Monday blues

Methane danger.

It seems that the entire west coast of the US is on fire.

And if you aren't on fire, you're melting from the heat.

Market crash tied to China?  Paul Krugman: ..."what we’re seeing is what happens when too much money is chasing too few investment opportunities".

Bed bugs.

Or you could just have police crash through your door at 5 in the morning, not let you cover your naked body, and tell you to shut up.... before they realize they have the wrong apartment.

A little of this, a bit of that

Laser pointers and cat variations

Bed bugs and the psychological effects of coping with them.  And ways to get rid of them.

Protecting our drinking water.  Cleaning plastic from our oceans.

Monsanto working hard to discredit scientists.

Mark Ruffalo, a true hulk.  Fear of powerful women.

Dutch sexuality education.

Interesting question and intriguing answers:  What has the internet made obsolete?

The awfulness of the 2000 presidential election revisited.

How can you tell if rocks were tools in prehistoric times?

The dangers of coal to our climate.  Ocean conservationist sounds a warning to Canada.

Eggs, chickens, and turkeys are going to become more expensive.

Wendell Potter explains the machinations of the health insurance companies.

Pesticides killing off the Monarch butterfly.

Ten poverty myths disproved.

New Bush, new lies about the Iraq War.

And .... they're off!

Louisiana Parents Fear Elementary School Cafeteria Scanner Will Implant the Antichrist’s ‘Mark of the Beast’ on Kids’ Hands

Congress: They don't work for you.

Bedbugs in hospitals.

We can blame Chile for deforming the earth.

This PROVES we should let the oil companies build pipelines all over the place and drill and ... oops...

Roundup ... is really really toxic.

Have telemarketing people been calling you more on the phone?

What single gif or picture would you show someone?

Georgie Bush's Great Mulligan.

Teaching Game Theory.

Monday meandering about the net...

bed bugs.

Answering the silly question anti-evolutionists ask.

This is too cute.

Paul Krugman warns us about the current 'Republican brain':

What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence. 

The most obvious example other than evolution is man-made climate change. As the evidence for a warming planet becomes ever stronger — and ever scarier — the G.O.P. has buried deeper into denial, into assertions that the whole thing is a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists. And this denial has been accompanied by frantic efforts to silence and punish anyone reporting the inconvenient facts. But the same phenomenon is visible in many other fields. The most recent demonstration came in the matter of election polls. Coming into the recent election, state-level polling clearly pointed to an Obama victory — yet more or less the whole Republican Party refused to acknowledge this reality. Instead, pundits and politicians alike fiercely denied the numbers and personally attacked anyone pointing out the obvious; the demonizing of The Times’s Nate Silver, in particular, was remarkable to behold.

Not conservative enough, obviously.

Gah!!!

In New York City, bedbugs now are 250 times more resistant to the standard pesticide than bedbugs in Florida, due to changes in a gene controlling the resilience of the nerve cells targeted by the insecticide.

We're going to have to walk around in those hazmat suits and live in plastic houses....

Other articles on bedbugs.

Update 5/31/11: Top 10 Myths about Bedbugs

What bed bugs are

And what they are not.

Update 8/31: More on the rapidly rising infestation.

And what you can do without trying to bring back DDT.

Besides nuking your house or spraying with DDT

This may work on bedbugs....(my bold)

How to Build Your Own Bedbug Detector.

Researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey have created a homemade bedbug trap using a plastic cat-food dish, an insulated jug and some dry-ice pellets. According to Wan-Tien Tsai, who reported her findings in December at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America, the dry-ice-and-thermos combo captured the bloodsucking critters in an infested apartment just as effectively as, if not more so than, equipment used by professional exterminators.

The most important part of this MacGyverized contraption is an insulated one-third-gallon jug--like the kind sold in camping-supply stores--filled with 2½ lb. of frozen carbon dioxide, which costs about $1 per lb. (and should be handled only with gloves). As the dry-ice pellets slowly evaporate, the open thermos spout lets the CO[subscript 2]--which falsely signals bedbugs that a breathing, blood-filled meal is nearby--seep out overnight. That's usually enough time to entice the nocturnal insects into the other key component of the trap: the overturned food-and-water dish on which the thermos sits. The bugs climb the outer surface of the dish, which can be scuffed with sandpaper for better traction, and get stuck in its moat, made slippery-smooth with a dusting of talcum powder.

This trap was designed to give consumers a cheap way to determine if they have--or, in many cases, still have--a bedbug problem that requires a proper extermination. Bedbugs have made a serious comeback in North America over the past few years, especially in big cities like Toronto and San Francisco.

This would be wonderful if it works. I'm still getting hits and the occasional argument in favor of bringing back DDT. Which would really make Rachel Carson turn in her grave.

Infestations of all kinds

Wingnuts write letters.

The horrors of bedbugs.

Vipers with guns.

Reagan zombinomics.

People telling jokes.