Here is a Katrina mobcast/blog that was set up today - lots more signal than noise, so far. I have a feeling that this disaster is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I have a very bad feeling about the superdome. When I read yesterday that 10,000 people were sheltering in there, I said, “that’s just about the worst idea I ever heard.” I pray that it’s not as bad as I think it might be.
NYT on the new religion called Pastafarianism that was born out of one man’s holy quest for truth… and his frustration with the Kansas school system’s embrace of “intelligent design”.
Last night’s Daily Show interview made me get my ass up off the couch and applaud. Not quite as much of a coup as Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire, but his interview with Hitchens did culminate in a rather articulate, passionate, and beautifully logical smackdown. Ding ding ding! We have a winner!
Video here, for the time being.
This is pretty interesting. Apparently there is a 70-year-old method of converting coal into gasoline and diesel fuel that, if implemented with America’s vast coal supply, could power us for the next 40 years. The cost to start it with a plant in Montana, where 1/3 of the nation’s coal is located? About 1.5 billion dollars. A whole lot cheaper than the Iraq war.
Of course, I have mixed feelings about this, after having seen the horrors that coal mining inflicts upon the land in the Appalachians. And the coal-fired electrical power plants we have now are in serious need of overhaul and cleanup. Bush’s energy bill “grandfathered” older coal plants so that they would not be subject to the same environmental standards as new plants.
Coal is dirty. It’s sooty and gross, and you have to blow up mountains to get to it. And we’re going to run out of it. But… we don’t have the perfect solution to the oil problem yet, and this method, on its surface, seems to do a lot less harm than oil does, ecomonically and envioronmentally. And it could save us from having to deal with the middle east for our energy needs.
I dunno…. maybe for 1.5 billion it’s worth a try.
The Palm Beach Post is maintaining an interactive map of the hometowns of service members killed in the Iraq war. There’s no single state in America–red or blue–that hasn’t suffered senseless losses from this war.
Cindy Sheehan’s quiet sit-in outside Bush’s Crawford ranch is percolating up through the Mainstream Media. Finally, something to give real momentum to the growing anti-invasion movement. I can’t wait to see how Bush weasels out of this one.
I find myself thinking back on John Kerry’s 1971 question - “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”