Readin’ Writin’ with Stomach Churnin’
Filed Under Bullshit, Double Standard, Economy | Leave a Comment
As the protests across the US against GOP governmental operations — Wisconsin, Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, and on and on — gain momentum against the budget-busting, don’t-give-a-shit attitude of right-wing politicans whose exploits fly in the face of a big chunk of America’s children, who can’t do much learning while hungry.
From UPI:
Two-thirds of U.S. teachers say some children regularly come to school too hungry to learn — some having had no dinner the night before, a survey indicates.
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“I’ve had lots of students come to school — not just one or two — who put their heads down and cry because they haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday,” Stacey Frakes, an elementary teacher at Greenville Elementary School in Madison County, Fla., says in a statement.
And this ain’t no giggle.
More from Ms Frakes via USAToday:
When she asked them what was wrong, they’d tell her they hadn’t had any breakfast.
She kept peanut butter crackers on hand to give them, and one time gave a student her own lunch.
She says hungry students “couldn’t focus at all. All they could think about was wanting food. They would ask, ‘What time is lunch? Is it lunchtime yet?’ “
It’s was hard to teach them when “they are thinking about their next good meal,” Frakes says.
It’s been said an army travels on its stomach, and children need food to not only to learn, but to LIVE.
Results of the survey can be found here.
Paul Krugman, in his post this morning in the NYT, looks at Texas and how the GOP crowd there has ruined their children’s tomorrow.
A couple of snips:
Now, politicians — and especially, in my experience, conservative politicians — always claim to be deeply concerned about the nation’s children.
Back during the 2000 campaign, then-candidate George W. Bush, touting the “Texas miracle” of dramatically lower dropout rates, declared that he wanted to be the “education president.”
Today, advocates of big spending cuts often claim that their greatest concern is the burden of debt our children will face.
In practice, however, when advocates of lower spending get a chance to put their ideas into practice, the burden always seems to fall disproportionately on those very children they claim to hold so dear.
…
But here’s the thing: While low spending may sound good in the abstract, what it amounts to in practice is low spending on children, who account directly or indirectly for a large part of government outlays at the state and local level.
And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right.
The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance.
And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.
…
The really striking thing about all this isn’t the cruelty — at this point you expect that — but the shortsightedness.
What’s supposed to happen when today’s neglected children become tomorrow’s work force?
Anyway, the next time some self-proclaimed deficit hawk tells you how much he worries about the debt we’re leaving our children, remember what’s happening in Texas, a state whose slogan right now might as well be “Lose the future.”
Nowadays, the GOP is made up of nothing but immoral assholes, and with all the problems facing this country, and the entire freakin’ planet, the biggest challenge and the biggest hurdle are the shit-head, two-faced, lying sonofabitches like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
Let them bastards eat lunch every-other-day.
GAS — (And NOT the bowel blowback kind, either)
Filed Under Economy, Energy, Finance, Scratching Sounds | 2 Comments
A good, quick guide for keeping track; from CNNMoney:
The spike in oil last week could translate to an increase in gas prices of 37 cents per gallon in the coming weeks, according Moody’s Analytics economist Chris Lafakis. He estimates that for every $1 increase in the price of oil, retail gas prices typically rise 2.5 cents a gallon.
Gasoline is a product depending entirely on oil.
At the end of the day Friday, oil settled at $97.88, down from a high of $103 Thursday but still up 13 percent over the last week.
The oil-to-gas pump-process does indeed exhibit a not-so-slow trickle down effect: Up here along the northern California coast, in less than a week, gas prices have jumped a dime — the last I looked, $3.89 a gallon for regular.
(Illustration found here).
Last Wednesday, in a rare, financial/news/life event, I decided the shit horrifying Libya right now might make already-high gas prices even higher, and thusly, in another even-more rare action, I filled up my Jeep Comanche’s gas tank — usually I just put $20-at-time — at my normal Union-76 station with the price of regular set at $3.79 a gallon.
And on Saturday, as I was out and about, the general gas-station billboard had regular at $.10 more — a spike made actually in just three days.
Cost for certain stuff is higher here in Humboldt County, among that stuff is fuel — regular gas found in my former San Luis Obispo residence (located on California’s central coast, midway twixt LAX and SFO) is $.23 cheaper, at least as of this morning (Sunday).
This area up here is way-higher than the national average — $3.35 — and even higher than, though not that much, from California’s own state average — $3.71 a gallon.
As I don’t really drive that much any more, the next few days I’ll be ahead of the curve, be able to cruise gas stations not only with impunity, but also a certain glorious, financially-felt emotion of “I Beat You!“
However, in just a few days, maybe gauged down in hours, that dime will have evaporated quicker than gasoline stench on concrete.
Seriously worrisome is how fragile and how quick the entire oil panoramic-picture reacts to stimuli — Libya is only the 17th-largest producer in the world, and which at its height, yielded a crude oil output of 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) (Reuters).
In comparison: Two years ago (2009) and according to estimates from the US CIA, Russia is the planet’s biggest oil producer at 9.9 bpd, much-closely followed by Saudi Arabia at near 9.8 — Libya shouldn’t be that awesome of a deal, yet…
In just 11 days, Libya’s oil production has plunged some 90 percent, dropping from that 1.6 million figure to 850,00 bpd — one complex, 200km west of Benghazi, has seen production rapidly descend from 90,000 bpd to just 11,000.
Even this has caused a shit-storm within the oil-production system.
In one particular view, from the UK’s The Telegraph, a major oil-price spike could lead the US into a recession, this based on history: Ever since the early 1970s, every single time oil prices have spiked sharply (rising by 80pc or more), regular as clockwork the US has entered recession. Given America’s massive influence on worldwide economic sentiment, the past five global recessions have all come in the wake of sharp jumps in the price of crude.
Some shit, huh?
Well, it’s some shit that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and the cheap-shit variety is gone, leaving civilization holding a wet, empty bag, bringing forth now that infamous back-burner of a problem, peak oil, or in reality, the end of inexpensive oil.
In an interesting post in Foreign Policy Journal, Jeremy Hammond, notes the time is more-than nigh to confront the machinery of oil consumption.
A couple of snips from the piece published this morning:
Peak Oil is often called a “theory”, as though it wasn’t a fact that oil is a finite resource, and as though it wasn’t a mathematical reality that production must peak, just as global oil discovery peaked in the 1960s, and just as U.S. domestic oil production peaked in the early 1970s.
That oil production must reach a peak, after which point it must decline, is not some kind of paranoid delusion.
It’s a mathematical certainty we’ve already witnessed as historical fact, on the national scale.
Global peak oil production is likewise not a question of if but when.
According to world-renowned petroleum geologist Dr. Colin Campbell, the data shows that the peak of world oil production is already behind us, having occurred sometime between 2005 and 2008.
As Campbell also points out, “Today, 29 billion barrels of oil a year support 6.8 billion people with an energy supply equivalent to that of billions of slaves working around the clock.”
…
The sky is not falling.
But Peak Oil is most assuredly upon us, and if we don’t start rethinking our ways and changing our habits now, the consequences will be disastrous.
We can choose our future.
We can choose to ignore Peak Oil, delude ourselves into thinking that cheap energy will continue to be available into the foreseeable future, and continue on present course; or we can recognize that Peak Oil is a reality, that the end of the age of cheap oil is nigh, and make the changes required, both on an individual and societal basis, in order to prepare for what’s coming and have some kind of framework in place to be able to deal with it and avert, or at least mitigate, catastrophe.
Humanity has a lot on its collective plates nowadays — I fear fear, and thus some kind of knotted bowel constriction, thus not allowing harmful, noxious gases from escaping, leading to a horrifying kind of personal implosion — a gas removal pump, that’s it, yeah!
Nuclear Exchange: ‘A Real Bummer’
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment, Madness | Leave a Comment
In the last few years, nuclear war and nuclear weapons has taken somewhat of a back seat to more conventional forms of killing (AK-47s, tanks, etc.) and even to the mega-simple (IEDs), but earlier this month the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science opened up the old Cold War can of whup-ass.
Discussions at the gathering revealed what even a small, contained nuclear exchange between neighboring countries could do to the globe’s environment, and if you figured global warming/climate change was some bad shit, then just wait…
From Wired‘s coverage of the event:
“This is tremendously dangerous,” said environmental scientist Alan Robock of Rutgers University, one of the climate scientists presenting at the meeting. “The climate change would be unprecedented in human history, and you can imagine the world … would just shut down.”
And in an interview with Michael Mills, an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, some real-ugly stuff.
Wired: In your simulation, a war between India and Pakistan breaks out. Each country launches 50 nukes at their opponent’s cities. What happens after the first bomb goes off?
Mills: The initial explosions ignite fires in the cities, and those fires would build up for hours.
What you eventually get is a firestorm, something on the level we saw in World War II in cities like Dresden, in Tokyo, Hiroshima and so on.
Today we have larger cities than we did then — mega cities.
And using 100 weapons on these different mega cities, like those in India and Pakistan, would cause these firestorms to build on themselves.
They would create their own weather and start sucking air through bottom.
People and objects would be sucked into buildings from the winds, basically burning everything in the city. It’ll burn concrete, the temperatures get so hot.
It converts mega cities into black carbon smoke.
And after explanations of some rather ugly scientific shit:
Wired: What would all of this do to the planet, to civilization?
Mills: UV has big impacts on whole ecosystems.
Plant height reduction, decreased shoot mass, reduction in foliage area.
It can affect genetic stability of plants, increase susceptibility to attacks by insects and pathogens, and so on.
It changes the whole competitive balance of plants and nutrients, and it can affect processes from which plants get their nitrogen.
Then there’s marine life, which depends heavily on phytoplankton.
Phytoplankton are essential; they live in top layer of the ocean and they’re the plants of the ocean.
They can go a little lower in the ocean if there’s UV, but then they can’t get as much sunlight and produce as much energy.
As soon as you cut off plants in the ocean, the animals would die pretty quickly.
You also get damage to larval development and reproduction in fish, shrimp, crabs and other animals. Amphibians are also very susceptible to UV.
A 16 percent ozone depletion could result in a 5 percent loss in phytoplankton, which could result in a 7 percent loss in fisheries and aquaculture.
And in our model we see a much greater global average loss of ozone for many years; the global average hides a lot.
Wired: This doesn’t sound very good at all.
Mills: No, as we said it’s a real bummer.
It’s pretty clear this would lead to a global nuclear famine.
As a baby boomer, I’m fairly well-acquainted with the nuclear threat — all the propaganda-induced fear rolled like a nasty, salty tide across the 1950s and early ’60s.
One in an incredibly-long list of horrifying things mankind has done over the years was to break-up the atom — there can/will be no peaceable result from either nuclear power (as in electricity, energy) and nuclear weapons (nuclear war) as waste from both products are mega-mega harmful.
The current US nuclear-plant/storage of eons-long-dangerous-spent-fuel situation is beyond hideous — The total quantity of spent fuel stored at U.S. nuclear reactors in 2002 was 47 thousand tons. An additional 20 tons of spent fuel discharged per year from 104 reactors for 9 years totals 18.7 thousand tons, so our estimate is that the total quantity of spent nuclear fuel currently stored at U.S. reactors exceeds 60 thousand tons (from the NRDC).
And spent nuclear fuel is bad beyond imagination.
No real good has come from splitting the atom.
Especially, the most obvious via warfare.
In the tone of the Wired story, National Geographic in a piece last week reported this small nuclear-weapon exchange would indeed reverse global warming, and could be even worse than the awesome catastrophe now coming under the current warming-up scenario — great global cooling: Earth is currently in a long-term warming trend. After a regional nuclear war, though, average global temperatures would drop by 2.25 degrees F (1.25 degrees C) for two to three years afterward, the models suggest…For a time Earth would likely be a colder, hungrier planet.
And the global civilization created in less than two centuries, could go in a pop-of-a-second.
War Crimes
Filed Under Bullshit, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad,” said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.
– Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, 2/16/09
(Illustration found here).
War crimes means more than what one would think.
An official study titled “Commission on Wartime Contracting” and released Thursday revealed billions and billions of US dollars in reconstruction funds for Iraq and Afghanistan have been lost, maybe upwards to $12 billion — and the reason?
From AFP:
The report found that “criminal behavior and blatant corruption” were responsible for much of the waste related to the nearly $200 billion spent since 2002 on US reconstruction and other projects in the two countries.
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“When it comes to oversight of contingency contracting, we’ve been driving beyond the reach of our headlights. Reforms are badly needed,” said the report.
“For many years, the government has abdicated its contracting responsibilities — too often using contractors as the default mechanism — without consideration for the resources needed to manage them.”
Further, from Bloomberg News: “War by its nature entails waste,” the report said. “But the scale of the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan also reflects the toxic interplay of huge sums of money pumped into relatively small economies and an unprecedented reliance on contractors.”
Last year, about 200,000 contract employees — primarily non-Americans — supported US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a figure roughly equal to the number of military personnel in the two war zones.
In an age of the long war, the US manages by using private contractors for everything, from food for troops to security, and in an age of The Dick‘s no-bid contracts, these assholes could and can suck up the cash and high-tail it.
See a partial list of US defense contractors complied by Wikipedia here.
And in the midst of vile corruption, the big US defense contractors made some great profits, and put cash where it was needed — Raytheon contributed nearly a million dollars to various defense-related political campaigns in the presidential election year of 2004, spending much more than that on lobbying expenses.
The commission’s report this week also recommended way-more oversight of these contractors and noted: “U.S. government’s limited jurisdiction over criminal behavior and limited access to records, have contributed to an environment where contractors misbehave with limited accountability.”
And make tons and tons of taxpayer-fed money.
Paul Krugman, in his column in the New York Times yesterday, touches briefly upon Iraqi reconstruction in tying the chaos in Madison, Wis., to corporations’ grabbing more and more power — a no-bids grab to own it all.
As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way.
Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision.
Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”
And leaving the regular, ordinary Jack American holding an empty bag.
Stealing is still a crime, war or not.
Clueless — ‘Worrisome to Dire’
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Environment | Leave a Comment
Canadians — what can you do?
From a new poll by two Canadian organizations, the Public Policy Forum and Sustainable Prosperity:
The survey, released Wednesday, found that 80 per cent of Canadians polled said they believe there is solid evidence of global warming, compared to 58 per cent of Americans.
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About half the Americans surveyed said they believed scientists were overstating the potential effects of global warming.
Blind and clueless do as the blind and clueless do — US peoples are experiencing first-hand the effects of climate change in this winter’s weather, yet can’t see.
(Illustration found here).
The survey also mentioned politics in the general view of climate change: In the U.S., 69 per cent of Democrats and just 41 per cent of Republicans said they believed the science.
Too much disinformation and negative chatter on the airwaves from the right-wing nut-jobs.
Even as Washington fiddles and the GOP continues to lie through its ass, climate change is still continuing, still bringing destruction — another brick in the wall for the globe’s coral reefs.
From Climate Central yesterday:
According to a new report from the World Resources Institute (WRI), Reefs at Risk Revisited, more than 75 percent of the coral reefs in the Atlantic, including those surrounding Florida, are now threatened by human activities.
Though overfishing is the largest single threat to coral reef ecosystems in the area, marine species are becoming more vulnerable to the effects of climate change and high carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, says the report.
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“This is a critical time for ocean ecosystems in general, but in particular for coral reefs,” said Lubchenco (NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco), speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
Since the initial Reefs at Risk report, she described the threats to coral reefs as having gone from “worrisome to dire.”
And the function of those reefs: Coral reefs help prevent sediments from washing up and damaging the shoreline. They act as a physical barrier which helps create a healthier, protected coastline habitat. They also sequester carbon dioxide, which helps create an environment that continues to attract marine biodiversity. Coral reefs also have economic benefits for nearby cities and towns. Coral can be harvested for use in medicines and jewelery. Fish and marine plants can be harvested for use in aquariums worldwide. Tourists may also visit to view the spectacular underwater life of coral reefs.
Other than that, and of course, other than their neat, incredible beauty, the reefs are pretty-much worthless.
As the events in Wisconsin reveal, US peoples as a whole do not think as the lying GOP, but still…
From the BBC this morning:
With a majority in the House of Representatives, politicians unconvinced of the case for action on climate change have been able to attack the edifices of climate science and international negotiations in quite dramatic ways.
Budgetary measures passed by the House at the weekend would not only withdraw US funding from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – they would also end financing for the office occupied by Todd Stern, the experienced official who leads US diplomacy within the UN climate convention (UNFCCC) and other fora.
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The claims used to back the proposed IPCC cuts are easily countered. Launching his “de-funding” amendment, Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer described the panel as: “…an entity that is fraught with waste and fraud, and engaged in dubious science…”
Even as global warming hurdles toward some unthinkable horror, a few climate zombies can ruin the future for everyone, and I do mean everyone.
There’s no escaping, and the children and grandchildren of all of us will consider this generation as immoral and clueless — beyond worrisome to way-dire.