• The stupidity of Rick Santorum and of the conservative movement is exemplified by this:
  
  

  Rick Santorum took aim at Mitt Romney for the former governor’s position on climate change Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

  “Who would be the better person to go after the Obama administration on trying to control the energy and manufacturing sector of our economy and trying to dictate to you what lights to turn on and what car to drive?” Santorum said during his speech at the conference.

  “Would it be someone who bought into man-made global warming and imposed the first carbon cap in the state of Massachusetts, the first state to do so in the country?”

  In the Republican Party you win mojo by ignoring the science about the most important issue humanity has ever faced. Of course, true to form, Romney now has flip-flopped on the issue and now also is a climate denier.

• And on some people’s active willingness to be deceived, read wufnik:
  

  The more pressing question, I suppose, is how did so many of our institutions—particularly politics and the media—get to be so dominated by these people? Was it when colleges and universities started offering degrees in things like “Media Studies?” Was it growing up with Ronald Reagan as President and thinking that that was the default condition–Reagan? I have no idea. What I do know is that this is the defining characteristic of the people who dominate public discussions on things like the economy and Climate Change these days—people who can sound like they know what they’re talking about, but on closer inspection clearly don’t. But they’ve somehow, often by accident, managed to acquire the ability to sound good. And because they sound good, they’re convinced themselves, and others, that they know something, and that something is worth sharing. It’s a low rent version of the Categorical Imperative—if I can say something, no matter how foolish, I should.

• End of an era:
  

  The last veteran of World War I was a waitress, and for 90 years no one knew her name.

  Florence Green, a member of Britain’s Royal Air Force who was afraid of flying, died in England on Saturday, two weeks shy of her 111th birthday. She was believed to have been the war’s last living veteran — the last anywhere of the tens of millions who served.

  Mrs. Green, who joined the R.A.F. as a teenager shortly before war’s end, worked in an officer’s mess on the home front. Her service was officially recognized only in 2010, after a researcher unearthed her records in Britain’s National Archives.

  Of course, the disastrous consequences of that disastrous war continue to haunt and devastate.

• It will take much more than this, but it would be a start.
  

  A major fundraiser for Susan G Komen for the Cure, the breast cancer advocacy group at the centre of a row over its funding cut to Planned Parenthood, has called for the organisation to “clean house” at the top, starting with the resignation of its founder Nancy Brinker.

  Eve Ellis, a former board member of affiliate group Komen New York City, said she does not believe Brinker’s claims that the cuts were not politically motivated and, as a result, no longer trusts Komen as an organisation. A passionate supporter and board member of six years standing who has raised $ 250,000 for Komen NYC, Ellis has cut all ties to the group.

  And only a start.

• It’s well past time to downgrade Standard & Poor’s:
  

  The U.S., lacking a plan to contain $ 1 trillion deficits, faces the prospect of another rating cut in six to 24 months depending on the outcome of November elections, according to John Chambers of Standard & Poor’s.

  They’re trying to hold our entire political system hostage.

• Sometimes the headline says it all:
  

  RAF helicopter death revelation leads to secret Iraq detention camp

  Death in RAF helicopter and secret prison camp in Iraq desert raises questions about legality of British and US operations

• Don’t tell Charles Murray and Andrew Sullivan:
  

  Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.

  It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.

  Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

• That drug war in Mexico sure is working out well.
• Science Daily:
  

  As an ice age crept upon them thousands of years ago, Neanderthals and modern human ancestors expanded their territory ranges across Asia and Europe to adapt to the changing environment. In the process, they encountered each other.

  Although many anthropologists believe that modern humans ancestors “wiped out” Neanderthals, it’s more likely that Neanderthals were integrated into the human gene pool thousands of years ago during the Upper Pleistocene era as cultural and climatic forces brought the two groups together, said Arizona State University Professor C. Michael Barton of the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity and School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

  “The traditional story in textbooks doesn’t fit well with what we know about hunter-gatherers. For the most part, they don’t like to go far from home. It’s dangerous,” Barton said.

  The idea that modern humans arrived on the scene and wiped out the Neanderthals fits the political agenda of some, but humankind as innate killers doesn’t fit the facts.

• The art scene is thriving in Brooklyn.
• And Ron Paul doesn’t care much for public lands, either.

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