• Amity, Monday, January 23, 2012 at 8:0011 pm

Articles like this annoy me. The United States has been profoundly divided politically for nearly a quarter of a millennium. We have never not been violently at odds. I mean, red states and blue states used to go to war with each other. Elected representatives fought each other physically in the halls of Congress. [note: pre-U.S. neighbours fought and killed each other during the American Revolutionary War]

Spare us the weepy sad sorrow for the bygone days of halcyon bipartisanship. When were these days of golden unity? They never existed.

And as for the idea of a “missing center,” I can explain the apparent conundrum very easily. The urban centers of America are the center. Some go center-left, most swing center-right. The reason why you all can’t find the common ground that doesn’t consist of going further right is that from here, from where you all are, there is nowhere left to go but further and further right.

The Democratic Party is by any sane application of the terminology a center-right party. The Republican Party is far right — more or less fascist in practice, if not in principle.

The actual American left, such as it is, consists mostly of a small number of miscellaneous Occupy protesters, shivering in the cold.

Oh, and also, spare us the horseshit about homogeneity in liberal enclaves. There are few American cities with more fractured politics than San Francisco.

2. An ode to the Gulag Archipelago – Love, American-style.

3. Aurora forecast.

4. A nod to the new director of UAF’s Geophysical Institute, Robert “Bob” McCoy.  Tell us more about the importance of thermokarst lakes, why dontcha?

5. A nod to Christian Schrader, a geologist from NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, who helps find meteorites in the Antarctic.