Later On

He could sign on to the treaty—already signed by most nations—to ban the use of land mines, which continue to cause terrible civilian casualties in old battlefields. Bill Moyers and Michael Winship in Salon:

Many people are troubled that Barack Obama flew to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize so soon after escalating the war in Afghanistan. He is now more than doubling the number of troops there when George W. Bush left office.

The irony was not lost on the president, and he tried to address it in his Nobel acceptance speech. “I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land,” he said. “Some will kill. Some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict — filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other.”

Granted, there’s a gap here between the rhetoric and the reality. But there’s always been something askew about Nobel Peace Prize, in no small part because it’s given in the name of the man who invented dynamite, one of the most powerful and destructive weapons in the human arsenal.

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Dan Bricklin is the guy who created the spreadsheet—VisiCalc was his program, and it sold more Apple II computers than any other program. Now he’s created this:

Gina Trapani has a story about the app, which is where I got the video.

Just got a call from the landlord: my kitchen stove (long on its last legs) will be replaced this morning. So now I have to June around and get everything ready so that they can get the stove into the apartment and get the old stove out, which means moving things out of the hallway. I thought I’d have a day to do this, rather than two hours.

"to June around" means, I think, to move busily about, from the June bug. It might be a southern-Oklahomaism. Ah, here it is. In the sense that my family used, it was not to loaf around, but rather busy yourself getting your ducks in a row.

I’m having some doubts about the Semogue 2000. It doesn’t seem to be getting better like, say, the Omega 48 and the Koh-I-Noor have. I’ll continue to use it, but I had to go to the soap for every pass this morning. Maybe the suribachi-bowl lathering, as suggested in a recent comment, will help. I’ll certainly give it a go.

Nonetheless, I was able to get sufficient lather on every pass, and the little Classic 1904 was a fine razor. And bay rum is always a fine aftershave.

Michael Le Page reviews Storms of My Grandchildren: The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity by James Hansen in New Scientist. The review begins:

"I did not want my grandchildren, someday in the future, to look back and say, ‘Opa understood what was happening but did not make it clear’." So Opa, otherwise known as renowned climate researcher James Hansen, is telling it as he sees it, and the result is the most frightening book I have ever read, for three reasons.

First, Hansen has come to believe, based on studies of past climate change, that the threat facing us is far worse than he thought even a few years ago. The very survival of life on Earth is at stake, he says. The sun is 2 per cent brighter than it was just 250 million years ago, and if we burn up all the fossil fuel on the planet – all the oil, coal, tar sand and tar shale – we will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect that will ultimately lead to the oceans boiling away, he claims.

This won’t happen in our lifetimes, but if we don’t curb our emissions now it will become harder and harder to avert the total extinction of life. Which brings us to the second reason: Hansen thinks nothing meaningful is being done to limit emissions. "Your governments are lying through their teeth," he says. He believes the Kyoto protocol is a dismal failure, and its proposed successors, along with the cap-and-trade schemes favoured by President Barack Obama, have no chance of achieving what is needed either. "Unfortunately, nature and the laws of physics cannot compromise – they are what they are," he points out.

It gets worse…

Continue reading.

Here it comes: the annual tsunami of top 10 lists. These might have something helpful in them.

The first is on spiritual abuse, typically from an authoritarian pastor.

The second is a  probable explanation of how the Northwest Airlines flight overflew Minneapolis, the destination.

This is great. I just went to Nob Hill to pick up some ground turkey (to make The Wife more of those turkey muffin-size meatloaves) and I spotted beef tendon in the meat aisle. Beef tendon! I’ve never had it or even thought about it, but of course I immediately bought a package and started thinking about how to cook them. Obviously, not something you sauté and serve on a toothpick. I’m thinking long, slow braising with some lemon juice in the mix.

Of course, in the back of my mind is the thought that if I’m having tendon/ligament trouble, eating some tendons might help—sort of along the lines of eating your enemy’s heart to get his courage, I guess. But it is also a very cold, overcast, rainy day, and something braised would be good.

And, by chance, right next to the tendons was oxtail: perfect for long slow braising. I’ll just include the tendons with the tails.

Hmm. It seems that the tendon is rising in popularity. Look at this post.

I seem to be taking a day off from blogging. This is pretty rare, but I think I’ll go with it. It feels right to give myself a little break. Back tomorrow.

TYD advised that I discontinue adding 10 seconds a day and just stick with the current time for a full week. It’s always good to accept your kids’ advice—maybe then they’ll accept yours. In any event, I thought it was good advice: I’m always thinking I’m younger than I am (though, in my defense, never younger than I once was) and that gets me into trouble: cf. anserine bursitis.

So this morning was again 7 min 20 sec. I have added the Nordic Track to my HabitForge.com list, so now I’ll be tracking that activity, along with my daily plan and my small lunch/dinner resolution.

I wanted to get back to work breaking in some of the boar brushes, and I particularly like the Koh-I-Noor shown, so it’s first up. Very good lather from the Dovo soap, with a brief return to the soap for the third pass. The Gillette red-tipped Super Speed with a UK Wilkinson blade did a fine job. Pitralon was a fine finish with its enigmatic fragrance. Very satisfying.

People are ingenious, no doubt about it.

From Wordsmith I learn that rhopalic (ro-PAL-ik) is an adjective that means "Having each successive word longer by a letter or syllable." And here’s a great example of a rhopalic sentence by Dmitri Borgmann:

I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalises intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.

Tried some beginning tai chi moves, but bending the knee while standing and supporting weight on it seems like a bad idea. I’ll wait a while for that.

Unsettling post by David Dayen at Firedoglake:

The House Rules Committee released a very tight rule, with basically no amendments, for the regulatory reform effort being headed up by Barney Frank. This did not please members of the New Democrats, who are notoriously friendly with banking lobbyists. So they threatened to vote against the rule. This is from Congress Daily (sub. reqd.):

Members of the New Democrat Coalition Tuesday warned House leaders they will consider voting against a rule for debate on an overhaul of the nation’s financial regulatory system if Democratic leaders do not allow floor votes on amendments they are backing — ones which make the measure more palatable to K Street.

“The New Dems feel strongly that a regulatory reform bill should be considered under an open and balanced rule,” said a Democratic source. The source added that members of the 68-member coalition would “no-vote” if the rule on the bill “doesn’t live up to the commitments that have been made.” It was uncertain how many members would follow through on such a threat Tuesday night.

Apparently, enough of them would have followed through to take down the bill, at least in the eyes of the House leadership, which delayed the bill today, clearly fearing it couldn’t pass:

A group of Democrats friendly to the interests of Wall Street forced a delay in consideration of the landmark financial regulatory reform bill scheduled to hit the House floor on Wednesday, Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) told reporters in the Speaker’s lobby.

Frank accused the New Democrat Coalition of blocking the bill because they are being prodded by big banks to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and to allow major financial institutions to avoid state laws tougher than federal regulations. A Democratic leadership aide confirmed that centrist and conservative Democrats are threatening to vote no on the bill, leaving the caucus short of the needed votes.

“The big banks in particular are trying to get more preemption,” said Frank. “It’s a state-consumer battle with the big banks. We want compromise. They want to offer an amendment that makes it easier to preempt state consumer laws.”

Pre-emption on Consumer Financial Protection Agency laws is among the major sticking points. Melissa Bean has wanted to allow banks this privilege for a while now – her former chief of staff was lobbying on it. But pre-emption lost in the Financial Services Committee, preserving the ability for state regulators to challenge banking practices. Bean’s modified amendment would give the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency the ability to determine whether federal policies are enough to protect consumers.

At the time, liberals said they would oppose the overall bill if Bean’s amendment passed, and she backed down, amid White House pressure. Bean claimed to Congress Daily that she got a guarantee from Frank to get her amendment a vote, but Frank has never said that, at least not publicly.

There’s another amendment sought by the New Dems by Rep. Walt Minnick (D-ID) which would effectively kill the CFPA altogether, and replace it with a regulatory council. Liberals would probably completely revolt from the bill if that happened.

There are actually liberal amendments that some want considered on the floor, including one from Mel Watt (D-NC): …

Continue reading.

That will take care of a lot of Florida:

That’s take from this post at Climate Progress. Read the whole thing: it’s chilling. From that post:

“Since 1990, sea level has been rising at 3.4 millimetres per year, twice as fast as on average over the 20th century. Even if that rate just remained steady, this would already lead to 34 centimetres rise in the 21st century,” Dr Rahmstorf said.

“But the data show us clearly – the warmer it gets, the faster the sea level rises. If we want to prevent a galloping sea level rise, we should stop global warming as soon as possible,” he said.

Crooks & Liars has the video and more of the transcript, along with comments, but I wanted to point out just this part:

MITCHELL: Congratulations on the book. You write in your new book, “Our Choice,” “The global warming deniers’ arguments are fraudulent and often nonsensical.” Yet even today, one of the best-known voices in the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, has an op-ed in the Washington Post, and she is escalating a major attack against Copenhagen and against — against the summit. Palin calls it “junk science.” She says, “The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worst.”

What’s your response to that?

GORE: Well, you know, the — the global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?

The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies — drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths (ph) in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.

These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation — that’s going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning. [And where do the denialists think all that heat is coming from? It takes a LOT of heat to do the things Gore listed---what's the source if it's not heat trapped by the CO2 and other greenhouse gases that have grown rapidly due to human activity. And, BTW, "natural variation" is not a source of heat: what is the source of the heat? The question they cannot answer. – LG]

MITCHELL: Well, one of the things that she has written recently on Facebook is that this is doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that makes the public feel like owning an SUV is a sin against the planet.

GORE: Well, the scientific community has worked very intensively for 20 years within this international process, and they now say the evidence is unequivocal. A hundred and fifty years ago this year was the discovery that CO-2 traps heat. That is a — a principle in physics. It’s not a question of debate. It’s like gravity; it exists.

This is worth pondering. The President:

Despite what some have claimed, the cost of the Recovery Act is only a very small part of our current budget imbalance.  In reality, the deficit had been building dramatically over the previous eight years.  We have a structural gap between the money going out and the money coming in.

Folks passed tax cuts and expansive entitlement programs without paying for any of it — even as health care costs kept rising, year after year.  As a result, the deficit had reached $1.3 trillion when we walked into the White House.  And I’d note:  These budget-busting tax cuts and spending programs were approved by many of the same people who are now waxing political about fiscal responsibility, while opposing our efforts to reduce deficits by getting health care costs under control.  It’s a sight to see…

In the end, the economic crisis of the past year was not just the result of weaknesses in our economy.  It was also the result of weaknesses in our political system, because for decades, too many in Washington put off the hard decisions.  For decades, we’ve watched as efforts to solve tough problems have fallen prey to the bitterness of partisanship, to prosaic concerns of politics, to ever-quickening news cycles, to endless campaigns focused on scoring points instead of meeting our common challenges.

We’ve seen the consequences of this failure of responsibility.  The American people have paid a heavy price.  And the question we’ll have to answer now is if we’re going to learn from our past, or if — even in the aftermath of disaster — we’re going to repeat those same mistakes.  As the alarm bells fade, the din of Washington rises, as the forces of the status quo marshal their resources, we can be sure that answering this question will be a fight to the finish.

Very interesting post by Lee Fang at ThinkProgress:

In mid-November, thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit webmail server — a top climate research center in the United Kingdom — were hacked and dumped on a Russian web server. Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth. The skeptics also propelled the story, dubbed “Climategate,” to the cover of the New York Times and newspapers across the globe. According to a Nexis news search, the Climategate story has been reported at least 325 times in the American press alone.

While the hacked e-mails may reveal that scientists might not have nice things to say about climate change deniers at times, they do nothing to change the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use are raising temperatures and making oceans more acidic. As the right attempts to use the Climategate story to derail the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference this week, arctic sea ice is still at historically low levels, Australia is still on fire, the northern United Kingdom is still underwater, the world’s glaciers are still disappearing and today NOAA confirmed that not only is it the hottest decade in history, but 2009 was one of the hottest years in history. But how did the right-wing noise machine hijack the debate?

The methods for the right-wing political hit machine were honed during the Clinton years. Columnist and language-guru William Safire, a former aide to actual Watergate crook President Nixon, attached “-gate” to any minor post-Nixon incident as a “rhetorical legerdemain” intended “to establish moral equivalence.” (See phony manufactured scandals “Travelgate,” “Whitewatergate,” etc.) A right-wing echo chamber — including the Rev. Moon-funded Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, talk radio, and the constellation of various conservative front groups and think tanks — would then blare the scandal incessantly, regardless of the truth. But the more troubling aspect of this gimmick is the increasing willingness for traditional media outlets, from the Evening News to the Washington Post, to largely reprint unfounded right-wing smears without context or critical reporting.

One of the most successful coups for right-wing hit men was the “SwiftBoat” campaign, a well financed effort orchestrated by lobbyists and Bush allies to smear Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) war record. But “Climategate” is no different, with many of the same conservatives actors playing their respective roles:

Nov. 17:

– RealClimate blogger Gavin Schmidt realized that someone was hacking his computer and downloading 160MB of files from a Turkish IP address. About an hour after the intrusion, a mysterious commenter at the climate skeptic blog Climate Audit posted a link to the hacked files with a note reading: “A miracle just happened.” Schmidt noted that, “four downloads occurred from that link while the file was still there (it no longer is).”

Nov. 19:

– Hackers then used a computer in Saudi Arabia to post the stolen e-mails, stored on a Russian server, on the climate skeptic website Air Vent.

– Skeptic blog “Watts Up With That” curiously is among the first blogs to post the hacked e-mails.

– Chris Horner, an operative of the Koch Industries/ExxonMobil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, blogged giddily at National Review that although he had not been “able to fully digest this at present,” “the blue dress moment may have arrived” on climate science.

– Sarah Palin appears on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor to discuss her new book. Palin and O’Reilly compare a young man who briefly hacked into her e-mail account in 2008, calling the incident “extremely disconcerting and disruptive” and “Watergate-lite.” O’Reilly and Plain do not discussed the hacked climate e-mails.

Nov. 20: …

Continue reading.