Sunday Scan

No Fireworks In Gualala

A couple weeks back, I wrote about a particularly worrisome matter of the Cal. Coastal Commission issuing a cease and desist order against a 4th of July fireworks show planned in the No. Cal town of Gualala. It is, I think, the foothold the Coastal Commission has been seeking in a larger effort to stop these patriotic displays all along the California Coast.

How crazy is that? This crazy: One of the Gualala Gaeans said in a comment on the post that the damage of a 15 minute fireworks show would be permanent and unmitigatable. My gosh, if the earth were really that fragile, if would have dissolved into dust long ago.

The Gualala Patriots Day Committee (the good guys) appealed the decision and lost, so there will be no fireworks show this year. But the fight goes on; the judge merely failed to overturn the cease and desist; he did not rule on the underlaying matter. Says the Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing the Patriots Day group:

“The legal fight goes on against this abuse of power by the California Coastal Commission. Although the fireworks won’t happen this year, our lawsuit goes forward. We’ll be litigating to bring the fireworks back in future years – and to have the courts instruct the Coastal Commission on the proper limits of its power.”

For a PLF summary on the case, click here.

The Inevitable In Zimbabwe

The despotic leaders of the multitude of thug-ocracies of the world can breathe a sigh of relief -- the popular uprising against their role model hero, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, has been crushed.

This was a close one, with Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic Change actually winning a popular election. But Mugabe froze the election results and started a campaign of intimidation ... which may be too faint a word. Remember what Mugabe's supporters did to the wife of Patson Chipiro, a MDC regional leader?

They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window. (BBC)

Preceding the MDC announcement it was not going to participate in the new election was this, also from BBC:

On Sunday, the MDC was due to stage a rally in Harare - the highlight of the campaign.

But supporters of Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF occupied the stadium venue and roads leading up to it.

Witnesses reported seeing hundreds of youths around the venue wielding sticks, some chanting slogans, and others circling the stadium crammed onto the backs of trucks.

Some set upon opposition activists, leaving a number badly injured, the MDC said.

It said African election monitors were also chased away from the rally site.

Sounds like exactly the sort of election Jimmy Carter would deem to be fair.

Another Reason To Vote For McCain

Buried deep in a WaPo story on hate groups and rising racism that's very short on stats and figures and verrrry loooong on opinion, we find this:

"One person put it this way: Obama for president paves the way for David Duke as president," said Duke, who ran for president in 1988, received less than 1 percent of the vote and has since spent much of his time in Europe. "This is finally going to make whites begin to realize it's a necessity to stick up for their own heritage, and that's going to make them turn to people like me. We're the next logical step."

Keep Duke in Europe! Vote McCain!

Alternative Energy Dreamin'

There's another horse in the alternative energy race ... but this one seems unlikely to generate even one horsepower. But what the heck! Don't stop believin', hold on to that feelin':

Scientists from Europe’s Atomic Energy Commission, in Grenoble, France, have shown that vibrations from raindrops landing on a certain type of plastic can generate enough energy to operate some low-power wireless sensors, like battery-powered outdoor thermometers.

Leonardo diCaprio, take note!

Plenty Magazine offers an "In Depth" feature on the new technology, gushing about how it could be used to power climate sensing devices that now need batteries, so that we get a continuous flow of data to feed into the electricity sucking beasts we call computers.

Of course, rain drop power comes with that bane of all alternative energy: a dearth of economic viability. It takes Penty to the last paragraph to mention this tidbit: The material used to generate raindrop power costs $460 for 1 kilogram, and given the milliwatts produced, a bunch of kilograms will be required. Batteries, on the other hand, cost a buck.

Undaunted, the article ends:

Who knows, April showers may soon bring power.

Of course, not enough power to offset the solar power that's not being generated due to the rain.

Very nice art: Josh Cochran

Extreme Climate Change

NOAA (named, perhaps, for that ark chap, since the oceans are going to flood us all) has released its newest climate change report, Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate. The resulting bad reporting can perhaps be best summarized by two quick cuts.

First, the pocket liner set got their first impression of the report from this Science Digest intro:

Among the major findings reported in this assessment are that droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace as humans continue to increase the atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

While the mainstream tuned into this Digg summary ...

New report highlights the likely changes in extreme weather and climate conditions under ongoing climate change.

... which in turn generated comments like:

Report: Turning on lamp will light up room.
Report: Pissing into wind will get you wet.
Report: Falling linked to failure to stand upright.

How many of these stories do we need to read before people start seeing this as completely obvious?!

Well, of course, it's just not that obvious. ICECAP gives us this summary by Roger Pielke Jr., who just happens to believe in anthropogenic global warming:

The report contains several remarkable conclusions, that somehow did not seem to make it into the official press release. They include: over the long-term U.S. hurricane landfalls have been declining, nationwide there have been no long-term increases in drought, despite increases in some measures of precipitation, there have not been corresponding increases in peak streamflows, there have been no observed changes in the occurrence of tornadoes or thunderstorms, there have been no long-term increases in strong East Coast winter storms (ECWS), called Nor’easters, there are no long-term trends in either heat waves or cold spells, though there are trends within shorter time periods in the overall record.

Pshaw. What's the fun in reporting boring ol' stuff like that?

Seismic Mitigation As Art

This amazing piece of industrial art is actually the tuned mass damper at the top of Taipei 101, for now the planet's tallest completed skyscraper.

The 728-ton steel ball is so massive it couldn't be lifted into location; rather, it had to be assembled in a cavern carved out of four stories at the top of the tower. Why, you might well ask, put a 728-ton ball at the top of the building?

The simple answer is that Taipei 101 stands just 800 feet from an earthquake fault. More specific: The ball swings counter to motion caused by wind or earth movement, dampening sway.

Deputy Dog, an architecture blog, has a short story on the mass damper, but what really attracts is the video that was shot on May 12, when shocks from China's massive earthquake hit the tower. Tourists in the building actually flocked up to the viewing area for the damper to see it in action.



Don't you just love human ingenuity?

Can You Say "Semper Cheese?"


If you don't understand this, says Blackfive, you've never met a Marine.

Setting Up A Winning GOP Campaign Strategy

In his Saturday address, President Bush handed McCain the campaign theme most likely to keep the White House in Republican hands:

The fundamental problem behind high gas prices is that the supply of oil has not kept up with the rising demand across the world. One obvious solution is for America to increase our domestic oil production. So my Administration has repeatedly called on Congress to open access to new oil exploration here in the United States. Unfortunately, Democrats on Capitol Hill have rejected virtually every proposal. Now Americans are paying the price at the pump for this obstruction.

Delivering the Dem response to the prez's radio address was Nick Rahall, chair of the Natural Resources Committee, which is the Senatorial power broker in this debate. His response:

This week, President Bush and his Republicans allies rallied behind the oil industry's political agenda once again and advocated opening more of America's federal land, including coastal areas, to drilling. This proposal will not bring the type of relief Americans deserve at the pump.

So we're told that supply and demand for some mysterious reason won't work with petroleum. Yet we're told that this same supply and demand does work with the cornerstone of the Dems' horse in the energy race, alternative fuels: We'll increase supply of alternative fuels and the price of energy will drop.

Everything the enviros have said since gas prices started spiking -- heck, everything they've ever said about energy pricing -- ignores supply and demand in favor of government controls through incentives, punishments,cap and trade programs and government take-over. It's not surprising since its basic socialism.

Also inherent in Rahall's response is a problem over the definition of federal lands. He criticizes Bush for calling for "opening more" federal land (and seas) for resource development. The name of Rahall's committee is "Resources," a word the Dems and their green special interest supporters have come to define as "something that should not be touched," but traditionally means "a source of supply, support or wealth."

What exactly is this "America's federal land" Rehall's talking about? The Bureau of Land Management has under its jurisdiction 258 million surface acres and 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estates. The surface holdings represent about 13 percent of all the US, and BLM states its purpose as management first and conservation second. The land it manages represents just 40 percent of all land owned by the Federal government.

And it's profitable stuff:

The public lands provide significant economic benefits to the Nation and to states and counties where these lands are located. Revenues generated from public lands make BLM one of the top revenue-generating agencies in the Federal government. In 2007, for instance, BLM’s onshore mineral leasing activities will generate an estimated $4.5 billion in receipts from royalties, bonuses, and rentals that are collected by the Minerals Management Service. Approximately half of these revenues will be returned to the States where the mineral leasing occurred.

These are the lands Bush -- and most of the rest of us -- are interested in opening up, which is the right thing to do, since it's the federal land purposed for productivity. The other federally owned land includes military bases, prisons, nuke storage sites, Washington DC -- and land owned and managed by the Department of Interior's wildlife guys for the Dem definition of "natural resources" -- critters and plants that just could not survive without our loving protection.

But to Rahall and the special interests he serves (Earth First!, the Center for Biological Depravity ... oops, Diversity, etc.), all federal land should be treated as this subset of DOI-managed land: preserved for critters and none of it leased for resources. It doesn't matter if the impact of production on land is large (as in oil shale) or small (as in drilling); no level of impact to Gaea is allowable.

You can't blame Rahall and the Greenies for the current energy situation; you can only blame them for part of it. How much is a matter of debate; they would say the impact of their anti-petroleum, anti-nuclear position is minimal, and that it would be less then minimal if only we would get our hearts behind alternative energy.

But our hearts have been behind alternative energy since the gas shortages of the 1970s. Billions of dollars are going into alternative energy and we have little to show for it beyond higher food prices thanks to ethanol production.

McCain, like all savvy politicians is a proponent of alternative energy -- after all he can read polls that say 98% (!) of usbelieve a goal of 25% alternative energy sources by 2025 is a good one. (Of course, the poll question didn't attach a cost to that effort or say reaching the goal might cause some discomfort and displacement.) But he can also read the frustration of voters who are paying over $4 per gallon of gas, and seeing the price raise every week, so he changed his position on drilling. Albeit, not far enough, since he's still stuck in a no position on ANWR, but unlike the Dems, he changed.

And the left pounced, with the Dem party strutting and crowing about McCain's Offshore Drilling Flip-Flop: "McCain caves, once again, to the special interest." We've been through the special interest allegation already, but in this particular case, the special interest isn't the dreaded "Texas oil," which was guilty of the great sin of helping make America the most powerful, wealthiest, comfortable nation on earth, it's the people at the pump.

With "flip-flop," the Dems are trying to paint McCain with a Kerry brush, but they fail. McCain is looking at an economic policy, seeing a changed global condition brought about by soaring demand and stifled production and refining capacity (see this lengthy PowerPoint for a good explanation of all that), and a futures market that's betting that price increases will continue, and he simply deduced that changed circumstances support changed policy.

Kerry, on the other hand, was looking at an Iraq where nothing was changing -- it was early in the war, instable and violent, and potentially could get worse or could get better. What was changing was not the situation, but the power and funding capacity of the anti-war faction of the Dem party. McCain saw a changed world and changed his policy. Kerry saw a changed Dem power elite and changed his.

It boils down to this: $4 gas gives the GOP a glimmer of hope in November because we have the right policy and, finally, a candidate who has signaled that he's with us on that policy. The Dems have a candidate who appears not to care about the plight of the people; he'll put the supposed plight of the polar bear first.

Congress, thanks to Bush's challenge to open up more land for drilling, needs to deal with this. My guess: The Dems will go on August recess without acting. McCain better be putting on his pouncing shoes.

Drilling Through Obama's Rhetoric

Obama looks at oil as foreign policy:

"Oil money pays for the bombs going off from Baghdad to Beirut, and the bombast of dictators from Caracas to Tehran." (WaPo)

What a bizarre ... no, what a leftist ... view. Commerce is evil. Big commerce is big evil.

The Dem presumptive also refers to oil drilling as "a failed policy." Failed? Look at what oil drilling has accomplished for our world. It changed us from a globe of far-flung, isolated peoples to a global community. It gave us new medicines and materials that have improved our lives. It made it possible to get to the hospital by ambulance or helicopter instead of horse and carriage. It fuels our economy, creating jobs and wealth.

One drawback: It makes it possible for one Barack Obama to campaign relentlessly across our very large nation.

But to him, oil and drilling for oil are nothing more than a failed policy -- even though all the alternative energy forms, that have been spouted relentlessly since the 1970s, have failed to deliver even five percent of our national energy needs.

Not only does Obama support failed energy sources, he supports failed methods for making alternative energy just energy. His plan is to use money raised through an auction of greenhouse-gas emissions credits (i.e., an energy tax) to bolster research and development projects, which have been bolstered for three decades now with little to show for it.

Meanwhile, he wants to force alternative energy into the economy by imposing requirements on how much renewable energy public utilities would have to buy. Ve have ways ov making you buy! Never mind whether its available, never mind whether its cost effective. What people have to pay for energy is of no concern to Mr. Elite, because it's a hidden tax.

Meanwhile, McCain's laying out an energy policy with some positive energy behind it: Drill now in America. Go nuclear. Conserve. Use alternate fuels. This is a sound and diverse plan that actually would cause America to be less dependent on foreign oil

Drill now? Obama actually said that there's no point in drilling now because it'll be ten years until offshore oil wells deliver. Clinton said the same thing about drilling for ANWR oil -- ten years ago. If he had been a visionary instead of reflexively pushing alternative fuels, ANWR oil would be moderating prices today. Alternative fuels certainly aren't.

Of course, Obama's not alone in calling oil drilling "failed policy." Here's the DNC:

The Democratic National Committee responded that Mr. McCain’s speech “will cave in to his friends in the oil and gas industry’’ and that he would be offering “more of the same failed Bush policies that have driven energy prices through the roof.’’ (NYT)

Note to Dems: Fuel prices under Bush in 2001 were the same as they were in 1995. After Sept. 11, they started a slow climb -- but they didn't start soaring until the Dems took over Congress in 2006.

Fatal Energy Policies

"While all the presidential candidates were railing about lost manufacturing jobs in Ohio," writes Thomas Friedman in today's NYT, "no one noticed that America’s premier solar company, First Solar, from Toledo, Ohio, was opening its newest factory in the former East Germany — 540 high-paying engineering jobs — because Germany has created a booming solar market and America has not."

Well, that's a biased way to present good news. It's not like First Solar shut down it Ohio operations and moved lock, stock and barrel to Germany. Rather, they saw a strong emerging market rich with government incentives and expanded their operations.

Friedman's overarching point -- that America needs a sound energy policy -- is correct, but he picks weird way to present it and ends up with a policy that panders to the Warmies and the expense of the consumers.

Friedman starts by picking a lousy example in First Solar. He wants the US to incentivize alternative energy, which is a somewhat good idea, so he focused his example on First Solar's German operations -- but he ignored the company's Malaysian plant because he certainly doesn't want call for cheap US labor.

And neither did he want to write about Ohio's crumbling infrastructure and rustbelt ways to drive up the cost of business. Otherwise, he might have mentioned that First Solar pulled up its roots last week and moved to Arizona.

Still, there's much I agree with in Friedman's analysis, starting with his dislike of the currently voguish drive to cut or eliminate federal gas taxes over the summer. His point -- that we're giving money to China to incentivize us to enjoy ourselves by driving our SUVs to vacation spots -- is sound on the China debt front, but elitist in how he wants to mandate our behavior. (He did not divulge the Friedman vacation plans, BTW.)

He is also correct that if it is our goal to use incentives to quicken the development and market penetration of renewable technologies, incentivizing the use of gasoline is not the way to do it, whether it's the McCain/Clinton tax cut idea, or all the existing credits that go oil's way.

I think reasonable incentives for alternative energy -- accelerated depreciation for alternative energy infrastructure, reduced regulatory burdens for "green" transmission corridors, tax credits for purchases -- are a good idea if they're carefully watched so they don't become permanent subsidies for successful businesses.

I'd go further, though, and say that all politically motivated federal give-aways -- the gas tax cut, Obama's college freebie or the checks the IRS mailed out last week -- send the wrong message. Government isn't in existence to dole out freebies, and whenever it does, it keeps the free market from making the adjustments necessary to sustain a sound economy.

Friedman also acts as if we have only one energy source available to us -- alternatives -- and wants to pretend we can just leave oil behind. Alternative energy is called alternative for a reason. There's a Big Daddy energy and then there are these yapping alternatives that say they can replace Big Daddy, but they're hardly out of diapers.

If we worry, as we should and Friedman does, about our increasing debt to China, then why should we continue to compete against China on world markets for oil? If we're worried about the social and economic consequences of the rising cost of energy, why shouldn't we work to increase all supply?

Friedman says nothing about opening ANWR or the continental shelf to drilling; he's mum on exploration on federal lands; there's not a peep about the benefits of fuel mix standardization or the construction or expansion of refineries -- all things that would greatly benefit America's energy picture and economy.

These are simply discounted with the charge that any use of oil simply increases "our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit."

America is moving dramatically toward more efficient, cleaner use of petroleum, from Priuses and clean-burning diesels to more efficient industrial applications. And as long as the debate on global warming isn't over -- and it's not -- it's perfectly fine to use it, drill it and refine it until the alternatives shed their diapers and are ready to replace Big Daddy.

Get it wrong, and the economy crashes and people suffer. And Friedman gets it wrong.

Sunday Scan

Lessons In New Politics From Barack

Barack Obama is leaving the old politics behind, supplanting it with a new, cleaner style that leaves the smarminess behind. Here, courtesy of The LA Times (which provides a darn good compendium of Obama-smashing news, in its usual blatant favoritism for Hillary objective style), is a tutorial in how Obama approaches politics the new, clean way:

1. Need money after your first unsuccessful campaign for Congress? Then get a sweet job from a big campaign supporter to supplement your state senate income. (Obama got a $112,000 job from Robert Blackwell Jr., about double his state senate salary of $58,000.)
   
   
2. In return for the favor, urge the state legislature to grant a Blackwell company, table tennis promoter Killerspin, a $50,000 tourism grant. (Pingpong tourism is such an important tourist market, and so deserving of state subsidies!) ((Shall we make, or avoid, the devilishly clever connection between the name "Killerspin" and the Obama PR machine?))
   
   
3. Then, to show that a cash-stuffed paper bag the system really does work, land $320,000 in state subsidies for Killerspin tournaments.
   
   
4. Finally, get new political contributions from Blackwell as soon as the grants go through.

There are business people who feel it is their responsibility to run a profitable company, and there are business people who feel it is the people's responsibility to make their company profitable. There are politicians who believe in the former, and politicians like Obama who, despite all their fine talk about new ways of doing things, definitely believe in the latter.

Islamist Horror Stories

Bubba, of What Bubba Knows, has put together a list of stories for Sabine, a gal who apparently doesn't get the threat posed by Islamist thought and action. Here's his intro:

For Sabine's education, today's stories of atrocities by Muslims.

May you come to realize who and what is the real threat to peace, may you learn to recognize the face of the real enemies of your peaceful, tranquil world.

And here are the story links:

¤ Please Let Me Marry Her and Then Kill Me
¤ The criminality against children in the koran
¤ German Charity Helps Turkish Women Escape Forced Marriages
¤ Europe or Eurabia?
¤ Home-grown 'champion of Islam'
¤ Saudi women 'kept in childhood'
¤ Not Child's Play: The Teddy-Bear Intifada

The first link one tells of a particularly heartless murder carried out by an al-Qaeda in Iraq thug, who is now in prison, awaiting his death sentence. Another prisoner wanted to identify the thug's victim:

So, he asked the killer to give him the name of the victim.

The killer replied he didn’t know, he asked from what tribe? The killer didn’t know, he asked from what sect? The killer didn’t know, he asked him from what province? The killer didn’t know.

Then he asked him, then why you killed him? The killer said he cannot remember, whether it was the victim's haircut or the way he was dressed or the music pouring from his car.

This is the enemy we're fighting, and this is why we're fighting this enemy. Islamist terrorists are the vilest villains we have ever fought, a fact the Left is quick to forget, despite unforgettable stories like this one.

Lessons In Environmental Hypocrisy

If you like the splendor and quiet, hot solitude of the desert, Anza Borrego is your state park. It's the state's largest park, stretching across most of eastern San Diego County almost all the way to the Mexican border, with 500 miles of dirt roads, 12 separate wilderness areas and untold miles of hiking trails.

Somewhere in that vastness, a long line of wooden power poles stretches from horizon to horizon, lost in the vastness, hardly noticed by most park visitors. Call the power lines the Maginot Line of the war between the Greenies and the rest of us.

San Diego Gas & Electric, in order to meet a state mandate that 20% of its power come from alternative sources by 2010 (that's less than two years away!), proposes to convert the current power corridor to a new Sunrise Powerlink, which would carry renewable power from the sun, wind and geothermal facilities to be built in the Imperial Valley.

The environmentalists, who demand that we stop using oil and go with renewable resources, are furious, of course. Here's Elizabeth Goldstein, prez of the California Parks Foundation, quoted in the LA Times:

"The idea that we're going to sacrifice critical pieces of our environment to protect other pieces of our environment seems a little ironic. That's an irony I cannot accept. We have to find a way to do both."

I think she means "protect both," not "sacrifice both," but the sentence's structure is a little hazy. The Sierra Club makes it more clear, talking about a "powerline juggernaut:"

Fare thee well, big skies and open vistas. To feed the energy demands of the West's inland megalopolises and crowded coasts, public lands in 11 Western states may soon be crisscrossed by a web of power lines and pipelines. These "energy easements," up to three-quarters of a mile wide, are slated for every sort of public property: national forests, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) holdings, state parks, even national parks. Since they'll be "preapproved," the easements will be ready to go at the energy companies' convenience.

Note that they don't say a word about these easements being required to comply with the alternative energy mandates they themselves demanded. So like a Kennedy attacking windmills, they attack the infrastructure required to make their alternative energy dream come true.

But you see, having 20% alternative energy isn't their dream, not if it means conventional power solutions. They wanted growth to stop, grids to be ripped out, and Americans to change the way they live. Nothing less will do.

So they will fight this power line, even though there really isn't a good alternative route. They would rather condemn private land than use public land for a public use. And the public, I hope, will see the Greenies for what they are: Demanding and totally inflexible, demanding the world without giving up a square inch, and self-righteous but thoroughly hypocritical.