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Friday music blogging: Wild Light

Wild Light is a indie pop band out of New Hampshire. One of the band's two key members, Timothy Kyle, was briefly a part of Arcade Fire, is a good friend of AF lead singer Win Butler, and opened for the band on a couple of tours. That partially explains the mega-buzz around the band in music circles, but much of it also traces to their exuberant, ambitious sound -- a welcome antidote to the kind of grim artiness of so much independent music. These guys are not afraid of a hook!

Their debut album, Adult Nights, is a joyful listen from top to bottom, but for obvious reasons, this song captures my current mood. Thankfully, I'm back in Seattle.

Does daylight savings cut energy use? Don’t lose sleep over the question

Daylight savings goes into effect this weekend, and with it comes the semiannual arguments over whether the program actually saves time and energy. Those of us who can change our clocks correctly can spend our extra hour parsing new claims that extending daylight savings saves energy and money. What’s that? We lose an hour? Then […]

Slightly off topic but utterly essential

The Daily Show is a national treasure.

The Onion: still funny

"San Francisco Historians Condemn 1906 Earthquake Deniers"

Six firms agree to stop using chemical in baby bottles

WASHINGTON — The six major baby bottle makers in the United States have agreed to stop using the toxic chemical Bisphenol-A, suspected of harming human development, local officials said. “All six major baby bottle companies — Avent, Disney First Years, Gerber, Dr. Brown, Playtex and Evenflow — have agreed to voluntarily ban BPA from bottles […]

Slate tricked into publishing a parody of its own reflexive contrarianism

In 1996, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted a paper to the postmodern culture studies journal Social Text. When it was published, Sokal revealed that the paper was an elaborate ruse, a parody, filled with the most absurd postmodernist tropes he could dream up. It became known as the Sokal Hoax.

Slate has just been the subject of what future historians will likely call the Pellettieri Hoax. Jill Hunter Pellettieri wrote an article lampooning Slate's penchant for vapid, picayune, deeply privileged, self-conscious contrarianism ... and tricked Slate into publishing it!

Well played, Pellettieri. Slate, you've been punk'd!

A look at the non-experts speaking at Heartland Institute's denialist sideshow

When the science behind Gore's CO2 "hockey stick" slaps you down, there's nothing like indulging in old-fashioned denialism.

What is to be done when the world's leading experts in a field come together in the largest, most extensively peer-reviewed inquiry in the history of science and arrive at a conclusion that is diametrically opposed to your own long-held worldview? Most of us would reevaluate our ideas so they actually mesh with reality. That's called learning.

But if you are the staunchly "free market," anti-regulation think tank called the Heartland Institute and the conclusion is that humanity must cooperate to get the world out of a worsening climate crisis ... well, then what you do is simply manufacture a conclusion that is more to your liking.

Make no mistake, this is what the Heartland Institute's "International Conference on Climate Change" is all about. Set to begin Sunday in New York, the gathering's guest list includes the standard roster of "scientist-denialists" -- a large group of "experts" who have never published a single peer-reviewed study in their lives, along with a handful of fringe researchers who do (though rarely) publish in the field of climate science. The conference tagline is: "Global Warming: was it ever really a crisis?" and the conclusion is predetermined. "Was it ever a crisis?" ... as if it isn't right now.

By conception, the Heartland gathering seeks to establish itself as an authoritative gathering of genuine experts in climate science. The claim the Heartland Institute makes is pretty simple: "more than 70 of the world's elite scientists specializing in climate issues" will be there.

So, Heartland says to the unsuspecting, the experts are all coming to this event, and they all say there is nothing to worry about. That actually makes the whole charade pretty easy to unmask.

We don't have to examine every particular scientific or pseudo-scientific argument that will be advanced during the conference (that's been done repeatedly), because the whole thrust of this conference is about who is attending, not what they are saying.

Gore declines to debate Lomborg

I forgot to mention: the one "newsworthy" event at today's conference was the fact that Al Gore was directly confronted by Bjorn Lomborg and refused to debate him.

Coal River Mountain sit-in campaign blooms

Cherry Pond Mountain, Coal River Mountain, West Virginia

Photo: Nicole Motson.

As the U.S. Supreme Court continues to hear the Brent Benjamin-Don Blankenship case on the compromise of judicial neutrality from special interest lobbies -- read: Massey Energy's Big Coal grip on West Virginia courts -- five more arrests took place today in a growing campaign to stop mountaintop removal in the Coal River Valley.

If the local and nationwide momentum is any indication of a promised spring and summer campaign of civil disobedience, Coal River Mountain is destined for an extraordinary Appalachian Spring.

Earlier this week, a student campaign at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit-related school in California, won a successful victory in getting their university administration to agree to divest from their stock in Massey Energy.

Today's action took place at 1:30 p.m., at the Massey Energy Edwight mountaintop-removal site on Cherry Pond Mountain. Calling attention to the mine blasting taking place near the Shumate Dam, a mountain valley Class-C dam which holds 2.8 billion gallons of coal sludge that sits a few football fields above the Marsh Fork Elementary School, five activists unfurled a banner -- "Stop Blasting, Save the Kids" -- and were cited for trespassing and peacefully escorted by the state police to jail at Pettus, West Virginia. They were released.

World Bank approves $1.3 billion for Brazilian eco-projects

WASHINGTON — The World Bank said Thursday it has approved $1.3 billion for environmental and climate projects in Brazil, focused on fighting deterioration of the Amazon rain forest and renewable energy sources. The World Bank said its board of directors approved Thursday the 1.3 billion dollar loan to the Brazilian government of President Luiz Inacio […]