After work, I headed over to REI to get some new water bottles, and to look at some of the things I want to get for my weekend trip that I have dubbed my "Into the Wild Weekend".
Trying not to spend a ton of money on things, but between a sleeping bag and pad, tent and possibly a new larger backpack, I am going to end up spending quite a bit. But it's probably not any more than if I bought an airline ticket and flew somewhere. Besides, I can't get any time off, so the weekend is all I have.
Discovered that REI has a ton of vegetarian and vegan camping foods available, but they all require hot water and I wasn't expecting to have to cook, but I might end up having to, which means more gear to buy. I just have to make sure that if I spend all this money on things like this, I need to use them more than once. Have to find a good hiking/backpacking/camping partner I believe.
I mentioned my plans last weekend to Josh and Melissa and I think I hurt Melissa's feelings when she asked if they could all go and I said no - this was my trip that I was planning on taking myself.
Mockingbird is one of just a small handful of books that I read about once a year. As I get older, I find something else to enjoy in this book, and each year it affects me more deeply than the year before.
Generally I don't get emotional reading, but this morning on the train I felt tears when I came to this passage:
Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'.
That one simple passage really hit me today.
Last summer, I was in a leadership workshop at work, and we were asked who our heroes were. Most of the group had heroes like a mother or a father, one person said Gwen Stefani (which I still don't understand); I said my hero was Atticus Finch.
I still think this. Just something about his character - what he says and doesn't say, how he looks at the world and what he believes in and stands for. This is what I wish I could be and yet I try and fail at it. One of these days I'll figure it out.
While reading today I realized that I don't think I've watched the movie version of Mockingbird</i> since high school. And I own not one, but two DVDs of it. Must remember to find my copy and watch it again.
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meredith was in town last weekend, so we went to the 8th Annual Fire Arts Festival in Oakland. (Note to self: when meeting a woman for the first time, don’t park in the empty underground parking garage.)
We arrived just as the gates opened, and the place was soon packed. The announcer said that over 2000 people were there that night.
My favorite exhibit was the Fire Vortex. Two guys dressed in silver flame retardant suits stood across from each other. Each held a long metal wand, from which they could shoot an aerosolized mist of fuel. Between them was a large ducted fan, which created a strong vortex of air. They would fire fuel from the wands into the vortex, and light the mist on fire, creating a tornado of fire.
My second favorite? The Omega Recoil, which consisted of a man dressed in a full body Faraday cage. He writhed underneath a giant inverted Tesla coil, which shot lighting bolts into his suit.
Meredith and I climbed up through the center of the Steampunk Treehouse. The Festival was held in view of the Caltrain, and every time one passed, you could see the passengers looking out the window to watch the exhibits. It made quite a lovely tableau, with the crowds writhing around the burning fire exhibits, as a lighted train filled with passengers passed slowly along on the risers above.
Some pictures:
Original: craschworks - comments
 Happy 90th birthday, Nelson Mandela! In case you haven't heard, Mister Bush has signed a law that says you can visit the United States without having to get the Secretary of State to write you a pass saying you're not a terrorist. |
Former FBI special agent Coleen Rowley and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern write about 'Justifying' Torture: Two Big Lies at Consortium News.
Writing consequent to former Attorney General John Ashcroft's Thursday testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, those two big lies, they explain in detail, are, first, that after failing to prevent the September 11 attacks the Cheney-Bush administration pulled out the stops to avoid another attack. And, second, that torture saves lives.
What accounts for the blithe departure from international and national law — not to mention time-honored civilized procedures for dealing with prisoners and detainees?
What accounts for the marginalization of those military, FBI and other professionals who warned that torture is not only a war crime but also that it doesn’t yield reliable information — that, rather, it is the very best recruiting tool for terrorists?
We suggest four reasons why George "I don’t care what the international lawyers say" Bush and dark-side Dick Cheney opted for torture:
1 - Deceit: Granted, torture does not yield truthful information. It can, though, be an excellent way to obtain the untruthful information you may wish to acquire. All you really need to know is what you want the victims to "confess" to and torture them, or render them abroad to "friendly" intelligence services toward the same end.
One case that speaks volumes is that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured and rendered to Egypt, where, under torture, he told his interrogators precisely what they wanted to hear. ...
2 - Sadism: Cheney’s open advocacy of waterboarding speaks volumes, but what about the President? Sad to say, as psychiatrist Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, has noted:
"Bush’s certitude that he is right gives him carte blanche for destructive behavior. He has always had a sadistic streak: from blowing up frogs, to shooting his siblings with a BB gun, to branding fraternity pledges with white-hot coat hangers (explaining that the resulting wound was ‘only a cigarette burn’)..."
3 - Intimidation: Are you perhaps in some "shock and awe" at the prospect of the President designating you an "enemy combatant" and sending you off to the Navy brig in South Carolina for an indefinite stay? He now has court approval to do precisely that, and we are proceeding on faith that this joint article will not bring us "enhanced interrogation techniques." ...
4 -- Because We Can: Lord Acton was, of course, right. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And closeness to it does the same. ...
The very transparency of the excuses for torture serves to demonstrate that this kind of power is in place, and is not to be questioned.
As is often the case, you can't get the full flavor from excerpts. Click on through to the whole essay.
The Overnight News Digest is posted.
Comical old person John “WALNUTS!” McCain appeared on a popular late-night television show on Friday. He was so funny! His jokes are unstoppable. He pretended to fall asleep in Conan’s lap! So funny! Oh and jeez what’s in his mouth now??? Ahhhhhhggg! [Boston Globe/Top of the Ticket]
Two months later, I have finally seen said pictures, and of course, promptly stole them.
In this first picture, I'm turning off of the bike path onto the city street:
Here is a better picture of me as I ran by my brother and his friends:
And one last picture - but this time of Josh - my running lackey:
Tonight's Rescue Rangers are Louisiana 1976, smokeymonkey, BentLiberal, dopper0189, Avila, joyful and grog.
The Crumbling Economy
- lapin expresses my feelings precisely: I am not an economist, but things look sh*tty. (smokeymonkey)
- cammi317 bares the naked truth about some discount clothing by exposing the fact that it may really not be such a good deal in Finding Out the Hard Way. (Louisiana 1976)
Our Crumbling Civil Liberties
- davidseth reports on the continued assault on the First Amendment in Maryland Police Spied On Activists, Claim It Was Legal. (dopper0189)
Crumbly Politics
- A double-dip of diary discussions on our country's Second-in-Command: Yirmiyahu uses historical analysis to shatter the myth of VP candidates carrying their homestates, while colonelgreen wonders Who Backs up the Backups? Filling Vice Presidential candidates' job vacancies. (joyful)
- larbabe details KBR's history of incompetence - you should be outraged and you will be after looking at their list of criminal activities. (joyful)
Beyond Our So-Called Crumbling Borders...Mostly
- pfiore8 explains why Republicans want to destroy the world: because . . . (smokeymonkey)
- Daisy Cutter offers a concise, well-written essay on the violent and tragic history of Haiti with Book Review: "Damming the Flood" by Peter Hallward, pt 1. (Avila)
- MmeVoltaire discusses the changes in military build-up on the Pacific islands of Guam and Okinawa and what it means to the indigenous people on those islands in Does Obama have guts for global military change? (smokeymonkey)
Nothing Crumbling Here
- In a personal recounting of growing up in conservative Colorado Springs, Subo muses on keeping sane in Why I Love Al Franken. (BentLiberal)
- Fred Etcheverry says that when it comes to renewable energy, The High Price of Oil Is The Message. (joyful)
jotter gives us the day's High Impact Diaries - July 17, 2008, while monkeybiz has Top Comments 7.18.08: Kill Your Lawn.
Shamelessly self promote your diary, pimp for a friend or talk behind the backs of everybody at NN in this Open Thread.
Stephanie "I Hate Film For A Living" Zacharek is wronger than usual, which is pretty wrong.
Also, the trailer for Watchmen came on before it. It looks great. As does Quantum of Solace.
Mummy VII: This Time It's In China? Not so much.
Still, it would be a crime not to wish
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amerou a happy birthday, though there's a chance she won't find out about this until later.I can't remember ever seeing a person grow so much or come so far in the course of a single year. It was a long time coming, but she's tackling all the challenges that come at her with grace and wisdom, not letting the world's troubles throw a shadow over her. I'm awfully proud of her. She knows what she's doing.
Yeah, yeah ... quit starin'. =>_>=
- Music:Amon Düül II - Phallus Dei
Most Republicans and a couple handfuls of Democrats voted against the House Democratic leadership Thursday. Blocking a piece of legislation the majority approved. So what else is new? Just this: The Dems lost the legislative skirmish but they won the narrative fight. If they make use of it and exercise some patience, a solid overall victory can be theirs - and ours - in the long run. All they have to do is hold off until January. Simply wait for the new Congress.
Given that the issue at hand is oil and gas leasing, such a victory would be no small matter.
But it would be sooooo easy to screw it up. All the leadership would have to do is follow Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey’s lead and continue to pursue this. No, no, no. Just stop for six months. And, on the campaign trail, use the hypocritical Republican stance on the issue to pound every GOP candidate who claims Democrats are the obstacle to more domestic energy production.
The back story here includes a lot of numbers. Thanks to oil spills, particularly the devastating one in the Santa Barbara Channel in 1969, most of the Outer Continental Shelf has been off-limits to drilling since 1981. Not all, however. Private corporations have leases on about 2.4% of this taxpayer-owned land. That’s 44 million acres mostly in the central and western Gulf of Mexico and part of the offshore area in Alaska.
These leases produce around 15 percent of domestic natural gas production and 27 percent of domestic oil. After being granted by the Bureau of Land Management, the leases, as well as 47.2 million acres of on-shore leases of federal and Indian trust lands, are managed by the Minerals Management Service. Both BLM and MMS are bureaus of the Department of the Interior, which collects about $8 billion in revenue from oil and gas leases every year.
MMS estimates that beneath the 1.3 billion OCS acres currently barred from leasing are tucked 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That’s almost exactly how much oil the whole world consumes in one year, and four years’ supply of natural gas at current rates of consumption.
Nothing to sneeze at. Particularly not when oil is priced at plus or minus $130 a barrel and the U.S. imports 65%-70% of the barrels it consumes each year from ... uh ... unstable and otherwise problematic places. And maybe there’s more. Survey techniques are better than when the areas in question were last evaluated.
From the standpoint of the oil companies, their puppets and allies, what all those numbers have combined to do is create the perfect storm. They’re making record profits. The occupation of Iraq and relentless talk about war with Iran have made people edgy. Environmentalists are under pressure because polls indicate the majority of price-shocked American consumers favor more off-shore drilling in the belief their paychecks will stretch further and the U.S. will gain the separation from foreign oil producers that’s been talked about ever since Richard Nixon launched Project Independence 35 years ago.
What better time than now, it being an election year and all, to press for an end to the OCS ban?
So, here we are, less than four months away from what could be a watershed at the polls, and the cry is drill for independence, drill for cheaper pump prices, drill for American pride. Could they have more propaganda value on their side? National security, economic populism and a dab of patriotism all wrapped up in one appealing package. Just let us drill, we’ll be careful, our newest technology is practically foolproof, and don’t you all hate leaning on the Saudis and Hugo Chávez anyway?
All but a few Republicans back lifting the ban. The shifty McCain backs it. Mister Bush has already lifted the presidential ban on further OCS leasing that was established in 1990. What yet stands in the way is the 27-year-old legislative ban passed just before a global recession caused a plunge in oil prices that were, until two years ago, the highest that modern American consumers had ever faced.
The problem is that a lot of people, including most congressional Democrats, see this sweet come-on for exactly what it is, a land grab which will further fatten oil company wallets, harm the environment, reduce prices marginally if at all and do next to nothing for that vaunted energy independence. Because the oil companies already lease 91.5 million acres of federal land, but they’re not drilling or producing on three-fourths of them.
Here’s a map showing in gray the 229 million acres of federal land that were leased or offered for lease from 1982-2004. In the past four years, the Cheney-Bush administration has issued new leases at a faster pace than ever in the history of the program. From 1999-2007, the issuing of drilling permits rose 361%. Permits have doubled what they were in 2002.
Are the oil companies actually drilling on this land? Yes. But only about 13 million of the on-shore and 10.5 million of the off-shore acres are in production, according to a report by the House Committee on Natural Resources, The Truth About America’s Energy: Big Oil Stockpiles Supplies and Pockets Profits. If they actually developed their other leases, on-shore and off, the report stated in an extrapolation from MMS data, it would nearly double current domestic oil production, which could cut imports by one-third and increase domestic natural gas production by 75%. On existing leases.
Seeing this, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick J. Rahall introduced H.R. 6251 on June 12. Formally it was called the Responsible Federal Oil and Gas Lease Act of 2008. Nicknamed the "use it or lose it" act, it would have required oil and gas companies to actually develop their leases within a reasonable period or give them up.
Industry folks said the bill didn’t take into account the complexities of the leasing-drilling-production ratio. Plus, they said, the current system already allows the Department of Interior to end a lease if certain rules aren’t met. The Rahall bill included benchmarks requiring that leaseholders produce oil or gas from each lease within the five-year original term of the lease, and that they submit a "diligent development plan" showing how they would meet the benchmarks.
None other than House Minority Leader John Boehner called it
...nothing more than a hoax designed to provide political cover to rank-and-file Democrats caught between their constituents who strongly support more American energy production and their liberal Democratic leaders beholden to radical environmentalists who want oil and gas prices to rise even higher.
Hilarious hyperbole considering that many environmental advocates don’t want already-leased lands drilled as the bill would require.
Under normal House rules, Republicans or renegade Democrats could have amended the bill to allow additional acreage now unavailable to be leased. The Democratic leadership, having had plenty of recent examples to remind them, feared that they might be unable to maintain party discipline in this matter. So they brought it to the floor June 26 under a suspension of the rules, which require a two-thirds vote. The effort failed 223-195.
On Thursday, with a new version of the bill in hand that included a requirement for the BLM to offer annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve and speed up completion of pipelines that would carry oil and gas from the NPR and other regions of Alaska to the other states. This also failed, although the vote was far closer, with 15 Republicans and eight Democrats who rejected the original bill coming aboard for a 244-173 tally.
You know what those hold-outs are waiting for. For the Democrats to cave. With Hawai'i’s Neil Abercrombie and Texans like Charles Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar already on their side, they’re hoping to get at least a piece of the real prize: an OK for more OCS leases before November 4.
As Rahall told CongressDaily:
While Democratic leaders initially appeared poised to further modify their use-it-or-lose-it plan in the last hours before Thursday's vote to mollify oil-patch Democrats that the bill put up too much of a barrier to new leases, Pelosi did not end up making those changes.
"We were going to but didn't," Natural Resources Chairman Nick Rahall told reporters. Rahall said it would not have made a difference in the final tally. "They weren't going to vote for us if we did it," he said, referring to Democratic opponents. He said the conditions for their support were fluid. "It was always something new," Rahall said.
There it is in a nutshell. Two tries are enough. Why do it again?
Senate consideration of Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd’s similar "use-it-or-lose-it" bill is tied up with the anti-speculation bill, which could be considered next week.
If the Feingold/Dodd proposal is discussed as an amendment to that bill, then Republicans would be allowed to present amendments of their own, which would likely be focused on opening more of the Outer Continental Shelf to leasing. Given some Senate Democrats' soft-headedness on the matter, such an amendment could pass.
What is the friggin’ rush? Yes, there’s a crisis. But after more than a quarter-century of lousy energy policy, what's six measly months that remain until a new President takes office? How we go forward – and let us hope that it finally is forward – should be up to him and the 111th Congress, not Mister Bush and the 110th.
With global warming breathing its hot breath down our necks, the worst energy-efficiency ratio in the developed world, and other environmental and geopolitical concerns at issue, we stand on the brink of making decisions that will affect us for a very long time. Action should not be taken on the basis of what will happen in the next four months, but rather in the spirit of the Haudenosee (Iroquois) League, which keeps the interests of the next seven generations in mind every time it makes a major choice to do or not do something.
Congress should just wait.
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Check out the new teaser poster for the upcoming movie (see above, released at Comic-Con 2008).
What does everyone think?
Personally, I'm not a fan of the "quad image" thing (see The Matrix Revolutions dvd cover), but I do think Kirk, Spock and Uhura look great. I'm not sure about the villain, though - I guess he's trying to hide which race he is. The tattoo looks...out of place for Trek, but it could be a stylized logo or something.
- Music:Jennie & Rusty clucking like chickens at The Simpsons. (...fuck if I know what that's about)
Maybe it’s true! After all, Osama bin Laden would’ve never known about New York’s big Jewish population had Jesse not called it “Hymietown.” EVERYBODY WILL BE ISSUED NEW NAMES AT THE CONVENTIONS. [Morning Joe/MSNBC] UPDATE: Oh what the hell, Newell posted this like twelve hours earlier. Oh well, no way to take the post down now ….
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All
Is that the hill you wanna die on?
2 (40.0%)
So what's Congress going to do about this one? (subscription req.)
The Bush administration is refusing to comply with an unusual resolution adopted by the House Natural Resources Committee seeking to halt uranium mining near the Grand Canyon.
An Interior Department official said this week that the administration could not act on the resolution because a quorum was not present for the committee vote....
Democrats cited a rarely invoked provision in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (PL 94-579) that allows the panel to seek immediate withdrawal of lands under "emergency" situations.
The Democrats on the committee used this provision for the incredibly controversial protection of one of the nation's greatest treasures. Republicans boycotted the vote in committee. Because of course we have to have uranium mining at the Grand Canyon. And what could possibly be the problem with that? It's not like there aren't other national parks, right?
Committee chair Nick Rahall has written to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, explaining that, by committee rules, a sufficient quorum was present and the resolution stands. Another sternly worded letter to the Bush administration. Yeah, that'll work.