Wii and Vampirism  

TreeHugger has a post on how WiiConnect24 ensures vampirism, which undoes some of the good work Ninentendo put into energy efficiency in the Wii box itself. Obviously slaying the "standby" energy vampire is going to be harder than some people imagine.

Tivo and its various media centre equivalents are also going to have the same problem - you "need" to leave them on 24 hours a day for them to do their "job". I think the way around this is to turn the devices on for limited periods while they do their downloads for the day (and while you are using them obviously) - easy for the WiiConnect service but not so easy for the Tivo et al which are dependent on the TV schedule. This problem would get solved when the dominant mechanism for grabbing content becomes downloads rather than recording broadcast transmissions - hopefully the day TV shows are disseminated via BitTorrent to most people isn't too far away.

One of Nintendo's biggest accomplishments with the new Nintendo Wii is its extremely low power consumption. During gameplay, the device uses only 17 watts, less electricity than a compact fluorescent light bulb (not including the display.) The Wii uses at least ten times less power than either the PS3 or the Xbox 360.
However, the Wii has been marketed along with an online service from Nintendo called WiiConnect24. This service encourages users to keep their Wii's on all the time, while delivering them services like free games, firmware updates, news, and some social networking.

The problem is that WiiConnect24 prevents the Wii from having a true power-save standby, and keeps the device on all the time. Initial reports show the Wii using about 10 watts of power in standby mode, five times that of the XBOX 360 and ten times EU recommendations.

The only solution, of course, is to unplug your Wii at the source, thus not making as much use of the WiiConnect24 service. Not since the first generation of gaming systems has there been such an efficient in-home system. After all that work to ensure plenty of performance without a lot of power, WiiConnect24 seems like a short-sighted move by Nintendo.

TreeHugger also has a post on new advances in solar lighting - another example of passive solar and how it can enable large reductions in energy usage.

The most efficient use of solar power is lighting. Sunlight is already light, no energy is lost in conversion to or from electricity. Thus the success of windows and the more moderate success of skylights. But What if you need the light to get somewhere not directly connected to the outdoors. What if there's three feet of insulation between your wall and the outside, as there probably should be.

You could use expensive fiber optics to move the light around, as we've seen at Treehugger before. Or you could just shunt the light into a highly reflective pipe, and pipe the light into your house. Light pipes are not a new thing, but advances in inexpensive, extremely reflective materials have recently made them more viable. The people at Solatube, for example, seem to have a really great system going.

The cap of the light pipe redirects light straight into the tube no matter where the sun is, and then their proprietary reflective pipe transports the light into the interior will relatively little loss of light. At the end of the tube, a refractive lens or mirror spreads the light through the interior of the building. Their system has already been installed in factories, warehouses, retail stores and homes across America. No word on cost per installation, though I imagine it varies pretty widely. I sure would like to have one in this basement office.

The Australian has a reasonably good article on the psychology of peak oil called "Head for the hills - the new survivalists".

While everyone responds to peak oil (and the limits to growth in general) in a different way, its worth noting that very few people (if any) can do the survivalist thing successfully and in the long run you need to come up with solutions that work on a larger scale than just your own immediate environment. That said its still worthwhile minimising your own dependency on resources coming in from elsewhere - one of the most interesting reader emails I've ever received was from a family in Canada who had been reading for a while and decided to go off and build a small village in outback Quebec which they were farming based on permaculture principles. I was more than a bit impressed when I received this note out of the blue one day with pictures of the houses and barns they'd built and their draught horses etc. While this approach isn't practical for everyone (and I've noted before I think that dense cities are the future for most of us) its certainly a good thing for those who are resourceful enough and attracted by that lifestyle.

I'll also note that the "second great depression" scenario is but one option to consider for peak oil - a huge "dirty energy" boom is another - as is a huge "clean energy" boom (along with urban and industrial reconfiguration) - and I think people are best advised to work towards the latter - never forget - "the economy" is a matter of confidence (and perception) as much as anything.

Peter Ward surveys the shrivelled seedlings in his vegie patch after a hot wind has blown in from the desert, and he knows there's a long way to go. He didn't move out to the dry country east of the Adelaide Hills a decade ago to survive any sort of Armageddon. He, his wife Sue and their children were going to produce boutique olive oil, but the day after ABC TV's Catalyst program ran a story about peak oil in November last year, Ward went out and bought a motorbike.

He researched it some more and decided that while oil was in no danger of running out soon, when production started to decline the flow-on effects through society would be massive, as the price of everything skyrocketed, interest rates rose calamitously and industrial farming faltered. There would be shortages.

The Wards knew life would be hard in their low-rainfall district. The ruined chimney of the original soldier settler on their 8ha block is testament to that. But they reasoned it would be harder in the suburbs - a decision complicated by Sue's encroaching multiple sclerosis.

They began stockpiling enough food to last up to six months. They've found it difficult figuring out how to manage the stockpile so that nothing goes off. And they're still remembering things they will need. Just the other day they realised they hadn't stored any toothbrushes.

Gardening took on a sudden urgency. "We've played with vegie gardening over the years. It sounds romantic and it never works ... The bugs eat the plants, you put seedlings in and there's a hot day and they all die. Or you get too much of something ... everybody groans when you bring another zucchini in. You've been eating them for three weeks solid. So knowing how to grow a good range of vegetables, growing them at the right time, and keeping them alive, is a pretty skilful thing.

"We feel that if we're three years away from the start of the difficult times, that three years is a very important time to practise. And particularly when you look at our vegie plot you'll see we need a lot of practice."

They have a paddock full of 10-year-old olive trees. They hope to use the olive oil to barter for other goods. They hope their neighbours, all on several thousand hectares of cropping land, will run a few dairy cows whose milk they can trade. They have some young fruit trees surviving in the septic run-off and Ward has built a shade shelter for his five precious avocado trees to protect them from the desert wind.

"I can't stress enough, once you decide there's a problem, you need to get cracking," he says in his refined South Australian accent. "We have time - but once things get tough, that's a bad time to be moving. The problems are likely to be both getting to the supermarket, and also getting produce to the supermarket, because most of the stuff in the supermarket has been shifted a jolly long way."

They have started trying to shop fortnightly, but found even that difficult. "It should be simple but it just isn't. This just-in-time mentality is so ingrained now. And it's all based on the availability of cheap oil transport."

Ward tries not to dwell on the more dire scenarios and what would happen if hungry hordes started to pour over the hill from Adelaide. He's thought about buying a gun for the rabbits, which might also be used for defence. "But I'm not skilled with it, I'd probably shoot myself rather than any intruder. And it's an unpleasant thing to think about." Their son James, 24, who is building a petrol/pedal bicycle which he hopes will get 150km to the litre, is doing a PhD on groundwater hydrology. But when he finishes that, he plans to do a DipEd and become a school teacher. He's not the only "peaknik" to take this career path.

Dr Shane Simonsen, 28, formerly a research scientist at the ANU working on plant defence mechanisms, has also packed it in for a DipEd. "I think we're heading for what is going to look like an economic depression, so I'm looking for a more stable form of employment," Simonsen says. "In the Great Depression, three out of four people kept their job. So you just have to pick the right kind of job."

He has bought a 1ha block with his parents in Queensland's Sunshine Coast hinterland. "We're going to put in an orchard and vegie patch and derive at least some of our food from that. Anything that requires transport and refrigeration is going to become a lot more expensive and less accessible. This is just a small buffer. "I've had to have a hard look at what we're doing and realise that I would do it regardless of whether peak oil was happening or not. The survivalists who run off into a bolt-hole and wait for the end to come, you can't live like that. Even if solar or free energy or fusion comes along and everything keeps motoring along, I'd be perfectly happy with the way I've decided to go."

Dr Dan Kortschak, 35, has been published in Nature for his work on the genetics of coral evolution, but he has also dropped out of the glamour end of science to become a high school teacher. Living just 2km from the heart of Adelaide, in Maylands, he has three pushbikes for different jobs, including a recumbent trike with a large trailer for carting gardening equipment and building materials. He now grows all his fruit and vegetables in his backyard, doesn't eat meat because of the transport costs, and survives each week on about $50 of groceries for him and his dog.

He lived in Nepal for a while, promoting permaculture (self-sustaining) farming. "I live luxuriously compared to people there. You look at an eco--footprint calculator and I'm still above what would be a sustainable level if everyone were to do it. Which is scary, because most people wouldn't want to live the way that I live."

...

American Andi Hazelwood and her Australian husband, Dean, met and married in a whirlwind trans-Pacific internet relationship in 1997. They were living in Atlanta, Georgia, in early 2004 - she was producing radio ads, he was an internet development manager - when they heard about peak oil. "Literally that day, and once we realised there was no argument for this not happening, we started realising we needed a plan. It was either Australia or America and the options in America weren't as good."

They moved to the Burnett region of southern Queensland because they could afford a block there without going into debt and because Dean had family in the state. "When we told people we were going to quit our jobs, move to the bush and grow vegies, they're just like, 'What? Why in the world would you do that?' People think we're crackpots and people ask 'What are you going to do if there is some magic solution and there's no problem?' And our answer is we've built our own house on a piece of property bought and paid for, we're growing our own food and only having to work part time. What's the problem?"

They arrived in November 2005 and have set about building a strawbale house, planting a garden, buying solar panels and a composting toilet. Hazelwood has also set up a group, Relocalisation Works in the Burnett Inland, one of many such groups popping up worldwide, with the ambition of weaning the district off oil. A big ask in an area with a lot of distance between everywhere, but the most basic step would be to get local producers to sell locally rather than trucking to Brisbane and having the goods trucked back by a supermarket chain.

When I tell her how some of the "peakniks" I'd spoken to didn't want to be named for fear of becoming magnets to the unprepared when things went wrong, she didn't seem overly concerned. "My thought is that if you're actually making the effort to make things better for the community as a whole instead of just yourselves, then it's foolish for people to try to target you ... we're relying on the goodness of people."

While researching this story, I spoke to 18 people who were changing their lives in preparation for big trouble up ahead. Not one of them sounded like a nut job - not to me, anyway. Five of them were scientists, three were engineers and five were in IT.

They weren't treechangers or seachangers, although sometimes they might have portrayed themselves as such so as not to look like loons. I sure hope they're wrong, but in the months that this story was in gestation, I bought two chooks and planted some fruit trees. Hey, it can't hurt.

Public Opinion points to an article in The Age about the nuclear debate and the "false choices in energy" on offer.

The political message from the Howard Government Climate is that only nuclear power can save us from global warming. It looks as nuclear power will be over-subsidised and under-scrutinised while other more promising and more rapid responses to climate change will be neglected whilst the greenhouse gases that they could have averted continue to pollute the skies.

Ric Brazzale makes some good points in an op-ed in The Age. He makes the obvious point that, as the focus of the Government's nuclear taskforce was narrowly on nuclear power, so it excluded consideration of clean energy sources, such as renewable energy, gas-fired generation and energy efficiency. So we had a a false choice — between nuclear energy and coal — as if no other large-capacity power options were available. As we know this is a false choice as we have solar power, wind power, bioenergy, geothermal "hot rocks", energy efficiency, solar water heating and natural gas. That undercuts nuclear power being a magic bullet answer to climate change.

The Stern Report and the Government's nuclear taskforce a carbon price signal is essential for greenhouse gas reduction and for investment in the development and deployment of zero and low-emission technologies.Brazzale says that the flaw of the taskforce is:

We don't need to wait 15 to 20 years to build nuclear power stations.More importantly, we don't have 15 to 20 years to wait to build them.As Stern observed in his recent report: "There is a high price to delay. Weak action in the next 10 to 20 years would put stabilisation even at 550 ppm (parts per million) carbon dioxide beyond reach — and this level is already associated with significant risks."

And he adds that it is possible to address this lag because:

Australia already has an abundance of zero-emission renewable and low-emission energy technologies. They could be deployed en masse tomorrow and begin to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. This would be instead of our waiting 15 or 20 years for a nuclear power station to be built.

The "Asia Sentinel" has an article on "The Rising Dragon’s Environmental Disaster".

Its nose-curling stench hits you even before you see the floating carpet of green algae and a dense matting of water hyacinth. Once a beauty spot praised by poets, Dianchi Lake, around Kunming, the capital of subtropical Yunnan province shows the cost to China of its frantic growth.

“There are fewer fish and they keep getting smaller. They don’t taste good either.” complains fisherman Gong Gaoling. When he was growing up, the waters were crystal clear and there were 57 types of fish and shrimp to catch. Now, half of the species have vanished altogether and just six are worth catching.

“When I was young you could swim in it and see the stones at the bottom,” he said. Now the bottom has poisonous sediment of cadmium, arsenic and lead, three feet thick which can only be removed by dredging.

Where ever you go in this beautiful landscape that borders Burma, Thailand and Vietnam, you find a heartbreaking legacy of environmental mismanagement and the prospect of worse damage to come. Kunming has spent over US$2 billion on efforts to clean up the lake but it is still too toxic to drink, and nowhere near meeting the country's minimum quality standards.

The industrial hub of a poor province with 42 million people, Kunming has around 5,000 industrial plants, pouring effluent into the lake. For years, the municipal government would order, time after time, the worst polluters to shut down.

“They just pretend, I can hear them when they secretly open again, sometimes at night,” Mr. Zhong scoffed. Many factories are still using machinery dating from the 1950s to produce chemical fertilizers or to process tine and phosphorous.

And until the first waste water plant was built in 1990, Kunming pumped ninety percent of the city's waste water directly into the lake untreated. Around 254 million cubic meters of wastewater is discharged into Dianchi Lake every year.
Major cities across the country are grappling with just the same threats as Kunming and water is only one facet of a crisis which, if unchecked, could overwhelm the whole modernization project. Its origins can be traced to a mixture of inherited problems and new ones but in both cases the root causes are political.

The environment poses one of the gravest threats to the political stability of the country because lays bare for all to see the failure of the political system. The environmental protest movements and failures like the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant spurred the downfall of the Soviet system in the 1980s. It is remarkable that so far nothing similar happened in China because the failures are as painfully evident here. Disputes over pollution are one of the chief reasons for the rapid growth of grass roots protests in China.

Australian oil and gas company Santos continues to have problems in Indonesia - first mudslides now exploding gas pipelines.

SANTOS'S Indonesian woes have taken a devastating turn, with its multi-million-dollar mud flow disaster linked to a massive gas explosion which has killed at least eight people.

The explosion in the state-owned Pertamina East Java gas pipeline near Surabaya yesterday also injured 16 people and at least three more were missing. The explosion occurred near Santos's troubled part-owned Banjar Panji-1 well, which has been the site of a disastrous, and continuing, mud flood since May.

Experts have been struggling to stop a mud leak believed to have been caused by a drilling incident at the exploratory gas well - 18 per cent owned by Santos - in May. Millions of cubic metres of hot mud have spewed from the site, flooding more than 400 hectares, swallowing eight entire villages, hectares of rice paddy fields and numerous factories in East Java, and displacing 12,000 people.

Last night's gas explosion, which sent a fireball 500 metres into the air, was believed to have been triggered when the East Java gas pipeline cracked under pressure, authorities said.

Santos is also considering the future of the once promising but now problematic Jeruk field off Indonesia as reserves appear closer to 50 million barrels than earlier fevered predictions of 250+ million barrels.

The future of Santos Ltd's Jeruk oil discovery in offshore Indonesia is in doubt, after the Australian energy company again downgraded its reserves and said it was considering whether to continue with its development.

The news capped off a difficult week for Santos during which a massive gas explosion occurred near one of its exploration wells in Indonesia, killing at least thirteen people. The explosion was thought to be linked to a multi-million dollar mudflow disaster at the site. Santos said that the upside recoverable oil resource for Jeruk, in which it has a 40.5 per cent stake, was likely to be under 50 million barrels.

Meanwhile, a little south in the Northern Territory, some of the fallout of Johnny's obsession with radioactivity seems to be settling on the local population - however the territory government is denying the Ranger uranium mine is to blame for a much higher incidence of cancer around Kakadu.

THE Northern Territory Government has rejected any link between Australia's largest uranium mine and higher levels of cancer among Aboriginal people living nearby. The disturbing findings are part of a preliminary discussion paper into the health affects of Energy Resources of Australia's (ERA) Ranger mine, which is surrounded by the world heritage-listed Kakadu National Park.

The NT Government says the cancers found in nearby Aboriginal communities are of the type caused by lifestyle and not radiation. However the Commonwealth's peak indigenous research body, which commissioned the report, says its discovery of a near doubling in the overall cancer incidence rate, compared to other areas of the territory, is a cause for “serious concern”. It wants an investigation into a possible link with the mine.

“There is an excess of cancer in the Aboriginal communities of the Kakadu region,” says the leaked report from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies (AIATSIS).

The Winnipeg Free Press has an article containing predictions of significant jumps in oil and gas prices coming over the northern winter.

CONSUMERS who have been feeling warm and fuzzy about falling oil prices had better brace themselves for a blast of cold air, according to one of Canada's leading oil and natural gas authorities.

Josef Schachter, president and chief investment officer of Calgary-based Schachter Asset Management Inc., said the recent swoon in oil and natural gas prices is temporary, spurred on by earlier forecasts of a warmer-than-usual North American winter and high inventories. But with Old Man Winter beginning to settle in and U.S. inventories of crude oil, heating fuel and jet fuel dwindling rapidly in recent weeks, oil prices are about to start heading back up again, he predicted in an interview yesterday. Schachter, who is in Winnipeg today to address a Jory Capital Inc. investment forum, said he expects oil prices to dip a little lower over the next week or two, to between US$54 and $57, then rebound to about $65 by the end of December and to more than $70 by February. "We're still in the bull cam," he added. "We believe the average price will be $70 next year, compared to $66 or $67 this year."

Oil prices climbed above $60 a barrel Tuesday amid temporary trouble with an Alaskan pipeline and a couple of U.S. refinery outages. Energy traders were also buying ahead of the weekly U.S. oil inventory report, which is released Wednesday. Analysts are expecting it to show that U.S. supply of gasoline and distillates -- which include heating oil and diesel fuel -- dropped last week.

While higher oil and natural gas prices mean higher pump prices and high heating bills for consumers, Schachter maintained they're necessary to ensure there'll be ongoing oil and gas exploration and development taking place in Canada. "We're not running out of oil, we're just running out of cheap oil," he said, noting it costs big money to access natural gas reserves that are deep in the ground and to extract oil from the sea and from the northern Alberta tar sands.

Our oil war in Iraq is taking an ever higher toll on the local populace.

Funeral processions began on Friday for the more than 20 people who were killed by car bombs and mortars in Baghdad's largest Shiite district.

Hundreds of men, women and children beat their chests, chanted and cried as they walked beside vehicles carrying the caskets of their loved ones.

The rest of Baghdad remained under a 24-hour curfew aimed at stopping widespread sectarian violence in the capital.

But Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, himself a Shiite, ordered police to guard the processions carrying victims of Thursday's attacks by Sunni Muslim insurgents in Sadr City to Najaf, the holy Shiite city where they will be buried.

"God is great. There is no God but Allah. Mohammed is the messenger of Allah," many of the mourners chanted, as they beat their chests while walking through the Sadr City slum alongside the slow moving the cars and minivans carrying the wooden caskets tied to the rooftops.

Some of the men and women repeatedly touched the sides of the vehicles or the caskets in an effort to say a final farewell to their relatives or friends.

Once the processions reached the edge of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad, the cars and minivans left most of the mourners behind for the 150-kilometre drive south to Najaf, a treacherous journey that passes through many checkpoints and areas controlled by Sunni militants in Iraq's so-called "Triangle of Death."

In the well-coordinated attack, Sunni insurgents blew up five car bombs and fired mortars in Sadr City, killing 202 people and wounding 252 in a dramatic attack that sent the US ambassador racing to meet with Iraqi leaders in an effort to contain the growing sectarian war.

I noticed this picture of the relative price of liquids from Gizmodo on Reddit today.



Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to be keen to throw his weight around lately, with his hardball negoitations over gas supplies to the EU now spilling over into other areas - which looks like it might be prompting the revving up of a (quite possibly well deserved) demonisation campaign in the western media. Russia is going to be an interesting situation to watch in the coming years - an underpopulated, extremely resource rich region in a planet starting to hit the limits to growth - and with enough nuclear weapons to defend itself.

Russia announced a ban on all European meat imports from January 1 as a dispute with Poland engulfed the rest of the European Union yesterday. The move by President Putin, which has cast a shadow over an EU-Russia summit in Finland today, came after Poland blocked trade talks between Brussels and Moscow.

Although the summit will still go ahead, the Poles insisted on their right to act over the Russian refusal to accept their meat. In return, President Putin raised the stakes by saying that Russia also had concerns about Bulgarian and Romanian meat and would turn away all imports from the EU until these were addressed.

Sticking points

Meat Poland says cost of Russian meat blockade is €1 million a day and vetoes EU trade talks. Russia announces ban on EU meat

Energy Europe wants access to Russian gas but President Putin refuses to open the mahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.bold.gifrket

Human rights President Putin rejects reproof from Europe of large number of contract killings in Russia

Georgia EU has raised concerns over Russian treatment of pro-Western Georgian Government

Iran Russia may use Security Council veto to stop sanctions against Iran over nuclear issue

Putin has also been in the news flow around the mysterious poisoning of a Russian dissident in London.

The poisoned Russian spy breathed defiance at the Kremlin as the effects of a mystery cocktail pushed him towards his death last night.

“I want to survive, just to show them,” Alexander Litvinenko said in an exclusive interview given just hours before he died.

Too weak to move his limbs and visibly in great pain, the former Russian intelligence officer suggested that he knew he may not win his struggle against the lethal chemicals destroying his vital organs. But he said the campaign for truth would go on with or without him. “The bastards got me,” he whispered. “But they won’t get everybody.”

…

He also managed a joke at his own expense, suggesting that his poisoning was proof that his campaign against the Kremlin had targeted the right people. “This is what it takes to prove one has been telling the truth,” he said. He was referring to allegations he made in a book, The FSB Blows up Russia, which accuses the Russian security services of causing a series of apartment block explosions in Moscow in 1999 that helped to propel Mr Putin into the presidency.

There is no shortage of tinfoil on this topic as The Times illustrates above - with the Moscow apartment bombings (and perhaps the later theatre massacre) being viewed by tinfoil types as the Russian equivalent of 9/11.

To me, Putin is a mirror image of Bush / Cheney in many ways - a living demonstration of why you shouldn't allow people from the intelligence apparatus to move into the political realm (and I'm talking more about HW Bush here) - there is no longer anyone watching the watchmen, and we all know where that eventually leads....

Litvinenko chose an auspicious week to get assassinated, given that the anniversaries of the deaths of Robert F Kennedy and JFK occurred this week.

Rigorous Intuition managed to combine the RFK assassination (subject of a very interesting BBC documentary this week) with the that of the Russian and some extremely creepy tales about Mr Putin.

Earlier this week, BBC's Newsnight reported the findingsof Shane O'Sullivan's study of photographs and videotape from LA's Ambassador Hotel the evening of Robert Kennedy's assassination. He discovered the unaccounted for presence of three senior veterens of CIA covert ops: Gordon Campbell, George Joannides and the notorious David Sanchez Morales. All three had served at the agency's massive anti-Castro (and later, anti-Kennedy) Miami station, JM/Wave. (Campbell as deputy directory, Joannides as head of psychological operations, and Morales as operations chief.)

This was no security detail. In 1968 presidential candidates were responsible for their own safety, the agency had no official domestic jurisdiction, and it hated the Kennedys and dreaded what Bobby might do - these three in particular. In 1973 Morales launched into a drunken tirade with friends that ended, "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." O'Sullivan asks Wayne Smith, a former State Department official who knew Morales well and corroborated his identity, whether Morales might have been covertly protecting Kennedy. Smith laughs, saying he was the "last person" for the job, and remembers Morales ranting at a Buenos Aires cocktail party in 1975 that Kennedy "got what was coming to him."

Morales, incidentally, died suddenly several weeks before he was scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, a couple of years after his mobbed-up confederate John Rosselli failed to appear because he was otherwise hacked to pieces and floating in a steel drum off the coast of Miami. Cause of death was a "supposed heart attack," so described to Gaeton Fonzi in The Last Investigation by Morales' close friend Ruben Carbajal. The evening of his death in retirement in Arizona, Morales had told him "I don't know what's wrong with me. Ever since I left Washington I haven't been feeling very comfortable." He'd become somewhat disillusioned with his former paymasters, and had described them to Carbajal as "the most ruthless motherfuckers there is, and if they want to get somebody, they will. They will do their own people up." His wife refused an autopsy. "I think the government took good care of her," said Carbajal.

And then there's the likely radiological poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, former KGB/FSB counter-terrorist officer and author of Blowing Up Russia, an important account of 1999's false flag apartment bombing campaign that anchored authority for the as-yet unelected Vladimir Putin. A statement from the FSB implies that Litvinenko is not important enough to bother killing, adding "The man got sick. I would like to wish him early recovery."

Though I wonder whether something Litvinenko wrote a few months ago, after Putin impulsively kissed a boy on his belly, might have raised his Kremlin profile as a "person of interest." From last July 5 (and thanks to a reader for the link, which is found now only in cache): The Kremlin Pedophile...

I also noticed a few tinfoil people commenting on the fact that CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley both died on the same day that JFK did (though according to the Wikipedia profiles both had long standing illnesses).

I'm not really sure what the supposed connection is here beyond the dates, but both Lewis and Huxley turn up in all sorts of conspiracy theories themselves - Lewis mostly on account of the warnings of a fascist new world order embedded in his book "That Hideous Strength" and Huxley, well, for all sorts of things - but I guess traditionalist tinfoil on "drugs and the counterculture as the vehicle for an occult new world order" might best describe it. So I guess the "fascist new world order" theme is the common thread linking the 3. I'm not sure how the quote below reconciles with tinfoil theories about Huxley introducing LSD into the US though - however its getting late and I'm not up to ploughing through a large heap of conspiracy writings trying to work it out...

In 1960, Huxley himself was diagnosed with cancer and in the years that followed, with his health deteriorating, he wrote the utopian novel Island, and gave lectures on "Human Potentialities" at the Esalen institute which were foundational to the forming of the Human Potential Movement. He was also invited to speak at several prestigious American universities and at a speech given in 1961 at the California Medical School in San Francisco, Huxley warned: "There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it." This idea was based on his 1932 novel, Brave New World, and echoed by contemporary writer J. B. Priestley in his 1954 novel, The Magicians.