We're some damned smart chimps

This is a photo of a Soyuz approaching the ISS.

1) That's a space ship flying to a space ship.

2) That is an incredibly detailed photograph. From space.

3) I just pushed a few buttons and posted some text that will allow you to view the picture. Well, not even the picture but a digital representation of the picture (Ceci n'est pas une pipe).

Oh, I'm reminded that I've nearly finished a fantabulous book about the ISS: Too Far From Home by Chris Jones who is, apparently, a sports writer. The book gets slammed hard on Amazon by a couple of space geeks who think that everything written about the space program has to be an engineering treatise, but this is an excellent book. It's primarily about the guys that were crewing the ISS when Columbia broke up. It gave me an affectation that I'm going to start using starting now: the astronauts fly up to station. Not "the" station. It's not a thing. It's a place. I suspect that it has as much to do with the lack of definite articles in Russian as it does with anything else, but it still makes you sound like you're in the know. Like calling the CIA, just "CIA" and the CIA director, "DCI".

Let's start with extra-solar planets

Seems that astronomers have found a planet orbiting within a star's "habitable zone." Very big news. Exciting stuff.

Wednesday night, a young lady in my graduate seminar on the Great Depression brought this story up. I was pleased to see that there were people outside of astronomers and science geeks who knew this kind of story was important.

Then my pleasure came crashing down. I want to re-iterate that this was a graduate seminar. Those present hold bachelor's degrees from accredited universities. The first question that was asked was quite reasonable when you consider the critical techniques of history, something these people are trained in: "How do they know?" I supplied the answer: they know how hot these kinds of stars are and they know how far the planet is from the star. Then came another question that caused me to start worrying: "How do they know?" Oh, christ, I thought. I answered: All stars of this type have common characteristics, that's why they are classed together. And the planet's distance from the star is estimated by the amount of gravitational tug the planet exerts on the star; it's mathy, I added.

Here's where is got bad. "Why don't they send a robot thingy to look at it? Or the Hubble Telescope? Or the space shuttle?" I was stunned. These questions weren't coming from just one person and there wasn't anybody in the room who seemed to be as shocked at their ignorance as I was. I stuttered something about inter-stellar distances being enormous and then I just stopped talking. They had dismissed me. They weren't listening anymore because I had started using science words and I had already told them that there was math involved.

I've wondered in the past why people weren't more excited about the fairly regularly appearing stories about the discovery of extra-solar planets. Now I know: they haven't the faintest idea what it means. They are utterly pig-ignorant about the universe. They know fuck-all about how far away things are. Conway? About 35 miles. Does the shuttle fly higher or lower than that? I dunno. How far away is the sun? Nearer or further than Jupiter? I dunno. How long does it take light from the sun to get to earth: seconds? mintues? hours? I dunno. How long does it take light to get to the earth from the nearest star? seconds? minutes? hours? days? years? I dunno but surely not years. How could it take years?

Grrrr.

We get the government we deserve.

I'm still not so sure that they're gonna leave in January '09

They've built up a lot of tools to use to keep power. I'm sure they'd hate to leave office without having had the chance to use them.





Impeach the Mother Fuckers Already

And we don't get our torches and pitchforks and *demand* they hand Bush over to us

It's the way it work anywhere else in the world when you start demonstrating that an election was stolen. It's a coup excuse -- it's the sort of thing that topples governments the world over. But we let it go. Eh. Whaddayagonnado?

Impeachment is not enough. I want to see them prosecuted and sent to prison where they belong.

The administration has betrayed our troops!

Well, they've played fast and loose with security and security clearance. That's the same as not supporting the troops, right? Yes, yes it is.

It remains important to frame the national discussion in a fair way. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The Democrats need to paint the Republicans as a threat to national security. Because they are.

Things are heating up for the administration

Seems that things are happening and, as usual, the national media is giving Dear and Glorious Leader a pass. The Office of the Special Counsel is investigating Rove. He can't handle that kind of scrutiny. I'm sooooo looking forward to this.

At least one Congressman remembers his oath of office

Seems that Dennis Kucinich knows what "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" means.

Someone is laboring under the delusion that he's the head of government of a sovereign nation

I suppose it will be explained to him by our satrap.

It's funny how understanding can creep up on you

Many years ago, I spent an agonizing evening trying to understand finance. My pal, Dr. Daniel, thought that it was just a perfectly simple subject but there was something about it that I couldn't grasp.

Time passes and I think about finance and economics from time to time and continue to tell myself I don't understand them. I read a lot of history and a lot of economic info gets filtered into me but I continue to say I don't understand finance.

The I read this blog entry. I say, as I'm reading, this is a perfectly simple subject, why would anybody not recognize these things? And then I realized that I understand finance.

The blog entry linked to above is a brilliant piece in its simplicity and the amount of information conveyed in it. It explains what the hell is wrong with the American economy and it implies why nobody will do anything about it. Read it. Learn from it.

As Bob is my witless, human beings are insane

It seems that the Scientologists want to help ease the grief of the students at Virginia Tech.

Of course, everybody that isn't a Scientologist laughs at this stuff but those same people either believe in a dead man waking up, angels, water turned to wine, and a virgin giving birth or they think it's in bad taste to laugh at people who believe those things. I think the free pass that Christianity and Judaism get bugs me as much as anything else about religion in America. Why is it that the insanity of Mormonism isn't put on the same level as the insanity of Scientology. Why isn't Mary Baker Eddy laughed at like L. Ron Hubbard is laughed at (or condemned for her con artistry the way he is)? Why is the refusal to eat pork just acknowledged, with respect, as a part of someone's religion?

Sigh. It's probably too early in the morning, Central Daylight Savings Time, to get wound up on religion.

Once again, the administration re-defines reality

It seems that the administration believes that the Republican National Committee is an extension of the executive branch of the federal government. How else can the White House justify telling the RNC that they are to defy a Congressional request for e-mails?






ITMFA

This is the way things are done

Are there people still laboring under the assumption that there is any meritocracy in the US? When you get a position of power, you give your friends raises or get them jobs. Why would anybody expect a former member of the corrupt administration of the Dear and Glorious Leader to do anything other than attempt to enrich his girl friend?

The House has invited Condi to come perjure herself

And if she does testify that the White House had credible information regarding the Niger uranium, what will Representative Waxman do? The same thing the Democrats are doing on everything else: shrugging and saying "oh."




ITMFA

The convergence of these three headlines is making me exceedingly uncomfortable

No sign of N. Korea reactor shutdown, U.S. official says

Iran vows to boost nuclear capacity despite sanctions

and

Ex-general: Stretched military puts U.S. in 'strategic peril'

That last one is something I don't recall seeing under a Republican president before. I put it to you that if the generals and admirals weren't afraid of what might happen with regard to the first two of these three headlines, we wouldn't be seeing the third.

Why didn't he make these speeches when he president?

Whyowhyo did Bill wait until he was out of office to start calling a spade a spade? Sure, we pay too much for health care and get too little in return. And it's the fault of insurance companies and pharmaceuticals and everybody knows it. Why didn't he do something about it?

Oh. Wait. Because he was too busy defending himself against charges that he was getting secret blow jobs to effectively govern. Silly me. I wonder what the right-wing could have done that would have worked better at hamstringing the most popular president since FDR?

Growing corn for fuel is a bad idea

And giving mills that are producing ethanol leave and let to double their pollution output is a very, very bad idea.

Every acre of corn given over to ethanol production is an acre of corn that is not going to be eaten. This will either result in food shortages or in increased acreage. Increasing the acreage under cultivation will mean that either marginal land will be cultivated (a very bad idea. See: Dust Bowl) or new forestland will be cleared (also a very bad idea. See: carbon sequestration in forests). But politicos see promoting ethanol production as "good fer the farmers," of which there are none -- there are only farm factories with laborers. And they also get to tell their "constiency" that they're working on the security of the US by getting us off the oil tit.

What they fail to grasp -- and I really do think it's a failure of imagination and wit, not mendacity -- is that they are encouraging the degradation of the environment in ways from which we cannot recover for years and years.

I *knew* cel phones were evil

And now we have evidence that they're behind the disappearance of the bees. (Incidentley, I've linked to the truthout version because the Independent page is freaking out)

Y'know, this bee things is really, really weird and nobody seems to be paying attention, as is typical of environment and ecology stories. But without bees, we've got no apples. No oranges. No pears. No okra. No cucumbers. A dearth of flowers of all kinds. People need to pay attention.

Maryland legislature disenfranchises Maryland presidential voters

Is there any other way to interpret this? Maryland could vote, overwhelmingly, to support candidate X and then have all of its electoral votes cast for candidate Y. In fact, candidate Y could elect to not even appear on the Maryland ballot, get 0 popular votes in Maryland, and still get Maryland's electoral votes.

I know that the Electoral College gets kicked around a lot but a direct, popular vote for president would meant that Arkansas, Montana, Maine, New Mexico, and places like that would never see a presidential television ad much less a candidate in the flesh. Why would you spend campaign dollars anywhere except California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Florida?

The Founders envisioned presidential politics as a matter of regionalism and fully expected most presidential elections to be determined in the House of Representatives with states casting electoral votes for favorite sons on a regular basis. Modern, mass communication has pretty much ended regionalism as an overt force in American politics but it still remains powerful.; you can't win without Nixon's Southern Strategy. For good or for ill, the South votes for its own and those it perceives to be its own at the expense of those who really are its own (see November 2000).

My idea of an ideal way of apportioning electoral votes is that one vote should go to the winner of the majority of the votes from each Congressional district and the other two should go to whoever carries the state overall. The majors don't like this plan because it would force them to spend money in more media markets. If LA gets you just as many votes as Jonesboro, Arkansas you've got a lot of decisions to make. Perhaps it would result in less money being spent all 'way 'round and then there wouldn't be the need to raise so much and the people might actually have a chance to elect the right man for the job. Like, oh, say, Dennis Kucinich.

Lingusitics is another area that I wish I had time to study

Seems there's a Brazilian tribe whose language refutes Chomsky's ideas about iteration. They live in the now (no past tense conjugations); they can't count; they don't have any color names; and they forget the names of their dead grandparents.

It's worth a little time to remember the BCCI scandal

This article reminds us that the Bushes and the Bin Ladens are business partners and no amount of explaining that Osama is a pariah to his family can make it go away.

The connections between the rich are, of course, many and varied but I don't think we should let this particular one get out of the American consciousness.