What Would Kukka Do?

Our Maximum Leader is doing her best Kukka-Maria impression. Only not so super-sexy as Kukka, of course.

KT

Kukka-Maria

The Climate Is Changing, now Give me a Dollar

The UN has put forth a document claiming the Earth's climate is changing. It probably is. It's always changing. So what? Greenland used to be green. Now it's covered in ice. Climates change. Get over it.

The UN and the Greens always have the same solution to the problem. More taxes, more regulation, transfer funds. Convert your SUV into a planter because gas will be $8 a gallon with all of the consumption-suppressing taxes. Don't build new buildings because it will cover precious Mother Gaia. Send money to the developing world so that they can...they can...look, just send it, OK? And no more back talk.

There is a colossal environmental crisis upon us, but it's not global warming. All of those worker's paradise places like Venezuela, China, Russia, Eastern Europe and so on have totally wrecked their environments. Drinking the water, breathing the air and tilling the soil should all qualify for combat pay in some of those places. Meanwhile, what are we worried about? The average global temperature went up by tenths of a degree.

Don't kid yourself. There is an environmental crisis.

In 50 years, Martha's Vinyard might have smaller beaches. Long before that, tens of millions of people living in socialist countries will have been poisoned by unrestrained development. For that reason alone, the Greens ought to support the war in Iraq. It's hard to find a democracy with an environmental record as bad as the totalitarian part of the world.

Mark Steyn's column today has plenty of good stuff on the UN pronouncement and the rush from the left to parrot it. The climate is changing. No question about it. It always does.

The silliest argument is the anecdotal one: "You only have to look outside your window to see that climate change is happening." Outside my window in northern New England last week, it was minus 20 Fahrenheit. Very cold. Must be the old climate change kicking in, right? After all, December was very mild. Which was itself a sign of climate change. A few years ago, the little old lady who served as my town's historian for many decades combed over the farmers' diaries from two centuries ago that various neighbors had donated to her: From the daily records of 15 Januarys, she concluded that three were what we'd now regard as classic New Hampshire winters, ideal for lumbering or winter sports; eight had January thaws, and four had no snow at all. This was in the pre-industrial 18th century.

So what?

You could take every dime spent by every government and NGO and eco-group to investigate "climate change" and spend it on Internet porn instead, and it wouldn't make the slightest difference to what the climate will be in 2050.

The solutions proposed by the left are exactly the ones that led to the ravaging of the environment in the socialist world. More power to the government. The rationale is always the same. Guilt. The US does consume more resources than anyone else. We also produce more than anyone else and have a better environmental record than any of the other developed nations. What do we have to feel guilty about? Decades ago, we killed Lake Erie. We managed to amend our ways without electing Hugo Chavez. Or Al Gore, for that matter. Now it's only Al's intellectual allies that are killing the environment.

Instead of importing their politics, we ought to be exporting democracy. Oh yeah. We're doing that already in Iraq. Hmmm.

Update: The Feline Theocracy's Missionary to the Frozen Wastelands has posted a response to this. He makes the point that you should listen to the scientists, not the press or the politicians. I agree. His point of view is different than mine, but I highly respect his intellect and his judgment. I think he'll give you a lot to think about. Read the whole thing.

Around the Theocracy

Our fellow Feline Theocraticians have posted some great stuff recently. Here's just a few. (We'll make it a pack of mystery posts. Just click and see why we chose it.)

Precentor of Measurements.

Mother Superior of the Holy Order of Ocean Whitefish.

Nun of the Above.

Keeper of the Catacombs.

Official Artist.

Missionary to the Frozen Wastelands.

There's lots more. Just check out what's on the blogroll!

The Biochemistry of Blogging Blahs

I posted yesterday asking if there was a psychiatric reason for the blahs you get from too much mental exertion, like I experienced following a recent three day conference. The Last Psychiatrist (TLP) responded in the comments of that post as follows.

I'm not sure this is what happens here, but it is established that depletion of dopamine from, say, cocaine, leads one to not experience the next situation as particularly exciting.

It also happens to neurons in a different manner, such that you can't fire the neuron again until after a time when the voltage resets (called refractory period.)

TLP, you the man! (Or perhaps, you the woman! as the case may be.)

I followed up on this with a little more research about the biochemistry of mental exhaustion. It echoed what my friend at the conference had suggested and TLP confirmed, you basically run out of fuel in your head. Mind Sports Nutrition is a commercial website offering supplements of unknown quality. I'm hedging because all I'm taking from their site is their white paper on norepinephrine and I don't know anything at all about their products.

As physical and mental stress increases, it has been shown that depletion of norepinephrine occurs in the brain. When depleted levels of this neurotransmitter occurs, the individual will possess the inability to think clearly and feel mentally exhausted.

I might spend a little more time looking into this, but in essence, it appears that your brain produces norepinephrine and dopamine at a given rate and when you're thinking hard, you're using it faster than you create it. Eventually, you run low and the neurons won't fire as fast. That would be the source of the feelings of mental exhaustion.

I would guess that mental idleness would be a way of rebuilding stores of the stuff. Now you could read the New York Times or watch C-SPAN as a way of turning your brain off, but I wouldn't recommend it. There is too great a chance for adult onset mental retardation with both of those. Instead, meditation might do the trick.

Maybe that's what is happening to people that claim that meditation gives them great mental energy when they're done. What they're doing is putting their brains in neutral and giving them a chance to rebuild their stores of norepinephrine and dopamine. Hmmm.

China Backs off of Kyoto

China, in a spasm of self-ignorance, signed the Kyoto Protocol accords about global warming. Whoops! Maybe we didn't mean that. Check out this video from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).


There have been previous WSJ articles discussing China's ignorance of it's own pollution. Provincial governments from the poorer, inland provinces have turned a blind eye to horrific pollution in exchange for profitable industries. Just as they did with Mao, the local and provincial governments lie to the national government about what's going on so everything looks better than it is.

The Independent had an article recently on the environmental catastrophe that is China's use of coal. As an aside, the US use of coal is highly regulated and far cleaner than China's.

The trucks rattling away from the collieries in China's Shanxi province are on a tight schedule. There are lumps of coal lying on the grass verges beside the roads. Pollution from the coking plants chokes the air while in some places the whole landscape looks like it's been coated with fine coal dust. Datong is one of these places.

The city is one of the three most polluted in China - the other two, Linfen and Yangquan, are in Shanxi province as well - and when you tell people in China you are going to Datong, it often provokes a strange reaction. They point at the sky and say "hei yu", or "black rain". Some of Shanxi looks like the surface of the moon.

Here's a short article from National Geographic that says China is being blown away. Literally.

China has mounted various efforts to halt the increasing desertification, which is caused by overuse of the land for farming and grazing. Nonetheless, as much as 900 square miles (2,300 square kilometers) of farmland in northern China—an area more than twice the size of Hong Kong—is blown away by the wind each year, according to a Chinese scientist quoted in a New York Times article last year.

The UN, that model of honesty and decorum, recently published a study concluding that mankind had screwed Mother Gaia and we were all going to roast in our own CO2. What happens when we find out that the worst polluters turn out to be places like China instead of the US?

I wonder what our Missionary to the Frozen Wastelands has to say?

Who has the Best Corporate Reputation?

You'll be surprised by who is #1.


For my friends from work who read this blog, dig what the guy says about the top reasons for a good corporate reputation. Connection with the customers and quality of product. Nothing there about process improvement. What a shock.

This video came from the online Wall Street Journal. I knew they had been providing videos, but I didn't see the little button at the bottom of the screen saying "get code" until today. Fantastic. I love the WSJ.

February San Diego Sunset

Click on these for larger, higher resolution images.




Wow.

Pschiatric Explanation for Blogging Blahs?

I just got back from the last day of our trade show where I manned a booth, talking and liveblogging simultaneously. I'm fried. Like I said yesterday, I'm all yakked out.

I was talking about it with a friend of mine in the booth and he suggested a biochemical reason for it. Essentially, the chemicals required for your neurons to fire may have been all used up during the trade show and there just aren't enough left to come home and blog. I hope we can find a psychiatrist blogger to explain this in a blogversation.

I just checked out The Last Psychiatrist. They've got some great posts. Maybe they can shed some light on this...

Are You Surprised at William Arkin?

William Arkin is a writer for the Washington Post. He wrote a column this week filled with veiled threats against our military. In essence it said, "We in the anti-war movement have been easy on you murderers and rapists up to now. If you keep complaining about how we in the press treat you, it could easily go the other way." Here are some excerpts.

The effort in Iraq has been filled with atrocities, but the press has gone easy.

Through every Abu Ghraib and Haditha, through every rape and murder, the American public has indulged those in uniform, accepting that the incidents were the product of bad apples or even of some administration or command order.

The troops are lucky they get any support at all.

These soldiers should be grateful that the American public, which by all polls overwhelmingly disapproves of the Iraq war and the President's handling of it, do still offer their support to them, and their respect.

After all, they're just hired thugs.

But it is the United States, and the recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.

Read the whole thing. This is how the Mainstream Media (MSM) sees the military. You could throw John Kerry's thoughts about the military being a haven for the stupid and they would feel right at home.

Are you surprised?

H/T: Our Patriarch of the Airwaves.

Update: It just dawned on me that the soldiers who come back and protest the war are treated by the MSM as expert witnesses to failure. What William Arkin is objecting to is the majority of soldiers who support it. Apparently, he feels that they lack the credibility of the protesting ones. Nothing can be learned from them.

Resting up for the Afternoon Nap

Most sports injuries occur because of sudden starts and stops. It's important to ease into your daily activities in order to prevent problems. The afternoon will include lots of napping, so our Maximum Leader is just practicing good preparation techniques right now.

All Yakked Out

I worked our booth at a trade show yesterday and liveblogged the event simultaneously. This morning I got up, found a good Pay Per Post subject, had a Thursday Thirteen in my head and found an interesting Wall Street Journal article, but I just couldn't get down to writing. I wonder if there is a limit to the amount of communicating you can do in 24 hours. It's a struggle to write or communicate at all right now.

I think I sprained something in my head. :-)

How to Tell if Your Boat Is too Small

World of Good, Artists Helping Children Style

Get my cup of coffee. Stumble over the junk in the game room to get to the computer. Turn on the light that is situated at the far end of the room instead of the doorway so all of that stumbling is done in the dark. Repress shouts of pain to keep from waking the kids as I step on various hard objects on the floor.

Sit down. Do a little searching on the web. Very little. The World of Good (WOG) would leap in at me through the windows if I left them open. Check out a site. Good Lord! It's talking to me!

Do you want to brighten up the days of a sick child?

Well, yes.

Are you a crafty person who likes to knit or sew?

Not really, but some of my readers might be.

We need your creative spirit and your loving help. There are so many children in hospitals, shelters, orphanages, etc who could use a cuddly animal or doll.

Oh we do, do we? Just who is this we that's making all these demands on me?

Click on the bear to get instructions on how to make it.

"We" turns out to be Artists Helping Children and that little bit came from their Knitting for Charity effort. Here's how Artists Helping Children describe themselves.

Artists Helping Children is a site dedicated to bringing comfort to children in hospitals, clinics, and shelters by brightening their environment with murals and other art. There are so many children who live on a daily basis, suffering, and always surrounded by white walls. Our mission is to bring color and fun to these children's lives by painting uplifting murals on institutional walls, making the child’s visit much less stressful to take their focus off of their pain and refocus their energy.

Full disclosure time. I spent a great deal of my childhood in hospitals. They never had a problem figuring out where to stick the IV needle in my arm because they'd done it so many times before. Your wrist swells up after a few days with an IV stuck in it, so sometimes they had to take it out of one wrist and stick it in the other.

Simple instructions: Click on kitty. Make kitty. Give kitty to child in hospital.

Hospitals, as filled with caring people as they are, are sucky places to be as a kid. The pictures on the walls, if there are any, are anonymous. They were there before you came and they will be there after you leave. As I write this, I'm deciphering why I felt the way I did all those years ago. Wow. But I digress.

Traditionalists can make a Raggedy Ann. New Age types can call it Raggedy Gaia. I really don't care. Click. Make. Give.

Almost none of the stuff in the hospital room is yours. It's not your bed, it's not your room, it's not your family walking around outside the curtains. It's not home. What makes the work done by Artists Helping Children so special is that the gift the kid receives is theirs. It's not a toy borrowed from an antiseptic pile and it's something someone made special just for them. You cling to those little bits of warmth. Family visits are the best, but little things made just for you with a handwritten note are a close second.

Groovy, isn't it? Now click, make and give, quick! Your neighbor is surfing over to The Scratching Post right now and they're about to start making one of these. You've got to beat them to the punch otherwise you'll be humiliated forever!

Back to the knitting. "Go ye and knit!" said St. Augustine several centuries ago. Or he would have had he not been busy smiting infidels, keeping literacy alive or whatever it was he was doing instead of knitting. But what about us he-men, macho types? You know, the ones skilled at munching on tortilla chips and salsa while reading blogs. What can we do?

Are you uncomfortable with the idea of sewing or knitting, no matter how easy the pattern? There is one bag below that is made out of foam...there is no sewing involved at all.

Thank God. The last thing I want to do is let the guys know I'm knitting. They'd laugh so hard, they'd spit out their half-decaf soy milk lattes all over their pastel sweaters.

This is a simple, no-knitting required thing you can make for the kids from stuff you buy at Michael's. It's so easy even I could do it. With power tools, of course. Don't make me come over there and click for you.

Check out Artists Helping Children. Their front page says they are no longer acting as a non-profit organization, but everything they suggest is still valid and they've got great resources for people who want to do fun things as a family that make sick kids feel better. They're still a part of the World of Good, no matter how the US Tax Code classifies them.

For more WOGs, why we WOG, the philosophy behind the WOGs and the economic effect of WOGs on the price of polyurethane skateboard wheels in Zanzibar, check out this post.

An Image

My last four posts in a row have been all text and I find the effect aesthetically jarring. To counter that, here's a picture.


Ahhhhhh.

It's Time for an AdSense Celebration!

I just broke $100 in AdSense! It only took about a zillion hits, but I did it. Now all I have to do is wait for payment. Something like 7 weeks from the looks of things.

This weekend, it will be time to restructure the site. Any suggestions for cool art or animations for the left had column?

Thanks to everyone who clicked. I really appreciate it.

Update: I just removed three of my four AdSense blocks. I like the look much better.

I Don't Think This is a Good Marketing Idea

This used to be apropos. It isn't any more.

The Sky is a Treacherous Thing

Last night it rained. Our Maximum Leader decided that the sky is treacherous. One minute it's giving warm sunbeams and the next minute it's making things wet. Wet! How hideous. She bravely went out into the rain to make her nightly rounds of her territory nonetheless. After that. she stayed curled up indoors, safe and warm.

The Catfish Institute

I like to eat catfish. I'm always looking for new recipes and a great place to go is The Catfish Institute. The name has always sounded like some kind of high-tech research establishment. I've got a slogan for them.

"The Catfish Institute. Serving tomorrow's catfish, today."

You're welcome.

Resting Comfortably

After a frantic morning of being petted, laying around, eating her crunchies and being let in and out of various doors, our Maximum Leader is resting comfortably.


We will continue to monitor her condition and give you updates as events warrant.

No Ads Today

Just to let you know, I scoured Pay Per Post for interesting blog topics and I didn't find any. I tried two of them, but as I wrote them I found I didn't really like them. The PPP ads you see on this site really are ones I would have written about anyway.

I'm near a payout on AdSense. As soon as that happens, I'll be making changes to this blog. I'm thinking of using the space on the left hand side for photos from others' blogs with links back to them. I want to do something dramatic and beautiful with that space.