appears to be over

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The dirty secret of California, specifically Los Angeles, is that large amounts of its electricity comes from coal plants in other states. Now, the state is mandating that coal power be substantially cleaner. This will also open the door for increased use of renewable power as the price will become more competitive, as well as being clean.

And why, you may ask, does L.A. import energy from coal plants in other states? Because coal plants are illegal in California, that’s why. To make things even more ethically challenged, many of those coal plants are on Native American reservations, which certainly sounds like it could be environmental racism, eh?.

Transmitting the power for several hundred miles to L.A. results in a power loss of more than 10%. It would be hard to come up with a worse system for power generation than what L.A. has. Coal is a dirty, filthy, highly polluting way to produce energy, both in the huge acreages it despoils as well as in the pollutants it produces during power generation. If L.A. is to be taken seriously about getting green, they need to stop using coal completely.

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A woman close to Sue and me has survived breast cancer twice, even though she’s only in her 30’s. They thought they got it all. They didn’t. Now it’s metastasized and is on bones in several areas. She started radiation and some chemo today. She can no longer walk and is in a wheelchair. They hope the meds will enable her to walk again in a couple of months. Meanwhile, she’ll be going through many tests, radiation, and chemo.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Theologians call it “the question of evil, ” and it is of course unanswerable by logic. The answer comes from somewhere deep within. As does the courage to keep on hoping and trying, and not giving up.

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They’re already doing it in Toronto and Halifax, and Cornell University plans to do the same. Cold water from deep within lakes is used to cool buildings, greatly cutting longterm costs.

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Not many anymore, now that the real estate bubble has burst. Housing Bubble Blog details the current wipe out in multiple areas of the country where once-pricey condos are selling at drastically reduced prices, or would be selling, except there aren’t any buyers.

Their point is, for the market to revive, prices will need to drop much further because in the current non-bubble world, $500,000 is an insane price to pay for a condo. Moreover, with rapid price appreciations now a thing of the past, most people simply can’t afford those prices.

Do the math. A $500,000 condo with 20% down means a 5.75% mortgage will cost $2300 a month. Add in another $700 a month for taxes, insurance, utilities, etc and that’s $3,000 a month. To be prudent, housing shouldn’t be more than 1/3 of your gross income, so that means you’d need to make $9,000 a month or $108,000 a year to buy what would probably be a smallish condo in areas like Miami, southern California, and Queens.

Yes, I admit to using formerly quaint notions in my calculations, like 20% down and no more than 1/3 of gross income for housing. Now that a Home Equity Line of Credit can no longer be used as an endless ATM, those notions may return - after prices drop down to levels the middle class can actually afford.

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Six articles by Fidel Castro, written in the spring of 2007. Compiled by Socialist Voice. Download the PDF (264k)

FYI: For those who may not know, Cuba by necessity went to large scale organic farming and now is a recognized leader in the field. Virtually all their food is grown organically and without pesticides. Yes, it can be done on a scale large enough to feed a nation.

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Let Lenin’s Tomb introduce you to his probable successor.

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From 1820

German friend of 1820 Daniel Mittler from Greenpeace has leaked an internal document from the G8 negotiations. As he says; “The bluntness of the White House is sometimes truly inspiring.”

I was thinking “nauseating” would be a better description. Or maybe “junk science” and “fanaticism.”

The original is a MS Word document with track changes revealing edits by the Bush administration…

Does the current administration ever stop lying and distorting the truth? Answer: No.

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As evidence, [the Venezuelan Communications Minister] cited Globovision showing footage of an assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in 1981 accompanied by the song “This Does Not Stop Here,” sung by Ruben Blades.

“The conclusion of the specialists … is that (in this segment) they are inciting the assassination of the president of Venezuela,” Lara told reporters at the prosecutor’s office.

If ABC aired something like that here, the Secret Service might well investigate even if, to an outsider, the threat of the video seems a bit oblique.

The Venezuelan government, by their recent moves, is inviting right wing counter reaction. The question is, why these moves by the Venezuelan government now? Perhaps forces are in play we know nothing about. Turbulence ahead for Venezuela?

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Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing originally posted a rather anti-Chavez piece, then after getting the opposing view from readers, did a long piece with lots of comments from readers explaining the history and why they back what the Venezuelan government did. Thank you, Xeni.

Here’s some of the reader comments.

While normally a station losing a license would be a sad thing, this is a TV station that actively supported a coup against Chavez in 2002, and was partially responsible for the violence and deaths that took place at this time. These events, including the role of RCTV and others are well documented in the (award-winning) film “The Revolution will not be televised”.

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Firstly, it is not being shut down. Chavez is not renewing the license for the use of the public airwaves.

The can still broadcast over cable, internet, and satellite. Secondly, the poster failed to mention that RCTV openly supported and helped a coup of his government that was partially successful. Chavez did not shut it down immediately but allowed the contract to expire 5 years later.

He also allows other networks that are openly critical of him to continue, just not the ones that tell people to overthrow a democratically elected government.

It seems plausible that the US would do the same if ABC openly supported and helped enact a coup of the government.

Quoting Colin Burgon in The Guardian

Almost all Venezuelan newspapers remain in private hands. The press is free to report, and express opinions, without government interference. Most do so with considerable brio on a daily basis. No media outlet has encountered licensing problems for the expression of political views. No journalist has been imprisoned or punished for report or comment.

In the UK, if Channel 4 aided an attempted coup against the government that resulted in civil unrest and even death, would anyone be supporting the renewal of its licence? RCTV has lost its licence because its wealthy owners slanted news coverage to provide support to the April 2002 coup against Chávez and the elected government. This will not be news to those who gathered in parliament last week to view John Pilger’s excellent documentary The War on Democracy, which shows footage of RCTV involvement.

And in a letter to the Guardian Burgon said:

This is not a case of censorship. In Venezuela more than 90% of the media is privately owned and virulently opposed to the Chávez government.

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Not that it’s by any means any easy decision to come to.

Cindy Sheehan leaves Democratic Party

We do not condone our government’s violent meddling in sovereign countries and we condemn the continued murderous occupation of Iraq .

We gave you a chance, you betrayed us.

May the trend continue. More and more, people who genuinely believed the Democratic Party was opposed to the war now see what back-stabbing weaseldicks they are.

Both parties are equally complicit in the war(s) and the recent deliberate caving by the Democrats on war funding now makes that abundantly clear.

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Andrew Sullivan, a religious conservative, says the fathomless sadism of al Qaeda torture techniques are beyond comprehension but tortures done by the US (or its proxies) are also stomach-turning and hideous.

What al Qaeda and Saddam did was an extreme form of sadistic torture, the kind that psychopaths enjoy and inflict. But that does not make, say, freezing someone to near-death, reviving him, re-freezing him again any less torture. Yes, we did that, carefully monitored by Rumsfeld. It does not make the Khmer Rouge waterboarding technique any less torture. It does not make contorting a prisoner into an excruciating stress position and then smashing his head against the wall any less torture. We should not forget that there have been more than a hundred deaths in U.S.-run torture chambers under George W. Bush either.

Torture is not justifiable because others do it more brutally. It still destroys people, their lives, their minds. That this country is even having a debate about whether torture can be justifiable simply shows how debased things have become.

Is torture ever justifiable? The answer, quite simply, is “Never.”

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We recognise that the non-renewal of the broadcasting licence for RCTV is a legitimate and democratic decision of the Venezuelan government. The reason for this action is not that RCTV is against the government of Hugo Chavez, but rather that this TV channel participated directly in the organisation of the military coup against the democratically elected government. We welcome the decision to set up a new public access TV station “TVes”. The problem of the media in Venezuela is not that the government is curtailing freedom of expression but rather the need to democratise access to the media, which is dominated by a handful of monopoly groups that use their position to sabotage the expressed will of the majority of the Venezuelan people.

That’s a key point. Chavez has won several elections, and they were internationally monitored and declared fair. RCTV did participate directly in a coup attempt against the state, and when the time came to renew their license, the government said no. Any government on the planet would have done the same.

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The Dems pulled a sleazy parliamentary maneuver to pretend they opposed war funding then stepped aside so Repubs could pass it. Worse, the Dems then bragged to the press about how they fooled the American public. Drinking Liberally in New Milford has the full sordid tale and concludes with

This is what we’re dealing with folks. A party that runs to the press to brag about the brilliance of using their majority not to end the war, but to create a situation that makes it seem as if they oppose the war, while actually helping Republicans continue it.

The Twin Parties of Militarism and Imperialism lurch mindlessly on. With a few scattered exceptions, not one of them gives a damn about dead American soldiers (and certainly not about dead Iraqis) even as they will cry crocodile tears about it at today’s Memorial Day events.

Andrew Bacevich on his son’s death in Iraq

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation’s call to “global leadership.” It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.This is not some great conspiracy. It’s the way our system works.

Then the answer must be: replace the current exploitative system with one that is humane and genuinely responsive to the people.

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Gazprom, the Russian oil company owned by the state, has not only been blackmailing central Asian countries by cutting off their oil supplies, it has been buying up independent Russian media and turning them into propaganda tools. Craig Murray writes about this on his website and in Mail on Sunday saying Putin is using Russian Mafia as allies and has installed former KGB allies in positions of power, with many of them now more wealthy than the more public billionaire oligarchs.

Further, he says the evidence and politics support the view that Russian security forces, not rebels, were responsible for the bombing of apartment blocks in Chechnya in 2000, using it as a pretext for increased repression.

His primary point is that Europe needs to rather quickly go to renewable sources of energy to avoid dependence on an increasingly despotic Russia who plans to use their huge energy resources as a political weapon.

Murray also says

I rather despair of the many on the Left who seem to accept Bush and Blair’s risible “With us or against us” logic, and conclude that any opponent of Bush is a good person. Anyone who believes that the Russian oligarchs are not just as evil and machinating as Dick Cheney, has switched off his critical faculties.

Indeed, the opponent of my opponent may not only not be a friend or ally but  instead equally loathsome.

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Not only do their power plants use water for cooling, some of the power is from hydro. So it’s a double whammy. The price of electricity is rising fast, and the drought continues.

Solar, wind, and wave power, anyone?

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I blogged recently about Dion Dimucci. This post covers some of the exceptional music done by him and the Belmonts.

Dion. King of the New York Streets
This 3 CD set of features Dion with the Belmonts, then later on his own. His work here spans thirty years and a multitude of styles. For example, his version of “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix is so different from the original that it takes some time until you realize what the song is. And the arrangement works. “Abraham, Martin and John”, written 20 minutes after RFK was assassinated, was his biggest hit. While the spotlight may have fallen off him, he continues to record excellent music, and the third CD in the set includes his recent work.

Dion. Bronx in Blue
Released in 2006, this acoustic blues CD covers blues classics and Hank Williams as well, and was nominated for two Grammys.

On his website Dion says he grew up listening to blues and Hank Williams because there was no rock and roll then and how that, decades later, led to Bronx in Blue.

Black music, filtered through an Italian neighborhood, comes out with an attitude. Rock & Roll. Yo! The music on this CD was the undercurrent of every song I did: Runaround Sue, The Wanderer, even the foot stomping on Ruby Baby I got from John Lee Hooker’s Walkin’ Boogie.

The Belmonts. Cigars, Acappella, Candy (1971)
This stunning gem features the Belmonts singing acappella, without instrumental accompaniment. Songs include doo wop classics, George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”, and ends with a 14-song medley showstopper, “Street Corner Symphony.”

Dion and the Belmonts. Reunion Madison Square Garden ‘72
A reviewer at the time said, “this wasn’t a reunion concert, it was a religious experience.” The audience was remarkable and Dion and the Belmonts responded in kind.

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The new US embassy in the Green Zone has been completed, but they neglected to build enough armored housing so hundreds of embassy employees are sleeping in “tin-can trailers” with “no overhead protection.” Some have taken to wrapping themselves in Kevlar blankets when they sleep. Sweet dreams?

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The US announced a new strategy to combat money laundering but seems unaware of the recent developments in the field.

Yet the latest digital advances open to criminals and terrorists — mobile phones or other mobile devices to secretly transfer money globally, or M-payments; gambling; and transfer of virtual money through online role-playing games, or RPGs — are missing from this long-awaited government strategy.

Transferring money via online games like Second Life is difficult to track, the servers might not even be on US soil, there are no applicable laws governing such transfers, and the games allow any amount of money to flow in and out of the game.

This would also appear to be a swell way to transfer bribe money to corrupt politicians. How could local investigators discover the esteemed council member got $20,000 from a local contractor in exchange for a favorable vote when the money was transferred from DeathSkull93 to NinjaMan in a RPG hosted on servers in Europe?

Hmm, I wonder, will we see rogue RPGs appear? That while they will provide a game for people to play, their real purpose will be to launder money?

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The cartoon explains all.

Via Environmental Economics

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Multiple kites flown by a master of the art.

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Judge blocks protesters from marching to West Point to protest Cheney, who will be speaking there tomorrow. The usual national security nonsense was cited as the reason.

Funny, they didn’t block us from protesting near the gate of the US Coast Guard Acaemy on Wednesday when Bush spoke there.  I guess Cheney must be extra-sensitive nowadays given that his poll ratings are even worse than Dubya’s. He well may be the most despised person in the government.

The protest, which is expected to draw thousands, will be gathering in a nearby town as planned and the protest and rally will happen, march or no march.

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Email from Patrick McElwee

The Venezuelan government has legally decided not to renew the broadcast license of a major TV network, Radio Caracas Television (RCTV). RCTV is overtly opposed to the government. That opposition included direct support for the 2002 military coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez.

[My Common Dreams] article also reveals that the policy people at Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and Reporters Without Borders - all of whom have criticized the RCTV decision - cannot say that RCTV would get its license renewed in the United States or Europe.

No government anywhere would allow a TV network that had supported overthrowing them to continue to broadcast. Had this happened in, say, Britain, the same critics would no doubt be applauding the decision. Their anti-Chavez bias is showing.

The House and the Senate are likely to take up a measure today criticizing the Chavez government; the European Parliament passed a similar motion this morning, although a tiny fraction of the parliamentarians were in attendance; and the media is going to be all over this. RCTV goes off the air Sunday night.

Let’s get the word out about this in advance of the usual venomous right wing attacks on Venezuela for doing what any country would have done.

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HeadZup is back after a hiatus, and now delivers their patented zany political animations to email and rss as well as cell phones.

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This Saturday, May 26, 8:30 AM
Veterans Park on Main St.
Highland Falls NY, (adjacent to West Point)

ANSWER and dozens of other groups are mobilizing to protest Dick Cheney when he speaks at West Point on Saturday.

From the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter

The protest is sponsored by the ad hoc West Point May 26th Organizing Committee, a coalition of 47 regional and national peace organizations. The demonstration is expected to be large.

Participants are encouraged to arrive by 8:30 a.m., but we suggest you aim for 8 a.m. Thousands of family members and guests of the graduating class will be traveling over local roads at the same time and delays are inevitable. Further, this will be a well-attended rally and parking space close to the rally site may fill up early. Other travel information is listed below.

The first rally will begin at 9 a.m., followed by a fairly brief 10 a.m. march through Highland Falls, passing in front of the Thayer Gate to West Point, which of course will be blocked by police on the town side and soldiers on the Academy grounds. The march will continue until returning to Veteran¹s Park for a second rally.

WestPointRally has more information, as does ANSWER.

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