Tuesday, August 20th, 2013
MARC LYNCH, Associate Professor of Political science and International Affairs at George Washington University - Foreign Policy
Stephan: We are in the endless war because of the stupidity of American foreign policy beginning with the Reagan Administration, which was notably inept. And, thanks to Dick Cheney and the Neocons, we have transformed what was once a deep affection for Americans in the Arab world, which I experienced in the two years I lived in Egypt in the 70s, into a deep and abiding hatred which will endure for generations.
This week, Hosni Mubarak’s old media boss, Abdel Latif el-Menawy, published an astonishing essay on the website of the Saudi-funded, Emirati-based satellite television station Al Arabiya. Menawy described a wild conspiracy in which the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, directed Muslim Brotherhood snipers to murder Egyptian soldiers.
It would be easy to dismiss the ravings of an old Mubarak hand if they were not almost tame compared with the wild rumors and allegations across much of the Egyptian media and public. Even longtime observers of Egyptian rhetoric have been taken aback by the vitriol and sheer lunacy of the current wave of anti-American rhetoric. The streets have been filled with fliers, banners, posters, and graffiti denouncing President Barack Obama for supporting terrorism and featuring Photoshopped images of Obama with a Muslim-y beard or bearing Muslim Brotherhood colors.
A big Tahrir Square banner declaring love for the American people alongside hatred for Obama rings somewhat false given the fierce, simultaneous campaign against CNN and American journalists. The rhetoric spans the political spectrum: veteran leftist George Ishaq (Patterson ‘is an evil lady’), the Salafi Front (calling for demonstrations at the U.S. Embassy against foreign interference), the reckless secularist TV host Tawfik Okasha (whipping […]
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Tuesday, August 20th, 2013
Stephan: If you look at pictures of cities all over China, or Singapore, Japan, or South Korea they seem like something from a future century, particularly when compared with once great American cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, or Chicago. Our failure to invest in infrastructure, or to support a thriving middle class, has left us looking shabby and outdated. This is some of what is going on in the modern world.
This was the rare week when an innovative transportation scheme captivated America’s imagination. After months of expectation, on Monday Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the Hyperloop, a giant vacuum tube designed to whisk passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco at nearly 800 miles per hour, completing a 520-mile journey in a mere 40 minutes. By now, attentive readers have experienced all the dizzying spins of the Hyperloop news cycle: anticipation, excitement, backlash, rebound.
Love it, hate it or just forget about it: the Hyperloop isn’t even the most exciting transit technology of the month. (New York City had a pneumatic train back in 1870, after all.)
No, that distinction goes to a road in the South Korean city of Gumi. While Musk and company were dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s in the 57-page Hyperloop proposal, Gumi (population 375,000) transformed a common section of road into something extraordinary: a wireless charging strip for electric vehicles. They may have reinvented the road.
On the 15-mile round-trip to and from the train station, Gumi’s electric buses are charged by electromagnetic fields generated by cables in the roadway. It’s a groundbreaking step for what engineers at nearby Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology […]
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Monday, August 19th, 2013
Karl-Friedrich Lenz, PhD, - CleanTechnica
Stephan: Germany has become a laboratory for the transition out of carbon energy. With national will the country is showing the world how it can be done, and why it is both better and cheaper, as this report describes
RWE has announced in their latest report on their first six months results (press release in German) that they plan to take 3.1 GW of fossil fuel generating capacity off the market.
The reason they give for that is that wholesale electricity prices are way down in Germany as a consequence of more renewable in the mix. They would be losing money if they needed to sell at these low prices. They don’t, since most of their business is fulfilling contracts from the past couple of years, which still have higher prices, but that effect will be gone soon.
Welt has an excellent article giving some background on this (in German).
They show an interesting graphic, which I hesitate to reproduce here for copyright reasons.
We learn from that: Prices have gone down from the mid term average of around EUR 55 a MWh to less than EUR 40. They estimate the minimum price necessary for gas generation as EUR 70, for coal as EUR 60, for lignite as EUR 45, and even for nuclear power after the plants have already paid back their investment as EUR 40, including a tax on nuclear fuel.
With prices below EUR 40 on the wholesale markets, operators like […]
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Monday, August 19th, 2013
JOE ROMM, - Climate Progress
Stephan: This is a very upsetting story. It's telling us climate change is coming faster than previously understood, and the next IPCC report we are going to get is the lowball, as this explains.
The Fifth - and hopefully final - Assessment Report (AR5) from the UN Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) is due next month. The leaks are already here:
Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the UN panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities – chiefly the burning of fossil fuels – are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.
That is up from at least 90 percent in the last report in 2007, 66 percent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995, steadily squeezing out the arguments by a small minority of scientists that natural variations in the climate might be to blame.
This is a doubly impressive story since, as we’ve reported, Reuters has slashed climate coverage and pressured reporters to include false balance. Leading climatologists who have seen drafts of the report confirm this story’s accuracy.
Of course, nothing in the report should be a surprise to readers of Climate Progress, since the AR5 is just a (partial) review of the scientific literature (see my 12/11 post, It’s ‘Extremely Likely That at Least 74% of Observed Warming […]
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Monday, August 19th, 2013
Stephan: I love data, and what it tells us about ourselves.
Boobs
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