• Weekly Ezine for Democrats

All the stuff I'd post on the current political scene if I wasn't so fucking lazy.

• Can it get any worse?: industrial bleach as cancer and HIV cure

• Where Did the Carter White House's Solar Panels Go?

One of the 32 solar-thermal panels that captured energy on the roof of the White House more than 30 years ago landed this week at a science museum in China

• Proximal Intercessory Prayer

One of the core “pearls” of this blog is that not all scientific studies are created equal. It is common for the media and the public to cite the fact that “a study shows” some claim or other, but such appeals to evidence are worthless unless we can assess the quality of the study. We now have a gaggle of science bloggers – real scientists blogging about research – to help explain all the various ways to look at the quality of a study, and hopefully this is resulting in a more savvy population of science enthusiasts (the kind of people who read science blogs).

Posted by Norm at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by RedSeven at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CNN's best political team goes to a gay bar at three in the afternoon to cover reactions on a federal judge's decision to overturn Proposition 8. (07:41)

Posted by Norm at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

• The French Fry and the Polluted Sky

Earlier this year, in a typical exercise in editorial bloviation, the pompous Thomas Friedman, a high priest in the cult of the entrepreneur, belittled the bail-outs and by inference any proto-Keynesian impulses from the left. Bail-out money would have been better spent on start-ups, Friedman suggests. Grove destroys the nonsensical position that the government should back start-ups while commodity manufacturing should be allowed to die. No matter what Mr. Friedman says, our faith in start-ups as little job creation engines is misplaced. Long experience in Silicon Valley informs Grove’s argument that shipping jobs overseas to avoid rising costs stateside is a chump’s game.

• Marriage Is a Constitutional Right

Until Wednesday, the thousands of same-sex couples who have married did so because a state judge or Legislature allowed them to. The nation’s most fundamental guarantees of freedom, set out in the Constitution, were not part of the equation. That has changed with the historic decision by a federal judge in California, Vaughn Walker, that his state’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the 14th Amendment’s rights to equal protection and due process of law.

The decision, though an instant landmark in American legal history, is more than that. It also is a stirring and eloquently reasoned denunciation of all forms of irrational discrimination, the latest link in a chain of pathbreaking decisions that permitted interracial marriages and decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults.

As the case heads toward appeals at the circuit level and probably the Supreme Court, Judge Walker’s opinion will provide a firm legal foundation that will be difficult for appellate judges to assail.

• Organic Skyscrapers (tip to Rose)

Food Growing, Energy Producing Harvest Green Tower

• Cyclists Are Said to Back Claims That Armstrong Doped

Posted by Norm at 7:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

So the loud and well spoken atheist that we all hate to love has appeared a few times in the last week to declare himself down but not out. His piece on Chavez tells a tale as strange as we might have feared about the leader. I love a good man of the people but some people get drunk with power and still others seem to act like power is Mescaline. And Mr. Hitchens has also written in Vanity Fair today about his health and his "battle" with Cancer. His writing voice is as healthy and forceful as ever. His story is hopefully one that can pull a few heart strings even for those he pisses off quite regularly.

What I learned about Hugo Chávez's mental health when I visited Venezuela with Sean Penn.

Recent accounts of Hugo Chávez's politicized necrophilia may seem almost too lurid to believe, but I can testify from personal experience that they may well be an understatement.

Read the Full Story

Topic of Cancer

One fine June day, the author is launching his best-selling memoir, Hitch-22. The next, he's throwing up backstage at The Daily Show, in a brief bout of denial, before entering the unfamiliar country--with its egalitarian spirit, martial metaphors, and hard bargains of people who have cancer.

"These are my first raw reactions to being stricken. I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice."

Read the Full Story

Posted by RedSeven at 1:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Norm at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

• How to feed a hungry world

Producing enough food for the world's population in 2050 will be easy. But doing it at an acceptable cost to the planet will depend on research into everything from high-tech seeds to low-tech farming practices.

With the world's population expected to grow from 6.8 billion today to 9.1 billion by 2050, a certain Malthusian alarmism has set in: how will all these extra mouths be fed? The world's population more than doubled from 3 billion between 1961 and 2007, yet agricultural output kept pace — and current projections (see page 546) suggest it will continue to do so. Admittedly, climate change adds a large degree of uncertainty to projections of agricultural output, but that just underlines the importance of monitoring and research to refine those predictions. That aside, in the words of one official at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the task of feeding the world's population in 2050 in itself seems “easily possible”.

Easy, that is, if the world brings into play swathes of extra land, spreads still more fertilizers and pesticides, and further depletes already scarce groundwater supplies. But clearing hundreds of millions of hectares of wildlands — most of the land that would be brought into use is in Latin America and Africa — while increasing today's brand of resource-intensive, environmentally destructive agriculture is a poor option. Therein lies the real challenge in the coming decades: how to expand agricultural output massively without increasing by much the amount of land used.

What is needed is a second green revolution — an approach that Britain's Royal Society aptly describes as the “sustainable intensification of global agriculture”. Such a revolution will require a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research. There is an urgent need for new crop varieties that offer higher yields but use less water, fertilizers or other inputs — created, for example, through long-neglected research on modifying roots (see page 552) — and for crops that are more resistant to drought, heat, submersion and pests. Equally crucial is lower-tech research into basics such as crop rotation, mixed farming of animals and plants on smallholder farms, soil management and curbing waste. (Between one-quarter and one-third of the food produced worldwide is lost or spoiled.)

Posted by Norm at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

• The Truth About Sarah Palin’s $3.8 Trillion Hand Job

• Vegatest – High Tech Pseudoscience

John (a fictitious patient) is suffering from fatigue, poor sleep, difficulty concentrating, and has been noticing little bumps on his skin. His primary care doctor performed a basic workup, which was completely negative, and started asking John about his stress levels and sleep habits. But John was convinced that something was happening to him and so sought additional opinions.

• God the CEO

Here’s our sophisticated theology of the week, an explanation of why the deity runs his creation using random processes, like mutation or the chance fertilization of an egg by a sperm, instead of direct intervention:

• Will Satellites and Supercomputers Improve Bird Watching?

Combining high-tech tools with a database of bird sightings may help indicate how climate change is affecting bird movement in the United States

• Solar storms could bring northern lights to south(tip to Steve)

Posted by Norm at 7:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(tip to Joel)

Posted by Norm at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Argument (with bad music)

Responses (with charming accent)

From QualiaSoup and TheraminTrees, who* I am not certain are separate people.

• Accents from the British Isles always make me what to use "whom".

Posted by RedSeven at 7:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

Posted by Norm at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)