Species protection madness in Australia

BREITBART.COM - Just The News:

"The number of wild 'salties' estimated to live in the Northern Territory has jumped from as few as 3,000 in 1971 to more than 75,000 currently."

"But Manolis does not think culling is the answer."

Charlie Manolis, the article tells us, is the co-author of a study that found one in three croc attacks in Australia involved alcohol consumption (not necessarily to the point of drunkenness). So? That means two-thirds of attacks do not involve alcohol and some number between zero and one-third involve minimal drinking with little impairment of judgment. Besides, this is Australia - not known as a land of T-total abstainers.

The real news here is not the non-study published in the highly partisan Wilderness Society Medical Journal. The real news is that a supposed expert would dismiss out of hand the possibility that increasing the number of crocs by a factor of 25 would have anything to do with increasing human-croc interactions which are often disastrous for humans. Here in Pennsylvania, the species of animal life the most dangerous to humans is the whitetail deer and we have very good statistics that the deaths and injuries to humans caused by interaction with deer are related to the numbers of deer.

WorldNetDaily: Feds crack down on immigrant child offenders

WorldNetDaily: Feds crack down on immigrant child offenders:

"A federal effort aimed at cracking down on immigrant child sex criminals has resulted in the arrest of more than 6,000 people, officials say.

"Known as 'Operation Predator,' the law enforcement effort is part of a two-year-old Department of Homeland Security initiative carried out by the agency's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Some 85 percent of those arrested are foreign-born, according to DHS officials; 40 percent are illegal aliens."

This story also includes a quote from an official of the National Association of Chiefs of Police that 100,000 criminal aliens (not just sex criminals, but your usual run of burglars, armed robbers, and murderers) have been arrested in a nine-month period.

One problem with Operation Predator's emphasis on deporting illegal alien sex offenders is that there is little to keep them from coming back. One case mentioned involved a Mexican who was arrested in August who had been deported six times, although it did not mention if he had been deported after his conviction for sexual abuse of a 14-year old girl in Arkansas in 2002.

It won't do much good to deport these sex criminals if the border continues to leak like a sieve.

On a related note, I just became aware of a recent case where 14 men - all of them illegal aliens from Honduras - raped a woman in Florida.

An apology and a warning

The apology is for going AWOL again. It's been all but two weeks since my last post. Technical difficulties limited my net access to occasional use of a dial-up connection in a friend's office - much too cumbersome for anything but email. I admit it, I have gotten spoiled by broadband.

The warning is that I am polishing what is currently an eight page rumination on eminent domain. You can expect to see it posted in three to five installments later this week.

Also, you will soon find some new pix at http://keensphotos.blogspot.com/

Capricorn One, anyone?

Xinhua - English:

"The re-entry capsule of the Shenzhou-6 sapcecraft, which blasted off on Oct. 12 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gansu Province, touched down at the landing site in Siziwang Banner, at 4:33 am Oct. 17 (2033 GMT) following a five-day mission."

You can follow the link to the photos. I heard Matt Drudge on the radio Sunday night saying the photos look like fakes. You can judge for yourself. But, you would have to admit that if the fake space mission depicted in the film Capricorn One had used such a hokey looking spacecraft it could not have hoped to fool anyone. The Chinese spacecraft looks more like an illustration from Willy Ley's 1950s book By Spaceship To The Moon than anything the US or USSR/Russia have actually put into space.

It's about time for the GOP to return to fiscal sanity

House GOP Leaders Set to Cut Spending:

"Since Bush came to office, federal spending had grown by a third, from $1.86 trillion to $2.47 trillion, while record budget surpluses turned to record deficits. Conservative activists, led by talk show hosts and opinion columnists, had begun pressing Republicans hard on what they saw as Big Government Conservatism."

It remains to be seen if this movement can gain any traction in the full House, let alone the Senate or the White House, but I would much rather go into the 2006 elections with a GOP that was at least trying to put the Beast on a diet.

Healthcare is not the place I would start, however. It is a large target and has plenty of fraud, waste and abuse, but it does feed the image of the "heartless Republicans." Revisiting that abomination of a transportation bill would be a good start; Bush should have vetoed it the first time around.

I think it is also time to dust off some old spending cuts, first unveiled a decade ago even if they are mostly symbolic. To zero out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Academy of the Arts and the National Academy of the Humanities will not save a lot of money, but it would send a useful message that entire agencies and functions can be axed.

The next thing I would do is to go for the financial jugular of the Democrat Party by cutting education spending starting with the repeal of No Child Left Behind. Federal funding of local schools is, I believe, well under ten percent of total preK-12 government expenditure and complying with all the rules and regulations that go with those dollars costs a lot of money as well, so the actual classroom impact would be even less.

Republicans should sell this idea by pointing out that we have long since passed the point where increased expenditures improve performance and that many of the justifications for higher spending (lower student-teacher ratios for example) have been shown to be myths. Moreover, it plays to our historic commitment to local control which is far more responsive to local needs.

FEMA says no to police escorts for rescuers

FEMA Suspends Phoenix Rescuers Over Arms:

"FEMA relies on 28 elite teams like the Phoenix group to perform specialized rescue operations immediately after terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

"According to the mayor, FEMA officials advised the team to bring U.S. marshals along on the initial trip.

"After Hurricane Katrina struck, firefighters faced deployment to areas plagued by looting and lawlessness. Twice, Phoenix's team was confronted by law enforcement officers who refused to let them pass through their communities and told them to 'get out or get shot,' Gordon said."

All this fuss over a total of four Phoenix police officers who had been been sworn in as deputy US marshals in an arrangement US Marshal David Gonzales is reported to have described as ideal.

It may be that tales of sniper activity were over-blown. Gen. Honore thought so and pointed out in an interview that he was touring N.O. an open boat without wearing body armor. But, it was certainly not unreasonable to provide for the possibility that the firefighters might need protection, not to mention the reported $1.4 million in federal equipment assigned to the Phoenix rescue unit.

Note that FEMA's urban search and rescue (USAR) capability is composed of contracts with more than two dozen agencies. They don't have a stable of people in house for this sort of specialized work. This is why you can't just say, let FEMA do it. Much of what FEMA can do is just piggy-backing on the capabilities of other agencies, many of them not even federal, which agree to go and help when and where there is a crisis.

Another remarkably bad, and unconstitutional, idea from the White House

My Way News:

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush asked Congress on Tuesday to consider giving him powers to use the military to enforce quarantines in case of an avian influenza epidemic."

If anyone is aware of a Constitutional mandate for this, I'd like to hear it. Of course, the way things are going, people may be so spooked by the "millions will die" propaganda coming from the government that any quarantine will probably be too late with traffic jams caused by panicky motorists fleeing the outbreak proving more effective in restraining travel than the military.

Think about this scenario. HSN1 or some other superbug arrives from Asia. It probably comes in via an airplane where the recirculating air has already spread it to dozens of other people. Passengers on the flight have different destination cities which they reach by further air travel, rail, bus, taxi, etc. During all this time they are either asymptomatic or haven't yet figured out that what they have isn't a routine illness. By the time a cluster of cases is confirmed in one city and the military ordered to surround it, there will likely be other clusters in other cities, probably dozens of others, being reported in short order. By the tiime the epidemiologists can track back to case zero, the infection will be all over the place and contact tracing will be all but impossible and useless.

If that infected flight arrives at Los Angeles and infected passengers continue on to San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and St. Louis - how many troops will it take to seal off those ten cities? What happens to transport of food and fuel?

For those who suspect this might work, rent a copy of Stephen King's miniseries The Stand and watch the first 30 or 45 minutes which deal with the escape and spread of the infection that wipes out most of North America. Then, if you like movies, you'll be hooked and watch the whole thing.

New York City's hurricane evacuation plan

BREITBART.COM - Just The News:

"It's coming, with skyscraper-rattling winds and a 30-foot storm surge that threatens to submerge Wall Street, flood the subways and turn Coney Island into a water park. And when it arrives, more than 3 million New Yorkers _ more than six times the population of New Orleans _ could be forced to evacuate by the first major hurricane to hit the city since 1938."

My loyal reader (or are there two of you?) will note that I recently (26 September) discussed at length some problems with evacuating New York City. This AP story gives a few further details.

First, in response to a category four hurricane, the city plans to evacuate only 3.3 million persons and to shelter an additional 800,000 displaced persons within the city. This is substantially fewer than I was estimating, but that is the end of the good news.

The bad news includes an evacuation rate of 18 hours per million persons. That looks like 59.4 hours to me. But, as I wrote earlier, there is also the problem of Long Island. Taking a low figure of about 2.5 million persons in Nassau and Suffolk, evacuating just 40% of that population adds another million evacuees and another 18 hours. Now, we are looking at a 78-hour evacuation plan, or more.

A category four hurricane moving at over 30 miles per hour and having hurricane force winds and heavy rains out more than 100 miles from the eye means completing the evacuation probably four hours before landfall as traffic conditions will not be safe, especially on very exposed places. You want an E-ticket ride? Try crossing the Verazzano Narrows Bridge, the second longest suspension bridge in the world (4,260 feet) with its roadbed over 200 feet above the water, in a gale with driving rain.

I think we are now 82 hours from landfall of the eye of the hurricane as the point where the evacuation must begin. To put that in better perspective, Katrina hit N.O. about 8 AM on a Monday; 82 hours prior would have been 10 PM on Thursday. But, a storm moving 30 miles an hour would be over 2,500 miles away when the evacuation order is issued - but that is impossible. Typically, storms travel more slowly in the tropics, so lets take an average speed of 10 mph on its way to NYC - that still means the evacuation order must go out when the storm is over 700 miles away.

This brings us to a point noted in another recent post here. How confident will people be in our government's forecast of the time and place where the storm will hit? (I linked to a story on this topic on 28 September.) Add to this the point that a recent poll (see the linked story above) shows about two thirds of New Yorkers don't believe their own neighborhood can be evacuated.

As I said before, I'd hate to see this plan collide with reality.

Who ya gonna call ... when the cops stage a riot?

Haaretz - Israel News - PA police officers break into parliament, firing into air:

"The storming came one day after fierce clashes between police and Hamas in Gaza City and the nearby Shati refugee camp, during which Hamas gunmen attacked the local police station with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The camp's deputy police chief, Ali Makawi, was killed in the fighting."

The disturbance came as the Palestinian Authority (PA) parliament voted 43-5 to endorse "a parliamentary committee's report criticizing [Prime Minister Ahmed] Qureia's cabinet for its handling of factional anarchy."

Just a reminder that Iraq is not the only place in the Middle East where terrorists make it especially dangerous to be a policeman.

Another glimmer of hope for restarting non-proliferation talks with Iran

Haaretz - Israel News - Iran says ready for unconditional nuclear talks with Europeans:

"European states have said in the past that negotiations would not resume unless Iran stops uranium reprocessing in Isfahan. Tehran says it will never again stop uranium conversion but is ready for dialogue."

Yes, I am still riding my nuclear non-proliferation hobby horse.

It is not clear what this latest announcement from Iran means. It seems to mean just slightly less than the headline Haaretz has given to this AP story. Still any diplomatic issue on which the US and the Big 3 of the EU are on the same page can't easily be written off as hopeless. (I hope!)

I won't rehash the whole argument now, but I will remind my readers (are you there?) that as a merely game theory proposition, the more players, the more opportunities for something to go wrong. And when that something is nuclear war, the stakes will be high indeed.

Virginia Postrel on the secular left's threat to scientific research

Criminalizing Science - Forbes.com:

"At a business conference this summer in Toronto Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, told the Canadians again and again how wonderful they are--how open to new ideas, how tolerant, how diverse and therefore how potentially creative. Unlike the U.S., which is afflicted by divisiveness and the religious right, Canada is a model country. That was his story, at any rate.

"A few hours later I picked up a newspaper and got a different view. On the op-ed page a scientist was pleading for Canada to repeal its law against cloning human embryos for research. In tolerant, open-minded, diverse and creative Canada therapeutic cloning--defined as creating an in vitro embryo with the same chromosomes as any other individual--is a crime punishable by ten years in prison."

Wow! Federal law in the US only prevents federal money paying for such research - and even then has an exception for certain cultured cell lines already established.

Ms. Postrel does a great service by pointing out how the secular left in Europe and Canada is in important ways more hostile to genetic research than the religious USA.

I don't agree with Ms. Postrel on therapeutic cloning - or any procedure which destroys a viable embryo for research purposes, but the article covers more ground than that and I highly recommend it.

Me defending a liberal, will wonders never cease?

TCS: Tech Central Station - Feelers vs. Thinkers:

".... Harvard President Larry Summers recently suggested that researchers should look into whether genetics could explain why there are so few women scientists. Feelers immediately condemned him. Summers suggested something intensely painful for some feminists to hear. His feeler critics assumed that he would put them though such an emotional ordeal only if he hated them. For feelers Summers' comments were so horrible in part because deep down these feminists probably think there might be a genetic cause for the dearth of female scientists."

In the forum for comments on this article, I defend President Summers from a knee-jerk liberal attack on his intellectual integrity. The article itself is a bit uneven, but the topic - how feelings trump logic in much public debate - is important. Scroll to the bottom to find the link to the comments page and look for my name.

Don't like Halliburton getting paid to rebuild N.O.? How about Punj Lloyd?

US asks Indian cos to rebuild New Orleans : HindustanTimes.com:

"In the aftermath of devastation by Hurricane Katrina, the US administration has announced a $200 billion reconstruction package. And several Indian companies like Punj Lloyd have been approached to facilitate the reconstruction."

Punj Lloyd, according to its website, was formed in 1982. With headquarters in New Delhi and 13 other offices in London, the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf, and Asia, it is a major player in the global engineering and construction industry. Their plans to get a piece of the Katrina/Rita reconstruction pie depend partly on getting a waiver of US visa restrictions to bring in enough of their key personnel.

I suppose the left will prefer this to letting contracts to outfits like Halliburton whose executives may have contributed to Republican candidates they don't like. All I care about is where firms getting these rich contracts are going to be paying taxes.

Thoughts on the airline industry vs. the railroads

WorldNetDaily: Southwest Airlines: When mercy trumps accountability:

"Several years ago an analyst added up the cumulative profit of the publicly held airlines that had existed up to that time. The result of the computation was approximately zero. Consequently many investors, such as the redoubtable Warren Buffet, have concluded that the airline industry is not worthy of their investment dollars."

The point of Gerald R. Chester's article for Business Reform magazine is to criticize Southwest Airlines for its policy of avoiding discharging workers. Considering that he levies this complaint against the best performing company in the industry is a question for another time. What intrigued me was the paragraph quoted above.

As someone who hates air travel (for the same reason I hate buses, the seats are uncomfortable, the air is stale and the trip is noisy) and likes train travel, but does little of either (I'd go to Europe if you could drive there), it always irritates me when my fellow rightwingers single out Amtrak for condemnation as a wasteful, subsidized form of transport and say nothing of the subsidies that keep the airline industry afloat (and only just barely, at that) - at least partly at the expense of rail travel.

Of course, part of the problem is that a large amount of air travel subsidization is not done by the federal government and involves no appropriations even from the states and localities shouldering the burden, so it is hard to get good numbers. But consider what it means financially if a metropolitan airport operated by a local government or some state or local authority occupies hundreds of acres of valuable real estate which goes untaxed. Even if the authority makes some payment in lieu of tax (PILOT), it is seldom comparable to what the assessed value of that land would be if it were occupied by homes or businesses. Meanwhile, railroads pay taxes on real estate (sometimes based on track miles or other measures rather than acreage) which indirectly enter into the cost to Amtrak to operate on their tracks.

I'm not going to extend this analysis here, just a thought made more relevant by the recent hurricanes. One essay I read asked why Amtrak wasn't used to evacuate N.O. - and the answer is it could have helped a little if anyone (the governor or mayor) had asked in a timely manner, but passenger rolling stock is limited in that region. Another recent article (which I blogged recently) had to do with urban evacuation plans, especially for New York City. Railroads were mentioned as an important part of some of those plans.

You won't have trains to do much of the heavy lifting in future emergencies if we get out of the passenger business now. Most urban rail systems have little or no capacity to move people outside the city and maybe its close-in suburbs. That's another reason we ought to think carefully before pulling the plug on inter-city rail transport. Of course, we could maintain a strategic fleet of passenger coaches and use the freight roads to move them in emergencies, but I suspect that would be more expensive and we would lose most of the facilities for embarking and disembarking passengers.

The new Mississippi Bubble?

My Way News:

"The Mississippi coast, wracked by Hurricane Katrina, is caught up in a real estate rush, as speculators and those looking to replace their own wrecked homes pinpoint broken and battered waterfront neighborhoods. In the weeks since the hurricane, prices of many homes - even damaged properties - have jumped 10 to 20 percent."

We've been waiting for real estate prices, especially in trendy areas like seacosts (but also San Francisco, Baltimore, etc.) to collapse as interest rates have edged up and now we find prices going up in the wake of Katrina. For those who have lost so much and haven't enough insurance to rebuild, I suppose this is good news and I wish them well. But, there is something sad about blue collar communities, some with generations of history, now gone forever.

2005 White House Staff List -- By Salary(washingtonpost.com)

2005 White House Staff List -- By Salary(washingtonpost.com):

"Peace, Cheryl D Director, Physical IP Policy 131,671"

I'm offering a reward (likely value less than $10) to the first person who can tell me what "Physical IP Policy" is, let alone why its director should occupy the third highest pay rate on the White House staff, two notches ahead of all the special assistants and associate counsels. I intend by this no disrespect to the incumbent in this high office, I assume she is well-qualified and hard-working. I just want to know what it is we are paying her to do.

Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin has thoughtfully provided the entire list which can be viewed in salary or alpha order and even compared to prior years. It's a great public service to let us mere taxpayers see how our money gets spread around.