Of course, whining aside, we should help Pakistan

Not because they will be as grateful as Indians, or that this is a good use relative to other places in the world where there are more appreciative people, but the way to sell this is part of the war on terror. For that, we'll spend a billion dollars a day and not blink.

Things are getting worse and the Pakistanis may be getting a little tired of their government. They may not become cheerleaders for America out of this, but if we donated a bazillion tents, cook stoves, sacks of rice and porta-potties, all marked "Made in USA," it might do us some good, and the billion a day is doing less than nothing, so why not?

Of course, before writing "Made in USA" on the materiel, we would need to scrub off all the "Made in China" markings.

Pakistan Needs Our Help, They Tell Us

It seems that Pakistan is going to need billions of dollars to repair damage from the monsoon flooding.

Now if I remember right, Pakistan is the country that helped North Korea get the technology for its nuclear bomb. Its intelligence branch has been helping the Taliban, which just murdered ten people for the crime of helping while Christian.

If we plan to assist Pakistan to boost our image, we should consider the recent past. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, the 2005 earthquake similarly opened an opportunity to boost the US image. Five years later, most Pakistanis view us as an enemy. They'll take our help again, but we aren't going to win any hearts or minds.

In India, a country with a generally positive attitude towards the United States, there are many among the dalits, formerly known as untouchables, who have suffered for a couple thousand years what the Pakistanis are suffering now for a few weeks. Bill Gates has recognize this and has started to help. Our money would earn us a lot more return if we spent it in India.

Rush Limbaugh on Sherrod -- No Surprise

It's odd the people are showing shock and surprise at Rush Limbaugh for his goal line stand on the Sherrod fiasco. Limbaugh is a very rich man, who has built his fortune on his ability to present the world to a significant segment of the population in a manner that they support.

He's a successful businessman and his expressed opinions are his product. Whether they are genuine opinions, or whether they make sense, is as irrelevant as whether Lindsay Lohan thinks she should go to jail. He says what his rabble wants to hear and gets well paid for doing so. End of story.

Paul Krugman versus reality

Krugman believes that without government opening the spigots of borrowed cash to solve our current economic problem, we're doomed to sink further. The Europeans, he assures us, have it all wrong. Gonna tank over across the Atlantic.

Despite his advice, the Europeans are showing signs of discipline in government spending. They are taking deficits seriously. Nevertheless, or in consequence depending on what you believe, the euro zone is showing signs of life, while the American economy, having "benefited" from trillions of deficit spending, remains in the doldrums.

How inconvenient!

Why the Washington Post is still needed

If we saw anything from the Shirley Sherrod incident, it's the danger of allowing people who don't understand fact checking to lead national opinion. Bloggers have their role, which is to stir things up, but when the NAACP and the USDA take as gospel their "investigation" of something, and act immediately, we get what we have just got. Those people who were genuinely snookered will now be backing up, and claiming that it wasn't their fault. People like Fox News will be making excuses like they had nothing to do with it.

The truth is that the blogosphere has scared everybody in power to the degree that they feel obligated to respond quickly. This is what the social media people tell companies. When criticized in the evening, have a response on Facebook by midnight. Don't wait until the morning.

Responsible journalism, as practiced still by the Washington Post and some others, checks facts and gets as full a story as possible, or at least indicates that all the facts are not yet in. If they go down and we're left with the raving lunatics of the Internet, God help us.

Reality sets in

In an AP article about how the well is soon to be capped, appeared the following telling items:

News that a solution is near cheered Jeff Hunt who scans the waves daily for telltale tar balls in Pensacola Beach, Fla.

If three months on, people are "scanning" for signs of the oil spill in Pensacola, we can assume that Pensacola isn't going to be much impacted. Things always wash up on beaches. Dead fish, dead birds, dead whales. A few tar balls aren't going to matter much.

The spill hasn't reached the big money beaches of Florida so we can assume that they either won't at all or won't in any material way. The surface of the water around the well is already starting to look better. There are many other seeping wells in the gulf that nobody bothers with because the gulf simply processes the oil.

In six months, except for a few locations, you'll have a hard time finding evidence that this spill ever took place.

Global Warming vs AGW

Eugene Robinson, appearing in today's Register-Guard, considers the debate on global warming to be over. We should now proceed to the debate on how to deal with it. I'd be perfectly happy, except that warmists shut down any discussion of alternatives to their apocalyptic vision.

But leaving that aside, the debate is not really over warming, it's over manmade warming and specifically over the impact of CO2 in the atmosphere. NASA has a Key Climate Indicators site where they should a number of interesting graphs. One of these is temperature. It does in fact show a much steeper rise over the past 30 years than during the 30 that preceded. CO2 is also much higher. This could be taken as an indication of causation.

However, looking somewhat left on the same graph, we find the period 1910 to 1940. Also 30 years, also showing a rise of about .5 C, however without the corresponding CO2 concentrations.

It's probably getting a bit warmer. It has been getting warmer for the past two and a half centuries, since the end of the Little Ice Age. Still farther back in time, it used to be warmer than then and maybe warmer than now. At the point that science can explain why it's now CO2 and not the same factors that have played out before, then maybe the science will be settled. Not before.

Why liberals should support the Second Amendment

Daily Kos has an article entitled, "Why Liberals Should Love the Second Amendment." Personally, I think this goes a little too far, but a more moderate position would be expect liberals, and most particularly ACLU liberals, to support the Second Amendment, whatever they feel about the NRA.

Back in the 1960's, Lyndon Johnson remarked, with reference to those attacking him from the left of his own party, "I'm the only president you've got." Those were different times and many of us probably would not have eased up, even knowing that it might lead to Richard Nixon.

What the ACLU and its supporters should now recognize is that the first ten amendments are the only Bill of Rights we've got. The horse trading ended two centuries ago. Actually, at that time the First and Second amendments were probably not appealing to separate constuencies as they do now, but no matter. They are both in the Bill of Rights.

For two hundred years, courts have been extending the interpretation of the Constitution from its literal form to adapt to modern realities and modern sensibilities. It's certainly true that the framers of the Constitution did not envision powerful and accurate handguns, or assault rifles beyond what anyone would use to hunt game for the family. But they also did not regard burning a flag as speech.

The problem is that by criticizing an expansive view of the Second Amendment, you call into question the expansive view of the First. Frankly, the Second isn't much of a problem. Gun laws haven't stopped gun violence, or even dented it in places like Chicago.

But actually reining it in would be a problem. I worry much more about my government than about my armed neighbors, and a possibly overwrought interpretation of the Second Amendment isn't going to change my priorities.

Dog Bites Man Again

It seems to be news that the Afghan government won't allow prosecutions of corrupt government officials. It also seems to be news that the powerful people behind the "government" of Haiti are more concerned with further enrichment than rebuilding Port-au-Prince.

This isn't news. These are not governments in the sense we know them, organizations of people working generally for the betterment of the population. The "governments" of Afghanistan and Haiti, and many others throughout the world, are essentially criminal in nature and exist for the exploitation of the citizenry.

There isn't anyone who can fix Haiti. And nobody can fix Afghanistan except the Taliban. Oops, we're fighting the Taliban while insisting that Afghanistan be fixed. Just a small logical dilemma.

The third world is looking robust

In two articles I've just read, Southeast Asia and Turkey seem to be booming while the United States and Europe are in the doldrums. To quote part of the article on Turkey:

So complete has this evolution been that Turkey is now closer to fulfilling the criteria for adopting the euro — if it ever does get into the European Union — than most of the troubled economies already in the euro zone.

The comfortable feeling that we know how to do things and everybody else needs to learn from us may have been true. Fortunately or unfortunately, they appear to have learned what they need.

Maybe this time, word will get around

An Associated Press writer reports from the congo:

At the time, Jackson Ndengwa, 15, was inside one of the makeshift halls to watch one of his favorite teams, Ghana, play Uruguay.

"The hall was full of people," he said from his hospital bed in the lakeside town of Uvira, about 20 miles (30 kilometers) to the south. "We never expected that there could be a fire like this."

At first, I assumed it was a sudden event that nobody could escape. Now it turns out that the tanker was leaking for an hour and the UN folks were trying to get everyone out of the area because of the danger.

Instead, they wanted to watch the World Cup.

Bye, Bye, Karzai

According to the LA Times, during the huge festivities to welcome General Petraeus to Kabul,

Karzai, whose relationship with the Obama administration has been strained amid fresh allegations of corruption in his government, was not present for Saturday's festivities, although the presidential palace said he was in the capital. He sent his foreign minister, Zalmay Rasul, to represent him.

We're spending untold billions of dollars propping up his sorry ass, and he snubs the ceremony. Let's get the hell out. Now. Today. Pack our gear, come home, and let the rump government sort things out. If they start any more trouble, nuke 'em.

They can't do the math in New York

“The difference between us and him is $200 million,” said Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, “$200 million over what will be a $135- or $136-billion budget, which I suggest to you is less than a tenth of 1 percent.”

And we tell sixth graders that if they don't learn how to calculate percentages, they end up homeless, derelict, unemployable, or speaker of the New York Assembly.

Slower Progress in Afghanistan. Really!

Leon Panetta seems to feel that things are going a bit slowly in Afghanistan. Slower than anyone expected.

Slower than expected by whom? I can identify quite a number of people, from the illustrious like William Pfaff down to obscure unknowns such as your present writer, who are not only not surprised that progress hasn't been greater, but would be surprised if there is in fact any underlying, sustainable progress whatsoever.

It reminds me of how Governor Kulongoski wants us to believe that the revenue shortfall in Oregon, identified in May, "couldn't have been predicted," although quite a number of people, again including this writer, predicted it twelve months earlier. People who make mistakes shouldn't assume that nobody else is able to see future trends any better than they can.

Another way of looking at the BP spill in the Gulf

What we keep hearing is how bad it's getting. It's not good, but let's consider this.

There are half a quintillion gallons of water in the Gulf, and every one is full of microbes. The water is warm, the sun is shining straight down on it, and while fish may not eat petroleum, microbes do, and things eat microbes that are eaten by things that are eaten by fish, oysters, and shrimp. People talk about this as an environmental disaster for the Gulf. I look at it as lunch.

Of course, in the short term, those higher up the chain such as fishermen and pelicans are going to be stressed, but I worry about real national catastrophes that we might do something about, like why our sixth graders can't multiply. In the mathematical sense.

Violence at G20

It is reported that Canada spent more than a billion dollars on security for the G20 conference in Toronto.

One has to ask: Haven't these people heard of teleconferencing?

A War Too Far

Remember "A Bridge Too Far," the movie about World War II? I think we may be seeing the equivalent now. With General Petraeus taking over in Afghanistan, expectations are starting to crop up based on his "success" with the surge in Iraq.

And that would be what, exactly? We've given them elections, but they don't result in a new government and whatever government they had probably couldn't deliver reliable electric power to their cities. They've stopped killing each other quite as freely, but by any standards other than Iraqi, the civil war goes on.

But however weak his legacy really was in Iraq, there was at least a pleasant illusion that he had succeeded. Now he has Afghanistan. Nobody, from Alexander the Great on, has marched into Afghanistan and later marched out, thinking back about what a splendid idea it was. Not the Macedonians, not the British, not the Russians, and now not us. There is no good outcome in the works. And it's Petraeus' baby now.

They say it's technically a demotion. Technically, politically, spiritually, ...

American Demagoguery at its Worst

H L Mencken said that America was ruled by the booboisie. It still is, a century later. Today there are two stories. Tony Hayward is catching hell for taking Father's Day off, and BP is making progress towards capping the spill.

First, why shouldn't he take Father's Day off? Would he be helpful, a Brit, working in the Louisiana bayous scooping up oil? Aren't there enough unemployed Louisianans looking for a paycheck to fill any vacancy?

And has he ever had anything to contribute personally to capping the well? This is the worst accident in oil drilling history, and the people who will solve it are petroleum engineers, working for industry not the government. I hope they succeed soon. I don't expect all the people who happily drive cars powered by the petroleum they find to express any gratitude.

There's a lot of talk about the possible impact of a hurricane. What will eventually solve the problem is the natural process of degradation, which takes place because petroleum is a natural, organic substance. It breaks down as a function of its surface area. The surface area of the petroleum that has spilled goes up as the spill is broken up. A hurricane will speed up the process.

There are a half a quintillion gallons of water in the Gulf of Mexico. That's a real number, not like a gazillion. A quintillion is a billion billion. In six months, you will have trouble finding a beach with a tar ball on it. In two years, you'll never know this happened unless you're a research scientist and know where to look.

None of this is to deny that Joe Barton is a bought and paid mouthpiece of the petroleum industry. That's a separate issue.

A silver lining for the BP spill

As anger in the U.S. increases over British Petroleum's having done exactly what the U.S. economy's unrestrained lust for oil required, so the British resentment begins to rise, a sort of political version of Newton's third law.

This could work out well. For instance, after a little more British bashing by Obama, the Brits might say, "You're right. We're at fault here. And it's going to cost us a ton of money. So why don't you take care of Afghanistan from now on?"

As the "allied" effort in Iraq dwindles to just the United States, so might the war in Afghanistan. Maybe we'd just bag it.

Not likely, but one can dream.

Gaza and Afghanistan, a common attitude

The actions of Israel against the aid flotilla headed to Gaza should be no great surprise. If you accept enough premises, you can justify almost any conclusion. The Zionist premise is that God gave them Palestine and the non-Jewish elements are there on sufferance. They cannot accept the notion of large numbers of people who hate them occupying much of Palestine and governing themselves. So they accept any method to defeat this result.

In fact, since the first establishment of a Zionist state in an Arab region, this outcome has been pretty much inevitable. The Palestinians are going to hate them and there are too many to drive away. Eventually, they will have a state and they will deeply hate Israel, even if they decide they need to do business.

Now consider Afghanistan. We refuse to contemplate a country governed by people who once allowed Osama bin Laden to hang out, so we try to change the country through war even though this won't work. We assume that given enough time, money, and American knowhow, anything is possible. All the evidence to the contrary will not change our leaders' minds.

The American view of nuclear weapons is going to be very difficult to sell in the UN now. Everybody knows Israel already has them. We want everyone to view Iran as the worst possible country in the Middle East to have nuclear weapons. Today, do we think this is going to fly?

We are living with North Korea's having nukes. We've lived almost 50 years with China having them. Pakistan and India live with the fact that each of them have them. Do we want Iran to have nukes? Of course not. Is it tolerable? Of course it is, and we will soon need to tolerate it.