American airlines tits up in the deep end

They have between 3 and 4 billion in cash in the bank, this doesn't sound like bankrupt.  This was a ploy to hose the employees and some of their suppliers.  This self made hari-kari was to dump health care for it's employees, that was stated as goal number one, getting out of the pension business was next, wages after that.  This is the wave of the future, or wave of the current era.  Speculators say they will now lay off,  merge, and lay off again.  This will end in lower fares for major heavy use routes, and higher fares on the rodeo circuit, Amarillo, Wichita, Fargo.
Fuck the corporate world, this is a method to enrich themselves further.  Ever hear a bunch of businessmen bitching that the lay-abouts declare bankruptcy every few years to get out of their obligations?

Venezuela preparing for crackdown.

Chavez is bringing all the gold the nation holds in reserve in banks in Europe and the US to Venezuela.  Last week a cargo loaded with gold bricks flew from France, a hugh army force met the plane and carried the gold to storage, others are scheduled.  He has seen this year the news, when dictators OK shooting people in the streets, torturing and killing people snatched from homes, offices and off the streets, the rest of the world retaliates by taking over your gold.    I think he is doing this for a reason, and it's not fear of Swiss or Japanese banks have a security issue.

Slate snake

5" long, real thin, a piece of salvaged blackboard from a school remodeling.  Not so good, but the first time working with slate, I have more of it, I will do better next time.

the poor are not needed

Latest numbers show something like 42 million US citizens are living in poverty.  Unemployment is at 9% as accounted, the actual number is thought to be in the mid teens.  Another million met the requirement for food stamps the last accounting period.

Retailers say the start of the Christmas shopping season saw a 7 to 9% jump in stores and 24% jump on line, a good chance this could be a record setting Christmas.

Parallel universes exist.  Why help the poor, we don't need them, they are a drag on the economy.  Imagine what the economy would look like if it weren't for the unemployed.  Take a lesson from Kansas and the Governor Brownback, when they closed mental therapy centers for children, immediately a state GOP dipwad announced it had resulted in an improvement of mental health in the state based on the lower number of new cases.  See, stop helping the poor and counting the poor and your numbers will improve.    Economic Darwinism is pointing the finger at who we do not need, so stop helping them, learn the lesson people, stop helping them.  (this public announcement brought to you by the Republican party)

Sarge wanted to know, what vegans do for turkey day

Dressing; toasted whole wheat bread cubes, mushrooms, onions, hazel nuts, dried cherries, celery, fresh parsley.
Mashed potato.
Gravy; add flour to hot walnut oil and stir, when it starts to fry add vegetable broth,  black pepper, paprika, thyme, salt, red pepper flakes.  Simmer a few minutes add a dusting of corn starch if not thick enough.  (Not to much flour or it will taste like crap.  Also, we think the best tasting vegi broth is "Imagine" Organic, some vegi broth can be disappointing, try a few brands to find a good one.  Follow this recipe and your gravy will taste like it was meat based, or at least almost.)
Cranberry relish: the wife made this Wednesday, not sure but it had cranberries, walnuts, golden raisins, a little sugar.
Green beans (frozen).
Fresh spinich leaf salad.
Pumpkin pudding; (pie without the crusts)  We baked several pie pumpkins a month ago, scraped out the meat, mashed it up and froze it in small containers.  My wife substitutes ground flax seed for eggs in the pie, it tastes fantastic, but it makes for a browner appearance.  The pie looks better when made with eggs, but we are OK with it and prefer the flax.  Flax can take the place of eggs in baking, but it requires some adjustment of liquid volumes in the mix, experiment before you try it on a valued guest.
Multiple glasses of wine.

It was really good, I don't miss meat, I didn't once wish I had a piece of turkey.    Eating a big vegi meal is different than a meat pig out, you get stuffed, and in a few minutes you can get to work, I spent almost all afternoon working on two sculptures, I got a lot done.  Then I diluted some orange and lemon juice with rum, and watched the sun set.

We are over 3 months, almost 4 maybe, into the vegan diet.  My wife has had salmon at home 3 times, cod in a restaurant once.  I have had fish the same amount, plus a small sliced beef sandwich and a salad with a small grilled chicken breast, so 6 times non vegan.  The beef and chicken were at business lunches at places without any good vegi choices, but later I figured out I could have ordered a number of sides and made it work, since then I do that and it works just fine.   I don't mind eating meat if I must, but I prefer not to, and really do like damn near every fruit and vegi, even mustard greens and chard.  Follow the asian african and south american poor peoples recipe, I swear many are more fantastic in flavor than meat dishes.

The best Thanksgiving song of all time

Oh the good ole days, when turkey and congress didn't smell of *%#&

The public view of congress is at an all time low.  Amazingly about 9% of us are so high we think congress is doing a good job.  The rest of us know the Republican led Congress serve much the same function as feces washed turkeys do for your countertop on Thanksgiving morning.

Yet, aside from helping to sell clorox and drugs to combat septic gut ailments, there is an upside, well, no there isn't, unless we can learn from our mistakes.  That lesson should be that our way of making congress and turkey birds must change, over feeding and washing them in shit is a bad idea.

And here is the proof things can be better, it's in our recent history.  Turkeys that walked on the earth, fed without medications, on small farms, killed by axe and washed with well water made for mighty safe eating.  And the last congress, the democratic controlled congress had a 40% approval, stellar compared to the GOP's 9.


Which sound better?  9, or 40?  Turkey or a petri dish project?

Clearly women sitting on the ground hold the upper hand, it's asymmetrical violence on her part, the bitch.

Pepper spray can swell eyes shut, throat and airways shut depending if it is sprayed in the mouth and how much is inhaled.  A pregnant women miscarried a couple days following being sprayed in Calif last week (and she did announce she was pregnant and ask to be let out of the line just before she was first struck then sprayed).  No doubt her sitting down did violence against bankers, speculators, lobbyist, corporations, the GOP.

Fux news continues it's proud tradition of keeping republicans stupid

A new study finds that Fux news viewers are the most ill informed viewers out there.  The most amazing part of it is this finding......people who watch no news at all are better informed about current events and complex issues than Fux viewers.
This is the 6th such study in as many years, but the first time they were found to rank below feral cats.

Washington Lobbyists Crafted $850,000 Secret Plan For Bank Lobbyists To Undermine Occupy Wall Street

Washington Lobbyists Crafted $850,000 Secret Plan For Bank Lobbyists To Undermine Occupy Wall Street: pThis weekend, the MSNBC show Up! With Chris Hayes broke a stunning story about how Washington lobbyists are scrambling to undermine the protesters on Wall Street and across the country. Hayes’ report, which can be viewed here, details how the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford (CLGC) compiled a secret plan to [...]/p

U.S. meat supply flying at half staph

Why not have a few more meat free meals, it's better for you, and you reduce your risks from drugs, drug resistant bugs, heart disease, gout, on and on.  Vegans, pissing people off by not eating meat.

can you go there without "the man" knowing it, marketing it, storing it?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2011/11/salman_rushdie_and_facebook_s_pseudonym_policy_.html

1% protected from you, and, 1% more destructive than 7 billion people

In the last few days Obama quietly signed a bill passed with most the senate and congresses voting for it, to protect the privacy of owners of private aircraft.  This bill prevents the live internet tracking/displaying/identifying of private and corporate aircrafts movements in real time.  It seems our national security and those (mostly) millionaires need their travels kept quiet.  Yet, all the new cell phones have a tracking device in them, as do many new cars (on star and other like services), but the wealthy felt they needed another "gated community" to shield them from.........you!

7 billion, gonna eat up everything, waste everything, pollute everything.  Or, are the 1%ers more destructive?  A watchdog group reports that the worlds 3,000 largest corporations are responsible for more pollution than the whole of the population are.  The top 1% own about 3/4 of the corporate resources and land either directly or through the governments they control.  The corporations and governments who control the standards of pollution are held by these few million people of the world.  The Putins and Kochs and the Saudi family and so on, create (in dollars) pollution which if it were a nation would be the 3rd or 4th most wealthy nation in the world.  US, China, Germany, Pollution.

A bit of good news.  Also, quietly a few days ago, the Obama administration through the power given it by  a pit bull California, Sierra Club, and NRDC new MPG standards were set on top of those from a couple years back.  Depending on the type of car, within the next decade MPG will jump into the low 50's on some, and in the high 20's on pickups.  Honda, Toyota, GM, Ford, and a few others were actually (somewhat) eager to agree to this.  California and some other states, and Canada (Canada often copies Calif. standards) were going to set their own standards which would have been a nightmare for automakers working with so many state regs.  This agreement is estimated to save the consumer $4,000 to $8,000 in fuel cost during the life of the car.  For some models the purchase price may be higher, a few hundred to $2,000 but it will save the nation 1/4 of it's daily imports.  Thanks to the left coast.

Bill Moyers on Plutonomy

"and then on April 15th, this is the funny part, the middle class & poor put those little checks right in the mail box, stop stop my sides hurts."

 In 2009, 1,470 households reported income of more than $1 million but paid no federal income tax on it, through their use of various tax loopholes and shelters. Tax rates for millionaires have fallen by 25 percent since the mid-’90s, while one quarter of millionaires currently pay lower tax rates than the average middle-class household.

(text copied from Politico.com, check it out)

In consideration of pleasure, 2

Almost done.  My goal, finish by thanksgiving, seems doable.  I will put the final picture up in a few days.

Higher price for natural gas is in your future.

The lovely adds on TV and in the newspaper announce fracking is going to give us flower covered fields, low cost natural gas for baking cookies .  It is clean, and it is right here, so lets get at this benign freebee.

Last night I read a number of oil industry news sites.  In the last few weeks, an executive being questioned by a government body testified that the cost of: exploration, piping new fields, and the very high cost of fracking means this gas is expensive compared to traditional gas wells.  Once in the pipeline it's mixed, so this raises the overall cost of gas.  Thus...........the public will see higher prices for NG.

Let me explain it further because it flys in the face of economic logic.  The more supply they bring to market the higher the price will become.  Supply up, demand flat, should mean lower prices, but that ain't gonna happen.  Add to that, some of this gas is already promised for liquidification and sale to other nations.  So, more supply means higher prices and not much of an increase in the actual supply for the domestic consumer, just the risk to ground water and the ever present danger of gas line explosions, of which there are dozens each year, remember the biggest recently in San Francisco and south of Dallas.   (and earthquakes?)

the good die young

About 3 years ago we jumped in the car and drove 1500 mile to a family thingy way out yonder.  Some family also invited their friends.  Over 3 days of picnics and dinners and huddled at kitchen tables we had a ball.  One couple (friends of distant family) my wife and I really liked, and they us.  Had we lived near by there is no doubt we would have been hanging out together, it was friendship at first sight. 

A few days ago we heard that a suddenly discovered liver cancer took the mans life.  He passed away a couple of weeks ago. 

He had a most extraordinary job.  For 20 years he worked for the petroleum industry, to educate the top executives on global warming.  There is an umbrella group they pay into which does all sorts of unsavory things I suppose, he worked for them, but as the voice of the real science. 

He traveled all over the US and Canada visiting the offices of managers and presidents and lawyers, giving them the real science on temperature increases, pollution, sea levels, predictions. 

He said privately, in their offices, these guys were eager to have a session with him, they never challenged the data he cited or the gloomy predictions he gave.  Their most common question was “how long do we have?”, sometimes it was how long until we screw up the whole planet, and sometimes it was how long until the public and governments make us stop, but it was always “how long do we have?”.

Our friend of three days was so happy, I ask him how can you be when these guys set through your lecture but keep damaging the planet?  He said "privately these are nice guys, I have to believe some of them are going to do the right thing soon”.

Let it be.  And let it be soon.  
They know, they absolutely know, and they will fill their pockets for as long as they dare, or as long as we let them. 

Janis Joplin - Cry Baby (live in toronto 1970)

beautiful visit to North Carolina

Tennessee was beautiful, some areas we were to late for peak leaf color, but most was very nice.  Stayed with friends on the outskirts of Charlotte, 7 acres of steep hills and dense tall woods, it was so relaxing.  We had a really good time playing canasta and walking around in the woods.  Trader Joe's had some amazing wine, cheap, good, not excellent, but good, did I say cheap.  Drank a few bottles with friends, brought a case home.

Along I40 in East Tennessee in the country on a farm pasture hillside we saw workers installing maybe 60 acres of solar PV, that was kind of cool.

The friends daughter lives in NYC, she has been going to a few of the occupy protests, she went to bank of amerika a few days ago, after the action date to close bank accounts, and even on that day a loud group was outside waiting to close, the bank manager refused to let them in except two at a time.  Cool they said, we will raise hell while we wait, so they had a good ole time singing and blocking the door until she got in, the process was extremely slow and rude, and she was even told they were fine with her decision, they want only to work with good people.
Way to go BofA, that pissed off her parents, who we were staying with, they are interviewing credit unions in Charlotte and local owned banks, they are very methodical and live by self set deadlines, they will have a new bank by mid Dec.  Our friend has a super duper job, not the kind of account BofA wants to lose, I guarantee it.
Last I heard, the first week of Nov. credit unions signed 1.2 million new accounts, and small local banks about the same.  Not much really in the banking overall, but this is what has to be done, consumers must punish big corporations for greed in business, disregard for customers, and for buying politicians, they have to be driven from ownership of our governments, local or national.

Then we heard from our daughter-in-law, they have a busy Nov and Dec, but plan to get out of BofA by Feb. 1.   Like I said, punish big corps.

road trip

Gonna go poking around in the fall colored hills and little towns through Arkansas, Tennessee, over to Charlotte NC.
"swoop down don't you lose control"  the Mills brothers

Maybe when I get back to southern Kansas, those damn earthquakes coming off the fracking fields east of Oklahoma City will stop rocking the house every few hours.  It's like standing up fucking in a hammock, it's fun, but it's kind of scary to.

Keep Wall Street Occupied (Part 1)

More Junk Science from the fringe

Most of us can't really understand the phrase "carbon foot print", what do they mean when they say our fire place or driving released some tons of carbon, what are they talking of, we might do more to save the environment if we understood it just a little.  Perhaps you will get a rough idea from my tutorial.  Perhaps you'll get a good mark on the test.

------------

When I was in the 7th grade (mid 1960'a) my old science teacher told of an experiment going on while he was at university.  They wanted to figure out where the weight of a tree comes from.  A large tank was built, all the dirt was weighed that went in and a tree was planted .  The tree was growing in it's container, one day it would be pulled up and weighed, and the soil weighed again. Well, it had been years, they had yet to complete it so far as he knew though he thought he knew the outcome.  We all imagined (with his prompting I suspect) the dirt became wood and so it might weigh less, it made sense since we were often told wood rots and returns to dirt one day.  

Today I can tell you our imagined results had little to do with what happened.  What really happens is trees absorb only a few ounces of elements and minerals and carry them into its wood.  If we re-weigh the dirt in that container, it will be virtually the same volume and weight as before.  So where did the mass of the tree come from?  

Carbon, a constant on earth.  The volume of carbon does not change.  What changes is where the carbon is.  The danger to us, to the planets current life forms and our current form of agriculture lies in where that carbon goes, or where we are putting it.  

Carbon is the primary ingredient in plants and animals.  Now science knows the weight of that tree was about 90% carbon, 10% water,a few ounces of trace minerals and elements. The volume of the dirt it grew in did not change. If a storm blows down a big tree behind your house and you leave it lay, slowly over the years it molders away. The water and the carbon are released during the rot and insect activity, released into the atmosphere. The tons of carbon simply float away in the air.  Some minerals remain; bugs and microbes wallow in the humus and build a little soil there, but the weight of the tree, those tons, the carbon, it just floated off.  Now if the first winter after the tree fell, you had cut it up to burn it, those tons of carbon are released right then by the flame, immediately into the atmosphere.  If the storm that fell the tree had instead been a landslide and the tree had been covered deep under ground, these tons of carbon would not have made it into the atmosphere for a long time, perhaps centuries, perhaps it could have become oil or coal in millions of years.

When we dig up coal, oil, or natural gas, which were the trees meadows and animals of earlier biospheres and burn it in our car or power plant, we are taking that CO2 from one place on earth, deep underground, and shooting it immediately into the atmosphere, tons and tons of it all day every day.  Most of this ends up in the atmosphere, the thin layer of balanced thermal and light wave protection system only 1/1000^th as thick of the diameter of earth, where it disturbs that balance.   Remember, the volume of CO2 hasn't changed, only it’s location and concentration, creating a greenhouse of rising temperature and chemical reaction disaster at the earth’s surface such as ocean acidification.

The fact is, dirt does not become trees that become dirt again, ashes to ashes is not a true description of the natural world.  CO2 is taken in from the atmosphere by cell respiration of plants and resides there in forms that are useful and support the current biosphere.   Since the industrial revolution, 200 years now, we have been releasing ever-increasing volumes of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, at the same time clearing the earth of our best carbon storing plants.  Saving and replanting the worlds forests, low till farming, energy conservation and alternative energies are the only way to halt the migration of CO2 into dangerous locations. 

Better plant a tree now, carbon will build you a shade tree, tons and tons of shade.

Who's side are you on? Do you have a survival instinct?

A year or two ago this lady threw a fit at Target and it got on utube and Target took some grief.  Then netflix caught it, 1 million left the service, about $15 million a month kick in the bag,  when they just decided the customer is hooked and stupid, I dropped part of their service, and we are dropping it all at the end of the year.

Next that cute little gal in California threw a hissy and got the banks to back off their debit card charge, and it is estimated she influenced several hundred thousand to move accounts to credit unions and locals.  My accounts are all in in state banks and mortgage company.

The big banks have said they are backing off those charges, but they also said the hundreds of millions a  year income from it is necessary and will be created with other new service fees.  That is no idle threat.  They will not leave the poor and middle class alone, they have a stupid cow, and they intend to milk it.  Get out if you are in one of these big multistate banks, go to a new one, or credit unions are the cheapest, they will help you move automatic deposit (retirement or whatever) and automatic payment systems over.

The only way the 99% can get these corporations and their stooges in congress attention is through boycotts and walkouts and demonstrations.  (I would say voting but that is not evident lately.)  Do it for yourself, for all of us.  Don't you have a survival instinct?  Fucking use it, fight or flight.

"In consideration of pleasures"

Part way through a block of limestone.  Still lots of work to do on this new sculpture,  done in batches of 15 minutes or an hour each evening, hope to be finished before Thanksgiving.  My plan for the hair is going to be a lot of work.  Will post a final pic when done.

Crime down, yes, despite fux news and others scaring old aunt Mini

I wrote a while back that crime is down and environmental pollution is helping.  Scientist see less mercury and lead in young men all the time, both cause problems with reasoning and both can cause bizarre and violent behavior.  Thanks to unleaded gas, paint, and continued EPA efforts to remove more sources, all of which the GOP threatens in their attacks on EPA and health agencies.  Do not fall into the trap of believing harsh punishment is responsible, our surroundings contribute as well, as now we see with girls growing more violent, in their case it's not these chemicals but plastics.  Interesting isn't it, that the sexes would be hit by different chemicals?

Every day solar, wind, wave energy announces a "biggest" ever project somewhere, but not in America

It will happen when the Koch brothers have exclusive rights to sun light.