Because in case you have heard, the most credible believer in alien/human encounters since Dennis Kucinich has been recently thrust into the public eye. Actually, as an Apollo 14 spacedude who chilled on the surface of the moon for nine hours, he is a helluva lot more credible than Kucinich on these issues. His name is
Dr. Edgar Mitchell. Here’s what he has to say:
Oh yeah by the way he grew up in Roswell, NM. Oh, and he’s also into some far out stuff, like
dyadic models of consciousness. At any rate, after Mitchell recently renewed his claims that folks within the government were secretly covering up over 60 years of extraterrestrial contact, NASA released a delicately worded statement lauding Mitchell as a great American and “disagreeing with his opinions.”
A little more context - some of the more credible (eg less easily explained)
UFO sightings in recent memory
occurred over Texas earlier this year, with all the fanfare and t-shirt sales you might expect from a small town’s encounter with Aliens/international media.
So what’s up? Because talking about aliens in a serious way is so deeply coded to mean you are crazy (which is why asking Denny K the question during the presidential debate was a way to de-legitimize him), I almost hesitate to continue. But since the
New York Times broke the ice today with a pretty rational, national security-related argument for investigating UFOs, perhaps the time is right.
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Remember Y6B, the year when the global population hit 6 billion? Wasn’t that, like, a month ago?
Turns out it was actually 9 years ago, in 1999. So, according to the J-Curve, we’re about
due for another billion.
The world’s population will reach 7 billion in 2012, even as the global community struggles to satisfy its appetite for natural resources, according to a new government projection. There are 6.7 billion people in the world today.
The world’s population surpassed 6 billion in 1999, meaning it will take only 13 years to add a billion people.
By comparison, the number of people didn’t reach 1 billion until 1800, said Carl Haub, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau. It didn’t reach 2 billion until 130 years later.
Meanwhile, some oversexed Massachusetts 15 year olds have entered a
“pregnancy or bust” pact, which is totally not helping.
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For some reason, it takes
fancily-worded articles in the New York Times for my family and friends to realize what I’ve been hollering about for years… America’s addiction to incarceration. Anyway, props to Adam Liptak for consistently bringing these issues to public eye. Today, Liptak sheds light on an important and staggering statistic: that the US, with 5% of the world’s population, incarcerates nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners. He writes:
Indeed, the United States
leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Oh, and speaking of crimes that would not produce prison sentences in other countries,
scope my bit on how lil’ Rhody incarcerates its debtors in this week’s Phoenix.
A vast ice shelf hanging on by a thin strip looks to be the next chunk to break off from the Antarctic Peninsula, the latest sign of global warming’s impact on Earth’s southernmost continent.
Scientists are shocked by the
rapid change of events.
Glaciologist Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado was monitoring satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and spotted a huge iceberg measuring 25 miles by 1.5 miles that appeared to have broken away from the shelf.
As the democrats spend their time bashing each others’ brains in, and McCain slowly loses his, the planet is literally falling apart. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the actual consequences of events like this, but it seems like two results are obvious. 1) A short term drop in the price of a
bag of ice at your local convenience store, and 2) rising sea levels.
One is a joke, the other is a harbinger of global economic and human disaster. Guess ‘em!
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Which one is Ben Stein? Here he is in the Projo,
going off on Darwinism. And here he is on O’Reilly:
Stein gets this right (while taking on the tone of the godless evolutionist
Christopher Hitchens):
Maybe we would have a new theory: We are just pitiful humans. Life is unimaginably complex. We are still trying to figure it out. We need every bit of input we can get. Let’s be humble about what we know and what we don’t know, and maybe in time, some answers will come.
But how does that jibe with broad assertions of Creationism, predicated on nothing?
He had been scheduled to speak in Providence on Tuesday. Their Foreign Minister says they hope to reschedule ASAP:
Bolivia:
Evo Puts off US Visit
La Paz, Feb 23 (Prensa Latina) Bolivian President Evo Morales called off his announced trip to the United States in order to focus on aiding victims of the weather La Nina phenomenon.
He made the announcement on Friday at the Government Palace, where he presented several decrees to aid victims of the flooding of the Bolivian Amazon River.
For a different take on Castro’s resignation, one that the mainstream press can’t really offer, check out this tidbit from the folks over at
History is a Weapon:
We hang with the anarchists, we’ve got a whole stack of Spanish Civil War books on the shelf and are quick to argue the possibility and beauty in an anarchist world. Occasionally, we drink with the liberals and we hang with every sect of lefty faction, including the world renowned communist factionalist league. But some of them anarchists grit their teeth when they hear us talk about Cuba. We love Cuba. A quick sail from the deepest south, a plantation society was overthrown.
This is
a big deal. Though that it is a big deal is somewhat contradictory: Either Castro was the titular head of a movement, or he wasn’t. If he was, he mattered in that he was a function of his popular support. If he wasn’t, then he was a straight-up despot with no legitimacy.
A 14-day-old infant traveling here for heart surgery died at Honolulu International Airport on Friday after he, his mother and a nurse were detained by immigration officials in a locked room, a lawyer for the boy’s family said.
The Honolulu medical examiner’s office yesterday identified the infant as Michael Futi of Tafuna, American Samoa’s largest village, which is located on the east coast of Tutuila Island. Autopsy findings have been deferred.
Linc Chafee and James Green introduce it in the Projo, with a great op-ed:
Although mostly it is the presidents of each country that garner media attention — particularly Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales — there is much more to the picture than presidents. In the 10 years of the Chávez government in Venezuela, literacy has increased from 85 percent of the population to 99 percent. Health clinics now appear in even the poorest neighborhoods, granting access to free treatment. While these programs are not perfect, they represent a return to focus on social development, rather than exclusively economic development, a trend that is becoming increasingly popular in the region.
Explaining these trends as authoritarian populism, as some critics do, is insufficient, and it suggests that Venezuelan and Bolivian voters are unsophisticated dupes. American editorialists and political leaders too often fail to take seriously Bolivians’ and Venezuelans’ criticisms and deep frustration with the failed economic and social policies that have put their countries under stress and deepened inequality. The current governments are offering an alternative, whether we agree or not with the form it takes.
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