~ We can learn from history—there once was a civilization of Job Creators that thrived in America because it created jobs that allowed millions to thrive. The Onion reports on the findings of latter-day archaeologists about how they once built
...highly distinctive steel and brick structures wherever they went, including many buildings thought to have held hundreds of paid workers at a time.
"It's truly fascinating—after spending a certain number of hours performing assigned tasks, the so-called 'employees' at such facilities would receive monetary compensation that allowed them to support themselves and their families," said archaeologist Alan H. Mueller, citing old ledgers and time-keeping devices unearthed at excavation sites in the region. "In fact, this practice seems to have been the norm for their culture, which consisted of advanced tool users capable of exploiting their skills to produce highly valued goods and services."
For The Nightmare ~ Tomorrow is your last chance this year to experience the best haunt in Greater Seattle, the Nightmare at Beaver Lake. See what 11,000 people have raved about—our best show yet.
Whatever you do tomorrow night, be careful out there; not all the zombies have been fed.
But not one of the super-rich too paralyzed to hire or invest, supposedly because of oppressive taxes and regulation.
No, I mean I really create jobs, by founding new ventures, by investing in startup companies, and, as an executive, by growing opportunities from idea to revenue. Along the way value is built, customers are served, workers are hired, and taxes are paid.
I've been doing this for 18 years, and never once did I choose not to grow a business or hire a worker because the tax burden was too high or because the regulations were too onerous.
~ Apart from those that think climate change isn't happening, there are those that accept the evidence of it, but think it remains a distant problem that is secondary to more immediate concerns. If you live in any number of Pacific islands of course, you know the problem is serious and immediate.
It turns out the signs go beyond inundated islands, melting glaciers, loss of shellfish, disappearing arctic ice, dying coral reefs and other evidence that seems to some perhaps to be far enough removed from where we live in the US.
Today, Miami is seeing rising ocean levels on its city streets. At high tide, salt water seeps up from underground, flooding roads. The problem is not remote, but is growing, with the flood waters are getting higher and more frequent. Unchecked, the problem threatens not just the natural beauty of the area and environmental treasures like the Everglades, but also the Biscayne Aquifer which supplies nearly all of South Florida's water supply.
~ In poker a person who doesn't know what's going on is called the fish. The fish is destined to lose all his money. There's a long-time saying at the poker table about this:
If you look around the poker table and you don't know who the fish is, it's you.
The 99% are really motivated because it's finally become undeniably obvious that they are the fish in Wall Street's greedy game of grift. They haven't been beaten, they've been ripped off. Here are some of the ways:
FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. [Banks] get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent... and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income... Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?
It is interesting how much people complain about energy costs, especially when one compares what people pay in other countries. The US has some of the cheapest energy in the world, partly due to the subsidization of energy by the US government.
~ An Exxon executive complains that Democrats are pandering to the deficit "Super Committee" when they urge rolling back oil and tax breaks. He's evidently unfamiliar with political pandering, one definition of which is to assert views "merely for the purpose of drawing support ...and [that] do not necessarily reflect one's personal values."
It is too much of a stretch, however, to say that these Senate Democrats are pushing this merely for political support and even less credible to suggest it doesn't match their personal values. Rather, a $2B annual reduction in largesse to Big Oil appears as an extremely modest step to address the current deficit hysteria:
Despite the oil companies’ insistence to the contrary, we know from analyses by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service and Joint Economic Committee that cutting $2 billion in annual oil subsidies and tax breaks for oil companies would not make oil and gasoline more expensive. The price of oil and gas is set on the world market, and federal subsidies play no role in prices consumers pay at the pump. To put it another way, if the five largest and wealthiest private oil companies were willing to live with $142 billion in profits this year, rather than their projected $144 billion, they would be paying their fair share in taxes without raising gasoline prices one penny.
What does real pandering look like? Newt Gingrich does show and tell:
"Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"
--Chico Marx, Duck Soup
There are several kinds of opponents of a meaningful response to the threat of climate change. But the prize for intellectual dishonesty goes to those who, with unwitting hilarity, suggest we ignore evidence in front of our faces in favor of their insistent fiction.
One can argue for hours whether this year was warmer or colder than last... [but] it doesn't matter. We should be reading the earth, not thermometers. The earth is clearly warming, and sea level is clearly rising.
Skeptics confuse weather with climate, blather about putative "global cooling", mount endless ad hominem attacks against scientists, pretend to be authoritative, distort economic effects, strew red herrings, and cling tenaciously to comfortable fantasies. To believe such charlatans is to choose delusion.
~ GOP Senator Lindsay Graham thinks we should be doing more to build up infrastructure. Trouble is, he wants to do it in Libya, not here in the US. Of course, Huckleberry is really only interested in grabbing the oil, and ramming laissez-faire on the hapless Libyans, but a lot of other things would need to be built too just to enable access to a rebuilt oil operation. Video from TPM:
There seems to be a fair amount of Republican support for infrastructure projects in Libya and in Iraq, doubtless motivated by the prospect of controlling all that oil (and not incidentally enriching their Big Oil campaign contributors.) But there's also support for it in Afghanistan, which has no oil at all (although some potentially interesting mineral deposits worth coveting.)
Why are we spending precious taxpayer dollars in an era of deficit hysteria on infrastructure projects in other countries, especially ones that were once hostile to us and could conceivably be so again? Is there a good reason beyond a neo-imperial desire to control the next period of resource extraction? If there's a bona fide humanitarian motivation, then why do we not apply that same ethos here domestically? It's not as if we don't have a long list of needed infrastructure projects ourselves: roads, bridges, high-speed Internet, rail, HVDC transmission, smart grid... Many other countries are doing a better job on these things than we are. Where is the national impetus to retain our quasi-legendary standing as the greatest country in the world?
Some days I think we should invade ourselves, just so we can then embark on nation building here at home.
Schedule and ticket prices here. Come for a nice 45 minute walk in the woods, and see who (or what) else enjoys the sights and sounds of seasonal death and decay...
And this year is extra special! CJ Graham, who played Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th movies will be there on Friday the 28th and Saturday the 29th. Get a photo or an autograph. Before he gets you.
He is the consummate blowhard, which makes this parody all the more exquisite:
Don't feel too much pity for this pompous fraud. He calls himself a member of the British House of Lords, although he is not. That institution took the unprecedented step of issuing him a letter setting him straight, and putting a notice on their website. Undaunted, Monckton stood for election 4 times, never receiving a single vote, apparently not even from himself. That's serious twit cred.
In hyping the Solyndra faux scandal, Republicans have gone after the loan-guarantee program with guns blazing. It is, they charge, an example of big government trying to "pick winners." And by golly they just can't support big government picking winners!
Except, uh, turns out they can. In their haste to condemn everything connected to Obama, Republicans have stepped on a bit of a rake. After all, history—recent history!—is replete with examples of Republicans pushing for loan guarantees for energy businesses in their districts.
Some food crops (e.g. corn) are diverted for making fuels
Fresh water supplies are dwindling or under threat
Modern agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuel inputs for transportation and fertilizer
Arable land is vanishing to development and to erosion
To produce enough food for everyone there will need to be many coordinated solutions. One partial solution would be to grow more plants in less space with fewer energy inputs. A new startup company spun out of WSU has technology that does exactly that.
Phytelligence makes smarter plants, or rather, has a smarter process for propagating them and boosting them through their earliest (plantlet) growth stage. It's not genetic engineering, or GMO, but rather the smart application of proprietary technology to grow vigorous and healthy plantlets in less time, at less cost, and with less water and energy.
The Company has already successfully propagated 4 of the top 5 fruits in the US as measured by crop value and by acres planted. There is enormous opportunity in other fruits, tree nuts, and other kinds of crops generally. The nursery business has seen little change in generations; Phytelligence is aiming to bring to the industry 21st Century technology, sustainability practices and logistics.
Come learn more about Phytelligence at the NWEN First Look Forum, this Tuesday, 3:00-5:00 at the Arctic Hotel in Seattle. Reception to follow.
Update: Phytelligence finished in the top 5. Thanks to NWEN for a great event!
What Are We Fighting For? ~ The chattering classes snipe that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are not clear about their demands. True. Not yet. It is still sputtering rage that can't quite decide which of the fat targets to pick first.
I'd like to suggest this one:
Or perhaps some of this. Or this. One doesn't have to search very hard really to understand. The 1% get it quite clearly. Expect a harsh and authoritarian backlash soon; they're just waiting for a lull.
~ Hereditary leader of reclusive North Korea, Kim Jong Il, toured various facilities in his country recently, including the Solar Equipment Centre, which is building solar hot water heaters "on a trial basis."
According to the press release, he was pleased with the work of the Centre, and appreciated the building's various features, including rain water collecting, a wind turbine, and solar energy harvesting. He "stressed the importance of the use of renewable energy sources."
How long will it be before some wingnut uses the support of Kim to attack renewable energy?
The press release itself is laughable for the hagiography of Kim, the stilted language and the way it strives to make the ordinary remarkable:
~ The Australian House just passed a national carbon tax. It was quite a fight. While the merits of the law are worth discussion, more interesting is the light shone on the political process both in Australia and here in the United States.
Advocates championed the law, saying it would make polluters pay for their costs, address climate change, protect the environment, enable selected tax cuts elsewhere, and fund renewable energy investments.
“Today our MPs have voted yes to creating a stronger economy, yes to new jobs in clean industries and yes to giving our wildlife a fighting chance,” commented WWF Australia chief executive Dermot O’Gorman in a statement.
Opponents fulminated about the loss of jobs, unfair taxation, and the futility of action on climate change without international agreement and coordinated action.
Most MPs, however, were simply exhausted from the fight, which has gone on for years and more than one elected government.
