big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
Aeolus, king of the winds, lives in a magical place, a place where his free spirit can dwell. There, you can live in the shadow of a double emotion: feeling the fire under your feet and the sky above your thoughts.
From Alex Renton at Olives 101, “Oil pressed from the first green olives is a taste like no other. You wouldn’t put it in your mouth if it wasn’t so reassuringly expensive. …”
There’s a lot being said, and felt in the guts, while ending the ideological and greedy era of the Republicans and G. W. Bush. ProPublica has started to publish the numbers.
It’s an ongoing project. ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. To help build citizen journalism, when you see another pertinent set of numbers, please remember to pass them to ProPublica.
Nuts.
Ed Ring at EcoWorld goes around a few numbers.
There are going to eventually be not quite 10.0 billion people living on earth.
Currently in the U.S., each person consumes about 350 million BTUs of energy per year. In the European Union each person consumes about 250 million BTUs of energy per year. If there were 10 billion people on earth, each consuming on average only 100 million BTUs of energy per year, we would still have to double energy production on the planet, from 500 quadrillion BTUs per year to 1,000 quadrillion BTUs per year.
The point remains inescapable – energy production worldwide is going to need to increase significantly.
He continues:
Our position is we should use those trillions to build roads, hospitals, power plants, reforestation, aquifer replenishment, and medical (and other scientific) research.
We should nurture free trade, free markets, and entrepreneurship.
We should deliver to humanity the universal prosperity that is the destiny of our generation.
Then by sometime between 2025 and 2050, we will have created economic abundance, we will have advanced technology, and we will be well positioned to handle whatever the climate may throw at us.
In other words, ecologically speaking, what’s the market for a 1,000 quadrillion divided by 10 billion by 2025?
New Orleans goes on but is far from over. Food prices and economic turmoil, like we needed that, have pushed the number of hungry to almost 1 billion, a 7th.
The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2008.
For millions of people in developing countries, eating the minimum amount of food every day to live an active and healthy life is a distant dream. The structural problems of hunger, like the lack of access to land, credit and employment, combined with high food prices remain a dire reality.
But, but, oh, the banks, the cars, portents and war.
Oops, my incongruity misaligns.
Wrecked America discovers stupid is infinite.
Stephen Johnson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is a creationist.
A Philadelphia Inquirer profile of EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson this weekend reveals that the chief steward of our environmental protection is unwilling – or unable – to separate religion from science.
The Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson notes that, when questioned by reporters, Stephen Johnson admitted he does not see a “clean-cut division” between the two:
“It’s not a clean-cut division. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there’s theistic or God-controlled evolution and there’s variations on all those themes.”
Philadelphia Inquirer article: An Eroding Mission at EPA.
J-Walk points out “Johnson’s approach at the EPA has been marked by putting his faith in corporate polluters.”
No comment. Mind is blown.
Cash-Strapped School District Causes Teacher To Sell Ad Space On Tests
Probity.
Watch for it.
Require more.
And, as Frank Langella of the “Frost/Nixon” film said to Charlie Rose, we can loosen up judging each other’s peccadillo. It’s not so important to rant about small things in each of us always.
Let’s be certain and clear about who’s ripping us off. We can do that. After all, it’s not the judgment that hurts. It’s the sentencing.
Times are tough. Cities are broke.
With that in mind, Congress and the new automobile czar are requiring Detroit’s Big Three to offer lower cost and environmentally prudent public safety equipment.
“We know we’ve been late to the game,” said a manufacturer’s representative in Washington, “But we’re hoping the American people will see our deep commitment to respond positively and quickly to market conditions.”
emergic by
I wrote this post about a year-and-a-half ago. In it, I described my vision of the world to come in the form of the shifts that are happening:
Behind the PC to Mobile shift, there are four key elements to my philosophy about this ‘Emerging’ Internet that I want to elaborate on in this Tech Talk. First, even as the PC Internet has been wonderful in helping us navigate the Reference Web, it is the mobile Internet will help us build sensors into the Live Web. Second, what search was to the PC Internet, subscriptions will be to the mobile Internet. Third, advertising as the dominant business model on the Internet will give way to “invertising” on mobiles. Finally, this new world will first be visible in emerging markets like India – and in this new world will rise the next Google.
Gary Maxwell wonders if it’s true that we can’t overcome the daunting challenges we face because we have pissed away the cash and credit needed to solve them.
Over a trillion dollars squandered on the Iraq and Wall Street misadventures. Why, with a trillion dollars, we could:
- Provide health care to everyone in the USA
- Educate all of our children and provide activities for them while their parents work
- Transform our society and economy to be sustainable
- Rebuild our infrastructure for the 21st century
- Fund a Manhattan Project to mitigate the climate problem
But, who am I to whine over squandered opportunities?
The list goes on….
Can he fix entire economies? The world?
There is one thing the new president must do.
Never again can unrestrained capitalism be permitted to hold the country, indeed the world, ransom to the ability of thieves in three-piece suits to plunder without consequences. After the 1929 crash, FDR faced the same situation. The capitalist establishment pleaded with him that they could police themselves. Roosevelt knew better and put one of the bandits, Joseph Kennedy (father of) in charge of the new Securities Exchange Commission, saying he was “setting a thief to catch a thief.”
Surely now that we’ve seen the Savings & Loan scandals, the Enron scam, the collapse of banks one thought of as impregnable, and the stock market crash, we’re ready for some real rules in the investment world, with the government an active policemen, and laws, which if broken, result not in bonuses but time behind bars.
No man has come to the White House with the array of problems domestic and foreign as has Barack Obama.
We know he can speak and inspire people.
Obviously he knows how to command loyalty.
Let’s hope and pray he can also fix economies and, indeed, the world.
Rafe Mair is a Canadian leader and retired politician, at one time head of Vancouver’s upstart stock exchange.
American car company to Japanese supplier, “I want 10,000 of these brake systems delivered by next month, and only 1.5% can be defective.”
Japanese supplier to American car company, “Here are your brake systems. We have no idea why you would want 1.5% defective units, but for your convenience, we’ve packaged them separately.”
A routine interview and merely thoughtful replies. Get used to it.
CNN synopsis, or the entire video interview at Meet The Press.
“We are not going to simply write a bunch of checks and let them be spent without some very clear criteria as to how this money is going to benefit the overall economy and put people back to work. We’re not going to be making decisions on projects simply based on politics and — and lobbying.”
On the other hand, we’re still accustomed to Bush and the corruption of an era:
Nearly $8 trillion in federal commitments is already out the door, and half of the $700 billion October rescue package has been spent.
The economic downturn is accelerating.
And nobody is really in charge.
Among a lame-duck Bush administration, a lame-duck Congress, and a president-elect, Barack Obama, who has no legal authority to act and is reluctant to get entangled with the Bush team, Washington’s political vacuum has left policy adrift at the most critical economic period in a generation.
Yesterday’s ribbon cutting ceremony by the South Dakota Department of Transportation commemorates the long awaited highway to the back side of Mt. Rushmore.
It was easy to be radical in the ’70s, the early ’70s. We all knew we needed new and no one had yet been made afraid of new ideas or lost their shirt in the game of change.
I and my crew erected an exhibit for the American Institute of Architects 1973 convention in the state’s Museum of California History in Oakland (their joke website here). The museum’s vast Great Hall became a ‘Main Street’ with a dozen ‘storefronts’ on each side as high as 25 feet. Each decade from the 1900’s was on display.
Historical pieces and artifacts of each era were props, such as a turn-of-the-century sidewalk clock, a mid-century neon sign or an early retailer’s aluminum window frame with it’s painted poster of 12 Eggs for 49 Cents, pallets of boxes and a great variety of goods, a classic car. From a collection of photographs, flyers, adverts, drawings and public records spread over a work area the size of a football field, staff and docents edited tens of thousands of pieces over several weeks to display our world for just the few days of the AIA gathering. Money was different then.
A 40ft arch was over the entry, Americaville, painted in red, white & blue. I don’t remember if 500 or 1,000 architects arrived opening night. I was enjoying the white wine and truly jumbo prawns. A few architects were angry with this exhibit. I remember their scorn. Most were intrigued and impressed because I remember their quizzical frowns and praise.
The entire large room was showing error, decade by decade, where architecture was losing to planning and planning was lost to transportation.
The exhibits were the actual pieces and records, undeniably easy to see that asphalt and concrete and utilities were the prow of our towns while architectural scale and human living had become an unimportant afterthought. This exhibit disturbed the members, pointing to the destruction of human community, the erasure of detail and art, the dominance of brand and cheaper brands on skies of advertising, the rude criss-cross of highways and stark roads to parking lots, the other tiki-taki, the staccato-timing of human travel, the mechanization of our bones and tissue, the rude intrusion of a handful of mass distributors and their enabling King Car…!
In one century we have re-worked America into a damn grid and a warehouse.
Merely keeping it lit is pilfering our pockets. Confused and bewildered, we truly need GPS gadgets to peek from the sky. It was clear then and it’s clear now that intermodal, multinodal and consumer transportation has changed our living more than any penciled neighborhood or artful facade. We said in this 70s exhibit that planning and architecture had lost its potency to become a minor usher on a huge moneyed floor we see all around us.
In the development game, it’s not architecture or design, however pretty or smart each fashion or style. It’s TPD. Trips Per Day, the fundamental term that is the actuary of distribution hubs and the feasibility of malls for the proximity of our hastily built homes.
Every product and every person is part of millions and billions and trillions of trips.
Every day developers lure and capture these trips. We ask for very little else. There’s much inefficient cost and overhead in this buzz to focus our cash. It will not be fixed by worker payroll or the margins of the Big Three versus Foreign Imports. It’s not fixed bullying OPEC’s gasoline or being bullied by Cargill’s ethanol. Nor with hybrids from mailorder showrooms nor a new trillion dollar electric grid. None of these will make us solvent nor sustainable unless we re-work trips.
An entire shift “back to the land” isn’t needed. Bio-fiber tents and solar television and filtering our water through a straw? Power plants or lettuce farms on rooftops may not be needed everywhere, but why not a few? Breakthrough ideas will come along here and there without breaking our future or blindly hoisting another empire atop us again and again. For many of us, local is old and new again. Local foods. Local workspace. Local culture and education. Local humanity. For these, we’ll need local leaders again.
Failing to require ‘total accounting’ is the true free ride. Lifecycle and impact costs, some are runaway, can easily be controlled along with keeping the books on production and distribution and triple-net profits.
Society is coughing up while profiteers and shareholders are long gone. But that’s another story.
We waste too much weight and time in distance.
For our goods, for our services, for our work and our fun too, a tremendous first step in our energy and impact crisis is merely counting all the steps. And trips.
From Wiki, on Trips Per Day
The Institute of Transportation Engineers‘s Trip Generation informational report provides trip generation rates for numerous land use and building types. The planner can add local adjustment factors and treat mixes of uses with ease. Ongoing work is adding to the stockpile of numbers; over 4000 studies were aggregated for the current edition.
ITE Procedures estimate the number of trips entering or exiting a site at a given time (sometimes the number entering and exiting combined is estimated). ITE Rates are functions of type of development, and square footage, number of gas pumps, number of dwelling units, or other standard measurable things, usually produced in site plans. They are typically of the form Trips = a + b * Area OR Trips = a + bln(Area). They do not consider location, competitors, complements, the cost of transportation, or many other obviously likely important factors. They are often estimated based on very few observations (a non-statistically significant sample). Many localities require their use to ensure adequate public facilities for growth management and subdivision approval.
Other keywords and phrases:
Per capita person trips per day…
The average household trip rate is 11.1 trips per day (all modes), but vary over the week. Mondays are the lowest, with 10.1 trips per day…
Traffic estimates for a planned Wal-Mart suggest that the store won’t overburden nearby roads… 2000 trips per day and ultimately over 16000 trips per day, obviously requiring an enlarged roadway…
Increase in vehicles trips per day: (Note: The applicant may be required to provide the necessary engineering studies…)
Americans average 9.7 trips per day per household.
Sara at Down To Earth Blog is wondering about our food. She raises quality small-lot beef.
Study shows some meat/dairy is more efficient than total vegetarian diet
“One of the issues that people often bring up to me as a beef producer is the “footprint” of eating meat versus a strictly vegetarian diet. I know that my cattle are raised on land that could not be (or should not be) used for any sort of cultivation, but I’ve been looking for some good research reports on the subject. I got some leads from friends at the American Farmland Trust.
“A study at Cornell University looked at a range of diets in terms of how much of New York’s population could be fed by food produced within the state.
“Although a strictly vegetarian diet uses the least total land mass, a diet that includes some meat and dairy is more efficient in terms of total land use and sustainability. The reason is that fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on high-quality cropland. Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available, land that can support pasture and hay.
This is news to me. Vegetarian friends will find it impossible to believe that livestock may be necessary in order to feed us all.
The wonder of systems and ecology is how often one approach buggers the other approach. Our brutish industrialization has damaged many things. We look for solutions, but it’s not easy.
There is nothing better than bending rules accurately!
The Bend The Rules Ruler is made of stainless steel in Bananistan.
Petfinder’s annual list of popular pet names!
Top 10 Most Unusual Names
1. Woe Izmee
2. Gwyneth Poultry (a duck)
3. SoSueMe
4. 54cent Swee’T
5. Iamaredneckwoman
6. Angry Chef Soup
7. Ms. Cornflake Especially
8. Bon Jo Flea
9. McLovin
10. Joe the Plumber
Top 10 Most Unusual Group Names
1. Domino, Ditto, Etcetera, And-so-on and An-so-forth
2. Ebay, Google, Yahoo and Spam
3. Felony, Warrant and Trespass
4. The Xerox puppies
5. Chiclit, TicTac, Extra, Wrigley and BigRed
6. Elbow-Toe and Neck Face
7. Sara, Andi and Patti (“Serendipity”)
8. Footloose and Fancy Free
9. Noodle, Macaroni and Spaghetti
and, rescued from puppy mills,
10. Barney Miller, Nicole Miller and Sienna Miller
Top 10 Most Popular Dog Names
1. Buddy (805)
2. Max (620)
3. Daisy (588)
4. Jack (520)
5. Lucy (496)
6. Molly (476)
7. Charlie (431)
8. Sadie (415)
9. Jake (407)
10. Lucky (405)
Top 10 Most Popular Cat Names
1. Lucy (354)
2. Molly (328)
3. Oreo (320)
4. Kittens (318)
5. Smokey (315)
6. Princess (312)
7. Shadow (310)
8. Tigger (310)
9. Angel (309)
10. Missy (301)
Bush has edited public documents dealing with support for the war between 2003 and 2005, removed original documents, altered them and replaced them with backdated modifications that only appear to be originals.
Illinois University reports,
“Our intention was to alert scholars and journalists who rely on government documents to let them know the facts have been tampered with.”
“I think that it raises the question of whether or not we can trust the government to maintain public records of things that were said or done that later prove embarrassing,” Illinois political science professor Scott Althaus said.
“It could be what we found is limited. But if it is not, it certainly opens the finding up to larger questions.”
Propaganda in the USA is too easy. How it’s happened I don’t know, but workers and their perks are taking blame for crippling US automakers.
Retired personnel are perceived as greedy deadweight and current employees are intimidated not only by their bosses but by the mood of the country. Foreign firms are cited for efficiency, praised for locating where they pay less and provide few benefits while pumping profits to handfuls of lenders and shareholders.
I think our perception is upside down. Workers have too little.
Should #1
After several generations building a terrific industry we should be defending and elevating our American workers. They should be both rich and proud after all these years and we should be glad of it!
Should #2
We should be preserving autoworker gains, seeing their prizes as a damn pittance, praising every effort to keep upward mobility and damning every dollar sucked into the one-percent layer that cries as easily as it steals.
Should #3
Decades have passed. It’s clear, employees have too little. In society and industry, we should be demanding much more.
Whether a book cover hunk or bald as a doorknob, a systematic study of male body image
–
head hair,
body hair,
height,
penis size,
weight and
muscles
–
found that men were dissatisfied with all six, but hair does not affect self-esteem.
It’s legal. To bypass the recession and build a regional boom, Milwaukee neighborhoods could print own money, to be spent only in local stores and business not Walmart or Home Depot.
Planned Parenthood has launched Gift Certificates for health care, annual exams for women, including Pap tests and breast exams, but only in Indiana.
Many many folks could use a basic health care checkup. Many folks could benefit from frank and honest sex talk, a refresher on social disease prevention and contraception. Magazines, newspapers and media have backed away from coverage to accede to a few demanding fundamentalists.
Why not a Gift Certificate program? Why not send a Health Gift Certificate to Alaska’s Sarah Palin and other ostrich governors to distribute to isolated young people forgotten by a bloated medical bureaucracy? Cities and counties could provide chits to the homeless.
Ninety-five percent of visits to Planned Parenthood are for basic health care, not abortions, where counsel and early detection is an important service our society is too lazy to provide across the board.