Too close to call and the twat concedes!

US politics
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You cannot know how absolutely fucking angry I am right now. After four long years of incompetent leadership, after the biggest terrorist attack in the history of the US, one that could’ve been prevented, after four years of plunder, two years of an unnecessary war, an absolutely despicable election campaign waged by the Republicans, filled with more fraud then even 2000 saw, John “twat” Kerry thinks it’s a noble thing to concede before all the fucking votes are counted! Better for Kerry to have died forgotten in Vietnam than this shameful charade.

Kerry and the Democratic leadership have betrayed their party, their activists and their voters. Those who said Kerry was a false choice, who urged to vote third party, were right. Once again, when it comes to the crunch, the Democrats rolled over and died.

Thank you fucking much.

Squid profit from global warming

Natural World
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We may not like it, us poor folk in the Netherlands especially, but squid apparantely thrive on global warming, overtaking humans in biomass. Not only are there more squid, according to Dr George Jackson from the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean they are also getting bigger:

“Many of the species have exponential growth, particularly during the juvenile stage so if you increase the water temperature by even a degree it has a tremendous snowballing effect of rapidly increasing their growth rate and their ultimate body size.

“They get much bigger and they can mature earlier and it just accelerates everything.”

The squid not only thrive on global warming, but also due to more direct interference by us. Since we seem intent on hunting their predators like tuna, to extinction, as well as their direct competitors, various finfish, squid can expand enormously. A good thing perhaps for them, not so good for the oceans’ ecology.

Also not good, the reports about Humboldt squid moving north into the waters around Alaska, when normally the furthest north they come is San Francisco. these squid are normally warm water animals, not suitable for living in colder waters (and indeed dying off in large numbers). The worry is, that this is happening because the warm water currents in the Pacific Ocean are shifting. And squid aren’t the only sea animals being found far north of their usual habitat: both thresher and great white sharks, as well as a hard-shell turtle and a jack mackarel have been sighted in Alaska recently…

Dead Men Left on The Guardian

funny
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James over at Dead Men Left has the perfect description of The Guardian’s attitude towards the US:

I think they see Americans as something like the rest of us see spiders: fine when behaving themselves and sitting quietly in the corner, but bloody terrifying when zooming around unpredictably at high speed, with no easy option but to stand on a chair and scream. It’s not an unreasonable fear if either beast should arrive with guns, I suppose, but the best thing to do with the particular breed of Republican spider the Guardian has run foul of is to follow the traditional rememdy: trap them in a box with a piece of paper and throw them outside the front door; or, failing that, end the occupation of Iraq.

Power of Nightmares BitTorrent

Decentists and other ex-lefties, Meta, wingnuts
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A little bird told me someone has put up a torrent of the first episode of The power of Nightmares. You need to get a BitTorrent client first to be able to download it. If you haven’t seen it yet and especially if you are in the USA, download it, watch it and let your friends watch it.

Another political download available via BitTorrent: Eminem’s MOSH video…

(BitTorrent is yet another kind of Peer to Peer client, which works without central servers of any kind. Every time you start a bittorrent download, you immediately start sharing this with others, which also means you do not have to depend on any given user to have the file you want, as long as some users have it. A better explenation is available at the BitTorrent site.)

The power of nightmares, part 2

Decentists and other ex-lefties, wingnuts
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Vaara says what I’ve been noticing as well about the simularities between the neocons and the Al Quaida tendency as shown in the power of nightmare documentary:

What really struck me about this show is the extent to which both ideologies — the Muslims and “Team B” — share certain characteristics. For example, the belief in fear as a way of motivating populations to behave a certain way. And a certain devotion to violence. But most profoundly, the Straussians and the Islamists are both wedded to the idea that individualism and liberal democracy are evil. And that what is required for the construction of a safe, stable society is the complete elimination of the Other.

Meanwhile, Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber has responded to a ridiculous column by David “cruisemissile liberal” Aaronovitch which asserts that this documentary claims that Al Quaida is a myth:

It is hard to know exactly where Curtis will go next, but I expect him to argue that whilst Islamic terrorist groups certainly exist (who could deny that!) they don’t constitute a co-ordinated international network (AQ+ Hamas + Hezbollah, etc etc) of the kind that is often suggested. He’ll probably suggest that such “links” as are claimed are largely an artefact of similar propaganda to that behind the last “international terror network”. Anyone who has followed the pathetic attempts by figures like the Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin to demonstrate a Saddam-AQ link will probably suspect he has a point.

Chris is skeptical about what is going to be the subject of the second episode in the series, about the Muhajedin war in Afghanistan against the USSR and the neocon’s supposed influence on this:

For example, next week’s episode is supposed to be about the neocons and the Islamic fundamentalists joining forces to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, as if this was a project dreamed up in the neocons’ heads. But the idea of drawing them into a war in Afghanistan was conceived not by the neocons but by Zbigniew Brzezinski under the Carter administration.

I’m skeptical about this as well, having read George Crile’s excellent if somewhat naive book My Enemy’s Enemy, which demonstrated that in fact the funding for the Afghan resistance movement came from Congress and from Democratic members of Congress in fact rather than from the Reagan government or the neocons. The latter Crile showed were more enamoured of the Contras in Nicaragua. (In fact, the fuckup there seems to be much more a neocon hallmark than the relative succesful campaign in Afghanistan, even if the followup there after the soviets left was non-existent.)