The Stranded Armada  

The Australian seemed to be jealous of the SMH's display of front page energy and the environment news yesterday, leading today with a story about a stranded armada of coal carriers floating idle off the coast. Unfortunately they seem to think what Australia needs to do is to ship out coal even faster - obvious Rupert's new focus on global warming hasn't managed to be drilled into the thick skulls of the editors yet.

THEY stretch to the horizon in every direction. But these ships off Newcastle are a fraction of the fleet anchored off the nation's east coast waiting weeks at a time to load almost $1 billion worth of Australian coal.

As state and federal governments bicker about how to fix the bottlenecks crippling Australia's ability to exploit the explosive demand for its coal, a near-record 153 idle ships were offshore yesterday, cluttering ports in NSW and Queensland.

The ships - destined for markets in Japan, Korea and China - are waiting up to 25 days to load 14 million tonnes of coal, worth $850 million to the economy. Not only are the delays costing the country in stalled export earnings, mining companies and their customers are incurring demurrage costs, or penalties for delaying ships, of more than $400,000 a ship. ...

Also on the front page, an article on the development of a map to spotlight climate hotspots.

A $300 MILLION-plus project to map the impact of climate change on coastal areas and farmlands will be considered by national leaders on Friday.
John Howard has told the premiers he wants a "wide-ranging discussion" on climate change at the Council of Australian Governments summit, including on a potential national emissions trading scheme. But the Prime Minister and the premiers will also consider a major report that suggests an urgent scoping study be undertaken into the nation's ability to adapt to climate change.

A digital map likely to form part of a bigger project will pinpoint coastal communities that face being washed away by rising sea levels, identifying roads, homes, businesses and transport and port facilities in danger of being submerged. Under the COAG plan, scientists and environmental consultants would examine in detail how climate change will affect particularly vulnerable regions, such as far north Queensland. They will also assess the impact on Australia's farmers and other agricultural producers whose businesses could be severely harmed by global warming. ...

The push by national leaders to examine the impact of global warming comes after a high-level UN taskforce warned on Friday that one-third of the world's plants and animals face extinction if global temperatures continue to rise. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also forecast a grim future for the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory if action were not taken.

The SMH has an article on consumers "seeing green".

The world is on the verge of a consumer revolution driven by global warming, or so says the boss of one of the world's biggest supermarket chains. But if he's right neither Australian retailers nor the customers they serve are part of the vanguard. Consumers tell pollsters they are worried about global warming, but that's not translating into climate-friendly spending. And the response to climate change by our big retailers, such as Woolworths and Coles, lags their global counterparts.

Last month, Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, Britain's biggest retailer and the world's third largest grocery chain, said we were on the threshold of "nothing less than a revolution in green consumption". In a speech Leahy promised to give customers clear information about the carbon cost of all the products they buy from Tesco. The firm is developing a new labelling system that will show how much carbon was emitted during the production and distribution of each item on sale. The goal is to allow customers to compare the carbon footprints of the products they buy, just as they can now compare price or nutritional value. "When millions of customers a week have this information and start using it to exercise green choices, believe me, it will send very powerful economic signals through the supply chain - shock waves that will change behaviour," Leahy said.

He is of the view that carbon labelling will give consumers the information they need to reduce their own carbon footprint - if that's what they want to do. The scheme promises to boost demand for low-carbon products and reward businesses that change production methods to use less carbon. It also has the potential to encourage greater use of environmentally friendly transport options, especially rail.

Leahy's is not a lone voice. Big retailers in Britain are competing to differentiate themselves as climate change-friendly. Even the biggest retailer of them all, the American giant Wal-Mart, has made some substantial green commitments. About 18 months ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Wal-Mart announced an ambition to use 100 per cent renewable energy, create zero waste and only sell products that "sustain our resources and environment". There was no firm time frame for achieving these goals, but it's significant that such an influential company set them. ...

The SMH also has an article on the upcoming "Live Earth" concerts.

Midnight Oil, with its singer-turned-politician frontman Peter Garrett, will take part in some capacity in the Sydney leg of the round-the-world Live Earth concerts, aimed at raising awareness of climate change. The global concert series will begin in Sydney at Aussie Stadium and continue across all seven continents, concluding with a show in the US.

The Live Earth series will be held in seven major cities on July 7 - New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro. Organisers have also promised an event in Antarctica. More than 100 acts will take part around the world in the 24-hour event and organisers hope to reach more than 2 billion people on television, radio and the internet. The concerts will be broadcast by more than 120 networks around the world, and streamed live online.

The Sydney line-up is expected to be announced later this month. The John Butler Trio and Wolfmother have already revealed they'll perform. And there are rumours that Silverchair will be on the bill. ...

Other Live Earth gigs will take place at Tokyo Stadium, the steps of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai, Johannesburg's Cradle of Human Kind and Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach. Organisers today said top artists had rushed to be part of the global initiative, which has been compared to the Live Aid concerts held around the world in the 1980s to fight famine. The concerts mark the start of a new campaign called Save Our Selves (SOS) - The Campaign for a Climate in Crisis.

The PNG gas story continues to slowly drag on, with Santos now talking about getting involved in an LNG plant.

Oil producer Santos has joined with an ExxonMobil-led consortium in a bid to exploit vast gas resources in Papua New Guinea. Santos will work with ExxonMobil, Oil Search Ltd and Nippon Oil to jointly progress a detailed study of a stand-alone liquified natural gas (LNG) project in PNG. The consortium is investigating the viability of a stand-alone LNG operation after shelving its troubled $8 billion PNG to Australia gas pipeline project in February.

Santos managing director John Ellice-Flint said the move to join the consortium would increase the company's participation in the expanding LNG market. "Santos is committed to working with the PNG government, ExxonMobil and the other project partners to progress LNG development options in a timely manner, and in a way which will maximise the value of the large contingent gas resources in PNG," he said.

Technology Review has an article on data visualisation applications like the new online application "Many Eyes".

IBM's site lets people collaborate to creatively visualize and discuss data on fast food, Jesus' apostles, greenhouse-gas trends, and more.

IBM is showing that there's more to the social Internet than just sharing pictures and video clips. The company has launched a new website, called Many Eyes, with the hope of adding a social aspect to data visualizations like maps, network diagrams, and scatter plots. Already the site is being used by everyone from Bible researchers to college professors.

Many Eyes teaches people how to build their own visualizations (a simple tutorial can be found here) so that they can dive into complex, multidimensional data. Since its launch in January, the site has amassed nearly 2,000 visualizations that illustrate, for example, the carbon emission of cars and the nutritional information of food on a McDonald's menu. For example, by illustrating numbers graphically, users see how Big Macs compare with double cheeseburgers in terms of calories, fat, and sodium--differences that might be harder to spot on a chart of numbers.

Many Eyes was developed by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas, researchers at IBM's Visual Communication Lab, in Cambridge, MA. To be sure, Many Eyes is not the first, or even the most powerful, data-visualization tool available. Spotfire, for instance, is well-known software that businesses use to visualize and analyze trends. But what makes Many Eyes novel is that it's explicitly designed to be a social site for sharing visualizations and analysis; it's essentially the Flickr of data plots.

While the field of data visualization in general isn't new, it has seen a sort of rebirth in the past few years thanks to the availability of software tools that explore data sets, as well as the ubiquity of data sets themselves, says Ben Shneiderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, in College Park. "It's one of those things that after 15 years, it's an overnight success." Recently, Shneiderman says, data visualizations have gone from static charts commonly used in PowerPoint presentations to dynamic displays of multidimensional data. "Suddenly," he says, "we've been given a new eye to see things that we've never seen before." ...

The Arlington Institute (the "email from the future" people) are launching a web site called "The Worlds Biggest Problems", which sounds like an interesting and worthwhile exercise - go and deluge them with Viridian ideas when they open and see if they have an impact.

In a world where people recognize large problems, yet feel completely powerless to change their course...

In a world where people want everyone to "stop bitching and start a revolution"...


The Arlington Institute, a Washington, D.C. based think tank with an 18 years history, has decided to do just that. Our latest project, World's Biggest Problems, is an attempt to tackle the planet's largest and most systemic problems - Rapid Climate Change, Water Crisis, Peak Oil, Species Extinction, and Economic Collapse. These problems are issues that clearly cannot be solved using current thinking; rather they require the collective wisdom of the entire global community to produce innovation. Through WBP we hope to provide high level analysis in concert with the public, and make our results and technology architecture freely available to everyone. ...

The [solution] will focus on designing a collaborative solution space. This solution space would allow the users to take the information collected and leverage a suite of innovation discovery tools, which are a collection of software search engines able to search through the world-wide patent database and locate/discover open source inventions complementary to the identified local problem. Identifying these innovations will help humans engage their environment more sustainably. This space will also be used to match funders to projects, allow gaming situations between groups and promote competitions for the best solutions at many different levels - personal, family/household, community, government, global.

Human beings are presently facing a number of global, systemic, intractable problems. All of these issues are planetary in scope and highly entrenched, making them unsolvable under the current paradigm of thinking. For problems that are going over the cliff in a hurry, solutions must be identified as soon as possible. For this reason, The Arlington Institute is launching a new initiative entitled The World's Biggest Problems (WBP).

The overarching WBP project seeks to aggregate, organize, and disseminate information pertinent to these major problems, namely - Rapid Climate Change, Water Crisis, Peak Oil, Species Extinction and Economic Collapse. WBP's goals will be twofold; firstly, supporting a wider public understanding of these five global problems. Secondly, providing the space for the community to organically generate solutions. This is particularly important because none of these issues can be solved through a top down, hierarchical approach; they require the wisdom and determination of every person on the planet.

The logo for this one is a little unusual:



I listened to an interesting "Long Now" podcast from John Baez (recorded last year) called "Zooming Out in Time" this week - its worth a listen, covering many of my favourite topics.

The graphs we see these days, John Baez began, all look vertical--- carbon burning shooting up, CO2 in the air shooting up, global temperature shooting up, and population still shooting up. How can we understand what really going on? "It's like trying to understand geology while you're hanging by your fingernails on a cliff, scared to death. You think all geology is vertical."

So, zoom out for some perspective. An Earth temperature graph for the last 18,000 years shows that we've built a false sense of security from 10,000 years of unusually stable climate. Even so, a "little dent" in the graph of a drop of only 1 degree Celsius put Europe in a what's called "the little ice age" from 1555 to 1850. It ended just when industrial activity took off, which raises the question whether it was us that ended it.

Nobel laureate atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen suggests that the current geological era should be called the "Anthropocene," because it is increasingly dominated by human-caused effects. Baez noted that oil companies now can send their tankers through a Northwest Passage that they may have created, since it is fossil fuel burning that raised the CO2 that raised the summer temperatures in the Arctic that melts the polar ice away from the land.

Zoom out further still to the last 65 million years. The temperature graph show several major features. One is the rapid (every 100,000 years) wide swings of major ice ages. When they began, 1.35 million years ago, is when humans mastered fire. But almost all of the period was much warmer than now, with ferns growing in Antarctica. "Now it's cold. What's wrong with a little warming?" Baez asked.

The problem is that the current warming is happening too fast.

Studies of 1,500 species in Europe show that their ranges are moving north at 6 kilometers a decade, but the climate zones are moving north at 40 kilometers a decade, faster than they can keep up. The global temperature is now the hottest it's been in 120,000 years. One degree Celsius more and it will be the hottest since 1.35 million years ago, before the ice ages. Baez suggested that the Anthropocene may be characterized mainly by species such as cockroaches and
raccoons who accommodate well to humans. Coyotes are now turning up in Manhattan and Los Angeles. There are expectations that we could lose one-third of all species by mid-century, from climate change and other human causes.

Okay, to think about major extinctions, zoom out again. Over the last 550 million years there have been over a dozen mass extinctions, the worst being the Permian-Triassic extinction 250 million years ago, when over half of all life disappeared. The cause is still uncertain, but one candidate is the methane clathrates ("methane ice") on the ocean floor. Since methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, massive "burps" of the gas could have led to sudden drastic global heating and thus the huge die-off of species. Naturally the methane clathrates are being studied as an industrial fuel for when the oil runs out in this century, "which could make our effect on global warming 10,000 times worse," Baez noted.

"Zooming out in time is how I calm myself down after reading the newspapers," Baez concluded. "A mass extinction is a sad thing, but life does bounce back, and it gets more interesting each time. We probably won't kill off all life on Earth. But even if we do, there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and ten billion galaxies in the observable universe.

TreeHugger has a post on cataclysmic climate change in Second Life (not everyone's cup of tea - I don't have sufficient free time to wander around the place to have an opinion). Plus a post on Welsh town Totnes' plans for dealing with peak oil (of the "energy descent" genre). Go and vote for TreeHugger at the Webby awards as well.

In an extremely bizarre and ironic twist, fake cities in the popular massively multiplayer game Second Life were submerged by Adventure Ecology to remind folks that there's a real world outside their doors and if Second Life's server farms get flooded, their avatar could face a premature demise.

Creating the floods, which covered London, Tokyo and the Netherlands was no simple task. Cities in Second Life are owned by individual players, sometimes hundreds of them, and getting everyone to agree to a date and time for the flood was on par with some of the biggest Step it Up events.

Apparently, the Second Lifers took the floods in stride. A few pub-goers just converted their tables to boats and kept drinking their pints, though the topic of conversation had shifted...to global warming.

After Gutenberg has a post on desirable new green house features in Canada - ground source heat pumps.

In reporting on double digit growth in the installation of ground source heat pumps in Canada, this blog noted when building a new home that a a geothermal heating system would cost approximately $6000 above what a straight natural gas or electric system would cost. The new home owner could expect to recoup such an extra investment in less than seven years.

The previous post also noted annual savings on heating costs in the neighbourhood of $450. In a recent post to his blog, Clean Break, and column of the same name in this past week Toronto Star, Tyler Hamilton predicted that there will come a time, perhaps not too far off, when people will actively seek out such homes and pay a premium for them, or, on the flip side, ask for a discount on homes that are deemed energy inefficient and in need of a major retrofit.

The context was his reporting on a new federal rebate for GSHPs (Ground Source Heat Pumps). Being a reporter, Hamilton referred to them as “geo-exchange” systems. In other words, let’s exchange dirt. But, I digress.

The rebate is valued at $3,500, roughly 15 per cent of the cost of a system (including installation). “Quite good, and impressive considering this is coming out of our Conservative federal government”, he observed.

Since such geo-exchange systems on their properties could reduce home owners’ overall energy use by as much as 50 per cent, it makes a good deal of sense. Indeed, such technology would be a good example of when especially to reward efforts at reducing the emissions profile of the manufacturing and installation processes.

George Monbiot has a look in The Guardian at climate change censorship - and the deniers who dish it out

Global warming scientists are under intense pressure to water down findings, and are then accused of silencing their critics.

The drafting of reports by the world's pre-eminent group of climate scientists is an odd process. For months scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tussle over the evidence. Nothing gets published unless it achieves consensus. This means that the panel's reports are conservative - even timid. It also means that they are as trustworthy as a scientific document can be.

Then, when all is settled among the scientists, the politicians sweep in and seek to excise from the summaries anything that threatens their interests.

The scientists fight back, but they always have to make concessions. The report released on Friday, for example, was shorn of the warning that "North America is expected to experience locally severe economic damage, plus substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate change related events".

This is the opposite of the story endlessly repeated in the rightwing press: that the IPCC, in collusion with governments, is conspiring to exaggerate the science. No one explains why governments should seek to amplify their own failures. In the wacky world of the climate conspiracists no explanations are required. The world's most conservative scientific body has somehow been transformed into a conspiracy of screaming demagogues.

This is just one aspect of a story that is endlessly told the wrong way round. In the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Mail, in columns by Dominic Lawson, Tom Utley and Janet Daley, the allegation is repeated that climate scientists and environmentalists are trying to "shut down debate". Those who say that man-made global warming is not taking place, they claim, are being censored.

Something is missing from their accusations: a single valid example. The closest any of them have been able to get is two letters sent - by the Royal Society and by the US senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe - to that delicate flower ExxonMobil, asking that it cease funding lobbyists who deliberately distort climate science. These correspondents had no power to enforce their wishes. They were merely urging Exxon to change its practices. If everyone who urges is a censor, then the comment pages of the newspapers must be closed in the name of free speech.

In a recent interview, Martin Durkin, who made Channel 4's film The Great Global Warming Swindle, claimed he was subject to "invisible censorship". He seems to have forgotten that he had 90 minutes of prime-time television to expound his theory that climate change is a green conspiracy. What did this censorship amount to? Complaints about one of his programmes had been upheld by the Independent Television Commission. It found that "the views of the four complainants, as made clear to the interviewer, had been distorted by selective editing" and that they had been "misled as to the content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part". This, apparently, makes him a martyr.

If you want to know what real censorship looks like, let me show you what has been happening on the other side of the fence. Scientists whose research demonstrates that climate change is taking place have been repeatedly threatened and silenced and their findings edited or suppressed.

The Union of Concerned Scientists found that 58% of the 279 climate scientists working at federal agencies in the US who responded to its survey reported that they had experienced one of the following constraints: 1. Pressure to eliminate the words "climate change", "global warming", or other similar terms from their communications; 2. Editing of scientific reports by their superiors that "changed the meaning of scientific findings"; 3. Statements by officials at their agencies that misrepresented their findings; 4. The disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials relating to climate; 5. New or unusual administrative requirements that impair climate-related work; 6. Situations in which scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project because of pressure to change scientific findings. They reported 435 incidents of political interference over the past five years.

In 2003, the White House gutted the climate-change section of a report by the Environmental Protection Agency. It deleted references to studies showing that global warming is caused by manmade emissions. It added a reference to a study, partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute, that suggested that temperatures are not rising. Eventually the agency decided to drop the section altogether.

After Thomas Knutson at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a paper in 2004 linking rising emissions with more intense tropical cyclones, he was blocked by his superiors from speaking to the media. He agreed to one request to appear on MSNBC, but a public affairs officer at NOAA rang the station and said that Knutson was "too tired" to conduct the interview. The official explained to him that the "White House said no". All media inquiries were to be routed instead to a scientist who believed there was no connection between global warming and hurricanes.

Last year Nasa's top climate scientist, James Hansen, reported that his bosses were trying to censor his lectures, papers and web postings. He was told by Nasa's PR officials that there would be "dire consequences" if he continued to call for rapid reductions in greenhouse gases.

Last month, the Alaskan branch of the US fish and wildlife service told its scientists that anyone travelling to the Arctic must understand "the administration's position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues".

At hearings in the US Congress three weeks ago, Philip Cooney, a former White House aide who had previously worked at the American Petroleum Institute, admitted he had made hundreds of changes to government reports about climate change on behalf of the Bush administration. Though not a scientist, he had struck out evidence that glaciers were retreating and inserted phrases suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about global warming.

The guardians of free speech in Britain aren't above attempting a little suppression, either. The Guardian and I have now received several letters from the climate sceptic Viscount Monckton threatening us with libel proceedings after I challenged his claims about climate science. On two of these occasions he has demanded that articles are removed from the internet. Monckton is the man who wrote to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, claiming that their letter to ExxonMobil offends the corporation's "right of free speech".

After Martin Durkin's film was broadcast, one of the scientists it featured, Professor Carl Wunsch, complained that his views on climate change had been misrepresented. He says he has received a legal letter from Durkin's production company, Wag TV, threatening to sue him for defamation unless he agrees to make a public statement that he was neither misrepresented nor misled.

Would it be terribly impolite to suggest that when such people complain of censorship, a certain amount of projection is taking place?

Atrios has a good catch of some propagandising the Washington Post is doing on behalf of the attack Iran camp - there's nothing quite like watching inconvenient facts getting stuffed down the memory hole in real time.

Ah, we remember it well. The EFPs which COULD ONLY HAVE BEEN MADE IN IRAN. Much like the anthrax which COULD HAVE ONLY BEEN MADE IN IRAQ

Front page NYT story, 2/20/07:

The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.

Except, you know, not [Reuters article today].

Bleichwehl said troops, facing scattered resistance, discovered a factory that produced "explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs), a particularly deadly type of explosive that can destroy a main battle tank and several weapons caches.

Burrrp burrp! Does not compute! Does not compute! Washington Post version of the story, as captured by Google News "1 hour ago."



That paragraph is now missing from that WaPo version of the story. But you do have this:

The U.S. military said two U.S. soldiers died in separate roadside bombings in the east and west of Baghdad on Friday.

One of the bombs was an explosively formed projectile, a particularly deadly type of device which Washington accuses Iran of supplying Iraqi militants.

Over at MSNBC they have a little lesson on Iranian history - which somehow neglects to mention the overthrow of the Mossadeq government in the 1950's and its replacement with the Shah's feudal regime (and of course, who organised the overthrow of the aforesaid democratically elected government). The history of controlling oil isn't a pretty one of course - best not to worry about it too much...

MSNBC has put together a slide-show offering a brief history of Iran. They’ve managed to go back further than 1979 - impressive for a mainstream outlet, whose memories usually begin with the Islamic revolution.

But, amazingly, they’ve contrived to ignore Mohammed Mossadeq, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran who in 1953 was overthrown in a UK/CIA-backed coup, which installed the brutal and corrupt Shah in his place. The overthrow of Mossadeq is probably, together with the 1979 Islamic revolution, the seminal moment in the history of 20th century Iran, and MSNBC has just wiped it out for political convenience. Mossadeq had dared to nationalise the Iranian oil industry at the expense of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum), and such defiance could obviously not be tolerated by the masters of the world.

The slide-show also makes no mention of the fact that the U.S. supported Iraq in its aggression against Iran, which left up a million people dead on all sides.

The mainstream media has been caught, once again, shamelessly re-writing history in the interests of power. That MSNBC has completely obliterated the U.S.’ history of aggression towards Iran at a time when the Bush administration is trying to drum up militaristic fervour amongst the population with a possible view to another imperialistic war against that country is an utter disgrace.

A more accurate overview of modern Iranian history can be found here.

The Herald had an unenthusiastic review of 300 on the weekend.

There must be 300 reasons to avoid this violent exercise in military propaganda.

This adaptation of the story of the 300 Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae, based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, would have Herodotus turning in his grave and Hitler rising from his.

It is violent enough to make you shudder and close enough to fascist art to make your skin crawl. It celebrates all the things the Fuehrer loved - the glorious, operatic spectacle of senseless death, the ruthless weeding out of the weak, the gross caricaturing of the enemy, the indoctrination of the young, even a mountain-climbing ordeal for the hero - and all as it purports to be a movie about freedom.

Welcome to the new double-speak: Sparta as a metaphor for America, courtesy of Warner Bros, in which the politics of eugenics is reborn amid one of the most sickeningly violent and mindless films of the new millennium. Adolf would have been pleased: he may have lost the war, but his ideas live on in mystical, military propaganda like this, aimed at spotty boys in need of heroes. God help us.

Of course, latent fascism isn't new in American military movies. It's just that it's rarely as politically naive as it is in 300. That's me being charitable. It's just possible the filmmakers intended it to be as inflammatory as it is. These are strange times and 300 fits the mood of a part of the West that would like to see the Middle-Eastern barbarians bathed in their own blood. This is their kind of movie, complete with references to "barbarians" and "Asian hordes". Perhaps the Klan has become a new demographic for Hollywood. ...

The Daily Princetonian has an article lobbying for the US to attack Iceland instead of Iran - damn - now someone will need to make a movie about slaughtering evil Vikings instead of evil Persians...

The conservative press, and reportedly the White House, are chomping at the bit to bomb Iran. A much better idea would be to bomb Iceland instead, in a "shock and awe" spectacular that could be staged as a win-win-win deal all around, even for Icelanders.

"Why Iceland of all places?" you might ask? "Why not some other country, like, say, Pakistan or Nepal?" Let me count the reasons.

First, Iceland is an ideal target. You either hit it, or you hit the ocean. Not so if we bomb in regions where all countries look the same from above. Accidentally bombing countries we currently are not at war with might be misinterpreted by them and, worse still, trigger one of Condoleezza Rice's much-feared scowls.

Second, Iceland is much closer than Iran. Our pilots could lift off stateside in the morning, bomb Iceland at noon, fly to the United Kingdom for a night of English theater or pubs, load up the next day with ordnance kindly kept there for us by the ever helpful Tony Blair and bomb Iceland again on the way home, returning stateside for supper. It's an efficient way to do a war.

Third, the CIA recently reported having seen "a swarthy man order yellow cake from an equally swarthy waitress" in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland's capital. Though the waitress brought the man vanilla cake, the transaction could easily be construed by the United Nations as something far more sinister and in need of bombing.

Fourth, while America abounds with boisterous patriots, too few of them volunteer for our armed forces to securely occupy Iraq, Afghanistan or Iran — which has been hugely embarrassing for a superpower. Iceland has a population of only 300,000 or so. With luck and added military pay, we might scrounge up enough additional warriors to do that country properly.

If we unleashed Shock and Awe in Reykjavik, we would generously compensate Iceland to the tune of, say, 275 percent of that country's $14 billion 2006 GDP — a mere trifle in our giant federal budget. Furthermore, we would build, at our expense, an exact pre-bombing replica of their pulverized city, albeit with 21stcentury American plumbing and electronics. Could any reasonable people resist such generosity? And even if Icelanders irrationally did, we would, as noted, have the troops to make the Icelandic people accept what's good for them. What could Syria do about it?

American companies — such as Halliburton and Bechtel — would be given the customary sole-source federal contracts to (a) rebuild Reykjavik after the Shock and Awe show and (b) build a giant subterranean bomb shelter in the mountain range south of Reykjavik before the show, to shield Iceland's population and art treasures from the exploding ordnance our bombers and ships would deliver. These contracts would substantially raise the firms' earnings per share and, thus, their stock prices. Much enriched shareholders would reward the firms' executives with well-deserved, million-dollar bonuses. As The Wall Street Journal would tell you, that added wealth would make America stronger.

Similarly rich rewards would accrue to the folks producing the ordnance. Think about it! Every time a U.S. soldier or Marine fires an artillery shell in Iraq, and every time a U.S pilot drops a smart bomb or missile there, some employees, shareholders and company executives at home book sizeable financial gains from the event. The same would hold true in the Iceland incident. War always begets millionaires (and now billionaires) by the bushel. [Recall the heartwarming story of the wealthy U.S. manufacturer of bulletproof vests who in 2005 threw for his teenage daughter a reported $10 million bat mitzvah in New York.]

As is their wont in modern war, America's television channels would dispatch their reporters to Reykjavik ahead of "shock and awe," giving armchair patriots a bomb-by-bomb, missile-by-missile account of the spectacular, ably assisted by sundry mothballed generals. Let's face it: While we are a peace-loving people merely seeking to export our splendid way of life to the rest of the world, we do love our "shock and awe" television specials. Indeed, "shock and awe": Iceland could be made so captivating as to trump even American Idol.

But wouldn't American taxpayers be the losers, you may query? They would if we were dumb enough to tax-finance the venture. But chances are that Japan and China would gladly finance the Iceland thing just as they have gladly financed our ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan so far. True, our kids and theirs might one day have to repay that foreign debt; but kids don't vote and therefore don't count in forging U.S. fiscal policy.

So there you have it. By doing Iran, we might just embarrass ourselves once more, as we have by doing Iraq. Why take that chance? A debt-financed bombing of Iceland would (1) modernize that country, (2) (2) create wealth in our economy, (3) demonstrate our military might abroad and (4) be cheaper. It's win-win-win all around.

And to close, a visual demonstration of why you don't want to go camping in Angola.