What we need is a spine transplant

Molly Ivens is not what I would call stupid or naive. She's had it with Washington Democrats who are still afraid to take a stand on anything for fear of being called unpatriotic.

Take “unpatriotic” and shove it. How dare they do this to our country? “Unpatriotic”? These people have ruined the American military! Not to mention the economy, the middle class, and our reputation in the world. Everything they touch turns to dirt, including Medicare prescription drugs and hurricane relief.

This is not a time for a candidate who will offend no one; it is time for a candidate who takes clear stands and kicks ass.

Who are these idiots talking about Warner of Virginia? Being anodyne is not sufficient qualification for being President. And if there’s nobody in Washington and we can’t find a Democratic governor, let’s run Bill Moyers, or Oprah, or some university president with ethics and charisma.

Sounds like a plan.

"Avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings"

We're not used to retired Supreme Court justices speaking out, since they usually retire in very poor health or not at all. By Supreme Court standards, Sandra Day O'Connor is young and healthy, and she hasn't stopped participating in public life. If Nina Totenberg's NPR story on O'Connor's Georgetown University speech challenging Republican attacks on the courts is any indication, things might get interesting. NPR audio / Raw Story transcript

Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O’Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

I can't help wishing she had heeded her own advice when the Supremes were deciding Gore vs Florida, but hey, better she start speaking up now than never. Hope we hear more from her.

Falling, falling, falling…

In my dream, the elephants are falling from the sky in slow motion. At first they don't seem too worried about their unaccustomed negative vertical displacement — though it’s hard to tell with elephants. They don't change position, break formation or do much to slow their descent, which seems to be picking up speed. Things don't look so good for the elephants. Gravity is starting to have its way with them. They're plummeting now. And because all of them are facing to the right, they don't see the donkeys rising over on the left, out of their field of vision. The donkeys are too disorganized to accomplish much, just making frisky little experimental leaps. But you get the feeling they are finally getting it together, and their time is coming.

Sometimes you just get tired of photos that make sense and start to crave pretty patterns instead

That's a good time to just point your camera out the car window at night and see what the camera comes up with on its own. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You can always resume active control later.

Hiding in a billion bales of hay

If data mining can help Visa curb credit card fraud, why is it damn near useless when it comes to uncovering terrorist conspiracies? Bruce Schneier:

Terrorist plots are different. There is no well-defined profile and attacks are very rare. Taken together, these facts mean that data-mining systems won't uncover any terrorist plots until they are very accurate, and that even very accurate systems will be so flooded with false alarms that they will be useless.

{Even an] unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month

It’s like finding a needle in a bale of hay, and throwing more computing power at the problem is like adding more bales, making the needle that much harder to find.

Kind of makes you wonder about the Bush administration’s end-run around FISA. Do they even care about the needle? Or are they really looking for something else?

Glow-in-the-dark apparition tempts sleep-driving zombies to get behind the wheel and hit the road

It glows seductively in the dark and loops in lazy slow-motion across our TV screens, beckoning would-be sleepers. The moth always strikes me as vaguely sinister. It seems to have an agenda, a place for insomniacs to go on the far side of sleep. Where would that be? Now I know. It’s behind the wheel.

Ambien, the nation's best-selling prescription sleeping pill, is showing up with regularity as a factor in traffic arrests, sometimes involving drivers who later say they were sleep-driving and have no memory of taking the wheel after taking the drug.

I know Ambien isn’t the one that uses a Luna Moth as its marketing representative. That would be Lunesta — who else? But they’re chemical cousins belonging to the same class, targeting the same receptor in the brain. Ambien dominates the toxicology reports in the U.S. because it has 84% of the market share. Lunesta's track record in Europe suggests it probably has similar side effects.

Dr. Carlat cited a 1998 study in Britain, published in The Lancet, which found that taking zopiclone, the compound known as the "mother" of Lunesta and marketed in Europe, was linked to an increased risk of automobile accidents.

Americans — most of them drivers — filled more than 31 million prescriptions for sleeping pills last year. Keep your eyes open and your seat belt fastened — the zombies are on the move.

Morning commute

Driving along on a bright, sunny morning with hoarfrost glittering in the trees, when all of a sudden, ground fog settles across the road and eats the world.

When the sun starts acting up, do people follow suit?

According to the latest solar weather forecast, the sunspot cycle will peak in 2012. If you have something in orbit or happen to own a power grid, it's not too soon to start preparing. Scientists warn:

The next sunspot cycle will be a year late and as much as 50% stronger than the last one, according to a forecast released Monday by scientists from NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Such predictions are vital because the solar storms associated with the sunspots not only endanger humans in space, but can slow satellites in orbit, disrupt communications, interfere with Global Positioning Systems and bring down power grids.

The most recent cycle, which peaked in 2001, was relatively weak with few significant disruptions reported. A major solar storm associated with the sunspot cycle on March 13, 1989, brought down the power grid in Quebec, darkening much of the Canadian province for nine hours.

Do solar storms affect more than power lines? Do they affect people's behavior? Scientists who respect the scientific method and value their reputations avoid such generalizations like the plague. Others are not so circumspect. Here's a believer in A. L. Tchijevsky’s theory of sunspot activity and human activity who holds a more robust view of Sunspot Power:

Scenes below of riot and rebellion during 2000-2001 in Seoul, Washington, D.C., Miami, Palestine, Quebec City, India...September 11 terrorist attacks...just a few of the thousands of such events to occur during the height of sunspot cycle #23...however, by early 2006 people in general are less exciteable, though they will continue to push for change in those areas where they feel most oppressed...

In the mid-1980s, writing in two small radical publications, I predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union and freedom for eastern Europe for the exact month that it did in fact happen. I did not predict it specifically for November of 1989. I predicted it for the height of the next eleven year sunspot cycle. The height occurred in November of 1989. And, as this article argues, this was no coincidence. For the sunspots give off solar flares that increase negative ionization on earth--and negative ionizations increases human exciteability and activity.

And that's not all. Followers of Tchijevsky associate most every major war, revolution, depression and all manner of other nasty historical phenomena with the solar cycle. From this point of view, all hell will break loose with the next peak, since it's expected to be so much stronger than the last.

Since some solar cycles are shorter or longer than others and the Tchijevsky theory also encompasses the pre-peak run-up and the post-peak letdown, it seems to me we're dealing with a pattern here that is so loosey-goosey you could fit almost anything to it. I'm not too worried.

Of course, it only seems prudent, starting late in 2011, to avoid flood plains, construct a backyard bomb shelter, stockpile food and other supplies and convert liquid assets to a form more amenable to stashing under a mattress.

For Sale by Owner

One thing the Bushies are good at is cooking up schemes of breathtaking cynicism for plundering public assets. What could be more Machiavellian than defunding rural schools and then coming to the rescue with a plan to restore funding through the biggest public forestland sell-off in decades? California would take the biggest hit, with more than 85,000 acres up for grabs — nearly 300 of them in Sequoia National Forest. Here in Wisconsin we get off pretty easy, with only 80 acres in the Nicolet National Forest being considered for the honor of helping the cause of rural education. How does your state fare? Find out here. The list of parcels reads like a developer’s wet dream.