Heat up the coffee and stay alert, it's minutes before midnight and the sea is running hard….
June 17, 2014 Leave a Comment
Not many recent posts here, for which I apologize. On a five week trip through middle Europe finding the time to post and frankly to keep up with events beyond my immediate horizons proved difficult. Let’s see, now that I’m back what the back will bear. The problem with travel is that a country name now becomes a place with people and histories and current events to which one feels closer, and wants to keep up with!
June 1, 2014 Leave a Comment
I’ve been traveling for about a month, thus the lack of posts here. In Croatia I’ve had some time to catch up with reading and writing [see All In One Boat for posts] and pursued a matter of much importance to me, and I hope to many others.
96% believe it’s a problem. The United States should be so lucky.
May 8, 2014 Leave a Comment
Not good.
…Vietnamese vessels confronted Chinese ships that were working to place an oil rig off Vietnam’s coast, and Vietnamese officials claimed that their ships had been rammed by the Chinese vessels three days earlier.
May 8, 2014 Leave a Comment
From the NY Times
During high tide one recent afternoon, Eliseo Toussaint looked out the window of his Alton Road laundromat and watched bottle-green saltwater seep from the gutters, fill the street and block the entrance to his front door.
“This never used to happen,” Mr. Toussaint said. “I’ve owned this place eight years, and now it’s all the time.”…Waters around southeast Florida could surge up to two feet by 2060.
BUT
….three prominent Florida Republicans — Senator Marco Rubio, former Gov. Jeb Bush and the current governor, Rick Scott — declined repeated requests to be interviewed on the subject.
April 28, 2014 Leave a Comment
Krugman, among many, is shaking his head in disbelief over the welfare cattleman stand-off. What ever happened to thinking things through — either by the speechifier or those who celebrated him?
He calls Cliven Bundy a “welfare queen of the purple sage,” which is unfair to queens, of course. If someone actually on welfare refused to do the work required to receive the subsidy, said person would be cut-off. Bundy says, hell no! The people’s land is his to graze on as he pleases! By what right or reason does he say? Reason of ancestry? My goodness, other ancestors have some claim on the same land if he wants to go down that road.
…treating Mr. Bundy as some kind of libertarian hero is, not to put too fine a point on it, crazy. Suppose he had been grazing his cattle on land belonging to one of his neighbors, and had refused to pay for the privilege. That would clearly have been theft — and brandishing guns when someone tried to stop the theft would have turned it into armed robbery. The fact that in this case the public owns the land shouldn’t make any difference.
March 30, 2014 Leave a Comment
Eagan has it absolutely right:
DON’T tell me, please, that nobody saw one of the deadliest landslides in American history coming. Say a prayer or send a donation for a community buried under a mountain of mud along a great river in Washington State, the Stillaguamish. Praise the emergency workers still trying to find a pulse of life in a disaster that left 25 people dead and 90 missing.
But enough with the denial, the willful ignorance of cause and effect, the shock that one of the prettiest valleys on the planet could turn in a flash from quiet respite in the foothills of the North Cascades to a gravelly graveyard.
And, as he says, the rain may have been an Act of God but the logging that changed forest to post-forest sponge was not
March 15, 2014 Leave a Comment
Google is seeking to black out portions of a transcript from a public court hearing that includes information on how it mines data from personal e-mails.
Google, fighting a lawsuit claiming its interception of e-mails amounts to illegal wiretapping, asked U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in a filing in San Jose on Thursday to redact “confidential” information from the transcript, without being more specific. The main revelation at the Feb. 27 hearing was the existence of “Content Onebox,” used by Google to intercept e-mails for tailored advertising and to build user profiles, Sean Rommel, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told the judge at the time.
March 1, 2014 Leave a Comment
In an abrupt change of direction, Richie Incognito, who infamously poured a stream of pornographic wishes and curses onto team mate Jonathan Martin of the Miami Dolphins, driving Martin into therapy for depression, has now checked himself into a facility — after smashing his own $295,000 Ferrari with a hammer.
He claims his mother and dad “understand” it. I for one bet that if his mother saw her son’s sick ranting she would be sick herself, and would have encouraged him to get help, even before the Ferrari incident.
[From earlier post: Here is the report. Jump to page 13 for a small sample of what happened. “Offensive language” doesn’t begin to cover it. This is extremist thuggery, under the cover of boys will be boys. ]
And more at Miami Herald
and ESPN
February 13, 2014 Leave a Comment
Following up on earlier post about the San Diego mayoral election:
Republican Councilman Kevin Faulconer defeated Democratic Councilman David Alvarez, 54.5% to 45.5%, to become the city’s next mayor, according to unofficial results tallied by the county registrar of voters.
The tally includes all absentee votes and votes from all 582 precincts. Unofficial turnout for the special election was 37%. LA Times
A couple of things worth mentioning: Faulkner is not one of your troglodyte Republicans, enraged by human behavior not his own. According to some of the commentors in the LA Times link (above), he supports marriage equality, is well thought of by the LGBT community, has marched in Gay Pride parades and supports reproductive rights. Secondly, the turn out was 37% — not what it would have been in a full election year. This doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have won had participation been fuller, but discouragement in the ranks of the opposition must have taken its toll. Thirdly, the most recent scandal, and the more salacious — Democrat Bob Filner’s persistent pushiness with women— is more remembered than the previous scandal — GOP fiscal malfeasance and corruption.
The important question now is, how Faulkner’s plans to renege on pension contracts, and to job out city services to low bidders will affect the city and its citizens. If streets can be kept clean at lower cost, and if the lower wages to accomplish that do not drive down city tax collection, throw more onto welfare or homeless rolls, folks will be happy. If on the other hand such private contracts devolve to cronyism, shoddy services and increased income inequality, second thoughts will surface.
January 24, 2014 Leave a Comment
A train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July, killing 47. Mathieu Belanger/Reuters
According to recommendations by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, oil carried on trains should be treated the same way as other dangerous materials like explosives or toxic materials. In those cases, rail carriers perform a more detailed security and safety analysis and look for alternative routes to avoid highly populated areas, iconic buildings, landmarks or environmentally sensitive regions.
Railroads should also be required to develop spill-response plans similar to those that are required from pipeline operators, the recommendations said. Those plans would help emergency workers and could help reduce the impact of any spill. In addition, the safety officials also recommended making sure that hazardous cargo was properly classified. Investigators looking into the Lac-Mégantic accident found that the crude oil in transit had been mislabeled into a less hazardous category.
It’s interesting to remember that Theodore Roosevelt’s reputation as a reforming Republican and trust buster was cemented with actions he took over Standard Oil’s cavalier and corrupt use of railroads and pipelines to transport oil — in the Midwest. It’s too much to hope that a similar wave of reform is in the offing but the trio of issues of fracking — rail transport — pipeline safety and growth are stirring the folks in the once radical state of Kansas. Even, I’ve heard in the never too radical state of Texas. Citizens of Azle, TX are not at all happy with the swarms of earthquakes that have hit their town in the last several months. The likely culprit? Fracking.
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