jims musings

I was filled with hor­ror as I read an arti­cle in The Inde­pen­dent (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article341967.ece) about how the UN’s Devel­op­ment Pro­gram (UNDP) has fig­ured out how to raise 7 tril­lion dol­lars to fix all the prob­lems in the world.
Half is to come from the United States, essen­tially a tax on the US for the bur­den placed upon the global envi­ron­ment.  This is the most inter­est­ing part of the scheme. The UN is propos­ing to offer ‘pol­lu­tion cred­its’, which can be pur­chased by those who will exceed Kyoto Pro­to­col agree­ments. The money paid for these cred­its would then be used by the UN to save the world.

The other half, roughly, would basi­cally come from restruc­tur­ing debts in the 3rd world. I’m sim­pli­fy­ing this part, but this seems an accu­rate description.

The 2005 bud­get for the UN is 1.8 bil­lion, with a B. So, being gen­er­ous, the UN is talk­ing about han­dling monies 3500 times larger than their annual bud­get. The hor­ror I feel stems from my belief that the UN, as an orga­ni­za­tion, is unac­count­able to any­one yet wants to con­trol a huge amount of money. The UN is already suf­fer­ing from admit­ted seri­ous cor­rup­tion prob­lems; I can’t imag­ine what this would cause. Fur­ther­more, spend­ing that much money is not easy… there is only so much you can buy with­out rais­ing prices dra­mat­i­cally.
Back to that part about Kyoto. The United States would have to sign onto Kyoto (or some­thing very sim­i­lar). This effec­tively shack­les the United States (there is a rea­son every U.S. Sen­a­tor voted against it 95–0, in 1997, includ­ing Kerry, Lieber­man and McCain) with­out impos­ing sim­i­lar lim­its and con­trols on other nations, such as China. Basi­cally, this plan will be largely financed by the United States.

One last item; the one that scares me the most (quote from the Inde­pen­dent): “…the nation-state is an old-fashioned con­cept that has no role to play in a mod­ern glob­alised world…” The arti­cle implies that, in order to move for­ward with this grand scheme, national soverignty would be done away with.
The nation-state came into being with the Treaty of West­phalia, in 1648 (go read some his­tory, or lack­ing the time, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Westphalia).  Giv­ing up this con­cept of national sovreignty implies sur­ren­der­ing the U.S. con­sti­tu­tion, and all the rights and priv­i­leges that I enjoy.
I am filled with tremen­dous unease.

Fam­ily pic­tures today. $80.

Con­fig­ured addi­tional email for the web­site here.

Snow­ing outside.

I see on drudge that the ‘top cli­mate sci­en­tist at NASA says the Bush admin­is­tra­tion has tried to stop him from speak­ing out’. He’s been talk­ing about global warm­ing since the late 1980’s.

Okay, first ques­tion, why is he at NASA? Shouldn’t a ‘top cli­mate sci­en­tist’ be at NOAA? That issue aside, I under­stand the global warm­ing argu­ment, I even accept it. Great. Planet earth is warm­ing up… and that is where nearly evey­body seems to be stuck at. I see it as sci­ence. Global warm­ing is a hypothe­i­sis with lots of sup­port­ing evi­dence (but not enough so that every­body agrees).

There are three things to do at this point: 1) Lets make sure, 2) Can we do any­thing about it, and 3) Do we want to?

Well, another day, another web host­ing service.

I’ve moved martin-family.net to a new host­ing ser­vice, mostly to get a big increase in space with­out a big increase in cost… some of you may have noticed that our email was down for a few days while I made the (slow) tran­si­tion. My apolo­gies. The new web­site has all the key fea­tures up and run­ning, par­tic­u­larly email. Over the next while, I’ll be tak­ing advan­tage of the new photo gallery ser­vice I’ve installed, so we’ll have new pho­tos posted on a fairly reg­u­lar basis… as I said ear­lier, space was a con­cern on the old site, and thus the rather stale images. I have big­ger hopes for the new location.

Spent some time last night try­ing to get web­cams to work between the Utah Mar­tins and the Cal­i­for­nia Mar­tins. We got halfway; CA could see UT, but not vice versa. Will con­tinue to work on that.

Samuel (lit­tlest one) has begun tak­ing honest-to-goodness steps today. I’m look­ing for­ward to hav­ing him put­ter­ing around the house. Kids are so much more… kid­like when they’re on two feet.  Eliz­a­beth is fig­ur­ing out the potty-training thing. She’s pretty good dur­ing the day, but we can’t trust her through the night yet. Even so, every visit to the toi­let is one less dia­per to change.