The Adventuress

The Latest Hybrid News

2006-04-26T11:12:00.000-07:00

Instapundit links to an interesting report about the latest in hybrid motor engine technology -- air-hybrid. The technology is claimed to produce cars that are three times as energy-efficient as hybrid-electric vehicles at a much cheaper cost. The air-hybrid engine has attracted interest from Detroit and $8 million seed money.

University of Florida to Build Cellulose Ethanol Plant

2006-04-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

FLORIDA --

"UF aspires to turn trunks, stalks and stems into clean, renewable fuel for Florida. The Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences is lobbying the Legislature for $20 million to build an ethanol plant, which would convert plant matter into viable fuel. The facility would fuel all or part of UF's fleet of vehicles. Most modern vehicles can process an ethanol solution of up to 85 percent . . ."
"The plant could produce 1 million to 2 million gallons a year, enough to fuel UF vehicles, but it would not suffice as a large-scale commercial facility, Ingram said. Instead, it would allow researchers to refine and simplify the technology for use statewide, thus returning the Legislature's $20 million investment.

"The payoff for the state is to build a new industry and provide employment - to take advantage of the natural resources that we have available," Ingram said. "We could be the No. 1 ethanol-producing state in the country."

He said ethanol is clean, renewable and, if produced in mass quantities, it may become cheaper than petroleum.

According to the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Florida produces more wood waste from forests and cities than any other state.
That waste, paired with paper mill residue, could yield 12.4 billion gallons of ethanol each year. Floridians burn 8.6 billion gallons of gasoline yearly. . . "
If you read the whole article, it explains in laymen's terms how the plant waste is converted to ethanol.

Flouting Left Wing Hollywood Orthodoxy

2006-04-19T10:42:00.000-07:00

Two upcoming films seem poised to challenge Establishment Hollywood's near lock-step Cultural Left orthodoxy: United 93 and The Lost City. The first film is rumored to be a respectful treatment (i.e., no blaming the victims for their own victimization) of the Flight 93 hijacking on 9/11 ; the second is an anti-Communist, anti-Castro memoir of the Cuban Revolution made by actor Andy Garcia. Dennis Prager discusses United 93 here and Roger L. Simon gives "thumbs up" to The Lost City here. Bit by bit the Culture Wars launched by the left are being challenged.

US Death Rate Declines Sharply

2006-04-19T09:53:00.000-07:00

ATLANTA -

"In a powerful testament to U.S. health improvements, the annual number of deaths in the country dropped by about 50,000 in 2004 — the largest such decline in more than 60 years.

Drops in the death rates for heart disease, cancer and stroke accounted for most of the surprising development, health officials said. Overall, age-adjusted death rates fell to a record low of 801 deaths per 100,000 population in 2004, down from almost 833 deaths per 100,000 in 2003.

Strange results indeed for the "world's only developed country that doesn't have universal healthcare" (i.e. socialized medicine) as the left likes to describe us.

Europe's Racist Soccer Chants

2006-04-14T10:51:00.000-07:00

Erik Svane of No Pasaran! reports on a disturbing trend in European soccer hooliganism, incidents in which white soccer fans routinely chant racist slogans at black players, including making insulting monkey noises at them. Writes Svane:

Can anyone — an American or a European or a third-party national — imagine going to a football game (or a basketball game!) in the United States, and having the black players submitted to a litany of racial insults?

Idiots

2006-04-14T10:34:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a bunch of idiots releasing their unwanted exotic pets into the Florida Everglades eco-system, Southeast Asian water pythons are now a North American species.The pythons have no natural enemies in the Everglades and are breeding quickly and threatening to wipe out the native wildlife. The Everglades are a unique eco-system and one of the continental US's greatest natural treasures. People caught releasing pythons or other non-native species into the Everglades should be treated very harshly, IMHO.

Mexico Industrial Output Up 5+ Percent

2006-04-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

This is good news; let's hope that it continues to grow and relieve some of the extreme underemployment issues in Mexico, the massive fall-out of which is being felt north of the border.

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Mexico's industrial production rose more than 5 percent for a second month in February as declining interest rates spurred homebuilding and quickening U.S. economic growth fueled demand for Mexican-made
cars.

Industrial output rose 5.4 percent from a year earlier after increasing 6 percent in January, a government report showed. Construction surged 8.7 percent and manufacturing rose 4.9 percent.

The jump in industrial production in the first two months of the year may push Mexico's first-quarter economic growth to as high as 5 percent, said Salvador Moreno, chief economist at ING Groep NV's Mexican unit. That would be
the fastest growth since President Vicente Fox took office in 2000 and would benefit his party's candidate in July's presidential election -- former Energy Minister Felipe Calderon.

The Latest UK Multicultural Idiocy

2006-04-13T11:09:00.000-07:00

Scott at Daily Ablution wittily and aptly takes down the loathesome University of Chester "professor" who recently plumbed new depths in Western self-hatred: comparing the 7/7 bombings of the London subway to a protest demonstration. Scott's post is -- as usual -- link-rich, funny and dead-on:

For Professor Geaves, one facet of the "first-hand, lived
experience" of Islam in today's Britain is conveyed by acts of "demonstration" - rather like those carried out by fox hunting
supporters or disgruntled pensioners, one supposes. Of course,
given that many experiencers of Islam are somewhat more likely to "rock the boat" than their morally equivalent counterparts in the pension reform movement, their demonstrations can at times become a little more "extreme", bless 'em.

One such demo (incidentally killing 52 non-demonstrators)
was that carried out in London on July 7, 2005, by four members of the British Muslim community - who, in the words of our Professor, were simply carrying out "an extreme form of demonstration".
And they wonder why "multiculturalism" and "political correctness" are so despised!

They're Comin' To America

2006-04-12T10:09:00.000-07:00

On the boats and on the planes
They're comin' to America
Never looking back again
They're comin' to America

Now look at this. What are we going to do with all of these masses of people? If they aren't all comin' to America from the same place and culture, and not all at once, it wouldn't be so scary. The melting pot would squeeze them all in somehow. However, if they are comin' all at once, from the same place and culture, and 10s of millions at a time -- scary. Plus, when we took in all those sacred Ellis Island ancestors, everybody pretty much came on the same financial basis -- flat dead broke. And most of the people who were already here weren't that much better off than the new immigrants.

Today we're importing millions of very poor people into a highly advanced society of very affluent people. A recipe for social unrest like we've never seen before. I'm very disturbed.

There Will Always Be an England, Part 976. . .

2006-04-08T20:18:00.000-07:00

A giant lop-eared rabbit terrorizes English vegetable farmers. Perhaps the farmers should seek advice from one James Earl Carter Jr., former Leader of the Free World, who has deep experience with confronting killer rabbits.

Sharks With Laser Beams On Their Heads

2006-04-08T16:47:00.000-07:00

Caltech is working on it -- sort of:

". . . the sharks could carry sensors to
unfamiliar coasts and detect "radioactivity,
poisons or who knows whatever else there is."

Oslo Heats Up With Human Poo?

2006-04-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

Extreme energy project is right. But any port's good in a storm:

In an extreme energy project tapping heat from raw sewage, Oslo's citizens are helping to warm their homes and offices simply by flushing the toilet.

Large blue machines at the end of a 300-meter long tunnel in a hillside in central Oslo use fridge technology to suck heat from the sewer and transfer it to a network of hot water pipes feeding thousands of radiators and taps around the city.

"We believe this is the biggest heating system in the world using raw sewage," Lars-Anders Loervik, managing director of Oslo energy company Viken Fjernvarme which runs the plant, told Reuters. The plant opened this week.

Red-Green Alliance Destroys Historical Documents?

2006-03-24T17:31:00.000-08:00

The English-language affiliate of the France-Echos blog is claiming that a group of radical Muslims and leftists have destroyed 10 centuries' worth of Western/Christian historical documents housed at the Sorbonne. I haven't found anything in the MSM on this but I'll keep looking.

A 'Wife' at Age Four

2006-03-20T17:40:00.000-08:00

Heart-breaking story of an Afghan girl forced to marry a 30-year-old man at age four, and the extreme physical abuse she took from his family for seven years.

It Never Seems to End

2006-03-20T11:07:00.000-08:00

The dhimmitude from Al-Britain-stan just never seems to end.

UPDATE: And speaking of never-ending, the "Danish" imams are back in the Middle East again, trying to stir up hatred, embassy bombings and murder against their host nation yet again, in response to the Khartoon jihad.

Social Destructiveness.

2006-03-20T10:16:00.000-08:00

I had meant to blog about the subject of the O'Connor Vs. Donaldson Supreme Court decision of 1975 a while ago when this case became news in November, but didn't get around to it. I've been inspired to get my long-simmering thoughts about it down now that we are facing yet another momentous bit of social engineering via judicial activism (i.e. legalization of polygamy and other "alternative" forms of marriage).

As you can read in the link, O'Connor vs. Donaldson was the case which greatly hampered the ability of courts and authorities to institutionalize mentally ill people in the United States. Thanks to this case and subsequent meddling from the ACLU, from 1975 on, mentally ill people were not allowed to be institutionalized against their will unless proven dangerous to themselves or others. The catch being, of course, that "proof" of dangerousness is not usually attainable until a mentally ill person actually does something to show it, like throwing three tiny children into the freezing cold San Francisco Bay on account of hearing "voices" in their head (see other link above) after "forgetting" to take the prescribed anti-psychotic drugs.
Hard lines on the kids and all that, but at least their schizoid mother's precious civil rights were protected. BTW, thanks to our valiant civil rights campaigners, the ACLU, who set the new standards bar for institutionalization in the wake of O'Connor vs. Donaldson.

As I recall, the liberal elite campaigned hard for O'Connor vs. Donaldson or other similar types of measures. And to be fair, pre-1975, there were abuses at mental institutions of people who were unfairly committed just because they were inconvenient to their families. But those were the exceptions, not the rule. The vast number of mental patients belonged in institutions. And when mental institutions were largely emptied of their clientele after 1975, their clientele ended up mostly in the street.

Round about 1977 or so, was when I remembered the first hardcore homeless showing up in San Francisco. Since then, our newspapers have been full of endless accounts of "what to do about the homeless problem" and the endless laments of social workers who struggle mightily to convince some homeless schizoid to enter a shelter, only to have their "client" go right back onto the streets a few days later. In the brave new world of "civil rights," we're so very, very solicitous of the mentally ill -- we won't force them into institutional care, but we're perfectly willing to let them live -- and often die -- in their own filth on our city streets.

I don't know if anyone has ever quantified the social, monetary and human costs of O'Connor vs. Donaldson. I suspect that they are vast. Not that we would notice. We've all just somehow gotten used to pretending we don't see that ragged, dysfunctional homeless man taking a piss in the stairwell of the BART station. And don't get me started on Leshaun Harris and her three murdered kids. . .I mean, not that I meant to suggest that the ACLU is responsible for the deaths of those kids and all the other victims of violent mentally ill people in the US over the past 30 years -- oh well, maybe I actually did mean to suggest that. . .

I also suspect that the ACLU and the rest of the left's cultural warrior caste haven't given O'Connor vs. Donaldson a second thought after all these years. I'm sure they patted themselves on the back for their great righteous civil rights victory and then went back to their Upper West Side condos or Marin County split-levels and thumbed through their old collected editions of The Nation, smug and self-satisfied as it's possible for a body to be. Roll on the bigger and better victories and bigger and better victim classes to advocate for in the name of "civil rights."

They remind me of that famous line in The Great Gatsby about the millionaire couple, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, whose selfish machinations resulted in the murder of Gatsby: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

There will be lots more messes to clean up from the latest round of social destructiveness dreamed up by the cultural warriors of the left, of that I have no doubt.

Brave New World

2006-03-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

The next brave new frontier for the insatiable cultural leftists in the West is legalizing polygamy. The ACLU supports it and so does Hollywood and the New York Times. When that triumvirate of cultural leftism wants something, they usually seem to get it.

Their preferred method of attack is of course the courts, so it's doubtful that the people of the United States will be given a chance to democratically express their feelings about a potentially momentous cultural change that will affect all of us. But any negative social effects we will of course have to pay for with our tax dollars.

All of which will be quite good news for the continued healthy growth of Islam in the West. But not very good news for people of the vaginal persuasion, Jews or gays.

UPDATE: Tapestry Against Polygamy in the US and Stop Polygamy in Canada, founded respectively by women of Mormon and Muslim backgrounds who have experienced polygamy either personally or culturally, are two organizations concerned with fighting polygamy. These organizations don't look capable of taking on the combined forces of the ACLU, the Grey Lady ad Hollywood, but at least they are a start.

FL Project on Cellulose Ethanol

2006-03-18T14:20:00.000-08:00

I haven't previously been enthusiastic about ethanol as a subsitute for petroleum, due to the massive amounts of arable land required to produce it from corn, sugar beets or sugarcane by conventional means. But cellulose ethanol, using bacteria and fungi to produce ethanol from waste produces like corn husks, yard clippings and sawdust, is another story all together, as it converts substances that are usually just thrown out into a useable energy source.

Florida recently announced a foray into cellulose ethanol:

"[Florida Ag Commissioner Charles] Bronson talked up a new biofuels process developed by the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS) that can make ethanol, a synthetic fuel, from agricultural waste products.The technology has the potential of replacing 12 percent to 15 percent of the oil-based fuels used annually in Florida by 2016, Bronson told The Ledger after his breakfast speech."Maybe quicker than that," said James "Jimmy" Cheek, the IFAS chief executive, who was in the audience.
The process takes agricultural waste products, such as wood chips, yard clippings collected by local governments and plant byproducts
usually plowed under at the end of the season, and converts them to ethanol with
the help of genetically modified E. coli bacteria, Cheek said. The bacteria work
to degrade the plant cellulose to produce the synthetic fuel, he said. Lonnie
Ingram, a professor of microbiology and cell science, developed the modified
bacteria.IFAS has asked the Legislature for $20 million in next year's state budget to build a pilot manufacturing plant using the biofuels process, Cheek said. The process works well in the lab, but Ingram still needs to demonstrate the process is feasible on a large scale.
PS -- Florida's Ag Commissioner is called Charles Bronson? Heh. Heh.

Stirling Solar Tapped For Fast Company Honor

2006-03-18T13:54:00.000-08:00

Fast Company magazine has chosen Stirling Solar and its ceo Bruce Osborn for its annual "Fast 50" list of up-and-coming ideas. Writes Fast Company:

Stirling's solar power." "By spring of 2010, each dawn will see a startling robotic performance in the Mojave Desert, north of Los Angeles. Just before sunrise, thousands of broad, mirrored dishes will wake in unison, their faces to the east. Each will be as wide as a school bus is long; arrayed in perfect lines for miles, they will track the sun all day, feeding power to the hungry city. After sundown, the dishes will pivot back to await the next dawn. "It's going to be like a ballet," says Stirling CEO Bruce Osborn, the man responsible for putting the dishes in the desert. "Way cool."

Stirling, based in Phoenix, appears to have cracked the solar
conundrum: how to tap an energy source that's all around us. "This is historic in magnitude," says Gil Alexander, a spokesperson for Southern California Edison, Osborn's first customer (and the beast that sends power to 13 million people in 11 counties, including L.A.). "Assuming Stirling pulls it off--and we believe they will--this facility will be capable of producing more electricity from solar energy than all U.S. solar projects currently in existence combined."
We could have built a lot of these babies all over the South and the Southwest for the money we spent (wasted?) on the Iraq war. Bummer.

French Blog in English on Islamization

2006-03-10T12:50:00.000-08:00

Visit here.

What was that phrase again? "The lights are going out all over Europe." Why did it spring to mind when I saw some of the stuff cited on this blog?

What is Wrong With Them?

2006-03-02T16:24:00.000-08:00

Danish blogger Agora reports that 12 Muslims were caught stalking the school-age daughter of one of the cartoonists.
Speechless.

UPDATE, 3/3 and 3/18: Thank god, the story isn't true. Mea culpa. It was a bunch of girls who showed up at a school looking for the cartoonists' daughter, not a bunch of men. However, Agora still has questions.

The Leader of the Free World Speaks

2006-02-27T14:23:00.000-08:00

No, it ain't George W. Bush.

Honor Crimes in Sweden

2006-02-27T10:00:00.000-08:00

Informative post by Kiwi/Swedish blogger Chefen at Sir Humphrey's, a New Zealand group blog, on the subject of honor crimes against Muslim girls in Sweden and the political culture which keeps them from being properly addressed. Chefen hits it right on the money:

"The county gets money to train to "handle" the cases that come in. The national government castigates Denmark for not respecting the religion used to justify the whole culture. Message to the girls... we'll help you abandon your family but we respect the culture doing this to you more than we respect your need to live a life free of violence."

The Great French Social Model

2006-02-26T20:09:00.000-08:00

Vigorously blogged here. Worth a look.

Holocaust Denier David Irving Loves Al-'Tardian

2006-02-26T20:03:00.000-08:00

Not that it surprises me.

“I AM TROUBLED TO FIND THAT I like more and more of what The Guardian, this left-wing liberal British newspaper has to say; and its Sunday sister, The Observer. Perhaps I am really left-wing after all, a socialist, as was the aforementioned artist and statesman (The “statesman” in question is, of course, Herr Hitler - Ed) . He too would probably have liked The Guardian in its present colours. I have never felt comfortable with the right-wing tag applied to me by less discerning elements of the journaille.”