If this isn't a blatantly partisan attempt to disenfranchise just the people most likely to be angry with the incumbent party, I don't know what is.

Wasn't it quite a long time ago that this country extended voting rights from landowners to all citizens?

This was a pleasant surprise: organic food is not only more sustainably grown, it's actually healthier. I had always been rather sceptical about such claims, and saw the selling point of organic food as simply the hope that it fucked up rivers less than chemical-intensive agriculture, but apparently it also contains significantly larger ( Read more... )

Some amazing 21st Century achievements of humanity:

• Fireproofing and stain-guarding harbour seals. The same chemicals accumulate in our bodies - keep this up and we'll be invincible!
• Increasing the ratio of girls:boys among new births. Lucky boys; maybe the girls will have to move to China.
• Put Greenland on defrost - another few decades of this, ( Read more... )

How to gain a climate consensus, by George Schultz

I think he's spot-on, what do you think?

In other news, the P-Patch Post came today, with my article on the front page. It's only a community newsletter with a circulation of a thousand or less 1700, but it's very satisfying seeing my words in print all the same.

lazy post for today.

There's an unusually good wind power story in the PI: Wind power catches on; towers not so popular. I've been working on related things through the summer, and it's nice to see this being covered sensibly, even if the headline comes across as rather more negative than the story. The organisation I'm working for has a strong ( Read more... )

I only just found out about this: the Big Dig involved deliberately freezing the groundwater, to make waterlogged soil stable for excavation.

Jose just sent round [and critiqued] an article from the Times, claiming among other things that driving around is greener than walking. It's a highly irritating article, full of spurious claims based on evaluating one side of an argument carefully but accepting the other unquestioned, but I think the appearance of articles like this is a warning ( Read more... )