Happy Friday.

Pope Francis personally called his delivery guy to cancel his Buenos Aires newspaper subscription: "Seriously, itÂ’s Jorge Bergoglio, IÂ’m calling you from Rome."

The Obama administration hopes to bring NSA-style scanning of email, web traffic "closer to ordinary U.S. residents without triggering an outcry from privacy advocates" by using DHS as a middleman.

This sounds pretty far-fetched, though it's not hard to believe that neither man would yield when it came time to decide who would get to sit in the big chair.

Speaker Boehner's super-PAC has launched its first 2014 ads against Democrats who voted against the Ryan budget.

And in "It's a Weird, Weird World" news, Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe and Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo have submitted an amicus brief in the Prop 8 case (PDF) arguing in favor of marriage equality. It's kinduva weird brief.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:52 AM | Comments (258)
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The Great Green Con

When your 95% confidence interval is exceeded within just a few years, maybe your models kinda suck.

Jeff Bezos recovers Apollo F-1 engines from the ocean floor

They still don't know which mission they came from but they've been 14,000 feet deep for over 40 years.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 04:43 PM | Comments (767)
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Sure can! more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:35 PM | Comments (279)
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Oh Dear God in Heaven, please make clueless female politicians stop pretending they like sports.

And male ones, too.

I was going to pray that the media stops with this bullshit of asking female politicians which football team or whatever they like -- spare them of the embarrassment of lying --- but here, it seems that Nancy Pelosi started the lie herself. She called herself "March Mad," then told us all she was rooting for "everyone, especially the players."

What, not the refs? Racist.

Posted by: Ace at 02:44 PM | Comments (272)
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Interesting story.

I guess. I can't tell from this reporter's writing. I don't think he understands anything at all. If he does, he sure is hiding that fact.

The map, the Planck team said in news conferences and in 29 papers posted online Thursday morning, is in stunning agreement with the general view of the universe that has emerged over the past 20 years, of a cosmos dominated by dark energy that is pushing it apart and dark matter that is pulling galaxies together. It also shows a universe that seems to have endured an explosive burp known as inflation, which was the dynamite in the Big Bang.

Does that sentence clarify or obscure? He thinks his metaphors are pretty nifty; I think they're awful.

Vague bad-novelistic metaphor is the First Sin of Media Science Writing. The next sin is to just quote people talking about how awesome whatever is, without ever explaining that whatever.

You'll just have to take experts' word for it: It's awesome. For some reason.

In a statement issued by the European Space Agency, Jean-Jacques Dordain, its director general, said, “The extraordinary quality of Planck’s portrait of the infant universe allows us to peel back its layers to the very foundations, revealing that our blueprint of the cosmos is far from complete.”

It's probably time for Deepak Choprah-like How-It-All-Really-Just-Fits-Together quote, which indicates without explicating.

Marc Kamionkowski, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who commented on the work at a news teleconference sponsored by NASA, called Planck “cosmology’s human genome project,” saying, “It shows the seeds from which the current universe grew.”

You may have lost some non-science readers who want to pretend they're "pro-science" with that one. It's time to take this up to the 20,000 100,000 foot level. Let's get really basic now, and just say it's very pretty.

David N. Spergel, a Princeton University cosmologist, described the new results “beautiful,” adding that “the standard cosmological model looks even stronger today than yesterday. The universe remains simple and strange.”

After explaining the universe is slightly "lumpier" than previously thought (why? Maybe add some details here about the structure of space itself? Nah) we're back to faux-mystical take on things to comfort the liberal arts majors.

Now cosmologists will have to take them more seriously, said Max Tegmark, an expert on the early universe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not part of the Planck team and who termed the new results “very exciting.” It could be, he said, that “the universe is trying to tell us something.”

Like? Ooh, good. Let's hear the details.

In fairness I think the next paragraph is supposed to add some meat to that bone, but it itself is vague. It just says that some hope to create a "new physics" to explain why space is made up of clumps of matter rather than evenly-distributed matter.

But as it stands that paragraph is just soft-soap for the Mystics who aren't reading for the science, just for the whispered It's Full of Stars drama of it. The people whose understanding of, for example, Chaos Theory, is pretty much limited to the Depak Chopra version of it: Shit happens, dude.

Read the article and let me know if you find yourself knowing anything more than you did when you read it. Or if you've just had a bunch of pop-science bookcover-blurb buzzwords tossed at you. It all just seems like hype, trying to let you know that there's a fantastic party going on -- a sentiment I don't mind at all -- but the writer himself apparently never got into the party so can only tell you about some of the music he heard out on the street.

And these guys, by the way, are the experts who tell us the Science is Settled on global warming.

A Better Account: From Business Insider.

This cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB, is still detectable today, and interestingly, it's not evenly spread out across the universe. There are tiny fluctuations that make it "clumpy," and that shapes the universe around us. The clumpiness was the seeds of galaxies and clusters of galaxies that we see in the universe today.

It is clumpy because of fluctuations in the temperature and density of the universe at the moment the radiation waves started moving through it. Planck is able to look back at the universe when it was just 370,000 years old — when this radiation started moving.

Then they graphically illustrate the finer detail of the Planck map, comparing it to past maps of background radiation.

It does start off shaky, telling us the universe is 100 million years older than we thought -- no one sweats 100 million years in a guestimate of something 13+ billion years old. And then it tells us the early Big Bang was "white hot... blindingly bright," which is... gee thanks, I didn't figure on it being blindingly bright. I figured it was more like 300 watts, who knows, maybe even 400.

Anyway, though, after that stuff for dumb people, it does a better job than the "science" writer at the NYT.

Posted by: Ace at 01:23 PM | Comments (372)
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Guy's got some skillz.

“Adam Lanza commits a crime, and I’m here to gr0vel and plead for my rights and explain to you that my firearms are kept safely?” he asked rhetorically. “I keep hearing the word “solution”… you’re not going to find a solution, it doesn’t exist. You can’t find a broad brush solution to evil.”

...

“You’ll get a better handle on it maybe in a dictatorship where they just go in and take all your guns and lock-down, and they’ve got big brother watching all over you everywhere, they’ve got cameras on every corner, cameras in every neighborhood,” the Democrat continued.

“Well, we have some of that going on right now,” Steed interrupted.

Mikutel explained that Connecticut doesn’t want to go down that route and so it makes lawmakers’ job more “difficult.”

“The reason that your jobs are becoming so difficult is because you’re coloring outside the lines of constitutional parameters,” Steed shot back. “That’s the bottom line. You are trying to marriage up public safety with constitutional rights. The Constitution did not guarantee public safety, it guaranteed liberty. And sometimes what comes with liberty is tragedy, unfortunately.”

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Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (251)
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A conservative writer, T.P. Carney, questions whether it was "conservative" in ambition in the first place.

Not only have the costs -- human, monetary and political -- become glaring, but the unconservatism of the war has become hard to ignore.

War is the antithesis of fiscal conservatism. The war drove up federal spending, piling a trillion dollars onto the debt, killing Republican credibility on spending restraint and later helping justify President Obama's trillion dollars in tax hikes.

War also strips away limits on federal power. Constitutional restraints get tested in times of war. When that war lasts a decade and has no clear finish line, this untethers the state all the more. The precedents Bush set for indefinite detention and warrantless wiretaps will empower every future president.

Randolph Bourne, a leftist intellectual who opposed World War I, wrote that war is the health of the state. As such, it is a cancer on the rivals of the state -- civil society and individual liberty.

And consider the Bush administration's ambitious talk of remaking Iraq as a stepping stone to remaking the region. This national-greatness conservatism has a clear echo in Obama's national-greatness liberalism, which aims at "remaking America" and promises "we do big things."

Rallying behind Bush's ambitious "freedom agenda" meant abandoning a core insight of conservatism: that big ideas and big plans are dangerous because human knowledge and ability to predict consequences are limited much more than our planners tend to imagine.

Posted by: Ace at 10:34 AM | Comments (332)
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This is from two years ago, when Piers Morgan's show debuted, but it's funny, funny because it's true.

The narcissism riff is good, too.

Speaking of Gun Control Dummies: Biden says he's still "pushing" for that assault weapon ban that he's given up on.

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Posted by: Ace at 10:03 AM | Comments (125)
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Be warned, this one pretty much gives you the whole plot, though they still avoid mentioning the villain's name. I don't see why they have to do that, particularly with a film like this. I mean, does anyone think they're going to have trouble getting folks to see it in theaters? more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:13 AM | Comments (270)
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The Cuomo smugness, from January:

"Common sense can win," Cuomo said. "You can overpower the extremists with intelligence and with reason and with common sense."

“There is no such thing as a seven-bullet magazine. That doesn’t exist. So you really have no practical option,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo admitted yesterday at a news conference, explaining why his tough ban on ammunition magazines over seven rounds should be repealed.

Oh, well. Live and learn. But probably not learn.

Update: Also, *ahem*.

Update 2: I probably should have mentioned this is the same bill that was rushed through in the middle of the night and forgot to exempt police officers. So overall, just a stellar example of responsible lawmaking.

Posted by: JohnE. at 09:32 AM | Comments (249)
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