The Green­housers Strike Back and Out [Coun­ter­Punch]

The lat­est in the series on global warm­ing that I’ve men­tioned previously.

Good­bye, Stan­ley Miller. Stan­ley Miller’s obit­u­ary was in the papers last week. He died aged 77, but earned those obit­u­ar­ies at the age of 22 while still a stu­dent. Nobel lau­re­ate Harold Urey had sug­gested that Earth’s prim­i­tive atmos­phere might, like Jupiter’s, be rich in hydro­gen, ammo­nia, methane and water vapour. Miller won­dered if he could repli­cate those early con­di­tions, and bom­barded a pyrex flask filled with those chem­i­cals with elec­tric charges to sim­u­late light­ning. After two days he found a sim­ple amino acid, glycine, had been cre­ated. After a week he found that 10–15 per­cent of the car­bon had formed into organic com­pounds, includ­ing 13 of the 22 amino acids that make proteins.

The ‘Miller exper­i­ment’ was an imme­di­ate sen­sa­tion when he pub­lished his paper in the jour­nal Sci­ence in May 1953. Peo­ple had spec­u­lated that the build­ing blocks of life might have assem­bled them­selves in the primeval sea or atmos­phere, but no-one had sup­posed it would be so fast. The impli­ca­tion was that if it could hap­pen so eas­ily and so quickly, then it might have hap­pened else­where. His exper­i­ment changed our per­cep­tion of life from that of being an unlikely and rare occur­rence into some­thing which might hap­pen reg­u­larly dur­ing the devel­op­ment of cer­tain types of planet.

He also showed that even a hum­ble stu­dent armed with a good idea and the wit to pur­sue it can make his or her mark and add to human knowl­edge and under­stand­ing. He never gained the Nobel prize he prob­a­bly deserved, but he did gain the acco­lade of his peers and the respect of his gen­er­a­tion. Thank you, Stan­ley Miller. [Adam Smith Insti­tute Blog]

Besides its impli­ca­tions for the ori­gins of life on Earth, the exper­i­ment takes on new sig­nif­i­cance with the recent dis­cov­ery of a poten­tially hab­it­able planet in the Gliese 581 system.

Elon Musk Is Bet­ting His For­tune on a Mis­sion Beyond Earth’s Orbit [Wired]

A look at SpaceX, a com­pany which is very close to reach­ing orbit entirely on their own, with no gov­ern­ment handouts.

In an arti­cle mostly about Iraq, we also find this:

Edwards also called Mon­day for spread­ing the bur­den of serv­ing the coun­try by man­dat­ing national service.

“One of the things we ought to be think­ing about is some level of manda­tory ser­vice to our coun­try, so that every­body in Amer­ica — not just the poor kids who get sent to war — are serv­ing this coun­try,” he said.

I’m a lit­tle sur­prised that even a Demo­c­rat would openly advo­cate slav­ery in the 21^st cen­tury. I sup­pose that, now that the first ten amend­ments to the Con­sti­tu­tion are pretty much dead, they’ve decided to move on the the thirteenth.

MARK BRADY: Arguably the Sin­gle Best Essay on Global Warm­ing That I Have Read So Far.

Read Josie Appleton’s Mea­sur­ing the Polit­i­cal Tem­per­a­ture here. The author explains how global warm­ing has ceased to be a sci­en­tific hypoth­e­sis and become an eth­i­cal, reli­gious and polit­i­cal prin­ci­ple to guide our lives.

[Lib­erty & Power: Group Blog]

An inter­est­ing look at what has become the cen­tral dogma of the ecof­reak religion.

Those Vicious Iran­ian Drug Cops.

In an appar­ent attempt to drum up sup­port for war with Iran, neo­con bul­wark Michael Ledeen points read­ers to pic­tures of an Iran­ian drug bust, and comments:

Ter­ri­fy­ing pic­tures, to be sure. For me, the most reveal­ing thing about them is that the police feel obliged to wear masks while con­duct­ing a drug bust in the cap­i­tal. tells you some­thing about the rela­tion­ship between the peo­ple and the state.

Oh, where to begin. Per­haps here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here. [Hit & Run]

For once, he’s absolutely cor­rect. It really does tell you something–just not about the state he had in mind.

Why the US Gov­ern­ment Is Hated All Over the World.

Fred Reed at LewRockwell.com — they hate us for our government’s bul­ly­ing. As they should. As you should. Click here for Fred’s own copy of this essay, enti­tled “A New Improved Amer­ica: The Com­ing of God Knows What”. [lew]

[End the War on Free­dom]

NEOCONNED: Who is biggest Neo­Conartist? [Free Cen­tury]

What makes this poll unusual is that the three can­di­dates who have been anointed by the main­stream media as the only ones who mat­ter actu­ally do occupy the top three posi­tions in the results.

Ron Paul’s Rad­i­cal Mix: Truth & Pol­i­tics. Hats off to Ron Paul for another great per­for­mance in the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial debate in South Car­olina last night.

For almost six years, politi­cians have acted as if it is fed­eral crime to speak bluntly about 9/11. On the day of the attacks, George Bush pro­claimed that the hijack­ers attacked because they hate Amer­ica for its free­dom. This has been treated as a revealed truth ever since. (When I saw Bush on TV that day, I was per­plexed how the US gov­ern­ment could know the motive before it knew the iden­tity of the hijackers).

Ron Paul has never kow­towed to this dogma, and last night he deftly debunked the 9/11 cat­e­chism. From the tran­script:

MR. GOLER: Con­gress­man Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as — almost imme­di­ately, sir. Are you out of step with your party? Is your party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seek­ing its nomination?

REP. PAUL: Well, I think the party has lost its way, because the con­ser­v­a­tive wing of the Repub­li­can Party always advo­cated a non­in­ter­ven­tion­ist for­eign pol­icy. Sen­a­tor Robert Taft didn’t even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the elec­tion in the year 2000 cam­paign­ing on a hum­ble for­eign pol­icy — no nation-building, no polic­ing of the world. Repub­li­cans were elected to end the Korean War. The Repub­li­cans were elected to end the Viet­nam War. There’s a strong tra­di­tion of being anti-war in the Repub­li­can party. It is the con­sti­tu­tional posi­tion. It is the advice of the Founders to fol­low a non-interventionist for­eign pol­icy, stay out of entan­gling alliances, be friends with coun­tries, nego­ti­ate and talk with them and trade with them.
Just think of the tremen­dous improve­ment — rela­tion­ships with Viet­nam. We lost 60,000 men. We came home in defeat. Now we go over there and invest in Viet­nam.
So there’s a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and fol­low­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion.
And my argu­ment is that we shouldn’t go to war so care­lessly. (Bell rings.) When we do, the wars don’t end.

MR. GOLER: Con­gress­man, you don’t think that changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?

REP. PAUL: What changed?

MR. GOLER: The non-interventionist policies.

REP. PAUL: No. Non-intervention was a major con­tribut­ing fac­tor. Have you ever read the rea­sons they attacked us? They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bomb­ing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Mid­dle East — I think Rea­gan was right.
We don’t under­stand the irra­tional­ity of Mid­dle East­ern pol­i­tics. So right now we’re build­ing an embassy in Iraq that’s big­ger than the Vat­i­can. We’re build­ing 14 per­ma­nent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our coun­try or in the Gulf of Mex­ico? We would be object­ing. We need to look at what we do from the per­spec­tive of what would hap­pen if some­body else did it to us.
(Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Are you sug­gest­ing we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?

REP. PAUL: I’m sug­gest­ing that we lis­ten to the peo­ple who attacked us and the rea­son they did it, and they are delighted that we’re over there because Osama bin Laden has said, “I am glad you’re over on our sand because we can tar­get you so much eas­ier.” They have already now since that time — (bell rings) — have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don’t think it was necessary.

MR. GIULIANI: Wen­dell, may I com­ment on that? That’s really an extra­or­di­nary state­ment. That’s an extra­or­di­nary state­ment, as some­one who lived through the
attack of Sep­tem­ber 11, that we invited the attack because we were attack­ing Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd expla­na­tions for Sep­tem­ber 11^th. (Applause, cheers.) And I would ask the con­gress­man to with­draw that com­ment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Congressman?

REP. PAUL: I believe very sin­cerely that the CIA is cor­rect when they teach and talk about blow­back. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blow­back. A reac­tion to that was the tak­ing of our hostages and that per­sists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a prob­lem.
They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there. I mean, what would we think if we were — if other for­eign coun­tries were doing that to us?

****

Giuliani’s snort is the best answer the Repub­li­can estab­lish­ment can offer for the hard facts that Paul presents.

But such snorts will not be enough to per­pet­u­ate Repub­li­can con­trol over the Amer­i­can people.

Ron Paul is the type of can­di­date that the Found­ing Fathers envi­sioned — some­one who cher­ishes the Con­sti­tu­tion and under­stands why it leashed politi­cians in per­pe­tu­ity. [Bovard]

Despite the pre­dictable howls of out­rage from the media and the other Repub­li­can can­di­dates for point­ing out the obvi­ous, this actu­ally seems to have helped Ron Paul con­sid­er­ably. After the last debate, the main­stream media largely ignored him, with some arti­cles and polls not even men­tion­ing his name. Now, they’re falling over each other in the rush to denounce him and insist that he should be excluded from future debates.

Sex, Drugs and Updat­ing Your Blog. The uni­verse of musi­cians mak­ing their way online includes many bands that func­tion in a tra­di­tional way — sign­ing up with a label — while using the Inter­net pri­mar­ily as a means of pro­mo­tion, the way OK Go has done. Two-thirds of OK Go’s album sales are still in the phys­i­cal world: actual CDs sold through tra­di­tional CD stores. But the B-list increas­ingly includes a newer and more curi­ous life-form: per­form­ers like Coul­ton, who con­struct their entire busi­ness model online. With­out the Inter­net, their musi­cal careers might not exist at all. Coul­ton has for­gone a record-label con­tract; instead, he uses a grow­ing array of online tools to sell music directly to fans. He con­tracts with a vir­tual ful­fill­ment house called CD Baby, which ware­houses his CDs, processes the credit-card pay­ment for each sale and ships it out, while pock­et­ing only $4 of the album’s price, a much smaller cut than a tra­di­tional label would take. CD Baby also places his music on the major digital-music stores like iTunes, Rhap­sody and Nap­ster. Most lucra­tively, Coul­ton sells MP3s from his own per­sonal Web sites, where there’s no mid­dle­man at all.

In total, 41 per­cent of Coulton’s income is from digital-music sales, three-quarters of which are sold directly off his own Web site. Another 29 per­cent of his income is from CD sales; 18 per­cent is from ticket sales for his live shows. The final 11 per­cent comes from T-shirts, often bought online.

Indeed, run­ning a Web store has allowed Coul­ton and other artists to exper­i­ment with intrigu­ing inno­va­tions in flex­i­ble pric­ing. Remark­ably, Coul­ton offers most of his music free on his site; when fans buy his songs, it is because they want to give him money. The Cana­dian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has an even more clever sys­tem: she has a “pay what you can” pol­icy with her down­load­able songs, so fans can down­load them free — but her site also shows the aver­age price her cus­tomers have paid for each track. This sub­tly cre­ates a com­mu­nity stan­dard, a gen­er­al­ized aware­ness of how much peo­ple think each track is really worth. The result? The aver­age price is as much as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes. [The New York Times Mag­a­zine]