By Tom on 11/12/2008 11:42 AM

That's stretched a little from Bill Mc Kibben's current article in Mother Jones, this paragraph for instance:

"The final piece of the puzzle came early this year, and again from James Hansen. Twenty years after his crucial testimony, he published a paper with several coauthors called "Target Atmospheric CO2." It put, finally, a number on the table—indeed it did so in the boldest of terms. 'If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,' it said, 'paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.'   Stunned, I tried to get  my duck response team lined up so I could consult with the leader. The first clear response turned out to be a resolve to let my two granddaughters know what is going to happen to the next generation. Next, it became clear that duck number two wanted Vashon to sign on en masse to Fourth Corner Exchange, a trading scheme using...

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By Tom on 11/5/2008 9:55 PM

During the Camp Casey period, Bush failing to  notice the grieving mother camped nearby, he had plenty of time to speak at an American Legion event, right there in Texas. A photographer caught this picture of the bon homie between the veteran and the draft dodger. When it appeared in the  news it was too much for me so I added Cindy. The combination says what i can't put into words about the callous hypocrisy of George Bush. The picture doesn't compliment the Legionaire for which I can't say I'm sorry.

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By Tom on 11/3/2008 7:54 PM

To The Beachcomber Nov 3, 2008   New classrooms at this juncture are questionable in the extreme due to the financial meltdown underway and to the fact that such construction would belie Vashon’s growing spiritual need, a need due to imminent national mass hysteria over a corrupted government. School facilities should provide a” framework” that begs to be built upon. Yet school boards tend to put students “on Astroturf”, if you permit, so as to reduce cost. With “Astroturf” include electronics and other technological features that are seen as improving the effectiveness of teaching. Do the new classrooms improve education in proportion? The answer depends on the extent to which students are the “builders”. I believe it axiomatic that one learns by doing. Okay, then, here’s this broken down old school, and here’s this unruly crowd of muscle and charm, let one and one make three: hold a referendum on what they think will improve their education, and then next spring let it happen. Example? Astroturf aint green....

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By Tom on 10/29/2008 7:49 AM

Whereas the following is an example of my rule of one blog, one thought, I must  say that David Sirota's idea of a "progressive mandate" is an attempt to inject a modicum of significance  into a paper mache election:

The Potential Progressive Mandate* Denver Post's PoliticsWest, 10/28/08 Thanks to Maryrose Asher for finding this and so providing an opening for my single thought. Sirota states that McCain has augured a hole of some kind that a president Obama would have a mandate to fill. Misquote? Go read it yourself. My single thought, regardless, is that the 2009 president's only mandate is to  provide a cloak of change for unchanging corporate control of our government. Johnson changed it, Reagan changed it, but since then the presidents have been window dressers, Clinton the most skilful.

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By Tom on 10/28/2008 4:37 PM

NPR used to feature "Dr. Science, he knows more than you do." In these trying times we need himerher, oh well, him actually, more than ever, as authorities daily try our faith in reason. So we have looked him up, and the first question we posed was: how come Christian Science can heal?

"Simple," he said. "It is known that the auto-immune diseases are strongly modulated by stress. Well, these are typical of the diseases that have been cured by Christian Science practitioners."

Don't bother contesting this , remember, he knows more than you do.

By Tom on 10/26/2008 9:23 AM

The bubbles of truth rising to the surface of the mediatraumanian sea tell me that on election day we bail out of a losing situation using a parachute with a hole in it. Got that from Europe, actually. The word from Latin America is similar but has an edge of hostile defiance. L.A. has my whole-hearted empathy in that regard, no matter that Senors Hugo and Evo are poking a desperate US in the eye. (Can a blog put a wiggly over an n?) Now, about that hole, it's the vacuum of moral authority in the office of the President. The "dark matter" in that vacuum is corporate hegemony, revealed finally for all to see and despise.

Vashon, oh my Vashon, whyfore dost thou stick thy obomination signs in the hardpan? You have been proffered a straw whilst his backers roll in the hay.

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By Tom on 10/19/2008 6:12 PM

  An ironical blend of farce and tragedy, this election for president has as its icon the adorable wolverine in Juneau. The debates are a farce, and tragically, both campaigns are financed by non human, inhuman, corporations that are laying waste to every profitable square inch and soul on our little blue dot. The timing of the irony is remarkable in that so many things are going sour at the same time. Arctic methane is putting an afterburner on climate change, the Iraq middle class has fled, Palestinians are being dehumanized, species are going extinct at a rate exceeding the big extinction, the rain forests are over half gone, the NAFTA-con-Wall Street fiasco has newly pushed poor Mexicans into poverty, the fiasco itself has been “rewarded” while the people hurt by it have been ignored, and on October 15 at Hofstra University a mounted police officer deliberately trampled a protesting veteran of the Iraq war. Menwomen, as the farce plays on, the war on terror has come home. But of course there never as a war...

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By Tom on 10/19/2008 6:08 PM

A Green Rhizome As this appears in e-print the GPoWS will have approved amendment #1, survived a week tacked to a bulletin board, and be ready for diversion. But all you’re going to get here is a root canal job. With #1 passed, the state party will be an aggregation of locals, GPoWS becoming GPsoWS. How the locals will operate will be new, but their goal will still be to put good people into office. The wisdom of that should be questioned, because it so far has gotten us nowhere: us, the Party, nowhere. Findings are listed, and then a different goal offered. Electioneering at the national level will continue to fail because the two-party system was designed by professionals to keep a third party out. Electioneering by labor movements in the past has eviscerated them, eg the Workingmen’s Party faded after it diverted energy into electioneering. We are smarter? Corporate control of national offices has severely limited options for good works. It’s the money, right? The higher the level of office the lower...

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By Tom on 10/19/2008 6:06 PM

The other day a man in a wheelchair was seen at the Vashon north end coffee kiosk. While that in itself was not uncommon, the cluster of white dogs around the wheelchair was uncommon. What then happened was out of this world. A poodle separated out from the cluster to reveal a pair of big white Alaskan sled dogs attached to the wheelchair. And off they went down the walkway to the ferry. As they passed our car the wheelchair was seen to have no arm rests nor, apparently, a back. And they were moving. I don’t know if the walkway at this time had been clear, or got cleared suddenly, but no late walk-on ever hit this pace. The effect was as if a ray of hope had broken through the miasma of MARSEC signs that insult ferry commuters these days. At risk of dog paddling in deep water I’ll comment on human nature. Not just because a wheelchair was doing wheelies behind two sled dogs, but also because last Friday Andrew Bacevich told Bill Moyers that Americans are stodgy greedy lumps. You could look up the exact words...

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By Tom on 10/13/2008 11:25 AM

  Last week arctic researchers found “chimneys of methane” erupting from the surface of the Barents Sea. The gas is released by melting sub-sea permafrost. Calculations have shown that there is more carbon where that is coming from than in known coal reserves. Meanwhile, Henry “Poke” Paulson is telling Congress that the financial sector is the basis of the US economy. We hope Congress will maintain a deaf ear to that, but hope is in short supply what with McCain wanting to augment the 700 billion that may be going into Wall Street’s poke by throwing Social Security in after it. Given all this one would think that the election would turn on an issue: if not the war then perhaps the resale value of a Prius, or how to live on crackers and high fructose cola. Could someone explain to this stupefied column how it is that at this worst crisis in US history both nominees for president promise to make things worse? Speaking of the election, it’s a paradox that the race for California’s 8th district House seat is more...

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