2-17-2005 Global Warming or: How to invade a neighboring state without firing a single shot

Attempts to turn every unusual weather event into confirmation of these forecasts by climate change propagandists and politicians, from England's Tony Blair to Australia's Beazley, should be seen for what they are - either misinformed or fraudulent.

Rather than let them alarm you, ask yourself this: do you think people who can't tell you whether it will rain next Wednesday are really capable of building models that tell you what the climate will be like 100 years from now? I wouldn't trust any economic modelling that forecast what the world economy would look like a century hence, and climate models are at least as flawed as economists' ones.--Alan Wood, The Australian

I skipped the Nancy & Kev show on WILK this morning. I still don't feel well and I just could not subject myself to that. Now that the Kyoto Treaty has kicked in, these two folks spent the previous show standing on Dubya's nuts for correctly being skeptical about all of this global warming bullspit.

I recently traded an e-mail of two with Nancy on this climate warming gibberish. My entire point was that for every "expert" she could cite predicting an impending ecological disaster, I could list a "skeptic" that wholeheartedly disagreed with the conclusions of the "expert." So, during yesterday's daily Bush-bash, she made the claim that the great preponderance of scientists are saying that global warming is an undisputable fact above debate. Nothing...nothing...could be any farther from the truth, and I was stunned to hear her make such a ludicrous statement over the airwaves in Culm County. Know-it-all Kev is typically given to making grand pronouncements not supported by hard facts, but Nancy usually does a little homework before spouting off. I guess the rush to bash Bush can cloud people's judgement.

Me? I could care less what some "expert" selling his book on CNN has to say about the coming ice age suddenly turned global warming. I prefer to read what scientists have to say about science. Or the lack thereof. Click on the following link and read on. The speech is a tad lengthy, but it's dead on accurate. And surprisingly enough, it's completely apolitical. Imagine that. Science that hasn't been politicized? These days, that's a radical concept. Well, these days it is.

And while I understand that a lecture by Michael Crichton does not carry near as much weight as the opinions of a former tennis coach (expert) whereas the future of the Earth's climate is concerned, I figure we might as well consider what the "skeptics" are saying.

This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Aliens Cause Global Warming

And why is it again that China is exempt from the Kyoto gibberish? Maybe one of those PHDs at WILK can educate us stupid red-staters.

BBCNews

Thursday, 17 February, 2005, 10:07 GMT

China emerges as global consumer

China has "eclipsed" the US as a consumer nation China has overtaken the US in the consumption of basic agricultural and industrial goods, a survey has found. With a booming economy and 1.3bn people, it is now the world's largest consumer of grain, meat, coal and steel, said the Earth Policy Institute.

But China's insatiable demands are putting ever more pressure on the country's natural resources.

Air and water pollution are already serious problems, and there is talk of a looming ecological crisis.

China is well ahead of the US in the consumption of goods such as television sets, refrigerators and mobile phones, according to the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute.

However, per capita consumption in China - the world's most populous country - remains far below that of the US.

According to the report:

64m tons of meat were consumed in China in 2004 compared to 38m tons in the US

258m tons of steel were used in China in 2003 compared to 104m in the US

China's factories and homes burned 40% more coal than in the US

The number of PCs in China is doubling every 28 months. The latest official figures for the Chinese economy, the sixth-largest in the world, show it is growing at an even faster rate than expected.

It expanded by 9.5% in 2004, its highest rate for eight years, the figures show.

"China's eclipse of the United States as a consumer nation should be seen as another milestone along the path of its evolution as a world economic leader," Lester Brown, the institute's president, said.

"China is no longer just a developing country," he said. "It is an emerging economic superpower, one that is writing economic history".

Illegal timber

The report said China's massive appetite for goods ranging from grain to platinum had placed it "at the centre of the world raw materials economy".

60% of Chinese cities have serious air pollution problems

One of these raw materials is wood - and the illegal trade in stolen timber is stripping Asia of its last substantial forests, according to a report by the US and UK-based Environmental Investigations Agency and Indonesian campaigning group Telapak.

Indonesia is now suffering the fastest rate of deforestation in the world, losing a wooded area the size of Switzerland every year.

According to investigators, Chinese factories process one stolen Indonesian log every minute of every working day.

Deforestation is not the only unwanted consequence of China's huge consumption of natural materials, says the BBC's Louisa Lim in Beijing.

Coal-fired power plants supply much of the country's energy and according to government estimates, 60% of Chinese cities have serious air pollution problems, she says.

The Kyoto Protocol considers China a developing nation, and it is currently exempt from cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

Experts also say that more than three-quarters of the water flowing through China's cities is unsuitable for drinking because of pollution from industrial waste, according to our correspondent.

Scores of rivers have dried up and water tables are getting ever lower.

An official from the Chinese environmental watchdog, Panyue, said the nation's resources and its environment had already reached the limits of their capacity to cope.

Initial moves are now being taken to enforce environmental laws, but moves in this direction could ignite new tensions between government agencies and big business.

Inside of nearly every committed environmentalist churns a frustrated communist.

Is that some WILK show prep???


From the e-mail inbox CDBG's? Didn't I see the Talking Heads there in `79? More Songs About Buildings And Food!

Harry

You know, I thought the same damned thing. CDBGs, or CBGBs, or EBGBs, or BVDBs...I dun-freakin-no. All I know is, that danged mayor of ours had better not waste our CBGBs. Or was it CDBGs? Or the EBGBs?

I prefer Talking Heads '77 myself. Did you really see Talking Heads in that legendary place? If so, I am forever jealous, you...

I see the states, across this big nation
I see the laws made in washington, d.c.
I think of the ones I consider my favorites
I think of the people that are working for me

Some civil servants are just like my loved ones
They work so hard and they try to be strong
I’m a lucky guy to live in my building
They own the buildings to help them along

It’s over there, it’s over there
My building has every convenience
It’s gonna make life easy for me
It’s gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones

Loved ones, loved ones visit the building
Take the highway, park and come up and see me
I’ll be working, working but if you come visit
I’ll put down what I’m doing, my friends are important

I wouldn’t worry ’bout
I wouldn’t worry about me
Don’t you worry ’bout me
Don’t you worry ’bout me..........

State Sen. Lisa Boscola: The champion of the teen-aged drive thru attendents. She's going to go to bat for the people that don't vote anyway. Yeah, we reduce the right-to-toil tax to $10, and raise the minimum wage to $7.50 an hour. Why not $8.50 an hour?

Boscola bill would abolish the EMS tax

By ERIC MARK
Pocono Record Writer
emark@poconorecord.com

State Sen. Lisa Boscola has introduced legislation in the state Senate to repeal the controversial Emergency and Municipal Services Tax, which took effect this year.

Boscola, D-18, wants to reduce the maximum amount a municipality can levy for its EMS tax from $52 to $10 annually.

Boscola essentially wants to turn back the clock a year: The former occupational privilege tax — the precursor to the EMS tax — was capped at $10.

The EMS tax was authorized by the state Legislature in November near the end of the fall session.

All municipalities in Pennsylvania can levy the tax, which is taken out of the paychecks of workers whose employer is located within their borders. The school district of which the municipality is a part gets $5 of the tax.The idea behind the EMS tax is to shift part of the tax burden from property owners, especially the elderly, to workers who are earning income.

It is similar to the former occupational privilege tax, or OPT. There are two differences: the EMS tax can be levied at up to $52 per year, unlike the OPT, which was capped at $10 per year.

Also, the EMS tax must be used for a few specific purposes: either property tax reduction or to fund law enforcement, fire protection, ambulance or other emergency service.

Five Monroe County municipalities — the boroughs of Delaware Water Gap, East Stroudsburg, Mount Pocono and Stroudsburg as well as Paradise Township — adopted the tax for 2005.

Paradise set its EMS tax at $30 for the year. Stroudsburg decided on $40 per year, while East Stroudsburg, Delaware Water Gap and Mount Pocono set it at $52.

"Last year, the state Legislature turned a $10 nuisance tax into a big pain," Boscola said. "It's wrong to punish people who work hard every day. Workers already have too many taxes taken out of their paycheck. Pretty soon there won't be any take-home pay left to take home."

Boscola said she recently received a letter from a teenage girl whose last paycheck from her part-time job was zero because the $52 EMS tax had been deducted from her gross earnings.

The EMS tax was included in a bill last year that was designed to help the city of Pittsburgh avoid bankruptcy, according to Boscola.

"When this tax increase passed last year, a lot of my colleagues brushed it off and said it was only a couple of dollars here and a couple of dollars there," Boscola said. "But I know that ... (can) add up real fast. Before you know it, your paycheck is a couple of dollars short every week and you can't pay your other bills."

Boscola will have an unusual political ally in her fight against the EMS tax.

State Rep. Mario Scavello, R-176, has introduced a House bill that would abolish the tax altogether.

Scavello and Boscola are not generally considered political allies, though their districts overlap in part of Monroe County.


From the e-mail inbox Hey there,

My bud from pittston sent me the link to your site and the wife and I have been chuckling for a week now. You sure keep things stirred up in your town. I know more about Wilkes Barre then I ever cared to know, but you make the learning part a ton o fun. Keep on. I'll be dropping by from time to time. Just thought I'd drop you a line.

Doug
Clifford, PA

Clifford Dude? Wow! The word sure gets around, heyna? People from practically every corner of this backward state read my stuff and secretly feel sorry for me. Way cool! I'm thrilled to hear that both you and the wifey visited my site and don't hate me yet. That's a very rare happening.

I've been up in your neck of the woods a few times. Lemme see here...Clifford. Yeah, there's a gas station. And a grocery store. A bar. A bed 'n' breakfast. A moto-cross dirt track on the side of a smallish mountain. An ice cream stand. And, of course, the buffalo farm. No community would be complete without a buffalo farm. The first time I ever drove past that spread, I just about lost control of my straight job while doing numerous double takes. Not my fault. There ain't supposed to be buffalo roaming the culm covered plains. Are there?

Democracy in the Middle East? Man, don't be talkin' freakin' crazy like. That could never happen. Don't believe me. Ask one of those clueless democrat dickheads.

February 15, 2005

Now Iraq has tasted democracy, the Arab tyrants are shaking in their shoes

Amir Taheri

AN ELECTION that was not supposed to happen because the so-called resistance in Iraq — and its sympathisers in the West — did not want it has produced results that the doomsters did not expect. First, the massive boycott of the polls did not take place. Last month almost two thirds of Iraqi voters voted in the first free and fair election in their history.

Now, the final results show that the doomsters were wrong a second time. There was no green tidal wave of radical Shiism that was supposed to transform Iraq into a carbon copy of the Khomeinist republic in Iran. The United Iraqi Alliance, a list endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the primus inter pares of the Shia clerics, did win 48 per cent of the votes. But this is far short of the two-third majority that the Shia could have won had they all voted for the list. In any case, the UIA list was not a confessional ticket and had Arab Sunnis, Kurds, and Christians standing as candidates. It is an alliance of half a dozen parties and groups, including secularists.

The supposed total exclusion of the Arab Sunnis from the National Assembly did not happen, either. Arab Sunnis account for some 15 per cent of the Iraqi population and are a majority in four out of 18 provinces. In three of those provinces the voter turnout was below 30 per cent, and in one, Anbar, dropped to 2 per cent. But only half of the Arab Sunnis live in those provinces. The other half, in Baghdad and other major cities, voted in larger numbers.

Based on their demographic strength, the Arab Sunnis should have 42 seats in the 275-seat transitional National Assembly. The final results show that the new assembly will have 49 Arab Sunnis sitting in it. Of these 40 were elected on the Shia-led and the Kurdish lists, plus the list headed by Iyad Allawi, the interim Prime Minister. Five were elected on a list led by Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawer, the Arab Sunni interim President, while four more won within smaller alliances. If we add the Kurds, who are also Sunni Muslims, at least 110 members of the assembly are Sunnis.

But the politics of new Iraq is not about sectarian differences. Religious and ethnic identities were used in this election, but this was in an absence of political organisations that could not take shape under Saddam Hussein’s despotic regimes. The Shia-led and Kurdish lists, the two main winners, could theoretically form a coalition and control the transition and the writing of a new constitution. But we are not dealing with monolithic groups. The two lists are alliances that include many different ideologies — nationalist, liberal, Islamist, far Left, socialist and social democrat. My instinct is that the new assembly will be organised on the basis of political programmes rather than sectarian and/or ethnic identities with Arab nationalist, Islamists and liberals-conservatives blocs forming. But those who have known the new emerging Iraqi leadership for years know that almost all its members are united in their rejection of any new form of despotism. Having been liberated from Saddamism, few Iraqis would want to return to a state of virtual servitude, whether in the name of God or political ideology.

Saddam nostalgics, having failed in all their predictions of doom, are playing another tune. They claim that post-election Iraq will either become an Iranian-style Islamic republic or will be plunged into civil war. Some despotic Arab regimes, already shaking with fear that democracy in Iraq may spread to their neck of the wood, have lost no time in saying this.

Al-Ahram, the daily newspaper of the Egyptian Government, greeted the election results as the signal for civil war, claiming that holding elections is the principal cause of the current violence in Iraq. The Saudi media has brought back the Shia bogeyman as an argument against the holding of genuine elections in the region. The overwhelming majority of Iraqis, however, see the Khomeinist regime in Tehran not as a model but as a warning. The Iraqi electorate has rejected not only Khomeinism but all other brands of extremism: the combined share of the votes for the most radical groups was puny. The party of Muqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand anti-American Shia cleric who was supposed to represent the angry Arab street, won just two seats.

One thing is sure: Iraq has been set on the road to democracy. This is going to be a bumpy road with many zigzags. But, provided the US-led coalition does not lose its nerve, but stays committed until the new Iraq can defend itself against its domestic and foreign foes, the Iraqi experience could inspire democratic change in other Muslim countries in the Middle East.

It would not be easy for Syria to orchestrate another fake election in Lebanon in May. The Khomeinists in Iran would find it hard to present another fixed election in June as a genuine reflection of the popular will. The Egyptians would have a hard time producing another 99.99 per cent majority for President Hosni Mubarak, or his son Gamal, in yet another single-candidate election next year. The Saudis would not be able to indefinitely postpone demands for at least half of the seats in the Majlis, their parliament, to go to elected members. In Libya Colonel Gaddafi might find it harder to appoint his son as prime minister with a mere acclamation from his henchmen.

The Arab despots and their friends in the West make a meal of the cliché that democracy cannot be imposed by force. But what happened in Iraq was not imposing democracy by force. The US-led alliance used force to remove impediments to democracy. The people of Iraq became the co-liberators of their country, first by not opposing the US-led coalition and then by risking their lives to set their nation on a new path in the face of vicious terrorism.

It is time to see what is happening in Iraq on its own merits, not in the context of an irrational hatred of the United States and George W. Bush. Like it or not, President Bush has got one thing right: give any nation a chance to choose democracy and it will.

Amir Taheri is an Iranian author and commentator

You think the Republican National Committee could get this many people of color in a single room? Only if they had the hotel staff in here.--Your newly elected Democratic Party Chairman, Howard Dean.

Boy, he's off to a great f**king start. NOT!!!

An obvious racist playing the race card? You figure it out.


Mrs. Craft Lady herself, wifey, went and scored a sh*tload of gift cards this past Christmas, so all of a sudden, I'm expected to cart her all over the freakin' place in search of mostly oddball trinkets that only a hopeless craft kook, or Pumpkinhead's zombie of a grandmammy could appreciate.

Alrighty then, what sort of important rubbish do we need to hunt down today, honey? Glue sticks, green pipe cleaners, more frickin' pole ties, (???) glue-on eyeballs, smiley face stickers and 12 pounds of purple yarn. What? No imported eye of newt? Now, why is it again that we're not supposed to knock chicks the f**k out?

And she can't craft anymore without needing something, anything from frickin' Sprawl-Mart. No...she can't get the right glue-on eyeballs anywhere else. They gotta be the Sprawl-Mart brand black-and-white eyeballs. They're just right. Those American Somoans sure know their glue-on eyeballs, thank you very much!

What if somebody sees us? They'd be left to assume that we've got some unspent money left on our Access Card balance. Or they'll think we're trying to use up the last of those plastic food stamp tokens we've been hanging onto just in case. Or they'll figure we've finally scored on our daily number tickets and we're going to load up on duct tape so we can finally insulate the bathroom of our 80 X 16 mobile palace. I do not grapple with low self esteem, and on most days I could really care less what anyone thinks of my mostly sorry act. But this is too much to bare. What if somebody sees us?

Shopping at Sprawl-Mart? I'd rather wake up stuck in the bottomless jowels of one Rosie O'Donnell.

Kill me now!

Big parade on Saturday morning? Are some of you people gonna join me down there? Our returning troops deserve nothing less than our being there.

I found out tonight that Rory, our recently returned Iraq veteran, is having his marriage blessed next week and a big wedding reception immediately afterwards. Good for him. It's been a long time coming.

Have a good one.

CYA