50 marathons in 50 days

Dean Karnazes web site: http://enduranceis.typepad.com/

I'm flying to Indiana tomorrow to run my 42nd marathon state. The following weekend I'll be in Kentucky to run my 43rd... Both are trail marathons... I try to run trail marathons when at all possible these days... Easier recovery...

Marine Life Leaped From Simple to Complex After Greatest Mass Extinction

The greatest “great dying,” 251 million years ago, erased 95 percent of species in the oceans (and most vertebrates on land). But new research suggests that it was followed by an explosion of complexity in marine life, one that has persisted ever since.

My only question is how does this match up with the great flood and a world only 6,000 years old?

Electrons to Enlightenment

I've enjoyed listening on line to this series from "To the best of our Knowledge"

Electrons to Enlightenment: A Five Part Series on Science and Religion.

They talk of an interesting sounding documentary on Cosmic Africa that sounds like it would be worth a look.

Iraq War Links for today

Newsweek: Why the most Dangerous Man in Iraq, Moqtad Al-Sadr will decide our fate.

Booman Tribune: Bobble Head Generals and Iraq Fallout.

EPA IS HASTILY DISPOSING OF ITS LIBRARY COLLECTIONS

Bushevics are scurrying to hide the evidence.

Washington, DC — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is frantically dispersing its library collections to preempt Congressional intervention, according to internal emails released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Contrary to promises by EPA Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock that all of the former library materials will be made available electronically, vast troves of unique technical reports and analyses will remain indefinitely inaccessible.

Iraq War Links for today

Death Squads infiltrate Iraqi Police.

Iraq: Handicapping the Baker Report, Part Two

Maureen Dowd says: After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and give an interview headlined: “If I did it, here’s how the civil war in Iraq happened.”

The Last Throes of the Insurgency

Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska (R) has this excellent piece: Leaving Iraq, Honorably.

Eric Schlosser in Sierra Club Magazine

Cheap Food Nation

Eric Schlosser: "Changing your eating habits can send ripples far and wide."

WHENEVER A WELL-KNOWN ATHLETE gets caught using anabolic steroids to run faster, pedal harder, or hit a baseball farther, there's a universal chorus of disapproval. Most Americans regard steroid use in sports as an unhealthy form of cheating. Under federal law, all performance-enhancing synthetic hormones are class III controlled substances; obtaining them without a prescription is a felony. Steroid users may suffer from a wide variety of physical and mental ailments, some of them irreversible--and the long-term effects of the drugs are unknown.

Meanwhile, for the past two decades, a number of the same steroids abused by athletes have been given to U.S. cattle on a massive scale. Without much publicity or government concern, growth hormones like testosterone are routinely administered to about 80 percent of the nation's feedlot cattle, accelerating their weight gain and making them profitable to slaughter at a younger age. The practice is legal in the United States but banned throughout the European Union, due to concerns about its effect on human health. A recent study by Danish scientists suggested that hormone residues in U.S. beef may be linked to high rates of breast and prostate cancer, as well as to early-onset puberty in girls. Hormone residues excreted in manure also wind up in rivers and streams. A 2003 study of male minnows downstream from one Nebraska feedlot found that many of them had unusually small testes. When female minnows in a laboratory were exposed to trenbolone--a synthetic hormone widely administered to cattle--they developed male sex organs.

Dollar falls to 19 month low against Euro

Watch for more of this in the near future. A budget deficit that has ballooned from $4T in 2000 to $9T today and a trade deficit of $800B/yr and climbing is the reason. Tax cuts for the top 1%, constant war, and a dim bulb prez contribute to our demise.

Things that can't go on forever Don't!!

Dollar falls to 19 month low.

Global Warming and Peak Oil Links

NASA's Dr. James Hansen speaks the truth on global warming despite the attempts of administration Luddites to suppress him.

The Oil Drum: Europe: Analysis and Discussion of the European Energy Gap and Peak Oil

The Oil Drum: Discussions about energy and our future.

TheOilDrum.Com

 

Navajos' desert cleanup no more than a mirage

LA Times:

Church Rock Mine, N.M. -- Most of the mining companies that drilled, dug and blasted for uranium on the Navajo reservation during the Cold War did nothing to repair the environmental damage they left behind. For a time, tribal leaders staked their hopes for a cleanup on Superfund, the landmark legislation that forces polluters to pay for remediation of toxic sites.

More than 1,000 abandoned mines are scattered across the Navajo homeland, which covers 27,000 square miles in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico.

Backstory: The unvarnished Gore Vidal

From the Christian Science Monitor:

It was just an ordinary day in the journalistic trenches when I got the call. "Gore Vidal has a new book out ... would you like to interview him?" said the voice on the other end of the phone, a well-known Los Angeles publicist.

"Isn't he the guy famous for saying, "It's not enough to succeed. Others must fail?" I asked.

"That's the one," she said.

"The one who said, 'I had never wanted to meet most of the people I had met, and the fact that I never got to know most of them took dedication and steadfastness on my part?"

"That's him," she answered.

"Sounds like a lovely opportunity," I said. "I'll take it."

OK, it didn't happen quite that way. But like everyone - like some people, anyway - I thought I knew who Gore Vidal was, at least on the surface: literary lion, scold, verbal jester, and political screed writer. To double-check my memory, I went on Wikipedia (just to make sure the upstart website was up to snuff):

Author of 25 novels, six plays, 200 essays, and several screenplays. Check. An early novel, "The City and the Pillar," and a later sexual farce, "Myra Breckinridge," credited with pushing the envelope of sexuality in modern literature. Check. Historical novels ranging from the Roman Empire ("Julian") to the birth of the American republic ("Burr") garnered wide respect among historians, and his "United States: Essays 1952-1992" won the 1993 National Book Award. Tried politics in the distant past. Check, check, and check.

Tomgram: Mark Danner, How a War of Unbound Fantasies Happened

Tom Dispatch makes one of the longest pieces ever done in the New York Review of Books available on-line. The print version will come out in the December 21st edition. If you are interested in understanding how we blundered into the Iraq Quagmire, spend some time reading this excellent piece: Iraq the War of the Imagination.

Missing Votes in FL-13 Favored Dems

The group of nearly 18,000 voters that registered no choice in Sarasota's disputed congressional election solidly backed Democratic candidates in all five of Florida's statewide races, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of ballot data shows.

Among these voters, even the weakest Democrat - agriculture commissioner candidate Eric Copeland - outpaced a much-better-known Republican incumbent by 551 votes.

The trend, which continues up the ticket to the race for governor and US Senate, suggests that if votes were truly cast and lost - as Democrat Christine Jennings maintains - they were votes that likely cost her the congressional election.

Live forever

Kurzweil: Computers Will Enable People To Live Forever

John Muir: Conservationist

The Scot who saved nature

John Muir, 1838-1914

The Scotsman

Restore Hetchy Hetchy

Clear Evidence 2006 Congressional Elections Hacked

Clear Evidence 2006 Congressional Elections Hacked

Results skewed nationwide in favor of Republicans by 4 percent, 3 million votes.

A major undercount of Democratic votes and an overcount of Republican votes in US House and Senate races across the country is indicated by an analysis of national exit polling data, by the Election Defense Alliance (EDA), a national election integrity organization.

These findings have led EDA to issue an urgent call for further investigation into the 2006 election results and a moratorium on deployment of all electronic election equipment.

"We see evidence of pervasive fraud, but apparently calibrated to political conditions existing before recent developments shifted the political landscape," said attorney Jonathan Simon, co-founder of Election Defense Alliance, "so 'the fix' turned out not to be sufficient for the actual circumstances." Explained Simon, "When you set out to rig an election, you want to do just enough to win. The greater the shift from expectations, (from exit polling, pre-election polling, demographics) the greater the risk of exposure--of provoking investigation. What was plenty to win on October 1 fell short on November 7.

Run, Al, Run

From an interview of Al Gore in GQ via Suburban Guerilla:

Q. Really? How about all the warnings?

A. That’s a separate question. And it’s almost too easy to say, “I would have heeded the warnings.” In fact, I think I would have, I know I would have. We had several instances when the CIA’s alarm bells went off, and what we did when that happened was, we had emergency meetings and called everybody together and made sure that all systems were go and every agency was hitting on all cylinders, and we made them bring more information, and go into the second and third and fourth level of detail. And made suggestions on how we could respond in a more coordinated, more effective way. It is inconceivable to me that Bush would read a warning as stark and as clear [voice angry now] as the one he received on August 6th of 2001, and, according to some of the new histories, he turned to the briefer and said, “Well, you’ve covered your ass.” And never called a follow up meeting. Never made an inquiry. Never asked a single question. To this day, I don’t understand it. And, I think it’s fair to say that he personally does in fact bear a measure of blame for not doing his job at a time when we really needed him to do his job. And now the Woodward book has this episode that has been confirmed by the record that George Tenet, who was much abused by this administration, went over to the White House for the purpose of calling an emergency meeting and warning as clearly as possible about the extremely dangerous situation with Osama bin Laden, and was brushed off!

And I don’t know why—honestly—I mean, I understand how horrible this Congressman Foley situation with the instant messaging is, okay? I understand that. But, why didn’t these kinds of things produce a similar outrage? And you know, I’m even reluctant to talk about it in these terms because it’s so easy for people to hear this or read this as sort of cheap political game-playing. I understand how it could sound that way. [Practically screaming now] But dammit, whatever happened to the concept of accountability for catastrophic failure? This administration has been by far the most incompetent, inept, and with more moral cowardice, and obsequiousness to their wealthy contributors, and obliviousness to the public interest of any administration in modern history, and probably in the entire history of the country!

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China’s Path to Modernity, Mirrored in a Troubled River - New York Times

For centuries, the Yellow River symbolized the greatness and sorrows of China’s ancient civilization, as emperors equated controlling the river and taming its catastrophic floods with controlling China. Now, the river is a very different symbol — of the dire state of China’s limited resources at a time when the country’s soaring economic growth needs more of everything.

“The Yellow River flows through all these densely populated parts of northern China,” said Liu Shiyin, a scientist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Without water in northern China, people can’t survive. And the economic development that has been going on cannot continue.”

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Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera English

is now on the airwaves.

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