If you want to drive a

"Go to Iraq."   Thomas Friedman

Democracy Now

Difference of opinion, Iraq, August 25, 2005
DN! Headlines: text, audio, and video
[Bloodshed in Iraq: Violence Among Religious Factions]

Digerati

Annie Lennox

Click to Listen.
Darfur

Some of the news that's fit to print

[Free News]

Put the camera down Put the camera down. Now.

Police swat party in Utah. No pics please. [wikinews]

Philosopy of the mind

John Searle
How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause consciousness.

Serial killer

He was our ally at one time. By mistake.
Are these leaders mistakes?
Saudi Arabia's Abdullah [1]
Russia's Vladimir Putin [2]
China's Hu Jintao [3]
Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo [4]

Divine Right of Kings

Divine Right in today's language: National Sovereignty.
-----
"Why is it right that the world takes no action when millions are ... dying in a dictatorship?" Haider asked. "In the Red Zone", p54.

Elevated walkways and bikeways

The Highline in New York City.
The cars have taken the earth.
Let's have elevated bikeways and walkways.

Banana Republicans

Richest country.   Poorest government.

The "All Volunteer" army: the War Core

Americans in the Spanish Civil War
----
Many soldiers are extended against their will via "Stop Loss".

Valerie Plame

is not the largest issue.
That was a "dirty trick", and criminal.
Whose idea was it to forge the Niger "yellow cake" documents?
Italian military intelligence officer Rocco Martini? Let's ask him.
Democracy Now! contemplates Berlusconi as a co-consiprator
----
Adrianna speculates, darkly, on why Judith won't talk.
Similarly, Cockburn squints at Judy Miller's War
----
John Dean comments on Karl's problems with Title 18 USC 641.

Fundamentalist

Extremist
----
[1.Is it: good secular muslims and bad fundamentalist muslims?]
[2.What we need is more radicals]

Peak coal

500 billion tons is 10 Quintillion BTUs (US share = 2.3 Quint BTUs)
Current USA coal usage is 23 Quadrillion BTUs per year.
2.3 Quints is a 100 year supply if used at the current rate.
----
Wyoming produces the most coal. The black hills.

What comes before Hydrogen cars?

Coal cars.
What comes after hydrogen cars?
Bike paths.

Fetus

This was you.

Love your enemy

The sermon on the mount. [Matthew 5]

Marlboro Man

Barbara Walter's comment
[causes of death in the USA]

TV: The whole world is watching

Genocide IS news.[play video]
----
August 23rd:
Networks refuse to carry ads about themselves. [story]

Died, 1879

Bernedette Soubirous of Lourdes (1844-1879).
Her well preserved body as it is today at Nevers, France.
Some other miracles.

Our Lady of Gudalupe in Los Angeles

A very tiny piece of Juan Diego's tilma (cloak)
is on display at the Los Angeles cathedral.
The rest is in Mexico City.

Illegal immigration into the US from Mexico

Steven Vincent

Steven writes about the Thugs of Basra
Censorship, jihad style.

Cooling towers

A lot of heat is "lost" making electricity.
Maybe you can see where it goes.

Products from crude

Almost half of all crude oil is refined into gasoline.
[DoE chart]

2001 energy sources and uses

97 Quadrillion BTUs.
------------------------------------
40 Quadrillion BTUs from oil
23 Quadrillion BTUs from coal
24 Quadrillion BTUs from natural gas
10 Quads from Uranium and Hydro
------------------------------------
56 Quads lost in conversion
35 Quads productive work done
06 Quads equivalent of oil not used for energy
------------------------------------
[original graph by Lawrence Livermore Labs]
------------------------------------
If we used oil at the same rate per capita as the Europeans,
we would reduce our imports of oil by 20 Quads or 80%

Of the 27 quads used for transportation, two thirds or 18 quads is used by cars. If we doubled "average" mpg, we would reduce imports by 9 quads or 36%.

The 2004 CAFE standard for the majority of new vehicles is 20.7
The bad people are unlikely to change the CAFE standards anytime soon. But car pooling can be done now. Even a Hummer can get good "passenger miles per gallon" if it has enough passengers.

Per Capita oil usage: US vs Europe

The Europeans use half as much oil per capita as we do.
[DoE chart]

Peace

1531 Mexico
Mary gives Juan Diego a sign.
Our Lady of Guadalupe.

War

The jihadists are counter-revolutionairies says Frederick Turner.

Religious states vs My Kingdom is not of this world

1) Christendom in 526.
2) The Plymouth Colony
3) The Tower of Babel
Attempts to take heaven by force.

Do you support terrorism?

Where do those terrorists get all that money?

Artificial gravity

If there is no difference between acceleration effects and real gravity, why do we call it artificial gravity? If real gravity is an acceleration effect, then it is probably time to
give up hope for anti-gravity.

Galactic rings

How can a galaxy have spiral arms and circular orbits?
The stars are not in circular orbits; they are in spiral orbits.
What causes the spiral? The orbital decay is due to friction.
Friction with what? Something.    Something tiny I think.
---2008/07/28 different idea
These may be new, temporary, structures recently formed by the collision of two galaxies, and soon to be blended away, after a revolution or two.
Antennae Galaxies

Mistakes were made

in the past.
That the courts decided to have Terri starve to death demonstrates that they felt queasy about killing her.
Big Deal.

Limiting death of brain cells

Anticonvulsants used as detoxification agents are thought to be potentially neuroprotective and neurotrophic. reference
See a discussion of "neurotrophic" in Wikpedia

Beyond Rangoon

Aung San turns 60. She is a jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner, in Burma. Some of her story is seen as backdrop in the movie: Beyond Rangoon, with Spaulding Gray.
[News story 9-29]

Loser

Help us.

Set in Port-au-Prince

"You really intend" Doctor Magiot asked me, "to take over the hotel?"
"Why not? I have a little experience of restaurant-work. I can see great possibilities of improvement. My mother was not catering for the luxury-trade."
"The luxury-trade?" Doctor Magiot repeated. "I think you can hardly depend on that here."
"Some hotels do."
"The good years will not always continue. Not very long now and there will be the elections..."
"It doesn't make much difference, does it, who wins?"
"Not for the poor. But to the tourist perhaps."
He put a flowered saucer upon the table beside me -
------
LA County library
OC Library
------
See also Herman Melville's "The Confidence Man"

Death and Taxes

Actually, Love and Taxes.
Josh Kornbluth is an ex-communist monologist who is interested in tax policy. Taxes allow the government to do what we, presumably, ask it to do for us.
How will we recognize a good tax system if we see one?
A partial answer.

Kibeho, Rwanda

Prophetic apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary
in Kibeho, Rwanda 1981-1983/1989
before the 1994 slaughter

Uncle Sam wants you, to think

The nation that will insist upon drawing a line between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.
from the US Naval Academy web site, Stephen Frantzich

Be sure you're right then go ahead

Apparently, this is not so easy
see Amazon
Editorial Reviews
       Amazon.com
the first review, by John Moe,ending:
"In an age where Westerners have trouble comprehending what drives Islamic fundamentalists to kill, Jon Krakauer advises us to look within America's own borders."

Apple

Don't take the first bite.

Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902)

The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor,
and the social problems should largely be solved by them.
from Mountains Beyond Mountains, the story of Partners In Health. See some examples.

Social Security Crisis, a crisis of confidence

President Bush is willing to mislead regarding Social Security.
Yes, maybe we should invest some national retirement resources into productive assets in addition to current expenses. But before people will be willing to change the system, we need to be able to trust the system that will change the system.
A system run by people with disordered priorities.

Estimating powers of 2

How many grains will be on the final square if you put one grain on the first, and twice as many on each successive square?
The answer is 2**63.    But how many is that?
Divide the exponent by ten to get the number of commas in the answer:   the answer has six commas and is three tenths of the way, logarithmically speaking, to the seventh comma.
2**10 is 1024. This is approximately 1,000. One comma.
2**60 is six commas: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
2**(60+3) is six commas times two cubed = 8 quintillion.
The actual number is 9+ quintillion.
-----
Note that 2 commas is a million, not a billion, unfortunately.
Similarly 2**40,  4 commas, is a trillion, not a quadrillion

Salt

RC Sproul speaks (mp3/5MB) about Terri.

All men are brothers

In 5 generations, I have 2**5 ancestors (32).
In 50, I have 2**50, a quadrillion.
50 generations ago is 1500 years ago, or 500 AD.
My chart has a quadrillion boxes in 500 AD.
The point: all of us are related.

Wage Peace

There is a movie posted on the Friends site that is worth seeing. Essentially, I think, it says we are all human, all brothers, and all the killing is so sad.