The Re Collection

Amanda at Pandagan finds a real whopper at RedState.org:

These are a few of the starting points when discussing where throwing God out of the equation leaves man in the philosophical and political sense. I could go on by noting that if atheistic evolution is true, Marx was correct and Locke was wrong, there is no justification for condemning the Nazis, and so on and so on - but I hope that the point has been driven home adequately that one’s metaphysical view does have real life political, philosophical and actual consequences.

Not a Good Day for Innovation, Customer Rights and Free Speech

The Grokster file sharing decision was the most notorious of the ones handed down today. But the court also came down on the wrong side in the so-called “Brand X” matter, saying cable Internet access providers companies don’t have to provide access to third party ISPs. They own the cable, so they get to decide what data gets sent, in what order.

Given that there are only two “broadband” providers in most communities — if that many — this is an invitation to a media consolidation that makes the current one look pale. The decision, which ratifies Congressional and FCC failure to address the open-access question in a way that promotes freedom of speech, is a gift to the cable/phone duopoly. They will abuse their power, because history shows that’s how they work.

Do you care? Or are you a sheep, baa baa, ready to be just a consumer of the crap Hollywood feeds you? Are you willing to let the phone and cable companies dominate tomorrow’s media, having built “their” networks on the backs of monopoly deals with government that they now leverage to capture entirely new markets? Baa baa.

If you care, fight back. Call, and especially write, your member of the U.S. House and U.S. senators. Tell them that the law is now grossly out of balance in the hands of the entertainment cartel and data duopoly. They won’t pay much attention if you’re the only one who calls, but they may begin to wake up if enough people care.

PZ at The American Street has a great post about theNiobrara chalk deposit in Kansas.

I’ve only briefly visited modern Kansas, but the Kansas of my imagination is a fiercely exotic ocean, a warm and savage sea richer than any place still extant. Try mentioning the magic word “Niobrara” to a paleontologist, or any enthusiast familiar with Mesozoic reptiles…their eyes will light up as it conjures visions of the world of 85 million years ago, a world well documented in the incredible fossil beds of Kansas. It’s a powerful, evocative word that links us to a wealth of evidence and a complex, fascinating history.

Reading about the ridiculous anti-evolution trial going on there was rather depressing. It isn’t just that the creationist arguments are so poor, but that they are making them in Kansas, where beneath their very feet are the relics of an ancient world that show them to be wrong. Don’t schoolchildren there take pride in the paleontological wealth of their home? Do the people bury their imaginations and avoid thinking about the history that surrounds them?

This is hilarious:
Yahoo! News - Blogs Will Change Your Business

..wherein you will learn such important points as “[…]we’re going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story — call it Blogs 101 for businesses — in the style of a blog. We’re even sprinkling it with links. These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story’s online version to another Web page. […]

and so on. I will give the writer credit for at least making one critical point:

But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.

Couldn’t be happier about that, myself.

The LeftCoaster has a good rundown of the very nasty Earth Day present delivered by the House yesterday. What a disaster.

I remember the first Earth Day in 1970. The Catholic High School I attended let us out for the day to go to the march. It was fantastic, joyful and full of hope. A few years later, quite a lot of good legislation had been passed, and folks were becoming conscious and future-thinking. Then Reagan came in with his anti-intellectual, pseudo-populist bullshit and now my brother, like millions of other mis-informed people, think the hole in the ozone, and anything else associated with “treehuggers,” is a hoax. And he won’t recycle until they pay him to do it, like getting your deposit back on bottles (yeah, they used to do that).

I remember when McDonald’s stopped using styrofoam to wrap Big Macs due to public pressure. And being seen at the store getting your groceries bagged in plastic was a social disgrace (paper wasn’t much better; you brought your own canvas bags, thank you very much). Boy, those were the good old days. If we’d seen the parking lots full of SUV that awaited us 30 years hence, I don’t think we would have been quite so excited by what we were doing.

As a political geek, I went to the site of the National Weather Service after hearing how Sen. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum is sponsoring a bill to eliminate the NWS so that commercial enterprises can make you pay for their weather news instead (oh, and guess who donated a big hunk o’ dough to Santorum’s campaign?)

But my father is a total weather geek and apparently some of that has rubbed off on me. That — and the graphic design advice I always like to dispurse whether it’s asked for or not — made the forecast icon survey a total rush for me.

Stripped Down. This article from New Scientist magazine tells of an idea for bringing low-cost computing to the poor in developing countries. The key to making it possible: no Microsoft.