The psychopathology of ATVs

From The Twilight of Mechanized Lumpenleisure, by James Howard Kunstler:

The demoralization of the American public, and especially of the economic lower orders proceeded remorselessly from the 1980s on and became focused on two very pernicious ideas: first the belief that it was possible to get something for nothing, and second the belief that when you wish upon a star your dreams come true. ...

Now, the trouble with this kind of demoralizing belief system is that most adult human beings realize at some level that it is at odds with the way the universe works, that it is an edifice of lies -- just as the suburban housing developments were an edifice of lies about an enduring way of life, and a maxed-out collection of credit cards was a lie about one’s personal finances. Their own sensed moral failures aroused in Americans a welter of negative emotion including guilt, shame, unworthiness, powerlessness, terror, and ultimately anger over having to feel these unpleasant emotions, and they expressed their anger by striking out against nature, employing the very machines that defined the terms of their existence, the automobile and its spawn: monster trucks, motorcycles, dune buggies, snowmobiles, all-terrain vehicles, and gigantic motorboats whose chief attractions were their power to negate the scale of the average freshwater lake while making enormous amounts of noise. These were people who no longer felt comfortable, or even ontologically present in the world, unless engines of some kind were ringing in their ears. Their assault on the landscape of America completed the destruction that suburbia had left unfinished. And as the cheap oil, which made the whole exercise possible, fades into history with the global oil production peak upon us, America was reduced to a nation of tattooed, overfed clowns in paramilitary drag, pretending to be powerful and good.

Wind turbine noise is serious health issue

The Noise Association of the U.K. recently produced a study of wind turbines. The 3.8-MB PDF is available on National Wind Watch's new web site at www.wind-watch.org.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism

The Israeli soldiers were caught IN Lebanon

What Really Happened  has gathered several news reports lest the world forget that Hezbollah did not "invade" Israel to "kidnap" two soldiers. The soldiers were in fact in Lebanon, obviously aiming to provoke the the very disastrous war that they then blamed on Hezbollah. In summary:

Israel sent troops across the border into Lebanon. They then claimed the captured invaders were "kidnap victims" and launched their attacks.

The imagined airline bombings

Craig Murray writes from the U.K. about the obvious charade of the massive new terror plot that Bush and Blair hoped would salvage some of their delusional paranoia while Israel's effort to draw Iran into war so quickly turned into a predictable disaster.

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year -- like thousands of other British Muslims. ... Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests. ... As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity. ...

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes -- which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth. ...

We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shoveled. ...

In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. ... Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few -- just over two per cent of arrests -- who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do with terrorism, but of some minor offence the police happened upon while trawling through the wreckage of the lives they had shattered.

Eighty hectares of low scrub and pine burn in a fire between Pétrola and Corral Rubio

From El Verdad, Albacete, Spain [translation from Spanish]:

www.laverdad.es

Mount Albaceteño brought a new fright yesterday. An aerogenerator in the Anorias Wind Facility in Pétrola began to burn at four in the afternoon and started a forest fire in the area known as La Cuerda.

As the Mayor of Pétrola, Juan Gómez, described it to this newspaper, the strong winds made the fire spread quickly. ...

Around eight in the evening the fire was brought under control, although the reserve of firemen remained some time more to cool the ground and prevent the fire being revived by the wind. ...

In the end, according to both mayors, and initial official estimates, between eighty and a hundred hectares [200-250 acres] of low scrub and pine were burned.

According to sources from the Castilla/La Mancha firefighters, the effort to extinguish the fire required four teams with four firetrucks, two airplanes carrying dirt, and a helicopter with another team. Two Sepei (Provincial Firefighting Service) trucks also participated.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, environment, environmentalism

Israel targets civilians

Hezbollah targets civilians. Israel does not. Yet for every 3 Israeli civilians killed by the unaimed rockets of Hezbollah, 100 Lebanese civilians have been killed by the precisely targeted missiles of Israel. Who is terrorizing whom? All for 2 soldiers who wandered over the border and were caught.

The language of the demented can not substitute for the facts of their actions.

Sacred view threatened on Lewis

Every 18 years, the moon is reborn on Scotland's island of Lewis, rising from between the knees of the Old Woman of the Moors, Cailleach na Mointeach. The ancient Callanish stones mark this cyclic event -- the resynchronization of lunar and solar time, the "golden year" that Catholicism still uses to date Easter -- and now a 16-foot-diameter cairn has been discovered near the hills that are the Cailleach's knees. That could prevent the construction of some of the giant wind turbines proposed for the island moors (never mind that disruption of peat by the turbines' erections would release so much carbon it would cancel any possible benefits for 25 years (should they last that long)). Needless to say, the turbines would stand in the way of this view that has been sacred for thousands of years.

wind power, wind energy, wind farms, wind turbines, environment, environmentalism