New York Times interactive map. Click to use.
California only enrolls about half of those eligible, a proportion *less* than any other state. The report breaks the numbers down by county, with several having more than 40% of the total population receiving aid.
Something [...]
A story in yesterday’s New York Times about the rising use of food stamps paints a pretty grim picture of where we are as a nation. For instance, the program,
now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.
About 20,000 people are added to the program everyday. [...]
Zero Hedge
1) The carbon footprint of war negates most everything else we do to slow climate change.
2) Carbon trading is a scam that investment will manipulate and make billions from.
(Posted from my iPhone with the WordPress app)
[...]Best tv segment of bikini baristas:
Quickie records pop punk tribute to bikini baristas:
Pretty in Pink owners stiff bikini barristas:
My thoughts:
First: They aren’t wearing “bikinis” — they are wearing underwear. Some of the bras are see-through, and the women are required by their employers [...]
The Blue Voice ponders Jerry Brown, radical politics on both sides of the spectrum, civil liberties, and more in a thoughtful post.
They quote from an interview Jerry Brown did with The Progressive in 1995. Brown makes a crucial point, that militia anger is based on real grievances. The [...]
The Swiss have voted to outlaw minarets, thus Islam has been demonised, which of course will be helpful to those who want to promote hatred.
I guess Bin Laden and the Swiss People Party will both be celebrating.
Islam is as European as it gets, think of Spain as a Muslim country, [...]
US company Capstone and Israeli firm HelioFocus plan to develop a micro-turbine that runs on concentrated solar power. It will use super-heated air to drive the turbines.
“The ability for solar projects to generate energy more efficiently and at night is the value proposition driving this [...]
Osama bin Laden was within the grasp of US forces in late 2001 and could have been caught if then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld hadn’t rejected calls for reinforcements, a hard-hitting US Senate report says.
The report indicates this happened about Dec. 2001, after 9/11, but before the start of the [...]
What if accounting data was presented in a uniform, standardized way in an open XML format that everyone understood. Why, that would be “radical transparency,” and that’s precisely what we need now, an eXtensible Markup Reporting Language (XBRL)
Wired says let’s use XBRL on [...]
A Scottish startup has tested a prototype wind turbine where the blades connect directly to the generator via an axle. This drastically cuts down the weight of the generator and makes installation simpler. Plus, with fewer parts, the turbines would require less maintenance in the harsh offshore environment.
Judge erases $525g mortgage for NY couple, citing ‘repulsive’ acts by bank
This is getting to be a trend. What is not a trend yet though is criminal prosecutions of the banks involved.
Dave Riley has a thoughtful essay on the tendency of the far left to build castles of rhetoric based on their interpretation of Marxism and to defend it against all other factions.
The complication being that inasmuch as you are isolated from the main business of society [...]
Dubai is well-known for being a world hub of money-laundering while construction is notorious among fraud investigators as a way to make dirty money clean, make gray money vanish, and siphon off money for use elsewhere.
Any attempt to draw similarities between the irresponsible greedhead behavior of [...]
Iceland stills live off geothermal. At least their economic crash didn’t affect the geothermal. The US has huge amounts of untapped geothermal, we just have to use it.
[...]
Organised piracy syndicates operating in Dubai and other Gulf states are laundering vast sums of money taken in ransom from vessels hijacked off the Horn of Africa.
“What we can say is that these people are not just fishermen who have taken up a bit [...]
Palm Island resort, Dubai
ZeroHedge says Dubai never even remotely resembled capitalism and makes some telling points, detailing what led to the imminent Dubai default on debt:
A total discount of the importance of institutional strength
A deleterious disregard for even the most basic fixed cost [...]
Salinas homicides and shootings 2009. By KSBW
The homicide rate in Salinas is three times that of L.A. and local police are clearly overwhelmed by warfare between the major and powerful Hispanic gangs of La Familia and the Mexican Mafia. So they’re [...]
A telecom company in India, has launched a new service that allows farmers to operate their irrigation pumps remotely using a SMS-capable cellphone. This is extremely useful because the alternative often is for the farmers to walk many miles to the pumps, often at night because the electricity supply [...]
This is making banks and lenders across the planet quite twitchy and could be the biggest sovereign debt default since Argentina in 2001. Abu Dhabi won’t backstop the debt and the price of credit default swaps for Dubai’s debt is is now greater than that for [...]
I am turkducken. Fear me.
A chicken stuffed in duck stuffed in a turkey, all wrapped in bacon. Otherwise known as a bacon-wrapped turducken.
[...]
From the grumps at Clusterstock
Everything comes in pumpkin pie flavor. Even coffee. Which is sacrilege.
Aunt Flo’s nasty green bean casserole. No further explanation required. Except that you have to pretend to like it.
The family dog. Who never stops begging for food. We are having sixteen [...]
Inequitable. Unconscionable. Vexatious. Opprobrious.
These are just a few of the choice words a New York state judge used to describe the behavior of Indymac in a decision in which he wiped out the $292,500 sub-prime mortgage owed by a homeowner to the bank.
May thousands more follow.
The court found that [...]
At this point there is little sense in putting up any more gold charts. It is pretty clear what is happening: John McClane and Samuel L. Jackson are waiting for the next phone call with detailed instructions from Bernanke on how to short the dollar as [...]
Gee, where have we heard that before?
(For you youngsters out there, that’s Lyndon B. Johnson, the President who campaigned as the “peace candidate” against “war-hawk” Barry Goldwater, while escalating American troop levels from 16,000 to 550,000.)
Yes, given that sending lots of troops into Afghanistan hasn’t worked [...]
In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself—the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American [...]
MIT announces new way to trap waste heat and convert it to energy
It could even work on cell phones and laptops as well as in much larger engines and devices
Researchers develop machine to recycle carbon dioxide into fuel
This could be a welcome replacement for sequestration of CO2
Wall Street Cheat Sheet gives this prestigious award to the man who without him, the financial collapse could not have happened – Alan (”I heart Ayn Rand”) Greenspan.
The video explains that Ayn Rand would have detested what Greenspan did, as he was constantly meddling with the markets and [...]
Five acres of land zoned for agricultural and residential in southern Utah (located near a freeway with water rights for a home) sold three years ago for $110,000. A few days ago it went at a foreclosure auction for $14,500. That’s a 87% drop in price.
Many other [...]
This time it was SWP in Britain who purged Clare Solomon, apparently for thought crimes that led to traitorous behavior. As one who was purged from a far left US Marxist grouplet a few years back, I can sympathize. The process is jolting. But then you realize those [...]
Brazil Pellet has developed a way to process bagasse, the waste from sugar cane processing into pellets for use in coal plants. They are thinking very big, like 520,000 tons of pellets a year that would produce 2,420 GW of power.
Most bagasse now is dumped where it decomposes and [...]
Jim Kunstler in one of his finest moments
How infantile is American society? Last night’s CBS “Business Update” (in the midst of its “60 Minutes” program) featured three items: 1.) The New Moon teen vampire movie led the weekend box-office receipts; 2.) Cadbury shares hit an all-time [...]
Russia ‘is now a criminal state’ says Bill Browder, who was once their leading foreign investor.
[...]Columbia is the only country there that still freely allow the US to militarize within its borders. So the US is building seven new bases there and planning to station nuclear weapons there too.
This is complete madness, dealing with the most thuggish government in the area while deliberately provoking [...]
Culture is politics. Palin is at the red-hot center of age-old American resentments that have boiled up both from the ascent of our first black president and from the intractability of the Great Recession for those Americans who haven’t benefited from [...]
A two meter long protrusion on the back of trucks cuts fuel consumption by up to 7.5%
WhiteHouse.gov now runs on Drupal. At a recent Drupal meet-up, White House representatives said they plan to “openly participate in and help foster open source projects.”
[...]Sure, she’s news. But too many liberals and lefties foam at the mouth at the mere mention of her name. I’m sure she appreciates the free publicity.
Here’s a tip, don’t try to understand her. It’ll just make your head hurt. She sometimes doesn’t make much sense and appears immune [...]
Their projects include algae biodiesel, biobutanol from wheat straw in Britain, and partnering with Verenium in Louisiana using enzymes to breakdown grasses into alcohol.
[...]
The President of Venezuela has just praised Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and, wait for it, Idi Amin – even if he was a cannibal.
Oh, and Carlos the Jackal too. Can’t forget him. Selfless fighters against imperialism, all of them.
Lordy, what a lunatic blowhard Chavez has turned [...]
Creating a worldwide Secession Network promoting the Right to Secede – Community-Based Secession – Libertarian/Decentralist Political Processes – Nonviolent Secession and Institutions
Via Global Guerillas
The wave-powered generator is a hinged flap connected to the sea-bed, with each wave moving the flap to drive a hydraulic piston.
[...]Where criminals are still free and desperately arguing for a continued coverup of their crimes:
I’m not amused that the Wall Street Journal solicited an op-ed attacking the decision to try KSM in civilian court from one of the people–John Yoo–with the biggest conflict on such a decision. It’s [...]
Bob Morris, Connecticutman1, Buddhagem, Sue, Byron DeLear, DJ, Derek Wall
