Archives for 2013

Pakistan, a country 97 percent Muslim, has just made its first successful transition from one elected, civilian government to another since its founding in 1947. The country has had long bouts of military rule, and a history of coups against elected prime ministers, as well as, in the 1990s, a series of presidential decrees dismissing […]

Morocco has enormous solar and wind energy potential and plans to get 40% of its electricity from green energy sources by 2020, only 7 years from now. This documentary explores the potential of clean energy in a country with loads of wind and sunshine, estimating that it could produce 2000 times as much energy as […]

Clashes broke out on Sunday in a western suburb of Tunis and in the city of Kairouan at the Mosque of the Martyrs between Tunisian police and militants of the proscribed Ansar al-Sharia cell. Although the movement makes exaggerated claims for its adherents, I shouldn’t imagine they amount to more than a couple thousand core […]

That boulder-sized meteoroid that hit the moon on the 17th, causing a star-bright conflagration? NASA reports that it likely was part of a whole pack of meteoroids, a smaller set of which hit the earth’s atmosphere around the same time. Meteoroids are space rocks up to 10 yards / meter wide. From 10 meters wide […]

Michael Mann: Climate change is already costing us $1 trillion a year. Aljazeera asks Professor Mann why there is still confusion among Americans about the perils of climate change, at a time when the scientific consensus is virtually complete. Some recent links on the impact: Much of Australia’s farmland could turn to desert or be […]

Late capitalism in the United States is a process whereby more and more of the national income is going every month to a smaller number of people at the top, while the average wage of the average worker has been virtually static in real terms since 1970. All the extra money the US has made […]

Not an endorsement, but this cover by secular leftists of Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 “I will Survive,” with satirical Arabic lyrics (translated in subtitles) about the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis in Egypt since the fall of dictator Hosni Mubarak gives a window into the grievances and disappointments of the youth who made the […]

John Aravosis at AmericaBlog has been all over the Republican congressmen who forged versions of alleged White House emails on Benghazi and falsified them to the news networks, trying to make it look like there had been a cover-up. Extraordinarily, Bob Schieffer of CBS News called them out, naming the party but not the individuals […]

The Moapa Paiutes are celebrating the advent of solar power and the beginning of the end of coal power in southern Nevada. They are having a solar plant built on tribal lands, which will allow them meet their own needs and to sell electricity to Los Angeles. Best of all, they can envision the closing […]