Leftist logic

Facts and reason are so regularly subversive to Green/Left  claims that it is always amusing to read the commentaries they put up.  How do they get around  the pesky facts? Mainly by telling just half the truth.  There is a good example below.  The article was headed: "A New American Low: One Rule For The Whites, Another For Its First Peoples".  It's a desperate attempt to connect two totally unconnected things.  The article below is from "New Matilda" but there have been similar articles in "The Guardian" and some other Leftist organs.

The first thing covered below is the dispersal of protesters occupying private land in order to block construction of the Dakota access pipeline.  The pipeline is an important piece of infrastructure that will enable domestically produced crude oil from North Dakota to reach major refining markets in a more direct, cost-effective, safer and environmentally responsible manner. The pipeline will also reduce the current use of rail and truck transportation.  There is of course no mention of the environmental and safety benefits of the pipeline below.

The key claim, however, is that the removal of the "Sioux" protesters shows bias against these wonderful native people who mainly live on the taxpayer these days.  Whites would have been treated better, is the claim.  Again something is not mentioned -- something that completely blows apart the accusation of bias:  Most of the protesters were white, not Sioux!  And exactly the same methods were used to disperse both groups.  Both Sioux and whites were treated equally!  What a laugh!  Leftists quite cheerfully lie in their teeth.

The second event covered below is the exoneration of the Bundy brothers.  Sit-ins and protests are fine if you are black, Leftist or some other favoured group but sit-ins and protests by white ranchers protesting government oppression get absolutely NO sympathy below.  That good ol' double standard again. Apparently, the wrongness of what the Bundys did arises solely from their whiteness!  Just the usual Leftist obsession with race


Forget the US presidential race. Over the weekend, two things happened in the USA that define the nation better than a sexual assaulting Republican candidate and a deeply corrupt Democrat ever could.

The story goes like this: Protestors from the Sioux Nation, along with a growing band of supporters, have been facing off with state police against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota.

The pipeline is to carry oil, and traditional owners say it threatens lives and livelihoods, because of its proximity to the Missouri River, the life blood of a huge section of north and central America and the major river system that feeds into the Mississippi.

Over the weekend, about 250 protestors were outnumbered by more than 300 police, armed to teeth and driving armoured cars, Humvees and helicopters.

The police moved in – dozens of protestors were arrested, and some of them shot with rubber bullets, including this guy, who copped one in the face.

The situation is so grave, that Amnesty International has committed to sending impartial observers.

At the same time, a Portland (Oregon) jury came in with a verdict on the armed occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Reserve, which took place in January this year.

On January 2, dozens of heavily armed (predominantly white) ‘ranchers’ overran the government compound, and seized it in a coup that eventually led to one man being shot by police, and dozens arrested.

On Friday, seven of the white nationalist extremists, led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy, were acquitted of all charges of impeding federal officers in their duties. The jury was all white.

This despite an armed stand-off that lasted weeks, and included a call out from the terrorists for people to send “snacks”.

It’s not clear what, if any, effect the two incidents will have on the US presidential election. But more than likely, it’ll be none. Business as usual.

SOURCE



Environmental laws are for little people only

Someone aboard a bus chartered by the Democratic National Committee, which depicted the Democratic presidential and vice presidential candidates, reportedly dumped sewage into a storm drain in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

A DNC spokesperson described the sewage dump as “an honest mistake,” but it is actually a crime, and individuals have been criminally prosecuted for similar “honest mistakes” in the past.

This incident presents a familiar problem (one raised by the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2015 Animas River spill), that the government must choose: either stop prosecuting ordinary citizens for “criminal negligence” or enforce the same laws against more powerful or well-known parties.

At around 9:30 a.m., a man reported seeing someone get out of a DNC-chartered bus “and dump ‘it’s sewage into the storm drain.’”

The witness told Fox 5, “You don’t pull up and dump raw sewage on the street and in the storm drain. You just don’t do that.” In fact, if you do, it is a crime.

Police Capt. Jeff Smith told Fox 5, “There is a city violation for dumping materials into the storm drain system, obviously this feeds into streams.” The Lawrenceville ordinance prohibits dumping pollutants into the storm sewer system.

These discharges, according to city officials, “impact waterways individually” and “can have cumulative impacts on receiving waters. The impacts of these discharges adversely affect public health and safety, drinking water supplies, recreation, fish and other aquatic life, property values, and other uses of lands and waters.”

Unsurprisingly, the discharge from the DNC bus may also be a federal crime, depending on where that particular drain leads. Just ask Lawrence Lewis.

Prosecution

Lawrence Lewis escaped the projects of the District of Columbia, whereas his three older brothers were caught up in our criminal justice system and eventually murdered. Lewis worked for the District school system as a janitor while taking night classes, eventually becoming chief engineer for the Knollwood military retirement center. He was also a caretaker for his elderly mother and a role model for his two daughters.

Unfortunately for Lewis, the retirement home had recurring problems with sewage backup. After one backup, trying to protect the home’s patients from harm, Lewis did what his predecessors had often done and rerouted backed-up sewage into a storm drain. Lewis believed that the storm drain flowed into city sewage treatment facilities, but unbeknownst to him, the storm drain runs into Rock Creek, which flows into the Potomac River.

The Clean Water Act makes it a federal crime to negligently discharge sewage without a permit into “waters of the United States,” including Rock Creek and the Potomac River.

Lewis avoided a felony conviction and a long-term jail sentence by pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, for which he was sentenced to one year of probation.

The Democratic National Committee says that dumping sewage into a storm drain “was an honest mistake and we apologize … We were unaware of any possible violations.”

‘Honest Mistake’

Now, the DNC seeks to use an “honest mistake” defense that was unavailable to Lewis, because it is not a recognized defense under the Clean Water Act.

It did not work for Edward Hanousek either, who was also criminally prosecuted under the Clean Water Act for negligent discharge without a permit after employees he supervised accidentally spilled 1,000 to 5,000 gallons of oil into Alaska’s Skagway River.

Hanousek was off-duty and at home when the accidental spill occurred. Nonetheless, a district court “sentenced him to six months in prison, another six months in a halfway house, another six months on supervised release, and imposed a $5,000 fine.”

The man who reportedly saw someone dump waste into a Lawrenceville storm drain said, “It’s wrong, it’s absolutely wrong. I don’t care whose name is on the bus.” But as Lewis, Hanousek, and many others know, it is also a federal crime, regardless of who is responsible for the discharge.

Federal courts have held—as the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in West Virginia Highlands Conservancy v. Huffman (2010)—that the provisions of the Clean Water Act “apply to anyone who discharges pollutants into the waters of the United States,” including the folks on the DNC-chartered bus.

As Heritage Foundation scholars have argued elsewhere, “the government should be put to a choice: either abandon criminal liability based on negligence,” or bring charges against powerful parties “at the scene and up through the responsible chain of command. Sauce for the goose ought to be sauce for the gander.”

Already, however, The Washington Post reports that “Lawrenceville police told Fox 5 that they are not filing charges, but opted to hand over the investigation to the state’s Environmental Protection Agency.”

SOURCE




The Buzz: Six Reasons Not To Worry About The Bees

Bees are in the news, but for all the wrong reasons—mainly, dire tales of disappearing bees threatening a third of our food supply. Time Magazine, opting for sensationalism over accuracy, said we were headed toward “A world without bees,” with an online video explaining, “Why bees are going extinct.” They called it the “beepocalypse” and blamed it all on modern agricultural technologies, urging immediate and aggressive action before it’s too late.

This would be scary stuff indeed—if it were true. But like so many overly simplistic, sky-is-falling claims, these predictions are misleading and false. Activist groups like Loonies of the Earth—sorry, I mean Friends of the Earth—and the Pesticide Action Network work tirelessly to provide the media a steady stream of suitable doom-and-gloom material that they and other groups then use for “save the bees” fundraising opportunities.

Bees are popular, even iconic. The public naturally wants them to survive, but it simply isn’t true that honeybees are about to disappear–so they don’t need “saving.” The truth about the bees turns out to be far more complex, and far more interesting, than the alarmist headlines suggest.

1. There are billions more bees than a decade ago

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture counted 2,660,000 million honeybee colonies across the United States. A decade earlier, in 2004, there were 2,556,000 honeybee colonies. That’s a gain of 104,000 colonies, not a loss. At around 50,000 bees per colony, that’s an increase of five billion honeybees in the United States.

The overall honeybee numbers in the United States have stayed steady at about 2.5 million colonies for the last two decades, dipping slightly when the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) hit in 2006, then rebounded at a healthy clip and actually reached a 20-year high in 2014. Europe and Canada have experienced significant increases in their honeybee populations as well, and worldwide, there are 30 million more hives today than in 1961, an increase of about 60%. That means there about 1.5 trillion more bees buzzing around today than there were 50 years ago. There simply is no bee-pocalypse and never was.

The way thousands of reporters and editors of supposedly serious publications were able to turn a massive expansion of bee populations into a cataclysmic near-extinction event is, well, beyond bee-lief.

2. Bees are always dying–and reproducing–at an “alarming” rate

Not so long ago, amusing photos spread across the Internet adorned with the phrase, “bees are dying globally at an alarming rate.” The first of these memes depicted Eli Manning, the New York Giants quarterback, purportedly pondering unhappily the fate of the pollinators. While it’s true that beekeepers in the U.S. are having increasing trouble keeping their hives healthy, and that hive losses have been elevated in recent years, if it weren’t a spoof, I’d suggest that Manning should worry less about bees being blitzed and more about the adequacy of his own offensive line. High losses, while they may create economic hardship for some beekeepers, don’t spell catastrophe. That’s because bees also reproduce “at an alarming rate,” or at least, very, very quickly.

Unlike the animals we tend to be more familiar with, honeybees have an exceptionally short lifespan–about six weeks. It is shorter during warm weather months and in perennially warm climates where honeybees never go into winter hibernation, or “cluster.” Many generations of honeybees are born and die within any given year, so rapid rises and falls in population numbers within any given year are common.

Recently, the Bee Informed Partnership–which conducts an annual survey of U.S. beekeepers–decided to add the warm weather losses to the traditional count of overwinter losses to come up with the startling announcement that, “Beekeepers lost 41 percent of Bees in 2015-2016.”

Bee Informed is funded by USDA, and this change in reporting was a sure-fire way to heighten concern and therefore increase funding dollars for the U.S. government (pardon my cynicism), but it did little to enlighten anyone as to what was really going on with bees. Not surprisingly, most journalists reported this as if our entire bee population was on the verge of being wiped out in the space of a few years. A May CBS News headline, for example, read, “Death rate for honeybees takes turn for the worse.” As usual in “if it bleeds, it leads” journalism, there was no mention that even with these cataclysmic-sounding losses, the U.S. bee population was still very near a two-decade high.

3. Bees are livestock, just like cattle

Activists spread hysteria about dying honeybees because it advances their political aims. They want the public to think the happy little bees we see buzzing about our gardens are about to draw their final breath, and that their imminent disappearance will threaten the world’s ability to feed itself. The exact opposite of this apocalyptic theory is true: Agricultural production guarantees steady honeybee numbers because of the potent effects of market forces.

The honeybee is a domesticated species, imported from Europe. Like cattle and other livestock, bees are raised in the numbers needed, in this case to pollinate agricultural crops. Human intervention is the driving force underlying their population numbers. Certainly, hives can experience severe health problems, usually driven by disease caused by mites and viruses, and those hives can collapse or die.

The rest of the story, however, is that given the demand for bees, beekeepers adapt to losses by “splitting” a healthy hive to grow more bees to suit their needs. One of the most basic beekeeping skills is to divide an existing colony and introduce (or grow) a new queen for the “new” hive. The new queen, which can be ordered online for as little as $25, will lay enough eggs—about 2,000 a day—so that what was once a single hive becomes two hives. With a little help from its human friends, nature is resilient.

Honeybee numbers fluctuate with beekeepers’ expectations about market conditions, including domestic and overseas demand for specific types of honey or other bee byproducts.

4. Crop pesticides aren’t killing honeybees

Activists’ political goal  is to convince regulators and lawmakers to ban the most popular agricultural chemicals, especially a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, or neonics for short. They have had some success in doing so by blaming the disappearance of honeybees, which isn’t actually happening, on neonics. This is a particularly obnoxious attack since modern crop protection products such as neonics are actually designed to target harmful pests while, when used according to the instructions on the label, keeping beneficial insects like honeybees as safe as possible. There are several ways we know neonicotinoids aren’t killing bees.

First of all, bees aren’t attracted to the most popular U.S. crops like corn, rice, soybean and wheat, which account for the majority of neonic usage. Honeybees would come into contact with neonics used on these crops only if beekeepers place their colonies close to fields that are about to be planted so that dust from the planting machines might drift and spread to the hive. This is a rather simple problem to fix, by ensuring beekeepers and farmers talk to one another so they know when to keep the bees away.

Second, 98% of the time, neonics aren’t sprayed on crops at all but are used as seed treatments. This high-tech approach is what makes the product friendly to bees and other non-target organisms while still being lethal to biting insects that attack plants at the earliest stage, when they are most vulnerable. Bees forage much later, on nectar and pollen from flowers. By the time bee-attracting, neonic- seed-treated crops reach the flowering stage, the amount of neonics expressed in crop pollen (and, for crops that produce it, nectar) is extremely low. A small amount of the pesticide is applied to the seed, and as the plant grows, the chemical becomes more and more diluted, to the point that it has no significant effect on bees.

That’s why bees positively thrive in Canada’s extensive canola fields, which are almost 100% grown from seeds treated with neonicotinoids. A good account of the Canadian experience can be found in the blog, “Alberta Buzzing,” by Lee Townsend, one of Alberta’s most successful beekeepers. Like other beekeepers in Alberta, he loves neonics because they keep the canola healthy, and canola produces a particularly tasty brand of honey.

There’s more evidence. Since neonics arrived on the scene in the mid-1990′s, honeybee hive numbers have climbed. Bee populations fell before neonics were introduced. That was due in large part to the loss of small farms, with their individual beehives, after World War II, and the devastation wrought by the Varroa destructor mite, which hit the U.S. in the mid-1980′s and which bee scientists recognize is the chief cause of bee health problems.

More HERE



Vitamin A rice coming to Bangladesh

The first field trial of the Golden Rice in Bangladesh has yielded promising results, triggering prospect of the vitamin A-rich grain's release as early as 2018.

Two months after harvesting the Bangladeshi version of Golden Rice line, GR2E BRRI dhan29, scientists at Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) found that rice grains retained 10 μg/g (micrograms/gram) beta carotene which is good enough to address vitamin-A deficiency (VAD).

Beta carotene, also known as pro-vitamin A, is a substance that the human body can convert to vitamin A.

With this development, a long wait is nearly over for rice breeders who have been trying since 1999 for a varietal development and release of Golden Rice, long being touted by the scientist fraternity as a key remedy to acute VAD problem.

According to the World Health Organization's global VAD database, one in every five pre-school children in Bangladesh is vitamin A-deficient. Among the pregnant women, 23.7 percent suffer from VAD.

BRRI scientists analysed the post-harvest data collected from the first field test conducted on GR2E BRRI dhan29 during the last Boro season (November 2015 - May 2016) and drew the conclusion just recently that the results are positive.

“Two months after harvest, we've found an average of over 10 μg/g beta carotene in GR2E BRRI dhan29. The amount is good enough to meet 50 percent of vitamin-A needs of people consuming rice in their daily diet,” Dr Partha S Biswas, project leader of Golden Rice Project at BRRI, told The Daily Star.

The vitamin A-rich rice, named Golden Rice for its golden colour, was first developed by splicing three foreign genes -- two from daffodil and one from a bacterium -- into japonica rice, a variety adapted to temperate climates. It is capable of producing beta carotene. But for a better beta carotene expression in rice, the daffodil genes were replaced by maize genes later in 2005.

The BRRI carried out the field trial on the campus of Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) in Gazipur to keep Golden Rice segregated from other rice varieties grown in BRRI fields.

Provided the BRRI gets the necessary regulatory approval, the organisation would go for multi-location field trials of GR2E BRRI dhan29 in Boro seasons in next two years to set off the process of its commercial release, said Partha.

None of the major diseases like blast, sheath blight, bacterial blight and tungro was observed in the transgenic GR2E BRRI dhan29 and the yield was as good as that of the BRRI dhan29 (check variety) with good expression of beta carotene, according to a paper titled “Recent Advances in Breeding Golden Rice in Bangladesh”.

The paper coauthored by Dr Partha, and the IRRI's Golden Rice Project Coordinator Dr Violeta Villegas, and Regulatory Affairs head Dr Donald J Mackenzie, was presented at the 4th Annual South Asia Biosafety Conference in Hyderabad, India in late September.

The Philippines is the only other country that is carrying out a multi-location field trial now on their homegrown Golden Rice line while the process of Golden Rice research remained at laboratory and greenhouse stages in Indonesia, India and Vietnam.

Although Bangladeshi rice scientists have been at the forefront of Golden Rice research since the development of this transgenic rice by Swiss and German scientists in 1999, the process gathered momentum only when then IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) plant biotechnologist, Dr Swapan K Datta, infused the genes responsible for beta carotene into BRRI dhan29 in 2002-03.

The genetic engineering technology to derive vitamin A in rice was first applied by Prof Ingo Potrykus of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and Prof Peter Beyer of the University of Freiburg, Germany back in 1999. All renowned journals and news magazines, including the Nature, the Science and the Time, covered the breakthrough in 2000.

The first generation Golden Rice (known as GR1) was developed through infusing genes from daffodil, but later the second generation variety (known as GR2) was developed by taking a maize from corn as it gave much better output of pro-vitamin A.

Some six lines of GR2 (scientifically called “events”) were developed and the IRRI chose to work on one called GR2R, which it developed and subsequently infused in Filipino and Bangladeshi rice varieties.

After years of lab and greenhouse tests on GR2R, the Philippines and Bangladesh eventually stopped upon an IRRI advice that Event GR2E would work better.

Golden Rice co-inventor Prof Peter Beyer told this newspaper that there were some problems with the Event GR2R. He said the new Event should work well.

Swapan K Datta, ex-IRRI scientist who infused beta carotene-producing genes into Bangladesh's best performing rice variety, BRRI dhan29, said he was looking forward to see Golden Rice goes to farmers' fields.

The BRRI dhan29, developed by BRRI in 1994, is the most productive dry season rice variety of Bangladesh that has gone beyond national boundaries to be grown in many other countries including India, China, Vietnam, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar.

Rice does not contain beta carotene. Therefore, dependence on rice as the predominant food source necessarily leads to vitamin-A deficiency, most severely affecting small children and pregnant women.

Consumption of only 150 gram of Golden Rice a day is expected to supply half of the recommended daily intake (RDA) of vitamin A for an adult. People in Bangladesh depend on rice for 70 percent of their daily calorie intakes.

The IRRI says VAD is the main cause of preventable blindness in children and globally, some 6.7 million children die every year and another 3,50,000 go blind because they are vitamin-A deficient.

In April 2011, Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sanctioned a grant of over $10 million to IRRI to fund, develop and evaluate Golden Rice varieties for Bangladesh and the Philippines.

Officials concerned at IRRI and Gates Foundation said as the Golden Rice inventors and subsequent technology developer Syngenta allowed a royalty-free access to the patents, the new rice would be of the same price as other rice varieties once released for commercial farming in Bangladesh, and farmers would be able to share and replant the seeds as they wish.

SOURCE




Foreign-funded green groups could take whole swathes of Australia out of the productive economy

Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard have a lot in common — and it’s not just the ladylike shoes and matching pearl earrings.

They both love to play the gender card, turning their immense privilege into victim status and ­dividing the electorate by sex.

Thus, Gillard nobbled Tony ­Abbott with her fabled misogyny speech and Clinton’s machine manages to drown out every Wikileaks embarrassment with a new Donald Trump bimbo eruption.

The other thing the two ladies have in common is the Clinton Foundation, which Wikileaks emails now show is an influence-peddling political slush fund.

And guess which country was one of its biggest donors? Australia. Yep, we’re up there with Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The Australian taxpayer shovelled at least $88 million into the Clinton Foundation and associated entities from 2006 to 2014, reaching a peak of $10.3 million in 2012-13, Gillard’s last year in office.

On the Clinton Foundation website, AusAID and the Commonwealth of Australia score separate entries in the $10 million-plus group of donors, one rung up from American teacher unions.

In 2009-10 Kevin Rudd handed over another $10 million to the foundation for climate research, part of $300 million he squandered on a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.

Gillard also donated $300 million of our money to the Clinton-affiliated Global Partnership for Education.

Lo and behold, she became chairman in 2014 and has been ­actively promoting Clinton as president ever since — in a campaign video last December slamming Trump, in opeds trumpeting the next woman president and in appearances with Clinton spruiking girls’ education.

The Abbott government topped up the left-wing organisation’s coffers with another $140 million in 2014, bringing total Australian largesse to $460 million, according to a press release from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.

And yet, apart from the beautiful friendship with Gillard, what did Australia get from the Clintons for all that cash? A whole lot of trouble is what.

The latest treasure trove of Wikileaks emails released last week shows that Australian green groups have been secretly funded to destroy our coal industry by environmental activists connected to the Clinton campaign.

The email account of Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta reveals extraordinary details of the sabotage of the $16 billion Adani coalmine in Queensland, which has damaged Australia’s national interest and denied cheap electricity to millions of poor Indians.

Last August John Hepburn, former Greenpeace activist and founder of Australian anti-coal group the Sunrise Project, sent a crowing email to his American paymasters, the Sandler Foundation, which is also a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. (Founder Herb Sandler and mate George Soros funded another Clinton-aligned progressive group, the Centre for American Progress, previously chaired by Podesta.)

“The Adani Carmichael mine and the whole Galilee Basin fossil fuel industrial complex is in its death throes,” Hepburn wrote in the email forwarded to Podesta.

“I am going to buy a few bottles of bubbly for a celebration with the (Environmental ­Defenders Office) legal team, our colleagues at GetUp, Greenpeace, 350.org, ECF, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Mackay Conservation Group, Market Forces and the brilliant and tireless Sunrise team.”

In another email forwarded to Podesta, Hepburn panics about an Abbott government inquiry into environmental charities and discusses hiding Sunrise’s sources of funding to safeguard its charitable tax status.

Hepburn boasts about the latest legal blow to Adani, when the Federal Court overturned its approval and the Commonwealth Bank quit the project. In it he now wants to “escalate the campaign ­towards the other 3 big Australian banks”.

And he mocks miners who “try to claim that there is some kind of foreign-funded and tightly orchestrated conspiracy to systematically ­destroy the Australian coal industry. (I seriously don’t know where they get these wacky ideas from!)”

As if it’s not bad enough that foreign-funded activists are meddling with our largest export earner, Podesta’s emails also detail their insidious influence on indigenous land owners who blocked the Adani mine using powerful native title rights.

This alliance of green groups with native title owners is a frightening development detailed in a new book by historian Keith Windschuttle, The Break-up of Australia: The Real Agenda behind Aboriginal Recognition.

He reveals the imminent expansion of native title claims, either ­approved or quietly being processed, stretch across a whopping 60 per cent of the Australian continent, an area twice the size of Western Europe.

Already 6000sq km of the Kidman cattle empire in the Kimberley has been given, via native title, to green activists to be converted from productive cattle country to a wildlife conservation area.

“In return, the Yulumbu people get a paltry $50,000 a year royalty,” Windschuttle writes. “As a flora and fauna sanctuary it is economically defunct for the foreseeable future.”

At worst, writes Windschuttle, the upcoming referendum for indigenous constitutional recognition, proposed by Gillard in 2012, could pave the way for a separate Aboriginal state on native title land, funded by taxation, royalties and lease payments — passive welfare in another guise.

At the very least, the ­alliance between foreign-­funded green groups and ­indigenous owners gives ­environmentalists the opportunity to take whole swathes of Australia out of the productive economy and shut down industries they don’t like, from coal mines in Queensland to cattle farms in Western Australia.

Thanks for nothing, Hillary and Julia.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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