Something to read on the UK Terror Plot

Because of the threat of THIS, I can't bring a bottle of water on the plane?

How to mix a batch of explosives on an airplane.

Industry Shills

This is great! We received a comment from one David Wojick on our recent post about global warming. David comments that the industry shill I complained about being quoted in WaPo was "right, as usual."

Since we happen to know most of our commenters, Max googled our friend David. Turns out that David himself is an industry shill! Does it get any more pathetic? If David has nothing better to do than post comments on minor blogs arguing against global warming, shouldn't he at least use a false name so he has some hope of being considered an authentic voice? Or does David want us to google him and find his stuff on the web, in the hopes that we'll read it and be convinced. And is he aware of how very few readers we get here at Biscuit?

For the LAST TIME, people: not a single peer-reviewed scientific article in the last gazillion years disputes the fact of global warming caused by humans.Credible scientists argue about the meaning of particular studies, and critique the methods of results of one another's studies, because that is how science is done. No studies are perfect. But at the end of the day, all the people studying this stuff (and not being paid, in some fashion, by the fossil fuel industry) agree on the basic facts about global warming: It is real, and it is serious.

I am sorry this gets in the way of some people's free market utopias, but that doesn't make it any less true. The data about global warming are not based on just a few studies, over just a few years, but over many studies spanning many years, and research from ice cores going back for hundreds of thousands of years. Michael Crichton does not count as a credible scientist on global warming, by the way.

Okay? So if you want to dispute whether global warming is actually happening, please take your comments to some other blog where people want to hear your bullshit. If you want to argue about the best way to deal with it, feel free to stay and share.

And oh, those of you who think that Greenland got its name because a thousand years ago it was beautiful and green and warm, just like it will be again someday (and that's a Good Thing): the name was, according to Norse legend, a marketing ploy to encourage immigrants. It is true that things were a bit warmer in Europe then than they are now, but overall the island was still pretty seriously iced up. (One small part of the island does now and did then get very green and beautiful in the summer).

For more information, start here:
Jim Hansen of NASA talks about global warming and reviews Al Gore's movie and other resources on global warming in the New York Review of Books.

I heart Mayor Daley

Who has made green roofs the norm, not the exception, for new development in Chicago. When our roof has to be redone, we hope we can convince our condo association to go green.

Global warming news, BBC vs. Washington Post

Greenland's ice is melting faster than we thought. That's the water that might shut down the gulf stream. If I were Europe, I'd be pretty damn worried. Oh wait, Europe IS pretty damn worried.

The BBC reports on two new studies of the warming without bothering to contact an industry shill for the 'other side'.

The Washington Post does at least identify its industry shill as an industry shill, which I guess must be Al Gore's influence at work:

Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, questioned why scientists are drawing broad conclusions from data covering such a short time span.

"We now have 'the sky is falling down' on the basis of a few years of data," said Ebell, whose group is partly funded by the fossil-fuel industry.

Still, I'd prefer that to read "Fossil fuel industry shill Myron Ebell says 'don't worry, keep driving!'"

I won't fly again till I can bring my bottled water on the plane

Oh, so ridiculous, this hysteria. As Patrick Smith, Salon's resident pilot/writer, says:

Half a decade after Sept. 11, having spent billions to upgrade air security, we're still needlessly obsessed with hobby knives and silverware, trying to thwart an attack that already happened and is all but certain never to happen again.

Is it any wonder that the specter of liquid explosives, the possibilities of which have been known to authorities for many years, should inspire a whole new round of reactionary panic and waste? It's too early, maybe, to be so cynical, but some of us have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it were, ever since Richard Reid's would-be sneaker bomb commenced the silly and apparently never-to-end X-raying of footwear at airports across America. I presume the new security paradigm will call for the permanent banning of toothpaste, shampoo and drinking water.

What we need to get through our terror-addled heads is this: It has been, and it will always be, relatively easy to smuggle a potentially deadly weapon onto an aircraft.

Once more, with feeling, people: if you are worried about dying horribly, don't drive so damn much! That's your big death risk right there. Terrorists are real, but they're much better at terrorizing us than they actually are at killing us. Not that they don't kill. But that so many other things kill us too, the terrorist killing is really lost in the shuffle of car accidents, tragic drownings, heart attacks, stabbings, shootings, lung cancer, heat stroke, drug overdoses, hurricanes, people who climb Mt. Everest, and so on.

Puking update: Still puking. Almost daily. It's fun to be pregnant. Except that it's really, really not. On the other hand, we expect to produce the first baby girl in the family, come December.

Good News for Us Crazy People

NIMH has found a drug that alleviates symptoms of depression within hours, not weeks. Anyone who's ever been severely, severely depressed knows that this can make all the difference in the world. Weeks of waiting for the traditional drugs to work are weeks in which your mind has lots of time to roam over the "it's never going to work for me, I'll feel like this forever" territory. That territory is a treacherous land leading, inevitably, to thoughts of death.

What NIMH has found doesn't look like something we'll be shooting any old person up with anytime soon, but I for one will sleep better knowing that if I go to that bad land again, there may well be a way out fast enough to compete with the obvious and permanent one I'd rather never have to take.

Lamont v. Lieberman

This has been heavily quoted on the lefty blogosphere in the past few days, but I'm posting it anyway because I like it so much. It's Mark Schmitt on the Lieberman race, which he says is all about "The End of Checklist Liberalism":

Lamont supporters actually aren’t ideologues. They aren’t looking for the party to be more liberal on traditional dimensions. They’re looking for it to be more of a party. They want to put issues on the table that don’t have an interest group behind them - like Lieberman’s support for the bankruptcy bill -- because they are part of a broader vision. And I think that’s what blows the mind of the traditional Dems. They can handle a challenge from the left, on predictable, narrow-constituency terms. But where do these other issues come from? These are “elitist insurgents,” as Broder puts it - since when do they care about bankruptcy? What if all of a sudden you couldn’t count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice - what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women’s economic and personal opportunities?

But caring about bankruptcy, even if you’re not teetering on the brink of it or a bankruptcy lawyer yourself, is part of a vision of a just society. And a vision of a just society - not just the single-issue push-buttons of a bunch of constituency groups - is what a center-left political party ought to be about. And at the end of this fight, I don’t expect that we’ll have a more leftist Democratic Party, but one that can at least begin to get beyond checklist liberalism.

I do wish we'd have a more left-wing Democratic Party, but the fact is that the pundits, the MSM, and, it seems, Joe Lieberman himself are either being obtuse about why so many of us want desperately to see him lose, or else they just prefer to push another, more inflammatory story. I, for one, want him to lose because he's a preachy moralist who has bad values -- not values I want represented in the Democratic party -- and who denounces me and my ilk for giving enough of a crap about the country to have an opinion about something important like, say, the War, and cozies up to Republicans without getting anything useful in return for Democrats. It's not because I am part of a blogofascist conspiracy of fanatical leftists who want to purge the party of all dissent in the course of destroying the country and making it safe for the terrorists, to whom we will give hybrid cars we paid for by a massive sales tax on SUVs.

Actually, I think it would be a great idea to put a massive sales tax on SUVs and subsidize hybrids for low-income people. But not terrorists. They probably want to bike, anyway, as part of their training regimen.