The NY Times is in a tizzy about a draft report circulating around the Department of Interior that makes changes to the Park Service’s basic management policy. The Times opines:

But there is nothing subtle about the main thrust of this rewrite. It is a frontal attack on the idea of “impairment.” According to the act that established the national parks, preventing impairment of park resources – including the landscape, wildlife and such intangibles as the soundscape of Yellowstone, for instance – is the “fundamental purpose.” In Mr. Hoffman’s world, it is now merely one of the purposes.

When reading the NY Times, it is always important to do your research, because the NY Times doesn’t bother with basic research. The National Park Service Organic Act actually states:

The service thus established shall promote and regulate the use of the Federal areas known as national parks, monuments, and reservations hereinafter specified by such means and measures as conform to the fundamental purposes of the said parks, monuments, and reservations, which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.

To put this in language the employees of the NY Times understand, the purpose of the Park Service is first to “promote and regulate the use” of parks. Parks are to be used by the public. That’s the point of having then. The use is to “conform to the fundamental purposes” of the parks. Note, to the NY Times, when a noun like “purpose” has an “s” on the end, that makes it plural. So there are multiple purposes of national parks.

Admittedly, the Act isn’t written using the clearest language, because the next part of the act says “purpose” in the singular. But what is the “purpose”? The act reads, “which purpose is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” I read this to say tha the single purpose is two-fold and cannot be separated. The two-fold purpose is to “conserve” the park and “provide for the enjoyment” of the use of the parks. This conservation and use, however, must be done is such as way to “leave them unimpared for the enjoyment of future generations.”

According to the National Park Service Organic Act, the purpose of national parks is to protect them and to enjoy them. Both the protection and use are concepts that go hand in hand. But the NY Times doesn’t see it that way. The NY Times continues:

Mr. Hoffman’s rewrite would open up nearly every park in the nation to off-road vehicles, snowmobiles and Jet Skis. According to his revision, the use of such vehicles would become one of the parks’ purposes. To accommodate such activities, he redefines impairment to mean an irreversible impact. To prove that an activity is impairing the parks, under Mr. Hoffman’s rules, you would have to prove that it is doing so irreversibly – a very high standard of proof. This would have a genuinely erosive effect on the standards used to protect the national parks.

The pattern prevails throughout this 194-page document – easing the rules that limit how visitors use the parks and toughening the standard of proof needed to block those uses. Behind this pattern, too, there is a fundamental shift in how the parks are regarded. If the laws establishing the national park system were fundamentally forward-looking – if their mission, first and foremost, was protecting the parks for the future – Mr. Hoffman’s revisions place a new, unwelcome and unnecessary emphasis on the present, on what he calls “opportunities for visitors to use and enjoy their parks.”

Mr. Hoffman, along with a lot of other people, believe that the Park Service does too much to keep people from enjoying the National Parks. Apparently he would like to see the Parks opened up to more uses–that is the fundamental use of the parks.

Or course this comes down to the question of how people should enjoy National Parks. Personally I prefer wilderness to urbanization. I prefer solitude to the bussle of city life. I prefer being on cross country skis in the middle of wilderness instead of on a snowmobile, but I think that snowmobiling should be an option for places like Yellowstone. I’m not an elitist that wants to impose my will on other and limit other people’s options.

I haven’t been following Able Danger very much, but reading this article by Ed Morrissey really opened my eyes. Morrissey makes a very compelling case that the 9/11 Commission was seriously flawed and they left out a lot of important information from their report. Morrissey writes:

INSTEAD OF BEING THE DEFINITIVE WORD on September 11, the report has begun to resemble a literary equivalent of Swiss cheese as more and more data came out about what else the Commission missed in its report, either by chance or by design. These data points, or dots as the Commissioners themselves called them, did not have the opportunity for connection in their report:

* The trial and conviction of Mohammed Afroze in India, for his part in a conspiracy to use airplanes to bomb four overseas targets on 9/11/01 using commercial flights out of Heathrow Airport in London.

* The second memo from U.S. District Attorney Mary Jo White in response to the notorious memo from Deputy Attorney General Jamie

S. Gorelick, warning that the implications of the memo will create insurmountable obstacles for prevention of terrorist attacks in the United States. In fact, the report barely mentions the Gorelick memo at all. It certainly never mentions the fact that the Gorelick memo was sent to the Office of Intelligence and Policy Review, which provided legal advice to all government agencies on the use and sharing of intelligence information with Department of Justice agencies.

* A July 21, 2001 editorial in a state-run Iraqi newspaper, al-Nasiriyah, which predicted the three targets of the September 11 attacks two months beforehand. This editorial read was read into the Congressional record by Senator Fritz Hollings on September 12, 2002.

* On July 26, 2001, an Iranian espionage agent told CIA agents in Baku, Azerbaijan, that Osama bin Laden would attack the United States on 9/11 using six men who had already entered the country via Iran. When pressed for his sources, the agent told them that Iranian intelligence knew all about the plot.

* The discovery and arrest of two Iraqi spies in Germany in February 2001, which the Germans claimed at the time exposed an extensive Iraqi espionage network operating in several German cities–at the same time three of the four 9/11 lead hijackers traveled to or through Germany, the only time it ever happened after their successful entry into the United States. Almost six moths to the day before the 9/11 attacks, an Arabic newspaper in Paris described the arrests as relating to the suspicion that radical Islamists, and specifically Osama bin Laden, had started working with the Iraqis to target American interests around the world.

* A memo from the State Department warned Bill Clinton in 1996 that its intelligence services had determined that the United States had to stop Osama bin Laden from relocating to Afghanistan, or al Qaeda would grow into an even more dangerous threat. The report also fails to mention a later Clinton administration effort to offer the Taliban official recognition if they handed bin Laden over to our custody.

* German intelligence analysts concluded in 2002 that radical Islamist terrorists such as al Qaeda worked with Iraqi intelligence services through contacts in the German neo-Nazi community.

* As Stephen Hayes points out, the Commission failed to include Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and Abdul Rahman Yasin–despite their connections to the first World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 hijackers.

None of the above data points is mentioned in the Commission’s final report. They all indicate a possibility that other state sponsors had close ties to al Qaeda. They also indicate that the scope of the Islamist war has little to do with American policy but instead with the establishment of a latter-day caliphate for the ummah, and after that, global Islamist domination. More to the point, however, they all demonstrate–along with Able Danger–that the intelligence services had recognized the threat and tried to take at least some action to stop it before it could fully form against the United States.

What kept them from taking that action? Bureaucracies expressing more concern over appearances of impropriety than in providing for national security. The architect of that policy, Jamie S. Gorelick, sat on the Commission itself. And the Commission took this myopic approach and used it to generate an expansion of the very same bureaucratic problem, passing this off as a solution, rather than the primary cause of the failure.

RFK Jr. writes:

Well, the science is clear. This month, a study published in the journal Nature by a renowned MIT climatologist linked the increasing prevalence of destructive hurricanes to human-induced global warming.

Now we are all learning what it

George Will has written a great article about Cindy Sheehan.

Sad yet riveting, like a wreck by the side of the road, Cindy Sheehan, a plaything of her own sincerities and other people’s opportunisms, has already been largely erased from the national memory by new waves of media fickleness in the service of the public’s summer ennui. But before she becomes fully relegated to the role of opening act for more durable luminaries at antiwar rallies, prudent Democrats — those political snail darters, the emblematic endangered species of American politics — should consider the possibility that, although she was a burr under the president’s saddle for several weeks, she is symptomatic of something that in 2008 could cause the Democratic Party a sixth loss in eight presidential elections. That something is a shrillness unlike anything heard in living memory from a major tendency within a major party.

Jane Galt is ticked, and rightly so, over the jurors who abdicated their role in the recent Vioxx case.

Merck argued that Vioxx couldn’t have caused Mr. Ernst’s death because, according to his death certificate, he died of an arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat, not a heart attack. While scientific evidence suggests Vioxx can promote blood clots leading to a heart attack, no data have linked the drug with arrhythmias.

Jurors who voted against Merck said much of the science sailed right over their heads. “Whenever Merck was up there, it was like wah, wah, wah,” said juror John Ostrom, imitating the sounds Charlie Brown’s teacher makes in the television cartoon. “We didn’t know what the heck they were talking about.”

Merck’s attornyies obviously messed up, but the jurors have a job to do. This really ticks me off and makes me wonder how much longer we will have juries in these type of cases.

Econbrowser has some good information about the studies that started the lawsuit. Econbrowswer notes:

The obvious question here is whether in fact the authors were able to observe all the relevant risk factors. The study openly acknowledged that it did not, missing such important information as smoking and family history of myocardial infarction.

Econbrowswer also writes:Or, to be a little more accurate, even if there actually is an elevated risk of the magnitude the studies suggest but can’t prove, the question is whether I might want to accept a 1 in 4,000 risk of dying from a heart attack in order to get the only medication that makes my pain bearable and a mobile life livable. And if I say no to the Vioxx, I may end up taking something that is less effective for my pain but has risks of its own.

And now I have a question for Mr. Lanier. How did we arrive at a system in which 12 random Texans are assigned responsibility for evaluating the scientific merits of statistical evidence of this type, weighing the costs and benefits, and potentially sending a productive blue-chip American company into bankruptcy protection?

Our legal system is broken.

My sister loves to backpack and she didn’t want to leave her 14 month old son home, so she brought him backpacking with us. Here’s one of my favorite pictures of them together.

On Sunday I returned from a week of backpacking in the Wind Rivers in Wyoming and a week of boating on Lake Powell in southern Utah. Just before the trip I bought a new camera. Over the next few days I’ll post some pictures of my trip. This first picture is one my Mom took of a sunset in the foothills to the Wind Rivers.

Here’s an article on Ars Technica on editing digitial images.

Gamespot has some new screenshots from Unreal Tournament 2007 up. Check them out. They are amazing.

Ann Althouse writes about the end of radio as we know it and she makes some good points. Talk radio is on the decline because it is really tough (and really boring) to talk about politics all the time. And much of broadcast radio is on the decline. I used to listen to political talk radio all the time, but after moving to DC I quit because I hit politics overload. Every time I listen to broadcast music radio I get frustrated at the music and the commercials and quickly turn back to XM. Radio as we know it is as good as dead.