GINA LOUDON: Ask Not For Whom the Bell Tolls, MSM: It Tolls for Thee. Actually, the MSM has been tolling its own bell for decades. This isn’t a death, it’s a suicide.
Archive for 2010
February 27, 2010
GROOVIN’ ON RAHM: Another fun photo from the White House Flickr stream.
UPDATE: I’d missed this amusing animation. Heh.
UH OH: 8.8 Earthquake Hits Chile.
UPDATE: Via Jake Tapper on Facebook, here’s the State Department number for those concerned about friends or relatives traveling in Chile: 1-888-407-4747.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The Chaiten volcano webcam is still up and showing a lot of smoke or something. Connection? Who knows? (Thanks to reader Joan of Arghh for the link).
MORE: A list of Hawaii twitterers covering the tsunami warning. More on the warning here: Tsunami expected at 11:19 a.m. Hawaii time, 4:19 p.m. Eastern.
MORE ON THAT BRITISH TEA PARTY MOVEMENT. They start today — wish ’em luck!
AN UPDATE ON how Jim Treacher’s doing.
February 26, 2010
L.A. TIMES: What’s really behind the departure of Desiree Rogers from Obama’s White House. Personally, I blame racism . . . .
AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.
CHARLIE RANGEL’S Caribbean tic.
IMITATION IS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY, so the Tea Party movement ought to be flattered by the me-too lefty “Coffee Party.”
This is actually the second imitation; the first was an epic fail. Maybe this one will do better, but so far they’ve got a message problem: “I don’t really understand what they’re about other than ‘we don’t like the Tea Party’ and ‘we’re for a better process.'”
However, if it does take off, it’ll just prove my point that we’re undergoing a Third Great Awakening, one that’s political, rather than religious in nature.
UPDATE: “Latte Liberals.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve Wylie writes: “Great job by the Post: they can finally write (somewhat) objectively about a movement that’s been around for a year and attracted hundreds of thousands to its ranks, but only by writing about another movement that’s been around for about a month and has not quite ten thousand ‘fans’ on Facebook.”
MORE: A reader emails: “Can we call them ‘Teabagees’?”
ADVICE TO JUDGES: “If you want to write like Dahlia Lithwick, get a blog.”
TALKING ABOUT ALIENS: “As far as I can tell, nobody talking about interstellar contact has a model even vaguely close to a reasonable analysis of the situation.”
Star travel is expensive; it costs on the order of a ship’s own mass in equivalent energy to get it up to relativistic speeds. Any culture capable of that will be at least a Kardashev Type I civilization, and most likely a Type II. And the reason they’ll be doing star travel is to work their way up towards Type III. Any sentient creatures that actually get here will be nanotech-based robots, not water-based organisms. They won’t have spacecraft, they’ll be spacecraft. They will be unlikely interested in the carbon-poor mudballs of the inner solar system, but reap abundant carbon from the outer planets and carbonaceous asteroids to build Dyson-sphere-like structures around the orbit of Mercury.
We simply aren’t going to see less sophisticated visitors due to the starship paradox: send a starship out now with all Earth’s current technological resources behind it, and then wait and send one in 50 years with full nanotech. The second one gets there first.
We aren’t going to see any less ambitious visitors due to simple evolution: in a universe where the ultimate meaning of “carbon footprint” is the total mass of the superintelligent diamondoid robots you’ve built, spaceships burning cellulosic ethanol simply aren’t going to be anywhere near the fittest. Indeed, cultures that aren’t inherently aggressive and ambitious aren’t going to put the effort into sending out starships at all. The question is, what are they going to think of us, the thin layer of green slime coating an insignificant rock?
Read the whole thing. Some interesting links, too.
FROM WASTE BIOMASS to jet fuel. As long as they’re not making it out of food.
THE ST. LOUIS TEA PARTY celebrates its one-year anniversary tomorrow.
ALWAYS TRUST CONTENT FROM INSTAPUNDIT: Not long ago I warned of insufficient condom stocks at the Winter Olympics. Readers laughed, but now there’s this: Emergency shipment of condoms headed to Olympic athletes. “Health officials in Vancouver have already provided 100,000 free condoms to the roughly 7,000 ahtletes and officials at the Games. That’s about 14 condoms per person. But as of Wednesday, those supplies started running dangerously low.”
KILLER WHALE: The clue’s in the name. Gee, do you think?
AN INTERVIEW WITH ANGIE JACKSON, the woman who live-tweeted her abortion.
BILL DELAHUNT UPDATE: “U.S. Rep. William Delahunt blew nearly $560,000 in campaign cash last year – much of it on lavish meals and a family-friendly payroll that includes his ex-wife, son-in-law and daughter – stoking speculation the Quincy Democrat is emptying his war chest and won’t seek re-election.”
HOW TO FEED THE WORLD: Monsanto vs. Michael Pollan.
SHOCKER: CNN poll: Majority of Americans … agree with founders. “This shouldn’t be a surprise; it should be basic civics. . . . A massive federal government and the crushing debt it produces is exactly what the founders wanted to avoid. Thankfully, 56% of Americans have awoken to the danger of Leviathan. It’s hard to figure out what it will take to get the other 44% to comprehend it, short of total collapse.”
UPDATE: Reader Joe Johnson writes:
Prof. Reynolds, please recall that some 40% or so of American households now pay zero federal/state taxes, so they really haven’t much incentive to agree with the founders about the debt crisis and the coming tax increases to pay interest on the debt.
I think you mean income tax. Well, about 33% disagreed with the founders at the time of the Revolution, so we haven’t fallen all that far.
SENATOR BUNNING: “I object.”
LOSING GOOGLE would hit Chinese science hard.
SHUT UP ABOUT MY CARBON FOOTPRINT, HARRISON: Enviro-Hypocrisy: Harrison Ford’s Private-Jet Cheeseburger Runs.