Month: August 2008

Where the Fat Comes From

Calorie Counter CalorieLab
Click on the Calorielab link above to search 70,000 foods and 500 restaurant menus to see just how fat-laden-drenched is your favorite food or menu. It was recently reported that for the first time in history, there are now more overweight than malnourished people in the world. Here are the leading obese states in The US.

Obesity, it may be useful to repeat, is not a euphemism for being overweight. It means being so fat that one’s health is affected. You are defined as obese if you have a body mass index of 30 or over (with a bmi of between 25 and 30, you are merely overweight). The US is the most overweight nation in the world, with over a quarter of the total population being obese. See Strange Maps for more interesting maps.

Hit The Kremlin In The Wallet

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky – Target the Kremlin Pocketbooks – washingtonpost.com
Moscow is dominated by a network of ex-KGB siloviks and wealthy Kremlin-friendly tycoons. Despite their gangsteresque behavior — including assassinations of business and political rivals — Russia is a member, albeit a thuggish one, of the global economic system. Bereft of any significant civilian manufacturing, Russia’s economy depends on natural resources exports. As a result, Russia, though grotesquely corrupt, is tightly plugged into global financial and commercial networks.

The shady cadre running modern Russia has embraced globalization. These “Chekist oligarchs” — to distinguish them from the Western-oriented robber barons who rose in the 1990s, only to be purged by Putin — increasingly dominate lists of the world’s richest individuals.

Clearly, something far more dangerous than mere authoritarianism has arisen in Putin’s Russia. A peculiar blend of political autocracy and corruption, seamlessly fusing political, economic and military power, threatens world peace. Challenging this state of affairs is a strategic necessity.

North Pole Still Melting

Arctic Sea Ice Drops to 2nd Lowest Level on Record | LiveScience
In spite of a shift to what climatologists call the cold phase of a cycle in the North Pacific Ocean called the “Pacific Decadal Oscillation,” or PDO, giving Alaska an unusually cold and wet summer and a record breaking Winter, Summer sea ice last year shrunk to about 1.65 million square miles, nearly 40 percent less than the long-term average between 1979 and 2000. Most climate modelers predict a continued downward spiral, possibly with an Arctic Ocean that’s ice free during summer months by 2030 or sooner. Most of the Ice loss has been on the pacific side, while the Atlantic had a major build of new ice last winter.

Krenz said the announcement Tuesday showed that last year’s record low sea ice was not an anomaly. As ice covers fewer square miles of ocean, he said, warming will accelerate.”It’s going to accelerate climate change through changes in the reflectance of the Arctic,” he said. “It’s going from bright ice to a much darker ocean.”More square miles of dark ocean will absorb more heat. More warmth will accelerate melting of Arctic permafrost, allowing organic matter now frozen to melt and add to the greenhouse gas problem, he said.”That allows for the breakdown of that by bacteria and other organisms that release CO2 or methane, depending on how the breakdown occurs,” he said.

Other authors claim that this is a normal Decadal Arctic Oscillation.

Wind Power Will Need $60 Billion Upgrade To Our Grid

The Energy Challenge – Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid’s Limits – Series – NYTimes.com
Wind advocates say that just two of the windiest states, North Dakota and South Dakota, could in principle generate half the nation’s electricity from turbines. But the way the national grid is configured, half the country would have to move to the Dakotas in order to use the power.

Video of a more-efficient Vertical Turbine Propeller that claims to be safer for birds.

Continue reading “Wind Power Will Need $60 Billion Upgrade To Our Grid”

Let’s Not Rush into Cold War II

Pajamas Media » Let’s Not Rush into Cold War II
From administration to administration, we zigzag with the needs of the moment in our dealings with Russia without a clear vision of what America’s vital interests in the former Soviet states actually are.

Georgia is a textbook case. While America has a legitimate concern in encouraging former Soviet states to develop into market democracies, there is no intrinsic economic or strategic American vital interest in Georgia per se and even less in South Ossetia. Georgia is our ally for only two reasons: Tblisi was enthusiastic to send troops to help in Iraq in return for military aid and it occupies a strategic location for oil and gas pipelines that will meet future European energy needs. In other words, Georgia’s role is of a primary strategic interest to the EU, not the United States. Which is why European and British companies have such a large shareholder stake in the BTC pipeline and why European FDI in Georgia exceeds ours. Yet it will be American troops in Georgia handing out bottled water and MREs, not the Bundeswehr or the French Foreign Legion. Something does not compute here.

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