March 26, 2008 archive

Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Living in California, I’m always seeing bumper stickers that say, “Keep Tahoe Blue”.. and well……. looks like they’re losing.

RENO, Nev. – A new study predicts water circulation in Lake Tahoe is being dramatically altered by global warming, threatening the lake’s delicate ecosystem and famed clear waters.

The University of California, Davis study said one likely consequence is warmer lake temperatures that will mean fewer cold-water native fish and more invasive species – like carp, largemouth bass and bluegill.

“What we expect is that deep mixing of Lake Tahoe’s water layers will become less frequent, even nonexistent, depleting the bottom waters of oxygen,” said Geoffrey Schladow, director of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center at U.C. Davis.

snip

The changes, the study concluded, could turn Tahoe’s famed cobalt-blue waters to a murky green in about a decade.

A decade. Sad. I hope they’re wrong but we’ll find out soon enough, right? I’ve never really liked going in the water because it’s always crowded (herds of tourists…bleh), but the views from the mountains up above are absolutely beautiful. It’ll probably still be nice, but the fact that we’re damaging one of the landmarks that defines the Sierras is just devastating.

This is a tough post for me, as I have tried very hard to not criticize the candidacy of Sen. Hillary Clinton for President.  But considering the current economic crisis in America, particularly in the liquidity markets, I cannot stay silent.  Irrespective of the merits or lack thereof of Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy, I have to say that I feel that Sen. Clinton is the wrong choice for President of the United States.

You see, it’s the economy.

In Pennsylvania yesterday, Sen. Clinton said:

We need a president who is ready on Day 1 to be commander in chief of our economy.

Cross-posted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

The National Ice and Snow Institute (NISDC) has released a report documenting a dramatic and troubling collapse of a large portion (nine times the size of Manhattan) of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

Satellite imagery from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder reveals that a 13,680 square kilometer (5,282 square mile) ice shelf has begun to collapse because of rapid climate change in a fast-warming region of Antarctica.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf is a broad plate of permanent floating ice on the southwest Antarctic Peninsula, about 1,000 miles south of South America. In the past 50 years, the western Antarctic Peninsula has experienced the biggest temperature increase on Earth, rising by 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) per decade. NSIDC Lead Scientist Ted Scambos, who first spotted the disintegration in March, said, “We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years. But warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing a break-up.”

The ice shelf began its visible collapse on February 28th, when a huge iceberg (41 x 2.5 kilometers – 25.5 by 1.5 miles) broke away, triggering a wider collapse of 405 square kilometers (160 square miles) of the shelf…

Photo Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center

The rest of the article, more photos, videos, satellite views and animation at this link

Today Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Barbara Ehrenreich and Danny Glover published a open letter to American progressives urging them to join them and support Barack Obama. Why? Because Obama’s campaign is a movement.

We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama’s unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined

I think this is a very important letter and I’ll take a deeper look at it in this essay.

Clintonstein Meets The Scaife Man

Hillary Clinton was interviewed yesterday by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. She took the opportunity to continue a pattern of personal attacks on her opponent, Barack Obama:

“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”

What’s interesting about this encounter is not the rough and tumble tenor of modern electioneering. That has sadly become all too familiar in these dog days of democracy. What rattled my antennae was the venue Clinton chose for these remarks.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is owned by billionaire right-winger, Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife has a place all his own in what Clinton herself tagged the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” He is a principal in, or contributor to, rightist political and media organizations like NewsMax, the Media Research Center, the American Enterprise Institute, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Landmark Legal Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the American Spectator.

Just to start…

If you missed ‘Democracy Now’ today:

“Many of us volunteered with patriotic feelings in our heart, only to see them subverted and bastardized by the administration and sent into the wrong country. Yes, we volunteered, but we didn¹t volunteer where you sent us to go.”