NEWS FLASH: World’s Library Sabotaged

Agree! I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for quite awhile now. Search results are definitely skewed as to what shows up at the top.

“That is the right remedy, not kvetching about Google, which is obviously successful in giving lots of people the lists of links they want.”

Yup, the “they” in your sentence is Google.

Try googeling idiot.

Try this instead
https://www.google.com/search?&q=idiot+-Trump

For more on this story see
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/google-does-it-again-a-web-search-for-idiot-will-show-you-trumps-pictures/articleshow/65065719.cms

“Were you even alive in the 1970s? If you were an adult then, and in college, you couldn’t have missed the new ice age scare.

It was in all the papers and on TV.”

I was in first year university in 1969, and yes it was in the MSM, most notoriously Newsweek, and on TV in the early 1970s. Nigel Calder made a TV series called The Weather Machine for the BBC who also published a book based on the series. Calder had been a journalist and editor of New Scientist. Lengthy extract follows:

The vultures have been feeding well, along the southern fringe of the Sahara. In 1973 several countries of the Sahel of West Africa reported the death from drought of 30 to 70 per cent of their cattle, as well as widespread crop failures. Sahel is an Arabic word meaning shore, used here for the inland southern ‘shore’ of the Sahara desert, a zone across Africa where human subsistence is just about possible. Closest to the deep Sahara range the nomadic herdsmen, but farmers, too, scratch a living from a few months’ meagre rainfall. For them the present change of climate is not a statistical curiosity or intellectual speculation but a toll of dead animals and the sight of their soil blowing away in the wind. Ten million people are refugees from the drought.

The rains of the Sahel come in from the south in summer, as wedges of moist oceanic air insert themselves over Africa in miniature monsoons. The rainfall is abundant along the coast from Sierra Leone to Nigeria, and in southern Ethiopia, but it peters out towards the north in the zone where farming and herding are marginally_possible. Reliable and timely rain comes less far into Africa than it did in recent decades. The marginal zone has therefore been shifting towards the sea, with the Sahara advancing southwards behind it. Rainfall in the Sahel has been ‘below average’ for seven or eight years — that is how the reports are worded… In the better period after 1931, which coincided with the decades of maximum warmth in Europe and the Arctic, the herdsmen edged further north with their cattle, towards the heart of the Sahara. The farmers advanced behind them and populations grew.

Now the Saharan tide has turned. The herdsmen are driven back on to farmland, whether or not the farmers have yet abandoned it. The towns are crowded with hungry refugees. The traditional strategy of the Tuareg nomad in hard times is to turn to trading to recoup his losses, but amid general impoverishment conditions that is hard to implement. Nevertheless, the nomads are more adaptable than the farmers, and can readily move north or south according to the season’s rainfall.

The tragedy has been starkest in northern Ethiopia, in the eastward extension of the Sahel zone. The disaster exposed the feudal abominations of the ‘hidden empire’ which hid its starvation for as long as possible and neglected to feed the dying from its own resources. Not until October 1973, when more than 100,000 were already in their graves and many more were past help, did the Ethiopian government admit that 3-4000 were perishing every week in the northern districts and appeal for help from other countries. Pneumonia or gastroenteritis or cholera was often the immediate cause of death, but hunger was at the root of it.

….

Four countries lie wholly within the affected zone — Mali, Upper Volta, Niger and Chad. They could become uninhabitable if the desert were to continue its southward march during future decades. We may be witnessing the elimination of these nation states by drought, while nearby Senegal and Mauretania could be reduced, for practical purposes, to coastal strips. Meanwhile, human pressures on the land do nothing to impede creation of new desert. Herds of cattle may overgraze the land and loosen the soil, though not so readily as do the cultivators, who create dust bowls when the rainfall is inadequate. Cutting firewood is certainly harmful near the towns of the Sahel. Yet environmentalists are probably adding insult to injury when they blame the local people for causing the southward expansion of the Sahara. On the northern edge of the Sahara, in the Atlas mountains of Algeria and Morocco, rainfall has been increasing. That suggests that the whole dry zone of the Sahara is moving bodily southwards and that the Sahelian drought is a consequence of world-wide changes of climate.

The simplest and most ominous theory is that the advance of the Sahara in the Sahel is directly linked with the general cooling of the northern hemisphere that has been in progress since 1950. As the Arctic zone of cold enlarges, the stormy zone and desert zone shift southwards towards the equator.

[Nigel Calder, The Weather Machine 1974, pp 45-46]

#PG.
Then there is this opinion piece from the famous climatologist Hubert H Lamb described as “an international authority on the long term processes of climatic change” (remember him?) published in August-September 1973:-
Lamb, H. H. (1973) Is the Earth’s Climate Changing? For the past 30 years the temperature of our planet has been steadily dropping. The UNESCO Courier: a window open on the world; Vol. XXVI (8/9), 17-20.

It’s a lot better with Trump in charge, don’t you think?

Trump just shamed some drug companies into freezing their drug prices. He is in the process of reforming the health care system, one little tweak at a time, and turning it into a free market which will reduce prices. If he had any cooperation in Congress, these thngs would already be done.

I switched to DuckDuckGo several months ago. My google front page always had several little news sites below the search box. The political topics of these sites were clearly and distinctly allied to the searches I had made but almost universally had a counter view to the nature of my searches. No, it isn’t paranoia but certainly climate searches produced a whole lot of topics opposed to my needs. This does not happen on DuckDuckGo.