Read this. New study on the effect of the paleocene/eocene thermal maximum on ocean currents. (About 55M years ago, a 7-degree rise in temperatures basically caused the entire world's climate to flip) If you haven't been following this story carefully, you should -- people are finally starting to discuss in public the big secret of climate change, which is that it's a great deal more serious than anyone's wanted to talk about in public.

Ariel Sharon just had a major stroke. Power transferred to Vice Premier Olmert; what this means for the coming elections, I have no idea.

This scares me. Sharon had become the person with enough moral weight to push forward a real plan for the future. And he seemed to have one. I don't believe that any of the other people in this party could hold it together enough to really make things work - to win a strong plurality and push forward an actual something that could lead to peace. I feel like it's 1995 again, when Rabin was assassinated and we all suddenly realized that our hopes were in the hands of a single all-too-mortal person. I just never thought I would be thinking that about Sharon.

God help him, and help us all.

New Scientist has an interesting little article about "13 things that do not make sense" -- basically, odd experimental results from the past couple of years that nobody really feels comfortable explaining yet.

Now, the crackpots will be out in force saying "See! Science is at an end! There are things it can't explain! There therefore must be an intelligent designer intentionally confounding the attempts of humans to tinker with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know..." et cetera. I'll just leave them out in the pottery shed; these thirteen things are really interesting, and while most of them probably won't pan out, if any of them do then there's some damned interesting advances going on. These are all under fairly active research (for the theoretical ones and the more well-understood experimental ones [like cosmic rays] people are working hard on them, and for the stranger experimental ones [like tetraneutrons, or one they forgot, the magnetic monopole] people are still waiting for experimental confirmation).

I was just at the donations page for Médecins Sans Frontières, and was amused to see the list of titles you can fill in on the form...
( Which would you like to be?Collapse )

Which list, I suppose, makes good sense for an organization like this. But it's not often that you see "Emperor" used on a web form in complete seriousness.

I would make a poll out of this, but I don't think lj could handle that long a radio list...

The FISA court is arranging a formal briefing where the administration will (in theory) explain its warrantless spying program.

• Will there be any analogue of opposing counsel there? Will someone be asking hard questions of the administration, or will it simply be the administration people giving a presentation to the judges and then the judges having to decide to quit or not? Why is this not a matter for a hearing of the ordinary sort?


• Note that this WP article quietly confirms Ars Technica's analysis of what the illegal spying program actually entailed...

In the Padilla case, Judge J. Michael Luttig of the 4th circuit court of appeals blasted the administration's handling of the case and rejected their move to do a jurisdictional shuffle to keep this case from ever reaching the Supreme Court.

For those of you who haven't been following: Padilla was arrested on a charge of a "dirty bomb" plot about 3.5 years ago and was held incommunicado in a military prison until heavy outside pressure forced them to allow him counsel (about a year and a half later). The case now pending before the court is whether the administration has the right to hold a US citizen as an enemy combatant outside of the legal system. The case is approaching the Supreme Court, so a few weeks ago the government tried a jurisdiction move: they formally charged Padilla with some unrelated matters and ordered him moved to a civilian prison, in an attempt to moot the issue, and asked the court of appeals to withdraw an earlier decision it made in their favor so that the Supreme Court wouldn't have a chance to review it. Luttig is a very prominent (and very conservative) jurist, so the forcefulness of his statement today is a big deal.

If you haven't been reading the news in the past few days, here are some important things:

(1) More details on the violence in China

(2) More on domestic spying by the NSA: FISA judge resigns in protest; interesting analysis from Slate; even more interesting analysis from Ars Technica.

(3) The latest version of the Scopes Monkey Trial ended. Analysis article; the judge's decision is very worth reading if you have the time and want a very clear and systematic explanation of the problems with creationism.

(From a WP article about rioting in China)

"he was also director general of the Dongzhou Buddha Council, which the statement described as 'a superstitious organization in charge of divine activities in Dongzhou.'"

I believe that some game that I run in the future will have to contain a Dongzhou Buddha Council, which will be in charge of divine activities in the area. Although I can't imagine who would sit on it.

I just got back from watching Syriana, and at this point I honestly feel like throwing up.
( Might be spoilersCollapse )

Let me present Susblood Labs, which is manufacturing a combination pen and capsule of preserved pig's blood, designed to reconstitute in the heat of a suicide bomb and defile the body of the bomber. Apparently this is meant to act as a deterrent to bombers, by keeping them out of heaven.

(I could talk about the basic physics and theology problems with this, but why bother? There's something delightfully mad about the whole thing.)

EDIT: But wait! There's more! From the Middle East Media Research Institute, a translation of a fascinating contest showing up on some Islamist websites. Help design a website for a terror group, and get to fire missiles at American troops!

(You know, I really wish I were kidding. It could be that both of these things are bogus... but somehow, I doubt it. The first one, in particular, just seems so appropriate to the mindset that if it's satire, it's the most brilliant bloody satire I've seen in a while. The latter... well, all sorts of strange things show up on the public fora of terror groups. Most of them are nonsense. But such splendid nonsense! For that one, I think the best commentary came from Dry Bones.)

A simple little idea: Go to your Calendar and find the first real entry for each month of 2005 (not including memes of course). Post the first line of it in your journal, and that's your year in review. Mine seems to be a pretty good summary of what I use this blog for...
( SummaryCollapse )

Creativity determines sexual success

Atlantic warm-water currents are weakening

The latter article is actually fairly important.

I've been re-reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, and finding it very thought-provoking; it's a good book to come back to after a time, and if you haven't read it (and his more recent book, Collapse) I recommend it highly.

But here's a question that popped into my head while reading it: (This will probably make a bit more sense to those who have read the book) Why did England successfully invade and colonize India, and not the other way round? I'm curious both about the proximate causes (my lack of Indian history is showing through) and the deeper reasons, if any can be traced back. Diamond's analysis doesn't seem to carry over unmodified to this case; India certainly had no shortage of intensive agriculture, nor a late start in developing it, and at times in its history was a large empire. Had the two countries been neighbors, the outcome might have been very different; similarly if they had come into contact a thousand years earlier. Nor was the battle completely one-sided; the Sikhs twice managed to field a very impressive army and pose a real challenge to British domination. Yet despite all of this, the British managed to basically set up shop and run a country many times their size, and hold that empire for over a century; so there must have been some major fundamental asymmetry.

Thoughts?

Well, at least something in the news feels familiar... twenty or thirty years out of date, but familiar. Plus ça change, plus la même chose...

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, and supposedly an Evangelical Christian, responded to calls for "Creation Care" (i.e., stewardship of the world) from the National Association of Evangelicals, in an interesting fashion: (Source article)

Mr. Inhofe said the vast majority of the nation's evangelical groups would oppose global warming legislation as inconsistent with a conservative agenda that also includes opposition to abortion rights and gay rights. He said the National Evangelical Association had been "led down a liberal path" by environmentalists and others who have convinced the group that issues like poverty and the environment are worth their efforts.

From koga:

( Which historic general are you?Collapse )

I can deal with that. Although I would have liked some more options on the questions: if your enemy has retreated to highly defensible positions around the city you're supposed to be attacking, you may want to consider making a fuck of a lot of noise at the city gates while your main forces sneak around and attack them from behind, rather than simply weighing a frontal assault against waiting them out.

It's been a while since I wrote a detailed political post, and what with it being a relatively calm time in the news, I figured it might be a good time to pull out the political crystal ball and try to make some projections for things to come, and things to watch out for. I'll be keeping this one focused on international politics, especially the Middle East; (since that's where I actually know enough to have something useful to say) and so this post should be taken as analysis, sometimes conjecture, and sometimes opinion, rather than as a record of fact.

As usual, comments and discussion are welcomed!

( Eenie meenie, jelly beanie, the spirits are about to speak!Collapse )

US to detail who paid bribes in Iraq oil sales: This is actually a pretty interesting report that's about to come out. If you wondered why France was so opposed to the Iraq war, it has everything to do with what's going to come out in this document, and very little to do with them having an opinion, or really even caring, about the wisdom of the war itself. (I've been waiting for this one for a little while - it's interesting stuff. And I can promise you that major French companies don't engage in this sort of large-scale operation without the full knowledge and consent of the government)

President Ahmadinejad of Iran calls for anihilation of Israel: Just in case anyone forgot during the past couple of years, Iran - specifically its hard-liner government, which is back in full control after the last election - is not your friend. In fact, it's safe to say that this government considers itself to be your enemy, and would quite happily kill you if it got a chance. (That's "you" referring to anyone living in the US, Israel, and probably the UK. Well, and several other places, too.)

Oh yes, and they have intermediate-range ballistic missiles and are working on nuclear weapons.

(Coming soon: A more detailed Middle-East Roundup which I started writing on the flight home. There's a lot to say right now)

Administration's Tone Signals a Longer, Broader Iraq Conflict (NYT)

No shit? I'd almost be tempted to ascribe this to, oh, reading the newspaper for once, instead of trusting the same people who started a problem to keep you apprised of its status.

Well, at least we can be grateful for the remarkable feat of infrastructure our administration has pulled off: creating the largest, most sophisticated terrorist training facility in recorded history, complete with daily live-target practice, and capable of handling tens of thousands (maybe more!) of trainees at a time. The price may be a bit high - something in the ballpark of $100B and a few thousand American soldiers' lives, to say nothing of the number of Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire - but if you really want to create an effective, well-trained and well-equipped enemy, there's just no substitute for a large country, out-of-the-way for us but centrally located for them, with no functioning government and a steady American military presence just large enough to draw fire but nowhere near large enough to actually stabilize things.

President Bush has nominated White House Counsel Harriet Miers to succeed Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. She has no prior judicial experience; her background is as an attorney, including as the President's personal attorney, chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission, staff secretary to the President, and deputy chief of staff.

Unlike the nomination of John Roberts, this one smells extremely bad to me. I'd be willing to lay at least 2:1 odds that she has a strong ideological bent, simply based on her background; but more to the point, is it really proper to be making an obvious patronage appointment to the Supreme Court, especially after the rollicking success of his last famous one?

Armed, military-trained dolphins are loose in the Gulf of Mexico following Katrina.

'My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,' he said. 'The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?'

Caramelized oranges with french vanilla ice cream: A good deal of work for an only OK flavor. They taste pretty much exactly the way you would imagine them to. While I could imagine some ways to improve this, (e.g., instead of the simple orange-caramel sauce, do something a good deal more alcoholic) it's not obvious that the work is worth the effort.

Sage chicken and rosemary potatos: Yum. I need to cook more often.

FEMA reroutes Katrina-bound ice to Maine.

Glad to see our government is in good hands, here.

An Australian man's jacket almost set the building on fire.

New results: Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, apparently has an atmosphere and liquid water beneath the surface. WP article gives a summary of this and other recent discoveries from the Cassini mission.