Newshoggers.com

Mocking The Conservative Intellectually Afflicted

By Steve Hynd

I know it's wrong to mock the afflicted but I just can't help it. And I'd at least try to argue that showing up such mouthdropping stupidity and the bigotry that comes from it is a public duty.

First up, via Steve Benen and Alex Kopelman, is FOX host Brian Kilmeade.

Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer's. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are -- we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other ..."

At this point, his co-host tried to -- in that jokey morning show way -- tell Kilmeade he needed to shut up, and quick, for his own sake. But he didn't get the message, adding, "See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes .... Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society."

Salon has the video. But seriously "marrying other species" as well as ethnic inter-marriage? Kilmeade must be thinking about anti-abortion activist Neal Horsley and his self-admitted intimate relations with the farm mule.

The ignorance and bigotry just shines through Kilmeade's Fox pas but there's a video doing the rounds today of a conservative so embarassingly ignorant that even the rightwing Little Green Footballs website can't resist mocking.

Arizona Republican State Senator Sylvia Allen argues in favor of uranium mining on state land, because our planet has managed to last 6,000 years without any environmental laws, and look, we’re just fine.

I can’t say enough how it’s time that we get beyond, and, and start focusing on the technology we have, and move forward into the future so that our grandchildren and, can have the same lifestyle we have, and, and, this earth’s been here 6,000 years and I know I’m goin’ on and on and I’ll shut up ... It’s been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn’t been done away with.

Video here.

Of course, as Phil Plait at Discover magazine notes:

The irony, of course — and there’s always irony when creationism is involved — is that she’s talking about uranium mining, and it’s through the radioactive decay of uranium that we know the Earth is billions of years old. And she also praises technological achievements!

This, folks, is the party of opposition. The one DC Dems keep falling over themselves to appease. Jeezy Creezy!

Space Rocks Now Classified

By Steve Hynd

Can liberals, lefties, progressives and Democrats all be honest and admit we'd have howled in outrrage about overly zealous police-state secrecy if this had been done during the Bush years? (H/t Kat):

For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by U.S. classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth's atmosphere – but no longer.

A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned.

The satellites' main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists.

The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified.

"It's baffling to us why this would suddenly change," said one scientist familiar with the work. "It's unfortunate because there was this great synergy...a very good cooperative arrangement. Systems were put into dual-use mode where a lot of science was getting done that couldn't be done any other way. It's a regrettable change in policy."

Scientists say not only will research into the threat from space be hampered, but public understanding of sometimes dramatic sky explosions will be diminished, perhaps leading to hype and fear of the unknown.

Can we be that honest, to admit that Obama's administration is pushing kneejerk secrecy - the cornerstone of the Imperial Presidency - to undreamt of heights? You'd think so.

Climate Change

Commentary By Ron Beasley

This is why we need to call it Climate Change not Global Warming.

Canada frosts the most widespread in recent memory

The multiple frosts that have blanketed Western Canada in the last week are the most widespread in the top canola-growing province of Saskatchewan in at least five years, the Canola Council of Canada said on Tuesday.

Two overnight frosts last week have already resulted in some Saskatchewan farmers reseeding their canola, a Canadian variant of rapeseed, said Jim Bessel, senior agronomy specialist in the province for the industry group Canola Council.

As we pointed out here global warming/climate change does not mean it gets warmer everywhere.  Global warming may well result in in a new Ice Age.  But here is another reason we should call it climate change.

Scientists: Global warming has already changed oceans

In Washington state, oysters in some areas haven't reproduced for four years, and preliminary evidence suggests that the increasing acidity of the ocean could be the cause. In the Gulf of Mexico, falling oxygen levels in the water have forced shrimp to migrate elsewhere.

Though two marine-derived drugs, one for treating cancer and the other for pain control, are on the market and 25 others are under development, the fungus growing on seaweed, bacteria in deep sea mud and sea fans that could produce life-saving medicines are under assault from changing the ocean conditions.

Researchers, scientists and Jacques Cousteau's granddaughter painted a bleak picture Tuesday of the future of oceans and the "blue economy" of the nation's coastal states.

The hearing before the oceans subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee was expected to focus on how the degradation of the oceans was affecting marine businesses and coastal communities. Instead, much of the testimony focused on how the waters that cover 70 percent of the planet are already changing because of global warming.

Ocean acidification or diseases that thrive in acidified, oxygen-depleted seawater could be responsible for oysters not reproducing in Washington state, said Brad Warren, who oversees the ocean health and acidification program of the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership in Seattle. A federal study found that two-thirds of larval blue crabs died when exposed to acidity levels like those currently measured off the West Coast, he said.

The increased CO₂ has already resulted in a slow death for the oceans which are a major food source for a large number of people. Of course the NH₄ based fertilizers have not helped.

The planet is warming.  Much of that warming is currently being absorbed by the oceans but the climate is being impacted.  More tornadoes, not more but stronger hurricanes.  More floods and more droughts. Colder in some places warmer in others and in some places both.  Climate Change!

 

US/Russian Scientist's Report: What Iranian Threat?

By Steve Hynd

Political rhetoric avoids inconvenient facts, again. From the WaPo, via Robert Dreyfuss, a report on a study by a joint panel of US and Russian scientists who concluded the "imminent threat" of a nuclear Iran is a chimera:

The U.S.-Russian team also judged that it would be more than five years before Iran is capable of building both a nuclear warhead and a missile capable of carrying it over long distances. And if Iran attempted such an attack, the experts say, it would ensure its own destruction.

"The missile threat from Iran to Europe is thus not imminent," the 12-member technical panel concludes in a report produced by the EastWest Institute, an independent think tank based in Moscow, New York and Belgium.

...The year-long study brought together six senior technical experts from both the United States and Russia to assess the military threat to Europe from Iran's nuclear and missile programs. The report's conclusions were reviewed by former defense secretary William J. Perry, among others, before being presented to national security adviser James L. Jones and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The report acknowledges dramatic technological gains by Iran, and it predicts that the country could probably build a simple nuclear device in one to three years, if it kicked out U.N. inspectors and retooled its uranium-processing plants to make weapons-grade enriched uranium. Another five years would be needed to build a warhead that would fit on one of Iran's missiles, the panel says. U.S. intelligence agencies have made similar predictions; Israel maintains that Iran could build a bomb in as little as eight months.

The U.S.-Russian experts say Iran faces limits in developing ballistic missiles that could someday carry nuclear warheads...

As a result, the missiles have inherent weaknesses stemming from such aged technology, despite some improvements in their range, the report states. Moreover, the country lacks "the infrastructure of research institutions, industrial plants, or the scientists and engineers that are needed to make substantial improvements."

They conclude that it would take Iran at least another six to eight years to produce a missile with enough range to reach Southern Europe and that only illicit foreign assistance or a concerted and highly visible, decade-long effort might produce the breakthroughs needed for a nuclear-tipped missile to threaten the United States. [All emphasis mine - S]

Note that key phrase "if it kicked out U.N. inspectors and retooled its uranium-processing plants to make weapons-grade enriched uranium". Iran has shown absolutely no signs of doing either - and in the meantime all their uranium stock and enrichment facilities are subject to 24/7 monitoring by the IAEA. The clock on that entirely hypothetical 6-8 year nuclear missile program isn't even ticking yet.

As far as anyone, including US intelligence, can see Iran's nuclear program is currently entirely civilian and thus something it is allowed by right under the NPT. So what's with Clinton, Obama, Panetta and Hill Democrats joining with the right's bloodthirsty hawks in talking about the urgent need to stop an Iranian nuclear weapons program that doesn't, in fact, exist?

Sanity, please?

Good News About Sea Level Rises!

By BJ Bjornson

Well, actually, just less catastrophic news, but like the news that rate of job losses was slowing, (since revised), less bad counts as good to some extent.

A new analysis halves longstanding projections of how much sea levels could rise if Antarctica’s massive western ice sheets fully disintegrated as a result of global warming.

The flow of ice into the sea would probably raise sea levels about 10 feet rather than 20 feet, according to the analysis, published in the May 15 issue of the journal Science.

Sounds good, although the New York Times has the science wrong.  (Somehow this doesn't surprise me.)  From the BBC story on the same issue:

Current projections suggest that a complete collapse of WAIS would result in an increase of up to six metres.

But Professor Bamber said that no-one had revisited the calculation, despite new data sets becoming available, and scientists developing a better understanding of the dynamics in the vast ice sheets.

The original estimates were based on "very basic ice thickness data", he explained.

"Ice thickness data gives you information about the depth of the bedrock underneath the ice sheet.

"Over the past 30 years, we have acquired much more ice thickness data over the whole of Antarctica, particularly over West Antarctica.

"We also have much better surface topography. Those two data sets are critical in determining two things."

The first was knowing the volume of ice that could contribute to sea level rise, and the second was a better understanding of the proportion of WAIS that was potentially susceptible to this instability.

Instead of assuming that the entire WAIS would collapse, causing sea level to rise by up to six metres, Professor Bamber and colleagues used models based on glaciological theory to simulate how the 2.2 million-cubic-km ice sheet would respond.

"Our reassessment of West Antarctica's contribution to sea level rise if the ice sheet was to collapse is about 3.3 metres," he said.

Basically, they're saying that the entire ice sheet isn't going to collapse all at once.  If it were to fully disintegrate, as the NYTimes says, the six meters/20 feet figure would still be valid.  However, as stated at the bottom of the story, the real question to ask is how much ice will be lost in the foreseeable future that we will have to deal and plan for, rather than the total amount.  Even the smaller figure is worth worrying about.

"A sea level rise of just 1.5m would displace 17 million people in Bangladesh alone," he added.

Oh, and there is an added bonus for US readers in the BBC piece.

"Sea level rise is not uniform across the world's oceans, partly as a result of disruptions to the Earth's gravity field," explained Professor Bamber.

"It turns out that the maximum increase in sea level rise is centred at a latitude of about 40 degrees along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards of North America."

This would include cities such as San Francisco and New York.

These areas could expect increases of one-and-a-quarter times the global average, the team estimated.

The Face Of The First European

By Steve Hynd

This, according to noted forensic scientist Richard Neave, is the face of possibly the first European, constructed from skull fragments dating back 35,000 years:

  

The Daily Mail:

His recreation offers a tantalising glimpse into life before the dawn of civilisation. It also shows the close links between the first European settlers and their immediate African ancestors.

To sculpt the head, Mr Neave called on his years of experience recreating the appearance of murder victims as well as using careful measurements of bone.

It was made for the BBC2 series The Incredible Human Journey. This will follow the evolution of humans from the cradle of Africa to the waves of migrations that saw Homo sapiens colonise the globe.

The head has taken pride of place on the desk of Alice Roberts, an anthropologist at Bristol University, who presents the programme.

'It's really quite bizarre,' she told Radio Times. 'I'm a scientist and objective but I look at that face and think "Gosh, I'm looking at the face of somebody from 40,000 years ago" and there's something weirdly moving about that.

'Richard creates skulls of much more recent humans and he's used to looking at differences between populations.

'He said the skull doesn't look European or Asian or African. It looks like a mixture of all of them.

'That's probably what you'd expect of someone among the earliest populations to come to Europe.'

That certainly seems to be true. I ran the face through the infamous MyHeritage celebrity lookalike machine and got a wide range of celebrity matches. The strongest match was Polish novelist Witold Marian Gombrowicz but the color-blind face recognition software also spat out: musician Peter Gabriel (63% match), Billy Graham (63% and wouldn't he be pissed), Quincy Jones (62%), Robert Mugabe (60%) and Tony Blair (59%).

A truly cosmopolitan fossil (the reconstruction, not Billy Graham).

Locking In Ignorance

By BJ Bjornson

I always do love to be reminded that I come from Canada's version of the Bible Belt.

A controversial Alberta bill will enshrine into law the rights of parents to pull their children out of classes discussing the topics of evolution and homosexuality.

The new rules that would require schools to notify parents in advance for "subject-matter that deals explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation" is buried in a bill that extends human rights to homosexuals. Parents can ask for their child to be excluded from the discussion.

After all, we wouldn't want children to actually learn things while in school, would we? I mean, if they were to start acquiring knowledge, they may start questioning the silly superstitions and prejudices of their parents, and we can't have that.

Swine Flu Mania

By BJ Bjornson

Outside of certain vice-presidents and much of the mainstream media, a lot of people are starting to put this whole "Swine Flu" thing into perspective.

If I were to say that this year 30,000 Americans would die from the flu, you’d probably think I was offering an alarmist take on the current swine flu outbreak. In fact, I would be offering an extremely optimistic take on influenza in 2009. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the country sees about 36,000 flu-related deaths in a normal year and around 200,000 hospitalizations. It’s standard for between five and twenty percent of the population to contract the flu in any given year.

Given all that, not only do we face the risk of an unusually bad pandemic of “swine flu” we also face a risk of panic. Apparently, very high levels of flu-related hospitalizations and deaths are actually pretty normal. But the media doesn’t normally cover them as national news stories. The heightened awareness of swine flu risks, however, means that anything flu-related is going to get dramatically inflated attention.

I think avoiding panic is one of the biggest concerns right now, and its nice to see most now using the WHO numbers for Mexico rather than the much larger "suspected" figures. As the above quote shows, even the suspected cases wouldn't count as a major surprise for an ordinary flu in a country of Mexico's population, but the way it is being treated by the media makes it sound far worse than it probably is.

Not that it hasn't kept certain people from taking advantage of the situation. Though I will have to disagree with John in that it would only be a gaffe if they didn't intend to say it. With this crew, the "kepp-the-dirty-brown-people-out" is unfortunately completely on-message, even if it is entirely ridiculous.

All that said, I'm forced to admit that this story had me shaking my head.

Three young Port Perry women who are Ontario's first confirmed cases of swine flu returned from Cancun on Friday with symptoms but spent the weekend at the local casino and visiting friends because their local hospital never advised them to stay home.

And even after 21-year-old Justine Stevenson was informed on Tuesday afternoon that she has the virus, no one has told her mom to close her home daycare business.

I can't wait until they just quarantine North America.

What's in a Name?

By BJ Bjornson

At this point, its still way too early to determine if Swine Flu is going to be anything more than a temporary flash in the pan crisis, but the PR work surrounding it has been fairly impressive, so much so that people are now beginning to argue over the name.

First up is an Israeli official complaining that the name is offensive to Jews and Muslims because they consider pigs to be unclean. (Stigmatizing Mexicans by naming the flu after them, on the other hand, is apparently no big deal.) Perhaps some of our Jewish or Muslim readers can shed some light on this official’s reasoning, but I would think of this as more of an affirmation of your beliefs, as in, “See! We told you those pigs were unclean! This is what you get for raising and eating them!”

Not that eating pork has anything to do with getting the flu, (well, outside of possible causation stemming from the way pigs are kept before being slaughtered), but that hasn’t stopped people from taking advantage of the issue and forcing the US government into a name change of its own.

U.S. officials were on message today: It's no longer "swine flu" that Mexican and global health authorities are fighting, but the "2009 H1N1 virus outbreak."

"This really isn't swine flu. It's H1N1 virus," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at an afternoon news briefing with U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

. . .

The switch was anything but casual. International prices of U.S. pork, corn and soybeans plummeted yesterday after Russia, China and the Philippines suspended pork imports from Mexico and some U.S. states where the virus has been detected, despite the absence of any link between pork consumption and the virus.

I understand their concerns, but nobody is going to change what they call "Swine Flu" to "H1N1 virus outbreak". Not too catchy and too much of a mouthful.

Quote of the Day

By BJ Bjornson

DougJ at Balloon Juice:

It will be interesting to see if the Village goes into “Obama needs to do something to stop the swine flu” mode. I’m not sure if invading Mexico or torturing people to find out where the swine flu came from is the answer.

But if Obama looks weak to the flu virus, we can expect a lot more flu viruses to attack us. I know that much.

On a serious note, those looking for good information on the Swine Flu should pay a visit to Effect Measure, where there's some pretty good informed commentary.