Thursday, March 26, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Ecoloblue Life - Atmospheric Water Generators
http://www.ecoloblue.com/en/ecoloblue
The website also has links to solar iphone/ipod chargers and biodegradable plastics.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
“Boast of Quietness” by Jorge Luis Borges
Sure of my life and of my death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Obama's unprecedented message to the Iranian People
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Viva
their Viva La Vida album, and halfway through the gig they ran off the
stage and played an acoustic set about ten metres from our seats.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Friday, March 13, 2009
How the US hit the reset button
If ever the world would have forgiven a man for not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, it would have been now. No one would blame Barack Obama if he focused exclusively on the economic crisis, pushing the foreign policy in-tray to the back of his desk. After all, there's only so much even a Messiah can handle.
For all that, the new US President has crammed a slew of foreign policy moves into his first six weeks, any one of which would have made big news in normal times. Instead, in the age of global economic meltdown, they have had to fight for more than fleeting media attention.
Most visible have been the big declarations, whether announcing the beginning of the end of the Iraq war, avowing that "the United States of America does not torture" or ordering that Guantanamo be closed. In just the last week, we've had the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, dispatching officials to Syria as well as inviting Iran to talks on the future of Afghanistan - extending a hand to two states previously consigned to outer darkness.
The start of the month brought the revelation that Obama had written a secret letter to his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, hinting at a deal in which Moscow would lean on Iran, urging it to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons, in return for the US scrapping its planned installation of a missile defence system in Russia's eastern European backyard. A gesture to cap it all: the Obama Administration has moved to ease trade and travel restrictions with Cuba.
The question - 50 days into the administration - is: is there a common thread of logic running through these moves, one that we might describe, however prematurely, as the Obama doctrine?
The first unifying theme, sounded minutes after he took the presidential oath, is a repudiation of the legacy of his predecessor. Obama is determined to signal to the world that he is the unBush. Some on the left and right alike have suggested that this is more symbolic than real, that in fact the basic lineaments of US policy remain in place.
Obama will keep rather a lot of troops in Iraq until the end of 2011, just as the Bush administration planned; he has intensified US involvement in Afghanistan, sending 17,000 more troops; and Robert Gates, George Bush's defence secretary, remains in this post under Obama.
Put that to the Obama team and they don't wholly deny it. The US did not become a different country on January 20, they say; its interests have not changed overnight.
The difference, says the new team in Washington, is that while the Bush folk were "forced" into realism after seeing their ideological dreams in ruins, "this is our starting point".
What no one denies is that there is a clear advantage for the US in the rest of the world believing that a profound change has come about. Which is why the declaration by the Vice President, Joe Biden, that the US is pressing the "reset button" has become the current catchphrase of US diplomacy.
A benign assessment of the Obama record so far would see two other early traits. The first is a readiness to speak the truth. Asked by The New York Times last week whether the US was winning the war in Afghanistan, he replied tersely: "No." After the Bush years, when those who followed the evidence were dismissed as dullards imprisoned in the narrow-minded confines of the "reality-based community", such candour is a relief. Second, there are some signs of imaginative thinking. Deploying the veteran of the Northern Ireland peace process, George Mitchell, to the Israel-Palestine conflict is one of those ideas that seems obvious - but only because it makes so much sense. The same goes for allocating the Afghan-Pakistan, or "Afpak", file to the hardball maestro Richard Holbrooke.
But plaudits surely go to Obama's direct appeal to Medvedev, with its echoes of the former US president John Kennedy's resolution of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Just as JFK agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey if the Soviet Union took theirs away from Cuba, so Obama implicitly made a similar offer to Russia: you get Iran to back down and I'll remove my interceptor missiles and radar stations from Poland and the Czech Republic. If such an initiative were to work, the knock-on effects would be multiple.
Take one: Israel has long hinted that if its friends were to make the Iranian threat go away, it would respond by moving forward on the peace track. For a long while that was assumed to mean military action against Iran. But if Obama's Russia gambit were to succeed - and the critics claim Gates started work on these lines a year ago - the goal of an Iranian nuclear freeze, with all its ancillary benefits, would be achieved without a shot being fired.
To be clear, this is not guitar-strumming hippie dovishness, as the escalation in Afghanistan confirms - though one administration official warns against overinterpreting that move. It is a "time-buying exercise", he says, ensuring things don't get worse on the ground while the White House undertakes a strategic review of the entire Afpak region, from where, it argues, every major al-Qaeda attack since September 11, 2001, has emanated.
I'm told this was the thrust of Biden's message to NATO's North Atlantic Council in Brussels this week: not some kind of "wussy multilateralism", with lots of cosy meetings and platitudes, but a "results-oriented" desire to get things done - and the belief that that only happens when the world acts in concert.
To be sure, these are only the early signals in the early days. But from a President with his hands full, they are encouraging.
The Guardian - 13/3/2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
Stuck Between Stations - The Hold Steady
Boys and Girls in America have such a sad time together.
Sucking off each other at the demonstrations
Making sure their makeup’s straight
Crushing one another with colossal expectations.
Dependent, undisciplined, and sleeping late.
She was a really cool kisser and she wasn’t all that strict of a Christian.
She was a damn good dancer but she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend.
She likes the warm feeling but she’s tired of all the dehydration.
Most nights are crystal clear
But tonight it’s like it’s stuck between stations
On the radio.
The devil and John Berryman
Took a walk together.
They ended up on Washington
Talking to the river.
He said “I’ve surrounded myself with doctors
And deep thinkers.
But big heads with soft bodies
Make for lousy lovers.”
There was that night that we thought John Berryman could fly.
But he didn’t
So he died.
She said “You’re pretty good with words
But words won’t save your life.”
And they didn’t.
So he died.
He was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected.
He loved the Golden Gophers but he hated all the drawn out winters.
He likes the warm feeling but he’s tired of all the dehydration
Most nights were kind of fuzzy
But that last night he had total retention.
These Twin Cities kisses
Sound like clicks and hisses.
We all tumbled down and
Drowned in the Mississippi River.
We drink
We dry up
Then we crumble to dust.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Green Gloves
friends are somewhere getting wasted,
hope they're staying glued together,
I have arms for them.
Take another sip of them,
it floats around and takes me over
like a little drop of ink in a glass of water.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Swheat! Split personality juice...
frivolity... but never did I think I'd bump into this baby - a shot of
wheatgrass and green drink on one side with a shot of orange, mango
and a few other fruits from the yellow to red spectrum on the other.
Two's company on this tip, fe sho.
'But chickens are buddhists too!'
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Mail2Blogger
running... and from my iPhone!
Sent from my iPhone
