Sunday Scan

Triple Crown

Jockey Kent Desormeaux summed up yesterday's Belmont Stakes pretty well, saying of Triple Crown contender Big Brown, "I had no horse." Big Brown finished a distant, distant last, and another year goes by without a Triple Crown winner.

I didn't even watch the race because I've soured on all forms of gambling, but it reminded me of 1977 and Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew, who I saw very up-close at the Kentucky Derby.

The not so incredible ex-wife was a photographer at the Louisville Courier Journal and I was her Derby photo assistant. She buried an auto-drive Nikon so the lens was at dirt level under the rail about 10 yards past the finish line. She focused it on the finish line, and handed me a cable remote.

"Push it when they reach the last pole before the finish and hold it down until the last horse is past you," she said. And that's what I did.

As the pack tore past me, I heard the jockeys yelling and the leather creaking and the whips slapping, I felt a hot rush of air, and was spattered with horse sweat. It was one of the most intense experiences of my life. After they blew past, I let the shutter button go and remembered to start breathing again.

In the process, I took an image of Seattle Slew crossing the finish line, all four feet in the air. It became somewhat famous; in fact, when a commemorative plate company selected one image of Seattle Slew for a series of plates on Triple Crown winners, they selected my Derby picture. Here it is:

I can't claim it as mine; it's credited to my ex-wife. But it's a heck of a lot better than the crummy one of the Belmont at the top of the post, isn't it?

Those Racist Clintons

"Sometimes your opponent just runs a good campaign," lamented Hillary's campaign chief Mark Penn in an NYT op/ed today.

I thought you paid geniuses like Penn millions of dollars, as Hillary did, so that your candidate would run a better campaign.

Penn raises many excuses for Hillary's failure, boiling it down mostly to money -- another responsibility of the campaign chief -- but the most interesting paragraph in the piece is this one:

The Clintons have spent their lives fighting as much as any leaders in their generation for greater equality across racial and gender lines. I believe nothing they said was ever intended to divide the country by race. Any suggestion to the contrary was perhaps the greatest injustice done to them in this campaign.

All in all, I have to agree with him, even though I can't stand it, and even with the famous Bill-ism about the only reason why Obama is running a fairy-tale campaign is because he's black, and the famously misinterpreted Hil-ism about Bobby Kennedy's assassination.

Back in February, I wrote a post titled In A PC Nation, How Will The GOP Run? that raised the issue of hyper-sensitivity on race issues:

Even if there were a line fine enough to appease the keepers of political correctness in the black, feminist and media communities, and there's not, the GOP will be charged with crossing it. There is no way the GOP can get to November without being called every "ist" in the book.

Still true, more true, today. As it turns out, even the Clintons couldn't pass this test in the face of the Obamaniacs who are found in high positions in the media and the DNC. The challenge for that old white guy with his blond cutie-pie of a wife has not gotten any easier.

China, The Nation That Keeps On Giving

Toys with lead paint, tainted dog food, and of course who can forget bird flu? China is such a generous nation! So giving! And since bird flu was such a hit last time around, it's now time for bird flu redux:

HONG KONG (WSJ) -- Hong Kong authorities slaughtered 2,700 birds and banned live poultry imports from mainland China for up to 21 days, after a routine inspection Saturday found chickens in one of the city's poultry markets infected with the dangerous H5N1 bird-flu virus.

While there's little immediate threat to humans from the infected birds, the discovery revives fears that the disease could still be a problem with poultry flocks in southern China -- although it isn't yet clear whether the infected birds came from local or mainland Chinese farms."

And what does the generous, giving People's Republic have to say about all this? Ever the humble gift-giver, they deferred:

An official with the General Administration of Quality, Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said the agency needed to consider questions about the matter before responding.

Can you say "chicken?"

Those Pesky Thermometers

Yesterday I wrote about NASA cooking the books on its US temperature data, a story Warmie cultists would no doubt reject as tales of denial by Warmie heretics. Well, if they had pipes and if they burned those little bowls of carbon-based plant material, I'd tell them to put this in their pipes and smoke it:

A perfect illustration is found when comparing the USHCN (U.S. Historical Climatology Network) temperature records from Central Park in New York City to those taken a mere 55 miles away at West Point. Readings in Central Park have been regularly measured since 1835 when the city's population had just surpassed 200,000. Today, surrounded by a metropolis of eight million people filled with some of the world's tallest buildings, a massive underground subway system, an extensive sewer system, power generation facilities, and millions of cars, buses, and taxis, the Central Park temperatures have been greatly altered by urbanization. And, as one might expect, the Central Park historical temperature plot illustrates an incredible warming increase of nearly 4øF.

The West Point readings have also been meticulously maintained since 1835, but the environment surrounding the thermometer shelter has experienced significantly less manmade interference then the one in Central Park. The West Point readings illustrate a significantly lower warming increase of only about 0.6øF over the same 170-year period. This is remarkable given that the year 1835 is considered to be the last gasp of the Little Ice Age -- a significant period of global cooling that stretched back several hundred years.

Cries of out of control global warming become more dubious when one looks at the hottest decade in modern history, the 1930s. The summer of 1930 marked the beginning of the longest drought of the 20th Century. From June 1 to August 3, Washington, D.C. experienced twenty-one days of high temperatures of at least 100ø. During that record-shattering heat wave, there were maximum temperatures set on nine different days that remain unbroken more than three-quarters-of-a-century later. (emphasis added; source)

How long can the global warming myth stand up to the temperature facts? It's an unanswerable question because global warming is the science of hysterics and hypnotism, and is therefore outside the realm of rational deduction.

hat-tip: Greenie Watch

Forever Reuters

No one can slip subjectivity into journalistic objectivity like Reuters. Here they are again, reporting on the meeting of G8 energy chiefs in Japan:

Japan, the United States, China, India and South Korea -- who together guzzle nearly half the world's oil -- said that they had agreed on the need for greater transparency in energy markets and more investment by consumers and producers both, while stopping short of calling on OPEC to pump more crude today. (source)

"Guzzle" is defined as "to drink especially liquor greedily, continually, or habitually." The U.S. and Japan should not be included with the guzzlers; we are more and more merely consumers. Greed simply isn't a part of our oil consumption; efficient output is. We consume ever more efficiently, investing billions in ways to make our automotive fleet, our homes and our industrial operations more efficient.

An objective Reuters (oxymoron) would have used the word consume. If it wants to look for oil-guzzling whipping boys, it should have stopped the list at China and Inda, which have put economic growth far ahead of environmental protection, and have put the acquisition of oil ahead of the efficient consumption of oil. In fact, both countries still subsidize the price of fuel to their populations, and refused reasoned calls to stop the practice in the name of greater fuel conservation.

Excitable Electrons

Confession time: I never understood this Mohamed ElBardei guy, and could no see the top UN nuke monitoring guy as a Nobel Prize winner than ... say ... Al Gore.

His mini-interview in Spiegel (the full interview publishes on Tuesday) gives me no further insights.

On Iran:

"The readiness on Iran's side to cooperate leaves a lot to be desired," he said. "We have pressing questions." Iran's leadership, he said, is sending "a message to the entire world: We can build a bomb in relatively short time."

On Syria:

But the general director of the International Atomic Energy Agency also said he expected "absolute transparency" from Syria.

On stopping proliferation by military action:

"With unilateral military actions, countries are undermining international agreements, and we are at a historic turning point."

What's difference between Iran and Syria might explain why ElBardei expects complete transparency from Syria, but not Iran? The only thing that comes to my mind is that there's been military action against Syria's nukes but not Iran's.

Hyper-Hysteria

Fear is rising with a bullet on the list of global motivators. Plastic baby bottles, genetically engineered food, cell phones ... all feed the hysteria machine, ultimately producing stories like this:

South Korean politics are on the brink of meltdown after spiralling public hysteria over “mad cow” disease in American beef unleashed a weekend of mass protests and pitched battles between demonstrators and riot police.

Police vehicles were today attacked by angry mobs armed with sticks and police lines were reportedly charged after the 40,000-strong crowd of peaceful protesters thinned-out to leave a smaller group of activists.

With the violence threatening to continue for another week, and the calls for his resignation being screamed by students on the streets of Seoul, President Lee Myung Bak now faces a series of potentially crippling departures from his immediate circle of allies. (Times of London)

How many recent cases of BSE have there been in the US? One.

How many recent cases of BSE in the US were discovered before the cow was slaughtered for beef? One.

How many humans have been infected from BSE in US beef? None.

Frankly, being in that crowd of angry Koreans looks far more dangerous to one's health than eating U.S. beef.

Sunday Scan

Al Qaeda No Big Deal

Let's not overblow this whole al Qaeda thing, shall we? So says the retired (Thank God!) top adviser on terrorism to the British government, Richard Mottram. The Observer reports:

Britian's outgoing intelligence chief believes there is a danger of exaggerating the threat posed by al-Qaeda at the expense of equally significant security issues, such as global warming.

Sir Richard Mottram, who has just stood down as Permanent Secretary in charge of Intelligence Security and Resilience, the body that advises the Prime Minister on the country's response to emergencies, will use a lecture this week to call for individual citizens to play a new role in combating the risks associated with increasing globalisation.

I have to say I do like "Relilience" bit. Dept. of Homeland Security and Resilience? Nah. Half the country wouldn't understand the meaning.

There was a danger, he said, of over-emphasising the spectre of international terrorism, which could play to al-Qaeda's advantage and divide communities.

'What we shouldn't do is play into al-Qaeda's hands by exaggerating the extent and nature of the threat they present globally. This focus is not smart when it comes to dealing with people who are trying to make us think that they are the greatest threat.'

Instead Mottram ... said there was a need to understand the potential impact of a range of strategic risks, of which terrorism was just one. He identified global warming, flu pandemics, the emergence of rogue states, globalisation and its impact on power balances, global poverty and its impact on population movement, energy security, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and serious and organised crime as similarly significant problems.

Yes, let's be careful to keep our troops handy in case we need them to fight global warming, globalization and poverty!

Please, Mottram, let's acknowledge that different problems have different solutions and attentiveness to al Qaeda does not preclude attentiveness to the others.

Clarity In Des Moines

Nice town, Des Moines. Figured in my meeting of Incredible Wife. Long story. But here's a short story, from today's editorial page of the Des Moines Register:

“With dissension at home and distrust abroad, as American troops continue to fight wars on two fronts, the times call for two essential qualities in the next American president,” the Register’s editorial board concluded. “Those qualities became the paramount considerations in making endorsements for the Democratic and Republican nominees in the 2008 Iowa caucuses.

“The times call for competence. Americans want their government to work again. The times call for readiness to lead. Americans want their country to do great things again. They’ll regain trust in their government when they see a president make that happen.”

The times, the say, call for John McCain and Hillary Clinton -- the paper's picks for the upcoming caucuses.

You know, I couldn't agree more.

hat-tip: memeorandum

Pucker Up

It's going to get dry, very dry, here in California, thanks to the Natural Resources Defense Council, a premier Greenie litigation mill. We've been waiting with bated breath (parched throats?) for the decision in the NRDC's lawsuit against the future of California to come down, and it has, and badly:

FRESNO – A federal court order finalized Friday could mean millions of Californians will have to get accustomed to spending more money on less water – and soon.

The order by U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger, based in Fresno, wraps up his August decision in favor of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The environmental group sued state and federal agencies that pump water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Wanger ruled that those agencies failed to adequately protect the Delta smelt, a fragile fingerling listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act. His final order in the case Friday could result in a 30 percent reduction in water pumped out of the Delta starting as soon as Christmas Day. (Sac Bee; registration required)

The Delta smelt is threatened, not endangered; that means a lot. Under section 4(d) of the Act, a threatened listing gives many more options for how to deal with the species listing. Then why are we facing a 30 percent reduction in water deliveries -- when we're already on the cusp of mandatory conservation measures?

That's why this decision is such a massive victory for the no-growth Greenies. While a lesser alternative could have been possible, the Greenies have succeeded in creating an artificial drought, a regulatory drought, under the guise of protecting a species that is merely threatened, not endangered, in order to place an artificial cap on humanity's growth in California.

And While We're On The Subject

Meanwhile, in LA:

In the midst of a drought, Los Angeles officials announced Friday that 600 million gallons of water must be dumped from two reservoirs that supply a swath of the city because an unexpected chemical reaction rendered it undrinkable.

Silver Lake and Elysian reservoirs registered elevated levels of the suspected carcinogen bromate between June and October, the result of an unusual combination of intense sunlight, bromide naturally present in groundwater and chlorine used to kill bacteria. (LA Times)

LA gets its water primarily from the Owens Valley, not the Delta, but this is not a good time to be losing any water supplies in California.

Another Terrorist Guilty Plea

Friday, it was two terrorists pleading guilty in OC; today it's one in San Diego.

A well-known animal rights activist pleaded guilty yesterday to a charge of showing people at a speech in San Diego four years ago how to make a destructive device with the goal of having someone commit a violent crime.

The plea by activist Rodney Coronado [shown here with a jug of gasoline] ends a controversial case that involved free-speech rights and an unsolved arson case in University City in 2003.

Coronado's case went to trial in September, but the jury could not reach a decision and a mistrial was declared. Some on the panel said afterward that the majority was leaning toward acquitting Coronado.

Coronado's lawyer, Jerry Singleton, said that as part of the guilty plea, the government will not pursue two other cases against his client. One in Washington, D.C., involves the same charge stemming from a speech Coronado gave at American University there. (SD Union Tribune)

Coronado is a cause celebre in the radical animal rights movement, and his guilty plea ends his years-long effort to exploit his criminal behavior to draw more goofball animal lovers into his Animal Liberation Front terror cells.

Note to warden: Throw away the key.

Where Is The Passion?

On Capitol Hill, they drone on with their "my esteemed colleague" this and "the gentleman from North Dakota" that. Yawn. Where is the passion?

Is it just that we're not eating enough kimchee?

Who even knows what they were fighting over this time at the Korean Parliament? Sky News just calls it "an election fight." Whatever.

It's comforting, isn't it, to know that while Samsung and LG and Hyundai are becoming globally competitive and knocking our products around, the SoKo government is knocking itself out.

Stupid Penguins Warmies

Where is the intelligence in this?

Penguins In Peril As Climate Warms

ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2007) — The penguin population of Antarctica is under pressure from global warming, according to a WWF report.

The report, Antarctic Penguins and Climate Change, shows that the four populations of penguins that breed on the Antarctic continent — Adélie, Emperor, Chinstrap and Gentoo — are under escalating pressure. For some, global warming is taking away precious ground on which penguins raise their young. For others, food has become increasingly scarce because of warming in conjunction with overfishing.

There's causality between overfishing and global warming? Did not know that?

I also did not know that the penguins had not survived the multitude of previous warming/cooling cycles they've been through. Pity they were wiped out the last time it got warm!

Oh, they weren't wiped out last time? Perhaps someone should tell the WWF, since the the Greenie/Warmie WWF does not appear to have the collective IQ of that other WWF, the ones that smash themselves up in a wrestling ring.