Cold, Desolate, Contains Protein

Conditions: Tentatively Warm.


Back In '04, Again

The latest revelation from the Bush administration has the Presidents aides "pressuring" the then-homeland security chief Tom Ridge to raise the terror alert level. Because of an impending threat, you inquire? No, because of the impending election.

Washington - Former US homeland security chief Tom Ridge charges in a new book that top aides to then-president George W. Bush pressured him to raise the "terror alert" level to sway the November 2004 US election.

Then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and attorney general John Ashcroft pushed him to elevate the color-coded threat level, but Ridge refused, according to a summary from his publisher, Thomas Dunne Books.
[...]

Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, was the first secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security that the US Congress created in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes.

He also says that Bush's homeland security adviser at the White House, Fran Townsend, called his department ahead of an August 1, 2004 speech to ask Ridge to include a reference to "defensive measures ... away from home" -- language that he read as being a reference to the Iraq war.

In those remarks, Ridge said he was raising the threat alert level for the financial services sector in New York City, northern New Jersey, and Washington DC, and went on to praise Bush's leadership against extremism.

"The reports that have led to this alert are the result of offensive intelligence and military operations overseas, as well as strong partnerships with our allies around the world, such as Pakistan," said Ridge.

"Such operations and partnerships give us insight into the enemy so we can better target our defensive measures here and away from home," he said at the time.

He later publicly acknowledged that much of the information underpinning the new alert was three years old, stoking Bush critics' charges of political manipulation.

- truthout.org/

It'd be nice if for once we could have had predictions of how manipulative and downright shady the Bush administration was, and have those predictions turn out to be incorrect.



Flash: Universe Just Got A Little Warmer.

Back in 2004 a space probe sent out by Nasa flew through the trail of a comet and returned to Earth. Well now the scientists have finished analyzing it, and have quite the surprising claim: that a building block of proteins has been found in said comet.

That adds to the prevailing notion that many of the ingredients for the origin of life showered down on the early Earth when asteroids (interplanetary rocks orbiting the inner solar system) and comets (dirty ice balls that generally congregate in the outer solar system beyond Neptune) made impact with the planet.

In the new research, scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., detected the amino acid glycine in comet bits brought back in 2006 by the NASA space probe Stardust.

“It tells us more about the inventory of organics in the early solar system,” said Jamie Elsila, an astrochemist at Goddard who led the research.

Amino acids are small molecules that, when strung together into chains, form a diversity of proteins. For four decades, scientists have found a multitude of amino acids in some meteorites, the bits of asteroids that land on Earth. More recently, astronomers reported that amino acids might float throughout the cosmos, a belief resulting from their detection of the color signatures of glycine, the simplest of the amino acids, in distant interstellar gas clouds.

- nytimes.com/

Sp, turns out deep space may be a lot more fertile than we thought it was. Of course, this doesn't answer the 64 billion dollar question of where the Proteins actually came from in the first place. But I guess it's a start.



Film Review: Public Enemies.

I really don't know what Michael Mann is doing anymore. I'm sure he considers himself the pioneer of digital filming, and perhaps as such he feels the need to keep pushing it one step further. But every time you watch one of his movies now you're confronted with a film that really doesn't look like a film should. Grainy, shaky, and bobbing around, his last few features felt more like awkward documentaries than films. Public Enemies attempts to tell the tale of John Dillinger, the bank-robbing gangster, who was running loose back in the thirties. It's fairly ripe territory, and it certainly been covered before, but Michael seems to be trying to strip as much glamour out of it as possible.

It's a gritty, grimy, desperate film. Johnny Depp stars, and he does what he can with the script he has. The problem is that there's just nothing really here. Dillinger was a gangster who robbed banks, the government formed the FBI who then had the authority to chase him across state lines, leading to a series of violent bank holdups and car chases. The key to Dillinger's downfall seems to be a combination of him falling for a girl and trying to take her with him, and the formation of organised crime who, while being fond of Dillinger, were not happy about the attention his antics brought their fledging racket, and so stopped helping him. Dillinger, who personified the never-think-about-tomorrow gangster stereotype, quickly became an outcast. This doesn't really lead us towards any kind of warm conclusion, and the portrayal of the feds, led by Christian Bale, leaves them looking like nothing more than a bunch of amateur thugs with badges and guns.

So we spend the film in a grainy, grimy, dark, old-fashioned America, slowly spiraling downward toward an inevitable violent death. The film certainly seems accurate in tone, but film's aren't really meant to be first and foremost about accuracy. It's supposed to be about a story, and this story is not much fun at all. It's a long film too, feels a lot longer than it's actual running time. I think that they wanted to make Dillinger something of an enigma, somewhat noble in his intentions and loyalties, and casting Johnny Depp goes a long way toward that goal. But there's a fine line between enigmatic and hollow, and here it's all too easy to see the flaws and shortcomings. There's no one to cheer for, there's no happy outcome, there's nothing here but violence and death. If that was the intention, then perhaps this should have been a documentary rather than a film. One and a half bullets out of Five.


- Peace out