Norway saves the planet and other stuff

Thank you, Norway!  Helping keep the Brazilian rain forests alive.

Kate Beaton.

Joe Hill, who should never be erased from history.



Library books that people try to censor most.

Myth Surrounding Alleged Iranian Nuclear Facility Begins to Unravel

Bill Nye and women's reproduction.

When and Where to See the Super-Rare Supermoon Lunar Eclipse

The evils of microbeads.

Says you.

Brazilian archbishop: all teenagers are 'spontaneously homosexual'

I believe a deep therapy session is in order for you, sir.

Lack of water = lack of fish = lack of jobs= lack of food

The effects of drought bring disaster on so many levels:

The once free-flowing Manaquiri River, which runs through the state of Amazonas in northwest Brazil, is in the fight of its life against a spell of dry weather - and it appears to be losing the battle.

Thousands of dead fish are rotting on the river banks and hundreds more float on its surface, turning the area into a toxic cesspool.

Vultures circle overhead, picking away at the rotting carcasses. Even an alligator - one of the fiercest reptiles of the Amazon - floats belly up in the river.

Local fishermen say it has not rained in more than 25 days, leaving the large surrounding rivers in recession. This has in turn choked off the tributaries that provide fresh water to the Manaquiri.

With no fresh water coming in, oxygen levels in the river have dropped, leaving the fish to suffocate to death.

"One week the river water levels dropped, the next week all the fish died," Bruno dos Santos, a fisherman, told Al Jazeera.

"In five days all the fish were dead. We have nothing left, only this ugly water."

There will be more of these stories in the future.

Blog sprinkles

City that ended hunger

Scalia: Homophobe

Slashing, cutting, blood on the floor? Do I detect a theme?



Fascinating discussion with a representative of Monsanto over at Crooks and Liars (thanks, Mahakal!)

By the way, Obama did NOT ignore mainstream news in his Q&A yesterday. The Sailor at SteveAudio sets the record straight:

And to the moron who thinks he only called on 'niche' reporters?
That's not true. He called on the AP, NBC, ABC, CBS, Univision, Stars and Stripes, CNN, Ebony & AFP. Shoot, he even called on Faux News and the Washington Times! There was only so much time and he answered original questions and followups at length.

BTW, the military, Blacks and Latinos are not a niche in this country, they are Americans who have just as much right as you to ask questions of our president as the MSM does.

Digby: Disaster Capitalist Humor. Just how worried should we be?

Californian Republicans at it again.

The difference between liberals and conservatives.

Mail the Pope a condom?

GM crops attacked and destroyed by Brazilians

Strange... sounds like they didn't like what Monsanto was doing. (Via Katrinacrat, Dizzy's Ten Post round-up:)

SAO PAULO (AFP) — Around 300 women rural residents in Brazil burst into a property owned by the US company Monsanto and destroyed a plant nursery and crops containing genetically modified corn, their organization said.

The women were protesting what they saw as environmental damage by the crops.

They trashed the plants within 30 minutes and left before police arrived at the site in the southern state of Sao Paulo, a member of the Landless Workers' Movement, Igor Foride, told AFP.

The Brazilian government had "caved in to pressure from agrobusinesses" by recently allowing tinkered crops to be grown in the country, he said.

In Brasilia, a protest by another 400 women from an umbrella group, Via Campesina (the Rural Way), was held in front of the Swiss embassy against Syngenta, a Swiss company that is selling genetically modified seeds in Brazil.

[snip]

Via Campesina said in a statement that "no scientific studies exist that guarantee that genetically modified crops won't have negative effects on human health and on nature."

It added that on Tuesday, another 900 of its members had entered a property owned by the Swedish-Finnish paper giant Stora Enso and ripped out non-modified eucalyptus saplings they claimed were illegally planted.

Goodness! Why on earth would they not trust such a nice company as Monsanto? Just because they've created the terminator gene? And sue farmers when their genetically modified crops pollinate the farmer's crops accidentally? Or ignore suicides by Indian farmers? And force people to drink rBGH (BST) without knowledge? Or support the return of DDT? Or smear the name of Rachel Carson?

Why are the Brazilians more aware than us of the dangers of corporations ignoring the needs and rights of people?

Maybe Adam used this one as a can-opener?

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) -- The 80 million-year-old remains of a land-bound reptile described as a possible link between prehistoric and modern-day crocodiles were displayed to the public for the first time on Thursday.

The fossil of the 5 1/2-foot-long predator was found in 2004 near the small city of Monte Alto, 215 miles northwest of Sao Paulo, paleontologist Felipe Mesquita de Vasconcellos said by telephone, after presenting the find to a news conference at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

The long-limbed and extremely agile animal, dubbed "Montealtosuchus arrudacamposi," roamed arid and hot terrain that is now Brazilian countryside, Vasconcelos said.

"As a missing link to prehistoric crocodiles, it offers us an excellent opportunity to study the evolutionary transition of these animals," Vasconcellos said. "It has a mix of morphological traits common in prehistoric crocodiles and in the ones that exist today."

How on earth do fundamentalists who believe the world is only 6000 years old explain away something so bristling with predator teeth?

I don't think he's lost

I think he's hiding:

A 5.5m long minke whale has been spotted more than 1600km (994 miles) from the Atlantic Ocean, deep inside the Amazon rain forest. The whale ran aground earlier this week but after being freed with the help of vets and biologists it disappeared shortly afterwards.

Because of this:

The UK, Australia and New Zealand have sharply criticised Japan for the launch of its largest ever whaling expedition. The hunting fleet has instructions to kill up to 1,000 whales. Humpback whales will be hunted for the first time in over 40 years.

Swim for your lives! You're food!



Update 11/20: P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula has the last word.

Adam used this one to pull his trailer?

It had a huge neck, see...

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Brazilian and Argentine paleontologists have discovered the largely complete fossil of a new species of giant dinosaur that roamed what is now northern Patagonia about 80 million years ago.

The herbivorous Futalognkosaurus dukei measured an estimated 105 feet to 112 feet from head to tail and was as high as a four-storey building. It is one of the three biggest dinosaurs yet found in the world.

"It's a new species, it's a new group," Argentine paleontologist Juan Porfiri told a news conference in Rio de Janeiro on Monday.

The find pointed to a new lineage of titanosaurs, with particularly bulky necks, he said.

"Its neck was very big in diameter, strong and huge."

Ethanol is a scam

As we knew from the beginning:

Biofuel - gasoline or other fuel produced from refining food products - is being touted as a solution to the controversial global-warming problem. Leaving aside the faked science and the political interests behind the sudden hype about dangers of global warming, biofuels offer no net positive benefits over oil even under the best conditions.

Their advocates claim that present first-generation biofuels save up to 60% of the carbon emission of equivalent petroleum fuels. As well, amid rising oil prices at $75 per barrel for Brent marker grades, governments such as Brazil's are frantic to substitute home-grown biofuels for imported gasoline. In Brazil today, 70% of all cars have "flexi-fuel" engines able to switch from conventional gasoline to 100% biofuel or any mix. Biofuel production has become one of Brazil's major export industries as well.

The green claims for biofuel as a friendly and better fuel than gasoline are at best dubious, if not outright fraudulent. Depending on who runs the tests, ethanol has little if any effect on exhaust-pipe emissions in current car models. It has significant emission, however, of some toxins, including formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, a suspected neurotoxin that has been banned as carcinogenic in California.

Ethanol is not some benign substance as we are led to think from the industry propaganda. It is highly corrosive to pipelines as well as to seals and fuel systems of existing car or other gasoline engines. It requires special new pumps. All that conversion costs money.

But the killer about ethanol is that it holds at least 30% less energy per liter than normal gasoline, translating into a loss in fuel economy of at least 25% over gasoline for an Ethanol E-85% blend.

No advocate of the ethanol boondoggle addresses the huge social cost that is beginning to hit the dining-room tables across the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Food prices are exploding as corn, soybeans and all cereal-grain prices are going through the roof because of the astronomical - US Congress-driven - demand for corn to burn for biofuel.

This year the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report concluding that using corn-based ethanol instead of gasoline would have no impact on greenhouse-gas emissions, and would even expand fossil-fuel use because of increased demand for fertilizer and irrigation to expand acreage of ethanol crops. And according to MIT, "natural-gas consumption is 66% of total corn-ethanol production energy", meaning huge new strains on natural-gas supply, pushing prices of that product higher.

The article concludes with this warning:

Today a new element has replaced Soviet grain demand and harvest shortfalls. Biofuel demand, fed by US government subsidies, is literally linking food prices to oil prices. The scale of the subsidized biofuel consumption has exploded so dramatically since the beginning of 2006, when the US Energy Policy Act of 2005 first began to impact crop-planting decisions, that there is emerging a de facto competition between people and cars for the same grains.

Environmental analyst Lester Brown recently noted, "We're looking at competition in the global market between 800 million automobiles and the world's 2 billion poorest people for the same commodity, the same grains. We are now in a new economic era where oil and food are interchangeable commodities because we can convert grain, sugarcane, soybeans - anything - into fuel for cars. In effect the price of oil is beginning to set the price of food."

In the mid-1970s, secretary of state Henry Kissinger, a protege of the Rockefeller family and of its institutions, stated, "Control the oil and you control entire nations; control the food and you control the people." The same cast of characters who brought the world the Iraq war, and who cry about the "problem of world overpopulation", are now backing conversion of global grain production to burn as fuel at a time of declining global grain reserves. That alone should give pause for thought. As the popular saying goes, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."

Ethanol: just a way for the mega behemoth agro-businesses to get money?

Right? Using ethanol is not an efficient fuel, it costs too much to produce, both in farm equipment and in factory production, and it will affect food prices of wheat and other grains which would have been planted in the same fields:

In his Jan. 23 State of the Union Address, President Bush called for ramping up production of biofuels, such as ethanol from corn, to help cut U.S. dependency on foreign oil. A new report describes an ethanol-industry expansion already under way that is poised to boost corn-ethanol production by 160 percent within 2 years.

[snip]

The 116 existing U.S. ethanol-fuel distilleries now use 53 million tons of corn. The 90 distilleries under or planned for construction would boost that demand to 139 million metric tons of corn, half of the projected 2008 U.S. harvest.

U.S. farmers produce 40 percent of the world's corn and export 55 million tons. Brown argues that any change in the crop's availability for food and feed will propel world grain prices--including those of wheat and rice--"to levels never seen before," He explains, "These three crops compete for much of the same land."

This fact exposes the greed: Ethanol is supposed to help us ween ourselves off foreign oil and help fight global warming, right? Look at the reaction and the anger in Brazil. Only a few will get rich, and many will suffer.

And why on earth are we planning to run an ethanol plant on coal?:

The country is investing in ethanol not only as a way to reduce our reliance on oil, but as a way to reduce our greenhouse emissions and our overall emissions, said David Morris, a renewable energy specialist at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis. I don't deny there is a savings for these ethanol plants using coal instead of natural gas. But at the same time, the country is providing an enormous incentive for making the ethanol in the first place.Until now, all 16 of Minnesota's corn-based ethanol plants were powered by natural gas. Currently, the most popular alternative for existing plants is generating heat with biomass, like plants in Little Falls, Winnebago and, soon, Benson.

Let's see if Georgie can say this without pouting

Or throwing something:

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) -- Taunted by leftist President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, President Bush on Friday insisted the United States is not neglecting Latin America and celebrated an alternative-fuels pact with Brazil as proof.

"I don't think America gets enough credit for trying to help improve people's lives," Bush said at a joint news conference with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. "My trip is to explain as clearly as I can that our nation is generous and compassionate."

They love Bush in Brazil

They welcomed him very... enthusiastically:

US President George W Bush has arrived in Brazil's largest city, Sao Paulo, as a massive march in protest at his visit turned violent.

At least 20 people were hurt in clashes between demonstrators and riot police.

The US president is due to meet Brazil's Luis Inacio Lula da Silva to sign an ethanol energy alliance.

[snip]

Many of the demonstrators are angry at the war in Iraq and the proposed ethanol deal, which they say is an attempt to control the country's production of the bio-fuel which powers eight out of 10 new cars in Brazil.

Together with Colombia, Brazil produces about 70% of the world's ethanol, a bio-fuel made from sugar cane or corn.

The proposed accord would make ethanol an internationally traded commodity and promote its production in Central America and the Caribbean.

But activists claim that sugar cane cultivation is water intensive and responsible for stripping the Amazon rainforest.

They also say that the ethanol production process is concentrated in the hands of a few powerful families or corporations.

As Mr Bush left Washington to begin his tour, hundreds of protesters occupied the Cevasa sugar and ethanol-processing plant in Sao Paulo state that was recently sold to a US company.

Update: Others say Bush's visit is to try and destroy the influence Hugo Chavez has:

According to a former Brazilian ambassador in Washington, Rubens Barbosa, the tour is a belated attempt by Mr Bush to regain ground lost to Mr Chavez as a result of the US administration's neglect of Latin America. According to a former Brazilian ambassador in Washington, Rubens Barbosa, the tour is a belated attempt by Mr Bush to regain ground lost to Mr Chavez as a result of the US administration's neglect of Latin America.

Bush got to speechify before he flew down:

My trip is an opportunity to remind the folks in our neighborhood that the United States has a robust policy toward empowering individuals to realize their full potential.

NTodd notes Godwin's law.

Update 3/9: Compare and contrast Clinton's visit to Bush's visit.