Unsafe Abortion Kills 70K Women Annually

Guttmacher Institute estimates that unsafe abortion kills 70,000 women annually.

In totally unrelated news, abortion (safe & unsafe) kills 41 million children a year.

1/3rd Dino Species Never Existed?

From National Geographic News

There is a theory that as many as 1/3 of the known dinosaur species may not have been different species but rather they are different stages of the same animal. The video on page 2 cites the triceratops and a modern day bird, the hornbill, as examples of creatures with age related differences. The triceratop's horns grew in curved backwards and later turn to the front in the adult that most of us are familiar with. They give some reasons for this but unfortunately get too much into anthropomorphism in their reasoning. Basically the backwards curving horns would have prevented the juveniles from competing for mates but would have still been good for protection or grazing.

We will have to wait to see how this plays out, but it will give a good framework for future understanding of some of the world's coolest creatures. (Tho it might be a bad thing if your favorite dino wasn't its own species after all)

Solace

Solace by Project 86

We have waited for so long to occur this day
There are those who fly away to a distant place
But I think I'll stay and I wouldn't have it any other way
In this solace I see a light piercing the darkness
Coming on the winds of imagery, When all I know is crumbling
I am becoming something more than humanity
Could ever allow me to be
I remember a day when my dreams of escape seemed so far away

Let's go back in time, you and I to my
Initiation to your false empire
You greased, you aimed and then you spit while I
Once again pushed away my conscience

Yet always, it seems
I cannot fathom the plateau without first the pit

Against the goads there can be no pleading
Because every thought reaps an action
And for you, my former captor all the earthly wisdom and wealth
Cannot erase your susceptibility to brutal mortality
And the funny thing about justice
Is that it always comes when you least expect it
So friends it won't be long
seems I stole your smile
Right from wrong

So forever now we'll find our peace inside this
We'll find our solace in your silence
And though I once desired your twisted sense of fame
I know, I know that in myself I'm nothing
Nothing, Nothing
Nothing but the words of the "meaningless"

You have given me all I'll ever need
The nerve, the greed, the lust
the lust, the lust, the lust for justice
And now I will never rest
Until the meaningless become your silence.
And you're over, over, over, out!
Over, over, over, out!
Over, over, over, out!
Over, over, over, out!

Now I mean to thank you once again, with this
My, my, my goodbye kiss
You broke my heart but something tells me
that I won't, that I won't, and I won't miss it
And on this very day and on this very hill
While the heavens are hushed in anticipation
Beckoning we'll have ourselves a reckoning
And all of the oppressed will greet you
And you're over, over, over, out!
Over, over, over

Obama The Nobel (Noble)

Well, all kings and dictators need a name that will distinguish them from the average every-day, run-of-the-mill Dear Leader. Seems that the world has bestowed one upon Obama and he shall henceforth be known as Obama The Nobel (pronounced Noble)

OSLO (AP) - President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision designed to build momentum behind his initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and stress diplomacy and cooperation rather than unilateralism.

Many observers were shocked by the unexpected choice so early in the Obama presidency, which began less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline and has yet to yield concrete achievements in peacemaking.

Seems that the glorification of our very own Dear Leader was already in the bag and that they just had to find a reason for it. And that reason is, for offering the world hope.

(Note: On second link I would have used the original but for the fact that it had already been edited to remove the blantant deification glorification adoration hero worshipcredit due to Obama so as to be "fair and balanced")

URGENT: Astronomy Buffs and Armchair Scientists

The short:
Intentional crashing of spacecraft into the moon to test for water will be shown LIVE, EARLY Friday morning on the NASA website.


LCROSS Lunar Impact
7:31 a.m. EDT/4:31 a.m. PDT
Friday Oct. 9

A live NASA TV Broadcast is planned for the LCROSS impacts starting at 6:15 a.m. EDT (3:15 a.m. PDT), Oct. 9, on NASA TV and www.nasa.gov/ntv.

The 1.5 hour broadcast includes:

Live footage from spacecraft camera
Real-time telemetry based animation
Views of LCROSS Mission and Science Operations
Broadcast commentary with expert guests
Prepared video segments
Views of the public impact viewing event at NASA Ames
Possible live footage from the University of Hawaii, 88-inch telescope on Mauna Kea.

Doubt I will be up for it but go to this page for more info

More AGW Scientific Fraud

There are two fields of science that continue to have fraud exposed, but yet these same two fields never suffer any ill effects from this. They are evolutionary biology and the Climate Change FraudField. The latest is the for the AGW crowd is that the study that heavily influenced the IPCC was found to have used cherry picked data that showed the authors bias. Worse, this fraudulent data foisted upon us the "hockey stick" graph that may have been the reason Gore created his movie "An Inconvenient Truth." If this can be verified I strongly recommend these scientists be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. But I digress...

Seems that these scientists took core samples from 254 trees and then used only 12 that proved the point they wanted to make. They made such statements as

"Late 20th century warmth is unprecedented for at least roughly the past two millennia for the Northern Hemisphere," wrote the two authors of Global Surface Temperatures over the Past Two Millennia published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2003 - Mann, and Phil Jones of CRU.

Briffa's 2008 paper concludes that: "The extent of recent widespread warming across northwest Eurasia, with respect to 100- to 200-year trends, is unprecedented in the last 2000 years."

Fortunately we are assured by the science fetishists that science is self correcting and the peer review process is used to weed out frauds like this. Sure glad that worked! Oh, wait, thats not how it worked. Seems that this got thru the peer review process several times. No worries still, because science is all about reproducing expirements and double checking data. Hmmm, seems that didn't work either...

Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret - failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to demand the data from contributors.

Mann too used dendrochronology to chill temperatures, and rebuffed attempts to publish his measurement data. Initially he said he had forgotten where he put it, then declined to disclosed it.

Seems that Mann's research was accidentally discovered on his FTP server in a folder titled "BACKTO_1400-CENSORED" Oops! (I bet the person who "accidentally" found it was employed by Big Oil!) So from these 12 trees we have determined that the Medieval Warm Period AKA the Medieval Climate Optimum never happened and that we are now killing the planet due to greenhouse gasses.

Still, I predict that AGW will emerge unscathed from this as they do from every other fraud that is exposed. AGW is more about a worldview than it is about science and as such science could thoroughly debunk it and the AGWers would still believe it. Even if we went into a deep ice age it would be man's fault in their minds.

Longer School Year Update

I mentioned in my prior post how the additional schooling costs that the extra 12-15% [cost for the additional schooling] is more than any States economy can bare right now.

Well, out comes an item from Fox News titled
Extended School Year Would Have Dire Economic Effects, Critics Say.

Critics say the president's call for a longer academic calendar and a shorter summer vacation will bring on a host of unintended consequences -- including increased costs for school systems, major cuts to the nation's hotel and tourism industries, and a serious blow to summer camp operators.

The consequences would be much farther reaching than that of course. There would be additional taxation leading to a lower consumption rate leading to lower sales tax revenue (which is the cities main revenue generator) and lower employment. This would lead to higher demand for government social services while at the same time reducing the ability of the government to fund those services. And none of that even goes into the reprogramming of the children that will occur at an even greater rate with the longer contact time with the schools.

But on the plus side, at least they won't be getting religious instruction. Or will they?