Bob Morris @ 22:45 Category: Unfiled Tags: fuel cells;
These fuel cell stickers use hydrogen as fuel, air as the oxidant, and emit nothing but water vapor which quickly evaporates. They are stackable, and thus can be used a power sources in portable electronics like laptops and cell phones.
Tip CleanTechnica:
Bob Morris @ 18:26 Category: Unfiled Tags: pirates, Somalia, systempunkt;
Global Guerrillas on systempunkt
In global guerrilla warfare (a combination of open source innovation, bazaar transactions, and low tech weapons), the point of greatest emphasis is called a systempunkt. It is the point point in a system (either an infrastructure or a market), always identified by autonomous groups within the bazaar, where a swarm of small insults will cause a cascade of collapse in the targeted system. Within infrastructure, this collapse takes the form of disrupted flows that result in immediate financial loss or ongoing supply shortages. Within a market, an attack on the systempunkt destabilizes the psychology of the market to induce severe inefficiencies and uncertainties. The ultimate objective of this activity, in aggregate, is the collapse of the target state and globalization
The pirates are causing serious disruption in shipping in that crucial area with vessels already being diverted around the cape of Africa to avoid them. Maybe these pirates aren’t just a bunch of random crazed criminals. Or maybe they are. But the result is a systempunkt, whether deliberate or not.
Somali pirates keep hundreds of hostages in pirate city of Eyl. There have been 36 successful hijackings this year with about 14 ships and 250 crew members still being held hostage. With an entire city under control of pirates, then the next question is, are they on their own?
Somalia’s interim government is fighting a strengthening Islamist insurgency, and does not have forces to patrol its territorial waters.
Maybe, Or maybe the government and the Islamists are getting some of the loot in return for supplying arms and protection.
Why Somali pirates are hard to defeat.The oceans are huge and stopping them is dangerous. [Blackwater] “plans to dispatch the MV McArthur, a 183-foot vessel with a crew of 14 and a helicopter pad, to the Gulf of Aden to provide escort services.”
My guess: the pirates will end up like Queen Teuta, whose pirates raided in the Adriatic around 231 BC. She eventually believed she could raid Roman ships and thus challenge Rome without consequences. She was wrong.
More proof, if any be needed, of the fiendishness of the pirates: Somali pirates threatening Western videogame shipments
Bob Morris @ 13:44 Category: Unfiled;
Our pal Wood Ingham, poet, blogger, and award-winning author of RPG sourcebooks, has just released MSG™.
From his blog, the John Heron Project.
Here we go, then. This is what I have been working on recently. MSG™ is a game of negotiation and conscience for three to six adults, what I wrote, designed and illustrated myself, with help from my ubiquitous partner in crime Becky Lowe and my genius colleague Benjamin Baugh.
It’s an 88-page illustrated paperback book, and until December 1st 2008, it’s £3.99 in print, and 99p for the pdf.
You can buy MSG™ at Lulu priced in dollars.
Bob Morris @ 12:45 Category: Unfiled;
Hijacked tanker Sirius Star
The attack happened 450 nautical miles offshore and marks a major escalation in piracy.
So, I’m wondering, how do the pirates expect to get the ransom then get off the ship alive? How did they board the tanker? Was some of the crew in on it?
Also, will big oil tankers now be forced to carry assault helicopters and paramilitary squads? Or maybe, they and all other ships will now just completely avoid the Somalia area, in effect doing an embargo upon the country.
The holes in the global security system are so big now, that you can drive a super-tanker through them.
Bob Morris @ 10:04 Category: Credit crisis;
From Oligopoly Watch, on returning to blogging after recovering from knee replacement surgery
I’ve used the time to think a little about the major changes in corporate power and the naked way in which national governments are manipulated to maintain that power. No doubt I’ll be walking straight long before the economy is.
DJ @ 05:30 Category: Socialism;
Marxism, that body of political thought based on the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, has had a hard time of it. When it’s been tried, it has failed to bring about its most fundamental goals. Only rarely has it improved the condition of the proletariat. More often, it has resulted in the rise of a new ruling class that exploited its people as badly as the old one. Often Marxists argue that the failure of the system has been caused by improper implementation or by capitalist meddling. But now, as we move from modern to post-modern society, Marxism as a political philosophy has become irrelevant.
The world has changed. No longer do we exist as citizens of nations of industrial workers exploited by those who hold the means of production. Rather, we industrial workers now number ourselves among the very rich of the world. The vast majority of the population of this global community lives in abject poverty– but not necessarily because of exploitation by capitalists.
Roughly half the world’s population lives by subsistence agriculture. That’s the half that lives on less than $2.50 a day. They exist primarily outside the capitalist system, growing enough food for themselves and perhaps a little to trade or sell to someone else. They own their means of production: hand tools, and if they’re very lucky, perhaps a draft animal such as a water buffalo. And though the agri-giants of the capitalist world seek alternately to sell them things they don’t need, or throw them off their land completely, they exist in conditions largely unchanged for decades.
The main challenge of such people is overpopulation, which causes their subsistence plots to get smaller with each generation. They’re not often exploited by cannibalistic capitalists, but they are politically marginalized by urban politicians.
What they need is not a centralized system of socialization or rescue by a benevolent dictatorship of the proletariat, but rather a devolved political system that allows them self-determination. Call it subsidiarity (as the Catholics do– decisionmaking at the lowest possible level) or gramswaraj (village-based government, as the Sri Lankans do), but the principle is the same: decisions that can be made locally are made locally, and each community has equal input into the regional and national government.
A secondary challenge for such people is meddling from outside. Development agencies, economists, capitalists, and even some Marxists want them to give up their means of production and join the ranks of industrial workers. They can, it is argued, triple their income by working in a factory. And that’s true– but without self-produced food and the family plot of land, they sink ever deeper into poverty. I’ve seen places where so many factory workers live, they have to sleep in shifts because there isn’t room for them all to lie down on the floor at the same time. It’s hard to argue that the economic system causes this problem: when subsistence farmers abandon their farms for the realm of industrialization, they trade a self-sufficient life for dependence upon someone else’s management, and they get poorer.
That such an approach increases poverty is not its worst failure– centralized government attempts to impose a one-size-fits-all solution that ignores differences in culture, ethnicity, language, and religion. It favors (no surprise here) those who are in power, regardless of whether the system is capitalist or otherwise. The result, from Chiapas to Jaffna to East Timor, is conflict as people try to reclaim their right to self-determination from a government that by its very centralization has only its own interests at heart.
The political challenge of the 21st century is not to create kinder, gentler centralized governments, but rather how to devolve power to the community level. Its goal is not centralized orthodoxy (capitalist, Marxist, Maoist, or otherwise), but community self-expression and self-determination. There are groups all over the world now working diligently toward that end, each in its own individual way.
Marxism, in its orthodox form, dictates a strong central government. It tells people how they ought to think and how they should relate to each other. That, like nationalism and colonialism, is an idea whose time has passed.
Bob Morris @ 00:15 Category: Unfiled;
At the age of 28, Jackie Speier was an aide to Congressman Leo Ryan when he went to Guyana to investigate Jim Jones. He was assassinated, she was shot five times and left for dead on an airstrip.
She survived that, ten surgeries, death threats, and began getting elected to public office. When she was 43 and pregnant, her husband was killed in an automobile accident.
The loss of my husband was more traumatic than anything that had ever happened to me. I didn’t want to get out of bed. But I had no choice. I was now the single mother of two children, one yet unborn. Because my late husband had no life insurance, I was financially devastated, too. I had to sell everything, including my home.
I only tell this story because I don’t know how I would have coped with this had it not been for my experience, 16 years earlier, on that dreadful airstrip in Guyana.
…
There is a quote from Winston Churchill that reminds me of Leo Ryan: “Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.
It is now the 30th anniversary of Jonestown. In April 2008, Spiers was elected to Congressman Ryan’s old seat in the House of Representatives.
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