Alexa and the Wayback Machine let you snoop for scoops

What did BC Blue report about the last federal election?

When did Bears Rant start posting?

Does smalldeadanimals have more US than Canadian readers?

What got Dr Roy blogging at peak volume last September and October?

How popular is the Prince Arthur Herald?

Alexa.com tracks all the blogs and websites in the world and lets you see a lot for free. Click on "Details" for more and scroll down to the second last section to click on “How did …. Look in the past?” to see the Wayback Machine. It's calendar lets you see how much was happening when, and you can click through to any date they recorded and scroll around to see what else was happening.

Part-time Idiocy; Full-time Obamacare.

Whether as a nation or a single citizen, what you get done is what you manage to get past your scarcest necessary resource. The ultimate bottleneck is a policy that blinds you to your options for getting ahead.  Obamacare is a policy that's blinding the United States.  Their workers are being dumped into part time jobs to feed the Affordable Health Care Act.  This one chart blows my mind. So simple!

h/t Global Economic Analysis

Shouldn't some policy makers be punished for stealing livelihoods?

Obamacare applies to full time workers and this is defined as 30 hours or more per week.

Obamacare costs won't fall on government workers. (The "Thee but not Me" principle).

Outmanoeuvered by blogs, newspapers for sale cheap.

Bezos of Amazon

Today, the Washington Post was bought by the owner of Amazon. (Lost 87% of its value in ten years)

The Boston Globe was resold for $70 million the other day though NYT had bought it for almost a billion.

The LA Times is for sale.

Newsweek was sold for one dollar.

The Chicago Tribune is on offer.

A Mexican billionaire put 1/4 billion into the New York Times.
Conrad Black sold The National Post to Izzy Asper in 2000. (pre-blog era).  And so it goes.

Biased news is the norm

but so is change.  The big guys finish their day in the sun.

Readers at Blogging Tories probably feel the media give little voice to their priorities.

That will change when it has to, when the money runs out for Plan A on the left.

Re Washington Post sale:  The newspaper, not the whole congolomerate was sold and it was sold without pension liabilities for past employees.  Bezos bought as a private individual, not as owner of Amazon.  The only hopeful thing in his announcement is that news starts with what's important to readers, not what is important to the reporters and editors.
    Added:  Uh Oh!

"The Post is now Bezos’ latest political tool in a crony capitalist effort to work with the Obama administration. How else to explain President Obama puzzling decision last week to roll out his corporate tax plan at an Amazon.com fulfillment center?"

Another update for National Review Online:  "Fish don't know they're wet": "They just see liberalism as the natural state of thinking people...And that’s why, despite Bezos’s business acumen, the Post will likely continue down the path of clueless, parochial liberalism, and keep hemorrhaging readers".

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.  

Self-publishing makes owning a press cheap and creates competition for the old media.

Protect your blog!

Cottage in Paradise, Vancouver Island.

 On a tiny lane in Brentwood Bay on Vancouver Island, someone's dream came true.  A few feet behind the camera is a bank of wild blackberries and a short drop to a sheltered harbour on the sea.

Al Qaeda Victory: US lowers flag in the Muslim world.

The US is becoming the laughing stock of the world, announcing 21 embassy shutdowns because of Al Qaeda internet chatter about attacks.  Of course they should take protective measures but why did Obama put this scaredy-cat message out in public?

This is the best bang-for-your-buck terrorism I have ever seen.

The terrorists (including those recently sprung from jail) can head home, Mission Accomplished.Daniel Pipes has put the idea forward already.

"I find this pre-emptive cringing unworthy of a great country, even humiliating. Why do we allow a bunch of extremist thugs to close us down, rather than the reverse?"  (hat tip to Smallldeadanimals for the link)

Link to Al Masry, the belly dancer's mocking song and lyrics about Obama's unwanted interference in Egypt, favouring the Sunnis and the Muslim Brotherhood.

 Canada grumbles about being next door to the elephant.  The US is losing the will to protect our hemisphere.  Think about it.

AlMasry (the Belly Dancer) mocks Obama and his support for the Muslim Brotherhood. Video and lyrics in English.

Sama ElMasry's rant and dance.
US has lost ground since Obama's great pivot to Islam speech in Cairo when he first came to power.



"You Obama - Your father, your mother"

Ole Ole
AlSissi has dismissed Morsi
Ole Ole
AlSissi has dismissed Morsi
Hey .... you Sayed
Morsi won't see the feast
Hey... you Sayed
Morsi won't see the feast

You Obama, your father, mother
And all the others
Listen to me Obama
Our army is very strong
You Obama, your father, mother
And all the others
Behave yourself
Our army is very strong

Hey Obama ... Hey Obama
Hey Obama, supports the terrorism  
Traitor like the Brotherhood members
Obama says it's a coup
That's not your business dirty man
Obama says it's a coup
That's not your "father, mother" business

And you, Patterson, stop messing
Old bitch woman.

Hey Obama, your father, mother,
You want us to release Morsi
Hey Obama you are stupid bad man
You want us to release Morsi
Stop this or I will stab you.
Why then you told Mubarak
To leave immediately?
Hey!
Hey Obama, your father, mother
You threaten us with the US Aid
Fuck it and fuck you
You are a jerk
Obama
You threaten us with the US Aid
Your ambassador is very wicked woman
AlSissi has beaten you
And Egyptian people supported him.

Hey Obama, your father, mother
You meet AlNoor Islamic Party
  HA HA HA!
Now we know all the secrets.
Egyptians are not idiots
You meet AlNoor Islamic Party
This party is sneaky and menless (sic)
Al Noor, Brotherhood and Aboul Fotooh are the same.

Hey Obama, your father, mother
Hey Obama
Be polite.
Hey Obama, your father, mother
You and terrorists,
Listen to me Obama
Our army is very strong.
Hey Obama, your father, mother
And all the disgusting guys,
We are the people tell you
You can't fool us.
You tried to play it
But you can't play this wicked game
With us "cause we are the Alfa (?)..

(Last verse was not translated on the You Tube Video).
Why not?
Some delusional thoughts about the Egyptian army are included.

Bear does takeout, walks dumpster backwards out of yard

Are bears getting smarter?  h/t Powerline.
Half way through this two minute video, the bear flips back the dumpster lid.  Standing on its back legs, the bear then manoeuvers the dumpster out of a corner and backs up, still standing like a man, until the dumpster is off-screen out of the lit area behind the Edelweiss restaurant.

Vegan alert: Mass herds of meat animals will save the planet and reverse climate change.

Before and after pictures will stun you.
Massed herds of grazing animals moved to mimic nature will heal grasslands and stop desertification.

This is bigger than fossil fuels for climate change and the fix is cheap.
Big government not required.

Before is on the left, after is on the right less than ten years later.
In the second pair of photos, the broken branches are made by elephants that have returned.
In the third pair, the audience broke into spontaneous applause. Even with the arrow marking a hillock, you would hardly know it is the same place.

Desertifying lands

Some humid lands always bounce back but marginal land with seasonal rains turns into desert unless the plant growth is composted in time for the next season. Marginal land is all the sandy areas on the world map above.   Ten thousand years of small herd pastoral exploitation (goats, cattle and sheep) and accelerating deterioration in the last hundred years created most of these conditions.  Parklands set aside in the US and South Africa went downhill faster when cattle or elephants were removed. 

Fierce predators bunched grazers into massive herds.  Those herds chowed down the fresh growth, churned the soil, left dung and urine and litter on the ground and then moved on because the food was used or soiled for that year.  As kids we walked barefoot and know for a fact that bare ground is burning hot in July and grass is quite cool.  Multiply those little hot patches by billions and we have climate change.   Mimic the massive moving herds,  capture the seasonal rainfall, and transform the lands. Climate change is reversed and living plants and animals repopulate the land.   Fifteen million hectares have already switched to this grazing method.

The notes are abstracted from Alan Savory's TED Talk.   This is affordable hope for a cooler green world.

We used to have buffalo.

Canadians eating horsefood, not kiwifruit says New Zealand visitor.

Our friends were appalled at the kiwifruit sold here in BC - small or unshapely.   They were further shocked to see these same kiwis were bagged with the Zespri label which is the sole exporter for New Zealand.  The fruit looks pretty good to me.  Both assured me  horse food was a best case scenario.

For sale in Sidney BC

There's quite a bit of anger in Kiwi Land that others were allowed to take New Zealand stock and start growing it in places like British Columbia without the same grading rules.
Update:  Apparently root stock was first exported to Italy and Israel with the idea this would promote kiwifruit but in the off-season when it wouldn't compete with NZ fruit.

Kiwi orchard on Saanich Peninsula,
Vancouver Island.  Not yet ripe August 2nd 

This may be like Chianti. The best grade is rarely exported from Italy.

Sex check for public speaking

If you have spinach on your teeth, half the audience will go deaf until you remove it.  A scientific survey of my wife and daughter confirms this fact.

Why is that?
The idiot explanation is that women are shallow and overemphasize appearance.   The genius explanation is that more women expect to see your whole life reflect outwardly what you claim inwardly.  The tooth defect points to a deflect in relational skill which casts grave doubt on the value of your message.

What I know for sure is that I should never stand up in public to express views on politics and human nature without asking my wife to check that the shirt is tucked in, grease spots are not present, and the spinach has been removed.  Politicians and public speakers take note.

(My wife vetted this posting with one comment: "That's disgusting!"  
Thinking the text erred, I asked for an explanation.
"The spinach", she replied.)

Calvin & Hobbes: Bafflegab Primer for Politicians

Inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning.

hat  tip to Powerline  "I'm a huge supporter of decriminalization of marijuana" is the fuzzy version of  "Decriminalize marijuana".     The "Affordable Care Act" is the Unaffordable Care Act.  And so on.

3D Statue yourself for $300

This is not a real person.  This is a statue of a girl printed from a file for $300.  She can edit her hair before it's printed.  h/t Instapundit.

US-Canada Bridge is private property.

The Saint Lawrence River divides Canada and the US.  There is one Canada-to-US bridge however that does not.  It is private property!

Photo taken on a boat cruise out of Kingston, Ontario.   Canada is on your left.

Zero Avenue

There's a little known road down the border of two great tribes, the Canadians and the Americans.  A bit of ditch and occasional cameras are the only marker between them on this stretch between Abbotsford and Surrey BC.  The pictures will remind you the border is firstly in tribespeople's heads and only then mapped on the ground.  
     (The first picture has the 0 Avenue signpost with a US-Canada border monument visible just to the right.  The fellow bent over in the blue shirt is at home in America. There is no fence.)

Zero Avenue at 240th St.

Do you want that letter to the US to go airmail or ground mail?  It's the difference between placing it in front of your feet or giving it a little toss. If you put your hand to the back of yourmail slot, you may have to go through customs.  Frankly, it looks like the mail box may be across the border!

When I look at the raspberries and blueberries and corn and grapes, tended and harvested the same way by the same sort of people on both sides of this paved lane, I want to know why such a line exists somewhere between every tribe on earth.













In the third picture, a Washington pickup is driving by. In the background is a raspberry cane shaker that straddles the row of canes.  Ride-along workers put the berries in boxes.

MORE?  See my photo of the only private bridge between the United States and Canada.

Jail-Breakin' Jihadis Rebuild Al Qaeda and Co.

Benghazi break out.

Quick and cheap jail attacks sprang almost two thousand terrorists in one week - Iraq, Libya, and now Pakistan.

July 27  "Mass jailbreak from Libyan prison frees 1200"  BBC
July 28   (Reuters: "Mass Jail Break in Pakistan" frees 250.)

Pakistan jail after the guests left.

"In an operation carried out with military-like precision, Taliban fighters disguised as police and armed with bombs broke 250 prisoners out of a Pakistan jail on Tuesday with the help of what appeared to be insider informants".   (Details added:  100 armed men, 7 suicide bombers, machine guns were involved. In another report:  "Police officers and constables had hidden in sewer lines".

Attackers approach Abu Ghraib

July 26:  Mass jailbreak from Iraq's Abu Ghraib:  This one involved suicide bomber cars, gunmen, mortars.

Iraqi officials say that some 400 al-Qaeda fighters are still at large over this week’s high-profile jailbreak from Abu Ghraib. Though some may stay in Iraq, analysts say the smart money is on most of them going to Syria to join the rebellion there.

April 27:   500 escape in Afghanistan using keys, cell phones, masterminded by Taliban commanders.
June 8:      Dozen escape using explosives in Afghanistan.
If you were the bad guys, you'd do the same.  Your enemy has wasted millions of treasure to round up the prisoners and you get them almost all back for a couple hours work and some thinking time.

The good news:
Some were just hard core criminals escaping with the crowd.

Added: I feel angry towards Barack Obama for making sure that gains in governance and influence in Iraq and the middle east are being dismantled while Iraq cosies up to Iran.  A great treasure in lives and wealth was flushed away.  Arabs will suffer more for it than Americans in the coming years.  Ditto for his support for Sunni Arab movements (read "Muslim Brotherhood") in Egypt and elsewhere.

All the boats in the world tracked for one day in video

This haunting video (100 seconds) makes a movie from outer space of GPS tracks for all major vessels on earth for one day, following them through the straights of Malacca, the Suez Canal and into Panama.  Credit to Nautilus, information generated by FleetMon Satellite AIS and FleetMon Explorer. Turn off the sound.


See also all the planes on earth for one day visualized from space.


Daily World Air Traffic from Heidi De Vries on Vimeo.

Crops make their own fertilizer if seeds are sprayed with good bacteria.

Expect to see N-Fix treated seeds within 3 years.
This is a gamechanger - more crops for far less money and energy.  It's green (no pollution).  No GM manipulation is involved.  Reported at ScienceDaily.com.

Nitrogen is free everywhere in the air but only the pea family seemed to harvest it for fertilizer. Most successful  crops depended on people spreading tons of fertilizer.  The legume secret is root nodules with colonies of nitrogen-fixing bacteria.  The ground-breaking news is that a nitrogen-fixing bacterium found in sugar cane is happy to colonize all the major crop plants. Just spray some bacteria on the seeds.  The plants grow up making their own nitrogen fertilizer.

Professor Ted Cocking

Professor Cocking of the University of Nottingham calls the product "N-FIX".
Peter Blezard of Azotic Technologies says, "It has enormous potential to feed more people in many of the poorer parts oft he world, while at the same time, dramatically reducing the amount of synthetic nitrogen produced in the world."

Camera on booster rocket follows space shuttle to the edge of space and back to splashdown.

Stunning video and sound is compiled from two shuttle launches.  Every detail shows from first ignition, passing the sound barrier,  booster separation, burn off on the leading edge, spinning at the edge of space, tumbling through the clouds, parachutes deployed and splashdown. Seven wonderful minutes.

Print stuff on your home 3D printer and save thousands. See the list. Update: UPS too!

Big.

Small and cute

It's already cheaper to make some of your own stuff on a 3-D printer than to buy it in the store.  Shopping in Canada is about to be re-invented. You can get the printer ($300-1900), set it up in half an hour and start making stuff.  Science Daily News reports on a test run.   Twenty widgets that would have cost several hundred to over a thousand to buy at the store, were downloaded for free from Thingiverse and printed for $18 in materials.

Feast your eyes on the Thingiverse website pictures.  Click through to the fashion, gadget and hobby pictures.  (The free stuff is for home use only).  I'm still thinking, "Is this for real?".  It's for real.

You're going on a picnic so you print some plastic knives and spoons.
You want a 3 1/2 inch wood screw with a  3/16 inch shaft and a 5/8" hex head.  Print it in plastic.

You'd like a crash-resistant case for your Samsung Galaxy S3.  Print it.  Home made lego lookalikes for Junior?  Frames for your specs?  A chess set?  You want a set of matched boxes to store pins and buttons.  Download and print.
You'd like a holder to clip a water bottle to the bike frame? Push "Start".  The fleches on your dart set are broken?  Print some more.  Spare copy of your house key in hard plastic? You broke the corner off the plastic on the electric egg beater.  Re-print.
You need a custom fitted prosthesis?  Collaborate with the software guy and print it at home.
A holder for screw bits and a 10 mm wrench (in blue plastic)?  Edit file, press Control P.
Landscape models for an architect?  Already done.

Some of this is already on Thingiverse.
A few years from now there will be hundreds of thousands of thing downloads.
Access to reprint files will be part of product support when you buy a new gadget.
Small businesses will stock a lot of stuff in a print out file, available in a few hours without having to courier
it in from Toronto or Vancouver.



You can buy them:

Printed in one piece
and the parts move.

Cubify  (Available at Staples from June 2013)
Price comparison page  (About 100 units priced from $200 to $2000)
http://www.3dprinterscanada.com/  (Print the plastic shell with rubbery buttons for a TV remote.


Some things aren't available that would need molten metal.
But they have been printing human organ shape and printing live cells into the matrix.  And then there's copyright!

Get ready.  Your smartphone was just a start.  The 3D sequel is as big or bigger and will change how our economy works.
UPDATE: UPS is testing 3D service 
UPDATE:  3D Statue of yourself that looks real for $300
UPDATE:  Expectations are overhyped.  Written by a guy who prints lots of 3D stuff.
UPDATE:  A 1911 pistol made of laser deposited sintered metal, fired 50 shots so far.

$325,000 Hamburger grown in a lab. UPDATE: Taste test

The first taste test of lab-grown hamburger meat is coming next week in London.  Nicknamed the "Shamburger", the muscle tissue was grown at Maastricht University.

Lab meat

As a kid I wondered where the meat on a cow was located, not realizing meat is muscle with a bit of fat. Although the idea of lab-meat grosses me out, I think the day is coming when it will make perfect sense and taste first rate on a barbecue.  The meat can be grown using less energy than a cow would do.  For those of you alarmed about stuff in the atmosphere, there would be no cow farts either.     Meat is meat and if it can be grown from the same rudiments that creatures use, then it can be perfected and tasty.

UPDATE:
"I was expecting the texture to be more soft... there is quite some intense taste; it's close to meat, but it's not that juicy. The consistency is perfect, but I miss salt and pepper.
"This is meat to me. It's not falling apart"

For other opinions and the news that Google funded the experiment, click here at the BBC. 

.

Rising grey tide means the future will be "conservative but not necessarily Conservative".

There are more older people everywhere and older people usually have some property and long term relationships to hang onto, a disinclination to riot in the streets, and have a less exalted view of their ability. The school of experience tempers their opinion. This adds up to conservative voting patterns. They may not end up in the Conservative party.  The NDP will be looking a little more conservative each year too.

Seniors hum along now to the rebel rock and roll tunes of my youth.  They often have a smartphone, holiday in other countries, sport a google identity and wear joggers instead of oxfords. Which party will feel like home to these folks?

Rising tide.

As Michael Medved wrote after the US 2012 election:

"Forget 2012: Long-Term Demographic Trends Are Favorable to Republicans.   Democrats may have won this time, but they shouldn’t celebrate for too long—America is growing older fast, and older folks reliably vote Republican."

Some Winnipeg voters.

Seniors are the reliable voters who turn out in all weathers.     From the Elections Canada website:

Turnout steadily increased with age from 38.8% for ages 18–24 to 75.1% for ages 65–74 and then declined to 60.3% for those 75 and older. This same general pattern has been seen in every general election since 2004, when these studies began.

And which are you?

From Punch magazine 
in 1896 comes a cartoon explaining
the difference between Tories and Radicals.

Canadiana gem: "What nationality were your parents?"

Grandfather KD Woodworth volunteered to join the Royal Navy in WW1.
As he arrived from Canada, the immigration officer asked KD's nationality.
"Canadian.
"There's no such thing. What nationality were your parents?"
"Canadian."
"Well, what were their parents before that?"
"Canadian, and Before That They Were Monkeys."

Photo of the actual vessel

The Woodworth family came to New England right after the Mayflower and as loyal citizens of Good King George, moved to modern day Nova Scotia after the American Revolution, granted land at the expense of Acadians.   In Canada you find some loyalty to the British crown but it goes only so far.

Men are reasonably intelligent but act stupid about sex.

 "All men can think about is sex" is a common putdown.  Ladies, this is a feature, not a bug.  If men didn't have the add-on stupid factor, you'd be paying to get pregnant. Harlequin romances about being cherished and madly desired would be found in antiquarian bookstores.  Without the "stupid about sex override" kicking in, men would be much harder for women to manage.

This humourous video clip claims dildos were hunted to extinction.  That wouldn't be the case.

Phases of the moon influence sleep. (Trust, but verify)

Here's a writeup at Science Daily News:

"The lunar cycle seems to influence human sleep, even when one does not 'see' the moon and is not aware of the actual moon phase," says Christian Cajochen of the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel.   ...     The data show that around the full moon, brain activity related to deep sleep dropped by 30 percent. People also took five minutes longer to fall asleep, and they slept for twenty minutes less time overall. Study participants felt as though their sleep was poorer when the moon was full, and they showed diminished levels of melatonin, a hormone known to regulate sleep and wake cycles.

This is interesting.
But remember, the phase of the moon tells you how much of the moon is lit up at night, not how much of the moon there is out there.  Perhaps the idea is that when sun and moon are on opposite sides of the earth, their gravity fields are working against each other.  I remember how excited I was to find out if people had coloured auras and if the position of stars affected character and does putting a used razor blade inside a pyramid shape re-sharpen the blade.  Biorhythms were the rage.  Many anglers swear by the sollunar tables.   It's our nature to want to believe this stuff prematurely.

Bring on the documented research.

Too much power like piss on the lawn

Normal where untouched.  Green and lush on the edges.  Useless to everyone with the full load in the middle.

Moderate exercise of power promotes growth.  Excess power in the hands of individuals kills it.

I would pay for Status. Why aren't Native Nations selling tax-exempt citizenship?

Don't fight the sovereign Native Nation movement --- Buy into it.  One can become a Swiss citizen with a customized tax treaty.  Why aren't the Indians trying to sell citizenship too? If they are sovereign, they are sovereign. Class A rights would include lifetime exemption from income tax.  Class B would be the simple GST exemption. An accountant can quickly calculate the present value of a future stream of tax payments and suggest the right price.  Poverty on the reserve doesn't have to happen.  (If you don't like this idea, try the Fraser Institute's plea for property rights on the reserve as the cheapest, simplest way to increase wealth and reduce poverty).

Here's Harper being made an honorary Indian.
Why not be made the real thing?

Maybe I'll look for an eagle feather, change my name to "He who goes laughing" and email an offer to Canadian bands..

I much prefer the simpler idea of chucking the Indian Act and all of us sharing one equal status. Become full normal citizens of one of the wealthiest and most attractive lands the world has ever seen.




Footnote:Switzerland: "For 150 years, Switzerland has also offered tax breaks for foreign millionaires to boost tourism, making them exempt from an income tax and allowing them to pay a flat fee."
Perhaps you'd rather buy  Caribbean Citizenship: 

Wealth: The median Canadian adult has twice the worth of the median American

This chart from the Global Wealth Data Book shows Australia's middle class on top, Canada in twelfth place and the US down at number 27. (Hat tip to Zero Hedge).  Houses are the biggest asset class for most people.  US house prices have taken a sharp correction since 2008 but Canadian house prices are arguably still in a bubble as long as the rent you can charge for a property is less than what it costs per month to own it.
   The chart title, "We're Number 27!" is Zero Hedge's lament.

Global Wealth Databook 2012 from Credit Suisse.

Huffington Post (cited at Zero Hedge link) writes:

"The most telling comparative measurement is median wealth (per adult). It describes the amount of wealth accumulated by the person precisely in the middle of the wealth distribution -- fifty percent of the adult population has more wealth, while fifty percent has less.  You can't get more middle than that."

Whales almost swallow people. It's about sardines, not Jonah.

Divers, sardine hordes, porpoises, humpback whales, gulls, the ocean boiling with food and competition to eat your fill.  Stunning closeup video shows massive whales rising from the sea, jaws agape, missing by "inches" the California divers.



Divers joke " You really have to do more to clean that wet suit."

The larger article at grindtv.com
hat tip small dead animals.