The Spook Has Moved!

my new address is:
http://www.althespook.com/ravings/
please drop by! And did I mention you can finally comment? Really!

The Spook Has Moved!

my new address is:
http://www.althespook.com/ravings/
please drop by! And did I mention you can finally comment? Really!

Pro Bono Investigative Journalism [Free Press]

We all know that the reality of a Free Press has been replaced over the last three decades with a sham press owned and tightly controlled by Fifth Reich corporatists, the Main Stream Media. While the blogosphere tries to fill the gap, we Progressives are hindered by a lack of raw facts in many cases, having to get them from firsthand blogger accounts or local media outlets not muzzled by the MSM's higher echelon Gang of 500 thugs.

And now we have a new contender in our corner! It is called Pro Publica, and it is essentially a muckraking free press foundation doing pro bono publico work with an annual budget of $10 million from Progressive philanthropists and foundations. It will disseminate its research via both a web site and to all media outlets who want it, like Reuters or the Associated Press. Here is a quote from its press release:

“ProPublica will focus exclusively on journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them. We will be non-partisan and non-ideological, adhering to the strictest standards of journalistic impartiality and fairness. We will look hard at the critical functions of business and of government, the two biggest centers of power. But we will also focus on such institutions as unions, universities, hospitals, foundations and the media when they appear to be exploiting or oppressing those weaker than they, or when there is evidence that they are abusing the public trust.”

Sounds like our kind of folks, don't they? Let's be sure and get the word out when they go live early next year. (Image courtesy of Pro Publica.)

Sustainable Fusion In Five Years? [Green Energy][Renewable Energy]

There are two different ways to get electricity in a Progressive Way for our energy-hungry world, the Renewable Way (utilizing a continually-renewing resource like wind or sunlight) and the Green Way (obtaining the energy without increasing greenhouse gases and otherwise harming the environment). Few industrial strength (megawatt range) energy sources manage to be both at once, but hydrogen fusion is one that does. It is green in that it emits no CO2 and has no radioactive waste like fission reactors, and it is renewable in that it uses deuterium from seawater, which is in effect renews due to solar radiation creating more every year. The problem with fusion is that conventional Tokamak fusion reactors such as ITER are consumers rather than generators of electricity, and thus as yet have not even achieved break-even energy generation, much less become a usable power source.

However, there is an alternative fusion technique called Dense Plasma Focus. It has none of the problems of Tokamak reactors and as an added bonus does not need to use a steam system to drive turbines to generate electricity as current ITER plans require; it can tap the electricity of the fusion process directly.

Now a research initiative funded partially by Google called Focus Fusion is attempting to make this technology a reality. Their web site is well designed and has a neat slide show illustrating the basics of the process. They also list all the actual research on the process done to date, which is considerable. With a modest 2 million dollars, they can create and test a prototype of their device, which is already dialed-in to the academic research system. Once the tests over about two years are successful, here is what comes next:

In this phase, over a period of three to five years, working with engineers, we would perfect the device, based on existing, proven technology to directly extract the energy from the ion beam and the x-rays emitted by the plasmoid and convert it into electricity. We will also perfect the repetitive functioning of the device, which will have to pulse a thousand times a second for a year between replacement of the electrodes.

We estimate that this reactor engineering development phase will cost about $5 million dollars.

Once a prototype reactor is developed, it will be ready to be licensed to governments and other manufactures around the world for mass production. With mass production, it is expected that the cost of each reactor will be far less than the cost of research funds spent to design the first reactor, and much less than any nuclear, coal, hydro or oil-based power plants currently available.

At that point the Fusion Age will have begun!

Supporters of the World Economic Union, let's consider giving these people our support (it's tax deductible in most countries that have income tax.) The first major step to creating the WEU is breaking the dependence of our technology on oil, coal, and fission reactors for electricity. Focus Fusion may well be the sledgehammer that does just that! (Hat tip to Slashdot, the old fogey, for the initial link and previous karma-currying discussions.) (Images courtesy of Focus Fusion.)

A Brief Note About Comments

After some discussion it appears that the Kelgarries Blogswarm won't be able to support comments at this time due to sheer volume of material we need to work with to achieve our goals. Once we migrate to our own servers (scheduled for early 2009) we'll be able to support a full comments implementation.

Thanks for your interest, and enjoy the blog!

How To Subscribe To Affairs As An RSS Feed In Internet Explorer 7

It has come to our attention that many readers of Affairs would like to have the ability to know when new posts are available automatically. Fortunately, the internet and IE7 provide this feature very nicely.

Rather than duplicate postings and eat up space here at Blogspot, we have posted a very simple but quite effective Tutorial on the matter at our sister blog, Tutorials On Using Voltaic Difference Engines. Enjoy!

It's Time For The World State! (No, not THAT one!)

More and more people are realizing, as we head inexorably into the 21st century, that the old order of the Nineteenth Century which died on the battlefields of World War One but managed to survive a galvanized, stinking zombie-fied existence via the horrors of World War Two and then the Cold War (and its attendant Brush Wars) due to the enervating power of money mixed with technology, has got to go. Unfortunately, we Progressives are late to the gate on this concept. The corporate entities known as multinationals at one time have already figured this out and are well on their way to stacking the deck so the New World Order will meet their needs first and foremost. Unfortunately, this will result in the Same Old Same Old and not solve the increasingly lethal set of issues Teh Old Order has engendered.

Fortunately Progressives have another model for their World Government: the European Union, born out of the European Economic Union. As more and more nations around Europe clamor for memberships (Turkey wants in, the former Warsaw Pact nations are many of them already in) and Russia itself would like to join except that it is still too proud (and its current generation of aparatchik leaders too stupidly insular). The EU does not grant membership casually; Turkey in particular is struggling to get its social house in order to meet the EU's stringent human rights requirements for joining.

Now, gentle readers, let us assume a wondrous thing. Suppose we are able to obtain real power in this fine nation of ours, and convert it back to the shining city on a hill that it once was and still aspires to be. If this political miracle should indeed take place, we have an unprecedented opportunity to join with the EU in an exact inversion of the Global Corporatocracy, which I will hereafter call the World Economic Union.

The WEU will work much like the EU, using economic prosperity as its carrot to force social and economic change rather than using a military or diplomatic stick as the United States has too often done (matched by its counterpart the Soviet Union during the years of its existence.) This blog will attempt to lay out both strategies and implementations of how the WEU can solve all the current major problems of our lovely but long suffering planet and propel mankind into not only the solar system but the near stars as well!

Ad Astra, Progressives!

(Images courtesy of Ask.com, The Global Policy Center, and The European Union Web Portal.)