The United States chemical weapons stockpile is distributed all around the country. There was one outside of the Continental United States, but it is done will all operations now. Some of the facilities are finished and closed, but most others are not.

This will be a comparatively short diary to show where the stockpile is, or was. Some of those locations may be near you. Effort will be made to tell what kinds of materiel was located there. In no particular order they are:

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“But for life the universe were nothing: and all that life has requires nourishment.” (more…)

Texas Governor Fights U.S. Ethanol Rule That Raises Food Costs

By Alan Bjerga and Jim Efstathiou Jr.

July 21 (Bloomberg) — Rising U.S. gasoline prices and the growing world food crisis will clash this week when the Bush administration decides whether to relax rules requiring greater use of ethanol in auto fuels.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, backed by at least 26 senators and 51 representatives, is seeking to halve a requirement that the U.S. produce 9 billion gallons of ethanol this year. The Environmental Protection Agency must rule by July 24 on their request for a waiver of the rule [which is] favored by oil and food retailers and opposed by farm groups and environmentalists.

But wait… Governor Goodhair isn’t being entirely a friend to environmentalists here.

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For any weapon to be effective, a means of delivery must be devised. This is particularly important for chemical weapons, because, even with protective gear, there is extreme risk to the forces using them if off normal cases occur.

The first delivery system in World War I was to open a valve on a cylinder of chlorine (chlorine is a gas at normal pressures, but a liquid in the high pressure cylinder) and let the wind carry it towards the target. That works OK for materials like cyanogen chloride, hydrogen cyanide, chlorine, and phosgene that are gases, but obviously will not work for solid and liquid materials. In addition, a shift in wind direction can be a disaster.

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July 21, 2008 5:58 PM

ABC News’ Charles Herman reports: Don’t expect lower prices in the grocery aisles any time soon.

Food prices are expected to rise 4.5 percent to 5 percent this year and then another 4 percent to 5 percent in 2009, according to a government forecast to be released this week from the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

Egg prices will crack double-digit price increases of at least 13 percent this year. Baked goods and cereals will rise more than 9 percent. And food items, like peanut butter, salad dressing, butter and cooking oils will go up by as much as 12.5 percent, largely due to higher soy prices.

Higher prices for corn and soy and other crops, along with higher energy prices, are to blame.

Time to get the canner and dehydrator going. If you don’t have a garden, patronize your local farmer’s market.

A comment the other day jogged my mind to remember my Commodore 64 computer. How many of you used one years ago? To jog your mind, it had 64k memory, hence the name. No graphic interface, no mouse, just a keyboard.

I wish that I had not discarded it, along with the printer and the 1451 (as I recall) single sided floppy (5.25″) disk drive. It would have been better to keep those items in a box for posterity, but what can I say?

The C-64 was probably the first computer that was really available for the masses. It was easy to use (for the time), had a huge 64 kilobyte memory, and understood BASIC, so you could program it yourself. There were even some third party programs that actually worked well.

The C-64 was an integrated keyboard, processor, and associated memory and motherboard components, and would let you plug it into a TV to use as a monitor. You could add the single sided floppy disk drive, which was really essential in those days before flash memory or hard drives. One of my professors called the 5.25″ disk the “clipboard of the ’80s”. That is pretty apt. Does anyone out there have any 5.25″ floppies left?

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