New weblog template for the New Year

The old one was decrepit, motheaten and shopworn, to put it mildly. Things that once seemed of great import no longer do - I've been bitching about the cuisine in the dining car while the train's headed off a cliff.

Help me to keep my focus on the big stuff, people.
(confidential to my trolls: yes, even you, but please do it face to face.)

Update: RealClimate overview of The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change

Gore speech at Nobel ceremony

Transcript and video of Gore’s speech. I beg you - if you're from Planet Earth - watch the video.

The man has a brain, folks, and he's not afraid to use it, to lead the fight to save our home.

From the speech -

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency - a threat to the survival of our civilization...

...many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."

The catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented - and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action.

It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.

But jeez, at the end, what a maroon of an anchorman...
Tuesday update: they've got a different video up now, sans anchorman. Which is a pity - the anchorman's cameo bit at the end spoke volumes about why we're in the mess we're in.

Read this: Scott Ritter lays out U.S.:Iran intentions

Very late updates:
1) much less likely now. ("Iran has no nuke program, U.S. intel says"; publ. Dec 4)
2) Seymour Hersh on Iran NIE, also Dec.4

Bush/Cheney are planning another "elective" war, on Iran, around April 2008. You can do your part: keep shopping.

This Scott Ritter interview is very, very good. Read it.
Ritter points out who's ultimately responsible:

[V]ery few Americans actually function as citizens anymore. What I mean by that are people who invest themselves in this country, people who care, who give a damn. Americans are primarily consumers today, and so long as they continue to wrap themselves in the cocoon of comfort, and the system keeps them walking down a road to the perceived path of prosperity, they don't want to rock the boat. If it doesn't have a direct impact on their day-to-day existence, they simply don't care.

There's a minority of people who do, but the majority of Americans don't. And if the people don't care — and remember, the people are the constituents — if the constituents don't care, then those they elect to higher office won't feel the pressure to change.

And we will get war.

Here's a man who speaks of World War III and the apocalypse and he has his hand on the button and he talks to God. I don't know, if it's a show, its a dangerous show, if its real, we should all be scared to death.

Margaret Atwood's When you open the door of war... from March 2003.

When a door swings open, you never know what will come through it. ...[T]he fortunes of war, being notoriously unpredictable, are ruled by the Goddess of Chance.

A. Hitler: (via)

To initiate a war is always like opening a large door into a dark room. You have no idea what is lurking there.