I miss Monica – music/video.
For those of you who are nostalgic for the good old days of . . . oh . . . six years ago, check out this work by Dean Friedman.
“Fixing” the United Nations
We all know the story of the League of Nations. An early, botched attempt at international diplomacy, history tells us it collapsed due to its own lack of authority and under the chaos created by a body of countries all fighting for individual interest, rather than global good. In history classes, we read that the League of Nations proved totally ineffectual, doomed from the start by its own design.
In recent years, such criticisms have likewise fallen upon the League’s replacement, the United Nations. Citing failures such as Iraq’s 17 ignored resolutions since 1991, the corruption behind the Oil for Food Programme, and more recently, the UN’s inability to respond to crises such as the genocide in Darfur and the nuclear development of North Korea, the UN’s critics see the body as both powerless and bogged down in bureaucratic corruption. The UN either needs massive reform, critics say, or we should take John Bolton’s suggestion and blow ten stories off the UN Secretary Building and rid ourselves of the mess.…
Don’t question Bush’s newest “Plan” for Iraq
Bush’s newest “Iraq” plan is to continue bashing those who question this costly war. There’s still no metric and no projection of how many more Iraqi and American deaths will occur or what might be accomplished by those deaths. Only more rhetoric.
As reported by Media Matters, the Bush Administration’s Iraq strategy is truly bizarre. It is not a war strategy at all. It is only a PR strategy and, with very few exceptions, it has been gobbled up by the official stenographer for the Bush Administration: the mainstream media. Here are the official talking points for the “new” Iraq strategy:
What’s especially curious about this “war” strategy” is that it could never have served to justify invading Iraq. Not even neocons could have bought this, could they? It would have been transpararent for all to see back in 2003.
For those who are so currently so numbed to evidence-based reasoning, though, it’s interesting to note that this “Iraq” strategy could actually serve to justify any military endeaver anywhere in the world (just substitute any other country for “Iraq” in the third point). Notice the absence of facts in this strategy–it is actually a highly …
The United States needs a king (or queen).
My father-in-law (now deceased) sometimes commented that the United States needed an aristocracy to give a "face" to our nation. He suggested that this arrangement would allow the power-holding leaders of the United States to spend more time doing the hard work of government in a less ostentatious and more effective…
The real danger of global warming
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine there is a salad bowl sitting (upright) on your kitchen table. Imagine, also, there is a marble resting in the bottom of the salad bowl. If you slightly disturb the marble with your finger, the marble will roll around the bottom of the bowl. If you disturb the marble a bit more, the marble will roll up the side of the bowl and then roll back down to the bottom. In this situation, the marble is said to be in a “stable equilibrium,” because the marble remains inside the bowl (equilibrium) despite reasonable-sized disturbances.
Now, imagine removing the marble from the bowl, turning the bowl upside-down, and resting the marble on the flat base of the bowl. Although the marble will remain within the boundary of the flat base (equilibrium), even a relatively small disturbance will roll the marble off the base, down the side of the bowl, across the kitchen table and onto the floor. In this situation, the marble is said to be in “unstable equilibrium,” because of the tendency of the marble to roll (far) out of position with even a small disturbance. Once on the floor, the marble is again in equilibrium: it will stay on the floor unless some force lifts it back to the tabletop.
Now, let us consider global warming. For tens of thousands of years (and perhaps much longer), our planet has maintained roughly the same average temperature. Yes, there were a few ice ages, but …