Will there be a design contest for the trillion-dollar coin? Maybe the winner can participate in the secured walk to the federal reserve?
- The White House's response to the petition asking for the creation of a Death Star is an absolute must-read. Don't believe me? Here's how it begins:
Official White House Response to Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016.
This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For
If you don't understand why that's funny...well, I have a bad feeling about that.
- President Bill Clinton, owning up to mistakes:
In the wake of Haiti's devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake exactly three years ago, former U.S. President Bill Clinton issued an unusual and now infamous apology. Calling his subsidies to American rice farmers in the 1990s a mistake because it undercut rice production in Haiti, Clinton said he had struck a "devil's bargain" that ultimately resulted in greater poverty and food insecurity in Haiti.
"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked," he said. "I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did."
- Either Fox News is stupid, or they're hoping their audience is. Actually, we know which one of those is more the case. But here they are, attempting to mislead their viewers into thinking that the trillion-dollar coin would actually contain a trillion dollars' worth of platinum. Which, of course, would defeat the purpose. Apparently, these jokers think that a hundred-collar bill contains a hundred times as much paper as a one-dollar bill.
- Climate change news is more of the same--namely, that bad things will continue to happen with increasing frequency:
WASHINGTON — The impacts of climate change driven by human activity are spreading through the United States faster than had been predicted, increasingly threatening infrastructure, water supplies, crops and shorelines, according to a federal advisory committee.
The draft Third National Climate Assessment, issued every four years, delivers a bracing picture of environmental changes and natural disasters that mounting scientific evidence indicates is fostered by climate change: heavier rains in the Northeast, Midwest and Plains that have overwhelmed storm drains and led to flooding and erosion; sea level rise that has battered coastal communities; drought that has turned much of the West into a tinderbox.
But no need to make this a priority, right?
- Burnt Orange Report says, via The Hill, that former Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) is being considered to replace Ray LaHood as President Obama's Secretary of Transportation. I'm still getting used to someone with the designation of (R-TX) being mentioned as a potential cabinet pick.
- Headline of the day:
Satanists organize rally in support of Florida governor Rick Scott
- spocko's post on FireDogLake about the NRA is excellent reading on their messaging techniques.
- Read up on the largest structure heretofore discovered in the entire universe:
Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe, a clump of active galactic cores that stretches 4 billion light-years from end to end.
The structure is a large quasar group (LQG), a collection of extremely luminous galactic nuclei powered by supermassive central black holes. This particular group is so large that it challenges modern cosmological theory, researchers said.
"While it is difficult to fathom the scale of this LQG, we can say quite definitely it is the largest structure ever seen in the entire universe," lead author Roger Clowes, of the University of Central Lancashire in England, said in a statement. "This is hugely exciting, not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe."
In other words, it's so big that it shouldn't exist, according to our current theories of the universe. And yet...there it is. Four billion light-years' worth of quasar.