The bill that Congress will send to the President for his veto on Monday or Tuesday is unacceptable to President Bush because he believes that it allows Congress to meddle in warmaking by setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.
Not quite. What it does do is allow Congress to do that which the Constitution demands — determine whether we are going to be at war or not. When last I looked at the Constitution, it was the President's job to determine how, but not whether, a war will be carried out, and it was the Congress's job to determine whether, but not how, a war will be carried out.
Had Congress come up with the idea of the "surge" and attempted to force that on the President, that would indeed be a usurpation of presidential powers. But to determine that, beyond a certain date, we shall not engage in hostilities in Iraq is certainly within the mandate of Congress. (It's been done before — think Somalia. But then we had a President who listened.)
The Columbine-like catastrophe which occurred today at Virginia Tech gives us a chance to look and see what preparations campus security forces have made for such occurrences.
The simple answer would seem to be "none".
Today's killer started out his attack in a dormitory, where he shot two people dead. He was then quiet for two or three hours while the campus movers-and-shakers got together with campus security to decide what to do next. Apparently they decided to do nothing, under the mistaken impression that the killer had left the campus and perhaps even the state. Then, around nine o'clock, the killer started in again in one of the engineering buildings. Final toll: 33 dead. How the killer finally died, I don't know, but given the efficiency of campus security and the local police during the killing sweep, I would guess that he shot himself, if only to embarrass the police.
Campus security had neither plan nor clue.
Does campus security have contingency plans for anything? Apparently, yes. A reporter for our local radio news station KCBS asked a campus security rep from one of the regional California State University campuses about this and was assured that campus security keeps its eyes wide open for situations that will attract protesters.
Protesters???
Maybe someone out there will point out to me a single case in which a protester has ever killed another student.
No, it now seems to me that the job of campus security is not to protect the students, but to protect the sensibilities of university movers-and-shakers from students. Campus security can't stop one kid from shooting 33 fellow students; but odds-on, if the Regents were ever to hold a meeting to discuss increasing investment in Myanmar, security would be out in force to prevent student protesters from forcing the Regents to pay attention to opinions that they might not share.
After watching the scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 in which right-wing enthusiast Paul Wolfowitz spit-combs his hair, one must ask: "What would a woman see in such a person?"
The answer is now clear: a salary higher than that of the Secretary of State of the United States. Wolfowitz, as head of the World Bank, kicked his inamorata's salary up to almost $200,000. Boys and girls, how many of you can spell nepotism?
Of course, there are excuses. Wolfowitz recused himself from the process (yeah, sure). The girl-frendo deserved such a salary. The far left is out to get Wolfowitz because of his role in starting the Iraq War.
Point remains: Head of World Bank's girlfriend received a salary far beyond what any other minion of that organization (with the possible exception of the bank president) was getting.
A radio report this morning informed us that women may now be able to give birth without the intervention — direct or indirect — of men. Seems that scientists believe that they can now generate a very weak form of sperm from a woman's bone marrow. This can be used to fertilize the woman's eggs. No males need apply.
Of course, the genetic material in the sperm would be identical to that in the egg, and the result would be — whisper the word! — a clone of the woman in question. But the horrible, horrible C-word was not used in the radio report, which simply pointed out that the resulting offspring would, of necessity, be female, since the male Y-chromosome would be missing.
Is this going to be a way of getting around the clone-ban that "ethical" geneticists have attempted to introduce into the question of genetic engineering?
Have we run out of time in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Not likely. In Afghanistan, the USSR held out for a decade before being forced out — pretty much by the same people who are now working on us (the Taliban — who were our clients then). The Taliban are now staging something of a comeback, but they have almost five years to go before we reach the same temporal position the USSR was in when it finally withdrew.
For Iraq, we still have around six years to go.
We should, of course, remember what ultimately happened to the USSR when it was forced out of Afghanistan.
I never cease to be amazed by the number of people who will insist that observable facts are non-existent, if these offend their sense of economic rightness. Yet global warming is easily observable, all over the planet, from the loss of days of winter to the melting of both mountain and icecap glaciers. And the interesting point is that the physics of global warming have been well understood since early in the twentieth century; the only question left was, whether and how much we were affecting the atmosphere in ways that would contribute, a question that has only been recently answered.
Start with the earth's heat budget. The sun, at several thousand degrees Kelvin (1), radiates like a black body whose most intense wavelength is that of visible light (actually, somewhere in the green). Most of this light radiates off into space; a tiny fraction is intercepted by the earth, with a cross-section of around 200 million square miles. Some of the light that reaches earth immediately bounces off snow caps or cloud tops into space, and does not contribute to the heat budget; but the rest, reaching the ground, is absorbed, heats up the ground a bit, and the warmer ground then heats up the lower atmosphere.
Now for a simple rule to understand: as much heat as is absorbed by the earth from the sun every twenty-four hours has to be radiated back into space in that same twenty-four-hour period. Otherwise, the earth will continue to heat up, very, very fast, and we will all quickly be turned into crispy critters in a process that will make actual global warming look like a cool winter day.
The earth, like the sun, radiates like a black body, but since its temperature is so much lower (around 300 degrees Kelvin compared to several thousand for the sun) its highest level of radiation is at much longer wavelengths, namely those of infrared radiation or heat.
The interesting point is that certain gases in the atmosphere, ones that have slightly more complex than normal molecular structures — carbon dioxide and methane spring immediately to mind — tend to absorb infrared waves at certain wavelengths or bands of wavelengths. They don't hold onto this extra energy forever, but reradiate it away at these and other wavelengths, so that these heat waves can go on their merry way. The problem is that the molecules in question don't necessarily reradiate them in the same direction they were going in the first place; they are just as likely to head right back down towards the earth, where they will have to be radiated away again. If you increase the number of molecules of these somewhat complex "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere, more and more heat gets recycled within the atmosphere rather than being radiated back out into space.
The result? Remember the 24-hour rule? Well, what happens is that not all the heat arriving from the sun in that 24-hour period gets radiated back away in the same 24-hour period.
So why haven't we turned into crispy critters yet? Luckily, there's an easier solution. As the earth warms up a bit, it radiates more heat waves, and so, even though more get caught by the greenhouse molecules, more also escape into space. By the time the temperature of the surface of the earth and atmosphere rise by a tiny fraction — say, a couple of degrees Kelvin (significantly less than one percent of the baseline temperature of earth and atmosphere), the heat budget is back in synch and we are all saved from being turned into charcoal.
Again, this process has been understood since the early twentieth century, and the only problem with extrapolating it to man-caused global warming was the assumption that we were not significantly affecting the number of greenhouse molecules in the atmosphere — an assumption which has turned out, over the past few decades, to be wildly optimistic.
So, since we are obviously not going to be burnt to a crisp, should we worry? Yes, because our oceans and atmosphere are very sensitive to such tiny changes in temperature. They may make the difference (to choose an obvious example) between having a part of the earth covered by solid H2O and not having that, which in turn will affect the earth's albedo, allowing significantly more solar radiation to be absorbed by the earth, which in turn will cause even higher temperatures before the heat budget is in synch again.
We are in a bad way. It's small comfort to realise that things could be much worse.