The ALCAIDE’S CAFE

Obama, knowing only Chicago-style politics, with no executive experience in business or politics, and no significant legislative experience, is stuck. All he really knows is how to act like a community organizer/activist, a la Chicago-style. And truthfully, with the from the perspective of one who’s had some experience in all three types of politics, I don’t think he was ever even all that experienced or successful as an organizer/activist. As best I can tell from written records, he really hasn’t had much to brag about even in Chicago. To compensate, to prop his Presidency up, he’s trying to rely on a cadre of Chicago cronies - though “cronies” suggests he’s had equal or superior experience and standing to those people, but the record shows it the other way around. Were he not now the President, he’d be the junior partner.

So now we see a President sorely lacking in ability to lead, direct, or orchestrate the office. Some say he’s governing from the left. I say its Chicago’s left-leaning political establishment who’s doing the governing - and it doing it in typical Chicago style. Union bosses, political bosses, 60’s radicals, all from his Chicago background, along with Pelosi’s similarly family of Bay Area “Left Coast” (the Berkeley-San Francisco coalition rooted in the 60s and 70s – and I was once part of that), are setting the agenda and pretty much legislating and preparing to execute it. Obama is quite content to let them, apparently aware its beyond his job skills (above his “pay grade”, as he once said). He continues to do what he has proven best at, speech-making, the art of campaigning, an art he possesses, in spades.

In consequence we are all witnessing an embarrassingly messy process in Washington, which is usually much quieter and more discreet. It’s not so unusual that a new Administration’s runs like a bull with its agenda and policy goals in order to beat the inevitable “end of the honeymoon” and midterm elections. But is usually much better concealed, even genteel looking. But this time, well I’ve never heard so many apologies for “the ugliness of making the sausage” by the party in power as we do now.

Politics are not all the same. There are several distinct species. Legislators rarely make good Presidents. With few exceptions, great Presidents come with resumes built in governorships, or in the military or business. Obama had none of these. His primary resume entry, community organizer/activist, is vastly different. Even antithetical to governing a nation.

A community organizer is mostly a rabble-rouser. Obama’s campaigning skills are the kind of skills a community organizer/activist needs: getting people together; turning them out for a cause, usually narrow, usually local, often personal; playing a crowd, working it, inspiring emotions with oratory; getting the rabble an easy target, a company, a landlord, a CEO, a political figure and (Ayers is right, here) personalizing, demonizing and vilifying it, to focus anger and hit with demands. Once the crowd is at the gates, the organizer/activist typically has little more to do. He doesn’t have to effectuate responses, that’s the target’s problem. The target has to change, pay the price or whatever is being demanded. The organizer/activist supplies the heat but really doesn’t do the cooking. He neither writes legislation, nor creates or carries out policy. The target might, or the organizer/activist’s bosses or sponsors (union execs, politicians- those at the “higher pay grades”) carry the water once the target capitulates.

This is the skill set Obama developed in his history. This is how he’s carrying out his Presidency. He still does the speaking, rousing a crowd, and demanding some ransom/result. He’s not been as successful, I think, as he thought he would be, when facing higher levels of power. He’s discovered, as in the Olympic debacle, or the Copenhagen adventure, or at the UN security council, and with Iran, Korea, Israel, and Russia, sovereign powers are less intimidated than local banks or landlords. He’s doing better with us, and our bankers and CEOs and lower level Democrats. But even there his limited repertoire of political experience is telling. Considering how overwhelmed his administration looks, and his drop in the polls as the public more and more think he’s overwhelmed and less a stellar leader than was promised…. and now as even some in Congress, like the Black Caucus, are beginning to carp and try to push him where they want him to go.

So who is running this administration? It isn’t Obama. He’s simply not equipped to do it. That’s why they are hiring this cadre of Czars. They fill in the gaps, supply the knowledge, develop the policy, and provide the detailed executive talents he lacks. But that’s not running the administration at the White House level. So who is? Naturally, we might expect the strongmen from Chicago, like Axelrod and Emanuel and Andy Stern, etc. But if we look at how Obama’s major policy initiatives move forward, there’s a surprising clue. Obama has consistently handed them over to Pelosi and Reid.

Pelosi, especially, seems to set out the details and overall goals, and Reid tries his best to meet them. Obama does little more than go out and speak about them as being exactly what he wants. Then, however, whatever the legislative duo is able to get, or doesn’t, Obama’s next speech outlines that as his actual goal or “bottom line”. So it looks a lot like Pelosi and Reid are more in charge than anyone. We’ll have to wait and see. It’s still not clear who’s really in charge, its just plain that Obama isn’t.

I’m not a Republican, though I have moved to the conservative side in my latter years. Officially I register as “Independent”, unless I want to vote in a primary. In my earlier years I was officially a Socialist. My dad (who had a top-level security clearance to work for Los Alamos, then for Convair on the Atlas and space program) feared I was a Communist. My Uncle nearly had a heart attack when he saw my Che banner hanging over our mantle (my parents had no idea who it was, just liked the red in the Christmas decor). I ran with SNCC and CORE in the mid 60s, getting my bona fides for Civil Rights with a summer in Mississippi in ‘65. Got arrested in a march and spent two weeks in a Jackson jail (one week in the county fairgrounds, suffering strep throat). And I had a learning moment from Stokely Carmichael before that march, when he told me how much he disliked/distrusted “liberals”. “The Mississippi whites (mostly Democrats then, I expect), are at least civil and polite to your face, and you know where they are coming from. I never know about liberals.”, he told me. I was thoroughly surprised at that. This was Stokely, radical leader of Black student politics and their “power to the people” movement, and my sponsor. He who often scorned Martin Luther King, saying that his Gandhian style would be useless were it not for SNCC and CORE scaring the whites so that they clung to King as the lesser of evils, he actually trusted the Southern white politicians more than Northern liberals!  I never forgot it. And I took about 20 years to understand it. Today, it is so plain, I am embarrassed to admit I missed the obvious. 

In the 60s, the South was owned by Democrats. Even today, some of the most senior Democrats (think Byrd) are still from that old South that really fought against civil rights (Byrd was once high in the KKK). In the 60s, the Republicans were the “Freedom Choice”. And it was them who really passed the Civil Rights Act. Nowadays Lyndon Johnson gets credit for it. And maybe deserves it considering how far he went, much farther than the liberal icon JFK ever considered going. But the power behind civil rights was Republicans! Most Dems were opposed to Civil Rights. Get that? The Civil Rights Act was a Republican, a “Conservatives” accomplishment!

That fact has been totally lost in the 40 plus years since. The Democrat’s championing of “losers” and the glory of “losing” has obscured the fact that Republicans once did their best to free the downtrodden African Americans (best known, then, as “Negroes” or “Colored”, and now as “Blacks”) and give them EQUAL OPPORTUNITY! Just like the rest of Americans. Somehow (well, I know how, actually - Democrats remain today the best at BS, propoganda, urban legend creation, and exploitation) that story of history has been lost. Worse than lost, it’s been totally obscured and reversed in the popular political culture. Democrats have managed to sell themselves as the champions of minorities and downtrodden and disenfranchised people in America. They are good at obfuscation. They pick a party line (or myth) and SELL IT. (If you doubt, look at how Obama is increasingly following Bush’s footsteps, doing the very things the Dems - and Obama - originally vilified Bush for and rode the Republicans out of town on a rail for, but gets away with it!)

So how do they sell it so well? Mostly by following Stalin’s old moral. Stalin once advised, “First, pick a chicken clean. Pluck all its feathers out. Then feed it. It will follow you forever after!” That’s what’s now known as the “Stockholm Syndrome”, a label/diagnosis of why so many Jews became the Nazi’s faithful helpers in the concentration camps. In the modern scenario: welfare, affirmative action, bilingual education, loans to home buyers who have no qualifications, minimum (starvation) wages, free abortion (mostly eliminating black babies and encouraging black freedom from real family life!) … the list just goes on and on. Everything sold as “compassion”, and “help” is actually more a “buyout”, buying the loyalty of a minority community sold on “victimization” and “You just can’t do it on your own” - and pretty much insuring they never will develop the means and attitudes of success. I remember being asked by a reporter, back in days when I was a political actor (in Oregon) about what I thought of bilingual education. I said then, I was opposed because it merely assured second class citizenship, that the lack of English skills almost guarantees never reaching the top in the US. So it has proven. And those same people who back bilingual education also back just more and more money to lousy schools and teachers and kill charters and vouchers that would liberate those same students!

And my point? If the Republicans ever want to regain the ground they (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the last two election cycles, ought to go about reclaiming those lost bonafides. They should use whatever means available. Write some book. Get some memoirs of the Civil Rights history out there. Get the party line and talking points focussed on it. Start some “branding” advertising that recalls their glory days. And some ads that point out exactly how all this welfare (especially THIS moment in time) coopts, weakens, almost enslaves the plucked chickens - who are certainly no longer just the people of color. The Obama-Democrat run to the socialist-welfare state (remember, I KNOW all about it!!!) is hoping to turn us (well, not themselves, of course, not the power elite) into plucked but grateful chickens! And they’re in a hurry, wanting to get it done before any of us realizes what hit us. I hope, not because I’m a Republican (I’m NOT!), but because I’ve seen it coming from early on in the Obama campaign (I walked the same walk, talked the same talk, knew the same people and thought the same thoughts) they fail. I don’t want to go there any more.

Here we are, in the throes of a recession … which the Obama-ites called a Depression … but now they say, “We underestimated how severe it was, the mess Bush left us”, to excuse their so-far failure to turn it around. Like, they said a trillion dollar program had to be passed by Congress in 12 hours or DOOM! … but now, 6 months later they say “We underestimated how severe it was, the Bush mess…..” How much more severe was it, than DOOM?

Give me a break! EVERYTHING in their “STIMULUS” was supposed to gush out money on “Shovel-Ready infrastructure projects … read “roads, potholes, bridges …. WPA-like stuff”. But from day one, I wondered, “Just where are these idjuts coming from?” The people who are unemployed are sales clerks, loan officers, teachers, IT people, dress designers, office clerks, warehousemen, musicians, nurses, opticians, house builders…. so what the hell are “shovel jobs” supposed to do for them? I don’t think we live in a society, or time, when “shoveling” rock or asphalt, or building bridges or new playgrounds is exactly what OUR 21^st century unemployed are going to be able to do. That mighta worked for FDR in the 1940’s, but now? Maybe Obama, who has tried so hard to be a modern FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) should forget that, and the WPA (a failure, ultimately, in economic “stimulus … it took a war to end the Depression), and rethink his economic recovery in modern terms!

Get my point? I don’t see how all these road construction jobs were ever going to help the folks suddenly losing their jobs in 2008 & 9, get back to work. Even if the money we all have now been taxed did get put into play this year. I, for one, am not exactly a hardhat shovel-ready kinda guy!

PS: Maybe, just maybe, the Republican (no, I’m not one myself) idea of tax cuts woulda been a lot better! Just think: Even a trillion dollars of tax cuts - no income or FICA taxes, for instance - (same cost to the government) would have meant a lot of mortgage foreclosures never would have happened and banks would have stayed solvent; thousands of restaurants would have stayed open; lots of TVs and computers and school clothes would have been sold - to exactly the folks who really wanted them; a lot of doctors (dentists too) would have seen patients and been paid; cars would have been bought and GM and Chrysler stayed in business; airlines and hotels stayed in business as folks went on their vacations; state and local governments would have collected their sales and property and income taxes and not gone broke….

I don’t get it … just how did the Obama program do us better????? 

After the worldwide recession hit, and economies everywhere fell flat; after we (the U.S. Government) created the TARP & Stimulus “rescues” and set the stage for tomorrow’s bankruptcy; after we “bailed out” all those sinking banks and finance firms; after we villainized CEOs and big-time finance people and sent thugs to threaten and disgrace them even at home; after we essentially took over banks and AIG and our finance sector; after we punished and outlawed whomever we thought guilty of the “subprime fiasco”; after we reset the regulations to outlaw subprime loans (as best we could) and instead turned to low downs and low interest rates and government subsidies and tax credits and (anything else we might imagine) to help houses be bought on the cheap so poor folk can have them too; after all that, after 6 months of “gotta do it now” government intervention in our economy and trillions of debt for our children tomorrow … after everything else … someone has finally thought to analyse the facts, to see just what did happen in the great housing and economic meltdown we are still watching melt before our very eyes.

The analysis was just written up in the Wall Street Journal on July 3. Stan Liebowitz, professor of economics at the University of Texas, looked at the facts and figures in a database of some 30 million mortgages. What he found is almost laughable, were it not so tragic … and devastating to the actions and promises of our government. The subprime loans, declared the source of all the evil in the world’s economic fall, had little to nothing to do with it! They were a negligable factor in most mortgage forclosures. Instead, the problem in the majority of cases was exactly the so-called cure that the government is now turning to to refill empty houses and renew the promises that even poor folks can own their own dreamhouse: the low or no down payment loans! Simply continuing to get houses into the hands of folks who have little or no material equity in life by setting up mortgages on little or no financial equity in the house!

Liebowitz, in “New Evidence on the Foreclosure Crisis“ pretty well tells it in the subtitle of his article: “Zero money down, not subprime loans, led to the mortgage meltdown”. A rather obvious fact shows up in the analysis, obvious enough that most of us hardly needed a professor, or any so-called expertt tell us. If someone bought their house for essentially nothing, and were paying for it much like they’d otherwise pay rent, they have little compunction at walking away (just as any landlord can tell you) in the middle of the night if times get tough, or there’s a need (say, a new job, or divorce, or sick parent in another town) to move on. They’ve nothing, really, to lose. It is pretty much a “well, it was cool while it lasted” season in life. Gotta go now.

Even in the most sincere of intentions, the only way new home buyers will stick around and really try to make things work, is if they have an investment (that’s why landlords get the biggest deposit they can, upfront) they don’t want to lose. And the only way most of our government programs will work is if housing prices get back “on the bubble”, start rising up fast enought to create at least a paper equity that stressed home buyers might hate to lose. Ah yes, once again the government solution is a hope for “more of the same”! Change you can believe in. You do, don’t you?

If you have followed this blog, recently, or in it’s first 4 year incarnation, you know I’ve been a huge skeptic … no, make that “opponent”, of the great global climate warming theory … no, make that “scam”. I will, in fact, try to get the time to transfer/resurrect more of my past writings on that topic. but meanwhile, I’ll keep on keepin on with new postings. Such as this.  

This one is not exactly my own. I could try to rewrite it so it would appear to be so, but the truth is, I couldn’t really add anything to make it better, in writing, in the important details, or in getting the point made. So I will simply post this excerpt, and give you the proper credit and reference to the original. The title was/is, “The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic“. The author, Kimberley Strassel. The publisher, the Wall Street Journal (July 3, 2009) Here it is:

Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. “We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA,” the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from “any direct communication” with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: “The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.” (Emphasis added.)

Mr. McGartland blasted yet another email: “With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.” Ideology? Nope, not here. Just us science folk. Honest.

Are you willing to drastically change your, and all the U.S. of A’s, economy and way of life when this is the sort of gerrymandering of science and politics is going on to underwrite the policies and politics of Obama and the Democrats in Congress to (unilaterally) “save the world” (well, a quarter of a degree F of warming in the next half century)?

By the way, Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency.

  

Climate change has flat-lined for the last decade. The EPA predicts the world will actually get cooler for the next 30 years. More and more scientists are announcing that the Global Warming scenario is NOT supported by the data, or science.

Australia is bailing, no longer convinced there is anything to the Global Warming, bit, especially regarding human influences. They asked the Obama Admin to show them the evidence, and were told that it could not. So Australia is reversing its policies, not going to try to “slow warming” by sacrificing its own economy.

China, the world’s biggest offender, in terms that Al Gore and his Kyoto Kronies pitch, (China dwarfs our “Carbon Footprint” by factors of tens) is totally uninterested in doing anything to change their way of life if it costs them even a dime. India (ditto China … but a little less) says the same.

Spain went “green years ago. Lost two jobs for every one gained in “green industries”. They are bailing. Same for England. Same for Germany. Same for Japan. Same for almost everyone in the world. But….

The U.S. (Congress and Obama Admin both) will march ahead, boldly going where even fools no longer dare to go. Even though, in the best of circumstances, we (the U.S.) can influence about 2 or 3 % of the man-caused climate effects, if their more-and-more discredited climate theories were correct and there are such effects – and will actually cause about 1/4^th a degree (F) of warming in the next 30 years as they claim – they (Congress and Obama Admin) are trying to march ahead with their restructuring of our U.S. Economy, and way of life. Congress (well, the House) has passed the Cap and Trade energy tax system while everyone else in the world is retreating from it because it is an economic disaster, not to mention public policy (CORRUPTION!) disaster. So….

Do you think there is something else going on here? Duh. You better get smart before you get bankrupt!

I’m absolutely amazed by all the apocalyptic predictions that countless species will perish as the climates warm up. What happened to adaptation and evolutionary processes? We know that micro-climates and macro-climates are always changing. Always have.

The tribes of Indians living in the temperate paradise of our American Southwest, building the magnificent cliff dwellings were driven out by desertification just a few centuries ago. California Indians came in and developed rich cultures as California filled with acorn-producing oak parklands, after their ancestors skirted the glaciers to chase the Woolly Mammoth, and moved into the Great Plains when the glaciers disappeared almost entirely to make way for the buffalo, etc., etc. Just a 150 years ago England and Europe marveled at a minor ice age that turned their rivers into ice rinks. We don’t have to look far to see adaptation and migration of not just humans, but all the flora and fauna.

Oh, I know, that calming bit of insight ruins the apocalyptic visions of politicians and industrialists and scientists hoping to build their careers on their ‘chicken little” acts. But that is the truth.

When we are told the coasts are going to be submerged in 50 or 100 years, why don’t we just stop building on them, and in floodplains, and start a sensible withdrawal and redrawing our cities’ boundaries on higher ground? Why do we even rebuild New Orleans beneath the sea levels of today’s ocean?

When we are told the birds and butterflies, and flowers and snails we are accustomed to cannot survive … well, sit back and watch them slowly drift northward, and take your next vacation to places south and see the birds and butterflies and flowers and snails your grandchildren will get to experience and feed in their bird feeders in the backyard. Don’t panic! Maybe, in fact, the birds and butterflies you like the most will do exactly what scientists have been preaching at us for the past 100 years: adapt; evolve; learn to eat the new seeds, drink the nectar of warmer-clime flowers, pounce on the mice that like warmer weather! Or move north to stay with your favorites.

Farmers can grow regular wheat instead of winter wheat. Northern Californians can grow the rice their central Californians grow now.

Change is a vital part of our earth and in the creation of all the life if we are to believe the theories of evolution. And our earth is always changing. Often very rapidly, and to some serious extremes. So why the sudden failure of the natural processes? Like evolution. Why the sudden inability for OUR society to adapt and adjust to new foodstuffs and migrate a few miles back from the coasts in the next century – IF the global-warming alarmists are right?

Maybe there’s a clue in something I heard just today: our ex-VP, Al Gore has increased his personal fortunes from $2 million, to over $100 million, in the past eight years! And all the while, as the media keep showing, not giving up his huge mansion, or private jets, or big cars, like he tells us we must if we want to survive the next decade!

As the banishment of gender continues in our culture, one wonders at what else that might hide from our eyes. For example, “same-sex marriage” serves the purposes of numerous allied agendas.

Churches and religion are further marginalized, as one of their basic doctrines and services to their own and the larger population, is eroded. They are less esteemed for the extra sense of “special” and “important” they give married couples as marriage is diminished. “Civil unions” and the new and “less old-fashioned” (traditional, religious) “marriage” become more a matter of legal contracts and governmental affairs.

Now, few constitutional lawyers really doubt that once same-sex marriages are established, the same reasoning and legal principals will justify plural marriage, marriage between humans and animals (PETA wins that one), marriage between adults and younger children (already “age discrimination”, and “privacy rights” are already eroding “old fashioned” ideas of parental authority), marriage between closer relatives – even brother and sisters (with same sex marriage fuzzing up definitions of “family”, and brother-sister marriage has a lot of history already – Greeks, Romans, European royalty, etc). I’ve even heard (jokingly now, but…) of human robot marriage. As “robots” become more human-like and equipped with very human-like bodies (see what the Japanese have already done!) what business is it of ours or yours (that infamous “right to privacy” doctrine)?

Much the same rubric now accompanies a new legislative move to banish gender from public view, legislation creating “same-sex insurance”. Senator John Kerry says it is “to prohibit insurers from considering sex as a factor in setting premiums for policies in the individual insurance market.” His argument, that women pay higher rates for insurance than men is disingenuous at best, and patently false in most cases.

Insurance, of course, has always been actuarially priced. Smokers pay more. Bad (or more frequently ticketed or accident prone) pay more. Old people close to the end of normal lifetimes pay more. Flood plain homeowners pay more. People with serious illnesses pay more to start either life or health policies. Why? Because the insurance is not a philanthropic enterprise or gift from someone somewhere. While companies are profit driven (someone has to pay wages and stockholders), they are still ultimately the facilitators of communities of policy holders willing to pool their money to help ameliorate (pay for) risks, like sickness, accidents, or death. If the pool is used up by one very sick member, everyone else loses everything, gains nothing. Would you buy into that? Of course not. So IF you know that the next person wanting to get into the pool is very sick, or very accident prone, or extremely risky for whatever reason, you will at least demand higher investment (rates paid) or refuse their membership. That’s a “Duh!”

Well, women of childbearing years are much more likely to use the pool ($). If for no other reason than childbearing! So their rates are likely to be higher. But older men have usually pay much higher life insurance rates. Young men generally pay more because of their propensity to risky behavior. And so on. Its so obvious. So obvious that the public (so-called taxpayers) is more and more calling for higher rates or stricter limits to public health benefits (say, Medicare) for smokers or the “morbidly obese”.

Surely Kerry and his fellow Democrats know all this. They aren’t that stupid, I hope. So what other agenda(s) might be hidden behind this? I believe, as usual when you see alliances of legislators and various groups like union, political activists, etc., there are several beneficiaries being served at least. Feminist groups, maybe. Gays and lesbians, maybe. Nationalizing (Government owning and operating) health care, definitely. Nationalizing the health care is a real priority of this new government.

So how can this help that agenda. Well, it immediately stokes knee jerk resentments and senses of “justice” from the unfair greedy insurance companies. And seems to promise lower rates to a large constituency. With government the champion, of course.

And it should be obvious that only the government and bureaucrats can ignore actuarial facts and treat everyone “fairly”. They don’t need to make a profit, though once their budgets start getting cut (they always do, sooner or later) the benefits will get cut, and start being “politicized”, i.e., punish those darn smokers and fat people, or let them pay more for their own bad choices.

Politics is a treacherous business. Lots of smoke and mirrors. Strange bedfellows. All that. But rarely do YOU come out ahead. Higher taxes, if nothing else.

Those of you who knew the first life of Alcaide’s Cafe know we were ardent fans of the Hubble. We used its awesome photos frequently. We praised it almost every Sunday in a feature titled “Sunday’s Praise”. We lobbied for this last space shuttle mission (scheduled to launch May 11th) and featured a prominent button linking to the “Save the Hubble” group and petition on our sidebar.

I am glad it is going, but I can understand why NASA was originally so reluctant, and why they’ve spent a couple of years training for the mission. Just look at this picture (I’ll improve it after I do some studying up - this is my first image in a post in this incarnation of the Cafe, and WordPress):

Replacing this mess of stuff is just one of five back-to-back similar projects teams of astronauts will “spacewalk” to perform. The others are to install six new stabilizing gyroscopes, six new nickel-hydrogen battery packs, the new data computer and two new instruments, the $126 million Wide Field Camera 3 and the $81 million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. Can you imagine doing that housed in the bulky spacesuits, floating in space, having to make sure not even a tiny screw escape to get into some trouble. It would be a major challenge in a good cleanroom here on earth with days, not hours, to get each done!

I almost feel I should apologize. Instead, I think I’ll salute them (even if they end up failing!) and praise their courage and willingness to serve us all.

Ice Sheet Behavior Much More Volatile And Dynamic Than Previously Thought, Tahiti Corals Show (ScienceDaily, Apr. 30, 2009)

— Fossilised corals from tropical Tahiti show that the behaviour of ice sheets is much more volatile and dynamic than previously thought, a team led by Oxford University scientists has found.

Analysis of the corals suggests that ice sheets can change rapidly over just hundreds of years ….

“It’s amazing just how rapidly these ‘melting’ – or ‘deglaciation’ – events occurred and how enormous the volumes of ice involved were,” said Dr Alex Thomas, from the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University, lead author of the paper. “In the case of deglaciation after the penultimate ice age, before 137,000 years ago, we’re talking about ice sheets – that covered most of the USA and Canada and were up to five kilometres thick – simply vanishing.”….

We are starting to understand that recent observations of changes in ice sheets have not prepared us for just how rapidly the covering of ice across the Earth can fluctuate and that, as yet, we have not identified all the natural phenomena which drive deglaciation.”

Would someone please send this to Al Gore?

Oh, that’s right. There is no more uncertainty, or debate. We know it all, now. And we are certain that the enemy we espied is us! Our fault, the science is clear and concluded, and we must be punished … sent to our caves to think about what we’ve done. We can come out when we are ready to live purely (you know, like Golden Savages, leaving no trash or carbon footprint behind).