01-27-09
- Religious Wacko Watch:
- Nature documentarian David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from creationists for failing to credit God in his documentaries. (guardian.co.uk) - "They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator." "They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance."
- Health Care Reform in Danger of Democrats:
- Key Democrat, dinosaur James Clyburn (SC) trying to kill health care reform (thehill) - House Majority Whip wants tiny, incremental change -- you know, the kind that never does the job. I'm so tired of Democratic corporate water carriers standing in the way of change for the common good. It revives my belief that progressives desperately need to split off from the centrist and right-wing Democrats, form their own 3rd party, and thus exercise greater control over what the anachronistic Democrat Party does with its occasional, precious, and accidental time in power.
- Military-Industrial Complex:
- On Arab TV, Obama makes overture to Muslims (iht) - In a search for common ground from which to move forward, "Obama did something in the interview Monday that he had not done during the presidential campaign: He mentioned the Muslim background of many of his Kenyan relatives and alluded to his childhood in predominantly Muslim Indonesia." However, Obama's poison pill was his consistent stalwart defense of Israel right or wrong.
- Global Warming:
- Change We Can Believe In: Driven by facts, Obama issues a flurry of environment-related orders (gristmill)
- Oops, Too Late: Many damaging effects of climate change are already largely irreversible. (boston.com) - Even if carbon emissions could somehow be halted, temperatures around the globe will remain high for 1000 years. The damage that man has already done has set into irresistible motion a catastrophic sequence of events that at best we could only hope to mitigate, not cure.
- Too late? Why scientists say we should expect the worst (guardian.co.uk) - A rise of 4 °C above preindustrial temperatures is more probable than not, and would lead to massive dislocation of millions of people and the destruction of countless additional species.
- X-Files Warning: Even though global warming is now out of control and there is little hope of deliberately mitigating it substantially by human intervention, we could look at a severe global recession, possibly even one deliberately set into motion, as a benefit, in that emissions would be significantly reduced worldwide. If that actually happened, how long would the powers-that-be cause such a recession--or depression--to continue in their effort to limit those emissions? -- My gawd! I'm beginning to sound like a right-wing paranoid. Time to listen again to Roy Zimmerman's song (top of right column). Where are Mulder and Scully when you need them?
- Economic Shakedown:
- Congress is poised to give the Federal Reserve significant new powers to regulate the financial system. (washingtonpost) - They should instead probably be eliminating the Federal Reserve completely as a destructive, exploitative, and failed experiment.
- Rachel Maddow looks at why critical transit funding was slashed in Obama's stimulus plan (grist). Clinton administration holdover, dinosaur Larry Summers is the man to thank. Way to go, Mr. President! Isn't broad inclusion a wonderful thing! See also my entries on 01-24-09 (Stimulus Package Success . . . and Chief Obama Adviser . . .)
- Stimulus Includes Tax Cuts That Even Obama Economists Panned As Ineffective (huffingtonpost) - But what's another wasted $23.8 billion (that's 23,800,000,000 U.S. dollars)? Oh, it's just the price of cooperation with the obstructionists. I've been watching these "cooperation" payments adding up since Paulson first dropped his little 3-page declaration of war on the common man. The total extortion money has reached astronomical proportions and has watered down whatever legislation it has touched. Obama's world view includes this as an ordinary cost of doing business. Mr. Obama, in case you haven't noticed, you have more power at this moment than any Democratic president in scores of years. You have the power to put the obstructionists, Republican and Democrat alike, into their proper place in the corner and use your popular support to fulfill your promises. Instead, what you're giving us is the usual spineless Democratic pablum that has allowed extremist Republicans to take over this country for decades and bring her to the point of collapse. I don't believe the people who worked for you and voted you into office want you to play footsies with obstructionists at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and milquetoast legislation. They want you to get in there and fulfill the promises you made.
- The Milky Way Over Mauna Kea (apod)
