JJG Journal

Got to watch the 2004 movie "The Day after Tomorrow" over the weekend. It’s a good movie, even  though basic science gets grossly abused in the process of creating the required gripping story line. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to look at how far we’ve come in our appreciation of climate change since 2004:

• The polar ice caps are melting away...Continue Reading »

The date was Wednesday, 17 October 2007, around 5:00pm. I was sitting at a terminal gate at DFW, waiting to board my flight back to New York. As usual, it’s hard to escape the noise of the TV broadcasting CNN’s latest news. Suddenly I hear this: "It seems to me that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III . . . you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." I know there is only one nutcase crazy enough to utter such nonsense. Our current President. Sure enough, looking up at the TV monitor, I see...Continue Reading »

Whenever I hear the nonsense about ‘manned space flight’ I have to cringe. Here’s why

• The budget for space exploration is finite.
• Any money spend on manned missions can not be spend on real space science.
• No science has come from any manned missions (except for studies of human space physiology).
• Manned missions cost orders or magnitude more that robotic missions but yield no scientific results.
• Manned missions have and will cost human lives.
• All hard scientific results so far have been obtained by inexpensive (compared...Continue Reading »

Yesterday’s Washington Post ran this courageous op-ed piece about our current Iraq quagmire, written by 12 former Army captains. "America, it has been five years. It’s time to make a choice."

Irony and humor are great rhetorical weapons, exposing extreme points of view without obviously insulting the person that holds them. In today’s Salon.com column, Glenn Greenwald uses irony and humor in discussing current right-wing views,  starting with a comment made by a notorious right-wing talking head. Makes for great reading!

Our country’s leftist radicals would provide habeas corpus, obtain warrants before eavesdropping and ban torture.

read more | digg...Continue Reading »

When Secretary of State, Condi Rice, traveled to the Middle-East in September, little was expected of her and she delivered accordingly. What she did ‘accomplish’ was the announcement of a new peace initiative in the guise of a formal peace summit to be held in the U.S. city of Annapolis, Maryland. Even if the Bush administration had everything going for it, it is a lame duck and as such can accomplish only very little. Everybody realizes this thus begging the question: What good can...Continue Reading »

Eugene Debs was an American political leader and social activist who ran for President of the United States while being in prison in 1920 and received almost 1 million votes. Today he is mostly forgotten. He is mentioned with admiration in the writings of Kurt Vonnegut, e.g., here.

What we are taught as being objective historical facts is really a narrative told from the point of view of the powerful and ruling elements of society. For an alternative view of history in which Eugene Debs plays a greater...Continue Reading »

Our government launched a national add camping advocating sexual abstinence as a way to promote teenager health. It can be viewed here:

It is surreal to see a U.S. President who just spend $500 billion on an illegitimate war (and is currently requesting an additional $180 billion in supplemental funding for said war) veto a bill that would cost an additional $35 billion spread over 5 years to expand health insurance coverage for American’s neediest children. What is going on in this man’s head? Frankly I am worried. The way things look for the Republican party at this point, they will drop off a cliff when the next election comes around. Even a man as manifestly detached from reality as Mr. Bush sooner or later will...Continue Reading »

Our current occupant will be in office for another 15 months, or so, and I truly hope that no further opportunity presents itself for him to screw up. Everybody (yes, everybody, in the long run) will be better off if the man goes back to clearing shrubs on his ranch or does some other useful and harmless work, like giving motivational speeches to executives. Ours is a great nation not because of our leaders, but in spite of them, that much is certain.

Of the current crop of political candidates two stand out, in my humble opinion. There is Ron Paul on the Republican side and Barrack Obama...Continue Reading »