One province of Argentina will send hunters to protect whales from seagulls that have learned to attack whales.

It appears that the motive for caring about the whales is that whale watching is a big business there.

The province says that this is temporary and that it will implement the right solution, which is to deny gulls access to garbage.

One interesting point is that keas in New Zealand attack sheep in the same way. Keas are not closely related to gulls, so it seems that this kind of behavior is a potential for many kinds of birds.

Certain bird-friendly farming practices can bring back some species of birds that have been harmed by intensive farming.

Businesses do many kinds of harm to people. Why, then, the reflex of offering to subsidize businesses that make an effort to do less harm? Could this reflect a mental habit of genuflecting to business?

Perhaps that mental habit is why the solution offered for every problem takes the form of reducing taxes on business.

Since we need business to pay more taxes, how about if we instead fine farms for doing harm to birds, and reduce the fines for those that do less harm?

The bully's threat to cut UN funding for the refugee camps in Palestine threatens to loose the violent groups to take over or displace the Palestinian Authority.

Negotiation with the bullshitter is worthless since he famously does not keep the deals he makes.

Finally a program for piecing together shreds of paper really exists.

In the 1970s, the CIA had an office in 545 Tech Sq right across from the Logo Lab (Logo was a programming system for children). Every day, the CIA set out some bags of shredded paper to be collected as trash. Many MIT people in the building had a very negative attitude towards the CIA.

One day, as a CIA person went to the toilet, two MIT people went there after him and and had a conversation between toilet stalls. One said, "How is that shredded paper vision system coming?" The other replied, "It's starting to work. We put the shreds in front of the camera and the robot arm can line them up."

The next day, the CIA did not put out its usual trash bag of shredded paper. A few days later, the bags resumed, but the paper had been shredded twice.

Of course, there was no such vision system in the 1970s. It was far beyond the technology of the day. The two MIT hackers had made it up as a hoax to hack the CIA.

Or at least, this is what people in that group said had been done. If there was any documentary record of this, I suppose the CIA shredded it long ago.

The NHS has been knocked down so much by insufficient funds that it has cancelled all non-urgent surgery.

I expect the NHS will resume non-urgent surgery when Labour is elected and gives it more funds.