Category: observations

SpaceWeather.com — News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids:

AURORA ALERT: A coronal mass ejection (CME) swept past Earth earlier today (1000 UT, July 22nd) and, although it did not spark auroras right away, solar wind conditions in the wake of the CME are increasingly favorable for a geomagnetic storm. Sky watchers in, e.g., Canada and northern-tier US states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Washington should be alert for auroras tonight.

It’s hot here right now, 90 degrees hot, which might not seem like a big deal to anyone else, but here in the un-air conditioned Pacific Northwest, it’s really uncomfortable. So the possibility of seeing the aurora might make up for it. I don’t know if I see anything from my house, but perhaps some local folks will grab a picture or two. From what I can tell, film picks them up more readily than the naked eye: you might have an image without realizing it. Take a look at the gallery linked above and see what they say.

Whiskey Bar: Building a Bridge to the 19th Century

It’s funny to see the Journal suddenly decide that the “Two Americas” merits front-page coverage – much less an implicit admission that the growing gap between rich and not rich is an economic problem in and of itself. Last year, when the paper noted the same trend, it was with a completely neutral sigh of relief that the “recovery” was finally on track.

Long (as Billmon posts usually are) but informative post on the “Two Americas” with some historical perspective and analysis. The trade-offs between the Old Deal and the New Deal are interesting: never learned that stuff in my college econ classes.

All told, real wages dropped 17% between 1972 and 1992. I’ve often wondered what the political fallout would have been if that same decline had been administered the old-fashioned way – through direct pay cuts by employers instead of the gradual, indirect erosion of inflation. Who knows? Instead of Ronald Reagan, we might have gotten an American Lenin.

17%?

So, there were no WMDs, nowhere near the genocide totals (at least as far as anyone can verify), and the locals didn’t welcome the liberators with flowers and kisses.

Observer | PM admits graves claim ‘untrue’:

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ‘400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves.

In that publication – Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: ‘We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.’

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: ‘The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.’

The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports ‘to the outer limits’ in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.

Does anyone doubt that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant of the first order? So why exaggerate everything? The only reason I can imagine is to mislead the public into supporting a war.

Mena’s Corner: Barak at Six Apart:

Tonight, on the eve of a change of position, I write about Barak Berkowitz who will be taking over my role of CEO.

Mena Trott steps down as CEO of SixApart, relinquishing control to a board member who joined in the wake of their VC funding.

Read it and see if you get the same vibe.

Continue reading “did they fall or were they pushed?”

Mark Twain
“The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.” [Motivational Quotes of the Day]

I have been reading Guns, Germs and Steel this week. It’s an interesting walk through human history and has clarified or just covered things I hadn’t thought much about.

The parts about domesticating plants, how it works, reminded me of The Botany of Desire: where Diamond talks about early people’s domesticated plants, Pollan makes a convincing case that they domesticated each other. Not that Pollan contradicts or disputes Diamond: I find they complemented each other on this point.

So far, one of Diamond’s central arguments is that the switch from subsistence hunting and gathering to agriculture is how civilizations got their start: the regions of the world with wild grasses that could be harvested and later planted systematically were able to support non-farm specialist classes (bureaucrats and politicos, to make a short list). The grasses he mentions were plentiful in the Fertile Crescent (the SW Asian highlands or modern Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, et al), less so in Europe and almost non-existent in other climatically similar areas. And to narrow the odds still further, the process of domestication stems from mutations: where true-breeding wild grains might drop seeds when ripe, making them inaccessible by hunter/gatherers, certain mutants would keep their seeds, allowing our ancient forebears to collect them and either thresh and grind them now or save them for later planting.

That, and his argument that the demise of certain large mammals on each continent is extricably tied to the arrival of early humans as they spread out from Africa and Asia, got me to thinking about how that maps onto modern society. As the modern world runs on energy, electricity specifically, but oil more generally as the chief means of generating it, are we hunter/gatherers or farmers? Do we harvest energy as our forebears harvested crops? Or do we slash and burn our way through, always expecting we’ll find more over the next ridge? The complex societies we know all stem from the ability or discovery of surpluses and the resulting freedom from subsistence food production/gathering.

I’ll be thinking more about this as I work through the book, but it seemed there was something resonating from the headlines. Diamond makes the point that not all cultures went into agriculture, even when their neighbors did, even if they traded with agricultural societies: that also resonates, since not all nations produce energy but they all use it, at increasing rates.

now playing: Pursuance (Part 3)/Psalm (Part 4) from the album A Love Supreme by John Coltrane | Buy it

I ran across some trolls over here and the last blast I got before I gave up was some gibbering equating Operation Desert Fox and Operation Iraqi Freedom, as the invasion was formally known. Pretty simple to look up the mission statements . . .

Operation Desert Fox:

OPERATION NAME: Operation Desert Fox

MISSION:  To strike military and security targets in Iraq that contribute to Iraq’s ability to produce, store, maintain and deliver weapons of mass destruction.

Attacking Iraq – Operation Iraqi Freedom:

At 9:34 PM EST on March 19, 2003 (5:34 AM local time in Baghdad on March 20), United States and United Kingdom forces consisting of 40 cruise missiles and strikes led by 2 F-117s from the 8th Fighter Squadron (supported by Navy EA-6B Prowlers) and other aircraft began conducting military operations against the state of Iraq designed to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction and to remove the Iraqi Regime from power.

Where one was in support of the containment doctrine that evidence now tells us was effective, the other was expressly to remove the regime from power.

I’m sure whatever it is, it’s all Clinton’s fault, perhaps even Carter’s.

Obsidian Wings: Failures of Imagination:

If we’re safe, it’s not because of any of virtue on our part. It’s because of a blind, lucky accident of birth. Or, depending on your interpretation, because our parents, grandparents, or more distant ancestors risked the journey here from someplace else. Or because exactly 228 years and 5 days ago, a group of Englishmen imagined a different sort of country.

I don’t have to look all that far back to see an Englishman who imagined something different: my father emigrated for a better life, more opportunity, more than 30 years ago. Not all the immigrants who come to the US hoping for the future are historical figures. Some of them are still available to have a beer with.

Continue reading “if there’s someone you can thank, now would be a good time”

Don’t worry, sir, it will all be over by November.

Continue reading “bad day at the office”

My petition to link congressional pay to the minimum wage has only garnered 9 signatures so far.

I somehow forgot that the most recent constitutional amendment also dealt with congressional pay, but I don’t see that it does all that much: requiring that an election be held between the enactment of a raise and it’s effective date doesn’t do anything to make our electeds more responsive to their constituents.

LII: Constitution:

Amendment XXVII

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.

If you haven’t signed it and you’d like to, here’s the link.