This Is Very Cool

Every once in a while I come across a little news article that really takes the freezer burn off my heart. This is such an article, and it talks about a new movement in Germany.

Take a book, leave a book. In the birthplace of the printing press, public bookshelves are popping up across the nation on street corners, city squares and suburban supermarkets.

In these free-for-all libraries, people can grab whatever they want to read, and leave behind anything they want for others. There's no need to register, no due date, and you can take or give as many as you want. ...

The public book shelves, which are usually financed by donations and cared for by local volunteer groups, have popped up independently of each other in many cities across Germany including Berlin, Hannover and Bonn, and also in suburbs and villages.

Each shelf holds around 200 books and it takes about six weeks for a complete turnover, with all the old titles replaced by new ones, he said.

The program has been so successful that other countries have requested information on the process. While the Germans are still fine tuning, they have been willing to share that information to increase reading habits. And book sellers are beginning to notice that the availability of free books hasn't cut into their business at all. In fact, several have reported an uptick as the reading public is, well, reading more.

Would such a program work in the US? I don't see why not. Yes, we have free public libraries, but many of them are either closing or cutting back the hours and days they are open because of state and local budget crunches. Most of them are located inconveniently far from those who because of their own budget crunches can't take advantage of them. Having these small book shelves in different areas takes an edge off those problems.

It's a nifty idea, one that I hope succeeds all over the planet.

And The Hits Just Keep Coming

The FBI has a new plan for intruding into our internet privacy. In an attempt to drum up support for a proposal to expand a 1994 law on law enforcement access to private communications on the internet, FBI Director Robert Mueller has been visiting with companies in Silicon Valley.

From the New York Times:

Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users.

Mr. Mueller and the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie Caproni, were scheduled to meet with senior managers of several major companies, including Google and Facebook, according to several people familiar with the discussions. How Mr. Mueller’s proposal was received was not clear. ...

Mr. Mueller wants to expand a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, to impose regulations on Internet companies.

The law requires phone and broadband network access providers like Verizon and Comcast to make sure they can immediately comply when presented with a court wiretapping order.

Law enforcement officials want the 1994 law to also cover Internet companies because people increasingly communicate online. An interagency task force of Obama administration officials is trying to develop legislation for the plan, and submit it to Congress early next year. [Emphasis added]

Now, I understand the challenge which the new technologies present to law enforcement, and there are some good reasons for enabling law enforcement to meet those challenges as long as there are some safeguards in place. I'm not so certain that those safeguards are uppermost in the minds of the FBI and other law enforcement officials. After all, that "court wiretapping order" is quite often the rubberstamp edition issued by FISA, often after the wiretapping has already been done. The FBI, via its own internal audit, admits that the process was abused thousands of times during investigations. The FBI still loves those fishing expedition trips, and that is what concerns me.

It also concerns several other agencies within the government:

The Commerce Department and State Department have questioned whether it would inhibit innovation, as well as whether repressive regimes might harness the same capabilities to identify political dissidents, according to officials familiar with the discussions. [Emphasis added]

Those political dissidents need not be located in places like China, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea. They just might be located in places like Houston, Texas or Topeka, Kansas or Temple City, California. Those political dissidents might be complaining about all the broken promises of an elected official and plotting to unseat the incumbent by putting up a primary challenger. Or they might be planning a demonstration in Washington, DC to protest the ongoing military activities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. They might even be sharing plans for the construction of (gasp!) GIANT PUPPETS.

Unless any proposal to update the 1994 law also contains clear, unequivocal protections consistent with the Bill of Rights, it should be a non-starter. Should be, but somehow I doubt that will be the case.

Up In Smoke

If you are facing an economic meltdown, what do you do? In cases coming to light now, many desperate people lit up the car. Insurance companies are paying on arson, as the times get worse.

Of course, there are a few signs that the fire was intentional, I see. Having removed all your valuables first is a major one. That was true of house fires as well, I have learned from a little reading on the topic. The family pets being out is yet another indicator.

Pressed by the current financial environment car owners render to deceptive tricks to get more money. According to the reports from the Associated Press a growing number of people are torching, sinking or ditching their vehicles and then reporting them stolen to cash in on the insurance.

A number of SUVs were found ablaze in the Nevada desert. Cars were dumped in a Miami canal and a BMW was discovered buried in a field in Texas. Besides, some people deliberately parked their vehicles in the path of a hurricane.

You may well be asking yourself by now exactly why I'm researching burning cars. Actually, I had to file an insurance claim when a truck backed into me, and came on this development of lighting the jalopy, while I was working on that.

Wednesday at the Clay Fire Department, a special seminar was held to help investigators learn how to spot arson.

Two cars were burned at the seminar; one to show what an accidental car fire looks like, and one that was a car arson.

To make a determination between the two, the investigators there were instructed to look for specific clues, like where the fire started on the car, what was missing from the vehicle and the background information -- for instance, if the car owner had any financial or insurance problems.

Investigators say any one of those clues would typically point to fraud.

“In the state of New York, there are some signs of an increase of vehicle arsons, and it's concerning for law enforcement and the industry -- and we pay, in New York State, another $350 a year per person because of fraud investigations,” says State Police auto theft investigator Peter Kontos.

About 120 people attended Wednesday's seminar. Organizers hope investigators will now have all the tools necessary to properly spot car arsons.

Fire investigators say cars intentionally set on fire tend to burn faster and longer because an accelerant is typically used. Accidental fires are usually caused by a catalytic converter.

This is certainly a step beyond refinancing the house, which I understand no longer exists, to make it possible to go on spending more than you have coming in. As my own accident was relatively minor, I am pretty sanguine about it.

The innovation so prized by our financial institutions comes out in innumerable ways. Self-financing by lighter is yet another estimable invention, wouldn't you say? It's not going to rock the world economy just yet, though it's sure to be unwelcome news to insurance companies. The atmospehre toward insurance companies isn't exactly going to mitigate that inclination to cheat them, after the 'innovation' shown toward our pocketbooks.

My insurance company isn't that AIG that I kinda own, anyway.

Things That Make You Go Wow

Sometimes people come up with really screwy ideas, or at least they seem to be screwy, but somehow some of those ideas get implemented and turn out to be major contributions to our culture. I'm thinking of everything from the telephone and the Internet to Post-Its. Right now, when the biggest challenge facing the planet is climate change, and one of the most essential ways to meet that challenge is to come up with non-carbon based, clean, renewable energy. One start-up company has come up with what many critics are calling a really screwy idea, but maybe this will turn out to be one of those ideas that actually work.

From the Los Angeles Times:

A Manhattan Beach start-up called Solaren Corp. seeks to launch an array of giant solar power collectors into orbit 23,000 miles above Fresno and beam the energy to Earth. PG&E has signed a contract to buy the power -- if Solaren can make the technology work. ...

Solaren won't discuss the details or costs of its plan, other than to give a ballpark price tag at more than $2 billion, to generate enough electricity for 150,000 homes across much of Northern and Central California. It has asked utility regulators to keep the information confidential, for now.

But executives say that by 2016 they can put together the technology to harness energy that constantly bathes Earth from 93 million miles away.

"If our numbers are anywhere near where we think they will be, we will be able to provide power at a cost that's comparable with anything on Earth, that is much cleaner and all from space," says Gary Spirnak, Solaren's chief executive. ...

The concept behind space-based solar power is simple, Solaren says.

Four or five rocket launches would be needed to put enough solar collectors into a stationary orbit to produce 200 megawatts of power, about half the output of a modern natural-gas-fired plant. The solar energy would be converted [to] radio waves and beamed to a receiving station in Fresno, leaving unscathed any birds or airplanes that get in the way of the highly diffused beam. There, it would be converted to either alternating or direct electric current and dispatched to customers via high-voltage transmission lines.

Will it work? Lots of people, including consumer protection organizations, say it's a pie-in-the-sky idea, a screwy idea. Still, the theory has worked out on a limited scale, according to the article. The problem will be in the transmission from space to the earth. Given the company's time line and the speed with which technology grows once a breakthrough is made, that problem just might be overcome.

And it's not like Solaren is being run by a bunch of cranks. They were smart enough to get Pacific Gas and Electric to sign a contract to purchase the energy once it starts to flow. That has two benefits: consumers are not going to have to pay up front to develop the technology and investors have some assurance that if the technology can be developed, there is a buyer already on line.

Admittedly there are a lot of "ifs" in the equation, but it certainly is worth a shot. It also shows that there are still some thinkers around willing to approach a difficult problem with a creative solution. That in itself is grounds for optimism.

Things That Make You Go "Wow!"

An article in today's Washington Post restored some of my good humor. Far-sighted and well-intentioned people have found another good way to use the internet:

A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on the Internet, serving up mankind's accumulated knowledge in seven languages for students around the world.

James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress who launched the project four years ago, said the ambition was to make available on an easy-to-navigate site, free for scholars and other curious people anywhere, a collection of primary documents and authoritative explanations from the planet's leading libraries.

The site [full link below] has put up the Japanese work that is considered the first novel in history, for instance, along with the Aztecs' first mention of the Christ child in the New World and the works of ancient Arab scholars piercing the mysteries of algebra, each entry flanked by learned commentary. "There are many one-of-a-kind documents," Billington said in an interview. ...

Development costs of more than $10 million were financed by private donors, including Google, Microsoft, the Qatar Foundation, King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. By comparison, the American Memory project cost about $60 million, suggesting that more funds will have to be raised as the World Digital Library expands.

I clicked on the link to see just how easily navigable the site was and to sample some of the early works which have been digitized and the "learned commentary." The site is pretty easy to get around in, but only after a couple of false starts. Thumbnail pictures serve as links, but they get you only to larger pictures of the texts themselves. Clicking on one of the categories at the top of the page ("place," "time period," "subject") was easier for me.

The commentaries are placed alongside the reduced pictures, and are rather helpful in understanding just why the subject is important to the culture that produced it and to the rest of the world. The only defect I see is that the commentaries are a bit too succinct for the average person, although there are additional links on the page (which I did not check out) which might make that defect moot.

All in all, the project is amazing, even at this early stage. Mr. Billington, the United Nations agency in charge, and the various philanthropic organizations which funded the project are to be congratulated and thanked for bringing this vision to fruition.

Planting the Seeds

Being that time of year for farmers' daughters means that good feeling of putting seeds into ground and watching green sprouts come up. It's something I thought everyone loved, but I was brought up short by remarks I heard recently about the black community's estrangement from the land.

Growing up in the city often keeps children from having contact with the growing seasons, or anything that means direct contact with plant life. Fortunately, a program in Ft. Worth is combining prairieland preservation with city youth to give a sense of the land to children who wouldn't otherwise know that feeling of growing things. The writer of this article, Bob Ray Sanders, is a community-oriented gentleman as well, who has contributed a great deal to Ft. Worth's operation.

The patient had been violently injured, and the gaping wound needed immediate attention.

The laceration was so wide and long that the young "medics" in attendance were hard-pressed to decide where to begin treatment.

But they would begin, and although their hours of work resulted in only a small portion of the injury being addressed, last weekend’s operation was a success.

This patient is not human, even though environmental activist Jarid Manos often refers to it in human terms.

It is a 1,983-acre tract in southwest Fort Worth and Tarrant County that is the last remaining piece of the Fort Worth tallgrass prairie, land that Manos and a growing number of public and private citizens have been trying to save from destruction through development.

Manos is founder and chief executive officer of the Great Plains Restoration Council, in Fort Worth, and the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

For those who have never seen this land — once home to several Indian tribes, the buffalo and one of Texas’ earliest Anglo settlers — its majesty is almost unbelievable.

It is part of a million-year-old ecosystem, a way station for the migrating monarch butterfly and now home to a couple of buffalo that have been reintroduced to the prairie.

It’s owned now by the Texas General Land Office, but sale of the property has been on hold as Manos’ group tries to find a way to save it and preserve it for generations to come.

There is much that we miss by detachment, and the feel for the land you get by working it is something I hope everyone can appreciate. Getting your hands dirty has more meaning when you have done it, and profited by growing something you can see, smell and touch. During the Great Depression, relocation of urban workers gave them a new sense of the land as well as a way to support themselves.

These new friends of the land are gaining, and the earth is, too. This is a program that should be available to youth for all of our benefit.

One of the kinds of peace I hope everyone can experience is the quiet whisper of wind blowing through the tall grasses.

Finessed

We have a huge need to head off the rape of our parks and our heritage, one of those last ditch destruction moves that the occupied White House has brought on. It makes me very proud to see some one with a very imaginative approach that has been working.

Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was in the news (and under arrest) last week after he disrupted a Bureau of Land Management auction of oil and gas leases on large tracts in southern Utah -- by walking into the auction and bidding on multiple leases. He won some leases, of course with no intention of paying up, and succeeded in bidding up the price on others.
(snip)
Turns out he is an econ major at the University of Utah, which is home to one of the very few economics departments in the United States with a significant heterodox/left presence. DeChristopher discussed the importance of his econ courses:

The professors, especially, have been really supportive and have joined my team so far. And, you know, they kind of did their job beforehand. They kind of did their job in getting me ready for this and committing me to hold true to my values and in teaching me what was going on. In fact, the final exam that I took on Friday morning, one of the questions was about this oil sale and about, if only the oil companies were bidding on this land, are they actually going to be paying the real price for the production of oil? And, of course, the answer that the professor was expecting is no, they're not, because there's a lot of external costs that all of us have to pay for the production of oil that aren't included in those. So they did their part ahead of time in putting me where I needed to be. (Emphasis added.)

The oil business that spawned the cabal at the occupied White House has colored much of their activity. A resentment of the conservation and appreciation of natural beauty is a very large part of the oil industry's attitude. The unleashing of any damage to them that can be managed has been the final throw of the departing criminals, and that some one has managed to counter that move is very heartening.

Woody has a take on deChristopher's coup that is very nice, and includes a Buzzflash article:

On Friday, December 19th, the BLM kicked off a hotly disputed oil- and gas-lease auction of public lands in Southern Utah near Arches, the White River, the Desolation/Green River region, Canyonlands, Nine Mile Canyon, the Book Cliffs, and Deep Creek Mountains. It had been organized, and pushed through as a parting gidt to the Busheviks' loyal owners and managers in the energy industry.

One man decided to screw it up. He's the recipient of

WINGS OF JUSTICE

The left wing economics studies supports a concept that Avedon and I have both brought up several times this week. We have ourselves, and have seen in other left leaning blogs, the realization that deregulation and its many accompanying flaws was headed toward disaster. We have not bought the winger line that everything was rosy, housing values were always going to rise, and the stock market was now permanently rising. Reality-based rationality has remained on the outside, as the Eat the Poor faction dominated.

Low wages and poor opportunities were seen by us on the left as damaging to our economy, while the wingers insisted it was making business prosper, a boon to everyone. Jobs were not being made, but all of the undermining of workers' rights was supposed to be for that end. Promoting business at the cost of hurting workers was supposed to be good, creating more jobs. That was wrong, and it has led to disaster.

The actions by deChristopher were a boon to all of us. It is heartening to know that reality-based economics are being taught, and are empowering, people who have true values. For the past eight years it has been hard to believe that reality was holding on somewhere.

Happy New Year.

Health Care For Employment

The expenses of automakers' commitment to retiree benefits has sparked an idea that seems like a great one. The whole country needs health care, and if we had it, a large part of the automakers' burden would be lifted.

In addition, employers great and small would have the burden of insurance lifted, and be able to employ more workers, with better salaries if the country would put in place a civilized nation's health care system.

I heard a reference to health care that prompted me to this conclusion, from Congressman Ryan on Washington Journal this morning. He mentioned that the health care benefits weren't an expense in Canadian auto industry, because that country has a public system that takes care of workers. All workers. Since then, I have been doing a little looking and found another post touting this little nicety.

In an economy with a 6.5 percent unemployment rate and rising, it is too great a risk for the government to sit idly by while an additional 2.5 million jobs disappear. But a bailout needs to be fashioned with care, so that the competitiveness of the U.S. auto industry is improved over the long term.

First, we must use part of the $700 billion bailout package to provide bridge loans to enable the auto companies to meet current expenses in order for them to avoid bankruptcy, but only on the condition that auto company management and the United Auto Worker leadership agree to meet with the top government officials, both in the executive branch and in Congress to fashion a strategy for a restructuring of the industry.

And here is the deal that will need to be struck. The UAW will need to get its members to accept substantial cuts in pay and benefits – far better than no job at all. The government will need to pass a national health care plan for the nation that will also relieve the auto makers of a substantial part of its cost for health care to its workers and retirees. And the government will need to pursue a policy of stabilizing gas prices using the gasoline tax, first keeping gas prices at the pump from rising until we get through the current crisis, but gradually increasing them over time and keeping them stable by varying the gas tax, so as to encourage consumers to want fuel efficient autos. Then the auto companies can count on and plan for an increasing demand for such vehicles, without being seesawed by wild swings in gas prices.

That is the deal that will have to be struck, and there must be teeth in the agreement so all parties stick to it. (Emphasis added.)

While I don't agree with all of this proposal, a lot of it makes really good sense.

It makes so much sense, no wonder it isn't being presented by our occupied White House and all its minions. Our future Secretary of HHS, Tom Daschle, is going to be working toward a goal that would greatly benefit employers.

Frankenfood

The recession that is sending us back to farming and growing our own foodstuffs may become a well-disguised benefit. The more I learn about food industry, and what I am eating, the more I realize that we are giving up more than we know for all that convenience.

At one time in my young life, I had home-grown chickens that we kept in the back of our large lot and put on the table for Sunday dinner. As you may have divined, there was a gory part of that process, but we kids learned that our dinner didn't come neatly wrapped in plastic. As far as I can tell, it didn't make me any less sensitive to suffering either. As I am reading this morning, it was not quite so bad for me as what is being fed to me now, through that meat wrapped in the plastic that looks so orderly.

For all the outrage about Chinese melamine, what American consumers and government agencies have studiously failed to scrutinize is how much melamine has pervaded our own food system. In casting stones, we’ve forgotten that our own house has more than its share of exposed glass.

To be sure, in China some food manufacturers deliberately added melamine to products to increase profits. Makers of baby formula, for example, watered down their product, lowering the amount of protein and nutrients, then added melamine, which is cheap and fools tests measuring protein levels.

But melamine is also integral to the material life of any industrialized society. It’s a common ingredient in cleaning products, waterproof plywood, plastic compounds, cement, ink and fire-retardant paint. Chemical plants throughout the United States produce millions of pounds of melamine a year.

Given the pervasiveness of melamine, it’s always possible that trace elements will end up in food. The F.D.A. thus sets the legal limit for melamine in food at 2.5 parts per million. This amount is indeed minuscule, a couple of sand grains in an expanse of desert that pose no real threat to public health. Moreover, the 2.5 p.p.m. figure is calculated for a person weighing 132 pounds — a cautious benchmark given that the average adult weighs 150 to 180 pounds.

But these figures obscure more than they reveal. First, while adults eat about one-fortieth of their weight every day, toddlers consume closer to one-tenth. Although scientists haven’t measured the differential impact of melamine on infants versus adults, it’s likely that this intensified ratio would at least double (if not quadruple) the impact of legal levels of melamine on toddlers.

This doubled exposure might not land a child in the hospital, but it could certainly contribute to the long-term kidney and liver problems that we know are caused by chronic exposure to melamine.

On a more concrete note, melamine not only has widespread industrial applications, but is also used to buttress the foundation of American agriculture.

Fertilizer companies commonly add melamine to their products because it helps control the rate at which nitrogen seeps into soil, thereby allowing the farmer to get more nutrient bang for the fertilizer buck. But the government doesn’t regulate how much melamine is applied to the soil. This melamine accumulates as salt crystals in the ground, tainting the soil through which American food sucks up American nutrients.

A related area of agricultural concern is animal feed. Chinese eggs seized last month in Hong Kong, for instance, contained elevated levels of melamine because of the melamine-laden wheat gluten used in the feed for the chickens that produced the eggs.

To think American consumers are immune to this unscrupulous behavior is to ignore the Byzantine reality of the global gluten trade. Tracking the flow of wheat gluten around the world, much less evaluating its quality, is like trying to contain a drop of dye in a churning whirlpool.

'Whirlpool' reminds me of natural gardening on Okinawa, which involved a cesspool stage.

While my neighbor's lawn leaks green lush areas of her commercial fertilizer onto my own yard, at least I think my little garden is far enough away to be free of contamination. I gathered seed from several of my more successful veggies, and am putting it away to plant in the spring. This practice may be becoming necessity, rather than whimsy, for those of us who really want to keep the poisons out of our system as much as possible.

Kudos to all of you who are growing your own, and making organic gardening/farming part of your lifestyle. Below is a picture from last spring, of the small garden I cultivated then. I see it growing bigger this year.

Can Do

Lovely building, isn't it? That's the City Hall in Pasadena, California, and it just went through some pretty nifty seismic repair and retro-fitting after suffering some minor yet troubling damage in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Here's what was done to bring this 80-year old beauty back into safe use:

Structural base isolation—effectively “floating” a building on rubber pads to safely ride out an earthquake—is nothing new in California. But the isolators installed for the structural and architectural renovation of Pasadena’s 1927 City Hall, designed by Bakewell and Brown, represent an innovative approach for addressing historic structures. Instead of placing an isolator under each structural concrete column, as is typically done, the engineers at San Francisco–based Forell/Elsesser Engineers designed a system of transfer beams that reduce the overall number of isolators.

The original building, designed in a California Mediterranean style, was slated for the $117.5 million seismic upgrade and renovation project after suffering minor damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake and after investigators found the structure to present potential life-safety issues, such as collapse. Although Forell/Elsesser began seismic investigation of the building in 1994, they were joined by ARG and construction manager DMJMH+N for the current completed project in 1999. Construction began in March 2005 and finished in April 2007, a surprising two months ahead of schedule.

Pretty impressive use of technology, isn't it? The amazing thing is that none of the extensive renovation and seismic retro-fitting is at all visible. The building looks and feels just as it did twenty years ago when I first visited it, except, of course, for the fresh paint job.

Now, it occurs to me that this building serves as a pretty good example of what can happen when the innovative use of technology is directed toward solving a problem. The architects, engineers, and construction experts worked together to repair the building and to eliminate the hazards which had developed, yet managed to maintain the architectural integrity of the building. That was what the people of Pasadena demanded, and that is what they got.

This "can-do" attitude is nothing new in the country, and we're pretty good at it. We've just apparently forgotten that part of our heritage. Now would be a good time to pull that trick out of the national hat. Just imagine what would be possible in the realms of global warming, renewable energy, and crumbling infrastructure if we just put our minds and our tax dollars towards solving those problems. And then consider what the effect of that kind of committment would have on the national economy and national psyche. We could get our people back to work at decent wages producing something besides hamburgers. We'd have something to show for those tax dollars besides flag-draped coffins.

This administration, of course, isn't interested in putting money to work in this country. There is, however, an election coming up.

351 days.