Bread + Circuses = Presidency

Or at least that is what the socialist party presidential candidate in France is promising. Segolene Royal has announced that she stands four-square for more welfare, more handouts and less work for the taxpaying public. She doesn't exactly come out and explain how less work will yield the revenue to pay for all the bread and circuses, however.

In a speech before 15,000 Socialist Party (PS) delegates, Royal announced a 100-point "presidential pact" including promises to increase the minimum wage, boost social housing, invest in renewable energy sources and "consolidate" the 35-hour-week.

"No longer will politics be conducted without you, the people," she said to rapturous applause and foot-stamping at the exhibition centre near Paris.

"I want, today, to give back hope and courage to the weakest. To all I say that the time of imagination and daring has arrived. I will forget no-one because France — in order to recover — needs every man and woman," she said.

Her two-hour address was frequently interrupted by whoops and chants of "President, President" from a crowd anxious to believe that the candidate, who has been slipping badly in the polls, is poised to make an aggressive comeback against right-wing rival Nicolas Sarkozy.

Royal took a major risk by delaying her manifesto while she held three months of "consultations" via the Internet and thousands of open-door "participative debates."

Critics accused her of populism, but she said it was vital to reestablish links with a disillusioned electorate.

"The cries of silent distress, the poor broken lives, the humiliated families ravaged by misery and injustice … all this inspired me to propose the policies of change which alone are capable of surmounting the crisis," she said.

At the end of the speech, activists unveiled the campaign's new slogan: "A fairer France for a stronger France."

Royal's exhaustive list was heavily influenced by the PS's own manifesto — a left-wing document that was released last year.

But really, the very best part of it all is the return to outright mob rule and the double-speak of keeping minors out of prison - by locking them up. A real classic.

Vowing to keep under-age offenders out of prison, she called for "reinforced educational centres, if necessary with a military structure" for young delinquents. She also said "citizens' juries" should be introduced to extend "participative democracy" in the community.

Presumably, the guillotine will be along shortly. Oh well, at least she looks good in a bikini. Unlike Chirac.

UPDATE: IHT coverage here.

Run Like Hell

The Venezuelan people who can afford it and are lucky enough to have relatives in different countries are running like all hell out of Venezuela ahead of (T)Hugo Chavez's complete takeover. These are the best and the brightest that Venezuela has and the country will suffer horribly for it in the very near future. But the smart ones see there is no future at all in the pit that Venezuela is becoming under Chavez.

Opponents of his "20th century socialism" are so desperate to escape that they have resorted to learning new languages and tracking down long lost European relatives in the hope of securing a visa.

At the US Embassy, visa enquiries have almost doubled in recent weeks, from 400 to about 800 a day. "There are normal spikes toward Christmas or another major holiday, but this increase doesn't fall into that category," said embassy spokesman Brian Penn.

The British embassy has seen a similar rise in numbers. "It has been increasing for some time, but what's different now is the tone of desperation," said a British spokesman.

A website for would-be emigrants - mequieroir.com (I want to leave.com) - reports that since Mr Chavez's December 3 election victory, and his announcement last month that he would nationalise the telecommunications and electricity industries, the number of daily visits it receives has soared from 20,000 to 60,000.

20th century socialism. That was tried before, many times in the 20th century. It didn't work out real well, did it? Chavez may secure his future by driving the middle class out of his personal hades. But it won't be worth living in the worker's paradise he is setting up.

A Little (Sunday) Night Music

I loved it when Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi did their "Blues Brothers" routines on Saturday Night Live. The movie was, well, stupid, but still, the music was great. But they did revive interest in a couple of real legendary showmen. Ladies and gentlemen, Sam and Dave, the original Soul Men.

Changing The World?

Push hard enough for a replacement to oil and things will, indeed, start to happen. Alternatives will begin to appear. New ways to produce fuels will begin to appear. Push hard enough for a replacement to trans fats, as New York City, newly crowned nanny capitol of the US, just did and solutions will also rear their heads for that problem. The solutions may, in fact, be one and the same.

But the consequences of those "solutions" may be devastating.

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) - The oil palm must be the most reviled plant on earth, held responsible for everything from rainforest destruction and orangutan annihilation to polluted Asian skies and exploitation of workers.

But lately, high crude oil prices and new health concerns have given the towering palm, grown mostly in Malaysia and Indonesia, a surprising new status as an environmental saviour.

Palm oil production and prices are soaring as it finds favour as a source of eco-friendly biofuel — fuel derived from renewable resources as an alternative to fossil fuels — and as a substitute for the new dietary baddy trans fats, which are commonly used in processed food.

Palm oil used to be shunned because it is a saturated fat, but trans fats are now believed to be much more harmful and last year the US market for Malaysian palm oil grew by 65 percent as consumers began making the switch.

Meanwhile, European nations in particular are fuelling big demand for biofuel, which is derived from natural oils and plants and added to ordinary diesel, and is seen as an important tool for reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

Last year Malaysian exports of palm oil, already the world's largest, grew to a record 31.81 billion ringgit (9.05 billion dollars), five percent up on the last high set in 2004.

Biodiesel production is expected to double this year……

……"We owe no apology to anyone to use our forests for our own use. Just like the Europeans who used up all their forests for their own use," Energy Minister Lim Keng Yaik said last year.

In Indonesia, however, land clearing is rampant and last month Greenpeace warned that European Union demand for bio-fuel could threaten Indonesia's remaining forests as the government approves new palm oil plantations.

Chinese-funded plans for a vast new plantation in Indonesia's Kalimantan which would see the forest stripped from a 1.8 million-hectare (4.5 million-acre) site — half the size of the Netherlands — have raised particular alarm.

Apart from destroying forests where new species are still being discovered at the rate of three a month, burning to clear land for palm oil poses a major hazard because the dense smoke wafts right across the region.

In 1997-98 the haze choked large parts of Southeast Asia, costing an estimated 9.0 billion dollars by disrupting air travel and other business activities, and triggering a health crisis that rears its head annually.

Kind of interesting, isn't it? China is heavily involved in disrupting the environment while demanding the West change its ways. Do you get the feeling the true believers in man-induced global warming are being played?

I do.

Denouement

My son and I had a chance to talk for a short while (it is always too short) the other day. The subject of William Arkin and his blatant anti-military stance and public smearing of the troops came up. Let me put this delicately to conform with my own policies here. He has a low opinion of Mr. Arkin. Actually, considerably lower than Arkin's opinion of the troops.

Which, as it turns out, is even lower than people generally realized. But he fully outed himself today. He informed the world that he is: "probably one of the best-known and respected anti-military military bloggers."

You simply cannot make this stuff up.

Deborah Howell, the ombudsman for the Washington Post does her level best to distance the newspaper from the website. But she also flat out calls Arkin's words wrong.

The fact that The Post and washingtonpost.com are interlocking yet separate is lost on most readers, who do not care that the two are miles apart physically and under different management……

….Software allows writers to post with a delay for editors to raise questions. Brady said: "We do edit almost all blogs. Usually, it's pre-publication. Sometimes — like when live-blogging a hearing or a Redskins game — we'll edit live." Blogs are held to the same standards as any Post journalism, he said.

Arkin's column did not meet Post standards, but then, newspaper editing isn't perfect, either. But "mercenary" surely is live ammo; such an incendiary word should have popped out in flames to Post editors.

I really was not as hard on Arkin as some were. But, frankly, I wonder at this point exactly what his admission reveals about his employer's agendas. Let me rephrase that: I really don't wonder at all any more. Neither should anyone else.

UPDATE: Others: Power Line, QandO, Little Green Footballs, Democracy Project, PostWatch,

Digging Out In Tug Hill

I mentioned the other day that I was a veteran of winters in Oswego, New York. Trust me on this, surviving winters up there is a whole different world than it is in a lot of the country. The lake effect snow is a real force to be reckoned with. I mentioned the Tug Hill region in passing in that post. Well today, the major media also noticed Tug Hill. I thought people might be interested.

Residents of the nearby town of Mexico see 5- to 6-foot snowfalls every two or three years, but this time even hardened locals are amazed.

The only signs of parked SUVs are their radio antennas or roof racks sticking up above the snow. Front doors are buried and footprints lead to second-story windows. Sidewalks that have been dug out look like miniature canyons.

The state transportation department said 125 workers from elsewhere in the state had been sent in with snow equipment to help.

The region is located along the Tug Hill Plateau, the snowiest region this side of the Rocky Mountains. It's a 50-mile wedge of land that rises 2,100 feet from the eastern shore of Lake Ontario. It usually gets about 300 inches — roughly 25 feet — of snow a year. The hamlet of Hooker, near the boundaries of Jefferson, Lewis, and Oswego counties, holds the state's one-year record with 466.9 inches, about 39 feet, in the winter of 1976-77.

Less than a month ago it seemed more like spring.

Some homes in the Tug Hill area have an outside door on the second floor of the house. There are no outside steps leading to that door. People who are not familiar with the area don't understand this when they drive past in the summer months. (I have heard of these doors being called "angel doors", which is kind of an interesting term). These are doors for the winter months. The other architectural oddity you see in that region is flashing on the eaves of the roof that extends back three feet or better from the edge. This helps combat ice dams. Here's a website for the Tug Hill region. One of the guys I went to college with was from Hooker, incidentally. That winter of '76-'77 was amazing. His family had a heck of a time that year, I heard the stories firsthand.

Palestinian Peace, But First The Revenge

In one of those weird reports that the Associated Press is putting out recently that doesn't even appear to notice its complete disconnect from reality, they inform us that the "peace" agreement is sort of at risk. Because the revenge motive is very high.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Khamis Bakr demands revenge. The local Fatah leader's 16-year-old nephew was killed by Hamas gunmen in one of Gaza's recent street battles, and Bakr wants to even the score, despite last week's Saudi-brokered truce between the two rivals. Bakr, 35, said he'll always put the interest of his family before that of his party.

Unfinished business between Gaza's powerful clans is one of the main threats to the power-sharing agreement signed last week between the Islamic militant group Hamas and the Fatah movement of the moderate Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Despite assurances by Hamas and Fatah leaders that they are putting months of deadly factional fighting behind them, resentment and mistrust still run high. And the agreement risks unraveling even before being implemented because of Hamas's failure to accept international demands to recognize Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday he did not believe the agreement met conditions for lifting a painful international aid boycott of the Palestinian Authority, imposed after Hamas won elections, according to a participant in a weekly Cabinet meeting.

In Gaza City, graffiti on the smoke-blackened walls of Islamic University, a Hamas stronghold trashed earlier this month by Abbas-allied security forces, reflected festering anger.

"The president's people are destroyers," read one slogan on the scorched wall of the computer lab. The attackers, who caused $15 million in damage, according to Hamas, left behind messages of their own, including this spray-painted warning: "The Presidential Guard will show no mercy."

Yeah, this will work out real well, won't it?

More About Alternative Theories

One of the authors of the new book coming out discussing the effect that solar activity has on global warming has an article posted over at the Times Online. Since I have been added to a target list by one of the true believers, I thought I'd post this as well.

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latterday Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

What I have never seen documented anywhere is experimental evidence of how great a change a few hundred parts per billion in CO2 makes in the greenhouse effect. I have seen theoretical models, I have seen experiments using pure CO2 and plain air, but never the more "nuanced", for want of a better term, experiment. If someone has and wants to politely point to it, I'll be happy to take a look. (There is a comment policy here, it is enforced and blacklists are forever.)

Finally!

They promised us all flying cars years ago. At last, someone is making them. (There have been attempts over the years, to be fair). Now a company in Massachusetts is working on bringing the real thing to market.

Ever find yourself wishing you could just jump in the car and take off somewhere really interesting?

Well soon you will be able to do just that - quite literally.

Engineers have developed a car that makes an ideal runaround for town, but when you tire of the congested roads, just press a button and your vehicle will transform into a plane with a 27ft wingspan capable of 120mph.

This astonishing hybrid vehicle - called the Transition - is already on sale in America, with the first due to be delivered to the owners in two years.

It is powered by a 100-horsepower engine which turns either the wheels or a rear-mounted propeller and, when not in use, its wings fold in half and tuck in alongside the cockpit.

The £75,600 vehicle has been developed by graduates from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have formed a company called Terrafugia - 'escape from the Earth' in Latin - to market it.

There's also these guys trying to bring one out. Terrafugia's website is here. All this is meaningless, of course. The Australians have been holding out on us for years.

Omission Or Commission?

This is interesting. An American senior intelligence officer gave a talk to journalists today. The Associated Press reports it thusly:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - High-tech roadside bombs that have proved particularly deadly to American soldiers are manufactured in Iran and delivered to Iraq on orders from the "highest levels" of the Iranian government, a senior intelligence officer said Sunday.

The officer, briefing reporters on condition he not be further identified, said that between June 2004 and last week, more than 170 Americans had been killed by the bombs, which the military calls "explosively formed projectiles."

Those weapons are capable of destroying an Abrams tank.

The officer said American intelligence analysts believe the EFPs are manufactured in Iran and smuggled into Iraq on orders from the top of the Iranian government. He did not elaborate. (Emphasis added)

No mention whatsoever of a kind of important part of the story. AFP reports thusly:

"The Qods Force arms extremists and insurgents to carry out terrorist attacks and guerrilla warfare," he said. "The Qods Force provides advice, training and weapons to proxy forces in Iraq."

The men spoke on condition of anonymity for their security and cameras and recording devices were barred from the briefing, where an array of mortar shells and booby traps were laid out for inspection.

Reporters were issued with a disc containing photographs of alleged Iranian weapons seized in Iraq — a Misagh-1 ground-to-air missile, EFPs and mortar shells — showing manufacturing dates in late 2006. (Emphasis added.)

Get that? The AP fails - completely - to report that photographic evidence was provided to the reporters. Even AFP, not noted for its love of the US government, did not attempt to leave that detail unreported. This is a very, very big deal. Either that information was accidentally omitted, indicating a lack of competence, or that fact was left out intentionally. Instead of reporting that actual evidence was handed out to the reporters, the AP instead makes a one sentence assertion, "He did not elaborate" that leaves the strong impression that the official made unsupported claims.

So, error of omission or error of commission? Or was it an error at all? Is the AP purposely leaving out vital information? We report, you should be able to figure it out.

UPDATE: Sadly, the Washington Post also chooses not to report the fact that reporters were given photographic evidence, instead focusing on the fact that cell phones and video cameras were taken away from the reporters before the briefing.

We Should Have Seen This Coming

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have been working hard to raise awareness of the evil Animal Uprising™. But we did not predict this and we really should have. In order to finance their various terror campaigns and scientific research, the animals need some source of money. We have documented their many criminal enterprises but didn't see this one until today: they are now dealing drugs to raise money.

BUCKLEY, Wash. - Pierce County Sheriff's deputies were startled Friday when they entered a house near Buckley for a drug bust and found an alligator in one of the bedrooms.

They say it wasn't a giant alligator but it was big enough and looked plenty fierce enough to scare them, even though the deputies were armed.

Detective Ed Troyer says the 4-foot-long alligator was in a closet and had water. It was apparently moving around inside the house. Troyer says the alligator was big enough and had a big enough mouth to do some serious damage.

The authorities are trying to claim that the alligator belonged to the human. Our readers know the truth, however. The alligator owned the human.

A Matter Of Degree

Or of 0.7 degrees, as the case may be. Mark Steyn reacts to the demonization attempt by Ellen Goodman and looks at a number of the same points I have posted about in the past few days. He also rounds up a few pertinent facts, (He also gets paid for his work. Me, I do it for free. There's something wrong with my approach.)

Not all of us are quite so hung up on credentialization. But, if you are, you might want to read the December issue of the Journal Of Atmospheric And Solar-Terrestrial Physics in which Cornelis de Jager of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and Ilya Usoskin of the Sodankyla Geophysical Observatory in Finland test the validity of two current hypotheses on the dependence of climate change on solar energy — the first being that variations in the tropospheric temperature are caused directly by changes of the solar radiance (total or spectral), the other that cosmic ray fluctuations, caused by the solar/heliospheric modulation, affect the climate via cloud formation. The Finn and the Dutch guy from the A-list institutions with the fancypants monikers writing in the peer-reviewed journal conclude that the former is more likely — that tropospheric temperatures are more likely affected by variations in the UV radiation flux rather than by those in the CR flux.

Are you thinking maybe it's time to turn over the page to the Anna Nicole Smith "A life in pictures" double spread? Well, that's my point. Most of us aren't reading the science, or even a precis of the science. We're just reading a constant din from the press that "the science is settled," and therefore we no longer need to think about it: The thinking has been done for us. Last week's U.N. IPCC "report," for example, is not the report, but a political summary thereof. As David Warren wrote in the Ottawa Citizen:

"Note that the IPCC report's conclusions were issued first, and the supporting research is now promised for several months from now. What does that tell you?"

Indeed. However, when you do read the actual science, you quickly appreciate that it's not by any means "settled" — that there all kinds of variables. To quote the Finnish-Dutch big shots:

"There is general agreement that variations in the global (or hemispheric) tropospheric temperature are, at least partly, related to those in solar activity (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Solanki and Krikova, 2003; Usoskin et al., 2005; Kilcik, 2005)."

Therefore: "Variations of the mean tropospheric temperature must include stratosphere-troposphere interaction." However: "A detailed mechanism effectively transferring stratospheric heating into the troposphere is yet not clear."

There is quite a lot more and, as always, Steyn is highly entertaining. As he points out, all the dire predictions are based off the fact that the temperature has risen about 0.7 degrees Celsius. In sensible terms, rather than hysterical interpretations, this is essentially statistical noise. Had the US fully implemented Kyoto and had Europe actually obeyed that agreement instead of just paying lip service to it, it would have theoretically dropped the temperature around 0.7 degrees. But it would have cost an absolutely stunning amount of money to do that.

So the question for reasonable people (rather than hysterical absolutists who are screaming for the heads of scientists who disagree with the "consensus",  figuratively now, probably literally soon) is this: what is the more rational approach to addressing that 0.7 degree rise in temperature? Gutting the economies of the West or figuring out how to adapt to the change and come to reasonable solutions?

Because while elitist spokesmen like Al Gore are private-jetting all over the world, merrily emitting greenhouse gasses in an effort to decry the emission of greenhouse gasses, nobody appears to be addressing the elephant in the room: China has no intention of dialing back its emissions and has said so quite openly. They are cheering on the efforts of the extremists to gut the Western economies, however.

Take The Next Eggsit

A truckload of eggs, about 165,000 of them or so, was spilled all over an interstate in Virginia yesterday. The result was the worlds largest omelet. The authorities would love to hear the driver's explanation for the accident. Except he fled the scene on foot.

The tractor-trailer crashed into a guard rail just after midnight Saturday, spilling its runny load and forcing officials to close an exit ramp to Interstate 66 and the far left lane of Interstate 495 north for several hours. Everything reopened just after 11 a.m.

The truck driver fled the scene before police arrived and had not been located by Saturday afternoon, said state police spokesman Sgt. Terry Licklider. He said the driver would likely face charges for fleeing and possibly other offenses.

"For him to just up and leave like that, that's kinda odd," Licklider said.

The truck and trailer are owned by H.L.W. Inc. in Moorefield, W.Va., Licklider said. The owner of the company, H.L. Wilson, told The Associated Press he hadn't heard from the driver either.

"Don't know where he's at," Wilson said. "Don't know what the deal is."

Fairfax County police used a helicopter to search for the missing driver.

The eggs were supposed to be heading to a chicken hatchery. Longtime readers will immediately suspect fowl play in all this. We here at Blue Crab Boulevard certainly do. We suspect that the truck was actually hijacked by operatives of the Animal Uprising™. The load of eggs was going to be used in the animal's ongoing efforts to genetically engineer the new 4-wheel drive chicken stormtroopers. When we called the Virginia authorities to inform them of this, however, they threatened to trace the call, so we hung up.

Alternate Theories

The Telegraph reports on a new book being published this week that argues that cosmic rays have a much greater impact on global warming that has previously been thought. And the author of that book is gaining followers in the scientific community.

Man-made climate change may be happening at a far slower rate than has been claimed, according to controversial new research.

Scientists say that cosmic rays from outer space play a far greater role in changing the Earth's climate than global warming experts previously thought.

In a book, to be published this week, they claim that fluctuations in the number of cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere directly alter the amount of cloud covering the planet.

High levels of cloud cover blankets the Earth and reflects radiated heat from the Sun back out into space, causing the planet to cool.

Henrik Svensmark, a weather scientist at the Danish National Space Centre who led the team behind the research, believes that the planet is experiencing a natural period of low cloud cover due to fewer cosmic rays entering the atmosphere.

This, he says, is responsible for much of the global warming we are experiencing.

He claims carbon dioxide emissions due to human activity are having a smaller impact on climate change than scientists think. If he is correct, it could mean that mankind has more time to reduce our effect on the climate.

Here is what is interesting about this  to me. They are about to conduct large scale testing of the theory using a particle accelerator. To my knowledge nobody has ever shown experimental results that prove that 300 or so parts per billion of CO2 actually creates a major difference in greenhouse effects. This is why it is completely and utterly wrong to try to stifle debate by demonizing people who don't toe the line of the "consensus".

Because what if the consensus is wrong? What if you are demanding enormous changes with enormous negative economic consequences - and you are completely or mostly - wrong?