Intelligent Design is a good site that shows the latest Creationist tactic to destroy science education in our schools.
Holy cow! According to this page, "one old gas powered lawn mower running for an hour emits as much pollution as driving 650 miles in a 1992 model automobile." I'm glad I'm using my manual mower! Apparently the primary reason they pollute so much is because they don't have catalytic converters, which really help reduce automobile emissions.
In March 2000, the EPA ordered major cuts in emissions from lawnmowers, chainsaws, leaf blowers and other small engine powered equipment. By 2007, when the new standards will be fully in place, the ground level ozone pollution caused by these engines will be cut by 70 percent or 350,000 tons each year.
The new emission reduction standards will affect small hand held engines at or below 19 kilowatts, or 25 horsepower, such as those used in lawn and garden equipment. The 20,000,000 small engines sold in the U.S. each year contribute about one tenth of the total U.S. mobile source hydrocarbon emissions, and are the largest single contributor to these non-road emissions.
I'm trying to figure out a new design for this site. I wanted to separate the blog and the link/bookmark aspects, and also put stronger emphasis on my personal pages (many of which are currently neglected).
I'm playing around with Plone right now, and it's actually pretty flexible and seems like it will be a good fit. I don't like that it's so "heavy", i.e. it sits on top of Zope which gets called from Apache. I do like that it will allow me to seemlessly present a blog (via "News" items) alongside a rolling list of links while keeping them separate. The calendar is a nice little feature that I might use. The coolest thing is that since it's all written in Python, I can easily write new portlets to do whatever I want - hook into del.icio.us or show my latest forums.14853.net comments, etc.
If you have a suggestion for a framework I should try, please leave a comment.
Today's CNN story about Louisiana banning gay marriage has this quote:
"It's gratifying to see the people of Louisiana had an opportunity, as distinguished from judges, having the final say on the issue of whether traditional marriage will continue to be the fundamental institution in our state," said Darrell White, a retired state judge and consultant for Louisiana Family Forum, which pushed for the amendment.
I have two issues with Darrell; one is a nitpick while the other is more fundamental. Firstly, no one is repealing the idea of "traditional [heterosexual] marriage" as the "fundamental institution". Gay marriage proponents advocate gay marriage precisely *because* marriage *is* a fundamental institution. Every time I read anything about this issue, I inevitably come across the argument that allowing gays to marry lessens the "sanctity" of existing heterosexual marriages. Maybe it's because of my physics background, but I find this sort of non-local action-at-a-distance to be preposterous, unless it's (1) a quantum effect, or (2) follows a 1/r^2 falloff.
The second, more important issue, is the idea that "the people... as opposed to the judges" will have a final say in how to amend the state's Constitution. This is a fatally dangerous misconception. Democracy - and specifically, American Democracy - is not about enforcing the will of the many over the will of the few. In fact, if anything, it is there to *protect* the few from the tyranny of the majority. What good are "rights" if a mere 51% of the population can strip them away from the other 49%? What good are laws if 51% of people decide to legalize theft and murder and rape of the other 49%? Darrell seems to believe that it's right and good for people (aka the unruly mob) to trump the judgement of judges (aka professional scholars and interpreters of the Constitution).
Fellow Cornellian and a straight shooter. (This is the guy who, in the aftermath of September 11th, lost his TV show and his job because he said that it takes balls to crash an airplane into a building. If ever we have a naked emperor, we need Bill on the peasants' side.)
"You can't run [for President] on a mistake. FDR didn't run for re-election claiming that Pearl Harbor was his finest hour. Abe Lincoln was a great President, but the highlight of his second term wasn't theater-security. 9-11 wasn't a triumph of the human spirit, it was a &$%*-up by a guy on vacation. Now, don't get me wrong Mr. President, I'm not blaming you for 9-11 - we have blue-ribbon commissions to do that - and I'm not saying there was anything improper with your response to the attacks - someone had to stay in that classroom and protect those kids from Chechen rebels. But by the looks of your convention, you'd think that the worst thing that ever happened to us was the best thing that ever happened to you..."
-- Bill Maher
Finally! Some Muslims angry at the hijacking of their religion and their culture by fundamentalists and jihadists. Here are some editorials and comments by Muslim columnists, specifically in response to Beslan.
Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims. The kidnappers of the students in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepalese workers and cooks are also Muslims. Those who rape and murder in Darfour are Muslims, and their victims are Muslims as well. Those who blew up the residential complexes in Riyadh and Al-Khobar are Muslims. Those who kidnapped the two French journalists are Muslims. The two [women] who blew up the two planes [over Russia] a week ago are Muslims. Bin Laden is a Muslim and Al-Houthi [the head of a terrorist group in Yemen] is a Muslim. The majority of those who carried out suicide operations against buses, schools, houses, and buildings around the world in the last ten years are also Muslims.
What a terrible record. Does this not say something about us, about our society and our culture? If we put all of these pictures together in one day, we will see that these pictures are difficult, embarrassing, and humiliating for us. However, instead of avoiding them and justifying them it is incumbent upon us first of all to recognize their authenticity rather than to compose eloquent articles and speeches proclaiming our innocence…
Islam has suffered an injustice at the hands of the new Muslims… We will only be able to clear our reputation once we have admitted the clear and shameful fact that most of the terrorist acts in the world today are carried out by Muslims. We have to realize that we cannot correct the condition of our youth who carry out these disgraceful operations until we have treated the minds of our sheikhs who have turned themselves into pulpit revolutionaries who send the children of others to fight while they send their own children to European schools.
Here is a website with a nice and thorough compilation of recent political video clips.
Andrew Sullivan's essay Smear and Pivot succinctly sums up a Bush-style political campaign:
In some ways, you have to hand it to president Bush. He has cojones. Most politicians who found a cushy domestic out during Vietnam might be leery of attacking the war record of a man who volunteered for duty, took shrapnel, and got Purple Hearts for his courage and heroism. But not Bush. Recall that in 2000, at a very similar juncture in a tight presidential race against John McCain, the Bush campaign also unleashed the hounds against a man who had been imprisoned and tortured at the hands of the Viet Cong. Flyers appeared throughout South Carolina claiming that McCain had a black child, that he was the "fag candidate," that his wife was a drug addict, that his experience under torture had made him unstable, that he had "betrayed" veterans, and on and on. None of this could be traced directly to Bush, but no one was under any illusions. In public, Bush said he honored McCain's service. But his surrogates smeared him relentlessly. And McCain told Bush to his face in a debate that he should be "ashamed" by his campaign tactics.
But shame is not something that comes easily to this president. He had used similar dirt-ball tactics against Ann Richards, the single female governor of Texas whom he defeated. Rumors emerged from East Texas in that race, as CBS News' Dick Meyer recalled last week, that Richards was a lesbian and that she had appointed "avowed homosexuals" to her administration. This year, Bush has played the anti-gay card by backing a constitutional amendment against marriage rights for gays and also the Vietnam card against Kerry. It's a two-fer: the summation of every Bush dirty trick of the past twenty years.
Call this strategy: smear and pivot. Get your low-life buddies to trash your rival and then appear above it all at your own convention. It worked for Papa Bush against Dukakis in 1988. It worked for W against Richards and McCain. It could work again against Kerry. But this time, of course, the opposition knows what this strategy is and might very well respond in kind. Everything is now "on the table," one Kerry adviser warned last week. Bush's past sex life? Drug use? Some other nasty smear? Mud-wrestling was never this sleazy. And it's still only August.
David Brooks wrote a great article for the New York Times magazine entitled How To Reinvent the GOP. He traces the history of the Republican party and the conservative movement - from Hamilton and Lincoln through Roosevelt and Reagan to today's party of Tom DeLay and Ashcroft, Cheney & Co. He then lays out a proposal for a conservative vision that, if implemented, would certainly win my vote. This is an extremely well-thought-out and well-argued essay. Conservatives/Republicans should certainly read it but I especially encourage liberals (especially moderates) to read it as well.
Democrats may imagine that the G.O.P. is an amalgam of fat cats and conservative ideologues, but things feel different inside Republican circles. Inside there are, beneath the cheering and the resolve, waves of anxiety, uncertainty and disagreement. You hang around Republicans, and you begin to hear all sorts of discordant things. Jesse Helms recently remarked he wouldn't have voted for the tax cut if he'd known how bad the deficit would become. Three of the senior right-wing columnists -- George F. Will, Robert Novak and William F. Buckley Jr. -- have come out, in their different ways, against the war in Iraq. I had lunch recently with a senior Republican official who said his party had succumbed; it was ''defeatist'' about reducing the size of government. As Will himself has observed, under President Bush, American conservatism is undergoing an identity crisis.
There used to be a spirit of solidarity binding all the embattled members of the conservative movement. But with conservatism ascendant, that spirit has eroded. Should Bush lose, it will be like a pack of wolves that suddenly turns on itself. The civil war over the future of the party will be ruthless and bloody. The foreign-policy realists will battle the democracy-promoting Reaganites. The immigrant-bashing nativists will battle the free marketeers. The tax-cutting growth wing will battle the fiscally prudent deficit hawks. The social conservatives will war with the social moderates, the biotech skeptics with the biotech enthusiasts, the K Street corporatists with the tariff-loving populists, the civil libertarians with the security-minded Ashcroftians. In short, the Republican Party is unstable.
Why Bush's defeat would be good for the GOP. An interesting comparison between GW Bush and John Major (and the GOP and the British Tories) by Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard.
Could something similar be about to happen in the U.S.? In my view, the Bush administration, too, does not deserve to be re-elected. Its idée fixe about regime change in Iraq was not a logical response to the crisis of 9/11. Its fiscal policy has been an orgy of irresponsibility. Given the hesitations of independent voters in the swing states, polls currently point to a narrow Bush defeat. Yet Mr. Kerry, like Mr. Kinnock, is the kind who can blow an election in a single sound bite. It's still all too easy to imagine George W. Bush, like John Major, scraping home by the narrowest of margins (not least, of course, because Mr. Bush did just that four years ago).
But then what? The lesson of British history is that a second Bush term could be more damaging to the Republicans and more beneficial to the Democrats than a Bush defeat. If he secures re-election, President Bush can be relied upon to press on with a foreign policy based on pre-emptive military force, to ignore the impending fiscal crisis (on the Cheney principle that "deficits don't matter") and to pursue socially conservative objectives like the constitutional ban on gay marriage. Anyone who thinks this combination will serve to maintain Republican unity is dreaming; it will do the opposite. Meanwhile, the Dems will have another four years to figure out what the Labour Party finally figured out: It's the candidate, stupid. And when the 2008 Republican candidate goes head-to-head with the American Tony Blair, he will get wiped out.
Great article by a professed Republican on why Why George Bush isn't the kind of Republican Schwarzenegger described.
His blog of the RNC has the following bit:
Bush is taking the fight "to the terrorists," Franks keeps saying, whereas "some" (read: Kerry) would treat the war on terror as a "law enforcement" matter and "retreat into a defensive posture," hoping the terrorists won't attack us again.
I've heard this misrepresentation of Kerry's position so many times I hardly notice it anymore. The only offensive military effort Kerry objected to—and it was only in manner—was the war in Iraq. And Iraq wasn't a terrorist threat, so it's false to describe Kerry's objection there as having anything to do with the war on terror. The selling point for the Iraq war was weapons of mass destruction. What does Franks have to say about that? He applauds Bush for caring so much about American troops that he "made sure everything possible was done to protect our troops from the weapons of mass destruction we all expected."
And, hey, it worked. No American troops were injured by weapons of mass destruction.
And he's right-on about the GOP flaunting patriotism:
But the important thing isn't the falsity of the charges, which Republicans continue to repeat despite press reports debunking them. The important thing is that the GOP is trying to quash criticism of the president simply because it's criticism of the president. The election is becoming a referendum on democracy.
In a democracy, the commander in chief works for you. You hire him when you elect him. You watch him do the job. If he makes good decisions and serves your interests, you rehire him. If he doesn't, you fire him by voting for his opponent in the next election.
Not every country works this way. In some countries, the commander in chief builds a propaganda apparatus that equates him with the military and the nation. If you object that he's making bad decisions and disserving the national interest, you're accused of weakening the nation, undermining its security, sabotaging the commander in chief, and serving a foreign power—the very charges Miller leveled tonight against Bush's critics.
Are you prepared to become one of those countries?
Harsh and well-deserved. link from Talking Points Memo or read the full text below.
Read full entry...Paul Krugman of the NY Times slams the administration's policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. Registration is required to view the article, so I've pasted the contents below. Did you know that the Bush Administration initially forgot to put *any* money into its 2004 budget for Afghanistan?
Read full entry...Here are some great resources for Texans who disagree with the radical right-wing agenda of the current administration:
Texans for Truth
DriveDemocracy.org
Texas Freedom Network
Texas Faith Network (What?? Christians from Texas who loathe the Christian Coalition? There *is* a God!)
Texas Arts Community
Democracy for Texas
And here is yet another essay by a Texan about why he support Kerry, and why he disapproves of GW Bush.
What was our courageous President doing while Kerry was earning Purple Hearts in Vietnam? Why, Bush was pissing on cars and getting smashed in Alabama! (Free Salon.com link with partial article; to read the full article, read the rest of this entry.)
George W. Bush's missing year
The widow of a Bush family confidant says her husband gave the future president an Alabama Senate campaign job as a favor to his worried father. Did they see him do any National Guard service? "Good lord, no."
Here are some startling facts about global warming:
According to recent reports of the joint WMO/United Nations Environmental Panel on Climate Change, the global average surface temperature has increased around 34° since 1861. New analyses of proxy data for the Northern Hemisphere indicate that in the 21st century increases are likely to be the largest in any century over the past 1,000 years. Average global land and sea surface temperatures in May 2003 were the second highest since records began in 1880. The ten hottest years in the 143-year-old global temperature record have all been since 1990, with the three hottest being 1998, 2001 and 2002.
Of course, the Bush administration refuses to pass any legislation to reduce warming-causing pollution. (Until 2002, the administration denied that global warming was a problem.)
Here are some tidbits from Johann Hari's report from the RNC. If you call yourself a Republican, why not see what some of your bedfellows are saying?
The Two Americas begin to collide. Small and bloated and red, Rubin Israel, a 43-year old businessman from the South, is surrounded by a sweaty posse of NYPD officers. His banner says, "Trust in Jesus Christ and President Bush - 2 Chron 7.14". I asked him what that passage of the Bible actually says, "Thou Shalt Not Vote Kerry"? "Yeah, somethin' like that," he says with a shrug.
...
"Would you like a bandage, honey?" she asks. "They're John Kerry bandages. We're telling delegates to give themselves a little scratch, take a bandage and demand a Purple Heart for their courage." She pauses, then says: "There's no way that man was brave in Vietnam. He speaks French. Fluently. If you ask me, I think he shot himself just so he could talk about it in the campaign. He's cunning and he thinks ahead. Like the Japanese. Probably speaks that too."
...
The most animated ones are wearing fogeyish clothes: bow-ties and blazers. I approach the most handsome and ask him why he is a Republican. "Uh, because I believe in freedom. I like Bush. He's strong." These three sentences take him several minutes. I ask around; he's typical. I ask them what books have influenced their political thought. They look at me as though I am insane. These frat-boys seem harmless airheads, then I glimpse a sign boasting that they have raised $10m for the Bush campaign.
...
The Republicans particularly love any gag about killing Muslims and/or left-wingers. A comedian called Jeff Wayne says: "There's a huge bounty on Osama's head - it's like, $25m - so I shot 10 guys who look like him. Unfortunately, I was in a 7/11 in Minnesota." The audience cheered. "Shall I go on with the Muslim-bashing?" the comic asked. "More! More!" they cried, but he shifted the subject. "You know those tree-sitters? The hippies who sit in trees so they can't be cut down? Well, in my town a woman fell 150ft to her death last week doing that. Good. Now we can chop the tree down. I suggest we make a casket for that dumb bitch."
This is what happens when we, as Britney encourages us to do, "trust our government". Ashcroft's Justice Department has recently redacted (that's "blanked out" in legal speak) a portion of the ACLU's filings against it in an ongoing battle about free speech rights. They have this ability because, wisdom says, it's important that we don't make public sensitive information that could threaten national security. What was it the text that the Justice Department felt was a threat to national security? It was part of a 1972 Supreme Court ruling that says:
"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."
Read more at The Memory Hole.
Ever wonder what it really means to be a Republican nowadays? Ever wondered if the platform consists of more than just flag-waving and ignoring the blunder in Iraq? I did to - and I found some surprising stuff (even for jaded me). The Irregular Times has a page showing examples of Republicans in action. An example:
An excellent case in point emerged in the Oregon State Senate in the month of March 2003. Republican Senator John Minnis brought forth legislation, the central text of which you can read below (and the complete text of which you can read here). The impact of the bill can be summed up simply:
If you engage in civil disobedience that involves:
Blocking traffic
A "sit-in" at a high school, college or university
Picketing a local politician's office, or
The barricading of a Starbucks,
Or if you take part in a political demonstration in which someone does any of these things,
Or if you are planning to engage in such civil disobedience,
Or if you are planning to take part in a political demonstration in which someone will do any of these things,
Then by law you are guilty of TERRORISM and are subject to LIFE IMPRISONMENT, with actual time served to be an absolute minimum of TWENTY FIVE YEARS.
Better to lock 'em up than let them enjoy any of our precious freedom! We're all freedom-lovers here!
Dave has a great essay about the failures of this administration and why he feels Kerry is a good replacement.
Perhaps he has an Outlook plugin that turns emails into speeches/diatribes. Martini Republic points out that Zell Miller's rant about Kerry "voting against every military appropriate since 1988" is lifted from a mass email.
And, of course, the email is untrue! Urban Myth debunking site Snopes.com has an analysis.
From here on out there is going to be a lot more political stuff on this blog. The speeches given by Zell Miller and Dick Cheney at the RNC convention have shown me how low the GOP will stoop. Anyone who will stoop to outright lies deserves to be defeated with the harsh light of truth.
So for starters:
Dubya's House of Waffles
Did you know that President Bush ACTUALLY said the following about Osama bin Laden? "I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him... I truly am not that concerned about him."
Hooo boy. lots to read. Some of the latest entries to read (and these are a MUST READ) from http://buggieboy.blogspot.com/.
Kerry and the Anti-war movement: Transcript of pro-Bush General Tommy Franks being interviewed on Hannity & Colmes, and *defending* Kerry's anti-Vietnam War activism
Attacking Back: About GWB's texas air national guard service and video testimony of Ben Barnes, former texas speaker of the house, saying that he personally made a call to help GWB skip ahead of 100,000 applicants for the texas air national guard and get one of the last two open spots.
Patriotism: About scott ritter, UN weapons inspector, and what he said pre-Iraq war
A very informative essay: Python for Lisp Programmers. (It apparently also works in reverse, in case you are a Python programmer wanting to learn Lisp.)