Laura Hamburg: Mendocino Access TV Grand Opening

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From LAURA HAMBURG

I am on the Board of Directors for our new community access television station. I would love for you to give us your feedback on what kind of community programming you’d like to see — or even better come with your own ideas for your own show. Sky’s the limit on what you might do — all things Mendo, localization, food safety, politics, arts, music, children, theater, sports, gardening, farming & ranching, cooking, marijuana, interviews, on-location programming and more…

Come to our Grand Opening this Friday — November 12, 5 pm at the Brush Street station. Food, drinks and frolic.

What Do You Want To See? What do you want to create? A weekly, monthly show, a once-in-a-while film project? All content must be either educational, community-oriented, or government. Other than that, there is NO CENSORSHIP.

Programming is seen on Comcast stations 3, 64 & 65. And content is shared with 1,500 other public access television stations nationwide.

A $30 yearly membership fee buys you the ability to check-out and borrow the station’s state-of-the art cameras to film wherever you like, use the studio and the studio equipment for production and editing, and hands-on-training with our wonderful Director of Programming Jason Killilea.
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Thom Hartmann: Rebooting the American Dream – 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

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From THOM HARTMANN

Truthout is proud to bring you an exclusive series from America’s No. 1 progressive radio host, Thom Hartmann. Starting today, we’ll be publishing weekly installments of Hartmann’s acclaimed new book, “Rebooting the American Dream: 11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country.” We invite Truthout readers to join us over the next 12 weeks as, chapter by chapter, we explore these groundbreaking ideas for national transformation. We begin today with the book’s introduction.
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I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power. ~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, September 28, 1820

On April 14, 1789, George Washington was out walking through the fields at Mount Vernon, his home in Virginia, when Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress, showed up on horseback. Thomson had a letter for Washington from the president pro tempore of the new, constitutionally created United States Senate, telling Washington that he’d just been elected president and the inauguration was set for April 30 in the nation’s capital, New York City.

Why Republicans are So Intent on Killing Health Care Reform

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From ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE

It’s not just about expanded care. It’s about proving our government can be a force for the common good.

[Michael Moore has long ago proven the lies that conservatives and tea partiers will tell to kill even the feeble new health care laws we have. We need to stand tall and stop these big lie, sicko bastards in their tracks. -DS]

Why are John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell so intent on stopping health care reform from ever taking hold? For the same reason that Republicans and the corporate Right spent more than $200 million in the last year to demonize health care in swing Congressional districts. It wasn’t just about trying to stop the bill from becoming law or taking over Congress. It is because health reform, if it takes hold, will create a bond between the American people and government, just as Social Security and Medicare have done. Democrats, and all those who believe that government has a positive place in our lives, should remember how much is at stake as Republicans and corporate elites try to use their electoral victory to dismantle the new health care law.

My enjoyment of the MLB playoffs last month was interrupted by ads run by Karl Rove’s Crossroads front group against upstate New York Rep. Scott Murphy, who was defeated last Tuesday. Rove’s ads rained accusations on Murphy, including the charge of a “government takeover of health care.” Some might have thought that once the public option was removed from the health care legislation, Republicans couldn’t make that charge. But it was never tied to the public option or any other specific reform. Republicans and their allies, following the advice of message guru Frank Luntz, were going to call

The end of cheap oil will be the end of globalization

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From JEFF RUBIN
The Oil Drum
Excerpted

One of the keynote speakers at the recent ASPO-USA conference was Jeff Rubin, former Chief Economist with CIBC World Market. Rubin talked about why he believes high oil prices caused the recent recession. He also talked about how high oil prices are likely to vastly reduce globalization. He views this as a positive situation, because he expects this will change supply curves in such a way as to make American-made products more competitive. He believes that we will find our new smaller world much more livable and sustainable.

Every major recession in the post-war period has oil’s fingerprints all over it. The 1973 first oil shock led to what was then the deepest post-war recession, at the time. The second OPEC oil shock led to no less than two recessions: 1979 and 1982. And then when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and left half of its oil fields on fire, and oil spiked to the then unheard-of price of $40 barrel, lo and behold, the industrialized world again fell into recession.

Gee, I wonder what happened to oil prices before this recession. It seems to me that oil prices went from about $30 barrel, at the beginning of 2004, to almost $150 barrel by 2008. Even in real terms, that is, inflation-adjusted, that price increase was over double the price increase of either the first or the second OPEC oil shock. If they had led to devastating recessions, why would not the biggest oil shock of them all, be the obvious culprit for what has been the deepest recession to date?…

I will tell you where I think oil prices are going. Even in this most anemic of economic recoveries, we are going to see triple digit oil prices. We are not going to see triple digit oil prices in 10 to 15 years. And it is certainly not clear to me that the global economy is

Book Review: ‘Death Of The Liberal Class’ by Chris Hedges

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From NPR

From organizing workers to preventing war to making the economy more green, journalist Chris Hedges argues that, for decades, liberals have surrendered the good fights to corporations and ruling powers.

In his new book, Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges slams five specific groups and institutions — the Democratic Party, churches, unions, the media and academia — for failing Americans and allowing for the creation of a “permanent underclass.”

Hedges says that, for motives ranging from self-preservation to careerism, the “liberal establishment” purged radicals from its own ranks and, as a result, lost its checks on capitalism and corporate power.

“For millions of Americans, including the 15 million unemployed Americans,” Hedges tells NPR’S Neal Conan, “the suffering is becoming acute.”

He sites a recent trip to Camden, N.J., per capita the poorest city in the nation, as an example.

“When you get up and see the human cost of what this has done — these foreclosures, these bank repossessions, the fact that one in eight Americans and one in four children depend on food stamps to survive,”

FDR Sanity: Time to Try Government as Employer of Last Resort

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From ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE

[If you really wanna piss off your right wing friends, this one will send them over the moon! -DS]

In the wake of the highest unemployment rate in 25 years, the Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. Marshall Auerback calls for government to step in as employer of last resort.

At 10.2%, unemployment is now at its highest level since 1983. Nearly 16 million people can’t find jobs even, though we are constantly being told that the worst recession since the Great Depression has officially ended. Yet instead of trying to revive the productive economy, most of the Obama Administration’s recovery efforts still remain focused on cardio-shock treatment for Wall Street. The President still seems curiously hamstrung by his Herbert Hoover-like devotion to fiscal rectitude: he wants to spend but not add “one dime to the deficit,” as he announced at his Congressional address on health care in September. He does this even though deficits are a natural consequence of slowing economic growth, falling tax revenues and higher social welfare payments.

To all of the “Chicken Littles” (including the president), who fret about “excessive” government spending, we would simply point out that it is far better to deploy government spending in a way that reduces unemployment instead of settling for having it rise as a consequence of this spending.

Another Jim Kunstler Classic: Pre Post Mortem

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From JIM KUNSTLER

The poetry of dynamic forces does not lend itself to easy explication. Thought exercise: Imagine the vector of a Chevy Trailblazer and a CSX coal train of four 3000-horsepower diesel engines hauling 88 loaded hopper cars four miles north of Chugwater, Wyoming. The Chevy driver left his meth lab, say, fourteen minutes earlier after piping up and doing three tequila shots. The lead engineer on the coal train, a sturdy fellow, five-feet-ten-inches and 270 pounds, having finished his supper of double deluxe nachos (with two meats and extra cheese) is entering a less than blissful realm of myocardial infarction. Meanwhile, a meteor the size of a basketball has passed into the troposphere on a trajectory to strike the planet Earth at precisely the point where the CSX line crosses state road no. 44. That there would be a snapshot of your US political economy.

Of course, lying and doubletalk don’t help none, either. Such as the widespread falsehood that a “recovery” to the consumer credit nirvana and rising house prices of yesteryear is underway (Krugman, Friedman, et al). Or that a program called quantitative easing represents anything more than a national check-kiting scheme ramping up so many zeros that the goddess of infinity herself would run shrieking from the scene in embarrassment.

I saw a black swan in the botanical garden at Melbourne a week or so ago and it reminded me most poetically of Mr. Taleb’s proposition that nobody really knows what is going on in this republic. And so, appropriately, we held an election in which many candidates who know nothing found themselves…
Full article here
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Voters: Forget Politics. Jobs, Please!

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From MOTHER JONES

The most widely accepted narrative to emerge from the 2010 midterm elections, in which Democrats took a “shellacking” and lost the most congressional seats since World War II, was this: Sick of liberal overreach, voters—especially independents—shifted their favor to the right, choosing Republican candidates in huge numbers.

Not so, according to a new exit poll by the firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. The firm’s findings, released Friday, show that voters weren’t necessarily allying themselves with the GOP, but rather were voicing their disapproval with Washington as a whole, and especially with the federal government’s inability to restart America’s economic engine. To wit, voters polled gave equally poor favorability ratings to both parties as well as the tea party, the poll found. Twenty-six percent of voters said their vote was a message to “both parties,” while 20 percent said it was a rebuke of Obama and 15 percent said it was a rebuke of congressional Democrats. Voters’ chief complaint was “too much bickering in Washington”—a charge directed at both parties.

What matters most to voters isn’t political nit-picking or Washington drama but the economy, plain and simple. As pollster Stan Greenberg, a former Clinton White House staffer, put it, “While this clearly was a blow…to the president and Democrats for failing to fix the economy, there’s very little indication it was an affirmation of conservative ideology and agenda. In fact, we were rather surprised in many ways at the fact that the voters, in large numbers, are still looking for larger answers to an economy that’s not working for them in a situation that they find for the country very worrisome.”

Grant Awarded to Defend Pesticides Use on Food Crops

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From SOURCEWATCH
Via Mother Jones

The Alliance for Food and Farming acts as a front group for the fruit and vegetable industry, claiming the safety of numerous pesticides.^[1] According to its website, the group “was formed in 1989 and currently has a membership of approximately 50 agricultural groups representing a wide range of organizations including commodity boards, major farm groups and individual grower/shippers.” ^[2] It was registered as a non-profit in 1997 and does not disclose its member organizations. In July 2010, the Alliance for Food and Farming held a webinar and released a paper aiming to “debunk” the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list of the most pesticide-laden fruits and vegetables that should be purchased as organic whenever possible.

In September 2010, the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) announced a grant of $180,000 to the Alliance for Food and Farming for a project titled “Correcting Misconceptions about Pesticide Residues.”^[3] The CDFA press release describes the project as follows:

“The project seeks to correct the misconception that some fresh produce items contain excessive amounts of pesticide residues. Claims by activist groups about unsafe levels of pesticides have been widely reported in the media for many years, but have largely gone uncontested. Continued media coverage of this misleading information is damaging to producers of California specialty crops and may also have a negative impact on public health. Utilizing sound science backed by a team of nutrition and toxicological experts, the Alliance for Food and Farming will seek to provide the media, the public and various target audiences

It’s the end of the world as we’ve known it since WWII

From FABIOUS MAXIMUS
Via The Oil Drum

Summary:  A status report about the end of the post-WWII world.  The great recession has accelerated the process, revealing its weaknesses and showing the people of the rapidly growing emerging nations that they have outgrown it.  The US is almost its lone defender, a futile effort wasting time and resources that could be spent adjusting to the new world being born.

The post-WWII era slowly winds down, slowly but noisily.  It consists so far of two sets of interrelated dynamics.  First, a reversion to the mean of history:  the center of economic power returns to the East, ending a few hundred year long aberration.

• The economic and political regimes of the developed nations (US, Japan, Europe) are failing under pressure of aging demographics and their accumulated public policy errors.
• Growth in the Emerging Nations (EM’s) is accelerating as they adopt modern social and technological patterns.

Second, the foundations of the post-WWII’s geopolitical and financial regimes are washing away:

• western leadership, with the US and Russia as hegemonic powers,
• US dollar as the reserve currency,
• free trade, and
• (since 1970) free capital flows between nations.

How long will the transition take?

Large transitions take one or even two generations. The long peace (1815-1914) was the greatest period of peace and prosperity in recorded history.  

Surface Area Required To Power The World With Solar Panels Alone

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Click on Post Title To Enlarge

Original Map here
Thanks to Ron Epstein

[The hard-to-read map says: These 19 contiguous areas show roughly what would be a reasonable responsibility for various parts of the world. They would be further divided many times, the more the better to reach a diversified infrastructure that localizes use as much as possible... -DS]
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Bill Maher: There’s a difference between a mad man, and a madman!

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From BILL MAHER
[Transcribed for the dial-ups...oops, video pulled off the internet Sunday, so now transcribed for everyone...  - DS]

New rule: If you’re going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you may as well go ahead and make it about something. It seems if you really wanted to come down on the side of sanity and reason, you’d side with the sane and reasonable, and not try to pretend that the insanity is equally distributed in both parties.

Keith Olbermann is right when he says he’s not equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts, the other one is very close to playing with his poop (prolonged laughter and applause).

And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balances sake… that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism.

There’s a difference between a mad man, and a madman!

Now, getting over 200,00 people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement… it gave me hope. And what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size as the Glenn Beck crowd on the mall in August. (applause)… although it weighed the same. (prolonged laughter and applause).

But the message of the rally as I heard it was that if the media would just quit giving voice to crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all non-partisan and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side…

Book Review: “The Witch of Hebron” by James Kunstler

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From AMANDA KOVATTANA
Energy Bulletin

Having stated publicly that he is not anti-feminist as many concluded from his first post apocalyptic novel, World Made By Hand, Kunstler attempts to redeem himself with the title character. The Witch of Hebron is a delectable goddess of a woman who survives living alone through the grace of various psychic powers and the healing of men with a good lay. Armed thus, she appears to have an edge in a world peopled with robbers and filled with frequent violence.

I also greeted, like old friends, the white flight sensibilities of the community of middle aged men who peopled his first novel. The most “colorful” characters being the ridiculously archaic religious order of white men from the South fleeing the race riots, but that is not mentioned again and we are safe for now.

He begins the novel by fleshing out the psychic talents of the porcine queen bee spiritual leader of the religious order, though this does take away a bit of the mystery. And despite his having decreed that dogs are rare in a post apocalyptic world (because there would be no more canned dog food), he introduces quite a healthy dog and a boy. The boy sets the plot in motion due to the dog’s death (by horse stomping).

As we follow along we realize that this boy is everything to the book. And in this regard, Kunstler wins me over by giving the boy such capabilities as have gone missing in the last decades of overcautious parenting. The boy has been apprenticing with his doctor dad since he was 8 and now at 11, he shows a good deal of confidence and success in doctoring at every opportunity as he sets off across the countryside.

“Whatever” happend to real friends

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From L.A. TIMES
Excerpts

Everywhere you look on TV, there are crowds of friends and extended families all together all the time. What does it say about viewers?

Facebook, in fact, only underscores how much traditional friendship — friendship in which you meet, talk and share — has become an anachronism and how much being “friended” is an ironic term… It is Facebook with hundreds of “friends” but without any actual contact with any of them, only the virtual contact of watching… But what none of these theories of television has noticed is that TV has learned how to compensate for the increasing alienation it seems to induce. And it compensates not by letting us kill time with “friends” on screen but by providing us with those nonstop fantasies of friendship, which clearly give us a vicarious pleasure…

One feels a little churlish pointing out how phony most of this intimacy is. After all, these shows, even one as observant as “Modern Family,” aren’t about realism. They aren’t about the genuine emotional underpinnings of friendship or family, and they certainly aren’t about the rough course that almost every relationship, be it with a friend or family member, takes — the inevitable squabbles, the sometimes long and even permanent ruptures, the obtuseness, the selfishness, the reprioritization, the expectations of reciprocity, the drifting apart, the agonizing sense of loneliness even within the flock. These shows are pure wish fulfillment. They offer us friends and family at one’s beck and call but without any of the hassles. It is friendship as we want it to be.

Authoritarian Pathocrats and the Hard-Core Base of Fox News

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From Sott.net
Thanks to Don Sanderson

Perhaps the most important question of our time why, throughout human history, have despicable characters repeatedly risen to the pinnacles of power. The 20th Century alone witnessed an estimated 140 million war deaths and another 16 million from genocide. Mass starvation kills millions in an era when there is plenty enough food to feed the world. And not coincidentally, in the world today 40% of the world’s wealth is held in the hands of 1% of its inhabitants, while the bottom 50% owns only 1% of the world’s wealth. That means that the top 1% owns 40 times more than half the world’s population. There are of course numerous reasons for this sorry state of affairs. But certainly the tremendous wealth and power disparity in the world, along with the abuse of that power by so many who have the most of it explains a great deal. Why have so many despicable characters throughout history acquired the ability to inflict so much suffering on the rest of humanity?

I have read two books in particular that provide much insight into this issue: The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer (This link is to a free electronic version of Altemeyer’s whole book); and, Political Ponerology – A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes by Andrew M. Lobaczewski. Both books talk about much the same process, but Altemeyer approaches it from the individual psychological perspective, whereas Lobaczewski approaches it more from the societal level. Both books were recommended to me by fellow DUer Larry Ogg.

Bob Altemeyer is a retired psychology professor who spent most of his life researching authoritarianism. Lobaczewski was a Polish psychiatrist and one of several scientists

Todd Walton: Sport

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From TODD WALTON
UnderTheTable
Mendocino

“If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.” Thich Nhat Hanh

My maternal grandfather, Myron “Casey” Weinstein, went to the University of Michigan in 1918 on an athletic scholarship to wrestle and play baseball. Casey was the backup catcher behind the great Ernie Vick, and proudly recited this historic tidbit even after Alzheimer’s had robbed him of virtually every other memory. My paternal great grandfather, Charles Walton, was a world champion roller skater in the days when skates had steel wheels. His world’s records for sprints and long distances stood for decades after steel skates were things of the distant past.

Even so, my parents were horrified to discover they had given birth to a son, yours truly, who shortly after learning to walk wanted to do little else but play ball. My father was a non-athlete and openly contemptuous of men who played or followed sports. My mother was fond of saying that only boys who weren’t smart enough to do anything else became athletes. I knew this was nonsense because I was one of the smartest guys in my class (judging by the number of silver stars after my name on the class chart) and I adored sports. In fact, the smartest guys I knew, the best guys, were crazy about sports. Kickball, dodge ball, four-square, tetherball, baseball, football, basketball. If a ball was involved, sign me up. I liked bows and arrows and spears, too, but I was most enamored of balls. In an earlier epoch, I would have been a warrior and a hunter.

What is local?

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From SUSTAINABLE TABLE

With the explosion of interest in local food, consumers now have more choices of products, labels, and ways to shop, so, many people are left wondering where to start. Food choices can be overwhelming, and changing where and how we shop can be stressful. On the other hand, the benefits of buying local can be great…

What exactly is local food?
Talk of local food is everywhere. But what does it mean? How local is local? Local is shorthand for an idea that doesn’t have a firm definition. Unlike organic standards, which entail specific legal definitions, inspection processes, and labels, local means different things to different people, depending on where they live, how long their growing season is, and what products they are looking for.

Practically speaking, local food production can be thought of in concentric circles that start with growing food at home. The next ring out might be food grown in our immediate community – then state, region, and country. For some parts of the year or for some products that thrive in the local climate, it may be possible to buy closer to home. At other times, or for less common products, an expanded reach may be required.

People who value local as their primary food criterion are sometimes referred to as locavores. The term “locavore” was coined by Jessica Prentice from the San Francisco Bay Area for World Environment Day 2005 to describe and promote the practice of eating a diet consisting of food harvested from within an area most commonly bound by a 100 mile radius. With such excitement and momentum building in the local food movement, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose locavore as its word of the year in 2007.

One easy way to start buying local is to choose one product to focus on. Produce also offers a good introduction

Tea Party? Ain’t nothing populist about it…

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From JIM HIGHTOWER
Truthout
Thanks to Mari Rodin

[Progressive base loses faith: This Dylan Ratigan clip with Glenn Greenwald is highly recommended... -DS]

The tea party spoke! Loudly, powerfully and proudly.

But besides, “Throw the bums out,” what did it say? And now that the party part is over and the nasty business of governing begins, what does it all add up to? What’s its governing agenda? How does it make anything positive out of the disparate mish-mash of issue positions within its own rank and file?

And then there’s the big one — the huge, grotesque, democracy-choking monster that the party invited into the center of its own movement: corporate money. Throughout the election, tea partiers demurely averted their eyes from this ugly dude, for the monster was lavishing millions of corporate dollars on their candidates. But now, whether they meant to or not, they’ve ensconced it as the unrivaled, controlling power in the new Congress. What will they do as it asserts its selfish interests over theirs, devouring their ideals and their pretension that they are in control?

The media establishment insists on referring to the tea party as a “populist” movement — but real populists fight corporate power, they don’t hug it! The party certainly is a popular uprising, and a successful one, but there’s nothing populist about it. Indeed, its leaders and candidates have vociferously opposed the populist ideals of egalitarianism, social justice, cooperative action and the common good.

“Shrink the Government” sounds good as a campaign cry, but its substance, as expressed by many of the most prominent teabag nominees and electees, is to kill Social Security… Complete article here
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An October Round-up of What’s Happening out in the World of Transition

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From TRANSITION CULTURE

[...] In the US, Transition Town Houston has lots of interesting activities coming up including solar tours, permablitzes and film screenings, while Transition Lyons (Colorado) has given us an update on all the activities they’ve been getting up to. Transition groups in Los Angeles held a seed and herb swap with all sorts of side events, and there are loads of useful resources and information on the webpage too, so have a look and grab some ideas! Transition Northfield organised a community workday to bring to community together and they prepared fresh apple cider, planted a tree and built a chicken coup. Transition Town Ashland has been reviewing and discussing their town’s updated transport plans and preparing people to given written or verbal input into the process to encourage a low carbon/low energy future. If you’re around that way then why not get involved so you can add to the pressure for a sustainable transport system.

Congratulations to two new Transition Towns – Viroqua Transition Town Initiative and Transition Coastside – so we welcome you both! And then congratulations to Transition Reno on their Great Unleashing and becoming the 50^th official TT in the US! Two stories for you to enjoy here and here. Transition US held a Regional Summit in Cascadia, with lots of US Transitioners describing and discussing various Transition activities going on in the US. Transition Staunton Augusta has a new online magazine – Transition Voice – so take your time and read all about it. Transition Sarasota is hoping to harvest 30,000 pounds of fresh produce for their local food banks and they need volunteers to help out. They’re also holding a local food open space and a local currency debate, great activities to get involved with if you’re round that way. And finally for the US, here’s Sandpoint Transition Initiative’s fantastic Folkschool, which teaches the arts and crafts of sustainable living, and there’s a lovely story for you to enjoy too…

Full article here
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Letter to a whiny young Democrat

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Hey, at least this guy voted. Obama won in ’08 with 66% of the 18-29 vote. Most of that demo stayed home this time and played Cut the Rope and drank vodka/Red Bulls and tweeted about not caring anymore. Ah, silly youth.

From MARK MORFORD
SFGate

Oh, now you’ve done it.

See? You see what happens when you young liberal voters get so disgruntled and disillusioned that you drop all your party’s newborn, hard-won ideas about Hope™ and Change™, without any patience, without really giving them sufficient time to mature, without understanding that hugely foreign, anti-American concept known as “the long view”?

See what happens when you wallow in hollow disappointment, trudging all over your liberal arts campus and refusing to vote in a rather important mid-term election, all because your pet issues and nubile ego weren’t immediately serviced by a mesmerizing guy named Barack Obama just after he sucked you into his web of fuzzyhappy promises a mere two years ago, back when you were knee-high to a shiny liberal ideology?

Well, now you know. This is what happens: The U.S. House of Representatives, the most insufferable gaggle of political mongrels this side of, well, the rest of Congress, reverts to GOP control like a brain tumor reverts to a more aggressive form of cancer, and everything gets bleaker and sadder and, frankly, a whole lot nastier.

What happens is: Many kinds of fragmented, muddled, but still constructive Democratic progress might get stopped quite nearly dead, and even a few pieces of legislation we actually did gain get slapped around, threatened, stomped on the head like a scientist at a Rand Paul rally. Happy now?

Check it out, kiddo: This is not just any Republican party you allowed back into power; these mealy folks are not anything like the war-hungry, Bush-tainted army of flying monkeys and Dick Cheney moose knuckles you so wonderfully helped bury in the history books last election.

Gene Logsdon: The Best and Worst Smells On A Farm

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From GENE LOGSDON
Upper Sandusky, Ohio

Pat Leuchtman brought up an interesting subject when she reviewed my book, “Holy Shit,” on www.commonweeder.com. She reminisced about her early experiences on the farm and how much she liked the smell of cow manure in the barn when she was a child. Lots of us agree with Pat but it has been awhile since I’ve heard anyone praise the smell of manure right out loud. It got me to thinking about the subjectivity of nasal sensations. I wonder if you, dear reader, would agree with my list, below, of the worst and best farm smells, or if you have riper candidates.

The worst farm smells:

1. A bucket of decaying potatoes.
2. An egg so rotten that what remains inside the shell is just a rubbery, almost dry remnant of yolk.
3. Liquid manure slurry from factory hogs fed with a high soybean meal protein supplement. When this manure is being stored in underground pits, the odor will lay you out prostrate on the ground.
4. Buzzard vomit. I don’t know this from experience but my father always said this was “by far the worst smell God ever created.” If you are innocent enough to approach a buzzard nest, this might be your fate.
5. Rotting plant residue on a cabbage field after harvest.

The best farm smells:

1. Wild grape blossoms
2. Good quality hay curing in the mow
3. Freshly-turned, rich, moist soil
4. Air filtering through a woodlot in the spring after a rain shower
5. Blooming apple trees over an orchard floor of white clover.

The odor of barn manure after it has been soaked up and mixed with straw bedding and aged a bit is not offensive to me. It smells like money. As I try to show in my book, high quality manure is going up in value. That’s because commercial chemical fertilizer prices are skyrocketing…

Full article here
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“Expect next phase of market crash and a large one for that matter…” – Interview with Nicole “Stoneleigh” Foss

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From ENERGY BULLETIN

Nicole Foss alias Stoneleigh – the co-editor-in-chief of the blog The Automatic Earth, together with Ilargi – is one of a few “big picture“ persons and it was a delightful experience to meet her at ASPO peak oil conference. For her, business-as-usual is not an option and current form of capitalism is a Ponzi scheme. She is clear about peak oil (it is here and renewables will not come to the rescue!), but she is even much more clear about financial markets – they will make everything worse. The next phase of debt-deflation and final bubble bursting will hinder future investments in energy sector. In the short term oil prices will go down, not up, as probably most of peak oil energy analysts expect. Unless we are in debt, nothing is solved, and she says that Paul Krugman is a monetarist whose recommendations will make nothing better (except maybe prolonging the life of banks – which is not good either). One planet for her would be not enough, but she hopes that that what she does justifies this. Decide for yourselves.

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Alexander Ac: Here at ASPO-USA conference in Washington everybody seems to understand implications of energy scarcity. What would be your message to a lay person? What are the main implications of peak oil for the daily life?

Stoneleigh: We are going to have to get used to a much lower energy lifestyle. Energy has been cheap for a very long time, so we have developed a structural dependency on it. Energy is not going to be cheap for much longer though, and that means many of the things we take for granted will no longer be affordable.

Sanity Still Reigns In Mendo!

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As the country moves harder right, Mendo stays true to its local roots.

It’s Crowing time…

Congratulations!

Dan Hamburg
Phil Baldwin
Mary Anne Landis
Benj Thomas
~

…and it’s Eating Crow time…

~Big Bucks Failures~
Strike 1: GMOs Banned
Strike 2: Monster Mall Killed
Strike 3: Dan Hamburg Elected

Albion Headlands Saved!
Adios, Carpetbaggers!
~

~~

We can survive a Republican Congress

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From THE AMERICAN PROSPECT

[Hunker down local. It's not the end of the world. -DS]

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, many Republicans went berserk. The governor of Texas began talking about seceding from the Union, religious conservatives literally saw the new president as the Antichrist and decided Armageddon was around the corner, and people even started listening to Glenn Beck. Now, faced with the likelihood of a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives (and the small but real possibility of the Senate turning Republican as well), Democrats have to decide just how freaked out to be.

There’s a lot to be concerned about, and it would be naive to say that having Republicans back in possession of a house or two won’t bring some very bad things. But we shouldn’t get too carried away. This too shall pass.

This is probably not the prevailing opinion on the left, even among those not normally inclined toward panic. “This is going to be terrible,” Paul Krugman wrote last week. “In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.” He could be right, but there are some reasons to believe that the damage will be limited.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not among those who believe that having a Republican Congress is just what the doctor ordered for Obama’s political fortunes. It may prove politically useful for the administration to have a foil, and when Americans get to know John Boehner and the gang, they’re not likely to be particularly impressed. What matters most are results, and with such an oppositional opposition, there won’t be much in the way of results coming from Congress.

Our Sacred Democracy

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From MIKE LUX
Progressive Strategies

I have spent thousands of hours over my career picking up absentee ballots, planning early vote field operations, raising money for them, and encouraging people to vote early, but I have rarely done it myself. For me, going to my local polling place on election day, standing in line with my fellow citizens (hopefully for a good long time), and going into the polling booth and casting my ballot is a sacred ritual, a moment that thrills me and almost always brings tears of joy to my eyes. I am religious about democracy, and the act of voting is the ultimate democratic ritual there is.

Thomas Jefferson’s words launching this great modern experiment with democracy sum it up, and they are part of my scripture:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to pursue these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.”

We vote because government requires consent of the governed, and in that voting booth, we are the equal of every other citizen in this country. Some people have more money, some have more power, but in the act of voting, everyone’s vote counts the same. And no matter how messed up things get, as long as we get to vote, we have a chance to change things. Wealth and power can and do manipulate our economy and manipulate our system of government, but when we vote, we still have the power to take things back into our own hands.

True Colors: Wendy Roberts now has a public record

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From NICHOLAS WILSON
Mendocino County 5th District

[Although Wendy Roberts has never run for public office and has no record of votes that can tell us who she really is as an elected representative, she has continued to attack Dan Hamburg by falsifying his public service record in cowardly hit pieces in the mail and in the newspapers, thus compiling her own record of nefarious political games. It is both who he is, and his record of many years in public service here in Mendocino County, that his many local endorsers have relied on to encourage your vote for him. Thankfully, our loyal support of Dan against the onslaught of falsities has flushed out the true Wendy Roberts. She's running scared.

As has become all too frequent now in our national elections, Rovian-style politics that attacks the record of a politician, which is their strength, by distorting it and blatantly employing Big Lie techniques, has now arrived in Mendocino County via outside Republican consultants. Newcomer Wendy Roberts, who has never before stood for democratic election, has produced a record of Republican dirty tricks that exposes who she is, and a list of big money development supporters that exposes how she will vote if she were elected to office.

Vote local. Vote for one of our own. Vote for Dan Hamburg. -DS]

Facts Are Facts – It’s Time for Retractions of False and Libelous Accusations by Wendy Roberts and political surrogate Grant Miller

Grant Miller, the 4th district resident acting as surrogate for 5th district candidate Wendy Roberts, has refused repeated demands that he retract accusations that I faked my aerial photo of the Albion Headlands site of the controversial housing development proposed by the Smiths.

Voting, misunderstood

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From SETH GODIN

This year, fewer than 40% of voting age Americans will actually vote.

A serious glitch in self-marketing, I think.

If you don’t vote because you’re trying to teach politicians a lesson, you’re tragically misguided in your strategy. The very politicians you’re trying to send a message to don’t want you to vote. Since 1960, voting turnouts in mid-term elections are down significantly, and there’s one reason: because of TV advertising.

Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent’s supporters. If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote (“they’re all bums”) then their strategy has succeeded.

The astonishing thing is that voters haven’t figured this out. As the scumminess and nastiness of campaigning and governing has escalated and the flakiness of candidates appears to have escalated as well, we’ve largely abdicated the high ground and permitted selfish partisans on both sides to hijack the system.

Voting is free. It’s fairly fast. It doesn’t make you responsible for the outcome, but it sure has an impact on what we have to live with going forward. The only thing that would make it better is free snacks.

Even if you’re disgusted, vote. Vote for your least unfavorite choice. But go vote.
~~

Dan Hamburg: Listen Up, Jared Carter…

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From DAN HAMBURG
Candidate or 5th District Supervisor
Mendocino County

The Headwaters Forest Act which I authored in 1993 made saving the ancient redwood forests of Humboldt County a national issue. While former Pacific Lumber vice-president Jared Carter claims that the bill “went nowhere” [UDJ LTE 10/30/10], it received 288 votes in the House and failed in the Senate by a single vote (Malcolm Wallop-WY).

My plan was for the management of the most significant groves to be put under government management (BLM or Forest Service) with Hurwitz being “repaid” by being forgiven the $1.5 billion that he owed the taxpayers for the failure of his Houston-based S&L.

Of course, the 1994 national electoral debacle, in which I lost my seat, made this impossible. In 1996, needing some way to mollify a very disenchanted environmental community, Bill Clinton assigned assistant Secretary of the Interior John Garamendi to craft a plan to save the groves. $480 million later it was done.

I did not support the Garamendi/Feinstein/Riggs plan. It did save some trees for a period of time, but not the company which soon after went bankrupt, throwing thousands of workers out of their jobs and homes.

~~