From The Things To Panic About Dept.: “The Sun’s Face is Dead And It’s Getting Cold” — not so much

UPDATE: it’s complete BS. Thanks Eric A and Phil O on the climate science and Tom S on the sunspots.

Sunspots have an 11 year cycle. In March 2007 they were supposed to hit a low and start rebounding. Instead they disappeared completely.

In the late 17th century, there was a 50-year “little ice age” which coincided with a period of no sunspots.

Guess what! Global temperature dropped 0.7C in 2007, reversing 78 years of temperature increase in one year!

Warning: Science often undergoes wild permutations and distortions between its production and its appearance in the news media. God only knows if there’s anything to this whatsoever.

Sun Goes Longer than Normal Without Producing Sunspots

Prepare for New Ice Age, Says Scientist

Futzmonkey’s Pet Songbird

Futzmonkey commands me to try Songbird, now that version 0.6 is officially out.

Spiffy thing: It will import your iTunes songs “in-place” so that you can play anything you’ve got in iTunes (well, not DRMed stuff I guess) through Songbird. So — instant library ready to use!

Videos as well as audio. Podcasts too. It’s all imported in there.

I’ll give it a spin.

UPDATE: cool, but I have iTunes. Oh well.

The Nineteenth Amendment Giveth the Vote; The State Law Taketh it Away, and The Supreme Court Is Cool With That.

Shirley Preiss was born in Kentucky in 1910 – a full 10 years before American women gained the right to vote. She first voted in a presidential election in 1932, for FDR. She’s voted in every presidential election since, but that’s all about to change due to Arizona’s draconian voter ID law.

As Art Levine reported, Shirley effectively lost her right to vote when she moved to Arizona:

After living in Arizona for two years, she was eagerly looking forward to casting her ballot in the February primary for the first major woman candidate for President, Hillary Clinton. But lacking a birth certificate or even elementary school records to prove she’s a native-born American citizen, the state of Arizona’s bureaucrats determined that this former school-teacher who taught generations of Americans shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

The state’s voter ID law, passed in 2004, requires voters to show ID at the polling place and to provide proof of citizenship in order to register. But birth certificates weren’t issued in 1910 in Shirley’s birthplace of Clinton, KY, and her elementary school no longer exists.

[From Crooks and Liars » 97-Year-Old Arizona Woman Disenfranchised by Voter ID Law]