If you were gonna build a house is southern Louisiana,

say around New Orleans, you'd use materials you KNEW could take the temperatures and humidity, would you not?
Unfortunately, Make It Right has found that TimberSIL can't stand the moisture in the balmy city and has turned dark gray and begun falling apart. The organization has replaced wood in 30 homes and is considering legal action. TimberSIL has reportedly caused trouble for at least one other client: a project in Western Massachusetts that had to be repaired when the builders found the wood retained too much moisture and couldn't hold paint.
Apparently if you say 'Eco-friendly!  No nasty chemicals!  It's great!', that's enough to make a lot of people not think to ask "Has this shit been tested in these conditions?"

Which reminds me of something Og posted a while after Katrina:
All of the buildings and residences damaged beyond repair by Katrina were ground up in such a manner. What, might you ask, would they do with all this debris? Well I’ll tell you what they ARE doingh with it: Making new levees.
My contribution:
I read a book a while back that had a description of the construction of levees in the 19-teens & twenties. I specifically noted that fill brought in or scraped over was inspected to get rid of any wood- logs, lumber, whatever- they could find because it would rot and make weak spots in the construction.
And now they’re using ground-up houses...


The ultimate ideal of Government Motors: make cars too expensive for the peasants to afford.  
Except they'll have special prices for union and Party members, of course.


Higher Indoctrination(sure-hell doesn't count as 'education'):
Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton —the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.

In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare. . . .



Well, here's a Colt that's gonna go for a tall price.


And on the "Global Warming/Climate Change all the ice is melting(except right here)!" front,
Responding to a request from Russia, China and Australia, a U.S. Coast Guard heavy icebreaker will leave Australia for Antarctica on Sunday to rescue more than 120 crew members aboard two icebreakers trapped in pack ice near the frozen continent’s eastern edge, officials said.

The nearly 400-foot cutter, the Polar Star, is set to assist the Russian and Chinese ships because “there is sufficient concern that the vessels may not be able to free themselves from the ice,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.

In case you haven't followed this, they're stuck because they went to rescue a bunch of AGW researchers who went there to show 'all the ice is melting!' and got stuck.

Be it noted that a lot of scientists are not real happy with the idiots who started this chain of events.


Boiling water sprayed into a -41F day



Wonderful people, aren't they?
A Kuwaiti woman who is called an “activist” and former candidate to the Kuwaiti parliament, spoke to the Kuwait Times about the establishment of a new law permitting men to buy and sell non-Muslim girls, captured in jihad, as sexual slaves in order to protect Muslim men against seductive sexual immorality. The Arabic Al Arabiya had more details on what that woman, Salwa al-Mutairi, is advocating:


Also in the mid-East, what Syrians are putting together as artillery.