WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global warming, setting up what could be one of the court's most important decisions on the environment.

The decision means the court will address whether the administration's decision to rely on voluntary measures to combat climate change are legal under federal clean air laws.

"This is the whole ball of wax. This will determine whether the Environmental Protection Agency is to regulate greenhouse gases from cars and whether EPA can regulate carbon dioxide from power plants," said David Bookbinder, an attorney for the Sierra Club.

Bookbinder said if the court upholds the administration's argument it also could jeopardize plans by California and 10 other states, including most of the Northeast, to require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles.

There was no immediate comment from either the EPA or White House on the court's action.

"Fundamentally, we don't think carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and so we don't think these attempts are a good idea," said John Felmy, chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group representing oil and gas producers.

If the Supreme Court agrees with the plantiffs, I will simultaneously have a stroke and heart attack. Bush has two stooges on the Court -- how can we possibly expect them to rule against him? Moreover, who in their right mind would expect him to rule against the oil and gas lobbyists? This is a simple mathematical identity with environmentalists (and anyone with a brain) on the losing side.

-janelane, CO2 pessimist

CNN.com - Supreme Court takes on global warming - Jun 26, 2006

"The first step towards gravitational wave astronomy has been taken."

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Lab tuned to gravity's 'ripples'

OMG Steven Colbert is just a screaming genius. lol

This is funny.

Congressman that sponsored 10 commandments bill asked to name the 10 commandments

This tracks names by boys and girls based on popularity (birth) - type in any name and see the rise and fall. Using data like this it looks like you could predict someone's age +/- 5 years just based on the popularity of their name. Try it out with the names of people you know.

Names visualizer (Java)

The Earth is the hottest it has been in at least 400 years, probably even longer. The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia."
A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is running a fever and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.

BREITBART.COM - Study Says Earth's Temp at 400-Year High

The Road From K Street to Yusufiya

By FRANK RICH

AS the remains of two slaughtered American soldiers, Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker and Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, were discovered near Yusufiya, Iraq, on Tuesday, a former White House official named David Safavian was convicted in Washington on four charges of lying and obstruction of justice. The three men had something in common: all had enlisted in government service in a time of war. The similarities end there. The difference between Mr. Safavian's kind of public service and that of the soldiers says everything about the disconnect between the government that has sabotaged this war and the brave men and women who have volunteered in good faith to fight it.

Privates Tucker and Menchaca made the ultimate sacrifice. Their bodies were so mutilated that they could be identified only by DNA. Mr. Safavian, by contrast, can be readily identified by smell. His idea of wartime sacrifice overseas was to chew over government business with the Jack Abramoff gang while on a golfing junket in Scotland. But what's most indicative of Mr. Safavian's public service is not his felonies in the Abramoff-Tom DeLay axis of scandal, but his legal activities before his arrest. In his DNA you get a snapshot of the governmental philosophy that has guided the war effort both in Iraq and at home (that would be the Department of Homeland Security) and doomed it to failure.

Mr. Safavian, a former lobbyist, had a hand in federal spending, first as chief of staff of the General Services Administration and then as the White House's chief procurement officer, overseeing a kitty of some $300 billion (plus $62 billion designated for Katrina relief). He arrived to help enforce a Bush management initiative called "competitive sourcing." Simply put, this was a plan to outsource as much of government as possible by forcing federal agencies to compete with private contractors and their K Street lobbyists for huge and lucrative assignments. The initiative's objective, as the C.E.O. administration officially put it, was to deliver "high-quality services to our citizens at the lowest cost."

The result was low-quality services at high cost: the creation of a shadow government of private companies rife with both incompetence and corruption. Last week Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who commissioned the first comprehensive study of Bush administration contracting, revealed that the federal procurement spending supervised for a time by Mr. Safavian had increased by $175 billion between 2000 and 2005. (Halliburton contracts alone, unsurprisingly, went up more than 600 percent.) Nearly 40 cents of every dollar in federal discretionary spending now goes to private companies.

In this favor-driven world of fat contracts awarded to the well-connected, Mr. Safavian was only an aspiring consigliere. He was not powerful enough or in government long enough to do much beyond petty reconnaissanc... [ Read More (0.8k in body) ]

The Road From K Street to Yusufiya - New York Times

The Tragedy of the Leaves

I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,
the potted plants yellow as corn;
my woman was gone
and the empty bottles like bled corpses
surrounded me with their uselessness;
the sun was still good, though,
and my landlady's note cracked in fine and
undemanding yellowness; what was needed now
was a good comedian, andcient style, a jester
with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd
because it exists, nothing more;
I shaved carefully with an old razor
the man who had once been young and
said to have genius; but
that's the tragedy of the leaves,
the dead ferns, the dead plants;
and I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world has failed us
both.

My favorite Bukowski Poem.

The Tragedy of the Leaves : Charles Bukowski

For the past 30 years the greatest novelists writing in English have been genre writers: John le Carr�, George Higgins and Patrick O'Brian.

I am a total science fiction fan on the whole however this year i've been delving into other literary mines for my gold
John le Carre i know from my childhood when my grandmother read his novels and a vague recollection of TV serialisations being required viewing. John le Carre is a brilliant writer and I've enjoyed several of his novels this year especially the Smiley trilogy.
And a week or so ago I started Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian. I remember talk about him when he died and thought at the time yes i must read some and promptly forgot his name but an impression remained of a writer of naval stories during the great age of sail who was very admired and rich in authentic detail. Then last week I was reading the paper between calls at work when Patrick O'Brian's name was mentioned.
The article memed is an old one from when Patrick O'Brian died but it is by David Mamet, who I greatly admire, and is a defence of genre fiction and pleasure in literature.
To be enlightened and educated by a novel is good but principally I read to be entertained and enthralled by a narritive. Art should be a byproduct and not an aim. I have no faith in those who seek to create art, that is the road to pretension. Give me art by sleight of hand. Give me a writer who is not grandstanding their technique but is in the tradition of Homer, telling a story.

The Humble Genre Novel, Sometimes Full of Genius

Many boomer parents carefully planned and fiercely protected their children, according to Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, by Neil Howe and William Strauss.
They saw their youngsters as "special," and they sheltered them. Parents outfitted their cars with Baby on Board stickers. They insisted their children wear bicycle helmets, knee pads and elbow guards. They scheduled children's every hour with organized extracurricular activities. They led the PTA and developed best-friend-like relationships with their children, says Mastrodicasa, co-author of a book on millennials.

Dear Mom and Dad,
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for not doing ANY of the above!
Love,
Your well-adjusted adult daughter.

Mommy, tell my professor he's not nice!

Thirty years ago, a young biologist set out to explain some new ideas in evolutionary biology to a wider audience. But he ended up restating Darwinian theory in such a broad and forceful way that his book has influenced specialists as well.

Inspiring Evolutionary Thought, and a New Title, by Turning Genetics Into Prose - New York Times