born live love die

New York Times has endorsed Ned Lamont for the Democratic Party.

As Mr. Lieberman sees it, this is a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party — his moderate fair-mindedness against a partisan radicalism that alienates most Americans.

Mr. Lieberman is usually described as a moderate, civil man.

Let’s be honest for a moment. Mr. Lieberman’s positions are not those of a moderate, centrist man. They are the positions of a candidate who is trying to align himself for a Presidential run in 2008.

Lieberman is another opportunistic huckster who was caught out by his own hedging of positions.

Peter Beinart waits until the last paragraph to cough up the hairball of meme spread by Karl Rove via Pravda Fox.

Privately, some Democrats, while admitting that they haven’t exactly been taking the high road, say they have no choice, that in a competition with Karl Rove, nice guys finish last. But even politically, that’s probably wrong. The Democratic Party’s single biggest foreign policy liability is not that Americans think Democrats are soft. It is that Americans think Democrats stand for nothing, that they have no principles beyond political expedience. And given the party’s behavior over the past several months, it is not hard to understand why.

Rove established the meme that Democrats needed to be united in a position and that any position other than the President’s position was treason.  Americans don’t think that Democrats stand for nothing.  Beinart should look all the Congressional and Senate races that are suddenly hinging on Democrats taking a stand to get our troops out of Iraq.  The American public wants the troops out and Democrats are voicing that position.

Senator Edward Kennedy claims that Mssrs. Roberts and Alito misled the Senate. Well, duh! This was a crime that happened with the lights on.

During Alito’s hearing, I asked him about a 1985 job application in which he stated that he believed “very strongly in the supremacy of the elected branches of government.” He backpedaled, claiming: “I certainly didn’t mean that literally at the time, and I wouldn’t say that today.”

But he is willing to say it now. In the very recent case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , Alito signed on to a dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas that asserts a judicial “duty to accept the Executive’s judgment in matters of military operations and foreign affairs” as grounds for allowing the administration to use military commissions of its own design to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The good Senator and his buddies had a chance to stop Alito and didn’t take it. Don’t pass the buck now.

200 million light years across

An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the universe exploded into existence after the theoretical Big Bang. The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea.

This is what it looks like.

Being a good Christian, President Bush sees no need to tell the truth. He has stated repeatedly that “the jury is still out on global warming”. Feh.

In the thin, cold air here atop the Andes mountains, the blue ice that has claimed these peaks for thousands of years and loyally fed the streams below is now disappearing rapidly.

Mountain glaciers such as this are in retreat around the Earth, taking with them vast stores of water that grow crops, generate electricity and sustain cities and rural areas.

Farmers here say that over the past two decades they have noticed a dramatic decrease in the amount of ice and snow on their mountaintops. The steady supply of water they need to grow crops has become erratic.

These people govern from the position that “God is coming back, and then it won’t matter.” Feh.

In his book, A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo says that a senior NCO told him that Marines in his command would be willing to do horrible things, that there was no limit to what those good American boys would do.  Caputo didn’t believe him.  He does now.

From the New York Times,

For more than a month after the killings, Sgt. Lemuel Lemus stuck to his story.

“Proper escalation of force was used,” he told an investigator, describing how members of his unit shot and killed three Iraqi prisoners who had lashed out at their captors and tried to escape after a raid northwest of Baghdad on May 9.

Then, on June 15, Sergeant Lemus offered a new and much darker account.

In a lengthy sworn statement, he said he had witnessed a deliberate plot by his fellow soldiers to kill the three handcuffed Iraqis and a cover-up in which one soldier cut another to bolster their story. The squad leader threatened to kill anyone who talked.

I was against the war in Iraq for three reasons: 1) it was not justified, 2) it would expose the limits of American power, and 3) it would wreck the Army.

This article (registration required) tells the story of young soldiers who have been put under stress for too long and lose the ability to exercise the judgement of right and wrong.  They are going to prison, but Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should be there with them.

Here is the breathless headline from MSNBC.com

Naked sunbathers shock Albanian beachgoers

sub head

Police, locals speechless as 30 Scandinavian women go topless

story

TIRANA, Albania - Albanian police were speechless when around 30 Scandinavian women went topless, shocking local bathers and causing an uproar in an Albanian beach resort.

Why not “Topless sunbathers” in the headline?  What is ‘naked’?  Does a woman baring her nipples make her naked?

Or is that MECO, a magnetic, eternally collapsing object?

Rudolph Schild of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, led a team that observed a quasar situated 9 billion light years from Earth. A quasar is a very bright, compact object, whose radiation is usually thought to be generated by a giant black hole devouring its surrounding matter.

A black hole, as traditionally understood, is an object with such a powerful gravitational field that even light is not fast enough to escape it. Anything that gets within a certain distance of the black hole’s centre, called the event horizon, will be trapped.

A well accepted property of black holes is that they cannot sustain a magnetic field of their own. But observations of quasar Q0957+561 indicate that the object powering it does have a magnetic field, Schild’s team says. For this reason, they believe that rather than a black hole, this quasar contains something called a magnetospheric eternally collapsing object (MECO). If so, it would be best evidence yet for such an object.

According to theory, MECOs and black holes cannot mutually exist.  It is one or the other.  There have been reports of black holes that seem to not consume all the matter within the event horizon and seem to actually eject some matter.  I didn’t understand those reports and if I can find one, I’ll link it later.

Until then, read the whole thing.

Check out the following picture:

Now, check out the following quote on MSNBC.com:

One mother who didn’t like the cover explains she was concerned about her 13-year-old son seeing it.

“I shredded it,” said Gayle Ash, of Belton, Texas, in a telephone interview. “A breast is a breast — it’s a sexual thing. He didn’t need to see that.”

Ms. Ash thinks that a mammary gland being used for the purpose that either God or evolution (depending on your ability to seek truth) intended is sexual.  Does it go off and have sex with other mammaries?
I think this picture is what her 13 year old son should see to let him know that there is a purpose to all of the hormones running through his body.

JMan is not one to be pushed.  He is like transmission fluid: friction goes up in relation to the pressure that is put on him.

JMan is tall, lean, strong.  I know that he would be a good swimmer if he got some instruction.  His sister, Bookzilla, is quick to try any new thing that comes along.  Last summer, we were at the outdoor pool and she saw kids lining up for the diving board.  She asked if she could try it.  I said yes and she started cannon balling.  JMan is willing to watch her try things, but reluctant to do it on his own.

I took him to a parent-toddler swim class when he was twoish.  He complained about the water on his face.  Incessantly.  I tried to get him to try some things in the pool, but he will not do anything I suggest, at least not while I am there.

I signed him up for a swim class.  He said he was not going to do it.  He complained and griped the whole way there.  As the instructor was leading them around to get in the pool, he was crying, “My dad is making me do this and I don’t want to do it!”

Once he was in the water, he was laughing and joking with the instructor.  But when he got out, he said that the class wasn’t even about swimming.  The next night, he kicked with a kickboard, to the instructor.  He did a good job.  The instructor had to spend more time with other kids because they were slow to learn.  After the lesson, JMan called me over and demonstrated a survival float to me.

Along the way of trying to get this boy to try things in swimming, I explained my many near drowning experiences and what I had done to overcome my fear of water.  When I came back to the States from Germany, I used the pool at my apartment complex to decondition myself.  I went into the deep end and did a survival float (I didn’t know that it was called that at the time) where one goes into a fetal ball and floats just at the surface of the water, extending out to take a breath, then back into the ball.  So, JMan demonstrated that to me last night.  Then he got out of the pool and said that he didn’t need to take swimming lessons because he already knew how to swim.

He pushes back on me because it is safe to do so.  I find some small solace in that.  The transmission of him to me and me to him is fluid and happens when we are not watching.