Mohamed, Jesus and Moses

People are remarking that "we," presumably Westerners, do not name our children Moses or Jesus. Of course, that's wrong. It's certainly not as common a name as John, but a good number of kids enter life as Jesus, particularly Hispanics, and some are named Moses. But so what?

Muslims are entitled to consider Mohamed an acceptable name for their children, but not for their pets. What they don't seem to understand is that their views on names for people and inanimate objects are their own and should not, in a modern society, be forced on nonbelievers, especially foreigners. Especially invited foreigners, considering that Sudan requires some $2 billion annually just to feed its population.

A population that is growing at around 2% annually. According to the CIA, the average Sudanese woman gives birth to nearly five children. Fortunately, one in ten dies in infancy, but that isn't enough to hold back the population. Since domestic agriculture is precarious and vulnerable to droughts and other natural pressures, it's only a matter of time before there is a Sudanese "humanitarian crisis" as happens regularly in Ethiopia. It is inevitable that more people will sooner or later die by famine there than will ever die in the Darfur conflict.

The Saudis have enough cash for their top prince to order an Airbus A380 for himself. The Sudanese authorities want to maintain Sharia law and apply it to everyone. It seems to me that they should be getting their aid from people who agree, like the Arabs.

Sudan Shows Islam is Most Arrogant Religion

The case against a British teacher in Sudan, charged with insulting Islam by allowing her 7-year-old students to choose "Mohammed" as a name for the class teddy bear, demonstrates clearly that Islam is in a class by itself in terms of arrogance. In civilized countries, criminal laws are generally clear and not philosophical. In Sudan, a foreigner, teaching at a school attended largely by foreigners, is expected to understand the nuances of Muslim religious sensitivity or face the prospect of 40 lashes.

This is not to say that some religions aren't theoretically more arrogant. It would be hard to top Judaism, which asserts that God specifically picked their tribe out of all the people in the world, but Jews don't seem inclined to emphasize the racist streak. And Hinduism, where higher castes figure they are superior to many of their co-religionists and not necessarily to foreigners of similar position, which seems odd.

However, the general trend in most religions today seems to be a growing tolerance. If that trend is taking place in Islam, it's keeping a low profile. And much as Juan Cole would like us to believe that Islamic voices oppose situations like Gillian Gibbons', I haven't heard any expressions of outrage from them.

Islam is a religion from the Dark Ages, largely unaffected by the last thirteen centuries. We're told that we must respect all of the world's "great" religions. I'm hard pressed to understand why.

Nothing to say about Iraq

We're getting into a period where the Surge is being touted as a success and Iraq is fading from the public consciousness. I have never been especially wedded to my specific predictions, although some of them look decently prescient. However, I've had one core prediction that I'm prepared to stick with. This isn't going to turn out well.

For it to turn out well, the United States needs to complete its mission and be able to walk away without chaos ensuing. The fact that we can tamp down violence while stationing more troops that we can possibly maintain without a major upgrade of our defense establishment proves nothing. The theory at the outset was that we would buy the Iraqis some quiet time during which they could reconcile. Nothing like that is happening. Certainly, Iraqis have lost their affection for Al Qaeda, which gives some basis for hope. But otherwise, the best description of politics in Iraq is paralysis.

So without knowing specifics, I continue to believe that the end will not justify the means. Particularly as the means have entailed more and more costs. Probably a million or so dead, millions displaced, a trillion dollars either spent or now committed, as in future VA costs. The current success consists of somewhat fewer people dying, with the economy, the political establishment, and Iraqi society in shambles and making no progress. I don't feel any need to defend my five years of pessimism.

Utah Cop and Taser

There's evidently a video going around showing a Utah cop tasering someone who had been pulled over for speeding. The gist is that the guy got tasered for speeding.

Wrong. He got tasered for not complying with the officer's instructions. The officer was evidently on single patrol. They were in the middle of nowhere. There's a rule which everyone should be made to memorize. If you want to debate, do it in court. Don't challenge the police officer on the scene.

I don't want to be a cop, but I'm glad other people do. It's a dangerous world out there and cops are the ones who stand between us and a lot of the craziness. Sometimes, they aren't ideal human beings, but to repeat a point I just made, I don't want to be one. The people who want to sit on review panels don't want to be cops. They just want to criticize cops. As Jack Nicholson said in "A Few Good Men," we want these people doing what they do.

This is a job where you spend almost all your time dealing with people who are doing things they shouldn't and know it. Occasionally, the circumstances may be in dispute but an arrest scene is not the time or place.

We had a cop in nearby Springfield who tracked down a kid who had stolen a truck. Middle of the night, deserted area. The kid wouldn't get out of the truck and eventually the cop shot him. Family, despite a general aura of criminality, got a lot of sympathy. Not from me. Do what the cop says. If you're not happy sort it out later. But do what the cop says. If you even create the appearance of a possibility of a threat, be prepared for violence. And no sympathy.

Hydro-Quebec and Northeast Heating Oil

Maybe we can't make the United States entirely energy independent, but we certainly should be able to do it for North America as a whole. Canadians have lots of extra energy, from the tar sands in Alberta to trillions of gallons of water flowing downhill in northern Quebec and Labrador. These are people we can deal with. They don't flog rape victims, for example.

We should make a deal with Hydro-Quebec, the provincial electric power utility. We have people who need to be heated up during the winter, and Hydro's electricity could do that. Hundreds of thousands of Quebeckers are freezing their asses every winter, and we have Florida. There's a deal here to be made. It still leaves open what the Northeast would do to earn its part of the arrangement, maybe sending lots of lobsters to Florida. Anyway, it makes more sense than buying more petroleum products from Venezuela.

Barbarism in Saudi Arabia

Saudi courts have condemned a victim of a gang rape to 200 lashes and six months in jail for having met a man without having a male relative present. I'm a little dubious about the lashes, since 200 serious lashes is a death sentence, but it's clearly still the kind of ruling one would expect from people whose judicial, ethical, and consequently governmental systems are based on the mores of 7th century desert nomads.

This would be just a quaint, a reminder that there's still a world out there that we would rather not encounter, except that we depend completely on these people to stay afloat. In oil, that is. We cannot afford to say what we feel publicly, although we're quick to condemn the regimes in Iran and Burma.

Our dependence on imports, both the manufactured ones which overseas employers produce with exploited workers and petroleum from countries we really don't trust, is making America weak. We can't really criticize the Saudis because we need their oil. We can't criticize the Chinese because we need everything and we owe them a trillion dollars.

Free trade is an abyss. As someone put it, it involves spreading wealth around the world until every worker has what a Pakistani bricklayer considers a decent income.

Urban Renewal in Eugene Oregon

Folks in Eugene desperately want to revive their moribund downtown. Ain't gonna happen. A proposal on the last ballot to fund redevelopment through an expanded urban renewal district went down to crushing defeat. Conservatives mistrust city government, rightly. Progressives mistrust any proposal under which anyone makes a profit, which is inevitable if you bring in private developers. Disparate groups like the Eugene Chamber of Commerce and leftwing mayor Kitty Piercy supported it, to no avail.

I'm glad I don't live in Eugene (I'm in Florence 65 miles away). It's not a good situation. If the construction was just wood and would rot away in a few years, I'd say let it rot, but the city, county and federal governments are concentrated there, plus some more infrastructure like the convention center (and its dependent Hilton) and the new library.

What's missing is private enterprise and the question has to be asked, why would it ever return? It costs more to build downtown, parking sucks, and the people on the streets there do not represent a good potential market. The measure on the ballot was quite large and many people spoke in favor of smaller, incremental redevelopments. Unfortunately, this overlooks the simple fact that a small change in downtown means it is still repulsive.

Eugene's downtown will continue to decline. The voters of Springfield, however, voted in favor of more urban renewal for their downtow. The relative fortunes of these twin cities will be interesting to watch over the next decade.

Mass Transit for Florence Oregon

It's hard to think of anything more foolish than bringing "mass transit" to Florence, but we already have it in the form of the "Rhody Express" (Florence is famous for rhododendrons) and the idea of tying us to Eugene via Lane Transit is being bruited. I can only explain this as a knee-jerk reaction to the notion of mass transit.

Mass transit requires a mass. Florence has a population under 10,000, which doesn't cut it. The Rhody Express runs for a few hours a day, shuttling a handful of people between a handful of locations in a loop. I don't know if they bother to collect fares and it wouldn't make a material difference. If the grants on which it operates dry up, it will vanish without a trace.

Disregarding this experience, people in Eugene and Florence are making noises about including us in LTD and running buses on the roughly 130 mile round trip between somewhere in Florence and downtown Eugene. If we paid the substantial payroll tax that funds LTD, about 1/150 of earnings, it might earn us four trips daily, five at most. This isn't enough for anyone to use regularly. Gaps would be about three hours and there wouldn't be evening services.

A few dozen people would benefit from a tax of more than a half million dollars a year, imposed on thousands of workers. Why? You have to ask what the social contract is. We all need roads, fire protection and police, so we all pay. But intercity buses? It doesn't reduce pollution, it doesn't reduce congestion, and it doesn't make it possible to live in Florence without personal transportation. Why should a worker making $40,000 a year pay $250 for a service that is of no personal benefit?

The only thing I can think is that progressives feel a need to support any program that is labelled "mass transit," even if it isn't. The Register-Guard supports it because the RG favors all increases in taxes and government activity. Fortunately, there won't be enough others and this will die a quiet death.

Bjorn Lomborg as pariah

I just read an article by someone at the Voice of San Diego Web site, blaming the wildfires on global warming. Nobody disagrees about global warming anymore, he announces, except a few like Bjorn Lomborg, who says the global warming doesn't matter.

I think the reason take so many potshots at Lomborg is that he apostasized. The people at Fox News have always been right wing on all subjects, but Lomborg was once a fairly mainstream environmentalist. He developed doubts, and religions take a much harder line on people who leave the flock than those who never subscribe to their beliefs.

Put very simply, Lomborg doubts that the trend is as well documented as people would like us to believe, but more importantly, we can't do diddly about it. Those who say we must respond seem to avoid the question of whether we can. Since China and India have both indicated that they will take no action that slows their efforts to bring their populations out of poverty, the likelihood that real agreement can be reached is zero. And, as Lomborg further points out, if everything in Kyoto were implemented, we would merely delay slightly the doom which is predicted.

In actuality, modern engineering will solve almost all the problems that realistically may result from global warming (which does not include large proportions of species dying off). In fact, this solution, which will take place, will cost a fraction of what the "solution," actually just a delay, that the global warming worriers propose.

While the US cannot make a major impact on global warming trends, it can through its own policies take itself out of the fossil fuel dependence that is sapping its economy and putting it into an increasingly fragile military situation. This we can do. It won't stop wildfires, which are due primarily to other factors, and we may still get a few degrees warmer. But we won't owe our souls to the Chinese and the Saudis. That's an objective worthwhile on its own.

Headlines are always the worst climate case story

I had hoped that the Christian Science Monitor would be the exception to the rule, but the corruption of journalism in pursuit of global warming headlines seem to affect them just as much. They picked up the AP story on the "ecodisaster" of Katrina and subheaded it The hurricane destroyed or damaged about 320 million trees across the South. The story then states that the 100 million metric tons of greenhouse gases produced by all this stuff rotting exceeds the amount by which forests across America take in carbon in the course of a year.

The comparison with annual carbon uptake by all forests seems a stretch. The hundred megaton figure is within shouting distance of estimates of CO2 from forest fires, which surely destroy a small percentage of the trees in the country or we wouldn't have a forest industry.

But the main point, regarding the quality of journalism, is that in the second half of the article, the authors note that respectable forestry people, living in the area, think the figures are grossly inflated. Experts at the Mississippi Institute for Forest Inventory conducted a scientific survey, taking random samples of woodlots, and concluded that the loss was perhaps a fifth of what the UNH and Tulane research showed from satellite imagery. Most of us would tend to believe what people can see up close rather than computer estimates based on images from hundreds of miles away.

CSM, unfortunately, chose to use the higher figure and present it as authoritative in the subhead. In a perfect world, everyone would read the whole article and could form their own opinions, but in practice, many readers don't get past the head and subhead, or at most the first paragraph or two. So when those create a completely unbalanced picture, it is very misleading. I had hoped for more from this newspaper.

Climate Change will make the end of the world even worse

Mencken once said that no man ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public. It looks as though newspapers have a new twist on that. No newspaper ever lost circulation underestimating the willingness of the American public to be frightened.

The International Herald Tribune has an article that reports that "many" feel that the UN pronouncements on global warming see the impact as too mild. In a world with more than six billion people, it's not hard to find "many" people supporting any position whatsoever. This is a fairly low threshold to make something qualify as newsworthy.

The head of the UN, Mr. Ban, is described as hitting various climate change hot spots, including place in Chile where children wear protective clothing to shield them from UV radiation that gets through the hole in the ozone layer.

Wait a minute. The ozone layer is way up there. It is being affected by certain manmade chemicals, which have been banned by the industrial nations and largely eliminated. Due to the long lag time, the layer will continue to suffer and will not completely recover for another half century. But it isn't climate and it has absolutely nothing to do with CO2.

Having reported that the UN may have underplayed the danger, the reporters might have shown why they said this. Like a quote that said that the situation was worse than reported. I've looked it over and there seems to be nothing. The report says things are bad. People have commented that things are bad. Nowhere does it show that anyone says it's worse than in the report.

So here's the state of journalism in the world today. When reporting on global warming, it is OK not only to report finding that the world is doomed, but to say that some unnamed people think it's even more doomed, and to make that unsupported claim the headline.

Drought in Australia

The International Herald Tribune is reporting that "many" people in Australia fear that the current drought is the result of global warming and the good old days, when it was easy to raise cows to produce milk (the point of the article) are past.

Droughts come and go. Judging from what I see on the Weather Channel, the drought that's affecting Atlanta looks like it may go away soon, just as the drought in Texas turned into waterlogging this year.

I'd like to make a prediction. The drought in Australia will go away as well. You heard it from me. I don't understand why the wire services never come to ask my opinions.

Gravity more than Global Warming

The UN report on global warming made the front page of the Register Guard here in Lane County, Oregon, today. As expected, all moderation was stripped away and the main point was that catastrophe is now unavoidable. Even if we stop putting carbon into the atmosphere, we've done so much already that we're doomed to suffer. The only question will be, how much.

Actually, I saw very little in the actual report to support panic. In fact, the charts look much less frightening. Take the rise in the level of the ocean. The article suggests that 4.6 feet is realistic. The chart of historical worldwide changes in sea level shows changes in the 100-150 range, but it uses millimeters as the scale. There are 25 millimeters to an inch. The scary numbers are a little less frightening when you realize that.

Even more pertinent, the chart shows a long process of rising seas over a century and a half. Specifically, it shows that in the 25 years from 1945 to 1970, the oceans rose. And from 1970 to 2005, they rose again by about the same amount. The only problem is that the former period of 25 years saw overall global cooling. The rise during 25 years of cooling was as great as in the subsequent 35 years of warming. It makes a person wonder about the warming-rising nexus.

This was another AP report, probably taken by the R-G without editing, so a lot of my criticism is of AP. It was the same with the earlier report on how Bangkok was threatened by rising sea level, due to global warming. In reality, Bangkok is sinking many times faster than the water around it is rising. AP barely mentions that, deep inside the story.

Everyone should understand a basic fact of physics. What tectonic and volcanic activity moves upwards, gravity tends to pull back downwards. Since gravity affects everything, more places are likely to be going downward than upward. This is particularly true in deltas, which is why Dacca, Bangkok, and New Orleans have problems. Human activity tends to cause marshy land to sink under the best of circumstances, and the tendency to pump water from the readily available underlying aquifer just makes it worse.

We are going to have problems with coastal cities during the next century. We will have most of the problems whether we have global warming or not. We will meet and defeat all of them by improved engineering. We will run out of petroleum at reasonable cost, and we will replace it with new sources. We will not be wiped out by tropical diseases. Trust Yankee ingenuity. Or maybe Hindi.

The right plan even if the wrong reasons

I'm torn between wanting to criticize speculation by scientists and supporting the same public policies that they advocate. The UN has issued a warning about the consequences of manmade climate change. I think they're exaggerating the consequences but America should still take exactly the steps they suggest.

The report predicts that more people will die from heat. It ignores the offsetting decline in deaths from cold. Food production in Africa is predicted to decline, but the manmade problem in Africa is not climate, it's unscientific farming practices. We are warned against the rising oceans, but in fact they are going up at about an inch per decade.

But after disagreeing about these points, I fully support making America less dependent on fossil fuels. We have a limited supply of them and we are forced increasingly to buy from overseas. These leads to two unsustainable trends. Economically, we are destroying the greenback as the international reserve currency, and militarily, we are becoming dependent on people with different national interests. We owe the Chinese a trillion dollars already.

I can't understand why there is so much policy debate. Even people who disagree about the science should come to the same conclusions about policies. America needs to go Green for its national survival.

Ku Klux Klan redux

I've had a long comment published to an old post I made in January about the analogy between the Sunnis in Iraq and southern Whites in the Reconstruction South. I'm not really sure what it meant, except that the situation was quite complicated in the American South.

But I wasn't really concerned with Reconstruction, which is pretty much a done deal. I was observing that in a fight without American interference, the outnumbered Sunnis are likely to do pretty well against the Shiites, having the greater tradition of military leadership. That is still the point, but the situation is changing. The American South was more likely the old Iraq, with Whites and Blacks living in close proximity. Iraq has largely been converted into ethnic neighborhoods. The decline in civilian deaths is largely due to the completion of this process.

Leaving the question, what does the US military presence now achieve? Juan Cole has long argued that we are obliged to keep some military presence to prevent the outbreak of large scale civil war operations. I've noted that the action was taking place on a micro scale anyway. But perhaps the micro phrase is past and now the question really is, can we prevent a standard civil war between identifiable military groups by keeping our own troops on the ground?

Maybe we can. And anyone who thinks it's a good use of 200 billion a year is free to use that as an excuse for staying. Something like 15% of the population is now displaced and there is no indication that a political solution will ever get Iraq back to normal. Maybe we can do this forever. Any takers?