Gore's Boiled Frog Metaphor

James Fallows wrote a series of blog entries for 'The Atlantic' decrying Al Gore's boiled frog metaphor, particularly as adopted by Hillary Clinton. http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/boiledfrog/
Notably, though Fallows requested alternative metaphors, he didn't get any he thought worth repeating.

How about this one?
Put a generation of frogs in a vast container of cold water, then turn up the heat. The most heat-sensitive of the frogs will die. Those best adapted to higher temperatures will survive to reproduce as the following generation. Occasional mutants will occur who are more heat-tolerant than any frog in the initial generation. They will survive in disproportionate numbers. As the temperature rises still more, even-more-heat-tolerant mutants will arise among them and eventually replace the original mutant population. And so on. Eventually the mutants-upon-mutants will be splashing around happily in boiling water. But they will be nothing the first generation would recognize as frogs.

e.g. tolerance of Muslims in the UK evolving into the Archbishop of Canterbury saying publicly that elements of shari'a law should be adopted in the UK.

Moral: We can adapt to anything if we don't mind paying with our identities and self-respect.

How to Get Over a Huge Misery-making Cold

1. Suffer.
2. Drive seemingly forever back from the funeral in Fresno of mother of one's compulsively bitchy ex-girlfriend.
3. Stop at office of telephone company that has been making life miserable for months to replace broken cellphone. Breathe on entire staff.
4. Home. Television. Cheap-but-actually-pretty-good California brandy from Costco.
5. Sleep 15 hours.
6. Still feel like sh_t but not as bad.
7 Repeat as necessary.

A Moment's Diversion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo

One Last Shpiel About Politics for Awhile

I have been going on about politics so much in this blog that I am boring myself so this will be the last one for a while.

The press and the Democrats have been acting like McCain is the GOP nominee already. He isn't. It has been the standard thing to say that McCain was winning because the conservatives were split between Romney and Huckabee. With Romney out, the conservatives aren't split anymore. A lot of them don't like McCain because he has voted for a number of crossover issues in the Senate including some that were pro-abortion. I don't think anybody can win the Republican nomination without conservative support. Romney still has more than a hundred delegates whom he has not released and he may well point them at Huckabee when he does.

Huckabee this morning was campaigning in Nebraska and used both "Wall Street" and "class rule" in his stump speech. If Huckabee wins Nebraska he will win lots of other states as well. He has the additional advantage that he is likable which McCain signally is not. Ronald Reagan proved beyond all question that Americans, particularly Republicans, will vote for brain-dead policies if they are attached to an attractive personality.

McCain has a substantial delegate lead but nothing like a majority. If Huckabee wins Nebraska Tuesday the GOP nomination would be wide open again. My guess is that this thing is not over 'til it's over.

There will always be an...

Citing a YouTube video in which she is seen smoking crack cocaine, US immigration authorities declined to admit British rock star Amy Winehaus to the US for the Grammies, for which she has four nominations. Winehaus' lawyer said she should be able to leave rehab any day now.

Which is of no interest except that it recalled to mind the British government's refusal to admit rapper, hoodlum, and suspected murderer, Snoop Dogg to the United Kingdom in 2006. The immigration minister, Kevin Andrews, made the decision after Snoop Dogg's troubles with the law elsewhere. “He doesn’t seem the sort of bloke we want in this country,’’ he said.

What's Left

Romney dropped out today. With him went the hopes of the Eastern elite Wall-Street-and-banking wing of the Republican Party. Huckabee represents the religious-right wing of the party. (Why do those words go together? Jesus mocked the rich and exalted the poor.) McCain represents the military-jingoist small town narrow-mindedness-as-ideology, laughably called conservatism, the broad mainstream of the party. Ironically he is having trouble with the party faithful for not being conservative enough.

Judging by the California results, Obama represents a bizarre coalition of Black people and wine-and-cheese suburban liberals (some of whose Best Friends Are Black, i.e. the cleaning lady). He carried inflated-real-estate counties like Marin, San Francisco, and San Luis Obispo. Clinton represents a more reasonable coalition of Hispanics and working people generally. She carried counties like Fresno and Los Angeles. Butte County narrowly went for Clinton. Without Orland it was probably an Obama county. In terms of real estate values, living in an Obama county is a sign of having Arrived. Need I mention that proletarian Contra Costa is Clinton country?

Clinton represents Hispanics and people with jobs. Obama represents Blacks and people with careers.

The lumpenpunditariat have been dancing around the apparent dislike of Hispanics for Obama, and making up doofus explanations citing Clinton's "deep ties to the Latino community". By which we are supposed to believe that the vote of a Los Angeles gardener named Martinez is driven by whether Bill Clinton had lunch with Bill Richardson in 1996 or not. I don't think it is.

My guess is that Hispanics are voting against Obama for the converse of the reasons the suburban liberals are voting for him. Prosperous whites do not feel Blacks are any economic competition to them. Hispanics do. Prosperous whites feel guilty about their heritage of slavery and racism. Hispanics drop out of high school before getting that far in their US history textbooks, and anyway it was all a century before they swam the Rio Grande. So they don't feel guilty.

Prosperous whites like affirmative action because it reinforces their sense of superiority in having gotten to the top of the heap without it. Hispanics are conscious that when Blacks get special attention from the government it is affirmative action. When Hispanics get special attention from the government it is deportation. Hispanics like affirmative action for themselves because it compensates them for having to go to school in a foreign language, English. Hispanics hate affirmative action for Blacks because Blacks go to school in their native language, Ebonics. Prosperous whites live far away from Black muggings, break-ins, and assaults. Hispanics do not. Hispanics know that crime should be committed not just by any moron with a shiv, but by joining the street gang of your choice.

Huckabee - McCain

Andrew Jackson was 'Old Hickory'. Zachary Taylor was 'Tippecanoe'. Abraham Lincoln was 'Honest Abe'. The Republican candidates are reminiscent of the saying of foxhole chaplains. They are "Praise the Lord" and "Pass the Ammunition".

I haven't got anything for the Democrats yet. Provisionally they are 'Phoney' and 'Baloney'.

Romney is on the tube now. He is such a mediocre nothing that he is not worth the powder to blow him up. Maybe putting a pillow shaped like one of those stupid styrofoam catcher's mitts over his face would be best.

The War

It is a remarkable feature of this election that in the midst of an unpopular war, the war is all but unmentioned.

Though many, perhaps most, people are viscerally opposed to the war and blame the US for it, the war no longer seems to be a stalemate. The various collections of primitives are beginning to fall into a status quo of some sort, judging by the decline of attacks as against last year. On this calculus, the war is on the way to being won. This is the position of General Petraeus and of George Bush.

On the other hand, the combatants are primitive but not stupid. How great an insight does it take to see that the party of an unpopular president is not likely to win the next election? How great an insight does it take to realize that a wave of attacks after one or the other of the Democratic peace candidates becomes president, will lead to a hasty withdrawal? Why get killed fighting the hated (despised religio-ethnic group) while they are defended from our holy wrath by the American soldiers -- when next year the American soldiers will be gone?

There has been a great deal of quibbling over timetables for withdrawal in both parties (which descended into the worst kind of demeaning petty bickering between McCain and Romney in their last debate) but the mere fact that the two candidates with by far the best chance of being elected are both peace candidates is itself a reliable timetable, declared or not. Not everybody in Iraq is there to commit suicide. Many of them can wait until 2009 to liberate Baghdad from the cowardly (despised religio-ethnic group).

So the defeatist spoutings from the left that the war has mobilized ordinary Muslims to become jihadis against us and that the war is lost, is seen to be false. So too the idea from the right that the decline in attacks means the war is won. I think what we are seeing is neither a defeat nor a victory but a lull pending our elections and the inauguration of the new administration.

Though I admit I know nothing at all about it, the only outcome that could with a straight face be called satsfactory would be if by the time Clinton or Obama is inaugurated and during the timetables for withdrawals each of them has set, the Sunnis can be damaged politically sufficient to permit a stable Shi'ite government. The only outcome that could conceivably be called a victory would be if that government were strong enough to not become an Iranian satellite. Who will actually know and honestly tell us whether that has happened or not?

Which means that unless it is a catastrophic defeat, which isn't likely, we will never know what the outcome of this war actually was.

Closure

The problem with the Superbowl result was that it left the perfect season unperfected. Nobody at all thinks the Giants were the better team. Does affirming the randomness in human affairs make anyone feel better about life? Is randomness better than predictability? Is irrational hope better than tedious certainty? Could we live without hope? Without predictability? Or maybe it was just a football game and the predictability was that there would be terrific commercials. Which there were.

Predictions about the Clinton Presidency

Another thing I predict is that during Hillary's presidency Bill Clinton is going to be caught schtupping some bimbo. It will then be politically impossible for him to continue as an adviser and he will go back to New York. Without him in the White House, her administration will begin to stumble from one ill-advised fiasco to another. If Bill leaves during her first term she probably won't be re-elected. I think he will be caught with a bimbo sooner rather than later.

I further predict that if the main bimbo scandal (there will be several, but one will be more egregious and provable than the others) happens before midterm elections, the Republicans will win control of the House in 2010.

Indeed, no matter what she does she is going to become unpopular when the Iraq War doesn't have the nice clean end the Democrats implied they would be able to deliver. If she withdraws the troops and the al-Maliki government is defeated and replaced by a militantly anti-US one, she will be vastly unpopular. If the bloodshed and fighting in Iraq escalates after she withdraws the troops she will be unpopular. If she does not withdraw the troops and continues to attempt to stabilize and pacify Iraq she will be following the same policy that has made George Bush so unpopular. It will make her unpopular too, but even more so since she has run on being critical of the war.

Even an attempt to fall back to the position that she wasn't against the war per se but only against the incompetence of its prosecution, will fall flat. Bush has been careful to be seen to delegate the conduct of the war entirely to the military. The disingenuousness of Clinton's position will become immediately apparent the moment she is inaugurated. Does she really know better how to conduct a Middle Eastern war than General Petraeus? If her administration were to be seen to meddle in the conduct of the war or to reduce its funding, every casualty thereafter will be treated by the right as though Clinton had personally murdered that soldier.

I would love to believe that Bill Clinton will be able to again perform his miracle of charming the birds from the trees and resolving the war as a special envoy to a settlement conference. The limits of that approach were shown at Camp David when Clinton was unable to get Yasser Arafat to make good on what he had already agreed to at Oslo. With Middle Eastern primitives, charm and intelligence are not enough. Iraq is one tar baby that will not go away.

She will be in an even worse position than George Bush is in now. If the army were able to win the war in the remaining year of his presidency he could justifiably take credit for the victory. If the army were to win the war during her presidency, having run against the war, her claiming credit for the victory would be ridiculous. If her administration took the position, "See, we won where Bush couldn't", the anti-war people would feel betrayed and call her a hawk.

If the war were to be lost during her presidency after she had run against it, she would be politically dead, there and then, and permanently. If there were therafter a terrorist attack against the United States originating from Iraq, she would be impeached.

If she is as unpopular as I expect, the GOP will win control of congress in 2012 in any case. After four years of her administration instinctively reaching for the hardball and the stonewall, the GOP will reply in kind as soon as they have Congress. She may well be the second member of her family to be impeached.

I reiterate that I am not for or against any of this happening. It is just what I expect will happen.

More Italian Grammar

Apparently it is pronounced "Edwards-a".

Italian Grammar and the Florida Primary

What is the past tense of "Giuliani"?

Old News Is Still News

Did you know that Scorpion once observed, "Dysfunctional relationship is a redundancy."?

Why Haven't I Lost Interest in the Campaign Yet?

Because I enjoy each new revelation of as-yet unimagined levels of mendacity.

Various bloggers were described in the NYT as furious with Bill Clinton for having noticed not only that Obama is black but for having so much as implied that voters in South Carolina may have noticed it too. Black voters would vote for a brown paper bag and Clinton had the audacity to hint they would.

Humorously the question put to Jackson was whether he was offended by Clinton having mentioned that he had twice won the South Carolina Democratic primary. Can't get more offensive than that. Jackson, having had Clinton wipe the floor with him politically over the 1992 Sista Souljah remarks about killing cops, chose not to be offended.

In a year Barack Obama will be a half-remembered bump in the road on Bill Clinton's way back to the White House.

Madame President

Barack Obama all but pronounced himself president after winning the South Carolina primary yesterday. He got 55% of the vote. He seemed deaf to the fact that he got 78% of the black vote but only 20% of the white vote. I haven't seen it reported anywhere, but the numbers make it likely that Hillary Clinton got more white votes than Obama did and Edwards about as many.

Bill Clinton showed his political and intellectual superiority by setting out to use Obama's strengths against him. Bill casually observed that Jesse Jackson had won in South Carolina in both 1984 and 1988. Since Jackson never had any chance of winning the nomination let alone the election, that was a persuasive brushing aside of the South Carolina result. Put less politely, Clinton's observation was that any black politician would win the South Carolina Democratic primary, no matter how lame, so it didn't mean anything.

The remark also revealed the contradictory premises Obama is running on. He tells blacks they should vote for him because he's black, and he tells other voters his color doesn't matter, that he's a unity candidate. I think the endlessly shrewd William Jefferson Clinton has thought this through and the Clinton campaign is going to work on defining Obama as a black candidate.

In retrospect, that was the tactical significance over the seemingly idiotic controversy over whether Martin Luther King or Lyndon Johnson brought about the Civil Rights Act. Seen from a national point of view of course it was Johnson. Only from the narrower view of the politics of mobilizing black voters and marchers was it King. Obama fell right into the trap by claiming it was MLK rather than LBJ. Clinton got Obama to define himself as a black candidate, one who can carry South Carolina and no other state, a latter day Jesse Jackson. The white voters of South Carolina just demonstrated that Clinton's strategy is working.

I am sad to have to predict that the Democratic nominee and the next president will be Mrs. Clinton. The Clinton campaign will be more professional and organized, staffed by many of the same people that worked on the last two Clinton campaigns. The inspiration campaign Obama will have to rely on will be less effective. I predict too that if McCain is the GOP nominee, he will be a latter day Bob Dole and suffer the same fate.

I predict also that her presidencies will be the most polarizing and embittering since those of Abraham Lincoln, the most scandal-ridden since Harding. My reason for thinking so is that she has shown such ruthlessness in Democratic party politicsm and such smug self-righteousness, that her instinct will always to be to hardball and to stonewall. If she is the same in national politics, the Republicans will gladly reply in kind. If they regain control of congress in 2010, it is conceivable she will be the second Clinton to be impeached.

Tell Me Again Why I Should Give a Damn About Hollywood Loser Scumbags?

Christian Brando dies at L.A. hospital

By ROBERT JABLON, Associated Press Writer 36 minutes ago

LOS ANGELES - Christian Brando, the troubled eldest son of the late famed actor Marlon Brando, has died from pneumonia at a Los Angeles hospital, an attorney said Saturday. He was 49.
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Brando died Saturday morning at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, said David Seeley, an attorney representing Marlon Brando's estate.

Seeley said Brando was taken to the hospital on Jan. 11. There are no funeral plans yet scheduled, he added.

"This is a sad and difficult time for the family," Seeley said.

Born May 11, 1958, the younger Brando had small roles in a handful of movies, including 1968's "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!" but he was better known for his brushes with the law.

He spent five years in prison after pleading guilty to manslaughter in 1990 for killing his sister's boyfriend, Dag Drollet, at the Brando family's estate.

Brando said he accidentally shot Drollet as they struggled for a gun during an argument over whether Drollet, 26, had beaten Brando's pregnant half-sister, Cheyenne.

Cheyenne, who later gave birth to Drollet's son, committed suicide in 1995 after losing custody. She was 25.

Brando's ex-wife, Deborah Brando, sued him for domestic violence in 2005. She claimed that shortly after their 2004 marriage, Brando repeatedly beat her and threatened to kill her in the presence of her teenage daughter.

Brando countersued, alleging that his ex-wife broke into his home and beat him because he wanted to annul their marriage only 10 weeks after exchanging vows.

The lawsuits were settled last year on undisclosed terms.

Brando was charged Jan. 10, 2005, with two counts of spousal abuse and he pleaded guilty. He was placed on three years' probation and ordered to drug and alcohol rehabilitation as well as a spousal-abuse prevention program.

Brando also was the one-time lover of Bonnie Lee Bakley, who was shot to death in 2001. At one time, Bakley claimed Brando had fathered her child but tests showed it belonged to actor Robert Blake, whom she later married.

Blake was tried for her murder and acquitted but later ordered to pay $30 million in a wrongful death lawsuit. During that civil case, Blake's lawyer suggested Brando was the killer.

Brando, who had denied any involvement, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination on the stand during the trial.

Seeley said Brando was not married at the time of his death and did not leave any children.

Celebrity Confessions

I have relapsed into my addiction. Seven hours of the Australian Open today alone, ending at 3 am. But after Roger Federer beats the crap out of Nadal or whoever else is in the finals with him on Sunday, I will go into rehab. I promise.

What is a recession?

A recession is a smaller, shorter version of a depression. The technical definition is when the Gross Domestic Product declines for two consecutive quarters or longer.

The primary effect on ordinary people is that unemployment rises. The two reasons are that businesses lay people off because the market for their goods and services declines. They also stop hiring. People who have jobs are less secure in their jobs. Those who have secure jobs are less likely to get raises, or they get smaller ones. People are afraid to quit jobs because it may be much harder to get another one. Tax revenues fall so governments other than the Federal government have their budgets shrink and have to cut spending sharply because only the federal government may run a deficit. Counties, cities, and states can't. Since a lot of state spending is already mandated, often for schools and highways, the amount of the rest of the programs and the employees in them is generally cut sharply. Kids graduating fewer job opportunities. Pensions do not rise as fast as prices and have a built-in lag since adjustments are not made until the end of the year in which the price increases occurred. Business profits and investment opportunities shrink so the stock market tanks. (I have lost a quarter of my portfolio since October 11.)

When the unemployment rate goes above 7% (it is about 5% right now) the federal government adds an up-to-13 week extension to the amount of time one can draw unemployment benefits. Overall the nation becomes poorer. In practice that means that the overall cost of living becomes more expensive compared to the total amount of wages and salaries paid in the country. This can happen either by prices rising faster than wages and salaries, or by prices remaining stable while total wages and salaries fall. Because so much of ordinary people's spending is fixed ( i.e. non-discretionary -- rent/mortgage, utilities, insurance, debt payments, medical, etcetera) a relatively small decline in real incomes produces a substantial decline in discretionary spending (going out to dinner, electronic toys, travel, presents, etcetera). Even if the percent decline in real income were the same for rich as for poor, the effect on the poor would be substantially greater because a much larger percentage of our incomes are non-discretionary spending.

In the current environment, it also becomes harder to spend even if one has the money. With their huge loan losses, lenders are going to make qualification standards much stiffer than they were last year so items like new cars and houses will become less available. Overall life becomes a little grayer, a little more limited.

My New Diet an Unexpected Success

Since October I have lost my ass. Unfortunately I lost it in the stock market. My main stock, an ETF (Exchange Traded Fund, i.e. shares based on an index mutual fund) named VXF (Vanguard Extended Market, i.e. the 4500 NYSE stocks not in the S&P 500) was 116 on October 11. This morning it opened at 86. You do the math. For the fraction-impaired, subtract the low number from the high number, divide by the high number, equals down-the-crapper.

The Fed's sharp rate cut this morning reduced what started as a large economic disaster to a moderate one. Still, disaster probably should not be the goal of government policy.

I have lost not only my money but my self-esteem as well. When the market was up, I was giving people pompous investment advice as though I knew what I was talking about. Now I am embarrassed to recall having done that. Sigh.

My other, Wellbutrin-fueled, diet has also had modest success. Since October I have shed a pants size, down from Boy-Are-You-Fat to mere Triple Enormous. Someone actually noticed the change without even being prompted. Needless to say I will cherish that person forever.

Sneak Preview of Brazilian Independent Film

Alice’s House is just what a director’s first film should be – full of both flaws and promise. Several things are wonderful about the movie, foremost among them the luminous lead, Carla Ribas. She gives us a Brazilian reprise of Ann Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson, a compellingly sexually attractive woman of 40-something. The other actors are equally well-cast, well-directed, and persuasive. The writing and filming give us what seems an authentic feel of the daily life of ordinary people in Brazil.

Sadly the editing, and filming are not of the same quality as the casting and acting. The story, a tale of the decay and collapse of a dysfunctional family, may also be a metaphor of Brazilian society. But it is presented as one damned thing after another, with no development of any of the themes or issues raised, like a soap opera, which it eventually comes to resemble. The filming starts with closeup face shots, stays with closeup face shots, and ends with them. When they are shots of Carla Ribas it is hard to object but one soon says, “Enough already!”

Another difficulty is that most of the men are seen as mindless sonsofbitches while most of the women are seen sympathetically though all are equally adulterous and self-seeking. Another reviewer said that if the movie had been made by a woman it would have been dismissed as “shrill”. But political correctness is tedious no matter who the perpetrator is.

Alice’s House shows the downside of making movies with a miniscule budget – the second tier semi-technical people like editors, cinematographers, lighting people, were just not up to the level of the actors and director. For Chico Texeira to have done this good a film with so little support makes me look forward to his next film, which presumably will have more. And if Carla Ribas is reading this, please call me.

Instant Movie Review

I saw 'Juno' over the weekend. Excellent witty dialogue throughout. Good acting. Two thumbs up.

Neat Stuff for Free

I have discovered the menu at upper left in Gmail (Google mail). Among the features there are 'Documents' and 'Calendar'. Documents includes slightly truncated versions of MS Excel, MS Word, and MS their presentation software. The Excel and Word clones contain more or less all the features anyone not working full-time in those applications would ever want. I don't know about the presentation software and don't care.

There are several large advantages the Google version of Office has over the Microsoft version. One is that it is free. MS Office costs $400. Another is that it is online. When your disk crashes, your computer is stolen or lost, or just not where you are, your spreadsheets and Word documents are still readily accessible. They are also password-protected if that matters to you. They are also shareable with anyone with a free Gmail account whom the user specifies. They can be shared as read-only, or shared with permission to edit or delete. The Google word processor also includes the comment feature. In theory one can do all these things with MS Office over a LAN, but in practice security and permissions makes it so cumbersome it never happens. Over the internet it is easy and global.

There is also a Calendar application which does much of what MS Outlook does, but in a better, more relational-database kind of way. I was confused at first that there seemed no way to code different appointments with different colors. I have since figured out that one creates additional calendars, each with its own color, and assigns each appointment to one of the calendars. One clicks the clickbox next to the calendar and it is displayed. Click several and several are displayed. Other calendars like national and Jewish holidays and phases of the moon are provided as well, as in Outlook. As with the other documents, calendars can be made viewable and or editable by specified Gmail users. In theory these sharings are for coworkers or supervisors and underlings. I think the calendar would work best for wives and husbands.

A feature that is not provided in Outlook is the weather calendar. Since at some point or another I must have entered my location, it shows the weather forecast for the next three days as icons of rain or sun. While it is easy to see how they do it, it is still way slick.

There is a bunch of other stuff as well, including 'maps' which is like Mapquest but faster and higher resolution.

Gmail is free but is available only by invitation from a Gmail account holder. One is permitted 50 invitations and the number renews every so often. I think this prevents it from being used as a way to publish spam.

If anybody is interested, write me at jackkessler01@gmail.com and I will invite you.

Dead Pool 2008

Harvey's list

1. Britney-a no brainer
2. Musharif-ditto
3. Dan Rather
4. Dick Cheney
5. Barak Obama
6. O. BinLaden
7. Gloria Steinem
8. Lindsey Lohan
9. Paul Newman
10. Jimmy Carter

Jack's

1. Bhutto - father
2. Bhutto - son
3. John McCain -- especially if the nomination is still undecided after Super Tuesday
4. Keith Richards
5. Jacques Chirac
6. George H. W. Bush
7. O. J. Simpson
8. Peter O'Toole
9. Fidel Castro
10 Muammar Khadafi

Sorry about so many Dying Hulks but I have not gotten many points lately.

Still Dead

In view of the unexpected results in Iowa, no one is talking about the expected results. Biden and Chris Dodd have both bitten the big one, folded their tents, called it a quadrennium and gone home. Sigh.

A More Modest Proposal

In France, any husband who can afford it has a mistress. Any wife who can arrange it has a lover. Everyone knows about it. No one cares. These are often lifelong relationships. Culturally different than the US but not as alien as Muslim polygamy.

Why shouldn't a man have two mistresses and no wife? A woman have two lovers and no husband?

In the United States we have begun to recognize a limited form of marriage called a domestic partnership. Like marriage a domestic partnership is a collection of rights and obligations. It is illegal to have more than one wife or husband. Is it illegal to have more than one domestic partner? Maybe it shouldn't be?

A Modest Proposal

Well here we are. Facing what everyone fears, being alone, dying alone. Yet we can't make our relationships work.

Maybe we should learn from our enemies. Muslims may be a bunch of murderous bastards (they killed Benazir Bhutto yesterday for the crime of being a woman who intended to democratize her country) but I suppose they love their wives and their wives love them. The problem is that they treat their wives, and women generally, like s__t. But what if they didn't? How might polygamy and polyandry work in a free egalitarian society?

If a man could have four wives and love them and cherish them and be bound to them for life, would that be more stable than having only one, as we attempt to do? Could a woman have four husbands and love and cherish them and be bound to them for life?

In the old days it wouldn't have worked because men would have insisted on knowing which children were theirs. But now we have DNA testing that can establish that. And the hot blood of youth would be a problem for competitive young men. Women have their own careers and property so the relationship is no longer inherently unequal as in Muslim societies. For people past fifty it might work. As absurd as it sounds, it is worth trying because what we have now, serial monogamy, is clearly not working.

I have very little real likelihood of having one woman alongside my deathbed. But there is a real possibility I might have four. And I might have a happier life with four wives than with an intermittent series of ones. A woman might be happier with four husbands than with an intermittent series of ones.

If someone has a better idea I would be glad to hear it, but that is the best idea I have been able to come up with so far.

Benazir Bhutto

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto brings to mind John Donne - "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." The collapse of Pakistan into Gaza-like chaos containing nuclear weapons would be a significant disaster for everyone in the world. It is not my custom to distinguish between good Muslims and bad Muslims but I am here obliged to pull in my horns and hope that the less crazy and less maladapted-for-reality Muslims prevail over those more crazy and maladapted.

Routers

Here are the basics. 802.11a was used only by big organizations with their own LAN's. The first consumer wireless routers were 802.11b models which transmitted and received up to 11 Mbps. Then came the current adopted standard 802.11g routers which send and receive at up to 54 Mbps (hence the commercial shorthand of them being '54G' routers). There has been issued RFC 802.11n as a draft standard. RFC stands for Request for Comments. N routers have up to four times the speed and three times the range of 54g routers,

Until a final international standard is adopted there is some risk that any hardware one buys could become obsolete if the adopted standard is so different than the draft standard that the old equipment won't work with the new equipment. The industry is betting that any changes adopted in the finalization of the standard will be minor and peripheral and that their equipment will continue to work. In practice it doesn't matter to you at all. If YOUR receiver will receive YOUR router, what do you care what standard is finally adopted by the industry?

Most computers come with 802.11a/b/g receiving capability built in to them. Recent ones come with 'n' receiving capability built in as well. If your machine does not have a receiver built in, or it receives a lower standard than you want, you will have to buy a separate receiver that will plug either into your USB port or your pc card slot. For reasons of tradition and basic reluctance to use comprehensible English, these plug-in receivers are called 'adapters'.

As to specific makes and models it is good to "ask the man who owns one". The best place to look for this kind of information is the user comments in Amazon.com . Look up the product and read twenty or thirty of the comments and a consensus will appear. I had assumed I would get a Linksys router and that checking the user information was something of a formality. Linksys is made by Cisco, a giant in the industry and thus basically the standard router, providing reliability and utility at a reasonable price compared to its competitors. At least on the 54g routers, On the N routers, the customers were screaming that they just didn't work no matter what they did to configure them. Customer support was inadequate, seemingly because the underlying problem is that the routers are no damn good. The anger and frustration was palpable. Nobody had anything to say one way or the other about the Belkin N routers. They plugged them in and they worked, which nobody found noteworthy.

As to your current router -- if it has one or two antennae on the back it is both wireless and ethernet. If it doesn't it is ethernet only, I know of no way to make an ethernet router into a wireless one, Ethernet (the wire connection using what looks like oversized phone jack connectors at the ends) runs at 100 Mbps, almost twice as fast as 802.11g wireless, but not as fast as 802.11n wireless,

Sadly one is not free to ignore the advance of router speed. Website writers are aware of the speed of most routers and they write websites correspondingly to include ever-bigger files. I suspect the optimum balance between cost and performance is to get the most standard and conventional. My notion is that buying bleeding-edge hardware is probably a waste of money. The N standard not having been adopted yet, it would qualify as bleeding edge. B is outdated and will become more so and is also a waste of money, My suggestion would be to get a Linksys 54G, It's relatively cheap and works with no struggle. If you are connecting a desktop, you can get a pci card receiver-adapter. If the desired receiver is not built in to one's laptop, one can get a receiver-adapter for the USB port or pc card slot as I mentioned above, but almost any current laptop will have at least b and g receivers built in.

Good News on a Small Subject

In a time of war and transformation it is good to know that this week is also the time when Fuyu persimmons are in grocery stores. They are wonderful and are known to cure hunger, scurvy, and lack of persimmons.

Dealing with Death

The Difference

between Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden is that Clinton is nominatable but not electable. Biden is electable but not nominatable.

More Harrassing Larry

Look who's responsible for taking out and dealing with the trash at the hotels. The poorest, least educated, least thoughtful. Go behind a hotel in Norway and you'll see the trash dealt with in some eco-sensitive and expensive way. Which has everything to do with Norwegians being rich, educated, and highly socialized compared to Fijians.

I didn't say anything about how to get from Fijian social and economic conditions (which are actually quite good by third world standards) to Norwegian conditions.

But I think no good argument can be made against the proposition that the incomes of the workers are more likely to rise when the gross national income is rising. It does not follow that our only option is to hope that the workers will get their fair share by trickle down and do nothing else. Measures short of revolution and redistribution by force have been applied by capitalist societies with mixed success for more than a century. And they have always been most successful when the overall economy was growing.

The economic principles of the imperialist societies of a century ago appear to remain valid, but today they are stood on their heads in the application. For example, in 1907 the US and the British Empire wanted influence in China because they hoped to make it a market for their industrial goods. The rivalries among the empires was for overseas markets. The terms of trade were such that the poorer countries always got screwed and their people impoverished by foreign trade.

In 2007 the capitalist countries seek to gain influence by providing (or withholding) access to their own economies as markets for the goods of the poorer countries. The terms of trade are such as to enrich the poorer countries. The obvious example is China and the Tiger economies - Japan, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan. Sometimes, as with OPEC, the relationship is involuntary.

What provokes so much controversy and resistance is that the resulting increase in wealth in the exporting countries is rarely distributed fairly. The resulting development is rarely attractive or socially desirable. In short, the developing countries are in the same situation as the developed ones. Rising wealth is a precondition of increasing incomes and improved living conditions for the workers, but by no means guarantees it.

Even so, opposing growth of national incomes and infrastructure development seems to me to be always and everywhere a mistake. Romanticizing poverty and backwardness is always and everywhere a mistake. What is wanted is fairer distribution and redistribution of wealth, not less wealth. What is wanted is more social controls on development, not less development. This is true both at home and abroad.

More Sexes Stuff

.

Hot Babe puts it to Cool Dude in Public!!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Letter to Larry

Such a pessimist. You won't like hearing this but the solution is right there in front of you. The hotels clean up the garbage because a) their guests have been educated or conditioned not to want crap on the beach, and b) because they can afford to pay to have it done. When everybody in Fiji is as rich and educated as the customers in the hotels, all the beaches will be as clean as the ones in the hotels.

The rest of the solution is in the evolution of our consumerism. My tenant is moving out because I have evicted her and has moved her internet access account to her new address. So I have been shopping for a new provider, either cable or dsl. It will cost something but with the latest and greatest it will be worth it. How much material will I be consuming with it every month? The electronic boxes are small light and an afterthought. The same is true of cellphones and all the ringtones and mpg bullshit that goes with it. The television I got last year has only a fraction of the materials my television had ten years ago. Most of what I paid for is HD which is fancy electronics, not material, and for loser football teams like the 49'ers, which is arguably a service and not a product.

With the decline in the size and material content of our goods the resources needed to transport them will decline as well. We still have to find more efficient ways to transport our ever-burgeoning asses from continent to continent because tourism is a big consumption item among wealthy societies. Education and medical care are also ever bigger items among rich aging populations and neither is natural resource intensive.

In the long run the pressure on the environment comes from low-tech more than from high-tech. We have to get the fuckers (other fuckers) out of their (our) carbon-belching mobiles and into something small light, yes, plastic, and non carbon-emitting. The possible future that does not involve the collapse of the world economy and large scale starvation, is not to go from our current mix of low and high tech to no tech, but to get the whole damned world on the highest of high tech. With luck we should be able to replace the main hardships in human life, want and disease, with bad technical support and failed fashion risks by the end of the century.

Only airheads find the meaning of life in rock song lyrics...

when everybody knows it is in cartoons.

Bangladesh is drowning; 3,000 have died

Millions are homeless. Yet no Israeli emergency relief aid or personnel have arrived. Bangladesh is a Muslim country and they do not permit Jews there. So they have refused aid from Israel.

Moral: Whom the gods would destroy they first make stupid and bigoted so they will deserve what they get.

86 to 9

In last evening's rioting by largely Muslim youth in the Paris suburb of Villiers le Bel, 86 policemen were injured, two severely by gunfire. One lost an eye, the other had his shoulder shattered by a bullet. There were 9 arrests. 9. It may be that it was something like a battle and the police lost. One rarely has time to make arrests while being beaten up. Notably the police responded to live gunfire with tear gas -- for fear of hurting anybody.

Unless France is willing to send representatives to Annapolis to cede Villiers le Bel to the Muslims alongside the Israeli delegation there preparing to cede eastern Jerusalem to them, the police and government will have to do more. One has to hope that when President Sarkozy returns from China tomorrow a more responsive policy will be forthcoming. I think France and the Muslim rioters both deserve one.

Jukebox

Here's a nifty site. It plays a bunch of top 40 tunes from 1950 to 1982, and will play in the background while one is in a different window. The 1950 collection includes the hora 'Tsana Tsana' sung in English.

http://www.tropicalglen.com/

Despicable

Just because his middle name is Hussein, his father was a Muslim, he was raised in a Muslim country, he went to a Muslim school, and his mother kept copies of the Koran around the house, why would anybody think he's a Muslim?

This is like thinking Senator Larry Craig is gay even after he's denied it.

What We've Always Suspected

From the New York Times, Monday 19 November 2007

[Goldman Sachs was the only major Wall Street firm to see the subprime mortgage disaster coming. They positioned themselves to make money on it.]

“There is no mystery, or secret handshake,” said Stephen Friedman, a former co-chairman and now a Goldman director. “We did a lot of work to build a culture here in the 1980s, and now people are playing on the balls of their feet. We just have a damn good talent pool.”

That pool has allowed Goldman to extend its reach across Wall Street and beyond.

Last week, John A. Thain, a former Goldman co-president, accepted the top position at Merrill Lynch, while a fellow Goldman alumnus, Duncan L. Niederauer, took Mr. Thain’s job running the New York Stock Exchange. Another fellow veteran trader, Daniel Och, took his $30 billion hedge fund public.

Meanwhile, two Goldman managing directors helped bring Alex Rodriguez back to the Yankees, a deal that could enhance the value of Goldman’s 40 percent stake in the YES cable network — which it is trying to sell — while also pleasing Yankee fans. The symmetry was perfect: like the Yankees, Goldman, more than any other bank on Wall Street, is both hated and revered.

Robert E. Rubin, a former Goldman head, [and former Secretary of the Treasury] is the new chairman of Citigroup. In Washington, another former chief, Henry M. Paulson Jr., is the Treasury secretary, having been recruited by Joshua B. Bolten, the White House chief of staff and yet another former Goldman executive.

The heads of the Canadian and Italian central banks are Goldman alumni. The World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, is another. Jon S. Corzine, once a co-chairman, is the governor of New Jersey. And in academia, Robert S. Kaplan, a former vice chairman, has just been picked as the interim head of Harvard University’s $35 billion endowment.

This ought to put an end to the myth that Wall Street bankers run the country...

The News from El Cerrito

I have discovered that the chronic backache I have had more or less constantly since I got back has a cause. And it is not just being old and fat. Last night I slept on the floor instead of on my supposedly excellent and firm mattress. This morning I feel, if not good, better, for the first time in weeks.

It is not exclusively age related either. I remember now that I used to sleep either on the floor or on a piece of carpeted plywood in the bed. That was when I lived on La Loma in the 1980's. I was in my late 30's, early 40's, then. I no longer remember what became of the futon I slept on for many years after La Loma. But it is time to either sleep on the floor again or to shop for another futon.

I am so pleased to learn that the rest of my life will not be spent hunched over in pain as this past month has been.

The News from Shanghai

I have been watching the the ATP Masters Tournament in Shanghai. I just saw Rafael Nadal play some of the best tennis I have ever seen anyone play. His serve was consistent, fast and live. His gets were swift, agile, and wide-ranging. His ground strokes were powerful deep, accurate, and varied with all kinds of spins and angles on them. His play at net was quick and impeccable.

Even with all that, to say that Roger Federer wiped the court with him would be to make the match sound closer than it actually was. Federer is universally recognized as by far the best player in tennis, and even so is still under-estimated.

We might still be living in the Space Age, the Computer Age, the American Century, or some such. But it is also the Age of Roger Federer. It is a real joy to watch anybody being that good at anything.

Text from an old GeoCities website - 2001

How I Spent My Summer Vacation
or
Is Zimbabwe the One on the Left?
The solar eclipse of 2001 crossed southern Africa on June 21, the Southern Hemisphere's winter solstice. The viewing site choices were Angola (bloody endless civil war), Madagascar (no roads near path of eclipse), Mozambique (failed Marxist regime clings to power, nothing works), Zambia and Zimbabwe. By impression, Zambia is like Guatemala - the government is stable, but for all the wrong reasons, and is poor, backward and corrupt.

Zimbabwe is to South Africa as Canada is to the US - smaller, socially similar, about equally prosperous and developed, nominally independent. It is a safe and reasonable place to go - or so I thought.

I took my bicycle and camping gear, expecting to tour the country by bicycle. It didn't happen. I assumed that the farm occupations that we had read about during the past year or so would be none of my concern since I don't own a farm. That turned out to be an over-simplification. The farm occupations have been one part of a rising wave of social unrest, manifesting itself not only as farm seizures, but also as demonstrations, occasional riots, assaults, and robberies. Ironically even the wave of violence shows how fundamentally civilized Zimbabwe is - only one person has been killed in a year of unrest.


Even so, there are soldiers, police, and security guards absolutely everywhere. There are frequent police roadblocks and car searches for weapons,which takes some getting used to. Our Fourth Amendment looks pretty good when you've had your car searched by the police without a warrant or probable cause. Anyway, I chickened out and decided to tour by rented car.

Bad Stuff about Zimbabwe
By standard definitions, unemployment has reached 50% (although of course there is marginal employment which mitigates the rate), a one party government which has won every parliamentary and presidential election since independence, vast disparities in wealth between the suburban middle class and the working class, at least as great disparities between town and country. Suburbanites drive SUV's, use cellphones, shop at malls, have three car garages and servants. Suburban Harare would look familiar to folks from Marin County, except for three quarters of the faces being black. The working class suburb of Chinowidze would make residents of East Oakland wish they were home. Zimbabwe now has the highest reported rate of HIV infection in the world. Life expectancy has fallen to 27 years. Population growth has fallen to zero in spite of a staggeringly high birth rate. Every woman in the country has a baby on her back. The currency is not convertible and all tourist prices are also quoted in US dollars. There is almost no foreign currency reserve left and everyone is blaming someone else for it. Almost no one seems interested in the most likely culprits: inflation and a fixed exchange rate. Rural areas lack electricity, running water, sewer lines, telephone, and the roads are unpaved and poor.

Good Stuff about Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe is pleasant and still prosperous. The Shona and Matabele people are friendly, polite, and have missionary school manners. The police appear honest and the judicial system is apparently real and honest as well. There are schools, particularly vocational schools, everywhere. Medical care is widespread and free. I saw no one who appeared hungry nor anyone in rags. Rural housing is the traditional round one-room houses with thatched rooves, but everyone seems to have one, possibly because the government provides that they will. There is endless thievery but apparently little violence, at least now that the police, army, and guards are everywhere. The roads are excellent (albeit lacking shoulders for bicycling) and there is regular bus service everywhere. There seems to be high levels of literacy throughout the country, including in English which is the national language, as well as Shona and Ndebele. There is substantial light industry which produces most ordinary consumer goods. Most of what one buys in a supermarket is both grown in Zimbabwe and processed or canned there. Clothing and most small household objects are manufactured there. When they get past this period of instability, Zimbabwe will again be a fine place to go.

The Debate

Interestingly the best Democratic debaters were Kucinich, Obama, and Biden. Biden looked good because he knew what he was talking about. Kucinich looked very good because he has the radical's advantage of being consistent and having been consistent, and having to make no fine distinctions. Obama sounded good because he looks good. More than the others he looks and sounds presidential.

The debate was skewed by the Clinton campaign having succeeded in packing the hall with Clinton partisans.

There was an electrifying moment during the exchange over the payroll tax which is currently paid against only the first $97K of income. Obama wants to remove the cap. Clinton opposed removing the cap. She said it would be a trillion dollar increase on the middle class. Clinton having sounded the clarion in the night by saying the word "class" - Obama said that only 6% of Americans make more than $97K. He said that those 6% are the upper class, not the middle class.

So we have a choice of a schwartze from Harvard, a Yenta from Wellesley, a Carolina Gomer , a rich greaseball banker, a Cleveland Bolshie, a Connecticut alte kocker, and Joe Biden.

The Good Life

So I get a couple of 24-ouncers, one for each half, and a roast beef sandwich. I discover that my fancy television can get the 49er game in HD, which is actually pretty good. I turn it on, am impressed with the picture, the beer, and the sandwich. But in spite of all the makings of a fine Monday Night at home, I discover two things are missing -- the offense and the defense. Steve Young shows up to save the day, but now he is an announcer. The Niners go on to tie a league low for fewest first downs. The only cheers from the stands are the fans yelling, "Feh!"

The Faithful are back to the time the local eleven received the kickoff in the first play of the first game of the season, fumbled, and had the visitors run it back for a touchdown. Whereupon Herb Caen reported the earliest ever cry of "Wait 'til next year!" Sigh.

More About Joe Hill, er, Biden

Senator Biden, the only candidate in either party who seems to know his tokhas from second base about foreign policy is polling a solid 3 to 5 percent of Democrats. Right now he would lose in Iowa to Osama bin Laden. But if I can root for the 49'ers, I can root for Biden. If Obama were arrested in a men's room, Hilary were to use the N' word, and Edwards were to defend OJ, Biden would have a shot.

It Isn't?

Contrary to my prior impression, I have just learned that Cunnilingus is NOT a village in Ireland.

The Trouble with Outsourcing

I was depressed last night so I called Lifeline.

Got a call center in Pakistan.

I told them I was suicidal.

They got all excited and asked if I could fly a plane.

Sound of Penny Dropping

Reading the Washington Post in preference to the New York Times is starting to pay off. I read about the disaster with sub-prime mortgages and finally got it. I suppose what is happening was clearer to others but I finally have been let in on the news.

I had assumed that the problem was that there had been so many defaults and foreclosures. That is not the problem. The problem is that there are still so many mortgages, millions, out there in homeowner land with built-in interest rate resets scheduled to reset soon. The problem is that we have an absolute guarantee that there are going to be far more defaults and foreclosures in the near future.

Some are merely adjustables which transfer the risk of interest rate fluctuation from the lender to the borrower. These the Federal Reserve Board has tried to protect by lowering interest rates with two consecutive rate cuts so that the index rates on which they are based will stay low. They have made these cuts by risking inflation in the overall economy exactly when overall inflation pressures are mounting.

As the dollar sinks, the prices of imported goods, particularly oil, will rise. Domestic goods sellers, faced with reduced price competition from foreign goods will raise their prices too. So the Federal Reserve, faced with the risk of inflation by adding interest rate cuts to other inflationary pressures, and the risk of millions of additional defaults and foreclosures, has chosen to risk the inflation rather than the foreclosures.

[I know well how this works and how it feels. But I was lucky enough to have got an adjustable mortgage in the 1990's, an era of declining interest rates. I refinanced to a fixed at a low rate just as I had hoped I someday would. My strategy has always been to rely on dumb luck.]

Other mortgages reset to higher rates automatically just with the passage of time. These are not transferring risk, they are closer to outright fraud. People are able and encouraged to buy a house, i.e. a mortgage, with interest rates of 4% or 3%. How they will pay 7%, 8%, or 11% in two, three, or five years is left up to "somehow" and "we'll think about it then" or "maybe we will be able to refinance later".

The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, has proposed to Congress that the government fund the hoped-for refinances in a variety of ways. With pressures from the banking industry pushing in ways that people with souls can't even imagine, and an election coming up, there is no knowing what Congress will do. But too little too late would be a good bet.

This you call Yiddish humor?

Morris returns from a long business trip and finds out that his wife
has been unfaithful during his time away.

"Who was it!!!???" he yells. "That alta kakker Goldstein?"

"No," replied his wife. "It wasn't Goldstein."

"Was it Feldman, that dirty old man?"

"No, not him."

"Aha! Then it must have been that idiot Rabinovich!"

"No, it wasn't Rabinovich either..."

Morris was now fuming. "What's the matter?" he cried. "None of my
friends are good enough for you?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A Doctor was addressing a large audience in Tampa .

"The material we put into our stomachs is enough to have killed most
of us sitting here, years ago. Red meat is awful. Soft drinks corrode
your stomach lining. Chinese food is loaded with MSG. High fat diets
can be disastrous, and none of us realizes the long-term harm caused
by the germs in our drinking water.

"But there is one thing that is the most dangerous of all, and we all
have, or will, eat it. Would anyone care to guess what food causes the
most grief and suffering for years after eating it?"

After several seconds of quiet, a small 75-year-old Jewish man in the
front row, raised his hand and said, "Vedding Cake?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Miriam was dying and on her deathbed, she gave final instructions to
her husband Sidney.

"Sidney , you've been so good to me all these years. I know you never
even thought about another woman. But now that I'm going, I want you
to marry again as soon as is possible and I want you to give your new
wife all my expensive clothes."

"I can't do that, darling," Sidney said. "You're a size 16 and she's only a 10."

The Problem with Joe Biden

The problem with electing Joe Biden is the same as with selecting a doctor. I don't know squat about medicine so how am I to know which doctor is more competent? Here's a quote in which Senator Biden mocks Rudy Giuliani:

Rudy was saying that Clinton and Obama weren't qualified on foreign policy. And here's a man who several months ago said, in a public statement reported in the New York Times, 'I don't know who's further ahead on nuclear weapons, Iran or Korea.'

Senator Biden annihilated Giuliani as having no foreign policy credentials whatever while walking down a street eating a sandwich. Film here

I am retired and have plenty of time to waste reading newspapers so I happen to know why that is a devastating remark i.e. that Giuliani didn't know the United States, China, Japan and several other countries have been working hard for months to pressure North Korea not to sell nuclear technology to Iran. People engaged in more useful pursuits are unlikely to have any clue what Biden is talking about. So Giuliani leads in the polls and Biden is a lame fourth.

One of the major problems of a democracy is that the people are generally ill-informed. And even when we are informed, we are generally a bunch of numbnuts with poor judgment. So we wind up voting for a woman because she is woman, a black because he is a black, or somebody from our home state for no particular reason at all.

The Debate

I caught the second half of the Democratic debate. Lest the discussion focus on the war, Iran, health care, taxes, illegal immigrants and other boring crap, the moderators asked Dennis Kucinich whether he had seen a UFO. Kucinich attempted to charm his way out of it but acknowledged having seen one and said it was a powerful emotional experience. So the idiot moderators asked the other candidates if they believed in UFOs too. The next guy was a deer in the headlights, knowing that according to some poll, 14% of the public/voters claim to have seen one, enough to turn a narrow win into a landslide defeat. Obama had the presence of mind to say that he believed in life on earth and that children and old people need health care and blah blah blah -- i.e. it was a stupid question.

Hillary made a fool of herself by contradicting herself on the subject of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants and Obama and Edwards both jumped on her for doubletalk. It appeared from the post-debate chatter that she had contradicted herself eariler as well. It appeared that Hillary lost and Edwards, Obama, and Biden won.

In a post-debate interview Biden said that he was the only Democrat with foreign policy qualifications and the only qualified Republican was John McCain. He also said that Giuliani constructed every sentence with a noun, a verb, and 9-11.

Further Language Rectification

A headline/link to an article in the New York Times today:

Memories of Obama in New York Differ
By JANNY SCOTT

Some say that Barack Obama has taken some literary license in portraying the time he spent in Manhattan.

Could it be that the difference between "memories differing" and "taking literary license" on one side, and "lying" on the other, is being a major Democratic Party candidate?

But let no one suspect the New York Times of twisting the news because of any liberal or Democratic Party partisanship. Their slanting partisanship is nowhere near so broad. The Flagship of the Dailies has reduced itself to a mouthpiece for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

60 Minutes interview of President Sarkozy

Just great. Leslie Stahl deliberately pissed off the first pro-American President of France in more than 30 years by asking him stupid questions about his personal life. Sarkozy quite justifiably took off his microphone and walked off the stage.

Leslie Stahl was arrogant and offensive. We can only hope that Sarkozy will be thick-skinned enough to dismiss her as the trivial minded twit she has shown herself to be. One hopes that CBS will attempt to salvage some shred of its credibility by dismissing her as well. I think the very least that can be expected of CBS management, beside the dismissal of Stahl, is to publicly apologize to President Sarkozy for the uncouthness of their former employee.

Disorder Spreads in Pakistan

After frequent fighting in Waziristan, fighting has now broken out in the less known region of Swat. Apparently there is no agreed-on successor to Babe Ruth.

Prediction

The movie "Lions for Lambs" has Robert Redford in its credits, hence it will be defeatist propaganda. Like Mammy Yokum, "Ah has spoken!"

Beatings on TV

In the various unarmed gladiatorial contests on television there seems to be a fixed rule that the fighter with the lighter complexion is the one that gets knocked out. Thank G_d for firearms.

The Piano

In the movie 'The Piano' every single character is vulgar, self-demeaning, and varies between unlikeable and despicable. It is hard to see what anyone liked about it. Like its characters, its pompous symbolism, and its story, it is a wretched piece of crap. Other than that I liked it. Feh.

Politics in a Nutshell

Senator Joe Biden seems to be the only candidate running on the premise that the American public are not idiots, and that progressive domestic policies do not therefore have to be accompanied by a defeatist foreign policy. Unfortunately, judging by the polls, he appears to be wrong.

Sensible of Sensuousness

Anybody with access to Comcast On Demand movies, Netflix, or to a really good video store, should consider the Emma Thompson-Kate Winslett-Hugh Grant version of 'Sense and Sensibility'. Hugh Grant is a good technical actor. When his Mr. Ferrars is supposed to be covered with embarrassment and confusion, Mr. Grant credibly appears covered with embarrassment and confusion. Kate Winslett, as Marianne, is also. But she is so luminously beautiful, especially in the opening sequences, that one doesn't care what she does so long as they leave the camera on her. Emma Thompson however is more than just technically good. She gives us an Eleanor Dashwood who is both credible and moving. She is superlative. Even her being seemingly a little too old (36 when the movie was made in 1995) is perfect because it emphasizes that she has, as her in-laws privately say of her, become a spinster. Losing Ferrars is losing not just her love, but her last chance for a decent life.

Everything about the cinematography is lush and beautiful, from Winslett's face to the grounds and interiors of the aristocratic estates. I don't know who is responsible for getting horses that are big, beautiful, and high-stepping, but even details like that were splendid.

There are so many fine performances by lesser-known and unknown actors that one has to attribute them to the director, Ang Lee. I confess that I supposed at the time that Ang Lee was a fad, ballyhooed because he was an exotic, Hollywood affirmative action. But this film proves otherwise. The movie moves along at just the right pace. Having read the book long ago, and only dimly remembered it, it was so much better to see the whole thing done in two hours on the screen.

It is paradoxical that Jane Austen's novels, arguably the best written in English, are also Chick-Lit up the wazoo. Which suggests that excellence matters more than form or audience. The notion that only literature about black people can be meaningful to African Americans, or about Hispanics meaningful to Hispanics, is belied by the persuasiveness and freshness of 'Sense and Sensibility' to non-19th century English gentry spinsters.

Afternote -- It turns out that this movie is not some hidden gem which I alone had the taste and luck to discover. It won a 1996 Oscar for best screenplay adapted from another medium, and was nominated for 6 others - best actress, best supporting actress, best cinematography, best costumes, best music, and best picture. The adaptation of Jane Austen was done by Emma Thompson.

This was as good a way to kill two hours as I have seen in a while.

Impossible

According to articles in both the 'New Yorker' and the 'Manchester Guardian', we ought not to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities because it wouldn't work. Both publications stated unequivocally that there was no way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. The American article said that only negotiation would work. Nothing was mentioned about the fact that the present talk of bombing arises precisely from the failure of negotiations. The British article, writing with even less sense of the possible skepticism of readers, went on to say the United States should, "accept defeat".

The Israeli government, perhaps not having access to Hebrew translations of these august publications, apparently did not get the message.



Satellite imagery of a suspected nuclear facility in Syria collected on August 10, 2007, left, and October 24.

Amnesty International

has published a report condemning the arbitrary arrests and disappearances by Hamas and Fatah of hundreds of their opponents in Gaza and the West Bank. Apparently Amnesty International's concern stems from the fact that the victims of these Palestinian murders weren't Jews.

New Vocabulary Project - Restoration of Words

If everytime one heard the word "diversity", it registered as "fragmentation", would it still be a good thing?

New Vocabulary Project

We need a new vocabulary for our new era. In 1984 George Orwell gave us the word and concept of 'Newspeak', the language in which one could only speak in praise of Big Brother and in which there was no vocabulary in which to form thoughts of resistance or rebellion. Various dialects of 'Newspeak' are spreading continually through the media and the population in general.

My contribution is a word for the mental process corresponding to Newspeak. It is crapthink. I have the copyright to it but it is available as a free download.

I call on my thousands of readers to contribute their own new words for the new millennium to this blog.

Movie Stars

Well actually moving stars. NASA has a java software online that shows where and when to look for the International Space Station and a bunch of other stuff. http://spaceflight1.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/JavaSSOP.html

Movie

All the News That's Fit to Print

Today the big news is that Joe Torre has rejected the Yankees' offer of $5 million to manage the team in 2008. Google's profit was up 54%. Deborah Kerr died at 86. Judge Mukasey was questioned by a Senate committee during his confirmation hearings as Attorney-General. John McCain campaigned in South Carolina.

Did anything else happen? Oh yeah, 108 people were killed in Pakistan in bombings which were an attempt to assassinate Benazir Bhutto. As if that mattered.

A Global Marshall Plan?

One of the ideas that has been floating around lately, particularly on the left, is that of a Global Marshall Plan, a pouring out of money to redeem the poor countries from their crushing poverty.

The US has been running huge federal budget deficits. Our balance of payments is in even larger deficit. Which means vastly more dollars are going overseas than are coming back through trade. The dollar has declined from the Euro being 88 cents to it being $1.43 today. Sterling has risen from $1.38 a few years ago to $2.05. The Canadian dollar has risen from 68 cents to $1.03. It is generally acknowledged that the reason things are not much, much worse than they already are is that Japan and China are subsidizing us by buying huge amounts of dollar-denominated debt. If there comes a time when the Chinese and Japanese governments decide that it is just too costly to keep acquiring more and more rapidly-depreciating dollars, the plunge could become rapid and dramatic.

If the dollar collapsed to its true value against foreign currencies, the effects in the US would be disastrous. Inflation and interest rates would soar. Government spending would be slashed to minimize the inflationary effects of the deficit. State budgets, which do not have the option of running deficits, would be slashed even more.

I hardly need say on whose shoulders the resulting economic distress and dislocation would fall most heavily. The social effects from government spending cuts alone would be greatly reduced education budgets, health care spending would be cut, income transfer programs like AFDC would be gutted, government hiring would shrink to a trickle. The private economy effects would be even worse. Unemployment (which is already much higher than officially acknowledged) would soar. Mortgage lending, already reduced, would stop. Any remaining hope that working people could buy their own homes would vanish. With ever larger numbers of people unemployed, again I hardly need say which segments of the working people would suffer most severely.

With greatly increased unemployment would come all the social vices that beset the poorest among us. Drug dependency, prostitution, wife-beating, crime, dropping out of school, mental illness, preventable illnesses, infant mortality, homelessness, violence, would all increase sharply. At the same time government programs to address these problems would shrivel for lack of funding. White perceptions of the ghetto and barrio would lead to a hardening of racial attitudes. The gains of two generations of social amelioration could be reversed and wiped out within a few years. With rising unemployment and social distress, the pressure on Congress and the Administration for mass deportations would grow until it became irresistible.

Paradoxically there would be winners. Those of us with large fixed rate mortgages would make out handsomely. Another winner would be the Defense Department. For all the flag-waving about what heroes the soldiers are, one of the main reasons for enlisting is unemployment. Part of the reason the army cannot now realistically plan on invading Iran is that they can't get the manpower for it because the unemployment rate is relatively low. If the dollar were to collapse and interest rates and unemployment to rise relentlessly, the services would be able to enlist all the man- and womanpower they wanted. Even worse, faced with the alternative of deportation to a progressively impoverished Mexico, many illegals would seek citizenship by enlisting. Our armies would become in effect mercenaries. Once the public came to realize that a large fraction of our soldiers were foreign mercenaries, public sensitivity to the army taking casualties would diminish. With more boots on the ground and less concern about casualties, the military options open to Washington would multiply.

The post-World War II Marshall Plan was financed out of the vast balance of payments surpluses the United States, with the only large industrial economy not devastated by wartime bombing and invasion, enjoyed. As people our age may recall, the dollar was huge when we went to Europe until the early 1970's.

None of that is any longer the case. A global Marshall Plan is indeed a wonderful and even necessary idea. But it is US-centric thinking to suppose that we should lead it. We would be risking economic collapse to attempt it. The countries which should do it are those which are in the economic position the United States was in after World War II, those with strong currencies and large balance of payments surpluses. The countries in that situation are the European Union, Japan, China, Britain, and Canada. I was in Canada all this past summer and saw that the subject is already being discussed with some seriousness in influential magazines like McLean's.

What I want to be when I grow up

A moment's excitement here in this dullest of all suburbs. I smelled a kind of nasty electrical smell and thought about opening a window when I heard the sirens. When I went outside, the street was full of fire engines and firefighters and long canvas hoses. It was the next house but one to mine. Close enough to be exciting, not close enough to be dangerous. I saw a short muscular-looking man put an oxygen tank on his back, a huge axe on his waist, and a classic fireman's helmet on his head. He then walked determinedly into the building. I was stunned. It was one of those moments when you see something that you have always known about but never actually seen before, and in seeing it one understands it in a whole new way. Except for the oxygen tank the scene was a cliche seen in one form or another since pictures in first grade readers. The only thing missing was the Dalmatian dog.

But in seeing it, I realized the man was walking into a burning building when the only sane thing to do is to run out. Surely the man is well-paid but I am not sure that is all there was to it. I think that a lot of his purpose was to maintain his status among his comrades, but another large part was that he was doing his social duty. I suppose if I had stopped him and asked why he was walking into the building, he would have said something like, "It's my job." and, "We can't just let people's houses burn down, can we?" Which would translate as, "It's my duty." and, "It's my social duty." I may have been idealizing, but the combination of cojones and rectitude was impressive.



Bob White rejoins:

That fireman could walk into tht building with confidence that he would come out, not because he was brave, which he may have been, or idealistic, which he also may have been, but because he was well trained. He knew what to expect, he knew how to handle the situation. When I was in the Navy I worked at a firefighting school on treasure island. We would set fires in steel structures simulating a fire in a ship at sea. At first the students would freak out at the raging flames and me and another lowlife worker would have to go in and put out the fire. We became pretty good at it and eventually so did the students.

True, unexpected things happen and firemen do get killed, but for the most part they do a well-trained job with confidence in their training

How Noble is the Nobel Prize?

Wouldn't we all think better of Al Gore getting the Nobel Peace Prize if Yasser Arafat hadn't won it too? Which is not to take anything away from Gore, just from the Nobel Prize committee. They are no more able to see beyond journalism and political fashion than anyone else. I once made it a project to read all the works which had won Nobel Prizes for literature. I was forced to give it up because so many were worthless and unreadable.

This year's runaway best seller which critics agree is the greatest thing since movable type, a generation later is a waste of binding and paper. One cannot even fault the Nobel Prize committee for not being able to know which books will still be read a century later and which will be forgotten. Nobody else can do it either. F. Scott Fitzgerald, arguably the best American writer of the 20th Century, won nothing, possibly because he died so young. Neither did Aldous Huxley, or George Orwell. Possibly they were omitted because the committee was busy honoring Gao Xingjian, Jose Saramago, Elfriede Jelinek, Imre Kertesz, Dario Fo, Wislawa Szymborska, and a variety of other writers no one had heard of before and no one has heard of since.

Orwell is a more interesting omission. A writer who criticized Communism and Communists from the perspective of a veteran of the Spanish Civil War was not likely to be acceptable in then-socialist and still-politically correct Sweden.

Freaks in Underwear

When is the last time you saw someone 7 feet tall? Have you ever seen anyone 7 feet tall? They are vanishingly rare. Yet the the NBA rests on the premise that that minuscule minority just happen to be the best and most watchable athletes in the world. Curiously no 7 footers are able to get into professional baseball, professional football, professional tennis, professional soccer, nor any Olympic sport.

Simple statistics suggests that athletes recruited from a tiny group cannot be very good. If it were a requirement that every professional baseball player could only be recruited from the population of one small town, how good those teams be? Is there a reason why a team recruited only from Chico will never beat the Yankees? The only conclusion one can draw is that the NBA is a bush league.

An intrinsically mediocre winter sport is made even duller by interminable playoffs that stretch into June.

What can be done? One step that would change everything for the better would be to put the fences 700 feet from home plate. Whoops! Wrong rant. If the basket were two or three feet higher so that nobody could dunk, it would favor faster players who have the eye-hand coordination to throw the ball through the hoop while running. To avoid the game becoming even duller by reducing everybody's shooting percentage, the hoop, while higher, would also be larger. The angular width of the target would remain the same from most of the court.

There would still be advantages for big men. There is no getting away from the advantages of being tall and having long arms when guarding another player. But the advantages of height would be only on defense. Offense would require athletic ability.

The advantage of speed and eye-hand coordination, i.e. athletic ability, over height would be enhanced by changing the 3 point shot into a 5 point shot. The game would no longer be about shooting from as close to the basket as possible for a layup or tip-in. It would become about getting as close to the 5 point line as possible. One big advantage, aside from favoring normal-sized human beings, would be to expand the shooting area to a large circumference around the court. With a large shooting area, it might become a possible strategy to pass the ball other than just getting it to the Big Man under the basket. This would again favor fast coordinated players over freakishly tall ones.

Another change that would improve the game would be to penalize players who consistently miss free throws by taking them out and shooting them. This is equivalent to baseball players being able to successfully run to first base unopposed only 50 percent of the time.

These reforms would vastly improve basketball. It would however remain a boring stupid game with nothing to recommend it except requiring less real estate than other team sports. The solution to this problem would be to reverse the system of selecting extraordinarily large players in favor of breeding extraordinarily small players only a few inches tall who would be able to play tackle football on grassed-over basketball courts.

Stayed tuned for future issues in which Jack reforms miniature golf and pingpong....

A Modest Proposal

In the midst of the playoffs and upcoming World Series, is it too topical to suggest a reform of the National Pastime?

To come to the point - home runs are bush league. Home runs are boring. When the ball goes over the fence it goes out of play. Baseball is about throwing, catching, fielding, baserunning, and hitting. None of that happens after the ball goes over the fence. Even the hitting stops because there is no one on base afterwards.

They are also inflated in value. A run composed of beating out an infield hit, stealing second, getting to third on a sacrifice bunt, and coming home on a fly ball counts no more than one composed of some steroid junkie swinging once. A ball hit over the fence is even valued the same as an inside-the-park home run, the greatest feat in baseball. But which one is more like a competitive sport? After a home run, the moron who hits it actually trots rather than runs around the bases. Everybody else just stands around. What could be a more explicit demonstration of how dull a home run is? Home runs are not play, they are a stop in play. Home runs enable big strong guys to beat good baseball players at baseball.

I once thought that ballparks should be made so big that nobody could hit home runs. Push the fences out to 500 or 600 feet. But that would put the bleacher fans too far way to see the game. Worse, it would have required rebuilding or replacing all the ballparks. There would have been a transition while some of the parks had been converted and some had not. No possible way for that to happen.

A spiffier and more accessible way to do it would be to change the rules. The rule now is that if a ball lands fair and bounces over the fence it is what used to be called a 'ground rule double'. I heard an announcer recently refer to one as a 'rulebook double'. I don't know the reason for the change but it might be that nobody could think of what a ground rule is. The reason for the rule is clear enough. To hit the ball that far and have it fall in fair means that one got a substantial hit. That it went over the fence means that the fielder cannot reach it to throw it back to keep the runner from advancing any further. Since it would be unfair and disproportionate to let the runner advance unlimitedly all the way to home just because the ball is inaccessible, the runner is held to a double. It is hard to think of any part of that logic that does not apply to a ball hit over the fence as well as one that bounces over it.

A ball hit over the fence could be treated as an out or as a foul ball but that would be to go from over-valuing it to under-valuing it. Hitting the ball as hard and far as possible is an integral part of baseball, it just isn't all of baseball.

If a ball hit over the outfield fence were a rulebook double it would advance a runner on first base to third, and one on second or third would score. A triple would be a more valuable hit than a ball hit over the fence because it is harder to do. A slow runner cannot hit a triple. A beer barrel can hit a ball over the fence. A bases-loaded triple could drive in three runs, rulebook double a maximum of two.

This rule change would end the current scandal of some 240 pound putz with a beer belly batting fourth and commanding tens of millions of dollars while some medium-sized fast kid who can field, throw, and hit, bats eighth or never comes up from the minors at all.

Even with exactly the same players, if batters were not swinging for the fences there would be fewer strikeouts, more hits, and more men on base. There would be more playing of baseball. If pitchers were not constantly having to deal with the possibility of home runs they could throw more strikes so there would be fewer walks and more hits. With fewer bad pitches, at-bats would be shorter and games would move along more briskly. Instead of the three-and-a-half or four hour "is the paint dry yet?" marathons we get now, games would be over in two or two and half hours. Which would make possible the revival of the now old-fashioned doubleheader, two games the same day.

It would also end the over-valuing of a handful of players, the home run hitters, and level the playing field as it were. It would also get rid of the game played for the single grandiose gesture. Instead of one batter hitting a home run off one pitcher to decide the game, there would be more emphasis on playing cooperatively as a team. Getting rid of the home run would therefore make an end to prima donna stars. We would never have to endure a schmuck like Barry Bonds again.

A Step Too Far

According to the news bite on Yahoo, the Olmert cabinet is considering conceding part of Jerusalem to the Arabs. It has long been my custom to never express opinions other than privately on questions of Israeli politics. As Americans we have a duty to support Israel as a friendly country. As citizens of a world power we also have a concomitant duty not to interfere in the internal politics of a smaller ally.

But my 'hands off' commitment is overwhelmed by the concession of any part of Jerusalem.

Has conceding Gaza worked? Is there not some part of the process where the world can consider not only what the Arabs want but what the Jews want? How many times do they have to be shown that mollifying Arab demands brings more demands, not peace? How many Arab declarations of intent to destroy Israel will it take for the Israelis to understand that they mean it? How many times does the galut mentality "If we're nice to them they'll like us" fantasy have to be proven wrong for Jews to stop trying it? If they keep winning, why do they keep surrendering? Will the package include dropping "v'Yerushalaim" from HaTikvah? Olmert has to go.

Torture and Family Values

One of the interrogation techniques that has come under scrutiny as a possible form of torture is head-slapping. If head-slapping is torture we will have to imprison pretty much every Italian, Black, Eastern European, and Hispanic father in the country.

A head-slap usually accompanied by,"Stupido!", is considered almost affectionate. It IS chauvinist though. I have never seen a girl get her head slapped. Mothers, when provoked, will face-slap just about anyone.

I'm Back

I don't know who if anyone reads these maunderings but they are about to resume after a three month hiatus. I returned home Sunday from my summer wanderings in the North. I will be again filling these pages with my carryings on. Stay tuned.

NOW they tell me....

A little tiny ENORMOUS fact about the war that seems to have gone unmentioned until now is that, while Iraq is lousy with oil, none of it is in the Sunni areas.

Which means that a postwar partitioned Iraq, or even a loosely federal Iraq, will leave the Shi'ites and Kurds with the prospect of becoming rich, and the Sunnis with an economy of which the main export will be poverty.

So the only acceptable scenario for the Sunnis is a strong centralized government. The Iraqi experience of strong centralized governments has been that they divide society into the Ins and the Outs, where being an Out is both impoverishing and dangerous. So the Sunni objective is for a strong centralized government - which they control.

The Sunnis are fighting for a future in which they have oil and power, as in the past. The alternative is that they will have neither. In practice, if the Sunnis have the power, they will have the oil revenues too.

If there were oil in every part of Iraq, there might still be fighting over allocation of more or less. Because there is no oil in the Sunni areas, the fight is all or nothing.

This is compounded by the fact that the Shi'ites have historically been a subject class to the Sunnis, so a democracy dominated by the majority Shi'ites has overtones of a servile revolt, of the unwashed servant class taking over.

Since there is no politically acceptable discourse except Islam which openly denies the desirability of democracy, that is what the Sunni claim to be fighting for.

After all this time, we find out that it really is all about oil, just as the naysayers said at the very beginning. But that was before the war degenerated from an invasion, which was not about Iraqi oil, into a civil war, which is. It may now be degenerating still further into a generalized melee without clear sides or issues. If it does, the next stage should be a form of warlordism as emerged in Afghanistan after the war against the Soviets degenerated into melee.

As Gilda used to say -- "Never Mind"

I.I.T.S. or 'It Isn't That Simple' is the rule which dominates and informs one's attempts to understand the world.

The problem with human-induced global warming is that it is fast, all but instantaneous in geological, and more importantly in evolutionary timescales. If it came into effect over a period of several tens of millions of years during which new species could evolve to replace and more than replace old ones as they became extinct, then I would have been right. As the tropical forests expanded, the new species in them would outnumber the temperate and arctic species becoming extinct because of the same climatic change.

But extinction can be quick. Evolution cannot. The timescale of human-induced climate change is in decades, not eons.

Few things that happen on earth are of any lasting effect. Mountain ranges comes and go, seas cover the land and then recede, dams block rivers for a geological instant and are then swept away, glaciers cover the land then melt.

Extinctions are an exception. Once the last condor, red-legged tree frog, smokey leopard, or blue whale bites the big one, it stays that way permanently. Extinctions are the natural course of things and are not to be feared nor even complained of -- IF and only IF they are balanced by an equal or greater rate of speciation, of the creation of new species.

That is not happening with current human-caused extinctions and it surely won't happen with global warming induced extinctions. So global warming, by my reasoning and values, actually is the catastrophe everyone says it is.

Further thoughts on Global Warming

As much to be a pain in the ass as for any other reason, I am beginning to wonder, just wonder mind you - not conclude, whether global warming might not be a good thing.

During most of the time since the Cambrian (the past 545 million years) the earth has been both much warmer than it is now and has had much higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. For the past 60 million years the temperature has been declining and the climate getting drier. (According to a graph I saw at the Denver Museum of Science and a botany textbook I just finished.) The only time in the past half-billion years that has been colder was a brief episode in the Permian period, at the end of the Palaeozoic. Shortly (if a few million years can be called "shortly") after the Permian cold period, 70 percent of aquatic species and 95 to 97 percent of land species became extinct. The Permian Event dwarfed the K-T Event 66 million years ago that extinguished the dinosaurs but did away with far fewer species.

The actual operation, I posit, is that declining temperatures progressively shrank the tropical forests until they vanished. Most of the temperate areas shrank too. I think that is how the Permian Event came about.

Most of the species on the planet right now are in the tropical forests. Continuing cooling could easily lead to the continued shrinkage of the tropical climate areas and their eventual disappearance. With the disappearance of the tropical forests would come the extinction of all of the tropical species, just as in the Permian.

Anthropogenic global warming can reverse that. Global warming will reverse the shrinking of the tropics. It means the tropics may eventually become larger, the arctic smaller. I figured out in driving south the past couple of days that the main difference between the green productive fields of Alberta and the taiga wastelands of the Northwest Territories is only a few degrees. The reason the few degrees matter so much is that it is enough that Alberta has normal soil in which crops grow, and the NWT has permafrost in which only stunted trees grow.

Global warming would make the NWT, Yukon, Alaska, Greenland, Siberia, Lappland, and Iceland as habitable as the Midwest is today. It could give humanity a whole new continent to live on when the ice in Antarctica melts. The alternative might be to slide into another Permian Event mass extinction.

It could be the reason the human race is here, our purpose, to cause global warming. Also it is an excuse to continue to drive an RV that gets 10 miles to the gallon..... :o)