Weekly Reads From Common Dreams 9/10/11
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Weekly Reads From Common Dreams
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Sarah Palin Hovers In Mid Air Unannounced And Unnoticed In Iowa Half Marathon

Sarah Palin Flying, Running or Hovering Unannounced And Unnoticed In Iowa Click on Image to enlarge.
Greta Van What’sHerName ran the photo at left on her blog on Sunday morning.
The Huffington Post reported:
Sarah Palin ran a half-marathon after giving a speech at a Tea Party rally in Iowa on September 4.
Palin ran unannounced in the “Jump Right in and Run” half-marathon sponsored by Storm Lake Running Club. She registered for the race under her maiden name, Sarah Heath, and listed her hometown as Des Moines.
News of Palin’s participation in the race broke after Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren posted a photo to her website of a runner she claimed was the former vice presidential candidate.
I’m no expert on Photoshop but this looks suspicious to me. Not only does she appear to be effortlessly flying along, or just suspended in mid air she’s the only one not running on the course… in the street, it’s that maverick thing again, I guess.
She does have an interesting running style though, if there were a broom involved she’d be in danger of being mistaken for Christine O’Donnell.
Greta doesn’t explain where she got the photo and there’s no credit or I’d run it here.
Sarah Palin Runs Iowa Half-Marathon Unannounced Over Labor Day Weekend.
Good Morning Irene
It’s 4AM on Saturday and I’m up early. When you cant go back to sleep in the 21st century you turn the on computer, then the news.
According to NOAA, and verified visually on Google Earth, Hurricane Irene is centered at 33.7N and 77.5W which puts it in position to munch Beaufort, North Carolina just a degree or so north and west at 4°43′15″N 76°39′9″W according to Wikipedia.
A degree of latitude is about 69 miles and NOAA tells me that the Lady is moving north at 12 knots which means landfall in a few hours.
As you can see this is a monster of a storm stretching up the east coast from the Carolinas to New York and beyond.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: Good Morning Irene
Fire, Water, Wind or Sunshine, a Watt is a Watt
I sometimes think that many of us have a deep seated mania that causes us to believe that for a substance to be an effective source of energy it must be something that can be burned. Not only must it be combustible, the substance must be hard to get. This manic belief requires that the energy source must be searched out and dug up or clawed from the earth at great trouble and expense.
What’s more, to be a credible source the fuel must be retrieved from the bowels of the earth or the deepest depths of the ocean in an odyssey by intrepid explorers with fedoras and a five day growth of manly stubble, all else is considered to be alchemy.
“We know that renewable energies like solar and wind at this point in time are not capable of addressing the world’s total energy demands.” The Remarkable Energy Potential of Methane Hydrate from Clean Technica by Glenn Meyers
Not to single out a fellow writer here at Clean Technica, I’ve heard and read similar statements many times but the fact that they grossly distort the reality of the potential energy sources all around us does make them nettlesome. Actually we “know” no such thing.
I don’t know where this belief comes from or how it got started, maybe it’s primal. It could be an archetype, lodged early in the human mind, left over from the terror, fascination, even trauma, when some guy with a five day stubble first dragged a burning branch from a lightning struck tree back to the cave for a mastodon roast.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: Fire, Water, Wind or Sunshine, a Watt is a Watt
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WTF: What’s This Fracking?

Hydraulic Fracturing of Shale Gas Deposits in US / Source: Energy Information Administration Click for larger image
Reading” Looking for Gas in All the Wrong Places” a piece in Monday’s NYT by Stanley Fish I found a calm, collected, depiction of an equally calm and collected town meeting in Andes, N.Y. where the subject on the agenda was “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing of shale gas deposits.
Calm, rational, and civil aren’t normally descriptive of a gathering when fracking, the subject that is bitterly dividing communities from North Texas and Colorado to Pennsylvania, and from West Virginia to New York is under discussion. Fracking is a national and local hot potato.
This contentious issue has the oil and gas industries, development interests, and cash strapped landowners looking to make some quick lease money, on one side, facing down environmentalists, agricultural, tourism interests and other landowners, looking to protect the nature of their land and water from what they see as polluters and wastrels, on the other.
In the middle is water, the use and abuse of billions of gallons of it and the potential pollution, and ruination of billions, trillions… or some impossibly larger quantity, more.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: WTF: What’s This Fracking?
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More Drilling In The Gulf, The Death Of A Thousand Cuts

Map of the northern Gulf of Mexico showing the nearly 4,000 active oil and gas platforms. NOAA Photo
There are about 4000 active oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, a fact I bumped into while researching an article on BP’s Macondo field Deepwater Horizon disaster last year.
In addition, there are more than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells that dot the Gulf, actually it’s much more like a blanket.
This morning I ran across a map and a video by tsinn at The Sword Press in which he plots these wells by time and position as well as location as in the NOAA map above.
Watching the brief video is a bit ominous as the rigs spread east and west along the Gulf coast and retreat farther from shore and into ever deeper water over a time span from 1942 through 2005.
I had oil on my mind over coffee this morning because the first item in my Email was a NYT article “U.S. to Offer Oil Leases in the Gulf.” Times writer John M. Broder reveals the administration’s new lease plans and he stopped me cold with this statement:
The lease offering includes parcels from nine to 250 miles offshore and in water depths from 16 to nearly 11,000 feet. The Interior Department estimates that the tract could produce 222 million to 423 million barrels of oil and 1.49 trillion to 2.65 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. “ U.S. to Offer Oil Leases in the Gulf.” John M. Broder NYT
Please note that many of these wells will be more than five times as far from the coast and in more than twice the water depth as BPs colossal failure of last year, greatly increasing the technological problems and challenges while making recovery and mitigation of a spill vastly more problematic.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: More Drilling In The Gulf, The Death Of A Thousand Cuts
You Don’t Need A Weatherman To Demonstrate The Obvious
The guy is standing on the beach, back to the driving rain, hoodie and trousers flapping crazily, shouting into a microphone, like Ahab standing in the bow of the Pequod screaming at the fates.
They cut to a woman reporter at another location wearing the obligatory hoodie and speaking more reservedly into a microphone, slightly sheltered on the boardwalk above the seawall but sill being pelted by stinging rain and buffeted by the cyclonic wind.
And so it goes, hour after hour, on every cable news outlet, in every storm, the weather critters offer their graphic demonstrations of wind or rain, if it’s snowing they’ll seize a handful and hold it up for the camera as if it was an alien substance found in a meteorite.
In a flood they don waders and plunge in to their thighs to prove beyond doubt that the water is really stacking up out there. A good flood or snowstorm in a city calls for boat rentals to truly show that the water is deep enough to… row a boat or ski rentals to demonstrate… ad nauseum.
If you watch for awhile or you’ll notice that from channel to channel they all perform the same schtick, the dialog is numbingly similar and I’m sure that there are specialized courses of study for weather critters, Severe Weather Coverage 101, or Advanced Weather Drama 201, Theory of Disaster Props and Costumes and so on.
Meanwhile the camera cuts back and forth between our hardy hero braving the elements and the anchor person seated cozily at the anchor desk, with a sheaf of anchor papers and a mouthful of stupid anchor questions to fill another five minutes between Enzyte or Geico commercials.
Big Coal: Making Mountains Even Better
Coal provides jobs. The jobs are dirty, they produce a product that’s harmful to the planet, hazardous to the health and welfare of the workers and their neighbors, but… hey, they’re jobs.
Besides, some of those jobs involve improving our mountains. They blow the tops off them, and haul away the coal, leaving flat tops, suitable for landing pads, parking lots, Nascar racing, or Appalachian soccer matches.
Where once was a vista of jagged, irregular, disorganized peaks we now have a neat, orderly range of mountains that looks like a platoon of Bob Haldemans.
They also leave behind some pretty ugly mountains.
CNN ran a documentary Sunday night by anchor Soledad O’Brien titled “Battle for Blair Mountain” which should have carried a warning that it was an advertisement for Big Coal.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: Big Coal: Making Mountains Even Better
Fukushima To Do List: Take a Walk, Lunch, 100k Chest X Rays, Pick Up Kids
What we are getting is alarming and according to an Al Jazeera story yesterday Japanese scientists and doctors are sounding the alarm.
There is a spreading feeling that the government and TEPCO are under-reporting the severity of the situation, the radiation levels and the extent of the affected areas.
There are a number statements that jump off the page in the Al Jazeera piece:
“… the total amount of radiation released over a period of more than five months from the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster is the equivalent to more than 29 “Hiroshima-type atomic bombs” and the amount of uranium released “is equivalent to 20″ Hiroshima bombs.” Dr Tatsuhiko Kodama, a professor at the Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology and Director of the University of Tokyo’s Radioisotope Centre quoted in Al Jazeera.
Or this one:
When on August 2nd readings of 10,000 millisieverts (10 sieverts) of radioactivity per hour were detected at the plant, Japan’s science ministry said that level of dose is fatal to humans, and is enough radiation to kill a person within one to two weeks after the exposure. 10,000 millisieverts (mSv) is the equivalent of approximately 100,000 chest x-rays.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: Fukushima To Do List: Take a Walk, Lunch,100k Chest X Rays, Pick Up Kids
Evacuate Fukushima
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An Ocean of Oil, A Toxic Brew
Another oil spill, the worst in the North Sea in a decade according to several media sources. I didn’t bother to call Donald Trump when news of Shell’s North Sea oil spill broke on this side of the pond. He’s not taking my calls.
I would have asked him if he found it ironic that a week after publicly berating Scotland for wanting to site a wind farm off the coast of his golf development near Aberdeen, Shell dumped more than 55,000 gallons of oil into the North Sea out beyond where the wind farm would stand.
Big oil seems to work night and day adding layers of tarnish to their negative image.
I don’t know how expensive or difficult it is to properly maintain oil fields and pipelines in a safe and responsible fashion, I’m not in the oil business. The difficulties must be extreme and the costs prohibitive though, because some of the largest, wealthiest and most powerful corporations on earth are unable to keep this poisonous beast it its cage.
Every few weeks bring news of another escape, another ugly load of toxic crude oil in some greater or lesser quantity is added to the already overtaxed, over fished and slowly over heating ocean on which all of the life on earth ultimately depends.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: An Ocean of Oil, A Toxic Brew
An Ill Wind From Aberdeen Blows Donald Trump No Good
Donald Trump is upset with the possibility of the construction of a wind farm off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland where he is in the process of building another of his splashy monuments to ostentation.
“When I saw this piece of land I was overwhelmed by the imposing dunes and rugged Aberdeenshire coastline. I knew that this was the perfect site for Trump International – Scotland. I have never seen such an unspoiled and dramatic sea side landscape and the location makes it perfect for our development. Our site is close to two of the world’s most famous courses and is just 15 minutes by car from Aberdeen Airport.” Donald Trump from the Trump International National Golf Links Website
I’ve seen unspoiled coastlines from the Carolinas to California’s Big Sur, from Mendocino to Puerto Rico. I’ve walked pristine beaches in Mexico and Vietnam but nowhere while strolling the clean wet sand of a peaceful tide line or hiking the powdery dunes, enjoying an onshore breeze, have I ever had a lustful vision of development, of neon and glitz, and billboards with my name in six foot letters.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: An Ill Wind From Aberdeen Blows Donald Trump No Good
A Legacy: The Eternal Nuclear Dump
I got an email this morning inviting me to host a screening for a documentary film titled “Into Eternity.” It’s the story of Onkalo which means hiding place or cave, a nuclear waste repository being constructed in Finland, The film delves into the ethical questions of storing nuclear waste for centuries and the building of a facility to last 100,000 years when no structure that we know of has lasted a tenth that long.
I’ve been against the continued development of nuclear power and weapons since grade school when they used to send us to the basement to prepare for a Russian nuclear attack by crouching in the boiler room, covering our heads with our arms and kissing our little butts goodbye.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: A Legacy: The Eternal Nuclear Dump
Tripoli: Rebels Stand Ready to Welcome Advance
Rebels Advance, Surround Tripoli, as Qaddafi Totters
By Juan Cole / Informed Comment
The long slow slog of the Libyan struggle to throw off the rule of Muammar Qaddafi, accelerated this weekend, possibly decisively, with rebel forces making major advances. Tripoli was said to be ready to embrace the rebel youth when they came into the capital.
Free Libya forces made substantial advances over the weekend, coming up from Zintan to take much of Zawiya on the coast, with the help of the majority in the city that opposes dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Zawiya was the site of among the first and biggest anti-Qaddafi demonstrations, and was brutally repressed with tank and artillery fire on unarmed noncombatants by Qaddafi brigades. Since March it has been under secret police rule, but that was thrown off jointly by locals and by their allies from the Western Mountain region to the south.
Read more: Rebels Advance, Surround Tripoli, as Qaddafi Totters | Informed Comment.
Discovering Solar: It’s a Radiometer, I Wanted a Magic 8-Ball
When I was a kid my parents were big on educational toys. Most Christmases, in addition to a new bike or other barely affordable extravagance, I could expect to find, surrounded by a detestable pile of new socks and underwear, an erector set or a chemistry set, a microscope perhaps and a couple of dime store curiosities like the device pictured at left.
I don’t remember much about that long ago Christmas morning when I unwrapped the Crookes radiometer. I do remember that I was fascinated by it and still am today. It sat on my desk or window sill for a year or so until shattered by one of my brothers. Which brother was the culprit has never been determined but I’m still on the case.
At the time it was a quiet, inexpensive, solitary treat for a geeky 8 year old. To watch the gizmo respond when I switched a desk lamp on and off or spin wildly when I placed it in direct sunlight and wondered about light and heat, atoms and the mysterious forces that surrounded me was better than TV. These were the days of the Indian Chief test pattern, there wasn’t much on.
Thinking about it this morning I couldn’t remember what the gadget was called and had to search for solar powered toys and solar vanes until I discovered with amusement that the Crookes radiometer has its own Wikipedia page.
Originally posted at Clean Technica: Discovering Solar: It’s a Radiometer, I Wanted a Magic 8-Ball (more…)
Children of the Corn Back Bachmann in Iowa
In what is being described as a total repudiation of sanity, the red eyed followers of “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” have selected Michelle Bachmann as Corn Queen.
The corn is pleased.
Weekly Reads from Common Dreams
- John Atcheson: The Beast Is Starved: Welcome to the Next Great Depression
- Linda McQuaig: Tycoons Laughing All the Way to the Bank
- Sarah Churchwell: The Willful Ignorance That Has Dragged the US to the Brink
- Ralph Nader: ‘Retreat, Surrender, Can He at Least Plead?
- Amy Goodman: War, Debt and the President
- Robert Reich: Ransom Paid
- Matthew Norman: The Unmaking of a President
- Jim Rigby: Five Scriptures You Won’t Hear at Rick Perry’s Prayer Event
- Nick Turse: A Secret War in 120 Countries: The Pentagon’s New Power Elite
- Ray McGovern: Obama Blows a Judas Kiss to the Poor
Class Warfare, Coming Soon to a Community Near You
Honduran Police Burn Community to the Ground
Homes, churches, schools, and crops all destroyed as the post-coup government continues to side with wealthy plantation owners over the country’s organized farmers.
Watch this video from: The Real News and know this: If these hideous crimes against working people can be committed in Honduras by police and military units likely trained and supported by US dollars they can be committed here.
Economic collapse, debt crisis, gas and food prices through the roof, no jobs, terror in the streets, endless wars and the destruction of all societal safety mechanisms? These are the gifts being offered by the ever expanding modern industrial society.
But there’s more. After the capitalist class has gambled away the wealth of the country and squandered another generation of our youth in their wars for resources and empire they will force you to pay the bill.
They’re working on it now, night and day wrangling over the republican manufactured debt crisis, they are preparing the complete destruction of the middle class and the total privatization of all government functions where everything will be paid for at the company store at several times the price.
You will be called on to tighten your belt, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, to make a greater sacrifice for your country except that your country will have become a wholly owned subsidiary of a consortium of stateless and soulless corporations.
They will come for your land, your homes, your meager wealth, using the tools, the police, even the army of the government that they bought, co-opted and finally seized. And finally having taken everything they want they will simply dispose of you, disappeared, dead, it doesn’t matter, as long as you are gone and they have room to ride their horses and cruise their yachts.
They will keep those who are acceptably docile to work in their mills and fields and to guard the remainder who show signs of resistance in their camps and prisons and maintain continued docility among a slave labor class.
Watch the video, prepare for the future.
More on the rape of Rigores and related stories:
Weekly Reading List From Common Dreams
You can’t go wrong with any of these:
- Tim DeChristopher: I Do Not Want Mercy, I Want You To Join Me
- Jeff Cohen: Obama is NOT “Caving” to Corporate Interests
- Paul Buchheit: The Question Conservatives Can’t Answer
- Paul Krugman: ‘Centrism’: The Cult That Is Destroying America
- Christopher Brauchli: The Tax Burden of the Very Rich
- Robert Reich: Why Washington is About to Make the Jobs Crisis Worse
- Robert Scheer: Debt Madness Was Always About Killing Social Security
- Holly Sklar: CEOs to Workers: More for Me, Less for You
- Glenn Greenwald: On Not Freaking Out With Fear: An Un-American Response to Oslo
- Tom Tresser: None Dare Call it Privatization
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