CapitalistImperialistPig

Many have asked what The New York Times could be thinking in hiring Bill Kristol. The Times has a somewhat exaggerated reputation as a liberal paper and Kristol is pure right-wing meth, a hardcore neocon famous for his Iraq war cheerleading and absurdly wrong war predictions. Kristol despises the NYT and most of its readers return the contempt with interest. So why did they make a move so clearly likely to offend a majority of their readers? I have a two part theory. First, the Times sees itself as locked in a death match with Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal , and its infamously wing-nut editorial page. Second, even though New York is one of the more liberal American cities, it is also the most Jewish city in the world, and many otherwise liberal American Jews don't believe that you can be radical enough in your support of right-wing Israeli politics. The two pillars of Neocon politics are a devotion to the interests of the Israeli right and the American rich, an...

Luboš Motl, a Czech blogger and potato bug expert , has written about the concentration of funding in science. He didn't say much interesting about it, but did use the occasion to rant about some of his favorite villains. I posted a comment which got deleted, no doubt because he didn't like my observation that if it were up to him, there would only be one idea in fundamental physics. Just sayin'.

Cycles are pretty common in the Universe. Galaxies go through cycles of star formation and decay. Atoms are cycled through stars and back into the interstellar medium. Here on Earth, we have the hydrological cycle, with water evaporating from the oceans or elsewhere, condensing and falling as precipitation, and flowing back to the ocean. Oceanic crust and other materials from the interior of the planet is extruded at mid-ocean rifts and volcanos, cycled across oceans and subducted back into the interior. Oxygen and carbon atoms have their own cycles through rock, ocean, and atmosphere. Closest to our interest here are the cycles of life. Birth, growth, death and decay take place in a cosmic instant, but these cycles have something crucial in common with all the others - they are all heat engines, powered by taking in energy at low entropy and putting it out at higher entropy. The same of course is true of the cycle that powers your automobile. All the cycles mentioned are in s...

At least one pundit predicted that Mike Huckabee's campaign would run aground on Tim Russert's patented gotcha questions on MTP. I caught part of Huckabee's appearance and I don't think so. He looked solid, confident, and well briefed. I think that our nameless pundit (because I can't remember who it was ;)) missed the mark because he failed to note that: Huckabee is a veteran pol and cool under fire. Huckabee apparently knows how to prepare, unlike, say, Richardson, who completely booted his MTP appearance. Little Russ saves the tough questions for Democrats. I now think Huckabee is very likely to be the Republican nominee, and somewhat likely to beat Hillary. He might even beat Obama.

Paul Steinberg, writing in today's New York Times, has an interesting parable on the subject of George Bush's intellect. Even after longstanding sobriety this inflammatory response translates into a tendency to stay the course, a diminished capacity for relearning and maladaptive decision-making. I thought the part about inflexibility of learning was particularly apropos - it explains a lot. Apparently the efficacy of exercise is less in humans, however.

Arun, writing in the comments to an earlier post, brought my attention to Robert Shapiro's Scientific American cover story on a metabolism first approach to the origin of life. (Subscription only, but a longer, earlier, free version, minus nifty graphics and some other features is here. ) The magic without magic of small molecule cycles is heredity without heredity - actually, a distributed type of heredity. Such a system takes energy from the environment, uses it to drive a chemical cycle which includes producing more of the molecules that participate in the cycle. In effect, such systems create a local negative entropy gradient by exploiting some naturally occuring negative entropy gradient (energy from the Sun, volcanos, lightning, whatever). Hurricanes perform an analogous feat. Once organized, their ferocious winds very efficiently extract heat from the ocean and use it to drive those same winds. The entropy gradient they exploit is that between the warm ocean below and the...

I never would have believed it myself. I seem to recall that Ann Coulter once wished for the destruction of the New York Times building, presumably with the staff inside. Now, it seems, I can no longer in good conscience disagree. It's time to retire the Gray Lady, time to realize that print is, or by all that's holy, ought to be, dead. Word is that ... I can't bear to say it... Sob. And SOB. And other imprecations too vile for a family flog.