Four for Friday - Huge News Week

Here are four very significant stories to be aware of this weekend, as we move into what is apparently the fourth week or so of the Christmas season this year...

1. Dubai Tower, world's tallest building by far, set to open next month

Next month's opening of the Burj Dubai tower, the world's tallest building, will bring Dubai's era of exuberant expansion to a juddering halt as hundreds of other building projects are already mothballed.

The article actually speaks much more of Dubai's ongoing economic woes than of the tower itself, but the building is an impressive undertaking. Here's the tower's wiki page for more info.
The tragic human rights story behind the undertaking is that of the thousands of immigrants brought in for what is basically illegal slave labor. Their story needs to be told.

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2. Next we have being reported what the Russians have known for a long time: your crayons are not made from a T-rex... This is a potential energy revolution in the making:

Many Russians and Ukrainians — no slouches in the hard sciences — have since the 1950s held that oil does not come exclusively, or even partly, from dinosaurs but is formed below the Earth’s 25-mile deep crust. This theory — first espoused in 1877 by Dmitri Mendeleev, who also developed the periodic table — was rejected by geologists of the day because he postulated that the Earth’s crust had deep faults, an idea then considered absurd. Mendeleev wouldn’t be vindicated by his countrymen until after the Second World War when the then-Soviet Union, shut out of the Middle East and with scant petroleum reserves of its own, embarked on a crash program to develop a petroleum industry that would allow it to fend off the military and economic challenges posed by the West. Today, Russians laugh at our peak oil theories as they explore, and find, the bounty in the bowels of the Earth.

Someday the idea that your car runs on smushed prehistoric biomass will be set down alongside the ideas that the earth is flat and that flies spontaneously generate from rotten meat...

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3. Next up, say a prayer for modern western civilization: Britain is no longer a sovereign state, but now subject to the EU presiding body in Brussels. (see also Vox Day's article and links)

We woke up in a different country today. Alright, it doesn’t look very different. The trees still seem black against the winter sun; the motorways continue to jam inexplicably; commuters carry on avoiding eye contact. But Britain is no longer a sovereign nation. At midnight last night, we ceased to be an independent state, bound by international treaties to other independent states, and became instead a subordinate unit within a European state.

So it turns out that the Eurocrats got England before the Muslims did. Ah well. Wait 50 years and see how things stand...


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4. Lastly, also on the British front, what is now being ubiquitously referred to as "Climate-gate".
You all know about this one, I hope, but for those of you who don't read the news much, or want more info than Jon Stewart (so far the Daily Show spot is the most coverage the issue has gotten in American "news media") provided, I highly recommend going here for a tongue-in-cheek but accurate summary of the extent of the scandal unleashed by this uninvited peek into the sordid underbelly of the global warming conspiracy. Enjoy:

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”.

The information heist came at just the right time, too, when the public had been pushed just a little too far into fearing the imminent destruction of the world, and started to push back. Polls in America had already started to indicate the public was still skeptical of the warming. Of course, now those few alarmists which have not switched from "warming" to "climate change" will do so, perhaps even have the gall to swap to "cooling" and themselves decry the false tactics used to skew the data to show false warming when we're really all in danger of the next ice age. The remedy will be the same in either case, however: taxes and regulations to stifle evil, job-providing and wealth-producing industries and line the pockets of more bureaucrats.

4+. Of course, the wrath of the stung bureaucrats will now turn upon those who exposed their game:

"Leaked e-mails allegedly undermining climate change science should be treated as a criminal matter, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said Wednesday afternoon..."

"...We may well have a hearing on this, we may not. We may have a briefing for senators, we may not," Boxer said. "Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated.

Naturally.

-()4k..