New nominee
President Bush has nominated White House Counsel Harriet Miers to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. She has no prior judicial experience; her background is as an attorney, including as the President’s personal attorney, chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission, staff secretary to the President, and deputy chief of staff.
Unlike the nomination of John Roberts, this one smells extremely bad to me. I’d be willing to lay at least 2:1 odds that she has a strong ideological bent, simply based on her background; but more to the point, is it really proper to be making an obvious patronage appointment to the Supreme Court, especially after the rollicking success of his last famous one?
Your news warning for the day
Armed, military-trained dolphins are loose in the Gulf of Mexico following Katrina.
‘My concern is that they have learnt to shoot at divers in wetsuits who have simulated terrorists in exercises. If divers or windsurfers are mistaken for a spy or suicide bomber and if equipped with special harnesses carrying toxic darts, they could fire,’ he said. ‘The darts are designed to put the target to sleep so they can be interrogated later, but what happens if the victim is not found for hours?’
Apparently, the warnings from the Onion weren’t adequately heeded.
Now the question is, what will they do? Will these dolphins stay together or disperse? Will they try to assimilate into the broader Gulf cetacean society, and if they do, will they communicate their newfound knowledge to others? Will US military training help these dolphins build a future for themselves and their people, and give them the organizational skills – and force multiplication ability – to effectively counter expanded fishing and pollution threats? Or will they remain perpetual outsiders, even becoming delphinic bandits or warlords, in the manner of unexpectedly disbanded soldiers in civil wars?
(I’m hypothesizing that the latter won’t happen – that’s normally a symptom of people who have lived with the pervasive anomie of a civil war, rather than of professional soldiers suddenly on leave.)
But honestly, after thinking about this a bit – it could be worse. I would certainly trust dolphins with guns more than, say, chimpanzees; they seem less likely to engage in completely gratuitous warfare, or hurl feces. But IANAMB (I am not a marine biologist) so I may be wrong on this. For now, I’ll just say that I, for one, welcome our new cetacean overlords.
Experiment results from tonight
Caramelized oranges with french vanilla ice cream: A good deal of work for an only OK flavor. They taste pretty much exactly the way you would imagine them to. While I could imagine some ways to improve this, (e.g., instead of the simple orange-caramel sauce, do something a good deal more alcoholic) it’s not obvious that the work is worth the effort.
Sage chicken and rosemary potatos: Yum. I need to cook more often.
Your tax dollars at work
FEMA reroutes Katrina-bound ice to Maine.
Glad to see our government is in good hands, here.
Be careful what you wear, or, how to almost become an X-files episode
An Australian man’s jacket almost set the building on fire.
Just in from Saturn
New results: Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, apparently has an atmosphere and liquid water beneath the surface. WP article gives a summary of this and other recent discoveries from the Cassini mission.
Science News: Apocalypse Real Soon Now
The Independent is reporting that a new report indicates that polar ice melting may have just passed the critical point. I think this is something worth taking very seriously: I’ve been expecting a report that says this for a few years. Note that this may trigger a very large-scale change soon, such as a shutdown or other significant change in the Gulf Stream thanks to the change in thermal absorption due to having fresh instead of saltwater in the northern Atlantic.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 