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Friday, December 29, 2006
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Baghdad Burning: "A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted."
Thanks to Juan Cole for the link.
"2008 pres"
4:54:48 PM 
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Say what you will about John Edwards' chances this time around but you'll have to agree that he understands applying technology to his quest for the Democratic nomination. Here are some links: RSS for his weblog; main page for the weblog; John Edwards.com.
The website is well done visually. We really like the sign up for email right up top. He appears to want supporters and interested parties to listen to his message first and foremost. Good strategy, start a conversation. Navigation is easy, lots of photos. If you've doubted his seriousness and focus he's showing you that there is no reason to.
He'll be Live-Blogging today at 10:30 a.m. MST.
"2008 pres"
7:33:55 AM
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U.S. Senator Barack Obama: "Escalation is not the answer.
"As the New Year approaches, we are told that the President is considering the deployment of tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq in the desperate hope of subduing the burgeoning civil war there.
"This is a chilling prospect that threatens to compound the tragic mistakes he has already made over the last four years.
"In 2002, I strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq because I felt it was an ill-conceived venture which I warned would 'require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undermined cost, with undetermined consequences.' I said then that an invasion without strong international support could drain our military, distract us from the war with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and further destabilize the Middle East.
"Sadly, all of those concerns have been borne out...
"There is no military solution to this war. Our troops can help suppress the violence, but they cannot solve its root causes. And all the troops in the world won't be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down at a table, resolve their differences, and forge a lasting peace. In fact, adding more troops will only push this political settlement further and further into the future, as it tells the Iraqis that no matter how much of a mess they make, the American military will always be there to clean it up."
"2008 pres"
7:13:25 AM
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Robert Scoble: "The world of politics is changing, he [Dan Balz, political journalist for the Washington Post] told me, because now a candidate must give dozens of interviews to tons of different people with small audiences. The age of talking to one guy who had a massive audience is probably over. Even if you leave blogs out of the story even the mainstream press is seeing its audiences split up into smaller and smaller niches with more and more pieces. I remember back to journalism school where I saw pictures of the Presidential press corps back in the 1960s: there were only a handful of journalists. Today, even for news like today, dozens of different camera crews show up, along with dozens more of print journalists, photographers, everyday citizens, and radio journalists."
Thanks to Ed Cone for the link.
"denver 2007"
7:10:32 AM
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Wind energy cannot replace the electrical generating capacity of traditional power plants due to the fickle nature of weather, according to the Star News Online. From the article, "Wind, almost everybody's best hope for big supplies of clean, affordable electricity, is turning out to have complications.
"Engineers have cut the price of electricity derived from wind by about 80 percent in the last 20 years, setting up this renewable technology for a major share of the electricity market. But for all its promise, wind also generates a big problem: because it is unpredictable and often fails to blow when electricity is most needed, wind is not reliable enough to assure supplies for an electric grid that must be prepared to deliver power to everybody who wants it - even when it is in greatest demand...
"But Frank P. Prager, managing director of environmental policy at the company, said that the higher the reliance on wind, the more an electricity transmission grid would need to keep conventional generators on standby - generally low-efficiency plants that run on natural gas and can be started and stopped quickly. He said that in one of the states the company serves, Colorado, planners calculate that if wind machines reach 20 percent of total generating capacity, the cost of standby generators will reach $8 a megawatt-hour of wind. That is on top of a generating cost of $50 or $60 a megawatt-hour, after including a federal tax credit of $18 a megawatt-hour. By contrast, electricity from a new coal plant currently costs in the range of $33 to $41 a megawatt-hour, according to experts. That price, however, would rise if the carbon dioxide produced in burning coal were taxed, a distinct possibility over the life of a new coal plant. (A megawatt-hour is the amount of power that a large hospital or a Super Wal-Mart would use in an hour.) Without major advances in ways to store large quantities of electricity or big changes in the way regional power grids are organized, wind may run up against its practical limits sooner than expected...
"The Electric Power Research Institute said that existing hydroelectric dams could be used as storage; they can increase and decrease their generation quickly, and each watt generated in a wind machine means water need not be run through the dam's turbines; it can be kept in storage, ready for use later, when it is most needed. The institute listed another possibility, still in the exploratory stage: using surplus electricity made from wind to pump air, under pressure, into underground caverns. At peak hours, the compressed air could be withdrawn and injected into generators fired by natural gas. Natural-gas turbines usually compress their own air; compression from wind would cut gas consumption by 40 percent, the institute said."
"2008 pres"
6:20:15 AM
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© Copyright 2009 John Orr.
Last update: 3/15/09; 12:22:22 PM.
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