“[Inventor, Wolfgang] Sigmund said the UF surface may be the most or among the most water phobic. Close-up photographs of water droplets on dime-sized plastic squares show that the droplets maintain their spherical shape, whether standing still or moving. Droplets bulge down on most other surfaces, dragging a kind of tail as they move. Sigmund said his surface is the first to shuttle droplets with no tail.”
“Also, unlike many water-repelling surfaces, the UF one relies entirely on the microscopic shape and patterns of the material — rather than its composition.”. . .”Sigmund’s surfaces need never slough off dangerous chemicals. Provided the surface material itself is made safe, making it water repellent introduces no new risks.”
“Although he hasn’t published the research yet, Sigmund said a variation of the surface also repels oil, a first for the industry.”
A remarkable photo of a spherical droplet on the artificial surface (below some photomicrographs of spider hair) shows how much it repels water. See it on the original University of Florida, Sigmund Group page, “Hairy Surfaces.”
Take heed, Janitors: Prepare to join the revolution or suffer the consequences!
And you there, with your lathering and scrubbing behavior, take note of the hairy spider glass breakthrough a-coming. It makes me feel cleaner already.
Bill Gates was in the news a few weeks back taking climate change deniers to task.
I must admit I lean to the skeptical side myself. I’m for off-grid power for reasons such as the probable coming oil famine and hyperinflation. But I don’t have the expertise and inclination to go on a crusade on either side of global warming, except to say that if we’re concerned about the poor, let’s make sure the transition to carbonless power doesn’t add excessive trauma to the already stressed global economy.
Even if there is warming, it seems that other problems, such as non-CO2 pollution, soil erosion, new dust bowls, and over-fished oceans are more urgent. Global warming has a number of quick fix engineering schemes.
Given Gates’ history founding and running Microsoft, I was puzzled about all the *ahem* “energy” he put into his recent remarks. Now the mystery is solved. He’s backing an energy initiative with another Microsoft founder, Nathan Myhrvold (hear Nathan talk about “Reinventing Invention” in a Harvard Business podcast).
The new company is called TerraPower. Gates describes the funding plan and principles of operation in the just released TED Talk, “Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!.”
Given his stated goal of zero emissions, he highlighted the advantage nuclear has over renewables because of nuclear’s energy density. He also mentioned a “liquid nuclear” system in passing that I think means the LFTR (Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor) I’ve mentioned in a previous post. (It has safety advantages compared to conventional U-235 plants, much less waste, little terrorist bomb potential and plentiful domestic thorium fuel for thousands of years. Also, thorium is detectable from space and is found on the Moon and Mars. Recently, uranium was found on the Moon.)
The TerraPower system is called a “traveling-wave” reactor, able to slowly consume a cylinder of waste U-238 for up to 60 years.
“A traveling-wave reactor can sustain fission in a nonfissile fuel such as depleted uranium because it sets up a slow-moving wave in which neutrons produced by fission reactions in one small part of the core convert adjacent fuel pellets from fertile isotopes (such as U238) into fissile isotopes (such as Pu239).”
And when the waste U-238 is used up, it’s much more plentiful in nature than our current U-235 fuel isotope facing “peak uranium.” By then, other technologies will probably be online.
There are hippie holdouts having flashbacks about the Cold War who are still anti-nuke. The current generation doesn’t worry about The Day After anymore. They worry about The Day After Tomorrow. (Another pro-nuke advocate is Whole Earth Catalog pioneer, Stewart Brand.)
My worry is that big nuke plants perpetuate the grid, but already there are hotel and neighborhood scale reactors on the market now. We’re bound to get local sized versions of the new designs.
DVD at Amazon From Kurzweil AI comes a summary of a Physorg report that must be read completely about Turkish scientists creating a revolutionary glass spray that promises to “make cleaning obsolete” and even serve as a non-toxic barrier to pests for food crops.
“The liquid glass coating is breathable, which means it can be used on plants and seeds. Trials in vineyards have found spraying vines increases their resistance to fungal diseases, while other tests have shown sprayed seeds germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds, and coated wood is not attacked by termites.”
In 1952, actor Sir Alec Guinness (long before his most famous role as the elderly bathrobed Jedi Knight, Obi-Wan Kenobi) was the title character, chemist Henry [Update: Oops, it’s Sidney] Stratton, in the film The Man In The White Suit. Stratton invents a durable suit that never needs washing or pressing, thus opposing the interests of factory owners and labor unions in the garment business. One of the most moving moments in the film is when he takes a break from running from everybody to hear a washer woman ask how she’s supposed to make a living in his brilliant future.
Treehugger describes it having “an unbelievable number of applications” if the liquid glass spray is proven safe and effective. (More successful trials are described including clothing applications in the PhysOrg article, bringing the White Suit to mind. The article continues.)
“. . .it can be used in the oven, in bathrooms, tiles, sinks, and almost every other surface in the home, and one spray is said to last a year. . .many supermarkets, may be unwilling to stock the products because they make enormous profits from cleaning products that need to be replaced regularly, and liquid glass would make virtually all of them obsolete.”
No doubt consumerism driven profits will fuel industry to question non-biodegradable treated items finding their way into the trash, as if they were newly converted to being green. Somehow I think they’ll neglect mentioning how rarely such treated items need to be tossed out.
I’ve heard the Lifesaver bottle advertised on The Survival Podcast, but was not excited about it until I saw this TED Talk video from 2009 of Lifesaver’s inventor and CEO Michael Pritchard’s presentation at Oxford, England.
The Lifesaver system filters out contaminants larger than 15 nanometers. It’s 100% effective against the 25 nanometer sized polio virus and other water borne viruses. And certainly 100% effective in filtering considerably larger bacteria and infectious cysts.
The demonstration is very impressive. Gather the water through the base, pump a few times by hand like a big water squirt gun, uncap the top and immediately get pure sterile safe drinking water from out of the most horrific sources. Very important for disaster relief and economical for day to day off-grid usage.
In the future the Tea Party movement will call for higher taxes. It will be done in the name of national security. Their beloved Leader, Sarah Palin, will be in the forefront of demanding the increased revenue. She won’t call it taxes. She will call it something else—something really stupid.
Meanwhile, here in 2010, we see typically petty behavior from the enemies of the heroic Ron Paul. How dare he be a dissenting voice inside the Big Tent of the Republican freak show? How dare he succeed with his book called END THE FED. Doesn’t he know that the one thing the Tea Party and town hall movements really support is the federal reserve?
Semper Fi, Fed!
Sooner or later the neocons had to deal with Ron Paul. Of course, the neocons never exist when they actually do anything substantive. Only a conspiracy nut would believe otherwise. The neocons are the most lovable objective analysts you will ever meet in a dark alley.
Somebody is out to get Ron Paul. The Tea Party that he helped originate has targeted him for political destruction. How ironic if he loses his House seat to a tea party candidate.
Sarah Palin speaks for the forces who hijacked an entire political movement from the libertarians. Apparently her appetite for what belongs to others is insatiable. Now the wicked witch of Alaska wants Ron Paul’s son. She has endorsed Rand Paul’s political ambitions. It makes one want to shrug.
Ron Paul was just on the Rachel Maddow show. He was talking about the neocon infiltration of the Tea Party movement. Why should the neocons settle for influence over something as retro as Democrats and Republicans? You never know where to find votes in this day and age.
It is not enough that the Tea Party protests were taken away from antiwar libertarians such as Ron Paul and twisted into the thing it is today. The Boston Tea Party was far too radical. Those guys wore disguises. Did they think they were at a WTO summit? Even worse, they were opposing a tax meant to support the troops (Americans had not yet separated from the British Lion back then) in King George’s war against terrorism—you know, the French. The Boston Tea Party was opposed to everything represented by today’s Tea Party.
It wasn’t enough that the real libertarians were screwed over yet again by Republicans—the way the republicans in the Spanish Civil War were buggered by Joe Stalin. What do today’s libertarians expect in the land of the free lunch?
To quote myself being quoted by someone else (thus topping Ayn Rand’s self quotes) Kent Hastings in a recent PermaKent blog post said that I am sick of the American debate being put in the form of a conflict between Wall Street and Main Street. With a little research, Kent discovered that the main drag near the Pentagon is Fern Street. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Just meet me at the corner of Fern Street and Off Budget. Bring your checkbook.
Ron Paul is the bravest politician in America. He has real libertarian principles. As a working politician it is no surprise that he is a minarchist. Some hypocrites who pretend to be anarchists attack Ron Paul for not supporting the War Machine. We are not talking about military defense here. The War Machine needs the planet.
When Ron Paul was asked by Maddow what he thought of the Palin support for his son, he tried to shrug it off as just another generic Republican endorsement. He was clearly unhappy. The road to power right now does not lie through Main Street or Wall Street, but Fern Street. Rand Paul may think he’s on the road to Galt’s Gulch, but Fern Street is more likely to lead him to Project X (for those who remember ATLAS SHRUGGED).
If Obama expands the wars he has a second term. If he fails to do this then War Republicans will replace the War Democrats. This has nothing to do with defense or protecting this country from violent psychotics. It has everything to do with expanding a welfare state at home by building a welfare state overseas.
If Ron Paul’s son had any loyalty to his father, he would repudiate an endorsement by America’s most notorious palm reader (a practice condemned by the Bible). If there are any libertarians left in this country who involve themselves in the political process (i.e. not pure anarchists), they should do everything they can to get Ron Paul reelected against the challenge of his Tea Party opponents. After all, Ron Paul wants to end the War on Drugs and these bastards love that particular crusade almost as much as they love the War on Terror.
If we are going to declare war on the entire world and turn ourselves into the new Soviet Union let us finally be honest about it. The great crime is never torture, mayhem and mass murder. The real evil will always be the lies told against honorable men and women who believe the moral rules they were taught in Sunday school. Let us honor Ron Paul as that rarest of Americans: an honest man.
At a certain point Ron Paul’s tea lost its flavor. Besides, it was cold. He needs to drink something better at those college campuses where the real grass roots movement honors his integrity.
There is a legitimate comparison of our current tea parties and a famous example. You know, it’s sort of Sarah in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter is putting something in her drink. Give this woman half a chance and she will transform into the Queen of Hearts.
You betcha!
THE END
Ronald Reagan never expressed a public opinion on Sarah Palin but he did on the author of this piece. Reagan’s opinion of Brad Linaweaver can be found in Stories In His Own Hand—The Everyday Wisdom of Ronald Reagan from the Free Press. Mr. Linaweaver honors all the heroes of America’s military services as much as he despises armchair ideologues who send them to unnecessary battles.
Very Interesting. . . Brad Linaweaver says he’s getting tired of the “Wall Street vs. Main Street” rhetoric, which he believes ignores the Empire as the dominant agency for the immiseration of the proletariat, comrade. (He wouldn’t put it like that.)
Brad suggested finding out if the Pentagon was located on a Street that could find its way into vulgar political discourse. Sure enough, “Fern Street” fits the bill.
Just thinking about foliage brings to mind how the military industrial complex camouflages its share of the budget. Also, I’m hearing renewed rumors of war against Iran. And the DJIA is falling below 10,000 again.
A post with details about the incredible number of unaccounted assets in the Pentagon budget, Iran’s history and recent past (now we know the outcome of their election), and the wonderful state of our economy from March, 2009 is current once again, “It Usually Begins With Iran.”
The term “blowback” originates with a 1950s CIA after action report of dirty tricks pulled in Iran–a shameful false flag operation conducted with pride that still haunts us today.
Fern Street evokes other bush and shrub related metaphors, such as not seeing the forest for the trees or snakes in the grass. Just keep those m*f*ing snakes off the m*f*ing planes!
What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the Pentagon. In the news.
A few days ago it was widely reported that military intelligence at the Pentagon, which will get about two feet of snow this weekend, released a report about the threat of global warming. Now the warm mongers want to levitate the Pentagon in public esteem.
Maybe our armed forces will convert their vehicles to carbon neutral energy sources. Lucky for us Iran leads the Middle East in wind power generation, so our plug-in hybrid tanks will be easily recharged during the invasion. Because of Iran’s gas shortages (!) maybe their plug-in battery powered tanks will have to recharge on odd numbered days after ours are topped off.
Arte Johnson (the German spy pictured above) appeared regularly on The Smothers Brothers, as did the cult fake Presidential candidate, Pat Paulsen.
I never met Pat Paulsen, but I had his comedy record and was a fan. But I’ve always heard that my cousins, aunt and uncle on my mom’s side of the family knew Pat. My aunt Judy told me on a recent visit that she remembers rehearsing routines with him. Pat told them on a road trip that if the car crashed the news would report “Pat Paulsen and Others Killed in Crash.” That didn’t happen thankfully, but he did die eventually, but his memory is kept alive at http://paulsen.com.
Here’s a YouTube video of his son Monty carrying on the tradition, with a “Dead Man Running” campaign and perhaps running himself in 2012. Monty Paulsen? All he needs is a flying circus.
Stone Clement runs Shaxul Records with a partner who, because of the exoteric absence in the article, evidently must not be named, in a hole in the wall joint specializing in Heavy Metal band music.
While the Shaxul proprietors pride themselves in stocking H.P. Lovecraft inspired Metal on vinyl, I bet their carcinogenic PVC riddled inventory does not include such classics as HPLHS’s “If I Were A Deep One” from their legally challenged “A Shoggoth on the Roof” album. (Some Broadway composer took offense at the commercial availability of said parody.)
I also doubt you’d find the Dagon Tabernacle Choir’s stirring performance of “Carol of the Old Ones,” or one of the many songs from HPLHS’s Solstice Carol album such as the bouncy “I Saw Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth.
And finally, you really must have a crown of thorns stigmata in the head to believe they have a copy of the following pop culture karaoke ripoff renamed “Hey There, Cthulhu.”
Tagari.com Sometimes you can be a prophet in your own land.
Permaculture founder Bill Mollison was recognized for his work educating millions throughout the world by leaders in his native Australia.
“Bill was awarded with the distinctive title of “Senior Australian of the Year 2010 – National Finalist” in a ceremony held in Hobart on November 23, 2009 and will go to Canberra for the National Awards ceremony held at Parliament House on January 25, 2010.”
For those who live in cooler climates, here is the first of a series of YouTube videos featuring Mollison on camera, “Temperate Permaculture Strategies Pt. 1.”
“One of the odd possibilities that could emerge from global warming is that much of Europe, robbed of the ocean current patterns that help keep it warm, could rather abruptly enter a deep freeze and have a climate that more closely resembles Alaska than the modest temperatures it now enjoys.”
One proposal to combat increased temperature in urban heat islands is to paint roofs and other city surfaces lighter colors to reduce absorption of sunlight.
The scientists at Vangelis (heh) say the Earth’s albedo is 0.39. If the Earth’s surface was a perfect mirror, the albedo would be 1.00, with all light hitting it reflected back to space. I wonder if all that reflected sunlight from frozen Europe and most of the U.S. covered in snow is a negative feedback fighting global warming.
If so, residents of the American Southwest can keep driving their SUVs forever. Drill baby, drill! (That was sarcasm).
“Oh, try taking photos someplace the government has decided is their turf.”
“On a Sunday in summer 2006, when the Las Vegas FBI office was closed, I tried to shoot video of a plaque honoring FBI agents that was posted outside the building, with open access from an empty parking lot facing the street. The parking lot wasn’t chained off and there were no signs restricting public access. I was going to use that shot of the plaque honoring FBI agents in Lady Magdalene’s.”
“But within seconds after I tried taking that video a security guard ran out and ordered me and my associate producer, J. Kent Hastings, to freeze. The FBI guard confiscated my video camera, kept Kent and me standing in 110 degree summer heat for over two hours, and when he returned my video camera he had confiscated my tape and memory card.”
“Six months later the memory card was returned by mail — they’d erased it.”
Neil makes the case that the government and its activities should be transparent while private (isn’t that word a hint) citizens should enjoy the right to pursue privacy.
What’s ironic about the FBI shoot for Lady Magdalene’s is that the intent was to show the feds in a good light, honestly doing their part to stop a terrorist plot in the film, so naturally our reward was to be harassed. The film’s Director of Photography caught the incident on camera from inside another crew car.
Meanwhile, a big studio picture at the time, Flight Plan, portrayed a federal air marshall played by Peter Sarsgaard as a murderous villain trying to frame innocent Arab airline passengers. That piece of anti-government propaganda probably had the red carpet rolled out for them by the feds.
Neil Schulman is also the author of Alongside Night, a novel predicting America’s collapse.
“urban ecology detroit presents a workshop with eric toensmeier - lessons learned from nuestras raices: permaculture for community and economic redevelopment, february 2nd from 10am to 2pm at the environmental interpretive center located on the campus of the university of michigan dearborn . the cost is 15-50 dollars sliding scale, reservation are required and lunch will be served. there are limited numbers of places so please reserve early.”
Contact Patrick Crouch at the email address listed at the end of his announcement “to register or for questions.”
I highlighted Ed Toensmeier’s book on Perennial Vegetables in a blog post, which also links to his Edible Forest Gardens 2-volume set of books. Preserving a hundred perennial vegetable species in the face of Monsanto’s GMO terminator seeds (or legal harassment equivalent) may be the difference between life and death in a collapsed economy.
So we see that organizations like Urban Farming, which started in Detroit, can get support all across the political spectrum. This YouTube video shows urban farming support all across the U.S.
Geo.’s approach reminds me of the Rebel Alliance attack plan against the Empire’s Death Star. The State of California doesn’t consider traffic tickets to be much of a threat or they would have a tighter defense. Or in their case, a prosecutor present who doesn’t ignore exculpatory evidence and mountains of settled case law. Instead, every county looks at tickets as an easy source of revenue.
This makes the California state government extremely vulnerable to a legal death blow they won’t believe is coming until it arrives. And even if the Powers That Be are truly scared, they won’t have time to change the course of their Titanic bureaucracy before hitting this legal iceberg and sinking in defeat. California would only be the beginning.
Instead of using third party elections, mass movement protests, or fighting the legal system over taxes or drug laws, Geo. is using traffic violation cases, which he has won for himself and others to devastating effect on the arresting officers, to attempt to prove lack of due process and numerous instances of malicious prosecution, which eventually could result in a much bigger lawsuit with jury-determined exemplary (a.k.a. “punitive”) damages against the State of California under the U.S. federal RICO Act.
Among the “terms of surrender” he believes will be their cheapest option to avoid unbelievably massive liability exposure, are conditions such as getting rid of the red light cameras and requiring a prosecutor and fully informed jury to be present in a real trial for any case, no matter how small. Geo. asks (I’m paraphrasing), “Why should a three time murderer have more defense protection than a granny in a first offense traffic case?”
Geo.’s success will put a screeching stop to “tickets for revenue,” and likely block convictions for victimless crimes because jurors will be told they can determine the justice of the law as well as the facts of the case.
Geo. joked that his talk was scheduled on the winter solstice. That’s the shortest, darkest day of the year. Brighter days lay ahead for the cause of freedom.
This ABC 7 online article, “Urban Farming Gains Popularity in Bay Area,” features video of a small farm in Oakland, California and a store in Berkeley catering to increasing numbers of urban farmers in cities surrounding San Francisco.
In San Francisco itself, from the YouTube description posted July 30, 2009, a doctor at UCSF deals with the changes in the American diet since 1975, comparing it to Atkins and the traditional Japanese diet. Video: “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.”
“Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin.”
Which reminded me about the promising EEstor breakthrough that’s supposed to be demonstrated this year, as mentioned in this Autoblog story, “GM Volt plus EEStor could work if EESU worked.”
One of the commenters at ARS Technica mentioned a recent more hopeful news item, about Stanford research scientists using carbon nanotube and silver nanowire ink to print batteries and supercapacitors on paper. Here’s the direct link to the university report, “At Stanford, nanotubes + ink + paper = instant battery.”
Conservation
Refugees In a recent podcast of the San Francisco radio show An Organic Conversation, with host Helge Hellberg, Guernica magazine and former Mother Jones journalist and now “investigative historian,” Mark Dowie, talked about his career and plans for his own radio show.
I enjoyed the German, Hellberg’s personal account of his experience twenty years ago when the Berlin Wall came down and West embraced East.
For this show, Dowie described urban farming on former playgrounds and abandoned houses converted to greenhouses solving the food deserts in wrecked cities like Detroit.
Tim Meyers in Bethel, Alaska is growing fresh produce 365 days a year in greenhouses and heat from compost generated methane. No fossil fuels or transporting from a thousand miles away required.
Dowie touched on other fascinating topics he’s covered in his career, including uncovering environmentalist mistakes made when the National Park System was created in the United States.
Not a right winger by any means, Dowie suggests that the foundation of this so-called “Best Idea” was one of ethnic cleansing. For example, seven tribes of native inhabitants were forcibly evicted from Yosemite and 300 people were shot by the U.S. Army in one day. So Amerinds in the natural setting with food security were driven out or killed to pave roads and make a tourist playground. Yeah, it’s the Best.
There’s plenty of related information in the PBS website’s history section about John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society. Despite the annoying title of the series, it doesn’t whitewash the story much.
“Long after the tribe was finally located and forced from their beloved valley, scholars would learn that in fact the natives called the valley Ahwahnee, meaning “the place of a gaping mouth,” and that they called themselves the Ahwahneechees, in honor of the valley they had considered their home for centuries. “Yosemite,” it was learned, meant something entirely different. In the native language, “Yosemite” refers to people who should be feared. It means, “they are killers.”"
There are 2.3 billion acres of land in the United States, much of it managed directly by the federal government. If we have–wait for it–food riots thanks to hyperinflation, in the not so distant future, perhaps these playgrounds could be settled by citizen stewards who pass an exam, like maybe a permaculture design certificate. We could literally chew the scenery to survive.
I doubt FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) has the Best Idea compared to that.
The video’s producer persuaded Stephen Fry to volunteer his time for narration during a chance meeting in Copenhagen (hence the “Fry-day” category and also because it’s still Friday in my local time zone).
WeForest encourages local indigenous inhabitants of ecologically devastated areas to plant permaculture food forests to fight famine, joblessness, and eventually make an impact on that bogus issue the sneaky One World Overlords are contriving in order to impose their global dictatorship upon us.
Reforested land encourages cloud formation. Those new clouds reflect sunlight back to outer space where the deadly rays can melt some other planet’s ice caps. (I’ve been watching too much Colbert).
Food forests collect solar power in food calorie form and wood for burning while preventing loss of topsoil. Perhaps oil producing plants could make some biofuel. Permaculture swales, a natural water catchment method, stores rainwater using the landscape.
Coca Cola was one of the companies listed on an often played TV ad in the U.S. that shows the word “Copenhagen” morphing into “Hopenhagen.”
Maybe Coke’s marketing department was thinking of their polar bear mascots.
The solution to stopping global warming proposed by scientist Saul Griffith, in his SALT talk in January of this year, is to put renewable power generators (wind, photovoltaics, solar mirrors, etc.) on a land area he named “Renewistan” the size of North America, distributed throughout the world.
He actually mentioned that aluminum formerly used by energy hogging soda drinks should be polished into vast stretches of reflective solar mirrors instead. That would be the end of the evil power hungry manufacturer of corn syrup filled Coke! Good work, guys. Some energy drink, eh?
Neil’s item has a funny punchline about the Climategate emails being denied. Critics claim cap and trade will be a World Bank boondoggle that fails to limit carbon just like the U.S. bank bailouts failed to increase consumer access to credit.
There are other worrisome proposals in the draft Copenhagen treaty including, if the report I heard is correct, an unprecedented global tax on cross border financial transactions and we should be concerned for our freedoms.
The word from peer-reviewed journals like Nature is that the skeptics are “Laughable Paranoids on the Denialist Fringe.”
The U.S. Constitution has been a dead letter, or as former Prez W. called it, “just a goddamn piece of paper,” for some time. And long before 9-11 and the “Patriot” Act (there’s an Orwellian name for you)–maybe going back to when the War on Drugs first brought us SWAT teams and asset forfeiture laws? Yet the living document is enshrined and our rulers like to keep up appearances, so sometimes they’ll leave us alone like they’re supposed to. But perhaps that’s due to laziness on their part and our good fortune that we don’t get all the government we pay for.
Nobody can deny that the stated agenda of the meeting of world leaders in Copenhagen is about negotiating a binding treaty that would legally supercede the U.S. Constitution if adopted. Hopefully, the public will have an opportunity to comment on whatever is being proposed and at least have the chance to voice an opinion, however warped by propaganda it may be.
It would be swell if public policy that affects the entire planet, impacts millions of poor, starving children, costs trillions of dollars, creates global taxing authority and otherwise limits everyone’s freedom could be based on public data available to all.
Newsweek has a reputation for bias toward the Democrat party in the U.S. Browsing their website tends to support that notion, because of the anti-Fox News and pro-Federal Reserve articles. That Fed support is a bit much even for most Democrats. Job numbers are “growing” (still at 10% unemployment) and anything else the administration does is great.
In jarring contrast, the magazine’s print cover on the stands, which I couldn’t find online so I scanned it, shows the Capitol building with both houses of a Democrat majority Congress upside down. The headline reads in all caps, “HOW GREAT POWERS FALL.” A pull quote from the article by Niall Ferguson:
“42% of Americans say cutting the deficit in half is the administration’s most important task–compared with 24% for health care reform.”
Maybe the publisher put that economically alarmist cover out to sell copies. It worked for me–I collect such “disaster porn” these days. Check out my posts about Popular Mechanics and Los Angeles Magazine.
I’m also interesting in solving problems, in accord with the President’s vague “green jobs” proposal, I guess. I bought Homepower magazine’s survey of solar, wind, geothermal, micro-hydro and energy storage systems this month.
The Homepower issue also includes Michael Welch’s “Power Politics” column, “The French Nuclear Myth,” which even nuke proponents I’ve seen on video agree “have good PR.” Most of the French radioactive waste output is uncounted by the slogans of many nuclear cheerleaders, only the most lethal concentrated product is often cited in debate. A poll of French citizens according to the article, shows only 20% of them support their country’s nuclear industry, even as more reactors are being planned, which is about the same as the 20% support in anti-nuclear Germany.
The nuke proponent mentioned earlier, Dr. Joe Bonometti, advocates research and development of LFTR “Lifter” (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) designs that would use thorium, which is much more plentiful than the fuel used today facing “peak uranium.” A new thorium design could perhaps be cheaper than coal, with 300 times less waste and better safety in operation and from bomb makers than current reactors. There’s enough thorium in Idaho to keep the entire U.S. powered for thousands of years.
The title for this post is inspired by Newsweek’s rave review of “Me and Orson Welles,” a film in theaters now about the stage premiere of Caesar at Welles’ Mercury Theatre. From the Mercury Theatre online history page:
“Their first production, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, adapted by Mr. Welles (and set in fascist Italy), opened in New York on November 11 and created as much controversy as the young producers had hoped; The Mercury Theatre (along with the widespread public recognition of Orson Welles) was off and running.”
The film is getting good notices if little business. I enjoyed watching it at the Landmark and appreciate the three pages devoted to the ups and downs of Welles’ career in the Newsweek review.
Here’s a direct link to the Stewart Brand talk, Rethinking Green, mentioned a few posts back:
Harvard Gazette photo If you’re confused why something tagged “Winds-day” is being posted on a day other than Wednesday, let me remind you that the universe isn’t tied to your homeworld’s orbital position. Not by a strong force anyway. Moving on. . .
Although the great Saul Griffith talks about global warming a lot, his Instructables site, MAKE magazine, HOWTOONS, Squid Labs, Potenco and other fantastic projects are worthy of admiration by even the most militant AGW skeptic.
Just because Piltdown Man was a complete scientific fraud doesn’t make evolution, a theory accepted even by the Vatican today, invalid. Similarly, the climate gate irregularities may ultimately result in a bulletproof AGW model that will find greater acceptance.
I lean against the “warm mongers” position (as J. Neil Schulman calls the alarmists), but realize I could be wrong. There are plenty of other environmental threats that make emitting lung killing particulates a bad thing. Also, economic collapse and war over scarce resources should encourage development of domestic energy sources, especially when the answer is blowin’ in the wind.
Griffith’s Makani Power site declares a goal of harvesting high altitude wind energy.
“Capturing a small fraction of the global high-altitude wind energy flux could be sufficient to supply the current energy needs of the globe. Makani is developing high-altitude wind energy extraction technologies aimed at the most powerful wind resources.”
“Making kite-mounted power plants requires only off-the-shelf technology, and the physics is straightforward. The same wind that flows over a wing to keep the kite aloft can be captured as energy by wing-mounted turbines.”
The BBC online story “Hydro-electricity in Wales: Turning streams into cash” describes micro-hydro turbines gaining popularity among farmers. The small systems are generating the amount of power used in surrounding communities.
The linked article at MAKE online, “Ocean power,” reports that the invention was inspired by the powerful vortex that destroyed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge shortly after it was built in 1940, reminding me of how Shawn Frayne came up with his cheap mylar ribbon “windbelt” power generator.
Josiah Warren began publishing his The Peaceful Revolutionist paper in 1833, and is most famous for promoting his version of “The Sovereignty of the Individual.” He ran a successful “time store” in Cincinnati based on his theories and later founded entire utopian communities.
If you’ve been in the broad libertarian movement, you’ll likely have heard about a book titled The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton, since it features a police detective infiltrating a vast violent anarchist conspiracy operating across Europe. He makes some astounding discoveries.
G.K.’s humorous take on radicals, in this work written in 1908, could have been written yesterday, even though the setting is reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes story with horse drawn carriages and gaslight. Chesterton was a bit of a reformer himself by dint of his Catholic Distributism.
Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society, answers the question, “Who is this guy and why haven’t I heard of him?” He gives three explanations to “. . .and why haven’t I heard of him?”, “1. I don’t know, 2. You’ve been cheated, and 3.—-” I’ll save his long, serious explanation for perusal at his site.
This Thanksgiving I’m thankful to my co-author Brad Linaweaver for putting Chesterton as a character in our collaborative alternate history novel, Anarquia.
“Frankly — as a subscriber to Permakent who has it as the only external blog on my blog roll at J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review — I’d been waiting for you to make a statement on this for several days. Just as I was disappointed in Randy Herrst for not being first in line to attack the victim disarmament at Fort Hood, I am likewise disappointed that your excellent private comments to Brad have not yet appeared publicly on Permakent.”
“My motivation for this blog about permaculture is “carbon neutral.” Do ignorant government politicians use pseudoscience to whip up bogus threats? All the time. But do corporations cover their ass by denying real hazards? Uh, yep.”
I continued to explain the agnostic position I still have on global warming in that post.
Whatever your motivation for planting a food forest, having battery backup or going completely off-grid with wind, solar or geothermal power generation, I agree with such action. You should not be a gridhead subject to being unplugged by government and corporate masters. That includes a grid powered by coal with some converted to gas or big nuke plants and plug-ins.
That being said, here’s the message about the grid titled “AGW Debate Ends Forever. NOT.”
I agree with the skeptic Swindle show guys that the “hacker” might be classified under UK law as a legal “whistleblower,” performing a public service uncovering this kind of scientific fraud, considering the bogus agitation, massive economic impact and loss of freedom it caused.
Yes. The story appeared in the Slimes and other big media, but is being marginalized with great vigor depending on the outlet.
The scientists involved with the Swindle show are combing through the leaked email archive with relish. The emails came from the inner circle that falsely “peer reviews” articles only on the alarmist side of the issue.
Skeptic Tim Ball wrote:
“Dominant names involved are ones I have followed throughout my career including, Phil Jones, Benjamin Santer, Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Jonathan Overpeck, Ken Briffa and Tom Wigley. I have watched climate science hijacked and corrupted by this small group of scientists. This small, elite, community was named by Professor Wegman in his report to the National Academy of Science (NAS).”
Ball thinks this might be the end of the road for the alarmists, but they have such a global industry in place and friendly environmental journalists who won’t get paid for good news. Getting the truth out beyond Limbaugh, Beck and Hannity will be difficult, I think. I would love to be wrong.
“. . .the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion. Surely this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the Carbon Credits shell game.”
Even if the skeptics lose the media battle in the end and we have to shove coal up our asses this Cthulhumas, at least non-carbon-emitting NUKES like they have in FRANCE are gaining ground with U.S. environmentalists. A recent SALT podcast from the San Francisco Long Now Foundation hosted by Whole Earth Catalog creator Stuart Brand is a big part of the resurgence. [Update: It’s *Stewart* Brand. The case for green nuke power goes back at least to the 1980s, when I was researching a talk on alternative energy to a Green group. The Swindle show says Thatcher promoted global warming to sell the building of British nuke plants. Even if power came from solar and wind (on a large scale) it would still be the grid.]
Coal gasification plants don’t build themselves overnight. Nukes might get done in about the same time and energy is energy.
The article describes the San Jose based company, Solexant, in some detail including, “The company expects to sell modules for $1 per watt, with efficiencies above 10 percent.”
Nanotech leader Paul Alivisatos, of UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Lab, sits on Solexant’s board.
TR describes the strategy, “. . .Solexant is banking on simpler, cheaper printing processes and materials, as well as lower initial capital costs to build its plants.”
A recent WorldChanging article, which came to my attention in this TreeHugger article, complains about the alleged “Dark Side of Transition Thinking,” and thus bashes a growing movement active throughout the world.
The author, Alex Steffen, wrote in “Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities?” that “All over the world, groups of people with graduate degrees, affluence, decades of work experience, varieties of advanced training and technological capacities beyond the imagining of our great-grandparents are coming together, looking into the face of apocalypse… and deciding to start a seed exchange or a kids clothing swap.”
He goes on to complain that these individual efforts, which I guess would include a Green Transition Chico potluck being held today by the Chico Permaculture Guild in one of my old stomping grounds, don’t do important things like starting a credit union or massive political organization.
Maybe they should ape ACORN instead. As if big government and corporations have really been effective lately other than completely wasting our energy and wealth.
Ask anyone who is out of work or soon will be, is having their unemployment run out, their other relief benefits slashed, their businesses bankrupted, their houses foreclosed, their stock prices crashed, and their kids in school dropping out because of the lack of undebased money. With no foreseeable job prospects or purchasing power in the official economy, why bother going into massive debt to pay for an education that used to be affordable by the working class without tax subsidized student loans a generation ago?
In my opinion, if you don’t want to starve, it would be prudent to get out your gardening gloves or be able to trade with your local farmer even if the official currency is worth nothing, there is no traditional job income and no bank credit. The barter and local private party exchanges Steffen thinks are trivial may be the only way trade is done in the not so distant future.
Did the aboveground economy come roaring back when I wasn’t looking? No. Even more job layoffs are projected next year. Start prepping. Learn to do things yourself. Don’t come crying to me when you wake up dead in the food riots thanks to hyperinflation. (Gotta work that “food riots thanks to hyperinflation” thing in every so often).
Back to that ee-vil Alex Steffen, why not add free and open source software that runs most of the world’s Internet servers to the list of things Steffen scoffs at? That’s just little nerdy groups like GNU and individuals like Linus Torvalds and geeky volunteers tinkering around. I bet he hates bunnies, puppies and kittens, too.
Sustainable production methods being tested by the slackers at Open Farm Tech promise to deliver copylefted free technology for building houses, mechanized farm equipment and “China on your desktop” CNC and 3D printing manufacturing systems for many consumer products automatically at one tenth the cost of current prices. These technically adept hobbyists should work for Monsanto getting patents or pay big city rents in a highrise apartment so they can work in a highrise brokerage bilking you out of your life savings. Instead, these layabouts live cheap on Missouri farmland creating their “Resilient Community Construction Set” blueprints for a hungry world, those bums.
Used to be, the Land Question was about collective vs. individual property rights or full plenum allodium title versus the Henry Georgists and the Distributists. Ayn Rand staked out her homestead on an economic position of individualism.
From inside Russia during the dark red dawn at the beginning of the Soviet empire, Rand saw Europe as a bright planet and America as the sun. She admired the skyline of New York as a monument to achievement and eventually made it her home.
The atheist Ayn Rand also wrote about peculiarly defined “altruists” (enemies of individualism ranging from Catholics to Communists) “forcing mankind to unite to form one neck ready for one leash.” What about depending on one city to provide vital services?
Another problem with Steffen and Rand’s love of New York is that living there is not economically sustainable compared to raw land or cheap housing that can be purchased free and clear forever in low tax states for the cost of an amazingly few months rent in the big city. After those few months in the Big Apple, you’d be homeless in the very likely event that you lose your income these days. Didn’t they see Rent for Chrissakes?
Peter Thiel, a PayPal founder and pioneer behind The SeaSteading Institute, has been criticized for his cunning plan of escaping taxes and other irritating regulations by building a gated community in the ocean. Here’s a Cato Unbound article he wrote about his philosophy, “The Education of a Libertarian.”
Such a community might achieve self-sufficiency through solar, wind, and wave power enough to desalinate the seawater for drinking and freshwater floating garden irrigation as well as through ocean aquaculture and deep sea fishing.
A seastead could trade with vessels bringing supplies by providing fresh food, biofuel, hydrogen, or stored electricity and whatever other goods and services are feasible to produce at sea.
I hope their commercial theatrical release opens wider than Food, Inc.’s, which I caught at one of the few showings in a small theater in Culver City. Dirt the Movie is also available for pre-order on DVD online.
I noticed the existence of the film from an ad in Documentary magazine, which also features a story about ‘Joe Berlinger’s “Crude” Awakening’ under the big headline “Oil Change” on this month’s cover.
Dirt! the Movie (there’s an exclamation mark supposed to be in there), from what I gather from the engaging trailer, which you can see at their site and also at YouTube (embedded below), covers the damage that large scale mechanized agribusiness has done, including topsoil erosion, pollution and loss of soil fertility.
The trailer hints at a permaculture-ish organic no till and maybe forest garden alternative as solutions. I agree with that, but perhaps in order to scale up and feed the world, smart mechanization with farm robots weeding without herbicides and pesticides could plant, tend and harvest polyculture crops with better vision and object recognition systems. Engadget featured something that might be a first step in that direction last week. Here’s an ongoing Georgia Tech Growbot Symposium blog.
The film was an official selection at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and a winner at the 2009 Mendocino and Maui film festivals. Here’s an excerpt from the movie’s online description:
“DIRT! the Movie–narrated by Jaime Lee Curtis–brings to life the environmental, economic, social and political impact that the soil has. It shares the stories of experts from all over the world who study and are able to harness the beauty and power of a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with soil.”
This is a response to my friend Brad Linaweaver’s article “Repent, Roman!” and several comments in the Mondo Cult forum. Follow the links at Mondo Cult online.
It’s appropriate to review the real life horror story, Polanski 2: The Extradition, on Halloween weekend.
An L.A. Times editorial published Oct. 31, 2009 defends the Jew hunters in Switzerland who grabbed Roman Polanski before he could receive his lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival. The headline of the Times editorial is “Polanski’s victim is not judge and jury.” The editorial is full of verbage best read in a German accent about the continuing danger he poses to society and the community. If correct, he’s a menace to the French, who seem not to be afraid of him. But nein, nein, nein! Achtung! Vee must make an example of him! Macht schnell! Let’s bring him to California where he can have the taxpayers spend more money they don’t have on his case and perhaps have the prosecution fumble the ball O.J. style so he can be released in Hollywood. Then he could be our menace.
The victim, Samantha Geimer, age 45 now, states that she wishes the whole matter would just go away, according to CNN reporter Ann O’Neill, in a story titled “Victim: Courts did more harm than Polanski.” The story includes this passage, “Every time this case is brought to the attention of the court, great focus is made of me, my family, my mother and others,” Geimer wrote in her affidavit to the court. “That attention is not pleasant to experience and is not worth maintaining over some irrelevant legal nicety, the continuation of the case.” . . . She wrote in January, “I have become a victim of the actions of the district attorney.”
Despite Geimer’s claim that “I was this sweet 13-year-old girl” who got unfairly tagged as a little Lolita, Gore Vidal recently (Oct. 28, 2009) called her a “hooker” in an interview about his career in The Atlantic. Following up on the widely reported comment, Vidal said, “The media can’t get anything straight. . .The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko – that’s what people were calling him – well, the story is totally different now from what it was then.” The Atlantic interviewer also asked, “Errol Flynn stood trial for raping underage girls in 1943, and was acquitted. Was he treated differently than Roman Polanski?” Vidal replied, “Everybody liked Errol Flynn.”
Mondo Cult forum commenter “traveler” made some interesting points. First, if there were only 48 days left on Polanski’s sentence, it seems logical to serve that brief a time considering the serious charge. But then again, accused child molesters are targets in prison, so perhaps Polanski didn’t believe he would survive his term. The failing U.S. “justice” system, with California being one of the worst, can’t “remain a topic for discussion another time” – it is the topic.
Oh, and as for Brad, my co-author on the novel Anarquia, bashing the “Totalitarian Internet?” Sometimes my Kentribution is to reign in his natural Luddite impulse. After all, isn’t he getting to speak his piece on the dread Interweb itself?
Punishing crime is not justice. It may be “maintaining order” to enforce laws forbidding women to possess and use vibrators in the state of Mississippi (thankfully guns are legal), but true justice is restoring victims to a condition of pre-harm, not indulging puritans of the religious right and anti-sex-league left. While researching this subject, I learned that the age of consent in California went up since the Sixties, from 16 to 18. Really? All those actresses appearing nude in Celebrity Sleuth were virgins on their 18th birthday? As Brad has often said, “Everyone in the country laughs at the idea that the age of consent in California is 18.”
California courts are ordering the release of 40,000 thugs due to prison overcrowding in the first wave of perhaps a series of forced releases thanks to the budget crisis. The financial bubble that burst was caused by the Federal Reserve’s increase of the money supply. Rest assured that victimless vice squad “criminals,” unapproved drug users, and non-violent offenders will remain locked up as long as possible.
Brad’s modest proposal is for California to receive some money from Polanski instead of adding taxpayers to the list of victims next to Samantha Geimer. “America needs money more than it needs symbolism.” I don’t believe it will be enough to stop the chaos from government caused hyperinflation and the food riots to follow. How much stability will there be when the State of California issues IOUs not just to its vendors, but to its welfare recipients? Expect disorder.
I was surprised not to find Ruth Stout already here in a search of this blog.
Ruth lived from 1884 until 1980 and is famous for her planting method of essentially pressing seeds into the ground, which she prepared by covering with soft hay to protect from the sun, suppress weeds and keep the ground moist. There are a few other things she did, but nothing compared to conventional horticulture.
Hers was such a quick and easy way of planting without plowing, weeding, poison sprays and time consuming labor that she was able to do it into her nineties. Seems like the title of one her books about this approach is truth in advertising, Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy, and the Indolent.
An alternative that might be tried in combination with hay mulching is to create permaculture seedballs from red clay, organic compost, seeds and water then let them dry out to be cast on the ground to germinate when the rains come.
A food forest that thrived without human intervention for many years indicates that these methods could work on remote untended land, what survivalist/preppers like Jack Spirko call a “bug out location.”
“”We should have had the 37th anniversary or the 41 and 1/2 anniversary; 40 seems too predictable for Python,” says Michael Palin, one of six members of the comedy troupe that launched Monty Python’s Flying Circus in 1969.”
Don’t worry, Mike. Giant man-eating snakes invading the U.S. are in the news to help with the publicity.
“Nine species of giant snakes—none of them native to North America and all popular pets among reptile lovers—could wreak havoc on U.S. ecosystems if the snakes become established in the wild, according to a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)”
If that’s not absurd enough for you, this report from Miami claims that PETA is concerned for the snakes, which grow up to 20 feet long in South Florida.
“Thankfully, while South Florida’s and potentially the nation’s ecosystems and wildlife are being threatened by invasive species, PETA is doing their best to ensure that thousands of 200-pound giant snakes die a dignified death.”
I want those *bleep*ing snakes off this *bleeping* continent!
British humour and weird Internet memes win yet again.
In the October, 2009 issue of Los Angeles Magazine, amongst the full page luxury car ads, guides to trendy clothing stores, restaurants, shopping in general, and Hollywood industry discussion, I was surprised to see “Homegrown” and “How to have a bumper crop right in your own backyard” on the cover.
The print edition has a section about gardeners of urban edible plants, a guide to nurseries hip to this new trend, and even a page about different types of chickens available for egg and/or meat production.
There are advocates of urbanism, such as the author of this “Green Metropolis” article in a different publication, who prefer dense highrise cities to living off suburban and rural land.
“. . .Manhattan was and remains a very good environmental model, with its highly efficient use of land and walkable neighborhoods. And that, if we could bring the per capita environmental footprint of America closer to that of Manhattan, we would be achieving a great green success.”
I wonder how green Manhattan looks if, due to hyperinflation, the water, power and waste management stops and there are serious food shortages? A couple months rent in the big city could buy an acre or two of rural land free and clear.
I’d bet crime and disease would spread more rapidly in a densely packed population than between self reliant off grid homesteads growing their own food, fuel and medicinal plants.
Would thousands of people in a skyscraper be able to get by as well on rooftop gardens and rainwater collectors? I doubt it.
From Australia comes a story, “Trend blossoms,” by Meg Sobey in the Moonee Valley Community News about neighbors doing an extreme makeover of a family’s backyard. (Thanks, Google Alerts).
“IT is difficult to imagine that Melanie Henkel’s kitchen once looked out over a grey courtyard. Her backyard now resembles a miniature farm, offering vegetables, fruit and even eggs for the dinner table.”
From a site devoted to this “Permablitz” doctrine, these permacultural “blitzoids” promulgate their “mulched Earth policy” of “eating the suburbs, one backyard at a time.”
Here’s a time lapse YouTube video of a similar backyard clearing and planting in the Netherlands.
I hope this backyard makeover trend catches on in the U.S. It’s something to bring up with any permies or guerrilla gardeners you may know.
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A recent WorldChanging article, which came to my attention in 
