To the confusion of those who voted for him, President Obama insists on treating Republicans with a respect that no one outside the party thinks they any longer deserve. After his victory, and with no discernible leader outside a drug-addled blowhard, they’re reeling.

Worse for the Republicans, it looks as if dramatic inroads are being made into territory Republicans have long claimed as their own — national security. In other words, we may finally be zeroing in on Osama bin-Laden. Full story »

First, just in case you haven’t seen it, please review the video (in three parts).

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Have you ever wondered what happens when you take a really, really dumb idea and run with it?  Not just run with it for a few steps either, run withthe it for nearly three decades until it becomes the foundation for the decision making process throughout the business world.  Look around.  This, right now, is what happens when you run with a really dumb idea for that long.

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SOMETHING MUST BE DONE TO STOP AMERICA’S DANGEROUS RUSH INTO THE ARMS OF SOCIALISM!!!! If Obama isn’t stopped immediately he’ll tax us all to death just like his SOCIALIST predecessors, Eisenhower and Nixon and Reagan and … errr, wait a minute….

I get seriously annoyed when I read that James Hansen and others are comparing climate disruption deniers and skeptics to Nazis and war criminals – it’s too extreme and it leads to polarization and results like the latest Gallup poll. I also get seriously annoyed when I read that garbage coming from said deniers and skeptics.

Yesterday, Dr. Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the originator of the petition against Al Gore’s global warming hoax which as of now 32,000 scientists have signed, told the 2nd International Conference on Climate Change, that the people like Al Gore who promote global warming alarmism are committing genocide by the withdrawal of technology from the developing world.

[Robinson] noted, “that the billions of people who live at the lowest level of human existence will suffer greatly from the rationing of energy, and this, in turn, will lead to the death of hundreds of millions, or possibly billions.” Full story »

After eighteen years, I finally got around to reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X—the novel that literally defined my generation.

In a way, that makes Generation X sort of like the Moby Dick for Gen X-ers—one of those novels that one should read because it’s a Classic-with-a-capital-C. It’s Important. It’s defining. It’s about me.

Right?

Published in 1991, Generation X tells the story of three unfulfilled, uninspired twenty-somethings who float through life, tell stories to each other, and experience a nagging sense of being adrift in their own lives despite their best efforts to ground themselves. You can almost hear U2 belting out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in the background.

Being young means getting old, and middle class means boredom. Full story »

Almost 50 days into his administration President Obama made his way around to what strikes me as America’s #1 long-term issue, education. The soundbite is pretty catchy: he wants to overhaul the system “from the cradle up through a career.”

A compelling sentiment, that is. Our educational system couldn’t be much more broken, and a righteous keelhauling overhauling is certainly in order. But the rhetoric doesn’t tell us a lot. Full story »

Turns out he’s in the process of redeeming himself. Alexandra Penny explains at the Daily Beast:

By not entering into a plea bargain, he’s saved his dirty secrets and implicated none of the others who helped him scheme and steal. He’s also “saved” sweet, innocent little Ruthie and his sons, brother, grandchildren, et al. — a whole slew of his skanky relatives. … This is a magnanimous gesture [especially for someone who is] given to. . . sociopathic selfishness to exponential extremes.

(If you’re wondering about the tone of Ms. Penny’s writing, she’s among those Madoff wiped out.)

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• IPCC 2007 conclusions were too conservative
• International Climate Congress updates IPCC science for Copenhagen
• International Polar Year finds significant polar warming since 1959
• Less CO₂ absorbed by one plankton species

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The Fourth Assesment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Program on Climate Change (IPCC) is a consensus report. This means that politicians and diplomats from many different nations had nearly as much authority over what was written as the scientists and economists who wrote the various documents did. While the working group documents were left more-or-less alone, the executive summaries for all three working group documents used language that was literally negotiated out between dozens of countries. If China or the U.S. didn’t like a word here or there, they could refuse to sign the document until the language was changed, and we know for a fact that they did so. And when literally everyone has to approve, you end up with a document that is as watered down as the most critical signatory wants it to be.

In addition, the nature of a large organization such as the IPCC means that it can’t react fast to recent data and scientific advances. For that reason, the various working groups that produced the actual reports didn’t look at data much beyond 2002, even though significant scientific advances occurred between then and the release of the report in 2007.

A new article published by the Earth Island Institute illustrates just how conservative the IPCC reports were with respect to the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in general, and carbon dioxide (CO₂) in particular. Full story »

Afternoon edition

In my 40+ years of life I’ve thoroughly enjoyed many genres of music, everything from ambient to thrash, bop to opera, bluegrass to prog. I like anything that moves me. Variety, spice, all that.

But in recent years I’ve become quite fixated on one particular kind of sound: space music.

I’m fortunate to live in such a beautiful state as Colorado. On a clear night, especially when camping high in the Rockies, you can see more stars than you might’ve even guessed were there, especially if you’re city folk. As you’re gazing into the night sky, it’s not out of the ordinary to see a multitude of shooting stars or even a satellite float slowly by, made visible by reflecting sunlight just as the moon does. Throw in a crackling fire, some grilled vittles, and a few ice-cold local microbrews, and what could possibly be missing?

Only one thing, for me anyway: cosmic tunage. (My five favorite space tracks are at the end of this post.)

I’m pretty certain my obsession with space music began with Full story »

Like a lot of other people, I watched the Watchmen this past weekend.

Despite lukewarm reviews and a running time that nearly hits three hours, the movie still managed to pull in a hefty $55.7 million dollars. While that’s apparently at the low end of industry expectations, the movie exceeded my fanboy expectations.

What I didn’t expect, though, was the spectacular time capsule-on-a-movie screen that Watchmen turned out to be.

As ground-breaking as Watchmen was as a comic book back in 1986-87, it was also very much a product of its time, infused with Cold War sensibility and anxiety, set in a crime-and-slime-ridden Times Square atmosphere writ large upon the world. Full story »

Dear Mr. Buffet, Mr. Gates, Mr. Turner, Mr. Soros, Ms. Winfrey, and any other hyper-rich types with progressive political leanings:

If this essay has, against all odds, somehow made its way to your desk, please, bear with me. It’s longish, but it winds eventually toward an exceedingly important conclusion. If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll do my best to reward your patience.
_______________

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama won a landmark political victory on a couple of prominent themes: “hope” and “change.” He has since been afforded ample opportunity to talk about these ideas, having inherited the nastiest economic quagmire in living memory and a Republican minority in Congress that has interpreted November’s results as a mandate to obstruct the public interest even more rabidly than it was doing before. Reactions among those of us who supported Obama have been predictably mixed, but even those who have been critical of his efforts to date are generally united in their hope that his win signaled the end of “movement conservatism” in the US. Full story »

Hot links from recent days: A space rock 100′ wide came within a few miles of hitting Earth … The Beach Boys + Ray Charles = Awesomeness … US immigration policies bring global shame on us, argues Roberto Lovato … Harlem’s legendary Apollo turns 75 this year … Barbara O’Brien discusses gimmicks and the GOP at Mahablog … Sonia Dong profiles the amazing Moken people at Environmental Graffiti … Ari Melber on how insiders failed Obama … Inside the new science of neuroengineering: a report by Quinn Norton at Wired … Rev. Billy of the Church of Life After Shopping is challenging Bloomberg for NYC mayor … Lars Ulrich: I downloaded music illegally … Michael Steele, fugitive slave … German biz mag declares the age of national economic policies in Europe over … The sad past but hopeful future of a feral little girl, Dani Lierow … Onion: The CIA’s been using black highlighters all this time … Andy Worthington’s “definitive list” of Gitmo’s prisoners … Parenting’s a big waste of time, didn’t you know? … Guess which prominent US senator says Obama’s war plans are too costly, too vague, and possibly too dangerous? … Mark Pagel’s handy guide to Stone Age small talk … A Republican lawmaker says he might be a “closet Democrat” … News from a local editor: there’s very little real news on “the blogs” … The Economist says it knows how to stop the drug wars … David Corn wonders if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be debated honestly … Tensions in Tibet continue to rise; China speaks of another Great Wall … Tom Engelhardt’s dictionary of American Empire-speak … Rush Limbaugh is the least of the Republican’s problems, claims Nate Silver … And finally, gag headline from S&R friend Lee Camp: Virginia joins the Green Revolution by attempting the first wind-powered execution. ∞

President Obama has committed 17,000 additional troops to Operation Enduring Freedom, our misadventure in Afghanistan. His generals don’t know what to do with those troops when they get there; they’re not even sure what troops to send. Someone on Obama’s sprawling national security team should have told him it’s a bad, bad idea to send troops into a combat zone without a well-defined task and purpose. Ronald Reagan’s 1983 end zone fumble in Beirut should serve as a shining example of that maxim, but today’s defense hierarchy isn’t keen on learning from the past. Neocon luminary Fred Kagan, chief architect of the surge strategy, taught military history at West Point for a decade, which shows you how little regard the Army has for the subject.

The Keystone Kollege of Armed Konflict Knowledge that all our generals seem to have attended doesn’t place much importance on coherent strategy making, either. Full story »

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Washington was caught in the trap that was snaring so many other Virginia planters and that Thomas Jefferson, another victim, described as the chronic condition of indebtedness, which then became “hereditary from father to son for many generations, so that planters were a species of property annexed to certain mercantile houses in London. … If a debt is once contracted by a farmer, it is never paid but by a sale,” meaning bankruptcy proceedings.
– His Excellency George Washington, Joseph Ellis

Most of us know the Revolutionary War was about more than just life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Like most uprisings in fact, it was the expression of a people who felt their economic lifeline was being pinched by the British and their tax schemes. If you’ll recall your high-school American history, the Sugar Act enforced a tariff on molasses and taxed the importation of items such as silk and wine, the Stamp Act — every document or newspaper printed in the colonies — and the Townshend Act: lead, paint, paper, glass, and tea imported by colonists.

Even a personage as august as George Washington had reasons other than unadulterated fealty to Lady Liberty for rejecting foreign rule. In fact, beyond just onerous English taxation, what galvanized him was the eighteenth century version of credit card debt. Full story »

Those Americans who’ve spent any significant time overseas know what’s it like to be embarrassed by their fellow innocents abroad.  There’s not much worse than being accosted for spare change outside of Amsterdam’s Central Station by a fellow American in vagrant residence; or, a summer stroll down Salzburg’s Getreidegasse only to be confronted by an obese American wearing blindingly white shoes and a sweatshirt emblazoned with a sequined representation of Old Glory…using a walkie-talkie to loudly arrange a meeting at the McDonald’s.

And then there’s our Secretary of State, managing to take the cliche of Dumb-ugly American to new heights where the only solace is to place your head in your hands and weep.

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Those who own a property have the right to continue owning that property, and what they do with their justly owned and acquired property is entirely their own look-out.

If you happen to be the owner of a unique piece of art, say the Mona Lisa, and you decide to set fire to it, then that is a terrible tragedy, but it is your property.  No government should ever have the right to intervene.

Apartheid in South Africa was a crime against humanity.  You can argue the reasons.  Some say that it was racial prejudice translating into attempted genocide.  Others that it was a violation of human rights of equality and justice.
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This is unbelievable. The performances are incredible, the production is staggering, the vision… Just watch and listen.

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