Oh Yes.

The man Steven Kazmierczak,who gunned down five people at Northern Illinois University before killing himself had become erratic after failing to take his medication and carried a shotgun to campus inside a guitar case ...
but, Kazmierczak had no criminal record and no history of mental illness.

Accountability.

Iatrogenic effects to become public. A frightening array of serious medical mishaps and preventable deaths in hospitals is due to be revealed next week.

And this is long overdue.
It will, unfortunately, just be the 'tip of the ice berg' (If you enter a public hospital you have a 15 per cent chance of suffering an adverse event.) Many 'adverse events' would self remit, would not be recorded as such, rather as complications to normal procedure. It will also, as has been stated by a Wellington doctor, push hospitals "back into the dark ages". "People will be less likely to own up when something goes wrong."

Now one would hope they would become more methodical, more careful ... that the standard of health care would improve as a result ...

And really one should be able to expect a little more than an 'all care no responsibility' adage from perhaps the most well paid professionals in society due to the trust a majority of people (mis)place in them.

Inevitable Really.

So, Police are moving onto south Auckland secondary schools in a move to cut youth crime and gang activities ... Police said the system was to build up trust with youngsters and gather intelligence about youth gangs, drug dealing and to tackle crime before it happened.

Now I would have thought that those kids getting in to significant criminal activity at a young age would have significant others in their lives modelling these activities, condoning these activities and 'doing quite well, thankyou' out of these activities. Further, these activities encompass such characteristics as force, fraud, intimidation and ostracism to maintain 'ethical standards:' such as an overwhelming sense of loyalty ('thou shalt not nark'); carmerarderie in the face of adversity (practice in dealing with the social services), and the delegation of culpability ... so ultimately these police placements will only be able to act on what they see, and that wont be much because their presence will also result in more intensely meted out sanctions for violating those 'ethical standards.'
... And the police know that young people can do 'things' these days largely with impunity, they know their elders allow them to 'take the rap' (nay, they demand it) for their law breaking and, if they thought about it, they would know that being in schools will publicly show them to be inconsequential and this will generalise to their wider activities.

But they will claim it is a successful intervention, and it will probably be instituted in other schools.

Sooo ... we have plummeting teaching standards and this impacting largely on those schools servicing low socio ecconomic areas; an increase in poorly disciplined and poorly socialised kids again largely (although by no means exclusively) deriving from these lower socio economic areas ... and the latter was of course 'successfully' addressed by having social workers in schools. Or was it? Is that not the role the police are considering?

The next move will of course be to have those police present in the classroom, restraining and withdrawing the 'wild ones' and this up to the mandatory age of 18.

Now some time ago, I believed teachers should have begun a programme 'tazers for teachers' the deteriorated situation was certainly warranting this. That is, the ongoing disempowerment of both parents and teachers in the management of their children. Unbeknown to me they were discreetly doing this all the time, in fact more sensibly than I had considered ... having a third party to 'pull the trigger.'

An additional bonus, is of course, that this move will help redress the female/male imbalance amongst adults in schools.

So parents and teachers can no longer use force for correction ... but policemen can.

One has to wonder where Helen Clarke, Sue Bradford and Cindy Kiro 'sit' with respect to all of this ... this is after all their legacy to society.

Update: Auckland Post Primary Principals' Association regional chair Gerald van Waardenberg teaches at Otahuhu college, one of the schools which will have a police officer.
He says there has been no consultation and was surprised at the news. "It's in no way clear what kind of a role the police will have within the school, whether they'll be approaching students directly, what the police will actually be doing." ... the idea follows a pilot scheme about eight years ago, and is supported by the Minister of Police, Annette King.

So again, those that a policy will directly impact on have not been consulted.

NIWA Unfilled Vacancy.

The Southern Alps' 12 biggest glaciers had crossed a "tipping point" into faster melting as they respond to regional warming, said National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research principal scientist Jim Salinger.

Smaller glaciers, having rapidly adjusted to regional warming earlier, had not receded much in the past 20 years or in a few cases have slightly advanced. They include two well-known West Coast glaciers, the Fox and the Franz Josef

Smaller glaciers, having rapidly adjusted to regional warming earlier, had not receded much in the past 20 years or in a few cases have slightly advanced. They include two well-known West Coast glaciers, the Fox and the Franz Josef

Smaller glaciers, having rapidly adjusted to regional warming earlier, had not receded much in the past 20 years or in a few cases have slightly advanced. They include two well-known West Coast glaciers, the Fox and the Franz Josef

(this is repeated because it needs repeating).


Salinger says, "it is already clear that they will not return to their earlier lengths without extraordinary cooling of the climate because the large lakes now block their advance"... so it is the lakes, the obstruction that is stopping the progress of these glaciers .. if indeed they are reducing as obviously the most visited and visible (Fox and Franz Joseph) are increasing.

New Zealand's glaciers are shrinking. Startling pictures taken from space 17 years apart show the extent of the retreat of the Tasman, Hooker and Mueller Glaciers in the Southern Alps.
The first picture was taken by a Nasa satellite on December 30, 1990, and the second picture was taken on December 6, 2007.

Indeed, bigger lake, retreated glacier ... but greater snow cover. Global warming? "Tipping point?"

To emphatically state these changes have occurred and stating causal relationships is somewhat surprising when ...

New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (2007). World climate predictors right only half the time. Media release 7 June. Available at http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0706/S00026.htm


Taylor (2007) compared seasonal forecasts by New Zealand’s National Institute of
Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) with outcomes for the period May 2002 to
April 2007. He found NIWA’s forecasts of average regional temperatures for the
season ahead were 48% correct, which was no more accurate than chance. That this is a general result was confirmed by New Zealand climatologist Jim Renwick, who
observed that NIWA’s low success rate was comparable to that of other forecasting
groups worldwide. He added that “Climate prediction is hard, half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, and so we don’t expect to do terrifically well.”
Renwick is a co-author with Working Group I of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, and
also serves on the World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology
Expert Team on Seasonal Forecasting. His expert view is that current GCM climate
models are unable to predict future climate any better than chance (New Zealand
Climate Science Coalition 2007).

None the less we find ...

Warm winters may be rousing hibernating pet tortoises early and endangering their lives but there is a solution, experts say – keep them through the winter in the fridge ... Tortoises hibernate through the winter but need to keep their body temperature between 3 and 5 degrees Celsius.

But ...
There have been a number of indications that January 2008 has been an exceptional month for winter weather in not only North America, but the entire Northern Hemisphere. We’ve had anecdotal evidence of odd weather in the form of wire reports from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and China where record setting cold and snow has been felt with intensity not seen for 30-100 years, depending on the region.

From our remote sensing groups, we have reports of significant negative anomalies in both the RSS and UAH global satellite data for the lower troposphere. Then there’s NOAA’s announcement that January 2008, was below 20th century averages, plus news that Arctic sea ice has quickly recovered from the record low extent of Summer 2007. Finally, there’s the massive La Nina said to be the driver of all this but may be a harbinger of a more permanent phase shift according to veteran forecaster Joe Bastardi.

So perhaps the fridge is a good idea ... maintaining that narrow optimal temperature range for the turtles ... and of course this would be good beit the ambient temperatures are too high or too low ... and it would appear they are indeed low.

GLOBAL WARMING: FORECASTS BY SCIENTISTS
VERSUS SCIENTIFIC FORECASTS

The forecasts in the (IPCC) Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In
effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and
obscured by complex writing. Research on forecasting has shown that experts’
predictions are not useful in situations involving uncertainly and complexity. We
have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims that
the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder.

Now this is certainly consistent with Taylor's (2007) results.

Taylor, M. (2007). An evaluation of NIWA’s climate predictions for May 2002 to April 2007.
Climate Science Coalition. Available at
http://www.climatescience.org.nz/assets/2007691051580.ClimateUpdateEvaluationText.pdf
Data available at
http://www.climatescience.org.nz/assets/2007691059100.ClimateUpdateEvaluationCalc.xls.pdf

And ...

Back in 1991, before Al Gore first shouted that the Earth was in the balance, the Danish Meteorological Institute released a study using data that went back centuries that showed that global temperatures closely tracked solar cycles.
To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.
And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.

And regarding the unfilled vacancy ... NIWA has a strong programme of measurement and modelling of atmospheric trace gases, including greenhouse gases. A particular strength is the long-term measurement of carbon isotopes in carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane in both contemporary air and air extracted from polar ice, and their interpretation. This is linked to a wider effort to improve knowledge of human impacts on the atmosphere that will help mitigate changes in atmospheric constituents and the wider climate system. Research effort is also targeted at mitigation measures to reduce agricultural emissions and improve the accuracy of reported national emissions.

... so again the the stated 'causal relationship' is a given ... what point science?

Some Places Are Cooler ... Much Cooler.

Brrrrr. Near-record cold chills Interior Alaska ... 70 degrees below zero

Only class war on public schools can rid us of this unhinged ruling class

Perhaps I am a bit naive, wanting in historical knowledge, but this I found both currently and historically interesting. In NZ, too, these institutionally cultivated, family dispossessed products are readily identifiable by their sense of 'public proper,' private naive excess, dispassionate pursuit of goals, amorality and unquestionable support and 'carmerarderie' from those similarly detached and institutionally moulded ... and almost all attain positions in society equivalent to what could be described as 'an unhinged ruling class.'
'Emotional cripples,' some say.

Threat of major blackout due to degraded cable

A third of the power supply to the North Island is under threat after Transpower shut down an important section of the Cook Strait cable because it was so degraded it could not be insured against "catastrophic failure".

Nine out of 15 major pieces of equipment used to transfer power across one of two sections of the Cook Strait cable have serious faults which could lead to catastrophic disaster.

Now one would have thought this situation could have been averted by implementing a realistic R & M programme and programming for replacement ... sort of basic really.