email archives Support the site by shopping through these amazon links: amazon.com amazon.co.uk amazon.de		2008, May 8, Thursday. What happens when you take a Polish TV Soap Opera, and have Irish actors re-dub it? The end result is Soupy Norman! A BBC show from 2031 looks back on the early 21st century: Time Trumpet.       Some weeks ago I tried to talk a friend of a friend out of buying a house in Portland. The guy's a firefighter, and his fiancee wants The House Thing. Poor guy went ahead and bought a place for a ridiculous amount of money. Oh well. "...but you can never tell any body anything I've learned that..." Now China is outsourcing to America. Don't forget to take off your shoes in the airport citizen, so that the convicts can smell your feet. UK wastes 10 billion pounds sterling of food a year. UK to build a 50M tall white horse for £2,000,000! That's right - waste and burn the energy, while we still can! Monbiot: Can we fly on Zeppelins? I've long been an admirer of lighter than air travel - it's the most energy efficient mode of air travel - if not the fastest. Before it can return, the big dumb jet industry will have to collapse. Speed the day. Make a Master Information Document for worst case scenarios. The Washington Post is attacked for posting the photo of a dying Iraqi child being lifted from rubble following a US airstrike. SO publishing the photo is wrong, as opposed the act of child-murder. These people are monsters... Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, May 7, Wednesday. Via Ran Prieur, the ironic observation that Hilary Clinton's horse comes in second, and is euthanised. You see, God is a Cosmic Joker after all. OK, it's a bit too long and overwrought, but The Empire Strikes Barack did make me laugh a few times. A nicely written piece by John Feeney in the Guardian on The Population Timebomb. Reading the comments that follow might give you some idea as to why I've given up hope for salvaging this stupid species. Which leads nicely to: Surplus food supplies dry up. Wheat crop failures could be total. Jeremy Leggett: Dawn of an Energy Famine. Kunstler: We're in a strange collective psychic bubble. Yeah, let's keep breeding. 9 billion people? 90 billion people? It'll all work out. After all, humans are intelligent and resourceful, right? RIGHT? Florida teacher accused of "Wizardry" after performing a magic trick with a toothpick. UK: Billions of dollars wasted on Big Brother spy cameras. Anti-psychotic drug use soars among US and UK children. I know what to do - let's build more roads! US: 120 war vets commit suicide weekly. According to "Christians", they go to hell. RedStateSon: Burma: this season's atrocity. But what if these enlightened celebs were asked to promote human rights in, say, the Occupied Territories? How many would rush forward, photos of Israeli tanks demolishing Palestinian homes in hand, and denounce starvation and death in Gaza? I'll crawl out on a frail limb here and guess zero. Okay, maybe Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, and I'll toss in Danny Glover as well. But I can't think of many more who would dare portray Palestinians as human rights victims worthy of immediate support and solidarity, while excoriating the Israeli state for its ongoing strangulation of Gaza and continued building of West Bank settlements. There's also the minor fact that as American taxpayers, Hollywood celebs directly finance these atrocities, and so are more responsible for what they subsidize than what is fashionable in a PSA. I know -- pie in the exploding sky. Wake me when George Clooney narrates a documentary about the reality of Palestinian suffering. As to Israeli atrocities, I'm guessing he's talking about ones like this, courtesy of the US taxpayer. Sure Cletus, they hate us because we're free. Criminey - according to the "Mogambo Guru", the derivatives bubble is now close to 700 Trillion dollars. Another 300 Trillion and we get to use the word "Quadrillion" for the first time. Then we die. I wonder what would have happened if this guy had pulled the trigger... Asia Times: How under the gun Iran plays it cool. Under such conditions, what if there were an American air attack on Iran? The Supreme Leader, on the record, offered his own version of threats in 2006. If Iran were attacked, he said, the retaliation would be doubly powerful against US interests elsewhere in the world. From American supply lines and bases in southern Iraq to the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians, though no military powerhouse, do have the ability to cause real damage to American forces and interests - and certainly to drive the price of oil into the stratosphere. Such a "war" would clearly be a disaster for everyone. The Iranian theocratic leadership, however, seems to doubt that the Bush administration and the US military, exhausted by their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will attack. They feel a tide at their backs. Meanwhile the "Look East" strategy, driven by soaring energy prices, is bearing fruit. Ahmadinejad has just concluded a tour of South Asia and, to the despair of American neo-cons, the Asian energy security grid is quickly becoming a reality. Two years ago, at the Petroleum Ministry in Tehran, I was told Iran is betting on the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-economic politics". This year, Iran finally becomes a natural gas-exporting country. The framework for the $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the "peace" pipeline, is a go. Both these key South Asian US allies are ignoring Bush administration desires and rapidly bolstering their economic, political, cultural, and - crucially - geostrategic connections with Iran. An attack on Iran would now inevitably be viewed as an attack against Asia. What a disaster in the making, and yet, now more than ever, Cheney's faction in Washington (not to mention possible future president John McCain) seems ready to bomb. Perhaps the Mahdi himself - in his occult wisdom - is betting on a US war against Asia to slouch towards Qom to be reborn. Iran drops US dollar. US draws up plans to attack. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, May 6, Tuesday. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, May 5, Monday. Damn this effing Toshiba Laptop. I try to reinstall Windows with the recovery disks (with a 2003 date on them; they're supposed to be XP). For some reason it attempts to install windoze 98 (WTF?), then tells me that I've got the wrong machine. I check the labels, and, um, no - I do have the right machine. Toshiba's website is a joke - they don't even have this model listed on the US site. Thanks to Microsoft's abysmal TOS, it's not possible to buy replacement install disks (not that I would). I'll say it again: don't buy Toshiba. Enough on that topic. Time for a new laptop soon...then I'll wipe this brick and install Ubuntu on it for jollies. I've already booted it from CD, and it works like a champ. And, it's FREE. Lovely photos of a storm on Saturn. Some lovelies my lovelies:       Taking a laptop across the border, citizen? Take precautions. Hey, even if it's as simple as compressing your data into a big zip file, changing the extension to .tmp, then burying it deep in a windows folder...do you think the incompetent apes in DHS will find that? Speaking of...Air marshals grounded in list mix-ups Yes, America's descent into international laughing stock continues unabated. Ben Stein compares scientists to Nazis. Until he needs a hip replacement, the fundamentalist boob. Sad and amazing: Civil war cannonball kills relic collector. Think about this: a civil war weapon kills a man 150 years after it was fired. Now think of all the clusterbombs and landmines that our taxmoney has dropped on Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon over the last four years alone. Nice to know that some poor bastard will be eviscerated centuries after we're all dead.       The Coal Crunch is materialising. The Vice-President of the State Electric Power Supervisory Commission, Wang Yeping, said that in Hebei, Anhui, and Chongqing, the stockpile of coal for power generation was not even enough to last 7 days. This situation is quite similar to the one that existed in January 2008. Theoretically, a stockpile that is smaller than 7 days supply has reached an “urgent level”. Julian Darley: The day the gas dried up. John Michael Greer: Not the end of the world. A different perspective on collapse. The most polluted cities in the US. LA, you'll always be my number 1! Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, May 2, Friday. Some advice for you guys: don't buy a Toshiba Laptop. Now, to reformat my HD, and reinstall Windows. "I am just going outside and may be some time." Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, April 29, Tuesday. Well folks, told ya so. Food rationing hits US. Hope you got your supplies. Mmm. Meaty goodness:       Ah, human stupidity knows no bounds: $80 BILLION DAM FOR CONGO. This on a continent made for solar (PV and solar thermal - easily the most hopeful alt-energy source). The collective suicide of the species continues unabated. Fermi's Paradox "If there are aliens, where are they?" has been answered. All the industrial civs have collapsed back into permanent stone ages. Yay. Sexy: Still. Russia's most beautiful city? Sochi. Bagnewsnotes on TV whores: Pentagon's hidden hand, and Sights and Symbols. The "Hero" John McCain. Ha! Lego Rocky. A deadly new virus discovered in Bolivia. Just what we need. "Free Tibet" flags are Made In China. No comment needed. Exposed: The great GM crops myth. When sorting through 7 years of (mostly crappy) bookmarks a few weeks ago, I stumbled across a site called lifehacker.com. I'm kicking myself that I've missed out on several years of posts. It's a daily must-read now. Here are some recent offerings from them: Filter Google Results by Date with a URL Trick Hardy Heron Makes Linux Worth Another Look (run XP from inside Linux!) What apps should you never install? I love my Cintiq: Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, April 26, Saturday. Very busy right now; I should be free by next week. In the meantime, check out The Forum for daily updates, from myself and other readers. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, April 24, Thursday. My first Cintiq - created cartoon. Just messing around... I'm still getting the hang of it. Drawing directly onto a monitor takes some getting used to. It's fun though, not having to mess with a scanner. I'm hoping to reach a point where I'll be able to do several cartoons a week (hopefully a bit sharper than the one above). Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, April 23, Wednesday. A chronicle of my recent bus journey, (with photos!) To the folk who are waiting on delivery of "Worst Wing" original sketches, I'll get to the mailing ritual in the days ahead, now that I'm settling back in to my home. Today I'll take delivery of my spanking new Cintiq. Many non-artists haven't seen these things - monitors that you can draw on - eliminating the need for paper, pencil and scanners. I'm not one for tech toys, but 20 seconds using a friend's convinced me that I had to buy one. Not cheap at $2000, but it'll be guaranteed to change my workflow. Once I adapt to it expect to see more sketches and cartoons on the site. Joe Bageant: Media shit-storms and heartland reality. Condi ("the idiot") Rice accuses Al Sadr of being a coward. How many Communists did Bush kill in Vietnam? How many Cheney? Any of them? INSERT CHIRPING CRICKET SOUNDS HERE. With all these tough American men tapping away from behind their keyboards or oak desks in D.C., you'd think the Marines would have enough males to fill the ranks without having to recruit women... Peculiar, no? Basra: Echoes of Vietman. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, April 22, Tuesday. Well, I'm finally back in Portland, 3.5 months late. Back to work (and off the booze) for a while. Some fun(?) stuff:       Collapse continues, even when I don't read the news for a few days... CNN: The Trillion Dollar Mortgage Time-bomb. Archdruid: The Specialisation Trap. Cryptogon: Japanese oil tanker attacked off Yemen. AFP: Stern review author says he wasn't pessmistic enough. Exile: Charlton Heston predicts food crisis. more interesting and less commented on is why the U.S. government in 2022 is making the green Cheeze-It-looking wafers in the first place. The reason is climate change. In the film's opening scene, New York City detective Robert Thorn (Heston) listens to his elderly roommate Sol (Edward G. Robinson) kvetch about life in 2022. "How can anything survive in a climate like this?" spits Robinson. "A heat-wave all year long. A greenhouse effect. Everything burning up." unlikely to boost Hummer sales... Midway through the film, there are food riots exactly like the ones that erupted from Haiti to Indonesia a week after Heston's death. Various factors, climate change high among them, have in the past year doubled the price of some staple grains. But he echoes of Soylent Green aren't just general: In the film, riot cops are attacked during the food riots; two days ago in Haiti, a UN peacekeeper was shot and killed for his ration. It was the first killing in the four-year history of the UN's current mission in Haiti. unlikely to boost Hummer sales... A high-profile Soylent Green scenario was laid out in careful detail in a 2002 World Bank study of current demographic and environmental trend lines, "Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World." The report warned that unless the global economy switched tracks onto a more sustainable path—and fast—the results would be social and environmental chaos during the current generation, with a return to scarcity the defining feature of this dystopia. Five years later the fundamental changes called for in the World Bank report seem as distant as ever, with the Soylent Green reality it warned of coming rapidly into focus. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, April 18, Friday. More Design Fail. Mmm. Loopable. The Onion: Chinese Class Clown Executed. South Oak, IL Dodge's racist commerical. Clearcut forest screened from road. Babies: NYU Lockdown. Eek! Take away my freedom, but keep me safe! Wow. Athiests in America are almost as hated as Scientologists. Well, to Hell with you God-botherers. Don't you have an abortion clinic to bomb? McCain's "Senior Moment"> Good for JMC that he's got Lieberman's sage counsel. The Peak Oil Crisis: The Silly Season is here. We have clearly entered the silly season, for all three major candidates now have endorsed the notion that the U.S. should stop buying oil for its strategic reserve in order to force prices back down. This might sound sensible until you learn that the U.S. is only squirreling away eight ten-thousandths of the world’s production each day. The Republican candidate for President is now calling for a “holiday” that would suspend the 18.4 cent a gallon federal gas tax. This proposal of course will never pass, but if it should, the hoped-for jump in gasoline sales will quickly move gas prices higher. At a time when prices are rising about 5 cents a week, cutting taxes is unlikely to boost Hummer sales... ...The great irony in all this is that the problem is simple to understand. World crude oil production has been essentially flat for the last three years while 1.3 billion Chinese, 1.1 billion Indians, and another quarter billion or so living in oil exporting countries continue to increase their oil consumption at a prodigious pace. Incidentally, the Chinese just announced that their diesel imports during the first quarter of 2008 were up seven fold over 2007. Hilary Clinton on working class whites: Screw 'Em! Make your own biosphere. Houses covered in Kudzu. Kazakhstan bans wheat exports for four months. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, April 17, Thursday. Clik deh purdy pitchers fur stories:       Excellent rundown from "The Trumpet" - it's a Christian publication, but the overview of oil & energy is fine: The First Oil Shortages: As oil prices have soared over $100 per barrel, oil companies in the U.S. have doubled the number of wells drilled per year. But despite massive investment, less oil continues to flow out of the ground. There are hundreds of thousands of old wells in the U.S.—each producing a little less oil each day—and new production isn’t getting close to covering the dropoff. “[D]omestic volumes of oil output are depleting and declining inexorably,” says oil analyst Byron King. “From the North Slope of Alaska to the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, U.S. output is just plain falling.” Despite popular opinion, opening up the Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (anwr) and other off-limit areas to drilling isn’t a magic bullet either. These areas may temporarily provide a source of oil, but will ultimately be just a drop in the bucket of what is needed. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates with 95 percent probability that anwr holds 5.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil. At current consumption levels, 5.7 billion barrels would last for 285 days. Even assuming 10 billion barrels in anwr, it wouldn’t even cover our needs for a year and a half. Bear in mind that when some witless politician calls for "energy independence", or some equally witless hack starts blathering about amazing new oilfields ("It contains a BILLION barrels of oil!") that these folk are energy illiterate. They simply don't know what they're talking about. Witness John McCain's recent suggestion to abolish the tax on gas this Summer, or to stop refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve! These are the kinds of ideas I'd expect from a twelve year old (no offence to twelve year olds). How to make a desktop biosphere. A co-worker of mine had a really amazing aquarium at work ... Carl Sagan's account of his eco-sphere. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, April 16, Wedensday. Posting will be spotty for a few days. I'll be taking the train up to San Jose/San Francisco on Friday. I'll be there for three days. Once done, I resume the train trip back to Portland - I should be arriving there on Tuesday.       Fears that Russian oil output has peaked. The oilfiend Bakken is no energy panacea. Petrobras discovers world's third largest oilfield...allegedly. From the comments on the site: UPDATE (Apr 15). Dave Cohen of ASPO-USA writes: Regarding the Carioca field offshore Brazil -- It is completely irresponsible for anyone to whisper to the world that there are 33 billion barrels of -- what? oil-in-place? barrels of oil equivalent? technically recoverable oil? economically recoverable oil? -- in the Carioca offshore block BM-S-9. Brazil has drilled a single test well at BM-S-9, which achieved a good flow as discussed in Rigzone's BG Participates in New Oil Discovery Offshore Brazil (September, 2007) This very deep "pre-salt" field will yield its bounty reluctantly, no matter what the estimated recoverable oil turns out to be. (And remember, you always need to know how an estimate was calculated.) There is no basis at this time for the "33 billion" barrels. Why not 43? Why not 53? The one thing we know for sure at this point is that the leaked number has been very good for BG, Repsol and Petrabras share prices. Hunger, strikes, riots. The food crisis bites. Iraqi militias using food as a recruiting tool. Canadian government to pay farmers $50,000,000 to kill 150,000 pigs, and then dump the carcasses. Maybe there should be food riots of a different sort up North, eh? A Sumerian observation of an asteroid impact? Unlikely. From 2006, funny stories of actors versus celphones. (Actors win). Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, April 15, Tuesday. Food crisis? If you give a crap, you'll stop eating meat. THREE TIMES over the last few days, I've heard a bunch of BS about this "orphan copyright" law. Folks - it's pure bunkum. There are plenty of real threats to our freedom to worry about without making stuff up. Mark Simon - crawl in a hole and leave us alone.       Another anniversary Americans have forgotten about. Warning: dead Arab children alert. Yet more Freakonomics cretinism - the US motto: Our worst critics prefer to stay. Yeah, like there's an outside to globalism to which we can flee. You Smarmy Sh!ts - don't you understand the meaning of the world "GLOBAL"? Then again, what do you expect from a bunch of narcissistic 'tards who spend most of their day chanting "Ooo ess ay, Number one!" Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. 2008, April 14, Monday. Happy Moon-day:       The Wall St. Journal blog makes a pitiful attempt to debunk the internet cable cuts from a few weeks back. Apparently all NINE cuts...spread over thousands of miles) are the work of two ships...both of which were apprehended by the authorities in DUBAI (pals of GWB, no doubt). Ho Ho Ho, the WSJ hacks chortle. It's all solved now - no need for crazy conspiracy theories...pfft. Note the lame attempt at an "appeal to ridicule" by attempting to associate the remote control shark explanation for the cuts - this is the first time I've heard that one. Cretins. Buy a cel-phone, become a baby. Cell phones turn adults into babies, constantly needing contact with their spouses, friends and children. In fact, it's possible that children in a cell-connected world make out worst of all. This morning, not five minutes after I'd left for work, my 11-year-old called from the kitchen to ask if he could have banana bread for breakfast. Kid — I'm not there . Eat ice cream and marshmallows. Make a vodka smoothie! Go wild or be a good boy, just pretend it's 1990 and I'm unreachable. With all of us connected all the time — "Mom, I'm on the bus," "Mom, I'm two blocks from home" — independence never gets a foothold. Young adults fare no better. I have a friend whose daughter went shopping for her first college formal and sent her mom — 1,000 miles away — a photo of each dress as she tried it on. Grow up! Buy a dress by yourself! And while we're at it, learn to make plans, too. Modern parents have been systematically brainwashed by the TV "News" to believe in the myth of the child-kidnapper. While it does occur, it's in such minute numbers as to be statistically insignficant. Nice job, media whores! I know I'm not the only man to experience the phenomenon of mothers placing themselves between me and their kids (as though kiddie-diddlers would be DUMB enough to grab a six year old and attempt to run off with said sprogling. Christ on a crutch lady, I weigh 147 LBS on a good day - do you really think I could carry your fat brat and run more than ten feet before crumpling to the ground, a wheezing wreck? Enjoy your fear. Don't attempt suicide, or we'll send in the SWAT team! Don't you know? Your life doesn't belong to you ... it belongs to The State. Permalink--- Discuss this post in the idleworm forum. Previous Posts.