Monthly Archives: August 2004

Hackworth on Missing Billions in Iraq

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Highly decorated retired colonel David Hackworth on a CPA Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Inspector General Report on 8.8Billion that is MIA:

In Iraq, $8.8 billion is MIA. Serious dough even for the big spenders in Washington, D.C.
A pal in Iraq slipped me a draft Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Inspector General (IG) report dated July 12, 2004, that blisters the CPA for giving the missing billions to Iraqi ministries without appropriate controls.

Driving the U.S. – Gasoline Free

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Brian Murphy writes:

BARRING A MAJOR METEOR STRIKE, by the time you read this, Australian Shaun Murphy will have completed his eight-month, 16,000-mile circumnavigation of the United States, completely gasoline-free. Murphy is trying to show the world that gasoline, that stuff we?ve loved, wasted and purchased so cheaply for 100 years, is not necessary. To do so, Murphy is crossing the country in a variety of vehicles powered by everything from soybean oil to electricity generated by the methane of cow dung.
Murphy?s rides have so far included just about the whole catalog of wheeled unconventionalism. Electricity?generated through what Murphy calls clean sources like hydro, solar and wind?powers the three-wheeled Corbin Sparrow, the TZero sports car, a converted Volkswagen Beetle, a converted Pontiac Fiero, a few battery-powered motorcycles and one solar-electric canoe (that?s right, a canoe). Biodiesel powers a VW Golf, a near-10-second quarter-mile dragster, two Hummers and the TV crew?s Ford F-650-based motor home. Ethanol produced from corn powers an airplane in which he flew. The ?Human-Powered Car,? meanwhile, has four seats with everyone cranking to make it go. That one didn?t cover much of the 16,000 miles.

Dark Age Ahead?

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Jane Jacobs has published Dark Age Ahead (Random House, 2004), in which she targets “five crucial weaknnesses in the foundation of contemporary life in the West” — one of which is “dumbed down taxes.”
Author, activitist, social theorist and renowned urban planner, Jane Jacobs defined an increasingly influential way of looking at cities by opposing “slum” clearance and “suburban sprawl,” and advocating the “restoration” of urban centers. Still in print 40-plus years after publication, her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) revolutionized urban planning.
Jacob’s later works explored her fundament ideas for different perspectives: urban economics in The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), and political philosophy in Systems of Survival (1992). More recently Ms. Jacobs argued that economic life obeys the same rules as those governing the systems in nature in The Nature of Economies (2000).
About her latest work, Publisher’s Weekly wrote “Witty, beautifully written–the culmination of Jacobs’ previous thinking, and a step forward that deftly invokes a broader philosophical, even metaphysical, context.” Via Taxprof.

Renewable Energy: “We’ve got sun”

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T.R. Reid writes from Arizona:

“Some states have oil. Some have coal. Here in Arizona, we’ve got sun,” said Hansen, a vice president of Tucson Electric Power Co., as he squinted through heavy-duty sunglasses. “And now we’re using that resource to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.”
On an utterly shadeless expanse of high desert plateau near the New Mexico border, Hansen manages America’s largest solar-powered electric generating station. It looks at first glance like a long, long row of windowpanes propped up to face the sun. In fact, each “window” is an array of photovoltaic cells that generate electric current when exposed to the light.