A professor at the University of Arizona has a bold, new tired prediction: WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!! This guy isn't as interesting as my other doomsayer posts, but only because he's about the ten-thousandth person to blame globalization, corporations, and oil for our imminent demise. He also manages to make a dig at Ronald Reagan, which I thought was a nice touch.

We exploit humans and resources, often with extreme violence, to provide Americans with indulgences beyond belief to most people.

Had we started the project of powering down at least 30 years ago, there might still be time. At this point, I cannot imagine any steps that could allow us to avoid a meltdown of the economy or a relatively rapid transition into the post-industrial Stone Age. We depend on abundant, inexpensive oil for delivery of food, water, shelter, and health care. The days of abundant, inexpensive oil are behind us. American Empire will soon run its course.

I am hopeful we can save a few tens of millions of Americans. But we will need to make massive changes in our entire way of life, starting immediately. We must abandon the project of globalization and its attendant indulgences, for example, and focus on saving lives.

The good news is that he says there's nothing we can do in our daily lives that will make a difference. Sure, he's quick to assure us that he uses CFLs, doesn't eat meat, and drives a hybrid, but the fate of the human race will be decided by "corporate CEOs and politicians." His halo securely fashioned to the back of his noggin, he goes on to explain that alternative energy sources won't save us because they weren't developed back when they would have made a difference.

No alternatives scale, and we're out of time. We made the important decision about energy policy at two critical junctures in American history: (1) shortly after WWII, when we created the interstate highway system and the suburbs to build a way of life that had no future because it relied completely on ready supplies of a finite resource, and (2) in 1980, when we dismissed conservation at irrelevant -- I guess we didn't think we needed lights any more, because it was "morning in America."

Can you imagine how long he's been carrying around that bit of resentment? Really, to call that up after 24 years makes it a hell of a grudge. But that's not the best part. He's one of those idiots who thinks the demise of America and decent into barbarism is a good thing.

This is wonderful news on many levels. Passing the world oil peak means the world economy will collapse, thereby giving other cultures and species an opportunity to persist a few more years. Economic growth is tightly linked to extinction rates, so the forthcoming Greatest Depression is great news from the other occupants of planet Earth.

Who would have thought that someone as ignorant as this could admit to powerlessness and still be so annoying? I think it's because he has no sense of irony. The nitwit rails against globalization and brags about using CFLs, but apparently doesn't realize that the vast majority of CFLs (70% last year) are imported from China.

H/t Warren Meyer.

Stone Age? Dark Ages, Baby! [ace]: The increasingly silly Nicholas Kristof of the increasingly worthless NYT piles on another prediction about the dire consequences of global warming -- witch burnings!

I'm quite serious. Or is he? Does the NYT think about blog traffic so much that its writers craft deliberately-stupid columns just to get linked? I don't know. It seems possible. You tell me what Kristof's motivation is here.

ereÂ’s a forecast for a particularly bizarre consequence of climate change: more executions of witches.

As we pump out greenhouse gases, most of the discussion focuses on direct consequences like rising seas or aggravated hurricanes. But the indirect social and political impact in poor countries may be even more far-reaching, including upheavals and civil wars — and even more witches hacked to death with machetes.

In rural Tanzania, murders of elderly women accused of witchcraft are a very common form of homicide. And when Tanzania suffers unusual rainfall — either drought or flooding — witch-killings double, according to research by Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

“In bad years, the killings explode,” Professor Miguel said. He believes that if climate change causes more drought years in Tanzania, the result will be more elderly women executed there and in other poor countries that still commonly attack supposed witches.

There is evidence that European witch-burnings in past centuries may also have resulted from climate variations and the resulting crop failures, economic distress and search for scapegoats. Emily Oster, a University of Chicago economist, tracked witchcraft trials and weather in Western Europe between 1520 and 1770 and found a close correlation: colder weather led to more crackdowns on witches.

In particular, Europe’s “little ice age” led to a sharp cooling in the late 1500s, and that corresponds to a renewal in witchcraft trials after a long lull.

The Little Ice Age? Shhh, you're not supposed to mention naturally-caused shifts in climate, Nicholas. Ixnay on the Ittlay Ice Age and ixnay on the Edeivalmay Armway Eriodpay.

There's just enough actual fact here to be interesting enough to write about but... aren't these soft-headed idiots going a little hog-wild in claiming global warming causes everything?

As I've joked: "Sorry honey I can't get it up tonight... you know, global warming."

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:41 PM | Comments (98)
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This is an old story but one not very well covered.

...Yet, what may be the most dramatic change of the pending legislation is the shift from a "first-to-invent" to a "first-to-file" criterion for issuing patents. At present, even if a patent has already been filed for a particular invention, another inventor can win the patent if he can successfully demonstrate that he invented it first. Passage of the patent reform bill would award a patent to the first person to file for it, thereby eliminating a time-consuming court process...

I filed for several patents while at IBM and had a few awarded, and the others were considered by the internal patent app review committee to be in the "publish" catgory -- something valuable enough that IBM didn't want anyone else to patent it, but not valuable enough to bother going through the whole patent process. This was one of the reasons why publications like the IBM Systems Journal existed -- to document "prior art" so some moron couldn't come along later and try to patent an idea that IBM came up with years before. A Systems Journal article was proof positive that said moron's idea was neither new nor novel. That covered IBM's ass when a "publish" grade idea was used in products.

Outfits like BountyQuest were offering rewards for anyone who could prove prior art on an existing patent to either invalidate it, or support its claims to being new and novel if nobody could prove any prior art. You never knew who was offering the bounty, it might have been someone looking to challenge a patent, or the patent owner looking to ensure that their patent really was solid.

This particular "reform" strikes me as a disaster waiting to happen. There could be a "gold rush" of patent filings on all sorts of old and well documented ideas that have essentially been in the public domain for ages. People will be swamping the already overworked and thinly skilled USPTO with a bunch of ill researched quickies trying to be the first to file.

USPTO logistics aspect aside, there seems to be something fundamentally unfair to having a patent awarded to someone who wasn't the first to have an idea. That is very very bogus.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:29 PM | Comments (34)
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Mediate between the United States and Hamas.

We need this, uh, why?

It's completely in-character for him, nothing he does anymore surprises me much, but dude. Assuming he can collect some "important notes from the discussion" he could share with whatever Special Assistant to the Junior Under-Secretary of International Things at State might care to listen to, the official policy right now is "isolate them".

He's confident though, that this will be helpful.

"I can't say that they will be amenable to any suggestions, but at least after I meet with them I can go back and relay what they say, as just a communicator, to the leaders of the United States," he said.

I cannot say they will be amenable to any suggestions either (ok I'm lying, sorry), but whatever suggestions we the United States might have, I'm pretty sure we don't need you to pass them along sir, thanks so.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:02 PM | Comments (55)
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You've seen this sort of thing in sci-fi horror movies.

So this toad, this disgusting perverted Surinam toad, mates by fertilizing the female's eggs and then rubbing them on her back, where they adhere and some type of vile amniotic skin grows over them.

The female whore-toad then gives birth to her horrid trollop-spawn by... shedding the foul little choadlings off her back.

I'm kidding with all the whore and pervert stuff, but this is kinda nasty. It's not that it's gory or anything, it's just so... alien it seems perverse. These little mutants wriggling off the mother's back like parasites... yuch.

You know how much I fear the vagina? Well, the back is somehow worse.

And, uhh... not to tell tales out of school but, uhh... let me just say I'm newly thankful that the human reproductive cycle does not involve the back at any phase. IYKWIMAITYD. more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:16 PM | Comments (53)
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Berlusconi wins.

Right now the Retards, Morons, and Cretins are trying to cobble together a scant parliamentary majority, but they're distracted by thoughts of chicken pot pie and tapioca.

Posted by: Ace at 01:24 PM | Comments (29)
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Which is good, considering that 90% of the state doesn't even have TV or radio, but instead relies on a slower, traditional method of communication involving carving crude "Messenger Runes" into neighbors' foreheads and genitals.

So any breaking news is limited in speed according to how long it takes you to catch, pin, and inscribe your neighbor. Plus the limited number of onlookers who can see your message carved into him before he dies from blood loss.

It's one of those "traditions that work" that rubes turn to when the mill closes. Obama's not against that tradition, mind you. He finds it quaint and colorful.

Fun fact: Indiana is where the saying "No news is good news" was coined.*

Bonus there: Rush Limbaugh says "This is who he [Obama] is," echoing Anwyn.

*Another fun fact: I was once caught by an Indiana cop skinning a hobo in the bushes.

"So," he says, "What's the news?"

News? I wondered to myself. "Um... Dow up 40?"

"Carry on," says he, and walks away.

Posted by: Ace at 01:04 PM | Comments (62)
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First-degree eyefucking.

A jurisdiction seeks to criminalize sexual staring, especially as regards children.

I've got to mull this one over.

This is such a vague proposed law that it probably should just be handled by hassling someone for breaking other vague laws, like loitering, though I don't know if that's still on the books in most places. Or "disorderly person."

Yeah, the latter. We have a lot of "not sure what the actual charge is but you're fucking around in a way we don't like" sort of laws. To some extent they're necessary. Not sure if we need to go multiplying them and getting overly specific with our vaguer laws.

Posted by: Ace at 11:39 AM | Comments (80)
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Non-Christian Israel's Non-Christian Shin Bet declines to assist the Christian Jimmy Carter in his trip to meet with the Hamas, who are also non-Christian but better than those other non-Christians, if you know who I mean and I think you do.

These non-Christians are getting out of hand. The next thing you know and these non-Christian manipulators will pollute our Christian youth's heads by importing that savage Negroid Jazz from America.

Thanks to Janet.

Posted by: Ace at 10:53 AM | Comments (28)
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See the "Delicious Update" at post's end, especially.

Of course, he just took $125,000 from Jack Abramoff's old firm, too.

How come the MSM doesn't notice it?

Because the Obamessiah works in mysterious ways, that's why. Who could know the mind of Obamallmighty?

Thanks to CJ.

Posted by: Ace at 10:49 AM | Comments (23)
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Good piece by George Will on Bob Barr, who'll be seeking (and getting) the Libertarian Party nomination on Memorial Day.

Compact and Feisty Bob Barr, 59, probably will seek and get the presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party, which convenes in Denver on Memorial Day weekend....

The son of a soldier, Barr graduated from high school in Tehran. In 1994, he was elected to Congress as the Republicans, led by another pugnacious Georgian, Newt Gingrich, ended 40 years of Democratic control of the House. Four years later, Barr, a former prosecutor inflamed by charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, was central to the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Since losing his seat in 2002, he has been active in the National Rifle Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, an unusual tandem.

...

Barr's new party (he joined in 2006) also is handicapped by John McCain's handiwork. One wealthy libertarian would give $1 million if the McCain-Feingold law regulating political participation did not ban contributions of more than $28,500 to national parties. Another wealthy libertarian—he is dead, so he has none of the supposedly corrupt purposes that make McCain so cross—bequeathed more than $200,000 to the party. That would fund the ballot access struggles, but it is in escrow because of McCain-Feingold. If libertarian voters cost McCain the presidency, that will be condign punishment.

McCain's going to have to fight for every conservative vote out there.

Posted by: Ace at 10:04 AM | Comments (47)
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