VARDAMAN VIRTUAL FORESTRY COMPANY

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Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company

FRIDAY REPORT OF 8/26/05

The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy

“GLOBAL WARMING BLOWS – OR DOES IT?”
by Patrick J. Michaels

Our title and quotes are from the 08/17/05 REASON article cited below:

“…MIT’s Kerry Emanuel has a paper in the online version of NATURE magazine saying that hurricanes are becoming dramatically more powerful as a result of global warming.

“Merely venturing into the discussion of hurricanes and global warming is more dangerous than most tropical cyclones. About Emanuel’s article, William Gray of Colorado State University – the guy who issues the annual hurricane forecast that grabs headlines every summer – told the Boston Globe, ‘It’s a terrible paper, one of the worst I’ve ever looked at…’

“Consider the recent NATURE article. If hurricanes had doubled in power in the last ten decades as Emanuel claims, the change would be obvious; you wouldn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing. All of these feuding scientists would have agreed on the facts long ago.

“Damages caused by doubling the strength of hurricanes would be massive and increasing dramatically. Figures are pretty easy to come by, at least in the United States. The insured value of property from Brownsville, Texas to Eastport, Maine – our hurricane prone Atlantic Coast – is greater than a year of our Gross Domestic Product. If hurricanes had actually doubled in power, the losses in the insurance industry would be catastrophic.

“…Hurricanes are causing greater dollar damages because more and more people are building increasing expensive beachfront monstrosities that have financially appreciated during the recent real-estate bubble. Account for these and there is no significant change in hurricane expenses along our coast…”

Patrick J. Michaels is Cato Institute senior fellow for environmental studies and author of “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.”

Click on http://www.reason.com/hod/pm081705.shtml to read the full text.

“THE ICONOCLAST
AN INTERVIEW OF SALMAN RUSHDIE BY SHIKHA DALMIA”

Our title and quotes are from August/September/2005 issue of REASON:

“Salman Rushdie is a political novelist whose political and novelistic instincts have long been in tension with each other…His 1988 book, The Satanic Verses, included a parody of Islam that incensed Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who charged Rushdie with apostasy and issued a fatwa calling for his death…

“Rushdie: The idea of universal rights – the idea of rights that are universal to all people because they correspond to our natures as human beings, not to where we live or what our cultural background is – is an incredibly important one. This belief is being challenged by apostles of cultural relativism who refuse to accept that such rights exist. If you look at those who employ this idea, it turns out to be Robert Mugabe, the leaders of China, the leaders of Singapore, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khomeini. It is a dangerous belief that everything is relative and therefore these people should be allowed to kill because it’s their culture to kill.

“I think we live in a bad age for the free speech argument. Many of us have internalized the censorship argument, which is that it is better to shut people up than to let them say things that we don’t like. This is a dangerous slippery slope, because people of good intentions and high principles can see censorship as a way of advancing their cause and not as a terrible mistake. Yet bad ideas don’t cease to exist by not being expressed. They fester and become more powerful…

“Rushdie: Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people. This Islam did carry out this attack.

“I think there is a desire, for virtuous reasons, to make this disassociation. You can respect those reasons, but there is a problem of truth. It reminds me a little bit of what Western socialists used to say during the worst excesses of the Soviet Union. They would say that that’s not really socialism. There is a real socialism that is about liberty, social justice, and so on, but that tyrannical regime over there which was actually existing socialism is not really Marxism. The problem was that that’s what there was. When that fell, in a way that whole intellectual construct of socialism fell with it. It became very difficult to ignore all these people coming out of the Soviet Union who detested the term socialism, because to them it meant tyranny. I think there is beginning to be that kind of disconnect in the discourse about Islam. There is an actually existing Islam which is not at all likeable…

“The First Amendment is one of the great achievements of any democracy anywhere. It jointly supports the freedom of religious belief and the freedom of expression. They are both in the same clause. And it is interesting to see that. Because what it means is that of course people need to be free to believe what they choose to believe but the state is not going to favor any of those beliefs…”

Click on http://www.reason.com/0508/fe.sd.the.shtml to read this entire thought-provoking interview.

“THE MORAL-HAZARD MYTH
The bad idea behind our failed health-care system
By Malcolm Gladwell”

Our title and quotes below are from THE NEW YORKER of 08/28/05:

“One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century – during the First World War - during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years – efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average…

“The issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument over socialized versus private medicine. It is, instead, about a few very simple questions. Do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouth closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? In the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. The reason the United States has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem.”

To read this complete valuable, thoughtful, 4.5-page article, click on http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050829fa_fact

YEAR’S TREE GROWTH IS OVER; NOW TIME FOR TRIMMING

Windstorms of one kind or another may now cause damage that resulted from or was accentuated by growth. We urge you to review “Trees and the Urban Environment,” by W. Kirk Shearer, an outstanding article on our site at http://vardaman.com/gs/urban.php

CHANGES IN BOOK SALES

This week we sold several batches of books and deleted them from the offering at http://www.vardaman.com/booksale.php. We deleted all empty spaces and added new books beginning at #406.

NEW SYSTEM FOR BUYING OR SELLING LAND OR TIMBER

For the details, click on http://www.vardaman.com and then on the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” You can offer to buy or sell timber or land. You must post the general area of your interest; be sure to include the state. You must also post your E-MAIL ADDRESS and the URL of your Internet site. Our tracking report will not report the number of visitors UNLESS you enter your URL. If you are selling, you should post the name of the tract. When you have entered all details, click on “Submit,” and what you just entered will appear on our Internet site at the bottom of the page under the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” Be sure to check for and correct errors.

For each tract posted after 05/12/05 and whose owner posted his URL, we charge $0.25 for each visit his ad receives. On each Friday at 0900 Central Time, we will e-mail him a bill for $0.25 for each visit his ad received during the week just ended. You can pay us by e-mailing the money to “Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company” at PayPal or mailing it to P.O. Box 12293, Jackson, MS 39236. We will delete your ad when your payments cease. The new fee schedule does not apply to tracts marked with asterisks::

SELL LAND OR TIMBER

For 107-A. tract in GA, send e-mail to slaseter@comcast.net

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*For tracts in AR, send e-mail to dyork@digitalpassage.com
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