SKOWHEGAN, Maine - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has sent a proposal to the Somerset County commissioners to lease their jail for the worlds first Lobster Empathy Center. Somebody went under a dock
And there they saw a rock
But it wasn't a rock
It was a rock . . . lobster!
The central Maine county is constructing a new jail and has put the century-old jail in downtown Skowhegan up for sale. The Realtor handling the sale called the offer "likely a publicity stunt."
Oh, you think? ...
"A prison is the perfect setting to demonstrate how lobsters suffer when they are caught in traps or confined to cramped, filthy supermarket tanks," PETA wrote in a June 2 letter to the commissioners. "The center will teach visitors to have compassion for these interesting, sensitive animals while also commemorating the millions of lobsters who are ripped from their homes in the ocean off the coast of Maine each year before being boiled alive." "Lobster empathy" is an old idea. It's been done before.
Commissioner Chairman Phil Roy, who doesnt care for lobster, was at a loss for words Monday afternoon. "Im shocked and I dont know what to say. I didnt realize Skowhegan was the coastal community PETA was looking for," Roy said, with tongue in cheek. As the crow flies, the distance from Skowhegan to Rockland, home of the Maine Lobster Festival and a lobster fishing port, is approximately 53 miles.
Posted by: Mike ||
06/05/2008 07:06 ||
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#1
I've worked in Skowhegan. Good, solid people. I don't think they'll pit up with this crap.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
06/05/2008 7:25 Comments ||
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#2
Isn't that what the local Red Lobster is for?
Posted by: ed ||
06/05/2008 7:42 Comments ||
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#11
This is a perfect example of what a rich society we have. If we can afford to waste resources on this kind of drivel, then life must be really grand for those people. Apparently they aren't spending all of their waking moments simply trying to feed themselves somehow.
Smoking cannabis for long periods of time may shrink parts of the brain that govern memory, emotion and aggression, according to researchers in Australia. Scientists used magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of people who admitted to smoking more than five joints a day for at least 10 years and compared them with brain images taken from non-drug users.
Those who smoked cannabis regularly had on average a 12% smaller hippocampus, the part of the brain which is thought to be involved with emotion and memory, and a 7% smaller amygdala, which plays a role in regulating fear and aggression.
For the study, researchers imaged the brains of 15 cannabis smokers and 16 individuals who did not use the drug. The scientists, led by Murat Yücel at the University of Melbourne and colleagues at the University of Wollongong, said scans on larger numbers of people were needed to confirm the extent of the effect.
"Although modest use may not lead to significant neurotoxic effects, these results suggest that heavy daily use might indeed be toxic to human brain tissue," the scientists report in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.
Cannabis users also fared worse in tests of verbal memory and were more likely to have low-level symptoms of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and mania.
Last month, a team at New York University scanned the brains of a group of 17- to 30-year-olds who had smoked cannabis two to three times a week for at least a year. In that study, the brains of drug users looked no different from those who had never taken cannabis.
In 2004, Cyril D'Souza, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University, reported that THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, caused fleeting schizophrenia-like symptoms in users, ranging from suspiciousness and delusions to poor memory and attention span.
#15
No problem...the expansion of your waistline owing to Double-Stuff Oreos, Cheeto's (be careful of a person displaying yellow nostrils, by the way!), etc... will balance the books.....
#18
Personally, I don't know ANYONE who can smoke that much.
Scooter,
You've just been hanging out with the wrong crowd.
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
06/05/2008 12:02 Comments ||
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#19
How do people who smoke that much cannabis remember ten minutes ago, let alone ten years?
Posted by: Rambler in California ||
06/05/2008 13:29 Comments ||
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#20
Those who smoked cannabis regularly had on average a 12% smaller hippocampus, the part of the brain which is thought to be involved with emotion and memory, and a 7% smaller amygdala, which plays a role in regulating fear and aggression.
Marijuana smokers in my experience aren't aggressive. Alcohol is way more of a problem in this regard.
#23
What did the pot smoker's brains look like before they smoked? Sample sizes of 15 and 16 are fairly small. I wonder what the error rates are. Hey don't Bogart that joint!
SYDNEY (AFP) - Australia's military chief on Wednesday cleared entertainer Tania Zaetta of allegations she had sex with soldiers in war-torn Afghanistan and said he would personally apologise to her. Zaetta, who has a budding Bollywood career, was named in a defence briefing note as having slept with elite special forces soldiers while on a concert tour at a military base in the Taliban stronghold of Uruzgan in April.
Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston told a parliamentary committee in Canberra the claim was baseless. "There was no substance to the allegations, and I will conclude the matter with a letter to the person in question," he said. "I will obviously apologise and express my deep regret about any hurt she has suffered."
Zaetta, 37, had denied the allegations which she described as "complete made-up lies". "(And) apart from being hurtful, it's damaging to a woman's career, to her reputation and I wish someone had come and asked me before there had been any documentation," she told Australian television last month.
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/05/2008 00:00 ||
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as having slept with elite special forces soldiers while on a concert tour at a military base
KATHMANDU - Nepal's deposed king is to move from his main palace in the heart of the capital into a former royal hunting lodge on the edge of Kathmandu, a minister said Wednesday. Ousted monarch Gyanendra officially lost his crown last week when a Maoist-dominated constitutional assembly made Nepal a republic after an overwhelming vote in favour of ending the 240-year-old monarchy.
The assembly also issued a 15-day deadline for Gyanendra to vacate the sprawling Narayanhiti palace, now slated to be turned into a national museum.
"The cabinet meeting on Wednesday decided to provide Nagarjun palace to the ex-king Gyanendra for accommodation for the time being," Nepal's peace minister, Ram Chandra Poudel, told AFP. Nagarjun palace is one of seven royal properties nationalised last year. It is situated in an army-protected forest reserve eight kilometres (five miles) north of the centre of Kathmandu.
Accommodation or prison?
The move is a temporary measure until the king can make other arrangements, Maoist spokesman Krishna Bahadur Mahara said. "He won't be able to stay there for a life-long period. He will have to find another place for himself eventually," he said.
The government is currently auditing property inside the king's main palace which contains national treasures including a crown studded with diamonds and ringed with huge emeralds.
A security review is also under way and the government has agreed to provide the ousted king with police protection. It chose not to use the army to guard the ex-king as it is seen as an institution dominated by pro-royals. "He won't be getting any military security. We will arrange security from the police if he requests it," the Maoist spokesman said.
Makes it easier for them to do a Ekaterinburg-style solution in the near future ...
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/05/2008 00:00 ||
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....Not that I am advocating an Ekaterinburg Solution, but didn't His Majesty whack most of his own family in the first place?
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
06/05/2008 5:42 Comments ||
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No - IIRC, Gyanendra was the brother of the previous monarch, who was killed, along with a good portion of his family by his own son... who went bat-s**t crazy with an automatic weapon during cocktail hour at the Palace.
When the smoke cleared, Gyanedra was about the only one of the family left available to assume the throne, evem though he was not particularly popular, or as popular as his brother had been.
To add to what she said, a portion of the public was never quite convinced that Gyanendra was blameless over the murders, and that also dragged his popularity down.
Posted by: Steve White ||
06/05/2008 9:26 Comments ||
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#4
The Crown Prince massacred his family because he couldn't marry the woman he loved, and instead had to marry some relative to keep the royal bloodline pure. Inbred and rotten to the core.
#5
Hard to pinpoint the real villain in this tragedy, but I don't think it's Gyanendra. I blame Prince CrazyKiller and the greedy Commie-Maoist politicians. Can't you just see the smug bureaucrats squabbling over who gets to wear the King's crown? Hamlet, eat your heart out.
A newly released audit report reveals that the popular online power plant emissions ranker Carbon Monitoring for Action, run by the Center for Global Development (CGD), is utilizing erroneous and questionable CO2 emissions data.
The new report, titled "Climate Campaign Built on Questionable Data," provides quantitative evidence cataloguing the depth and breadth of errors and gaps in CARMA's numbers, which have faced criticism before.
The report also raises questions about CGD's lack of disclaimer and disclosure policies. CGD has known of data quality issues since early December of 2007. Given the policy importance of climate management (and the unmistakable role that a rallied public plays in the issue), the auditors provide guidelines for generating reliable and actionable CO2 data.
"The first signal of CARMA's dubious data emerged when Hong Kong's Castle Peak power station publicly refuted CARMA's numbers," said the lead author of the report, environmental consultant Shakeb Afsah.
Afsah, a policy analyst trained at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, is best known for his work with the World Bank, implementing environmental rating programs in Indonesia and the Philippines in the mid nineties. CGD's explanation of the Castle Peak errors led Afsah to suspect broader problems in CARMA's database.
When CARMA was launched on Nov. 14, 2007, Castle Peak presented the group with company data showing electricity production at 14.15 MWh for the year. CARMA had calculated power generation at 28.2 million MWh for Castle Peak - twice what company data showed. The CGD corrected the error.
Its communications department then wrote: "So far, out of the 50,000 plants listed only one meaningful discrepancy has been identified."
NOT TRUE - The audit reveals that 90 percent of CARMA's CO2 estimates have discrepancy with US Government's data if a +-5 percent margin of error is used. And more than half of CARMA's CO2 estimates exceed a 25 percent margin of error when contrasted with the USEPA data. These differences are difficult to reconcile.
Examples abound. USEPA data shows Florida's Manatee plant generating 5.7 million tons of CO2. CARMA sets the number at 11.7 million. The Mountainview Power plant in California, Hays Energy in Texas, RS Nelson in Louisiana. are just a few plants with CO2 emissions values differing by more than one million tons between CARMA and USEPA data.
Given such immense differences, both data sets cannot be correct. The contradictory numbers pose an additional problem: the public has no clear understanding of which ranking system, data set and website should be trusted.
The audit report shows that CARMA's model accounts for the discrepancy between USEPA and CARMA numbers. CARMA's numbers are simply too outlandish. CARMA estimates that the Laramie River power station in Platte County, Wyo. generated 24.8 million MWh of electricity in 2007. The plant's maximum generation capacity, by all accounts, is 70 percent less.
CARMA has other illogical estimates for Laramie River. It shows the coal based power station generating 815 lbs of CO2 for every megawatt hour of electricity. Coal fired power plants generally have carbon intensity ranges between 1800 and 2200 lbs CO2/MWh. CARMA's inordinately low numbers raise red flags for analysts.
These errors impact rankings. USEPA ranks the Laramie River plant 24 among US carbon emitters. CARMA ranks this plant at 58. The discrepancy has serious reputational implications for a company. The Rockport power station in Spencer County, Ind. sits on CARMA's distinctive "Dirty Dozen" list. But the USEPA ranks Rockport at 22, reserving the "Dirty Dozen" label for another company.
Three other plants - the Cumberland plant in Tennessee, the Sherbourne County plant in the Becker, Min. and the Bruce Mansfield plant in Shippingport, Pa.-- are also incorrectly labeled "Dirty Dozen" by CARMA.
The relative ranking of power plants is the driving force behind activism incentives that CARMA aims to create. If this critical information itself is questionable, it raises doubts about CARMA's usability for climate protection initiatives. There are clear signs that CARMA's methodology doesn't resonate well with the CO2 monitoring and verification protocols like those recommended by the World Resources Institute.
CARMA's technical inconsistencies extend beyond CO2 estimates; its carbon intensity data seems implausible. CARMA attributed many natural gas power plants with a carbon intensity of 6,000 lbs/MWh - nearly three times the average for coal-fired plants. Natural gas simply cannot generate so much CO2 during the combustion process.
Nabiel Makarim, former Minster of Environment in Indonesia, who first conceived the idea of environmental rating and disclosure program in 1993, considers accurate information vital. "Data credibility is essential for environmental disclosure programs. Such programs have zero-tolerance standard for inaccuracies."
Stakeholders on both sides of the contentious issue of carbon emissions have read the pre-release draft of the report. They have uniformly expressed support for disclosure and reiterated Makarim's concerns.
"For decision makers to arrive at sensible climate policies, they must have available reliable and verifiable data on which to base legislation and regulations," said Ned Leonard, Vice President for Policy at the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Environmental economists who read the audit report also expressed that CO2 emission rankings should be based on actual measured data and not statistical estimates.
Why have the principles of quality been compromised? The surging popularity of climate issues has created a tempting environment for public recognition, but popularity doesn't preclude the need for accuracy. Terms CARMA employs, like "Power plant voyeurism," stimulate the public around negative information. This is not information-sharing. CARMA's public promises are not being kept.
Even geographical coordinates have been fudged. CARMA claims to have marked the exact locations of 50,000 power plants, but 41 percent of U.S. power plants are missing from their database. The plants that are marked have faulty geographic coordinates, placing, for example, Washington D.C.'s Benning power plant in an apartment complex.
Afsah hopes that his due diligence work results in more disciplined data-based analysis and stronger on-site monitoring and verification of CO2 emissions. He says that CARMA fosters an asymmetric focus on large power plants when in many cases these plants have the lowest carbon intensity.
Smaller power plants with worse carbon intensities get relegated to an irrelevant subset by CARMA. This lopsided effect of CARMA's ranking system could shape distorted policies.
CGD severed contact with the audit's authors after reading an initial draft in December-07, to the authors' distress and disappointment. As a publicly relevant policy instrument CARMA and its backers at CGD should be answerable to those with legitimate concerns.
CGD's behavior raises questions about the accountability channels available to the public when such organizations run policy programs using private data. A public agency would face higher accountability standards.
On Dec. 7 of last year, Dennis de Tray, Vice President for Special Initiatives at CGD, communicated that CARMA's David Wheeler would "deal with many of the issues" raised about the program's methodology. More than five months later, and five days after a pre-release version of the audit hit the internet, CARMA released a methodology paper.
Power engineers quickly confirmed that important operational variables, like the supply stack that reflects the mix of power plants in a region, are not included in CARMA's estimation model. Such omissions inevitably create questionable estimates.
Such concerns were voiced early on by the Australian spokeswoman for the New South Wales Energy Minister Ian MacDonald: "The US study has utilized a number of assumptions, some of which are highly questionable.
For example, the quoted tonnes are inaccurate because they are based on capacity only and ignore actual generation, fuel type and efficiency. Simply using the size of a power plant is not appropriate for comparing rates of emissions.
The study also appears to have assumed how the power stations operate, rather than researching the actual operation data." Now that CARMA's methodology is out, authors of this report look forward to full debate on this matter.
But unfortunately CARMA has again withheld information - the database used to create CARMA's estimation model, comprising information on around 3,000 power plants, remains outside the public domain. As such, the model remains impossible to replicate.
Auditors don't expect perfection, but are CARMA's numbers accurate enough to rank power plants or geographical aggregates? CARMA's discrepancies have impacted county aggregate rankings - Walker County, Ala. is ranked first for CO2 emissions by CARMA, but USEPA ranks it 115. CARMA ranks California at 13, but USEPA sets it at 25.
Similarly Michigan ranks at nine by CARMA but 13 by USEPA. Which ranking is right? The auditors hope that their report initiates a profound discussion on public disclosure and data accuracy.
In the meantime, dedicated CO2 monitors can use data from the USEPA, an institution that has adopted many of the basic steps that would make CARMA more honest and more valuable, including disclosure about where statistical models were used in place of hard data, what the margin of error is in those occasions, and full "open sourcing" of the model so the public can review and critique the data and updates on the database.
#1
OK CARMA, so when are you going to stop lying to us?
Posted by: Richard of Oregon ||
06/05/2008 9:22 Comments ||
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#2
for what its worth, May 08 was substantially cooler than May 07 and in fact, average worldwide temperatures every month since Jan 08 have been below the long term lower troposphere average temps according to the Huntsville algorithm method of temperature estimation (there are other algorithms which don't show as much of a temperature decrease).
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
SYDNEY (AFP) - Australia's military chief on Wednesday cleared entertainer Tania Zaetta of allegations she had sex with soldiers in war-torn Afghanistan and said he would personally apologise to her. Zaetta, who has a budding Bollywood career, was named in a defence briefing note as having slept with elite special forces soldiers while on a concert tour at a military base in the Taliban stronghold of Uruzgan in April.
