Sunday, September 25, 2005
UNKNOWABLE FUTURE KNOWN
In his latest “the sky is falling, and the sky is on fire, and the whole damn sky is full of depleted uranium!” book, environmentaloid extremist Tim Flannery allows that:
Science is about hypotheses, not truths, and no one can absolutely know the future.
Go tell it to Sir John Lawton, pal:
Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are the “smoking gun” of global warming, one of Britain’s leading scientists believes ...
In a series of outspoken comments—a thinly veiled attack on the Bush administration—Sir John hit out at neoconservatives in the US who still deny the reality of climate change.
Referring to the arrival of Hurricane Rita he said: “If this makes the climate loonies in the States realise we’ve got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation.”
Asked what conclusion the Bush administration should draw from two hurricanes of such high intensity hitting the US in quick succession, Sir John said: “If what looks like is going to be a horrible mess causes the extreme sceptics about climate change in the US to reconsider their opinion, that would be an extremely valuable outcome.”
Climate loonies? How impolite. I’m a climate dissident, and I’ll thank you not to crush my dissent.
LABOR LEADER LEADS
Kim Beazley wishes John Howard was less of a wimp on terrorism, and proposes practical new policies that don’t get dragged down into civil liberty debates:
One of the problems with this government is it seeks to have a debate on terrorism that gets to an argument about civil liberties. We need a debate that goes around practical measures. We’ve put out one suggestion which is similar to legislation which exists now in NSW, so it’s a bit tougher and we think it should be picked up in the other States in a uniform way and by Canberra, and that is to give the capacity to the Police Commissioner in any jurisdiction to lock down an area from which he believes a terrorist threat may be emerging or where it’s actually occurred. This gives the police substantial powers of search and seizure …
Search and seize means that, say you’ve identified a suburb from which you think a threat is emanating … it gives you a capacity to search any like area without a warrant.
Imagine the screeching if Howard suggested suburb-wide warrantless searches. Beazley—whose tough new views may be alarming to 20% of his party—also supports the booting of goatee warrior Scott Parkin.
WORLD FED. ACTUALLY, OVERFED
Hey, Bob Geldof! Thanks for all the heart disease and diabetes:
A staggering one billion of the world’s population of 6.45 billion is overweight, warns the World Health Organization. And rates of overweight and obesity are rising dramatically in poorer countries, not just wealthy nations.
If the current trend continues, by 2015 there will be 1.5 billion overweight people in the world. Being overweight or obese greatly increases a person’s risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and other chronic diseases.
Look for Saint Bob to gather around him the world’s lamest singers for a rousing recording of Starve the World:
While much about ageing remains a mystery, there seems to be at least one way to stay alive longer: adopting the brutal diet known as caloric restriction. Although it has not yet been proved to work for people, in every animal species on which it has been tested it extends lifespan by up to 50 per cent.
Let’s test it on musicians.
BUSH CONDEMNED, BUMBLER APPLAUDED
They’ll get the President coming and going, writes Sher Zieve:
After blaming President Bush for the feds response to Katrina, [NBC’s David] Gregory decided to rebuke him for “too much response” to Hurricane Rita’s impending onslaught when he asked the president, at a news conference: “Aren’t you and your entourage getting in the way?”
Gregory may have had a little goalpost work done lately by the fine folks at Sortelli’s Movers and Landscapers. On related matters, John Leo asks:
Which politician emerged from the mess of Katrina as the biggest bonehead involved? No, it’s not Michael Brown, George W. Bush, or even the bumbling Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco.
Hint: it’s the same guy over whom the New York Times gushes: “Hurricane Katrina has given the nation a new political celebrity ... ”
CINDY’S PEOPLE
Little Green Footballs tracks crowd estimates at this weekend’s Motherpalooza in Washington. Numbers seem a little inflated. In fact, AP’s Jennifer Kerr found them so great as to be beyond her ability to calculate:
In the crowd: young activists, nuns whose anti-war activism dates to Vietnam, parents mourning their children in uniform lost in Iraq, and uncountable families motivated for the first time to protest.
Jeff Goldstein dissects another Kerr report here. If numbers are below expectations, maybe it’s because disoriented protesters have wandered away to protest things they don’t mean to protest:
The left-wing Working Assets sent protesters last Wednesday to heckle conservatives at their weekly meeting in downtown Washington at the offices of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). But they arrived too early and ended up heckling environmentalists and other workers starting their day.
The people actually heckled were employees of the League of Conservation Voters and many other organizations housed in the building along with ATR. “We did what made sense to us, given people’s work schedules,” Working Assets spokesman Andrew Boyd told this column.
They have work schedules?
Saturday, September 24, 2005
VISION OF THE FUTURE
As foretold in Kingstonian prophesy, fifty years from now children will every day be directed to crucial information by an image of Super Margo:
Remember the little photo you can click on to read all the news on your school palmtop? That’s the picture of the woman who started all this. She was called Margo Kingston.
Why wait until 2055? Iowahawk brings you the future TODAY!
DC PROTEST BREAKS ALL THE RULES
This protest gets it all wrong. For a start, many of the protesters are young and attractive. Their heads appear to be upright instead of compassionately tilted. And their signs are positive and funny.
More protesty wrongness here.
UPDATE. Protesters still upright and cute.
UPDATE II. Look at these ridiculous people.
LADDERITE OPPORTUNISTS REJECT SAVIOUR
Michael Duffy theorises that the dullness and selfishness of “ordinary people” brought Mark Latham down:
Latham discovered to his horror that most voters are not interested, that “the disempowered don’t really care” about politics ...
The diaries even reveal that Latham came to regret promoting the cause of aspiration, because those people who climb the ladder of opportunity lose their concern for community.
My guess is that in the end it was not the politicians and the media but ordinary people who destroyed Mark Latham’s faith. He’d spent his adult life trying to save people who no longer want to be saved.
The lost election was merely the last step in this disillusionment.
Please, Michael. Get a grip. This is sickening.
UPDATE. Add Queensland Labor MP Craig Emerson to Latham’s pieces of work list:
Emerson - an untrustworthy piece of work.
UPDATE II. Melbourne Age reader Eli Nossbaum:
Mungo MacCallum’s ‘What if Latham had triumphed?’, surmising the utopia Australia would live in had Latham won, seemed to me at the time as typical leftist delusion. Now Latham has proved it so.
That piece was published on September 4. MacCallum has since had second thoughts:
Latham truly was the wolf in sheep’s clothing that his detractors had always feared ... He fooled a lot of people, including me.
Just as well journalists aren’t responsible for electing Prime Ministers (me included, seeing as how I was fooled into voting for John Hewson, who turned out to be a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Another bullet dodged.)
SKEETERS GASSED
Good news from South Africa, where malaria is now in decline following four years of cautious DDT use:
South Africa had stopped using DDT in 1996. Until then the total number of malaria cases was below 10,000 and there were seldom more than 30 deaths per year.
But in 2000, the country saw malaria cases skyrocket to 65,000 and 458 people were killed ...
Last year only 89 deaths were recorded.
(Via Professor Bunyip, who suggests the above may present a challenge for certain anti-DDT types)
PARADE INCLUDES FIREWORKS
In typically enthusiastic style, Hamas celebrates Israel’s Gaza withdrawal:
A massive explosion ripped through a crowd at a rally staged by the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip today, killing at least 10 Palestinians and wounding scores of others, medical officials said.
Cause of the blast appears to be blundering Hamas killbots:
The jeep was ferrying gunmen from the Islamic fundamentalist movement’s armed wing to the open space set aside for festivities celebrating Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza when the vehicle exploded, sending mangled body parts of militants and bystanders flying.
Palestinian witnesses said a crowd, including many children, swarmed around the truck moments before it blew up.
The victims include at least two children and three militants.
You know what these guys need? A state of their own! Naturally, Hamas—the Three Stooges of global terrorism—has denied responsibility:
Hamas blamed Israel, which categorically denied any involvement in the blast. Witness accounts and some Palestinian Authority officials suggested that ordnance and weaponry being paraded by the group had accidentally exploded.
This sort of thing happens often:
An accidental explosion would be only the latest in a string of deadly mishaps for militant groups in Gaza.
A Hamas weapons warehouse exploded this month in Gaza City, killing six people. Hamas claimed it was an Israeli attack, but Palestinian security forces found the blast was an accident caused by the militants.
During an Islamic Jihad rally at the abandoned Jewish settlement of Netzarim last week, a gunman died after accidentally shooting himself in the head.
Even after the blast Friday, seven or eight gunmen stood in the back of another truck riding through Gaza, using their feet to stop a half-dozen rockets from bouncing around in the bed.
(Via RWDB)
UPDATE. Richard McEnroe asks: “Now that they have a beach, will we see The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion Swimsuit Edition?”
RITA HITS
An early ABC report:
Rita made landfall early Saturday as a Category 3 storm just east of Sabine Pass, on the Texas-Louisiana line, more than 275 miles from New Orleans. Despite the flooding in New Orleans, meteorologists said the gravest concern was in southwestern Louisiana communities, particularly the port city of Lake Charles.
“I know we’re all concerned about New Orleans, but I’m more focused on these other communities right now,” said Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “That’s where people are going to die.”
Lake Charles was a virtual ghost town, its residents among up to 500,000 people in southwestern Louisiana who headed north. The hurricane center had no information about conditions in Lake Charles at landfall.
“Those sensors went down” hours earlier, meteorologist Dave Roberts said. In New Orleans, water poured through gaps in the Industrial Canal levee, which engineers had tried to repair after Katrina’s floodwaters left 80 percent of the city under water. The rushing water spilled east into St. Bernard Parish, where ducks swam down Judge Perez Drive.
Those ducks are faring better than poor Mayor Noggin, now trapped on the last short bus out of New Orleans. Once he escapes and finds another job, he can tell his story to the world. For further Rita info, Instapundit points to the WSJ and Houston’s Bill Dyer.
UPDATE. Kathy from Austin, God bless her, writes:
My city of about 1MM has swelled to about 1.3MM. It is really putting a strain on our resources. But hey, what can you do? It could be us for some other reason. What you do is open your arms and welcome them to Austin.
Friday, September 23, 2005
“SHE WAS CALLED MARGO KINGSTON”
Jack Smit, called upon last night to launch Margo Kingston’s TypePad blog, foresees a modest level of success:
Margo’s move to Webdiary was in itself already something to take note of, and her separation and independence of Fairfax is something which I imagine will still be discussed in journalism courses in 50 years time, if we still run them in Australia.
Let’s fast forward to that time, 50 years from now.
A child asks: “Dad, what is a newspaper?” Dad obligingly answers, and says: “Well, you remember the trees that were chopped up for paper long ago as you learnt at school? When that still happened, many of the beautiful Australian trees were chopped up to make real cheap paper, and every day all the news that now comes in on your school palm top and on mummy’s laptop, was printed on fat bundles of that cheap paper. That’s what newspapers were until the government stopped doing that and gave people big fines for wasting paper.”
The child then asks: “When did that paper wasting stop?” And Dad goes: “Well, there was this woman journalist, and she started the first newspaper without using paper in Australia. And soon every person who had a computer got the summary of the articles on their PC every morning in their newsreader program, while the sales of printed newspapers kept going down and down until all the big fat companies around the world went broke. Remember the little photo you can click on to read all the news on your school palmtop? That’s the picture of the woman who started all this. She was called Margo Kingston.”
UPDATE. Margo receives some helpful promotion from Stephen Bennetts in The Australian:
In Australia, engaging with civil society may involve membership of a local parent-teacher association, the Australian Conservation Foundation, a refugee rights group or participating in Margo Kingston’s web diary, Your Democracy.
Unhelpfully, Margo abandoned Your Democracy not long after writing this:
I have employed my brother Hamish for a year to get the website going. I hope that at the end of that year, our site will be such that people will want to “subscribe” to allow it to continue and grow, although the site will remain open to all.
I want the site to develop through a transparent process with maximum reader involvement. So if you’re on our mailing list be prepared to be asked lots of questions, and there’ll be a section on the site for reader’s ideas, complaints and queries. I take full responsibility for the site’s content, and will make the final decision, after advice from the yourdemocracy board, when there’s a major disagreement.
Your Democracy—which Margo hoped would become an Australian version of MoveOn.org—now staggers along in the hands of a few unreadable dead-enders. Hamish hasn’t posted anything since July; Margo gave up in May.
HALF-GALLON OF WHISKEY AND A ROOM
AP writer Matt Crenson’s apocalyptic pre-Katrina piece turned out to be more accurate than many would have suspected, so it might be worth reading this Crenson item on Hurricane Rita. Meanwhile, Texans are on the move:
The Texas coast is now on high alert and it seems people trying to leave could walk out faster than drive.
Where they end up is anyone’s guess, but many of them may be heading to Central New York.
If they get all the way to Manhattan, they can stay with James Wolcott. Lamentations have already commenced for The Poor and Forgotten Who Are Most at Risk in Evil Bush’s Category 5 America, but these homeless guys seem to be doing OK:
Eddie McKinney, 64, who had no home, no teeth and a torn shirt, stood outside the EZ Pawn shop, drinking a beer under a sign that said, “No Loitering.”
“We got no other choice but to stay here. We’re homeless and we’re broke,” he said. “I thought about going to Dallas, but now it’s too late. I got no way to get there.”
Where will he stay?
“A nice white man gave me a motel room for three days. Just walked up and said, ‘Here.’ So my buddy and me will stick it out,” he said, pointing to another homeless man. “We got a half-gallon of whiskey and a room.”
Good luck to them.
ADVANCING ARTHUR
The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby on Arthur Chrenkoff’s Good News series:
The first installment appeared on May 19, 2004. Headlined ‘‘Good news from Iraq — bet you didn’t know there was any,’’ it offered a respite from the grim litany of insurgent violence, Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, and coalition casualties that the mainstream media’s coverage of the war tends to dwell on. In Iraq, it proclaimed, there was news to cheer: the democratic election of town councils in Dhi Qar province. The publication of 51 million new Ba’ath-free textbooks for Iraqi schoolchildren. The ‘‘brain drain in reverse’’ that was bringing thousands of educated Iraqi expatriates back to their homeland to teach. The revival of Kurdish music, long suppressed under Saddam. The reflooding of the ruined southern marshes. The 3-1 upset soccer victory over Saudi Arabia that meant Iraq was going to the Olympics.
And more is on its way, from the Wall Street Journal:
Chrenkoff has taken a new job that requires him to give up outside writing, but we will be carrying the tradition forward. Watch this space.
HE DESERVED IT
Robert Fisk has been brutally delayed by a hostile gang of American airport officials:
U.S. immigration officials refused Tuesday to allow Robert Fisk, longtime Middle East correspondent for the London newspaper, The Independent, to board a plane from Toronto to Denver. Fisk was on his way to Santa Fe for a sold-out appearance in the Lannan Foundation’s readings-and-conversations series Wednesday night.
According to Christie Mazuera Davis, a Lannan program officer, Fisk was told that his papers were not in order.
Well, at least they didn’t beat him and pelt him with rocks … although Robert sometimes prefers that.
The controversial British journalist, who is based in Beirut, filed many eyewitness reports on the U.S. invasion of Iraq and criticized Western reporters for “hotel journalism ,” a phrase he coined to describe correspondents who covered the war from heavily fortified hotel suites and offices.
A lot of Fisk fans credit their hero with that phrase. In fact, it pre-dates Fisk by some years.