Arizona just had the big Schultz fires:

Add to this the floods that have been occurring around the world. The current flood in Pakistan has hit over 14 million people:

In April, a massive flood in Rio de Janeiro killed over 200 people:

Meanwhile, a massive part of the Petermann glacier in Greenland, a section four times the size of Manhattan Island, just broke off. Scientist say that if Greenland keeps shrinking at this rate, ocean levels will rise by 3 feet this century.

Oh, and remember this year’s “Snowmageddon” in Washington DC? And how these denial morons claimed it disproved “global warming”? Okay, it should have been called “Climate Change” from the beginning to take away such inane talking points but the truth is, the first six months of 2010 are the hottest on record.

And all of this has happened just 8 months into 2010, not even addressing all of the extreme weather last year or the years before.

As a reminder about how high and climbing our planet’s CO2 levels are:

As the GOP and corporate interests fiddle, the world burns and drowns. The greed-motivated deniers of climate change have a transparent agenda of, “The future is irrelevant to my getting more money today.” They seem to believe that the worst won’t have hit by the time they die so they don’t care, it’s their kids and grandkids’ problem. Family Values 2.0 for the GOP.

If the Earth continues to be swept by fires, floods, record snow, record heat, record droughts, oceans rising and disintegration of glaciers and other cooling forces on the planet…with extreme climates year round all across the world, how much will global crop yields and potable water decline? How might that increase the suffering of especially the poorest and how might it foster more wars between peoples and countries over resources?

There are many issues that are critical at this time in history but none of them matter in the long run if the Earth’s environment becomes too unstable or hostile.

We need to get addressing Climate Change back on the table in a big way. Of course, the Repubs will again be the Party of No when it comes to the preservation/protection of human civilization but they can’t be allowed to filibuster a livable planet.

Yesterday morning, I opened my copy of The Guardian to learn that various tranches and services of the British National Health Service were being outsourced to private providers and, leading the fray for tenders, was none other than our old friend, Humana – AKA Bill Frist Inc.

I was drinking my coffee at the time.  I didn’t have a Pepsi moment, and I didn’t vomit in my mouth. I simply smiled wryly, because I’d seen this coming.

The NHS has been an albatross around the neck of the Conservative Party in Britain since Maggie Thatcher chopped dental and optical services from its auspices back in the 1980s, and Cameron wanted to take this further. Last summer, there were stories abounding here of how the Tories intended on reforming the NHS, how it was working at a loss – things everyone had known as truisms for a long time, but things no one would think of addressing because, well, because the NHS here is the Third Rail of Third Rails.

And when the GOP started airing pejorative commercials in the US, railing against rationed medical treatments and long waiting lists, basically presenting the NHS and all like her in a pretty crass light, Cameron flip-flopped and came out fighting for the NHS. Well he should do, because his oldest child, who had recently died, was born with severe birth defects and had depended on the NHS for care and treatment. Then and there, Cameron vouchsafed the safety of the NHS under any potential Tory regime.

Well, the Tory regime is a reality – albeit, officially it’s a coalition with the Liberal Democrats; but more and more, instead of the pundits referring to a ConLib pact, they’re calling the coalition “ConDem” in a clever jeu des mots.

Because, under the guise of austerity moves, this government – cleverly caricatured by the resident Guardian cartoonist as consisting of Cameron as a louche and depraved version of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy wickedly enticing Nick Clegg, depicted as a rosy-cheeked and cheerfully ignorant version of Pinocchio, to come and play in his termite-infested sawmill – is systematically dismantling any and all entitlement schemes from the government.

This is Thatcherism Mach II: Trickledown – the Sequel.

When the coalition took control of things, once again Cameron reiterated that the NHS would suffer no cutback in services. Then, in the special emergency budget, Camerons Treasury wonk, George Osborne, an independently wealthy trust fund child who’s never worked a day in his life, blithely announced that all government departments must cut budgetary spending from between 25% and 40% – except the Defense Department, which would only suffer cutbacks of 10%. Of course.

And, of course, this would mean immense numbers of civil service and outsourced contractors being laid off prematurely – some permanently – in this age of recession.

Now, it’s not rocket science and I’m no economist, but saying that the NHS wouldn’t suffer any cutback in services, and then saying that that same department has to cut its budget by between 25 and 40% … doesn’t that kinda sorta mean that somewhere along the way, services are going to be cut? You can make as many paper-pushers redundant as you want in the NHS, it still stands to reason that x amount of nurses or doctors or some sort of specialist personnel won’t be being hired, that various forms of surgery/treatments/drug therapies won’t be implemented because of lack of funding.

As painful as it is for me to say it, and as many times as Progressives who don’t know have accused me of lying, the GOP’s commercials last summer did have a bare ring of truth about them; because here in the UK, in some areas, healthcare is rationed, there are waiting lists for surgeries and treatments. It’s simply a postcode lottery, and your quality of service reflects how well your health authority has managed its budget. My primary healthcare trust is a pretty good one, but a pregnant woman still has to have her labour monitered up to a certain point in one hospital, before she’s transferred, at breakneck speed, fourteen miles to another hospital in order, actually, to give birth.

The announcement that Humana were entrenching themselves in the tendering process confirmed suspicions I’d been having for the past few months, when every night on commercial television here, you see no less than five different advertisements for private health insurance, and when – out of the blue – commercials for Viagra have started to appear. (Contrary to life in the United States, prescription drug remedies aren’t advertised on television in the UK or in Europe.)

The NHS wouldn’t actually cut services to the public; instead, they would outsource them to private entities, probably for a fee. That would, at least, justify the increase in NHS contributions we’ve now had inflicted on us – yes, America, the NHS is NOT free; we pay an additional tax called the National Insurance to cover this – but the public was surreptitiously being edged and manipulated into buying into private health insurance schemes.

I’d love to give the clever ConDems the benefit of the doubt and say they’re gently edging us into a more French-like, hybrid system, but knowing Thatcher’s children as well as I do, I know this is nothing more or less than what it actually is … a CON. It’s incremental change that will inch along until one day someone will blink and realise that the good old NHS just ceased to exist somewhere in the first five-year fixed term (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) of Blueboy Cameron and Pinocchio Clegg.

The British public had been had. They had been, in local parlance, tango’d.

Last Sunday on Meet the Press (a venerable national treasure of a program which has managed to go from the sublime to the ridiculous in the two years since the late Tim Russert’s death), Robert Gibbs, the President’s Press Secretary sounded a codified clarion call to Democrats, grassroots, elected and electable: there was a very real possibility that the Democratic Party could lose control of the House.

NUDGE. NUDGE. WINK. WINK … HELLOOOOOOO?

Immediately, he said that, the cable news boys and girls went into meltdown, along with the Wicked Witch of the West’s lovechild, Arianna Huffington. Like Chicken Littles rolling about in orgasmic frenzy, they all screeched simultaneously that Gibbs admitted weakness, he admitted weakness, there he goes, I heard him, he said it … You get the picture, illustrated with a myriad of nameless, anonymous sources, all offering different insight, opinion and second guesses.

The Fox minions affected the smug smirk of “I told you so”, intimating that this was all the more reason straight-thinking people should vote Republican in November. The MSNBC contingent and Mother Huffington huffed and puffed and clicked their teeth, not saying, but clearly intimating that it really wasn’t worth the bother at all to vote for such losers.

People still able to think for themselves (and to read Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post) got the message loud and clear, coming – not coincidentally – on the back of the President’s campaign trips to Missouri and Nevada in support of Robin Carnahan and Harry Reid, and the message is this: Nobody’s guaranteed a win, and the Democrats aren’t entitled to even assume they’ll retain control of the House. Just like on a sports team, intimating that players have to fight for a place in the starting eleven, makes them keen, hungry to attain it. So, the Democrats hoping to retain their House seats should go on the offensive. So, the Democrats hoping to win a House seat should drive that offensive home. So the grassroots supporters should turn OFF the cable guys, stop listening to the rhetoric of a Keith Olbermann who doesn’t vote, stop reckoning that Bill Maher always speaks the truth when he admits Obama’s achieved more legislatively than FDR at this point, but in the next breath says he’s done nothing and endorses Romney, and stop listening to Arianna Huffington’s purrings and subtle ad hominem musings about Barack Obama, mindful of the fact that she is, was and always will be a Republican at heart. (Listen, the original Damascene conversion was hearsay handed down at best; at least hers, which took place on November 3, 2004, was, first and foremost, a money-making venture to fill a niche against Matt Drudge). Voters have to think for themselves, and listen to the candidates.

It’s nerve-wracking that Nancy Pelosi allowed herself to fall prey to her own hubris in reacting to this message personally. It’s as though she didn’t see the forest for the trees.

The ammunititon is all there for the Democrats – the GOP’s refutation of Wall Street Reform, their determination to repeal that and the healthcare reform, their embracement, through Congressman Barton’s apology, of BP and big oil, the overt ambition of the Queen Mother of snake oil salesmen, Darrell Issa, to bring articles of impeachment against Obama.

But most of all, the big bazoomba is this: the Republicans are running without any iota of an alternative plan to put this country back together. They are running on NO and that’s running on empty. They are running on lies and innuendo and hate and something one drop short of out-and-out racism. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the people. It’s the power they want.

John Boehner can sip from a styrofoam cup and demand to know, “Where are the jobs?” But what is his answer? As a politician who questions, he should be questioned too. If he’s as dissatisfied with the jobs situation, as an elected official, he must have some inkling of an alternative, workable plan. It would be too much to believe in a conspiracy of dunces, to believe that private enterprise is holding off hiring and potentially restoring the economy a smidgeon, just to ensure that there might be a GOP victory in the House after November, thus making it look like a trump card held up the collective Republican sleeve … would it? And yet, how many of us remember the coincidence of Iran releasing hostages days after the inauguration of that Republican saint, Ronald Reagan.

As the Brits would say, pull the other one. It’s got bells.

So bells ought to be ringing, and the Democrats and their supporters should come out swinging. We have ample enough ammunition at our disposal – and also enough to shoot ourselves in the foot.

We can’t be had like the Brits were had in May by their sinister, yet cackhanded coalition. The big tent of the Democratic Party has to buck up, suck up and sure as hell not fuck up … or risk being tango’d from the tanning bed of John Boehner.

The Earth’s head has got to be spinning. Humans are filling its seas with oil, chemicals, waste and massive islands of pollution, the process of mining natural gas is poisoning our ground water, rainforests and old growth trees are being razed at a dizzying speed, the ozone layer is being destroyed by a never ending spewing of CO².

The Earth has gotta be thinking about humanity, “Man, what total assholes!”

Perhaps we’ve been looking at the state of our environment in the totally wrong way.  We look at the damage done by the acquisition and usage of fossil fuels and conclude that what we need to do to solve this problem is seek renewable and less polluting sources of energy. Blocking the way for this though are the people who have profited from and been bought off by those who have profited from the plundering of the Earth.

Oil was around for millions of years, it’s existence  never harmed the Earth before. Oil, coal, natural gas, etc. are not the cause of our problems, it is the people mentioned above and their companies that are. We need two things, we need to move to non-polluting renewable fuels and we need to get these enemies of doing so out of the way.

So, my proposal is that we re-engineer the ethanol process so that we can use those humans who stand in the way of progress as the organic material from which ethanol is derived. We can call it, Soylent Green Power! Or maybe just People Power!

Think of how much energy could be converted from the average, obese pro-Republican! All those dimpled calories just bursting to get out! And those slimy oil company and Wall Street execs would be an energy bonanza! We could simultaneously solve the energy, corporate and population-related issues that are endangering the planet and if anyone complains, just ask them if they liked “The Matrix” because it’s kind of like that.

Want a Tiger in your tank? Let’s add celebrities who cheat on their wives to the list! And we could give the Tea Partiers an immediate way to shrink government, turn them from obnoxiously rude into valuable crude which would reduce the population in their communities and thus reduce the number of US Representatives there! It’s a win-win!

People could list on their Driver’s Licenses whether they wanted to donate their organs or the amount of fuel they’re converted into. Sorry Dr. Kervorkian but euthanasia could be conveniently performed at your local BP station, mourners attending a wake could receive an oil change and tune up with each service, driving away with a remembrance of their loved one every time they stepped on the gas.

Gas bags like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh could power fleets of buses in major cities for years. Take that socialism! That would be 100% American made fuel!

All of these enemies of progress and a life sustaining Earth could simply be told straight up, “Ask not what biofuels can do for you but what you can do for biofuels.”

After buying the old farmhouse at the end of March, I quickly went around to its back to look at what I had really purchased it for.  Because, although the house was very old and pretty in a vernacularly plain way, the property upon which the house sat was the real gem.  Sloping just this side of gentle as an expansive amphitheater of lawn down to the woods below, it swirled around outcroppings of gray rock and pistachio-colored lichen. It passed two or three ancient apple trees and went through a proscenium arch formed by opposing copses of enormous white paper birches; their tallest branches meeting high above the lawn’s center stage. It could have  called “Nature’s Gothic Doorway”.

As I took stock of my newly purchased out-of-doors I imagined how the old farm’s horse-drawn carts would travel upon the flat ribbon of trail that switch-backed midway across the slope. The trail now made a subtle snaking terrace of grass.

It was in contemplation of all this when I was met with large mossy rocks, boulders actually, and a distinct squish beneath my feet.  Bending down, I saw small  percolations of spring water rising to the lawn’s surface which then ran beneath my feet and across the descending lawn beyond, in broad sheets.  There were six or seven of them spread over a small distance, all converging down “stream” like a large ooze creating a fan of soggy lawn.  I could barely contain my excitement.  An onlooker may have seen my muted jump for joy.   I became instantly obsessed with visions of what my soggy lawn fan could become.

I impatiently rushed up to the kitchen and with a very large, handy serving spoon, I scooped out a few spoonfuls of ground releasing more water from its high table just beneath the grass .  The more I dug, the more water gushed out. My mind feverishly had its way with both spoon and ground as I  fantasized what must certainly be a torrent just below the surface.  I came up with a plan.  I’d merge all these springs into a stream that was to tumble, froth, and foam as it swept all its way down to the woods.  For that, I was going to need a shovel.

Trading in spoon for spade, I excavated around the springs .  As water emerged and descended the slope, I guided them by taking spadefuls of earth  and directed them to converge.  With each spring I had the same “dialogue”. In our dialogue, some of the springs did not like my bullying, domineering nature, rather, they stubbornly stayed submerged beneath thicker mud and bigger stones.  I relented, letting them have their way because I knew my plan was a good one and as long as I didn’t force the issue Nature would eventually agree with me in the end.  Nature just didn’t know that yet.  I knew it would take days and days of digging, sloshing, negotiating, arguing with , submitting to, but occasionally dominating the subterranean ocean I was sure I was now in charge of.

A stream was indeed there, sort of.  By now, it had all the water I could summon from its admittedly modest headwaters.  All the water it was ever to get all year because it was early Spring. My efforts produced a small but respectable brooklet. I was  pleased.  I ran the hundred yards or so up to the house into the kitchen and looked out the window toward my birch tree theater and the lawn’s new onstage star:  My stream.  At first I thought I actually saw it, but it turned out to be a rock.  I squinted wanting to believe my eye saw what was not really visible but what they wished was: A stream. Any stream.  I continued to scan and scout, and finally with the shift of the sun and its beginning to set,  I saw glimmers of backlit water.  So, it really was there.  I would just have to wait till the sun’s position in the sky was just so or resort to binoculars.  Neither option was good.  A revision of my plan was therefore needed.  WHY?  I wanted to see water, water, water!  I wanted to see  water from every room that overlooked the back yard and that meant nearly every room in the house.  So, my dream remained lofty as I realized my resources were more meager than I even admitted to myself.

Still, a vision is a vision and what does one replace a vision failed than with another vision?!  A new plan!  A pool!  So clever I thought.  So easily done.  I had already done the hard work and gotten the springs to obey me (with some compromise of course) making them form a single runnel (I could now admit my stream was no more than a largish runnel because I now had a  better dream, a more important vision).  All I’d have to do is dig something for the runnel to flow into and contain the water so it could reflect what was above.  For what is water really good for apart from drinking, if not for reflecting sky and trees around it?  In a matter of a day or two there it was.  It worked!  It was splendid!  Not only did it reward me with little ripples upon its surface, but those ripples could be seen from my kitchen window, the perch which acted as final judge of whether my vision was realized or not.  True my pool was small, only three feet by four and about eight inches deep.  But, it was shaped like an eye  which grew silver and then gold and occasionally hazel when the clouds allowed the sky to peek through.  I had an eye of water!  An eye of liquid mirroring a hovering birch branch or flying bird.  An eye in the landscape.  I rested.  My vision turned out to be an eye.

Spring continued.  New leaves on the birch added green to my eye while greater warmth stole water from it.  My eye was shrinking and shrinking fast.  It then dried up completely.  Yes, it would fill with  a hard rain, spill over even, only to cruelly return to a dark hollow socket. I was new here and Nature was not junior to my groping expertise at landscape design.   Evaporation, my unexpected foe, was now also joined by a retreating water table which absconded with my water, having its way with it deep below the surface.  I became jealous and grieved.  I knew I must win back the heart of my vision.  Scheming and plotting, I  knew full well I would resort to any trick to fool Nature into giving me what I felt was rightfully mine.   But I knew Nature had a vested interest and owned more than half of my venture’s shares so  I figured I’d better have Nature sitting with me at the water table during our next board meeting.

I figured I could  only enter the water table’s lair by digging deeper.  I could minimize water loss by making the basin wider, longer, and deeper, thereby  yielding a substantial volume of water to resist evaporation. Who knew? I might even unearth more springs! The summer was the time to dig, before the Winter ice and snow and Spring run  made digging and dredging necessary with back breaking labor.

I  invested in picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, pails and rope.  I dug into the gravel with the moist sand enticing me with what just laid below.  Occasionally, rain filled the bottom of my basin with a few inches of muddy water.  On one summer day, after such a rain, I saw a frog had come to investigate my work.  It was bobbing in the water looking directly at me.  I was charmed.  So charmed by an acknowledgment such as this and so grateful in fact, that I made a pact with the green wood frog (I also knew the rest of nature would be  listening).  I told the frog “I’m digging this for you, you know!”  The frog looked at me, impassively, not judging, just blankly appraising like frogs are wont to do. “That’s right. I promise you  a home”.  The frog stayed put, bobbing, while I dug the rest of the day filling buckets of earth and water and dumping them on the shore.  I took care not to accidentally evict the frog to whom I had just promised a home.

Now that froggie had come a-calling and since I promised him a home, my digging intensified.  I dug by moonlight, I dug in rain,  I dug when I cried, I dug while I sang. I’d fall down digging getting up just to fall into the mud again. I was called flat out crazy by some. A lunatic. A lunatic?  For digging under a full moon?  Well, I needed the moon’s opinion too!  Besides, it was so kind to illuminate my venture.

“Why don’t you just get somebody with a back hoe to dig it out for you?”.  A back hoe?  NO!  I’m the one having this conversation with my  soon-to-be-pond, not a man with some machine.  Not that I didn’t give the back hoe idea  a thought myself.  But I knew it would not do.

The winter returned, but that did not dissuade me from digging and dredging.  The water popped out of  the ground anew and trickled down the slope, once again letting me know where I should dig and where to surrender my piece of my vision to Nature’s will.  Furthermore, the water also cooperated by making my work easier.  Water helped me dig in the ice and snow as flowing water doesn’t freeze, so it melted and softened any ground it permeated. I could take out the ground in chunks. For that, I was often thankful and praised the water. The pool was now shaping up to be a large basin of mud and ice.  It was uglier than a cesspool.  Thinking the honeymoon might be over, I even started thinking of it as a cesspool.

One day, expecting the UPS man to arrive with a package, I thought I’d play a joke.  After I heard he’d arrived, I walked up to the house in my muddy work clothes, my hair and face caked with earth.  I greeted him and  told him not to mind my appearance.  That I was just in the middle of “cleaning the bathroom”.  I don’t know how he responded because by the time I finished my words laughing myself blind with hysterics, he was gone.  That’s what nature was doing to me.  Making me submit to uncontrollable giddiness and probably unwelcomed bathroom humor.

Because the emerging pond had become so ugly that Winter, come early Spring, I decided the pool was to be festooned with wild flower plants I was to start from seed.  But by that time the pool was not simply a pool anymore.  It had grown and began to take shape as bits of green emerged around it. It became more defined and rich.  It had become deep… five feet.  It was long…. twenty five feet and nearly as wide.  I stopped digging for a moment and looked.  It was actually becoming something and it kept on becoming something, a something I had been seeing only in my mind’s eye for a couple of years now.  I felt like I both knew it intimately yet was  detached and  astonished by it.  It was something so alien and wonderful.

I stopped digging for a few days allowing the silt to settle.  With the water clear and the emergent vegetation all around beginning to cloak the ground it was becoming  sort of magnificent to me.  I had channeled the excess run off from the pond making a small but effective cascade down a staircase of rocks.  It even made a sound.  I planted more flowers all around to give it a crowning glory.  I tidied up, I admired, I meditated, I was mesmerized.  I almost slept with it.

One late May afternoon,  when I could not think of anything more to do, I sat with my back against one of the mossy boulders under which so much of my spring emerged.  The sun was starting to make its descent and through the trees, light was hitting the water so as to reflect the ripples  like a screen upon the flat face of one of the giant stones.  I watched this display for a few moments when I noticed next to me under a marsh marigold blossom was a frog.  Its body postioned, once again, toward me head on.  It stared and ballooned its membranes signaling my work was done.  I told the frog “See?  I told you I would make a place for you to live”.  Satisfied now, I got up and began to ascend the lawn through the proscenium of birch, turning often to see what the pond looked like from as many angles and altitudes as I could.  The sky was blue,  rays of sun slipped through the chartreuse leaves.  There was a rich shadow giving a mysterious contrast to the land.  The air was soft, dry,  fragrant and clear.  I reluctantly bid adieu to my pond and entered the house.  I made my way to the kitchen where my husband was waiting.  I went to the sink and looked out from my perch of judgment.  There it was.  A miraculous tarn of clear mountain spring water peeking through “Nature’s Gothic Doorway.

Just then I caught sight of a large splash followed by waves which hit the shores.  It must have been some large frog I thought, maybe even a bull frog.  But through the birches I saw something entirely different.  There, floating and bobbing, was a duck.  By the looks of it a female.  I couldn’t speak.  Before I realized I couldn’t speak I saw another duck: A male.  To me, any male duck is a mallard as he was painted these most beautiful shades of caramel, red, purple iridescent rainbow and emerald green, and blue.  Too many colors!  All outlined in a bright white.  By this time the sheer adrenaline of seeing something that beautiful overtook me and broke my silence.

“Look!!”.
My husband came to the window and said:
“Oh, wow!  That is the most beautiful duck I’ve ever seen, I wonder what kind it is”.

“A mallard”.
“Oh no it’s not” he said.  “That is the most beautiful duck in the world” and since neither of us knew what kind of duck it was, I decided to identify it with the help of a bird book.  It took no time to identify it as a wood duck.  The first line of text describing it was: ”Considered by many to be the most beautiful duck in the world…”

Had I a vision of making a pond so that two  unknown birds would find it and swim, taking up courtship activities there every morning and evening for two weeks at the end of May, I never could have done it.    Nature made sure I knew it was pleased.  I was given the gift of a vision I could have never envisioned.

We are stardust, we are golden

we are billion year old carbon

and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden

- Jonie Mitchell, “Woodstock”

Ferrets are more determined than they are bright. Case in point being my own pet ferret, Rosie. Rosie explores nooks and crannies with the unrestrained zeal of a fanatic. Wikipedia tells me that ferrets have been domesticated (they are the domesticated version of the polecat) since perhaps the time of Socrates and Buddha, and all that breeding – for going down holes, for ferreting out pest rodents – has resulted in a lovable freak of nature that behaves nearly suicidally in its compulsion to know, KNOW!, what’s down that hole, or in that crevice! Even if that hole leads to a drop off of ten or more feet (that’s like a twenty story building to a ferret), and a fatal fall, the only thing that will stop a ferret is the loving, exasperated hand of its owner. We can’t understand ferrets in this regard; it’s something they “just gotta”.

Or perhaps we can understand them, and all too well at that. My thoughts are now linked with those of so many others as we contemplate the unspeakable tragedy that is unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. As the oil spews out from a mile below, it is staggering to consider how technology has been so horrifyingly misapplied in this instance. Explorers were able, through sophisticated devices, to discover that there is a vast reservoir of oil out there beyond sight of land. Engineers developed machinery that can dig through solid rock, another mile below the ocean floor, in order to get at that reservoir. Because we “just gotta” have that oil! Cruelly ironic that we have developed astounding technology in order to drill through bedrock, but have not developed applications to produce or harvest energy that doesn’t send the environment, our one and only home planet, down a tailspin of degradation. Humans, like ferrets, are more determined than they are bright.

Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. It turns out that that is a myth. The whole myth developed like a meme in reaction to some wildlife footage shot in the mid 1950s, and televised frequently thereafter, for a Disney-produced wildlife documentary. Multiple generations watched in horror, on their upholstered couches (and I was among them) as a mass desperation forced the pathetic critters to fling themselves out over a cliff, into the cold, cruel sea, where they swam a futile swim to exhaustion and a watery death. This was a culling process of nature, we were taught to believe; that as their population exploded beyond a certain point, instinct forced them into behavior that they would never otherwise consider, as if a switch had been thrown by Mother Nature. The footage itself, and how it was presented, was hokum. First of all, the “documentary” aspect of the scene that fused itself in our brains has been challenged. The animals we saw were herded, it is now alleged. The rush hour subway density of lemmings was staged in order to heighten their panic. Lemmings do behave radically when their population exceeds a certain quotient. They do fan out in all directions in search of new habitat. They do, if they encounter a body of water, jump in, in order to explore the land, and its food potential, on the other side. But lemmings are very good swimmers. More often that not, as in WAY more often than not, the majority of them reach the other side. Therefore, the fact that they were transported to an inhospitable coast by filmmakers is all the more ghastly. Those critters thought they had a good chance of crossing over, because in a natural situation, they would have. Alas, this all too convenient, and frequently used, metaphor for our own existential situation is forced and inaccurate. We do not have allies among our fellow animals (or at least if we do, it is not the misunderstood lemming) in plunging carelessly toward our own demise. We as a mammalian species are alone in engaging in obviously suicidal behavior, with the concomitant collateral side effect of taking billions of other life forms with us.

And there can be no mistake, this IS the direction we are heading. One of Einstein’s most famous quotes is that problems cannot be solved at the level of consciousness at which they were created, and yet many hasten to assure us that technology, for all the devastation it has wrought since the Industrial Revolution, is nevertheless the solution to the ills we face today. Apparently, according to this way of thinking, it is now incumbent upon our technology to transform itself into Superman, and rescue us from the death trap its Lex Luthor alter ego has placed us in. Uh….right.

Technology is not the answer. Nor is it the problem, per se, so much as it is a symptom. There is a sickness affecting humanity that threatens our very survival as a species. We have lost touch with our center, our very DNA, and are behaving as if we are not part of this earth any more. We base our way of life on a system that will stop working in less time than the duration between now and Shakespeare. It is utter madness, but we go about our lives as if it will all work out somehow. We are the true “lemmings”, and our divorce from our naturalness will not, and cannot possibly be, solved by forcing ourselves even deeper into the ouroboros that is the left hemisphere of our brain, there to extract ever newer technologies to serve as antidotes to the technologies that are being run with such destructive consequences in our modern civilization.

Our survival as a species has nothing to do with technological geekery or, as some technophiles have suggested, “heading out to the stars”. Imagine the audacity! We trash life on this planet, but hey, it’s okay, so long as we learn to cultivate our own moon, or the moons of Jupiter or wherever. The very fact that some would consider this to be a solution is indicative itself that something is really wrong with our current mindset. A species, a contributing member of the biosphere and completely dependent on it, deluding itself that it can pick up and move elsewhere if need be. The Sufis advise us to “be in the world but not of it”. Sound advice when its meaning relates to an individual striving for peace of mind. But for the human race as a collective, the admonition should be, “Be in the world and don’t forget for a moment that YOU ARE OF IT!” Ours has been a history of pulling ourselves out of the real Matrix, the impeccable miracle that is our planet’s propensity to, generously, host ecosystems based on the simplest and most brilliant of exchanges – oxygen for carbon dioxide, food for fertilizer, death for life – and placing ourselves in an unreal Matrix that weakens us fundamentally and threatens us existentially. And we must learn how to stop.

Surely Tokyo, where I live, is one of the most wasteful cities on the entire planet. The foods that are thrown away each day, the electricity used in the neon light signs and giant televisions advertising bubblegum pop music in front of the major train stations; the air conditioners blasting out from four million domiciles in the summer, raising the temperature two degrees (Celsius) higher than outside the city; the appliances and computers and cellphones that are pitched and replaced rather than repaired, etc.; taken together this would easily provide enough food and energy and sundries to supply a city of a million or more people each day. And yet, a mere hundred and fifty odd years ago, Tokyo, or as it was then called, Edo, was a very different place altogether. It was, as has been suggested in a book by novelist/historian Eisuke Ishikawa titled “The Edo Period had a Recycling Society”, the most environmentally efficient city on the face of the earth. The Japanese of Old Edo were not self consciously preserving their environment so much as they were subconsciously aware of themselves as part of the environment. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the commercial use of “night soil”, a lovely euphemism for human excrement, as a fertilizer. If you were to go back to Edo and stop by a roadside teahouse, you might meet a man who would proudly tell you, “I sell shit”. And why not be proud? While Europeans were risking plague at every turn, throwing their raw sewage out onto the street, the Japanese were living healthily and sanitarily, giving their produce back to the earth, so that it could continue to yield its produce for their use. This is the way of things, it is what Nature teaches us, and yet it is something that we have forgotten. Instead, we eat chemically fertilized foods, laced with pesticides and denuded of nutrients, and dump (literally) that into our water supply, of all places! We have night soil for brains, it seems!

We have to, metaphorically if not literally, return to the wilds and become creatures of the forest again. In a forest, absolutely nothing is wasted. Not air, not sunlight, not a drop of rain or sweat, not a carcass or a pellet of shit. A forest can run, continually rejuvenating itself, for millennia, once a system is set in place. In a place called Gaviotas, in Colombia, a group of scientists and environmental engineers figured out a way to put a rainforest back where the desert had encroached, and not by simply planting trees. They built it up from the ground floor, beginning with the small plants that would have originally grown there, and moving forward incrementally. Almost miraculously, the birds began to appear as if from nowhere. And the lizards, and the rodents. Over time, the forest was back, and all its creatures were working in harmony. Gaia knew what to do, and just needed a nudge.

I am not idealizing forest life as if it is some sort of trans-species hippiefest waiting to welcome us back. In any given clump of dirt in a forest that you may happen to pick up with your bare hand, an atrocity is occuring. The little things of this planet dispense with each other in ways so gruesome and cruel that they would blush the faces of the most depraved Medieval torturer. It can easily be surmised that the very terrors of the natural world have impacted our psychology and seeded our destructiveness. We needed to learn to use our brains for protection, for offense and defense. We would not have survived had we not learned to attack, fight for our very lives, take without asking. It’s part of who we are and it was bequeathed to us by Gaia. We are her legacy. Nevertheless, that is not an excuse to stay on our present course as it leads down a road toward extinction. We can use our minds to imagine, and create, a new Eden. Our children can be the butterflies and birds that spread the seeds and nectar, through their vigor and curiosity. Our senior citizens can be the massive sycamores that hold the very life of the forest in their hearts and minds. Every one of us must discover our place in this new “human forest” before we can reintegrate ourselves with the broader ecosystem both on our terms and its. Because what we are really wasting more than anything is our minds, and what we are destroying is our humanness. We have to remember what that means first, to be human. If we want to be sane again.

It has been hailed as America’s most sensible solution for breaking our dependency on foreign oil and reducing the potential environmental destruction oil drilling can cause, such as the ongoing catastrophe in the gulf.

It has been marketed and promoted by such trustworthy sources as T. Boone Pickens, oil industy megabillionaire and former financier of the fraudulent Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Natural gas will save America. And hey, it’s natural!

Of course, so is benzine and many other cancer-causing chemicals which are now polluting our nation’s water supply like an epidemic because of the process used to get natural gas out of the ground.

The lie is that natural gas is better for the environment than oil. The truth is that while the exhaust from vehicles and generators that use processed natural gas is less polluting than oil, extracting natural gas from the Earth is a horribly destructive process to our environment.

The trade off is, our drinkable water for fuel. Does this make any sense?

It is in fact a kind of shell game, all that is promoted to the public is the final product, cleaner burning fuel. What is hidden is that the destruction to the environment to get that fuel.

There is a remarkable documentary now airing on HBO titled “Gasland” that keenly exposes this deceit and the fraud of “natural” gas.  Here is the trailer for this eye opening film:

What is at the root of the catastrophe that is natural gas production is the method of extraction that is called Hydraulic Fracturing (referred to as “Frac” or “Fracking”).  In essence, it consists of high pressure drilling of holes which create many fractures in the Earth’s crust then forcing huge amounts water bearing over 596 toxic chemicals in to free the trapped natural gas and force it to the surface.

What this is accomplishing is destroying ground water, rivers and lakes across America. If it continues at the current pace, we may have plenty of cleaner burning fuel for our cars and reduce some of our dependency on foreign oil but we may instead become dependent on importing our drinking water from foreign countries. And there is no alternative to pursue for our reliance on water.

The process of mining and refining natural gas actually produces an enormous amount of hydrocarbons and toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.

In Gasland, filmmaker Josh Fox documents how severely polluted the water table is becoming. In the trailer above, you will witness one of many cases presented in the film of people lighting their tap water on fire.  River water bubbles with natural gas and lights on fire. Water wells at people’s homes have exploded. People who have lived on ground water have become ill and have died. Many now have to cart in huge amounts of water on a weekly basis to fill plastic cisterns on their property so they can have water to drink, do laundry and water plants. Animals and vegetation have become poisoned and killed. Cattle, chickens, etc. drinking contaminated water enter the nation’s food supply.

A few pieces of information from Gasland that are interesting:

• The 2005 Energy Policy Act (nicknamed “The Haliburton Loophole”), drafted via Dick Cheney and his Energy Task Force that included the CEOs of most major oil and gas corporations in the U.S., exempted oil and gas companies from The Safe Water Drinking Act, The Clean Air Act and The Clean Water Act. They are permitted by law to put any chemicals they unilaterally choose to use, no matter how toxic or cancer causing, into the Earth and water that people drink and bathe in. The passage of this bill unleashed a stampede of companies to drill and the frenzy continues today.

• Despite the conclusion in 2004 by the EPA that Hydraulic Fracturing was causing water contamination, the industry-stocked panel that the Bush Admin put in place rejected the report, simultaneously acknowledging that this process was putting toxic, cancer-causing chemicals into water but declaring that there was no reason to investigate and it wasn’t a risk. Five of the seven members on Bush’s panels appeared to have had conflicts of interest due to their involvement in the oil and gas industries and would appear to benefit from the EPA not pursuing this matter.

• Each well, from drilling to the first flooding with Frac water (water that is contaminated with hundreds of toxic chemicals), requires 1,150 truck trips, often to distant, remote areas.  Out of all of the 400 to 600 tankers of Frac water that is injected in the drill holes, only about half of that amount comes back up and is removed…to open pits that allow for the Frac water to seep into the ground and some even have evaporation sprayers that spray Frac water up to evaporate into the air we breathe.  More problematic, the refining process for natural gas evaporates unwanted Frac moisture out of the gas and also releases it into the atmosphere. Ozone and pollutants in the air around such communities where such facilities are located are elevated and in some cases, far above EPA acceptable levels.

• There are approximately 450,000 natural gas wells around the U.S. at this time. For the Frac process, each well initially requires between 1 million and 7 million gallons of water. Wells are re-Fracked up to 18 times, each time another 1 million to 7 million gallons of water are used. The math looks like this, 450,000 wells times 18 times 1-7 million gallons is in the ballpark of 40 trillion gallons of water…all of it polluted with the 596 chemicals and undrinkable in the future (how long can this be sustained without severely and permanently depleting our nation’s potable water supply?).

• The Natural Gas industry is in the process of drilling and pursuing hundreds of thousands of more Frac wells across the country. The northern portion of the watershed area that supplies New York and the Delaware river basin, the largest unfiltered water supply in the world which supplies 15.6 million people with water (in NY, DE, PA and NJ),  is slated for natural gas drilling.  Around 50,000 gas wells are expected to be drilled in this area if drilling is not prevented (no NG wells have yet been drilled).

As with the Gulf state Governors who howl about the moritorium on deep sea oil drilling because of how it impacts the short term economy, this small minded ignorance of killing the golden goose to get its golden eggs today is reflective of the battle over a transition to clean energy.

The only way to make a transition is to reduce one element while increasing others. The problem here is that many states and corporations make a lot of money off of fossil fuels and will fight a real transition with everything they’ve got. Bobby Jindal, Mary Landrieu, Haley Barbour and other oil-company-owned pols in the Gulf will mindlessly campaign for more oil drilling even if it destroys their fishing industry and their wetlands…which will make another hurricane’s destruction of New Orleans more likely.  So, in order to save the Gulf, we must make destroying it more likely.

And the Natural Gas industry is smiling glibly at offering natural gas as a transitional fuel to get us to renewable energy but the more money they make and the bigger portion of the energy marketplace they hold is only a testament to the battle they will mount against ever moving off of natural gas to renewable energy.

The industry push for natural gas is the equivilent of a crack dealer offering their drug to help you get off of that nasty meth. It is not an answer, it is more quicksand for any pursuit of renewable and nonpolluting fuels. Unfortunately, many progressives (including me) and Dem politicians all the way up to Pres. Obama have been convinced along the way by the propaganda of natural gas and have supported it in the past.

As it was a wake up call for me, I hope policy makers and the President see “Gasland” and recognize that the terribly polluting process of obtaining natural gas is not outweighed by its cleaner burning properties and conversion should not proceed any further. At some point, there must be a somewhat bumpy change of course offroad from the Fossil Fuels Highway to the Renewable Fuels Highway. There will always be those that protest at the loss of jobs and business that fossil fuels “fuels” but that loss must occur at some time if we are to end our dependency on it.

Progress is painful but it is necessary. Avoiding pain in the short term at the cost of sacrificing necessary progress in the long term is short sighted and in the big picture, self-destructive.

After all, what jobs will left in the oil and natural gas industries anyway if there’s not enough water left for Americans to drink?

Happy Fathers Day, Dad.

The day is here.  What memories do you have of this day?  Do you remember a kindness that you and your father shared?  A secret you cherished, one your siblings did not know?  An ice cream cone he bought you?  Playing catch?  Your Dad meeting your date?  The hug he gave you. Teaching you to swim, ride a bike, read a book…….?

I was my Father’s caregiver the last couple months of his life and I think it was the closest we ever were in our lives.  Since that time , Fathers Day means more to me now than when he was alive.

Share a thought with us or just post him your wishes.

I have many memories I could share but just to start his day off, here’s a one of the good ones.

Perhaps the most lasting influence my Father had on me was his involvement in the Union (first picket line at and the Democratic Party (first election at 9), and a “need” to help improve  working peoples lives.  But on to a story….

This story has to do with a gift my Father gave to me.  A gift I am quite sure he never knew he gave me.
My dads work required him to be on call all the time, we never knew when he would be working and when he would be off.  When I was in high school I was involved in sports, one of them being “Track & Field”, one of his H.S. activities.
On certain days my dad would get off work, and instead of going home (or to the bar) he would stop by either my practice or a meet.  I would be occupied in the practice, look up and just happen to see him there talking to my coaches, or if it was a meet, catch a glimpse of him cheering me on, there on top of the fourth corner.  Nothing was ever said later and I never told him how much it meant to me.  Such a little thing.  But it felt as if he was saying “I care about you- I’m proud of my son.”  I have thought about that for many years and it always gives me a warm feeling. Just that little gesture.  Unknown to anyone but me.

I know fathers Day is highly controversial and I apologize to anyone I may have offended.

I hates the yankee nation and everything they do.
I hates the declaration of independence, too.
I hates the glorious union, just dripping with our blood.
I hates the striped banner, and fit it all I could

I road with Robert E. Lee,
For three years, thereabout.
Got wounded in four places,
And I starved at point lookout.
I caught the rheumatism
Campin’ in the snow.
But I killed a chance of Yankees
And I’d like to kill some more.

3 hundred thousand Yankees
Is stiff in southern dust.
We got 3 hundred thousand
Before they conquered us
They died of Southern Fever
And southern steel and shot
I wish there were 3 million
Instead of what we got.
I can’t pick up my musket
And fight ‘um down no more
But I ain’t gonna love ‘um
Now that is certain sure
And I don’t want no pardon
For what I was and am
I won’t be reconstructed
And I do not give a damn

Oh, I’m a good old rebel,
Now that’s just what I am,
And for this yankee nation,
I do not give a damn.
I’m glad I fought agin ‘er,
I only wish we won.
I ain’t asked any pardon for anything I’ve done.

As many times as I’ve heard/read those lyrics, I still get a chill when I consider the tremendous bitterness that went into their composition.

Did the Confederacy that this “Good Ole Rebel” fought for gradually fade away and disappear between 1865 and the end of the 19th century? Or has the South risen again? Are we living in an era of nascent  Neo-Confederacy? Are Southern cultural values finding their way into the national psyche?

The first question might be: what are Southern Cultural values?

A number of studies would include the following traits:

A high value placed upon personal honor and a willingness to use violence to defend it.

Religious conservatism.

Strictly defined hierarchy in family life, with males in the dominant or leadership position, and women and children subservient.

Distrust of formal governmental institutions and law enforcement.

High value placed on gun ownership and the ability to use weapons.

High value placed on property ownership and respect for the rights of property owners.

Mistrust of “outsiders” and hostility toward racial, ethnic, religious and cultural groups considered “inferior.”

Are we experiencing the 21st century “Southernization” of American culture? If the Republican Party has its way, the answer would be “yes.”

Matthew Iglesias, after noting how many Southern whites believe that Barack Obama was not born in this country (a considerably higher percentage than white in other regions) comments:

“I think Republicans have basically given up on the battle of trying to win more Hispanics over to their side. Which leaves them with the medium-term objective of trying to get non-southern whites to act more like southern whites.”

When we take a look at the characteristics of Southern culture noted above, how many of them sound familiar compared  to the Tea Party “values” of 2010?

Do people like Joe Wilson, who felt safe in shouting “You lie!” to an African-American president, or Joe Barton, who abjectly apologized to the CEO of BP for the “shakedown” he had allegedly “suffered” at the hands of Barack Obama — both from Southern states — represent the attitude of Southern states toward our current government?

A Louisiana State University study on the roots of Southern violence makes a connection between religion and violence in the South:

“The religious beliefs of the Scots-Irish immigrants also played a role in theirhigh rates of violence. They were the predecessors of the fundamentalist Christians of today, they were considered the first radicals in America (Webb 2005) Some
research suggests the favorable attitudes toward violence may have its historical
and contemporary roots in the fundamentalist, Protestant religious culture of the
South. It has been argued this religious world view lends support to the
legitimization of both formal violence, e.g., capital punishment, and informal justice
done by the hands of the populace due to low levels of formal social control agencies
that, though perhaps illegal, has, or at least had historically, a source of
legitimization in the religious culture (Borg 1977; Ellison , Burr, and McCall 2003;
Ellison and Sherkat 1993).”

The Republican Party, the religious right and the Tea Party, whether they overtly claim it or not, are increasingly finding their base in the South and their roots in Southern culture. And they’re in an evangelical mood these days.

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President Obama is addressing the nation tonight from the Oval Office at 5:00 pm PDT, 8:00 pm EDT.

We will be adding the live video to this post as soon as the address begins, you can watch it here and comment in real time below.

Pres. Obama’s speech is expected to address the BP oil spill and moving forward with a national energy policy.

Hope to see you then!