gregladen | April 22, 2009Kellermann was the head of the troubled Freddie Mac financial institution. He had apparently hanged himself. A few news agencies are reporting it. Some details here.
gregladen | April 22, 2009Norm Coleman has requested a more "leisurely" (as the Star Tribune calls it) schedule for his recount appeal. What is more leisurely? The Coleman team would like oral arguments to begin no sooner than mid-May, and easily later than that.
source
Clearly, the hypothesis that Norm Coleman is simply playing a delaying game stands, still, unrejected.
gregladen | April 22, 2009Upcoming nature web carnival deadlines are nicely summarized here. Please attend to these requests for your nature posts.
gregladen | April 22, 2009This is why unions are important and all corporations are inherently evil.
gregladen | April 22, 2009I remember my first Earth Day, which was also The first Earth Day. There was a big lead up to it. Our teachers had us make poster size drawings appropriate for Earth Day. I have no recollection of what I did. But, I do remember putting an air quality measuring device in my back yard and turning it in at the firehouse and getting the building next door busted for burning bad heating oil. I was also armed that summer with a plastic card that I could use to measure smoke quality. I'd wear the card around my neck and go around the city, and whenever I saw a smoke stack belching smoke I'd hold…
gregladen | April 22, 2009Jennifer Jacquet of Shifting Baselines has a new blog, called Guilty Planet.
Go and have a look, and welcome the new blog to the blogosphere!
gregladen | April 22, 2009... or was that Replace Michele Bachmann....
Anyway, the Replace Michele Bachmann Web Carnival is scheduled for the end of the present week, Friday or Saturday. Please get your posts in! Here is the handy dandy submission form. Thank you very much.
gregladen | April 22, 2009This is a sister post to: The Black Forest Inn: Anarchists 2, Scientists 1
Lizzie had said in her email, "Let's meet at the Black Forest Inn. I think you told me you'd never been there. It's a place you might like."
How nice of Lizzie to suggest a new place for me to enjoy. Of course, I had been there many times, most recently for the Science Blogs Millionth Comment Party--so it had been a while. But there was a time when I lived around the corner and came here much more often. So when I met up with Lizzie that night, and we were sitting at the bar in the Black Forest eating our hearty…
gregladen | April 21, 2009South Africans are preparing to go to the polls in what is expected to be the most competitive general election since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Some 20,000 polling stations are due to open at 0500 GMT for the more than 23 million registered voters.
The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is expected to win, but its two-thirds majority is being challenged.
ANC leader Jacob Zuma said the emergence of the opposition Congress of the People had "re-energised" the ANC.
bbc
I remember the first election. I was in Bloomington, Indiana at the conference for the Society of Africanist…
gregladen | April 21, 2009African Union troops are physically disarming 21,000 fighters from Burundi's last active rebel group, the Forces for National Liberation (FNL).
It follows a weekend ceremony where FNL leader Agathon Rwasa symbolically surrendered his own weapons to the AU.
A grenade attack killed six people but the BBC's Prime Ndikumagenge says it was not linked to the rebels.
But he says it shows how many weapons are circulating in Burundi following more than 10 years of ethnic conflict.
bbc
gregladen | April 21, 2009Monica sent me a link to a Faux News story on global warming, which makes the claim that global warming is not real because ice is expanding, and not contracting, in Antarctica. It also makes the claim that 90 percent of the earth's ice and 80 percent of the earth's fresh water is in Antarctica, which I assume is mentioned because it would make Antarctica seem more important than other parts of the world, and thus the "fact" that global warming is not happening there is proof of ... whatever.
I'd like to clarify.
To start with, let's get the fresh water thing straight. Most of the fresh…
gregladen | April 21, 2009The Star Tribune reports that Norm Coleman has filed an appeal with the Minnesota Supreme Court. He did so late Monday. I believe this is nine days after the lower judicial panel's decision, which places this appeal just under the deadline. Clearly, Coleman has a strategy in mind that has little to do with the advancement of Democracy or the representation of Minnesotans. He should be ashamed of himself. But he appears to lack that emotion. Perhaps he was knocked on the head as a kid or something.
gregladen | April 21, 2009... somewhat ironically named Scientia Pro Publica, is a new Blog Carnival started by science blogger GrrlScientist. I think her objective is to create a general science carnival with reinvigorated interest that will give people fingertip access to current blog posts in any and all of the sciences, and this seems to be working. The second edition is now available, and it is one of the better carnivals I've seen.
Please go to Scientia Pro Publica 2, The Science, Nature and Medicine Blog Carnival and then click on all the links so people know you ae out there. In the mean time, do read at…
gregladen | April 20, 2009President Mobotu Sese Seku, Kuku Kibombi, dictator of Zaire and arch typical fascist leader, once shoved a book in my hand, sort of like how Hugo Chavez shoved a book in Obama's hand. Republicans did not mock me as they are now mocking Obama, mainly because I was not President of the United States of America at the time. It was a little embarrassing, but I kept the book. It's called "Mobutu ... something something something." (I wonder if that is the same book Chavez gave to Obama? D'ya think?)
Anyway, the Yahoos are all over Obama because some drone paparazzi copped a photograph of Obama…
gregladen | April 20, 2009In one of the more nauseating passages, [of the recently released torture memos] Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.
These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors' statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for…
gregladen | April 20, 2009You can bank on it, I think. Eric Holder has apparently been moving in that direction, and JD officials were a bit put off on hearing Rahn Emanuel's comments to the contrary. Holder may name an outside counsel to investigate torture.
This is coming from Newsweek via Rachel Maddow.
gregladen | April 20, 2009This is being reported:
President Barack Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies that led to the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday.
[Earlier,] ... he said "it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice, that they will not be subject to prosecution." He did not specifically address the policymakers.
Asked Sunday on ABC's "This Week" about the fate of those officials, Emanuel said the president…
gregladen | April 20, 2009"Hey, look! I've located my first love! Cool, maybe we can go have dinner or something!" ... precisely the words a newlywed husband was hoping to hear from his wife ...
Amanda was sitting on the couch discovering Facebook, a place on the internet she had been assiduously avoiding until only a day or two earlier. Finally, she became convinced that she could do this and keep it under control ... keep her professional life (as a teacher) separate from it (if any of her students are reading this, don't even try to friend her!). It was fun watching her learn the ins and outs, and to reconnect…
gregladen | April 20, 2009Physicist Stephen Hawking, the author of "A Brief History of Time" who is almost completely paralyzed by motor neurone disease, has been urgently admitted to hospital, Cambridge University said on Monday.
Hawking, 67, was taken by ambulance to a local hospital in Cambridge, where he teaches as a professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.
"Professor Hawking is very ill and has been taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke's Hospital," the university said.
details
h/t Ben
gregladen | April 20, 2009...I sat in the bar with the old man from Italy and thought about how much of our common knowledge of historical events is based on the plots of movies. Talking to Vincenzo forced me to step back and question these assumptions that I myself make. If I learn something from a movie, before I convict someone in my own mind, fairness dictates that I research a bit more....
Salieri and Mozart in Vesuvio Saloon @ Quiche Moraine Dot Com