One Stop Thought Shop

From the NYTimes, the difference in greenhouse gas emissions from cars burning gasoline-only fuel and fuels made from various forms of ethanol:

• Corn ethanol: 0-3 percent greenhouse gas emission reduction.
• Sugar cane ethanol: 50-70 percent reduction.
• Cellulosic ethanol: 90-plus percent.

But wait, there’s more:

Which form of ethanol production is the United States government (and its taxpayers) subsidizing? Corn, of course.

Which form of ethanol production does the United States government levy a 53-cents-a-gallon import tariff on? Sugar cane, naturally.

And which form of ethanol production is under-funded, under-researched, and furthest from commercial production? The cleanest choice, obviously.

Do you see a pattern here?

An additional snippet from the comments at the NYTimes article:

Estimated ethanol yields by the gallon for different plants per acre of land:

• Corn Grain = 354 gallons per acre
• Sugar Cane = 662 gallons per acre
• Switch Grass = 1150 gallons per acre
• Hemp = 1000 gallons per acre

The always concise Mike Masnick at Techdirt alerts us to why we grump that systems are always weak when overly powerful.

A disgruntled employee at the USA Department of Homeland Security uses its database to track his girlfriend 163 times, to arrange for her deportation, and attempt to kill her family!

We forget that for centuries we have struggled to be free of the threat of authority rather than from the authority of threats.

BTW, what’s a gruntled employee?

While the touch of Nature’s art
Harmonizes heart to heart,
I leave this notice on my door
For each accustomed visitor:

I am gone into the fields
To take what this sweet hour yields.
Reflection, you may come tomorrow,
Sit by the fireside with Sorrow.
You with the unpaid bill, Despair;
You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care,
I will pay you in the grave.
Death will listen to your stave.
Expectation too, be off!
Today is for itself enough.

To Jane: An invitation

37days posted this photo of a mother and her child after returning from Iraq.

Patricia Digh writes in her post,
“I saw this photograph, a soldier returning to her young daughter after being stationed in Iraq.

“Now this–this is a real reunion.

“This is a reunion where aggressive moisturizing plays no part, where posturing or nervousness or trying to impress play no part. No, this is the kind of full-floor reunion we should all have.

“Real, honest, true emotion.”

A syndicated photo at LATimes shows Terri Gurrola as she ‘clings to her daughter Gabrielle, 3, at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, having just returned from a seven-month tour in Iraq.’

1st Lt. Terri Gurrola is a medic in Company C, 203rd Forward Support Battalion. She’s also featured here in an Operation Iraqi Freedom story about assisting wounded Iraqi civilians.

To move toward less pollution, the fourth largest city in the world, Sao Paolo, Brazil, has banned all outdoor advertising – neon signs, banners, billboards; all the ads are being taken away.

More than 70 percent of its citizens submitted approval. WorldChanging posts part of the justification here.

Is Your Boss Spying on You? Inside New Workplace Surveillance

More stealthy and prevalent than ever before, corporate security software is monitoring your every move inside and out of the office. Your employer has more powerful tools to watch over you than the cops—and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Little Tommy Tucker
Sang for his supper
What shall we give him?
Brown bread and butter

How shall he cut it,
without a knife?
How shall he marry,
without a wife?

London has 10,000 publicly funded crime-fighting spy cameras at a cost of USD400 million, but four out of five of the regions with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

The figures were obtained using the U.K. Freedom of Information Act. [Evening Standard via Wired]

This is the best graphic I’ve found showing this year’s summer ice with the long-term average represented by the pink line.

“The sea ice cover this year has reached a new record low,” says Mark Serreze, senior research scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “It’s not just that we beat the old record, we annihilated it.”

Full report at Scientific American

There’s another black water contributing to America’s falling standing among the people of the world.

It takes 1.5 gallons of water to make a quart of Coca-Cola.

In March 2000 Coca-Cola opened a plant near a village in southern India to produce 1.2m bottles of Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite, Limca, Thumbs Up, Kinley Soda and Maaza every day. The company drilled more than six wells and illegally installed high-powered electric pumps to extract millions of gallons of pure water.

The level of the water table fell from 150 to 500 feet below the surface. 260 drinking water and irrigation wells have run dry. Local women were forced to walk about 3 miles to fetch drinkable water. Part of India’s rice bowl, local crop yields plummeted.

Coke dumped waste into paddy fields, canals and wells; then into dry boreholes that had been drilled on-site for the disposal of solid waste. This contaminated the aquifers. In 2003 the district medical officer advised the people that their water was so polluted that it was unfit for consumption.

How had the company addressed the problem?
It allegedly bribed officials and then sought national leverage. And it hired a public relations firm to pump its green image by giving $20 million to the World Wildlife Fund.

But these weak efforts seem to be failing. India’s Supreme Court has declared Coca-Cola’s property rights do not extend to the ground water below the land it owns, adding that nobody has the right to appropriate the lion’s share of a public resource and the government has no power to license vast quantities of extraction. The Supreme Court has rejected appeals.

Both Coke and Pepsi products are now banned in the state. The Indian parliament has banned the sale of Coke and Pepsi products in its cafeteria finding more than 30 times the toxins allowed in overseas products.

As recently as January 2007, human chains formed around Coca-Cola and Pepsi factories across India.

Full report here, via Bruno Giussani
Originally published in LeMonde 2005. More coverage here.
KillerCoke.org is dedicated to bad news about Coca-Cola.

Picture of the Year.
BBC 2007.
Above the Arctic Circle in Finland.

The president of Mattel recently apologized to the Chinese saying that the magnet-related recalls were due to the design and had nothing to do with whether the toys were manufactured in China.

A total of 17.4 million toys were recalled because of loose magnets, while 2.2 million toys were recalled over impermissible levels of lead

Pamela’s top tips for staying sane

Soothing touch. The warmth of human contact. We all need it, especially when we are sad or in pain.

Cry if you need to. Allow yourself to sob; it is a marvellous, healing release.

Exercise. There are many psychological benefits to be gained, including reduced feelings of depression and anxiety.

Seek humour in your life. It is very healing to laugh. Humour reduces stress and sadness.

Keep learning. We thrive on mental stimulation, and it can help protect us against dementia and mental atrophy as we age.

Write. Writing down your thoughts, and especially feelings, helps to soothe and organise emotions.

Eat nutritious, well-balanced meals. There is a relationship between mental health and a decent diet. Feed your brain.

Don’t abuse alcohol and drugs, and keep use to a minimum. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant.

Contact nature. A visit to the botanical gardens or even peeking at the stars will provide us with a calming sense of our place on the planet.

Learn to give and receive love.

Allan Dumfries is merely typing a comment under an article, but doesn’t he say it well?

Do not judge lest you be judged. Surely some degree of common humanity would not be amiss as we jump to condemnation of these often mentally ill inmates. Let Society abhor the crime but find some measure of forgiveness for the criminal for by that virtue shall our civilisation be respected.

What’s the latest report on the status and power of the evangelical right wing?

I recently learned there’s a breed farm in Colorado Springs that’s spawning Dominionist Christians to convert lonely soldiers stationed at 174 of our military bases.

Why should we worry?

“They are, in short, responsible for a great many of the most notable social and intellectual embarrassments in America since the new millennium took hold, and rest assured, we and the rest of the civilized world shall recall their bleak accomplishments for much of our natural born lives, and shudder.

Mark Morford is offering choice words of comfort.

Oh yes, by all means please take a moment to look around, ye who might be feeling a bit hopeful and optimistic right now.

Because indeed, you’ve got your wonderful and ever-accelerating green movement, your lovely mixed-blessing organic food movement and your rejuvenated attention to solar power and sustainable buildings and organic cotton and fair-trade coffee and clean energy and CFLs and urban recycling and sleek gorgeous modern vibrator design to make hip women of the world swoon.

We’ve got urban smoking bans and Smart cars and women finally rising to the most powerful positions in the land. We’ve even got an increasing awareness (BushCo, the Middle East, and China gruesomely excepted) of industrial pollution and global warming, all maybe indicating a subtle but still profound shift away from traditional modes of waste and war and our everlasting thirst for death and all possibly pointing to a happy delicious karmic sea change toward light and health and love for all beings everywhere for all time, as the butterflies and bunnies and birds all hum and smile and sing. Mmm, utopian.

But wait, why stop there? While we’re wearing these swell rose-colored glasses of momentary progressive bliss, let us go one big step further.

Because right now, there is perhaps no greater item we as a struggling human ant farm can be grateful for, no single social emetic we can look to for inspiration or hope or a happy tingly sensation in our collective groinal region indicating a possible move away from our long-standing Dick-Cheney-in-hell attitude of shrill bleakness, alarmism and religious righteousness than the simply wonderful implosion of the evangelical Christian right that’s happening right now in America.

Congestion is getting worse in regions of all sizes.

Read 1000s of articles promoting the new green or, heaven forbid, demanding new green taxes to drive us off the road, there’s little or nothing about wasting billions of gallons crammed in 1000s of gasoline spillways that no corn crop can conquer.

And look!
Not one recommended fix for crawling 72 hours a year in gridlock requires a dead Iraqi.

• flexible work hours
• removing stalled vehicles quickly
• correctly timed traffic signals
• relieve choke points
• improve corridors
• diversify destination patterns

Wordsworth said it this way:

… And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Bergeron Nursery in frigid winters Minnesota has for three generations taken great pride in becoming successful in an area of the country that can make living in your refrigerator seem like a beach. Perhaps its rural ethics have helped keep its business solvent. Or because since the 1940s all employees are fed homemade meals with fresh bread, cake, pie, and meat and potatoes, and all customers are offered homemade donuts.

Here’s a subtle country-styled vignette to warm your heart.

Our patch of fall-bearing Caroline raspberries is bearing far too many berries for Dad to freeze, so we invited our new Amish neighbors over to pick.

After the two young women and three little tykes disembuggied with their pails, I pointed out the patch and mentioned that they could take some tomatoes, too.

“We have tomatoes,” the young woman said, thoughtfully. “Do you have any watermelon?”

“Uh, no,” I stammered. “We did but we’ve picked them all.”

From her seemingly empty pail she procured a small watermelon and held it out for me with a smile. “Would you like one?”

A rhythmic but painful post that starts with these words:

When I fell in love with my husband, how did I miss all the signs that I was signing up for a prison sentence of undefined length?

And she’s Relaxed in Spite of It All.

Our planet is in desperate need of women who love themselves. Women who use their time, energy, and resources to design life-affirming solutions for the challenges confronting humankind. Women who give birth to images of inclusion, poems of truth, rituals of healing, experiences of transformation, relationships of equality, strategies of peace, institutions of justice, and households of compassion. – Patricia Lynn Reilly

Bold and unshrinking
Annie Lennox in this 3 page news article “addresses global warming, the war in Iraq, the Aids pandemic in Africa, religious conflict, political corruption, business greed, global poverty and rampant inequality.

“This planet is absolutely off its head. It’s insane,” she says. “It is Hieronymus Bosch out there. Half the people are drinking or drugging themselves to numb it. A lot of people are in pain.”

“We contain polarity within ourselves, we are full of possibilities, light and beauty and goodness, but at the same time we are ravaged by doubt or despair or hopelessness. I have been through my own trials and tribulations, so in a way I am trying to make sense of it. But its not about a logical, rational sense. The language of music expresses things that are almost inexpressible.”

Annie Lennox, Why
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILJxICUIbCY]

An assault on reason itself.
I’m capturing this post from the new comment system installed at Google News where affected parties that are principal to the news event may insert their point of view or rebuttal. I’m certain this comment will be scissored as editors feed the story so I am posting it to preserve and elevate its poignant and pertinent warning.

Florida cops were out of line Tasering student at speech

Google Comment – Sep 19, 2007
The conduct of the police officers at Monday’s forum with John Kerry is nothing short of an embarrassment for both the University of Florida and the City of Gainesville as a whole.

We will not be quick to recover from the wounds that we all suffer as a result of the complex betrayal on behalf of the University of Florida Police Department. As if the suppression of thought is not in itself, heinous enough a crime, the unabashed abuse of physical force by those sworn to protect us leaves trust broken and wounds open.

This incident will be remembered as a physical assault as well as an assault on reason itself. How dare law enforcement act in such a manner! We, the students of this university, must not allow this aggression to stand!

Benjamin N. Dictor

Don’t hate the media, become the media. – Jello Biafra

We all rant. It’s popular.
Professional pundits and columnists can make a fine living bitching. Listening in on banter in any coffee shop, acrid comments are tipped with the acrid coffee. And blogs have released a 10 to 1 ratio of caustic opinion over tolerant observation.

It’s not good to be continually sour and cynical.
We’re just humans spinning on a rock. Not one of us is truly certain that we clearly see the motive or purpose in all things.

But a good rant that sums all the poison brimming into our world can’t be left without a good ramp of links. Frank Paynter found this acerbic piece. It’s pure catharsis.

THE NEW AMERICAN INFANT

Copyright 1996, 1997 John Trubee

Now
such grotesqueries as chocolatey and lemony
infect the lexicon
bespeaking the ubiquitous oral preeminence
of the New American Infant.

Once proud cowboy
now fat-assed cretin.
Once curious scientist
now mall drone gangbanger.
Once ballsy westward-forger
now jacuzzi-lounging sleazeball.
Once prolific inventor
now drunken celebrity wastrel.
Once hardy pioneer prairie mama
now scaggy teenage crack whore.

O America
You blew it.

You became too soft for your own damn good.

Your nuclear submarines beneath the Indian Ocean
protect the trust funds of golfing adulterers in Indian Wells
–from what?

Thomas Jefferson’s vision
somehow hideously devolved
into the embarrassingly trivial tripe
of the Jerry Springer Show.

O America
founded by geniuses with utmost esteem for the mind
you’ve become a gaudy playground
for capricious brats,
imbecilic sociopaths,
emotional snivelers,
and feel-good movie patrons weeping upon their fake popcorn
who constantly kill mind
in mindless reflex.

Petty orally-fixated ninnies
bullying for money,
lying, cheating, stealing,
insider trading,
filing spurious lawsuits for dubious gain,
and squandering job slavedom’s bucks
upon chimerical lottery ticket delusions,
you trashed your vaunted work ethic
in the mad mob dash for sticky candy.

(At what point does optimism become stupidity?)

(How many stomped hopes at last inform the deluded mind?)

You murdered your freedom with cretinous irresponsibility,
you placed social approval above the expressions of the mind,
you slobbered over money as the supreme value,

and now you wonder why you are drowning in shit.

O America
neon playground for vicious money whores
and candyass upwardly mobile dipshits:
who’ll incinerate these vermin?

The New American Infant soils his diapers
and whimpers.

The Sydney Morning Herald is republishing 8 pages on the current life of Al Gore.

The opening byline says,
“Not long ago, he was the butt of jokes-lockbox, earth tones, a postelection beard. Then he dusted off an old slide show and jumped with both feet into the private sector.”

“The untold story of how an epic loser engineered what may be the greatest brand makeover of our time.”

Financial disclosure documents released before the 2000 election put the Gore family’s net worth at $US1 million to $US2 million. After years of public service-and four kids needing high-priced educations-Al and Tipper used to fret occasionally about money.

Not anymore. They have a new multimillion-dollar home in a tony section of Nashville and a family home in Virginia, and have recently bought a multimillion-dollar condo at the St. Regis condo/hotel in San Francisco.

Available data indicate a net worth well in excess of $US100 million.

I’m not criticizing. I think it’s neat.
He’s ‘become a stunningly successful businessman’.

Since his nonelection, Gore has become a millionaire many times over, bringing him, in financial terms, shoulder to shoulder with the C-suite denizens he used to hit up for campaign cash.

In addition to the steady flow of six-figure speaking gigs, he has become an insider at two of the hottest companies on the planet: at Google, where he signed on as an adviser in 2001, pre-IPO (and received stock options now reportedly worth north of $US30 million), and at Apple, where he joined the board in 2003 (and got stock options now valued at about $US6 million). He enjoyed a big payday as vice chairman of an investment firm in L.A., and, more recently, started a cable-television company and an asset-management firm, both of which are becoming quiet forces in their fields.

Al Gore is building a new kind of media company to democratize television, confident that video will become the dominant method of communication in the years ahead. “Much of TV is mind deadening. It’s a one-way conduit of knowledge.”