Posts from — June 2011

The ABC reports on their local variety: Death threats sent to top climate scientists

Several of Australia’s top climate change scientists at the Australian National University have been subjected to a campaign of death threats, forcing the university to tighten security.

Several of the scientists in Canberra have been moved to a more secure location after receiving the threats over their research.

Vice-chancellor Professor Ian Young says the scientists have received large numbers of emails, including death threats and abusive phone calls, threatening to attack the academics in the street if they continue their research.

He says it has been happening for the past six months and the situation has worsened significantly in recent weeks.

Anything that disturbs the belief system of these lowlifes is met with violence. They don’t have any other response to challenges to their weltanschauung, their reality. Climatologists aren’t really equipped to deal with this crap. Trust me, martial arts is not a core requirement for the degree.

Given what has been happening recently in Australia, how can anyone doubt that things are seriously screwed up, and something needs to be done.

My response to anyone who complains about the cost is simple – how do we afford the disasters if we continue to do nothing? We have had seven weather events so far this year in the US that have each cost more than a billion dollars. Even with inflation, that is some serious money.

Reuters has the outline of the problem: Residents evacuate flood-threatened Missouri River areas.

Same reasons as the other floods: higher than normal snowfall, heavier than normal spring rains, coming together to produce a 100-year flood. The Army Corps of Engineers has been keeping a lid on it because it flows into the Mississippi system, but they have to release water from the flood control dams or risk them.

North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri will be affected. The effect on the Mississippi system will be to keep the water high throughout the summer. This means that one good tropical storm heading up the Mississippi Valley will raise hell and water levels for the rest of the year.

Now that they have been plowed under, it turns out that they probably weren’t the source of the E. coli in Germany.

The BBC reports that the Outbreak is new form of E. coli

The Health Protection Agency said it was likely to be a new variant of the rare strain O104 – possibly with a newly acquired ability to infect large numbers of people.

In a statement it said: “While there is a lot more that we need to learn about this bacterium, the evidence that is already available tells us that the German authorities have been dealing with something new.”

Professor Gad Frankel, from Imperial College London, the Sanger Institute and the Medical Research Council, said: “This is a new combination and a deadly combination.

“It has a gene which produces a toxin and another which helps the bacterium colonise the gut more efficiently, which effectively means even more toxin is produced.

“Research we published last year showed this same factor mediates attachment to the human gut and the surface of salad leaves.”

[Read more →]

Chillin’

Hot enough for you?

[Editor: CC finds some shade under an ornamental palm during another triple-digit afternoon. {That’s not actually a palm, but a Cycas revoluta.}]

Friday Ark

Everyone who actually cared about the health of the Gulf of Mexico has known this from the beginning and wasn’t fooled by BP’s or the government’s propaganda.

The Sarasota Herald Tribune asks: Did BP’s oil-dissolving chemical make the spill worse?

The combination of oil and Corexit, the chemical BP used to dissolve the slick, is more toxic to tiny plants and animals than the oil in most cases, according to preliminary research by several Florida scientists. And the chemicals may not have broken down the oil as well as expected.

Scientists reported some of their early findings last week at a Florida Institute of Oceanography conference at the University of Central Florida. The researchers were funded a year ago through a $10 million BP grant.
…
[Read more →]

It has been difficult to avoid the flood of media effluent that surrounded an alleged posting on Twitter of an inappropriate picture by Congresscritter Tony Weiner (D-NY9).

This is another Breitbart fraud, and given the long string of frauds perpetrated by Breitbart, the media should be roundly condemned for even bringing it up. How many lies does this guy have to tell before “news” organizations stop repeating them?

Joe Cannon at Cannonfire with the able assistance of one of his readers, Milowent, shows how it was done. It doesn’t even require hacking, just the name of someone’s Yfrog photo account. You e-mail a picture to that account, and Yfrog automatically generates the “Tweet” using the Twitter account of the owner.

In an update, Joe Cannon notes that Yfrog as turned off the e-mail feature.

The only one showing any class in this mess is the young woman to whom the “tweet” was sent: Gennette Nicole Cordova quotes Oscar Wilde: “The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing.”

She is a journalism major, who may want to rethink that, based on the way the “professionals” have reacted.

So, the day after Boehner staged his thoroughly political vote on raising the debt limit with a clean bill, that was designed to fail, it was the Worst day of the year for Dow, S&P 500. Basically all of the Wall Street casinos were down more than 2%.

It wasn’t just the debt limit. People are beginning to realize that things are not getting better and the news is bad all around.

At this point I would like to address something that doesn’t seem to be mentioned much – what happens when the government checks don’t go out. While everyone is concentrating on the effect on US bonds, no one seems to realize what is going to happen in the wider economy.

A lot of people receive government checks: government employees including the military, retirees in several programs including Social Security, government contractors, etc. The individuals have been encouraged over the years to shift to direct deposits to their banks, which is cheaper for the government, and safer for the individual, but that leads to the assumption that the money will be there on time, because it always has been.

What happens if Congress doesn’t raise the debt limit and the checks stop?

Anyone care to guess how many checks written because “the money is always deposited” are going to bounce? How many mortgages and loan payments are going to go unpaid. How many credit cards are going to get slapped with the 29.99% interest rate because of a missed payment? How many won’t have the money to buy their food or medication? How many businesses are going to fail because their customers can’t pay? How many government contractors won’t make their payroll?

Screw the bond market and Wall Street, Main Street is going suffer a huge blow, and a double dip recession is the best that can be hoped for. If the Republicans thought they took heat for the Ryan budget plan, they might want to avoid their constituents for an extended period if they cause the checks to individuals to stop.

On an individual note, there are several purchases I intend to make, but I’m not going to do it until this crisis is over, because I may need that cash to cover my normal bills. The uncertainty is reducing demand, and people are worried about their income.

The heat index today was 110°. The Gulf is already at 85°, which is not exactly “refreshing”, and the jellyfish [Portuguese Man-of-Wars] decided to back off for a bit.

My cell phone turned into a LEGO, a small plastic brick, insisting I could only call 911, and everyone who called me got directed to voice-mail [except that I hate voice-mail and don’t ever set it up, which better than my Mother, who has voice-mail set up, but never checks it].

This was supposed to be a good day, as I finally have health insurance again, after paying the premiums since 1965, but the Republicans want to steal the Social Security Trust Fund, and the Democrats have no spine, so I have no idea how long I will get to keep it.

My letter carrier deserves some sort of award for bringing the ton of junk mail that has shown up in the last month as a result of this birthday. There should be some way of composting all of this paper, but too much of it needs to be shredded because it contains information that would make identity theft easy. We need an official do-not-mail list. Be warned, that in addition to the health insurance vultures wanting to sell you “Medi-gap” insurance, others want to sell you a pre-paid funeral. The truly pathetic stuff is from the “financial advisors” who think that you need their “estate planning” services.

Given some of the stupid and mildly dangerous things I have done in my life, living this long is a major accomplishment. I realistically shouldn’t have made it to 30, so I shouldn’t really complain, but I will anyway. I’m an official “old guy” and complaining is a well established right of “old guys”.

June 1^st:

The official start of the hurricane season [Invest 93 off the coast of South Carolina].

Events:
1495 – Friar John Cor records the first known batch of scotch whisky.
1660 – Mary Dyer is hanged in Boston, Massachusetts, for defying a law banning Quakers from the colony. She is considered by some to be the last religious martyr in what would become the United States.
1890 – The United States Census Bureau begins using Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine to count census returns.
1967 – The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is released.
1980 – The Cable News Network (CNN) begins broadcasting.

Births:
1563 – Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, English statesman and spymaster (d. 1612)
1780 – Carl von Clausewitz, Prussian general (d. 1831)
1804 – Mikhail Glinka, Russian composer (d. 1857)

For some reason I didn’t make the list.