Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Watering Hole: Wednesday, April 6, 2011: Hump Day

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There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. Genesis 6:4

And in this one passage in Genesis, all of the ancient myths are incorporated into the Bible.

Who were these “sons of God” who impregnated the daughters of men? Do their genes still flow in our gene pool?

This is our daily open thread. What do you think of this and other stuff that’s going on?

The Watering Hole: April 5, Someone stop me….

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I can still get furious. And I am just that.

Now the apologists have found a new way of telling us, the Fukushima accident is not really bad at all. Look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so many survivors live there still, which belies all concern that exposure to radiation makes you sick and leads to an earlier death. You may of course die immediately, but no one in Fukushima has, have they? They are more likely to die from smoking and get sick of the psychological impact of the catastrophe.

I’m talking about  today’s comment in the NZZ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung) which should have been clearly marked with “inspired and paid for by the nuclear industry”, and which is, unfortunately ,not available online but parts must have taken more or less right from here.

Nice try:

“Little Boy” the Hiroshima bomb contained about 64 kg of Uranium 235, less than 1 kg reacted and “Fat Man” the Nagasaki bomb 6kg Plutonium.

The Fukushima plant has much more material in its belly than either of the bombs, nor both of them combined had. If you want to get really scared, look here, it’s staggering.

Again: The comparison with the nuclear bombs is off! The only comparison possible is indeed Chernobyl and huge areas around this particular site are uninhabitable for generations to come. 20 years later children were born with massive birth defects and children were suffering from thyroid cancer in previously unheard of numbers. In Chernobyl one reactor exploded and dispatched radioactive material across Europe and the rest of the world. In Fukushima no such explosion has occurred. Luckily for us, we will not have to cope with fall out as serious as the one we had in 1986. But there are four reactors involved now. There will be a slowly-but-surely poisoning of the Pacific and a slowly-but-surely poisoning of the earth, the groundwater and drinking water supply of the surrounding areas. Maybe even the water supply of the Tokyo area with its 35 million inhabitants. Even in the best case scenario we have again made a huge strip of land uninhabitable to any life form, in the worst case we have managed to displace millions of people. But hey, that’s not a problem really, don’t lets panic, we are safe as houses and our reactors are safe as well.

Someone stop me, or I’ll go on and on and on and on…

Oh, and while I am at it, if you google “Chernobyl Disaster” the first and topmost hits are completely different to the ones you found pre Fukushima, now the “realistic” assessments are topmost, not the “alarmist” ones like from Greenpeace or some such lefties. Telling?

This is our open thread, There must have been other things going on, so tell us…

Deniers lose another one

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This is one check the Koch Brothers are certainly regretting: $150,000 to the Berkeley Earth Service Temperature project, run by a long-time critic of Climate Change science, was intended to bolster the deniers with some hard data. Somehow, things didn’t work out quite as expected and the news came out in a Congressional committee meeting intending to support the attack on the EPA. Somehow, I don’t think this is what the Kochs had in mind.

But Muller unexpectedly told a congressional hearing last week that the work of the three principal groups that have analyzed the temperature trends underlying climate science is “excellent…. We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.”

It will be interesting to observe how much attention (if any) is given to the Berkeley project results. Perhaps Fox News will give it wide coverage and their pundits and “journalists” will be quick to concede they’d had it wrong. Or maybe not.

But conservative critics who had expected Muller’s group to demonstrate a bias among climate scientists reacted with disappointment.

Anthony Watts, a former TV weatherman who runs the skeptic blog WattsUpWithThat.com, wrote that the Berkeley group is releasing results that are not “fully working and debugged yet…. But, post normal science political theater is like that.”

Over the years, Muller has praised Watts’ efforts to show that weather station data in official studies are untrustworthy because of the urban heat island effect, which boosts temperature readings in areas that have been encroached on by cities and suburbs.

But leading climatologists said the previous studies accounted for the effect, and the Berkeley analysis is confirming that, Muller acknowledged. “Did such poor station quality exaggerate the estimates of global warming?” he asked in his written testimony. “We’ve studied this issue, and our preliminary answer is no.”

Muller’s testimony must have felt like a slap in the face to the GOP members of the Science & Technology Committee, who were expecting a golden opportunity to scoff at Global Climate Change and urge the increased exploitation of non-renewable energy sources. Perhaps in the future the Koch Brothers will demand results before cutting a check.

 

The Watering Hole April 4, 2011 Happy Trails

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Late afternoon blooms of the Claret Cup cactus, New Mexico.

This is my last Monday post for the season, I’ll be hitting the trails of my home turf soon, but not before exploring some new terrain to the north. Be well and happy! Raven

Having scheduled this last Friday, there may be gnus, maybe knot.

In any event, this is our Daily Open Thread, and it’s where it’s at…

Sunday Roast: The Real Boston Tea Party

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The Tea Party got its start in 2009, when the Koch brothers-funded, right-wing, big corporation loving, group “Freedom Works” picked up on the silly and selfish rant by Rick Santelli, wherein he called for a “Chicago Tea Party,” due to his opposition to President Obama’s idea to help out homeowners who were in trouble with their mortgages.

Low information voters all over the United States began turning out in droves that summer of 2009 to protest that they were “Taxed Enough Already” and reeling from the dreadful hazard of providing health care to all Americans, delivered hundreds of thousands of teabags to a park near the White House, and were seen sporting hats with teabags stapled to the brims.  They proclaimed themselves “teabaggers,” until the snickers and guffaws caused them to research the term with the Google, and then they retreated to calling themselves “tea partiers.”

They remembered to bring their signs with clever (and usually mis-spelled) tax-related sayings; they gleefully marched with their signs featuring the President as Hitler, an African witch doctor, and the Joker — although what those signs had to do with taxes or health care is still a mystery to me; and they held their Gadsden flags high in the breeze.

What they didn’t remember to do was actually read the history behind the Boston Tea Party.  To put it factually and bluntly, if this were 1770s America, the tea partiers would be loyalists to the British Crown.  What!?

Thom Hartmann explains it clearly in the video above — in case you didn’t remember your grade school history classes (I’m looking at you, teabaggers) — or if you just never knew in the first place.

The real Boston Tea Party was a protest against huge corporate tax cuts for the British East India Company, the largest trans-national corporation then in existence. This corporate tax cut threatened to decimate small Colonial businesses by helping the BEIC pull a Wal-Mart against small entrepreneurial tea shops, and individuals began a revolt that kicked-off a series of events that ended in the creation of The United States of America.

They covered their faces, massed in the streets, and destroyed the property of a giant global corporation. Declaring an end to global trade run by the East India Company that was destroying local economies, this small, masked minority started a revolution with an act of rebellion later called the Boston Tea Party.

Yep, that’s it.  A protest against the King giving a huge tax break to the biggest corporation in existence at the time, which would have the effect of crippling colonial merchants.

No, it was not a protest against excessive personal taxes or taxation of corporations — this is what Freedom Works and the Koch brothers would like us all to believe, and luckily for them, the tea partiers bought it, hook, line, and sinker; and they have happily and diligently worked against their own interests ever since.

This is our daily open thread — Do you think we can find common ground with the tea party, and find a way to work together against our common enemy?

Libya, Obama, and the Relevance of the War Powers Act

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Due to the recent controversy over whether or not President Obama needed Congressional approval to take action in Libya, our bloggy friend, 5thstate, recently took an in-depth look at what the War Powers Act of 1973 actually says and what it requires of the President.

What he found might be surprising to most laymen and Congresspeople…

In a Huffington Post opinion piece of March 29th, 2011, Representative Mike Honda, the co-chairperson of the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s Peace and Security Taskforce, took issue with the President’s use of US military forces with regard to the month-old Libyan uprising that, after three weeks of popular, political and geographic momentum had not only stalled in its progress but was under threat of total destruction by Moammar Ghaddafi’s resource-rich, formally-trained, and overwhelmingly better-equipped forces.

The key concern remains the lack of Congressional involvement and oversight. The War Powers Act of 1973, created after the Vietnam War to ensure legislative checks and balances before and during wartime situations, limits the president’s ability to commit armed forces to conditions that are not met in this case.

If the U.S. wants to lead and inspire the world in setting the standard for good governance, getting this executive-legislative relationship right is critical.

Mike Honda, Democrat

The thrust of Representative Honda’s complaint is shared by several other Democratic Party members and by many Republicans too, representing a rare (these days) shared bipartisan concern over not only policy but also legal and constitutional issues — which would be encouraging if the expressed concerns from both sides of the political aisle shared the same motivation for complaint, and even if, regardless of motivation, they were based on direct knowledge rather than vague interpretation and practical fact rather than conjectural fantasy.

Rep. Mike Honda:

The War Powers Act of 1973, created after the Vietnam War to ensure legislative checks and balances before and during wartime situations, limits the president’s ability to commit armed forces…

Wrong — and for so many reasons!

1973 War Powers Act:

Sec. 4. (a) In the absence of a declaration of war, in any case in which United States Armed Forces are introduced—

(1) into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances;

 

(2) into the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation, while equipped for combat, except for deployments which relate solely to supply, replacement, repair, or training of such forces; or

(3) in numbers which substantially enlarge United States Armed Forces equipped for combat already located in a foreign nation; the President shall submit within 48 hours to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and to the President pro tempore of the Senate a report, in writing, setting forth—

(A) the circumstances necessitating the introduction of United States Armed Forces;

 

(B) the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place; and

 

(C) the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement.

 

[Sec. 4](b) The President shall provide such other information as the Congress may request in the fulfillment of its constitutional responsibilities with respect to committing the Nation to war and to the use of United States Armed Forces abroad. (Emphasis added)

First of all; the constitutionality of any Act or general action is decided by a given, sitting, Supreme Court; the War Powers Act was not established as being constitutional by the 1973 Supreme Court and has never been ratified or struck-down by the SCOTUS since, because it has never been placed on the Supreme Court’s docket—the invocation of “constitutional responsibilities” in the War Powers Act verbiage is a rhetorical argument only, not a matter of legal fact, but never mind that; theoretically any Act passed by Congress is both legal and constitutional until tested and proven otherwise, thus the War Powers Act is actually legal, absent a specific test of constitutionality.

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The Watering Hole: April 2 – Oldsmobile

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1904 Olds Model 6C (Curved Dash)

This date marks the 7th anniversary of the day that the last Oldsmobile was produced. When it was discontinued in 2004, Oldsmobile was the oldest surviving American automobile marque, and was only outlived by Daimler and Peugeot.

Yesterday’s Daily was about April’s Fool’s Day and soon drifted over to automobiles. Does that say something?

This is our Open Thread. Please feel free to present your thoughts on automobiles, or even world events.

The Watering Hole: April 1, 2011, April Fools Day

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April 1, 2001, in Denmark, regarding Copenhagen’s new metro

April Fools Day is celebrated all over the world; a day for practical jokes, hoaxes and silliness.  What you may not know is that April Fools Day has been celebrated for centuries.  A reference to this day is found in the Canterbury Tales in 1392!

Here are some awesome April Fools Day pranks:

Taco Liberty Bell: In 1996, Taco Bell took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times announcing that they had purchased theLiberty Bell to “reduce the country’s debt” and renamed it the “Taco Liberty Bell”. When asked about the sale, White House press secretary Mike McCurry replied tongue-in-cheek that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold and would henceforth be known as the Lincoln Mercury Memorial.

Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect: In 1976, British astronomer Sir Patrick Moore told listeners of BBC Radio 2 that unique alignment of two planets would result in an upward gravitational pull making people lighter at precisely 9:47 a.m. that day. He invited his audience to jump in the air and experience “a strange floating sensation”. Dozens of listeners phoned in to say the experiment had worked.

Spaghetti trees: The BBC television programme Panorama ran a famous hoax in 1957, showing Swiss harvesting spaghetti from trees. They had claimed that the despised pest, the spaghetti weevil, had been eradicated. A large number of people contacted the BBC wanting to know how to cultivate their own spaghetti trees.

In 2010, British newspaper The Sun run an article about its new “Scratch and Sniff” paper, providing a sample of plain newspaper. This led to a lot of readers sniffing the paper in an attempt to smell the scent.

Real news happened on this day as well:

The April 1, 1946 Aleutian Island earthquake tsunami that killed 165 people in Hawaii and Alaska resulted in the creation of a tsunami warning system, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, established in 1949 for Pacific Ocean countries. The tsunami in question is known in Hawaii as the “April Fools’ Day Tsunami” due to people drowning because of the assumptions that the warnings were an April Fools’ prank.

The AMC Gremlin was first introduced on April 1, 1970.

That last one has to be a joke, right…?

This is our daily open thread — What was your most awesome
April Fools Day joke?