An ice-free Arctic

The Guardian has published an article entitled "Ice-Free Arctic Could Be Here in 23 Years". It's very sobering to realize that, conceivably, I could live to see this:

The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at a record low, scientists said last night. Experts said they were “stunned” by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as Britain disappearing in the last week alone. So much ice has melted this summer that the north-west passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the north-east passage along Russia’s Arctic coast could open later this month. If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030.

Mark Serreze, an Arctic specialist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre at Colorado University in Denver which released the figures, said: “It’s amazing. It’s simply fallen off a cliff and we’re still losing ice.” The Arctic has now lost about a third of its ice since satellite measurements began 30 years ago, and the rate of loss has accelerated sharply since 2002.

And here's something I found in the comments section:

I give up. The human race deserves this hell we’ve made for ourselves. Global warming won’t kill us fast enough; let’s just nuke each other to hell.

I really do understand that person's mixture of deep cynicism and utter despair. There's every reason to feel the way he or she does. I don't wish it on the human race, mind you, but I think it's highly likely that things are going to play out that way.

Keith Olbermann on Bush's "surprise" visit to Iraq

Sent to me by Frank Ford:

Cannabis issues

Okay. I know a lot of people won't believe this given my generation and all. But I have never used marijuana - not even once. I did my undergraduate work in music - majoring in oboe with a double minor in voice and keyboard (piano and organ) - and I was not about to do anything that might affect my lungs. I didn't want to do anything that would affect my mind either. Heck, I also didn't drink during my college years.

Having provided this disclaimer, I want to come out completely in favor of legalizing cannabis. One, we really need the hemp industry for all sorts of ecological reasons. (And there's evidence that the wood pulp paper industry had something to do with criminalizing cannabis in order to destroy the the hemp paper competition.) Two, I want cannabis available if I get cancer.

Anyway, this came up because I found an article on Alternet entitled "The Top Ten Reasons Marijuana Should Be Legal". The article is good but what is more fascinating is reading all the comments after it.

Here's the point about hemp:

Marijuana's legalization would simplify the development of hemp as a valuable and diverse agricultural crop in the United States, including its development as a new bio-fuel to reduce carbon emissions. Canada and European countries have managed to support legal hemp cultivation without legalizing marijuana, but in the United States opposition to legal marijuana remains the biggest obstacle to development of industrial hemp as a valuable agricultural commodity. As US energy policy continues to embrace and promote the development of bio-fuels as an alternative to oil dependency and a way to reduce carbon emissions, it is all the more important to develop industrial hemp as a bio-fuel source - especially since use of hemp stalks as a fuel source will not increase demand and prices for food, such as corn. Legalization of marijuana will greatly simplify the regulatory burden on prospective hemp cultivation in the United States.

And not only that, the paper industry is cutting down old growth forests. Hemp makes wonderful paper.

Read the article and the comments if you have time and let me know what you think.

UPDATE: Here're some interesting facts from the website I linked to above:

Marijuana and hemp both come from the same species of plant, Cannabis sativa L., but from different varieties or cultivars. There are different varieties of Cannabis, just as Chihuahuas and wolves are different breeds of Canis lupus.

Marijuana is the flowering tops and leaves of psychoactive varieties of Cannabis that are grown for their high THC content.

Hemp, also referred to as industrial hemp, are low-THC varieties of Cannabis that are grown for their seeds and fiber. Hemp is grown legally in just about every industrialized country except the USA.
...
Notoriety obscures the history and value of hemp. Hemp has a long history in America, from the first plantings in Jamestown, where growing hemp was mandatory, to the hemp sails of 19th-century clipper ships and the hemp canvas covers of pioneer wagons, to World War II's massive "Hemp for victory" program. Hemp is a major part of humanity's agricultural and commercial heritage, having been used extensively for millennia in cultures around the world.

Hemp seed was known long ago for its healthy protein and rich oil. The stalk's outer fiber was used for clothing, canvas, and rope, and textile rags were recycled into paper pulp. The Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp paper, and the finest Bibles are still printed on hemp-based paper. The woody core fiber of hemp stalks was used for construction and fuel. In the early 20th century, hemp-derived cellulose was promoted as an affordable and renewable raw material for plastics; Henry Ford even built a prototype car from biocomposite materials, using agricultural fiber such as hemp.

Beginning with the passage of the "Marihuana Tax Act" of 1937 and continuing after the World War II "Hemp for Victory" program, misplaced fears that industrial hemp is marijuana and harassment by law enforcement discouraged farmers from growing hemp. The last crop was grown in Wisconsin in 1958, and the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) of 1970 formally prohibited cultivation.

It's so stupid that we are not aggressivly exploiting this wonderful plant.

Once more with feeling...

PLEASE don't shop at Wal-Mart:

Matt Huculak sent me this picture.

The best labor focused speech yet

All right. We've all heard the end of Martin Luther King's last speech when he talks about having been to the mountain top and how he's not worried about anything anymore. But have we heard the first part of that speech when he teases out the meaning of the Good Samaritan story with regard to supporting the striking sanitation workers of Memphis? I don't think I'd ever heard that part of the speech until today.

His insistence on reframing the question was unbelievably powerful. He says that we usually ask, "What will happen to me if I help this person?" and that this is the WRONG question. The question we need to ask is, "What will happen to this person if I don't?"

Please listen to the speech. It will shake you out of complacency and apathy - that's for sure:



UPDATE: I found the text of the whole speech. The part on the video above starts about half way down the printed text here. Really worth reading and pondering.

Labor’s Failure

The title, Labor’s Failure, says it all, really. But I'll give you a couple of excerpts here and then ask you to go read the whole article. It's short:

The 19th-century dream of a workers’ vanguard leading to a better world was both betrayed and realized, and in each case, labor was undercut. The betrayal occurred when tyrants, in advancing the cause of “the people,” actually advanced themselves. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” turned out to be mere dictatorship. Yet the discrediting of the vision of Karl Marx by the 20th-century communisms that claimed him does not vitiate the original vision. Echoing what Mahatma Gandhi once said of Christianity, Marxism has yet to be really tried.

The realization of the workers’ dream occurred, across the same decades of the 20th century, when regulated capitalism made its adjustments, and a vast population of working people was able to lay solid claim to the middle class. But affluence had an inherently co-opting effect, as was powerfully displayed during the American civil rights movement, when the labor virtue of solidarity was trumped by racism, and union members mostly found themselves on the wrong side of history. The curious phenomenon of “Reagan Democrats” saw workers recruited into a reactionary political movement that undercuts their own interests.
...
What would have happened at the end of the Cold War, when the expected “peace dividend” might have rescued education or rebuilt the nation’s infrastructure, if union leaders, backed by the grass-roots labor movement, had demanded an end to the Pentagon boondoggle? The conversion of a military-based economy, serving no real purpose beyond its own enrichment, to an economy of authentic productivity would have transformed foreign policy in the nick of time (no war in Iraq), and provided resources for homefront infrastructure (no failed dikes in New Orleans, or collapsed bridges in Minneapolis).

It did not happen, for a lot of reasons - one of which is the hollowed out commitment of a movement that should have known better. What this nation needs is a revitalized reason to celebrate Labor Day.

For of all sad words of tongue or pen/The saddest are these: "It might have been!" -- John Greenleaf Whittier

We forget this to our peril

But yet we forget it:

We all live downstream.

-- Publilius Syrus

Public discourse is dead

I read this in the comment section of an artcile called "Bush Plans War on Iran" by Marjorie Cohn:

…Bush called for "an Iran whose government is accountable to its people, instead of leaders who promote terror and pursue the technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons."

When our president can say this without irony, we know that public discourse is dead.

I think true public discourse had been dead a long time but, yes, this is a particularly telling remark.

What's happened to education

I'm so glad I'm not in education any more. You know, any reasonably aware education student from the 60s or 70s could have predicted the results of No Child Left Behind. The research is there for all to see. Why do people make policy on what they think should be the case and don't bother to look at the studies (going back decades) that have actually determined how children really learn and how they don't?

Take a look:

With the start of the new academic year, we focus on school for a short while. School, so important to our community and central to our country’s future, has become increasingly toxic to our children. Recess has been eliminated in many districts, music and art have been discontinued and 25% of school time is now spent on getting ready or taking the state wide tests. Kindergarten is now the new first grade. We should all be concerned but parents are on the front line. Parents, its time to take a stand for our children and say loud and clear: “Enough is enough!”

In the summer of 2005, a conference held at Yale University was attended by 100 early childhood professionals along with leaders in social policy. Visit this site for their complete report: Play=Learning

Here is part of their report with emphasis added:

"Children in the direct instruction programs had higher rates of delinquency, were less willing to help other children, and more likely to experience emotional problems (p. 139). Hart, Yang, Charlesworth, and Burts (2003) confirm these findings in a longitudinal study that directly compared children who received direct instruction with those who received developmentally appropriate pedagogical practices. Results showed that through the third grade, children receiving direct instruction experienced more stress than children receiving developmentally appropriate curricula. Furthermore, stress seemed to play a causal role in Hart et al.’s model as it predicted the appearance of hyperactive and distractible behaviors as well as greater hostility and aggression. Importantly, these findings emerged regardless of
gender, race, and socio-economic status."

In other words, too much emphasis on academics does exactly the opposite of what we desire for our children. It should be no surprise that stress hinders children’s learning. In short, the present educational focus on higher test scores may be hazardous to our children’s overall health, their cognitive development and future emotional/social adjustment.

But no. Forget the science of the thing. Let's be Puritans instead and punish children into learning. Can you imagine school without recess? Horrible. Everybody needs a break - even children.

Good grief.

Money and the population

I want to show you two excerpts from an article entitled "Attack of the Wallmart-istas?" The first is actually quoted from a second article called "The U.S. today - an oligarchy with inequality growing worse":

The top 10% of income earners in the United States now owns 70% of the wealth, and the wealthiest 1% owns more than the bottom 95%, according to the Federal Reserve. In 2005, the top 300,000 Americans enjoyed about the same share of the nation's income -- 21.8% -- as the bottom 150 million...New York is an especially bleak case study. The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now makes 52 times what the lowest fifth makes -- $365,826 annually compared with $7,047 -- roughly comparable to income disparity in Namibia. Meanwhile, the ratio of average CEO to worker pay in the U.S. shot up from 301-to-1 to 431-to-1 in 2004. The average CEO now earns substantially more in one day than the average worker earns all year. Adding insult to injury, taxpayers actually give tax breaks to corporations for those salaries, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

And here's something I've been predicting for a long time and wondering why the CEOs of the world didn't realize it from the get-go:

Last month WallMart announced lower earnings expectations going forward. The company's chief financial officer noted the reason being that, "Clearly our customers are running out of money before the end of each month."

Well, yeah. Duh.

If you lower people's wages enough, then eventually you lose your customer base because the people don't have enough money to buy your stuff. You know, a five year old could get this.

The party of family values still once more

Found this a few minutes ago. Sigh:

A lot of people are calling Senator Craig a hypocrite because he was a very vocal opponent of same-sex marriages. ... But to be fair, he has never come out publicly against anonymous gay bathroom sex.

--Jay Leno

Capitalism

Oh my:

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

-- Fran Lebowitz

Really, really, really facing reality

Oh, my goodness. I just found an article on Common Dreams entitled "The Necessary Embrace of Conspiracy" by Robert Shetterly and I beg you to go read it all. I'll give you a couple of dynamite excerpts but this is an article that needs to be read in its entirety:

It has always confounded me every year when we celebrate Dr. King’s life that no mention is made of that Riverside Church speech in the major media. We are always treated to sound bites of the 1963 I Have a Dream speech. That speech’s oratory is as powerful as it is non-confrontational. Which is why it is re-played for modern audiences. Dr. King was about confrontation. Non-violence and confrontation, each ennobling and making the other effective. In 1967 he said, “… my country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And he explained how our economic system thrived on exploitation and violence, or, as Emma Goldman put it, “The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.”

This was probably the most important speech King ever gave and not playing it when we ostensibly honor him, is tantamount to castrating him morally and intellectually. Just as there is a long history of White America castrating black men, there is an equal legacy of Elite America cutting the most important truths of our social prophets out of the history books. We pay homage to King’s icon, the cardboard cutout, but not to his strongest beliefs and his most cogent analysis of our problems — to what vision called forth his courage. And, if we think that he spoke the truth, to censor that truth is to promote a curious kind of segregation. He is segregated, not for the color of his skin, but for the accuracy of his perception, how close to the bone his words cut. We can’t bear to hear the sound of truth’s knife scraping on hypocrisy’s bone. Only people who actually want to change the system dance to that music or want it to be heard.

Equally important, and part of the same neglect, is the intentional ignoring of the facts of his death. In my talk on Martha’s Vineyard I spoke about William Pepper’s book, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr. Pepper had been James Earl Ray’s lawyer. Ray was the man convicted of killing King. But both Pepper and the King family were convinced that Ray was innocent. The King family hired Pepper to represent them in a suit; they asked only $100.00 in damages to clear Ray’s name. Before the trial came to court in 1999, Ray had died in prison. The jury determined that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy involving the Memphis police, the Mafia, the FBI, and the Special Forces of the U.S. Army. Ray, the patsy, had left town before the shot was fired. Pepper had confessions from people involved from each of the organizations named. The verdict was barely mentioned in the U.S. media then and is not mentioned every year on the anniversary of his death. Why?

And now take a look at this:

America is steeped in conspiracy, and even more steeped in propaganda that discredits those who try to expose the conspiracies. Whether we’re talking about MLK, Jr., JFK, RFK, Iran-Contra, 9/11, or, most importantly, the status quo, anyone who works to uncover the truth is branded a “conspiracy nut” and discredited before any evidence has a fair hearing. The government/corporate/media version is THE VERSION. Anything else is illusory.

In fact, the cultural success of labeling investigative reporters and forensic historians, and, simply, anyone who tries to name reality, “conspiracy nuts” is perhaps the most successful conspiracy of our time. Well, not the most successful. That prize goes to the conspiracy to give corporations all the rights of individual persons under our Constitution. That conspiracy has codified and consolidated corporate power so that it controls our lives in almost every meaningful way. It controls the election funds of our candidates, and them once they are in office. It controls our major media including public broadcasting. It controls the content of our television programming. It controls how are tax dollars are spent making sure that the richest get the most welfare. It controls the laws, the courts, the prison system and the mind numbing propaganda that we are the greatest democracy on earth. It controls the values with which we raise our children. It controls our ability to dispense justice. It controls how we treat nature, how we deface our land with strip malls, and blow the tops off our mountains — a form of corporate free speech. It dictates our modes of transportation. It controls our inability to respond to true crises like climate change. It attempts to create a spiritual deficiency in every person that can be filled and healed only with stuff — and no stuff is ever enough.

I so agree with this. Now please. Please click through and read the whole article. It won't hurt you to read the parts I've excerpted over again. In fact, it will be a good thing.

I've been amazed for years now by people whom I respect in most ways but who are uncritically certain that the government's official story on everything is, without question, the correct one. If the government, media and corporate powers in colusion will devastate whole nations, if they will cause the deaths and horrible injuries of millions of innocent people, why are we so surprised that they will lie? And we know that they lie. Lies have been exposed over and over. And for some reason, the credulous mainstream seems to think, "Well, okay. They lied about those few things. But there're some lies even they won't tell." Oh really? What shred of evidence does anyone have for that?

Friday cat blogging!

Tux

Photo by Paul Rogers

Paul says the following:

Tux came to visit us for a week and took over Bugs' scratching pad. It took awhile for Bugs to see that he is now much bigger than Tux and then reclaimed his pad. This is Tux in his short moment of victory.

Remembering Diana

This morning I was up really early and happened to catch the CNN streaming video of the 10th Anniversary Memorial Service for Diana that was organized by her sons. I want to link you to this article: Diana memorial service: Speeches in full

And I want to share these words of hers as quoted by the Bishop of London:

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or TB but the feeling of being unwanted.

-- Diana, Princess of Wales

Adversity

My, my. Look at what I just found:

That was rough.... Thing to do now is try and forget it.... I guess I don't quite mean that. It's not a thing you can forget. Maybe not even a thing you want to forget.... Life's like that sometimes... Now and then for no good reason a man can figure out, life will just haul off and knock him flat, slam him agin' the ground so hard it seems like all his insides is busted. But it's not all like that. A lot of it's mighty fine, and you can't afford to waste the good part frettin' about the bad. That makes it all bad.... Sure, I know - sayin' it's one thing and feelin' it's another. But I'll tell you a trick that's sometimes a big help. When you start lookin' around for something good to take the place of the bad, as a general rule you can find it.

~From the movie Old Yeller

How true. How very, very true. Mind you, it took me long enough to learn it but you know what they say: It takes what it takes.

Work and self

Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn

How very true:

The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.

-- Dame Margot Fonteyn