Chilly Willy

My question is why conservatives think it advances their purpose to continue this demonstrably wrong adherence to climate change denialism. This isn’t like, say, evolution. Scientific evidence of evolution is quite strong and will only continue to get stronger, but that growing evidence won’t be ever more obvious to the layperson. Birds, for instance, won’t start evolving faster and faster until it’s frighteningly clear that evolution is real and all those deniers were, in fact, cranks.

But the planet is getting warmer, and people are going to notice. Will can talk about global cooling all he wants, but arctic ice is actually disappearing. Snowpacks are shrinking. Droughts are intensifying. Sea-levels are rising. And this isn’t going to stop.

Climate change denialism is like arguing at three that in two hours it won’t be five. However convincing you think you are, you will ultimately be revealed as a fool and a charlatan.

The Bellows

Link via Grasping Reality with Both Hands.

Nice

One of ours finds her way back home.

Beyond contempt

A radio talk guy in Denver repeatedly refers to Rep. Diana DeGette as Vagina DeJet.

Crooks and Liars

Best game ever

Well, at least the best named game ever.

KenKen shares some properties with sudoku. Each is a pure logic challenge in which numbers are filled in the squares of a grid. Unlike sudoku, though, in which the numbers act solely as symbols (letters or pictures would work as well), KenKen requires arithmetic.

The New York Times

Play KenKen online.

Hey we didn’t have to wait until next week

Citigroup is at $2 at this moment.

It was $2.51 at closing yesterday.

Update 9:15 AM MST: $1.97. Bank of America at $3.26.

GM down to $1.71. Once America’s largest company, all of its stock is now worth just over ONE billion dollars.

Or about 40% less than Panera Bread.

11:25 AM MST: Citi $1.74 Bank of America $2.80 GM $1.53

GM market cap now less than a billion.

2:10 PM MST: Citi closed at $1.95, Bank of America at $3.79 and GM at $1.77

Best line of the day, so far

“The most valuable lesson I learned from the year I spent in Washington…was the extent to which senior government figures have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.”

Paul Krugman

Politics is all performance art.

Road trips

The L.A. Times posts a number of road trips to spots in the west. Seven are in New Mexico. Begin the slide show here.

The main article begins here.

The TARP Visualized

Calculated Risk

Don’t skip this one.

An exciting new NewMexiKen poll

Line of the day

“The Dow industrials declined 1.2% to a new bear-market closing low as bank stocks continued to grind downward. Bank of America and Citigroup dropped 14% each.”

WSJ.com

The DJIA consists of just 30 stocks. For the price of a six-pack of decent beer (including tax), you could get a share each of GM ($2), Citigroup ($2.51) and Bank of America ($3.93). (The beer would have more value.)

3M Co
Alcoa Inc
American Express Company
AT&T Inc.
Bank of America Corporation
Boeing Co.
Caterpillar Inc.
Chevron Corp
Citigroup, Inc.
E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company
Exxon Mobil Corp
General Electric Company
General Motors Corporation
Hewlett-Packard Co.
Intel Corporation
International Business Machines
Johnson & Johnson
JP Morgan & Chase & Co
Kraft Foods Inc.
McDonald’s Corporation
Merck & Co., Inc.
Microsoft Corporation
Pfizer Inc
The Coca-Cola Company
The Home Depot, Inc.
The Procter & Gamble Company
United Technologies Corporation
Verizon Communications
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Walt Disney Company

Idle thought

They’re going to nationalize the big banks — the choice is being made by the reality of the situation. The Administration is in denial because letting on that it’s about to happen will drive the stock prices of the banks to zero. (So it will happen on a weekend.)

My question. All my investments are in cash. Where should I put the cash?

I realize FDIC protects my deposit accounts, but this is going to be messy and unprecedented and go on for who knows how long. And I need to worry about something else now that Sweetie Reid is over his virus.

Iwo

Two Marine divisions landed on Iwo Jima on this date in 1945; 30,000 troops came ashore that first day. Their initial objective was Mt. Suribachi.

131 years ago today

Thomas Edison received a patent for the phonograph and ultimately music changed forever.

The phonograph was developed as a result of Thomas Edison’s work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape…This development led Edison to speculate that a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback. When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and dale) groove pattern. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John Kreusi, to build, which Kreusi supposedly did within 30 hours. Edison immediately tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, “Mary had a little lamb.” To his amazement, the machine played his words back to him. …

The invention was highly original. The only other recorded evidence of such an invention was in a paper by French scientist Charles Cros, written on April 18, 1877. There were some differences, however, between the two men’s ideas, and Cros’s work remained only a theory, since he did not produce a working model of it.

Source: Library of Congress

It didn’t look much like an iPod. Click image for larger version.

Trader Sepp’s

Do You Know Who Owns Trader Joe’s?

Idle thought

So this Stanford ponzi financial institution allegedly had lots of Mexican drug cartel cash among its deposits. Now it’s all lost.

What was he thinking?

Compared to what Stanford faces if caught by the bad guys, Zed was given bon bons by Marcellus Wallace’s medievalists.

Stall

Fascinating background about aerodynamics and what may have happened in the Buffalo crash from Atlantic’s James Fallows.

Mauna Kea Milky Way Panorama

Click the image for a larger version and to learn more.

Stegner’s Complaint

A fine appreciation of Wallace Stegner by Timothy Egan.

Everywhere else, though, Stegner has grown in stature. For starters, there are rivers undammed, desert vistas unspoiled and forests uncut in the wondrous West because of his pen.

He influenced several presidents, from Kennedy to Clinton, to see that “something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” as he wrote.

How many writers of fiction can make that claim?

February 18th was the 100th anniversary of Stegner’s birth.

Idle thought

$75 billion to save home ownership for 9 million Americans.

That’s $8,333 each.

How will that do it?

Update: Oh, there’s another $200 billion for Freddie and Fannie.

Best line of the day, so far

“Fiske and her co-scientists reached the obvious and unsurprising conclusion that women are better than men. Again, anyone who has met both men and women would reach that same conclusion without having to fill out a grant application, just by watching us eat.”

Functional Ambivalent

Best line of the day, so far

“George Will is entitled to his own opinions. He is not entitled to his own facts.”

John Fleck in “Cherry-Picked Facts Heat Up Climate Debate”

Toni Morrison

… winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 is 78 today. The following is from the press release announcing her selection:

“who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

“My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world”. These are the words of this year’s Nobel Laureate in Literature, the American writer Toni Morrison, in her book of essays “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992). And she adds, “My project rises from delight, not disappointment…”

Toni Morrison is 62 years old, and was born in Lorain, Ohio, in the United States. Her works comprise novels and essays. In her academic career she is a professor in the humanities at the University of Princeton, New Jersey.

She has written six novels, each of them of great interest. Her oeuvre is unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at the same time rich in variation. One can delight in her unique narrative technique, varying from book to book and developed independently, even though its roots stem from Faulkner and American writers from further south. The lasting impression is nevertheless sympathy, humanity, of the kind which is always based on profound humour.

“Song of Solomon” (1978) with its description of the black world in life and legend, forms an excellent introduction to the work of Toni Morrison. Milkman Dead’s quest for his real self and its source reflects a basic theme in the novels. The Solomon of the title, the southern ancestor, was to be found in the songs of childhood games. His inner intensity had borne him back, like Icarus, through the air to the Africa of his roots. This insight finally becomes Milkman’s too.

“Beloved” (1987) continues to widen the themes and to weave together the places and times in the network of motifs. The combination of realistic notation and folklore paradoxically intensifies the credibility. There is enormous power in the depiction of Sethe’s action to liberate her child from the life she envisages for it, and the consequences of this action for Sethe’s own life.

In her latest novel “Jazz” (1992), Toni Morrison uses a device which is akin to the way jazz itself is played. The book’s first lines provide a synopsis, and in reading the novel one becomes aware of a narrator who varies, embellishes and intensifies. The result is a richly complex, sensuously conveyed image of the events, the characters and moods.

As the motivation for the award implies, Toni Morrison is a literary artist of the first rank. She delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race. And she addresses us with the lustre of poetry.

The Writer’s Almanac, as they often do, had some insight in 2004 about Toni Morrison:

She didn’t start writing fiction until she was in her thirties. She wasn’t happy with her marriage, and writing helped her escape her daily troubles. She later said, “It was as though I had nothing left but my imagination. . . . I wrote like someone with a dirty habit. Secretly. Compulsively. Slyly.” She joined a small writing group, and one day she didn’t have anything to bring to the group meeting, so she jotted down a story about a black girl who wants blue eyes. The story later became her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1969). She wrote most of it in the mornings and on weekends while she was working as an editor for Random House and raising her children on her own. …

Morrison said, “[Writing] stretches you . . . [and] makes you stay in touch with yourself. . . . It’s like going under water for me, the danger. Yet I’m certain I’m going to come up.”

Wallace Stegner

In 1999, San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the 100 best non-fiction and fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.

NewMexiKen has posted the top 10 from the lists several times, but repeats them each year — because the lists are interesting, but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born 100 years ago today.

Stegner is first in fiction, second in non-fiction; now that’s a writer.

TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett

TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis

His father was a schemer who was constantly moving the family from place to place, hoping to strike it rich in one of the Western boomtowns. He watched as his father tried and failed to plant a farm in North Dakota, tried and failed to run a lunchroom in the backwoods of Washington state, sold bootleg liquor in Great Falls, Montana, poured the family’s savings into an invention that was supposed to detect gold in the ground, and finally bought a piece of redwood forest in California, only to cut it all down and sell it for firewood. By the time Stegner was 20, he had lived in more than 20 different houses, including, at one point, a derailed dining car. But though he had a tough childhood, Stegner grew to love the great open wilderness of the American West.

. . .

He’d already begun writing fiction, but he wanted to write a new kind of novel about the American West. At that time, the only novels being published about the West were full of cowboys and heroic pioneers. Stegner said, “I wanted to write about what happens to the pioneer virtues and the pioneer type of family when the frontiers are gone and the opportunities all used up. The result was his first big success, his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), loosely based on the experiences of his own family. It tells the story of a man named Bo Mason and his wife, Elsa, who travel over the American West, trying to make it rich.

Stegner went on to write dozens of novels about the West, including Angle of Repose (1971) and The Spectator Bird (1976). But he also started one of the most influential creative writing programs in the country, at Stanford University, where his students included Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, and Scott Turow.

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

1-800-GOOG-411

It’s a free 411 service.

1-800-GOOG-411 [Video]

Thanks for the link, uncle.

Who said it?

“It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring. I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do.”

So sayeth Mr. laissez faire himself, Alan Greenspan as reported by Financial Times