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May 24, 2006

Lou Dobbs on Ignoring Illegal Aliens...

Lou Dobbs has rather strong words for the President and the Congress for ignoring "200 million middle-class Americans".

President Bush says that the installation of the new Iraqi government was a "watershed event," but at the same time warns Americans of the challenges and loss as we continue to prosecute the war against Iraqi insurgents. Sen. Harry Reid declares that legislation that would render English the national language is racist.

Thirty-seven Democrats vote for full amnesty for all illegal aliens in this country, even though nobody really knows whether the number is 11 million, 12 million or 20 million. The Senate Republican leadership demands that a "comprehensive immigration reform" plan must be passed before this Memorial Day weekend. And the president signs into law a tax cut that raises taxes on the educational funds of teenagers saving for college.

Never before in our country's history have both the president and Congress been so out of touch with most Americans. Never before have so few of our elected officials and corporate leaders been less willing to commit to the national interest. And never before has our nation's largest constituent group -- some 200 million middle-class Americans -- been without representation in our nation's capital.(Watch why Dobbs said Mexico's leader is in charge of U.S. immigration policy -- 3:16)

George W. Bush's approval ratings have slumped to the lowest of his presidency. The approval rating for Congress is even lower, and nearly three-quarters of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction.

But what is our government doing about that? The president is staying the course in Iraq and apparently demanding little of his generals to create a new, far more effective strategy for urgent success. Of course, he also wants a guest-worker program and amnesty of millions of illegal aliens. And Congress, faced with midterm elections in just over five months, is intent on giving the president what he wants and telling working men and women and their families, American citizens all, to go to hell.

Illegal aliens are more important to this Congress than securing our borders and our ports, more important than those legal immigrants who have waited in line and who follow the law. The Senate has added to the litany of lunacy that makes up what it calls reform: Illegal aliens would only have to pay back taxes on three of the past five years, they will not be prosecuted for felonies such as identity theft or purchasing or using fraudulent Social Security cards, and unlike millions of visa holders who have to leave the country to have them renewed, they may simply remain in the United States while this Congress and this president give away all the benefits and privileges of American citizenship.

This is an outright assault in the elitist war on the middle class. And working men and women who've already borne the pain of losing good-paying manufacturing jobs and having middle-class jobs outsourced to cheap foreign labor markets are faced with the onslaught of more illegal immigration and cheap labor into the American economy. This president and Congress talk about bringing illegal aliens out of the shadows while they turn out the lights on our middle class.

President Bush and his most trusted advisers tell us how well our economy is doing, how many jobs have been created and how so-called free trade will enrich the lives of the same people whose livelihoods these policies are destroying.

It's hard not to think of the trusted adviser to Catherine the Great who sought to hide from her the embarrassing and shoddy condition of Ukrainian and Crimean villages by having elaborate facades built to divert her attention and to mask an uncomfortable reality. I don't know whether Karl Rove is President Bush's Grigori Potemkin or whether George Bush has created Potemkin villages all by himself. But the facades are cracking, and phony fronts of failed policies are quickly crumbling.

Six thousand unarmed National Guardsmen working as adjunct rear support to our undermanned, under-equipped Border Patrol is not border security. Three million illegal aliens continue to cross our borders and depress wages by hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The millions of manufacturing and middle-class jobs lost over the last five years have been replaced by lower-wage employment.

The president's faith-based commitment to so-called free trade will likely lead to a $1 trillion U.S. current account deficit this year and a trade debt of $4.5 trillion after 30 years of trade deficits. And while the president and Congress point to No Child Left Behind as a solution to our educational crisis, we're failing an entire generation of Americans whose test scores continue to fall and whose high school dropout rates would be embarrassing to a third-world country.

And a third-world country is what we will be if our elected officials don't soon come to their senses.

I must say, as Ed Meese points out in todays New York Times op-ed (May 24) - what the Senate is proposing is (1) an Amnesty program for illegal aliens and (2) just about identical to what the Congress passed 20 years ago.

It is clear to just about everyone that the problem of illegal aliens has become worse in the 20 years since the last law was passed. To do the exact same thing now strikes me as, well, insane. 20 years ago there were an estimated 2 million illegal aliens in the country. Now estimates are between 10 and 12 million illegal aliens. Clearly, by any reasonable standard, the law passed 20 years ago failed. Why pass it again? Time for a new approach I think.

I strongly suggest building a major, expensive, and 99% unbeatable wall across the entire border with Mexico. Yes it will cost lots of money. Yes Mexico will complain. And yes, it will make it harder for illegal aliens to go over the border back south to Mexico. Sorry. The current situation is intolerable and getting worse. The other strategies (guest workers, employee enforcement, building up Mexico's economy) have been tried and essentially have all failed. Time for the wall.

Posted by rakhier at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)

Serious Errors in Reporting on Hurricane Katrina...

Here is a rather strong attack on the media for spreading lies about what was going on in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Jonah Goldberg NRO

On a recent edition of Larry King Live, liberal Republican Congressman Christopher Shays, eager to put some distance between himself and the president, explained what he thinks is George Bush’s real albatross. “Let me just say that I think the thing that has hurt the president most is not Iraq. It’s Katrina,” Shays said. “People saw an arrogant but confident administration, but when they saw Katrina, they saw arrogance and frankly incompetence, and that was very unsettling.”

his sentiment is pervasive among Democrats and the press. Time writes matter-of-factly that “the government’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina” is a major liability for Republicans in ‘06. Howard Dean and other Democrats mention Katrina as a staple talking point. That’s certainly fair, given that the bar is set pretty low for what constitutes fair in American politics these days. But it is worth reminding people that the Katrina they think they remember wasn’t the Katrina that actually took place. In fact, it is difficult to think of a bigger media scandal in my lifetime than the fraudulently inaccurate coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

Where to begin? As I’ve written before, virtually all of the gripping stories from Katrina were untrue. All of those stories about, in Paula Zahn’s words, “bands of rapists, going block to block”? Not true. The tales of snipers firing on medevac helicopters? Bogus. The yarns, peddled on Oprah by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the New Orleans police chief, that “little babies” were getting raped in the Superdome and that the bodies of the murdered were piling up? Completely false. The stories about poor blacks dying in comparatively huge numbers because American society “left them behind”? Nah-ah. While most outlets limited themselves to taking Nagin’s estimate of 10,000 dead at face value, Editor and Publisher—the watchdog of the media—ran the headline, “Mortuary Director Tells Local Paper 40,000 Could Be Lost in Hurricane.”

In all of Louisiana, not just New Orleans, the total dead from Katrina was roughly 1,500. Blacks did not die disproportionately, nor did the poor. The only group truly singled out in terms of mortality was the elderly. According to a Knight-Ridder study, while only 15 percent of the population of New Orleans was over the age of 60, some 74 percent of the dead were 60 or older, and almost half were older than 75. Blacks were, if anything, slightly underrepresented among the dead given their share of the population.

This barely captures how badly the press bungled Katrina coverage. Keep in mind that the most horrifying tales of woe that captivated the press and prompted news anchors to scream—quite literally—at federal officials occurred within the safe zone around the Superdome where the press was operating. Shame on local officials for fomenting fear and passing along newly minted urban legends, but double shame on the press for recycling this stuff uncritically. Members of the press had access to the Superdome. Why not just run in and look for the bodies? Interview the rape victims? Couldn’t be bothered? The major networks had hundreds of people in New Orleans. Was there not a single intern available to fact-check? The coverage actually cost lives. Helicopters were grounded for 24 hours in response to media reports of sniper attacks. At least two patients died waiting to be evacuated.

And yet, an ubiquitous media chorus claims simultaneously that Katrina was Bush’s worst hour and the press’s best. That faultless paragon of media scrupulousness Dan Rather proclaimed it one of the “quintessential great moments in television news.” Christiane Amanpour explained, “I think what’s interesting is that it took a Katrina, you know, to bring us back to where we belong. In other words, real journalists, real journalism, and I think that’s a good thing.”

But in the race to prove the federal response incompetent, the “real journalists” missed some important details. As Lou Dolinar exhaustively documents, the National Guard did amazing work in New Orleans. From the Superdome, the Guard managed some 2,500 troops, a dozen emergency shelters, more than 200 boats, 150 helicopters (which flew more than 10,000 sorties moving 88,181 passengers, 18,834 tons of cargo, and saved 17,411 survivors), and an enormous M*A*S*H operation that, among other things, delivered seven babies.

Also left out of the conventional tale of Katrina is the fact that the hurricane hardly singled out New Orleans. Obviously, the flooding there was worse because of the levee breaks. But, as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour noted, the people of his state and Alabama and Florida have the same federal government. And despite awesome destruction, they managed to do okay.

None of this is to say that the federal government and the Bush administration didn’t make mistakes. But, if we’re looking for poster children for arrogant incompetence in response to Katrina, there are better candidates than George W. Bush.

Posted by rakhier at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2006

Mark Steyn explains that Europe is Dying...

You can't get a more grimly reasonable prediction about Europe than this rather long piece by Mark Steyn. In it he lays out the problems which Europe (and the West in General) faces. You can sum it up in one word: demographics.

Personally, I didn't expect to see cultural decadence in my lifetime but that is exactly what we are seeing. A culture that will no longer defend itself is a decadent culture. Clearly in an important sense, Europe is no longer willing to defend itself. Based on demographics it is not willing to perpetuate itself. The only thing that is going to stop the sustained decline of Europe's population is increasing numbers of people who are willing to have and raise children. It turns out that the "Post-Christian hyperrationalists" aren't willing to do this at even a replacement rate. Instead we see most Western countries with fertility rates around 1.5 and lower. (Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, Germany & Austria are at 1.3, Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1). This means these countries are shrinking and they are going to keep on shrinking until something changes.

Having children is expensive. Its a burden. It means you care about the future and you want to be a part of it. When the average woman is having just one child in her life time, there is clearly a problem with the idea that you care about the future. In the long run, the world belongs to people who want to have children. Problem is: educated post-Christian-rationalist Europeans aren't in that group. Don't expect people like that to be in power in 50 years time.

Posted by rakhier at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2006

Why is Soil Brown?

I learned a great deal from this answer. The Q&A is found on the SciAm web site.

Why is most ground brown? Steven Allison, an ecology researcher at the University of California, Irvine, provides this answer.

Many soils are brown in color because they contain large amounts of carbon. In particular, carbon-containing polymers called humic compounds absorb most visible wavelengths of light and give soils a dark brown appearance. Often the majority of soil carbon is present as humic compounds, which means they have a large impact on soil chemistry and fertility

What is most surprising about humic compounds, and indeed all soil carbon, is that there is so much of it. Many species of bacteria, fungi and other invertebrates decompose and consume soil carbon as a food source, yet soils hold somewhere between 1,500 and 2,300 petagrams--or as much as two quintillion grams--of carbon globally; this is two to three times the amount of carbon present in all the plants in the world. A large fraction of this soil carbon is ancient--hundreds to thousands of years old--meaning that it has escaped conversion into carbon dioxide by soil decomposers. These escape mechanisms are ultimately what cause the ground to be brown.

Ecologists have long wondered how plants avoid being eaten by herbivores, that is: Why is the world green? Yet few have asked the analogous question about carbon in the soil. It turns out that chemistry explains why herbivores don’t eat some plants and why so much soil carbon escapes decomposition. The chemical challenges are especially acute for decomposers, because so many of them are microorganisms that cannot take up their food directly. Instead, they secrete enzymes to break down organic compounds into small molecules that they can take up. If these enzymes are intercepted or destroyed in the soil environment, then decomposition slows down.

Even when microbial enzymes persist in the soil, they are not capable of degrading all forms of soil carbon. Soils represent the final destination for carbon fixed by plants during photosynthesis. After plants die, decomposers consume the dead plant carbon and assimilate some of it while respiring the remainder as carbon dioxide. When the decomposers die, their assimilated carbon can be consumed and respired by other decomposers. Over time, this recycling process returns most of the carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but a small fraction is transformed into chemically resistant forms that accumulate in the soil. These compounds no longer resemble plant material at all but rather are the chemical leftovers of decomposition. Many are humic compounds and their complicated chemical structures prevent enzymes from efficiently attacking them. Along with chemically similar compounds called polyphenols, humic compounds act as a true dead end for soil carbon because they can also bind to and inactivate the very enzymes that could potentially degrade them.

Other environmental factors also diminish the efficiency of microbial enzymes. If soils are nitrogen poor, then microbes may not have the nutrients available to build enzymes. Some enzymes require oxygen as a substrate, thus anoxic conditions often cause soil carbon to accumulate; this occurs in many bogs and peatlands because of their waterlogged soils. Also, many soil minerals adsorb enzymes and soil carbon, including humic compounds. This process blocks the enzymes from achieving the correct orientation to attack their carbon substrates.

Not all ground is brown, of course: soil minerals, when not covered in carbon compounds, often give soils a red, yellow or gray hue. In some ecosystems, we see the colors of the underlying minerals instead of brown ground, because carbon inputs to the soil are low due to erosion or a lack of plant growth, as in the iron-rich red soils of certain deserts. Yet, ultimately, the majority of ground is brown because the majority of soils remain carbon-rich.

Answer posted on May 01, 2006

I must say, I never considered why all the carbon in the soil wasn't turned into carbon dioxide. Also, the reason why the soil of Hawaii is so red is because it is such young soil and still shows the minerals.

Posted by rakhier at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2006

The Problem with the Powell Doctrine..

This is a part of a huge, and brilliant post from a Windsofchange.net discussion by "celebrim", comment #54

“The Powell doctrine had always been to go in with overwhelming force: enough to impose day-by-day, neighborhood-by-neighborhood law and order.”

I’ve never ever seen the implication of the “Powell doctrine”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_doctrine be that we would have sufficient force to impose law and order. In fact, a more full statement of the Powell doctrine than the breezy one you quote would indicate that the Powell doctrine would be to avoid occupations entirely. Frankly, I’m somewhat mystified how any military observer would at this time be a fan of the Powell doctrine. The Powell doctrine was a disaster virtually every where it was applied – beginning with Powell’s command in Beirut and continuing right on to Gulf War I and Somalia.

The Powell doctrine was less of a military doctrine than it was a political approach to the challenges created by the damage done to the American spirit by the Vietnam War. It required that all the following questions be clearly answered:

  1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?
  2. Do we have a clear attainable objective?
  3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
  4. Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
  5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
  6. Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
  7. Is the action supported by the American people?
  8. Do we have genuine broad international support?

Essentially the Powell doctrine is only enter into wars which will be short, decisive, and popular. Superficially, there is nothing wrong with that, and there is nothing at all wrong with the above check list. But in practice, the Powell doctrine – whether Powell was in command or someone else was trying to implement it – could be shortened down to the statement, “Whenever you meet resistance, cut your losses and run.” This resulted in a series of seemingly minor failures over the course of two decades which were little noticed in America, but served to give notice to our enemies that America was a paper tiger that lacked the will for a long or difficult fight. It’s that apparent weakness which in the words of our present enemies led to their decision to attack the United States.

In practice, the Powell doctrine requires too high of a burden. It’s simply not possible only to fight wars which meet all the Powell hurdles. Under the Powell doctrine, the Union would have settled with the Confederacy after losing at Bull Run, the US wouldn’t have entered WWI, and would have negotiated peace with Japan after Pearl Harbor. How can you ever know what all the possible consequences of your action will be? How can you always be certain of victory? In the real world, you’ve sometimes got to take your chances. In particular, it notion of a “plausible exit strategy” means that the US is continually looking for some out other than victory and the surrender and destruction of the enemy. Most of all though, the Powell doctrine fails to learn the central lesson of 20th century warfare – never leave a war half-finished and your opponent unbeaten. That haunted the whole world in WWII, and will continue to haunt the US through the rest of this century – assuming we survive it.

I agree.

Posted by rakhier at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)