I Have Got To Get A New Dictionary

I keep looking up the word muzzled or stifled or silenced and I never, ever seem to get this definition anywhere I look. A NASA scientist claims he was muzzled because he was only allowed to give 1,400 interviews. on company time, in the past few years.

1,400. In a few years time. Let's take that as the past three years. that's like 467 per year or more than one a day. Each and every day for three years. He doesn't even take weekends off, it seems. Silenced? Heck, you can't get a word in edgewise.

James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who argues global warming could be catastrophic, said NASA staffers denied his request to do a National Public Radio interview because they didn't want his message to get out.

But Republicans told him the hundreds of other interviews he did belie his broad claim he was being silenced. "We have over 1,400 opportunities that you've availed yourself to, and yet you call it, you know, being stifled," said Rep. Darrell Issa, California Republican.

Mr. Hansen responded: "For the sake of the taxpayers, they should be availed of my expertise. I shouldn't be required to parrot some company line."

I think we've been availed of Mr. Hansen's enormous ego at this point. And his mutilation of the meaning of words, including 'availed'. (I don't link the Washington Times very often at all, but this one was so patently absurd, I just had to.) If anyone can be heard over the loudly clamoring "silence" of Mr. Hansen, please let us know here in the Crabitat. We'd like pictures.

Forehead!

Golfing in Mundelein, Illinois is completely different from in other places. When you hit a bad tee shot, you have to shout "Forehead". That way people will duck out of the way of the incoming human skull.

MUNDELEIN, Ill. - Golf course workers uncovering the tees for the season discovered a human skull at a suburban Chicago club and found bones nearby in the fairway, authorities said.

The skull was spotted Monday near the 14th tee of the Prairie Course, one of two 18-hole courses at the Countryside Golf Club in Mundelein, according to Lake County Forest Preserve Police Chief John Galford.

"It was laying there, right in the middle of the fairway," Galford said.

I'd suggest the three iron from there.

Belarus Invades Ukraine

Belarus launched a waterborne invasion of the Ukraine earlier today. The crack Ukrainian border guards were able to head the entire thing off, however. They captured the entire invasion force.

And their rowboats, too.

KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian border guards arrested Belarus's national rowing team Tuesday for illegally entering the country on a flotilla of eight boats.

The border guard service said a coast guard vessel was dispatched to intercept and detain 10 rowers who had crossed into Ukrainian waters on the border with Transdniestria, a region of ex-Soviet Moldova controlled by separatists.

Funny, isn't it? A couple thousand years ago, being sentenced to the galleys was a bad thing. Now it's a competitive sport.

Trouble In (The Iranian) Paradise?

It appears that troubles are escalating between Russia and Iran over the nearly completed nuclear reactor the Russia has been building. Russia is withdrawing technicians and engineers from the Bushehr project in a payment dispute that is getting worse. Iran is now publicly bashing Russia - not exactly a good way to smooth things over when you haven't been paying your bills on time.

The representatives — a European diplomat and a U.S. official — said a large number of Russian technicians, engineers and other specialists have returned to Moscow in the past week, at about the same time senior Russian and Iranian officials tried unsuccessfully to resolve financial differences over the Bushehr nuclear reactor. They spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because their information was confidential.

"A good number of them have left recently," said the U.S. official, of the approximately 2,000 Russian workers on site of the nearly completed reactor outside the southern city of Bushehr. The European diplomat, who is accredited to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, said a large number had left as recently as last week.

Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for Rosatom, Russia's Federal Nuclear Power Agency, confirmed that the number of Russian workers at the Bushehr plant had dwindled because of what he said were Iranian payment delays. He would not say how many had left.

In a commentary, Iranian state television criticized Russia for what it described as a policy of procrastination in constructing Bushehr.

"Double standard stances by Russian officials regarding Iran's nuclear issue shows that Russians are not a reliable partner in the field of nuclear cooperation," the commentary said.

There is some speculation that it may be possible to get much tougher UN sanctions on Iran as the Russians lose patience with the people running things in Tehran. This could get interesting.

The Coming Swindle

Hey, did you know the politicians have ordered television broadcasters to turn off their analog broadcasts on February 17, 2009? That's the date your old television will stop pulling in free signals from the airwaves. Oh, you'll still be able to get free television programming.

Provided you pay a lot of money to switch over to new equipment.

Your old televisions will still work with cable and satellite for some unspecified period of time, but the broadcasts on the older analog channels will be gone. There will be a program to provide those who respond quickly enough with two $40 vouchers from the Federal government to help offset the cost of conversion. The money is very limited, however. And $40 (or even $80) doesn't even begin to address the costs involved.

We don't know when the vouchers will be available, but when they are, sign up right away — there may not be enough to go around. If the government is going to take away the TV broadcasts you've been perfectly happy with, it might as well pay part of the cost to keep your set alive.

The $40 vouchers are the heart of a $1.5 billion switch-over plan announced last week by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. This little-known agency has an unhappy job — taking the sting out of a forced change in household technology that will turn politically toxic once millions of viewers figure out they've been had.

As part of a deal hatched by politicians, broadcasters and TV makers in the mid-1990s, the nation's TV stations are abandoning the analog transmission system they've used for over-the-air broadcasts since the 1940s.

They're replacing it with a new and incompatible digital transmission scheme that will provide them with more channels, including the capacity for high-definition broadcasts. The change also will force consumers to spend billions on new TVs, converters, antennas and other gadgets.

Most local stations are broadcasting in both formats today. But Congress has told broadcasters to cease their analog transmissions on Feb. 17, 2009.

That politically convenient date is just after the Super Bowl, but far enough ahead of the NCAA basketball tournament that lawmakers can skip town before millions of fans start to realize that they can't get digital broadcasts in their neighborhoods.

As the author of the linked article says, the older analog bandwidth will be auctioned off to wireless operators for really important things. Like streaming pornography. Just some more reason to thank Washington for all its help. (And this is not partisan, by the way. The laws that mandated this happened to have been passed during the Clinton administration, but it took bi-partisan support to get passed. So you can indulge in completely guilt-free bashing of politicians in general!)

Dirty Little Secrets

Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybodys pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry

We can do the innuendo
We can dance and sing
When its said and done we havent told you a thing
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
(Don Henley, Dirty Laundry)

Bjorn Lomborg, who does believe that humans cause global warming, but who does not believe in the foolishly expensive quick fixes being touted by the true believers airs a bit of dirty laundry today. The much ballyhooed European agreement to cut CO2 emissions by 20% is actually worse than useless.

But nobody sees fit to reveal the agreement's dirty little secret: It will do next to no good - and again at very high cost. According to one well-established and peer-reviewed model, the effect of the EU cutting emissions by 20 percent will postpone warming in the 21st century by just two years, yet the cost will be about $90 billion annually. It will be costly, because Europe is a costly place to cut carbon-dioxide, and it will be inconsequential, because the EU will account for only about 6 percent of all emissions in the 21st century. So the new treaty will be an even less efficient use of our resources than the old Kyoto Protocol.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb.

It is important to learn from the past. We have often been promised dramatic cuts in carbon-dioxide emissions far into the future, only to see the promises vanish when we got there. In Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the West promised to stabilize emissions, but overshot this by 12 percent. In Kyoto, we were promised a 7 percent reduction in world emissions, but will probably achieve only 0.4 percent. Of course, such promises are made by politicians who in all likelihood are no longer in office when the time comes to fulfil them.

Things like this cost inordinate amounts of money and yet do virtually nothing to actually fix the problem. Lomborg says there are real strategies, but not these quick fixes that cripple economies:

We will not be able to solve global warming over the next decades, but only over the next half or full century. We need to find a viable, long-term strategy that is smart, equitable, and doesn't require inordinate sacrifice for trivial benefits. Fortunately, there is such a strategy: research and development. Investing in the research and development of non-carbon-emitting energy technologies would leave future generations able to make serious and yet economically feasible and advantageous cuts. A new global warming treaty should mandate spending 0.05 percent of GDP on research and development in the future. It would be much cheaper, yet do much more good in the long run.

I do not completely agree with Lomborg. Yet he's right that the Gorezilla approach is worse than useless. Because it makes people think something is actually being done while accomplishing no good worth mentioning. It does, however cost a lot and causes real economic damage. (But it sure will enrich some folks like Gorezilla, the strip-mine king). Dirty little secrets, indeed.

See? We Told You so.

Some people question our reporting on the Animal Uprising™, saying that animals don't actually know how to communicate with one another. But scientists have now documented that animals - two different bird species in this case - can actually discriminate the information in one another's languages. Told ya.

WASHINGTON - Nuthatches appear to have learned to understand a foreign language — chickadee. It's not unusual for one animal to react to the alarm call of another, but nuthatches seem to go beyond that — interpreting the type of alarm and what sort of predator poses a threat. When a chickadee sees a predator, it issues warning call — a soft "seet" for a flying hawk, owl or falcon, or a loud "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" for a perched predator.

The "chick-a-dee" call can have 10 to 15 "dees" at the end and varies in sound to encode information on the type of predator. It also calls in other small birds to mob the predator, Christopher Templeton of the University of Washington said in a telephone interview.

"In this case the nuthatch is able to discriminate the information in this call," said Templeton, a doctoral candidate.

The findings by Templeton and Erick Green, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Montana, are reported in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Now we don't want to alarm anyone, but the scientists are also saying the nuthatches are forming mobs. No, really:

The nuthatches formed into mobs, flicking their wings and swirling around the speakers when the warning was for small predators than for larger ones.

Mobbing is a defensive behavior, Templeton said, when large groups of small birds pester a predator.

"They're not enough to kill you or hurt you, but they are enough to make you want to go and sit somewhere else," he said.

Hah. Says you, Doc. Enough nuthatches can carry you off. We know its true, we saw in on a cartoon once!. But we here at Blue Crab Boulevard wonder if this is why that nice man from the health department keeps calling the Crabitat a "nuthatch". Could it be he recognizes our piuoneering scientifical expertise? Maybe he actually IS a supporter!

Fun Pictures

Zombie keeps up his efforts to document the full-throated moonbattery of the anti-war crowd when they gather for their festivals. These are the pictures you'll never see in the mainstream press. Because then average Americans would be disgusted and repelled by the socialist-infested marches. In honor of Zombie's tireless efforts to document the reality of these marches, we cheerfully re-present one of our fauxtography efforts from the past:

Marxists. They're everywhere.

Comedy Gold

Ed Morrisey beat me to this story. Which frankly isn't surprising, what with the way I have been feeling the past few days. (My wife and I think I contracted the mother of all cases of flu, but the fever finally broke yesterday). So, it seems that German "Animal Rights campaigners" have decided that a polar bear cub rescued from death by officials at the Berlin Zoo must be killed in order to preserve "proper polar bears" everywhere (we're not making this up, really).

The male cub is the first baby polar bear to survive in Berlin zoo for 30 years. After he was born on December 5 last year, his mother, Tosca, a grumpy 20-year-old former East German circus bear, put Knut and his brother out to die on a rock in the bear pit. Keepers scooped the cubs out of the compound with a fishing net and placed them in an incubator.

Only Knut survived, and was fed with human milk and cod-liver oil every half hour. In the Arctic, the minus 35C (-31F) temperatures destroy viruses and bacteria and make it easier for cubs to live. Knut has been brought up as a pampered baby. He is fed chicken purée, was given his own Christmas tree, sleeps with a teddy bear, plays with a football and his pony-tailed keeper strums Elvis Presley songs to improve his mood. The keeper, Thomas Doerflein, says the cub falls asleep when he sings You’re the Devil in Disguise.

The German capital has made Knut into a kind of mascot and even quality newspapers have been keeping a regular Knut diary. “We Need You Knut”, says graffiti on walls. The zoo has allowed Annie Leibovitz, the New York photographer, to snap the cub for an international anti-greenhouse-gas campaign to illustrate the melting of the icebergs. Out of 70 cubs born in captivity over the past 50 years, only 34 have lived. Now it could be curtains for Knut.

“Hand-feeding is not appropriate to the species and is a grave violation of the animal protection laws,” said Frank Albrecht, an animal rights campaigner. “Legally speaking, the zoo should kill the baby bear. Otherwise it is condemning the bear to a dysfunctional life and that too is a breach of the law.”

The director of Aachen zoo, Wolfram Ludwig, also believes the Berliners made the wrong decision in saving Knut: “It is not correct to bottle-feed a small polar bear. He will always be fixated on his keeper and will never grow to be a proper polar bear.” Knut, he argues, should have been killed when Tosca rejected him. “One should have had the courage to kill him much earlier.”

Leipzig zoo showed the way last December by injecting a rejected baby sloth with T61, a poison that kills in two seconds. The argument used by Leipzig and specialists such as Rödiger Schmiedel, the head of Germany’s Bear Foundation, is that it is impossible to domesticate a wild animal so it is better not to start. But the “save Knut” faction could yet win the day. The cub is due to be presented to the public this week after reaching the critical weight of 8kg (18lb), at which he is deemed strong enough to face TV cameras. It will then be even harder to dispatch him quietly with a T61 jab.

“The humanisation of this bear has to stop as soon as possible,” said Wolfgang Apel, the head of the German animal protection league, “but he has a right to live.”

Now what is really disturbing here - well aside from the fact that some humans who champion "animal rights" would rather kill animals than save them, is that some zoos are already practicing this. They are killing animals in order to save them. We'll just let the readers figure that logic out on your own. It escapes us completely. Perhaps it would be a good idea to start a campaign to save the animal right campaigners, too? Hey, fair's fair, right? (And, no. That does not mean we're advocating offing them. We're more humane than they are.) We have a lot of fun with the Animal Uprising™ theme around here. That doesn't mean we advocate killing animals because they are not animal enough to suit us.