Video: Guy nearly walks into bear while texting

I'm surprised I'd never seen this before.

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Italians make edible coffee cup

God bless them.

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Quick life hacks, Part 1

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Congress passes bill to stop anti-gay Evangelicals from protesting funerals of US troops

Christian conservatives at their finest. Read the rest of this post...

The poetry of good blogging, and writing

I'm a big fan of the English language.

Its song.

Its cadence.

The way a good sentence - like good music - carries you along for a ride.

I studied a good deal of poetry in college.  I studied writing, actually, but it included poetry, and poetry writing.

I've always loved language.  All languages, really.  But particularly my mother tongue, English.  Perhaps it's my immigrant mom, with her funny inability to pronounce the difference between "sheet" and the English equivalent of merde, who first got me to notice language at all.

I started taking foreign languages at a young age - began with Spanish in the 5th grade because that's when they started in my public school (Quien es Bobo?  Bobo es mi mono!).  All the while, I also took Greek at church twice a week after school, because it's what all the kids of immigrants did in my day.

Took a year of Russian in college, but hated it (declensions and a bad prof from Russia), though I did learn enough to get drunk for three hours with a very cute straight blond Russian skier (who didn't speak a lick of English) in Petropavlovsk in the early 90s, so I guess it was worth it.

Me and my new Russian friend getting plastered on homemade moonshine
in Petropavlovsk (before and after photos). He ended up giving me his 
watch, which was a wedding gift from his wife, who was not pleased. 
I was told by American friends in attendance that I had no choice but to
accept, per local custom. The watch died soon after I got home.

With my friends Marco Scanu
and Sabine Wedig in St. Michel,
Paris in 1984.

Then decided it was time to learn French, so I went to Paris for a year to study - where I fell in love with Italians, and taught myself Italian.  Then came back to the states and took four different classes in Greek, Spanish, French and Italian all simultaneously my senior year of college.  (There was a stint with Portuguese after that, but never got to use it, and it's gone now.)

So yeah, I kind of like language.

I've always tried to infuse my writing with poetry.  Seriously.  It's not about getting all sing-songy.  Rather, it's the cadence.  The rhythm of the sentence.  It's not always something obvious when you first read it.  And while sometimes it's intentional on the part of the writer, sometimes it's not - but it's not random either, it's the writer's ear, what he/she has learned, and how it comes across organically in the written word.

What got me thinking about this (again) was a sentence in Chris Andoe's first post yesterday about Chick-fil-A.  Chris had a paragraph that ended up with some great poetic cadence (I edited the piece so I have no idea what Chris wrote and what I wrote, I think this was likely a fusion of the two of us):

Supposedly civilized people turning to the drive-through window for a super-sized order of malnutrition, warped spirituality, and bigoted political discourse.

Here's why I like this sentence.

"Supposedly civilized people." It's got three things going for it. First, the consonance of supposedly and civilized. Second, the beat, the cadence, of the three words in a row, beats like a good line from a poem:

su-PO-sed-ly CI-vi-lized PEO-ple

or

-|-- |-- |-

And third, it mirrors the last three words of the sentence, "bigoted political discourse" - same rhythm.

"Turning to the drive-through window" has a similar beat:

TUR-ning to the DRIVE-through WIN-dow for a SU-per sized OR-der

You can almost tap your foot to it, up and down and up and down. (On the downside, I couldn't find another word for "malnutrition" in that paragraph - it's the wrong word (it's a word I chose, Chris initially had "nutrition"), but it doesn't have the right beat for the sentence. Sometimes you have to settle for less.

Even the first four words of the post could be the beginning of a poem: "The God of Gluttony smiled", again, consonance and rhythm - it's a great phrase.

Some of the poets I liked the best: Yeats of course (though I find some of his poems difficult), loved Leda and the Swan; TS Eliot; and Sylvia Plath, who was a master at words falling hard and flat with a punch - her poem Daddy comes to mind. Excerpt:

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

I remember the first time I read that poem.  I was 20.  Blew me away.  Still does.

I know all of this might sound odd, but it's the way you write poems, and I think it's the way you write well, period. You listen to the words, how they sound together, their beat, cadence, how the sentence falls, and moves, and carries the reader along. It's lyricism.  It's difficult to do it throughout an entire essay, which would then become a poem.  But if you can do it even occasionally, it lends a beauty to the language, I think.  Even if the reader has no conscious idea that it's happening.

And it's why studying things like poetry, and languages, matter.  It actually can help you be better at your own language.

Anyway, just thought I'd give you a window into the way I write, at least.  For what it's worth. Read the rest of this post...

PEW: Romney unfavorables remain high, increasing

PEW:

Currently, slightly more voters have a favorable (50%) than unfavorable (45%) opinion of Barack Obama. Though there are still more than three months to go before the election, Obama’s current favorability ratings compare poorly with the final pre-election ratings for previous Democratic candidates. Not since Michael Dukakis in 1988 has a Democratic candidate gone into the election with favorability ratings as low as Obama’s are today.

Romney faces a more daunting challenge, as more voters say they have an unfavorable (52%) than favorable (37%) opinion of him. The only prior presidential candidates to be viewed negatively going into the election were George H.W. Bush in October 1992 and Bob Dole in October 1996.

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Is Carbon Tax the answer to climate catastrophe?

Lately we've been looking at climate catastrophe — what it is and how we can stop it. That series has included these posts so far, ordered by topic.

Intro:

  ■ Hugging the monster: Climate scientists and the C-word
  ■ What is "climate catastrophe"?

A walk through the numbers:

  ■ Hansen on 3°C: Quarter to half of species on earth may die from global warming
  ■ McKibben's Three Numbers—Measuring the march toward climate catastrophe
  ■ Illustrating global warming—What does "a 2°C increase" refer to?
  ■ We're on track for 7°C temperature rise by 2100
  ■ Koch-funded climate denier reverses: "Humans almost entirely the cause" of global warming

Along the way, we looked at two recent phenomena:

  ■ The epic heat wave: "Of course it's about climate change"
  ■ Radical decline in Arctic ice "at least 70 percent" man-made

Our most recent posts have started to look at solutions, the politics of the problem:

  ■ Climate strategies that don't work
  ■ Who is the enemy leading us to climate catastrophe?

We're almost finished. Here I want to examine one of Bill McKibben's suggested solutions — the imposition of a carbon tax — from near the end of his Rolling Stone piece, "Global Warming's Terrifying New Math", which we've referred to previously.

The problem in a nutshell

We know what doesn't work, because we've tried it. Individual action, though needed, isn't enough. All the self-greening in the world won't let us beat the deadline — less than 3½°F (2°C) increase globally before 2100.

Broadly, the answer for McKibben is to target the real enemy, the carbon producers. The math is simple:

• To stay below 3½°F (2°C) warming, we can only pour an additional 565 gigatons of carbon into the air.
  
  
• The carbon producers have 2795 gigaton reserves (five times what will kill this way of life) waiting in the ground.
  
  
• As the Arctic ice melts, they're looking for even more carbon than that to put into the air.
  
  
• The do-nothing, business-as-usual scenario puts on track for 12½°F (7°C) warming — a death sentence.

The real problem is thus to force the carbon producers to keep 80% of their carbon in the ground. And then make them stop looking for more.

In other words, put them out of business so the species can survive.

The problem with that is that these people are power-freaks, filled with Trumpism, relentlessly drilling for money-money-money, and they're not going to be stopped by asking or argument. My assessment:

So what do you think the Oil & Gas Barons (Our Betters) think of the fact that global warming — of all things — is opening up the Arctic for more oil and gas exploration?

Mission Accomplished, of course. For them, it's an opportunity.

Watch as they clamor for the chance to get rich by accelerating the catastrophe they're causing. Watch as world-wide government types (eager retainers all) fall over themselves to enable the world-wide destruction. (I include Mr. Eager-For-Keystone Obama in this) ...

These people are conscienceless. ... They plan to make money till it kills us all.

As with most problems involving humans, when conscience fails utterly and education won't work, adjusting the incentives often provides the answer.

What will "incentivize" the Koch Bros to keep their carbon in the ground? Let's look. (By the way, I'm leaving violence off the table for now. Those of you who want it, don't worry — you'll get your fill if all else fails.)

Is Carbon Tax the answer?

Let's start with market incentives. Is a carbon tax the answer? McKibben on that (my emphasis and paragraphing throughout):

Until a quarter-century ago, almost no one knew that CO2 was dangerous. But now that we understand that carbon is heating the planet and acidifying the oceans, its price becomes the central issue.

If you put a price on carbon, through a direct tax or other methods, it would enlist markets in the fight against global warming. Once Exxon has to pay for the damage its carbon is doing to the atmosphere, the price of its products would rise. ...

And you could do it all without bankrupting citizens – a so-called "fee-and-dividend" scheme would put a hefty tax on coal and gas and oil, then simply divide up the proceeds, sending everyone in the country a check each month for their share of the added costs of carbon. By switching to cleaner energy sources, most people would actually come out ahead.

Not a bad solution. But:

There's only one problem: Putting a price on carbon would reduce the profitability of the fossil-fuel industry. After all, the answer to the question "How high should the price of carbon be?" is "High enough to keep those carbon reserves that would take us past two degrees safely in the ground."

The higher the price on carbon, the more of those reserves would be worthless.

The fight, in the end, is about whether the industry will succeed in its fight to keep its special pollution break alive past the point of climate catastrophe, or whether, in the economists' parlance, we'll make them internalize those externalities.

This raises two questions the article addresses. One is about the use of market pressure on the carbon producers. Can that be effective?

To a degree, yes. The theory is that if the cost of climate catastrophe to other industries — for example, insurance and agribusiness via megafloods and megadrought — is great enough, there will be pressure from those industries, plus an investment threat to the stock of the carbon producers, to force them to turn from carbon to energy alternatives.

In other words, this theory says that at some point the cost born by other dinos feeding in the predatory money forest will threaten the profits of the carbon industry. Predator-on-predator violence — i.e., incentivizing the loser predators — might solve the problem. McKibben:

"The regular process of economic evolution is that businesses are left with stranded assets all the time," says Nick Robins, who runs HSBC's Climate Change Centre. "Think of film cameras, or typewriters.

The question is not whether this will happen. It will. Pension systems have been hit by the dot-com and credit crunch. They'll be hit by this."

That's one route to a carbon tax solution. But the second question is — can that route be effective enough to succeed, to keep us below 2°C? On this McKibben is doubtful:

Still, it hasn't been easy to convince investors, who have shared in the oil industry's record profits. "The reason you get bubbles," sighs Leaton, "is that everyone thinks they're the best analyst – that they'll go to the edge of the cliff and then jump back when everyone else goes over."

He concludes that "pure self-interest" even in the face of market incentives will not be enough.

Is he right in his pessimism? I think the political establishment — retainers who work for the dinos in power, who win by keeping them in power — are betting he's wrong.

They're hoping, in other words, that this can be kept as a war between predators as they duke it out amongst themselves. They're hoping that they — politicians, opinion makers, shepherds of us sheep — can stay out of it, thus keeping their own food chain intact.

Will relying on market incentives work? I agree with the assessment of the last quote above. No.

I think the investor class is much more likely to let markets sink to chaos — and the world with it — than to guide an orderly market solution to a problem everyone hopes will go away on its own. Bubbles and crashes, so common lately, offer ample evidence of the inability of top market predators to keep the feeding orderly.

Bottom line — A sufficiently high carbon tax would solve the problem. But there's no way to get there using market forces.

Where does that leave us?

That leaves us with McKibben's solution (read ahead if you like; start at "If pure self-interest") and suggestions of my own.

Obviously the answer requires effort and involvement — something nearly everyone on the planet with power is trying to avoid. But that doesn't mean the solution doesn't exist — something I think the readers of these pages often fear. As I always say, the game is not over yet.

The next piece will be the last in this series. It will focus on more effective strategies — what we haven't tried yet to apply maximum pressure to leverage points.

This is not about helplessness. It's about intelligently designed effort — my contributions anyway.

As noted earlier I exclude violence — as impractical, if for no other reason. Remember, we're trying to reduce the chaos, not increase it. If your solution is increased chaos, you may be right in the end. But that's not where most of us want to go first.

Please stay tuned; just one more piece to go. And thank you for following this far.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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NRA's LaPierre hosting event for Romney just two weeks after Aurora massacre

As I predicted, America (and Mitt Romney) would quickly forget its "horror" over the Aurora shooting in Colorado, and get back to the business of worshipping the people who put guns on America's streets.

Make you sure thank Mitt Romney, and the NRA, the next time your child walks into a movie theater.

You'll note NRA chief Wayne LaPierre among the
event co-chairs. Click to see larger version.

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US flags still up and waving on the moon

Well, perhaps not waving.  As there's no atmosphere I'm pretty sure you can't have any wind.  Just googled - who knew, this is part of the whole Capricorn One conspiracy thing:

On July 20, 1969, two Apollo 11 astronauts planted an American flag on the surface of the moon. The flag was a standard 3-foot-by-5-foot nylon flag that was altered by sewing a hem along the top. A telescoping crossbar, hinged to the flagpole, was extended through this hem so that when the flag was planted on the Moon, it would stand out instead of hanging limp against the flagpole (as it would normally do, since there is no wind on the Moon). When the flag was planted, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had a little trouble getting the telescoping crossbar to extend to its full length, and so it ended up being a little shorter than it should have been. As a result, the flag was bunched up slightly and looked like it was actually "waving in the breeze."

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Conservative study shows government austerity may be hurting economy

This is not a surprise, but it is interesting that the study is coming out of conservative-land. From HuffPo:

The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, has some data out indicating that cutting government spending may be off-setting private sector growth. That's notable, especially when coming from an organization with the motto "Freedom. Opportunity. Enterprise."

Public sector GDP -- a measure of the goods and services produced by the government -- has shrunk for eight consecutive quarters, according to AEI. At the same time, private sector growth has increased for 12 quarters in a row, indicating that America’s slow overall GDP growth may mostly be a result of a drop in government spending.

Even the Wall Street Journal, owned by GOP propagandist Rupert Murdoch, admits that the end of the stimulus is hurting growth (the GOP party line has been that the stimulus actually "caused" unemployment, which is absurd, but the GOP tends to pander to its uneducated base, and they've found that the truth doesn't tend to work for them at the ballot box). Read the rest of this post...