Transforming food into fuels is a monstrosity.

Regardless of numerous official statements assuring that this is not a choice between food and fuel, reality shows that this, and no other, is exactly the alternative: either the land is used to produce food or to produce biofuels.

Read the whole thing. His basic point is that the more land used to grow biofuel stock, the less land is available to grow food. Worse, most of such growing will be done in third world countries, making the lives of the desperately poor and hungry even worse.

Further

It is not true that biofuels are a renewable and constant energy source, given that the crucial factor in plant growth is not sunlight but the availability of water and suitable soil conditions. If this were not the case, we would be able to grow corn or sugarcane in the Sahara Desert. The effects of large-scale production of biofuels will be devastating.

It is not true that they do not pollute. Even if ethanol produces less carbon emissions, the process to obtain it pollutes the surface and the water with nitrates, herbicides, pesticides and waste, and the air is polluted with aldehydes and alcohols that are carcinogens. The presumption of a “green and clean” fuel is a fallacy.

That some may go hungry so others more wealthy can drive their cars using ethanol is an abomination. Yes, we need renewable energy, but as Castro points out, ethanol from foodstocks is not renewable. Nor is it equitable or fair.

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Bruce Schneier, Is Big Brother a Big Deal?

The fear isn’t an Orwellian government deliberately creating the ultimate totalitarian state… It’s that we’re doing it ourselves, as a natural byproduct of the information society. We’re building the computer infrastructure that makes it easy for governments, corporations, criminal organizations and even teenage hackers to record everything we do, and—yes—even change our votes. And we will continue to do so unless we pass laws regulating the creation, use, protection, resale and disposal of personal data. It’s precisely the attitude that trivializes the problem that creates it.

Marcus Ranum, Big Brother is a sissy

Can you seriously imagine what The Department Of Big Brother Department would be like? If they had gotten started in 1984 like they were supposed to, they’d probably have just recently switched most of their agency Email off of AOL into their own, outsourced, private service - after incurring massive cost-overruns and having their mail server compromised by a 9-year-old hacker. If The President ordered The Department Of Big Brother Department to jigger the E-voting machines in Florida to rig the 2008 election, it’d never work. By the time they had gotten the first couple implementations specified, implemented and tested, it would be 2016 and by then the E-voting machines wouldn’t be running Vista any more and they’d need to start over.

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It’s just fiction, it couldn’t happen, right?

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Author Ken MacLeod (see above post) on the recent elections in Scotland

But enough squabbling amongst ourselves! Let’s turn and face the real enemy, the Judean People’s Front! Thanks to its divisions the far left has been wiped off the electoral map, going from six MSPs to nil. The Scottish Socialist Party was not only beaten handily by Solidarity - in five of the seven regions it won fewer votes than the Socialist Labour Party.

The what? Precisely. The Socialist Labour Party has next to no presence on the ground in Scotland. Socialist Labour got one election broadcast, fronted by the popular English actor Ricky Tomlinson, who emphasised that the party stood firmly against Scottish nationalism. Around a third of Scotland’s far-left voters must have agreed.

They no doubt opposed nationalism on the grounds that any nationalism plan backed by centrists is, by definition, flawed and a sell-out, or worse, backed by the Judean Popular People’s Front.

To be fair, the far right has their fratricidal infighting too, as witness the recent lawsuits, counter-lawsuits, and forming of a splinter group among California Minutemen. But sectarianism does seem epidemic on the far left at times. Why is this?

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