You Can’t Get There From Here

There are a lot of people who advocate that Apple is ever-so-much-better than Microsoft. There are many people who swear the iPod is a great little device.

Only don't try to transfer your legal, purchased music from a now wiped computer hard drive to a different computer. Because your iPod will not allow it. Your choices are to a) wipe your music off your iPod or b) wipe your music off your iPod.

Every, single song on my daughter's iPod was ripped from a purchased, legal CD. No downloads, no stolen music, no Apple iStore purchases. All legal.  But the computer it used to be synced to had to be wiped and the operating system reinstalled. There is now no way to sync her iPod to another computer and salvage her music. So she will have to tediously re-rip all that music back to her pristine, Apple-reformatted iPod. (Or purchase a third party program that may or may not work - none of the trial versions of four different programs did.)

And she will never, ever buy another product from Apple. She's in tears, I'm furious and worst of all, the wife is really angry. Great move, guys.

Excuse me while I go see what Linux has to offer for MP3 player support. Because you are not worth the effort.

A Deadly Math

Buried at the very end of this positive article on efforts in Japan to start using ethanol as an automotive fuel is a very, very illuminating figure, but we'll get to that after the requisite environmental fawning.

SHINANOMACHI, Japan (Reuters) - Japanese motorists may one day pump their cars full of sake, the fermented rice wine that is Japan's national drink, if a pilot project to create sake fuel is a hit with locals in this mountain resort.

The government-funded project at Shinanomachi, 200 kilometres (124 miles) northwest of Tokyo, will produce cheap rice-origin ethanol brew with the help of local farmers who will donate farm waste such as rice hulls to be turned into ethanol.

"We want to present the next generation a preferable blue print — a self-sustainable use of local fuels," said Yasuo Igarashi, a professor of applied microbiology at the University of Tokyo who heads the three year project.

If the project catches on with locals then it could pave the way for similar endeavours across Japan that will see Japanese cars running on Japanese-made biofuels in the future, he added.

Lots and lots of positive press for ethanol, isn't there. The interesting number at the very, very bottom of the article (literally the last sentence):

With one 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of rice needed to produce 0.5 litre of ethanol, the main challenge will be creating a low cost biofuel that can compete with ordinary gasoline, which is now sold at around 135 yen ($1.13) a litre, including gasoline related taxes of some 56 yen.

That means 4.4 pounds of rice per liter or roughly 17.6 pounds of rice per gallon of fuel. Japan is already importing rice to feed its population. According to these figures (you have to do the math yourself), Japanese per capita rice consumption runs somewhere around 136 pounds annually. Taking all of the year's rice supply from one hypothetical Japanese person would yield less than 8 gallons of fuel. So the question becomes, who dies of starvation first? And who decides who dies?

(Note: figures are slightly skewed because while Japan is importing rice, it is also exporting sake. So there is some slop in there. But the back-of-the-envelope estimate is essentially correct. Houston, we have a serious problem.)

Well, Since We’re Talking Campaign Gaffes

Having just chided the Giuliani campaign for a stunning blunder, it seems only fair to point out one on the other side of the aisle, so to speak. The Detroit Free Press is throwing the flag - hard - over Barack Obama's pious environmental preaching, especially urging people to drive hybrids. Why?

Because his personal ride is a Chrysler 300C with a powerful 340 horsepower Hemi in it.

So his choice to drive a V8 Hemi-powered Chrysler 300C emits a whiff of hypocrisy along with its exhaust fumes. Obama's choice proves once again that fuel economy is seldom the No. 1 factor when Americans buy cars. The 340-horsepower 300C has plenty of room for the lanky senator, his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters. It gets 25 miles per gallon on the highway, good for a big sedan, but far short of hybrids and compact cars.

His campaign Thursday said it leases a flex-fuel vehicle, and Obama, whose family has just one car, "believes we need to work together to achieve energy independence."

The campaign leases one flex fuel vehicle? For all of them? Is this like a clown car where hundreds can all fit inside the energy efficient campaign icon in properly clowncarish splendor? Or is this just more Gorespeak - do as I say, not as I do? Sure sounds it. Edwards has his mammoth, energy-guzzling mansion, Obama has his muscle car. Get the feeling that maybe they ain't quite as green as they profess to be?

Absolutely Terrible Mistake

Rudy Giuliani's campaign made an absolutely terrible move in Iowa that will not sit well with the voters. After asking a farming couple from Eastern Iowa to host an event, his staff suddenly decided that they would go elsewhere. Allegedly after finding out that the couple did not have sufficient assets.

Deborah VonSprecken had looked forward to having former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani photographed with Jack of Diamonds, one of the Texas Longhorns on her family's 80-acre farm near the eastern Iowa town of Olin.

Instead VonSprecken and her husband, Jerry, feel they received a bum steer from the Republican presidential candidate.

The couple was asked by Giuliani's campaign staff to host an event on May 4 at their farm. They began feverishly making preparations, then learned a few days later that the Republican candidate was not going to come after all.

Giuliani did speak at a rally in Cedar Rapids that day, stressing his record as a tax cutter and urging permanent repeal of the federal estate tax.

Deborah VonSprecken said Giuliani's campaign backed out of the event at her home after deciding she and her husband did not fill the bill for the candidate's talk about the so-called "death tax."

"They checked our assets, and since we're not considered millionaires, they canceled," she said.

VonSprecken told her local newspaper, "Why would Rudy Giuliani not come speak to the average Americans that live in eastern Iowa, instead of qualifying you as a millionaire before he will show up to your place?"

The couple had told the Giuliani campaign staff from the beginning, "We're just poor farmers," she said.

Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for Giuliani's campaign, called the matter an unfortunate misunderstanding without directly addressing why the location of the event was changed.

"We certainly apologize for any inconvenience that occurred," Comella said.

This was a serious mistake. The decision was bad enough, the stonewall from the campaign is even worse (note - it would have made a world of difference if Giuliani himself had made an apology to the couple before they went to the media. The story probably would never have been reported at all had that been done). It will be interesting to see how Giuliani polls in Iowa after this. The vast majority of Iowans are not millionaires, after all. Those are the people candidates need to convince to vote for them. And they have just been dissed.

An Interesting Dissent

The Nation magazine is not the place you would expect to see a full-bore attack on Al Gore and the First Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of Global Warming™. The Nation describes itself as the "flagship of the Left". Yet today, Alexander Cockburn delivers a world-class drubbing on the "science" of global warming and especially the strip-mining, energy guzzling Al Gore. This is as harsh as it is unexpected.

No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies. A second, equally predictable retort contrasts the ever-diminishing number of agnostics with the growing legions of scientists now born again to the "truth" that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the earth's warming trend.

Actually, the energy companies have long since adapted to prevailing fantasies, dutifully reciting the whole catechism about carbon neutrality, repositioning themselves as eager pioneers in the search for alternative fuels, settling comfortably into new homes, such as British Petroleum's Energy Biosciences Institute at UC, Berkeley.

In fact, when it comes to corporate sponsorship of crackpot theories about why the world is getting warmer, the best documented conspiracy of interest is between the fearmongers and the nuclear industry, now largely owned by oil companies, whose prospects twenty years ago looked dark. The apex fearmongers are well aware that the only exit from the imaginary crisis they have been sponsoring is through a big door marked "nuclear power," with a servants' side door labeled "clean coal."

The world's best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. White House advisory bodies on climate change in the Clinton/Gore years were well freighted with nukers like Larry Papay of Bechtel.

As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters. By the mid-'90s he'd positioned himself at the head of a strategic alliance formed around "the challenge of climate change," which stepped forward to take Communism's place in the threatosphere essential to political life.

The foot soldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by devotees of the fearmongers' catechism. The IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.

It actually gets even more brutal from there. Wow. Not everyone on the left is at all happy with the Gorebots and the hysterical alarmists, apparently. And Cockburn is not exactly without credentials as a card-carrying "progressive". Welcome to the "global warming deniers database", Mr. Cockburn.

Fun With Fish Feces

Well, this story should elicit an "urk" from readers. Four workers at a fish farming operation in Massachusetts had to be rescued from a tank containing a slimy mess of sand mixed with fish feces.

Rescuers cut through a filtration tank of dense fish feces to reach four workers who fell into the sludgy dung Friday while cleaning the 18-foot tank at a western Massachusetts farm.

The workers became trapped for 45 minutes after a bracket holding a plastic filtration pad collapsed as workers stood on it to clean the fiberglass tank at the Australis Aquaculture fish farm, said Turners Falls Fire Capt. David Dion and the fish farm's manager, Josh Goldman.

One of the farmhands was submerged in what Dion described as a sand-and-feces mix, while the other three had their heads above the sludge, he said.

Dion said rescue workers cut a hole in the side of the tank at the farm, which raises barramundi, a fish farmed as a replacement for grouper.

I will have to add this to the list of jobs I refuse to aspire to.

Lost Credibility

Quite seriously, why in the world would any body sponsored by the UN have any credibility whatsoever? The simple fact is that the UN is a mess and is actually getting worse. The most recent excavation by that body: the election of Zimbabwe to lead the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. That would be Robert Mugabe's disaster where inflation is currently running at 2200 percent annually. The nation that used to be an enormously productive exporter of food and now cannot even feed its own citizens. The country where political opposition is beaten and jailed.

UNITED NATIONS — Zimbabwe, a country suffering from acute food shortages and rampant inflation, won approval to lead the important U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development despite protests from the U.S., European nations and human rights organizations.

Africa nominated Francis Nhema, Zimbabwe's minister of environment and tourism, for the post, and the 53-member commission approved that recommendation Friday in a vote of 26-21 with three abstentions, said Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado, the commission's vice chair.

The post rotates every year among regions of the world and it was Africa's turn to sit in the chair.

"We're very disappointed in the election of Zimbabwe as chair," said the U.S. representative to the commission Dan Reifsnyder, deputy assistant secretary for environment and science at the State Department.

"We really think it calls into question the credibility of this organization to have a representative from a country that has decimated its agriculture, that used to be the breadbasket of Africa and can't now feed itself," Reifsnyder said.

Zimbabwe is suffering its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, with acute shortages of food, hard currency, gasoline, medicines and most other basic goods. Official inflation is running at about 2,200 percent annually, the highest in the world.

Will the last shred of credibility leaving the UN please turn out the lights.

“I Just Got Back From The Auto-De-Fe”

The Inquisition (what a show)
The Inquisition (here we go)
We know you're wishin' that we'd go away.
But the Inquisition's here and it's here to-
"Hey Toquemada, walk this way."
"I just got back from the Auto-de-fe."
"Auto-de-fe? What's an Auto-de-fe?"
"It's what you oughtn't to do but you do anyway."
Will you convert? "No, no, no, no."
Will you confess? "No, no, no, no."
Will you revert? "No, no, no, no."
Will you say yes? "No, no, no, no!"
Now I asked in a nice way, I said, "Pretty please."
I bent their ears, now I'll work on their knees!
"Hey Toquemada, walk this way. We got a little game that you might wanna play, so pull that handle, try you're luck."
"Who knows, Toq, you might win a buck!"
(Mel Brooks, The Inquisition Song from History of the World:Part 1)

Everything old is new again, at least at Tufts University. The Tufts Committee on Student Life (hereafter called what it is: the Inquisition) has decided that it has a duty to crush free expression.

BOSTON, May 11, 2007—Showing profound disregard for free speech and freedom of the press, Tufts University has found a conservative student publication guilty of harassment and creating a hostile environment for publishing political satire. Despite explicitly promising to protect controversial and offensive expression in its policies, the Tufts Committee on Student Life decided yesterday to punish the student publication The Primary Source (TPS) for printing two articles that offended African-American and Muslim students on campus. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has spearheaded the defense of TPS, is now launching a public campaign to oppose Tufts’ outrageous actions.

“We now know that Tufts’ promises of free expression are hollow,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “By punishing political expression—the type of expression at the very core of the right to free speech—Tufts has shown that, in spite of its promises, it has no regard for its students’ fundamental rights. Such hypocrisy must not go unchallenged.”

Last December, TPS published a satirical Christmas carol entitled “Oh Come All Ye Black Folk.” Although TPS runs a Christmas carol parody every year, December’s carol sparked controversy on campus because it harshly lampooned race-based admissions. Realizing that the carol offended large portions of the Tufts community, TPS published an apology on December 6, 2006. Four months later, however, a student filed charges alleging that the carol constituted “harassment” and created a “hostile environment.” Other students filed similar charges in response to TPS’ April 11, 2007 piece entitled “Islam—Arabic Translation: Submission,” a satirical advertisement that ridiculed Tufts’ “Islamic Awareness Week” by highlighting militant Islamic terrorism.

The two complaints were consolidated for a hearing before the university’s Committee on Student Life on April 30, 2007. Yesterday, the Committee issued a decision holding that TPS had violated the university’s harassment policy by publishing the two pieces. The Committee found that the carol “targeted [black students] on the basis of their race, subjected them to ridicule and embarrassment, intimidated them, and had a deleterious impact on their growth and well-being on campus.” The Committee also held that the parody of Islamic Awareness Week “targeted members of the Tufts Muslim community for harassment and embarrassment, and that Muslim students felt psychologically intimidated by the piece.”

“By issuing this decision, Tufts University is saying that its students are not strong enough to live with freedom,” Lukianoff said. “Satire and parody are so strongly protected by the U.S. Constitution precisely because they may offend or provoke. Tufts knows that the proper cure for speech one dislikes is more speech—but it has instead elected to meet controversial speech with repression. We call on the president of Tufts to overturn this unwise and illiberal decision.”

Eugene Volokh has the specific "violations" that the student publication ran. As he puts it:

Welcome to the new freedom of speech at the new university. No, the Committee's actions don't violate the First Amendment, since Tufts is a private university. But they violate basic principles of academic freedom and public debate on university campuses, especially when the top university administrators claim to "fully recognize freedom of speech on campus." Appalling.

Welcome to the brave new Inquisition. One presumes Tufts will immediately change its name to something more fitting. Torquemada University fits nicely - and they wouldn't even have to change the monograms! Bonus.