Thoreau: Voice of Environmentalists, Anti-War Radicals, Civil Rights Activists, and … Ronald Reagan?

Henry David Thoreau, an American Transcendentalist writer, philosopher, and activist, 1817 to 1862, lived his ideals of simplicity, self-reliance, and individualism. He lived for 2 years and 2 months on a cabin on the edge of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He built the cabin himself on the estate of his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, using recycled materials. After leaving Walden Pond, he worked against slavery as an abolitionist and on the underground railroad. In the book, he describes his philosophy and his life, and asks two questions, which resonate today.

  1. How much is enough?
  2. How do I know what I want?

Continue reading →

Health Care Costs and Access, US, Canada

Back in 2006, 45 Million Americans, one out of every six people, had no health insurance. When those one of every six people got exposed to something contagious, they exposed a lot of other people. Given the level of unemployment today, the number of people without health insurance is probably higher. It includes everyone who lost their job and can’t afford or no longer qualifies for COBRA.  According to a report on CNN, produced by Jennifer Pifer-Bixler, published March 4, 2009, at some point during 2007 or 2008, 86.7 Million Americans –One out of Three were without health insurance.

As Peter Barnes put it, in Capitalism 3.0, (ISBN-10: 1-57675-361-1)

Here’s the bottom line.  All Canadians get health care and peace of mind at a per capita cost that’s about 45% lower than ours. Canada lays out less than ten cents of every health care dollar on administration, while we spend nearly thirty cents (and that doesn’t include time and energy patients themselves spend on paperwork.) What’s more, our health care system doesn’t even keep us healthy. Our infant mortality is higher than Canada’s, our life expectancy is lower, and we have proportionally more obesity, cancer, diabetes, and depression. To top it off, forty-five million of us have no health insurance at all.

Health Care By The Numbers, 2005 United States

 Canada
Estimated per capita expenditures (2004; US $) $6,040 $3,326
Percent spent on administration (1999) 26% 10%
Monthly premium for family of four $1045 $88
Male life expectancy (years) 75 77
Female life expectancy (years) 81 84
Infant mortality (per 1,000 births)

6.4 4.7

This is not why Paul Revere rode thru Boston on the 18th of April in ’75. This is not why John Hancock, Sam Adams, John Adams, Richard Stockton, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the rest of the 56 delegates signed the Declaration of Independence (U S History . org , wikipedia).

This is not the America I know and love.

Here’s the article on CNN :

Study: 86.7 million Americans uninsured over last two years

By Jennifer Pifer-Bixler, CNN Senior Medial Producer
March 5, 2009: 1:44 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNN) — One out of three Americans under 65 went without health insurance at some point during 2007 and 2008, according to a report released Wednesday.

The study, commissioned by the consumer health advocacy group Families USA, found 86.7 million Americans were uninsured for at least a portion of those two years.

Among the report’s key findings:

  • Nearly three out of four of those uninsured Americans were without health insurance for at least six months.
  • Almost two-thirds of them were uninsured for nine months or more.
  • Four out of five of the uninsured were in working families.
  • People without health insurance are less likely to have a usual doctor and often go without screenings or preventative care.

“The huge number of people without health coverage is worse than an epidemic,” Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, said in a news release. “Inaction on health care reform in 2009 cannot be an option for the tens of millions of people who lack or lose health coverage each year. … The cost of doing nothing is too high.”

Coal Is Really Dirty

Burn Coal – release arsenic, mercury, radioactive particles, and carbon – lots of carbon.  Here’s how the National Resources Defense Council, NRDC, describes it:  Coal is Dirty and Dangerous

Coal is America’s dirtiest energy source — and the country’s leading source of global warming pollution.

Coal mining destroys land, pollutes thousands of miles of streams and brings massive environmental damage to mountain communities.

… produces dirty air, acid rain and contaminated land and water … childhood asthma, birth defects and respiratory diseases that take nearly 25,000 lives each year.

“Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.” – James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientistThere are far cleaner and cheaper ways to meet America’s energy needs. Yet industry apologists are spending millions of dollars to block clean energy solutions and persuade Americans that they can keep using coal without the consequences.

…

Green technologies and renewable fuels will create millions of good-paying jobs, … reduce dangerous pollution and help fight global warming.

TouchTable video demonstration

Our friend Bill Campbell – our resident guru on Skype and other comms technologies, and always ahead of the curve – sent me this link to a PBS video about the new TouchTable

It’s part of the PBS/Wired Wired Science series, which is new to me.

At current prices – in excess of $90K – it’s going to take some time and/or big orders to drive prices down – but it’s one impressive tool.

TouchTable .

NATURAL CHICKEN – WITH SALT WATER

Chicken labeled “Natural” can contain salt, and lots of it: 200 to 400 mg sodium per four-ounce serving – almost as much as in French Fries. One third of all fresh chicken sold in the US is “plumped” with salt-water. Real natural chicken contains 45 to 60 mg sodium per serving. According to Melinda Beck at the Wall St. Journal,

(click here) and the Truthful Labeling Coalition, chicken producers can inject up to 15% of saltwater and seaweed into the birds and call them “natural” because saltwater and seaweed are natural, even tho they don’t naturally appear in chickens.  $2 Billion worth of Salt Water in $40 Billion worth of Chicken.

The industry says “People like salty chicken.” Well, we like cigarettes, French Fries, and soda, but that doesn’t make them healthy or natural.

Waxman Markey ACES Is A Start

Popular Logistics is about Policy, not Politics. However, it takes success at politics in order to implement policy. In terms of Policy, Popular Logistics thinks that the United States could, and should, move to 100% clean energy in 10 years (click here , here , here , or here).  However, in a democracy, important policy is made by compromise, and while will, as Al Gore once said, is a renewable resource, the public doesn’t seem to have the will to embrace wind, solar, geothermal, marine current, and negawatts. Thus Waxman-Markey. While we agree with those who say that the bill doesn’t go far enough, fast enough we view Waxman Markey as a good start.

While it allows 2 Billion Tons of offsets each year and while the goal for 2020 is 17% below 2005, while it mandates a minimum of 12% clean energy by 2020, the law is comprehensive and as noted, it is a start.

To those who say it is expensive, the costs of doing nothing are the cost of destroying Appalachia, the costs of more coal ash disasters like the 12/22/08 flood in Tennessee, and the costs of adding more arsenic, mercury, and radioactive particles and carbon from coal. These costs are higher, much higher than the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of 18 cents per day (Cited Paul Krugman, NY Times – Click here for PDF).
The law says a) we must move forward, b) we may move forward at a glacial pace, and c) we may move faster. We hope that America will move faster than the law mandates.  After all, the only thing that should move at a glacial pace are glaciers.

For a detailed summary of Waxman Markey, click here. For a high level overview, click here.

EYES ON INVISIBLE HANDS

The hand is quicker than the eye – especially when the hand is invisible and the eye is closed or blind. The heavy hands of wisdom and authority must guide the invisible hand of desire without limits, just as a parent stops a child from grabbing too many cookies before dinner and a shop-keeper stops a thief from grabbing cookies it is neither entitled to nor willing to pay for.

Some call this Regulation. I call it Common Sense. (Click Here for “Why Economists Failed to Predict the Financial Crisis from “Knowledge @ Wharton.”)

Terrible Problems with 911 Systems

9-1-1 Should Never Give Me A Busy Signal. By  Jason Kincaid at  TechCrunch.

Last night I got word that my parents had witnessed a tragic accident while driving in Northern California. I won’t get into the details, but suffice to say one person was killed and others were left bleeding, in various states of unconsciousness. Thank God my parents were not hurt in the accident, but they witnessed it first hand, as well as the disturbing aftermath.

Immediately after the accident, my parents and other witnesses began trying to dial 9-1-1. Attempt after attempt resulted in a busy signal. This isn’t unusual in the event of an emergency, as multiple dialers often tie up the lines to report the same incident. Except it seems that nobody managed to get through for far too long: emergency personal didn’t arrive for 20 minutes. The first officer to arrive at the scene said it took him two minutes to get there from the time he got the call. Which means that it took approximately 18 minutes for the news to reach him in the first place. Continue reading →

Brooklyn-based Sudia Lab's outdoor PV table

The Sun Table – which has no moving parts, adjustable stainless-steel legs – and whose wooden frame is made of teak – comes with an inverter and internal battery. Four hours of direct sunlight, according to Sudia, will yield enough energy to use a laptop for hours via the battery. (Use the laptop at/on the table on a sunny day, and the the useful life will be more than four hours, of course).

[imagebrowser id=88]

The current price is $2,200 and ships within 4 – 6 weeks of order.Our quick calculations suggest that – deductibility aside – this would knock about $30 per month from a New York City residential electric bill.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations based on data from the Public Policy Institute of New York State and Michael BlueJay, aka Mr. Electricity

Sun Table from Sudia Labs

(Cross-posted at Caton Avenue

). Via Solar Today

(March 2008 issue).

The False Assumptions of Neo-Conservatives

To paraphrase John Kennedy, “Ich bin ein Keynesian.”

Jude Wanniski coined the term “Supply Side Economics” in 1976 as a reaction to  Keynesian and monetarist thought. In his book, The Way The World Works, Wanniski argues against taxes. “Working together three men can build three houses in three months. Working separately, they can build three houses in six months…. If the tax rate on home building is 49% they will work together … if the tax goes to 51% they will suffer a net loss because of their teamwork and so will work separately in the barter economy and pay no taxes. … the government loses all the revenue and the economy loses the production…”

Here are Wanniski’s assumptions:

  1. Working alone three men can build a total of six houses in one year. Working together they can build 12 houses in the same year.
  2. A 4% change in the tax rate, from 49% to 51%, is significant enough to cause someone to “drop out.”
  3. The government taxes people when they work together but not when they work separately.

These assumptions are flawed. Continue reading →

Iran and Britain expel diplomats after Iranian presidential election – Wikinews, the free news source

Via WikiNews:Iran and Britain expel diplomats after Iranian presidential election.

We note that while attacks from President Obama’s political right have urged him to be more aggressive, in the UK David Cameron has reminded the P.M. that the “Iranian elections [are] an internal Iranian conflict, between Iranians and other Iranians.” If this ends with a full end of diplomatic relations, what impact will this have for formal and informal communications and intelligence-gathering between Iran and the west? Not good, we suspect.

The expulsions come in the wake of the recent Iranian presidential election, and hostility directed by Iran to the United Kingdom by Iranian leaders and official news services, including statements made by Supreme Leader of IranAli Khamenei

calling the British government the “most evil” of foreign governments.

Commenting upon the expulsion as it was announced, Leader of the Opposition in the British House of Commons, David Cameron , urged people to remember that this was not a conflict between Iran and the United Kingdom, but was an internal Iranian conflict, between Iranians and other Iranians.

Continue reading →

Wired/Washington Post: Construction Crew Severs Secret ‘Black Line’

Another reminder of how effective government can be once it’s decided to be vigilant:

A construction crew working on an office building in Virginia in 2000 severed a fiber optic cable that wasn’t on anyone’s map. Apparently it was a ‘black line’ used for carrying secret intelligence data, according to sources who spoke recently with the Washington Post.

Within minutes of cutting the cable, three black SUV’s pulled up carrying men in suits who complained that their line was severed.

“The construction manager was shocked,” a worker told the Washington Post. “He had never seen a line get cut and people show up within seconds. Usually you’ve got to figure out whose line it is. To garner that kind of response that quickly was amazing.”

Construction Crew Severs Secret ‘Black Line.’

Fiddler on the Roof hd

Hard-Boiled hd

The Forbidden Kingdom ipod