May 27, 2012

Sunday's Doonesbury - Helping Veterans

May 27, 2012

Toon- The many uses of police drones

May 26, 2012

NYPD Catches Sexual Assailant, Then Lets Him Go Free Because He Didn't Feel Like Being Questioned

Good news, criminals: You can sexually assault someone, get caught, decide you simply don’t feel like being questioned right at this moment and then walk free. Or at least those are the rules the NYPD plays by:

New York’s Finest, right here.

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/935266/nypd_catches_sexual_assailant%2C_then_lets_him_go_free_because_he_didn%27t_feel_like_being_questioned/

May 26, 2012

Climate Armageddon: How the World's Weather Could Quickly Run Amok

By Fred Guterl | May 25, 2012


The eminent British scientist James Lovelock, back in the 1970s, formulated his theory of Gaia, which held that the Earth was a kind of super organism. It had a self-regulating quality that would keep everything within that narrow band that made life possible. If things got too warm or too cold—if sunlight varied, or volcanoes caused a fall in temperatures, and so forth—Gaia would eventually compensate. This was a comforting notion. It was also wrong, as Lovelock himself later concluded. "I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilization are in grave danger," he wrote in the Independent in 2006.

The world has warmed since those heady days of Gaia, and scientists have grown gloomier in their assessment of the state of the world's climate. NASA climate scientist James Hanson has warned of a "Venus effect," in which runaway warming turns Earth into an uninhabitable desert, with a surface temperature high enough to melt lead, sometime in the next few centuries. Even Hanson, though, is beginning to look downright optimistic compared to a new crop of climate scientists, who fret that things could head south as quickly as a handful of years, or even months, if we're particularly unlucky. Ironically, some of them are intellectual offspring of Lovelock, the original optimist gone sour.

The true gloomsters are scientists who look at climate through the lens of "dynamical systems," a mathematics that describes things that tend to change suddenly and are difficult to predict. It is the mathematics of the tipping point—the moment at which a "system" that has been changing slowly and predictably will suddenly "flip." The colloquial example is the straw that breaks that camel's back. Or you can also think of it as a ship that is stable until it tips too far in one direction and then capsizes. In this view, Earth's climate is, or could soon be, ready to capsize, causing sudden, perhaps catastrophic, changes. And once it capsizes, it could be next to impossible to right it again.


more
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-worlds-weather-could-quickly-run-amok

May 26, 2012

Engine Could Boost Fuel Economy by 50%

BY KEVIN BULLIS

Delphi, a major parts supplier to automakers, is developing an engine technology that could improve the fuel economy of gas-powered cars by 50 percent, potentially rivaling the performance of hybrid vehicles while costing less. A test engine based on the technology is similar in some ways to a highly efficient diesel engine, but runs on gasoline.

The company has demonstrated the technology in a single-piston test engine under a wide range of operating conditions. It is beginning tests on a multicylinder engine that will more closely approximate a production engine. Its fuel economy estimates suggest that engines based on the technology could be far more efficient than even diesel engines. Those estimates are based on simulations of how a midsized vehicle would perform with a multicylinder version of the new engine.

The Delphi technology is the latest attempt by researchers to combine the best qualities of diesel and gasoline engines. Diesel engines are 40 to 45 percent efficient in using the energy in fuel to propel a vehicle, compared to roughly 30 percent efficiency for gasoline engines. But diesel engines are dirty and require expensive exhaust-treatment technology to meet emissions regulations.

For decades, researchers have attempted to run diesel-like engines on gasoline to achieve high efficiency with low emissions. Such engines might be cheaper than hybrid technology, since they don't require a large battery and electric motor.

more

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/40422/?p1=MstRcnt

May 26, 2012

Crazy Conspiracy Theorists

by Clay Jones
Now that the facts are out that federal spending under Obama has NOT increased at a rate Republicans have been claiming, they’re going to stop saying it. HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Not really. They’ll continue with that lie just like they do about Obama’s apology tour.

Yes, it’s true. If you measure the rate federal spending has increased since Eisenhower was president, Obama comes in dead last at 1.4%. After Obama Ike comes in second at 3.6% and Clinton comes in third at 4.0%. And for you conservatives out there, Reagan comes in at 8.6% and George W. Bush comes in at 5.8%. This is going to be something Republicans will refuse to believe, no matter how true it is.

The narrative that’s plagued Democrats for years is that they tax and spend. They don’t tax and spend anymore than Republicans do….in fact, they spend less. The problem for Democrats is that the GOP is better at spinning lies than they are.

Now if Republicans want to gripe, they can say Obama doesn’t deserve all the credit for the low spending. That would be accurate. He wanted to spend more but Congress wouldn’t let him. But the fact is spending has not increased under Obama. Most spending in his first term (he’ll have a second) came in his first year from Bush’s programs. Yes, blaming Bush again…but why ignore it?

Have fun with that, my GOP friends. Don’t believe me? Have a look for yourself at politifact.
http://blogs.fredericksburg.com/toontalk/2012/05/25/crazy-conspiracy-theorists/

May 26, 2012

Paul Krugman- The New Political Correctness (Newspeak)

Remember the furor over liberal political correctness? Yes, some of it was over the top — but it was mainly silly, not something that actually warped our national discussion.

Today, however, the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which — unlike the liberal version — has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of Newspeak: to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order.

Thus, even talking about “the wealthy” brings angry denunciations; we’re supposed to call them “job creators”. Even talking about inequality is “class warfare”.

And then there’s the teaching of history. Eric Rauchway has a great post about attacks on the history curriculum, in which even talking about “immigration and ethnicity” or “environmental history” becomes part of a left-wing conspiracy. As he says, he’ll name his new course “US History: The Awesomeness of Awesome Americans.” That, after all, seems to be the only safe kind of thing to say.

more

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/26/the-new-political-correctness/

May 26, 2012

Canada kills entire ocean pollution monitoring program

BY CINDY E. HARNETT,
VICTORIA TIMES COLONIST MAY 22, 2012

Canada's only marine mammal toxicologist at the Institute of Ocean Sciences on Vancouver Island is losing his job as the federal government cuts almost all employees who monitor ocean pollution across Canada.

Peter Ross, an expert on killer whales and other marine mammals, was the lead author of a report 10 years ago that demonstrated Canada's killer whales are the most contaminated marine mammals on the planet. He has more than 100 published reports.

Now, he's a casualty of federal budget cuts, one of 75 people across Canada told Thurs-day his services will no longer be needed because the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is closing the nation's contaminants program.

In total, 1,075 people working for the Department of Fisheries received letters Thursday telling them that their jobs will be redundant or affected - including 215 in the Pacific Region.



Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Ottawa+axes+ocean+pollution+monitoring+program/6657341/story.html

May 26, 2012

Toon - Any help for the post-born?

May 25, 2012

Lack of Funding Forces Heartland to End Climate Denial Conference

The Heartland Institute has announced that this year’s climate denial conference will be its last for the foreseeable future. In his closing speech at this year’s event in Chicago, Heartland President Joseph Bast said that financial troubles are preventing the organization from putting on another event.

“I hope to see you at a future conference, but at this point we have no plans to do another ICCC,” said Bast, addressing the remaining attendees this afternoon.

The International Conference on Climate Change is a yearly gathering of climate change deniers and disinformers — mostly hardcore libertarians — who attempt to spread doubts about climate science.
Earlier this month, Heartland posted a billboard that compared believers in global warming with the unibomber. The campaign set off a firestorm of criticism that caused a split within the organization and ended with 11 of Heartland’s donors pulling support for the organization — taking an estimated 35% its corporate revenue for 2012.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/23/489452/lack-of-funding-forces-heartland-to-end-climate-denial-conference/