Lefty Blogs
williampfaff ++ ++
Russian News ++
seaton-newslinks. USA expat in Europe ++
bilegrip Asu spleen ++
us-rockstroh a rant, not a blog ++
aboutmyplanet eco ++
sfgate ++
crookedtimber ++
onthecommons ++
sjlendman ++
....
abutamam freeiraq ++
airamericaradio +
amygdalagf +
angryarab ++
annezook +
antiwar ++
norwegianity
terrorism-news
blogspot
ourtomorrow
politickybitch
welcome-to-pottersville
aviraqi
billmon ++ whiskeyB
consortiumnews ++
dahrjamailiraq
dailywarnews ++
drforbush +
english +
fallujahinpictures
freespeechradio
halcyondays ++
healingiraq
hereticalideas ++
icasualties
maru
om
boxspinning boxes

jamaicaobserver newspaper
jameswolcott +
lefarkins +
liberalgirlnextdoor ++
lonehighlander Libya, not lefty
mahablog +++ solid
maruthecrankpot +
indymedia melbourne
messopotamian +7Apr06
monkey ++
motherjones ++
fisk
nocapital +
norightturn +NZ
peakoil ++
pilger +
politicalhumor +
raedinthemiddle
rafahtoday Feb05?
rense w= wacko conspiracies
rigorousintuition x
hegemon ++
ruckus ++
rudepundit ++
satiricalpolitical +
scaramoucheblog ++
secretsinbaghdad ++15Ap06
Energring
aliveinbaghdad ++
riverbendblog ++
sideshow +++
signs-of-the-times +++
slashdot ++techy
talkleft ++
thinkprogress ++
thismodernworld +++
uncapitalist ++
velorution ++ bicycles
org ++Brazil peasants
warandpiece +
warfare.ru +russia military
greenpeace
allhatnocattle
alternet ++
americanpolitics
antiwar
gbruno ++YT
axisoflogic ++
blackcommentator
bobharris +
bradblog +
buckfush +funnies
buggery +
buzzflash ++
changeforamerica
countercurrents
counterpunch +++
crisispapers
crooksandliars ++?
csmonitor
dahrjamailiraqhref="http://www.dailykos.com/
davidcorn
democracynow
democracyuprising
dissidentvoice
earthfirstjournal
earthstation5
empirenotes
foodfirst
fpif
fromthewilderness
geocities
granta
grist ??
gristmagazine
guerrillanews
gulf
hizbollah
huffingtonpost ++
informationclearinghouse
infoshop +
inthesetimes x
iranmania x
ivaw
jihadunspun
juancole ++
kuro5hin ++ notlefty
kurtnimmo ++
lrb ++ Iraqi?
mahablog
lewrockwell ++
marklynas climate change
mnftiu get your war on comics
motherjones
nilemedia
nybooks
occupationwatch
oriononline
palestine
prisonplanet
rall ++ Ted Rall cartonist
ratical
redpepper
rense
robert
rollingstone
scoop
selvesandothers ++
smirkingchimp
snappingturtle
socialistworker
spiked
tblog
theiraqiroulette
theleftcoaster +
thepoorman +
tnr ++ magazine
tompaine ++ mag
traprockpeace ++
truthout +
boondocks ++
crowning3
. . . helix
Base
rain radar
Weather
worldtribunal +
worldwatch ++ $ required
zaman + Turkish news
youcantmakeitup + ?
youngfox ????????????
bareknucklepolitics videos?
popdrain videos??
discovery videos??
cs videos??
aegisIraq video??
mariyaguchi video??
iwilltryit video..
baghdadtreasure
ahram cairo newspaper
felbers
thepartyline
jfaughnan 28/04/2006 10:25AM
shrillblog +
thinkprogress +
marchforjustice + pictures
messopotamian + Iraqi not so radical, but scared (also see IraqTheModel which was a USA front, but is now also scared)
scaramoucheblog +
counterpunch
.............
blogads liberal blogs by CPM $ per view
malakandsky ++ stolid?
republicoft + black gay parent??
dailykos ++
rawstory ++
democraticunderground ++
atrios ++
workingforchange +
leftinthewest +
dembloggers +
talkingpointsmemo +
firedoglake ++
vastleft ++
pamspaulding +
americablog +
washingtonmonthly ++
mydd +
politics1 +
bartcop ++
politicalwire +
sisterstalk black lesbian?
culturekitchen ++
alternet
wonkette +++
billstclair +
freefreedomtoldhere ++ pipe bomb

......
almuajaha defunct
whynot defunct
winstonsmith defunct
samadams dormant
mquinn02 defunct
iraqblogcount ++14Apr06 suspended
iraqicomments most recent: jan2005
iraqidoctor most recent: Aug2005
georgemustgo + moved?
vialls ++Dormant (joe is dead)
warblogging Defunct
hammeroftruth quiescant?
mediastorm quiescant? +
bushwhackedusa defunct
hamasonline defunct
4Jul06

22 June 2006

The Passenger, monkey lov, bisphenol A, grain, pale anemone crab, Leonard Cohen, Hine Te Aparangi

I believe your questions demonstrate more about you than my answers will demonstrate about me.
Maria
Maria
At last Jack has allowed Antonioni's "The Passenger" out on DVD
One of the Great Movies. passenger othervoices ejumpcut
I sat through All A's Monica Vitti movies of the 60's. Arty indeed.
I recall seeing The Passenger with the beautiful June Pallot in Auckland 1975
The last moment of perfect happiness in my life? Zooming back down Grafton Gully on my motorbike. June went on to become an architect, one of her house designs appeared in a NZ architecture book.Then she got another degree in economics, and went with Roger Douglas to an IMF meeting in Washington. Became Professor of Accountancy at the University of Canterbury.
June died from cancer on 5 November 2004 at the age of 51. No one told me. I discovered just now on google.
So at this moment I'm considering chucking this desk and heading into the Malian Desert.

Is there anything more pathetic than a Satrapy snarling at a running dog?
Iraq's Trade Minister has lashed out at Australia after escorts guarding an embassy delegation that visited him at his Baghdad office shot dead one of his guards and wounded several others.
"They are trampling on the dignity and sovereignty of Iraqis," Minister Abdel Falah al-Sudany..
"We demand an explanation from the Australian Government for this intentional and unwarranted criminal aggression against members of our protection force.

Apparently al-Sudany has called for all trade with Aus to halt. Guess he doesnt know on which side his bread is buttered. Doesnt he realise that Aus troops are notoriously akward with weapons (see Pv Kovko, killed while tossing his 9mm in a bedroom jape]

macleans topix Leonard Cohen ripped off by his long-time manager

The U.S. consumes 21 million barrels of petroleum each day (3 gallons/person). Even if we utilized all 72 million acres of corn planted in the nation for ethanol and biodiesel, it would satisfy only 10% of our current petroleum consumption

acs
bisphenol A (BPA)
6 billion pounds....polycarbonate plastic - the resin lining food cans - and dental sealants.
the journal Endocrinology, Beverly Rubin..tiny pumps into female mice. From the 8th day of pregnancy until the 16th day of nursing, these pumps released doses of BPA into the mothers. .. on the eighth day .. mice begin growing neurons in a region of the brain that is critical for sexual behavior.
250 nanograms per kilogram per day (ng/kg/d)
95% of Americans excrete 100 parts per trillion (ppt) of BPA in their urine.
..In a section of the brain that controls the sexual cycle, female mice have 2–3 times as many neurons as males. But female mice who had been exposed to BPA ..fewer neurons than usual ..activity level ..dropped and mirrored that of their brothers.

"We found that the differences between males and females, at least for these two markers, were obliterated" adds Rubin.

October 2004 Novozymes and Genencor,..created genetically modified organisms [started with the fungus Trichoderma reesei] that produce large amounts of cellulase enzymes that digest cellulose efficiently.
..reduced the cost of cellulose-digesting enzymes to 10 - 18 cents per gallon of ethanol... cost of cellulosic ethanol $1.50 per gal

Over their 30-year life spans, photovoltaic panels with an area of 10 meter² can spare ..40 tons of CO2..
..photovoltaic systems can pay back the energy required for their production, installation, and dismantling in 19-56 months. Even better, solar panels deliver 8-18 times that amount over their lifetimes.
eupvplatform [pdf]

enn June 16, 2006 By the Earth Policy Institute
"This year's world grain harvest is projected to fall short of consumption by 61 million tons, marking the sixth time in the last seven years that production has failed to satisfy demand... world carryover stocks at the end of this crop year are projected to drop to 57 days of consumption, the shortest buffer since the 56-day-low in 1972 that triggered a doubling of grain prices,
...The 2006 world grain harvest of 1,984 million tons,(USDA in its June crop report), is down 24 million tons from last year, 1% .. down 3% from the historical high of 2,044 million tons produced in 2004 data
...Roughly 60% of the world grain harvest is consumed as food, 36% as feed, and 3% as fuel. While the use of grain for food and feed grows by roughly 1% per year, that used for fuel is growing by over 20% per year.
..Among crop ecologists there is now a consensus that for each temperature rise of 1°C above the historical average during the growing season, we can expect a 10% decline in grain yields.

crab
This pale anemone crab is one of three crab species in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands that invite the soft-bodied animals to piggyback on their shells...
..Sylvia Earle said the National Geographic book Archipelago was among the influences that led U.S. President Bush to designate the region a national monument... Bush thanked Earle, noting that she gave him "a pretty good lecture about life."

beyondorganic mp3 Global Warming & Community

Hine
Hine Te Aparangi. from flickr

flickr
spiky

Windows nagging you about that Panthip Plaza XP?
wga mydigitallife mydigitallife com zdnet

boing boing stuff:
fundumper
thinkgeek
Monkey Love
monkey love
blogger blabshow blabshow


21 June 2006

Little Tommy Tucker, Jabaliya, Alkatiri, Favorit, Victorias Basement

Little Tommy Tucker
Sing for your supper.
What shall he sing for?
White bread and butter.
How can he cut it
Without any knife?
How can he marry
Without any wife?

Good news from Iraq, some USAnians have got their just deserts:
"they were killed in a barbaric way" - as opposed to the civilised way that neoZion shells children and keeps Australians in sensory deprivation for years.

Kristian Menchaca & Thomas L Tucker
"mutilated beyond recognition." - how right, Nahr . crusaders given their own medecine.

20 June 2006.. aljazeera ..
An Israeli air strike on a car in the northern Gaza Strip has killed three Palestinian children and wounded 10 other people.
..The sources named one of the dead children as Mohammed Jamal Roqa, a five-year-old boy. A seven-year-old girl who died was not immediately identified.
..a 16-year-old girl also died of her wounds, and that among the other injured children, ranging in age from three to 12, three were in a grave condition.
..aircraft fired missiles at a car in the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza.
Witnesses said the people in the car jumped out before the blast.
..Israel's Channel 2 TV said the raid was "another failed assassination attempt, and again innocent civilians were hit".

In Timor-L'este PM Mari Alkatiri has got right up the Australians nose, perhaps because he insisted that Australia give back the oil fields that it had attempted to steal.
Alkatiri is a descendent of Yemeni immigrants, word in Dili is he is related to UbL.
Meanwhile Pres Xanana Gusmao hugs every murderous Indonesian he meets, someone ought to tell him that a handshake might suffuce.

Russian rockets. Just which is the best Ground to air in the world?
SA-10D/E/F Grumble / S300PMU/2/3
"Several 48N6E2 missiles were launched to intercept Scuds. During the interception, the explosion of the air defense missiles' military load detonated the high-explosive charge of the ballistic missiles. .. The best achievement of Patriot missiles during Operation Desert Storm was the interception of Scud missiles after which the latter deviated from the termination point by four to five kilometers. Throughout the Gulf war, Patriots never managed to destroy a single Scud missile in the Scudsair.
According to the Air Defense Forces command, Favorit is now the world's most powerful and efficient air defense system. "
.. .. ..
Or:
The S-400 (NATO name SA-20 Triumf)..
The Triumph system's architecture is similar to that of the Favorit air defense system, but significantly outperforms it in terms of the following basic performance characteristics:
- maximum target engaging ranges and altitudes;
- target/missile channel capacity;
- jamming immunity of ground-based and onboard electronic facilities;
- high fire power potential;
- maximum target speed (5,000 m/s) that corresponds to nonstrategic ballistic missiles with a range of up to 3,500 km.
.. .. ..
Both presumably suprass the short range TOR-M1 9M330 as supplied to Iran?

____zz
The South Island
The South Island 12 June 2006
big

Thug
Victorias Basement Assault: kitchen-ware shop in Alexandria Sydney.
This guy demanded to see my bag. I asked for his ID, which seems a sensible precaution. He refused, seemed unable to say any English other than 'show me your bag', chased me into the street, hit me in the chest - not hard, with his 210 cm he would have flattened me. I yelled "dont attack me" - he ceased.
Moral:Its not safe to shop in Victorias Basement.










20 June 2006

Dong, Klimt, Search, Cryptography

Dong
Dong or NoDong? Can this baby really drop a nuke on my house?
USA say that NKorea cant do the layer-cake Be-Pu-U-Pu-U to make a small enough bomb.
Also the 3rd stage is notional as yet?



KlimtD
artchive .. cs
Pricey picture $137E6 Adele apparently had a deformed finger, which elicits my sympathy.




KlimtH


Search Me: I would dearly love a means to search my Computer, but sadly Yahoo & Google have caught the µsoft disease: They have ceased offering simple functionality and now want to occupy your entire computer. Both have search "bars" which confuse and dismay and seek to dominate your machine.
µsoft has an indexing service, which bizarrely enough do not connect with WExplorers Search - unless...
xpsearch says for XP use @filename words?inside* in the word or phrase area
or !"some content" Simple. Obscure. Stupid
[this does seem to work in Wind2000]
Even more sadly, I once wrote an Intel Machine code Boyer-More search. Which got lost in the floppy conversion on 91? My code showed the line containing the search term centered in 80 characters, irrespective of eol/lf characters - what a beauty!

Also lost, I guess, Kuttaka.exe My TPascal Large integer calculator
Sifr my RSA encryption source, including Intel Assembler Large Integer Maths
From around 1986 to 1991 or later I had the worlds fastest RSA PC.
Eventually machines got fast enough that Machine Assembler wasn't necessary. I have a working RSA key demo which signs in about 10msec (1024 bits). In the early days on 8086 that was about 20 secs (512 bits) so machines have got at least 16000x faster.
I have got tired, and have now little interest in Prime Numbers, Cryptography, Assembler, and all that. Writing for the Aus Defense Dept gave me Sciatica. The winners in the RSA field were a couple of Aussies who gave away their C++ source, which seemed crazy at the time, but their SSL code is now behind the tiny padlock you see in your browser window.

19 June 2006

Mouse, Baghdad Social Discord, Fin whales, Evolution in 10 words

3 am this morning, Rugby with no hands dressed down by off-form Brazil
- some big money on 2-0? That missed Brazil goal was too easy...

My house has regressed from untidy to trashy, the mammals are moving in. What I suppose (hope) is a brushtailed possum scrabbles noisily round my attic most nights. I havn't been up there to check on my stored stuff. Any stuff not used within 6 months belongs to the critters, they say. A fat mouse has taken to tintambulating noisily around my dishes pile, maybe she'll scrape them clean. I left a dozen ganja seeds on a saucer for her, she labouriously scraped the insides out. The woody husk is, as I suspect, indigestible. The insides have the only perfectly matched Omega3|Omega6 EFAs in the plant kingdom.
Social
digbysblog
wapo pdf
[Apologies for the jpg, but the wapo doc is in pdf (ugh!) that well-known turd on the Internet shag-pile]
[oddly Digby's link gets into the wapo, other links dont & bugmenot.com is blocked in wapo]


more Digby
So I grabbed her little sister and pulled her in front of me.
As the bullets began to fly
The blood sprayed from between her eyes
And then I laughed maniacally
Then I hid behind the TV
And I locked and loaded my M-16
And I blew those little fuckers to eternity.
And I said

Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad
Sherpa Sherpa Bak Allah
They should have known they were fucking with a Marine


18Jun06
Starting from last November it has doubled its quota of minke whales, and started killing highly endangered fin whales, the second biggest species. And from next year it will start slaughtering the humpbacks.
Yesterday Joji Moshita, "we put priority on science rather than politics or emotions."
[humpback]is at less than a fifth of its former abundance.
So if emotion doesnt count, lets grab a typical Japanese whaler, strip him naked and plunge him in icy water until just before he dies or gets frostbite. That way, no scientific harm would be done, just some emotional upset.

ruckus .. punkasscrusade .. not your soldier


The Perth-based company that markets the sunscreen Invisible Zinc, Ganehill Pty Ltd, said it also had no safety concerns. Megan Gale invisible zinc $30 150g

Evolution in 10 words:
evolution_in_less_than_10_word
drrob

"Discrete Genes imperfectly reproducing vary organisms success at reproduction."

I believe the discrete 'digital' nature of genes is important. The alternative pre-mendel 'analog' or 'continuous' gives 'blending' which caused CD some head-scratching.

The 'imperfectly' is best very small. Organisms spend as much as they can on DNA repair. Wouldnt you want to stay the same if you were the product of 4.5 billion years of testing?

A common mis-understanding is that the purpose of sex is to 'increase variety' to 'enable evolution'. Whereas organisms desperately want not to change. Bill Hamiltons idea that sex is to resist faster smaller biters, ie parasites, seems the best.
.... .... .... .... .... .... ....
I'm a big fan of Bill Hamilton, but not his rather silly ideas on human eugenics. He seemed to be worried that we are headed to a 'hospital' society while we allow mutants to survive. He vaguely suggested a 'voucher' system for good breeders. My leftish anti-authoritarian views immediately ask 'who dispenses the vouchers?'
S J Gould had politics more sympathetic to me, but I note his fat book has just one line on Bill H. even though Bill was called 'the greatest theoretical biologist since Darwin' or some such, by someone big (?)
.... .... .... .... .... .... ....
typepad levels of selection
gene expression