I’ve been following lately my friend Mark Boslough’s battles over RS 2477, an old federal law that is at the center of some pretty important land fights in the western United States.
In Mark’s case, off-roaders with giant-tired four-wheel drive vehicles have claimed RS 2477 rights to drive their vehicles up a creek bed on a ranch Mark’s family owns in the mountains of Colorado. They claim it’s a road. Mark’s got some great pictures of the RS 2477 “road” here.
How cool is that, when you’ve got a five-time Tour winner working for you as a domestique:
“I think Floyd is probably the leader for tomorrow because he’s in much better condition for the climbs. I don’t know the climb, but he’s climbing much better than I am and I suspect we’ll work for him.”
It apparently worked as Floyd Landis won Algarve.
Kevin Drum pointed his browser yesterday evening at this article in the Observer and then helpfully shared the results with us:
Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
This is the same report that good a good ride last month from Fortune, sending out some ripples not so much because of the science – this abrupt climate change stuff is old news but the source. When the Pentagon notices global climate change….
A narcissus in the front garden:
Our first flower of spring.
The new head of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation makes an increasingly familiar argument – that nuclear power is a viable option for generating energy in the face of greenhouse-induced climate change: “If one believes the European Union projections . . . nuclear power will come back as the world starts moving towards carbon taxes. In Europe the feeling against burning coal is pretty strong.” You don’t hear that much here in the U.S., but it obviously resonates in places where attitudes toward greenhouse stuff are more solidified.
DCM and I followed the same path from Aaron’s blog to Malcolm Gladwell’s January New Yorker piece on the safety of SUV’s. I couldn’t possibly afford the time commitment of a New Yorker subscription, but Gladwell is quite literally my favorite journalist writing today, so I’ve been feeling a llittle bit parched by his recent hiatus. But his take on SUV safety doesn’t disappoint, a classic Gladwell disquisition that gets once again at the intersection between culture and psychology’s quiet truths.
Continue reading ‘Gladwell on SUV’s’ »
And then (I hate to belabor a point. No, that’s wrong, I think we must belabor this point.) there is this, from no less than Andrew Sullivan:
The pictures of all those regular and not-so-regular couples waiting patiently in line for hours and hours and even days to get a piece of paper which probably won’t give them any rights at all – that’s revolutionary in the public consciousness. Suddenly, it’s not the gay pride parades and mardi gras festivals that illustrate gay lives. Suddenly, it’s love and patience and kids and umbrellas and bouquets and tuxedoes and all the other bric-a-brac of living.
On my earlier squib pointing readers to the Albuquerque Journal’s gay marriage poll, I drew several unexpected responses from readers who think same-sex unions are “abnormal”. Josh Marshall last night published an amazingly touching letter from a reader about another time and place in our society in which the same argument was made:
I’m 62 years old and grew up in Missouri. When I married my first wife, who was Japanese American, we had to do so in another state. At that time it was against Missouri state law for interracial marriages to take place. Times change.
40 years later the pain of that state-sanctioned inequality, which made some couples second-class citizens, still stirs an old, deep-felt resentment. While I’m not gay, I certainly have sympathy for the state-sanctioned unfairness that gay couples endure and believe that in another 40 years (probably much sooner) gay marriages will be a simple, accepted fact of life.
Just a note to point out that I prize thoughtfulness and civility in discourse, and I feel completely comfortable deleting that which is within my power to delete when it doesn’t meet that test. For example:
It’s sick, disgusting and immoral and all the liberal freaks around the FOSS community will scream, but it’s true.
It had much worse than that to offer, but you get the idea.
I also delete all the human growth hormone comment spam.
Should two people of the same gender be allowed to marry in New Mexico?
(Update: I might not have made this clear. You’re supposed to click on the link above and vote. Not that I mind having votes left in the comments, but that wasn’t really the purpose.))