Questions, questions...

Cares about the future.

With him it's just sex, sex, sex.

Did Niall Ferguson say something true?

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson posted an "unqualified apology" on his personal blog on Saturday after saying that British economist John Maynard Keynes did not care about the future because he was gay and had no children. The comments were "as stupid as they were insensitive," Ferguson wrote.

Well, they were that. (He also said they were "off the cuff", suggesting he really needs to start patronizing a different laundry, since he has found the same remarks on his cuff before.)

These wind turbines helped supply 70% of Portugal's energy needs renewably over a three-month period.

Can solar power destroy the electrical power industry as we know it? The industry seems to think so:

Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground.

That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.

You need to read this. Meanwhile, CO2 concentration as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory has just hit 400 parts per million for the first time in human history, and nobody has a plan.

Kuala Lumpur? Johor Bahru? Australia Network News, anyway.

Is Malaysia having its first unpredictable general election since 1957? So far early results from Sarawak (for the Barisan Nasional government, as expected) and the city of Penang (Anwar Ibrahim's opposition movement, as expected).

Update:

Looks like the old government (the current prime minister, Najib Razak, the country's sixth, is the son of the second, Tun Abdul Razak, and nephew of the third, Tun Hussein Onn) is going to be the new one. No South Seas Spring in the offing, whatever may happen in Myanmar. Poor old Anwar (I have to say, I remember when he was poor young Anwar, the ruling party's Islamist firebrand, catapulting out of PM Mahathir Muhammad's good graces in the early 80s for being more popular than the PM) is complaining about the Barisan sneaking foreigners into the voting booths. (Yes, Republicans, voter fraud can be a serious problem. Just not in Ohio.)

Ugarit News, via AP, via New York Times.

Has Israel taken sides in the Syrian civil war? Times:

Syrian state television said the explosions confirmed what the government has been contending all along: that the rebels are part of an American-Israeli conspiracy to target Mr. Assad for his support of Palestinians and opposition to Western policies in the Middle East.

Along with those notable Israeli puppet organizations Al Qa'eda and the Chechen resistance. I guess it's pretty complicated, huh, Senator McCain?

Update:

My favorite Friedman, Really, Tom Friedman proposes a grand solution:

the only way to help Syrians is to eliminate their capacity to help themselves. Only a million-man-army of white people can midwife and referee or colonize and subdue these raving savages and, by killing nearly all of them on all sides, restore order for the survivors. It’s like how we buy pork: you can’t just walk in to a store and say, “I’d like a thing of bacon and four pig feet and a nose, please.” No. In periods of international crisis you have to buy the whole hog.

And finally, Syria brings to mind the question:

From Encyclopedia of Babies of Beautiful Wild Animals.

Is there Conclusive Proof that there is no god and humans are essentially evil?

Jack Adams at Vice offers some, in the form of the story of Pony,

an orangutan from a small village in Borneo, where they cut down the rain forest to render the palm oil that gets sold abroad and made into lip salve, ice cream, chocolates, and cheese crackers.

Pony, though an orangutan, was a sex worker until recently, in a brothel-village serving the needs of plantation workers. She was in chains and shaved regularly all over her body, very bad for her sensitive skin. Humans did that.

She was ultimately rescued, by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, which is composed of humans too. If you think humans are not essentially evil maybe you can show them some love.