LeftiOnTheNews points out that 9/11 conspiracy theorists must be in a dither today because of the tanker truck explosion in the S.F. Bay Area. The force of the explosion and the resulting heat softened the supporting steel, causing the overpass to collapse.

This is precisely what the conspiracy theorists say could not have happened during 9/11. But the tanker crash shows clearly that steel can be softened, and by a mere tanker crash (which has way less fuel than a passenger jet plane)

I’m posting a review tomorrow here of Mike Davis’ new book, Buda’s Wagon. A Short History of the Car Bomb. Among other things, he points out just how powerful car bombs can be - and an exploding gas tanker IS a car bomb.

The US left Lebanon in the 80’s after Hezbollah car bombs blew up US and French barracks. The French barracks was 9 stories. The bomb lifted it off the foundation and moved it 20 feet. That explosive power was unquestionably way less than that of the planes that hit the WTC on 9/11, which not only caused explosions but also massive fires.

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And this presidential candidate wants to increase defense spending and put more US troops everywhere.

Read it and weep, liberals. When it comes to foreign policy, Barack Obama appears little different from George Bush.

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So, after moving to Connecticut (where I grew up), a rash appeared on my legs and wouldn’t go away. Finally went to an MD who looked at it for about two seconds and said it was poison ivy. How can that be I said, it’s early Spring and it’s not even blooming yet. Dunno, he said, but I see it at least a couple of times a week now.

Ah well, there were a multitude of black widow spiders in our backyard in California. I will feel about as much compunction over spraying poison ivy with herbicide as I did for killing black widows on sight.

As for other beasties, there’s a few rattlers here, but nothing like southern California, as well as the occasional copperhead. You do need to look out for deer ticks, as they can carry Lyme disease (so named because it was first found in Lyme CT.) As for insects, rumors that the black fly is the state bird are frivolous…

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The Economist has an excellent backgrounder on the serious drought in Australia and what they’re doing to mitigate it.

Dave Riley, who lives in Australia, details the severity of the drought and how recycling kitchen water has led to an herb garden in his backyard.

Wikipedia on the drought

Prime Minister John Howard announced on 19 April 2007 that unless substantial rain occurs in the next six weeks no water will be allocated to irrigators in the Murray-Darling basin for the coming year. The result of this would be “catastrophic” for farmers and the economy and the price of food would significantly rise. Electricity shortages are also likely if the Snowy Mountains Scheme is forced to shut down its hydroelectric generators^.

The Australian government is being hugely proactive, doing whatever they can think of to help. A mega-drought is predicted for the American southwest, so it’s way past time for state and federal governments to get proactive here. A real good start would be to ban the building golf courses in deserts and to shut down existing courses.

As said here before, the only way to combat global warming is for governments to mandate the changes. Only they have the power to make it happen.

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Ocean Power Technologies “wave generation system uses a ’smart,’ ocean-going buoy to capture and convert wave energy into low-cost, clean electricity.”

A 10 MW power station would occupy 30 acres of ocean space, and is scalable to 100 MW.

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Because even Microsoft says their Jet database isn’t meant to be using in a complex environment with many concurrent users. And an audit showed that, indeed, a Jet database may have been corrupted in Ohio in 2006 , as two tables that should have had the same data in them didn’t, plus date and time stamps were missing, certainly signs the database can’t handle the load.

Intoxination says, why not use Linux instead? Or SQL Server, for that matter… Both can scale hugely.

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From Homeless on the High Desert

You can’t bring a bottle of water past the airport screener, but once you’re in the terminal, you can buy all the Diet Coke and Mentos you want.

(Eepybird has the videos…)

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Reading Housing Bubble Blog gives an idea how widespread the subprime collapse is. They post news from all parts of the country. Lots of people are getting hosed, losing homes, in debt way past anything they can hope to repay. Meanwhile, in Sacramento, Casey Serin’s little bubble has imploded catastrophically for him. He’s lost all his houses, is about to get evicted, has no money, and his car just got broken into and burgled.

The subprime crisis is expected to worsen, says the chief executive of Freddie Mac. That’s because the most problematic ARMs, those from 2006, haven’t reset yet. This means what we’re seeing now is just the leading edge.

The US economy is slowing, with fears of stagflation. The collapsing housing market is the “main culprit.” To fight inflation (and to keep China and Japan buying t-bills) the Fed needs to raise interest rates, but as the head of PIMCO recently stated, the only way the Fed can stave off precipitous drops in the price of real estate is by lowering rates. That they will raise rates is, I think, a given.

The subprime racket was a giant Ponzi scheme that transferred billions from the poor and middle class to the already wealthy. The greedy pig investment banks and sleazy mortgage companies who foisted this on the public knew exactly what they were doing. Brokers have been going to prison, but it’s way past time for investment bankers to get indicted too.

Sue says, wait until the accounting scandals start hitting the mortgage companies. Expect another big shakeout, one that could impact investment banks too. Also, watch the allowances for bad debt, as they are probably way inadequate.

This has been a giant transfer of wealth to the ruling class from the rest of us. But they got so greedy and larcenous this time that it’s blowing up in their faces.

We need an economic system where this kind of exploitation isn’t allowed to happen, where government is beholden to the people not the wealthy.

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This is because two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions occur while growing the crops used to produce biodiesel, according to a recent study. Thus, when you view the entire cycle of producing it, it’s no improvement over gasoline.

The best answer, as always, is to cut consumption.

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This is a desperation ploy to stave off expected massive defeats for Labour in this Thursday’s elections, says The Telegraph.

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“Massages, not sex” my ass, says Sue.

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Framing the violence throughout Iraq is a recent report from the Brookings Institution, a pro-imperialist U.S. research institute. The report concluded that 75 percent of attacks are directed at occupation forces, while a further 17 percent are directed at puppet Iraqi forces. This means that at least 92 percent of all attacks are directed at U.S. forces or its proxies.

The so-called “civil war” in Iraq is a myth. The war is aimed squarely at the U.S. occupation, and it is growing stronger by the day.

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Germany wants to become the most energy efficient country in the world within 13 years. Mayor Bloomberg of New York City released a 127-part plan to make NYC deeply green as well as providing hundreds of thousands of new affordable homes.

The US needs policies like these at the federal level. Thinking big. Looking way ahead. Putting the well-being of everyone ahead of short-term interests.

Changes like this will have to occur at the governmental level because they are the only entities who can mandate them to happen.

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LeftiOnTheNews went on vacation and posted some music, including “Barbara Ann” by The Regents, before he left. This, the original version, is a classic mix of doo wop and rock and roll and got me thinking about another Italian doo wop group from the Bronx, Dion and the Belmonts.

Doo wop was street corner singing. It emerged out of black culture and was people on the stoop outside the tenement building singing. The harmonies, intricacies, and interplay between the voices was often startlingly good, especially considering they had no formal musical training.

The first single by Dion and the Belmonts, “I Wonder Why” is a dazzling classic. There’s so much going on in the song, and it’s made all the more remarkable in that they, as nobodies, walked in off the street and recorded it in two hours. Clearly, they had huge talent.

Dion wanted to do a single, and wanted the best singers. He choose the The Belmonts from members of a rival gang. As a young teenager (”there was no rock and roll then”) he listened to blues and Hank Williams. “For me, putting country and blues together, that’s what I call Rock & Roll.” Indeed.

The Italian doo wop groups from the Bronx did something else, they put doo wop and rock and roll together. The purists may have screamed, but these groups were breaking new ground. They also had serious attitude and were a needed counterpoint to the bland White teen idols of the day.

Dion went through some rough times, including heroin addiction while at the peak of his fame. He spent decades trying to find a spiritual place to call home, and chronicles his search in quite moving terms. Since the 60’s fame, he’s done folk, rock, gospel, and recently recorded a well-received blues album. Clearly, he keeps the creative juices flowing, not content to just do oldies show.

From Lou Reed’s speech inducting Dion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

And then there was Dion — that great opening to “I Wonder Why” engraved in my skull forever. Dion, whose voice was unlike any other I had heard before. Dion could do all the turns, stretch those syllables so effortlessly, soar so high he could reach the sky and dance there among the stars forever. What a voice that had absorbed and transmogrified all these influences into his own soul, as the wine turns into blood, a voice that stood on its own, remarkably and unmistakably from New York. Bronx Soul.

Bronx Soul Music is now the name of one of Dion’s companies. This is music that stands the test of time.

DionDimucci.com[tags]Dion Dimucci[/tags]

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When you type in google.com in the address bar of your browser, it goes to a Domain Name Server to look up the ip address then takes you to the site. This is completely transparent to you, the user.

OpenDNS replaces your current DNS. Configuring it takes about 30 seconds and is free. It will block you from going to phishing and other such nasty sites. This alone makes it worth it.

But there’s more! It’s extremely fast (they serve about one billion DNS requests a day) and you can create shortcuts (like “goog” to go to google ) plus it automatically corrects typos.

They currently have four locations in the US, one in London, and more coming.

Link via the pay version of Windows Secrets newsletter.

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Matthew Simmons, major investment banker to the oil business for decades, on peak oil and the need for alt energy.

“Many alternative energy sources are energy intensive,” he said. “Corn-based energy is a scam; it’s very energy-intensive.” Simmons also pointed out that nuclear power plants must run for 15 years before they can produce enough energy to replace the energy used to build the plant itself.

“New supply sources are important, but they cannot fill the energy gap,” Simmons added.

His views on corn-based energy and nuclear are, too put it mildly, enlightening.

He says the oil industry got blindsided by peak oil because they refused to believe it could happen.

“It was a religion that was faith-based, not fact based,” Simmons said. “We’re flying blind. Since we don’t have the data we stay in the dark.”

Simmons says the US has been living in an “energy dream,” that we face “a real crisis,” and “have no Plan B.” This from one of the heaviest hitters in energy investment and banking. Too bad Congress and the White House are still sleep walking in the dream world.

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Two senators, one Republican, one Democrat, have proposed a plan to divide Iraq into three parts, no doubt still controlled by the United States.

Except, the plan is a hallucination and can’t work. The US is not in control there and hasn’t been for quite some time. Not that this matters to congress members in whose view the US must always be supreme, even if reality clearly contradicts this.

It’s important to note this imperialist plan to divide Iraq didn’t even bother to make a pretense of consulting Iraqis to get their view and is bipartisan.

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Apparently so.

this pitiful excuse for socialist politics held by the SEP is exactly the kind you would expect from a… CEO’s revolutionary consciousness.

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The AWS wave energy converter is a cylinder shaped buoy, moored to the seabed. Passing waves move an air-filled upper casing against a lower fixed cylinder, with up and down movement converted into electricity.

The concept has been proven at full-scale in 2004 via a pilot plant that was installed off the coast of Portugal. Engineering for a pre-commercial demonstrator is now ongoing.

The converters are at least 18 feet underwater, can survive violent storms, and produce more power in less space than other wave generation methods. Unlike solar or wind, wave power is steady and reliable, the waves are always there. In the coming world, we’ll generate power any number of ways, and wave power sure looks promising.

Alternative-energy-news.info has detailed information and there’s more on the company website, AWS Ocean Energy.

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Iggy Pop has reunited with the Asheton Brothers, and they brought in Mike Watt on bass for this, the first new Stooges album in decades. For those of you who know who the Stooges and Mike Watt are, nothing else needs be said. Except, of course, is it good?

One word. Yes.

(Photo is back cover from Amazon)

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Riverbend, the eloquent anonymous blogger from Baghdad, has just posted again. She and her family are leaving Iraq, to where they do not know.

There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends… And to what?

It’s difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.

May their escape be fast and safe, and may they soon find a place to call home. So too for all refugees of the war started by the imbecile.

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Urban Dictionary, “a slang dictionary with your definitions,” is a fun site

Some samples:

globfrag
Coined word from globalization and fragmentation; as the world becomes more globalized with increasing technology and knowledge, more fragmentation occurs among individuals and societies.

clicktease
When a website or website link leads you to believe you will be seeing pornography or some other sexual material, when in fact this offer is false or misleading.

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Thames Water and other privatized water companies in Scotland have “third world” equipment and are currently dumping 1000 liters per second of raw sewage into the water because darn it, something broke, and company execs are just too busy counting their massive profits to go fix it. This on top of massive leaks that occur constantly in the system.

Gus Abraham at 1820 has two posts and a video about this. He emails “Watch the video. Warning ***some bad sweary words are used*** do not watch this if you don’t want to hear bad sweary words.” (Click the picture to watch the video)

I’d be swearing too if huge amounts of sewage were flowing into waters near me as fat cats twiddled their thumbs. And for those who might call this vandalism, I say the real vandals are those running Thames Water.

This is what water privatization too often does. Quality and service become abysmal as the sole focus becomes profit. Water is too important and too basic to be left to the private sector and the profit motive. It belongs to the people and should be managed by the people.

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But the wheels of repression grind on, with neither party discussing the
“torture, repression of immigrants, the gathering of secret evidence by mass spying, and so on.”

On these abuses by the Attorney General and the government, the Democrats are as silent as the Republicans.

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Stamford CT is home to major financial institutions as well as other large corporations. They’ve also been getting too many blackouts during the summer as the inadequate power grid can’t handle the load. Even the mayor admits “we’re just kind of a Third World country here. We have to expect interruptions in our power.” But too much of this and businesses will start leaving. Hey, in a globalized Internet world, those companies can be anywhere.

So, the plan is to create micro grids, an idea already in practice in Europe, the UK, and Walt Disney World. Businesses and neighbors team together to produce their own power, sharing it as needed.

For example, a hotel and office building might team up, with the hotel needing electricity more at night and the office building needing it more during the day.

They can use fuel cells, solar, geothermal, whatever is available to create power, and try to stay off the grid as much as possible. This not only helps the users in the micro grid, it helps the community at large because it takes load off the main grid.

Micro grids and power generation is, I think, the coming trend. Produce power in small amounts locally and use it locally, that’s the way to go.

Connecticut Energy Blog has full details.

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