Motley Moose – Archive

Independents would rather have Charlie Sheen as their POTUS instead of Sarah Palin.

http://publicpolicypolling.blo…

“We’ve found a lot of brutal poll numbers for Sarah Palin so far in 2011: down in South Dakota, down in South Carolina, down in Arizona, only up by 1 point in Texas, only up by 1 point in Nebraska to name a few. But this has to be the worst-independent voters say they would support Charlie Sheen over Palin for President by a 41/36 margin.”

Who would I vote for?

If you only had these 2 choices and you had to vote.

I finally chose Sheen because he’d probably choose a VP who would do the POTUS thing while he bangs 7 gram rocks. With Palin she’d probably nuke somebody and somebody would nuke us and we’d all be dead. I’d rather my prez be doing coke than destroying the world.

So if you had to vote for POTUS.

Who would you choose?

Some of you may know that I am an avid poetry reader. It is a passion my mother instilled in me at an early age by reading me her favorites, like Blake and Shakespeare and Keats, when I was a kid. But the poetry collections to be found in my childhood home were not nearly extensive enough, and much of my library time as a kid was spent digging through old poetry volumes looking for new and interesting things. Beyond the esteemed Langston Hughes, African American poets were not very well showcased in the sricki household when I was younger. My mom was a British literature addict, so you were much more likely to find D. H. Lawrence on our shelves than Maya Angelou. While it was unfortunate in many ways that there was a general paucity of poetry authored by African Americans in my home growing up… at the same time it enabled me to make many an exciting discovery as I sought out new poetic frontiers.

I could ramble about poets all week, but for now I thought I’d just showcase three of my favorite African American poets. The three you’ll find below are certainly very widely known, but I steered clear of Angelou and Hughes specifically because they are so well known by evvvvvverybody. Maybe not everyone is as intimately familiar with Paul Laurence Dunbar, Phillis Wheatley, and Countee Cullen. All three are of tremendous historical importance, authors of stirring poetry, and were taken from this world far too soon (all before the age of 45).

It’s a fair point. As the sound of anti-craft fire combined with the distant crumps of explosions disturb the Libyan night, it’s a fair point: are we celebrating death? Are we cheering on exactly the same kind of indiscriminate slaughter which was unleashed in Vietnam and Cambodia, and more recently in Iraq? Democracy, founded on debate and dissent, should never try to silence those questions. It should ask them. Ask them of ourselves, and those in Government, or the Armed Forces, who seek to represent and defend us.

But for once, this isn’t about us. The uprisings in the Maghreb and Mashriq, the revolutions in the Arab World from Morocco to Yemen, Tunisia to Syria, have not been led by us. It’s a spring awakening, as important as 1968 or 1848.

On my walk today, I saw a license plate subheader that read “Fight Terrorism.”

And I thought to myself, isn’t that what they want?

Polar stratospheric clouds (shown) have formed over large areas of the Arctic, which could signal coming losses of protective ozone, new research suggests.

Credit: Ross J. Salawitch/University of Maryland

Science News

Trioxygen, more commonly known as Ozone (O₃), is a polar molecule consisting of three oxygen atoms. It is a pale blue gas found throughout the atmosphere, and depending on its location, it can be noxious or beneficial.

In the troposphere (the lowest portion of the Earth’s atmosphere) it is considered a pollutant, and is formed by the reactions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxide gases (NOx) in the presence of sunlight. These compounds and gases are produced by numerous sources, from human-made causes such as industrial emissions and gasoline fumes, to natural phenomenon such as the emission of compounds like isoprene or pinene by different types of trees. Ground-level ozone is harmful to breathe, damaging to crops, and is a primary ingredient of what we call smog.

Beneficial ozone is produced naturally in the stratosphere, particularly the “bottom” portion, commonly called the ozone layer. It serves as a sort of “barrier,” absorbing over 97% of the ultraviolet light emanating from the sun which can be damaging to life on Earth. Ozone depletion (resulting in the formation of ozone “holes”) has a plethora of negative effects on humans, other animals, and vegetation.

Ozone hole around South Pole in 2003. View of the South Pole from NASA’s TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer) satellite. Blue and green indicate relatively large amounts of ozone. Red and yellow mark the “ozone hole”, an area of decreased ozone. (Credit: NASA)

Science Daily

(This diary is written by an American expat living in the European Union who is a male business librarian who holds a graduate library degree (MLS) and a Master’s degree in business administration in marketing).

This diary written in support of library funding discusses the GOP led class warfare full throated assault on library funding, because they’ve decided that libraries are the last truly fully socialized government institution in America.  

Book burnings couldn’t destroy the library, nor could banning books, nor could the ignorance or superstition of the Dark Ages or the branding iron of the inquisition calling certain texts heretical. Libraries have withstood the test of time and great historical disasters, such as the burning of the great library of Alexandria. All cultures even in antiquity value the libraries. Imagine the great libraries and ancient scrolls of Egypt. Let’s also remember the revolution of the Gutenberg printing press, removing economic barriers in creating affordable books. Libraries are where Western and Eastern philosophy have met seamlessly. But now libraries face the greatest threat in all history. It’s not the Internet, nor is it any of the things I’ve listed. It’s you not standing up to the for-profit motive in fee for service librarianship, which constitutes a de facto form of economic censorship, that threatens yet once again to render the masses functionally illiterate by creating a class of information haves and a class of information have nots, by de facto undoing the revolutionary work of the Gutenberg presses, which removed economic barriers to information for the masses.

Let’s consider the fact that some controversial studies have revealed that the majority of the 6 billion people on the planet are barely literate or functionally illiterate. Let’s consider that the hi-tech US military has most of its manuals written at the 9th grade reading level. Let’s consider that social scientists through voluminous studies have formed a strong nexus between crime and low literacy rates, and that in America as we have 2 million people incarcerated, that we have incarcerated nearly more people than exist in the military. Can we really afford this type of staggering loss of human potential? Can we really afford to stand by and watch the end of library public funding grow ever closer and for most people to continue to do nothing!  

As the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant recedes from mainstream media coverage the situation is presumed to be stabilising, largely because TEPCO and the Japanese government have confined themselves to positive news regarding cooling operations and the restoration of mains electricity power to the site.

Recently we have had reports of some food and water contamination in Fukushima Prefecture and reassurances that the situation is not worsening at the four crippled reactors and that radiation levels are remaining low.  The story, as far as the media is concerned, has largely become one of human interest regarding the clearly heroic efforts of staff and volunteers at the site.  But serious questions remain unanswered and largely unmentioned, specifically regarding the most threatening risks at the plant:

Edward Morse, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, added that it will take huge amounts of water to compensate for the cracks in the containment pools that were uncovered by U.S. surveillance aircraft on Friday.

“The best thing to do is use as much of the Pacific Ocean as possible,” he said.

Ralph Vartabedian, W J Hennigan and Thomas H Maugh II What are the options for containing Fukushima’s radioactive emissions? LAT via Bellingham Herald 18 Mar 11

Say what?  “Cracks in the containment pools that were uncovered by U.S. surveillance aircraft on Friday?”

Transcript from The Journeying Progressive’s speech today (downtown Kansas City, MO):

“Good afternoon. It is dark right now in the nation of Libya. For the past month, the world has watched a selfish dictator brutally suppress the protests of a people in crisis. Today, the United States and her allies have said “Enough.”

By: Inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

Wisconsin, the badger state, constitutes a perennial battleground state. Like many of its Midwestern neighbors, the state leans Democratic but remains readily willing to vote Republican. While voting for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama by double-digit margins, the state also came within one percent – twice – of voting for Republican candidate George W. Bush.

These voting patterns have quite interesting historical roots. Indeed, they stretch back for more than a century.

To examine these roots, let’s first take a look at a map of German immigration patterns in 1890:

More below.

Intervention in Libya begins. French warplanes have now begun to take out Kadaffi’s assets on the ground.

Image Popa Matumula

French warplanes have hit four tanks used by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi on the outskirts of the opposition stronghold of Benghazi, on a day when opposition fighters in the city reported coming under constant artillery and mortar fire.

The action marks the first international military move against the Libyan leader, and it comes a day after the UN Security Council authorised a no-fly zone over the North African country.

A spokesman for the French military had confirmed that his country’s fighter jets have attacked another vehicle belonging to Gaddafi’s forces.

“The vehicle was clearly identified as being enemy,” army spokesman Colonel Thierry Burckhard said after the first UN-mandated air strike, describing the target as “a vehicle that was threatening the civilian population”.

* Editor’s note: The live blog takes place in the comment section.