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Alyssa

Romeo Save Me

I am humiliated by how much I want to see “Letters to Juliet”:

The movie really should push none of my buttons.  I actually don’t like Romeo & Juliet very much, mostly because I actually prefer the proposal scene in Henry V.  How can a girl possibly resist something like this:

And while thou
livest, dear Kate, take a fellow of plain and
uncoined constancy…What! a
speaker is but a prater; a rhyme is but a ballad. A
good leg will fall; a straight back will stoop; a
black beard will turn white; a curled pate will grow
bald; a fair face will wither; a full eye will wax
hollow: but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the
moon; or, rather, the sun, and not the moon; for it
shines bright and never changes, but keeps his
course truly. If thou would have such a one, take
me; and take me, take a soldier; take a soldier,
take a king.

Love that he’s not sure she’ll take him for himself so he offers himself up in an escalating list of titles.
Let’s see what else.  The Golden Cynical Dude in the trailer seems exceedingly dull.  I know how the whole movie is going to end now, thanks to poor trailer decision-making.  Amanda Seyfried is so absurdly peaches-and-cream and adorable that I think she might be a rom-com robot.  And her conflicts with her pasta-making fiancee seem exceedingly manufactured.

And yet, I will likely see this on opening weekend.  I am an enormous sucker for movies involving the exchange of letters, Vanessa Redgrave, second chances, and Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” which is an absurdly mature and lovely piece of pop songwriting.  ”I was a scarlet letter” spoken as a declaration of pride, devotion, and sexual desire is kind of amazing as a commercially successful act of feminist reclamation.  Also, “this love is difficult, but it’s real” is one of the sager one-sentence assessments of a relationship in a song ever.    And it has one of those changing choruses, much like The Cranberries, which, in its shift from “it’s just my imagination” to “it’s not my imagination,” is uplifting if you notice it.

All of which is to say that I am as susceptible to marketing to anyone else.  I’m just capable of working myself into a disgruntled, elliptical, tryptophan-induced huff about it.

Yglesias

The China Turnaround

James Fallows rounds up the headlines and finds sudden progress being made on just about every issue on which Obama’s trip to China was deemed a “failure” by the media consensus. To reiterate what I said before, I do think it’s fair to observe that it seems slightly strange to have gone ahead with the trip in the absence of a clear signal that there were important bilateral deals ready to be signed. But it looks like Fallows’ earlier argument that this lack of blockbuster headlines was obscuring a broad range of successes now has the bulk of the evidence on its side.

Climate Progress

A Bipartisan Call for Climate Action

In an open letter published [last week] on a full page of the Washington Post, members of WWF’s current and past Boards of Directors call for “a clear bipartisan blueprint from the Senate prior to Copenhagen, followed by final passage of legislation early next year,” saying that it is “vital to securing corresponding actions by other countries in a new global pact to head off the worst impacts of climate change. “

That’s from the World Wildlife Fund’s news release on their “Bipartisan Call for Climate Action.”  The video is from one of the signers, The Honorable William K. Reilly, Chairman Emeritus of WWF and EPA Administrator during the entire Bush Sr. presidency.  Another signer is The Honorable Russell E. Train, Founder Chairman Emeritus of WWF and President Nixon’s and Ford’s EPA Administrator from 1973-1977.

The text of the letter and list of signers follows (PDF here):

Read more

Climate Progress

­An open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research from Dr. Judith Curry regarding hacked CRU emails

I have known Dr. Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for many years.  I have interviewed her a number of times and quoted her work on the hurricane-warming connection at length for my 2006 book, “Hell and High Water:  Global Warming — the Solution and the Politics.”  Later, I spent a day giving talks with her in various Florida cities.  She is a first rate scientist (CV here) and someone I have great respect for.  Her past public statements and articles on climate change can be found here.  As is the case with other guest bloggers on CP, I do not agree with everything she writes here.  But the hacked CRU emails raise important issues, I believe scientists should keep maintaining considerably higher standards than their critics, and I think her views deserve to be read and debated widely.  Comments are greatly desired, as always.

­An open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research

Based upon feedback that I’ve received from graduate students at Georgia Tech, I suspect that you are confused, troubled, or worried by what you have been reading about ClimateGate and the contents of the hacked CRU emails. After spending considerable time reading the hacked emails and other posts in the blogosphere, I wrote an essay that calls for greater transparency in climate data and other methods used in climate research. The essay is posted over at climateaudit.org (you can read it at http://camirror.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/curry-on-the-credibility-of-climate-research/).

What has been noticeably absent so far in the ClimateGate discussion is a public reaffirmation by climate researchers of our basic research values:  the rigors of the scientific method (including reproducibility), research integrity and ethics, open minds, and critical thinking.  Under no circumstances should we ever sacrifice any of these values; the CRU emails, however, appear to violate them.

My motivation for communicating on this issue in the blogosphere comes from emails that I received from Georgia Tech graduate students and alums. As a result of my post on climateaudit, I started receiving emails from graduate students from other universities. I post the content of one of the emails here, without reference to the student’s name or institution:

Read more

Yglesias

The Big Winner of an Israel-Iran War

200px-Vladimir_Putin_official_portrait

As a parenthetical to a long post on Russia’s possibly shifting Iran policy, Michael Crowley argues:

(It’s not likely that Russia, which hasn’t publicly explained the delay, wants to make an Israeli air strike any easier–Moscow doesn’t welcome the strategic and economic instability such an attack would bring; more likely, the Kremlin understands that shipping the missiles would be a destabilizing move that could prompt a quick Israeli strike before Tehran has time to put the batteries into position.)

I dunno . . . wouldn’t Russia be the primary beneficiary of the strategic and economic instability on Israeli attack on Iran would bring? Recall the Arab oil boycott in the 1970s—this essentially acted as a bailout for the Soviet economy, giving the energy-rich USSR access to enough hard currency to boost the availability of consumer goods. I’m generally an optimist about the possibilities for international cooperation, but the fact of the matter is that Russia, a declining great power with a shrinking population and an economy oriented around the export of fossil fuels and weapons, is an unlikely voice for stability.

Conversely, in an Israeli attack on Iran it’s the United States that’s bearing the lion’s share of the downside risk. If such an attack triggered the kind of instability that sends oil prices skyrocketing we, the most oil-dependent nation on earth, will bear the largest share of the pain. But beyond the specific case of the United States, you could easily imagine a spike in oil prices throwing the whole developed world into an economic tailspin.

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