The creatures from the Black Lagoon

Inside the mind of Mark Foley.

Inside the pants of Michael Duvall, a family values Republican state representative from Orange County, California. His resignation came rather fast...

One in 33 Female Worshipers Is Target of Sexual Advances by Clergy Member

Rep. Joe Wilson having to apologize for shouting,"You lie!' at the president. Broke the House rules.

And then finally.... Russia:

Dalarna, Sweden – Russia angrily denied media reports over the weekend that a freighter seized in what was dubbed the first act of piracy in northern Europe in over 100 years was in fact carrying a secret cargo of missiles to Iran.

"This is absolutely not true," said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday, reacting to claims made in last week's Sunday Times (London) and elsewhere that the Arctic Sea, the ship allegedly hijacked on July 28 off Sweden's coast and released on Aug. 16 by a Russian Navy ship, was secretly carrying S-300 antiaircraft missiles to Iran. The ship's official cargo was timber bound for Algeria.

Nevertheless, rumors continue to swirl around the seizure of the Arctic Sea, not least because Russia has not been forthcoming about the results of its investigation, centering around eight men who it says hijacked the ship and are now in Russian custody.

The Great Blob of Alaska?

It's not Putin's rearing head...



Palin's bloated ego....



or the oozing mass of ethics violations converging upon Wasilla....



but an unheard of algae bloom...

A group of hunters aboard a small boat out of the tiny Alaska village of Wainwright were the first to spot what would eventually be called "the blob." It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska's northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black.

But what was it? An oil slick? Some sort of immense, amorphous organism adrift in some of the planet's most remote waters? Maybe a worrisome sign of global climate change? Or was it something insidious and, perhaps, even carnivorous like the man-eating jello from the old Steve McQueen movie that inspired the Alaskan phenomenon's nickname? (Read Richard Corliss' review of The Thing, a sci-fi film set in the Arctic.)

The hunters got word to the U.S. Coast Guard, which immediately sent two spill response experts to fly over the mass, which looked sort of rusty from the air. They also approached it by boat. The North Slope Borough, the local government for the vast and sparsely populated cap of Alaska, sent its own people out the main village of Barrow to have a look. They scooped up jars of the stuff for analysis in a state lab in Anchorage.

"We responded as if it were an oil product," says Coast Guard Petty Officer Terry Hasenauer. "It was described to us as an oil-like substance, thick and lingering below the surface of the water. Those characteristics can indicate heavy, degraded oil, maybe crude oil, or possibly an intermediate fuel oil." Meanwhile, the story spread over the internet like an oil-spill, giving lots of people a queasy feeling. (Check out a story about the coming battle for the resources of the Arctic.)

Test results released Thursday showed the blob wasn't oil, but a plant - a massive bloom of algae. While that may seem less dangerous, a lot of people are still uneasy. It's something the mostly Inupiat Eskimo residents along Alaska's northern coast say they could never remember seeing before.

I think this is even scarier than Palin, Putin, and the Blob put together.... visions of our future, drowning in muck where our oceans used to be.

Stories that make you say....

Awwww: Pitcher rooming in assisted living center.

Boo fucking hoo: Banksters don't want credit card reform. They really don't want it. In fact... they would really like it if you wouldn't pay off your card every month.

Brrrr: Arctic survey of the thickness of sea-ice is completed.

Uh huh:

Congress will have legislation fixing the nation's healthcare system before lawmakers take their August recess, President Barack Obama and House Democrats announced on Wednesday, a day after a report from Medicare Trustees said the ailing health program may become insolvent in less than a decade.

Yay: Allowing texting police will help deaf people.

More Yays: Fixing up Stonehenge.

On the other hand

Global warming will make boat travel much faster!:

Kiel, Germany - After studying ice formation on the Siberian coast, German scientists forecast Monday that regular ships would be able to sail through the entire North-East Passage between Europe and Asia in summer in 10 to 15 years. Heidemarie Kassens of the Leibniz Oceanography Institute in Kiel said earlier estimates this would happen by 2050 were out of date because of the rapid pace of climate change. The passage through Arctic waters north of Russia would link the Atlantic and Pacific.

Speaking after a six-week expedition to the Laptev Sea off Siberia, she called the development alarming. The region was a major source of new ice, but this year it had produced very little, she said.

It was noticeable that many Atlantic species of plankton were invading the Arctic and displacing Arctic species.

"The ice cover on the sea is melting faster than our models forecast," Kassens said, adding that Siberia's permafrost was thawing too. The expedition saw buildings on the permafrost cracked and in danger of collapse.

FLOATING nuclear power stations?

Apparently the Russians are eyeing the Arctic Oil:

Russia is planning a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves, causing widespread alarm among environmentalists.

A prototype floating nuclear power station being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk is due to be completed next year. Agreement to build a further four was reached between the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and the northern Siberian republic of Yakutiya in February.

What could possibly go wrong?

How about a few pirates?

Global warming can kill

(My bold) WASHINGTON — What's likely to happen if the world does nothing to combat global warming? The answer from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was jaw-dropping: more than 40 percent of known plant and animal species could become extinct by the end of this century.

Many scientists who've been studying climate change say extinctions aren't inevitable if the world greatly reduces its dependence on oil, coal and natural gas. As daunting as the warning signs and projections are, there's still time to fend off the worst, they say. But they also warn that "business as usual" would bring devastating changes in the decades ahead.

"We're locked into a different planet, but we can still make it a planet similar to what we have known," said Lara Hansen, an ecologist who's the chief climate-change scientist at the World Wildlife Fund. The Arctic Ocean will be ice free in the summer in a few years, "but we're not locked into the Arctic being ice-free year round, or Greenland melting."

[snip]

Some paleontologists have suggested that the world already is witnessing a sixth mass extinction, after five others known from the fossil record. The fifth was the end of the dinosaurs and some 70 percent of other species 65 million years ago. Some of the projections of a do-nothing trend on global warming suggest that 70 percent of all living things could become extinct again.

[snip]

The World Conservation Union says that the rapid loss of species today is 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the natural rate of species loss over the past millions of years. The causes of the current threat go back through human history: habitat destruction for development and agriculture, overexploitation, diseases and invasions of alien species. Climate change adds to the pressure on vulnerable species.

The group's "Red List" comprises 16,306 plant and animal species that the group says are threatened with extinction. It also says that there's evidence from the effects of climate change on species around the world that rising temperatures will be "catastrophic for many species."

Biologist Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas at Austin, who participated on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that some 40 scientific studies found that the risk at higher temperature increases, 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, could range from an extinction rate of more than 40 percent to more than 70 percent.

[snip]

Earth's average temperature has increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1890, and roughly another degree is expected from the greenhouse gases that already have been released, because of a lag in the climate system and because carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

Many scientists say that the world would be in trouble with any warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius — about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit — above 19th-century levels. At that temperature, the panel's report said, up to 30 percent of species would be at increasing risk of extinction and most corals would be bleached.

The report found that temperatures could be kept below that level by reducing greenhouse gas emissions by about 80 percent by 2050, or about 2 percent per year. They're now increasing by about 3 percent per year.

Thomas Lovejoy, a conservation biologist who heads the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, said he thought that the world would see serious disruptions in ecosystems before global warming hit 3.5 degrees. But he said that the high level of extinction the panel projected wasn't inevitable if society greatly reduced fossil fuel pollution and invested more in wildlife protection.

Lovejoy, Parmesan and some 600 other scientists sent a letter last month urging Congress to pass legislation to curb U.S. global-warming pollution and invest more in protecting wildlife and habitats.

The National Wildlife Federation sent a similar appeal this week from 670 hunting and fishing organizations in all the states.

Maybe I'll have a beach front property....

If I'm not underwater...

Thailand(AP)-- Cities around the world are facing the danger of rising seas and other disasters related to climate change.

Of the 33 cities predicted to have at least 8 million people by 2015, at least 21 are highly vulnerable, says the Worldwatch Institute.

They include Dhaka in Bangladesh; Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro; Shanghai and Tianjin in China; Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt; Mumbai and Kolkata in India; Jakarta in Indonesia; Tokyo and Osaka-Kobe in Japan; Lagos in Nigeria; Karachi in Pakistan; Bangkok in Thailand, and New York and Los Angeles in the United States, according to studies by the United Nations and others.

More than one-tenth of the world's population, or 643 million people, live in low-lying areas at risk from climate change, say U.S.and European experts. Most imperiled, in descending order, are China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, U.S., Thailand, and the Philippines.

And speaking of new waterways:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 — For most of human history, the Arctic Ocean has been an ice-locked frontier. But now, in one of the most concrete signs of the effect of a warming climate on government operations, the Coast Guard is planning its first operating base there as a way of dealing with the cruise ships and the tankers that are already beginning to ply Arctic waters.
With increasingly long seasons of open water in the region, the Coast Guard has also begun discussions with the Russians about controlling anticipated ship traffic through the Bering Strait, which until now has been crossed mainly by ice-breaking research vessels and native seal and walrus hunters.
The Coast Guard says its base, which would probably be near the United States’ northernmost town, Barrow, Alaska, on the North Slope coast, would be seasonal and would initially have just a helicopter equipped for cold-weather operations and several small boats.
But given continued warming, that small base, which could be in place by next spring, would be expanded later to help speed responses to oil spills from tankers that the Coast Guard believes could eventually carry shipments from Scandinavia to Asia through the Bering Strait. Such a long-hoped-for polar route would cut 5,000 miles or more from a journey that would otherwise entail passage through the Panama Canal or the Suez.