Last post on the BP/Halliburton/TransOcean Macondo well blowout....is Keystone XL next?

Courtesy of Dibgy's thoughtful post here:

"singularly insignificant"

I remember a time when the blogosphere gave a shit about this sort of thing.

Jesse Lava sort of sums up my feelings, exactly:

As one of those pro-Obama progressives, I figured he would vacillate between his two personas -- pursuing conciliation on some issues so he could go big on others. Maybe he'd fail to prosecute Bush's torture regime but then take on Wall Street with gusto. Perhaps he'd neglect climate change but insist on a robust public option in the health care bill. Maybe he'd undertake a massive escalation in Afghanistan but only after restoring the rule of law to our national security apparatus. No president can take on the whole world, and progressives did not expect Obama to be Dennis Kucinich.

Progressives did, however, expect Obama to push strategic, selective transformation. Obama was supposed to seize the moment of our greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression and pursue reforms that would lay the economic foundation for the next generation. He was supposed to try -- try, at least -- to change Washington.

But that is not what he did. If progressives had known that he would immediately hire Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and other insiders who had helped push the country off the financial cliff; that he would give a pass both to Bush-era torturers and to Wall Street fraudsters; that his "Keynesian" stimulus would fall far short of what Keynesian economists said was needed; that he'd not only escalate far more than he pledged in Afghanistan but also get us ensnared in Libya and Yemen without the congressional approval required by law; that his civil liberties record would lead ACLU president Anthony Romero to be "disgusted with this president"; that the U.S. would be even more hated in the Middle East than it was under Bush; that Obama's biggest progressive win would be a health care bill that lacked a public option (honoring a backroom deal he made with the insurance industry) and was eerily similar to what the conservative Heritage Foundation proposed two decades ago; that he would make virtually no effort at all on climate change and immigration; that he'd propose (propose!) cutting Social Security and sign a debt ceiling deal agreeing to slash spending at levels that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush could only dream of -- in short, if we'd known that Obama the Conciliator would make it to the White House and Obama the Transformer would be left in Chicago's Grant Park on election night -- many of us would have gambled on someone else. I certainly would have. [read the whole thing, with links here]

Most Disappointing Presidency Ever

A rare unfettered glimpse into how banks own our modern politics: Obama just effectively secured his second term (in the vile and despicable form of pardoning Wall Street crime).

Here's what seems, for all intents and purposes, to have happened:

Wall Street donors waking up to the impending depths of global recession demand Obama do something to reassure markets. Obama calls up Warren Buffett from the Vineyard, somehow reassuring him that propping up our too-big-to-fail-banks is still his number one priority, and that Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Ally Financial and especially Bank of America will be granted effective immunity from future embarrassing and potentially quite costly litigation, after paying their purely symbolic petty one-time fine, so that everyone can move on.

Everyone, that is, unless you happen to be one of the victims of the largest criminal mortgage and pension frauds in history. Your rights, along with any records of the unprecedented criminal activity of the professional gamblers who swindled you into financial ruin, will be swept under the carpet.

True to Obama's word, Eric Schneiderman, the only man alive with any integrity, has been plucked out of the multi-state mortgage-settlement talks.

Buffett suddenly, brazenly invests $5 Billion in Bank of America, whose self-inflicted problems with the crooks at Countrywide are about to go away, and has already earned some of it back based on the extremely positive market reaction.

NPR does its typical kid glove job almost covering the story here, without offending anyone.

Jonathan Turley puts NPR to shame, and gets more intelligent comments as well.


Update: New evidence reveals the failure of the bailout to do anything for Main Street.

Cecil Bothwell will be getting lots of volunteer work from me

My fellow North Carolinians will almost certainly vote Cecil Bothwell in to replace the flailing Heath Shuler, if they know what is good for their own families. Heath Shuler has proven time and again that no matter what he says or how many footballs he can fumble, he always answers first and foremost to the criminally rich, gambling big-city bankers. Heath Shuler's only plan is to extend the recession further, by raising taxes on the middle class and working people, while protecting offshore tax havens for the same folks who ruined this economy. Can't afford your healthcare, or want to keep your hard-earned rights to Medicare and Social Security? Don't have a job? Heath Shuler voted against both the President's pathetic little stimulus AND health care reform because he cares more about protecting international corporate profits. Beware the slick advertising campaign concocted by Heath Shuler's elitist and unpatriotic, tax-dodging pals; his actions in betraying working class people time and again speak louder than words.

The truth is that Cecil Bothwell is the real thing, a proven candidate who listens to the people more than big money in Washington. I'm not being paid to say this. Cecil Bothwell is worth fighting for. In his own words:

We have been in an economic recession since 2008. Most economists agree that it was triggered by the Bush tax cuts for the rich, American involvement in foreign wars and the housing bubble that burst when it was discovered that highly rated, bundled subprime mortgages promoted by investment bankers were actually worthless. Interestingly, no one was ever brought to trial or held accountable for this widespread scam. The government bailed out the banks and provided a relatively small stimulus for economic growth.

But people who lost their life savings and/or homes received almost no help or consideration. As job loss continues, more and more people are suffering. The big banks and mega-corporations however are making as much money as before the 2008 crash. And obviously, they are not using these profits to create jobs; they are simply giving big bonuses to executives and sitting on their cash, most of which is held offshore to avoid taxation. Needless to say, if this corporate profit were repatriated, the money would generate tax revenue which could be used by the government to create jobs and/or reduce the deficit.

To date, the Republicans have insisted on debt reduction at the expense of job creation. The net result is that they call for draconian cuts in spending that can only shrink the economy. If the “super congress” committee composed of six Republican and six Democrats from the House and Senate cannot agree on severe cuts in government spending, measures to further shrink and eliminate government spending will automatically kick in. Programs at greatest risk include Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and the Pentagon budget.

It is time for the living, breathing people of this nation to reexamine our priorities and reclaim management of our country. The United States was created to grant real people an opportunity for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” What we need now includes medical care for all, education for all, retirement with dignity for all and opportunities for workers to improve life circumstances for themselves and their families. Banks and corporations are, after all, only artificial entities created by and intended to serve real, living humans.

(via)

Obama's last chance to earn any volunteer work from me

It's bad enough Barack Obama is actively working to help cover up and grant immunity to financial industry crimes, [UPDATE: more about which here], but if he fails to heed the largest environmental protests of recent times and block the Keystone XL pipeline, then he's clearly just a one-term anti-environmental putz.

• Jim Hansen's now-famous "game over" letter is here.

• The facts about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline are available here, and include:

1. For every barrel of tar sand oil produced, six barrels of freshwater from the Athabasca River are polluted and stored in 30 square mile toxic ponds that sit adjacent to the river.
2. These ponds are already leaking over 3 million gallons of toxic water into the Athabasca River every day.

3. The pipeline is set to cross over the Ogalalla Aquifer which irrigates one-third of all crops in the Midwest and provides eight states with drinking water.

4. Producing a barrel of Tar Sand oil emits three times more greenhouse gases than producing a barrel of conventional oil.

5. Extraction of the Tar Sands requires permanently disturbing one of the largest, intact old-growth forests left on Earth. The destruction of this forest will destroy habitat and prevent the boreal forest from providing ecosystem services that at present moment are catching and storing carbon from our climate.

6. If this pipeline and current development of the tar sands continues as planned, it will release twice as many greenhouse gases as are currently produced by all the cars and trucks in Canada.

7. Scientific research predicts that more than 166 million birds will die from habitat loss and drowning in the toxic pools over the next 30-50 years if development continues as planned.

8. Large game species are exhibiting tumors and mutations as a result of consuming toxic water. Nearby moose have been found to have over 33 times the safe amount of arsenic in their meat, a staple for indigenous populations.

9. Communities downstream from the tar sands are already exhibiting respiratory problems, rare forms of cancer, and cardiovascular diseases.

10. The Koch Brothers, the same corporation dedicated to spreading lies about climate change and funding the tea party, is set to be the primary profiteer from building this pipeline.

Investigative Journalism Not Dead Yet: This American Life

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2011/07/28/the-supreme-court-should-invalidate-software-patents/

Last Word on the BP Oil Atrocity

David Koch, Charles Koch, Racism and Segregation in North Carolina Public Schools

UPDATE: The Koch "Tea Party" PR-machine is in high gear denying their involvement. Shameless lies, as usual.


Next time you see that Americans For Prosperity bumper sticker, be sure to thank the driver/(probably unwitting) tool of Queen of the Night monopulent white trash David Koch and Charles Koch for their wonderful work re-instituting racism and segregation, among other vile things:







More here, in case you missed it...or below.

Concentrated wealth blocks new ideas

Great post by Jared Bernstein.

"But there was no story–and there has been none since"

Drew Westen in the Sunday Review NYTimes (I agree with every word):

Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling.

Response from Kevin Drum, here, and Digby, here...

A word or two on spalted woods in cutting boards

Enough people have asked that it's time I had a public link to my own views on the subject of spalt in cutting boards and chopping blocks.

"Spalting" is actually a stable form of highly-desirable, natural discoloration (if harvested correctly, before the wood turns punky) caused by the presence of various fungi, sometimes intruduced by a parasite (such as the ambrosia beetle), or by moisture, etc.

Different kinds of spalting have different names, such as "dead man's fingers" "ambrosia" etc. Perhaps understandably, when people hear the fine woodworking term "noble rot" or just the pejorative "fungus" they tend to get paranoid about bacteria or poisoning. I've heard this from certain purist corners, especially Japanese knife forums where some board-makers with cult-like followings insist it is improper to use spalted woods for any food preparation whatsoever. Similarly, some people insist on avoiding exotic woods that if themselves consumed in large quantities would probably make you sick. But the amount of potential ingestion is so minimal as to nearly beg comparisons with the non-molecular "effects" of homeopathy. In the absence of any convincing proof to the contrary of common sense, such purist superstitions seem a poor reason to limit oneself to boring old maple, cherry and walnut (especially when there are so many woods worth appreciating, and so many fine scraps being thrown away).

The truth, at least in my own experience of 17-odd years woodworking, is that unless you are perhaps eating your cutting board itself whole (and with end grain you really are not even cutting the wood itself, but rather slicing *between* the fibers, which then "heal" back together) the concern is completely baseless. I have never once heard of anybody being made sick by cutting food on a certain specialty hardwood. Hardwood countertops, including those meant to be chopped upon, are routinely made from spalted maple. More importantly, recent studies have demonstrated again and again that hardwood has natural anti-bacterial qualities, and is in fact more sanitary with proper care than either plastic or glass (neither of which are any fun to cut on)

In fact there should be a law against ruining your knives on glass or bamboo (grass) cutting boards falsely advertised as environmentally "green", in any just society.

Plastic quickly develops rough edges and becomes nearly impossibly to clean, even in a dishwasher, the harsh cleaning products of which are probably much worse for you than any spalting. Wood meanwhile cleans itself, and as long as you are keeping the board cleaned, and the pores of the end grain filled with mineral (never organic) oil, and/or the top coated with beeswax or melted paraffin, I think the concern over spalting is entirely ill-founded. I've had customers with decidedly delicate stomachs use spalted blocks daily for over a decade with no problem whatsoever. And, it is the most beautiful demonstration of the character of the grain, particularly in end grain (almost resembling marble) so why not use it?

Of course, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that someone might have an allergic vulnerability to something I don't know about. Frankly I'm more concerned about the link between complex plastics and pesticides (organochlorines), the cancer industry, and cancer, than any minute amounts of spalting.

People pay through the nose for high-end mushrooms and stinky cheese, companies sell yogurt with live bacteria at a premium, but a little fungus in a beautiful piece of wood is unsafe...probably not. Sometimes a little bit of spalting makes the difference between a board you can get at Wal-mart (with untested and a genuine piece of art.

That being said, I don't reckon any of my "plain" maple boards can be found at Wal-Mart or some factory in China.

Mine are all personally-designed and handmade in Asheville, North Carolina with 90% salvaged wood, and almost always with the needs of specific customers in mind.

Please don't hesitate to ask me about my sliding scale for educators, middle class survivors, workers and non-hedgefunders.









Pictures are of custom 12/4 spalted maple block with rare earth magnets, listed here and slab shelving, here.

"Liking" is for cowards

• Jonathan Franzen in the NYTimes: very well stated.

• A City by City series from n+1, whose current issue also features a rather convincing, devastating review of C by Tom McCarthy (subscribers only).

THREE MELTDOWNS confirmed at Fukushima

One of them actually began within 5 hours of the earthquake, readers of TEPCO propaganda might be surprised to hear. The Washington Post reports. And more.

Germany, like Italy, knows what's what.

The Cancer Industry is Collecting Donations

Happy Breast Cancer Awareness Month. For those still unaware, here is how the scam functions:

These people make money polluting with impunity, saturating our world with organochlorines such as pesticides (DDT was the first) which have been directly linked to causing the cancer pandemic (now affecting 1 in 2 men, 1 in 3 women). These cynical bastards then shamelessly raise money from a traumatized population for research on expensive "treatments" that don't work (and often even cause other forms of cancer) and financially destroy entire families while making these same industries even more obscenely rich, all the while censoring any hint of a discussion about CAUSES or PREVENTION.

Guess who originally founded and still holds veto power over all Breast Cancer Awareness Month material? Look it up. The sad truth is that this collection of powerful and interrelated corporate interests is not even remotely interested in a "cure," less it can be spun into yet another problem that will make them even more money. They have it far too damn good. And don't expect any of your child's fundraising to be used for any research that might hurt their bottom line. When it comes to the mounting body of evidence about CANCER CAUSES and REAL PREVENTION (not just "early detection" so they can start selling you drugs sooner) these same people are criminally neglectful.

Fred, David and Charles Koch, Inc.

Update: And then there's this...

Seriously, what a bunch of weirdos, signifying everything that is most wrong with America.

Shamelessly dishonest, self-important extremist mediocrities with their deluded self-serving Ayn Rand sound-bot psuedo-philosophy and more blood money than is healthy for any democracy to let fester in private hands.

I mean, it sure seems to me anyway, that once a corporation is allowed by law to intimidate its employees into voting for whoever the bosses say, especially when it is for some batshit crazy, fundamentalist politician who will turn around and cut their wages even more and hurt their families, then this is not a country worth living in anymore. Certainly it is antithetical to any "freedom-loving democracy."

In light of which barbaric mediocrity, may the Koch brothers' losing continue.

“Now, companies like Koch Industries are free to send out newsletters persuading their employees how to vote. They can even intimidate their employees into voting for their candidates.” Secunda adds, “It’s a very troubling situation.”

[...]

Further into the company newsletter is an article headlined “What’s a Business to Do?” It portrays corporate titans like the Kochs [net worth over $44 Billion] as freedom-fighting underdogs, modern-day Sakharovs and Mandelas targeted for repression by Big Government statists: “Citizens who are openly critical of the European Union bureaucracy in Brussels or the out-of-control government of the United States are being shouted down by politicians, government officials and their media and other allies.”

In this scenario, Big Government wants to muzzle the Kochs before they can spread their message to the people. That message comes down to preaching the benefits of lower wages.

[...]

Travis McKinney, an employee at a Portland Georgia-Pacific distribution center, says, “They drill into your head things like ‘The 10 Guiding Principles of Koch Industries.’ They even stamp the ten principles on your time card.”

McKinney, a fourth-generation employee of Georgia-Pacific, says relations have sharply deteriorated since Koch Industries bought the company in late 2005. He and fellow employees at three Georgia-Pacific distribution centers are locked in a yearlong contract battle with the new Koch Industries management. Workers there, members of the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific (an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) recently voted unanimously to reject management’s contract and voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike if management continues to try to impose cuts in benefits and job security in the new contracts. (read the whole thing)

Further recent custom end grain chopping boards

Heirloom quality end grain boards, handmade by GreenRiverWoods:

Recent Work...

GreenRiverWoods:
























Spalted maple end grain island top built to custom order, measures 48" x 28" x 3"

GreenRiverWoods.Etsy.Com

5 Scott Walker Republicans Down, Only 2 to Go

Hell fucking yes:

Yesterday, local activists in Wisconsin submitted over 100% of the signatures needed to recall Republican Senator Alberta Darling.

That's 3 Republicans recalled in one week, 5 in total! (What a week!)

After local officials certify the signatures, these Republicans will face do-over elections against Democratic candidates. PCCC supporters in Wisconsin and across the nation have been vital to this accomplishment -- thanks for all you've done. And congrats!

We'll keep our powerful TV ads up through Election Day so long as folks keep chipping in. We've raised $580,000 -- can you help us reach $600,000 by Monday? Click here to chip in $3.

Help keep our ad on TV!

This ad is jointly done with our friends at Democracy for America.

Republicans declared war on the middle class. And with your help, we're going to win. Thanks for being a bold progressive.

-- Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, Matt Burgess, Jason Rosenbaum, Amanda Johnson, and the PCCC team

Want to support our work? We're entirely funded by our members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chip in here.

Last post on the BP/Halliburton/TransOcean Macondo well blowout

"We're stuck doing what we've done ever since we lived in caves. Whenever we want some energy we light fire to something. The United States is stuck in a debate that says that harnessing the eternal sources of energy that run the planet is too expensive and too impractical. But China is not under that delusion, neither is Germany, Denmark or Spain. Nor Canada.

All these countries are ahead of us in developing clean technologies, diversified energy sources, creating the jobs that go with it and the infrastructure that goes with it...as we pretend that it's impractical, while our factories rust and we complain about high unemployment."

The whole show is worth watching. Meanwhile in Japan...


See also new site, CounterSpill.

One Down, Seven Scott Walker Republicans To Go

This movement is still growing. Keep the pressure on.