Paul over at Wizbang takes the blogosphere to task for self serving Katrina reporting. He says instead of just blogging about it, do some good and help the victims, of which he is one.

There’ll be plenty of time to show off your 20/20 hindsight next week. For now, accept this for what it is… a natural disaster of biblical proportions.

If you want to do something, quit yer whining and do what blogs and bloggers do best… Use information to change the world.

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Think of the simple things- Thousands of people lost their glasses. Somebody set up a website where they can coordinate donations of (known) prescription glasses from people who no longer need them. Get a freight company to donate the freight. I bet FedEx will give you an account number that will route all the glasses to some agency in New Orleans.

If you do something to help the victims, ping this post… If there is a lot of people helping out, Kevin will set up a post with the links. (I just volunteered him ;)

Think about it for a second from my chair… (I’m not whining but) I’m almost 40 years old…. Here is the sum total of all my worldly possessions: 4 pairs of shorts, 5 shirts, 2 pairs of shoes, 4 pairs of underwear, 1 pair of blue jeans, a box of family pictures, 2 flashlights, a piece of trench art my grandfather brought back from WWI and my father’s hammer. (Hey, it means a lot to me!) That’s it. Everything else is gone. And BTW, I’m unemployed.

I tell you that not to whine but to let you see the tree thru the forest. Multiply my situation by about a million. Stop and think about that… A million people homeless and unemployed.

If you’re a blogger then (by near definition) you’re a self proclaimed talented person. Prove it. They’ll be plenty of time for punditry and pontification next month… In the mean time there is work to be done. Figure out how to help the victims.

Hugh Hewitt is thinking along the same lines. He and Glenn are organizing an effort which N.Z. will help facilitate.

Mark Tapscott thinks so.

LaShawn Barber says “Yes.” The Colossus disagrees.

Justin Torres looks back on the past several months.

I have to admit, I’m still not sure what to make of everything that happened. This column is just one attempt to figure it all out. I am convinced that God was guiding the entire process to some definite end, for some ineluctable purpose. I don’t know why we were handed this task, but I do think of it as task. I believe my family was given the job not simply of bringing Susan’s baby into the world, but of testifying in this very public way to the preciousness of life and the importance of fighting for the most vulnerable among us.

Didn’t you know? Robert F. Kennedy thinks so.

I have to agree with commenter Mark Adams, who said:

I declare this to be an instant HuffPo classic. Satire is - once again - made redundant.

If you haven’t heard the buzzing, Rolling Stones has a new song out.

From NME via Sivacracy.

You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite
You call yourself a patriot, well I think you’re full of sh**.

Sivacracy wonders if Jagger will get Dixie Chicked.

America lives in freedom because of families like the Pruetts.

I can’t help but think that Pat Robertson is digging a deeper hole. It sure seems to me like his recent denials are simple false. Some might call it lying.

The “clarification:”

“I said our special forces could take him out. Take him out could be a number of things including kidnapping,”

What he said originally:

If he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.

We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability.

Kidnapping him. Right. Whether or not you agree with Mr. Robertson that Chavez should be taken out or assassinated, Pat is digging himself into a hole denying something which so obviously is what he said.

Wizbang points to The Buzz’s coverage of Camp Sheehan as “Hilarious Stuff. Great Original Reporting.”

Check it out.

WISN has a winner!

Central Indiana Homeschool blog pointed me to this article by John Haney about homeschooling’s rising popularity.

Home schooling is a growing trend earning more respect. Its supporters say that’s because it is getting results.

Statistics from the Dept. of Education show that children who learn at home read better and do better in math.

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Home school students have standardized achievement test scores nearly 35 percent higher than public students. That means more and more elite colleges are choosing home school students in the application process.

Future employers are also taking notice.

Check out the whole article.

Processing information at the speed of light may be possible. Scientists have discovered, for the first time, how to speed up or slow down light using off the shelf technologies at the telecommunications wavelengths.

The telecommunications industry transmits vast quantities of data via fiber optics. Light signals race down the information superhighway at about 186,000 miles per second. But information cannot be processed at this speed, because with current technology light signals cannot be stored, routed or processed without first being transformed into electrical signals, which work much more slowly. If the light signal could be controlled by light, it would be possible to route and process optical data without the costly electrical conversion, opening up the possibility of processing information at the speed of light.

This is exactly what the EPFL team has demonstrated. Using their Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) method, the group was able to slow a light signal down by a factor of 3.6, creating a sort of temporary “optical memory.” They were also able to create extreme conditions in which the light signal travelled faster than 300 million meters a second. And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, Einstein needn’t move over – relativity isn’t called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected.

Slowing down light is considered to be a critical step in our ability to process information optically. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) considers it so important that it has been funnelling millions of dollars into projects such as “Applications of Slow Light in Optical Fibers” and research on all-optical routers. To succeed commercially, a device that slows down light must be able to work across a range of wavelengths, be capable of working at high bit-rates and be reasonably compact and inexpensive.

The Northbrook Village Board wants to mandate sprinkler systems in all new single family homes.

Northbrook Village Board proponents maintain that compared to the value of the lives the devices might save, their cost is insignificant.

Karagianis challenged them, saying, “If you feel that’s true, why don’t you back a requirement for retrofitting” houses with sprinklers?

Heller protested that retrofitting a house could run more than twice as much.

“So cost is an issue, then,” Karagianis replied. “When you start considering your own budget, suddenly it strikes home to you.”

Fark’s take:

So when residents burn toast, instead of that annoying beeping, they can simply haul the soaked contents of their house to the curb and buy all new stuff

Hah!

Yep. That’s right. Mark Morford is ecstatic that it’s been done with virtually no notice and no outrage.

Amazon.com is selling sex toys. A lot of sex toys. More than you knew it would ever dare sell and more than you even knew were being manufactured in the world today and a more advanced and varied selection than you probably imagined they could ever get away with.

And what’s more, Amazon has added this array of delicious adult goods quietly, effortlessly, with zero fanfare and zero marketing and zero apparent intolerant outcry (so far as I know) from the right-wing Christian sex tormenters, and with absolutely no children anywhere in the nation spontaneously combusting or being struck by lightning and/or converting to wanton paganism (yet) by viewing any of these items (which they easily can)

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This is no trifling thing. Amazon’s sex-toy department is simply a huge portion of the site’s Health and Personal Care area. The “Sex and Sensuality” section of the site contains a staggering 37,000 items, with the Sexual Enhancers (that’s the toys, baby) subsection alone offering up a whopping 4,863 items — enough to satisfy an entire repressed evangelical congregation and terrify Alabama

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There are no cheesy porny product shots. There is no explicit nudity or raunchy descriptions, except for the wonderful and silly product titles. There is no age-verification system and no insulting adult warning and no purchase restrictions. Amazon has done the perfectly natural thing of merely folding the toys into its array of general offerings as if nothing’s unusual, no pornographic shock value, nothing to worry about. It’s as if these items were perfectly commonplace and acceptable and everyone should have them. Imagine.

This, then, is the most glorious upshot. Sex toys, like much of the porn biz in general, have gone mainstream. They have been normalized. [Emphasis mine]

This site has some interesting ideas… including this one:

Change the name of the show to “CBS Evening Rumors.” Instead of news, offer rumors. Isn’t that what Dan Rather did anyway? The 18-to-34 demographic already has all of its news by 6:30 anyway via the Internet, so why not just focus on rumors and gossip that people on the Net will be talking about tomorrow?

Interesting wager. Bookmark Myopic Zeal and come back in 10 years, we’ll be there for the results!

Two climate change sceptics, who believe the dangers of global warming are overstated, have put their money where their mouth is and bet $10,000 that the planet will cool over the next decade.
The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev have agreed the wager with a British climate expert, James Annan.

The pair, based in Irkutsk, at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, believe that global temperatures are driven more by changes in the sun’s activity than by the emission of greenhouse gases.

The scientific global warming experts Hillary Clinton and John McCain disagree. I guess we’ll just have to wait it out.

Interesting stuff from the Funky P.

As it turns out, when “Jedi Counsel” was translated by the Chinese they went with “church of the elders” which, when translated back into English for the subtitles was translated “Presbyterian Church”. Presbyterian comes from presbuteros, the greek word for elder, so actually it’s quite acurate!

Captain Ed takes his own congressional candidate, Coleen Rowley, to task for supporting Sheehan.

Except for refusing to pay taxes, Sheehan has every right to protest in this manner. My reason for quoting her so extensively is to ask Coleen Rowley — who will run against Congressman John Kline in my district — exactly how she supports these contentions. This rhetoric is what Rowley and Lourey have flown to Texas to support and amplify on Sheehan’s behalf. Will Rowley issue a joint statement of support for these arguments with David Duke and Michael Moore? Will she also stand with Sheehan to promote the notion that this country deserves no sacrifice and stands for nothing but killing?

Sheehan lost her son and appears to have gone seriously off-balance with grief. Lourey has also lost a son. Rowley has no excuse, and Minnesotans will demand to know why she went out of her way to leech off of Sheehan’s publicity to align herself with the most virulent band of America-haters seen since the last election.

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If that’s what she believes about this country and her government, then former Marine and current Congressman John Kline will certainly have no problem convincing voters in our district that Rowley has no business serving in the government in any capacity.

Rob Port, of Say Anything, takes Trigaux to task over at Wizbang.

My problem is Trigaux’s assumption that Florida’s association with the United States in its advertising will negatively impact that state’s tourism. Does he really think that people from abroad are so stupid as to not realize that Florida is in the United States? That by removing reference to the U.S. from Florida’s advertising foreigners will be tricked into visiting America when they otherwise would not?

Michelle Malkin’s Air American investigative report is up.

Watch Radio Equalizer early tomorrow morning for the second installment.

Someday, maybe.

Lions stalking deer in the stubble of a Nebraska corn field. Elephants trumpeting across Colorado’s high plains. Cheetah slouching through the West Texas scrub.

Prominent ecologists are floating an audacious plan that sounds like a Jumanji sequel - transplant African wildlife to the Great Plains of North America.

But…

Lions would be a harder sell, even if they would thin elk herds.

“Lions eat people,” said co-author Josh Donlan of Cornell. “There has to be a pretty serious attitude shift on how you view predators.”