That’s “Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious” - headline: Wi-Fi Access Increases Time Spent Online.

In other news: obtaining first driver’s license increases time spent behind the wheel; eating half-gallon of Death by Chocolate every day increases weight; effective store advertsing increases sales.

No, this was not a campaign mounted by the NRA, but by activists for the homeless at Ohio State University.

In 1993, a press release was given to the Columbus, Ohio, news media that announced the formation of a new charity to help homeless people. They would provide the homeless with protection in the form of guns. They called the organization, “The Arm the Homeless Coalition.”

See how it turned out.

Actually, there is a lot of theology in this sketch, as well as an inquiry into what is art and what about art’s patronage.

But which world?

Interesting list . . .

From the mind and computer of the incomprable Scott Ott, here is is al Qaeda’s number 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Christmas message to America.

Oct. 7, 2001 was World Communion Sunday. It was also the day that the air campaign against Taliban-ruled Afghanistan began. On that day, not knowing that the bombing raids would begin exactly during the time of our worship service, I concluded my sermon thus:

Today is the first Communion Sunday since al Qaeda killed six thousand of us. This Communion Sunday is a special one when Christians around the world recognize that we are one body in Christ. We reach out in the Lord’s spirit to share the bread and the cup, and we are praying for one another and the whole world.

Let us dare to pray that the day can come when we may welcome even Osama bin Laden and his cohorts into Christian communion as our brother in Christ. Let us pray and work for a day when the world’s hatred and rage and murderousness are overcome by the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Let us pray for a day to come when we can kneel even with our present enemies at the altar of the Son of God and partake together of the goodness of Christ. Let us hope and work for the day when we break bread together with them on our knees.

Let people of Christian faith remember to pray for our enemies. Our Lord and Savior, whom our enemies know of, but do not actually know, commands it. And so we do it, even if sometimes it is through clenched teeth.

It’s one week before Christmas. I went shopping today wearing shorts and a pullover shirt. Temps were in the 68-70 range, maybe even a little more. It’s been like that since the middle of last week or so. I shot a trap meet Saturday in my shirtsleeves. The range runs along the Harpeth river in Nashville and there were actually pleasure boaters on the water, cutting water donuts with the boat’s top down.

I am presently watching Monday Night Football on my notebook computer with Slingbox whilst sitting on my patio in my shirtsleeves, enjoying a Don Tomas while I view and type.

“Act now to stop global warming!” Naaaah, I think not!

Update: Over at Nashville Is Talking, Brittney links here and snarks of it, “This joke will never die. Until we are all swallowed up by the melting polar ice caps, that is.”

So, let’s take a look. According to the US Geological Survey’s article, “Sea Level and Climate,” we are now living in the Holocene Epoch. It is an interglacial epoch that began 10,000 years ago. “Sea levels during several previous interglacials were about 3 to as much as 20 meters higher than current sea level.” This page also says that complete melting of the polar ice caps would raise the sea level by 80 meters (note: complete melting of the ice caps, which has never happened). But over epochs, sea levels rise and fall: “Global sea level was about 125 meters below today’s sea level at the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago.”

And the United Nations has downgraded both its prediction of sea level rise for the coming century and its estimate of the extent to which human activity is responsible for climate warming.

Mankind has had less effect on global warming than previously supposed, a United Nations report on climate change will claim next year.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there can be little doubt that humans are responsible for warming the planet, but the organisation has reduced its overall estimate of this effect by 25 per cent. …

The IPCC has been forced to halve its predictions for sea-level rise by 2100, one of the key threats from climate change. It says improved data have reduced the upper estimate from 34 in to 17 in.

I’m not quite sure how a rise of 17 inches will cause us to be “swallowed up.” While the reports authors are still pessimistic,

Julian Morris, executive director of the International Policy Network, urged governments to be cautious. “There needs to be better data before billions of pounds are spent on policy measures that may have little impact,” he said.

Yep. As Senator James Inhofe observed from the report’s conclusions, “We are all skeptics now. It appears that the UN is now acknowledging what an increasing number of scientists who study the climate have come to realize: Predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming are simply unsustainable.”

Let’s take a look at the conclusion of the Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative, which is supported by the World Bank, the EU, various government minstries and departments in Europe and the US, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN:

“The livestock sector is…responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is a higher share than transport.”

Let’s be very clear here: … cows are responsible for more of the pollution that people fear is causing global warming than cars, airplanes, trains, and ships combined.

Now, to be fair, there aren’t many wild cows. Left to itself, a herd of cows would be pretty small (provided, of course, predators were also left to themselves). There are, according to the UN report, 1.5 billion head of livestock in the world. Cattle are used by human beings to provide four main things: milk, meat, labor (as oxen) and leather. Absent their multiple usefulness to humankind, cows would be much less numerous. Across the world outside North America and Europe, cattle are not kept mostly for meat, but for milk and labor. As the Independent summarized,

Burning fuel to produce fertiliser to grow feed, to produce meat and to transport it - and clearing vegetation for grazing - produces 9 per cent of all emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas. And their wind and manure emit more than one third of emissions of another, methane, which warms the world 20 times faster than carbon dioxide.

Livestock also produces more than 100 other polluting gases, including more than two-thirds of the world’s emissions of ammonia, one of the main causes of acid rain.

Ranching, the report adds, is “the major driver of deforestation” worldwide, and overgrazing is turning a fifth of all pastures and ranges into desert.Cows also soak up vast amounts of water: it takes a staggering 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk.

Wastes from feedlots and fertilisers used to grow their feed overnourish water, causing weeds to choke all other life. And the pesticides, antibiotics and hormones used to treat them get into drinking water and endanger human health.

The pollution washes down to the sea, killing coral reefs and creating “dead zones” devoid of life. One is up to 21,000 sqkm, in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of the waste from US beef production is carried down the Mississippi.

The report concludes that, unless drastic changes are made, the massive damage done by livestock will more than double by 2050, as demand for meat increases.

So it’s nonsensical to exclude cattle-generated gases from the domain of human activity even if its effects are one species removed from homo sapiens. But the report does point out that the Luddite-based philosophy of the worldwide environmentalist movement is badly misdirected, taking aim almost exclusively at technology when the real culprit (if culprits must be named) is animal herding.

But activism against animal herding gets activists nowhere. The political segment of environmentalism, which is to say almost all of it, is heavily tilted against the industry of the First World, with other nations leading the charge to suppress industry and technology there. I won’t go into their motives here, but activists know they can’t get publicity or media coverage, funding or, most importantly, Third World support by denouncing livestock herding, which plays a very different and very important role in Africa, Asia, the Asian subcontinent and South America than it does here or Europe. Thus, working to reduce cattle herding outside the US and Europe is just a nonstarter and would be seen as another plot by the First World to depress the economies of the rest of the world.

Speaking of the increased demand for meat that the article mentions, I have a book somewhere by anthropologist Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures, that explains why cattle are unique among domesticated animals and why cattle herding will increase over keeping other edible animals such as pigs. I’ll try to find it and recount his argument.

This post is shamelessly trolled to James Joyner’s Beltway Traffic Jam.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

To wit:

Born in England sometime in the second decade of the nineteenth century, you carved a notable business career, in South Africa and later San Francisco, until an entry into the rice market wiped out your fortune in 1854. After this, you became quite different. The first sign of this came on September 17, 1859, when you expressed your dissatisfaction with the political situation in America by declaring yourself Norton I, Emperor of the USA. You remained as such, unchallenged, for twenty-one years.

Within a month you had decreed the dissolution of Congress. When this was largely ignored, you summoned all interested parties to discuss the matter in a music hall, and then summoned the army to quell the rebellious leaders in Washington. This did not work. Magnanimously, you decreed (eventually) that Congress could remain for the time being. However, you disbanded both major political parties in 1869, as well as instituting a fine of $25 for using the abominable nickname “Frisco” for your home city.

Your days consisted of parading around your domain - the San Francisco streets - in a uniform of royal blue with gold epaulettes. This was set off by a beaver hat and umbrella. You dispensed philosophy and inspected the state of sidewalks and the police with equal aplomb. You were a great ally of the maligned Chinese of the city, and once dispersed a riot by standing between the Chinese and their would-be assailants and reciting the Lord’s Prayer quietly, head bowed.

Once arrested, you were swiftly pardoned by the Police Chief with all apologies, after which all policemen were ordered to salute you on the street. Your renown grew. Proprietors of respectable establishments fixed brass plaques to their walls proclaiming your patronage; musical and theatrical performances invariably reserved seats for you and your two dogs. (As an aside, you were a good friend of Mark Twain, who wrote an epitaph for one of your faithful hounds, Bummer.) The Census of 1870 listed your occupation as “Emperor”.

The Board of Supervisors of San Francisco, upon noticing the slightly delapidated state of your attire, replaced it at their own expense. You responded graciously by granting a patent of nobility to each member. Your death, collapsing on the street on January 8, 1880, made front page news under the headline “Le Roi est Mort”. Aside from what you had on your person, your possessions amounted to a single sovereign, a collection of walking sticks, an old sabre, your correspondence with Queen Victoria and 1,098,235 shares of stock in a worthless gold mine. Your funeral cortege was of 30,000 people and over two miles long.

The burial was marked by a total eclipse of the sun.

It figures.