Update: In unrelated untimely celebration of the good news Rick Perry pulls out of the GOP nom race.
It’s over. It may not feel over, it sure as hell doesn’t seem over for a lot of people including me. But the Great Recession is over. I was pretty sure late last year when I saw the confirmation bump in the trend, but I’m as certain now as one can be about these things. [Read more…]
So the energy industry, with their collective oily hands deep up the asses of the nation’s political apparatus, are whining about delaying the Keystone pipeline. If you haven’t been keeping up, this is an oil pipe stretching from the Canada tar sand production region to the booming petroleum port of Louisiana. The whiners think we’re so stupid that we’re all supposed to believe creating a river of oil flowing through the lower 48 for rapid shipment offshore to Europe, Latin America, and Asia is all about serving US energy needs. Wednesday alone I witnessed a parade of mostly conservative politicians claiming oil mined in Canada sent to nations’ halfway around the world somehow counts as domestic energy production used by US consumers. In related news, I decree honey produced by Mexico for export offsets US honey-bee decline if it passes within ten miles of our coast or border on the way to Manilla … [Read more…]
If you made it this far, grats! Fabulous prizes await! Alas, new content on The Zingularity is not among the prizes as I will be standing in support with my cyber comrades on SOPA/PIPA. BTW, the Daily Kos idea was pretty cool. We put a stamp on the site that does not interfere, too much, with viewing and does not redirect to other sites, and used FOIA redaction formatting to drive it home.
Outside of that, please take this opportunity to visit other FTB sites. There’s a ton of them, I read everyone, every day, and learn something new and interestng every time; one of my fave daily reads and one of our best kept secrets imo is Hank Fox’s Blue Collar Athiest. I worked with Hank on another project years ago, he’s not only a terrific writer, he was among the first people to encourage me to blog, but who took the time to give key editorial/copy wrier tips and content devices which made me an immeasurably better writer almost overnight. Still not as good as he is though … :)
There’ll be an online protest of sorts tomorrow. Markos has a post up on Daily Kos saying we have a gimmick up our sleeve (No, I don’t know what it is). There are rumors other sites — which may or may not include FTB — will do something as well. Why you ask? The cyber ruckus is about the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA. [Read more…]
From a just released bulletin — that I had to sit on for a couple of hours and wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about publicly. The recall Governor of Wisconsin, i.e., Scott Walker, seems to have scored big. About 46% of the entire Wisconsin electorate signed the recall petition, that’s huge. And where is Walker as this unfolds? He’s at an NYC fundraiser far away from his home state, begging the guy who founded the firm that crashed the economy for money so he can keep handing out gravy-laden middle-class tax-payer goodies to the pampered 0.01% who preyed on the rest of us for the last 30 years. Some stats from the recall release below the fold: [Read more…]
It may not have made the world news, but a Martian tried to sneak in under our radar cover last summer and set up residence in the desert of Northwest Africa not far from Morocco. But of course it was nothing biological, no LGM’s or off-world octopi, dammit! This was merely an inert piece of Mars. Chipped off the surface of the Red Planet eons ago, and newly fallen to earth after a no doubt long journey through the inner solar system. Needless to say, rocks form mars hitting earth are rare, and rarer still that we actually see one streak in. [Read more…]
Ron Paul, quasi-libertarian (Except when he agrees with Big Gubmint inspection of reproductive genitalia) front runner, is under intense scrutiny for another batch of racist, prejudiced laced missives smearing everyone from Jews to gays to secret world-wide conspiracies of the Black Man and Black Helicopter kinds and, of course, the Clintons as America’s number one crime family. Some of this sounds quite ugly, but it’s not clear just how Paul was involved or if he was much involved at all. So far his campaign has issued no official explanation or statement that I’m aware of on these new revelations: [Read more…]
It seems a Dr Howard Lang was in the archives of the British Geological Survey when he found some drawers marked Unregistered Fossil Plants. Inside were hundreds of fossils that have not seen the light of day for a smuch as 165 years. Museum curators soon realized that some of the material was actually collected or analyzed by Charles Darwin himself and during his most scientically formative time; see the piece of fossil wood below found by Darwin in 1834 while sailing on the HMS Beagle, and thinking about how biological diversity could arise over time, an idea he would later call evolution. [Read more…]
The thing about SuperPACs is they can’t be for someone. But they can sure as hell be against ’em. In a two-party system, there’s probably a binary legal argument about what that reduces to. In the meantime, Colbert demonstrates just how absurd SuperPACs can be with his own Colbert for President SPAC — not to be in any way confused with the official campaign. [Read more…]
Well, maybe not evolution per se, but the stuff of evolution, i.e., genetic diversity manifested as morphological variance, and this is a pretty cute example if indeed it’s a product of heritable genotype. Click image for the skinny on this adorable little guy from Nat’l Geo.