House of the rising Moonglum

Just got back from Alaska, where it was pretty hard to find any Palin merchandise. There were actually some pretty good pro-Palin news stories on why it is a good idea for her to step down, even if you believe in her (for local Alaska political reasons, not personal or national political reasons). And this is a good thing, because her actual resignation speech was incomprehensible. I present for your enjoyment, two attempts to fix up her speech a little bit. First, the editors over at Vanity Fair give it a go. Pretty useful comments in there, which actually turn it into a pretty good speech.

Second, and by far my favorite, is a “reading” of the beat poem that is Palin’s speech, as read by William Shatner. Oh yeah.

Here’s a sappy little story about a preschooler in San Francisco who collected over $3,000 for the local food bank. You can make a difference as well.

I saw this sitting on my table when I got home. It was not what I at first thought it was.

The thoughts I had upon seeing it: Hmm, I wonder why my wife is rereading Pride and Prejudice? How odd, I don’t remember the cover having some odd skull bits showing through… I might have to take a look at that when she is done. Oh. Zombies.

Unsurprisingly the Kurds updated their own constitution and laid claim to all the land and oil in the north of Iraq. I would like to believe that this is just a negotiating tactic for getting a better deal with the central government, but that would ignore a thousand years of history. What are we doing still messing around in countries with thousands of years of history that we will never understand?

In a shockingly well thought out move, the Department of the Interior is consolidating all its efforts to permit solar power in the US southwest. The plan is to identify the best sites (lowest regulatory risk, highest energy return) for solar power on federal land, and do a bulk analysis of the environmental impact on those sites. This will smooth the process of permitting for any companies looking to build on federal land. Currently there is under 1GW of solar production US wide on federal land, this plan looks to increase that to between 75 and 100GW. By comparison, total us consumption is about 1TW. This is real progress.