KABUL — The United States declared Afghanistan a major non-NATO ally on Saturday, with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton personally delivering the news of Afghanistan’s entry into a club that includes Israel, Japan, Pakistan, and other close Asian and Middle Eastern allies.
The move, announced as Clinton stood with President Hamid Karzai amid the towering trees and rose beds on the grounds of the presidential palace here …
The moves also appear to have already yielded one dividend for the United States: Karzai has not recently lashed out at his backers, as he has in the past, at one point calling Americans ‘‘demons.’’
“Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.??? — Sun Tzu for the American Geo-Politician
“As Paisley and his band finished their final song (Welcome to the Future), fireworks began over the National Mall.”
In the mail, this morning:
George —
Election Day will be here in less than four months. And we’re facing a big problem right now that could directly affect the outcome that day.
The Romney campaign and the Republicans raised $100 million in the month of June alone. That is a massive sum.
Just wait until they start spending all that money in full force in key states we need to win.
Folks, here is the simple reality: Building this campaign today is more important than it was a few days ago. We can still win even while getting outraised by these guys. But we’ve got to keep it close.
That means none of us — not one — can wait to make a difference right now, with whatever we can afford to chip in:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Closing-the-Gap
A little incentive: A donation before midnight tonight will also automatically enter you for the chance to sit down with me for a cup of coffee sometime soon. We’ll fly you out, and you can bring a guest.
And really — thanks, for whatever you’re able to give today.
Joe
Holy cow, a four dollar lottery ticket with one in a million odds to have coffee with Joe Biden!
Ask Brad.
Oh, wait. He’s probably already had coffee, soda and hot dogs with you and the President at the White House a few times.
In a side note, Brad Paisley is about the only mainstream big-selling country artist who would appear to be inclined to vote for the President in November.
Romney and the Republicans announced yesterday that they brought in more than $100 million in June.
For context, that’s about what we raised in April and May combined.
We’re still tallying our own numbers, but this means their gap is getting wider, and if it continues at this pace, it could cost us the election.
We need to reverse this trend — and we need to start now. Will you make a donation of $4 or more today?
One hundred million is alarming enough, but it doesn’t even include the millions pouring into pro-Romney super PACs — or the fact that, unlike four years ago, it’s perfectly legal for the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Karl Rove, and anonymous billionaires to funnel unlimited money into attacking President Obama in critical battleground states.
I’m proud of the way we build this organization. Through the primaries, more than three-quarters of our donations were from people giving less than $1,000. Meanwhile, in that same period, Mitt Romney’s campaign raised three-quarters of its money from people giving $1,000 or more.
If we don’t take this seriously now, we risk finding ourselves at a point where there is too much ground to make up.
We need to do something about it. Today.
Here, send [Mean Future] … to your mailing list and I might think about donating.
Friend –
Thank you for your email.
If you would like to contact the Obama for America campaign, please visit www.barackobama.com/contact-us.
At www.barackobama.com/contact-us you can:
? Write to us with a question, comment, or feedback.
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You can also reach us by calling (312) 698-3670.
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If you are writing regarding an issue with your 2012 Merchandise, please call 1-800-556-5975.
For the most up to date information about the campaign, please bookmark www.barackobama.com.
Thank you,
Obama for America
It’s such a great idea to send robotic dunning e-mails to the little people everyday. That’s the definitive answer to Mitt Romney’s crazy right-wing billionaire sugar daddies.
Obama visited Ziggy’s Pub and Restaurant in Amherst, Ohio …
“I’ll arm wrestle you for your vote,” [patron Jeff Hawks] told Obama. (Landler’s report was mum on the relative sizes of the two men). The president demurred.
340 pounds of loud sodden fun. The President’s a gamer, that’s for sure.
How the future really turned out. Not quite what Brad Paisley’s big hit single, Welcome to the Future, advertised. Well, it wasn’t his fault. He got the iPhone bit right.
You’ve now found it impossible to miss the spectacle of some of the country’s biggest phonies, journalists who assiduously avoided anything science in college, writing about the “God particle.”
Rebecca J. Rosen is an associate editor at The Atlantic. She was previously an associate editor at The Wilson Quarterly, where she spearheaded the magazine’s In Essence section (a place where no science is seen, ever).
We stand today on the eve of one of the most highly anticipated scientific announcements of all time: an “update in the search for the Higgs boson” (a delightfully understated description if there ever were one). Has the world ever been so excited about a particle before? No. But why? What is this Higgs boson, and is there more to it than just its catchy moniker, the “God particle”?
Cut to an animation from “PHD Comics.” The Atlantic is a Google Editor’s Choice, mostly because The Atlantic bribes them.
So, you might be asking what’s so important about finding the Higgs boson?
The short answer is that the Higgs boson can account for all of the unexplained mass in the universe …
Particle physics is the study of the individual elements that comprise our universe. As most know, atoms are composed of smaller components; neutrons, electrons and protons. When electrons jump between atoms, new substances are formed, but the nucleus of an atom generally remains unchanged unless it undergoes a nuclear reaction …
I’m eagerly awaiting the announcement tomorrow. If the scientists at the LHC found proof of the Higgs boson, it would be huge for the scientific community and the future of science as we know it.
From TIME:
Sometime Wednesday, depending on word that comes out of a press conference in Geneva, the universe will cease to exist. All forms of matter — planets, stars, dogs, cars, you — will effectively dissolve. Mass will be no more; only energy will remain.
That’s the bad possibility. The good possibility is that researchers working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the mammoth, $10 billion particle accelerator located 380 ft. (116 m) underground at the French-Swiss border — will announce that they’ve at last confirmed the existence of the long-sought Higgs boson …
ASPEN, Colo. — Physicists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider said Wednesday that they had discovered a new subatomic particle that looks for all the world like the Higgs boson, a potential key to an understanding of why elementary particles have mass and indeed to the existence of diversity and life in the universe …
I mention Overbye only because I once tried to read his Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos.
At any time, from a guaranteed sleeping pill. If you ever wanted to discourage anyone from becoming a little too fascinated with science and discovery, Overbye’s was the book to give them. Gift-wrapped.
Journalists do take science courses. If compelled. Decades ago I taught biochemistry lab at Lehigh. It was a senior/grad level course and it occasionally attracted journalists who were trying to attain a credential to burnish their careers as “science writers” for newspapers.
Years ago I attended a journalist’s seminar at the University of Maryland on a Knight Fellowship to learn about nuclear proliferation.
I was the only trained scientist in the bunch and one of the faculty organizers remarked “There aren’t many like you doing this.”
One of the Manhattan Project’s old scientists, Carson Mark, was a lecturer.
Mark gave a long seminar on the basics of fission, one in which he spent time speaking about the geometry of a bare critical assembly. It was a good lecture. The journalists virtually rioted, complaining bitterly afterward that they had their time wasted getting bogged down in the arcana of mathematics and high energy physics.
The US army has successfully tested a laser device that shoots out 50 billion watt-powered bolts of lightning.
“We never got tired of the lightning bolts zapping our simulated targets,” admitted George Fischer, a physicist leading the project at the Picatinny Arsenal research lab in New Jersey …
The successful model tested features a series of adaptations that should ensure it can survive tough conditions in the field and stay powered-up for long stretches.
Not a trick question: What has the Picatinny Arsenal brought to science?
Continuing in yesterday’s vein, the LA Times blogging ninnies jump on the bandwagon, because talking about how many American believe in really stupid things and how American entertainment cleverly caters to them is just so … much … fun! As opposed to demoralizing.
Not only do more than 80 million Americans believe that UFOs exist, many are not afraid of an alien drop-in, according to a new study.
As part of its new “Chasing UFOs” series, the National Geographic Channel conducted a poll to assess Americans’ views on the paranormal. The study found that 11% of those polled firmly believed they’d spotted a UFO.
In addition, most of those polls said they would regard a minor alien invasion as only a minor inconvenience. And most expect the visitors to be “E.T.”-type friendly, according to a news release on the study.
Number of stories on National Geographic’s Alien invasion/Chasing UFO’s garbage in the Google news tab: 6,400.
That’s a gold medal record for dog excrement!
“The ‘Aliens Among Us’ survey was conducted with a random nationwide sample of 1,114 Americans from May 21 to 29. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.9%.” it reads. “‘Chasing UFOs’ will premiere at 9 p.m. Friday on the National Geographic Channel.”
And they are not worth the dust a rude wind might blow in their faces.
In the real world, SCOTUS screwed over the Tough Crowd in upholding Obamacare. Civil society 1, Heevahavas 0, at least for now.
In the event that Bill Pullman isn’t available, two-thirds of respondents to a new survey say that President Barack Obama would be better suited to handle an alien invasion than presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
“We wanted the pulse on people’s opinions,” said Brad Dancer, senior vice president of research and digital media for National Geographic, who conducted the survey for the new series “Chasing UFOs.” “We wanted to get a sense of how Americans view UFOs, what people believe and how mainstream pop culture may or may not be playing into their opinions on it.”
Nearly 65 percent of respondents said Obama would be better suited to handle a theoretical alien invasion than Romney …
I thought the pandering was bad then. The show, as billed, was to put together a team of “scientists” — or at least people who appear to look sort of like scientists to stupid people — to investigate whether things like UFO, Mothman, and other sightings were, ahem, fact or faked.
The correct science answer is they’re all faked, or imagined, or something else rational. And no real scientists waste their time on such things.
Assembling a team of “entertainers” to tease an audience on such issues is a disservice. It is not right to coddle the beliefs of idiots or encourage their manias. Doing it puts you on the side of evil, even if it’s just television and you need the money.
Six years gone by and it’s worse, ‘fact or faked’ being an industry standard. But at least I don’t even have to endure the commercials anymore.
I gave up cable and network tv shortly after viewing Doomsday Preppers.
