By Tom on 11/26/2008 10:26 AM

The swirl about K2 has a close relative in the desperate attempt to find a use for an expensive gadget you cannot for the life of you find a use for. A second cousin is finding a use for the unused portion of a batch of mixed epoxy: K2 is here, it is big, ergo the question is how to use it. But a far more important question goes unasked and that is how to use our Island. Pull your heads out of the swirl of words about K2 and look at what is happening willy nilly to America and will soon be happening to Vashon. Bled white and with the Damocles sword of abrupt climate change over our heads we join the third world. Predictions of when it will happen differ wildly but all trend sooner, not later. And while you are calculating, do not forget war. When, then? My mailbox finds a consensus of next summer. There’s the context, and the above noted far more important question is how we use Vashon. Let’s simplify the challenges by two slight exaggerations: when the change has fully developed ferry fares will prohibit commuting...

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By Tom on 11/21/2008 12:22 PM

  (From Greener Times) The den of thieves back East are looting the country and we are supposed to celebrate Thanksgiving? Troops home by Christmas would be something to celebrate; too bad that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen says there are so many men and so much materiel in Iraq that a pullout would take years. And eviction of the Bush administration, so hoped for, is yet no cause to celebrate because Bush has planted stink bombs in every crevice of the crumbling bureaucracy of government. Thanks to Bush climate change has passed the threshold of instability with as yet no corrective measures taken, even some measures taken to speed up change. Coal burning could stop today yet not prevent the abrupt culmination of positive feedback that will occur within ten years. Ask James Hanson. Thanks to Bush morbid programs like No Child Left Behind, the Patriot act and Homeland Security are in place with no uninstall software available. And those are merely the tip of the smelly iceberg. In fact, Bush has instituted...

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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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