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The demise of some of China’s ruling dynasties may have been linked to changes in the strength of monsoon rains, a new study suggests.

The findings come from 1,800-year record of the Asian monsoon preserved in a stalagmite from a Chinese cave.

Weak – and therefore dry – monsoon periods coincided with the demise of the Tang, Yuan and Ming imperial dynasties, the scientists said.

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Trey Parker and Matt Stone have always turned around “South Park” episodes with impressive speed, but Wednesday night was ridiculous.

The latest “Park” was entirely about Barack Obama and John McCain — post election.

Though much of the content could have prepared in advance, the opening was directly from Obama’s Grant Park acceptance speech Tuesday night (complete with those unsettling bulletproof walls). There was also a segment from John McCain’s concession speech.

“We’ve only ever worked on an Obama version,” said Parker and Stone via email, when asked if they prepped two versions in case McCain won. “We followed Vegas odds. If McCain would have won we would have been screwed. It would have been our ‘Dewey defeats Truman’ moment.”

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Barack Obama may have been elected only three days ago, but his victory is already beginning to shift the political ground in Iraq and the region.

Iraqi Shiite politicians are indicating that they will move faster toward a new security agreement about American troops, and a Bush administration official said he believed that Iraqis could ratify the agreement as early as the middle of this month.

“Before, the Iraqis were thinking that if they sign the pact, there will be no respect for the schedule of troop withdrawal by Dec. 31, 2011,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a powerful member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite party. “If Republicans were still there, there would be no respect for this timetable. This is a positive step to have the same theory about the timetable as Mr. Obama.”

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Any notion that Tuesday’s election represented a liberal juggernaut must overcome a detail from the voting booths of California: The same voters who turned out strongest for Barack Obama also drove a stake through the heart of same-sex marriage.

Seven in 10 African Americans who went to the polls voted yes on Proposition 8, the ballot measure overruling a state Supreme Court judgment that legalized same-sex marriage and brought 18,000 gay and lesbian couples to Golden State courthouses in the past six months.

[..]

“I think it’s mainly because of the way we were brought up in the church; we don’t agree with it,” said Jasmine Jones, 25, who is black. “I’m not really the type that I wanted to stop people’s rights. But I still have my beliefs, and if I can vote my beliefs that’s what I’m going to do.

“God doesn’t approve it, so I don’t approve it. And I approve of Him.”

It doesn’t seem to worry him that the same argument kept him at the back of the bus 40 years ago…

Religion does indeed keep people stupid..

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[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo “You live”

Watching the concession speech. From this flickr set

http://www.change.gov/

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He questioned Google’s ability to make money with Android. “I don’t really understand their strategy. Maybe somebody else does. If I went to my shareholder meeting, my analyst meeting, and said, ‘hey, we’ve just launched a new product that has no revenue model!’…I’m not sure that my investors would take that very well. But that’s kind of what Google’s telling their investors about Android,” he said.

Google search had no revenue model, the iPod was going to flop, the Zune was going to take over, and, if we’re going to talk about phones alone:

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There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.

Why doesn’t the Microsoft Board fire this guy? Before or after Apple gets bigger?

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