I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
– Galileo Galilei
– Galileo Galilei
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
who is getting tired of hearing about the latest Borat lawsuits, but here’s another one: AP/Yahoo
Interesting that he’s suing over something that isn’t actually in the movie.
Cohen better hope there are no men on that jury because urinal staring is a beating offense.
home of the completely idiotic: NYT
At least they increased their student aid to go along with the price gouging, but really, why are consumers demanding higher prices for education? WTF? I’ve watched my grad school tuition go up by 40% in the last 4 years, and it hasn’t made the degree any more desirable to me. It just ticks me off.
Parents aren’t paying for a lot of that grad study. With undergrads, it’s parental prestige on the line, also.
My own college (Carleton) has set next year’s price at $42,864! (That’s a comprehensive tuition + room and board fee). It is an unbelievable amount of money. After adjusting for inflation since I began college, it is still a 288% increase in costs.
The good thing I can say is that my school practices “need blind” admission: students are admitted without reference to their financial circumstances. Once admitted, the college pretty much guarantees sufficient financial aid to make attendance possible. They did that for me, and are still doing that. Wish it were so for all colleges and universities!
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LOBATSE, Botswana (Reuters) 10 min. ago — Botswana’s top judge said on Wednesday the High Court should dismiss a bid by some 1,000 Bushmen to return to their ancestral lands, dampening their hopes ahead of a final verdict expected later in the day.
But a second of the court’s three judges stood up for the Bushmen, saying the government had been wrong to push them out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve against their will.
The case pits Africa’s last hunter gatherers against one of the continent’s most admired governments in a dispute over diamond-rich land and development priorities.
Bushmen forced off their ancestral land in favor of government diamond mining.
● Survival International
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."High Court Rules 2-1 in Favor of Bushmen!
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LOBATSE, Botswana (Reuters) 4 min. ago — Botswana’s High Court ruled that more than 1,000 Bushmen had been wrongly evicted from ancestral hunting grounds in the Kalahari desert and should be allowed to return. Three judges have taken all day to read out their separate ruling.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."So I woke up and turned on the Today Show and who’s on to discuss the situtation in Iraq – Bill Bennett. I knew this would be interesting. Here are a few of the things Mr. “Give war a chance” had to say:
The Today Show then followed all that up with a report on how Reyes didn’t know that Al Queda was Sunni and Hezbollah has Shiite. I don’t remember them reporting W’s awakening to these kinds of facts AFTER he had decided to invade Iraq.
It all makes me think that the network that led the way with finally calling it a Civil War heard all the wingnuts calling them “the most liberal network” and is beginning to try a pay back. Sorry state of affairs.
I’m so glad you posted this! I saw that too, and was horrified. How stupid do they think we are? And the fact that they are so desperate that they’re turning to the likes of Bill Bennett for cover is incredible.
Do you think we can find a YouTube or Crooks and Liars clip of what he said later today?
I’m certainly hoping C&L puts up a video. We’ll have to keep checking. I know he put up one of the generals talking on the Today Show about their meeting with Bush earlier this week. Here’s hoping.
Bill Bennett is such a fascist, it almost takes my breath away every time I hear him talk.
Couple of notables here on the ISG, Bennett joins
“A principled stonewalling.”
The administration’s continued dellusions – denial aside, it is evident that we have a rift with our biggest Middle East ally, the Saudis, on how to proceed. They are now directing this orchestra after Cheney being summoned to Riyadh and Prince Turki’s abrupt departure from DC without notice, fanfare.
Saudi Arabia has told the Bush administration that it might provide financial backing to Iraqi Sunnis in any war against Iraq’s Shiites if the United States pulls its troops out of Iraq, according to American and Arab diplomats.-( NYT via Laura Rozen)
so we are ‘changing course’ to involve an enlargement of hostilities with a proxy war against Iran. So bowing to the Saudis, we need more troops. How will the president sell Americans on expanding the Iraq war?
Feels like 17. Too bad for Jeff Skilling who is on his way there to pay his own and Ken Lay’s debt to society.
Too bad he couldn’t figure out how to fake his own death.
I’ve done time in Minnesota, and believe me, he’ll need plenty of alcohol to survive those winters.
But one quick way to cool the climate would be a small nuclear war </snark>. Even a small-scale nuclear war would have far-reaching consequences for the global climate. Scientists using the latest supercomputers have modeled the effects of a limited conflict in the light of new concerns over weapons proliferation. For an exchange of 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs, the modeling suggested there would be millions of deaths, as well as climate cooling and ozone damage.
100 Hiroshima-sized bombs (equivalent 15k ton) is 1.5 megaton. I wonder whether the scientists have put in their supercomputer modeling the effect of the superpowers testing their nuclear bombs throughout the fifties en sixties of the 20th century???
Twenty-three nuclear tests were carried out at Bikini between 1946 and 1958
1954 - The US has produced the biggest ever man-made explosion ... It is believed the hydrogen bomb was up to 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima."But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Try the nuclear weapons archive.org for record of tests. Leave us not forget “MIRV” is not a tv talk-show host.
I wonder whether the scientists have put in their supercomputer modeling the effect of the superpowers testing their nuclear bombs throughout the fifties en sixties of the 20th century???
That’s an excellent question!
It would also be interesting to compare when the nuclear test ban treaty went into effect versus when the global cooling (that was the worry around 1970) was replaced with global warming as a worry.
Part of the assumption of nuclear winter resulting from a nuclear war was from the smoke from burning cities, however, and that wouldn’t have been nearly as big a problem with nuclear tests in deserts or on tropical atolls.
Still, could the a-bomb tests compare to volcanic eruptions in their climate cooling effects?
The tallest mountains ever seen on Titan — coated with layers of organic material and blanketed by clouds — have been imaged on Saturn’s moon Titan by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. During an Oct. 25 flyby designed to obtain the highest resolution infrared views of Titan yet, Cassini resolved surface features as small as 400 meters (1,300 feet). The images reveal a large mountain range, dunes, and a deposit of material that resembles a volcanic flow. These data, together with radar data from previous flybys, provide new information on the height and composition of geologic features on Titan.
Long-term monitoring by satellite of the distribution of freshwater over the Earth reveals that several African basins, such as the Congo, Zambezi and Nile, show significant drying over the past five years. In the United States, the Mississippi and Colorado River basins show water storage increases during that time. Such information is vital for managing water resources in vulnerable parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, since increasing populations and standards of living place demands on water resources that are often unsustainable…
…As illustrated by the following story: Beijing is facing an escalating water crisis amid relentless population growth, with 2010 seen as a crucial time when China’s capital may have to take drastic measures, state media said Wednesday. There was enough water in Beijing to adequately supply just over 14 million people in 2005, but the city had 15 million permanent residents and four million migrant workers at the end of last year, Xinhua news agency said.
In a more hopeful story, Eritrea aims to become the first country in the world to turn its entire coast into an environmentally protected zone to ensure balanced and sustainable development, officials said Tuesday. The Red Sea state intends to protect all of its 1,350-kilometer (837-mile) coastline, along with another 1,950-kilometers (1,209-miles) of coast around its more than 350 islands, according to a draft coastal policy document.
Researchers were surprised to find that water forms DNA-like “spiral staircase” structures when frozen inside carbon nanotubes at high pressures. (See link for some jaw-dropping computer crystal structures.)
The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has issued a new report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, saying that the livestock industry is one of the two or three top most environmentally destructive industries in the world. The sector ever generates more greenhouse gases (18%) than the transportation sector (13.5%).
Small insects that inhabit some of the most remote parts of the United States are sending a strong message about climate change. New research suggests that changes in midge communities in some of these areas provide additional evidence that the globe is indeed getting warmer. Studying the remains of midges in remote lakes researchers found that, starting around 25 years ago, warmer-water midges began to edge out cooler-water midge species.
Researchers in Colorado have found that that surprisingly low concentrations of treatment-plant effluent can change male fish into females. The study showed that certain chemicals from pharmaceuticals and personal-care products made it through the Boulder Wastewater Treatment Plant and into Boulder Creek. Ninety percent of the white suckers swimming downstream of the plant were female. Upstream, there was an even split. The chemicals are believed to come from excreted birth-control hormones, natural female hormones and detergents flushed down toilets and drains. In the ecosystem, they are known as endocrine disrupters, settling into cell receptors intended for hormones and garbling the body’s chemical communications. [Come the next administration, look for this subject to bust wide open: it’s been percolating just below the radar here for years, while Europe moves ahead with regulations in this area – K.P.]
From the WaPo (now that it’s flu season again…) – New analysis of how American cities responded to the killer Spanish flu of 1918 suggests that closing schools, banning large gatherings, staggering work hours and quarantining households may have saved tens of thousands of lives. In 1918, the public health responses included isolating the ill, quarantining houses, closing schools, canceling worship services, restricting the size of funerals and weddings, closing saloons and theaters, restricting door-to-door sales, discouraging the use of public transportation, staggering the hours of business and factory operations, imposing curfews and, in some places, recommending the use of face masks in public.
Long-term management plans for national forests will no longer go through a formal environmental impact statement, the U.S. Forest Service announced Tuesday. The Forest Service said writing the 15-year plans has no effect on the environment, making the impact statements unnecessary. That conclusion was based on changes to forest planning rules made last year and a past U.S. Supreme Court ruling that says a plan is a statement of intent and does not cause anything to happen. Individual projects, such as logging, were cut out of forest management plans in last year’s rule changes. Those projects will still have to go through a formal analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA.
If ever a twist there was and the question of the week: Why are Jews at the ‘Holocaust denial’ conference?
Here’s the clue: they also want an end to the Israeli state.
Tommy Delay admits, “I don’t write My Own blog (ht/t: Thinkprogress)
Andrew Sullivan admits he’s impressed with and suggests we read Obama’s speech.
and Watch the Obama announcement Teaser (via Huffpost)
Write this down. One thing that can be said about this administration is that they have perfected no bid contracts to the unqualified: The $5.6 billion Project BioShield” boondooggle – Ken Silverstein Harper’s
Time to take action on Darfur: A no fly zone, air strikes and a blockade has been proposed. US military said to strongly oppose. And China may not go along for the junket.
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Holocaust survivor Dr Hajo G Meyer said that Zionism predates fascism and fascists and Zionists had a history of cooperating with each other. He said that the Zionist state of Israel wants to create anti-Semitism in the world so that more and more Jews start migrating to Israel.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."from the WP: