The Montreal Gazette goes content free.
(From the comments; “Usually they have more words with their no-content.”)
Reader Tips
Tips thread.
Y2Kyoto: When Rhinos Roamed The Glaciers
ONE day, climate change could cost the earth. For now, it is a nice little earner for Russian hunter Alexander Vatagin.
In Siberia’s northernmost reaches, well above the Arctic Circle, the changing temperature is thawing the permafrost to reveal the bones of prehistoric animals such as mammoths, woolly rhinos and lions that have lay buried for thousands of years.
[…]
Back in Chersky, Sergei Davydov, 52, a scientist, keeps the bones he collects to study climate change, but also because they fascinate him. “This tooth has an unusual bump here. The mammoth suffered from a terrible toothache. We can only imagine how he must have roared.”
And we can only imagine he broke it munching on ice.
The Enemy Of Our Enemy
And who’s kidding whom? The University of Toronto would be first in the lineup behind them.
More – “What is moral blindness but the inability to tell right from wrong, friend from enemy, love from hate? And what is moral deafness but a man who can hear words and never understand their meaning?”
“We want revenge…”
The assassination of popular Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Resha has backfired. Via AJStrata;
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Much more at the link.
The Great Intellectual
Thoughtful people worried that we had reached “the limits of growth,” the point at which the world would begin running out of natural resources. Prime minister Pierre Trudeau warned Canadians, most notoriously in his Dec. 28, 1975, end of year interview: “We haven’t been able to make it work, the free enterprise system.”
Rachel Carson – Not Dead Enough
[South Africa’s] Health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, says cooperation between South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique has led to a 90% reduction in new malaria infections in the three countries.
Tshabala-Msimang says this has been achieved through the use of Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), an agent that kills the malaria-carrying mosquitoes. She was speaking at one of the commissions of the People’s Assembly in Bizana, which was discussing the health situation in the country. […]
“… They wanted to tell us that we mustn’t use DDT for indoor residual spraying because it destroys vegetables and… fauna and we just said, ‘Look in Europe they conquered malaria because they used DDT’… The Italians told us that, ‘Don’t listen to what they are saying, we conquered malaria because we just killed the mosquitoes’ (sic),” said Tshabalala-Msimang.
Good for them.
Y2Kyoto: Someone Stop Darryl Hannah
Rapeseed and maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realised. The research team found that 3 to 5 per cent of the nitrogen in fertiliser was converted and emitted. In contrast, the figure used by the International Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the extent and impact of man-made global warming, was 2 per cent. The findings illustrated the importance, the researchers said, of ensuring that measures designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are assessed thoroughly before being hailed as a solution.
[…]
It was accepted by the scientists that other factors, such as the use of fossil fuels to produce fertiliser, have yet to be fully analysed for their impact on overall figures. But they concluded that the biofuels “can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2 O emissions than cooling by fossil-fuel savings”.
The research is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, where it has been placed for open review. The research team was formed of scientists from Britain, the US and Germany, and included Professor Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone.
Reader Tips
I’ve a lot on my plate today, so blogging will be light. Your tips can go here for the time being.
“Devout Muslims Kill 4 Policemen, But Original Target was Children’s Festival”.
This sounds like a job for Spurwing Plover!
The name may change, but the snark remains the same!
Native Syndicate VS Indian Posse
At Fort Qu’appelle. Population; 2000
Don Newman’s Politics
“It’s the PPG’s job to care about what Stephen Harper thinks, not the other way around.“
Rathergoat
In 2004, at the height of the Dan Rather Memogate story, I wrote in National Review: “Across the media universe the questions pour out: Why is Dan Rather doing this to himself? Why does he drag this out? Why won’t he just come clean? Why would he let this happen in the first place? Why is CBS standing by him? Why … why … why?
“There is only one plausible answer: Ours is a just and decent God.”
An Ottawa Cancer Patient & Liberal Jim Watson
Dalton McIntimacy
Nothing says “forgive me” like a politician baring his soul to a tv camera while the voter watches from the shadows.
Reader Tips
Tips thread for Friday.
The Agenda Item Targeting Israel
[On Sept. 20]“… the UN Human Rights Council launched a special agenda item singling out Israel for permanent indictment. The special debate criticizing Israel allowed the Palestinian representative to take the floor and accuse Israel of “atrocities”, Syria to charge Israel with “Judaising” the Golan, and the Islamic group to protested Israel’s entry of Syrian airspace. Cuba on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement complained Israel was excavating around the Al-Aqsa mosque. Iran, Kuwait, Algeria, and Venezuela and others also joined in condemning the Jewish state.”
“And if they lose 18% as they did on Monday?”
Wells asks;
…”anyone want to do the math on a swing of, say, six points from the Bloc to the Tories across Quebec and tell me how it changes the seat totals?”
Lance provides the answer..
“In a world of perfect karma”
“Ahmadinejad would be captured by American “students” and held hostage for over a year, paraded before TV cameras and threatened almost daily with death.”
There’s still time.
The Sound Of Settled Science
USHCN station Titusville, FL
“On your scale of 1 to 5, this is an 8.”
Is Your Online Account Safe?
So, why is any of this of interest, especially in a column devoted to tech and society? Because, one little item in the middle of this story caught my attention. It was a quote by a Northern Rock depositor who, seeing the long line in front of his local branch, decided to be clever and go online to withdraw his funds. The response: The server was currently busy.
That wasn’t surprising. So he tried again. And again. And again. The same reply every time. Forty-eight hours later, he was still getting a “server busy” reply. Needless to say, he had long since come to the conclusion that the system wasn’t overloaded at all, but that Northern Rock had simply locked down the system.
For 20 years now, we’ve all been worried about cybercrime, identity theft and the loss of privacy in regards to banking on the Internet. Some people are so fearful of the Wild West Web that they simply refuse to bank there.
But what never crossed my mind, and I suspect not yours either, is that the banks themselves might pose a threat — that they might, willy-nilly, choose to lock their virtual doors in the same way that they historically have shuttered their real ones.