Rui goncalves number 5 and Musquin 25 pinning it down the start straight on their KTM’s. My friend Yann designed some of their Alpinestars gear and sent me the photo as I did the bike gfx and the tweaked KTM logo for MX (not the numbers though which, in Yann’s words, are kind of weak).

On the recommendation of Kenson over at CNTRL.be and after reading some reviews, I picked myself up the new Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ7 and did a few test shots yesterday. First tests really impressed me.

It has a 25mm super wide Leica lens. Never seen such wideangle shots before short of using a fisheye.

It has some really nice settings for playing around with. Still trying to figure them out..

Ok, this is on full zoom out. The quality of the pictures is the closest to film I have seen yet in a point and shoot digi.

Standing at the same spot, i then zoomed into a place on the mountain you see in the far distance above. 12x zoom! Ridiculous.

The macro is pretty sweet too

So far I am blown away with this camera, it is so much better than any small digital camera I have used before.
Cant wait to start using it properly. Especially the HD Video it has on it too.

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So, we were thinking about some more -273 T-Shirts, one of them should be available pretty soon but we have a few more designs and rather than get them in production straight away, thought we would see what people thought beforehand. I added a little voting thing to the posts now so you can either vote with that or leave a comment. I guess depending on what people think we will either make it or not. The print could be down the side, across the front or diagnonal.
My hand was killing me after drawing all those circles.
(UPDATE: I CHANGED THE RATING SYSTEM TO A BETTER ONE, BUT YOUR PREVIOUS RATING WONT SHOW UP)

Deep.

Martyn – Gilles Peterson Guest Mix 2009:

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Martyn – Rob Da Bank Mix 2009:

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You can download these mixes and more here..

So Luke finally has his blog up and running smoothly with a little help from his big brother. If you are so inclined you can visit to check out photos of his season in New Zealand and other stuff. It really does look amazing out there. If only it wasnt so far away…

It feels like we are back into winter here too, been raining non stop for about 5 weeks now. Not just raining, but heavy thunderstorms. Sucks, I need some more sun.

First of all, check out this excerpt from this article by Matt Taibbi. The article is about how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression, if you didn’t read the article yet, then you really should. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, then read the last couple of pages, from Bubble#6:

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won’t we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it is even collected.

Now, I was on the Reuters website on Friday evening and read that they just passed this bill on cap and trade

From reuters:

At the core of the bill, which is around 1,500 pages long, is a “cap and trade” program designed to achieve the emissions reductions by industry. Under the plan, the government would issue a declining number of pollution permits to companies, which could sell those permits to each other as needed.

C-R-A-Z-Y right?. Like knowing a murder is about to happen and then watching it in slow motion. Dam.

Via Zero Hedge

I think it is very important to understand social inertia for the awesome force that it is. I have found that many people are almost genetically predisposed to not want to understand what I have been saying, and many others understand it on some level but refuse to act on it.

Back to what is actually happening right now. There seems to be a wide range of opinion on how to characterise it, from recession to depression to collapse. The press has recently been filled with stories about “green shoots” and the economists are discussing the exact timing of economic recovery. Mainstream opinion ranges from “later this year” to “sometime next year.” None of them dares to say that global economic growth might be finished for good, or that it will be over in “the not-too-distant future” — a vague term they seem to like a whole lot.

There does seem to be a consensus forming that last year’s financial crash was precipitated by the spike in oil prices last summer, when oil briefly touched $147/bbl. Why this should have happened seems rather obvious. Since most things in a fully developed, industrialised economy run on oil, it is not an optional purchase: for a given level of economic activity, a certain level of oil consumption is required, and so one simply pays the price for as long as access to credit is maintained, and after that suddenly it’s game over.

We continue to listen to economists because we love their lies. Yes, of course, the economy will recover later this year, maybe the next. Yes, as soon as the economy recovers, all these toxic assets will be valuable again. Yes, this is just a financial problem; we just need to shore up the financial system by injecting taxpayer funds. These are all lies, but they make us feel all right. They are lying, and we are buying every word of it.

Another brilliant talk from Dmitri Orlov that everyone needs to read..

Three years ago, David Fridley purchased two and a half acres of land in rural Sonoma County. He planted drought-resistant blue Zuni corn, fruit trees and basic vegetables while leaving a full acre of extant forest for firewood collection. Today, Fridley and several friends and family subsist almost entirely off this small plot of land, with the surplus going to public charity.

But Fridley is hardly a homegrown hippie who spends his leisure time gardening. He spent 12 years consulting for the oil industry in Asia. He is now a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a fellow of the Post Carbon Institute in Sebastopol, where members discuss the problems inherent to fossil-fuel dependency.

Fridley has his doubts about renewable energies, and he has grave doubts about the future of crude oil. In fact, he believes to a certainty that society is literally running out of gas and that, perhaps within years, the trucks will stop rolling into Safeway and the only reliable food available will be that grown in our backyards.

Fridley, like a few other thinkers, activists and pessimists, could talk all night about “peak oil.” This catch phrase describes a scenario, perhaps already unfurling, in which the easy days of oil-based society are over, a scenario in which global oil production has peaked and in which every barrel of crude oil drawn from the earth from that point forth is more difficult to extract than the barrel before it. According to peak oil theory, the time is approaching when the effort and cost of extraction will no longer be worth the oil itself, leaving us without the fuel to power our transportation, factories, farms, society and the very essence of our oil-dependent lives. Fridley believes the change will be very unpleasant for many people.

“If you are a typical American and have expectations of increasing income, cheap food, nondiscretionary spending, leisure time and vacations in Hawaii, then the change we expect soon could be what you would consider ‘doom,’” he says soberly, “because your life is going to fall apart.”

Read the full article here…

Fridley says too many Americans believe in solutions to all problems, but peak oil is a terrible anomaly among crises, he explains, because there is no solution. Fridley doesn’t even see any hope in solar, wind, water and other renewable energy sources. Even nuclear power creates only electricity, while crude oil is the basis for thousands of synthetic products.

“There is nothing that can replace oil and allow us to maintain life at the pace we’ve been living,” he says. “Crude oil is hundreds of millions of years of stored sunlight, and we’re using it all up in a few generations. It’s like living off of a savings account, whereas solar energy is like working and living off your daily wages.”

The sheer cost-efficiency of oil eclipses all supposed alternatives. Removed from the ground and burned, oil makes things move almost miraculously. A tank of gasoline in a sedan holds enough energy to equal approximately five years of one person’s rigorous manual labor.

The gallery was a little big so I have stuck it below the fold…

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Just got back from 4 brilliant days in Mallorca at a friends wedding.. Lot of photos coming soon..

Photo credit LSP

Henry’s comments on the Le Mans post below got me thinking. It’s not a new problem, dealing with the difference between what we would like to happen and what will happen. Between reality and fantasy. Between our everyday lives and our dreams. Finding balance.

As anyone who has been following this site for a while now knows, I think we are heading for a long, long period of irreversible decline, due largely to Peak oil and it’s multitude of effects.

We are in the dawn of the second half of the oil age when production and everything that depends on it declines. We have used up half of 2 billions years worth of accumulated energy reserves in only 150 years, which has allowed the rapid expansion of almost everything, fueled by cheap energy flowing from the ground.

There will be times when it looks like things are getting better, but as the worlds resources fail to keep up with the needs of people and the demands of economies designed only to grow, we will head into a long term downtrend.

Eventually there will be complete paralysis in this fragile modern system we have built up, as the oil supply to run it declines below what is needed.  We are in the first stage of this now, as the oil supply failed to keep up with demand last summer and the oil price spiked, (also due to speculators like GS) breaking the back of the already over indebted consumers (man, I hate that word for people) of the world. Exponential growth is an Impossibility on a finite planet.

Now the dilemma is that I obviously don’t wish for this to happen, I love Motorsports and I love driving cars. I love almost everything about cars and Motorcycles, always have done, but after years of research I cant see anyway out of the predicament we are in save for some miracle invention.

So whilst I think the remaining oil would be better saved for essential services and use in medicine, fertiliser, petro agriculture and even plastics, than being burned and sent into the atmosphere, I cant help but retain my love of motocycles, cars and motorsports. Just because there is a difference between what will happen and what I would like to happen doesn’t mean the two have to be mutually exclusive. I accept both.

Whatever happens, whatever the speed of decline over the coming decades, the world will keep spinning on it’s axis. Until it doesn’t.

Change is inevitable.

Few pics from PJ

Stephane Ortelli repping -273

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Benny and I went and hit up leogang Bikepark on Saturday which is about an hour from Salzburg. There is a bubble lift which you can either take to the top of the park or all the way to the very top of the mountain. We always took it all the way up, as you then have about 1000 vertical meteres of fullspeed downhill either on grass like a golf course or on a winding gravel track, before you arrive at the entrance to the park. Super fun racing each other and sliding around the corners.

The park has some pretty big drops all the way down, with the biggest at the bottom. Benny catching some air off the last drop.

There are loads of nice wallrides all the way down.

Once you know the track you can keep your speed and clear all the doubles and drops. I need a few more runs until I get all of them dialed.

As cool as the park is I love bombing it down here! Mad speed!

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