I have four or five things for you.
First off, Joel Rosenberg is dead. He wrote "Everything You Need to Know About (Legally) Carrying a Handgun in Minnesota" and ran the web site "Jew with a gun." I've blogged about him before. Go have a look and pay special attention to the comments The back story, with a few margaritas and the right company, could be commercial.
In an entirely different matter, Jeb Baugh tells me that Lamar White has put together a blog post that provides a detailed overview and analysis of the Louisiana Family Forum's finances. Say that five times fast. It is here.
They're considered one of the most influential lobbying organizations in the State of Louisiana. On their website and their Facebook page, they're upfront about their true mission: Influencing legislators and legislation. They publish an annual legislative scorecard, and every year, they host a lavish dinner for selected legislators, doling out awards and commendations.
And every year, they raise and then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax-deductible donations.
Climate scientists in Australia have been receiving death threats from Anthropogenic Global Warming Deniers. It was serious enough that authorities have moved the scientists to safer quarters.
The revelation of the death threats follows a week of bitter exchanges between the government and the opposition in the wake of a pro-carbon price TV advert featuring actor Cate Blanchett.
The Australia National University (ANU) in Canberra said that it has moved a number of its climate scientists to a secure facility after they received a large number of threatening emails and phone calls.
...
Prof David Koroly, of the University of Melbourne's school of Earth science, told the ABC that he receives threats whenever he is interviewed by the media.
"It is clear that there is a campaign in terms of either organised or disorganised threats to discourage scientists from presenting the best available climate science on television or radio," he said.
The blogger Gay Girl in Damascus has been jailed in Syria. Show your support by liking the "free Amina Abdalla" page on facebook.
A large volcano in Chile has erupted. It is called Puyehue.
Oh, and the sun exploded:
What you're seeing here is a solar flare (an enormous explosion of pent-up magnetic energy) coupled with a prominence (a physical eruption of gas from the surface). This event blasted something like a billion tons of material away from the Sun. Note the size of it, too: while it started from a small region on the Sun's surface, it quickly expanded into a plume easily as big as the Sun itself! I'd estimate its size at well over a million kilometers across. It looks like most of the material fell back down to the Sun's surface; that's common, though sometimes such an event manages to blast the material completely away into space.
The Bad Astronomer has the whole story here.
That is all.
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Whenever I hear of an organization with "family" in it's name I twitch and my head races. 37 years ago I went away to a little technical school (downriver from the little liberal arts college where Greg was once). I had to wangle that: I was waiting list; my parents wanted me to go to a different university, as did my prep school, and I ultimately conditionally accepted then stood them up. The reason? They had a non-discrimination policy that included sexual orientation (and had had one since the late 60s).
22 years ago my mother died. We hadn't spoken in about 2 years; I'd given up on her. They'd moved out to Retired Nutjob, Arizona. Without telling me. I have virtually no keepsakes from pre-college; mainly one large, poor-quality picture of me with a choir at the White House with Tricky Dicky.
My father remarried a nice church-going Christian lady less than 2 years later. She was almost certainly fundigelical of some sort but I have no idea if she was a YEC (I probably didn't believe such people existed at the time: I was very protected growing up.) I visited once around some holidays and ended up in the ER with a panic attack and premature atrial contractions (and I was a bicyclist and non-smoker at the time.) She was that nice to her husband's only son.
My father turned into a dittohead. I didn't know what that was at the time, but he had the at least the outline of the talking points down. Say "Clinton" and he would have paroxysms of indignation. I eventually figured it out because my all-night supermarket played Rush at high volume when they restocked after midnight. Obama, of course, was a socialist dictator out to ruin the country; I'm not sure if he was also Muslim and Nazi. I'm pretty sure he picked these things up second hand from golf buddies. Needless to say, this made conversation with my father rather difficult since he was pretty incurious.
Sorry to go leaving messes, Greg, but the "family" stuff makes me go non-linear and it's a bad time. My father died late April; I just got a FedEx delivery of some papers from a stranger.
I think he's my step-brother. I don't know my step-siblings names.