With oil prices at crippling highs, the project would convert cars in the Makati financial district to run on a mix of 40 percent diesel and 60 percent cooking oil, its police chief Senior Superintendent Gilbert Cruz said.
Used cooking oil will be donated by Makati outlets of the hamburger giant, said McDonalds franchising manager Buth Salaya.
Okay this isn't a solution to the world's energy needs but the point is energy is pretty damn common and we've been addicted to the easy energy fix for years and haven't bothered looking into tapping other sources. And sources is plural. It'll be many things in many areas, it'll be nut oil in rural India and massive heat sinks in Australia. Standardization will be difficult and it won't be cheap, but that means new industries will arise and jobs will be created. The only losers in the long run will be the people who have funded elections world wide for the past thirty years: big oil.
...thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.
...
The reason for this cognitive disconnect is that we have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old.
The "reality" tribe (or "libruls" as they are often called in the wild) depend on cogent arguments based on actual proposals by Obama and mistakes by McCain and no one cares because they are shrill. The libruls are thin and underfed, and we've heard they're grouchy a lot.
I readily concede that, you know, it's not going to produce a barrel of oil tomorrow, but it is going to change the psychology that demand will constantly outstrip supply. As I said in my remarks, it's going to take a while to get these reserves on line. But it won't take a while to send a signal to the world that we're willing to use new technologies to find oil reserves here at home.
Yeah, we'll start drilling so that 10 years form now we can turn around and yell "psych!" at all the folks pumping gas at $12 a gallon. Wheeee.
"I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold," Mr. McCain said, referring to Roosevelt’s reputation for reform, environmentalism and tough foreign policy.
Not sure what he means by mold. Maybe he's thinking as President he'll be moldy? And by moldy I mean old. In fact there are almost as many years between McCain's birth and Obama's birth as there are between McCain's birth and Teddy's Presidency.
John McCain likes to say he has often crossed the aisle and worked with Democratic Senators.
And it is true.
In fact I can think of one famous example of him working with 4 Democratic Senators: The Keating Five
The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Four of the Senators were Democrats, but always the maverick, Republican Sen. McCain wanted in.
Gray [former chief of the Federal Home Loan Ban Board (FHLBB)] testified that several U.S. senators had approached him and requested that he ease off on the Lincoln investigation.
...
McCain received $112,000 by 1987 from Keating and Keating's relatives and employees to McCain's Senate campaign, more than any of the other Senators.
And yes there were expensive jet rides and vacations that McCain forgot to pay for until things started getting hot. Scandal aside, the Savings and Loan collapse should sound very familiar to you.
The rich getting richer didn't happen just under Bush, it happened under Clinton and Reagan too.
The government being the lap dog of corporations didn't start with Bush. It has been around for decades. Heck Eisenhower warned us of the danger of defense contractors influencing foreign policy almost 50 years ago.
If Obama wins he needs to be a radical.
Not a progressive radical.
An American radical.
He needs to recreate the dream. He needs to make it possible.
He doesn't need to "redistribute the wealth" he needs to stop the government handing it over to the wealthy.
The deck is stacked against small business. It doesn't matter if you are liberal or conservative, everyone should support small businesses.
They move the economy. They create real wealth and not paper wealth that leads to bubble burst after bubble burst.
They buy locally, this is good for the environment and the local economy involved.
Give me something familiar
Somethin' similar
To what we know already
That will keep us steady
Steady, steady
Steady going nowhere
- Fiona Apple (Please Please Please)
I don't know what to say... wait, how's this: "appalling"
HOUMA, La. (AP) — School officials in Terrebonne Parish are considering a policy that would require all commencement speeches to be in English.
The proposal comes after Hue and Cindy Vo, cousins who were co-valedictorians at Ellender High School, delivered part of their commencement addresses last month in Vietnamese.
...
Ms. Vo said her statement in Vietnamese was aimed at her parents, who do not speak fluent English. "Out of the whole speech, it’s one sentence dedicated to them to give thanks," she said.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former South African President Nelson Mandela is to be removed from a U.S. terrorism watch list under a bill President Bush signed Tuesday.
...
South Africa's apartheid government had designated the ANC a terrorist organization during the group's decades-long struggle against whites-only rule. Its members have been barred from receiving U.S. visas without special permission, and the bill Bush signed will lift that requirement, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said.
...
Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 with F. W. de Klerk, the South African president and National Party leader who worked with Mandela to end apartheid. Mandela replaced him as president in 1994 and served until 1999.
When Mandela took office he did a daring and wonderful thing: His administration created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Bush supporters, desperately trying to find one success from his "reign", often blurt out "America hasn't been attacked since 9/11."
Except of course that is not true, within days after 9/11 people were dying from a white powder delivered by a government employee. Some one was sending death via the post office. Why is it so east to forget the Anthrax "attack"?
For a already weakened national psyche this attack's effectiveness as a weapon of terror was dramatic. Middle America though frightened, angered, and saddened by the attack in NYC and the Pentagon still found it distant. But this, this was an attack that could effect anyone, anywhere.
It was probably these attacks more than 9/11 alone that pushed so many lawmakers onto the unPATRIOT ACT train.
Our government, laws, and society take precedent seriously, and the Bush administration sets so many dangerous precedents that they must not stand.
And unless Congress and the American people are willing to stomach impeachment hearings during an election year then the only thing we can do is if/when Obama gets elected we need to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Defense Department counterintelligence investigators suspected that Iranian exiles who provided dubious intelligence on Iraq and Iran to a small group of Pentagon officials might have "been used as agents of a foreign intelligence service ... to reach into and influence the highest levels of the U.S. government," a Senate Intelligence Committee report said...
This shouldn’t be a surprising or even outrageous question. Clues have been pointing towards this for years, lets take a look at a few of them shall we?
Tonight CineMax is showing my friend’s Oscar award winning documentary short Freeheld.
Detective Lieutenant Laurel Hester spent 25 years investigating tough cases in Ocean County, New Jersey, protecting the rights of victims and putting her life on the line. She had no reason to expect that in the last year of her life, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, that her final battle for justice would be for the woman she loved.
The documentary film "Freeheld" chronicles Laurel's struggle to transfer her earned pension to her domestic partner, Stacie Andree. With less than six months to live, Laurel refuses to back down when her elected officials - the Ocean County Freeholders -deny her request to leave her pension to Stacie, an automatic option for heterosexual married couples.
In the seventies GM (and others) sat back on their laurels watching the money rolling in from the muscle cars and large sedans. The money was rolling in - why put effort and risk into more fuel efficient designs with smaller margins? So when gas prices went up and the market wanted smaller more efficient cars the American car manufacturers were caught with their pants down and their profits plunged and their list of employees being laid off shot up.
I thought Chris Matthews opened Hardball last night with a strong argument about how the McClellan book is the final word on the fact that the Bush administration used propaganda to sell a war. Trickery and marketing was used to bring America into a war with Iraq. Not a discussion of the facts so Americans knew what we were asking our soldiers to fight and die for, but rather lies and manipulation were all that America received. He was angry. And I think happy to finally express his anger.
I also thought Chris Matthews looked like he agreed with Scott McClellan that the media didn't do its job.
But America's journalists have a weak chin and they really really disagreed with that - to the point of calling in to question all of McClellan's points, because if he thought the press wasn't doing their job - he's wrong. And what else was he wrong on?
David Gregory thinks it is a personal attack on him.
This war was a test case for NeoCon philosophies. Not just their obviously messed up foreign policy concepts were being tested, but their whole belief that government (or at least competent government) was unnecessary.
These people were so deluded they believed that their philosophy could withstand reality. Competence, planning, experience, history, and knowledge were unnecessary superfluous things. They had the NeoCon philosophy and that was their trump card.
The man who said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" was almost overthrown in a coup d’etat by American men who were very very afraid.
They were afraid of the Nazi’s and they were afraid of the Depression. These things could harm America and the American way of life they thought. So they set out to destroying those very two things, planning a coup to overthrow FDR and move the country towards the fascist path of Hitler and Mussolini. They didn’t succeed obviously (and I won’t go into the fact that Prescott Bush – W’s granddaddy – was one of the conspirators).
Their fear made them willing to destroy what makes America great – its freedom – while all the long using the excuse that they were "protecting America" as a shield. Hiding behind patriotism – hiding in fear.
Read about more frightening acts of frightened people below.
Five years after Arab terrorists attacked the United States, only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics.
Counting agents who know only a handful of Arabic words -- including those who scored zero on a standard proficiency test -- just 1 percent of the FBI's 12,000 agents have any familiarity with the language, the statistics show.
Yes, I think this sums up the war on terror.
To fight this war we need to remove the right of habeas corpus, we need to destroy our moral standing and allow torture, we need to allow warrantless wire tapping - but hire more Arabic speakers - you freaking kidding me?!!??!!
