Garden Update

I spoke to my wife on the phone a little while ago.

She wanted to know about the big hole in my garden.

My dogs have some splainin' to do.

Open Letter to Susan Gaertner, Ramsey County Attorney

To: Susan Gaertner, Ramsey County Attorney

I want to think you for making it clear, what is in store for Americans that disagree with the Republican platform.

Your recent indictment against RNC protestors on terrorism charges, makes the US position on dissent very clear.

In the eyes of government, dissent against the Republican Party, is terrorism. From your perspective, disagreement with the Republican Party is just as heinous a crime as hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings, or blowing up government buildings.

After all, isn't it true that all crimes begin with a thought? And so if the government is going to prevent terrorism, it must first make sure that people do not have thoughts that disagree with the party line? And to do so, the government must make sure that those who disagree with the party line are arrested and punished for their wrong thinking.

By making this a public case, rather than renditioning these people secretly, to be tortured off shore, you're sending a clear message to the public. Dissent against that party will not be tolerated.

I trust that you'll be moving forward the way other governments do and taking increasingly drastic actions, to prevent future shows of dissent against the Party? Perhaps a party guide can be published that explainhow Republican Party Patriots must act, if they do not want to become targets of the government and disapeared on terrorism charges? But then in countries where the USA taught these tactics, the point wasn't obedience, but fear. It's a lot scarier when cops bust down your door, take out a family member, then weeks later be called down to identify the loved one's mutiliated body. I think you'll agree, that fear is the point.

I'm well aware that at some future date, I may be rounded up for my anti-American rants on the importance of preserving the US Constitution as a framework document, for our laws and legal system. I know that the US Constitution is considered by most leading members of the Republican Party to be a dead and irrelevant document. History for them, after all, began on 9/11. Before that, there were no wars or terrorism. No one who lived before 9/11, had experience with a world in which people committed crimes and atrocities for political purposes.

For myself though, I'm too old now to see the world in the new way, where a boot stomping on a face is the symbol of safety and harmony. I remember a pre-9/11 world where there were terrorism and wars, and yet freedom wasn't considered an evil that must be stamped out, to make the world a safer place.

With the government bailouts following the Argentina plan, I think we both can agree that hard times are coming. Our leaders have imposed this same plan on many other nations, since the 1970s. Now with that experience, you'll be one of the chosen ones to administer the new kind of justice that was once reserved for people in countries that lacked an admirable human rights record.

I wonder, as you work to de-evolve our justice system, what role will you play. How far will you go? Will watch interrogations and executions, or will you be a willing participant?

I know that if I were smart, I wouldn't be speaking out all. For this email alone, you can have me locked up for the rest of my life on terrorism charges. But I'm a dinosaur, one of the old style patriots that still believes in the US Constitution and the Rule of Law. I hope that one day, such a dream can be restored to some degree. If not, I await my extinction. Perhaps you will play a part?

Jack Dingler
http://weaseldog.blogspot.com/

Finally! A Start On My Garden!

Last night I got some seeds started in trays. I planted artichokes, tomatoes, peppers and amaranth.

I also worked on the garden bed around my fish pond. I planted two blueberry and two blackberry bushes. I got it all mulched in with some stale chicken poo.

After I got it all watered in, my dogs promptly raced through the mud, arced around the yard and into the house. My wife was not amused.

I topped it all off with a couple of bags of leaves. The area I planted them in is a raised bed, bordered by logs collected around the neighborhood. A few years back I filled it in with lot's of tree trimmings and covered it in soil from a hole dug elsewhere in the yard. It's now very friable. It's come a long way from the hard sandy clay that makes up most of my yard.


In that area, I'll later add in artichokes, rosemary bushes and sunflowers. I promise to post pictures at a later date.

Rep. Dan Burton (R-Indiana)

Someone is telling tales out of school.

Who told this guy that he's allowed to tell the truth?

Chet Atkins

His music speaks for itself.

Vincent


Gallopin' Guitar


Orange Blossom Special


Walk of Life - with Mark Knopfler


Birth of The Blues - Les Paul and Chet Atkins


Beatles Medley - Chet Atkins & Paul Yandell

I've Been Shooting My Mouth Off

I thought I would link a comment I made a year ago on the bailout, in case anyone calls me on my claim that I saw it coming.

************************************************************************

I agree that many institutions in the mortgage industry assumed a level of risk that, in retrospect, was not wise.

I still think it was a very smart move for the bankers to make so many bad loans.

By making the bad loans, they can collect money from customers until it is time to take the house. Once they foreclose, they gain title to property that was purchased by conjuring money from nothing.

Then they can absolutely count on a taxpayer funded bailout.

So in the end, they gain property, reimbursement for expenses and monetary profit.

The fractional reserve ratio was suspended months ago, and the negative asset sheets that it looks like the big banks are carrying, appear to be guaranteed somewhere.

I think there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Gov has already begun the bailout, and has guaranteed their debts.

The full extent of the under the table dealing, is unlikely to be evident for a time. At least not until after the elections.

And even then, they likely won't admit the degree and length of time it has been going on.

Posted by: Weaseldog | February 7, 2008 12:06 PM

2BSirius

I got a new YouTube subscriber today, her screen name is 2BSirius. she has a number of very interesting videos on her site, that I encourage folks to go take a peak at.

As I was viewing them today, my perennial question came to mind and I decided to send her a message and ask her opinion of it. I didn't include anything naughty in that message, so I though I might share here, also, as see what comments you folks might have for these thoughts and this line of inquiry.

*******************************************************

I'm currently working my way through your videos. I see that early in the series you were well aware of Peak Oil.

You talk about solving the 'problem'. Do you come to any conclusions or definitions as to what you think the problem is?

This is a topic that had been thinking about for decades, but really gelled for me in 1998, when I read, "The End of Cheap Oil" by Colin Campbell and Jean Laherre, in the May Scientific American. That's when I understood the problem I had been worrying over all along. That of resoruce depletion and how to go about understanding the timing of resource depletion.

Ove the last decade in conversations in many forums, I have been vexed by the cyclic redundancy of arguments and solutions presented. Much of the ground we covered in those early conversations, has now made it into books by the 'experts', who seem to have gone no further into this topic than we did.

They lay out the problems, show the scale of the crisis with various data points, then end with a nebulous fuzzy path to some sort of 'solution'.

I think that this optimism is driven by two things.

1. Publishers want a happy ending.
2. We want to believe that we control our destinies.

In a Peak Oil town hall meeting in Austin many years back, after the presenters gave their arguments and slideshows, several audience members took turns, asking for the solution. I remember one woman said, "Throw us a bone. How can we fix this?"

She got me thinking about this. Can we fix it? I knew logically, and mathematically, that I had proven to myself that this problem was in essence, a problem of the exponential function. And the exponential function has no solution. It's like the computer (Joshua) says at the end of the movie, 'War Games', "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeOHEU7Ykyg

But we are already playing.

The problem is usually characterized as, 'How do we return to business as usual?' Which can be paraphrased as, "How do we get back on track to infinite growth?'

But infinite growth is impossible, as we quickly get into a state were our rate of consumption of resources reaches impossible levels. For instance, a healthy 3% growth in oil consumption, leads to a doubling every 25.6 years. When people argue that this can be continued to the year 3000, I can help but laugh. The mass of oil required exceeds the mass of the known universe. Clearly, the problem of returning to infinite growth, is completely insolvable.

In ecological studies, we have the concepts of overshoot and dieoff. These concepts, when applied to our current situation, fit in neatly. We've eliminated 90% of our food fish and more than 90 percent of our topsoil. We're still eliminating our last old growth forests at fantastic rates. We have build a civilization that is completely dependant of fossil fuels.

When we fall back onto pre-fossil fuel aged modes of living, it will be very hard on us. We have done so much damage to our biosphere that it may not be able to support even the population levels we had, before the industrial revolution.

The financial disasters we're seeing now, are completely predictable in the face of peak oil. As early as 2000, I was writing online that governments would combat peak oil by increasing liquidity, by printing money and would pull all stops in an effort to bail out it's top institutions, to keep them growing, and expanding, no matter what. As they do so, they'll sacrific smaller entities and destroy thr economies that support them. It seems that this prediction has come true. This trend will continue.

I originally took my cues from what I knew of Perestroika. then much of the rest just seemed to follow a logic line of reasoning. After all, the politicians in Washington are vetted and groomed by the wealthiest institutions. These entities will get unlimited support, no matter what.

Further, Peak Oil preparations in my view, require an intentional move to a more 'conservative' lifestyle. In conservative, I mean it in the actual definition, not in the jello-like, political definition.

Our political conservatives, have made it clear that true conservation is an evil that they will not pursue. As Dick Cheney argued, 'It's not a basis for sound policy.'

So our government then and now, are intent to chase after the spectre of infinite growth. Our owners will not allow us to elect anyone with a saner or more rational view.

So if policy cannot change, then we can only change ourselves. And only to a limited degree, as the government will take our stuff away, if we do not participate in the prescribed fashion. We must still play at capitalism and consumption, or lose our property in tax siezures.

Finally, the real root of our problem, is that we have too many people. That topic is untouchable, unsolveable by the likes of you and I. So the problem will persist no matter what we do.

So if we can't solve the problem, we must redefine it. We must find a sub problem within the bigger set of problems, that will at least lend itself to temporary solutions.

The only way I see to do this, is to concern myself with my personal path and my local community. Within that scope, I can find solutions to problems. And even better yet, many of those solutions I can implement. But even as I do so, I think it's wise to keep an eye on how the bigger problems are unfolding as they have a way of becoming local.

This isn't a message of hope. But in day to day survival, the path we've taken since conception, there is hope. There is beauty. There is joy. We just need to remember that we're here to live, even as we fight to survive. We're going to experience shortages of stuff. but we don't need stuff, to be happy. We just think we do. But I think to be happy, we do need food and safe water drink. We need shelter. We need clothes and companionship. These are the things that support happiness. So there's no reason to despair over the big problems. We've taken our place on the great mandela. Enjoy the ride while we're here.

The crushing weight of the exponential function, coupled with man's nature, leads me to believe that we may end this century with less than a billion people. I don't see any proof in any of this to assume that our line will become extinct. But I believe that we can assume that evolution will shape future generations into new forms, better fitted to life in the world we'll leave them.

If I jump out of my little box for a moment, and work on a solution, assuming I could change human nature, I'm left with the essential problem, of getting our population down quickly, to under sustainable levels, without destroying the biosphere in the process. The only way as I see it is to fertility down to near zero. The world's resources would like support a diminishing and dying population and give us a 'prosperous way down'. But I doubt we'll see that. It seems like pie in the sky for me.

So back to my earlier question, have you considered the nature of the problem?

Open Letter To The Honorable Pete Sessions

I saw today that you voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Though I believe that government spending needs to be reduced on all fronts, I am puzzled why you would vote against a pork bill this late in the game.

You continually vote to fund no bid contracts in Iraq, shoveling what will ultimately be $trillions of dollars into this money pit. Likely because you highly value Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and of course, Dubai where Halliburton stashes their lucre.

Then you vote to give bankers who are crappy at business, $600 billion, with no oversight. Geitner now says that out of the $600 billion, $2.1 trillion has already been given away, leaving $300 billion left. What funny math you folks use in Washington. So I assume that keeping bankers who are crappy at banking, in the black matters to you. This is important to you.

There are many other pork programs you have supported and love, that I would deem wasteful, but there's little point in listing them here. Suffice it to say that I'm not aware that you voted against any of them.

Now you finally decide to vote nay on a program, and it's one and only defining characteristic, is that the money would be spent in America, on America.

You don't mind voting on Pork to send to Kuwait, but you veto Pork going to America.

It's clear that your issue isn't with the pork spending. You have a problem with America. You're giving us the finger. You're telling us that we can shove it where the sun don't shine.

Pete Sessions, why do you hate America? And why do you stay? Is it so that you work to continue to rot America away from the inside? do you simply see your duty as a saboteur, committing treason, bill by bill?

You wrote to me previously that the Patriot Act is Constitutional because a lawyer (Alberto Gonzales?), told you it is. The illegal spying, illegal torture, etc... is all legal, because a lawyer explained that anti-constitutional laws are constitutional. From that letter, you made it clear that you didn't read Patriot Act, that your haven't read and understood the US Constitution, and after all of these years in office, you haven't bothered improve your education in these matters.

So perhaps, you never read this bill. Perhaps someone shoved a couple of C-Notes into your hand and told you how to vote. Is this the case? Is that what happened?

Well take care. you might be a crook and a traitor, but I guess you're our crook and traitor.

Feel free to forward this email to the FBI as you have the others. and I wish you the best and good health, but I also wish you'd find another profession.