by Chris Barrus
Gee big surprise… Bush II renews the executive order that keeps Area 51, the Most Well Known And Not Secret Secret Base, classified for another year. These orders expire every September 18 and need to be renewed to keep a pack of environmental lawyers from filing hazardous waste claims against the government.
Lots of stuff here to chew through.
Mind-boggling article on what it is to be adjunct faculty. The opening paragraph says it all:
Bad pay, zero job security, no benefits, endless commutes. Is this any way to treat PhDs responsible for teaching a generation of college students?
The implied message for newly-minted PhDs? You’re no better than a temp worker.
I saw that headline on Stratfor and immediately thought the Japanese Prime Minister was betting his political future on the outcome of the game Diplomacy that Avalon Hill publishes.
Which of course led into the thought of settling the entire Middle East fiasco over a game of Diplomacy. Never mind that the game is set in World War One-era Europe.
It’s a great game. Been around for a long time, and has a lot of fans out there.
Handbasket to Hell, now boarding!
An official toilet paper has been launched to mark the World Summit.
The roll carries messages highlighting the plight of the millions of people around the world without access to sanitation and clean water.
It carries messages such as “Hygiene is not a soft issue” and “A flush is not the only winning hand”.
[via MetaFilter]
John Robb points out some interesting reading over on the Woods Hole web site about global warming’s side effects of weather instability.
The mechanism for this is simple. The north pole’s ice cap is melting quickly due to global warming. This has created an extremely large pool of fresh water near the ice cap. That pool of water will eventually drift southward. When it does, it will disrupt the gulf stream due a change in the density of the water. Without the gulf stream, the northeast US and Europe will quickly experience a 10 degree drop in temperatures.
This mini Ice Age would be similar to the one we experienced between 1300 and 1850. Remember that picture of Washington crossing the Delaware River? See the ice? That doesn’t happen anymore. According to the Woods Hole scientists, it will again. There is also an outside chance that disruption of the gulf stream could disrupt the entire ocean conveyor system which would impact the rest of the world.
Better bundle in some cold weather gear in that canoe.
Turkmenistan’s President, Saparmurad Niyazov is number one with a bullet (pun possibly intended) on the “cuckoo regime hot 100”. I suppose if you had Having Iran and Afghanistan as neighbors, you would be feeling kinda edgy too.
He began by renaming the months of the year after himself, his mother, who died in an earthquake when Niyazov was eight, and a few of his favourite words (“Flag Month”, for example); and followed it up by decreeing that old age officially doesn’t begin until 85. This was possibly in relation to both his 62nd birthday – which he celebrated by dying his hair jet-black – and his rampant hypochondria. On Turkmenistan’s website, there is more about Niyazov’s recent doctor’s appointment than on melons and sulphur combined. “I cannot help but admire [the President’s] inexhaustible power of life!” his doctor, “famous surgeon” Hans Meisner, is quoted as saying. Apparently, millions of the poverty-stricken people of Turkmenistan “sighed with relief” at the news. “Let us remember it uninterruptedly!” the website urges. With little else but melons and sulphur to contemplate, this shouldn’t be hard.
Have to admit that I like the phrase “Let us remember it uninterruptedly!”. It reads like a fumbled English sub-title in a old HK movie. I’m waiting for the decree for underwear to be worn on the outside.
Embassy Row in Washington D.C. is transforming into a weird amalgamation of the World’s Fair and the Las Vegas Strip.
One recent sticky summer evening, the Swedish ambassador welcomed his guests with chilled vodka and what he called the most important news of the year: Sweden had just received permission to build a new embassy here.
“This is the most powerful country in the history of the world, and we need a showpiece for Sweden,” said the ambassador, Jan Eliasson.
Then, to underline the seriousness of the venture, the ambassador pointed to a successful Nordic rival, “Like the Finnish Embassy.”
State of the art bulldada for your Sunday evening…
It must be understood that the identity of the statues is highly suspect. There were two large guardian Buddhas, with distorted quasi-Chinese features; as many people recollect, Buddha was Indian, and there was only one Siddhartha Gautama Buddha. A strong hint of the eldritch influence over the creation of these stone collossi comes from the fact that the particular emperors which constructed them ruled over the Indian cities of Sarnath and Mathura (which sounds more than a bit like Cathuria.) These were not meant to represent Buddha, but the gods that Barzai espied on Hatheg-Kla before he was snatched up unspeakably by the Other Gods.
Yet Lovecraft himself had interesting things to say about stone collossi, most notably in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. In it, Randolph Carter seeks Mount Ngranek to behold a carven visage of one of the terrestrial gods, in order to find the bloodline of those descended from these immortals. These unusual features, including slanted quasi-Chinese eyes and pendulous earlobes lead Carter to the villages surrounding the forbidden plateau of Leng. Unsurprisingly, this leads us to recognize that within what we today call Afghanistan is the plateau of Leng, the Cold Waste, and somewhere in the most forbidding mountainous regions Kadath itself.
Like a lot of folks, I belong to AAA and yes, they’ve bailed me out on more than one occasion. I’ve always considered them to be one of the cheerful good guys – a sort of throwback to old days of service stations with service. Little did you or I know, AAA is also a political group that’s been lobbying against every environmental or auto safety legislation for years.
On the subject of highway congestion, AAA can be found on the opposite side of the fence from both environmentalists and urban planners. In recent years, land-use planners have asserted that new roads actually worsen congestion because they open up more land to real estate development, which in turn puts still more cars on the roads. But AAA’s position has not substantially changed from the late 1980s. It argues that bottlenecks are a major cause of automobile pollution — so more roads must be built to eliminate them. Its 1988 “six-point strategy” for relieving congestion relied principally on new highways and outer loops around metropolitan areas. Twelve years and many miles of new road later, with congestion so bad that “road rage” is now part of the national vocabulary, AAA’s byword is still “increased roadway capacity.” Comments Paul Billings of the American Lung Association, “Building more roads to solve an air pollution problem is like buying a larger pair of pants to solve an obesity problem.”
…
Critics see an essential hypocrisy at AAA’s heart, for it poses as a consumer advocate yet opposes laws that would lead to cleaner air and a healthier environment for those same consumers. They also cite its history on safety. AAA says it promotes road construction and repair for the sake of its members’ safety — but when it comes to car safety, the story is different.
One of the most notorious examples was the airbag law. AAA came out against mandatory installation of airbags in cars. It released a nationwide survey showing that 67 percent of those questioned preferred laws mandating seat belt use, and started lobbying for those laws in state legislatures, weakening the airbag campaign.
In place of AAA, the Better World Travellers Club seems like a good alternative. Plus it appears to be less expensive too.