Bob Morris @ Sep 30th 2007 06:06 - Category: Unfiled ;
The Hartford Courant on Sat. quoted two blogs, FireDogLake and MyLeftNutmeg, on the front page in an article about how rightwing warmonger Rep. Chris Shays is losing support, and that blogs are helping to lead the charge.
Bob Morris @ Sep 30th 2007 00:15 - Category: Unfiled ;
About 150 marched Saturday in Hartford CT in support of the Jena 6, including current Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez and former Mayor Thirman Milner. For a grassroots march called on short notice with little time for outreach, getting this many people in downtown Hartford at 9am on a Saturday showed clearly that many care about this issue.
At the press conference, Kamora Harrington said she was tired of her 17 year old son being looked at as being criminal simply because he’s Black.
At the rally at Bushnell Park, several members of the state legislature spoke about the broken, unjust Connecticut criminal system. 75% of those in CT prisons are people of color, as are 85% of those in the juvenile justice system. That’s what Jena is about, separate and unequal systems of justice based on race and class.
The lawmakers urged us to get involved and help stop the current push in the legislature to enact a Draconian Three Strikes-like law in CT, this in reaction to the hideous recent Cheshire home invasion murders (which were white-on-white.) But the effect of any such law will fall disproportionately on people of color.
Y’know, there aren’t many cities where a current and former mayor will march in support of the Jena 6. But they did in Hartford.
Minister Cornell Lewis with noose
Former mayor Thirman Milner
Current mayor Eddie Perez
Bob Morris @ Sep 29th 2007 00:17 - Category: Unfiled ;
From the authors of Breakthrough.
There are five reasons why setting a price on carbon dioxide, either through a cap and trade approach or an outright tax, cannot reduce greenhouse gas emissions anywhere close to what is needed.
1. The regulation-centered approach won’t result in the deep reductions in global carbon emissions that climate scientists believe are necessary to avoid catastrophic climate impacts.
2. Governments will continue to set a low price for carbon, which will prevent clean energy sources from becoming cost-competitive.
3. Developing nations like China will not sacrifice their economic growth to reduce its emissions.
This crucial point is too often overlooked in the States. Developing countries look at environmentalists and carbon caps as elitist, preachy, and deliberating attempting to slow their economy. Why does the West, the biggest polluter of all, they ask, have the right to tell us not to develop the power and transport systems that they already have?
4. Dramatic and rapid technological breakthroughs will not be primarily driven by the private sector.
5. Public investment will be far more important than pollution limits in driving technological innovation and reducing the real price of clean energy. This point seems to be controversial only among environmentalists.
This is their key point. Only massive investing by governments can (hopefully) create new ways sources of clean, non-polluting energy. As an example, they use the Internet. It was the huge amounts of government-led R&D into chips, fiber, and Arpanet that led to the net of today. Private companies certainly have contributed to the R&D in recent years, but it was the US government (specifically the military) that created what became the Internet. So, they say, let’s do the same with clean energy.
Other major problems with carbon caps is that for them to work, they must be universal and verifiable, something they are nowhere close to being. If one country institutes strict caps, a business can simply move to a less restrictive (or more easily bribed) country. Plus, just because, say, WalMart buys credits for 10,000 trees in Borneo doesn’t mean they were actually planted and maintained. There needs to be transparent audit trails on trading emissions, and no such systems exist at present. And again, they need to be universal.
Carbon emission offsets are kludgy, unworkable, and unenforceable. We need massive public research into clean energy along with cutbacks in consumption by all.
You can change the world by changing technology. So, you can try and ban coal fired power plants all day and night for the next thirty years and you won’t have much luck. But if you go get a degree in physics, and create a solar panel that produces cheaper electricity than coal power plants, then no legislation in the world is going to keep coal alive.
Bob Morris @ Sep 29th 2007 00:13 - Category: Unfiled ;
The town of Riverside NJ passed a nasty, racist ordinance designed to drive undocumented workers out of town. It worked! So many undocumented workers left town that their local economy collapsed.
The town has now rescinded the ordinance.
Bob Morris @ Sep 29th 2007 00:07 - Category: Unfiled ;
A conservative estimate is that 9.4% of total US electric consumption is from computers. This includes data servers and PCs, but not printers, scanners, faxes and the endless rechargeable devices that access the Net.
Too many devices continue to draw power even when turned off. The best way to ensure that the power is really off is by having the power cords plugged into a power strip, then turn off the power strip.
Or get a smart power strip, and let it turn things off for you. Until devices get smarter and don’t draw unneeded power, that is.
Bob Morris @ Sep 28th 2007 15:50 - Category: Unfiled ;
He may be re-tried, but this not as an adult.
Hartford CT. Tomorrow Sept. 29th, 9am
March and rally in support of the Jena 6.
9:00am. Assemble at Albany and Main
9:30am. Press Conference
10:00am. March to Bushnell Park
Info: (860) 246-4656
Bob Morris @ Sep 28th 2007 00:15 - Category: Unfiled ;
From Douglas Rushkoff
I believe that 9-11 theorizing debilitates the counterculture. It robs us of some potentially creative thinkers. It replaces truly important questions with trivial ones. It marginalizes more constructive investigation of American participation in the development of Al Qaeda as well as its subsequent aggravation.
…
And that’s where I suspect all this theorizing really takes us: to the heart of a racist jingoism worse even than the triumphalism justifying our foreign policy to begin with. They can’t bring themselves to accept that our big bad government can really be so swiftly outfoxed by a dozen relatively untrained Arab guys.
Which of course is exactly what 4th Generation Warfare is, a tiny opposition inflicting major damage on a much larger, vastly more powerful foe. Military theorists familiar with 4GW have no problem understanding how twelve people could do a 9/11 attack.
The 9/11 conspiracists take a few discrepancies in the accounts of the attacks then make a huge and unsupportable leap into saying a multitude of US government officials must have known and planned this in advance. Yet they offer zero proof of any actual complicity. Further, their assumption posits that the Bush Administration is highly competent, yet, as Rushkoff points out, the Bushies can’t even fire a few lawyers without tripping over their own feet.
By looking under the rug for what isn’t even there, we neglect the horror show that is in plain view. In the process, we make it even easier for the criminals running our government to perpetuate their illegal, unethical and un-American activities.
Bob Morris @ Sep 28th 2007 00:12 - Category: Unfiled ;
Private Military Corporations have created a dependency like “addiction” for the US military, but stock up now on Blackwater t-shirts before they become “the Enron of Private Security Contractors” and the t-shirts become collector items. Possible new slogan:”Twice the Shootings, Same Great Price“
Bob Morris @ Sep 28th 2007 00:08 - Category: Unfiled ;
Big Oil in the United States is fighting on several fronts to delay or stop, if possible, the adoption of ethanol as a widely used fuel for automobiles. That’s not the opinion of anti-globalists or green radicals, but one expressed in an article in the BusinessWeek, hardly a hotbed of anti-business conspiracy theories.
Were Big Oil not primarily Neanderthals who oppose any perceived threats to their business, they might have actually tried to jump on the ethanol and renewable energy bandwagons and thus make billions. Ah well, some of them will be dead or dying within the next decade or so, too big and too dumb to change.
Bob Morris @ Sep 27th 2007 12:54 - Category: Unfiled ;
Bob Morris @ Sep 27th 2007 00:22 - Category: Climate change, Peak oil, Renewable energy ;
There is simply no way we can achieve an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions without creating breakthrough technologies that do not pollute.
– from the Introduction to “Breakthrough. From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility” by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
To stop global warming, we need to get everyone on board, facing the same direction, and optimistic about the process. That’s where traditional greens and the left lose their potential audience. They scold that we must cut back, reduce growth, accept a greatly reduced lifestyle - then wonder why many are hostile to their ideas and nothing happens.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus, both longtime environmentalists, have a different plan. Launch a New Apollo Project with the federal government spending 300 billion on research for new non-polluting energy sources. They estimate private enterprise would then add 200 billion more and real solutions could certainly be found. They polled the public on their idea and found almost universal acceptance, Texas rednecks as well as Bay Area enviros were in approval.
Sadly, traditional environmental groups ended up opposing it, because it stepped all over their sacred cows (and donor base, no doubt.) So now the authors have an institute, new book, and book tour, and plan to spread the word.
“If this book doesn’t piss off a whole lot of conservatives and a whole lot of liberals, we’ve failed,” Nordhaus says.
I like their attitude.
Wired has a must-read article on this, and for me it was a real eureka moment. Yes, with a plan like this we have a real chance of both stopping global warming and solving the peak oil problem - and really, what’s the alternative? Wait for the oil to run out and the seas to rise bemoaning our fate all the way as endless wars for oil and water rage across the planet?
Socialists say this kind of change can only happen when a new form of government takes power, but that takes too long and then you’ve got years of fighting those forced from power. We don’t have twenty years. We need to start now. Free marketers think the market can do it alone, but this is illusion. Only governments have the resources and power to pull off a plan like this.
What if the economic solution to environmental disaster weren’t a matter of stepping on the brakes but of stepping on the gas?
Indeed. (I’ll be reviewing the book as soon as it arrives from Amazon.)
Bob Morris @ Sep 27th 2007 00:16 - Category: Unfiled ;
NRG Energy has applied to build two nuclear reactors in Texas, with more applications are coming from other companies. These are the first such applications in 31 years.
Bob Morris @ Sep 27th 2007 00:08 - Category: Unfiled ;
The Venture Communist Telephony Collective, Telekommunisten, launches Initial Public Offering giving labour-investors the opportunity to earn equity in this anti-capitalist technology startup.Founded in May 1st, 2006,Telekommunisten is working toward experimenting with and developing the practise of Venture Communism.
Bob Morris @ Sep 26th 2007 08:39 - Category: Unfiled ;
Tonight, during the Saryusz-Wolski report “Towards a common European foreign policy on energy” the Euro realist MEP Tom Wise will use parliamentary privilege to spell out the allegations against Alisher Usmanov. He has been talking to Craig Murray to ensure that the allegations are accurate and to the point.Under the rules governing parliamentary privilege, any news organisation can repeat what has been said in the Parliament chamber, allowing the MSM to circumvent the legal threats being thrown about by Usmanov’s lawyers Schillings.
Let the fun begin.
I think I can hear the sound of toys being thrown out of prams.
Matt Wardman has the speech. Early on in this, someone commented Usmanov, an Uzbek billionaire who forced blogs critical of him off the net, didn’t know what he was taking on in attacking former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray. Now Murray’s allegations about Usmanov’s corruption, having been mentioned in Parliament, can be quoted by anyone without fear of being sued. Sweet.
Bob Morris @ Sep 26th 2007 07:18 - Category: Unfiled ;
The just-released version 2.3 of WordPress includes an auto-update “feature” which phones home with information on the site; installed plug-ins, url, etc. It can’t be disabled natively and they don’t tell you they’re doing it.
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg appears evasive and unhelpful about this, saying everyone else does it (perhaps, but at least they tell you they’re doing it and provide opt-outs) then says hey, there’s a fix for it (however it’s a third-party plugin, and not from WordPress itself.)
When Microsoft pulls crap like this, people can and do protest loudly about privacy violations.
WordPress is about the most trusted name in blogging, hope they don’t blow it.
Bob Morris @ Sep 26th 2007 00:17 - Category: Unfiled ;
This Saturday, Sept. 29th
Show your support for the Jena 6 by wearing Black and joining Greater Hartford’s “March for Justice” in America.
9:00am. Assemble at Albany and Main
9:30am. Press Conference
10:00am. March to Bushnell Park
Info: (860) 246-4656
Bob Morris @ Sep 26th 2007 00:14 - Category: Unfiled ;
Yes, higher, that’s because in the U.S. there are multiple taxes, which result in Americans paying a higher effective tax rate than in Europe.
Next time a politician warns that his opponent wants to tax you like the Europeans, tell him, “I wish!” Then ask him (or her), why do we pay so much more and get so much less?
Bob Morris @ Sep 26th 2007 00:09 - Category: Unfiled ;
Ford is planning to feed toxic fumes from an assembly paint shop into a fuel cell that will convert it to electricity as well as cutting down on noxious emissions.
This is the kind of creative thinking, that once done on a mass scale, could make a huge difference. They are literally turning toxins into power.
Bob Morris @ Sep 25th 2007 14:30 - Category: Unfiled ;
Quietly at first, and now with the whole world watching, the Buddhist monks of Burma are nonviolently protesting one of the most vicious, thuggish governments on the planet.
They marched again today in an inspiring show of bravery and solidarity, and in defiance of government threats.
But this is the first time Burma’s 400,000-strong Buddhist monkhood has taken a lead in the protest movement, pitting rifles against their maroon-coloured robes in a looming confrontation that could easily spark an uprising.
In 1988, the pro-democracy movement there was crushed, at least temporarily, when the government slaughtered 3,000. The marchers are quite literally risking their lives and deserve our full support.
Bob Morris @ Sep 25th 2007 08:12 - Category: Unfiled ;
The protests are growing fast. 100,000 marched yesterday in nonviolent protest, led by the monks in this heavily Buddhist country. There will either be one million in the streets soon or the generals will order machine guns to be used (something they’ve done before.) Can’t see much middle ground here.
Bob Morris @ Sep 25th 2007 06:05 - Category: Unfiled ;
“In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country … I don’t know who’s told you that we have this.”
His homophobia and ignorance is quite stunning, isn’t it?
“If the root causes of 9/11 are examined properly - why it happened, what caused it, what were the conditions that led to it, who truly was involved, who was really involved - and put it all together to understand how to prevent the crisis in Iraq, fix the problem in Afghanistan and Iraq combined”
I’ve read that several times and still have no idea what he means. That Bush did 9/11? That the US brought it upon itself? And what does that have to do with stopping current wars?
“I’m not saying that [the Holocaust] didn’t happen at all … [But] can you argue that researching a phenomenon is finished forever, done? Can we close the books forever on a historical event?”
This is akin to saying the Law of Gravity requires more research. It doesn’t. Neither does wondering if the Holocaust happened.
While any country, including Iran, has the right to self-defense, and while Ahmadinejad was deliberately and pointlessly insulted by the president of Columbia, his willful provincial ignorance reminds of none other than George Bush.
Bob Morris @ Sep 25th 2007 00:07 - Category: Climate change ;
Asymptotic Life has published an invaluable 10-part series on how to do an energy audit, with the aim of cutting back to zero carbon emissions. They live on a small ranch in rural Utah and explain the process. The posts are long, informative, and most definitely worth reading.
Part 1. Introduction
George Monbiot says we need to cut carbon emissions below zero to halt global warming. Yes, below zero, as this includes absorbing carbon already present. How can a household do this? The first step is to audit energy use. That’s what they did.
Part 2: Electric Use Audit
Create a spreadsheet with estimated amounts of energy used by each appliance, then determine where and how to cut usage. CFLs and turning off computers and printers are a good start. (Even with that, many devices still draw power when turned off. We need smarter, more efficient electronics, and while we’re at it, universal transformers too. Having one transformer per device that gets tossed out with the device is wasteful.)
Part 3: Heating
Their solution is to burn more wood and use less propane. However, I question the premise that burning wood is carbon-neutral because decaying wood emits carbon too. The rate of decay is much slower for decaying wood vs. a few hours for burning wood, thus the emissions get pumped out much faster with burning. Then there is the problem of particulate emission, which is particularly nasty from wood.
Part 4: Propane Appliances
They turn the hot water heater off at night to save propane. Tankless water heaters are another option, as they only heat water when needed (and do so extremely quickly) but are more expensive. Ditto for stoves with electronic ignition and no pilot light.
Part 5: Transportation
This is always the problematic one. How do we cut automobile usage? Car pool. Plan trips more efficiently so each trip accomplishes multiple things. Buy a more fuel-efficient car. None of which really solves the huge dependence on cars (and trucking) in America.
Part 6: Other Sources of Carbon Emissions
A single round-trip, cross-country flight produces half the Kyoto protocol’s 11,000 pound per person annual allowance of CO2.
Yikes.
Part 7: Tallying It Up
They found they could cut carbon emissions by nearly 70% using “simple and relatively inexpensive changes” but more than that would require major expenses, like for more solar, wind power, and a root cellar. One option, pay for the planting of trees.
Part 8: The Hard Way
To cut emissions to zero means they would use only their solar power for energy. This would lead to a much more primitive life style. Therein lies the problem. To cut emissions to zero on a national level would mean trucking and air transportation would stop, putting millions out of work as all the industries that depend on them would collapse too. A depression would inevitably follow.
In short, cutting emissions to zero the hard way would not be pretty. It would look a lot like the Stone Age, but with internet.
It behooves us all to look at cutting emissions in some sort of planned approach because, speaking for myself, the Stone Age is not where I want to live.
Part 9. Commitment to Action
Make a plan to cut energy, then stick to it. They have a detailed plan and will be reporting back on the implementation at the end of the year.
Part 10: Will You Take the Challenge?
I’ve posted about the step-by-step process through which my wife and I analyzed our CO2 emissions, and how we plan to reduce our carbon impact to zero. Now, I’ll ask you join me in taking the Zero Emissions Challenge. Because if we wait for someone else to act, we may wait too long.
Also includes links to resources to help you calculate your own carbon footprint.
There is a wealth of information in this series. Dive in.
Bob Morris @ Sep 24th 2007 13:07 - Category: Unfiled ;
From Danger Room, no Blackwater hater, comes Blackwater: From Bad to Worse
It’s not too late Blackwater. Re-read Danger Room’s PR advice. Otherwise, I predict that Blackwater will soon be the Enron of Private Security Contractors.
There’s lots of companies like Blackwater, yet most of them prefer to stay well out of sight, out of mind. Blackwater likes the spotlight, something which could be their downfall.
When crime boss and media celebrity John Giotti got convicted and sent to prison, a NY crime reporter (I forget who) wrote that there are five crime families in New York plus a boss of all the families, and you don’t know his name. Here, I’ll tell you his name, and you’ve never heard of him. And he was right. Guess what, the reporter continued, this boss of the bosses lives quietly, isn’t flashy, hides from media - and walks the streets a free man.
Lots of non-flashy private military contractors will happily fill the void, should Big Mouth Blackwater take a fall.
Bob Morris @ Sep 24th 2007 11:20 - Category: Unfiled ;
John Robb says “the US military is completely dependent on private military companies” like Blackwater and this trend will increase and can’t be reversed. Why? Because PMCs are “efficient, scalable, and contingent.” In other words, they get hired for the same reason any contractor gets hired. Especially by bellicose governments fighting too many wars with too few troops.
The only way to stop them and their growth is by ending the wars they are hired to fight in.
Machiavelli was noted in the comments. He said mercenaries are never good because they are either militarily ineffective, and thus useless, or they are militarily effective, and thus a threat to you.
Bob Morris @ Sep 24th 2007 07:10 - Category: Climate change ;
Global warming melts permafrost. Permafrost releases billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases. Global warming gets a shot in the arm. This is one of many feedback loops we’ll look at over the next weeks.
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