net.casting

what appears here?
...
a selection of items of interest that I come upon in my online peregrinations; or things i've contributed to the web
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for which extended commentary
may be found at
the free radical.
other tumblrs:
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    ☯ Tania
    ☯ TIC
December 2
“ Is America a nation that tortures? The question is being asked all around the world. It’s not a matter of idle speculation.
…
Here’s the short version: “We do not torture?” That claim has been formally reviewed by a court and found to be a lie.
—Scott Horton in Harpers.org: “A Nation That Tortures:”
November 1
October 31
fr. NASA’s Earth Observatory newsroom: 2007 Ozone Hole.Each year, the ozone hole over the Southern Hemisphere reaches its largest size during September. Data from NASA’s Aura satellite show that the annual ozone hole peaked in size on September 13, reaching 9.7 million square miles, slightly larger than North America. That’s “pretty average,” says Paul Newman, an atmospheric scientist at NASA Goddard Space Fight Center, when compared to the area of ozone holes measured over the last 15 years. Still, the extent this year was “very big,” he says, compared to the state of the ozone layer in the 1970s, when the hole did not yet exist.
fr. NASA’s Earth Observatory newsroom: 2007 Ozone Hole.

Each year, the ozone hole over the Southern Hemisphere reaches its largest size during September. Data from NASA’s Aura satellite show that the annual ozone hole peaked in size on September 13, reaching 9.7 million square miles, slightly larger than North America. That’s “pretty average,” says Paul Newman, an atmospheric scientist at NASA Goddard Space Fight Center, when compared to the area of ozone holes measured over the last 15 years. Still, the extent this year was “very big,” he says, compared to the state of the ozone layer in the 1970s, when the hole did not yet exist.
October 26
“ …torture gives false information. And the worst scenarios that tortured detainees coughed up—many of them completely innocent, remember—may well have come to fuel US national security policy.

And of course they also fueled more torture. Because once you hear of the existential plots confessed by one tortured prisoner, you need to torture more prisoners to get at the real truth. We do not know what actual intelligence they were getting, and Cheney has ensured that we will never know. But it is perfectly conceivable that the torture regime—combined with panic and paranoia—created an imaginationland of untruth and half-truth that has guided US policy for this entire war. It may well have led to the president being informed of any number of plots that never existed, and any number of threats that are pure imagination.

And once torture has entered the system, you can never find out the real truth. You are lost in a vortex of lies and fears. In this vortex, the actual threats that we face may well be overlooked or ignored, as we chase false leads and pursue non-existent WMDs.

—Andrew Sullivan, in his post Imaginationland. A MUST-READ.
October 25
Shark lurks off Maui coast…
Shark lurks off Maui coast…
October 24
“ Bush’s presidency has made a shambles of real conservatism. …

On issue after Mom-and-apple-pie issue, from authorizing torture to approving illegal wiretapping to launching a self-destructive war, Bush has done incalculable damage to conservative principles—far more, in fact, than any recent Democratic president. And he has been supported every step of the way by Republicans in Congress, who have voted in lockstep for his radical policies. None of the major Republican candidates running for office have repudiated any of Bush’s policies. They simply promise to execute them better.

—Gary Kamiya, in Salon.com: How Bush wrecked conservatism
October 23
Tracking the California Wildfires - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog
Tracking the California Wildfires - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog
October 22
“ The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

—Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek: Stalin, Mao And … Ahmadinejad?
October 21
Hawaiian temples tell tale of social change - Science Mysteries - MSNBC.com
Hawaiian temples tell tale of social change - Science Mysteries - MSNBC.com
October 18
“ Let us leave aside for a moment the Bush administration’s abject failure in rallying the world for any purpose, let alone regime change or even nuclear sanity in Iran. Six years of neoconservative “toughness” has done nothing to discourage the Iranian regime, and instead has encouraged a harder line by the mullahs — who have enjoyed a vast improvement in their regional power because of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.

But the problems with Bush’s approach go even deeper, because he has consistently provided the Iranians with excuses to do precisely what we and our allies want to stop them from doing.

—Joe Conason in Salon.com: Nuclear hypocrisy
October 17
A severe and unprecedented drought has hit the American South. Fr. the NY Times: “Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices”
A severe and unprecedented drought has hit the American South. Fr. the NY Times: “Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices”
October 16
“ These “rugged individualists” of the frontier, these swaggering skeptics and despisers of government power, these Burkean defenders of individual liberty who hate “centralized government” and—above all else—are guided by “a deep suspicion of the power of the state,” now want to vest virtually unlimited secret power in the President to spy on Americans.

Has there ever been a political movement more antithetical to the political values they pompously espouse than the right-wing movement—those “small government” Authoritarians—epitomized by National Review Editors?
—fr. Glenn Greenwald, at Salon.com: The conservative vision of America, by National Review
October 15
An excellent Beirut video, In the Mausoleum from The Flying Club Cup.
October 14
“ We track world oil production using perhaps the most reliable source, Oil & Gas Journal. Their database has been updated through July 2007. World oil production declined 386,000 barrels of oil per day relative to the same period in 2006. If it continues for the full year, I believe this will be the first year-on-year decline in world oil production since 1984-1985.

—Andrew Leonard quotes a UC Berkeley prof. of chemical engineering, in How the World Works at Salon.com
October 13
Fascinating news mashup site: Newsmap“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”
Fascinating news mashup site: Newsmap

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”