URLs du Jour

2018-09-11

[Amazon Link]
(paid link)

[A belated entry. I swear I had an article queued up for this date, but it didn't get posted. A sketchy reconstruction, almost certainly incomplete, from my memory and browser history follows.]

  • Jonah Goldberg's G-file from last week was apparently addressed to Senate Judiciary Committee members: None of You Idiots Is Spartacus

    For those of you who don’t know, Cory Booker heroically® (according to his P.R. operation) defied Senate rules and risked expulsion from that chamber in order to release confidential documents that the American people desperately needed to see. The people needed to understand what the dangerous bigot whom Trump nominated to the Court had written in an email about racial profiling while working in the Bush White House after 9/11.

    There were only a couple of problems: The email in question was already cleared for public release (and Booker knew it), and the substance of the email revealed that the Monster Kavanaugh opposed racial profiling. It was as if Cory Booker — once a famous, if choreographed, good Samaritan — saw a mugging, leapt out of his car, tire-iron in hand, to save the day only to stop 20 feet from the assailant in front of some TV cameras, and proceed to smash the makeshift weapon into his own crotch. “I am Spartacus! Ow! I am Spartacus — Ooof!”

    Our Amazon Product du Jour is … self-explanatory.


  • If you can read this, thank a teacher. Or your parents. Or your own good sense at an early age in realizing that literacy was a good skill to acquire.

    But, as Reason's Ronald Bailey suggests, If You Hate Ice Ages, Thank a Farmer.

    University of Virginia climatologist William Ruddiman has spent a good bit of his career studying the Pleistocene cycle of ice ages that began about 2.6 million years ago. Periods of large-scale glaciation and deglaciation are governed by the Milankovitch cycle, in which shifts of the Earth's orbit and its inclination toward the sun change how much sunlight reaches the northern hemipsphere to warm the surface. Based on solely these orbital cycles, global average temperatures of our current interglacial period—the Holcene—should be dropping, with the result that glaciers should now be growing in northern Canada and Siberia. That is not happening. Why?

    Puzzled by these anomalies, Ruddiman hypothesized nearly two decades ago that an increase in greenhouse gases that began about 8,000 years ago was keeping the onset of a new ice age at bay. Specifically, he noted that the atmospheric concentrations of the two chief greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) were not following the downward trends observed at similar stages in previous interglacial periods. Fuddiman noted that the ice core data showed no case during past ice ages in which carbon dioxide concentrations rose after peaking at the point of maximum deglaciation.

    Yup, not enough greenhouse gas can also be hazardous to your imaginary ideal climate. I'm sure the eco-warriors have taken that into account, right? Because they f'ing love science?


  • I missed this Michael Ramirez cartoon when it came out in April, but it's still appplicable:

    [Kamikaze Trade War]

    As always, click through for a big uncropped version.


Last Modified 2024-02-02 4:52 AM EDT