Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Hypselodoris infucata there.

(Photo by Stephen Childs.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The Connecticut Supreme Court has ruled that gay and straight Americans should have equal rights.

The Connecticut Supreme Court overturned a ban on same-sex marriage on Friday in a victory for gay-rights advocates that will allow couples to marry in the New England state.

The court found that the state's law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation.

Ya don't say.

An ill-conceived relocation program for the desert tortoise has been suspended:

Fort Irwin officials on Thursday suspended their disastrous desert tortoise translocation program, in response to a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity and Desert Survivors. The flawed translocation project, undertaken to remove tortoises from an area where the fort intends to expand its training areas, has so far sustained huge losses. More than 90 relocated and resident tortoises have perished, primarily killed by predators, and more losses are expected due to healthy tortoises being introduced into diseased populations — against the recommendations of epidemiologists.

Black rhinos have been released into the wild for the first time in 25 years:

According to an article from ZSL the fifteen rhinos were sedated and had GPS transmitters installed in their horns before being moved to their new home. The fifteen individuals were selected from a single herd, so the animals would already be familiar with one another. If the release proves successful, ZSL hopes to take what is has learned in Kenya to Uganda and Tanzania for similar projects there.

Argentina has banned fishing and trawling in a sensitive coastal area:

Burdwood Bank is rich with endemic species and serves as an important feeding ground for sea lions, penguins, albatross and other marine life. The area is also a breeding site for southern blue whiting and Fuegian sardine and supports unique hard and soft coral species.

WCS reports that the Argentine Fisheries Secretary permanently banned all fishing activities in the area — including bottom trawling — on September 26th, 2008.

Hundreds of new species have been found off the coast of Tasmania, including this odd sea star.


Chevron has failed in its latest bid to avoid paying for clean-up efforts in the Ecuadorean rainforest:

The set back for Chevron comes after a July report revealed that the oil firm has hired lobbyists to persuade the Bush administration and Congress to threaten the use of trade sanctions against Ecuador to get it off the hook for damages.

According to The Sietch Blog, the environazis have taken another step towards dismantling civilization:

Solectria Renewables has completed delivery of more than 5 MegaWatts (MW) of 95 kW three-phase grid-tied inverters for multiple photovoltaic (PV) systems in South Korea. These systems were designed and installed by Hyundai Heavy Industries and Jarada Co. Ltd., Solectria Renewables’ distributor in South Korea. This is a great example of American made products being exported to other countries.

While we're on the subject of economic opportunity, consider this:

As the economic might of Japan faces up to the global banking crisis, a single cat has boosted the finances of a small Japanese city by millions of dollars, according to a study.

Tortoiseshell Tama is the master of the unmanned Kishi train station where she was born and raised, on the provincial Kishigawa Line. But it is not her labours on the platform which have seen the cash rolling in.

It is rather Tama's irresistible charm which has brought tourists flocking in their thousands to the western city of Kinokawa to see the feline worker patrolling in the uniform of her office -- a Wakayama Electric Railway cap.

With 55,000 more people having used the Kishigawa Line than would normally be expected, Tama is being credited with a contribution to the local economy calculated to have reached as much as 1.1 billion yen (10.44 million dollars) in 2007 alone, according to a study announced last week.

The path to our salvation is clear!


AIDG Blog links to a nice story about a remarkable urban garden in Milwaukee:

Will Allen already had the makings of an agricultural dream packed into two scruffy acres in one of Milwaukee’s most economically distressed neighborhoods.

His Growing Power organization has six greenhouses and eight hoophouses for greens, herbs and vegetables; pens for goats, ducks and turkeys; a chicken coop and beehives; and a system for raising tilapia and perch. There’s an advanced composting operation — a virtual worm farm — and a lab that is working on ways to turn food waste into fertilizer and methane gas for energy.

With a staff of about three dozen full-time workers and 2,000 residents pitching in as volunteers, his operation raises about $500,000 worth of affordable produce, meat and fish for one of what he calls the “food deserts” of American cities, where the only access to food is corner grocery stories filled with beer, cigarettes and processed foods.

Meanwhile, vertical gardens are springing up in LA's Skid Row:

“Bees and butterflies arrived within seconds after we put the walls up,” says Joyce Lewis, Urban Farming’s L.A. project manager, who organizes local volunteers to tend the vertical gardens. “They greened an environment that would otherwise just be concrete and steel.”

I like this idea quite a bit:

They are everywhere: images of animals and nature to market large corporations’ products. There is the simply-sketched penguin on every Penguin Book; the leaping silver jaguar from the car company of the same name; the jumping helmet-wearing dolphin of the Miami Dolphins’ football team; and the ubiquitous talking gecko used in Geico auto insurance commercials. Such logos have always been free; however a new campaign, Save Your Logo, will encourage corporations with animal or nature logos to support endangered species and their dwindling habitats.

According to an article on the IUCN website, the initiative is apart of a new partnership of the IUCN, The Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the World Bank with additional cooperation from the Belgian NGO, Noe Institute.

Consumer Reports has created a new website called Full Frontal Scrutiny in order to keep tabs on industry front groups.

[W]e created this site...to focus public attention on the people and organizations who function in our society as hidden persuaders. You'll find them at work posting to blogs, speaking before city councils, quoted in newspapers and published on the editorial page, even sponsoring presidential election debates. All this while pretending to represent the grassroots when in fact they are working against citizens' best interests. We call these organizations front groups. One of the best ways to put their agendas in proper perspective is to expose their work. That's what this website is for. We hope you'll use it, tell your friends about it, even contribute to it.

There's more here.

A recordsetting 61 Nobel laureates have endorsed Barack Obama.

We especially applaud his emphasis during the campaign on the power of science and technology to enhance our nation’s competitiveness. In particular, we support the measures he plans to take – through new initiatives in education and training, expanded research funding, an unbiased process for obtaining scientific advice, and an appropriate balance of basic and applied research – to meet the nation’s and the world’s most urgent needs.

An adobe pyramid has been discovered in Peru:

"We know that many buildings are still buried under Cahuachi's sands, but until now, it was almost impossible to exactly locate them and detect their shape from an aerial view," Masini told Discovery News. "The biggest problem was the very low contrast between adobe, which is sun-dried earth, and the background subsoil."

Ethiopia will build Africa's biggest wind farm:

Ethiopia has been chronically hit by droughts, affecting the humanitarian plight of millions as well as crippling its electricity production, which is heavily reliant on hydroelectric dams.

The landlocked Horn of Africa country -- Africa's second most populous -- is currently experiencing a severe drought and has been plagued by incessant power cuts in recent months.

Indigenous forest dwellers in Borneo will not allow an oil palm plantation on their land:

In a two-hour meeting Saturday in the city of Miri, representatives from the Berawan-Tering ethnic group officially rejected an overture to turn their land over to a private firm for oil palm development. About 90 percent of community members opposed the deal which would have given the oil palm a 60-year concession to their land, according to former Baram District Councillor Philip Ube, who represented the native.

Indonesian officials have agreed to protect Sumatra's forests:

The ten governors of Sumatra — along with four federal ministers — have signed an agreement to protect forests and other ecosystems on the Indonesian island, according to WWF. The announcement is significant because Sumatra is a biodiversity hotspot — home to rare and endemic wildlife — that is under great threat from logging and expansion oil palm plantations. The island has lost 48 percent of its forest cover since 1985.

Inhabitat reports on a clever new bicycle design:

[T]he Aquaduct is “a pedal-powered concept vehicle that transports, filters, and stores water.” Pedal to the well, fill up the tank and by the time you’re home you have 8 liters of purified water....It works by using a pedal-driven peristaltic pump to drive water from its trunk through a filter into a clean tank. The bike can carry enough water for an entire family, and can filter while moving or stationary.

Scientists have reportedly found a way to identify sources of mercury pollution:

For the past eight years, Blum and co-workers have been trying to develop a way of reading mercury fingerprints in coal and other sources of mercury. The hope was that they could then find those same fingerprints in soil and water bodies, much as a detective matches a suspect's fingerprints to those found at a crime scene, and use them to figure out exactly what the sources of mercury pollution are in certain areas.

"For some time, we weren't sure that it was going to be technically possible, but now we've cracked that nut and have shown significant differences not only between mercury from coal and, say, metallic forms of mercury that are used in industry, but also between different coal deposits," Blum said.

This is pretty amazing:

Four months after a successful hand transplant -- 35 years after amputation in an industrial accident at age 19 -- a 54-year-old man's emerging sense of touch is registered in the former "hand area" of the his brain, says a University of Oregon neuroscientist.

Geoff Manaugh makes some interesting and timely points about the fixation of the American political elite on rural "authenticity":

If the United States – if the entire world – is rapidly urbanizing, then it would seem like literally the last thing we need in the White House, in an era of collapsing bridges and levees, is someone whose idea of public infrastructure is a dirt road.

Read the whole thing, by all means. It ties in with some speculations of my own, which I may eventually get around to posting here, or chez Echidne. (In the meantime, let's consider tea as a North/South litmus test.)

Things you lived long enough to see: The colors of the moon (via Plep). A prehistoric hedgehog figurine. The craters of Mercury.


In addition, if not multiplication: The not inconsiderable virtues of sandbag houses. The quietest place on earth, an unsettling locale for which the Western Soundscape Archive is a reliable antidote. Ice cliffs in foreclosed malls: one possible outcome of five failed political axioms, and a possible haven for Antarctic botany (this could save countless local economies, especially if the caretaker is a cat in snow goggles).


Furthermore: Junk Drawers and Medicine Cabinets (via things). The Routefinder, a strange and beautiful precursor to handheld GPS. And some evocative photos from the Moscow Zoo, 1920 (also via Plep).


Here's a movie to end with. Don't watch it all in one place!



(Photo at top: "Agar Plate of Fluorescent Bacteria Colonies" by Roger Y. Tsien.)

Selling Bad Ideas

Shawn Akers follows the trail of soggy crumbs left by Jonah Goldberg, and discovers a grave and gathering threat called "Commufascism."

Here's how it operates:

The secret to selling bad ideas is to make sure they are the only ones available. This is how totalitarian regimes take power.

This is quite true, which is why we need to crush academia. And demonize anyone who suggests that there's any historical explanation for anti-Americanism in the Middle East. And represent abortion as murder, period. And denounce anything short of trigger-happy anarcho-capitalist chaos as a nigger-coddling Nanny State.

Whether it was Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany or Vladimir Lenin in Communist Russia, the pattern is largely the same – totalitarian dictators come to power by enshrining themselves as cults of personality and then creating political monopolies through often less than delicate campaigns of indoctrination and censorship – especially censorship enshrouded in the intimidating aura of state power.

This is such prodigious nonsense that I feel almost helpless before it; it's as though I'm trying to extinguish Vesuvius with a squirt gun. Consider Akers' plodding earnestness as he reveals the hermetic secrets of 20th-century totalitarianism. (Talking about serious things makes you a serious person! Try it at home! Impress your friends!) Consider his dainty objection to the "less than delicate" methods of Commufascist political monopolies. Consider his judicious distinction between totalitarian censorship per se, and the totalitarian censorship that's "enshrouded in the intimidating aura of state power." And, above all, consider his perfect obliviousness to the political culture of the last eight years, in which the most frequent complaint the Right had against government censorship and intimidation was that it stopped short of executing celebrity peaceniks.

Akers goes on to argue that when a government dominates, impoverishes, and enslaves its people, "the result is always the same – tyranny." Please do make a note of it.

All this proves once again that the Historical Perspective has only one great purpose in conservative thought, and that's to paint moderates like Obama as the rectally born love children of Hitler and Stalin:

[S]cattered around the nation are tri-color campaign posters of Mr. Obama, bearing a striking resemblance to the larger than life representations of Lenin, Marx, and Engels used by soviet propagandists in the glory days of Mother Russia.

Remember that thing Akers said a moment ago, about how "the secret to selling bad ideas is to make sure they are the only ones available"? Well, he's exactly right, and that's why Obama's mild call for expanded healthcare (plus American exceptionalism) and renewable energy (plus unconditional support for Israel) has to be cast as something out of The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution.

Akers complains that Obama is being transformed from an underachieving mediocrity into Our National Savior, which suggests that conservatives were right, for once, when they claimed that irony died on 9/11. It's not just that Akers dislikes being dosed with his own medicine, though; he has a larger, more universal concern.

[U]nfortunately for the American people, what has been true of the form of the Obama campaign is now materializing in its function as individuals cloaked in the appearance of state authority seek to silence dissent and indoctrinate the masses.

Akers is referring to the claim that an Obama "truth squad" in Missouri has vowed to prosecute anyone who dares to point out that he's a Commufascist, a secret Muslim, a Marxist, a neo-Marxist, a terrorist, a drug user or dealer, an advocate of post-birth abortion, a messianic megalomaniac, an America-hater, a citizen of Kenya or Indonesia, an uppity arugula-eater, the Antichrist, or all of the above. The chilling effect of this threat is demonstrated by the astonishing number of people who have called Obama these things and worse over the last week; this inspires Akers to rail against the "true Nazi-Reichsführer-school-meets-Communist-Reeducation-Camp style" of the "Obama jugend," whose impolitic language "would have made Stalin blush."

Worse, Obama's henchmen have allegedly threatened legal action against radio stations that "air unapproved ads." To you, it's common sense. To Akers, it's an example of "'forced coordination' – what the Nazis referred to as Gleichschaltung."

To his credit, Akers doesn't curse the darkie without lighting what the Nazis referred to as eine kerze.

Attempts at tyranny have historically struck a sour note in the collective [!!!] soul of Americans. There is something written on our hearts that says it is wrong to take property that does not belong to you even if you take it for a “good cause;” it is wrong to kill the innocent even if their existence is inconvenient for you; it is wrong to win a contest by intimidating the judges; and it is the honor of the strong to secure justice for the weak.

That's clear enough, right? Winning a contest by intimidating judges = Commufascism. Winning a contest by pretending that you're running against an Islamo-Stalinist Hitler = democracy and fair play.

This gibberish probably won't resonate with anyone who doesn't already hate Obama. But then, it's not supposed to. The point of Akers' piece is simply that if Obama wins, the victory will be both illegitimate and intolerable. Currently, Obama's popularity is proof that he's a quasi-fascist demagogue; if he wins, the idea that he was legally elected by a majority of voters will be rejected as a moral and mathematical impossibility.

In the coming weeks, these dangerous ideas will be "the only ones available" to real Americans, thanks to "less than delicate campaigns" like Akers'. And if anyone gets killed...well, sic semper tyrannis.

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

In between a place and candy is a narrow foot-path that shows more mounting than anything, so much really that a calling meaning a bolster measured a whole thing with that. A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and Chromodoris collingwoodi there is no satin wood shining.

(Photo by doug.deep.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The American Psychological Association will prohibit members from taking part in interrogations at illegal detention sites:

"The effect of this new policy is to prohibit psychologists from any involvement in interrogations or any other operational procedures at detention sites that are in violation of the U.S. Constitution or international law (e.g., the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention Against Torture)," says the letter, from APA President Alan E. Kazdin, PhD. "In such unlawful detention settings, persons are deprived of basic human rights and legal protections, including the right to independent judicial review of their detention."

The roles of psychologists at such sites would now be limited to working directly for the people being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights, or to providing treatment to military personnel. The new policy was voted on by APA members and is in the process of being implemented.

For the past 20 years, APA policy has unequivocally condemned torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, which can arise from interrogation procedures or conditions of confinement. APA's previous policies had expressed grave concerns about settings where people are deprived of human rights and had offered support to psychologists who refused to work in such settings.

California has passed a new law that protects farmers from being sued when their fields are contaminated with genetically engineered seeds:

AB 541 indemnifies California farmers who have not been able to prevent the inevitable - the drift of GE pollen or seed onto their land and the subsequent contamination of non-GE crops. Currently, farmers with crops that become contaminated by patented seeds or pollen have been the target of harassing lawsuits brought by biotech patent holders, most notoriously Monsanto....The bill also establishes a mandatory crop sampling protocol to level the playing field when biotech companies investigate alleged patent or contract violations.

A 100-year experiment proves the value of sustainable agriculture:

A plot of land on the campus of Auburn University shows that 110 years of sustainable farming practices can produce similar cotton crops to those using other methods.

In 1896, Professor J.F. Duggar at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama (now Auburn University) started an experiment to test his theories that sustainable cotton production was possible on Alabama soils if growers would use crop rotation and include winter legumes (clovers and/or vetch) to protect the soil from winter erosion

Colorado is testing a new system that may help prevent animals from being hit by cars:

[H]ighway officials are testing a system that involves a cable buried parallel to the highway. The cable emits an electromagnetic field that is calibrated to detect large animals.

When an animal is detected, electronic signs are activated to warn drivers.

Scientists are looking into the possibility of sending electricity from parked hybrid cars to the grid:

Think of it as the end of cars’ slacker days: No more sitting idle for hours in parking lots or garages racking up payments, but instead earning their keep by providing power to the electricity grid.

Scientists at the University of Michigan, using a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), are exploring plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) that not only use grid electricity to meet their power needs, but return it to the grid, earning money for the owner....The concept, called vehicle-to-grid (V2G) integration, is part of a larger effort to embrace large-scale changes that are needed to improve the sustainability and resilience of the transportation and electric power infrastructures. If V2G integration succeeds, it will enable the grid to utilize PHEV batteries for storing excess renewable energy from wind and the sun, releasing this energy to grid customers when needed, such as during peak hours.

A new device allegedly removes CO2 from the air, even though it's essential to life and therefore safe at any level.

University of Calgary climate change researchers say they are close to figuring out how to commercialize the capture of carbon dioxide directly from the air with a simple system that could be set up anywhere in the world.

If they can make it work, it would allow greenhouse gas to be removed from ambient air and reduce the effect of emissions from transportation sources such as cars and airplanes.

The EPA has withdrawn a plan to allow advertisements on pesticide containers:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has formally withdrawn a proposal to allow pesticide manufacturers to display “third-party endorsements” and charitable tie-ins on their labels. The agency acknowledged that these commercial displays on pesticide labels could confuse consumers and distract from safe usage directions on insecticides, herbicides, rat poisons and anti-microbial agents, echoing objections lodged by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

WorldChanging has an interesting article on recycling waste heat:

in a move that will save money and cut carbon emissions, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana has begun housing some of its computer servers in the nearby "Arizona Desert Dome," a conservatory for cacti and other desert plants. Computer servers create a lot of waste heat -- so much so that keeping them cool is a major cost driver and engineering challenge for data centers. Particularly in coal-fired Indiana, air conditioning for data centers equates to a lot of carbon emissions. Cacti, on the other hand, need a lot of heat, particularly in the winter, when South Bend is blanketed in snow.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have banned their most polluting trucks:

The ban on pre-1989 trucks immediately excludes more than 2,000 vehicles -- roughly 14 percent of the ports' combined fleet of diesel haulers -- that account for about half of the port area's total truck pollution, port officials say....

"The ports will see a 50 percent reduction (in truck emissions) overnight," said Jessica Lass, a spokeswoman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which helped formulate the clean-air plans after suing the ports to block expansion until public health issues were addressed.

Inhabitat reports on an interesting new modular rainwater collection system:

Simply put, the Rainwaterhog is a system of 100% recyclable, 1/4″ thick, UV stabilized, food-grade plastic 50 gallon units that can be connected with standard 1″ brass fittings to create a custom, DIY system. The modular nature of the system allows homeowners to place the HOG tanks at several different locations throughout the property, thereby lowering pumping and electricity costs and avoiding unsightly and/or costly large central collection units.

In the Netherlands, 90,000 homes will be powered by chicken manure:

The biomass power plant is more than merely “carbon neutral”. If the chicken manure were to be spread out over farm land, it would release not only CO2, but also methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. By using the manure for power generation, the release of methane is avoided.

The cheetah population has stabilized in Namibia:

Viewing the world's fastest land animal as a threat to their livestock, in the 1980s farmers killed half of Namibia's cheetah population. The trend continued into the early 1990s, when the population was diminished again by nearly half, leaving less than 2,500 cheetah in the southern African country. Today cheetah populations have stabilized due, in large part, to the efforts of the Cheetah Conservation Fund....

Also in Africa, conservation efforts are helping the painted dog:

While the outlook is not good in many countries, there are emerging signs of hope, particularly in Zimbabwe where the efforts of a community-based conservation project has nearly doubled the population of the dog to 700 individuals.

Photograph by Chris Johns
A frog long thought to be extinct has been found in Honduras:

A rough-skinned frog species thought to have gone extinct more than 20 years ago has been found alive in a Honduran rain forest, experts said. Craugastor milesi—also called the miles' robber frog—was considered "locally abundant" in Honduras until the 1980s, when attempts to find the frog proved unsuccessful.

Mexico has banned all parrot sales in order to crack down on smugglers:

The government has been unable to control the clandestine capture and sale of the protected birds, environmentalists say.

The new ban—an amendment to Mexico's wildlife law—will eliminate the parrot and guacamaya market completely.

China is stepping up efforts to protect its freshwater dolphins:

The key initiative of the new Yangtze Dolphin Network is to connect existing reserves established for the Baiji dolphin, the world's most endangered member of the whale family, and the finless porpoise.

Toshiba's e-waste recycling program will now accept electronics from other manufacturers:

Toshiba now has one of the most comprehensive trade-in programs when it comes to e-waste. The program now accepts e-waste that has no market value for recycling without requiring consumers to purchase Toshiba products.

Low-Tech Magazine expresses some timely "doubts on technology," and explains the history of the optical telegraph (via Plep).

In other news: The Geology of the Civil War. King Alfonso XIII's bathing machine. A human-powered ferris wheel from India. Epilectic Seizure Comparison, "an ongoing location wherein non-epileptic persons may begin to experience, under 'controlled conditions,' the majestic potentials of convulsive seizure." And photos by Rick Dingus.


Not enough for you? Then watch this incredible movie in which magnetic fields are "revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries" (via Coudal). Afterwards, you can imagine how the fields would look around these Modernist gas stations (via things). Or in these photographs by Victor Prevost.


Still not enough? Danger Dogs of Nepal. Photographs of the Scottish Highlands. And Circus Slang (all via Plep).

Last, Carlsbad Caverns in the 1920s.



(Illustration at top: "Durack Range" by Sidney Nolan, 1950.)

An Unforgivable Choice

Matt Barber, a member in good standing of what Peggy Noonan calls the Conservative Thinkosphere of the Net, has discovered an ugly example of left-wing hypocrisy: Liberals claim to believe in tolerance, but in reality, they're intolerant...of intolerance!

If you don't believe this, try calling publicly for the extermination of homosexuals, and see how long it takes for some lefty to get angry at you.

The fact that writers for Town Hall and NewsMax discover this paradox anew every few days shouldn't distract us from Barber's more impressive achievement: he has revealed feminist women once and for all as people who tend to support abortion rights and oppose anti-feminist politicians. The jig is up, ladies, and your disdain for Sarah Palin was what gave you away:

Palin blew it, you see. She made an unforgivable “choice.” She publicly expressed, through both word and selfless deed, that she values all people during every stage of development*, from conception to natural death.

*Offer may not be valid in all states.

In the real world, of course, no one finds Palin's choice unforgivable; many people, including myself, find it admirable. What's unforgivable is the fact that she wants to be applauded for making that choice of her own free will, and for wishing to take free will entirely out of the equation for women who don't have her personal beliefs or her financial resources.

Beyond that, her decision to give birth to and raise her own child doesn't indicate that "she values all people during every stage of development," any more than the prohibition on abortion in Pakistan makes that nation a peaceable kingdom (please note that I'm referring here to violence besides the support of policies that routinely result in women being mutilated or killed).

Barber singles out "abortion-centric feminism" for particular abuse, as though any other kind were possible while the earth is encumbered with panty-sniffing control-addicts like him. He admires Palin because she's "easy on the eyes," as all godly men must, but also because she "declined to slaughter her own unborn child, Trig, to goddess feminism." And he complains that feminists are claiming en masse that she's "not a real woman," which is a terrible thing to say about any woman unless she's a feminazi or a dyke.

It turns out that feminists object to Palin's choice because they view abortion as an important rite of passage (which is why you never see them calling for sex education, male birth control pills, or increased access to contraception). In fact, the credo of these barren, castrating, shrewish, ugly, unnatural, selfish quasi-women is as follows:

“All women are endowed by mother earth with the inalienable right to eat their own young."

Putting aside the issue of Barber's soul-deep loathing for women -- which is as hard to miss, and as appetizing, as a foot-high pile of dogshit on your dinner plate -- I have to say I'm weary of being lectured on "selfishness" by people whose idea of virtue involves heaping abuse and misery on the poor and the powerless, in the name of a religion whose only truths are emotionally alien and politically inimical to them.

I'm also tired of being lectured on morality by people whose basic discomfort with human existence is so profound that only potential life has any chance of meeting their standards for purity. And I'm tired of being lectured on violence by people who are not only comfortable denying human rights to their fellow citizens, and forcing women to bear the children of rapists, but also have no problem blowing up pregnant women in foreign countries, and demanding that I wave the flag over whatever's left of their bodies.

One day, I hope to vote in an election that will finally sweep these people from any semblance of power, and to live in a country where their ravings get no more respect than they themselves currently afford to the pleas of the hungry and the homeless and the sick and the abused. For now, I'll gladly settle for flinging Sarah Palin back into the outer darkness where she belongs.

(Photo via Menstrual Poetry.)

Scary Stories

Chris Horner finds it amusing that members of Mensa -- who are supposed to be, like, all smart and shit -- have invited the archfiend James Hansen to be the keynote speaker at an upcoming synod, or convocation.

How can bright people believe, like the UN Secretary General, that computer model scenarios of the future are more frightening than Hollywood movies? Because they’re . . . real?

Well, apparently because they also accept observed, um, truths like “It is now firmly established that Earth’s global surface temperature is increasing and that human emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are the primary cause of that global warming.”

Horner may not know much about climate modeling, but he knows what he likes. And he likes this:


Most people, when they attempt to win an argument by posting a graph, make some effort to explain what the graph measures, and how, and why, and so forth. Horner can be forgiven for this oversight, as he's writing exclusively for blue-ribbon experts in the field of applied neopaleoconservato-climatologographical discoverism.

As for me, I write for the Plain People of the Blogosphere, who may not have much book-larnin', but know how many apples makes four. Thus, I think I should point out that the "2002" on the bottom left represents the year 2002, while the "2008" on the right represents the year that we're all enjoying right now, viz., 2008.

What we have here, in other words, is a six-year snapshot of temperature anomalies and CO2. The latter is going up. The former are fluctuating, but trending downwards.

You may have heard it said that there are insufficient data to support AGW; after all, instrumental temperature records only go back for over a century. No such objection is thinkable in regards to six years' worth of data, though. This one graph, spanning a mere three-quarters of the Bush administration and ending with a global cold spell, solves all problems, answers all objections, and refutes, in absentia, any "computer modeling scenarios" that predict this trend won't persist over the next decade.

Regardless, the conclusions Horner has drawn from it are wrong. And I have a chart that proves it.


What more evidence could anyone want?

Horner's no alarmist, generally speaking, but he is sincerely worried that Mensa is in danger of being "hijacked" by "activist members," just like the American Meteorological Society (which has apparently been taken over by zealots who insist on looking at climate data collected prior to 2002). A scary story, indeed.

Just for the record, the World Meteorological Organization measures climate averages over 30-year periods, in order to eliminate natural year-to-year variation. The question is: Are they crazy, or just plain stupid?

Sunday Music Blogging