Social Security and the Deficit

They have nothing to do with each other. Social Security is a self-supporting fund that is not part of the federal budget. Once again:

Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.

Read more about it in Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon.

A new world

At the outskirts of my father's dwellingplace, at the furthest limit of His encampment, there amid the ringing of haycocks where land gives way to earth, to pure planet — there's an emptied barrack or prison thatch that once quartered killers of mine and of any other kind, too, murderers with governments and the sanction of uniform, weapon, and horse. It's since become all board, nail, leak, and draft, its floor strewn with straw and that and its walls smeared with the sickening reek of we hair, pelage, daily turd. Inside, inhabiting, there's only a lone aged ram. It's humiliated, made modest, as its burden's considerable: how it's dually imaged, as if once for each horn, for each half of the cadence responsible; this ram both existing of its kind, as the last of its species still grazing, and then existing for its kind, too, as their most imperfected survivor — most imperfected as their survivor, their last and their only; to be herded humbled, alone, as a herd of one and itself, up the ramp of an Ark, bound express for our covenant's end: think the species' lowliest, and most degenerate aspect, made ancient to wizened bellwether with raggedy coat, then hefted here to rume out its life once it's downed its last golden door; it's lost its horns, too . . . how they'd been stolen by night, by a boy and his father, and an angel that'd saved them both from a mountaintop altar. At the sound of my horns, my own shofars these shofarot twinned in the wind, one for each lip ended upon that lip of last day . . . how this ram despite wormy illness and old age will perk, turn itself dumbly, lean its head toward the gusting, an echo. Hoof mud. Now, charging its brutishly bared head, and with nothing to fear, forward and always, this ram will hurl itself against the furthest wall of the barrack, not east nor west but out, only out and with such fierce and wet woolen force — to knock everything down, to shatter it through, an escape, into unlimited space.

—Witz by Joshua Cohen

High school military recruitment opt-out forms

Here are 3 opt-out forms to prevent your or your child's high school from sharing your private information with military recruiters. Only one of these 3 forms is needed.

Click here for the parent's form.

Click here for the legal guardian's form.

Click here for the student's form.

You ALSO need to send THIS FORM to the Pentagon's Joint Advertising Market Research & Studies office (whose address is in the form), which gathers information on 16–25-year-olds from sources other than schools and is used by military recruiters (click here for information).

Gubernatorial misconceptions regarding wind

On July 27, the Burlington Free Press printed replies on Vermont's energy future from the five Democratic (primary) and one Republican candidate for governor. Here are their statements regarding wind, with commentary following in italics. Dunne and Bartlett did not mention wind.

Dubie: Last November, Bolton Valley became the nation's second ski area, and Vermont's first, to install its own wind turbine -- a 121-foot-tall Northwind 100, manufactured by Vermonters at Northern Power in Barre. It will produce 300,000 kw annually.

As of 10:11 a.m., August 23, 2010, the Bolton Valley wind turbine had produced 125,809 kWh since October 2009. So, apart from confusing kilowatts (rate of production) with kilowatt-hours (energy produced), Dubie is basing his claim on a projection that almost one year later can be shown to be wrong. In its first year of operation, the Bolton Valley wind turbine is likely to produce less than half of the energy predicted (yet still claimed).

Racine: There are locations throughout the northeast that make sense for solar, wind, biomass, and hydro, and if we take a regional approach, we can site these power sources with the least impact possible.

This assumes that these projects must be built. As for wind, its poor production of almost no value to the grid does not justify its erection anywhere. The least impact possible is to forget about it.

Markowitz: I am a strong supporter of community wind projects, hydropower, solar, biomass and geothermal energy production. As governor, I will review our regulatory process to ensure that renewable energy projects get a fair hearing and fast results.

Since energy projects are developed by well capitalized corporations and inordinately affect host communities and environments, the concern should be that those who are adversely affected or who advocate for the environment are able to get a fair hearing.

Shumlin: To meet our electricity needs we will need power delivered from small community-based solar projects to utility scale wind farms and everything in between. As outlined in a Vision for Vermont, I will work with the Treasurer's office to leverage the state's ability to borrow money at affordable rates and issue a series of Vermont renewable energy bonds so that every Vermonter who wants to can literally invest in our energy future. The revenue generated through these projects, guaranteed through electricity sales to the utilities, will help pay the bonds off.

The "everything is needed" approach as presented by Shumlin lacks any sign of rational evaluation of costs and benefits. The only people who would benefit from this circular funding model are the manufacturers and installers — it is a job creation program, but without regard to its effect on the environment and hosting communities, or to its actual contributions to a reliable electricity supply.

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

To the south, which is for why always west ...

Which by an estranging yet commodious rictus brings us westward ho, which is southbound, again, as it’s been said with a smile, and, if given to belief in all the signs that bedevil the toothless, tongueless, gaping beyond, the north and east, too, all of it together and around again if the mystic’s you thing, also if not: silver highways that, if you obey the recommendations of their contingently blinking advisories, if only you would heed their wondrous warnings arcaned in ways symbolized of arrows and stars, promise to take you out as far as the garden of Angels, which is Holywood, the second city that is all cities, but is all other cities perfected, made irreal: apparently, a place of pilgrimage, the developers now sell it as, per the glossed propaganda a mystical shrine, in which dream need not be its own fulfillment, no matter how common its interpretation nor how brute its price. Here there are intersections and there are causeways and byways, there are interchanges and coded connections, known only to the select under hidden numbers, by secret names. To approach this wisdom, it’s said, you must follow the wide wave of the desert, then turn — averting disaster — just before its break, forsaking its spill over the concrete and the meridian there, to abandon its wake that drifts sand as if stars to constellate the further beach, which gives itself over to the Pacific as a grave, the bottommost burial of the world . . . this is the ocean, the other ocean. A rumbling wave prays in thanks for the sacrifice of the shore, the land, the dry earth. As here, as much as everywhere else, the heavens open: every weather crowded into cloud. It’s Friday already, it's the Sabbath again, and we tumble into its fissure, timequaked — the void of yet another Shabbos.

—Witz by Joshua Cohen

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