Doing the Impossible: What Detroit Doesn’t Want You to Know

Increasing gas mileage and horsepower with fast food waste

“Think about it,” Goodwin laughs. “…a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!”

Thus does Johnathan Goodwin, a 37-year old “who looks like Kevin Costner with better hair,” describe the 2005 H3 Hummer he’s recently hacked into being a tricked-out electric hybrid that runs on waste frying oils from fast food joints.

Fast Company Magazine calls him the “Motorhead Messiah” for taking the hugest gas-guzzlers in America and modifying them to get up to four times their rated gas mileage while burning low-emission biofuels grown on US soil – all the while doubling their horsepower. That’s what is becoming known as “Green and Mean.”

Martin Tobias, CEO of Imperium Renewables – the nation’s largest producer of biodiesel fuels, says Goodwin is in a league of his own. “Nobody out there is doing experiments like he is.” Particularly no one in Detroit. The big American automakers have been whining for decades that what Goodwin does regularly just because he can is impossible.

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Katrina Recovery in MS Goes to the Rich, Not the Poor

Two years later the color of the federal government’s hurricane rebuilding efforts in Mississippi is decidedly black and white. Which, if you think about it, probably does more to explain the 6 Days’ Horror in New Orleans that we all got to watch on television as the government hemmed and hawed and dragged its collective feet, FEMA denied entry to relief organizations from Red Cross to Baptist Conferences, and the FoxNews androids made excuse after excuse, day after day, for the obviously racist response. Which cost lives.

The Congress was not so slow in allotting billions for federal grants to help low-income residents trying to recover from the storm in the Gulf states, yet Mississippi still has not spent half of its share. Many of the homes and buildings damaged have yet to see any repairs at all.

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Veteran’s Day 2007: A Remembrance

It was May of 1985, we had been called to D.C. to testify at a hearing before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on a matter related to our past life. We brought the kids, 15 and 16 at the time, since they had few memories of when we’d lived close enough to Washington to be there for the 4th of July, to visit the Smithsonian museums regularly, to picnic and fly kites on glorious spring days on the Mall.

Because it had been more than a decade since we’d visited, we of course had to make the pilgrimage to The Wall – the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial finally installed below a berm years after that ill-advised war was over. The overall impression of the polished black granite wall etched with the names of the dead is somber, almost buried, unspeakably sad. My Vietnam-era veteran husband and I were in tears before we even got close enough to read any names.

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Waterboarding: Torture or Not?

It’s just so darned hard to get a straight answer out of policy makers and policy hacks. Though, interestingly enough, it’s not that hard to get opinions from warriors (or prisoners) who have been subjected to it.

Yes, it’s torture. It’s labeled such, known as such, practiced as such. The fact that we subject our SEALs and Rangers and other special forces operatives to it to give them an idea of what torture *is* and how to resist it, tells us that it’s legitimately, objectively classifiable as TORTURE.

So, you might ask with wonder in your eyes, why are Senators and Congresscitters and administration hacks arguing about it in public? Why is it “important” on somebody’s scale of things to do to make this long-ago made distinction? Why won’t AG candidate Michael Mukasey lend us his views on the issue? It’s a fair question, let’s ask it…

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Filed under Anti-War, Appointees, Corruption, History, Humor, Hypocrisy, Military, Republicans, Snark, Torture | Comments (2)

Those Very Strangely “Missing” Nukes

Update w/New Links and List of Deaths

Way back in early September I posted about a strange incident at Minot AFB in North Dakota, where 5 (now increased to 6) stockpiled nuclear warheads were taken out of storage, armed, attached to supposedly decommissioned Advanced Cruise Missiles, loaded onto the pilons of a B-52 strategic bomber, and flown to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana – a forward staging base for deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.

My analysis at that time was that the whistleblowers who reported the incident to The Army Times – which then broke the story – were just doing their job, which had to do with some rather obvious “Saber-Rattling” by the Bush administration against Iran. In that post I noted that ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson agreed with my analysis on his blog.

On Halloween investigative reporter Dave Lindorff posted a diary on DKos based on his article for The American Conservative [October 22 issue online]. He titled his diary The Air Force Cover-Up of that Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight and it’s full of little tidbits of information from the Air Force’s investigation report on the incident.

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