OMG, this is so funny:
On Friday’s edition of her MSNBC program Rachel Maddow highlighted a variety of right-wing extremist activities on gun related issues, including National Rifle Association (NRA) executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre’s increasingly infamous suggestion that because President Obama hasn’t pursued gun control he must be secretly plotting to “erase the Second Amendment.”
It gets better:
One Marine to another:
“I’m heading up there tonight in my dress blues. So far, 15 of my fellow marine buddies are meeting me there, also in Uniform. I want to send the following message to Wall St and Congress:I didn’t fight for Wall St. I fought for America. Now it’s Congress’ turn.
The finding for which this year’s Chemistry Nobel was awarded earlier today was sufficiently unexpected and counter to the orthodoxy of the time that today’s prize winner was tossed out of his own research group for reporting it. His 1982 discovery has to do with how atoms are organized in solid matter, and is based on observations made with electron microscopy. Daniel Shechtman’s imagery…
Continue reading “There can be no such creature” – Chemistry Nobel: Daniel Shechtman
Boy, was I wrong!
From Nancy Jackson, President of the American Chemical Society:
“It’s a great work of discovery, with potential applications that range from light-emitting diodes to improved diesel engines. As President of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, I am delighted to give warm congratulations on behalf of our more than 163,000 members. Coming as it does during the International Year of Chemistry, the prize showcases chemistry’s global reach and impact in improving life. Years of hard work and dedication lie behind this Nobel Prize. Great people like Dr. Shechtman inspire us all with their contributions to science and humanity”
This is an interesting story of scientific discovery. Here’s a write-up revealing the sordid truth of how science works.
But not for the stock brokers…
Starting today several new groups will add to the ranks of those “occupying” Wall Street, including MoveOn.org and various unions.
The anti-bank campaign has in fact been incubating for years — a “seed beneath the snow,†as the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone once termed the slow-to-arrive left. The sit-ins, teach-ins and street demonstrations popping up in Boston, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles are formally the handiwork of a coalition of community groups that recently gathered together as the New Bottom Line. Many of these groups have focused on immediate goals — such as stopping particular banks from foreclosing on more homes. They, along with unions, have demonstrated on Wall Street many times since the 2008 financial crisis. But only now, as Occupy Wall Street — an organization that they didn’t create — has grabbed the public imagination the past few weeks, are the myriad mobilizations commanding the media’s attention.
See the rest of this essay by Harold Meyerson
In related news, a new poll reported by the Washington Post (but not on their web site yet) indicates that about 14 percent of Americans approve of the job Congress is moving. And, finally, Obama is starting to become aggressive in his campaigning for “change.”
In Texas on Tuesday, the president went after a leading Republican by name: “Yesterday the Republican majority leader in Congress, Eric Cantor, said that right now he won’t even let this jobs bill have a vote in the House of Representatives,†Obama said. “I would like Mr. Cantor to come here to Dallas and explain what exactly in this jobs bill does he not believe in, what exactly he is opposed to. Does he not believe in rebuilding America’s roads and bridges? Does he not believe in tax breaks for small businesses or efforts to help our veterans?â€
This is obviously follow-up to Obama’s state of the economy speech in which he kicked the ball into Congresses’s (and mainly the Republicans’, and really, mainly the Tea Party’s) court.
This is going to be an interesting, and crucial, election season.
The Amazon Kindle originally promised a technology that would improve your reading experience, at the same time cutting the cost of books in half. Those books would arrive on your Kindle through the magic of the Whisper Net, a free space age delivery service. The Kindle itself would be easier to use, lighter weight, and more readable than an actual book.
Well, there’s good news and bad news. As the Kindle technology and the eBook market have developed, all of those original promises have become either vapor or else very different than first imagined. Nonetheless, I want a new-old Kindle as well as a Kindle Fire. Let me ‘splain.
Continue reading Amazon Kindle: Promises Broken, But I Still Want One. Well, Two.
… Martin Hertzberg did a grave disservice to your readers by making false and defamatory statements about me and my climate scientist colleagues …
It’s hard to imagine anyone packing more lies and distortions into a single commentary. Mr. Hertzberg uses libelous language in characterizing the so-called “hockey stick” — work of my own published more than a decade ago showing that recent warming is unusual over at least the past 1,000 years — as “fraudulent,” and claiming that it “it was fabricated from carefully selected tree-ring measurements with a phony computer program.”
These are just lies, regurgitation of dishonest smears that have been manufactured by fossil fuel industry-funded climate change deniers, and those who do their bidding by lying to the public about the science.
Nice.
There is a lot more where that came from. Read it here.
And more …
I went to graduate school to study Anthropology, so naturally, there was very little funding. Some semesters, I paid the bills working as an administrative assistant for one Harvard Muckimuck or another, often at the Kennedy School of Government, but for a while, at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. There, I was the assistant to the director, a man named Marvin Kalb. There is a chance you’ve heard of him as well as his brother, Bernard. Kalb was the Shorenstein Center’s original director and Edward R. Murrow Professor of Press and Public Policy. His brother Bernard is a journalist as well.
Working for Kalb was a blast.
Continue reading Even Better than a Halloween Costume: Life Size Cutouts!
Remember the question of mixing church ad state in Old Dixie? It apears that the City Council of Bay Minette, where people who committed low level offenses were to be given the option of messing with the law or having the whole thing just “go away” if they went to church for a year, are slowing down their rush into the abyss. They have asked the Alabama attorney general’s opinion first.
Continue reading Alabama “Church or Jail” plan awaits AG’s opinion
“In 1998, cosmology was shaken at its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed by Saul Perlmutter, one of the teams had set to work in 1988. Brian Schmidt headed another team, launched at the end of 1994, where Adam Riess was to play a crucial role. …
“The two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected — this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. … For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the Universe will end in ice.
“The acceleration is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma — perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.”
— the academy
At the beginning of the 20th century, a traveler in Central Africa made mention of some strange people that he had come across. He was traveling among regular, run-of-the-mill natives…probably Bantu-speaking people living in scattered villages and farming for their food. But along the way, strange people came out of the forest. These strange people had sloping foreheads; they were short of stature, bow-legged and otherwise misshapen. They also clearly were, in the eyes of the traveler, of subhuman intelligence. The traveler described these people as a separate, subhuman race that lived in the forest. As I read this, I began to think that perhaps he was speaking of so-called “Pygmies” who live in this region, and as I began to think that, I started to get mad at this writer because so-called “Pygmies” do not look or act as he described.
Then, the writer totally surprised me by noting (I paraphrase) that “unlike the Pygmies, who live in these forests and are of perfectly proportioned shape and appearance, these subhuman creatures were rather grotesque.”
The CSM reports:
The US Supreme Court declined Monday to take up a case examining whether an Ohio judge violated the separation of church and state when he displayed a poster in his courtroom that contrasted The Ten Commandments
with humanist precepts.
By declining the case, the court let stand rulings that found that the judge had indeed violated the church-state principle.
This follows from the case of Judge DeWeese, who made numerous claims about how judicial law and churchy law are the same thing, and how the founding fathers would want it this way, and so on and so forth. The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio saw it differently, filed suit, and won.
Continue reading It is still not OK to display the ten commandments in a court room