Terra Incognita

From NASA’s press release:

Rendered in myriad hues, vivid details of Saturn’s stormy atmosphere play out below the shadow of the rings.

A well defined storm swirls through the atmosphere of the southern hemisphere in the lower left of the image, like the tight blue circle of an eye’s iris.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 36 degrees below the ringplane. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Dec. 29, 2008 at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers (680,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 51 degrees. Image scale is 60 kilometers (37 miles) per pixel.

Ron Paul spoke.  Conservatives are talking more and more about Revolution (warning: Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck.  Dangerous amounts of stupid).  Sean Hannity even has a poll on his website asking regular visitors to his message board what kind of revolution they would prefer, which earned Sean a “Worst Person” from Keith Olbermann.

The Revolutionary Communist Party is holding a meeting about a revolution tomorrow at the University Center.  I’d like to think that there are leftists who are organizing for a revolution in the same way that the right is, using the ideas in Naomi Wolf’s most recent book Give Me Liberty and energized by the allegations made by Naomi Klein in her (more famous) book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

What the Ron Paul revolution’s (or reEVOLUtion) goals are speled out his book The Revolution: A Manifesto and include things like an immediate end to the war in Iraq, the legalization of marijuana (both of which I agree with).  They also include getting rid of social security, the Department of Education, the IRS and the Federal Reserve while repealing the 16th and 17th amendments to the Constitution.

The 16th Amendment gives the Congress the power to levy income tax without apportionment through states or regard to the census.  A federal income tax has existed in the US since 1861, but Paul’s Revolution would get rid of income taxes all-together after shrinking Government to its constitutional limits.

The 17th Amendment changes the Constitution so that Senators are directly elected by voters rather than appointed by state legislatures.  Earlier this month Sen. Russ Feingold proposed an amendment that would change the 17th Amendment to not allow the appointment of Senators by Governors should a vacancy arise (thanks to the Blagojevich/Burris scandal).  Instead, under this new amendment, when a vacancy arises, a special election will take place.

Paul advocates repealing the 17th Amendment entirely, going back to state legislature votes.

An animated short from Seth Macfarlane, creator of Family Guy

Michelle Bachmann spoke at CPAC, which is a bizzare circus this year.  She speaks against the stimulus bill and asks “What would the founding fathers think of representation WITH taxation?”  Why, that’s what we have right now!

See for yourself (from Keith Olbermann, I couldn’t find the original clip)

AronRa finishes his epic Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism with a two part final smackdown in which he explains the difference between facts, evidence, laws and theories in science and why dismissing evolution as “just a theory” is not only wrong, but silly.

PZ Myers is a biologist at the U of M Morris.  He’s also an athiest.  He blogs about these things and others subjects at his blog pharyngula.  He’s usually rational, if irreverent, in his arguments.

Then this post came where he warned about how criticizing religion might become illegal thanks to those no-goodniks at the UN.  His proof?  That Lou Dobbs segment I showed earlier that didn’t point out that General Assembly resolutions are non-binding.  He also linked to an article from Canwest about the non-binding resolution passed by the assembly in November of last year and presented it as if it was passed this week.

C’mon, man!  You have a PhD, you’re supposed to be smarter than me (who doesn’t even have a Bachelor’s yet)!

Seriously, what an asshole

Here

And Ed Vrdolyak gets 5 years probation and no jail

Watch this clip from CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight.  Notice any glaring omissions?

Here’s one:  The UN General Assembly can only pass non-binding resolutions.  The only UN body that can pass binding resolutions is the Security Council where the US has veto power.

Secondly, they keep referring to a resolution passed last year as a precursor to what’s to come.  That particular resolution (which was non-binding) was pushed by OIC countries, but the resolution was for combatting the “defamation of religion” not “defamation of Islam.”  Hitchens in this segment makes the best effort (if brief) to point out that other religions are intolerant of criticism, but the piece is more about how those damn Muslims don’t want to be criticized.