This is a hoot.

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Why? Because the UN peacekeeping force is ineffective. Lenin’s Tomb says this is just more liberal imperialism but that’s only part of it. The disquieting truth is that as governments including the US continue to hollow out, private corporations will fill the void.

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as the US government did little if anything to help, two corporations did quite a lot. Blackwater was hired by the wealthy to provide security and Wal-Mart just loaded up their trucks with supplies and rolled them in, ignoring government restrictions on such shipments. While you might be horrified by what Blackwater did, the sorry truth is they got their forces in when the US government couldn’t. And Wal-Mart may well have saved lives.

The hollowing out of governments will continue.

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Celcias highlights this video about global water problems from the excellent video news site Real News Network.

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China is raising their subsidized oil prices, something which caused spot oilprices to fall.. The number of miles driven by US drivers is falling. Maybe a Segway could be an alternative means of transportation?

Hey, these high oil prices even have this Prius driver gasping. 8 gallons cost me over $37 yesterday. Of course I can drive 360 miles on that.

We’re going on an extended road trip through the southwest and might drive 1500 miles or so. If your car gets 15 mpg then at California prices, you’d pay about $460 for gas. That’s got to be hurting the tourism and travel industries.

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Through the miracles of the Undo function in my text editor, I’ve managed to restore most of the posts from yesterday after our web hosting company was forced to restore data and we lost a day’s posts.

(I’m now copying completed posts into another text file and holding on to them for a day or two, just in case. They backup every night.)

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Cerebrus took Chrysler private last year. They installed Robert Nardelli as CEO. You may remember him. He was fired as CEO of Home Depot where he was cited as being among the “highest-paid chief executives of worst-performing companies.”

Oddly, Chrysler is in serious trouble now, burning through cash reserves while sales plummet. One analyst says they have months not years to engineer a turnaround.

Thet apparently are betting the company on their new version of the Dodge Ram pickup. And what, you ask, will it be like?

The new version of Chrysler’s most popular vehicle comes with satellite TV, a carlike ride and a bin in the cargo box for hauling 10 cases of beer. It’s set to go on sale in September, not the best time for a pickup that gets about 15 mpg in city driving and can cost more than $40,000.

No. I am not making this up. It’s difficult to imagine how supposed rational adults could be so clueless, but there you have it.

RIP Chrysler.

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There’s a time bomb set to explode in the auto leasing market. All those SUVs and trucks that no one wants now will be coming off lease and it’s expected their residual value will be $6,000 less per car than originally projected. This means leasing companies will eat billions in losses for several years to come.

General Motors owns 49% of car finance company GMAC. Thus, in a time when their auto sales are collapsing, they will face prolonged and serious losses in leasing too.

Meanwhile, the price of a used Prius has risen $1,000 in the past month. Japanese automakers understood the changing market years ago and changed with it. The Detroit dinosaurs never have.

(The other 51% of GMAC is owned by Cerebrus, the fine folks who are driving Chrysler into bankruptcy.)

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Wood at The John Heron Project has a fine rant about Edward Norton refusing to publicize The Incredible Hulk because scenes were cut that compromised his artistic vision of what this daring and groundbreaking film should be.

The message to Edward Norton, then, that Edward Norton will never read: YOU ARE IN A SHITTY HOLLYWOOD ACTION MOVIE, BASED AROUND A KIDS’ COMIC THAT CONCERNS A MAN WHO TURNS INTO A BIG GREEN MONSTER WHEN HE GETS A BIT ANGRY.

Where the hell are you going to get a “vision” for that?

Wood is still getting hostile comments from his rant a year ago about Star Wars, so here’s hoping he gets lots of them for daring to question the artistic integrity and depth of a movie about a big green angry monster.

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We on the antiwar Left have said this for years. Now even former US generals are agreeing.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice are war criminals and need to be treated as such. Congress: You have an impeachment resolution and now a former general has said Bush is a war criminal. What more do you need to impeach?

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The Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius already gets 19% of its electricity by burning bagasse, the waste from sugar cane processing. They plan to increase that to 33%, and already are exporting 15 million liters of ethanol made from sugar.

Why is it that the government of a tiny island nation truly gets it about renewable energy and is taking action while the government (including Congress) of the supposedly technologically advanced United States does little except argue about it? Embarrassing, isn’t it?

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The Freeway Blogger has put over 4,000 antiwar posters that are visible on freeways. These global warming banners are among his most brilliant.

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While AP whines about websites quoting from their stories and wants to ban such nefarious activity (have they never heard of Fair Use?), Reuters has news widgets for anyone to use.

Like this one.

Note the headlines. AP wants to charge any website for even using a headline.The influential tech blog TechCrunch has the right idea. They’ve banned AP from their sites.

Meanwhile, Reuters wants websites to syndicate their news.

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Our web host had problems last night and apparently had to restore to a earlier version, hence we lost about a day of posts. Aargh.

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