If you are morbid enough to want to see, in some detail, how President Cheney Bush marched us into war in Iraq, the new web site Iraq: The War Card (part of the site of The Center for Public Integrity) has it all. The front-page sub-head, "Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War" says it all. Even after all this time, it's still stomach-turning to see how these weasels casually threw away thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and billions of dollars of taxpayer money, for what? Who knows. Petty spite, probably. I do hope that each and every American who voted for George Bush is as sick to his or her stomach as the rest of the world is.
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"Cut up to 10 percent of your electric bill simply by turning off 'vampire' appliances that run all night" says an article at Salon. Sounds great, but people who urge this sort of thing tend to forget that those "vampires" are doing something with that energy. Some do indeed draw too much for simple standby functions, but many are doing things that their owners would miss were they to try the turnoff strategy. A much better idea would be to get Congress to pass some laws affecting such standby power draws in appliances. If they can set emission standards for autos, why not consumption standards for appliances?
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Glenn Greenwald has more on the FISA mess--you recall, the bill to grant telecom giants retroactive immunity from law-breaking involved in federal snooping on our private telephone calls and suchlike. Beside Senator Broken Reid, the chief other Republican in Democrat's clothing is Jay Rockefeller, and Greenwald lays out with surgical precision what a little shit Rockefeller is. If you haven't yet communicated with your Senators about this, please do so now. Just go to the Senate web site (click those words), select your Senators, and email them via the form made available there.* * * * *
Slate reports some interesting ideas on fixing our obviously broken patent laws.
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There's a great but little-discussed source of "green" energy that is starting to get some attention: geothermal. The Seattle Times has more.
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In the old days of comics, the Human Torch could control flames with "a weird trilling sound". Not so crazy: singing really can extinguish flames. Now, science is trying to convert that fact into a practical fire-control system for places (think of art museums) where conventional sprays are a bad idea. Scientific American reports.
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From the "What are they thinking of?" department: the Ninth Circuit--usually a pretty fair-minded lot--comes a bizarre decision concerning the feds' raids on baseball data.
More exactly, Major-League Baseball and the Player's Association had a contractual agreement that in 2004 players could be tested for certain banned substances and the overall results used to determine if further drug testing would be implemented in following years. The agreement was very clear that the results were to be absolutely confidential. But the feds (lashed on by that Inspector Javert madman Jeff Novitsky) raided the testing labs and carried off computer records. Now they had a warrant, true; but the warrant expressly named 11 players for whom information was being sought. The stolen (what other word is there?) records included every other major-league player.
The feds seem to consider those other names fair prizes of war, or some such thing. I'd have to see the various sides' briefs to understand more, but for now I do not see how a warrant for 11 men's data can be thought to cover 1,400 men's data. The feds argue that the 11 names they wanted were irrevocably mixed with the other names on computer hard drives. This is to make anyone over the age of seven roll on the floor laughing. The Players' Association is likely to appeal, first to an en banc session of the Ninth Circuit, then to the Supreme Court (good luck there on opposing federal power).
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Speaking of courts, the California Supreme Court has decided that even though state law expressly allows use of marijuana for approved medical purposes, a company can fire a worker who does so, on the ground that it is "illegal". If you're wondering how something that is legal can be illegal, it's that California says it's legal, but the feds insist that it's not, even if a state says it is. Hey, good conservatives always believe in states' rights except when they don't.
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The New York Times has an article "National Study Finds High Levels of Mercury in Tuna". This is not a surprise. But it still staggers the mind to think how severely we have managed to pollute the world around us. (About one-third of the samples actually exceeded the legal threshold for recall.)
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Last but not least, the Washington Post tells us that "Too Few U.S. Adults Getting Needed Vaccinations". You really, really should read it.
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2 comments:
To your 'vampire' gadgets point - after watching how well - HA - our government seems to work at regulating things, you're recommending government regulation to control draw? You seem much, much smarter than that.
It does work for some things, notably those that are easy to measure as a definite number.
Soon we will all be leaving behind incandescent bulbs; that's a clear case of a simple idea working. There are others.
Government's main problem is in getting to what needs regulating--Congress is mostly (though not entirely) a bunch of paid-off corporate flacks. The secondary problem is keeping the enforcing agencies from being corrupted by the industries they regulate.
I don't think that a standby-draw limitation would be a problem either way. Even the industry probably wouldn't squawk much, inasmuch as it isn't any material progfit or functionality hit.
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