September 2, 2010 by mike.

Initial reports say the crew got off and all are accounted for. Hopefully, this will not turn out to be another runaway well.

clipped from news.yahoo.com Gulf oil platform explodes, burning off La. coast GRAND ISLE, La. – An offshore petroleum platform exploded and was burning Thursday in the Gulf of Mexico about 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, west of the site where BP’s undersea well spilled after a rig explosion. The Coast Guard says no one was killed in the blast, which was reported by a commercial helicopter flying over the area Thursday morning. All 13 people aboard the rig have been accounted for, with one injury. The extent of the injury was not known. The Department of Homeland Security said the platform was in about 2,500 feet of water and owned by Mariner Energy of Houston. DHS said it was not producing oil and gas.

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September 1, 2010 by mike.

Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada spoke to a capacity crowd at the Olympia Center about why the Olympia Food Co-op decision to join the Palestinian Boycott Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement was a big deal. And up the road a piece in Seattle, a guy walked into a convenience store and assaulted the store employee who was wearing a turban.

I caught that story on Slate, who say they got it from Talking Points Memo, but the Slate link jumps to Gawker.

I think that assault story is part of the larger wave of Islamophobia that is being stoked by the right-wing as an election tactic and it’s a big story.  But the possibility of pressing Israel to deal fairly with the Palestinians through the BDS movement, the tactic that has been used in the past against South African apartheid, against grapes to support the UFW and Cesar Chavez and more is also a big story.

Ali Abunimah was persuasive, rational, collected and engaging.  He’s an articulate spokesman for Palestine.

Speaking of elections, Feingold seems to be in a tight race in Wisconsin, Murkowski got bumped by a tea partier who found some room to Murkowski’s right, and the prospects for the dems holding on to any congressional majorities continue to dim.

We progressives may feel it makes no difference when the dems are as hapless as they have been since the 2006 election when they were given a chance by the electorate, but then there is always the opportunity to look back and wonder if a President Gore would have used the 9-11 events to attack Iraq.  Even though Obama again declared the mission complete in Iraq yesterday, we will continue to reap the dubious benefits of that military adventure for many years and we are facing deficit hawks who want to cut Medicare and Social Security, but have no reservations about deficits if we are putting boots on the ground, drones in the air, or bailing out the bankers.

Oh, weather report - there’s a hurricane approaching the east coast.  Not just the political storm of tea parties in sequins, Hurricane Earl is currently pointed at North Carolina.    Category 4, that’s a big storm.  Earl also.

Cheers!

clipped from gawker.com A Washington man was charged with a hate crime today for assaulting a 7-11 clerk wearing a turban last week. His words to the convenience store employee? “You’re not even American, you’re Al-Qaeda. Go back to your country.” A 35-year-old Seattle man has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly punching a 7-11 clerk in the head. Police say Brock Stainbrook walked into the 7-11 just after midnight Aug. 24, approached a clerk wearing a turban, threw change on the floor and then punched the clerk in the side of the head. “You’re not even American, you’re Al-Qaeda. Go back to your country,” he then said, according to police. Another clerk then forced the man, kicking and screaming, to leave the store. Police picked him up a few blocks away after witnesses described a man in a white shirt, black pants and carrying one shoe. The Post-Intelligencer notes that the victim’s last name “is common within the Sikh community.” (Sikhs are, notably, not Muslim.)

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August 29, 2010 by mike.

I think that covers our options.

clipped from climateprogress.org Real adaptation is as politically tough as real mitigation, but much more expensive and not as effective in reducing future misery Rhetorical adaptation, however, is a political winner. Too bad it means preventable suffering for billions. clipped from climateprogress.org We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be. clipped from climateprogress.org August 27, 2010

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August 29, 2010 by mike.

From Peaceful Rivers:

Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth, let’s not speak any language,

let’s stop for one second, and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment, without hurry, without locomotives,

all of us would be together in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea would do no harm to the whales

and the peasant gathering salt would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars, wars of gas, wars of fire,

victories without survivors, would put on clean clothing

and would walk alongside their brothers in the shade, without doing a thing.

There is more, of course, but you get the sense of it.

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August 29, 2010 by mike.

Talking Points Memo has the Robert Reich oped piece on intolerance. Intolerance, violence, bigotry seem to be in the air.

In times of fear, Americans will compromise their most basic civil rights for the false promise of security. Need an example? Look back at Japanese internment after the Pearl Harbor attack.

Reich’s piece is dead-on imho, but it is an uphill battle reaching the cerebral cortex of america when the reptile brain is responding so strongly to the fear-mongering.

What did FDR say? All we have to fear is what? Japanese among us? Mosques at Ground Zero? Communists in the State Department?

No, it was all we have to fear is fear itself. Come on, step up, be brave.

clipped from tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com The Anatomy of Intolerance Connect the dots: Many Americans (and politicians who the polls) don’t want a mosque at Manhattan’s Ground Zero. An increasing percent believe the President is a Muslim. Most Americans approve of Arizona’s new law allowing police to stop anyone who looks Hispanic and demand proof of citizenship. Most would deny citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are here illegally. Where is all this coming from? It’s called fear. When people are deeply anxious about holding on to their homes, their jobs, and their savings, they look for someone to blame. And all too often they find it in “the other” - in people who look or act differently, who come from foreign lands, who have what seem to be strange religions, who cross our borders illegally. Economic fear is the handmaiden of intolerance. It’s used by demagogues who redirect the fear and anger toward people and groups who aren’t really to blame but are easy scapegoats.

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August 28, 2010 by mike.

I guess we should sing Happy Birthday.   But it’s a little discouraging really.

Real Climate remembers climatologist Wally Broecker’s 1975 article in Science where he laid out the problem of CO2 accumulated heat on the planet.

Real Climate is for climate wonks. Always worth keeping an eye on the discussion there.

clipped from www.realclimate.org Happy 35th birthday, global warming! Global warming is turning 35! Not only has the current spate of global warming been going on for about 35 years now, but also the term “global warming” will have its 35th anniversary next week. On 8 August 1975, Wally Broecker published his paper “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?” in the journal Science. That appears to be the first use of the term “global warming” in the scientific literature (at least it’s the first of over 10,000 papers for this search term according to the ISI database of journal articles). To those who even today claim that global warming is not predictable, the anniversary of Broecker’s paper is a reminder that global warming was actually predicted before it became evident in the global temperature records over a decade later (when Jim Hansen in 1988 famously stated that “global warming is here”).

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August 27, 2010 by mike.

Two stories that are in the news caught my attention.  The massive egg recall story reminds me why I buy my eggs from the Egg Lady in South Olympia.  She has a pretty big operation, hundreds of chickens, but the chickens are free to run in a fairly large space.  They look like happy chickens, if chickens experience joy walking around pecking at the ground.  It’s not an industrial scene where the chickens are trapped in very tight spaces with lots of other chickens.  This small farm operation looks good to me.  The industrialization of farming has some risks as the recent massive egg recall suggests.

The other story that caught my attention was the judicial decision that has effectively stopped embryonic stem cell research again.   There are lots of ways to look at this story, but I was thinking about the inconsistency of our political positions on the sanctity of life.  Dvorak Uncensored was also contemplating the sharia law implications of the debate.

Folks who are emphatically opposed to stem cell research because they believe a fertilized egg is a human being don’t seem to get up in arms over genetically modified crops and animals.  That upset is left to more liberal, tree hugging types who are not impressed with the inherent humanity of an embryonic stem cell line. And it continues down the line, progressives often don’t like the death penalty or drone attacks that take human life, but the conservatives who get apoplectic over human embryos seem less distressed by collateral damage, you know, children maimed and killed by proximity to our war on terror.

I am uneasy about the use of embryos as basic fuel for scientific research, but then I am uneasy about embryos in general.  I have a sense there are too many of us walking and pecking on this small blue planet and I don’t see how this species can collectively sort out the question of how, when, why we can decide who gets to carry a human embryo to term, and as the environment degrades, we face the demand to feel compassion over and over again for large numbers of human beings displaced by extreme weather, flooding, by drought, by food shortage, and sea rise displacement is on the horizon.  We are in this together, whether we are the folks displaced or the temporarily comfortable worrying about the folks dealing with flooding in Pakistan, or Tennessee or wherever.

Store owner Richard Dorer in the Tennessee link mentions that this is the second thousand year flood that has brought water into his store.  I don’t know if he has his stats down quite right, but I am willing to wager that Mr. Dorer believes that something is different about weather patterns on the planet.

Connect the dots.

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August 15, 2010 by mike.

Well, it sounds better than tree burning for electricity.

The industry types got biomass included in the green energy tax credits and it’s off and running, but is it green?

Dr. Tom Termotto and I don’t think so.

clipped from concernedcitizensofflorida.wordpress.com “. . . Biomass incineration is NOT clean and green, it’s not sustainable and renewable; it’s not carbon neutral, not cost effective; and it’s neither environmentally friendly nor ecologically sound.” By Dr. Tom Termotto Shall we begin by stating that biomass incinerators are rarely, if ever, factually represented by the many sales pitches we see issued by the Energy Industry sector that promotes them. In fact, the marketing language that has now become de rigueur is reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” To the point, biomass incineration is NOT clean and green, sustainable and renewable, carbon neutral and cost effective, or environmentally friendly and ecologically sound. It is quite the opposite of these beautiful and alluring marketing slogans. Biomass incineration is in reality quite polluting, unsustainable to the extreme and, in some cases, less environmentally friendly than coal burning plants.

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August 11, 2010 by Mike.

   ’nuff said?

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August 11, 2010 by mike.

The NYT has a story on the fires in Russia. Sounds a little distressing, but Dr. Onischenko says everything is fine.

That’s the official story.

Ok, but with a lot of folks pushing nuclear as clean, green energy source, maybe we should challenge the industry technicians to show that they can clean up an accident site before we commit to more potential accident sites. I realize that this is a non-starter because for the most part, the industry cannot clean up a site like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, but what does that tell you?

Of course, the deniers will say no connection between the heat waves stoking fires like these or the ones in Australia because they can find a datapoint somewhere that shows an unusually early or late frost event. There is a connection between these extreme weather events and global warming. It is predicted and documented.

Let’s deal with some big data sets, please.

clipped from www.nytimes.com Russian Fires Raise Fears of Radioactivity MOSCOW — As if things in Russia were not looking sufficiently apocalyptic already, with 100-degree temperatures and noxious fumes rolling in from burning peat bogs and forests, there is growing alarm here that fires in regions coated with fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 24 years ago could now be emitting plumes of radioactive smoke. “Fires on these territories will without a doubt lead to an increase in radiation,” said Vladimir Chuprov, head of the energy program at Greenpeace Russia. “The smoke will spread and the radioactive traces will spread. The amount depends upon the force of the wind.”Russia’s emergency minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, warned last week that the fires could release radioactive particles. Responding to the Greenpeace statement on Tuesday, Dr. Gennadi G. Onishchenko, Russia’s chief sanitary doctor, played down the danger. “There is no need to sow panic,” he told the Interfax news agency. “Everything is fine.”

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