White Hats, Black Hats, or All Hat?

TheoCons are all in a flutter about Clinton realigning Wallace's wheels, and all aflame with anger at his wife largely, as far as can be told, because she's stuck by him and occasionally had a liberal idea.

Seems like the Clintons are the Great Satan of the TheoConfederacy, so much so they'll rally the Crusade for Dear Leader and his War on Terra.

There are so many levels of subterfuge in that juxtaposition of players I can't begin to address it.

But I will stand with Duncan and Digby and several hundred others in this today: for anyone professing moral clarity or rectitude to beotch about the morality of the progressive movement while condoning torture and the suspension of habeus corpus is rank hypocrisy.

It is itself an immoral act.

One thing the TheoConfederacy might be smelling these days, though, isn't the brimstone. There's a far greater disturbance in the Force, one that happens about every 11 years or so.



Why is sunspot 905 backwards? Perhaps it is a key marker for the beginning of a new magnetic cycle on our Sun. Every 11 years, our Sun goes through a magnetic cycle, at the end of which its overall magnetic orientation is reversed. An 11-year solar cycle has been observed for hundreds of years by noting peaks and valleys in the average number of sunspots. Just now, the Sun is near Solar Minimum, and likely to start a long progression toward the most active time, called Solar Maximum, in about 5.5 years. An indicator that the sun's magnetic field is reversing is the appearance of sunspots with the reverse magnetic polarity than normal. A few weeks ago, one small candidate reverse sunspot was sighted but faded quickly. Now, however, a larger sunspot with negative polarity is being tracked. This sunspot, numbered 905, appears as the unusual white spot in the above magnetic image of the Sun taken with the SOHO spacecraft a few days ago. In the past few days, Sunspot 905 has actually begun to break apart and might also become the source of coronal mass ejections and explosive solar flares. Solar astronomers predict that the coming Solar Maximum will be unusually active.

You've got that right. Some of the hottest years in human history, one of the worst hurricane years on record, happened while the sun was bottoming out in its 11 year cycle of activity.

Now we're heading back up again.

Keep your cool, TheoCons. While you're watching for terra'ists, invest in sunscreen and lifejackets, you're gonna need them in Bu$h country.