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 ++
....
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angryarab ++
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antiwar ++
norwegianity
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blogspot
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aviraqi
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icasualties
maru
om
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messopotamian +7Apr06
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rafahtoday Feb05?
rense w= wacko conspiracies
rigorousintuition x
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satiricalpolitical +
scaramoucheblog ++
secretsinbaghdad ++15Ap06
Energring
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uncapitalist ++
velorution ++ bicycles
org ++Brazil peasants
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warfare.ru +russia military
greenpeace
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antiwar
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axisoflogic ++
blackcommentator
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buggery +
buzzflash ++
changeforamerica
countercurrents
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crisispapers
crooksandliars ++?
csmonitor
dahrjamailiraqhref="http://www.dailykos.com/
davidcorn
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grist ??
gristmagazine
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gulf
hizbollah
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inthesetimes x
iranmania x
ivaw
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lrb ++ Iraqi?
mahablog
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marklynas climate change
mnftiu get your war on comics
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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 ++
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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

30 October 2008

Arab President, Packets, Pat Buchanan, Sri Yantra

USA elections:
from the interactive USA electoral map
electoral map
Interactive map 270towin with neat historical clicks.
It looks like Obama will win even if Florida and Ohio are stolen by Diebold machine rigging
So its an Arab/Black USA president. Who wouldve thunk it?
The whole DNC, which I watched on CNN, was a 'Labour Party' wet dream. Imagine USA with a decent health system and not out there bombing the shit out of villages in Pakistan and Syria!

Astounding how discourse can switch in an instant. In 1989 one careless remark in East German Parliament mis-stating that the Berlin border was now open, and Stalinism was caput.
Brief mild struggle over Russia, 1st Yeltsin was a hero for defending the 'white house' then he was a hero for shelling it, then it was vouchers for all, gangster state.
[If youre a true libertarian why not a voucher system for national defence?]
RSA also became a gangster state overnight in 89 when Mandela walked.
Israel, with all its faux-jew Russian immigrants, appears to be another Gangsta state.

Hey, I'm not proud... where do I sign to join one of these Gangs?

Free Markets revealed as a joke in a week whem Bush handed the traders $700B.

How quickly might a Green New Deal arrive? I suspect that the embedded illusory Luxury-Indolence-Excitement of the Capital fantasy may prove resistant until the dustbowl actually spills over your threshold.

I guess I will be dead just a little while before the Green New Deal pokes its steady-state ideology into the absurd but exciting 'growth-forever on this finite sphere' discourse/ideology tent. Still I have lived through the cultural-rev, cant expect too much on this iron ball.
The globe can only be flattened once, courtesy of 707/747 hoi-polloi jaunts.
And packet technology can only arrive for the first time once
Packet technology:
Shipping containers ca 1970 and IP info packets, also 1970s but big only when Intel/Microsoft got fast/cheap with Wind95. It seems obvious in hindsight, packets move stuff/info efficiently.
I recall a vacation job in a rail shed in the 60s. pre-containers. Groups of lethargic workers trundled hand-trolleys onto rail-wagons. Entertaining challenge to attempt to solve the NP-complete package packing problem, but not a way to run a railroad.
Sure we may get better than IP for data packets, but youre talking incremental change. The fundamental change that moved manufacturing to Indonesia/China and Call centres to India is fait accompli.
Once 'real work' was ploughing and reaping. Oil powered tractors cut that out.
Then 'Real Work' was furnaces and factories. Packet technology shunted that offshore
Now 'Real work' is rump info-database shuffling and legal department boiler-plate contract and report writing - could be done in pajamas in the Bahamas.
Also big now is "Human Resources" - which is a bunch of 'liberated' feminists in black power suits needlessly gossiping about hirees.

The Metropolitan Centre of Empire must keep its 'white-collar' elite happy in employment. But the logic of Capital tears at those jobs.

Empire Centres were once places where modes of transport changed. [this idea is c/o Bucky Fuller] Where hard hand labour unloaded ships onto bullock carts, there sprung up Warehouses. And banks, and Insurance houses.
Now with containers, the warehouse is gone, and with it the logic for a city. Banking and Insurance are data-base handling - best placed near 3rd world universities.
With containers and kan-ban Just-In-Time manufacturing there is no warehouse. Your inventory is wherever the gps tracker on your container reports itself.

With the computerised hedge-fund-debt-swap now revealed as the major internal contradiction of Capital, we are forced to face the hollow shell of infinite growth. Guess what? we are biological players in a biological system. Even oil is merely stored algal sludge.
The only non-biological players are the French nuclear heaters, and a few Germans and Californian solar panels.
What you gonna eat I dont know, but sure as eggs it will be biological for the next century at least. Whose gonna grow it, weed it, squash the aphids?


I felt the urge to see what Pat Buchanan, my favourite Tridentine Mass attending, anti-immigration conservative is saying. Seems he loved the Obama DNC speech. youtube
Pat is sorta like a papist Winston Peters, very down on immigration. Hell, if you let those guest workers vote, the indulged privileged classes at the centre of Empire will never get to keep voting in their Masters.

Pat on Georgia is a classic
Saakashvili's blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili's army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours.
Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.

realclearpolitics



For $15 you can purchase the details of the Sri Yantra:
In the heady 90s I spent hours with Corel Draw approximating the Sri Yantra for my internet bubble corporate logo. I wrote the world's fastest long division program using 80386 assembler code. Based on Knuths book. Essential for PublicKeyCryptography. All other programmers wrote in C. Soon processors got fast enough that Assembler wasn't necessary. A couple of other Sydney lads put their RSA code into the public domain. Netscape picked it up. Now you can bank online thanks to them. My dreams of wealth as a security expert withered.
sriyantraresearch
wikimedia
aaa
__________________________________________________
weird blog max:

yesterrday, the grAhin, which had been kept at bay for a day came back to needle us. We called upon rudra to bear us aid in the second hour past mid-night and used the apsarA to relieve us from the grAhin. Today (19th) around 11.25 AM we were attacked by the cheTaka again, who also tried to sneak in the grAhin on us. Having draw-up the draw-bridge we remained cloistered in our fort. We could hear the cheTaka repeatedly banging on our doors. After about 45 minutes the cheTaka retreated.g.manasataramgini

28 October 2008

New World of Shit



The opposition NZ National Party immigration spokesman Lockwood Smith said that guest workers from the Pacific Islands need to be taught how to use showers and toilets. This caused a big scandal, LS is now not going to get Immigration cabinet post.
Funny thing is: NZ has a bad record of GastroEnteritis and Nora virus. The country isnt very clean.
I have lived in slums in SEAsia, that people here in NZ would call 'filthy' but never got Enterobius vermicularis (thread worms) there.
Surely because we wash our bottoms with water, rather than wipe with paper.
Head lice are common in both tropics and cold 40s. Somehow I dont get headlice anymore, despite children abounding, I suspect my dandruff deters them.
In NZ, every time I buy a salad roll, I get a 50% chance of worms. I love Rocket, but the packets of rocket from New WorldSupermarket aaa
(which has displaced asian vegetable shops in central wgtn) have a 50%+ chance of giving me worms. Small leaves hard to wash, so its no rocket for me.
Up to now, I dont get LBM or serious symptoms, but you have to worry about Hepatitis. Last week a couple of old people karked it from Nora virus. NZ aint that clean. (Aus aint that clean either. you learn to avoid salad rolls there also). Take me back to those 3rd world slums, where people have feelings,but not itchy anuses.

Yahoo is evil, Voting is good, Pipelineistan, Food First

Yahoo is evil
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has a suggestion for Yahoo. Divest yourself of Alibaba, the largest shark finning company in the world. Yahoo owns 40% of this destructive and merciless corporation.
That in addition to Yahoo's slavish kow-towing to the Chinese government makes this company one of the most unethical corporations in the world.
"I hope they go under," said Captain Paul Watson. "Yahoo is contributing to the extinction of world shark populations – they are arrogantly wiping the seas clean of sharks. I look at the graph of their losses and I smile – it serves them right."
myspace


After years with yahoo email, I am faced with the onerous job of migrating to google, because yahoo have sold out to spammers.
__________________________________________________
aaa
aaa
aaa
ukiyoe-gallery
__________________________________________________
Voting is a good
I may vote, for the first time in my life. Getting so carried away by election fever.
Labour candidate Grant Robertson has a bloke partner, or a blokes name anyway, Nationals candidate is Franks, an ultra-right guy who wants discrimination against gays allowed. Me, I'm not that big on gay rights, Sure would hate to see my hipag sister, or my gay cousins discriminated against, but. So I guess I'll have to drag my sorry progressive arse along to help newbie Robertson along. I would prefer to vote for Sue K, the Green, a star in the NZ firmament since the 70s. But mmp does let me tick her party.
Ethics aside, Heather Roy ACT would be the most highly nailable candidate.

Voting as an ethical action. One vote never matters, but ethics is about the sort of person you want to be. Thats the athiest credo in a phrase. A lot of peop;le want to be rich, but nobody wants to be greedy and grasping.




aaa
Przewalski horses at Chernobyl - these images come and go on the internets
__________________________________________________
Pipelineistan cont...
The Azeri government boasts that between now and 2013, when its Absheron peninsula reaches its peak oil production period, it will earn $100bn..
And it is for this reason that Azerbaijan has become a close friend of the West. [??? what?? with $100bn who needs da west? get super rich, and youre automatically a close friend of Batman??]
....The steady, but heavy-handed rule of Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, provides a degree of stability in this region that the US is keen to sustain. [USA sure likes those "heavy hands"]
Aliyev has so far provided a reliable supply of oil through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline to the West, ...during the Russia-Georgia war, when the BTC pipeline was out of operation, Azerbaijan diverted some of its oil supplies to Russia and Iran ... since the end of the conflict and the resumption of supply through the BTC pipeline, Baku has actually continued to supply oil south to Iran and north to Russia.
aljazeera


Israel free of Russia?
jcpa
* Israel today is at the height of a revolution whose main focus is the integration of natural gas into the electricity and industrial sectors. The desalination plant in Ashkelon, which is one of the largest in the world, is using natural gas,....
.. the Med Stream, which is planned to contain three pipelines. One is for crude oil, meaning that what arrives through the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline or the Samsun-Ceyhan pipeline will continue on to Israel. The second pipeline will be for natural gas. .
........................................................................
the natural gas pipeline would be the continuation of: 1. the BTE natural gas pipeline (Baku – Tbilisi –Erzerum) which conveys Azerian gas from the immense reservoirs of the Caspian Sea (the Shah – Deniz gas field); another option being considered is that in the future it would convey Kazakh and / or Turkmen gas; and / or 2. The Blue Stream pipeline which delivers Russian gas via the Black Sea.
........................................................................
OK it seems that The term "Caspian Pipe" may mean just that, a pipe under the Caspian sea, which would not cross Russia at all...?
........................................................................

Astana, 24 April 2007 - Kazakhstan's government could join a proposed gas pipeline linking the energy-rich Caspian to Europe, bypassing Russia, if the project meets the country's economic interests, the premier said.

The $6-billion pipeline project is an extension of the South Caucasus pipeline, linking Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, and is expected to run from Turkey to Austria via Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary. The project would transport Central Asian gas to Europe and is seen by the European Union (EU) as a way of diversifying energy supplies away from Russia..
The 2,113-mile pipeline across the Caspian is scheduled to be built beginning from 2008 and go on stream in 2011. ... annual capacity of 30 billion cubic meters is seen as a rival to Russian Gazprom's Blue Stream-2, which will use Turkey as a transit point for exports to the EU and have a capacity of 8 billion cubic meters and a commissioning date of 2012.
........................................................................
bigcampaign.org
Israel supplies 90 percent of its oil need from the Black Sea and carries crude to Israeli ports by ships.
Does this mean that Israel will no longer be dependant on Russia for energy?
........................................................................
10 Oct 2008
Baku. Elmin Ibrahimov – APA-ECONOMICS. Crude oil from Kazakhstan’s Tengiz oilfield will be pumped into Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline (BTC) from the second half of October, reaching the Turkish port of Ceyhan for leading in mid-November, BP said on its website.
........................................................................
Princely Caspian pipedreams to free Israel and EU from Russian Bear hands on the valve...
aaa
__________________________________________________
- this route through Russia may be obsolete - the new "Caspian Pipe" may be under the Caspian Sea.
The Caspian pipeline passes through Russia.
Due to low capacity , they started out using trains...7,000 oil cars and 3,000 liquefied-natural-gas cars, sending out a half-dozen trains a day toward four Russian ports on the Black Sea. It remains the world's largest rail-based oil-transport system....
........................................................................
I dont know where the Caspian pipeline is at today:
The Caspian pipeline agreement provides for modernizing the old Central Asia-Center pipeline, running from Begdash in Turkmenistan to Beineu in Kazakhstan, with an annual projected capacity of 10 billion cubic meters of gas in 2009-2010.

During the second stage in 2010-2017, the partners will prolong the pipeline to Aleksandrov Gai on the Russian-Kazakh border, with a capacity of 20 billion cubic meters, which will increase the total capacity of the pipeline to 30 billion.
Russian Industry and Energy Minister Viktor Khristenko said that the Caspian pipeline would be built by 2010, with each side making investments independently of others.
........................................................................
(www.defsec.info) - During the lat.est visit of Aleksey Miller, head of Gazprom in Turkmenistan they agreed to boost capacity of the [planned ] Caspian Pipeline from 20 to 30bn cu m/y.
the planned Caspian Pipeline (slated to go on stream in 2010) from 20 to 30bn cu m per year.
........................................................................
"The basic provision is that each partner shall build the part of the pipeline assigned to it. Turkmenistan will build 300 km (186 miles) of the pipeline and Kazakhstan, 1,500 km (932 miles). Russia's part will be the shortest, only a few dozen kilometers, but it should include a junction," Khristenko said.
[I dont understand how Russia has "only a few dozen km" - they must be talking about a different pipe from that in the map below
- does that "few km" allow the Bear to clench the pipe?]
.Although the new pipeline has been planned to have a capacity of 30 billion cubic meters a year, it will transport only 20 billion . Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan have pledged to provide up to 10 billion cubic meters of gas each.
rian
caucaz
........................................................................
The whole PipeLineIstan thing obviously needs elucidation ... obscure hundresd of billions make me nervous


Bill Hamilton
lavoisier
Bill Hamilton was not a New Zealander despite RNZ and BBC claims. His father was, according to wikip, but Bill was born in Egypt and never lived in NZ, so only very tenuously a kiwi. Check out the chapter on Egypt, parasites and incest on Google books


Food First
Food prices are set largely by commodities futures. There are several types of players on commodities markets, from the traditional “hedgers,” farmers and food companies that use futures to hedge against the uncertainties inherent in agriculture, to speculators, who bet on the short term up and down swings of the markets, and index investors, who seek long-term investments by hoarding futures contracts for extended periods and betting on the continued rise of commodity prices.

In the past ten years of deregulation, futures markets have actually created market volatility. Unregulated trading in the U.S. was authorized by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which removed position limits and disclosure requirements, essentially opening the door to unlimited speculation. Since the passage of the act, the total holdings of commodity index investors on regulated U.S. exchanges have increased 25 times, from $13 billion in 2003 to $317 billion as of July 2008; in the same time frame, commodity prices have tripled.(6) As of April 2008, index investors owned approximately 35% of all regulated corn futures contracts in the U.S., 42% of all soybean contracts, and 64% of all wheat contracts, compared to minimal holdings in 2001.(7)

I am abandoning technorati tags, they often ignore me, and google blog search beats the band, why should I need propriatary 'tags' in an age of intellligent search engines?