One Stop Thought Shop

HUGE tree-planting scheme

2009-07-15T00:31:00.000-07:00

Folks are definitely worrying:

MASS tree planting across Australia’s farmlands could provide feedstock to supply 90% of the nation’s transport fuel by 2030.

via CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia's national science agency and one of the largest and most diverse research agencies in the world.

a long way differs

2009-07-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

Just jump and evolve:

The part of the brain wanting pleasure is different from the part of the brain experiencing pleasure.

Community Collage

2009-07-14T22:37:00.000-07:00

“I love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, ‘Well, this is Obama’s economy,’”

the president said before an overwhelmingly supportive outdoor crowd at Macomb Community College.

“That’s fine — give it to me. My job is to solve problems, not stand on the sidelines and carp and gripe.”

The jab was not included in his prepared remarks, which focused on an announcement that the administration was proposing to spend $12 billion to bolster the nation’s network of community colleges. Community colleges are heavily attended by working adults, some seeking new expertise, others remedial instruction on the way to four-year college.

So the administration’s proposal should have particular resonance:

Commie-in-Chief Obama to give billions to community colleges in effort to make us into Socialist Hippie China Pinkotown.

Staying around awhile?

2009-07-14T22:20:00.000-07:00

Representatives Data Reported

2009-07-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

Study reveals votes are glued to contributors.

"I’m continually surprised by how direct the relationship is between the supporters of the bills, their financial backers and the correlations between campaign contributors and votes."

I'm not surprised.

Sad.

This is not just an abstract concept – money and politics...

What our analysis suggests is that there’s a good reason these special interests spend thousands of dollars – they get something in return.

Plug-in this

2009-07-14T16:18:00.000-07:00

Grass and ass

2009-07-14T15:12:00.000-07:00

My favorite eco- grass-fed cow snippet found via food safety wiz Doug Powell at Kansas.

"Frequently, results of studies are conflicting or not repeatable, which speaks to the complexity of the hindgut ecosystem."

disreluctance

2009-07-14T12:10:00.000-07:00

a crafting of diplomacy:

"While there is a natural reluctance to consider change, we must do so since humanity cannot expect to achieve a sustainable and secure future by continuing the practices that have resulted in the unsustainable and insecure present."

:-)

Exploding soap bubble

2009-07-13T19:20:00.000-07:00

Richard Heeks' exploding last moment of a soap bubble.

Flying Flag of Distress

2009-07-13T15:45:00.000-07:00

In mid-June, Vito Congine, 46, an Iraq war veteran, began flying the flag upside down - an accepted way to signal distress - outside the restaurant he wants to open in Crivitz, a village of about 1,000 people some 65 miles north of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

He said his distress is likely bankruptcy because the village board refused to grant him a liquor license after he spent nearly $200,000 to buy and remodel a downtown building for an Italian supper club.

Congine's upside-down-flag represents distress to him.

Here's the rub: Hours before a Fourth of July parade, four police officers went to Congine's property and removed the flag under the advice of Marinette County District Attorney Allen Brey.

Neighbor Steven Klein watched in disbelief.

"I said, 'What are you doing?' They said, 'It is none of your business.'"

Who's playing who?

2009-07-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

Family member Levi Johnston says a little more on the NBC Today show. Interview and video is here.

"We had tons of offers coming in from everybody out there and just all kinds of ridiculous things.

"There's been talk about it would be nice to just take the money and run," anywhere from $7 to $9 million. "It's up there."

"She's very smart, but I just don't think she can handle the stress level as governor - I don't think she can handle it as president or vice president."

Here's Jolie, Lohan, Theron, Foster, Aniston and Witherspoon. The New York Daily News is wondering which actress should play Sarah Palin in any upcoming biopic.

Bathccidents

2009-07-12T21:48:00.000-07:00

I have never understood why we haven't replaced wet porcelain and slippery flooring.

A new national study finds kids are being hurt in bathtubs and showers at a surprising rate.

Experts at Nationwide Children's Hospital say slips and falls are far too common, sending more than 43,000 kids a year to the emergency department.

That's an average of 120 kids every day who are hurt in the tub or shower.

In most cases, parents are watching their kids, but it doesn't matter.

Rent Free

2009-07-12T20:16:00.000-07:00

Unsaid also brutish

2009-07-12T14:35:00.000-07:00

Oh, the wars for oil go on and on:

The increasing importance of the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang autonomous region as a source of the energy and minerals needed to fuel China’s booming eastern cities is raising the stakes for Beijing in its battle against separatists agitating for an independent state.

“The Chinese didn’t want to let Xinjiang be independent before, but after they built all the oilfields, it became absolutely impossible.”

The desert around the city is punctuated every kilometer or two by oil and gas derricks, each of them topped with the red Chinese national flag, an assertion of sovereignty over every inch of the energy-rich ground. [Financial Times 2008]

Shifting sand

2009-07-12T13:08:00.000-07:00

In the list for 2009, 140 companies are American, the lowest number on record. Seven of the top 10 firms are oil companies

Pocket Shelter

2009-07-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

From the Asia Times:

And this doesn't even count the inflation in other costs, such as how my health insurance went up by another 8.8%, taking me to over $13,000 a year in premiums, which doesn't count the $2,000 deductibles that my wife and I must each pay, or the co-pays, which means I am out of pocket over $15,000 a year before they start picking up any of my needed medical costs!

clean up the wreckage

2009-07-12T11:30:00.000-07:00

Obama:

I am confident that the United States of America will weather this economic storm. But once we clear away the wreckage, the real question is what we will build in its place. Even as we rescue this economy from a full-blown crisis, I have insisted that we must rebuild it better than before. For if we do not seize this moment to confront the weaknesses that have plagued our economy for decades, we will consign ourselves and our children to future crises, sluggish growth, or both.

We must continue to clean up the wreckage of this recession, but it is time to rebuild something better in its place.

Gizmos and the gun

2009-07-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

The Conflict Minerals Pledge calls on electronics companies to ensure that their products are conflict free.

By signing the pledge, companies commit to tracing and auditing their supply chains, so that when we as consumers buy an iPod or cell phone, we can be certain that our purchase is not funding crimes against humanity.

Consumers can endorse the pledge and add their voice to the thousands of people who have already called on these companies to practice their due diligence.

An army of humanzees

2009-07-11T12:06:00.000-07:00

Getting it on with primate cousins:

While evidence of humanzees has been scant, there is no longer much doubt about real attempts to create one, and in some cases in rather spectacular fashion.

Secret documents recently uncovered in state archives after the fall of the Soviet Union have revealed that in the mid-1920s Joseph Stalin enlisted Russia's top animal-breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, the father of artificial insemination, to conduct a series of "interspecies hybridization experiments" with the intention of creating what Stalin envisioned as an invincible "Planet of the Apes"-like army of humanzees with superhuman strength and stamina.

Put in the form of an official request from the Politburo to the Academy of Science in 1926, the plan was to create both a "living war machine" to bolster the then beleaguered Red Army, and a new labor force for the Soviet Union's first Five-Year Plan to build a modern industrialized and egalitarian society.

"I want a new invincible human being," Stalin is quoted in Russian newspapers as having instructed Ivanov, "insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

Ivanov arranged an expedition to the western African nation of Guinea in March 1926 to conduct his experiments. Despite repeated failures at impregnating chimpanzees with human sperm, Ivanov was reportedly convinced that he'd have no trouble enlisting local women to be inseminated with chimp sperm, but could find no one willing to participate.

Upon his return to the Soviet Union, Ivanov continued his hybridization experiments at a newly established primate station in Sukhumi, Georgia. He had intended to impregnate five human volunteers there, but the only mature male chimp at Sukhumi died before the plan could be carried out.

A Rare Event

2009-07-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

Senior Exec of Cigna health insurance turns coat:

BILL MOYERS: You told Congress that the industry has hijacked our health care system and turned it into a giant ATM for Wall Street. You said, "I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick, all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors." How do they satisfy their Wall Street investors?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, there's a measure of profitability that investors look to, and it's called a medical loss ratio. And it's unique to the health insurance industry.

And by medical loss ratio, I mean that it's a measure that tells investors or anyone else how much of a premium dollar is used by the insurance company to actually pay medical claims. And that has been shrinking, over the years, since the industry's been dominated by, or become dominated by for-profit insurance companies.

Back in the early '90s, or back during the time that the Clinton plan was being debated, 95 cents out of every dollar was sent, you know, on average was used by the insurance companies to pay claims. Last year, it was down to just slightly above 80 percent.

Firearms Friday

2009-07-11T10:23:00.000-07:00

So what's Sarah Palin's first appearance since resigning? She chose 'Firearms Friday', a gun rights show on KFAR radio in Fairbanks. She said wanted to free herself of the constraints of the governor's job so that she could "get out there and fight". Gee whiz.

Or as Andrew Sullivan writes in the Times:

The idea of Sarah Palin, though, is sadly not the reality of Sarah Palin. The reality of Sarah Palin is that politics is a means to her higher goal: celebrity.

...
And this helps explain the broader problem with American conservatism right now. It is less a movement than an industry.

From Fox News to talk radio to conservative publishing houses, it has created an alternate and lucrative media reality that is worth a fortune to those able to exploit it.

Alas, these alternative media thrive on paranoia, hatred of liberal elites and growing extremist rhetoric made worse by a hermetically sealed echo chamber of true believers.

Out to get him

2009-07-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

Former Vice Presidents don't receive Secret Service protection beyond six months after leaving office. Except Dick Cheney. USNews reports that threats against Cheney haven't lessened since his term expired.

Plastic Ocean

2009-07-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita

The crew is all in good spirits and working in full gear to document the debris state of the Pacific.

Only at decks edge, 3 feet off the water, can you see the small fragments drifting by, at a rate of 10 pieces per minute ... and the all too typical ingredients of the plastic bottles, buoys, fragments of plastic bags and hard plastics.

The crew was shocked by the amount floating by....

"No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn’t pick up all the trash we see…it is impossible!"

Feed Eight Billion

2009-07-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

Discuss:

The key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms.

In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986.

With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade—in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.

While hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent.

As a result, the number of people in developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today.

Part of this recent rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic crisis.

In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.

Yes, a banker's banker

2009-07-10T14:57:00.000-07:00

In describing the failure of the markets as far back as 1998, White wrote that it is naïve to assume that markets behave in a disciplined way.

But Greenspan, the champion of free markets, remained impassive.

White was losing his patience. Was there no other option than to regularly allow the economy to collapse? Didn't the policy of operating without a safety net border on stupidity? And wasn't it written, in both the Bible and the Koran, that it was important to provide for seven years of famine during seven good years?

This time, White didn't just want to discuss his views behind closed doors. ...an assault on everything Greenspan had preached and, as everyone knew, he was not fond of being contradicted.

This time, he decided to seek a broader audience.