25 Sep 2006
Oil tumbles below $60

"Well, there's an election coming up..." seems to be the talk on the streets in Lebanon, Indiana anyway. It's curious how cynical these kinds of wild price fluctuations tend to make folks - they immediately see a conspiracy. They may or may not be right, but I will tell you this: if I had an investment account, I'd be buying oil futures for December or January delivery like mad!

Oil prices fell to a six-month low under $60 a barrel on Monday as BP's move to restore output at Prudhoe Bay earlier than expected added to a sense of healthy, secure supplies, while demand growth questions loomed large.

(link) [CNN]

10:08 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Apple squawks over 'podcast' use

Morons. They get all the buzz for gratis, the iPod rockets to the top of the market, and then they pull something like this. Do they have a suicide complex? I wonder if they're planning on suing this outfit, too?

So you've just started making your own podcasts, and you think you're the next high-tech audio star? Great, but you may want to think about changing the name.

(link) [CNET News.com]

08:20 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Pirate Radio Challenges Feds

From what I've seen lately, commercial radio is slowly dying in the US. Especially the AM variety, which is nowadays filled with ranting right wingers almost to the exclusion of anything else. I can't remember the last time I heard a song on the AM radio. And FM is devolving into a series of taped "formats".

I honestly hope these folks succeed - if they do, we'll have a radio band as interesting as the Internet. If they don't, we'll all Rush to know Jack, but that'll be about it.

Attendees at a secret "free radio" camp learn how to build their own FM transmitters and evade detection by the FCC. The rogue radio broadcasters claim it's their right to be on the air; feds say they interfere with legit radio signals.

(link) [Wired News: Top Stories]

07:25 /Technology | 2 comments | permanent link

Seeds 200 years old breathe again

Maybe there's some hope for this nutty venture after all.

Scientists at London's Kew Gardens persuade seeds from the time of George III into germination.

(link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

07:18 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Leaked intelligence report rocks Bush election stance

You know, if this wasn't a serious news item, and if we hadn't lost so many good boys in this insane war, I'd put this in my 'Humor' category as a "Study in Stupidity"...

I was skeptical about this war from the beginning - it seemed like a needless distraction from the hunt for the folks who flew airliners into buildings. My reservations would've vanished in a heartbeat if Saddam had been caught with nuclear/chemical/biological pants around his ankles - but he wasn't. And the planning for this fiasco had been nothing short of abominable.

The US military has effectively proved that it can overrun and conquer at will: the US administration has proved that it can barely run the government in Washington, much less anywhere else. We've gone from "Mission Accomplished" to "Mission Impossible" in a little over three years - and the parallels between our intervention in Vietnam and this war have grown over the same period.

I think everybody in DC is beginning to understand the term "quagmire" right about now: if we announce a firm date for our withdrawal, we insure a violent and bloody civil war with the probable outcome being an Iraq dominated by it's large Shite neighbor, who incidentally really is working furiously on nukes. If we don't, we insure many more American (and Iraqi) causalities, and tie up so many resources that we won't have the moxy to deal with the aforementioned large neighbor with nuclear ambitions.

It's a rock and a hard place, and there's no good way out. Thanks, Dubya!

AFP - US spy agencies have dropped a political bombshell six weeks before national elections, with the leak of a classified report concluding that the war in Iraq has spawned a new wave of Islamic radicalism and increased the global threat of terrorism.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

07:16 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Novelist acquitted of 'insulting Turkishness'

And this country wants admission to the EU ... amazing.

What do you think the reaction would be if Germany started punishing Holocaust survivors for "insulting Germaness"?

One of Turkey's leading authors was acquitted Thursday of "insulting Turkishness" in a novel that touched on the mass killings of Armenians during the final years of the Ottoman Empire.

(link) [CNN.com]

06:44 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link