Iraq War photo Gallery

I've just been made aware of this photo gallery from 2005. Der Spiegel ran an interesting piece in association with it. Very disturbing and graphic, but must see all.

Why I am ready to stop listening to NPR

Weapons claims revive calls for action against Iran

This piece cites several Bush administration officials who are hawks, quotes Joe Lieberman, claims that the Bush administration has pursued a diplomatic solution for the last year, repeats all the claims about Iran being a threat and supplying weapons to everyone, and offers no counter point. Maybe Judith Miller should look for a job at NPR.

LibriVox

LibriVox: "LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project."

How to write about Africa

Directed to from BoingBoing...:

Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or
'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar',
'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow',
'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas',
'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means
Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans.

Never
have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or
in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent
ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make
sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

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Food Prices Expected to Rise 7.5%, Ethanol to Blame

From the Christian Science Monitor

The reason people are smarting: Inflation in grocery aisles is up by more in the first six months of 2007 than in all of 2006. That means food costs are on track for the biggest annual percentage hike since 1980, according to the Labor Department. The anticipated 7.5 percent increase would readily outflank the 2.6 percent core inflation rate to date, which excludes food and energy. It's across every grocery aisle, too, from burgers to bagels, from duck to dumpling.

[snip]
The chief culprit is corn, namely No. 2 feed corn, the staple of the breadbasket. In answer to President Bush's call for greater oil independence, the amount of feed corn distilled into ethanol is expected to double in the next five to six years. Distillation is already sucking up 18 percent of the total crop. The ethanol gambit, in turn, is sending corn prices to historic levels – topping $4 per bushel earlier this year, and remaining high. All of this trickles down to the boards at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, affecting the price of everything from sirloin to eggs (which are up, by the way, 18.6 percent across the nation).

Is Lieberman Sane?

After all the debacles, after losing the democratic nomination, after all the support our President bs, Lieberman lets fly with this as reported in the Financial Times:

“I think we’ve got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq,” Mr Lieberman told CBS. “And to me that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people to kill our soldiers.”

[snip]

“By some estimates, [Iranian-trained Iraqis] have killed as many as 200 American soldiers,” Mr Lieberman said. “Well, we can tell them we want them to stop that. But . . . we can’t just talk to them. If they don’t play by the rules, we’ve got to use our force. And to me that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they’re doing.”

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007: "Richard Rorty, the leading American philosopher and heir to the pragmatist tradition, passed away on Friday, June 8."

Ethanol Continued

Here are some more reasons why the shift to ethanol is a cluster fuck. Politicians have proposed this so that they can look like they have an energy policy and, especially here in the mid-west, look like they are doing something about creating jobs.

1. It cannot solve the problem with “foreign oil.” Bush's stated goal of having 15% of our fuel usage come from ethanol would require the entire US corn crop.¹ In addition ethanol yields less energy per gallon that gasoline: in other words, your 7mpg hummer now only gets 5mpg.

2. It produces less energy than is put into producing it. This is idiotic. So that we can become independent from foreign oil, we should plant and grow a bunch of corn that requires machinery powered by oil, fertilizers and pesticides produced from oil. While the USDA “scientists” claim there is a net energy gain, they do not take into account all inputs If all inputs are taken into account, 29% less energy is produced from burning ethanol than goes into the production of it.²

3. It causes environmental damage. It does produce fewer emissions than gasoline when burnt. But, Corn requires more pesticides, herbicides, and nitrogen fertilizers than any other food crop. Production of the corn requires fossil fuels and the production of the ethanol from the corn produces “Volatile organic compounds” including “formaldehyde and acetic acid, both carcinogens. Methanol, although not known to cause cancer, also is classified as a hazardous pollutant.”³

4. It drives up the price of food. Most of the corn grown in the US goes to animal feed and so, when you drive around that corn, you drive up the prices of milk, eggs, meat, cheese, staples for poor people like us.

5. It doesn't benefit farmers. "Initially we all were excited by the high prices," said Troy Roush, a sixth-generation farmer who grows 2,600 acres of corn in central Indiana. "But the truth is that the farmers won't keep any of it. There's an old saying that expenses will always rise to meet revenue. It all gets built in."

   And that's exactly what has happened: As the price of corn has gone up, so has the cost of growing it. In just two months, the price Roush paid for fertilizer doubled. And speculation has driven land prices through the roof. "It's insane," Roush said. "In the last four months our land values have increased 40 percent. We're all sitting around wondering if it's real."

   While most farmers own some land, the vast majority rent part or all of their acreage.⁴

6. It benefits large agribusiness. “Ethanol leader ADM’s market share has actually declined from a stunningly high 60 percent to a still-worrisome 25 to 30 percent in recent years. But a recent analysis by USDA agricultural economists concluded, “The fuel ethanol industry may very well be in transition toward an inevitable concentration of ownership into the hands of a few large processing firms.” The market is driven by large-scale gasoline refining firms, which “don’t want to deal with all these small plants,” and a “virtual consolidation of ethanol processing” is taking place. (ADM didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)”⁵

1See: Colin Carter and Henry I. Miller, Christian Science Monitor:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0521/p09s02-coop.html

2See David Pimentel (Cornell) and Tad W. Patzek (Berkeley), Natural Resources Research, Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2005.

3This is from an AP story. I found it on CBS news. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/03/tech/main508006.shtml

4Lisa Hamilton, “Ethanol Booms, Farmers Bust,” http://alternet.org/environment/52073/

5Christopher Cook, “Biofuel: Who Benefits - Smaller Growers or Just Large-Scale Producers and Agribusiness?” from the Friday, April 14, 2006, American Prospect, accessed at http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0414-22.htm.

Some Justice

Think Progress » Breaking: Libby Sentenced To 30 Months In Prison, $250,000 Fine: "Breaking: Libby Sentenced To 30 Months In Prison, $250,000 Fine"