The next generation of cars

As gas has screamed past $4 a gallon and expected to go to $5 or $6 companies are racing to get their new ideas into production.

And if we don't get busy solving the oil situation we'll all be driving something like this:

Hillary just doesn't give up

There's conflicting reports about the Clinton campaign. Ap initially reported Obama the winner. Then the Clinton camp said not so fast it's not over yet. Last news blurb is saying Hillary is looking for a VP spot. I might have gone with this early in the campaign but after her win at all costs truth be damned tactics, I say no. Give her a remote position in some cabnet office or give her another shot at a national health care plan but not VP. She used too many plays from the Carl Rove playbook and we do not need another politician like that. We need to clean out the Bush attitude players and their ilk from the swamp. We need to get competant people in all of the critical positions and start rebuilding all departments. If you look closely at all major governmental departments in the federal government you will find that they have been gutted over the last eight years. I know Obama will get writers cramp from undoing all of the illegal signing statements that Shrub penned while in office.
Hillary has boxed herself into a corner and if the answer to her VP request is no by the delegates then she will have to fight to retain her senate seat. Remember she's quite a few million in debt and that money must be paid back.
Maybe we could make her head of domestic affairs (pun intended).

More food poisoning

If you live in the southwest think twice before buying tomatoes.

Bad Tomatoes

I really worry when I see articles like this because you never know where your produce was grown. This alert was listed for New Mexico and Texas (so far). The CDC is still investigating.

Update: Cases were found in the following states ( in Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, Illinois and Indiana )

Once again CNN gets it wrong

The original report that actually aired on 60 minutes a few years back mentioned that cronies in the White House changed the reports on global warming. These cronies had no scientific background but took it upon themselves to censor any information they felt would have negative effects on corporate america.
The CNN header for this story makes it sound like it was NASA who misled the public. "NASA misled on global warming". Wrong guys it was Bush and his cronies who misled as they always have.

Republican interferance

Now according to the scientist from the 60 Minutes report the clock is ticking. We have about a ten year window to really do something about climate change before it's too late. And as usual our wonderful elected leaders are bringing out the fiddle so they can play while the planet burns.

Does Nero come to mind?

An R&B great has died

Bo Diddley

The last time I saw him was in the movie Blues Brothers 2000 one of my favorite films just to see the blues greats. He will be missed.

Great summary on the gas situation

From a snarky penguin say hi to: Badtux


Here's a sampling of a comment from his blog:

Well, Yossi, those are not U.S. gallons, not Imperial gallons, so they're smaller than the gallons you may be familiar with. But anyhow, the deal is that while gasoline prices have been higher in some places for quite some time, that's because of road taxes. You may have been paying $5 a gallon in France ten years ago, but $4 of that was taxes to discourage people from driving. French farmers didn't pay that for fuel to operate their farm machinery. French railroads didn't pay that for fuel to operate their diesel locomotives. French shipping companies didn't pay that for fuel to operate their ships. French airlines didn't pay that for fuel to operate their aircraft.

But U.S. road taxes on fuel are minimal -- they haven't been raised in over a decade (thus why our roads are falling apart). So what you see is what *everybody* pays -- railroads, shippers, airline companies, everybody. The repercussions are going to reverberate through the economy. There are already truckers who are walking away from their trucks because Wal-mart won't pay them enough money to cover the fuel to haul their shit to Wal-mart so they can't pay the payment on their trucks and so they walk away and let it get repo'ed by the lenders because that's all they can do. The remains of the U.S. railroad network are already overtaxed as truck traffic shifts to rail (steel-on-steel has much less friction than rubber-on-concrete and diesel-electric power plants are extremely efficient). But our rail network was built when the U.S. had 1/3rd of the population that it has now. There is no way that it can carry everything needed to sustain technological civilization without significant infrastructure investments that are not being made.

The next problem, as was pointed out by distributorcap, is going to be *food*. The migrant workers who follow the harvests from north to south over the course of the year need some way to do that. Right now they own crappy old cars that also serve as their homes in far too many cases. But if they can't get gasoline for their cars, they can't get to where they need to be to do the harvesting. Then there's the farm equipment itself, which burns fuel. And the harvest gets carried to the processing plant via, for the most part, gasoline-powered trucks -- during citrus harvesting season locally, it's pretty interesting watching these stake-side trucks hauling down the road full of lemons or oranges or whatever to the nearest processing plant or distribution center. And there's fertilizer. Fertilizer is basically a way of turning oil into food. It's going to get significantly more expensive now. And people are going to start starving all around the world.

Then there's the impending national bankruptcy of the United States, part of which is related to these fuel prices, which will render the U.S. incapable of importing oil at all. When North Korea lost access to fertilizer and fuel for their farm machinery, their food production dropped by TWO THIRDS. If U.S. food production dropped by 2/3rds, there would be widespread starvation around the world and a whole lot of hunger within the United States itself. Ironically, the people most likely to be fed are those who are most spat upon today -- the manual laborers of America, whose ranks will swell as muscle power replaces oil. 

More later on the repercussions. Let's just say that the collapse of the American Empire will make the collapse of the Weimar Republic look like tapioca pudding insofar as its effect upon the world goes. Germany in 1933 did not have the ability to project forces worldwide in an attempt to seize at gunpoint resources needed to maintain its economy, and Germany in 1933 didn't have nuclear weapons. The U.S. in 2010 under President McCain will have both of those... meaning, if major U.S. cities don't end up glowing in the dark, I'm a penguin.

- Badtux the Pessimist Penguin

Couldn't have written a better summary myself - Demeur

Great idea

Somebody's going to get smart and start a company with this business concept:

Cheap gas

A small chain offers customers prepaid gas. The chain buys gas and stores it in large tanks or buys long term contracts at lower costs.
Only wish they had this here I'd have jumped on it.