Upset to learn that my kids have been under communist influence and the even worse realization that lutefisk have been discovered on Mars, I decided to engage in some light reading this weekend, and what could be lighter than reading about Stalin?

First I read excerpts of Milovan Djilas's "Conversations with Stalin."  And then I read the even more interesting "Lenin's Embalmers" by Ilya Zbarsky, biochemist, and the son of Lenin's embalmer and his wife, who happened to be Boris Pasternak's lover.  

Stalin - who had been an Orthodox seminarian before becoming a "revolutionary" - had a real appreciation for sainted relics and the way they provided power to their possessors, not metaphysical power, but pyschological power.  There is really nothing more fascinating Stalin's use of Lenin than the use he made out of Lenin's corpse in order to translate that essentially religious power to himself - while at the same time declaring religion to be the opiate of the people.

The dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste - which is largely unrestricted throughout most of the world - kills.

Unstated however is that much of the world relies on biofuel - wood mostly, but also paper with a little plastic mixed in - for cooking fuel.  Although I plainly confess that I use wood in the winter to heat my home - at least some of the time - I have written on the topic of third world use of renewable biofuels before, in the diary called This Power Plant Produces More Energy Than The Nation Of Cameroon.

For a long time, I've been coming here to offer my opinion on the fact that the anti-nuke community couldn't care less how many people die each year from dangerous fossil fuel waste.   In that time, I have had to scour the scientific literature for some easily accessible data on the subject.

Well I have one such link to produce now.   It's below:

When I was young and single in Southern California there was always this girl who was beautifully generic.   She was always blonde and she never shaved her legs and she always wore a pleated linen skirt that was well worn and worn well that was dyed with walnut derived dyes from the Mountains around Laurel Canyon.    She was always a vegetarian and lived in a house with sunflowers all around it, and had variable mauve trims and yellow painted shingles that somehow always seemed right in an unconventional way.  She always had a name like Allison, or Ailee, or Judith or Desilee, or Druwinda, Winda for short, and she always wore sandals, cloth sandals with wooden soles.   Her feet, always lightly coated with dry dust from her organic garden, were always long and slender and thin and at times, she'd sit on a divan, never a chair, that was upholstered with seaweed colored cordoroy and her sandals would fall away from her soles and you'd think that you'd never seen lines so clean, so perfect, as those that ran along her arches to her tiny smooth pointed toes.

When I began my last diary on this website, I reported that if I spent more than 10 minutes writing it, I was wasting time.

The diary was a waste of time, like all of my diaries - most of which are about energy although sometimes they are about Ulysses S. Grant - but the fact that it was a waste of time did not depend on how many minutes it took to write the diary, an amount which fell, happily, in to the category, "not much."

I spent part of the time wasted saying how I love to say, "The bold is mine."

Then I finished the diary by saying, "Time's up."

As it happens, I like to say that too, "Time's up," especially when I am confronted with some fantastic energy scheme that is supposed to save our asses from now inevitable tragedy or even better, keep our Western car culture lifestyle.    (Can you say 'Tesla?')

If I spend more than 10 minutes writing this diary, I am wasting time.

I have an interest in the chemistry of molten salts, as I may have remarked elsewhere.

There are some molten salts these days that exist at room temperature - an active and exciting area of research if you must know - but I am here to talk about high temperature molten salts.   High temperature molten salts - and yes you can melt table salt if you have the right kind of vessel - have been the object of some truly visionary, and I think, viable, technological consideration, but, like any technology - from Amory Lovins' hydrogen HYPErcar to the spray on solar cell - considerable hype as well.    The report I am going to discuss here is not actually from the "Journal of Unrealistic Expectations" - no such journal exists, although it might be a great place to study Greenpeace propaganda, but from the Journal of Power Sources.   The reference is below:

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

I was born in Brooklyn, and raised on Long Island and for me there was only one real city, "The City."   I've been to the Modern, the Met, the Guggenheim, I've seen Arthur Blythe blow in Haarlem and at 7th Avenue South, and John Ambercrombie grimace over notes at the Bottom Line.

I've been to the observatory in the Empire State Building many times.

But I never went up the World Trade Center Towers, not once.   I have never been to Ellis Island which in my heart - even though I am now a Jerseyan - is always New York Territory.

I fell hopelessly in love with my wife while staring at the Statue of Liberty with her, but I never went to it because somehow one never tours home.

Maybe it's for the best.   I mean isn't it cloying, that poem?

"Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."  

Where's Lou Dobbs, racist, when you need him?

This past January, in a diary that was ostensibly about constructed wetlands, I plaintively asked whatever readership I have why, at long last, I can't be like everyone else and hate Switzerland instead of Norway.

It may have something to do with the relative amounts of time I have spent in each country - I've spent a total of about 8 hours in Switzerland, during which time I never got out of the bus.   Norway, well, we won't talk about that.   Part of the problem might have to do with the question of what it is like to be an insomniac in Oslo during the summer solstice, and the rest of it seems to involve lutefisk, but maybe it's better we don't go there.

Switzerland is reportedly - it's seldom visited by civilized people - a country where they speak a kind of grammatically mangled German, not that speaking German correctly is a particularly wonderful thing, since, as Mark Twain remarked, German is a language where the correct pronoun for a little girl is "it," and the correct pronoun for a potato is "she."   It's also reported that they sometimes speak a decidedly less than euphonious form of French, with the worst of Italian thrown in, obscenities mostly, I've heard, but who cares?

I think the title of this brief diary says, um, about all we need to say.

There is a report in the scientific journal International Journal of Life Cycle Analysis on the environmental cost of, um, like, um, well, raising pigs.   The authors are Ingrid Strid Eriksson*, Helena Elmquist, Susanne Stern and Thomas Nybrant at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala Sweden.  (Int J LCA 10 (2) 143 – 154 (2005))

Pig meat is the most common type of meat consumed in Sweden, amounting to 36 kg pig meat per person and year (SBA 2002a). Most pig meat consumed in Sweden is produced within the country; and the production corresponds to 3.2 million pigs per year (SBA 2001a, SBA 2002b). Conventional Swedish pig production can briefly be described as consisting of two consecutive phases: rearing of sows that produce piglets and growing of piglets to produce slaughter pigs for the meat industry.

I'm not quite sure how this differs from say, Ecuadoran pig production in the details, but, um, um, um...

I have in the works a diary that I may publish some day on the subject of energy subsidies.   It is, for the record, derivative.

This year we are celebrating, with huge enthusiasm everywhere on the planet and the feeling of a lifted burden, the fact that biofuels have reached a one exajoule scale in the United States.   This is roughly 1/100th of American energy, and 1/40th of American petroleum use.

God Bless the Iowa Primary.

...The peddler now speaks to the countess
              who's pretending to care for him,
Saying "Name me someone who's not a parasite,
              and I'll go out and say a prayer for him..."

-Bob Dylan "Visions of Joanna," 1966.

Excepting the development of the mass produced automobile - which wins hands down - the greatest environmental disaster on the North American continent was not the dangerous fossil fuel accident spill in Prince Edward Sound nor was it the much ballyhooed and inflated accident at Three Mile Island.   It's not even close.    The greatest environmental disaster of all time in North America was first noticed at the Bronx Zoo in 1904 by a poor fellow named Herbert Merkel.   What Merkel noticed was that all of the magnificent Chestnut trees at the zoo were dying.

This was all Commodore Perry's fault.

I think I'll kill 15 minutes saying something useless about xylem hydraulics - the flow of water from tree roots to tree leaves - carbon dioxide, and your car.   If I spent more than 15 minutes, I'm being profligate with time.

One of the things I do here is to mock the "renewable energy will save us" and more specifically, and worse, the "renewable energy will save my car" hypothesis.

I frequently point out that none of the really, really, really, really cool and popular forms of renewable energy, solar, wind, geothermal and biofuels produce one exajoule of the 100 exajoules of energy consumed in the United States, nor one exajoule of the 500 exajoules humanity as a whole consumes.

Guess what?   A nonhydro renewable scheme has reached one exajoule in the US!  Time to stick it to NNadir!

This is not going to be a big diary.

I don't have the energy to write big diaries any more, and what would be the point, in any case?  

If the World Trade Center had a superstructure that was made of titanium and not of steel, it would might still be standing, albeit with some broken windows.   The melting point of the steel used to construct the World Trade Center is about 1510C - and no, I am not here to discuss conspiracy theories .   The melting point of titanium, by contrast, is 1688C.   Moreover titanium is stronger and lighter than steel.

So why aren't buildings built using titanium?   It is too rare?  Well no, actually.  It's not.  Titanium dioxide is one of the highest volume produced inorganic chemicals produced in the world.   It is a common constituent of many products, like paint, for instance, and is found in sunscreens.   Titanium oxide used to purify sewage water.   Titanium is a very common element, but it is largely only available as its oxide.

This diary is derived from a note by the poster PhantomPower over at Democratic Underground.  
Here is the post.

In case you don't know it, the Northern Texas panhandle, Kansas, and parts of Nebraska are irrigated using fossil water.   This of course is the water of the Ogallala Acquifer a huge underground water reservoir that has been mined - and the correct word is "mined" - for water for many decades now.   The rate at which the acquifer is falling is about 45 centimeters (almost 2 feet) per year.

The water is pumped out by farmers in the region, and it has proved an intractable matter to get them to do this in a sustainable way.

The pumps of course are all powered and the power they have generally used is diesel.

I probably shouldn't discuss this personal issue, but my mother died from a brain tumor.

She was 51 when she died.   There was no realistic treatment for it, although - I'm not sure it was wise, in retrospect. - radiation treatments were tried.   Very few people face terminal diseases with the realism to recognize that, sometimes, nothing can be done.   My family was no exception in this case.

Today, of course, brain cancer is very much in the news.  I am a Roosevelt Democrat - and this makes me a less than perfect fan of the Kennedy family - but, that said, I grieve with the rest of the nation over Senator Kennedy's illness and applaud, in this case, his profile in courage in the face of it.   I wish him whatever peace may come with his condition, and I hope his pain and suffering are minimal.

It is was somewhat ironic that I was in a position today to learn of the very latest research in brain cancer, and I took some time out of my reali life to attend the Pediatric Oncology Award lecture by Larry Kun, MD, of the Saint Jude's Research Hospital and Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium.

Every time you drive into a gas station in California to pay $4.00+/gallon for dangerous fossil fuel, you can see, if you look - and you probably don't - a sign that says that the product sold in the station is known to cause cancer.

If you're like most Californians if you notice this sign at all, you simply dream of a hydrogen Hummer like the one the rather stupid and disingenuous governor drives whenever a GM engineer is available to sit with him to prevent him from blowing his steriod enhanced tissues across the Freeway.   There's always a lot of talk about hydrogen in California - they passed a bill in the 1990's demanding that 10% of the vehicles sold in the state by 2002 be ZEV's (Zero emission vehicles).   So far there is one such vehicle - the one driven by the stupid governor.

In fact, the fundementalist rantings of Amory Lovins, fossil fuels apologist and greenwasher, aside, there are no hydrogen HYPErcars in showrooms nor will there be any.

I'm headed to a meeting this weekend in Chicago that will last through Tuesday.

On Tuesday here in New Jersey, we have a primary.   I have never missed a vote in my adult life, but I have, over the years, filed lots of absentee ballots.   I voted by absentee ballot today.  I am happy to say that the election of Rush Holt in 2000 - who reportedly lost by a few votes to the Republican creep Dick Zimmer in the 12th New Jersey Congressional district - was finally determined when the absentee ballots were counted.   One of those votes was mine.   In a bitter irony three of the votes I cast were in very close elections - a woman was elected to the town council here by one vote, again mine.   The other close election is the one we have all been bitterly experiencing these 8 years.