Month: May 2008

While McBush pins laurel you like, Hillary woos paychecks in peril; while Obama readies for our planet in peril, argument isn’t enough for tomorrow.

Costs rise and then rise. Warm up to that globally!

After several days exchanging this and that, I find myself wondering how you are, what you’re doing, is all OK?

The first OPEC noise of 1973 warmed me to the idea of serving our townships, nation and world by becoming proficient about our energy use and our world’s sustainability. California certified the first Energy Auditors in the mid-70s and I was number 84 and brought ideas to 6400 grocery stores and 8000 church buildings to cut ourselves away from oil.

Proficient is the wrong term because what we haven’t done has no expertise. Today’s OPEC steers a rope around us and neither energy use or sustainability has been made ready. You can say it’s greed done it, or unhealthy denial, or tired politics; mere human game.

But I can say I’ve failed too. For example, a reverse polarity electromagnetic engine might travel further on a cup than gas engines on a barrel, but I failed to finish a prototype to prove it (if I could). Why? Because incredulity tore me to ribbons. A simple pencil can turn a house toward the sun to soak up enough heat to reduce monthly drain. I designed passive solar in the 70s – chilly Lake Tahoe, others in Sonoma and Marin – to demonstrate what light or mass can achieve, what convection delivers and array can bring. But paying for incredulity costs more than buying innovation. Two samples of one hundred….

I shouldn’t mention I worked to put gold mine claims on Federal waters of the SFBay with a tug, a barge and a windmill to remove colloidal precious particles using wind and electrolysis and accretion with a sideline of selling the cleaned water before it’s lost to the Pacific. Nor that I promoted electron sterilization to thwart radioactive food irradiation. Or molecular sieves for inert gas refrigeration to ship strawberries and asparagus in bulk. Or closed loop industrial pallet and crate recycling instead of our third rank waste of trees. I’ve already told you about soy diesel to urban bus lines 25 years ago! So said this much, you should know the cheapest new transport system on earth is to suspend transit over our existing roads; airway already bought. Incredulity stops it. A few samples of dozens….

Stop losing things to wrong people, people. I’m too old to want much now but you should look for earnest folks and get out of the house and tinker with your friends. Soon.

Credulity needs you. It’s time to be what you’re believing.

Water, dirt, hot & cold, torn so much.
Malls are appalling and Hummers are bummers not only because they abuse the dribbling finite, but because they prove nothing but pride. Worse, we blame, envy or restrain, when none of us listen to our conscience. Our duty is to prosper, yes, with each other along the way, and not hurt this place, and to take a role in it. Community is the first thing we reach each day. There we see tomorrow and build it. Let’s bring cost to price and live in it. Sustainable society is worth it.

The Penny Party‘s Sensible ReConstitution. Silly, but fun.

We can better protect ourselves with rules and regulations we’re paid to follow. Results would be immediate. License no longer elite. Enforcement no longer rare. We pay adherence to any rule, all rules. I’m saying teach enough literacy to understand the rules we live by, then as a nation of bounty hunters we would enhance governing enough to save us. Rewarding rules, any posse or person might lure Wall Street or Washington where they won’t be jailed. Follow the rules or else.

I’ve often thought we’d be better off without politics, agents failing so often, and develop new groups that directly lobby prices, fees, and fraud.

Start here with hours of education in one graph.

An Average Consumer’s Spending,
or,
as the NY Times says,
All of Inflation’s Little Parts.

tip WorldChanging

I’ve enjoyed Kevin Phillips because there’s facts in his writings. Kevin Phillips says, “[Paul] Volcker is regarded as one of the last honest men in U.S. finance.”

Paul Volker says about the turmoil over the last couple of years, “To meet the challenge the Federal Reserve judged it necessary to take actions that extend to the very edge of its lawful and implied powers, transcending certain long-embedded central banking principles and practices.”

And we’re thinking Bush Arrogance is limited to war and tiny allies. Some are saying this Administration has secretly sold half of Fort Knox already. [odd story link]

A $3 box of cornflakes contains 15 ounces of corn that cost 8 cents when bought from the farmer.

Why do we blame increases in the cost of corn, wheat or rice on rapidly rising food prices? Production, transport, wages and packaging are the main costs of retail food where the effect of oil price increases can be huge.

Which brings us to the real culprit: the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

This year, with OPEC-rigged oil prices exceeding $100 a barrel, the U.S. will pay $800 billion for its oil supply, and the world as a whole will pay $3.2 trillion.

These figures are both up a factor of 10 from what they were in 1999 and represent a huge regressive tax on the world economy…

Chicago Tribune: Food vs. fuel a global myth

May 5 (Bloomberg) Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland briefed reporters at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Washington:

The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care…

Robin Williams cracked, “I’m from California. It’s 60% Hispanic and we have an Austrian governor. He’s a Republican Liberal. That’s like a Volvo with a gun rack.”

Larry Page sees a world of opportunity – in areas ranging from energy to safer cars. But he also sees a world of timidity; not enough people, he worries, are willing to place the big bets that could make a difference in meeting humanity’s biggest challenges. [Fortune Mag]

And the unfairness kills us:

The problem is not the poor robbing the rich through taxes, but the rich robbing the poor through tax cuts that wreck the infrastructure. And the rich have to the chutzpah to tell us that this robbery is the way to prosperity for all.

Governments excuse themselves from delivering social services because they don’t have the tax revenues any more. So private education and health care begin to look good to the affluent, while public education and health care, like public housing and transit, become down-market services for losers.

Because so many people still believe in Horatio Alger, the income-gap debate has stayed away from the health issue.

Income gap … is literally a matter of life and death.

When you read this Newsweek excerpt of The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria, maybe a few sentences will stand out. I copied a few:

On the first page, he points out “The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism”, and he says it’s the “power shift of the modern age—the rise of the rest“.

Later he says, “The underlying reality across the globe is of enormous vitality. For the first time ever, most countries around the world are practicing sensible economics” seeing that “$1 a day has plummeted from 40 percent in 1981 to 18 percent”, [on the way to 12 percent].

He sees “waves of globalization” in a “global economy [that] has more than doubled in size over the last 15 years.” [A mere 15 years!]

Huge numbers of people are in truth a “world of functioning economies”.

Comforting our worries, he says, “… this is America’s great —and potentially insurmountable— strength. It remains the most open, flexible society in the world, able to absorb other people, cultures, ideas, goods, and services.”

Helping us face facts, he says, “America’s unimpeded influence will decline. But if the world that’s being created has more power centers, nearly all are invested in order, stability and progress.”

“Rather than narrowly obsessing about our own short-term interests and interest groups, our chief priority should be to bring these rising forces into the global system, to integrate them so that they in turn broaden and deepen global economic, political, and cultural ties. If China, India, Russia, Brazil all feel that they have a stake in the existing global order, there will be less danger of war, depression, panics, and breakdowns.

“There will be lots of problems, crisis, and tensions, but they will occur against a backdrop of systemic stability. This benefits them but also us. It’s the ultimate win-win.”

Urging us to willingly enjoy the future, he warns, “For America to continue to lead the world, we will have to first join it. This is one of the most thrilling stories in history. The world will be enriched and ennobled as they become consumers, producers, inventors, thinkers, dreamers, and doers.”

Reminding us that we already know what we need to do, he concludes, “This is all happening because of American ideas and actions.”

Christopher Locke toughens.

In what may have been the single most revealing paragraph anyone has reported about the Bush administration, the author Ron Suskind, writing in The New York Times Magazine two weeks before the 2004 election, recounted a conversation with a presidential aide who spoke sarcastically of journalists and their “reality-based community.” The aide, who sounded uncannily like Karl Rove, informed Suskind with great condescension that a “judicious study of discernible reality” is “not the way the world really works anymore.” The aide explained, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

OK, then. Any questions?

Tip To Kaila: TIME/CNN:

Hillary Clinton enthusiastically picked a filly named Eight Belles to win the Kentucky Derby and compared herself to the horse. Eight Belles finished second. The winner was the favorite, Big Brown.

Eight Belles collapsed immediately after crossing the finish line, and was euthanized shortly thereafter.

http://thepage.time.com/2008/05/03/you-cant-make-this-up/

My friend asks, “I fear for the Democrats. Will we be stuck with another term of “Bush Politics”? I hope not.”

My desperate reply:

“Golly, if America repeats with McBush, it’s truly not America any longer. Some tired ol’ Brit thing maybe, but not Grand USA.

“Maybe weird things occur in this odd living. Surprise seems common.

“I celebrate the arguing though. Who knows really? I’m hoping good rants and steep contests will appear now, then, and beyond the election.

Per Obama: “Pretty Bright huh?!? Joy to have around.”

I was struck by the forthrightness here:

AUSTRALIA:
All the world’s a garden for night-time guerrillas
03.May.08
Reuters
Kate Kelland
TheAge.com.au
FoodSafety Kansas U

An army of self-styled Guerrilla Gardeners is, according to this story, growing across the world, fighting to transform urban wastelands into horticultural havens.

To document and encourage their victories, one of the movement’s leaders has written a handbook. On Guerrilla Gardening, by Richard Reynolds, defines the activity as “the illicit cultivation” of someone else’s land.

“Our main enemies are neglect and scarcity of land,” said Mr Reynolds, 30, a former advertising employee who wrote the book after his website, guerrillagardening.org, became a global focal point for activists.

“Land is a finite resource, and yet areas like this are not being used. That seems crazy to me. And if the authorities want to get in the way of that logic, then we will fight them, but peacefully, showing them what we can achieve with plants.”

On his website he writes: “Scattering seeds is the easiest way to guerrilla gardening. You do not even have to stop moving to do it.”

It’s so-o gol-darn odd that we get old and break.

I don’t like it.

Wait ’til I get my hands on those silly Archangels inventing this crap.

But gratitude for tender air on our cheek, cozy warmth over our skin, bright blue day, knowing a bit, and seeing much drift by, maybe rot is tolerable, ey?

Well, maybe.

Our boomagism oughta be headlines.
Much we deny, but why ending?

There’s no video here but lottsa photographs.

Nearly-famous girl visits every tribe on earth, takes pictures. She says, “We’re not dangerous.” Woot!

But also, every pic is thru the lens – no special effects nor software. Maybe nobody has built a library so true.

She’s becoming known. Don’t hurry.

Excruciating screaming held:

A survivor of the camps recognized an item in one exhibit and was able to explain its context to museum curators and fellow visitors.

Tortured living told:

If we decided to tell the tale, it is because we wanted the world to be a better world, just a better world, and learn and remember.

Preserving the horrible at Google….

Hearts gild, bleached or blackened, and one that comes to mind is Jingles. We’ve come a long way to become tender. Wise or wealthy is less important.

Stories about the mischievous…

“There must be somebody who hasn’t heard of Andy Devine, but that person sure doesn’t live in Kingman where Andy is becoming somewhat of a folk hero.

“Who would have thought on November 16,1906, when Amy Devine, Mae, her stepdaughter, and Tom, Jr., her son, stepped from the train in Kingman, that the year old boy she was carrying in her arms would turn out to be Kingman’s favorite son? Amy’s husband, Tom, had been a railroad employee in Flagstaff until a terrible accident had taken his leg. Unable to continue his work for the railroad, he took the settlement they offered and purchased the Beale Hotel.”

Dorothy Devine says the various versions of the “cat incident” make Andy sound awful, but she says the incident did indeed occur. What actually happened was that one of the local judges offered Andy and a friend 50 cents to get rid of a mangy old cat for him. He emphasized that they do so in humane manner.

Fifty cents was a princely sum in those days, so Andy and his friend undertook this assignment.. They knew where some dynamite was, so took cat, dynamite and a long, long fuse to the dump where they proceeded to carefully wrap the cat in dynamite. What could be more humane than instant destruction, they reasoned. They lit the fuse and ran like crazy.

They looked around and much to their dismay found the cat following them fuse burning vigorously. The boys ran by the Van Marter house and the cat ran under the house. Andy said he was terrified that the dynamite would blow up the house, but the cat ran out from under the house and into the woodshed. The woodshed blew sky high.

No one ever knew what happened until years later Andy, in a personal appearance in Kingman, confessed to the crime.

Furled In Wind.

Observation is less popular than superstition. Occasionally there are reports from the curious. Some of these teach.

The extent that paranoia occurs in the general public, 40% reports King’s College, tells us we embarrass ourselves under the paradigm of authority and war until the most praised of our powers merely bully common nightmare.

From my previous post:

In this King’s College study using Virtual Reality to mimic social interaction, the results showed that 40% of us are paranoid.

Piquepaille reports, “If you don’t know how common are paranoid thoughts, here is an answer. “In one recent survey, 70% of people said that they had, at some time, experienced the feeling that people were deliberately trying to harm or upset them in some way.”

Think about this. If 40% of us are generally paranoid and 70% of us have ‘sensed’ others are attempting to harm us, how does this affect our daily lives, our society, and our political choices?

Democrats, Republicans, Army, Navy, Diplomat, Preacher, each authenticate worry. War survives because we let the fearful rule. Pride is its cheap bargain.

Update written by Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:

In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

Ask any pastoral wordsmithy describing dandelion or sky: None say screech roots or threat flies. All flowers know our terror is useless appendage. Outside our dark cerebellum is living, better infinity than church; all creatures more gentle dying than we are alive.

I’m saying history will tell us our era is lifted on horror. I’m ashamed of that.

Splendor so forgotten, as aliens we endure. When will it be different? Splendor too forgotten, never strategy, might save us. We can promise again. It is our fearless tomorrow.

I’m surprised: Within the grand great universe we call thinking, Saul Bellows important words have merely earned 33 hits on Google. C’mon people,

“everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining”.

Though tests are incomplete, aiming may be bothersome. A better tease is never let a synapse see it coming.