Tiger's birdie

Tiger Woods has/had a girlfriend?

His private life is none of my business. Next subject?

"All of the details on this are tawdry, but we are tracking them anyway."-- Jonathon Mann on CNN

Beach bummer: when giving is taking

It sounds like a vaudeville joke:

We're going to dump some sand and widen your beach. -- That's good.
You don't have beachfront property anymore. -- That's bad.

It's also one for the Supreme Court: Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

That's it in a nutshell; the state wants to turn ocean front property into ocean view property and six landowners don't like that one bit. Is ocean frontage a property right?

The Kelo case was easy for me, I didn't like taking those people's houses for redevelopment.

This one is a tougher call, but then I've always lived in places where, theoretically, you had access to beachfronts even if they were private property. Theoretically, because it's not always easy to find a way to the beach through private land.

Evidently Justice John Paul Stevens has disqualified himself because of an apartment he owns in Florida. No word on Justice Antonin Scalia. Oh, yeah, it's Florida; he'd just tell us to get over it.

I'm interested, but not too concerned. We're more civilized about such things on Saipan. Here, the owners would just start landscaping, and maybe slip in a pavilion or tennis court.

See scientist, see scientist squirm

MoveOn.org doctored this photograph*, which makes it the perfect illustration for this piece. It's hilarious, too, which didn't hurt. After we stop climate change, maybe we can stop time.

Climate is a murky subject. Do we really need True Believers roiling the water even more? What do they mean by climate anyway? Not weather; that can change for a year-- or two or three. Pick your time scale: it's some sort of average, a composite of what the weather usually is like.

The climate in any place will change over time. Somebody just over the hill might have a different climate than yours, and theirs might change in a different way.

All right, they're talking about global climate, especially temperatures. I knew that. Supposedly, the figures everyone is arguing about are based on 517 temperature-monitoring stations. There are a lot more weather stations, ships at sea and satellites to supplement that data. Still, in any given year, one place may be warmer and another cooler. How do you sum up all this information?

Climatologists have made some pretty sophisticated models using that data. They make predictions based on those models and then refine them when they miss the mark. Basically, with my limited knowledge, I trust them-- the models anyway.

Starting in the 70's, "global temperatures" started a slow, steady rise. Carbon dioxide was identified as the major culprit. I was convinced. I still am.

A funny thing happened on the way to the millenium

Why, then, did "global warming" stop at about the time we looked away to obsess about Y2K? And why did some scientists start talking about fudging their data like a butcher with his thumb on the scale?

Somebody hacked the Hadley Climatic Research Unit's emails and found that there had at least been talk of fiddling with the facts. Bad scientists. Expect funding cuts, ridicule and humiliation. Global warming skeptics are having a field day. (I balance True Believers like the Yes Men with TB's on the Net Right. Sorry, NASA and the NSF trump them both.)

What's going on here? Did these people have so much of their egos invested in their work that they wanted to make the data fit? Or, had Global Warming become a religion so the facts had to be changed to conform to the dogma?

Most of their peers seem to have coughed politely and looked the other way. Others, like Professor Peter Kelemen were openly dismayed. (Yeah, it's Popular Mechanics, but that's probably one of the audiences a Columbia University professor should be reaching) His article is actually a pretty good summary, from my point of view, if you've got the time to read it. I particularly agree with his conclusion:

We're in an unprecedented situation, with regard to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the rate at which it is rising. Because this is unprecedented, we are not sure what is going to happen. But global warming is very likely, and reasonably probable outcomes could be fatal. Ignoring it would be like Russian roulette. Want to play? I do not.

Speaking of inconvenient truths

It's time to Gore Al a bit, because the earth stopped cooperating at just about the time he started popularizing the idea of global warming. Not that he's necessarily wrong, but he's too wide-eyed, gosh-darned certain for my taste. Besides, you'd almost think he was some sort of mainstream politician with all of this gobbledygook about carbon offsets. Yeah, Al. So can I pee in your reservoir if I build a treatment plant somewhere else?

Professor Keleman pointed me to the very good Der Spiegel story, Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out. I'd recommend any article that quotes Mojib Latif, who is quickly becoming my favorite climatologist.

Maybe it's the sunspot cycle, says one scientist. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is Latif's choice. (The PDO gives me a headache when I try to wade through some of the papers describing it, but that hasn't stopped me yet. It's like El Nino and La Nina, only different.) Their disagreements don't bother me a bit; in fact they're healthy. That's what science is supposed to be. Try a hypothesis; try another if that doesn't fit the data.

Whatever the cause of the current plateau, there seems to be a lot of agreement that it is indeed just a pause in the warming trend.

I've lost the link, but a scientist (Latif, I think) pointed out that there has already been substantial warming, and its effects are still working their way around a very complex planet. The oceans are warmer, mixing has changed somewhat; frankly we don't know how all of these systems interact and what changes are already irreversible.

As an example, I read one obscure paper that tried to quantify how much swarms of jellyfish contributed to mixing of warm and cold water. You see, warmer water generally means more jellyfish, but if they then cause more mixing....

* If you follow the link and watch the slide show, you will see that her poster actually reads "stop global warming". I checked-- don't know why, really. Maybe because she didn't seem that dumb.

Stuck in the middle

I'm not talking about 'federalization' of minimum wage and immigration control. To me at least, that's been inevitable for a long, long time. All of this noise about whether it 'should' happen is just a distraction (That's still not the best word, but it's better than demagoguery). In the end, like a small animal chasing its tail, you end up in the same place.

No. It's here, and where do we go from here?

Oversimplifying (my specialty), I've read and seen that there are too many 'guest workers'. There likely won't be enough when the CW* workers are phased out in five years.

Boonie Workers

The idea of CNMI-only H-2 workers has been floated. What would that accomplish? The CNMI, and Guam, are not subject to the quota: we can hire as many H-2 workers as we need. There's the rub; the H-2 classification is for skilled workers, while the Commonwealth will probably be short of semi-skilled workers. That proposal sounds like misdirection; an attempt to squeeze CW skills into the H-2 rules. Better we use something like, say, BW (boonie worker).

Any system that attempts to fill permanent positions with an underclass of temporary workers will be abused, and it doesn't matter whether it is administered locally or federally.

The shining path

Guest workers and their advocates argue that the solution is residency and a pathway to citizenship. They also say it is only fair to people who have worked and lived here for 10, 20 or more years.

Some opponents argue that they will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of aliens, losing control. That's already happened, except politically, but we'll set that aside.

Others like the BW system. "What if these people get status and then run to Guam?" they ask.

So here I am, stuck in the middle. Yes, citizenship, out of fairness and equity (though, despite the urban legends, you knew the rules). Yes, don't dilute the culture (but where were you 20 years ago?). Yes, there might not be enough workers when the transition ends (why, after all of these years, aren't our wages closer to Guam's?).

Just the facts, ma'am

Jack Webb got it right, but there aren't many facts to go by. That's another chase-your-own-tail blame game. The economy will change during the transition. How much, and in what ways is anybody's guess.

So far, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services people have been asking for help in getting from here to there. Some see that as a failing on their part. I don't. Rather it's something refreshing, coming as it does from the federal government.

Of course, the Secretary of the Interior is supposed to come out with a report by May 8, 2010 including "the number of aliens in the CNMI, their legal status, the length of the aliens’ stays in the CNMI, the CNMI economy’s need for foreign workers, and recommendations, if deemed appropriate, whether or not legal foreign workers in the CNMI on May 8, 2008, should be able to apply for long-term status under United States law."

Not so fast, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Nikolao I. Pula testified in May. He asked for another year, arguing that there wasn't enough time to see the trends with DHS delaying its takeover for 180 days.

Here we go again.

* The CW, or unskilled CNMI-only, category is on hold until Immigration goes back and issues its regulations following the Administrative Procedures Act.

Up in the air

I'd tip my hat, if I wore one, to Saipan Tribune reporter Moneth Deposa for yesterday's Air Saipan owner denies allegations of 'fake' deals.

The CNMI has seen enough fly-by-night airlines* to justify a little caution. I even had the unworthy suspicion that, like the Air Saipan proposal before the last election, it would never get off of the ground.

The Tribune ran across the site http://deanmillsconman.com, or were contacted by someone connected with the site, since it references their articles. It is chock-full of anecdotal aspersions on Mr. Mills character. They asked Mr. Mills about them-- standard practice I know, but often more honored in the breach than the observance here.

Reasonably enough, in his email response, Mills asked "Is there any evidence of these reports such as proof of warrants and other comments?"

Domainsbyproxy.com in Scottsdale, Arizona registered the domain name with GoDaddy.com. That, and the website IP, tell you exactly nothing. We don't know who is making these accusations.

Mills signals he might, with the comments "Many of these rumors were sent by people who don't understand that business sometimes doesn't work despite the best efforts of those concerned. Sometimes it is better to close a business.than to run at a deficit."

Sounds like his ex-partners in Air Andaman to me. There's little else on the internet, and I pecked about a bit using the countries mentioned as key words.

Cautionary tale or sour grapes? I wouldn't know. But, "The threat level in the airline sector is High or Orange," says the Department of Homeland Security-- one up from the level for other sectors.


* Though I suppose the planes they abandon are useful to fire rescue for training.

Feeding the fish

Feeding the fish

The link said lawsuit over fish pedicure. "You must be kidding," I thought.

Nope. What do you get for someone who has everything?

According to the Phoenix East Valley Tribune, the Arizona Board of Cosmetology ordered salon owner Cindy Vong to lay off her fish, forcing her to also lay off three employees.

Ah, but this is Goldwater country, and the institute bearing his name has stepped in.

"The board's action is more about protecting cosmetologists from competition than it is about protecting consumers against anything except wet feet and smooth skin," says director of litigation Clint Bolick.

Grooming instruments need to be sterilized, says the board. That seems like it would be a one-time deal for a fish.

I'm having fun with this, but Vong says she's out $50,000 to $60,000. I'd hate to see her have to eat that investment.

Disclaimer: My feet are incredibly ticklish, so I'm probably not a proper advocate.