Shelbyville Times-Gazette: Story: Readers respond to global warming issue

Shelbyville Times-Gazette: Story: Readers respond to global warming issue:

...evolutionary ecologist Eric Pianka told a Texas audience that 90 percent of the world's population should be eliminated by an airborne Ebola virus.

He received a standing ovation for his 'humane' remarks.

That is not true. What's it called when you repeat an untruth? A lie? Yes, that's it. A lie. It's a lie that Pianka advocates genocide by ebola, and it's a lie that his standing ovation was for any such suggestion.

People like Reid say they care about the future of humanity, but their ideas are usually at the expense of individual humans.

Well, of course! It's the mass of individual humans that is the source of the problem, so how could it be otherwise?

Four Innocents Murdered in Mistaken Drug Hit

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Update:
Well, well, well... The four killer policemen have been killed.
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Or so the story goes went.

Three El Salvadoran delegates to the Central American Congress were traveling by car in neighboring Guatemala (to or from some official function), with a driver. They were ambushed and all four were killed.

Now four Guatemalan police officers have been arrested for the crime. They were supposed to be off investigating theft from cargo containers, but instead, the GPS tracking device in their vehicle placed them at the scene of the crime at the time of the crime.

Guatemalan authorities have implicated at least one Salvadoran in the crime. This Salvadoran apparently had phone conversations with the chief of an organized crime police unit, and with one of the arrested officers, before, during and after the crime. Now, according to the Guatemalan paper, Prensa Libre:

Los policías capturados comentaron que fueron contratados para cometer el crimen por un grupo de narcotraficantes de Jalpatagua, Jutiapa, que tiene nexos con una organización en El Salvador.

The captured policemen said they were contracted to commit the crime by a group of drug traffickers from Jalpatagua, [a city in the department (state) of Jutiapa, Guatemala] which has ties with an organization in El Salvador.

When I read crap like this it causes my contempt for United States drug policy and the War on Some Drugs to surface for a while. Stupid stupid stupid! We breed corruption, finance terror, diminish our own supposedly precious freedoms, waste some $60 billion (with a "b") yearly, and foster disrespect and hatred with our idiotic policies. And for what?

The thing is, for all I know (and it's not too outlandish a possibility) it was a "legitimate" hit. As in, the delegates to the Central American Congress "deserved" to be hit by a rival syndicate.

Whatever.

How can we be so dumb? Or is it that our corrupt are good at keeping us that way?

Other coverage here.
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Robert Randolph and The Family Band

I happened to catch PBS's Austin City Limits last night on TV. Though I had missed about half of it, thanks to the magic of the DVR, when I pushed the record button it snagged the whole thing, which I watched this morning.

Outstanding! The band was joined by a few of Randolph's mentors, so this may be a special show worth keeping an eye out for. Local listings can be linked from here.

I wasn't familiar with Robert Randolph and The Family Band, but now I am. If I get a chance to see them in concert, I probably will.

Here's a sample from YouTube. The Wikipedia article links to Archive.org, which has a collection that's probably worthwhile (though I have not checked it out).

The Authoritarians

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The Authoritarians

Professor Bob Altemeyer, University of Manitoba, Department of Psychology, brought to some prominence by former Nixon lawyer John Dean, has apparently spent most of his life studying authoritarianism. He's releasing his new book, The Authoritarians, on the internet, he says,

...partly because this book would never have rung up big sales. I did make one attempt to place it with a trade publisher, but when their editor said no I stopped acting out of habit and started reflecting. I think what I have found is rather important to the survival of American democracy. As such, it should be made available to everyone, and be essentially free. The “www” makes this possible...

In Chapter 1, which is as far as I've gotten, there is the RWA Scale. "This survey is part of an investigation of general public opinion concerning a variety of social issues." He gives three reasons why one should take a personal score with some salt, and says his presentation of the survey in the book is to have the reader "experience for yourself the instrument used to identify and study authoritarian followers." And so on. It's pretty interesting so far.

I guess I'm a salty anti-authoritarian (I scored 34 on the survey), but I have mixed emotions about the issue. I worry that a preponderance of my mindset within the superorganism I inhabit may be suicidal (to my superorganism, that is). If there's to be a clash of memeplexes, and it seems likely that there is at least one serious clash in its early stages, it seems likely that the more cohesive memeplex (which I think implies "the most authoritarian memeplex" under present circumstances) may be the stronger. Is this self-evident or stupid?

Is it conceivable that an anti-authoritarian society could possess a ruthlessness sufficient to deal with this sort of clash? Is such ruthlessness conceivably compatible with a liberal society? Is such ruthlessness even necessary in such a clash?

I think the answer to the last question is probably "Yes". What, beside ruthlessness, will enable an anti-authoritarian society to survive in the face of conflict with a highly authoritarian and otherwise highly incompatible one, especially as the latter acquires the means, through various technologies and asymmetries, to threaten great or even terminal harm to the former?

Dunno. Given the trajectories of various other trends, it may not even matter. Sorry.

Hat tip to Pete Guither.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Que Sera composer Ray Evans dies

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Que Sera composer Ray Evans dies

What a great song. It's probably the most pleasurable earworm I get from time to time, and probably the song that's been burned into my memory longer than any other. I'm glad the authors had such long lives, and I hope they were good lives up until the very end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6WDdZ6xaPg
or

Beliefnet.com: Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan

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Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan on Faith, Religious Tolerance, Moderates, Islam, Atheism, Letter to a Christian Nation -- Beliefnet.com

The other day my wife mistakenly deleted from the Tivo a program I was in the middle of watching, a back and forth involving Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Reza Aslan (No god but God), moderated by Jonathan Kirsch (A History of the End of the World). I'm not prone to reading such books, but being somewhat familiar with Sam Harris I thought it would be interesting to see how he would do.

The program was gone from the Tivo, but BookTV sometimes makes their programs available over the internet, so I queried Google (which way I frequently find what I'm looking for more readily than by directly searching at the website of interest).

Book TV was only the second among Google's hits. The first hit turned out to be to the blog of Brian Flemming, the filmmaker who did the documentary, The God Who Wasn't There. A few posts down Flemming's blog was a link to the subject exchange between Harris and Sullivan on Beliefnet. That looked interesting so I followed the link.

I still haven't finished watching the Book TV segment, but I've read the exchange between Harris and Sullivan on Beliefnet. It's a civil exchange, and Sullivan seems to be a reasonable guy, but I thought he did a lot of eloquent sidestepping and arm waving. Shermer's bit about smart people being good at rationalizing came to mind.

To the meager extent I think any of this matters, I remain firmly sympathetic to Harris' position.

BBC NEWS | Health | Legal battle over 'right to die'

BBC NEWS | Health | Legal battle over 'right to die':

Dr Peter Saunders, campaign director for the Care Not Killing Alliance said: 'This is a very sad case but what is really needed is not a change in the law to allow lethal injections but access to the highest quality of palliative care to those who need it.'

And when that "highest quality of palliative care" doesn't work, it's ethical to deny the suffering patient autonomy?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Branson launches $25m climate bid

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Branson launches $25m climate bid:

They are looking for a method that will remove at least one billion tonnes of carbon per year from the atmosphere.

I wonder how large a pile of diamonds that would be?

Other scientists are also looking at schemes that might "scrub" the air of CO2, collecting the gas for safe storage; but many critics say the energy required to achieve this would make such an approach self-defeating.

Nonsense. It depends entirely on the source of that energy. This criticism assumes a fossil source, but there are others.

Red Flags

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Stern assumptions 'implausible':

Some climate scientists were predicting 'another ice age' in the next 100 years, Lord Lawson added...

That's a big red flag. Once a person has repeated the canard about supposed past projections of an impending ice age I read no further. Where there's bullshit there's probably more bullshit.

Other red flags include inability to model climate given weather forecasting difficulties and derision of global warming based on cold weather here and there. There are others.

A week or so ago Larry King had an economist on who said, essentially, that we ought not burden the economy with carbon concerns because by 2050 the expanding economy would raise the average Bangla Deshi to a $30,000 standard of living, making them better able to adapt to the consequences of global warming like the flooding of their sea-level country.

Lord Lawson said Britain would see "great benefits" from climate change over the next 100 years.

Oh, OK then.

Ice Halo Pics

Here are the ice halo pictures I took in Minneapolis last Friday. I should have tried for a shot including the sun, but I was in a hurry.



The shot below was taken through a tinted third floor window a little while after the one above.



Pretty day. I started to write something about wishing I could have spent it outside instead of in a classroom, but then I remembered how cold it was. I think it was around 6 degrees at the time. Later on it warmed up a bit, to the mid-teens or so, but there was enough wind to make flags unfurl completely. Going to and from the car was more than enough outside time for me.

Unity08: Select & Elect a Unity Ticket in the 2008 Presidential Race |

Unity08: Select & Elect a Unity Ticket in the 2008 Presidential Race

Yes, I am inclined to vote for a bipartisan ticket in 2008, as long as they don't do something stupid like nominate operators like Carville/Matalin.

Some people are against this effort because they see another spoiler. I don't care about that. As long as this thing turns out to be what it seems now to be, I say more power to them.

Here's what I'm looking for, in no particular order:

• Pro-nuclear energy and pro- other atmospherically benign energy sources with significant positive net energy. (If they promote corn ethanol I'll know they're not serious.)
  
• Effective administration of the death penalty
• End that massive stupidity of a drug war
• End earmarks
• Establish independent ethics watchdogs. None of this business of We won't go after yours if you don't go after ours.
• Modernize the nuclear arsenal. Have the best military, able to prevail in two simultaneous wars. DO NOT engage the military in police work or building democracy. If there's a need for military intervention, be bloody-minded, get the job done as quickly as possible, then get out
• Direct the country's (and the countries') attention to the need for sustainability.
  
• Promote family planning
• Immigration reform
• and so on

Brrr2

Looks like I got out of there just in time!



No, seriously...

I didn't get to see much of Minneapolis, spending most of my time in a classroom, hotel or restaurant out in the Plymouth area, but I left with a favorable impression of the place. The weather was quite cold, low 20's and below, with a couple of inches of crunchy snow on the ground. I very much prefer that to 35 degrees and slushy.

I hadn't been in weather like that since leaving northern Idaho 21 years ago. I seem to remember winters in Idaho that didn't see temperatures above about 25 for weeks and months on end. The most beautiful day I've ever experienced was during very cold weather like that. I wish I had a picture of one particular morning during which the temperature must have been -25 or so, ice crystals in the air sparkled all over a cloudless sky, wood smoke from every chimney rose in ruler-straight lines until encountering a layer of moving air quite a distance above our town, and the silence was complete. As cold as it was, I was perfectly comfortable outside in shirtsleeves. For a while. Gorgeous day.

I got some pictures of an ice halo (kind of like this) that turned out OK. This picture from the archives of NASA's Astronomy Picture Of The Day page is better, of course, but I'll put mine here when I get it off the camera. There's a good explanation of the ice halo linked from the NASA page.

If I had to chose, I'd prefer to live where the weather gets really cold, like Minneapolis, than where it just gets sloppy, wet cold. Given my druthers, though, I'd stay here in Phoenix where we don't have to shovel the heat. Yes, it gets hotter than blazes for a while during the summer, but the other nine months are excellent payback. That you can probably survive more easily without air conditioning in Arizona than without heat in Minneapolis is a factor in my energy-worried mind, too.

It's good to be home.

Brrr...

Guess where I get to spend this week.

Amazing Interactive Infoporn

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I'm blown away by Gapminder, an amazing presentation of various world stats from the folks at Google.

I don't know about the stats themselves (I assume they're OK), but the presentation is mind-blowing. SciAm said

Finally, and Not To Be Missed Under Any Circumstances: The Gapminder World, which is only the world's most fantastic and amazing piece of interactive infoporn you have ever laid eyes on. Really.

Well, that's certainly true for me.

The West and Islam: "Hurray! We're Capitulating!" - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

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The West and Islam: "Hurray! We're Capitulating!" - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

Good piece.

Why didn't we see the handwriting on the wall when there was still time?

Some did. Some do. Doesn't matter.

For those facing a hopeless situation and powerless to change it, self-deception offers at least some succor.

So, what can be done? Were I dictator I'd have a policy of "assimilate or out". When in Rome, do as the Romans or else.

Were I dictator we'd be ... Never mind. That would be evil.

I don't believe in preordination, but a fatalistic outlook seems justified.

Technology Review: Battery Breakthrough?

Technology Review: Battery Breakthrough?
Well, that's certainly interesting.

... dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals ...

And

... specific energy of about 280 watt hours per kilogram, compared with around 120 watt hours per kilogram for lithium-ion and 32 watt hours per kilogram for lead-acid gel batteries.

As for a first production run,

a 15-kilowatt-hour energy-storage system for a small electric car weighing less than 100 pounds, and with a 200-mile driving range. The vehicle, the company says, will be able to recharge in less than 10 minutes.

If my numbers are right that's a 90 kilowatt charge rate, several times the maximum my house uses at summer peak. Home plug-in charging will have to be throttled considerably, or dedicated charging stations will be required. The range and energy numbers imply something like 5 kilowatt drain, which may be reasonable for a small, aerodynamic car.

Should this thing take off in the automotive sector it will have significant implications for the electricity grid. That's no biggie, as the electricity grid already faces significant issues. This'll just be one more challenge, and not the biggest one.

Even if the thing doesn't work out in the automotive arena, and if this isn't a bunch of hype (such as I've become accustomed to with flywheels over the years), and if self-discharge isn't an issue, this could be a big deal. In any event it's worth watching.

My biggest problem with the article is the final part of this sentence:

Such a breakthrough has the potential to radically transform a transportation sector already flirting with an electric renaissance, improve the performance of intermittent energy sources such as wind and sun, and increase the efficiency and stability of power grids--all while fulfilling an oil-addicted America's quest for energy security.

It's a battery, not an energy source, and it's not going to fulfill any quest for energy security. Maybe I'm nitpicking.

Google Manhart

Apparently I was hasty. JJ was right about time lag.

This one was funny.

Unconfirmed Sources.

The Motorcycle Diaries (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Motorcycle Diaries (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I was never one to wear a Che t-shirt or anything like that, but I enjoyed this movie about a road trip he took in his younger years. I had to rely on the subtitles, though, because even though I'm fluent in Spanish, between my bad ears, the accent and the wide dynamic range typical of movie and TV audio, I couldn't make out much of the dialog.

I was a kid in Guatemala when Che was killed. The father of one of my friends down there was a CIA guy who occasionally had guys with guns in his house (which happened to be the location of the school I attended during third or fourth grade some years prior). My friend had huge stacks of worthless Bolivian money from having been stationed there prior to Guatemala. His father was supposed to have been involved in the operations leading to Che's capture and execution.

Another little tidbit about Che was that he was supposed to have been in my Grandfather's employ for a short time in Guatemala. I guess that would have been while my Grandfather was the president of the power company down there. Anyway, there was some story about how my Grandfather's life was spared by chance while Che was in his office one day. Something fell off my Grandfather's desk, and at the moment he bent over to pick it up a bullet came flying through the window.

Something like that. It's been a long time...

Political Ponerology

The majority who are healthy have a difficult time understanding that some people are not — they can not fathom being a psychopath or acting like one.
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For example, Lobaczewski discovered that dealing with psychopathic systems made healthy people neurotic. However, they could heal very quickly when he gave them a scientific framework for understanding what had happened and why.

Hmmm... This sounds interesting.

The Cold Within

I've had this poem cached in several places for a long time. I never knew who wrote it. Just "Author Unknown".

It still shows up "Author Unknown", but the widow of a fellow named James Patrick Kinney claimed her husband wrote it back in the 70's. I guess that's good enough for me.

The Cold Within

Six humans trapped by happenstance
In dark and bitter cold
Each possessed a stick of wood--
Or so the story's told.

Their dying fire in need of logs,
But the first one held hers back,
For, of the faces around the fire,
She noticed one was black.

The next one looked cross the way
Saw one not of his church,
And could not bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.

The third one sat in tattered clothes
He gave his coat a hitch,
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?

The rich man just sat back and thought
Of wealth he had in store,
And keeping all that he had earned
From the lazy, shiftless poor.

The black man's face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight,
For he saw in his stick of wood
A chance to spite the white.

And the last man of this forlorn group
Did nought except for gain,
Giving just to those who gave
Was how he played the game,

Their sticks held tight in death's stilled hands
Was proof enough of sin;
They did not die from cold without--
They died from cold within.

-- James Patrick Kinney