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No Oil For War!

For all the talk of America’s growing reliance on computers, advanced sensors, and stealth technology to prevail in warfare, it has been oil above all that gave the US military its capacity to “project power” onto distant battlefields like Iraq and Afghanistan. Every Humvee, tank, helicopter, and jet fighter requires its daily ration of petroleum, without which America’s technology-driven military would be forced to abandon the battlefield. No surprise, then, that the US Department of Defense is the world’s single-biggest consumer of petroleum … The average GI in Iraq now uses about seven times as much oil per day as GIs did in the first Gulf War less than two decades ago. And every sign indicates that the same ratio of increase will apply to coming conflicts; that the daily cost of fighting will skyrocket; and that the Pentagon’s capacity to shoulder multiple foreign military burdens will unravel. Thus are superpowers undone.

Tags: Afghanistan, Gulf War, Iraq, Pentagon, US, United States, geopolitics, oil by mike
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Captain Birdseye… Pirate!

Many of those fish you can see in such glorious abundance in Spanish markets … come not from European seas but from the coasts of the continents of the poor: Africa, South America and parts of Asia … Since 1979 the EU has negotiated deals on fishing rights with a string of impoverished African countries. Despite the EU’s own studies indicating massive and quite possibly irreversible damage to fish stocks off west Africa, these deals continue to be struck. In 2002, the year an EU report revealed that the Senegalese fish biomass had declined 75 per cent in 15 years, Brussels bought rights for four years’ fishing of tuna and bottom-dwelling fish on the Senegal coasts … among the millions of Africans who depend on fish as their main source of protein, consumption has declined from 9kg per year to 7kg.

Tags: EU, European Union, Senegal, fishing, food by mike
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Architecture Astronomy

Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you’re on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone…anyone…to come see the demo code they’ve just written with their “20% time,” doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization… between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy.

Tags: Google, Microsoft, Python, software by mike
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Serendipitous Germans

Diamorphine, also known as heroin, was first synthesized for commercial use in 1897. The men who discovered it, Felix Hoffman and Arthur Eichengrun, had also, a couple of weeks earlier, invented aspirin; for some years, heroin could be bought over the counter and aspirin required a prescription.

Irony is intense here, and the article is “technically” correct in that heroin was first synthesised in 1897 for commercial use. However, G.H. Beckett and C.R. Alder Wright were the first people known to have actually synthesised heroin, a generation earlier in 1874.

Tags: Arthur Eichengrun, Aspirin, Bayer, C.R. Alder Wright, Diamorphine, Felix Hoffman, G.H. Beckett, acetylsalicylic acid, diacetylmorphine, heroin by mike
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Corn Welfare

[Brazil] already churns out what many consider to be the world’s cheapest and most efficient mass-produced biofuel … In the United States, a 54 cent-per-gallon tax blocks most Brazilian ethanol from reaching U.S. consumers. Similar tariffs also block access to Europe, China and other major energy markets … the United States continues to block Brazilian ethanol while boosting production of ethanol made from corn, which produces much less ethanol per acre than sugar does, cuts into food supplies and does little to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions … an acre of sugar cane in Brazil produces about 800 gallons of ethanol, while an acre of corn produces 328 gallons … corn also must be converted into sugar before it can be turned into ethanol … sugar-cane ethanol produces 8 units of energy for every 1 unit of fossil fuels invested in its production, while the ratio for corn ethanol is 1.3 to 1.

Tags: corn, corporate welfare, ethanol by mike
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Military Targetting

“I can confirm that we conducted a strike in Sadr City this morning,” a US military spokesman told AFP. “The targets were known criminal elements. Battle damage assessment is currently ongoing.” However, witnesses and an AFP reporter at the scene said the main Al-Sadr hospital had been badly damaged and a fleet of ambulances were destroyed.

Tags: Baghdad, Iraq by mike
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Washington DC Crime Wave

“Why are we talking about this in the White House?” John Ashcroft nervously asked his fellow members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee. (The Principals were Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General Ashcroft.) “History will not judge this kindly,” Ashcroft predicted. “This” is torture.

Tags: Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, George Tenet, John Ashcroft, torture by mike
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