Rita is stronger than Katrina
Wed Sep 21, 2005 at 06:39:02 PM PDT
That's
official.
^^^ UPDATE 08:00 p.m. EDT, 9/21/05 ^^^
Rita is now the 3rd strongest Atlantic hurricane on record with a CP of 898 mb, surpassing Katrina's lowest recorded CP of 902 mb. She is growing in size as well, with 165 mph winds extending 70 miles outward from the eye. Rita now has the potential to be extraordinarily devastasting -- the lowest central pressure ever recorded is 882 mb, a mark that Rita could well challenge. Do not take any chances with this storm. If you have even the slightest thought about evacuating, listen to it and stay safe.
The warm Gulf of Mexico works like a hurricane machine. From now on, whenever a tropical storm or a weak hurricane enters the Gulf, and is going to a few day hike across, we have to say "Oops, he it goes again..." and hope for a lucky trajectory or lucky wind sheers.
A cup of coffee in Baghdad
Fri Sep 16, 2005 at 08:36:06 PM PDT
Last night
Condi Rice appeared on O'Reilly's Factor.
Bill was a bit tough, though he did not ask about "No one could have imagined them slamming a plane..."
O'Reilly: The truth of the matter is our correspondents at Fox News can't go out for a cup of coffee in Baghdad....
Rice: Bill, that's tough. It's tough. But what - would they have wanted to have gone out for a cup of coffee when Saddam Hussein was in power?..
That's almost as tough as the 9/11 commission. But what about cafes in Baghdad?
What breaks con's heart?
Thu Sep 08, 2005 at 11:35:53 PM PDT
NRO's
Jay Nordlinger looks quite emotional (emphasis mine):
In my opinion, the uses of global warming in the Katrina aftermath have been despicable - you know, Haley Barbour is responsible for the devastation in his state, because he urged the Bush administration to reject the Kyoto Protocol. That kind of thing. You don't know whether to be amazed or depressed.
What is so depictable and depressing about worrying about future? Who is possibly hurt by these talks? Only reckless politicians and pundits? Big corporations?
What about news like this - warming forces soil to release more carbon, which causes more warming, etc? Can we ever control and stabilize CO2 increase? Is hot weather is a big friend of personal freedom or something?
Are cons omniscient or stupid?
Tue Sep 06, 2005 at 10:50:25 PM PDT
Conservatives love to argue that we liberals "cannot decide" whether George W. Bush, Karl Rove (or Dick Cheney, etc) are omniscient geniuses or stupid idiots.
Here they go again, for example:
Once again, the American Left is at odds with itself over whether George W. Bush is the omniscient wizard or brainless Scarecrow. This time it didn't take a tornado or contentious election to send them spiraling skyward toward an alternate Land of Oz where every conspiracy theory, no matter how contradictory, comes to vivid Technicolor life. The excuse this time was a hurricane politicized a full day before it came ashore.
NRO defends high gas prices
Fri Sep 02, 2005 at 10:58:33 PM PDT
Gouge On
A defense of gas profiteering.
By Jerry Taylor
[How] should we ration our limited pool of gasoline? In a free market, scarce goods are typically rationed by price. People who value gasoline most are willing to pay higher prices than those who value it less. The former get the gasoline - the latter to some extent go without. Allocating resources to those who value them most is one very important reason why our economy outperforms economies where resources are allocated by political action.
It all sounds reasonable from libertarian point of view. But what happened to the argument that gas prices are crucial to the economy? In particular, that they are vital for small businesses and consumers? This argument suddenly disappeared... May suddenly troubled businesses and consumers drop dead?
NRO on flood non-insurance
Fri Sep 02, 2005 at 06:56:58 AM PDT
What does the 'serious' conservative
NRO Corner blog think about the possibility that standard hurricane insurance would not cover flood damage? Let Jonah "two strikes" Goldberg represent the opinion:
NOT COVERED [Jonah Goldberg ]
A friend of mine mentioned this to me the first day of the flooding but I was waiting to see it in print. Apparently a great many of the homeowners' insurance policies don't cover flood insurance.
Expect a huge argument about what taxpayers should be expected to cover. It will get ugly.
NRO roundup of today
Wed Aug 31, 2005 at 09:09:50 PM PDT
Yesterday
I commented the coverage of Katrina by the conservative
NRO Corner blog. Their focus was not sensitive, to put it mildly. Today started similarly:
SO MAYBE HE DIDN'T PLAY GOLF [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
but Bush
played guitar! Clearly the president doesn't give a damn.
That's the right thing to do, I conservatively suppose.
For a few hours, the hot Katrina issue was looting, of course. Sarcastic remarks were made towards RFK Jr (That man has no shame.) and Gov. Blanco (She may have won the election but she has no business being in charge of anything).
The real Katrina's name
Wed Aug 31, 2005 at 03:35:06 AM PDT
The hurricane that struck Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.
That's how
The Boston Globe puts it in a fresh article, by Ross Gelbspan. The article already got skeptics' attention - last night Foxnews' Brit Hume interviewed Cato's
Patrick Michaels. (Transcript
here.) The discussion was about this sentence.
Although Katrina began as a relatively small hurricane that glanced off southern Florida, it was supercharged with extraordinary intensity by the high sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.
Global warming
Tue Aug 23, 2005 at 01:12:23 AM PDT
In the
previous diary, I argued that skeptics of global warming held themselves to different working standards than the scientific community. Skeptics produce virtually no raw data or field research themselves, do not come up with their own climate models, their predictions are not detailed. They do not try to clarify things better, but sow confusion wherever they can.
Here I consider two reports from the skeptical camp, which at least have some predictions in numbers. The first article, of July 20, criticizes Sen. Jeff Bingaman's (D-NM) Climate and Economy Act, now under consideration in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. It claims that Bingaman's measures would avert at most 0.008 C of global warming by 2050, and would cost $331 billion. The second report from Lombard Street Research predicts $18 trillion price of preventing global warming, 45% of the global GDP.
Climate skeptics "work" still hard
Fri Aug 19, 2005 at 01:52:35 AM PDT
Evidence for global warming mounts every day. Just
last week scientists found out that previous measurements in the upper atmosphere were faulty. (Those measurements showed too little warming up there, hence problematic for the global warming theory.) Climate change in the Artic is obvious, US senators
Clinton, McCain, Graham say.
But still, skeptics cannot be "swayed" a bit. (Certainly, energy industry interests remain the same.) I am not sure how "balanced" the media keeps going. But today I typed "global warming" search at news.google.com, and half of the first page stories were still "anti-warming"... Did skeptics come up with something new?! Here are their stories, see yourself:
Foxnews junk science,
Common sense "prevails",
No warming, just cycles,
Shameless reason online,
Warming is too good for farmers,
Stopping warming is very very costly...
A reliable voting method
Thu Aug 04, 2005 at 06:18:04 AM PDT
I have this idea for several months; I even tried to apply for a patent. But I do not have time and experience for patent formalities, so I decided to post the idea in the "open source" fashion here. (I would appreciate much if companies or organizations which would actually use the whole idea would consider some gratuity.)
The idea is to use magnetic cards for electoral voting as follows. Each vote has to be registered on a magnetic card in two ways: it has to be recorded in the magnetic strip, and it has to be printed out on a side of the magnetic card.
The voter can check his vote by inspecting the printed record. The final tally would rely on the printed records. Magnetic records are to be used for assisting the count. The method is described more completely below the fold.
Bill O'Reilly: science is fascism
Wed Aug 03, 2005 at 02:53:06 AM PDT
Try to believe what O'Reilly said in his last "Talking Point Memo". Just check
Foxnews video... The memo title is "God vs Science".
While praising Bush for his opinion that Intelligent Design should be taught at schools, O'Reilly stated:
The National Academy of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Science both reject Intelligent Design and don't want to mention it in science classes. That, in my opinion, is fascism.
What to say... This surely indicates that right wing nuts stop at nothing - anything that stands in their way can be called fascists. Now they basically accuse all science and scientists of fascism. He surely refers to scientists in general, since the spoken words were supplemented by this text on the screen:
All beliefs should be respected. But the science folks say the intelligent design doesn't belong in schools.
Corporate rights since 1886 ?
Tue Aug 02, 2005 at 08:00:17 AM PDT
Corporations have the same rights as humans... This looks like an
absurd principle, yet this is a default doctrine in US courts. Corporations
have the same
rights of equal protection, due process, "free speech"... yet they do not have the same responsibilities and physical
needs.
It is commonly said that it was the 1886 Supreme Court decision in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case which settled that "corporations are persons"; or that they have the protections under the Fourteenth Amendment. But this is not true - the question of corporation rights was explicitly not considered in the formal SCOTUS opinion. But since then, the Fourteenth Amendment is employed most often by corporations seeking rights of natural persons, not by citizens seeking freedom...
The heat is on
Sun Jul 31, 2005 at 01:08:53 AM PDT
In the global warming debate, a widely employed argument is that climate change is a complex issue, that
there are still many variables and unknowns here. But why is this an argument to be skeptical about global warming? What we do not know might be an even more alarming picture...
OK, the issue is whether we have to force ourselves and all civilization to change policies and habits. Hence the standard is not of scientific curiosity, but of lawyers' scrutiny. Yet, concerned people have the right to insist that the "everything-will-be-all-right-at-the-end" hypotheses deserve just as much scrutiny.
Terrorism and us
Mon Jul 25, 2005 at 11:14:17 PM PDT
Terrorism is the threat that makes no one completely safe. But does it excuse the most powerful government in the world to play so insecure and anxious? If the United States is the most civilized country and the leader in the fight against terrorism, where is the confidence and some humble endurance?
Probably the most frustrating circumstance for muslims (and other "disfranchised" parties) is that the strong "American" antagonist (i.e., the ruling Republican/corporate/Christian fundamentalist clan in the US) wants to have it both ways: to feast on their share power, and to take most sympathy as some underdogs or victims. The others are left with nothing, even without rebel righteousness. If the strongest player whines the most, what should be expected then from much weaker sides?
Trying to like Roberts
Tue Jul 19, 2005 at 07:33:33 PM PDT
There is no doubt that Roberts is a committed conservative, but is he really badly partisan?
Yeah, he would overturn Roe v. Wade, but this is not an extraordinary circumstance for fillibuster. If it were, Bush would have lost the re-election.
I am more concerned with his pro-corporate and anti-environment affinities. But Roberts' disregard of worker's rights and environmnet does not seem complete...
Al Gore got exaggerated again
Wed Jun 29, 2005 at 01:14:02 AM PDT
What's up with that story of Al Gore picking up car keys for a muslim woman?
NRO's Goldberg goes green on this.
Is it supposed to be Al Gore's fault that his trivial help was so much appreciated? It was strange that NY Times saw the need to publish the "thanks" note as an op/ed piece, but was it something Al Gore badly needed?
That's reminds me something of the years 1999-2000... when several exaggerated Gore stories had to be invented... by NY Times as well...
