U.S. Attorney Defends Delays In Anthrax Investigation

It's an extremely tiny *universe* of people he's referring to....,

No Level I Love After All......,

So, as it turns out, the Nocera electrolysis breakthrough is 1 part breakthrough to 50 parts hype. The kinetics (meaning efficiency) of Nocera's oxygen-evolving electrode isn't really that good compared to what has been developed over the last 20-30 years of research. An anode with a thin film containing cobalt isn't new either. The *breakthrough* (if you can call it that) is the simplicity with which it is made, period. It remains to be seen whether this will spawn new avenues of fruitful electrochemical research. Which takes us squarely back to reality and to the increasingly pressing need for responsible folks to prepare themselves and their loved ones for the INEVITABILITY of the formal economy's declining ability to feed and house us.

With no level one deus ex machina in sight, it's time to roll up the old sleeves and take full advantage of the wealth of knowledge right here at our fingertips. Some years ago, my wife and I spent a wonderful couple of weeks at my father-in-law's former homestead on Bermuda. It was a masterpiece of environmental and economic efficiency - and a model for how we need to set about remaking routine aspects of our way of life. On Bermuda, his was not a re-engineered green exception, rather, it was the standard procedure for how folks lived. As for this remaking, nothing between it and us but initiative, air, and opportunity.

We're in luck in the opportunity dimension. Right here in our midst we have an invaluable knowledge resource in the person of RC who has 30 years of experience implementing the powered-down, highly economical and efficient modus operandi required to thrive in an energy, commodity, and resource constrained island setting. We're not talking survivalism and reactionary earth-marine type measures, rather, we're talking about the type of sustainable and doable measures implemented throughout the Carribean by folks who live well but vastly more efficiently and less wastefully than we do here.

In the meanwhile, for those not right in a downtown somewhere, I recommend a few small boat/marine type prop generators, a few solar panels, a small, but high quality invertor and a small marine gel battery bank combined with a super efficient, home made deep freeze/fridge and maybe a small gas generator for once a week use to run the washing machine.

Store all your water from runoff and reuse all the gray water from the sinks and showers for plants. We have these places running now and they are highly successful off the grid operations that I have been setting up since the mid seventies. Many of them start out with just the propellers and gradually add on until they leave the grid. Others are in remote areas and have to have all the components at the beginning. Others use a liquid propane gas input to run the refrigeration. Whatever we will be using in 2020 I bet no one has an idea right now. Meanwhile these setups have been in use, do work, work well, are proven and have been in place for more than thirty years.

For the homeowners among us, I believe that folks like RC can help us make incremental changes in how our houses are configured for power, lighting, water usage, gardening and overall efficiency suggestions rooted in first-hand practical experience. Doing some of the things that RC knows how to do will put folks on a path leading first to reduced costs, a smaller environmental footprint, and ultimately, if fully implemented and embraced, moving the homestead partially or even entirely off-grid - right there in the city where you live.

I need to figure out a way to permanently showcase solutions, and, to keep the valuable solutions dialogue top-of-blog so that it can serve as a useful reference and resource for folks who are serious about taking matters into their own hands.

Praying for Health?

In the Economist which speculates that religious diversity may be caused by disease. This funny little article skirts sooooo close to the truth, but then misses it by a country mile. Tell me if you can see the underlying biology of the matter, focus not on people as the unit of selection, rather, focus on what drives a composite organism to do what it do.

Mr Fincher is not arguing that disease-protection is religion’s main function. Biologists have different hypotheses for that. Not all follow Dr Dawkins in thinking it pathological. Some see it either as a way of promoting group solidarity in a hostile world, or as an accidental consequence of the predisposition to such solidarity. This solidarity-promotion is one of Mr Fincher’s starting points. The other is that bacteria, viruses and other parasites are powerful drivers of evolution. Many biologists think that sex, for example, is a response to parasitism. The continual mixing of genes that it promotes means that at least some offspring of any pair of parents are likely to be immune to a given disease.

Mr Fincher and his colleague Randy Thornhill wondered if disease might be driving important aspects of human social behaviour, too. Their hypothesis is that in places where disease is rampant, it behoves groups not to mix with one another more than is strictly necessary, in order to reduce the risk of contagion. They therefore predict that patterns of behaviour which promote group exclusivity will be stronger in disease-ridden areas. Since religious differences are certainly in that category, they specifically predict that the number of different religions in a place will vary with the disease load. Which is, as they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the case.

Always and everywhere clarity is lost - and truth distorted beyond recognition - by the lens of foolish and hubristic anthropocentric solipsism....,

AWAKEN

“There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge. This, in its turn, necessitates the work of collecting this matter of knowledge which would otherwise be lost. Thus the work of collecting scattered matter of knowledge frequently coincides with the beginning of the destruction and fall of cultures and civilizations.”

“This aspect of the question is clear. The crowd neither wants nor seeks knowledge, and the leaders of the crowd, in their own interests, try to strengthen its fear and dislike of everything new and unknown. The slavery in which mankind lives is based upon this fear. It is even difficult to imagine all the horror of this slavery. We do not understand what people are losing. But in order to understand the cause of this slavery it is enough to see how people live, what constitutes the aim of their existence, the object of their desires, passions, and aspirations, of what they think, of what they talk, what they serve and what they worship.”

G.I. Gurdjieff:
The Herald of Coming Good
The Struggle of the Magicians
Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson
Meetings with Remarkable Men
Life is Real Only Then, When "I am"
48 Exercises (handwritten)
Wartime Meetings
Gurdjieff 40's

Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson - 1931 Manuscript Copy
Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson - 1949 Prepared Text
Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson - 1950 Published Edition

P.D. Ouspensky:
A New Model of the Universe
Tertium Organum
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution
In Search of the Miraculous
Talks with a Devil
Strange Life of Ivan Osokin
The Fourth Way
A Record of Some of the Meetings
A Further Record
The Symbolism of the Tarot
Letters from Russia 1919

Rodney Collin:
The Theory of Celestial Influence
The Theory of Eternal Life
The Theory of Conscious Harmony
Hellas
Lessons in Religion for a Skeptical World
The Christian Mystery
The Herald of Harmony
The Mirror of Light
The Mysteries of the Seed

Wind won’t solve energy crisis

No it won't - but in conjunction with novel storage and state of the art transmission infrastructure - it would certainly help.

The disadvantage of wind-generated electricity is poor reliability because the weather doesn’t always cooperate. The most demanding need for energy is in the afternoons and during air-conditioned summers, but wind works best at night and during the other seasons, though intermittently. Even when the wind is blowing, it takes a 13 mph wind to power a large turbine.

Kansas has 364 megawatts of wind energy. But most of the year the wind is not blowing nearly hard enough to make 364 megawatts.

Last year wind generators nationally produced only 30 percent as much energy in a year as they would if they ran at full tilt, every hour of the year, a measure called “capacity factor.” Unlike nuclear power plants such as Wolf Creek, which achieve capacity factors of 90 percent or more, the wind operator cannot decide when the wind generator will run.

Texas has more wind energy than any other state, and bigger problems as a result. Last year the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said that wind power could be counted on as being reliable only 8.7 percent of the time during periods of peak demand. The rest of the time electric utilities were forced to use backup power generation, usually high-priced natural gas.

During a summer heat spell two years ago in California, another state with a lot of wind energy, wind generators operated at only 5 percent of capacity or less, setting off a Level 1 emergency in which people were asked to conserve power by using less air conditioning. Blackouts were barely averted when utilities decided to use gas turbines to provide emergency power.

Another problem with wind farms is their location. Where the wind is best is often hundreds of miles from cities that most need the power, so high-cost transmission lines must be built to transmit the electricity.

Instead of fantasizing about homes outfitted with Nocera electrolysis systems, the effort should be directed toward deployment of industrial scale hydrox plants that can safely handle the hydrogen, compress it, liquify it, and burn it as a useful clean energy transport and storage medium during non-peak production periods from equally clean solar and wind based energy production sources.

BioTerror "Efforts" Increased U.S. Risk

So here's the fearful bioterror narrative;

“Across the spectrum of biothreats we have expanded our capacity significantly,” said Craig Vanderwagen, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services who oversees the biodefense effort. Systems to detect an attack, investigate it and respond with drugs, vaccines and cleanup are all hugely improved, Dr. Vanderwagen said. “We can get pills in the mouth,” he said.

Supporters of the spending increase cite studies that project apocalyptic tolls from a large-scale biological attack. One 2003 study led by a Stanford scholar, for instance, found that just two pounds of anthrax spores dropped over an American city could kill more than 100,000 people, even if antibiotic distribution began quickly.

and here are the relevant bioterror facts;

Until the anthrax attacks of 2001, Bruce E. Ivins was one of just a few dozen American bioterrorism researchers working with the most lethal biological pathogens, almost all at high-security military laboratories.

Today, there are hundreds of such researchers in scores of laboratories at universities and other institutions around the United States, preparing for the next bioattack.

But the revelation that F.B.I. investigators believe that the anthrax attacks were carried out by Dr. Ivins, an Army biodefense scientist who committed suicide last week after he learned that he was about to be indicted for murder, has already re-ignited a debate: Has the unprecedented boom in biodefense research made the country less secure by multiplying the places and people with access to dangerous germs?

In today's NYTimes. And so it goes. Only those folks prepared to opportunistically and exploitatively jump on the homegrown, paranoid delusional bandwagon managed to profit from the fear that was instigated by Ivins (the Bush administration) with his here-to-now *unsolvable* involvement with this murderous elite hustle.

Level I After All?

'Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution - scientists mimic essence of plants' energy storage system.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon."

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity -- whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source -- runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to work. It's so easy to implement," he said.

Interestingly, this article first came to my attention late thursday courtesy my man BD. Homeboy must be harboring a flickering sentimental little urge to see the overshot species of talking monkeys make it through their Great Filter and out into the solar system after all....., click on the image of Nocera to see his little speech about the innovation on video.

Da LHC is Superduper Fly.....,

Particle physics meets hiphop in the Guardian - there may be hope for some of you humans after all....,

Pure New Age Silliness....,

Here comes another chunk of undigested op-ed granola, this time from the LATimes - Toward a Type 1 Civilization.

Our civilization is fast approaching a tipping point. Humans will need to make the transition from nonrenewable fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy to renewable energy sources that will allow us to flourish into the future. Failure to make that transformation will doom us to the endless political machinations and economic conflicts that have plagued civilization for the last half-millennium.

We need new technologies to be sure, but without evolved political and economic systems, we cannot become what we must. And what is that? A Type 1 civilization. Let me explain.

In a 1964 article on searching for extraterrestrial civilizations, the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev suggested using radio telescopes to detect energy signals from other solar systems in which there might be civilizations of three levels of advancement: Type 1 can harness all of the energy of its home planet; Type 2 can harvest all of the power of its sun; and Type 3 can master the energy from its entire galaxy.

Based on our energy efficiency at the time, in 1973 the astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that Earth represented a Type 0.7 civilization on a Type 0 to Type 1 scale. (More current assessments put us at 0.72.) As the Kardashevian scale is logarithmic -- where any increase in power consumption requires a huge leap in power production -- we have a ways before 1.0.

Pure comedy gold..., a little later during the 1970's - the U.S. had a SINGULAR opportunity under the leadership of James Earl Carter to ATTEMPT this transition. Unfortunately for the species, that was the road not taken. Instead, *we* replaced Carter with old triple 6 - and stayed on the imperial path of ruination that has dominated human affairs for 6000 years.

Fossil fuels won't get us there. Renewable sources such as solar, wind and geothermal are a good start, and coupled to nuclear power could eventually get us to Type 1.

Yet the hurdles are not solely -- or even primarily -- technological ones. We have a proven track record of achieving remarkable scientific solutions to survival problems -- as long as there is the political will and economic opportunities that allow the solutions to flourish. In other words, we need a Type 1 polity and economy, along with the technology, in order to become a Type 1 civilization.

He's right as far as he goes, the problem is that he doesn't go nearly far enough. It's not merely a question of political will and economic opportunity that will bring about the end of this species in the 3rd terrestrial species die-off, rather, it's the total lack of psychological evolution that has maintained an objectively evil status quo baseline in the dominant systems of human governance. Unevolved creatures don't spontaneously generate or sustain evolved systems of governance and evolved social orders, no more than turnips generate blood. Is common sense THAT sorely lacking?

For thousands of years, we have existed in a zero-sum tribal world in which a gain for one tribe, state or nation meant a loss for another tribe, state or nation -- and our political and economic systems have been designed for use in that win-lose world. But we have the opportunity to live in a win-win world and become a Type 1 civilization by spreading liberal democracy and free trade, in which the scientific and technological benefits will flourish. I am optimistic because in the evolutionist's deep time and the historian's long view, the trend lines toward achieving Type 1 status tick inexorably upward.

That is change we can believe in.

This part he gets right, except for the ridiculously optimistic conclusion. We have existed in and have been utterly and completely conditioned by a zero-sum tribal world. We will as a species die-off because of that de-evolutionary psychosocial condition. The problem as stated by this new-age wishful thinker is merely political. I cut him off at the knees for his superficiality, others wouldn't have even given this silly and ill-informed screed the time of day, to wit;

In the past few centuries the elites have gained a new method of growth conquest. The lever of Science/technology has been used to further their power. Through the creation of industrialism, we now live in a manufactured environment. We civilized people have created machines and been conditioned by the machine world until we begin to act in a machine-like manner. Powerless, we are thoroughly dependent upon the machine for our food and shelter survival. Alienated and atomized, we move around trying to fit into a niche in order to obtain survival. The pressure to move to a job breaks nuclear families apart and certainly precludes the existence of extended families. We have become interchangeable ciphers in the industrial machine. We have been culturally conditioned from birth to have great regard for non-living manufactured items and have been alienated from living things. We have more regard for the dead wood of a church! than for a living forest.

Today, when we look at the numbers and look back at those millions of acres of exhausted and eroded soils, common sense tells us that this is the end. The Patriarchs of empire have committed us to a fundamental biological error. Any organism that wantonly kills that which feeds it will not endure very long. The culture of empire does not have a political problem; it has a biological problem. It lives in a bubble of self-created definitions and has a dysfunctional relationship with the life of the earth. One might say that if the humans can't keep the planet alive, they certainly can't live here.

From where I sit, that's what looks really real. Be hopeful all you want, hopeful but fully informed. Otherwise, from a simple information awareness perspective, your situation is indeed entirely hopeless.

Unidentified Flying Threats?

The folks must be growing increasingly restive about the Obama candidacy. The NYTimes had this crunchy little morsel in this past week's op-eds.

The United States is no less vulnerable than Britain and France to threats to security and air safety. The United States Air Force or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should reopen investigations of U.F.O. phenomena. It would not imply that the country has suddenly started believing in little green men. It would simply recognize the possibility that radar alone cannot always tell us what’s out there.

A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment’s thought. But in the United States, this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds of unidentified aircraft — a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States.

The American government has not investigated U.F.O. sightings since 1969, when the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, an effort to scientifically analyze all sightings to see if any posed a threat to national security. Britain and France, in contrast, continue to investigate U.F.O. sightings, because of concerns that some sightings might be attributable to foreign military aircraft breaching their airspace, or to foreign space-based systems of interest to the intelligence community.

I love these articles. To me, they're like tchotchkys of the collective unconscious. I expect we'll be seeing lots more such bon mots in the weeks and months to come as the perfect storm afflicting the economy and the American body politic gathers strength. The American political theater will prove jarringly impotent in dealing with the encompassing reality corrections - so it's time once again to inject a little mystery and awe into the otherwise steady diet of bread and circuses....,

Some Saw Opportunity?

Yes, that's former general and Secretary of State Colin Powell holding up a vial of anthrax - part of the generalized misrepresentations alleging that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.

In the lead-up to the invasion, the U.S. and UK emphasized the argument that Saddam Hussein was developing "weapons of mass destruction" and thus presented an imminent threat to his neighbors, to the U.S., and to the world community. The US stated "on November 8, 2002, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441. All fifteen members of the Security Council agreed to give Iraq a final opportunity to comply with its obligations and disarm or face the serious consequences of failing to disarm. The resolution strengthened the mandate of the UN Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), giving them authority to go anywhere, at any time and talk to anyone in order to verify Iraq’s disarmament." Throughout late 2001, 2002, and early 2003, the Bush Administration worked to build a case for invading Iraq, culminating in then Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 2003 address to the Security Council. Shortly after the invasion, the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies largely discredited evidence related to Iraqi weapons and, as well as links to Al Qaeda, and at this point the Bush and Blair Administrations began to shift to secondary rationales for the war, such as the Hussein government's human rights record and promoting democracy in Iraq.

Accusations of faulty evidence and alleged shifting rationales became the focal point for critics of the war, who charge that the Bush Administration purposely fabricated evidence to justify an invasion it long planned to launch.

Many opine that the U.S. was conscientious in its pursuit of the Iraqi WMD artifacts. Given that the Pentagon and foggy bottom probably still had the invoices and receipts for much of that material, their level of concern was warranted.

Who can say?

From where I sit, it's already just another one of history's mysteries and an anomalous link in the chain of elite rule and the narratives supporting the same. Always interesting to see how a face and a voice invested with such trust and gravitas as Powell's could be associated with something so rank, dank, and stank. The lesson, I suppose, is to always critically examine the facts and the statements and to scrupulously ignore the feelings that the spokesperson evokes. If it bolsters public confidence and is expedient to the narrative aims - TPTB have access to a stellar cast of characters that can be deployed against public confidence building objectives.....,

Some Saw Dark Side

Ivins, 62, committed suicide this week as federal prosecutors zeroed in on him as a suspect in the 2001 attacks. They were planning to indict him and seek the death penalty.

Ivins' brother Tom, who stressed that had not spoken to Bruce since 1985, was not shocked to hear that his brother was accused of making death threats, and he conceded the possibility that Bruce may have been the anthrax mailer.

"It makes sense, what the social worker said," Tom Ivins said. "He considered himself like a god."

Some who knew Ivins said the scrutiny of the investigation was too much for him to bear. But they also asserted his innocence.

"The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways," his attorney, Paul F. Kemp, said in a statement. "In Dr. Ivins' case, it led to his untimely death."

Ivins had worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick. For more than a decade, he worked to develop an anthrax vaccine that worked even when different strains of anthrax were mixed, which made vaccines ineffective.

Dr. W. Russell Byrne, a colleague who worked in the bacteriology division of the Fort Detrick research facility, said Ivins was "hounded" by FBI agents who raided his home twice, and he was hospitalized for depression earlier this month.

According to Byrne and local police, Ivins was removed from his workplace out of fears that he might harm himself or others.

"I think he was just psychologically exhausted by the whole process," Byrne said. Ivins could frequently be seen walking around his neighborhood for exercise. He volunteered with the American Red Cross of Frederick County, and he played keyboard and helped clean up after Masses at St. John's the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, where a dozen parishioners gathered Friday after morning Mass to pray for him.

The Rev. Richard Murphy called Ivins "a quiet man ... always very helpful and pleasant."

An avid juggler, Ivins gave juggling demonstrations around Frederick in the 1980s.

"One time, he demonstrated his juggling skills by lying on his back in the department and juggling with his hands," said Byrne, who described Ivins as "eccentric."

Whenever a colleague would leave the bacteriology division, Ivins would write a song or poem for that person and perform it, accompanying himself on keyboard, Byrne said.

Ivins had several letters to the editor published in The Frederick News-Post over the last decade. He denounced taxpayer funding for assisted suicide, pointed readers to a study that suggested a genetic component for homosexuality and said he had stopped listening to local radio station WFMD because he was offended by the language and racially charged commentary of its hosts.

He also commented on the growing political influence of conservative Christians, and he was willing to criticize his church.

Ivins had mild persona, but some saw dark side

Case Closed?

A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., had been told about the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported for Friday editions. The laboratory has been at the center of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

Top U.S. biological weapons researcher commits suicide as FBI closes in...,

Soul Technology?

What did you mean when you said our civilization would follow its own past?

What was here before you was very great. It uncovered the secret to which you are blind, the secret of communion with the dead. It began to be able to use intelligent energy in its technology. To use souls as tools. Look at the carvings at Dendera in Egypt. Those strange objects in the containers are not electrical filaments or religious symbols. Those are souls. The walls of the containers bear a electrical charge of a type that imprisons them. Because of the use of such technology, elemental bodies extended their perception outside of the time stream, with the result that the school of the earth ceased to work as a place of change. Who knows the truth, cannot find their weakness, and that is your aim on earth. What was worse the knowledge of this power was kept from the common, ordinary people who have little self-will to begin with, and so are the only ones really capable of making good use of such abilities. The old world was destroyed because of its own greed and secretiveness. Those least evolved rose to the top, as happens here. Your leaders as you call them, are all people with damaged senses of self-worth The damaged goods run the civilization. That's why it cannot last.

extracts From: Whitley Strieber The Key

End of the American Land Yacht...,

Earlier this summer, I posted an obituary for the soon-to-be-extinct HumVee. This morning, I came across a legendary anti-SUV rant by Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle. I love few things more than a good old rip-snorting flame session, and this one is excellent. Here are some choice morsels from the column;

But really, who didn't see the SUV's collapse coming a mile away? Who didn't note the beginning of the end when, a mere five years ago, the world's worst consumer vehicle ever took its place as the king of obscene stupidity, the poster child for all that went wrong with the condescending American ethos, the oil-sucking war-drunk Bush-mauled mind-set?

Ah, the Hummer H2. Has any consumer product embodied our misguided arrogance better? The ridiculous scale, the horrible handling, the crappy build quality, the contemptible road manners, the false machismo, the Cro-Magnon design, the ability to traverse 60-degree rockslides in a hurricane even though all you ever really needed to do was run over those little concrete bumps in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Dude! Righteous!

But I have to admit, this part of the tale makes me a little bit sentimental. Honestly, I'm going to miss the Hummer (and its simply fantastic byproduct, Hummer cologne), much in the same way I'll miss Dick Cheney when the Hellmouth swallows him home next year. Dumb villains simply don't come much more glaring, much more churlish and sad than that.



But baby, it's all over now. GM is trying desperately to dump the Hummer brand (maybe on China), SUV sales are nosediving faster than Miley Cyrus' career into the land of anorexia and Olsen Twin-certified rehab.

Comedy gold. But all that snarky irony isn't really very far removed from the underlying fact that American identity did get sucked into a 20 year spiral during which personal status was conflated with unsustainable and ludicrous automotive excess. Not to mention the market-making tax credits extended to light truck owners that served to heavily subsidize this insufferable and regrettable binge. It WILL take time and ever-increasing gas prices to wean folks from the silly and gross errors of the Sport Utility Vehicle debacle....,

Climate Change Racialization

I finally understand why the now banned commenter Josh "thordaddy" Farst was soiling his britches over anthropogenic climate change and my opinion relative to that topic.

I suspect he fundamentally misunderstood my baseline of generalized, cold, martian disdain...,

That said, this morning I came across this choice morsel of absurd political theater. Click on the image of moe, larry, and curly to the left to go and visit this decidedly ungodly confluence shills and liars for hire.

Bottomline, expensive gasoline isn't a civil rights issue. It is a laws-of-thermodynamics and declining net energy issue. All of you humans are in trouble. No point scurrying around pointing fingers and blaming one another in any manner, form, or fashion - at this juncture. Better work together for all you're worth if you want to get past the great filter looming just beyond that signpost up ahead.....,

Take the Hit...,

In May 2006, at the height of the housing boom, Karen Trainer bought a $500,000 apartment in California - with money borrowed from her bank.

By this year, Karen still owed $500,000 on her mortgage, but her apartment was worth $200,000 less.

So she was deep in negative equity and, to make matters worse, the interest rate on her loan was about to increase.

"I thought 'this is crazy'," Ms Trainer says. "It just does not make financial sense."

As a successful professional, Karen could comfortably have managed the higher mortgage payments her bank demanded.

Instead, she decided to stop her mortgage payments altogether and let her bank repossess her apartment.

Her credit record will be badly damaged by the decision, but Ms Trainer expects this to recover soon.

"Generally speaking, within 5 years you are about back where you were, so my husband and I decided we'll take the hit and live with it."

America's house price time bomb; Faced with seemingly never-ending falls in the value of their properties, some American home-owners are taking radical action; they are choosing to walk away from homes and their mortgages.

A Little Less Flair.....,

Some Chotchkies bite the dust;

Several national restaurant chains were shuttered on Tuesday, possibly offering an early taste of what’s in store this year for businesses that depend on free-spending consumers whose budgets are now being squeezed.

The parent company of Bennigan’s, an Irish-themed bar and grill with about 200 sites across the country, filed for bankruptcy, a move that will put hundreds of employees out of work and leave many landlords with empty retail space during a painful time in the real estate market.

A sister brand, Steak & Ale, will also close. Franchise units of Bennigan’s will remain open for now, a spokeswoman, Leah Templeton, wrote in an e-mail message.

The restaurants are the latest casualties in the so-called casual dining sector, considered a cut above fast food. Soaring food costs and a surfeit of locations have hurt the companies’ bottom lines just as Americans are choosing to take more meals at home.

The closings are “something we’re going to see more of over the next 6 to 12 months,” said Amy Greene, a director at Avondale Partners who tracks the restaurant industry.

Bennigans was the shizznit in Framingham, for half a hot minute, in 1987 after the TGIF thrill was gone.....,

Speculative Food Chain Consolidation

Data points on the consolidating operations of the ancient absolute capitalistic hierarchial food powered make work enterprise - where it's absolutely obvious that food is gold.

Huge investment funds have already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into booming financial markets for commodities like wheat, corn and soybeans.

But a few big private investors are starting to make bolder and longer-term bets that the world’s need for food will greatly increase — by buying farmland, fertilizer, grain elevators and shipping equipment.

One has bought several ethanol plants, Canadian farmland and enough storage space in the Midwest to hold millions of bushels of grain.

Another is buying more than five dozen grain elevators, nearly that many fertilizer distribution outlets and a fleet of barges and ships.

And three institutional investors, including the giant BlackRock fund group in New York, are separately planning to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in agriculture, chiefly farmland, from sub-Saharan Africa to the English countryside.

“It’s going on big time,” said Brad Cole, president of Cole Partners Asset Management in Chicago, which runs a fund of hedge funds focused on natural resources. “There is considerable interest in what we call ‘owning structure’ — like United States farmland, Argentine farmland, English farmland — wherever the profit picture is improving.”

and this;

This is not a passing craze, according to Christopher Wyke, commodities product manager at Schroders. “We are in the early stages of an extended bull market [for agricultural commodities].”

He expects it to last 15 to 20 years, after the preceding 25-year bear market, during which affluent Europeans and Americans learnt to take food for granted. “The problem is that it is difficult to invest in agriculture. There are very few agricultural producers that are quoted.”

Remember, if you can lock down production and stockpile supply – you can control price. That's the endgame, checkmate.

Only in Wichita.....,

From the city which brought you the one and only BTK strangler, and my hometown;

A man whose girlfriend sat on a toilet for so long that the seat adhered to her body will spend six months on probation.

Kory McFarren pleaded no contest last month to a misdemeanor count of mistreatment of a dependent adult. A judge sentenced him Tuesday to six months in jail but granted the probation after the victim, Pam Babcock, asked for leniency.

"She didn't believe that her circumstances were his fault," Ness County Attorney Craig Crosswhite said.

Babcock's plight became known in February when McFarren called the Ness County sheriff, expressing concern about his live-in girlfriend. When authorities arrived, they found Babcock physically stuck to the toilet.

McFarren told police Babcock had refused to come out of the bathroom for two years. Medical personnel estimated she'd been sitting on the toilet for at least a month and said the seat had adhered to sores on her body.

She is now under the protection of a guardian who was appointed through the legal department at the hospital where she received treatment.

Also Tuesday, McFarren was sentenced to six months in jail for an unrelated charge of lewd and lascivious behavior for exposing himself to a teenage neighbor in March.

No matter how bad things get with the economy or anything else, just remember, there's always a subset of straight up reality casualties co-existing with you in this mortal coil. I've got two words for the tableau recounted here in pictures and words, the little still life that transpired in that rickety little old non-mobile, mobile home in that Ness City trailer park on the outskirts of wichititty, jes dayyum......,