Do you hear what I hear

From The Free Press, Rockland, Maine, Aug. 12, 2010:

"Wind turbine noise is becoming a bigger issue in the U.S.," said Patrick Moriarty, an aeronautical engineer for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. NREL belongs to the U.S. Department of Energy and is the primary research and development site for energy efficiency and renewable energy, including wind power. Moriarty is a senior engineer at the lab.

"It's been a big issue in Europe for a while because their wind farms have been up longer and they are in more densely populated areas," Moriarty said.

wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights

Wind power is a cynical game

Monique Aniel writes in the Bangor Daily News:

Wind power in Maine is a chess game, a chess game for those protected by multinational companies and allies in the current administration.

It is a game that took 20 years to design, a game that redefined new rules for state and federal agencies, reshaping their mandates of protecting America’s citizens and majestic lands into doing the exact opposite.

A game that puts people’s rights and public health behind those of the wind industry and simply ignored the complaints of those disturbed by the maddening whoosh of turbines.

Wind power is a game that turns electricity, which is already expensive, into a thrice absurdly expensive commodity hurting the pocketbook of residential and business customers alike. First in the purchasing cost, second in the cost of subsidies necessary to support the inefficiency and unreliability of this industry and third in the ratepayer-funded new electrical transmission structures required to accommodate the thermal stresses of spurting wind generation.

Wind power is a game that sacrifices America’s natural heritage for the profits of parasitic corporations adept at exploiting government policies, political correctness, guilty consciences of environmental organizations and fears about our environment.


wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights

Dayeinu

As gossip becomes rumor becomes rule of Law, then eventually discredited, dismissed, overturned, it’s difficult to know what to do besides stand aside, sleep our dreams, wake, walk, and whisper, monger our gossip into rumors, while letting the course of events inhuman enact whatever punishment it is that might appease the anger of a God; render unto and all that — let the Lord exact the AlmightyÆs retribution, take enough suffering to satisfy them both, then make wing for day.

—Witz by Joshua Cohen

Israel destroys Bedouin village

From CNN:

Police evicted 200 Bedouins from their homes in a southern Israeli village on Tuesday and demolished their dwellings, an act decried by residents who said they are on ancestral land.

The move occurred five miles north of Beer Sheva in a village called Al-Araqeeb, an enclave not recognized by the state of Israel.

Witnesses told CNN that the Israeli forces arrived at the village accompanied by busloads of civilians who cheered as the dwellings were demolished. They said armed police deployed with tear gas, water cannon, two helicopters and bulldozers.



Also read: "Ethnic cleansing in the Israeli Negev: The razing of a Bedouin village by Israeli police shows how far the state will go to achieve its aim of Judaising the Negev region" — Neve Gordon in The Guardian. Click here (more video, too).

If you have a house, you are safe.

Too early for morning, too late for regret, the air veined in lightning, the sun a clouded clot. Thunder. Gods are being born in the sky.

This is why we left the Garden and moved out to Siburbia, as we're always explaining, most of all to ourselves.

My boy, look around you, listen, sniff the air and taste the bread your mother bought, you're sure to understand: this is why we lit out, bringing only the candlesticks with us — why this dispersal to plot, this diaspora of the subdivision, such limitation of the eternal Development.

—Witz, by Joshua Cohen

Word

Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen. —Huey Long

(Via The Progressive Review)

Nimby wind developer

A New Zealand–based farmer who gave the go ahead for wind turbines to be built on moorland he owns above Rochdale [England] says he would be unhappy if a windfarm were built close to his home.

Jeremy Dearden, Lord of the Manor of Rochdale, told his local newspaper there had been a ‘NIMBY’ – Not In My Back Yard – aspect to the campaign against plans to build a dozen 400ft turbines at Crook Hill and is quoted as saying: “The visual pollution aspect of it … I can appreciate that.

“I have a pretty big view from my place here, and I don’t know that I’d like to see a lot of windmills.”

—Rochdale Observer, July 20, 2010