Now I've been happy lately, thinking about the good things to come And I believe it could be, something good has begun
Oh I've been smiling lately, dreaming about the world as one And I believe it could be, some day it's going to come
Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again
Now I've been smiling lately, thinking about the good things to come And I believe it could be, something good has begun
Oh peace train sounding louder Glide on the peace train Come on now peace train Yes, peace train holy roller
Everyone jump upon the peace train Come on now peace train
Get your bags together, go bring your good friends too Cause it's getting nearer, it soon will be with you
Now come and join the living, it's not so far from you And it's getting nearer, soon it will all be true
Now I've been crying lately, thinking about the world as it is Why must we go on hating, why can't we live in bliss
Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again
Peace Train
by Yusuf Islam
allspirit Washington's secret nuclear war By Shaheen Chughtai
Illegal weapons of mass destruction have not only been found in Iraq but have been used against Iraqis and have even killed US troops. .The WMD in question is depleted uranium (DU).. The radiation released by DU nuclear warfare is believed to be more than 10 times the amount dispersed by atmospheric testing. As a result, DU particles have engulfed the world in a radioactive poison gas that promises illness and death for millions. DU has a radioactivity level up to 0.4 (micro-curies) per gram
Thousands of DU shells and bombs have been used in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and - both during the 1990-91 Gulf war and the ongoing conflict - in Iraq. "They're using it in Falluja, Baghdad is chock-a-block with DU - it's all over the place"
Los Alamos .. improving the efficiency of ..superconductors.. ..simple and cheap method for increasing the current ..in a magnetic field. ..immense potential for improvements to efficiency in.. motors and generators "Nature Materials", Macmanus-Driscoll ..barium zirconate is deposited with the yttrium-barium-copper-oxi de superconductor, it naturally forms nanoscale particles 2-5x increase in the current densities of coated conductors in high magnetic fields ..at liquid nitrogen temperatures. .."..how to control defects..and use them to our advantage" Alan Tennant's On the Wing.. It begins in a battered single-engine Cessna Skyhawk 2,000 feet above ..great tidal flats off Padre Island on the Gulf Coast in Texas, home to more than 300 species of resident, wintering and migratory birds, including Falco peregrinus tundrius, the fabled arctic peregrine falcons... ..Tennant is in that old airplane, a guest of the Army Chemical Corps, which is trying to figure out where these falcons go when they migrate. The Army wants to know because in the tissue and bones of these tough little birds resides the residue of the millions of gallons of pesticides .. it hopes to figure out what is going to happen to them, and by extension to us, and to prepare for the worst.
Cities by John Reader 2004? urban agriculture..one in two Taiwanese families grow their own food and metropolitan Havana produces 60% of its own vegetables (organic ones too, thanks to the US embargo on artificial fertiliser) ...Hiroshima's subsequent tomato crop, which was abundant and pest-free as never before. The blast had sterilised the soil and the ash had fertilised it. Hermit crabs are currently experiencing a housing shortage due to global pollution and human shell collectors... "I am currently designing these structures .. die injection molds so that the houses are mass producible in large quantities in plastic... a small corporate logo on each house before it is placed in the wild.
.. Monsanto and Scotts..a strain of creeping bentgrass for use on golf courses ..resistant to.. Roundup..opposed by ..federal Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.. transfer resistance to weedy relatives..previous studies of the impact of ge plants have been too small to capture the full spread of genes. EPA found the bentgrass pollinated plants as far away as they measured 13 miles downwind ... Natural growths of grass of a different species were pollinated .. nine miles away. Australia's recent decision to ban fishing on a third of the Great Barrier Reef represented an important endorsement for an obscure computer program that has become the brains behind many conservation plans around the world. Marxan 1998 Ph.D. thesis Australian Ian R. Ball with Dr. Hugh P. Possingham, a director of the Ecology Center at U Queensland The program, which is free, takes data about species and their habitats and spits out an optimal design for the most efficient network of reserves to preserve biodiversity in a region. ..But in a paper in Ecology Letters Dr. Possingham warned..unless such plans were put in place within a year after they were created, it was better to follow the simple rules of thumb that conservationists have long used ....Dr. Eric Dinerstein, chief scientist for WWF.., said conservation plans were a good fund-raising tool, pointing out that they had persuaded governments to expand protection for tropical forests in Brazil and the Congo Basin, and helped get the World Bank's Global Environment Facility to allocate $11 million this year, as part of a $61 million, five-year plan, to protect the Cape region of South Africa. His fund, he said, spends $100,000 to $150,000 on ecoregional plans. Danny Day, the president of Eprida.. believes that greenhouse gases from burning coal.. can be captured and injected into charcoal,..then combined with ammonia to create a.. fertilizer. Day was developing a method for turning biomass into hydrogen,.. pyrolysis,.. discovered that turnips were growing in a pile of charcoal produced during the pyrolysis process.
charcoal had been used in the Brazilian Amazon Terra Preta de Indio. ..to create the charcoal biomass must be burned at temperatures lower than usual (250 - 300° ..Eprida has a demonstration of the scrubbing process.. But: Galen Suppes.. has "low regard" for technologies that claim to reduce greenhouse gases by turning them into solids. "I don't believe that the product you are turning into carbon is going to stay in the ground..
Johannes Lehmann.. Cornell.. however, said the carbon has been retained in the soil at the Terra Preta sites for up to 3,000 years. ..partially burning wood ..at lower temperatures ..combining it with nutrients such as.. bones or animal products made for a very effective fertilizer. ..Tribes..were able to stay in a single location for hundreds of years, according to Lehmann.
..U.S.. commitments of $20 billion to global warming research .. Carbon sequestration without economic benefits would strain the global economy and hurt the poorest nations first by reducing investment dollars .... Billions of $ poured into OldCarbon in hopes of "sequestration" A cruel way to preserve those monsters, and strangle clean de-centralised power ".. degraded soils need the carbon that is currently be emitted to our atmosphere. This is carbon use and restoration, not sequestration." - It appears that the system does NOT permanently sequester coal furnace smoke-stack carbon - a model proposed suggests 20% of smokestack CO2 is caught as Ammonium Carbonate, but turns back to CO2 in the ground. What is captured is a proportion of the "biomass" in the Hydrogen-producing first part of the system. So I dont know what to make of this Title: "VALUABLE AND STABLE CARBON CO-PRODUCT FROM FOSSIL FUEL EXHAUST SCRUBBING" but ECOSS is the best of a bad bunch: worth a look: ..Yamaguchi University believe that they have found a way to economically separate out carbon dioxide (CO2) from flue gases using a zeolite molecular sieve (New Scientist, 4 October 2003). To date, the only commercial ways of stripping CO2 from flue gas have been solvent stripping using monoethanolamine, with solvent recycling, or liquefying waste gases and distilling out the CO2. Both processes are currently uneconomic, although Statoil uses the second process to generate the CO2 it pumps into the Sleipner field - the economics being totally dependent on tax breaks from the Norwegian Government. The Japanese researchers claim the CO2 molecules at 0.33 nanometres diffuse through the sieve at 100 times the rate for N2 molecules at 0.36 nanometres, and that the sieves can work at up to 200°C. ..the technology has not really got out of the laboratory yet, for the oil industry
I remain deeply suspicious of Carbon sequestration. Seems like a Coal subsidy. It may be urgent to get carbon-free energy immediately. Every year that coal labs tinker may be Nero's fiddle. ..IHS Energy ..only three countries have replaced reserves on a five- and ten-year basis - Angola, Brazil and Kazakhstan. Australia more or less joins the exclusive club, but most of the discovery has been gas liquids and its oil production is already in decline. China - is having great difficulty in expanding production and may move into decline as early as 2005/2006. Indonesia, the other regional giant is experiencing quite rapid production decline, as is Australia. So far, Malaysia and Brunei are holding their own and expanding a little. Indonesia and Venezuela, both of which have production quotas that are significantly larger than their production capacities ..currently available oil production capacity all around the world will be producing flat out. How sustainable this proves to be remains to be seen.
For many years now non-Opec production has been operated at capacity, leaving Opec to fine tune production in order to achieve its price objectives. In economic terms, because no company or country had the capacity to challenge Opec, they had no choice but to be price takers, maximising earnings by maximising production.
Opec's record production of 31.7mn b/d in 1977 wasn't exceeded until November 2003, since then it has never been under that level... The utilisation of the final bits of readily available capacity in Saudi Arabia - in line with the 0.5mn b/d expansion in Opec quotas from August - means that early August production will exceed 33mn b/d. After that, the only incremental capacity is the, definitionally unsustainable, surge capacity and any new capacity... the Afghan President has just given the go ahead for oil and gas pipelines across his country... Turkmenistan has always had to look to Russia as the only egress for Turkmen oil and gas was via Russia, effectively depressing the value of Turkmen hydrocarbons. A pipeline route to export Turkmen oil and gas across Afghanistan and sell it into the Pakistani and Indian markets would change the whole political dynamics of the Caspian region. However, there are unresolved political tensions between Pakistan and India while meddling in Afghanistan seems to be a regional obsession. Clearly for the international oil and gas industry ‘The Great Game’ is still being played. The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg (2003) The Schwarzenegger administration is developing an ambitious plan The "Million Solar Homes Initiative," .. California would provide home builders with rebates if they added solar panels, and incentives to ..older houses. ..surcharge on customers .. $1 E9 over a decade .. photovoltaic panels to 40% of new homes by 2010, and 50% by 2013. ..require builders to add solar panels to 5% of homes by 2010 and 50% by 2020. By 2017..solar panels to 1.2 E6 houses ..884,000 new and 313,000 older houses.
Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: "..he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends." ..Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous...." ..Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College, said: "I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true...." ..W Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute - and the top expert on Iraq there - said: "I don't think that you can kill the insurgency".."We have a growing, maturing insurgency group,.. They are getting better ..there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed.. "I think the president ordered the attack on Fallujah," said General Hoare.." Then, just as suddenly, the order was rescinded, and Islamist radicals gained control, using the city as a base. ..religious imagery common now in Fallujah and the Sunni triangle: "There's talk of angels and the Prophet Mohammed coming down from heaven to lead the fighting, talk of martyrs whose bodies are glowing and emanating wonderful scents."
"I see no exit," said Record. "We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamisation...we had more time and money in state building in Vietnam than in Iraq." General Odom said: "This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war .. ..General Hoare believes .."a decision has been made" to attack Fallujah "..- after the election" ..General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he has ever seen .. including Vietnam. ".. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida." Global Relocalization is a building block;..the process by which communities localize their economies and essential systems, such as food and energy production, water, money, culture, governance, media, and ownership. This process will require that we rebuild our cities to severely reduce transport needs and support localization of essential systems - ecological city design provides as framework for this transformation. To effectively address energy scarcity and curtail biosphere destruction, relocalization must occur globally and with some degree of integration. Essentially human civilization needs to prepare itself to do less materially with much less energy and fewer natural resources.. postcarbon Putin's Russia: Is the Economy Next? The big question now is whether Putin will extend this steady concentration of power to the economy -- not a full-fledged return to Soviet-style economic management, but possibly a wide retreat from the free-market reforms Putin pursued during his first term,..
the American economy has actually been hollowed out, as we’ve outsourced and thrown away our manufacturing abilities and capabilities, and really what the American economy is about now, it’s about the creation of suburban sprawl and its furnishings and accessories. And at some point, there’s a recognition, I think perhaps unconscious, among the other nations in the world who observe us, that isn’t good enough. And the consensus is beginning to form that that’s not enough to support a strong dollar. In fact, this is a problematical economy, and perhaps a weak and precarious economy, and one that is based on the continuing misallocation of resources into a living arrangement based on the future consumption of enormous amounts of fossil fuel that are not going to be there. .. --one thing you can say about the Europeans and their living arrangement, is that they at least are living in towns and cities that have some prospect for utility in the future. Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World by Richard Heinberg If the US continues with current policies, the next decades will be marked by war, economic collapse, and environmental catastrophe. Resource depletion and population pressures are about to catch up with us, and no one is prepared. The political élites, especially in the US, are incapable of dealing with the situation, and have in mind a punishing game of "Last One Standing." The alternative is "Powerdown," a strategy that will require tremendous effort and economic sacrifice in order to reduce per-capita resource usage in wealthy countries, develop alternative energy sources, distribute resources more equitably, and reduce the human population humanely but systematically over time. While civil society organizations push for a mild version of this, the vast majority of the world's people are in the dark, not understanding the challenges ahead, nor the options realistically available. Powerdown speaks frankly to these dilemmas. Avoiding cynicism and despair, it begins with an overview of the likely impacts of oil and natural gas depletion and then outlines four options for industrial societies during the next decades:
Last One Standing: the path of competition for remaining resources;
Powerdown: the path of cooperation, conservation, and sharing;
Waiting for a Magic Elixir: wishful thinking, false hopes, and denial;
Building Lifeboats: the path of community solidarity and preserva
flyingfascism..surveillance equipment revealed at the Redstone Arsenal Arms Bazaar .. DCHD (Domestic Control Hover Drones)..a meter ..twenty kilograms each. It looks like a life ring with a motor ..$178,000 ..hover to 500 feet.. ..maximum speed is 50 mph..can stay aloft for up to three hours counter-rotating rotors.. boron-graphite composite .. controlled ..through satellites or ..Fixed or Mobile Relay Command Centers, .. it virtually no sound ..ten feet away, you couldn't hear ..sensors ..infrared cameras ..night cameras....see-through capability ..thermal imaging sensor .."non-lethal" .. stun gun .. powered by what's known as a fusion power cell..some sort of chemical reaction. These drones can stop and detain people.. they can hover right in your face, while you're looking into the camera. .. ..they hovered the thing around the room and then it came down in front of this Air Force captain's face, and it said, "Citizen, kindly present your national identification card." ..the government has not denied that they are using miniaturized fusion power cells. The reason they're not making a big deal out of it is because people would say, "let's replace the oil industry with fusion power."
Priests and Programmers by John Stephen Lansing "But why involve the mathematical apparatus of systems ecology and simulation modelling in an anthropological study of a social institution, the Balinese water temples? First, to make sense of the problem. Consider: the Oos and Petanu rivers of southern Bali provide irrigation water for nearly 200 subaks. Subaks are egalitarian, cooperative farmer’s associations that manage the flow of irrigation water into rice terraces, and also coordinate agricultural rituals. But the average size of each subak is less than 50 hectares and 100 members. When a single subak decides on its planting schedule for the next year (what to plant, and when), it sets in motion an irrigation schedule for itself, which will also affect its neighbors. In other words, how much water one gets depends in part on the irrigation schedules of one’s neighbors upstream. Moreover, as Balinese farmers recognize, the irrigation schedules chosen by subaks also affect the life cycles of rice pests, like rats, insects and diseases. My colleague Gusti Nyoman Aryawan, a Balinese ecologist, has shown that synchronizing irrigation schedules over a sufficiently large area of rice terraces can control rice pests, since ‘if all of the fields in a sufficiently large area are harvested at the same time, and subsequently flooded, rice pests are deprived of their habitat. If no alternative hosts are available, the pest population will drop’ (Lansing, 1991: 121, cf. Aryawan et al., 1993). So why did we bother with computer simulations, since the ecological point seems straightforward? Because ‘with hundreds of subaks distributed in many branches along a typical river, there are an enormous number of possible cropping schedules’:"
peak oil: at globalresearch In 1991 the largest discovery in the Western Hemisphere since the 1970's, was found at Cruz Beana in Columbia. But its production went from 500,000 bbd (barrels/day) to 200,000 barrels in 2002. In the mid-1980's the Forty Field in North Sea produced 500,000 bbd. Today it yields 50,000 barrels. One of the largest discoveries of the past 40 years, Prudhoe Bay, produced some 1.5 mbbd for almost 12 years. In 1989 it peaked, and today gives only 350,000 bbd. The giant Russian Samotlor field produced a peak of 3,500,000 bbd . It has now dropped to 325,000 a day.
"My 21-year old daughter disappeared from NYC last Tuesday afternoon when walking with friends through a park where no protest was being held -- and was held prisoner -- without being charged -- by the NYPD for three days." ..The first day and night she spent in an unsafe and inhumane facility at Pier 57 ("Little Guantanamo").. leased by the RNC to hold political dissenters ..chain link holding pens with razor wire on top in the old Pier 57 warehouse that had oil, gas and asbestos dust on the floor from a previous fire. ..without being allowed to make a call to a lawyer..or anyone -- ..This group-roundup tactic is called by the Republican party "preventative detention" .. used to terrorize those who might protest Bush's agenda ..
Weird Science...the 30:30 Solution
17-09-4 Seen in Australlia MercedesA-Class fuel-cell Hydrogen car weight 1500kg 65kW 210Nm 0-100kph 13.5 seconds top speed 140kph Nice car but its too powerful for the con-vivial 30:30 Solution: 30kW:30kph It still assumes the world is machine dominated, not people centric. Sadly, Mercedes have overpowered their machine, They want it to compete on the fantasy play-killing ground that is the modern road works. Some estimates suggest that an electric car only needs 10kW, since they have very high torque.
The question: What are cars for? excitement & thrill? to impress a mate? effective safe transport?
Hydrogen cars. like CarbonDioxide liquid burial, is a BigCarbon boondoggle - an attempt to keep tha fat Govt subsidies in old hands, and to resist real change. a 1997 study by the Institute for Applied Ecology in Berlin, Germany, a nuclear power station of standard size (1250-megawatt capacity) indirectly emits between 376 billion and 1300 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, taking into account the whole fuel-to-waste cycle. Nuclear power releases four to five times as much CO2 per unit of energy produced as renewable energy sources.
Monday 13 September 2004, 22:39 Makka ..11 people including a woman and children were killed and another 18 wounded under US fire on Monday. Ambulances and medical teams were targeted by US snipers in different areas of Ramadi particularly near hospitals for women and children, al-Saad said. Two ambulance drivers..killed Medical staff and patients inside the hospitals were targeted and a number of them were shot in the head.. ..US forces launched air strikes on Falluja, killing up to 18 people, including women, children and an ambulance driver. ..,"Every time we send out an ambulance, it gets targeted," Dr Rafia al-Isawi, director of Falluja hospital, told Aljazeera. "Shame on our government that cannot protect the people" ..The US army has no ethics.
Sunday 12 September 2004, 15:25 Makka ..new party dedicated to the expulsion of millions of Muslims and Christians from Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. ..many leaders of the officially outlawed but effectively tolerated Kach group .. a violent Jewish militia who reject democracy and advocate the expulsion or, if necessary, annihilation of Arabs ..Eretz Yisrael encompasses mandatory Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, and parts of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Turkey. ..Kach terrorists have killed scores of Arab civilians. Those caught .. received symbolic or light prison sentences. The bulk of the perpetrators are allowed to remain at large. ..Ben Elyaho, a co-founderthe expulsion of non-Jews from Israel would "resolve all of Israel's political, economic and social problems". .." cleansing the region extending .from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean from the Goyem" ..Baruch Marzel, a colleague of Baruch Goldstein.. ..eulogised him as a great "saint of the Torah". ..Kach.. mid-1970s by Meir Kahana, an American..who preached that Judaism and democracy were incompatible..became a member of the ..the Knesset, called for the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel.
13-09-4 9:53AM At least 42 people, including women and children, have died in a day of fierce clashes between Iraqi militiamen and US troops across the country.
In Ramadi, US tanks and helicopters killed 10 Iraqi civilians ..at least 10 Iraqis were killed and 35 others injured after US helicopters fired missiles at a crowd in a central Baghdad street. ..Palestinian television journalist, Mazin al-Tumaisi, was killed and two photographers wounded when the US missiles struck.
NYT9Sept American troops entered Samarra for the first time since July, when they pulled out in the face of relentless insurgent attacks. ..drove in..after gaining assurances from local Iraqi leaders that they would not be fired on. .. After a few hours.. ..left the way they came. ..the insurgents reappeared, conducting their own patrols ..they did not require the insurgents to give up their guns; only to disappear. ..In the past five months, the Americans have relinquished control over much of Anbar and Salahadin provinces, including cities like Ramadi and Falluja .."They have promised us to open the bridge today, but nothing happened until now.
AJ 10-09-4 10:07AM On Saturday, Iraqis and US forces battled in Tal Afar for several hours in clashes that killed at least 13 people. An army helicopter made a forced landing after coming under fire, and a Stryker vehicle sent to seal off the site where the helicopter came down was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
AJ "The American defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan has become just a question of time, God willing" he said in the tape telecast on Thursday. "In the two countries, the Americans are between two fires: if they remain there they will bleed to death, and if they withdraw they will have lost everything." A US air strike destroyed an weapon outside Falluja late on Monday, ..fighters shot down an unmanned aircraft in Falluja. The drone was paraded through the streets on a pick-up truck.
Cannabis, not such a bumper crop: "The most successful crop, calculated at 9.1 t/ha ..half that yield when baled .. The project manager reported that the crop required arable farmland, needed pesticides and irrigation and would not produce sufficient income ..Her opinion was that cultivating Italian eucalyptus would produce a better return"
There's a lot of loose talk about cannabis not needing pesticides or fertiliser,tell that to the thrips & slugs that feasted on my pitiful crop in Grey Lynn One amazing feature is the Seed Oil has a perfect W3-W6 ratio. Udo Erasmus says the ground seeds make a lovely spread. May fail you on a blood test but.
....................................................... Radiata Pine "In New Zealand, stands 35 to 40 years old yield about 770 m³/ha" pine bark tonic? One hectare of closely managed Pinus radiata in New Zealand is now expected to yield a remarkable 20 m³ of timber every year .. felled every 20 - 30 years. One famous plot on unfertilised land gave a 50m³/yr yield. This might be the king of biomass 20-50m³ = 10-25T/ha/yr radiata (@ 525 kg m³)
But: I worked in the Copper "recycling" industry in the 1970s ... All the copper recycled was dumped as CuOxyChloride on the Radiata.. so they may grow fantastically well with little fertiliser, but once all the copper toilet cisterns and all the phone wires are gone, we will need to find more Copper Is it "recycling" if the cycle ends in the forest? On balance it looks like NZ's huge radiata plantations are a giant carbon sink. The timber is not much good for building unless it is heavily poisoned: CopperChromeArsenic is the favourite. Hopefully this will discourage burning, so the Carbon will remain sunk. Some people day that radiata plantations are dull. The mat of needles does seem to inhibit a lot of undergrowth. Red Tailed cockatoos seem to like the cones, so they aint all bad.
Plantations covering 120 000 ha in the "green triangle", centred on Mt Gambier and straddling the South Australia/Victoria border..30% of Australia's softwood production.. $80 million a year...yields average 20-35cu.m per ha, with the best recorded figures well over 50cu.m.. ....................................................... canary grass Finland: 4-14(mean 10) T dm/ha on clay soil. ....................................................... miscanthus(Elephant grass) 15 T/ha/yr 1 kg dry = 0.4 kg of oil in energy,as a fuel. DM yield 11.7 - 25.3 t DM /ha/yr (44 t DM/ha/yr as reported from a source in Denmark) M. sacchariflorus .. southern England 12 - 20t DM/ha/yr. "In Europe..15 t/ha dw.. Over large areas, ..average.. 8t/ha .. may be expected" " If high yields can be attained, its energy and carbon balance may be favorable (though not as good as woody crops)," For Energy use "pulverisation energy" can be a big cost, even for miscanthus.
Davao City 1988 in a Christian area. The Ilaga (Visayan for "rat") Christian militia had recently cleared the communists out of this suburb. Armed Jeep patrols at night down the narrow lanes. I was asked "do you like the communists", I ducked the question by saying "I've never met one". Islamists were not then the worry near Davao.
We went out of town to the Eagle sanctuary. Monkey-eating eagles in a huge cage, but not big enough for the birds to mate on the wing. Fierce and thrilling. A few years later the keeper succeeded in breeding them. I believe it involved someone in a bird suit, seriously thick... The keeper said the NPA (communists) sometimes came by to use his showers. The birds got upset when the army fired armillary over the sanctuary. We saw an army patrol, I think it was army, a checkpoint with teenagers in tees with m16s
Total solar eclipse - worth crossing the world to see. As the moonshadow races along the coast towards you, you instantly realise that you are on one of many huge spheres moving through vast space at vast speeds..
Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, commander of the Army's 1st Cavalry Div.. ''He's Muqtada [ al-Sadr] decided the best thing for him to do is to go underground and regroup,'' .. ''We're not going to allow that to happen.'' The Mahdi Army hasn't launched a significant attack..in two days, ..militiamen remain heavily armed and in control of the northern half of Sadr City, a densely populated district of small alleys filled with booby traps and hidden bombs, he said. ..''Were going to go in and first.. no ultra-sensitive Muslim holy places will get in the Army's way.. Chiarelli said the group has laid bomb traps throughout the northern part of the district. ''There's a tremendous amount.. In a five-day stretch last month, U.S. troops disarmed or were hit by 82 hidden bombs in Sadr City,.. Soldiers painstakingly removed hidden bombs from the neighborhood's southern section and now patrol the area in armored Humvees, said Chiarelli. But U.S. troops can only enter the north side in Abrams tanks or Bradleys, the general said. The 1st Cavalry had to lay off most of the 15,000 Iraqis it hired to repair electrical, sewer and water infrastructure
How do you remove a leader from a city named after his father? Before the war I predicted big booby traps, but I underestimated Saddam, his dispersal of weapons & explosives was brilliant
"However many children in that school were held hostage, however many of them will die ... it is incomparably less than the 42,000 Chechen children of school age who have been killed by Russian invaders," said a statement on the website. "Dead children, dead adults - brutal murder of more than 250,000 Chechen peaceful civilians by the invaders - all of it cries to heaven and demands retribution. ..response to terrorism and crimes committed by the Kremlin's camarilla [cabal] which is still continuing to kill children, flood the Caucasus with blood, and poison the entire world with its deadly bacilli of Russism." ..some Chechen women on raids were seeking revenge.."There has been widespread use of war rape by contract soldiers .....I believe it's the accepted norm " discounts plans to attack schools? Unhappy USAnians:
signs-of-the-timesOn Sept. 12, 2000, Baltimore Sun reporter Miriam Miedzian wrote, "So when he was a kid, George W. enjoyed putting firecrackers into frogs, throwing them in the air, and then watching them blow up
No dejaremos a ningún niño atrás, ellos recogen y los tiran en una zanja. changeforamerica
(ABARE) forecast..the winter crop down 11 % on last year's record to 34.9 E6Ton. The wheat export crop down just 100,000 tonnes on last season to 17.3 E6Ton. 07-09-4 Global carbon dioxide emissions could double by 2050..Anne Lauvergeon....we cannot find one single scenario that will mean core emissions from transport will peak and start to go down before 2030.. Temperatures in NSW could rise by up to 6.4° by 2070 CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology By 2030 rainfall could fall by 20% in some areas and up to 40 % by 2070, ..another crippling drought could arrive with even greater intensity.
RSA California have produced a singulation Blocker RFID tag that swamps readers: shopliftersdelight!
Diversity is cool: Beehives with genetic diversity have better thermoregulation than Beehives with homogenous bees. The diverse bees start fanning or shivering at a wider range of temperatures, gives better temperature control of the hive.
Grass is new, linked to Diatoms: 52 Mybp (Million years ago) First C3 grass fossils 39 Mybp C3 grass expands 12 Mybp first C4 fossil 5 Mybp C3 - C4 shift (Sugar cane and Elephant grass are C4 plants,)
..Eeukaryotic phytoplankton that dominate modern seas have been ramping up since 200 Mybp. Since the silica-grasses have recently spread on land, silica diatoms have been doing well, sinking Carbon deep. Nature doesnt always recycle, not until plates subduct anyway. Grass weathers more rocks, carbonates flow to the ocean. Elephants and buffalo make grasslands. Seems Homo Sap. has arrived just in time. OK we make grasslands also, by doing the mega-fauna forest killing thing. but who else can dig up the Coal and burn it? Problem is, we cant do it slowly, so we gonna fuck ourselves up with a MassExtinctionEvent "..the dinoflagellates, coccolithophores, and diatoms all contain plastids derived from an ancestral red alga by secondary symbiosis." Cows give it up for Tennis: ..Nine of the top 20 women have some polyester in their racket head.. synthetic vertical.. gut on the horizontal ..Three cows are required for one racket
World Energy Congress is on in Sydney right now The oil-eaters in Aus & USA look set to re-elect the Carbon Kings - on the dumbass principle that its great to bomb the fuck out of someone, anyone, just to feel better. and when they bomb back... well just bomb someone else.
"Send these foul beasts back into the abyss!"
"Hydrogen Economy" is Big-Carbon's attempt to co-opt the Energy-Carbon debate. "Current U.S. policy .. is concentrating on research programs designed to bring us a hydrogen economy that will not be carbon-free and will not be with us any time soon. Meanwhile, our attention is deflected from the hard, even painful measures that would be needed to slow our business-as-usual carbon trajectory. Postponing action on emissions reduction is like refusing medication for a developing infection: It guarantees that greater costs will have to be paid later."
Stata center MIT another bendy metalic thingy from Frank Gehry'
Cold Turkey By Kurt Vonnegut aged 82 Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on. The New Road to SerfdomM. J. Parrish There are four distinct ideological spheres that are dominant in one or more aspects of national life right now, and their ideologies, just "coincidentally," all involve establishing a ruling elite that will rule over a docile and acquiescent populace of serfs.... 1) The Neocons, followers of Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago, believers in Machiavellian politics, previously followers of Trotsky and believers in perpetual revolution, are now pushing perpetual war and world domination. They believe the world should be governed by a handful of wealthy elite using deceit to achieve their broader aims; they believe in US domination..
2) The Dominionists, represented by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson.. have been working for 20 years to establish a theocratic kingdom in this country, where secular laws would be illegitimate and only Biblical law, including stoning for a variety of offenses, is allowable...
3) The free market fundamentalists, who have warped the theories of Adam Smith and Friedrich von Hayek, plus theories from Ricardo and Schumpeter from 150 - 200 years ago that were fatally flawed even when they were proposed, and built them into a theory of free markets that amounts to corporate libertarianism...
4) The Federalist Society, whose members are the only candidates George Bush nominates to fill openings in the judiciary.. Outstanding Unit Award. The photograph is also displayed on George H. W. Bush’s Presidential library website. ..trouble is GeorgeW is not entitled to wear it
ESA..to track all riders .. ..available on the Internet, on the Tour de France channel or will be broadcast by tv.. Fitted to each rider ..accuracy of EGNOS (European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service)..any moving object ..pinpointed to within a metre.. dont know what this mens for Shahab-3 CEP Mario Podestá, 51, an independent Argentine journalist. "I know of seven military officers responsible for disappearing opponents of the dictatorship" who are now in Iraq.
LA 11Mar 2003 - (ACN) Congressman James P. Moran(7 term Dem) "American Jews are responsible for pushing the country to war with Iraq".. ..March 3. "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this,"
"Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against israel" Zelikow 10Sep 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of 9/11 and the future of the war on the al-Qaeda.. "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell"
Totally unimportant issues, why NOT to not vote for someone: Stem Cell Research: The putative benefits may never arrive... far better to do some basic science, to determine how to make any gene|chromosome turn on embryo cells would them be unneeded. (but the boondocks cartoon is funny)
Homosexual weddings: Why should same-sex couples enjoy the rites that have traditionally belonged to herteros? Hey gays! Invent your own rites! why steal from breeders? Tech notes: I have been looking at SunStudioCreator (US$100) to develop Web Based Java - Its a good technology for building a CRUD ap (Create,Read,Update&Delet e a simple database) You can load Jpegs based on a url in the database. Overall a nice way to bind data to Java Server Faces (JSF) without having to learn much. BUT it does NOT support any graphics, not awt, not javascript. You cant draw a line. SO it wont do...sigh! .. guess I will have to start from the ground up, & learn Java Server Faces,Struts,JSP,CSS,XML, JSEE,Beans etc etc Websphere from IBM looks like the way to go... anything to avoid .NET
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Stata center MIT another bendy metalic thingy from Frank Gehry'
Outstanding Unit Award.
Erotismo, cultura, bicicleta : serenidad