The Party That Cracks Down

On illegal immigration will win the elections. Period. Want proof? Read this. Even the rumor of an amnesty brings massive increases in illegals trying to get in. Time to listen, politicians.

UPDATE: We here at Blue Crab Boulevard would like to point out to politicians: We told you so.

UPDATE: And some wonderfully written words from Peggy Noonan, writing in today's Opinion Journal:

I think open-borders proponents are, simply, wrong. I think those who call good people like members of the voluntary border patrols "yahoos" are snobs. I think those whose primary concern is preserving the Hispanic vote for the Democratic Party, or not losing the Hispanic vote for the Republican Party, are being cynical, selfish, and stupid, too. It's not all about who gets what vote, it's about continuing a system of laws that has allowed America to become, among many other things, a place immigrants want to come to. And it's about admitting immigrants in a coherent, orderly, legal manner, with an eye first to what America needs. That's how you continue a good thing, which is what we've had. That's how you leave Americans who've been here for a while grateful for immigration, and immigrants, and loving them, and even wanting, sometimes, to kiss their hands.

What she said.

A Placeholder

I'm working on a post but wanted to link this piece.

Wasting An Education

Brainster's Blog has a bit of research on the charming group of people who caused a disturbance at UCSC yesterday, forcing military recruiters to leave the job fair they were attending. (Briefly reported here). I don't think they're a serious protest group, though. I mean where are the giant puppets?

Man, I'll bet their parents are happy to be spending money on their kids doing this kind of stuff.

UPDATE: Sfgate coverage of the festivities,

Hey! None Of That!

An amateur cricket team in England has had to buy new jerseys and refund a sponsors money after the local league objected to the sponsor and threatened to take away every point the team scored. Why? Because the would be sponsor was a chain of adult shops selling pornographic videos and sex toys - quite legally - all across Northwest England and Wales. The league had originally approved the sponsorship, but withdrew permission when their governing body objected. 

Southport Trinity Cricket Club, in Lancashire, north-west England, had already produced shirts for its players displaying the logo of Nice'n'Naughty - a chain of adult shops selling pornographic videos and sex toys - in time for the start of their season this Saturday.

However, the amateur team was forced to ditch the shirts and refund Nice'n'Naughty's sponsorship money after being threatened with expulsion from the Liverpool and District Competition of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) Premier League.

….

The company's website boasts: "We are the UK's leading chain of licensed sex shops and offer an extensive range of hardcore VHS/DVD, magazines, fetish wear, PVC clothing, rubber clothing, leather clothing, boots, shoes, wigs, breast forms, bondage equipment, lingerie, hosiery, sex toys and novelties."

Hey, they should have been able to work some of that gear into the game. That would make it more interesting, wouldn't it?

The Right To Keep And Bear Potatoes

A Swedish man has been convicted of firing a potato gun. A court fined him eighty days wages for the offense. The 25-year old man had seen a potato gun on television and decided to build one. He and some friends were firing out of the window of the man's apartment, aiming at a parking lot. Police say they tested the gun and found it to be more powerful than a revolver.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard do not condone the use of potato guns (also known as spud guns) on parked cars. That's vandalism. Spud guns can be a new and exciting way of mashing potatoes, however. Fun for the whole family and good eating as well! We firmly believe in the right to keep and bear spuds, so long as it's done in a safe manner. Therefore, we proudly present The Spudgun Technology Center.

(Man, you can find anything on the internet, can't you? There are some things that we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are actually afraid to enter into the search bar. Because we might find them.)

Good For Him

White House press secretary Scott McClellan really took exception to the crappy reporting in the WaPo and on ABC news this morning over the trailer issue.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the account "reckless reporting" and said Bush made his statement based on the intelligence assessment of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), an arm of the Pentagon.

Bush cited the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction as the prime justification for invading Iraq. No such weapons were found.

A U.S. intelligence official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, confirmed the existence of the field report cited by the Post, but said it was a preliminary finding that had to be evaluated.

"You don't change a report that has been coordinated in the (intelligence) community based on a field report," the official said. "It's a preliminary report. No matter how strongly the individual may feel about the subject matter."

Good for them, it was a hit piece and it's being spun even further. I happened to catch the ABC report this morning. Gibson and whoever the reporter was were very sanctimonious in tone about the whole thing. It was not a report, it was an editorial.

"This is reckless reporting and for you all to go on the air this morning and make such a charge is irresponsible, and I hope that ABC would apologize for it and make a correction on the air," he said.

Land Shark!

Actually, land catfish. Scientists have been studying an African eel catfish that can move about on land and capture small insects.

These particular eel catfish, Channallabes apus, live in tropical swamps in Africa, where most of the water is confined to small, acidic pools.

"There's probably more food traveling on land than in these small puddles of mud," said Sam Van Wassenbergh of the University of Antwerp in Belgium. "That's probably why this fish has specialized to go out of water to search for food."

The catfish pick up speed in water and flop onto land, where their flexible vertebral column lets them move around like a snake. They also have a special organ for breathing air without using their gills, although scientists don't quite know how this works.

There's video if you follow the link.

American Duchy

Here's one I had never heard of. The city of Vernon, California has about 100 residents. Almost all of the residents work for the government and live in government owned housing at low rents. They hadn't had an election in 25 years.

A judge ordered an election after three new residents wanted to run for the city council.

The political order was upset earlier this year when three new residents filed as candidates for three of the City Council's five seats.

One of them, paper company salesman Don Huff, said that soon, he was being shadowed by private investigators, city crews shut off the power and police watched his building. Eventually Huff, 41, was evicted. He has been living in his car.

"They wanted to run us out, totally," he said. "The mayor owns the whole town. He controls it."

Huff sued along with the other newcomers after the city of fewer than 100 residents threw their names off the ballot. A judge reinstated them as candidates.

In their legal papers, the challengers charge that voters in Vernon are beholden to a City Hall that dispenses paychecks and arranges sweetheart rents. Vernon, they say, is a company town where the government is the company.

On Tuesday, acting City Clerk Bruce Malkenhorst Jr. said he would keep the ballot box locked until the court fight is resolved. An attorney for the challengers, Albert Robles, called the move "absolutely not legal."

The clerk locked up the ballot box and refused to count the votes.

The town has only had four mayors in it's history - all related to the founder. Funniest line in the article:

City officials have charged that Huff was part of a group, linked to a corrupt politician from the nearby city of South Gate, trying to engineer a coup.

Hand Over Those Eggs, Bunny….

OK, my ancestry includes grandparents who were immigrants from Norway after the first world war. So I grew up with at least a smattering of Norwegian culture which popped up at odd times during the year.

But this I have never heard of until now.

It seems the annual Easter tradition in a large part of Norway is to head to your ski cabin, watch crime dramas on television then read crime novels.

Sales of crime books jump around 500 percent in the week leading up to Easter, estimates bookshop chain Tanum, while television and radio programmers schedule back-to-back thrillers over the Easter break, which in Norway lasts 5-1/2 days.

Norway, incidentally, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.

Paws up, Bugs…..

Thank Heavens That’s Finally Settled

We now have a government authorized "factual reality", folks! The South African Government has declared that beans make you fart.

A TV advert for sweet onions showed a rugby player eating beans that made him smell "stinky". The advert claims that "with sweet onions there are no tears, no burn and definitely no stink".

The country's Dry Bean Producers Organisation complained…

The South African Advertising Standards Authority threw the complaint out.

Honest.

John Hawkins

On the turning the illegal immigration issue into a winner for the GOP. Something I've been saying for a while now.

The Global Warming Racket

Note: I started drafting this piece a few days ago. I am very glad I waited to post it. 

I got into a discussion with a guy who writes science columns for a newspaper in the comment section of another blog. He kept insisting that the preponderance of scientific evidence was proving that global warming is a reality, is caused by humans and is happening at an accelerating rate. I kept insisting that there still was no proof that man had anything to do with it yet.

It went on for a longish time by comment section standards, spanning several days. I kept telling him he needed to look into trying to follow the money. In other words, global warming is a business. Look at how many "climate change experts" there are right now? How many were there twenty years ago? All of these people's jobs depend on global warming. Do you honestly think they are being totally honest? They're paid to wail about global warming, they're paid to blame it on humans.

But some scientists are starting to push back. First came word that Canada was pulling out of Kyoto, at least partially because of a letter signed by 60 scientists. Now some of the media is starting to actually publish contrarian views.

I suspect it's about time to bring in Richard Lindzen MIT professor writing in the Opinion Journal.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

……..

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming–not whether it would actually happen.

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

UPDATE: Manolo has the upside to global warming.

Reality Based Reality

Some of the folks on the far left have taken to calling themselves the "reality based community". It doesn't matter that their brand of reality appears to be based in a different universe entirely from where everyone else lives. For an exercise, curious readers can go see what various reality-based folks are saying today about the WaPo article on the trailers. It's quite evident that being a member of the reality based community does not require critical reading skills or analytical ability.

For the people who tend to like their reality with a bit more actual reality, hard numbers and facts tend to dominate discussion. We'll call that the Reality Based Reality Community or RBRC for short. People in the RBRC tend to read media articles and think critically about what the author is saying and how it is being said. They also go and find actual numbers to back up what they say.

The tendency in that other community is to read an article then go find an analysis by a like-minded individual or three, trot those out and shout, "here's the proof". Now, the analysis (or three) they produce are all built around the same article they read and reach the undeniable conclusion that the original article was absolutely right. But they are elegantly worded analysis of the same flawed data or misdirection used in the original source.

This blog and a lot of others noted the slipshod New York Times reporting on the number of mid-level officers leaving the armed forces. Articles like that are added to the other "facts" the reality based folks use to build one of their elaborate sandcastles; The Army Is Broken™. Well, the RBRC, ever willing to dig out actual data rather than citing opinion disguised as fact has come out with this piece, by W. Thomas Smith, Jr. over at Townhall.com. It's a good read on the state of US armed forces.

Interesting Article On Indian Politics

I kind of hesitate to post this, since I got hit with that attempted DDOS attack a while ago, but hell, this ties right in to my earlier posts.

I noted earlier the "wardrobe malfunctions" at the fashion show in India, then a followup on Indian politicians and their obvious passion to investigate model's breasts.

Today in  Asia Times comes a (much) more sober look at the state of politics in India. It seems there are many political parties jumping on the decency bandwagon. Spending time and resources with abandon in various moves to "protect the culture" and "protect our youth". Meanwhile, more than 350 farmers unable to pay off their debts committed suicide by drinking pesticide over the past few months.

Politicians are the most vociferous in articulating outrage over "indecent acts" during fashion shows, but several of them were present at these shows. They express concern in the legislative assembly at the depravity in dance bars, but it is politicians, policemen and businessmen that patronize these dance bars most regularly. Some bars even have a separate VIP dance floor for "elite" clients who do not want to be recognized. In fact, many dance bars are owned by politicians and policemen.

But even as the likes of Navalkar and Patil and scores of other politicians are preoccupied with the wardrobe malfunctions, less than a few hundred miles away from the glamorous fashion runways, more than 350 farmers unable to pay off their debts committed suicide by drinking pesticide over the past few months. In Maharashtra's Vidarbha region some 77 farmers took their lives in March alone.

Where are the irate politicians demanding that the government take serious note of these deaths? The government has done little to investigate what led to the suicides. And the media, which endlessly covered every detail of the fashion week flap, look the other way.

I guess there's not all that much difference between politicians anywhere.

Want To Bet?

Eugene Volokh has a good takedown of a really dumb thing John McCain said the other day. McCain made a statement that nobody in the crowd he was adressing would take a job picking lettuce for $50 per hour. Um. What planet does John McCain live on exactly?

But surely there must be some substantial number of current American citizens who would be quite willing to engage even in highly strenuous physical labor for an annualized wage of $100,000 per year, no? Even if 99% of all Americans would be unwilling or unable to do the job, the remaining 1% should be plenty to fill those hypothetical jobs.

Yeah, what he said.

I think Mitt Romney has McCain running a bit scared right now.