We’re all going to die anyway, so why not bring back the dinosaurs?

Scientists who have brought to life the extinct DNA of a Tasmanian Tiger using a mouse embryo say the same technique could be used to bring back dinosaurs.

Of course such attempts will come under fire by people who believe scientists shouldn’t play God. Such an argument was well put by Andrew of Adelaide in the Herald Sun comments section who wrote:

“These scientists seem more concerned about being ‘The First’ rather than asking the obvious question ‘Why are we even doing this?’ How ethical are these experiments? how many freaks will be created in pursuit of this mad mans dream? Scientists are playing God once again with this Frankenstein gone wrong mentality.”

Andrew has a point, but to me he answers his question in the first line - yes it should be done because scientists can! Despite being extinct for millions of years dinosaurs are still among many children’s favourite animals, so how fantastic would it be to see them for real?

What can go wrong?

What’s right with this picture?

Barak Obama addressed a crowd of 75,000 on Portland Oregon yesterday. The first thing I noticed with the pics from the event is that there is a hell of a lot of “white” skin in that crowd.

MK shows what a stupid racist prick he is

MK, the fucktard’s fucktard over at A Western Heart has done one of those (to quote TISM) “I might be a cunt but I’m not a fucking cunt” posts which has a go at the horrific treatment of Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa.

MK writes how mobs of black South Africans, murdered, beat and looted from migrants, who they blamed for unemployment and rising food prices.

Fair enough, it’s a horrible state of affairs, not that MK feels sorry for the Zimbabweans, who are black after all.

The point of the post is simply to say “See lefties, that’s what you call real xenophobia, we supposed xenophobes here in the west have nothing on these bloody savages.”

So his brand of xenophobia (which includes referring to black people as savages - I bet he never used that language after the Cronulla riots) is OK because it doesn’t resort to violence. What he doesn’t understand that the fetid, racial hatred he espouses is one step away from the sort of bloodshed witnessed here.

While I don’t condone the violence in Johannesburg, it’s fair to say it was driven by desperation and the migrant workers became easy targets. While abhorrent, it’s a lot easier to explain than the rantings of some shithead blogger whose only reason for being a xenophobic racist cunt is the fact he doesn’t like the colour of certain people’s skin.

Note: I would have happily posted my opinion of MK and his post at A Western Heart, but I am banned from commenting. I welcome any comments from him or anyone who agrees with his views.

Either we’re fucked, or Tim Flannery has gone crazy-ape bonkers

Outspoken climate change campaigner Tim Flannery says we should pump sulphur into the atmosphere to stave off environmental collapse in the next FIVE years.

Flannery says sulphur could be inserted into the earth’s stratosphere to keep out the sun’s rays and slow global warming, a process called global dimming.

He said the process, which can be achieved by adding sulphur to jet fuel would create global dimming through contrails would even change the colour of the sky. Me thinks it would lead to acid rain too.

Aviation, which many people blame for greenhouse gas already contributes to global dimming - when all flights were banned in the US in the days after the September 11 attacks, the mean temperature around the United States shot up by a very significant one degree. 

While global dimming may be seen as the opposite of global warming  and thus a good thing, it is has it’s own negative effect on the environment in that it reduces the sun’s capacity to evaporate water by around 10 per cent, leading to less rainfall - some scientists believe it is global dimming which led to disastrous droughts in Ethiopia during the 1980s.

Flannery, admits the consequences of pumping sulphur into the atmosphere to increase global dimming are unknown - this to me sounds like a cane toad solution on a Biblical scale.

I don’t seek to denigrate Dr Flannery or be a climate change believer or sceptic - though I reckon he has certainly given some ammunition to the latter here.  However, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Earth has frozen over before, and it has been warmer than it is now - Antarctica had rain forests.

Whether or not the global warming trend is man-made or paert of a natural cycler is an argument I won’t get into here. But I do believe the planet will sort itself out and mankind has to be more flexible to nature’s evolution.

We built farms and towns to suit climatic conditions at a particular time, maybe we need to accept that this was always going to be a moveable feast,