I've heard so much insanity from the politicians and pundits lately that it's refreshing to see some good ol' fashioned non-partisan crazy. Check out Alfred Lambremont Webre's claim that NASA is bombing extraterrestrial civilizations on the moon:

The NASA moon bombing, a component of the LCROSS mission, may also trigger conflict with known extraterrestrial civilizations on the moon as reported on the moon in witnessed statements by U.S. astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, and in witnessed statements to NSA (National Security Agency) photos and documents regarding an extraterrestrial base on the dark side of the moon.

If the true intent of the LCROSS mission moon bombing is a hostile act by NASA against known extraterrestrial civilizations and settlements on the moon, then NASA and by extension the U.S. government are guilty of aggressive war which is the most serious of war crimes under the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions, to which the U.S. is subject.

LCROSS, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, is a real mission. And it is indeed going to crash into the moon -- just like meteors do all the time. But it's going to crash into the south lunar pole, where there might, in the shadow of a crater, be water ice. NASA is going to see if there's any water in the dust kicked up.

It's not going to hit the "dark side". So and ETs bases there are safe. (Chuckle.) Anyway, they would have to be dug in deep to protect themselves against natural impacts. Most of those natural impactors are of course much smaller, but are also traveling orders of magnitude faster. We're making this one happen where and when we want, but impact-wise, this is no big deal for the moon.

As for claims that Aldrin and Armstrong saw ET spaceships: rubbish. They saw a adapter panel from their upper stage, didn't know what it was at first (thus it was, literally, a UFO -- or perhaps more precisely, an unidentified orbiting object -- for a time), but later identified it.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem that includes eight or more words from the following list, which workshop participants brainstormed around the theme "home":

door warmth foundational Baltimore secure share hideaway den hearth siding vista center movable happy grow

sharing the center
with circles, those perfect shapes
this can only happen when
one encloses, surrounds, the other
but the oblong ellipse --
the shape of the earth's walk around Helios's den
and of the comet's plunge from its dark hideway down into the warmth of the solar hearth
the ellipse can share its focus with many
without surrounding

it is eccentricity that saves us
from surrounding or being surrounded
that takes us away and then back again
falling in and then shooting back out

in balance between our own momentum
and the foundational pull that roots us
we travel a loop with a one fixed focus
but the other focus is movable
orbital precession
so that we trace the shape of a blossom
a many-petaled flower
an emblem of our life
joy and beauty and --
let us not forget the flower's evolutionary purpose --
sexuality

sharing one focus
without surrounding
pulled the same way
but each expression individual
eccentric
unique

And the madness continues...on Tuesday, Obama will give a speech where he will "challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning," and call on students, parents and educators to see that every child receives the best education possible. The speech will take place during the school day and will be broadcast to many schools.

You might think that this is Mom and Apple Pie stuff which no one could possibly object to. In fact, Bush the First gave a similar speech, without any incident or protest that I can recall. And you might think that everyone knows that most students will doze through it.

But in the foaming vitriol of the right-wing pundits, this is Hitler Youth type stuff. Finkelstein compares Obama's "plan for our children" -- that they work hard and stay in school -- with Mao Zedong. Beck calls it "capturing your kids." Malkin says he's recruiting "junior lobbyists."

So nutcases like Bryan Fischer, Pamela Geller, and Tammy Bruce suggest having your kids skip school.

So, it seem that the conservative movement, such as it is, is now officially opposed to education.

Res ipsa loquitur.

I do so love a medical mystery. From The Daily Telegraph:

Retired architect Mr Darby, from Leicestershire, had worn spectacles since the age of two but was stunned when he came round after surgery to clear the blood clot causing his stroke, that he could see clearly without his glasses.

...

Malcolm suffered a major stroke on May 13 last year when he was working in his office at home in Oakham and managed to tell his wife Sylvia, 68, to dial 999 before he collapsed.

He was rushed to Kettering General Hospital for surgery where a two-hour operation was carried out to remove a blood clot that was blocking 80 per cent of his right carotid artery in his neck.

...

It is unclear why the stroke or the operation appears to have caused such a dramatic improvement in Mr Darby's sight but doctors believe there may have been pressure on the optic nerve at the back of the eye which was relieved as the clot was cleared

From The New Yorker, this story of how Texas executed a man for homicide by arson, on no reliable evidence, will chill you:

As Hurst looked through the case records, a statement by Manuel Vasquez, the state deputy fire marshal, jumped out at him. Vasquez had testified that, of the roughly twelve hundred to fifteen hundred fires he had investigated, “most all of them” were arson. This was an oddly high estimate; the Texas State Fire Marshals Office typically found arson in only fifty per cent of its cases.

Hurst was also struck by Vasquez’s claim that the Willingham blaze had “burned fast and hot” because of a liquid accelerant. The notion that a flammable or combustible liquid caused flames to reach higher temperatures had been repeated in court by arson sleuths for decades. Yet the theory was nonsense: experiments have proved that wood and gasoline-fuelled fires burn at essentially the same temperature.

So over at the day job, it looks like we want to upgrade the firmware for the RAID controller on our web server, a Dell PowerEdge. So I poke around support.dell.com and find the file. Great. I'll use wget to download it to the server...

Tripped across the Facebook fan page for LaSara Firefox. She is "is a writer, coach, and educator. Ms. Allen helps her clients find balance in their lives, and more full alignment with their personal and family-held values." She's also a frequent presenter at Starwood, where she's famous for giving a flirting workshop that incorporates some ideas from NLP.

For those of you who've been to my workshop "How *Not* To Flirt With A Goddess" at FSA's Beltane or Fires of Venus, she's the person who encouraged me to develop it (and suggested the alternate title, "How Not To Be `That Guy'"). So a tip of the hat to her, and if you're on Facebook, why don't you go check out her page?

From Peter Rothberg's blog at The Nation:

Do 87 million Verizon Wireless customers know that the company is a co-sponsor of a major climate-change-denying, union-busting, pro-mountaintop removal Labor Day rally staged by Massey Energy in Logan, West Virginia?

...

Massey Energy, the largest producer of Central Appalachian coal...[in 2008] agreed to pay $20 million in fines to the EPA to resolve more than 4,500 violations of the Clean Water Act for polluting waterways in West Virginia and Kentucky with coal slurry and wastewater.

One of the country's foremost practitioners of mountaintop removal, a radical form of coal mining in which entire mountains are blown up, devastating hundreds of square miles of Appalachia and polluting the headwaters of rivers, the company has fiercely lobbied against Obama administration and EPA efforts to crack down on the practice.

These anti-environmental sensibilities will be well represented at the company's Labor Day "Friends of America" celebrations next weekend. The gala's featured speaker, Lord Christopher Monckton, a science adviser to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is one of the world's most infamous global warming-deniers. Other "distinguished" speakers include Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent.

So why is Verizon sponsoring this pro-mountaintop removal rally on a strip mine site? Calls to the company have so far gone unanswered.

This "Friends of America" thing sounds like something from the next stage of teabagging we've previously discussed.

Letter to the editor, Washington Post:

Richard Cohen claims that "No one can possibly believe that America is now safer because of the new restrictions on enhanced interrogation." But Cohen, -- like other apologists for torture -- fails to realize that every abuse of a detainee acts to recruit more people to extremist groups. Those who beat and waterboarded prisoners, and those who ordered the torture, might as well have been drawing paychecks from Al Qaeda.

When we do evil, we only help the cause of those who would label America "the great Satan". Ending abuse is one of the best tools we have to stop terrorist ideology from spreading, and thus to make America safer.

HealthDay News reports on a Canadian study of the safety of home births attended by a registered midwife:

The mortality rate per 1,000 births was 0.35 in the home birth group, 0.57 in hospital births attended by midwives, and 0.64 among those attended by physicians, according to the study.

Women who gave birth at home were less likely to need interventions or to have problems such as vaginal tearing or hemorrhaging. These babies were also less likely to need oxygen therapy or resuscitation, the study found.

The authors acknowledge that "self-selection" could have skewed the study results, in that women who prefer home deliveries tend to be healthier and otherwise more fit to have a home birth.

Even with possible self selection, though, it's hard to ignore that difference in mortality rate.

And I suspect that midwives attending home births are much less likely to push women into unnecessary C-sections.

Speaking of which -- see this recent story where a district court held that a woman's refusal of an unnecessary C-section was “negligent”, and upheld taking her baby away. Because, you know, we might not be able to control who women marry anymore, and we can't stop them from using birth control, and we haven't been able to outlaw abortion yet, but by god we can still put them in their place by controlling how they give birth! Fortunately this part of the finding was overturned by the appellate court, but the fact that it was ever an issue ought to make you feel a bit queasy.