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.
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:
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).
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.
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?
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.
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!
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
First - this story that we had a record oil production month in January 2008 isn't quite accurate. Historically, these stats referred specifically to liquids - not low grade slop like tar sands, shale, and the like. The new figures include such dismal fuel sources as "liquids", in spite of the fact that they are NOT liquids - not to start with, anyway. Hence, the "record-breaking" figures. If we weren't in dire straits, we wouldn't be schlepping around in Alberta, trying to turn tar sand gunk into Synthetic crude (at colossal expense, financially, environmentally, not to mention the use of Natural gas & Freshwater in the conversion).
From the comments on the above article:
I have corrected the chart, It's clear that the Canadian tar sands are contributing a little bit to this new record. The production was around 800 kbpd in January 2005 and is now around 1,500 kbpd end of 2007. If you remove this contribution (~0.7 mbpd) the corrected maximum would be still in May 2005. Anyway, if Russia goes into a decline, the tar sands contribution will be wiped off in a few months.
And another good observation:
As I wrote about 2 years ago, the changing definition of 'what is oil' will confuse people and lull public into complacency at the same time the internals deteriorate. So for CRUDE OIL, May 2005 still is the peak. Ceteris paribus [all things being equal], I am sure more energy and other resources went into Jan 08 world oil production than went into May 2005 world oil production. In addition to higher dollar costs 4 years later, we have higher costs in terms of natural gas, iron ore, water, oil, and environmental inputs.
In other words, hold off on buying that new SUV you've been drooling over. Hint: 4 wheels bad, 2 wheels good.
Finally, a story to warm the cockles of your cynical hearts, idlewormers. I know I gripe about today's young people - but it seems that I'm being just a tad ungenerous. Here's a tale about two concerned young parents taking a close interest in their child's future education. The future of the world is in safe hands.
Philip Larkin's poem "This Be The Verse" was written for such creatures:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
The OlympicHitler's Torch fiasco just gets funnier by the hour. Maybe they can take the torch Freedom Flame through the streets of Baghdad next? Please please please...
Don't believe the happy TV bobbleheads: your life depends on you being a skeptic - nay, a cynic. Every morning on CNBC for the last few weeks you can hear the Morning Call to Prayer: "We have hit bottom - it's time to buy." (So did we hit bottom back in February, or is it now, two months later?) Bow down to the corporate shills if you must...if only the reality weren't still so foul:
Thirty-five naked and cash-strapped pensioners in Mickey Mouse masks will do their best to shock opera-goers in the east German city of Erfurt tonight when a re-interpretation of Verdi's A Masked Ball holds its premiere.
The work is being staged by the Austrian director Johann Kresnik, 68, a Marxist, who is famous throughout the German-speaking world for his provocative, anti-capitalist productions and his penchant for lavish displays of naked flesh.
His reworking of Verdi's 1859 opera promises to be no exception. Its setting is Ground Zero, the post- 9/11 ruin of New York's World Trade Centre, and the protagonists include not only nude pensioners, but lots of naked young women and a woman in a red swimsuit sporting a Hitler moustache.
The naked male and female pensioners, the oldest being 69, will have their bodies coated with grey paint and will wear their masks throughout the show. In other scenes, actors will appear on stage draped in the Stars and Stripes and burning Uncle Sam hats.
Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn’t pretty.
This reminded me of NY state's former teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto, who has seen the public education system for what it is:
...the industrial titans of the 1890's began to think that not only could the production line be engineered, but people's lives could be engineered as well, in order to work like homogeneous robots with the machines. Rockefeller and Carnegie gave huge sums to prominent academics to see if this could be realized through the educational system.
The titans were quite specific about their needs:
From the very first report issued by John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board -- this is their first mission statement: "In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into men of learning or philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters, great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, ... statesmen, politicians, creatures of whom we have ample supply ... The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way".
We want mindless robot consumers, and by God, we're going to get them. But what kind of creature is produced by the educational indoctrinational system?
As I watched it happen, it takes three years to break a kid, 3 years confined to an environment of emotional neediness, songs, smiles, bright colors, cooperative games, these work much better than angry words and punishment. Constant supplication for attention creates a chemistry whose products are the characteristics of modern school children -- whining, treachery, dishonesty, malice, cruelty and similar traits. Ceaseless competition for attention in the dramatic fishbowl of the classroom, I have never seen this dynamic examined in the public press -- not in 50 years of reading the public press. Ceaseless competition for attention in the dramatic fishbowl of the classroom, reliably delivers cowardly children, toadies, school stoolies, little people sunk into chronic boredom, little people with no apparent purpose, just like caged rats, pressing a bar for sustenance, who develop eccentric mannerisms on a periodic reinforcement schedule. Those of you who took rat psychology in college will know what I'm referring to -- just like the experience of rat psychology, the bizarre behavior kids display is a function of the reinforcement schedule in the confinement of schooling to a large degree. I'm certain of that. Children like this need extensive management.
Most of the sites such as this seem to be stuck somewhere between 10 and 20,000 visitors a day. Now I know why. The rest are watching "American Idol" clips on youtube.
I hope, gentle reader, that you don't have kids trapped in the American school mill. The Irish model is little better, and from what I read, the English is even worse.
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled - it is a fire to be lit." Plutarch.
Fascinating article on controlling people through direct eye contact. Read the second page for the details. Good to know - as I don't fancy the idea of some charlatan pulling this shite on me...
When your culture is in decline, it even affects animation. John K. (mad creator of "Ren & Stimply") contrasts classic Tom and Jerry artwork with its modern counterparts. Yeesh.
John generously provides guidance (when he's not pushing his own peculiar style) to students:
First steps to basic construction. Model sheets. Constructing the head.
Via growabrain, a photo-gallery of India's mines. It's not exactly the miracle of globalisation that the Prime Jester Tom Friedman would have us believe - unless you're a proponent of women and children being used for back breaking work with pick-axes....
Early this year we also heard that drought in the region could force nuclear reactor shut- downs. Nuclear reactors need billions of gallons of cooling water daily to operate, and in many of the lakes and rivers water levels are getting close to the limit set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It is possible in the coming months that we may see water levels decrease below the intake pipes, or that shallow water could become warmer and unusable as a coolant. While this may not cause blackouts, this can result in increased costs for energy as utilities have to buy from other sources.
Big tough John McCain, faces down a 16 year old girl. Wow...what a tough guy. To be fair, JMC was fairly pleasant in response - it was the pansies on CNN who talked up the event like it was a trial by combat. For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure I could beat the crap out of a fifteen year old girl. VOTE ME!
The torch relay, for example, is so ingrained in the modern choreography that most people today assume it was a revival of a pagan tradition—unaware that it was actually concocted for Hitler’s Games in Berlin...
...With its aura of ancient mysticism, the rite linked Nazism to the civilized glories of classical Greece, which the Reich’s academics were arguing had been an Aryan wonderland...Hitler took considerable personal interest in the ritual, and pumped funds into its promotion: The Nazi propaganda machine covered the torch relay slavishly, broadcast radio reports from every step of the route, and filled the Games with the iconography of ancient Greek athletics. Afterward, the ceremony became permanently embedded in the popular imagination in part due to Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of the Nazi Games, Olympia, which evocatively showed a Greek runner treading the gentle beaches of the Aegean at dusk.
“Especially that they approached us with guns, they had no right to come running at us and point with their guns at us and shout “sit down” and “shut up”.
“And as well they didn’t even make us empty our pockets. What kind of drug raid is that where they just watch you sit on the ground and as soon as you move you just get shouted at and you have guns pointed at you. Even my friend that was inside pure girl didn’t get touched. they only searched the guys.
“That night scared me so badly and just seeing the police running at us with those big black guns, that image is stuck in my head now…
Some years ago, I predicted that "asset stripping" - the dismantling of derelict suburban real estate - will become a major component in the post-collapse American economy. And so it has; with some houses worth less than their copper pipes, it is a matter of time before the copper is rescued and emigrates to a new life in China or India. Once the copper pipes are torn out, the value of these houses becomes negative, in effect creating an anti-house - a structure that begs to be demolished. As with matter and antimatter, without municipal efforts at antimatter containment, such anti-houses will react with neighboring houses in a reaction of mutual self-annihilation, leveling entire neighborhoods.
Two hours north of New York City, a mile-long stream and a marsh the size of a football field have mysteriously formed along a country road. They are such a marvel that people come from miles around to drink the crystal-clear water, believing it is bubbling up from a hidden natural spring.
The truth is far less romantic: The water is coming from a cracked 70-year-old tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, scientists say.
The tunnel is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day as it carries drinking water from a reservoir to the big city. It is a powerful warning sign of a larger problem around the country: The infrastructure that delivers water to the nation's cities is badly aging and in need of repairs.
The Environmental Protection Agency says utilities will need to invest more than $277 billion over the next two decades on repairs and improvements to drinking water systems. Water industry engineers put the figure drastically higher, at about $480 billion.
Dubai's power consumption will quadruple to 21,000 megawatts, equivalent to half of Florida's, over the next 12 years if growth doesn't slow sharply.
Burj Dubai, the world's tallest skyscraper, being built off Dubai's main Sheikh Zayed highway, will gobble up 150 megawatts of power, equivalent to about 10% of the power produced by a new-generation nuclear reactor.
A report by Zawya Dow Jones points out that poor energy planning means that in a region that controls 60% of the world's oil and 40% of known natural gas stocks Dubai finds itself begging its neighbours for energy.
China is expected to consume 62.5 percent more oil in 2020 compared with 2006 as fast economic growth will continue to fuel domestic oil demand, says a government think tank.
China's oil consumption would rise from 346.6 million tons in 2006 to 407 million tons in 2010 and 563 million tons in 2020, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences forecast in a new report.
Oil demand would grow by an annual average of 4.5 percent from 2007 to 2010 and an annual average of 3.3 percent from 2010 to 2020, it said.
The financial and economic crisis now upon us is by far the most menacing of the past century - even more so than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is not just a "subprime" crisis; it is systemic - affecting the entire financial system. It is also global, affecting various countries in various ways but affecting them all. In achieving a certain "globalization", we have been uniquely successful in globalizing collapse, chaos and misery. It is a globalization which, in our short-sighted negligence, we never envisaged...
...the Ponzi scheme to shame all others may yet be waiting to deliver its coup de grace. One commentator has drawn attention to "the bad news [which] is the US$500 trillion derivatives market". He says that "This is an area that the general public does not even know exists. Few professionals understand this market. There is no regulation as government just let it go ... and go it did. You must expect a 5% default problem. That is a $25 trillion number ... It can create insolvent institutions all over the world ... It is the making of the first global depression. The world is not ready."
The Fed is now considering borrowing from the Treasury (US taxpayers). Were the Fed to have to do this to remain whole, i.e., have the Treasury underwrite the Fed's balance sheet, the US central bank would be de facto insolvent, having insufficient assets to carry out its mandate.
Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans - but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending.
There have already been food riots around the world. Food-supplying countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have been limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers, leading to angry protests from farmers - and making things even worse in countries that need to import food.
Ibrahim Khalil, who five years ago took part in the iconic toppling of a giant statue of Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad, said on Wednesday he now regrets taking part in the hugely symbolic event.
"If history can take me back, I will kiss the statue of Saddam Hussein which I helped pull down," Khalil told reporters on the fifth anniversary of the statue's toppling.
"I will protect the statue more than my own self," Khalil said in Firdoos Square alongside a monument erected where Saddam's statue once stood before US marines and Iraqis strung a chain around its neck and brought it crashing down.
Khalil's frustration is best described in poetry:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, (Trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1859)
Untreated mental health problems suffered during combat are causing large numbers of repeatedly deployed troops "to unravel," in the words of an exhausted Army officer. Where once this country guaranteed its soldiers two days at home for every day deployed, that dwell-time ratio is now down to less than a day at home for every day deployed.
Pentagon reports make clear the problems unleashed on our troops by post-9/11 deployment cycles -- one recently termed the crisis "daunting and growing." Pentagon data show that after two deployments, the rate of mental health problems in the ranks grows by nearly half. Those who seek treatment often have to wait more than a month to see a medical professional.
Five years ago this month, US troops stood by as looters sacked the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA)--one of the oldest and most used in the world. In Arab countries the old expression was "Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads."
American troops were under orders not to intervene. Library staff who requested protection from the GI's were told, "We are soldiers, not policemen" or "our orders do not extend to protecting this [building]." American military orders did, however, extend to guarding the Ministry of Oil, and the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret police.
The selective passivity of US forces was not only ethically questionable, but also a violation of international law. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1954) makes clear that libraries should not only be spared attack in wartime but also actively protected.
see a medical professional.
Lovely photo gallery: Life goes on in Tehran. (Via growabrain.) Those photos should be compulsory viewing for any Americans still dim-witted enough to believe the one-dimensional caricature of Iran painted by their evil news media.
Oliver has announced plans for a television series in which he'll teach Britain to cook nutritious meals on a tight budget. He's been inspired by the dark days of the Second World War when the government took seriously its responsibility to encourage people to keep fighting fit by eating healthily on a limited diet.
Meat, butter, cheese, milk, sugar and eggs were all rationed, so the Ministry of Food came up with innovative and mouth-watering recipes such as Sheep's Head Roll, Mock Beef Rissoles, Sardines in Curry Sauce, Half-Pay Pudding, Vinegar Cake, Mock Cream and many other substitutes for the real thing. But what did these actually taste like?
I thought wired.com was smarter than this - encouraging consumers to destroy their electronics. Never mind the fact that said technology will likely contain lead, mercury, and assorted chemical nasties. Maybe the emasculated troglodytes who shoot their iPods should go up close and breathe the fumes deep into their lungs? Ah, the sweet smell of stupidity...forum thread.
To Hades with the Olympics - the greatest abomination that the World of "Sport" has to offer - and that's saying something. Wherever the Games go, people get kicked out of their homes to make way for the "Olympic Village" - a colossal concrete carbunkle in which to house the steroid freaks for four weeks. Often it is then abandoned, destined to be a post-apocalyptic themepark.
Far more damning is a study released last week by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions. In every city it examined, the Olympic games - accidentally or deliberately - have become a catalyst for mass evictions and impoverishment. Since the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, more than 2 million people have been driven from their homes to make way for the Olympics. The games have become a licence for land grabs.
Oh wait, citizen...it gets better:
In Beijing 1.25 million people have already been displaced to make way for the games, and another quarter of a million are due to be evicted. Like the people of Seoul, they have been threatened and beaten if they resist. Housing activists have been imprisoned. One man, Ye Guozhu, is currently serving four years for "disturbing social order", and has reportedly been suspended by his arms from the ceiling of his cell and tortured with electric batons. Beggars, vagrants and hawkers have been rounded up and sentenced to "re-education through labour". The authorities are planning to hospitalise mentally ill people so that visitors won't have to see them.
So, major kudos to the French protestors who managed to get the damned torch extinguished THREE TIMES. My only regret is that they didn't get close enough to smash the stupid thing to smithereens. As to the "spectacle"? Just don't watch. So many books to read...so many Bolshy websites.
Space Meat (click for juicy goodness):
Dammit - just pick a new lightbult type and let's get on with it. I'm not touching CFLs again. I'll keep my powder dry and get LEDs...
The blow out of the housing bubble is like an octopus with tentacles that have now reached far beyond real estate into many sectors of the economy. Think about it. Just last year, homeowners were taking out $800 billion a year in home equity loans and lines of credit and spending like crazy. But now the housing ATM is out of money. Home equity lines and credit cards are maxed out, and consumers are too.
The tentacles are beginning to sting by spreading into the corporate sector. Construction spending on commercial property is way down and has a long way to go. Companies are also cutting back on investment and employment (Who needs that new factory when people aren't buying the goods? Who needs the workers?) Sales at Toyota are so bad they may be forced to close an auto plant, following in the footsteps of Ford, Chrysler, and GM.
The technology sector is also hurting because mortgage companies and financial institutions, affected by the subprime mess and capital market freeze, are auctioning off unwanted computers and servers. It's highly unlikely they'll need new ones anytime soon.
The IMF gold sales "would come in handy for the gold market -- and I say that as a gold bull," wrote Ross Norma, joint managing director at FastMarkets Ltd., in a research note.
"Gold mine production is failing to keep up with burgeoning investment demand and the supply deficit has already seen a quadrupling of prices since Gordon Brown, former U.K. chancellor, sold precisely the same tonnage in 2001," Norman said.
"Given that the sales would happen over some years and within the CBGA [Central Bank Gold Agreement], this amount -- if approved -- would be readily absorbed by the investment and jewelry quarter," he said.
The gold will be bought up by India and China at reduced prices. Very nice of the IMF chaps to share the yellow metal.
A choice: will the next "battlestar galactica" space probe be to Jupiter or Saturn?
Combined with the climatic impact of a regional nuclear war -- which could reduce crop yields and starve hundreds of millions -- Mills' modeling shows that the entire globe would feel the repercussions of a hundred nuclear detonations, a small fraction of just the U.S. stockpile. After decades of Cold War research into the impacts that a full-blown war between the Soviet Union and the United States would have had on the globe, recent work has focused on regional nuclear wars, which are seen as more likely than all-out nuclear Armageddon. Incorporating the latest atmospheric modeling, the scientists are finding that even a small nuclear conflict would wreak havoc on the global environment -- cooling it twice as much as it's heated over the last century -- and on the structure of the atmosphere itself.
Artificial food colours are set to be removed from hundreds of products after a team of university researchers warned they were doing as much damage to children’s brains as lead in petrol.
Academics at Southampton University, who carried out an official study into seven additives for the Food Standards Agency (FSA), said children’s intelligence was being significantly damaged by E-numbers. After receiving the advice last month, officials at the FSA have advised their directors to call for the food industry to remove six additives named in the study by the end of next year.
The advice, which will be put before the FSA board next week, would be voluntary. However, manufacturers would be expected by the regulator to remove the additives, replacing them with natural alternatives if possible. Some sweetmakers have unilaterally agreed to remove the suspect colours following the latest scientific evidence.
A big shout-out to the heroes of the "food" industry for poisoning generations of unsuspecting children. Special place in Hell, etc., etc.,
...former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O' Neill, was asked how the problems with subprime mortgages could lead to a financial crisis of global proportions. O' Neill said,
“If you have 10 bottles of water, and one bottle has poison in it, and you don't know which one, you probably won’t drink out of any of the 10 bottles; that’s basically what we’ve got here.”
Bulls-eye. O' Neill's answer is the best yet for explaining a complex situation in simple terms. The term “subprime” is a red herring; it is used by the media to minimize what is really going on. The meltdown in financing extends across the entire range of mortgage-security products. No loan-type has been spared. The wholesale market for anything connected to mortgages is frozen and the details are being intentionally withheld from the public...
...These over-leveraged banking behemoths need to fail. Let the market work. 28 million Americans are on food stamps, tent cities are sprouting up across the country, discretionary spending is down, food and energy prices are skyrocketing, and wages have been frozen for a generation. Where's the bailout for the working man? Instead, the government's largess is showered on a throng of unctuous fat-cat banksters so they can keep the larder on Martha's Vineyard topped off with Godiva truffles and Cuban cigars.
Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out?
Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting?
These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which "body part the statute specifies."
But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief.
I've decided to take the plunge and buy a Cintiq in a few weeks. For those who don't know, this is a monitor that allows the user to draw directly on it, rather than having to hand draw artwork and laboriously scan it into photoshop. Once I'm set up, I'll be able to do a LOT more artwork for the site - regular cartoons and suchlike. They're not cheap - $2500 for the best model. I don't see how I can improve this site without one, however.
Here's a major Clay Bennett update from the CSM. Clay on the "War on Terror":
Clay on the Iraq War:
Clay on the Economy:
Clay somehow manages to address the most serious topics with a disarmingly sweet style. I think his cartoons have become slightly darker in tone recently, which is appropriate to our times...
A global rice shortage that has seen prices of one of the world's most important staple foods increase by 50 per cent in the past two weeks alone is triggering an international crisis, with countries banning export and threatening serious punishment for hoarders.
With rice stocks at their lowest for 30 years, prices of the grain rose more than 10 per cent on Friday to record highs and are expected to soar further in the coming months. Already China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia have imposed tariffs or export bans, as it has become clear that world production of rice this year will decline in real terms by 3.5 per cent. The impact will be felt most keenly by the world's poorest populations, who have become increasingly dependent on the crop as the prices of other grains have become too costly.
I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country has, but then I'm no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than nothing. Obama may yet be borne through the White House portico by a Democratic host of seraphim, but he cannot do much without the consent of a bought and paid for Congress. Only George Bush can do that, and we can only hope God broke the mold after he made George. And like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the "American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the entertainment branch of industry."
Thanks Christopher H. for the $100 donation! Site earnings for March were up - with $200 from the pesky ads, $150 in donations, and a smattering from the amazon links at the left side of the screen, somewhere around $350. Thanks everyone. And a wee reminder, if you're going to do shopping, clicking through the amazon links on the left will channel a few coins in my direction. That said, on with the fun:
More links of mystery:
Hoarders of rice in the Philippines face life imprisonment. For those of us who like to be prepared (i.e., to have a personal reserve of food for emergencies) this raises the unpleasant specter of having one's preparations declared illegal. Hoarding is wrong, of course, but if I spend my income over the course of several years to build a supply of food (for myself and my family), it would rankle, to put it mildly, were it to be criminalised by the incompetent thugs who run the nation.
It's not as if I'm the one who decided to turn corn into ethanol, instead of food.
Despite the similarity in conditions and periods of flooding nearly every year after those flood years more than a decade ago, one thing Midwesterners have not learned is "geologic reality," says Robert E. Criss, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
"When people build commercial or residential real estate in flood plains, when they build on sink holes, when they build on fault lines, when they build on the hillsides in L.A. that are going to burn and burn, over and over again, they're ignoring geologic reality," Criss says. "They're asking for chronic problems."
Excellent oildrum article on Solar Thermal. Readers will know that I tend to be skeptical about alternative energy, but I must say that this is one that seems to offer a glimmer of hope. One problem: humans are pretty thick...(witness the catastrophic invasion of Iraq). I wonder how many solar thermal plants might have been built for the 3,000,000,000,000 dollars (you read that right) that the war is now estimated to cost?
most Americans don't even understand the religion they want to see defended: "A majority of adults, in what is supposedly the most religious nation in the developed world, cannot name the four Gospels or identify Genesis as the first book of the Bible." For me, this startling information immediately brought to mind Stephen Colbert's interview with Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland on "The Colbert Report." Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill that would require the display of the Ten Commandments in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, but, when asked, couldn't actually list the commandments he's fighting to enshrine.
I think it would be more appropriate if the TV bobbleheads spoke like idiotic Californian teenagers: "Like, OMG, Moqtada Al Sadr is like, so totally radical, he's like such a LOSER!" That way, the quality of their speech would match its content. Here's an enlightening analysis from Patrick Cockburn on the "firebrand" "radical" cleric (currently running rings around the Americans and their flaccid Iraqi puppet regime).
Like, dude, if we like, drive a little slower, we, like use less gas!
Thousands of police who were supposed to be backing up the Iraqi Army either refused to fight or defected to Sadr’s Mahdi Army. In Basra, the Iraqi Army was stopped dead and clearly in danger of being crushed or forced to retreat from the city. In Baghdad, Sadr’s militia was rocketing the Green Zone non-stop—not a good look for the “Surge is working” PR drive—and driving the Iraqi Army clean out of the 2-million-man Shia slum, Sadr City. And in every poor Shia neighborhood in cities and towns all over Iraq, new branches of the Mahdi Army were forming up and attacking the government forces.
Savana, an honors student with no history of disciplinary trouble or drug problems, said she didn't know anything about the pills and agreed to a search of her backpack, which turned up nothing incriminating. Wilson nevertheless instructed a female secretary to strip-search Savana under the school nurse's supervision, without even bothering to contact the girl's mother.
The secretary had Savana take off all her clothing except her underwear. Then she told her to "pull her bra out and to the side and shake it, exposing her breasts," and "pull her underwear out at the crotch and shake it, exposing her pelvic area." Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between drug warriors and child molesters.
"I was embarrassed and scared," Savana said in an affidavit, "but felt I would be in more trouble if I did not do what they asked. I held my head down so they could not see I was about to cry." She called it "the most humiliating experience I have ever had." Later, she recalled, the principal, Robert Beeman, said "he did not think the strip search was a big deal because they did not find anything."
Don't expect consquence for these child molestors - or their fellow travelers. For real justice to be meted out, we would need a citizenry that wasn't brow-beaten and emasculated by decades of passive-tolerance bullshit.
Just think of the civic good that would occur if every time this happened, the perps were tarred and feathered by a masked mob - their carcasses strung from lamp-posts. The little Hitlers would stop and think the next time they presume to molest the helpless.
To take a quote from the Aubrey Maturin novels (via Admiral Nelson): "Never mind the manouvres, always go straight at them."
All I can say is - if that had been my daughter, I wouldn't be hiring a lawyer. I would be delivering a demonstration of Newton's Third Law of Motion.
Phosphorous is essential to plant growth. Mined out of phosphate rocks, it is one of the three critical elements found in fertilizer along with potassium and nitrogen.
"From our country's deposits, we could run out in 50 to 100 years, which isn't very long," said Jessica Davis, professor of soil and crop sciences at Colorado State University. "I think that people aren't really aware of it."...
..."In all farming, for food or fuel, some nutrients are removed with the harvested material," [Dan Bush, professor and chair in the biology department at CSU] wrote. "Over time, any given required nutrient can become limiting as it moves out of the field with the harvested tissue."
The notion that the US has enough phosphorous for 50 to 100 years assumes that we'll have the ability to extract in cheaply enough for the process to be viable. What happnes if the oil supply declines? Can we extract phosphorous (presumably an energy intensive activity) for fewer calories than we get from the food grown?
Mobile phones more dangerous than smoking. One report says they are, the next says they aren't. I pick the pessimistic one every time. If they're wrong, then at least I don't die of a brain tumour.
She’d leave the house at 7am and get back after 9pm. There was no time for friends or family or to spend the money she was earning. Before taking a holiday she would have to work until midnight for days ahead, in order to prepare, and when she got back it took three weeks to clear her in-tray. ‘I swore I’d never have another holiday again,’ says Jo. ‘Life is for living and I was not really living it.’
Now her quality of life in Cumbria is, she says, ‘Fantastic. I’m less stressed; I live in the most amazing converted barn, high on the Fells. Every day I walk across the fields, whatever the weather, and think how lucky I am.’
This is deranged:
As a result, in a mass consumerist society the downshifting value system is highly subversive. It rejects the idea that to be happy you need to acquire, accumulate and desire products, be they anti-ageing creams, ‘musthave’ handbags or a second home abroad. So much in our society seems geared towards getting us to do more, cram more into our already cramped and busy lives, and to buy more – in spite of credit card debt trebling between 1996 and 2003. And often, this means buying things we don’t really need.
For example, research by Churchill Home Insurance showed that 86 per cent of women have gone out and bought clothes that have remained on the hanger ever since. At an average of 14 items each, this amounts to £305 worth of clothes per year and a whopping £12,810 worth of unworn clothes over the average working life.
More: Creative ways to downshift. I've followed all the tips in that article (just through common sense). They work.
Here's an old Flash toy I did a few years ago - it's the arabic alphabet. (Who's a clever boy, then?) Click on the letters to hear the correct pronunciation:
Here's a link to the permanent page with the alphabet toy. Maybe someone will find it useful.
