Another Cheesy United Nations Ripoff
It's those wacky United Nations wingnuts again, who are bringing us the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, Aug. 26 - Sept. 4. Apparently it occurred to some genius among them that bringing 65,000 delegates to South Africa for the clambake might cause a bit of environmental damage, and not just to the local prostitutes. But not to worry, according to a UN press release; UNDP, GEF and World Bank Agree to Offset Environmental Impact On Johannesburg During Summit:

New York, 16 August - In an effort to make the World Summit on Sustainable Development more sustainable itself, the United Nations Development Programme, the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank have announced that they would offset the environmental impact caused by the travel by their delegations.

Hmm, one wonders what technology they are going to use?

The three international organizations will pay to 'neutralize' the amount of carbon dioxide based on the emissions released by travel to and from the summit as part of the Johannesburg Climate Legacy initiative. All funds generated by this initiative, which is part of the wider "Greening of the WSSD" programme, will be channeled to a Trust Fund set up through the Development Bank of South Africa.

Ah, the world's oldest technology, CASH! And deposited locally, where the local politicos can "handle" it.

South African Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Valli Moosa said, "It is ironic that the very staging of conferences related to sustainability actually has a negative impact on the environment through the carbon emissions from energy use and delegate travel.

It may be Christmas for Mr. Moosa, but he's clearly not the brightest bulb on the tree.

The Johannesburg Climate Legacy 2002 will change the blueprint and leave a legacy of learning and investment."

As a result, Valli Moosa invited governments to their delegations to the Summit "carbon neutral by "offset" to make through the implementation of carbon-reducing, sustainable development projects across South Africa including the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy technology. He said these interventions will be implemented in all economic environments, including domestic, commercial, industrial, education and health sectors.

Translation: He's inviting the government delegations to also pony up some cash to the South African political hack slush fund. But these are seasoned diplomats! Who would fall for this wheeze?

Two government delegations, Norway and the United Kingdom, have announced that they would go to Johannesburg "carbon neutral."

The Norwegian and British taxpayers must be flush. But wait, there's more!

It is estimated that carbon emissions generated as a result of the WSSD will total 289,619 tonnes of carbon dioxide. The aim of the Climate Legacy is to raise US$5 million by September 2002 in order to mitigate the effects of the carbon emissions of the Summit. Businesses are invited to purchase Climate Legacy Certificates representing values from $1,000 to $100,000 while individuals can take part by buying $10 certificates online at www.climatelegacy.org.

Ah, a little corporate extortion plus a mechanism for separating naive and gullible individuals from their cash. What a nice way to round out a tidy little racket!

I must confess that I am really tempted to sign up for the $10 certificate (delivered via email)


so I can leave a little screed on the dedication page. But I rather think they would edit me.

The Hills Are Alive With ... Martha Stewart?
Check out the back cover art on the latest catalog from Plant Delights Nursery. Click for a larger view.

What's Wrong With Africa?
The abysmal economic performance of Africa is well known, but the professional foreign aid crowd never seems to notice that most African governments are startlingly corrupt. Throwing money at them just feathers the governing elite's nest and leaves the bulk of the people no better off.

Matthew Parris recounts an extended anecdote in the Times (UK) about a plane flight with some members of the elite that provides insight into the problem. If you didn't know the African term, "waBenzi", for the foppish elite, it's an eye opener. If you did, well, it's old home week.

Star Chamber Alert!
FOXNews reports that old line black Democrats are at it again in Alabama:

SELMA, Ala. - In 1965, civil rights leaders marched on this Southern town to protest discrimination against black voters.

Thirty-seven years later, the "cradle of the voting rights movement" is being rocked by accusations from white voters who have been forced to testify before a legal panel of Democratic Party officials.

The hearings were launched by LaTosha Brown, who lost her bid for Alabama's District 67 State House of Representatives seat by 138 votes in a Democratic primary runoff against Yusuf Salaam.

Brown, who is African-American, held on to her base of liberal, black voters. But Salaam, who is both black and Muslim, attracted a large number of moderate to conservative white voters in the runoff.

...

Although Salaam is a Democrat, many of the district's Republican voters prefer his moderate views to what they consider Brown's "racially divisive" rhetoric.

...

Brown claims the election was unfair.

"I certainly feel that there is an effort led in the white community to sabotage the campaign," she said.

Brown and her attorneys claim as many as 600 residents who voted Republican in the June 4th Democratic primary illegally "crossed over" to the Democratic ballot in the June 25th runoff.

While Alabama's GOP allows crossover voting, Democrats do not.

Don't the poll workers check the registration?

And state law gives the parties authority to launch legal proceedings into voting impropriety.

A panel consisting of five members from Alabama's Democratic Executive Committee has been formed with full subpoena power.

Dozens of residents from predominantly white voting precincts have already been called to testify and were reportedly threatened with jail time if they failed to show up.

"There were elderly people there that were scared to death," said Selma resident Linda Harris. "'I won't ever vote again,' is what they were saying. And I told them, 'That's exactly what they want you to do.'"

My, my. The Democrat party thugs can set up their own kangaroo court! How special.

Ann Chandler, another Selma resident, claims one of Brown's attorneys threatened to have her arrested after she told the panel she hadn't voted in the runoff.

"They told me I had voted," Chandler said. "I thought there for a minute they were going to send me to jail."

According to Chandler, the panel eventually discovered she had been mistaken for a voter with a similar name on Democratic records.

A local minister claims someone tried to serve him a subpoena during church.

The scope of the inquiry has been a public relations nightmare for Alabama's Democratic Party.

Repeat after me: Count all the votes!

But Brown insists she just wants justice.

"The law was broken and it made a difference in the outcome of this race," Brown said. "There is no question in my mind that, in fact, we won the election."

Many voters have admitted to crossing parties during the runoff, but insist they had no idea it was illegal.

Crossover voter Carl Boline said, "If they were so concerned about it, why not put up a poster that says, 'These are the rules of the Democratic Party. If you break these rules, you're subject to prosecution by a quasi-judicial body that will come and get you in the middle of the night like the Gestapo.'"

Kinda sums it all up. One of the many virtues of the USA used to be that you could change your mind about any political issue or any political party as many times a day as you felt like. If these voters felt like Democrats on June 25, so be it. If state law prohibits voting in another party's primary without prior registration, they ought to check the registration at the polls. And the idea that the law sanctions a political witch hunt by party hacks is really scary.

I Should Have Known
The AP has all the details on swimsuits for devout Muslims (click here to jump to the picture):

Hafize Erdogan, a devout Muslim, proudly sports her new blue swimsuit ? a full-body outfit that covers her arms down to her wrists, her legs to her ankles and even much of her head.

The 30-year-old mother of two said she bought the suit so she could swim with her family while also observing religious rules about modesty.

"I used have to stand by and watch my family in the water," Erdogan said at Kilyos Beach on the outskirts of Istanbul. "I would watch my kids like a cat looks at liver ... But now I can swim, too."

...

"Islamic circles have traditionally understood beaches as something sinful," said Murat Cemrek, who teaches sociology at Ankara's Bilkent University. "But Islamic circles have become modernized. They've got money. They want to go to the beach and keep their Islamic values."

...

Erdogan's $25 bathing suit includes a headscarf, a long-armed top and full-length pants. It fits loosely so as not to show off the outlines of her body and is made of a synthetic material that dries quickly. It features a design that looks like denim dotted with yellow shooting stars.

With all that fabric, the suits still aren't perfect for swimming.

"Water gets inside and it sticks to you," Erdogan said. "But I don't have any other choice."

In the past, religious women in Turkey either didn't go to the beach or wore regular street clothing into the water. Most women at beaches in secular Turkey wear Western-style bathing suits.

The top company producing Islamic bathing suits, Hasema, says it sold 25,000 bathing suits last year and can't produce them quick enough to keep pace with demand. The company exports to Egypt, North America, England, and Australia.

Mehmet Sahin said he founded Hasema (pronounced Ha-shay-ma), because of his own problems on the beach as a university student.

Thirteen years ago, there was no company that made men's swimming trunks that extended from the bellybutton to the knees according to Islamic precepts, Sahin said.

"We used to have to cut off long pants. But we didn't find that very aesthetic," the bearded businessman said. "We developed the company according to our own needs ... but we found a place in the market."

I guess no one has to worry about competition from devout Muslims in Olympic swimming. The high dive would be hilarious though! Hey, how about synchronized swimming?

Thank You, Mr. President
Via Reuters:

President Bush will not attend the Johannesburg Earth Summit this month and will send Secretary of State Colin Powell to lead the U.S. delegation, officials said on Friday.

But the professional whiners are taking it poorly:

It's reflective ... of the fact that the United States has not been providing the kind of leadership that's essential if we are going to be trying to deal with the problems of climate degradation and environmental protection and sustainable development," said Jacob Scherr, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's international program.

"The United States is the only country that really has the technology, the organization skills ... to really deal with these problems," he said in a telephone news conference on Thursday.

Translation: The US taxpayers have not given us enough of their income.

The News24 (South Africa) version of the same story adds:

The next most senior US official planning to be at the summit is Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky, who will likely attend for a longer period of time than Powell, the officials said. Powell is expected to visit at least two other African countries as part of the trip, possibly Angola and Gabon, they added.

Looks like all they're going to get out of Colin is a quickie! What a hoot!

Malaria Drug Suspected in Ft. Bragg Killings
The UPI reports:

Friends of the three Fort Bragg soldiers suspected of killing their wives this summer say the men exhibited unusual anger and incoherence after returning from Afghanistan where they were given an anti-malaria drug associated with aggression and mental problems.

One of the soldiers was "almost incoherent" and visibly shaking while describing marital problems to a neighbor. Another became unable to control his anger at his wife in public, startling those who knew him. A third puzzled his new neighbors with his strange behavior.

Soldiers at Fort Bragg said they are well aware of mental problems linked to the anti-malaria drug Lariam, which include aggression, depression, paranoia, hallucinations and suicidal thinking, even as official military spokesmen dismiss a connection between the drug and the events around Fayetteville this summer which have drawn national attention.

...

Spokesmen for the Army, which invented the drug and says it is safe, told UPI the Army will review scientific literature on Lariam, also called mefloquine, but believe it played no role in any of the deaths because there is evidence of domestic problems in each one.

Over the years, Lariam's label, written by manufacturer Hoffmann-La Roche and approved by the Food and Drug Administration, has included increasingly troublesome side effects, and warns about aggression, paranoia, psychosis, hallucinations and suicidal thinking. Some patients complain of severe side effects lasting years after they stopped taking the drug.

...

Family of soldiers said they have long known about problems with Lariam.

"I don't know why the Army would tell them that it's OK, when obviously it's doing things to people," said Sheila Harriman, the wife of Stanley Harriman, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who was killed during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan. She also said her husband did contract malaria once, and that soldiers should take something to avoid suffering from the disease.

The Army first told UPI it had no plans to consider Lariam in its own review of the facts surrounding the deaths, but on Aug. 9th sent a statement saying that review would include a search of the medical literature about Lariam.

Army officials have also said Lariam probably did not play a role in the killings because the soldiers' marriages were in trouble. "I think you are heading down the wrong road. That is just my personal opinion," said Maj. Gary Kolb, spokesman for the Army's Special Operations Command.

Experts on domestic violence said this cluster of killings particularly puzzles them because so far there is no indication that any of the soldiers had a history of domestic violence. In 80 percent of cases an escalating cycle of violence precedes a killing.

More details by following the link. Or just Google Lariam for an eyeful.

Asian Brown Cloud Over Johannesburg!
Patrick Michaels in the National Post (Canada) notes the amazing way bogus environmental "crises" and United Nations environmental clambakes go hand in hand:

Nightmarish reports ... have a way of appearing right before big UN environmental conferences -- and being proven wrong not long thereafter. In 1995, a Geneva meeting, which gave rise to the infamous Kyoto Protocol on global warming, was prefaced with a breathless pronouncement that we now had climate models that matched the real atmosphere, lending credibility to gloom-and-doom forecasts of climate change. Months later, Nature magazine was compelled to publish a paper showing that the data which the UN cited was incomplete, and when all the numbers were put in, the correspondence vanished.

The UN's most recent world environment confab occurred last fall in Marrakesh. Days before that one, we learned that the poor islanders of Tuvalu were being drowned by sea-level rises caused by global warming. Within days, an article appeared in Science magazine showing that sea level around Tuvalu has been falling, not rising, for most of the last 50 years.

This makes him rather suspicious of the UN report which describes the Asian Brown Cloud (ABC), and claims that it could kill millions:

Lest anyone think the UN has learned anything about its environmental misrepresentations, let's examine the Brown Cloud story.

Summarizing the UN's report, CNN said that the ABC is so awful that it has "scientists warning that it could kill millions of people in the area, and pose a global threat." Further, the cloud "could cut rainfall over northwest Pakistan, Afghanistan, western China and west Central Asia by up to 40%."

Sleazy air exiting Asia is nothing new to climatologists. Reid Bryson, the eminent scientist who many believe is the progenitor of the modern notion of human-induced climate change, wrote about it in the 1950s. Since then, climate scientists have searched and searched through Indian monsoon data to try to find any systematic changes, and there have been none.

Don't take my word for it. Look at page 144 of the 2001 compendium on climate change published by the selfsame United Nations, and you won't find any systematic changes in South Asian rainfall.

The UN's pre-Johannesburg hype prompted CNN to write that the ABC "has led to some erratic weather, including flooding in Bangladesh, Nepal, and northeastern India, [and] drought in Pakistan, and northwestern India." The fact is that there isn't a single shred of scientific evidence to back up those claims. In fact, in its 2001 report, the UN noted that there's no evidence for any systematic changes in extreme weather around the planet.

...


When we get near these worldwide gatherings, there isn't a piece of UN science that isn't political. That's because what these meetings are about is blaming the West for environmental degradation, and holding us up for money.

Silly me! I thought the Brown Cloud was an unfortunate byproduct of all the fancy meals the junketeers ate at prior UN gatherings. And why are we paying for the UN to do "science" in the first place?

Greenpeace Goofs
The Telegraph (UK) shocks with: Melting glacier 'false alarm'

Pictures released by Greenpeace claiming to show how man-made global warming has caused Arctic glaciers to retreat are at best misleading and only illustrate a natural phenomenon, says a leading glaciologist.

The picture series, which compared the size of a glacier on Svalbard in 1918 with its size in 2002, was published across the world alongside a Greenpeace warning that global warming caused by man-made greenhouse gases was causing Arctic glaciers to melt.

"The blame can be put squarely on human activity," Greenpeace said. "Our addiction to fossil fuels releases millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and this is what is causing temperatures to rise and our future to melt before our eyes."

But Prof Ole Humlum, a leading glaciologist in Svalbard, 500 miles north of Norway, said yesterday: "That glacier had already disappeared in the early 1920s as a result of a perfectly natural rise in temperature that had nothing to do with man-made global warming." ... He said the picture series was at best misleading. "They should have asked the specialists on Svalbard first."

Nonetheless, we'll be hearing and seeing this "honest mistake" for years.

Hoist With Her Own Petard!
The Boston Globe enlightens with RFK daughter's Md. race hinges on black votes:

It is a sweltering day as Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend descends the stairs of the ''Great Blacks in Wax Museum'' and enters the mock belly of a slave ship. ...

Surrounded by the leading African-American politicians of Maryland, and trailed by television crews, Townsend would seem to be in her element. ...

Yet, in a twist that threatens to undermine her campaign strategy, the African-American voting bloc has become hotly contested.

The likely Republican opponent, US Representative Robert Ehrlich, has picked a black man, GOP state chairman Michael Steele, as his running mate. Townsend, meanwhile, has been the subject of widespread second-guessing for her selection of a white Republican, Navy Admiral Charles Larson, as her pick for lieutenant governor. On a recent day of campaigning, Larson was not given a speaking role when Townsend addressed black leaders at the wax museum, an absence that Townsend later attributed to a lack of time.

All of this has become crucial because the Townsend campaign has calculated - and analysts agree - that she will probably lose if she fails to secure less than about 80 percent of the black vote. Normally, that would not be a problem, but the GOP strategy of putting Steele on the ticket has ensured this is not a normal election. The most recent polls show that the race is statistically tied, a sharp turnaround from just a couple of months ago, when most observers suggested she would achieve a blowout.

Now, such talk is over. A number of Townsend's top supporters, especially those in the African-American community, met privately with her in recent days to tell her bluntly that she needs a major shift in her campaign, and Townsend agreed. Her campaign chief, Alan Fleischmann, said yesterday that Townsend is searching for the ''greatest lieutenants'' available, saying, ''We are at war.''

Ehrlich, a former Princeton quarterback, clearly has thrown the Townsend team off balance by picking Steele. The strategy of the Townsend campaign has been to attack Steele as a clone of his friend, US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, another black Republican. But Steele bristles in response that Townsend too often hides behind the Kennedy name - and says that name is something he knows about.

Steele said that his father was a gardener for then-Senator John F. Kennedy in the 1950s, that his stepfather once drove a limousine in the 1960s for then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and that he remembers watching the funeral train of Townsend's father rumble through Washington. He mocks the notion that Townsend is ''the great white hope for African Americans,'' saying many blacks, who make up about one-fourth of the electorate, have not benefited from the state's prosperity.

An incredible antidote to the "Kennedy mystique". What a hoot! And it's an encouraging sign when blacks don't feel locked in the pocket of the Democrat party. But I wouldn't underestimate the political machines of the old time black Democrats. They may "raise the dead" on election day.

Townsend, who once considered becoming a nun, has been portrayed as a different sort of Kennedy, more cerebral but less comfortable than most family members on the political stage. With her soft voice and diminutive stature, she has labored for years to project herself verbally and physically, pumping her fists and raising her voice with regularity.

The effort was clear on a recent day of campaigning, when US Representative Elijah Cummings of Baltimore, a rousing speaking with a booming baritone, introduced Townsend at the Great Blacks in Wax Museum by saying that people shouldn't pay attention to critics who don't like how she looks or talks. ''I don't care if she stutters!'' Cummings said as he ended his introduction. To which Townsend said, awkwardly: ''Amen, Elijah! Hallelujah!''

Cerebral! Sorry pal, she's dumber than a bag of hammers and demonstrates it regularly.