Yippee, more great news. This time from the planet’s primary air conditioner and sea level manager, which may be way more sensitive to small increases in temperature than some researchers thought: [Read more…]
I proposed this as satire a few years ago for Iraq, might as well use it in Afghanistan. Because it’s cheaper, way less dangerous, and it would probably work as well as whatever we’re supposed to be doing there now. [Read more…]
The born-again mastermind behind Nixon’s dirty tricks, Charles Colson, has died. He was 80 years old. Colson was serving time for a break-in and burglary of Daniel Ellsberg, one of the many people populating Nixon’s secret enemy’s list (Which Colson helped write), when he came to Jesus and went on to a sort of second life as a spokesperson for the evangelical right: [Read more…]
As if the military needed it, another gory photo showing US Marines posing proudly beside dead Afghans has surfaced. This one is even nastier than most: [Read more…]
The final resting place for the Titanic, the famous passenger liner that sank almost exactly 100 years ago, has offered up a grisly clue in a newly released photo: possible human remains: [Read more…]
The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality by Chris Mooney
Publisher Wiley; available on Kindle
During the darkest days of the Bush era, science writer Chris Mooney made a big splash in the publishing world with his first book detailing the Republican war on science. This month his newest effort, what could be nicknamed the Republican brain on science, hit the shelves. In it you will find Mooney is a stickler for detail, always important in any book on science, especially one with a bold title. But this is no clinical read, the book is a blast right off the bat, framing the main subject marvelously in the juiciest claims and tastier bits of conservative pseudoscientific lore readers here have come to lovingly know and ridicule. [Read more…]
Belly up the blog, comrade unbelievers, I need science content to consider for the Saturday Science round up on Daily Kos tomorrow. I’ll consider anything linked in comments, especially stuff that’s well researched and written with a political angle.
Fresh cores taken from the bottom of the Dea Sea indicate it fluctuated wildly for tens of thousands of years and may have dried up once or twice along the way: [Read more…]
Not be left behind by Mittens, Mitch McConnell lent his gravitas to the endless series of GOP lies that now makes up the religious-right conservative movement these days, with this comedy styling on the conservative crusade against women:
Talk about a manufactured issue. There is no issue. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine I think would be the first to say — and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska — ‘we don’t see any evidence of this.’
After I picked myself off the floor following a debilitating laughing attack, my colleagues and I at Daily Kos collected the statements below from those very female lawmakers names above for McConnell’s edification. [Read more…]
SpaceX Dragon spacecraft shown in a hypothetial dock with the ISS. The next test of this system is scheduled for 30 April
That was my opening line at a small talk over the weekend, my warmer upper, it’s not exactly a spine tingler, but it’s the truth. The only manned ground to orbit launch capacity on earth exist in Rsocosmos, the dregs of the Russian manned program. Because of management missteps, congressional malfeasance, a world-wide recession and austerity programs in the few space faring countries left standing, we as a species, ladies and gentlemen, are about one single launch/operational/reentry disaster away from having no manned capability at all, while a luxury free-fall hotel and science station weighing in at almost a million pounds whizzes around empty of science and man until it burns into a briefly spectacular, $100 billion high-altitude fireworks show. Right now much of our hope hinges on this event: [Read more…]