TrueNorth

Sounds like a good plan to me

Naked girls plow fields for rain | U.S. | Reuters

PATNA, India (Reuters) - Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.

Excellent article about the Obama trainwreck

Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie -- Obama's Domestic Agenda Teeters - washingtonpost.com

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president's approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to "accomplish too much," and 57 percent think the country is on the "wrong track."

Boris Johnson

We are now so spineless, I will never see a man walk on Mars - Telegraph

We will never conquer the Red Planet. Homo sapiens will flunk the next great test not because we lack the technology, nor even because we lack the money. We will fail, because – 40 years after the Moonshot – it is increasingly clear that we lack the willingness to take the necessary physical risk.

I think they've hit the nail on the head

Silvio Berlusconi newspaper: Italy better than Britain - Telegraph

In a front page editorial, Il Giornale, which is owned by Mr Berlusconi's brother and allied with the government, boasted: "Dear English people, we've now beaten you at everything".

Inside, the paper compared Britain unfavourably with Italy in the fields of politics, the economy, industry, crime, fashion, football and tourism.

"Great Britain is no longer great," ran a headline in large letters. "It was once considered a beacon of politics, journalism, business and sport. But today it no longer dominates."

I love cool new weapon systems but this creeps me out

Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News - FOXNews.com

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

My current stance on "Global Warming"

My position on "global warming" keeps evolving (as should every sensible person's, as new evidence comes in).   I started out skeptical (I start out skeptical about everything...I'm a conservative) but when Ron Bailey of Reason decided the evidence was conclusive, I flipped.  Also, I read "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjorn Lomborg, which surprisingly accepts the IPCC estimates on global warming but disputes the cost-benefit analysis that led to Kyoto.

Since then, several prominent people who were on the global warming side have switched back to being skeptics.  I don't know whether to believe them or not but my basic position remains about the same.

• the Earth's temperature is currently in a warming phase (though it seem so have stalled in the last decade) (FACT)
• CO2 concentrations are much higher than in recent history (FACT)
• temperature and CO2 have risen and fallen in sync based on ice core samples (FACT)
• ...however, the temperature rises first and CO2 goes up about 800 years later (FACT)
• CO2 is a greenhouse gas that, in the absence of side effects, would lead to a 1-2 degree rise in temperature by 2100 (FACT)
• the side effects of a rise in CO2 are a rise in water vapour, which speeds up the warming, and a rise in cloud cover, which slows it down (COMPUTER MODELS INCONCLUSIVE)
• cost of a 2 degree rise in CO2 is almost certainly less than the cost of Kyoto style controls (MANY PEOPLE'S OPINION, INCLUDING MINE)

My conclusion hasn't changed: We should take modest and inexpensive steps to begin to control the level of CO2.  The most important one being to encourage the building of nuclear plants, which do not produces CO2.  A much better reason for supporting this goal than the phony global warming "crisis" is that it would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and stop sending trillions of dollars to middle eastern dictatorships.

I favour research into geo-engineering schemes that will give mankind the ability to manage the planet's temperature in the future whether it is going up or down.  We are overdue for an ice age and all scientists agree that an ice age would be several orders of magnitude more devastating than global warming.  Civilization developed in the interregnum between ice ages. 

I write this from Windsor, Ontario.  In the last ice age, Windsor was under about a kilometer of ice.  For Canada, an ice age would be an extinction level event.