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

30 May 2009

Drones, Pipelinestan, Chickenfeed

Drones
The foreign policy community’s favorite counterinsurgency adviser, or at least their favorite Australian one, David Kilcullen, told lawmakers last week that the drone strikes targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Pakistan are creating enemies at a far faster rate than its killing them. According to statistics he provided, the success rate of the drone bombing campaign is extremely low: just 2 percent of bombs dropped have hit targeted militants. The other 98 percent? Those killed noncombatant Pakistani civilians, he said.

To block IR cameras, all you need is a canvas carport, possibly quilted canvas, or ply with pink batts. Those open Toyota 4x4 pickups will need a canopy. Then you move a bunch of 4x4 s around at random.
Of course you dont want to be the only house in the village with a carport.
Hezbollah worked this out years ago. As did POTUS after Ronnie got shot. Canopies over car exits.
Empire is obsessed with IR night-vision. in GW1 the Iraqis managed to hide their scud launchers by putting up lots of tin decoys with small warmers inside.


Pipelinestan
Russia has a lot of gas. More in the Arctic.
bbc
Austria's OMV and Hungary's MOL...two companies from the UAE.. to extract the gas from fields in Iraq's Kurdish region.
.. to feed the long-planned Nabucco pipeline, which proposes pumping gas to Austria via Turkey.
The pipeline would reduce Europe's dependency on gas from Russia.
..believe there is enough gas in the Khor Mor and Chemchemal gas fields..to supply the Nabucco pipeline
OMV said... 3bn cubic feet per day by 2015.

Competition
But Russia's Gazprom on Friday said it had signed agreements with a number of Balkan and southern European countries on the construction of a gas pipeline, South Stream, that will deliver gas to Central Europe and Italy via the Balkans.
aaa


___________________________________________
Mexico flagging
Pemex said that in the first four months of the year the value of its crude exports totaled $6.14 billion, down 60.4 percent compared to the same period of 2008.
....
Mexico’s peak level of oil output came in 2003, when production totaled 3.5 million bpd.
laht


tramadol (dolcet ) the new drug of abuse in Gaza. Hmmm may be worth a try.


Disgust I scored above average 1.6 And here I was believing I was low on the disgust scale (people say it about me, my rooms are disgusting)
Supposededly 'liberals' ie leftys are less disgustable, gosh.
Anyway is it rightwing to avoid a sneezing chef?
yourmorals


Chickenfeed
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/article/600/42/377348.htm
The future is chicken
My father was a bit of an urban snob. Despite his father dedicating his entire small Palmie backyard to veges and trees, Dad used to scoff at Chicken farmers as "failed schoolteachers"- a neat putdown of a lot of guys earning less than him. Not that he earned all that much, our bicycles were from Police auctions, where Dad got special deals since he was GP to top cops. How cheap was that?
Anyway the prejudice is wide: as in the expression "Chicken Feed"
Seriously folks, If I had had the nous to squirrel aside $200K, I would get into chicken feed. In the tropics. Sunflower seeds for starters.
Then grasshoppers. Visit NE Thailand where 3000 farmers grow insects, mainly for human consumption - Tourists and Thai cultural nostalgia fans. Learn what greenery grasshoppers eat - low value foliage for sure.
High protein chicken feed is a good earner. And in times of famine it becomes human food.

29 May 2009

Fertiliser



Fertiliser
Fertiliser 500 Litres urine 50 Litres faeces Total Fertiliser need for 230 kg cereal
Nitrogen (N) 5,6 kg 0,09 kg 5,7 kg 5,6 kg
Phosphorus (P) 0,4 kg 0,19 kg 0,6 kg 0,7 kg
Potassium (K) 1,0 kg `` 0,17 kg 1,2 kg ,1.2 kg
Total N+P+K 7,0 kg 94% 0,45 kg (6 %) 7,5 kg (100 %)

...................................

Stafford Beer , Nuclear Cost

Vietnam, Stafford Beer
Pondering why Vietnam became a rice exporter upon 'privatisation' of farms. How this proves the superiority of Capital over Central Planning. [CPE]
At my Roman Catholic School, the priests taught us that 'Freedom' ie Capital was superior to Communism because 'half' the food produced in Russia was from 'private plots'. This was because people 'naturally' worked harder on their own behalf than for land they didnt own.
Several thoughts occurred:

1) What about the majority of people under Capital who work for Corporations they dont own?

2) Actually the Russian system sounded not bad, with a lot of people growing their own food.

Just a theory, but I reckon the Vietnamese farmers produce under the incentive of Debt.
Loans (presumably from 'State' banks) enable them to buy fertiliser, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, oil powered tractors and pumps. This industrial agriculture gives high yields. (per man-hour, not per Joule).
The incentive is fear of loan default, not a simple joy in a bountiful self-owned farm. In North India 16,000 farmers have killed themselves, often with herbicides, as they failed to meet repayments.

3) Under Capital small farmers are rapidly taken over by mega-farms, where workers work for wages.


The benefit of Capital Free Markets is clear and accurate accounting. The prices paid and costs incurred are transparently known by the Bank.
Under CPE 'targets' are promulgated. Lies were told to the central government about yields. In the worst case this could mean famine, as the government, accepting at face value the claimed yields, would seize its 'proportion' of the crops. Which might be all of actual production.
In the best case, the lack of accounting meant lack of flexibility. Farmers couldn't rapidly switch crops or methods according to actual yields.

One great benefit of Capital is the ability to fail. Enterprises which fail to produce at the best level are left to fail.
Limited Liability corporations with compulsory Insurance protect the owners.
These days the phrase "Ltd'" is rarely used. Formerly it was part of the name of most entities. Maybe they dont care to advertise their limits now.
Upon bankruptcy now, corporations try to rapidly switch around so that workers dont get redundancy.

Under CPE its difficult for any enterprise to fail. The startup is similar: a bureaucrat authorises a loan. But for CPE enterprises to fail, planners would to have to admit mistakes.
Now that Capital is concentrated into Corporations "too big to fail" we seem to have the worst of both worlds.

In 1979, I attended a lecture at the Open University, given by Stafford Beer the eminent cybernetician. He described how he had worked with Salvador Allende to 'cyberneticise' the Socialist economy. in those days (1972) networked computers were rare. Beer proposed a network of teletype machines, reporting to the Centre. His idea was that they should only report deviations from the Plan. This would enable a CP Economy to have the flexibility of a Market economy.

Somehow this didnt sound like true transparency, despite being a bold idea [google Stafford Beer Chile]
..................................................
In the late 80s I programmed for Ford Motors, that notorious bastion of anti-unionism.
The idea was to put barcode tags on the cars, and readers in workers hands.
Terminals on the factory floor and even in dealers showrooms would connect Production and Sales.
Middle management were alarmed, rightly, that their function was being subsumed.
Workers, rightly, called for a 'technology allowance'
I ended up banned from the floor, a pawn in their game.

Rather soon, the New "Labour" Thatcherite govt canned the entire idea of assembling cars from kitsets
Pevious governments had had a vague idea that this was 'preserving industrial capability'. Since they werent 'making' much beyond fancy mag wheels, the New Right canned the idea, and commenced to import second hand Japanese cars.


Beer ,guardian


“The cats licked them perfectly clean”.



Rachel Maddow, Lefty Lesbian, dissects Barry O
As Japan installs 1G optic internet and doesnt know what to do with it, as the Internet collapses into expensive 3-4G cell phones,
I marvel at the lefty videos that remain,
opdiner





Karman vortices over Cape Verde
nasa






__________________________________________________
aaa

Rondônia deforestation
__________________________________________________
Nuclear reactors: Cost overruns...
After four years of construction and thousands of recorded defects and deficiencies, the original €3 billion, or $4.2 billion, price tag on the Olkiluoto reactor has climbed at least 50 percent. The reactor was supposed to be completed this summer, but work is so far behind schedule that Areva.. no longer are willing to predict with certainty when it will go online.
........
Areva also said its model would deliver 1,600 megawatts\
= $3.75/watt
cf NZ$3 for wind turbines = USD$1.9
olkiluoto
......................
The OL3 project is the only example of construction on a European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), the flagship of the so-called nuclear renaissance, aggressively promoted as a low-cost "mature" technology. The chronic delays and setbacks at the Olkiluoto plant show that quite the opposite is true: complications, escalating costs, chronic safety issues, delays and a lack of transparency remain the true face of the nuclear industry.

The story now unfolding in Olkiluoto is also typical of other nuclear reactor projects across the world. The latest Chinese reactor was finished two years behind schedule because of similar problems, in Taiwan the reactor project is five years behind schedule. In the UK, the latest nuclear reactor cost double the initial estimated price.

"As we are seeing in Finland, nuclear power undermines the true solutions to climate change. It is a dangerous, costly distraction.




USA today
Barry O promulgates Indefinite Preventive Detention
and thiss :
Two founder members of what was once the biggest Muslim charity in the US have each been jailed for 65 years.
Shukri Abu Baker, 50, and Ghassan Elashi, 55, were convicted of channelling funds to the Palestinian militant group (sic), Hamas.
Three other members of the Holy Land Foundation were jailed for between 15 and 20 years by a Dallas court.
The charity was found guilty last year of sending $12m (£7.4m) to fund social programmes controlled by Hamas.
bbc





Typhus extermination
requires good circulation
codoh



Wood why-gasifiers-rock
1 cord = 2.7 m³ solid wood

The truck burns one pound of wood for each mile driven, or about 5,000 miles per cord.




Dental Care:
Western Dentistry is expensive because of an Idea. The Idea that a Dentist is a "professional" who deserves several big cars and a big income.

In RP I got 2 crowns for P1500 each.
(US$32) which would have been AUD$1200 each plus several visits @ $120 each.
You might cherish the idea of becoming a "professional" yourself,
You might argue that my dentist deserved more, but he seemed happy and did good work.
_posted in peakoilhausfrau

Drug Money

Vienna-based UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said in an interview released by Austrian weekly Profil that drug money often became the only available capital when the crisis spiralled out of control last year.

"In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital," Costa was quoted as saying by Profil. "In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor."

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime had found evidence that "interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities,"






Trust me, I'm a mathematician; the the-black-scholes-equation
is a crock of shit
__________________________________________________


aaa
Miley



\\__________________________________________________

24 May 2009

Idle Fleet, David, Resnais

Idle Fleet
One of the largest fleets of ships ever gathered idles here just outside one of the world’s busiest ports, marooned by the receding tide of global trade...
So many ships have congregated here — 735, according to AIS Live ship tracking service of Lloyd’s..s announced on Tuesday.
China exports -22.6% in April
Philippines exports in March were -30.9% from a year earlier...
..Vessels have flocked to Singapore because it has few storms, excellent ship repair teams, cheap fuel from its own refinery and, most important, proximity to Asian ports that might eventually have cargo to ship.
..41 million tons, according to the AIS Live tracking service... 4% of the world’s fleet today.
150 vessels in and around the Straits of Gibraltar on Monday, and 300 around Rotterdam, the Netherlands
but ... Asia is the place you want to hang around this time in case things turn around.”
nytimes


aaa
humans occupy automobile bridge in Auckland
__________________________________________________
aaa
The mystery woman, school of David, restored from yellowed... on the right
Ghastly Renoir in the back Thanks sparklepony
___________________________________________________

Fisk
"our commitment to mutual principles and values" (which might not last too long if the Hizbollah alliance wins the 7 June national elections).


Columbus was so determined to believe that he had landed in the spice islands and not on a continent that he actually tortured the native population, and a few of his sailors, to get them to agree that he had, indeed, found the indies and not a new continent? And he went so far as to demand that his sailors sign a document stating that they they had found an island and not a continent.


nytimes nytimes passwords available at bugmenot
Alain Resnais’s sublime competition entry, “Wild Grass.” A story about chance, possibility and strange, reckless, impossible desire, the film finds Mr. Resnais — who turns 87 next month — doing some of his finest work to date. The Resnais regulars André Dussollier and Sabine Azéma, wearing a cloud of red hair (warning!) and at times a coat that brings to mind Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, star as two strangers who begin circling each other after he finds her identity papers (including a pilot’s license), which had been stolen along with her purse. She’s a dentist; he’s possibly mad or maybe simply a man with a dark past.
When the characters meet face to face it’s in a street outside a Paris cinema where he’s gone to see the 1954 movie “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” with William Holden and Grace Kelly. (At one point Mr. Resnais inserts a few flourishes from the 20th Century Fox theme music.) Anything seems possible after a movie, the unseen narrator (Edouard Baer) says as Ms. Azéma’s character catches sight of Mr. Dussollier exiting the theater. He seems so lost in thought that she runs ahead of him a little so he can see her. Finally they look at each other as Mr. Resnais’s astonishingly mobile camera, which soars and soars throughout this film, lets us see the precise moment when seeing becomes the recognition of love
.


aaa
extreme mammals
__________________________________________________________
discovermagazine
_posted

How charming it is to participate in blather about infants. How it eliminates the dour possibility of contemplating the immanent famines and wars coming about as we deplete our resources with our healthy multitudes.
Indeed any serious talk is in such bad taste, indicative of personality disorder, quickly change the topic back to childish things.
How delightful it is to sense the urgency of the continuance of our progeny, as opposed to the indifference of the circling spheres.
The childless savant, unbidden clarity in her view, cannot be bitter holding a child
How Oil & Climate and Politics are such a drag, mainly because they show we dont give a damn about our children & grandchildren, despite blathering on for hours about the quality of their pre-school paid care .."one on one carers! how wonderful!"
We chose 100kW 100kph steel delights over the starvation of those cute grandkids.
We dont actually care for the biosphere itself, the apotheosis of carelessness







aip
illusions!




aam
more miley
________________________________________________________________
...David?

________________________________________________________________