The Washington Pest

Pest Pesters Peace Prize

2007-10-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

There is a lot to like in this Nobel. First, it reinforces the (correct) public perception that global warming is a global political movement. Second, it is led by a retired politician looking for glory, a common occurrence that does not lend credibility to the cause. Gore is a liability to the Greens in many ways. We wish he would run for President. The "9 errors" British court ruling is a nice touch here.

But most of all, it certifies that the IPCC is also a political activist. We imagine this embarrasses them and it should be pushed at them. It will be interesting to see how the green press explains how "the world's leading scientists" (as they are laughingly called) can get a prize for political activism. IPCC credibility is damaged by this award.

IPCC=Gore. We love it.

The shift of the Nobel "Peace" Prize to environmental activism adds to the confusion. The Peace Prize is a hefty lefty prize. So be it.

The Washington Pest

Bush goes around, not Comes Around

2007-09-16T07:49:00.000-07:00

The happy headline says "Bush aide says warming man-made."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6994760.stm

Is Bush coming around?
No, he has been around all along.
This headline is a work of art. The press keeps reporting that Bush is changing, coming around at last, but it is wishful thinking born of abject error. Strange brew that.

Bush aide Marburger is head of the science and technology policy shop (OSTP). The US has a fistful of billion dollar S&T programs on CO2 reduction, so he is justifying them. (That is his job.) Bush has announced one such boondoggle almost very year. Hydrogen, FutureGen, most recently replacing 20% of the gasoline with mush. Bush even set a 5 year US CO2 intensity reduction goal in 2001, which he then met.

So it could not be clearer that the Bush admin believes in human induced global warming, and always has. (More's the fool's pity, but we digress.) Why then this latest in an endless, breathless series of newsies chanting "he is changing, he is changing"?

Because the great Green press insists on equating believing in global warming with invoking cap & trade rationing, so systematically misses the point. Thus too do the people. Fine by us, for as Machiavelli says, in war and politics the greatest advantage is to be underestimated by your opponent.

Nothing is changing and with luck Bush is going to ram a technology based, aspirational intensity goal down the UN's throat. Bush and China that is. China has also adopted an aspirational intensity goal.

He will do it precisely because he believes in "man-made warming," and has since the beginning. Won't everyone be surprised.

The Washington Pest

Brief Lives Briefly Viewed

2007-09-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

by John McCaughey

W.F. Deedes cheats a little with the title of this book*. First, "Brief Lives" was employed hundreds of years ago as a book title by the 17th Century scribbler John Evelyn and has been used often since then by other writers of books. Deedes ought to have scratched his head to find a more original title. In truth, they are not "Lives" at all in any real biographical sense but merely brief anecdotal sketches, mostly of contemporaries.

For all that, it is an interesting book. Bill Deedes, who died at 94 not long ago, had plenty of material. A politician, former cabinet minister, Editor of the national conservative newspaper The Daily Telegraph (known fondly as The Torygraph), he became a columnist in later life. His long career in London afforded him the opportunity to meet most of the history-making characters of the epoch. Unusually, for a politician and a newspaperman, he was much loved by his readers. His fame was greatly increased by a series of "Dear Bill" letters in the satirical magazine Private Eye. These were (ostensibly) letters from Dennis Thatcher (the then Prime Minister's husband) to his golfing friend Bill: two curmudgeonly old conservatives complaining about the vicissitudes of modern Britain. Deedes took the gentle mockery that the columns engendered with great good humor.

Nowadays, we are mostly cynical about and disenchanted with politicians. Deedes was more forgiving. "Whether they got it right or wrong," he says, "they serve as guideposts. That is what makes them worth writing about." And write about them he does, neither in a party hack nor a sarcastic style. He is especially good on the politics in England in the run-up to World War II. He understood politics, noting here: "That is a hard thing about politics: events may call upon a man to do something wholly contrary to his political creed. If he does so, his party will accuse him of betrayal; if he does not, then he will be seen as a man who put party before country."

Deedes is no flashy stylist but he writes with simplicity and lucidity --- perhaps a better thing. But he appreciates color. He tells an amusing yarn about Churchill who, refusing to take early retirement, "dons what looked like a cross between a bowler and a topper, mounted a horse and was declared to have joined a foxhunt."

Deedes‚ subjects (about 18 in all) are all over the shop: important (if now forgotten) politicians like Stanley Balwin or Anthony Eden, entertainers like Noel Coward (whose advice on getting the best seat on a railway train is alone worth the price of admission), mountaineers like Edmund Hilary (first man to climb Mount Everest) and more unlikely characters like Imelda Marcos (she of the shoes) and Princess Diana (with whom he shared a campaign against landmines), fellow journalists like Malcolm Muggeridge and even Mary Whitehouse, the oddball campaigner against what she perceived as pornography on BBC television. Some of these sketches may be of interest only to historians but it is good to have them in print, written by someone who was on the scene and knew the players personally.

In brief, Deedes‚ short book is in its way a serious work of British social, literary and political history. The tone is (very occasionally) a trifle self-congratulatory and one does yearn at times for a little sarcasm or satire. But that was never Deedes‚ way. He was gentle and kind. And he was an old man when he wrote the book so that he can easily be forgiven for not being Jonathan Swift.

*Brief Lives by W.F. Deedes. Pan Books (UK)

------------ends

TALLEYRAND: A CONTRARY MISFORTUNE

2007-09-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

by John McCaughey

Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838) was one of the most brilliant diplomatists --- indeed, statesmen --- of his era. A famed wit, a ruthless opportunist, aristocratic but a revolutionary, a liberal, a free-trader, pro-American, he was even a renegade bishop (Holy Orders were seen in those days --- perhaps still are --- as a path to material advancement). He helped make (and then break) Napoleon and then assisted in the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France. At the Congress of Vienna, which reshaped Europe after Napoleon, he played a weak French hand with consummate skill. He died reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church at the last minute --- to the fury of his critics. In this admirable new biography* Robin Harris has more than done justice to the complicated politics and psychology of one who, whatsoever his faults, was a great man.

Talleyrand, as depicted by Harris, had many virtues. Even his rivals admitted his self-possession and "extraordinary intelligence": cynical, his bon mots (although Talleyrand preferred to call these his mots juste) were polished and delivered in circumstances which assured their widest circulation (one of them, his famous disparagement of the Bourbons: "They forget nothing and learn nothing" has lived on); his conduct of affairs in his spell as Foreign Minister of France showed unmatched flair and finesse (as even Napoleon admitted); and he was extremely productive while affecting an air of nonchalance which his enemies often foolishly mistook for indolence.

A superb politician, he understood expediency and possessed (what few politicians do) the gifts of foresight, consistency, remorselessness and the character to follow the best course once he had worked this out. He had unmatched manipulative skills and political and social antennae. Sophisticated, he could appear open while giving nothing away. Said Chateaubriand: "You wonder if this man has not received an authority from nature to refashion or to obliterate the truth."

Always a wide-ranging reformer, he rewrote the French weights and measures system, then developed the modern, secular, centralized French education system. At the Foreign Ministry, he knew how to get the best out of his staff. More than that indeed. When one staffer brought back a monkey from Africa, the animal was set to work sealing letters at which the creature proved to be adept.

Politically, Talleyrand was what would nowadays be called a libertrarian: "What individual demands of every citizen," he said, "will be respected or re-established by the [revolutionary] Estates General. Beyond the law, all are free." It didn't quite work out that way, of course, but there is no doubting Talleyrand's sincerity.

Indeed he was really only a qualified supporter of Revolution, although he artfully concealed this fact. Inside, he was far too aristocratic to wish for a leveling of the social hierarchy.

At heart he was a royalist, but he managed easily to collaborate with Napoleon --to Talleyrand's and Napoleon's advantage and, it must be said, to the advantage of France. But it was a rocky, love-hate, conditional relationship that ultimately ended in bitterness. Talleyrand especially objected to Napoleon's bellicosity in foreign policy.

Nor did Talleyrand stick to his day job. On the side, he was an expert businessman. He speculated on property in the (as then, undeveloped) Champs Elysees and even explored buying land in Maine and upstate New York and he bought 100,000 acres of land in Pennsylvania which he resold in France, pocketing a 100 percent profit.

A gastronome, Talleyrand had a complicated system for drinking cognac, decided views on coffee (it had to be four-fifths mocha and one fifth Martinique) and he enjoyed peppered dishes which he fancied accelerated his slow metabolism and pulse rate.

For all his genius, Talleyrand had, unfortunately, great defects. He was a fearful snob, constantly high-hatting Napoleon, whom he regarded as a Corsican bourgeois upstart. He was a habitual liar (sometimes astonishingly so) -- never letting sentiment dominate calculation in determining his course of action. He was painstakingly vindictive both to persons and to governments which attempted to thwart him. He had huge reserves of ruthlessness and never hesitated to use them. He was madly ambitious, self-regarding and self-promoting. He made many mistakes, especially in military policy. He was shamelessly venal in soliciting bribes to a degree that would nowadays have instantly landed him before a grand jury. He was conspicuously promiscuous in an age when promiscuity was the norm.

Biographers are said usually to admire their subjects. In this book, Harris can't seem to quite make up his mind and takes refuge in rather too complicated (and sometimes boring) explications of 19th Century European politics and minor wars. "At the end," he writes, "I am left with the strong impression of a man quite unlike any other then or since His personality is as multi-layered as one of his chef Careme's millefeuille pastries." Perhaps the best Talleyrand quote, which applied as much to his statecraft as to his personal life, was: "I have never hurried, but I am always on time."

A supporter of the French reputation for logic and diplomacy (as opposed to the more robust English view of the French as a nation of intoxicated loonies stomping grapes in barrels), Talleyrand carefully rewrote just before his death his statement of reconciliation with Mother Church. Diplomatist to the very end, it was far from the statement that the Jesuits would have liked. When Talleyrand met his Maker at the Pearly Gates, it can only have been an interview fraught with difficulties for both men. Unfortunately, this biography omits a text of that interview.

On his birthday on 2 February 1837, Talleyrand wrote wearily: "That makes eighty three years that have passed! I do not know if I am satisfied when I recall the course of so many years. How much useless agitation! How many fruitless endeavours! Irritating complications, exaggerated emotions, worn-out strengths! Gifts wasted, ill-will inspired, equilibrium lost, illusions destroyed, tastes exhausted! And with what result? That of moral and physical fatigue, a complete despondency about the future and a profound disgust for the past. There are a mass of people who have the gift, or the deficiency, never to be self-aware. I have, in all to great a degree, the contrary misfortune; it increases along with the seriousness that the years bring with them."

On our deathbed, we should all write as well as Talleyrand.

*Talleyrand: Betrayer and Saviour of France. By Robin Harris. John Murray (UK) 2007.

------------ends-----------

BLATHER 21.VII.2007

2007-07-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

A Diary by John McCaughey
======================

Blather [magazine] is here. As we advance to make our bow, you will look in vain for signs of servility or for any evidence of a slavish desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. Blather doesn't care. A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?

---Flann O'Brien, Dublin, 1934

--------------------------------------------
None of us can really be sure that we exist. My whole life, as this Diary shows, is a lie. All the characters in it are invented, none bears any resemblance to anyone living or dead. People who claim to find themselves here must know that the only real existence we can any of us claim is in the imagination of God.

---Auberon Waugh, Diaries 1972-1985

--------------------------------------------------
What's a Website?

On trial recently in Woolwich Crown Court in south London were three young Mohomaddens accused of helping to distribute Islamic propaganda over the internet in support of Al Quaeeda. One, who surfed the net using the name Irhabi007 (Terrorist 007) was said to have links with Al Quaeda in Iraq. The youths were also said to be involved in a murder plot organized by Islamaterrorists.

Hearing the case was Mr. Justice Openshaw who told stunned prosecutors: "The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a website is."

The trial had to be held up when it was all explained to the dim-witted jurist. He rather resembled the judge who decades ago asked counsel: "Who is this gentleman Mussolini, who appears to be an Italian?"

The trial of the Mohommadens continues. But aren't British judges wonderful? And it's not just the silly wigs.

-------------------------------

Gates versus GM

At a recent computer expo, Microsoft's Bill Gates commented that "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response, a General Motors press release said:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

#For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash...twice a day.
#Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
#Occasionally, your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
#Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
#Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive---but would run on only 5 percent of the roads.
#The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car has Performed an Illegal Operation" warning light.
#The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
#Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
#Every time a new car was introduced, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
#You would have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.
--------------------------------

QUOTABLE

Lingua Latina saepe dicitur mortua esse...

{It's often said that Latin is a dead language}

Ars gratia Artis

{Art for Art's sake}

----from Blather's "Bluffer's Guide to Latin"
-----------------
Idiot Savant?

"I can calculate the movement of the stars but not the madness of men..."

---A rueful Sir Isaac Newton after losing a fortune in the stock market crash of 1720.

-----------
Plagiarism? Or Intellectual Magpie?

"I make others say for me what either from want of language or want of sense I cannot myself so well express..."

---The self-effacing French essayist Michel Montaigne who was fond of citing the Roman historian Suetonius.
-------------------

Bossy women?

"The motive force that impelled some Crusaders [a 19th Century American anti-booze women's group] transcended the cause of temperance. The constant marching, the trapping of sinful men in the very commission of their sins, storming halls of legislature theretofore barred to women, the tumult, the martyrdom, the public attention---all this was adventure that liberated them from the tyranny of wifehood, motherhood and domestic duty........

"The [prohibitionist] group had the inquisitorial type of mind, said one critic. They want to coerce you into believing in their god...Temperance means moderation through self-control. When one is grown-up, compulsion through the law creates revulsion. You cannot make man just through the law, you cannot make man merciful through the law, you cannot make a man affectionate through the law."

----John Kobler: "Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition"

--------------------------
Impossible Things

"There is no use trying," said Alice. "One can't believe impossible things." "I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen, "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

---Lewis Carroll
------------------------------

Mathematics

"Whenever anyone asked Jerico why he was a mathematician...he would shake his head and smile and claim that he had no idea. If they persisted, he might, with some diffidence, direct them to the definition offered by G.H. Hardy in his famous 'Apology': "a mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns."

If that didn't satisfy them, he would try to explain by quoting the most basic illustration he could think of: pi--3.14--the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Calculate pi to a thousand decimal places , he would say, or a million or more, and you will discover no pattern to its unending sequence of digits. It appears random, chaotic, ugly. Yet Leibnitz and Gregory can take the same number and tease from it a pattern of crystalline elegance:

pi=1 -1 +1 -1+1
4 3 5 7 9

and so on to infinity. Such a pattern had no practical usefulness, it was merely beautiful---as sublime, to Jerico, as a line in a fugue by Bach---and if his questioner still couldn't see what he was driving at, then, sadly, he would give up on them as a waste of time."

---"Enigma" [a novel about breaking the Nazi code machine in World War II] by Robert Harris

-----------------------------

The objective of life is not to be happy. The objective of life is to make society a better place in which to live. Every one of us has something to offer. Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the aeroplane and the pessimist the parachute.

---Anon

-----------------ends----------------------------

Supreme Court Press Pollution Confusion

2007-06-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

Anyone who enjoys confusion, and who doesn't, has to love the incoherent press coverage of the Supreme Court decision that EPA has the authority to regulate CO2 as a pollutant. Widely hailed as a victory for global warming, it was in fact just a small step in that general direction. But then every step, even backward, gets hailed as a victory. Best to celebrate now when nothing important may ever happen.

To begin with, the SC did not determine that CO2 is a hazardous pollutant, just a contributing pollutant along the lines of NOx, a precursor to ozone. The Clean Air Act defines a pollutant as any substance that has the potential to cause human harm if emitted. CO2 clearly fits this description if the theory of human induced warming is assumed possibly true, something the SC was not about to rule against.

The case was actually very narrow. The definition of "pollutant" occurs three places in the Act and climate change is specifically mentioned, but only in one of the three. The question was which definition controls? The Court ruled that the broadest definition holds, which we agree with as a matter of law. Nothing shocking about it, except maybe the 1990 language in the Act mentioning climate change. We have been at this a very long time. The press on this simple decision was suitably incoherent.

Now what? This action began with a citizen petition to EPA to regulate CO2 from autos. EPA said it did not have the authority to do so under the Clean Air Act. The Court says it does. EPA can now deny the petition on the grounds it offered the Court already -- uncertainty. Uncertainty so great the damage cannot be ascertained, if indeed there is any. If it does so that decision will be taken to court, where EPA has a good chance of winning because they are the experts and the courts seldom overturn agency expert findings.

Of course everything may change if we get a new administration and EPA suddenly wants to regulate CO2. Then we might get to the interesting little issues described below. You begin to see why 10-15 years is the timeframe.

Suppose EPA decides to regulate CO2, then if so, how? That too will be blockaded and litigated in great depth, as the Act does not provide a mechanism that is appropriate. The difference between being a hazardous air pollutant (HAP) and being an indirect or "criteria" pollutant is very big when it comes to possible EPA regulation. Rule making is itself heavily regulated and litigated, so many of the skeptical arguments will be tested in detail. This will take 10-15 years and serious regulation is by no means inevitable.

For example, EPA has to do a cost benefit regulatory analysis to show that any proposed rule is beneficial. Unlike the UK's nonsensical Nick Stern, who says helping people 200 years from now is just as important as helping them today, EPA has to use a large discount rate, usually 7 to 10%. This makes distant future benefits worthless. Positive net benefits based on a 100 year timeframe will be impossible to demonstrate.

The rules for cost benefit analysis of federal regulations are made by OMB/OIRA--
http://www.whitehouse.gov/OMB/inforeg/

Specific OIRA rules for regulatory analysis (also called regulatory impact analysis or RIA) start here --
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars/a004/a-4.html

Here is a nifty database of RIAs--
http://www.aei-brookings.org/publications/index.php?tab=topics&topicid=56

Also, while HAP emissions can be regulated directly, for criteria pollutants EPA has to set a national ambient concentration level. Only areas that exceed that level can be regulated, as well as being punished. What level can they choose? If they say 440 then everyone is in attainment. If 300 then everyone is out of attainment but due to global factors beyond their control, like Chinese coal plants and the last 50 years of human life, which is probably unConstitutional. This local concentration reg mechanism simply does not work for CO2. The courts should agree.

Basic point is that if Congress wants EPA to regulate CO2 they need a new law. If the system is rational this view is likely to prevail.

The Supreme Court decision is just the first move, no more than P-Q4 in a very colorful chess game. EPA tried to duck the entire issue but they can't, so now the real fun begins. Skepticism will finally get its day in court.

Enjoy the show.

The Washington Pest

Half Full of Nothing

2007-05-30T12:15:00.000-07:00

A funny thing happened on the way to the headlines. Three major wire services covered the recent meeting of 40 EU and Asian foreign ministers in Hamburg, ahead of next week's meeting of the Group of Eight (G8). The topic was agreeing on a timetable for agreeing on a post-Kyoto international treaty to take effect in 2012. The EU wanted new targets set by 2009, to support the multi-billion dollar carbon market.

AP happily reports that
"EU, Asia set 2009 climate pact deadline"

AFP (the French AP) unhappily informs us that
"Asia and Europe fail to agree on climate change targets"

Reuters is more precise and even less happy:
"Japan rebuffs EU on Kyoto pact"

What happened? The answer is nothing but the glass is half full. The EU wants to make a deal on 2012 targets by 2009. China was adamant (as always) that it will never agree to emissions targets. Targets for all are what everyone means by a post-Kyoto deal so there is no deal, not even a deal to make a deal. That is what AFP reported.

Japan said it would not commit to setting targets until China does (likely never) so it is too soon to commit to setting targets by 2009. That is what Reuters reported, like it is Japan's fault that China just says no.

But diplomats all, everyone agreed in principle that there should be an agreement by 2009, even though no one can agree and likely never will. This agreement to agree on nothing at a later date certain is what AP is so happy about. AP's glass is half full of nothing.

Moral, this is high stakes climate poker in action. Do not believe the headlines, read between the fine print, and expect nothing. If China, India and the USA stand pat the ultimate agreement, announced with much fanfare, will be to Do The Best We Can. But who knows?

Above all, enjoy the show.

The Washington Pest

Coal To Hit Green fan

2007-05-18T12:33:00.000-07:00

A load of coal is about to hit the green fan. Earlier this month we attended a conference on coal-fired electric power. A titanic collision is in progress, albeit unseen so far. An iceberg ahead in the night. The ship unable to swerve. Here's the deal.

US peak power use increases pretty steadily about 20,000 MW a year. It has for 40 years, an incredible straight line in a world of economic wiggles. We handle this growth with spurts of power plant construction. The last spurt was around 2000 and we quietly built about 150,000 MW, all natural gas-fired because gas was cheap and green. That is roughly 150 large power plants.

Now gas is prohibitively expensive, we are once again running out of power, and coal is the only large scale option. So the industry is gearing up to build a huge new fleet of coal fired power plants. They will do so for there is no option. You can't make electricity out of political rhetoric, would that you could.

What this cold shot of reality will do to the great green political movement presently underway remains to be seen. It will not be a pretty picture.

Enjoy the show.

The Washington Pest

Betejeman Book Review

2007-04-30T13:05:00.000-07:00

by John McCaughey

Dr. Ramsden cannot read The Times obituary
today,
He's dead.
Let monograms on silk worms by other people
be
Thrown away
Unread
For he who best could understand and criticize
them, he
Lies clay
In bed.

Sometimes, actually, you can judge a book by its cover. The dust jacket of Andrew Wilson's new Life of the great English poet John Betjeman* far from employing the conventional image of the merry, gleeful, teddy-bear- hugging poet shows a middle-aged man slumped in a heavy overcoat and black felt hat with an expression glum and even despairful. It is a clever play on the clown-as-tragedian theme: a theme that Wilson often touches upon in his book.

Poet Laureate John Betjeman was by far the most popular English poet of the 20th century---more popular, certainly, than the great but more intellectual William Butler Yeats. Interestingly, both men were in effect foreigners: Yeats being Irish and Betjeman coming from German roots. But, unlike the rubbish that is peddled today, their poetry rhymed, scanned and made sense. Indeed, some of Betjeman's best poems are set in Ireland where, during World War II, he worked at the British Embassy in Dublin.

Many poets spend 60 years writing poetry and never produce a memorable line---even (as one would have thought probable) were they to have done so by accident. Betjeman rarely wrote anything bad and perhaps a third of what he wrote was exceptionally good. His work sold: two million copies of his Collected Poems, exciting the jealousy and rage of his pseudish and less-talented rivals.

And it was accessible. Still today there is hardly a drinker in the saloon bar of an English pub who could not recite the famous opening lines of one of his poems:

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough
It is not fit for humans now....

Even the inhabitants of that benighted London suburb enjoyed the joke. And people in pubs tend to enjoy a joke and a rattling good rhyme.

Architecture, English tradition, elegies of a vanishing past, the Church of England, wry humor and a certain gloom were the leitmotifs and the appeal of Betjeman's poems.

In architecture, he was a tireless defender of the great classic buildings (most especially churches) then being torn down in a vandalistic, profiteering frenzy of destruction after World War II, a frenzy which peaked in the 1960s.

In religion, he was a devout follower of High Church Anglicalism and such associated literary masterpieces as The Book of Common Prayer.

And the Anglican Church in its way paid him back. The book of Hymns Ancient and Modern was the source of some of his best poems. In a significant way as well, so was the old music hall. It was an interesting admixture.

Betjeman won national fame and relative prosperity by his early employment of television documentaries to save precious buildings and old churches. It was hard work: the making of TV documentaries is a far more time-consuming and difficult art than people realize. But he was a natural and, in effect, directed his own shows. Earlier, he had been a well-paid gossip columnist and film critic for the newspapers.

In melancholy, he strove never to show it but was privately tormented. Publicly, he practised mirth. He spoke for the best of an Old England that has now largely vanished in the tsunami of yobs and yuptrash, hoodies and hooliganism.

The body waits in Pembrooke College
Where the ivy taps the panes
All night;
That old head so full of knowledge,
That good heart that kept the brains
All right,
Those old cheeks that faintly flushed as the port
suffused the veins,
Drain'd white.

Crocus in the Fellows' Garden, winter jasmine
up the wall
Gleam gold.
Shadows of Victorian chimneys on the sunny
grassplot fall
Long, cold.
Master, Bursar, Senior Tutor, these, his three
survivors, all
Feel old.

Betjeman's love life was tempestuous but mainly a menage a trois : he loved his wife (although, to his deep grief, she later became a Roman Catholic). Penelope, the wife, was no respecter of persons. For a year, because she spoke no English, the German cook at the Betjeman home believed that John Betjeman's name was "Shut Up" because that was how his wife invariably addressed him.

But Betjeman also loved Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of a duke and a Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret, the Queen's sister. In France, this would have excited little comment. In England, it was considered odd.

Both women were aware of the situation and from time to time they kicked a bit. His wife suggested divorce but Betjeman said that his religion forbade it. The poet could never be induced to choose between the two women and continued to patronise them both. He was, writes Wilson, "very nearly always in love, often unsuitably." He was in love with love.

They remember as the coffin to its final obsequations
Leaves the gates,
Buzz of bees in window boxes on their summer
ministrations,
Kitchen din.

Cups and plates,
And the getting of bump suppers for the long
dead generations
Coming in,
From Eights.

That poem honored Doctor Walter Ramsden of Pembroke College, Oxford University, who died on March 26, 1947. But Betjeman might just as well have been writing his own In Memoriam.

His was a curious life: more contradictory than most of us, deep into religious tradition, into architecture, into literature, publicly merry but privately melancholic and even timorous. Yet he was the finest poet of his generation---light years better than the hopeless rivals who denigrated his success as "coffee table" fame. All his life he inspired love and loyalty and he had a gift for maintaining friendships that few people possess.

*Betjeman: A Life by A.N. Wilson. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. $27.00.

(1000 words)
===================

An Earth Day Tribute to Global Warming

2007-04-21T12:07:00.000-07:00

Guest column by our old friend Warmhoax

Happy Earth Day everyone!!

In commemoration of the event, I want to pay tribute to "the greatest threat to humankind", global warming. Clearly, this should not be taken lightly, as this threat is at least equal to the one encountered in Salem Massachusetts in 1692, when witches were identified among the populace. But the community rallied then, just like now, and were able to eliminate that grave threat. So there is hope.

Of course, anyone who watches the news, by now, must be certain that the world is about to ignite due to global warming...and clearly, it is 100% our fault. If you question the orthodoxy of global warming and our role in causing it, you are "evil" and a "denier".

It is interesting however, that when the Earth was cooling (the 1970's), the predictions were just as dire....maybe even more dramatic. What could be worse than a cooling world heading towards an ice age? The predictions were apocalyptic. See many quotes below.

Simply put:

Cooling Climate = very bad ):

Of course, now the apocalyptic predictions for global warming are, well, exactly the same.

Simply put;

Warming Climate = very bad ):

If everything we've heard is true (and not junk science), logically, the following must be true:

Cooling Climate = very bad
Warming Climate = very bad

Therefore, since nobody knows what the perfect climate is supposed to be...and the climate is always changing (it's never static), we're screwed. Basically:

Cooling Climate = we're screwed
and
Warming Climate = we're screwed

Therefore:

Since Earth's climate is always changing = we're always screwed.

Maybe these panic mongers and chicken littles should try another planet (or Salem, Massachusetts)...perhaps they'd be happier on Mars. Personally, I'm tired of them and the media that worships them as oracles. But of course, the media loves a good scare...whether it's cooling or warming....as long as its bad. The bottom line: They're all crazy and fit very well in pseudo science fields...I can only assume some of these experts switched fields when they were flunking out of an area based on real science.

Lastly, remember this: a lie repeated often enough becomes accepted as the truth. My recommendation is to challenge the orthodoxy. When "they" talk about "Antarctica", don't be afraid to ask, "do you mean Antarctica as a whole, or the Antarctic Penninsula, which comprises only 5% of the continent?" Don't be afraid to point to contradictory data that they conveniently ignore (as it undermines their pet theory). Cooler heads may eventually prevail....as for the scientific consensus you always hear about, which is tenuous at best anyway....I'll close with a quote:

"Science is not a democracy...the majority is often wrong."
Joanne Simpson, First Woman PHD in Meteorology

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"No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out." Time magazine, when we were warming

"As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval." Time magazine, when we were cooling (remember, the 1970's?)

"From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us." Time magazine, when we were warming

"In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries." Time magazine, when we were cooling

"And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away." Time magazine, when we were warming

"Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone's recollection. " Time magazine, when we were cooling

"It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry--a Category 4 storm with wind bursts that reached 125 m.p.h.--exploded through northeastern Australia. " Time magazine, when we were warming

"Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest." Time magazine, when we were cooling

"It's at the North and South poles that those steambath conditions are felt particularly acutely, with glaciers and ice caps crumbling to slush....With habitats crashing, animals that live there are succumbing too." Time magazine, when we were warming

"...its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic." Time magazine, when we were cooling

"Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us." Time magazine, when we were warming

"....our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius. Such a large decrease in the average temperature of Earth, sustained over a period of a few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age." Climate scientist Stephen Schneider (one of the fathers of the global warming scare), when we were cooling

"We're increasing the number of heat waves." Climate scientist Stephen Schneider, when we were warming

"A cooling trend has set in, perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age." Climate scientist Stephen Schneider, when we were cooling

"The rate of change is so fast that I don't hesitate to call it potentially catastrophic for ecosystems." Climate scientist Stephen Schneider, when we were warming

"There is a finite possibility that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the Earth within the next 100 years." Climate scientist Stephen Schneider, when we were cooling

"[Global warming linked to emissions of CO2, methane and other gases] is a scientific phenomenon beyond doubt. It's only a question of how much warming there will be." Climate scientist Stephen Schneider, when we were warming

"Temperatures do not increase in proportion to an atmospheric increase in CO2 ... Even an eight-fold increase... might warm earth's surface less than two degrees Centigrade, and this is highly unlikely in the next several thousand years." Climate scientist Stephen Schneider, when we were cooling

"It is journalistically irresponsible to present both sides [of the global warming theory] as though it were a question of balance. " Climate scientist Stephen Schneider, when we were warming (apparently, journalists should have ignored him when he said we were heading towards an ice age? I don't get it.)

"Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects." Newsweek magazine, when we were cooling (wait a minute...if we had followed their advice then, we would have been trying to warm the planet...now they want us to cool the planet? I'm so confused.)

"So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." Climate scientist Stephen Schneider, when we were warming (rationalizing scare tactics & hyperbole)

"The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually." Newsweek magazine, when we were cooling

"Be Worried. Be Very Worried" Cover of Time magazine, when we were warming

"There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. " Newsweek magazine, when we were cooling

"Significant declines in grain yields are forecast for Africa, tropical Latin America and much of India and southeast Asia. Reduced yields are also projected for the USA, Canada, the Middle East, and southern Europe." The United Nations, when we were warming

"A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale...because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century." National Academy of Sciences, when we were cooling (so, they were referring to a warmer climate that helped food production...or not, I'm confused again)

"In early August this year the remote Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska was gripped with unseasonably mild weather: 20 degree afternoons, ravenous mosquitoes past prime insect season and dry tundra in the typically swampy lowlands of the coastal plain. These may be early signs of global warming" Newsweek magazine, when we were warming

"Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states." Newsweek magazine, when we were cooling

"Does this have anything to do with global warming?" Katie Couric on CBS News following tornado outbreak, when we were warming

"The world’s food-producing system is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago." Dr. James D. McQuigg, NOAA, when we were cooling

"Over the last several months, hundreds of Magellanic penguins have been washing ashore near Rio de Janeiro, 2,000 miles north of their usual haunts. The wayward birds may be signs of a massive climate shift in the South Atlantic" Newsweek, when we were warming

"The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality" Newsweek magazine, when we were cooling

"California sues six carmakers over global warming" Economic Times, when we were warming (thank goodness for environmental lawyers and state attorney generals..at least they're pursuing real, tangible issues)

"The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases " Newsweek magazine, when we were cooling
"Anecdotal evidence that the world's weather is getting wilder."
CNN, when we were warming

"...they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century." Newsweek magazine, when we were cooling (drat, that blasted scientific consensus...they were wrong, agricultural productivity went up...go figure!)

"There now is a growing consensus among mainstream scientists about the reality of global warming." Union of Concerned Scientists (AKA the Union of Confused Scientists) when we were warming...well, at least we have a consensus...thank goodness.

USA still a Developing Country

2007-04-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

The international politics of carbon cuts has always been a simple function of whose ox is growing. Germany and Britain say it is easy because it is easy for them, for reasons that have nothing to do with climate policy. Little things like North Sea gas (Brits) and the collapse of the Soviet Union (what do we call the German's these days? Merkles).

Canada and Japan, whose emissions have grown with their modest economies, are on board, doing nothing, and hope it will all go away when Kyoto runs out in 2012, a distinct possibility.

The US is adamantly opposed to mandatory cuts because it is growing like a developing country, which happily it still is, developing that is. The 400 year old miracle.

In fact reading between the turgid lines of the latest DOE emissions report shows that the still prospering USA is developing much faster than usually reported. It is usually reported that US emissions are about 20% over 1990 levels (the base year for Kyoto targets). Cutting back that 20% increase is of course an enormous job, but it doesn't sound all that big to people who do not understand energy, which is everybody within 50 miles of DC, plus the entire press corps except Ken Maize.

The fascinating fact is that this 20% increase includes the local USA version of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Specifically the fact that US industrial emissions have not increased at all since 1990, because our heavy industry is dead in the water or on its way to China. Industrial emissions, including electric power consumption, have actually gone down a fraction of a percent since 1990. Goodbye manufacturing industry, hello services. Yankee ingenuity is flipping burgers.

This interior statistic means that the other segments of society, the ones who are supposed to cut emissions in future, are growing like gangsters. Residential energy use (ban the bulb!) is up about a whopping 32%. Commercial use is even higher, at 35%. These two sectors together roughly matched industrial emissions in 1990 but now are much more. Then there is transportation, which is up about 25%. That is all there is worth counting. 20% is a low ball illusion.

The bottom line is that US carbon emissions are growing like a developing country should and only the transition from heavy to service industry masks this fact. Capping or cutting these prosperous emissions means reversing what the economists call a fundamental trend. It is no wonder we never see a serious analysis of what it would take. No one would take it seriously.

The Washington Pest

Orgy of Speculation

2007-04-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

Wild speculation reported as fact is now the norm in climate reportage. Willful suspension of disbelief is the prevailing stance it seems. Note the use of the word "likely" in the quote below. There is nothing likely about these modeling results, except continued funding due to emissions of press.

First, different models disagree dramatically on many regional climate forecasts. Some say rain will double (swamp), others that it will halve (desert), in the same places. If people were foolish enough to ask to see the local forecasts of all the mainline models, they would quickly learn that these are little more than billion dollar computer games.

So one wonders -- why do climate change impact forecasts at all until we get these models straightened out? A clear waste of taxpayer money. Second, all the models, taken together, are merely speculative. There is no likely there. Research should focus on resolving these huge unknowns.

Welcome to an orgy of speculation disguised as science. Enjoy the show.

Yellow-green journalism quote of the day:

"A new climate modeling study has identified regions of the world where greenhouse gas emissions during the next century are likely to cause the appearance of novel climates unlike anything that exists today."

From: Global Warming Forecasts Creation, Loss Of Climate Zones
Science Daily

The Washington Pest

BLATHER 24.III.2007

2007-03-24T10:44:00.000-07:00

A Diary by John McCaughey
======================
Blather [magazine] is here. As we advance to make our bow, you will look in vain for signs of servility or for any evidence of a slavish desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. Blather doesn't care. A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?

---Flann O'Brien, Dublin, 1934
--------------------------------------------
None of us can really be sure that we exist. My whole life, as this Diary shows, is a lie. All the characters in it are invented, none bears any resemblance to anyone living or dead. People who claim to find themselves here must know that the only real existence we can any of us claim is in the imagination of God.

---Auberon Waugh, Diaries 1972-1985
--------------------------------------------------

Organic Hot Sox

Has not this "organic" craze gone too far? It was all started by the Greenies and by Prince Charles (Old Bat Ears, as we called him at school, where he was not a very bright boy in the classroom).

Anyway, going out to buy 365 pairs of dress socks recently at Macy's (it would never do to wear the same pair twice) we find, when they are delivered, that they bear the label: "Hot Sox: Organic Cotton. Fiber from pesticide-free crops, preserving a pure environment. Made in Turkey. Natural."

Really! One would have thought that Turkish farmers had better things to do than to make socks. One can grow poppies there and make perfectly good opium, Blather is told. Far more helpful to the environment. And poppy fields make a pretty, elegiac display.

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row..."
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Magnificent Madness

A most amusing new book* by California-born Gerard DeGroot, now professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

DeGroot became interested in the Apollo program which put 12 American astronauts on the moon between 1969 and 1972.

The professor's latter-day research, he says, revealed "a gang of cynics, manipulators, demagogues, tyrants and even a few criminals. I discovered scheming politicians who amassed enormous power by playing on the public fascination for space and fear of what the Russians might do there....The moon mission was sold as a race the Americans could not afford to lose---a struggle for survival."

DeGroot concludes that Apollo was a $35 billion ego trip---an outrageous waste of money that could far better have been spent on solving terrestial problems and, in essence, achieved nothing for mankind (except, perhaps, for the invention of teflon which is useful in frying pans to stop the egg white from sticking).

The professor has a keen sense of humour and the ridiculous---pointing to NASA's extravagances such as can be illustrated by its penchant for finding the most expensive technological solution to a simple problem. It spent, for example, many millions developing a pen that would write in zero gravity (you can buy one at Staples for les than a dollar today). But the cannier Russians had a more economical solution. Pencils.

It all reminds us of a marginally less expensive (but equally silly) government venture at the time: the nuclear-powered bomber aircraft that could stay aloft for months at a time. Unfortunately, the radiation would have turned the crew glowing-blue long before then but in their greed for funding the advocates brushed that point aside. Our colleague Ken Maize's forthcoming book on the subject is eagerly awaited. One so needs a good laugh nowadays at how inventively they spend our money.

*Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest by Gerard DeGroot, New York University Press/Jonathan Cape, 300 pages.
------------------------------------------------------------------

You Name It....

Every year the Frankfurt Book Fair is made merry by a competition to find the oddest book title of the year. Previous winners include:

Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice;
Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers;
How to Shit in the Woods, an Environmentally-Sound Approach to a Lost Art;
and
People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It.

Short-listed entries for this year include:

How Green Were the Nazis?;
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: a Guide to Field Identification;
and
Tatooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan.

It would be amusing to think that the Frankfurt Book Fair flacks make these up over their evening cocktails. But can one be quite certain that it's not all true?
----------------------------------------

Believe or Die

It's turning a bit ugly. Scientists skeptical of mankind's impact on global warming are accustomed to being shunned by global warming zealots but now the deal has escalated.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada and a global warming skeptic, reports having received five anonymous death threats by e-mail. One threat told him that he would not live long enough to see further global warming.

Ball doesn't mind being called a skeptic because he thinks that all scientists should be skeptical. But he dislikes being called a "denier" with its connotations of the Holocaust. The death threats he attributes to his more extreme pro-global warming colleagues' fear of losing their lucrative government funding.

No doubt Ball goes out to the local restaurant for dinner as usual. But we surely hope that he is packing heat.
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QUOTABLE

"The anger index is way up in America meanwhile, fueled by road rage, workplace stress, family spats and ideological differences. Assorted surveys reveal we consistently rail against gas prices, the press, the judiciary, the health system, computers, weight loss, consumer culture and failed romance. We seethe over Hollywood, co-workers and the threat of terrorism. Some 16 million of us have 'explosive rage disorder', according to the National Institute of Mental Health."

-----The Washington Times
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"The greatest compensation of old age is its freedom of spirit. I suppose that is accompanied by a certain indifference to many of the things that men in their prime think important. Another compensation is that it liberates you from envy, hatred and malice. I do not believe that I envy anyone. I have made the most I could of such gifts as nature provided me with; I do not envy the greater gifts of others; I have had a great deal of success; I do not envy the success of others. I am quite willing to vacate the little niche I have occupied so long and let another step into it. I no longer mind what people think of me. They can take me or leave me. I am mildly pleased when they appear to like me and undisturbed if I know they don't. I have long known that there is something in me that antagonises certain persons; I think it is very natural, no one can like everyone; and their ill will interests rather than discomposes me. I am only curious to know what it is in me that is antipathetic to them...."

-----W. Somerset Maugham "A Writer's Notebook" (1944). Maugham had just celebrated his 70th birthday.
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"English and all the other modern European languages have many words that come from Latin and from Greek via Latin. They have entered the language at different times and via different routes. You might think that most of these words would have come in a long time ago when more people spoke Latin, but in fact the opposite is true. In the last hundred years or so we have taken in more words from this source than ever before. If anything, the rate seems to be increasing rather than decreasing."

A Natural History of Latin by Tore Janson

-----
"Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur"

Anything said in Latin sounds profound {The whole point of this column}.

------
Ipsa scientia potestas est.

Knowledge itself is power.
--------
"Si hoc legere scis nimium, eruditionis habes"

If you can read this, you're over-educated. {Rather a good bumper sticker here}.

----from Blather's "Bluffer's Guide to Latin"

---------------------ends----------------------------

Markey select-a-climate committee pork lineup

2007-03-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

Now that the lineup for the House Select-your-climate Committee is out, it is fun to see whose pork is on board. The Office of Speaker Pelosi was happy to spell it out for us. We are not making this up -- all quotes are straight from Pelosiville. (Likely recipients are Pest Best Guess in parentheses.)

Chairman Markey is "honorary Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Alliance to Save Energy" (energy efficient consumer & building product makers).

Earl Blumenauer is "a vocal advocate for mass transit" (big ticket mass transit constructors and equipment makers, plus the cities that feed them).

Jay Inslee is "a prominent advocate for the New Apollo Project" (the whole breathtaking barrel -- 3 million taxpayer funded jobs worth). Inslee's New Apollo bill may be a model for the Committee's output.

John Larson is the "founder and co-chair of the House Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Coalition" (fuel cell makers
and hydrogen infrastructure manufacturers).

Hilda Solis did "pioneering work on environmental justice issues in California" (California).

Stephenie Herseth is "co-chair of the Rural Working Group which produced Energizing America: Farmers Fueling Our Nation's Energy Independence" (corn growers, ironically at the expense of pork producers).

Emanuel Cleaver is the ex-Mayor of Kansas City MO (dark horse, we are guessing cities).

John Hall was "on the Board of Hudson River Sloop Clearwater… In the 1970s, Mr. Hall co-founded Musicians United for Safe Energy MUSE" (environmental entertainment?).

Jerry McNerney "was a wind engineer and a renewable energy expert" (we are guessing wind).

No science here, just pork. Mega-billions worth of expensive efficiency and renewables.

The Washington Pest

Water hits climate fan

2007-03-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

According to the AP, the forthcoming IPCC climate assessment report makes the following dire prediction:

"Hundreds of millions of Africans and tens of millions of Latin Americans who now have water will be short of it in less than 20 years."

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070311/D8NPKSRG2.html

This outlandish prediction constitutes an international relief emergency. Water supply projects on this unprecedented scale take at least a decade to plan, fund and build. Water supply infrastructure is very expensive, so we are talking a crash program to spend tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. (Figure $100 to $1000 per person or more.)

The IPCC has finally overhyped in the short term. No doubt because far out catastrophes were not selling enough political tickets.

Now comes the multi-billion dollar question. Does the international community want to divert this much money to supply water to people who already have it? On the shaky basis of computer models? Away from real problems?

Regional precipitation predictions are notoriously bad in climate models. We have seen cases where one model calls for a dramatic decrease (desert) and the next model calls for an even bigger increase (swamp). The international community is unlikely to pay untold billions on just in case both ways projects.

Maybe now they will finally take a serious look at the (un)reliability of the climate models. One can only hope.

Let the fun begin.

EU moves goal post, declares Victory

2007-03-10T10:07:00.000-08:00

A funny French news agency puts it this way:

"The accord's overarching achievement is to commit the 27-country EU to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 20 percent by 2020, compared to 1990 levels."

Achievement? The EU is doing this because they cannot meet the 2008-12 Kyoto targets. Like the proverbial fanatic redoubling his (or her) efforts, they are substituting a greater goal further away. The new goal is even more impossible but comfortably misty distant, for now. Political physics at work. See, we are gaining ground, see?

We expect the Democrats to propose 2020 goals as well; it is such a cool number. The only better number is 7-11 and that is taken.

This nonsense trend of setting lavish goals in the far distant future started with the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. We have just hit their impossible 25 year goals, like clean air in Los Angeles, the perpetual inversion by the sea. Dream on.

The Canadian Conservatives just tried this trick but overshot their wad, as 2050 proved laughable. But then the Canadians thrive on laughing at their government, instead of getting angry. Something US folks should try once. Maybe in 2020?

BLATHER 3.III.2007

2007-03-03T10:13:00.000-08:00

A Diary by John McCaughey
======================

Blather [magazine] is here. As we advance to make our bow, you will look in vain for signs of servility or for any evidence of a slavish desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. Blather doesn't care. A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?

---Flann O'Brien, Dublin, 1934

--------------------------------------------
None of us can really be sure that we exist. My whole life, as this Diary shows, is a lie. All the characters in it are invented, none bears any resemblance to anyone living or dead. People who claim to find themselves here must know that the only real existence we can any of us claim is in the imagination of God.

---Auberon Waugh, Diaries 1972-1985
--------------------------------------------------

Beer Alert!!!

As if all this ethanol and biofuels fever was not bad enough in what we taxpayers are giving away to Archer Daniels Midland in subsidies, someone pointed out over dinner the other evening a more present and immediate danger: the one to us beer drinkers of the world.

Apparently, strong biofuel demand for feedstocks such as corn, soyabeans and rapeseed is encouraging farmers to plant these crops rather than the traditional grains like barley.

The result? A structural change in agriculture in Europe and the United States that will bring about a permanent upswing in the price of beer, where barley and hops account for nearly 10 percent the cost of production. Barley feed futures are already up by 85 percent a tonne in the last ten months.

The unfortunate Mexicans, who exist largely on tortillas, are already halfway starving. Soon they won't even be able to afford a beer neither, never mind the slice of lemon on the neck of the bottle.

Al Gore and Dubya Bush will have much to answer for when they meet their Maker.
---------------------------

How the Irish Invented Technology

After having dug to a depth of 1,000 feet last year, Scottish scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1,000 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 1,000 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the Scots, English scientists dug to a depth of 2,000 feet and found traces of fiber-optic cable. They concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech digital communications network a thousand years earlier than the Scots.

One week later, Irish newspapers reported that after digging as deep as 5,000 feet in a Mayo bog, Irish scientists had found absolutely nothing.

They therefore concluded that 5,000 years ago the Irish were already using wireless technology.
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Politics as Usual

From New York State, of course, emerges the first-ever entirely bipartisan bumper sticker:

RUN HILARY RUN!!!

Democrats put it on the rear bumper. Republicans on the front bumper...
------------------------------------------

Humbuggery

Obese bore Al Gore, who is always lecturing us about our 'carbon footprint', turns out to be rather a humbug (indeed, a hypocrite) himself on the topic.

The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a free market think tank in Nashville where Gore maintains a large suburban home, has discovered that the home and swimming pool devoured nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours last year at a cost of $30,000. That lavish total is more than 20 times the national residential average consumption.

Gore has been powerless to dispute the numbers as they were taken from public records. The best riposte he could come up with to reporters was the ineffably feeble one that he and his wife Tipper "work out of our home."

And this is the guy who scolds and hectors us on energy use? Let him eat cake.
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Enough Brains to Fill an Eggcup?

Still on climate change (it really is the flavor du jour), NASA scientist James Hansen (he who set the whole global warming canard quacking many years ago, if Blather's memory serves) now tells the National Press Club in Washington D.C. that all existing coal plants without CO2 scrubbing should be closed: the loss of electric power to be made up by energy efficiency measures.

This truly is asinine, as Hansen must realise if he has enough brains to fill an eggcup.

Coal produces about half of the electricity consumed in America and about 160 new coal plants are in the pipeline to meet inevitably-growing demand in the next decade. Shutting down a large number of coal plants would likely bring the U.S. economy to its knees.

Luckily for NASA, Hansen said he was speaking as a private citizen which presumably encouraged him to hyperbole.
---------------------------------------

QUOTABLE

"Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words."

---Archibald Macleish

{Blather thought that he had a reasonable understanding of the English language but what the #!**#%!%@hell does this gibberish mean? Try again, Archibald.}
---------------------------------------

"Bureaucratic time, which is slower than geologic time but more expensive than time spent with Madame Claude's girls in Paris."

---P.J. O'Rourke
--------------------------------------

"If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't."

----Admiral Hyman Rickover
-----------------------------------------------

"Sustainability is like God, a good thing but, like God, something that is beyond comprehension."

----------Bob Hirsch

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"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years....."

Alexander Tyler, a history professor at the University of Edinburgh, was speaking (circa 1787) about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier. But today his words leave one wondering: how long do we have?

-----------------------------------------

"The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism [England] to a land of freedom [America] where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but prevent everybody else from enjoying his..."

------American humorist Charles Browne in 1866.
-------------------------------------------

"We have been subjected to a lot of nonsense about climate disasters, as some zealots have been painting extreme scenarios to frighten us. They claim ocean levels are about to rise spectacularly, that there could be an occasional tsunami as high as an eight-story building, the Amazon Basin could be destroyed as the ice cap in the Arctic melts.

"An overseas magazine called for Nuremberg-style trials for global warming skeptics while an American television correspondent compared skeptics to 'Holocaust Deniers'. What we are seeing from the doomsdayers is an induced dose of mild hysteria, semi-religious if you like, but dangerously close to superstition."

------George Cardinal Pell, archbishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of Sydney {Who said that all Cardinals have bird brains?}

----------------------------------------------

"Iniquia numquam regnan perpetui manent"

Unjust rules never endure forever {an optimistic---indeed somewhat questionable--aphorism from the Ancient Romans}.

"Insanus omnis furere credit ceteros"---Syrus

Every madman thinks that everyone else is mad {or a Guide to Daily Life on Capitol Hill}.

"Desideratum"

A thing much desired or needed {a phrase much employed in Singles Bars of a Friday evening, although 'Go Ugly Early' is the policy followed by the more cynical}.

"Inter spem et metum"

Between hope and fear {the congenital condition of Washington politicians around election time}.

"Homo doctus in se semper divitias habet"

A learned man always has wealth within himself.

----from Blather's "Bluffer's Guide to Latin"

---------------------ends----------------------------

Poor Exxon (who do you trust?)

2007-03-02T07:47:00.000-08:00

Exxon took a lot of heat for funding studies in climate skepticism and finally retired under pressure.

For scale, Exxon funded about $2 million/yr. Greenpeace Germany alone does about $40 million/yr and Greenpeace International about $35 million, so all told Greenpeace does around $100 million globally, though it is not all climate stuff. However, GP does very little in the US, where folks like NRDC, ED, WWF, UCS, etc., do many millions.

But the big US money is the federal USGCRP which spends about $1.7 billion/yr, mostly to support AGW. Most of the vocal AGW advocates feed at the federal trough. The center is NCAR, funded by NSF.

Most of the AGW leaders are modelers. A fascinating aspect of what is going on is the rise of modeling across the sciences. Some leaders call modeling the new "third pillar" of science, along with observation and theory. In reality modeling is just solving equations provided by theory, something we have always done.

The underlying issue is how much to believe models? Science as a whole is grappling with this issue, not just climate science.

BLATHER 22.II.2007

2007-02-22T10:14:00.000-08:00

A Diary by John McCaughey

Blather [magazine] is here. As we advance to make our bow, you will look in vain for signs of servility or for any evidence of a slavish desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. Blather doesn't care. A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?

---Flann O'Brien, Dublin, 1934
--------------------------------------------
None of us can really be sure that we exist. My whole life, as this Diary shows, is a lie. All the characters in it are invented, none bears any resemblance to anyone living or dead. People who claim to find themselves here must know that the only real existence we can any of us claim is in the imagination of God.

---Auberon Waugh, Diaries 1972-1985
--------------------------------------------------

Last Exit to Brooklyn

David Lochbaum, a safety engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists (it has few scientists and is concerned mostly about dues income), claims to have identified a serious new radiation threat.

This is the ubiquitous and seemingly-harmless "Exit" signs seen on any American highway.

Prodnose Lochbaum has discovered that the signs contain radioactive tritium which allows them to glow in the dark. And also that they are disposed off in ordinary landfills.

This means, he explains, that high levels of tritium could be contained in the water leaking from landfills---water that is technically called "leachate". So Prodnose wants the NRC, EPA and other fed regulators to monitor landfill sites and to solve the problem.

Just how this can be done remains a mystery. As is the mystery of who, in any case, drinks "leachate".
-----------------------

Lie Back and Enjoy It

The cant word of the moment is "resource nationalism". But in various forms it has been around for a long time: the practice of governments nationalizing foreign-owned enterprises on their soil, invariably at a low price (sometimes approaching zero). Confiscation, expropriation or theft might be better words for it, because, as it usually an oil facility or a coal mine or the like, the foreign owner is unable to pick up his marbles and run.

The current champion of the art is Venezuelan President Hugo "Fidel Light" Chavez who a month or so ago announced that he would nationalize key telecommunications, utility and oil ventures in his socialist Banana Republic, which now has an inflation rate of nearly 20 percent and is, in any case, seeing a huge flight from the country of oil industry professionals and drilling rigs.

Nothing unusual about the confiscations: in the trade it's called a "political risk" that a foreign buyer should have evaluated and taken into consideration before making his investment.

Thus, Arlington-based AES had little choice but to sell its 82 percent stake in EDC, Venezuela's largest private electric utility, back to Chavez's entirely-corrupt government for $739 million.

Sounds like a lot of money? Er, not quite. It is less than half of the $1.7 billion that AES spent to acquire the shares some seven years ago.

What is, perhaps, a trifle unusual is the saintly forebearance of AES chief executive Paul Hanrahan.

"I think this deal is a fair one," he told a news conference in Caracas shown on state-owned Globovision. He added that the deal had "respected the rights of investors....It's with a heavy heart that we part with EDC. We understand that it was a strategic decision of the Venezuelan government and we respect that."

It's difficult to negotiate with a gun at your head so Hanrahan's forebearance may perhaps be understood (and bugger the AES shareholders). But it does remind one rather of the anxious upper-class English woman who enquired what she should do if the island were invaded by Hitler and she was about to be raped by a Nazi storm-trooper.

"Oh, I shouldn't worry about that," replied her companion. "If you're going to be raped, just lie back and enjoy it."
------------------------------------------

Heatwave in Tibet

To Tibet, land of 46,000 glaciers and the world's highest mountains, for a weekend break. There, in the Karo-la Pass, our old friend Tsawang Dumi, the shepherd, reports delightedly that global warming has arrived. As a result, far fewer of his sheep and goats have died this winter. Tsawang lives on the 24,000 foot mountain of Nozing Kangtsang between the Tibetan capital city of Lhasa and Mount Everest.

To celebrate the global warming, Tsawang and Blather mount their yaks and descend a few thousand feet to the nearest public house, known as The Himalayan Hillside, where we partake of Hot Toddies made with fermented yak milk.

"I have heard of global warming," says Tsawang, "although I don't really understand what it means." Solemnly, we drink to this. Better to remain in ignorance.
------------------------------------

The Answer is Blowing in the Wind

Czechoslovakia, previously only known as a country that gave the world the beautiful city of Prague, has now achieved new fame. Visiting the city the other day, we dined with Czech president Vaclav Klaus (Blather always makes a point of meeting with political leaders when travelling abroad) and we were delighted when Vaclav told us that fears of catastrophic man-made global warming were "a myth" and that the UN IPCC process was just gotten up by a bunch of politicised hacks who are in it for the money.

It is good to know that Czechoslovakia is in such sensible hands. Perhaps too the pendulum is beginning to swing and the steam to go out of the global warming scare, as it went out of alar on apples, EMF fields and a score of other scares in recent decades.

Next to Rome to ask dear old Joe Ratzinger what are his views on the issue.
--------------------------------------

Unhappy Valentine's Day

British enviros marked Valentine's Day by complaining that air-freighting flowers to the country (they claim that the average bunch has flown 33,800 miles to reach Blighty) has "serious implications" for climate change in terms of carbon dioxide emissions from aeroplanes.

"We don't want to be killjoys, because receiving flowers can be lovely. But why not grow your own gift?" says Vicky Hird of Friends of the Earth.

Because roses don't grow in Britain in winter, you silly girl.
------------------------------------------

Here Comes the Sun

The little town of Viganella in Italy (close to the Swiss border) has a problem. It lives in the shadow of a steep mountain that blocks the sun's rays for most of the winter months.

Enter Emilio Barlocco, an engineer. At his suggestion, a 430-square-foot mirror was placed on the mountainside 2,900 feet above the town to deflect the sun's rays into the town square in winter.

The mirror is motorised, controlled by a computer in the town hall and is so versatile that the rays can be directed specifically---at the church for a baptism, for example, or the local bar for a wedding feast. It doesn't generate a lot of heat, Mayor Pierfranco Midali admits, but it may be helping the few hundred town inhabitants to lose their customary ghastly winter pallor.

It is also helping the local economy and is offsetting its $130,000 cost by attracting tourists, the media and the curious to the town. "More persons have passed through Viganella in the last two years than in the past two centuries," says the Mayor.

Aren't our engineers wonderful?
--------------------------------------

QUOTABLE

"The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a slim summary today trimming down thousands of pages of its massive overall Fourth Scientific Assessment on global warming, which will be released in May...Hundreds of scientists have been involved in the review process, and it is safe to say that means hundreds of bored scientists, because there is very little in it that is scientifically new....In summary, what's not new in today's IPCC report---that humans are warming the planet---will be treated as big news, while what is new--that sea levels are not likely to rise as much as previously predicted---will be ignored, at least by everyone except the extremist fringe."

----Patrick J. Michaels, The Cato Institute
-----------------------------------------

"When a lover once complained to him that, for a poet, he was not very romantic, Auden replied: 'If it's romance you're looking for, go f--- a journalist...' "

-----James Fenton, London Guardian newspaper, February 2007, on the English poet W.H. Auden. The poet was a bachelor.
------------------------------------------

"The loudest voices are those of the hardcore alarmists, with their 'moral' urge to compel us to consume less and fly less. H.L. Mencken observed astutely that 'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the population alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.'

"Where aviation and emissions are concerned, we should be very wary of politicians who brandish moralistic arguments to justify taxes which will ultimately yield few gains to us or to the environment."

----Kendra Okonski, environment program director, International Policy Network, London, on why punitive taxes on air fares and fuel will do little or nothing to save the planet.
----------------------------------------

"In the time of Henry Luce, information wasn't dispersed as quickly. Now, everyone has turned into a news reporter. It really is a different world and these legacy businesses are going through a wrenching transition. They have to run the old business while building the new one."

-----Harold Vogel, Vogel Capital Management, New York on the news that Time Inc is eliminating nearly 300 magazine jobs and closing numerous bureaux in big cities.
-----------------------------------------------

"Exercitatio optimus es magister"

Practice is the best teacher.

"Diabolus me coegit peccare!"

The Devil made me do it {always a good excuse when you've screwed up}.

"Procrastina rem nunc"

Procrastinate now...

"Industriae nil impossibile"

Nothing is impossible with industry...

-----from Blather's "Bluffer's Guide to Latin."
----------------------------

Our Hispanic Cousins

"There is nothing to say of Murillo* but that his pictures are very good furniture for sacred buildings. From any other standpoint they are profoundly insignificant. He has a pleasing talent for composition, his colour is soft and pretty; he is loose, sentimental, graceful and superficial. And yet when you see these paintings in the places for which they were painted, dimly lit and magnificently framed, in a chapel of which the rich tones complete their colour, you cannot deny that they have something. They appeal to an over-wrought, sickly devotion, the other side of the Spanish violence, crudity and brutishness. They appeal to the faculty of shedding abundant tears, the love of children, the casual admiration of a pretty girl and the half superstitious charitableness, which are to be found in the average Spaniard."

----W. Somerset Maugham "A Writer's Notebook" 1933

*Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), a Spanish painter who believed in God and worked for the Franciscans.
===================ends==================

Chinese horde menaces IPCC

2007-02-17T07:53:00.000-08:00

The highly touted IPCC opinion that humanistic climate change is very (90%) likely masks a non-consensual reality. Seems there was a 5 hour debate behind the closed green doors before this compromise figure was settled on. The usual suspects wanted an even higher figure -- 99% or virtually certain. (While this no doubt accurately measures their conviction it does not reflect the dramatically divided science, but that is another story.)

The Chinese, who were massed at the border of sanity, wanted a simple likely, or 66%. This was the first time the Red Horde had appeared in numbers and the Greens, like the US Army in Korea, were unprepared for the onslaught. Hence the 5 hour battle.

What makes this little fight tantalizing is two facts. First, the Chinese have embarked on an aggressive campaign to become a scientific superpower. They have invested large portions of their new found coal-fired prosperity in this effort. In fact the Chinese are estimated to have 800,000 research workers on the ground, second only to the US's 1.2 million and well ahead of the Japanese 650,000. Numerous scientific journals have been overrun by squads and companies of Chinese authors. Several hosts of Chinese scholars who came to the US to study and stayed have returned to the Eastern Empire, at least part time. It is a grand parade and science is that much better for it.

Second, China recently announced that climate science would be a new focus of this great effort, a major stop on its long march to scientific supremacy. Given its IPCC troublemaking, dare we hope that Chinese climate science will take a more skeptical route? It would certainly fit with the Chinese passion for coal. It would also break the Green stranglehold on national science.

On the other hand the Russians tried this rocky route and wound up being bought off with the promise of untold billions for carbon credits (presently worthless but the EU is working on it). The Chinese have now said that they have not the money or technology to reduce emissions, but it is for sale of course.

All things considered this looks to be a strong field position for the Chinese. Threatening massive scientific skepticism while holding out for much money. Since the Green Barbarians have never had to retreat it could be a Clash of Titans. Stay tuned and enjoy the show.

IPCC's Artful Bias

2007-02-03T09:59:00.000-08:00

Every trial lawyer will tell you that the key to presenting a strong case lies in carefully omitting the evidence against you. This is not lying, it is artful bias. Advocacy is the heart of our adversarial judicial system. Each side presents its case in the strongest possible terms, as though the other side's case did not exist. The jury hears both sides, puts the whole story together, then decides.

Anyone who doubts that the new IPCC Summary for Policy Makers is an advocacy document is ineligible for duty on the jury of reason. So what ain't they saying? Unfortunately the other side does not seem to be represented. We have looked in vain for the minority report. You would think that for $18 million they could afford one, but that just measures the advocationality of the thing. One side fits all.

Here is just a graphic peek at the missing side to give you the flavor of the game. Figure 2 shows a bunch of bars. Each represents one of the factors that is thought to have influenced global temperature. We see at once that all but one of these bars is human. Most are pretty big, especially the really big red one labeled CO2. There is one tiny natural bar labeled Solar.

There it is. Case closed. The jury can go home, no need to hear from the other side, it will only confuse them. We did it. The prosecution rests, let the persecution begin.

Well not really, as always in these proceedings. A big pile of contrary science is missing here. Good science, interesting science, being carried on by a whole lot of real scientists.

For simplicity let's divide this mountain of contrary science into three high heaps.

The first heap has to do with this little bitty solar bar. This bar is based on the relatively small amount of variable, direct radiant energy coming from the sun. What is omitted is a huge amount of research going on into indirect and amplified solar mechanisms. The reason for this research is the close correlation between solar variation and global temperature, seen over a lot of time scales. Something is going on but we don't know what and there are a lot of theories. Google Scholar lists over 500,000 scientific papers on solar variability. The IPCC omits this research because it does not help their case.

The second heap includes little things like the ocean, earth wobbles, etc., that are also thought to heavily influence climate. They get no bar at all, because we can't measure their influence either, even though we know it is there.

The third heap is ugly but very real. It is research into natural climate variability per se, something that has received a lot of attention. We now know that climate varies all the time, for reasons we do not understand. It has varied quite naturally a lot more than the little bit we are fussing with today. So today's warming may well be simply the emergence of mother earth from the famous Little Ice Age. But you can't put a bar on the LIA because we don't know what causes it. Looking at the IPCC bar chart you would never know there was a LIA, just a lot of human stuff and a bitty bit of sun. That is the truly artful part of their bias, simply ignore what we don't understand, like it did not exist.

In short, it is easy to argue that humans control climate, if you omit nature. That is just what the IPCC does, and it is very good advocacy. It's just not good science.

The Washington Pest

BLATHER 2.II.2007

2007-02-02T08:17:00.000-08:00

A Diary by John McCaughey
======================

Blather [magazine] is here. As we advance to make our bow, you will look in vain for signs of servility or for any evidence of a slavish desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. Blather doesn't care. A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?

---Flann O'Brien, Dublin, 1934
--------------------------------------------

None of us can really be sure that we exist. My whole life, as this Diary shows, is a lie. All the characters in it are invented, none bears any resemblance to anyone living or dead. People who claim to find themselves here must know that the only real existence we can any of us claim is in the imagination of God.

---Auberon Waugh, Diaries 1972-1985
--------------------------------------------------

Department of Weasel Words

Blather thought that it had heard all of the many euphemisms for a tax increase: "revenue enhancement" and "solidarity payments" are two of our favorites.

But California Ubergovernor Arnold Schwarzenegger came up with an imaginative new one the other day. He proposes to tax California doctors, hospitals and employers to raise money for his new $12 billion statewide health plan.

However "It's not a tax, just a loan," he told the Sacramento Bee, "because it does not go for general [expenditures]. It goes back to health care."

When and where, the Californians may well ask, can they obtain repayment of their loan. And will they be paid interest? Even by Californian standards, this does not pass the straight face test.

Who elected him anyway?
-----------------------------------

Casino not so Royale?

Oops, short your shares in the Nice, Cannes and Monaco casinos. A new European Commission report foresees chilly Northern Europe benefiting greatly from global warming while the Mediterranean (not to mention Spain, Greece and Italy) face shortages of water and tourists by mid-21st Century. The North Sea coast may become the new Riviera. Crops there would blossom and boom. Tourist spending in the South (an estimated $130 billion a year) would be drastically reduced.

Of course, all of this is thumb-sucking forecasting and almost certainly balls. But it is pleasant to contemplate, nevertheless. When we were staying at the Negresco Hotel on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice the other week, it was scandalous what they were charging for a simple cocktail. Serves the Frogs jolly well right.
-----------------------------------------

Loonspuddery: A Delightful Word

We spotted "loonspuddery" in a letter printed in Britain's "New Science" magazine recently. Essentially, it appears from the context to mean "arrant nonsense". It is perhaps a combination of "loon" ( a silly or foolish person) and "spudder" which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as fuss or disturbance.

In "New Scientist", the letter writer employed it in a discussion of how to detect that one's correspondent is a crackpot. In journalism, the old rule was that if the letter was handwritten in various colors of ink (especially green) and with no margins, the writer clearly was off his rocker.

This brings pleasurably to mind another amusing old story. Margins are more commonly referred to as "borders" in America. The late J. Edgar Hoover of FBI fame had a peculiar fetish (one of many) that all reports sent to him by agents in the field should have copious margins or borders so that Hoover would have space to scribble his comments alongside the text.

One agent in New Mexico neglected this injunction and sent in his report filling the entire page. Hoover angrily scribbled at the top: "Let's watch the borders, please".

As a result, it is said, hundreds of extra agents were dispatched for many months fruitlessly to watch the borders with Mexico and Canada.
---------------------------------

A New Dingellgram

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's bold (and almost certainly doomed) decision to create a non-legislative committee dedicated to global warming and thus to intrude into the turf of the Energy and Commerce Committee (chairman: the legendary John Dingell, D-Mich.) has produced a magisterial rebuke from that great man.

Dingell is no passionate believer in climate change or global warming---possibly because many of his supporters work in the ailing Detroit auto industry. Nonetheless, he is planning to smother the whole issue with kindness: that is, to hold endless hearings, even if this entails listening for hours to the tiresome and stupid Al Gore.

"I recognize that there is a wide range of opinion on climate change and it is my intention that we hear the full spectrum of views," says Dingell blandly and with only just a hint of sarcasm.

But then he tore off his whiskers and got down to business. Pelosi's "kind of committees are as useful in relevance as feathers on a fish", added the veteran old hunter and politician.

Nancy may have made a formidable enemy.
--------------------------------------

QUOTABLE

"Alas, I fear that there is no truth in the rumour that the two brothers* are thinking of joining the Roman Catholic Church. At any rate, it seems most unlikely that there is any truth in the rumour as I have just this moment invented it. But history is often moulded by poetic visions of this sort and I think I will send Lord Longford** round to see them.

"For myself, I propose to make a pilgrimage along the path of the old Crusades, lighting candles in all the churches on the way to advance this pleasant idea.

"First to St. Mark's in Venice where two huge candles burn side by side in honour of these unfortunate brothers, one for Toady, one for Slimy. Then to Ravenna where I light another two in the church of S. Apollinare in Classe under the wonderful Bzyantine mosaic of sheep on a green background.

"Soon candles will be burning all over the Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean, that God may see fit to lighten their sad lives and fill their poor shrivelled hearts with His love, giving them the fortitude to face the misfortunes and personal tragedies still in store for them..."

---Auberon Waugh: "Diaries" October 1980

*The brothers Toady and Slimy Shrimsley were two prominent Fleet Street journalists with whom Waugh had a feud on. Toady had insulted Waugh and Slimy had sued him for libel (an action subsequently and ignominiously withdrawn).

Waugh's Candle-Burning Campaign spectacularly succeeded. Within a short while, Toady died and Slimy was sacked from the editorship of a high-circulation (if smutty) British Sunday newspaper called "News of the Screws."

Neither brother was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

**Lord Longford was a well-known Roman Catholic peer engaged in a crusade for morality and public decency. This required assiduous research and for that reason he could often be seen in the front row at various London strip-tease bars.
--------------------------------------------

"Dixi"

I have spoken. I will say no more.
---------------------------------------------------

"But whatever the source of the individual words, in the domains of botany and zoology Latin is a language which guarantees that the terminology is correct and consistent. The system which Linnaeus* introduced has turned out to be so good that it does not just live on but is continuously being extended and added to. For Linnaeus, as we have seen, it was a matter of course to use Latin for his names, as it was the only scientific language available in his day. Latin may have disappeared from most other sciences, but when it comes to the naming of species it is most probably going to stay on for the foreseeable future. There is simply nothing else that works as well."

----Tore Janson, "A Natural History of Latin" {Oxford 2004}

*Carl Linnaeus, a Swede. Created the system of classifying living organisms based upon their reproductive systems. His famous book "Systema Naturae" classified 4,400 species of animals and 7,700 species of plants. He was born 300 years ago. Often called the Father of Taxonomy, his face appears on Swedish currency and several places on the Moon are named after him.

From Blather's "Bluffer's Guide to Latin."
---------------------------------------------

"Jules Renard was very honest, and he does not draw a pretty picture of himself in his 'Journal'. He was malignant, cold, selfish, narrow, envious and ungrateful. His only redeeming feature was his love for his wife; she is the only person in all these volumes of whom he consistently speaks with kindness. He was immensely susceptible to any fancied affront, and his vanity was outrageous. He had neither charity nor good will. He splashes with his angry contempt everything he doesn't understand, and the possibility never occurs to him that if he doesn't [understand] the fault may lie in himself. He was odious, incapable of a generous gesture, and almost incapable of a generous emotion. But for all that the 'Journal' is wonderfully good reading. It is extremely amusing. It is witty and subtle and often wise...."

---"A Writer's Notebook" by W. Somerset Maugham (1949)
--------------------------------

"How to be rude: It is easy to be rude on the Continent. You just shout and call people names of a zoological character...In England, rudeness has quite a different technique. If someone tells you an obviously-untrue story on the Continent, you would remark: 'You are a liar, Sir, and a rather dirty one at that.' In England you just say: 'Oh, is that so?'. Or 'That's rather an unusual story, isn't it?'."

Georges Mikes "How To Be an Alien" 1947. {Mikes was a Hungarian immigrant to Britain who enjoyed satirising the English. He died in 1987.}
-----ends--------------------------

Nothing New Here

2007-01-30T12:44:00.000-08:00

It's not clear whether the beloved (just kidding) Press has become more or less biased over the Centuries. One thing never changes -- people like to read what they want to hear.
The Pest

How shall I speak of thee or thy power address,
Thou God of our idolatry, the Press?
By thee, religion, liberty and laws
Exert their influence and advance their cause;
By thee worse plagues than Pharaoh's land befell,
Diffused, make earth the vestibule of Hell;
Thou fountain at which drink the good and wise;
Thou ever-bubbling spring of endless lies;
Like Eden's dead probationary tree,
Knowledge of good and evil is from thee.

"The Progress of Error"
William Cowper (1782)

BLATHER 25.I.2007

2007-01-26T11:23:00.000-08:00

Bush Jerks Climate Rug

2007-01-24T10:26:00.000-08:00

With a soft whoosh and a loud thud, George Bush pulled the climate rug right out from under Lady Pelosi and the Dems.

Bush is offering voters a simple, painless solution -- just use a different gas pump. E85 not only stops climate change but brings instant energy independence. This is something the Dems have also foolishly made part of the climate equation, with the Energy Independence or Global Warming Select Committee. Takes the heat off of electricity, where we only depend on our harmless and friendly neighbor, Canada.

Down with climate. Down with OPEC. Down I say.

This is so much better than the ration and gamble (a.k.a. cap & trade) big money you never see strategy of the Dems.

It even gets the kids off your back (the real need to do something) because it is an overt family act, done over and over, like recycling. Fill the tank to save the earth. Gotta love it. Sticker bait.

It also pays the farmers, making it the perfect political solution. Breathtaking.

Is this a great country or what?

The Pest

Protect Your Toilet Paper Rolls

2007-01-19T04:31:00.000-08:00

By Ima Kute Copp, local action news

A trashy story appears in the local action section of the fantasyland Washington Post-Democrat newspaper. We are not making this up. The hyperventilated headline is: "An Environmentalist's Moment of Glory: Arlington Lawmaker Praised for Greenhouse Gas Initiative."

The story behind the story (accompanied by two large color photographs) can no better be expressed than in the words of the newspaper's manifestly-stupid staff writer Annie Gowen:

"Over the years, residents of the Fairlington neighborhood in Arlington County have grown accustomed to the site (sic) of a tall, lanky figure going through the trash bins outside their homes.

"No matter---it's just their county board president, Paul Ferguson, making sure they've recycled their cardboard toilet paper rolls properly."

The lanky Ferguson with his strange proclivities for diving for toilet paper rolls is, the idiotic reporter gushes, 41 years old and a longtime environmentalist and a vegetarian. As the headline notes, he also makes laws.

He has launched a $6 million Inconvenience Initiative (inspired in part by Al Gore's silly and duplicitous movie) to lower Arlington County's greenhouse gas emissions. The taxpayers will be asked to cough up the $6 million despite the fact that the county has a budget shortfall for the coming year of an estimated $20 million. Ferguson says that he is nevertheless comfortable with the price tag. Clearly fit for Congress.

Our advice to anyone who finds this lanky weirdo diving for toilet paper rolls in their trash bins is to call the police, who have been trying to nab him. Better yet, set the dogs on him. In no case vote for him.

Climate Marxism -- a Book Review

2007-01-18T10:46:00.000-08:00

"Environment, Capitalism and Socialism"
Resistance Books, 23 Abercrombie St, Chippendale 2008, Australia

It is all here -- http://www.dsp.org.au/dsp/ECS/index.htm

An easy read if you like light Marxism, dry but not turgid. Marxism turns out to be surprisingly compatible with Climate Change Doctrine. Or maybe not that surprisingly, but very compatible. Marx, who never owned anything, would approve.

Marxism promises a workers' paradise upon the death of Capitalism. (Not to be confused with Muslim paradise, which is to die for.) Technology is supposed to provide the paradisiacal stuff of life, but this has been a hard check to cash.

Enter Climate Change Doctrine which teaches that we ought not to want so much. Behold, we have Sustainable Paradise. Climate Marxism promises not to make the workers equally rich, but to make them want to be equally poor. And we definitely have the technology to meet that challenge, the poor part, not the wanting part.

According to Climate Marxism the workers only want to be rich because of the evil genius of, you guessed it, Capitalism. Capitalism spends untold bazillions on mind-bending advertising (tell us about it) that dupes the workers into wanting unneeded stuff. Personal comfort and security is a con game. (We doubt this but it is Marx after all and a strong dose of willful suspension of disbelief is called for, preferably administered in a strong drink.)

Marxism only promises "to each according to need," not according to want, read the fine print. So only want what you need and paradise awaits. As soon as we get rid of evil genius Capitalism and all those damned commercials (a lot to like here).

Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains, your pensions and your carbon-based lifestyles. And no more commercials.

The Washington Pest

BLATHER 16.I.2007

2007-01-16T10:54:00.000-08:00

Fun With Asceticism

2007-01-13T10:39:00.000-08:00

British opposition Tory leader David Cameron says "We've got to try and make the environment and climate change uplifting and fun and interesting ..."

Fun? Doing less with less is fun? We have always said that energy conservation is asceticism disguised as engineering, but fun? For example:

(Stolen from the Brit Independent) Flights within the UK should be taxed almost out of existence, a leading Tory MP said today. Tim Yeo, who chairs the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, said he wanted to see "virtually no" domestic flights taking off within a decade. Fun? Trains are fun, well not really. Once, not twice.

Meanwhile, Alistair Darling, the Trade and Industry Secretary, said that climate change could be the biggest business opportunity of the 21st century with the potential to create 100,000 new jobs in the next decade. "From climate change seen simply as a threat, the environment a cost, to where it is viewed as the greatest business opportunity of our age. Bringing jobs and wealth to Britain," he said.

Fun + jobs! My Darling thinks enviro costs are benefits because somebody gets the money. Voters may disagree. 100,000 make-work jobs, like driving people who should be flying, is not fun.

Clearly British politics has fallen into a frenzy of green one-upmanship. But then these are the funny folks that brought us Through the Looking Glass. Let's watch the new US Congress try to top them, as they no doubt will.

Enjoy the show. It should be fun.

The Washington Pest

The smell of Manhattan By Erik Blare

2007-01-09T09:08:00.000-08:00

It was the fart that felled Manhattan.

On Monday morning, Jan. 8 2007, a foul odor invaded trendy Manhattan and parts of New Jersey, causing transit shutdowns, business closings, and angry New Yorkers demanding an answer to what was invading the normally clean, pellucid air of the Big Apple. The answer wasn’t rotten apple.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, D-R-I-G, and anything in between, announced at a press conference before noon that serious investigations determined that the smell was not natural gas. That’s cool, because natural gas does not have an odor at all.

What Bloomberg was saying, although it’s not likely he understood what he was saying, is that the smell wasn’t from pipeline natural gas. Because methane has no smell – and is dangerous because it is heavier than air and displaces oxygen, leading to asphyxiations in some circumstances (such as inside the oven or in a construction ditch) – hishonor was reassuring the public that there was nothing to fear from the odor, but fear itself.

Let us all breathe a collective breath of relief, while holding our noses.
“The smell is there, we don’t know the source of it; it does not appear to be dangerous,” Bloomberg said. “And some of the facilities that were evacuated or shut down are now being reopened or put back on line.”

Of course, if it was natural gas, there was not much to fear, either, for a variety of reasons. But that’s another tale.

The reason natural gas smells is that the natural gas industry adds chemicals – mercaptans – making sure it smells bad in order to alert consumers if their gas stove or heating system is leaking. The fear is explosion if the right oxygen and methane mix occurs (unlikely in the out-of-doors).

That’s why farts smell. They have body-made chemicals, thiols that are related to mercaptans, that add odor to the odorless methane. According to Wikipedia, “The odor of thiols is often strong and repulsive, particularly for those of low molecular weight. Thiols bind strongly to skin proteins, and are responsible for the intolerable, persistent odor produced by feces, rotting flesh and the spraying of skunks.”

So here’s the answer to the malodorous Manhattan conundrum: The East River Monster.

For many years, the more clear-headed of us observers of life in the Big Ap have know that a giant, Loch Ness-quality creature has been living in the East River. Every now and again, Eastie surfaces, to eat a Toyota pickup truck for a film crew, or to release a giant fart. Normally, the wind blows from west to east, sending Eastie’s effluvia toward his native Scotland.

There was no film crew at East River on Monday, and the wind was blowing from east to west. Uggh!

BLATHER by John McCaughey, himself

2007-01-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

After much begging on our part and the false promise of fame, John McCaughey has agreed to lend, but not sell, his fiascodic wit to The Pest. To Wit:

BLATHER

A Diary by John McCaughey

7.I.2007
======================

Blather [magazine] is here. As we advance to make our bow, you will look in vain for signs of servility or for any evidence of a slavish desire to please. We are an arrogant and depraved body of men. Blather doesn't care. A sardonic laugh escapes us as we bow, cruel and cynical hounds that we are. It is a terrible laugh, the laugh of lost men. Do you get the smell of porter?

---Flann O'Brien, Dublin, 1934
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A Bad Year for Hurricane Alarmists

There can be no doubt about it: 2006 was a very bad year for hurricane alarmists. Storm and hurricane days were each off by 30 percent, Category 3-plus days off by 50 percent and Category 4 days off by 54 percent. Hurricane days were at their lowest level since 1989. The hyped-season turned out not to happen. Deaths and damages were about a hundredfold less than the previous year. It must be a seasonal thing. So all these theories that global warming fuels hurricane activity turn out to be just balls. And the forecasters turn out to be about as useful as the Deaf Adder they used to teach me about when I won a prize for Scripture Knowledge in school. Still, every non-hurricane has a silver lining. Insurers posted a $24.4 billion profit in the first nine months of 2006.Insured losses in 2006 from natural disasters (usually hurricanes) were $15 billion compared to $99 billion in 2005.
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We'll Huff and We'll Puff and Not Blow the House Down

Having ruined some of the finest scenery in Europe (especially in the Scottish Highlands) the New Labour government in Britain turns out to have made a bloomer. A new independent study shows that very few wind farms in England and Wales produce anything like the amount of electricity civil servants and politicians had forecast, despite exorbitant subsidies to wide-boy wind farm developers.

Not merely do the turbines rarely work when power is most needed, but some of the output is ludicrously low: about 24 percent of capacity on average, dropping to 8.8 percent at one pharmaceutical plant which had installed its turbines for PC reasons rather than to benefit the shareholders.

Said John Constable of the group which performed the study: "We're really talking about a garden ornament, not a power station. These are statements about the company's corporate social responsibility, not efficient generating capacity."

Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has set a goal of producing 15 percent of Britain's energy from renewables by 2015. This would be comical if it were not so pathetic.
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After You, Claude...

Once a sensible, pragmatic, business newspaper, Britain's Financial Times has gone entirely wobbly, as a long, fatuous lead editorial in a recent edition reveals. This urges urgent and decisive action in 2007 to write and to ratify a new and much tougher Kyoto Accord against global warming. The leader column is full of the same tired old arguments with which the enviros have been boring us for years: mandatory cuts in emissions, the excellence of Al Gore's movie, you know the sort of hopeless rubbish.

Mercifully, the leader writer, to some extent gets a grip near the end when he quotes (from a classic British radio comedy) the phrase: "After you, Claude; No, after you, Cecil" about two old-school British gentlemen who could never get through a door because of excessive politeness.

"No country," says the leader writer, "wants to risk economic damage from cutting its carbon emissions unless it is sure that others will do the same." Quite so: ask the smirking Frogs, the Indians or the Chinks.
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The Natural Gas Cartel that Won't Happen

For a while, a year or so ago, it was a fertile and profitable story for energy hacks: the notion that (led by the Russians and Algerians) there would be created an OPEC-style natural gas cartel.

But as time goes by it seems ever less likely. Gas is traded mostly on long-term contracts, so manipulating prices by altering supply (in the way that OPEC does with oil) is more difficult.

In any case, in both Russia and Algeria, under-investment is such that no cartel is needed to boost gas prices, even if Europe depends on Russia for a quarter of its natural gas and Vladimir Putin is an old, unreconstructed KGB man determined to reconstitute the Stalin-era Soviet Union.

But, in the end, Russia's Gazprom is at least as reliant on Europe as Europe is on Gazprom. Go figure...
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Home Design Hot Air

BedZed, a development of 99 apartments in south London, was designed to provide "zero carbon" living and to be entirely sustainable: wind-driven ventilation, rainwater to flush toilets, solar panels, walls two feet thick packed with insulation, triple-glazed conservatory to trap sunlight and heat house and many more such features.

Four years later, it turns out that it doesn't work.

The wood-burning technology that was supposed to provide heat and power has been abandoned, few of the tenants use the recommended "organic food boxes" (whatever they are) and the sewage treatment system (waste water filtered through reed beds) is no longer used.

"This hasn't turned out to be a zero-carbon development," says a rue Pooran Desai, who helped found the project. "We have learned as much about how not to do things as how to do them."

The problem is that there is no such thing as a "zero-carbon house."
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Crackpot Charlie

Dear old Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, who has spent his life waiting fruitlessly for Queen Elizabeth II to die so that he may ascend the throne, now amuses himself by giving speeches.

The latest one informs us that we are "all living on borrowed time" if we don't stop eating up the world's resources.

Charlie is a fan of Al Gore, of course, and worries out loud about the "climate crisis." He encourages staff to get around London by bicycle rather than cars or cabs.

No question that Charlie is eccentric, but then he comes from an eccentric family. The current Queen's great-uncle Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, Duke of Clarence, eldest son of Edward VII, was widely suspected to be Jack the Ripper, the notorious killer of prostitutes in London around 1890. And Henry, Duke of Gloucester, suffered from a distressing mental illness for many years before his death in 1974.

Despite the fact that he believed himself to be a poached egg, at school in Eton we all liked the Duke. He used to be known by us as "Henry Bonkers". So Charles is following a honorable tradition.
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QUOTABLE

"In the case of global warming, the unanimity of so many scientists is very suspicious: it makes one feel that they are acting as a monopoly in their own interest (funds, power, publicity). Their sentences too often begin with the words 'The science says....' as if that could be asserted absolutely. When governments start to act against climate change, the efficacy of what they do will be highly uncertain. What will be certain, however, will be higher taxes (moralistically enforced in a 'Don't you know there's a war on?' tone of voice) and a vast extension of bureaucratic power. Having survived 50 years of people prophesying doom, I feel tempted to walk around with a placard saying 'The End is Not Nigh' ".

Charles Moore, The Spectator (London), November 2006
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"John Spence's "Shetland Folklore" (1899) mentioned an old custom from which the verb "to earmark" is derived : Everyone knew his own sheep by the marks cut in their ears. The various sheep marks had names by which they were known, such as "bits, crooks, fiddlers" and "shols" indicating different cuts in the ear...."

Jeffrey Kacirk, Dictionary of Forgotten English

Pandora's Polar Bear

2007-01-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

The US Fish & Wildlife Service has proposed classifying the polar bear as a threatened species. What makes this unusual is that the bear is not threatened by humans. The polar bear is threatened by computer models.

This action could set a really fat precedent because computer models are much more dangerous than humans. It is estimated that at least one half of all living species are threatened by computer models. Mitigating all these threats could keep the FWS busy, not to mention rich and powerful, for years to come.

The problem is that some computer models say the Arctic ice cap will disappear in about 40 years, give or take a century. Polar bears live and work on the ice so this might be a problem for them, we don't really know.

Just to be sure the FWS wants to invoke the Endangered Species Act, to give them dictatorial, sorry, administrative powers now to help the may someday be out of work bears. This especially means designating critical habitat (land, lots of it) where the bears can do whatever they are going to do when there is no ice to do it on. Artificial ice is also a possibility.

Mind you the bears are fine for now so send your BearCare packages to the Pandas as usual. In fact the polar bears might do very well on land, where they used to live about 300,000 years ago, before they took to the ice. They were called Grizzlies then and were brown, to go with their decor. Perhaps we are trying to protect the color, not the bear. The FWS proposal is silent on this question.

The Pest has learned that the FWS is also studying another million or so species for possible classification as threatened by computer models. Comments on the polar bear proposal are due around April Fool's Day, but the Pest has yet to figure out just who the joke is on. Send your nominations to the FWS, not the Pest.

For more and funnier information, see:
http://alaska.fws.gov/fisheries/mmm/polarbear/issues.htm

Green wave breaking -- Green Lip Syndrome

2006-12-24T08:36:00.000-08:00

Consider the physics of democracy. The first law of democracy is every squeak gets some grease. The second law is that when a cry for action is met by an equal and opposite response then no action is taken. This leads to system behavior that is described by the Hot Air law.

The Hot Air law is written PV=nRT, where P = pressure, V = volume or loudness, n = number of screamers, and RT = rhetorical temperature. RT is measured on the Direness scale, which ranges from (1) nice but not necessary all the way to (10) imminent catastrophe.

In the case of climate change n has been pretty much constant but RT has gone ballistic. P and V have both increased as a result, but because of the second law no real action has been forthcoming. In fact the ratio Action/RT remains approximately equal to zero because the science is unsettled. Conversely, the ratio of rhetoric to action is approaching infinity.

The result has been a dramatic increase in Green Lip Syndrome or GLS. Green Lip Syndrome is characterized by politicians making repeated gestures toward climate action while still doing nothing. One of the most common forms of GLS involves setting lofty targets with distant dates, while running for office in real time.

In this case the physics of democracy is driven by the physics of reality. The great green wave is breaking on the unquenchable fires of civilization. The screams are deafening but physics is deaf.

David Wojick

Chinese Find World's Largest Loophole

2006-12-23T09:08:00.000-08:00

Engineers have found the world's largest loophole in a chemical plant in Quzhou, China. Details are sketchy but according to the New York Times there is an incinerator project at the plant that is worth $500 million on the floor of the Kyoto/EU carbon trading market, but only costs $5 million to build.

In keeping with the Times's policy of not disclosing the facts behind its stories, it is unclear whether this sale has actually occurred or is merely inside a fortune (I'll say!) cookie. No knuckle headed buyer is named.

The flim to this flam is that the incinerator would burn trifluoromethane, or HFC-23, a very potent greenhouse gas that is produced and emitted at the factory here and in several dozen other plants in developing countries. Eliminating the plant's HFC emissions is Kyoto equivalent to eliminating one million cars, without the drivers even noticing.

The Chinese have always said that the Europeans and Japanese are dim witted barbarians. Case closed.

The Washington Pest

Green wave breaking -- Stern & Brown

2006-12-22T09:06:00.000-08:00

The great green wave is breaking on the unquenchable fires of civilization. Brit economic guru Stern says climate change will do more damage than both world wars, with the depression thrown in for fun. Brit budget chief Brown responds with proposed 10 pound tax on airfares. Measure for measure, this measures the force of climate hype in Britain. Elsewhere, nothing happens.

David Wojick
Pest nonsense editor

The Washington Pest is back!

2006-12-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there was a web-based satire site called The Washington Pest. That was us and we are them, as it were. We're baaaack!

The Pests