The Superbowl starts in a little over an hour, with weather in Indianapolis no one expected: clear skies and 9°C. In Chicago it's just a smidge cooler, but still a beautiful afternoon for February. Or for March, for that matter.
Parker gets one more walk before the game. Go Giants! (For why, see Robert Wright's decision tree on the subject.)
Erin Ryan at Jezebel put together a brief outline of the Susan Komen Race for the Cure public relations disaster over the past week:
We reported that the timing of Planned Parenthood's defunding seemed oddly coincidental, seeing as less than a year ago, Komen appointed a woman named Karen Handel to serve as the charity's Senior Vice President of Public Policy. Handel had run unsuccessful for governor of Georgia in 2010 on an anti-choice platform that cited as one of its central tenets the necessity of defunding Planned Parenthood. Could the defunding of Planned Parenthood have been a political move forced by external anti-choice voices as well as Komen's own personnel?
On Thursday, Joseph Goldberg at The Atlantic reported that according to sources inside Komen, Karen Handel was indeed behind the curiously recent "rule change" that led to Planned Parenthood's defunding, and that when the rule was put on the books in December, it upset one high-level Komen employee so much that she resigned in protest.
People's initial reaction—Komen bowed to pro-life pressure—has given way to the uncomfortable realization that Komen was the pro-life pressure. It's sad, really. But Komen isn't the only organization fighting breast cancer. New Jersey reporter Kathleen O'Brien came up with three local alternatives (who don't have prominent Republicans as CEOs) in just a few minutes: The Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, Friend 2 Friend/Sussex County (N.J.) Women's Forum, and Operation Bling.
As one commenter at Jezebel wrote, "In all honesty, I'm sort of weirdly glad that all this happened, because finally I won't have people being all "WHY DO YOU HATE THIS CHARITY OBVIOUSLY YOU LOVE BREAST CANCER YOU HEARTLESS WITCH" whenever I state that I think Susan G. Komen is a bloated money-making machine that's focused more on selling pink crap and creating this simultaneously sanitized and sexualized image of breast cancer than actually helping women."
Harsh, perhaps, but Komen's complete mishandling of this event, orchestrated in part by former George W. Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, of all people, may have politicized the organization into irrelevance. Let's see what happens to pink ribbons over the next few months.
The international airline consortium oneworld, which includes American Airlines and British Airways, this week lost one member and had an applicant postpone membership. On Thursday, Hungarian flag carrier Malév suspended operations:
Malev, the state-owned Hungarian airline, ceased flying with debts of €205 million after the government withdrew financing. The airline, which was placed under bankruptcy protection earlier this week, stopped operating all fights at 06.00 this morning.
Ryanair today announced that it will base four new Boeing 737-800 series aircraft at Budapest Airport commencing on Friday 17th February and open 31 new routes, “subject to reaching final agreement with Budapest Airport today on costs, facilities and handling”.
Then, Kingfisher Airlines said it needs more time to get its financial house in order before joining the alliance:
oneworld CEO Bruce Ashby said: "These are turbulent times for the airline industry in India and many other parts of the world. We have been working closely with Kingfisher Airlines over the past months and it has become increasingly clear recently that the airline needs more time to resolve the financial issues it is confronting before it can be welcomed into oneworld.
"We wish it well during this process and will work with Kingfisher Airlines with the aim of setting a new joining date once it is through this current period of turbulence."
In good news, however, Air Berlin will join the alliance on March 20th, and has jumped in to help mitigate the Malév collapse.
Sure, I've posted photos of the moon before, but it never gets old to me:
Well, all right, at 4½ billion years it is old to me, but you know what I meant.
On a side note, I just Googled "age of the moon" and discovered that many of the top results are from outside the reality-based community. For example, the second item on my results came from the Institute for Creation Research ("Biblical. Accurate. Certain."), in which one Thomas G. Barnes, D.Sc., begins with the assertion: "It takes but one proof of a young age for the moon or the earth to completely refute the doctrine of evolution." If you're a science teacher, you might want to have a look at this article, because it could be a great way to introduce kids to the meanings of theory, hypothesis, and fallacy.
And could someone please tell me what the credential "D.Sc." purports to be?
The thing I like most about February: at the end of it, Chicago has an hour and a quarter more daylight than at the beginning of it. Today we have 10 hours of daylight, the most since November 10th, and on the 29th we have 11 hours and 14 minutes.
I notice this every year around now, just as I forget every year how grim December can be.
With yesterday's temperatures more like April than January, Chicago magazine's explanation of it is timely:
So what is going on? It's the warmest La Niña on record. That brings the global temperature down, but causes different effects in different places. Chicago is going through a near-record warm spell—strong La Niñas correlate with above average temperatures, like the 18°C we hit in 1989 when the mean January max was 11°C, 2°C higher than this month's mean. Meanwhile, Alaska and northern Europe are suffering through deadly cold snaps.
This came to me through the WGN weather blog, which in the same story points out that groundhogs are less accurate than random chance at predicting the weather. Just a heads-up for tomorrow.
The normal temperatures in Chicago for January 31st are a low of -8.3°C and a high of 0°C.
Right now, the temperature is 13°C; the low last night was 7°C
The normal temperatures in Chicago for April 9th are a low of 2°C and a high of 13°C.
That is all.
Who was Saul Alinsky? Bill Maher explains, sort of:
I can scarcely believe I've had this guy for 10 years:
The car is named João, because he's from Brazil, and he seemed kind of like a Joe: He's a little rough around the edges, he's fun to hang out with, and he's super-reliable—except for the occasional hangover.
The photo is from the day after I got him. He's scarcely aged. (See, for example, this shot from last February. You can kind of see the dings, but he's still got a good profile.)
Robert Wright secretly loves Newt's candidacy:
The horror I feel when I imagine Newt assuming a position of responsibility can give way to melancholia if I contemplate the prospect of life without the feisty, aging smurf. Here are some things I'll miss should anyone ever succeed in driving a stake through Gingrich's heart...
Newt boldly goes where no aspiring president has gone before. He has pledged that as president he would support something that he (who else?) dreamed up as a congressman: "the northwest ordinance for space," which says that, once you have 13,000 Americans on the moon, the moon can apply for statehood.
The problem isn't the conundrums this would raise. (With one senator per 6,500 moon residents, would lunar interests be overrepresented in Congress? Or might this effect be partly offset by the difficulty senators would have flying home to take the pulse of their constituents on three-day weekends?) The problem, rather, is that this sounds like a crazy person talking!
What's not to like?