Special Earth Day, 40th Anniversery Edition!

It's April 22nd, 2010, and you know what that means: It's global warming Earth Day! Today all sorts of people will be doing all kinds of good and worthy things that I, as a person who enjoys nature, heartily approve of. Things like picking up trash, planting trees, visiting parks, and other activities to clean up our surroundings and teach our kids how to be good stewards of their environment are appropriate things to do on any day, and particularly this one.

What you will also have is scores of thousands of people using the day to proclaim their agenda of lowering deadly carbon emissions. You'll have politicians cry for more government regulation of evil industries like Big Oil, Big Auto (Wait, don't they own that one now?), and Big Puppy Mills. For example, you can read articles by VP Joe, Sen Kerry (D-MA, which might actually stand for Mars), and EPA admin Lisa Jackson.

It is statements like these, that demand ever stricter emissions regulations and clean energy mandates, that prompt me to celebrate this Earth Day by taking the longest route home I can do feasibly and, if I have any left, burning a Styrofoam plate on my porch when I get there. I do this because I firmly believe that man-made global warming is at best an uncertainty, and at worst is flat wrong.

If any of you have been following my blog since its inception then chances are you have heard this argument before. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves. Any subject will do.

For the rest of you, I will direct you to one of my favorite sources on Global Climate Change, the Petition Project. This is a petition that has been signed by 31,486 American scientists, including 9,029 with PhDs.
Their research is one of my favorites to cite for a few reasons, not the least of which because they have plenty of colorful pictures which makes it very easy to break the argument down into crayons.

Let's start with looking at what the temperature has been in the past...


The black line in the middle is the average temperature over the past 3,000 years. It is just a hair below 23 degrees C. A notable spike occurred around 1100 AD, and a notable dip at 1700 AD. If you examine really closely, you'll see that in 2006 we are sitting at approximately 22.8 degrees C...Which is actually below the 3,000 year average. In other words, it is a good thing we are warming up, because otherwise we would be headed back to freezing at Valley Forge! Also notice that over 3,000 years (during which time humans did not have access to fossil fuels) the temperature has not fluctuated more than 3 degrees.

I know what you're thinking: "Sure, in the past warming trends were naturally occurring, but now it's because of those darn fossil fuels! If this trend doesn't stop we'll be spontaneously combusting on the way to Starbucks, and those glaciers will melt and drown us all!" Let's just take a look at those glaciers...

The black line in the middle, sloping upwards, is the trend of glacial melt that is occurring. It begins in the early 19th century (in fact, since glacial melt lags behind temperature increase by about 20 years, the trend actually began even earlier than shown). Also mapped are fossil fuel uses. Note that the use of coal, oil, and gas increases dramatically beginning at around the time of WW II. Despite this fact, the rate of glacial melt remains constant. Therefore, glacial melting (which is affected primarily by temperature and precipitation) is not tied to the use of carbon producing fuels in the slightest.

"But wait!" you say, "The temperature is rising, so if man didn't do it, what did?"

I'm glad you asked.


If you look out your window, assuming it is during the daylight hours, you just might observe a large ball of burning fire in the sky. This celestial body, affectionately dubbed the sun, is primarily responsible for heating the atmosphere of Earth. As shocking as this might seem, the driving force (represented as the red line above) of artic temperature is the sun. What does not drive temperature increase is hydrocarbon use.

Nor is greater hydrocarbon use driving violent weather patterns. Rainfall is increasing at a constant rate of 1.8" per century. The number of Atlantic hurricanes that make landfall and max wind speed of those hurricanes are both holding steady over the century, and the number of tornadoes is actually decreasing over the century. The sea level is increasing at a steady rate of 7" over 150 years. This rate has been completely unaffected by increases in hydrocarbon use.

Even the basic hypothesis that hydrocarbons are the main driving force behind increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations is not necessarily true.

Note the increase was 30% prior to the great spike in hydrocarbon use. After, it was 22%.

The study goes on to show that greater carbon concentrations in the atmosphere are actually beneficial to wildlife, both flora and fauna.

The bottom line is this: Man is too small a factor on the planet to attribute global environmental changes to him. These changes are naturally occurring, and the Earth knows what it's doing.

Admin note: When a blog becomes self aware...

...or at the very least the blogger become more aware of the blog.

I've recently been looking to see just who, if anyone, is actually reading my blog. So, towards that end, I have:

• Installed an invisible hit counter on my webpage. Now I know your IP address, where you went, and even where you sleep...Okay, maybe not that last part...Not until V2.0, anyway.
• Sent friend requests to all my followers. If you got one, and you actually read the blog, accept it!

I also encourage all my readers to join up (it's free, and can link easily to your gmail account) and add me as a follower and friend. This also has the neat side effect of allowing you to comment directly on the blog itself, which is a pretty awesome perk, in my opinion.

Anyway, to my mom, Fluffy the imaginary monkey, and the other two readers I regularly have, thanks! Feel free to send blog ideas, links, and comments along using the comment feature on any of my blogs.

National Pay Equity Day: Mountain, meet molehill

According to the National Committee on Pay Equity, April 20th was National Pay Equity Day. Their website and many others abounded with articles bemoaning the disparity in wages between men and women in the workforce. Even our legislators found time to speak out, with Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) writing an article for the Huffington Post. He states that the fact that women make “77 cents on the dollar” compared to men is ridiculous because “it’s 2010 already, for pete’s sake”.

Unfortunately, while discrimination has become a bad word, just because women are paid less does not necessarily mean it is unfair.

Okay, you can stop throwing things at me now. No, really, stop it. Bear with me.

The NCoPE linked to a study by the AAUW Educational Foundation entitled “Behind the Pay Gap”. This 40+ page document sets out to show us the enormity of the problem we face. What it actually does, if you take the time to do something silly like actually read it, is show that the sound bite wisdom of Sen. Dodd and the NCoPE dramatically exaggerates the issue. According to the one liner statistics we are supposed to believe that a man and a woman who make identical choices will have a 23% difference in their wages, and that this disparity is due to the grossly unjust discrimination against women by corporate fat cats. Now, I understand it may be a little silly of me to expect Sen. Dodd to take the time to skim through a 40 page study when he, and the other great men and women of Congress, can’t be bothered to read the legislation they vote on. I mean, it’s only their job and all. It’s not like we’re paying them to be informed.

Page 10 of the study plays up the fact that many women go to four year colleges, and in fact perform just as well or better than their male peers in every way imaginable. This may seem to support Sen. Dodd’s argument…unless of course you keep reading all the way to page 11, which says in big, bold letters: ”Women and Men choose different majors”.

”…the average full-time employed
female education major earns just 60 percent as
much as the average full-time-employed female engineering
major earns ($520 versus $872 per week). Men who majored
in education also earned only 60 percent as much as men
who majored in engineering ($547 versus $915 per week).

THIS JUST IN from the desk of Captain Obvious: Engineers make more than teachers, regardless of gender!

Page 12 of the study breaks down majors by gender percentages, which reveals an obvious trend: Men tend to gravitate towards business and technical majors, while women gravitate more towards majors such as education, nursing, and more social majors.

This of course does not explain the data on page 14, which Sen. Dodd and friends clearly read. This is another bar graph which shows the wage gap of multiple professions. We’ll disregard the examples like education (Women make 95% of men’s wages) or history (women make 112% of men’s wages) and move right to Mathematics and Other Sciences. Here, women make 76% as much as men. The Justice League has their proof!...Right? Actually, what they appear to have is a severe case of narcolepsy, because if they had just managed to tough it out to page 15, they would’ve seen yet another big, bold headline: “ Men report working more hours than women
report working.” Page 17 shows that men are far, far more likely to work 41+ hours than women, who are most likely to be employed for less than a 40 hr work week.

On page 20 of “Behind the Pay Gap”, we see that “Women are more likely than men to take time off to care for children”.

”Ten years after graduation, 81 percent of men are employed full time, while only 61 percent of women are employed full time. When parents are considered, the gender difference is stark. About one-fifth (23 percent) of mothers are out of the work force and another 17 percent work part time, while only 1 percent of fathers are out of the work force and only 2 percent work part time.”

It also alludes to the fact that women are more likely to leave the workforce and then reenter it later. Because they have been gone and not gathered experience and tenure they are paid far less than their male peers upon reentry.

According to the study:

“ after controlling for all the factors known to affect earnings college-educated women earn about 5 percent less than college-educated men earn”

Maybe I’m naïve for thinking that little things like facts will get in the way of spirited rhetoric, but if the Sen. Dodd and the NCoPE wants to remain intellectually honest they ought to read their own published studies and realize that the pay inequality they are trumpeting is 80% explained away simply by career choices.

What about the last 5 cents on the dollar? Isn’t that discrimination? Aren’t women being paid less than men, even it is just 5% less? Shouldn’t Congress act!?

I agree that if two employees are exactly the same in every way excepting their genitalia, they ought to be paid the same. Doing this only makes good business sense. Paying employees competitive wages is an incentive get and to keep good employees. I disagree that Congress has the authority or the capability to do anything about it.

Men and women are different. They excel in different areas. Consequently, they are paid differently. If there is any “problem” it is a societal one, not a legislative one. Women are the primary caregivers in our society. Men are the primary breadwinners. If proponents of supposed “wage equity” truly wish to fix the “problem”, they need to target this fact and look to change it through education and convincing women to make different choices. They would have to convince women to choose careers that require longer hours, more time away from their family, and possibly not raising the family at all. In short, they would need to change the traditionally societal role of women as caregivers into a more masculine role.

Personally, I believe this would be a mistake. It seems to me that of the two roles, caregiver or breadwinner, women have one that is just as important, if not much more so. The work I do in the office is temporary and fleeting. I do it to put bread on the table to feed my family. I do it to fuel the engine, because that is my place as a man.

The work women do in the home is to raise the next generation of humanity.

Ponder that for a moment.

They are entrusted with making sure that the fate of our entire race is kept in good hands. They are responsible with teaching our children, our only true lasting legacy, how to be productive members of our society. Such a job is not valued in dollars and cents, and to attempt to frame it as such is demeaning.

I would say to women at large, fulfilling the traditional societal role of a mother: Keep on. The future of the planet rests in your hands, and feeds at your bosom.

Intellectually Challenging Humor: Cracked.com

When you have as staggering an intellect as mine own you often find it difficult to find sites with sufficient refinement, epic soliloquy, and academic merit enough to entertain. Fortunately, I have found one that rarely disappoints.

That site is Cracked.com. With great titles such as "Learn your Motherf#@kin' Science: A textbook for Juggalos" and "The 5 Most Socially Awkward Situations Everyone Deals With", this is a site that rarely disappoints even the most elite of the elite.

"6 Soldiers Who Survived Shit That Would Kill A Terminator"? Check.

"8 Amazing Stories of Ninja Failure"? Check.

Total awesomeness? Check.

Here are a few of my other favorites. I encourage you to increase your historical knowledge and comical palette.

"The Single Most Ridiculous Movie Premise Ever Made"
"The 17 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Propaganda Posters"
"6 New Weapons That You Literally Can't Hide From"
"5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying To Get You Addicted"

Collateral Damage: A fact of war.

While some of you may not believe it, it is exceptionally rare that I come across a story in the news that genuinely makes me angry, even on issues I am passionate about. Being able to reasonably evaluate world events while still maintaining passionate opinions is something I pride myself on.

I read a story recently on everyone’s favorite cabal of communist wackjobs legitimate source of information, the Huffington Post. This story was on a video released by Wikileaks which shows collateral damage in Iraq in graphic detail. The article HuffPo article focuses more on the military’s “coverup”, claiming they cannot find their copy of the video in question. A quick Google search led me to a Yahoo News article. Enter the Monday Morning Quarterback:

” WikiLeaks posted a video that showed the U.S. military in a less favorable light. WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange said his organization got the videotape of "the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people" and verified its authenticity from "a number of military whistle-blowers"; the videotape was ultimately confirmed as genuine by U.S. military officials.”

Indiscriminate slaying? Mercy me! Let’s read on. The men, including the reporters, are blown away by the gunship, and then:

“Suddenly a van appears and Iraqis hop out to help the man. The helicopter crew seeks and receives permission to fire on the vehicle. In the ensuing barrage, two children inside the vehicle are apparently wounded, and their father, a Good Samaritan who had stopped to take the wounded man to the hospital, is allegedly killed. When U.S. ground troops arrive later, they discover the youngsters. ‘Well, it's their fault,’ a member of the Apache crew says, ‘for bringing kids into a battle.’ Initially, the U.S. said the dead were all insurgents and had been killed in battle, but the video as released seems to offer no evidence of hostile intent by those on the ground.”

Oh the humanity! How could those soldiers be so cold, so callused? They just murdered over a dozen people!

Obviously there are no extenuating circumstances for such an atrocity…I mean, except for the fact that the two reporters in question had intentionally embedded themselves with a group of armed insurgents….or that there had been multiple attacks on American forces in the neighborhood that very day…or that the reporters neither told anyone in the military that they were going to be embedding themselves…or that the reporters didn’t even bother to mark themselves somehow to signify they were non-combatants…or that the reporter took a knee to take a photo of the oncoming patrol with his shoulder mounted camera, which is exactly the stance you’d take if you were about to fire with your shoulder mounted RPG…Nope, no extenuating circumstances here.

The Apache was in the area to defend American foot patrols. They saw a group of apparently armed insurgents, one of which was posed in a threatening manner towards friendly ground troops. They did exactly what they were trained to do: They eliminated the threat utilizing the most violent means they had at their disposal. After destroying the enemy, they see a van arrive on scene and begin giving aid to said enemy. This, under any rational rules of engagement, would classify said van as an enemy vehicle, making it a legitimate target.

It is very easy for someone who never has, and with any luck never will, seen the realities of war to sit back and judge the decisions of a soldier in the warzone. It is easy, given the comfort of your couch and the luxury of time and no ramifications, to dissect the course of action taken by that soldier. Unfortunately, when a soldier hesitates too long because he is uncertain, people die. When a soldier doesn’t hesitate, and makes a decision, and that decision is the wrong one, people die. When a soldier doesn’t hesitate, makes a decision, and that decision is the right one? You guessed it: People die!

This is not a game.

This is not a movie.

There is the very real possibility that no matter what the soldier does, some American family’s husband, wife, son, or daughter will never come home. All he can do, all anyone can do, is act on the perceived information he has and make the best of the consequences. This is the reality that the soldier must live with.

What do their detractors, those who call them murderers, suggest they had done? Should they have gotten out of the helicopter and asked the man politely if he was intending on harming the Americans he was pointing at? Should they erred on the side of caution? What if their caution had been incorrect? What if that person had gone on to kill members of the oncoming patrol? What do they suggest the Apache crew tell the grieving mother of those dead soldiers? “Sorry, but I decided I didn’t want to take the risk?”

The hidden tragedy here is not that these civilians were killed. Do not mistake me: If we could conduct a war without a single civilian casualty, I would be all for it. Any civilian who dies as part of the business of war is a tragic loss. What I mean when I say hidden tragedy is the fact that this was brought up to disparage our troops at all. I am referring to the mindset that sees it as legitimate news to bring up the fact that the soldiers made comments about the enemies they saw, about the enemies they had just killed, that may offend the sensibilities of those at home. It is this mindset of the comfortable civilian, the sheltered politician, the bleeding heart peacenik, who presumes to tell the soldier exactly how to do his job.

The Rules of Engagement have grown into a grotesque monster that serves only to bind our soldier’s hands and cause them to wonder if they will go to jail if they make the wrong move. Our men and women in uniform have enough on their minds, what with the daily threat of death and dismemberment and all. What they do not need is the threat of an ended career simply for pulling the trigger with the best of intentions.

It is appropriate that the situation was investigated. It was appropriate for any mistake to be evaluated, and for solutions to be found that will hopefully cause a better resolution next time. It was appropriate for these soldiers to be cleared of all wrongdoing. Now it would be appropriate for those who have never once put their life on the line for something greater than themselves to STFU, and let those who have do the job they swore to do.

Irony: A dish best served topless

Why is it that when something unbelievably awesome happens I am, invariably, no less than 500 miles away and don’t even hear about it for days later? Why am I never present for something completely off the wall like, just to pull an example out of thin air, two dozen women marching topless on the streets?

No, I am not making this up.




A group of men and women marched down the streets of Portland, ME, on the 3rd of April to protest the “double standard on male and female nudity”. From hereafter in this blog I will pretend that no males were a part of the demonstration because I would not want to let facts to interfere with the awesomeness of the story.

They marched on down to the local park where many “happily posed for pictures”.

WARNING: Critical levels of irony imminent.

” The women [were] preceded and followed by several hundred boisterous and mostly male onlookers, many of them carrying cameras…Ty McDowell, who organized the march, said she was "enraged" by the turnout of men attracted to the demonstration. The purpose, she said, was for society to have the same reaction to a woman walking around topless as it does to men without shirts on... Police said there were no incidents and no arrests – nudity is illegal in Maine only if genitals are displayed.“

Not only did the demonstration which was supposed to show society's acceptance of female nudity attract a massive crowd of men to demonstrate exactly how accepting they were of said nudity. Not only was Ty McDowell caught completely off guard by the fact that topless women might attract crowds of men with cameras. There were no arrests because the thing they were protesting, females being topless, was already completely legal in the area they were protesting.

Note to self: Move to Maine immediately.

Net Neutrality: The proper role of government?

Every once in a while there comes an issue on which I am undecided. Yes, as hard as this may be to believe, even someone as opinionated as me is stumped on occasion. One such occasion occurred today. From the AP:

”A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.

The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation's largest cable company. It had challenged the FCC's authority to impose so-called "net neutrality" obligations on broadband providers.”

Normally I am against government interference in the market by default. To see the words “big victory” attached to an entity whose name ends in “corporation” is usually enough to send tingles of glee down my leg. The roles of government in the market ought to be limited and confined to protecting on person from another. Legitimate examples would include fraud, monopoly, and trafficking.

Unfortunately in this instance my instinct for the Free Market runs headlong into my desire for freedom of information. In case you are unfamiliar with the net neutrality debate, the argument is whether or not companies have the right to regulate what data you can access using the bandwidth that you pay for. In other words, does Comcast have the right to censor your internet usage? Should they be able to stop you from visiting competitors?

The internet is the holy grail of free, somewhat accurate, and usually filthy, information. The arguments to keep it this way are self evident. If you give some CEO the right to say what you can and can’t see on the internet, it would give corporations enormous influence that could very well be used inappropriately.

On the other hand, the corporations contend that not all content is equal. Some sites eat up far more bandwidth than others, and simply allowing anyone to access anything they want whenever they want will cause the bandwidth available to dwindle until everyone is forced to get their daily Cyanide & Happiness comic via dinosaur.

Should companies start charging per MB of data usage, causing the free ride of the internet to turn into a bean counting nightmare? Should the government force the companies to allow anything and everything through their gateways to paying customers, causing the internet to grind to a halt when the bandwidth is eaten away by BitTorrent and Everquest?

What do you think, my loyal readers? Leave your comments here. Of course, if you are among the 99.999% of my readers who access this site via facebook, you’ll probably leave all your comments there so that if anyone else who might stumbles on my blog it’ll look like I’m talking to myself for page after page of content.

But hey, whichever works for you. No pressure. It won’t be the first time I looked like I was talking to myself.

Fmr. Secretary of Labor: Government should break up the banks!

If you are 1) Over twelve years of age, 2) Have a pulse, and 3) Are not a vegetable, then you are probably aware that the government gave huge bailout packages to struggling banks in the recent past. The argument we were pitched, the same argument used to socialize bailout the auto industry, is that these banks were “too big to fail”.

The idea that any private entity should be safe from failure is an affront to any red blooded capitalist. Strangely enough Robert Reich, a professor at Berkeley, agrees with me that this is a bad thing, and what’s more he has a plan. Because he is so much intelligenter than little ol’ me, I’m sure this plan will involve elegant sweeps of logical thought that move with breathtaking precision. Here it is:

The government should break up the banks.

Wait, what? Once I stopped projectile vomiting on my monitor I read on.

” A fight is brewing in Washington -- or, at the least, it ought to be brewing -- over whether to put limits on the size of financial entities in order that none becomes "too big to fail" in a future financial crisis... the danger of an even bigger cost in coming years continues to grow because we still don't have a new law to prevent what happened from happening again. In fact, now that they know for sure they'll be bailed out, Wall Street banks -- and those who lend to them or invest in them -- have every incentive to take even bigger risks. In effect, taxpayers are implicitly subsidizing them to do so. (Haldane figures the value of that implicit subsidy to be about $60 billion a year for each big bank.)" [Emphasis mine]

In case your brain was still trying to crawl out of your ears after reading the title of his argument, I’ll break it down for you.

Issue: Government bailed out banks that were failing because they were “too big to fail”.

Note there are two components to this issue. One: The government bailed out banks. Two: The banks were supposedly “too big to fail”. Nobody argues these two points. Enter the assumption, and exit all logical and reasonable though:

Assumption: Banks can be certain of future bailouts, because the government will always do this in future. In other words, Issue part 1 is an immutable Law of the Universe.

Solution: Therefore, we need to stop the “too big” part by making banks smaller.

As with many arguments the fault is not necessarily in the argument itself, but in its assumptions. Simply having assumptions is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it is very difficult to have any sort of opinion on anything without throwing an assumption or two in there somewhere.

So much of what Robert has to say could be coming out of my own mouth. The bailouts have encouraged terrible behavior by essentially subsidizing companies that performed badly. The failure of large banks is difficult to swallow for the economy. What Robert proposes to fix the problem, however, is sort of like this:

Dr. Reich says our patient, who for the sake of the story is named The Econ Omy, has an iron deficiency, and is suffering fatigue as a result. Dr. Reich tells Mr. Omy that his solution is to pump Mr. Omy with caffeine to eliminate the fatigue. This makes sense if you assume the only treatable problem is the fatigue, and that the iron deficiency is impossible to rectify. Fortunately you, the witness to this discussion, are not a moron, so you do what any reasonable person would do and punch the doctor in the throat.

The reason bankers are now licensed to be even more reckless is because they can rest assured that more bailouts are coming. The easiest, most simple, and least expensive method of stopping this bad behavior is for the government to get the #$^% out of the way and let the market work by killing bad businesses! If the bankers saw that bailouts were not, in fact, forthcoming and that risky behavior would lead directly to them being broke, they will either A) Fix said behavior, solving the problem, or B) Go bankrupt, no longer influence events, which solves the problem.

The market is designed with an excellent safeguard against poor decisions: The very real certainty of failure. Of course having a titan of any industry fall to the ground will cause earthquakes throughout the market. It will be painful. But more importantly, it will be temporary.

Would such a failure cause people to lose jobs, lose money, lose homes, etc.? Of course. Those are facts of life. Not everyone can succeed all the time. Losses are going to happen. These losses are something like small wildfires in forests. They clear out the dead growths, the weak plants, which otherwise would choke out all life around them. They burn early and often, so while every fire is painful, no one fire can kill the forest.

Forget the fact that to grant the government the authority to determine when a private entity (that is not a monopoly) should stop growing is a reckless maneuver that pisses away liberty. Forget that granting them this power is a dangerous precedent that points directly towards the government determining how much money Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and Mom & Pops Widget Store should make. If we do not allow the burning to happen periodically, if we step in and save every Tom, Dick, and Larry who falls on his face, then all we do is allow the dead brush to build to dangerous levels so that when the inevitable failure does happen, and there is nothing to we can do to stop it, it unleashes an inferno that will consume everything in its path without mercy.

Sometimes, you just have to let it burn.