baldilocks

Threats That Work (AskMom)

Over at the Chicago Tribune there's an article about the kind of threats that work.  Wal-Mart and other bastions of consumerism have decided that "Happy Holidays" is out this year, and "Merry Christmas" is in.   

How did the Wacky Religious Right impose their will on the flinty, bottom-line obsessed giants of secularism?  Threats.  Not of violence but of dollars taken elsewhere.  Apparently when hundreds of thousands of credit card wielding Moms and Dads go on the rampage, even the Great Satan of the American Marketplace trembles.

Just imagine the world we'd have if the "religion of peace" would substitute boycotts and petitions for beheadings and burnings.   It would be like, well, Christmas. 

Thanks to the Brothers Judd.

Joey was voted off and other light topics like.... Hydrogen (Baklava)

So... I like the show Dancing with the stars. I cheered when Drew won last year even though I wish they just called it a three way tie between Stacey, Jerry Rice and Drew. This year I have been hoping for either Joey or Emmitt Smith but Joey made 3rd place and won't be in the finale.

What other loves do I have? Home Improvement, cooking, and keeping up with technology, science and whatnot. Ever since high school when I learned about Hydrogen in Chemistry class, I always thought Hydrogen could be used instead of gas in cars. I watched fascinated as two electrodes in water (one negative and one positive) made water separate into hydrogen and oxygen. A balloon connected to the contraption filled with the hydrogen in minutes. And to everyone's delight the teacher struck a match and we watched a quick flash of flame when the hydrogen burned quickly.

So... due to my fascination I've always kept up on the technology/science/economics of using hydrogen for transportation. Popular Mechanics has a very good article outlining the difficulties in using hydrogen. It wants to stay attached to other elements as a molecule (like water - H20). It attaches very easily and is very hard to separate. It takes a lot of energy to separate and then store.

One part of the article says:

The lightest gas in the universe isn't easy to corral. Skeptics say that hydrogen promises to be a needlessly expensive solution for applications for which simpler, cheaper and cleaner alternatives already exist. "You have to step back and ask, 'What is the point?'" says Joseph Romm, executive director of the Center for Energy & Climate Solutions.

What is the point? I don't know. Because Brazil is doing it - so we have to do it. Sounds like peer pressure. How about because it's the cleanest of fuels - and that is cool ! Yes, it is clean but how much energy is expended in separating out hydrogen from water so that it can be used. That energy isn't clean....

Yes, I have a soft spot in my heart for the fuel "way of storing or transporting energy"  (Popular Mechanics says that's what it is and that it isn't a fuel), but  look at this paragraph:

At present, 95 percent of America's hydrogen is produced from natural gas. Through a process called steam methane reformation, high temperature and pressure break the hydrocarbon into hydrogen and carbon oxides — including carbon dioxide, which is released into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas. Over the next 10 or 20 years, fossil fuels most likely will continue to be the main feedstock for the hydrogen economy. And there's the rub: Using dirty energy to make clean energy doesn't solve the pollution problem-it just moves it around. "As a CO2 reducer, hydrogen stinks," Romm says.

After all that I've studied about Hydrogen I didn't know this secret. Why? Because the drive-by legacy press fails to do their job. Journalists around the country should be doing research, finding facts and publishing them. To give people the idea that hydrogen is a panacea or the wave of the future or a great hope without giving the other side of the story is negligent. Then again, when have journalists done due diligence lately? That was rhetorical. They haven't done it in constitutional law, economics, environment, ok... I'm overly harsh. They can't sell their product if they get too deep into the subject matter right?

I love charts and this article has a handy dandy one on the 3rd page giving people perspective about how much would be required for a technology to replace fossil fuels (like solar, wind, nuclear, coal, etc). Pretty interesting stuff.

Musings of a (Still) Free Press

My father—Philip Ochieng—took a week off from his usual commentary; it's not unprecedented (he’s been in precarious health of late). However, there is quite a bit of other interesting opinion-writing regarding the governmental raid of the Kenyan newspaper The Standard and the nation’s TV station, KTN.

Daily Nation Editorial, March 5, 2006 (I don't think that my father wrote this; it isn't in his writing style):

National Security minister John Michuki is trying very hard to back up his claim that that most brazen assault on the media since independence was in the interests of national security.

He is saying that the raid on the Standard newspapers and KTN premises - conducted by a shadowy police unit operating more like a private militia - had uncovered evidence of material that posed a threat to national security. Mr Michuki, however, was extremely economical with details on exactly what had been found. The most he could offer was that it was still being analysed.

This, to us, sounds like a desperate attempt to manufacture justification for a raid which has done incalculable harm to a government that was elected on a human rights and rule of law platform. The minister stated with his own mouth that anyone who provokes a snake must expect to be bitten.
We presume he meant that the Standard provoked the snake. So, anything else about alleged threats to state security can only be an afterthought. What happened was a blatant display of the coercive power of state machinery gone mad.

Mutuma Mathiu:

When a government turns loose hooded men on the population, when a government throws out the law, it ceases being a government and becomes an enemy of the people, an imposition willing to have its criminal way irrespective of the will of the people. [SNIP]

I don't think the government's criminal actions against the media was [sic] a punishment or revenge for an inaccurate story; rather, the story was merely an excuse, an opportunity to send a brutal message not just to the media but to the opposition and Kenyans, in general.

Gitau Warigi:

One thing was clear. This was not simply a bumbling operation by drunken officers. It was planned and deliberately executed. Could there be a cabal in government that has decided to throw all rationality out of the window and resort to bareknuckles in the name of combating imagined enemies of the State?

Lately, dark mutterings by State functionaries about there being "too much freedom" in the country have been on the increase. Soon, somebody in those circles is going to learn that such displays as we saw on Thursday are a suicidal way to demonstrate that the leadership has a backbone.

And if the intention was to send a message, violent as it were, to the Standard's owners, or its Board of Directors ... well ... that has been received loud and clear by everybody, even those it was not intended for. You can count the Kenyan voter right in there. When somebody in this government once told one [former Kenyan President] Daniel arap Moi to sit back and watch how a government is run, surely this could not have been what they had in mind.

(Don’t ask me how to pronounce the names.)

It appears that much of the country’s journalist population hasn’t be cowed by the government’s action against its colleagues. That’s a sign of hope. That Kenya’s media entities still feel free enough to slam its president and cabinet members for their apparent anti-liberal actions shows that they will not sit quietly while press freedom is violated.

As an additional twist to the situation, however, it's reported that the head of Kenya’s police agency officials wasn’t in the loop about the raids.

It has now emerged [that Kenyan] police commissioner Mohamed Hussein Ali was kept in the dark about the swoop, even though it was his own officers who masterminded the attack. [SNIP]

In the case of the raid on the Standard Group HQ and printing plant, it has emerged that final details of the raid were rehearsed during a meeting held at Harambee House [originally the official residence of the head of state, but, in practice, now the State House] on Wednesday evening. National Security minister John Michuki and CID [Central Investigation Department] director Joseph Kamau were reported to be present but Maj Gen Ali was not even invited.

Note to those who claim that free speech is clamped down upon here in the US: this is what real oppression looks like.

An Epidemic

Or maybe the suppression of free expression is just more noticeable in this age.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki appears to be taking some totalitarian steps that are frightening to me personally, as well as being another blow to an Africa that seems to take two or more steps backward for every step forward toward having more than a handful of free, open and peaceful societies.

Johannesburg - The African Editors' Forum (TAEF) has called on Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and his government to stop terrorising Kenyan journalists.

It said that Thursday morning's raid on The Standard newspaper in Nairobi by armed and masked police had shocked editors throughout Africa.

TAEF said: "We call for the immediate release of those detained, for the return of equipment stolen, and for the government to pay for the speedy repairs of broadcasting and printing equipment vandalised by the rogue policemen.

"They forced the 24-hour television station off air, took computers from the newspaper's newsroom and beat up staff and security personnel, among other illegal actions."

From the Telegraph (UK):

Tens of thousands of copies of yesterday's edition were set on fire in yards outside The Standard Group's print warehouses, where equipment was also badly damaged.

According to Tom Mshindi, of the group, the armed men, carrying AK-47 rifles and said to number at least 100, arrived in unmarked four-wheel-drive vehicles at about midnight.

His journalists recognised several as being members of an elite cadre of Kenya's police force.

The reason for the raid?

The raid came after three Standard journalists, arrested on Tuesday, were yesterday charged in Nairobi's magistrates' courts with printing "an alarming publication". On Saturday the newspaper alleged that President Mwai Kibaki and Kalonzo Musyoka, an opposition figure who helped lead the campaign to vote down a new constitution favoured by Mr Kibaki in a November referendum, had met secretly.

As most regular readers of this blog know, I have an interest in the well-being of one particular Kenyan journalist. My father is the managing editor of the Kenya's Daily Nation and has been an uncomprimising critic of his president. He has experienced some persecution during his long career, but he's an old man now. Still, it's not in my nature to worry.

Sunday is the day of his weekly op-ed piece, and with Nairobi being nine hours ahead of Los Angeles, I've been waiting until this afternoon to comment upon this turn of events in order to see what he had to say. I will post it later if it's on topic.

(Thanks to Tim Worstall and to readers Marty and Veeshir)

UPDATE: Bare Knuckle Politics has a video of the TV station raid. These things don't go as well hidden as they used to.

(Thanks to Glenn Reynolds)