All posts by Chris

Monumental failure

Politics

“Talking Points Memo”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ has an excellent article on “why W and Kerry are still neck-and-neck in the polls”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_09_12.php#003465 despite W’s disastrous policies in Iraq becoming more obviously disastrous each day.

_Bush has sought — with real success — to edge Iraq out of the campaign dialogue by putting the issue back on to Kerry, asking what he would do differently…_

_…in this way, [he] has managed to derive political advantage from the magnitude of his own failure._

_Politically, Kerry needs to ignore the commentators who will press him to come up with a twenty point plan … though the way forward may be murky, the last person you want to lead the country down that foggy path is the guy who screwed everything up so badly in the first place._

I love Jon Stewart

Politics

You didn’t think I forgot about our political pickle, did you? Here’s The Daily Show’s take on the overarching message of the RNC: “["Words Speak Louder Than Facts":http://video.lisarein.com/dailyshow/sept2004/bushcampaignfilmdailyshow.mov].”

New hope for nuclear?

Science

They may be on our dirty words list, but recent articles on “fission”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html and “cold fusion”:http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/sep04/0904nfus.html might signal a new age for nuclear power. Most interesting to me is the idea of a “pebble bed reactor”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor or “cold fusion bottle”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion providing megawatts of power to Mars missions and other weight-conscious applications without having to compromise on environmental security.

Having been burned by the original hype about both “Our Bold Atomic Future”:http://www.globalspin.com/mt/archives/000356.html and cold fusion, I’ll admit I’m skeptical. It’s now the responsibility of nuclear proponents to show that these technologies are safer and more effective than “existing”:http://www.greasecar.com/ “alternative”:http://www.cat.org.uk/index.tmpl?refer=index&init=1 “energy”:http://www.greenmountain.com/ “sources”:http://www.realgoods.com/. Good luck to them.

Axis of Eve

Politics

Now “that’s”:http://www.axisofeve.org/ what I’m talkin’ about! Anyone who creates “Panties with a Purpose”:http://www.axisofeve.org/collection.php is all right by me.

Perhaps they should coordinate with Barlow’s “DanceMob”:http://barlow.typepad.com/barlowfriendz/2004/08/new_york_during.html and really shake things up. So to speak.