Tony Fomison, NZ glaciers, energy forests, Elif Shafak

When I lived in the purple house in Grafton Gully 1974 with Tony Fomison, I had no idea his dark paintings would become so famous. Perhaps Frank Pound, now eminent art historian, who lived two doors down, made Tony famous? Its an old story, but why didn't I give Tony $20 for a pic? I seem to recall a time of poverty, fantastic sex, Mr Asia alarmingly pure shit. I walked away from that flat, left town and a couple of dozen 60's LPs that I miss now. Not as much as the two girls that I tried to juggle. And was there really a ladder from my room up to the bathroom? I know there was a view up the gully to Ward 10, The psych ward on top of Auckland Hospital, where we sometimes visited our casualties

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Most NZ glaciers are melting, Denialists mention 2 that are growing.


From 1890 there was a general slow recession of most glaciers until the late 1920's, when a widespread rapid retreat commenced. This retreat is
punctuated by only minor readvances in the more active glaciers (fig. 6)

The CCD camp is boasting about glacier advances, which are happening in a bunch of glaciers around the world.
An odd psychological occupance, where a reasonable prediction of major disadvantageous change, is painted as product of a narrow disturbed mindset, whereas the deniers are the ones with tunnel vision.The only explanation I can come up with is 'Identification with the oppressors ideology' - where the subject , no matter how deprived or oppressed, exalts the ideology of his oppressor. Somehow this can make a miserable existence tolerable. Recently this attitude is widely seen in 'celebrity'; worship. Where once it seemed reasonable to tax the super now they are in magazines as a surrogates for the lives of the miserable masses. Note that the misery is induced by the contrast. In a just and balanced world, all would live in what would now appear to be poverty, ie no 100kW autos, no 3kW air-con, but these would be days of delight, not misery. The misery lies in perceived deprivation, alleviated by fantasies of excess. Universal poverty will be a joy, not a misery. with neat phones and big screens..
My prediction is that the subjected mentality is so powerful that it will prevent adequate rational responses to these threats, leading to more extreme and rapid collapses into chaos.. Any warner will we hooted at as a spoiler, a wrecker of the pleasing state of mind of the subjugated.



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re Denialists: Arts & Letters Daily, the brainspawn of denialist Canterbury University Denis Dutton\
had a blurb about how rich Havana was under Batista pre-59, richer than Singapore, blames Castro for not being richer now.
How vile. Anyway, who wasn't richer than Singapore in 58? Avoid Duttons vile site


TimesOnLine has a "top eco blog" which gave equal weight to ClimateChaos evidence and deniers. That species of denialism will undoubtedly lead to more than 6 million deaths within this century.
If it wasnt illegal, I might blog about Auswitch, how the number of Jews killed there altered greatly during my lifetime. I dont know the latest official figure, but I'm sure its a crime not to believe it.
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youtube
bigdog robot - this is creepy, the first really scary robot...

com


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Ingres , as seen on handbag
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Some doubts on Schors quantum 'order' finder:?
shor_calculations



To factor a 4096-bit number, you need 72*40963 or 4,947,802,324,992 quantum gates. Lets just round that up to an even 5 trillion.

OR

the real story is that a quantum computer running at 1 MHZ could factor a 4096 qubit number using millions of qubits, in about an hour, even with the severe restriction of the architecture being a linear nearest neighbor system.


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Radio NZ National has
David Yeagley Conservative American Indian, Oklahoma, USA
raving briefly with Bryan Crump
DY did NOT allow my comment on his site

re David Yeagley on Easter Monday with Bryan Crump
Hi Bryan Crump,
I was irritated by David Yeagley. Some 'code' elements in his speech included:

Talking about the 'Democat' party. This has long been recognised as an ill mannered tactic to insult the Democratic party.

Mentioning Iraq immediately juxtaposed with "September 11 2002" - it has become ever more difficult to blame Saddam for 11Sep2001,
so a clumsy link is the remaining strategy (note he got the year wrong... are the neo-cons trying to bring the event closer to the present, to maintain its usefulness as a knee-jerk prod?)

The crude juxtaposition of Hitler, Mao and Hugo Chavez. Yeagley was bold-faced enough to claim that Chavez (an indigine) was more likely to massacre indigenous populations, than the USA. DY called Chavez a dictator. A bold accusation, given that Venezuela's election machines were cross-checked against random paper ballots - the only way to ensure that Computer voting machines are not subverted - as has happened in USA , as clearly stated by computer programmers there.

I am not opposed to RNZ National featuring (short) interviews with neo-con shills such as David Yeagly. I would like to see some challenges made to absurd accusations, even at the risk of annoying such people. No great loss if they get so annoyed that they dont return.

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Food Ethics:
guardian
air-transported green beans from Kenya could actually account for the emission of less carbon dioxide than British beans. The latter are grown in fields on which oil-based fertilisers have been sprayed and which are ploughed by tractors that burn diesel. In the words of Gareth Thomas, Minister for Trade and Development, speaking at a recent Department for International Development air-freight seminar: 'Driving 6.5 miles to buy your shopping emits more carbon than flying a pack of Kenyan green beans to the UK.'

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The Youth of Lebanon Salute Condi!

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Energy Savings:
"Residential is a slam-dunk, it's just a matter of applying the technology we have," says IPCC author Mark Levine, a senior staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California who studies these issues. "It's the biggest sector. It's the biggest savings."
sciam
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fEl Reventador, Ecuador, February 29, 2008—A tiny frog sits covered in oil after a rupture in a major pipeline contaminated a swamp east of Quito.
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A UN forecast released last week reports that half of all humans will live in urban areas by the end of the year—and 70 percent by 2050—even though cities occupy only about 3 percent of Earth's land surface.
- I thought we already were
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sef
Sustainable Energy Forum
- very disappointing site, not a Forum just a lot of pdf links
none of which mention 'forest'
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cnn
To feed an average family of four in the developed world uses up the equivalent of 930 gallons of gasoline a year -- just shy of the 1,070 gallons that same family would use up each year to power their cars.

The average developed world diet uses 1,600 liters of fossil fuels each year, according to the U.S. based Organic Consumers Association (OCA). Only 256 of those liters come from transporting the food, says OCA.

By contrast, a whopping 496 liters goes into the chemical fertilizers used during the food growing stage, representing well over one third of the food chain's entire fossil fuel consumption.
[this rather confused CNN quote says fertilisers are oil-expensive, rather more than I had thought

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Friday March 7, 12:41 PM
NZ oil exports outstrip lamb
- this odd headline ignores the fact that NZ imports a lot (4x) more oil than it exports

.
New Zealand's oil exports hit $620 million for the last three months of 2007.
..the Maari oil field off the North Island's west coast due to begin production later this year.
...exports were boosted by oil from the new Tui field...
But imports of crude oil and refined petroleum products were $494 million last month and have averaged $329 million a month over the past year.

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NZ had at least 830,000ha of steep, erodable, low-producing grass and shrub lands that could be cost-effectively used for forestry.

Dr Richardson said purpose-grown energy forests of short, medium and long rotation could be established using only 37 per cent of the 8.7 million hectares of medium- and low-quality land available.

Another recent feasibility study has shown bioethanol produced from wood and wood residues is a feasible option for transport biofuels despite previous concerns that it was too expensive and too difficult to use that resource.
[no discussion of technology in this herald article
EROEI analysis would be interesting:
Roads to those steep hills
Felling and trucking to the 'conversion factory'
Grinding to pulp [often a forgotten energy input]
maintain and fuel for bio-conversion to fuel - I believe this is very early experimental phase][
OR
pyrolysis : considerable fraction of input used in heating? nb in a complete EROEI the opportunity cost of eg wood chip heating would be considered.
but: wood chips offer no opportunity as a transport fuel (image of WWI car with huge rubber bladder of coal gas on its roof?)
.....
What we require is a transport fuel thats roughly as cheap as 'stick a pipe in the ground into a pressurised tank of liquid' - ie current cheap oil...

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"But no company has yet demonstrated a cost-competitive industrial process for making cellulosic biofuels."
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vanityfair
Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan.

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motherjones

As part of his investigation for hrw, the analyst met a 50-year-old laborer whose home was destroyed in the attack, killing seven family members. He found that 10 neighbors had also died. "When I stood in the crater and I was talking to the survivors," Garlasco says, "it wasn't so cool anymore."
Assassinations by air are a relatively new tactic in warfare.
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Elif Shafak
"in this weird world, suicide is a privilege more rare than rubies"
(from the Bastard of Istanbul)



blogspot
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blogspot
independent
1,121 Muslim suicide bombers have blown themselves up in Iraq. This is a very conservative figure and – given the propensity of the authorities (and of journalists) to report only those suicide bombings that kill dozens of people – the true estimate may be double this number. On several days, six – even nine – suicide bombers have exploded themselves in Iraq



Tony Fomison, NZ glaciers, energy forests, Elif Shafak