Lefty Blogs
williampfaff ++ ++
Russian News ++
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sfgate ++
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onthecommons ++
sjlendman ++
....
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norwegianity
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blogspot
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icasualties
maru
om
boxspinning boxes

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rafahtoday Feb05?
rense w= wacko conspiracies
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Energring
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org ++Brazil peasants
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csmonitor
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hizbollah
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ivaw
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. . . helix
Base
rain radar
Weather
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zaman + Turkish news
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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
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messopotamian + Iraqi not so radical, but scared (also see IraqTheModel which was a USA front, but is now also scared)
scaramoucheblog +
counterpunch
.............
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politicalwire +
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alternet
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billstclair +
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......
almuajaha defunct
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samadams dormant
mquinn02 defunct
iraqblogcount ++14Apr06 suspended
iraqicomments most recent: jan2005
iraqidoctor most recent: Aug2005
georgemustgo + moved?
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warblogging Defunct
hammeroftruth quiescant?
mediastorm quiescant? +
bushwhackedusa defunct
hamasonline defunct
4Jul06

26 October 2006

extinctions, nitrate

CO2 leads to stinky extinctions:
sciam
.. enough H2S was produced by such ocean upwellings at the end of the Permian to cause extinctions both on land and in the sea...
Around the time of multiple mass extinctions, major volcanic events are known to have extruded thousands of square kilometers of lava .. enormous volumes of carbon dioxide and methane .. rapid global warming. During the latest Permian and Triassic as well as in the early Jurassic, middle Cretaceous and late Paleocene, among other periods, the carbon-isotope record confirms that CO2 concentrations skyrocketed immediately before the start of the extinctions and then stayed high for hundreds of thousands to a few million years.
But the most critical factor seems to have been the oceans. Heating makes it harder for water to absorb oxygen from the atmosphere; .. conditions for the deep-sea anaerobic bacteria to generate massive upwellings of H2S. .. virtually no form of life on the earth was safe.
.. A poisoned ocean and atmosphere would account for the very slow recovery of life after that mass extinction as well.
.. could it happen again? Although estimates of the rates..are uncertain, the levels .. are known. The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under 1,000 ppm At the end of the Triassic, CO2 was just above 1,000 ppm. Today with CO2 around 385 ppm, it seems we are still safe. But with atmospheric carbon climbing at an annual rate of 2 ppm and expected to accelerate to 3 ppm, levels could approach 900 ppm by the end of the next century, and conditions that bring about the beginnings of ocean anoxia may be in place. How soon after that could there be a new greenhouse extinction?


440 kilograms of ammonium nitrate missing
smh October 26, 2006
..The theft occurred on October 6 about 6.30am as the freight train sat idle at Glendale, near Newcastle, waiting for another train to pass.
The driver of the second train alerted authorities after noticing some of the granular substance had spilled on to the tracks.
.."We can confirm that the train was tampered with, was broken into and a substantial amount was spilt on the ground.
"Until we confirm otherwise, we are treating it as a theft."
Mr O'Dell said the state's counter-terrorism unit has been alerted and is keeping a close watch on the investigation, which continues to be run by detectives from the Lake Macquarie Local Area Command.
..
The chemical fertiliser was used in the 2002 Bali bombings, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, and the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

[I believe Bali was actually chlorate. More of a burningfireball. people saw others vanish right in front of them.
The worry is, locals here say, the Newcastle police are notoriously inept. Too busy running hos to notice major crime. Hopefully their links to bike gangs may turn up some suspects. I hope the feds are keeping an eye on drag strips for excess nitro draw-down]

Maliki, Diem, Solar power, Alkatiri

Sadr City raid a flop?
latimes
Prime Minister Nouri Maliki..
.."We are going to request some explanations from the multinational forces to prevent a similar incident and to ensure coordination with the Iraqi security forces," the Iraqi leader said.
..Maliki also went out of his way to praise the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr for seemingly rejecting violence against other Muslims. Sadr has not renounced killing U.S. troops. American commanders believe that his militia, the Al Mahdi army, is behind most of the attacks against their troops.
..at least 91 American troops killed this month.


Ngo_Dinh_Diem
The Americans, who had heretofore strongly supported Diem, gave evidence of wavering, and this was all that a group of soldiers needed to depose him. Diem was overthrown and murdered on Nov. 2, 1963.


25 October 2006..ecoearth

Australia has announced plans to build the world's biggest solar power station as part of a radical rethink on climate change.
.. would contribute A$75 million towards the cost of the photovoltaic solar power plant.
154 megawatt cost A$420m ($318m) ..be built by Melbourne-based Solar Systems.
Capital cost US$2.06 per Watt (cf Sizewell "B" 1995 $3 per Watt)
..mirrors which concentrate the sun's rays 500x
[onto high temperature PV cells - the hard part was the adhesives. I believe the cells are liquid cooled solar-power]

..the government would also put A$50m into an A$360m pilot project to reduce, capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from a coal-fired power station ..
[I fear that CO2 sequestration is a big-carbon boondoggle. The volumes involved are huge, and I remain to be convinced the geostrata are available. Scientific American is bullish on sequestration. The $ amounts mentioned are trivial in the face of the problem, and in the face of current breaks for big carbon]

Timor-L'este...
smh
an Australian soldier was also involved in a shooting incident yesterday, the Australian Defence Force says, amid violence in Dili in which at least two people died and dozens were injured.

East Timor's army is also preparing to address the nation declaring its troops should no longer be confined to barracks because of the lawlessness, sources in Dili said last night.

The army's top officers will declare that the forced removal from office of former prime minister Mari Alkatiri amounted to a coup and that those responsible should be investigated by East Timorese, sources said.

The army was expected to make the address last night but state television went off the air, citing technical problems.

If the army goes ahead with the address it would be seen by Dili's political elite as criticism of the President, Xanana Gusmao, who is strongly supported by the Prime Minister, Jose Ramos-Horta. Mr Ramos-Horta is visiting the Pope at the Vatican.

25 October 2006

Solar, Biomass, coal, WWF footprint, Israel Psychopathic

Solar Irradiation database
Sydney: Avg 4.7kwh/m²/d peak 7
nb no australian city recorded average more than 6.5 so Sydneys peak is high
tropical values up to 8.3kWh
worldenergy

Biomass is part of the problem, not solution:
newstatesman
In 1997, the single worst year of Indonesian forest- and peat-burning, 2.67 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide were released by the fires, equivalent to 40 per cent of the year's entire emissions from burning fossil fuels. That was a particularly bad year: most summers, the emissions are only a billion or so tonnes, or about 15 per cent of total human emissions.

alt-e
is ethanol fuel a solution (hint no it isnt)
....
Bush: "Do you realize we've got 250 million years of coal?"
The figure quoted by the coal industry is 250 years of reserves, not 250 million years. The energy illiteracy ..in our political leadership it is a real cause for concern.

panda
WWF "living planet report" 2006 -I believe this is terribly important. Yet I have little patience with their single indicator "footprint" which they say is now 1.2 times the actual earth's area.
A quick eyeball of their report, and I couldnt make much sense of their 'footprint'
If a passionate data freak like me gets turned off, I can guess that most other people are also.
I believe that agricultural land is being degraded, fish are being depleted, water is becoming scarce. But the usefulness of a single number to indicate this seems weak.
The simple reaction to "1.2" might be "well were still here at 1.2, lets try for 2.2"

Israel - Psychopathic Nation
signs-of-the-times
The farmers said that this settler hides in olive orchards that belong to the farmers located near the Yetzhar settlement. He attacks, shoots at and threatens to kill the farmers whenever he has the chance. The farmers expressed fears that this may be part of a plan to expand the settlement, which was illegally built on their lands.

tomdispatch
energy books
busb


_______________________________________________________

onthecommons lefty
Try: Biological capitalism.
CPE's (Centrally Planned Economies) suffer from the zombie effect.
Nothing can die. If a Central bureau orders the construction of a shoe factory, it is so, and forever, no matter what the quality of the shoes. There must be a fail|death mechanism for evolution to happen. Under Capital2.0 thats bankruptancy. But Capital2.0 entities that grow immense also cannot die, and so are non-evolutionary.
Giant corporations are a danger to the world. The chief natural mechanism is splitting (social insects, meercats etc, the colonies split). Ma Bell an example? Warfare & parasites may not have useful analogues


mahdi
Armies carrying black flags will come from Khurasan. No power will be able to stop them and they will finally reach Eela (Baitul Maqdas in Jerusalem) where they will erect their flags."
...........
All streams of Islam believe in a divine saviour, known as the Mahdi, who will appear at the End of Days. ..
Iran's dominant "Twelver" sect believes this will be Mohammed ibn Hasan, regarded as the 12th Imam, or righteous descendant of the Prophet Mohammad.


Base mortar barrages a prominent resistance tactic... jihadunspun
Oct 18, 2006 In a bulletin posted at 10:17pm Makkah time Tuesday night, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that eight powerful explosions shook the US al-Warrar base on the Euphrates River west of Ramadi. Flame and smoke could be seen rising..

..Iraqi Resistance forces fired a mortar barrage at the US base in as-Saqlawiyah, about 15km northwest of al-Fallujah at dawn on Tuesday. The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported eyewitnesses as saying that for the second time in two consecutive days, the Resistance blasted the American base with mortars, scoring direct hits that set off massive explosions and sent plumes of smoke rising into the sky.



Chuck Norris facts:
clock .. chucknorrisfacts
“There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.”

“A dinosaur looked at Chuck Norris wrong once. Once!”

Chuck Norris can hit you so hard that he can actually alter your DNA. Decades from now your descendants will occasionally clutch their heads and yell "What The Hell was That?"

Chuck Norris can divide by zero.

In the beginning there was nothing...then Chuck Norris Roundhouse kicked that nothing in the face and said "Get a job". That is the story of the universe.

When chuck Norris does division, there are no remainders.


and when youre tired of chuck, try bruce:
Bruce Schneier can decrypt your PKI message with the public key.

When Bruce Schneier does modulo arithmetic, there are no remainders. Ever.



schneierfacts

knuth
caeds

24 October 2006

130 Liberty Plaza, Forward Base Falcon, Alkatiri, Llosa

Conspiracy Theory Tuesday
BTrust
My old Bankers Trust cubicle .. behind the stars on the flag wikipedia
In 2002, over a year after the attacks, a number of mummified human remains were found inside the building... September 2005,..human remains were found on the roof... In March 2006,.. more bone fragments and remains. .. In 2006 between April 7 to April 14, over 300 human bone fragments were discovered.. on the roof.

______________________________________________________
300 Olooch dead in one night
gootube (for some reason, youtube refuse to sign me up. A truly brain-dead signup process


In this video, we can see that stuff is going off all over the place but when the big ones go off (creating mushroom clouds), the ones that bathe the entire landscape in LIGHT, so do the sirens. Listen as the AMERICAN soldiers describe just how powerful a shockwave they FELT. These guys are concerned about fallout as well, either chemical or nuclear, because they voice audible concern over the direction of the wind.


tbrnews jihadunspun
Late on the evening of October 10, 2006, Iraqi resistance groups lobbed mortar and rocket rounds into the immense ‘Forward Base Falcon,’ the largest American military base in Iraq, located 13 km south of the Green Zone in Baghdad. In addition to accurate mortar fire, Grad and Katyusha rockets were also used
.. Not only has the U.S. military machine lost much of its armor and transport, and its entire reserves of ammunition and special fuel, but the casualty list for only the first day is over 300.. US trucks seen hauling burned out tanks out of Baghdad on Thursday evening, two days after Resistance barrage devastated American Falcon Forward Base arsenal.
albasrah
In a dispatch posted at 10:37pm Makkah time Thursday night, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that US forces were seen driving huge trucks carrying seven burned-out US tanks out of the city on the highway towards Saddam International Airport. The vehicles were some of the wreckage left over from the devastating Resistance bombardment of the US Forward Base Falcon arsenal late Tuesday night.
indymedia taylormarsh

Alkatiri framed, ousted
gnn 17 Oct 2006
United Nations report into human rights violations during the East Timor crisis of April and May 2006 has now been delivered, and it’s a hot one. It provides yet more evidence that the tiny Pacific nation suffered an externally directed “regime change” – when its leader adopted policies in opposition to the American and Australian political elite and its corporate allies.
.. In a leaked meeting dated November 2002, foreign minister Alexander Downer told Alkatiri, “We can stop everything” meaning cut off the flow of royalties and aid to East Timor if, that is, Alkatiri did not accede to Australian demand
.. another of Alkatiri’s crimes was to offer economic particpation in Timorese hydrocarbon reserves to China and India over Australia or the U.S.
.. then, as mentioned above, in January of this year he secured a greater share of the Greater Sunrise field revenues for his people and has worked towards the creation of a national oil company to ensure that East Timor benefits from East Timorese resources. This trend has placed him in the line of fire for those who seek both super-profits and strategic domination in the region.
.. is recent decision to hire nearly 500 Cuban doctors after visiting that country, despite strong objections from the US ambassador, was highly controversial
.. the senior US official even briefly attending one of the protests in person. Political insiders now wonder about the United States’ connections to rebel leader Reinaldo, whose wife works for the US Embassy and helps to oversee the Peace Corps program.”
.. Alkatiri left so as to prevent a genuine crisis and massive loss of life. In the process, East Timor became the most recent casualty of Peak Oil geopolitics. The UN, as Alkatiri might have hoped it would, has provided ample proof.


Supermarket flowers empty Kenya's rivers
guerrillanews
12 largest flower firms which farm hundreds of hectares of flowers, fruit and vegetables in the region and supply supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s and M&S and the European market, may be taking as much as 25% of water normally available to more than 100,000 small farmers.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa Director of the 'Center on Global Prosperity'
sjlendman
Rarely does such a prominent novelist engage in slimy lying propoganda on behalf of a warmongering elite. Llosa makes Rand look like Mother Tersa.

Evidently there's a major campaign against our Hugo
axisoflogic

fish
Gogonasus Yet another missing link
(each time a missing link is discovered, it created two more, one on each side in the timeline)
livescience is supposed to be a 3d skull video, but down here in Aus videos are a big Maybe
______________________________________________________

23 October 2006

Antonioni, Nuclear power, Whales, Iceland, Darwin

avvent
Michelangelo Antonioni retrospective Chauvel November 2006
________________________________________________________________
Nuclear Power Cost: hr
The last nuclear power plant in Britain, Sizewell "B", went in service in 1995, and cost about $3 per Watt about ten times the cost of a gas-fired plant.
Photovoltaic Solar Cells cost: ecobusinesslinks
$4.4-$5/Watt
So PV costs about 50% more to build than nuclear. It seems clear that PV costs will decline.
For PC one has to add the inverter & installation costs, but operating costs are minimal.
If every house roof gets PV cells, expect a number of deaths from falls. Not completely safe.
But nuclear should be forced to pay unsubsidised insurance for worst-case accidents. Not bloody likely. Nuclear should also amortise the cost of security guards for 250,000 years. Again, not bloody likely
'Organic' photovoltaics are being talked about for $0.2/per Watt, but not stable yet.

Reading Helen Caldicott's 'Nuclear Power is not the answer', noted a quote from Time magazine
Paul Blanche "A knowledgeable terrorist inside a control room can cause a meltdown in fairly short order" Time 20Jun2005
- that sends a chill down the spine. I had hoped that they made reactors kind of 'fail-safe'
Note to Helen C: the 1996 Tritium leak from Pickering4 was 50 trillion becquerels
ie 1300 Curies , not 50 Trillion Curies (page 116). Still Tritium is unpleasant to drink, it gets into your DNA.
HC goes into detail about proposed 'Inherently Safe' pebble reactors. If air gets in, the graphite pebbles catch fire. Wormwood was burning graphite.

Darwin online

I should think in no part of the world a more war-like race of inhabitants could be found than the New Zealanders. Their conduct in first seeing a Ship, as described by Capt. Cook, strongly illustrates this. The act of throwing volleys of stones at so great & novel an object as a ship & their defiance of "come on shore & we will kill & eat you all" shows uncommon boldness.

..there are many English residents. - These latter are of the most worthless character; & amongst them are many run away convicts from New South Wales. There are many grog spirit shops, & the whole population is addicted to drunkenness & all kinds of vice.



iceland
Iceland claims there are 25,000 fin whales nearby, and they aim to hunt and torture a bunch of them to death.
Write to these Icelandic whale watching companies,
hafsulan@hafsulan.is
info@elding.is

Tell them its grotesque to profit from whale-watching,
and then to torture whales to death.
Tell them the 'Boycott Iceland' movement is underway

tell this guy also:
Prime Minister's Office
postur@for.stjr.is

and the tourism board
http://www.goiceland.org/contact_us.html

Also: write to this "how do you like iceland" blog
icelandexpress
and leave a comment,
something like this:

How do I like Iceland?
the same way I like any creeps who hunt, and torture, rare and beautiful wild animals
I wish you all the bad luck in the world.


Keep up with the good ship 'Farley Mowat'
70south seashepherd seashepherd
buy a hat, or a tee.
_____________________________________________________

Whales needed to stir the sea:
newswise
the yearly amount of chemical power stored by phytoplankton in the form of new organic matter = 63 terawatts (terra = E12) 2001, humans consumed 13.5 tW
..1 terawatt of it is chemical power fortune in mechanical energy..swimming motions.. stirring may equal climate control.
biosphere mixing ..one third the power required to bring the deep, cold waters .. to the surface..

The Cuvier’s beaked whales dove to maximum depths of nearly 1,900 meters .. maximum duration of 85 minutes..the deepest confirmed dives reported from any air-breathing animal.

newswise
fisetin protects and promotes survival of cultured neurons and boosts memory in healthy mice ..Besides strawberries, fisetin is found in tomatoes, onions, oranges, apples, peaches, grapes, kiwifruit and persimmons...it would take about 10 pounds a day to achieve a beneficial effect,

Bug needs radiation:
world
..Oct. 20 Science...a newly cracked rock seeping water in a gold mine near Johannesburg
Genetic analyses revealed bacterial species.. dominated by ..Firmicutes. Other Firmicutes are from hydrothermal vents.
..the underground Firmicutes lost contact ..3-25 million years ago
..The microbes use hydrogen for respiration.. ..radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium .. radiation breaks down water, releasing hydrogen.
..Firmicutes use hydrogen for respiration. .energy from the reaction of hydrogen and sulfate..

Psychiatry used for indefinite detention: thesun
..British-born fugitive, who is from a Pakistani background
.. arrested in Pakistan..said to have received training with Mohammad Sidique Khan .. said to have been a close pal of Asid Muhammad Hanif..
The suspect was allowed to return to Britain ..
But two weeks ago — after being sectioned under the Mental Health Act — he escaped through a window of West Middlesex University Hospital in Isleworth.



sjlendman ++ lefty