April 1, 2008 archive

The Latest News

Latest articles from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST (see articles for video, links and resources):

Congress grills Big Oil on prices

The top five oil companies, testifying before Representative Edward Markey’s (D-MA) Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, insisted that their 125 billion dollar profit last was “in line with other industries.”

Representative Markey’s take on the profits:  “On April Fool’s Day, the biggest joke of all is being played on American families by Big Oil, while using every trick in the book to keep billions in federal tax subsidies even as they rake in record profits,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass.

April’s Protectors of Children

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, a time to show support for abused children (every month should be that) and to raise awareness about the groups working to save their lives…


Kyoto II climate meeting opens in Thailand

Talks by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to negotiate a replacement to the Kyoto Accord began in Bangkok today with a plea by the Secretary General for unity and a common purpose toward the remediation of climate change.

More at THE ENVIRONMENTALIST (we’ve been busy).

Ta!

Alabama Legislature Changes The Value Of Pi

NMSR reports:

NASA engineers and mathematicians in this high-tech city [Huntsville] are stunned and infuriated after the Alabama state legislature narrowly passed a law Friday [March 28, 2008] redefining pi, a mathematical constant used in the aerospace industry. The bill to change the value of pi to exactly three was introduced without fanfare by Leonard Lee Lawson (R, Crossville), and rapidly gained support after a letter-writing campaign by members of the Solomon Society, a traditional values group. Governor Bob Riley, who emphasized the Biblical reasons for the change in value, says he will sign it into law on Thursday.

The law took the state’s engineering community by surprise. “It would have been nice if they had consulted with someone who actually uses pi,” said Marshall Bergman, a manager at the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. According to Bergman, pi (p) is a Greek letter that signifies the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It is often used by engineers to calculate missile trajectories.

Prof. Kim Johanson, a mathematician from University of Alabama, said that pi is a universal constant, and cannot arbitrarily be changed by lawmakers. Johanson explained that pi is an irrational number, which means that it has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and can never be known exactly. Nevertheless, she said, pi is precisely defined by mathematics to be “3.14159, plus as many more digits as you have time to calculate”.

“I think that it is the mathematicians that are being irrational, and it is time for them to admit it,” said Lawson. “The Bible very clearly says in I Kings 7:23 that the altar font of Solomon’s Temple was ten cubits across and thirty cubits in diameter, and that it was round in compass.”

Lawson, the article says, called into question the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing an exact answer could harm students’ self-esteem. “We need to return to some absolutes in our society,” he said, “the Bible does not say that the font was thirty-something cubits. Plain reading says thirty cubits. Period.”

Governor Riley is expected to have a signing ceremony for the bill on Thursday in Montgomery at which former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore is expected to give an invocation.  Moore’s office today stated that the change in the value of pi to the Biblical value was a good, first, legislative step toward the Rapture, toward making the crooked straight and rough places plane.

Haven’t these people done enough already?  Is nothing sacrosanct?

Breaking: 30 laws, for the border fence

I see Magnifico caught this story in Four at Four, but tossing this post out there for depth’s sake.

We have to break the law in order to save it.

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration will use its authority to bypass more than 30 laws and regulations in an effort to finish building 670 miles of fence along the southwest U.S. border by the end of this year, federal officials said Tuesday.

Invoking the two legal waivers – which Congress authorized – will cut through bureaucratic red tape and sidestep environmental laws that currently stand in the way of the Homeland Security Department building 267 miles of fencing in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, according to officials familiar with the plan. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly about it.

More below the fold…

Four at Four

  1. Ever wonder why the Bush administration was leaning on the Maliki government in Iraq to crack down on Sadr’s militia? Well, this may be part of the answer – The Guardian reports Plans to cut UK troops in Iraq put on hold. “The defence secretary, Des Browne, today announced to parliament that planned cuts in British troop numbers in Iraq would be delayed. In a Commons statement, Browne said the decision to put off the proposed withdrawal of 1,600 troops this spring was based on military advice in the wake of the recent surge in fighting in Basra.” Mission “Stir the Hornet’s Nest” Accomplished. The Bush administration’s other goal was to depict Iran as meddlers.

  2. The New York Times reports Inside the Black Budget. “The classified budget of the Defense Department, concealed from the public in all but outline, has nearly doubled in the Bush years, to $32 billion… Those billions have expanded a secret world of advanced science and technology in which military units and federal contractors push back the frontiers of warfare.”

    “Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his Ph.D. in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has managed to document some of this hidden world” in his book I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me. “Mr. Paglen said he found them by touring bases, noting what personnel wore, joining alumni associations, interviewing active and former team members, talking to base historians and filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act.”

    Mr. Paglen plans to keep mining the patches and the field of clandestine military activity. “It’s kind of remarkable,” he said. “This stuff is a huge industry, I mean a huge industry. And it’s remarkable that you can develop these projects on an industrial scale, and we don’t know what they are. It’s an astounding feat of social engineering.”

  3. Here’s more of where we Americans spend our tax dollars. The Washington Post reports GAO Blasts Weapons Budget. “The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion, and are delivered almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that the GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages… The Pentagon has doubled the amount it has committed to new systems, from $790 billion in 2000 to $1.6 trillion last year, according to the 205-page GAO report. Total acquisition costs in 2007 for major defense programs increased 26 percent from first estimates.”

  4. The Los Angeles Times reports Border fence will skirt environmental laws. “In an aggressive move to finish building 670 miles of border fence by the end of this year, the Department of Homeland Security announced today that it will waive federal environmental laws to meet that goal. The two waivers, which will allow the department to slash through a thicket of environmental and cultural laws, would be the most expansive to date, encompassing land in California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas that stretches about 470 miles. The waivers are highly controversial with environmentalists and border communities, which see them as a federal imposition that could damage the land and disrupts wildlife.”

Breaking: Obama & Clinton Drop Out of Race

In a stunning development, both Obama and Clinton have decided to drop out of the race for President. Word from both camps is that Hillary and Obama had a private meeting last night over cocktails. According to an anonymous source, both Clinton and Obama had been nervous about their poll numbers against John McCain. They were sick of fighting with each other, and they wanted the election to be about the issues again. The anonymous source said that both candidates agreed that conceding the election to John Edwards was the right thing to do. We should be expecting a press conference announcing their withdrawals from the race later this afternoon.

more below the fold…..

You’re Welcome!!

Let’s just get that out of the way right now, because after you finish reading this you’ll be going ‘wow, thanks, moneysmith, this is great. You rock!’ Seriously. You will. Because I have a feeling a lot of us are at the end of our proverbial ropes, which by  now are so frayed they look more like worn-out drawstrings on a pair of ten-year-old sweatpants than the nice, thick, resilient ropes they once were.  

Ready for more? Walk this way (it’s all in the hips, really not that hard) …

My “April Fool” — the black hole of mental illness health care

All kidding aside, it’s true. My former husband had his first psychotic episode on April 1, 1984. Ever the punster/joker, he later referred to himself in a conversation with me as an “April fool.” Would that it were so–for one can live with a fool.

Diagnosed at that time with bipolar illness, for ten years he kept his demons at bay, continuing with his 25-year career as a full professor at a respected university in Boston. His brilliance dimmed but he continued writing and publishing books and articles.

Why was he able to maintain a certain normality in his life for those ten years? Are all those who suffer such illness afforded that opportunity? No, and there are 5.7m Americans with this illness. That’s why I’m writing today, democrats. The story might move you, I don’t know. It’s long, but skim it or skip it, and get to the bottom line, okay?

Crossposted on Orange.

Docudharma Presidential Endorsement: George W. Bush

Yes. You read that right.

After completing a deep personal consideration that included exiting this time space continuum and meditating in tantric union with Montana Wildhack in a dome on Tralfamadore for 23 years…I have come to the conclusion that the inhabitants of this planet deserve to suffer…..more.

And I can’t think of a better way to increase their suffering than having George W. Bush refuse to step down.

Why do they need to suffer more? As I posited in NL’s recent essay it sometimes seems that that the only way people change is through crisis….and we need change desperately!

So here we human beings are on April First 2008……..facing some hard choices, while things get steadily worserer on this third rock from a minor sun in a rather nondescript little galaxy. One choice that looms larger each day will either present (in the grand scheme of things) a relatively small change for the worst, McCain…or a relatively small change for the better…a Dem.

I say why fuck around? I say we go for BIG change!

                              Photobucket

Mugabe Negotiating Resignation

Voters in Zimbabwe, sick of struggling to get food and water under his reckless regime, have rejected Robert Mugabwe.

PRESIDENTIAL RESULTS (very incomplete)

Morgan Tsvangirai 1000, 000   51%

Robert Mugabe        844, 000   42%

Simba Makoni         148, 000   7%

He is reported to be negotiating a transition of power with the leading opposition candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai. Inside sources say he has decided against participation in a run off election.

The negotiations about a possible transfer of power away from Mr. Mugabe began after he apparently concluded that a runoff election would be demeaning, a diplomat said.

(also in orange)

On Tibet, Dick Lugar, Baichung Bhutia and the Power of One

“I sympathise with the Tibetan cause. This is my way of standing by the people of Tibet and their struggle. I abhor violence in any form,” Bhutia told the Times of India newspaper.

link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sou…

Baichung Bhutia, an Indian footballer, is making headlines across Asia and the world by making this statement and refusing to carry the Olympic torch across India later this month.

This is the power of one.

Where governments fall short in decrying injustice, it remains for all of us, regardless of religion, or ethnicity, or politics, to stand up and let our voices be heard.

GBCW

That’s right, I’m outta here. Haven’t seen me around much? Yeah, well, I’ve been busy. But geez, people, this place has gone straight to the cats. And as a dog person, I can’t take it any more.

Nocatz – you with me?

Pony Party, vigilance

Don’t be an April Fool 😉

Stay on your toes today, it might get funny out there…

Load more