Sad To Hear

A young couple was found dead in Forbes State Forrest in Pennsylvania.

ENNERSTOWN – The bodies of two hikers found at the base of popular climbing rocks have been identified as a Westmoreland County man and woman.

Sara Baum, 24, of Greensburg and Christopher Cardy, 25, of Ligonier died after apparently falling from the cliffs at Beams Rocks, part of Forbes State Forest in Lincoln Township, authorities said Monday.

An autopsy is scheduled for this morning, Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller said.

State police are asking anyone who may have seen or heard anything while at Beams Rocks between 2 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. Sunday to contact the Somerset barracks at 445-4104.

My condolences to their friends and family.
Update: An article about the folks that found the bodies. Police are still investigating including toxicology tests.

Slow Food

The other day I linked to this article about slow food. It seems to have upset some people. Here is the Slow Food USA response. But I really like this response from Kurt Micheal Friese at Gristmill. I just want to highlight a few graphs.

I'm not sure why Mr. Sterling considers these ideas to be so threatening, but the fact is Slow Food couldn't care less what the McDonalds and Monsantos of the world do, until they start to crap where we live. In the meantime, we promote these ideas because we believe them to be good ideas worthy of proliferation and preservation. Food defines who we are as individuals and as cultures. We are truly what we eat, and too many people are fast, cheap and easy. The right of ADM or Monsanto, Applebees or Burger King to swing its arms ends at the tip of the eater's nose. Who owns your food owns you, and it is unwise to let that power rest in the hands of a very few wealthy corporations.[...]
It's being done because, as the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity clearly states:

• 75% of European food product diversity has been lost since 1900
• 93% of American food product diversity has been lost in the same time period
• 33% of livestock varieties have disappeared or are near disappearing
• 30,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct in the last century, and one more is lost every six hours
• The mission of the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity is to organize and fund projects that defend our world's heritage of agricultural biodiversity and gastronomic traditions.
• We envision a new agricultural system that respects local cultural identities, the earth's resources, sustainable animal husbandry, and the health of individual consumers.

And yes, Mr. Sterling, biodiversity must be served. Nature does not function without it and the industrialization and standardization of food and flavors is a direct threat to that diversity. For those who would like to know the true mission (and criteria) of the Foundation for Biodiversity and the Presidia Projects, please click here.

The food supply is going to get interesting.

Still No D Word

But economists are getting closer. Krugman

For example, there was a 2003 photo-op in which officials from multiple agencies used pruning shears and chainsaws to chop up stacks of banking regulations. The occasion symbolized the shared determination of Bush appointees to suspend adult supervision just as the financial industry was starting to run wild.

Oh, and the Bush administration actively blocked state governments when they tried to protect families against predatory lending.

So, will the administration’s plan succeed? I’m not asking whether it will succeed in preventing future financial crises — that’s not its purpose. The question, instead, is whether it will succeed in confusing the issue sufficiently to stand in the way of real reform.

Let’s hope not. As I said, America’s financial crises have been getting bigger. A decade ago, the market disruption that followed the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management was considered a major, scary event; but compared with the current earthquake, the L.T.C.M. crisis was a minor tremor.

If we don’t reform the system this time, the next crisis could well be even bigger. And I, for one, really don’t want to live through a replay of the 1930s.

Read it all.

Interesting

Craig Stanton of New Zealand is going to walk from the south end of Japan to the north end.

The 27-year-old Takapuna man hiked the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada last year, and this time will start at the southern tip of Japan and finish at its northern cape.

His route will take him through mixed terrain and over mountain peaks, including the Japanese Alps.

Mr Stanton says he "didn’t want to sit at his desk all day".

"There are shrines and temples to see and hot springs to sit in. It would be great if there was one at the end of each day walking," he says.

"I’m a bit nervous about the weather. I’ve heard there are cruel winters in the north with drift ice and snow storms."

I googled around and found his websites. It does not appear that there is an Appalachian Trail like Trail that runs through the islands. So he will have to do a lot of rod walk in congested areas. But will hike trails for much of it.

PCT Journal

Japan website with blog.

Banned

British Treasurer has been banned from pubs in the United Kingdom.

British pub landlords have launched a campaign to bar finance minister Alistair Darling from every pub in the land for raising taxes on alcohol in his March 12 budget.

Pub landlord Jason Hughes kicked off the campaign just after the budget came out by placing a spoof poster in the window of his Utopia Bar in Edinburgh, Darling's hometown, barring him from the premises.

Man, Do I have Springer Fever

Springer fever is what happens every spring to the Long Distance hiker. It is time to hike. It is named after Springer Mountain at the begging of the Appalachian Trail.

I just spent far too much time watching John Fegy's videos of His thru-hike last year. I am not sure if I met him or not. The fast kids kind of blur together.

Mahoosuc Notch

White Rocks Sculpture

Lehigh Gap

Do Not Tell Anyone

I liked this. Via gristmill.

Good News

The Bear Mountain section of the Appalachian Trail is being rerouted with sustainable trails.

BEAR MOUNTAIN — Two Appalachian Trails diverged in the woods, and a group of about 15 volunteers yesterday took the one less traveled.

Rather, never yet traveled.

The group is part of a six-year effort to reroute the 3-mile stretch of the 2,147-mile Appalachian Trail extending from Georgia to Maine that cross through Bear Mountain.

Yesterday was the first day of this season's work, which will continue until November.

"The current (Appalachian Trail) that runs through here is very eroded and hard to navigate," said project manager Matt Townsend.

The project is being overseen by the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference and funded by the conference and several other nonprofit groups. It is expected to cost between $1.5 million and $2 million when it's completed in 2012.

The Appalachian Trail portion of the project has already started. It looks like that will be completed first. Major details can be found at the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference Bear Mountain Project page. The section from the Inn to summit is probably the most traveled section of trail, due to proximity to New York City.

And yes, they have a blog.

Police State

This should be hard to believe,but sadly it is not.

WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) — Cars lining the street. A house full of young people. A keg and drinking games inside. Police thought they had an underage boozing party on their hands.

But though they made dozens of teens take breath tests, none tested positive for alcohol. That's because the keg contained root beer.

The party was held by a high school student who wanted to show that teens don't always drink alcohol at their parties. It has gained fame on YouTube.com.

Dustin Zebro, 18, said he staged the party after friends at D.C. Everest High School got suspended from sports because of pictures showing them drinking from red cups.

The root-beer kegger was "to kind of make fun of the school," he said. "They assumed there was beer in the cups. We just wanted to have some root beer in red cups and just make it look like a party, but there actually wasn't any alcohol."

Suspended for drinking out of red cups. Get a life school officials. The police should be able to tell if the kids are drinking. But they had to be assholes.

Nearly 90 breath tests were done, and officers even searched locked rooms for hiding teens.

High School

A school in California has opened to teach about Marijuana.

Welcome to Oaksterdam University, a new trade school where "higher" education takes on a whole new meaning.

The school prepares people for jobs in California's thriving medical marijuana industry. For $200 and the cost of two required textbooks, students learn how to cultivate and cook with cannabis, study which strains of pot are best for certain ailments, and are instructed in the legalities of a business that is against the law in the eyes of the federal government. ''My basic idea is to try to professionalize the industry and have it taken seriously as a real industry, just like beer and distilling hard alcohol,'' said Richard Lee, 45, an activist and pot-dispensary owner who founded the school in a downtown storefront last fall.

Via Libby at Newshoggers, who discuses ways to help the economy with marijuana.

Odd

Farmers are getting cut out of price increases.

Whatever the reason, the price for a bushel of grain set in the derivatives markets has been substantially higher than the simultaneous price in the cash market.

When that happens, no one can be exactly sure which is the accurate price in these crucial commodity markets, an uncertainty that can influence food prices and production decisions around the world.

These disparities also raise the question of whether American farmers, who rely almost exclusively on the cash market, are being shortchanged by cash prices that are lower than they should be.

The markets found a way to screw the farmer. Via Avedon at the Sideshow.

McAfee Knob

Night Hike! Article here.

Loans and Leadership

Krugman:

When George W. Bush first ran for the White House, political reporters assured us that he came across as a reasonable, moderate guy.

Yet those of us who looked at his policy proposals — big tax cuts for the rich and Social Security privatization — had a very different impression. And we were right.

The moral is that it’s important to take a hard look at what candidates say about policy. It’s true that past promises are no guarantee of future performance. But policy proposals offer a window into candidates’ political souls — a much better window, if you ask me, than a bunch of supposedly revealing anecdotes and out-of-context quotes.

Which brings me to the latest big debate: how should we respond to the mortgage crisis? In the last few days John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have all weighed in. And their proposals arguably say a lot about the kind of president each would be.

Mr. McCain is often referred to as a “maverick” and a “moderate,” assessments based mainly on his engaging manner. But his speech on the economy was that of an orthodox, hard-line right-winger.[...]

Mr. McCain, we’re told, is a straight-talking maverick. But on domestic policy, he offers neither straight talk nor originality; instead, he panders shamelessly to right-wing ideologues.

Read it all.

Freedom

The video is of Ritchie Havens sing the song Freedom/Motherless Child.

In honor of Don Siegalman being released from prison. It was Bush league justice that got him convicted.

Small Scale Farming

I think we will need a lot of small scale farming in the future. It can also be a source of jobs in urban areas.

ell him what happened with the sign,” Daniel Ross said to Angel Ortiz at the gate to Nuestras Raíces farm, 30 acres of vegetables, animals, and flowers on the banks of the Connecticut River in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Ortiz, a strapping but shy 18-year-old who helps tend the farm—“the pig whisperer,” Ross calls him—looked down. “It was just a truck!” he said. Then he told the story: “I backed up and it broke on me.” Ross, smiling, stretched out his hand to take Ortiz’s in a long, solid grip. “Angel’s going to be the next mayor of Holyoke,” he said.

Young people run things at Nuestras Raíces (“Our Roots”), the nonprofit agency Ross heads. They’re allowed to screw up and figure out how to fix their own problems. Many agencies around the country encourage similar activities: city gardening, youth training, healthful eating, entrepreneurship. But few have integrated themselves with equal reach and results, or helped rebuild as troubled a community as Holyoke.

It is a good article.

McCain

This Is Funny

Here Comes The Sun

Large solar project in California.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Utility Southern California Edison said on Thursday it would spend $875 million to build a network of 250 megawatts of photovoltaic solar power generation, making it the biggest solar cell project in the nation.[...]

At 250 megawatts, the installation would be about half the size of the newest coal or natural gas-fired power generation units.

So far, companies behind the largest solar projects have favored solar thermal technology, in which parabolic mirrors are used to concentrate sunlight to heat a liquid that drives a power-generating turbine.

Photovoltaic technology converts sunlight directly into electricity inside the solar cells.

On Wednesday, FPL Group Inc, the nation's largest generator of wind and solar power, announced it planned to build a 250-megawatt thermal solar plant in California's Mojave Desert.

SCE said its new photovoltaic project was possible because recent advances had cut in half the traditional cost of installed solar generation in California.

Good news.

McCain Bias

Remember not to trust the media when discussing John McCain.

IT is certainly no secret that Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is a darling of the news media. Reporters routinely attach “maverick,” “straight talker” and “patriot” to him like Homeric epithets. Chris Matthews of MSNBC has even called the press “McCain’s base” — a comment that Mr. McCain himself has jokingly reiterated. The mainstream news media by and large don’t cover Mr. McCain; they canonize him. Hence the moniker on liberal blogs: St. McCain.[...]

Yet the reporters, so quick in general to jump on hypocrisy, seem to find his insincerity a virtue. When an old sobersides like Mitt Romney flip-flops, he is called a panderer. When Mr. McCain suddenly supports the tax cuts he once excoriated, or embraces the religious right, or emphasizes border security over a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, we are told by his press acolytes that he doesn’t really mean it, that his liberal cosmology will ultimately best his conservative rhetoric. “Discount his repositioning a bit,” Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, wrote two years ago, “and McCain looks like the same unconventional character who emerged during the Clinton years.” The article was subtitled “Psst ... He’s Not Really a Conservative.”

This suggests that love is blind. It also suggests that seducing the press with ironic detachment, the press’s soft spot, may be the best political strategy of all — one that Mr. McCain may walk on water right into the White House.

99 Cents Value Meal

From the New York Times.

So when I heard that the food you can buy at 99-cent stores is more diverse than you might imagine, I decided to conduct an experiment. I’d make dinner every night for a week using mostly ingredients bought at these stores and then, on the eighth night — once I’d gotten my game down — I’d prepare a meal for friends made only from ingredients bought at 99-cent stores.[...]
I trod more carefully when it came to meat — though the $4.99 Al Fresco chicken sausage that I tossed with some peas and farfalle one night was fine, I found myself neatly dodging the 99-cent ham cubes and the frozen fillets of tilapia and salmon, subconsciously putting them on my list of things I want to pay full freight for (surgery, sushi).

It is a fun article. It reminded me of Steve Don't Eat That.

There aren't too many products that feel the need to reassure you that they are, in fact, "food." Already not a good sign.

The list of ingredients is long and horrifying, coming right out of the gate with "MECHANICALLY SEPARATED CHICKEN." Oddly enough, I'm about to be separated from my lunch, and I haven't even opened the can yet.

Other ingredients include BEEF TRIPE, BEEF HEARTS, AND "PARTIALLY DE-FATTED COOKED PORK FATTY TISSUE" How does one de-fat fat? Bizarre. God knows what else is in here.

Slow Food

From metropolismag.com

As a nonprofit heritage organization, the Slow Food empire retains a mere 150 full-time employees with a modest budget of $37 million a year. Yet Slow Food has invented the modern Italian food-heritage industry. Today it is a thriving ganglion of local chapters, called convivia, which number about 83,000 people in more than 100 countries. It’s also a publishing house specializing in tourist guidebooks, restaurant recipes, and heritage reprints.

The group is the suave host for massive international food events in Torino. Other Slow Food emanations include a hotel, various nonprofit foundations, and—in a particularly significant development—a private college. The University of Gastronomic Sciences, founded in 2004, is the training ground for 200-plus international Slow Food myrmidons per year, who are taught to infiltrate farms, groceries, heritage tourism, restaurants, commercial consortia, hotel chains, catering companies, product promotion, journalism, and government. These areas are, of course, where Slow Food already lives.[...]
The cleverest innovation to date is the network’s presidium system. The Slow Food “presidia” make up a grassroots bottom-up version of the European “Domain of Control” system, which requires, for instance, that true “champagnes” must come from the province of Champagne, while lesser fizzy brews are labeled mere “sparkling wines.” These presidia have made Slow Food the planetary paladin of local production. Slow Food deploys its convivia to serve as talent scouts for food rarities (such as Polish Mead, the Istrian Giant Ox, and the Tehuacan Amaranth). Candidate discoveries are passed to Slow Food’s International Ark Commission, which decides whether the foodstuff is worthy of inclusion. Its criteria are strict: (a) Is the product nonglobalized or, better yet, inherently nonglobalizable? (b) Is it artisanally made (so there’s no possibility of any industrial economies of scale)? (c) Is it high-quality (the consumer “wow” factor)? (d) Is it sustainably produced? (Not only is this politically pleasing, but it swiftly eliminates competition from most multinationals.) (e) Is this product likely to disappear from the planet otherwise? (Biodiversity must be served!)

MMM! Food. When I stayed at Moon In The Pond Farm the food was slow and good.

Help Stop Crime

I always get a big kick out of it when one of the the big bloggers, a congressman or a senator e-mails me. Today, I got an e-mail from Jane Hamshire of Firedoglake and Kos of dailykos. It seems John McCain is breaking the law on a daily basis. He agreed to FEC spending limits and has now spent more a criminal act. Please sign this petition.

Tengrain Presents

Tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors presents The Miracle of Chimpy's Economy. It is better if you click the link.

Rausch Gap

cemetary, originally uploaded by cheflovesbeer.

This is a picture of the sign to the cemetery in this article about the Rausch Gap Bridge being closed.

here’s not much left of the village of Rausch Gap. There’s an old cemetery a short distance off the trail in the woods, but it’s hard to find among the tall trees.

Watts said the bridge was damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

Rausch Gap was one of a handful of small coal-mining towns that sprung up in Stony Valley during the 1800s. It was once connected to the Susquehanna River by the railroad and was home to about 1,000 residents who worked in the mines or in railroad shops.

Now a ghost town, Rausch Gap is one of the many stops along the 2,175-mile Appalachian Trail, with a shelter there for overnight campers.

Lame

Joseph Romm at Gristmill.

The Toronto Star reported an alarming factoid earlier this month:

No gasoline-powered car assembled in North America would meet China's current fuel-efficiency standard.

That's mainly because:

1. Currently, their standard is much higher than ours.
2. Their standard is a minimum-allowable efficiency standard rather than a "fleet-average" standard like ours.
3. Our lame car companies don't make their (relatively few) most efficient vehicles in this country.

We will not have any car companies left if we do not force them to do the right thing.

Pinhoti

I was reading this article about the Pinhoti extension to the Appalachian Trail and wanted to highlight this.

Just like any hobby or sport, there are purists. The Appalachian Trail runs from Springer Mountain, Ga., to Mount Katahdin, Maine, and that's that. And honestly, that's what it will always be. No matter how many trails connect to the Appalachian Trail, that 2,000-mile long footpath will always be the Appalachian Trail.

Benton MacKaye's vision was for an "extension" into Alabama. This connection of the Pinhoti Trail to the Appalachian Trail facilitates MacKaye's plan. If through-hikers want to hike the complete length of the Appalachian range, they need to come to Alabama to do it. If they want the traditional Appalachian Trail experience, then they can start at Springer Mountain. The only thing that has changed is the option of where the hiker can start the trip.

The sentence in bold type will be the talk of the trail this season. I remember Rusty of Rusty's Hard Time Hollow saying "Katahdin isn't going anywhere but Springer might."

I am going to see what the folks at Whiteblaze think.

Bridge Out

The bridge over Rausch Creek on the Appalachian Trail has been closed.

A 154-year-old bridge on the Appalachian Trail in northern Lebanon County has been closed after a partial collapse of its foundation.

The Rausch Gap Bridge was closed by the state Game Commission after recent flooding damaged the bridge. The stone-arch bridge was built in 1854 and once carried the Schuylkill & Susquehanna Railroad across the creek. The roadbed is now a 19-mile-long rail-trail that traverses State Game lands 211, known locally as St. Anthony’s Wilderness, from east to west.[...]

She said the Appalachian Trail Conservancy has been made aware of the bridge’s closing.

“We’re going to be trying to work with them to establish a detour,” Trewella said.

Although the closure will present an inconvenience, hikers determined to get across the creek, which is a tributary of Stony Creek, shouldn’t have a problem.

Appalachian Trail

Some pictures of me on the Appalachian Trail over the years.

Free Ride

Kevin Drum On John McCain And the press.

Let's recap. Foreign policy cred lets him get away with wild howlers on foreign policy. Fiscal integrity cred lets him get away with outlandishly irresponsible economic plans. Anti-lobbyist cred lets him get away with pandering to lobbyists. Campaign finance reform cred lets him get away with gaming the campaign finance system. Straight talking cred lets him get away with brutally slandering Mitt Romney in the closing days of the Republican primary. Maverick uprightness cred allows him to get away with begging for endorsements from extremist religious leaders like John Hagee. "Man of conviction" cred allows him to get away with transparent flip-flopping so egregious it would make any other politician a laughingstock. Anti-torture cred allows him to get away with supporting torture as long as only the CIA does it.

Remind me again: where does all this cred come from? And what window do Democrats go to to get the same treatment the press gives McCain?

Atrios is on the case too.

Digby

Here's the thing. It's not just McCain. They let Reagan and Junior get away with it too. The media allow Republicans to speak nonsense to the public all the time and don't challenge them. Meanwhile Democrats are derided for being dishonest, boring eggheads who can't be trusted.

The Republican nominee just spoke in classic Bushian gibberish on the nation's most pressing issue and everyone will call it straight talk. This is a problem and it's bigger than St John.

What War?

The media has decided to disappear the war that John McCain wants to keep going for a hundred years.

Since the start of last year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tracked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast television networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year.

Why report on something that makes McCain look bad.

Once More

This time with feeling. From paradox at the Left Coaster.

De-regulation has been a central tenet of Republican orthodoxy for thirty years, they bludgeoned the public into accepting private profit for socialized losses and when it turns out they’re total charlatans who—automatically, somehow—get bailed out with tens of billions of our…money…Democratic candidates for President of the United States have no comment?

Read it all. It is a good rant. Via Avedon at the Sideshow.

Hiking Can Be Dangerous

A University of Richmond law student fell to his death.

A law student at the University of Richmond died Saturday afternoon after he fell off a cliff during a hiking trip to the popular Crabtree Falls, relatives said yesterday.

Robert Slimak, 26, was on a weekend camping trip with a group of Virginia Commonwealth University alumni when he slid down a rock and fell about 150 feet, said his sister Katherin Crossling.

My condolences to his friends and family. Some safe hiking tips from the US Forrest service.

Update: More information about the incident and family.

Forward Thinking

Something Americas leaders have not been accused of. Wasting billions on illegal wars, they have been accused. The Germans, on the other hand, are working hard to integrate solar into their power grid.

Researchers will be sharing data and expertise to speed up the market introduction of large-scale solar thermal plants. The plants could supply up to 200 megawatts (MW) of electricity and desalinate water for 50,000 people.

Electricity from solar thermal plants could cost as little as €0.04/kilowatt hour (kWh) [US $0.06/kWh] by 2015 to 2020, Bernhard Milow from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) said. And using solar thermal power to desalinate seawater could cost the same.

"The technology and science is all there. It's just a question of transferring that knowledge to those who have the sunshine and optimizing the technology to make it competitive," Milow said.

Electricity from solar thermal plants currently costs €0.20 to 0.30/kWh [US $0.31 to 0.47/kWh], depending on the location of the plant and the amount of sunshine it receives. But with improvements in the performance of plants and better sites, solar thermal electricity could soon be cheaper than coal, and so generate huge amounts of reliable, clean electricity in hot desert regions, Milow said.

Even factoring in high steel prices and other costs, a kWh of electricity could still be as low as €0.06-0.07/kWh [US $0.09-0.11/kWh] if the power plants are in prime locations, Milow said.

That is cheaper than coal now. But if you add the future cost of coal burning it is far more competitive than coal. From Gristmill.

Federal legislation has been introduced that would have the net impact of taxing carbon. If any of the proposals are adopted, utility companies and their customers will pay far more for energy which produces carbon. It will also require spending billions on equipment to clean the atmosphere as thoroughly as possible. Building additional coal plants now is likely to create a significant economic liability for Kansas in the future.

Note that this is not an environmental argument. You don't have to care about climate change to see its logic. Events are likely to conspire to sharply increase the price of coal. You build two new dirty coal plants and you're hanging them around your own neck for the next 50 years. That's short-sighted.

Just think how much solar power we could have if we invested the war money in solar projects. We need forward thinking politicians to force the issue.

Taming The Beast

Krugman:

We’re now in the midst of an epic financial crisis, which ought to be at the center of the election debate. But it isn’t.

Now, I don’t expect presidential campaigns to have all the answers to our current crisis — even financial experts are scrambling to keep up with events. But I do think we’re entitled to more answers, and in particular a clearer commitment to financial reform, than we’re getting so far.

In truth, I don’t expect much from John McCain, who has both admitted not knowing much about economics and denied having ever said that. Anyway, lately he’s been busy demonstrating that he doesn’t know much about the Middle East, either.

Yet the McCain campaign’s silence on the financial crisis has disappointed even my low expectations.

Read it all.

Daren Gets A Trail Name

Daren Wendell who is attempting to walk around the world got named by the Appalachian Trail community.

Trail Name: Everyone one who is thru-hiking (GA - Maine) is usually given a trail name. You don't get to pick your trail name for it is usually given to you when you do something stupid or telling some type of story or even from things you have done before you got on the trail. I have a friend that received his trail name "Applicator" because he was walking down the trail one day and picked up what he thought to be chap stick and threw it at is friend and his friend said.. "dude..thats a tampon" other trail names I heard are "free hugs" ..."Bag Lady" "Mary Poppins" "Walgreens" "357" (I heard it is because he carries a 357 magnum in his backpack) ..nice "Brushstrokes" "Last Minute" and "Fish" are just to name a few.

My trail name is "Vagabond" I looked up the definition and here is what I got:

1. 1: A person without a permanent home who moves from place to place.
2. 2: A vagrant; a tramp.
3. 3: A wanderer; a rover.

I think I will pick number 1 and 3. I don't feel homeless but I guess if you get technical I don't own a house or rent an apartment. I am homeless!...I just happen to have a website

Vagabond should embrace number 2. Admit it your just tramping around.

Vive La McCain

For a few bucks he helped airbus get a contract. Too bad he could not help the American company. Vive la McCain, John McCain.

Yellowstone Bison

Bull Bison Yellowstone N.P., originally uploaded by rlw5663.

The bison that leave Yellowstone National Park are being killed at a record pace this year.

At first light on Tuesday, at the end of a closed road, past a boneyard of junk cars, trailers and old cabins, more than 60 of the park’s wild bison were being loaded on a semi-trailer to be shipped to a slaughterhouse.

With heavy snow still covering the park’s vast grasslands, hundreds of bison have been leaving Yellowstone in search of food at lower elevations. A record number of the migrating animals — 1,195, or about a quarter of the park’s population — have been killed by hunters or rounded up and sent to slaughterhouses by park employees. The bison are being killed because they have ventured outside the park into Montana and some might carry a disease called brucellosis, which can be passed along to cattle.

The large-scale culling, which is expected to continue through April, has outraged groups working to preserve the park’s bison herds, considered by scientists to be the largest genetically pure population in the country. It has also led to an angry exchange between Montana state officials and the federal government over a stalled agreement to create a haven for the bison that has not received the needed federal financing.

“When they leave the park they have nowhere to go,” said Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a Democrat. “This agreement would have given them a place to go.”

A 1.5 million dollar appropriation was killed by Montana's republican congressman.

127 pounds

GoLite founder Demetri "Coup" Coupounas is going to hike on the Appalachian Trail for 40 days without resupply.

At sunset tonight, Demetri “Coup” Coupounas, the president and co-founder of GoLite, with the weight equivalent of a small person strapped to his back, will set out to hike the Appalachian Trail. For 40 days and 40 nights, Coup will take the classic American pilgrimage—with no re-supply—as an elaborate field test of GoLite’s products. While 127 pounds (eight of them are chocolate!) is, to most, not a particularly light cargo, his journey is meant to affirm the company’s core values—that the outdoors is a lot more fun once you take a load off. He’s commemorating the 10th anniversary of GoLite, which he founded with his wife and late father, while hoping that by the end of his trip, on April 30, he will have broken the current 620-mile World Alpine Style Backpacking Distance record by at least a couple hundred miles.

He is carrying a charger so I guess he can go into town. Not to many electrical outlets on the trail. So, why carry all the food. He has maps for 1,100 miles. It is the Appalachian Trail. You do not need maps. But, hey what do I know? Best of luck to you Coup.

Blog Against Theocracy

BAT logo, originally uploaded by flangum.

It is blog against theocracy weekend. It is important to keep the separation of church and state. The founders of this nation knew how divisive religion could be. Maryland my home state was founded by Catholics who were thrown out of England because the were not the right kind of Christians. Do we really want to argue over Transubstantiation and Consubstantiation again? Me, I opted out of the cannibalism: ritual or otherwise.

Blog Against Theocracy and First Freedom First are good resources for the separation of church and state.

Friday Bird Feeder Blogging

cardinal flight.JPG, originally uploaded by cheflovesbeer.

It was about to land on the feeder.

Full Moon

Full moon of the vernal equinox 2008, originally uploaded by Body Soul Spirit.

Full moon. Vernal equinox. I have Springer fever.

Party Like Its 1929

Krugman

The answer, at a fundamental level, is that we’re paying the price for willful amnesia. We chose to forget what happened in the 1930s — and having refused to learn from history, we’re repeating it.

Contrary to popular belief, the stock market crash of 1929 wasn’t the defining moment of the Great Depression. What turned an ordinary recession into a civilization-threatening slump was the wave of bank runs that swept across America in 1930 and 1931.

This banking crisis of the 1930s showed that unregulated, unsupervised financial markets can all too easily suffer catastrophic failure.

Read it all.

Socialized Compensation

A New York Times Editorial.

But that’s not how it works. The ongoing bailout of the financial system by the Federal Reserve underscores the extent to which financial barons socialize the costs of private bets gone bad. Not a week goes by that the Fed doesn’t inaugurate a new way to provide liquidity — meaning money — to the financial system. Bear Stearns isn’t enormous. It doesn’t take deposits from the public. Yet the Fed believed that letting it implode could unleash a domino effect among other banks, and the Fed provided a $30 billion guarantee for JPMorgan to snap it up.

Once again, a bail out for the rich.

Bread Moon Rising

Bread prices are and will continue to rise. Read this from the Ethicurean.

Around the world there’s growing talk about food crisis as grain prices soar and supplies plummet. They’re talking food riots. And the American Bakers Association marched on Washington.

Meanwhile, in the breadbasket of the nation (a.k.a. Kansas), the price of bread rose yesterday in its best-known bakery, WheatFields. Nobody rioted.

It is a good article please read it all.

Thirsty

Twenty percent of the worlds population does not have safe drinking water.

PARIS (AFP) - A world without fresh water would be a world bereft of humans, and yet one in five people lacks regular access to this most basic of life-sustaining substances.

By 2025, fully a third of the planet's growing population could find itself scavenging for safe drinking water, the United Nations has warned ahead of World Water Day on Saturday.

More than two million people in developing countries -- the vast majority children -- die every year from diseases associated with unsanitary water.

There are a number of interlocking causes for this scourge.

Global economic growth, population pressures and the rise of mega-cities have all driven water use to record levels.

Mexico City, Jakarta and Bangkok, to name a few, have underground water sources -- some of them nonrenewable -- depleting at alarming rates.

Lets throw in some global warming and see what happens.

But even as scientists and governments look for ways to satisfy a thirsty world, another threat looms on the horizon: global warming.

Rising sea levels are already forcing salt water into aquifers beneath megadeltas that are home to tens of millions, and changing weather patterns are set to intensify droughts in large swathes of Africa, southern Europe and Asia, according to UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

I think rich nations may be able to fix there drinking water problems. Some of the poor ones may have trouble.

Bad News

Hiker Devin Ossman was found dead in Mt Rainier National Park.
Also, the hiker found in The San Bernadino's was identified.

Other hikers spotted the body of William Lyall Spearman about 8 a.m. Monday in a mountainous area known as the Big Horn Sheep Reserve and notified Cathedral City police, said Sgt. David Florez of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department.

Due to the terrain, the county Desert Search and Rescue team and the sheriff's Aviation Unit were summoned to recover the body.

The rescue party had to hike into the canyons and climb roughly 75 feet, Florez said, adding that the body was transported out of the area in a sheriff's helicopter.

An initial investigation determined that the hiker may have have died of natural causes, he said.

My condolences to their friends and families.

Bees On A Truck

Truck full of honey bees that were attacking our car, originally uploaded by CKB94114.

A truck carrying 12 million bees crashed in CA.

t was a stinging revelation on State Route 99 in Sacramento, California yesterday: mixing 12 million honeybees, a top-heavy tractor trailer and a tight freeway on-ramp makes a painfully sticky mess that will quickly bring traffic to a halt.

With an estimated 440 bee hives smashed on the side of the highway, and millions of stressed-out bees buzzing wildly and looking for victims, disaster was thankfully averted by a group of beekeepers who happened upon the accident (there's never a cop when you need one, but apparently beekeepers are readily available). Once their hives were re-assembled on another flatbed, the tiny insects made a bee-line for the shelter and, sweet ending in sight, began to bee-have themselves once again. Thanks to everyone who bugged us about the story.

Does this type of thing help cause Colony Collapse Disorder? It can not be good for the bees.

Hat tip clusterflock

Corporate Welfare

E J Dionne at the Washington Post

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios.

So they have stopped investing. The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can't have that. It's just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are "too big to fail," because they could bring us all down with them.

Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don't expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?

They are leaches. Via dday at Hullabaloo.

Trains

It would be nice to have high speed rail service from DC to RI. I saw this at Tree Hugger and wanted to post it. How we spend tax dollars is important.

8,555 -- Number of jobs created by spending $1 billion on defense.

10,779 -- Number of jobs created by spending $1 billion on health care.

17,687 -- Number of jobs created by spending $1 billion on education.

19,795 -- Number of jobs created by spending $1 billion on public transportation.

Hiker Missing

Mt Rainier National Park

Devin Ossman, 45, is thought to have hiked into the Kautz Creek drainage area. His car was found Monday just before dark, and a check of his license plate number showed he had already been reported missing, a park spokeswoman said.

Who You Gonna Call?

Krugman:

Nouriel is right: this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the Fed, with the best will in the world, probably lacks the tools to deal with it. Broader action is necessary.

But then comes the question: who ya gonna call?

The Gang That Couldn’t think Straight still holds the White House; no good ideas will come from that quarter. Worse, Incurious George would probably veto any sensible plan from Congress, even if said plan could get past a filibuster.

Hey, here’s an idea! Let’s create a nonpartisan expert commission, headed by Alan Gr …. oh, wait. He’s part of the problem. In fact, is there any way we can repossess his book royalties?

Seriously, it’s very hard to see who can take charge.

Things fall apart, and the center doesn’t exist.

Chinook Salmon Disappear

Chinook Salmon did not return to the Sacramento River this year.

The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations — and coming up dry.

Whatever the cause, there was widespread agreement among those attending a five-day meeting of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council here last week that the regional $150 million fishery, which usually opens for the four-month season on May 1, is almost certain to remain closed this year from northern Oregon to the Mexican border. A final decision on salmon fishing in the area is expected next month.

There are some guesses.

“It’s unprecedented that this fishery is in this kind of shape,” said Donald McIsaac, executive director of the council, which is organized under the auspices of the Commerce Department.

Fishermen think the Sacramento River was mismanaged in 2005, when this year’s fish first migrated downriver. Perhaps, they say, federal and state water managers drained too much water or drained at the wrong time to serve the state’s powerful agricultural interests and cities in arid Southern California. The fishermen think the fish were left susceptible to disease, or to predators, or to being sucked into diversion pumps and left to die in irrigation canals.

But federal and state fishery managers and biologists point to the highly unusual ocean conditions in 2005, which may have left the fingerling salmon with little or none of the rich nourishment provided by the normal upwelling currents near the shore.

It could be natural, perhaps a global warming change. Or it could be mismanagement. I can definitely believe that some loyal Bushie diverted water to another loyal Bushie.

It Is Getting Cold

Lion King is trekking through Iowa in the cold. I do not think I would enjoy that too much.

Life Imitates Art

Abba drummer found dead in garden.

A former drummer for the Swedish pop band ABBA was found dead with cuts to his neck in the garden of his house on the Spanish island of Mallorca. Police said Monday an autopsy showed it was an accident.

A neighbor found the body of 62-year-old Ola Brunkert on Sunday evening at his house in a coastal area outside the eastern town of Arta, a Civil Guard spokesman told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

He said an autopsy was carried out and confirmed initial investigations. "It was an accident," he said.

From the movie This Is Spinal Tap.

Keep America Beautiful

Trek Against Trash. Jordan Price and Carlie Tucker are going to hike the Appalachian Trail to raise money to Keep America Beautiful. Article with video. When I hike I try to pick up at least one peice of trash every day. I'm sure I have left some behind. I want the wilderness to be better after I walk through it.

Bailout

I think we should let the banks fail. Krugman

Bear, in other words, deserved to be allowed to fail — both on the merits and to teach Wall Street not to expect someone else to clean up its messes.

But the Fed rode to Bear’s rescue anyway, fearing that the collapse of a major investment bank would cause panic in the markets and wreak havoc with the wider economy. Fed officials knew that they were doing a bad thing, but believed that the alternative would be even worse.

As Bear goes, so will go the rest of the financial system. And if history is any guide, the coming taxpayer-financed bailout will end up costing a lot of money.

The U.S. savings and loan crisis of the 1980s ended up costing taxpayers 3.2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of $450 billion today. Some estimates put the fiscal cost of Japan’s post-bubble cleanup at more than 20 percent of G.D.P. — the equivalent of $3 trillion for the United States.

If these numbers shock you, they should. But the big bailout is coming. The only question is how well it will be managed.

As I said, the important thing is to bail out the system, not the people who got us into this mess. That means cleaning out the shareholders in failed institutions, making bondholders take a haircut, and canceling the stock options of executives who got rich playing heads I win, tails you lose.

According to late reports on Sunday, JPMorgan Chase will buy Bear for a pittance. That’s an O.K. resolution for this case — but not a model for the much bigger bailout to come. Looking ahead, we probably need something similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation, which took over bankrupt savings and loan institutions and sold off their assets to reimburse taxpayers. And we need it quickly: things are falling apart as you read this.

Read it all.

Update: A couple of good rants about the bailout I found at Avedon's Sideshow.

Athenae:

Couldn't Bear Stearns just get a job, already? I mean, I know of six or seven places that are hiring. I don't know what they pay, but surely it would be enough to keep them in sneakers and Xbox games.

I mean, just last week I heard that when we bailed out the airlines, jewelry sales at Wal-Mart went up 1400 percent. I didn't see it myself, but my cousins told me they heard it from somebody who knows somebody who works there, and it was like Christmas morning when those government checks cleared. What can you expect, really, from people trained in government dependency, I guess, but it still pisses me off, because that's my money. Fucking leeches.

Ruth at cab drollery, The market played, you lost.

profits are privatized and losses are socialized

McCain

CNN tried in vain to find an Iraqi that supported John McCain. It seems the Iraqi people know what is best for them. The 2008 presidential election is a matter of life and death for the Iraqis. They do not want a republican.

Also while McCain was in Iraq CNN tried to go to the market that was a sign of Iraqi progress a year ago. It was too dangerous.

Beer!

Guzzling beer is better for brain while quaffing wine is a worry, a new study has claimed.

Drug Prices

Micheal at Econospeak pointed out this article about expensive drugs. Some doctors are cutting the dose because the drug is so expensive. One doctor even went so far as to call it economic malpractice. It can cost as much as $400,000 dollars a year for some drugs.

With Cerezyme, which is made by Genzyme, the profits are sizable. Gaucher disease, which can have complications like ruined joints, is rare; only about 1,500 people in the United States are on the drug and about 5,000 worldwide. Sales of Cerezyme totaled $1.1 billion last year, making it a blockbuster by industry standards.

Wow, $1.1 billion. I guess they have to pay for research to make the drug. Except, your tax dollars paid for it.

But critics say the company’s development costs were minimal, because the early work on the treatment was done by the National Institutes of Health, which gave Genzyme a contract to manufacture it. And analysts estimate the current cost of manufacturing the drug to be only about 10 percent of its price.

Again, wow, that is one hell of a mark up. One would think that insurance companies would want to keep prices down. They do not. They pass it along to their customers.

Ms. Mangum began treatment in 2000, at a cost of more than $400,000 a year. The next year, the premiums for everyone in her insurance pool went up by $180 a month.

I would rather have the profits from $400,000 rather than $40,000 too. It would have been nice if the reporter, Andrew Pollack, did some reporting on weather the critics were right or not. He is after all a reporter. Instead he went with what the corporation most likely lies and critics most likely truths. But we do not know.

Lawless George

A New York Times Editorial. This is what the FISA bill is all about.

Finally, Mr. Bush said it was vital to national security to give amnesty to any company that turned over data on Americans without a court order. The purpose of this amnesty is not to protect national secrets — that could be done during a trial — but to make sure that the full damage to Americans’ civil liberties is never revealed. Mr. Bush also objects to a provision that would create a committee to examine his warrantless spying program.

Mr. Bush wanted the House to approve the Senate’s version of the bill, which includes Mr. Bush’s amnesty and does not do nearly as good a job of preserving Americans’ rights. We were glad the House ignored his bluster. If the Senate cannot summon the courage and good sense to follow suit, there is no rush to pass a law.

The president will continue to claim the country is in grave danger over this issue, but it is not. The real danger is for Mr. Bush. A good law — like the House bill — would allow Americans to finally see the breathtaking extent of his lawless behavior.

Read it all.

Naughty Trail Stories

It seems they got cut :(

This week’s Play column is about Sarasota’s Bill Walker, who wrote a hiking book: “SKYWALKER: Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail.”

Walker told me he had to cut lots of things out of the book, for space, including some naughty bits about life on the trail. There was this fiftysomething guy on the trail who was in the habit of asking female hikers for, um, favors.

Then there was the hiker called Stilts who was more successful in romancing women on the Appalachian Trail. The next day, though, he would hike away at a rapid pace.

“He was known as the most dangerous man on the trail,” Walker said, laughing. “He left behind a trail of tears.”

I guess if I ever write a book about the Appalachian Trail, I will have to write really well about that couple who were having sex in the shelter next to me last year. It was not the first time people having sex woke me up on the Appalachian Trail either.

I googled around and found an article about the hiker and his book. Definitely worth a read. It turns out I met him when I was staying with the Twelve Tribes in Rutland VT in 2006. He was hiking the long trail. I bet it is a good read.

In "SKYWALKER," Walker writes of mock struggles with size-14 boots, extra-long sleeping bags and hostel beds that are way too short. He found it easy to step over trees lying across the trail, but hard to duck under low branches.

Much more serious were his bouts with hypothermia.

At nearly 7 feet tall and barely 200 pounds, Walker didn't carry much insulating fat on his lean frame. He struggled to keep his body warm on mountaintop trails.

On one of his first nights, a cold, driving rain battered his lightweight tarp.

"All the concerns and paranoia of the last few hours morphed into a full-fledged fear for my life," Walker wrote. "As cold as I was, I didn't think I could survive a night exposed to these elements."

This Amazon review gave the book a good review.

Tough Week For Hikers

A hiker fell and died in the Red River Gorge in KY.

earch and rescue crews spent about five hours overnight searching for 29-year-old Donnie Rogers of Irvine, before they recovered his body. Officials confirm that marijuana was found on his body.

It's believed he fell more than 200 feet to his death in the Chimney Rock area of the gorge.

A woman fell in HI while hiking.

Police said the woman was trying to walk over the first stream crossing with several friends on Loop Road at about 6 p.m. when she slipped and fell into the river, impaling her lower right leg on a piece of steel reinforcing bar that was hidden beneath the surface of the water. Police, fire and medical personnel freed the victim from the rebar.

A hiker was rescued in AZ.

PHOENIX -- A missing hiker was found injured and dehydrated after spending at least 12 hours stranded on Piestewa Peak, Phoenix police officers said.

Ryan Williams, 29, was located in a precarious part of the mountain away from the normal hiking trails, said detective Reuben M. Gonzales of the Phoenix Police Department.

And in TN

David Gilbert, 23, of Cypress Creek Apartments, Cookeville, suffered a leg injury while hiking at the bottom of a steep hillside in Cumberland Cove about 4:30 p.m. Monday, according to Putnam Emergency Management Agency Director Tyler Smith.

First Update

Daren Wendell has updated his blog. He is on a trek around the world the first leg started at North Georgia College and University just south of the Appalachian Trail.

However, politics won't be a problem this summer on the Appalachian Trail. There Wendelle intends to travel 15 miles a day, camp where he can and then dine on plenty of pasta at night.

He plans to continue hiking until he reaches Nova Scotia. Then he will hop a plane and head for Portugal.

There he plans to hike in a northeastern direction through Europe. This will take him through China and then Russia.

There is a picture of him with his pack. Looks heavy. I say that as a hiker that carries more than the average long distance hiker. But seems in good spirits.

Thanksgiving

Lion King is in Iowa For Thanksgiving. On this episode of his American Discovery Trail adventure. His Website and Trail Journal.

Ate The BBQ

After reading these two articles by Common Nonsense. I became incensed. For those that do not know John McCain held a BBQ for the press. No cameras please. Off the record. Puts them up in a nice resort. With massages no less. It looks almost as if he were bribing the press to write favorably about him. The press that already considers itself to be John McCain's base.

I propose a term be used for the press that covers McCain. When they repeat uncritically what he says the reporter should be said to have "Ate the BBQ"

Via Majikthise.

Call For Help?

When is the right time to call for help? It can be a tough call. Lost, scarred, cold, snow storm. Nathan Freund got lost in January. Here is his story.

n January 22, 2008, I set out for a solo backpacking trip to summit Ontario Peak of the Cucamonga Wilderness. I was rescued by Search and Rescue Forces from the San Bernardino Mountains after a U.S. Air Force satellite detected my distress signal from my Personal Locator Beacon. It was the first successful rescue of this kind in California: One initiated from a legitimate activation of a personal EPIRP carried by a recreational hiker.

I had spent months staring into the snow-capped mountain range from the Claremont roads as I drove to school everyday. My third attempt to summit this season began on a clear Sunday morning. After hiking a mile above the city, I set up camp on top of Big Horn Peak. I woke up the next morning to see clouds covered everything below me.

Nothing in my previous experience told me I was in danger as I continued to climb toward my destination, though fowl weather was approaching. After a successful summit, my descent was blurred by a snowstorm and dense fog. Multiple attempts to descend failed. I was forced to fight my way back to base camp, my last familiar location, in knee- to waist-deep snow. A 15-minute panic ride down the wrong side of the mountain cost me two hours of valuable time to climb back up to the ridgeline where I regained my bearings.

He called for help at that point. But ended up walking out. I do not have all the fancy techno gadgets. I would have to get out on my own. Of course, winter camping is not really my thing.

Friday Bird Feeder Blogging

deer birdfeeder.JPG, originally uploaded by cheflovesbeer.

It is not a bird but I did not get a good picture this week.

Betting the Bank

Paul Krugman on the financial meltdown.

Four years ago, an academic economist named Ben Bernanke co-authored a technical paper that could have been titled “Things the Federal Reserve Might Try if It’s Desperate” — although that may not have been obvious from its actual title, “Monetary Policy Alternatives at the Zero Bound: An Empirical Investigation.”

Today, the Fed is indeed desperate, and Mr. Bernanke, as its chairman, is putting some of the paper’s suggestions into effect. Unfortunately, however, the Bernanke Fed’s actions — even though they’re unprecedented in their scope — probably won’t be enough to halt the economy’s downward spiral.

And if I’m right about that, there’s another implication: the ugly economics of the financial crisis will soon create some ugly politics, too.

Read it all.

Be The Media

Several blogs have noted that the American public has not been paying attention to the Iraq war. So Juan Cole says to post this.

Here is what Professor Cole has to say.

f you’re reading these words, you are better informed about US casualties in Iraq than most Americans, for whom it has become a forgotten war. If it is not on television, it does not exist.

Why don’t bloggers do more posting of pieces like this AP video, below, about the 8 US troops killed on Monday. We are after all a tv network if we want to be.

Olbermann Special Comment 3/12/08

Chicken Stock

There really is no right to making chicken stock but there is one major wrong. No cruciferous vegetables. This is the way I make it if I want to make something that stars chicken stock. Like chicken soup.

1. A whole chicken
2. Three carrots
3. Three stalks of celery
4. Two onions(quartered)

Take the whole chicken and remove the organs and neck. Place in a 12 quart pot with the celery, onion, and carrots. No need to peel the carrots or onion. Cover with water by two or three inches. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer. Simmer for an hour. Let cool strain. Pick the chicken for use as salad or something else.

You can, of course, use parts. I think legs and thighs are best. The cartilage in them gives the stock thickness and richness. If you bone out chicken parts save the bones for stock. There is no right, just one wrong. No cruciferous vegetables.

Use any vegetable, except cruciferous. If you roasted a chicken, pick the bones of meat add carrots, onions, and celery and bring to a boil and the simmer. You will get a better stock than the canned stuff. Freeze until you need it.

Hamburger Supply

The slaughterer of downed and diseased cows testified in congress today.

WASHINGTON — The president of a slaughterhouse at the heart of the largest-ever meat recall denied under oath on Wednesday, but then grudgingly admitted, that his company had introduced sick cows into the hamburger supply.

He then tried to minimize the significance.

The executive, Steve Mendell, of Hallmark/Westland Meat Company of Chino, Calif., said, “I was shocked. I was horrified. I was sickened,” by video that showed employees kicking or using electric prods on “downer” cattle that were too sick to walk, jabbing one in the eye with a baton and using forklifts to push animals around.

I know I am sometimes hard on the democrats in congress, but the republicans would not have cared. After all they like waterboarding. People or cows they do not care.

The video was taken by an undercover agent from the Humane Society of the United States. One tape showed a worker using a garden hose to try to squirt water up the nose of a downed cow, a technique that Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who conducted the hearing, referred to as waterboarding

Who Knew?

That there is a data base for high end users of prostitutes. From the Freaks at Freakonomics.

Q. Do you typically know the true identity of your clients, and if so, how?

A. Yes. Always. I insist that they give me their full names and their place of work so that I can contact them there before we meet. I also check their identification when we meet. I also use verification companies, which assist escorts in verification of clients. These companies do the verification of the client and put them in a database so that when the client wants to meet with a girl for the first time, he doesn’t have to go through the verification process again. For a fee, I can call in and they will tell me if the client has a history of giving the girls problems, where he works, and his full name.

Infrastructure At Risk

A multi agency task force studied the risk to infrastructure from rising seas.

Produced by a collaboration among agencies that included the United States Geological Survey, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Transportation, the report offers three estimates for sea-level rise by 2100: about 16 inches a century, a rate it said had already been exceeded; about two feet, an estimate many scientists regard as optimistic; and up to three feet, which the report says would be catastrophic for wetlands and other coastal features but that is “less than high estimates suggested by more recent publications.”

The academy report cited similar estimates.

The multiagency report cited the Port of Wilmington in Delaware as an example. The report says that if the sea level rises by two feet or even a bit less, 70 percent of port property will be affected.

I think all the estimates in this survey are wildly optimistic.

White Slave Trade Act of 1910

Scott Horton on Eliot Spitzer.

However, there is a second tier of questions that needs to be examined with respect to the Spitzer case. They go to prosecutorial motivation and direction. Note that this prosecution was managed with staffers from the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice. This section is now at the center of a major scandal concerning politically directed prosecutions. During the Bush Administration, his Justice Department has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican. Beyond this, a number of the cases seem to have been tied closely to election cycles. Indeed, a study of the cases out of Alabama shows clearly that even cases opened against Republicans are in fact only part of a broader pattern of going after Democrats. So here are the rather amazing facts that surface in the Spitzer case:

Five For Fighting

Absolutely, Brutal fight. via clusterflock.

Another Reason

To stop production of biofuels.

VANCOUVER, Canada (AFP) - A planned increase in US ethanol production from corn would spell environmental "disaster" for marine species in the Gulf of Mexico, said a co-author of a science study published Monday.

A boost in corn production will worsen the Gulf's so-called "dead zone," an area with so little oxygen that sealife suffocates, said Simon Donner, a geographer at the University of British Columbia in Western Canada.

"Most organisms are not able to survive without enough oxygen," Donner told AFP. "All the bottom-dwelling organisms that can't move away are probably going to die, while fish will migrate if they can."

Donner and Chris Kucharik of the University of Wisconsin used computer models to conclude that growing enough corn to meet US biofuel goals set for 2022 would cause a boost of 10 to 34 percent in nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, which run into the Gulf of Mexico.

The dead zone is more than 12,000 square miles.

Grow corn.
Just for food.
Not cars.

Appalachian Trail Extension

The Pinhoti Trail in Alabama has been completed for a 334 mile extension of the Appalachian Trail.

CHEAHA MOUNTAIN STATE PARK - The rumble of the front-end loader died away, the 10,000-pound limestone and granite boulder finally in its place.

The fog had cleared, and from the rocky overlook, the land fell away to the wooded valley that stretched out west 2,000 feet below. The shadowy humps of mountains to the north and to the south touched the low clouds.

And snaking into the woods was the Pinhoti Trail, marked with blue blazes, heading toward the ridges beyond, a continuous footpath that is now connected to the Appalachian Trail and can take a hiker up the spine of the mountains from Alabama 2,504 miles to Mount Katahdin in Maine.

om Cosby, a hiker and the marketing director of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce, watched the boulder placed in its spot, marking the Pinhoti Trail's highest point in Alabama. It was a crowning moment of more than two decades of work, and the fulfillment of a vision first articulated in 1925, a feat that will be celebrated next Sunday with the official opening of the Pinhoti Trail's connection to the Appalachian Trail.

"This puts Alabama on the map as a mountain hiking destination," Cosby said.

The Pinhoti also stretches south and will eventually be completed to Flagg Mountain in Coosa County, the southernmost mountain of the Appalachian mountain system. Backers hope eventually to make the case for getting the Alabama extension recognized as the official southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, which would require an act of Congress.

334 miles to AT:

From Cheaha, Alabama's highest mountain, it's 334 miles up through the remote regions of the Talladega National Forest and through the Chattahoochee National Forest in northwest Georgia to the beginning of the Appalachian Trail at Springer Mountain.

Currently, the trail takes about six months to hike. Adding the Pinhoti connection would extend that hike by about a month.

I do not think they will be able to get the act of congress passed. But, hey, what do I know.

Your Inner Nerd

What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Social Nerd You're interested in things such as politics, psychology, child care, and peace. I wouldn't go so far as to call you a hippie, but some of you may be tree-huggers. You're the type of people who are interested in bettering the world. You're possible the least nerdy of them all; unless you participate in other activies that paled your nerdiness compared to your involvement in social activities. Whatever the case, we could still use more of you around. ^_^
Literature Nerd
Science/Math Nerd
Gamer/Computer Nerd
Anime Nerd
Drama Nerd
Artistic Nerd
Musician
What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace

Centrism

Glen Greenwald on the evils of centrism.

But this belief that "balance" and "centrism" are intrinsically sober is itself a deeply corrupt and shallow notion. What if one side really is far more destructive and more toxic than the other -- not even necessarily because one side is more inherently corrupt but just because it exerts far more power? What if the administration and its political followers who happen to be running the country at any given time really are radical extremists and unprecedentedly corrupt and dangerous? Under those circumstances, practicing Beltway "balance" for its own sake -- venerating Broderian "centrism" -- is deeply unserious, even dishonest and dangerous.

When there is grave imbalance in political power, corruption or extremism -- as there has been for the last eight years, at least -- then those who preach balance and demand a centrist critique of everything are the ones who are mindless, misleading partisans. They demand centrist equivalencies as an ideology, regardless of whether those equivalencies are real.

The Paragons of Balance and Centrism are actually often destructive. By design, they prevent exposure of truly radical and extreme political misconduct by demanding that every criticism be restrained, muted, two-sided, drained of intensity, and circumscribed by false equivalencies -- lest the critique be dismissed as a "partisan screed." In this regard, those who insist upon the intrinsic virtues of Balance and Centrism in political commentary are the greatest allies of extremism and the most loyal protectors of the politically corrupt.

Read it all.

Meltdown

Krugman

Friday’s employment report — which was so weak that it had many economists declaring that we’re already in a recession — was bad news. But it was actually less disturbing than what’s going on in the financial markets.

The scariest thing I’ve read recently is a speech given last week by Tim Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Mr. Geithner came as close as a Fed official can to saying that we’re in the midst of a financial meltdown.

To understand the gravity of the situation, you have to know what the Fed did last summer, and again last fall.

As late as August the favorite buzzword of financial officials was “contained”: problems in subprime mortgages, we were assured, wouldn’t spread to other financial markets or to the economy as a whole.

Read it all.

User Fees

For our national forest land. You know the land we already own.

Though the new and increased fees still account for a small part of the agencies’ overall budgets, they have riled elected officials and environmental and recreation groups across the West. The critics complain that there has been insufficient public involvement in the changes — imposed at hundreds of locations over the past three years or so — and suggest that they reflect a significant shift in federal policy to a market-based approach from one of managing sites for public benefit.

Unlike the National Park Service, which has routinely charged admission and other fees at its parks, the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies have historically been less aggressive in imposing such assessments.

“Our government wants to charge us $5 or $10 to go for a walk in the woods — our woods,” said Kitty Benzar of the Western Slope No-Fee Coalition, in Durango, Colo. “We don’t think it’s right.”

Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, has introduced a bill that would repeal the authority of the Forest Service and other agencies to raise or institute many of the fees.

“The authority given land managers is being abused,” Mr. Baucus said. “They are using it to pad their budgets at the expense of the public. I think it’s just wrong.”

The Republicans added a provision in a large appropriations bill with no debate on the subject.

The 1965 rules were repealed in late 1996 by the Recreational Fee Demonstration Program that came to be known as Fee Demo. Originally limited to a 2-year experiment at no more than 100 sites, Fee Demo was repeatedly expanded and extended, but met increasing public resistance. By 2004, there was so much opposition to Fee Demo that another extension was unlikely to pass, and the program was set to expire. Instead, Representative Ralph Regula (R-OH) attached the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act to a must-pass omnibus appropriations bill, which went into effect on December 8, 2004.

FLREA, known to its detractors as the Recreation Access Tax, or RAT, replaced Fee Demo with a permanent fee program. It was never debated on the floor of the House and was not even introduced in the Senate. Under FLREA, access fees have multiplied, visitation has declined, recreational facilities that cannot pay their own way in fees have been closed, and fee revenue has replaced public funds at the local level.

"Recreation user fees were originally sold as a way for the agencies to raise supplemental funds to address their backlogged maintenance," according to Benzar. "Instead, fee revenue was used for day-to-day operations and to build facilities that have only added to long-term maintenance needs. And now we are facing thousands of site closures and being told they are necessary because there is still no money for the backlog."

I'm sure they would like to privatize all public land. Wild Wilderness has more info and a blog on the issue.

Past Peak?

It seems farmers are having a hard time keeping up with global demand for grains.

Farmers the world over are producing flat-out. American agricultural exports are expected to increase 23 percent this year to $101 billion, a record. The world’s grain stockpiles have fallen to the lowest levels in decades.

“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,” said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.”

No mention of biofuels taking corn from the food supply. The price of food by next summer/fall could be staggering. Not to mention the price of beer and pizza, things that make life wonderful and good.

Free Curly Fries Monday

Matt Kenseth won the Nationwide Series race. He was driving the number 17 Arby's Ford. In the post race interview he said free curly fries on Monday at Arby's.

Hopefully he will do well tomorrow.

Grand Canyon

Wrath, originally uploaded by Leviathor.

Scientists say the Grand Canyon is much older than thought.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A new dating technique has put the age of the Grand Canyon at 17 million years old, three times older than earlier estimates, according to a report in the latest edition of the journal Science.

The latest in uranium-lead isotope dating allowed researchers to study the canyon's "cave clouds", the mamillary coatings of carbon deposits that gather on the canyon walls at or near the water table, the journal said in its edition released Thursday.

"The canyon is older than we think," said Victor Polyak, a geologist at the University of New Mexico and principal author of the paper.

The age of the natural wonder in the US southwest has been in dispute for more than a century, as some methods commonly used to date geological events are unable to trace with precision beyond one million years ago.

Polyak and his team also found that, based on the hypothesis that the mineral deposits in the caves were left by a declining water table level as the Grand Canyon deepened, it formed first at its western side and then opened up to the east, with the eastern side cut out more quickly some five to six million years ago.

Around The World In Seven Years

Daren Wendell is about to start walking around the world. Starting with an Appalachian Trail thru-hike. According to his site theearthexpedition.com/ he should be starting within the hour. He will probably have to much weight judging by his March 1 entry.

I have a bit of a problem on my hands! I find it quite the task to condense everything that I own and have to live off of for the next seven years to under 40 pounds :{ It has been a couple days now and I still don't have it all figured out. I am afraid to weigh the pack but I know it is inevitable. Let's just hope it is under 40 because I am not sure what I can leave behind!

He does not have to carry everything. Judging from the site he should have a good bit of support. It will be interesting to see what he ditches along the way. I carry a base of 25 pounds and that is considered heavy in the long distance community. Hopefully he will stop at the Walasi-YI center in Neels gap and let them go through his pack.

There is a picture of his gear on the site. What do you think needs to go? Bear cannister, 1 litter fuel bottle, nalgenes ?

Well, Good luck, Daren! Sound like fun to me. May you stay healthy and wise.

Friday Bird Feeder Blogging

chickadee.JPG, originally uploaded by cheflovesbeer.

A black capped chikadee

Peak Food

British scientist John Beddington says food production problems will hit before global warming. Look what he has to say about biofuels.

But he reserved some of his most scathing comments for the biofuel industry, which he said had delivered a "major shock" to world food prices. "In terms of biofuels there has been, quite properly, a reaction against it," he said. "There are real problems with unsustainability."

Biofuel production is due to increase hugely in the next 15 years. The US plans to produce 30bn gallons of biofuels by 2022 - which will mean trebling maize production. The EU has a target for biofuels to make up 5.75% of transport fuels by 2010.

But Beddington said it was vital that biofuels were grown sustainably. "Some of the biofuels are hopeless. The idea that you cut down rainforest to actually grow biofuels seems profoundly stupid."

Before taking over the chief scientist post from Sir David King nine weeks ago, Beddington was professor of applied population biology at Imperial College London. He is an expert on the sustainable use of renewable resources.

Remember

Grow corn.
Just for food.
Not cars.

Tainted Drugs

Why can we import drugs from China? Time and time again they are contaminated. Why can we not import drugs from Canada? Canada has no history of tainted drugs. I bet it has to do with drug company profits.

But the FDA said that all the US batches of heparin linked to health problems and deaths were made with ingredients that came from China.

Anxiety Election

Paul Krugman from the New York Times.

All of this should work to the Democrats’ advantage. They can contrast the Clinton boom with the Bush bust; they can make the case that Republican economic ideology, with its fixation on privatization and deregulation, helped get us into this mess.

And John McCain can be ridiculed as a man who has declared on a number of occasions that he doesn’t know much about economics — only to insist, straight-talker that he is, that he never said any such thing.

Placebo

Amazing.

The pills had a strong placebo effect in both groups. But 85 percent of those using the expensive pills reported significant pain relief, compared with 61 percent on the cheaper pills. The investigators corrected for each person’s individual level of pain tolerance.

It makes me wonder if drugs actually work at all.

Appalachian Trail In PA

The PA Legislature is considering a zoning law to protect the trail corridor.

Each year, thousands of people come to Pennsylvania to hike the scenic and historic Appalachian Trail. As was the intent of its founder, Benton MacKaye, most use the trail to escape from life in a busy city or suburb and relax in nature -- trees, plants, wildlife and clean vistas. In some areas of the trail in this state, however, these views are being threatened.

Efforts to keep the skyline unobstructed and things like power lines far away have been initiated by state Rep. Bob Freeman, the Democrat from Easton and chairman of the House Local Government Committee. His bill, HB 1281, has been passed in the House of Representatives and is now awaiting action in the Senate. The new legislation, an amendment to the Appalachian Trail Act of 1978, would require each municipality through which the trail runs to create and enforce zoning laws to protect the trail from these visual encroachments.

Global Media Bias

Joseph Romm at Gristmill.

Maybe the best one line description of our current situation I have read is:

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

That's the final sentence in Elizabeth Kolbert's fine global warming book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, and as I'll show in this post, it is entirely accurate.

Read it all. It is not pretty.

Solar

New solar plants are coming online in Nevada and Arizona.

The technology is not new, but it is suddenly in high demand. As prices rise for fossil fuels and worries grow about their contribution to global warming, solar thermal plants are being viewed as a renewable power source with huge potential.

After a decade of no activity, two prototype solar thermal plants were recently opened in the United States, with a capacity that could power several big hotels, neon included, on the Las Vegas Strip, about 20 miles north of here. Another 10 power plants are in advanced planning in California, Arizona and Nevada.

On sunny afternoons, those 10 plants would produce as much electricity as three nuclear reactors, but they can be built in as little as two years, compared with a decade or longer for a nuclear plant. Some of the new plants will feature systems that allow them to store heat and generate electricity for hours after sunset.

It will soon have market forces working with it.

The power they produce is still relatively expensive. Industry experts say the plant here produces power at a cost per kilowatt- hour of 15 to 20 cents. With a little more experience and some economies of scale, that could fall to about 10 cents, according to a recent report by Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. Newly built coal-fired plants are expected to produce power at about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour or more if carbon is taxed.

McCain

McCain John McCain

Keith Olbermann

As Atrios says:

It's quite interesting watching Keith Olbermann when he's in the mix with the rest of the MSNBC gang. He doesn't share the same set of basic assumptions about the world that most cable talkers, across the ideological spectrum, do. He's also more likely to tweak

Media Matters caught this gem.

During MSNBC's March 5 coverage of the March 4 Democratic presidential primaries and caucus, NBC News anchor Brian Williams and MSNBC hosts Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann discussed Sen. Hillary Clinton's March 1 appearance on NBC's Saturday Night Live. Referring to former SNL head writer Tina Fey's statement on the February 23 edition of SNL that " 'bitch' is the new black," Matthews asked: "Dare we repeat what Tina Fey said was the new black?" Olbermann responded: "There's another word that begins with the same letter as "black" does. Let's distance ourselves -- especially you. Distance yourself as far as you can from that." Matthews said, "No, anyone I think would be fair, from that regard."

Impeach

Congress could get its dismal approval rating up if they would just impeach Bush.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Voters in two Vermont towns on Tuesday approved a measure that would instruct police to arrest President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for "crimes against our Constitution," local media reported.[...]
State lawmakers have passed nonbinding resolutions to end the war in Iraq and impeach Bush and Cheney, and several towns have also passed resolutions of impeachment. None of them have caught on in Washington.

John McCain

McCain is on the TV. Watch this John McCain. Libby will explain.

Limbaugh wants Clinton to be the Democratic Nominee.

Bush League Justice

Law professor Jonathan Turley. Mukasey's Paradox

In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president -- and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.[...]
Yet these are not real paradoxes -- they're merely political ironies. A paradox is a statement that seems true but yields a contradiction or a dual truth. When reduced to its purest form, Mukasey's Paradox is that government officials cannot violate the law -- but that because executive privilege is also a law, it's sometimes necessary to violate the law in order to uphold the law.

Perfect Bush Logic. Hat Tip Avedon.

The Cost Of War

Bob Herbert in the New York Times.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”

Crunchy Chicken

Notice the new button on the top right of my blog. After reading My Forbidden Fruits(and Vegetables), Crunchy Chicken wants us to petition congress about the farm commodities restriction.

Here is the deal. Once a farm enters the commodities program it can only grow corn, soy beans, wheat, and rice. The land can not be used for fruits and vegetables or the farmer will be severely penalized. Two points I will stress are these from the Forbiden Fruits op/ed.

Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.[...]
Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would provide some farmers, though only those who supply processors, with some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced — for example, a soybean farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his usual subsidy on those acres but suffer none of the other penalties. However, the Congressional delegations from the big produce states made the death of what is known as Farm Flex their highest farm bill priority, and so it appears to be going nowhere, except perhaps as a tiny pilot program.

Go see Crunchy Chickens letter. Also, Burban Mom. Do not copy their letters exactly. A form letter does not count as much as a regular letter. Congress. Senate.

Micheal Pollan described author of In Defense of Food said this was the books mantra.

Eat food.
Not to much.
Mostly plants.

The folks at Edible Portland came back with some of their own. I think this one is my anti bio diesel, anti commodities mantra.

Grow corn.
Just for food.
Not cars.

Short Sighted

Is about the nicest thing I can say about Detroit's auto makers. They refuse to make their vehicles more fuel efficient and actively work against making them more efficient. By keeping congress on a short leash, Detroit's auto makers are working against the will of the people.

The poll also found that Americans want Congress to boost fuel efficiency standards. Four out of five respondents, including 86 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of Republicans and independents, said that they would support “Congress taking the lead to achieve the highest possible fuel efficiency as quickly as possible” by raising the fuel-efficiency requirements for U.S. vehicles to achieve the goal of 40 mpg.

These cars are available in Europe but not the US. Of the top 10 most fuel efficient cars in the US none are made by American companies. German auto maker Volkswagen is going after the Toyota Prius with a new diesel hybrid Golf that gets 70 mph. That will fly off the car lots.

India's Mahindra&Mahindra is going to have a diesel hybrid pick up for sale in 2010. It should get 40 plus miles per hour. Detroit insists that the technology is not available to make fuel efficient cars. But they lie like a republican.

Italy's Iveco makes hybrid diesel delivery trucks and vans for Fed Ex.

Past The Tipping Point

North Pole sign, originally uploaded by Andy Revkin.

The polar ice cap is melting.

OSLO, Feb. 29 (Xinhua) -- The polar cap in the Arctic may well disappear this summer due to the global warming, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, said on Friday.

The shrinking of the Arctic ice cap has been astonishing, Orheim said in an interview with Xinhua.

"Ice sheet hit the historical low of 3 million square km duringthe hottest weeks last summer, while it covered 7.5 million squarekm on average before the year 2000, " he said.

"If Norway's average temperature this year equals that in 2007,the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away, which is highly possible judging from current conditions," Orheim said.

This is the worst case scenario I have seen. But every time you turn around the scientists seem more unsettled by their observations.

Peak Food

A New York Times editorial about the food supply.

The world’s food situation is bleak, and shortsighted policies in the United States and other wealthy countries — which are diverting crops to environmentally dubious biofuels — bear much of the blame.[...]

Population growth and economic progress are part of the problem. Consumption of meat and other high-quality foods —mainly in China and India— has boosted demand for grain for animal feed. Poor harvests due to bad weather in this country and elsewhere have contributed. High energy prices are adding to the pressures.

Yet the most important reason for the price shock is the rich world’s subsidized appetite for biofuels. In the United States, 14 percent of the corn crop was used to produce ethanol in 2006 — a share expected to reach 30 percent by 2010. This is also cutting into production of staples like soybeans, as farmers take advantage of generous subsidies and switch crops to corn for fuel.

And this raises the price of beer! Remember this:

Grow corn.
Just for food.
Not cars.

National Embarrassment

Remote Area Medical is a charity that flies doctors, nurses, and dentists into remote areas of the world for medical care because it is not available. Now they are doing it in the US, you know the place with the best health care in the world.

In a matter of hours, Remote Area Medical set up its massive clinic, for a weekend, in an exhibit hall in Knoxville, Tenn. Tools for dentists were laid out by the yard, optometrists prepared to make hundreds of pairs of glasses, general medical doctors set up for whatever might come though the door. Nearly everything is donated, and everyone is a volunteer. The care is free. But no one could say how many patients might show up.

The first clue came a little before midnight. Stan Brock, the founder of Remote Area Medical, opened the gate outside. The clinic wouldn't open for seven hours, but people in pain didn't want to chance being left out. State guardsmen came in for crowd control. They handed out what would become precious slips of paper - numbered tickets to board what amounted to a medical lifeboat.

It was 27 degrees. The young and the old would spend the night in their cars, running the engine for heat, but not much - not at $3 a gallon. At 5 a.m., Pelley took a walk through the parking lot.

"We got up at three o’clock this morning and we got here about four. We’ve been out where a little while it's cold," Margaret Walls, a hopeful patient from
Tennessee, told Pelley.

"Why did you come so early?" Pelley asked.

"'Cause we wanted to be seen," Walls replied.

Marty Tankersley came with his wife and his daughter, asleep behind the front seats. Tankersley says he drove some 200 miles to get to the clinic and slept in the parking lot for hours.

"Just to have this done?" Pelley asked.

"Yes, sir. I've been in some very excruciating pain," he replied.

Hiker Missing

A hiker is missing in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Volunteers from Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties continued searching today in steep canyons near Mount Baldy for a 46- year-old Chino man reportedly missing since Wednesday.

"We have 15 to 20 people looking today, but we won't have a helicopter because of the winds," said San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Beavers. "Some will be focused on Falling Rock Canyon, on the back side of Ontario Peak."

The missing man, Robert Bruner, told his girlfriend he was going to try a route beginning in Icehouse Canyon, Beavers said. Bruner's car was later found at the Icehouse Canyon trailhead, which is just beyond Baldy Village north of Claremont.

Update: ABC7 is reporting his body has been found. My condolences to his friends and family.

Scrabulous

I have been playing this game for a while. I did not use my facebook account at all before I started playing scrabulous. The NYT has an article.

Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once.

Everyone seems to love the online game — everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.

In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company. Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game.

Meanwhile

Harold Zeitz, senior vice president for games at RealNetworks, said Friday that he was working closely with the Agarwalla brothers to bring the official Scrabble game to Facebook users.

Hasbro, meanwhile, said in a statement that Electronic Arts was planning to release an online version of Scrabble this spring. And Mattel, which signed a deal with RealNetworks last July, says that settling with the Agarwallas would set a bad precedent.

The corporations just want to be dicks.

The Forbidden Fruit

A good op/ed in the New York Times on farm subsidies. It is still amazing how much congress works against Americans best interests and in favor of big agra business.

Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.

All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

In the farm bill fruits and vegetables are called specialty crops.

Prison Industrial Complex

I am sure everybody saw that the US is the worlds biggest jailer. 1 in 100 in prison. I liked Libby's response.

This harebrained policy is driven largely by the new prison-industrial complex that contributes heavily to politicians and is supported by small communities whose economic security depends on housing the prisons.

What's missing in the reactions to this story is the nexus between the war on marijuana and prison overcrowding. The root of the problem and the solution both lie there. Non-violent marijuana offenders make up a large percentage of the population. The communities who benefit from prison expansion are largely those who formerly thrived on agricultural enterprises. The obvious fix would be to legalize marijuana and industrial hemp.

These communites could then make a living on raising farm crops again instead of on caging their fellow Americans. Furthermore, the industry would be contributing revenue to the tax base, rather than sucking tax dollars out of the municipal coffers simply to punish our citizens for non-violent, non-infringing lifestyle choices.

Backpacking And Politics

Lion King goes to an Obama rally in Iowa and gets to ask a question.