Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
– Samuel Johnson
– Samuel Johnson
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
down on the fetal farm with Jon Stewart: Crooks and Liars
A glass gem found among the treasures of King Tut appears to have been formed by a meteor bursting above the desert, melting sand into glass – computer simulations of the event indicate events such as the 1908 Tunguska event may be more common than thought, occurring once a century or so, with many times the power of atomic bombs.
Researchers have found that a deadly fish virus detected in the northeastern United States for the first time in June in two species has probably spread to at least two more. But they have yet to determine whether the virus is responsible for the death of hundreds of fish in Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River in recent weeks.
A giant telescope with a mirror up to 60 metres wide is being planned by the European Southern Observatory. The telescope would be able to detect Earth-like planets around other stars and spot the universe’s first galaxies.
Divers and scientists observed and videotaped a massive blowout of methane from the ocean floor. It happened in an area of gas and oil seepage coming out of small volcanoes in the ocean floor of the Santa Barbara channel off California. The blowout sounded like a freight train, according to the divers, and released a volume of 5000 cu ft of gas. Atmospheric methane is at least 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Normally, small amounts of methane are released and dissolve in the seawater, where bacteria consume the methane. However, massive releases can result in 99% of the gas reaching the atmosphere. The research has implications for understanding both past climate changes and increased future risks from global warming.
The ability to spot venomous snakes may have played a major role in the evolution of monkeys, apes and humans, according to a new hypothesis by Lynne Isbell, professor of anthropology at UC-Davis. Primates like lemurs and South American monkeys were under less threat from venomous snakes, and have less developed visual systems. Having evolved for one purpose, a good eye for color, detail and movement later became useful for other purposes, such as social interactions in groups.
And then there are threats too rapid for evolution to address: Tigers have 40 percent less habitat than they did a decade ago, due to intense poaching and the rise of an Asian middle class that puts pressure on the big cats and their environment, wildlife experts said on Thursday.
A Spanish company claimed on Thursday to have developed a method of breeding plankton and turning the marine plants into oil, providing a potentially inexhaustible source of clean fuel. Since the plankton absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to grow, the carbon released from burning this oil would not contribute to global warming. A much better idea than this plan from Pennsylvania: Bipartisan political support is growing to use waste coal in what would be the nation’s first plant to convert coal into diesel fuel. The process involves a technology known as Fischer-Tropsch, developed and named after German scientists in the 1920s and used during World War II in Germany and several decades later in South Africa.
I’m shocked, shocked: Responding to a survey, more than a third of FDA scientists said that agency officials cared more about speeding new drugs and medical devices to market than public health.
From The Rude Pundit:
(In honor of our hardworking members of the legislative branch)
1. If your pipes were leaking to the point that your basement was flooded and your foundation was going to crumble, you’d order out for pizza and argue with the delivery guy over whether or not you wanted anchovies on the pie. You wouldn’t tip.
2. If your computer hard drive crashed, taking with it all the digital photos of your kids and your vacations, you’d write an angry letter to Ronald McDonald, demanding to know if the McDLT is ever coming back. You like hot and cold separate.
3. If a garbage truck ran over your foot, you’d go shopping for a new hat. A jaunty summer beret, perhaps.
4. If five men with clubs killed your sister’s dog and then raped her, you’d reorganize your copies of People magazine alphabetically by cover celebrity rather than by date. You’d argue with your spouse over using first or last names.
5. If your credit cards were maxed out and your debit card was used to empty your bank account by someone who stole the numbers and you didn’t have anything left to cover the cost of formula for your baby, you’d go sing Christmas carols at the Alzheimer’s wing of the nursing home. Even though it’s July.
Read the rest of this list of Republican altered reality, HERE
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Iraqis staged an anti-Israel protest with banners reading “Shiites and Sunnis unite” in the city of Samarra, where the bombing of a Shiite shrine in February brought the country to the brink of civil war.
Earlier this week, about 4,000 Iraqis answered the call of Shiite clerics to rally in the holy city of Karbala in protest of Israeli attacks, raising Iraqi and Lebanese flags. On Friday, radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr urged Sunnis and Shiites to unite so Muslims could defeat Israel — even without weapons. He predicted the Jewish state would collapse just as the World Trade Center did in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Members of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army march with a Lebanese and an Iraqi national flag during a protest denouncing the Israeli attacks on Lebanon, in the Sadr City area of Baghdad, Iraq. AP Photo/Karim Kadim“We promise you all that we will not forget our people in Lebanon despite our suffering from the American occupation. I will continue defending my Shiite and Sunni brothers and I tell them that if we unite, we will defeat Israel without the use of weapons. I want to remind you of a very important thing. The collapse of the World Trade Center towers in America” was almost five years ago, al-Sadr said. “The same way America’s idol collapsed, another idol will fall, and it is called Israel.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki— a Shiite — also condemned the Israeli destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure. “I call on the Arab League foreign ministers meeting in Cairo to take quick action to stop these aggressions. We call on the world to take quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression.”
Thousands of Shiites demonstrated in the Gulf kingdom of Bahrain in support of Hezbollah, two days after some 300 prominent Saudi Shiites wrote to the Bahraini government urging support to the Lebanese Shiite group. Both moves were seen as an assertion of increasing Shiite solidarity across the Arab world.
Fears of Increasing Hezbollah’s Popularity
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY