Interesting Items by Alex Gimarc, May 2007

1. 1984. An Obama-friendly video guy delivered the largest hand grenade in the current election cycle last week with the release of a mash-up of Apple’s infamous 1984 Superbowl ad on You Tube. The ad, which ran only during the 1984 Superbowl was originally done by Ridley Scott (Alien and Blade Runner), and introduced the Macintosh to the general public. It has been a long time since anyone saw the Apple ad. It was resurrected, modified to show Hillary droning on and on and on about her listening tour to the original drones. The aerobics lady with the hammer was modified with an iPod and a t-shirt with the Obama campaign logo. It ends with the Obama campaign logo replacing the Apple logo. The entire ad was posted on You Tube just over a week ago. It was a devastating ad and demonstrates several things that those of us in the current election cycle ought to consider. First: There are far more ways around McCain Feingold than anyone could have believed possible. Second: The technology is changing exponentially, as will the output from those who use the technology well. Third: The viewers of this ad on You Tube self-selected, and chose to view what was essentially a pro-Obama campaign ad. Finally – and this one is for Mrs. Clinton in p articular and her supporters in general: This isn’t 1992. You can’t run the same sort of campaign you did in 1992 through 2000. You have constructed a huge money and propaganda distribution machine, which would have been a slam-dunk winner in the previous world. However, this is not the previous world. It is more fragmented. It allows more choice. It provides orders of magnitude better, solid, verifiable information to the average voter in near real time. It allows rank amateurs to create emotional, viscerally appealing videos on their home computers and then make those videos available to anyone with a mouse. The new world is quicker, more agile, and more creative than the Clinton’s money machine. Whether it is enough to defeat them this next year remains to be seen. And I have no idea how well candidates on the right will operate in this new world. Whatever happens, get ready for a wild ride.

2. John Does. The Islamist, Hamas and Hezbollah supporting organization CAIR really did us all a great service by getting involved in the traveling Imams’ lawsuit. They are peddling furiously, trying to recreate the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, only this time as a vehicle for imposing Sharia and inoculating American Islamists from getting treated as the traitors they are. CAIR has jumped in the middle of the Imams’ lawsuit against US Air and the unspecified John Does who blew the whistle on the seven clowns. As such, CAIR becomes a target for any (all?) enterprising defense lawyers, who can then use the opportunity to explore their funding sources from the Middle East and their expenditures back into the Middle East. The last time CAIR got involved in a lawsuit, the defense lawyer immediately went after their support via deposition. CAIR quietly dropped that p articular action and slunk away rather than exposing their pro-terrorist ties. There are more people involved this time around. Perhaps they will end up like the infamous Holy Land Foundation which was shut down for supporting Hamas. This attempt at bullying via lawsuit also grabbed congressional attention, as Republicans in the House managed to float a House Resolution (HR) shielding any American who reported suspicious behavior onboard a transportation system from civil lawsuits against them. The HR was brought to the House floor, much to the dismay of the current leadership, and was passed with over 300 votes in support. It is now on its way to the senate.

3. Hostages. Iranians in the Persian Gulf jumped a squad of British sailors who just completed inspecting a vessel in Iraqi waters. The 15 were taken hostage and reportedly taken to Tehran. The British Captain of the ship that launched the inspection mission took no action against the Iranians, who were in inflatable watercraft and armed with light automatic weapons. We are now involved in a standoff and propaganda game with the Iranians. The Iranians claimed the Brits were seized in Iranian waters and displayed one of their GPS units to prove the claim. Unfortunately, the Iranian apparently didn’t know how to use a GPS and the coordinates displayed were well within Iraqi waters. This episode ought to be the perfect time to st art militarily squeezing the Mullahs into oblivion. The Brits and Americans ought to st art systematically seizing all the Iranian offshore oil production platforms in the Gulf. Seize the platforms. Seize the people working on them or return them to Iran. Shut in the wells and stop all production. Proceed to the next platform and the next. This will quickly shut down the vast majority all oil production for all of Iran and will shut down the flow of dollars into the pockets of the Mullahs. Should the Iranians respond militarily, blow their little boats out of the water and destroy the military installations onshore that support them. Very quickly, the Iranian threat to the Persian Gulf will disappear – which would be a nice outcome. We have done this before, in the late 1980s, when the USN fought a year-long war with Iran. Iran has a difficult time with force projection, and cannot militarily project anything but terror. They have been spoiling for a fight for a long time. We will eventually have to fight at least some of them. Today is probably as good a time as any.

4. Nukes. The greens are finally st arting to come around to the notion of reconsidering nuclear reactors as environmentally friendly, clean, low (or no) greenhouse gas producing power plants. Now the science behind this newfound popularity is still garbage, as water vapor makes up over 95% of all greenhouse gasses, but I will take what I can get for the time being. And if we can build 40-50 new reactors for primary power before they change their minds again, we may just be able to take a bite out of our energy problem and balance of trade problem (which isn’t really problem). Captain Ed of Captain’s Qu arters Friday reported that the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, Union of Concerned Scientists, National Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense all came out last week with statements that they would consider supporting nuclear energy as a solution to the problem of greenhouse gasses, which is a st art.

5. German Judge. Finally, we have the story of a female German judge that ruled against the request for an immediate divorce by a Moroccan-born woman on the grounds that the Koran allowed men to beat their wives. Reaction to this ruling was immediate, loud and visceral. She was blasted nationwide in print and other media. She was removed from the case as being too prejudiced to render an imp artial decision. She was blasted at the notion of putting Sharia above German law. Interestingly enough, at the time of the story, she was also unnamed and her identity kept secret from the general public. Some would rightfully point to this little event as yet another example of multiculturalism run amok, which it certainly is. One blogger was more interested in the reaction by the German public to this black-robed fool, and pointed out that the reaction to the ruling indicates that the time for multiculturalism as overbearing social policy may be drawing to a close, and that even the Germans are getting tired of having Islam and Sharia shoved down their collective throats. It also means that Europe may not be lost in this war at all. While the governments are collectively a bunch of weak-kneed, socialist twits, the people in Europe are about fed up with their Muslim neighbors who are hell-bent on turning Europe into Eurabia.

1. Cold. Note to readers: In previous years I have referred to former Clinton VP Al Gore as either algore (from Limbaugh) or Alpha Gore (from Naomi Wolf’s 2000 campaign advice on dressing him to resemble an Alpha Male). Today, there is a third and spectacularly better name for him: Manbearpig. This comes from the South Park episode last year that skewered the former algore’s single-minded pursuit of glory by making things up. Now, back to the column….. As Manbearpig (the former algore) prepared for his performance in front of congress this week, a funny thing happened. This Global Warming stuff is not working all that well up here in Alaska where Anchorage and Fairbanks have experienced some of the coldest months in recent memory. Fairbanks endured one of its coldest Februaries ever, with temperatures running in the -30 degree F range. Anchorage has had one of the coldest March’s in over 35 years, with an average temperature of 9.2 degrees F since Feb 18. The coldest March in history was in 1956, with an average temperature of 7.2 degrees F. Things normally st art warming up in April, with ice off the lakes by early May in recent years. Don’t think that we are going to see ice out until mid to late-May unless something nice happens. Over the weekend, we st arted getting reports of water hydrants here in Anchorage being decapitated by frozen ground. In bad winters, the line between frozen dirt and unfrozen dirt gets shoved deeper underground. When the winters are really hard (this one has been moderately hard), ground freezes up to 10-13 feet deep. Once the water in the dirt freezes more than 10 feet deep, its expansion is large enough to st art pushing up against the pipe collars where fire hydrants are bolted to the underground feeder pipes, decapitating them. You end up with an icy mess until the water can be turned off and a very difficult repair job to replace the collar and hydrant. This is only the second winter in 14 years up here I have seen fire hydrants st arting to be decapitated, which is most certainly not an indicator of Global Warming. But when Manbearpig and his ilk (I always wanted to use that word in a post) are running around the country proselytizing the Global Warming religion, little facts concerning actual cold winters are irrelevant. ADN, Fri.

2. Reactor. The saga of Iran’s reactor took an interesting turn over the course of the last week. This one may be three bits of good news: Russian agreement to put pressure on Iran; Iran’s economic chaos catching up with them; and the successful leveraging of the Putin government by the Bush administration. We have known for a number of months that the Iranian government was having economic problems – p arty due to the Islamic nirvana brought to the Iranian people by Khomeini and his followers, and p artly because of the large amount of dollars being poured into building nukes and exporting Islamist terror worldwide. Power projection of any nature is an expensive business, and normally requires a robust economic base to support it. Iran has no such economic base any more. The Mullahs are running a race between total economic collapse and successful testing of their nuke. Question is: if you spend yourself into oblivion building your nuke and exporting terror worldwide, what will be left to pay for its delivery and use when you want to use it? This weapon will not be used more than a single time, if that. Dr. Jack Wheeler has an interesting take on the Russian refusal to complete the reactor. Apparently Putin has been removing his rivals – including anyone who writes anything unpleasant about him or his government – from the gene pool with extreme prejudice, like all good Mafiosi Dons. Wheeler believes he had one such gentleman attacked on US soil last month. The target of this execution is currently in the hospital. Wheeler thinks that the Bush WH gave Putin an ultimatum, which nicely explains newfound Russian support for anti-Iranian resolutions in the UN and their refusal to complete the Iranian reactor. There is a lot going on in the background in this war, and those things seem to be working out well for the Good Guys so far.

3. Nelchina. The Alaska Board of Game, in an act of breathtaking hubris, instituted a means test for caribou hunting in a popular area of central Alaska. The new requirement is intended to limit well-financed hunters from the Raibelt (Seward, through Anchorage, to Fairbanks) from competing with local subsistence hunters near the herd. The new requirement is clearly unconstitutional, as all fish and game here in Alaska are commonly held, with each citizen having equal right to take fish and game from the field. Previously, access to this herd was obtained via lottery. Now, there is a means test to the lottery. The logic behind the new ruling is little more than pandering to local native activists who believe they own the resource because they live next to it. The ruling effectively turns hunting (and eventually fishing) into an act of public welfare – which it never was intended to be. It is a terrible precedent and will be vigorously fought by hunters and fishermen statewide. Wish us luck. We will need it. ADN, Mon.

4. Refuges. I’ve written about this before. The Anchorage Daily News (otherwise better known as the local fishwrapper or the Daily Worker) ran a hugely sympathetic article Monday about the use of newly created refuges as a technique to fight off local mining. Greens have used the technique for decades, locking up trillions of dollars worth of oil, natural gas and mineral deposits nationwide. Now they are teaming up with local NIMBYs and BANANAs to fend off attempts to build new mines here in Alaska. The first proposed was the new refuge north of Lake Iliamna, intended to halt the construction of the proposed Pebble Mine. Proponents claim that there is no problem mining inside a newly created 5-7 million acre state fish and game refuge, as it will only ensure that the mining company follows existing state and federal environmental rules. Realists who have seen this sort of bait and switch tactic before believe that they will simply be a vehicle used to completely stop the mine – which is the accurate viewpoint. The second proposed refuge is north of Anchorage in the Tangle Lakes area. Now, Alaska is not without its refuges, with a total area 74 million acres, an area about the size of the state of Arizona, or 20% of the total area of the state locked up in mostly federal refuges. The feds own yet another 40% of the total area of the state in a variety of National Forests, National Parks, Wilderness Areas and National Monuments. One would think that 60% of the area of the largest state in the union would be enough for the preservationists. Sadly, it’s not.

5. CAIR. The Fabulous Flying Imams who got themselves kicked off a US Airways flight last year filed a lawsuit against US Airways for wrongfully profiling them and removing them from the flight. Also named in the lawsuit are a number of unnamed John and Jane Does, people who complained about their threatening, bullying actions onboard. CAIR appears to be using the civil courts system as a vehicle to intimidate both the airlines and the traveling public. Most of us (all?) have little money to throw away in court pursuing frivolous lawsuits. CIAR raises its money from the Middle East oil guys, and have essentially an unlimited slush fund to create mayhem in the courts. To date, several large and well-respected powerhouse lawfirms have volunteered their services pro bono to defend the unnamed passengers. The only way these clowns (the Traveling Imams) can win in court is by outspending their opponents or by intimidating the airlines targeted into a pretrial agreement. They will never be able to win in front of a jury – especially one that sees video or cellphone footage of their activities in the boarding are and onboard. I do not know that such footage exists, but in this age of video capture cellphones literally everywhere, I expect it does. Note to the Traveling Imams: Be careful what you wish for, Girls. You may eventually get it. And I hope you enjoy it when it arrives.

1. Defector. There has been a high-ranking defector from Iran to the West. Ali Reza Asgari is an Iranian intelligence general and former Foreign Ministry official. He disappeared a few weeks ago while visiting Turkey and has not seen the light of day since. There are conflicting stories about whether he came out alone or with his family. As the reports continued to be embellished last week, the consensus formed that he was not a defector, but may very well have been a double agent, a mole that had been working for the US in Iran for years who was about to get caught by the Iranians. We hope for his continued good health and that he and his family live a long and happy life in the West. Most of all, we hope there are other Iranians who are stepping up to fill the void in human intelligence from Iran that will no longer be coming from this gentleman.

2. Pop-Ups. A cautionary story from the gentlemen who publish Windows Secrets, a weekly computer publication I subscribe to. The story concerns an elementary school public teacher in Connecticut who was convicted of child endangerment for porn pop-up ads showing up on the computer in her classroom the day she substituted in October 2004. The computer was a Win98 box, running Internet Explorer 6, with a spyware program that had been last updated four months before in June. Essentially, it was an unsecured operating system, an unsecured browser, connected to the internet without any current spyware protection. Substitute shows up for class. Regular teacher is in place. Regular teacher logs her into the computer (no temporary accounts for substitutes). Substitute leaves for a moment. She returns to class and the regular teacher is gone and students are surfing the internet and seeing a LOT of pop-ups, some of them quite disgusting. She turns the screen away from the students and goes for technical help during the next break. She goes for help but can’t find any. Someone complains during the day or afterwards, and she is arrested shortly afterwards on a charge of child endangerment for exposing the elementary students to porn via the pop-ups. Now the story enters the realm of Kafka, as the investigators did not have the technical expertise or interest to tell who visited the porn sites – the automatic redirects driven by the pop-ups, the kiddies, or one of the teachers clicking on links. The cops seize the computer and take a backup of the hard drive. The backup is not a forensic copy, nor is it secured. The investigating detectives do not search for adware / spyware / malware on her computer. The teacher is not p articularly computer literate. Either (apparently) are the cops or the people in the legal system. She is convicted of child endangerment and is now awaiting sentencing. This story hits the computer security world and she finally has some good technical help showing up – technical help that can demonstrate what the adware has done to the computer, how it has done it, where it came from, what installed it, the holes in the evidentiary chain, and lays the foundation for a new trial. She also gets a new computer-literate legal team. The sentencing hearing was supposed to be March 2. I haven’t found any updates to this story as yet. The word of warning is this: Have your computers protected at home and at work. You can pick up malware / adware / spyware from anywhere. You don’t even have to click on anything, as it can install itself simply by visiting the wrong site – and music download, games, or other sites that are set up for kids are p articularly bad in this regard. Once you get a couple things installed on your system, it tends to open the doors for lots of other things – none of them welcome. I’ve seen it happen on a work computer a couple years ago, when the whole world st arted opening up on a desktop. The user had to turn it off, unplug it from the local network and get the entire system wiped. And the legal system is not yet sm art enough about adware / spyware / malware to reliably figure out who did what to whom. So be careful out there, as it is the Wild West and will continue to be so for a while.

3. Libby. Former Cheney Chief of Staff Scooter Libby was convicted on four of five perjury and obstruction counts in his part of the Wilson-Plame affair. The convictions are felony convictions and may end up with giving him over 20 years in Club Fed. The trial was a travesty on both the prosecution and defense sides. For the prosecution, both the (In)Justice Department and Fitzgerald’s office knew from day one of the investigation who leaked Plame’s name to the media. It came out of Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department, Richard Armitage. The leak was also not a violation of federal law, as Plame was not covert at the time she, her husband and the anti-war clique of weasels at the CIA decided to undermine Bush’s war effort by sending Wilson to Niger to refute administration claims that Saddam was trying to procure yellowcake uranium in Africa (he was). Since Fitzgerald couldn’t convict anyone of outing Plame as a convert agent, he set about creating a perjury trap for the people in the WH he thought were playing political games. It appears that he swallowed the Wilson-Plame anti-administration story completely and set about to right that particular wrong. Libby appears to have been trying his level best to answer a bewildering maze of questions posed by Fitzgerald during multiple visits to the Grand Jury. Since his testimony varied a bit – along with that of every other witness before the Grand Jury – Fitzgerald was able to charge, try and convict him. This trial is one of the greatest travesties of prosecution and justice in a very long time. President Bush ought to pardon Libby and fire Fitzgerald immediately. As a result of this, it will be a cold day in Hell before any conservative in DC talks to another reporter or talks to any investigator or prosecutor without a lawyer present.

4. Iraq. The surge in Iraq continues to percolate along very nicely. The basic change in strategy was to take the new ground and keep it. And we keep that new ground by occupying it - literally by living among the locals. The troops like it; the Iraqis like it; the Iraqi police and military like it; and the Bad Guys are running as fast as they can for the hills. Friendly deaths are down 60% since all this began. And we are capturing and killing thousands of upon thousands of Bad Guys, with over 16,000 reportedly captured during the offensive so far. With this many Bad Guys and/or their sympathizers off the streets, things get quiet in a hurry. There were several reports that we had captured the top Al Qaida leader in Iraq, Ali Baghdadi. These reports ended up being wishful thinking. On the other hand, Americans and Iraqi forces moved into the 2.4 million people Baghdad slum called Sadr City and found terrible conditions including lack of water, sewage, trash removal and electricity. The Mahdi Militia had been supplying some of this to a very low level before they bugged out along with their cowardly, girlie-man leader Mookie Al Sadr. If the Good Guys can start providing the basic infrastructure of city living to these people and keep the streets safe, they will not turn back to the Mahdis when they crawl out from under their collective rocks. US troops also found a torture room with two kidnapped Iraqi police men awaiting execution. The Bad Guys were gone to get new batteries for their camcorder to record the executions. Also discovered on site were over 500 tons of bomb-making materials – about a million pounds. We are not going to get stories of successful prosecution of this war from the drive-by media, which is invested, along with the democrats, in ensuring our defeat, humiliation and failure. We appear to be doing a pretty good job so far, and this may all be over in a few months. Congratulations to Gen Petraeus, the Iraqi military, the Iraqi police, and most of all to our brave men and women in uniform for getting the job done, done well, done successfully, and victoriously. For more on all of this, keep reading the MilBlogs for additional near real time information.

1. Walter Reed. One of the unpleasant facts of military life has always been medical care. Military medicine was intended to patch people up well enough to return to the battlefield. However, during peacetime, military medical facilities and personnel need something else to do as there are no wars ongoing that require their special set of skills. Over the years, they have assumed responsibility for peacetime care of the military members and their families – which is another, completely different mission – mostly as a way to keep in practice. Medicine, like any other profession requires constant practice, and the numbers of medical staff needed to support a military during w artime is far larger than that necessary during peacetime, so what do they do when there is no war? With all of that as background, last week’s blow-up at Walter Reed Army Hospital in MD was not a big surprise to any of us with experience in military medicine. At its very basic level, military medicine is government health care. They do a pretty good job at their primary mission. They do not do so well at long-term care of injuries, sicknesses and other, health care. This is not a criticism, but a statement of fact. A number of soldiers and their families have been getting the bureaucratic run-around at Walter Reed, mostly in the out-patient p art of the business At least one congresscritter and his wife were blown off by someone in the hospital command chain when they complained about a soldier being ignored. Last week, it finally hit the fan and led to the firing of the Commanding General at the hospital and the resignation of the Army Secretary. There were the predictable cries of congressional outrage and there will be public hearings this week featuring aggrieved military members and their families. There will probably be a commission formed so congress won’t have to actually do anything about the problem. Interestingly, the VA also has a similar problem. Formed after the Civil War as a way to provide care to Civil War vets, the VA is yet another example of government-funded and operated health care. Like military medicine, there are a few things they do well, and a lot of things they do poorly. Is there a solution for this mess? Actually there is – and that solution is less government rather than more. Military medicine ought to return back to its basics – the care of people wounded on the battlefield. The care of people on active duty should be returned to the private sector at some level. This does not include care of family members. The Bush administration ought to consider allowing the military members and family members to opt out of the military facilities for their long term, chronic, and preventative care into the private sector by setting up Medical Savings Accounts (MSAs) or fully transferable vouchers for medical care. As to the military medical professionals, there ought to be consideration given for them work in civilian emergency rooms as a way to keep in practice. There is a budget for military medicine, a budget for military member and family health care insurance, and a budget for the VA. Congress ought to step up to the plate and make a per person percentage of that money available to set up a MSA for members – tax free, fully transferable, uncapped – that the member and the families can use to purchase health care outside the military system should the member choose to opt out and enter the private sector. I don’t know how much of this can be done for active duty military members. I suspect a lot. However, I do know that it can be done for all family members and all vets. Give the people the choice to opt out of the existing system. Introduce market forces into the solution of the problem. The solution to all this is not more government, more rules, more paper, more bureaucracy or more help from congress. The solution is – as always – is more liberty.

2. Lubbock. One of the techniques that local governments use to fleece its citizens of tax dollars is traffic cameras that photograph people who run red lights and exceed the speed limit. These operations typically are sold as a way to increase public safety and decrease local accident rates, but soon end up turning a bunch of law abiding citizens into law breakers. And as the locale governments get used to the flow of free money into the tax coffers, they become more creative about how they extract those dollars. In Lubbock, which installed an array of cameras that photograph people in intersections after the yellow light changes to red, we have one such example. A local TV station, in response to complaints about the system, went to the 12 intersections with the red light cameras and actually timed the lights. They found that the municipal traffic engineer not only had installed the cameras, but had adjusted the time that the yellow light was illuminated down an average of a second less than other lights on other streets in town at eight of the intersection sin question. Short, unexpected yellow lights, one of which was set shorter than federal highway safety standards, means more people in the intersections when the light turns, more tickets, and more revenues into the municipal coffers. Interestingly enough, if you go the other direction and increase the length of time the yellow light is illuminated, you can cut the number of violators in half and the accident rate by 40%. Given that the yellow lights were shortened rather than lengthened, I expect that the municipal direction was to grab free money from citizens of Lubbock via thousands of traffic tickets rather than decrease the number of local accidents. TheNewspaper.com , Mon.

3. Mars. As the Global Warming religion continues to overreach and demand all discussion cease because scientific consensus has been achieved, that consensus has st arted unraveling a bit. The first piece was recently published data that supports a connection between cosmic rays and global cooling. The mechanism is that in times of quiet sun, when the sun’s magnetic field does not shield the solar system quite as well from high energy charged p articles – cosmic rays. These p articles hit the atmosphere at very high speed, collide with atmospheric molecules, ionize a bunch of them and in turn form more clouds – thus cooling the e arth. The science is there. It is observable and reproducible. The last major cooling episode was during the Maunder minimum right at the he art of the Little Ice Age, when observed sunspots disappeared for 82 years. Conversely, when the sun is active – lots of sunspots – there are fewer cosmic rays getting through and hitting the atmosphere, forming fewer clouds and the global temperature goes up a bit. The second story has been the observed warming of Mars over the last few years. If global warming here is completely manmade and reversible if we give away all our wealth and return back to the wild to live like savages, what, pray tell is M artian global warming caused by? M artian SUVs? I think not. If Mars is warming up, there are a couple possible reasons. The first and most obvious is an increase in solar irradiance – the amount of heat delivered to the surface. And if this affects Mars, it also affects E arth which is generally located a bit closer to the actual heat source. A second reason is a change in the shape of its orbit, changes in axial tilt, and precession of the poles as Mars rotates on its axis. E arth has a similar, though smaller problem with this, but there are those – p articularly Russian astronomers – who believe there is a good correlation between changes in the shape of the orbit, tilt and precession of the poles and global warming and cooling cycles. These are called Milankovitch Cycles. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery have published a book entitled “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years” that describes yet another set of natural solar cycles that power long-term changes in the climate. Note that none of these mechanisms – all of which give far better predictions of global temperature changes than the man-made global warming theories – require human intervention, carbon taxes, or changes in carbon footprints. Indeed, there are some in the scientific community that are st arting to think of changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide as a lagging indicator rather than a cause. In other words, there are those that believe that whatever changes the climate – cosmic rays, changes in e arth’s orbit, solar activity, and/or a combination of all three – also ends up changing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not unlike the way smoke is caused by a fire rather than smoke being the cause of a fire. Bottom line in this entire discussion is that there are a lot of ways to change the climate – none of which we can do anything about.

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.

Note: Interesting Items can be found at the following locations:
Debate USA, http://www.debateusa.com/ ;
MatSu Valley News http://www.matsuvalleynews.com
and the home page: http://home.gci.net/~agimarc
Rod Martin's The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column. You can find it at: http://www.thevanguard.org/

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