Global Warming: The Cause of All Evil?

The headline in a German news article from Der Spiegel read, “Scientific Feud: Does Global Warming Make Us More Violent?” I couldn’t pass this up. Global warming is being blamed for a lot of things, but violence? Are the pseudo-scientists at it again?

Apparently, Der Spiegel isn’t the only news magazine to pick this up. The article spoke of other news reports that displayed headlines such as; "Hotter Weather Actually Makes Us Want to Kill Each Other," a headline chosen by the Atlantic, "Rise in violence 'linked to climate change,' wrote the BBC, "Global Warming Is Greatly Increasing Crime and Other Conflict," it read in the Huffington Post. According to Spiegel, several German outlets have run variations on the "Climate of Violence" theme with Focus Online leading the way sporting the headline, "Agro-Heat Turns People into Killers."

Okay, now I’m worried. Is he old boogey-man, Global Warming responsible for everything bad that happens? I couldn’t find my keys the other day. Was it the fault of the weather? Is Obama missing the boat by blaming his troubles on his predecessors instead of placing the blame on Global Warming? Are we really as gullible as the pseudo-scientists believe us to be?

Deeper in the article we find that this frenzy of misinformation was set off by a study from a team led by Solomon Hsiang from the University of California, Berkeley. Other scientists accuse them of, “using questionable statistical methods, of arriving at dubious conclusions and even of a tendentious selection of data.” Those familiar with my column may recall that I have demonstrated the fallibility of statistics. Repeating a lie enough times may make people believe it’s true but a much faster way is to use statistics.

Sports scores don’t lie; they are a direct outcome of a competition. Recorded temperature measurements are likewise reliable; they are the record of calibrated instruments. It’s when you selectively plot the recorded measurements over time and plug them into mathematic equations that you can make them “prove” whatever thesis you want. Now take the results of skewed statistics and correlate them with a selection of events biased to your desired outcome and you have the Big Lie destined to be accepted as truth.

Is the earth in a warming period? Some credible scientists say it is. Equally credible scientists say it is not. It’s enough to make us all neurotic. Now take this ambiguous data and mix it with a selected set of violent events and voila you have “proved” Global Warming causes violence. But wait…no; it “proves” no warming causes violence.

Now mix in the other ambiguous data on greenhouse gases and you find that we are actually responsible for global violence. Throw in more “data” and you find your car, lawnmower, barbecue, and fireplace are causing your neighbors to be violent. And here all along you may have thought they were just jerks.

All right, that issue is solved. What else can I “prove” for you? How about “Proving” Global Warming causes obesity, or maybe how Global Warming causes politicians to say and do dumb things? That one, I might actually believe.

Crime Now Pays

The old adage “Crime doesn’t pay” obviously no longer applies to California. It appears that Governor Moonbeam would rather spend our tax dollars on a bullet train than apply them toward confining lawbreakers. The Attitude of the courts used to be, “We sentence them, you figure out what to do with them.” It appears that is no longer the case. The courts want those they sentence to be housed in the equivalent of the Hilton rather than Motel 6. Are the jails crowded? Probably. There are a lot of crooks and criminals in California, some aren’t even in the legislature.

When you commit a crime, you are remanded to a penal institution. The key word here being penal. A wrongdoer must suffer a penalty. The people in prison have all committed a felony. Lesser crimes don’t get prison time. That is the penalty they must pay for crimes ranging from drug dealing to armed robbery and even murder. In every instance there were victims that were at the very least inconvenienced. Is it not reasonable that those committing the crimes should also be inconvenienced? In some countries, they simply throw a prisoner in a hole without even considering how many other prisoners are confined there.  As long as they can shoehorn another one in, they’re good.We are more civilized than that, but do we really need to assure convicts a cushy room with three gourmet meals a day — plus snacks and cigarettes and television? Sure makes honest homeless people look like chumps.

“America’s Toughest Sheriff," Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona has no overcrowding problem in his facilities. Each prisoner is assured a spot in an non-airconditioned tent and a fresh set of pink underwear. When he gets too many prisoners, he just buys another tent. Here’s a clip from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s web site:

Arpaio has between 7500 - 10,000 inmates in his jail system. In August, 1993, he started the nation’s largest Tent City for convicted inmates. Two thousand convicted men and women serve their sentences in a canvas incarceration compound. It is a remarkable success story that has attracted the attention of government officials, presidential candidates, and media worldwide.

Of equal success and notoriety are his chain gangs, which contribute thousands of dollars of free labor to the community. The male chain gang, and the world’s first-ever female and juvenile chain gangs, clean streets, paint over graffiti, and bury the indigent in the county cemetery.

Also impressive are the Sheriff’s get tough policies. For example, he banned smoking, coffee, movies, pornographic magazines, and unrestricted TV in all jails. He has the cheapest meals in the U.S. too. The average meal costs between 15 and 40 cents, and inmates are fed only twice daily, to cut the labor costs of meal delivery. He even stopped serving them salt and pepper to save tax payers $20,000 a year.

Another program Arpaio is very well known for is the pink underwear he makes all inmates wear. Years ago, when the Sheriff learned that inmates were stealing jailhouse white boxers, Arpaio had all inmate underwear dyed pink for better inventory control. The same is true for the Sheriff’s handcuffs. When they started disappearing, he ordered pink handcuffs as a replacement.

Another web site quotes Arpaio on the quality of the food:  …Other prisons in the State [Arizona] and around the nation will average a dollar to a buck and a half per meal.  But Arpaio says he doesn't do it to save money...he does cause "the prisoners deserve to be punished."

Maybe the courts figure that if they require the state to release a bunch of prisoners, they won’t be inclined to arrest so many criminals and the court case load will drop. Unfortunately that logic does nothing to reduce the number of crimes committed. It just means we will have more criminals in our neighborhoods that have learned a very valuable lesson — crime pays.

Instead of turning felons lose on an unsuspecting — we are no longer allowed to suspect, that would be profiling — public, Brown could take just a few of those dollars he is wasting on the high-speed rail and invest in some tents at Big 5 Sporting goods. He might even be able to go in with Maricopa County, Arizona and get a discount on some pink underwear and handcuffs. Are you listening, Jerry?

Racial Hyprocrisy on Trial

Here’s an interesting word from the New Oxford American Dictionary – hypocrisy, noun ( pl. -sies): the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.

You are probably wondering why I would choose to highlight this word. The truth is, I’m afraid there are far too many people in this country who pretend to know what the word means, but either neglect or choose to ignore it when it comes to their own actions. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised coming from a nation where personal responsibility is an increasingly rare commodity.

The concept of racism is one that is way too often molded from the point of view of the accuser that has created a distinct dual standard. When a person not sharing the genes of the black race uses the “N-Word” in describing another, he or she is considered racist. No matter when or under what circumstances, a person uttering something that even sounds like the “N-Word” will have their life destroyed in perpetuity – they are branded as racist. If you attend a show with a black comedian in it, the chances of not hearing the “N-Word” used are astronomical. It’s also a common street language in predominantly black communities – nothing racist about it.

The irony of the “N-Word” is that it originated in the 17^th century to describe people with black (French: nègre and Spanish: negro, Latin: niger) skin. The “N-Word” was purportedly associated with slavery in the pre-civil war south, and therefore today should be strictly taboo when referring to black skinned people. Okay, let’s purge our vocabularies and dictionaries of the “N-Word”.

“Cracker”, on the other hand, is a term very closely associated with slavery. A cracker was an over-seer who used a whip to keep slaves in-line and working. Even though there were also black over-seers with whips, the word is somehow associated only with the white ones.

Nobody even raises an eyebrow then a black person uses the word “Cracker” in any company to describe a white person. They don’t even bother to disguise the word with a euphemism such as “C-word”. That’s not racist? If not, then it’s at least hypocritical.

During the George Zimmerman trial, there were thinly veiled attempts to cast Zimmerman as racist. Were there reports of him uttering the “N-Word”? If so, it must have been censored in the news, because I didn’t hear or read about it. On the other hand, a witness stated she had a conversation with Martin right before the altercation that took his life where he used the word “Cracker” to describe the man following him. Let’s see, Zimmerman must be a racist but Martin is what, a choirboy?

The left wing news media are always portraying any opposition to Obama’s policies as racist. But while Obama gives $7 billion of our tax dollars to improve African electric power, and simultaneously cuts our National Guard and furloughing people at the pentagon, there is nothing racist about that it’s just plain wrong.

Universities notoriously lower standards for blacks so they can admit them over much higher qualified students of what? Other races! Nothing racist about that (wink-wink).

Now that George Zimmerman has been acquitted of murdering Travon Martin, our black head of the justice system, Eric Holder, is scrambling to find a way to charge this innocent man with some violation of the civil rights law, an act signed into law in 1964 aimed specifically at ending discrimination. I suppose if a non-black person kills a black man in self-defense, it must be discrimination. After all, why couldn’t he have chosen to shoot a white passer by instead of the black man that was pounding his head into the concrete? Was Martin discriminating when he said a “Cracker” was following him? If this isn’t racism, it surely is hypocrisy.

You can bet the farm that if this had gone the other way – Martin killing Zimmerman – there would have been two short paragraphs in just the local newspaper, and most of the country would have never heard of George Zimmerman.

How many Hispanics are killed every day by any race, without high profile news reporting? How many blacks are killed each day by other blacks without even a hint of protestation? How many whites are killed by any race with only back-page coverage in the local newspaper?

In 1995, a black man was acquitted of killing his white wife and white houseguest. White people took to the streets in hoards destroying property in protest of the injustice done to the white woman and man. No wait, that’s wrong! The white people did nothing, while the black people rejoiced at the acquittal of O.J. Simpson. What did reverend Al Sharptongue have to say about that? Do you hear crickets chirping? Or is that the sound of hypocrisy?

Although it’s not, I am certain there will be some people calling this column racist. There is no way anyone can call it hypocritical, though.

You Are a Winner!

So I go to the mailbox to retrieve my daily allocation of bills and junk mail, and neatly stuffed between the odd-sized grocery store papers and Penny Saver there is a window envelope with a very official sounding return address: Records Div. Payment Information Dept. Above the address window, a line says, “Check Payment Reference.” I know this has to be important, because it has the word IMPORTANT all over it.

The “important” letter enclosed has the heading, “Report of Payment to be Rendered.” The letter appears as official as any I have ever seen before, so I read further. There are ID numbers, Filer numbers, and impressive forms buried in the letter, but the part that pops right out is where it says, “Awards Payment -- $2,500,000.00.”

Yep, someone wants to give me two- and-a-half-million dollars. Who would ever say no to that? Of course, there is always fine print – the part they hope everyone skips over, and usually printed on the back. I only have to send them twenty bucks and the two-and-a-half- mill will be mine! After, all you can’t expect someone giving away $2.5 million to be able to afford to process the form for nothing.

We get several letters like this every week. They don’t send them to me, though. They are all addressed to my dear wife. Years ago, she bought into the Publisher’s Clearing House scheme. Yes, she keeps sending her forms in and even buys something now and then. Unfortunately, Dick Clark and Ed McMahan are both long dead and we still haven’t had a knock on our door from anyone bearing a giant check.

What this did, though, was put her name at the top of a list of people prone to taking the something-for-nothing bait. They are the same adults that still believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny. They’re the ones you can always find headed to one end or the other of a rainbow in search of the Leprechaun with the pot of gold.

Are these “notifications” real? Again, in the fine print, they all offer to make a list of winners available. I haven’t taken them up on that offer either, but no one I know has ever won anything on these schemes.

I find it hard to believe that somewhere in this country there is a One-percenter that feels so guilty about being rich that he or she wants to give large sums of money way to complete strangers. And he or she has built a whole organization to come up with random names of recipients. Naturally, we can’t expect him or her to foot the bill for the organization, so those on the (sucker) list will need to pay to find out if you are actually on the short list to get “your” check.

I am old enough to remember back in the ‘50s there was a television show called The Millionaire. If I remember the theme correctly, some guy named John Baresfoot Tipton sent Michael Ansara out to give complete strangers a check for a million dollars. The only hitch was that they had to spend it. Back then spending a million dollars was actually difficult. Today that might make a substantial down payment on a house in an upscale subdivision. Maybe this same guy is now sending letters to strangers since Michael Ansara is dead. Nope, it was just a TV script – darn.

“Everybody loves a winner,” goes the song. Everybody would love to be a winner, is more appropriate. No body wants to be a loser, and they believe they are endowed with that ethereal quality called luck. Casinos make billions from these people. Desperation fuels the belief in luck, and in far too many cases those least financially able to send $15 or $20 every time they get one of these letters are the ones supporting this scam.

One of the wisest people in the world, my grandfather, once told me, “You do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.” I have always remembered that sage advice.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to answer an email from a poor Nigerian widow with a dilemma. She wants to shelter her dead husband’s millions in my bank account. Maybe there is an Easter Bunny after all.

The Short Form of Impeachment

It’s nothing new. In most third-world countries impeachment comes at the end of a gun barrel. It’s quite efficient, actually – no prolonged discussion or trial over the wrongdoing of a leader – the military just shows up one day, and presto, a new government is formed.

No, I’m not advocating coup de’etat as always the best way to change government leadership. I do, however, marvel at the efficiency of the process.

President Bill Clinton’s philandering and lying during his administration got him into hot water resulting in impeachment proceedings against him. The House of Representatives had no problem voting for impeachment but the democrats and RINOs in the Senate just couldn’t get the job done. As a result, we were constantly bombarded with new revelations of sexual escapades and cover-ups in the news for most of his term in office.

By contrast, in Egypt, democratically elected president Mohammed Morsi provoked the ire of the Egyptian public by not making good on campaign promises and using his close association with the radical Muslim Brotherhood to inch closer to increasing Sharia law. As the numbers of protesters demanding Morsi step down climbed to hundreds of thousands, Army leaders gave the president fair warning then stepped in to replace him.

This was a real and incorruptible vote of the public – no inked fingers, no stuffed ballot boxes or hanging chads, no vote from graveyards, and no political shenanigans. The number of Egyptians protesting in the streets against Mohamed Morsi outnumbered those in support of him – mainly those in the radical Muslim Brotherhood. Someone had to listen to the voice of the people and do something else risk a civil war, ala Syria. It is unfortunate that the army had to be that someone, but they got the job done and without a lot of bloodshed.

By contrast, this style of impeachment voting has had a negative effect in Syria. Despite the departure of many high-ranking figures in the Syrian Army, they have turned against the people of Syria in unwarranted defense of the despot in charge, president Bashar Assad.

Government overthrows are nothing new. They were old-hat when Brutus and his Senate comrades hacked Caesar to death in Rome. But what I find interesting in the Egyptian process is the rejection of a leader once elected  -- albeit in a questionably free election by a mostly Islamic influenced vote -- then rejected for moving ever closer to Sharia law.

Radical Islam take note! Once a people have tasted freedom, even in a highly Islamic country as Egypt, they are not likely to be shackled under the oppression of strict Sharia rule.

Our own beloved third President and author of the US Declaration of Independence once advocated the short form of impeachment when he said, “The tree of liberty must from time to time be nourished by the blood of tyrants.” The situation in Egypt should serve as a reminder to all tyrannical despots of Jefferson’s words.

Creatures From Another Dimension

In Texas, they call them “aints”. Here, I call them a huge pain. I’m talking about those humble, tiny, indefatigable, pestilent creatures that appear in mega-force during summer anywhere they like in your house to devour anything edible – ants.

No, they aren’t just for picnics any more. These things are everywhere.

I tried checking the web to identify them, but the little buggers are so tiny you can’t just grab one to check it out. Identification seems to hinge on characteristics like the petiole nodes, thorax, head, smell, size, and other esoteric stuff. By the time I’m able to pick one up, there isn’t much left of it to identify. I can’t smell anything from the dead ant. Near as I can tell, the ones assailing my house – yes, we are under siege -- are probably the ubiquitous Argentine ants.

It’s an annual event in most households of the southwest. As the days get longer and warmer, the little suckers get bolder. The web sites seem unanimous on what they’re looking for, sweets. I can tell you with absolute confidence these pests will devour any organic material – including live human flesh. Yes, the critters bite!

We check the toilet thoroughly before having a seat. Getting bit in unmentionable places may sound funny to anyone listening, but to the victim, I assure you, it’s not.

They love lasagna. The other day my wife took the time to bake one of our favorite dishes, lasagna. After baking it for the appropriate time  -- I don’t cook, so I have no idea how long that is – she sat it on the counter to cool. Bad move. It didn’t take long for the little monsters to find this delicacy and invite the whole ant empire for the feast.

I don’t believe they even waited for it to cool. Within minutes there was a dark covering over the dish. And it was moving! An animated black line that looked like the 405 freeway at rush hour extended from the dish to a corner of the counter where it literally disappeared at the wall. I haven’t a clue how they managed to get through the solid wall. I couldn’t find a hole.

With tears in the corner of her eyes, my dear wife muttered a few unprintable words under her breath and gingerly transported our now spoiled dinner outside to the patio table. She spent the next few minutes brushing ants from her arms and other parts of her anatomy. For the next hour, we sprayed and washed down the counter and all around the still hot oven. Those little devils seem impervious to the heat.

Yes, I sprayed insecticide. In early spring, we buy it by the case. I know it’s poison. That’s the point, isn’t it – kill the things, not give them a stern lecture and ask them to leave and not come back. Over the years we tried all the “green” methods to get rid of them, Windex, soapy water, baits…you name it. Maybe it’s a matter of instant gratification, but insecticide spray works immediately. It takes a while to clean the spray residue and little dead ant bodies away, but it’s well worth the effort. Apparently, any fugitives tell their comrades stories of the ant massacre since they don’t usually return to that spot for a while. The rest of the house seems to be fair game, though.

We learned to keep our food in sealed containers. You need to make sure they are sealed tight, though. If there is even the slightest room, the ants will find it and squeeze through. The refrigerator is a good place to keep the ants out, although, one year I found them climbing through the Ice dispenser hole. They must have found a place to get ant overcoats and crampons, because I know they don’t like the cold.

I have a theory about the ants that invade our homes. Don’t laugh. I think they come from another dimension. Try this experiment: Say, you find an ant in the middle of your dining room table. Kill it and make sure there are no more on top of the table. Wait just a split second and another will appear. I know they’re fast, but there is no way they can get from the edge of the table to the middle in that amount of time. They have found a way to shift between dimensions. They’re aliens, and they are out to take over our world.

If that sounds crazy, it’s just because the ants are making me that way.

Spies All

Okay, here’s a trick question: What do traitors Edward Snowden and Patrick Manning have in common, besides being blabbermouth spies? The answer is they are both poster-boys for failings in the screening process of those entrusted with information critical to national security.

"There is an alarmingly insufficient level of oversight of the federal investigative services program" that conducts background checks for security clearances, said Patrick McFarland, the inspector general at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) during a recent congressional hearing. The most alarming revelation is that OPM is the agency that conducts 90 percent of the clearance investigations according to McFarland.

Maybe it’s no coincidence that the people that do investigations for our nation’s security are located in an area of Washington D.C. called “Foggy Bottom.” There must be so much fog there that even the inspector general can’t see what’s going on.

Snowden and Manning aren’t the first Americans to turn on their country and provide foreign countries with classified information. However, they may be the first to make sensitive information available to the global public via the Internet.

CIA counter –intelligence officer Aldrich Ames, FBI agent Richard Miller, United States Navy Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker, and civilian intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard are but a few of the recent high-profile turncoats to spy on the US. They did it for money or sex, though. Snowden and Manning, it seems, are only interested in the infamy associated with betraying their country. I have not heard reports of either being monetarily rewarded for their despicable acts of treason.

Reports have indicated that both Snowden and Manning have character issues that probably should have been more closely investigated before granting access to sensitive information. Snowden admits he intentionally sought out employment at the NSA to obtain classified information. Manning was a homosexual disgruntled with the Army’s attitude toward gays at the time of his foul deed.

There is a mountain of official guidelines, regulations, and directive s specifying everything pertaining to securing sensitive information and issuing clearance to individuals with a need to know this information. The 187 pages of DOD 5200.2-R, Personnel Security Program detail items investigators must look for in a candidate for each of the five levels of clearance. Apparently, the inordinate desire for fame at any cost must not be specifically called out as a disqualifying characteristic.

This is the same cowardly desire that drives mad men to shoot up schools, movie theaters, and other public venues, then commit suicide rather than face the consequences of their actions.

There are those who would term Snowden and Manning “whistleblowers” in the same category as Daniel Elsberg. They are not. Some would even say they are heroes for their disclosures. They are not.

Edward Snowden and Patrick Manning are cowardly traitors whose infamous actions have harmed our country’s security and may even cost American lives. They deserve the same fate as 20^th Century spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

The fate of those responsible for the failings in the Office of Personnel Management should probably be a little less severe, but heads should roll until they get their act together in Foggy Bottom.