"green" building at Emory University is bird slaughterhouse

back in the 1970's my family had some good friends in Birmingham, AL, who we would usually get together with once or twice a year. they had a beautiful house on a forested mountainside, with a towering A-frame front entrance with 2 panes of triangular glass which stretched to the ceiling, and this A-frame extended to the back of the house, which was a complete glass wall. you could see all the way through this house, and the view was lovely...trees, rocks, leaves...

from time to time while visiting we would hear a massive "WHOOOOMP!", and we would walk out the front door to see what kind of bird had flown into the windows this time and killed itself. i would estimate that between 1972-1976 i must've witnessed this between 10-15 times (which includes one case where two popped the glass at the same time).

flash forward to today...

Emory University's Math & Science Center is a "green-friendly" building, with soaring glass panels which aid in lighting and whatever else the environmentalists get out of it. it's a hallmark of the Atlanta school's effort to "go green"...it's also the "wall of death", as Emory Professor of Environmental Studies John Wegner charmingly put it in an atlanta journal-constitution story. he estimates that the building, whose windows reflect the forest in front of them, killed at least 60 birds in it's first year (2002) alone. he made a stink about it from the beginning, but, according to the story, it wasn't until he rammed some dead birds into his pockets and whipped them out in a meeting with his boss that he finally got some attention.

it's interesting that "green buildings" all share this glassy template. this bird deal is not isolated to Emory. in addition to my anecdote above (from 30 years ago, mind you...), just a casual coupling of "birds + buildings" in Google found this letter to the editor in a University of Saskatchewan campus newspaper, admonishing the school administration to take care of the same problem.

in the AJC story, they interviewed ornithologist David Klem, a professor who has "studied the problem for decades", and says that between 100 million and 1 billion birds die every year in the US by flying into glass windows. he seems to blame ARCHITECTS for the problem, because of the glass which has become such an integral part of "green" construction. by the way, according to the story, "buildings that earn LEED certification, the brass ring of environmentally sustainable construction, are often largely made of glass". the "brass ring", huh? i was thinking that the LEED certification was mainly an industry thing, but apparently environmental organizations such as the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) have endorsed this certification.

this whole thing begs so many questions for me...this all has to do with universities and public buildings efforts at environmental "sustainability", which i just blogged about. universities are filled with professors and scientists, right? my roommate, who works in a chemistry lab at the University of Florida, constantly lectures me about the sanctity of research which comes out of universities (as opposed to business-sponsored, which is defiled by $money$) because it is subject to "peer review".

somewhere, when it comes to this "sustainability" movement, this "peer review" seems to overlook the most obvious things--birds run into glass...you might want to mention this to architects--that even a stupid kid from alabama that i was could see as plain as day...

algore celebrates a touchdown! UF/FSU game to go "green"...

this is surreal.

they want to highlight the "fact" that football games produce a ton of greenhouse gasses. to help combat this problem,

...UF and its partners, the Florida Forestry Association and Environmental Defense, are arranging for approximately 18 acres of rural North Florida land to be set aside and managed as a pine plantation forest for 10 years. UF calculates that this is an acreage and period of time sufficient to absorb all the carbon emissions from the game.

according to Deedee Delongpre', director of UF's "Office of Sustainability",

At 18 acres for one game, some quick calculations reveal that we would need 126 acres to be managed for 10 years just to offset our football program for one year,” she said.

in a statement released from his office, Governor Crist approves, and will attend the game.

this is being hyped as the "first" carbon-neutral game ever. with 3 losses, i guess it's nice to be "first" in something...

go gators.


3 A.M. update--i can't sleep, this stuff is really bugging me. the more i read of this "office of sustainability" at UF, the more i want to puke. what a commie front. i'm going to this game tomorrow, and these whiners want to make me feel bad about it? i think a good old-fashioned protest could be in order...

another Democratic debate "average voter" plant?

LaShannon Spencer, in a photo from 2003, identified in
this New York Times story as "director of political affairs for the Democratic Party of Arkansas".


LaShannon Spencer, "undecided voter" in Nevada who got to ask a question.

BLITZER: Welcome back to the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. We're at the Democratic presidential debate. Suzanne Malveaux's got another undecided voter with a question.

MALVEAUX: LaShannon Spencer, please stand up for a moment. What is your question?

LASHANNON SPENCER: We constantly hear health care questions and questions pertaining to the war. But we don't hear questions pertaining to the Supreme Court justice or education. (Applause.)

My question is, if you are elected president, what qualities must the appointee possess?

Malveaux redirects the question...

MALVEAUX: ...And in answering that question, also tell us whether or not you would require your nominees to support abortion rights.

(Laughter, cross talk.)

then all the candidates were given an opportunity to voice their support for the "right to privacy".

Ms. Spencer's connection to the state of Arkansas wouldn't be telling, would it?

previous post about debate plants

Hollywood's war on the "war on terror"

independent reporter Michael Fumento has written an excellent piece demonstrating how Hollywood is covering up the islamic terrorist threat and is instead placing the blame on their versions of the "bad guys", i.e. the US gov't, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, etc...

he compares this to, for example, the years during WW2:

In 1942, Hollywood went to war. It began pumping out countless movies designed both to entertain the public and bolster its will to fight. A lot of them were cheap, hokey, or both. But even in a nation that seemingly needed little reminder of the dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor or the evils of the Nazis, they kept drilling home the message that we must persevere no matter the costs or the duration.

Well that they did. President Franklin Roosevelt lived in constant fear that the public would turn against the war. Indeed a Gallup Poll taken just five months before Germany’s collapse and long after the American public began learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, showed about one-fourth did not want to drive on to unconditional surrender.

Fast forward that reel to the post-9/11 era. Just how many Hollywood movies (not documentaries) have been made in which the bad guys are Islamist terrorists that do not specifically concern the Sept. 11 attacks? If you have to guess, guess “none.”

so, we had "United 93", which was pretty damn good. ABC broadcast "The Path to 9/11", which was excellent, even though liberals and former Clintonites freaked out about it. but, beyond that--nothing.

Fumento left out of his article movies like "The Road to Guantanamo", which portrayed "innocent" British Muslims being swept up in Afghanistan..."The Good Shepherd", which was an excuse to portray waterboarding as a CIA torture technique which is such a horrifying experience that the "waterboardee" has to commit suicide..."Children of Men", which has British Muslims having been removed from the population and rounded up into refugee camps (but they still manage to create mayhem)...even go back to "The Siege"--people freaked out about this pre-9/11 portrayal of islamic terrorists, but by the end of the movie who's the bad guy? ...Bruce Willis of the U.S. Armed Forces, not to mention Annette Bening's morally challenged intelligence role.

Global Warming Update: Gore shies from debate

the latest: a challenge from Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who was addressing the UN General Assembly this past week on climate change.

In ads appearing in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Times, Klaus has called on Gore to face him in a one-on-one debate on the proposition: "Global Warming Is Not a Crisis." Earlier in the year, similar challenges to Gore were issued by Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Lord Monckton of Brenchley, a former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. All calls on the former vice president to face his critics have fallen on deaf ears.

there are several other instances cited of Gore ignoring offers to debate cited in the article...

more from President Klaus:

...Klaus reserved his unkindest cut of all for the movement that has joined forces with Gore is spreading fear about global warming:

"As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."

strong words...but he's seen it...LIVED it..

why won't Algore debate the critics? the author of this article postulates that one reason might be the...

...unfortunate outcome of a global warming debate in New York last March. In the debate, a team of global warming skeptics composed of MIT scientist Richard Lindzen, University of London emeritus professor of biogeology Philip Stott, and physician-turned novelist/filmmaker Michael Crichton handily defeated a team of climate alarmists headed by NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt. Before the start of the nearly two-hour debate, the audience of several thousand polled 57.3 percent to 29.9 percent in favor of the proposition that global warming is a "crisis." At the end of the debate, the numbers had changed dramatically, with 46.2 percent favoring the skeptical point of view and 42.2 percent siding with the alarmists.

remember, that result comes after the audience members have been inundated with a steady drumbeat of "global warming crisis" propaganda for YEARS, rarely challenged in the "mainstream media".

plus, a smelly debate would get in the way of Gore's prime political tactic of silencing criticism by labeling his side of the debate a "consensus"...kind of like how some at The Weather Channel attempted to have the "Seal of Approval" from the AMS removed from meteorologists who question the theory...or maybe Gore doesn't want anyone pointing out his own hypocrisy when it comes to energy use and carbon footprints...or maybe even that the "carbon offsets" he purchases to compensate for the waste at his own home are bought from Generation Investment Management...a company the "Hon. Al Gore" chairs and helped to found.

British flooding shows global warming is here?

this picture,
as the author of this article states, is only a product of "cinematic trickery". but, in order to BEAT THE MESSAGE INTO OUR STUPID SKULLS, it's got to be used in order to show WHAT COULD HAPPEN if we don't start listening to the global warming crowd and start doing what they tell us we need to do. (btw...is that photo from "An Inconvenient Truth"? i never saw it.)

(environmental editor for the Telegraph.co.uk) Charles Clover's article is interesting...in my opinion for how he manages to undercut his argument. for example, while he warns that this flooding is caused by global warming, he writes:

"Of course, nowhere in the country are flood defences built to a higher standard than in London, because of the value, strategic and otherwise, of what lies behind them, so Trafalgar Square is unlikely ever to be as vulnerable as Tewkesbury, even though most of the capital is on a flood plain.'

i've never been to England before, so i don't know this for sure, but i would guess that these "defences" have been around for awhile. i would also guess that, given London's age, that it has been known forever that it was built in a "flood plain"....which, suggests that these floods are not really all that weird, huh? Clover continues:

"We now know that the storm of last Friday was the worst summer flood since the early 19th century. For the counties affected it was as bad as the spring floods of 1947."

does he mean the early 19th century when we didn't burn fossil fuels or run air conditioning and whatnot?

the global warming crowd claims that it uses predictive models which tell us of the upcoming danger our planet faces. but, even according to his own article, the weather service in Great Britain had a tough time even giving Brits a heads-up about the upcoming storm:

It was on Monday last week, July 16, that Met Office forecasters studying computer models of what the weather over the Atlantic might have in store for us began to believe that this summer's second burst of exceptional rain might be about to strike somewhere in England and Wales, bringing with it severe flooding.
Even though the Met Office did not have satellite images of the clouds forming until Thursday, by Wednesday night its computers had predicted accurately that severe weather would hit the south-west Midlands last Friday. By Thursday they knew we would be getting at least 4in (100mm) of rain.

then, on cue, the GOVERNMENT stepped up to the plate:

The Environment Agency flood-warning centre, which works with the Met Office, went into action and from late Thursday duly began delivering its automated alerts to people in high-risk areas who had signed up for them. Only 40 per cent of those living in high-risk flood areas had, but 123,000 people were successfully warned.

good job, GOVERNMENT. maybe you could try a bullhorn next time, or use TV or radio...

the story continues:

But it was only at 2pm on Friday that the order was given to take the large temporary flood barriers that protect properties on the banks of the River Severn out of their store in Kidderminster and to take them north to Upton upon Severn.

They never made it. Even though the agency vehicles carrying them had police outriders as they raced up the M5, they were caught in a tailback. A flash flood had preceded them and the carriageway was blocked.

i'm guessing that the term "outriders" is akin to what we call "escorts" here in America...but, that's neither here nor there. the end result is that lives were lost and billions of dollars damage occurred which the police couldn't prevent. an apt metaphor...

why didn't the british gov't act on these weather forecasts sooner? was it a bureaucratic snafu, or is the credibility of weather forecasting agencies on the line?

remember, this was forecasting for a few days out. and, apparently, scientists were fully aware that there was an uncommon atmospheric condition:

But it was more exceptional than that because it happened in the summer. Meteorologists say that in the short term the rain was caused by the jet stream, the ribbon of very strong winds in the upper atmosphere that largely determines where weather systems will bring rain across western Europe.

For much of the summer the jet stream has been further south and stronger than in a typical summer.

Clover did not blame the position of the jet stream on global warming. he instead uses journalistic sleight-of-hand to get us to "the big question":

The big question is not just why it rained but why the rainfall has been so intense. Is it within the range of past events, or are we in new territory thanks to man's influence on the climate? And if so, what are the implications for future flooding and, more widely, for the way we live?

one could argue that, well, "duh!"...these things have happened before! and they'll probably happen again!!

this after-the-fact "blame it on global warming" game is getting old. who can forget that on the day that Hurricane Katrina smashed into Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, causing widespread catastrophic damage,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was gleefully posting over at HuffPost that Mississippi gov. Haley Barbour should accept some of the blame:

As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.

not to mention that when that treaty was sent to the US Senate in 1997 it went unratified, to put it lightly. to put it more blunt, it got skunked 95-0. about a year and a half later, then VP Algore symbolically signed the protocol...

if global warming is such a slam dunk, why are the believers using kids (as i've written on before here on NGNG), hollywood types, and rock stars to warn us? how about some debates featuring real scientists who may have differing views? no, i guess that would be impossible. instead, we get this cabal of marxists, washed-up pols, and UN-sanctioned scientists that are going to tell us how we're bad people.

this speech by author Michael Crichton on the subject of global warming skepticism is interesting. and his book, "State of Fear", should at least be on as many schools' required reading lists as Algore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is required viewing...but, oh, i forgot: Crichton is "Big Oil's" favorite journalist...

i admit it: years ago i was WRONG about the Pat Tillman case

"You've got me really scared about my brain right now. I'm really having a problem."

--from the testimony of Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger, Jr., before the Pentagon inspector general's office in Dec. 2006.

conservative bloggers (e.g. :"my pet jawa", not to pick on them..) have been in a tizzy the last few days because of this post on Daily Kos, and other similar ones around the blogosphere, which insinuate that Pat Tillman was murdered as a part of a Bush Administration conspiracy to silence Tillman, who, as the conspiracy theory goes, was going to become an anti-iraq war activist as soon as his stint in afghanistan was over.

i admit it. i believed the original story where he died charging up the hill, killing 571 taliban and al-queada dudes, or however the story went. after the incident was then labeled a "friendly fire" accident, i grudgingly acknowledged it, though i fought like crazy against the notion that PAT TILLMAN could've been a "fan" of the writings of noam chomsky, because everybody knows that AMERICAN SOLDIERS wouldn't be caught dead reading the anti-american hate spewing from prof. chomsky's mouth...(here i was in October 2005 denying that Tillman could've been a fan of Chomsky and just generally wanting to believe the propaganda)...until it dawned on me that i read noam chomsky, too!!! for laughs, y'know...

if what's been reported about the just-released report re:Tillman is true, i.e., that the bullet holes in Tillman's head are consistent with an M-16 fired from about 10 yards away, well, that raises all kinds of questions about what really happened out there. was it "fragging"? did Tillman step over the line with his exhortation to a fellow ranger to "stop sniveling"?

i'm still not buying into the bush/cheney angle...YET.