This could be Japan's version of the China Syndrome

After I published a short blog entry yesterday regarding the troubles with 5 of Japan's nuclear power plants and Hillary Clinton's very bizarre account of the USAF delivery mystery coolant to one of them, a much scarier event took place--there was a massive hydrogen explosion (see photo above) outside of one of the damaged reactors.

Here is the L.A. Times account:

A day after responding to one of the worst earthquakes on record and a massive tsunami, the Japanese government sought to allay fears of a radioactive disaster at a nuclear power plant on the country's battered northeastern coast.

The outer walls of the Fukushima power plant's No. 1 reactor were blown off by a hydrogen explosion Saturday, leaving only a skeletal frame. Officials said four workers at the site received non-life-threatening injuries.

The inner container holding the reactor's fuel rods is not believed to be damaged, said Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, and workers were cooling the facilities with seawater.

If this kind of explosion happened in most countries other than Japan, I would be highly skeptical that such a blast would not pose a great threat to public safety. However, I have faith in the Japanese. I hope what they are now saying is true. If any country could design their facilities to weather such a horrific natural disaster, it would be the highly competent Japanese.

In a press conference shortly after the explosion, which left the facility shrouded in plumes of gray smoke, Edano explained that the reactor is contained within a steel chamber, which in turn is surrounded by a concrete and steel building. Although the explosion destroyed the building, it did not occur in the chamber.

"The escape of hydrogen mixed with the air between the chamber and the concrete-and-steel building and led to the explosion," Edano said.

Hydrogen explosions tend to be awesome. Their ferocity makes me wonder if we really want to move from gasoline powered cars to hydrogen fuel cells.

"Tokyo Electric Power Co. has confirmed that the inner reactor is undamaged," he added. "There was no massive release of radiation."

Still, the reactor was already showing signs of a partial meltdown after Friday's magnitude 8.9 earthquake had prevented the plant 150 miles north of Tokyo from fully powering its water cooling system. Without it, the facility could overheat and explode, spewing radiation into the air.

If that reactor explodes, I would guess that will set back the expansion of new nuclear power plants in the United States by at least 20 years. That would be a shame, given that nuclear power is one of the only technologies which can produce electricity at a reasonable price and emits no carbon dioxide. Given the realities of global warming, we must start producing more of our power from clean sources of energy, and nuclear power should be in that mix.

People were reportedly fleeing the surrounding area and Japanese television was urging people to cover their faces with wet towels and not to expose any skin to the potentially contaminated air. An evacuation zone was doubled to a 12-mile radius around the plant by Saturday evening.

It seems like I have seen this movie before: Japanese people wearing face masks running away (from Godzilla) in a mass panic.

Japan relies on nuclear power for a third of its electricity and is said to require exacting safety standards for its plants.

I don't think Japan has ever had a better choice than nuclear power for its electricity production. The problem, though, is when you get a crisis like this and 11 power plants are shut down, you are in a serious bind. You cannot produce enough electricity to provide power for your people and industry.

That said, there are many other countries, mostly in Europe, which are even more reliant on nuclear power than Japan is.

Here are the top 10 most reliant on nuclear energy:

Lithuania 78%
France 77%
Belgium 58%
Slovakia 53%
Ukraine 46%
Sweden 44%
Bulgaria 42%
Hungary 39%
Slovenia 39%
South Korea 39%

It turns out ... I am famous ... and a winner!

Because of some family business I was attending to yesterday, I didn't get around to looking at the Friday Davis Enterprise until this morning. After reading a handful of stories in the A-section, I turned to page B-3, where the opinion Forum was published.

I scanned a guest column, which discussed the notion of government subsidies for local news reporting; the Enterprise's editorial, which dealt with Libya; and a few letters to the editor, which addressed, in order, the lack of success of a neighborhood grocery store, a "peace" march and a new recycling program.

Surprisingly, until it came up last in the letters, I had not noticed the whole time I was reading the Forum page that I was the topic which drove someone named Scott Babcock to write a letter to the editor. Here is what Mr. Babcock had to say. It gave me a nice chuckle:

The mysterious delivery of magical coolant by the USAF? Or was it just more sniper fire?

Among the thousands of tragic stories emanating from Japan today, following the 8.9 magnitude earthquake and the massive tsunami, is the scary tale of serious damage to five nuclear reactors at two sites in northern Japan. Here is what The Washington Post is reporting:

Japanese authorities declared a state of emergency Saturday for five nuclear reactors at two quake-stricken power plants as military and utility officials scrambled to tame rising pressure and radioactivity levels inside the units and stabilize the systems used to cool the plants' hot reactor cores.

Radiation surged to around 1,000 times the normal level in the control room of one reactor, Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) said. Meanwhile, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Saturday that the temperatures at two other reactors at a different power plant were rising and that it had lost control over pressure in three reactors there.

Though no significant release of radioactive material had taken place, the earthquake, which forced the automatic shutdown of 11 of the country's 55 nuclear power plants, is certain to rattle confidence in nuclear power in Japan, where people have long been sensitized to the dangers of radioactive releases, and in the United States, where foes of nuclear power were already pointing to the Japan crisis as a warning sign.

One other thing in the Post story caught my attention. The Hillary Clinton whopper:

In a statement that confused nuclear experts, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday morning that U.S. Air Force planes in Japan had delivered "coolant" to a nuclear power plant affected by the quake. Nuclear reactors do not require special coolants, only large amounts of pumped water.

"They have very high engineering standards, but one of their plants came under a lot of stress with the earthquake and didn't have enough coolant," she said, "and so Air Force planes were able to deliver that."

I was watching TV when she made that statement. I didn't know enough about cooling a nuclear power plant this morning to know she was full of shit. It just struck me as good that our military was doing some good. But it turns out Sec. Clinton was either fed some bad information or she just made the whole thing up.

An Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon, however, said he was unaware of any deliveries being made by Air Force planes related to the reactor issues.

"To our knowledge, we have delivered nothing in support of the nuclear power plant," Lt. Col. John Haynes said. "Obviously, we stand by to assist with anything they might need." He said the Air Force had received no formal request for help.

This is the second instance I can think of where Hillary was caught in a completely indefensible lie (though possibly one, in this instance, in which she was just repeating what an aide told her). The earlier lie was when she was running for president, she made up some bullshit about landing in a plane in Bosnia and saying she came under sniper fire. No aide fed her that. She just invented the situation, which every other witness who was with her on that flight said they never came under fire of any sort.

State Department officials later said Clinton misspoke.

Misspoke is really the wrong word here. It is the same word Hillary used to excuse her Bosnia lie. If Mrs. Clinton had meant this morning to say something like, "Our deepest sympathies go out to ... the people of Japan," but instead of Japan she got mixed up and said Korea or Jordan or China, it would be fair to say she misspoke. But that's not what happened here: Sec. Clinton told a huge whopper about our Air Force planes carrying magical nuclear power plant coolant, when our Air Force planes did not fly into that area, when they were not called on to fly into that area, and when this magic coolant does not exist.

That is not misspeaking. That is lying.

Why kids no longer enjoy history: the Internet

The Sacramento Bee has a very brief interview today with UC Davis professor Alan Taylor, who won fame 15 years ago when his excellent book, "William Cooper's Town" won the Pulitzer Prize.

The story notes that his current book has a chance to win another prize:

Now, the history professor at the University of California, Davis, is looking at a possible George Washington Book Prize from Washington College in Maryland – which brings $50,000.

He is among three finalists for the prize, for his "The Civil War of 1812" (Knopf, $35, 640 pages), a project that took him 15 years to complete. The judges called the book "the most original history of the conflict ever written." The prize winner will be announced May 25.

While I look forward to reading Prof. Taylor's latest book, I have a different point of view about why kids today are less interested in history. Here is what The Bee asked Taylor and his reply:

On the subject of U.S. history, are we losing touch with it?

Yes, for a number of reasons. One is the mania for testing in grades K through 12. It's well-meant, but it's undermining true teaching because teachers are required to teach to the test. As a consequence, history comes across to students as the deadly dull memorization of facts.

It is certainly possible that testing is a part of the explanation. However, my take is that the decline in interest in history is a byproduct of the decline in literacy, which is largest among younger people.

That is to say, kids no longer read very much for amusement or to pass time. They don't read newspapers, magazines or books for pleasure. They play a lot of games on the Internet, participate in social media and otherwise occupy themselves on-line in their spare time.

I'm sure many kids have history reading assignments for school. But that never inspires anyone to "love history." What inspires is taking a week or so and reading a full, well written volume like "William Cooper's Town" or any other good history book.

I suspect that the children who come through the same, heavily tested schools but happen to be the few who read books, fiction and non-fiction, become lovers of history. What distinguishes them is not that they too did not come through school systems with a lot of tests on facts. They are different because they spend less time on the computer, less time watching TV, and more time reading.

When I was in school, the Internet did not yet exist. We were not heavily tested. The schools did not push us to read good books from cover to cover. We were bored to tears by the typical textbooks which had the feel of committee work. Yet I think the same distinction existed back then: kids who enjoyed reading books on their own and who watched less TV became fans and readers of history; and those who were never introduced to books and watched a lot of TV never developed an interest in history.

The only thing which has made this disconnect from history more severe from the time I was in school is the rise of the Internet. It has destroyed an interest in reading even more than television did.

When a flawed plan meets a perverse incentive structure: the result is serious government waste

The L.A. Times has a fascinating piece of investigative journalism in today's paper. It's a long and detailed account of how a "visionary," who had hoped to save millions of dollars for the Los Angeles Community College District by installing a spectacular array of solar, wind, geothermal and hydrogen fuel cell power generating systems over and around and all about the nine junior colleges which make up the LACCD has thus far wasted $10 million in taxpayer money on his poorly thought out program.

Larry Eisenberg had a vision. "Amazing," he called it. "Spectacular."

The Los Angeles Community College District would become a paragon of clean energy. By generating solar, wind and geothermal power, the district would supply all its electricity needs. Not only would the nine colleges sever ties to the grid, saving millions of dollars a year, they would make money by selling surplus power. Thanks to state and federal subsidies, construction of the green energy projects would cost nothing upfront.

As head of a $5.7-billion, taxpayer-funded program to rebuild the college campuses, Eisenberg commanded attention. But his plan for energy independence was seriously flawed.

He overestimated how much power the colleges could generate. He underestimated the cost. And he poured millions of dollars into designs for projects that proved so impractical or unpopular they were never built.

These and other blunders cost nearly $10 million that could have paid for new classrooms, laboratories and other college facilities, a Times investigation found.

There seem to be two major lessons within the Times's story.

First, there is a lot of wishful thinking and overhype about "green" energy. Many who are pitching solar energy projects, for example, massively exaggerate how much energy will be produced from the installed solar panels. The same is true of wind power. It usually takes a few years to really know how much power you will be getting. And by the time you know, the salesman is long gone from the scene.

I don't know if the companies which are overhyping their products are liable down the road, if the panels fail to produce the promised amount of power, but they should be. There should be a government agency cracking down on anyone selling new "green" products who is making claims which are false or exaggerated. It's ultimately a form of consumer fraud.

The second lesson from the story of the Los Angeles Community College District wasting million of dollars on projects which never came to fruition is an old one: public entities never spend money like it's their own. They always waste taxpayer money when they can.

It's just so much more fun to spend money that is not yours than it is to be frugal that people will almost always spend like the spigot is never going to stop. It's a perverse incentive for government agents built into all contracting arrangements.

SPEND, SPEND, SPEND

In order to revive our dormant economy, President Obama thought the best answer was his hugely wasteful stimulus plan. In Davis, we have firsthand evidence of what kind of crap the stimulus plan was funding: sidewalk bulb-outs. Those are the silly extensions of the sidewalks at intersections, which are supposed to make a city more pedestrian friendly by shortening the distance one has to walk from sidewalk to sidewalk. In reality, they are a big load of nonsense. If we really needed them, the City of Davis would have spent our own local taxpayer money on them. But we didn't really need them. So we grabbed the "free money" Obama was giving away in his farcical stimulus plan.

The irony is that we really are short of funds for street and sidewalk repairs, but the stimulus money would not cover those expenses. So instead of repaving cracked streets and replacing damaged sidewalks, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a very low priority item.

That is essentially what happened in the LACCD. They were sold a bill of goods that this was other peoples' money. If the people authorizing these expenses were spending their own funds, or if they treated the taxpayers' money as if it were their own, this unfortunate wastefulness never would have occurred.

In the end, it is likely that the LACCD will cover this loss by raising taxes on property owners in Los Angeles County. Either that or the students will get a much poorer education because the District screwed the pooch.

Burning the evidence: In Egypt, the secret police are trying to keep their evil deeds secret forever ...

Just because Egypt was never as bad as Libya, and just because Mubarak was never as evil as Kaddafi, does not mean that Egypt was not bad or evil under Mubarak. It was a brutal regime with unchecked state powers. It tortured and terrorized anyone who spoke up and it used intimidation tactics to make sure everyone else knew to never speak up.

Now that Mubarak is out of power, there has been an attempt among Egypt's revolutionaries to establish a truth and reconciliation commission, which would expose the horrors so many Egyptians were subject to, and then forgive the criminals who worked inside their Interior Ministry.

But there can be no truth and reconciliation without the documentation. And those in Mubarak's secret police are now trying to cover up their misdeeds.

The L.A. Times is reporting that Egyptian agents are dutifully burning the evidence of their crimes:

In an attempt to save documents that may incriminate Egypt's notorious state security services for years of torture and abuse, thousands of protesters on Saturday stormed Interior Ministry offices around Cairo as word spread that security officials were attempting to destroy files.

Witnesses and residents in 6th of October, a Cairo suburb, said protesters marched toward a state security office to prevent officials from burning documents. Protesters said they saw flames coming from near the building in the early hours of Saturday. About 3,000 protesters surrounded the building, eventually storming in and later handing it over to the army.

Witnesses claim that the majority of files, which may lead to the prosecution of state security officials for misuse of power, corruption and human rights violations, were already burned by the time protesters arrived. The documents, according to human-rights groups, would offer an intricate paper trail to former President Hosni Mubarak's reviled police state.

With the latest war raging in Libya and with the Egyptian military apparently ruling Egypt with the consent of the people, I had forgotten that there was still a great rift in Egypt between the democrats who forced Mubarak out of office and many people who still work for that government.

Later Saturday, several thousand protesters broke through barriers of the state security headquarters in the neighborhood of Nasr City. "State security obviously made an attempt to cover up or destroy implicating evidence of their horrible deeds over the last 30 years," Ahmed Raouf, one of the protesters, told The Times from inside the headquarters.

Protesters gathered documents and handed them to military officers, who in turn, forwarded files to a representative from the Attorney General's office. Another nearby state security headquarters also was successfully stormed less than an hour later. Many of the protesters were Islamists who either served time or had a member of their family detained at the underground building.

If Egypt is to become a democracy, the Islamists present a stumbling block. They were minimal in the effort to get rid of Hosni, but they might be the largest party in any democratic election. Beyond their extremism and their terrible values, the great danger of Islamists in government is if they ever take power, there may never again be a democratic election. Certainly they have no belief in elections, civil liberties or human rights. They simply want to force everyone else to live in a religious state, where they get to say what the religion is.

Under Islamic Law, apparently, if you are a part of the global jihad, Allah says you can rob banks ...

The Associated Press is reporting today that the Hamas government of the Gaza Strip is now authorizing bank robberies:

All banks in the Gaza Strip temporarily shut down on Thursday after men affiliated with the ruling group Hamas forced a local branch to cash some $500,000 in checks.

Gaza bankers said Hamas sent the police to confiscate the money from a branch of the Palestine Investment Bank. They said the police were accompanied by members of a committee Hamas had appointed in 2009 to oversee the Palestine Investment Fund, which is run by the rival Palestinian government in the West Bank.

The men confiscated checks from the fund, then ordered bank tellers to cash them, though the account did not contain enough money. The bankers spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

It's good to see that the Palestinians are such good people with such good leaders.

The Hamas Interior Ministry said the police helped to seize the money because the investment fund had improperly transferred money out of Gaza to the West Bank. Hamas denied that the money was taken at gunpoint.

The more you know about the psychopaths who make up the Hamas terrorist movement, the more you have to wonder how stupid the Palestinian people are. What other nation would be dumb enough to elect these pathological idiots whose religion justifies murdering children and old women and now robbing banks?

Killer of U.S. airmen is radical Muslim, German official says

CNN is reporting new details about the man in Germany who murdered two American Air Force servicemen:

The man suspected of shooting and killing two U.S. Air Force servicemen in Germany was seeking revenge because of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, according to a warrant issued on Friday for the suspect.

The suspect, Arid Uka, is a recently radicalized Muslim who seems to have been influenced by local radical Islamist websites, according to German authorities. Prosecutors say Uka shot and killed two U.S. servicemen and wounded two others in the attack Wednesday on a U.S. military bus at Frankfurt Airport.

The arrest warrant for Uka lists two accusations of murder, three allegations of attempted murder and two accusations of causing severe bodily harm.

The 21-year-old man said he was motivated to carry out the attack after seeing a video on the internet the day before, which he claimed showed U.S. soldiers raping Muslim women, according to a German intelligence official who viewed a record of the suspect's interrogation.

It's possible, not even unlikely, that Arid Uka is just stupid or he has serious mental health issues.

But it must be said that there are stupid and crazy people from all religions. Yet Jewish crazies, Hindu crazies and Christian crazies are not regularly translating their anger into terrorist attacks which they justify on the basis of their religion.

Islam is unique in this regard because so many of its adherents promote a violent response to whatever they believe is a slight against their people or their faith.

He was friends on Facebook with several pro-al Qaeda extremists from a group based in Bonn, Germany, that is known to German intelligence officials, according to the official. He also had links to an Islamist preacher named Pierre Vogel and someone named Nessery, who was arrested about two months ago in Afghanistan, according to a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the investigation.

I wonder if a legal case can be made against those "pro-al Qaeda extremists from a group based in Bonn, Germany"? I wonder if it could be demonstrated that they incited violence?

The suspect is from Mitrovica, a town in northern Kosovo, that country's interior minister, Bajram Rexhepi, told CNN. He cited the U.S. Embassy in Pristina as his source. The U.S. official with knowledge of the probe said Uka was a 1-year-old toddler when he moved to Germany, and that authorities believe Uka's relatives had suffered in the 1990s during the Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanians.

That he is a Kosovar is the most ironic part of the story. American soldiers and airmen risked their lives to save the lives of the Muslim majority in Kosovo. Tens of thousands of Kosovars who would have been killed by the Serbs are alive today because of the heroic efforts of Americans to protect them. That country is free today only because of U.S. intervention. And yet this one Kosovar nutjob decides to kill American soldiers. It's pathetically crazy.

No wonder so many of our schools stink ...

This is a common sense is dead story.

Today a teacher was placed on leave in Redwood City because he had in his classroom a complete idiot of an 8th grader.

A California school teacher was placed on paid administrative leave after he rattled a table to get the attention of his math students, startling an eighth-grade girl who used her cell phone to call police.

Atherton police Sgt. Tim Lynch tells the Palo Alto Daily News that officers went to Selby Lane School Tuesday afternoon because of reports a teacher was causing a disturbance.

Officers found a calm teacher with class in session.

The sergeant says the teacher's table-rattling startled a student and she used her cell phone to call 911. He says other students in the class weren't bothered by the teacher's actions.

Redwood City School District deputy superintendent John Baker says the teacher was placed on leave because there was a police response.

We need to severely cut education budgets in this state, enough so that the John Baker no longer has a job and anyone who had anything to do with the policy which says that "a police response" requires the teacher to be placed on leave is fired as well.

Moreover, the idiot girl who called 911 needs to be expelled.

When in doubt, blame the Jews ...

As the protests and rebellions continue to spread around the Arab world, it was only a matter of time before one of the despots pointed to the Jews as the culprits in this wave of citizen activism. Anti-Semitism is the favored card of Arabs of many stripes.

The despot who runs Yemen--or at least is in charge of the government in his capital city--says the reason the people in his fiefdom are so angry with him is because Obama and the Israelis are stirring them up:

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh delivered a fiery speech Tuesday blaming Israel and the United States for "destabilizing the Arab world," saying the anti-government protests in his capital were being "run by the White House."

Speaking to students and professors at Sana University, Saleh's accusations mark a departure for the president, a longtime ally of the United States in the war against Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula and the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid in recent years.

If Mr. Saleh were Pinocchio, his nose would be growing.

The rally came a day after key opposition figures refused Saleh's offer to form a "unity government." The offer, which was widely considered the president's last-ditch effort at reconciliation, promised to include opposition leaders as well as members of the ruling party. Saleh also promised "intensifying anti-corruption investigations" and other political reforms.

You mean to say, Mr. Saleh, that corruption and not Israel might be to blame for your unpopularity?

Sheik Abdul Majeed Zindani, whom the U.S. has accused of being linked to Al Qaeda, led prayers over a loudspeaker at the protest, calling on Saleh to grant the protesters' "legitimate demands and rights." He envisions Yemen as an Islamist state, and his words brought both cheers and concern from the assembled crowd, underscoring the diversity of Yemenis present.

So the president of Yemen wants us to believe that Israel and the United States are stirring up protests in his country so that this extremely ugly, red-bearded maniac, Sheik Zindani, can take charge? That sure makes a whole lot of sense. Yeah, we really want Al-Qaeda's Red Osama running Yemen.

And then there were none...

The New York Times is reporting that the last American veteran of the First World War has died.

Frank Buckles, who drove an Army ambulance in France in 1918 and came to symbolize a generation of embattled young Americans as the last of the World War I doughboys, died on Sunday at his home in Charles Town, W. Va. He was 110.

My mother's father, Benjamin Davis, was also a WW1 veteran. He served in the Army Air Corps in France, just as his son, my Uncle Fred, did a generation later in WW2. Ben sewed canvas patches on damaged airplanes when they came back to the airbase. Fred was a navigator on bombers, mostly ones which flew out of Great Britain to attack the Nazis in Europe.

Grandpa Davis, who was in his early 30s when he was drafted to fight in that conflict, passed away at approximately age 92 in 1978. (We don't know for sure what year he was born in Poland.) After the war Ben was accidentally reunited with his family who had, unbeknownst to him, moved to Los Angeles from Poland. Ben had been in the Czar's army in Siberia 15 years or more earlier when he fled to China and lost all contact with his parents in Poland. By chance Ben was living just blocks from them in the garment district of East L.A. in 1920 when the were reunited.

He was only a corporal and he never got closer than 30 or so miles from the Western Front trenches, but Mr. Buckles became something of a national treasure as the last living link to the two million men who served in the American Expeditionary Forces in France in “the war to end all wars.”

In its time, the First World War was generally called The Great War. I've read a number of excellent books detailing it. My favorite was probably A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin. That book tells the story of the war and its aftermath in the Middle East.



For a general history of the war, I recommend, The First World War: A Complete History by Martin Gilbert. Mr. Gilbert's book is very well written and gives an interesting insight into the many poets who served in that conflict. He quotes from a variety of poems penned by soldiers in the field of battle. The most famous poem from WW1 was, of course, In Flanders Fields by a Canadian doctor named Lt. Colonel John McCrae.



In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Should a Congressman step down because he is ill?

The story of David Wu, a Democratic member of Congress from Oregon, has gotten a lot of play in Washington, DC and in his home state, but not too much nationally.

According to those closest to Rep. Wu on his staff, he is mentally ill. Based on the stories, it is unclear to me what specific condition he has. The stories simply cite his "erratic behavior" and various "strange episodes," such as emailing pictures of himself dressed up as a cat.

The National Journal today sums up editorial opinions from Oregon, calling for him to resign:

Even as several of his Oregon papers have called for Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.) to resign, the seven-term congressman is showing no signs of stepping aside, and even filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday to begin organizing a reelection campaign for 2012.

The newspapers requesting he quit Congress are small and large:

On Thursday, the Beaverton Valley Times wrote that "Wu's troubles should force him to seek an immediate leave of absence from Congress or resign from office altogether" but that they did express hope he "receives professional help and recovers." The Times also wrote that Wu's latest actions weren't "all that surprising" though, as the Portland congressman has been rumored to have eccentric tendencies for years, but nothing as extreme as what happened last fall.

I don't know enough about Wu to say that resignation is the right course. However, it appears that the newspapers calling for him to step down don't believe treatment from a psychiatrist will lead to a satsifactory outcome, where he can perform his job. (My guess is that the newspapers are as ignorant as I am when it comes to his diagnosis and prospect for improvement.)

The Eugene Register-Guard wrote Wednesday that it was the fact that Wu was less-than-forthcoming about his problems that should cause him to step down. Wu "says he has sought professional care, and supporters claim that seeking treatment should not disqualify a person for public office. They're right, but that's not the issue. The real problem is a lack of candor, and for that he should resign."

Beside the stigma and embarrassment of mental illness, it is also true that many patients lack insight into their own disease. If you have skin cancer, you can see that your skin is not right. But when you have a brain disorder, there is nothing tangible and you might not realize that you are sick, even when others tell you that you are. As such, it seems a bit strange to suggest that "the real problem is a lack of candor." The real problem is likely that he is mentally ill and has not yet figured that out. If he gets good psychiatric treatment, perhaps he will recover and then his candor or lack thereof matters not at all.

The Daily Astorian was more sympathetic, writing that "Wu's situation appears to involve symptoms of mental illness, and that is sad to observe." But the paper ultimately comes to the conclusion that it "would be the better part of smartness for Wu to resign, but political decisions are more often emotional than rational."

I find it interesting that these newspapers want Wu to step down because he is sick and as such cannot serve his constituents. I don't think they are wrong to think that way. But compare Wu to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot through the head and is, likewise, unable to serve her constituents. Would all of these papers call for Ms. Giffords to resign her seat?

It is very unclear that Libya will have a good future after Kaddafi

As the Libyan civil war grows in violence every day--meaning Col. Kaddafi has been more and more ruthless trying to remain on his gilded throne--there have been suggestions floated in the United States that we ought to get involved, that we ought to side with the rebellion in order to help push Kaddafi from power.

Paul Wolfowitz, for example, wants the "imposition of a NATO-supported 'no fly' zone over Libya to halt further bombing by Qaddafi’s forces."

I'm sure Mr. Wolfowitz is well-intentioned. However, I think the risk that the rebellion there is seen as a coup by foreign powers is far greater than the risk of letting the Libyans defeat Kaddafi on their own. If the rebels are judged to be tools of foreign powers, then Kaddafi will gain strength from his nationalists.

It's possible that this war will go on for a long time and will cost a lot of lives and destroy a lot of that nation's infrastructure. That, I am sure, is what Wolfowitz would like to avoid. But I think it is far more dangerous than just letting things play out.

What ultimately comes of this war is hard to know. I doubt in the end Col. Kaddafi can win. However, once he is dead--it looks like he won't go into exile--there are a great number of possible outcomes I can fathom, many of which are bad for us (and probably bad for the Libyan people):

1. Dissolution. It's entirely possible that Libya breaks up into multiple, tribal-based smaller countries. If that happens, there would be a chance that those new states would fight each other over borders and minerals;

2. An Islamic state. Col. Kaddafi is now claiming that Osama bin Laden is the force behind this rebellion.

In a rambling discourse, he blamed the uprising on the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, saying he had drugged the people, giving them “hallucinogenic pills in their coffee with milk, like Nescafe.”

I doubt in any country anywhere at any time there is a genuine desire among a majority of citizens for an Islamic Republic where dirty old mullahs hold sway. However, in the absence of truly democratic parties, it's always possible in the Muslim world that Islamists are the best organized and most ruthless opponents of the regime in charge. If a vacuum arises, no one but the Islamists may be able to fill it;



3. Chaos. Somalia is a fine example of this. It's been 20 years since they had a central government which actually ruled that country. It's entirely possible that no one group will be able to take charge of Libya after Kaddafi is gone. What could follow is the rule of petty warlords over small patches of territory, each, like a mafia godfather, ruling with violence over his own people and fighting endlessly against other gangsters. In that scenario, Libya no longer produces much oil, and the standard of living drops off considerably, even from its current pathetic state;

4. A new strongman. It may take a decade or more for one to emerge, but I think this is a likely outcome in Libya. A new strongman, who personalizes power much like Kaddafi did, will be able to rule over the entire country by installing loyalists everywhere at the local level and quickly destroying anyone who would challenge him. No strongman rulers are ever entirely benevolent, but if Libya is lucky they might end up with one who advances that country, creating a vibrant market, investing in better public infrastructure and improving their basic public education. On the other hand, he could be a despot, just like Kaddafi has been for 42 years;

5. A democracy. Libya lacks just about everything you need to succeed as a democracy. It is poor and full of illiterates. It has no capitalist middle class. It has no tradition of democracy and civil rights. It is divided along tribal lines. And, because the people are Muslims, it is culturally not geared toward democracy. The people expect their leaders to be authoritarian. I don't expect a democratic outcome. However, if it comes, it may be because nothing else would work. Maybe the Libyans realize that a strongman is apt to end up being another brutal dictator. Maybe the Libyan people love Libya as a country and don't want to live as tribesmen. Maybe the Libyans have seen how horrible Islamism is in Iran and Saudi Arabia and everywhere it has been tried and will reject that as an option. Hopefully they will behave collectively and avoid the chaos of an anarchic state.

A best case scenario for Libyan "democracy" would be free and fair elections which put in a parliament which is broadly representative; and gives Libya a president whose powers are checked by the parliament. I expect they would have to start off in a socialist manner, making sure that the country's oil riches are collectively owned and serve the best interests of the infrastructure of their entire country. In time, they need to encourage the development of capitalist investment and better basic education. Hopefully they can figure out a way to respect the Islamic religion without letting the religious impose themselves on the state.

Morons: Don't believe the scientists; we know better than y'all

On average, I estimate, being a Southerner costs you 20 IQ points. How else to explain why such a large percentage of people from the South are blithering idiots?

In the 1950s and '60s, the stupid cause of the South was its indefensible defense of racist laws--most notably the suppression of the rights of blacks to vote and enjoy other civil rights. Once being a racist became unpopular, most of the Southern bigots pretended that segregation had nothing to do with racism and that no one they knew harbored any ill-will toward blacks. It was as if they thought, by saying the South was not a bastion of idiot racists, everyone else would forget that the South was a bastion of idiot racists.

In the 1920s and '30s, the stupid cause of South (and the Midwest) was the indefensible offense against the Darwinian science that human beings and other animals and plants evolve over millions and tens of millions of years. The idiot promoters of Creationism--yes, a few still exist to this day--based their anti-science attack on the Bible. Fundamentalists, unaware that the Bible is filled with errors and a whole lot of nonsense, take its words literally. So Adam was the first man and Eve was made from his rib; and the Earth is but 7,000 or so years old, created in six days by the magic father of Jesus.

The cause of causes of the South was its defense of the Lost Cause--the Civil War. Some idiot Southerners to this day pretend that their cause was not about fighting to retain slavery. It was. The enslavement of blacks was "the Southern way of life."

Today, the idiots of the South (and other parts of our country) have a new idiotic cause--their attacks on climate science. Never mind that most of these morons have no scientific education. Certainly none of them is an actual climatologist. But like their forefathers' attacks on the science of evolution, these retards feel like they know science better than the intelligent people who have dedicated their lives to studying the climate.

The New York Times has a story about a leading anti-science moron--of course he is from the Bible Belt--named Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II. Cooch was elected as the attorney general of Virginia.

For nearly a year, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, Virginia’s crusading Republican attorney general, has waged a one-man war on the theory of man-made global warming.




Invoking his subpoena powers, he has sought to force the University of Virginia to turn over the files of a prominent climatology professor, asserting that his research may be marred by fraud. The university is battling the move in the courts.

At the same time, Mr. Cuccinelli is suing the Environmental Protection Agency over its ruling that carbon dioxide and other global warming gases pose a threat to human health and welfare, describing the science behind the agency’s decision as “unreliable, unverifiable and doctored.”

So this ding-dong with a law degree thinks every one who studies climate science is engaged in some conspiracy?

Now his allegations of manipulated data and scientific fraud are resonating in Congress, where Republican leaders face an influx of new members, many of them Tea Party stalwarts like Mr. Cuccinelli, eager to inveigh against the body of research linking man-made emissions to warming.

“There’s a huge appetite among the rank-and-file to raise fundamental questions about the underlying science,” said Michael McKenna, a Republican strategist and energy lobbyist.

It would help the retard cause if they could find some reputable climatologists to support their cause. Instead, they tend to rely on the "findings" of petroleum engineers working for the oil and coal-mining companies. It doesn't quite hit the fundamentalists that those "scientists," who don't study the climate, might be biased in favor of their employers?

Responding to those concerns, the new Republican majority has introduced legislation that would strip federal regulators of their power to police the industrial emissions that contribute to climate change. But party leaders, treading warily, have cast their arguments against regulation largely in terms of economic consequences, playing down the prospect of major hearings to examine the scientific basis of human-caused warming.

Even dedicated opponents of climate action concede that hauling climate scientists before Congress and challenging their findings could easily backfire, as many representatives lack a sophisticated grasp of climatology and run the risk of making embarrassing errors.

Saying they "lack a sophisticated grasp of climatology" is another way of saying we are dealing with a large group of retards.

“It’s a trap for a lot of members,” said Marc Morano, a former Republican staff member on the Senate Environment and Public Works committee and publisher of Climate Depot, a Web site that advances the arguments of climate skeptics. “They’re apt to make mistakes.”

You mean to say retards don't know what the fuck they are talking about?

After fighting for decades to defend slavery, after fighting for decades to defend Creationism, and after fighting for decades to defend Jim Crow, the South lost every one of its stupid causes. But each time it lost, the morons of the South pretended that the position they faught for was not the position they really held. It was something else.

My guess is that for the next 20 or 30 years the South will fight against climatology. And then when all is lost and their cause is dead, those retards who claimed that they knew the science better than the scientists will pretend they never held such moronic views as they now hold.

Maybe it is not such a good thing to be the heir to the throne these days?

The little man standing next to President Obama in the photo above is H.E. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, President of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea. He is a serial murderer, a debaucherer, a kleptocrat and a megalomaniac along the lines of Saddam Hussein. With tremendous reserves of oil and natural gas in and around his country, Mr. Mbasogo is one of the world's wealtiest and most corrupt dictators.

Despite all the money in Equatorial Guinea, the people who live there have one of the worst standards of living in the world. They have high infant mortality rates and very low life expectancies. Disease, poverty, malnutrition and misery are ubiquitous in that oil-rich land.

Ken Silverstein, in this week's Foreign Policy magazine, details the lavish California lifestyle of the son of the dictator in Teodorin's World. This son is the heir to his father's throne. But maybe the people of his country will follow the steps of Egyptians in denying their dicatator's son that throne? If Col. Kaddafi is ousted in Libya and his son, Seif, is denied the reins of power, a trend could be emerging in which long-time dictators are being overrun just before they can hand off power to their filial heirs.

Here is how Silverstein's long piece begins:

The owner of the estate at 3620 Sweetwater Mesa Road, which sits high above Malibu, California, calls himself a prince, and he certainly lives like one. A long, tree-lined driveway runs from the estate's main gate past a motor court with fountains and down to a 15,000-square-foot mansion with eight bathrooms and an equal number of fireplaces. The grounds overlook the Pacific Ocean, complete with swimming pool, tennis court, four-hole golf course, and Hollywood stars Mel Gibson, Britney Spears, and Kelsey Grammer for neighbors.

With his short, stocky build, slicked-back hair, and Coke-bottle glasses, the prince hardly presents an image of royal elegance. But his wardrobe was picked from the racks of Versace, Gucci, and Dolce & Gabbana, and he spared no expense on himself, from the $30 million in cash he paid for the estate to what Senate investigators later reported were vast sums for household furnishings: $59,850 for rugs, $58,000 for a home theater, even $1,734.17 for a pair of wine glasses. When he arrived back home -- usually in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce or one of his other several dozen cars -- his employees were instructed to stand in a receiving line to greet the prince. And then they lined up to do the same when he left.