Spend! Spend! Spend as if there is no tomorrow...
and at the rate we're going, what we dreaded in the sixties might come and bite our bum... We desperately Professor Keating to explain how things work. Especially how the nuclear disarmament is a farce and to tell our melting Labor Pollies to oppose all these tax cuts that actually are constructed upside down... The more you earn the more you get a tax cut — giving the rich a reason to cream more of the loot and the poorest a reason to buy a hamburger more per week, while the foreign debt is so big it's about half the federal budget for this year...

Argh... Go and spend your money... It's yours anyway... the government already pinched it from your pocket, took its cut, did bugger all more with it and gives you about two percent back... Rejoice... Sweet tomorrow might never come...

From the ABC

Climate change blamed for mammoths' extinction

Climate shifts were probably responsible for the extinction of the mammoth and other species more than 10,000 years ago, not over-hunting by humans, according to new research...

read more at the ABC

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AS Gus understood it for many years — and I'm not alone here, there were scientific studies done on the mammoths before — that proved like in many extinction of species there is rarely one factor to blame.

And this why our moronic leaders can get away with murdering the planet because something like extinction can never be blamed exclusively on loss of habitat, on culling of species, on bringing feral exotic animals or plants into delicate natural balances, on global warming, nor on poisoning through the use of herbicides and insecticides and other chemicals. This also why they hang onto mega-porkies like "comet impacts wiping out the dinosaurs in one hit"... In fact it took at least one million years for dinosaurs to become extinct from the time of the first registered decline. A fact that still puzzle many scientists today but in the light of the multiplicity of factors in extinction is not surprising.

Extinction of the mammoth was a combination of global warming — a warming that some scientist place squarely on the shoulder of humans who were burning and clearing land as evidence of huge forest fires rest in the geological record of that period — combination of global warming thus that changed the environment where the mammoth used to live, hunting by human and the fact that their adaptive system was much slower than, say, species living in equatorial climates.

Quite a few years ago, some expedition in remote islands in Siberia, discovered a "sub"-species of mammoth, that was found to have survived at least 5,000 years after the time-line mammoths had been generally declared extinct. In fact, on close analysis of the bones of these pygmy mammoths (they were about half to a third of the size of the mainland animals) showed that they were the same species but due to limited food supply on the island, they had shrunk... What this showed was that until humans had not been able to reach these isolated island, — mostly cut off by raising sea levels — these animals had survived.

It sounds a bit strange that a species could shrink to such a degree but when one look at dogs or even human, breeding and availability of essential vitamins can shrink a species real quick without any "shift" towards becoming another species. A dog still is a wolf... Our ancestors in Europe for example were on average quite shorter than our basketballers... Doors in Middle Ages houses at five foot six were not made small because of shortage of timber... but a shortage of certain "vitamins" so to speak.

So it is a furphy to claim that hunting was not responsible in the extinction of the mammoths, Hunting was part of it...

And let me finish this rant with a letter published in the SMH today:

"""Elizabeth Farrelly's sadly honest piece and others by people like Professor Mary White, who begged us in her book to Listen … Our Land Is Crying, bring shame on this Government for its failure to listen. Why can't they hear? Joan Croll Drummoyne""""

Hear hear... The scientific works by Mary E White are massive reminders that we should be carers for our fragile planet, not rapists... Unfortunately as Mary E White reminds us, humans are a plague on the surface of the living planet. As Mary E White puts it so eloquently:

""""When a plague of an animal species occurs in nature, it is a short live phenomenon. Famine and diseases restore the balances and reduce the level to a number where food supply and space can sustain them. But the human species knows no such natural constraint and swarm in plague numbers, upsetting the balance of the biosphere. """

I will not rest my case, but continue to fight the morons who do not listen... till they open their heart a tad to the sound of the last breath of the last orang outang living in the wild and realise the horror of their moronic past ways. Hopefully it might not be too late but we are running out of time.

From the ABC

Police flown in to arrest tree-sitter
Anti-logging protesters say a tree-sitter in Tasmania's south-west has no regrets about his 51-day protest, despite being arrested this morning.

Protesters say police in a helicopter plucked Peter Firth from his platform in the canopy of a 75-metre tall eucalypt.

Mr Firth's protest was designed to draw attention to old-growth logging in the Styx Valley.

A friend, Holly Clark, says Mr Firth cooperated with police to avoid endangering them.

She was on the phone to him when police arrived:

"He was filming as the chopper was lowering police search and rescue down through the crown of his tree to the platform," she said.

"It is about I think 15 metres or so to the top of the tree from where his platform was.

"I did hear a couple of voices in the background when he was on the phone to me and they were packing up his gear."

Police have confirmed they mounted a helicopter operation this morning to arrest Mr Firth.
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Gus says that since the government does not listen to the voice of reasonable scientists, we need more tree sitters to help save trees from the chainsaws...

From the ABC

Australia in grip of diabetes epidemic: study
Researchers say Australia is suffering from a diabetes epidemic, with 100,000 new cases every year.

A new study has also found the illness is caused by lifestyle factors like obesity and poor diet, and is costing taxpayers $3 billion every year.

The Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study tested and interviewed 11,000 people five years ago to provide a snapshot of the nation's health.

Seven thousand people have been checked again to determine how many new cases of diabetes occur every year.

Associate Professor Jonathan Shaw says the statistics are alarming.

"Approximately 270 to 280 new cases are developing every day throughout Australia," he said.

"We've seen that people's waistlines and weight are increasing and in particular, the greatest in obesity are seen in younger adults rather than older adults."

read more about it at the ABC and your lolly shop

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Gus serving suggestion: eat organic food and less of it...
See cartoon at top of this line of blog, also "Costello slams executives' pay jump"... as well as "the fable of tacks cuts" hidden somewhere on this site...

From the Guardian

A menace to science 

...

But when you do compare people taking antioxidant supplement tablets with people on placebo, there's no benefit...

Believing Scripture but Playing by Science’s Rules

By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: February 12, 2007

KINGSTON, R.I. — There is nothing much unusual about the 197-page dissertation Marcus R. Ross submitted in December to complete his doctoral degree in geosciences here at the University of Rhode Island.

Can a scientist produce intellectually honest work that contradicts deeply held religious beliefs?

His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is “impeccable,” said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross’s dissertation adviser. “He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework.”

But Dr. Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a “young earth creationist” — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Dr. Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one “paradigm” for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, “that I am separating the different paradigms.”

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Gus: schizophrenia of the loopy believing kind... As honest as a fruit bat in Antarctica.

The last great extinction was triggered by a fall in sea levels, but others have been caused by a rise. Peters arrived at this conclusion by collecting rocks from 540 sites across America. He looked at two main types: carbonates, which he likens to the white sand you see in beautiful marine environments like the Bahamas, and siliciclastics, which are like the muddy sand beaches we have in the UK, dark with sediment that's been washed off the land.

"At each spot, I asked what the record of sea-level rise and fall was and what the environmental consequence of that was," Peters says. This enabled him to plot sea level against the numbers and types of species found in these two different types of marine sediment. "It doesn't mean that other physical perturbations aren't important," says Peters, referring to supervolcanoes and asteroid strikes. "The Yucatan crater is the biggest crater caused by an asteroid in the last 540 million years. If it happened now, I'd feel the shock wave and see the debris and dust at my desk in Wisconsin. But the problem with this theory is that we have lots of large craters – 100 kilometres in diameter – caused by asteroids that aren't linked to any extinctions."

So what led to the rise and fall in sea levels? One explanation is the shift in the Earth's tectonic plates. The other is climate change. Over the past 500 million years, ice sheets have been forming, advancing, melting and retreating. These vast perturbations in climate change were produced by shifts in Earth's orbit around the Sun. Geologists say this is natural and normal: we are in a cold phase right now.

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In the blogs above, including Budget for Dinosaurs, I have more or less formulated similar theories about climate change and the extinction of species including that of the mammoths. Sea levels play a big part in all this and at the last big melt between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago (the great biblical floods) the sea level rose by a massive amount — some geologists estimate this at more than 60 metres probably around 100 metres although some would say about 200 metres. But rise there was in a very short geological time, 2000 years. And as scientists till the mid 1940s thought we were in a cold phase, we are actually warming up. Although we do not "feel" it, indicative factors are strong and to some extent amazingly fast. That we HAVE TO DO something about global warming is not an understatement. Our release of carbon dioxide in the thin layer of the atmosphere is contributing greatly to the warming, warming is contributing to sea rise despite what Miranda Devine says.

United States President Barack Obama has called for a world free of nuclear weapons.

On his first trip to Europe since he took office in January, Mr Obama held US-style town hall meeting in the French city of Strasbourg and took questions from young people from France and Germany.

"Even with the Cold War over, the spread of nuclear weapons or the theft of nuclear material could lead to the extermination of any city on the planet," Mr Obama said.

"This weekend in Prague, I will lay out an agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons."

He told the crowd when he visits Prague on Sunday (local time) after the NATO summit in Strasbourg he will lay out for a world without nuclear weapons.

Earlier this week Mr Obama and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, agreed to seek a deal to cut their nuclear arsenals.

He has also urged America's allies to stand firm against Iran's nuclear ambitions and he again pressured North Korea over its planned missile launch saying it is provocative and unhelpful.

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Talk to professor Keating about it... see above... I will chase the cartoon that seems to have disappeared...