Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

Back in 2004, I had environmental and political worries about nuclear energy. Low safety standards in Iran, evidenced for example in the extremely high incidences of road accidents, would make anyone nervous about the possibility of another Chernobyl occurring in Iran. Politically, I argued that possessing nuclear weapons would embolden the new government of Iran, which was already exhibiting an unimpressive record on democracy and human rights.

But the events of the past two years -- most notably with what's happening in Iraq, along with last year's presidential election and other unfortunate events in the region -- has left no doubt in my mind, and in the minds of lots of secular Iranians, that the U.S. is behaving more and more like a reckless imperial force...

...in search of new sources of energy...

...and new markets to expand to economically.

Therefore, even if Iran becomes the most peaceful, secular and progressive, yet still independent state on the planet, the U.S. would be unable to tolerate it. The U.S. would seek new excuses to topple Iran's government and install their favorite instead.

Moreover, a nuclear Pakistan has always been a threat to Iran and a source of instability. Radical Wahabi and anti-Shia groups such as Sepah-e Sahabeh have murdered Iranian citizens or diplomats in the past twenty years. They helped create the Taliban, which almost got into war in Iran in late in late 90s.

As the Wilber/Carlson advocacy began to catch on with the public, a consortium of tax-hungry local governments throughout the state went to court and persuaded a judge to rule that the talk-show hosts' commentaries should be counted as "in-kind" contributions to the No New Gas Tax (NNGT) campaign. The court decided that the hosts and their station KVI-AM offered free political advertising to the gas-tax opponents.

Part of the rationale for the ruling—now on appeal to the state Supreme court—was that the hosts' employer—Fisher Communications— "sent" NNGT a contribution merely by allowing Wilbur and Carlson to comment in favor of the repeal initiative (which subsequently failed by a narrow margin, thanks in no small part to the overwhelming power of the moneyed campaign by the pro-taxers). It did not matter that the KVI talkers had proponents of the tax hike appear on their program as guests, or that Fisher's media properties included commentaries in favor of sticking Washington State consumers for more money at the pump.

Specifically, it will reduce the license period for broadcast stations back to four years. Eight years of operating without any oversight, we have discovered, is a license to steal.

Second, each station shall be required to hold 2 public hearings a year to ascertain the needs and interests of the communities they serve.

Transcripts of these hearing shall be placed in a public file, on the Internet, and be forwarded to the FCC as part of the license renewal process.

Third, stations will be required to report to the FCC on a biannual basis how they have covered diverse opinions about issues of public importance and how their coverage reflects the interests and viewpoints of their local community.

And last, the FCC shall take into account any failure to hold hearings or ascertain the needs and interests of the community into account when license renewal rolls around.

The second fallacy upon which the doctrine rests concerns the idea of "fairness" itself. As defined by proponents of the doctrine, "fairness" apparently means that each broadcaster must offer air time to anyone with a controversial view. Since it is impossible for every station to be monitored constantly, FCC regulators would arbitrarily determine what "fair access" is, and who is entitled to it, through selective enforcement. This, of course, puts immense power into the hands of federal regulators.

And in fact, the fairness doctrine was used by both the Kennedy and Nixon Administrations to limit political opposition. Telecommunications scholar Thomas W. Hazlett notes that under the Nixon Administration, "License harassment of stations considered unfriendly to the Administration became a regular item on the agenda at White House policy meetings." (Thomas W. Hazlett, "The Fairness Doctrine and the First Amendment," The Public Interest, Summer 1989, p. 105.) As one former Kennedy Administration official, Bill Ruder, has said, "We had a massive strategy to use the fairness doctrine to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters, and hope the challenge would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue." (Tony Snow, "Return of the Fairness Demon," The Washington Times, September 5, 1993, p. B3.)

What Warren is doing is positively divine, but not entirely new. He's putting a purpose-driven spin on the simplest idea: "abstinence, be faithful and condoms" (ABC) — to replace the old, hasn't-quite-worked approach — "safe sex" — with a much more promising strategy for saving at-risk people in Africa, and everyone else whose activities are liable to expose them to HIV.

Earlier this year, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives posted the winners of their Kid's Art Contest. The agency 'requested artwork from ATF employees' children under the age of 14 that depicted what they thought their parents did at work."

Pictured above is a winning entry drawn by a 6-year-old. Ostensibly a drawing of an ATF agent investigating a church arson, the image, especially the ambiguous child-like figure on the left side, eerily calls to mind the ATF's central role in the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidians outside Waco, Texas.

How many bloggers does it take to change a light bulb?

A blogger sees the light bulb is out and posts on it. Glenn Reynolds links, and 6,000 follow the Instalanche. Atrios directs a "dim bulb" joke at President Bush. Daily Kos blames Karl Rove and/or the IDF. LGF responds by linking to reports about Palestinian destruction of light bulbs. Andrew Sullivan rants about how light bulbs are used as torture devices at Gitmo, and is linked (once again) by Shrill Blog. Rand Simberg and Jay Manifold blog on light pollution, and Eugene Volokh muses on the legal implications thereof. Samizdata enters a post on light bulbs and free markets, illustrated with a photo of Adriana, gazing at a light bulb while a thought bubble filled with half a dozen currency symbols hovers over her head. Michael J. Totten, the most widely-traveled of all bloggers, goes out and changes the light bulb.

the same ingredients that made the 20th century the bloodiest in history (between 167 and 188 million killed in military conflict) are poised to make the 21st century just as deadly. The "three Es" as he calls them -- ethnic disintegration, economic volatility, and empires in decline -- when combined create a toxic soup that poisons cities, nations, and regions, and lead to violence, war, and genocide.

How do robbers with monopolistic State power behave? They enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else, of course. They also use that power to pursue whatever vendettas they may have been harboring. Communist leaders invariably turn their backs on creating a truly classless society, having made themselves feudal lords and the rest of the population serfs, but they retain the part of Marxism that calls for the destruction of the alleged "exploiter" classes. Sometimes murder is the weapon of choice. "Exploiters" are often neutralized by other means: imprisonment, forced relocation (to destroy an ethnic group cohesion by dispersing its members throughout the countryside), intimidation, brainwashing.

Hurricane Katrina should be a wake up call for President Bush on the need for urgent US action to tackle climate change, Friends of the Earth said today. The hurricane is one of the worst natural disasters America has ever faced and is a stark reminder of what scientists expect to happen as a result of human induced climate change.

Although there is at present no means by which to tell whether this particular storm was due to human induced global warming, the devastation it has caused is consistent with the projections generated by climate change models that suggest such storms will become more severe as the world warms up.

Computer models projecting the impacts of climate change on the weather suggest that increased sea surface temperatures caused by global warming will lead to more intense hurricanes. Research findings published in the science journal Nature [1] in July suggests that this is already happening. The analysis, by climatologist Professor Kerry Emanuel of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, says that major storms in the Atlantic and Pacific since the 1970s have increased in intensity by about 50 per cent. This trend is closely linked to rises in the average temperatures of the sea surface

Hurricanes require warm sea surface temperatures (SSTs), and last year the tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures were running well above normal. Global warming was the explanation given by most 'experts' the media interviewed. And since global warming will only get worse, those SSTs were expected to just keep on increasing.

But now those same regions that had anomalously warm SSTs last year are -- gasp! -- near normal. The accompanying graphic shows large areas in the tropical Atlantic even a little cooler than normal.

This is not the only surprisingly cool SST story. A new scientific article now accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the globally averaged upper ocean cooled dramatically between 2003 and 2005, effectively erasing 20% of the warming that occurred over the previous 48 years!

The rapidity of this observed temperature change is beyond what computerized climate models can explain. This is perplexing for modelers, who tend to believe that their models contain all of the important physics of the problem.

"Mel is now ready to talk to a Jewish group or a rabbi. I disagree. He is a Catholic and appears to need some spiritual guidance. Perhaps he should talk to one of his own faith. Maybe Cardinal Roger Mahoney (Los Angeles cleric) could be a great help," he said.

On March 9, 1916, Villa led 1,500 (disputed, one official US Army report stated "500 to 700") Mexican raiders in a cross-border attack against Columbus, New Mexico, in response to the U.S. government's official recognition of the Carranza regime. They attacked a detachment of the 13th US Cavalry, seized 100 horses and mules, burned the town, killed 10 soldiers and 8 of its residents, and took much ammunition and weaponry.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: But, here we have maybe 24 people who have lived in London and England and the free world for all these years that become citizens, subjects of the Crown, and yet, after having gotten to know us, they want to kill themselves to hurt us. Isn't that an even deeper conundrum here than the chemicals being used in these attacks.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: And that, Chris, that last aspect, the willingness to take one's own life. I always tell people there are guys on our team like that, too. They're called Army Rangers and Navy Seals and the Special Forces folks and the first responders on 9/11 who went into those buildings knowing, by the way, they weren't going to come out. So we have players like that on our team.

Just in time for the one-year anniversary of 7/7, a poll conducted for The Times of London indicates that 13 percent of British Muslims believe that the four Islamic suicide bombers who murdered 52 people in London last July should be regarded as "martyrs."

With a Muslim population in Britain estimated at 1.6 million, this means that some 208,000 British Muslims regard these killers with what can only be described as a worshipful attitude. Which is despicable. But Mother England, it seems, is home to an awful lot of despicable people.

The odd thing is that that most of the killings happened in the first 30 minutes. After that, students and towns people with deer rifles kept Charles pinned down.

"I was looking for a weapon, any weapon, because my handgun was 100 feet away, outside in my car. I made an incredibly stupid decision to follow the law, and that cost my family's lives," she says as she reflects on the massacre that ended with 24 people dead inside the Luby's Cafeteria at Killeen, a military town in Central Texas.

I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display, and I am asking the Jewish community, whom I have personally offended, to help me on my journey through recovery. Again, I am reaching out to the Jewish community for its help. I know there will be many in that community who will want nothing to do with me, and that would be understandable. But I pray that that door is not forever closed.

On Hannity's radio show earlier today, William Donohue (who branded Hitchens an anti-Catholic bigot, for reasons unknown) said that Mel needs to be careful about which Jewish leaders he meets with - specifically, to avoid the ones who simply want to use him like a punching bag. He's right. If Mel is salvageable, he shoudln't reach out to paranoid blowhards like Abe Foxman who have a nasty habit of dishing out false charges of anti-Semitism. (There's plenty of the real stuff to complain about, Abe.)