Harry Reid to Allow 100,000 Iraqi immigrants a Year

Reading the blogs, it seems that part of the cut and run plan is to allow 100,000 Iraqi refugees a year into the US. Perhaps I misread something. It hardly seems possible that even Senator Harry Reid is considering this. After all, the refugees would be Sunnis, the very people now sponsoring the "insurgency" which Reid intends to run away from. Well, running is an idea, usually a Democratic party idea. But who ever heard of carrying with you on your back those you are running from? Al Qaeda is embedded in the Sunni community. The Sunnis will be massacred if we cut and run. The Sunnis will be the refugees. So we leave Iraq but ... import Sunnis and Al Qaeda. Import the war to here. Surely not even a Democrat is proposing this!

PS Maybe ground zero at the World Trade Center could be the reception area. After all, these would be legal immigrants and that is an empty space.

Interglacial v. Human Global Warming

Global Warming - Fifth Interglacial Warming or First Human Warming?
The way I see it the present set of facts which are being used to prove human global warming are more likely to be evidence that we are in an interglacial warming period. This was Rachel Carson's view in The Sea Around Us. She presented evidence to show that warming had begun in 1900 and that is why I think the present warming is interglacial, not human. She explained that there had been four or more interglacial warming periods. There have been times when Hudson's Bay had had the climate of Georgia and times when Georgia has had the climate of Hudson's Bay. I have never seen a single piece of evidence tending to show that this warming period is in any way different from previous episodes of interglacial global warming.

The implications
The chief implication is the difference in policy. There is nothing we can do about interglacial global warming except prepare for it. If Al Gore and climatologists really know how fast it is happening, then they could tell us who has to move back from beach-front property and when. They could tell us when the Mississippi Valley is going to flood as it has done in past interglacial periods. It would be expensive to prepare for an interglacial period especially if climatologists can't really say when anything will happen. But perhaps we should do it or - if climatologists refuse to make concrete predictions - we can await events.

Meanwhile we are about to waste huge sums on foolishly trying to stop interglacial global warming on the assumption that the observed trend is human global warming which we caused with our cars. If the trend is real and is caused by interglacial warming then we didn't start it and we can't stop it. We can only waste money spitting into the wind. And then we will need the wasted money to deal with the interglacial warming anyhow - and we won't have it.

The point is that money spent on stopping human global warming would be spent differently than money spent preparing for an interglacial global warming. So we need to know which this.

Virginia - A Third Way Back

I've been reading William Kelso's book on Jamestown, Virginia and revisited Ivor Noel-Hume on Martin's Hundred plus roaming on the web and I think that early American colonial history is often lacking in documents so that we must turn to archeology to gain knowledge of this early period. But there is another, a third way, to gain knowledge of early conditions. This third way is to study the actual group from which the colonists or the colonial enterprise came and what happened to that predecessor group just before the colonizing enterprise.

For example, when we study Jamestown Fort, we can ask where the soldiers who built it had fought just before they came to Jamestown. Edward Maria Wingfield who built the fort and other soldiers with him came from the English regiments fighting in the Dutch - Spanish wars. More specifically they fought in the siege of Ostend. So how did the fort at Ostend influence the fort at Jamestown? and how did the experiences of the English regiments at Ostend influence the Jamestown experience? Information about Ostend and he English regiments is on the web. The Jamestown Fort resembles a part of the Ostend Fort while sickness, starvation and mutiny were common experiences for the regiments in Holland.

To take another example, the iron industry in the colonies began when a group of English iron manufacturers founded the Principio Company to mine and refine iron ore in the Chesapeake Bay in 1720. If we look at the foundation of the company we see that the initial impetus came from iron-makers who were worried about being cut off from supplies of Swedish iron. This suggests that we should look at Sweden rather than Staffordshire for the mining and refining model Principio was trying to emulate. Furthermore, some Swedish iron ore was especially well-suited for steel-making because it was low in phosphorus and high in manganese and the ore deposit Principio was organized to exploit was exactly like this special Swedish ore. When made into steel Akerby iron was in particular demand for use by the Royal Navy but Birmingham manufacturers also needed steel. They were competing with the Navy and with other parts of Europe for the limited supply from this special Swedish ore deposit when Joseph Farmer, a Birmingham manufacturer, found a similar deposit on the Chesapeake and organized Principio to develop it. So the history of Principio can be related to the much better documented history of Swedish steel.

Then if we ask about the Africans seized for the slave trade we see that they were farmers farming soil similar to the soil in the Southern states. Plate tectonics tells us that the European, American and African coasts were once closely adjacent in the middle of Pangea. The northern US states and Europe were then covered by glaciers so that their soil is similar to each other and dissimilar to Africa and the southern states (which are similar). So the African farmers were needed to farm effectively in the South - slavery was a technology transfer