Tone deaf...

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...

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:

1. 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
2. Chris Rock - Denzel would play Barack straight, Chris would be a better Obama, but would go for laughs. 2-1
3. 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
4. Morgan Freeman - Pretty much the go-to guy when it comes to portraying a black man with "gravitas," but too old. 6-1
5. 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
6. Bill Pullman (in black face) - Closer to Obama in body type, but see Harrison Ford above. 12-1
7. 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
8. 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
9. 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
10. 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
11. 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
12. 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:

1. 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
2. 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

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?

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...

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...

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

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.