Archive for 2008

Buckley’s Son: ‘Sorry Dad, I’m Voting for Obama’

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.

Dear Pup once said to me, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

More (fun)…

Shocking acts of cruelty in religious strife

Friday, October 10th, 2008

– I’ve ragged on India before.   It is my strong opinion that if a nation wants to present a first world hi-tech face to the world, it might have a serious thought about correcting its third-world medieval problems at home as part of an integrated effort to bring the whole country forward.

– India is both blessed with some of the best hi-tech minds of the 21st century and some of the biggest hypocrisies in the world.   Stunning poverty, class prejudices, bride burning and on and on.   And now, the story below:

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As she recalled her awful story, Puspanjali Panda, 38, made no attempt to halt the tears pouring down her face.

Holding her daughter close, she told how a Hindu mob dragged her husband – a Christian pastor – from his bed, beat him to death with stones and iron rods and then threw him into a river.

She found his corpse two days later, washed up on the bank. When she went to the police, they told her to go away.

Panda and thousands of others like her are victims of the worst communal violence between Hindus and Christians that India has seen for decades.

For a country that boasts of its mutual religious tolerance, the long-simmering tension that has erupted in the Kandhamal district of the state of Orissa – a nun being raped, churches being burned, at least 35 people killed and thousands forced from their villages – is both a belated wake-up call and a mounting embarrassment.

More… (if you can stomach it)

61 Nobel Laureates favor science and Obama

Friday, October 10th, 2008

– Respect for science under Republican administrations these last decades has, to put it bluntly, gone to hell.

– Here’s an open letter to the American public from 61 Nobel Laureates saying that they favor Barack Obama and why.

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To the letter…

‘Dead Zones’ Appear In Waters Worldwide

Friday, October 10th, 2008

New Study Estimates More Than 400

In the latest sign of trouble in the planet’s chemistry, the number of oxygen-starved “dead zones” in coastal waters around the world has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s, killing fish, crabs and massive amounts of marine life at the base of the food chain, according to a study released yesterday.

“These zones are popping up all over,” said Robert Diaz, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science who led the study, published online by the journal Science.

Diaz and co-author Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Goteborg in Sweden counted more than 400 dead zones globally, ranging from expansive ones in the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Mexico to small ones that episodically appear in river estuaries. Collectively, they cover about 95,000 square miles.

Low oxygen, known as hypoxia, is in significant measure a downstream effect of chemical fertilizers used in agriculture. Air pollution, including smog from automobiles, is another factor. The nitrogen from the fertilizer and the pollution feeds the growth of algae in coastal waters, particularly during summer.

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Norway MP called fortune-tellers

Friday, October 10th, 2008

“Ms Khan initially said the expensive calls were satellite phone calls to her boyfriend, who she said was on a secret foreign mission with Britain’s special forces.”

A Norwegian politician has said she will not seek re-election after running up a large phone bill ringing fortune-tellers at parliament’s expense.

Saera Khan, an MP for the ruling Labour Party, admits calling pay-per-minute fortune-tellers 793 times in one nine-month period, for a total of 133 hours.

In one three-month period, she spent 48,000 kroner (£4,590; $7,750), the daily Verdens Gang newspaper reported.

Ms Khan, 29, who is on sick leave, has said she has paid the money back.

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Gore urges civil disobedience to stop coal plants

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Al GoreNEW YORK (Reuters) – Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon.

The former U.S. vice president, whose climate change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Academy Award, told a philanthropic meeting in New York City that “the world has lost ground to the climate crisis.”

“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration,” Gore told the Clinton Global Initiative gathering to loud applause.Resisting evil and insanity

“I believe for a carbon company to spend money convincing the stock-buying public that the risk from the global climate crisis is not that great represents a form of stock fraud because they are misrepresenting a material fact,” he said. “I hope these state attorney generals around the country will take some action on that.”

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Keating 5 ring a bell?

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

– John McCain has got:

– A temper he has trouble controlling
– A lame academic record <– must read !
– A citation in Congress for “Poor Judgment”
– And he’s picked a know-nothing for his potential V.P.

– Why would any sane person think this man should be president?

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Once upon a time, a politician took campaign contributions and favors from a friendly constituent who happened to run a savings and loan association. The contributions were generous: They came to about $200,000 in today’s dollars, and on top of that there were several free vacations for the politician and his family, along with private jet trips and other perks. The politician voted repeatedly against congressional efforts to tighten regulation of S&Ls, and in 1987, when he learned that his constituent’s S&L was the target of a federal investigation, he met with regulators in an effort to get them to back off.

That politician was John McCain, and his generous friend was Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings & Loan. While he was courting McCain and other senators and urging them to oppose tougher regulation of S&Ls, Keating was also investing his depositors’ federally insured savings in risky ventures. When those lost money, Keating tried to hide the losses from regulators by inducing his customers to switch from insured accounts to uninsured (and worthless) bonds issued by Lincoln’s near-bankrupt parent company. In 1989, it went belly up — and more than 20,000 Lincoln customers saw their savings vanish.

Keating went to prison, and McCain’s Senate career almost ended. Together with the rest of the so-called Keating Five — Sens. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), John Glenn (D-Ohio), Don Riegle (D-Mich.) and Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), all of whom had also accepted large donations from Keating and intervened on his behalf — McCain was investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee and ultimately reprimanded for “poor judgment.

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A dire warning on water

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Countries across the world will have to dramatically increase investment in dams, pipes and other water infrastructure to avoid widespread flooding, drought and disease even before climate change accelerates these problems, experts have warned.

Investment needs to be at least doubled from the current level of US$80 billion a year, an international congress was told in early September, and one leading authority said spending needed to rise to 1.5% of gross domestic product just “to be able to cope with the current climate” — one thousand times the current level.

The warnings follow months of dramatic events, from hurricane flooding in the Caribbean and the United States to desperate measures in drought-stricken Mediterranean countries, including importing water by ship.

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Methane – is anyone listening?

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

Where it comes from– Two new articles out recently about newly discovered sources of methane venting into the atmosphere.   I’ve written on this topic in the past and I think it is one of the bigger Perfect Storm ‘sleeper’ issues out there. Where it ends up Very few people know about it, it has the strong potential to flip the climate suddenly, it’s been shown to have done this in the past, and it is happening right now (see below).

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Time for action

Arctic Ocean methane signals catastrophe

“We had a hectic finishing of the sampling program yesterday and this past night. An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.”

Gustafsson’s preliminary report, published in The Independent of September 23, is a development far more frightening than the current financial crisis, although it will get only one-thousandth of the coverage. The worst that the financial crisis can bring is some years of recession. The worst that massive methane releases in the Arctic can bring us is runaway, irreversible global warming.

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How levels are rising

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Hundreds of methane ‘plumes’ discovered

British scientists find more evidence of climate threat

British scientists have discovered hundreds more methane “plumes” bubbling up from the Arctic seabed, in an area to the west of the Norwegian island of Svalbard. It is the second time in a week that scientists have reported methane emissions from the Arctic.

Methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and the latest findings from two separate teams of scientists suggest it is being released in significant amounts from within the Arctic Circle.

On Tuesday, The Independent revealed that scientists on board a Russian research ship had detected vast quantities of methane breaking through the melting permafrost under the seabed of the shallow continental shelf off the Siberian coast.

Yesterday, researchers on board the British research ship the James Clark Ross said they had counted about 250 methane plumes bubbling from the seabed in an area of about 30 square miles in water less than 400 metres (1,300 feet) deep off the west coast of Svalbard. They have also discovered a set of deeper plumes at depths of about 1,200 metres at a second site near by. Analysis of sediments and seawater has confirmed the rising gas is methane, said Professor Graham Westbrook of Birmingham University, the study’s principal investigator.

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Trashed Tech Dumped Overseas: Does the U.S. Care?

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

A new report proves that the fed’s environmental watchdog has knowingly allowed toxic e-waste to be shipped overseas

e-WasteThe U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) knows that most of the 1.9 million tons (1.7 million metric tons) of discarded cell phones, computers and televisions, among other electronic goods, went into landfills, because those are the agency’s own figures.

The EPA also knows that this so-called e-waste contains cadmium, mercury and other toxic substances, and it is responsible for making sure that lead-laden monitors and television sets with cathode-ray tubes (CRT) are disposed of properly and the parts recycled. But congressional investigators charge that the EPA has failed to even attempt to clean up the mess—or keep it in check. The agency has “no plans and no timetable for developing the basic components of an enforcement strategy,” concludes a report released this week by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’s investigative arm.

GAO official John Stephenson testified at a House hearing yesterday that his investigators had posed as would-be buyers of CRT waste in Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, Singapore and Vietnam and found at least 43 recyclers willing to export the toxic e-waste from the U.S. in direct violation of EPA regulations. In addition, unlike the European Union (E.U.), the EPA has no regulations concerning the disposal of other types of used electronic devices, despite their dangers.

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