Events

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, Calif., confirmed the phenomenon yesterday: “The ocean has warmed up a little bit more. ... It’s certainly still a strong event,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center. Halpert said this El Niño still isn’t quite as strong as the current record holder, the El Niño that developed in 1997, but it’s “still respectable. Probably the second strongest we’ve seen at this time of year.” “We certainly favor a...

WGN meteorologist Tom Skilling isn't sure: This winter could for a number of reasons follow the lead of the past several winters and end up near or below normal. It would have to work at doing so. Bucking a strong El Nino isn’t impossible–but it’s not an easy thing for nature to do either. Air over the warm ocean waters also warms, and this appears at least one factor in the build-up of a ridge over western North America which has contributed to the diversion of needed precipitation away from the...

As I mentioned yesterday, the European Court of Justice ruled yesterday that the US-EU Safe Harbor pact is illegal under European law: The ruling, by the European Court of Justice, said the so-called safe harbor agreement was flawed because it allowed American government authorities to gain routine access to Europeans’ online information. The court said leaks from Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency, made it clear that American intelligence agencies had almost...

And so am I, about the immorality of the right's evolution on their pro-gun message: As I wrote on Friday, the craze to refuse to name the names of mass shooters is a grand form of evasion. Unable to address the actual causes of mass gun violence we stumble around for some feel-good nonsense that allows us to pretend we're taking action. But you can see the same drive expanding in other directions as well: even to the level of blaming the victims themselves. It's amazing that we're actually getting to...

Last note for now. Josh Marshall makes an excellent point: What would make a real difference would be a society where there were radically fewer guns, where buying a gun meant getting a license, needing to follow specific safety guidelines, where you couldn't build your own armory, where you had to carry insurance to own a weapon (like you do with a car and most everything else), etc. Those of us who see the current situation as not just non-ideal but actually a sort of societal sickness need to start...

These crossed my various news feeds today: Top story in my professional life: The EU's top court struck down Safe Harbor certification, leaving data privacy rules up to individual countries. An year-old video from ABC News demonstrating the ineffectiveness of concealed-carry (hint: you'll be shot with your own gun). The Illinois Technology Association, of which my employer is a member, is stepping up recruiting for Illinois companies in L.A. and New York. Geologists have found evidence of a huge tsunami...

Larry Wilmore gives a primer on how the right change the conversation:

Whatever I've been fighting the past few days is taking a really good whack at me today. I may post more substantially later; right now, not so much. Saturday, though, I had five hours of Bach, and it rocked, as much as a harpsichord, piano, and organ can rock.

Welcome to the Shining Beacon on a Hill, the example to the rest of the world, where we've had 294 mass shootings in 274 days so far this year: We've gone no more than eight days without one of these incidents this year. On six days in September, there were 3 mass shootings or more. If the initial casualty figures in Oregon hold up, that would bring the total of deaths by mass shooting this year to 380 so far, with well over one thousand injured. And of course, there's the broader universe of nearly...

Canadian Julia Cordray created an app described as a "Yelp for people," and apparently failed to predict the future: Except of course it took the rest of the world about two seconds to figure out that filtering the world to only include those with positive feelings was not exactly realistic, and all the app was likely to do was invite an endless stream of abuse, bullying, and stalking. It wasn't long before people were posting Cordray's personal details online – seemingly culled from the Whois...