An Astonishing Source For This

The Washington Post is one of the leading liberal newspapers in the U.S. It is also one of the leading newspapers in the U.S., regardless of political orientation. A lot of very ordinary papers around the country rely on the Washington Post and New York Times for wisdom and news. It is therefore astonishing to see this piece by the Editorial Page Editor of the Washington Post, which appeared March 9, 2008:

There's no question that the administration, and particularly Vice President Cheney, spoke with too much certainty at times and failed to anticipate or prepare the American people for the enormous undertaking in Iraq.

But dive into Rockefeller's report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.

On Iraq's nuclear weapons program? The president's statements "were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates."

On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president's statements "were substantiated by intelligence information."

And so on, with respect to chemical weapons and delivery systems for WMDs: "Generally substantiated by intelligence information."  The editorial points out that the report even agreed that ties between Iraq and terrorist groups was substantially justified by the intelligence reports.

I've linked to a variety of reports, from both Congress and the British Parliament, that come to similar conclusions: a heck of a lot of the world's intelligence services (not just ours) believed that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, had significant chemical WMD capabilities, and that there was serious risk that Iraq would use WMDs again--and there was no guarantee that they wouldn't be directed against us, perhaps through terrorist proxies. This article goes on to point out why the truth on this matters, not only because the core problem was not "Bush lied" but "tragically, catastrophically wrong" intelligence reports, but that it:

trivializes a double dilemma that President Bill Clinton faced before Bush and that President Obama or McCain may well face after: when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security, in a democracy that will always, and rightly, be reluctant.

For the next president, it may be Iran's nuclear program, or al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan, or, more likely, some potential horror that today no one even imagines. When that time comes, there will be plenty of warnings to heed from the Iraq experience, without the need to fictionalize more.

There's plenty that Bush screwed up after we invaded Iraq. He won the war; he very nearly lost the occupation, and more importantly, the costs that we have paid there have very nearly sunk the War on Terror (and the Republican Party) as a legitimate cause. In retrospect, it might have been better to have waited for Iraq to have set off a nuclear weapon in Baltimore, or New York City, Miami, or London. At least the leftists making excuses for terrorism would have shut up long enough to win the war.

The Pure Sleep Antisnoring Device

I saw the ad for this on TV. It is an oral appliance that apparently pulls the lower jaw forward to eliminate snoring. It costs $59.90 plus shipping, and has a 30 day money back guarantee. In spite of how well I now sleep (because of the sinus surgery some years ago, and the Breathe Right strips), I still snore--loudly enough that when we traveled with the kids, my wife would usually take refuge in the kid's room.

I am hoping it arrives before we fly back to Washington for the Supreme Court hearings. It would be lovely if my wife wasn't awakened multiple times during the night--which means that I get awakened multiple times during the night. "Roll over!"

The website asks a bunch of questions to screen out people with TMJ and other jaw joint problems.

UPDATE: Short answer: it didn't work for me, so I returned it.

Snowthrowers, Global Cooling, My Driveway, & Chains

Yes, these all fit together. The Corvette has been sitting quietly in its warm little garage, out of fear that it would get stuck on the driveway. Wednesday, we discovered that even the AWD Equinox wouldn't get up the driveway. There was just too much snow on top of too consistent a layer of ice. Most people would just shovel the driveway. Since my driveway is about 600 feet long....

Okay, so Thursday we decided that since there are no snowplow attachments for the Equinox (at least that I could find), the right solution was to buy a snowthrower. Astonishingly enough, Lowe's still had four snowthrowers in stock. We bought a Troy-Bilt 5.5 horsepower Storm 2 stage snowthrower. It has four forward gears and two reverse gears. It clears a path 24" wide. And yes, it breaks up ice.

So the plan was: clear the driveway. Drop ice melt on the ice. And this is where the global cooling comes in. We went to Home Depot, and said, "Where's your big bags of ice melt?"

"We're out. And so is the manufacturer."

We went to Wal-Mart. Completely out. No idea when they will see more. It appears that the remarkable cold snap that the U.S. is experiencing right now has sucked up all available ice melt in this part of the country. (I assume ice melt is shipped everywhere in America to meet demand.)

Anyway, if, like me, you come from a part of America where you have to drive several hours to see snow, much less shovel it, you may not think about snowthrowers, anymore than Idahoans think about car alarms.

A snowthrower looks an awful lot like a rototiller. The one we bought has a four stroke gasoline engine that turns a set of blades that pick up the snow, and feed it to an augur that fires it up and out of what looks like a smokestack, which you can direct either left, right, or, if you are feeling particularly masochistic, straight ahead. The blades reach within an inch or so of the ground.

You start it up much like a lawnmower, and aim it at your snowbank. (Ours has an electric starter that you plug into an extension cord if you don't feel like pulling the rope.) The left control runs the blades and augur.

The right control is a weird mixture of a reverse clutch and accelerator. When you release it, the transmission disengages. When you depress it, it engages the transmission and increases power to the driving wheels. (I'm hoping that these are two separate functions, or the clutch won't last long if you use it at lower speeds.)

It picks up snow and throws it with great enthusiasm. It is less enthusiastic about ice, but it will break up the frozen ice layer, along with whatever dirt and rocks it finds, and create the world's least attractive slushy. (Pretend it's chocolate chocolate chip slushy!) The ice tends to come up in big lumps, like 19th century sugar loaves, while the snow just flies!

Anyway, it turns out that the first try on using the snowthrower to clear the driveway took a couple of hours to make two complete passes. I'm glad that I bought one that was driven, but even with this, both my wife and I have muscles that are sore in places that we didn't even know we had muscles. Even this still left long patches of ice, so we bought chains. (It's an AWD--so it takes two sets of chains.)

Anyway, my wife has never put chains on a car before, so this was a new experience for her. I was dreading this quite a bit, largely because all of my memories of tire chains are unpleasant. The strongest memory was helping my father put chains on a 1967 Pontiac Ventura as we crossed the Siskiyou Summit from Oregon to California in 1971. It was cold. It was dark. We were at the side of I-5, with traffic going by at what, in retrospect, could not have been more than about 35 mph, but talk about a way to get your fingers cold and sore.

Anyway, the chains made it possible for us to drive up the ice-covered driveway with only a little adrenalin rush, but the prospect of having to take them off and put them back on again each time we reached the base of our driveway was a bit much for my wife, so I decided to declare war on ice.

I spent most of this morning and into the afternoon--perhaps three hours total--breaking up the ice, enough so that my wife was able to drive straight up the driveway, without drama. As I neared completion of the task, however, one rock managed to get stuck in the augur, preventing it from turning.

This was an unpleasant task to remove, since it was a piece of granite (very useful for dulling high speed drill bits on, by the way), and eventually I could only get it out the same way that one of my lower wisdom teeth came out some years ago: by breaking it in place with a hammer and chisel. (And yes, the anesthetic was beginning to wear off by that point. I'm glad this snowthrower doesn't scream.)

Sinus Washes

Instapundit points to an article about sinus washes as a treatment for sinus problems. I've been using NeilMed's product for several years, and I do think that they help. But I would say that the Breathe Right strips that I have discussed here have been more useful. Of course, it's not a choice; you can use both.

One downside to sinus washes--you really need to clean the sink carefully afterwards to maintain domestic peace. There's no question that the saline wash removes stuff from your sinuses--the evidence is unmistakable.

Alamar Ranch Again

I've mentioned previously the controversy about Alamar Ranch, a residential treatment school that is trying to set up operations in a rural part of Boise County. Some of the neighbors don't want it there.

Last night, my wife, my daughter, and I attended the second Boise County Planning & Zoning Commission hearing about this. The neighbors hired an attorney to represent their interests. I am sure that he thought he was being slick and effective at manipulation.* I find it hard to believe the Commission was stupid enough to be taken in by his tactics--but perhaps I'm giving them too much credit. They did finally vote 3-3 (one commissioner recused himself) on the request for a Conditional Use Permit--which means that Alamar Ranch now has to appeal to the County Board of Commissioners.

The Philosophy of Planning & Zoning

When I was younger, I found grand ideas and principles mesmerizing. The older I have become, the more I have seen that grand ideas and principles can often be very useful models, but the complexity of the real world and the variability of human abilities and foibles often means that a strict adherence to ideas--any ideas--can lead to silly or destructive results.

Land use, planning, zoning is one such example. As a grand idea, I don't think there should be restrictions on how you use your land, except those that you voluntarily accept as part of deed restrictions. If there is a problem of external effects (pollution, traffic, noise), well, injured parties should file suit against the polluter. If someone can figure out how to operate a slaughterhouse in a residential neighborhood without smells, noise, offal, then why should anyone care?

I can imagine a way that this could work--with underground tunnels bringing in cattle and sending out steaks, big air filtration systems to deal with the smells, lots of sound insulation, and little nuclear reactor in the basement to power everything. If this sounds like something out of L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach (1981), now available online as a graphic novel--well, that's my point. Lots of things are possible in a science fiction novel, but the real world tends to be a bit more difficult.

In practice, the external effects are sometimes so horrendous that damages after the fact can't compensate for the injuries. For example, if a lead smelting operation pollutes the ground water and air, causing birth defects in dozens of kids. Yes, you can buy the silence of the families, but the damage done to those kids is permanent, and unrepairable.

Sometimes the external effects are so minor from any single property owner that it simply does not make sense to file suit. How much air pollution does a single property owner burning trash upwind from you make? Not much--and it is impractical to file suit against that one owner. But if thousands are doing so, the cumulative effect is quite destructive--but the cost of filing suit against thousands of trash burners--especially when you can't identify each and every one of them--just makes this an absurd exercise.

When I was younger, most of what I saw of planning and zoning was in the Los Angeles basin--where the level of detail and control being exerted made libertarian ideas about this quite attractive. Since I moved to Idaho, what I have generally seen of the planning process is a lot of people making genuine attempts to resolve real world problems. You might have a philosophical objection to the process, but questions of traffic flow, blocking of sunlight, adequate parking within a development--I just haven't seen a lot of completely absurd concerns or solutions for most development proposals up here. As long as we are discussing relatively unemotional matters such as traffic, noise, property values, you can get have a polite and reasonably intelligent conversation.

But when it comes to personal safety--the NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) goes ballistic. As I've mentioned with respect to Booth House, a homeless family shelter in Boise, and this recent situation near Idaho City with Alamar Ranch, there's a lot of fear--and intelligent conversation seems to stop.

Alamar Ranch (Continued)

I mentioned the other day that my daughter spoke at the Boise County Planning Commission hearing as well. Here's what she had to say. I strongly encourage you to read it in full, to see how important it is to not give up on a troubled teenager.