A Yes Vote In Iraq!

In the news:

Iraqis Probe 'Unusually High' Yes Tally

Apparently, the proposed new constitution for Iraq won in an overwhelming plebiscite by the voters of that poor country. No surprise, since the whole procedure was "supervised" by the same people who organized the voting in the last two presidential elections in the United States! These are truly experts at getting the right result (though not with the same near-unanimity achieved by the pollers of the former Brutal Thug Dictator of Iraq).
I think it also interesting, in a bizaare sort of way (I was going to use the word outre', but I think it comes from that "Old Europe" somewhere), that people were voting for/against a document that most had not had a chance even to see, much less try to understand. Sort of like the U.S. Congress voting for the end-of-session spending authorization bills. "Can't take the time to read the @#$% things; I have to get back to my district and do some serious campaigning!" Convince the voters that I'm a responsible and trustworthy legislator. Pay no attention to the fact that I'm voting to enact laws I haven't bothered to read.
So, anyway, the People Of Iraq have voted Yes, or at least the Yes votes have been counted in greater number than the No votes.
In other news from Iraq -
Democracy is on the march!
The insurgents are in their last throes!
We can expect more violence in the days ahead!
We don't do body counts!
We killed 70 terrorists!

A sort of a theoretical/mathematical/statistical/human factors question: If we are killing insurgents faster than we are spurring new recruits, How Long before the violence actually goes down?

Why Does It Freeze?

Way long ago on a warm summer day when I was about 5 or 6, I was playing at a friends house. Sometime around the middle of the afternoon Benny's mom came out of the house with a contraption. She said "We're going to make some ice cream." Well, I was highly skeptical. I figured "making ice cream" was pretty much like "making potatoes", or "making milk". I was one of those who thought food came from the market. Anyway, we (she) poured some stuff into the middle part of this Ice Cream Maker,

and put ice and rock salt in the surrounding bucket. And told us to start cranking the handle. After what seemed like a long time (but probably wasn't) and a lot of work (and probably was), the cranking got difficult. We stopped; took the thing apart; opened the cannister in the middle, where we'd poured the cream, sugar, and things I don't have any idea about, and Voila'! Ice cream! Just as advertised. How? On a warm day, with the two of us sweating over the crank, and the ice melting; How? How did the liquid in the cannister freeze?

At last, the point - If you can't figure out how this happened, you shouldn't be allowed to talk about Global Warming. The simple answer is: heat transfer. You could look it up, to quote the late great Casey Stengel.
Now Steven Milloy, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, says HERE, global warming claims are contradicted by the fact that at one point on the Earth the temperature indicates we are making ice cream.

OOPS: I mean, rather, that thermometers aren't indicating a temperature increase in that locale. Therefore, the heat content of the system is not increasing! An incredible and totally unbelievable argument. Such illogic is stunning in its scope! There are still a number of people who, like Mr. Milloy, are finding local cold spots that they can point to in order to support a claim that the energy (heat content) of the Ice Cream Maker - I mean the Earth - is not increasing. You would suppose that any sensible person would be embarrassed to make such a fool of himself, and in public too! I suspect Mr. Coal and Mr. Petroleum are spending a lot of money to ease the embarrassment of these people.

Of course it's simple logic that the Earth is always either warming or cooling, so it's about 50/50 that at any given time we are in a warming part of the cycle (epicycle, or epiepicycle, etc.). The science regarding the Greenhouse Effect is simple, well understood, and clear. It's been known for decades. Without the Greenhouse Effect, the Earth would be uninhabitable by creatures such as ourselves. It's also been known, since the '50's anyway, that the release of Carbon Dioxide, Methane, and other greenhouse gases by humans increases the atmospheric concentration of these gases, magnifying the effect. Thus, the warming/cooling cycles are shifted toward increased warming. Can it get any simpler than that?

What seems toxic to me about the debate over this is that there are some who deny that warming is occuring, others who deny it could be a problem, and still others who say we really shouldn't pay any attention to the situation unless and until we are absolutely certain that there will be negative effects! OH!, I'll think about it tomorrow!, said Scarlett.
Now NOAA says that we are setting yet another record HERE.
I realize NOAA is a part of the US government, and therefore not to be trusted (heck, George W. Bush says not to trust a buncha bureaucrats), but I personally will take what the scientists there, using a lot of data, over what an "adjunct scholar" at a near-fanatical reactionary Cato Institute says, using his select subset of thermometers.

Once upon a time, the United States Government (and some local governments also) was preeminent in taking steps to reduce pollution, reduce impacts of human actvites on the environment, and generally led efforts to clean up and improve the health of the world environment. What Happened? Why is the government in a state of paralysis here? How do people (like the President) get away with claiming that reducing human impact on the Earth is A Bad Thing for the economy? This is belied by past experience; in general, reducing the release of industrial waste products has always been an economic boost, as well as improving the health of the population and the country (and the world) generally. I think we lost our compass.

A Stark Comparison

As we all know (or perhaps believe we know), the United States military is the best trained best equipped best supported and most capable military force ever in the history of the whole wide world. Therefore, there is nothing our armed forces cannot accomplish. Except, apparently, to force other combative types to stop fighting. Also, it appears the military cannot kill its opponents fast enough to bring a halt to the fighting. Now, in addition to training our own forces, the DOD has long made it a practice to train selected groups of fighting men from other countries as well - though sometimes this has been embarrassing, as the trainees returned home only to become, in essence, the palace cohort for a brutal thug dictator (anticommunist though!) in one of our many puppet bananna republics. That said, here is a visual comparison of the training our soldiers undergo at the storied Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, and the training we are giving to the Iraqi insurgents, who will end up, the survivors anyway, as the enforcement arm of one of the fundamentalist states we are creating in the former Iraq.



Soldiers Training at Ft. Huachuca



Insurgents Training at "Ft. Baghdad"

Congratulations!

To Mohamed ElBaradei, and to the IAEA, winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005. I haven't read the pronouncement, but I'm guessing the award was at least partly the responsibility of the Bush administration, which helped immensly by demonstrating that Mr. ElBaradei was dogged in pursuit of the truth about Iraq's 'reconstitution of nuclear weapons programs' in spite of all the harrassment he recieved from the United States government for not simply agreeing to the distortions and lies ('We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud') used to promote the war in Iraq.




I think Mr. ElBaradei owes the Bush administration a hearty thanks for propelling his formerly obscure United Nations office into such prominence.
And congratulations also to the United Nations for the many services it performs throughout the world in the face of continuing efforts by the current (and also past) US administration to make the institution into a rubber stamp for its retrograde social agenda.

The New Supreme?

The latest Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, and her twin Bette Davis.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist. The resemblance is, of course, completely irrelevant to anything at all. In fact, if Ms. Miers were to prove as talented as Bette Davis (hopefully in a different venue though), she would certainly leave a serious imprint on the Court, and the nation as well. I guess there's a lot of complaining going on about her lack of relevant experience. Considering the performance of the current members of the Court, and of many recent Justices, I find this not to be a compelling reason to reject her. In fact, the Court hasn't been up to snuff (in my opinion) since the incredibly muddleheaded "Money Equals Speech" decision. A claim that is certainly true de facto, but for the law to say that the person with the biggest megaphone has the right to shout down an opponent is easily the worst decision since Chief Justice Taney's Dred Scott decision.

A small diversion, sorry.

Here's a much more chilling (to me) photo; the first public picture I have seen of new Chief Justice John Roberts, with his philosophical soulmates President Bush and Archbishop John McCarrick.
Understanding that pictures are the best means of transmitting code messages, it's pretty clear what the message here is: forget the idea of "A Wall Between Church and State." We're going to make this christian nation into a Christian Nation. Roe V. Wade? History. This will be a much better place when we can return to the back-alley abortions of the past. All this conveyed in a sort of a "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" manner.