Instead of building a wall on the USA-Mexico border just for security purposes, why not build a solar array structure that also provides electric power to border states on both sides and provides economic benefits as well? That's what engineer/inventor Ken Clements is proposing with his "Friendship Solar Array Project,"http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=5785&m=15453
Archaeologists have uncovered a number of skeletons in Tecuaque, near Mexico City, which indicate that the Aztecs didn't just kill, but ritually sacrificed and even ate hundreds...
This has been all over the Internets, but I think it's brilliant and sublime, so I'm going to link to it too. Behold Glyph Jockey's animation of The Greatest Nancy Panel Ever Drawn. Music by Hawaiian slack-key guitar legend, Gabby Pahinui. Buddhist narration by Alan Watts.
The only thing preventing me from achieving Nancy Nirvana while watching this is the absence of Bushmiller's Three Rocks.
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 2 — Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul.
He described the figures as “alarming” and “very bad news” for the Afghan government and international donors who have poured millions of dollars into programs to reduce the poppy crop since 2001.
He said the increase in cultivation was significantly fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country’s prime opium growing region. As the insurgents have stepped up attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they expanded their opium operations.
“This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium — a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent,” Mr. Costa said at a news briefing.
He said the harvest increased by 49 percent from the year before, and it drastically outpaced the previous record of 4,600 metric tons, set in 1999 while the Taliban governed the country. The area cultivated increased by 59 percent, with more than 400,00 acres planted with poppies in 2006 compared with less than 260,000 in 2005.
“It is indeed very bad, you can say it is out of control,” Mr. Costa said Friday in an interview before the announcement.
President Hamid Karzai expressed disappointment at the results in a statement on Saturday and urged the international community to expand its commitment to strengthen the Afghan police and law enforcement agencies.
Bush administration policymakers and their congressional backers may get some unwelcome news from a new analysis on Iraq that the office of intelligence czar John Negroponte will soon produce. In late July, leading Senate Democrats asked Negroponte to come up with a new Iraq National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, a secret study that is supposed to reflect the views of all 16 U.S. intel agencies. The most recent Iraq NIE, produced two years ago, was generally pessimistic about the future of the country. In a letter to Negroponte, the Senate Dems asked for U.S. analysts' best assessment on a sheaf of awkward issues, including: Is Iraq in a civil war or close to it? How effective are new Iraqi security forces? Is the Iraqi government stable?
It's in the administration's interest to keep documents like this hidden and out of the public record. But as usual, the administration's political interests and the national interest are two completely unrelated things. This report needs to be declassified, and America needs to know the truth.
