Observations From the Back Row

The Dose Makes The Poison

Paracelsus to parascience: the environmental cancer distraction

Bruce N. Ames, Lois Swirsky Gold

Academia Nuts: The Left's Bias Against Conservatives Is Real - Education: A new study finds leftist bias all too real in academic hiring. Campus radicals not only run colleges but admit they discriminate against conservatives. So much for "tolerance." Why should voters foot the bill for this? Looking at just one branch of social science, researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands found that almost a third of social psychologists — nearly all of whom are leftists — admitted in a survey they'd discriminate against conservatives in hiring decisions and grant proposals….. This isn't exactly earth-shaking news, of course. Everyone knows leftists control universities with no accountability. It does raise questions, however, because higher education has grown bloated and the public is picking up an ever more onerous tab.

Parasite responsible for shrimp sex-change problem, says scientists - A gender-bending parasite has been discovered which is believed to be responsible for turning male shrimps and other crustaceans into females.....

My Take - As you read this you will see that they just can't help but blame modern chemistry in some form.

Balkan drought highlights years of farm neglect - As crops wilt and die in the Balkans, farmers struck down by a particularly harsh drought this year are ruing the region's failure to upgrade irrigation networks and invest in a long-term agricultural strategy. Hot, dry weather in eastern and southern Europe has piled pressure on world grain markets already reeling from huge drought damage in the United States. The toll in Bosnia, where surface soil temperatures in the south have hit 47 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit), is estimated at almost $1 billion - a huge blow to a country where the farming sector accounts for 20 percent of employment and about 10 percent of economic output. The cost to neighboring Serbia, where agriculture last year accounted for about 12 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), is around $2 billion, and up to $250 million in Croatia, where yields have also been halved….

My Take – This is what happens when we abandon common sense or we adopt socialism as a ruling concept. The reality is that people froze to death in Eastern Europe when they had a terribly cold winter and now they will certainly have serious economic issues because of the stupidity of central planning schemes that never worked. One thing for sure; this is what would occur worldwide the world adopts greenies policies. Dystopia!

Busted! Leaked emails snag global-warming alarmists - 'Skeptics will be all over us – the world is really cooling' - While NASA climate alarmist James Hansen insists record summer heat and drought are caused by man-made global warming, leaked internal emails from just three summers ago reveal that he and his colleagues expressed alarm that the planet was inexplicably … cooling.....In an Oct. 12, 2009, email to Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, fellow warming alarmist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., asked, “Where the heck is global warming?” ....“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.”.....Ignoring the record-breaking 2009 cooling period, Hansen recently argued that the evidence for human-made global warming is “overwhelming.” “We can say with high confidence that such extreme anomalies would not have occurred in the absence of global warming,” he said. Left unexplained, however, is the 2009 cooling anomaly..........