Month: April 2011

It looks like NATO bombed a house where Moammar Gaddafi was staying and killed his youngest son and three of his grandchildren, but did not harm to Gaddafi or his wife. If so, then this is another example of Gaddafi inexplicably surviving an attack from the West. However, I don’t put a lot of trust in these early reports. What is shows more than anything else is that he is going to pay a heavy price for clinging to power.

Update [2011-5-1 8:37:31 by BooMan]: Al Jazeera is skeptical of this entire report.

There are some people, not a lot, who make you feel much better just knowing that they are in the world doing their thing. These are mainly the quirky people who have no use for conventions and rules. Artists and activists and harmless kooks with strange hobbies. Warm-hearted people who mean no one any harm and who have original vision and hope for the future. Hell, even some slackers, like The Dude.

THE STRANGER: The Dude abides.

I don’t know about you, but I take
comfort in that. It’s good knowin’
he’s out there, the Dude, takin’ her
easy for all us sinners. Shoosh. I
sure hope he makes The finals. Welp,
that about does her, wraps her all
up.

Things seem to’ve worked out
pretty good for the Dude’n Walter,
and it was a purt good story, dontcha
think?

Made me laugh to beat the band. Parts, anyway. Course–I didn’t like seein’ Donny go. But
then, happen to know that there’s a
little Lebowski on the way. I guess
that’s the way the whole durned human
comedy keeps perpetuatin’ it-self,
down through the generations, westward
the wagons, across the sands a time until…

Even though he was the opposite of a slacker, that’s kind of how I felt about Ben Masel, a friend of mine who has just died at the too-young age of fifty-six. I met Ben at the Yearly Kos convention in Las Vegas, and I always looked forward to spending time with him at the annual Netroots Nation conferences. We didn’t talk much. Mainly, a random email or comment in a Facebook thread. But I didn’t need to talk to Ben to be comforted by his presence. Now he’s gone.

I like this profile from OPOL (One Pissed Off Liberal), who I met in Chicago and whose warmth and spirit also give me comfort.

You can see the love that Ben inspired on his Facebook page.

The world won’t be the same without you, Ben. Rest in peace.

So awesome. I remember an eight-year fruitless attempt to find out who met with Dick Cheney and helped set the Bush administration’s super-awesome energy policy. And, now?

House Republicans plan to probe the White House policy on disclosing its visitor records.

On Tuesday of next week, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing titled “White House Transparency, Visitor Logs and Lobbyists.” The hearing comes after a report by the Center for Public Integrity detailing disclosure gaps in visitor records released by the White House.

In a memo describing the hearing, staff for the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee cite the Center’s report about the visitor records. They also list a number of questions for the Obama administration on how its disclosure policy has come to function.

Remember how, when the Jack Abramoff scandal hit, the White House said he maybe visited once and it turned out that he practically lived there? Yeah. It’s okay if you are a Republican.

This last week while the birther controversy and Donald Trump jumped the shark, and a Royal Wedding distracted the media, we had the worst death toll in recent history from tornadoes. These massive storms cut a swath through the Deep South. The devastation and the tragedy is all the more incomprehensible since we now have far better radar technologies and warning systems in place. Yet, despite all our advancements, the storms popped up so quickly and were so intense that over 300 people died.

The death toll from this week’s tornadoes continued to climb Saturday morning, making the storms fueled by record winds the second worst in history.

As the rescue and relief efforts continued through much of seven states, officials braced for what was being called a humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people remained without power; usable water was in demand. In hard-hit Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama decided to end the school year early.

The Alabama Emergency Management Agency on Saturday morning reported that the state’s death toll has risen to 254, pushing the region’s total to more than 340. Mississippi and Tennessee each reported 34 deaths. Fifteen deaths were reported in Georgia, five in Virginia, two in Louisiana and one in Kentucky.

It was the deadliest storm toll since March 18, 1925, when 747 people were killed in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. The current numbers were expected to grow as would-be rescuers combed through rubble and debris.

In 1925 we had no radar, no television, no warning systems comparable to what we have today. So those deaths are somewhat understandable, even though the population was less. Today, however, we rarely hear of huge death tolls from tornado outbreaks thanks to modern advances and systems put in place by the Federal government to provide people with adequate warning of the impending threats posed by these storms of mass destruction.

Until this week.

I’m not going to discuss the role a warming globe may have payed in the fierce storms we are seeing the last few years. I’ve done that story before. No, today I write merely to acknowledge the deaths of our fellow Americans and the horrific conditions in which those who survived find themselves.

Sometimes, on blogs, both right and left, it is easy to demonize people who disagree with us. Yet whether the people of the South were members of the Tea Party or progressives, whether they were white or black, whether they were decent, loving and caring people, or people whose prejudices inform their hatred of others, all of them are human being deserving our respect, our concern for their well being and our help.

For those who died we should all mourn. John Donne, the famous English metaphysical poet and devotional writer, said this in his well known Meditation XVII, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions which speaks for me and I hope for you as well:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

No one is an island in today’s world. What affects one of us affects us all. Death and the ruination of lives anywhere on this globe should pain us all, even, or perhaps especially the misery of those with whom we are engaged in conflicts, religious, political, racial, ideological or otherwise.

In such times of grief and despair that follow catastrophes, it is important to remember that we are all part of the same humanity that suffers, the strives, that hopes and dreams for a better life. It is not for us to judge the living or the dead. Nor should we allow our own stereotypes and prejudices and beliefs to dismiss the misfortune of those with whom we may disagree or oppose in the political realm.

It should not be our reaction to such misery to sit back, basking in schadenfreude, enjoying the tragedy that has befallen others that we may wrongly assume do not deserve our assistance because they are not like us. We do not know those who died, or the lives that they and the survivors of this tragedy led, nor their beliefs, religions, races, sexual orientations or the balance of good and bad deeds they may have committed, but we should not condemn them.

I know that it is a common enough flaw to blame victims for their misfortune. We have seen this reaction from certain people before who dismissed the tragedy of Katrina or the deaths of those in Haiti, Pakistan or elsewhere out of spite or malice. Yet it is morally wrong to do so.

The Buddha said: “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”

Jesus said: “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart.”

Mohammed said: “A man’s true wealth is the good he does in this world.”

Let us put away any hatred we may feel and express our love. Let us bring out the good things we keep stored in our heart and not the evil. Let us find the wealth that only our good deeds can bring forth. Our brothers and sisters who died in Alabama, Georgia, Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee deserve our grief and those who still live, yet suffer deprivation from the loss of family, friends and basic services, deserve our help.

Go to the following links to find organizations to whom you can donate to assist the victims of these horrendous tornadoes if you are able:

Nonprofit Resource Memo

Network for Good

Sweet Home — Help Alabama Storm Victims

If you know of other charitable organizations who are providing relief or accepting volunteers to aid the victims of these storms please leave a link in the comments.

Thank you.

Steven D

The freak show begins. Last night the Manchester, New Hampshire chapter of Americans for Prosperity hosted the first (sort of) debate between Republican aspirants for the White House. It didn’t go well.

Beginning with Tim Pawlenty, each candidate spoke for eight minutes and then took one or two questions from an AFP official on stage. There was no debate and the question were softballs; no was going to be challenged. So the evening became a competition to see who could spin the most outlandish conservative fantasy. Pawlenty had the misfortune of going first and might not have realized what a gimme the event was going to be. He called only for “getting the government off our backs,” made the customary paeans to American greatness, and used the question-and-answer segment to apologize profusely for having once supported cap and trade (“I changed my position…it was a mistake, I’m stupid and I’m sorry…it was ham-fisted…I no longer have that position…it was really ham-fisted”).

Herman Cain upstaged him by specifically calling to lower the corporate income tax, the personal income tax, temporarily abolish the payroll tax (individual and employer), abolish the capital gains tax, repatriate profits from overseas (abolishing any taxes on those profits), and, the coup de grace, declaring that all this would pay for itself by spurring economic growth.

Michelle Bachmann called for an immediate 25 percent cut in federal discretionary spending, the cancellation of outstanding stimulus projects, and the privatization of vaccine development (she cited polio as an example). The debt ceiling? Keep it right where it is. She joined Cain in calling for the abolition of the capital gains tax, the “death tax,” proposed limiting income-tax rates to 20 percent, and then decided to scrap the federal tax code outright. “Let’s get rid of what we’ve got and start over,” she said.

Romney either chose to wing it or is simply rusty from not having been on the campaign trail. Though practically alone among the GOP candidates in not pandering to the fringes by questioning Obama’s citizenship, he made the strange choice to open with a birther joke about how, when Obama released his birth certificate last week, “there was no one more disappointed than that amiable, know-it-all windbag–Joe Biden.” Romney didn’t have a bullet-point fantasy list of tax cuts to abolish, so instead he parceled out bits of his old stump speech with charges that Obama had no private-sector experience and is trying to “Europeanize” America.

Romney remains an exceptionally unnatural public speaker. To convey passion and excitement, he raises the pitch of his voice and imbues it with urgency. But it never quite clicks. His tone and affect are like that of an adult doing a dramatic reading of a pirate story to a wide-eyed three year old. It doesn’t help that he speaks too quickly and often trips over his lines. At points during his speech, Romney seemed to slip into a frenzy and start madly free associating economic buzzwords.

This hurt him during the question-and-answer period when, in response to a question about high gas prices, he blurted out a Jimmy Carter-Barack Obama comparison about how just as Reagan had hung the “misery index” around Carter’s neck, so, too, would Republicans have to “hang” Obama with the country’s current economic hardship. Romney repeated the “we’re going to hang him” locution once more and then, all of a sudden, in mid-sentence, seemed to realize that metaphors about hanging a black man probably wouldn’t redound to his political benefit. He stammered that he meant it metaphorically, that “you have to be careful what you say.”

Now, let’s remember that Mitt Romney is really supposed to be a serious candidate who can avoid dabbling in birtherism and outright insanity and retain some kind of viability as a general-election candidate. If he were to stop pandering to the Republican base and just run on his record as the governor of Massachusetts, he’d be positioned as a moderate Republican alternative to Obama who has some more business experience and, maybe, a plausible claim to improving the economic condition of the country. So, what does he do in his first competitive campaign appearance? He opens with a birther joke and then moves on to alluding to the lynching of the president.

That’s an even worse Crazy Index than I would have predicted.

Every now and then some folks start talking about the possibilities of a “second Civil War” in these United States.  With all due respect, we’ve already had one—it’s called the Civil Rights Movement.

Violence and terror were the ugly heart of segregationist resistance to full citizenship by African-Americans.  Montgomery segregationists bombed the houses of Martin Luther King, Jr. and E. D. Nixon.  They bombed the houses of Revs. Ralph Abernathy and Robert Graetz.  They bombed Bell St., Hutchinson St. and First Baptist Churches.

Segregationists used the threat of violence.  Mrs. Parks writes, “Nobody tried to bomb my home, but I did get a lot of threatening telephone calls.  They’d say things like, ‘You’re the cause of all this.  You should be killed.’  It was frightening to get those calls, and it really bothered me when Mama answered the telephone and it was one of those calls.”

Segregationists used economic violence.  “The white people tried to break the boycott by not giving the church cars any insurance.  All the churches operated the station wagons, and had their names on the sides.  Without insurance, the cars could not operate legally.  Every time they got insurance from a new company, the policy would suddenly be canceled.”  (The eventual solution to that issue was “Dr. King got in touch with a black insurance agent in Atlanta named T. M. Alexander, and T. M. Alexander got Lloyd’s of London…to write a policy for the church-operated cars.”  You’ll notice Alexander didn’t go to national US insurance companies.  State Farm wasn’t there.  There were no good hands from Allstate.)

“A lot of people lost their jobs because they supported the boycott.”  Given that whites controlled the vast majority of the economy in Montgomery (and elsewhere in the US), this was a common and often devastatingly effective tactic of economic violence.  Raymond Parks resigned because “Mr. Armstrong, the white owner of the private barbering concession at Maxwell Field Air Force base, issues an order that there was to be no discussion of ‘the bus protest or Rosa Parks in his establishment.’  Parks said he would not work anywhere where his wife’s name could not be mentioned.”

“I was discharged from Montgomery Fair department store in January of 1956, but I was not told by the personnel officer that it was because of the boycott.  I do not like to form in my mind an idea that I don’t have any proof of.”  Mrs. Parks goes on to provide the facts as she knew them…which leave little doubt that her leadership role in the boycott was precisely the reason for her firing.

While the boycott continued, Rosa Parks took in sewing and worked with the MIA.  When the boycott ended, the harassment continued.  “The threatening telephone calls continued even after the Supreme Court decision.  My husband slept with a gun nearby for a time.  Bertha Butler, a close friend of ours in Montgomery, says that my mother would call her some nights and talk for long periods just to jam the lines so the hate calls couldn’t get through for a while.  Once, when I was on the street, a white man recognized me and made a hateful remark.  My picture had been in the papers, and it was doubtful that I could ever get a regular job in a white business in Montgomery.”

A relatively new natural gas drilling technique – hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking” – is being rushed into wide scale use with the same heedless abandon as deep water oil drilling.  Activists are trying to put the brakes on it before fracking has the chance to produce its own version of last year’s BP oil spill.

Cross posted from Pruning Shears.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

BACKGROUND

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the Marcellus Shale is “a sedimentary rock formation deposited over 350 million years ago in a shallow inland sea located in the eastern United States where the present-day Appalachian Mountains now stand” and it “contains significant quantities of natural gas.”  How significant?  Well, it kind of depends on whom you ask.  University researchers said there was quite a bit, but a key industry player claimed a wildly larger amount (emph. added):

In 2008, two professors at Pennsylvania State University and the State University of New York (SUNY) Fredonia estimated that about 50 TCF (trillion cubic feet) of recoverable natural gas could be extracted from the Marcellus Shale (Engelder and Lash, 2008). In November 2008, on the basis of production information from Chesapeake Energy Corporation [remember that name! – ed.], the estimate of recoverable gas from the Marcellus Shale was raised to more than 363 TCF (Esch, 2008).

Asking Chesapeake Energy if it was worthwhile to drill in an area where they had a direct financial interest seems a bit like asking Tobacco Institute scientists if smoking is linked to lung cancer, no?  An increase of over 700% ought to be looked into, not blandly passed along.  But either way, there’s a lot of natural gas under them thar hills and it is, as the USGS helpfully notes in its summary, “an abundant, domestic energy resource that burns cleanly, and emits the lowest amount of carbon dioxide per calorie of any fossil fuel.”

Chesapeake is on the same page, touting natural gas as “clean, affordable, abundant”  and flatly states: “The only scalable, affordable alternative to burning dirty coal is to burn clean natural gas.”  This is an extremely relevant and compelling point if the natural gas packages itself, grows legs and walks to the surface.  Sadly, it remains stubbornly immobile.  So the alternative is to force it out via directional drilling,

which involves steering a downhole drill bit in a direction other than vertical. An initially vertical drillhole is slowly turned 90 degrees to penetrate long horizontal distances, sometimes over a mile, through the Marcellus Shale bedrock. Hydraulic fractures are then created into the rock at intervals from the horizontal section of the borehole, allowing a substantial number of high-permeability pathways to contact a large volume of rock (fig. 5).

This drilling process requires a large quantity of water to hydraulically fracture the rock (hence the nickname “fracking”), and that water turns into a toxic stew:

Along with the introduced chemicals, hydrofrac water is in close contact with the rock during the course of the stimulation treatment, and when recovered may contain a variety of formation materials, including brines, heavy metals, radionuclides, and organics that can make wastewater treatment difficult and expensive. The formation brines often contain relatively high concentrations of sodium, chloride, bromide, and other inorganic constituents, such as arsenic, barium, other heavy metals, and radionuclides that significantly exceed drinking water standards (Harper, 2008).

No matter how clean it is when you actually consume it, the process of getting to it is unbelievably dirty.  Even the USGS acknowledges as much: “While the technology of drilling directional boreholes, and the use of sophisticated hydraulic fracturing processes to extract gas resources from tight rock have improved over the past few decades, the knowledge of how this extraction might affect water resources has not kept pace.”

Drilling technology sprinting past environmental protection – sound familiar?

EARLY RESULTS

That’s all very theoretical and academic, but how are these early adventures into fracking going?  Not so well.  In some cases it is merely disturbing, as in this video of a compressor station emitting lots of noise and…stuff.  Since we still do not have any sensible regulation of this process – hell, since we aren’t even aware what the byproducts and long term consequences are – it’s kind of hard to see footage like that and not be suspicious of what exactly is going on.  Literally no one knows.

The independent, non-profit news organization ProPublica has an entire series devoted to the threat posed by fracking, and has uncovered several examples of the damage done by it.  An award-winning documentary called GasLand has shown in frightening detail just how hazardous it is.  And these problems are just when it all goes according to plan.  When things go wrong, as it did with one of Chesapeake’s operations in Pennsylvania last week, (via) it’s even worse (via).

This is not just happening in America, either.  The industry is trying to get a foothold in Europe, but its reputation has already preceded it.  Hilariously, UK gas company CEO Mark Miller trots out the bad apples argument to try and wave off the poor track record.  (Ever since Abu Ghraib “bad apples” has been the go-to talking point for high ranking officials looking to evade responsibility.  Even putting aside the cheap and obvious scapegoating involved, the phrase itself is a clip from a proverb that, if fully considered, isn’t exactly exonerating.)

While major players are fiercely opposed to even simple disclosure, there is enough concern about the practice for some knowledgeable parties to sound the alarm – and thankfully not every politician is in the thrall of industry lobbyists.  Still, ProPublica considers the industry at a turning point (via): one where we will either start seeing effective regulation or the same “consequences be damned” heedlessness we’ve seen elsewhere.  I happen to be deeply skeptical of regulation, and I’ve gone on and on about it previously.  The short version is that between cognitive regulatory capture and the starving of agencies of proper resources, the whole idea of regulation has not worked well in practice.

CLOSE TO HOME

Opposition to fracking has been growing (via), and Ohio is no exception.  Our idiot governor has decided it’s a swell idea to approach economically desperate people with drilling proposals in exchange for a one-time shot of money.  Chesapeake is aggressively buying up rights and has lined up a willing local front group to, I don’t know, put cartoon buckeye stickers on the equipment.

The state legislature is considering a proposal to open additional state lands to drilling, and in response local activists staged a protest on Tuesday (via ProgressOhio‘s Flickr page):

State Rep. Teresa Fedor spoke at the rally:

And she noted – with commendable understatement – “There’s a lot that we don’t know about this new and unconventional drilling.”  (Read about previous Fedor awesomeness here.)

Her point shouldn’t really be controversial at all.  Considering the problems, and in some cases catastrophes, that we already know about elsewhere it shouldn’t be terribly provocative to cool it for a bit and try to get a better grip on what’s happening.  Unfortunately there are people like Tom Stewart of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association offering rebuttals such as this, which I wish I were making up:

With energy development or with any kind of economic activity, there’s always going to be an environmental footprint. Airplanes do fall out of the sky. … What Ohio citizens need to be concerned about is that the proper regulatory process is in place to regulate the industry, to ensure the public that they can have faith and trust that this is done properly.

The GOP-dominated legislature seems likely to do Chesapeake’s bidding and open up more public land for this private company to profit from.  But the opposition has been getting the word out, and doing so with increasing visibility.  The issue won’t go away until Chesapeake and their ilk go away (and until their sponsors in Columbus do as well), but in this case – as with the phenomenally energetic referendum effort to repeal SB 5 – citizen action might yet veto corporate greed.

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Notes

• There’s a nice Marcellus Shale map for Ohio here.
• From the USGS paper:
  

  The United States uses about 23 TCF of natural gas per year (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2009), so the Marcellus gas resource may be large enough to supply the needs of the entire Nation for roughly 15 years at the current rates of consumption.

  From the Chesapeake site:

  now estimated to contain more than two quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, more than doubling America’s previously estimated natural gas reserves, and giving us close to a 200-year supply of clean, affordable, American natural gas.

  Not sure where the extra 185 years supply comes from.  But then notice this from the Guardian piece:

  Within two years, predicts James Smith, outgoing UK chairman of Shell, the company will go from being an oil business to a gas producer. “Estimates show that we could have enough gas to power the world for 200 years,” he said.

  So maybe 200 years is the Friedman Unit of fracking.

• From the Chesapeake site:
  

  Wind and solar facilities are not economic without taxpayer or ratepayer subsidies.

  From the USGS paper:

  From the mid-1970s to early 1980s, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded the Eastern Gas Shales Project (EGSP) to develop new technology in partnership with industry that would advance the commercial development of Devonian shale gas (Schrider and Wise, 1980).

  Why is it that government funding is a partnership when given to fossil fuel companies but a subsidy when given to renewable energy companies?

• Last week I listened to the radio for the first time in a long, long while – probably over a year (see my “Free MP3 sites” blogroll!)  I was tuned to a “morning zoo in the afternoon” type show for less than an hour.  In that tiny, rare sampling of time I heard a Chesapeake commercial.  A cheerful voice explained that no one cares more about the environment than Chesapeake, so if you own mineral rights why not give us a call?  The fracking industry has been incredibly aggressive on this initiative.
• A minor complaint, but I don’t like seeing the word “brine” used to describe any part of the fracking wastewater.  It makes it sound like something you might encounter when tromping around the Scottish highlands instead of the poisonous brew created by blowing a bunch of shit to smithereens deep underground and then hauling it to the surface.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I’ll be continuing with the painting of the Pink House in Cape May, New Jersey.  I will be using the photo seen directly below. I’m working on an 8×10 canvas in my usual acrylic paints.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

For this week I’ve continued to work on the interior sections of the upper and lower porches.  Though I originally intended to leave those portions somewhat undefined, I’ve now changed my mind.  Accordingly, I’ve added to the trim, now seen in bright white.  The windows now provide a nice (dark) contrast.

Above, under the central gable, I’ve done the same for that single attic window.  Note that it has finally been reduced to an appropriate size.  Finally, the crosshatched  area to the lower right has been subdued a bit.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

That’s about it for now. Next week I’ll have more progress to show you. See you then. As always, feel free to add photos of your own work in the comments section below.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

You know things are looking bleak when you start arguing for the virtues of boring men. I’d actually change that up a bit and argue the virtues of men (and women) who have a passing acquaintance with reality. So, right away, candidates like Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Donald Trump could be excluded. It is interesting that Romney didn’t make the Spectator’s cut for good/boring. Is he too flashy or too phony? And what about Jon Huntsman? They may be Mormons, but they’ve got much better hair than Daniels and Pawlenty.

So, are you more interested in the Royal Wedding or the NFL Draft? I know I’m reading more about Prince Amukamara of Nigeria than Prince William of Wales. But, you know, I’m a dude.