Axel’s 7/1/8 letter to the editor

Axel seems not to like the Supreme Court’s 5-4 habeas corpus decision.
I don’t like 5-4 decisions by the US Supreme Court.
I do like the Court’s habeas decision; i.e. I agree with it.
McCain absolutely hates the habeas decision. Bush and Chaney, who believe America has the God-Given Right to do all the things no other country should be allowed to do, are disgusted by the decision. Habeas corpus disgusts them. Bush and Chaney disgust me. McCain is problematic.

Obama agrees with the decision.

Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution of the United States of America, survived the third branch of our government on a 5 to 4 vote. It may or may not have survived the second branch. Just a point of interest, but the only reason the issue even came up is that the Supreme Court of the United States stopped the recount of ballots in Florida in 2000, ceding Florida, and the election, to GW Bush. That vote was 5 to 4.

That’s seems scary to me.

Axel tries to make the point that the 9/11/1 attack on the US by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was an invasion; not only that, but an invasion that is ongoing so it justifies suspension of habeas corpus. Now, if Axel said the US had been invaded by Mexico, he might have a point, since there are said to be 12 million people from Mexico living illegally in the US. Fortunately he didn’t say that, because then there’d have to be a discussion centering around whether governments have to be involved in order for there to be an invasion; instead, he points to 19 dead suiciders, mostly from Saudi Arabia, and calls that an invasion. And of course those Saudis and such having died on American soil is therefore the reason hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans and Canadians and Germans and who knows who else are penned up by Americans with no way to even find out why they’re there.

So, Axel didn’t use Mexico as justification. Here’s another gimmick he could try: “in case of … invasion the public safety requires it.” There was an invasion, all right, but it was in 2003, and it was the US invasion of Iraq. Even at the biggest stretch that doesn’t work, though, because that was over when Bush declared “mission accomplished” in May of 2003. No more invasion after that. Since then it’s been war.

Axel is wrong. There was no 9/11/1 invasion. Axel is wrong. Habeas exists. Bush is wrong, Chaney is wrong, McCain is wrong. This is America. We have a Constitution that guides us.

Now, if only we had some way to enforce it besides the voluntary compliance of an executive who says he disagrees with the Court but gosh he’ll go along with it (and apparently without even a signing statement).

Proving God

Proving God - unfinished; God will provide.

Things sometimes prey on my mind (maybe on yours, too). Why is that, whose is that, what ate that. In this case it’s a fairly simple thing, something that’s been on the minds of millions or maybe billions of people over the ages, something that doesn’t need doing yet draws attention now and then anyway.
Proving God.
Lots of other things might seem more important. Criminal activity by the leaders of the Most Powerful Nation Ever To Rule The World. Past, present, and future lies from the Swift Boaters Who Fear Obama. Why Republicans need their bills to be paid by old people on fixed incomes and by young people who must spend their lives paying Republicans’ bills. How anyone can claim they’ll fix everything by lowering the taxes paid by rich people.
But the issue is Proving God.
1) the world exists therefore God exists. There, that’s fairly straightforward. God should like it.
2) God allows billions of people to believe in _false_ gods because God only has room in His Heaven for a limited number of True Believers. That makes good sense to me. Otherwise God would simply have everyone be a True Believer, destination: left hand of God. As Simon & Garfunkel said lo those many years ago, “…been Ayn Randed, even branded a Communist ’cause I’m left handed, that’s the hand you use - well never mind.” Those guys surely knew or they wouldn’t have been so successful (i.e. God wouldn’t have blessed them with success). So: since all the True Believers sit at the left hand of God, it follows that True Believers are that most paradoxical of creatures, Ayn Rand Communists. No wonder GW Bush is President.
So, why all those surplus people? God only knows (maybe Jerry Falwell knows, too), but here are a couple of maybes: a) Heaven has limited capacity, b) God made a deal with Satan to assure fodder for Hell. And clearly, since most humans are Unbelievers, Hell has room for far more humans than Heaven has. I guess that’s a good thing. But of course Proving Satan is not really part of Proving God.
(the following space reserved for God’s finishing thoughts)

Mathematicians Rule?

Before Copernicus, in the civilized world, mathematicians had managed to keep the Earth the center of the universe. Their math was maybe a little convoluted, maybe a little beyond the ken of the average person, but it worked.

Copernicus said, start here, not there, and the math is easier.

Now, mathematicians are working overtime to emphasize the relevance of our apparently 4-dimensional space-time continuum using, for instance, string theory, which is “based on the (deceptively simple) premise that at Planckian scales, where the quantum effects of gravity…” etc. They note that strings can begin or end on D-branes. So there you go: once again,
mathematicians are working overtime to keep us important.

Presumably, somewhere, sometime, someif, someelse, there’s a Copernicus saying “Hey, listen, all we have to do is put THIS at the middle instead of THAT and everything falls into place.”

Maybe there’ll be a visit.

My Conspiracy Compendium

Casey Denney wonders how 23-year-old army veteran Dillon Warn can call the Iraq war “unprovoked.”
There remain a lot of people like Casey Denney for whom the reality-based world is elusive.
Facts:

• Iraq had absolutely NO involvement in the 9/11/2001 destruction of the World Trade Center. That needs to be constantly repeated, because Bush and the Bushies continue to imply - sometimes outright say - Iraq did it.
• Iraq had absolutely NO Weapons of Mass Destruction. That also needs to be constantly repeated, because Bush and the Bushies continue to imply that they did, and for sure someday they will be found (gee, wouldn’t somebody use at least some part of them eventually?).
• Bush family & Saudi Arabian bin Laden family are friends and oil associates.
• Osama bin Laden masterminded the 9/11/2001 destruction of the Trade Center.
• 15 of 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian
• Bush & Cheney repeatedly state that Iran supplies fighters in Iraq.
• Iraq’s majority is Shia.
• Iran is a Shia country.
• al-Qaeda is a Sunni group led by a Saudi Arabian.
• Saudi Arabia supplies Sunni fighters in Iraq.
• Saudi Arabia is a Sunni country.
• Saddam Hussein was a Sunni; his ruling group was Sunni.
• Saudi Arabia is seldom mentioned as the place from which al-Qaeda originated.
• Saudi Arabia is a major supplier of oil to the United States.

Some more Facts:

• All the bin Ladens who were in the US when the Trade Center was destroyed got on a plane and left the country at a time when no air traffic was allowed in the US (verifiable?).
• Osama bin Laden has never been captured or killed, and is still at large. (As far as I know)
• When the United States had Osama bin Laden in its sights, the US backed off.
• al Qaeda’s base of operations now seems to be in Pakistan, which is our ally.
• Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow American military bases in their country. (Is that right?)
• Cheney & Bush said Iraq involved in 9/11
• Cheney still says Iraq involved in 9/11

Obvious conspiracy conclusion:

• George W Bush & Dick Cheney and their fellow conspirators, at the request of the Saudi Arabian bin Laden family, stopped trying to kill or capture Osama bin Laden.
• The bin Laden family would have lost face if they had allowed the US to kill a member of their family. As it is, bin Laden is a hero in much of the Muslim world and the bin Ladens’ status is enhanced by that (despite the Saudis’ fear that if they make a misstep al Qaeda will begin to harrass the Saudis).

So there they are, all the factoids and such necessary to answer the question: why is the US in Iraq.

Anniversary Speech

I made the following speech as a City Council Comment on St. Patrick’s Day 2008.

Happy St. Patty’s Day.

“It’s been over 6 years since the US entered Afghanistan to crush the repressive Taliban and crush al-qaeda.
The Taliban have regrouped. When al-qaeda disappeared into the mountains, the US pulled back.
Remember Osama bin-Laden? His whereabouts are unknown. Maybe in Pakistan.
It’s been over 5 years since the US entered Iraq to get those weapons of mass destruction that were north, south, east, and west of Baghdad. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Didn’t even have to say what they were to dupe America. Oh, for those of you who still believe Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction: give it up. Not there.
It’s all such a huge mass of cynicism and lies and hypocricy and incompetence that I can’t really find a good way to tackle it but there is this:
our official count of dead American soldiers in Iraq is near 4,000, and
the cost of George Bush’s romantic adventure to Iraq is about 3 trillion dollars, and
no one we’ve elected has the courage or good sense to mention that somebody has to pay for it
Today the US Government started using your money - my money - to prop up Wall Street.
There’s still no policy proposed to pay for any of this stuff.
And here in Missoula we’re still looking for handouts from the Federal Government.
Hell, they might as well send us a few billion, it’s all free money.”

For what it’s worth, I bowdlerized the last sentence.

Crap.

Evolution? Smarter or dumber?

I thought this would make a simple post. And of course I was right.

Is the human race becoming smarter? or dumber?
(is it a given that the human race isn’t staying the same?)
Are the smartest humans becoming smarter or dumber? Are the human race’s smartest people alive today? Or not?
If the smartest humans are alive today, are they powerless because of the aggregate stupidity of the rest of us? Is that an Ayn Rand thing? How do you pronounce Ayn? (This has been fully responded to by Larry Kralj).

Put aside common sense* for just a moment and consider that it’s been 65,000,000 years since dinosaurs (except for birds) infested the Earth. All Human Beings share a common upty-great grandpa from 60,000 years ago (named Umpty). Neither of those things has any bearing on human intelligence trends, as far as I know; it’s just that given enough time, unexpected things can happen.

Which is more important: whether the smartest people get smarter or dumber, or whether the rest of us get smarter or dumber? I’d venture that us non-smart people don’t advance the Human Race; it’s the smart people who do that. Us non-smart people have our place, though; we act as the governor that keeps the smart people from going to far, too fast.

*common sense tells us that God’s tiniest fingers keep the proper spin on each and every quark, whether it be up, down or even dare I say, charmed; it’s much like David Spathaky spinning plates or Meadowlark Lemon spinning a basketball. Actually, way more like David Spathaky. That’s been quite a feat for the 6,000 years since God set it up. Nobody with any sense could imagine God doing that for sixty-five million years, much less 4 1/2 billion years or more. Why should He?

The cost of forestalling terrorism

2/29/08 A couple of days ago I was listening to a government spokesman say once again that because the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, no Terrorist Act Has Been Carried out in the United States or against US Installations anywhere in the world since. (Not counting attacks against all American installations, fixed and mobile, in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course).

Starting here: 3,000 people killed in the US 9/11/2001, mostly by Saudi Arabians trained in Afghanistan.

Since the US invaded Iraq for no particular reason in 2003, almost 4,000 American soldiers died there, 30,000 American soldiers were wounded there, 400+ contractors died there, 150 journalists (mostly locals) were killed there, and there are almost 90,000 documented Iraqi civilian deaths (but as General Tommy Franks said, we don’t do body counts).

The dollar cost looks to be over 3,000,000,000,000 dollars so far (borrowed money).

Leaving aside the question of whether the Iraq invasion kept terrorist acts from being carried out etc., is 4,000++ American lives and 3 trillion dollars a reasonable price to pay to forestall some imagined terrorist act?

Iraq is better? or worse?

3/2/8 there are 2 Missoulian articles on the same page. One says the situation in Iraq is improved. The other says Iraqis are moving from Iraq to the US in record numbers. The things-are-better article is from AP. It doesn’t go into what it means to be better. I don’t remember where the other article was from. I could go look but why bother?

Why are all those Iraqis moving to the US if things are going so well in Iraq?

Sunspots.

Things change. Global Warming is a big deal. Why argue about its cause? Is it bovine flatulence? Is it coal-fired power plants? Is it sunspots? Is it the good intentions of do-gooders? What does it matter? Whatever it is, the puny efforts of 7 billion people won’t change things one bit. Except for the worse. Besides, the Doomsday Vault is ready for anything. Including seabottom methane.

As luck would have it, we don’t have that long before it’s all over.

Which leads to the obvious question: how much money can Missoulians afford to spend on streets and parks and sidewalks and pools and police and open space and such? It’s just common sense that there’s a limit, right? What is it? Should a majority of voters get to decide what it is? Should they get to vote? Or should their elected representatives decide not to let people make that decision for them?

If Missoula is now poor it’s time to stop buying amenities. No more sidewalks. No more paved roads. No more parks with grass. Lay off all those firefighters and police and truck drivers and computer techs and such.

Everybody except the elected people. We need them. A lot.

7 billion people

Figure 100 pounds each. There’s young ones and old ones, and most of them are hungry.

700,000,000,000 pounds. 350 million tons. 18% of that is carbon (per a wiki), or 63 million tons of carbon. .038% of Earth’s atmosphere is CO2. The atmosphere weighs 5.1361×10¹⁸ kg, per Wikipedia. You’d think they’d use pounds, eh? that’s 11 times 10 to the 18th power pounds, or just, like, 5 or 6 times 10 to, say, the 15th power.

Heck, I have no idea how much a pound of carbon weighs… oh, yeah, I get it.

So there you have it, all worked out. What? Oh. The atmosphere has 1 trillion 900 billion pounds of carbon dioxide

To convert carbon to co2, multiply the carbon times 44/12.

To see if human beings have  helped ward off global warming, do the calculation backward.

Or watch the Grammys.