Big Sky Cairn

Mike at Last Best Place has an interesting post comparing the reactions in two places to a disastrous excess of dihydrogen monoxide.

In New Orleans:

When Katrina hit New Orleans and the levees broke, people who had spent a lifetime being neutered by government dependence didn’t know what to do. There were riots, looting and murders. The sick and infirm were left on the side of streets and even inside buildings to die, if they hadn’t already perished, and the National Guard had to be deployed just to bring back order so recovery operations could begin.

In Iowa:

The entire state has been declared a disaster area. Flooding has turned it’s major cities into giant lakes, their farms, long known amongst those in the business as producing the “high yield” winners for corn and occasionally soybeans are ruined. No where in the media have I seen video of people standing on their roofs with signs saying “help me!” No where have we seen rioting or looting. No one has advocated bringing in a fleet of FEMA trailers to house people who will be “permanently dislocated” because of the storm.

Undoubtedly, I will be called a bad person (Mark T will call me racist), but in the aftermath of Katrina, I was embarrassed - ashamed even - by the way the people of New Orleans responded. That was not the neighbor helping neighbor response that makes this country great.

To this day, I am apathetic toward the rebuilding of New Orleans. I certainly don’t plan on visiting there in the near future. The trouble is, the tremendous generosity of the American People was not appreciated. It was expected by an entitled population who felt that they could turn their noses up at the help because it wasn’t fast enough or comfortable enough. Thanks, but there are plenty of people who need more help and that’s where I’ll put my resources - emotional and financial.

I don’t wish this sort of hardship on anyone, but when the times get hard, the true nature of a community go on display for the entire world to see. I am proud of Iowa.

Don’t get caught bringing a knife to an injection-knife fight.

This weapon injects a frozen ball of compressed gas approximately the size of a basketball at 850psi nearly instantly. The effects of this injection will drop many of the world’s largest land predators.

Drive down a main drag in Missoula at 3 a.m. and you’ll see two cars.  One, parked on the street and the police car that pulled the first one over to administer a sobriety test.  Yes, drunk driving is bad, but the the trend toward lowering the legal limits to levels that would be tripped by a few sprays of Binacca is disturbing.  The police are better served if the people they are supposed to protect aren’t perpetually afraid of them.

And then I read something like this.

On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.

Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.

A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax - a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.

Too far?  I think so.

When did beer commercials become about manufacturing process and health concerns and personal hygiene commercials become about half-naked women? Did I miss the memo?

It must have gone something like this:

“Say Jim, do you think we could make an entire television show based solely on musical montages?”

“I don’t know Bill, but I think we should try.”

“And we could make it about basketball and high school and nerds with hearts of gold and mean dads and the mafia.”

“That’s pretty ambitious, Jim, but I think we can do it if we get really attractive actors who deliver emotion-packed 90210-style lines about how they feel well beyond their maturity levels and at a level of self-awareness not attainable by normal people.”

“And we’ll do it all with musical montages?”

“Yep. Thousands of montages. Every week.”

“Yep.“

My lady-friend just loves this show. I don’t get it.  And no, that’s not Montana’s license plate in Lucas’ map of the U.S.

Are there aliens? I don’t know. But neither does anyone else. So I have to take exception to Carter over at The Hardliner for taking AG Candidate Lee Bruner to the wood-shed for contributing a small portion of his unused computing capability to SETI. Certainly putting this on par with a candidate who wants to abolish the U.S. Constitution and another one with a federal warrant for his arrest is going a bit too far. What Lee is doing is actually kind of cool… in a very nerdy way.

Yeah, I like me some sci-fi. I grew up with Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ender’s Game is one of my favorite books and I currently can’t get enough of Stargate: Atlantis. I like sci-fi because it unleashes the imagination to give real science direction. Clamshell cell phones existed in the 1960s and they were called Communicators.

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In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. penned one of the most powerful modern soliloquies in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. The subject was injustice and civil disobedience as a response to injustice. Undoubtedly, one of the students that staged a sit-in at the University of Montana read a rah-rah version of this letter in their “Activism for Dummies” handbook.

At first glance, it seems like a perfect match. Martin Luther King talks about sit-ins to challenge injustices. It’s his entire justification for why he’s sitting in Birmingham Jail writing letters. He is even analytic enough to provide certain steps - goals set forth - for civic disobedience.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

So far so good, right? For MLK, sit-ins were a means to an ends, in this case forcing negotiation with a dominant party that was refusing to come to the table. The sit-ins weren’t designed to get a press hit, they were designed to spark dialog.

But the similarities begin to fade with closer examination.

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In my Global Warming Axioms, I stated that the the choices that scientists (people) have made with regard to pseudo-scientific issues like catastrophic man-made global warming runs the serious risk of undermining science (method) in the long run. My concern is that by politicizing something that should be apolitical, scientists undermine the credibility of science. The flaw is human; it always is.

And so when I read that large segments of the public have grown skeptical of science itself, I am not surprised. The left has commandeered the scientific throne for political exploitation. The Nobel Prize was awarded to a politician for his advocacy of public policy. This misuse has dulled the tool for its intended purpose - observation of the natural order of things.

And the scientific community (the people) seem intent on dulling the tool of their trade even further by increasing its political involvement. Great Nobel laureates - once recognized for their accomplishments in scientific method - recently invited McCain, Obama and Clinton to a great science debate, and then mourned their refusal. Unless science has become as much about politics as about scientific method, what business do three politicians have in debating science? Shouldn’t that be the providence of scientists?

Sadly, I find myself more skeptical of all science because I no longer trust the scientists who report it, and I think the damage may not be undone in my lifetime.

Perhaps more sadly is the fact that the real culprits may not be the scientists, but the media who seek out the most extreme positions and then portray it as the consensus.  This not only drives scientists to the fringes for recognition and federal support, but it feeds the monster with more and more attention.

There was a little snow on the ground in the hills around Missoula this morning.  Nothing like 14 inches though.

I tried to see down into the city to determine if there was snow everywhere, but I couldn’t see anything past the cloud of smoke coming from the University area.  Ah, yes.  420.  Good luck finding a bag of Cheetos here for the next few days.

A new swimsuit - or performance enhancing technology - is sparking some controversy for the upcoming Olympic Games. I miss the good old days when the Olympics were about Freedom verses Commies on the Hockey Rink. Now it’s about haves and have-nots on an international stage.

The reason for the controversy:

Even we didn’t guess it would be this good. When I wrote last month about Speedo’s latest swimsuit—an extremely high-tech full-body wonder—three world records had already been broken by LZR-clad swimmers. Coincidence? Maybe. But, after eight more records fell in the past month, the suit is causing some serious waves.

Here’s my problem. Anyone ever hear of a guy named Roger Bannister and his famous 4-minute mile? In a nutshell, running a mile in under four minutes proved to be a stable record for nine years. People wondered if it could be done. And then Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3:59:40, and within two months at least two other runners beat this mark - running faster than they had previously been able to.

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