Lefty Blogs
williampfaff ++ ++
Russian News ++
seaton-newslinks. USA expat in Europe ++
bilegrip Asu spleen ++
us-rockstroh a rant, not a blog ++
aboutmyplanet eco ++
sfgate ++
crookedtimber ++
onthecommons ++
sjlendman ++
....
abutamam freeiraq ++
airamericaradio +
amygdalagf +
angryarab ++
annezook +
antiwar ++
norwegianity
terrorism-news
blogspot
ourtomorrow
politickybitch
welcome-to-pottersville
aviraqi
billmon ++ whiskeyB
consortiumnews ++
dahrjamailiraq
dailywarnews ++
drforbush +
english +
fallujahinpictures
freespeechradio
halcyondays ++
healingiraq
hereticalideas ++
icasualties
maru
om
boxspinning boxes

jamaicaobserver newspaper
jameswolcott +
lefarkins +
liberalgirlnextdoor ++
lonehighlander Libya, not lefty
mahablog +++ solid
maruthecrankpot +
indymedia melbourne
messopotamian +7Apr06
monkey ++
motherjones ++
fisk
nocapital +
norightturn +NZ
peakoil ++
pilger +
politicalhumor +
raedinthemiddle
rafahtoday Feb05?
rense w= wacko conspiracies
rigorousintuition x
hegemon ++
ruckus ++
rudepundit ++
satiricalpolitical +
scaramoucheblog ++
secretsinbaghdad ++15Ap06
Energring
aliveinbaghdad ++
riverbendblog ++
sideshow +++
signs-of-the-times +++
slashdot ++techy
talkleft ++
thinkprogress ++
thismodernworld +++
uncapitalist ++
velorution ++ bicycles
org ++Brazil peasants
warandpiece +
warfare.ru +russia military
greenpeace
allhatnocattle
alternet ++
americanpolitics
antiwar
gbruno ++YT
axisoflogic ++
blackcommentator
bobharris +
bradblog +
buckfush +funnies
buggery +
buzzflash ++
changeforamerica
countercurrents
counterpunch +++
crisispapers
crooksandliars ++?
csmonitor
dahrjamailiraqhref="http://www.dailykos.com/
davidcorn
democracynow
democracyuprising
dissidentvoice
earthfirstjournal
earthstation5
empirenotes
foodfirst
fpif
fromthewilderness
geocities
granta
grist ??
gristmagazine
guerrillanews
gulf
hizbollah
huffingtonpost ++
informationclearinghouse
infoshop +
inthesetimes x
iranmania x
ivaw
jihadunspun
juancole ++
kuro5hin ++ notlefty
kurtnimmo ++
lrb ++ Iraqi?
mahablog
lewrockwell ++
marklynas climate change
mnftiu get your war on comics
motherjones
nilemedia
nybooks
occupationwatch
oriononline
palestine
prisonplanet
rall ++ Ted Rall cartonist
ratical
redpepper
rense
robert
rollingstone
scoop
selvesandothers ++
smirkingchimp
snappingturtle
socialistworker
spiked
tblog
theiraqiroulette
theleftcoaster +
thepoorman +
tnr ++ magazine
tompaine ++ mag
traprockpeace ++
truthout +
boondocks ++
crowning3
. . . helix
Base
rain radar
Weather
worldtribunal +
worldwatch ++ $ required
zaman + Turkish news
youcantmakeitup + ?
youngfox ????????????
bareknucklepolitics videos?
popdrain videos??
discovery videos??
cs videos??
aegisIraq video??
mariyaguchi video??
iwilltryit video..
baghdadtreasure
ahram cairo newspaper
felbers
thepartyline
jfaughnan 28/04/2006 10:25AM
shrillblog +
thinkprogress +
marchforjustice + pictures
messopotamian + Iraqi not so radical, but scared (also see IraqTheModel which was a USA front, but is now also scared)
scaramoucheblog +
counterpunch
.............
blogads liberal blogs by CPM $ per view
malakandsky ++ stolid?
republicoft + black gay parent??
dailykos ++
rawstory ++
democraticunderground ++
atrios ++
workingforchange +
leftinthewest +
dembloggers +
talkingpointsmemo +
firedoglake ++
vastleft ++
pamspaulding +
americablog +
washingtonmonthly ++
mydd +
politics1 +
bartcop ++
politicalwire +
sisterstalk black lesbian?
culturekitchen ++
alternet
wonkette +++
billstclair +
freefreedomtoldhere ++ pipe bomb

......
almuajaha defunct
whynot defunct
winstonsmith defunct
samadams dormant
mquinn02 defunct
iraqblogcount ++14Apr06 suspended
iraqicomments most recent: jan2005
iraqidoctor most recent: Aug2005
georgemustgo + moved?
vialls ++Dormant (joe is dead)
warblogging Defunct
hammeroftruth quiescant?
mediastorm quiescant? +
bushwhackedusa defunct
hamasonline defunct
4Jul06

06 January 2006

Urban Coyotes, Frozen Krauts, Red cells from space, Oil Sands, secure Attributes, rat brain cells fly F-22

Weird Science

there may be somewhere between several hundred and 2,000 coyotes living in Chicago.
* Urban coyotes that don’t hunt in packs can cover ranges of 50 square miles or more, often in just a night. “The first solitary coyote we tracked covered five adjacent cities in a single night..
* Urban coyotes survive far longer than their rural cousins. A coyote living in urban Chicago has a 60-percent chance of surviving for one year, while a rural coyote has a 30% chance of living for another year.
___________________________________________________
science
Frozen Krauts
Jan. 3, 2006 ..the first baby born after being conceived with a frozen donor egg from a commercial egg bank.. Cryo Eggs International.. ..Wendy and Jared chose a donor with a similar ancestral background—German—

aaaBugs from space?
world-science
..after a meteor airburst event.. on 25th July 2001 near Changanacherry (Kerala).. sonic boom experienced by several people during early morning .. “The first case of red rain occurred in this area few hours after the airburst....
.. ..The “striking red colouration..from microscopic.. red particles..which had “no similarity with usual desert dust. .. 50,000 kg of the particles have fallen
..In a few places the rainwater appeared almost like blood.”
.. The particles look like one-celled organisms and are about 4 to 10 microns wide, ..[red blood cell = 8, bacteria 1-2?]
The particles seem to lack a nucleus.. Chemical tests indicated they lacked DNA..
The outer envelope seems to contain an “inner capsule,”..
“The major constituents ..are carbon and oxygen..Silicon is most prominent among the minor constituents.. other elements found were iron, sodium, aluminum and chlorine.
.. after storage in the original rainwater at room temperature without any preservative for four years, no decay or discolouration of the particles could be found.”
..Astrophysics and Space Science, has agreed to publish the paper..
[obviously its gong to be extremely hard to distinguish exo-biology from mere complex chemistry]
aaa
Oil companies create ponds in which to dump millions of cubic meters of the sandy, toxic by-product of oil-sand processing. These "tailings ponds" are characterized by salt and acids. Here, a worker installs a scarecrow to keep birds away .. ..
technologyreview
Where the oil sands lie close to the surface, mostly near the town of Fort McMurray in Alberta, they can be mined. In the effort to get at these sands, areas have been drained of wetlands and stripped of boreal forests, which play an important role in climate regulation and carbon storage.
..Producing crude oil from the Alberta sands is an energy-­intensive process. Giant digging and transportation machines use commensurately large amounts of fuel. Refining and welling technologies consume roughly per 300 cubic meters of natural gas barrel of recovered oil. Environmental watchdogs estimate that, as a result, producing a barrel of oil from the Alberta sands releases two to three times the volume of greenhouse gases that traditional oil production would. By 2015, production from the oil sands is projected to release 94 megatons of greenhouse gases.
_______________________________________________________
technologyreview
Internet is broken
One evolving solution, developed by Internet2 -- a research consortium based in Ann Arbor, MI, that develops advanced Internet technologies for use by research laboratories and universities -- effectively creates a middleman who does the job. Called Shibboleth, the software mediates between a sender and a recipient; it transmits the appropriate ID numbers, passwords, and other identifying information to the right recipients for you, securely, through the centralized exchange of digital certificates and other means. ..
In addition to making the dispersal of information more secure, it helps protect privacy. That's because it discloses only the "attributes" of a person pertinent to a particular transaction, rather than the person's full "identity."
[the 'central' agency seems problematic, but the idea of "attributes" is one of the many great features of PKC - Public Key Cryprography - that should be ubiquitous but aint]
technologyreview
With 9,000 megawatts of installed capacity, Spain ranked second in the world in 2005 in total installed capacity, behind Germany (16,000 megawatts) and ahead of the United States (6,500 megawatts).
..Spanish companies.. Gamesa Eólica (world's second largest turbine manufacturer), Iberdrola (world's largest wind-farm owner and operator) and Acciona Energía (world's largest wind-farm builder and developer).
livejournal independent Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.
Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
..thousands of existing CCTV cameras which are being converted to read number plates automatically night and day to provide 24/7 coverage of all motorways and main roads, as well as towns, cities, ports and petrol-station forecourts.
By next March a central database installed alongside the Police National Computer in Hendon, north London, will store the details of 35 million number-plate "reads" per day...plans to extend the database .. to 100 million number plates.. each day ..
Why this brain flies on rat cunning
theage
It sounds like science fiction: a brain nurtured in a Petri dish learns to pilot a fighter plane as scientists develop a new breed of "living" computer. But in groundbreaking experiments in a Florida laboratory that is exactly what is happening.
The "brain", grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida.
They hope their research into neural computation will help them develop sophisticated hybrid computers, with a thinking biological component.
One target is to install living computers in unmanned aircraft so they can be deployed on missions too dangerous for humans. ..
The brain-in-a-dish is the idea of Thomas DeMarse, 37, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida...
The 25,000 neurons were suspended in a specialised liquid to keep them alive and then laid across a grid of 60 electrodes in a small glass dish.

Suicide remarks are torn

From tonight in Australia its illegal to advise or instruct suicide by internet, fax or phone in Australia.
There being no bill of rights in Aus, the State can, and does, seize cherished 'rights' by fiat.
Fortunately this blog is hosted in USA, and several people contribute, so they cant get me.
I was taught as a child that suicide is the only sin that god wont forgive. Curious how Xtianity aligns with Capital. Workers are bound to lose, and are bound to stay in the game. Face it, CapitalCulture is moving evermore to the 5% state, whereby 95% of the people can go to hell, but its a crime to show the way.
I've been attempting suicide on & off since I was 12, and I'm here to tell you it aint easy. Tall buildings - back then security was lax on building sites, I used to climb up 10 stories onto new concrete slabs and sit on the edge. Cyanide - security was lax at Universities also, I made up capsules of Potassium cyanide and carried them around for years. (threw them away after smoking some Aceh black... life seemed so interesting.) Electrocution, suffocation, hanging.. I've considered them all. I can advise that taking a bottle of Diazepams can result in behaviour that you dont remember. Apparently I rang up a neurologist and abused his secretary, after scoffing a handful.

The best approach seems to be CarbonMonoxide in a plastic bag. A big bag, bigger than the normal garbage bag.
Ordinary suffocation without CO is very difficult. The idea is to scoff diazepam & Scotch and pipe in the CO.
I dont know the best way to make CO but google item#9 suggests Sulphuric acid plus formic acid pc.chemie.uni-siegen.de .. seems simple enough.
I would make a valve such that while conscious one could breath room air (bag already tied over your head).
After falling asleep, letting go of the valve should route CO into the bag. Much better than a car in a smoky garage.

Currently I plan to stick around for a few years, but ten years must be a maximum. Clearly Capital is constructing a culture so rapacious, violent and indifferent that none without a pile of cash can expect to be safe and secure in old age. Pensions and Superannuation funds will obviously vanish Enron style, and dignified poverty aint on the menu. Every old bloke will be hounded into the gutter. Dont expect me to stick around. Might be a chance to vanish into a township, but dont count on it.

05 January 2006

Surma boy


Surma boy, originally uploaded by foto_morgana.

culture & geometry

03 January 2006

Trans McDonalds, PumpWar, Baath parties on, Boiling torture, Reconstruction kaput, Abrams weak spot, Chalabi Zombie

McDonalds has agreed to pay a $8.5 million settlement over artery clogging trans fats in its cooking oils as the result of a lawsuit by a small US activist group called BanTransFat.com. Since lawyer and BanTransFat founder Stephen Joseph sued Kraft Foods two years ago over the trans fat content of Oreo cookies, Kraft has moved to reduce trans fats in its snack foods. In 2003, Denmark became the first country in the world to prohibit the use of oils and fats with trans fatty acid content of more than 2%. – foodqualitynews 14/2/05.

Russia flicks the switch, welcome to PumpWar
Michael Glos, the German economy minister, said Moscow must show it can be trusted as a supplier.
"Thirty per cent of our gas comes from Russia at the moment. That should be increased," Glos told the German radio station WDR. "But it can only be increased if we know that deliveries from the east are dependable."

fedupwithfoodadditives3/01/2006
IF we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following:
There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south, 8 Africans, 52 would be female, 48 would be male, 70 would be non-white, 30 would be white, 70 would be non-Christian, 30 would be Christian, 89 would be heterosexual,11 would be homosexual, 6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.
Some 80 would live in substandard housing, 70 would be unable to read, 50 would suffer from malnutrition, 1 would be near death, 1 would be near birth, 1 (yes, only I) would have a university education, 1 would own a computer,

When the Energy Department decided to get rid of some surplus weapons-type plutonium by turning it into nuclear fuel, no utilities would take it, even at no charge.
The Tennessee Valley Authority finally agreed to take the fuel. It described the transaction as selling the government "irradiation services."
robertdreyfussThe Iraqi armed resistance was prepared, systematically, in the year 2001, after the Iraqi leadership reached the conclusion that the Bush administration had decided to invade Iraq. In that year the final preparations were completed, such as establishing a secret leadership for the part and an elite force from Baath party, the Iraqi army, especially the elite of the Republican Guard, the most experienced intelligence officers, some scientists from the military industrialization establishment, [and] millions of Iraqis who were trained in urban guerilla warfare. Arms and ammunition were hidden in secret stores, enough for fighting at least ten years without any need for any outside support.

mightysporkDoctors who saw the body reported that such burns could only have been caused by immersing Avazov in boiling water.
cnnUNITED NATIONS (CNN) - Iraq still has "massive problems" in monitoring its oil revenues, including no oil metering system to measure output and the failure to use competitive bidding for all contracts,...
justworldnews
if no more funds will be requested for "reconstructrion" the Bush administration will be cutting Iraq loose to fend for itself. Once there is no more pretext of "reconstruction", the US military footprint will almost certainly be radically reduced and, in effect, most of the country handed over to the Iranians.
capitolhillblue“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
“In his Mission Accomplished foray, (Bush) wore a military uniform, something no president has done since Washington, and Washington only wore the uniform to quell a rebellion,”
Among security breaches in postings on soldiers' Web sites, the Army pointed to photos of an Abrams tank pierced by a rocket-propelled grenade, which could show Iraqi insurgents where to aim...
..Milblogs remain popular. mudvillegazette.com claimed more than 700,000 page views in 2005, with blackfive.net not far behind. And michaelyon.blogspot is ranked in the top 100 (No. 81) of the 8 million blogs tracked by Technorati.com.
Exports of crude, which had run at an average of about 1.6 million barrels per day (mbpd) since the end of the 2003 war, dropped to 1.2 mbpd in November and 1.1 mbpd in December, spokesman Assem Jihad said on Monday... Also on Monday, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, Iraq's oil minister, said he had submitted his resignation. Uloum said he had resigned in opposition to fuel prices imposed by the government on 19 December...since been replaced as head of the ministry by Ahmad Chalabi, a deputy prime minister.
Chalabi is already head of the Oil Council, a cabinet-level board, and is influential on Iraq's economic and commodities polic
(Chalabi got a miniscule vote in the OccupationElection - Zombies not popular?)