Friday.

Things are back to normal.  Bloglines is back up and functioning.  I spend a good bit of time trying to rebuild my reading list on Bloglovin and in my bookmarks.  Now that everything is functioning I can complete the process a little at a time.  I do get cranky when my technology doesn't function.  I hate to think of what a prolonged outage would do to my moods.

I just saw a headline which irritates me.  I won't link to the story itself which deals with the search for the Malaysian jet.  The headline read: "Eight Days Squandered?  Search Zone Shifts Hundreds of Miles."  I heard the gist of the argument on the TV morning news.  Evidently the jet was traveling at a higher speed than originally thought so it would not have flown as far as searchers originally thought.  Since the beginning the authorities have been refining their search as new information becomes available.  Think about what the original search areas were like--an arc from the central asian countries to almost the Antarctic Indian Ocean.  And the results of those "squandered" days helped refine the search and limit it.  What do the news writers not understand about that process?  I sometimes think being half brain-dead is a job requirement for news writers.

I hadn't intended to "squander" my time reading the article itself but I thought I should to be fair.  After all, the writer might have intended to debunk the headline.  Unfortunately, if that was the intent, s/he failed.  All they did was reinforce the notion that those heading the search are bumbling idiots and played up the drama.

While the premises of this article may be true--Russia may, indeed, be some form of capitalist economy--the conclusion does not follow from the premises.  It reminds me of arguments very well respected experts made prior to WWI that no prolonged period of war could occur because industrialized countries wouldn't want to suffer the damage to their prosperous economies.  The author compares Putin to a gang leader protecting his turf.  Does the fact that two gang leaders share a social/economic/political philosophy prevent gang wars?  Not likely.  For another take on this issue check out Sovereign Man.

The first segment on this Automatic Earth post makes an interesting point.  The semantics of the climate change argument do matter and those may mark a shift.  Instead of talking about reversing the anticipated effects it looks like they are shifting to how we can adapt to keep the merry party going forever.  I have always had a suspicion that the whole argument was futile to begin with.  First, all of the proposals for reversing the process required far more collective will among a far broader swath of our global population than is in evidence.  There really is no "we" do do anything.  Second, I think we are far enough along in our F*#king up this planet that things will happen that we won't like much and there isn't a damned thing we can do about it.  So the only alternative is to adapt.  And I think the adaptation will be at the individual and local level.

Finally, someone who is asking the same questions I am about our politicians and other pundits pushing "education" on us as though it were a drug.  There are pushers and there are pushers.  Not all that much difference between them.  Both are promising paradise if you only follow their advice and expend a large chunk of your time and borrowed money in pursuit of that mythical beast--an education.