Geoftopia

Celebrating 9-11

2011-09-10T17:09:00.000-07:00

Ten years after that fateful day, we have so much to celebrate. Who could have guessed after September 11, 2001 that our President had it in him? He really showed leadership like few before him. Certainly he will go down in history as a man who forever changed the path our country was headed.

It would have been so easy for him to cave in to the special monied interests, to simply sell out our freedoms for the illusion of safety, to continue the exercise in false bubble-economies, and to further continue the disparity of wealth and privilege in this nation. But he did not do that.

First of all, our President chose not to squander the outpouring of international sympathy. His call to all nations of the world to address the shameful inequalities in wealth did not fall on deaf ears, especially when the world could see how he brought together a bipartisan commission to end poverty in his own nation. Our President made a real commitment to the U.N. in terms of financial support. He did not apologize for the atrocities made against us — instead he made it clear that a world full of inequality was a world that would continue to be at war, and that an atrocity committed against one is an atrocity committed against humanity.

Secondly, our President and the people he chose to lead his Commissions realized that Class Warfare and the monied interests had to be kept in check. But the way he did this was brilliant — he didn't demonize wealth — instead he made it clear that with great privilege comes great responsibility. How our President made revenue available quickly at the behest of Philanthropy, and the way he petitioned the wealthy was nothing short of amazing. Ending the Free Trade Era and ushering in the Fair Trade Era has brought back millions of jobs in this country as well as creating competitive markets overseas while increasing the standards of living globally. It quickly became clear that a rush to the bottom was not the way to stabilize the world. His passing of the Employee Free Choice Act in 2002 created hundreds of thousands of good Union jobs.

Thirdly, our President tackled the Military Industrial Complex. This could have had the effect of ensuring a single term, but he did it in a way that was almost slight-of -hand. He made it clear that war was not an answer — the U.S. would no longer spend trillions of dollars to go to war with an invisible enemy. We closed down military bases throughout the world, while simultaneously moving military personnel close to home in security roles along with humanitarian ones. Renaming the Defense Department the Department of Peace and Homeland Security was controversial at first, but most Americans nowadays cannot imagine it any other way. Just look at Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Had we sent all our resources overseas to fight an unending War on Terror as many of our President's critics suggested, we could have lost an entire city. Instead, we made the repairs to infrastructure that we badly needed. New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were spared what could have been a horrible devastation.

Lastly, our President asked us to make real sacrifices, and we heeded his call. Americans stopped living a material existence. We put our families and communities first. Americans paid off their credit card bills and "grew up" to be responsible citizens. Working families saved billions of dollars and reinvested in their communities. After the Stock Market Speculation Bubble burst, many Banks started to look for other dubious investment schemes. The Nationalization of the Banking Industry and abolition of the Federal Reserve took back a crucial element of our Democratic Republic. Americans have seen their savings and investments grow. Trillions of dollars of real wealth have been created in this country, and by 2004 it was clear to most of us that reelection was a given.

Considering the accomplishments of the prior administration, they could have simply rested on their laurels. But it was astounding how they "amped up" their efforts to bring this country to the forefront once more and to lead as an example to the rest of the world.

Before the second Inaugural Address in 2004, the Counter-Terrorism Units had all but expunged Al-Qaeda from the surface of the Earth. Many Middle Eastern countries had already formed formidable revolutionary groups ready to embrace a democratic form of governance.

In January 2005 many Americans were unhappy about the new Gas Tax. But we had already built the economy in an unprecedented way. Unemployment was virtually nil. Working families had saved money and the dollar was King against any other currency. Wealthy Americans had been paying their fair share and government coffers had a surplus. So many people did not realize the value in such a tax — especially such a large tax. Of course Gas and Oil Companies spent millions trying to sway public opinion — to some effect. But the Gas Tax Bill passed both houses and the President signed it into Law. Gone were government subsidies to Big Oil.

In less than six months, Americans had adjusted to $6. a gallon tax in some unprecedented ways. The Big Three immediately responded by manufacturing highly efficient automobiles, including many good electric and biodiesel models, and this increased their market shares considerably. Americans started buying their food locally grown and support of the small family farms began in earnest. The Urban Farm movement began and city rooftops started sporting all kinds of food grown hydroponically. Conservation became commonplace. Yet it was the way government reinvested that tax money that has revolutionized this country. By the third quarter of 2005 the revenue collected by the Gas Tax Bill funded the U.S. High Speed Rail Project that was completed over a year ago. Just about every metropolitan area now has a high-speed train that connects it with other metropolitan areas. Inefficient and costly air travel is now a thing of the past between nearby cities. The future hold even more promises.

In 2007 the Public Transportation Bill was narrowly passed. Now in any city over 50,000 in population one can state that cheap, efficient and comfortable transit options exist. Private automobile ownership is no longer a prerequisite to the American standard of living, unless one lives in the rural outskirts. Retooling the Automobile Industry took surprisingly little time. Getting people out of their cars was a feat of marketing brilliance by middle of the second term of the administration, but the results have been miraculous. Whole city centers have now become carfree. There were now three experimental carfree cities in the United States, and there is a waiting list a mile long to gain admission. Many larger metropolitan areas have made public transit entirely free to their ridership increasing its use and efficiency of operation. American families have saved billions due to the decline of automobile ownership and reinvested in their homes, education and communities. The equality gap continues to close, and the reinvigorated communities — brought closer together due to such policies have nourished a renaissance in the arts.

By 2008 the United States economy was booming. Gas was $8 a gallon, but few cared. Americans had more money than seven years prior, and they were now disciplined enough to save and reinvest it. The Health Care Act of 2008 was a big fight in Washington D.C., but after so many successes and so much public confidence, it was clear that Big Pharma and the Health Insurance lobby were the clear losers. The single-payer system was the only system proposed, and we are so much better for it. Since health insurance was no longer based on employment, unions no longer had to negotiate their contracts with it in mind. Real wages immediately shot up. Two years afterwards and we see wages climbing over inflation. Most American workers today can afford to buy their own homes.

Congress amended the U.S. Constitution in 2008 to end term limits for the Presidency, and the President signed it into Law. Strangely, he did not seek a third term. Americans were bewildered. Instead he chose to pass on the reigns.

Clearly the support of the previous President was enough to usher in our current President. In 2009 it was clear that Big Oil's days were over. The Resource Preservation Act was handily passed. Regulation was clearly needed, as it was discovered that deep-sea oil drilling was in dangerous uncharted territory. A quick end to it ensued, and eminent disaster was averted. A gallon of gas at the end of 2009 soared past $10 a gallon, but most vehicles by this time were using little if any of it. The Solar Energy Industry was already taking a huge bite out of electric needs. Wind, Sea and Tidal Power Plants sprung up overnight. Half of this nation's electricity now comes from renewable energy sources only two years after this policy was put into effect. Many people voluntarily started leaving Suburbia by 2002, and much of the land was reclaimed for independent farms or returned to its natural state. Some suburban areas have been transformed to carfree cities. Who could have predicted such a transformative time in American history?

By 2010 the wealth of this country, and the world was at a peak. Rather than capitulating to fear and superstition, we had invested heavily in Science both in terms of research and education. The breakthroughs have all but dissipated the Dark Ages. America and the world have become decidedly Secular Humanist, because we saw what worked. We are no longer beholden to our narrow, tribal notions. We are witnessing a global era of peace and prosperity. In 2010 the United States did something that a decade prior would have been considered an impossibility. The Education Act of 2010 made all schools and Universities free based upon admission as long as a student showed desire and ability — and regardless of their national origin. This has created a Renaissance of learning based upon competition and desire and it has made this country a seat of culture like none other.

September 11, 2011. We have cause to celebrate, and reason to be hopeful that the future will bring more health and prosperity to our nation and the world.

The Scourge of My Profession

2010-11-08T15:26:00.000-08:00

Working for assholes can really take its toll. Pardon my lack of eloquence, but there are times where a vulgarity, aptly employed, reveals more truth than several more erudite phrases. I believe this to be one of them.

Lest you immediately think I am referring to our esteemed guests, let me persuade you that such is the furthest from my thoughts. No, I am alluding to those who do the bidding of the owner-class. Those soulless, lifeless banes of mankind's very existence. Vampires by any other name. Neither stupidity or cynicism knows its bounds in the cold hearts that beat in their hollow chests. Their ability to lie and deceive is unmatched. Their own greed and lust is so great they'd rob their own mothers blind. If there is ever a revolution in this country, it is their heads we should mount along the highways. Let the very rich remain — it would best behoove us to let this be a reminder to them. No longer able to dictate their wills, and now with a clear reminder that lest they not pay heed, they too shall find themselves headless — we just might see a blessed resurgence of philanthropy!

Prom Dates and Career Choices

2010-04-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

You often hear it said there's no use in crying over spilled milk. Perhaps this is true. But ruminating over it and imagining ways to prevent it from spilling in the future may be valuable.

Just recently there have been a series of stories of gay youth and their respective prom dates. The gist of these stories in my opinion is not about the remaining discrimination and ignorance that gays face — instead, it is about how damn far we've come. Youth today by and large do not discriminate. Gays are accepted by their peers. That's a long, long way from a quarter of a century ago when I was in high school.

I hated school. My hatred of my scholastic career began at the tender age of thirteen in the sixth grade. I look back now and realize I was robbed. My future was stolen. I resist playing the victim card, but I have to say that the amount of bullying and torment I was subjected to at that early age played a decisive role in the person that I have become and the possibilities I've been afforded. It could have been far worse. I could have simply committed suicide. There were many times I considered it. And my sexuality played the biggest role.

Funny thing, I was a good student. I was above average intelligence, creative and inquisitive about the world. Yet I was stifled due to the lack of acceptance of a fundamental part of who I was and who I am. My parents were supportive, although their religious views did not embrace the idea of a gay child. I was moved out of the hateful middle school I attended, and I was placed in a more supportive school during the eighth grade. It made a huge difference in my life in terms of finding friendship and support — regardless of the fact it was a religious school. But by high school I had given up. The damage was done.

Little did I know that University would likely have provided me so many means of coming to terms with myself and developing as an individual. I just figured it would be an extension of high school — and I was not having that! Unfortunately my parents did not have the foresight, since they had no direct experience of college themselves. So I ended up following my Dad in the family business — a business that I was able to develop a good amount of skill and knowledge in — yet a business that I was not passionate about. I enjoyed making decent money, but even in that regard I lacked a fundamental education and found myself at the end of two decades without anything to show for all my work and dedication. I found myself in a dead-end clerical job where I have worked essentially as an indentured servant for the past six years. I'd say that the benefits are good, but it is nothing less than velvet handcuffs. Had the benefits not been there I may have been forced to find something more fitting to my level of experience. Nonetheless, this is the metaphorical "spilled milk".

But I wonder how my life would have been different if the world I grew up in had accepted me for who I was. In such a parallel world, who would Geoffrey have become? What career(s) would I have chosen? What level of scholarship would I have attained? What kind of husband and family would I now have? Where might I have traveled? How might I have been involved in and/or recognized in my community?

I think I can rightly answer that my life would have been far better and with many more opportunities. I think I would have made more intelligent decisions about the people I chose to love, the places I decided to go, the ways I could have invested my money and the things I did for a living. But you can never know for certain. And since it's all hindsight, this is the life I have lived, and there's no point in regretting it — what's the point anyhow?

The point is: We don't let these injustices continue! We stop killing the creative spark in our children! We abandon our ridiculous and barbaric superstitious beliefs! We allow each other to develop fully! That's the whole fucking point to this rant. Am I bitter? You'd better goddamn believe it.

But good for these kids nowadays! I take some solace in the fact that two high school boys can each be dates at their prom, in a small town, in the south of all places — and their classmates cheer them on! At least there is hope for the future.

Where's the Baby?

2010-04-05T07:57:00.000-07:00

You've heard the proverb, "Don't throw out the baby with the bath water". As an Episcopalian, I have heard it used in reference to other Protestant denominations. Episcopalians retained the Liturgy and many other cults of the Catholic Church. Some of which is undeniably "bath water". Now, I say I am an Episcopalian in order to identify with a particular Christian heritage, which has helped mold me into the person I am presently. Prior to the age of sixteen, my Christian upbringing was decidedly more Evangelical. Regardless of the fact that Evangelical belief left an indelible mark on me, I stopped identifying with such a very long time ago.

And that leads me to the thoughts I've been struggling with since my public declaration of my atheism over a year ago. I've been pouring out an awful lot of stinky bath water, and wondering if indeed there is any baby lurking within it at all! Thrice I have attended an Episcopal service since my declaration — twice during Advent and just yesterday on Easter morning. On every occasion I was entranced with the homiletics. On one occasion I attended an Anglo-Catholic parish where I felt the level of "worship" was palpable — it even brought me to tears. Of course, any good production can do that. But each time I walk away, I walk away as a skeptic, but somehow thankful for my church. I still identify with it, and it still speaks to me in some mysterious way.

Surprisingly to some, I believe most atheists/agnostics struggle with "spirituality". We have many tools at our disposal. There is a sense of "community". We can meet and philosophize. Yet we don't have this ancient structure behind us — no awe-inspiring edifice — no Liturgy — imbued with the divine music of Johann Sebastian Bach! I wonder if such a community of skeptics could ever be built. And I wonder if it would inspire people the way religions have. What is it that religion offers? Where is the Baby?

The message I hear emanating behind the pulpits of the mainstream protestant denominations is one that most intelligent, and reasoning individuals can identify with. Yet mainstream protestantism seems to be losing steam. Instead, the Catholic, Evangelical, Pentecostal and Fundamentalist Christians are not only gaining huge strides, but their beliefs are becoming more entrenched and intolerant. I'm afraid that the mere existence of moderate, tolerant and liberal Christians only lends credence to these "fringe" groups. I say "fringe", but frankly it is rapidly becoming the accepted view of Christianity among believers and non-believers alike.

When I listen to the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and all the other self-declared spokespeople for his Divine Majesty, I cannot help but feel we pertain to entirely different religions. Such Christianity to me is unrecognizable. I suppose a literal reading of scripture, ignorance of scientific progress over the last several centuries, and profound lack of historical knowledge compounded with a complete disregard for comparative religious study might indeed lead one to such a radical view. However, even so, it is blatantly obvious that the literal interpretations of scripture have been carefully chosen so as not to offend some groups and to oppress others. Specifically, gay people are targeted in a horrific way. Yet divorcees are allowed. Women can be preachers. The membership is not required to keep Kosher. I could go on, but it's pointless. There is no arguing with these people.

Yet I know there is a Baby. And as a matter of fact, much of my secular humanism and my political egalitarianism is based upon the recognition of that Baby. I believe we are all equal under the law. I believe the face of the Divine is in each of us. I believe an injustice committed against one is an injustice against all. I believe human life is sacred (I am also in favor of a woman's right over her body). I believe we are still in an evolutionary process, and our faculties of reason and science and technology should be used to better all of humanity and the marvelous sphere we live upon. So I continue to believe in the Incarnation, albeit in an extremely metaphorical sense. I also believe in the Resurrection in the same way. Life goes on. New life can begin. This is a message of hope.

What's not Conservative about Conservation?

2010-04-03T04:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't been paying much attention to the likes of Sarah Palin and her ilk, the Teabaggers. However, it's next to impossible to ignore them. Thanks in particular to the "lamestream" media they purport to disdain. In my estimation they consist largely of a group of ill-informed, semi-literate, paranoid-delusional types, which unfortunately make up a significant minority in this country. I'd throw the words racist and xenophobic in the mix as well, but I'll suffice to say paranoid-delusional covers such attributes. Logic is obviously not one of their strong suits, so any attempt at dialogue is in vain.

But supposing for a moment it were possible to have an elucidative conversation with one of them, there is one question on my mind that I'd love to ask. "What's not conservative about conservation"?

I keep hearing how these folks won't give up their S.U.V.'s. They brag outright about how "big" their carbon footprints are, as if they were high school jocks in a locker room comparing dick sizes! They claim that climate change is a hoax, regardless of the profusion of scientific evidence that proves it. Regardless of their fear of "foreigners", they continue to support Big Oil. Do they not know where most petroleum is drilled? It's enough to make one cry out of irrational exhaustion.

What part of conservation do they not get? Do they not understand how this benefits them? Save your money, do not be wasteful. Keep the environment pristine. Theses ARE conservative values! It's just insane!

Happy Good Friday?

2010-04-02T05:04:00.001-07:00

Good Friday today. Not that it has any particular spiritual meaning to me anymore. Yet I find myself reflecting upon it. Jesus was more than likely a slightly deranged character who ran afoul of the religious and political authorities of his day. Apparently the majority of his friends and followers abandoned him in the hour of his greatest need (many of us can relate). He was tortured, mocked and publicly executed in one of the most horrific ways humanity has ever imagined. It is a terrible and sad story. It is also something that humanity has repeated millions of times over hence. As a matter of fact, the Church in particular had developed such torture and execution to a bit of a fine, albeit evil art during the centuries of the Inquisition. And of course the Jews, or Christ killers, were selected as a special group for society's derision. So it is of little surprise that Catholics are almost obsessed by this day where at least subconsciously they express their collective guilt.

Of course, we simply wait three days for the good news that Jesus actually didn't die on the cross and is alive. Pretty impressive. Now later on theologically speaking, it is determined that Jesus actually went on a little foray and descended to the depths of Sheol to offer forgiveness and redemption to all the souls of the departed before he popped back up to Palestine to eat some fish and socialize with his friends before being "beamed up" into Heaven where he currently sits upon a throne next to his Papa Yahweh to judge Heaven and Earth at the end of all Time. Now that's just beyond incredible! (and also why the study of Theology eventually led me to atheism).

Nonetheless, it is worthy of reflection that humanity is capable of doing horrible things to one another. The Jesus movement of his day could have posed a threat to the authorities — and that's just something you don't do unless you have a tinge of a Messianic complex! Jesus was really a rather harmless fellow who taught some pretty crazy ideas — many of which are certainly worthy of debate — such as selling off all one's possessions and leaving one's family! Yet many of Jesus' words were kind and wise advice. Yet one wonders if he were to come back today if we wouldn't kill him again? Indeed, metaphorically speaking, we have in the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many others. We don't like the message of peace and brotherhood, so we simply shoot the messenger. Maybe in the future some religious sect will wear little golden handguns around their necks?

I'm Back!

2010-04-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

Been away for a while. But I plan on slowly easing back into the blogging thing. I think that I will likely expand upon the Carfree theme, and include whatever I find interesting. So this will be more like therapy. I figure my readership is virtually nil, so I'm not doing this for any other reason than my own personal edification. If others find it attractive and wish to drop by and comment, that would be nice yet unnecessary.

1958 - Global Warming - It's NOT newly known

2008-08-15T20:21:00.001-07:00

Fifty years later, and the answer is offshore drilling!

David Byrne's Bike Racks

2008-08-15T20:13:00.001-07:00

Car Free Streets

2008-08-13T07:11:00.001-07:00

Not only is this young lady adorably cute, she also manages some decent improvisational lyrics and dance moves!

fast train - ave renfe - alta velocidad españa - spain

2008-07-12T13:48:00.001-07:00

Yet another reminder that we are so far behind the rest of the world. What's going on?

Is there a way to compare a human being to an engine in terms of efficiency?

2008-06-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

From howstuffworks.com:

It turns out that "biological engines" -- which is what the muscles in your body are -- are pretty amazing in terms of efficiency. To find out how efficient, let's look at how many calories a person burns while riding a bicycle.
If you look at a page like this calorie chart, you will find that a person riding a bicycle at 15 miles per hour (24 km per hour) burns 0.049 calories per pound per minute. So a 175-pound (77-kg) person burns 515 calories in an hour, or about 34 calories per mile (about 21 calories per km).

A gallon of gasoline (about 4 liters) contains about 31,000 calories. If a person could drink gasoline, then a person could ride about 912 miles on a gallon of gas (about 360 km per liter). Considering that a normal car gets about 30 miles per gallon, that's pretty impressive!

To be fair, keep in mind that a car generally weighs a ton or more, while a bicycle weighs only 30 pounds. Cars also travel a lot faster than 15 mph. But it is still an interesting comparison. Note also that people cannot drink gasoline. However, people can drink vegetable oil, which contains nearly the same number of calories per gallon (if you look at How Fats Work you can see that fat contains long hydrogen/carbon chains just like gasoline does).

The people riding in a race like the Tour de France are riding more like 25 mph. Because air resistance rises very quickly with speed, they are burning about three times more calories -- something like 100 calories per mile. In a 100-mile stage of the tour, a racer might burn something like 8,000 to 10,000 calories in one day! So they are getting only about 300 miles per gallon. The only way to replace those calories is to eat a lot of food (see How Dieting Works for details).

If People Could Run On Gasoline

2008-06-30T17:01:00.001-07:00

Some interesting thoughts relating to the posting above.

Is Parking Being Subsidized?

2008-06-25T18:21:00.001-07:00

It just so happens that I've worked in a landmark hotel here in San Francisco as a reception desk clerk for the past several years. Originally, I took this job as a stopgap, figuring I'd find work in my trade as a Lithographer at a later date. Two things happened. First of all, I found that the union benefits and seniority protections made my job quite enviable. Lastly, I discovered that my trade is all but a tattered remnant in the city where I wish to live, thanks to outsourcing and other things.

On top of everything else, I have found that I really like what I do for a living. I have many opportunities daily to talk to all sorts of people from all sorts of socioeconomic backgrounds, and varied cultures. The more I get to meet all these people, the more I've begun to realize that we all share the same concerns, hold the same values, and essentially we share much more in common than what might separate us. It also gives me an opportunity to plant seeds of change. I started this blog with the hopes that some of my ideas (those seeds of change) would get picked up and discussed, and people would begin to see some of the things I have noticed, and begin to reach their own conclusions. Right now, this blog has yet to gain any real readership or recognition, but it is a place where I am free to write down my insights and formulate ideas. Perhaps one day it will take off, but even if it simply inspires a few individuals to do something, then it has served a purpose greater than what I could ever do by myself.

Words – or better said, the ideas which words represent are powerful forces that can manifest themselves as physical realities. This is why we are wise to pick our words carefully. We are wise to refrain from immediately reacting to a given situation. Silence can be one's best defense. More often than not, we are generally unconscious to our words, and we tend to parrot everything we hear. At some point we can believe our own lies, and then those lies, or distortions, or exaggerations become manifest in the physical world in all sorts of ways.

My job in particular, is one of those jobs where diplomacy is paramount. But that does not mean I'm not free to express myself. I just have to choose my words with extreme care. Once a guest inquired as to whether or not I supported trade unions. It was apparent to me that our guest was not a fan of organized labor. My response to her was "Yes, I support organized labor. I am actually one of the representatives of my union here at this hotel, and it is my duty to ensure that our negotiated contract is followed and to make sure that our members are treated equitably. I don't believe that unions are free from corruption, or that they never make grave mistakes, or even that there have not been times unions have worked against their best economic interests. I keep an open mind, and many detractors of organized labor have made some valid arguments against them. Ideally, labor would represent all working people – not just those who are able to organize. But in the end, I believe there needs to be a balance of power for a democratic process to function, and in this country, the only true representatives of labor have been trade unions, and when it comes right down to the nitty-gritty, I know that my union has my best interests at heart." Our guest was dumbstruck, and realized that in my summary there was no way she could argue with me, because I had made a concession to her, and confessed that I did not have the perfect answer, but I made it clear that I would support the organization that had my best interests first and foremost. And why would I or anyone else for that matter, vote against our interests? I'm sure that this lady walked away with a different perspective, and perhaps more open to other ideas. If anything, I was at least successful in explaining why there are people who support unions. Had I been afraid to express myself, or worse yet, had I come across as defensive and argumentative, no transformation would take place – to the contrary, this individual would likely become more entrenched in her world view.

A few months ago, we raised our parking rates from $45 to $50 overnight. It is incredible how many of our guest's are up in arms over this. My strategy initially was to avert the blame by stating that the hotel does not manage the garage, and we have no control over their parking rates, which is generally correct. After seeing that averting the blame did little to quell our guest's ire, I tried another tactic, which was one of comparison. Stating that our parking rates were within the going rate in the area, seemed to work a little better. But I've found that my best tactic is simply to side with the guest and say something to the effect of, "isn't it crazy?". The problem with this tactic is that it is disingenuous. Let me explain why this is so.

There are things that have inherent value. A thing becomes more valuable as its scarcity rises. Space is one of those things. If you think about it, you'll realize that space is indeed limited on this planet. In fact, the oceans cover two thirds of the surface – so you can immediately count that out until we start building floating cities! But the truth of the matter is that space, especially in urban areas, is at a premium. And when you begin to realize that the auto-centric urban environments have dedicated a surprising amount of space to the personal motorcar, you'll also begin to realize how amazingly subsidized that space is when compared to everything else. I have made the same point repeatedly regarding fuel costs. The real price of gas is conservatively estimated at $20 per gallon. If the consumer were to see this reality at the pump, he would sell his car, buy a bicycle, move closer to work, or take public transit (or do all the aforementioned).

So let's get back to the idea of a privately owned car, and the ability to park it at will on open public space, or within a garage. One of my mental exercises involves taking a stroll through one's neighborhood and imagining personal, and privately owned objects, preferably of value, in place of the cars that are parked on the street. If you spot a new Mercedes Benz, then you can imagine a fine Persian carpet with a very expensive leather sofa, and perhaps an antique end table with a lovely art nouveau lamp on it, since that would essentially equate the value of the car in that space. Now let's say we come across a compact economy car, like a Toyota. Now we can imagine a large plasma screen television set and high-fidelity stereo system and a nice modern recliner in its place. Lastly, imagine a smog-belching junk heap of an automobile that might be worth five hundred dollars on a good day. You've just imagined my entire apartment's furnishings! Isn't this a fun exercise? This is exactly what personal transport is with a few important differences. First of all, it is arguably more of an eyesore, and it is noisier, it emits toxic fumes (and people get upset with cigarette smokers!), and it is only available to its owner. Presumably, if one were to park a sofa on the street, people tired from walking could take a break and sit upon it.

Most importantly, the car is designed to be mobile, although ironically, it spends over ninety percent of its time resting. That means that wherever I drive my car to, I need a space to park it once I get there. If you figure conservatively that the average parking space takes up 275 square feet, and every car owner needs an average of six parking spaces throughout the city at their disposal, then each car needs roughly 1,650 square feet of space for its intended operation, not including roadways. Now if you figure your average apartment is 700 square feet, and the average rent in this city is $1500 per month, you'll see that the residential rate is roughly $2 per square foot. If you figure that each car requires 1650 square feet of space throughout the city, then would it not be equitable to charge $3000 per month for its parking requirements? Can you begin to see how car owners are subsidized? Even if you were to charge for a single residential space, the equitable amount would be $550 per month, and our parking rates are not anywhere near that. You can buy a residential permit in my crowded neighborhood and park your heap of junk for $60 annually, or quite frankly next to nothing. Why is such valuable space considered so exclusive to the private use of car owners?

By now, you can probably see where I'm going here. Could it be then that parking is also subsidized by our hotel guests? Our hotel's average daily rate for a room is about $250 per night. Our average room is about 450 square feet. That equates to 55 cents per square foot. So you can see right off that $50 per night for a parking space is one third the going rate. Albeit, there is minimal maintenance, no maid service, and little in the way of utilities involved in keeping a parking space. However, there is overhead involved – there are parking attendants and there is a valet parking service. I dare say, a more equitable rate would be $80 per night, and I figure that conservatively. So to a certain degree, our guests who choose not to use our parking facility are subsidizing our guests who do utilize the parking facility.

As long as car ownership is considered a right in this country, and as long as we continue to subsidize its use, attitudes will likely never change. Yet when you begin to consider the actual cost of the automobile, the alternatives begin to look quite appealing indeed. The less we rely on our cars within urban environments, the more we can begin to invest in attractive alternatives. There are infinite possibilities out there. There is no particular reason why we cannot fathom cities with carfree zones, or carfree cities, for that matter. I for one, hope that someday I will be able to live in my city as a free citizen, stripped from the burdens of autocentric culture, where children are free to play in the streets, where citizens can gather in public spaces without fear of being hit by a car, and where there is less noise and pollution.

Now its your turn to imagine the possibilities.

Ivan Illich: Social effects of motorized transport

2008-06-09T04:49:00.000-07:00

This man is the one who got me thinking about alternatives to the automobile:

The United States puts between 25 and 45 per cent of its total energy (depending upon how one calculates this) into vehicles: to make them, run them, and clear a right of way for them when they roll, when they fly, and when they park. For the sole purpose of transporting people, 250 million Americans allocate more fuel than is used by 1.3 billion Chinese and Indians for all purposes.

The model American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy.

The model American puts in 1,600 hours to get 7,500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 per cent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 per cent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of life-time for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.
Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.
Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.

Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car. The cost of public utilities needed to facilitate bicycle traffic versus the price of an infrastructure tailored to high speeds is proportionately even less than the price differential of the vehicles used in the two systems. In the bicycle system, engineered roads are necessary only at certain points of dense traffic, and people who live far from the surfaced path are not thereby automatically isolated as they would be if they depended on cars or trains. The bicycle has extended man's radius without shunting him onto roads he cannot walk. Where he cannot ride his bike, he can usually push it.

The bicycle also uses little space. Eighteen bikes can be parked in the place of one car, thirty of them can move along in the space devoured by a single automobile. It takes three lanes of a given size to move 40,000 people across a bridge in one hour by using automated trains, four to move them on buses, twelve to move them in their cars, and only two lanes for them to pedal across on bicycles. Of all these vehicles, only the bicycle really allows people to go from door to door without walking. The cyclist can reach new destinations of his choice without his tool creating new locations from which he is barred.

Bicycles let people move with greater speed without taking up significant amounts of scarce space, energy, or time. They can spend fewer hours on each mile and still travel more miles in a year. They can get the benefit of technological breakthroughs without putting undue claims on the schedules, energy, or space of others. They become masters of their own movements without blocking those of their fellows. Their new tool creates only those demands which it can also satisfy. Every increase in motorized speed creates new demands on space and time. The use of the bicycle is self-limiting. It allows people to create a new relationship between their life-space and their life-time, between their territory and the pulse of their being, without destroying their inherited balance. The advantages of modern self-powered traffic are obvious, and ignored. That better traffic runs faster is asserted, but never proved. Before they ask people to pay for it, those who propose acceleration should try to display the evidence for their claim.

[from: Energy and Equity. In Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978.]

Cars Are Driving Us Nuts

2008-05-29T04:33:00.000-07:00

We drive ever longer distances in order to satisfy the same needs

An interview with Hermann Knoflacher

Martin Hablesreiter and Sonja Stummerer recently interviewed one of the leading traffic scientists, Professor Hermann Knoflacher. He has taught at the Institut fuer Verkehrsplanung und Verkehrstechnik at the Technische Universitaet in Vienna for more than 30 years. The 67-year-old professor became well known in Vienna for his innovative thinking on traffic issues. He developed pedestrian areas, put trams on separate roadways, and advocated a separate network of bicycle paths.
Translated by Ulrich Nehls with help from Sarah Whelan in Galway, Ireland.
Q: Are you opposed to the car?

HK: I am not opposed to the car. But I am aware of its impact on our society.

Q: Do you drive?

HK: I don't own a car, but I drive occasionally.

Q: So, what impact does motorization have on our society?

HK: An incredible one. The car is like a virus that beds in your brain and totally subverts behaviour, values, and perception. A normal person would call our present living space completely insane. We move into sealed houses more or less voluntarily, with noise-protected windows and leave the outside to the noise, dust, and exhaust of the cars. That is a full reversal of values, and we don't even notice it any more.

Q: In your opinion how did it come this far ?

HK: Our problem is upright walking. We consume a considerable amount of muscle and navigation energy in order to stabilize our body. Just think of the coordination problems when under the influence of alcohol. When driving we use only one sixth of our energy and feel incredibly fast and powerful. That is one part. The other one is urban planning that requires cars to be as close as possible to all of our social activities. That's how you destroy the natural habitat, public transit, local supply, and eventually the social network that humans have established in millennia.

Q: So the car destroys evolution?

HK: No, but the human accomplishments of past generations have been degraded by the car.

Q: Does the car era mean our cultural doom?

HK: I wouldn't say that, since a cultural doom is not the real problem in my eyes. It's only the latest layer of evolution to get lost. The permanent structural devastation caused by the car is much worse.

Q: Is driving addictive?

HK: Definitely! The car takes possession of people. The driver is more distinguished from a human than any insect.

Q: What do you mean by that?

HK: Mobility with the own body is something common between humans and insects. However, a driver does not need this. And no insects destroy the living space of their successors for their own convenience, or move so fast that it could kill themselves.

Q: In your opinion what should mobility in our society look like then?

HK: Every society needs mobility to satisfy its needs. If we could meet our needs locally we would be plants, not humans. Human mobility always emerges from local shortcomings.

Q: Why are we so proud of our mobility?

HK: You are talking about technical mobility. In historic terms we never were especially proud of mobility. On the contrary: mobility has always been a ballast. Settling down means getting rid of enforced mobility. Our mental mobility was enough to allow us to cultivate plants or domesticate animals.

Q: Is this why words such as gypsy or tramp are offensive?

HK: It's clear: The settled community have claimed their territory and refuse access to anybody else. Settled residences are seen as exclusive. Travellers challenge the ownership of the land of the settled people and are thus hated for doing so.

Q: You are both a critic of our traffic system and a planner. How does that work?

HK: At the start of my career I discovered that traditional traffic planning is merely based on assumptions. For a long time there was no consideration for the consequences for the society or the environment. Nobody cared about noise or pollution, about fatalities, about the economy being altered or unemployment being created. My goal is traffic planning on a scientific basis. Under this aspect it is my opinion that transportation is one of the most fascinating scientific areas.

Q: You criticize the lack of networking traffic planning with other scientific fields.

HK: Yes. Core statements in transportation are completely wrong from my point of view! The idea of mobility growth depends on an inchoate reflection of the system. There was the assumption of rising mobility by rising motorization. Today we know that only the number of car trips rises, while the overall amount of trips remains the same, because the use of public transportation and walking decrease at the same time. The other false assumption is that of saving time by higher speed. There are many evaluations of economic efficiency in traffic planning based on this assumption. In fact there is no such thing as saving time by higher speed. You only travel longer distances in the same period of time.

Q: How do you provide evidence for that?

HK: By critically watching the human time budget. It's interesting how the period of time for daily mobility is almost the same around the globe. But distances travelled are different. In the Sixties the philosopher Ivan Illich showed that the amount of energy invested into cars and road infrastructure would be sufficient to cover the distance by foot - and in a considerably more beautiful and peaceful environment.

Q: Doesn't social mobility increase when travelled distances increase?

HK: No. Quite the contrary. The additional distance is useless. Man covers greater distances for the same purposes as before. He does what he has always done, but travels farther.

Q: But we broaden our mind.

HK: How can I broaden my mind when I rush through the environment at 100 km/hr? You are really constricting your mind due to the speed.

Q: One experiences different things when travelling to India than to Bavaria.

HK: It does not depend on where you travel, but what you discover there. You won't experience more on a worn-out tourist trail in India than in Bavaria. Quite the contrary, with watchfulness and curiosity you may discover things in Bavaria you won't find in India. Speeds that exceed our evolutionary grown capabilities also exceed our perception. Mentally we cannot cope with the distances we have learnt to cover using technology.

Q: But we feel powerful.

HK: Of course. Mobility always equals power. By the way, studies have revealed that parents don't even consider their own children when it comes to opting for a parking space close to their front door or a low traffic zone. Restricted mobility, even at the risk of ones own offspring are accepted in favour of a convenient parking space.

Q: Is driving entirely insane?

HK: Considering the prerequisites man has created for his car driving, it is clearly the most convenient form of travelling, and thus quite rational. Look at the pedestrian infrastructure in comparison. Footpaths in their present shape are a joke! In earlier days the pedestrian was allowed to use the entire expanse of a street - for more than 7.000 years! We have pushed the pedestrians aside on the edge in last 50 years and now ask ourselves why this kind of mobility vanishes. The structures we have created forces people to drive!

Q: Are we living in a dictatorship of automobiles?

HK: Absolutely!

Q: Can this be changed?

HK: Certainly. Changing the way of organizing parking space would be sufficient. If you would pass a public transport stop, or a store - which would establish by itself - on your way to a parking lot, the demand for driving would decrease. Now a days people are taunted by fiddling with symptoms. They tack on a little parking fee here and a little congestion charge there. That is completely unfair. At first they establish conditions requiring people to use a car, and then they make them pay for it. As a traffic planner you ought to create arrangements that unburden people from the necessity to drive!

Q: That sounds like a conflict-laden job.

HK: At that time, my proposal of turning the Viennese Kartnerstrasse into a pedestrian zone was predicted to lead to its economical death. Later I was told that cycling was totally unwanted by the Viennese and that speeding up public transit by laying cobblestones near the stops would cause motorist uproar. All that was allegedly unpopular. Yet the Viennese have embraced these ideas and the city's living standard rose in international rankings. You can't only satisfy voters wishes. You don't give drug addicts tax-free drugs, even though the desire certainly exists.

Q: Could this problem, in your opinion, be solved with the gas price?

HK: No! Every gas price rise is a purely symbolic action and automatically leads into a social trap. When only the wealthy can afford filling up and the poor don't, there is still an unsolved traffic problem, with a social injustice added to it. The approach must be parking and the way to it. When you organise parking space properly, carfree spaces with a high value of living will be created. Who wants to sleep quietly must accept a longer walk to his car. And who prefers the car must live in noisy and stinky environment. Parking lots should be organised the same way as transit stops.

Q: Do you advocate more parking restriction?

HK: Look how auto-centric you think! When a pedestrian is interdicted to cross a street where he likes that's seen as pretty normal. Rearranging traffic in motor streets and pedestrian streets is demonised as anti-car, without considering that dividing the streets offers the best solution.

Q: What about the often-quoted freedom of the driver?

HK: This freedom is purely virtual, merchandised by advertisement. They show an empty road in a beautiful landscape, with one single car running on it. Would they show the reality with gridlock, nobody would be dumb enough to buy a car.

Q: Cars still sell very well.

HK: Yes, because drivers enjoy yet another form of freedom, a freedom of lawlessness. Unlike other people, they are allowed to be noisy, pollute the environment, and jeopardise public safety unpunished. A rampaging drunk may be arrested due to disturbance; motorists annoying us with noise day and night are accepted. If I as a pedestrian would spray cancerous substances from a can that would be against the law. Motorists are doing just that, unresisted every day, shortening our life span on average by 12 months.

Q: The car driver is a killer?

HK: Yes, in good faith. The car shifts us into a space-time arrangement of irresponsibility that we cannot comprehend nor handle. And there is strong lobbying: the auto industry, the construction industry, and banks that give credits for purchasing cars, who at all costs take care that studies, like the one mentioned by the WHO, are not published.

Q: Even teenagers are dreaming of cars.

HK: Because they experienced bondage in cars for years. In a car a child is radically restricted in its mobility. He is forbidden to walk to or cross a street, he must not play everywhere, he is caged for hours in the rear of a car and is even belted. That's clearly why teenagers are looking forward to regain their freedom with a licence and a car of their own.

Q: Do you think that cars are the cause of wars?

HK: Absolutely! And you don't have to look at Iraq. There is a permanent war on our streets. Every single day two people are killed on Austrian streets. Traffic physically injures 40.000 people a year. And those dying from the exhausts, as reported by the WHO, aren't even counted in this figure.

Q: What do you feel when you pass by suburban shopping centres, big box retailers, and the like?

HK: These are parasites! I feel sorry for any city with such structures. The traffic problem is in part a child of these shopping malls and outlet stores on the edge of cities. The main problem is free parking. This ought to be taxed so massively that parking there would cost as much as in the city centre. Everybody should be allowed to build where they like, but in-town businesses struggling with parking fees while everything is free in the suburbs is unacceptable.

Q: Do you expect European cities to look like those much ridiculed US cities, with sprawling suburban homes, giant shopping centres, and poor public transit?

HK: No, since there is a re-urbanisation taking place in many European cities. That is related to an ageing society. Elderly people just cannot get the needed services on the edge of a city. They simply have to move back into the city. Apart from that it's the energy issue that will make people move back into the cities.

Q: You mean gas prices?

HK: No, I mean energy prices in general. They will definitely rise and affect all areas of life. This means heating, electricity, transport - and all that carries more weight in the isolation of a suburban home than in a city centre. And elderly people need a lot of energy-rich services that become very expensive at price hikes. I don't just think of "meals-on-wheels" and the like. The more scattered people live, the more energy is needed. And we won't be able to afford that any more within a short period of time. This means we will have to create sustainable urban structures in order to be able to pay for them in the future. The actual cities with their suburbs aren't like this.

Q: Is it true that societal expenses of mobility are higher than the revenues, including employment in the car industry?

HK: That's absolutely correct. And the bill for consumers will become worse, since at the moment mobility is more or less free, and that is soon going to change drastically.

Q: Why is air travel so strongly criticized these days, in regards to climate protection and mobility, and not motorists?

HK: First of all, the damaging impact of air travel is serious and criticism is justified. No-frills airlines are activating groups of passengers that would not fly otherwise. Flying basically is the most degrading mode of travelling. Flying always reminds me of mass animal farming: Like chickens, fed like in battery farming. But unlike the humans in an aircraft chickens are not belted.

Where the Economy is Headed

2008-05-25T16:22:00.001-07:00

See www.shadowstats.com

San Jose High Speed Rail Station

2008-05-24T16:02:00.001-07:00

This is for my family in San Jose. Check out your future!

Shanghai Maglev Train: Complete Ride

2008-05-24T15:57:00.001-07:00

A train like this could get you from San Francisco to San Jose in about a quarter of an hour. That's a pretty easy commute. Imagine how many cars that would take of the streets! I'm astounded that China has progressed so far ahead of this country.

"Real Price Of Gasoline" Report Reveals Actual Cost of Gas to Consumers Is as High as $15.14 per Gallon

2008-05-23T15:25:00.000-07:00

A while back I mentioned that I had calculated the actual price of gas at around $10 per gallon. I estimated that rather conservatively. Since gas prices are in the news as of late, I thought this report might be of interest. Note that the date is almost ten years old! If you simply adjust to the Consumer Price Index, that amount today would be $20 per gallon. Crude oil is now $132 per barrel as opposed to $60 per barrel last year. Now is not the time to rethink driving habits. Now is the time to consider not driving at all!

11/16/1998

STUDY RELEASED BY THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT (CTA) DETAILS OVER $1.69 TRILLION IN SOCIAL COSTS AND GOVERNMENT 'WELFARE' FOR GAS INDUSTRY

MIDDLE EAST TENSIONS AND GLOBAL WARMING MAJOR CONTRIBUTORS TO MASSIVE INCREASE IN THE REAL COST OF GAS

Washington D.C. -- A report released today by the International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA) calculates that the actual cost of a gallon of gas to the American consumer could be as high as $15.14. The report "The Real Price of Gas" identifies and quantifies the many external costs of using gas that consumers pay indirectly by way of taxes, insurance costs and retail prices in other sectors. Established in 1994, the International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA), is a Washington-based research organization that analyzes how technology affects society.

The CTA study examines more than 40 separate cost factors associated with gasoline production and consumption. These include subsidies for the petroleum industry such as the percentage depletion allowance; tax-funded programs that directly subsidize oil production and consumption, like government-sponsored R&D for the oil industry; the costs of protecting oil supplies, shipments and motor vehicle usage, including military expenditures for protecting the Middle East and other oil rich regions; and environmental, health and social costs including those for global warming. Together these subsidies for gas paid by consumers total up to $1.68 trillion per year.

The Report will be released at a news conference today, Tuesday, November 17, 1998, at 10 a.m. The conference will be held at the offices of the Communications Consortium at 1200 New York Avenue, N.W. (AAAS Building, 1 block from Metro Center), Second Floor, Revelle Conference Room. Scheduled panelists include Andrew Kimbrell, and Joseph Mendelson of CTA, Ann Mesnikoff of the Sierra Club and Gawain Kripke of Friends of the Earth.

According to CTA Director Andrew Kimbrell, "The real price of gas has been hidden from the consumer for far too long. Some of these costs including those associated with military actions in the Middle East and global warming could skyrocket in the coming years. Once the public understands how much they are really paying for gas we should see a tremendous increase in political pressure for alternatives."

Joseph Mendelson III, CTA legal director commented, "This Report has major policy implications. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently drafting standards for the next generation of automobiles through the "Tier II" process. This Report indicates that the EPA should encourage a significant move away from gas-powered vehicles."

Right Wing, Left Wing…Why are they so much alike?

2008-05-10T05:09:00.000-07:00

Fundamentalism and extreme progressivism both harbor the very same penchant for intolerance. The more I live, the more I have witnessed this tendency. What I find fascinating, is that many people who remain at these outer edges of political, scientific, philosophical and religious discourse are so very much alike. It is as though they were the same people, yet they froth at each other spewing extreme vitriol, and their intolerance borders on the sociopathic. Even more illuminating is the observation that many of these people more often than not have had their formative years spent in a fundamentalist upbringing, only to reject such notions fully and find themselves at the polar opposite those teachings. It can work the other way round, but there are far fewer examples. Yet the same behavior is continuously exhibited, and the main trait can be summed up as intolerance for divergent views. I believe much of what passes for democratic discourse today in this country is simply people on the fringes yelling at each other across the masses of moderates and centrists, hoping to capture our attention or distract us with "sound bites".

Clearly, there is something going on that is damaging to the soul, or intellect, if you prefer among people who fall into these groups. I believe the problem is essentially the fact that the act of questioning has never been instilled in them. Or better said, from a young and formative age, the natural tendency to ask questions has been denied, and its growth stunted. Within such a fanatical framework skepticism is seen as an intellectual weakness. Later on, such becomes a real barrier to achieving experiential knowledge and maintaining a healthy skepticism. It's as if these people are forever stunted from becoming who they really are, and instead, they grasp onto ideologies clinging desperately and defending them to the bitter end, even when they prove to be less than correct. It is like a scientist that is so convinced of a theory, that he'll formulate the most absurd conditions to prove it. It's like science's obsession with the "ether", until finally one day, somebody said, "hey!, maybe there's no such thing as the ether!".

Let's keep the Socratic method alive, and burn our idols!

Obama 2008

2008-05-06T04:17:00.000-07:00

Those of you who read this blog know that I have lent my support to a number of politicians running for the presidency of the United States. I have spoken highly of Congressman Denis Kucinich, Congressman Dr. Ron Paul, and former Senator Mike Gravel. During this time, all three of these men have dropped out of the race, or their campaigns are no longer viable. I must express extreme disappointment in regards to Ron Paul, who simply chose not to spend enough during his campaign regardless of numerous campaign contributions driven mainly by grassroots organization. Dr. Ron Paul apparently was not all that serious about running for the presidency, since he switched gears to run a re-election campaign for his seat in Congress. Dr. Ron Paul has continually pronounced his belief that his campaign was not about "him" or any particular individual, and instead about the ideals expressed, namely "freedom".

That's fine by me, if you want to wax poetic. I love philosophical ramblings as much as any quasi-intellectual. But Ron Paul's musing is a cop-out. Leadership is still necessary to effect change. Anthropologically speaking, mankind is not yet a "collective" that works towards a common goal. We still behave as egoistic creatures regardless of our innate sense of love for our fellow man. And we still look for leaders to move us forward. Unfortunately, what we seem to get time and time again, are the least qualified and worst intentioned individuals that do not represent our best interests.

I have decided to lend my support to Senator Barack Obama. I have made a few contributions to his campaign and I have voiced my support for him whenever the topic is brought up. I must admit that I was not initially taken by the man, but the more I listen to him, the more I like him. I do not agree with his entire platform, but I do believe that Senator Obama will represent the average American's best interests. I also can see that his campaign is by far the more "populist" of all the rest. Neither McCain nor Clinton are viable options in my opinion. If in fact, Clinton manages to steal the show, I cannot see myself voting for her. Frankly, I'd prefer to see McCain win, because nothing will feed revolutionary change quicker than another four years of the same Bush & Co. policies!

NOVA Disappoints

2008-04-28T04:48:00.000-07:00

Last night I was in a rather vegetative mode, so I was channel surfing on television and I happened to stop at a PBS presentation of NOVA. I generally enjoy that show, since it tends to be intelligent, informative and evocative.

Not last night.

I could barely suffer through the first quarter of an hour. The show was entitled "The Car of the Future". I sent the comment to the NOVA folk at their website. Let's see if I get a reply:

Might I be so bold to suggest that the "car of the future" is indeed, no car at all? Why was the most obvious solution to our dependence upon petroleum altogether ignored? I was very disappointed in this program's complete lack of vision and denial of the myriad problems that automobile-centric culture has created. We don't need cars that burn other fuels, what humanity needs are cities and transit networks that negate the need for automobiles entirely, and give back mankind the independence he enjoyed for millennia.

We have evolved over millions of years as bipedal creatures, and civilization has existed for tens of thousands of years based essentially on pedestrian transportation; indeed, man covered the entire globe by walking to his next destination! We are also social beings that require contact with our fellow neighbors in an environment that fosters such on a human scale. The automobile just further isolates one person from another and creates a scale that is unfriendly to social interaction. In the suburbs, the only place you can see people gather is in a shopping mall!

Suburban sprawl is not only unnecessary and resource intensive, but it also paves over land better used for farming or simply left in its natural state. The automobile has its place in the countryside. Yet this incessant love affair with the automobile must come to an end, if we are to live in a just, harmonious and sensible world that values a clean environment. All this program accomplishes is to further the illusion that automobiles are necessary in urban areas, and by not addressing this fundamental question, it does a tremendous disservice to us all.

I also left my website address. I'd love to see NOVA do a report on Car-Free Cities. That would make an interesting show.

The Air Car

2008-01-07T09:45:00.001-08:00

Here are some wonderful ideas for service vehicles, buses and cars that don't pollute. There is some electricity required for the compressors however, but it is negligible when compared to what we are currently using. Imagine buses, service vehicles and the lot without the toxic fumes!

Norway says cars neither "green" nor "clean"

2008-01-07T09:12:00.000-08:00

Thu Sep 6, 2007 9:49am EDT

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - No car can be "green," "clean" or
"environmentally friendly," according to some of the world's
strictest advertising guidelines set to enter into force in
Norway next month.

"Cars cannot do anything good for the environment except
less damage than others," Bente Oeverli, a senior official at
the office of the state-run Consumer Ombudsman, told Reuters on
Thursday.

Carmakers such as Toyota, General Motor's Opel, Mitsubishi,
Peugeot Citroen, Saab and Suzuki had all used phrases this year
in advertisements that the watchdog judged misleading, she
said.

One Toyota advertisement for a Prius, for instance,
described the gasoline-electric hybrid as "the world's most
environmentally friendly car."

"If someone says their car is more 'green' or
'environmentally friendly' than others then they would have to
be able to document it in every aspect from production, to
emissions, to energy use, to recycling," she said.

"In practice that can't be done," she said of tougher
guidelines entering into force in Norway from October 15.

The guidelines distributed to carmakers said: "We ask that
... phrases such as 'environmentally friendly', 'green',
'clean', 'environmental car', 'natural' or similar descriptions
not be used in marketing cars."

Carmakers would risk fines if they failed to drop the
words. Oeverli said she did not know of other countries going
so far in cracking down on cars and the environment.

UTMOST RESPECT?

In one ruling abroad, for instance, Britain's advertising
watchdog said that Volvo advertisements should not repeat a
claim that its C30 car was "designed with the utmost respect
for the environment in mind."

Oeverli said carmakers, who are making huge investments in
cleaning up emissions, seemed happy to get clearer rules about
advertising. In future in Norway, they could only give
information that could be firmly documented.

That meant that even phrases such as "Car X has low
emissions of carbon dioxide," the main greenhouse gas released
by burning oil, should be avoided.

The watchdog argued that mentioning carbon dioxide alone
could mislead buyers into believing that the car also had low
emissions of toxic nitrous oxide or other polluting particles.

Transport, mainly trucks and cars, accounts for about a
fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions from human sources,
widely blamed for stoking a warming that could bring more
floods, desertification, heatwaves and rising seas.

© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

Why I Support Ron Paul

2007-12-27T08:08:00.001-08:00

First off let me say the elections in this country are a sham.

I do not mean to suggest that the United Nations monitor our election process, but according to our own measures of democratic elections abroad, we do not even come close to the standards we hold to other nations. There is plenty of reputable investigative journalism available (albeit, mainly outside the mainstream media) that not only proves that the 2000 election was hijacked, but also the 2004 election. If memory serves, "The Daily Mirror" ran a headline in 2004 that stated "How can 59 million people be so Dumb?". No doubt, Kerry ran a very poor campaign. One would almost think Kerry didn't want to win, running as Bush Lite – but I was still astonished by the outcome. I say astonished, because it truly was an incomprehensible and illogical result. Consider these facts:

1. Bush's approval ratings before the 2004 election among registered actual voters was at best estimates only 48 percent, yet somehow managed to get 51 percent of the vote. But these incumbents never made surges from their last horse race number:
1956 Eisenhower's final horse race projection 59.5%, his actual share of the vote 57.8%
1964 Johnson's final horse race projection 64%, his actual share of the vote 61.3%
1972 Nixon's final horse race projection tally 62%, his actual share of the vote 61.8%
1976 Ford's final horse race projection number 49%, his actual share of the vote 48.1%.
1980 Carter's final horse projection numer 44%, his actual share of the vote 41%.
1984 Reagan final horse race projection tally 59%, his actual share of the vote 59.2%.
1996 Clinton's final horse race number 52%, his actual share of the vote 49.2%

2. Over 122 million Americans voted in 2004, an increase of 17 million over the 2000 presidential election. Turnout jumped from 54 percent of eligible voters in 2000 to 61 percent in 2004. This was also a year where spontaneous protests cropped up in just about every urban center, and to my knowledge the only time a political party's convention also saw a strong, consolidated protest. The media did their best to ignore these inconvenient facts, but the truth is that Bush & Co. managed to upset a good number of Americans sufficiently to get them to travel to Washington D.C., and New York to voice their strong opposition to Bush's policies.

3. National exit polls projected Kerry at 51 percent and Bush at 48 percent, yet later the media widely reports such polls as being the most inaccurate of any election as well as a reluctancy among Republican voters to admit whom they voted for? Hmm…I have yet to meet any of those reluctant Republicans.

I could go on for pages, but to me it comes down to two simple questions. Why would voters show up in record numbers to reelect an unpopular incumbent president? And why would all the polls be so inaccurate in regard to one single election? I think the answer is all too obvious, and it is as simple as this: Bush stole the 2004 election. But lest I invite you to infer that Kerry would have been our savior, allow me to assuage such an inference. Kerry undoubtedly would have made little difference since he too would have furthered the neoliberal corporatist agenda.

Perhaps this is why half of the registered voters stay home? They see little point in voting, and I must say they are right. I believe that all eligible voters be registered to vote and required to vote in all elections, or otherwise face a fine or community service. Yet a vote of "no confidence" for any political office would be on all ballots. Should "no confidence" get a majority of votes, the election would be deemed suspended until a candidate inspire enough of the citizenry to claim a "mandate".

The Undivided States of America – we're not red and blue; we're purple

This is the "us" versus "them" map the media loves to show of the 2004 presidential election.

A more realistic depiction, yet one must also account for population centers.

I am a journeyman lithographer, and I can tell you that if you take 48 percent cyan (blue) and 51 percent magenta (red), you'll get purple. We are the purple people, folks! I use this illustration because I do not believe the myth of a divided nation that the media hypes. I have traveled across this nation on several occasions, and my experiential knowledge tells me another story. Call it anecdotal if you will, but I am more inclined to believe it. Most Americans are neither liberals nor conservatives. Most of us are centrists. Just as most of us are not bible-thumping proselytizers or raging atheists. Most of us are rather secular with some kind of nebulous religious affiliation. Yet most of us really want the same thing, and one thing that is a high priority is a protection of liberty and personal freedom. And not so surprisingly, most Americans are wary of career politicians and big government. What unites us is far more than what divides us. "E Pluribus Unum", "One out of Many". It's a good motto, and much more accurate than "In God We Trust", which belongs in a prayer book, not on our national currency. The sooner we get "god" out of government the better. Meanwhile, God in all his infinite glory can reside perpetually within his Universal Kingdom where no one can monopolize him.

Democrats I like, and why they don't stand a chance.

I like Kucinich and Gravel. Both of these men have proven records and stand on principled philosophies. Unfortunately, the DNC will ensure that neither one of them, or for that matter any true progressive, will ever stand a chance at winning their party's nomination. This is why I have reregistered as a Republican. I am tired of lending my support to candidates that cannot seem to rise to more than a mere couple of percentage points. The Democrats cannot sell their message to the people, because they have none. Now the Democratically controlled Congress actually has managed to fall below the Bush Administration in its approval ratings. And finally there are particular voters that actually get out to the polls on wedge issues that will always hurt the Democrats. Abortion and Guns are both non-issues in my mind, along with gay unions. I have an opinion on all three, but I don't think they are of such importance compared to the issues that really matter (see priorities). Ron Paul would actually cross that divide, whereas all the Democrats are guilty by association.

The Democratic Party has abandoned true progressive ideals.

Yes, the Republican Lite Party is owned and operated by the very same corporate interests. Whoda thunk it?

Third parties – Why bother?

Green Party? Reform Party? Constitutionalist Party? Libertarian Party? There is plenty of talent and good ideas, but the chances of winning a presidential bid in the present electoral system is about as likely as winning the state lottery two weeks in a row.

It's the primaries – tell the media to be quiet! (Or better yet, just stop listening)

We should be looking for the candidate that best represents our interests, not the candidate that the network news deems fit. Nor should you vote the "lesser of two evils" in order to "win". What are we "winning" anyway?

What are our priorities again?

I'd say, that number one is getting out of Iraq and just about everywhere else. Secondly is our economy and our monetary policy. Thirdly is rescinding all these horrible "free trade" agreements that have sent our jobs overseas where labor and environmental protections are not upheld. And finally, we should ensure that our government is truly representative of the people and make certain that our liberties are protected. Ron Paul gets an A on all of the above. Kucinich does almost as well, but he doesn't see a problem with our monetary policy (the Federal Reserve) and he supports the IRS and the Federal Income Tax. As long as those two things remain in place, there will be big, bureaucratic government and the military-industrial complex. Gravel does better, since he sees a connection between the IRS and a loss of sovereignty. No other candidates stand near these issues.

Growing autocratic nature of U.S. Government – Free Republic or Autocratic Empire? You decide.

This is the question of the century. Maybe even the next millennium!

Unifying messages and populist movements, and why they scare the bejesus out of the establishment.

See if the more support Ron Paul gets, the more the media will try and smear his character. Ask yourself why the corporate controlled media would do such a thing. I doubt the media will find much dirt on Paul, and he is smart enough to see them coming. So far, the worst anyone can come up with is guilt by association, since he received campaign contributions from some unsavory people. Apparently he also has some problems with the theory of evolution. Yet he is hardly alone. I don't see how any educated person can deny evolution as fact, but Paul doesn't actually go that far. I don't see why this should be reason not to vote for him. Maybe I wouldn't hire him as a science professor, but I have no doubt he can handle himself in the office he is running for.

Yeah, but can Ron Paul win?

Short answer: yes. He is a populist candidate, but he is smart enough to run as a candidate from one of our two major political parties. H. Ross Perot was the last populist candidate who ran independently in 1992. Even after dropping out of the race and later reentering, he was able to garner an unprecedented 19 percent of the popular vote. No third party candidate in recent times has rallied such a showing. I believe it was due to the populist nature of Perot's campaign, and had he not initially abandoned his bid for the presidency; I believe he likely would have actually stood a chance at winning a number of electoral votes, perhaps even upsetting Clinton's chances. Remember that we were in an economic recession at the time with an incumbent president who had upset many fiscal conservatives. I think that by the best estimates, 2008 will be a year of recession and stagflation. There is even a likelihood that our continued monetary policies will see another major devaluation of the dollar, in which case Americans will assuredly be open to a discussion of new economic policies. Such policies would undoubtedly include a major reduction in spending abroad. The only candidate besides Kucinich and Gravel who is against the continued occupation of Iraq, happens to be Ron Paul. His message is a unifying one that crosses all sorts of political ideologies, and it is common sense to most Americans. His message is a message of freedom and the responsibility inherent in maintaining liberty.

Once inaugurated, what can be done, actually?

My guess is a whole lot more than Giuliani or Clinton. The "war" in Iraq is opposed by 70 percent of Americans, so it shouldn't be that difficult for us to end our occupation. Paul would do a good deal to balance our budget, bring jobs home and stabilize our economy. Paul would also rescind all these gross violations of our liberties, like the Patriot Act. All of this would be far better than any of the corporate sponsored candidates.

Issues that seldom get discussed and the sorry state of "debate" in the media.

A few issues that come to mind immediately are monetary policy, economic policy, strategic power and policy abroad, government's true responsibility, just to mention what pops into my head. Nothing of any substance is ever debated in the media, and those "hot button" divisive issues are just shouting matches between hot airbags. A Paul presidency, or any true populist candidate would force a national dialog. It is about time we have such a thing, since most Americans are woefully ignorant on the real issues.

What is our responsibility as citizens?

We must take back our government and seek empowerment. We must insist upon our national sovereignty. We must elect populist candidates and unseat these career politicians once and for all. And finally, we must ensure that government remains of, by and for the people!

And if it comes down to Neoliberal Autocrat A or Neoliberal Autocrat B?

Or Neocons, if you prefer (it's all the same poor philosophy; fascism by another name). I suggest we either boycott the election or write-in "no confidence" on the ballot. I am not going to lend credence to a failed and fundamentally undemocratic election.

Conclusion.

This may very likely be our last chance at saving our republic. Now is the time for each and every one of us to act. We must save our heritage and pass something of value on to the future generations. May God help us.

The inevitable collapse of the dollar

2007-12-23T17:51:00.001-08:00

People And Power: Death of the Dollar

2007-12-23T17:43:00.001-08:00

Talk by Naomi Wolf - The End of America

2007-11-28T09:54:00.001-08:00

It is upon us unless we all take to task our fundamental duty as patriots.

Ten Reasons not to Vote for Clinton

2007-11-17T10:07:00.000-08:00

1. Clinton voted to give the President unprecedented powers to illegally invade a nation that posed no threat to U.S. security, bypassing Congress and openly defying our Constitution.

2. Clinton has continued to vote for massive appropriations for the continued Iraqi occupation.

3. Clinton has been complicit with the large majority of Democrats in posing no real opposition to the growing tyranny and power-hungry Executive branch under the Bush-Cheney regime.

4. Clinton has stated that "all options" are on the table for dealing with Iran, which is code for the nuclear option. Clinton will continue our illegal occupation of Iraq, and undoubtedly entangle us further in the Middle East.

5. Clinton has received millions from the Corporate Lobby. It should be obvious who she "represents".

6. Clinton is the consummate politician. Her rhetoric and her actions do not jibe.

7. Clinton's record as Senator, and her husband's record as President both support the Neoliberal (Neo-Con) agenda. They are both pro Big Government and pro Big Corporate Monopolies.

8. Clinton has made no statement at any time regarding the amount of power that has been obtained by the Executive branch during the past seven years, and she'd likely be content as the next American Emperor. It is doubtful she would do anything to restore our rights and liberties.

9. Clinton is the media "darling". This alone should be reason to question her motives and allegiance. Hint: it doesn't lie within the bounds of the Constitution.

10. 1980 (Bush Sr. V.P.), 1984 (Bush Sr. V.P.), 1988 (Bush Sr. Pres.), 1992 (Clinton Pres.), 1996 (Clinton Pres.), 2000 (GW Bush Pres.), 2004 (GW Bush Pres.), 2008 (Clinton Pres.?) Notice a pattern?

Please note that the mere fact that Clinton is a woman has nothing to do with my top ten reasons not to vote for her.

Penn and Teller Defend Ron Paul vs. Luntz and Fox News

2007-11-11T10:23:00.001-08:00

Most thinking people would say that Faux News is nothing more than a propaganda machine for the NeoLiberal Fascists (or NeoCons if you prefer). Yet we all are suckers for poll numbers. Don't believe the polls. Vote your conscience. Ron Paul blew the other Republican candidates away in the Fox News debate. He was asked only three questions, the moderator inferred that he got his "marching orders" from Al-Qaeda, and Giulliani cackled like a clown and cued his supporters to heckle Paul (over 1,000 of Giulliani's supporters were given tickets whereas Paul's supporters were allowed a mere handful regardless of the fact that wherever Paul goes he generates far more public support than any other candidate). Yet even still, when the text message polls were taken by Fox News, Congressman Paul won by a landslide 38% compared to Giulliani (the runner up) who managed to get 12 percent. Sean Hannity tried to bury the results and inferred that Paul supporters sent multiple messages (but the truth is that only a single vote could be made per phone). The Fox spin-machine then went into high gear attempting to explain away such support.

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Why Is the Dollar Losing Value?

2007-11-03T11:31:00.001-07:00

Why Is the Dollar Losing Value?
A Closer Look at the Dollar and the Euro and What the Dollar's Drop Means for You

By CHARLES HERMAN
ABC NEWS Business Unit
Sept. 20, 2007 —

The Canadian dollar has reached parity with the U.S. dollar for the first time since 1976. They are now equal in value. The euro also soared to its highest-ever level against the dollar, trading above $1.40 for the first time since the currency was introduced in 1999.

So why is the dollar plunging, and what impact does that plunge have on U.S. and world markets? Here's a look at some of the reasons for the dollar's fall, and the consequences

Why the Weak Dollar?

There are several reasons. First, there's the difference between the interest rate in the United States -- the one the Federal Reserve just dropped by half a percentage point to 4.75 percent -- and the interest rates of other central banks around the world.

When the United States dropped its rate, other banks did not follow. Now the spread between the interest rate at the European Central Bank (home of the euro) and the Federal Reserve (home of the dollar) is smaller than it has traditionally been, and that has weakened the value of the dollar against the euro. Put another way, you would get a better interest rate return holding a euro than a dollar.

Second, central banks around the world have been diversifying their holdings away from dollars to euros, British pounds and so on. That means there are more dollars out there in currency markets available to purchase. More dollars floating around means diminished value.

What Effect Does This Have?

Look at the record-high price of oil. Even if the same amount of oil is being pumped out of the ground, since it is traded in dollars and the dollar has weakened, the price of oil has increased to make up for the lost value of the dollar, creating a sort of vicious cycle.

Oil-producing countries don't want to keep all the dollars they are getting for their oil, since it's worth less, so they are diversifying and converting their dollars into euros or other currencies. That pushes more dollars back out into currency markets, which in turn pushes down the dollar's value.

One analyst told ABC News that Russia used to have 90 percent of its financial reserves in dollars. It now has 45 percent in dollars, 45 percent in euros and 10 percent in British pounds.

What Does This Mean in the U.S.?

The news is mixed. It's good, because it makes what we produce here cheaper to sell in foreign markets, and that in turn spurs exports of our products around the world. That translates into more manufacturing and more jobs. For example, BMW and Mercedes Benz want to build cars in the United States, because they can do it cheaper in nonunion states than in Germany, where they'd pay labor and parts in euros, and then bring the cars to the United States, where they would be too expensive to sell at a profit.

But a weak dollar is bad, because it leads to inflation in this country. Imports from foreign countries will become more expensive, and in particular, oil will be more expensive. That puts pressure on businesses to increase prices for anything that uses oil or products that come from overseas. One benefit for American shoppers is that China has largely pegged its currency to ours, so that keeps the price of Chinese-made goods low and therefore, keeps a check on inflation.

U.S. Treasuries, Bonds, Mortgages, Stocks

What does a weak dollar mean for all that, and why should I care? If the dollar falls too much, foreign investors and banks won't be so interested in buying T-bills and bonds that keep the U.S. government and businesses humming. That's because the interest rate might not be enough to compensate for inflation. In other words, whatever is earned would be worth less money.

To attract buyers, the T-bills and bonds will sell for less and have higher interest rates. And since many mortgages are tied to these interest rates, that might mean mortgage rates won't drop anytime soon. Also, a weak dollar might scare away foreign investors who don't want to own stock in U.S. companies.

What About Foreign Investors?

Could there be a wholesale dumping of U.S. dollars by foreign governments and investors? Maybe. But that would be executing a sort of "nuclear option."

If China were to dump its reserves of dollars into currency markets, that would dramatically lower the value of the dollar. All those bonds and T-bills that the country holds would drop in value, as inflation would erase any gains from the investment. China would be less able to sell its goods to the United States because the dollar would be too weak, and Chinese products would be more expensive.

If Saudi Arabia were to call for oil to be traded in euros, "that announcement would be the end of the U.S. dollar," said Ashraf Laidi, chief currency analyst at CMC Markets. But he said that would never happen as long as the United States and Saudi Arabia are allies, and the U.S. continues to negotiate arms and other deals with the world's largest oil producer.

Copyright © 2007 ABC News Internet Ventures

There ain't nothin' wrong with the tap.

2007-10-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

The Bottled Water Backlash
By Michael Blanding, AlterNet
Posted on October 19, 2007, Printed on October 19, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/65520/

At Bella Luna Restaurant in Boston's funky Jamaica Plain neighborhood, you'll find star-shaped paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling and gourmet pizzas named after Red Sox players. Downstairs, the attached Milky Way Lounge & Lanes boasts a seven-lane bowling alley and a Latin dance night on Saturdays.

But there is one thing you won't find at either venue: bottled water.

As a note at the bottom of the restaurant's wine list explains, "In an effort to preserve global resources, Bella Luna does not serve bottled water. We have fountain seltzer water and filtered still water by request."

Bella Luna's CEO, Kathie Mainzer made the decision to can the bottle six months ago after a trip to the Dominican Republic, where residents have to boil their tap water in order to drink it. "I came home realizing what a precious resource water is and how we take it for granted," she says, noting that tap water in Boston is safe, cheap and doesn't lead to more trash. "Here we were throwing away this free resource and generating more disposable items -- it seemed absurd."

Between the bottles of Saratoga Spring she served with dinner and Poland Spring that bar-goers would order downstairs, Mainzer figures she is losing around $500 a month from the decision. But "it was worth it to avoid adding more pollution to the landfills," she says. At the same time, she has also had to educate staff on how to explain the decision to customers, who may never have made the connection. "The first response is, 'Really?' Then the second response is, 'That's great,'" she says. "People are just kind of shocked, because it's new."

New it may be, but the eatery has joined a growing backlash against bottled water by restaurants, city governments, religious organizations and ordinary consumers, who reject it on environmental, economic and even moral grounds. At a time when Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming, and consumers are lining up to buy hybrid cars and fluorescent light bulbs to reduce their carbon footprint, they see bottled water as a glaring example of needless environmental waste.

Americans drank some 37 billion bottles of water in 2005, despite the inconvenient truth that in most parts of the country, tap water is not only perfectly safe, but also more tightly regulated that its bottled counterpart. At the same time, manufacturing plastic bottles for bottled water creates an astounding amount of pollution -- an annual equivalent of 1.5 billion barrels of oil, according to Food & Water Watch. Add to that the carbon emissions from transporting water from as far away as Norway (Voss), Italy (San Pellegrino), or Fiji (Fiji), and the billions of plastic bottles that end up in the waste stream, and drinking bottled water does start to seem a little bit of madness.

Yet even at supposedly environmentally conscious stores like Whole Foods Market, bottled water is the No. 1 selling item. Over the past decade, sales have continued to grow 10 percent a year, a rate that would make most companies blush. It was only a matter of time, perhaps, before the industry became a victim of its own success and people began realizing what comedians from Dennis Miller to Janeane Garofalo have been telling us for years -- that "Evian is just naïve spelled backwards."

Earlier this month, the activist group Corporate Accountability International (CAI) brought that message home to the consumers with its new "Think Outside the Bottle Pledge," which commits signees to "opt for public water over bottled water" and support "the efforts of local officials who prioritize strong public water systems." According to the group, CAI has already signed several thousand people on the pledge, including actor Martin Sheen and several mayors around the country.

"By taking this pledge, people are separating the packaging from the product and saying we don't have to create a waste stream of billions of bottles to have a drink of water," says Gigi Kellet, campaign director for the organization. "They are basically saying they are going to do what they can to support strong public water systems and let communities around the country who are struggling to regain control of their resources know they are not alone."

The pledge caps a summer of organizing that has seen the backlash against bottled water go mainstream. Bella Luna isn't the only restaurant to ban bottled water from its menu. The movement burst into public view this spring when chef Alice Waters, the godmother of "California cuisine," nixed bottled water from her Berkeley, Calif., restaurant Chez Panisse. Soon after, Food Network favorite Mario Batali followed suit at his empire of restaurants including Manhattan's swish Del Posto, serving filtered tap water in glasses etched with information on the harmful environmental impact of bottled water

Then cities -- who probably have the most to gain from promoting municipal water -- got into the act. This June, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to cancel the city's purchasing contract for bottled water, mandating instead that city departments rely on tap water that gushes down to the city from its clean reservoirs in Yosemite National Park. The next day, over heavy lobbying from the bottled water industry, Newsom along with progressive Salt Lake City Mayor Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak pushed through a resolution at the U.S. Conference of Mayors to commission a study looking at the impact of discarded bottled water bottles on city waste streams.

According to the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), 96 percent of bottled water is sold in single-size polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles, which, because they are frequently consumed "on the go," end up in city trash cans rather than recycling bins. The national recycling rate for all PET bottles, including soda bottles, is just 23.1 percent, and bottled water is even lower. CRI estimates some 4 billion PET bottles end up in the waste stream, costing cities some $70 million a year in cleanup and landfill costs.

Bottled water "very clearly reflects the wasteful and reckless consumerism in this country," said Salt Lake City's Anderson in a conference call with reporters this month. "You really have to wonder at the utter stupidity and the irresponsibility sometimes of American consumers. These false needs are provided, and too often we just fall in line with what Madison Avenue comes up with to market these unnecessary products."

While falling short of a binding executive order, Anderson issued a directive to all city departments a year ago mandating that no tax money be spent on providing bottles of water for meetings and events. In coordination with CAI, the city has launched a campaign, called "Knock Out Bottled Water," with its own pledge for consumers and restaurants. (So far, 15 have signed up, most of them part of the city's popular upscale Gastronmy Inc. chain, whose flagship Market Street Grill earned "chef of the year" honors from Salt Lake City magazine.)

Other cities have separately pioneered their own efforts. New York, which gets pristine water from the Catskills, has started an advertising campaign to encourage residents to drink "cool, healthy, clean ... NYC water." In Berkeley, the school district last year replaced bottled water machines with large containers of tap. Other California cities, including Santa Barbara, Emeryville, San Leandro and Los Angeles have either cancelled bottled water contracts or instructed city departments not to buy bottled water. And this month, Boston signed on to the CAI pledge.

Nor is it just cities in on the East and West coasts that are taking action -- Ann Arbor, Mich., has already cancelled bottled water contracts, and mayors in other cities such as Urbana, Ill., and Wauwatosa, Wis., are considering similar actions. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley is considering a proposal to tax bottled water producers who bottle municipal water. And one of the very first cities to promote its tap water is -- of all places -- Louisville, Ky., which has distributed more than 1.8 million "Pure Tap" water bottles to residents since 1997 and branded a mascot, Tapper, to educate kids about the source of their water.

As the wave against bottled water has grown into a tide, the industry has not taken long to splash back. This August, the International Bottled Water Association published full-page ads in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle decrying the "misguided and confusing criticism by activist groups and a handful of mayors who have presented misinformation and subjective criticism as facts."

Instead of pitting bottled water against tap water, the group says, bottled water should be seen as an alternative to soda and other sugary drinks consumed outside the home. Its ads quote statistics saying 70 percent of beverages are consumed from a can or bottle, "a result of our 24/7 on-the-go society. So as far as we are concerned, the drink in everyone's purse, backpack, and lunch box should be water."

In fact IWBA president Joe Doss says a private poll by one bottler found three-quarters of people drink both tap water and bottled water, depending on the circumstances. "We don't see tap water as our competition," he says. "Every day on newspapers and TV, you see stories about increasing obesity and diabetes. These actions against bottled water will have no good consequences if they discourage people from drinking a healthy beverage."

As for recycling, Doss says that bottled water companies have done their part to reduce the amount of PET resin in bottles by 40 percent over the last five years. Despite the number of bottles that end up in landfills, however, he says PET bottles represent only a third of 1 percent (.0033) of all trash. "If you can get your head around that, it's very clear that these efforts to target bottled water are misguided at best and totally ineffective in dealing with the problem at worst." Instead, Doss says IWBA has been involved in supporting curbside recycling initiatives to try and increase the number of water bottles that are recycled, adding that two-thirds of bottled water is consumed at home, work or offices, places where curbside recycling is readily available.

Of course, those are all places where tap water is also readily available, contradicting the argument that bottled water is necessary as an alternative beverage "on the go." When I point out the discrepancy, Doss repeats his mantra of "choice": "It is a choice, it's always a choice; they should have that choice. Bottled water consumers are choosing to drink both, and there is nothing wrong with that."

Perhaps not so coincidentally, that is the same argument that soda companies have used for a decade as their product has come increasingly under attack from health advocates looking to ban soda from schools. After all, many of the same companies at the lead of soda production also produce water. The top producer of bottled water is Nestlé, which owns a quarter of the market with its brands, including Poland Spring, Calistoga, Deer Park, Ice Mountain and Arrowhead. Second and third are PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Co., which produce Aquafina and Dasani, respectively.

In fact, as soft drinks started to decline in sales for the first time, Coke and Pepsi have increasingly promoted water as a healthy alternative, putting tens of millions of dollars of advertising into rebranding themselves as "hydration" companies and quietly replacing soda logos on vending machines with huge Aquafina and Dasani logos (with bottles of Coke and Pepsi, of course, still available a few buttons down.) Despite advertisements touting the purity of bottled water, however, Aquafina's former tagline says it all: "So pure we promise nothing."

While federal law requires that bottled water be held to the same standards as tap water, tap water is actually more tightly regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, which requires daily testing and mandatory reporting to the public. For bottled water, the Food and Drug Administration requires only weekly testing and voluntary reporting. A 1999 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council found contamination in some bottles, including e.coli and arsenic.

While some companies, such as Nestlé, report testing information on their website, others don't. "All bottled water companies have telephone numbers you can contact to get the info you want," says Doss. "If you don't get the info you want, you can say, 'I'm not going to drink that brand.' You don't have that choice with tap water."

Others don't see that way. "There is accountability in the municipal system," says Wenonah Hauter, director of Food & Water Watch, which produced a report on bottled water this spring called Take Back the Tap. Her organization originally got into the issue of bottled water while battling companies seeking to privatize municipal water systems. "The excuse that elected officials often gave for privatization was that the public had lost confidence in the public water systems," says Hauter. "We realized that the whole issue of bottled water and the ad campaigns they have done for the past 10 or 15 years has really undermined public water. If we spent just a fraction of what people spend for what is an inferior or at least not a better product, we could have clean water for everyone."

In other words, bottled water has created a chicken-and-egg syndrome whereby advertisements touting the purity of bottled water undermine public support for maintenance of public systems, creating more reliance on bottled water as a source of drinking water. "It's kind of like you keep building more and more highways to accommodate sprawl, and it's this vicious cycle," says Anderson. "We need to stop accommodating these problems and giving up by drinking bottled water. We need to start demanding city officials address these issues."

Despite the problems activists see with bottled water, tap water is hardly a panacea. The EPA estimates that municipalities face a $22 billion shortfall in spending on maintenance of their water systems, and some of the same environmental groups that oppose bottled water have also warned against tap water contamination, especially in rural areas. In other areas, water that is perfectly safe may still have an inherently unpleasant taste or contain added chemicals such as chlorine. It's no accident that cities pushing tap water are those with the best water -- Boston, San Francisco and New York, for example -- are among the five cities in the country with water so pure the EPA doesn't require filtration. And even in those cities, rusting lead pipes in certain buildings can cause contamination that isn't monitored by the EPA.

The safest and cheapest solution, says Hauter, is to invest in a home filtration system and fill your own water bottles from the tap. The most expensive systems cost only about $400 and use reverse osmosis, the same process used by Coke and Pepsi to filter their bottled water. The vast majority of consumers, however, don't need anything that extreme, says Hauter. For chemicals like chlorine, an "adsorptive filter" such as the popular Britta filters, can do the trick. Slightly fancier filters with "ion exchange resin" can take care of lead. And on-the-faucet "particulate filters" can remove particles and bacteria. Because the EPA requires municipalities to submit yearly tests on water quality, it's relatively easy to find out what contaminants, if any, are in your water by going to the agency's website. Or to be doubly sure, some municipal health departments will test your water for free. From there, the Take Back the Tap report lists several nonprofit organizations that can recommend the best filter on the basis of the findings.

After all, filtered tap water is good enough for many bottled water companies themselves. This summer, PepsiCo made the embarrassing public admission that its Aquafina brand water is actually nothing more than filtered water from municipal sources, a fact that the company will now note on its bottles. In fact, some 40 percent of bottled water, including Coke's Dasani brand, is water that it gets from the tap for free, puts through filtration processes, and then sells back to the public with a markup of up to 1,000 times. A law passed by the state legislature in California this year would have required all bottled water companies to print their source, as well as water quality information, on the label. Though the bill was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarchenegger this month, advocates see momentum on their side. "When we first introduced this bill in 2003, it was an uphill battle, and everyone said it was 'a solution in search of a problem,'" says Jennifer Clary of Clean Water Action. "No one was saying that this time."

In terms of environmental impact, however, that may be better than the water that Nestlé gets from springs and underwater aquifers around the country. Unlike with surface water, most states have no laws against takings of groundwater that lies underneath a landowner's property, leading to a situation that Texans call the "law of the biggest pump" -- that is, whoever sucks hardest can literally take the water from beneath his neighbor's property.

While industry advocates rightly point out that bottled water amounts to a very small percent of total groundwater use, rural communities around the country have fought specific bottled water plants that take millions of gallons of water out of their watersheds at no cost, and often without so much as a permit or study on environmental consequences.

In addition to the backlash in restaurants and cities, grassroots efforts around the country have taken the fight directly to the source, leading to bills in more than ten states to regulate groundwater takings -- including in Florida, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vermont and West Virginia. Some of the bills have even proposed an extraction tax of several cents a gallon that would offset costs to the environment. While most of these bills have been defeated after heavy lobbying from industry, both Michigan and Vermont have passed legislation requiring permits for taking water over a certain amount of water (250,000 gallons a day and 50,000 gallons a day, respectively).

The hardest battle has been fought in Maine, where Nestlé's Poland Spring brand extracts some 180 million gallons a year from land in three communities -- Poland, Hollis, and Fryeburg. Residents have complained about the hundreds of trucks that rumble through their rural communities, as well as anecdotal reports of dropping water levels in area wells, lakes, and rivers. In these days of massive droughts across the country, there's no telling how much of that, if any, is due to the bottling plants. But that's just the point, says Jim Wilfong, director of grassroots group H2OforME. "It's impossible to tell what's going on beneath the ground," he says. "They will always tell you they are monitoring water levels, but there is no independent confirmation."

Last year, Wilfong's group circulated petitions for a state referendum that would create a permitting process for water extraction that would include environmental review and ongoing monitoring. In addition, it would require a 20-cent-per-gallon extraction tax that would be contributed to a trust to compensate taxpayers for water takings. "That water belongs to all people of Maine, and the reason it's clean is we have invested in public sewer systems and cleaned up oil and gasoline spills," says Wilfong, a former state legislator and assistant trade secretary under Clinton. "Then a company moves in from Switzerland and takes some advantage of it. As a principle that is not right."

The referendum campaign was bitterly fought, with Nestlé reportedly contributing $200,000 to a political action committee that waged an aggressive media campaign, stirring up anti-tax sentiment and warning about lost jobs in rural areas. In the end, the referendum failed to make the ballot by just a few hundred signatures. When Wilfong vowed to bring it up again this year, however, Nestlé offered to sit down and hammer out a compromise. While the tax idea was dropped, the bill introduced this summer establishes much of what the referendum would have done, including a permitting process with environmental impact study and subsequent groundwater monitoring paid for by the companies, as well as language acknowledging for the first time that groundwater is a public resource that companies did not have unlimited access to.

"It's not the end-all, but, boy, it moved us along way up the path from where we were," says Wilfong. As the world faces a growing global water shortage in coming years and global warming continues to stoke fears of increasing incident of drought, it's vitally important that laws establish who owns the right to groundwater sources, he says. "That is the big issue, not just in Maine but around the country and around the world. The real questions are, who is going to own the water and who is going to control it, and isn't it insane policy to let people control something so important?"

Michael Blanding is a freelance writer living in Boston. Read more of his writing at MichaelBlanding.com.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/65520/

Coming Soon…

2007-10-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

It has been months since I have posted anything of my own here on this blog. I am not apologizing, however. It is simply a dry spell. It is what it is. That means I will not offer any excuses. I hope you have at least enjoyed some of the humor of my YouTube Selections.

Something I have been ruminating over is a concept I have for visualizing ideas for automobile-free zones within my very own neighborhood. A friend of mine has given me a licensed copy of Adobe Photoshop, and I have a digital camera. I will be introducing my own car-free visualizations with "before" and "after" shots. The "after" shots will be heavily manipulated, and I hope I am able to convincingly create images that convey in part what is locked up in my mind. Since I cannot draw or paint to save my life, I will photoshop instead! This will occupy a good deal of time, and it will likely be a while before you will see the results. Yet I think it will do a good deal to drive home the ideas I have for transforming cities into much more "livable" places.

Until then, I will be periodically submitting various posts and excerpts that I feel are more related to the subject matter of this blog. Although I am very politically minded, I will not be expressing much more in regard to politics either. However, I think I will be boycotting the next election, unless there is truly a candidate of substance in which to lend my support.

Hasta la vista, compadres.

Mike Gravel Young Men and Women

2007-09-02T13:02:00.001-07:00

Don't listen, he's just an old coot. Don't listen, now, don't you dare. You too will become senile and grumpy. -- The Media

America To The Rescue

2007-08-25T00:41:00.001-07:00

We's gots the experience, baby!

Bay Area Rally (pt. 1)

2007-08-16T14:22:00.001-07:00

Join the Revolution.

Bay Area Rally (pt. 2)

2007-08-16T14:21:00.001-07:00

Continued…

Cheney in 1994 on Iraq

2007-08-16T11:04:00.001-07:00

Like I've been saying all along, Cheney admits that this is a U.S. Occupation of Iraq. This is not a war.

Moving San Francisco Into the Future

2007-08-08T10:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see three proposed architectural models for my city's new Transbay Terminal. The models were set up in City Hall. I have decided to post pictures of my choice, which I feel is the boldest and most beautiful model. I have also posted the associated article from the architect's website, but first – pictures!

As things currently stand…

The SOM Transbay Terminal

Focal Point on the Skyline

Now that's a Grand Entrance! First & Mission Streets

The Architectural Model in City Hall

A Thing of Beauty

On August 6, 2007, SOM’s San Francisco-based design partners Craig Hartman and Brian Lee presented their vision for a new transit center and tower that will transform the future of San Francisco’s transit, skyline, and downtown community. The public presentation before the Transbay Joint Powers Authority Board of Directors was part of a rigorous design and development competition begun last fall. The jury’s recommendation is expected on September 20, 2007. SOM is teamed with the Rockefeller Group Development Corporation for the competition.

Signaling a new era for the city of San Francisco, SOM’s design for the new Transbay Transit Center will preserve and enhance the exceptional qualities of the City—the beauty of the light, climate, topography, bay, and City—as well as its people, while embodying a potent belief in the region’s future. The Center consists of two defining elements: the Transit Terminal, which defines the urban transportation facility for the 21st Century, and the Transit Tower, which serves as the beacon for the new center and will act as an economic and cultural catalyst for the neighborhood and the City. The programmatic and infrastructural requirements of the Transit Terminal and Tower make it a seminal model and symbol for global sustainability.
The SOM/RGDC design proposal makes a simple but bold adjustment to the TJPA’s four-block-long overhead bus deck. The adjustment will improve the transit operations, reduce annual operating costs, and radically reduce the emission of climate-changing carbon dioxide. Achieved by creating a double-deck bus platform—moving the eastern half of the bus deck to the west—the design effectively reduces the length of the bus deck by two city blocks. This innovation accommodates the entire transit program and improves operational efficiency while freeing two full city blocks for two significant civic gestures: a light-filled Transbay Hall—a dramatic arrival hall equal in scale to that of Grand Central Station—and a city-block-sized “opportunity site” or Performing Arts Park.

SOM’s 1,375-foot-high, mixed-use Transbay Tower is equally bold. Its first full floor lifts 100 feet above a full-block urban plaza at Mission Street, creating a civic portal to the Transbay Hall. Its uses include retail, cultural, office space, a boutique hotel, condominiums, and, at the top, a publicly accessible sky room. The tower’s tapered, turning structure is unique among U.S. skyscrapers. Its form, which unfolds as it reaches the sky, gracefully accommodates the different uses held within. Above the sky room are two state-of-the-art wind turbines that, combined with its photovoltaic crown, reduce annual mechanical electrical consumption by 74%. In addition to the proposed opportunity site, the SOM/RGDC project includes a partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which will provide a major digital arts program, and with the California State Library, which will lend its Sutro Collection. These partnerships add an extraordinary cultural dimension to what is already an advanced work of transportation infrastructure.

Through an intense collaboration with leading engineers and building technology experts, the Transbay Transit Center and Tower provides the highest level of environmental stewardship ever achieved in a major urban mixed-use project. The overall project harvests rainwater, reducing the burden on the city’s infrastructure, and makes extensive use of natural ventilation, natural light, as well as energy in the form of advanced solar and wind power. After the first decade of operation, the project’s combined reduction in emissions, compared to a conventional design, will be over 176,000,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. The Transit Center will achieve LEED® Platinum certification; the Tower will achieve a minimum of LEED® Gold and possibly LEED® Platinum.

Both buildings are designed to the highest levels of safety and security. The Transit Center’s base isolation structural system will allow the facility to withstand a “2,500 year” earthquake and serve as an emergency center in the event of a major seismic event. The Tower fully incorporates next generation lessons learned in the 21st Century for security and life safety.

Generation Chickenhawk: With The College Republicans

2007-07-24T08:53:00.001-07:00

LisaNova does George Bush!

2007-07-19T14:45:00.001-07:00

This is like totally awesome!

Human Potential & Philosophical Ruminations

2007-07-14T13:10:00.000-07:00

I am developing a belief that people behave more or less in ways in which they are expected to behave, or in the ways they are trained to behave. Most people are never trained to think for themselves, or better said, they are retrained to rely upon others – specifically those in authority – for advice and admonition. Institutionalized "learning", in its main manifestations – public schools, churches and universities – is designed to give answers and solutions rather than to teach its students and adherents to seek out those solutions for themselves. It really is more akin to indoctrination than learning. Learning is based upon personal experience, whereas indoctrination is based upon experience outside one's own immediate experience.

For example: After one's successful completion of his "education", he is awarded a diploma which signifies that he is now an "expert" in whichever fields of study, and for the rest of this person's life, he will base and contrast his experiences based upon his learned expectations. Rather than ever challenging his most basic assumptions, he will instead make every attempt at reclassification and reevaluation of experiences that either fall outside of said assumptions, or that do not neatly integrate within them. Perhaps this individual will disregard completely any information that runs counter to his "education", since it cannot be right. And this person represents a leader in our society; he is one of our educated elite! Those few, rare individuals that literally "think outside the box" (how I hate this cliché), are quite often ignored until their theories are later accepted as general rule.

Regardless of one's education, whether it be a high school diploma, community college, trade school or university; we all inherently "know" the falsities and illusions of this transitory existence. Most of us simply choose to ignore this inherent, internal wisdom. There are lyrics from Leonard Cohen which come to mind from his song/poem "Everybody Knows".

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that youve been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows youve been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows

And everybody knows that its now or never
Everybody knows that its me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when youve done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that its moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But theres gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

And everybody knows that youre in trouble
Everybody knows what youve been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows its coming apart
Take one last look at this sacred heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
Thats how it goes
Everybody knows…

For those who would defend institutions, it is said that the mass of humanity are like sheep that need a shepherd. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way (Isaiah 53:6). We need a Christ, or a Pope or a Führer to gather us together and show us the way. There is of course a spiritual truth in this scriptural morsel, but like all language it is subject to misunderstanding, for "the way" is not in a person, nor a Messiah. The Way is a practice, and a means of living that leads to the truth within each of us. We are each one of us, our very own Messiah. Each of us is a spark of Divinity, a child of G-d. That is the most assured truth in just about every faith tradition. We do not need anyone to find what is already within us, yet we are all in this together. The other grand spiritual truth is that we all are one. These truths are often dispelled by institutionalized religion and political organizations (corporations included), which attempt to isolate us and make us vulnerable. I sincerely believe the most fundamental human trait is empathy and compassion. The polar opposite is true for institutions which are invariably divisive and manipulate humanity in ways that are fully contrary to its nature.

Ever wonder why mankind collectively, consistently misbehaves like a selfish, spoiled child? Could it possibly be that our Institutions actually capitalize on such? Could it be that by treating us a children; we behave like children? Could it be that our human potential is intentionally, actively and repeatedly curtailed? Could it be that Institutions in fact represent a collective manifestation of our ego? Since we are not who we think we are; we are not what others think we are; we are not our thoughts nor language used to describe us; neither are we our acquisitions, material or otherwise; and finally we are not even our bodies which die and decay; therefore our ego is nothing but an illusion, and its greatest fear is "death", or its exposure to the truth that it never existed in the first place. The ego would prefer to see the destruction of the Universe over its own. We should know that our one and only adversary, the sole satanic force bent upon our destruction, is in fact what we so often perceive as ourselves – that incessant voice that broadcasts in our conscience night and day – that very voice we so readily confuse as our own! Be still and know that I AM. Be here and now. See the illusion for what it is.

Am I an Anarchist? I suppose one could find such ideological leanings in my evolving philosophy. Yet I also believe mankind is capable of so much either as individuals or in community. But mind you, community does not imply like minds and like motives even. Community is everyone living in relative harmony in all their various facets and expressions. Community implies tolerance of others. Judgement is withheld, and mercy flows like a river…

Intimacy Between Men Used Not to Imply One's Sexuality

2007-07-06T07:03:00.000-07:00

An essay by John Ibson, author of Picturing Men.

History's fundamental lesson warns those who are comfortable with contemporary social arrangements, as it reassures those who are oppressed by current practices: It hasn't always been like this, and isn't likely to stay this way forever. This lesson is certainly true when it comes to the way that American men today are inclined and allowed to express their affection for each other—whether that affection involves romance, sexual longing, or just profound fondness.

Ang Lee's magnificent film Brokeback Mountain is the sad story of two Wyoming ranch hands whose society severely inhibits their twenty-year-long affectionate and sexual relationship. They express their mutual attraction only when utterly alone in the wilderness, at huge expense to their emotional lives and also their relationships with women. Yet Brokeback Mountain may also be instructively seen as a movie that raises disturbing issues about the ways that all American men feel about the appropriate ways to express their fondness for each other, whether or not that fondness is accompanied by sexual desire. Our culture still so scorns sexual desire between two men that there is a common fear that such desire just might accompany any fondness, as well as a fear that other people might jump to conclusions about the implications of two men's attraction to each other.

Homophobia afflicts all males in our society, both those who genuinely are sexually attracted to each other, like Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain, as well as those whose love or simple affection for each other has no sexual dimension to it. For one man to tell another he loves him, some joking around often trivializes the expression, with all the depth of a commercial for Bud Light; if two men embrace, a reassuring punch is often part of the action. Simply because they are men, gay men—in spite of being sexually drawn to each other—may often be no less free of inhibition in expressing affection than are their straight brothers.

As an historian who has studied the shifting history of American men's various sorts of relationships with each other, I think it is critical to note that Brokeback Mountain's Ennis and Jack were nineteen in 1963, the year they met. (So was I coincidentally.) They were shaped by the culture of 1950s America, a culture that was unusually hostile to male intimacy, as I argue in Picturing Men.

When most American boys learned to fear and despise any suggestion of queerness in themselves, Ennis received a peculiarly graphic lesson: His father made it a point to show his nine-year-old son the sexually mutilated corpse of a rancher whose relationship with the man with whom he shared a home had bothered his neighbors. Jack's dream for himself and Ennis—simply to live together in peace—was a modest one, in contrast to the reasonable dreams of men today who want to marry each other. Yet, living when they did, Ennis could only warn Jack that if their feelings for each other were ever to "grab on to us again in the wrong place, wrong time, we'll be dead." Their intimacy had to remain in the shadows, making Brokeback Mountain a tragic tale of unrealized potential.

Picturing Men shows a different world. The lost world of American men that I depict in my work was a time when men clearly were comfortable with each other, feeling free to physically express mutual affection for all to witness—not hidden away on a Brokeback Mountain, but in front of a camera, wholly without the coldness or the reassuringly exaggerated gestures that would come to mark photographs from a later time. Picturing Men does not argue that the lost world was in every way better than the world of men today, but does surely maintain that the earlier world was different, and that our understanding it, and the reasons for its demise, might improve men's relationships nowadays, with each other and with the women in their lives.

Picturing Men is based on my systematic scrutiny of thousands of everyday photographs of two or more American men together, from the dawn of photography before the Civil War until the early 1950s—both studio portraits as well as the snapshots that became common after the invention of roll film in 1888. The book displays well over a hundred representative images, showing men indoors and out, in homes, dorm rooms, and bunk houses, at the beach and in the work place, soldiers, sailors, and civilians, camping, hunting, and posing for athletic team portraits. The ways men posed with each other changed markedly over the time my book surveys, and my interpretation of those changes leads me to an interpretation of drastic changes in the quality of men's various relationships with each other over a century of American history.

As cultural evidence, photographs document certain things, yet are wholly silent about others. In looking at this photograph taken around 1915, we see two men doing something we rarely observe nowadays. I refer not simply to their pose, but to the fact that they had their portrait taken together in a photographer's studio, a ritual once widespread among American men but extremely rare today. Many observers may confidently think they see evidence of romance and a likely sexual relationship in this photograph, but that judgment reveals something only about the observer, not the subjects. Without an inscription, we can actually discern nothing from this image regarding a matter that has come to obsess us about relationships: whether the parties are having sex with each other.

What we do observe in this photograph—and in countless others—is male intimacy, two men who were clearly so comfortable with each other that they felt no need to clown around, to reassure themselves and anyone who would see their photograph that nothing culturally scorned was being displayed. Another of history's critical lessons is that change always brings both gain and loss. Picturing Men maintains that certain losses that American men have experienced in their relationships with each other have been severe. It is not simply fictional ranch hands, and not just men sexually drawn to each other, whose lives today are full of unrealized potential.

(Following is a progression of team sport photographs documenting a loss of physical intimacy)

Public Art, or Public Eyesore?

2007-06-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

You be the judge.

The fountain in Justin Herman Plaza. This was obviously a very cynical criticism of the area when the fountain was installed with the horrific concrete eyesore that was the Embarcadero Freeway as its backdrop. It brings to mind a kind of an "Escape from New York", or "Soylent Green" harkening back of that particular decade's view of Armageddon. It is a vile piece of trash, somebody please dispose of this.

"Cupid's Span" on the Embarcadero. It is cartoonish, and its ridiculously-scaled proportions do nothing to invite the viewer. This belongs in Disney Land, if anywhere. I'd like to take a crossbow and let an arrow fly at the person responsible for this crap. The artist? Well, he has to live with this on his conscience – that should be sufficient punishment.

I saved the worst for last. This horrid nightmare stands in the foreground of what is actually a beautiful steel structure – The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. What the heck is it? It is frightening. I call it "The Hideous Sea-Zombies". Would someone please set off a couple grenades under its feet? Could it be temporary? Please let it be taken away soon!

The Occasion of Sin

2007-06-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

This from the BBC.

Pedestrian Street Closures

2007-06-26T07:51:00.000-07:00

Act Locally SF has an interesting article here. Thought I'd bring us back to the main topic.

3 Candidates; 3 Great Ideas

2007-06-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

I guess I'm a Libertarian socialist. I think that anytime power is concentrated it inevitably corrupts, whether it be corporate corruption or government corruption. Quite frankly, it is getting ever more challenging to draw that line between big government and corporate dicta. Our founding fathers had a pretty good idea of what tyranny looks like, and the inspired document upon which our democracy was founded does a pretty good job of limiting government powers and ensuring a balance between powers exists. Now, if only we would attempt to follow the U.S. Constitution!

Problem is, most Americans don't even know that they're living under tyranny as we watch these fabricated, controlled and manipulated "debates", by the same corporate media that continue to sell us a bill of goods seeking to perpetuate a fictitious "war on terror". Truthfully, there is no debate in this country, because the "top contenders" all essentially agree on the basics; in other words, they all openly defy the very premises of our Constitution and what a democracy should look like.

Nonetheless, there are three candidates of substance, and three ideas from each that I would like to elucidate. Firstly, there is the idea of allowing the citizenry control over their money:

Rep. Ron Paul is obviously a Libertarian at heart. He is a principled and intelligent man who is opposed to tyranny here and abroad. As much as I consider myself a liberal, progressive, democrat or socialist (and all those adjectives apply under various conditions), I think Rep. Paul might actually do the most to restore our dying democracy. I honestly believe that the fundamental means of restoring democracy is a redistribution of wealth. Whoa!, you say – you don't mean to refer to a communist revolution? Not at all. The way you restore wealth is by abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to a gold and silver standard. This puts real money back in the hands of the citizenry, and effectively empowers them. This is not an easy thing to accomplish, since it had taken the banking interests roughly sixty years, a great depression and two world wars to wrest our monetary system away from us, and since that time they have been keeping the financial bubble inflated for the past thirty years by creating credit-based economies. This cannot continue indefinitely, however. History has shown that fiat currency can never succeed, as well as it should not since it is intrinsically immoral (it is theft, pure and simple).

Some of my peers have expressed concern over Rep. Paul's assertion of State's rights, by mentioning Jim Crow laws that existed in the South, and the struggle for Civil Rights in the sixties. I think it is a fallacy to attribute the attainment of equal rights to a strong centralized government's insistence upon them. It is fairly clear to me that the Bill of Rights guarantees civil liberties to all men (and women). The individual States must adhere to the overarching Constitution that binds them. In other words, I do not believe that a large, bureaucratic centralized government is any more efficient, democratic or equitable than local and state governments.

Now, all that said…I do believe that the Federal government can be utilized democratically to ensure that certain standards are adhered to. We are living in a different time than when the founding fathers put their pens to parchment. They certainly did not face the specters of global warming and the destruction of the ecosystem, nuclear warfare, corporate globalization nor technological revolutions on a decade by decade basis. Nonetheless, I think we can continue to follow the basic premises of the U.S. Constitution to ensure we do not live under tyranny. Yet the centralized federal government, with the citizenry fully involved along with their representatives in Congress, under complete transparency of operation is able to achieve things that local and state governments, individuals and entrepreneurs cannot do separately. For example, we have the interstate highway system. And then there were the Apollo space missions.

I personally believe that large, fully funded projects that rebuild our manufacturing base are sorely needed to put a shot in the arm of our atrophied economy. They must be pioneering designs which wean us off of fossil fuels and create a more just and equitable future for our progeny. I do not envision any other means of accomplishing such massive projects than a centrally funded and directed campaign led primarily by our democratically elected government. I do not think we can afford to wait for the private sector to patch together a solution to climate change! My pet favorites are the creation of car-free zones in metropolitan areas, the creation of car-free cities, national high speed rail, revamping local transit systems, cleaner and safer nuclear energy and other renewable energy sources. This type of infrastructure will build the economy and support it for generations. This is where Rep. Paul and I diverge – he does not see the value of "big government". I am leery of it too, but I think as long as we have a voice, and as long as government seeks the greater good, wonderful things can be accomplished. These projects should be fully funded without credit (credit-based economies being dissolved), and the government bodies and corporate interests must be limited in size and scope once the infrastructure is put in place, which is only possible when you've got an educated, engaged and empowered citizenry.

The next idea of real value comes from retired Senator Mike Gravel. This is the Fair Tax, and the abolishment of the IRS:

This would not require repealing the questionably constitutional 16th amendment, which essentially allows the federal government the ability to levy direct, unapportioned tax on individual incomes. Yet I think it best to repeal it, since it is so repugnant to the ideals of a free society. The 16th amendment was questionably ratified right at the same time we instituted the Federal Reserve. The federal income tax goes to pay the interest on the federal reserve. Not one penny goes to fund government programs. I could write for chapters about this subject, but I think we can safely say that the IRS is wholly contrary to the spirit of our Constitution and the intent of our founding fathers. The IRS demands transparency from the citizenry, but we are not allowed the same favor. In other words, the IRS has the ability to peer into our private lives where we are required to divulge where we earned every penny, but we have no way of auditing them, or seeing where our taxes go. There is no law in existence, by the way, that requires you to even file a 1040 form. And how does one define income? Income traditionally has implied profits, so working for an employer and earning a wage is not "income", it is fair trade. Is it not? Ironically, it is the very wealthy who actually have "incomes" that are able to weasel their way out of paying income tax due to the myriad loopholes that exist in the tax code. But why should that surprise us? A "fair tax" would be placed on goods and services, so that the more one spends, the more tax one pays. Such a code encourages savings and investment. In order to protect the poorer segments of society, the government would issue prebate checks that pay back the tax paid on essentials. Since the federals reserve system would no longer exist, these tax earnings could be used to directly fund government spending. With all due transparency, the citizenry could then decide where the money is best spent. Senator Gravel also has a plan for direct involvement of citizenry along with our representatives in Congress. These are great ideas for wresting back our democracy and empowering the citizenry. One could expect to see revolutionary changes.

The third idea is from Rep. Dennis Kucinich; it is the repeal of NAFTA, GATT and other "free trade" agreements in favor of fair trade:

These trade pacts are not free trade at all. They have done more to destroy the middle class than the institution of fiat paper currency and individual income tax combined, by sending our high paying jobs overseas. These agreements have also ensured that our national sovereignty is diluted to insignificance. We fought for generations to ensure that we receive equitable pay and benefits through collective bargaining. We have fought for workplace safety and environmental protections. What good is that if big business can move next door and open up factories that require none of those considerations? Ever notice how everything is manufactured in China as of late? Do you think that is just coincidental? China is a totalitarian regime, by the way. How does one compete with that, exactly? And what about small business and individual entrepreneurs? You can forget about that in the global market. We now have an entire class of underemployed and underpaid citizenry.

If you don't realize that the real war that is being waged right now is a "class war", then you are deluded. This has been the real war for almost a century, and it was going on long before that. Yet since 1913 we have been loosing big time. We must wake up and take action before it is too late. The banking cartel will not stop until we are fully under their control. You might think this is an alarmist statement bordering on that of the conspiracy lunatics, but I assure you it is exactly what will transpire if we do not act soon to take back our country. One day you and I could be implanted with chips that allow us to make all our trade and economic transactions without paper money. There will be plenty of people that love the idea. But what that means is every transaction you make will be recorded and your every movement will be tracked. If you do anything to upset the interests of the banking cartel, they will simply turn off your chip and you will not be able to buy or sell. It is brilliant in its simplicity. Resistance will be futile.

Unconstitutional: The War on Civil Liberties. Part 3 of 3

2007-06-10T09:50:00.001-07:00

Part Trois

Unconstitutional: The War on Civil Liberties. Part 2 of 3

2007-06-10T09:49:00.001-07:00

Part Deux

Unconstitutional: The War on Civil Liberties. Part 1 of 3

2007-06-10T09:48:00.001-07:00

The Patriot Act has made us more vulnerable to terrorism, and simultaneously instituted state-sponsored terrorism in the USA. It is one of the most execrable violations of our Constitution and deserves to be abolished in its entirety.

Bush's "Magic" Economic Formula

2007-06-08T07:42:00.000-07:00

AlterNet: Bush's "Magic" Economic Formula: The Rich Get Richer; Regular People Lose Ground
By Larry Beinhart, AlterNet
Posted on June 4, 2007, Printed on June 8, 2007

Supposedly we are in a sustained economic recovery and have been since 2002.

Part of this is Bush hot air and the Republican Noise Machine, which the media quotes verbatim.

By a certain measure, however, it's real.

The economy has grown. Corporate profits are at an all-time high. Average income is up. There's lots of money around.

But the recovery has some really strange features. Oddities never before seen in a recovery.

Jobs: During Bush's first term the US actually lost private-sector jobs.

It finally improved in 2005, and now job creation is almost keeping pace with the increase in population. Still, over all, it's the worst record since Hoover, the fellow who presided over the onset of the Great Depression.

How do you have a recovery without creating jobs?

Income: Yes, average income is up during the tenure of the current administration.

The joke about average income is: Bill Gates walks into a bar. The average income of every person in the room immediately goes up 10,000 percent.

But median income, the amount that people in the middle of the group earn, barely budges. So let's look at that figure. Median income is down. The average person makes less now than when Bush came into office.

Not only that, the downward pressure on wages is no longer just a blue-collar issue, it's moved up to white-collar workers, the educated classes, even doctors.

How do you have a recovery when people are making less than before the recovery?

Cost of living: Key factors of the cost of living are much higher than they were six years ago.

In particular, fuel is up 100 percent, higher education costs are up about 44 percent, health care premiums are up 80 percent, and affordable housing is scarce.

Normally, when the cost of living goes up, we have inflation. But we've had low inflation during the Bush years.

How can the cost of living go up while the cost of money stays low?

Here's the most peculiar statistic of all: the Dow Jones index

You may have been hearing that the Dow Jones Index is at an all-time high. It's true. However, it is only 16 percent higher than the day George Bush came into office. By comparison, when Clinton left office the Dow was 320 percent higher than when he came into office.

It's a very rough measure of course, and there are many others. But by that measure, during the Clinton years investment in America's leading business had grown more than three times over. Under Bush it's only grown 16 percent in six years. Since the consumer price index is up 18 percent over the same period, when the new all-time high is adjusted for inflation, growth is effectively below zero.

How can there be a "recovery" in which not even businesses grow?

When a government wants an economy to grow, it throws money at it.

The administration did that with spending on pharmaceuticals, homeland security, and a couple of wars. But their most important weapon of choice was tax cuts for the rich, especially on unearned income, capital gains, inheritance, dividends, and interest.

This was sold, and accepted, on the myth that the rich -- the investing class -- are the most creative and daring members of our society. Just unleash them and they will march off into the wilderness -- actual, urban, or cyber -- with sacks of cash over their shoulders and they will build things!

Factories! Airlines! Housing! Toys! Computers! Undreamed wonders! Entire new civilizations! With jobs! jobs! jobs! Like an Ayn Rand novel!

But that's not what happened.

Because a shortage of cash was not the problem. The country, the world, is awash with cash.

The good, old, risk for rewards version of capitalism -- the burghers invest in a daring sea captain sailing to the Indies -- still exists. In recent years, it's given us FedEx, Wal-Mart, Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

But alongside it, over the last 50 years, the economy of credit has grown up.

In vastly oversimplified terms the credit economy works like this:

You own a house. It's worth $100,000.

Someone buys the house, no money down. They borrow that money. Let's say it's a straight-line 8 percent, 30-year mortgage. Forget closing costs, points, and any other complications -- that's a $220,000 debt. It goes on the bank's books as an asset.

Now you have $100,000. The bank has $220,000 (on paper). The buyer has a house worth $100,000. The bank has a lien on it, but the buyer will be gaining equity, plus he can get a second mortgage and home-improvement and other loans on it.

Again, this is a vast oversimplification, but that transaction has "created" something like $420,000 that is now "in play," as part of the economy.

No "thing" has been created -- no new business, no product, no jobs, no idea, no intellectual property, no entertainment.

But money has been created.

If you buy a dress on your Visa card or organize a consortium to buy a company, the same thing happens -- debt creates money. In every transaction, there's profit to be taken off the top.

A perfect example of the transformation of our society into a credit economy is the change in the way we finance higher education. States, and even cities, used to be in the business of building universities that were free, or nearly so. These were financed, up front, with tax money as an investment in our human infrastructure. Then, in 1965, the student loan program was invented. This changed the higher education business into a debt creation business and created a whole new creditor class, college graduates, who, were handed, along with their diploma, debts of ten to fifty thousand dollars or more.

The number one industry in America today is the money business -- debt swapping. In a closed economy, that might have a positive effect, as people look for something to do with their money.

Not, perhaps, as a general rule, but in an economy like ours, handing out money to rich people is the least effective way to make a healthier, stronger economy that benefits society as a whole. There are two reasons.

The first is that the Ayn Rand fantasy is a fantasy. For the most part, when people with millions of dollars get an extra hundred thousand, or several hundreds of thousands, or even millions, they invest it passively, in financial instruments and real estate.

So we get, for example, a real estate bubble. Which is worse that a dot.com bubble because a dot.com bubble is symptomatic of the excitement of investing in new, high risk, but high reward enterprises that are producing new things. A housing bubble is symptomatic of lots of money floating around with nowhere productive to go. The other reason is that insofar as investment does go into business, in terms of our society, there's a hole in the bucket. The hole is called globalization.

I'm writing this on a Mac. When I bought it, the money went through American Express (which took a few points) to Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, where Steve Jobs dipped in his ladle, then the rest poured out though the hole in the bottom to China, where it was actually made.

That's the economy that the statistics describe.

Lots of money is moving. As it passes through the company, the company profits. The company isn't going to build anything, so profits are spent on executive compensation. The actual work is outsourced (the money flows out), and no jobs are created. Nor does the actual business grow very much either, except as a middle man, taking American money and passing it on to foreign businesses (and oil producers).

At the same time, this creates downward pressure on normal working people.

Remember those old movies, with 200 men at the factory gate? A foreman inside with three jobs to give out, saying, "You. You. And you. The rest of you, go home." Those three lucky stiffs didn't demand health insurance, pensions, or job security.

Now it's India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mexico, Honduras, China, Korea, and many others at the gate. American companies tell their workers they have to be competitive. Not only do wages go down, but benefits begin to disappear.

This is combined strong anti-union and anti-worker efforts by government, supporting the anti-union and anti-worker efforts of major corporations.

This may be bad for America as a society, but the people in the money business love it.

Indeed, it is the trick that makes Bushenomics work for people in the money business. That includes anyone who invests in financial instruments. The problem with pumping out money -- printing money -- is that it can create inflation. Money lenders hate inflation. If I loan out money at 8% and by the time the creditor pays it back, inflation is up 8%, then my profit is zero. The profit margin in lending is -- in a significant part -- the difference between the rate of the loan and the rate of inflation.

Really high inflation, and worse, runaway inflation, is, of course, a threat to everyone. But moderate inflation, with rising wages, favors debtors and hurts creditors.

So how can you pump out money while keeping inflation down?

In Bushenomics you do it by keeping a lid on earned income. Even driving it down. Millions upon millions of people earning a little bit less take away from the pressure of a few people earning millions upon millions more.

That, along with, the flood of low cost goods from low wage countries, helps balance out the inflationary pressure of rising costs in certain particular industries, like oil, health care and higher education.

It's not a question of conservatism vs. liberalism. Of government vs. free markets. All economies are, of necessity, mixed. All governments are concerned with the wealth of their nation. Government decisions will always effect how business operates. The question is, does the way government spends and invests create a sounder and healthier society? Or does it merely make certain sectors and classes rich, while hollowing out our economy?

If we are to invest public funds -- through government borrowing or spending or through simply spending tax revenues -- we have to be aware that rich people running around with bags of money won't necessarily do what is good for the wealth of our nation. They may run us into bankruptcy, the way the smartest guys in the room ran Enron into bankruptcy.

Larry Beinhart is the author of Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/52955/

No More Blood for Oil

2007-06-07T11:27:00.001-07:00

When the Formula is Right…

2007-06-02T12:54:00.000-07:00

Yet lacking any character, surprise or nuance whatsoever.

Every other realtively cheaply built house looks like every other relatively cheaply built house. You think we could abandon this total lack of creative vision? Had the architects designed some varying styles, and had the budgets allowed the addition of some architectural features, like bay windows, as well as materials that provide a sense of permanence and affluence, this project would have engaged imaginations rather than squandered yet another opportunity to provide better alternatives to sprawl. And finally, why is everything painted the same damn color? That is a stroke of institutionalization that is bound to appeal to no one.

A case where the formula is right, yet lack of organic structure, eccentricity, and the element of surprise just leaves our souls dry and thirsty. If you look at nature, you'll see she does this quite well. All we need do is imitate her.

I think they'll probably fill up nicely, however. I for one, should these homes be affordable, would seriously consider moving here. The advantages of having a decent market within the same block as well as being across the street from BART are quite appealing at my age now, not to mention in a decade or two when I will be older. We'll have to wait and see.

Addendum:

Well, I just got off the phone with Sharon, a nice lady who works at the Solaire rental office. Too bad there are no opportunities for home ownership there; they're all rentals. The property seems nice enough however. I was curious about the lower income housing. They have a few 750 square foot one bedroom units available on the low income plan. My partner and I actually qualify for the adjusted rent even though we both work 40 hours per week, but it only saves a couple hundred dollars per month, putting the rent to roughly $1900. I don't think South San Francisco has rent control, so that figure would likely go up each year. Currently we are paying $1275 for rent here in Chinatown for a one bedroom apartment (built in 1922) that is probably slightly larger. We shan't be moving to Solaire Apartments anytime soon.

Ron Paul : Join The Revolution

2007-05-27T13:35:00.001-07:00

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Giuliani.

Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve

2007-05-27T12:39:00.001-07:00

One Final Illustration

2007-05-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

Relationship between gold & silver and the monetary system.

USD (Federal Reserve Dollar)
$ (Dollar as a defined, tangible unit based upon silver & gold)

Gold = 654 USD per troy ounce
Silver = 13 USD per troy ounce

The Dollar, or Unit as defined by the Coinage Act of 1792 containing .773 oz. pure silver
(True value = 10 USD)
The Eagle, or 10 Dollar coin per the same Act containing .564 oz. pure gold
(True value = 369 USD)
You will note that the relationship between gold and silver is no longer valued at the same ratio.

Yet interestingly enough, we no longer mint the same coins – they have been replaced with Silver Eagles and Gold Eagles as follows:

1 Troy Ounce Silver Eagle = 13 USD
Face Value = $1 (or 1.3, 1792-1964 Silver Dollars)

0.10 ounce American Gold Eagle coin = 65 USD
Face value = $5 (Note that 13 times 5 is 65)

0.25 ounce American Gold Eagle = 164 USD
Face value = $10 (The appropriate denomination should be $12-1/2)

0.50 ounce American Gold Eagle = 327 USD
Face value = $25 (Note that 13 times 25 is 325)

1 Troy Ounce Gold Eagle = 654 USD
Face value = $50 (Note that 13 times 50 is 650)

You can see immediately the relationship between the denominations. Now these coins are minted for investors and collectors, and they are composed of purer metals than coins made for circulation. As you can see, the quarter ounce Gold Eagle falls out of place with its denominational value of ten dollars, but the rest calculate pretty well to the current price of silver and gold. Now you'd be lucky to find these coins anywhere for the actual USD prices. The current selling prices are:

$1 Silver Eagle = 15 USD
$5 Gold Eagle = 75 USD
$10 Gold Eagle = 180 USD
$25 Gold Eagle = 350 USD
$50 Gold Eagle = 700 USD

I'd suggest investing in gold and silver since these metals will always hold their value. When the Chinese come knocking on our door asking to collect the One Trillion Dollars we owe them, you will still own something of value. Rep. Ron Paul before the U.S. House of Representatives addresses this very issue. I commend this article to you. By the way, Rep. Paul is a true Republican running on a true conservative platform. I'd vote for him. He is being marginalized by the media in he same way Kucinich and Gravel have been.

Just How Much Cash Are We Talking About?

2007-05-25T14:56:00.001-07:00

Try to buy one of these things and it will set you back 15-20 dollars, yet the denomination of the coin is one dollar.

(Fictional Scenario Follows)

I was just thinking about money, can you imagine that? Funny how we tend to dwell on those things we don't have…

Anyhow, Supposing we had a machine that could transport us through a multi-dimensional universe and we found ourselves in Geoftopia (my imaginary world), I occasionally muse upon what it might look and feel like. Now Geoftopia is not Utopia, it is bound by those very same universal physical principles that bind us here on 21st century earth; bad things and unexpected things happen, there still is death and taxes; people still are people, and they are capable of doing shitty things to each other. But I am President of the U.S. of A., Congress has seen my wisdom, the people are behind me, and all eight planks of my platform have been made into law with a few concessions and adaptations, implemented to varying degrees of success, and we have begun to work to build a new future that promises to be one of the most free, just and equitable societies ever created by civilization. Our founding fathers (and mum's too) have finally stopped turning in their graves and are at peaceful rest. (I can dream, can't I?)

So in my internal reality, I was thinking about cash, moola, dinero. I am thinking about how much I might possess, how much it might be worth, and even what it might look like. I'm imagining my palms laced with silver, twenty dollar gold pieces and shiny, coppery pennies that can actually buy you something.

As far as possessing money, nowadays there's really no point in it unless you're saving up to buy something, 'cause it's not worth anything in and of itself. But gold and silver will always be worth something, they have inherent value. There's a stability to that kind of money that makes possession of it desirable. Of course the true, spiritual value of money is not the money itself, it is the power that it wields – namely the ability to buy things, trade things and create things we want. But saving for a rainy day, one's inevitable old age and leaving an inheritance of value to one's progeny is not just gratifying, it is savvy and altruistic. On a large scale, such saving allows each progressive generation to one-up the previous one. Is that not the whole idea here?

We have simply embraced our oppressive servitude for momentary pleasures and the hollow void of empty consumerism, and we leave our children mired deeper in debt, with little concern for the world they'll inherit. We have debased ourselves and betrayed our true inheritance as children of God, and refusing to act as responsible citizens when we accept anything less than liberty. What good is this life without liberty? We might as well be dogs living the way we do with no thought for the future, satisfying our own needs with no thought for our brothers. Only dogs have an excuse, and might actually show more love than what we routinely do. We may not be worthy of our inheritance after all.

But I digress. We are in Geoftopia right now, where people are becoming accustomed to the responsibilities inherent to liberty and are not averse to sacrificing momentary pleasure to building a more just and equitable future for their children. But ironically, along with such uncomfortable adjustment and occasional pain that growth brings, we find ourselves liberated, empowered and more fully human.

After the dissolution of the financial oligarchy and the return to the gold and silver-based currencies, there was a rapid deflationary period. Of course, wages decreased simultaneously, the minimum wage was no longer held in place, and instead labor unions were allowed to organize (with the N.L.R.B. actually representing labor for a change). Since the establishment of a Universal Healthcare Insurance had occurred prior to the monetary reforms, employers had already saved millions, labor relations improved immensely without the health insurance obstacle, employees saw their wages increase and more jobs were created as companies reinvested the fortunes that were being siphoned off to the "health for profit" industries. Labor unions were then allowed to concentrate their efforts on issues of workplace safety, seniority, and job classifications, along with wage negotiations that produced results.

People that work in service sector jobs that made wages close to $20 per hour are currently making around $1.50 per hour, but the purchasing power of $1.50 is closer to what $30 bought one previously. One does not see many $100 bills any longer, unless they're picking up their pay (which employers must pay in cash on a biweekly or semi-monthly period mandated by law). The same service sector worker can expect to earn roughly $120 biweekly (equal to $2400 prior to reform). Even though this same worker has essentially seen a real pay increase of close to 100 percent due to monetary and tax reform, he now has to pay a quarter on the dollar for goods and services, but there are "prebate" cheques from the government for "necessities" that compensate for lower paid workers. The net result is the average worker has seen his spending power increase dramatically, and the economy has grown exponentially as a result, since most of these people were previously living at subsistence levels and can now invest in things like college educations for their kids. Billionaires are now millionaires, but they're still rich, and if they don't feel like giving the government a quarter for every dollar spent on their next Ferrari, they can always invest their money or save it.

There are no longer any payroll taxes since the IRS was dissolved. All government programs are now financed by a national tax on goods and services, it is a hefty tax equal to a quarter on the dollar, but it is based on the Fair Tax Code and fully transparent. In other words, Joe Citizen can actually see where his tax goes and what it funds. As a result, the military-industrial complex took a severe beating. People figured they already have enough nuclear warheads to unleash Armageddon, and enough is enough. Instead, the existing industrial sector is undergoing a vast "retooling" to maintain employment and reinvest in infrastructure that will provide energy, transport and communications and allow the economy to thrive for years into the future – and all while looking at sustainable, ecologically intelligent means of doing so. The States get a portion of the tax as well, so there is no longer any justification for a separate State Income Tax. Social Security Reform cinched up the existing money and prevented it from ever being used for anything other than payments, and the remaining funding now comes from the sole National Tax. Citizens are allowed to make direct contributions towards their own retirement as well, which they have begun to do now that they have discretionary income.

Lastly, it was decided that the days of religious meddling would be put to a quick rest. Separation of Church and State was fully comprehended. The government would no longer be in the business of determining morality, and God would be respectably given his due place as Creator of the Universe and taken off currency. No more mottos of "In God We Trust" (all others pay cash). No more idolatry on our coins. Instead, we began to trust one another, and with each passing day, new-found freedoms we had all but forgotten empowered us to become more fully human. The government had become "of, by and for the people". Never in history had man been so in charge of his fate. The prospects of an equitable future seemed imminent.

A Case for the Lowly Penny

2007-05-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

Click on the penny above for "Citizens for Retiring the Penny"! Yes, they are a nuisance, aren't they? According to this site and other sources I have found, it costs more to mint a penny than the actual value of a penny – 1.4 cents to be exact. And we all know what you can buy with a penny – absolutely nothing. I have a little adage that I repeat rather frequently, based upon Ben Franklin's "a penny saved is a penny earned", that goes "a penny saved, isn't worth very much". (chuckle)

As my readers know (there are probably four of them), one of my platform planks is monetary reform. But I do not wish to send the penny packing. I'll explain why I think that focussing on remedies for a failing, devalued currency are misguided. I think the penny still has a place in our hearts, even if it be a small one.

The dollar is quite independent from the U.S. Constitution, which instead has a number of disability clauses that limit the powers of government in such matters. For all intents and purposes, our current monetary system flies in the face of the Constitution and violates its very premises. In other words, our "fiat" paper currency is illegal and illegitimate. The mere fact that it is not backed by anything (or redeemable) makes it nothing more than rather meaningless and valueless paper. The more paper "dollars" put into circulation, the less value such "dollars" possess, until you get to our current state of affairs. Compared to the value of the dollar in 1913, today's dollar is worth 4¢. Simple arithmetic tells us that a penny in 1913 was worth one of today's quarters. Nobody's considering eliminating the quarter dollar now, are they?

Do you know that the "dollar" is a defined unit according to the Coinage Act of 1792? "The Dollar or Unit shall be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current," that is, running in the market, "to wit, three hundred and seventy-one and one-quarter grains of silver." That is 0.773 troy ounces of pure silver. At the time of this writing, the current value of that amount of silver is about 10 Federal Reserve dollars. I commend this article to you: "How Misconstruction of the Monetary Powers and Disabilities Subverted the Founding Fathers' Intent",by Dr. Edwin Viera, Jr.. There are a good number of American citizens around today that can probably recall "silver certificates", payable to the bearer on demand – redeemable currency that was tied to the value of something tangible.

If I may take a slight deviation in our discourse, I would like to state that my entire raison d'être, in this life is about empowerment – personally and communally. This is oversimplification, but for the sake of understanding, I see the world composed of two philosophical camps. I try to boil things down to their roots, examine the soil, the prime motivation and underlying source of their constructs and then decide which camp they sprang from. There is the egalitarian, libertarian, free thinking, creative, empowering camp that views humanity as the pinnacle of Creation and inspires us to be more, to grow and evolve and realize our full potential. That is the camp that I struggle to align myself with. Then there is the totalitarian, dystopian, oppressive, mundane, institutional enslaving camp that views humanity as nothing more than a disposable resource (or at the most, a smart ape) and seeks to bind and shackle us with fear so that we can never break free. The world is not so black and white, but the seeds of ideas are. Ideas are the most important "things" we've got, so we'd best be careful choosing the ones we want. Our current monetary system is an abuse of power, an enslaving institution that is not worthy of us.

So it is my suggestion that we abolish our fiat currency and replace it with currency that is redeemable for silver and gold. The Federal Reserve must be abolished entirely, and banks will no longer have the ability to create money out of nothing. Why should financial institutions be able to suck the life from those who have worked, scrimped and saved for their children's futures? How come your average citizen who essentially sacrifices his very being to the betterment of society finds home ownership entirely outside his grasp? The financial bowl is only getting deeper, and those in the center can only dream their way out, while a few on the edges enjoy wealth beyond imagination, and contribute nothing while doing so. It is hardly an equitable, democratic system we currently have in place.

It is not a socialist notion to say that workers, those who actually produce things of value and provide needed services are entitled to some meaningful compensation for their work. Then why are we paid with valueless paper? Think about this. You could see your life savings quite literally snuffed out by any significant financial downturn. Is that fair? Is it equitable? Meanwhile there will be speculators, lenders and financial institutions that will make their killings. Everything is in place right now waiting for just such an event. Our government has openly defied our God-given rights and constitutionally granted liberties; they will hardly flinch at instating martial law under the guise of security. Do you think you own anything? Think again. What will happen when you cannot afford your mortgage payment? There are those inside and outside our government that are waiting for the biggest power transfer ever, and we are playing right into their hands.

I think these power elite have once more underestimated the common man. They may be in for a big surprise. However, it seems to me that preventive medicine is always preferable to invasive surgery. That is why I so much as bother to write my ideas down. It may not be much, but it is something. If we all do a little something, it can add up to a whole lot of something. Now is the time to take up our calling and make those little differences. Let's not wait until we are facing our enemy fully on his terms, herding us into rail cars bound for the work camps. So much for the lowly penny!

Dennis Kucinich Reports

2007-05-24T12:44:00.001-07:00

Hey, Mr. Olbermann! You forgot this guy.

Olbermann's Commentary

2007-05-24T12:33:00.001-07:00

I'd like to add that Kucinich was never mentioned here. I wonder why not?

Brown 2008 Platform

2007-05-24T10:37:00.000-07:00

I have chosen to run as a candidate for President of the United States in the 2008 general election. I am running as a populist candidate with no party affiliation. Once elected, I will work with all parties and elected officials to effect the best change possible. I truly believe that all parties and platforms have some merit, and the winner should never call all the shots. I meet all the criteria for the presidency; I will be 43 years old when inaugurated in 2009, I was born in Santa Clara county in the great state of California in 1965, and I have never committed nor been convicted of a felony.

Planks (An Overview):

1.) An end to our illegal occupation of Iraq and an end to preemptive military aggression. I believe we can safely change the name of the Defense Department to the Department of Peace and World Welfare. Any time we declare "war" on something, you will note that it never actually gets rid of anything. Instead, the problem only appears to be exacerbated. So let's try waging peace for a change. This does not imply weakness, or lack of defense, or a lack of willingness to protect – quite to the contrary. Let's leave Armageddon to the realm of phantasy, shall we?

2.) Election Reform. Let's bring democracy back to the U.S.A.

3.) Monetary Reform. Abolish the Federal Reserve and put monetary control back to the people where the founding fathers and U.S. Constitution put it. Audit the Federal Reserve and make sure we still have the gold and silver to back our currency.

4.) Rescind NAFTA and other "free trade" agreements. Let's return to fair trade and bring our jobs back home where they belong. We can rebuild this country's infrastructure and create a full-employment economy.

5.) Universal Healthcare. Businesses should be allowed to do business and hire employees without the constraints of paying their employee's healthcare costs. We need a nationalized single payer healthcare system that is not for profit. Workers should be able to see their real incomes rise to the cost of living increases, and not allocated to higher and higher insurance rates. Healthcare should never hinge upon one's employment.

6.) Eliminate the IRS and the Federal Income Tax. Since our federal income tax goes exclusively to the interest on the debt incurred by the administration of the Federal Reserve, and since the Federal Reserve will be reincorporated into the confines of the government with all due transparency, such a questionably constitutional tax will be repealed and replaced with a Fair Tax on goods and services.

7.) Limits on Corporations and Break Private Monopolies. Re-amend the Constitution to allow the government to revoke corporate charters when deemed necessary, and place the power back into the hands of the citizenry where it belongs. Let's bring free market capitalism back to our country.

8.) The "New" New Deal. Public works on a large scale and retooling of existing industry to build a bright future here and around the world. We can once again lead the way by example, not through fear and intimidation. Primarily, we should be concerned with the environment, energy equity and a sustainable future. We can ease off our oil dependence, and look at renewable, clean energy and safer nuclear energy, as well as building infrastructure that conserves energy, such as high speed rail, car-free cities and more efficient use of land and resources.

Sound like Utopia? Why not? Nothing is impossible, except the impossible (of course). I will elaborate on each plank at later dates.

I have little doubt that if I should ever become president, as unlikely as that is to happen, that there will be many attempts made at assassinating me. But I promise to do my best at dodging those bullets!

Corporate Candidates and the Illusion of Choice

2007-05-24T08:58:00.000-07:00

I have been pondering the way in which the corporate media propagandize and control our "democratic" elections, and in doing so I have come up with a means to bring back our democracy. It requires participation however, and from those who are the most disenfranchised and least likely to vote in a system that they feel has little or nothing to do with their lives, or at least they perceive it as something beyond their control and so corrupt that it makes no difference who they vote for.

I used to think this non-voting block of Americans had to be lazy, apathetic or ignorant – or perhaps all three! It is by far the largest vote in any election. Or better said, the non-vote (or vote of no confidence) seldom, if ever slips below 50 percent. That is actually a sobering statistic if you just let it seep in. Remember Bush-43's mandate in 2000? Well, almost twice as many eligible voters voted "no confidence" in the system as those who voted for either candidate. What does that say about democracy in the U.S.A.?

Before I began to investigate and research this posting I was under a very false impression (I actually make some attempt at verifying, fact checking and clarification of the matters before a I write about a subject, unless it is purely anecdotal or conjecture – don't you wish "journalists" would do the same?). I had always heard this "50 percent of the voters" thrown around, and I was very much under the impression that it implied half of the registered voters. It does not. This figure is the percentage of eligible and registered voters that tend not to vote in any given general election. The figures are even more pathetic for midterm elections, where roughly two thirds of eligible voters do not register and/or vote! As an aside here, it is probably the midterm elections that have a greater effect on us, considering the fact we are electing "representatives" from our respective geographical/cultural regions.

Let's take the 2000 election as an example. It was one of the most contested elections in our history (and rightly so). We allowed the ideologically-skewed Supreme Court to appoint our Commander in Chief. It is all quite questionable. Yet I am not going to delve into that particular abyss. I just want to talk numbers, if I may. In 2000 there were 206 million eligible voters, of which 156 million registered, of which 106 million voted. Out of the 106 million (all these numbers are rounded), 51 million voted for Gore, 50 million voted for Bush, 3 million voted for Nader, 1 million did not vote for a presidential candidate, and 1 million voted for other candidates.

I was a "spoiler", or a Nader voter. Just notice if you will, that sixteen times as many registered voters did not bother to get off their collective ass to vote, as opposed to those who voted their conscience, voted green and voted for Nader. Yet I never heard the media call these slackers' patriotism into question. So, extrapolating from the numbers listed (and yes, we're strictly dealing with the popular vote presently), the candidate that received the greatest number of votes in 2000 was "none of the above", with over 55 million votes. I counted the third-party candidates solely due to the fact that our two party system takes all, and anyone like myself that voted third party knew fully well that their vote was a protest vote and nothing else. If you now add the 50 million eligible voters who did not even see the point in registering to vote, you have 105 million disenfranchised citizens – or more than the combined total who voted for both Gore and Bush. So much for mandates!

To say we're in need of election reform in this country is merely stating the blatantly obvious. But hey, why not state the obvious? And while I am at it, I am also announcing my candidacy for the presidency. I am ready to be your president, and one of the planks of my platform will be election reform. Allow me to present the steps I'll take at bringing back our voice in government:

1.) Public funding of all parties and candidates. No corporate contributions. Personal contributions limited to $200 annually per candidate. All candidates will be granted equal air time, and debates will not be controlled or "framed". Debates will be organized by the public and broadcast for free without commercial interruption on the public television networks.
2.) Declaration of "Election Days" as mandatory, national holidays.
3.) Same-day voter registration, or within 24-72 hours of election allowed.
4.) Ban on electronic voting machines. We must have paper trails.
5.) Polls will be open for a 24 hour period throughout the country, at which time they may not disclose running tallies or results. Exit polling will be prohibited unless conducted by a disinterested and approved source, and they will be prohibited from discussing the results until after the election.
6.) All eligible citizens will be required to vote, or they will be fined or serve time in community service. For those who do not feel they have a voice, "none of the above", or "no confidence" will be options on the ballots. If a "no confidence" vote wins the majority, the election will be deemed invalid, and voters will have to return to vote again at a later date.
7.) The Constitution will be amended to disband the Electoral College and enact a Popular Vote in its place.
8.) Gerrymandering will be laid to rest. Districts will only be allowed based upon existing political geography – cities, counties and states. (Included in the Election Reform Amendment).

I think this should this be implemented, we would see a real surge of democratic participation in this country. That would be a good thing.

Until then, I suggest that we can begin to arrange and organize a mass boycott of the sham that is to be the 2008 general election. I am either voting for Kucinich or Gravel in the primary, so we'll see how they do. But I am fairly certain the continued marginalization of such candidates by the media will do the trick in painting them as "unelectable", and we will be forced to choose from the list of pre-approved candidates (in which case it really does not matter who we vote for). I suggest staging sit-ins outside our polling places where we can burn our voter registration cards in protest. T-shirts with "None of the Above" printed on them, and buttons with No Confidence 2008 could be made. Just some ideas folks.

Your participation is always appreciated. Oh, and vote for me in 2008.

Currently Reading:

2007-05-18T09:46:00.000-07:00

"The End of Gay, and the Death of Heterosexuality", by Bert Archer

I think we are beginning to realise that a gender-based, sexual identity is a thing that we can no longer perpetuate. In fact we are polymorphous sexual beings with less than clearly defined gender roles. We should not limit ourselves by definitions.

Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. –Terentius.
I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.

Rant O' th' Day

2007-05-14T10:00:00.000-07:00

(heavy Brooklyn accent) Talk amongst yourselves…let me give you a topic…Human Resources is neither human nor a resource. Discuss.

One of the many ways I resent the heck out of the established corporate oligarchy is how it has effectively and pervasively fucked up English. Pardon my French.

We have so many wonderful words in English, yet the Corpofascist regime insists upon inventing new (and not so improved) ways of saying things. Actually, that is pretty much what they do – keep us perpetually in a fog as to what they are really saying and doing. Of course we all love their little slogans and we repeat them with resolute glee. Don't I sound educated? (Yeah, to a three year old you fuck wit, you actually sound like a right prick).

Let me give you an example that chaps my ass regularly. There once were Personnel Departments. That's pretty straight forward; just by the name you can tell what they do. Personnel manages people (persons). I'm a person, she's a person, we're all persons. Then some corporate half wit decided the word had to be changed and came up with the term "human resources". I hate the term. I never say it unless it is in a disparaging context.

I am not a "human resource"; I am a person. Let's define the words "person" and "resource", shall we?

A person is an individual of inherent value. The value of a person is immeasurable. A person has rights and responsibilities. A person exists outside and beyond what he does for a living or what he directly contributes.

A resource is generally a raw material. It is something of no intrinsic value, yet once utilized it can be of measured value. A resource is an inanimate object with no rights or responsibilities. A resource only exists as long as it is deemed of value.

One cannot put the words "human" and "resource" together to describe anything unless one is describing a physical resource of value to humankind, otherwise it is an oxymoron, and the person responsible for this insidious term is indeed a "moron". To say that human beings are important to other people is superfluous. Actually, it's just plain stupid.

Instead, what the term really means is that the corporate mentality (or philosophy if you prefer) sees humanity merely as a resource! Now that's some scary shit. But it does help explain how they have no qualms using our brave men and women in uniform as cannon fodder to increase their already astounding profits.

Fuckers.

(Props to my man, George Carlin)

If This Isn't Fascism, What Is?

2007-05-14T07:21:00.001-07:00

Gas Is Heavily Subsidized and So Is Parking

2007-05-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

There has recently been a chain e-mail circulating and making its rounds that encourages consumers to boycott purchasing gas on May 15, in order to send a message to the Gas & Oil Corporations that we are fed up with such inflated prices at the pumps. Whereas I am a staunch supporter of consumer/citizen action, I also believe the real point is missed entirely here. First in my mind, a single day will hardly make any lasting effect on the price of gas, because the underlying demand still exists. What will make a difference is for us to reevaluate our driving habits and make significant changes. The best thing we can do for our future and the future of our kids is to relinquish our dependence on the automobile entirely. The next best thing we can do is reconsider how many cars we need. In other words, can we make due with a single car? We can conserve the number of miles we drive – consolidate trips, carpool, limit unnecessary jaunts – as this will conserve gas and bring demand down. Finally, we can trade in our guzzlers for hybrids, biodeisel or low emission vehicles. But keep in mind that the manufacture of automobiles is in and of itself very hard on the environment. It actually does much less damage to the environment to keep an older car in good mechanical condition and simply drive conservatively. Limit your milage and drive slowly and smoothly, not abruptly or spasmodically. Many people do not realize this.

The automobile is driving us poor. Forget the price of gas; there are several other huge outlying costs to automobile ownership, such as insurance, maintenance, licensing fees and other taxes, and parking. No wonder people are upset that gas is nearly four dollars per gallon.

In my mind, however, the price of gas is not the main issue. There are actually quite a few hidden costs to the gas we put in our tanks – namely the continued occupation of Iraq. Now the administration appears to be considering launching an attack on Iran. Expect much higher prices should this terrible blunder be made. The actual price per gallon of gasoline when these hidden costs are factored in is really 7 - 8 dollars per gallon (some estimates are as high as 10 dollars per gallon). That means that citizens who do not even drive are subsidizing the price of gas for those who do drive. If consumers could see those real numbers at the pump, I bet they'd start changing their driving habits quickly. But as it currently stands, the price of gas is ridiculously low and heavily subsidized.

It also stands to reason that the roads and parking considerations are also heavily subsidized, regardless of the occasional toll (which in itself is counterproductive to relieving congestion, conserving energy or reducing commute times). Suburban sprawl has nearly dictated that we all drive to our destinations, but even in these less than idyllic conditions, ask yourself if a bicycle will allow you to make certain trips. Can you walk? Right now, cars own the roads, but we can reclaim our streets. Have you ever wondered just how much space cars take up? Not to mention the visual clutter they make.

I have a little task for you, should you indulge me. Take a walk through your neighborhood, and when you do so, focus on automobiles and everything built to accommodate them. Take mental note as though you come from a place or time where automobiles do not exist. Simply observe the space they require, observe how inanimate the majority are, and how they simply occupy space and do very little in regard to actually moving people. Now imagine each car as a large sofa. What would you think if your neighbor parked his sofa in front of your house? Can you begin to see how the automobile is an anti-social device? Now imagine a vibrant street with people on it with no cars to be seen. People are much more interesting than metal boxes, are they not?

I commend to you a well written and informative article on the subject: "The Automobile Shapes the City", by Martin V. Melosi. I have posted a couple excerpts pertinent to our discussion:

Even cars at rest—in parking mode if you will—created problems for cities that few other forms of transportation faced. It is ironic that a technology designed to provide individuals with greater flexibility in meeting their transportation needs remains unused much of its life. “An adequate highway system—one affording completely free movement of vehicles—would still not solve our transportation problem,” noted one expert in 1950. “This is because the objective of every motor vehicle is a terminal. The average motor vehicle, for instance, is in motion about 500 hours a year; it is parked the remaining 8,260 hours.” More than forty years later, other experts expressed a similar sentiment: “If one were to set out the most inefficient means of transport, the auto might be the outcome. Consider, for example, the facts that the average auto is parked and unused for about 90 percent of its lifetime and that even when it is used, it is nearly empty.”

Detroit in 1962 – an abominable waste of prime real estate & blight on the city; car parks prevail.

Excerpt from same article: A parking study conducted in California stated that about 59 percent of the ground area in Los Angeles’ central business district (CBD) in 1960 was devoted to streets and parking, with about 35 percent for roads, streets, alleys, and sidewalks, and 24 percent for parking lots and garages not included in buildings with other purposes. During roughly the same period, acreage devoted to streets and parking in other urban cores was similar in scale or slightly less. In Detroit (1953), streets and parking made up 49.5 percent of the central city; in Chicago (1956), 40.7 percent; in Minneapolis (1958), 48.3 percent; Nashville (1959), 39 percent; and in Dallas (1961), 41.4 percent.

What one does not see here is the square footage of garages within buildings and the space reserved for street parking, so the amount of land required for parking cars and housing them is really quite astounding. We have destroyed our cities in the United States. There are few examples of vibrant cultural centers that remain, and in those few cases (such as San Francisco and New York City) the public fought and prevailed against carving their cities up with expressways. San Francisco made the wise decision to finally tear down the few expressways that were built, starting with the Embarcadero Freeway, and later the Central Freeway. Both neighborhoods are now revitalized, and visually pleasing.

Central Freeway Before

After

Had the planners had their way…truly would have been the death of my beloved city. (1948 plan)

Now it's time for the good news. There are options, and we live in a democracy where we still have a voice. Albeit, at this stage it might actually require wresting that voice back with a little civil disobedience. Nonetheless, the inspired documents of our founding fathers remain regardless of our leader's open defiance of them. Some people have rightly inquired why I have chosen the automobile as my personal adversary. Obviously we have bigger problems, there's the "war on terror", failing schools, lost jobs, destruction of the environment, loss of freedom, escalating health care costs and collapsing infrastructure. Why would I pick on the defenseless passenger car?

Here's how I see it, and my gratitude for following my leaps of logic. Currently we are "at war". It is not a war in the traditional sense. We cannot even see our enemy. I could go on for a thousand pages on this subject alone, but I will spare everyone. I think we can all pretty much agree than the main motivation behind our invasion and occupation of Iraq is the mere fact that it happens to sit on some of the world's largest oil reserves. We use a lot of oil in this country – some may say we are quite dependent upon it. A good deal of that oil is combusted in engines of automobiles. We have also created infrastructure and cities that are largely dependent upon automobiles as a means of getting around. If we begin to rethink this, redesign our existing cities and fund public transit, and perhaps have the vision to begin to build new car-free cities, we will decrease our dependence on foreign oil. We will no longer have to waste billions of dollars fighting global wars, and instead we can fund infrastructure, schools and healthcare, and in doing so we can create high paying jobs and rebuild our economy. We are on the verge of what can either become a global catastrophe, or a bright new future. The decision is ours. Now is the time.

May God help us.

Maglev Train

2007-05-10T00:26:00.001-07:00

Extreme Trainsurfer

2007-05-10T00:21:00.003-07:00

Seriously kids, this is not a recommended way to get around.

French Train Breaks Record

2007-05-10T00:19:00.001-07:00

'Cool Grey City' Projected to Turn Murderously Hot

2007-05-07T09:13:00.000-07:00

It is only May, and this is probably the third or fourth day that we've had a heat wave here in San Francisco. It is 9 am, and the tempertaure is already soaring past 23 degrees. We are projected at hitting 30 degrees today. Last year we had a week long heatwave in July. This is not typical weather for our city, and we are ill prepared for it. Our apartment is like a furnace, with no means of cooling down. We have all the blinds shut and curtains drawn. Surprisingly, our beloved fog may be somewhat responsible for extreme variations of weather in our immediate future. So now we can buy air conditioners that will simply increase CO-2 emissions to combat the effects of global warming? We are frogs in a warm bath, and the flame is getting higher!

Here's an article from 2004, enjoy!

Rant O' Th'morning

2007-05-06T08:55:00.000-07:00

(I Posted as a comment to another blog.)

What ever happened to old people?

Why is the adjective "old" considered uncomplimentary?

How about "people who are very close to expiration"?

Seriously, we have a major psychological issue of denial in regard to our imminent demise.

Perhaps if we could just stop obsessing over our death (which is quite assuredly inevitable), and instead turn our energy towards leaving something of value for the generations to come, then at the very least we will be remembered fondly, and our handiwork will attest to our collective vision of munificence. As it now stands, we are not only assured that we will die and decompose, but all memory of us will also fade, with perhaps the sole exception being the fact that we behaved like a bunch of childish, selfish, ignominious morons.

More Trains

2007-05-05T11:40:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I made several attempts at uploading videos from You Tube, to no avail. I had a fantastic video of the French TGV breaking a speed record of 574 kilometers per hour! Now that's extremely quick. For a little perspective, if one were to maintain that velocity a trip form coast to coast could be made in under 9 hours! Another way to envision such speed is to imagine traveling one mile in ten seconds! Mind you, this is old technology, since we're talking about wheels on tracks and overhead cables.

Maglev trains are a step up in technology, since the computer controlled driving mechanism is in the track bed. In the case of Maglev, there are no overhead cables, and the wheels retract at speeds above 140 kmph so that in effect, the train is suspended in air, reducing friction to mere aerodynamic considerations. However, even this is not cutting-edge technology – the future involves Maglev trains in transatlantic and transglobal vaccuum tubes, where speeds of 5000 kmph could be attained. A transatlantic crossing in such a scenario would take so little time, that commuters could live in London and work in New York. I had posted a Japanese Maglev train breaking a speed record of 581 kmph. Don't ask what happened to the video – I'll attempt to link to it later. That is not significantly faster than the tried and true TGV, but the limit of Maglev is still being tested. The last video that never made it to my blog is a currently operational Maglev train in Shanghai, China that routinely travels up to speeds of 430 kmph.

I may decide not to post for a while, since this takes up a lot of time, and I do work for a living. I also find myself getting awfully depressed at the state of politics in this country and often wonder if it will continue to decline to the point that I might find myself emigrating to China, or someplace that is building an economy. Here in California, our "governator", Schwarzenegger and the lilly-livered Legislature are about to kill the HS Rail bond measure we as voters would have been voting on in 2008. What the hell are they afraid of? You want an answer? The voters!

I have decided to put my full support behind Senator Mike Gravel. I was a big Kucinich supporter, and I still admire the man greatly. Yet Gravel really impresses me as less of an idealist and more of a realist. You need that balance. I also think he has a presence that makes him more "electable". He is relatively old, but I don't think voters will care too much. But best of all are his planks for a national initiative that allows direct voter participation in the legislative process, elimination of the IRS and the unconstitutional income tax, full funding and no raiding of Social Security, and of course an end to our illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq.

Please contact your representatives. Tell them you want a voice regarding the future of rail in California.

Political Cartoon

2007-05-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

More High Speed Rail

2007-05-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

"Ultimately, the question is whether Californians are willing to modify their long-standing relationship with the passenger car, and re-establish their historical love affair with rail."

America: Freedom to Fascism

2007-05-03T13:13:00.001-07:00

This is a full length movie, my peeps. Gravel '08 Campaign has the abolishment of the IRS and elimination of the Federal Income Tax as one of the planks on their platform. Nobody ever talks about this fundamental and unconstitutional abuse, so I've posted it here. However, a word of warning is due. Although I believe some valid questions are raised, this video borders on the madness of conspiracists. I suggest if you are feeling at all ill, or queasy, or if you are in a blue funk, that watching this would quite doubtfully have the effect of remedying your maladies

Gasoline Tankers & Black Swans

2007-05-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

Bishop Andrus speaks his mind.

Gravel 2008

2007-05-01T17:54:00.000-07:00

Rail Was, Is, and Will Be the Solution

2007-05-01T13:28:00.000-07:00

The "Holy Trinity" of personal transport rail is:

1.) Intercity/Interstate High Speed Rail

This is the highest technology, cutting-edge rail transport. I believe we should seriously be looking at nuclear energy. I know this is opposed by many in the environmental/green movement, and I think it is unfortunate. Our energy needs are increasing, and in order to grow the economy and continue to provide energy equity for all, I believe nuclear energy is our future. Wind, wave and solar all have their place and they should most certainly be utilized, but in order to truly break our dependence upon oil, nuclear is the only way to go presently. Nuclear energy does not have to pose a threat to life on the planet. Eventually, given proper funding and research, we can harness nuclear fusion which will indeed not only provide stunning amounts of energy, but it is inherently clean and totally renewable. Another astounding area of research should be magnetic levitation, or superconducting maglev trains. Such trains could maintain speeds up to 350 mph. At such speeds, most domestic flights would become unnecessary, thereby eliminating even more destruction to our environment and dependence on oil. One could travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles within an hour and a half, including stops. A trip from coast to coast could be made in twelve hours with stops along the way. One could say that such is unreasonable considering the fact that a transcontinental flight can be made in half the time, however, we are talking door to door here. As it now stands, to make such a trip, one is required to leave his home approximately two hours before his flight, and then he needs to either book a shuttle, take a cab or train to the city center which could easily occupy another hour, and there are generally delays or connecting flights, so even in the best case scenario such a flight would be marginally faster. Yet the maglev train could shuttle you in true comfort and pamper your tastes for luxury along the way. Not to mention, they don't generally fall out of the skies!

2.) Regional Commute Rail (Heavy Rail)

Why not talk about BART? It has saved our ass time and time again. It is a pretty good system, and it would be even more successful if the politicos would just let it. There are three big issues I have with BART however.
A.) It does not link the entire region. It should logically be extended down the peninsula and up to the north bay.
B.) The measured fares are crazy! BART should be entirely subsidized and made "free" to all passengers.
C.) It does not run 24 hours. This just makes no sense at all.
If our politicians could get off their collective ass and implement those three things, we'd be looking at a real alternative to automobiles.

3.) Inner City Light Rail

SFMTA could certainly use some help. As a resident of San Francisco, I can honestly say it sucks. Most of the time I choose to either walk, bike or cab to my destinations. Fortunately, the size and density of this city allows me to do so. MUNI does little to actually assist in my transportation needs. The busses and cars are almost always in disrepair, they run erratically at best and they are almost always driven by people who apparently hate their jobs. And of course when one finally does get on board, he would be fortunate to find a seat. All that said, there are a few lines that work well and tend to run regularly. My solutions for MUNI are as follows:
A.) Make it an employee-owned company with plenty of subsidies from the city.
B.) Eliminate fare collection altogether.
C.) Replace some existing bus lines with light rail.
D.) Replace existing diesel coaches with electric ones, namely the 12 Folsom that runs outside my flat.

So there we have it, a means at eliminating the need for automobile ownership, improving transit, building the economy, increasing productivity, and protecting the environment – and essentially doing so with existing infrastructure.

Moyers Interviews Stewart

2007-04-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

So John Stewart is just a comedian. Yeah, but he's a pretty smart one!

Interview with Bill Moyers. By the way, I have had the pleasure of checking in Mr. Moyers to my hotel, and he is a very gracious and lovely gentleman. This is a fantastic interview, and there are some splendid questions asked.

Stewart: "It's hard to feel the difficulties our military families face – sometimes you have to put yourself in somebody's shoes to get a sense of that. One of the things I think government counts on is that people are busy. It's very difficult to mobilize a busy and relatively affluent country, unless it's over a really crucial, foundational issue that forces a kind of tipping point.

Moyers: "Like the war?"

Stewart: "It really hasn't affected us here in the way that you would imagine a five year war. Here's the disconnect, and I've always had a problem with the rationality of it. The President says we're in the fight for our way of life. This is the greatest battle of our generation and the generations to come. Iraq has to be won, or our way of life ends, and our children and children's children all suffer. So what I'm going to do is send 10,000 more troops to Baghdad. So there's the disconnect between saying this is the fight of our generation, and increasing troop strength by ten percent. I'm sure what he (the President) would like to do is send 400 thousand more troops, but that would mean instating the draft, and the minute you do that, suddenly the country is not so damn busy anymore. And then the public really fights back and the whole thing falls apart. So the government has a very delicate balance to walk between keeping us relatively fearful, but not so fearful that we stop what we're doing and really examine the way they've been waging this."

My comment on the above: We're not at war. The only real war being waged here is a class war, and what is left of the middle class is getting the shaft. We are an occupational force, period. The occupation of Iraq must indeed go on as long as our economic interests lie therein. We have no plan on "winning" the "war", because once we do the Iraqis may start to question what we are doing there – at least after they stop fighting amongst themselves. And then we'll have a real war as long as we insist upon running their country and controlling their biggest national resource, petroleum. Indeed, the President is right when he states that our way of life depends upon the invasion and occupation of another sovereign nation. What the current American regime (most Democrats included) does not offer is anything visionary or creative in regards to building an even more equitable, and democratic future for the world. And that is their biggest sin; thinking only for momentary profit and gain at the expense of human life, which they hold little regard for unless it is their own. Eventually we are going to be forced to 'fess up, and deal with the problems we've created – the only question is how long we're going to put it off.

8,000 Gallons of Gas Melts Overpass

2007-04-30T01:17:00.000-07:00

Click the picture for a link to the SF Gate article.

Over $30,000 worth of unleaded fuel does over $10,000,000 worth of damage and ties up traffic for months. Now that's a bad day at the office, eh? Or in this case, behind the wheel of your tractor-trailer. Solely the driver sustained injuries, which is incredible. Had this happened during rush hour it would have been absolute carnage.

I wonder why these big rigs are even allowed on such roads. Freight rail surely would be better. I don't wish to place the blame here, since mistakes are made and tragedies occur regardless of whether or not the best plans are laid out. However, this should just go to show how very tenuous conditions are. All it takes is one sleepy driver. Actually, I am constantly amazed that the world seems to work most of the time considering how we seldom bother to do our homework.

Our Governator's answer: Free rides on public transit tomorrow. That's a great idea. Why don't we make public transit free? The fares that are collected only pay a fraction fo what it actually costs to run, and the entire fare collection process and bureaucracy behind it just serve to slow down service and penalise or hinder ridership.

Petition: Halt the Blue Angels

2007-04-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

Sign the petition:

Welcome to the Monkeysphere

2007-04-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

Yous can click on the picture to be redirected to the article.

Interesting article and amusingly written. Any and all comments are welcome, as always.

Cheers! My little monkeys.

Save Our Chocolate

2007-04-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

I realise this is not the most pressing issue in the world. However, for those of us who love chocoalte and do not fancy consuming an altogether different confection made with vegetable oil and god knows what other chemical additives, we would at least appreciate the manufacturer be honest enough not to call it "chocolate". Thank you FDA! Ya think this might be slightly deceptive to the consumer? Deception under the Bush regime? – nah!

Cliquéa la foto

More Carefree Places

2007-04-27T09:09:00.000-07:00

Siena

Venice

Venice

Carfree Scenes

2007-04-26T13:47:00.000-07:00

Strøget, Denmark

Freiburg, Germany

Fascism in 10 Easy Steps

2007-04-24T22:53:00.000-07:00

It should be fairly obvious to any conscious person of average intelligence who has read history and is relatively well informed of current events that during the past six years of the Bush regime, we have all but lost any semblance of democracy in the United States of America. This has nothing to do with cars, but nonetheless I commend it to you all. The Guardian.

Let's Ground the Blue Angels

2007-04-24T12:08:00.000-07:00

Should we continue to allow the Blue Angles to perform aerial acrobatics over our densely populated urban center?

Add your two cents here.

Fellow blogger SFMike has an intriguing piece on the subject, as well as his admirable exercises of civic duty.

You can read my comments on SFGate, but I'll sum up my points succinctly here.

1.) Aerial acrobatics performed over cities are disruptive and disturbing to the peace.

2.) Such has the potential for disaster, and puts lives of citizens in danger.

3.) Such displays are wasteful of fuel and send a pro-war message that help propagate further destruction of our planet and continued warfare that trivializes human life.

4.) There is no practical value or need for such displays.

5.) And lastly, residents of this city have the right to voice their opinion and the government is obliged to follow such opinion.

A Fellow Anglican's Opinion

2007-04-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

Churchtimes opinion letter. This was sent to me from a good friend who happens to be one of the most inspirational people I have met in regard to living without an automobile, and in other ways as well. She has managed to live thus far without a car, and she doesn't even live in the city. As a single individual, she has done more to save this planet than most of us ever will.

High Speed Rail

2007-04-20T08:52:00.000-07:00

High Speed Rail, three beautiful words. I just have one question, "What's taking so long?" There's some really cool computer generated animation here folks.

According to one statistic, we use 320 million gallons of gas per day in the United States. That works out to roughly a gallon of gas per person per day. Now this next bit is not scientific research, it is educated conjecture. Let's suppose for a moment that half of that fuel is used for industry and agriculture. That leaves us with half a gallon that we can assume is used mainly for personal transportation. Now let's imagine for a moment that half the current motoring population of California makes the decision to go car-free, or car-light. We now have a quart of gasoline per California resident that is being conserved. Now for the sake of argument, let's give half that away and say we have only a pint of gasoline conserved per day per resident of California.

Following me so far? The price of gas in CA is roughly $3.30 per gallon as of today. There are about 35 million residents in our lovely state. According to our rather conservative estimate of a pint of gas per resident, that gives us a figure of 4,375,000 gallons of gas conserved per day by choosing not to drive our cherished automobiles. Multiply that amount by the cost of fuel and you'll see a savings of 13 million dollars per day. After a year that is an astonishing savings of 4.79 billion dollars! In a span of seven years the savings in gasoline alone could fully fund such a multibillion dollar project such as the California High Speed Rail. If this money is redirected to such a project, that means that it could presumably be constructed with no extra cost to the residents of California and without ballot measures or bonds. If such savings would continue to be used for building of infrastructure and paying for the costs of the operation of such high speed trains, such subsidies would make such travel affordable to all citizens of the Golden State.

We have not even begun to talk about the number of high paying jobs created by such a project, and the way in which the California economy could be stimulated. We are long overdue for such visionary projects. Our bridges here in SF Bay were built seventy years ago! We cannot afford to wait for the rest of the country. Once again, California will lead the way.

Imagine taking a trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than three hours, for let's say, $40 round trip. None of this is a pipe dream. Such a scenario is completely feasible.

E-mail to a Friend

2007-04-20T07:27:00.000-07:00

Good to hear from you! I did not design my page as a guilt-inducer, it is simply consciousness-building. I'm just trying to get people to think about things. Most of us (myself included) tend to never really stop to question why we do certain things, nor do we ask the question if it really is the best thing for us to be doing.

Living in most U.S. cities without a car is next to impossible, since everything has been designed around cars. My proposal is that we reconsider how we design cities, and how we can restore existing cities to pedestrian & cyclist friendly places. I used to be in the throes of a true love affair with the automobile. I spent a small fortune on cars. One of these days I will sit down and attempt to calculate just how much I spent on cars from the time I learned to drive (1981) until the day I gave away my last car (2000). In those two decades I bet I spent close to 150 grand. Them's plenty of bus fares! For heaven's sake, you can buy a house for that in some parts of the country.

But something happened to me. Years later, I realized just how much I no longer missed owning a car. I realized how well I was living without one. A whole new world of new-found freedom had opened up to me. Not to mention, I seemed to always have cash – something I seldom had before!

I now realize even more clearly how we are quite literally brainwashed from an early age into accepting some pretty big absurdities. I also am beginning to draw parallels between the automobile and a loss of individual autonomy, civic responsibility, and "commons", or public spaces, which in turn has led to a degradation of urban life, democratic representation and equity. I also can see the parallels to consumption and waste of natural resources (namely petroleum), Corpofascist wars in the Middle East, and degradation to our natural environment.

Automobile Ownership: Just Say No!

2007-04-19T11:58:00.000-07:00

I decided upon the onset of this century that I would no longer require or own an automobile. My partner and I are beginning our eighth year without the many restraints of automobile ownership. We are both fortunate enough to live within a ten minute stroll to our workplace (we work in the same hotel). That is twenty minutes per day that we spend walking to and fro. We don't even have to rely upon public transit. We currently live in San Francisco – a city known for public transit, albeit far from efficient – and rather easily circumnavigated and pedestrian friendly. However, we lived in Miami for two years without cars also, and we managed to figure out a relatively easy commute on rail. It takes some creativity and planning and some personal sacrifice to live without a car, but I propose that the advantages by far outweigh any small loss of momentary freedom. Allow me to highlight the advantages of remaining outside the automobile industry loop.

1.) Economic advantages:
These are many. We are a working class, blue collar household, and even though we are living without children, it takes both of our salaries to pay the basic necessities of life – namely food and shelter. We like most people in this country live from paycheck to paycheck. Home ownership in the cities is prohibitive for us, but rent tends to be more affordable, so we rent. If we were to choose life in the suburbs, undoubtedly we could rent something for less, and it would likely be larger than the one bedroom apartment we now have. Yet to do so would require that we own at least one car. Since we do not have the economic means of purchasing a new car, that would mean financing one at a high interest rate. We then would have to purchase the most costly insurance. Even if we decided to purchase a used car, then one has to factor in higher maintenance costs, and the unreliability of such transportation. There are registration and smog fees. Gas is soon to be $4 per gallon here. Even if we were not to commute by car, it is almost always necessary to drive to the train station, in which case parking is yet another expense. And we have not even discussed time lost during one's commute, which would be close to two hours per day in the best case scenario. All this said, we would be better served by ownership of two cars in such case as our shifts do not coincide, or if one need to run errands on his day off. So for the sake of argument, let's say we purchase one economical new car and one fairly used car. Let's assume we commute by rail and limit our driving to the most essential errands.

Cost of automobile #1: $15,000 financed over 60 months, or $350 per month.
Approximate cost of insurance for 2 cars: $200 per month
Gas & maintenance: $200 per month
Registration/licensing & other fees: $100 per month
Approximate commute costs: $200 per month
Time spent commuting: 80+ hours per month

Right here one can see that by a very conservative estimate, we have over $1,000 per month dedicated to automobile ownership and over 80 hours of lost time in order to either rent or purchase a home in the suburbs. Now one can work in the suburbs, but due to the nature of suburban living, a car is still pretty much a necessity. So one could save time, but the economic forecast remains. A two-bedroom apartment in the city is around $2500 per month. If one rents in the suburbs, the monthly rent could drop to $1500. Notice that the difference in rent is offset entirely by automobile ownership. And more than likely, it would indeed cost more to live outside the city, even with savings in the cost of food and household items that one generally sees in the suburbs.

2.) Psychological & Health Advantages:
Obviously living without a car is more conducive to healthy living. First of all, one tends to walk. Walking is the main activity that human beings have engaged in since before we were homo sapiens. Walking is an amazingly efficient mode of transportation. As a matter of fact, it is the most efficient means of transportation nature has designed. Humanity did one up nature with the invention of the bicycle. However, the automobile is amazingly inefficient and destructive to the environment, both in its manufacture and its operation. One of the most life threatening things we all do on a regular basis is to drive our car. Even with seat belts and airbags, driving has been shown statistically to shave off 19 minutes of one's life for every hour of interstate/freeway driving and 8 minutes for every hour of city driving (not to mention the danger to pedestrians!). Ironically, cardiovascular disease and obesity are the biggest killers, and much of that could be prevented by living a life other than the sedentary one many of us now live. Get out and walk daily. Driving is a highly stressful activity, especially when one is stuck in traffic and running late. I oftentimes wonder just how much impact this has on productivity at work and anger and rage within households. However, all this stated, most American cities and towns are not built for pedestrians. I commend a fantastic website: Carfree.com This is a wonderful resource. Buy the book.

3.) Environmental Advantages:
Ivan Illich published an article in "Le Monde" in 1973, entitled "Energy & Equity". It is available online.
It goes without saying that automobiles have had a tremendously negative effect upon the environment, both in their manufacture and operation. Petroleum is a natural resource that is quite literally wasted in making of fuel for automobiles. The greenhouse gasses and other noxious substances emanating from tailpipes is doing plenty to degrade our quality of life. We are now fighting "corporate wars" over petroleum in order to maintain our current paradigm. Lives are being needlessly terminated, science is ignored and underfunded, democracy itself is at stake, our environment is being plundered, we are borrowing upon our grandchildren's futures and all this for the sake of driving the latest model of S.U.V., or as I prefer to call them, S.A.V. (Suburban Assault Vehicles). Once one opts out of the current automobile paradigm, it will begin to shift. The more people that do this, the more resources we will have for alternatives. We can no longer afford to continue in the direction we've been headed. Now is the time for immediate action.

Get out of your car now. Stop helping support terrorism by walking to work.