Brian's Morning Newsletter

Tuesday, August Thirty First 2010

Good Morning
Ah, Glen Beck and Sarah Palin on stage together, I mean what more could we ask for? There is a scenario in the Douglas Adams book "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy,"  in which all of the telephone sanitizers, used car salesmen, as well as a planet's entire population of intellectually challenged,  are shipped off-world, "to populate a new planet (which coincidentally turned out to be Earth)" they were told because their home world was going to crash into the sun or some such catastrophe.  We can thank Palin and Beck for rounding up America's idiots. All that is left is to figure out how to get rid of them.

We can also thank the Tea Party for showing the appeal and excitement of endlessly arguing about subjects to which we have no expertise. Whether we want to believe in severe weather being due to climate change being natural phenomenon or human caused when in fact we haven't got off the couch in ten years to form our own opinion through active scientific research. Americans were reared by television, and the advertisers that fund the shows hammered home a constant psychological message: Consumerism, we deserve to consume the latest gadget, then as quickly as possible toss it in the rubbish bin  and buy the newer gadget: repeat. The bottom line is we are now a nation of entitled idiots incapable of believing the corporations would harm the planet, while bringing the cheapest products to market.

God will smite those who don't believe in said consumerism. Look if you will at what oil companies are doing to local wealth in Africa. I plugged  "Oil Production National Wealth " into Google. I don't know, maybe here http://allafrica.com/stories/200909180906.html, this is just one article but what I'm thinking about are interviews with people in Gambia from the documentary film, The Age of Stupid.  There is no Trickle Down Economics, people! Once the corporation has plundered a region, they bail-out leaving the locals to clean up the mess, or most likely being left penniless the locals will continue to live in the filth of post "oil exploration and drilling" activities. 

Instead of piping excess gas from wells to locals for cooking the oil companies burn-off the gas at the well. The locals get to watch as their natural resource goes uselessly up in smoke in black noxious clouds. These are the companies we trust folks, you know in your hearts this is true, every depressing bit of it is true.  Yet we still avoid  conservation and renewable energies. I get it, my question is do you get it?

You know us, Nell and I evolved from a Doom and Gloomers into biodieselers and homemade wind turbine builders having fun learning how energy is created, and creating some. The act of accomplishing energy production on even our personal scale is true entitlement, not what some pseudo-psychologist  gives us as a sales pitch.

We have to stop arguing people, civilization is falling, centuries of forward progress is threatened by one stupid narrow minded idiom: mindless consumerism. We do not actually deserve a break today. We have been fucking-up for quite some time now, and the clock is ticking. Bubble after bubble has burst, the government can not stop this decline. It goes without question that Palin's simple-brained politics are worse than Nero fiddling while Rome burned. 

Nell suggested yesterday that Americans look at the life of Marie Antoinette "Marie Antoinette (IPA: [maʁi ɑ̃twanɛt]; Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna; 2 November 1755 – 16 October 1793) was an Archduchess of Austria and the Queen of France and of Navarre. She was the fifteenth and penultimate child of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Emperor Francis I…" She is infamously quoted, "Let them eat Cake." Nell suggests that Americans have as little common sense of the people of the world as Antoinette did when she suggested if the people are hungry they should eat cake. Of course "they" didn't have any cake, or any sort of food, which is why they were considered "hungry," but what does a penultimate child of an Empress know about anything? (I always loved the word "penultimate,'" and looked it up back in the 70's when I read Phillip K. Dick's Penultimate Truth)

Entitled: Is this what being an American has come to mean? We are entitled to all the comforts we were sold and our parents bought, regardless of the consequences to the toil of the people of foreign lands for which we depend for cheap goods and services?  I've actually heard the right wing republicans spew Antoinettisms, if I can coin the phrase. "Those people don't have to work in our factories for for barely subsistence wages." The righteous attitude of the Capitalists: They  ought to be bowing in gratitude for the opportunity to work for ten dollars a day.

How do we explain some Americans' attraction to Hummers, if not because we feel entitled to all the privileges of the empress' penultimate daughter? For a lot of us a Hummer represent the penultimate in pre-pubertal machismo with a shiny paint job and lots of chrome where the actual weapons reside on the military version.  Whatever, Assholes. You can go around wasting twice as much fuel as the rest of us because it makes you feel… What? like you are a proper Asshole? An American Asshole, wow, we kneel at the very wheels of your vehicle, not!  Get lost asshole.

All I am saying is maybe Douglas Adams had it right: We need to round up the unprecedented quantities of people feeling "entitled," in fact who are a terrible burden on civilization, and ship them off the the second coming of Christ or whatever the fuck nonsensical noise they believe in, so the rest of who are actually contributing to our planet's well-being can get about our business without the distraction of constant argument.

–
Brian Rodgers

Comments online at: http://outfitnm.com/category/brians-morning-newsletter If you wish to chance that I'll post it off my email hit "reply," but not really the preferred method

Letters

Jonathan Wrote: "Makes me puke."
Oil companies have committed the worst environmental atrocities of the industrial age. Wind Turbines make you puke?
Brian.
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FYI…

this weekend we went to Colorado. We passed a sign that said a new solar farm was going to be installed somewhere up around Springer. There was a big electrical grid thing right by the sign along the highway so I assume whatever solar power is harvested will be injected into the grid right there.

Good to see NM capitalizing on its greatest resources: wind and sun.

MB
—————         
We are as well. Thank you for the positive vibes, Brian
———-
Hey Brian -

Check out the attached 50m wind potential/transmission capacity map.

http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/maps_template.asp?stateab=nm

For a little dirt on the money trail of anti-alternative energy/anti-climate change propaganda, search on the Koch Brothers.  The wingnuts like to whine about the contributions to 'liberal' causes by George Soros.  Pack of hypocrites!

I was working on the lower Pecos back in '03 when the Ft. Sumner wind project was just coming to completion.  The ranchers down there love it.  They get ~$6K/yr for the lease of the land for each tower.  As for looks, driving down from Santa Rosa it looks like the Indians lining up on the mesa above the EXXON/Mobile wagon train.  Beautiful.

Those vanadium liquid batteries I mentioned a while back scale up to boxcar size and can store enough power to smooth out the supply should the wind go variable.

Keep up the good work.

Le Spaz d'Argent

I haven't lost my mind -
I know exactly where I left it.
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Yep, the Koch Bros have been exposed on my Yahoo group Wastewatts, creating one of the largest arguments between right wing and left, another reason I decided to shift my stance on the wind farms, too much propaganda: Nobody knows what to believe, so I went with my common sense which hadn't let me down in the past. Wind farms are desperately needed, anything besides burning fossil fuels and nuclear fuels to create energy for Americans to burn wastefully (in my opinion.)  As far as the Koch Brother conspiracy I didn't read any of it, I did hit delete when I saw the corporate-brain-washed-responses. People can't think for themselves any longer.
Many people seem to need to be told the truth. I do a lot of tellin, to a lot of people, I have no idea if what I hear is the truth or not, so I go with my seat of the pants approach. Wind farms appear to me to be fantastic new sources of non-fossil fuel energy. 
Any source of energy which does not support the planet polluting uber-evil oil corporations is better more positive approach to working with the planet, instead of the current level  raping & plundering.
  
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Hey Brian and Nell,
Hope you guys are doing well.
Had to put my 2 cents in.
xo L.
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Hi Lisa
I didn't see your "two cents," anywhere in your reply.
We want to hear why you folks over there in Bernal are so against the wind farm.
I'm thinking of writing a letter to the Optic in favor of the wind farms so that people know that not every one is against renewable energy. I don't mean to stir up anxiety, but I haven't heard any convincing evidence.. I mean compared to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, to compel me not to advocate for the biggest wind farm anywhere, whether it be a corporation or group of people can muster as close to the power grid as needed.
We're doing fine, thanks for askin :-[
Brian
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Brian's Desktop now has the latest Ubuntu installed, this morning will be the test drive of Lucid Lynx, Mozilla's Thunderbird 3.0 for Linux, and Lordy knows what other slicker than snot improvements!

 
http://www.ubuntu.com/

 Ubuntu – Linux for Human Beings!

You are using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
                – the Lucid Lynx – released in April 2010 and supported until April 2013.
   

This section is an introduction to Ubuntu. It explains the Ubuntu philosophy and roots, gives information about how to contribute to Ubuntu, and shows how to get help with Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is an entirely open source operating system built around the
          Linux kernel. The Ubuntu community is built around the ideals enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be
                available free of charge, that software tools should be usable
                by people in their local language and despite any disabilities,
                and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter
                their software in whatever way they see fit. For those reasons:
               
What is Linux?

The Linux kernel is the heart of the Ubuntu operating system.
          A kernel is an important part of
                any operating system, providing the communication bridge between
                hardware and software.
               

Linux was brought to life in 1991 by a Finnish student named
                Linus Torvalds. At the time, it would run only on i386 systems,
                and was essentially an independently-created clone of the UNIX
                kernel, intended to take advantage of the then-new i386
                architecture.
               

Nowadays, thanks to a substantial amount of development
                effort by people all around the world, Linux runs on virtually
          every modern computer architecture.
                 

The Linux kernel has gained an ideological importance as well as a technical one.
          There is an entire community of people who believe in the ideals
                of free software and spend their time helping to make open
                source technology as good as it can be.
               

People in this community gave rise to initiatives such as
                Ubuntu, standards committees that shape the development of the
                Internet, organizations like the Mozilla Foundation, responsible
                for creating Mozilla Firefox, and countless other software
                projects from which you've almost certainly benefited in the past.
               

The spirit of open source, commonly attributed to Linux, is
                influencing software developers and users everywhere to drive
                communities with common goals.