‘Fortress America’ Visa System Scaring Businesses Away
December 29th, 2006Business travelers… How about Americans who escaped the U.S. and hope never to return!?
Via: International Herald Tribune:
For growing numbers of international business travelers, visa and customs regulations are making trips to the United States a thing of the past.
Companies say U.S. rules have become so onerous in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that it is often simpler to meet customers, business partners and employees elsewhere.
Sploid is Dead, Long Live Wonkette
December 28th, 2006Do you miss Sploid as much as I do? Well, Wonkette is starting to have that “Sploid” feel about it.
Ken, if you decide to strike out on your own somewhere, you know, with a Sploid-like thing on afterburner, I’m sure that many of us will link right in and get the ball rolling, if ya know what I’m sayin’….
Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash
December 28th, 2006UPDATE: 1/4/2007
The book is back at the regular Amazon price now. Thanks to everyone who ordered it at the special price!
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This book is priced at $2.99 (new) on Amazon right now! That’s a 77% discount. How/why? I don’t know, but spread the word…
Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash by Aric McBay:
Oil and energy are not limitless resources, and someday the supply will be depleted. Peak Oil Survival shows readers how to plan for the future: how to survive and thrive when the food, transport, and energy industries sputter out. Author Aric McBay gives an essential crash course complete with clear, simple instructions and easy-to-read diagrams. Peak Oil Survival will explain how people can protect their families and strengthen their communities in the event of a crisis – and live comfortably off the grid.
Cryptogon Reader Contributes $25
December 28th, 2006AH sent her $25 contribution to Cryptogon, but she wrote that she appreciates the Cryptogon-plus-Farmlet synergy. Thanks AH!
All Electric Vehicles and the Concept of Enough
December 28th, 2006The all electric SUV is almost here! While it’s not quite the electric Hummer I wrote about recently, what did I tell ya!?!
Head down to the clean, green Walmart to buy some blood soaked crap made by slaves in China with your somehow fungible U.S. dollars. Haul your goods back to your no-money-down, stucco box (“bought” with a 50 year adjustable rate mortgage) in your new, all electric, zero emission SUV! Water your lawn. Enjoy a handful of genetically engineered peanuts as you BBQ a big, juicy clone burger. Live it up! Because it’s back to work on Monday morning.
How much more absurd can this thing get?
While the energy situation we’re facing is a serious, engineered-to-happen crisis, it’s inconsequential when compared to the dire anthropological and spiritual shortcomings we humans continue to bump up against. We’re essentially feces flinging apes that somehow acquired the ability to create and use written languages and abstract computational techniques.
We have used these traits to systematically murder the Earth and enslave each other to the extent possible.
Don’t take this personally. I’m not saying that you are a planet killing fascist. But look at what has tended to happen when more than a few dozen people get together and it’s just not too pretty.
Yes, I know about the anti civilization movement, and I don’t see anything worth emulating there. I’m living a more primitive, lower energy existence than any of the people writing about anti civilization issues! This gives me quite a bit of pause about that area of inquiry. Besides, why stop at stone age tribes? Stone age tribes (the few non-violent ones, of course, not the head hunters, etc.) seem to be the nirvana state of being that these people like to write about, in front of their computers, in their heated homes. Why not crawl around on all fours? Why not partially blind ourselves to reduce our visual capability to that of a paramecium, with its light-sensing eyespot? If it’s all about going backwards, totally, and without question, why not really go for it!?
HA.
I don’t know why some of us have a concept of enough while most of us don’t. As the never-enoughers ruin the world, reactionary belief systems grow in popularity and seem increasingly valid, even though they are just as stupid as the more-forever paradigm.
Humans are great at extremism, but not so great at seeing the big picture, and carefully choosing and using appropriate tools to create stable systems that are in balance with the environment. While it’s theoretically possible to create stable systems that don’t wreck the planet, like lots of things on paper, it doesn’t happen in the real world. Why?
The tragedy of the commons is still the best explanation of why humans have failed—and will continue to fail—to create stable systems that are in balance with the environment. Even if some of us, or many of us, create such systems, hierarchical dominators will eventually build armies, bribe, swindle, deceive and kill us to exploit the stable systems we worked so hard to maintain. The enoughers have never been able to defend themselves from the notenoughers because the enoughers do not resort to extermination to achieve their goals. The notenoughers would rather see a resource destroyed than lose control of it.
The side that is better at extermination/exploitation will gain control, gain influence, and if unchecked by a different hierarchical dominator, this process will continue until some higher plateau is reached. Decline and disintegration follows in the years or decades after the plateau. Warlords will rise from the smoldering ruins, climb the mountains of skulls and do it all over again.
So here we are, having never really developed the consciousness necessary to wield the tools—that our large brains enabled us to construct—in any good way, raping the commons to within an inch of its life. Instead of flinging feces, crushing skulls with clubs, lighting off cannons or shooting machine guns, the creatures are now armed with nuclear weapons. Same ape consciousness as ever, but with the power to exterminate with god-like efficiency.
So, while the clean, green fascists jump up and down and cheer the arrival of the all electric SUV, I’ll count each day that passes without the appearance of mushroom clouds as a precious gift to those of us who understood the concept of enough.
Via: Phoenix Motor Cars:
Phoenix Motorcars manufactures zero-emission, freeway-speed fleet vehicles. It is an early leader in the mass production of full function, green electric trucks and SUVs for commercial fleet use. Based in Ontario, California, Phoenix Motorcars uses the NanoSafe battery, a non-toxic, all-battery solution to eliminate noise and toxic vehicle emissions that contribute to air pollution.
FDA Approves Meat, Milk from Cloned Animals; No Labels Necessary
December 27th, 2006The darkness really is closing in on the U.S. now. It’s a struggle, trying to think of meaningful things to write about the U.S. and stories like this…
Most people involved with the meat industrial complex have never seen a cow on pasture. Have a look at the cows my wife and I are raising. You don’t have to bother with the words; the pictures are pretty self explanatory. Clones? Needles? Toxic chemicals? We don’t have any of that stuff on our farm and our cows are healthy, plump, active and happy.
Via: Boston Globe:
A long-awaited study by US scientists has concluded that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring are safe to eat and drink and should be allowed to enter the food supply without any special labeling.
The finding is a strong signal that the Food and Drug Administration will endorse the use of cloning technology for cattle, goats, and pigs when it publishes a key safety assessment intended to clear the way for formal approval of the products. That assessment is expected this week.
“All of the studies indicate that the composition of meat and milk from clones is within the compositional ranges of meat and milk consumed in the US,” the FDA scientists concluded in a report published in the Jan. 1 issue of the journal Theriogenology, which focuses on animal reproduction.
The study, however, prompted a sharp reaction from food safety advocates.
The FDA “has been trying to foist this bad science on us for several years,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Food Safety in Washington. “When there is so much concern among so many Americans, this is really a rush to judgment.”
Many ranchers and dairy producers have already cloned animals for meat and milk production, but a voluntary moratorium initiated about five years ago by the FDA has largely kept them and their offspring out of grocery stores and restaurants.
However, ranchers say there is no doubt that some of the animals taken to slaughterhouses in the past couple of years have been fathered by clones.
“There’s been lots and lots of them that went into the food chain,” said Larry Coleman, who raises limousin cattle in Charlo, Mont., and has made five clones of his prize bull, named First Down. He estimated that at least 10 of their offspring have wound up on dinner tables.
Since Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996, agricultural scientists have imagined a time when they could dispense with the uncertainties of conventional breeding and make exact copies of their best animals. Cows were cloned in 1998 and pigs followed in 2000.
Consumers greeted the news with a combination of amazement and revulsion.
U.A.E. Central Bank Is Selling Dollars, Buying Euros
December 27th, 2006Via: Bloomberg:
The United Arab Emirates will convert 8 percent of its foreign-exchange reserves to euros from dollars before September after the U.S. currency slumped this year, the country’s central bank governor said.
The U.A.E. has started “in a limited way” to sell part of its dollar reserves, Sultan Bin Nasser al-Suwaidi said in an interview in Abu Dhabi on Dec. 24. “We will accumulate euros each time the market appears to dip,” as part of a plan to expand the country’s holding of euros to 10 percent of the total from 2 percent today, he said.
Related: U.S., CHINA and EUROPE: FINGERS ON TRIGGERS IN MEXICAN STANDOFF
Scientists Get OK for Engineered Peanuts
December 27th, 2006Oh sure.
Via: AP:
A leading industry group has given scientists the go-ahead to build genetically engineered peanuts that could be safer, more nutritious and easier to grow than their conventional version.
The work could lead to peanuts that yield more oil for biofuel production, need less rainfall and grow more efficiently, with built-in herbicide and pest resistance – traits that have already been engineered into major crops such as cotton, corn, soybeans and canola.
For consumers, the work could lead to peanuts with enhanced flavor, more vitamins and nutrients, and possibly even nuts that are less likely to trigger allergic reactions, a life-threatening problem for a small percentage of the population and a major food industry concern.
A few researchers have been genetically modifying peanuts for at least a decade, but their discoveries have had little impact because the industry, fearing a consumer backlash, was reluctant to support the work.
However, with the two leading peanut-producing countries, China and India, working aggressively on transgenic peanuts, the American Peanut Council and its research arm, the Peanut Foundation, this month approved a major policy change. The council represents all segments of the industry – growers, shellers, exporters and manufacturers.
Work Outside D.C.’s Primary Blast Radius
December 27th, 2006Via: Washington Post:
Winchester and its neighbors along Interstate 81 in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley have much to recommend themselves to potential employers, including a low cost of living, access to a major highway and views of the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains.
More recently, though, the area has been successfully trumpeting another attribute: It is just outside the “blast zone.”
In a little-noticed migration with implications for both greater Washington and the valley, several federal agencies, including the FBI, are relocating operations to the I-81 corridor. Helping drive the shift is the government’s emphasis on security in a post-Sept. 11 world, which turns Winchester’s location 75 miles from Washington into a geographic ideal. It is far enough from the capital to escape the fallout of a nuclear explosion — a distance often estimated at 50 miles — but still close enough so that employees can get to the District relatively easily when they need to.
Truckload of Uranium Stolen in India
December 27th, 2006Via: Yahoo/AFP:
A container packed with radioactive material has been stolen from a fortified research facility in eastern India, prompting a major hunt and fears of contamination, officials said.
“It carries uranium and radiation and could have an adverse effect in an area of 1.5 kilometres (0.93 mile),” Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Khoda warned.
Khoda said the uranium was stolen nearly three weeks ago after being moved to a research site at the densely-populated town of Rajrappa from a federal atomic facility near Mumbai.
The United States and India this month signed a landmark atomic energy deal to give India access to western technology and nuclear fuel, despite warnings from critics that demand tighter security measures to prevent proliferation.
Khoda did not say to what degree the uranium was enriched to, although an official from Jharkhand’s Central Mine Planning and Development Institute (CMPDI) said the missing material was not highly-enriched.
“It was not highly-enriched but neither was it just yellow cake (uranium ore) and it was meant for a project but we can’t talk about that,” the official from the Ranchi-based CMPDI said on condition he not be named.
