To the surprise of probably no one, the Bush Administration has been interfering with the career scientists at the EPA.

More than half the Environmental Protection Agency scientists who responded to an independent survey made public yesterday said that they had witnessed political interference in scientific decisions at the agency during the past five years.  Read more 

Bring the candle over, dear,It’s very hard to see
Shine so I can see the screen of battery TV

Lights are out all over from Daytona to the Keys
Line failure’s marching through Flor’da.

(to the tune of ’Marching Through Georgia’)

Weird story, just breaking now so I suppose some confusion is unavoidable. Massive storms are hitting the northern part of the state, but this outage is in the south, I wasn’t kidding about the “Daytona to the Keys” line (although they say the Keys are coming back on. I’d like to see where the southernmost power plant is before I believe this story.)

Another cascade effect at any rate. Reminds me of the one a few years ago where literally a tree branch down on a transmission line knocked out the whole Northeast from Ohio to New York and other places.

Weren’t we going to beef up the infrastructure after that? Oh, wait…..  Read more 

We’ve all seen CSI, where within an hour two or three impossible cases are pieced together and there is an arrest headed for conviction. Or Law and Order, where they usually limit themselves to one case. The reality is different. Despite decades of law and orderism breaking out all over the United States, it is more possible to get away with a murder now than before.

Well it is a myth, and one which favors the right wing, because it creates the impression that modern police work is better. It’s not, the old police departments had more murders to deal with, and they had a better rate of clearing them by arrest. Now some of these clears as we find out later, was because they arrested the wrong person, but not by the proportion that we see a drop in solving crims.  Read more 

Alright, maybe I should ahve been more bloggy and said fuck off. But I think “Go to Hell” is literalistly more correct. The New York Times publishes a long apologia by Noah Feldman which contains a string of lies and implicit assertions about fact which are verifiably untrue. These assertions, were a blogger or Democratic nominee for President make them would get a stern warning from teh serious people and the Village Idiots about sticking more closely to truthiness.

For example:  Read more 

As this fine editorial (scroll down) suggests, the Lessons Learned from Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” have been forgotten — if not deliberately,  Read more 

This is the kind of great news for cancer victims that you hope will break down the walls of a prejudice. Cannabis has been found to have potential for halting the metastases of breast cancer, and has been shown to have that effect in brain cancer.  Read more 

Yet another reason the anti-sex Christianist enclaves in the Red States are so—forgive the expression—fucked up. A new identical twins study at the University of Virginia:

The researchers analyzed data on 534 same-sex twin pairs in the United States gathered at three time points over a seven-year period. By examining surveys of twins, the investigators were able to eliminate the genetic and socio-economic variables that otherwise might influence the behaviors of adolescents.

“We got a very surprising finding, particularly that early sex seems to forecast less antisocial behavior a few years later, rather than more,” said Kathryn Paige Harden, the study’s lead author and a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia.

Well, I always knew sex was good for something!  Read more 

Worldwide, the belief that rapid industrialization is the answer to poverty and hunger now faces a challenge from the World Bank, issued today.
Launching the Bank’s latest World Development Report, Agriculture for Development, the Bank’s president, Robert Zoellick, said: “A dynamic agriculture for development agenda can benefit the estimated 900 million rural people in the developing world who live on less than $1 a day, most of whom are engaged in agriculture. We need to give agriculture more prominence. At the global level, countries must deliver on vital reforms such as cutting subsidies and opening markets”.

The report argued that richer countries would have to engage in this reform agenda, pointing out, for example, the damage done to African smallholders by the American government’s subsidies to its cotton growers. Biofuels also come in for criticism. The World Bank said: “the problem is both tariffs and heavy subsidies in rich countries, which drive up food prices and limit export opportunities for efficient developing country providers.”

No mention of the effect of $90+ per barrel  Read more 

In this booming economy which is so full of promise that we can hardly keep U.S. consumers from beating down the doors at the malls to buy the Holy Stuff … more great news.

The service sector, where the burger flippers who used to sell you sub-prime mortgages or manufacture your American cars or something silly like that, took a dive.  Read more 

Say goodbye to French wines, baseball and the Great Barrier Reef. Christmas trees. Fly fishing. Salmon. Gray whales.  Read more 

Weird.

LIMA (AFP) - Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a “strange odor,” local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.  Read more 

I have no idea what this means. Have fun!

Sharon Gaudin, | September 6

Information Week - The Storm worm botnet has grown so massive and far-reaching that it easily overpowers the world’s top supercomputers.
That’s the latest word from security researchers who are tracking the burgeoning network of Microsoft Windows machines that have been compromised by the virulent Storm worm, which has pounded the Internet non-stop for the past three months. Despite the wide ranging estimates as to the size of the botnet, researchers tend to agree that it’s one of the largest zombie grids they’ve ever seen — one capable of doing great damage.  Read more 

What part of paying your way don’t the GOP get?

One day I’ll post the amusing story of How I Learned to Hate the “Science” of Psychology, but for now I’ll direct your attention to the “serious” publication Pyschology Today which decided to lower the reputation of the field even further by publishing the following Deep Insights about how evolution “makes” us act and think:

1. Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
…
4. Most suicide bombers are Muslim
5. Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
6. Beautiful people have more daughters

etc.  Read more 

Study: Female sharks fertilize own eggs.  Read more 

There are two parts to this Salon piece by Pete Moore (with help from his 8 year old son): what these CPA documents say and what else they say, and how the “what else” parts were found.

My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the “View” menu at the top of the screen and select the “Mark up” option. If you are in a Word document where “Track changes” has been turned on, hitting “Mark up” will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors.  Read more 

Make up your own jokes!

No, but Seriously, folks:  Read more 

+++

Limbo’s Gone Off to Limbo
by mjs

I went to my old haunt to see what was what
Just to visit a few friends and hear scuttlebut
As I got closer to the place I called home
I found it resembled the ruins of Rome

The gates were all rusted, the motel was gone
The houses were silent, weeds choking the lawns
The cafes and parlours, the old cineplex
Extinct dinosaurs like my old bud T-Rex

What could have happened? Where did it all go?
Unbaptized babies are all a no-show
The poopers, the Gerbers, the plump little bimbos
Have all gone away: Limbo’s gone off to Limbo  Read more 

Forget dead troops. Forget a trillion dollars missing from the treasury. The war is about making money, and when you factor in the upward direction of oil prices due to speculation and neoliberalism, this data makes a lot of sense. If you’re an oil exec taking advantage of the new Iraqi “constitution” which gives away oil revenues to Western interests, that is:

Iraq is sitting on potential reserves of 100 billion barrels, nearly twice as much as currently estimated, according to a study by energy analysts IHS.

If these reserves were exploited, it said, Iraq could overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer.  Read more 

With a little research, I’m pretty sure an enterprising investigator could turn this lede into the story of the century.  Read more 

From the invaluable ThinkProgress today, the latest “offer” from the RNC as to just how much Congressional oversight they will ever so graciously allow Rep. Waxman to perform:

In a new letter to the Republican National Committee, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman writes that the RNC has provided only minimal information regarding White House officials’ use of RNC e-mail accounts. The purpose of Waxman’s inquiry was in part to determine the extent that White House staff used “non-governmental e-mail accounts to conduct official government business.”

In the new letter, Waxman reveals that the RNC’s response thus far has been to propose that any Congressional requests for emails be filtered through “eight search terms, such as ‘political briefing,’ ‘Hatch Act,’ and ‘2008.’”

Is this cute or what? You think the FBI would have caught Al Capone if they were only allowed to use evidence of him speaking or writing the words “bootlegging” and “criminal conspiracy” and “tax evasion”? Set phasers on “hit ’em with the chair,” Henry.

And just to do our part I think we, all of us here—that means you too readers!— should come up with our own list of “eight search terms” that would be most productive in this search.  Read more 

I heard a rumor about this earlier but now it’s confirmed:
Blackberry System Dead in entire Western Hemisphere.

Wonder what could cause such a massive outage of this system, the tit of which Karl R suckles on incessantly? Don’t you wonder if maybe their attempt to pull his records out of the servers could have caused something to go a little bit oopsie?

I bet he’s wondering that about now. I hear their servers are in Canada too…  Read more 

[Another organic question here.]

Wow. This sucks:

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world’s harvests fail.  Read more