Tuesday morning catchup

The usual story, too many open Firefox tabs and not enough time

1) Lew Rockwell has analysed some of Barack Obama's scholastic work from his time at Harvard. He's not ery comlimentary:

'The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.

...

Although the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times. In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen ... the other half are selected ... "

Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space.'

2) Yahoo News reports that:

'Palestinians in Gaza have acquired anti-aircraft and anti-tank rockets from Libya during its six-month civil war, enlarging but not significantly improving their arsenal, Israeli officials said on Monday.

While the rebellion against Muammar Gaddafi has stirred concern abroad about the fate of Libya's aging chemical weapons stockpiles, Israel has no indication Hamas or other Palestinian factions have sought these, the officials said.

Instead, Israeli officials have detected an inflow of SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), said one official, describing an overland supply route that opened up between eastern Libya -- after it fell to the rebels -- and the Gaza Strip via Egypt.'

3) MSNBC reports that many Americans are stocking up on incandescent lightbulbs in the run-up to them being phased out. I have a large stash of 60W pearl lightbulbs that should last me 10 years or so...


4) WND
are still pushing the Barack Obama birth certificate story. It's another interesting story but I am not sure how many people are listening!


5) James Cridland wonders 'How big is Murdoch’s “stranglehold” on UK news media?' There's some interesting statistics, here's a few:

'Overall reach
How much of our news does Murdoch control, then? It’s difficult to put a figure on the above; but Sky News and online are small, and his newspapers have a roughly 20% share of all the population. Only Sky News’s deal with commercial radio boosts Murdoch’s news ‘reach’ to around 60%, and there is likely to be considerable overlap between commercial radio listeners and newspaper readers. (Commercial radio’s output is also not mainly news).

Who is bigger than Murdoch?
There’s only one contender as a bigger provider of news than Rupert Murdoch… the BBC.

Newspapers
The BBC do not operate printed newspapers.

Television news
The BBC News Channel is watched, weekly, by 15% of the population.
Additionally, BBC News content is carried on BBC ONE, BBC TWO, BBC THREE and BBC FOUR. Just BBC ONE itself attracts 83% of the population each week.
BARB Jun 27 – Jul 03 2011

Radio news
The BBC owns 50 radio stations, and BBC News content is on almost all of them (only BBC Radio 4 Extra carries no news).
BBC radio is listened-to by 68% of the population each week.
RAJAR Q1 2011

Online news
The BBC’s website attracts 19.5m adults each week – 38% of the population. BBC News makes up a high percentage of BBC website traffic.
BBC Annual Report 2010/2011

Overall reach
The BBC Annual Report says it best: “across all platforms 81% of [UK] adults consumed BBC News every week”
BBC Annual Report 2010/2011

So – Murdoch media reaches around 65% of the population, and BBC News reaches 81%.

However you examine these figures, it’s clear that the influence of the BBC is considerably larger than anything Murdoch is putting out, even after a BSkyB buyout.'

6) John Phelan at The Commentator also soes't think too much of the claims re Murdoch's 'monopoly':
'The idea that Rupert Murdoch has a monopoly of British media or is even close to getting one is nonsense. According to an Ofcom report into News International’s bid for BSkyB, television accounts for seventy-three percent of the news people receive and seventy-percent of that comes from the BBC.

In internet and radio the BBC is similarly dominant. News International, by contrast, accounts for less than thirty percent of newspapers read and Sky News accounts for just six percent of television news.

...

There’s a good reason why the left might choose to regulate Murdoch rather than compete with him; they aren’t much good at it. The BBC certainly provides stiff competition but then it is funded by a compulsory levy on all TV and radio consumers whether they listen to the BBC or not, a luxury Murdoch doesn’t have.


7) Human Events reveals that 'Global Warming Link to Drowned Polar Bears Melts Under Searing Fed Probe'. It's a long article, here's an extract:

'Polar bears drowning in an Alaskan sea because the ice packs are melting—it’s the iconic image of the global warming debate.

But the validity of the science behind the image—presented as an ignoble testament to our environment in peril by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth​—is now part of a federal investigation that has the environmental community on edge.

Special agents from the Interior Department​’s inspector general's office are questioning the two government scientists about the paper they wrote on drowned polar bears, suggesting mistakes were made in the math and as to how the bears actually died, and the department is eyeing another study currently underway on bear populations.

Biologist Charles Monnett, the lead scientist on the paper, was placed on administrative leave July 18. Fellow biologist Jeffrey Gleason, who also contributed to the study, is being questioned, but has not been suspended.

The disputed paper was published by the journal Polar Biology in 2006, and suggests that the “drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open-water periods continues.”

It galvanized the environmental movement that led to the bear’s controversial listing in 2008 as threatened, and it is now protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Although the four dead bears cited in the paper were observed from 1,500 feet during flights over the Beaufort Sea, and the carcasses were never recovered or examined, Gleason told investigators it is likely the creatures drowned in a sudden windstorm that produced 30-knot winds, not for lack of an ice pack.

“We never mentioned global warming in the paper,” Gleason told the investigators, according to the transcript.

“But it’s inferred,” responded investigator Eric May. “That’s why the world took it up as a global warming tangent.”

Gleason told investigators that reaction to his and Monnett’s paper was overblown and spun out of context.

“I think these sorts of things tend to mushroom, and the interpretation gets popularized,” Gleason said. “Something very small turns into this big snowball coming down the mountain, and that's, I think, what happened with this paper.”

Gleason concedes that the study had a major impact on the controversial listing of the bear as an endangered species because of global warming.

“As a side note, talking about my former supervisor, he actually sent me an e-mail at one point saying, ‘You’re the reason polar bears got listed,’” Gleason said.

Monnett now manages $50 million in studies as part of his duties as a wildlife biologist with the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

Investigators are also examining Monnet’s procurement of one of those research studies on polar bears conducted by Canada's University of Alberta, as well as the “disclosure of personal relationships and preparation of the scope of work,” according to a July 29 memo from the Interior Department's inspector general’s office.'

Do read it all, and as always it's best to 'follow the money'.