Saturday, 29 November 2008 by bbbeard.

Just a quick remark on a remarkable trend in cinema.

The last three movies I’ve seen have featured Ukrainian (or ostensibly Ukrainian) heroines. First Max Payne, then Quantum of Solace, and now Transporter 3 (yes, I have a teenage son). What’s up with that? Is Ukraine the new France?

And the other thing I’ve noticed is that both QoS and T3 featured villains that used environmental organizations as front groups. Is Hollywood ready to throw Greens under the bus?

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Tuesday, 18 November 2008 by bbbeard.

The big news we’ve all been tracking this summer and fall, of course, is the disconcerting lack of sunspots. This is correlated BTW with a dramatic drop in solar wind pressure.

But now it looks like Cycle 24 might finally be starting:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/07nov_signsoflife.htm

A concern has nagged the climatology community that the fluctuation in solar activity represented by Cycle 23 has contributed to the muting of the global warming signal, at least relative to the GCMs employed by the modelers. It will be interesting to see if Cycle 24 does continue the recent trend of less active solar disturbances, and whether there is a correlation with cooler climatology on Earth. As always, correlation is not causation — but it’s food for thought and model fodder.

It might also be informative to hear the perspective from our Arctic Circle friends, who actually know something about solar physics. And about ice.

UPDATE: Nice big sunspot image from 12 Nov 2008 located here.

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Monday, 10 November 2008 by bbbeard.

We had a long email discussion on election day, too long and tiresome to repeat here. I continue to believe the Fresh Prince of Bill Ayers will rule as a leftist authoritarian, and that he is fairly called a communist fellow-traveler. I have been mildly surprised that since the election, so many journalists are so open about their fond desire that America be a one-party state. (Ah, well, “journalist”, “not very smart”, and “really deceptive” kind of go hand-in-hand, at least in this country.) I find it amusingly ironic that countries not known for their conservatism (Sweden, China) have been calling on Obama not to abandon free trade. Apparently Obama is to the left of the Chinese Communist Party, at least on this issue. And one wonders on how many more issues this is true, given his stated fondness for how things are done in China.

At the same time, a number of conservatives have congratulated Obama and pledged they would not repeat the (successful) excesses of the left-lunatic Bush-hatemongers that have basically made the country ungovernable. In truth, if they don’t have the stomach for hardball, they should go find another game.

The image that keeps popping up in my mind is a fighter combat maneuver called the “vertical rolling scissors“. In the vertical rolling scissors, two pilots, each trying to kill the other, turn their aircraft as hard as they can into their enemy’s path, each trying to get behind the other for a shot. The physics of air combat being what it is, if this goes on long enough it pulls the combat closer and closer to the ground. Hit the ground and you’re “out”. The thing is, the first one to leave the scissors is the first to die. Conceding a tail shot to the enemy is not the way to meet your grandkids.

That’s what our politics has turned into – ‘hardball’ has become combat, and if you leave, you die. Whether you’re out of power or in power, you have to throw everything into it in an attempt to damage your opponent. It risks your own integrity, but you can’t leave – you leave, you die. Bush, for all the liberal derangement about Karl Rove, never tried to destroy his political enemies the way Clinton did, and the way the left has tried to destroy Bush.

The Democrats have succeeded in this cycle to regain power “by any means necessary”. We are coming off a campaign where the winning candidate has made fun of his opponent’s disabilities, called the VP candidate a “pig”, viciously pursued — with government resources – a private citizen who had the temerity to ask him an unscripted question, and recruited state prosecutors to persecute his critics. His minions literally demanded DNA tests of her newborn son, pushed a fictional abuse-of-power scandal that only unraveled the day before the election, and sported T-shirts that said “Sarah Palin is a C*nt“. And on top of this he has long-standing ties to anti-Semites and terrorists — associations that he lied about to hide. And he has deemed any opposition to him ‘racist’ — even discussing his ties to Communists has caused his supporters to cry “racism!”

Well, maybe bringing back the “Fairness Doctrine“, regulating blogs, confiscating guns, and assembling a “civilian national security force” will calm things down… in some fantasy world.

I blame Clinton for the divisive politics we now enjoy.

Bill Clinton’s real legacy is that he brought back the era of hardball politics. He understood that getting and keeping power means crushing your enemies and lying through your teeth. That’s how he managed to escape removal from office, while his nemeses Gingrich and Livingston did the honorable thing and left public service when disgraced.

Despite his whining about persecution, it was Clinton who invented the modern ‘politics of personal destruction’. I won’t review his long and sordid history unless you think it’s necessary. But he abused his power, sent the FBI and IRS after his opponents, and enraged his enemies.

Clinton brought out the worst in us. And we are still living with his legacy. I don’t know how we are going to find our way out of this.

One prospect is that the GOP itself may disintegrate, leaving us for a while with a de facto one-party state. The Whig Party, despite victory in several presidential elections, dwindled to nothing by the time of the Civil War — you could even point to the unstable Party politics of that era as establishing the environment for the Civil War. If the GOP cannot mount an effective resistance to the leftist takeover of our institutions and economy, we may be headed down the same path.

UPDATE: Let me clarify that last bit. I remain stubbornly optimistic that Americans are too lazy to fight another Civil War.

However, anarchy is another matter….

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Sunday, 9 November 2008 by aurora_guy.

Thank goodness the 2008 election is finished.  I have to say my own mind was basically made up many months ago.  My candidate didn’t win, nor would my candidate have won had the McPalin ticket swept the polls.  So you could say I’m a bit of an outlier.  This position afforded me a little luxury to follow the battle without a strong emotional investment in either major party.

I’m still shaking my head.

I tried to sift through the epithets and flaming arrows to find cogent, rational arguments for aligning with Democrat or Republican, and I really couldn’t.  I’m slow sometimes, but I really tried.  All I found was that the parties had a common theme: “We’re not the other guys.”

But, in fact, both parties have been behaving badly for years, with Republicans seeming to have departed from core principles in a more dramatic way than the Democrats.  The Dems actually appear to me to have come back towards center without a will to fight for radical, sweeping social agendas.  At the same time, the Republicans have abandoned any notion of small government or fiscal responsibility, and they have thought nothing of trampling individual rights into the dust.

In a post-election interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, Dick Armey gave a succinct, clear post-mortem for his party, reinforcing my own conclusion about moving far away from basic party ideals.  Also, I thought one phrase he used was particularly apt for elected officials across the board.   “Delinquency in office” has failed constituents and the country in a wholesale manner.  The tripod of a federal government balanced between three branches has just about toppled over, yet neither party seems to have recognized the need to address this problem, either.

Thus, trying to follow presidential and local campaigns was a lot like tracking an argument between Ford and Chevy owners.  Even normally rational folks lose their cool over cars.  People seemed to be voting for a brand rather than any inherent differences in function or quality of the products.

Suddenly, this made some sense to me, especially given the general lack of critical thinking and the programmed-consumer nature of our society.  I started reading up on related topics from marketing psychology to “magical thinking”, which proved immensely valuable in understanding what was going on.  No wonder there was little substance to the arguments.  The parties’ efforts and campaign dollars have been focused on very sophisticated consumer programming, not much more.

The up-side, of course, is that we’re much more homogenous in our thinking (or lack of it) than the executive producers of “Survivor - Washington, DC” would have us think.  We really have come together as a nation.

Is this a great country, or what?

Posted in Politics & Society | Print | 7 Comments »

Saturday, 8 November 2008 by bbbeard.

Now that the nasty Republican war on science is over, scientists at last feel free to post pictures like these.

Great job, all you planetary scientists out there!

Posted in Space, Science | Print | 3 Comments »