Archive for March, 2011
China Leads The World In Clean Energy
Photo: Richard Chambers (CC)
One of the most polluted countries has become number one in clean energy. The US ranks number three. The Guardian reports:
China has overtaken the US for the first time in a league table of investments in low-carbon energy among the G-20, according to a new report by not for profit group the Pew Charitable Trusts published this week.
The report found that despite an overall 6.6 per cent global decline in clean energy investments last year, China invested almost twice as much as the United States in clean energy during 2009.
But the US still leads in energy capacity. It’s interesting for the UK too:
• third in overall clean energy investments
• fourth in five-year clean energy investment growth rate
• fifth in the percentage of total power it receives from clean energy sources ahead of France, China and the US
Plasticize Me: The Ethics Of What To Do With The Dead
Will recent advances in human tissue preservation change the way we think about bodies, death, God…and China?
Guernica discusses how “plasticization” and other advances create new questions regarding how we may make use of corpses. Cadavers are in-demand like never before, for all sorts of purposes, including macabre exhibitions:
Von Hagens is a tireless promoter of the ethical difference between his exhibits and the others. “All the copycat exhibitions are from China,” he told the New York Times. “And they’re all using unclaimed bodies.”
Both “Bodies…The Exhibition” and “Body Worlds” make use of a new technology von Hagens calls “Plastination,” by which all water is removed from human tissues and replaced with soft silicone polymers. A macabre detail included in the story von Hagens tells of the development of this process hints at the ethical questions that were to come: He first thought of creating perfectly preserved cross-sections of human bodies when he was…
India’s Population Reaches 1.21 Billion
The world’s population has had a rapid increase in the last decade, but India takes the cake. With the 2011 census updated, India’s population reaches 1.21 billion. BBC reports:
India’s population has grown by 181 million people over the past decade to 1.21bn, according to the 2011 census.
More people now live in India than in the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan and Bangladesh combined.
India is on course to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation by 2030, but its growth rate is falling, figures show. China has 1.3bn people.
The census also reveals a continuing preference for boys – India’s sex ratio is at its worst since independence.
Female foeticide remains common in India, although sex-selective abortion based on ultraso
The Video Game Preservation Crisis
Perhaps they were conceived as toys for children, but video games of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s are significant artifacts of 20th-century technological, cultural, and design history. Much of that history is being lost or thrown away. Gamasutra discusses the Game Preservation Crisis:
Trash cans, landfills, and incinerators. Erasure, deletion, and obsolescence. These words could describe what has happened to the various building blocks of the video game industry in countries around the world. These building blocks consist of video game source code, the actual computer hardware used to create a particular video game, level layout diagrams, character designs, production documents, marketing material, and more.
These are just some elements of game creation that are gone — never to be seen again. These elements make up the home console, handheld, PC and arcade games we’ve played. The only remnant of a particular game may be its name, or its final published version, since…
Beautiful Highway Crash: Massive Spill Of Rainbow Ink Outside Boston
The Boston Globe reports that a tractor-trailer hauling 16,000 pounds of red, blue, and yellow printers’ ink overturned on the highway in Peabody, Massachusetts this past month, spilling a gorgeous array of colors down Interstate 95. Sadly, the affected sections of the highway are being replaced, as authorities found removing the colors to be impossible.
Will You Drink Fukushima Milk?
Photo: FiveRings (CC)
How do you feel about drinking milk with trace radiation from Fukushima’s nuclear disaster, even if our government assures us there’s no health hazard? From US News:
In an update to its ongoing radiation monitoring following the Fukushima Daiichi reactor crisis in Japan, U.S. government officials announced late Wednesday that milk sampled March 25 in Washington state contained low levels of radiation not likely to cause harm to humans.
In a statement released jointly by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, the two agencies said that their screening of milk from Spokane, Wash., showed levels of iodine-131 that were “more than 5,000 times lower than the Derived Intervention Level” set by the FDA.
The level of iodine-131 found in the Spokane milk is “far below levels of public health concern, including for infants and children,” the FDA and the EPA both said. The agencies also noted…
CIA Operating In Libya, In Consultation With Opposition
Via CNN:
CIA operatives are providing intelligence from Libya, where opposition forces are on the run and the defiant government suffered the embarrassing defection of its foreign minister Wednesday.
The NATO-led coalition, which is enforcing a no-fly zone and protecting civilians from the intense fighting, got no help from the weather in its ongoing efforts to protect the fragile opposition movement.
“The weather conditions did not allow close combat support by aircraft in the last couple of days,” said Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Moammar Gadhafi’s government, for its part, kept up the war of words. State-run Libyan TV late Wednesday quoted a military source as saying a “civilian location was shelled tonight in the city of Tripoli by the colonizing crusader aggression.”
Amid debate on whether the allies will arm the retreating and undertrained rebels, a U.S. intelligence source told CNN the CIA is in…
“Liberals” Take Over The Media
As far as memes go, “liberals control the media” seems pretty prevalent. People who long for the days of school spankings shriek it at the top of their lungs – actual liberals believe it if only so they can believe they control something. But as we slowly descend back to Earth we realize The Media is a business.
And the point has been made that you could look long and hard through the board of directors of any of the media giant(s) before you find an honest-to-God Liberal. Liberals are tolerated in the media to the extent that they can make their bosses money.
All these points became clear to me in light of a new propaganda film (made by Citizens Against Government Waste) making the rounds where we see a group of Chinese circa 2030 cackling over America’s demise. Maybe you’ve seen it too – where some communists attribute America’s immanent doom…
“Herr Prösser?!!”: The Madison Uprising to Shift Gears on April 5th
The madness surrounding Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to destroy trade unionism continues apace, but outsiders are likely to be deceived into thinking momentum of the Madison Uprising has been dissipated from its previous well-defined orbit. They couldn’t be more wrong — and the turnout for Wisconsin’s April 5th supreme court contest between Prosser (R) and Kloppenburg (D) will prove that.
Current reports from Madison consistently describe a hard core of about one to two dozen protestors haunting the capitol building these days. Some Right Wing supporters of the union-busting tactics have publicly taken courage from this decrease since March 11th, when Walker signed the contententious bill. That, however, would be to focus on the hole, rather than the doughnut, so to speak.
While massive 100+ person rallies like those that continued for 3+ weeks in the capitol building are hugely important for gathering momentum and mobilizing latent energies, they really only represent the tip of an ungodly horror being whipped up for Walker and his supporters in…
Fukushima Radioactive Fallout Nears Chernobyl Levels
Reported by a source no less than the New Scientist:
Japan’s damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors – designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests – to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl.
The difference between this accident and Chernobyl, they say, is that at Chernobyl a huge fire released large amounts of many radioactive materials, including fuel particles, in smoke. At Fukushima Daiichi, only the volatile elements, such as iodine and caesium, are bubbling off the damaged fuel. But these substances could nevertheless pose a significant health risk outside…
How Two Bumbling Stoner Kids Became The Pentagon’s Favorite Arms Dealers
It sounds like the plot of a John Hughes ’80s teen comedy. Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz were a pair of underachieving kids from Miami (interests: football, “whisky”, and “chilling with the boyz”) until, as part of the privatization effort, they somehow landed a $300 million contract from the Bush administration to provide ammunition for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Then things soured: greed pitted the friends against one another, all they could give the military were defective, Chinese-made munitions from Albania, and now Diveroli is in jail. Rolling Stone has the barely-believable saga:
Reassured by the e-mail, Packouz got into his brand-new blue Audi A4 and headed home for the evening, windows open, the stereo blasting. At 25, he wasn’t exactly used to the pressures of being an international arms dealer. Only months earlier, he had been making his living as a massage therapist; his studies at the Educating Hands School of Massage…
Gaddaffi’s Exile Options: Which Country?
Via The Washington Post:
For dictators, it is no longer easy to get away from it all. Just ask Col. Moammar Gaddafi. As Libya’s rebels surround him and NATO’s no-fly zone shrinks Gaddafi’s dominion to a sliver of real estate, he may be seriously contemplating his Plan E. Exile, that is.
The trouble is, Africa’s so-called “king of kings”doesn’t have many choices. Gaddafi’s brutal treatment of Libyan citizens would make him an unwelcome house guest for any country that wants to have a semblance of a relationship with the United States or much of Europe. No Asian nation wants the headache of a dictatorial diva. Thirty-one African countries have signed on to the International Criminal Court, which probably would put Gaddafi at too much risk of ending up at The Hague. And most of his fellow Arab autocrats are hardly in a position to offer anyone a safe haven these days. Plus, if…
Seventy Metal Books That Could Change Our View Of The Bible
Photo: Einarspetz (CC)
A new way to rewrite history: find another version already written. A discovery to rival the Dead Sea Scrolls has seventy metal books found in a cave in Jordan. These books may give a new perspective to the days of Christianity. Via Daily India:
The discovery of seventy ancient metal books in a cave in Jordan is said to have the possibilities of unlocking some of the secrets of the earliest days of Christianity.
The tiny books, their lead pages bound with wire, have left academics divided over their authenticity, but they say that if they are verified, they could prove as pivotal as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947.
The pages are not much bigger than a credit card, and on them are images, symbols and words that appear to refer to the Messiah and, possibly even, to the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Adding to the intrigue, many of…
China ‘To Pass United States In Science’ In Two Years
For years we were warned that American students trailed other nations’ in math and science — now the chickens have come home to roost. The BBC reports that in 2013 China will pass the United States as the global leader in scientific output. But can scientific progress really be measured? And, must it be viewed as a battle between nations? This issue may be as much about Western fears as anything else:
The country that invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing is set for a globally important comeback. China is on course to overtake the US in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013 – far earlier than expected.
That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK’s national science academy. The study, Knowledge, Networks and Nations, charts the challenge to the traditional dominance of the United States, Europe and Japan. The figures are based…
Obama and Biden on Impeaching People Like Themselves
From the Daily Paul:
“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
— Senator Barack Obama, December 20, 2007
Also, here’s Ron Paul on “Freedom Watch” (I don’t see how Napolitano can remain on Fox News, I think by this time next year, I’ll be he’ll have been kicked out):
JPMorganChase And HSBC Allegedly Manipulated Precious Metal Markets
Silver nugget. Photo: Jurii (CC)
“The conspiracy and scheme was enormously successful, netting the defendants substantial illegal profits” in the billions of dollars … JPMorgan and HSBC together “controlled over 85 percent the commercial net short positions” … William D. Cohan writes in the New York Times:
As Americans know all too well by this point, commodity prices — for corn, wheat, soybeans, crude oil, gold and even farmland — have been going through the roof for what seems like forever. There are many causes, primarily supply and demand pressures driven by fears about the unrest in the Middle East, the rise of consumerism in China and India, and the Fed’s $600 billion campaign to increase the money supply.
Nonetheless, how to explain the price of silver? In the past six months, the value of the precious metal has increased nearly 80 percent, to more than $34 an ounce from around $19 an ounce.…
Juan Cole: Libya Is Not Iraq
Is the bombing of Libya Obama’s Iraq redux? Informed Comment says no, laying out the factors that make the Libyan intervention ethical, non-imperialist, and fundamentally different from Bush’s 2003 invasion. Convincing or not?
On the surface, the situation in Libya a week and a half ago posed a contradiction between two key principles of Left politics: supporting the ordinary people and opposing foreign domination of them. Libya’s workers and townspeople had risen up to overthrow the dictator in city after city. Even in the capital of Tripoli, working-class neighborhoods such as Suq al-Jumah and Tajoura had chased out the secret police. In the two weeks after February 17, there was little or no sign of the protesters being armed or engaging in violence.
Then Muammar Qaddafi’s sons rallied his armored brigades and air force to bomb the civilian crowds and shoot tank shells into them. Members of the Transitional Government Council in Benghazi…
The Grisly (And Gristly) Online World Of Cannibals
If you wanted to eat someone (either alive or slaughtered) where would you find them? The Awl delves into the dark and disturbing cannibalism internet subculture, including the now-defunct Cannibalism Cafe Forum, which became notorious following the murder trial of Armin Meiwes, a German who in 2001 killed, cooked, and ate a man whom he met online. (The victim wished to be cannibalized.) In addition to cannibals-looking-for-victims personals, typical content includes:
• Cooking temperatures: “I like a low heat around 250 degree for a long slow cook. I start the out with the meat being tied to the grill alive and kicking. After the meat pass I remover her from the heat and gut her, and then back to the grill for several more hours after about a 10 to 12 hour cook the meat just fall off the bone. I shred the meat and mix it with BBQ and red pepper flakes very tasty.”
• Celebrities: “[Miley Cyrus] needs to be hung upside down from a meathook, have her throat slit, and be sliced into chunks of meat. It’s not like she has a remarkable music career or anything.”…
