SeniorJunior

The War Over Christmas The rightest of rightwing memes is "the war on Christmas," allegedly being waged by the godless left. Maybe that's why I just can't whip up the spirit. There must be a war going on somewhere around this sacred holiday, 'cause something has almost done in my Christmas spirit.  This is serious.  That lovely warm glow that has always accompanied the season and fogged out some of the distress of everything from shopping to watching the news has abandoned me this year.  First time ever. Maybe it is the news itself.  Sixty million folks displaced by war, famine, terror and the like. That would be about the population of England or France, or Italy. When I think of all those folks, the kids, the grandparents, the moms and dads, so totally out of luck, it makes a trip to Target seem, I don't know, un-spiritual. And politics! Great heavens, what craziness abounds from the Republicans. They have become untethered from facts, scienc

Forbes Magazine was Just a Billionaire's Fan Boy …But I still thought they had some decent financial reporting, some telling investigations and a tendency to be tough when it counted.  That was their "image" in my wee brain for years.  I thought Steve Forbes was a rightist dweeb, but I didn't hold that against his magazine. (source) Then they hired "Smiley" James Taylor (here supporting Rick Perry) (senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute*)  to write blatant denialist pieces on climate change.  He's a slick trickster who writes pseudo-science with the total confidence of a con man selling you a pyramid scheme.  Here's an example: He reports on a NOAA study from 2013 about the relationship between extreme weather and global warming, and headlines it: NOAA Report Destroys Global Warming Link To Extreme Weather …cherry picking such paragraphs as this:  " Adding additional emphasis to the NOAA publication’s fin

The World is Having an Extinction Event But We Live too Fast to See It. Permian Extinction - A quarter billion years ago.  75% of all Animal, 95% of all sea creatures and plants wiped out.  Took perhaps a two to three million years to happen.  The "big finish," the eruption of the Siberian Flats. [source] Even this  humongous catastrophe took maybe a million years to finish the kill off. Dinosaur Extinction - 66 million years ago.  All the dinos plus about half of plant life and sea creatures wiped out .  Took perhaps half a million years to happen.  The monster rock that hit Earth (Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico), and some others, plus the Deccan Flats eruptions in India were the villains.                                                     [source]       [source] We Probably Wouldn't Have Noticed.  If there happened to be humans around (there weren't) in the middle of either of those giant extinctions, things would be chang

What's Wrong With Us? Why can't we bring political pressure to bear where it can improve our health?  Why can't BPA, with lots of proven nasty effects on our bodies, simply be eliminated?  Who's pulling what strings? See if this looks like it needs regulating: [[See the whole piece HERE ]] [[See my posts on BPA since 2007 here .]] YOU CAN GET A CRAZY AMOUNT OF BPA FROM  CASH REGISTER RECEIPTS BY  PAUL RAUBER Schematic diagram of the transmission of BPA from thermal receipts to your skin and the food you eat.  Ever since  early exposes  showed the endocrine-system-disrupting effects of the industrial chemical BPA, manufacturers have discontinued its use in water bottles, baby bottle, and binkies. (That's why everyone drinks their water out of metal containers these days.) In estimating human exposure to the gender-bending chemical these days, federal regulators assume that the main source of exposure to BPA is from food

Check out the new "book" website . (That's areluctantgod.blogspot.com) for a summary.  Find out if it's your kind of fiction. And if it is, you can get your very own here . Go on, give it a shot. scooter

Lots of Infrastructure Recommendations This morning's (July 22, 2014) the Washington Post has another thought piece on one of my fav topics, When the Robots Do All the Work, What Will We Humans Do?  Check it out here. Naturally I responded with: One point: Infrastructure work, even with the best computer guided gear, still takes many folks. Bury all power and communications lines, upgrade every sewage system to recycle water, rebuild the roads for robocars/trucks, build the space beanstalks, thin and control burn the forests, pipe water from floods to drylands and recharge the aquifers, train a corps of nutrition teachers, make school more compelling - fun even… Oh there's plenty of work to do with our hands and our minds. BUT I go a lot further in me new book A Reluctant god.  Look for 99% of the population living in "The Dream Game," where work is fun, learning is inevitable, creativity is its own reward, and warfare saves our welfare (butts). C

HERE WE GO! I'm sure you have been wondering whether I died or took vows of silence or forgot how to type… being that this is the first post on this venerable blog since last September. But NO… I've been finishing up a sci-fi novel.  To wit: It's an optimistic look at humanity's future.  OK, I do start by wiping out 99.999% of the population, but after that, it's all uphill. NOTES:  When the final cover comes out of the hash, the "G" will be "g," not to get all theological. The book is available on Amazon.com and Smashwords.com It has its own blog, of course.  The first post is the story of this cover.  Give it a shot here .

MESSING US UP BIG TIME OK, I'm not all that happy with the Republicans in general. BUT this 'shut down the government' crap because you can't get enough Repubs elected to change the laws the lawful way, is too much. One little, insignificant anecdote:  Dorothy and I have been planning our vacation to the Grand Canyon north rim for over a year.  We arrive on the 1st of October.  If the government shuts down we will be shut out, lose our deposits and be deeply disappointed and angry. We are white, kind of old and once in a while we've voted for a Republican. Until they get their heads screwed back on right, no more.

"I've Earned The Right To Be Angry" That was the title of an op-ed in my local daily paper, The Albuquerque Journal.  Back in November, 2012 a guy quoted a bunch of Fox News positions, claimed they were his and got all self-righteous about it.  Part of his babble was that he was an older white guy.  I decided not to reproduce his op-ed here because I don't want that kind of slop on my oh-so-neat blog.  But you can get the drift by my responses. WELL, the honor of  OWGs was on the line, so naturally I whipped out a rebuttal and sent it to the Journal.  A week went by and I was told my letter would be published.  Lo and behold, seven letters from Angry Olds were published, a whole page Op-Ed titled, "Mad as Heck, But at Whom?"  I and six others, not all white or guys BTW, piled on this Fox-ite.  I have to say I was proud of my demographic.  Here's my letter:  (click it for readable size) I hope you don't need a magnifying

Dang! I've expressed great enthusiasm for desalination as one of the technological end runs we might make on water fickle Mother Nature. YaleGlobal Online (yep, published by Yale) takes a pretty hard anti-desalination position with: Desalination is not a solution to freshwater shortages being reported by many dry regions around the globe, including many sections of the United States. Adam Scow of Food & Water Watch argues that conservation of water is the better strategy and notes that “the technology is being pushed by private interests looking to profit from the sale of water while sticking the public with its high financial and environmental costs.” Desalination has high energy costs, and the leftover salt is a pollutant. He explains that about 80 percent of California’s water, for example, is used for agriculture purposes. Farmers could plan for efficient water use by using more care in selecting crops appropriate for their region’s climate and ecology. The United S

Every Little Bit.. . So I got so upset with the banks after the BushCrash that m'Wife and I moved our money from Wells Fargo and BofA to a local credit union (spoiler alert: another post on co-ops of all kinds is coming).  I was so miffed at the banks I even adopted "banksters" as a new perjorative. Granted, my bottom-99% funds will not even tickle the banksters, much less give them a stabbing pain. BUT... every little bit one can do just might do some good.  Every time we repair-reuse-repurpose and recycle we do a tiny little bit. So good old Steven Pearlstein   writes in the Washington Post, "Occupy Wall Street? Just defund it." And it's all about moving your money from wall street to co-ops.  My credit union - yours too, if you have one - is a co-op.  Owned by its customers, as opposed to Wall Street FatCats. And there are all sorts of co-ops out there, just look at this and this . We shop at grower-owned Farmers' Markets, too. O

The Red/Blue States Map Now Makes Sense You know I'm a Good-Graphics-Make-Good-Communications nut ? This is NOT a good graphic.... ...because it looks like Red States win! And we all know what really happened. So map genius  Mark Newman , using programs he co-invented modified each state to reflect how many electoral College votes it has to come up with this wonder.... Lotsa votes = bigger state on the map. Voila!   Now you see why the blue states called the election. There are lots of other great maps of this ilk on Dr. Newman's site .  Check it out.  Then ask your favorite TV news source why you haven't seen this kind of graphic.