Beardy Guy Musings

Ianqui over at the Oil Drum provides a nice introduction to Our oil-laden food chain:

Just to get started, according to this estimate, the food production system uses 17% of all of the fossil fuel consumed in the US.

Technorati Tags: Energy, Healthy Diet, Natural, Natural Resources, Oil, Peak Energy, Peak Oil, Vegetarianism, Simple Living

James Kunstler continues to write the most cutting and accurate articles regarding oil and world energy. Here are a few choice nuggets from his most recent, Still Clueless:

Cluelessness over the the world energy / economic predicament fogs the public discussion more than ever as we approach summer. The New York Times ran a big story in the Sunday news section about India’s soaring energy needs and its future plans (“Hunger For Energy Transforms How India Operates”). India is the world’s fifth leading energy user. Dig this: they import 70 percent of their oil. India’s government predicts that the country will have to import 85 percent of its oil two decades from now.

So what’s India’s plan? According to Energy Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, the solution is “to persuade China to cooperate rather than compete.” Okay, and your bargaining chip would be. . .? Also consider this: The US, Japan, Europe and China will all have to import more than three quarters of their oil supplies. Does this suggest that the world is going to remain an orderly place?

…

The Times story about all this is so devoid of critical analysis that it appears to have been written by an 11-year-old child.

…

Here in the States, the price of a barrel of oil is back over $55 and we are only one week into the summer vacation driving season. President Bush is running a scam on the public by pretending to push Congress to act on an energy bill that offers nothing to realistically address the nation’s oil addiction and, especially, its car dependency. He doesn’t dare, I suppose, because he must know that the American economy is about little more than car dependency. But just watch: as the price for a barrel of oil heads north past $60, Bush’s abject leadership failure will become self-evident and the public mood will appear to shift overnight. The oval office will become a very lonely place indeed by this coming fall, and its occupant will have three long and terrible years left to suffer there.

Technorati Tags: Energy, Energy Crisis, Oil, Peak Energy, Peak Oil

Over at CounterPunch Paul Craig Roberts asks: Is Bush a Sith Lord? The answer, of course, is yes. I’ve wanted to write something like this for a long while. No need since Roberts has done such a fine job. Officially the U.S. claims to be a democratic republic but in truth, with each passing day the U.S. solidifies its position as an Empire. Roberts writes:

The current episode of Star Wars is dynamite for the duplicitous Bush administration. Palpatine, a Sith Lord masquerading as a galactic Republican, becomes Chancellor of the Galatic Republic through deception. Palpatine uses wars that he instigates to elevate security over the power of the Senate and to become dictator.



In a moment of triumph, Palpatine tells the Senate: “In order to ensure our security and continuing stability, the Republic will be reorganized into the first Galactic Empire, for a safe and secure society.” The senators respond with sustained cheering and applause. Padme says, “So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause."

Sith lords use the powers of the dark side of the force. Jedi knights use the power of the good side. The Jedi are selfless and use their incredible powers to protect the Republic. Sith are evil and crave absolute power.

Palpatine, who is really Darth Sidious, manipulates the Senate and enlists the Jedi Council’s patriotism to “defend” the Republic against a “separatist” army that he secretly directs. The purpose of the orchestrated war is to erode liberty in the name of security. The naïve Jedi catch on too late and are decimated. The Republic falls.

Bush’s “war against terrorism” is no less orchestrated than Palpatine’s war and has led to the same result: a society dominated by security concerns.

The top secret British government memo that was leaked to the London Times proves beyond all doubt that Bush invaded Iraq for none of the changing reasons that he has given a too-trusting public. Bush did not invade Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction or because he wanted to bring democracy to Iraq.

Technorati Tags: Empire, George Bush, Politics, Star Wars

A few months back I wrote:

I’ve written before about my concern regarding our use of fossil fuels. It is a subject that I’ve been thinking about over the past 15 years and it weighs on my mind more with each passing year. Recently it occurred to me that I might start writing a bit about how I try to limit my use of fossil fuels and related resources. I think this will take the form of a short tip-like post once a week. Feel free to add any ideas you’ve implemented in your own life.

There are just three rules and one exception:
• No Snacks
• No Sweets
• No Seconds
Except (sometimes) on days that start with ’s'

…

Why is this diet so much better?
Because it is simple, sustainable, and you aren’t really depriving yourself of anything. You don’t have to sacrifice anything – not time, not health, not any delicious thing… There are no magic potions and there are no poisons. You are targeting just the culprit, just the bad habit of overeating itself.

…

What do you mean by “sweets”?

I mean something whose principal source of calories is sugar. Go ahead and put sugar in your coffee or oatmeal; you have my blessing. Of course fruits are fine.

But beware of soda and corn syrup “juice” drinks. I’m not just being a killjoy; Americans get an estimated 10% of their calories from such nutritionally bankrupt “liquid carbohydrates.” (footnote pending)

I wouldn’t worry too much about borderline foods like yoghurt and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. If these are a problem for you, i.e., you eat them every day and lay it on thick, then make them esses. If not, don’t. Just by targeting the really egregious offenders you’ll be cutting out a lot of calories. And you’ll be that much more likely to stick with the plan. If you’re like most first worlders, it’s a little revolting to think how much unambiguously crappy food you consume. So forget the borderline cases, the clear cut cases are 80% of the problem and 0% of the headache.

This is probably the most important S. Do you know how many pounds of sugar the average American ingests each year? According to the USDA’s Economic Research Service, 105 pounds (2001). That’s about 20% of total calories. You could make a snowman out of that. That’s less than 2 years till you’ve eaten your body weight in sugar. If you’re a real whopper, chances are you eat even more sugar than that, so I figure it works out about the same. And this is a pretty conservative number. The ERS assumes that over 40 pounds of “delivered” sugar is “lost” (147 delivered, 105 ingested), which I find a little hard to believe, but I guess we’re wastrels as well as gluttons.

How do you think that compares with the sugar intake of our ancestors? We don’t have to go back to hunter gatherer times to find a striking contrast, or even before Columbus (when it was close to nil because there was no refined sugar in most places). 1821 will do: 10 pounds (that’s delivered, not ingested!).

…

Nosdiet is slow, but the idea is, it’s permanent. It’s humane enough that you can do it your whole life. I find it enhances my enjoyment of food.

Technorati Tags: Healthy Diet, Natural, puppy, Simple Living, Simplicity

Thanks to Chuck for pointing this out. Matt Taibbi over at the New York Press has written an excellent article on the importance of confronting religious conservatives in America:

Progressives in this country have always maintained a kind of fuzzy belief that fundamentalists will eventually just disappear, as if by magic, that the phenomenon of grown men and women believing in devils and witches and angels will inevitably be outgrown, the way children outgrow Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Marx. When some pastor in rural Alabama takes the pulpit to denounce SpongeBob Squarepants as the agent of the Evil One, we figure no response is really necessary—folks will figure out the joke on their own, somewhere down the line.

Because of this, nothing like an organized resistance to this buffoonery has ever taken root in America. Though fundamentalists themselves imagine their secular opponents as a great and unified conspiracy, in truth the only weapons trained on Christians in this country are the occasional lawsuit by the ACLU (a group which normally opposes not religion itself, as I would prefer, but some ostensibly unconstitutional intrusion of religion into the public sphere) and the sarcastic barbs of ineffectual heathen media figures like Maureen Dowd and Jon Stewart.

Our pornographic pop culture, seen by religious conservatives as a coordinated, premeditated military offensive against Christian values, is as indifferent to Christianity as it is to environmentalism. It is not a true opponent of fundamentalist Christianity, because it doesn’t give a shit about fundamentalist Christianity—or about anything else for that matter, except ratings and sales.

What organized political resistance fundamentalists do encounter comes in the form of groups that oppose their political objectives, not Christianity itself. Even pro-choice groups like NARAL, which come into direct and often violent contact with Christians, restrict themselves to agitation for abortion rights, and leave the issue of their opponents' religion alone. In general, there is almost no public figure, anywhere, who has ever suggested publicly that fundamentalist Christianity, as a thing-in-itself, should be opposed. The strongest suggestion most critics will make is to say that it should be contained, and indeed that seems to be the best-case strategy of progressives: that the God-fearing set can be boxed in, kept from being a nuisance and from meddling in areas where they don’t belong, just long enough for them to eventually die out of natural causes.

This is a mistake, and it is the same mistake people have made for centuries: underestimating the American zeal for superstition, for boobism, for living the intellectual lives of farm animals. A large statistical majority of Americans would rather live their whole lives in perpetual fear of the devil than listen to ten minutes of common sense. When you consider where these people live intellectually, the idea that the Democratic Party can somehow succeed in Middle America by making small tactical changes, by waving a few more flags, seems absurd. You either believe in the devil or you don’t; and if you don’t, you’re never going to fool these people. The Republicans, for all their seeming “confusion,” understand this now better than ever. Their seemingly open attempts in recent months to radicalize and embolden their evangelical base may have had a temporary desultory effect with regard to their poll numbers.

But this current crew of Republican strategists has always understood American thinking better than the Tom Junods of the world. They know that most political trends are fleeting. Liberalism vanished at the first sign of trouble; pacifism disappeared one generation after Vietnam; even fiscal conservatism is easily forgotten. The one thing that never disappears in this country is stupidity, and if you court it, you’ll always have votes down the line. Especially when it lives on unopposed.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Democracy, Politics, Religious Conservatives, Religious Right

Juan Cole has an excellent post comparing the death rate in Iraq with Saddam to that since his removal by the U.S. illegal war.:

Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, when questioned about the Iraq war that he helped spearhead, asked, “Would you really prefer to have Saddam Hussein in power?"

But the reason for not having Saddam in power was that he had killed so many people. If not having him means that 8,000 people a year have to die, then what? And what if the number of people dying in Iraq is even higher? What if it is not 8,000 a year, as Jabr maintains, but more like 50,000? Jabr’s figures are only for casualties of guerrilla actions. What about all the Iraqis who have died as a result of US bombing raids on civilian quarters of cities? What about all the murders that occur as part of political reprisals?

The Baath Party was in power for about 35 years. If it had killed 8000 civilians per year, that would be 280,000 persons. That is about what is alleged, though it is probably an exaggeration. (The deaths in the Iran-Iraq war cannot all be laid at Saddam’s feet, since he began suing for peace in 1982, but was rebuffed by Khomeini, who insisted on dragging the war out until 1988 in hopes of taking Baghdad and putting the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in power there. Likewise, Mr. Rumsfeld’s offer of support to Saddam and greenlighting of the use of chemical weapons prolonged the war).

In other words, Bayan Jabr’s figures suggest that in US-dominated Iraq, people are dying so far at about the same rate as they did under Baath rule. (If he is underestimating the civilian casualties, then it is possible that many more are dying per year than under Saddam!) In any case, Saddam’s killing sprees were largely over with by the late 1990s, so the rate of death in Iraq now is enormously greater than it was in, say, 2001.

Wolfowitz should give up on the propaganda technique of just demonizing his opponents and then asking how anyone could want them in power. The real question is, are Iraqis better off under US auspices? So far, the answer with regard to the death rate is a resounding “No!"

Technorati Tags: Empire, Iraq, Politics, War

Blooming by our little garden pond. These blooms tend to open in the evening and stay open through the morning. Most of the flowers only seem to last 1-2 days. One of my favorites.

Technorati Tags: Gardening, Native Landscaping, Natural, Missouri Primrose, Wild flowers

Infoshop News has posted a Reuters story regarding Earth’s bird species in danger:

More than a fifth of the planet’s bird species face extinction as humans venture further into their habitats and introduce alien predators, an environmental group said on Wednesday.

While there have been some success stories of species that reappeared or recovered, the overall situation of the world’s birds is worsening, BirdLife International said in its annual assessment of the feathered fauna.

“The total number (of bird species) considered to be threatened with extinction is now 1,212, which when combined with the number of near threatened species gives a total of exactly 2,000 species in trouble – more than a fifth of the planet’s remaining 9,775 species,” BirdLife said.

Several species from Europe appear in the list for the first time, including the European roller, for which key populations in Turkey and European Russia have declined markedly.

BirdLife, a global alliance of conservation groups, said 179 species were categorised as critically endangered, the highest level of threat. They include the Azores bullfinch, one of Europe’s rarest songbirds that has fewer than 300 left.

There has been some good news on the bird front.

The ivory-billed woodpecker was sighted in the United States for the first time in decades.

On the Seychelles the magpie-robin, a species that had dwindled to just 12-15 birds on one island by 1965, recovered to over 130 after birds were relocated to small, predator-free islands off Africa’s east coast.

But news has been bad elsewhere. BirdLife said two of New Zealand’s species have moved closer to joining five others that are extinct there, largely because of introduced rat population explosions in 1999 and 2000.

These resulted in the loss of two populations of yellowhead and almost wiped out the orange-fronted parakeet, reducing its numbers to tens.

Habitat destruction and the introduction of alien predators are among the biggest threats to bird populations globally.

“Despite the recent rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, overall more species are currently sliding towards oblivion,” said BirdLife communication officer Ed Parnell.

“One in five bird species on the planet now faces a risk in the short or medium-term of joining the dodo, great auk and 129 other species that we know have become extinct since 1500."

Technorati Tags: Birds, Extinction, Natural

CNN, that bastion of truth, is reporting on Bush’s response to Amnesty’s torture report:

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Bush called a human rights report “absurd” for criticizing the United States' detention of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said Tuesday the allegations were made by “people who hate America."

“It’s absurd. It’s an absurd allegation. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world,” Bush said of the Amnesty International report that compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag.

Technorati Tags: George Bush, Politics, Torture, War

The Sand Diego Union-Tribune discusses oil: Difficult choices await a nation – and world – stuck on oil.

To be sure, America long ago lost its energy independence and has at times lost control of prices, as it did when OPEC flexed its muscle in the 1970s.

But new forces in world energy markets, unrestrained consumption epitomized by the boom in sport utility vehicles and the depletion of oil have subjected the United States to buffeting by forces outside its control.
Call it the era of the permanent oil shock.

…

China and India have developed enough economic strength for a substantial number of their citizens to begin buying automobiles, said Raghuram Rajan, research director at the IMF.
In both countries, demand for oil has doubled in 10 years. Although ox-drawn carts are still common as the two nations leapfrog from the 19th century into the 21st, the impact on the oil market has been enormous.

“This demand starts taking off in a tremendous way,” Rajan said. “Our sense is that the growth in transport demand will account for a very, very big chunk of the growth in oil demand going forward."
Said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy, “They have doubled their use in a decade, and eventually that kind of doubling gets you."

But it’s misleading to assign Asia sole responsibility for the surge in world oil prices. The United States uses twice as much oil as India and China, despite having a less than a sixth of the comibined population. Person for person, the United States uses 15 times as much oil as China.

Technorati Tags: Energy, Energy Crisis, Natural Resources, Oil, Peak Energy, Peak Oil

The mass media may finally be picking up on a story that it should have been discussing for many years: Peak Oil. USA Today has an AP story that acknowledges the obvious fact that there is a finite supply of oil: Are we there yet? Oil joyride may be over.

Could the petroleum joyride — cheap, abundant oil that has sent the global economy whizzing along with the pedal to the metal and the AC blasting for decades — be coming to an end?

Some observers of the oil industry think so. They predict that this year, maybe next — almost certainly by the end of the decade — the world’s oil production, having grown exuberantly for more than a century, will peak and begin to decline.

And then it really will be all downhill. The price of oil will increase drastically. Major oil-consuming countries will experience crippling inflation, unemployment and economic instability. Princeton University geologist Kenneth S. Deffeyes predicts “a permanent state of oil shortage."

BLACK MAGIC. During the last century oil has transformed the world. British coal launched the Industrial Revolution, but American oil put the pedal to the metal. No other material has so profoundly changed the face of the world in such a short time. Petroleum is black magic, the lifeblood of our civilization. The petroleum industry provides 40% of the globe’s energy and is humanity’s largest commercial enterprise. Oil is our most concentrated, flexible, and convenient fuel. Without petroleum there would be no automobile industry, no tourism. Without petroleum 2% of Americans could not feed the remaining 98%. But oil is more than energy. It’s the key feedstock for plastics, medicines, clothing, pesticides, paint, and thousands of other products. Fueling Toyota or fabricated into Tupperware, petroleum is the world’s premier commodity. Soon, experts say, world oil production will reach an all-time high, an apex, a peak. Then, after a short plateau, it will decline forever. What historians will someday call the Oil Era will last just two centuries. In 1998 we are closer to its end than its beginning.

Technorati Tags: Energy, Natural Resources, Oil, Peak Oil

I was watching today’s Democracy Now! which included a segment on the current Newsweek dealio and an interview with Norman Solomon who has recently published a new book, War Made Easy. Excellent interview and discussion regarding the incredible idiocy and hypocrisy of the current flap with Newsweek and the White House. To sum it up, Newsweek published a little article which it then sort of retracted after White House went nutso because of the violence and protests that occurred, they say, in response to the article. Then the FBI releases documents which seem to verify the content of the article: that copies of the Koran were abused in front of prisoners as a part of a larger program of torture.

Meanwhile we can expect the corporate media (including Newsweek) to continue the trend of non-reporting, self-sensorship, and obedience set in place over the past 30 years. The vast majority of “news reporting” will continue to reflect the lies dictated by the masters of state and the profit priority. This is nothing new. The only difference in recent years is that the Bush administration are now caught serving a soup of lies used to wage a pre-emptive war. It’s a gigantic bowl of lies and corporate media has been vigorously lapping it up with no complaint. The resulting belches of violence produced by the war, 1,600+ U.S. soldiers and possibly 100,000+ Iraqi civilians is vast by comparison to the violence following the Newsweek article.

Oh, and let’s remember the cause of this current controversy: the torture of prisoners. The focus of attention should never have been diverted from that but of course that is the point, isn’t it? When you are the aggressor, when you wage a war based on a series of very deliberate lies, you have to be prepared to divert and distract.

Who knew George Bush and co. were such magnificent magicians?

Technorati Tags: Democracy, George Bush, Human Rights, Iraq, Mass Media, Media, Democracy Now!, Torture, War

Sarah Left, writing for the Guardian, reports on Amnesty International’s condemnation of US human rights record:

The US abdicated its responsibility to set a global example in upholding human rights in 2004 and, with the UK, led a “dangerous new agenda” by sanctioning torture in a failed attempt to combat terrorism, Amnesty International warned today.

—

The US came in for particular criticism over its pronouncements on torture and for “usurping the language of justice and freedom to pursue policies of fear and insecurity”, she told a London press conference.

“The USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyperpower, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide,” she said. “When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity."

—

“The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law,” she said. " Guantánamo evokes memories of Soviet repression."

Ms Khan likened the Bush administration’s practice of holding unregistered prisoners, or “ghost detainees”, at secret locations to tactics deployed in some Latin American countries.

Technorati Tags: Empire, Human Rights, Amnesty International, Terrorism, Torture, War

Ah just playing catchup on an article by Walter Pincus posted a couple weeks ago by the Washington Post: British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War:

Blair Was Told of White House’s Determination to Use Military Against Hussein

Seven months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of British foreign intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush wanted to topple Saddam Hussein by military action and warned that in Washington intelligence was “being fixed around the policy,” according to notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting with Blair at No. 10 Downing Street."

Military action was now seen as inevitable," said the notes, summarizing a report by Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, British intelligence, who had just returned from consultations in Washington along with other senior British officials. Dearlove went on, “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

“The case was thin,” summarized the notes taken by a British national security aide at the meeting. “Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.

—

The notes of the Blair meeting, attended by the prime minister’s senior national security team, also disclose for the first time that Britain’s intelligence boss believed that Bush had decided to go to war in mid-2002, and that he believed U.S. policymakers were trying to use the limited intelligence they had to make the Iraqi leader appear to be a bigger threat than was supported by known facts.

Although critics of the Iraq war have accused Bush and his top aides of misusing what has since been shown as limited intelligence in the prewar period, Bush’s critics have been unsuccessful in getting an investigation of that matter.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has dropped its previous plan to review how U.S. policymakers used Iraq intelligence, and the president’s commission on intelligence did not look into the subject because it was not authorized to do so by its charter, Laurence H. Silberman, the co-chairman, told reporters last month.

Technorati Tags: Empire, George Bush, Iraq, Politics, Tony Blair, War

Amit Asaravala over at Wired News has an interesting article about the vast potential of wind for the generation of power. According to the article researchers have recently compiled a map which reveals the airstream potential of more than 8,000 sites across the planet.

Wind power could generate enough electricity to support the world’s energy needs several times over, according to a new map of global wind speeds that scientists say is the first of its kind.

The map, compiled by researchers at Stanford University, shows wind speeds at more than 8,000 sites around the world. The researchers found that at least 13 percent of those sites experience winds fast enough to power a modern wind turbine. If turbines were set up in all these regions, they would generate 72 terawatts of electricity, according to the researchers.

That’s more than five times the world’s energy needs, which was roughly 14 terawatts in 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Technorati Tags: Energy, Natural Resources, Wind Energy

Mother Davis over at Irregular Times writes about Republicans that want to ban Newsweek:

I never thought that I would live to see the day when a significant element of America’s ruling party would be calling for the banning of publications that dare to question the actions of the government. There are problems with Newsweek’s use of an unnamed source to back up a one-sentence statement about desecration of the Koran in American prisons at Guantanamo Bay (allegations of which now appear to have been corroborated from dozens of sources). But, does a problem with a source used to support a single sentence in a news report really merit a government shut-down of a major news publication?

Technorati Tags: Democracy, Empire, Freedom of Speech, Politics, Newsweek

A simple little FileMakerPro database for keeping track of the birds you’ve seen. I’m new to birding so I may have left out fields important to more experienced birders. If you have a suggestion please write with your ideas.

Easy to use. Click in the common name field and choose from the drop down list which will then auto enter the genus and species for you. Enter all other data that you want. There are buttons for easy and automatic searching of Google for images and audio. There is also a button for searching of the Wikipedia.

Requirement: FileMakerPro 7.

This is freeware though I gladly accept donations.

More info at MacProductive.
Download

Technorati Tags: Birding, Birds, FileMaker Pro, Natural

Fantastically fun little flash movie for the unorganized rabble rouser in your life. Time Management for Anarchists: The Movie. Not a specific endorsement of GTD (Getting Things Done) but in that direction. You can find more of that at 43Folders.

Being a geek that has a PowerBook attached to my hip I’d also suggest GTDTiddlyWiki. A self contained, single file wiki that has been designed around GTD. Very cool. It won’t work with Apple’s Safari but works very well with Camino or Firefox. The newest version is self saving so you never have to remember to save. To get started save the html file to your hard drive by control clicking the above link and choose “Save linked file to Desktop”. Next, open that file in Camino or Firefox, and you’re set to go. Open existing articles, “Tiddlers” to learn more about how it works and delete them or change them to your needs. As much as I like Instiki I like this better because it’s not a separate application. The only way it could be better is with Safari support.

Via Audio Activism.

Technorati Tags: Activism, Anarchism, GTD, GTDTiddlyWiki, Productivity

I continue to read Juan Cole everyday and, well, Iraq is not getting any better. Not that I thought it would be getting better.

Another excellent source, this one from an independent journalist on the ground in Iraq, Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches. In particular, his most recent post is worth reading. It’s a fucking mess… our mess.

U.S. aggression against Iraq was, is, and will continue to be illegal and a war crime.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, War