Is it just me....?

Another look at Sharia law...

2011-12-14T07:46:00.000-08:00

In yet another example of Sharia law barbarity, Saudi Arabia recently beheaded a woman for being a witch, after a trial that, it's presumed, looked a lot like this. However, buried in Uri Friedman's story on this bit of Islamic pleasantry was a reference to "an Eritrean national [who] was imprisoned and lashed hundreds of times for "charlatanry"..." Wow, I thought, maybe there are some aspects of Sharia law we could learn from; these charlatanry provisions, for example. Imagine if the FBI formed an Anti-Charlatanry Unit, charged with rooting out and expunging charlatanry wherever it existed. Why, I would personally turn in 535 members of Congress, the entire management groups of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Department of Education, and the Department of Energy, the entire Nevada State legislature, and the Clark County School Board. Oh, yes...the Special Charlatanry Prosecutor would have a full docket.

Don't get me wrong...I consider Sharia law a barbaric anachronism that should have died at the Battle of Lepanto (Lesson: Mess with capitalists and you'll get your ass kicked, Islam), but "charlatanry" laws...think about it.

The wussification of America continues...

2011-12-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

What do you get when you raise a generation of kids in playgrounds covered with foam rubber? Cowboys wearing helmets and body armor, that's what...

The National Finals Rodeo is in town and the Las Vegas Sun, which normally alternates between acting like the UNLV student newspaper and the Nevada Democratic Party newsletter, is all rodeo, all the time. Today's edition even includes a column by a stripper - I could not make this shit up - who admits that cowboys are actually very nice in spite of the fact that they are all - gasp! - Republicans.

I digress...

Bull riders wearing helmets and body armor...W.T.F?? Sure...riding bare-back on an evil-tempered, 2000 pound animal, who by the way, has strap cinched around his gut to make him even more grumpy, is a dangerous gig. But isn't that the point? Don't get me wrong here. I am not the sort that goes to rodeos and roots for the bulls (Bullfights, yes, but not rodeos). It seems to me that part of the challenge of bull riding is overcoming a perfectly rational, perfectly understandable fear and engaging in something that "normal" humans can't even conceive of doing. Part of the reason we watch bull riding is, not so much to observe the skills involved, but to sit there and marvel that there are people who even do things like that. When you remove the risk and, consequently, remove some of the "fear factor," you somehow diminish the sport.

Mountaineering has gotten to a point where essentially anyone with enough money and free time can get to the top of Mount Everest. That being the case, where is the challenge and the subsequent sense of accomplishment? It would seem that bull-riding is heading to where anyone with enough body armor will be able to hop on a bull. Hell, as soon as my Master Chief Spartan body suit, complete with regenerating electromagnetic armor and shield lock feature, shows up, I'll probably give it a shot.

But maybe that's just me...

Butch up...

2011-11-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

I put this up on Twitter this afternoon. The University of California at Davis, the media, and the Occupy Wall Street crowd are all up in arms that the UCD police pepper-sprayed some of the OWS protestors there. Maybe the cops over-reacted, maybe they felt legitimately threatened, who knows? But at the end of the day this was pepper spray. Pepper spray. A chemical considered so non-lethal that anyone can walk in off the street and buy some. Please.

Okay, protestor wannabees, let's talk about protests. Tienanmen Square was a protest. I wrote about it in one of my first blogs. The protest at Tienanmen Square was so effective that the Chinese government had to call out their army, send tanks into the square, and start killing people. Killing...as in dead. You were sprayed with pepper spray. Think about that. What happened in Tienanmen Square was, literally, world changing. It put the most populous country in the world on a course that, in a few years, changed it from a third world backwater to what will be the dominant economy in the world within the next ten years. You, on the other hand, just got pepper-sprayed and roundly ignored.

Your little encampments are being tolerated because you're threatening no one. Certainly not Wall Street, the banks, or "evil" corporations, who are ignoring you because they have the law on their side. The "law" that exists because it is supported by the power of the government, which oddly, you seem to have no issues with.

If you want to to take your "movement" beyond the exercise in quasi-intellectual masturbation that it has become to a legitimate protest, make sure you are protesting against the right things to the people who are really responsible...and when the police start using bullets instead of pepper-spray, you'll know you're on the right track.

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt...and that's how it should be.

2011-11-17T16:44:00.000-08:00

Driving in to work today, I found myself stopped at a light next to a large step van belonging to TotTurf, which purports to supply "playground safety surfacing." What. The. Fuck. Have we come to a point where we've become so wussiefied that we have to cover the world with foam rubber to protect "the children"??

Warning! Geezer rant sequence initiating in 3, 2, 1...

When I was growing up, we had playgrounds and those playgrounds were made of galvanized steel pipe and surfaced variously with concrete, asphalt, gravel, or just plain dirt. By today's standards these places were safety nightmares. Kids fell down and they bled, kids jumped, fell, or were pushed off these abominations and they broke bones, bruises and lacerations were so common we didn't even think about them...and note: We usually only played at these playgrounds under adult supervision. Why, you may ask? Quite simply, by our standards of "fun," playgrounds were just plain boring. Left to our own devices, we had far better ways of entertaining ourselves...like playing with fire. This was back in the days when people burned their garbage and everyone had a "incinerator" (generally, an old oil drum) in their back yard. Burning garbage was one of my brother's and my "chores." Heh. Little did our parents know that we would have burned all that stuff, and more, without being told. But trust me, we were absolutely zealous about getting every last bit of combustion out of every last bit of garbage. Poking the fire with sticks was required, flames leaping 10 feet in the air, a goal, and showers of sparks, a source of joy. Setting parts of the garden on fire in our zeal only added to our entertainment as it required a scramble to get the hose to put the fire out. Good times. As I type this, I am looking down at a scar the size of a quarter, acquired when my brother flung a flaming, molten piece of plastic at me in one attempt of ours to maximize the spark generation rate.

The town I grew up in was in a transition from rural to suburban and our house backed up to a cattle ranch...and not just any cattle, it was a Brahma bull ranch that raised bulls for the rodeo. The primary fixture in the pasture behind our house was Black Dempsey, an enormous, retired rodeo bull who, it was rumored, had actually killed a few rodeo clowns, or so the story went. Black Dempsey presided over a harem of a few dozen cows, who exceeded even him in bad temper when calves were around. Of course, the pasture was strictly off-limits and the penalties for disobeying parental dictates were threatened to be particularly fearsome - this, in a day and age when corporal punishment was a daily occurrence. Naturally, we never passed up a chance to climb the fence and mingle with the livestock. I suspect my brother and I escaped goring and/or stomping solely for two reasons: 1) Small boys can easily hide in 3 foot high field grass and 2) Our half springer spaniel/half cocker spaniel dog was an absolutely fearless cow chaser, in spite of his ridiculously short legs. Good times.

Within walking distance of our house, there was a landlocked piece of undeveloped and wooded property that was bounded on one side by Little Cottonwood Creek (known simply as "the Crick" in the local lexicon). Of course, there were as many parental edicts against going anywhere near "the Crick" as there there were involving the bull pasture. So what to do with 4 acres or so of forest? BB guns wars, of course. These were highly organized, if infrequent, events with pre-chosen teams and agreed upon starting times and starting points. I marvel even now that several dozen 12 year old boys were able to put these events together in complete secrecy. A BB gun war involved, as one might expect, showing up with a BB gun - I had to borrow one - with whatever protective gear you might deem necessary and running about "the Grove" as it was called, shooting the other team. No rules and we didn't keep score. We would fight until we ran out of ammunition or were completely exhausted, which generally didn't take too long as a heavy winter coat was standard body armor and these wars were always in the summer. In retrospect, this was all appallingly dangerous, but we never had any injuries outside of returning home sporting a few telltale round bruises. Good times.

I really feel sorry for the kids whose concept of "fun" involves a foam rubber covered swingset.

More bad vacation ideas...

2011-11-15T06:59:00.000-08:00

In my on-going efforts to stay abreast of bad vacation choices, even incipient ones, I have come across this story: Take a Volcano Vacation. Well, sure...who doesn't have a hankerin' to see molten lava spewing hundreds of feet into the air? However, let's review this "tempting" offer:

It's in the Congo.
It's Nyiragongo, referred to by Forbes as "the world's deadliest volcano."
It's an actively erupting volcano.
Armed escorts are required.
Reread #4: Armed escorts are required.

But, not to worry..."experts" say that it is perfectly "safe."

Developing...

Perceived risk

2011-11-14T20:11:00.000-08:00

The Chevy Volt catching on fire recently has gotten a lot of attention and has many people raising the issue of how dangerous electric cars might be. The car in question was being used by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in some routine crash tests that every new vehicle is subjected to. In the crash test, the vehicle's battery was damaged and three weeks later, the car burst into flames in a NHTSA storage facility.

I'm not a fan of the Volt and tend to agree with Johan de Nysschen, the president of Audi, when he called it "a car for idiots." However, my assessment of the Volt has nothing to do with how safe it is. Let me repeat, the car was involved in a crash and three weeks later it caught on fire.

Some perspective: The Chevy Volt has a 16 kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery (to be specific, since there are a lot of flavors of lithium-ion out there, it has a lithium manganese oxide/graphite battery manufactured by LG Chem of South Korea). For you techie types, that is 57 million joules of stored energy...a big battery by any measure, but it has to be; it takes a lot of energy to move 3700 pounds of metal and plastic around. However, ponder this...my truck has a 23 gallon gas tank. When full, that is 3 billion joules of stored energy; more than fifty times what was sitting in the Volt's battery. Twenty-three gallons of gasoline, properly dispersed and ignited, would flatten several city blocks...and yet none of us thinks twice about getting in these mobile explosive devices we call cars and driving around at high speeds with other mobile explosive devices driven by individuals whose driving skills are almost always vastly inferior to our own.

Let's get a grip here. While we still don't know the root cause of the recent Volt fire, at the end of the day, my bet is on the problem being a lack of understanding of how to deal with a damaged battery. Remember it took three weeks for this fire to start. If the battery had been fully discharged prior to putting the car in storage, chances are we would never have heard this story.

Speaking as someone who has seen his share of battery fires, the most likely cause of death for any electric car owner is: boredom.

Knowing who you are...

2011-11-10T09:44:00.000-08:00

Travel is inherently a self-centered activity. Surrounded by strangers, each of whom is intent on their own plans and destinations, loaded into and unloaded from metal tubes with the same courtesy afforded cows on their way to slaughter - and less personal space, it is hard to avoid devoting your full attention to getting yourself and your baggage to your destination with as little discomfort and inconvenience as possible.

If you travel enough on a given airline, you'll invariably find yourself elevated to one "elite" status or another. This is, of course, a sham as the benefits in most of these programs are inconsequential and do little to make travel any more civilized. However, given the generally dehumanizing nature of travel these days, it is hard of avoid a slight feeling of self-importance when an airline lets you board slightly earlier than the mass of hoi polloi.

With these observations, I present the following vignette recorded by Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari:

The best story about the Cairo Railway Station, told to me by a man who witnessed it unfold, does not concern a luminary but rather a person delayed in the third-class ticket line. When this fussed and furious man at last got to the window he expressed his exasperation to the clerk, saying, "Do you know who I am?" The clerk looked him up and down and, without missing a beat, said, "In that shabby suit, with a watermelon under your arm, and a third-class ticket to El Minya, who could you possibly be?"

...and aren't we all holding third-class tickets to El Minya these days?

The 99 percent...

2011-10-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

This picture appeared on the Occupy Wall Street website along with many other, similarly presented tales of woe and I don't doubt that this young citizen posed for this with the very sincere intention of telling his story and showing his solidarity with America's downtrodden. But, in reading his little bio-in-Sharpie, I am forced to conclude that this is nothing more than the pathetic - and really embarrassing - admission of a failed life.

I will assume, Mr. Ex-Printer Repairman, that you are not so morbidly stupid as to have paid 87 Large to be trained as a printer repairman. Under that assumption, you obviously borrowed eighty-seven thousand dollars to get a degree in something that did not make you employable when you graduated. One can only wonder what your degree is in, but at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. At your age, I borrowed $36K to buy a house and it scared the crap out of me, but I recognized that I would end up with a house. Did you know what you would end up with after your $87K expenditure? Did you have a plan beyond spending four years on an all-expenses-paid bong binge? Did you have an inkling of what the job market was for the skill you had chosen to train yourself in? Or were you just fucking clueless on the concept of "borrowing"? Whatever. You took $87,000 of someone's money and now they want it back. Welcome to the real world. Be grateful you didn't borrow from someone who ties delinquents to some cinder blocks and tosses them in the East River.

Listen, broheim, I've been unemployed twice in my life and also underemployed for something like 3 years, although admittedly not underemployed-squared as your toilet cleaning job would seem to be, and it sucks. Totally sucks. Suckity-suck-suck-sucks. I could even argue, with some legitimacy, that my unemployment was not my fault and the result of dark forces at work, incompetent corporate overlords, yadda, yadda, yadda. However, for all that, it never even crossed my mind that anyone should be involved in fixing my problem except me.

I'll leave you with two thoughts, Mr. Ex-Printer Repairman:

The real unfortunates in your Sharpie bio are your cats. Unlike you, they didn't get to pick the loser life they now have.
Capitalism has been much, much better to me than the government ever was. Food for thought as you have your hand out for some of the alleged "Obama stash."

CORRECTION: On closer examination, it would appear that, contrary to using a Sharpie as I stated, Mr. Ex-Printer Repairman used the mad skillz he picked up as a printer repairman and actually printed his bio. Apparently, mom's basement is fully wired. However, he did print it using Comic Sans font, which further highlights what a loser he is.

A geek's tale...

2011-10-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

Nobel Prizes are all in the news right now, so here's a Nobel Prize story:

In 1922, Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the structure of the atom. Bohr’s model, where an atom is represented as a micro-solar system with electrons orbiting a central nucleus, is the one most people are familiar with. Unlike some recent Nobel Peace Prize awards, Bohr’s Nobel Prize was well-deserved and made him quite a celebrity in his native Denmark....so much so that the Danish Academy offered Bohr lifetime free occupancy in the Danish House of Honor.

The Danish House of Honor was originally the palatial estate of the founder of the Carlsberg Brewery, Jacob Christian Jacobson. When he died, Jacob left his entire estate, including the brewery, to the charitable Carlsberg Foundation. The Foundation turned Jacob’s house into the so-called Danish House of Honor, occupancy of which was reserved for Denmark’s most distinguished citizen, and was considered to be the most prestigious address in the country, outside of the king’s palace. An invitation to live in the House of Honor was considered a very significant honor and Bohr's being awarded lifetime occupancy is indicative of his celebrity at the time. The House of Honor was located immediately adjacent to the Carlsberg brewery and one of its many perks was a hard-plumbed line to the brewery that provided an infinite supply of fresh-from-the-brewery beer. Sweet.

Bohr’s tenure in the House of Honor was interrupted by the Nazi invasion of Denmark in 1940. Although the American Embassy had guaranteed the Bohr's safe passage to the United States, Bohr decided to stay to help insure the safety of the Jewish scientists on his institute’s staff. He also found himself in a minor dilemna - and this is the "geek" part of the story: Max von Laue and James Franck had given him their gold Nobel Prize medals for safekeeping. However, with the Nazi occupation, sending them out of the country was impossible as exporting gold was illegal and, since each laureate’s name is prominently engraved on the medal, could not be done without incriminating von Laue and Franck, who were both still in Germany at the time. Keeping them was also dangerous as the Nazis, who were desperate for hard currency to finance their war effort, would confiscate them for the value of their gold if they were discovered. Bohr came up with a physicist’s solution, in a very literal sense, to the problem. He dissolved the medals in acid and stored the solutions in unmarked jars on his laboratory shelves. These jars sat out the war unmolested and, afterwards, the Nobel Foundation recovered the gold and recast the medals.

Side note: I don't doubt that some might claim that Bohr actually came up with a chemist's solution to his dilemma, but physicists have always claimed that chemistry was nothing more than the smelly part of physics.

Another side note: Bohr remained in Denmark until 1943 when it was learned that the Nazis were about to start rounding up Jews (Bohr's mother was Jewish). Bohr's international celebrity was such that he was able to travel to Stockholm where he convinced the Swedish government to agree to intern any Danish Jews that made their way to Sweden. The Swedish government also sent a formal letter of protest to the Nazis, which was made public. The publication of the letter had the effect Bohr desired; the Danes were alerted to the imminent danger to their countrymen and when the Nazis began their round-up, there were no Jews to be found. The Danes, to their eternal credit, had hidden their Jewish citizens away and began to smuggle them into Sweden. Of the 7,000 Jews living in Denmark at that time, only 284 were picked up by the Nazis.

Following up on: Bad vacation choices

2011-10-03T16:49:00.000-07:00

This just in: An elderly French woman, reportedly confined to a wheelchair, was abducted by gunmen from yet another Kenyan luxury resort located near the Somali border. Once again, I'm left to wonder what part of "near the border of Somalia" is confusing people.

and an interesting bit of trivia: Recent Iranian prison dweller nee' free-spirited hiker, Shane Bauer has a degree in "Peace and Conflict Studies" from the University of California at Berkeley. There's all kinds of things I could say about this information, but why bother? The jokes just write themselves...

Bad vacation choices...

2011-09-25T12:03:00.000-07:00

When your camping trip ends with you spending two years in an Iranian prison, I think it is safe to say that you made a poor vacation choice. While we are all glad that Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer have been "released" and are now back home - and let's be clear that, all political posturing aside, they were ransomed, plain and simple - we should not forget that these two were in prison because they decided to go backpacking in Iraq, close to the Iranian border. What the hell? Did these two mouthbreathers grow up on Planet Pollyanna?

In truth, bad vacation choices, like Josh and Shane's, are made all the time and I am tempted to start up an annual award for the worst vacation choice. But first, what constitutes a "bad" vacation choice? Let's rule out vacations that are ruined by force majeure - or acts of God, if you will. For example, a vacation in Thailand is not necessarily a bad choice, even though vacationing on the Thai coast on December 26, 2004 ended up being an egregiously bad idea. Let's also rule out vacations ruined by the unknown and people who deliberately put themselves in harm's way. Case in point, the Farralon Islands, off the coast of California, were discovered to be the home of one of the largest great white shark populations in the world when a tour boat full of divers suddenly realized that there were a lot fewer divers getting back into the boat than had initially jumped off. It's hard to say this was a bad vacation choice - unlucky, to be sure - because none of the divers realized they were serving themselves up for a sharks' buffet. Nowadays, however, anyone diving near the Farralons is clearly in the "thrillseeker" category. So, for the purposes of discussion, a "bad" vacation choice will be one where a reasonable man would look at the situation and say, "That's not just foolish, it is borderline insane." and when I say, "reasonable man" I mean, me.

Without further ado, here are some recent examples:

Hendri Coetzee - Kayaking on the crocodile-infested Lukuga River in the Congo. What could possibly go wrong? Well, getting eaten by a crocodile kind of comes to mind...which is exactly what happened to "legendary" kayaker and adventure guide, Hendri Coetzee.

Bicycle touring in Lebanon - Most people would hesitate to tour Lebanon in an M-1 tank, let alone on a bicycle, but a bicycle tour of Lebanon's Bekka Valley seemed like a good idea to seven Estonians who subsequently were - wait for it - abducted by armed gunmen.

Pleasure boating in pirate-infested waters - You have a sailboat. Don't you just want to stay far, far away from the Pirate World Headquarters, also known as Somalia? Apparently not, since Somali pirates have captured private yachts sailing off the Somali coast, not once, but twice in the past few years. The first was a British couple who were held hostage for over a year and were released for a $1 million ransom...and the pirates kept their boat. The second was a yacht with four Americans, who the pirates killed before the Navy could mount a rescue attempt. Just so.

Any vacation anywhere near Somalia - An exotic safari at a luxury resort in Kenya. What could be better? Well, almost anything, as it turns out...if that luxury resort happens to be near the freaking border of Somalia!! Per the BBC story, "Tourist resorts have not been targeted before but the site is near Somalia and Somali pirates could be involved." Ya think?

Dances with polar bears - I've written about this before. Camping when there is nothing between you and a hungry polar bear but a few layers of ballistic nylon? Bad idea. But this is not just the case in the Great White North; right here in the western U.S. of A., grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park have started gobbling up tourists like they were pick-i-nick baskets with legs. Yeah, I know you're thinking, "Damn! That's scary. Next time I go to Yellowstone, I'll be packing heat." Let me make a few points here. First, it may not be entirely legal for you to have a firearm in a national park. Second, if you worry at all about the previous point, what part of "concealed carry" are you not understanding? But, finally and most importantly, even having a gun probably won't help, as this particular "feel good" article points out.

Any place Paul Theroux has written about - This man is a gifted writer and a ruthlessly adventuresome traveler, but he also seems to live a charmed life in that he has traveled through some of the most lawless parts of the world and has never had anything really bad happen to him. I suspect that there are few other people who would be that lucky. My advice? Let Theroux make the bad vacation choice and then you can read about it. A couple of his more recent books I would very much recommend are Dark Star Safari and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.

This is my current list of bad vacation choices I don't doubt that there will be further additions as the year progresses. Your nominations for what I plan to call the Hendri Coetzee Memorial Bad Vacation Award are also welcome.

UPDATE: Our two intrepid ex-Iranian prisoners, nee' carefree hikers, held a press conference today wherein they announced that they were held by the Iranians for two years purely because they were Americans. Wow. That is exactly the kind of deep thinking I would expect of anyone who plans a vacation in northern Iraq. Holy crap, Skippy, where have you been for the past 20 years? Did you think the Iranians were going to give you a big, wet kiss when you wandered into their country? A little bit, I am beginning to think that the Iranians really had these guys in protective custody because they recognized that any Americans hiking in northern Iraq were clearly too stupid to walk around without supervision.

...as a luggage problem.

2011-09-17T21:22:00.000-07:00

This scene from Joe vs. The Volcano captures the dilemma all frequent travelers face: Getting your stuff from Point A to Point B. As the luggage salesman says, "Out there, it's just you and your luggage." Overnight trips aren't a problem...throw a shirt, underwear, and socks in the Adventure Bag and I'm good to go. Two to three day trips are equally trouble-free...extra clothes in a small, carry-on bag and the Adventure Bag with its usual collection of gear suffices nicely.

Now, when I say small, carry-on bag, I really mean a small bag that I physically pick up and carry on the airplane...and "small" means it takes up about a quarter of an overhead bin. This, I recognize, is in marked contrast to the three other major classes of "carry-on" luggage: backpacks, shopping bags, and wheelie bags. I accept day packs as perfectly legitimate carry-on luggage and have, on occasion, resorted to using one. However, to men who travel wearing a suit and a back pack: "Buy yourself some 'big boy' luggage and grow up." Also note that I specify "day pack" here. See that overhead bin, Sparky? Only a third of it is yours. The rest belongs to your two seat mates. They may choose to use it or not. That is their prerogative as a fellow passenger. Don't presume to make the decision for them by being a selfish asshole and throwing your big-ass piece of luggage up there.

Shopping bags are an unfortunate, but sometimes necessary, piece of carry-on luggage. However, I have to say that if you find yourself using plastic grocery bags as carry-ons on even a semi-regular basis, you really need to rethink your travel strategy.

Wheelie bags. Wheelie bags are one of the most diabolical evils ever foisted upon the traveling public...and, like most diabolical evils, it, at first, seemed to be a good thing. A bag, with wheels and a handle, that you wouldn't have to carry, just pull behind you like a grown-up version of a little red wagon. What could be better? Why nothing, nothing at all...until you have a plane full of people trying to maneuver their bloated wheelies down a narrow 757 aisle and heft them up and stuff them into an overhead bin. The GI's in World War II presciently invented the word "blivet" to describe this situation...and men, if you are young and in good health, and I see you trotting down a concourse with a little wheelie carry-on bag trailing behind you....well, let's just say that I have to assume you are flying off to see a Cher concert and your wheelie contains your "in-drag" costume. Man up, bro.

Having said all this, on extended trips when I have to check luggage, for years, my "go-to" bag has been a Land's End duffel that has served me long and well:

I have survived for multiple weeks out of the contents of this bag...and had enough extra room to pack trinkets for family members for the return trip (Attention female relations: Those Prada bags you're sporting around came back from Shanghai in this bag). But there's a problem here. After a few trips of lugging this bag through the Frankfurt airport through tunnels like this:

I realized, like Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, that I was getting too old for this shit. I needed to trade in my old faithful duffel for a wheelie bag that I could check in. Let me stress that this, given my tirade about wheelies earlier, would only be for luggage that I have to check, because whenever I cannot carry - as in hold in my hands - my carry-on luggage onto a plane, that will be a signal that I need to stay home sitting in my rocker wrapped in a shawl. Either that, or start going "dress-up" to Bett Midler concerts.

So, after having just lugged my Land's End duffel through the Honolulu airport, I decided I needed to buy a wheelie bag I could check. After doing a lot of research, I've decided on this one, (Click on the "fit1" picture) because sometimes, the redhead likes to travel with me.

Botanical Darwinism...

2011-09-11T17:29:00.000-07:00

This...is the oleander that grows by the Fortress of Solitude. It's really pretty bad-assed. I recognize that bad-assery is not normally a quality that one ascribes to plants, but let's recap: The Fortress of Solitude is in the middle of the Mojave Desert, no rain to speak off, hotter than Satan's sauna in the summer, and what passes for "soil" here is a mixture of powdered gypsum and lime. It's not very plant-friendly and yet, here is this giant oleander that gets no attention from me outside of my checking, once a year, that my drip system is not giving it anymore water than it deserves, which isn't very much because I'm a cheap bastard. Not only does it survive, it thrives.

Three years ago, I embarked on a major trimming of this bad boy. I was not gentle. There was a chainsaw, a Sawzall with a 12 inch branch trimming blade - there's a horror movie right there, and every other sawing, cutting, and snipping device imaginable involved. At the end of two days, I had hauled three truckloads of dismembered oleander parts away. Did it care? No. It just kept sprouting and growing.

The oleander is actually four separate plants and, two years ago, in what we now refer to as the Unfortunate Water Softener Incident, the two plants on the left of the picture above were subjected to a flood of brine. It killed them. Dead. Dead as a plant can get. Leaves wilted, dried up and dropped, leaving nothing but a bunch of naked sticks sticking up, like a giant's wienie roast gone wrong. Nothing to do, I thought, but grab the chainsaw, cut this all out and start over.

But, it turns out, salt to an oleander is like cobra venom to a honey badger. It doesn't kill, it just turns the oleander into a sleepy fuck for a while. Three weeks later, I noticed new sprouts on the stumps and, now, look at the picture above. Can you tell the difference between the two plants on the left and the two plants on the right? No. No, you can't, because the oleander just doesn't give a shit what you do or don't do to it. God forbid, I should ever fertilize this son of a bitch.

Having been convinced of the invincibility of the oleander, we've come to terms with the beast. A couple of times a year, I trim the big guy to a) keep the homeowner's association busy bodies out of my hair, b) let the neighbors keep their view of the Strip, and c) allow me to open my back gate. In turn, the oleander provides an effective screen that prevents passers-by from observing what's going on in my back yard as well as supplying biomass. Lots and lots of biomass. In the past 6 months, I've dumped something like twenty 30-gallon barrels of oleander trimmings onto my compost pile, which is a good thing.

But still...

Here's a close up of Mr. Oleander. The light green stuff you're seeing is what has grown since I trimmed it back last week. It's like the bastard is almost defying me.

All I can say to that is, "How about a little FIRE, Scarecrow??"

Tone deaf...

2011-08-18T11:07:00.000-07:00

Here's our president in Iowa yesterday. What's that behind him? Pallets. Stacks and stacks of pallets. Apparently, our president - and no one in his entourage - appreciates the significance of this back drop. Here's a clue, Mr. President: Out here in the real world, beyond the bubble of the Washington Beltway that you and the rest of this country's pampered political class live in, pallets are used to ship stuff. All kinds of stuff. Food, clothing, machine tools, television sets, windows, toilet paper, paint, detergent, newsprint...all the stuff of commerce, at one point or another, was sitting on pallet in a truck or a rail car being shipped from Point A to Point B. So what's with all those empty pallets behind you, Mr. President? Here's another clue: They are there because nobody is shipping "stuff" and nobody is shipping "stuff" because no one is buying "stuff." Since no one is buying "stuff," other people are not even making "stuff" to ship. I find it hard to believe that your administration is so clueless as to stage a photo-op in front of such a clear symbol of the wrecked economy you're presiding over, but there it is...

You want more symbols, Mr. President? Drive west on I-10 out of Phoenix, get off at the Salome Road exit, and drive up through Bouse towards Parker. See all those miles and miles of freight cars sitting on sidings out there in the middle of nowhere? They're there for the same reason all those empty pallets are stacked behind you in Iowa. Stage a photo op there.

For a different type of photo op, head north up to Flagstaff. Stop in at the Lumberyard Brewing Company there. Nice place. Have a seat in the outdoor patio, order a beer, and have lunch. You could even have a press conference there, but I wouldn't suggest it. You see, the Lumberyard is right next to railroad tracks and every 10 minutes, you'd be interrupted by a freight train passing. Freight trains hauling nothing but shipping containers, stacked two high. Shipping containers with names like "Hanjin" and "Yuan" on them. Shipping containers filled with "stuff" - on pallets, of course - made in places with names like Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Suzhou, Baoding, and Fengxian. Full shipping containers headed east, empty shipping containers (and pallets) headed west for Long Beach and then by boat back to Shanghai. Yeah...there's a picture for your campaign, Mr. President.

But, be that as it may, enjoy your vacation. I certainly don't begrudge you your ten days off. After all, tens of millions of Americans have been taking way, way more time off than that lately...only outside of the Beltway, we call it "unemployment."

Casting call...

2011-08-15T20:26:00.000-07:00

Okay...it's been announced that Hollywood will be making a movie about the killing of Osama bin Laden that will be released next October. Let's just step back from the political ramifications of this and give some thought to the movie itself. Issue #1 - as John McLaughlin would say - casting. Who get's to play our president? Interesting question. But since I live in Las Vegas, I'm inclined to take odds on these things. So here goes:

Denzel Washington - Obvious choice after Man on Fire - and if you haven't seen this movie, fix that deficiency RIGHT NOW! - I'll give Denzel 5-4 odds
Chris Rock - Denzel would play Barack straight, Chris would be a better Obama, but would go for laughs. 2-1
James Earl Jones - Just this guy's voice should be president. Imagine that you're Vladimir Putin and you pick up the Red Telephone and Darth Vader is on the other end. I'd say, "Advantage USA!" But no resemblance to Obama. 4-1
Morgan Freeman - Pretty much the go-to guy when it comes to portraying a black man with "gravitas," but too old. 6-1
Harrison Ford (in black face) - Interesting concept, since Harrison has already shown he can do a credible president-as-action-hero role and Hollywood has already demonstrated that they have no issues with cross-ethnic casting (The Prince of Persia was just a white guy). However, I think not. 15-1
Bill Pullman (in black face) - Closer to Obama in body type, but see Harrison Ford above. 12-1
Wesley Snipes - Wesley could totally pull this off (see Passenger 57), but I think he's in prison or on parole or something. 9-1
Charlie Rangel - Gunnery Sgt. R. Lee Ermey, USMC Ret. demonstrated that Marines can step into a movie role and turn it into an iconic tour-de-force. I see Charlie totally doing this, but I suspect that Hollywood is a little risk-averse these days. 10-1
Bruce Willis/Alan Rickman - Admit it, you'd want either of these guys purely to hear them say, "Yippie-kai-yay, mother-fucker!" 18-1
A carrot with googly eyes stuck on it (I'm indebted to @Tots4Masses for this)- Admittedly, this would add a certain authenticity to the role, but Hollywood is going to be on a deadline and CGI is expensive. 25-1
Simon Pegg - A crazed white Scotsman portraying a black American president would be a totally daring interpretation, but I think it could work. 20-1
Phineas and Ferb - Think about it..."Aren't you a little young to be hunting down diabolical Al-Queda masterminds?" "Why, yes. Yes, we are..." 35-1

I'm open to suggestions here and, of course, will alter the above odds as updated information warrants. Obviously, Barack Obama is only one role in a cast of hundreds...outside of Joe Biden, who will be 100% animatronic.

UPDATE!

There are two additional entries:

JarJar Binks - Thanks to the Cheesemistress for this one. Like the googly-eyed carrot (see above) JarJar would add a certain authenticity to the roll, but would be far more animated. However, there were rumblings of racial stereotyping associated with his early work. 18-1
Tim Meadows - Same age as the president and there's a strong resemblance with the potential for providing a certain comedic twist to the role. I gotta go 7-5.

Evolution of a desert rat, part II

2011-08-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

Me (checking the weather for our upcoming trip to Utah): Looks like it's going to be sunny with a high of 90 and a low of 60.

Redhead: Crap! I'm going to have to pack long pants and a sweater.

Adventure camp or bear buffet?

2011-08-07T09:04:00.000-07:00

No doubt, everyone has heard the recent polar bear attack on Svalbard Island, Norway. A group of English teenagers, participating in a "high end adventure camp" on Svalbard (human population: 2500, polar bear population: 3000), were set upon by a polar bear in an attack that left one of the teenagers dead and four other members of the group injured. The polar bear was shot and killed.

Tragic. But let me ask the obvious question: Who in their right mind goes camping on an island that is home to 3000 polar bears? In a previous post, I pointed out how polar bears have been made into the poster children of global warming. Mostly as a result of this particular notoriety, they are typically portrayed as the big, ol' lovable huggie bear in the egregiously awful Nissan Leaf commercial or the cutesy cartoon bears in Coca-Cola commercials. Perhaps, all of this polar bear love has led people to forget that polar bears are the largest land predator on the planet and that a full grown polar bear is pretty much the honey badger of the North. Fifteen hundred pound bull walrus? Polar bear don't give shit; he just drags its ass out of the water and eats it.

So when you go camping in the land of the polar bear should you be surprised when you wake up to find one of the hungry indigents gnawing on your leg? I think not. No doubt, Mr. Bear wandered into camp and was thinking, "Sweet! Here's dinner...and they are all pre-packaged in these convenient down bags! Bien manger!" Sadly, a teenage boy is dead here, but so is the polar bear. The bear was just being a bear. The people were just being plain stupid.

Special added bonus:

I am indebted to my bud, Ron Alberston for this. The "adventure campers" at least recognized that there were large, man-eating predators about, but apparently, took completely inadequate measures to protect themselves and their charges. Check out the link and note that their rifle - which they had to kill bears who lived on the island the "adventurers" were intruding on - misfired four out of four times. This just does not happen in real life. This tells me that the rifle the "adventure campers" had was pro forma. I suspect it had been purchased, along with ammunition, but no one had actually fired it and the four rounds that misfired had probably been sitting in the magazine for years. Again, the people in charge of this "adventure camp" just did not take polar bears seriously. Idiots.

The evolution of a desert rat...

2011-08-06T07:54:00.000-07:00

Shortly after we had moved to Las Vegas, the redhead discovered a bark scorpion on the kitchen floor. Bark scorpions are not all that big - a 2-inch long one would be a monster - but they are scorpions nonetheless and if one stings you it will hurt like a motherfucker. In any case, this was the first scorpion the redhead had seen here. I was in the other room and, while I had heard the phrase "scream like a girl" and, even used it myself, many times before, the noise I heard coming from the kitchen was - and still is - the purest manifestation of girl screaming I have ever experienced. Screaming eventually transitioned to serial "Oh, my Gawd!"-ing, but by the time she had the exterminator on the phone - the scorpion had long since scurried under a nearby cabinet - some coherence had returned. I didn't catch the entire conversation, but the phrases, "Kill them!", "Kill them all!", and "Oh, just fucking kill them!" figured prominently. At least, this is my memory of the event.

Fast forward to last night. We have long since ceased to engage the services of an exterminator; having recognized that whatever he was spraying around the house was doing little more than washing the dust off our scorpion population...at least they weren't tracking it into the house. I did buy a bottle of what was called "Demon-X" in a Shanghai street market, which very efficiently killed scorpions, but then it seemed to very efficiently kill everything that came in contact with it, up to and including small mammals and, probably, cats had we let them anywhere near the "Zone of Death." So, we gave up on Demon-X, but when the revolution comes, I've already got my own little WMD stash.

I digress...

Last night, the redhead is reading, I'm learning about our country's new AA+ bond rating and drinking, and the cats, as usual, are laying about staring sullenly at me due to my refusal to turn up the A/C and cool them off. Into this bucolic scene walks a scorpion, a big one, just taking a stroll through the living room. "Hey, bros! How's it going?" he says, "Just thought I'd check out the place. Got any bugs or shit like that around for me to eat?" The redhead gets up, goes into the kitchen, and grabs the tweezers and glass jar we keep there for such occasions. She picks up the scorpion with the tweezers, plops it in the jar, puts the lid on the jar, and sits back down with her book. Heh.

Polars bears...

2011-07-30T10:06:00.000-07:00

Monnett and Gleason detailed their observations in an article published two years later in the journal Polar Biology. In the peer-reviewed article, they said they were reporting, to the best of their knowledge, the first observations of the bears floating dead and presumed drowned while apparently swimming long distances.

Thus sayeth the AP News story reporting that Charles Monnett had been put on leave and was under investigation for "integrity issues" by his employer, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. Let's move past the astonishing fact that the USBOEMRE actually exists and consider the even more astonishing fact that said agency, which owes its very existence to "settled science" of anthropogenic climate change, is investigating one of the "rock stars" of global warming for "integrity issues."

If you haven't heard of Charles Monnett, you have certainly heard of his work, referenced in the quote above. Messrs Monnett and Gleason reported famously that, because of global warming and the shrinking Arctic ice cap, polar bears were being forced to swim greater distances and were, consequently, drowning in greater numbers. This report was grasped onto immediately by the media who turned polar bears into the poster children of global warming.

In fairness, a "source familiar with the investigation" has said that Monnett's "integrity issues" have nothing to do with with his now-famous Polar Biology paper, but the nature of these "issues" has not been disclosed. Still...it's worth taking another look at said paper to get a flavor for Mr. Monnett's body of work. You can find the abstract here.

In brief, Monnett and Gleason were counting polar bears from the air; a very sensible approach to counting polar bears given videos like this one (Thanks to Sheri Gilmour for bringing my attention to this). In September, 2004, they observed, from their airplane, what they described as four floating polar bear carcasses. This is the data on which this paper is based, period. We'll assume, pending conclusion of the USBOEMRE's investigation, that Monnett and Gleason were sufficiently practiced to correctly identify a floating polar bear and to further correctly assess that said floating bear was dead. From this observation, our intrepid bear counters concluded that 1) the bears had drowned, 2) the drownings were a result of fatigue from too much swimming, 3) polar bears were being forced to swim longer distances due to a anthropogenic global warming-caused shrinking Arctic ice cap, and 4) humans are a disgusting blight on the planet. The authors themselves admit that the bears "presumably" drowned...and that "presumably" moves their paper out of the realm of serious scientific investigation into pure editorializing that has no place in a serious peer-reviewed journal.

Clearly, there are many reasons polar bears might die in the wild; disease, starvation, predation - even a polar bear might look to be a tasty snack to a killer whale, poisoning from eating red tide-tainted fish, and all manner of calamities that the indigent humans might visit upon them. By failing to eliminate any of these other potential causes and confirming their observations by similar surveys in subsequent years (or other areas, their survey was apparently limited to the Beaufort Sea), Monnett and Gleason are able to "presume" a commonality and conjure up a logic train that ends up supporting their apparent foregone conclusion. This is blatant and obvious intellectual dishonesty. Shame.

But more than Monnett and Gleason have behaved shamefully on this. Polar Biology is allegedly a peer-reviewed journal, which means that three to five other scientists with direct knowledge of the subject would have been given copies of this paper to review and comment on prior to its publication. Shame on the majority of these reviewers who, apparently, did not reject this paper out-of-hand. Shame on the editors of Polar Biology who published this paper in spite of the sophomoric, glaring gaps of logic it contained. Finally, shame on the readers of Polar Biology, none of whom seem to have called Monnett and Gleason out on what, at best, was an embarrassingly sloppy piece of work. Scientists tend to be a rather argumentative and contentious group and most scientific journals routinely publish criticisms and comments on previously published articles. In reviewing the table of contents of Polar Biology issues published after the Monnett and Gleason paper, I've found no such comments. Sad.

...and finally, let's not forget Monnett's employer, the arcanely-named U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. Never forget that an alarming report of the dire consequences of anthropogenic climate change would be translated into a funding increase for the USBOEMRE to enable more "study" of said dire consequences. Could that have at all influenced the obvious jumping to conclusions in this paper? Hmmmm...?

The publication of a badly researched and poorly reasoned paper such as "Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea" (the title itself is a stretch of logic), reduces Polar Biology to the level of being a National Enquirer of scientific literature and reveals its readers and contributors to be the WalMart shoppers of their technical community.

Independence Day

2011-07-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

Having fought you twice, Lieutenant-General Burgoyne has waited some days in his present position, determined to try a third conflict against any force you could bring to attack him...He is apprised of the superiority of your numbers, and the disposition of your troops to impede his supplies, and render his retreat a scene of carnage on both sides. In this situation he is impelled by humanity, and thinks himself justifiable by established principles and precedents of state, and of war, to spare the lives of brave men upon honorable terms. Should Major-General Gates be inclined to treat upon the idea, General Burgoyne would propose a cessation of arms during the time necessary to communicate the preliminary terms by which, in any extremity, he and his arm mean to abide.

...and with this note, the British invasion of America, via Quebec, Lakes Champlain and George, and the upper Hudson River, effectively came to an end near Saratoga, New York on October 13, 1777. John Burgoyne had launched his invasion in the summer of 1777, confident that he could sweep aside rebel resistance and meet up with General Howe's troops marching north from New York City, isolating New England - which the British saw as the seat of the rebellion - from the rest of the colonies and "cutting the head of the serpent" as Burgoyne put it. Burgoyne's campaign met with initial success. He traversed Lake Champlain without serious resistance and, through maneuvering, captured Fort Ticonderoga without firing a shot. The way to Albany and the lower Hudson seemed open at that point and success assured, but this was just when the wheels started to come off the campaign. A detachment of the British army (with German mercenaries) sent into southern Vermont to procure horses and food was repulsed at Bennington by Vermont militia led by John Stark - an unsung hero of the Revolution - leaving the British short of both food and transport (not to mention hundreds of troops killed or captured). Word of atrocities by the Indians enlisted by the British to "help" them in their invasion aroused the general populace and Nathaniel Gates, the commander of the Northern Army, found his previously inadequate army swelled by the arrival of militia looking for some payback.

There has been a lot written about the battle of Saratoga..."battles" actually, as there were two on widely separated days followed by a British retreat and eventual investment that resulted in a surrender when their supplies ran out and the army's situation became untenable. The narrative over the years has described General Gates as indecisive and weak and pointed to the irony of Benedict Arnold's intervention to snatch defeat from victory. Recent scholarship has brought some of this into question and, of course, knowledge of history is important. However, Saratoga was a victory for the new nation because men who had been tending their farms only days/weeks before stood up and went toe-to-toe - in the 18th century this was literally true - with arguably the best army in the world.

We, correctly, celebrate July 4th as Independence Day to commemorate the day when we declared ourselves a free and independent nation. However, as any teenager will attest, saying that you're independent and actually being independent are two different things. America gained its independence through force of arms. The Continental Congress declared independence on July 4th 1776, but as John Keegan has pointed out, history is determined by ordinary soldiers facing their enemy on the battlefield and having the will to defeat them. In October of 1777, farmers, not soldiers, defeated the best the British could send against them and convinced the world that America was, indeed, independent.

He's bad-assed...

2011-06-28T21:25:00.000-07:00

This...is the spider that lives in my brewery. He's totally bad-assed...and just doesn't give a shit.

Skinny little guy with spindly legs, right? Yeah, but don't let his delicate appearance deceive you because he is a totally bad-assed mother-fucker that would have Samuel L. Jackson crying like a school girl if the two of them ever went toe-to-toe.

Okay...excuse the gender bias here. I'll stipulate that "he" might well be a "she." Let's move on...

So...said (non-gender-specific) spider moved into the brewery a few months back. Boris - as we'll call him/her - set up a web in a remote corner over the main floor drain. I didn't think much of it at the time as the brewery is in a garage...the presence of insects, arachnids, and other invertebrates is not unusual. But over time, Boris thrived - on what, I have no idea - and the web was gradually enlarged. It finally got to the point where I could not shut off the cold water line to the brewery without waving away all kinds of spider web crap. Creepy. So, tonight, I am doing some routine cleaning in the brewery and say, "Enough! Sorry, but this mess has to go." I pull out my hot water hose and let fly on Boris and his/her web. This is hot water straight out of my water heater. I have literally killed scorpions - the toughest invertebrates on the planet - with this same jet of hot water. Web destroyed and washed down the drain. Boris, not in evidence. Mission accomplished and Miller time, I figure.

Not so fast. The picture above is Boris in his/her NEW web, not more than 20 minutes after the hot water Armageddon I unleashed on him/her. This motherfucker is bad-assed and I'm a little skeered right now.

In honor of Father's Day...

2011-06-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

Since it's Father's Day, I thought I would share this rather touching father and son story that has always been something of an inspiration to me:

On Father's Day, Jesus and God decide to spend the day together and they start with a round of golf. It being Father's Day, Jesus gives God the honors. God tees up and just bangs it...big hitter, God...but he hooks it off towards the trees. Just as Jesus is about to say, "Nice one there, Shankosaurus," a powerful wind comes up and starts whipping the tree branches around. One of the branches knocks God's ball back onto the fairway. A squirrel runs out on the fairway, grabs the ball, and starts scampering into the rough with it. Just as the squirrel reaches the edge of the fairway, an eagle swoops down and snatches the squirrel up in its talons. The eagle flies down the fairway, clutching its prey, who still has a death grip on God's ball. As the eagle flies over the green, it drops the squirrel, who carries the ball over to the hole and drops it in. God turns to Jesus and says, "I guess you can put me down for one."

Jesus looks at God and says, "Are we playing golf here or are you just going to fuck around?"

The Squirrely wrath Beer Chronicles, Part III

2011-06-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

...and for the final post in the Beer Chronicle series, I answer the question: Favorite breweries and brewpubs are fine, but what's in the refrigerator at the Fortress of Solitude? In truth, since I am a brewer, there's usually not much there - and, shut up! That twelver of Stella Artois is the Redhead's, not mine. However, given the demands of work, travel, and the usual life maintenance activities, on occasion, homebrew stocks run low and I am required to venture out and purchase commercial beer. When that happens, here's the result (again listed in no particular order):

The Squirrely wrath List of Favorite Beers

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale - It's hard to over-emphasize what an outstanding beer this is. When the big American breweries were treating hops like a rare and expensive seasoning, Sierra Nevada started using American hops by the bucketful. Forget budmillercoors beer, this is the quintessential American beer.
North Coast Brewing Red Seal Ale - Another great example of an American pale ale; a little more balanced towards malt than Sierra Nevada, but still insanely hopped with a long, lingering finish. I'm drinking one now, even as I type. Don't hate me, beotches...
Uinta Brewing Cutthroat Pale Ale - For the non-cognoscenti, it's pronounced "You-in-tah" and the beer is named after a native species of trout, not nefarious piratey-types. Uinta describes this as a Northwest amber ale, but, given this is a low-alcohol beer per Utah law, it really shows the world that "lite" beers do not have to be the tasteless, colored water that the mega-breweries churn out. Cutthroat is sold in a higher alcohol version outside of Utah as Angler's Pale Ale and Angler's is a very credible beer, but the Cutthroat low-alcohol recipe is genius.
New Belgium Fat Tire - Just as Sierra Nevada showed the world what you could do with American hops, New Belgium demonstrated what could be done with malt, specifically, biscuit malt, lots and lots of it. However, in the interest of full disclosure, when New Belgium's 2 Degrees Below comes out in the fall, there's no room for Fat Tire in my refrigerator.
Bell's Two-Hearted Ale - Where Sierra Nevada very generously hops their Pale Ale with Cascade hops, Bell's uses another classic American variety, Centennial, for another great American pale ale. This beer is, sadly, hard for us Western folks to come by.
Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale - This is Sierra Nevada's winter seasonal beer and think of it as their Pale Ale, squared; more hops, more malt, just more of a beer, if that's possible to imagine.
Any Beer Brewed by Deschutes - It's impossible for me to pick a favorite beer from this brewery. Their Black Butte Porter might well be the best commercial example of this hard-to-get-right style. Their Mirror Pond Pale Ale is a less hoppy, more balanced pale ale than other American examples and the list goes on: Inversion IPA, Obsidian Stout, Red Chair Northwest Pale Ale, and I'll never pass up a six-pack of their Jubelale when it shows up on the shelves.
Victory Brewing Yakima Glory nee' Yakima Twilight - This has been described as a dark India pale ale and that pretty much nails it; insanely hopped with a whole chocolately, roasted malt thing going on in the background. This is just a dang good beer.
New Glarus Staghorn Octoberfest - I like the Oktoberfest style and have brewed a lot of them. In my mind, I have a model of what an O'fest should be; deep amber with caramel overtones, balanced with a toasty flavor that comes from the use of a big pile of Munich malt. Most Oktoberfests don't match up to this ideal. Even imported Oktoberfests seemed to be watered and dumbed down for the American market. In my mind, Staghorn is what an Oktoberfest should be.
Flying Dog Doggie-Style Pale Ale - Another, very well-balanced pale ale from the brewery endorsed by Hunter S. Thompson, who knew a little about drinking beer.

Obviously, I'm picking ten beers out of literally hundreds (if not, thousands) and I've restricted my list to strictly domestic beer, so the above list begs for Honorable Mentions:

Goose Island Honkers Ale
Victory Brewing HopDevil
Three Floyds Alpha King
Bell's Hopslam
Stone Arrogant Bastard Ale
Goose Island Nut Brown Ale - sadly, GI has retired this beer
New Belgium 1554
Stone Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale
Others to be added as I think of them...

"Call me crazy..."

2011-06-11T13:18:00.000-07:00

A troubling and enduring story line among 9/11 truthers is that the Twin Towers were brought down, not by an act of Islamic terrorists, but by a deliberately planned act of the Federal government that was intended to incite the American populace to a) support a war for oil in the Mideast, b) permit themselves to be manipulated into complacency by fascist stormtroopers, or c) some other silly bullshit. One of the central tenants of this "argument" is that the fires started by the planes crashing into the Twin Towers could not have been hot enough to melt the structural steel that was used to make the frame of these buildings.

Years later, the estimable Charlie Sheen famously came out and said, "As I watched the Twin Towers come down, I remember saying, 'Call me crazy (Author's note: It's hard to imagine more prescient words ever being uttered), but did that look like a controlled demolition?'"

This silliness has persisted since 9/11 and survives primarily because anyone who knows anything about metallurgy knows that the argument is so moronic that even bothering to respond is likely to make one stupider. However, fools rush in...so, here are the facts:

Steel is an almost magical material; a mixture of iron and a tiny bit of carbon, which if heat-treated a particular way, makes a material that is harder than crap but very brittle and, if treated another way, makes something that is so soft that most of us could bend in their hands. For the most part, this process is reversible; you can take a hard, brittle piece of steel, re-heat-treat it and turn it into a bend-in-your-hands metal noodle. Note - because this is important - heat-treating steel is done at temperatures much, much lower than the melting point. I could launch into a long, involved discussion of how the strength of steel is largely determined by its microstructure (a combination of the size and shape of the iron crystals that make up the steel and how the carbon is distributed among these crystals) and that this microstructure changes radically with temperature, but I won't. For the purposes of this discussion, it is only important to know that steel loses strength as it is heated up.

Strength versus temperature data for structural steel is pretty easy to come by. Here, for instance. What is this graph telling us? Most importantly, it says that structural steel heated to 1200 deg F has only 20% of the strength it has at room temperature. Note that steel melts at 2795 deg F, so at less than half of its melting point, steel is already 5 times weaker than it is at room temperature.

Next question: Exactly how hot is 1200 deg F? As any Boy Scout who has spent time playing with campfires - and all Boy Scouts, of course, were primarily Boy Scouts so they could do just that - will tell you, a reasonably hot campfire will melt an aluminum can. Aluminum, as it turns out, melts at 1220 deg F. Consequently, a reasonably robust campfire will be hot enough to seriously weaken structural steel. As a historical aside, this fact was used to advantage by William Sherman's Federal army during its march through Georgia. Any Confederate railroads they came across were torn up, the wooden ties piled up and torched, and then the steel rails laid over the fire. Once the rails had heated up, men would pick up the ends of the rail and bend it around a nearby tree trunk.

Back to the Twin Towers, terrorists crashed planes into them with essentially full fuel tanks. For a 767 this is 23,980 gallons of Jet-A. Twenty-four thousand gallons of jet fuel burning is more than a reasonably hot campfire. In fact, simulations run by the NIST in their report on the WTC collapse put the maximum structural column temperature 60 minutes "after impact" at 1396 deg F. At this temperature, structural steel is down to ~10% of its room temperature strength...the Twin Towers collapsed due to temperature-induced creep and plastic failure, period. End of story. Sorry, truthers, go sell crazy somewhere else.

Of course, there's no need to take the word of an anonymous blogger on this. Take a look at the National Institute of Standards and Technology reports on the WTC collapse...it's all there, post-mortems on the recovered structural members, mechanical and thermal simulations, analysis, and enough other "techy" stuff to drive a much-needed wooden stake into the heart of the truther vampire.

Even more things explained...

2011-06-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

Many people who meet me think, "Wow! Anyone that awesome must have sprung, like Athena, fully formed from the forehead of Zeus..." However, that's not the case. I was born of woman like everyone else and my sister, having dug deep into the family archives, has provided the following photographic evidence, taken shortly after my introduction to Planet Earth:

I need not point out here that Holy Cross Hospital clearly did not have Annie Leibovitz on retainer to handle their infant photos, but let's be honest...I wasn't giving anyone a lot to work with here. Not obvious in the picture is the fact that it was taken while I was in a little baby straitjacket. No, that's not a typo. Shortly after birth, I was put in a straitjacket. Now, I'd like to say that it was because the head nurse spoke up and said, "Leave this one alone" 'cuz she could tell right away, baby, that I was bad to the bone. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bad. Bad to the bone. I'd really like to say that, but no. It turns out that, not only was I born with a full head of hair, I was also born with fully formed fingernails that I kept trying to gouge my eyes with...and from the looks of the above-mentioned picture I'd been doing a little bit of that in utero. The motivation for my wanting to gouge my eyes is a mystery, but let's remember this was the 50's - people thought putting fins on cars was a good idea for God's sake - and being thrown into that half-formed...well, let's just say that's a Rod Serling Twilight Zone intro right there.

The Squirrely wrath Beer Chronicles, Part II

2011-05-30T14:40:00.000-07:00

Let's move on from breweries to brewpubs. Brewpubs add another layer of complexity on to the whole "beer thing" in that, by their nature, you are a captive consumer and they provide the "environment" for your drinking. Great beer consumed in the ambiance of a wet t-shirt contest being cheered on by a horde of drunken frat-boys is going to be devalued to some extent. Actually, I've never consumed great beer while watching a wet t-shirt contest cheered on by drunken frat-boys, so I am only imagining that this would be "bad"...but, hopefully, I make my point.

...and let the record show that the following is extremely Me-centric. I don't doubt that there are many, many excellent brewpubs that are not on this list purely because I haven't been to them. If you disagree with this list, let me know. I don't need much of an excuse to try new beer...

So, without further ado:

The Squirrely wrath Top 10 List of Brewpubs

(The order here is stream-of-consciousness and has no significance)

Goose Island, Clyborn Ave, Chicago - This is the brewpub that started the Goose Island empire and taught many Chicago residents, myself included, what the craft beer revolution was all about. The brewpub has survived re-zoning, gentrification, and all manner of other urban ills....and it has Goose Island beer. Enough said.
Squatters, Salt Lake City - For me, two significant events happened here: 1) The last dinner I had with my mom, and 2) Daughter #2's wedding rehearsal dinner. A sentimental favorite, perhaps, but Squatters does Utah-mandated low alcohol beer well. If I'm in Salt Lake, I go there as much for the excellent beer as the misty-eyed memories.
Great Lakes Brewing, Cleveland - Yes, Cleveland. Despite its location in a moderately sketchy area, Great Lakes has two things going for it: The always excellent Great Lakes beer and a spectacular Victorian era bar, complete with bullet holes left over from a by-gone episode where none other than Elliot Ness himself apparently felt the need to educate the locals in the "Chicago Way" of doing things.
Deschuttes Brewpub, Portland - Well, duh. Deschuttes beer and great food, including burgers made from happy cows who spent their (short) lives munching on spent grain from the brewery, but don't think about that too much during dinner.
Mad Fox Brewing, Falls Church, VA - A rather recent and quite-by-chance discovery in a quiet DC suburb. Their very excellent Orange Whip IPA introduced me to the absolute awesomeness that is Citra hops.
Moab Brewing, Moab, UT - Surprisingly, this remote Utah town boasts two brewpubs, the rather embarrassingly-named Eddie McStiff's and Moab Brewing. For reasons not germane to this narrative, I am a quasi-regular visitor to Moab and, while there, Moab Brewing is a nightly stop for me and mine. Low alcohol Utah beer, very nicely done with an "eclectic" touristy clientele.
Great Basin Brewing, Sparks, NV - Good beer in a relentlessly casual - some might say, "ramshackle" - ambience. In spite of being a short walk from the Nugget mega-resort, its generally a locals-only crowd with a heavy sprinkling of the local homebrewers.
Four Peaks Brewing, Tempe, AZ - Always a big selection of great beers in an interior that looks far more "brewery" than "restaurant." It's proximity to ASU makes a stop here in the evening a little problematic for quite, contemplative beer consumption, so stop in for lunch, instead.
Elevator Brewing, Columbus, OH - Another Ohio brewpub featuring great beer and an absolutely spectacular Victorian-era bar. This is how your great-grandfather sat down for a beer.
Great Dane Brewing, Madison, WI - A sprawling brewpub, just off Capitol Square in downtown Madison. Consistently tasty beer with a distinctly Madisonian crowd. Don't expect to find a lot of Rush Limbaugh fans quaffing suds here, but I'm apolitical when it comes to beer and, as long as you don't get in my face with your stupid opinions, I'll drink with anyone.

Honorable Mentions: Of course, the list above is highly subjective and another day and another time or after another visit many others might make the list, including: Desert Edge, Salt Lake City - In my intemperate youth, I spent many hours downing pitchers of Coors in what was then called, "The Pub." Years later, on returning to Salt Lake, I found that, as my taste in beer had matured, so had Utah's, The Pub was now Desert Edge Brewing. Ninkasi Brewing, Eugene, OR - Strictly speaking, this is a tasting room, but you're tasting Ninkasi's beers. That is all. Chicago Brewing Co., Las Vegas - In a city where you can find faux versions of New York, Paris, and Venice, why not a little bit of my ex-residence? Chicago Brewing is easily the best of the local brewpubs. Rock Bottom, Everywhere - Rock Bottom had an inauspicious start; a chain of brewpubs all brewing the same completely uninteresting, but "safe" beers, but the company saw the light and hired brewmasters for each of their brewpubs and let them brew their own recipes. Whenever you're a stranger in a strange town, the local Rock Bottom is a safe bet. LadyFace Brewing, Agoura Hills, CA - The beer scene in southern Kalifornia is, like most things there, grim, but LadyFace is a standout; a small, very experimentally-minded brewery. Not all of their beers are good, but they are definitely trying to push the envelope.

Posthumous Award: This list wouldn't be complete without mention of the now-closed Bardo Rodeo, Arlington, VA. The Bardo owners took over an abandoned car dealership, turned the service counter into a bar, put tables in the showroom and service bay, and turned the upstairs offices into a pool room. The beers were eclectic, but leaned a little towards Northwest styles; their Chinook Ale was an experience. My first contact with William Blake was in the Bardo's men's room where, over the urinals, someone had scrawled, "The road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom." Well, yeah...

But wait! There's more...

It has occurred to me that the above list is incomplete without mentioning two very excellent brewpubs in Boulder, CO: Mountain Sun and Boulder Brewing. The Mountain Sun can only be described as relentlessly counter-culture and this might put many off, but they always have a big selection of interesting beers on tap and they are not afraid to experiment. Boulder Brewing's pub is actually located at their brewery and, with the addition of a kitchen, their tasting room has morphed into a brewpub.

...and at the other end of the spectrum:

Of course, there are brewpubs at the other end of the spectrum: the bad ones. Now it's not my way break bad on people when they don't have an opportunity to rebut and, consequently, I shy away from slamming a brewpub. Besides, I give every small brewer a little consideration. If I don't like their beer, I recognize they might have had a few "bad" batches or recipe malfunctions. Having said that, I have been into a few brewpubs that were so egregiously and heinously bad that I have no problem waving people off from them as their beer is so bad as to give microbreweries everywhere a bad name. So...this Hall of Shame includes:

Boulder Dam Brewing - I wanted to like this place. I really, really wanted to like this place. Located in historic downtown Boulder City, an easy drive from the Fortress of Solitude, with ideal outdoor seating, when I heard they were opening, I thought my prayers had been answered. However, upon heading over and settling down for a few beers, all hopes were dashed. The beer was Gawd-awful; no body, carbonation all wrong, and every beer I had was seriously flawed. Oxidized, gigantic amounts of diacetyl, and one was clearly infected. I gave them another shot six months later, thinking, "Okay, the last time was in the middle of their start-up pains; maybe they're better." No. Still crap...and then, I learned that their brewing system was from these bastards. Sweet Mother of Gawd! This is a travesty; a single tank brewing system, using supplied extract mixes and then this gruel is served off the dormant yeast. No wonder the beer sucked, big time.

Port Aransas Brewing Co. - Sometimes, even the idyllic life in the Mojave Desert requires a break and that's why the redhead and I have a Fortress of Solitude Lite on the Texas Gulf Coast...and when I heard the nearby Port Aransas had acquired the "Port Aransas Brewing Co." as its newest restaurant...well, you can imagine my excitement. But, no...karma is a cruel bitch and when the redhead and I rolled in, I saw the same Specialty International equipment that was turning out the total swill at Boulder Dam Brewing. Crap. To their credit, "brewpub" does have an impressive - for south Texas - selection of micros, but at the end of the day, like Boulder Dam Brewing, these guys just don't care...

One other entry here, Oggi's Pizza & Brewing, Orange, CA. Oggi's is a chain, but they came well-recommended and their beers are well-regarded in brewing circles...and it is entirely possible that their beers were spectacular, but who could tell? This place was just fucking loud, really loud; as in, family night loud; as in, small children running in and out of the bar, squealing; as in, sports bar, my-team-is-kicking-butt; as in, a table full of nurses, drinking their way through happy hour at the top of their lungs. It is possible one could go here on another night and be able to down a few beers in the relative quiet that a respect for good beers dictates, but I wonder if it is worth it.

...and people wonder why I'm messed up.

2011-05-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

Picture time for young Squirrely...

Perry Como sweater...check!
Slap on a bow tie...check!
Pants made from some old drapes...check!
Cowboy boots (Yee-hah!)...check!

All right, get the photographer. Let's do this thing!

The Squirrely wrath Beer Chronicles, Part I

2011-05-16T21:12:00.000-07:00

I know a little bit about beer. I've been brewing my own for just short of 19 years and am a National-level BJCP-certified beer judge. How does one get to be a beer judge, you might ask? The same way you get to Carnegie Hall, my friend...practice. In any case, as anyone who has not been living in a cave on the dark side of the moon for the past twenty years knows, craft brewing has returned to America after Prohibition - thank you, all you early 20th century do-gooders - killed it. In fact, craft brewing has become so popular that it can almost be confusing going to a store for beer these days and being confronted with a virtual rainbow of choices...and I have been asked, "What do people who know about beer drink when they are drinking beer?" To that, I have to respond: It doesn't matter what I drink. The best thing you can do is to just try different beers - and in the process, support you local craft brewer - and decide what you like. Beer is a big universe - far bigger than the budmillercoors crowd would have you believe - and you need to find your own space in it. It's about what you like. However, for those who feel they need guidance, I'm here for you.

This is going to have to be multiple posts as there is just too much to write about. This first post will be devoted to my favorite breweries, the second will be about my favorite brewpubs, the third will be about my favorite beers, and finally, the last will be a short tutorial on beer appreciation and what makes for a good beer.

...and so, it begins.

The Squirrely wrath List of Top Ten Breweries

Before I begin, let me qualify what follows by saying that my favorites are limited to breweries that I have actually had an opportunity to sample their wares. Obviously, this list is subject to change as my range of experience expands and, if you think there is a glaring omission here, by all means let me know. I really don't need an excuse to try a new beer.

Drum roll, please.....

Sierra Nevada - It's not much of a stretch to call Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, "iconic." This beer defines the American pale ale style and it is virtually impossible to drink any American pale ale without comparing it to Sierra Nevada's relentlessly hopped version. Sierra Nevada's other beers are uniformly good - and their seasonal Celebration is awesome - but their Pale Ale alone earns them a place on this list.
Deschuttes - The person who introduced me to this Bend, Oregon brewery said, "These guys just don't know how to make bad beer." I'd disagree; they don't even know how to make mediocre beer. Deschuttes' Black Butte Porter is probably the best example of this style being brewed today.
New Belgium - Just as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale has defined what can be done with hops in a beer, New Belgium's Fat Tire sets the example for what can be done with a malt-dominated beer and their other beers are uniformly interesting and tasty. When their 2 Degree Below seasonal is available, I never pass it up. Besides, they had a brew dog named Arrow that is posthumously remembered in their Mighty Arrow beer...you just got to like them for that alone.
Anchor - Fritz Maytag, of the washing machine Maytags, bought an abandoned brewery and, arguably, began the craft brewing revolution in America. While Fritz's rather ruthless defense of his "Steam Beer" trademark has not sit well with many brewers, Anchor Steam remains another iconic, exclusively American beer style and Anchor's annual Christmas Ale, good, bad, or just plain weird, is always much anticipated in the beer community.
Uinta Brewing - Utah's arcane beer laws place alcohol restrictions on beer brewed within the state and yet, Uinta has worked within those boundaries and produced Cutthroat Pale Ale, easily my favorite low alcohol beer. Whenever, I am back in my home state, my trunk is invariably filled with cases of Cutthroat.
Marstons - Okay, your brewery is in Burton-on-Trent, the heart of Britain's brewing industry...you better know how to make beer. Fortunately, this 1834 established brewery has had lost of practice and, just as SNPA defines the American pale ale style, Marstons Pedigree defines the English version.
Cantillon - One word, "lambic." Forget what everything you think you know about what beer is and try a bottle from this Belgian brewery. You might hate it, you might love it, but I promise it will be an adventure.
Victory Brewing - This Pennsylvania brewery is another place that seems incapable of making uninteresting beer. Their Hop Devil is a not to be missed beer and their limited release of Yakima Twilight last year...all I can say is, "Wow!"
Stone Brewing - When a brewery names their flagship beer "Arrogant Bastard Ale," it's pretty much a sign that they don't give a crap about what you think about their beer...and that's a good thing. Stone is know for making big, complex, high-alcohol beers and, if you are not collecting their yearly Vertical Epic releases...well, why the hell not??
Chimay - Belgium is blessed with many, many, many breweries, all brewing their own unique beer styles most of which never make it to the United States. Chimay is generally available and all of their beers are just dang good.

This is my list and be warned that, were I to write this blog next week or next month or next year, the list might well be different. It's a tribute to how much good beer there is being made in America these days that my list of Honorable Mentions is rather lengthy: Ninkasi Brewing (Tricerahops Double IPA), Russian River (Pliny the Elder), Three Floyds (Alpha King, Robert the Bruce), Goose Island (Nut Brown Ale), Bells (Two -Hearted Ale), Middle Ages (Druid Fluid...funny story here, but it will have to wait), New Glarus (Elkhorn Octoberfest), and others that, no doubt escape me at the moment.

Say what you want about the U.S. of A. right now, but it's a great time to be a beer-lover.

But wait, there's more! Here's a special added bonus feature:

Inevitably, there were breweries worthy of mention that I neglected to add to the above list, most notably Flying Dog Brewing - they make great beer and have Ralph Steadman designing their labels; wrapping awesome around awesome. I also have to, begrudgingly, add Dogfish Head to the list. I mean, their 60, 90, and 120 Minute IPA's are great beers, but for the love of Gawd, Sam, enough with all these silly, gimmicky beers. Ice from Antarctica for the brewing water for Pangea? Get back to me when you're ready to take beer seriously again, Dogfish.

...and a posthumous mention of the William S. Newman Brewing Co. of Albany, NY. For me, the craft brewing revolution started in 1982 when I walked into Newman's, carrying my then 1-year-old Daughter #1, and bought a box of beer (this was a 1 gallon, soft plastic container in a cardboard box) from Bill Newman himself - he actually went into the back and filled it. Here's the conversation:

Bill: First time here?
Me: Yeah.
Bill: Wanna taste?
Me: Okay.
Bill (pointing to Daughter #1): What about her? She want a taste, too?
Me: Naw...it's a little early for her, but I'm good. Set me up.

Newman's packaging sucked and the beer was, by today's standards, mediocre, but it was one of the first ripples of the tidal wave that was coming.

English lesson

2011-05-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

Recently, the redhead and I stopped into our favorite watering hole for dinner and a few beers. We seated ourselves and shortly had a couple of frosty beverages in front of us. A few sips later, it became apparent that, in addition to dinner and beer, we were also going to be treated to a lesson in the use of what Ralphie referred to as "...THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the "F-dash-dash-dash" word!" Sitting immediately behind us was a thirty-something woman and an older couple. Thirty-something was engaged in a loud, almost-continuous monolog, the point of which was virtually incomprehensible other then demonstrating her expertise in the use of the word, "fuck." Her skills were, indeed, impressive and she practiced them relentlessly. As we drank our beer, a cloud of obscenity was being generated at the adjacent table that, seemingly, filled the bar and sucked all conscious thought into itself. The redhead and I were speechless and were unable to do anything but sit there, mesmerized by the torrent of cursing next to us.

She favored its use as an adjective, "...and, like, the fuckin' guy came over the other fuckin' night." or "The fuckin' air conditioner fell out of the fuckin' window and it was so fuckin' hot after that." but mixed it up a lot and also used it as a verb ("..and I told the fuckin' people to go fuck themselves."), a noun ("...so, like, what the fuck was up with that fucker?"), and even as an adverb ("After the cops showed up, we started fuckin' runnin' down the fuckin' alley."). Of course, being well-practiced, she frequently combined multiple forms in a single sentence ("Those fucked-up fuckers down at the fuckin' bail bond place.") But she demonstrated her mastery of the word by using it as verbal punctuation: A comma ("So, fuck, what was I supposed to do with a fuckin' engine block in my front yard?"), a period ("...and he fuckin' didn't even give me fuckin' gas money, fuck."), an exclamation point ("...and then, the fucker called his fuckin' mother, the fuckin' whore! Fuck! Just fuck!"), and even an ellipsis ("But what really fuckin' pissed me off is when the fuckin' bitch said I was just fuckin' trailer trash. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.").

The older couple sitting with 30-something seemed to be as dumbfounded as the redhead and I; they just sat there, staring blankly at her as she rocketed along her verbal trajectory. Realizing there was some truly powerful ju-ju at work, I thought a counter-spell might be in order; raising my voice a decibel, I said - apropos of nothing, "I could not fucking believe that fucking United would pull a fucking stunt like that! I mean, what the fuck? The bunch of fucking fuckers!" This worked, but on the wrong target. The female half of the older couple, whipped her head around like a lassoed steer at a rodeo and stared at me. Thirty-something hesitated long enough to light another cigarette and started up where she left off. My mojo was no match for hers; I was defeated.

...and so it went for our entire stay ("Fuckin', fucked up bunch of fuckin' fuckers, fuck!"). We paid up ("...and then the fuckin' mother-fucker really fucked up fuckin' big time!") and walked, almost zombie-like, to the door ("I can't even fuckin' imagine how fuckin' fucked-up I would fuckin' have to be to do that kind of fuckin' shit").

Driving home, the redhead summed the evening up succinctly, "What the fuck?"

How to become a super hero.

2011-05-13T16:45:00.000-07:00

Step 1: Acquire one or more super powers. If this is not possible, then acquisition of highly advanced and not-generally-available technology is essential.

Step 2: Design and make a cool-looking Spandex suit. Yes, I know that "cool-looking Spandex" is an oxymoron.

Note that the order of these steps is important:

A fashion dilemma...help!

2011-05-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

I am in need of fashion advice and what better way to get it than ask anonymous strangers on the Internet. So here goes...

The Background
For my 50th birthday, the redhead gave me a diamond stud. This was completely unexpected and not something I had ever even thought about having, but there it was. In truth, the gift was both a birthday present and memento of my recent transition from a techie gearhead slaving away in the military-industrial complex to an owner/operator of a kite store. So I thought about it and then thought about it some more and then went and got my (left) ear pierced. Yes, that would have been me, in line with a bunch of tweeners getting our ears pierced. Yeah.

They say that if you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans and my "retirement" lasted an entire month as it seems the military-industrial complex was not done with me. In any case, I returned to the techie gearhead world newly accessorized:


Representation of my diamond stud in situ. The presence of the cows in the background is unexplained.

The Dilemma
Fast forward seven years. My left ear, as some of you know, still looks like the above picture. Then, for a recent anniversary, the redhead decides that my accessorization needs an upgrade:


Fashion accessory V2.0. Again, the presence of the cow in the background is unexplained.

A pirate earring. Yes, it's a pirate earring, but Captain Jack Sparrow never had one made out of freaking titanium! Yeah, that's aerospace-quality, forged titanium decorating my earlobe there. Dang cool, right? Did I mention that it's titanium? Having said that, I'm thinking that the military-industrial complex may not be ready for pirate chic, but my 21st century fashion sense may not be entirely up to date (Note: Most of my "wardrobe" carries a Hamilton Carhartt label).

So, here's your chance to weigh in and help shape the Squirrely look of the future. Discrete stud or flamboyant titanium earring?

Earth Day at the Fortress of Solitude

2011-04-17T17:59:00.000-07:00

We celebrated Earth Day here at the Fortress of Solitude yesterday. Yes, I know that "officially" Earth Day is this Friday, the 22nd, but - I'm sorry - we work for a living. So this weekend was our celebration.

The festivities began when I woke up and was wandering about the backyard with my coffee and noticed that, somehow, it had transformed into the Kingdom of the Spiders and, this being southern Nevada, that means black widow spiders - big fucking black widow spiders. I'm "WTF? When did this happen?" but headed to the garage where we keep a collection of spider toxins. I didn't deem the situation serious enough resort to my bottle of Demon X, a pesticide purchased at a Shanghai street market - where they are freaking serious about killing "pests," environmental impact be damned - and undoubtedly is considered a WMD by many UN commissions. I commenced to dispatch spiders in my backyard and then moved into the front yard, where the spider population proved to be booming, too. I returned to the backyard to find the porch covered with cockroaches, unhappy with the fact that I had poisoned them. Cockroaches are ubiquitous here in the desert...never seen them in the house, however. I think the scorpions scare them off.

During my spider slaughtering adventures, I noticed that weeds were getting a little out of control, too. Here's the thing: This is the middle of the Mohave Desert, one of the most hostile botanical environments in the world; no rain to speak of and the "soil" is a powdered mixture of limestone and gypsum- dig a hole here and you have a lime pit - and yet, I have weeds. I have to respect the tough little fuckers, but we have an HOA that gets all tense about "unsightly weeds." They have to die. So...Round-Up time. Yippee-kai-yay, motherfuckers. Oh...and happy Earth Day, Mother Gaia.

But, the festivities were just getting started. By the time, I had finished my environmental atrocities and was surveying the sea of dead spiders and roaches and rapidly wilting weeds - in my mind, the weeds were screaming, "Oh, you wretched little man, we're melting, melting...." - the redhead was up and asking what the plan was for the day. I replied that I was wanting to install the new filter on our water line and needed to take a trip to Lowes. I asked if she wanted to come along and she said, "Oh, yeah. I've got a 10% off coupon. Let's go." I sensed that my plan for the day was beginning to unravel since the redhead in a store with a coupon is pretty much like Charlie Sheen at a porn star convention. But, off we went...

Since I recognized we would need a "cargo vehicle" for this trip, we took Big Red, the prerequisite large pick-up truck that any real resident of Nevada must possess - again, happy Earth Day, Mother Gaia.

We get to Lowes and the redhead says, "Let's go by the nursery and and look at their rosebushes. We need one for the one spot over in the corner." An hour and a cart full of plants later, I say, "I guess I'm not going to be doing plumbing today." "Let's get what you need anyway. We have a 10% off coupon," the redhead replies. "We always have a 10% off coupon. Lowes bribes you to shop here. Besides, I've forgotten what I need," I reply and we leave.

The rest of the afternoon is spent gardening. Now, per my comment above, gardening in southern Nevada consists of digging a ginormous hole - not infrequently, a pick is required - filling said hole with compost, and then planting your new plant in the middle of the compost. Think of it as in-ground container gardening. No, I'm not making this up. Dirt - one hesitates to call it "soil" - is literally white here.

So, you're thinking, "Gardening seems pretty darn Earth-friendly, doesn't it?" Yeah, well, bite me. Remember that I spent the morning slaughtering the native plants that Mother Gaia, by raising the Sierra Nevada mountains 5 million years ago and putting the Great Basin in their rain shadow, decreed should be growing in my yard. What we were doing yesterday was an "unnatural" act of human arrogance; remaking our backyard into a human-friendly environment. In effect, laughing at the dictates of Mother Gaia, and through the liberal use of human-generated compost, fertilizer, and piped-in water, re-engineering the botanical nightmare she had created in southern Nevada. Happy Earth Day, Mother Gaia.

But, as usual, Mother Gaia had one last statement to make yesterday. We had just finished up and I was lounging in the newly-landscaped backyard with a cold beverage, when the Las Vegas Wash caught on fire. This actually happens all the time. The wash is populated by native plants that require a good brush fire as part of their reproductive cycle and they are pretty much programmed to go up in flames frequently. The first time I saw one of these fires, it was quite alarming; 50 foot flames, pushing a column of thick black smoke hundreds of feet in the air less than a mile from the Fortress of Solitude. However, ten years into our occupation of the Fortress of Solitude, a fire in the wash is little more than an entertaining late afternoon spectacle. So, there I was contentedly sipping my cold beverage, when the wind-blown ash from the fire arrived. All of a sudden, it was raining blackened chunks of immolated plants....and we're talking Pompeii Lite here. I'm sitting there, picking ashes out of my beer and watching my pool fill up with black crap, when it occurs to me, "I wonder how people in Miagyi will be celebrating Earth Day this year?"

Egypt...

2011-02-11T19:30:00.000-08:00

As I write this, the media is having a full-on, screaming orgasm over Hosni Murabak stepping down and even our President is pronouncing that "the people have spoken" or some such bullshit. Let's step back and recognize that transitions of power, driven by popular uprising, in the Mideast have, in recent history, been bad for western civilization, in general, and the United States, specifically.

When the Shah of Iran stepped down, Iran descended into chaos and was stabilized only when the present collection of nutjobs, who are building nuclear weapons as fast as they can, took over. Advantage? Not western civilization as we know it or the United States.

After the mujaheddin kicked the Russians out of Afghanistan, the country descended into chaos where it still remains, much to the detriment of the United States and our sons and daughters deployed there for reasons which are hard to ascertain at this point.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Balkans also descended into chaos - we can call the Balkans part of the Mideast here, because the incursions of the jihadists in the Middle Ages were a direct cause of the recent problems there - and, after more expenditure of the United States treasury, this was stabilized for the moment, at least.

When Saddam Hussein was deposed, rightly or wrongly by the intervention of the United States, Iraq descended into chaos, much to the detriment of our sons and daughters who were and are deployed there with a mission which has proven to be misguided.

...and yet our media, which seemingly has the attention span of a teenager with an iPod, is declaring that Egypt is a triumph of "the people" and "democracy." We all should seriously hope this is true. However, democracy has a damned shitty track record in the Mideast.

For some perspective, let's look at another example of a people's uprising in recent history. Tienanmen Square, at the time, was reported as an uprising of students against the oppressive Communist regime...and when the government called in the military to put down the revolt "by any means necessary," it was an atrocity and is still held out today as and example of an out-of-control and self-serving government.

For reasons that are unimportant here, my first trip to China was in 1999 and I met with Chinese nationals, entrepreneurs in the "New China," who pointed out that Tienanmen Square was not just a bunch of unhappy students who couldn't buy Levis. Tienanmen Square was a manifestation of a country-wide dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in China after years and years of Chairman Mao's corrupt mismanagement. The Chinese leadership at the time realized that they had two choices: Send in the military to put down what was a really a widespread revolt or pack their bags and get out of the country. They sent in the military...and who among us believes our own President would not make the same decision in a similar situation?

The take-away for the Chinese leadership after Tienanmen Square was that if they wanted to stay in power, they had to change the way they got business done...and, here's the thing, they did change and the people of China and the world are way better for it. China is now, arguably, the most business-friendly country on the planet. If you do a start-up in the United States these days, you raise some U.S. venture capital money and build a factory in China ASAP, because, thanks to the EPA, OSHA, and various other local, state, and federal "authorities," you'll be retired and being paid the big bucks consulting with Chinese companies before you'll build a factory in the U.S. The Chinese government sees Business as a partner that provides jobs and income for the otherwise unruly masses, as opposed to western governments who view Business as an adversary and potential source of revenue.

As the Athenians learned during the Peloponnesian War and our Founding Fathers recognized, a democracy is not any way to run a country...Thomas Hobbes was right, under a democracy, "life is nasty, brutish, and short." Recognizing the inherent drawbacks of mob rule, the United States was founded as a representative republic which has edged ever closer to a democracy as the number of government employees and recipients of government largess have increasingly dominated the population of voters.

We can only hope that there are rational, clear decision makers driving the bus in Egypt right now, because a rational person should put no hope in the mob in the streets...just as no rational person should put hope in the professional politicians, government employees, or government largess recipients in the United States.

God help us all.

The great disappearing toad mystery solved...

2010-12-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

A while back, I wrote about a paper that appeared in the Journal of Zoological Douchery - or some such - where the authors reported that all the toads in an entire swamp had mysteriously disappeared just prior to the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake in Italy. Said authors had traveled to Italy to study said toads and were somewhat "annoyed" to discover that there were no toads to study. So to justify their stay on the Italian Riviera, said authors wrote a "paper" on the fact that there were no toads there because the toads had cleared out prior to the earthquake and ascribed this disappearance to a disturbance in the ionosphere or some such nonsense.

I don't doubt that this mysterious toad disappearance has continued to bother most people. Why did the toads leave? Are they okay? Are extraterrestrials involved? Can we blame it on global warming? (This last from noted thinker, Al Gore) After all, we can't just have toads disappearing without explanation. Fortunately, this month's Geology magazine has come to the rescue and shed some light on this mystery. A paper by Toshiko Terakawa used focal mechanism tomography - read "a way to let us publish awesome looking 3-D color pictures in our article" - to infer that the L'Aquila earthquake was caused by high pressure carbon dioxide infiltrating into the fault zone. This infiltration had the effect of lubricating the fractured rock surfaces, causing them to slip. Dr. Terakawa notes that the infiltration was accompanied by a "diffuse degassing." In other words, a great deal of carbon dioxide was seeping up out of the ground in the days prior to the earthquake. One might imagine that with all this carbon dioxide coming out of the ground, life down at toad level might have become generally unpleasant...not only is it getting hard to breathe, but your favorite swamp water is slowly turning into one big Scotch and soda minus the Scotch.

In a second paper in the same issue of Geology, Francesco Pio Lucente presents his analysis of the 188 foreshocks that preceded the main earthquake. Dr. Lucente's analysis is not particularly relevant here, but note: There were 188 small earthquakes leading up to the main event. So, imagine if you will, you're a toad living in the L'Aquila toad swamp when the whole place starts jiggling like a Jello mold on a folding card table. I suspect that to whatever degree the toad brain can conceptualize "This sucks" it did and they cleared out to more stable - and breathable - swamp land.

Mystery solved. You're welcome.

Hey, kids! Let's do some math...just for fun.

2010-08-21T08:32:00.000-07:00

This month's issue of Geology has an article with the rather arcane title of "Covariability of the Southern Westerlies and atmospheric CO₂ during the Holocene." As I was reading it - yes, yes, yes, I do read this kind of stuff for "fun" and I don't have a life and I do need to get out more, but let's focus for the moment - I started to wonder how much CO₂ is dissolved in the ocean. Okay, so here is where the math comes in...I'll go slow.

Carbon dioxide can exist in water either as a dissolved gas, as it is in club soda or, more importantly, beer, or it can react with a water molecule to form a bicarbonate ion. So the total amount of CO₂ in the ocean is going to be the sum of the amount of dissolved gas and the amount tied up as bicarbonate ions. A few minutes Googling will give you these numbers which are 90 milligrams of CO₂per kilogram of seawater and 104.6 milligrams of CO₂ as bicarbonate per kilogram of seawater. Keep in mind that the salinity of the ocean varies with temperature, location, and depth, so these are rough numbers, but we're going for order of magnitude here. A little more Googling tells me that there are 1.37 million trillion metric tons of water in the world's oceans...again, this is a rough number, the CRC Handbook gives a number 20% higher. Punching a few buttons on a calculator reveals that there are an estimated 2.67 hundred trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide in ocean waters right now. Keep in mind also that this is just the "free" carbon dioxide available in sea water. If all this CO₂ were magically removed, it would be replenished by the dissolution of the calcium and magnesium carbonates that make up the bulk of sea floor sediments. Consequently, it can be assumed that the levels of free CO₂ in the ocean are more or less constant and that sea water represents an inexhaustible source of carbon dioxide.

How big are these numbers compared with what is bandied about by the anthropogenic global warmng types. I will quote the estimable Department of Energy's numbers for annual fossil fuel derived carbon emissions: averaging 26 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year between 2000 and 2006. One suspects that these numbers are as inflated as James Hansen's temperature measurements, but let's just go with these for the moment. What these numbers tell us is that it would take a hundred years of coal-burning, SUV-driving, natural gas-heating, airplane-flying carbon emissions at the present record-high levels to amount to one percent of the carbon dioxide reserve in the ocean.

Let me further point out that the solubility of carbon dioxide goes down sharply as the temperature goes up, which is why it is never a good idea to open a warm can of soda. Between 0 deg C and 20 deg C (roughly the range of ocean temperatures these days) the solubility of carbon dioxide in water decreases about 5% for every degree of temperature increase. Consequently, if the average temperature of the ocean increased one degree, that would have the potential for releasing 13 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere - the equivalent of 500 years of current levels of fossil fuel-based emissions.

Which brings me back to the Geology article I mentioned earlier. Without boring you with the grisly details, the authors discovered that there was a direct correlation between the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (as determined from Antarctic ice cores) and how hard the Southern Westerly winds were blowing (as inferred from pollen populations taken from South American lake sediment samples). These winds, to quote the authors, “…constitute the major driver of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the formation and overturning of North Atlantic Deep Water, and the up-welling of CO₂-rich deep water.” In other words, 14,000 years ago, strong winds in the Southern Hemisphere drove ocean currents that caused CO₂-rich water in deep ocean basins to rise to the warmer surface where it devolved carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

This combination of westerly winds and ocean currents seems to have been operating for at least the past 800,000 years and, arguably, since the opening of the Atlantic Ocean about 40 million years ago. The correlation between the Southern Westerlies and atmospheric carbon dioxide described in the Geology article would suggest that this has been the dominant mechanism for fixing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere for the past 14,000 years.

The take-away here: The world's oceans represent a very large and temperature sensitive reservoir ofCO₂ and air and ocean currents provide a mechanism for the exchange of CO₂ between the ocean and the atmosphere. In the geologically recent past, this exchange has been the primary mechanism for fixing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. This begs the question that has been dodged and ignored by the Jame Hansen/Phil Jones/Michael Mann crowd: Are the present high levels of atmospheric CO₂ an artifact of rising global temperatures as opposed to the cause of them?

Technology: Telecommunications Issues

2010-07-24T20:20:00.000-07:00

I never answer my house phone. Why? Because anyone we want to talk to calls me or the redhead on our mobile numbers. Since we never use our house phone, I had thought to disconnect it, but then I realized that, for $25 a month, I had a decoy number that would attract telemarketers (Do Not Call List ?...yeah, right.), political groups, alumni associations (how do those fuckers keep finding me?), pollsters, etc. Any form that I am required to fill out that wants a phone number gets the house number. Any douchebag who asks for my number, in those social situations where "Bite me" is an inappropriate response, gets my house number. Stockbrokers calling me with a "hot stock tip"? Buwuhahahaha! "Damn! That sounds awesome...but I need to read the prospectus first. Overnight it to me and then call me tomorrow at (house number)."

Of course, I have an answering machine, so when these undesirables call, they get a message telling them to leave a message -- I'm thinking of changing it to something really smarmy (We're Very Sorry we missed your call and You Are Very Important to us, so Please, Please, Please leave a message and we'll get right back to you...WHEN HELL FREEZES OVER, YOU LOSER!!! This last part won't be in the message.) -- and I dutifully hit the "Delete All" button when the display flashes the "Memory Full".

The other advantage of this strategy is that it turns my house phone into an entertainment device. Here's the scenario: I'm at home, I'm bored, and the phone rings. I look at the caller ID and see that it's my alma mater. I answer:

Me: Hello.
Earnest Student Volunteer: This in MaiXiang from Small Eastern Technical School calling. Can I talk to Dr. Wrath?
Me: Dr.Wrath?? You've got a lot of fucking nerve calling here, missy!
ESV: What? Why? What?
Me: This is Squirrely's brother. He never got over that Stonehenge Day incident at Small Eastern Technical School and dissolved himself in a vat of acid yesterday. All that was left was his IHTFP t-shirt, which was polyester so the acid had no affect on it. It was horrible and in all the papers out here.
ESV: Oh, I am so, so sorry. That is awful...
Me: Oh, cry me a fucking river, chickie. I've got 500 gallons of acid in the garage here that used to be my brother, the EPA pounding on my door, and I don't know whether to call a funeral home or a toxic waste disposal unit....[click]

Or:

Me: Hello.
Telemarketer: Sir...I wanted to let you know that we have a special on cleaning carpets this week.
Me: Well, that's fucking awesome, because we have 35 cats and pretty much gave up on the litter box thing two years ago. How soon can you be here?
Telemarketer: [click]

$25 dollars a month...I'm just saying.

Methane bubbles...

2010-07-10T19:58:00.000-07:00

There are media reports coming out that, in addition to oozing a few bazillion gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon site is on the verge of unleashing a massive methane bubble that will cause global warming on an inconceivable scale, leading to the planet heating up to where we will all be immolated and life as we know it will end. These reports claim that the same thing happened 250 million years ago at the end of the Permian period when there was a mass extinction, allegedly caused by a methane bubble of indeterminate origin, that wiped out 90 percent of the species then living.

This is absolute and shameless douchery on the part of anyone who is propagating these reports. There was, indeed, a mass extinction at the end of the Permian period. It was so massive that life on Earth came very close to being wiped out and it took the biosphere something like 75 million years to recover. To put this 75 million number in perspective, homo sapiens has been dragging its knuckles around the planet for about 20 thousand years. Whatever happened at the end of the Permian period was some powerful bad juju, but the fact of the matter is that no one has a clue what happened.

The problem is that the geological record from 250 million years ago is very sparse. The boundary between the Permian and the Triassic period, where the extinction event occurred, has been preserved in only three places in the world; South Africa, central Russia, and reportedly, in a section of China. That limited geological record tells us that at the end of the Permian period, there was an abundance of life and, at the beginning of the Triassic period, bupkus, nada, zilch. The boundary between the Permian and the Triassic, where it has been preserved, is characterized by a thick layer of black, carbonaceous gunk...the remnants of trillions of tons of animal and plant life that checked out. Oxygen isotope samples indicate a substantial increase in temperatures at this boundary (maybe 10 degrees Celsius). This is what is known about the Permian mass extinction. Truth.

So, what caused this catastrophe? -- and this was a catastrophe. No one knows. The extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period that wiped out the dinosaurs was recent enough that the geological record is mostly preserved and it is, at this point, unambiguously clear that it was caused by a big honking meteorite/comet slamming into the Earth at cosmic speeds off-shore from the Yucatan Peninsula. Buh-bye dinosaurs.

The Permian extinction is much more mysterious. The temperature increase suggested by oxygen isotope samples led some geologists to speculate that extreme global warming caused it...and indeed, there is evidence of massive volcanic eruptions in India at about that time period (India being far to the south and not part of Asia at the end of the Permian period). However, estimates of the carbon dioxide released by those eruptions showed that the warming associated with that release was far short of what would be required to cause the indicated temperature rise. It was then speculated -- and let me stress the word "speculated" -- that the temperature rise attributable to the volcanic emissions was enough to cause sufficient warming at the poles to stimulate the release of massive methane bubbles that were enough to account for the indicated temperature rise.

However, other geologists have looked at the record and claimed that the temperature rise is an expected consequence of the death and decay of virtually every living thing on the planet, which releases methane on a massive scale. These geologists would claim that the origin of the Permian extinction is unknowable based on presently available information, but it is not inconsistent with a massive meteor impact or a massive solar fluctuation. Other geologists have rejected the idea that the Permian extinction was the result of a single catastrophic event and have argued that the assembly of the supercontinent, Pangea, at the beginning of the Permian period radically altered ocean and air circulation around the globe, which set in motion climatic changes that most species then living were unable to adapt to and became extinct. Keep in mind that the geologic record from that time period is so incomplete that it is impossible to determine whether the Permian extinction occurred suddenly or over the course of several hundred thousand years.

The moral of this story, kids, is that any "science" you read in the mainstream media has nothing to do with science. It is junk science being used to push an agenda.

A very accessible book on the Permian extinction is Michael J. Benton's "When Life Nearly Died". An even more entertaining and readable discussion of the Cretaceous (buh-bye dinosaurs) extinction is Walter Alvarez' "T-Rex and the Crater of Doom". References to alternate explanations for the Permian extinction can be found in Frank Decourten's "The Broken Land" and Scott Baldridge's "Geology of the American Southwest'.

...and another thing.

2010-06-27T08:09:00.000-07:00

Since I am on the subject of the current global warming douchery, let me make a few things clear:

"Climate" is caused by an extremely complex interaction of ocean and air currents that has only recently begun to be studied and is a long way from being understood with any degree of certainty. With 6 billion people in the world dependent on intensive agriculture for survival, spending billions to perpetuate Al "Call me Mr. President, baby" Gore/Phil Jones/James Hansen pseudo-science instead of using that money to understand real climatic changes that have historically caused disruptions in human societies is truly criminal.
Solar radiation is the source of energy that drives the ocean and air currents that cause "climate", but the details of this interaction are no more well understood than the connections between ocean and air movements and climate change...and causal effects are neither simple or obvious. For example, shortly after the last Ice Age (about 11,000 BC), warming in the Arctic released massive amounts of fresh water into the Atlantic Ocean. This influx of fresh water disrupted the Gulf Stream which caused cooling in Europe and northern Asia and essentially returned this part of the globe to Ice Age-like conditions for the next 1000 years (yes...1000 years as in "10 centuries"). This time span is referred to as the Younger Drydas Period. At the end of this period, the Gulf Stream restarted -- no one knows how or why -- and Europe warmed up again.
The UN IPCC report that Al "I think I'll go get a massage, Tipper" Gore claimed was the "nail in the coffin" for proving global warming is science practiced at the high school science fair level. The "forcing model" that is the basis for all of the dire warming claims is almost embarrassingly rudimentary...a one-dimensional model that adds up things that trap heat in the atmosphere, subtracts things that reflect it back into space and comes up with a number that predicts how fast the earth will warm up. Even if you assume that this simple-minded model reflects something remotely connected with reality, if you look at the margin of error assigned to all of the individual "forcing" factors, the margins on subtracting factors (variable albedo, airborne particulates, etc.) are so great that the model actually predicts cooling if these subtracting factors are higher than the IPCC "scientists" have assumed them to be.
Something I was unaware of until a recent conversation with an actual climate scientist: All attempts to use the "forcing model" to predict actual climate change have failed...and this has not been from lack of trying or shortage of supercomputer time. In other words, if you take the temperature increases predicted by the forcing model and plug them into an actual climate model, the results have never reflected the reality. For example, these climate models consistently predict that increased global temperatures will result in much dryer, hotter weather in the midwest United States and this obviously has not happened.
Finally, how does one actually measure an average global temperature? Using a strictly local phenomenon (temperature) to determine a global effect is an exercise fraught with peril. So how do you do it to come up with a meaningful number? Obviously, you take temperature readings all over the world and calculate an average. However, to arrive at this average, you need to take into account things like variation of temperature with altitude, seasonal variations, variation of temperature with latitude (the farther north you go, the cooler it becomes), and environmental variations (a maritime climate will be warmer than a continental climate at the same altitude and latitude). This can all be done, but you need to be extremely careful with how you sample temperatures to insure that you don't skew the results, especially since there are a lot of subtleties involved. For example, suppose you have a sampling station that has been used to monitor temperature over 50 years or so. If this station is in a location that has become increasingly urbanized over that time period, it will measure an average temperature increase purely due to the fact that vegetation is being gradually replaced by concrete. James Hansen's models of temperature change in the United States in the 20th century embarrassingly ignored this issue. Determining this average global temperature requires an enormous amount of processing of an enormous amount of data...and there is a lot of room for error -- or outright fraud -- in doing this calculation...and it is really the validity of these calculations that is the heart of the global warming controversy, as we have learned from the revelation of the flim-flam in Phil Jones' "research" group.

Rant over...

The curious case of sunspots...

2010-06-25T00:23:00.000-07:00

The scientists at NASA (Motto: It's not rocket science...hell, what we do isn't even science) have announced that there has been a curious absence of sunspots for the past few years and this absence has been the most prolonged in the past 100 years....and there is hand-wringing at NASA that this may just be the calm before the Sun unleashes solar storms on a epic level. This last is pure douchery as there is no clear idea as to what drives the sunspot cycle within the Sun...but NASA climate change dogma requires it be said.

Lack of sunspot activity is by no means unprecedented. The sixteenth century marked the beginning of systematic astronomical activity and the presence or absence of sunspots received a great deal of attention. Astronomers through the next three hundred years noted periods of unusually low sunspot activity. These periods were even named after their discoverers, the Sporer Minimum (1425-1575), the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715), and the Dalton Minimum (1790-1820). Long periods of low sunspot activity are well documented and yet, NASA, in its hand-wringing report of a couple of years without sunspots, fails to even mention these precedents. Why?

There is really no big mystery here. Large portions of the NASA budget are dependent on climate change research and by "climate change" we mean "catastrophic anthropogenic global warming threatening life-as-we-know-it that will require massive government funding (to NASA) in order to save us from ourselves". Historical sunspot minima are especially inconvenient in the present context for NASA climate doomsayers because low sunspot activity correlates to reduced solar luminosity and the previous minima coincide with the coldest periods of the so-called "Little Ice Age" that occurred between roughly 1380 and 1850. Imagine that...variations in solar intensity being a primary driver of climate changes. Note that the NASA report implies that sunspot activity has been high for the past 100 years. Hmmm...increased solar intensity over the same period of time that mankind has supposedly been raping the planet with carbon emissions? Coincidence? I think not.

Imagine the budgetary disaster at NASA if they started talking about 30 to 60 years of cooling temperatures ahead. James Hansen might actually have to start doing real science instead of just making shit up.

Welcome to Stalag 1050

2010-05-28T07:47:00.000-07:00

The Fortress of Solitude is situated on a corner lot in an undisclosed location near Las Vegas. For reasons unexplained, the original builder built the house facing away from the corner. Consequently, the backyard faces the street. This is not as much of an inconvenience as one might think as the lot grade is about four feet above street level and the back yard is surrounded by a four foot block wall. So, the Fortress of Solitude is, literally, a fortress. Were we set upon by barbarians, jihadists, or angry Harry Reid supporters, I could, at my leisure, pour boiling oil on them from the safety of my fortress parapet. "Buwuhahahahaha...that looks like it hurts, you heathen bastards! Here...let me crack open another cold one while the next pot of boiling oil heats up. Hahahahahaha!"

It's a sweet set-up, but with one minor drawback. It is a corner lot and the city decreed at some point that there had to be a street light on this particular corner for the Greater Public Good. What this "Good" might be in a neighborhood where a couple of 50-somethings, i.e., me and the redhead, are considered the "young punks" is an impenetrable mystery...regardless, there is a street light on the corner, immediately adjacent to the backyard of the Fortress of Solitude. Now, when we originally bought the house, this streetlight was your garden-variety 400W high pressure sodium lamp. Distracting -- when the redhead and I would sit in the backyard to enjoy the evening or take a late night swim in the heat of the summer -- but tolerable. In truth, I've always harbored something of an affection for high pressure sodium lights as one of my first tasks as a callow youth at the General Forge and Foundry Co. just out of graduate school was to figure out why low wattage high pressure sodium lamps were failing long before their big brothers. I did and now, you can go out and buy a 50 watt high pressure sodium lamp for your illumination pleasure...you're welcome.

But I digress...anyway, for years I enjoyed whatever late night frolicking might be in order under the pale yellow-orange glow of "our" streetlight. But then, about a week ago, I head into the backyard one evening in the midst of a typical Las Vegas windstorm to secure lawn furniture, fish random debris out of the pool, wrap my windchimes in duct tape, and tie my garbage cans down so I don't have to go on a "treasure hunt" to find them in the morning. I'm doing all these things -- of course, I have belayed myself to the house with 13mm climbing rope to insure that I, myself, am not the subject of a morning "treasure hunt" -- when, suddenly, it hits me...it's brighter than freaking daylight out here! Either someone has detonated a thermonuclear "device" over Las Vegas or...Yes! That's it!...We have a new street light.

...and there I was, looking up at a five eleventy-bazillion lumen Ha-Larc street light that was lighting up my backyard like it was a prison compound. WTF? When did this happen? Apparently, the city decided that a mere 400W high pressure sodium lamp was not bright enough to protect the neighborhood from...what? An impending zombie apocalypse or vampire outbreak? Clearly, they wanted to insure that any miscreants that might be lurking around the neighborhood at night will need to wear sunglasses.

The redhead basking in the near-demonically bright street light that has turned the Fortress of Solitude into Stalag 1050.

Obviously, this situation is intolerable and demands action, but what? My first thought was an act of vandalism that might, say, cause the light to break. The redhead counsels a more mature approach where we go to the city and complain. Yeah, right...and when those complaints fall on deaf ears, as they inevitably will, we become the lead suspects when I implement my campaign of vandalism. What about the homeowner's association? she suggests. I remind her that we have been locked in a mortal, tag-team, battle-to-the-death with the stormtrooper-like compliance committee for nine years now. It's unlikely we will find sympathy with that group of nebbishes, douchebags, and busybodies.

No. I am afraid that vandalism is the only viable approach. But how to put the light out? Of course, the Fortress is equipped with an array of handguns, any of which would easily do the job. However, I suspect that my neighbors might look in askance and the local constabulary disapprove if I stood out in my backyard and started banging away at the light with my Desert Eagle. Similarly, treating the streetlight as a stationary clay pigeon and ending its reign of illumination terror with a shotgun blast would, no doubt, attract unwanted attention and draw protests from neighbors who might be peppered with errant 00 pellets. It then occurred to me, if I opened a bedroom window and crouched in the bathroom, I would have a straight shot at the streetlight with my AR-15, with the bedroom muffling the report and hiding the muzzle flash. Yes, that could work...but if I missed, I would end up sending 5.56mm rounds into the new housing development down the wash...and I'm just wanting to put out a street light, not snipe my distant neighbors, even if most of them are refugees from the People's Republik of Kalifornia. No. Sadly, I don't seem to be properly equipped for the bit of skulduggery that's needed.

However, a little Googling provided this. Hmmmm...

Seriously...Western civilization as we know it is in peril!

2010-05-03T20:42:00.000-07:00

I started this blog to occasionally critique technical reporting in newspapers, which really is abysmal and almost always pushing an agenda. I thought, as I have some credentials and experience in things science-related, I could do my part to improve the general public's understanding of the usually complex technical issues that are being reported by total morons. However, in doing so, I have discovered that I have turned a blind eye to some critically important, no, Mortally Important issues that are not being addressed at all by the mainstream media and even the so-called blogosphere, which prides itself on being on top of everything, continues to ignore.

I am, of course, referring to the crisis of near galactic importance that has been brewing at Starbucks ("brewing" "Starbucks"...get it?). The coffee juggernaut has apparently changed its frappacinno recipe (OH! SWEET MOTHER OF GOD! NO! NO! NO!). I am indebted to Sheri Gilmour for bringing this to my attention, because although I am a regular Starbucks customer, I usually just go in, wade through the sea of small children, cranked up on sugar and caffeine, who are wilding in the store, stand in line behind a bunch of douches who are demanding a soy mocha-frappa-skinny-latte with whipped cream and an extra pump of some syrupy bullshit, and order - call me "old school" - coffee. Consequently, I was blissfully unaware to the mind-boggling crisis that is shaking the very roots of our way of life! A few minutes on MyStarbucksIdea.com will convince you of the enormity of the disaster in the making. Long time Starbucks customers have actually threatened to NOT BUY THE NEW FRAPPACINNO! Other customers are experiencing symptoms of stress. Still others have complained that their dear sweet children have pitched a booger and refused to drink the new frappacinno...and it goes without saying that grave concerns have been voiced over the impact that this new recipe will have on the environment.

Of course, predictably, there are those drawing parallels between this fiasco and the New Coke disaster of the 1980's and others pointing out that this is only a harbinger of the end of the world in 2012. There are even hints that the new recipe is the work of Dark Corporate Starbucks Overlords who have changed the recipe to advance their Evil Agenda. There does seem to be some disagreement as to what this agenda actually is, but rumors of increased profits, sterilization of the undesirable, and take-over by the Republican Party abound.

I don't know...I'm just a simple rustic living in the distant provinces. I go into a store and buy a whatever, taste it and think, "This tastes like crap."...I just walk down the street and buy something at Peet's that I might like better, but that's just me. But I also realize that my simple world view is sometimes too simple. It would seem that there are many people in this world convinced that Armageddon is here, life as we know it is ending, and unspeakable Evil is afoot. Out of respect for them, I am begging everyone who reads this to take action. Call, email, write your entire congressional delegation. Hearings must be held! Call, email, write your favored media outlets and demand to know why this is not being reported. Organize grass-roots efforts to protest this abomination! But most of all, contact Reynolds Aluminum and tell them to beef up production of aluminum foil...it would seem that a lot of Starbucks customers have lost their hats.

Scary climate change...

2010-04-18T08:41:00.000-07:00

As the Eyjafjallajokull volcano reminds us that Nature doesn't just mess with people in the third world, I'd like to direct people's attention to two very informative books dealing with climate change...and this would be real and documented climate change, not the Al Gore/James Hansen junk science silliness that everyone considers "climate change" these days. Presented for your edification: The Long Summer and Flood, Famines, and Emperors, both by Brian Fagan. Fagan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at UC-Santa Barbara who has written extensively on the effect that the vagaries of climate have had on past civilizations. The two books I've cited are both very readable and, I'd say, reasonably accessible to the non-technical reader.

In both books, Fagan references anthropogenic global warming and makes the expected worrisome comments about a future of human-induced climate change. However, his careful cataloging of ten thousand years of climate changes provides a powerful argument for a more measured interpretation of recent climate "changes". Two general observations stand out in reading Fagan's books. First, all significant climate change since the end of the last Ice Age has been driven by changes in ocean and air currents. Second, and more significant, is how frequently the phrase "we don't know why.." appears in Fagan's descriptions. Fagan admits that the mechanisms that drive changes in ocean and air currents are poorly understood and this is a significant revelation in a time when climate "scientists" are making dire and, apparently, precise predictions on the effects of the average global temperature changing by a few tenths of a degree.

What is known about ocean and air currents is that they are driven by convection; warm air (or water) rises and cool air (or water) sinks. Temperature differences between the poles and the equator provide an engine for the movement of air and water on an inconceivably massive scale. Throw in some continents, island chains, ocean basins, and deep ocean trenches and you have a lot of quasi-stable ocean currents set up that defy modelling...and this fact points to the very heart of the intellectual dishonesty of the climate change gloom and doomers. Even if we assume that human activity has caused the average global temperature to rise (and let me stress that this is an "if" that puts us close to the realm of science fiction), we don't know how that is going to change the climate and we know so little about movement of air and water on a global scale that it is impossible to say that a global temperature rise would be a bad thing.

What Fagan does point out is where the very real danger of climate change lies. An astounding 70 percent of the world's population live in regions that would be affected by a significant El Nino event such as those that ended the Mayan civilization in Central America or drove the Anazasi out of the New Mexico deserts. Both of these cultures were dependent upon very intensive farming on a limited amount of available land. When an El Nino event triggered a multi-year drought, both cultures collapsed.

Fagan points out that with the earth's present population of 6 billion people, essentially all agriculture is as intensive as that feeding the Maya and Anazasi cultures and that literally hundreds of millions of people are currently dependent upon the agricultural output of marginal lands that would become untenable in a major El Nino event. As Floods, Famines, and Emperors makes clear, the shifting of trade winds and ocean currents in the central Pacific that characterizes an El Nino is a global event that affects weather around the entire globe in ways that are not clearly understood - again, let me stress the "not clearly understood" aspect here. A significant El Nino could cause agriculture to crash in places as far away as sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and China with the resultant famine and subsequent unrest destabilizing governments and economies around the world.

...and here lies the true crime of the scientists and bureaucrats who have built reputations, careers, and institutional empires on anthropogenic global warming. By squandering billions and billions of research dollars in their attempts to "prove" human-caused climate change, studies of the real and historically documented threats that climate change presents to humanity have been left largely under-funded. Fagan's books would suggest that it is only a matter of time - as in years, not decades or centuries - before we come to regret our ignorance.

Who are these "scientists" in the Union of Concerned Scientists and what are they concerned about?

2010-04-04T09:01:00.000-07:00

Because of these standards, Americans will drive vehicles that save them money at the pump, cut the country's oil dependence and produce a lot less global warming pollution.

Thus quoth Jim Kleisch, Senior Engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists referring, of course, to the recently mandated automotive fuel efficiency standards. In and of itself, Mr. Kleisch's statement is not particularly notable...walk into any wonk drinking establishment in Washington these days and you'll hear something to this effect two, maybe three, times before you've finished your first beer. However, it was Mr. Kleisch's title that caught my attention, "Senior Engineer" with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Impressive...and I'm left wondering as to what qualifies one to gain a "Senior" title at the UCS.

A Google search (72,100 hit's on "Jim Kleisch") later I find that Mr. Kleisch's official title is "Senior Analyst/Engineer" with the UCS and that he specializes in "clean vehicle technologies." Fair enough. A little more searching reveals that he has held the following positions:
*
Senior Vehicles Analyst
Union of Concerned Scientists
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Senior Engineer
Union of Concerned Scientists
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Research Associate
ACEEE (American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy)
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Vehicle Analyst
ACEEE (American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy)
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Research Associate
American Councils
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Principal Vehicle Analyst
American Councils
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Researcher
American Councils

Wait...none of these jobs sounds particularly engineer-like. The UCS rounds out Mr. Kleisch's bio with "He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Ohio University, and a master's degree in environmental and energy policy from the University of Delaware" and helpfully adds that "Mr. Kleisch has been widely cited in the national media, including the Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Washington Post and has appeared on CNN, CNBC, and the BBC." No papers in refereed journals or issued patents, but Mr. Kleisch has been quoted by Rolling Stone magazine...sorry, Jimmy, your professional credentials are entirely not impressive.

What I'm not seeing here is anything "automotive" in Mr. Kleisch's background or anything even vaguely related to engineering. Yes, he does have an EE degree, but there's no evidence that he has ever engineered anything, electrical or otherwise. What he has done in his brief career -- looking at the picture in his bio, I'd put Mr. Kleisch in his mid-30's -- is be a policy drone, who probably considers recharging his Starbucks card on-line to be an engineering feat...and yet, the Union of Concerned Scientists drags Mr. Kleisch out for a quote supporting their "Clean Energy" agenda and slaps a "Senior Engineer" title on him to give his musings an aura of technical credibility. This sort of obfuscation is unforgivable. There are very real issues associated with the oil-based economy that is currently driving the industrialized world. Issues of sustainability, of transfer of wealth and political power, of emission of pollutants, but for the UCS to attempt to drive the conversation by inventing a faux expert to issue feel good statements on cue is intellectual dishonesty in its most cynical form.

Earthquake predicting toads?

2010-04-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

A story has shown up in newspapers and web news sites over the past days about a report that toads have the ability to "predict" earthquakes. The report even showed up on the prestigious journal, Nature's blog. Commenter "karl" at the end of the Nature blog report captures the gist of my thoughts on this particular scientific amusement.

The source of this report of almost magical powers in toads is a paper published in the Journal of Zoology by a Rachel Grant who noted that the toads around L’Aquila, Italy stopped doing their normal toad stuff and cleared out of the area shortly before an earthquake there. Granted, this is an interesting observation, but one wonders why the reviewers for the Journal of Zoology did not return this paper to Ms. Grant with a three letter review: "WTF??"

One group of toads acting oddly before one earthquake is interesting, but as Ms. Grant herself admits, "purely anecdotal." The J.Zoo. (was we scientists like to abbreviate journal titles) paper does make a weak attempt at a causal explanation:

The team suspect the strange toad behaviour was triggered by pre-seismic perturbations in the ionosphere, which were detected by very low frequency radio sounding.

As I said, weak...the ionosphere extends from 43 miles above the earth to 250 miles above the earth. Ms. Grant would speculate that stresses in the Earth's crust miles below the surface have some affect on the upper atmosphere that a male toad hopping around in a swamp, bent on finding female toads, is particularly sensitive to...I won't say this is utter nonsense, but I need a little more explanation for how this near magical communication takes place.

So how does something like this ever make the light of day? Here's my opinion: Ms. Grant and her team are studying the spawning behavior of common toads in Italy -- and why Italy? Don't common toads exist in Ms. Grant's native England? Call me cynical, but my boondoggle sensor is going off here. In any case... -- in the middle of their study, the toads clear out, which Ms. Grant understandably finds "annoying". The toad studiers go home with nothing to show for their efforts and then, boom! There's and earthquake back in the Italian toad swamp and, all of a sudden, Team Toad has something to write about...not much mind you, but it's better than admitting you couldn't find any toads to study. Paper written, Ms. Grant gets to add another line to her curriculum vitae -- and is one step closer to tenure -- and J.Zoo. gets to pad their next issue so they don't look like a loser journal than nobody reads or publishes in.

Has the body of knowledge we call "Science" been advanced? Maybe a wee tiny bit. This is a credible observation -- we hope -- and there might be a real, physical connection between the toads disappearing and the earthquake. Ignoring the ionospheric silliness, it's possible the toads were sensitive to very low frequency vibrations that were precursor to the fault slipping or were getting away from a release of radon gas -- or something -- prior to the quake. The way Science generally works in these matters is: 1) Make observation, 2) Form hypothesis, 3) Test hypothesis via experiment, 4) Compare experimental result with observation, and 5) Return to Step 2, as necessary. Jumping from the observation stage to publication is just a lazy person's way to pad their resume.

Fuzzy thinking apparently continues in Barcelona

2010-03-27T07:56:00.000-07:00

Maria Cheng continues to report on the Barcelona breast cancer conference today: and the topic du jour is the effectiveness of breast cancer screening. In an article practically devoid of anything substantiating, the experts would seem to be arguing that 1) Too many women are being screened for breast cancer, 2) Too much screening is bad because of "false alarms and unneeded biopsies", 3) It really doesn't help the women being screened all that much, and 4) Patients need to be screened prior to being screened for breast cancer. Interestingly enough, there is no discussion reported as how this screening of the screenees would be done. Also absent is any substantiation of the statement that screening doesn't really help that much. I think I need the words "help" and "much" defined a little better here.

There is a statement in the article:

U.S. researchers last year estimated five lives saved per thousand women screened.

If your mother, wife, or daughter were one of the five, would you consider breast cancer screening "not much help"? There are roughly 60 million women in the US over the age of 40. If only 20% of them were being screened, this would be 60,000 lives saved. How in the name of God does this get called "not helping very much"?

But the telling statement comes towards the end of the article:

Jorgensen (Karsten Jorgensen of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen) said screening has become more of a political issue than a medical one. Officials have spent so many years convincing women to get mammograms that it will be difficult to now change policies, especially with a very vocal and powerful breast cancer lobby.

Political? Policies? Obviously, we are several steps away from a doctor advising his female patients, based on their lifestyle, family history, etc. whether they should have a mammogram when they turn 40. This is about money, plain and simple. Health care costs, among other entitlement programs, are driving the European economy into bankruptcy and the medical community meeting in Barcelona is trying to rationalize cutting costs.

In fairness, I am drawing conclusions based on Ms. Cheng's reporting of the Barcelona conference and obviously there is a lot more discussion and information being distributed that I don't have access to. If I am maligning the intent of the conferees, I apologize but will still hold Ms. Cheng to task for bad reporting.

In the interest of full disclosure, my mother died of ovarian cancer and my mother-in-law died of breast cancer. Do I want my wife and daughters to be screened? Absolutely. Would I pay for it myself? Without question. If medicine ever came to a point where they would be denied screening based on a bureaucrat's view as to what was an "acceptable" cost, what can I say? Aux barricades, chers concitoyens

Breast cancer, diet, and exercise...I smell a rat

2010-03-26T10:30:00.000-07:00

"Up to a third of breast cancer cases in Western countries could be avoided if women ate less and exercised more..." -- Associated Press

When stories like this show up on the front page of the paper, they always get my attention. I'm naturally a skeptic and am always suspicious when technical subjects get sensationalized. Normally, when I read something like this, I suspect statistical douchery. For example, suppose you search a database and find that the breast cancer mortality rate for women who don't exercise is 27 deaths per 100,000 and the mortality rate for women who exercise is 18 deaths per 100,000. In the world of cancer research where the competition for funding is fierce, you may rush a paper into publication that states that exercising can reduce breast cancer deaths by a third. However, suppose you do a little additional searching of the data base and sort the exercising and non-exercising groups by household income where you find that the death rate for breast cancer in both groups is much higher for low income households than high income households. You also find that, since high income households have more disposable income and more leisure time than lower incomes, a much greater percentage of exercisers belong to high income households. Consequently, your original exercise correlation was merely telling you that poor women have a higher breast cancer death rate than women who can afford more frequent doctor visits, regular screening, etc.

Purely statistical correlations such as the one I've hypothetically described above are entirely useless when it comes to reducing breast cancer rates. However, when they are used to identify mechanisms by which cancer cell growth is triggered, they can be a valuable tool. To continue the above example, suppose you used the exercising correlation to look into the hormone levels of exercisers and non-exercisers and found that the exercisers had lower levels of certain hormones that have been associated with cancer occurrences. This is useful information.

So...with this in mind, I went on the Internet to track down the source of the "one-third reduction" number. The report ended up being based on a talk given by Carlo La Vecchia at a conference in Barcelona. The source of La Vecchia's figures was cited to be a study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. If you go to the IARC website, you'll find that the figures come from a report (Volume 6) that was written in 2002 and is now out-of-print. Hmmm...data from an 8 year old report suddenly makes front page news. What the hell? First, understand that in any technical field, 8 years ago was ancient history. I am supposed to believe that a supposedly critical connection between diet and exercise and breast cancer was announced 8 years ago and that there have been no follow-up studies that have made more recent or updated data available? I think not. So what is going on here? Here are my best guesses:

1. Carlo La Vecchia wanted a boondoggle to the Barcelona conference, so he submitted an abstract for essentially a throw away talk using old data. Consequently, he gets the University of Milan to pay for his trip. Meanwhile, Maria Cheng, the AP reporter, is at the conference looking for something, anything, she can write a story on. La Vecchia mentions his 25 to 30 percent reduction in breast cancer number, Cheng grabs that, rounds it up to "one-third", makes a few calls to some breast cancer workers she knows who give her some broad general comments, and she's got an easy byline.

2. The story has an interesting quote by La Vecchia, "What can be achieved with screening has been achieved. We can't do much more. It's time to move on to other things." By "other things", the professor is obviously talking about preventing breast cancer through diet and exercise, which will, of course, require tens of millions of dollars in new funding to study...and as he has just established himself as the lead expert in this subject -- if only by dredging up some work probably done 10 years ago -- La Vecchia looks to be leader in the clubhouse as the recipient of a good chunk of that money.

3. A potentially darker interpretation of the timing of this story, since it is coming out of the Associated Press, who can't issue any story without injecting their political agenda into it, is that it is intimately connected to the recent health care debate. Anyone with a brain recognizes that the health care bill that just passed is going to result in higher taxes and reduced services -- if you don't believe this, please email and tell me about the rest of your life on Planet Pollyanna...I'll bet it's nice there. Taxes will go up, but tax increases are never very palatable to the American public, even during prosperous times. Any congress person that votes for a significant tax increase these days might as well go home and campaign for their successor. Reducing services is much easier to slip by the public, since they won't know they're missing them until they need them. Herein lies a possible subtext in the AP's story...if you're a fat woman, who drinks, doesn't exercise, and is diagnosed with breast cancer, then "I'm sorry, ma'am...you've brought this on yourself. We need to save our very expensive treatment for people who are more deserving. Why don't you go take a walk and quit eating Big Mac's?" The AP article mentions drinking (bad), exercise (good), and obesity (doubly bad)...I'm surprised they didn't go for the trifecta and throw in smoking.

China...thoughts from one who's been there and returned.

2010-03-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

A common topic among many conservative commentators is the looming threat of China as an implacable enemy intent on the destruction of the United States and our way of life. However, to the likes of Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, I have to say, "World communism as you knew it is dead. The harsh realities of the global marketplace drove a stake through the heart of that vampire in the late 80's." Is China an implacable enemy? Hardly. Are they our friend? Don't kid yourself...

To understand China today, you need to understand what really happened at Tienanmen Square. The impression that was left with the American public was that the powerful Communist government called in the full force of its military to brutally suppress a peaceful protest by Chinese students. A Chinese acquaintance who was a student at the time had a somewhat different story: The protest that was centered at Tienanmen Square was far more widespread than a collection of students and the military was called out only when the the government was faced with imminent collapse in what was quickly becoming nothing less than open rebellion in the populace. If we accept that this was the case, can Americans who moralize about the brutal government response at Tienanmen claim that our own government would respond any differently? I think not...

In any case, Tienanmen Square did serve as a wake up call for the Beijing government that economic reform was long overdue and, to their credit, radical and, literally, world-changing reform was made to happen in short order. The odd hybrid of socialism and capitalism, "planned capitalism" if you will, that exists today in China is the result of that reform. Nothing drove home to me the rapid and decisive nature of this change more than when I visited Beijing in late 1999 (ten years after Tienanmen Square) and found a McDonald's open for business across the street from Mao's Tomb. Ten years earlier, anyone standing at that spot would have been watching tanks running over students in the nearby square.

China has grown its economy over the past twenty years through the massive export of manufactured goods. It has, and still does, encourage foreign manufacturers to build plants in China as well as growing its own native manufacturing. This economic growth has provided for order of magnitude increases in the standard of living of the Chinese people, which of course, was the whole point of the post-Tienanmen economic reforms. However, this growth has not come without problems. There's an old joke that says, "Cocaine will make you a new man...and the first thing the new man wants is more cocaine." Prosperity is like that...once people get a little, they want more. Consequently, the Chinese government is faced with the dilemma of maintaining economic growth to feed the increasing demand for more "stuff" from the increasingly prosperous Chinese people.

Economic growth in China means continued export of manufactured goods on a massive scale, which in turn requires a healthy appetite for those goods in the world's dominant economy, i.e., the United States. A weak American economy threatens the economic health of China. China has lent hundreds of billions of dollars to the United States, not as part of a diabolical plot to destroy the U.S. economy, but as an almost desperate attempt to prop up the primary customer of Chinese manufactured goods. The lessons of Tienanmen Square are constantly on the minds of Chinese leaders. They stay in power only as long as the Chinese people are prosperous and economic growth continues.

China should be viewed as a fierce and determined economic competitor. The Cold War is over...capitalism won, but that is small consolation for the United States. Just as the most fervent Christian is the recent convert, China has not so much embraced capitalism as it has roped it, saddled up, and is riding it like a stolen horse. However, the economic growth that has stabilized Chinese society is not sustainable. Even now, wages in China are rising rapidly and I have spoken with Chinese factory owners who are seriously contemplating moving operations to Vietnam, among other places, to, ironically enough, take advantage of cheaper labor. The Chinese government has also started to recognize that their "growth at any cost" strategy has brought many areas of the country to the verge of environmental collapse - I've spent a lot of time in the industrial zone south of Shanghai and have yet to see anything resembling a blue sky and even tap water in downtown Shanghai is too polluted to drink. Correcting what can only be called "environmental atrocities" while necessary, will have a distinctly negative impact on China's global competitiveness. I don't know how the Chinese government will end up addressing the issue of economic sustainability, but I do know that whatever actions they take will dominate the world of Realpolitk for at least the next 20 years.

It only seems like "warming"...

2009-08-18T17:02:00.000-07:00

In a separate entry, I discussed how the politics of government funding have largely created the “global warming” crisis. In this entry I’ll discuss the technical merits of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming.

…and here is the thing: Starting in the late 1300’s, the Earth went into a substantial period of cooling that lasted until the early 1800’s. This cold period has been called “the Little Ice Age” and was responsible, among other things, for the collapse of the thriving Viking colony on Greenland that had been established in a warmer time when southern Greenland really was “green”. The cause of the Little Ice Age has not been established conclusively, but in the early 1800’s the climate began to warm again and now, in the early 21st century, global temperatures have returned to the same levels they had been at during the Middle Ages. I’ll repeat that…global temperatures have just now returned to levels that were considered “normal” during the Middle Ages.

Proponents of anthropogenic global warming are fond of showing plots of global temperatures starting in the early 1800’s up through the present, as these show an alarming “hockey stick” increase in average global temperatures. I’ll discuss temperature trends in the last half of the 20th century presently, but if these same temperature graphs are extended back 1000 years instead of 100, the data look far less alarming. The temperature increase during the 19th and 20th centuries is seen to be merely the planet’s recovery from the so-called Little Ice Age. This 1000 year data also show that the recent increase is essentially symmetrical with the temperature decrease in the 13th and 14th centuries, i.e., the Earth warmed up at about the same rate as it cooled down. A credible argument of anthropogenic global warming would have to demonstrate warming above and beyond this recovery from an extended period of cooling. This simply has not been done and even the existence of the Little Ice Age has not entered into the popular discussion of global warming.

The 1000 year temperature data, which has been deduced from a combination of pollen counts in ice cores, tree ring growth patterns, and historical observations, has been criticized as accurate thermometers have only been generally available for the past few hundred years. However, agrarian societies, highly sensitive to the growing season, have been almost fanatical in recording dates of the first and the last frost, amounts of snow and rainfall, and any unusual weather conditions. When these dates are referenced to the lunar and solar calendars an accurate picture of temperature trends can be assembled and, as these observations are consistent with data from independent sources, i.e., pollen samples and tree ring data, this 1000 year temperature data can be viewed as entirely credible.

One of the more alarmist claims of proponents of anthropogenic global warming is that nine of the hottest years in the United States during the 20th century occurred in the 1990’s. These claims were based primarily on work published by NASA’s James Hansen and they would be alarming, indeed, if true. However, Hansen’s conclusions were based on temperatures measured at weather stations across the United States which were then averaged using an algorithm that accounted for differences in altitude and local climate. However, analysis of Hansen’s data after he made his hyperbolic claims revealed some glaring errors in his calculation methods. One of the more egregious of these was a failure to account for the increasing urbanization of the United States over the course of the 20th century. Simply put, a weather station sitting in a cow pasture in the 1930’s would read substantially lower temperatures than that same weather station sitting in a suburban parking lot in the 1960’s. When these analysis errors were corrected, it was found that the hottest years in the 20th century occurred during the 1930’s and that the early 21st century has been characterized by a slight cooling trend...again consistent with a climate where global temperatures have leveled off after recovering from an extended period of cooling.

If the increase in global temperature from the early 1800’s to the present is recognized as a recovery from an extended cooling period, then all of the global warming alarmism gets put in perspective. The supposedly dire consequences of anthropogenic global warming – melting ice packs, rising sea levels, plant and animal extinctions, droughts, floods, violent hurricanes, etc., etc., etc. – can be viewed, not as apocalyptic, end-of-life-as-we-know-it disasters, but as the consequences of an extremely complex interaction of fluctuating solar radiation, cyclic “wobbling” of the earth’s rotation on its axis, and changes in atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. Had all of these supposedly impending disasters not been blamed on the convenient catch-all of “global warming”, the billions of dollars and thousands of man-years spent on “proving” that our impending “doom” was a result of human activities might actually have been used to study the real mechanisms for climate change. Had that been the case, not only would we have a much better understanding of the natural world we inhabit, but planners in the southwest US might have useful tools for predicting the duration of the current drought, maritime nations might have tools for planning shipping routes in the high Arctic, agriculturalists might have more accurate knowledge of growing seasons…the list of benefits for serious climate research is a long one. Unfortunately for all of us, these resources have been squandered on a failed effort to use government-funded science to drive an agenda.

Harry Reid's Clean (Sort of) Energy Summit 2.0

2009-08-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

I attended a conference on Monday where a Texas oil man was roundly praised as a visionary for proposing that the United States solve its emerging energy crisis by drilling for domestic natural gas. A conference chaired by Newt Gingrich to support his “drill here, drill now” campaign? No…this was Harry Reid’s Clean Energy Summit 2.0. Let me say that again, surrounded by such notables as Harry Reid, Al Gore, Wesley Clark, Stephen Chu, Van Jones, and John Podesta, T. Boone Pickens proposed drilling into the country’s plentiful domestic natural gas reserves as a way of reducing our dependence on foreign oil. In any other venue, such an opinion would produce shrieks of rage from environmentalists, but this was Clean Energy Summit 2.0 and Pickens’ pronouncement was heralded as nothing short of brilliant and visionary. The fact that power produced by the combustion of natural gas generates copious quantities of carbon dioxide managed to get a weak whimper out of Al Gore but was otherwise ignored in this gathering of environment-friendly types. Stephen Chu was also silent in spite of the fact that studies done by his own Department of Energy have predicted that a scenario where 20% of the country’s power is generated by wind and solar backed up by gas turbines would generate more carbon dioxide than a scenario where that 20% was generated by gas turbines alone. This seemingly bizarre conclusion is a result of the fact that a gas turbine runs most efficiently and most cleanly when it is operated continuously; while constantly spinning them up and down to accommodate gaps in “renewable” generation is extremely inefficient.

Given that one year ago, T. Boone had stood with Harry at his first Clean Energy Summit and declared that wind generation was the power source of the future for the US, this turnaround might well seem astounding. However, clearly the past year has been an educational one for Mr. Pickens. It doesn’t take a whole lot of thinking to recognize that wind generators and solar arrays only generate power when the wind blows or the sun shines. Since power cannot, at present, be stored, what this means is that for every megawatt of wind or solar power that is installed, a megawatt of back-up generating capacity is required. The only type of power generation currently available that can be brought on line quickly to accommodate the loss of capacity due to clouds covering a solar array or the wind dying is a natural gas turbine. Once your thought process has brought you to this point, it’s not a very long walk to the recognition that, if you have to install the gas turbine capacity to back up wind and solar generators, you can run the gas turbines 24/7, which is much more efficient than running them intermittently, and cut your capital costs significantly by not installing the wind and solar plants at all. If Pickens has come to the conclusion that a commitment to install gas turbine capacity makes an investment in wind and solar unnecessary, he kept it to himself on Monday. However, in the year between Harry’s two Clean Energy Summits, Pickens has divested himself of his wind power investments and shifted his focus to the recovery of natural gas from domestic oil shale. After that, a phone call to Harry – accompanied by a sizable contribution to Harry’s reelection campaign, one suspects – seems to have been sufficient to change the Clean Energy agenda. In a sense, Pickens’ proposal has driven a stake through the heart of massive wind and solar generation in the near future for this country, especially if separate entities own and operate the gas turbines generators and wind power fields.

T. Boone Pickens’ announcement was an astounding departure from the theme of the previous Summit where reduction of greenhouse gas emissions through the use of renewable energy sources was the focus. In truth, natural gas is a “renewable” energy source, but more on that later. While a great deal of lip service was paid the the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions at Monday’s Summit, especially out of Al Gore, Pickens’ announcement and the general acquiescence of the group, pretty much cut the legs out from under any argument that the conference had anything to do with combating climate change. What the conference was clearly about was jobs as speaker after speaker stressed. Two union representatives made the pointed comment that unemployment in construction unions in northern Nevada was running around 50%, while a small number of large projects in southern Nevada had kept that unemployment number to around 25%. Consequently, there was a great deal of discussion about the weatherization program money that the Department of Energy has released to the states being used to put these construction workers back to work. Whether or not iron workers, electricians, and plumbers will jump at the opportunity to go around chalking windows remains to be seen. Another widely acclaimed source of new jobs was the manufacture, installation, and maintenance of all the megawatts of wind and solar generators discussed in last year’s Summit. The fact that T. Boone’s initiative has for all practical purposes pulled the plug on those installations seems to have escaped the attention of the attendees as has the fact that the major manufacturers of wind generators and solar panels are currently all off-shore…but why should such details be allowed to interfere with the whole feel-good, self-congratulatory attitude of the day.

The one throwback to last year’s Summit was the always-entertaining Al Gore, who has not toned down his global warming rhetoric a bit…and yes, he still calls it “global warming”. Coming at a time when the carefully orchestrated fabric of the global warming farce has begun to unravel, Al’s doom and gloom is growing increasingly comical. Recent revelations of ten years of steadily decreasing global temperatures, of James Hansen’s much celebrated historical temperature trends being seriously flawed through either sloppy science or outright fraud, of studies that have demonstrated that ocean currents are the primary drivers of short-term climate change not atmospheric composition, of observations of Arctic ice that have shown the observed melting is due to a cyclic temperature change known popularly as “spring” have slowly, but surely begun to shine sunlight on the vampire of “global warming”…and Al Gore is increasingly being relegated to the position of America’s “crazy uncle” that everyone feels compelled to invite to Thanksgiving dinner, but can’t wait until he drinks enough to pass out.

Finally, natural gas as a “renewable resource”…yes, it is. Up until about 25 years ago, it was thought that natural gas has a similar source as oil, i.e., the decomposition of organic matter buried in the earth, and much of the natural gas found in proximity to oil reserves almost certainly derived from organic sources. However, as plate tectonics and movements of the Earth’s crust have become better understood, there is increasing recognition that the vast majority of natural gas deposits are inorganic in origin and that these deposits are constantly being renewed. In a grossly over-simplified nutshell: At the leading edge of every continental plate is a subduction zone. One of the most well-known subduction zones is marked by the San Andreas fault where the North American plate is riding up over the Pacific plate. As the Pacific plate slides under the North American plate, it carries millions of tons or sea water and carbonate deposits with it as the plate travels down towards the mantle. The highly reducing conditions deep underground cause the water and carbonates to react to form methane, the primary component of natural gas. It is estimated that the entire contents of the ocean are cycled through subduction zones in this way about once every 10 million years. The upshot here is that there is an enormous amount of natural gas being actively generated every year. It is renewable and we’re not running out. Note also that the carbonate deposits on the ocean floor are caused by carbon dioxide dissolving in sea water and then precipitating out, mostly as either magnesium or calcium carbonate, so this raw material for methane production is also being renewed by the very carbon dioxide being produced by the combustion of methane.

While his approach has changed radically in the past year, T. Boone Pickens has remained consistent in stating that his primary motivation is to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, most of which is owned by regimes not necessarily friendly to us. His shift from a focus on “green” technologies to natural gas represents, I suspect, a hard-eyed look at the economics of wind and solar power. In spite of the strange bedfellows he is keeping these days, his ideas are rational, make economic and political sense, and deserve everyone’s support.

Global warming and the technocrats

2009-08-02T10:11:00.001-07:00

So…if I were to ask the question, who caused the global warming crisis, the politically popular response would, of course, be “Mankind!” In truth, I would have to agree. Surprised? Don’t be, because it is important to distinguish between the physical cause (or causes) of changing global temperatures and the cause of the present global warming “crisis.” Yes, yes…I know that the formal term is now “climate change”, but I’ll get to that particular nuance presently. I will argue that the present “crisis” is, indeed, caused by mankind, but not mankind, in general, but by specific groups who have reaped huge benefits by manufacturing this “crisis”. If you are looking for a tin-foil hat, black helicopter, New World Order conspiracy in this, be prepared for disappointment. I will argue that the true culprit in all this is the way that scientific research is presently being funded in this country and in the world in general.

Scientific research that is far removed from commercial application is generally referred to as “basic research.” Thirty years ago, private industry funded a large fraction of the on-going basic research. Large corporations, such as General Electric, AT&T, General Motors, and IBM, all had large basic research budgets and well-equipped and staffed research and development facilities. However, industry increasingly began to focus more on applied research and product development, i.e., efforts aimed at fairly narrowly focused technologies and specific commercial products. As corporations evaluated their cost structures to become more competitive in the global market place, it became far easier to justify the cost of a program if it promised to bring a specific product to market in 18 months than it was to argue that research into phonon scattering in Type III-V semiconductors might lead to something useful at some indeterminate time in the future. This sharp decrease in industrial involvement in basic research is highlighted by the fact that between 1965 and 1987, there were nine Nobel prizes in Physics awarded to scientists working in industrial laboratories. In the 22 years since 1987, there have been only two Nobel laureates to come out of industry.

With basic research funding in industry decreasing, the Federal government became the prime and essentially only source of funding in many fields. This radically changed scientific research and not for the better. To see how this “sole source” funding of basic research affected the scientific community, it is instructive to examine another, earlier “crisis”…ozone depletion.

In the late 70’s, a hole in the ozone layer was discovered over Antarctica. Subsequent investigation showed that this hole was growing. As ozone serves to reduce the amount of ultraviolet radiation reaching the earth’s surface, there was concern that a depletion or disappearance of the ozone layer would have serious health consequences. Further work advanced the theory that ozone depletion was caused by a class of chlorinated fluorocarbons, (CFC’s). Cries for the reduction of CFC emissions soon followed. Exactly why these CFC emissions chose to destroy ozone in a part of the globe far removed from the emission sources in the northern hemisphere was never explained. None the less, the media, whores for sensationalism that they are, immediately picked up on the predictions of the dire consequences of ozone depletion: skin cancer epidemics, cities, such as Denver, at high altitude rendered uninhabitable, dozens, hundreds, even thousands of animal species extinct, and essentially the end of life as we know it by the end of the 20th century unless CFC emissions were stopped. As a consequence, the chlorinated fluorocarbon industry, which supplied propellants for aerosols, refrigerants, industrial solvents, among other applications, in the United States and Europe was eviscerated. Unfortunately, this did not reduce CFC emissions as the manufacture of these chemicals was simply transferred to China and India, where leaders were unimpressed with warnings of the approaching Apocalypse. Unregulated manufacture and use in these countries actually resulted in an increase in global CFC emissions.

However, casual observation shows that the turn of the century has come and gone without life as we know it ending, not even a rash – as it were – of skin cancers in Denver…and in late 2007, NASA very quietly announced that the hole in the ozone over Antarctica was shrinking, in spite of CFC emissions being at an all time high. Oops.

So…how is it possible that hundreds of scientists could write thousands of peer-reviewed journal papers and attend dozens of conferences addressing the CFC problem and all of them be so very, very wrong? The answer lies in how this work was funded and how that funding process corrupts the peer-review process. However, before we get to the funding process, a short digression on peer-review for those not familiar with it: Peer review is really a primary mechanism for insuring the integrity or published research. As a scientist, I do some research with I think is worthy of sharing, so I write a paper describing my work and the conclusions I draw from it. I pick an appropriate technical journal and submit it for publication. Prior to putting it in print, however, the journal editors will submit copies of my paper to two or three other experts in my field, who will read my paper critically, point out potential errors, make suggestions, and, on rare occasions, even reject the work as being unworthy of publication. These reviews are “single blind”…the reviewers will know I am the author, but I will never know who my reviewers are. Not a perfect system by any means, but it had functioned reasonably well for decades…until the government became everyone’s source for research funding.

Now for the funding process…most offices in the Executive Branch fund research, NASA, the NSF, NIH, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, etc. All of these agencies are beholden to Congress for their operating budgets and competition for congressional funding between agencies is fierce and the competition for funds within a give agency is equally fierce. For example, both NASA and DOE operate their own internal laboratories, as well as funding sponsored work at universities and private industries. As a consequence, anyone involved in research associated with any of these agencies is in constant fund-raising mode…justifying past work, proposing new programs (and new funding) that is in competition with other new programs, both inside and outside of their agency. Now, given this highly competitive environment, imagine you are the director of the Office of Fungus Investigation within the Department of Agriculture – I hope that I just made this office up; if not, my apologies to fungus investigators for what follows. As the director of an obscure office that most people don’t know exists, you are constantly struggling for what little funding you get. Then one day, a report from a project you are funding comes in that describes a fungus that grows rapidly and can cause a rash when it comes in contact with human flesh. You’re at the beginning of your funding cycle and are looking for new programs to propose and, given the human connection on this one, you propose an expanded program to further investigate this fungus that causes skin disease in humans. Your proposal works its way up through the bureaucracy with various embellishments added to make it look a little more “sexy” to the appropriate congressional committees. At some point, either a really bored reporter looking for some story, any story out of the Department of Agriculture or an actual press release happens and, all of a sudden, it is all over the news that there is a flesh-eating fungus threatening humans. Panic, press conferences, congressional hearings, and a general consensus that there’s a “crisis” and something must be done…and what is done is to pour funds into the Office of Fungus Investigation. As the director, you see your budget doubled, tripled, quadrupled, you’re hiring staff, sending out requests for proposals and funding those that promise to address the flesh-eating fungus crisis, giving press conferences, and fielding requests to travel the country giving talks on the status of the “crisis”…and you have 50,000 followers on your Twitter account.

Papers on the flesh-eating fungus begin to get published and there is some criticism that the connection between the fungus and the reported rashes was a little ambiguous. Those critical of the original conclusion submit proposals to investigate whether the fungus really is responsible for the rash. But, you’re in the middle of a “crisis” that must be addressed and you don’t have time to get bogged down in cause-and-effect details…besides, if the “crisis” goes away, so does your huge budget and the media attention and you’re back to sitting in your office trying to think of a proposal that will make pond scum sound interesting. You reject their proposal, saying that it is “non-responsive”. The proposers have nowhere else to go for funding, so they submit another proposal that promises to investigate the growth of the fungus once it contacts human flesh. This one you fund.

In the meantime, it turns out that the original rash that was connected to the flesh-eating fungus, as it is now known, turns out to be nothing more than a case of eczema. No matter…you’re living large and your program has taken on a life (and funding) of its own. You deny the report, attempt to discredit the source, and keep on growing your office…
…and this is how an ozone depletion or global warming “crisis” gets created. The template for the global warming crisis was created with the ozone layer “crisis”. Once Congress is convinced that there is a serious problem that must be addressed and starts funding it, government research offices start to grow to meet the crisis and, once grown, the crisis must be perpetuated to ensure continued funding. The process becomes self-perpetuating as other agencies recognize a potentially lucrative source of funds and start their own programs to address the “crisis”. For example, while the Department of Energy does not fund climate research, they can ask for (and have gotten) funding to help “fix” the problem, i.e., development of renewable energy sources, electric vehicles, etc. Even when evidence starts to accumulate that there is no crisis, these agencies will struggle desperately to maintain the “crisis” status. Hence, now that we have experienced a decade of cooling temperatures, government scientists assure us that this is just a temporary respite before temperatures will start to rise alarmingly again and the term “climate change” is introduced. This last a bit of particularly brilliant legerdemain in that it quietly shifts the “crisis” from one of global warming to the idea that any climate change (warming, cooling, whatever…) contains the seeds of disaster.
One may ask, “Where is the scientific integrity here?” and the answer is that integrity is not always a priority when one’s livelihood is at stake. In an earlier time, there were multiple funding sources for atmospheric and climate research. A scientist working for Bell Labs could stand up at a conference and question the assumptions being made by a NASA scientist or give a research paper a bad review for muddled reasoning without any fear of repercussions beyond some hurt feelings. With a single source of funding, where the funding agency is primarily concerned with perpetuating itself and its programs, anyone espousing views opposing the agencies dogma are highly unlikely to be funded and alternative viewpoints will very rarely reach the light of day. Not only do these opposing views not get funded, scientists will be hesitant to even express them for fear of hurting their chances for future funding. Mainstream scientific research, consequently, devolves to little more than a big touchy-feely love fest where everybody agrees, everybody gets along, and everybody is happy, but critical thinking, the constant questioning of results and conclusions, and the revision of “pet” hypotheses to fit new information – the very core of scientific endeavor for centuries – has long since been kicked to the curb.

I have focused my discussion here on the process by which research is funded and how funding dominated by government agencies almost insures the creation of “crises” and I have avoided any discussion of the evidence that is being used to convince the public and, more importantly, Congress that there is a global warming…sorry, climate change crisis. That’s a subject of for different time.

Cancer of convenience...

2009-08-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

Having lost a mother and a grandmother to ovarian cancer, I know that it is not something to be taken lightly. So when my older brother told me a few months back that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, it was one of those "the gods hate us" moments. However, the cancer was detected at a very early stage and the doctor told my 57 year old brother, "You know, this is a very slow growing cancer and if you were 10 years older I wouldn't recommend that we even treat it." Since then, my brother has begun is treatment, which seems to be proceeding well and the prognosis is, thankfully, excellent.

Which brings me to Christopher Dodd...under a lot of criticism for getting a sweetheart mortgage and then lying about it and his poll numbers against likely rivals falling like Lindsay Lohan at the end of a happy hour, he announces he has prostate cancer and, magically, the criticism stops, he is bombarded with well wishes, and I have already read one reference to his "brave fight with cancer."

I'm sorry...I have to call "bullshit" on this one. Not on the cancer, on the timing. It's just too, too convenient. If Senator Dodd has, indeed, just been diagnosed with "an early stage" of prostate cancer, I suspect he was given the option of either not treating it at all or waiting and monitoring its progress before they resorted to anything invasive. More cynically, it is possible that the diagnosis is months - years? - old, and the senator has pulled the cancer card out of his sleeve to save his butt right now.

Obviously, I have no inside information on the senator's condition and, as a fellow human, I sincerely hope his treatment is successful. But the timing on all this just seems, well...convenient.