Meanwhile

After the fake debt crisis, reality reappears:

Record high radiation at crippled Japan nuke plant

Chile: Snow, rain hit world's driest desert

FAA fiasco won’t be resolved anytime soon

Wisconsin Citizen Jumps Through DMV Hoops to Get Photo ID in Order to Cast Legal Vote

Oh boy...

Weirdness and wizards

The Guardian liked the last Harry Potter movie.

Haboob!! (The video is silent but astonishing)

24 types of libertarian.

Neptune celebrates first anniversary on July 12, 2011

On Tuesday, July 12, 2011, the planet Neptune completes its first revolution around the sun since its discovery on September 23, 1846. Neptune finally reaches this milestone at 22:27 Universal Time today. It takes Neptune 164.79 Earth-years to go full circle through the constellations of the Zodiac, whereas the Earth goes full circle in just 365.256 days.

Russian trilobites.

And speaking of fossilized brains...

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) became the first presidential candidate to sign a pledge created by The Family Leader, a conservative, Iowa-based Christian group that opposes same sex marriage, Sharia law and pornography.

By signing the pledge (PDF), Bachmann vowed to support a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage, as well as agreeing that same sex marriage was akin to polygamy.

The document also implies that homosexuality is a choice.

The ocean gyres are getting bigger

The Sahara, the Gobi, the Chihuahuan--all are great deserts. But what about the South Pacific's subtropical gyre? This "biological desert" within a swirling expanse of nutrient-starved saltwater is the largest, and least productive, ecosystem of the South Pacific. Together with the subtropical gyres in other oceans, biological deserts cover 40% of Earth's surface. But their relative obscurity may be about to change. Researchers are reporting that the ocean's biological deserts have been expanding, and they are growing much faster than global warming models predict.

The evidence comes from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) onboard the orbiting SeaStar spacecraft. Launched in 1997, SeaWiFS maps ocean color around the globe. The green of the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll a is a measure of the abundance of plant life, which supports the base of the food chain. In an upcoming Geophysical Research Letters paper, biological oceanographer Jeffrey Polovina of the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service in Honolulu, Hawaii, and his colleagues describe how they charted the changing size of the central region of faintest green in the subtropical gyres of the North and South Pacific, North and South Atlantic, and South Indian oceans from SeaWiFS's launch through 2006.

All of the biological deserts had grown, except the South Indian Ocean's. The total expansion was 6.6 million square kilometers or 15%, and it happened as the shallow waters of the gyres were warming. "We're seeing this pattern in each of the four ocean basins," says Polovina. That suggests to him that global warming could be the ultimate cause of the observed desert expansion.

Gyre waters are already strongly layered, so stirring by the wind brings little of the nutrients stored in deep waters to the surface to fuel plant and ultimately animal growth. Warming further strengthens this stratification, making such nourishing mixing all the more difficult. Climate-ecosystem models predict that global warming will exacerbate ocean desert expansion, but not this quickly, Polovina notes. During the past 9 years, gyre deserts expanded 10 to 25 times faster than modeled.

The Bush Era will also mark of the death of the oceans, the destruction of the environment, the speeding up of Global Warming, the spread of theocracy wars, the spike in terrorism, Peak Oil, and the collapse of world economies.

Did I forget anything?