CapitalistImperialistPig

NPR had an interview this AM with an author who has written on life's little annoyances. One annoyance was those irritating blown in cards that fall out of every magazine you get. His revenge - don't fill them out, just send them in. The advertiser has to pay the postage, so it does send them a hint.

CNN had a multi-part show on "intelligent design" tonight, featuring Michael Behe, the Lehigh University biologist who is prominent among the IDers. I think it might have been part of the Paula Zero show. It was even-handed in the usual "some say the moon is a big old rock" but "others say it's made out of green cheese" sort of way. While they made it pretty clear that Behe is an isolated, even somewhat persecuted, figure I didn't see much presentation of the more mainstream view that Behe is a mediocrity who made a name for himself by embracing popular nonsense. I didn't see the whole thing - it had already started when I turned it on, and it eventually became too annoying, but what I saw illustrated why TV usually does such a crappy job on this type of reporting. Behe got to show his lovely picture of a bacterial flagellum and talk about how it couldn't have arisen by chance, but Niles Eldridge was just a suit walking through a museum....

A new study reported here by Andrew C Revkin in the New York Times, provides yet more evidence that our current experiment with the planets climate had entered new and perilous territory. Shafts of ancient ice pulled from Antarctica's frozen depths show that for at least 650,000 years three important heat-trapping greenhouse gases never reached recent atmospheric levels caused by human activities, scientists are reporting today. The measured gases were carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Concentrations have risen over the last several centuries at a pace far beyond that seen before humans began intensively clearing forests and burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas (about 21 times more potent than CO2) and is scary partly because large amounts of it are generated when permafrost melts and because very large amounts exist in methane clathyrates in the deep ocean. The current Acrctic warming is melting a lot of permafrost and it's po...

Even the crankiest of us should take a bit of time off to celebrate our blessings. So here goes: I'm thankful for my wife, my two great sons, my parents, and my siblings. I'm thankful to live in a country that is still pretty free and a good place to live. I'm thankful to have a job I like. More blog relevantly, I'm thankful that the American people are waking up to the fact that we've put our fate so largely in the hands of scoundrels and incompetents. I'm greatful that some people actually seem to read some of my rantings, and expecially for those who comment. I have learned something from each of you, and from some a lot. When I look around the blogosphere, I'm always amazed and humbled by how many people are writing such good stuff. The letters written by Civil War soldiers impress me with how literary and eloquent these ordinary soldiers once were. I think we may hope that the blogosphere is our chance for ordinary people (and others) to develop ...

Textbook publishers, too, have their role to play in Satan's legion. I don't want to make this a blanket condemnation, because there are a few prominent exceptions: Cambridge University Press and Springer, for example, who continue to publish nicely bound volumes of good stuff at usually quite reasonable prices. Overall, though, textbook prices have increased much more rapidly than inflation, and this has happened despite technological changes which have made it far cheaper to publish a textbook. Anyone who has recently paid for a college education knows that the savings have not been passed on to the students. What has happened instead is that textbook publishers have become more skillful in exploiting the fact that students are a captive audience. They aren't really selling books to students, but to their teachers (who don't have to pay!). Many teachers are quite happy to assign their students several required textbooks, each costing about $150. One striking effec...

Amid the familiar evidence that Bush is lazy, disinterested in governing, impulsive, ignorant, and surrounded by yes women, from time to time we get a hint of the real, dynamic, bat-shit crazy leader of the free world. Did Bush target Wilson - nah, that had to be Cheney - Bush wouldn't be that kind of loose cannon, would he? Would he? London's Daily Mirror has this story on a recently escaped secret British Memo talking about how Bush wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera right in the allied country where we had our headquarters. The Daily Mirror reported that Bush spoke of targeting Al-Jazeera's headquarters in Doha, Qatar, when he met Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004. The Bush administration has regularly accused Al-Jazeera of being nothing more than a mouthpiece for anti-American sentiments. ... Al-Jazeera offices in Iraq and Afghanistan have been hit by U.S. bombs or missiles, but each time the U.S. military said they were not intentionally targeting the broadcaster....

Careful students of Lumology will not be surprised that guys with an IQ of 185 also do stupid things. Lumo, it seems, bit on a phishing email: One month ago or so, I did a very stupid thing. A few hours after I wrote one of my reviews at amazon.com, I received an e-mail inviting me to amazon.com.encrypted-inquiry.cn/exec/obidos (looks good, does not it?) and asking me to update my debit card number and so on to improve the community and so forth. ... After opening a page that looked just like at amazon.com, I entered my credit card number to the fraudulent website, and to show how really stupid I was, I also filled out another page with the social security number. (Please don't annoy me much with the messages about the credit history. I don't intend to borrow anything and I don't care.) Not being the type to worry, Lumo just monitored his debit card until somebody charged $2415 worth of shoes to it. He was pleased but not surprised at how easy it was to get corporations t...