Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asks the GOP to wake the f*ck up about climate change

what if climate change is a hoax and we create a better world for nothing?

By Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Remarks from the Senator’s weekly climate address. His office notes: “Yesterday afternoon Senator Whitehouse took to the Senate floor to deliver his weekly speech about climate change. It was a speech that had been prepared in advance, and which included a general reference to tornadoes in Oklahoma. Tragically, and unbeknownst to [...]

Tornadoes, storms, and superstorms – yes, it’s global warming.

tornato devastation from Moore, OK

Yesterday, I wrote Yes, global warming IS giving us bigger, more devastating tornadoes, in response to the horrific devastation in Moore, Oklahoma. And the usual jerks came out, accusing me of everything from being a retard to being a despicable liberal using the bodies of dead children to push my climate change agenda. It would have been [...]

Yes, global warming IS giving us bigger, more devastating tornadoes

tornado devastates Moore, Oklahoma

As an insanely huge tornado smashes a path through the former oilfields of Oklahoma, it might be a nice time to remember – yes, climate change and global warming are giving us bigger, badder, and more costly storms. Remember that the next time somebody tells you that dealing with climate change will be too expensive. [...]

James Howard Kunstler – America’s exceptional way of going FrAcKiNg CrAzY

Atlantic-cover-never-run-out-of-oil

By James Howard Kunstler The collective state of mind in the USA these days may be even more peculiar than what went on in Germany in the early 1930s, when the Nazis were freely elected to lead the country and reconstructed the battered national psyche into a superman cult that soon beat a path to [...]

Supreme Court hands Monsanto the farm

supreme court Some rights reserved by Envios

In a huge disappointment to organic food and non-GMO activists, the Supreme Court gave Monsanto a huge victory this morning. There had been some hope that they would re-evaluate the crazy notion that companies can patent life-forms. It is, after all, an idea that would have been laughed at by the founding fathers of this [...]

James Howard Kunstler – We also can’t bet our way to prosperity

money swirling down the drain

By James Howard Kunstler Whenever the Federal Reserve wants to tweak the dials of the economy — or pretend that it can — it turns first to its sock puppet at The Wall Street Journal, John Hilsenrath, and leaks a rumor of policy change. They like to do this late on Fridays when financial markets [...]

David Brin – Can private enterprise inspire us to Mars?

inspiration_mars_header1

By David Brin Mars One: why did I volunteer? I  believe that a one way Mars mission is a viable-enough idea for some people to consider it, even knowing, as I do, that “one-way” has several possible connotations. On the surface, the claim is that eliminating the huge cost of the return flight will allow instead [...]

David Brin – Can private prizes stimulate us to the stars?

lunarxprize

By David Brin Grand challenges!  It’s an approach to stimulating research and technology that has been around for a while, stretching back to the British longitude prize of the 1700s. Aviation medals and awards spurred rapid advances during the 1920s and 1930s and sparked breakthroughs in human-powered flight in the 1980s and 1990s.  One contest helped lead to creation [...]

Sierra Club California hates Gov Jerry Brown’s insane water policy

How out-of-step is Governor Jerry Brown, when it comes to his destructive water polices for the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas? The Sierra Club of California has called on Brown to abandon his position on  the construction of twin peripheral tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a policy that would harm [...]

David Brin: Dilbert vs Skynet (battle of the transparency titans)

dilbert vs skynet - battle of the transparency titans

By David Brin Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) and I have both agreed and disagreed about transparency, for years. In his posting, Crime and Privacy, he has opined, for example, that  ”Ironically, the more the government clamps down on individual privacy, the more freedom the residents will have. When the government can detect every sort of [...]