What a week: Snow and Tornadoes in South Africa and a deadly heatwave in the US. In the US, the Midwest and East Coast were cooking – New York declared a heat emergency with temperatures of up to 38°C/101F and a heat index of up to 110F/43°C. Here in Bahama it was sweltering, too, with a weekly high of 97F/36°C and over 90 percent humidity.

Rough weather conditions also wreaked havoc in South Africa and in the mountains of Lesotho last week. In Lesotho, eight people had to be rescued after their vehicle got stuck in the snow! And while New York was sweating, Johannesburg had snow flurries for the first time in eight years. On Tuesday, a tornado hit a town in Mpumalanga Province, and caused several injuries and some damage and severe flooding killed five people in the Easters Cape province.

And, of course, Typhoon Prapiroon caused death and devastation in Southern China …

According to the Global Crafts website, Volkswagen of America has backed off:

Volkswagen of America have sent a letter of apology and revoked the Cease & Desist notice. Thank you for your support, I know many of you emailed Volkswagen on our behalf.

They have also offered to work with us towards a license which we hope we can get in the name of the name of the artisans so that they can sell to and Fair Trade importer and eliminate the risk of this occurring again.

We would also like to publicly thank Peter Bloch at Lightyearsip.net who has helped and is continuing to help in this matter.
Global Crafts website, Aug. 3, 2006.

I hope they give their attack-dog lawyers a muzzle, too. Incidents like this are really counterproductive and damage VWs image.

Nevertheless: Congratulations, VWoA. Smart, timely decision.

This is a great example of elephants with sledgehammers protecting a china store: VW of America’s lawyers have sent “cease and desist” orders to the Fair-Trade importers of toys made by the Teenage Mothers of Kenya crafts cooperative:

Teenage Mothers and Girls Association of Kenya is an organization working for the rescue, rehabilitation and economic empowerment of girls and young women. Our programmes focus on helping solve the problems of HIV/AIDS infected children, their parents (often teenage girls who are single), orphans, the poor and the destitute of the community.
TEMAK website

Yeah, this sounds exactly like the type of organization on which VW wants to sick their lawyers. Make an example of these trademark-infringing teenage moms! Can you see the headlines on CNN and NPR: “Volkswagen sues Teen Moms of Kenya”

And over what? Toy cars made from wire!

These young women in Kenya thought it was a cute idea to make little VW Beetle® model cars to sell, so they could make a little bit of money support themselves and their kids. All over East Africa wire toys of this kind are popular and inexpensive fun for kids. And our own, gameboyed, interactivated, hypertained kids love the wire model cars and galimotos we buy at the local Fair Trade store.

VW should be proud that these folks chose the iconic Beetle® for their modest enterprise, and not the far more ubiquitous Toyotas. They should make an advertisement that highlights that when these women think “car” they picture a VW Beetle®!

Get a grip, VW of America. Embrace these women and give them a hand, instead of threatening their fair trade partners.

Last weekend was a big weekend for my biodiesel production project. Friday I pulled a 220 Volt/30 Amp circuit to the reactor in the basement. A friend who is an electrician emailed me instructions for what breaker and wiring to get, after I explained the project. So I cut the power, plugged in the new breaker, pulled the wire and hooked up the reactor. No biggie.

Saturday I filtered 120 Liters (30 Gals) of veggie oil and pumped it into the reactor, 20 Liters at a time, to calibrate the sight tube. That way I now know how much feedstock is in the vessel. Since I turned the water heater upside down, the heating element is a bit higher off the bottom as it would be the other way around. So the minimum fill is about 100 liters (25 Gals) for a batch. I then fired up the heater, and began circulating the oil to warm it up. I ran it for several hours to test it and to calibrate the temperature to just below 140 Deg. F. Once the oil was warm, I noticed a couple of leaks in the plumbing – nothing serious, just a little dripping. I’ll fix that this week.

Sunday I tinkered with my wash tank setup and realized that the stand for the tank is not sturdy enough. I’ll need to improve it – probably with some plywood. Also, the stand pipe leaks, because it’s not glued in yet. I’ll do that once I am happy with the setup.

This is very exciting. I am so close, I can smell my first big batch of homebrew!

To do:

• Fix plumbing
• Buy methanol and KOH
• Fix washtank
• Drying tank
• Setup for final filtering
• Prepare storage

There’s still a bit of work, but it looks like the centerpiece of my homebrew operation is in place now.

Praise the Lard!

Wal Mart is throwing the towel in Germany! Looks like they’ll sell their 85 German stores at a loss of $1Billion to Germany’s largest retailer Metro. I despise Wal Mart, and I find an odd sense of satisfaction in the news that German stubborn attitudes brought Wal Mart, the death star of retail, to its knees. I can just see Grandma Mayer slapping the bagger at the checkout on his fingers: “Those are MY groceries, young man – leave them alone! I bought ’em -I’ll bag ’em!”

Maybe stubborn consumer attitudes hurt Wal Mart, but stubborn worker attitudes really gave Wal Mart the rest. You just try telling German store workers they cannot unionize! Wal Mart sports a patronizing corporate “culture” which encourages ratting on fellow workers, frowns on dating fellow workers (not that I think that that’s generally a smart idea) and generally aims at disenfranchising its employees. This did not go over too well with the German workforce and gave Wal Mart a really negative image in the eyes of the consumer.

Seems like Germans have this funny, antiquated sense that store clerks should be competent professionals, and that they should be treated as such by their employers. Those silly Krautheimers and their attitudes!

Ah – hark the master of the moral high ground: the chief ethical executive from Royal Dutch Shell has spoken:

Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s top marketer of biofuels, considers using food crops to make biofuels “morally inappropriate” as long as there are people in the world who are starving, an executive said on Thursday.
Shell Says Biofuels From Food Crops “Morally Inappropriate” – PlanetArk, July 7, 2006

Yeah, biodiesel becomes popular and Big Oil finds its soft spot for the poor, starving masses. I would like to see them to produce a single current example where the biofuels cause hunger. Food shortages are usually caused by war, which in turn is often caused by conflict over scarce or valuable resources like oil. If any fuel is “morally inappropriate” it’s petroleum based fuel. Access to oil is the underlying reason for war, oppression and violence. Oil extraction destroys environmental resources and pollutes the earth.

Just ask the Ogoni people in Nigeria if Shell is acting in a “morally appropriate” way in the Niger delta:

Since Shell began drilling oil in Ogoniland in 1958, the people of Ogoniland have had pipelines built across their farmlands and in front of their homes, suffered endemic oil leaks from these very pipelines, been forced to live with the constant flaring of gas. This environmental assault has smothered land with oil, killed masses of fish and other aquatic life, and introduced devastating acid rain to the land of the Ogoni.
Shell in Nigeria: What are the issues? – Boycott Shell, 2001.

Big Oil buys arms for the Nigerian military, which terrorizes and kills anyone critical of the actions of Big Oil in the Niger Delta. A huge portion of Nigeria’s revenues come from oil, but the people who live in the Niger Delta, where the oil is extracted, see nothing of it. Except maybe the guns bought from it. But they are at the wrong end of the gun barrel.

Clearly it would be preferable for fuel and food production NOT not to be in competition. Pursuing ways to make fuel from waste biomass is great. We need to pursue all options that might yield efficient, renewable sources of fuels, and if Shell can come up with a way to make fuel efficiently without competing with food crops for land or resources – more power to them. But to have Big Oil make pronouncements regarding the ethics of fuel production is absurd.

No, biodiesel is not much of a spectator sport and provides only little entertainment value to most people. But when Lyle talks about biodiesel he is really funny and quite entertaining. Lyle’s humorous and insightful stories from the epicenter of the North Carolina biofuels movement made yesterday’s book reading at the Regulator Bookstore in Durham a real success. The event was well attended – roughly 40 – 50 people – and the discussion after the reading was quite lively. Just like the book, the discussion was focused less on technical issues and more on “big-picture” topics, like the regulatory environment, the status of the sustainability movement, biofuels-centered lifestyles, and the place of biofuels in the sustainable-energy toolbox for this country.

Lyle posts regular updates about his adventures and insights on his energy blog on the Piedmont Biofuels website.

Mexico’s presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (or AMLO), unlike Gore or Kerry, is not about to give up his fight for democracy and justice in his country. In light of evidence of blatant ballot-stuffing by the ruling party PAN, and considering that nearly one million votes have not been counted, the PRD’s candidate has called for massive protests in Mexico City and across the country to pressure the electoral commission (which is controlled by the ruling PAN) to order a complete re-count.

There does seem to be evidence that the ruling PAN also had help from North-of-the-Border. Greg Palast, who published many reports about the problems with the elections in 2000 and 2004, says he has evidence that the Republican-friendly voter-purgers from ChoicePoint compiled citizen files and voter lists for Mexico and Venezuela, just like they did for Florida, under the cover of a “counter-terrorism” contract with the FBI. The Mexican list was apparently provided to the ruling PAN in order to be used to “scrub” AMLO-supporters from the voter rolls for the presidential election earlier this month.

Why does the US government want to influence the elections in Mexico? Could it be because Mexico sell more crude oil to the US than Saudi Arabia:

US Crude Oil Imports (Thousand Barrels per Day)

Country 	YTD 2006
CANADA 		1,757 	
MEXICO 		1,668 	
SAUDI ARABIA 	1,422 	
VENEZUELA 	1,186 	
NIGERIA 	1,134 	
IRAQ 		666 	

source: US EIA

This may be a simplistic POV, but the US government is aggressively meddling with the internal affairs of just about each of these countries (not sure about Canada, though I would not be surprised), especially where the powers-that-be start talking about regulation and public ownership of natural resources (Venezuela, Saddam in Iraq). If the US government spent half the effort on energy conservation, fuel efficiency and alternative energy sources, as it spends on meddling with the internal affairs of these countries – let alone occupying them – this country would be a healthier place in many ways, and the world would be a much more peaceful place.

President Bush is visiting (de) Angela Merkel’s home district in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The cute, historic town of Stralsund is under siege: all cars had to be removed to lots outside the town, gutters are welded shut, mailboxes sealed, stores cannot open, and residents are even prohibited from opening their WINDOWS in July! (Remember very few German houses have A/C). And to top it off, no one knows who will foot the 20-million-Euro bill for the visit.

Way to win the “hearts and minds” of the folks in Stralsund …

The German Football Federation announced (de) that assistant coach Joachim Löw got a 2-year contract as national trainer, after Jürgen Klinsmann elected not to renew his contract after the Worldcup. Löw hails from Schönau (de) in the Black Forest, and I find it intriguing to see a fellow Badenser and former player at SC Freiburg (our regional football “powerhouse”) take the reins of the national team. It appears that Löw will provide good continuity of Klinsmann’s style and leadership – hopefully also of Klinsmann’s success.

Germany’s biggest loss of this Worldcup came today – two days after the closing ceremony, as the German Football Federation (DFB) confirms Jürgen Klinsmann’s decision to quit. Considering his commute and the amount of abuse he had to suffer before the Worldcup, his decision does not come as a total shock – just as a major disappointment. Thank you, Herr Klinsmann, for your courage to make hard decisions, and for pulling together a fantastic team that played some of the best football in this tournament and that put the spunk back into German football.

On the positive side, however, 90 percent of the foreign Worldcup tourists say that they would recommend Germany as a tourist destination (according to a poll conducted by the German tourism association DZT). The images from Germany during the last month have been very positive: cheerful enthusiasm and hospitality, combined with a new flag-waving self-confidence that seems to be generally well-received.

Personally, I find all this flag-waving a bit silly, but on the other hand it appears to be a sign of a cheerful, self-confident flavor of patriotism that is hardly threatening. And after all, they are waving the banner of the German Märzrevolution (de) (en) of 1848, which was a perfectly respectable (if ill-fated) Democratic revolution. Of all the flags Germans might be waving, we like this one best …

Busy, hot day today at the Eno Festival – but lots of fun! The festival was well attended and we had a constant stream of people with questions about biodiesel: “Can I use it in my car?” – “Where can I get it?” – “How is it made?” – What do you do with the glycerol?” – How does it compare to Ethanol?” – ” How much does it cost?” … All perfectly reasonable questions, and we were excited to see all this interest.

The BBC’s Newsnight published an interviw with Joseph Kony (left), the leader of the so-called “Lord’s Resistance Army” (LRA), which is responsible for the genocide on the Acholi people of Northern Uganda. This is the first-ever interview with Kony, who is wanted by a UN court for war crimes. The BBC also posted an interview with one of the LRA’s victims, the 25-year-old Ugandan Ochola John (right) (warning – the contents of the interview are quite graphic).

The importance of this interview is probably not so much in what Kony said (which is not much), but merely in the fact that it took place at all. Maybe it’s a sign that the LRA is truly interested in peace talks with Museveni’s government.

See Uganda-CAN for frequent updates on the situation in Uganda.

With Ghana, Australia and Ecuador out, all that is left at the FIFA Worldcup® is millionaire football. Both Ghana and Australia got screwed by the FIFA refs (unfair, 92nd-minute penalty against the socceroos and two off-side goals for Brazil against Ghana). Too bad – millionaire football is not that much fun.

Most Germans, I think, would profess to “love nature.” yet, when “nature” has claws and teeth, it must die.

Naturliebe auf Deutsch: gepflegte Waldwege zum Wandern, ein sauberes Gasthaus zum einkehren, ein paar Rehe am Waldrand. Bloss kein Stress. Ein wilder Bär? Ein “Risikobär??” Das kann ja wohl nicht sein! Der muss abgeschossen werden befor “noch was passiert!”

Gestern ist Bruno gestorben. Die Bedeutung seines Todes ist aber noch lange nicht klar. Die deutsche und internationale Presse hat sich daher Gedanken gemacht. Im folgenden dokumentieren wir die Ergebnisse.
Pressespiegel zum Tod des Bären Bruno tagesschau.de

Es ist zu schade dass die Deutschen (Politiker) nicht meher Mut hatten sich etwas mehr auf Bruno’s Bären-natur einzulassen. Ruhe in Frieden, Bruno.

As of last weekend TDI does not only stand for outstanding fuel economy but also for “superior racing platform.” The Audi R10 TDI of Joest Racing made history with the first-ever win of a diesel-powered race car at the 24-hours of LeMans – one of the toughest and most prestigious races in motor sports.

The fans on the race track and a worldwide audience of millions of TV viewers saw an impressive demonstration of Audi TDI Power and the performance of modern diesel engines. The brace of Audi R10 TDI cars, powered by a 650 hp V12 TDI engine, were by far the fastest and most economical cars. During the entire race, one of the new diesel sportscars from Ingolstadt was at the head of the field. Le Mans record winner Tom Kristensen drove the fastest lap of the race, setting a 3m 31.211s time, and he was the first driver at the wheel of an LM P1 sportscar to cover 16 laps with one fuel load. Completing 380 laps, Audi also set a new distance record.

In the race, the advantage in fuel consumption of the Audi TDI Power was visible for the spectators too: on average, the Audi drivers only pitted every 14 laps to refuel 90 litres of Shell V-Power Diesel. The opposition, who relies on petrol engines, had to pit considerably more often. The fans were also impressed just how quiet an environmentally friendly 650-hp sportscar can be.
Joest Racing press release, 18/06/06

I wonder if these diesel racers can run on biodiesel??!

…. for the goal-less first half of the game, but after Patrick Vieira’s goal in the 55th Minute the Eperviers collapse and France reels in a 2-0 victory.

Too bad that the first appearance at the Worldcup was such a bumpy ride for the team from Togo. But I hope they still had a good time in Germany (especially the players who don’t live in Germany). I certainly enjoyed watching the games at my favorite bar here in Durham. They played very spirited football and showed great resilience, despite their difficulties with their management. FIFA has intervened and assures us that the players will be paid by the FTF.

La Liberation has an interesting portrait (fr) of the president of the FTF (Fédération togolaise de football):

Président de la fédération togolaise et fils de l’ex-dictateur Eyadéma, l’imprévisible Rock Gnassingbe a plongé son équipe dans le chaos pour son premier Mondial.
Gnassingbe Rock’n’Roll par Stéphane Regy, 19 juin 2006.

Regy describes the son of Togo’s late strongman Gnassingbé Eyadema as a poor manager who allows very little financial transparency, and who appears to prefer the company of the animals at his private zoo to the mundane duties of running an organization.

The zoo at the Togolese camp in Germany was a direct result of the incompetent leadership at the FTF, and resulted in an ill-prepared and distracted team that was unable to realize all its potential. The chaos also sadly reinforced old stereotypes about Africa and African leadership. But worst of all, it let down the people of Togo, who deserve better than that, and who could have really used a boost in national self-confidence after the political unrest of the last six months.

Ghana beat USA and qualifies for the next round! Only to meet Brazil … oh well …

Happy solstice to all you Wiccans!

The picture says it all: the 2-0 loss of the Eperviers against Switzerland is no big shock to most, but nevertheless a big disappointment to many. It seems that the back-and-forth over the premiums, and the FIFA’s “play-or-else” order, left very little spunk in that team. Sadly, Togo’s first Worldcup appearance will not primarily be remembered for the quality of the football the players played, but for the incompetence of their management.
(Image copyright Getty Images)

The BBC’s James Copnall wrote a piece that, despite its snarky, almost condescending tone, scratches the surface of the Togo story slightly deeper than the usual “greedy-players” line of the ESPN talking heads. At least he bothers to ask some Togolese what they think:

“A famished player cannot play good football, so I think they should get the money,” one fan said.

“After all, the World Cup has brought lots of money into Togolese football, and it should go to the players.”

Fifa gives each nation that qualifies for the World Cup $5.7 million (£3.1m), and each country makes additional money from sponsorship.

“If the players don’t get the money it will just go straight into the pockets of the administrators,” said another fan.
Bonus row haunts failed Togo bid, BBC News, 19 June 2006

Yeah, the Togolese get it. They know their officials. If the FTF pockets all the FIFA money and the players have to hitch-hike home, it still does not really qualify as a proper scandal in Togo. I mean, the official Togo government mouthpiece proudly announced today that the President Faure Gnassingbé appointed his brother Mey Gnassingbé to a juicy government post. Imagine George Bush announcing that he appointed his brother Jeb to be the FEMA Director. Uh – bad example – Jeb already HAS a juicy government job in Florida …

The NY Times also manages to see a bit past the “greedy players” line:

At the heart of most of Togo’s team troubles is money. The bonuses the players seek may seem disproportionate to the means of the country, which is slightly smaller than West Virginia with a population of about 5.6 million. But the equation is not that simple. Togo’s Sparrow Hawks are all professionals with European and Middle Eastern clubs, and the star forward Emmanuel Adebayor plays for Arsenal, the English power.

[snip]
Each federation receives $5.8 million from FIFA for qualifying for the World Cup. The eventual champion will receive a bonus pool of $21.8 million. Viewed in that context, the demands by Togo’s team are perhaps less strident.

[snip]
The president of Togo’s soccer federation, Rock Gnassingbé, whose brother, Faure, is president of the country, has been accused by the federation’s treasurer of a lack of accountability in handling finances, according to news reports.
Togo’s Chaotic Trip to Remember and Forget, Ny Times, June 14, 2006

Uh, yeah … you read that correctly … the president of the the FTF (Federation Togolaise de Football) is the brother of the countries president, Faure Gassingbé, who is the son of the former president of Togo, Gassingbé Eyadema. Get it? Togo is a family business, of sorts. And in the end, this nepotism is directly responsible for the $1,600-a-year per-capita income of Togo. And now this nepotism spoiled Togo’s innaugural appearance at the Worldcup.