Tom's Ramblings

Buried by Wall Street, the Oceans will Float Us Away

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:42:15 GMT

That's stretched a little from Bill Mc Kibben's current article in Mother Jones, this paragraph for instance:

"The final piece of the puzzle came early this year, and again from James Hansen. Twenty years after his crucial testimony, he published a paper with several coauthors called "Target Atmospheric CO₂." It put, finally, a number on the table—indeed it did so in the boldest of terms. 'If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,' it said, 'paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO₂ will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.'

Stunned, I tried to get my duck response team lined up so I could consult with the leader. The first clear response turned out to be a resolve to let my two granddaughters know what is going to happen to the next generation.

Next, it became clear that duck number two wanted Vashon to sign on en masse to Fourth Corner Exchange, a trading scheme using "Life Dollars" to facilitate trades just like the death dollars we use now.

Duck numbers three through six quacked on without agreeing on rank so I'll just copy what they said:

Medical

While the nation plays volleyball with plans A to Z, half of your pension, Tom, goes for Medicare backup. We are trapped in a wait til it’s broke situation, all the while paying a thirty percent surcharge for paperwork. Surely there is something we can do about it, and do it now.

Energy

This island does not have an amicus curious for energy. We do have auditors skilled at finding air leaks and faulty insulation, but far as we know, none can help the homeowner make decisions. Take a house with an 80% hot air gas furnace. Should it be replaced by a condensing model at 95%, an outlaw act against carbon sense, or move to hot water solar at five times the cost? Or, would it be cheaper to zone the gas heat and get some electric radiators? And, there are no solar retailers on the island. And what can be done to prepare for an extended power outage? Get some natural gas electric generators? In other words, if not a PUD, what?

Water

Conservation is talked up and arguments go down. There is no culture of water on this island. We act like city folk on a summer holiday with no more brains than a duck. Let’s have some creative ideas. Here’s one, stop using the term “conservation”; it’s un-American. Sane water use? Aquifer management? Ugh. Water well? Getting better.

Social Well Being

Vashon-Maury is a community only as regards disaster preparedness and ferry use. Such a situation is inadequate for meeting the wide variety of other stresses we face. Name any issue and chances are the Council does not lead; instead the issue is addressed by dedicated individuals. For example, take our response to the invasion of Iraq: we have been – as a community – silent. This denial of our humanity is affecting us like a physical illness. Or consider our disadvantaged: They will increase, so more cooperation will become essential if we are to forestall the consequences of dire need. And so, yes or no, should Vashon-Maury become a true community, town hall meetings, downtown youth center, the works? If yes, how?

Smart ducks, if I say so myself. I do not hold out much hope for prompt action on these five "problems". The political parties are constrained by electioneering mind-set. Our many values-based groups occupy interesting zones on our social wallpaper. It's going to take leadership by the community council to get anywhere. In case this post has failed to make the timetable clear, bank failures and bad weather will bring us down within five years. That's based on the methane. I know more about methane than banking. A five year frame would beat the quickest weather change in paleo history. That frame was a twenty-year change to an ice age caused by sudden slipping of a whole lot of ice. Refer to:

The Two-Mile Time Machine:
Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future
Richard B. Alley

Winner of 2001 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science
One of Choices Outstanding Academic Titles for 2001

Best of luck, Vashon. I'm building a shelter.

Camp Casey

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 05:55:16 GMT

During the Camp Casey period, Bush failing to notice the grieving mother camped nearby, he had plenty of time to speak at an American Legion event, right there in Texas. A photographer caught this picture of the bon homie between the veteran and the draft dodger. When it appeared in the news it was too much for me so I added Cindy. The combination says what i can't put into words about the callous hypocrisy of George Bush. The picture doesn't compliment the Legionaire for which I can't say I'm sorry.

High School Rebuild

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:54:09 GMT

To The Beachcomber Nov 3, 2008

New classrooms at this juncture are questionable in the extreme due to the financial meltdown underway and to the fact that such construction would belie Vashon’s growing spiritual need, a need due to imminent national mass hysteria over a corrupted government.

School facilities should provide a” framework” that begs to be built upon. Yet school boards tend to put students “on Astroturf”, if you permit, so as to reduce cost. With “Astroturf” include electronics and other technological features that are seen as improving the effectiveness of teaching. Do the new classrooms improve education in proportion? The answer depends on the extent to which students are the “builders”. I believe it axiomatic that one learns by doing. Okay, then, here’s this broken down old school, and here’s this unruly crowd of muscle and charm, let one and one make three: hold a referendum on what they think will improve their education, and then next spring let it happen.

Example? Astroturf aint green. Let the athletes keep the fields in shape.

There’s more. It has come to the attention of many, but to the agenda of few, that this country is reaching a social crisis; hysteria is not too strong a word. But on Vashon this takes the forms of passionate involvement in irrelevant politics and worrying about ferry service. Is it just possible that our high school students are aware of the paradox? Why don’t we ask them?

Next year the Community Council will face immediate material problems and struggle to find a communal voice for the spiritual agony of silence during the death and suffering of millions of foreign peoples due to actions in our name. In accord, the high school should not be rebuilt. If classroom space is needed, plop down some tin shacks and get on with it.

October 29, 2008

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:49:45 GMT

Whereas the following is an example of my rule of one blog, one thought, I must say that David Sirota's idea of a "progressive mandate" is an attempt to inject a modicum of significance into a paper mache election:

The Potential Progressive Mandate* Denver Post's PoliticsWest, 10/28/08

Thanks to Maryrose Asher for finding this and so providing an opening for my single thought. Sirota states that McCain has augured a hole of some kind that a president Obama would have a mandate to fill. Misquote? Go read it yourself. My single thought, regardless, is that the 2009 president's only mandate is to provide a cloak of change for unchanging corporate control of our government.

Johnson changed it, Reagan changed it, but since then the presidents have been window dressers, Clinton the most skilful.

Doctor Science October 28

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:37:32 GMT

NPR used to feature "Dr. Science, he knows more than you do." In these trying times we need himerher, oh well, him actually, more than ever, as authorities daily try our faith in reason. So we have looked him up, and the first question we posed was: how come Christian Science can heal?

"Simple," he said. "It is known that the auto-immune diseases are strongly modulated by stress. Well, these are typical of the diseases that have been cured by Christian Science practitioners."

Don't bother contesting this , remember, he knows more than you do.

Sunday October 26

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 17:23:03 GMT

The bubbles of truth rising to the surface of the mediatraumanian sea tell me that on election day we bail out of a losing situation using a parachute with a hole in it. Got that from Europe, actually. The word from Latin America is similar but has an edge of hostile defiance. L.A. has my whole-hearted empathy in that regard, no matter that Senors Hugo and Evo are poking a desperate US in the eye. (Can a blog put a wiggly over an n?) Now, about that hole, it's the vacuum of moral authority in the office of the President. The "dark matter" in that vacuum is corporate hegemony, revealed finally for all to see and despise.

Vashon, oh my Vashon, whyfore dost thou stick thy obomination signs in the hardpan? You have been proffered a straw whilst his backers roll in the hay.

An Aesop's Fable

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:12:45 GMT

An ironical blend of farce and tragedy, this election for president has as its icon the adorable wolverine in Juneau. The debates are a farce, and tragically, both campaigns are financed by non human, inhuman, corporations that are laying waste to every profitable square inch and soul on our little blue dot. The timing of the irony is remarkable in that so many things are going sour at the same time. Arctic methane is putting an afterburner on climate change, the Iraq middle class has fled, Palestinians are being dehumanized, species are going extinct at a rate exceeding the big extinction, the rain forests are over half gone, the NAFTA-con-Wall Street fiasco has newly pushed poor Mexicans into poverty, the fiasco itself has been “rewarded” while the people hurt by it have been ignored, and on October 15 at Hofstra University a mounted police officer deliberately trampled a protesting veteran of the Iraq war. Menwomen, as the farce plays on, the war on terror has come home.

But of course there never as a war on terror, nor a war on drugs, nor good intent in No Child Left Behind. We have been played for suckers. And so, like confined rats we have turned on each other, heaping abuse on good people like Kuchinich, Chomsky, Nader, McKinney, and Sheehan. It is put to you that we do not realize the size of what’s happening, and anyway that we disagree on the root cause. These are dangerous flaws, for it is we who always were the target of these “wars’. This election is important only for the confluence of trouble it puts a date to. And now as the farce plays on we are paralyzed. Suppose we step back and take a hard look at the “confluence”.

Elective effort by us Greens and by the great independents Nader and Sheehan is doing more good than could be mustered next year by designated savior Obama. Yet, as overly explained above, it’s inadequate to deal with the confluence. Lean on that for a few moments and out pops the conclusion that for the past eight or eighty years we should have been doing something different. One aspect that overwhelms all else is size, for the something has to be commensurate with the horrific size of the confluence. Some flickers of hope illuminate the direction:

The Brattleboro, Vermont, City Council voted to arrest Bush, January 2008.

The Lakota Sioux seceded from the United States in December 2007.

Hardwick Vermont has recovered from economic failure by “uniting around food”, NY Times October 8, 2008.

You thought it was going to be some kind of coalition, The Backbone, World Can’t Wait and Critical Mass all rolled into one, or maybe a Green Panthers? Hornets with afterburners! No, the direction is a swarm of “seceding” neighborhoods so large that when it calls for a general strike the corporate cancer will run out of blood. An image that comes close to the idea is provided by Aesop’s fable of the bundle of sticks: the bundle could not be broken. You ask, what connects secession with unison? Glad you asked: The “cancer” has by intent and cunning been dividing neighbor from neighbor in order to conquer. It follows that in “secession” the agents of division are rendered powerless.

Brattleboro found its communal voice when it ignored Public Television’s pablum.

The Lakota Sioux foreswore the charity that was smothering them.

Hardwick, bankrupt, boycotted cheap supermarket food.

Great idea, but how can it be spread given that the “cancer” has bought the media? Hmm, well, Aesop with tongue in cheek might remind us that the old English word for that bundle of sticks was faggot. Maybe somehow get our talented gays to queer the works? Pretty good start actually, because we have to come out of the box thinking. An eloquent expression of the difficulty of adopting a brand new view was provided the other day by Mike Davis who likened Obama’s inability to size up the financial disaster to the early Spanish explorers’ inability to comprehend the geological implications of the Grand Canyon. (!) Close to home, there is underway on Vashon a move to increase the scope of our Council. Myself, I’ll be searching for more Brattleboros.

Acknowledgements:

Mike Davis was found by Truthout: http://www.truthout.org/101508D

The Brattleboro story was found by

Rebecca Em Campbell, “Seattle whole-systems artist/thinker/activist":

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/marian_burros/index.html?inline=nyt-per

A Green Rhizome

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:08:57 GMT

A Green Rhizome

As this appears in e-print the GPoWS will have approved amendment #1, survived a week tacked to a bulletin board, and be ready for diversion. But all you’re going to get here is a root canal job.

With #1 passed, the state party will be an aggregation of locals, GPoWS becoming GPsoWS. How the locals will operate will be new, but their goal will still be to put good people into office. The wisdom of that should be questioned, because it so far has gotten us nowhere: us, the Party, nowhere. Findings are listed, and then a different goal offered.

Electioneering at the national level will continue to fail because the two-party system was designed by professionals to keep a third party out.

Electioneering by labor movements in the past has eviscerated them, eg the Workingmen’s Party faded after it diverted energy into electioneering. We are smarter?

Corporate control of national offices has severely limited options for good works.

It’s the money, right? The higher the level of office the lower the ethics; and here we are, all ethics and no money trying to put our people into high office. I’m reminded of that cartoon of vultures in a dead tree where one says, patience my ass, I’m gonna kill something. Menwomen, let’s get some clout, and it better come from the ten values ‘cause it’s never gonna come from the five percent. Which presents a small problem in that precious little in the ten values tells the vulture where to kill what. The closest is Decentralization, which, stretched a lot, might mean do it to your neighbor. Regardless, let’s march off at ninety degrees from our present course. Don’t worry, Gary and Howard, you’ll get more votes this way.

Granted that explicit instructions are not included in the ten values, what we should do is set to work creating nuclei of wholeness. Enough preaching, enough “elect himerher because heershe will do good”. Time now for us, the erstwhile Green voters, to do good works, and that means make our communities whole. Most are not whole, instead have lost the roots they used to have in the common turf of a walking, face to face, old fashioned town. Rootless, we have been conned into complicity with the heinous acts of a lawless administration. To show how this might develop, here’s an example.

The town is a bedroom community in rural XYZ county and is unincorporated. The rich are gaining ascendance, gentrifying the shops and putting up huge stick-built homes. It has defeated hospital and public utility district proposals then proposed no alternates. It has no solar retrofit program and its groundwater management is meddled with in Olympia. It has a low level vandalism problem. Its real estate taxes subsidize an already rich county. It has no town hall meetings, and its County-chartered Council restricts itself to a list of cold-button issues. It votes overwhelmingly Democratic and has not participated as a community in State or National issues. Now apply the ten values. The town would:

Hold regular Town Hall meetings of which the first would address priorities of survival. What will it do if its banks fail, when food prices become a widespread hardship, and when its police turn on it? Should it hold referendums in order to make its collective will known up the line? Does it have a collective will? How important is it to change its commuting?

Have its Council promote collective action on affordable solar hot water retrofit,

on increased agrarian production (used to have large berry and chicken farms), on remote water use readouts, on electric trams, on a teen center.

Eliminate political party presence. Substitute town hall meetings for those yard signs.

You get the drift. By dropping the trappings of Party, local Greens could blend into their community distinguished only by their common values, and known by their deeds. Membership in the Green Party would be earned by working to put its values into effect.

Some such radical change in the party is needed fast. Our Party has become a pariah. I hope that many of you are as tired as I am of getting grass stains on my knees.

A rhizome is a root growing sideways looking for sunlight.

PS, a somewhat similar idea will be found at

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_14979.cfm

Sled Dogs

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 02:06:04 GMT

The other day a man in a wheelchair was seen at the Vashon north end coffee kiosk. While that in itself was not uncommon, the cluster of white dogs around the wheelchair was uncommon. What then happened was out of this world. A poodle separated out from the cluster to reveal a pair of big white Alaskan sled dogs attached to the wheelchair. And off they went down the walkway to the ferry. As they passed our car the wheelchair was seen to have no arm rests nor, apparently, a back. And they were moving. I don’t know if the walkway at this time had been clear, or got cleared suddenly, but no late walk-on ever hit this pace. The effect was as if a ray of hope had broken through the miasma of MARSEC signs that insult ferry commuters these days.

At risk of dog paddling in deep water I’ll comment on human nature. Not just because a wheelchair was doing wheelies behind two sled dogs, but also because last Friday Andrew Bacevich told Bill Moyers that Americans are stodgy greedy lumps. You could look up the exact words but those will do. I contend that we are good-hearted clay that’s been shaped by circumstance into something worse. We are not simply passive, but rather have lost the ability to empathize. If that is not precisely what we have lost it’s close enough.

We are able to get through the day while Haitian mothers feed mud to their starving children as their very lives are drenched in mud from a hurricane, while Mexicans braving Minutemen and Homeland Security flee a Nafta-ravaged economy, while US agents foment unrest in Bolivia and Venezuela, while our soldiers kill Moslem civilians then are condemned to suicide and living death, while Guatemalan women are murdered by US supported agents, while the Fort Benning School of the Americas trains South American military in torture techniques, while private prisons profit from misery, while the state of Israel, USA carries out genocide of Palestinians, while our riot police attack protestors, while New Orleans people of color get the back of the hand from FEMA and local whites, while mortgage companies legally rob, while agri and food processing corporations poison us, while the so-called healthcare industry wraps illness in paperwork, while corporations that abuse their immigrant employees call in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to scare them into submission, while the carbon fuel industry paralyzes prudent climate action in Congress, while the US flag is reduced to wallpaper, and while the financial sector metamorphoses into the entity Hal that is programmed to destroy public will.

We are able to get through today, and if there are enough sled dogs around to teach us maybe we will make it through tomorrow as well.

Mother Nature Breaks Wind As Wall Street Begs

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:25:56 GMT

Last week arctic researchers found “chimneys of methane” erupting from the surface of the Barents Sea. The gas is released by melting sub-sea permafrost. Calculations have shown that there is more carbon where that is coming from than in known coal reserves. Meanwhile, Henry “Poke” Paulson is telling Congress that the financial sector is the basis of the US economy. We hope Congress will maintain a deaf ear to that, but hope is in short supply what with McCain wanting to augment the 700 billion that may be going into Wall Street’s poke by throwing Social Security in after it. Given all this one would think that the election would turn on an issue: if not the war then perhaps the resale value of a Prius, or how to live on crackers and high fructose cola. Could someone explain to this stupefied column how it is that at this worst crisis in US history both nominees for president promise to make things worse?

Speaking of the election, it’s a paradox that the race for California’s 8^th district House seat is more important than our presidential candidate’s race for five percent. I hate to see those words. But it has been said, and I agree, that our role in the 2008 presidential election should have been to discredit the process, not put up a sacrifice. To those who maintain that making it into the debates would be a victory of such worth it would justify the punishment Cynthia and the Greens are taking, please reflect that the worthy victory would be to expose the presidential election for what it is, a con

A con? A con with a twist because the script includes disenfranchising low income voters and hacking the machines! Can you picture anything more bizarre than conning the public into voting for the lesser evil, then fixing the count?

But once again we’ll get the winning vote for spoiler. We will owe Cynthia a debt we cannot pay for her courage, her eloquence, and her devotion to the cause of humanity. GPoWS will get a chance Oct 3-12 to tell her we think she has used the bully pulpit well.

Methane is 40 times more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping solar heat. But the present concentrations are Methane 1.7 ppm and carbon dioxide 385 ppm, so that the present warming is due to carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide concentration had been constant at 280 ppm for at least the past 1000 years, beginning its rise around 1900. Affected industries have tried to deflect attention from manmade carbon dioxide by pointing to the far greater potency of methane and citing its natural sources, like cows. Well, fellows, it looks like you were on to something now that Mother Nature is out-farting the cows.

Tom's Ramblings

Buried by Wall Street, the Oceans will Float Us Away

The Two-Mile Time Machine:Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our FutureRichard B. Alley

Camp Casey

High School Rebuild

October 29, 2008

Doctor Science October 28

Sunday October 26

An Aesop's Fable

A Green Rhizome

Sled Dogs

Mother Nature Breaks Wind As Wall Street Begs

The Two-Mile Time Machine:
Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future
Richard B. Alley