How boring life would be without reading about new "studies" and new "research"

Gotta wonder how much money was wasted on the doggie waste.

Benjamin Fearnow writing at CBSLocal:
....Dogs are quite particular    about where they choose to relieve themselves — not only do they defecate in direction with the north-south axis, but they also are sensitive to slight changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.
A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Zoology finds that a wide range of canines preferred to “excrete with the body being aligned along the north-south axis” under “calm magnetic field conditions.” The nearly 37 breeds of dogs studied were found to completely avoid urination or defecation along an east-west direction.
The study is the first time that magnetic sensitivity was proven in dogs, although previous research has shown that many mammals “spontaneously align their body axis” with Earth’s magnetic field in a diverse range of behavioral contexts.
Examination of 70 dogs over two years – including 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations – revealed that dogs who were not leashed or influenced in movement were naturally inclined to relieve themselves in “axial orientation” with the earth’s magnetic field.....

"Frost Quakes" in Ontario

I suppose these kind of quakes are now more likely every winter, as in my opinion, our Earth has stepped into a mini-Ice Age.

James Nye writing at DailyMail:
...Canada is so cold residents are experiencing loud booms caused by 'frost quakes'

While America collectively freaks out over their impending 'polar vortex', Canada is changing the game when it comes to cold weather phenomenon as reports of 'frost quakes' emerge from around Toronto and across Ontario.



Indeed, as temperatures drop overnight to around -4f around the city hundreds of people are being startled by hearing large booms - causing them to think their homes are being broken into or gunshots are being fired.
In fact, they are merely hearing the after-effects of the frost quakes - or cryoseism - which are more commonly found on a glacier in the polar regions..........

Frack, Frack, Frack !

I haven't listened to the podcast as yet .... but I know it will be fun.

Podcast  from TelegraphUK:
....  Just when you thought the debate over fracking    couldn't get any more heated, the Telegram has crammed Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party, into a small studio with James Delingpole. Plus our global economics guru Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Then it's on to the serious stuff. Dr Tim Stanley and Dr Damian Thompson discuss whether Peter Capaldi's Doctor Who can possibly attain the bouffant heights of Jon Pertwee.

listen to ‘Fears of fracking and memories of Jon Pertwee’ on Audioboo

Something is not right in the world of honey bees

Some researchers first noticed that bees were dying off in Japan and as a result many of the cherry blossom trees there were also showing a "fading off".  Some say only one species of the bees, the European honey bee, is affected.  Is it because of the pesticides or something else?  Is this another kind of an environmental funding scheme or for real?  And, if really happening,  what would the implications mean  to our food supply?

The first vid is from 2007 .... so this problem of  bees dying off  in their millions has been going on for a while.  It now looks like Ontario's beekeepers have also been hard hit.

Beekeeper John Van Blyderveen  is troubled by the silence in his laneway in Ontario's Oxford County.

The familiar summertime buzz of bees hovering over the lush cherry blossom trees is noticeably absent. The flowers sit untouched.

"This is extremely unusual for this being a bee farm, there are no bees here," Van Blyderveen says. "This is really sad."

This increasingly familiar scene, which is playing out across North America and Europe, worries beekeepers, farmers and scientists who have been tracking the collapse of honeybee colonies over the past decade.
In the process, two main camps have emerged, vigorously debating the root causes of the decline.


Some scientists and insecticide companies suggest the bees are being overrun by an infestation of mites, while other observers suggest seeds coated with neonicotinoid insecticide – or "neonics" – are to blame.

On July 9, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne announced she will convene a working group – made up of a range of experts – to study this issue and provide recommendations.

It's a puzzle with huge implications. Bees and other pollinators are responsible for ensuring most fruit and vegetable crops around the world mature into food.

Most sources suggest about one-third of the food we eat is reliant on pollinators, and Bloomberg Business Week estimates bee pollination affects "$200 billion worth of crops annually."

The logical Mr. Rex Murphy: "Oil sands are a triumph for the human 'environment'."

That's telling the knuckleheads what's what as only Rex Murphy can !!!   Great piece of writing ... and you gotta go read the whole thing. The vid below on environmentalists is from 2007. And, just for fun a vid slapping Justin Trudeau is also included.... just couldn't help myself although that vid has no relevance to the subject of this post.

.....Outside Fort McMurray, it is impossible to escape the furor over the Alberta oilsands. Its product is routinely described, lazily and slanderously, as the dirtiest on the planet. The Premier of Ontario, a province that owes much of its prosperity to its huge automobile industry shivers when he looks at Alberta, mutters about the dark forces of the “petro-dollar,” and implied (until he was scolded and half-recanted) that somehow Ontario’s fretful financial state is Alberta’s fault.

It’s almost a fantasy disconnect. Dalton Mcguinty can throw billions at General Motors and urge the feds to do the same, all to save the automobile industry. He ignores that four decades or more of Ontario’s prosperity wasn’t founded on windmills: It was based on gas-guzzling cars and trucks.

Down in the States, Fort MacMurray is the green lobby’s ultimate bogeyman. Environmental groups raise money by attacks on the oilsands. Fort McMurray and the Keystone XL pipeline that would take its bounty south. This rhetoric has even made it into presidential politics. The shameless and high-gloss National Geographic put out a hit-issue deploring the oilsands as the ultimate “polluter.”



Are Canadians falling for this propaganda, too? The bounty of our country has made us complacent, even smug, about the resource extraction that makes it possible. Canada is at the very forefront of the world’s developed nations. Our schools, hospitals, universities, arts and industries are at the very top of the chain — all because we have the energy to drive an economy that can support these great boons.

Yet how easily we bite the hand that feeds us. “Environment” has become a narrow, bitterly focussed word turning exclusively on hurts or despoilations of nature, magnifying the slightest alteration or disturbance of “the natural” as an unspeakable sin..........

"Global Cooling" and the Bilderberg group and how to tax everybody some more

A must-read article by James Delingpole. All those who think Glenn Beck is stark raving mad when he talks about Global governance and the Bilderberg group....you are the loony ones. The Bilderberg group is not just stuff of thriller novels, it's real, it's powerful and it can make or break any acceptable norms in society.

Bilderberg. Whether you believe it’s part of a sinister conspiracy which will lead inexorably to one world government or whether you think it’s just an innocent high-level talking shop, there’s one thing that can’t be denied: it knows which way the wind is blowing.

At its June meeting in Sitges, Spain (unreported and held in camera, as is Bilderberg’s way), some of the world’s most powerful CEOs rubbed shoulders with notable academics and leading politicians. They included: the chairman of Fiat, the Irish Attorney General Paul Gallagher, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Dick Perle, the Queen of the Netherlands, the editor of the Economist…. Definitely not Z-list, in other words.

Which is what makes one particular item on the group’s discussion agenda so tremendously significant. See if you can spot the one I mean:

The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3 – 6 June 2010. The Conference will deal mainly with Financial Reform, Security, Cyber Technology, Energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, World Food Problem, Global Cooling, Social Networking, Medical Science, EU-US relations.

Yep, that’s right. Global Cooling.

Which means one of two things.

Either it was a printing error.

Or................