It’s enough to make an ex-Boulderite proud.

From the Record-Courier:

In one of the reddest counties in the US, about twenty students at Douglas High have formed an Amnesty International Club. On December 6th, these students held a bake sale where they sold $300 worth of cookies, the proceeds of which went towards the purchase of twenty solar ovens. They have packed up these ovens and sent them to Darfur, where they will be used not only to cook food, but also to boil water. This enables the refugees to remain inside the camps without having to resort to the risky task of searching for firewood in the surrounding area where Sudanese-backed militias lurk.

The club president, Jesus Palma said, “It gives us satisfaction to know we are doing something for those whose human rights have been trampled,” he said.

These students are committed to advocating for the release of political prisoners and speaking out for human rights in a world where these rights seem to be evaporating. I’m proud of these young men and women, and I wish them all the best, since they will be the activists and leaders in the next couple of decades. I’m also very pleased that the Record-Courier spotlighted these students with a positive, detailed article. In a time and place where hard-hearted bigotry and fundamentalism is once again fashionable, it’s good to have a little light shining into the dark corners.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the Amtrak trains that generated so much outrage that they sparked a national story. In case you haven’t, check MLive.com for the dirt. On a good day, it’s a 4 hour ride from Chicago to Ann Arbor. The gist of the story: Bad weather causes 12 hour delay. Toilets freeze. They run out of toilet paper and coffee. The engineer times out at his federally-mandated 12 hours and stops the train. They turned off the power in the passenger cars for a sustained amount of time.

All in all, an ugly trip. Since it’s a) Amtrak and b) a blizzard, I normally wouldn’t really comment on this, since winter and Amtrak are not the best of friends. However, this seems to have generated some sort of national interest, and *that* interests me.

It has been a goal of the Bush administration to choke Amtrak out of existence, in spite of a need for another form of reliable mass transit. They’ve constantly reduced the amount of money allotted to maintain Amtrak equipment, and old, outdated cars and locomotives only leads to smug fingerpointing from the right, “See? Amtrak needs to be dissolved.” Having traveled by Amtrak a good deal, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with employees and other passengers. Every trip feels like something out of the song “City of New Orleans,” where everyone wonders if this train ride is their last. In spite of the hard times, the service has always been exemplary, and I’ve found the staff friendly, caring, and proud of their jobs in spite of being given less and less means to do their jobs well.

In comparison, I’ve had, overall, much worse customer service from airlines…but they have new airports, new planes, toilets that don’t freeze, even at 48,000 feet. *Pay* for a pillow? No blanket? Only peanuts and a soft drink on a 6 hour flight? Instead of indignant stories highlighting the profound collapse of customer service, these poor examples of service are only soft targets for late night talk show monologues. I’ve been stranded in airports by flights that were mysteriously canceled on bright sunny days and not offered an alternative. At least Amtrak put us on a bus when we were stranded by a broken train.

As I write this, Bush is tossing billions of our money at the foundering auto industry. Yet, he is more than willing to strangle Amtrak, also costing thousands of jobs. Republicans complain that Amtrak is subsidized and therefore should be eradicated. Yet the airlines and auto industry benefit from government largess–and hardly a peep of outrage.

Rail travel is a feasible and potentially-significant mode of travel, if only the government acknowledged it. Infrastructure improvements and equipment upgrades (like toilet tank heaters) could prevent the situations that sparked yesterday’s horror stories. Rail travel fills that vital niche of “cheaper than a plane and faster/better than a bus.” High-speed rail links between cities could move thousands of people and get them out of their cars. Why do France and Japan and Germany maintain high speed rail links? Why does the US only support high speed rail, the Acela, in a small patch of the east coast? If we could catch a fast train from Reno to San Francisco or Denver, we’d be all over it! But no. Back into the car we go.

To be honest, I don’t know which is worse: Running out of toilet paper or running out of coffee.

Click on the image for a full-sized view of how truly huge Kentsnorth power station is. To get a concept of scale, look at the far right edge...that's a full-sized freighter.

Here’s something from the UK that we’re not really hearing much about here in the colonies.

Via Global Guerillas:   On November 28th, in full view of CCTV security cameras, a lone activist scaled not one but two razor-wire-encrusted, electrified fences, sauntered through one of the most secure coal power plants in Britain, moseyed into the generator room and coolly shut down a 500MW turbine. He or she then left a banner with “No New Coal” scrawled in gaffer’s tape across a bedsheet. The activist then turned and calmly left the plant the same way that he or she got in.

The mystery activist has been dubbed, “Climate Man” in the UK.

Greenpeace, mystified, said it wasn’t them because “We would never act anonymously.”  (Methinks they’re envious)  As Global Guerillas points out, these are the reason that Greenpeace fails: Ego and legacy protest thinking. He’s right–these days, no-one really gets inspired or thrilled by a couple of people hanging a banner on a bridge. That’s already old.   But THIS guy Climate Man…

From the Guardian (12/11) article:

All power from the coal and oil-powered Kingsnorth station in Kent was halted for four hours, in which time it is thought the mystery saboteur’s actions reduced UK climate change emissions by 2%. Enough electricity to power a city the size of Bristol was lost.

Of the many things that intrigue me about the article, this one ranks waaay up there. The reporter doesn’t validate his claim about a 2% CO2 reduction. I’m assuming here that he means during the 4 hour time the generator was offline that continuous CO2 emissions fell by 2%, as opposed to 2% of yearly total.  He doesn’t mention if alternate generating stations came on line to backfill the missing power, nor whether emergency generators at power-critical locations like hospitals kicked online. The multiple small CO2 sources that came online should have offset the CO2 reduction–but by how much? This is stuff I want to know.

Like, how did the power station representative know that the tape on the bedsheet was gaffer’s tape? Essentially, this is an expensive, black, cloth duct tape used by lighting people in theater, TV, and film. It’s not a product that your everyday activist is going to have handy lying about. If it truly was gaffer’s tape, that indeed thickens the mystery, yet narrows the field of suspects. Oooh! Was it the BBC fishing for a sensationalist story? Was it a speed-addled roadie from the Metallica tour?  Maybe it’s just British vernacular describing masking tape. I dunno.

This person really, really knew what they were doing. After navigating the fences, razor wire, and security cameras, they walked up to a monster turbine, went to the computer, and with a few keystrokes took down the turbine. How many of us can do that? Hell, I couldn’t. Most über-geeks I know would have had to study the computer interface a while to understand what they needed to do, during which time they would have eventually been discovered before hanging their tatty little bedsheet banner.  That’s the other thing–why would the activist go through the effort of planning and executing a flawless commando-ninja infiltration through the most heavily-guarded power station in the UK only to hang a sad little bedsheet with duct tape lettering? That’s just anticlimactic; if it was me, I would have left behind a widescreen multimedia extravaganza outlining my manifesto and heartwarming personal story as directed by Michael Moore. Not to mention–where the heck is the generator room? I’d have to tap some hard-hatted goon on the shoulder and ask for directions.

Who would have the essential and not-readily-available knowledge on how to shut down a massive generator, and do it elegantly without simply blowing it up?  I mean, come on–that’s half a freakin’ gigawatt of output. That’s really big. It’s not like unplugging the toaster. So…inside job? Disgruntled former employee?

Maybe. Since it’s more intriguing, let’s say this was a lone activist who studied carefully at the local library or on the internet. From some stray manual somewhere, they gleaned the knowledge on how to use the computer to shut down a generator without completely destroying it. Through patient surveillance, they learn all about the £12 million security systems and waltz right through them without raising a single alarm. This smacks of a Tom Clancy plot, or a near-impossible level in a video game.

Now let’s extend that thought process to Nevada. Let’s say that Bushie’s DoE gets their wish and Yucca Mountain goes online with three times as much high-level nuclear trash as was originally specified. Some lone actor then simply walks in and hijacks just a little high level nuke waste, waltzes back out, and then makes a dirty bomb out of it. With the action of the Climate Man in Kingsnorth, the possibility has just gone from “remote” to “feasible.” We hypothetically know that security is a mirage–with guns, mind you, but a mirage nonetheless. The hypothesis has just been proven. No matter how good the security seems, there’s a way around it (or straight through it, in this case) that a patient and clever person acting alone can figure out.

I must admit that I admire the Climate Man’s actions; however, I find the ramifications very unsettling, yet exciting. It seems very…well, equalizing.

From the Tahoe Daily Tribune: For the ninth straight month, Northwestern Nevada’s seen a decrease in gamblers’ dollars coming into the casinos. Thanks to the economy, people are just not dropping the same amount of money at the tables that they were last year.

The numbers are ugly:
South Lake Tahoe: down 16.8 percent just in September alone. Table revenue down nearly 41 percent.
Carson Valley: down 20.6 percent. Both slots and table revenue combined down more than 20 percent.

Since Nevada’s health depends a good deal upon a robust gaming industry, this bodes ill in a state already beset by budget woes. We’ve gone through one emergency legislative session this year; I’m not sure what else they can cut without harming the state.

This reflects a drop in consumer confidence, obviously. But, I sense that there is something psychological as well, and it may be a bellwether indicator about greater economic troubles. Read the rest of this entry »

Mexican scientists have discovered how to make high-purity diamonds out of tequila. They were experimenting with creating diamond nanofilms with diluted and gasified ethyl alcohol. After realizing that tequila had the proper ratio of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, the scientists switched to cheap tequila, and received identical results.

The American Response
Not to be “outdone by Meskins”, an attempt to recreate the results in Tennessee using Jack Daniels resulted in the destruction of Coy Dobson’s toolshed and an attached outhouse.  “Rhonda’s gonna be mad,” lamented Dobson. “I’m gonna be cleanin’ a crystalline nanofilm o’ crap offa the trailer for the next week.”

You know times are bad when…

Starbucks’ Fourth Quarter profits down 97%

To reiterate: Ninety-Seven percent. Seems like people worried about their next mortgage payment are more than willing to sacrifice the two-tailed mermaid on the altar of financial necessity.

Paris Hilton has booked a flight on Richard Branson’s tourist spaceflight venture.

Hilton says, “I’m very scared to do it. What if I don’t come back? With the whole light-years thing, what if I come back 10,000 years later, and everyone I know is dead? I’ll be like, ‘Great. Now I have to start all over.’”

At first, I was appropriately supercilious and all like “Ha Ha, stupid girl.”  Then I got to thinking. I suddenly realized that she actually understands more about Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity than most Americans, and for that I take back (most of) the snarky thoughts. It’s just that she hasn’t grasped the whole mechanical engineering thing yet. Richard Branson is good, but for now, lightspeed is a little beyond his capabilities.

I suppose that someone should tell her that the faster she goes, the more her mass will increase. Oooh!