Looks like another South American country is taking a left turn: Bolivia seems to have handed a clear victory to Aymara Indian candidate Evo Morales, a socialist and admirer of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez:

Several polls give him 42-45% of the vote ahead of his nearest challenger, former President Jorge Quiroga who, the polls say, got between 33-37%.

Mr Quiroga has now admitted defeat, offering his congratulations to his opponent and his party.

Mr Morales seems certain to become Bolivia’s first indigenous president.
Leftist set for Bolivia victory, BBC News, 19 December 2005, 01:21 GMT

And there might be more left turns in elections in various South American countries next year.

This is great news – especially for the family of Susanne Osthof:

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German woman abducted in Iraq three weeks ago is free, her brother told German n-tv television on Sunday.

Archaeologist Susanne Osthoff, 43, who spent more than a decade working on excavations in Iraq, disappeared with her driver on November 25.

Robert Osthoff, her brother, told German television: “My sister is free. We are all happy.”
German hostage in Iraq free, brother tells German TV, Sun Dec 18, 2005

I wonder how much ransom they paid …

Shark fin sup is considered a delicacy in Asia. Shark’s fin is “regarded as a tonic food and an aphrodisiac, the Chinese believe shark’s fin strengthens the internal organs and retard aging,” explains a recipe. The sharks that supply their trademark body parts to this dish are caught using longlines. Fishermen then cut off the desirable dorsal fin and toss the wounded shark back in the ocean.

In Mozambique and other parts of Africa, Asian business men offer poor local fishermen money for fins and so create a market for this very wasteful fishery. For hundreds of years these fishermen depended on the ocean to feed their families often utilizing sharks as a food source and had a low impact that was sustainable. Today traditional fishing is becoming unsustainable due to huge numbers of foreign flagged boats raping the coast lines of these poor countries to catch sharks for their fins as well as other threatened species such as billfish, turtles etc. The result is starving families not able to catch their daily meal whilst just a few miles offshore large numbers of sharks are stripped of their fins and dumped back into the ocean.

What is needed is a immediate ban on shark longlining off the South African coastline as well as the Mozambiquean coastline and declaring sharks a no take species. The future of sharks as well as other species hangs in the balance if rapid action is not taken. If South Africa and Mozambique lead the way and the benefits can be seen countries such as Tanzania, Namibia, Angola, Kenya and others will follow suit.
‘Air Jaws’ Photographers Make Desperate Plea for South Africa’s Dwindling Shark Population – Underwater Times, December 11, 2005

via divesouthafrica
Finning a shark is a cruel and wasteful practice per se. But these fishermen are also plundering a precious marine resources along the coast that has great potential. In South Africa, shark diving is a huge tourism industry. The reefs off of St. Lucia and Sodwana boast over a dozen species, and all day boats take divers out to encounter these fascinating creatures.

Interestingly the shark fin cartilage used in the soup has no taste whatsoever – itmerely supplies a supposedly interesting texture to the soup.

Boycott shark fin soup.

It’s getting chilly out in Durham and the chill gelled the juice in the juicebox, despite the 10 percent kerosene blend. Today at noon it was just below freezing, and the biodiesel/kerosene blend (B90) was solid in the mason jar net to the pump. The pump only managed to squeeze a few drops out of the juicebox.

So as soon as we can, we’re going to add more kerosene, and possibly some additives that should keep the juice flowing freely. In the meantime, we need to check the thermometer when we plan to fill up with biodiesel. Also, I topped off with couple of gallons of diesel on my way home tonight, because I want to be sure my car starts tomorrow morning …

Not your daddy’s diesel clunker: Audi is going to compete at the 24 hours of LeMans with the R10 race car, powered by a 5.5 liter 650 HP V12 diesel engine. According to Audi this engine put out 1100 Newton meters of torque (811 Lb Ft).

Audi claims this is the most powerful diesel engine – well for cars it may be. But check out this one!

The cold fact that Governor Schwarzenegger refused to grant clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams was predictable and consistent with the cruel spirit of the death penalty. The practice in this country to terminate the lives of convicted murderers is irrespective of any subsequent redemption or repentance. It is thus quite remarkable that the Governator’s decision (pdf) was based on the lack of an apology from Williams:

Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings there can be no redemption. In this case, the one thing that would be the clearest indication of complete remorse and full redemption is the one thing Williams will not do.
Statement of Decision (pdf)

So had Tookie said “sorry,” and admitted guilt, Schwarzenegger would have let him live? Hardly.

In the death penalty the state executes its patriarchal control over its subjects. In other societies where the state has the right to take a citizen’s life, like China, Swaziland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Libya, Iran, or Bangladesh, the power of the state to control a citizen’s life is much less questioned than in the U.S. While most Americans prefer the state to stay out of their lifes, most also agree that the state has the right to end the life of those among them who commit capital crimes.

But I believe for the average American this issue is not one of the state executing control over their life, but one of the state projecting the image of the strict (but just) father figure. Many in the American middle class want the state to wield this power to punish the “bad children” with the wrath of the God of Abraham and Moses. This is why to the fundamentalist Christian Americans anti-abortion and pro-death-penalty positions are NOT inconsistent. It’s all about submitting to the authority of the “Father.” This fundamentalist Christian absolutism is a moral framework that is popular across American mainstream society.

As popular as this moral absolutism is, most Americans are really pragmatists and the steadily eroding support for the death penalty shows this. Key is to show that using the death penalty the state projects strength at our expense. The death penalty is a social and moral burden to this country. It has no value as a deterrent, provides no “closure” or “comfort” to the victims, it is prohibitively expensive and it drags this country down morally. The death penalty bestows an absolute power over life and death onto the government and the judiciary that these all-to-human and error-prone institutions should not have. It is the beginning of a slippery slope of the government using more and more force to enforce its laws and impress upon its citizens its determination to do so. And in the end, no matter how rigorous the judicial process, the state will end up killing someone innocent. And in America, we are the state.

The Reverend Moon is at it again, promoting an idea so breathtakingly absurd that he should get a prize for it: a highway tunnel from Alaska to Siberia!

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the South Korean giant of the religious right who owns the Washington Times, is on a 100-city speaking tour to promote his $200 billion “Peace King Tunnel” dream. As he describes it, the tunnel would be both a monument to his magnificence, and a totem to his prophecy of a unified Planet Earth. In this vision, the United Nations would be reinvented as an instrument of God’s plan, and democracy and sexual freedom would crumble in the face of this faith-based glory.
AlterNet: Neil Bush Meets the Messiah

So far, so crazy. But guess who is a featured speaker on Moon’s crusade for the Peace King Lunacy? The prezman’s younger brother Neil Bush. Yeah – the younger Bush is tagging along with the Moonies to promote this project, which is, according to the Moonie brochures, “God’s fervent desire,” dwarfing such past wonders as the Chunnel and heralding a “new era of automobile travel.”

Looking for a good laugh? Check out the video of Moon’s coronation as the worlds messiah and peace king at the Senate Office building (yes – the United States Senate!) last year.

Old Europe is in a tizzy over finding out more and more details of how the CIA used European airspace and airports to shuttle abducted terrorism suspects to and fro for “innovative interrogation” in what some call a “gulag-like” system of “black sites” – secret prisons. Well, the GULAG it ain’t, but a scandal it sure is.

Now it looks like the CIA had an interesting collaborator in Germany: former Minister of the Interior Otto Schily, as the Washington Post reports:

In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country’s interior minister. (…)

[Ambassador Daniel R.] Coats informed the German minister that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request: that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.
Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake – Washington Post, December 4, 2005; Page A01

Otto Schily is an interesting figure in German politics. As a co-founder of the Green Party, he is a key figure of the German left. He later “defected” to the Social Democrats, and built a reputation as the one-man law-and-order wing of the German left.

The issue of the CIA planes transporting abducted suspects, many of whom were innocent, could be a huge problem for Germany and other European countries, because they may violate the European Convention on Human Rights. If the German government was aware of these flights and human rights violations were perpetrated on these planes in German airspace or on the ground, than Germany is also implicated in these violations. and unlike the U.S. government, the German government does not assume it can violate human rights with impunity by waving the “9-11 wand.”

Big promises, lots of talk today, and some quirky publicity, for World Aids Day. Anybody care to listen to the voices of those among us living with the dreaded disease? The stories of how the stigma, the ignorance, the silence kills millions? Anybody? Black Looks shares one of those stories, Rose’s story, with us:

R: The pressure he put on me to keep this secret was huge. And not being able to talk about it to my friends and family increased the huge shame he made me feel about what I had done. Because it also meant at the time that I could not have children. I became very frightened, depressed and isolated, loosing all confidence in myself and feeling very undeserving of everything. It was only thanks to the small women’s support group that I survived those early years but he eventually made me leave that when it (the group) became more public ally known in case I might be “spotted” there. It took me 10 years to get out of this abusive relationship because I always felt I had no option but to say as who would want a woman with HIV? Therefore I should just be thankful and put up with it.

It is very difficult to explain what it was like from one year to the next because so many people were dying and that is what we were told to expect. Every time I got the slightest sickness I thought this was it and of course every 3 months you had to go and get your bloods tested and wait the two weeks for the dreaded results.
Personal Story – Living with HIV – Black Looks, November 30, 2005

Thanks to “Rose” for coming forward and sharing her story and thanks to Black Looks for posting the interview (great blog, BTW, read it!) Only if more of those among us who live with HIV/AIDS get a chance to share their stories, get a voice, do we stand a chance to cure this world of AIDS.

As this year’s record-breaking hurricane season officially ends (tell that to Epsilon), the residents of the Canary Islands are picking up from the devastation caused by tropical storm Delta. Delta was the first tropical storm recorded to ever get anywhere near the Canary Islands, according to Jeff Masters. Although is was not officially classified as a tropical storm when it hit the islands, it caused the deaths of seven people, did significant damage and destroyed the landmark of Tenerife:

The emblematic rocky pinnacle known as El Dedo de Dios or God’s Finger, which had pointed skywards from the sea for millennia, a natural wonder and one of the must-see sights of the archipelago finally gave up the ghost after thousands of years and collapsed into the broiling sea. The news of the loss has left islanders in a state of shock.
Tenerife News English Local News from Tenerife Canary Islands

So now have 6 months to get ready for the next crazy hurricane season!?

BILD, der bottomfeeder des Schmuddeljournalismus lotet neue Tiefen aus: Deutsche Geisel – Wird sie geköpft?

Schluss, der Irrsinn dieses Blattes und seine millionenfache Ruchlosigkeit sind ansteckend wie Aids und haben in Wirklichkeit schon längst die Abdankung von Takt und Mitleid im weiten Kreis seiner Leser zur Folge gehabt. Warum sonst würden sie sich täglich gemein machen mit solcher abgründigen journalistischen Gemeinheit?

Es sei, so heißt es in Berliner politischen Kreisen, BILD das neue Leitmedium der Republik. Das wollen wir gerne glauben.
Deutschland : Ruchlosigkeit, millionenfach, Michael Naumann, Herausgeber, Die Zeit, Nov. 30, 2005

Leitmedium der Republik – vielleicht. Ganz sicher aber ist BILD das Leitmedium der Leitkultur-mentalität in der Republik. Und immer mal wieder das Leitmedium der Kultur die sich am Leid der “Anderen” aufgeilt.

[Update] Jawoll – die Sau wird durch Kleinbloggersdorf getrieben! Überall werden die Mistforken gewetzt … auch bei der taz … den Katholiken … und im Presserat.
(via BILDblog)
Treibt die Sau!

What an extraordinary hurricane season! I wonder if this is the first tropical storm recorded to have hit Africa?

Tropical Storm Delta slammed into Spain’s Canary Islands last night at near hurricane strength, killing at least seven people. One man died when he was blown off the roof he was trying to repair, and six African illegal immigrants drowned after winds caused their boat to capsize while attempting to reach Gran Canaria Island. Twelve of the immigrants remained missing while 32 were rescued. Each year, thousands of migrants try to reach the Canary Islands from Africa and many die in the attempt, but usually not in a tropical storm!
Wunder Blog : Weather Underground

And tropical storm Epsilon may yet turn into a Hurricane (of sorts).

Worried yet about the bird flu? At least the Feds are on the job, now, right? There are competent public-health experts hammering out plans for a response to a flu pandemic, right?

Meet Stewart Simonson. He’s the official charged by Bush with “the protection of the civilian population from acts of bioterrorism and other public health emergencies”–a well-connected, ideological, ambitious Republican with zero public health management or medical expertise, whose previous job was as a corporate lawyer for Amtrak. When Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently speculated, “If something comes along that is truly serious…like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence,” many of those professionally concerned with such scenarios couldn’t help thinking of Simonson. They recalled his own unsettling words at a recent Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on government response to a chemical or biological attack: “We’re learning as we go.”
Germ Boys and Yes Men – The Nation – November 28, 2005 issue

A lawyer? A former Amtrak lawyer? And he is learning as he goes???

I dread the day the president announces that “Simonson, you’re doing a heckuva job!”

The Council on Foreign Relations held a conference on Nov. 16 in New York where a number of high-powered panelists discussed the threat of a flu pandemic and the status of avian flu preparedness in the U.S. and around the world. The intensity and complexity of the problem, as laid out in the discussions, is truly mind-boggling. The experts seem to mostly agree that we don’t know when the pandemic is going to begin, and we don’t know how bad it’s going to be. Most also agree that we are pretty sure it’s going to be bad, but just how bad is a matter of debate.

“Hope for the best and prepare for the worst” is the operating mode for folks involved in crisis preparation and contingency planning. Some of the scenarios kicked around in the discussions talk about a massive pandemic, a horror scenario where millions die, 1 in 2 are sick, critical infrastructure breaks down, hospitals are totally overwhelmed. Hundreds of millions have no power, no fuel, no medicines, little food or water. I have not seen any predictions as to the real probability of this worst-case scenario, but it is clearly out there as a possibility. The factors that will determine the scale of the pandemic are either unknown or variable. What we don’t know is how soon the H5N1 virus will be able to start jumping easily from human to human and the pathogenicity of that virus. And one of the changing variables we control is our level of preparedness.

The effects of the next flu pandemic are difficult to predict, because these major variables are unknown or changing. Preparedness is a major factor, and there is now momentum on a global scale to get ready. However, preparations are only in the beginning stages, and we need a lot more time to be able to cope with a major pandemic.

In a discussion with David Nabarro, UN system senior coordinator for avian and human influenza, and David Fedson of Aventis-Pasteur, Michael Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at University of Minnesota lays out this picture in Session 2 of the CFR conference:

OSTERHOLM: (…) I mean, when you think about the fact that this if a pandemic were to occur today, there’s a very high likelihood we would begin to shut borders around the world. We live in a global, just-in-time economy today where this country, in particular, absolutely lives on the goods and services of much of the rest of the world. Many of our critical medical supplies, our pharmaceutical products, our food supply everything you can name that would come to a screeching and crashing halt if, in fact, pandemic began today.

Read the rest of this entry »

Both are depressing:
Kanzlerin Sauerkraut climbs behind the wheel of that stalling, choking, smoking dumptruck that Germany is these days. Good luck, you’ll need it. 53 members of the Bundestag from her own “coalition” voted against her. I give this arrangement no more than 2 years. This government will probably fail not so much over SPD-CDU tensions as over power struggles inside the two parties. Too bad, because Germany really could use some bold, smart leadership.

History: President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on this day in 1963 in Dallas, Texas.

We woke up this morning at 5:30 because Julia was not feeling well, and noticed the woods behind our house were burning. Across an area of about an acre (roughly a third of a hectare) the leaf litter on the ground was burning and the fire was rapidly spreading in a wide swath across the forest. So I called 911 (emergency) and within 5 minutes the first fireman arrived, and now we have the driveway in front and in the back of the house full of firetrucks and about a dozen firemen hosing down smoldering logs.

It looks like the neighbor was burning leaves yesterday and did not fully extinguish the fire. Over night is restarted and spread across their back yard and into ours and another neighbor’s. I am glad that I cleaned our foot/bike path from leaves yesterday, because the fire did not get across the path. That prevented it from getting near our wood shed, which is full of … you guessed it … dry fire wood! That might have made this morning even more interesting. As it is, it does not look like any damage was done, but I bet the guy who caused the fire feels pretty stupid!
[UPDATE: added some pictures – see below the fold]

Read the rest of this entry »

Interesting new technology developed in Japan: a sugar-based catalyst to replace the commonly used lye in the transesterification reaction that turns veg-oil into biodiesel:

Michikazu Hara, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues have used common, inexpensive sugars to form a recyclable solid acid that does the job on the cheap. Their research is reported in last week’s issue of the journal Nature.

“We estimate the cost of the catalyst to be one-tenth to one-fiftieth that of conventional catalysts,” Hara said.

The breakthrough could provide cost savings on a massive scale, he said, because the technique could fairly easily make the transition from the lab to the refinery—if interest warrants.
Cheaper Veggie Diesel May Change the Way We Drive National Geographic – 11/14/05

(thanks, Rachel)
Production cost is one major problem holding back biodiesel from large-scale adoption in the US. We need more researchers to contribute in such a productive way to solving the problems of renewable energy, instead of sniping at this technology from the ivory tower.

After apparently reasonably fair elections, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is about to take charge of battered Liberia as the first second female African head of state. This is a very hopeful turn of events for this war-torn, exploited country.

On the other side of the continent, Uganda’s strongman Yoweri Museveni had his main opposition candidate Kizza Besigye arrested for treason, sparking riots in Kampala. The arrest comes as the country is gearing up for a general election. Museveni also had the Ugandan constitution amended, in order to be able to run again in the election. And this is playing out as a regular genocide is in progress in Northern Uganda …

The recent Sony rootkit scandal takes all that’s wrong with our “brave, new world” of networked computing: spam, viruses, spyware, malware, sloppyware (=Windows) and adds a major technology and entertainment corporation’s bad attitude about consumer’s rights.

Earlier this year, Sony sold music CDs with copyright protection software that installs a rootkit on Windows machines, making these machines vulnerable to hackers and trojan attacks. Apparently, this software also calls home – to the Sony offices in Cary, NC.

Sony is apologetic and working hard to fix what they broke, right? Hell no! They have a smart-ass attitude about this. Here is what the president of Sony BMG’s global digital business division Thomas Hesse has to say:

“Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”
Sony executive Thomas Hesse on NPR’s Morning Edition, November 4, 2005

Well, fuck you too, Mr. Hesse! Let’s boycott Sony this season.

[UPDATE: EFF shows that the EULA is just as bad as the software. For example, if your house gets burgled, or if you declare bankruptcy, you have to delete all your music. Oh and I forgot to mention that the EFF also reports that the rootkit “uninstaller” from Sony creates yet new security holes. WOW! And these guys don’t even work for the Bush administration!]

Kanzlerin Pestbeule is ready to lead Germany … in circles probably. On the surface a national consensus government may seem like a good idea to accomplish needed but painful social reforms in the next four years. That would be the case if this was 1) a government with a mandate, and 2) a government with real leadership.

1) despite fact that this “coalition” occupies 448 of 614 seats in parliament, it does not represent the will of 70 percent of the population. In fact, a poll last week shows that 75 percent of German voters see the arrangement as a “Notlösung” – a solution of last resort. Better than – uh – no government. A the same time, 54 percent are optimistic about the coalition. That’s not much of a mandate for such an arrangement.

2) Both SPD and CDU have serious leadership problems. The CSU (the Bavarian flavor and Siamese twin of the CDU) has no leadership problems. They have no leadeship. The Social Democrats have just dealt with their leadership problems and put a new generation of leadership in charge. We’ll see how that plays out.

This weird coalition represents quite well the state of mind of the German electorate. They want things to change – but not really. The fact is that Germany has been governed by a hidden “grand coalition” for a while. None of the reforms and changes Schröder’s government did, would have been possible without help from the opposition. These deals were hammered out in bi-and tri-partisan committees. If the Merkel gang had any complaint, it was that the entitlement reforms did not go far enough. The German electorate became frustrated with increasing cost of health care and disappearing entitlements, and voted for a conservative government – but not really.

Germany is entering an interesting transition phase. Several things can happen:

• Nothing much
• New leadership emerges and takes charge
• This “coalition” becomes gridlocked and no one is in charge – which will likely lead to
• New elections

Or any combination of the above.

I doubt that any of this will bring about the much-needed smart reforms of the social network and the entitlement programs.