Click here: Northeast Snowstorm Leaves Millions Without Power
Because, for more than a century of obvious need ignored, of valuing war and irresponsible slapdash profiteering over lives, safety, beauty, rights of ownership and sheer common sense, we still have an exposed power grid, now the obivious and supremely ideal target of seriously inimical human forces as well as that of an increasingly roiling, hostile meteorology.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Two Great 'Occupy Wall Street' Signs
Ironically found in a pro-corporate-rights neoconjob article at Frum Forum:
I CAN'T AFFORD MY OWN POLITICIAN SO I MADE THIS SIGN
I'LL BELIEVE A CORPORATION IS A PERSON WHEN GEORGIA EXECUTES ONE
And, seen scrawled on rough bark of someone's tree in my neck o' the asphalt:
END WAR
END WASTE
RICH PAY
FORTRESS USA
I CAN'T AFFORD MY OWN POLITICIAN SO I MADE THIS SIGN
I'LL BELIEVE A CORPORATION IS A PERSON WHEN GEORGIA EXECUTES ONE
And, seen scrawled on rough bark of someone's tree in my neck o' the asphalt:
END WAR
END WASTE
RICH PAY
FORTRESS USA
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Margin Call-ing at the Crater's Rim
Superb review with political-angle relevance as usual from Telly Davidson:
http://www.frumforum.com/in-the-financial-meltdown-who-made-the-margin-call#comments
Here's a great quote from commentor Graychin:
'The highest-paid people in America don’t create value. They only trade the value that others create – like Monopoly deeds.'
http://www.frumforum.com/in-the-financial-meltdown-who-made-the-margin-call#comments
Here's a great quote from commentor Graychin:
'The highest-paid people in America don’t create value. They only trade the value that others create – like Monopoly deeds.'
US Wants Drinking Water from Mexico - Like, Really!
More blind madness based on 'forgetting' that FREE ENERGY - tidal, wind, sun, methane and other biofuels, and the wasted, unrecycled heat and motion of urban/highway busy-ness is in immeasurably vast abundance and availability all over the places mentioned. The head of the Gulf of California / Sea of Cortez, where the depleted Colorado River trinkles to the ocean, is one of the greatest natural places in the world for tidal power, far better than Biscay and Fundy where the tides have electric-powered ever-growing cities effectively for around a century. And forgetting that salt and other natural sea water matter and particulates are valuable, salable commodities.
When will we stop FUKUSHIMAing ourselves - why do the Powers That Be / Princes of the World who rule in a manner that says we can't wipe ourselves out fast enough, but we must try, only delaying if the methods thereto can maximize power and lucre to to those insatiable bloodsuckers - and get real with using
FREE CLEAN ENERGY???????
We know about the Club of Rome -scratch their 'humanitarian' veneer and find that 'humane' for them means anything that reduces the Excess Population, and the pseudo-ecologists (pseudo-animal rightsists, etc.) who want all humans and any life 'compromised' / modified by humans: Domestic animals, horticultural species, any wild flora & fauna who have adjusted to or thrived or been endangered - reduced to (ahem, some humans' notion of a not-good-enough gene pool - by human activity. These are the Let It Burn-ers, the Fire and Death worshippers, the sick, sick souls who cannot imagine a peace that is not the barren rock and lifeless water of post-Ragnarok-without hope. We know about them; we know they are often in very high places; positions of rule. The other side of the coin of these most bleak Robinson Jeffers-style romantics are the Black Metal raving lunatics rioting to cast themselves into the depths of 'the Satanic Paradise'. These drive each other on, misery after misery, exulting in the triumphs of cynicism proved by every act of theirs that makes things worse. The greater mystery is of those who seem to want - to think they can get - a good outcome by supporting cruel wasteful polluters.
It can be hard, sometimes, not to believe in the sci-fi cliche of inimical alien life-forms out to utterly change our poor planet and its natives into things annihilated or drastically re-made as hopeless slaves to themselves. So hard to think that our own can be that bad.
Click here: US Looks to Mexico for More Water
Fox News Latino
Western states have long relied on the drought-prone Colorado River for water to fill drinking glasses, flush toilets and sprinkle lawns. But now it's looking south of the border to fill up on water.
Mexico may start sending water north as four major U.S. water districts help plan one of two huge desalination plant proposals in Playas de Rosarito, about 15 miles south of San Diego. Combined, they would produce 150 million gallons a day, enough to supply more than 300,000 homes on both sides of the border.
The plants are one strategy by both countries to wean themselves off of the Colorado River, which flows 1,450 miles from the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortez. Decades of friction over the Colorado, in fact, are said to be a hurdle to current desalination negotiations.
The proposed plants have also sparked concerns that American water interests looking to Mexico are simply trying to dodge U.S. environmental reviews and legal challenges.
Desalination plants can blight coastal landscapes, sucking in and killing fish eggs and larvae. They require massive amounts of electricity and dump millions of gallons of brine back into the ocean that can, if not properly disposed, also be harmful to fish.
But desalination has helped quench demand in Australia, Saudi Arabia and other countries lacking fresh water.
Dozens of proposals are on the drawing board in the United States to address water scarcity but the only big project to recently win regulators' blessings would produce 50 million gallons a day in Carlsbad, near San Diego. A smaller plant was approved last year in Monterey, some 110 miles south of San Francisco.
Mexico is a relative newcomer to desalination. Its largest plant supplies 5 million gallons a day in the Baja California resort town of Cabo San Lucas, with a smattering of tiny ones on the Baja peninsula. Skeptics already question the two proposed plants in Playas de Rosarito — known as Rosarito Beach to American expatriates and visiting college spring-breakers.
"It raises all kinds of red flags," said Joe Geever, California policy coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation, an environmentalist group that has fought the Carlsbad plant for years in court, saying it will kill marine life and require too much electricity.
Water agencies that supply much of Southern California, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Tijuana, Mexico, are pursuing the plant that would produce 50 million gallons a day in Rosarito near an existing electricity plant. They commissioned a study last year that found no fatal flaws and ordered another one that will include a cost estimate, with an eye toward starting operations in three to five years.
Potential disagreements between the two countries include how the new water stores will be used.
The U.S. agencies want to consider helping pay for the plant and letting Mexico keep the water for booming areas of Tijuana and Rosarito. In exchange, Mexico would surrender some of its allotment from the Colorado River, sparing the cost of laying pipes from the plant to California.
Mexico would never give up water from the Colorado, which feeds seven western U.S. states and northwest Mexico, said Jose Gutierrez, assistant director for binational affairs at Mexico's National Water Commission. Mexico's rights are enshrined in a 1944 treaty.
"The treaty carries great significance in our country. We have to protect it fiercely," Gutierrez said.
Rick Van Schoik, director of Arizona State University's North American Center for Transborder Studies, said laying a pipeline across the border would be too costly.
"It's expensive enough to desalinate. I just don't see how it calculates out," he said.
The other big plant proposal joins Consolidated Water Co., a Cayman Islands company, with Mexican investors. Their proposal would send much of its 100 million gallons a day from Rosarito to the United States via a new pipeline, with operations beginning in 2014.
Mexico isn't likely to approve both plants, said Gutierrez, whose government is sponsoring the 50-million-gallon-a-day plant with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the San Diego County Water Authority, the Central Arizona Water Conservation District and the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
A key question is whether Mexico will allow water first used at the neighboring electric plant to be desalinated — a giant potential savings. California recently adopted rules that prohibit the state's electric plants from sucking in vast amounts of seawater to cool their machinery.
The Carlsbad plant illustrates how difficult it can be to build a plant in California. Poseidon Resources Corp., based in Stamford, Conn., has survived about a decade of legal challenges and regulatory review.
The company, which plans to begin major construction when it secures financing, was required to restore 66 acres of wetlands and take other measures to offset carbon emission from the electricity it consumes.
The San Diego County Water Authority is also considering a plant at Southern California's Camp Pendleton that would produce up to 150 million gallons a day. Poseidon wants to build one in Huntington Beach, near Los Angeles, that would churn out 50 million gallons a day. Those ideas face significant challenges.
"The planets will never be in alignment like they were in Carlsbad," said Tom Pankrantz, editor of Water Desalination Report. "They had the right project, at the right place, at the right time."
The San Diego agency wants to get 10 percent of the region's water from desalination by 2020 as a way to lessen its dependence on the Colorado River, which is connected by aqueduct about 200 miles away. Tijuana also wants to rely less on the river, a priority that gained urgency after a 2010 earthquake knocked out its aqueduct for about three weeks.
The U.S. and Mexico can save money by joining forces, achieving economies of scale, said Halla Razak, the San Diego agency's Colorado River program manager. At least half of the plant's water would stay in Mexico, she said.
"Mexico is the entity that is driving the project, even more than the United States," she said.
U.S. and Mexican officials say they expect the new plants will adhere to the same standards as California, including water quality, but that Mexico's regulators may act faster and shield sponsors from legal challenges.
"The Mexicans will ask all the same questions that we ask here, but it's not endless lawsuits," said Mark Watton, general manager of Otay Water District, which would buy about 20 million gallons a day from Consolidated's Mexico plant for its San Diego-area customers. "You get an answer quicker."
Based on reporting by The Associated Press.
Sorry About the Link Misdirections
For long while, I couldn't get any links to load via the my blog toolbar um, LINK link, except the URL to my own blog. I thought maybe the magic sprites of the unfathomable mysteries of electronic communication would re-translate the links to their proper venues. As usual in the 'Net world, Blogger offers almost no useful help or instruction. Anyhow, it now seems to work right if one has the HTTP type URL link. Not going to try to go back & correct, but hope things will make more sense in the future. (Yeah, right, we know about 'those hopey changey things'! )
Right Back to the Worst of the Right 'Round a Century Ago
Click here: Robert Reich: The Rise of the Regressive Right and the Reawakening of America
A fundamental war has been waged in this nation since its founding, between progressive forces pushing us forward and regressive forces pulling us backward.
We are going to battle once again.
Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.
Regressives take the opposite positions.
Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.
They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.
In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.
Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s -- the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the "rot" is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).
In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.
Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.
The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation's wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America's wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker's wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers' wage.
This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.
Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts (and, all too often, Kennedy) claim they're conservative jurists. But they're judicial activists bent on overturning 75 years of jurisprudence by resurrecting states' rights, treating the 2nd Amendment as if America still relied on local militias, narrowing the Commerce Clause, and calling money speech and corporations people.
Yet the great arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, the nation eventually rallies and moves forward. Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble; sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.
Look at the Progressive reforms between 1900 and 1916; the New Deal of the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; the widening opportunities for women, minorities, people with disabilities, and gays; and the environmental reforms of the 1970s.
In each of these eras, regressive forces reignited the progressive ideals on which America is built. The result was fundamental reform.
Perhaps this is what's beginning to happen again across America.
A fundamental war has been waged in this nation since its founding, between progressive forces pushing us forward and regressive forces pulling us backward.
We are going to battle once again.
Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance. Progressives assume we're all in it together: We all benefit from public investments in schools and health care and infrastructure. And we all do better with strong safety nets, reasonable constraints on Wall Street and big business, and a truly progressive tax system. Progressives worry when the rich and privileged become powerful enough to undermine democracy.
Regressives take the opposite positions.
Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the other tribunes of today's Republican right aren't really conservatives. Their goal isn't to conserve what we have. It's to take us backwards.
They'd like to return to the 1920s -- before Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, the minimum wage, Medicare and Medicaid, worker safety laws, the Environmental Protection Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the Securities and Exchange Act, and the Voting Rights Act.
In the 1920s Wall Street was unfettered, the rich grew far richer and everyone else went deep into debt, and the nation closed its doors to immigrants.
Rather than conserve the economy, these regressives want to resurrect the classical economics of the 1920s -- the view that economic downturns are best addressed by doing nothing until the "rot" is purged out of the system (as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so decorously put it).
In truth, if they had their way we'd be back in the late nineteenth century -- before the federal income tax, antitrust laws, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Federal Reserve. A time when robber barons -- railroad, financial, and oil titans -- ran the country. A time of wrenching squalor for the many and mind-numbing wealth for the few.
Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same Social Darwinism Americans were fed more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: Survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.
The regressive right has slowly consolidated power over the last three decades as income and wealth have concentrated at the top. In the late 1970s the richest 1 percent of Americans received 9 percent of total income and held 18 percent of the nation's wealth; by 2007, they had more than 23 percent of total income and 35 percent of America's wealth. CEOs of the 1970s were paid 40 times the average worker's wage; now CEOs receive 300 times the typical workers' wage.
This concentration of income and wealth has generated the political heft to deregulate Wall Street and halve top tax rates. It has bankrolled the so-called Tea Party movement, and captured the House of Representatives and many state governments. Through a sequence of presidential appointments it has also overtaken the Supreme Court.
Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts (and, all too often, Kennedy) claim they're conservative jurists. But they're judicial activists bent on overturning 75 years of jurisprudence by resurrecting states' rights, treating the 2nd Amendment as if America still relied on local militias, narrowing the Commerce Clause, and calling money speech and corporations people.
Yet the great arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, the nation eventually rallies and moves forward. Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble; sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.
Look at the Progressive reforms between 1900 and 1916; the New Deal of the 1930s; the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s; the widening opportunities for women, minorities, people with disabilities, and gays; and the environmental reforms of the 1970s.
In each of these eras, regressive forces reignited the progressive ideals on which America is built. The result was fundamental reform.
Perhaps this is what's beginning to happen again across America.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
MISSION CREEP: Is It Inevitable?
Should there be a Constitutional amendment limiting federal MISSION CREEP in... Military intervention abroad, at home (installations, investigations, flyovers, takeovers of anything including disaster relief, and that planet-sized Godzilla in the room, the Military-Industrial Complex); ports 'n' borders*. in declared and undeclared acts of war...In paramilitary wars like the War On Drugs**, in metaphorical wars like the War On Poverty and the War On Cancer, and on all sorts of other things that were originally mandated within certain parameters and even time limits but even-if-you-think-they're-mosty-for-the-good,-can-we-use-the-term-metastacized??
*Ports 'n' borders is where I think they should be...
**Click here: Mexico: Marines Seize Marijuana, Kill Drug Cartel Members
Now, these are Mexican Marines, in a country wherein the national military forces have acually spent most of their history in policing their own fellow-citizens with pretty much the willful freedom of an 'occupying' alien conqueror army (thus eliciting all those attempts at revolution), but, considering what they'e up against - narcotraficante warlords, really, with burgeoning cells and agents all over our own USA - it has already become un grito de mas norteamericanos, from racist-paranoid militia types to antiwar lefties and libertarians, that we ought to bring our troops home and go General Pershing on our perimeters to sew up the 'haemorrhaging borders' from continuing to cause bloodshed all over the land.
*Ports 'n' borders is where I think they should be...
**Click here: Mexico: Marines Seize Marijuana, Kill Drug Cartel Members
Now, these are Mexican Marines, in a country wherein the national military forces have acually spent most of their history in policing their own fellow-citizens with pretty much the willful freedom of an 'occupying' alien conqueror army (thus eliciting all those attempts at revolution), but, considering what they'e up against - narcotraficante warlords, really, with burgeoning cells and agents all over our own USA - it has already become un grito de mas norteamericanos, from racist-paranoid militia types to antiwar lefties and libertarians, that we ought to bring our troops home and go General Pershing on our perimeters to sew up the 'haemorrhaging borders' from continuing to cause bloodshed all over the land.
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