Climate change is a myth.

I don't want anyone to panic, but apparently there's a space storm alert. Stock up on guns and water and meet me under Lincoln's nose at Mt. Rushmore. If everyone listens to me we'll be fine.

Sunday linkdump #2, our ruined economy edition.

* Matt Taibi has today's must-read AIG article in Rolling Stone, "The Big Takeover." Discussion at MeFi with more links.

* The article in this month's Harper's ("Infinite Debt") is good too, but unfortunately it's not available to non-subscribers online yet.

* Rachel Maddow on how deregulation helped get us into this mess.

* John Gray reviews Margaret Atwood's new book on debt for The New York Review of Books.

* And Paul Krugman is very unhappy about the Geithner toxic assets plan. He's not the only one.

A few more.

* Wikipedia is doomed. Doomed!

* Storage closets of the American Museum of Natural History. With awesome slideshow, via MeFi.

* Tim Morton makes the simple but necessary point that as the only sentient agents in the area—the only beings with "response ability"—we are "responsible" for climate change whether we are "causing" it or not.

* Biggest solar deal ever announced. The article goes on to say "When fully operational, the companies say the facility will provide enough electricity to power 845,000 homes — more than exist in San Francisco — though estimates like that are notoriously squirrely."

* Washington Monthly tries to suss out Judd Gregg's erratic behavior.

* Legalize it? The real question is why haven't we yet.

* And Krugman (via Ezra Klein) says we may just be screwed.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.

Jim Hansen: We have four years left to save the Earth. Matt Yglesias: "My best guess is that Obama’s climate proposals are too ambitious to be enacted and too timid to avert catastrophe." Conclusion: We're screwed.

How does this happen? How can the person in charge of assessing Wall Street firms not have the tools to understand them? Is the S.E.C. that inept? Perhaps, but the problem inside the commission is far worse — because inept people can be replaced. The problem is systemic. The new director of risk assessment was no more likely to grasp the risk of Bernard Madoff than the old director of risk assessment because the new guy’s thoughts and beliefs were guided by the same incentives: the need to curry favor with the politically influential and the desire to keep sweet the Wall Street elite.

And here’s the most incredible thing of all: 18 months into the most spectacular man-made financial calamity in modern experience, nothing has been done to change that, or any of the other bad incentives that led us here in the first place.

The end of the financial world as we know it, in the New York Times. Widely linked this morning, but I first saw it on MetaFilter.

Female dolphins have begun to use tools. Can invasion be far behind?

As best the researchers can tell, a single dolphin may have invented the technique relatively recently and taught it to her kin. The simple innovation dramatically changed their behavior, hunting habits and social life, the researchers found. Those that adopted it became loners who spend much more time on the hunt than others and dive more deeply in search of prey. The sponging dolphins teach the technique to all their young, but only the females seem to grasp the idea.

"It is indisputably tool use," says primate anthropologist Craig Stanford at the University of Southern California, an authority on animal cognition and behavior who wasn't part of the dolphin research group. "Despite the fact they lack hands and legs, dolphins make do."

For those seeking a glimpse of our own beginnings, the dolphins of Shark Bay offer a hint of the inventive impulse when our earliest ancestors first shaped destiny by fashioning implements with their own hands.

Via MeFi.

Sunday.

* Uncool: A U.N. resolution on the right to food passed 180-1. Via Lenin's Tomb.

* Lots of links floating around to this revisionist interpretation of It's a Wonderful Life:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

... Take the extended sequence in which George Bailey (James Stewart), having repeatedly tried and failed to escape Bedford Falls, N.Y., sees what it would be like had he never been born. The bucolic small town is replaced by a smoky, nightclub-filled, boogie-woogie-driven haven for showgirls and gamblers, who spill raucously out into the crowded sidewalks on Christmas Eve. It’s been renamed Pottersville, after the villainous Mr. Potter, Lionel Barrymore’s scheming financier.

Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.

* Will Obama gut NASA? Nice followup to last week's discussion on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio.

* On the plus side, Obama pledges allegiance to science.

* Ultimately, these disputes can't really be resolved until Obama is in office. Only then will we know whether Obama's embrace of every establishment and even right-wing figure he can find is a reflection of what the substance of his governing will be, or whether -- as many of his supporters claim -- it's a master strategy designed to diffuse tension and hostility in order to enable easier enactment of his progressive agenda. If Obama devotes genuine efforts to repealing DOMA and don't-ask-don't-tell, I doubt anyone will care how many times he hugs Rick Warren -- just as if Obama really closes Guantanamo, withdraws from Iraq and forges a diplomatic peace with Iran, few people will care how much he embraces Joe Lieberman -- though obviously those are very, very large "ifs." Only time will tell. Via Open Left.

* Arctic melt 20 years ahead of climate models. Response to global warming 20 years behind rational policy-making.

* Hadley Center study warns of “catastrophic” 5°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path. Did I mention we're screwed?

Late night links.

* Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions.

* It's good to live in a country without nobility or hereditary office.

* Are you a film addict? I am 55.2% yes.

* John Updike considers Mars.

* Matt, Josh, and Ezra consider the fillibuster and the extent to which we should just dump the damn thing.

* Coleman has gone to the Minnesota Supreme Court (a majority of whom have apparently been appointed by Tim Pawlenty) to ask that improperly rejected absentee ballots not be counted in the recount. I've looked, but I haven't actually found any sort of legitimate reason why he thinks ballots that were improperly rejected should stay improperly rejected, other than "I might win that way." Some commentary at TPM.

* Scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world at least a decade before it was predicted to happen. We're so very screwed.

Links!

* The podcast of my appearance last night on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio is already up.

* Lots of anxiety today over Google's commitment to Net Neutrality after a report in the Wall Street Journal that they were looking to sell a "fast lane" to their services. Google denounces the report, but questions remain.

* Franken +200? So says the AP. More at First Read and TPM, which reports that optimism in the Franken camp is at very high.

* Does Harry Potter poison young minds? Richard Dawkins hates puppies and sunshine, too.

* The IEA says we're screwed starting in 2020. That's actually sort of good news; there's good reason to think we may already be screwed right now.

* Whose poetry will be read at the inauguration?

There's buzz about all sorts of names. Among them: Philip Levine, a Midwesterner whose writings are attuned to the working class; Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate who created the Favorite Poem Project; Yusef Komunyakaa, whose work is heavily influenced by jazz; U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan.

* Epic collection of sci-fi ray guns.

Krugman in the New York Review of Books explains what we need to do.

Letterman on global warming: "Until we get the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we're screwed. We are walking dead people. We are the lost civilization. You're looking at us, right here, time to go, the cab is coming... "



There can be no other response to the mad decadence of the last thirty years but anger.