even be profitable to them. It is also true that with a tidal range near 20 feet, any oil spill would not last very long but be swept out to sea pretty fast. But environmentalists think their asinine, immature, irrational fears justify the shutting down of an entire part of the world in economic activity, when everything that even can be done to protect that wilderness already is.

The original locality makes somewhat more sense, but only somewhat, to protest. That of course is the lands through the plains that the original Keystone XL would've run through. Of course, unlike BC, there are plenty of roads in the Plains, and even more in Texas. Lots of 2-lane or 4-lane roads going passed corn fields, unused infrastructure, tiny cities and all. This is true. It is also true that the Great Plains aquifer is pretty big, though one could counter that being so big its really not that easy to substantially impurify, and what oil would do is certainly no worse then what farmlands already do with fertilizers and pesticides. Oil also has the advantage over farmlands with their pesticides and fertilizers that it is not generally to the advantage of oil companies for their pipelines to be constantly leaking. It has yet another advantage that increasing land prices may drive the farms with their pesticides and fertilizers out of business. Further, there is the little matter of refining at Wood River, Illinois and Steele, Nebraska, right over the aquifer and the Mississippi River, where oil leaks and all manner of chemical spills are much more likely to happen then at the pipeline, and where the final expansion to Houston and Port Arthur could've eventually replaced those refineries by economies of scale, in the middle of a swamp where bacteria and a chemical-recycling ecosystem already can handle most water purity issues.

Yet even here, the same picture of the environmentalist as a spoiled brat emerges - unshaking, unwilling to compromise, loud, sort of like a toddler. Instead of seeing that some development, even if not constrained by the great mountains of the Kitimat Inlet, is neccesary to finance and safeguard environmental protection, they would rather shout and scream and yell and let everything go to some third world country where no chance exists for proper controls or procedures to prevent what they want to prevent. The result is that for every ton of smog they prevent in Southern California, two tons come across the pacific blown by winds from China, and the prairie starves, and no one even really pays close attention to what they are saying or any way of making a reasonable solution to the problem. There answer is to criticize China, a country doing its best to get out of poverty, who has no special interest in listening to much of anyone who lives on this side of the Pacific. The result also is that eventually, as people become poorer and poorer, the toddler who cried wolf may really get eaten after all.

We'll all be sad that day, just like any parent would be, but it doesn't change the fact that it happened, and that the child is gone forever and not coming back. When you yourself feed on irrationality, don't be too surprised if you eventually get fed to it. Environmentalists with no respect for reason will not be given reasonable attention, and this will be a collective judgement, not an individual one, applied to all environmentalists everywhere, whether they were part of the problem or not. They will not be heard, nor will anyone else about our very real environmental problems.

Evolution of a Meme

When the world-created the mind-numbing abberations of 4chan and reddit, I don't think anyone expected us to unleash a Golden Age of photography and art. Alas, it seems to have occurred!

Starting from the same birth group, 4chans /b/(random) board, also known as the seventh circle of Hell, as all the "Advice Dog" series, a simple, elegant and professional photograph of a wolf by Montana artist Jeff Vanaugha was cut up, cropped on to a pattern of colored rays and finally, TA-DA!!!:


But wait, there's more! We can't have too much of a good thing right? No, not possible, or as courage wolf would put it, "Get there, get more there!" We had to find more wolf pictures:


Sir Courage Wolf Esquire. This art is wonderful in that nearly anyone can claim it as their own, in this case a Britain and world in a crisis of identity.


Baby Courage Wolf, classic comedic juxtaposition. Did I mention that every one of these, has come in to being (including the original Courage Wolf) since June of 2010?


Insanity Wolf, a classic nightmare image with background clearly conjuring the emotions and thoughts required to contemplate it.

Finally, beyond adding to the great library of Meme, there are modifications of existing images:


Monsieur Le Courage Wolf. It may be art but it is not above the stereotype. It also is nowhere near as popular as the other deeper images that convey a far truer message or at least use better comedic forms. This brings up an important point: are unartistic television shows profitable because its what people want, or because they cost less to make and are more predictable, a crucial consideration for those who will spend money to advertise a product on TV, and they are still tolerable to the audience?

Insanity Wolf in turn became a major meme all its own, inspiring numerous spin offs. In the interest of limited bandwidth, we will largely no longer be showing many additional images. However, nearly all memes originated in similar ways - a first, followed by a second, followed by seconds of seconds, each time taking on the watermark and unique thoughts and emotions of the people who created in anonymity before it. I believe it was Ronald Reagan who once said "You would be surprised what you can achieve in life if you don't care who gets the credit."

Some memes also originated as spoofs of the websites where memes originate. Included are "Pedobear," an image of a "Protection Bear" posted whenever child pornography was posted in a 4chan thread, the joke, of course, being that he must show up for the wonderful child pornography, while his smiling bearish face juxtaposed with a creepy pedophile creates humor too good to buy! Also Redditors Wife, who is constantly being ignored in the interest of Reddit, and the various Pokemon memes (including one of Ash Ketchum as a Hispanic) that obviously spoof the fascination of 4chan users with such ridiculously retarded things - in both cases spoofing the readers as opposed to the site itself.

Lastly, let us consider the Baron Ducreaux, in some ways an expression of the longing in our society for civility, depth, and sophistication as it juxtaposes good manners and rap music:


Centuries ahead of his time, the French court painter Baron Joseph Ducreaux famously painted himself using body language that would not become the norm for another 200 years in imitation, according to the artist, of a Mockingbird. (Painting title: Portrait de l'artiste sous les traits d'un moqueur, translated Self-portrait of the artist in the guise of a mockingbird by KnowYourMeme.com) This is far from the only unusual painting that the Baron did in his time with the doomed court of Louis XVI, as he experimented often with facial expressions and features as a vehicle for describing personality, a crucial problem in an era before photography and easy travel, when portraits were used to show wealthy women and men their prospective mates. Though his painting are in the Louvre, what likelihood is there that the Barons work could've achieved such notoriety and widespread appreciation without 4chan, reddit, facebook, and the other pathetic wastes of time of the unwashed masses?

Unfortunately, such widespread appreciation has also inspired modification, including famously the Steve Buscemi Ducreux where Steve Buscemis face is inserted in the place of Baron Ducreaux's, but since in doing so the authors have satirized Steve Buscemi's manner and personality, have they not, albeit unwittingly, contributed to Ducreaux's legacy? By satirizing the satire, a new work of art has been born. Andy Warhol, in particular, DESIRED imitation with his simultaneously kitsch and inspiring works on Marilyn Monroe and soup cans, and purposefully sought out the field of advertising as a place to find true beauty.

There is too often a tendency to call putting weird strings and things on paper modern art, when the true modern art is right underneath our noses, evolving, as always, with the modern world. If any of you wish to further inquire about the art of Memes, I would suggest KnowYourMeme.com, a specialty news site that analyzes online trends, as a broad-based and reliable source.

All images from MemeGenerator.net, and with clear legal intent, discarded works.

Rivers & Navigation

The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Public domain work of Army Corps of Engineers.

Very early in Americas history, before railroads and airplanes and highways successively made America more reachable, there were only two alternatives for transit: the covered wagon/horse and the ship. Even in the 1600's, shipping was surprisingly well-developed at sea, and a trip across the Atlantic often took far less time then a similarly distanced trip across land, while the ship itself could carry far more cargo far more affordably then a similar number of covered wagons. The result was that coastal areas with ports became highly developed centers of wealth, while Appalachia and those areas away from ports became the distinctive "redneck" culture of charming economic ne'er-do-wells we all know and love.

In between theses two extremes were the lands along improvable seaways, and these would prove critical to the further development of America away from the East Coast. The most famous of these is the Erie Canal, built in 1825, from Albany to Buffalo through New York State. Combined with the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal, built 10 years later, linking the Chicago River to Lake Michigan, you had for the first time a true continuous seaway from New York City to the Mississippi River and the vast new lands beyond. The immediate result was a massive outflow of westward settlers, filling out the areas we now popularly know as the Midwest, and creating a market for mail-order goods that would be essential for the further development of the West. In addition, the vast cattle and grain lands of the West supplied the Chicago Stockyards, Chicagos first great manufacturing industry. Lastly and still importantly, the economy of all the great centers of upstate New York was built by cargo passing through the Erie canal.

In more recent years, the Chicago Canal and the Erie canal have both become largely irrelevant due to the increasing draft of freighters, but before they did, the intense increase in interest and investment in Great Lakes Shipping built the iron boat fleets. The iron boats now criss cross all 5 Great Lakes and the rivers that feed in to them carrying Iron Ore from Ontario, Minnesota, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to steel mills in Pennsylvania (through Erie, PA) and Indiana (through the Port of Gary). Stepping in to their place, the brand new Saint Lawrence seaway, easily deep enough for all but the biggest ocean-going freighters, has replaced the Erie Canal running from Lake Ontario to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence along the Saint Lawrence River, and a new steel mill has opened up in Montreal to harness the iron fleets, while grain boats now dock at Duluth, Minnesota and Lake Winnebago (connected through the Winnebago river) to use the Saint Lawrence Seaway to reach Europe. Unfortunately, the Chicago canal has not been replaced, and the Chicago river is too shallow for a canal improvement to be sensible, so it is primarily used by local barges, often carrying iron ore from Tennessee and Alabama to Gary.

In the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, land still largely undeveloped except for the least of uses, even less then agriculture, the Osage river was once targeted for improvement. Many attempts were made to allow ships from the Missouri to access the resource-rich and mountainous regions of the center of the state. The constant turns and rapids of the Osage made it difficult, and finally, the building of a dam at what is now the Lake of the Ozarks without locks ruined the dream of Ozarkian navigation forever. A few wealthy people and vacation homes exist on the Lake of the Ozarks, and very little significant economic activity.

A similar but somehow more lucrative Upper Missouri received major improvements throughout the 1800's and 1900's. Originally ending at Kansas City, where it meets up with the Kansas River, the navigable stretch of the Missouri was extended first to Omaha, and finally to Sioux Falls, Iowa. The region is now a hive of industry and transportation, and used to be even more so. Even with competition from the railroads, the barges were still more useful for many needs, and remain so to this day.

Yet another story of gradually expanding navigation is the Columbia. The navigation head on the Columbia was Portland, Oregon, and indeed for this it was named, from the late 1700's until the late 1870's, where thereafter an intense rapid prevented most further transportation. It was only one unnavigable site, however, and otherwise the river remained well navigable to what is now the Tri-Cities of Washington where the Columbia meets the Snake, and so even in the relatively undeveloped West it made sense to add a couple locks bypassing it. Shortly thereafter, a railroad, one of the oldest in the state, was built from Wallula to Walla Walla, Washingtons' oldest settlement, carrying fresh farm goods and resoures to port to be loaded on to ships and taken downstream, and in some cases even continue north to Alaska where they were needed absolutely and supported the gold rush. Ice also was transported, due to the divergent weather patterns of Eastern Washington (which freezes readily) and Western Washington (which stays fairly warm all year) on opposite sides of the rapids. Finally, in the 1930's, a couple hydroelectric dams were built on the Snake River, and it was realized that with one additional dam navigation could continue to Lewiston, ID; Lewiston, Idaho today is a center of the paper industry due to its location as a transportation center, in the desert halfway between two great timberlands.

Just because a river was unnavigable, however, did not mean it could not be useful for transit. Wagons too benefited form the relatively flat land and easy trails and abundant fresh water and game that even a tiny river provided. Five different wagon trails, to points in Oregon, California, Montana and Utah, all continued along the Platt River through Nebraska, a river known for being too shallow and unsteady even for canoe traffic. Likewise, sometimes navigability is in the eyes of the beholder - many of the rivers Lewis and Clark used are, even today, considered largely unnavigable, while many rivers in Texas, a state usually regarded as being all but without navigable rivers, such as the Trinity were once frequented by steamboats. Starting in the 1830's, short navigable sections of the Chattahoochee, mostly unnavigable that far north, near Atlanta were used for wagon ferries - the ferries have long since been replaced with roads that still bear their names, and they are still many of the most major roads in the city.

Fast flowing rivers, of the sort that are seldom navigable, are also often power sources for industry, and any river navigable or not can be used as a source of water and silt. Silt makes good farmland, and carries downstream minerals like the Gold that was famously panned along the various rivers of Alaska, and also the Diamonds found on the banks of the Ganges that introduced Europe to the Diamond in the 1700's. As a meeting place of navigable deep and broad and unnavigable fast moving rivers, fall line cities such as Hartford, CT, Augusta, GA, Pittsburgh, PA, Trenton, NJ, Baltimore, MD, and the great Industrial center of the confederacy Richmond, VA, where rivers come off a major incline, have been a valuable location for industry. Sometimes though, you can eat your cake and have it too: modern hydroelectric dams provide the same electric power that the old watermill provided mechanically, and can have a concurrent lock for shipping, such as the various dams on the Snake River that bring shipping in to Idaho, often times even making an unnavigable reach navigable.

Georgia has gone the opposite of the Missouri and the Columbia - once home to three navigable rivers, two of them, the Oconee and the Savannah, have been largely cannibalized for irrigation and drinking water. Former ports such as Augusta are no longer reachable to even the most basic of traffic. A movement now exists to do similarly to Georgias last remaining navigable river, the Chatahoochee, which is navigable from Columbus, Georgia to the Gulf of Mexico, despite many dams and improvements made over the years to make river navigation possible, all in the interest of Atlantas (which is not served by the river) literal thirst and growth. In addition, environmentalists in California are trying to bust CA's hydroelectric dams - those don't support shipping, but they do support electric power.

There are also the stories of navigation never completed. A canal project from Washington DC to Ohio was going to create a westward route for shipping traffic from the Chesapeake bay, but was canceled largely because of the availability of the railroad and the Great Lakes system providing too little remaining demand. The Nicaragua Canal was a viable alternative to the Panama Canal that could have potentially served far more local traffic. The latter may still be built simply because the Panama Canal is beyond capacity, the former however will largely not be built because the Potomac River, like the Chicago, is too shallow for modern oceangoing craft.

In general, though, riverine navigation is no longer a priority for modern government infrastructure, and Georgia is frankly a sign of things to come, a world that has largely lost faith in progress and edges more and more to mediocrity and an assumption of good results nearly every day. Less and less are people interested in expanding outside of existing centers and ways, preferring instead to blindly favor what already exists. This combined with radical environmentalism seems to indicate that America, and most of the worlds, days of canal building and extending the great seas to where they are needed are over. It is no wonder that Americas middle class and business base does not grow, as America itself does not grow, favoring only what already exists to the obvious benefit of the current wealthy.

Current Marine Highways of the United States, 2010, public domain work of US-DOT

One must understand them

So often we hear about Israeli "atrocities," about all the evil they supposedly do and these "poor Palestinians" (though one must admit, they are in poverty) who are sitting right under their thumb. In this narrative, Israel was taken from "peaceloving" Arabs.

The reality though is that the people who say these things have never once tried to understand Israels actions. Never once have they put themselves in Israels shoes before they judge. Instead, they use their own European mores, made from a totally different history and social fabric, while judging a nation that they could not possibly understand in a time and place they could not possibly know.

Not once but three times since 1945 have the Arab states tried to squish Israel, and two of those were when they were staying within "appropriate borders." In 1968, after yet another attempt on them, Israel went ahead and took the "lands of others" that had been used as bases and fortresses for the attack on them.

Since 1973 however, the Arabs have realized that attacking Israel militarily is not the way to get anywhere, so instead of attacking straight on, they amass tremendous monetary funds for the families of suicide bombers so they may encourage one of their starving children to blow himself up to continue the war against Israel, without endangering themselves. The result being that because their least favorite child has blown himself up and taken Jews with him, the rest of the family can eat.

With the exception of Jordan, their previous overlord, none of the Arab states have allowed Palestinians to immigrate to their soils and away from the violence. Yet they will rant on and on about the suffering of these Palestinians at the hands of Israelis.

The Jews, meanwhile, are left in a world where nothing is certain, where behind every streetcorner is a bomb waiting to destroy them, and in this world, the rest of the Earth demands that they behave normally. They are left in a world where, because of constant threat of attack from many nations at once, they must resort to a conscription army, which has never led to low civilian casualties (including when America did it in Vietnam) and causes anger against them to rise as a result. Meanwhile, the obvious solution is rejected, simply because the rest of the world wants to fell "good about it self." The obvious solution, of course, is removing the Palestinians to somewhere far away.

On their own land, the Jews have created one of the most brilliant, prosperous shining lights of civilization the world has ever seen in the middle of a desert. Here in their small desert homeland, they have excelled in Agricultural Genetics, built a tremendous education system that Microsoft trusts as one of only three sites worldwide (Tel Aviv) for coding, created a huge middle class, and, perhaps most importantly, a democratic government that protects the rights of all those involved. They've done all this while the Arabs have been shooting at them from every direction and every way, every day of the year. The Isrealis are a true blessing to humanity, while Palestine continues to stagger in non-development, even with its generous gifts of land that they certainly did not deserve for pursuing a constant, unending war with Israel, and ever more bitter poverty.

I do believe that the Palestinians should have a homeland, but it should not be anywhere near Israel. Perhaps Canada or Amazonas can accommodate them? The Sea of Ohktosk is a possibility, even has rich grounds for fishing, and certainly more land then they presently have. The proof is in the pudding, a very bloody pudding filled with the blown off parts of human beings, whole lives snuffed out for no purpose besides Arab greed.

Tattered battle flag of Jerusalem, photo by David Shankbone, license c.c. a.s.a. 3.0 unported

The Great Confusion - a critique of "socially-conscious" enterprise

Wind farm in the Techape Mountains, CA, by Stan Shebs, license c.c. a.s.a 3.0 unported

Whether its renewable energy, microlending in Asia, or low-income housing, we end up hearing "socially-conscious" or "social entrepreneurship" frequently enough to nauseate. As I look through the news, at "socially minded entrepreneurs," I cannot help but notice just how insignificant they really are. For all of their "changing the world," only microlending appears to have changed much, and microlending was not started as "social entrepreneurship" but rather adopted by the figurative guild of "social entrepreneurs" later.

One of the great dangers of social entrepreneurship is the tendency to treat profit as a hurdle instead of an objective. Whereas standard business aims to sell enough at a good enough price to justify its existence, expand and attract others to compete, social entrepreneurship does just barely well enough to exist. Worse, sometimes it doesn't even do that, but rather siphons off funds from the taxpayers through government edict that could be put to better use. In the end, this destabilizes governments and entire economies, as America is only now finding out.

Sometimes people claim that social entrepreneurship can fulfill aspects of true progress that standard entrepreneurship could not. This, simply, is a lie. Take green energy for example. The claim is that we cannot create carbon-free/pollution-free energy without some kind of government investment, but the reality is that we already have such things. We have at least two extremely profitable carbon-free power sources: hydroelectric and uranium-based fission nuclear. We also have a moderately profitable one called Geothermal. Detractors will argue that uranium creates nuclear waste, hydroelectric floods land and threatens biodiveristy, and geothermal takes land in natural areas like the Valles Caldera. And yet they advance wind, which takes up far more land in natural areas then geothermal ever would, and hydro would in some cases, and harms biodiversity by destroying migratory birds, and solar, which, like all semiconductors, requires dangerous chemicals and chemical wastes in the production of solar panels, or else, in the form of solar-thermal, takes up vast land and destroys entire habitats like wind, while taking astronomical costs to build and in the end not being sustainable for the simple and basic reason that nothing built can last forever.

Another claim is bringing third-world countries out of poverty, but alas, every first-world nation was once a third-world nation, and every one of them was brought out of this condition by the expansion of private business. And today, in India, Brazil, Russia, Rwanda, Uganda and China, private business is bringing a few more home. Does this mean there is no role for government or charity? Hardly, this is all collectivist we have not even looked at taking care of individuals yet, but it does mean that your "social entrepreneuers" are wrong about precisely what that role is.

And then there's the matter of precisely what profit is. When most people here the word, they think of some fat guy in a suit who already has too much money (in this day and age, that more accurately describes politicians.) Most business today is done by a combination of ma and pa business and joint stock ventures, depending upon the sector. Indeed, "fat suit guy sole proprietor" has not been the dominant model since the late 1800's.

Joint stock ventures are made up of 1,000's of investors of every social status, both wealthy seeking more wealth and workers seeking a retirement through 401K's, putting money towards a limited liability venture that they are not in control of but still suffer the gains and losses of through stock price and dividend. When you create profit for your joint stock venture, that's a larger 401K for a soon to be old man as well as a larger portfolio for a serious investor (who is not always, but usually is, rich.)

But that's not all profit does! Profit also means that a large enough number of people will contribute a large enough sum to your product to make it more then worthwhile to produce. It also creates new investor groups, both ma and pa and joint stock, to create more production of the desired thing. This virtuous cycle puts out WHAT PEOPLE WANT IN THE GREATEST SENSE, instead of what is desired by a small "ecologically friendly" elite. Indeed, it is far more democratic then democracy, as democracy only considers yes or no and not the degree to which something is desired. Democracy is like a net of thick rope with 4 inch gaps and the free market is like the finest of satins - its holes nearly invisible.

Profit too prevents the waste of resources - if building space, workers and raw materials are demanded by a more profitable enterprise, the price will increase until finally the less profitable either go out of business or rearrange their assets, freeing up the building space, workers and raw materials. As our society decided "getting off of foreign oil" was the highest of all goals, E85 drove up the price of food to cause many of our poor to starve by taking tons of corn and turning it in to small quantities of motor oil. Meanwhile, oil prices continue to rise astronomically, and a few foolish legislators suggested increasing Ethanol content beyond what engines can take without corrosion.

The reality is that profit is a very lofty and socially honorable thing, that very much does empower all of society, and create the best world the given conditions can create for the common man. Treating it as a problem, instead of a solution, will lead to hubris and a small elite dictating things as "the right thing to do" instead of allowing nature and the common man to decide amongst themselves. There is no one so ignorant as one who thinks he knows what's good for his neighbor, and so much of the 20th century has been ruled and ruined by such men.

Full Extent of the Pacific Electric Railway, circa 1920. Public domain work of US Federal Gov't.

Leading the Party - How Romney would be a disaster for the GOP

The Black highlights significant dips in the Generic Congressional Vote relative to the democrats, while the red lines and green lines indicate where Romneys vote has rapidly increased (red) or staggered to gradual decline (green). Screenshots from RCP Polling Averages, Fair Use, with a few basic visual annotations. I apologize for the hazy quality - Blogger could not fully handle the image.

The RCP Polling average, at realclearpolitics.com, averages a whole series of generally accepted polls while discluding major outliers to form a scientific estimation of the actual vote. Mitt Romneys slip in the polls in June corresponded with an improvement in the Generic Congressional Vote. Later, when Perry also appeared to have many of the same problems to Conservatives and, given the evidence above, others, the Congressional Vote slipped once again. In short, Romney, though popular himself, as a standard-bearer for the greater Republican Party is a disaster, and the fruits of this disaster would show itself in (at best) stagnation in the congressional races of 2012 should he be the nominee. At worse, the Republicans could end up not only failing to take the Senate, but losing the House, as their generic congressional ballot is often underperforming the Democrats.

Most reasonable Republicans agree that getting rid of the Reidosi dominated congress is as important as getting rid of Obama. Romney looks presidential, talks soberly (though I wouldn't say well, as that requires that you actually say something), has a nice suit and nice hair, and isn't Obama. Because of this, a lot of people are willing to vote for him for President. But a lot of those people will also see him as the representative of the Republican Party, and will conclude that it is every bit as corrupt, unethical, lukewarm and openly fat cat Wall Street elitist as it was in 2008. They'll still vote for Romney, because he's not Obama and looks like a President regardless of what he does, but they won't vote for Republican candidates outside of Romney. It will also prevent the discussion of ideas that leads to congressional majorities, instead having a presidential race focused entirely on personalities and handing the congressional races directly over to California Environmentalists and Wisconsin Public Sector Unions.

And why would it be any different? Most Americans, outside of the most venom-filled, unthinking and partisan branches of the Republican party, know that George W. Bush is just as responsible for our nations current situation as Barrack Obama. Romney represents the Republican party of Bush. Romney represents Republicans with no principles, who will do anything to get elected, will accept bribes like Ted Stevens, know nothing about Main Street or the physical economy (Romney is, after all, the quintessential Wall Street number cruncher who thinks that the economy is a math equation) and have no trouble trampling on the rights of ordinary Americans or casting all good economic sense to the wind (including what he actually knows) simply to be "popular."

Romney represents the kind of thinking that forces Americans to buy a private good and favors a gradual government takeover of the economy - something which he has not only done, but seems rather proud of. Romney, frankly, should move to the countries that follow his way of thinking, putting everything in the hands of corrupt elites, namely the Sudan, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Chad, the Central African Republic or any number of other African Kleptocracies. Maybe then he would realize why an Ivy-Leagueized America is not a good idea and that public-private collusion is not a virtue.

And should we elect him, just what will he do? Will the man who inspired Obamas entire economics agenda really depart from them substantially? Will he kowtow and get along well with the Democrat Congress that he helped elect? Just what will he do?

Update 10/9/11 - As Mr. Presidents approval ratings continue to drop in the RCP average to their lowest point ever this week, now approaching that crucial 40% mark, it seems that more and more the legitimate interest of the Republican Party needs to be selecting a man who can lead the entire party to victory in all 50 states. Winning the electoral college by more votes is not going to help the Conservatives govern. Winning the electoral college, and then winning the Senate and House by more, will.

The Vain Hubris of Sustainability

Whenever anyone talks about sustainability, there are three basic facts that need to be understood:

1 - Nothing you build will last forever.

2 - There's no such thing as something for nothing.

3 - Throughout history, industrial economies have changed from one resource to another, usually without so much as a headline in the newspaper.

Since number three is the fact that is most surprising to many, I will begin with it. 200 years ago, houses and buildings were constructed almost exclusively from wood and brick. In those days, efficient methods for making both were common, but steel took days to manufacture, and had to be made from already well processed pure iron. Both the fuel and time needs were tremendous to conduct two separate chemical processes each taking days. Further, the quantities made were whatever you could fit in a single crucible.

Bessemer discovered a fast process for making steel in 1855, so fast in fact that it only took 10-20 minutes. The result was the first steel buildings and ships. With Steel, the size of structures increased tremendously, and the skyscraper, along with its steel elevator, became not only a possibility but something neccesary to provide commercial space for the fast growing cities. It also allowed for the internal combustion engine, whose fine moving parts cannot be made effectively from other materials, and with it the car and the airplane.

The Bessemer process could remove many impurities from the original iron ore, and together with the Blast Furnace, silion and silicates, manganese and permanganates, carbon, and sulfur could all be effectively removed. The one thing it could not effectively remove, however, was phosphate, so for the process to work, low-phosphate ores had to be used.

Unfortunately the world began running out of low-phosphate ores in the 1950's, so what did the invisible hand "do"? It introduced two new processes. The first was the Basic Oxygen Process, which took slightly longer (30-40 minutes) but could remove phosphate from the molten steel and had tighter control over the chemistry, allowing new alloys such as Boron Steel to be produced for the first time, and Stainless Steel (also known as Chromium Steel) to be produced inexpensively, and the exact carbon content to be dictated to a hundredth of a percent. The cost is a little higher, but you get higher quality with it. The second was the Electric Arc Process, which for inexpensive steel needs would recycle scrap metal effectively. Between these two, quality improved, new resources were used, and the world did not end, while the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur would set a record for the tallest building in the world a few decades later.

This is not the only example. When strikes and labor politics made the price of coal more expensive, Americans switched to heating with oil and natural gas. Before this, Europeans had switched from firewood to coal as the great forests of Europe were gradually axed away during the Middle Ages, but those castles, those great Cathedrals, and all the splendor of medieval art and music was made with fireplaces burning wood, and those were still around when the wood went away, and before then, it was far easier to go outside to axe a tree then to go underground and risk your neck mining for coal.

No power plant or road we build today is going to last 60 years, so why are we thinking in terms of 600? We should only consider what power sources will still be available 60 years from now when building that plant, and the free market has a device for that too, it's called a futures market. Investors buy up resources now to sell them later at a higher prices, creating a clean and smooth and flat distribution of resources when the market is sufficiently large and well informed, and they do try to be both for their own self-interest. And if people really will benefit from more expense now to avoid expense later (e.g. flourescents), they will buy them, but they probably don't, as they are already in debt and one dollar not repaid now will be a dollar repaid with interest later.

Lastly, and addressing number two, whenever something is used, something is lost, and that includes the materials to build solar panels, and the materials used to make the materials to make solar panels, as plastics and long complex molecules are almost always involved. There is always chemistry involved, and always wasteage, and the free market is a far better evaluator of what the true costs of that wastage is then some government bureaucrat whose never had a job outside of bureaucracy, or scientist specifically trained to only see from the perspective of his field. There is more to cost then electricity and fuel - even things like transportation, labor, land, and the space and finances lost from holding inventory are significant. The reality is that sustainability is not sustainable, as nothing is and we will see when the climate changes and the wind no longer blows where it did, or we run out of some chemical required in the manufacture of solar panels, or even great dust and ash from a supervolcano eruption block the sun. Everything must shift with its right and proper season, and this includes all sources of energy. Sustainability is a vain and impossible notion.

Abolish Property Tax Now!

Thames Tow Boat Company, New London, CT, 1975. Source: Wikimedia, public domain.

Imagine you are a rancher, on 10,000 acres, about what is needed to have a profitable Cattle ranch. You and your fathers have lived on this land for many generations, essentially since there were Europeans in the area. You don't have any debt, and you wake up every morning to a Montana sunrise against the rockies before a hard day of work.

Unfortunately, a bunch of wealthy Los Angelinos find out about these beautiful Montana sunrises, and move in to megahouses just next door. Your property values go through the roof. The government forces you to sell, as otherwise you can't pay your taxes. You never really owned the land to begin with.

Then we cry and scream about poor people who can take out loans that they can never pay off, but if those poor peoples property values ever went up, they would be driven off their land anyways, and at least they KNOW how much the bank will charge them (or think they know.) But why should they have a balanced checkbook? What benefit do they get? Why should they work hard and save when nothing truly qualifies you as an owner.

And then there are city councils that limit what you can do with your land, telling you you can't raise chickens, you can't raise horses, you can only have two dogs. People next to you decide that because they want high property values, they can tell you what to do with YOUR land. I think if George Washington saw modern suburbia, he would be perfectly ashamed.

And no, I'm not a property owner myself. I live in a 15 by 15 foot room that I rent, and I am offended and ashamed that my country, which call itself the "land of the free, home of the brave" destroys freedom and cowardly avoids productive activity in the name of land values. This is cowardice, and slavery, both.

These behaviors finally culminated in the Kelo decision. The city of New London, a long eclipsed New England city that was once a powerhouse of industry, decided it was going to make "hard choices" to improve its economy. Naturally, these choices were made with other peoples land. They took, by eminent domain, land from many owners, including Kelo, who challenged the constitutionality of this decision. By a narrow majority, the Supreme Court ruled that it was constitutional for the "public use" of reselling to a developer who will make "better purpose" of the land. In a twist of irony, the taken lands are now unused and fenced off, a decaying brownsfield, and I cannot help but think that the wrath of God is at work.

But then there's practicality. Supporters will argue that property taxes are neccesary for the funding of city coffers, but in reality property taxes are a very unreliable source of revenue that have impoverished far more cities then they have made wealthy. The desolation of the inner cities in the 1950's occurred because of wealthy whites fleeing the city, causing land values to fall rapidly. The city then raised property taxes, driving out business, and impoverishing it further. And it is not high property values that define a city. Rather, a city is defined by being the best place for business, a place to buy and sell, manufacture, import and export, a distribution center is the essence of a city, so why not tax THAT? The overall tax burden need not increase, in fact a thorough review of city budgets in the current political climate will likely lead to cuts.

In reality, property taxes serve no one but the wealthy attempting to eliminate the "riff raff" of their town, and those with a vested interest in delegitimizing the right to property. It violates the natural and legitimate right of property, harms the poor by providing subpar, underfunded city services, and encourages a mentality that can lead only to tyranny.

Megafeature: A Summary of the Stings

Source Photobucket

One of the more remarkable innovations of the T.E.A. party has been the use of "sting" operations. These sting operations involve a hapless victim that the teamen in question feel is being disingenuous, and a disguise of a figure that they feel he or she will be honest to. Sometimes the plot itself is so absurd that its practicality serves as a lesson regardless of the result, and then even more absurdly, it is vindicated. Such an example was the sting operation against a ground manager of a Planned Parenthood clinic, who has since been fired:

Planned Parenthood Sting Video

The most disturbing part of this video comes at timemark 8:38, when the manager informs a pimp how to avoid being detected by the law, how to avoid arrest, so that he and his enslaved Columbian girls, scared and far from home, can continue violating the states prostitution law and abort the babies thus produced. The most troubling aspect, however, is the callous and unthinking way she talks to one of the most evil kinds of villains that can exist: a slaver, and not just a slaver, but one who violates females through forced prostitution.

Then there's the issue of government waste. For this we get the NPR sting, a sting against an organization that is supposedly a national radio station of the United States but has long been suspected of bias in favor of progressives. The NPR sting demonstrated (sort of, well get to that in a minute) numerous bigoted statements, from comparing conservative Christians to the Taliban, to hating upon gun owners and the federal standards enforced upon NPR that they do a more then good enough job bending already:

This sting is not without controversy, in fact it may be without support. Sources from all across the political spectrum, as far left as the Huffington Post and as far right as the Blaze (Glenn Becks newspaper/amalgamator) have criticized O'Keefes video for its extremely unethical and dishonest editing techniques. Many, in fact, the left-wing Brudowsky praised Glenn Beck for his extremely professional, objective, and powerful dissection of the "NPR Sting," and I am among many whose respect for Mr. Beck, an icon of the Tea Party and the right in general, has greatly increased. While Becks criticism is in general the most thorough and useful to read through, there is one particular quote from the Huffington Post criticism that I find especially potent:

While Schiller does say the Republican Party has been "hijacked" by the tea party and Christian evangelicals -- and is "fanatically involved in people's personal lives" -- it is evident in the full tape that he is not giving his own view but rather quoting two influential Republicans, according to reporter Folkenflik. Schiller does not challenge those assertions, but they are not his.

O'Keefe is also famous for his ACORN stings, including one where, with his girlfriend, he attempted (and nearly did, with extensive assistance offered) to acquire starting funds for a prostitution house that he would pay back on interest that ACORN could use for political campaigns. Before this, he attempted to have Lucky Charms removed from the Rutgers cafeteria because it is "offensive to his Irish heritage" and apparently caught a conversation with the dining chiefs on tape exposing the absurdity of the situation. He stated that he is "still in [his] bunker producing more videos. We're releasing another video in San Diego right now. I'm focusing on doing what I do best." Although congress looked to punish ACORN with a defunding bill, a Federal Court has ruled that such actions would be the exclusive remedy of the Judicial Branch. This is not the first time recently that we have seen our governments dormant constitutional protections awoken from their sleep, and everyone is watching as the American people push for reform and government officials pit "ambition against ambition" in a classic display of democratic, Madisonian magic.

The organization Life Dynamics dialed up 800 calls to Planned Parenthood stating that they needed an abortion for a 13-year-old to cover up impregnation by her 22-year-old boyfriend. This is illegal in all 50 states, but Planned Parenthood did not report any of these incidences. Just for the record, I actually support the actions of Planned Parenthood in this regard, as concealing a pregnancy is, at least in my mind, a good (if not the only good) reason for abortion as it is a case where putting up the baby for adoption is simply not good enough. This said, I know that many disagree with this sentiment, and technically it is against the (stupid) law, which requires all suspected cases of abuse to be reported to authorities by medical professionals.

And then finally, and greatest of all, is ClimateGate, the sting operation that may have fundamentally altered global environmental politics, and that the Democrat Party at large insists on ignoring the ramifications of. The product of a hacker, 1000 emails among staff at the UK's Climate Research Unit have been made public. Although FactCheck.org, in its examination of ClimateGate, disagrees that it disproves anthropogenic global warming, a conclusion a self-interested Saudi came to, it does agree that the emails show scientists "sometimes being rude, dismissive, insular, or even behaving like jerks" while the public has rightly responded to attitudes and interpersonal aggression, such as declaring global warming "settled science" along with the climategate emails, clearly not conducive to good science. While the ClimateGate emails may or may not (I have not read them myself) show the science to be false, they do show the scientists to be false, and with the alternative sources offered all being government entities (NOAA and NASA), we the public are left with little more then a few university degrees on which to trust theories that could fundamentally alter our lives.

Unfortunately, and we see this clearly with ClimateGate, named for the much lesser WaterGate, "operations" like these can only have a true impact (where the much better funded and marketed "Supersize Me!" failed) when a cultural context exists to support them.

To create such, we have a play with many characters. There's an arugula growing, elite talking, Harvard Law-Chicago Cesspool Obama intent on breaking the budget with spending in excess of even Bush. There's an irrepressible lady from California and gentleman from Nevada who seem intent on shattering any popular or political movement against them. There's a lightbulb ban, an "individual mandate" (thou must purchase something, approved by thine bureaucratic overlords, if thou seekest to breathe) and big shot corporations receiving welfare while "99ers" go cold and hungry in the street. There's government destroying cars to make people buy more and a liberal establishment that wants congress to pass a bill so they can read what's in them. There's an American people who do not even understand all the "Hope" and "Change" that their initially lauded leader has brought.

In short, political overreach, and too much game playing, manipulation and intrigue for an American people who know they will be the ones to pay the bill.

Responding to the controversy, Slate commisioned blogger Weigel held a twitter conversation with one of the publishers of the original, edited, NPR Sting video. The exchange is revealing. The actual conversation reveals an NPR chief quoting a top donor for the Republican Party as saying he voted for Obama because he's scared of the xenophobic, gun-toting, racist post-Obama Party. When Weigel challenges him on this account, the publisher responds: "No, it's really not. Go ahead and try to make the argument Schiller isn't CLEARLY agreeing with them. Go ahead. Moron."

To the publishers credit, the actual tone expressed in the original quote does indicate, at the very least, a fear that the Kingmaker may be right. And a Kingmaker is generally held in high esteem. Also to the publishers credit, while this "edit" is not good journalism, username "simon templar" is not a professional journalist, and clearly feels very overwhelmed as this tweet reveals: "nobody likes an access journalist/tweeter. we'll get you the info/emails you asked for eventually, I'm sure." It is also worth noting that every controversial remark attributed, falsely or otherwise, to the NPR head in the sting, is commonly found among liberals on the internet and in IRL, including, of course, the "gun-toting nutjobs" line that is argued over in this article.

"simon templar" is a common man, pushed in to uncommon work. He is, in fact, out of his league, but right now, who IS in their league?

Which leads me to my next point, what's become irrelevant. While teamen with camcorders flood the internet with "stings," documentaries by top Hollywood directors like Oliver Stone (e.g. "W") go totally unwatched and unremembered. I can't even remember the last time a story about a Hollywood star, a bigshot CEO, or a Harvard professor made the papers. The only "elites" who still seem to make papers, in fact, are the politicians we're all scared of and a few big media demagogues, like Krugman and O'Reilly, who are little more then highly paid whipping boys for the common citizens. In the words of Scripture: "the last shall be first, and the first shall be last."

And then there's the Middle East. While here at home we break our own elite peacefully, using the full well-oiled machinery of our democracy and a thousand years of Western legal wisdom, the streets of Benghazi are soaked in blood. The alleys of Bahrain lay covered in shell casings, and aircraft streak over the Mediterranean carrying every sort of explosive payload. In Egypt, the army, a traditional symbol of tyranny and distrust, is helping to provide for what the Arab world doesn't have, insisting on all parties respecting each other and disarming those who would hurt the people. That Army has so much to be proud of, and I know I would be proud to carry an Egyptian rifle right now. In this great moment to be alive, the long oppressed show the irrepressible, stubborn, freedom-loving and faithful spirit of humanity. They also almost exactly mirror the tea party, using many of the same methods, and the sheer tinyness of the media involved makes it nearly impossible for the government to stop the word. The government is stopping army ants with an elephant gun.

And then there's Japan, where ordinary men and women, Japanese and others, have volunteered their time by the truckload to rebuild and service the survivors*, and where the nations eyes lay flatly and squarely pointed towards the power plant workers risking their lives to bring a reactor under control. "She said in an entry on social networking site Mixi that her boyfriend, who also works at the plant, had tearfully told her "you go ahead to safety", before she evacuated in a company car." (Hindustan Times)

And in Britain, flash mobs have become a common occurence.

We find a world suspiciously popular and self-driven, where the elites find themselves unneeded and out of touch. This is the world where Obama is trying to force huge, coercive government actions and sweeping reforms led by, you guessed it, the elites. This is the world that Obama, half Harvard and half machine politician, an outdated relic from a time period that mostly ended in 1910, finds himself in. The past meets the future, my friends, and usually, the future wins.

*Source note: You will need to browse to the end of the article to find this information. Here's a quote:

Fumio and her daughter were among the roughly 600 people (men, women and children of all ages) who had taken shelter on the gymnasium's wood floor, beneath the basketball hoops and nets. Evacuees were offered food, such as warm milk and rice — some of which had been taken from a home economics class — and a place to sleep. A flat-panel television was broadcasting news of the unfolding catastrophe, which by then was focused on the potential meltdown of reactors within the Fukushima nuclear plants.

Out West Newspaper

WyrdLight-McCallum www.wyrdlight.eu, license: c.c.a.s.a 2.5-gen

Have you ever wondered where to buy a wooden Indian? Do you want to know how the border between US and Canada was made, or what crazy German (hint) thought of it? Do you like puns made by extremely cheesy Western small business owners? Is your mind dirty with jokes about outhouses? Do you just love photographs of wide open roads?

If so, have we got a treat for you! "Out West was a quarterly "on-the-road" newspaper founded in 1987 by roving editor/reporter Chuck Woodbury, who spent much of the following 13 years exploring the two-lane highways of the American West in an RV searching for stories about whatever he found interesting." No longer published, having printed its last issue in 2000 with a final subscription base of 10,000, this gem of the open road is now almost totally available online for free, along with links to resources about RV's, RV camps, a bookstore in an RV, and lots of crazy odd pictures that once showed up in the magazine.

I found this magazine by mistake when searching for a good short history of the Pig War, the almost conflict (in some ways analogous to what is currently happening in Egypt, but a bit more toned down) that ended with Kaiser Wilheim I proclaiming an official, general, easily recognizable border between America and British possessions in North America. In finding it, the pictures and content immediately made me miss home, and the wide open spaces of Washington State along with the humor and charm of its people. In particular, no where else in the world would a electric company put up a sign saying:

"Let us remove your shorts"

Or would you find a business that specializes in shipping Wooden Indians!

The eccentricities and hopeful love that the writer, Chuck Woodbury, showcased are great attributes of the great land called simply the West, and though many people have cried and sung about its passing away, really, it's still there. It's changed a bit, the industries and jobs are different, and in a few places open space has been lost, but overall, the West is still live and well.

We'd recommend this great old paper to anyone!

Chuck Woodbury still runs a blog of short, about bi-monthly posts out of rvtravel.com. Our Prayers are with him over recent loss, and that he may stay as lively and curious as he has always been and, with promise, will always be. He still travels and lives life with wonder as he did in his Out West Newspaper days.

Guest Post - Roy Sanders is Magic (and other discoveries at the CHoA Autism Conference)

Yet another guest post from our good friend Walt Guthrie on the "social sciences." Enjoy!

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I wasn't expecting much from this year's CHoA Autism Confernce that was held last Saturday.
Boy, was I surprised.
Who knew that Roy Sanders had magical powers?

But I'll get to that.
Let's take the events of the conference in chronological order.

First up was Catherine Rice, a behaviorist from the CDC, who was there to give us the obligatory What-Is-Autism? opening presentation.
The talk actually touched more on issues of classification than anything else I have seen so far in these types of events. In the course of her presentation, she inadvertently raised a couple of interesting points. First, until 1980, the DSM classified autism as a type of schizophrenia.
Now here's a question (one that I didn't actually ask): In 1979, WAS autism actually a type of schizophrenia and in 1981 it WASN'T schizophrenia? The implication from Rice, of course, was that this is an example of how far the understanding of autism has come. But, as my numerous public questions to "experts" make clear, the classification of autism, even today, is divorced completely from empirical evidence. James McPartland, in my questioning of him, admitted that the use of the word "disorder" in the classification of ASDs was purely definitional.
If autism, or any word, is only whatever a designated authority structure says it is, then that's what it is. If autism is defined as schizophrenia, then it's schizophrenia. And if it's defined as a disorder, then it's a disorder. And if it's defined as two parts from this column of symptoms and three parts from that column, then that is what you have.
If you believe that the evidence points to the moon being made of cheese, then upon arriving on it, you may be forced to admit that no, the moon is not made of cheese. If you DEFINE the Moon as being made of cheese, then upon discovering that the orb revolving around our planet is actually composed of a different substance, you may be forced to admit that it is not, in actuality, the Moon.
If autism,as defined, is different from autism as experienced, then it's pragmatic utility as a useful term, even for the "science" of behaviorism, is questionable indeed.
Which was brought more into focus by Rice's second tidbit. She declared that there are those with autistic traits who are not counted as having an Autistic Spectrum Disorder. She compared it as the difference between neuroses and psychoses but then didn't really touch on it again.Yet, given how much of her presentation was related to doing counts of "ASD" cases in the general populace and whether or not the rate of autism is rising, this would seem to be highly pertinent Let's follow this line of reasoning. All autism is a disorder (thus ASD). Some people have autistic traits but, they are not disordered. So now, at least according to Rices' brief explanation, we find out that, a little bit of autism equals no autism at all.
Now, why not the easier explanation of: some people have autism and they're fine with it? Is it because that interpretation would be injurious to the autistic population? Or would the real victim of such an interpretation be the behaviorist money train for whom every diagnosis is a ka-ching?
I asked Rice, what the methodological procedure was for labeling the entire autistic spectrum as disordered (taking into account that she doesn't consider autistic-lites as part of the spectrum). It was at this point that Roy Sanders, the Medical Director of Marcus popped in to shut me off.
Hmm.

Next up was Felissa Goldsmith, a child psychiatrist from Marcus
Dr. Goldsmith treats a PowerPoint presentation like a teleprompter. And that's not a compliment.
There was little new here. However, there was such an underlying contempt for autistic kids in her talk that I had to check with Linda later to confirm that it wasn't just me picking up that vibe.
To give just the most egregious example: Goldsmith suggested more than once that parents should be encouraged to mourn their children's autism like a death. And to do this on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas. This easily was the most sickening thing I've been exposed to all week. ("Daddy will be down in a moment, Timmy. He's mourning the child he wanted that you'll never be.") This is the advice you'd expect to come from a monster and I said as much.
I asked Sanders, if this was the official policy of the Marcus Center. Boos from the audience. He curtly dismissed the question as inappropriate.
Well, it's not like I was the one who brought it up.

Dr. Michael Morrier, from the Emory Autism Center, gave a somewhat uneven presentation on ABA that ended up focusing on how his people do it over there. I want to say some good things somewhere and it might as well be here. As I told Morrier after the presentation, he is the least offensive behaviorist I have ever encountered. When asked about his center's use of aversives, he replied that they don't use any.
Giving Morrier the benefit of the doubt, if I was forced to send a child anywhere for the application of ABA, Morrier would probably be my choice.
Still, even if he seemed more of an actual human being than any other behaviorist that I have ever personally met, he still was, after all, a behaviorist. At one point, talking about instilling eye contact as a habit in children, he observed that one could be TOO successful. If children make eye contact all the time they become creepy staring machines. And Morrier noted that regular run-of-the-mill kids don't make eye contact all the time either. Instead, they do it 63% of the time. (Or something like that number, I neglected to make a note of his actual percentages and all the figures that follow in this paragraph are approximations of his actual numbers.) Morrier was quite explicit that the goal was to get the autistic kids to make eye contact at EXACTLY the same percentage of the time as normal kids. He even talked about making up the gap (as if this were some sort of missile crisis from the 1960s) between the two groups so that children who begin training at age three are 14 percentage points behind in eye contact percentages and those that begin at age 4 are 28% behind.
Morrier never felt the need to explain why a random sampling of non-autistic kid's eye contact percentages (or any other behavior) should serve as the golden mean against which all similar autistic behavior should be measured. There was no suggestion that it might be possible that regular kids might be indulging in too much eye contact and perhaps should receive some therapy to tone it down a bit.
There was no evidence presented that, having trained children to achieve the same percentage of eye contact to non-eye contact, that these children were indeed receiving the same benefits from this activity. Presumably, eye contact is a skill that delivers information to those engaging in it and that the everyday children doing it were themselves benefiting from the activity.
Certainly a question that you might think should be asked is: do autistic children, trained to make eye contact, receive the same benefits as regular children naturally engaged in the same activity? Or are they merely being trained to pretend that they are not autistic? A previous speaker at the AAC made a big deal about how his research has shown that those on the spectrum tend to gain their information about people from studying mouths rather than eyes. Assuming that this is indeed the case, and that all these babies haven't had laser pointers slapped on their heads for nothing, then wouldn't you want to know if forcing a child to shift his primary attention from mouth to eyes will be accompanied by an increasing ability to make use of this information? Or, will the child be left in a worse position, forced to concentrate on areas of the face he is less equipped to easily decipher?

Finally it was Sanders turn.
During his presentation, Sanders literally sat on his hands and continuously kicked out his legs and pointed his feet which might have been adorable if he was a shy, pretty girl in a sundress instead a self-conscious middle-aged introvert seemingly hyper-aware of his own poor public speaking skills.
Sanders attempted to use his own personal situation to illuminate what parents in the audience would face and the things they should do to prepare for raising a child on the autistic spectrum. And, as might be expected, it was the same old, tired checklist, although this time it was wrapped in a droning awkward wallow of self-pity and look-at-me-I'm-a-martyr-for-raising-an-autistic-child self aggrandizement.
At the conclusion of his talk, I asked the question why, in the two years of this particular conference, which seems to be aimed squarely at the parents of autistic children, that they had not chosen to include a single adult or teenager who was actually on the spectrum. Someone who might be able to explain to the parents what their own children were actually experiencing.
Sanders was dismissive of this question as well.
I then asked why, with all the usual suspects that he was recommending parents consult, he had not included actual people on the autistic spectrum who could possibly contribute a valuable understanding as to why their children thought and acted as they did.
His response was that not all people who claim to be on the spectrum actually are.
Well, THAT'S awfully cryptic, Roy.
His meaning became clear soon enough, right after the meeting. And it was at this point that I discovered that Roy Sanders' has magical powers. For he revealed to me, much to my surprise, that I am not on the autistic spectrum.
Wait a minute, I hear some of you saying. Don't you have to take a bunch of intricate expensive tests and pay a bunch of money to get an autistic diagnosis? Well, yeah. That's what I thought. A major part of this whole four hour plus drone-a-thon I had just finished sitting through was about the importance of getting special testing. Nobody said anything about just dropping Roy Sanders into the room and having him magically deduce it.
But his magic didn't end there. He had an even more dazzling trick up his sleeve.
It seems, rather than being on the spectrum I'm a "schizo" something-something-something. I'm afraid I didn't catch the full diagnosis. DSM labels are like your kid's Pokemon monsters. What grown-up with a life really has the time to keep up with them all? But I invite Roy to publicly post his diagnosis to this group so that I might be properly discredited as an autistic advocate in a public forum.
This later part was all relayed to me as he walked briskly to his car, making so little eye contact with me that he practically called out for a session of ABA and Christmas day parental mourning.
I'm sure you can imagine my internal dialogue:
"Huh? What? What are you doing? You can't walk away now after dropping that on me! I'm going to need counseling. YEARS of therapy! Preferably behavioral because that's science! I need to come to terms with this diagnosis! This changes my entire life! I need to know that there's hope for me and that I can live with this schizo-whatever-whatever and still have hope for a happy and productive life!"
Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, was not the magical diagnosis enough, and, in his quick retreat, he sure seemed like he had some place he needed to be. Perhaps, and I'm only speculating here, Saturday is the day of the week he reserves for mourning his own adopted child's autism.
And, of course, declaring me off the spectrum was probably an easy call. After all, if I am on the spectrum, it's not like Sanders or the Marcus Center are in a position to make a buck off of it.

In reality, his is the game pseudo-scientists play all the time, employing the magical intuitive powers that their credentials supposedly convey to conveniently discredit their adversaries.
Sanders was explicit that if I continue to pursue matters as I have that I will soon find myself barred from meetings such as this one. How much easier that will be if he is in a position to use his special magical insight to claim that his critic doesn't have standing.

I have spent years now arguing just how untenable the behaviorists' and their allies position are. I have shown you how they can't answer the simplest of questions.
Sanders, being the stupid man that he is, thinks that if he bars me from the meetings that he will have won. If it happens it will instead be a complete and total vindication for myself. I have, since my early days in Bob Morris' group, argued that you can't do business with these people. Nonetheless, in the time since then, I have treated them as the scientists I know them not to be. I have asked them to justify their uses of simple words they use everyday like "disorder" and those from our community who have attended these meetings have seen their complete inability to do so. What more do I need to do to show their essential fraudulent nature?
When I am barred (and i think it is a matter of when rather than if) I will have demonstrated, once and for all and for everyone here in the autistic community to see, that the behaviorists and their allies are unwilling to engage the autistic community in any form of real dialogue or debate that does not at first begin with a servile acknowledgment of their superior knowledge and authority in all matters pertaining to us.

I was asked, after the meeting, why it was that I couldn't be nicer. Bob Morris was nice. And they repaid his niceness by treating him with contempt and running the clock out on him.
The people charged with fixing us, hate us. Loathe us. Talk about us as tragedy, a collection of deficits and disorders. They encourage parents to MOURN when their children are identified as us. They think the best that we can ever be is a crude approximation of them. They compare us to animals. They compare us to AIDS. They compare us to cancer. They compare us to death.
And in doing all this they enrich themselves.

The time for nice, from me, or anyone, is past.

Way, way past.

Walt Guthrie