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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
Showing posts with label Alan Johnson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alan Johnson. Show all posts

Monday, January 17, 2011

17 January - Late Links

British Soldiers patrol Helmand Province.Image via Wikipedia

I've been offline for several days due to technical problems with my broadband connection. Since I'm also in the process of moving and house-sitting things are likely to be somewhat spotty. Plus My Opera has not been resolving this evening and I have been able to make only a partial record.

Afghanistan's push to tax U.S. contractors could renew tensions


UK linked to notorious Bangladesh torture centre

In September it emerged that in recent years MI5 and MI6 have always asked the home secretary or foreign secretary for permission before conducting any information exchange where there was a risk of an individual being tortured. Smith, her successor Alan Johnson and David Miliband, the foreign secretary during the period of the joint UK-Bangladeshi counter-terrorism campaign, have declined to answer questions about the matter.



Haiti at boiling point as former dictator returns

The US state department has refused to comment 
( There's a first! )


Groundwater Overexplotiation Pushes Arsenic into Deeper Aquifers


The War on Logic


By PAUL KRUGMAN
Last year, looking at claims that we can cut taxes, avoid cuts to any popular program and still balance the budget, I observed that Republicans seemed to have lost interest in the war on terror and shifted focus to the war on arithmetic. But now the G.O.P. has moved on to an even bigger project: the war on logic.
The G.O.P. also claims that $115 billion of other health care spending should be charged to health reform, even though the budget office has tried to explain that most of this spending would have taken place even without reform.
To be sure, the Republican analysis doesn’t rely entirely on spurious attributions of cost — it also relies on using three-card monte tricks to make money disappear. Health reform, says the budget office, will increase Social Security revenues and reduce Medicare costs. But the G.O.P. analysis says that these sums don’t count, because some people have said that these savings would also extend the life of these programs’ trust funds, so counting these savings as deficit reduction would be “double-counting,” because — well, actually it doesn’t make any sense, but it sounds impressive.

Shale gas moratorium in UK urged by Tyndall Centre

In the US, officials are investigating claims that shale gas drilling has polluted water supplies.
However, UK ministers have rejected a moratorium, saying that drilling for shale gas does not pose a threat.
"We are aware that there have been reports from US of issues linked to some shale gas projects," a spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) told BBC News.
"However, we understand that these are only in a few cases and that Cuadrilla (the firm testing for shale gas in Lancashire) has made it clear that there is no likelihood of environmental damage and that it is applying technical expertise and exercising the utmost care as it takes drilling and testing forward."

Here's how to get there

The Sierra Club's Beyond Oil campaign proposes to move the United States off oil in the next 20 years. The following pages sketch out how we could do so. 


NOAA is serious about including attribution of extreme events as part of its proposed National Climate Service. 
The assumption that extreme weather events “demand explanation” is strange in and of itself; most people assume that weather “happens” and are mainly concerned about having a good forecast with advanced warning.  Those wondering about the climate connections might be interested in whether or not this was an El Nino year, or of course we expect more Atlantic hurricanes since it the active (warm) phase of the AMO, it was the “pineapple express,” there was a big blocking pattern that brought in warm air from Africa, etc.
Since Hurricane Katrina, the issue of whether global warming is contributing to specific extreme events has been discussed in the media by scientists.  Exactly what would someone do with the information (if they could assume it accurate) that 5% less rainfall would have fell in Pakistan without global warming   (95% of the rain would still cause massive flooding)?  Would this help people adapt better to extreme events (there is already a large adaptation deficit in most places)?  Would it provide fodder for litigation or the “blame game” to motivate more international humanitarian assistance?  Would it help build political will to support CO2 mitigation policies?  Can you think of other things people might do with such information?  Do any of these reasons seem valid/useful and potentially worth U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide such attribution service?

Learning to love uncertainty

Knowing the limits of what science can tell us, and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that would improve people’s lives.
Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of Aix-Marseille, emphasised the uselessness of certainty. He said that the idea of something being “scientifically proven” was practically an oxymoron and that the very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.
“A good scientist is never ‘certain’. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability.”
Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid. 

Pakistan flood follow-up



85% of the affected population in Sindh province remained unable to return to what remained of their homes.(Dixon and Shaffer 2010).  Mines and artillery shells have been flushed downstream by the floods and scattered in low-lying areas, posing a future risk to returning inhabitants (cited by the Wikipedia).


SMOKING CAUSES GENE DAMAGE IN MINUTES



There is a group who might as well not exist. The newspapers rarely write about us, (unless it is to demonise or deny us with Daily Mail Group hyperbole) the TV stations turn a blind eye – there is not even a political party prepared to stand up for us. We have no-one but ourselves, yet our voices are probably the weakest in society. Most of us can’t physically march, some can’t even speak at all and others don’t know what is being done to them. We have no networks of influential contacts, most can’t attend rallies or flash-mobs.
Sick and Disabled people are now facing cuts of up to a third in their incomes.

Daniel Hernandez, Intern Who Helped Save Giffords: Political Discourse Has Become "Completely Destructive"


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Tuesday, January 4, 2011

4 January - Blogs I'm Following

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