Kellermann was the head of the troubled Freddie Mac financial institution. He had apparently hanged himself. A few news agencies are reporting it. Some details here.
Monthly Archives: April 2009
Norm Coleman: Against Democracy
Norm Coleman has requested a more “leisurely” (as the Star Tribune calls it) schedule for his recount appeal. What is more leisurely? The Coleman team would like oral arguments to begin no sooner than mid-May, and easily later than that.
Clearly, the hypothesis that Norm Coleman is simply playing a delaying game stands, still, unrejected.
Nature Carnival Deadlines
Upcoming nature web carnival deadlines are nicely summarized here. Please attend to these requests for your nature posts.
Major Company Coddles Stockholders, Screws Employees
This is why unions are important and all corporations are inherently evil.
Earth Day!
I remember my first Earth Day, which was also The first Earth Day. There was a big lead up to it. Our teachers had us make poster size drawings appropriate for Earth Day. I have no recollection of what I did. But, I do remember putting an air quality measuring device in my back yard and turning it in at the firehouse and getting the building next door busted for burning bad heating oil. I was also armed that summer with a plastic card that I could use to measure smoke quality. I’d wear the card around my neck and go around the city, and whenever I saw a smoke stack belching smoke I’d hold the card up and estimate the percentage of particulate matter using the card. Then I’d get the address of the smoke stack and fill out a report and turn it in somewhere.
I think that was the same year that the Albany Billiard Ball Factory burned down and exploded multiple times, spewing more toxic crap into the air than the entire city had been spewing all year. Which tells us something: Don’t let your freakin’ factory blow up, man!
Anyway, as a kid, I was already into the environment owing to the influences of Rachel Carson and, more locally, Robert Rienow, but Earth Day certainly increased my interest and involvement. I started a club, called the Nature Conservation Club, or the NCC, and made all my friends and family join it. I even got Pete Segeer to join!!! And I wrote letters and continued turning in smoky factories and carrying out interventions (regarding littering behavior).
I think that is the main function of Earth Day: To be a focal point to garner effort and resources in the educational setting to bring kids on board with, well, saving the Earth. Earth day helped make conservation a basic issue simply by getting the kids involved so that as they grew up they thought differently about conservation than many of their parents had.
Earth Day: It worked!
Guilty Planet Blog
Jennifer Jacquet of Shifting Baselines has a new blog, called Guilty Planet.
Go and have a look, and welcome the new blog to the blogosphere!
Erase Michele Bachmann
… or was that Replace Michele Bachmann….
Anyway, the Replace Michele Bachmann Web Carnival is scheduled for the end of the present week, Friday or Saturday. Please get your posts in! Here is the handy dandy submission form. Thank you very much.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the city. Three times.
This is a sister post to: The Black Forest Inn: Anarchists 2, Scientists 1
Lizzie had said in her email, “Let’s meet at the Black Forest Inn. I think you told me you’d never been there. It’s a place you might like.”
How nice of Lizzie to suggest a new place for me to enjoy. Of course, I had been there many times, most recently for the Science Blogs Millionth Comment Party–so it had been a while. But there was a time when I lived around the corner and came here much more often. So when I met up with Lizzie that night, and we were sitting at the bar in the Black Forest eating our hearty Germanic food, I reminisced a bit….
Continue reading How I learned to stop worrying and love the city. Three times.
South Africa Elections
South Africans are preparing to go to the polls in what is expected to be the most competitive general election since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Some 20,000 polling stations are due to open at 0500 GMT for the more than 23 million registered voters.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is expected to win, but its two-thirds majority is being challenged.
ANC leader Jacob Zuma said the emergence of the opposition Congress of the People had “re-energised” the ANC.
I remember the first election. I was in Bloomington, Indiana at the conference for the Society of Africanist Anthropologists. A number of the other participants in the conference were South Africans, and they had all voted using an absentee system. It had not been that long before when we all got to watch, on TV broadcasts around the world, Nelson Mandela walk away from his prison on Robbens Island, near Cape Town.
It’s actually the main thing I remember at that conference. Oh, and the party at Jeane Sept’s house. I remember that mainly because of a long conversation with Henry Harpending about genetic bottlenecks.
Anyway, congratulations to South Africa for keeping your act pretty much together all these years! I knew you could do it!
Progress in Burundi
African Union troops are physically disarming 21,000 fighters from Burundi’s last active rebel group, the Forces for National Liberation (FNL).
It follows a weekend ceremony where FNL leader Agathon Rwasa symbolically surrendered his own weapons to the AU.
A grenade attack killed six people but the BBC’s Prime Ndikumagenge says it was not linked to the rebels.
But he says it shows how many weapons are circulating in Burundi following more than 10 years of ethnic conflict.
Wither The Water, Fox News?
Monica sent me a link to a Faux News story on global warming, which makes the claim that global warming is not real because ice is expanding, and not contracting, in Antarctica. It also makes the claim that 90 percent of the earth’s ice and 80 percent of the earth’s fresh water is in Antarctica, which I assume is mentioned because it would make Antarctica seem more important than other parts of the world, and thus the “fact” that global warming is not happening there is proof of … whatever.
I’d like to clarify.
To start with, let’s get the fresh water thing straight. Most of the fresh water that matters to the average person on the average day is not in Antarctica. It is in the sky. From where I sit right now, I can see this lake, and the lake is charged from groundwater, and most of this groundwater comes from another lake uphill from this lake, etc. etc. But all of this … the local lakes and groundwater … is charged from rain, and this rain comes from the sky, and the clouds in the sky picked up most of this moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific. Around the world, a huge percentage of the rainwater comes from either the ocean or from continental sources which in turn came from the ocean.
In other words, the vast majority of immediately relevant fresh water comes from salt water. Most of the fresh water that matters comes from the huge reservoirs of salt water known as the oceans and seas, and beyond this, knowing the percentage of fresh water that is either here or there is neither here nor there. What matters is the process.
But even so, Fox has it wrong. It is true that about 90 percent of the world’s ice is in Antarctica. I’m not sure why that matters to Fox news. If ten percent of that ice melted, sea levels would rise catastrophically. It is not true that 80 percent of the worlds’ fresh water is in Antarctica. Just under 70% of the world’s fresh water is distributed among the frozen reservoirs (Antarctica, the northern ice fields, and mountain glaciers); Just over 30% is in the form of ground water, and just under one percent is evenly distributed between water that is in the air and about to fall on us, and water that is on the surface (lakes, rivers, etc.) most of which is on it’s way back into the ocean.
So, let’s characterize the whole water situation on the earth like this: Most of the water is in the ocean. Over time, a small percentage of this water evaporates and falls as rain back on the ocean. Of this, a small percentage falls temporarily on land and re-joins the ocean in a matter of days or months.
As this is happening, two great reservoirs are formed and grow or shrink over time, one in ice and one in groundwater.
Regarding the seeming inability of Antarctica to cooperate with the conspiratorial liberal agenda to make up this whole “Global Warming” thing; There is nothing going on here. Globally, averaging out the entire planet, there is warming. This warming is severe in the Arctic, and less severe in the Antarctic, and there are even regions in the Antarctic that are cooler and/or have more ice forming. However, there are also parts of the Antarctic where there are ice masses that are melting down and/or falling into the ocean.
So this is Fox News as an Insurance Appraiser:
“So, this is your car, and you claim it was in an accident?”
“Yes, see how the front is all mashed up?”
“Hey, what I’m looking at is the trunk, and it’s fine. I see no evidence of an accident.”
“But look, the engine is sitting in the front seat and the windshield is busted up, and the fenders are all crumple…..”
“No, no, no … look here. The gas tank … which holds the gas which could blow up in an accident … is fine. The gas tank is totally intact.”
“But wait, the front half of the car is crumpled and in pieces because that is where the accident happened….”
“The back half of the car, where the trunk is where we keep the spare tire, and the gas tank which could explode, are just fine. No accident. No insurance payment. ….”
Whack!!!
(That was the sound of the car’s owner slapping the Fox Insurance Appraiser upside the head.)
So instead of reading some stupid-ass article from Fox News, check out this alarming Liberal Agenda Scare Tactic piece from the BBC
Coleman Appeals Election Ruling to MNSC
The Star Tribune reports that Norm Coleman has filed an appeal with the Minnesota Supreme Court. He did so late Monday. I believe this is nine days after the lower judicial panel’s decision, which places this appeal just under the deadline. Clearly, Coleman has a strategy in mind that has little to do with the advancement of Democracy or the representation of Minnesotans. He should be ashamed of himself. But he appears to lack that emotion. Perhaps he was knocked on the head as a kid or something.
Science For the People
… somewhat ironically named Scientia Pro Publica, is a new Blog Carnival started by science blogger GrrlScientist. I think her objective is to create a general science carnival with reinvigorated interest that will give people fingertip access to current blog posts in any and all of the sciences, and this seems to be working. The second edition is now available, and it is one of the better carnivals I’ve seen.
Please go to Scientia Pro Publica 2, The Science, Nature and Medicine Blog Carnival and then click on all the links so people know you ae out there. In the mean time, do read at least a few of the entries because there is a lot of good stuff in this issue!!!!!
I know exactly how Obama feels …
President Mobotu Sese Seku, Kuku Kibombi, dictator of Zaire and arch typical fascist leader, once shoved a book in my hand, sort of like how Hugo Chavez shoved a book in Obama’s hand. Republicans did not mock me as they are now mocking Obama, mainly because I was not President of the United States of America at the time. It was a little embarrassing, but I kept the book. It’s called “Mobutu … something something something.” (I wonder if that is the same book Chavez gave to Obama? D’ya think?)
Anyway, the Yahoos are all over Obama because some drone paparazzi copped a photograph of Obama and The Enemy of The Free World shaking hands and looking happy. How dare he. End of the world, end of freedom, he’s ruining it for everyone. No Republican Leader would ever do anything like that.
Impeach Judge Jay Bybee
In one of the more nauseating passages, [of the recently released torture memos] Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.
These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.
Jay Bybee is now a federal circuit court judge. This is as high as you get as a judge short of the supreme court or a fistful of ludes. The phrases above come from a recent piece in the New York Times.