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So the students at a nothingburger college in Vermont invite a convicted cop-killer to be their graduation speaker. Pickerhead always said free speech makes it easy to spot the idiots. David Harsanyi posts on the controversy.
The perverted habit of glorifying people like Mumia Abu-Jamal has been part of tedious campus “radicalism” for the past 45 years. Still, I can’t get too worked up over the fact that a bunch of twits at GoddardCollege invited a murderer to their school. For one, these sorts of incidents help me compile a list of schools for my kids to avoid.
What is interesting, though, is how academics and administrators continue to rationalize moronic behavior:
“As a reflection of Goddard’s individualized and transformational educational model,” Goddard College Interim President Bob Kenny explained, “…choosing Mumia as their commencement speaker, to me, shows how this newest group of Goddard graduates expresses their freedom to engage and think radically and critically in a world that often sets up barriers to do just that.”
Oh, where to begin? …
American Interest on the transformative power of shale.
Eleven years ago, energy majors Qatar Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, and Conoco Phillips came together to construct a $2 billion liquified natural gas import facility in Texas. The enormous GoldenPass terminal was meant to regassify liquified gas being shipped overseas, but lately it hasn’t seen much action. Thanks to the shale boom, the United States is flush with natural gas—fracking has destroyed the need for imports. Now, in an attempt to salvage some of their investment, Exxon Mobil and Qatar Petroleum are investing an estimated $10 billion in converting the import facility into one suitable for gas exports. …
… You’d be hard-pressed to find a better example of the disruptive power of shale energy. …
The Chamber of Commerce says the shale boom makes the US the world’s top petroleum producer.
The International Energy Agency confirms what we’ve known for a while: The United States is the world’s top petroleum producer. The American Interest’s Walter Russell Mead quotes from a Financial Times story [subscription required]:
“US production of oil and related liquids such as ethane and propane was neck-and-neck with Saudi Arabia in June and again in August at about 11.5m barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency, the watchdog backed by rich countries.
With US production continuing to boom, its output is set to exceed Saudi Arabia’s this month or next for the first time since 1991. [...]
Rising oil and gas production has caused the US trade deficit in energy to shrink, and prompted a wave of investment in petrochemicals and other related industries. [...] It is also having an impact on global security. Imports are expected to provide just 21 per cent of US liquid fuel consumption next year, down from 60 per cent in 2005. …”
While we’re having a boom, Europe is pretending to be green. American.com with the story.
“Germany produces half of energy with solar.” That was the recent headline on a German website of news in English, and it would have duly impressed anybody whose understanding of energy matters extends to just such headlines. But the headline, totally wrong, was also a perfect example of why it is so important to deconstruct the reports about green Europe.
Analysis by the Fraunhofer ISE research institute showed that the recent peak of Germany’s solar energy usage lasted for only 1 hour, and that the record share (50.6 percent) was due not only to hot, sunny weather but that day being a public holiday with lower than normal demand — and, most fundamentally, to the fact that solar and wind have legal priority over fossil fuels and when available must be used to the maximum possible extent. But the key error of that headline’s claim is that it was not half of energy use (Energieverbrauch), it was half of electricity production (Stormerzeugung). And in Germany, as in any modern economy, electricity accounts for only a fraction of overall energy use, known as total primary energy supply, which consists of all fuels (be they fossil or biofuels) and all electricity produced by nuclear reactors, water and wind turbines, solar photovoltaics (PV), and geothermal steam.
So how green is Germany’s and Europe’s energy supply in reality? …
Nature tells us about new maps of the ocean floor provided by satellites.
As though someone had pulled a plug in the oceans and drained them away, a sea-floor map has exposed thousands of never-before-seen underwater mountains and ridges. The map — generated by the highest-resolution gravity model ever made for the oceans — will guide deep-sea research for years to come.
An international team of researchers led by David Sandwell, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, publishes the map in the 3 October issue of Science. The team created it using data mostly from two satellites: CryoSat-2, from the European Space Agency, and Jason-1, from NASA and the French space agency CNES.
Both satellites sought to chart the planet, but with different goals. The ongoing CryoSat-2 mission studies the polar ice caps, whereas Jason-1 studied changes in sea level before it was turned off last year. Both probes carried radar altimeters, instruments that measure the precise distance between the satellite and the surface of the land or ocean below. …
Nautilus tells us about the sound so loud it circled the earth four times.
On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since.
It was 10:02 AM local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (“extraordinary sounds were heard, as of guns firing”); 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia (“a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery in a north-westerly direction”); and even 3,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues, near Mauritius (“coming from the eastward, like the distant roar of heavy guns.”) In all, it was heard by people in over 50 different geographical locations, together spanning an area covering a thirteenth of the globe.
Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is. If you’re in Boston and someone tells you that they heard a sound coming from New York City, you’re probably going to give them a funny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we’re talking about here is like being in Boston and clearly hearing a noise coming from Dublin, Ireland. Travelling at the speed of sound (766 miles or 1,233 kilometers per hour), it takes a noise about 4 hours to cover that distance. This is the most distant sound that has ever been heard in recorded history. …
Good news for couch potatoes. BioSpace says just a small amount of weight bearing exercise can improve memory.
… “Our study indicates that people don’t have to dedicate large amounts of time to give their brain a boost,” said Lisa Weinberg, the Georgia Tech graduate student who led the project .
Although the study used weight exercises, Weinberg notes that resistance activities such as squats or knee bends would likely produce the same results. In other words, exercises that don’t require the person to be in good enough shape to bike, run or participate in prolonged aerobic exercises. …
We close with a sweet story. In a WSJ interview, actress Rene Russo talks about growing up broke in blue collar Burbank.
I grew up in Burbank—but not the Burbank of valet parking and TV studios. In the late 1950s, there was a small apartment complex on Elmwood Avenue that rented mostly to families on welfare. I lived there from age 3 to 11 and again from 14 to 18 with my mother, Shirley, and my younger sister, Toni. It wasn’t pretty. …
… I dropped out of high school when I was in the 10th grade. My sister was in the eighth grade and dropped out, too. I took a job near our apartment at an eyeglass factory inspecting frames.
Then the oddest thing happened. In June 1972, I went with friends to see the Rolling Stones at the Los Angeles Forum. After the concert, as we crossed through the parking lot, a guy in a brown Mercedes stopped in the middle of the street and got out. He came up to me and asked if I had ever modeled. I could see he had a woman in the car and was well dressed, so I took the card he held out. He said, “Have your mother call me,” which put me at ease.
Me, a model? Crazy, I thought. When I got home, I told my mother. She called the guy—an agent named John Crosby—and we went to see him at his office on Sunset Blvd. …
… As soon as the modeling checks started coming in 1974, I began saving to get my mom out of Elmwood. Within a year, I was able to move her into a rental apartment in Burbank near StudioCity. Two years later in 1977, Toni and I decided to send my mom and two of her friends on vacation to Palm Springs. The day she returned, I picked her up and asked if she’d mind looking at a few open houses before I dropped her off at her apartment.
We passed a one-story ranch with an “open house” sign out front. Once inside, mom seemed puzzled. Looking around at the furnishings, she said, “Wow, that’s strange, I have a coffee table just like that one—and this lamp, too.” What she didn’t know is that Toni and I had saved enough to buy her the house and had moved in her stuff while she was away. In the backyard, all of her friends yelled, “Welcome home!” She was overjoyed—and still lives there today.
As for me, modeling turned into acting in 1987 when I auditioned for “Sable,” a TV series. Today, I live with my husband and our daughter in a one-story, three-bedroom contemporary house in the hills above Brentwood. As for John Crosby, he’s still my manager.
How about that? A complete edition of Pickings without items on the miscreants in our governments. We’ll get back to those creeps tomorrow.