Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Michael Yon has been on the front lines for the better part of a decade, but he still has an eye for truly beautiful, mad photography. I've never heard of kishmesh khana before, nor even that Afghanistan had any vineyards to speak of, let alone beautiful, fertile ones like the one Yon was photographing in the middle of a violent, close-quarters infantry campaign. The vineyards sound like the bocage in miniature.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Holy crap! Documentary evidence that the linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure ("no level of radiation exposure is harmless") was established upon systemic & deliberate suppression of contrary experimental results by a Nobel Prize recipient! That there was contrary evidence is not, today, surprising - actual experimental results have demonstrated otherwise since then - but the initial prestige-established no-threshold rule is enshrined by radiation paranoia and institutional inertia.

And the good people wonder why the rest of us are less and less willing to take the scientifically credentialed at their naked word!

h/t Ace of Spades headlines.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

While I agree entirely with Ace's point about this really irritating anti-Stewart piece, it's hard to take
That's true but that is a rather minor problem compared to the first. And, in the scheme of things, someone might be justified in noting that both are comparatively minor problems to obsess about; that media criticism is, necessarily, a relatively trivial pursuit. Add into that that among the various ways one could engage this relatively minor topic, Stewart's chosen the least important way, and that means that for all his influence, his mission itself concerns the most trivial critique in a field that is already rather trivial.

from a guy who spent two obsessive weeks delivering hub-to-hub, time-on-target saturation shelling on the head of a minority-party congressman for using twitter to send pictures of his junk to female admirers. I can't think of a more trivial display by a major right-wing blogger, at least not this year.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Pennsylvania going Nebraska/Maine in the Electoral College? Stupid idea, and it reeks of cowardice on the part of the state GOP- an admission that they're never going to take the state again in a presidential year.

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

There's a lot of chatter this week about the post office going bankrupt. By my count, there are as many as twenty-one unnecessary and excess post offices in Centre County. Every little burg in the hills doesn't need its own staffed office, and there are way too many branch offices in State College. Most of those are probably buildings with one to three walls of post office boxes and a bored staffer holding down a desk. I've never even heard about some of the branch offices in State College. They could easily consolidate those PO boxes into existing structures.
Barack Obama is not unaware of this game. He gets to play elbows out while his opposition has to be doubly careful to avoid anything that is remotely seems racist. In the short term, it is a pain in the ass, but in the long run, it forces conservatives to argue facts, logic and reason — and it actually is quite liberating to be unable to attack the person.

- Don Surber

A pretty sentiment, but I don't know how true it is.

Just a place-holder, to let people know I still live, and haven't been washed downhill.

Yet.