The DOW was down 322, most of the other major indexes were sharply down too. The stock market has been whistling in the dark for about a month now, pretending all is well while the credit markets screamed “warning, warning, danger, danger.”

Even the Plunge Protection Team, I think, is about out of tricks for ways to keep the market up. So, down it will go because, well, there’s not much in the way of good news to keep it rising.

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Obama is good, almost scary good. This is political jui jitsu, really. Turning attacks back against the opponent.

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(Image from Robert Paterson’s Weblog)

This Feb. in CT was officially the wettest on record as well as having the least amount of sun that anyone can remember. Ptui. And it was only a few months ago we were officially in a “severe drought.”

Sure, some of this can be normal fluctuations in weather pattern, but climate change also means highly variable weather, not just increased heat.

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Subtopia suffered a horrendous crash last night. Or got hacked. Or something. The blog was mangled, seemingly beyond repair. But then Alex Trevi of Pruned, a fellow traveler blog to Suptopia, stepped in and after hours of late night work, Subtopia was back.

Kudos to Pruned, and this is what blogging is really about. By helping others in your milieu, you help your own blog too.

Check out both blogs. They exist at the edgy interesection of architecture, politics, and culture, and are gems.

Subtopia: “A field guide to urban militarism”

Pruned: “On landscape architecture and related fields”

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For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison—a fact that significantly impacts state budgets without delivering a clear return on public safety

Not only does this prison-industrial complex not make things safer, the United States also has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Full report (PDF)

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It was the opening show for his North American tour, we had second row center seats. This self-described “pinko songwriter” transcends categories. Is he country, bluegrass, folk, or rock? Yes.

Singing Jerusalem at the Operation Ceasefire Concert in Washington DC on 9/24/2005

“I woke up this mornin’ and none of the news was good
And death machines were rumblin’ ‘cross the ground where Jesus stood
And the man on my TV told me that it had always been that way
And there was nothin’ anyone could do or say

And I almost listened to him
Yeah, I almost lost my mind
Then I regained my senses again
And looked into my heart to find

That I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem”

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The FuelMeister creates biodiesel out of used cooking oil, methanol, lye, electricity and tap water. With these ingredients properly blended the FuelMeister can kick out 80 gallons of clean-burning fuel every day. This fuel can be used to power your vehicle or even your home or both.

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Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber has been criss-crossing the world in support of Abu Dhabi’s $15 billion Masdar Initiative, which aims to build a zero-carbon, zero-waste city with a population of 50,000 in hopes it can “re-engineer the way cities are built.”

Meanwhile, in that apparent cleantech backwater called the United States, reactionary forces continue their losing battle to fight for their right to despoil the atmosphere and deplete resources.

Yes, there are plenty of highly progressive cleantech initiatives in the US, often championed by huge corporations like Wal-Mart, and lots of venture capital and funding for cleantech too. But on the political level, the US remains an anachronism, stuck in the past, almost proudly refusing to change.

Maybe the next U.S. president will change all that. Let’s hope so.

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