Angela Bacon-Kidwell's exceptional photography. Love love love it. She's a Texan too.




Take a quick look here at some, and visit her site:

http://www.angelabaconkidwell.com

(  2 more I like, though I like all of em )

this faun is now sticking his tongue out at me.

This Fourth, talk about this with your friends and family:

In recent years, the statistics regarding income disparity in America have been startling. After-tax annual income for the bottom fifth of American households inched up just 6 percent from 1979 to 2005, according to the Congressional Budget Office. During that time, income for the middle fifth of households grew by a modest 21 percent, with much of that gain caused by women in many households working more hours. Over that same period, income for the top fifth of households jumped by an impressive 80 percent, while income for the top 1 percent more than tripled, soaring by 228 percent.

"The average American went exactly nowhere on the economic scale" over the past two decades. "He's been on a treadmill, while the superrich have been on a spaceship."
- Warren Buffett, now America's richest person.

Buffett, known as the Sage of Omaha, had another surprising insight: "There's class warfare all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war and we're winning."

What is little understood is that those who accuse others of class warfare as they seek to silence anyone who criticizes America's worsening income inequality are slyly engaging in a form of class warfare themselves--with the aim of defending the interests of those at the very top of the income pyramid.

Reducing inequality won't be easy, but according to many economists, there are numerous measures that would help, among them increasing taxes on the richest Americans, increasing the earned income tax credit, ensuring greater educational opportunities to those at the bottom, making it easier to unionize low-wage workers and doing more to preserve manufacturing industries that pay middle-class wages.




info from Steven Greenhouse

I'm no fan of Christopher Hitchens, but good on him for doing this. Also noteworthy, is how short of a time he lasts, but still talks about the lingering affects of being waterboarded.

How does it feel to be “aggressively interrogated”? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America’s use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere.


http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/video/2008/hitchens_video200808




more here:
The most gruesome thing about Hitchens' video is watching the slow, methodic preparation for his torture. See him hooded, strapped to the board, bonds squeezing his fat chest and stomach. See the hooded interrogator slowly explaining to him about non-verbal signals for "unendurable stress." See the men in khakis and polo shirts daintily putting a towel over Hitchens' hooded face. See his awful expression and gasping red face as he gives up within seconds. And recognize that the men who were waterboarded -- whose waterboarding means, in a society allegedly devoted to the rule of law, that they will never be successfully prosecuted in any recognizable system of justice -- never had the baseline mercies that these terrifying scenes nevertheless indicated Hitchens enjoyed.

http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2008/07/02/hitchensboarding/

Impossible to find the newest from McDaniel and Hoagland. Amazon here I come. I looked in every local store, no dice. i can wait no more.

All the bubbles, and more, right here:
http://flickr.com/photos/mojodragonfly/

god bless Shannon. my heartfelt condolences to her mom, friends and family


http://red-five.livejournal.com/

take your protein pill and put your helmet on

Bubble in a Bubble



Bubble sunset

thorns of the moon

The City of Austin, the LCRA, the City of Dripping Springs and two groundwater conservation districts have approved a settlement agreement that would allow the Belterra subdivision to dump 350,000 gallons a day of treated sewage into Bear Creek, which feeds the Barton Springs portion of the Edwards Aquifer.

The plan initially met with universal dissaproval, but costly lawsuits and fears that the Orwellianly-named Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would approve Belterra's initial request to dump 800,000 gallons a day have reduced the opposition to a handful of downstream neighbors.

The only remaining required approval is expected to come from Hays County tomorrow. The agreement would make Belterra the first subdivision allowed to dump treated sewage directly into a stream in the Barton Springs part of the Edwards Aquifer. Belterra currently discharges treated sewage via underground drip irrigation into a fenced off parcel of land.

Sewage-dumping proponents say treated sewage is safe enough to drink. Of course, they don't drink it or even water their lawns with it, so they really mean it is safe enough for other people to drink (or swim in). Also, water treatment plants often fail - last week an estimated 200,000 gallons of raw sewage spilled into Little Sandy Creek north of Eligin. This will not be the first pollution of a pristine environment - Barton Springs' water quality has already been degraded by upstream development (treated sewage discharged as drip irrigation by Belterra and other subdivisions still ends up in Edwards Aquifer, along with lawn chemicals, highway runoff, etc.), but it will enable Belterra to expand from 350 houses to as many as 2,000 and create a precedent to allow other subdivisions to dump treated sewage.

though my Doggett still rocks!

Drilling off the coasts


This is the big stink these days. You're paying too much in gas, lift the ban! Despite the fact that lifting the ban wouldn't affect prices for years, since operations would need to be put in place, which takes time.


Nonetheless, it is important to remember why a ban (some twenty years old) was put in place, and that is what is missing from all coverage.


Here's why:

http://environmentoregon.org/issues/ocean/stop-offshore-drilling

The Threat of Oil and Gas Drilling

The effects of an oil spill are cemented in the minds of anyone who remembers the Exxon Valdez spill or, for those who remember, the 1971 oil spills off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. The images of oil-coated birds and wildlife, and of ruined beaches, are hard to forget.

However, the damage caused by oil and gas extraction goes far beyond the effects of an oil spill. In an environmental impact statement on drilling activities in the Gulf of Mexico, the Minerals Management Service listed the following as “unavoidable” consequences of offshore drilling: erosion of wetlands, air pollution, contamination by toxic chemicals, dumping of industrial waste and debris, and the decline of fish populations.

A single drilling rig can drill between 50 and 100 wells, each dumping as much as 25,000 pounds of toxic metals such as lead, chromium, and mercury, and potent carcinogens such as toluene, benzene, and xylene into the ocean. Each drilling rig can create as much air pollution as 7,000 cars driving 50 miles each day.

*****

http://www.bluestemprairie.com/a_bluestem_prairie/2008/06/house-natural-r.html

visit the link above to learn more about these facts, from the House Natural Resources Committee Report

_ On the Outer Continental Shelf, 82% of federal natural gas and 79%
of federal oil is located in areas that are currently open for leasing.

_ Onshore, 72% of oil and 84% of natural gas resources are either fully accessible under standard lease stipulations designed to protect lands and wildlife, or will be accessible pending the completion of land-use planning or environmental reviews.

_ Between 1999 and 2007, drilling permits for oil and gas development on public lands increased more than 361%.

_ Since 2004, the Bureau of Land Management has issued 28,776 permits to drill on public land; in that same time, only 18,954 wells were actually drilled.

_ Oil and gas companies have stockpiled nearly 10,000 extra permits to drill that they are not using to increase domestic production.

_ Onshore, of the 47.5 million acres of federal lands leased by oil and gas companies, only about 13 million acres are actually producing oil and gas.

_ Offshore, only 10.5 million of the 44 million leased acres are currently producing oil or gas.

_ Combined, oil and gas companies hold leases to nearly 68 million acres of federal land that are not producing oil and gas.

_ The 68 million acres of leased, inactive federal land could produce an additional 4.8 million barrels of oil and 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day.

_ That would nearly double total U.S. oil production, and increase natural gas production by 75%.

_ 4.8 million barrels of oil equals more than six times the estimated peak production from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

_ Development of and production from the 68 million acres currently under lease but not in production would cut US imports of oil by one-third.

There's much more and a link to the majority report of the House Committee on Natural Resources. Check it out and spread the word.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.havana15jun15,0,7343562.story

Cuba's urban farming program has been a stunning, and surprising, success. The farms, many of them on tiny plots like Bouza's, now supply much of Cuba's vegetables. They also provide 350,000 jobs nationwide with relatively high pay and have transformed eating habits in a nation accustomed to a less-than-ideal diet of rice and beans and canned goods from Eastern Europe.

*

...when the collapse of the Soviet Union - and the halt of its subsidized food shipments to Cuba - effectively cut her government salary to $3 a month. Suddenly, a trip to the grocery store was out of reach.

...she quit her job, and under a program championed by then-Defense Minister Raul Castro, asked the government for the right to farm an overgrown, half-acre lot near her Havana home. Now, her husband tends rows of tomatoes, sweet potatoes and spinach, while Bouza, 48, sells the produce at a stall on a busy street.

Neighbors are happy with cheap vegetables fresh from the field. Bouza never lacks for fresh produce, and she pulls in $100 to $250 a month - many times the average government salary of $19.

*

"It's a really interesting model looking at what's possible in a nation that's 80 percent urban," said Catherine Murphy, a California sociologist who spent a decade studying farms in Havana. "It shows that cities can produce huge amounts of their own food, and you get all kinds of social and ecological benefits."

Of course, urban farms might not be such a success in a healthy, competitive economy.




"All that money is mine," she said. "The only thing I have to buy is protein" - meat.

I got street credibility!



You know you know the wham rap! Don't be frontin'!

PHONE CALL

By Tony Hoagland


Maybe I overdid it
when I called my father an enemy of humanity.
That might have been a little strongly put,
a slight overexaggeration,

an immoderate description of the person
who at that moment, two thousand miles away,
holding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear,
must have regretted paying for my therapy.

What I meant was that my father
was an enemy of my humanity
and what I meant behind that
was that my father was split
into two people, one of them

living deep inside of me
like a bad king or an incurable disease—
blighting my crops,
striking down my herds,
poisoning my wells—the other
standing in another time zone,
in a kitchen in Wyoming,
with bad knees and white hair sprouting from his ears.

I don't want to scream forever,
I don't want to live without proportion
like some kind of infection from the past,

so I have to remember the second father,
the one whose TV dinner is getting cold
while he holds the phone in his left hand
and stares blankly out the window

where just now the sun is going down
and the last fingertips of sunlight
are withdrawing from the hills
they once touched like a child.


******

so I have to remember the second father...withdrawing from the hills they once touched like a child.

it is at this point that emotions, I would fail to match to words, well up in me. Something like, personal, and yeah, and my dad, and me dad, and well...

every once in a while I have to remind Connor as he attacks me with a plastic sword, or kicks at me with all his might, when we are play fighting that, indeed, I am human an can be hurt, and I'm sure eventually, I'll add to that wrong. My father was.

When I tell Connor that I can be hurt, and that he should be play fighting like I am, he looks at me, unbelievingly, and continues his all out assault. Is there a parent in the world who doesn't understand the feelings of a sacred bull? The sacrificial bull that sustains the world with its blood?

This guys takes the most amazing fotos of Spider eyes. He has is macro rig setup as well, if you're gear-curious like me.

http://flickr.com/photos/7539598@N04/




and this guy recreates famous fotos with legos. I just like it. Shut up!

http://flickr.com/photos/balakov/

The male rejection of adulthood is now the dominant attitude in Hollywood comedy, even (or perhaps especially) in movies whose sexual frankness makes them officially unsuitable for children. Occasionally you will see a functioning if beleaguered dad, usually a widower, like Steve Carell’s character in “Dan in Real Life.” And sometimes, as in “Little Miss Sunshine,” a coeducational, multigenerational ensemble will carry the therapeutic and satirical burdens of the genre.

But far more often the center of attention will be a guy, his buddies and his toys. He will, most of the time, be nudged toward responsibility, forgiven for his quirks and nurtured in his needs and neuroses by a woman who represents an ideal amalgam of supermodel and mom.

It would be hypocritical of me to dismiss the appeal of this fantasy and silly to deny that a lot of these movies manage to be both very funny and disarmingly insightful about the male psyche. But I suspect I’m not alone in growing weary of the relentless contemplation of that psyche in its infantile state, and of the endless celebration of arrested development as a social entitlement.

The attachment to the emotional world of childhood and adolescence — along with the fetishistic, fake-ironic clinging to tokens of that world — is so widespread that it almost escapes notice. Impulsive, self-centered, loyal to our pals, anxious about women, physically restless, slow-witted and geeky: that’s just what we’re like, isn’t it? John Updike once remarked that in America “a man is a failed boy,” but it increasingly seems that a man is, at last, a triumphant boy, with access to money, sex and freedom but without the sad grown-up ballast of duty and compromise.

from:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/movies/moviesspecial/04scot.html?_r=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin