July 8, 2008 archive

Pony Party

Pony Party is an Open Thread. Do Not wRECk it.

Pony Party

Pony Party is an Open Thread. Don’t wRECk it.

Walgreens Knows-So Get Off The Grid

There are literally commercials on TeeVee telling us that our future is destined to become a grade B sci-fi horror movie like Gattica.  In the ad there are people wearing Tshirts saying “I use three pharmacies”.  But the jist of the ad is that all of that is no worries.  Why?  Well, because big brother Walgreens knows exactly what the fuck you are ON and It’s no problem for you.

Well it’s a digital interconnected world so if Walgreens knows so does the world.  Trust me, they will use it against you.

Freedom from the car

Want to be free of cars? Neal Peirce writes:

Bikes, overall, account for 37 percent of Amsterdam transport. Public transit comes in second, at 22 percent of trips. On top of regular and high-speed rail, there’s a massive light-rail network — 50 miles of tramlines, with many stops, dense in the center city, radiating out to neighborhoods and suburbs with cross-connecting lines too. Recently, freight tramcars began running through the city, cutting truck use (and pollution). And Amsterdam has added three new subway lines since its first in 1976.

So what’s the Amsterdam game plan? For decades it’s been to nurture the “compact city,” slowing a middle-class exodus and preserving the open landscape by dense development, recycling old industrial areas and intermingling uses. Reducing auto use — now just 41 percent of trips compared to 90 percent-plus in most U.S. cities — is the heart of the plan.

Helped along by the Netherlands’ high gas taxes (per gallon costs are now over $9), the Amsterdam approach not only cuts energy use but provides a starting point for dramatic carbon reduction. But its genius, so rarely discussed in America, is smart land use and curbing the auto use that so easily overwhelms modern world cities.

Cities in the Netherlands like Amsterdam have been busy changing and evolving away from a car transportation system since Jimmy Carter was elected in the United States in 1976. American cities, on the other hand, largely have been pushing for more roads, wider roads, and more cars.

Resulting in, as the International Herald Tribune describes, America’s oil addiction: Chronicle of a crisis foretold.

Over the last 25 years, opportunities to head off the current crisis were ignored, missed or deliberately blocked, according to analysts, politicians and veterans of the oil and automobile industries. What’s more, for all the surprise at just how high oil prices have climbed, and fears for the future, this is one crisis we were warned about. Ever since the oil shortages of the 1970s, one report after another has cautioned against America’s oil addiction.

Even as politicians heatedly debate opening new regions to drilling, corralling energy speculators, or starting an Apollo-like effort to find renewable energy supplies, analysts say the real source of the problem is closer to home. In fact, it’s parked in our driveways.

Nearly 70 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil the United States consumes every day goes for transportation, with the bulk of that burned by individual drivers, according to the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan research group that advises Congress.

People in the Netherlands are paying twice as much — $9 a gallon — for gasoline… and have something to show for it. What does America have to show for $4.50 a gallon gasoline?

Voodoo Economics Redux

You gotta love Republican economics.  It flip flops like a fish on a dock.  Is it supply side or is it deficit hawk?  Is it for profligate spending and no taxation?  Will it claim somehow to balance the budget by decreasing taxes?  What kind of crazy voodoo economics is it this time?

An early example of fish thrashing on wood.  When he was trying to be the Republican presidential nominee in 1980, George H.W. Bush (George Pere) derided Reagan’s supply-side policies as “voodoo economics”. Later he promoted those policies to become the Republican nominee 1988.  Famously pronouncing, “Read my lips, no new taxes”, he ended up eating his words. He imposed tax increases.  He was for tax increases before he was against them and then he was for them again.  Mostly, he was for rich folks’ benefit and winning the election.  That seems a fairly easy idea to fulfill.  Not.

And now you have John McSame who is dancing to the same Republican economics pipers. Today’s New York Times reports that McSame’s economics policy is not very pleasing at all to the rich folks:

As Senator John McCain began a week of economic-themed campaigning here on Monday, it was apparent that some of the underlying tension between the two schools that guide his economic thinking – supply-siders who want to cut taxes and deficit hawks who want to balance the federal budget – remained unresolved.

Mr. McCain is pledging once again to balance the budget by the end of his first term as president in 2013, his advisers said Monday, reverting to an earlier pledge that the Arizona senator had abandoned in April when he proposed a series of costly tax cuts for corporations and high earners, and said it might take two terms to balance the budget.

“American workers and families pay their bills and balance their budgets, and I will demand the same of the government,” Mr. McCain said at a town hall-style meeting here.

But it is unclear how Mr. McCain plans to balance the budget, given that fiscal analysts who have examined his economic plans say his calls to extend the Bush tax cuts while cutting corporate and other taxes would likely increase the deficit significantly.

This tension between steep tax cuts and deficit reduction has been a recurring theme in the evolution of Mr. McCain.

Humanity’s Last Chance

This is not a criticism – it’s a plea.

We are at a time unlike any other in the 250,000-year history of our species.  What we do now will determine the fate of our kind.  We may soon know whether or not we deserve the name we have given ourselves, homo sapiens sapiens – wise or knowing human.

Before-it-blows

A Just Foreign Policy

YES Magazine, Summer ’08 Edition, has a number of really good articles, and an interview, that should be read and obsorbed as to some of what we should be putting into public discussion as we try to turn this ship of state around and head in a direction that should already have been. These articles touch on a number of important issues, Very Important, not only for us, as a country, but our place in the world and for the world as a whole. They are also a matter of our Security and the Security of the planet


This one with Shultz might sound abit familiar for any who heard him talking when they returned from this conferance, but this is an Extremely Important subject and not only for us, and our National Security but the Security of everyone.

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