In a somewhat strange statement issued by the Romney for not-Romney campaign, Mittens criticizes Obama for getting out of Iraq as promised on the 2008 campaign trail:

“President Obama’s astonishing failure to secure an orderly transition in Iraq has unnecessarily put at risk the victories that were won through the blood and sacrifice of thousands of American men and women,” Romney said in a statement.

Maybe Romney visualizes soldiers hanging out on an embassy rooftop or clinging for dear life on Huey skids. I’m not sure. But the transition sure looks to be pretty damn orderly and most important of all, it hasn’t happened yet. So it’s more than a little puzzling how it could be an astonishing failure already.

The misguided action in Iraq, at least the official involvement of the US military in it, is coming to a close according to a statement issued by President Obama from the White House press room.  The President said in part:

As a candidate for President I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end … after taking office I announced a new strategy [to remove US troops] . Today I can report after nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.” … “The troops will be home by the holidays.”

Details here: below, it looks kinda like a cross between a pod-person and a robot twitching to life if you keep watching for a few minutes.

Bring the rain! The Spitzer Space Telescope has found evidence that a nearby star system only 60 light-years away may be undergoing a period of bombardment similar to what happened during and before the Hadean Eon in our solar system about five-billion years ago:

The infrared telescope spotted a band of dust around Eta Corvi that strongly matches the chemical makeup of an obliterated giant comet, said Carey Lisse, senior research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and lead author of the new study. The Eta Corvi system is approximately 1 billion years old, which would place it in the right time period for such a comet storm, the researchers said.

Before there were blogs, there was use.net. One of the most fun message boards there was called Talk Origins, a meeting of the minds between the reality-based community and a gaggle of trolls and drive-by creationists. One of the best essays posted there was by a member named Aron-Ra, and a few years later I adapted it to the emerging new medium of the blogosphere. I’ve reposted an a newly edited, more streamlined version below. — DS

My grandfather wasn’t no monkey!”, “You think we came from slime?!”, and “man, if you want to believe your great^100 grandpa was a rock, be my guest…but it’s STUPID!” One thing we can agree on is, yes, thinking that evolutionary biology stipulates that your ancestor from 100 generations ago was a monkey is indeed stupid. For a lot of reasons, not the least of which is just to get to “monkeys,” let alone “slime,” we’ll need a lot more zeros in there …  [Read more…]

I’m lucky, in this day and age. I have a job, my firm is making money, and I might get a little piece of it. My bonus should be a couple of thousand bucks — if I’m still employed when that time rolls around and if — thanks to missing four days last month while recovering from a life threatening injury in the trauma ward of a local hospital — I don’t miss a single day of work between now and then. So cry me a fucking river:

During the first nine months of the year, Goldman set aside an average of $292,836 of pay per employee, down 21 percent from $370,706 for the same period last year. But much of that pay was set aside in the first two quarters of the year. In the third quarter, the bank set aside just $46,000 per employee, down an eye-popping 57 percent from the same period last year.

Short answer seems to be … No! [Read more…]

Cut and burn Republicans usually interested in eliminating grandma’s health insurance and pension in favor of their rich, thieving friends can’t get themselves enough government spending in some cases. And so it is with the decaying corpse of NASA, there’s meat on them thar bones for shortsighted politicians to pilfer yet! One of them goes by the name of the Space Launch System or SLS. There it is over to the right, in conceptual form anyway. [Read more…]