Public Comments Meetings- BushCo Style

Bush and Co. continue to destroy basic democratic traditions in the US. One of the latest is the erosion of the public comment process. In the development of coal resources on publice and native lands in the desert Southwest, the tried-and-true town hall meeting is now quietly being replaced with the Orwellian-named "Open House" meeting. This travesty of democracy has just happened in Northern AZ communities, concerning the Black Mesa Coal Mining Environmental Impact Statement.

At least as far back as 2003, the Interior Dept. showed its disdain for public participation in its decision-making process. This is an exerpt from a letter from the Upper Green River Valley Coalition (pdf file) to the Director of the Bureau of Land Management, taking the agency to task for the public comment process being used at that time around energy exploitation in Wyoming:

"For example, during the scoping “open house” for the Jonah Infill Drilling Project (in the
Pinedale Field Office), the BLM moved a public open house to the site of a gas industry
pep rally. In this case, your agency granted a last minute request from industry and
changed the meeting from its scheduled location at the Sublette County Library to the site
of a company barbecue held by the EnCana Corporation and British Petroleum. Workers
from the gas fields were given time off from their jobs and a free meal as incentives to
speak for the industry at this “public” event. Clearly the BLM cannot make the case that
this forum was fair and open to all points of view, and indeed a number of local residents
have since said that they were too uncomfortable to speak at such a biased venue. This
change in location prevented the fair and even-handed exchange of ideas that Federal
agencies are supposed to provide for the public."

As we learn with great sorrow, non-democratic practices evolve too. Public participation in government decisionmaking is becoming a victim of Republican narcissism. One of the characteristic policies within the Bush administration has been the stealthy morphing of public comment meetings from the townhall format, where individuals are given a chance to speak to and be heard by everyone present, into the open house meeting "procedure" (pdf file), when individuals must stand in a line and wait their turn to speak to a government representative or a machine in order to make their voice "heard".

One of the latest examples of this kind of Animal Farm outreach is occurring this month in Arizona communities. It is so blatant that I can't even mince the words properly to present the situation in decent language. Let the words of Cyndi Cole, reporter on the AZ Daily Sun, a Flagstaff paper, relate the news:

"A new mining and pipeline proposal for the Black Mesa coal mine turned contentious Thursday night at a meeting at Little America attended by 100 people.

The meeting was an open house where the public could read about the project, watch a video, ask questions of Office of Surface Mining officials and, individually, make comments to a person writing them down or recording them."

The meeting became soon became contentious:

"Office of Surface Mining officials declined to answer questions publicly.

So a crowd of about 60 pipeline opponents followed one official in particular around the room, asking questions and shouting his replies so all could hear. The questions turned into verbal attacks, where the opponents were complaining about the proposal or shouting disagreements toward the Office of Surface Mining man.

A second Flagstaff police officer arrived to stand by.

"If we're not going to have a civilized discussion, we're not going to have a discussion," Office of Surface Mining employee Rick Holbrook said.

The crowd began giving statements to the recorder, one by one."

So, after first declining to publicly answer questions, the OSM officials used the subsequent outrage to justify it.

Similar open houses have been taking place in local Hopi Nation and Navajo Nation meeting places. Last week, there was one in Kayenta, one of the towns most affected by the Peabody-Salt River Project combine. People who attended said the same format that was used in the Flagstaff meeting was used. It didn't help that this whole process is being conducted in the middle of Winter, when the roads are icy and snow-packed in much of the affected area, making it exceedingly difficult for people to even get the word of the meetings, much less attend them. The 753-page Environmental Impact Statement was released without publicity, around the time of Thanksgiving. The public comment period ends Feb. 11th, still the middle of winter in Northern AZ.

A similarly flawed process surrounds the imminent construction of the Desert Rock coal-fired power plant, also on Navajo lands, the same area where three existing coal-fired plants generate the equivalent of 3.5 million automobiles' worth of pollution. This greenhouse-outgassing project is gaining its permits by the awful use of pollution credits. Thus, the local population breathes and eats mercury, as Sithe Energy Co., the appropriately-named Houston-based company that is behind Desert Rock, will still profit handsomely after making cap and trade transactions in the pollution market.

How long must we wait for the Congress to impeach them?

America’s Public School System: Creating Aliens Through Alienation

"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."
Doris Lessing

There are still many factories in the US that have not dissolved away only to reappear in foreign lands. These factories, however, go by another, less mechanistic name: Public Schools. It could change, however, in the blink of an eye if we can agree to abandon the factory model of education.

Ted Sizer, founder of the Coalition for Essential Schools says,

"To teach students well, obviously, we have to know each one well. For us in the Coalition, that means that the total,  consistent student "load" per teacher has to be fewer than eighty in secondary schools and twenty in elementary  schools; and each student has to be with us for more than a few months. All else flows from that ratio and stability. In  most schools that means a program focused on the essentials, beginning with literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding and  moving on from there."

That is commonly not the case, though.  Many urban and rural schools are confronting student daily loads of 100, 150, or more.  Like the Giant Combine in Ken Kesey’s book, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, this strained condition- present within far too many schools- is grinding down teachers and students alike.  The current emphasis on productivity-based education has stifled the field, creating far too many negative returns to justify whatever successes there have also been.

Think of your idea of a classic farm setting.  Then visit your nearest animal feedlot.  That is what public education has become.

And so many of us protest, and make fine, reasoned arguments about the situation.  But what really gets me is how many other people are ok with the school-as-feedlot model of public education.  

Words like “alienation” and “indoctrination”, once part of the language of progressive educators trying to empower children, are now commonly used by the dominant society in their efforts to maintain their hold on power.  Even the term, “empowerment”, is finding itself appropriated by the mainstream status quo as is found in this example:

“Current trends and innovations in middle school mathematics encourage students to become the quantitative thinkers that educators want them to be. The goals of these new movements are to enhance students' critical, creative, and logical problem-solving abilities, to increase their chances for succeeding in higher-level mathematics, and to prepare them for life experiences with mathematics.”

The title of the article from which this quote was taken is- what? “Middle school mathematics: student empowerment through quality innovations.”

As a math teacher I can see how children are empowered by math.  But the way the word is used in the above quote places intrinsic learning into the passive voice.  What's so empowering about that?   I am slowly seeing now how the progressive educators’ language of change is co-opted by the power elite.  This marginalization of meaningful reform mirrors (alliteratively) what has been happening to the Left for the past, oh...., 30 years or so.  What remains for the voice of the disempowered, then, seems to be the ever-stronger words of revolution.  The logical conclusion:  only a revolution- in thinking, or in actions- can effect positive empowerment for those who lack any.

The dominant society knows this, and are building prisons at a feverish pace, even as record numbers of non-violent offenders- including growing numbers of peaceful protestors- are already in jail.  This is why liberals are struggling for change.

“A person's freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take form someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.”

John Holt

Few responsible persons in educational leadership positions are currently trying to mediate the gross conflicts of interest among the parties in public education today.  The administrators are mainly interested in smoothing things out, and implementing directives from their higher-ups.  Teachers are interested in maintaining order in the midst of total or near-total dysfunction, as well as affording financially to continue as being teachers.  Parents are torn between seeing that their kids are getting the best education, and bearing the burden of paying for that education.

Voila!  The system defaults to the Hidden Curriculum that nobody but Cylons and Fascists wanted in the first place, helped along nicely by BushCo.

Meanwhile, children, just interested in growing up happy and loved, face daily exploitation of their very lives, with little to say about it.

From an affective perspective, there are some serious emotional consequences to this tangle of negligence and despair.  The same seven deadly sins that afflict the world at large are also besetting our children in school.

“Alienation is produced in the classroom, when the administration determines the curriculum and the mode of learning.  Students are expected to conform and to listen, but neither their voices, nor more importantly their feelings, are heard.   By the time the student becomes an adolescent, he has often developed a deep distrust of other people and their motives, and has lost touch with his sense of self.”

Shaun Kerry, M.D.

Diplomate, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology

Years ago, John Holt questioned how a strong, growing society that still had poverty, racism, and all the other ills of 60s America would do any better after the nest round of growth.  Well, here it is, 40 years after he and others pointed out the social follies we were committing, and what have we accomplished?  Despite a huge creation of wealth over four decades, America is still grappling with its ills, living fiscal year to fiscal year, mortgaging its descendants’ futures, even eating its seed corn.  From space, we look little different from bees in a hive, or ants in an anthill.

Somebody said that the raison d’etre of tyrants to rob people of their freedom is always given to the people as a pressing need upon which their very survival depends.  We have to do this; we have to do that; we have to do the other.  Any psychologist deconstructing the emotional baggage behind such assertions from already-dominant parties would call them  “emotionally needy” to a pathological degree.

But these are supposedly mature adults leading us!  Clearly, maturity transcends age.  So reality shows us once again that the true emotionally needy people in this world are children and Captains.  Immature, growing, learning children.  And mature, stifled, groping-in-fear Captains.  Unfortunately, few children are maturing much themselves these days.  How can they, spending every day in a nation- and a school system- run by selfish emotionally-deficient idiots?

Which brings us to the federal No Child Left Behind Act.  Created in a crucible of fear, NCLB is now “producing” EXACTLY the kind of children with the qualities that it was designed to avoid sending out into the world:  poorly prepared, insecure, reality-deficient, fearful of authoritarianism, disempowered, common sense deprived, immature young adults.  Perfect hosts for bigotry, apathy, reactionary-mindedness, and- of course- emotional neediness.  NCLB has sadly perpetuated the very cycle it was designed to stop, and which so many past progressive educators sweated blood to end as they shouldered the karmic wheel of- well- progress.

NCLB must be changed.  There are many, many clear and progressive voices out there whose time has come to be heard.  Leadership into the dark, often windowless, alienating, disempowered, stifling, degrading, undignified, exploited, and disgusting shell of a system that public education has become must change now.  Whoever it was that brought this grey goo of a nationalized public institution has had their chance to remake the system in their own image.  They played God with peoples’ lives- and to what end?  In the end, all they have done is prove they are not capable of reinventing the wheel.  What an expensive way to learn this lesson!

Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility.... Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?”

-Neil Postman

Can anyone deny that what has been missing in today’s federalized public education is the local communities’ standards and flavor?

Let us look at NCLB Republican Style as it really has been:  a move on the part of the Right to marginalize the education professionals, twice as many of whom are Democrats than Republicans (though I’ve heard it’s as high as 90% Democrat at the university level).

All the countless insidious divide-and-conquer tricks these ideologists used against the teachers, as well as the economic maneuvers designed to both favor their own children and enrich themselves financially at the expense of others’ children succeeded in wreaking havoc.  Literally years- entire careers’ worths of slowly-made gains in building trust and raising the maturity levels of kids were lost.  If only it were just a bad dream, but it’s not.  And, just like in Iraq today, it may be too late to turn around.

Politicians:  Please listen to reason and change NCLB before it completely ruins public education.  Policy-makers:  Renew your basic vision of an equal and free education for all.  Fellow citizens:  Come to embrace the idea of social justice in all its cultural diversity.  Pretty please, with sanity on top?

Who Are the Real Luddites of the World?

Who are the real Luddites of the world?

First of all, the Luddites, 19th century followers of the mythical Ned Ludd were more interested in maintaining their jobs than they were in opposing technology. It was a case of one position being the result of the other. In this regard, today’s Luddites could very well be all those former workers in US manufacturing whose jobs went bye-bye as a result of “free” trade. Perhaps the main difference is that in early 19th century England-read some Dickens to learn about the time- it wasn’t a case of Change or Die, as life today may be characherized, it was a case of Change and Die.

Today, the term, “Luddite”, commonly has a less historically-correct meaning. Forgotten is the worker abuse part. A Luddite today is simply a person who opposes technological change. Back-to-the-landers, environmentalists, dirty f**king hippies, tribalists, and other proponents of less industry and more harmony with nature have been called Luddites for their beliefs. For the sake of throwing shit back into certain peoples’ faces (duck!), I am going to use the lower-case term, “luddite”, in its modern context- an opponent of technological change.

But who are the REAL opponents of technological changes, of a new 21st century industrial revolution? That’s easy; they are, by and large, corporate CEOs, board members, and the politicians who enable and support them. What irony. Let’s see about just a few:

a.) Fossil Fuel Power. The real luddites here are the followers of King Coal. Example: For years, Peabody Coal resisted using over 5000 acre-feet of pristine deserst aquifer water to operate a 270-mile coal slurry line to a power plant that was the most polluting facility in the entire US. That was after they succeeded in forcible removing over 10,000 people from the land they had lived on for generations. When confronted with the prospect of a shutdown unless they invested in modernization steps that would abate the pollution and excessive desert water use, they shut down the mine. The Mohave power plant that used all that watered-down coal also shut down. Even today, Navajo people are facing the same set of intrusions into their lives and culture with the imminent construction of the Desert Rock power plant by Sithe Energy, a big energy company. But it's not just coal. Ditto Queen Oil, if for nothing else but for buying up solar energy companies and running them into the ground. Luddites, all.

b.) Automobiles. Let’s not elaborate too much here. As a former UAW member, I saw the end of US dominance in the car and truck industry on the horizon long ago. At least they put robots in the horrible body assembly lines.

c.) Lighting. Can anyone say, compact fluorescent? Wait! This just in: Can anyone say LED or this one: LED(b) or this one: LED(c) or this one: LED(d)?

d.) Nukyular Energy. Whatever happened to those borosilicate beads, anyway? All our storage problems were supposed to be at mitigated by locking up the waste in glass beads. But what about the current resurgence of “new” nuke power? Luddite alternatives like pebble bed reactors and in situ uranium mining don’t change the environmental equations one little bit. Nuclear energy is the quintessential luddite scheme. Nothing changes for 10,000 years or more!

e.) Computers. Sure, hi-tech has Moore’s Law to shield itself from the charges of luddism. Except that Greenpeace has a slightly different take on things, accusing Apple Computer (albeit in a verrrry kindly way) of failing to make proven changes in its laptop manufacturing process that would reduce toxic substances in the industrial stream. Li-ion batteries, too. Poof!

f.) Let’s just stop there. You get the idea, and I’m already on hour two with this post. Yes, I just marvel at you daily diarists!

To summarize: Today’s luddites are the people in power who are resisting technological change in exchange for short-term profits and/or other pathological motives.

p.s.: Possible 21st Century Manhattan Projects: End electrical generation that uses fossil fuels, save billions of tons of CO2 waste; End the manufacture of gas hogs that leave shit in the air from LA to the Colorado River, save billions of tons of CO2 waste; End incandescent lighting, save billions of tons of CO2 waste; End nuclear reactor use, save millions of gallons of pristine desert aquifer water, and tons of radioactive waste; End industrial processes that produce toxic chemicals as an environmental waste byproduct, save a planet and its inhabitants.

Have I forgot any ideas? Duhhhhh....

No, no, no, no to nuclear power

(crossposted on Daily Kos) I guess it's my responsibility to remind people about the forgotten issues of mining the shit in the first place.

The Colorado AIM (American Indian Movement) blog has a couple very timely posts now about the issue. One post is about an article in the Gallup Independent called,"Residents tell of mining's tragic impact".

The other posting is about the threat to peoples' water supply, as told by a local group called ENDAUM (Eastern Navajo Dine' Against Uranium Mining).

These links provide a more or less clear story of the past, present, and future effects of uranium mining on REAL PEOPLE.

Although I avoid generalizing, it is my opinion, based on world history I have learned, that European uranium will be coming from places like Niger, Australia, and other distant places, and that similar kinds of adverse mining effects will be tolerated by policymakers, just like all the other past exploitative practices have been tolerated. And the rationales for it will be the same or similar to the ones used since time memorial when confronted with the ugliness of human mistreatment in distant places.

What gives me the right to say all this? Because I live in the Navajo Nation, and see it every day, but I hear very few people mention it whenever the discussion of nukes comes up in polite company.

The irony of it all is that right here, where the Uranium is mined, also exist 4 (soon to be 5) huge coal power plants that feed electricity to the big cities of the Western US- and turn the air around here a rich shade of sulphur brown. At least the Mohave plant is closed down for now, thanks to such groups as the Center for Biological Diversity, the Grand Canyon Trust, the Black Mesa Trust, and others.

To me, the only answer to wise energy use is a mix of conservation and non-renewables. The other ways are mixes of kool-aid.

It's in the language

I still can't clearly define an opinion about the failues of the Democrats, but the idea of abandoning politicians who are Repubs in Democrat clothing has been with me since the days of Jimmy Carter, when MLKs', McGovernists' and other strongly liberal peoples' popular ideas were "appropriated"- nee commandeered- by mainstream party hacks, only to be so weakly supported during the Carter presidency that within the span of less than a decade the reactionary Reaganist platitudes were enabled and have managed to bring our country to the point it is today with the looming- no, impending- SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) ultra-conservative gang of four.

It is obvious to liberals that the language of orthodox political economy is rooted in greed. This is the front in the battle for the standing of the United States as a Godly nation.

I consider BushCo dogma to be the antithesis of freedom. The SCOTUS gang of four will work for years to make this dogma into permanent law.

Here is one example of how dogmatic economic doctrine has worked: The "law of supply and demand" is not a law in any sense of the word, yet it has been behind the oppression of working people since the days of Adam Smith. It is not a law of Nature, as the pseudo-scientific mainstream economists would have us believe, and is how it is taught. It is not a constitutional law of the land; not a statutory law, not a mass local ordinance, nor even a case law. It is merely a doctrine of belief that underlies our capitalististic system- a doctrine, and one, I would like to add, that does make sense to most people in the light of freedom. For example, it can work very well to determine the best allocation of resources, given current social economic circumstances. It can also be shown to work very poorly in far too many cases, though. Thus, it is easily made a vassal of free enterprise (make that cotton into denim dammit!), but just as easily invalidated by common sense (too many plastic flowers, not enough cheap heating oil).

However, the most glaring example of the failure of the law of supply and demand in the course of human events is when it comes to determining living wages for human beings. Here, the law of supply and demand serves to enable managers to justify their awful pay rate decisions on the supply of workers, rather than on the needs of the workers. People are being treated as just another factor of production, like steel, or grain. But steel and grain do not need food, clothing, and warm shelter. As liberals, we bemoan the lack of living wages for so many workers- a crisis further confounded by the labor arbitrage available through globalization. Corporate heads, whose decisionmaking serves stockholders first, won't even consider honoring a living wage for their employees, because it violates one of their "laws"- the law of supply and demand. Too bad for workers, say the corporadoes, we MUST OBEY the "law". See how it works?

If liberals want to really make the idea of a living wage a real law, as in a legislated statutory law, then we must popularly "decertify" the dogmatic law of supply and demand for human beings and certify living wage levels.

Who is up for this? I fail in even clearly expressing it in writing, let alone in a heated debate! But one thing I am sure of, it has to be done. Let the enemies of a living wage attack the idea, but there must be a consensus formed that a legislated living wage does not violate any "law". Opposing it, however violates the code of human decency. The issue has to be framed this way to make any progress.

It's all in the language. And freedom is in the truth.

Harry Truman Said Then What Needs Said Now

Thanks to Best of the Blogs for linking to this video of a speech by Harry Truman, in which Truman says, "Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat." -- April 24, 1950

Wow. Maybe Nixon's ghost isn't the only one making the rounds these days.

"Power Über Alles"

Here is a money quote from Paul Craig Roberts:
What has become of the American people that they permit the despicable practices of tyrants to be practiced in their name? The Bush administration is in violation of the US Constitution, the rule of law, the Geneva Convention, the Nuremberg Standard, and basic humanity. It is a gang of criminals. The Republican Party is so terrified of losing power that it supports a tyrannical administration that has brought shame not just to the Republican name but to all Americans.

Thanks, Paul, for telling it straight. You sure earned the respect of this ol' liberal.

Ethanol Production is a Welfare Industry

The Alternative Energy Blog had a great article back in July on the viability of ethanol as a substitute for gasoline. Clearly, there has been billions of taxpayer dollars spent on creating an ethanol industry, despite the fact that it is sustainable only with the addition of cheap oil inputs in ethanol's source and manufacture. Here is a portion of the discussion:

The stickiest question about ethanol is this: Does making alcohol from grain or plant waste really create any new energy?

The answer, of course, depends upon whom you ask. The ethanol lobby claims there's a 30 percent net gain in BTUs from ethanol made from corn. Other boosters, including Woolsey, claim there are huge energy gains (as much as 700 percent) to be had by making ethanol from grass.

But the ethanol critics have shown that the industry calculations are bogus. David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who has been studying grain alcohol for 20 years, and Tad Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, co-wrote a recent report that estimates that making ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel itself actually contains.

The two scientists calculated all the fuel inputs for ethanol production—from the diesel fuel for the tractor planting the corn, to the fertilizer put in the field, to the energy needed at the processing plant—and found that ethanol is a net energy-loser. According to their calculations, ethanol contains about 76,000 BTUs per gallon, but producing that ethanol from corn takes about 98,000 BTUs. For comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains about 116,000 BTUs per gallon. But making that gallon of gas—from drilling the well, to transportation, through refining—requires around 22,000 BTUs.

In addition to their findings on corn, they determined that making ethanol from switch grass requires 50 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol yields, wood biomass 57 percent more, and sunflowers 118 percent more. The best yield comes from soybeans, but they, too, are a net loser, requiring 27 percent more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced. In other words, more ethanol production will increase America's total energy consumption, not decrease it. (Pimentel has not taken money from the oil or refining industries. Patzek runs the UC Oil Consortium, which does research on oil and is funded by oil companies. His ethanol research is not funded by the oil or refining industries.)

Ethanol poses other serious difficulties for our energy economy. First, 8 billion gallons of ethanol will do almost nothing to reduce our oil imports. Eight billion gallons may sound like a lot, until you realize that America burned more than 134 billion gallons of gasoline last year. By 2012, those 8 billion gallons might reduce America's overall oil consumption by 0.5 percent. Way back in 1997, the General Accounting Office concluded that "ethanol's potential for substituting for petroleum is so small that it is unlikely to significantly affect overall energy security." That's still true today.

Adding more ethanol will also increase the complexity of America's refining infrastructure, which is already straining to meet demand, thus raising pump prices. Ethanol must be blended with gasoline. But ethanol absorbs water. Gasoline doesn't. Therefore, ethanol cannot be shipped by regular petroleum pipelines. Instead, it must be segregated from other motor fuels and shipped by truck, rail car, or barge. Those shipping methods are far more expensive than pipelines.

There's a final point to be raised about ethanol: It contains only about two-thirds as much energy as gasoline. Thus, when it gets blended with regular gasoline, it lowers the heat content of the fuel. So, while a gallon of ethanol-blended gas may cost the same as regular gasoline, it won't take you as far.

We are forgetting what high-quality even looks like anymore. Sheesh!

Fitzmas

My only comment on this is the same one I have had ever since the beginning of the "end justifies the means" murdering began: What on Earth could have been so precious that it could allow these war criminals to say in the end, "It was worth it", for what they did?

Now For Sale: National Parks

It appears that my concerns about the selloff of federal (as in common) property is now under consideration in Congress. These are Parks, Monuments, and other Historical sites. What madness, what mindless greed.

A Jury of Conscience Among Peacemakers

We are witnessing the struggle by the Iraqis to write a good Constitution. While this effort was taking place these past few months, one of the best political things to occur this summer was the Statement of Conscience made regarding war crimes committed by President George Bush and others.

The Conscience of Consciousness is coming!

Under the Radar

Thanks to the dedicated folks at the Environmental Education Outreach Program Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals, I learned that another tragedy is repeating itself: a Uranium mining rush. This horror- thousands of uranium workers and family members were sickened by the first rush; huge tailings contaminations, one of which is threatening the Colorado River in Moab, Utah, today; future atomic waste; terrorism running rampant. And it's all paid for by taxpayers in the end.

This slideshow explains quite clearly what a tragedy uranium mining is.

Where's that wooden stake at? What kind of people are these?

Read It and Weep

The book is Coyote Warriors, by Paul VanDevelder. There is not much more to say, except that is goes from deeply depressing to wonderfully uplifting. Tearful reading at each extreme.

(Krugman) Thursday's statement from the People's Bank of China, announcing that the yuan is no longer pegged to the dollar, was terse and uninformative - you might say inscrutable. There's a good chance that this is simply a piece of theater designed to buy a few months' respite from protectionist pressures in the U.S. Congress.

No School left behind

Last year, President War Criminal issued an executive order:
President Bush's Executive Order on American Indian and Alaska Native Education (EO 13336).
Although it is over a year old, my school district has yet to announce it, and I wonder if the administrators are even aware of it!

In a nutshell, here is a list of the Order's salient points:

• The Executive Order supports Tribal traditions, languages and cultures.
  
• Development of a Federal Plan.
  
• Research Study.
  
• Report to the President.
  
• Enhancement of Research Capabilities of Tribal-Level Educational Institutions.
  
• National Conference.
  

Although this may sound like gobbletygook to most folks, in Native areas it is supposed to ameliorate the culturally invasive aspects of the No Child Left Behind law. Those who want to read a more thorough summary of this Order would be making a very positive step in understanding the current needs of Native people, who have been relentlessly exploited up to the present day.

How to Make a Fire With an Aluminum Can

Well, once again an obvious answer presents itself. It is possible to polish the bottom of an aluminum can and use it to make a small parabolic mirror to start a fire. This, and other wilderness survival topics may be found at Tracker Trail. This idea actually uses chocolate from a candy bar as the polishing agent!

Thanks to BoingBoing for this and other neat connections.

My Faith Described

Faith is not the belief that God is on your side, it is the belief that you are on His side.

A Most Plausible Future

WWIII and its outcome. Funny isn't it, how war is always reduced to hand-to-hand combat? But, like the 6-year old wise-child said, "If we all hold hands, then we can't fight." Amen.

Solidarity Forever Starts With Womens' Rights

Take a look at the Executive Summary of last year's report from the National Women's Law Center. The report, which is still as fresh as the day it was published, is called, "Slip-Sliding Away: The Erosion of Hard-Won Gains for Women Under the Bush Administration and an Agenda for Moving Forward (April, 2004)". It pretty much shows how many hard-won gains in equality are not just eroding under the current administration, but are being sabotaged as well. The Summary can be downloaded in .pdf format. The entire report may also be found in .pdf format at this link.

Seems like there are quite a few Not So Good 'Ol Boys trying to run things out there.

Here Come the Kids

Such good news! Much more to come, I'm sure.

Bipartisanship in Education

Calling NCLB a "flawed, convoluted and unconstitutional education reform initiative that had usurped state and local control of public schools", the National Council of State Legislators hit a home run.

IIM Trust Fund Portends Social Security Fate

While reading this article, substitute the words, "Social Security" every time you see the words, "Individual Indian Money Trust Fund" (IIM). It may make you think about the reality facing working people in the US.

Again, this is not welfare, but rather money owed. And it is redefining the meaning if the word, "trust", in the halls of the federal government.

Uranium Mining Banned on Navajo Nation

Here's a pdf file of the Navajo Tribal Council resolution banning uranium mining: uraniumminingend.pdf

Social Security Methods Compared Calculator

Click the title to see what will happen to your benefit if the privatized changes happen.

Most non-politicized or non-ideological assessments of Social Security that I have read deplore privitization.

Who Bombed Lebanon?

"History is important. Those who believe they can turn history back should remember the origin of previous wars. The Germans didn't accept Versailles and that was the origin of Fascism." -Ricardo Alarcon Quesada, Cuba's Vice President and President of its National Assembly, January, 2005.

My suspicion is that the bombing in Lebanon is a pretext, whether premeditated or via opportunism, to take out Syria. One contiguous area of Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq under US/Israeli control is a mighty reality jolt.

CNN, How Could You Do This?

This incident involving the use of the same photograph to show a nuclear plant in in Iran and North Korea is the end of whatever was left of CNN's credibility for me. How dare they perpetrate this deception of convenience? How many will die for this lie?

Where is a good class-action lawsuit (for journalistic fraud over public airwaves) when you need one!?

CNN = "Caught Nuking News"
How disgusting.

update: But wait.... there's more!