North Carolina Judge Mangum in Wake County has disgraced himself -- and the freedom loving, self-confident half of the scientific world -- by engaging in what looks like science-bigotry in none other than a divorce case.
Talk about history mirroring itself. It was in Tennessee that the South did disgrace itself many years ago by engaging in religious-bigotry to prevent a teacher from introducing a theory – Darwin's Evolution – into his own Tennessee classroom to challenge a legislated bigotry that was designed to establish Bible teachings as official doctrines for students to accept without 'confusion' of other ideas of where humans came from.
This year is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. In the aftermath of the science community's impotence in the face of GWBushism's imposition of his own brand of political Christianity – done to stifle the environmental and other dissenting science advising voices opposing his policies -- now the science magazines, the academic community and the media have been engaging in an orgy of articles, full magazine focused issues and celebratory events to flaunt Darwinism 'rightness' and to ridicule 'creationism'. Their goal is to combat the residual political doctrines that had so irritated the science and academic world -- Bushism's religious group paybacks to political supporters, that evolution be demoted to questioned theory level in student textbooks. The overriding strident attitude of these editorials and feature articles was to trumpet a hollow sounding success story that encourages bigotry among those whose grasp of freedom's essence and American rights -- not to mention genuine scientific confidence when questioned -- is slipping into the dustbin.
It appears to have permeated the mind of Judge Mangum whose blatantly prejudiced orders to strip a homeschooling mother of her parental rights to suit an overly adulterous spouse in order to 'challenge' her children's religious beliefs is making so much unfavorable news that he's revised his initial reliance on everything that happened -- and was exposed online -- in the courtroom documents that have been hashed over on the internet – print and broadcast media – and trying to justify his original injustice on the basis of other less public documents which he thinks will not be as easily accessed by the public online. But we shall see, it doesn't look like the internet's justice system is going to be deterred any time soon.
The controversy is still generating a lot of attention with little consensus on the issues except that
-- parents should have the right to guide and structure their children's education and upbringing
and that
-- the judge thoroughly was making a mess of the case by ordering the children to attend public schooling while allowing the adulterous husband to live in the common home that he's disgraced with his adulterous affairs which still continue publicly. And further insisting that only the mother be psychologically evaluated, for which she would be expected to pay in spite of her current stay-at-home mother status as basically a pauper with the absolute minimum childsupport allowable under the state's formula, ignoring the substantial $122,000/year income of the adulterous father.
Politically, their state senator condemned the judge's order as 'terrible' and North Carolina Governor Perdue had just reaffirmed her position as supporting homeschooling for its contribution to excellence and to diversity in the education efforts of the state. All of which criticisms are likely being brought to the judge's notice just as opinions are being formulated publicly. Clearly the adulterous husband has considerable influence in the minds of some officials but his behavior is despicable and we would suggest that there be another poll conducted to answer the following issue.
Kings and baronets have abdicated their rights as kings and elites in order to be with their true love, giving up all power over the country they were ruling or ceding their titles to younger brothers. This kingship right is a family right. As is a barony. What about parenthood, is it abdicatable? Can it be lost due to malfeasance?
Just how unending is parenthood? Is the holder of the title 'parent' able to lose all power over the family rights that they once held? In fact, parenthood claims cease because some are able to give up their children for adoption. Parenthood ends then, so clearly it's not a lifelong, inalienable right and is abdicatable. What about a child abuser claiming parenthood? Even a pedophile. Conviction of serious crimes – felonies and damaging criminal activity – that result in lengthy imprisonment -- for violence especially -- effectively terminate most family relationships for at least the incarceration period and sometimes forever. Just how inalienable, vulnerable to malfeasance evidence, are parenthood's rights?
Florida, and by now probably other states, have judged that a child who is of a certain knowledgeable age – about early teen age, just a couple years older than these children -- can divorce his or her father – or mother – so the parent-right can be terminated at will for malfeasance, hence it can also be lost for malfeasance and is not inalienable.
In this contest of wills between Vanessa Mills and Thomas Mills, his demand that his children should not be allowed to continue homeschooling under their mother's direction is the pivotal issue.
To evaluate the fitness of the defendant Thomas Mills to be a co-parent, we need to evaluate the judge's decided preference for Thomas Mills – since the judge's apparent bias could be serving as an indicative favorable character witness.
The judge has -- unexplainably in justice terms -- sided with this adulterous husband to the extent of actually having made biased references in the court proceedings including to the idea that he would be looking forward to how public schooling would "challenge" Vanessa's teaching of her rightfully-held and chosen faith in the minds of her children. Unexplainably because – for a judge's professional responsibility, he's supposed to be committed to fairness and impartiality and evidence and to protecting the innocent children in divorce cases, not treating them as rats in a maze. Instead his judicial favoritism pointedly sided with the public school option (cheapest for one party and on that party's demand list) -- not an alternate private schooling less disruptive to the children considering their religious background and more acceptable to the other party in this dispute who had removed her children specifically from public schools, as well as sensibly acceptable presumably to a well-to-do reasonable father, clue number one. This judge-person's professional sense of justice does willingly want to put the children's feet to the flames instead of protecting their fragile interests. How much do you trust someone's judgment who would harm small animals and children in crisis? How trustworthy is his character valuation?
Bias occurs when opinions get adopted in spite of evidence to the contrary, leading to clue number two. The judge's bias – yes bias because the judge's statements are in conflict with the evidence presented in this case -- is confirmed by other comments he made. Specifically, in one comment he disparaged these children's education for lack of socialization in their homeschooling – which was effectively disputed with extensive lists of the children's social activities within and outside their homeschooling community, which evidence he was fully aware of in the documents that the presiding judge has in preparation for a case like this. How trustworthy is the judgement of someone who selectively ignores facts of evidence and presents character support for false claims?
The list of demonstrations of bias continues. The children are doing well academically – judging by the state's testing – and this academic progress under Vanessa's guidance was openly acknowledged in the courtroom by all parties. Yet the judge steadfastly maintains his opposition which is solely focused on their unusual religious beliefs that make them different from the public school's mandated teachings. The judge's attack is against homeschooling's rightful role as a valued diversity component of the state's education programming and a stimulus for excellence in learning. This role is specifically stated in the Governor's proclamation honoring homeschooling's academic excellence and diversity value to the state just recently. This judge is ignorant of or disdainful of the importance of diversity -- strictly bigotry, in spite of the testimony and evidence of his peers and betters in North Carolina's government. Such a stance shows ugly bigotry instead of judicial fairness based on evidence. Judge Mangum's bigoted performance disqualifies his opinion of the defendant adulterous husband, and in fact suggests an unsavory truth about his favored party.
There was no evidence presented that showed that the children's rightful comfort in their current caregiving was in need of improvement, with the exception of the influence of the adulterous husband. The current pseudo-science-based-bigotry is being applied by an ignorant judge instead of professional judgment of rightness, otherwise these conflicts between evidence and bigotry-based orders could not have happened. The judge has been brainwashed into desecrating constitutional respect for religious freedom. His reliance on the general consensus of the establishment scientific community in favor of evolution is no excuse for desecrating his responsibility to American justice under constitutional law.
Furthermore, a general consensus by the scientific community doesn't make the status of theories invulnerable to change. In the beginning of the last century, it was the consensus of the physics community within the science world that they had fully identified the laws of physics and it was now merely a matter of refinement of the constants of their glorified physical laws. Then came Einstein, then came quantum theory, then the physics community exploded with new ideas never dreamed of before in their earlier complacency. Genuine science doesn't quail before questioning people and instead demand that they salute. Personally I tend to think the evolution evidence – though not the science evidence on consciousness nor life -- will hold up to the ongoing exploration of the intricacies of how evolution works in the myriad situations where it must be operating. But that doesn't preclude honoring another's sincerely held ideas that hurt no one, including Thomas Mills nor the judge, and may in fact hold the key to understanding consciousness or life.
Hence we shall consider the Judge's opinion of the situation and his favored defendant to be faulty and shall disqualify that judge as a reliable character reference for the defendant. In fact we shall be leery of this defendant because the favorable opinion of his examining character witness – the court's judge -- is based on that witness blocking out evidence, which is a bad sign. However, we shall start again from scratch and examine the existing evidence and see what it shall indicate about whether Thomas Mills would be a fit co-parent or has abdicated his parental rights.
What evidence of parental aptitude has Thomas Mills shown or has he shown evidence of significant malfeasance and callous abusiveness in his dealings with these children and dishonesty in his claims of caring?
We begin by looking at his claims of caring and what they show about his motivations and priorities. He claims his success as a co-parent is dependent on Vanessa's ceasing to homeschool their children and that their children must attend public school. This is his priority demand so he can have equal co-custody. Some people would agree that his rights were being violated if his wife's chosen method of educating their children was to be continued at his expense.
But what about the children's wellbeing since this is a priority in fairly adjudicating a divorce where children are involved. Otherwise the children's wellbeing is being set aside in favor of one demander – as are the parental rights of the other party being unjustly set aside.
Our precondition for even considering his demand should be that the children would be enrolled in a Montessori or Quaker private school which would be necessary to protect children being uprooted and shuffled around like property between hostile parties. And further it would be a precondition that the demander shall be responsible for all tuition since this change is at his own demand.
Thomas Mills' only reason available for making such a demand is so he can be fully involved in their children's education while they are in his custody. But has he demonstrated that this involvement is how he will operate when he is no longer under duress of court judgment? The children's wellbeing is at risk here as well as the imposition of a possible injustice to their mother's own rights to control her children's education and upbringing. That upbringing and education has been acknowledged by both the defendant and the judge -- in the courtroom -- to be fine mothering and to show proficiency in her handling her children's education. So we must not allow the children's welfare to be disrespected.
We shall not tolerate any cessation of homeschooling that does not meet the private schooling requirement. Should Thomas Mills insist that his requirement of public schooling is a precondition in order for him to agree to other settlement terms. We shall point out that this homeschooling arrangement was in place for the LAST FOUR YEARS during which it was never disputed UNTIL Vanessa filed for divorce after finding out about Thomas Mills' adulterous affairs. Somehow this his current demand suggests something other than genuine disputed parenthood rights on Thomas Mills' side, more like paybacks for divorcing him. This is what he would be revealing about his parenting motivations.
In addition it reveals that he gets other benefits from such a demand of insisting on public schooling. First of all, he avoids the expenses that she is incurring as part of her homeschooling processes. And public schooling is cheap by any financial standards and even moreso for him because his income would allow private schooling in the venues we have selected for their philosophy where children are respected.
With acceptance of our precondition of appropriate private schooling which he would pay for, we can now examine his track record of parenting under previous circumstances.
Thomas Mills' own proven acceptance for four years of Vanessa's religious-based homeschooling -- into which his contribution of time and attention was likely absent due to his philandering with a mistress -- suggests that his newfound upright-concern that his wife and children are 'IN A CULT' is fraudulent play-acting, indicating that he is fully capable of attempting to swindle the court, disrespecting the oath he took to tell the truth while telling a lie under oath. That alone would disqualify his pledges of caring co-parenting as reliable in our opinion.
But there's more to this strange lying than just reliability in pledging caregiving.
What sort of genuine parent would be pleased FOR FOUR YEARS-- including statements to that effect in his court testimony while simultaneously expecting the court to believe that the homeschooling of his children was an arrangement he genuinely considered to be 'BRAINWASHING' of those children 'IN A CULT' of Vanessa's choosing, making her the scapegoat of his displeasure??
Which leaves the alternative explanation standing that his demand is abusive in the extreme. Abusers' main weapon in holding their victims from relief and from escaping further abuse is to isolate them from friends and family. This tactic is recognized as a defining characteristic of abusers. Thomas Mill's phony concern – to which the judge is providing malfeasant support – does precisely this. Specifically, Vanessa's homeschooling friends and her church 'family' are in support of her rightful freedom from a terminated relationship with an adulterous husband and he knows his scapegoating claims will cut those ties better than he is otherwise able, especially if he and his lawyer can dupe the judge into enforcing Vanessa's separation from her support groups' mutual ongoing children's activities and social/religious events where divorced women are less welcome in most circles.
We may not be able to look over their shoulders in their private life – past – but we can measure some behaviors in their present circumstances and compare them to standards. Other signs of abusive mentality that are emerging include the suggestion for Vanessa to undergo demeaning evaluation as an unstable mother and his personal vendetta is to denigrate her publicly before her friends and church membership.
Add to that the monetary issues of their marital circumstances, where she must effectively submit individual requests for HIS approval of hers and the children's and household expenses before he will release the money. His financial status revealed his rather lavishly well-endowed income of over $9,000 PER MONTH with a house mortgage of only about $1,100 per month. What exactly is his other use of funds that he must be so completely tight-fisted and stingy, unless it's the need to pamper one or more mistresses, some of whom he still plays tennis with, openly embarrassing his wife and children in front of their friends and neighbors. Otherwise his money practices are simply another abusive tactic.
Nor has there been any claim by Thomas Mills that his personal and emotional needs were not met by his wife, nor that she is irresponsible with money. Nor is there any sign of some other source of income in Vanessa's past, such as an endowment or trustfund that she would be expected -- even obligated to consider -- to be using for her and her children's needs and expenses.
Can someone who has so many indicative behaviors that fit the description of an abuser actually be expected to be a caring co-parent?
What's the prospect for success as a co-parent in domestic relations experience?
My former brother-in-law was a decent co-parent but he was also a decent parent. Conversely, my own ex-husband immediately ceased to pay the minimum child support and was eventually excluded from further contact under risk of arrest for non-support of my children should he show up. That minimal amount was so low because my lawyer and my-now-ex's lawyer could not get agreement from him on any other higher amount and this was the rock bottom permissible amount in domestic relations rules -- even for minimal income situations -- even though my-now-ex was quite well off where he was and I was making the transition to new employment in my family's new home. When – in court -- the judge considered $25/month/child in 1983 to be unacceptably low, my own lawyer – who had spent many years in domestic relations court as judge as well as many years as a lawyer – cautioned the judge not to disallow this settlement and predicted that the child support would likely not be paid in any case since my lawyer's experience as a judge had shown him that there are men who do not perform as fathers and, in my case, my now-ex would never be a father to my children in any capacity in the lawyers' opinion because my now-ex was already reneging on his lawyer's billing and had an impressive lack of interest in his own young daughter to the extent that he had never held her for any longer than one picture taking moment or two since she was born 12 months before our divorce was filed. In my lawyer's own experience as a judge there was no point in expecting co-parenting when the individual was not a decent parent in the home before the disruption. Which my-now-ex wasn't and my sister's now-ex was. Rule applies across genders.
So now let's add up the evidence and figure out just whether co-parenting is a reasonable expectation or if Thomas Mills has abdicated his fatherhood of Vanessa's children and has criminally terminated their family-identity for his own pleasure.
Thomas Mills now claims that his children have been laboring under brainwashing influence as part of a cult religion that his wife did join FOR THE LAST FOUR YEARS... while his father-role was what? Was he getting involved in 'his' children's educational activities, not likely, mistresses tend to complicate group activities? Was he so concerned about THE CULT that he was reaching out to change 'his' children's education arrangements, not according to his records. He was pleased with their academic progress. He considered his wife's homeschooling to be within his level of acceptability during the period while he was adulterous. Conveniently for his purposes in adultery. Obviously he not only had the time to do things, he had the money – AND THE CONTROL OF THAT MONEY'S EXPENDITURES ON HOMESCHOOLING – to make his wishes wellknown if they were in any conflict with hers. HIS NOW-CLAIMS ARE SEEN CLEARLY AS UNTRUE. His concern was to find and entertain a mistress or more than one, using his lavish income, boat, tennis and other apparently extensive free-time -- sufficient to do these things. We do judge him accordingly as having abdicated his fatherhood of Vanessa's children on the basis of malfeasance as a parent to those children and as having terminated his marital relationship with Vanessa, publicly.
Therefore we do find Thomas Mills in contempt of court for lying – under oath likely – about his parental role and about his concerns for his wife's sanity and her church relationship. He is merely abusing Vanessa and destroying the peaceful homeschooling lives of 'his' children -- now still successful academically and still socially involved with the wider public in their routine homeschooling events than they would otherwise be in public school – for his own pleasure and sadistic attempts to damage his wife who dared to divorce him for his criminal adultery.
We further maintain that his demands be dismissed and that the children's wellbeing be allowed to go undisturbed as much as possible.
Nor should he be able to fail to pay for the mortgage that he agreed to as the earning member of an economic union with Vanessa, minus an allowance for salary of his own personal housekeeper. However due to the unlikelihood of this ever reaching completion of this mortgage's terms since this arrangement will be seen as disagreeable to anybody in this divorcing situation, the house should be sold and the proceeds split, with an adequate portion set aside from Thomas Mills 50% share to cover the normal realignment of the stay-at-home partner's earning prospects. Thomas Mills – as the financial manager of the economic union he and Vanessa set up -- is obligated to honor the normal employment realignment requirements for Vanessa just as he would for himself if he had lost his income temporarily. An economic union is an economic union – evenfor those couples where they have arranged for one party to be a stay-at-home parent to the exclusion of that party's continued development of a career. Financial planning usually advises a 6 month savings account be established to cover the eventuality of a 'job-loss' requiring the finding and the beginning of new employment as available because this job-seeking is basically what he has caused. This implies a transition payment upfront to fund such six-month savings account for such an eventuality now occurring, even though -- or because -- Thomas Mills was the one whose earning career was enabled to thrive above his own individual powers because of full support at home. Taking the funding for this six-month savings account to support Vanessa's job transition out of the house sales proceeds is sensible because it is unlikely – though it is possible -- that he would have been agreeable without oversight. No further demands for her support shall be honored should they be made by Vanessa Mills.
As for child support, Thomas Mills will probably welch on that after the dust has settled so that child support amount should be alleviated or reduced to some safety minimum. Such precaution of establishing a defaulting figure is necessary in order to protect the children and Vanessa from later disruption of their post-divorce relief by an unsavory re-intrusion of an emotionally charged ex-husband in the future -- after never supporting the children as is frequently and tragically seen in general domestic relations practice. We do not recommend any but overseen visitation for Thomas Mills since he has displayed abusiveness in his personal relationship and neglect when it was to his advantage.
Vanessa now is responsible for her own children and her own wellbeing. Judging from the mortgage payment, the current home – at interest rates recently available for ordinary payment terms to credibly employed married men – could supply enough equity by now to adequately pay for a small, decent doublewide in the country, free and clear, assuming Thomas Mills was even a halfway decent manager of his own finances. With enough creativity, it's still possible to homeschool three well supplied responsible children – one at least 12 years old -- in Ohio using OHDELA -- Ohio Distance Education and Learning Academy which is quite friendly to homeschoolers -- and parttime work for Vanessa. Governor Perdue, how about in North Carolina?
Case closed. Court adjourned, we wish.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Sunday, February 01, 2009
CBS 60Minutes Disgraced: Caught Mouthing Hamas Propaganda
Recently, the word was spreading around that the Israelis were proving that the Palestinian Hamas "warriors" were definitely using UN schools, hospitals, as well as their own mosque sites and their people in them as human shields for Hamas' rocket launching equipment and operations. The broadcast proof was said to be on YouTube. Those who had recommended this YouTube channel do specialize in monitoring videographic presentations for signs of doctored photographics so the trip to have a look seemed warranted inn order to see the reality from a cockpit at the combat site. I went to Google to find it:
Israel Air Force Precision Strike on Qassam Rocket Launcher 30 Dec. 2008 From IDFNADesk
The images on this and other clips from IDF flight videos showed targets being hit and moments later massive explosions when the initial strike ignited munitions hidden in or adjacent to those buildings. Effectively the Hamas "warriors" were hiding their artillery behind the skirts of women and children, behind the wounded in medical facilities, behind the religious peoples there.
But I also noticed a link among the Google references that showed that CBS -- that major trusted TV broadcaster in the US -- had reported on the YouTube effort by the Israeli's. This was -- I thought -- amazingly good news because it would mean that the constant stories of atrocities would now focus on the use of non-combatants as human shields. So I went to see what CBS had discovered:
Israeli Military Pounds Gaza, On YouTube Posted by Khaled Wassef, an analyst and producer with the CBS News Internet terrorism monitoring team.
The article was unbelievably misrepresenting the reality of what the videos had shown. The initial paragraphs were straight factual:
But the conclusion of the CBS report -- for the non-benefit of those who would probably never go surfing over to YouTube for their own look, possibly since the factual portion had made the point that some clips supposedly showed carnage (which was not in any of the footage that I had seen) -- completely misled readers as to the important content. Hiding the reality of the Hamas abuse of non-combatants, CBS stated that the footage showed that the IAF was not as accurate as they'd like the public to believe! Specifically:
What, a lie? Was CBS simply hiring unscrupulous writers with their own personal bias on display and strangely no editor curious enough to check the article? Was there a larger group -- including editors and fact-checkers -- who were covering the conflict in the middle east at the moment and were consciously doctoring data? Maybe some large stockholders had bought major segments of CBS ownership issues and undeniably had influenced the hiring practices or just editorial judgment?
Ordinarily, I wouldn't even have been interested in foreign affairs, much less digging further, but the idea that the once revered venue that produced Walter Kronkite had such a twisted propaganda arm in place was puzzling. I personally would not qualify for any favoritism by Israeli government acceptance as an immigrant. To the Jewish world, I've been labeled a 'shicksa' and my son was called a 'sheigitz' (spelling unknown) by my former mother-in-law. Not that I was ever interested in going to Israel. But my instinctive alarm over such a misrepresentation of reality by a major source of trusted information was ignited. So I looked around for other CBS coverage.
It didn't take long to find that the article hiding the Hamas cowardice and abusiveness of their own people was part of a much larger CBS fantasy production. Video after video was up at the CBS online site whose headlines fit the same picture of Israeli troublemaking and Hamas/Palestinian victimization, with peace as lost and hopeless. Check these examples:
So we did, check them, and this is what we found in the one titled "Time Running Out for a Two-State Solution". For your convenient study, the text from CBS is presented with highlighted commentary to raise flags as necessary for decent FACT-CHECKING, which we do for our own operation here in our in-house research, my son included:
QUESTION: How would it make sense to spend scarce civic construction money on a high speed highway then clog it with hundreds of checkpoints to make it secure enough. In order to carry other-than-Israeli traffic how could it be done without those hundreds of checkpoints? Perhaps there's some logic to the absence of any checkpoints on the highway and the limitation on users that has escaped CBS's writers' mental image of the fantasy they are constructing and it would spoil their big viewership emotional response to clutter up the image with logical complicating ideas of how to accomplish their wishes. We would also wonder if some complication on construction cost-sharing -- as we shall see in the water system -- affected the highway sharing.
FACT: Barghouti's cousin was convicted in Israel of the murder of several people and is held in prison there -- where he, Barghouti, is excluded. Guess that fact slipped Barghouti's mind as a possible reason why his visiting privileges might be reduced, because he "neglected" to inform CBS's Simon. As for Simon's research skills -- or those of CBS' vaunted 60Minutes fact checkers -- this connection was found in a quick search of Google records on Barghouti. Either CBS has a seriously pathetic research team or they have no interest in disturbing the fantasy-story they calculate will draw large viewership. Possibly trumped-up war-stories are as good for TV networks as murders were once said to be for selling newspapers. Would a broadcast network be inclined to nudge viewers into an angry mindset and risk US military involvement in an unjust war venture just to boost prime-time? What would be their dis-incentive? Not financial.
FACT: The incendiary concatenation of this image of crusader invasiveness with the subsequent assertion that the invasiveness is rampant with presumeably settlers invading and occupying Arabs space "inside their own homes" -- after all, settlers' actions were the topic of this paragraph, not Israeli military on security missions -- is sheer calculated hyperbole. The CBS fantasy writers swing right into a vignette to cover the sleight of tongue as though they have easily discovered an ugly example. That's sheer theater tactics, not news reporting.
As for the location of the settlers enclaves, and yes they would need to be fully community operations because the settlers were originally not welcomed decently... what a crime, "little cities"... don't the Palestinians live in their own towns and "little cities"?
And then there's the accusation that the settlers had taken the 'high ground' as if that were the most desirable in the WestBank. When the settlers began arriving in the beginning, there were no critical services like water and electric for the area and the prime locations were in the bottoms where the water at least would be accumulated naturally and be handy. In those areas the Palestinians had already made the prime land their own. The settlers were told by the Israelis to occupy the then-less-desirable heights, as also offering some security from an unstable situation as well as being what was less contentiously undesirable by the existing population of Palestinians.
When water services were proposed later, the Palestinians were negative, some refusing entirely to participate, some Palestinian officials refusing to contribute their community funding share to the project which put the entire price of the water for their people on the individual Palestinian using the water service. Furthermore, the water coming through the pipelines used by the settlers -- and those Palestinians who did stubbornly choose to be connected to the pipelines in spite of their "leaders" decisions -- is Israeli water, not Palestinian water. It is being pumped from Israeli aquifers within the Israeli boundaries with the exception of a couple wells within meters of the boundary.
The data on the water situation is available online with a simple Google search and download. In pdf form it will be attached here for further reading. Amazing lack of fact-checking by a major news organization makes you wonder whether the entire American schoolsystem is responsible for some mental character-flaw where the listener is expected to take every, and only the, word of some authority and to simply repeat it on request. Totally schoolish. CBS factcheckers do fit the image and their management apparently expects that their viewership will also simply swallow the fantasy pill as presented by their 60Minute news authority experts without questioning any part of the concoction.
NOTE: CBS has access to much more senior political contacts, yet they basically wimp out on asking anyone with more authority to discuss legal/political issues whether this is standard practice for a war-zone. Nor do we have any clue on how long this particular surveillance operation has been active.
Note also that the demure, beautiful woman that is in one of these scenes and never says a word or plays any significant role, becomes the main icon used for the cover image to the entire video, in contrast to the burly, roughneck woman mayor from one of the troublemaking settlers' groups who was featured repeatedly and usually quoted after presenting her with incendiary remarks that challenged the safety of the settlers from eviction from the homes they've built, diminishing the roles they've played in support of the occupation's security.
NOTE: Curious lack of notice by Bob Simon that larger families in circumstances where you can't find jobs or support your existing population is rather irresponsible for anyone else to do. In this fantasy of CBS creation, it's just a 'strategy'. Interesting that the Hamas use of women and children as human-shields could also be confirmation that the value of individual lives is in low regard and that more human-shields are expected to be useful for their 'strategy', hence the women must produce more human-shields -- or warriors if needed . Canon-fodder time is immoral personal, civic and military operation. Yet we see no uprising against Hamas in any of Simon's reporting. Support for those who make your children into human shields makes no sense. Possibly the Palestinians are, in effect, hostages of the Hamas mafia and are excusably Stockholm syndrome affected, which is not an attempt at diagnosis only an observation reminiscent of the Patti Hearst events of my graduate school days when we saw the kidnap victim join her kidnappers and take up weapons to rob banks to get funds to support her abusive kidnappers' agenda.
FACT: CBS is again repeating a standard -- but gross 'inaccuracy' -- line from the Palestinian propaganda machine. The pdf attached above -- including factual data on water in the West Bank and Gaza -- and cited earlier shows the reality of Palestinian refusal to participate in the construction of the water pipeline.
Further the damning idea that Israelis are profligate water-wasters and that the Israeli claim to greening the desert -- by using intelligent methods of agriculture and conservation -- is supposedly exposed as phony are also revealed to be gross propaganda when checking the facts. The Israelis' water usage is approaching the sustainability levels that have been measured for their water sources and the Israelis have been the 2nd lowest water users among the arab neighboring countries.
FACT: Livni is as athletic and brusque as any military paratrooper and constitutes the embarassing third puppet-image for this feminized theatrical production, to contrast with the burly settlerwoman and the demure silent arab beauty. Livni is tough and impressive and promising brutal fighting among the Israeli troops and the settlers. Stay tuned, viewers! More theater! To CBS, of course, the broadcaster who also knows how to use women.
CBS has presented this image of the settlers as brutal invaders who don't belong there, but the fact is that Israel has absorbed over 600,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries so that by now there are almost no Jewish refugees left to come, but the Arab 'brothers' have outright refused to absorb the Palestinian refugees, not even lining up to provide substantial resources for them -- nothing sufficient to thrive, only to suffer -- much less encouraging them to come to their brothers' homelands. Just the opposite. The Egyptians shoot at Palestinians trying to flee Gaza. (See evidence below).
The Palestinians never did have a state of their own either. There was no reason why they should have been considered to have been forced to be refugees for these 40 years when they could have had their own state -- multiple times in past negotiations as far back as 1967 when the offer was made to them after they had been evicted from Israel for the attack that led to the 1967 Seven Day War. Or even been welcomed into the homelands of their Arab 'brothers', but they were more convenient and useful to their Arab brothers as abscesses on the Israeli border. What would Americans have done if we were the Palestinians' arab brothers with our refugee brothers on our doorsteps? Think about it.
Further, none of the current states in the Arab world were in existence much longer than the Israeli state, so the claims of invasive state-creation is diminished to a suspect claim. There were over a million Jews spread out in the Arab world in 1948, and if they had not been badly treated by those Arabs, why have those populations of Jews emigrated to the point that there are few left in Arab countries and Israel has welcomed 600,000 of them when they arrived destitute on Israel's doorstep. The Arab world and their Palestinian brothers are the cause of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees. The earliest Arab state was a product of the WWI conflict resolution, barely 40 years prior to Israel's claim. The other Arab statehood dates are even later -- Syria as late as 1941 and Kuwait in 1961. Prior to WWI, the area was mostly ruled by Turkey, and subsequently imperially 'incubated' by France and England while they were supposedly developing their infrastructure for independence again in some new form. Ethnic groups were not neatly separated, the Jewish population had an established presence in the area and their claim to statehood is contemporary with the objecting Arab countries. (See the population movements in the evidence below).
There were 600,000 Jews in Israel in 1948, and over 1,000,000 jewish refugees in the Arab countries surrounding Israel. Israel has demonstrated their statehood-worthiness in both economic, military and humanitarian responsibility for their Jewish brothers effectively banished from the Arab territories, something their Arab neighbors have yet to demonstrate for their own brotherhood. The Egyptians guard their border with Gaza and treat any Palestinians trying to escape the carnage in Gaza as if they were criminals to be excluded from Egypt at all costs. Jordan even reneged on supplying their agreed quota of critical water for the Palestinians. Only the Israelis have supplied access to water from their own resources as well as electric from their own resources.
All of these 'inconvenient truths' are public knowledge if any fact-checkers or responsible editors were employed by CBS News. The sources quoted in the pdf on water and the public history dates, the history facts are all credible sources, not just Israeli propaganda.
How long will the American viewers remain docile in the face of CBS lying to us? How long will Americans continue to trust the educational curriculum and training of the factory-schoolsystem that inculcates this sort of docile ignorance and susceptibility to trumped-up enthusiasms that make such scams as CBS is pulling over viewers' eyes possible? For whose benefit is this fantasy-enthusiasm being created and where will those misled by it be circumstantially guilty of what crimes?
Stay tuned to CBS? We have a new administration that is currently more trusting of such fantasies as CBS is broadcasting. Where will they lead? Will there be more alertness when we are told the sky is falling. And yes, there's going to be carnage, and yes we care, and we realize this is a warzone where carnage happens. The Israelis airlift warnings -- air-dropped leaflets to be precise -- but war produces disasterous mindsets that need to be corrected, which we have seen happens occasionally among the Israelis when one of their combatants goes over the edge. Hamas however is the supposedly elected government of the Palestinians and that government is totally over the edge (see the evidence below) and will not be at all capable of justice. In fact, since there is such a curiously drastic difference between Gaza and the West Bank in the guerilla activities, it would appear that the Hamas have decided that Gaza is not worth a decent life since they concentrate their death-and-destruction activities in Gaza, effectively deciding that Gaza's people are to be sacrificed as victims -- useful for crying and reproducing. If there were a decent humanitarian peace group, their focus would be to transfer Gazans -- willing to be abandoning everything in their current homes that they cannot carry -- to new homes in the West Bank. There are instances covered online of what happens to Gazans who protest to Hamas when they don't wish to be human shields any longer and the Hamas response was gruesome. The peace groups on site are the only ones capable of finding a way to do something to relieve the unwilling sacrificial human shields.
So where is the UN, to insist that the Palestinians should be welcomed into the countries of the surrounding Arab states? The UN? All hiding behind their own oil dependence. At least for now. If the end of the oil age is approaching, this whole scenario could turn totally around. It would seem the only practical solution is to stall while we work for independence from foreign oil. Then insist that the Palestinians be re-settled by their Arab brothers. Some attempts at progress on this oil-independence path are in play all over the world -- third world and first world. Economics is going in this direction if we can just keep the situation from getting out of control with trumped-up enthusiasms based on 'gross inaccuracies' THEN PEACE IS NOT OUT OF REACH AS CBS WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE.
Israel Air Force Precision Strike on Qassam Rocket Launcher 30 Dec. 2008 From IDFNADesk
The images on this and other clips from IDF flight videos showed targets being hit and moments later massive explosions when the initial strike ignited munitions hidden in or adjacent to those buildings. Effectively the Hamas "warriors" were hiding their artillery behind the skirts of women and children, behind the wounded in medical facilities, behind the religious peoples there.
But I also noticed a link among the Google references that showed that CBS -- that major trusted TV broadcaster in the US -- had reported on the YouTube effort by the Israeli's. This was -- I thought -- amazingly good news because it would mean that the constant stories of atrocities would now focus on the use of non-combatants as human shields. So I went to see what CBS had discovered:
Israeli Military Pounds Gaza, On YouTube Posted by Khaled Wassef, an analyst and producer with the CBS News Internet terrorism monitoring team.
The article was unbelievably misrepresenting the reality of what the videos had shown. The initial paragraphs were straight factual:
(CBSNEWS) Video clips of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) strikes on Gaza have been posted on a special channel set up by the Israeli military on the famous video-sharing Web site, YouTube.
The channel youtube.com/user/idfnadesk was launched on Dec. 29, 2008, and has already attracted 4,122 subscribers. Twelve videos are on-show so far.
YouTube requires age verification if you want to see some of the clips that show missile strikes on human targets.
Some of the videos have already been censored, and then restored by YouTube.
"We were saddened on Dec. 30, 2008 when YouTube took down some of our exclusive footage showing the IDF's (Israeli Defense Forces) operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip. Fortunately, due to blogger and viewer support, YouTube has returned the footage they removed," a message posted on the channel's page explained.
But the conclusion of the CBS report -- for the non-benefit of those who would probably never go surfing over to YouTube for their own look, possibly since the factual portion had made the point that some clips supposedly showed carnage (which was not in any of the footage that I had seen) -- completely misled readers as to the important content. Hiding the reality of the Hamas abuse of non-combatants, CBS stated that the footage showed that the IAF was not as accurate as they'd like the public to believe! Specifically:
(CBSNEWS) The IDF move to set up a channel on YouTube comes amid reports of heavy civilian casualties suggesting that the Israeli air strikes on Gaza may not be as 'surgical' as claimed by the IAF.
What, a lie? Was CBS simply hiring unscrupulous writers with their own personal bias on display and strangely no editor curious enough to check the article? Was there a larger group -- including editors and fact-checkers -- who were covering the conflict in the middle east at the moment and were consciously doctoring data? Maybe some large stockholders had bought major segments of CBS ownership issues and undeniably had influenced the hiring practices or just editorial judgment?
Ordinarily, I wouldn't even have been interested in foreign affairs, much less digging further, but the idea that the once revered venue that produced Walter Kronkite had such a twisted propaganda arm in place was puzzling. I personally would not qualify for any favoritism by Israeli government acceptance as an immigrant. To the Jewish world, I've been labeled a 'shicksa' and my son was called a 'sheigitz' (spelling unknown) by my former mother-in-law. Not that I was ever interested in going to Israel. But my instinctive alarm over such a misrepresentation of reality by a major source of trusted information was ignited. So I looked around for other CBS coverage.
It didn't take long to find that the article hiding the Hamas cowardice and abusiveness of their own people was part of a much larger CBS fantasy production. Video after video was up at the CBS online site whose headlines fit the same picture of Israeli troublemaking and Hamas/Palestinian victimization, with peace as lost and hopeless. Check these examples:
Time Running Out For A Two-State Solution? 60 Minutes: Growing Number Of Israelis, Palestinians Say Two-State Solution Is No Longer Possible
Has peace in the Middle East become nothing more than a pipe dream? As Bob Simon reports, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians feel that a two-state solution is no longer possible.
Is Peace Out Of Reach? (13:09)
* Hamas political leader Moussa Abu Marzuk explained to Steve Kroft, in 2002, that the terrorist organization was developing missiles to escalate the conflict with Israel beyond suicide bombings.
Hamas (3:35)
* Bob Simon reported from Israel and the West Bank in 2003, where the construction of a fence to block Palestinian suicide bombers had received international opposition.
The Fence (4:45)
So we did, check them, and this is what we found in the one titled "Time Running Out for a Two-State Solution". For your convenient study, the text from CBS is presented with highlighted commentary to raise flags as necessary for decent FACT-CHECKING, which we do for our own operation here in our in-house research, my son included:
(CBS) Getting a peace deal in the Middle East is such a priority to President Obama that his first foreign calls on his first day in office were to Arab and Israeli leaders. And on day two, the president made former Senator George Mitchell his special envoy for Middle East peace. Mr. Obama wants to shore up the ceasefire in Gaza, but a lasting peace really depends on the West Bank where Palestinians had hoped to create their state. The problem is, even before Israel invaded Gaza, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians had concluded that peace between them was no longer possible, that history had passed it by. For peace to have a chance, Israel would have to withdraw from the West Bank, which would then become the Palestinian state.
It's known as the "two-state" solution. But, while negotiations have been going on for 15 years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have moved in to occupy the West Bank. Palestinians say they can't have a state with Israeli settlers all over it, which the settlers say is precisely the idea.
Daniella Weiss moved from Israel to the West Bank 33 years ago. She has been the mayor of a large settlement.
"I think that settlements prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the land of Israel. This is the goal. And this is the reality," Weiss told 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon.
Though settlers and Palestinians don't agree on anything, most do agree now that a peace deal has been overtaken by events.
"While my heart still wants to believe that the two-state solution is possible, my brain keeps telling me the opposite because of what I see in terms of the building of settlements. So, these settlers are destroying the potential peace for both people that would have been created if we had a two-state solution," Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, once a former candidate for Palestinian president, told Simon.
And he told 60 Minutes Israel's invasion of Gaza - all the death and destruction in response to rockets from Hamas - convinces him that Israel does not want a two-state solution. "My heart is deeply broken, and I am very worried that what Israel has done has furthered us much further from the possibility of [a] two-state solution."
Palestinians had hoped to establish their state on the West Bank, an area the size of Delaware. But Israelis have split it up with scores of settlements, and hundreds of miles of new highways that only settlers can use. Palestinians have to drive - or ride - on the older roads.
When they want to travel from one town to another, they have to submit to humiliating delays at checkpoints and roadblocks. There are more than 600 of them on the West Bank.
QUESTION: How would it make sense to spend scarce civic construction money on a high speed highway then clog it with hundreds of checkpoints to make it secure enough. In order to carry other-than-Israeli traffic how could it be done without those hundreds of checkpoints? Perhaps there's some logic to the absence of any checkpoints on the highway and the limitation on users that has escaped CBS's writers' mental image of the fantasy they are constructing and it would spoil their big viewership emotional response to clutter up the image with logical complicating ideas of how to accomplish their wishes. We would also wonder if some complication on construction cost-sharing -- as we shall see in the water system -- affected the highway sharing.
(CBS) Asked why there are so many checkpoints, Dr. Barghouti said, "I think the main goal is to fragment the West Bank. Maybe a little bit of them can be justified because they say it's for security. But I think the vast majority of them are basically to block the movement of people from one place to another."
Here's how they block Barghouti: he was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Jerusalem and worked in a hospital there for 14 years. Four years ago he moved to a town just 10 miles away, but now, because he no longer lives in Jerusalem, he can't get back in - ever.
He says he can't get a permit to go. "I asked for a permit to go to Jerusalem during the last year, the last years about 16 times. And 16 times they were rejected. Like most Palestinians, I don't have a permit to go to the city I was born in, to the city I used to work in, to the city where my sister lives."
FACT: Barghouti's cousin was convicted in Israel of the murder of several people and is held in prison there -- where he, Barghouti, is excluded. Guess that fact slipped Barghouti's mind as a possible reason why his visiting privileges might be reduced, because he "neglected" to inform CBS's Simon. As for Simon's research skills -- or those of CBS' vaunted 60Minutes fact checkers -- this connection was found in a quick search of Google records on Barghouti. Either CBS has a seriously pathetic research team or they have no interest in disturbing the fantasy-story they calculate will draw large viewership. Possibly trumped-up war-stories are as good for TV networks as murders were once said to be for selling newspapers. Would a broadcast network be inclined to nudge viewers into an angry mindset and risk US military involvement in an unjust war venture just to boost prime-time? What would be their dis-incentive? Not financial.
(Bob Simon/CBS)What he's up against are scores of Israeli settlements dominating the lowlands like crusader fortresses. Many are little cities, and none of them existed 40 years ago. The Israelis always take the high ground, sometimes the hills, and sometimes the homes. And sometimes Arabs are occupied inside their own homes.
FACT: The incendiary concatenation of this image of crusader invasiveness with the subsequent assertion that the invasiveness is rampant with presumeably settlers invading and occupying Arabs space "inside their own homes" -- after all, settlers' actions were the topic of this paragraph, not Israeli military on security missions -- is sheer calculated hyperbole. The CBS fantasy writers swing right into a vignette to cover the sleight of tongue as though they have easily discovered an ugly example. That's sheer theater tactics, not news reporting.
As for the location of the settlers enclaves, and yes they would need to be fully community operations because the settlers were originally not welcomed decently... what a crime, "little cities"... don't the Palestinians live in their own towns and "little cities"?
And then there's the accusation that the settlers had taken the 'high ground' as if that were the most desirable in the WestBank. When the settlers began arriving in the beginning, there were no critical services like water and electric for the area and the prime locations were in the bottoms where the water at least would be accumulated naturally and be handy. In those areas the Palestinians had already made the prime land their own. The settlers were told by the Israelis to occupy the then-less-desirable heights, as also offering some security from an unstable situation as well as being what was less contentiously undesirable by the existing population of Palestinians.
When water services were proposed later, the Palestinians were negative, some refusing entirely to participate, some Palestinian officials refusing to contribute their community funding share to the project which put the entire price of the water for their people on the individual Palestinian using the water service. Furthermore, the water coming through the pipelines used by the settlers -- and those Palestinians who did stubbornly choose to be connected to the pipelines in spite of their "leaders" decisions -- is Israeli water, not Palestinian water. It is being pumped from Israeli aquifers within the Israeli boundaries with the exception of a couple wells within meters of the boundary.
The data on the water situation is available online with a simple Google search and download. In pdf form it will be attached here for further reading. Amazing lack of fact-checking by a major news organization makes you wonder whether the entire American schoolsystem is responsible for some mental character-flaw where the listener is expected to take every, and only the, word of some authority and to simply repeat it on request. Totally schoolish. CBS factcheckers do fit the image and their management apparently expects that their viewership will also simply swallow the fantasy pill as presented by their 60Minute news authority experts without questioning any part of the concoction.
(Bob Simon/CBS) One house for example is the highest house on the highest hill overlooking the town of Nablus. 60 Minutes learned that Israeli soldiers often corral the four families who live there and take over the house to monitor movement down below.
Simon and the 60 Minutes team went to an apartment owned by a Mr. Nassif. That morning, Israeli soldiers had apparently entered the apartment, without notice, and remained there when Simon knocked on the door.
"We cannot speak with you, there are soldiers," Nassif told Simon. "We are in prison here."
Asked what was happening, Nassif says, "They are keeping us here and the soldiers are upstairs, we cannot move. We cannot speak with you."
Nassif said he couldn't leave the house and didn't know how long he'd have to stay in place. Asked if they were paying him any money, he told Simon, "You are kidding?"
Abdul Nassif, a bank manager said he had to get to his bank to open the safe, but one of the soldiers wouldn't let him go. He told 60 Minutes whenever the soldiers come they wake everybody up, and herd them into a kitchen for hours while soldiers sleep in their beds. They can't leave or use the phone, or let 60 Minutes in.
(CBS) He sent 60 Minutes downstairs to see if his brother would open the door so we could ask the soldiers why they keep taking over this house. But the brother told Simon, "The soldiers close the door from the key. They take the key."
So Simon and the crew left, and that night, so did the soldiers. But when 60 Minutes returned two days later, the soldiers were back for more surveillance. This time they kept the women under house arrest, but let the men go to work and the children go to school. When the children returned, we caught a glimpse of two armed soldiers at the top of the stairs.
Then more children came home, but the soldiers wouldn't open the door again.
A commander told Simon that he and the crew would have to go back behind a wall in order for the children to be let in.
The commander declined to talk to 60 Minutes. "But we are talking to you now," Simon pointed out, standing outside. "Why don't you tell us what you are doing here? Have you lost your voice? Well they've closed the door now, they've closed the window so I guess if the children are going to get home now we have to leave, so that is what we will do."
An army spokesperson told us the army uses the Nassifs' house for important surveillance operations. The Nassifs told 60 Minutes that soldiers usually stay for a day or two, always coming and going in the middle of the night. When they do go, the Nassifs never know when they will be occupied again. It could be tomorrow, next week, or next month. The only certainty, they say, is that the soldiers will be back.
NOTE: CBS has access to much more senior political contacts, yet they basically wimp out on asking anyone with more authority to discuss legal/political issues whether this is standard practice for a war-zone. Nor do we have any clue on how long this particular surveillance operation has been active.
Note also that the demure, beautiful woman that is in one of these scenes and never says a word or plays any significant role, becomes the main icon used for the cover image to the entire video, in contrast to the burly, roughneck woman mayor from one of the troublemaking settlers' groups who was featured repeatedly and usually quoted after presenting her with incendiary remarks that challenged the safety of the settlers from eviction from the homes they've built, diminishing the roles they've played in support of the occupation's security.
(Bob Simon/CBS) Another crippling reality on the West Bank is high unemployment, now about 20 percent. So some Palestinians can only find jobs building Israeli settlements. They're so ashamed to work on the construction sites that they asked 60 Minutes not to show their faces.
The settlers now number 280,000, and as they keep moving in, their population keeps growing about five percent every year. But the 2.5 million Arabs have their strategy too: they're growing bigger families.
NOTE: Curious lack of notice by Bob Simon that larger families in circumstances where you can't find jobs or support your existing population is rather irresponsible for anyone else to do. In this fantasy of CBS creation, it's just a 'strategy'. Interesting that the Hamas use of women and children as human-shields could also be confirmation that the value of individual lives is in low regard and that more human-shields are expected to be useful for their 'strategy', hence the women must produce more human-shields -- or warriors if needed . Canon-fodder time is immoral personal, civic and military operation. Yet we see no uprising against Hamas in any of Simon's reporting. Support for those who make your children into human shields makes no sense. Possibly the Palestinians are, in effect, hostages of the Hamas mafia and are excusably Stockholm syndrome affected, which is not an attempt at diagnosis only an observation reminiscent of the Patti Hearst events of my graduate school days when we saw the kidnap victim join her kidnappers and take up weapons to rob banks to get funds to support her abusive kidnappers' agenda.
(Bob Simon/CBS) Demographers predict that within ten years Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Without a separate Palestinian state the Israelis would have three options, none of them good. They could try ethnic cleansing, drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank, or they could give the Palestinians the vote. That would be the democratic option but it would mean the end of the Jewish state. Or they could try apartheid - have the minority Israelis rule the majority Palestinians, but apartheid regimes don't have a very long life.
"Unfortunately, and I have to say to you that apartheid is already in place," Dr. Barghouti argued.
(CBS) Apartheid? Israel is building what it calls a security wall between the West Bank and Israel to stop suicide bombers. The Palestinians are furious because it appropriates eight percent of the West Bank. Not only that. It weaves its way through Palestinian farms, separating farmers from their land. They have to wait at gates for soldiers to let them in. Settlers get a lot more water than Palestinians, which is why settlements are green and Arab areas are not.
FACT: CBS is again repeating a standard -- but gross 'inaccuracy' -- line from the Palestinian propaganda machine. The pdf attached above -- including factual data on water in the West Bank and Gaza -- and cited earlier shows the reality of Palestinian refusal to participate in the construction of the water pipeline.
Further the damning idea that Israelis are profligate water-wasters and that the Israeli claim to greening the desert -- by using intelligent methods of agriculture and conservation -- is supposedly exposed as phony are also revealed to be gross propaganda when checking the facts. The Israelis' water usage is approaching the sustainability levels that have been measured for their water sources and the Israelis have been the 2nd lowest water users among the arab neighboring countries.
(Bob Simon/CBS) Moderate Israelis who deplore the occupation used to believe passionately in a two-state solution. That is no longer the case.
Meron Benvenisti used to be deputy mayor of Jerusalem. He told Simon the prospects of the two-state solution becoming a reality are "nil."
"The geopolitical condition that¹s been created in '67 is irreversible. Cannot be changed. You cannot unscramble that egg," he explained.
Asked if this means the settlers have won, Benvenisti told Simon, "Yes."
"And the settlers will remain forever and ever?" Simon asked.
"I don't know forever and ever, but they will remain and will flourish," Benvenisti said.
"The settlers, the attitude that I present here, this is the heart. This is the pulse. This is the past, present, and future of the Jewish state," Daniella Weiss told Simon.
She says the she and the settlers are immovable. "We will stay here forever."
But one very important Israeli says she intends to move them out. She's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a candidate to become prime minister in elections next month. She's also Israel¹s chief negotiator with the Palestinians, and she told 60 Minutes peace is unthinkable with the settlers where they are.
"Can you really imagine evacuating the tens of thousands of settlers who say they will not leave?" Simon asked.
"It's not going to be easy. But this is the only solution," she replied.
"But you know that there are settlers who say, 'We will fight. We will not leave. We will fight,'" Simon asked.
"So this is the responsibility of the government and police to stop them. As simple as that. Israel is a state of law and order," Livni said.
FACT: Livni is as athletic and brusque as any military paratrooper and constitutes the embarassing third puppet-image for this feminized theatrical production, to contrast with the burly settlerwoman and the demure silent arab beauty. Livni is tough and impressive and promising brutal fighting among the Israeli troops and the settlers. Stay tuned, viewers! More theater! To CBS, of course, the broadcaster who also knows how to use women.
CBS has presented this image of the settlers as brutal invaders who don't belong there, but the fact is that Israel has absorbed over 600,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries so that by now there are almost no Jewish refugees left to come, but the Arab 'brothers' have outright refused to absorb the Palestinian refugees, not even lining up to provide substantial resources for them -- nothing sufficient to thrive, only to suffer -- much less encouraging them to come to their brothers' homelands. Just the opposite. The Egyptians shoot at Palestinians trying to flee Gaza. (See evidence below).
The Palestinians never did have a state of their own either. There was no reason why they should have been considered to have been forced to be refugees for these 40 years when they could have had their own state -- multiple times in past negotiations as far back as 1967 when the offer was made to them after they had been evicted from Israel for the attack that led to the 1967 Seven Day War. Or even been welcomed into the homelands of their Arab 'brothers', but they were more convenient and useful to their Arab brothers as abscesses on the Israeli border. What would Americans have done if we were the Palestinians' arab brothers with our refugee brothers on our doorsteps? Think about it.
Further, none of the current states in the Arab world were in existence much longer than the Israeli state, so the claims of invasive state-creation is diminished to a suspect claim. There were over a million Jews spread out in the Arab world in 1948, and if they had not been badly treated by those Arabs, why have those populations of Jews emigrated to the point that there are few left in Arab countries and Israel has welcomed 600,000 of them when they arrived destitute on Israel's doorstep. The Arab world and their Palestinian brothers are the cause of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees. The earliest Arab state was a product of the WWI conflict resolution, barely 40 years prior to Israel's claim. The other Arab statehood dates are even later -- Syria as late as 1941 and Kuwait in 1961. Prior to WWI, the area was mostly ruled by Turkey, and subsequently imperially 'incubated' by France and England while they were supposedly developing their infrastructure for independence again in some new form. Ethnic groups were not neatly separated, the Jewish population had an established presence in the area and their claim to statehood is contemporary with the objecting Arab countries. (See the population movements in the evidence below).
There were 600,000 Jews in Israel in 1948, and over 1,000,000 jewish refugees in the Arab countries surrounding Israel. Israel has demonstrated their statehood-worthiness in both economic, military and humanitarian responsibility for their Jewish brothers effectively banished from the Arab territories, something their Arab neighbors have yet to demonstrate for their own brotherhood. The Egyptians guard their border with Gaza and treat any Palestinians trying to escape the carnage in Gaza as if they were criminals to be excluded from Egypt at all costs. Jordan even reneged on supplying their agreed quota of critical water for the Palestinians. Only the Israelis have supplied access to water from their own resources as well as electric from their own resources.
All of these 'inconvenient truths' are public knowledge if any fact-checkers or responsible editors were employed by CBS News. The sources quoted in the pdf on water and the public history dates, the history facts are all credible sources, not just Israeli propaganda.
How long will the American viewers remain docile in the face of CBS lying to us? How long will Americans continue to trust the educational curriculum and training of the factory-schoolsystem that inculcates this sort of docile ignorance and susceptibility to trumped-up enthusiasms that make such scams as CBS is pulling over viewers' eyes possible? For whose benefit is this fantasy-enthusiasm being created and where will those misled by it be circumstantially guilty of what crimes?
Stay tuned to CBS? We have a new administration that is currently more trusting of such fantasies as CBS is broadcasting. Where will they lead? Will there be more alertness when we are told the sky is falling. And yes, there's going to be carnage, and yes we care, and we realize this is a warzone where carnage happens. The Israelis airlift warnings -- air-dropped leaflets to be precise -- but war produces disasterous mindsets that need to be corrected, which we have seen happens occasionally among the Israelis when one of their combatants goes over the edge. Hamas however is the supposedly elected government of the Palestinians and that government is totally over the edge (see the evidence below) and will not be at all capable of justice. In fact, since there is such a curiously drastic difference between Gaza and the West Bank in the guerilla activities, it would appear that the Hamas have decided that Gaza is not worth a decent life since they concentrate their death-and-destruction activities in Gaza, effectively deciding that Gaza's people are to be sacrificed as victims -- useful for crying and reproducing. If there were a decent humanitarian peace group, their focus would be to transfer Gazans -- willing to be abandoning everything in their current homes that they cannot carry -- to new homes in the West Bank. There are instances covered online of what happens to Gazans who protest to Hamas when they don't wish to be human shields any longer and the Hamas response was gruesome. The peace groups on site are the only ones capable of finding a way to do something to relieve the unwilling sacrificial human shields.
So where is the UN, to insist that the Palestinians should be welcomed into the countries of the surrounding Arab states? The UN? All hiding behind their own oil dependence. At least for now. If the end of the oil age is approaching, this whole scenario could turn totally around. It would seem the only practical solution is to stall while we work for independence from foreign oil. Then insist that the Palestinians be re-settled by their Arab brothers. Some attempts at progress on this oil-independence path are in play all over the world -- third world and first world. Economics is going in this direction if we can just keep the situation from getting out of control with trumped-up enthusiasms based on 'gross inaccuracies' THEN PEACE IS NOT OUT OF REACH AS CBS WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE.
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Further evidence:
** Egyptian government shoots at hundreds of Palestinians fleeing Gaza. Simply fleeing for their lives and their children's lives. Three hundred extra Egyptian guards rushed to seal the border and to repulse Palestinians along this small 9 mile border. Where is the American big media coverage of these inhumane acts against sensible Palestinians wanting to live freely?
** Who's the humanitarian side in this struggle? Refugee rescue, or none
** Water usage photos of Palestinian swimming pools -- as well as the data on water systems -- that the powerful US big-media somehow never notices for public broadcasting of their fantasy reports. Which Palestinians are using scarce resources, further reducing water for their fellow refugees while maintaining that the Israelis cheat the Palestinians out of water for life's needs.
** How pathetic must we believe the CBS journalists and editors are to have not found this scoop -- at wikipedia no less -- on why the excellent Dr Barghouti wasn't welcomed to visit Jerusalem. CBS instead honors the good doctor's claims that Israelis were trying to handicap Palestinians' rightful freedoms, while never mentioning that his cousin, a convicted Intifada political murderer, held in prison on the Jerusalem side had co-conspirators and operatives in those murders -- still at large -- who might avail themselves of access to the good doctor's freedom of movement among the Barghouti clan and allies. Whether the Barghouti cousin is a political prisoner or a POW or a war criminal or other criminal is immaterial, there is justification for the Israeli judgment to sensibly restrict the good doctor's access to the area because he would be a convenient target for Hamas or Fatah to use in an attempt to engineer the escape of a prize prisoner. Claiming that this case shows that Palestinians are unjustly blocked from their rightful freedom is either grossly neglectful of responsible broadcasting or outright deception being practiced on us. Take your pick.
** Hamas' leader bragging in public speech that Hamas has adopted a strategy of death for women, children and the aged, making Hamas operatives fully authorized to use women and children as human-shields -- willing or not -- and making it clear to the women and children what's expected of the population. Human sacrifice to provide the media with a message to sell to the world that Palestinian women and children prefer death to Israeli occupation. How could this public broadcast by Hamas have escaped CBS's notice in their professionally required intensive review of material on and from their subjects?
** And some of the women and children are not willing, as seen in this clip captured by some Italian youtube member in the tumult of IDF conflict, where armed Hamas operatives grab children apparently at random as the operatives are running from an Israeli assault. When you are the target for the shooting, you are not 'saving' anyone by grabbing them and dragging them along the road with you, the target. Nor are you enhancing your speed and agility by dragging someone, so you're not improving their survival chances nor are you improving your own UNLESS you have another use for them.
** Hamas claims that their opposing party - Fatah - is harboring spies and collaborators with the Israelis. Official spokesman claims they'll be hunted down and jailed, but somehow, in that month of hunting there was not much jailing, instead CNN reported that 175 Fatah members were reported shot -- knee-caps, elbows, feet, etc -- at close range and by Hamas members. I suppose CBS wouldn't have noticed this sort of behavior among their play-actors in the CBS fantasy as an indication of a responsible, truly elected government of the Palestinians methods of dealing with the opposition party.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Ethanol, Competition, Risking Food Prices and Escaping Oil
There was a major article in the Cincinnati Enquirer on Ethanol and there are glaring errors in their ideas being foisted on the Cincinnati public.
Sometimes I wonder if the editors of our mainstream media setup these articles on ideas that would change our lives specifically to include such obvious and gross errors as to provoke the readers to write in and play a sort of publishing game of tag. Unfortunately the Cincinnati Enquirer seems to be serious about their errors.
The latest in this pattern was the Fourth of July Forum front page story on "Ethanol: Fueling Debate".
Anyone who's been awake and reading for any amount of the last 50 years must have been rolling on the floor laughing at the hypocritical standard set for ethanol to 'compete fairly' with gasoline. Please, really. Where have the editors of this paper been? Over the last 50 years, our taxes have funded $350 BILLION in subsidies for oil and gas, whether they were called that or not. (International Center for Technology Assessment) That's $7billion each and every year of windfall support from your taxes. Specifically, these included tax breaks, accounting tricks, direct subsitides, R&D support and something euphmistically called royalties. And the 2005 Energy Bill was no exception. In the middle of oil company profits pushing record billions of dollars, the bill had a new slick sleight of hand royalty that could net the oil industry a minimum of $7Billion, maybe as much as $30Billion over the life of the royalty -- another $140-360 million annually over the usual.
We scoff at the Enquirer's claim that the ethanol and biodiesel newbie's are unfair players. Renewables would just LOVE to have a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.
And then there's the claim that ethanol doesn't deliver the power that gasoline does. Let's straighten this out. Gas has more BTUs per gallon, but lower octane. The bottom line on power is the compression ratio. Ethanol runs very well on compression ratios as high as 13:1 whereas gas is limited to numbers around 8 or 9:1 so later model cars with turbo-charging are closer to thriving on ethanol's power. Cars may get slightly lower mileage. The Indy500 is running on ethanol this year. But less power, my foot.
Next is the timetable the Enquirer's writers grudgingly set for the emergence of ethanol as 'America's "second" fuel', -- sniff, second, sniff -- suggesting that years and years of research and 'scientific innnovation' was lacking yet. FFV's have been on the road in the USA for over 10 years, TEN, with millions of them. We not only have a good handle on what they perform like, we have far more knowledge about their viability than on any other alternative. Even more, among those comparing notes online at the open encyclopedia -- wikipedia -- Americans have been informally experimenting to determine with their own non-ffvs just what ratio of ethanol blending is compatible with our everyday cars thanks to the automotive engineers' conservative standards. It currently looks like something in the vicinity of e30 -- a 2-to-1 mix of regular gasoline and e85.
On top of that there are two Canadian groups building commercial plants to produce ethanol from cellolosic waste. This year and next, not 'long term'. Maybe the Enquirer editors should read the business pages instead of whatever their usual sources are. The world's largest investment bank, Goldman and Sachs, just layed $27 million onto the table for Iogen, one of the Canadian-based biotechs specializing in ethanol made from cellulose, to start building on a commercial scale. The US has BRI in Arkansas, and Vancouver has Syntec Biofuel, both of whom have near term construction plans. With about 3-4 years of nuts-and-bolts adjustments, all of these should be at the finish line. Are you ready for it. Let's free ourselves from oil and WWIII.
Meanwhile, we have corn-based ethanol providing us with launching platforms to work from and with stable long term potential since the ethanol's the same whether corn or cellulosic. Especially since we have a lot of car buying to re-direct to FFVs and diesels. And for those thinking of a new car right now, simply order the FFV version. Unlike the big step necessary to produce a hybrid, the tinkering necessary to give you an FFV -- at assemply line time -- instead of a non-ffv is around a mere $100. For lack of that measly amount we could have been driving FFVs by now.
Which brings us to the Enquirer's curiously blind 'worry' about a failed crop from drought as a reason to back off. A failed crop is just another source of cellulosic feedstock for the other ethanol producers, not a risk at all by the time we have shifted to ethanol. But most of all, the Enquirer totally ignores our knight in shining armor who came to the aid of our rescuers in Katrina-land. It wasn't the sheiks and the oil barons, it was the farmers with their biodiesel and ethanol. They are the ones we should stand with and choose renewables.
The Enquirer frets about the impact on the price of food if we are using corn for ethanol, but they blithely ignore the real source of the already rising cost of food, namely the skyrocketing cost of gasoline, which we can get rid of by diverting some corn to ethanol for a moderate time while we convert our vehicles away from the really frightening risks of gasoline.
We have genuinely massive worries over the big risks in depending on gasoline -- from the increasing likelihood of hostile political embargos, or simply the unpredictable success of terrorists with firepower aimed at oilwells because they know our craven dependence on oil, to the sudden needs of increasingly frequent category 4-5 hurricanes.
On top of these sudden nightmares, we have the realization that the convergence of the high price of 'cheap oil' and the greed to tap the oil-sources where the damages of drilling and removal -- like the tar sands -- and damages to our pristine treasured remote sites are colluding to produce nightmares in our air and water, the life support of our children's future as well as all those we compatibly share this planet with. Is the Enquirer seriously clinging to petroleum oil in the face of these and advocating fear of a minimal shortterm risk? Yeah, that's what it amounts to, but should we? Hardly.
And last, but not least, ethanol is not as impotent as the Enquirer and the politicians think, not when we combine it with its renewable cousins, namely TDP-oils -- thermal depolymerization of industrial and municipal wastes. Do the numbers. For example, TDP can produce 150 gallons of the equivalent of home heating oil from each ton of turkey offal at their fully functioning plant in Carthage MO, which would be wildly profitable if the playing field were level. That's an amazing 60% by weight, and the process can be applied to industrial and municipal waste, much as Rumpke is producing natural gas from Cincinnati's garbage for DukeEnergy, formerly Cinergy. And for the record, industrial wastes per the EPA, are 5 times as great as agricultural waste, which alone would eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. And for the capping achievement, Rocky Mountain Institute has a method to make carbon-fibre car bodies -- ultra light, ultra strong and safe -- affordable which would give us the last and final piece of the puzzle, namely genuinely high fuel mileage.
If you don't want to do the numbers yourself, come look at the displays at the website of www.bergerac.tv in the top story, a substantial article on the oil topic. The pages within called The Solution have what Enquirer readers really need. More soon.
Sometimes I wonder if the editors of our mainstream media setup these articles on ideas that would change our lives specifically to include such obvious and gross errors as to provoke the readers to write in and play a sort of publishing game of tag. Unfortunately the Cincinnati Enquirer seems to be serious about their errors.
The latest in this pattern was the Fourth of July Forum front page story on "Ethanol: Fueling Debate".
Anyone who's been awake and reading for any amount of the last 50 years must have been rolling on the floor laughing at the hypocritical standard set for ethanol to 'compete fairly' with gasoline. Please, really. Where have the editors of this paper been? Over the last 50 years, our taxes have funded $350 BILLION in subsidies for oil and gas, whether they were called that or not. (International Center for Technology Assessment) That's $7billion each and every year of windfall support from your taxes. Specifically, these included tax breaks, accounting tricks, direct subsitides, R&D support and something euphmistically called royalties. And the 2005 Energy Bill was no exception. In the middle of oil company profits pushing record billions of dollars, the bill had a new slick sleight of hand royalty that could net the oil industry a minimum of $7Billion, maybe as much as $30Billion over the life of the royalty -- another $140-360 million annually over the usual.
We scoff at the Enquirer's claim that the ethanol and biodiesel newbie's are unfair players. Renewables would just LOVE to have a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.
And then there's the claim that ethanol doesn't deliver the power that gasoline does. Let's straighten this out. Gas has more BTUs per gallon, but lower octane. The bottom line on power is the compression ratio. Ethanol runs very well on compression ratios as high as 13:1 whereas gas is limited to numbers around 8 or 9:1 so later model cars with turbo-charging are closer to thriving on ethanol's power. Cars may get slightly lower mileage. The Indy500 is running on ethanol this year. But less power, my foot.
Next is the timetable the Enquirer's writers grudgingly set for the emergence of ethanol as 'America's "second" fuel', -- sniff, second, sniff -- suggesting that years and years of research and 'scientific innnovation' was lacking yet. FFV's have been on the road in the USA for over 10 years, TEN, with millions of them. We not only have a good handle on what they perform like, we have far more knowledge about their viability than on any other alternative. Even more, among those comparing notes online at the open encyclopedia -- wikipedia -- Americans have been informally experimenting to determine with their own non-ffvs just what ratio of ethanol blending is compatible with our everyday cars thanks to the automotive engineers' conservative standards. It currently looks like something in the vicinity of e30 -- a 2-to-1 mix of regular gasoline and e85.
On top of that there are two Canadian groups building commercial plants to produce ethanol from cellolosic waste. This year and next, not 'long term'. Maybe the Enquirer editors should read the business pages instead of whatever their usual sources are. The world's largest investment bank, Goldman and Sachs, just layed $27 million onto the table for Iogen, one of the Canadian-based biotechs specializing in ethanol made from cellulose, to start building on a commercial scale. The US has BRI in Arkansas, and Vancouver has Syntec Biofuel, both of whom have near term construction plans. With about 3-4 years of nuts-and-bolts adjustments, all of these should be at the finish line. Are you ready for it. Let's free ourselves from oil and WWIII.
Meanwhile, we have corn-based ethanol providing us with launching platforms to work from and with stable long term potential since the ethanol's the same whether corn or cellulosic. Especially since we have a lot of car buying to re-direct to FFVs and diesels. And for those thinking of a new car right now, simply order the FFV version. Unlike the big step necessary to produce a hybrid, the tinkering necessary to give you an FFV -- at assemply line time -- instead of a non-ffv is around a mere $100. For lack of that measly amount we could have been driving FFVs by now.
Which brings us to the Enquirer's curiously blind 'worry' about a failed crop from drought as a reason to back off. A failed crop is just another source of cellulosic feedstock for the other ethanol producers, not a risk at all by the time we have shifted to ethanol. But most of all, the Enquirer totally ignores our knight in shining armor who came to the aid of our rescuers in Katrina-land. It wasn't the sheiks and the oil barons, it was the farmers with their biodiesel and ethanol. They are the ones we should stand with and choose renewables.
The Enquirer frets about the impact on the price of food if we are using corn for ethanol, but they blithely ignore the real source of the already rising cost of food, namely the skyrocketing cost of gasoline, which we can get rid of by diverting some corn to ethanol for a moderate time while we convert our vehicles away from the really frightening risks of gasoline.
We have genuinely massive worries over the big risks in depending on gasoline -- from the increasing likelihood of hostile political embargos, or simply the unpredictable success of terrorists with firepower aimed at oilwells because they know our craven dependence on oil, to the sudden needs of increasingly frequent category 4-5 hurricanes.
On top of these sudden nightmares, we have the realization that the convergence of the high price of 'cheap oil' and the greed to tap the oil-sources where the damages of drilling and removal -- like the tar sands -- and damages to our pristine treasured remote sites are colluding to produce nightmares in our air and water, the life support of our children's future as well as all those we compatibly share this planet with. Is the Enquirer seriously clinging to petroleum oil in the face of these and advocating fear of a minimal shortterm risk? Yeah, that's what it amounts to, but should we? Hardly.
And last, but not least, ethanol is not as impotent as the Enquirer and the politicians think, not when we combine it with its renewable cousins, namely TDP-oils -- thermal depolymerization of industrial and municipal wastes. Do the numbers. For example, TDP can produce 150 gallons of the equivalent of home heating oil from each ton of turkey offal at their fully functioning plant in Carthage MO, which would be wildly profitable if the playing field were level. That's an amazing 60% by weight, and the process can be applied to industrial and municipal waste, much as Rumpke is producing natural gas from Cincinnati's garbage for DukeEnergy, formerly Cinergy. And for the record, industrial wastes per the EPA, are 5 times as great as agricultural waste, which alone would eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. And for the capping achievement, Rocky Mountain Institute has a method to make carbon-fibre car bodies -- ultra light, ultra strong and safe -- affordable which would give us the last and final piece of the puzzle, namely genuinely high fuel mileage.
If you don't want to do the numbers yourself, come look at the displays at the website of www.bergerac.tv in the top story, a substantial article on the oil topic. The pages within called The Solution have what Enquirer readers really need. More soon.
Saturday, July 01, 2006
Sailing West to the Orient to Reach Independence
In a recent pronouncement from the University of Chicago's prestigious
Graduate School of Business, the geniuses finally getting around to figuring
out how
corporate games are played are again prescribing some strategy for women
to try in the equity adventure.
They've got a new set of buzzwords in the 'science' of networking analysis, namely social capital, structural holes and illegitimacy. Naturally they conclude that women aren't doing things right and should 'about face' and march to UC-GSB's new tune. All on the basis of a handful of current timeframe studies, they conclude that women never tried their super-clever marching song before, otherwise they'd be populating fortune 500 boardrooms in numbers.
Look at Token Woman, written in 1997 about a timeframe in the late 70s, before you tell us that you know the answer.
Women readers have every right to be cranky over yet another putdown. Sociologists and the bottomfeeders who sell big-hype advicebooks are misleading women pursuing parity.
Think about it. Your 'strategic partner', eagerly clawing his way to the top, who loans you 'some social capital' is putting his 'legitimacy' at risk and at the first sign of loss among his peers is going to cut you loose in most cases regardless of your value to his work or the corporation. But the bottomfeeders can sell advice if they make women feel inadequate and needy, while dangling some ephemeral carrot-mirage in front of the hungry.
Corporate top management has made it clear and sociologists have recorded top managements' answer that the 'responsibilities at their level' are too important to risk the extraneous effort of making them uncomfortable with common rules like including women in their high-powered operations just because the women are eminently capable and have succeeded at proving themselves, even in 'structural holes' in the organization. I remember the sociology presentation at a Women's Studies Luncheon at UC back in about '98 where this result was announced. (Harlan & Weiss) Everyone shrugged and spoke of promise for other generations, but that's not the response women should take.
The women's leadership in the corporate parity marketplace keep being 'puzzled' and constantly coming up with 'new' strategies to say women should try. Well they've been tried, including the one about social capital and structural holes. The women who entered the corporate games in the 70s were not dumb, nor were they poorly endowed with degrees and goals.
The game top management plays is simple and I've outlined it before. It's called creating a 'token woman', specifically a younger one, promote her several steps ahead of all her male peers and those peers immediately stop being nice and working as a team. Doesn't matter whether she's suitably capable, dedicated and well-connected, not even if she's unique and ideally situated. She, and by association, all the other women in the organization automatically become pariahs among their peers unless they openly choose the mommy-track. Frozen out, stalled. There are stats that show that promotions start for males at a later age. The politically correct roosters just ignore the implications and crow that women are making progress with each of those token women! How deluded!
Meanwhile the rest of women's problems keep haunting the shadows giving us nightmares.
It's time to write off the corporate parity thrust and rework our strategy, including how and when to pursue higher education. We've got the cart ahead of the horse in the current sequence.
We should be supporting young women (and our sons) in getting themselves established with a home of their own FIRST. Complete with a set of skills in construction and self-employment. With a women's system-designed home, built with workingclass values and ergonomics, and supporting a lifestyle geared to health and smart economics, our children's futures will be established, unlike the albatross/homes being foisted on the public, not to mention the unproductive adventures as immature learners in higher education. And homes like these, built with major labor input by our construction-talented children would cost less than the usual bill for most college educations at today's prices.
They would effectively earn a home in their youth. Where are young people going to get a job offer with financial potential like this. Want to see how we can swing this?
Postpone the highstakes risks chosen by the wealthy in chasing a degree or three, running up big debts and delaying our natural needs til we and our children are in jeopardy, behind in the race forever because we're not rich enough to make up for the extravagances of the wealthy. Don't emulate that strategy, it's a mistake.
Do the numbers, with a home like we're proposing, free and clear, our economic struggles are minimized. The choices -- of academic pursuits or of civic engagements and activism or of careers of all sorts, most especially in the arts and letters -- are within reach. All because we take the time to get the horse first.
Maybe you think that horse is overly expensive. In fact, not only is it in many cases less expensive than the 'higher' education, but is accessible to a much wider spectrum than just those considering post-secondary education. The numbers I've been accumulating run in the range of $20/sf, or $30/sf if you start with a knowledgeably selected doublewide and make serious improvements. Think about those numbers, with your typical home now being 1500sf, that's an investment of $45,000 and 4 years work, tops. Women just have to learn to tackle real construction with a systems analysis rigor.
But here's the really good part. Look how many women are about to 'retire'. Maybe you've been misled to believe that SocialSecurity-income is inadequate. Well, the game is changed because of our strategy and now we're going to incorporate another thread, namely the home should be multigenerational.
Did you know that in Crete, parents endow their daughters with a home of her own on the promise that the parents can count on their daughters for care in their old age? Interesting, but we're going another step further.
Medicare is the albatross in seniors' financing yet in other societies (Sardinia, Okinawa and the American 7thDay Adventists who were studied in medical circles and photo-storied in National Geographic) the 'typical' aging scenario is invalidated. Specifically in The China Study, the trojan horse carrying the diseases afflicting our lives is our western diet with high proportions of overheated and overprocessed foods and high percentages of animal proteins, one of the other mistaken marks of wealth we've adopted.
But health and smart economics was one of our system-design requirements so our women of the boomer generation could cherry-pick that benefit by keeping their children and grandchildren fully sharing in this home, now larger, that manages its food operations accordingly.
Did you know that intentional communities where resources and operations are shared, majorly reduce the amount of work required to maintain those resources and operations? Roughly half the time and effort of standard individual housekeeping and maintenance.
A large home with shared food-area, utilities, tools, and social areas but with ample private spaces for each couple and their children is economically more buildable than separate homes for each couple. Reducing isolation in aging and supplying experiential knowledge to youth, and financially more doable both to build and to maintain for all of them.
The HOME is the key, not the education nor the career.
I suspect Bodichon and Parkes -- earlier writers on what resources women needed -- also never did the numbers either though I haven't read them and would be interested to know, but from descriptions of their prescriptions it clearly sounds like they were totally focussed on 'income' but that's the wrong place to look.
It's the BOTTOM LINE that matters and by that I'm not excluding intangibles... In decision analysis you have techniques for incorporating intangibles into the bottom line. The good news is that in this case the bottom line financially is itself favorable, and the intangibles in harmony.
Furthermore that bottom line is less prone to risks like workingclass families run into when their employment fails them or some accident occurs. With a more sustainable home economically, especially energy-wise, and more income streams, even though likely smaller for a variety of reasons, the law of large numbers makes the bottomline more stable, not prone to being 'lost', ever.
As a mathematical decision analyst I frequently do mathematical models of situations I'm researching and I'm thinking of doing this scenario of our women boomers and their near-grown children, with soon-to-be families, just to demonstrate 'the numbers'. Everyone seems to have an aversion to doing the numbers and they stay stuck in the ruts corporate greed has engineered. Those mathematical models tell stories, at least to those who pore over the results and who play what-if games with the variables. It's a kind of gaming.
In this case I'd throw out medicare and health insurance, regular schools and childcare.
I can hear the screams now but the reality is, when you look at numbers and logic, those institutions are unbelievably detrimental on any end-use/least-cost analysis.
Did you know that hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical drugs are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US? How do you square that with our society's knee-jerk fear of being denied access to the 3rd leading cause of death, even being willing to pay extortionary premiums for their chance to play this russian-roulette.
Medicare is one of the worst distortions. I have a set of numbers on the costs of stroke care, at home vs with medicare, and the figures clearly show the financial hardships imposed by medicare -- if you want 'the benefits' owed to you for the premiums you paid for, you actually pay more for the care than if you arranged all the services for yourself at home. What sense does Medicare make? Dump it, skip the death-roulette. Skip the extorionary costs of premiums. In fact, with the home/diet strategy of this plan, you've increased the likelihood of staying healthy.
Yet the insane fear prevails. Everyone knows the world is flat. Imagine the impossibility of sailing west to the orient. Only madwomen would try it.
And then there's the screams over dumping regular k-12 and childcare. Home and cyberspace and libraries are our answer. In particular, in Ohio, there's a cybercharter school called OHDELA where any Ohio child can enroll (gotta have a phone). Every OHDELA cybercharter student (or two in the family) is endowed with an empowering computer, complete with scanner, printer and internet access. Plus a budget for individual programs and curriculum, as well as an edu-consultant to work with the parents, or grandma. No rational parent in hard straits like those described by workingclass academics would choose regular school, putting their child at a competitive disadvantage academically and socially, when their child can grow in an environment on near equal footing with their age-peers, have customized opportunities and have more time for needed involvement in family. Not to mention hugely improved time-on-task being free of the herding and crowd-control of factory schooling, not to mention busing. Unfortunately, no one, in the school system those children have access to, will tell them, even though the cybercharter option is less burdensome on the taxpayer.
Think what that computer/internet-access would do for the family after school hours are over.
I once did a comparable financial analysis for a hypothetical pair of single mothers (with one child each) and working only parttime, making near minimum wage to start, finding them a way out of poverty, but an even better arrangement would be if it was grandmother on social security with her daughter and grandchildren. In that presentation, I refrained from displaying the tables of numbers, relying on the story they told. I have since decided that the story has the vulnerability of being discounted as not based on hard facts even though the story includes the significant variables, so I'm thinking of recreating the numbers and posting them with the article.
More like I did in the analysis I did for a presentation of a strategy for the peace & justice art show's program on our energy dilemma, where I trailed along the tables of numbers as they developed. If I was going to sail west to the orient (and I am) I'd want a verifiable set of numbers.
In any case, the answer to the puzzle about women, post-secondary education and remunerative working life is that women should put their funds into a mortgage free, modified home, preferably with mother and siblings, before tackling the adventure of advanced education and not worry about big income promises. Meaningful work, of her own choosing and design, is then a possibility while still being able to share a comfortable, healthy life with her children, free of the financial instability.
Bottomline independence and well-being, not income and parity frustrations.
They've got a new set of buzzwords in the 'science' of networking analysis, namely social capital, structural holes and illegitimacy. Naturally they conclude that women aren't doing things right and should 'about face' and march to UC-GSB's new tune. All on the basis of a handful of current timeframe studies, they conclude that women never tried their super-clever marching song before, otherwise they'd be populating fortune 500 boardrooms in numbers.
Look at Token Woman, written in 1997 about a timeframe in the late 70s, before you tell us that you know the answer.
Women readers have every right to be cranky over yet another putdown. Sociologists and the bottomfeeders who sell big-hype advicebooks are misleading women pursuing parity.
Think about it. Your 'strategic partner', eagerly clawing his way to the top, who loans you 'some social capital' is putting his 'legitimacy' at risk and at the first sign of loss among his peers is going to cut you loose in most cases regardless of your value to his work or the corporation. But the bottomfeeders can sell advice if they make women feel inadequate and needy, while dangling some ephemeral carrot-mirage in front of the hungry.
Corporate top management has made it clear and sociologists have recorded top managements' answer that the 'responsibilities at their level' are too important to risk the extraneous effort of making them uncomfortable with common rules like including women in their high-powered operations just because the women are eminently capable and have succeeded at proving themselves, even in 'structural holes' in the organization. I remember the sociology presentation at a Women's Studies Luncheon at UC back in about '98 where this result was announced. (Harlan & Weiss) Everyone shrugged and spoke of promise for other generations, but that's not the response women should take.
The women's leadership in the corporate parity marketplace keep being 'puzzled' and constantly coming up with 'new' strategies to say women should try. Well they've been tried, including the one about social capital and structural holes. The women who entered the corporate games in the 70s were not dumb, nor were they poorly endowed with degrees and goals.
The game top management plays is simple and I've outlined it before. It's called creating a 'token woman', specifically a younger one, promote her several steps ahead of all her male peers and those peers immediately stop being nice and working as a team. Doesn't matter whether she's suitably capable, dedicated and well-connected, not even if she's unique and ideally situated. She, and by association, all the other women in the organization automatically become pariahs among their peers unless they openly choose the mommy-track. Frozen out, stalled. There are stats that show that promotions start for males at a later age. The politically correct roosters just ignore the implications and crow that women are making progress with each of those token women! How deluded!
Meanwhile the rest of women's problems keep haunting the shadows giving us nightmares.
It's time to write off the corporate parity thrust and rework our strategy, including how and when to pursue higher education. We've got the cart ahead of the horse in the current sequence.
We should be supporting young women (and our sons) in getting themselves established with a home of their own FIRST. Complete with a set of skills in construction and self-employment. With a women's system-designed home, built with workingclass values and ergonomics, and supporting a lifestyle geared to health and smart economics, our children's futures will be established, unlike the albatross/homes being foisted on the public, not to mention the unproductive adventures as immature learners in higher education. And homes like these, built with major labor input by our construction-talented children would cost less than the usual bill for most college educations at today's prices.
They would effectively earn a home in their youth. Where are young people going to get a job offer with financial potential like this. Want to see how we can swing this?
Postpone the highstakes risks chosen by the wealthy in chasing a degree or three, running up big debts and delaying our natural needs til we and our children are in jeopardy, behind in the race forever because we're not rich enough to make up for the extravagances of the wealthy. Don't emulate that strategy, it's a mistake.
Do the numbers, with a home like we're proposing, free and clear, our economic struggles are minimized. The choices -- of academic pursuits or of civic engagements and activism or of careers of all sorts, most especially in the arts and letters -- are within reach. All because we take the time to get the horse first.
Maybe you think that horse is overly expensive. In fact, not only is it in many cases less expensive than the 'higher' education, but is accessible to a much wider spectrum than just those considering post-secondary education. The numbers I've been accumulating run in the range of $20/sf, or $30/sf if you start with a knowledgeably selected doublewide and make serious improvements. Think about those numbers, with your typical home now being 1500sf, that's an investment of $45,000 and 4 years work, tops. Women just have to learn to tackle real construction with a systems analysis rigor.
But here's the really good part. Look how many women are about to 'retire'. Maybe you've been misled to believe that SocialSecurity-income is inadequate. Well, the game is changed because of our strategy and now we're going to incorporate another thread, namely the home should be multigenerational.
Did you know that in Crete, parents endow their daughters with a home of her own on the promise that the parents can count on their daughters for care in their old age? Interesting, but we're going another step further.
Medicare is the albatross in seniors' financing yet in other societies (Sardinia, Okinawa and the American 7thDay Adventists who were studied in medical circles and photo-storied in National Geographic) the 'typical' aging scenario is invalidated. Specifically in The China Study, the trojan horse carrying the diseases afflicting our lives is our western diet with high proportions of overheated and overprocessed foods and high percentages of animal proteins, one of the other mistaken marks of wealth we've adopted.
But health and smart economics was one of our system-design requirements so our women of the boomer generation could cherry-pick that benefit by keeping their children and grandchildren fully sharing in this home, now larger, that manages its food operations accordingly.
Did you know that intentional communities where resources and operations are shared, majorly reduce the amount of work required to maintain those resources and operations? Roughly half the time and effort of standard individual housekeeping and maintenance.
A large home with shared food-area, utilities, tools, and social areas but with ample private spaces for each couple and their children is economically more buildable than separate homes for each couple. Reducing isolation in aging and supplying experiential knowledge to youth, and financially more doable both to build and to maintain for all of them.
The HOME is the key, not the education nor the career.
I suspect Bodichon and Parkes -- earlier writers on what resources women needed -- also never did the numbers either though I haven't read them and would be interested to know, but from descriptions of their prescriptions it clearly sounds like they were totally focussed on 'income' but that's the wrong place to look.
It's the BOTTOM LINE that matters and by that I'm not excluding intangibles... In decision analysis you have techniques for incorporating intangibles into the bottom line. The good news is that in this case the bottom line financially is itself favorable, and the intangibles in harmony.
Furthermore that bottom line is less prone to risks like workingclass families run into when their employment fails them or some accident occurs. With a more sustainable home economically, especially energy-wise, and more income streams, even though likely smaller for a variety of reasons, the law of large numbers makes the bottomline more stable, not prone to being 'lost', ever.
As a mathematical decision analyst I frequently do mathematical models of situations I'm researching and I'm thinking of doing this scenario of our women boomers and their near-grown children, with soon-to-be families, just to demonstrate 'the numbers'. Everyone seems to have an aversion to doing the numbers and they stay stuck in the ruts corporate greed has engineered. Those mathematical models tell stories, at least to those who pore over the results and who play what-if games with the variables. It's a kind of gaming.
In this case I'd throw out medicare and health insurance, regular schools and childcare.
I can hear the screams now but the reality is, when you look at numbers and logic, those institutions are unbelievably detrimental on any end-use/least-cost analysis.
Did you know that hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical drugs are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US? How do you square that with our society's knee-jerk fear of being denied access to the 3rd leading cause of death, even being willing to pay extortionary premiums for their chance to play this russian-roulette.
Medicare is one of the worst distortions. I have a set of numbers on the costs of stroke care, at home vs with medicare, and the figures clearly show the financial hardships imposed by medicare -- if you want 'the benefits' owed to you for the premiums you paid for, you actually pay more for the care than if you arranged all the services for yourself at home. What sense does Medicare make? Dump it, skip the death-roulette. Skip the extorionary costs of premiums. In fact, with the home/diet strategy of this plan, you've increased the likelihood of staying healthy.
Yet the insane fear prevails. Everyone knows the world is flat. Imagine the impossibility of sailing west to the orient. Only madwomen would try it.
And then there's the screams over dumping regular k-12 and childcare. Home and cyberspace and libraries are our answer. In particular, in Ohio, there's a cybercharter school called OHDELA where any Ohio child can enroll (gotta have a phone). Every OHDELA cybercharter student (or two in the family) is endowed with an empowering computer, complete with scanner, printer and internet access. Plus a budget for individual programs and curriculum, as well as an edu-consultant to work with the parents, or grandma. No rational parent in hard straits like those described by workingclass academics would choose regular school, putting their child at a competitive disadvantage academically and socially, when their child can grow in an environment on near equal footing with their age-peers, have customized opportunities and have more time for needed involvement in family. Not to mention hugely improved time-on-task being free of the herding and crowd-control of factory schooling, not to mention busing. Unfortunately, no one, in the school system those children have access to, will tell them, even though the cybercharter option is less burdensome on the taxpayer.
Think what that computer/internet-access would do for the family after school hours are over.
I once did a comparable financial analysis for a hypothetical pair of single mothers (with one child each) and working only parttime, making near minimum wage to start, finding them a way out of poverty, but an even better arrangement would be if it was grandmother on social security with her daughter and grandchildren. In that presentation, I refrained from displaying the tables of numbers, relying on the story they told. I have since decided that the story has the vulnerability of being discounted as not based on hard facts even though the story includes the significant variables, so I'm thinking of recreating the numbers and posting them with the article.
More like I did in the analysis I did for a presentation of a strategy for the peace & justice art show's program on our energy dilemma, where I trailed along the tables of numbers as they developed. If I was going to sail west to the orient (and I am) I'd want a verifiable set of numbers.
In any case, the answer to the puzzle about women, post-secondary education and remunerative working life is that women should put their funds into a mortgage free, modified home, preferably with mother and siblings, before tackling the adventure of advanced education and not worry about big income promises. Meaningful work, of her own choosing and design, is then a possibility while still being able to share a comfortable, healthy life with her children, free of the financial instability.
Bottomline independence and well-being, not income and parity frustrations.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Dark Humor, the Sierra Club and Peak Oil
Do members of the Sierra Club get a kick out of dark humor? In a recent appeal they apparently enjoyed putting the following oil facts juxtaposed with the Sierra's appeal for contributions. I mean, read especially these amazing facts from their list:
Government will only do what business wants. THE ONLY WAY TO GET WHAT WE WANT IS TO MAKE ANYTHING ELSE FINANCIALLY UNPLEASANT FOR BIG BUSINESS WHILE AT THE SAME TIME CUTTING OUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT FOR GOVT SO THAT THEY CANNOT PROVIDE BIG BUSINESS WHAT WE DENY TO BIG BUSINESS.
It's a fact of life!
Anything less is an exercise in futility, a waste, a self-imposed defeat.
The oil picture is an opportunity, but only if we keep the facts of life clearly in focus. Predictions of Peak Oil are looking pretty impressive compared to the Real World Performance, even with the impacts of embargos and Gulf Wars.
The big business interests have every intention of running the last drop of oil into our veins in order to extract the continuing flow of our funds and avoid the intellectual work and risk of dealing with the unpleasantness ahead. Then they plan to turn around and make us scapegoats and slaves when the oil picture is undeniable and our alternative is a dieoff. They're already trying to make us take the weight, claiming the american public should control their appetites -- unsaid is that industry should continue to draw their piece which btw is roughly 50% to 100% more than what we directly use. And their waste is unbelievably huge.
Big business fully intends to go on wolfing down profits to the detriment of the private individual by playing this petroleum card til the wells are dry. If we let them, we will witness the extremes of that detriment, as if now is not bad enough. All the while chasing our tails on useless agendas like the Sierra's, if we don't grasp the reality of government's perfidy, and act on it.
Meanwhile China, India and the rest are growing faster than we are, especially in population. How are they going to stem their demand? Collision ahead.
Eisenhower warned us about being so dependent of foreign oil, Carter started trying to get us off. Then the oil barons, here and abroad, went into high gear and brought us... (drum roll) cheap oil for a few years so we'd be hooked again. The Saudi oil barons not only accomplished that one, they are responsible for bankrupting Russia. Oil was a major export for the Russians, look in any old atlas. The Saudi cheap oil, undercut the Russian market and Saudi Aramco held them in that hammerlock for six years til there were so many shortages in Russia that the government could no longer continue its operations. Hence Glasnost, all economics, all designed to deal with the big powers.
After recent history, do you think the government will rise to the challenge. Not a chance.
There is a way to piece together a replacement energy system within the next 8-12 years, all finessed by our power as consumers but... the full plan gets to be heavy reading and pretty math stuff so we'll do the executive overview here and you can read the rest at your leisure. I've got the data accumulated at a website, have been discussing this plan with the members of the alternate energy group here in Cinci and will be doing presentations on the concept, first one was last Sunday to a group at the Mockbee galleries. The most urgent part is our basic role as consumers.
The car companies in the US have been making FFVs (flexible fuel vehicles) that will run on gas (which is now 85% gas and 15% ethanol), or on e85 (which is 85% ethanol and 15% gas) or on blends of those, for the last 10 years, that's right 10 YEARS. These FFVs were designed to reduce pollution and the wizards in govt made some phony concessions to environmentalists to require that fleets reduce their collective pollution -- at least on paper -- by buying some of these cars. The Sierra Club's quotas are such a waste, an invitation to weasels. This 'brilliant' government strategy resulted in the FFVs being widely dispersed in fleets everywhere. Of course with this distribution, there was no real market for the e85 they were to run on -- no market anywhere. So although by now there are about 4-5 million of them, the e85 stations are so few that the FFVs run mostly on gas and their enviro impact is nil. A few of the agricultural-states have tried to push their own fleets into using e85 but it wasn't until this year that any of us could get one of these, except as a used car, strictly luck, nor have most people ever heard of e85.
We could have all been driving these FFVs since they're well understood technology and we could have simply driven away from this oil mess. Now comes the opening for consumers, now that these FFVs are "supposed" to be available to the public beginning in 2006, anyone not wanting to throw away their car budget should refuse to buy anything but a diesel or an FFV. (Chrysler announced their plan just last month but the dealers here weren't told and have no clue, only internet readers monitoring these events have paid any attention.) Unless we spread the word that PEOPLE HAVE THIS CHOICE, no one will know and the car companies will pocket your new car money without improving anyone's chances of getting through this mess unscathed.
We simultaneously need to get those already existing FFVs into a limited area so then the e85 conversion can begin. Illinois is offering incentives to stations to clean out one of their tanks and offer e85. That's basically all it would take to provide the infrastructure. In fact, if we get into a real fix, like another embargo, it would be really useful to have the e85 stations around everywhere as well even before we have lots of FFVs, but let's save that 'wiggle room' for discussion IF something dire happens. (Note Illinois govt is interested because of the benefit to business in their state)
Meanwhile, know any good mechanic who likes to travel to fleet auctions? Taking FFVs from states-with-no-real-e85-stations to states-with-a real-e85-market would probably get a better price. Any other suggestions? This is not a waste of our efforts.
Every FFV running on e85 cuts their contribution to big oil's immoral profits by 82%, AND IF we refuse to buy any new cars but FFVs BUT we continue to replace our vehicles at about 10% of them per year, within 6 years we will have cut our cars' oil consumption in half. In 12 years we're free of the monsters in oil -- at least when we're driving.
The other part of the equation is a process called TDP (thermal de-polymerization) which has the ability to convert most of our waste into oil, everything carbon-based can be converted (which means no help with nuclear waste so until someone wants that stuff in their backyard the nukes have to go but that's covered in another part of the strategy). Sewage yes, old tires yes, turkey guts and cow brains yes, plastics yes, etc. All produce oil. The key is to have a consistent stream of waste, so the optimal arrangement is to have a suitable size TDP facility adjacent to a dedicated source, like a factory or a mall or the sewage plant or a junkyard, etc.
The volumes required to replace foreign oil, however, would require 30,000 such facilities and cost $600 billion. Those are big numbers so let's put them in perspective with appropriate sources of site and funding. Assuming we aren't limiting ourselves to agricultural waste, since industrial waste is 5 times as great, this would mean about 300 some in Ohio, with maybe 7 inside the Cincinnati loop. Not too bad.
On the funding side, US corporations have $ 500 billion in retained profits -- after paying shareholders -- FROM LAST YEAR ALONE, which they have not committed to investing in their operation's growth or improvement because they 'detect' a 'lack confidence' in consumers. Maybe they remember how they downsized huge numbers of those potential consumers as former employees, then stole their pensions later, in between getting caught in major corruption scandals and still try to induce us to risk more of the equity in our home on more shoddy merchandise.
Anyway they are sitting on this huge stash. Almost what's needed in just one year's retained earnings! Nor are other year's profits that much less, with the lowest in the last 5 years being at least 70% of this year's. Rationally, the funds invested would save them from spikes in their oil expenses due to foreign meddling (like an embargo, or unstable supplies due to terrorist activities, or maybe just another Katrina), would likely marginally increase their earnings (from oil income minus operating costs, instead of waste removal expense) and generate positive PR, not to mention that it has to be done eventually.
We're going to have to push them to move, any way we can. Suggestions, consumer pressure, stockholder lures, whatever. If the car companies get the message that we're serious about our demand for FFVs, maybe investors will shift their money -- and corporations will be forced to dance to our tune that much sooner.
The third piece is to get our homes using as much solar heating as we can so we can get free of the need for oil (and soon natural gas) to shelter our families from the cold. To make solar work in the midwest (the original solar designs are more viable elsewhere, but the midwest has been only recently developing refinements of solar that are more practical here) requires well insulated homes, and thermal storage to get through the sometimes 10-11 winter days of very little sun. This push for solar is not just a nicety anymore.
Nor are conservation tactics like setting the thermostat lower in winter (and higher in summer) and making adjustments in lifestyle to fit. The key at lower temps is to enjoy the season's treats of well-designed warm clothing, warm drinks, infra-red task lighting, more baking, radiant heat under your feet, warm bathing areas, etc... The principle is that a small allocation of energy to personal warmth makes the large allocation of energy for space heating an unnecessary waste and hence an opportunity to save.
The main change in thermal storage is insulated berms. Houses in the midwest should have berms. It's simply regionally appropriate. And in those berms we can store summer's heat, using way fewer solar collectors once the berm is insulated and designed for the purpose. That design is called PAHS -- passive annual heat storage.
Cars and heat are our biggest vulnerabilities and as consumers they're in our grasp.
There are a few more wrinkles to our plan but those are the big pieces. How many more of the wrinkles we will need -- and how soon -- will depend on when oil production can't keep up with growth in demand, as well as on how well we manage to twist arms to get FFVs and begin building TDP facilities.
What we do know is that we have to get as many families as we can to start figuring their way along this path -- FFVs, e85, TDP, conservation, solar and berms -- so we can get free of petroleum-based oil.
Oh, and if you did want to read through the details of the full picture, the first presentation is currently developing at Bergerac.TV assembled by the reader with the spreadsheet.
-
HANDOUTS TO AMERICANS VERSUS BIG OIL
$30 million...Amount the top 10 oil companies spent on lobbying in 2005.
$80 billion...in subsidies and tax loopholes to the oil and gas and other polluting energy industries in the energy law signed in 2005. (Taxpayers for Common Sense – www.taxpayer.net)
$7 billion...Amount oil companies would gain over the next five years by avoiding royalty payments for Gulf oil and gas drilling, thanks to an obscure provision in the 2005 energy bill. The costs could soar to $28 billion. (New York Times, March 28, 2006)
$100...Amount some in Congress proposed giving to Americans in the form of a tax rebate later this summer.
Government will only do what business wants. THE ONLY WAY TO GET WHAT WE WANT IS TO MAKE ANYTHING ELSE FINANCIALLY UNPLEASANT FOR BIG BUSINESS WHILE AT THE SAME TIME CUTTING OUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT FOR GOVT SO THAT THEY CANNOT PROVIDE BIG BUSINESS WHAT WE DENY TO BIG BUSINESS.
It's a fact of life!
Anything less is an exercise in futility, a waste, a self-imposed defeat.
The oil picture is an opportunity, but only if we keep the facts of life clearly in focus. Predictions of Peak Oil are looking pretty impressive compared to the Real World Performance, even with the impacts of embargos and Gulf Wars.
The big business interests have every intention of running the last drop of oil into our veins in order to extract the continuing flow of our funds and avoid the intellectual work and risk of dealing with the unpleasantness ahead. Then they plan to turn around and make us scapegoats and slaves when the oil picture is undeniable and our alternative is a dieoff. They're already trying to make us take the weight, claiming the american public should control their appetites -- unsaid is that industry should continue to draw their piece which btw is roughly 50% to 100% more than what we directly use. And their waste is unbelievably huge.
Big business fully intends to go on wolfing down profits to the detriment of the private individual by playing this petroleum card til the wells are dry. If we let them, we will witness the extremes of that detriment, as if now is not bad enough. All the while chasing our tails on useless agendas like the Sierra's, if we don't grasp the reality of government's perfidy, and act on it.
Meanwhile China, India and the rest are growing faster than we are, especially in population. How are they going to stem their demand? Collision ahead.
Eisenhower warned us about being so dependent of foreign oil, Carter started trying to get us off. Then the oil barons, here and abroad, went into high gear and brought us... (drum roll) cheap oil for a few years so we'd be hooked again. The Saudi oil barons not only accomplished that one, they are responsible for bankrupting Russia. Oil was a major export for the Russians, look in any old atlas. The Saudi cheap oil, undercut the Russian market and Saudi Aramco held them in that hammerlock for six years til there were so many shortages in Russia that the government could no longer continue its operations. Hence Glasnost, all economics, all designed to deal with the big powers.
After recent history, do you think the government will rise to the challenge. Not a chance.
There is a way to piece together a replacement energy system within the next 8-12 years, all finessed by our power as consumers but... the full plan gets to be heavy reading and pretty math stuff so we'll do the executive overview here and you can read the rest at your leisure. I've got the data accumulated at a website, have been discussing this plan with the members of the alternate energy group here in Cinci and will be doing presentations on the concept, first one was last Sunday to a group at the Mockbee galleries. The most urgent part is our basic role as consumers.
The car companies in the US have been making FFVs (flexible fuel vehicles) that will run on gas (which is now 85% gas and 15% ethanol), or on e85 (which is 85% ethanol and 15% gas) or on blends of those, for the last 10 years, that's right 10 YEARS. These FFVs were designed to reduce pollution and the wizards in govt made some phony concessions to environmentalists to require that fleets reduce their collective pollution -- at least on paper -- by buying some of these cars. The Sierra Club's quotas are such a waste, an invitation to weasels. This 'brilliant' government strategy resulted in the FFVs being widely dispersed in fleets everywhere. Of course with this distribution, there was no real market for the e85 they were to run on -- no market anywhere. So although by now there are about 4-5 million of them, the e85 stations are so few that the FFVs run mostly on gas and their enviro impact is nil. A few of the agricultural-states have tried to push their own fleets into using e85 but it wasn't until this year that any of us could get one of these, except as a used car, strictly luck, nor have most people ever heard of e85.
We could have all been driving these FFVs since they're well understood technology and we could have simply driven away from this oil mess. Now comes the opening for consumers, now that these FFVs are "supposed" to be available to the public beginning in 2006, anyone not wanting to throw away their car budget should refuse to buy anything but a diesel or an FFV. (Chrysler announced their plan just last month but the dealers here weren't told and have no clue, only internet readers monitoring these events have paid any attention.) Unless we spread the word that PEOPLE HAVE THIS CHOICE, no one will know and the car companies will pocket your new car money without improving anyone's chances of getting through this mess unscathed.
We simultaneously need to get those already existing FFVs into a limited area so then the e85 conversion can begin. Illinois is offering incentives to stations to clean out one of their tanks and offer e85. That's basically all it would take to provide the infrastructure. In fact, if we get into a real fix, like another embargo, it would be really useful to have the e85 stations around everywhere as well even before we have lots of FFVs, but let's save that 'wiggle room' for discussion IF something dire happens. (Note Illinois govt is interested because of the benefit to business in their state)
Meanwhile, know any good mechanic who likes to travel to fleet auctions? Taking FFVs from states-with-no-real-e85-stations to states-with-a real-e85-market would probably get a better price. Any other suggestions? This is not a waste of our efforts.
Every FFV running on e85 cuts their contribution to big oil's immoral profits by 82%, AND IF we refuse to buy any new cars but FFVs BUT we continue to replace our vehicles at about 10% of them per year, within 6 years we will have cut our cars' oil consumption in half. In 12 years we're free of the monsters in oil -- at least when we're driving.
The other part of the equation is a process called TDP (thermal de-polymerization) which has the ability to convert most of our waste into oil, everything carbon-based can be converted (which means no help with nuclear waste so until someone wants that stuff in their backyard the nukes have to go but that's covered in another part of the strategy). Sewage yes, old tires yes, turkey guts and cow brains yes, plastics yes, etc. All produce oil. The key is to have a consistent stream of waste, so the optimal arrangement is to have a suitable size TDP facility adjacent to a dedicated source, like a factory or a mall or the sewage plant or a junkyard, etc.
The volumes required to replace foreign oil, however, would require 30,000 such facilities and cost $600 billion. Those are big numbers so let's put them in perspective with appropriate sources of site and funding. Assuming we aren't limiting ourselves to agricultural waste, since industrial waste is 5 times as great, this would mean about 300 some in Ohio, with maybe 7 inside the Cincinnati loop. Not too bad.
On the funding side, US corporations have $ 500 billion in retained profits -- after paying shareholders -- FROM LAST YEAR ALONE, which they have not committed to investing in their operation's growth or improvement because they 'detect' a 'lack confidence' in consumers. Maybe they remember how they downsized huge numbers of those potential consumers as former employees, then stole their pensions later, in between getting caught in major corruption scandals and still try to induce us to risk more of the equity in our home on more shoddy merchandise.
Anyway they are sitting on this huge stash. Almost what's needed in just one year's retained earnings! Nor are other year's profits that much less, with the lowest in the last 5 years being at least 70% of this year's. Rationally, the funds invested would save them from spikes in their oil expenses due to foreign meddling (like an embargo, or unstable supplies due to terrorist activities, or maybe just another Katrina), would likely marginally increase their earnings (from oil income minus operating costs, instead of waste removal expense) and generate positive PR, not to mention that it has to be done eventually.
We're going to have to push them to move, any way we can. Suggestions, consumer pressure, stockholder lures, whatever. If the car companies get the message that we're serious about our demand for FFVs, maybe investors will shift their money -- and corporations will be forced to dance to our tune that much sooner.
The third piece is to get our homes using as much solar heating as we can so we can get free of the need for oil (and soon natural gas) to shelter our families from the cold. To make solar work in the midwest (the original solar designs are more viable elsewhere, but the midwest has been only recently developing refinements of solar that are more practical here) requires well insulated homes, and thermal storage to get through the sometimes 10-11 winter days of very little sun. This push for solar is not just a nicety anymore.
Nor are conservation tactics like setting the thermostat lower in winter (and higher in summer) and making adjustments in lifestyle to fit. The key at lower temps is to enjoy the season's treats of well-designed warm clothing, warm drinks, infra-red task lighting, more baking, radiant heat under your feet, warm bathing areas, etc... The principle is that a small allocation of energy to personal warmth makes the large allocation of energy for space heating an unnecessary waste and hence an opportunity to save.
The main change in thermal storage is insulated berms. Houses in the midwest should have berms. It's simply regionally appropriate. And in those berms we can store summer's heat, using way fewer solar collectors once the berm is insulated and designed for the purpose. That design is called PAHS -- passive annual heat storage.
Cars and heat are our biggest vulnerabilities and as consumers they're in our grasp.
There are a few more wrinkles to our plan but those are the big pieces. How many more of the wrinkles we will need -- and how soon -- will depend on when oil production can't keep up with growth in demand, as well as on how well we manage to twist arms to get FFVs and begin building TDP facilities.
What we do know is that we have to get as many families as we can to start figuring their way along this path -- FFVs, e85, TDP, conservation, solar and berms -- so we can get free of petroleum-based oil.
Oh, and if you did want to read through the details of the full picture, the first presentation is currently developing at Bergerac.TV assembled by the reader with the spreadsheet.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
What the 9-11 dead and their 911tapes are telling us about their killers
I trust you've seen/heard at least excerpts from the tapes of the 911 operators on 9-11. But in that emotional turmoil accompanying this reviving of that day's events and images, are we missing the real message the dead are sending us?
Look at the locations, the timing and the comments of the victims that have managed to get through the court's hurdles for release. Every one of them is pointing to smoke as their immediate killer. Not one is mentioning any blazing inferno. Any searing heat. The callers were still active, judging by the transcript's times, til at least 10 minutes before the total collapse of the towers.
Yet the WTC towers collapsed so rapidly, not even delayed by pancaking stages, that the official story's inferno would have had to have destroyed the towers' cores from bottom-to-top, including the floors where these calls originated. But steel doesn't melt down at Fahrenheit 451, more like ten times that. What happens in interiors of offices and homes is rapid incineration when the temperatures reach the flash point. In fact, I've read that smoke is a sign of a, relatively speaking, cool fire.
So 10 minutes before the building whooshed to the ground, the interiors of those offices were still below the flash point for all that office and paper mess. That was at least an hour and 15 minutes after the second plane hit. The planes' impact, the planes' contents, none of that has built an inferno in the core after an hour, yielding even temperatures that could ignite office materials from the inferno's heat.
Nor were these floors protected by the asbestos that was built into the lower floors. All that asbestos the WTC owners were trying to avoid 'remediating' was confined to the lower 70-some floors, not where these victims were trapped with no such protection. The heat from any quarter-mile long (full-tower-long) inferno in the core would have swept through these offices, now lacking life support, even sooner than the lower floors where firefighters were preparing to fight the fire they saw and expected to rescue the buildings' occupants.
Whatever brought that steel down was not being seen or experienced by either firefighters below, nor victims above. That's what those tapes and their messages from the dead are telling us. Not that the operators were badly prepared, nor handled the hazards inappropriately.
What this court release of tapes appears to be, with its timing coming on the heels of increasing media attention to the '911Truth' movements, is an attempt to again add the weight of anguish to the facade the real killers and their collaborators hide behind, the lie that our defenses failed, that incompetance and lack of preparedness, were the key to understanding the disaster.
Let's not be so easy to manipulate. Let's absorb the message our dead are telling us. The cause of the towers collapse was not likely the result of plane impacts and towering infernos. Instead we should add the weight of their testimony in the 911 emergency tapes to the accumulating attention to 9-11Truth.
It must be discomfiting the real killers to see even the puzzled mainstream media attention like CNN's program and the article in The New Yorker. How much more alarm must the petition documents filed by the Scholars for 911Truth be arousing in the depths of the minds of the truly guilty.
Or do they sit back like shellgame perpetrators and think this distraction aimed at 911 operators will strengthen their facade of incompetance adequately, that reminders of our trauma will make us want to forget that day's details, that attention stirred up on the topic by the Truth9-11 interest will be muddied with diffuse and unfocussed speculations about peripheral details?
Let's not give them that satisfaction. Let's turn their ploy against them, not let them or their collaborators who benefitted, majorly, escape recognition. We may or may not be able to get the current government to deal with the monstrous reality, but we have other ways to deal with them all, more subtle, more peaceful, more beneficial to all the innocent and more devastating to the guilty.
Look at the locations, the timing and the comments of the victims that have managed to get through the court's hurdles for release. Every one of them is pointing to smoke as their immediate killer. Not one is mentioning any blazing inferno. Any searing heat. The callers were still active, judging by the transcript's times, til at least 10 minutes before the total collapse of the towers.
Yet the WTC towers collapsed so rapidly, not even delayed by pancaking stages, that the official story's inferno would have had to have destroyed the towers' cores from bottom-to-top, including the floors where these calls originated. But steel doesn't melt down at Fahrenheit 451, more like ten times that. What happens in interiors of offices and homes is rapid incineration when the temperatures reach the flash point. In fact, I've read that smoke is a sign of a, relatively speaking, cool fire.
So 10 minutes before the building whooshed to the ground, the interiors of those offices were still below the flash point for all that office and paper mess. That was at least an hour and 15 minutes after the second plane hit. The planes' impact, the planes' contents, none of that has built an inferno in the core after an hour, yielding even temperatures that could ignite office materials from the inferno's heat.
Nor were these floors protected by the asbestos that was built into the lower floors. All that asbestos the WTC owners were trying to avoid 'remediating' was confined to the lower 70-some floors, not where these victims were trapped with no such protection. The heat from any quarter-mile long (full-tower-long) inferno in the core would have swept through these offices, now lacking life support, even sooner than the lower floors where firefighters were preparing to fight the fire they saw and expected to rescue the buildings' occupants.
Whatever brought that steel down was not being seen or experienced by either firefighters below, nor victims above. That's what those tapes and their messages from the dead are telling us. Not that the operators were badly prepared, nor handled the hazards inappropriately.
What this court release of tapes appears to be, with its timing coming on the heels of increasing media attention to the '911Truth' movements, is an attempt to again add the weight of anguish to the facade the real killers and their collaborators hide behind, the lie that our defenses failed, that incompetance and lack of preparedness, were the key to understanding the disaster.
Let's not be so easy to manipulate. Let's absorb the message our dead are telling us. The cause of the towers collapse was not likely the result of plane impacts and towering infernos. Instead we should add the weight of their testimony in the 911 emergency tapes to the accumulating attention to 9-11Truth.
It must be discomfiting the real killers to see even the puzzled mainstream media attention like CNN's program and the article in The New Yorker. How much more alarm must the petition documents filed by the Scholars for 911Truth be arousing in the depths of the minds of the truly guilty.
Or do they sit back like shellgame perpetrators and think this distraction aimed at 911 operators will strengthen their facade of incompetance adequately, that reminders of our trauma will make us want to forget that day's details, that attention stirred up on the topic by the Truth9-11 interest will be muddied with diffuse and unfocussed speculations about peripheral details?
Let's not give them that satisfaction. Let's turn their ploy against them, not let them or their collaborators who benefitted, majorly, escape recognition. We may or may not be able to get the current government to deal with the monstrous reality, but we have other ways to deal with them all, more subtle, more peaceful, more beneficial to all the innocent and more devastating to the guilty.
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