Slashdot Mirror

See Jonathan Lethem's excellent essay on the subject: http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387

Bonus points if you get to the end and read through the references section :-)

Microsoft will cooperate as long as they have a shot at public sector revenue. This is hardly unique to China. If the nation of Venezuela wanted Microsoft products, they'd take their money.

I think American crossed the line into full-scale hipocracy(sp!!) by calling China out on censorship. The Chinese are more overt, but the effects are the same.

How about killing prisoners at Guantanamo? http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368 How was that story handled?? I'd argue that's a pretty serious situation and yet, somehow the mainstream media won't touch it. The title AP gave it was "Harper's questions three Guantanamo deaths." Somehow, prisoners under 24/7 observation are able to stuff rags down their throats AND THEN hang themselves? There's room for 'a question?' http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-01-18-guantanamo-deaths_N.htm?csp=34

How about the *massive* transfer of weath orchestrated by the Fed and Treasury? It's a 'bailout.' Maiden Lane 3 somehow generates profits in a way obvious to exactly no one. GM's debt holders got barely pennies on the dollar depending on their debt senority and yet AIG's counter parties got every single cent back. And the headline is "this is troubling" ?? http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jan2010/db2010018_994080.htm

Let's go back a few years to Sibel Edmonds story that *no* media would touch.

I missed the part where the American Republic was a bastion of Freedom.

You mean how like the CIA recently suicided 3 detainees by hanging in Guantanamo bay?

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

The article seems credible. No way I could verify it obviously but it has enough detail that I think it could be verified easily by the FBI or DOJ. If you could get them to do their job, that is.

Or how Bush biographer, J.H. Hatfield, commits suicide
http://archive.salon.com/politics/red/2001/07/20/blue/

Or how Dr. David Kelly, who published facts inconvenient to Bush's poodle, commits suicide
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/830/blair_s_crisis_bush_s_crisis

Or how Itojun, a lynchpin in IPv6 security which would have eliminated many network exploits not to mention Windows, died 'unexpectedly'?
http://www.wide.ad.jp/news/press/20071031-itojun-e.html

There are more. The list is already very long.

You mean how like the CIA recently suicided 3 detainees by hanging in Guantanamo bay?

http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368

The article seems credible. No way I could verify it obviously but it has enough detail that I think it could be verified easily by the FBI or DOJ. If you could get them to do their job, that is.

Jesus killed Mohammed:
The crusade for a Christian military
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/05/0082488

He found his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio, with a couple of sergeants. They were snickering like schoolboys. They had commissioned the Special Forces interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint a legend across their Bradley's armor, in giant red Arabic script.

"What's it mean?" asked Humphrey.

"Jesus killed Mohammed," one of the men told him. The soldiers guffawed. JESUS KILLED MOHAMMED was about to cruise into the Iraqi night. ...

  The Iraqi interpreter took to the roof, bullhorn in hand. ...

"Jesus kill Mohammed!" chanted the interpreter. "Jesus kill Mohammed!"

Yeah. They got a quasi-race war in the press, to distract the base from stuff like this:
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/09/hbc-90005704

and this:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/15/bagram/index.html

Hey! Stay classy America! Your Edward R. Murrow is a comedian for chris'sake!
http://crooksandliars.com/dday/colbert-goes-there-only-media-figure-america

Meanwhile - back in the states:
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/8133
http://www.examiner.com/x-10317-San-Diego-County-Political-Buzz-Examiner~y2009m9d11-San-Diego-Sheriff-deployed-military-crowd-control-device-at-Congressional-town-halls

Gosh. Glenn Beck didn't FREAK OUT about that, did he?

There was an interesting, personal account of what its like in these treatment centers in the March 2007 issue of Harpers. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/03/0081438 [not free, sadly]

The poll says more about Democrats than about scientists. Whether causally or casually, Democrats want to be perceived as being the "Smart Party". On the other hand, the Republicans have been referred to as the "Stupid Party" (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004449). One could argue that there is more evolutionary advantage for a party that appeals broadly to the uneducated than for a party that appeals narrowly to the educated. And hence the lack of enthusiasm among the Republican elites for educating the masses.

Some subset of the religious far right in America have difficulty reconciling the overt word of God with the covert evidence of God's creation. Again, this says more about human nature than it does about Nature's God. An all powerful deity certainly could have planted pre-aged fossils underground - as well as layered the bedrock of the world with metamorphic, sedimentary and igneous strata that tell a coherent worldwide tale of deep time. The innumerable celestial clocks of planets, stars and galaxies could have been set in vast logically interconnected ways stretching back billions of years before James Ussher assures us the Universe first drew breathe. But again, doesn't this say more about the good Bishop than it does about He to whom the tetragrammaton refers?

We share the world with the few who share our individual ideas and ideals and with the many who will dispute us. Every one of the faithful from every one of the world's great and small religions is an atheist - toward all the other religions. Who now believes in Jupiter and Ra, Zeus and Odin? A poll of what scientists believe is as pointless as a poll of spiritual beliefs. The defining difference, rather, is that at the end of the day (or aeon) there is now and ever shall be one science, but many religions.

To deny religion is commonplace - at least the denial of specific religions belonging to others. To deny specific facts uncovered through scientific methods is also commonplace - even more so from other scientists. But the real world is ever ready to overcome all arguments. Humans will most likely be long gone before the supervolcano under Yellowstone reasserts its own scientific world view. But however long that Apocalypse is in coming, one can be confident that it will arrive before the Rapture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture).

50,000 -- that's peanuts compared to the likes of Google or Yahoo etc... Here's a short article on the data center that Google is building (has built??) in Oregon.. http://harpers.org/media/slideshow/annot/2008-03/index.html

Take a look at how many people are currently calling for Bush to be tried as a war criminal.

Spain is currently pushing for exactly this.
Take a look at
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2007/03/spain-judge-says-bush-and-iraq-war.php and
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/hbc-90004640 for example.

This is because we basically eat natural gas, NG being the main feedstock for ammonia, which of course becomes fertilizer.

Its far worse than that because of diesel used for transportation and tractors and insecticides and, well, everything else.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/02/0079915

"Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten."

The theoildrum.com scientists seem to think ten is much more correct, a blathering mainstream media claims its 1:1, so it's probably somewhere in between, probably much closer to the scientists on theoildrum than to some magazine journalist. So, you can turn (the equivalent of) ten barrels of crude into (the equivalent of) one barrel of human food.

As a side issue, that is why it is not efficient to bicycle... if it takes ten gallons of gas to make the food equivalent of one gallon equivalent of bicycling. Just think about it. My car gets about 30 MPG and after a half hour 30 mile drive is thirsty for a gallon of gas. After a multi-hour 30 mile bike ride I am very hungry and can easily eat two pounds of food (and still lose weight, if it's salad and not eight quarter pounders with cheese and bacon). Anyway, that two pounds of food obviously takes twenty pounds of gasoline to grow and process and ship and cook. Now at 6 pounds of aviation gas per gallon (note I am not a pilot, but that is my fuzzy memory from wanting to be a pilot decades ago) that would make a bit over 3 gallons of gas to grow the food to bicycle 30 miles. Lets be very pessimistic and round my car down and bicycling up. I'm sure I can do better than 20 MPG for a car and I'm sure I'd do worse than 15 MPG for a bicycle. It's even worse if you have four people in the car vs four bike riders. Now bicycling is fun and good exercise, the fact that I'm wasting fossil fuel by bike riding instead of driving does not stop me from having a little fun, but I don't operate under some delusion that bicycling saves the planet compared to car driving.

Now if you're not going to bother making the food safe for humans to eat (like ethanol, or food that is imported from China) you can get that ratio down to maybe two barrels of crude makes one barrel of inedible fuel. Use far more toxic insecticides, process the inedible parts of the plant, a little rot at harvest time is OK as long as the overall total yield increases, bugs will ferment into fuel just as well as food ferments into fuel, etc. Some marketing people claim that under ideal perfect never attained conditions in the perfect climate ignoring some minor details like maintenance or personnel costs it is possible to turn one barrel of crude into slightly more than one barrel of ethanol, but no one believes that unless they are getting a marketing salary, or live in Brazil where they have a uniquely perfect climate.

If you enjoy being depressed, you may want to read "The Next Bubble", an article in Harper's by Eric Janszen from February 2008. He predicted this green bubble over a year ago, and it's a pretty grim prediction:

Supporting this alternative-energy bubble will be a boom in infrastructure--transportation and communications systems, water, and power. (...) Of course, alternative energy and the improvement of our infrastructure are both necessary for our national well-being; and therein lies the danger: hyperinflations, in the long run, are always destructive.

Sound something like recent legislation? Then comes the bad news:

The next bubble must be large enough to recover the losses from the housing bubble collapse. How bad will it be? Some rough calculations: the gross market value of all enterprises needed to develop hydroelectric power, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, wind farms, solar power, and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell technology--and the infrastructure to support it--is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion; assuming the bubble can get started, the hyperinflated fictitious value could add another $12 trillion. In a hyperinflation, infrastructure upgrades will accelerate, with plenty of opportunity for big government contractors fleeing the declining market in Iraq. Thus, we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver "energy security." When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry. FIRE, meanwhile, will already be engineering its next opportunity. Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble would be its absence.

Yes, you should read the whole article. It'll take some time, but you'll come away with a better understanding of how our global economy works these days.

ObCredit: I found this article via Memestreams.

What Obama can do is limited to what the citizens of the U.S. will support. Maybe U.S. citizens will support prosecution. Read the article in Harper's Magazine: Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration.

I think a lot of what the NSA does is just a smokescreen for the real purpose of the NSA, which is surveillance that gives someone an economic advantage. Certainly the NSA doesn't want to eliminate terrorists, because that would eventually cause the elimination of funding for the NSA. Any secret agency will eventually, or soon, become out of control.

Like this guy?

http://www.harpers.org/archive/1998/11/0059750

For those of you able to read

I haven't heard anything about this... where do you get it?

Well, I've heard similar things from a number of articles, but here's one from Naomi Klein in Harpers Magazine: http://harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197

When Paul Bremer shredded Iraq's Baathist constitution and replaced it with what The Economist greeted approvingly as "the wish list of foreign investors," there was one small detail he failed to mention: It was all completely illegal

Even the U.S.-appointed Iraqi politicians, up to now so obedient, were getting nervous about their own political futures if they went along with the privatization plans. Communications Minister Haider al-Abadi told me about his first meeting with Bremer. I said, Look, we don't have the mandate to sell any of this. Privatization is a big thing. We have to wait until there is an Iraqi government. Minister of Industry Mohamad Tofiq was even more direct: I am not going to do something that is not legal, so that's it.

Those were quickly pulled quotes, so you'll have to read it for yourself to get the full picture.

- John

You've been thinking about this article;

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908

Actually, I started off by calling candidates who would support your ideas idiots. So you can cut your half a dozen times down quite a bit.

Your better defense would have been to admit that you don't write well enough for anyone to discern precisely who you are insulting. Given that you have spewed insults on a couple of continents of people it is pretty clear you aren't that discriminating anyway.

Well, first off what did he lie to congress about? Are you talking about the state of the union address that was corrected the very next day and anyone with access to a radio, TV, or newspaper would have known that.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that 2nd sentence was a question. It's as good a place to start as any because it is utter nonsense and fiction, as usual.

Ignoring the significant evidence otherwise, let's assume the Niger uranium story made its way into the speech "by accident". You would be the only person to remember such an immediate correction. I refuse to play the game where you pull something out of your ass and I spend time proving you're lying. So show me the proof. Give me a traceable citation from January 29, 2003 to prove what you say. It should be easy, right?

On the other hand, here is a statement from the White House 2 and 1/2 months later repeating the same lie.

Or are you talking about the WMDs that there was specific inteligence (sic) to support. Hell, All during the Clinton years, the idea was the same and then all the after 2 years in office we are supposed to ignore all that because france said it wasn't true. well, here's a hint. France hasn't won a war in so long, nobody trusts their positions because they know it leads to defeat.

Wow, right out of the right wing lunatic play book. Never admit mistakes. Blame Clinton and the French, instead. Keep running that play for another election cycle or two, please!

Yup, a brilliant Bush move. Ignore the French. So what if they had much better contacts within the Hussein government than the US? They eat cheese! And ignore the Germans. And the UN. And even the British who wanted to wait on the UN. And, god forbid, don't wait for the UN inspectors to finish their work - they might report there was nothing to find and we would be denied shock and awe!

And all that "intelligence". You know, the plagiarized student papers, the the forged documents, the blurry satellite photos, and aluminum tubes, among so much other fabricated material. Whoever could have seen through that? Certainly not a Yale graduate or his entire administration and military!

And now, Mr. SumDumAss, who trusts us "knowing" it leads to defeat?

How it is unconstitutional to use signing statements of the law can't be passed to cover him in the first place.

Not that I really understand that sentence but...it isn't unconstitutional to issue signing statements, it's unconstitutional to use them to pretend that the president can ignore parts of the bill to which it is attached because he issued them. The signing statement is a footnote, not a line item veto.

You see, here is where the problems arise, You don't know what all of his signing statements are and you just assum that congress has the ultimate authority over the other branches by passing a law. Well, here is a hint for you. The roles and positions the different branches play can't be don't by another branch because the constitution gives each of those branches the power ha

The story of the Bush regime.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/10/0079780?pg=1

"A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies." (And that hasn't even been updated yet!)

While everyone basically suspected as such, the nation's highest leadership exacted retribution as if it were true, creating your mentioned dangerous cognitive dissonance.

Your hasty disclaimer - that your relevant, mild, and ordinary hypothetical is indeed just a hypothetical - speaks volumes towards your fear of your own government.

I would recommend neither qualifying nor apologizing for such words. Don't let them take away your right of expression by censoring yourself for them. Instead, embrace your words and defend the strength of your feelings with an indignant fury.

You might want to read this essay: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/06/0081057

Skipping a few steps, you could turn your radium paint into a neutron gun if you so desired. (Lead box with a shutter and aluminum (Or beryllium, like Mr. Boy scout*) You could also build a Farnsworth-Hirsch reactor http://www.fusor.net for a little more money and it would look a lot cooler on your workbench. Both are effective neutron sources.

What made his experience so remarkable was the persistence in acquiring materials. Whereas we would pop onto eBay and order some uranium ore, he spent days looking for radioactive rocks. When that failed he contacted a supplier on the opposite side of the world. The world is a lot smaller place now that it was in the early 90's.

It's not that vertical monopolies "fell out of favor" - they were instead regulated out of existence.

You have it backwards. Vertical integration was popular for much of the 20th century because of regulation. Namely, antitrust laws.

And beginning in the 1980s (continuing til now), antitrust regulation has been extremely lax. Thus, companies don't need to grow into a vertically-integrated form, as they can basically do whatever the fuck they want. So long as they don't gouge consumers. If they do that, then a slap on the wrist.

We still don't have a clue how to do strong AI, but we probably have the CPU power. One of those Google data centers probably could do strong AI if we had any clue how to program the thing. It certainly has more storage than a brain.

This isn't a hardware problem any more.

To most people (I hope!) the law is an uncrossable line. A solid boundary of ethical and moral behaviour.

I hope you're kidding, but you're probably not. I'm not sure why anyone would think of the law as an uncrossable line instead of something that says if you do X then you may be punished with Y.

If I'm willing to accept the punishment, then why should I feel bad about breaking the law?

Believing that something is moral and good simply because it's legal is pretty frightening. That sort of thinking leads me to believe that the individual has not developed a moral or ethical code of their own. This is the type of person that supports things like slavery and the oppression or murder of others because the law says it's okay. This is the type of person that will "go Nazi" if only given the chance.

Who Goes Nazi?

It may be Godwin, but it's also Harper's Magazine... from 1941.

http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/0020122

-theGreater.

corn derived ethanol is the only practical alternative to gasoline and it's renewable.

But ethanol isn't really renewable, at least not in the sense you're thinking, because we have to use so much oil-derived fertilizer to grow it each year.

I read an interesting article in Harper's about this a while back, called "The oil we eat". It says that "According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest". Even if the USDA is correct (and I'm suspicious), that's not a lot of savings.

Also, I don't see any easy way to create ethanol using renewable energy sources in the future - we'd have to come up with a way to create fertilizer (or otherwise inject energy into the soil for the corn to use) using wind or solar power. Maybe not impossible, but I've not heard of anyone even trying.. so it's not like the situation with ethanol is likely to improve much over time, either.

LOL. Yes, and they also don't take out zero-down mortgages, make car-buying decisions based on the monthly payment rather than the total cost, or rent extra-fancy furniture/tvs/etc when they could buy cheaper versions.

Average number of credit cards per U.S. household: 12.7

Just because you and your few closest buddies have some clue about financial planning, doesn't mean 99.9% of people do.

A republic, if you can keep it

You can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Haha. You mean like it's the job of the head of the EPA to advocate for the environment? Or the job of the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service to protect endangered species? Or the job of the US Attorneys to prosecute cases in a fair and nonpartisan manner? Or the job of the director of FEMA to respond to emergencies? (I'm not even going to bother linking to that one.)

I agree with you 100%--in fact, 120--but c'mon! Where was the outrage six years ago? This wolf-in-sheep's-clothes act has been going on since literally day one. It's partly gratifying to see people finally waking, but mostly just depressing and scary. Should things really have to sink this low before we start asking more from our leaders?

Harper's did a long article on these in the January 2007 issue. If you're a subscriber, you can go to http://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/0081345 to read it.

Also, if you're interested in this stuff, you might want to check out Ebbesmeyer's website and newsletter about beachcombing: http://beachcombersalert.org/

Tim Griffin, Michael Elston, Paul McNulty, Monica Goodling
Sara Taylor, Bradley Schlozman, Steve Biskupic, Alberto Gonzalez, David Safavian, Lurita Doan, Ken Tomlinson
Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Conrad Burns, Ted Stevens, Kyle Foggo, Duke Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, Mitchell Wade, Curt Weldon, Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Tobin
Scooter Libby, Manuel Miranda, Darleen Dryun, Thomas Scully, Chuck Mcgee, Pete Domenici
Porter Goss, Brant Bassett, Virgil Goode, Katherine Harris, Jerry Lewis, Ed Buckham, Steven Griles, Mark Foley, Paul Wolfowitz, Ken Lay, Conrad Black, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Roger Stilwell, Tony Rudy, Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon, William Heaton, Adam Kidan, Neil Volz,

Tim Griffin, Michael Elston, Paul McNulty, Monica Goodling
Sara Taylor, Bradley Schlozman, Steve Biskupic, Alberto Gonzalez, David Safavian, Lurita Doan, Ken Tomlinson
Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Conrad Burns, Ted Stevens, Kyle Foggo, Duke Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, Mitchell Wade, Curt Weldon, Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Tobin
Scooter Libby, Manuel Miranda, Darleen Dryun, Thomas Scully, Chuck Mcgee, Pete Domenici
Porter Goss, Brant Bassett, Virgil Goode, Katherine Harris, Jerry Lewis, Ed Buckham, Steven Griles, Mark Foley, Paul Wolfowitz, Ken Lay, Conrad Black, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Roger Stilwell, Tony Rudy, Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon, William Heaton, Adam Kidan, Neil Volz,

Your point about the viability of photographs as evidence for other things is well-taken. But I did RTFA - before it was on /.'s front page - and there are important other goals in this process. Forgive my long-windedness here, but hopefully it will clarify some of those.

You say you're not familiar with the Sudanese conflict, but you're right that there is more to the story. In particular, the conflict in Darfur is just the latest episode in a long, sad story of civil war and political stupidity, to put it nicely. The net result there is that the Sudanese government is acting largely with impunity in Darfur, as the African Union has a mere 7,000 troops in the region and the EU and UN are sitting on their thumbs.

One thing Nelson and the Amnesty/AAAS program in general are trying to do by releasing these photographs is let the Sudanese militias and government know that they are being watched. They're coupling the technological aspect with info from the ground.

Independent researchers, Amnesty workers, and refugees provide stories to go with the pictures, which helps corroborate the theory that it was violence that caused the fires. But they're also providing tips to the Amnesty/AAAS people that certain villages in Sudan might be next in advance. From my reading of TFA, I think they have two goals with these pictures: the first is that they want to let the Sudanese government know that they have their eye on those sites that appear to be at risk, and the second is that they want to be able to immediately commission new photos of those regions when word comes down that it has been attacked. Then their before/after photos are fresher, more reliable.

Second, these guys are not shy about saying they want to drum up support for the "Save Darfur" movement. They figure, probably correctly, that attaching photographs of villages burnt to a crisp to stories from refugees and survivors will strike a chord in the general population. So some of your comments are on-target, but they're already admitted.

Third, these photos provide information about regions the Sudanese government and militias have blocked off. TFA talks about one region no one has gotten into in years, not even Oxfam or the Red Cross. If the militias won't let them in, there's a good chance things are really bad there. These photos could provide meaningful intelligence about the situation on the ground.

Finally, let me reiterate what someone else said, though not so nicely: go find out more about Darfur. It's really a terrible story, but you're right that the media's depiction is one-sided. It really ignores the larger historical context and the political machinations that have made the situation what it is today. Harper's had a good write-up on it a year ago or so, and I'm sure there are myriad other resources. Cheers.

Build up their infrastructure? What have you been shooting into your veins, kiddo? The Bush crony Transnationals like Halliburton, Fluor Daniel, Lockheed Martin, Bechtel, et al., have destroyed the infrastructure - laying off as many Iraqis as possible and importing the cheapest foreign labor they can from Bangladesh, the Philippines and elsewhere.

They had a functioning army...now why do you suppose they fired them all - before they disarmed them?? Could it be the same reason Franks and his invading army ignored (at Franks' command) the cardinal rule of an invading force and secured the enemy's ordnance? Catch a clue, dood, read up on Naomi Klein's excellent article about the neocon's imbecilic strategy for Iraq. And read a few more books while you're at it (Blood Money, Armed Madhouse, etc.).

First of all, thanks for pointing me to that gapminder thing. Hours of fun.

The simplified model is still true for the price of a product. The thing that the GDP vs energy use model doesn't show is the money movement. There has always been a massive movement of money to China where they have a huge manufacturing base. Effectively when you buy that made in china toy you're sending a packet of money to china for them to spend on burning power.
The model does break down though in service industry based economies. This sort of answers the much more important question of "Can we be rich yet green?".
The way to be rich yet green is to only spend your money of services rather than products, then make sure the people you're giving the money to are not spending it on consumables, and so on, and on.
Say I give you $1,000,000 for a back rub, and you pay me back my million for me washing your car. Brilliant! We have both earned a million bucks this year, yet no trees were harmed.
Unfortunately the system works against that sort of thing. Although my house is quite green (by that I mean it's really cold in here), my university spends 70% of what is given for my research on services such as very wasteful heating, supercomputers sitting around the place turned on and not doing anything etc. So for now service industry spends most of its money on consumables (products or more directly electricity/fossil fuels).
Anyway, the facts that got me to think in this way are the Marxist economics with energy rather than wages and the fact that a number of products now link themselves to the price of oil rather than the price of currency(e.g. United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces).

An early precursor to this unfolded at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) a few months ago. In that case, a student was successful in getting the university to back off on its use of Turnitin for reasons similar to the case mentioned today. In the end, his professor had to mark the paper himself (gasp!) and judge whether any parts of it were plagiarized. Personally (full disclosure: I'm a prof), I think the objections to turnitin on the ground of copyright are a misuse of the latter so long as turnitin doesn't turn around and use the submissions for other purposes.

Here is the article:

http://harpers.org/TheMagicMountain.html

It's a fascinating look at the underworld of the Garbage Dwellers. It's really sad, horrible, horripilating, and awful.

The author says a recent garbagefall killed hundreds of people. And you're right: the people burn insulation off wires. Which still produces dioxins and carcinogens.

An excerpt:

Wandering from pile to pile, calling out, "Piyesa! Piyesa!" (Parts! Parts!), are brokers of electronic and computer components, a new and lucrative category of waste. I ask Bobby what's worth the most, and he replies without hesitating, "Epson." An empty refillable printer cartridge in working condition can go for as much as 350 pesos. Bobby knows the prices for all these, too: Monitor, 50 pesos. Motherboard, 30. Circuit boards for 25 a kilo, to be melted down for trace amounts of gold. Pentium chips, if the pins can be straightened, 50.

1. I believe everything I wrote above.
2. Trolling is when you say something you don't believe in order to elicit a desired response. Here I am saying something I do believe and don't expect any particular response - although I guess I should have expected the powers-that-be or one of their sheep to mod me down for speaking my mind.

Perhaps you don't remember this:

"People need to be careful what they say," said Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld stood up in front of the press in the white house and said that people need to be careful what they say. If you follow the link you can see that this is about allegations of desecration of the Koran by U.S. soldiers. If that wasn't a warning, I don't know WHAT it was. You can find more on that story in the Washington Post. This was a case where abuse of prisoners (if we adopt their methods, we become them - of course, we already Are them, we just have money so we don't have to use humans as munitions delivery systems) had been reported and Newsweek was threatened into dropping the story.

If you truly don't believe that this kind of abuse goes on in the USA, then you are part of the problem. Waking up to reality and the fact that a government that will treat other peoples as subhuman doesn't think too much of you either is the first step towards a solution.

Estimated number of calls made to Californian Al Nino since last year by people asking, "Why are you doing this?": 100

Fortunately, we have more than just anectdotal reports to lean on. I highly recommend Mark Crispin Miller's review of the studies that were done of the 2004 Ohio election from Harpers (http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptNoneDare.html). The conclusion of most of these was that Kerry probably won Ohio by a fair margin, but due to deliberate attempts to voter supression, incidents of touch-machines flipping mountains of votes to Bush or simply adding non-existent votes to the Bush column, and boxes of paper ballots mysteriously disappearing, he was denied a good many votes that should have gone to him.

These are facts, and you don't need to break out the tinfoil in order to apprehend them. Now, as to whether these efforts were the work of individuals or were coordinated by the likes of Karl Rove -- that's where documentation doesn't exist. But one way or another, it was a fraud, and there's no reason to assume it won't happen again. The pity is that, aside from a bit of idle discussion here and a on a few other websites, nothing will come of it.

As to your assertion that these incidents are getting too much attention, that's just dead wrong. The study done of Florida in the wake of the 2000 election was buried in the Times, as were the studies of Ohio in 2004. This very article is a good example of the problem -- it was printed in the *UK* for God's sake. Check Google News for "Florida" and you'll notice our story is the sixth one listed, after stuff about crocodiles and football. How's that for interest from the U.S. media? And not one paper picks up the Register's story. Is that what you call overreporting?

"The passport is nothing more than the evolution of the Lord's Chit"

This is probably the most insightful comment on this topic so far. Its the simple answer as to why more people haven't left the U.S. as its tilted to Fascism.

The fact is it is pretty hard to emigrate from the U.S., renounce your citizenship, and the process creates such high barriers most people wont run the gauntlet unless they are desperate. Most people instead opt to sit and wait and hope the country comes to its senses some day. Never underestimate the stupidity of American voters though, or the ability of the malevolent powers that be to manipulate them in to doing stupid things using fear mongering, propaganda and wedge issues.

Only 403 people renounced U.S. citizensip in 2002 and most were people who had immigrated to the U.S. and decided to return to their homeland.

Here is a somewhat humorous and sad article on why its a pain to kiss your U.S. citizenship goodbye. When this article was written there were still a few Caribbean islands selling citizenships for dollars but the U.S. has been using political and economic pressure to shut them down mostly to prevent wealthy Americans from escaping U.S. taxes.

Fact is, as long as you are a U.S. citizen you are owned by the U.S. government and you can't escape that fact unless you consent to be owned by some other country, it usually takes years to do that, you cant have a criminal record or HIV, and you usually have to clear years worth of hurdles that are usually more painful than just staying where you are and hope things get better. If you ever commit a crime, even a relatively minor one like drug offenses, you are pretty much enslaved to the U.S. because chances are no one else will take you unless you are rich enough to grease some palms or willing to be an illegal alien.

If you still choose to emigrate note you have to file IRS tax returns every year until you renounce citizenship, and hope tax treaties keep you from getting taxed in both your new home and the old one. The IRS may not leave you alone even after you renounce if they think some of your wealth belong to them.

You also cant legally emigrate or renounce your citizenship to escape military service. So if you joined the military before 9/11 to get that college education and not to fight an ugly illegal war in Iraq you are stuck until Uncle Sam lets you go. If the draft comes back you also wont be able to emigrate to escape it. It could be political suicide for whomever institutes a draft, but it could well happen since Uncle Sam will need more cannon fodder if Iraq continues to go south, and the U.S. opts to "Stay the Course", or if places like Iran or North Korea go south too. The U.S. barely has the cannon fodder for the current wars, fewer people want to volunteer, so if they need many more targets at all the draft will be back.

So it usually takes years, is usually not easy, and you wont be free of Uncle Sam until you've succeeded in gaining citizenship elsewhere and renounced U.S. citizenship. During this multi year process a myriad of things can go wrong that derail the whole process, a minor scrap with the law in your new home, can torpedo the whole process for example. Somewhere during the process, or worse right after you renounce your U.S. citizenship, the U.S. could come to its senses, elect a moderate sensible government, while your new home could go off the political deep end. Take comfort that the chances the U.S. will elect a moderate, sensible government look to be pretty low lately.

Unless you are attempting refugee status, and no country is going to given an American refugee status, chances are you need to be either very affluent or you are going to need a company to sponsor and employ you. If you have a nice employer and a job you like this isn't so bad, but there is a wicked catch. Your residence in your new country is often almost completely dependent on that employer, they know

"Have you noticed that the trend in technology is to use less and less power, and to be smaller and smaller (meaning requiring less materials?)"

are you sure about that?

It seems to me that for many things we are using more and more energy to do the same tasks.
Take for example food production, the most important thing we produce.
I've read a few times something like the following...

"In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1."

http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html

I only use that site as a reference cause I found it quickly but feel free to look into it. I'd prefer if it wasn't true :)

I'm going to go with the path of least resistence here and say, "Because there's nothing to report."

This is quoted from None dare call it stolen:

Even so, the evidence that something went extremely wrong last fall is copious, and not hard to find. Much of it was noted at the time, albeit by local papers and haphazardly. Concerning the decisive contest in Ohio, the evidence is lucidly compiled in a single congressional report, which, for the last half-year, has been available to anyone inclined to read it. It is a veritable arsenal of "smoking guns"--and yet its findings may be less extraordinary than the fact that no one in this country seems to care about them.

There's a lot more interesting reading (at the least) at that link.

The Gestapo isn't going to stop them from voting or rig the election.

If you'd like to educate yourself on what actually happened, I would suggest reading Harper's excellent and insightful None Dare Call it Stolen, which delves heavily into Representative John Conyers of Michigan's Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio.

Free to change? I dont think so. It's actually quite expensive and difficult to do so. http://www.harpers.org/ElectingToLeave.html

I can't really speak for Dell, but the usual way of doing it is this:

1: go to manufacturer and negotiate reasonable prices for lots and lots of stuff
2(a): wait until the manufacturer ramps up the workforce/leases on equipment and space to meet your order and has a significant portion of their income tied to your continued patronage
3(b): Tell them that they're going to lose your orders unless they reduce the price of their products and refuse to pay more when costs go up. Since such a huge part of their income comes from you, it'd be impossible for them to lose your business, no matter the cost
3: profit (massively, at the expense of pretty much everyone else)

There's an interesting article here: http://www.harpers.org/BreakingTheChain.html

Truth. But you are making a mistake in assuming that they are profiting from it. A 6% net profit doesn't lend much to the theory of:

Truth, they aren't profiting that much (well, apart from Halliburton). But not for lack of trying: http://www.harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html.

The US administration tried to basically GIVE the entire Iraqi oil production over to a few lucky companies. That's what I call profit.