idleworm
home
peak oil
news
games
movies
rants
tech
how to
sci-fi
links
FAQ
Support the site!
amazon donate
cool stuff
easter island
stuporman
rapture
enterprez
joker
emigrants
hitler
draft
caesar
fallujah
anthrax
dune?
iraq game
Brilliant: Lego Cthulhu.
Monkey Men.
Crikey - Iran's oil bourse is back. Delayed due to technical problems, it opens next week.The argument over how damaging it will be to the U.S. dollar will soon be resolved, assuming a tactical nuke doesn't blow it to smithereens.
Impeach Bush, State by State. Don't expect to see this covered by the clowns in the main-stream-media.
The American rags-to-riches myth is ... A MYTH. I know I know, you're as stunned as I am.
The humane mousetrap.
Pretty sounds and colors...
The World is uniting against Bush. There's a reason why: they're not stupid!
| Our biggest bankers are China and Japan, both of whom could cause the US serious financial problems if they wished. A country whose financial affairs are in the hands of foreigners is not a superpower. The US is heavily dependent on imports for manufactured goods, including advanced technology products. In 2005 US dependency (in dollar amounts) on imported manufactured goods was twice as large as US dependency on imported oil. In the 21st century the US has experienced a rapid increase in dependency on imports of advanced technology products. A country dependent on foreigners for manufactures and advanced technology products is not a superpower. |
2006 April 26, Wednesday
Maybe we can solve our oil problems by asking Superman for help!
Some local stations are running out of gas... Help us Superman!
Haw Haw Haw! Why does anyone listen to the "experts" at The Economist? Here they are, back in the late nineties, predicting $5 a BARREL for gas. Uh, dudes, like $5 a GALLON would be closer to the mark.
2006 April 25, Tuesday
Here's a question for the ages:
| How can we spoiled Americans have forefathers who fought a world war to stop the slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and Communists and then wind up with a president whose grandfather helped Hitler rise to power and invested in the company which manufactured the Zyklon B Gas used to kill these "undesirables"? |
| we are negotiating, or bargaining, as Elizabeth Kubler-Ross once put it in describing the sequence of emotional reactions of humans facing certain death: denial > bargaining > depression > acceptance ... ...The main thread in this bargaining stage is the desperate wish to keep our motoring fiesta going by other means than oil. This fantasy exerts its power across the whole political spectrum...The right wing still pretends we can still drill our way out of this, if only the nature freaks would allow them to. The "green" folks thinks that we can devote crops to the production of gasoline substitutes, even though a scarcity of fossil fuel-based fertilizers will sharply cut crop yields for human food. Nobody, it seems, can imagine an American life not centered on cars. |
Here's an amusement ride in poverty!
(The following links are from Life after the oil crash)
More on the threat to the dollar's reserve currency status - this time from the Russians as well as the Iranians:
| Were the Iranians to establish a Middle-East based euro-only oil exchange, the dollar's unique petrocurrency status could unravel. That, in turn, would threaten its broader dominance - which, given America's groaning twin deficit, could seriously hurt the US economy. Some cite this as the real reason the US wants to attack Iran: to protect the dollar's unique position. I wouldn't go that far, but the prospect of a non-dollar oil exchange in Tehran is certainly an aggravating factor. The opening of Iran's new oil exchange has recently been delayed. But, having spoken with numerous officials in Tehran, and western consultants who've been working with the Iranians for several years, I think it will go ahead. The exchange entity has already been legally incorporated in Iran and a site purchased to house administrative and regulatory staff. |
If and when the housing bubble bursts, there'll be blood on the walls:
| Because of the housing bubble, as engineered by the Federal Reserve, Americans are now drowning in mortgage debt while naïvely believing that living in a house is the path to wealth creation via long-term capital appreciation. Thus I am just going to come out and say it: countless American homeowners are already insolvent and simply don’t know it; and many of them continue to make ends meet by borrowing against credit cards and ever-shrinking home equity. It is commonplace for me to see married couples with mortgage-debt-to-income ratios that are wildly askew. The hyperreality conjured by the Federal Reserve’s relentless inflation of the money supply is characterized by a populace which believes that a permanent plateau of prosperity has been attained. This is the boom phase of the trade cycle. A mindset, correspondingly, arises in which people have absolutely no fear of debt. After all, the Federal Reserve has the economy under control. Debt, in fact, is embraced as a means to lever up one’s return on investment. When the bust phase of the trade cycle materializes - and followers of Austrian economics know it will, eventually - then the real horror show will unfold. Let’s face it: highly leveraged Americans have little to no chance of ever paying back their enormous mortgage debts. All it will take is for a husband or a wife to lose a job, or for interest rates to go higher, in order for mortgage debt to become unmanageable. In the bust phase, mortgage defaults will become a deluge. |
2006 April 24, Monday
ahem. Here's a Monday Morning wake me up:
You too can Wipe Your Arse with the Irish Independent!
2006 April 21, Friday
Here's a very well made Flash animation showing the effects of a nuclear attack on Iran. It's got sound.
What would a victorious Iran mean to the region? (A Kuwaiti article).
Ok, this is heavy. Put on your best diapers. We are Living in Perpetual Crisis. Buy Gold, Silver, Guns, and a plot o' land. Don't forget to bring women.
2006 April 20, Thursday
I've thought for a while that Bush resembles the demented President from the movie "The Dead Zone." Christopher Walken isn't going to bail us out either.
| "I have fulfilled my destiny," the president says manically. He has just entered the nuclear launch codes that will trigger World War III. Seconds later, he emerges from a bunker. The Secretary of State squeezes between two soldiers. "Mr. President!" he shouts. "We have a diplomatic solution!" He smiles. "It's too late," he replies. "The missiles are flying. Alleluia. Alleluia." The above scene, from David Cronenberg's 1983 adaptation of the horror novel "The Dead Zone," is a classic if slightly preposterous nightmare of a world destroyed by a demented demagogue. Now, incredibly, a lunatic out of a Stephen King movie has brought the United States to the brink of Armageddon. |
| "We're talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years," he went on. Crazy stuff. But whenever someone inside the Administration opposes the nuclear option, "They're shouted down." The pro-nuke faction, led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is responding to internal critics with a "B61 [nuclear bomb] with more blast and less radiation." |
Cartoon: Bush's support for Rumsfled!
Fun! These folk are living in the Iron Age... If Preznit Bush has his way, we'll be living in the Stone Age.
Here's a great article: Are humans carnivores?
By the same writer: Why I am a Vegan.
From the above site, horrific info on battery hens. The site also has great links on vegetarian alternatives to eggs. I still eat eggs, but I'm going to have to remove store bought eggs from my diet (as well as meals in restaurants that use them). What a vile and disgusting food-chain we've built for ourselves.
These vegetarian meals look yummy. I need to get my act together in the kitchen!
An astonishing number of rent-a-cops believe that it's illegal to photograph buildings! The comments section is full of comments from photographers who have been harassed by these Brownshirts. There seems to be some kind of industry-wide brainwashing going on.
As if Peak Oil, War with Iran, Bird Flu, Climate Change and the Housing Bubble weren't enough of a laxative, there's another killing mechanism that you may not have heard of: The Derivatives Bubble. If this bubble bursts, you can kiss your bank goodbye:
| There is $17 trillion in derivatives floating around with $1 trillion bet on GM alone, even though GM has a market cap of $20 billion or so. Is that a sign of a spectacular success, or is that a sign of unbelievable speculative leverage? Obviously, Greenspan learned nothing from the stock market crash of 2000. He is now claiming that derivatives have permitted the unbundling of financial risks. Have they? I have a couple of questions for you, Mr. Greenspan, that might bring you back to reality. Is there not a counter party to those trillions of dollars worth of derivatives? Has that risk been magically offloaded to Pluto or Mars? If not, who has that risk? |
2006 April 19, Wednesday
FUCKING RIGHT! Draft the war-loving bastards!!!
| There are a lot of nations in this world where people are kooky, but only America has the military outreach to project our kookiness onto the world. That is why more than any nation state, America desperately needs a military draft. Numb-skullism, when pertaining to family matters or animal rights or liver abuse, is small potatoes when compared to kickin’ the world’s butt. A military draft of our Rambos would immediately tie their words to their actions, behavior would no longer be removed from consequences, and life would no longer be cost-free. So tell me, just how important is it for you to liberate those Iraqi women? How about enough to blow two years of your life in the mindless U.S. military? Possibly lose a chunk of your body for a lifetime? |
| What's fascinating about these neocons is their obsession with the use of force as old men when, as young men, many of them --notably Cheney -- managed to avoid service in Vietnam. In their youth, when it might have mattered for their country, they never fired a shot in anger. (In Cheney's case, considering his marksmanship, that was not all bad.) |
| ...new evidence of Coke's antilabor tactics emerged in Indonesia, where, according to USAS, workers were intimidated when they attempted to unionize; and in Turkey, where more than 100 union members were fired and then clubbed and tear-gassed by police during a protest. |
You must have wondered as I have about the feeble nature of the American left. If the best they can produce is the weak-kneed moveon.org, there is little hope. The time for lilly-livered-liberalism is over: you don't reason with fascists like the Bushies. Stop trying to build a "consensus" with them. God, what fucking wimps.
Ah, the continuing emergence of Orwell's Oceania. Here begins the death of freedom in Britain.
| Every place that sells alcohol or cigarettes, every post office, every pharmacy and every bank will have an NIR terminal where you can be asked to "prove who you are". Each time you swipe the card, a record will be made at the NIR - so, for instance, the government will know every time you withdraw more than £99 from your bank account. Restaurants and off-licences will demand that the card be swiped so that they are indemnified from prosecution. Private business will have full access to the NIR. If you apply for a job, your card will have to be swiped. If you want a London Underground Oyster card, or a supermarket loyalty card, or a telephone line or a mobile phone or an internet account, your ID card will have to be swiped. |
| It won't come with jackboots and book-burnings, with mass rallies and fevered harangues. It won't come with "black helicopters" or tanks on the street. It won't come like a storm, but like a break in the weather, that sudden change of season you might feel when the wind shifts on an October evening: everything is the same, but everything has changed. Something has gone, departed from the world, and a new reality has taken its place. As in Rome, all the old forms will still be there: legislatures, elections, campaigns - plenty of bread and circuses for the folks. But the "consent of the governed" will no longer apply; actual control of the state will have passed to a small group of nobles who rule largely for the benefit of their wealthy peers and corporate patrons. To be sure, there will be factional conflicts among this elite, and a degree of free debate will be permitted, within limits; but no one outside the privileged circle will be allowed to govern or influence state policy. Dissidents will be marginalized - usually by "the people" themselves. Deprived of historical knowledge by an impoverished educational system designed to produce complacent consumers, not thoughtful citizens, and left ignorant of current events by a media devoted solely to profit, many will internalize the force-fed values of the ruling elite, and act accordingly. There will be little need for overt methods of control. The rulers will often act in secret. For reasons of "national security," the people will not be permitted to know what goes on in their name. Actions once unthinkable will be accepted as routine: government by executive fiat, the murder of "enemies" selected by the leader, undeclared war, torture, mass detentions without charge, the looting of the national treasury, the creation of huge new "security structures" targeted at the populace. In time, all this will come to seem "normal," as the chill of autumn feels normal when summer is gone. |
2006 April 18, Tuesday
It's so difficult to find non-apocalyptic links these days. I try my best though.
Bush's new addiction.
The Economy.
How not to be an ugly American.
2006 April 17, Monday
Ireland is at great risk from peak oil, stuck as we are the tail end of the energy pipeline (not just for oil, but natural gas as well). Here's a great six part series from RTE (Ireland's national radio service) about Peak Oil. My home town, Arklow, happens to be the site of a large wind farm, (scroll 2/3 down) which is mentioned in passing in the program.
Free-market madness from the UK: Britain now 'eating the planet':
| In 2004, the UK exported 1,500 tonnes of fresh potatoes to Germany, and imported 1,500 tonnes of the same product from the same country Imported 465 tonnes of gingerbread, but exported 460 tonnes of the same produce Sent 10,200 tonnes of milk and cream to France, yet imported 9,900 tonnes of the dairy goods from France |
2006 April 15, Saturday
Are you a walking corn?
| ...corn and its array of byproducts have so successfully colonized the U.S. diet -- and so dominate the diets of the animals consumed here -- that Americans have ripped the title of "the corn people" from Mexico, where corn was originally domesticated and remains a staple. Because of corn's rare carbon signature, Pollan writes, it's possible to discern from flesh or hair samples how much corn contributes to the formation of human bodies. "When you look at the isotope ratios, [U.S. residents] are corn chips with legs," a biologist tells him. |
| A Swiss company accidentally sold unapproved genetically modified seed corn in the US for four years. The mistake resulted in about 133 million kilograms of the corn making its way into the food chain. Officials for the company, Syngenta, and the US Environmental Protection Agency insist there is no danger to human health. But the EPA and the US Department of Agriculture are investigating to see if any laws or regulations were broken. The EPA confirmed the investigation was underway in a statement to the journal Nature. Between 2001 and 2004, Syngenta accidentally sold an unapproved corn variety called Bt 10, mistaking it for the approved variety Bt 11. Both varieties produce a bacterial toxin that kills insects, using the same inserted gene and producing the same protein. The only difference is the location of the inserted gene, Syngenta says. |
Bon appetit!
2006 April 14, Friday
The crazies still want war with Iran.
Indeed: Iran, we hardly knew ye.
At least the sheeple are slightly harder to brainwash this time.
The beneficial charactersitics of weeds.
2006 April 13, Thursday
The Omnivore's Dilemma:
| In the United States, Pollan makes clear, we're mostly fed by two things: corn and oil. We may not sit down to bowls of yummy petroleum, but almost everything we eat has used enormous amounts of fossil fuels to get to our tables. Oil products are part of the fertilizers that feed plants, the pesticides that keep insects away from them, the fuels used by the trains and trucks that transport them across the country, and the packaging in which they're wrapped. We're addicted to oil, and we really like to eat. |
Don't worry - we'll be saved by termite enzymes!
2006 April 12, Wednesday
Why do Canadians hate Amurca? - Is Your Entire Country on Crack?
| Speaking as a Canadian who is fond of judicious language, I feel that this situation deserves careful and measured thought. So let me just open with: Is your entire f*cking country on crack??? Are all you Americans out of your cotton picking minds??? Are you completely freaking delusional? Homicidal? Psychotic? Have you lost any shred of a moral compass? WHAT IN THE NAME OF JESUS H. CHRIST ON A CRUTCH IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!!!!! |
I'd rather drink plutonium than Benzene. Why is it in sodas???
Our discarded computers end up causing cancer in China..., which makes me think more highly of Hewlett Packard, who seem to be keen on recycling old computers. I recently received a pamphlet from HP, asking for old monitors, printers, computers, for recycling. If they dispose of my dead equipment as promised, my next machine (assuming I buy one) will be HP.
2006 April 11, Tuesday
Fascinating. Superimpose the price of oil with the price of gold using the BBC's commodities page, and you see an amazing parallel:
The most likely phenomenon that explains this: oil producers sinking their worthless petrodollars into real money (gold). I had noticed the pattern before a friend mentioned the following news item:
| Frank Holmes, chief executive of U.S. Global Investors, which manages the Gold Shares Fund , said that he believes the main support for gold at the moment is coming from the recycling of petrodollars. "If you look at countries with massive dollar buildup from selling oil, they're diversifying into gold," he asserted.Against this backdrop, May crude climbed to its highest intraday level since Feb. 1. |
2006 April 10, Monday
More on the evil of lawns.
Interview with Bill Mollison, permaculture founder.
I wonder what our new feudal overlords will be munching on as the peasants die of hunger, after the collapes. Could it be this obscene conconction? (Thanks Ian!)
2006 April 10, Monday
Ah, but this is fascinating (if accurate). Superimpose Bush's approval ratings with the price of gas, and there is an incredible correlation. Again, assuming that this is genuine/accurate, it speaks volumes for the political awareness of the vast majority of the electorate. Not that I need much convincing of the epic stupidity of Joe Public.
2006 April 7, Friday
The cosmic joker strikes again: we reduce pollution, we increase global warming.
2006 April 6, Thursday
2006 April 5, Wednesday
Kunstler's eyesores!
Wot u can do: I feed me.
Judge says fetuses don't count in carpool lanes. Cletus - get mah gun.
2006 April 4, Tuesday
Here's some good news (no really!): Bacteria Neutralise Uranium Contamination
Which is just as well, because Uranium bombing in Iraq contaminates Europe
2006 April 2, Sunday
Stupidest idea in the history of the human race: the notion that you can build a global economy based on never-ending exponential growth. And the Nobel Prize for Economics goes to...Homer Simpson!
This is funny. After all the talk of Brazil's use of cane-sugar ethanol as a "solution" to oil dependance - we now see the result. Ahem: Peak Sugar. To quote the linked article: ENTROPY WILL NOT BE MOCKED.
Here's a beautiful simplification of Thermodynamics:
| The British scientist and author C.P. Snow had an excellent way of remembering the three laws: 1. You cannot win (that is, you cannot get something for nothing, because matter and energy are conserved). 2. You cannot break even (you cannot return to the same energy state, because there is always an increase in disorder; entropy always increases). 3. You cannot get out of the game (because absolute zero is unattainable). |
| "It's an unprecedented die-off," said National Park Service fisheries biologist Jeff Miller, who last week checked 40 stations in the Virgin Islands. "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef ... We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months." |
Blimey. Information overload can hit hard sometimes, inducing a physical and mental paralysis.Here's a scary set of numbers. We eat oil.
| “400 gallons of oil equivalents are expended annually to feed each American.” The three largest fossil fuel inputs relied upon by commercial agriculture break down like this. 31% of this petroleum is used to produce fertilizers. 19% is used to operate the machinery that currently replaces human and animal labor on the farm, and 16% is used to transport the food we eat. The average piece of food travels over 1500 miles before it reaches your dinner table. As the price of the oil doubles and triples ad infinitum the price of producing and transporting food from across the nation or in some cases across the world will follow suit. Let’s set aside facts like modern agriculture consumes 85% of the fresh water used in the United States or the fact that topsoil in this country is being depleted at best 30 times faster than the rate at which it is naturally produced. |
old posts - about us - contact