Update: UN lowballs emissions. The Telegraph reports double the carbon emissions as the UN tries to. Part of the difference may be that the UN appears to only be reporting official delegates, not the huge media presence and assorted completely useless people like Leonardo DiCaprio.
Humor, Junk Science | Gaius Thursday, 6 December , 2007 | 
Comments (1)
HCDL over at Wake Up America has a post up about a "gotcha" moment at CNN that is so freaking phony, it should be presented an Oscar for best documentary (hey, it worked for Al Gore).
I stopped watching CNN after they showed one of our soldiers being taken out by an enemy sniper. Through the years, they have done little more than piss me off anyway, so it was no big loss for my news hunting to do without the Caliphate News Network.
Now they're trying to call into question Fred Thompson's NRA and gun support because he doesn't have a current hunting license. Well big deal, I don't either, and haven't for several years. It's not that I don't like hunting, don't advocate it, and don't wish that I had the TIME for it, I simply DON'T have the time with my work schedule or I would be out there as much as I could doing the hunting and fishing I love to do and look forward to doing one of these days when I retire.
Here's the CNN story. Which is, of course a complete strawman. I don't own a hunting license. Furthermore, I have never owned a hunting license. The only thing I "hunt" is paper targets or clay pigeons. But I also own, collect, shoot and am legally licensed to carry firearms (and I do). Gun owners are not all hunters - but all gun owners will recognize this for what it is - an attempted hit piece on Thompson by an inept reporter trying to cover a subject he obviously knows little or nothing about.
Stupidest media "gotcha" so far this season.
Media, Politics | Gaius | Comments (6)
The daughter of a British imam has been in hiding from her family for 15 long years, chased from home to home as they tried to track her down. He offense: converting to Christianity. The penalty her family wants to exact:
The daughter of a British imam is living under police protection after receiving death threats from her father for converting to Christianity.
The 31-year-old, whose father is the leader of a mosque in Lancashire, has moved house an astonishing 45 times after relatives pledged to hunt her down and kill her.
The British-born university graduate, who uses the pseudonym Hannah for her own safety, said she renounced the Muslim faith to escape being forced into an arranged marriage when she was 16.
She has been in hiding for more than a decade but called in police only a few months ago after receiving a text message from her brother.
In it, he said he would not be held responsible for his actions if she failed to return to Islam.
Officers have agreed to offer her protection in case of an attempt on her life.
Last night the woman said: "I'm determined to live my life the way I want to because I should have that freedom in this country.
"If you make the choice to come to this country, as my parents did from Pakistan, you have to abide by the laws of this country and that means respecting the freedoms of other people.
The woman is British, born, raised and educated. And she is in fear for her life. For daring to practice her religion. The Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, warned yesterday that the very freedom to believe is under attack by things like this. He's right. Until political correctness reared its ugly, ugly head, this thing would have been stomped on, quite firmly. No longer. Now, they give the victim of 15 years of torment a special phone number to call if she feels threatened. Maybe the police will show up in time to stop it - but what are the odds?
The west is the birthplace of freedom of religion. Don't let it become the graveyard of it.
I'm still shaking my head after reading this little gem that Harry Reid just pulled. He has scheduled a vote on the energy bill for Saturday - when a number of Democratis Senators already have campaign events lined up.
The Nevada Democrat told reporters Thursday he will schedule a Senate vote on the Energy Bill this Saturday. The bill, which calls for a fuel economy standard of 35 miles per gallon by the year 2020, passed the House earlier Thursday by a vote of 235-181.
But the vote is expected to be considerably tighter in the Senate, where Republicans have threatened to filibuster the measure and Reid may need to muster at least 60 votes to block that action. To that end, Reid said he has asked the four Senate Democrats running for president – Joe Biden of Delaware, Hillary Clinton of New York, Barack Obama of Illinois and Chris Dodd of Connecticut – to head back to Capitol Hill Saturday.
But with less than a month to go until the Iowa caucuses – and no clear frontrunner – Reid may have hard time getting the candidates back inside the Beltway.
Remind me again why they picked this guy as the Majority Leader. Do I detect Karl Rove's hand in this? Not that I mind, but who is he trying to shaft with this? Obama has a big event with Oprah, all the rest have events scheduled all over. Reid's on his way to being considered the worst Majority Leader in history.
New York City is, of course, a city of immigrants and is quite proud of its wide range of ethnicities. Apparently, the proprietors of a posh New York food store are immigrants from outer space. Because they labeled their display of various hams, "Delicious for Chanukah."
The non-kosher labelling was spotted at the weekend by Manhattan novelist Nancy Kay Shapiro, 46, who decided instead of alerting management to take a picture of the unorthodox sign and post it on the Internet.
"I just thought it was funny," Shapiro, who described herself as an unobservant Jew, told the New York Post. "I wasn't offended in any way. I just thought, here's somebody who knows nothing about what Jews eat."
By the time Shapiro returned to the store on Tuesday, the first night of Hanukkah, the signs had vanished, the newspaper reported.
Shapiro's website has the pictures and her take on the whole thing:
Personae: Me, shopping for low-carb food.
Action: I'm sort of staring at the meat display, lots of salamis and sausages, and then various hams. And the hams' price signs have all been tagged with festive PERFECT FOR CHANUKAH banners. Which I blinked at for a couple of secs, trying to decide if this was an example of truly monumental cluelessness or … nah. It's just the Department of Monumental Cluelessness, Well-Meaning Division.
The signs now read, "Perfect for the holidays." Note the good humor displayed by the author and contrast that with some other behaviors out there today.
Lightning smokes on the hillrise
Brought the man with the warning light
Shouting loud you had better fly
While the darkness can help you hide
Troubles comin without control
No ones stayin thats got a hope
Hurricane at the very least
In the words of the gypsy queenSign of the gypsy queen
Pack your things and leave
Word of a woman who knows
Take all your gold and you go
(Lorence Hud, Sign of the Gypsy Queen)
A feud between two gypsy families in Southern California has offered a very rare look at a normally very secretive culture. Instead of settling their dispute the old-fashioned way, it has spilled out into the California courts.
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. - A dispute between two Gypsy clans over control of the fortune telling trade in this Southern California city has spilled into court, offering a rare glimpse of an insular culture that has long settled scores according to its own Old World rules of honor.
The turf war in well-to-do Orange County has unfolded like a gangster movie, with allegations of death threats, a graveside scuffle, and nicknames like “White Bob” and “Black Bob” — details revealed in a police report and requests for restraining orders.
“The older Gypsies are pulling out their hair, not wanting the courts in our business because they’ll find out too much about us,” said Tom Merino, who is distantly related to one of the clans but has spurned his heritage. “Ignorance is the Gypsies’ weapon against the outside world.”
The Stevens and Merino clans, like other Gypsy families, have run numerous fortune telling businesses in Southern California for decades.
Apparently the Merino clan opened a fortune telling parlor in what the Stevens clan considered their turf and the dispute just escalated. Interesting look at how the old culture is giving way under modern pressures. One question: since they are fortune tellers, couldn't they already see how it would turn out and avoid the lawyer's fees?
Legal | Gaius | Comments (4)
Archaeologists in Britain have made a stunning find of objects from the last days of the Roman Empire. The pots, pails and other implements were found in an old well, almost perfectly preserved.
The 19 metal vessels, made from copper alloy or lead alloy, date from between 330 and 380AD and were uncovered in central London, once the Roman city of Londinium.
They would have belonged to a wealthy family, as poorer inhabitants would have made do with wooden or ceramic kitchenwear.
Among the collection are a matching set of three bowls that nest together, buckets that were probably used to water down wine, a cauldron, jugs and a ladle.
Despite being 1,700 years old, the swinging handles on some of the artefacts are still in working condition.
The collection was yesterday hailed as "unprecedented".
It was found in August by astonished archaeologist Chris Jarrett, during the last week of a nine month dig at Drapers’ Gardens in London.
It is thought that the set may have been hidden by a wealthy family preparing to leave the city, which was under constant attack at the time, with a view to reclaiming it on their return.
Alternatively it could have been laid as an offering to water spirits when the well was closed up, as was Roman custom at the time.
An AP story on the same find notes that the objects were probably from the middle class, not from the wealthy. The rich would have used gold and silver, the poor, earthenware. Coins found in the well directly under the objects prove that they were placed in there after 375 AD. Londinium was essentially abandoned after 380 AD, so they come from the very tail end of the Roman period in Britain.
After I posted that old newsreel footage from 1957 earlier, I decided to look up ramjet-powered helicopters, seeing if there was any information out there. Not only is there information, there is a surprise: the Hiller company actually produced an operational ramjet helicopter designated the HOE-1 Hornet and the US military bought and operated a number of them.
Hiller and a team consisting of Robert Wagner, chief engineer, Elbert Sargent, chief of propulsion, Harvey Holm, project engineer, and hanger supervisor Edward Bennett, began to develop a small, simple helicopter powered by ramjets that would be easy to fly and maintain, and ground-transportable. The design used no heavy components such as tail rotor assemblies, drive shafts, main rotor clutches, transmissions, or engine cooling blowers. In 1948, he started building the HJ-1 Hornet single-seat sport helicopter. The most difficult challenge was to engineer the ramjet engines. Virtually no one had attempted to put these devices to practical use, but they appeared to be far easier to incorporate into an aircraft than jet turbine engines. The ramjet consists of little more than fuel nozzles and an ignition device mounted inside a metal pipe internally shaped to help pressurize high-speed airflow. When air flows through the pipe with sufficient velocity, both pressure and temperature increase. Introduce fuel and ignite it and the ramjet becomes the simplest jet engine. Both the ramjet and the jet turbine engine produce thrust by generating hot gases but the ramjet has no moving parts and is considerably lighter and more reliable. Unlike the turbine, the ramjet must be accelerated to a comparatively high-speed before it can begin to operate. The ramjet also consumes much more fuel than the turbine engine.
Hiller experimented with a version of the ramjet engine called the pulse-jet but quickly discarded this approach in favor of the pure ramjet. During World War II, the German's used pulse-jet engines to power V-1 robot cruise missiles (see NASM collection). In 1949, Hiller introduced an improved ramjet engine that weighed only 5 kg (11 lb) and produced about 14 kg (31 lb) of thrust. He installed two of these motors on each blade tip of the HJ-1 main rotor. At maximum operational speed, the ramjets moved through the air at 207 m/sec (680 ft/sec) and the rotor turned at 550 rpm. The two ramjets produced a total of approximately 27 kg (59 lb.) of thrust, a miniscule amount but more than adequate to rotate the two engines and the small rotor. The rotor freewheeled and generated no torque so a tail rotor was not necessary. Hiller used a tiny 1 hp gasoline engine to turn the rotor fast enough (50 rpm) to generate the high-speed airflow required to start the ramjets. The ramjets were not at all particular about their fuel. They would operate satisfactorily on gasoline, kerosene, even fuel oil and the less-volatile fuels reduced the dangers of explosion and fire. A "flame-holder" inside each ramjet ignited the fuel and ensured re-ignition if the engine flamed out.
Hiller referred to the first single-seat HJ-1 as the utility model. It consisted of an open steel and aluminum tube frame left exposed to facilitate the tweaks and component adjustments that most prototypes frequently require. Although additional yaw control was theoretically unnecessary because the main rotor did not generate torque, in practice the fuselage wandered from side to side, particularly at low speeds and a rudder was installed to beef-up directional control. This design first flew in 1950. The next HJ-1 featured side-by-side seating for the pilot and a passenger inside a cozy cabin made of fiberglass. This marked one of the first applications of this new composite material in the aviation industry. Hiller used this aircraft to launch a marketing campaign for the ramjet helicopter and to fly certification tests for the Civil Aeronautics Authority.
There were still others developed and tested and the French produced one called the Djinn. I've never been all that big a helicopter buff, so all this was news to me. So there's today totally useless factoid and historical oddity.
Incidentally, given today's mania for political correctness, would the HOE-1 name be allowed? I'm betting not.
History, Machines | Gaius | Comments (1)
Las month, I posted about the city of Philadelphia threatening to evict the local chapter of the Boy Scouts of America from the building they have used since 1928. The city wanted the local council to renounce the national policy against gays serving as scoutmasters. The local was caught between a rock and a hard place. Or a rock and no place at all, if you prefer. Well, the city has gone ahead and evicted the Scouts from their building.
Municipal officials said the clash stemmed from a duty to defend civil rights and an obligation to abide by a local law that bars taxpayer support for any group that discriminates. Boy Scout officials said it was about preserving their culture, protecting the right of private organizations to remain exclusive and defending traditions like requiring members to swear an oath of duty to God and prohibiting membership by anyone who is openly homosexual.
This week the Boy Scouts made their last stand and lost.
“At the end of the day, you can not be in a city-owned facility being subsidized by the taxpayers and not have language in your lease that talks about nondiscrimination,” said City Councilman Darrell L. Clarke, who represents the district where the building is located. “Negotiations are over.”
Mr. Clarke said talks ended this week when the deadline passed for the local chapter to change its policy; on June 1 the group will be evicted.
“Since we were founded, we believe that open homosexuality would be inconsistent with the values that we want to communicate with our leaders,” said Gregg Shields, national spokesman for the Boy Scouts. “A belief in God is also mentioned in the Scout oath. We believe that those values are important. Tradition is important. Our mission is to instill those values in scouts and help them make good choices over their lifetimes.”
In 2000, the Supreme Court decided a case — Boy Scouts of America v. Dale — involving an openly gay scout from New Jersey who was barred from serving as troop leader. The court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision that, as a private organization, the group had a First Amendment right to set its membership rules.
One thing that might yet complicate things is that while the city does, indeed, own the land, the building itself was built and paid for by the Scouts. From a cost standpoint, the impact of the city's demand for $200,000 annual rent would result in some big negative impact on local programs:
Jeff Jubelirer, a spokesman for the local chapter, said it could not afford $200,000 a year in rent, and that such a price would require it to cut summer-camp funds for 800 needy children.
“With an epidemic of gun violence taking the lives of children almost daily in this city, it’s ironic that this administration chose to destroy programming that services thousands of children in the city,” Mr. Jubelirer said. He added that the organization serves more than 69,000 young people, mostly from the inner city, and that its programming focuses on mentoring and after-school programs instead of camping trips.
Regardless of whether the Scouts relocate or not, the city of Philadelphia will have done damage to much-needed programs that serve inner city youth. This was, as I pointed out last month, a needless fight that serves no good purpose. With a skyrocketing murder rate, the last thing Philadelphia needs is fewer programs that may divert boys from crime.
But the children come last in Philadelphia.
News | Gaius | Comments (13)
Daniel Henninger points out that US politics must look like a Saturday morning cartoon show to outside observers. A boing and a splat and candidates head off in a new direction. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is still actually a dangerous place with dangerous people thinking about pulling off some dangerous actions.
Let's assume for argument's sake that Iran did stop its nuke program in 2003. Why, then, in 2006 was Iran performing test flights of the Shabab-2 and Shabab-3 ballistic missiles, the latter with a range of some 1,200 miles? Commenting at the time, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the Iranians "are not unaware that the security environment is one in which if they actually were to do something, Iran would suffer greatly." But as of this week, they might not.
Indeed last week, just as the U.S. intelligence professionals were preparing to tell the world it could forget about Iran (as yesterday's news reports made clear the world is about to do), the Iranian defense ministry announced it has built a new 1,200-mile missile, the Ashura. In September, it put on display the 1,100-mile-range Ghadr-1 missile. If this is all an inconsequential feint, it's a remarkably big one.
North Korea in July 2006 tested the long-range Taepodong-2, a nuclear payload-capable ballistic missile. North Korea has exported its missile technology to Iran and Pakistan. And of course Hezbollah, in the same month North Korea was testing the Taepodong-2, fired thousands of Katyusha rockets at Israel, re-establishing the operational viability of short-range bombardment…………
……The Bush administration's effort to place a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe as counterweight to Iran's missiles was conventionally mocked by elite opinion as a rerun of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars scheme." In fact, Japan, Australia, Germany, Italy, Israel and Denmark are all attempting to develop antimissile technology. France is building a short-range ballistic missile defense system, the SAMP/T. What are they all afraid of?
They haven't forgotten that other nations do not act in accordance with the wishful thinking of self-absorbed narcissists, apparently. The real problem for the Democrats right now is that they have firmly jumped on the "negotiate at all costs" bandwagon. With little regard for what the costs might be.
This Wednesday, after the NIE's release, the Democratic candidates had a fresh opportunity at an Iowa debate to describe how their presidencies would address Iran and the world. John Edwards chose to attack Sen. Clinton for voting in September to label Iran's Revolutionary Guards as terrorists. She and Sen. Obama, along with Democrats in Congress, said the new Iran intelligence estimate now mandates diplomacy only. Sen. Obama: "They should have stopped the saber rattling, should have never started it. And they need, now, to aggressively move on the diplomatic front."
But in a July essay for Foreign Affairs, Sen. Obama said nuclear weapons "in the hands of a radical theocracy" is "too dangerous." While he favored "tough-minded" diplomacy with Iran, "we must not rule out using military force."
Which version is one supposed to believe? The candidates seeking votes from their party's pacifists, or the person who wants to represent his country's interests in a hostile world?
We cannot afford to pretend that threats do not exist, nor can we be so arrogant as to think that the world will comply with our wishes and beliefs. That old boing and splat routine may play well in domestic sound bites but it doesn't really amuse the rest of the world. Instead it worries allies and emboldens those who wish us ill.
Fifty years ago today, the United States attempted to launch the Vanguard Test Vehicle 3 (TV-3). from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Vanguard rocket reached a maximum altitude of four feet before returning to earth in an impressive fireball. (Check out the ramjet helicopter at the end of the newsreel, too.)
History, Space | Gaius | Comments (3)
Cuban authorities carried out a large-scale raid on an anti-government demonstration in Santiago de Cuba, storming a church, gassing, beating and finally arresting 15 dissidents. Catholic clergy report that the Cuban police desecrated the church, kicking open the doors and conducting the violent display of brute force.
The priest of Santa Teresita church in Santiago de Cuba, Jose Conrado Rodriguez, said at least five people were detained during the crackdown on Tuesday, in the Americas' only one-party communist-ruled state.
A leading dissident group said 15 people were rounded up by police in what it said was an "extremely serious act of political repression".
"They barged in spraying gas in the faces of people from those spray cans, and went about dishing out blows and shouting," Conrado Rodriguez told AFP by telephone.
He said about 15-20 patrol cars turned up at the church, outside which some 600 people had gathered, many of them from a protest march that had just ended.
Some 25 dissidents dressed in black had walked inside the church to protest the arrest of another government opponent, said Elizardo Sanchez, president of the Cuban Human Rights and National Reconciliation Commission.
"The repressors, headed by a lieutenant colonel and other state security officers, desecrated the church of Santa Teresita after kicking one of its doors open and savagely assaulting the peaceful dissidents," he said in a statement.
Seven of those arrested remain in custody. Cuba likes to say that they have no political prisoners. They do that by stating all the people rotting in their jails for political activities are foreign mercenaries. For the edification of those who perform interpretive dances here in the US in praise of Fidel Castro, this is what actual repression looks like. Perhaps your next terpsichorean soirée could strive for a more realistic approach and add gas and club-wielding thugs.
Will the attempt to 'patch' the Alternative Minimum Tax be the proverbial straw that shatters the backbone of the Democratic-controlled Congress? Quite possibly, according to the Washington Post. They report that 31 so-called Blue Dogs have revolted against the House leadership.
Thirty-one Blue Dogs sent a letter to Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) this week, saying that they will not accept legislation to stave off the growth of the alternative minimum tax unless its cost to the Treasury is offset by tax increases or spending cuts. They demanded compliance with Congress's new "pay as you go" — or "paygo" — rules.
"We believe that waiving PAYGO, no matter the political pressure, is both fiscally reckless and an abdication of our duties," the Blue Dogs wrote. "Under no circumstance will we vote for any piece of legislation that does not meet the requirements of PAYGO, nor will we vote to waive the PAYGO rules to allow for such legislation."
Rock, meet hard place.
Or back meet straw, whichever you prefer. While both parties will catch blame if the AMT is not fixed, the Democrats will suffer the most - they were the ones who imposed the tax in the first place and they are the ones who promised that they would make fixing it a priority. While the leadership dithers around trying to find ways to derail a war that appears to have taken a turn for the better, they let a pocketbook issue that will directly impact millions of taxpayers go. Add to that the fact that lobbyist money flowing into Democratic coffers is what derailed the tax increase and the Democrats may have hit a perfect storm with this mess.
Politics, Taxes | Gaius | Comments (4)
So much for that "respect the will of the people" thingee. (T)Hugo Chavez took a sharply different tone yesterday when talking about the defeat of his constitutional "reforms" and has promised that the changes will be made despite the opposition victory.
BOGOTA, Colombia, Dec. 5 — Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez on Wednesday used a four-letter expletive to dismiss the opposition victory in Sunday's referendum and pledged to press forward with plans to approve constitutional changes that would expand his power in one of the world's leading oil producing-countries.
Chávez's remarks, made on television programs broadcast in Venezuela, represent a sharp turn from his magnanimous comments Monday after voters narrowly blocked 69 constitutional changes in a national vote. It was the opposition's first electoral victory since Chávez first won office in a landslide election in 1998.
"I think the opposition has nothing to celebrate," Chávez said. "We didn't lose anything. Prepare yourself because a new offensive will come with a proposed reform — that one, or transformed, or simplified."
Chávez said Venezuelans have flooded him with letters of support. He said that with enough signatures, he could propose another referendum, "in other conditions, in another moment." Addressing his foes, he added: "I wouldn't sing victory, opposition misters."
The comments came after Venezuelan newspapers reported Wednesday that Chávez ceded to his foes in the pre-dawn hours Monday only after high-ranking military officers pressured him to do so. Venezuela has been rife with rumors about such a scenario because it had taken the National Electoral Council hours to announce the results, though voting in Venezuela is tallied electronically.
Chavez also revealed that he had plans in place to confiscate all broadcasting equipment in opposition broadcasting facilities had there been unrest. The mask has slipped. Chavez will make those changes he is demanding one way or another. Which is precisely what former Chavez ally and current staunch opponent Raul Baduel warned on Monday. He predicted that the opposition had better not celebrate just yet because the work of stopping Chavez was not over yet.
World news | Gaius | Comments Off
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