More Musick

So I'm back, after snarfing a few munchies (some excellent black bean salsa and chips). The band is great. If you want to hear some good music, come on down. I talked with Pete Bowers about Into the Woods, and met Jack Hebert, who looked terribly familiar but I couldn't place him until Mike introduced him by last name. He's one of those people I know by two names, sort of like Jacques Cousteau, Mike Musick, etc. Must have both names or the name doesn't stick in my mind.

At any rate, other interesting folks include James Pagell, Scott Johnson, amy Taylor, Shannan Turner, Amy Cameron, Jenny Schlofeldt (not sure I have the spelling of her name correctly), Jeanne Laurencelle, several regulars at the bar, and more unusual folks of various sorts. Mike stood at the mike (ho ho ho, yes yes, I know) for a few minutes and spoke on the importance of using less: less energy meaning less cost to the borough, rebates from the state of several tens of millions reserved for retrofitting houses and public buildings.

This is one of the things I think is an appropriate use of public money: if we save fuel, we save a LOT in terms of money, and we make ourselves much more secure with regard to fuel dependence. But I've gone on about this before.

Bob Siftar was feeling feisty and asked Mike about his old wood stove, which, as he said, "worked fine!" Mike had been talking about how the emissions standards for wood stoves didn't necessarily have to be an onerous thing, and in fact, if one improved one's efficiency (i.e., establish the baseline and then improve the efficiency of the heater--oil furnace, wood stove, whathaveyou), one could actually get a lot of money back on the proposition. So if your stove works fine, GOOD.

Jack Hebert does a lot of this for a living: evaluating houses for their heat loss and fuel efficiency. He works with the Cold Climate Housing Research Center and, he said, "for some reason people think my opinion is worth something." I'll say. The guy's only been working with green building for what, ten, fifteen years or more?

Hans just walked in, with his usual insane grin. Lori Neufeld, with her magnet attraction toward good music, has been here for a while. Time to mingle again, I think.

A most pleasant evening. We'll see if I can provide more substantive info on Musick's stance later.

Mike Musick meet and greet

Your intrepid blogger is here at the Golden Eagle, blogging live from the scene of a political fundraiser/gathering for Mike Musick, who is running for re-election to borough assembly. (The election is October 6.) Mike arrived a few minutes ago and is looking cheerful, chatting with Joe Thomas (that's state senator Joe) and Maggie Billington. I'm not close enough to eavesdrop, but I can step away from the computer and butt in on the conversation, I think. Northern River is tuning up for their next song--wait, they've started. Hoo! Great stuff. Beth is going to town on the fiddle.

Spoke briefly with Joe Thomas about the Ester library plans (new and improved).

So: who's here? Don DeWitt, Ray & Jill Cameron, JD Ragan, Nancy Burnham, Bob Grove, Charley Gray, Bob Siftar, Kate Billington, Jeff Stepp, Pete Bowers...Mike is out there mingling.

Aha. Mike Musick has just come over and I plan to query him on a few items (seeing as I didn't get to this for the Republic).

(Don DeWitt) Q. Have you heard about the plastic bag that dissolves in sunlight?

A. No. I'm not setting policy. I'm just working on setting up a recycling commission; I'm sure they'll they'll be happy to look into that.

(DeWitt and Musick discussed the relative merits of photodegradable plastic bags, on whether the degraded product--a powder after four months, according to DeWitt--is toxic or not)

This question related to the one I planned to ask him, as a Facebook user was curious about how he had voted on the plastic bag fee/tax ordinance and why.

Musick: I really wanted a grassroots, bottom-up recycling movement so I voted [against the ordinance] because I understand this community and that this would create a divisive situation...

[Musick said that he wanted to address the questioner directly about this (the bag ordinance and the fee). Mike has been instrumental in reviving the recycling commission (not yet officially voted on). I spoke with Layne St. John, a former assemblyman and chair of the Solid Waste Committee about this earlier--Hans and I ran into him and Janice at the Blue Loon earlier tonight where we had gone out to dinner. Layne described how the recycling commission/program idea has resurfaced over the years again and again but has never been able to stick. We talked about land fills, municipal composting, and methane gas reclamation from landfills, and the economics of recycling in such a small population base. I believe we need to get this thing in gear; shipping raw materials outside ends up being too expensive, but perhaps we can do the ol' value-added product thing.]

Okay, time to do a little mingling of my own. Will be back shortly.

Dave Lacey

Dave Lacey died yesterday at his home. He'd been sick (cancer, I think) and it finally got him. I know Dave from his volunteering for KUAC (Doctor Dave), a couple of articles he wrote for the Republic, Green Party meetings long ago at Into the Woods, and most recently, from his drive to establish a cooperative community market in Fairbanks. The man was one of those wonderful eccentrics with a good heart who make this town worth living in, and I'm sorry to see him go.

This photo came to me via Doug Yates.

Fluff and lies

Obsidian Wings has an excellent analysis of the falsehoods in Sarah Palin's speech. In condensed form, here they are:

1. McCain shows constancy. Nope: check the Carpetbagger Report on this.
2. "Thanks, but no thanks." Er, she did accept the money, and at a time when Louisiana and Mississippi were in desperate need of money for infrastructure rebuilding.
3. Obama hasn't authored major legislation. Unless you think that the "strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet" is, perhaps, major. Apparently Palin doesn't actually think much of ethics... And all these other bills that Obama sponsored or co-authored don't count with her either.
4. Obama is against producing more energy. Uh, what? That's directly contradicted here, on his website.
5. Under Obama, our taxes would go up. Yeah, right. See my commentary below on this pony puckey. (Pay attention, Mark. You mocked me the other night on this, and I'm not happy about it. )

Many thanks to Hilzoy for this excellent factchecking and analysis.

The Reality-Based Community also has a good refutation of Palin's lies.

And of course, the Daily Show has the word on community organizers. (See this interesting New York Times discussion of the term.)

Sarah, I'm really disappointed in you. Your speech is making me think seriously for the first time ever of actually donating money to the Democratic presidential campaign. I've been a long-time Green, but with this particular election and these particular candidates I might just break ranks. (God, I cringe to say this out loud.) Of course, what's really really annoying is that the Greens are damn good, but are shut out.

The Republicans offered nothing but the same old crap, with more extremism. Given what that's brought us to in the last eight years, I'm appalled that people could possibly think this would be good for the country. Apparently, though, you can fool a chump again and again.

Halving emissions by 2050: big deal

The supposedly "strong resolve" to cut global CO2 emission by the participants in the G8 Summit is a farce. No base year has been determined, no short-term or medium-term targets have been agreed on, and even if that long-term goal was met, we'll still be in a world of hurt. Forty-two years to get halfway back to too high? give me a break. The oceans have already changed and will continue to change even if we cut all CO2 emissions out NOW: and that is going to kill the coral reefs, which will wipe out about a third of oceanic life. This is due to warming but also to acidification. We are SCREWED.

We were warned about these problems and others back in 1992. Sixteen years later the leaders of the world's nations are STILL failing to grasp that we are in dire danger from environmental collapse. Most people I know have no concept of just how far off the cliff we've already run, Wile E. Coyote-like.

We've got only a very short window to reverse the worst of the situation. The biggie is overpopulation: we're supposed to have 9 billion people on the planet in forty years. Organizations like the Worldwatch Institute and movements like Slow Food, Green politics, and environmentalism are helping change the attitudes of people everywhere, but our goose is still cooked if we don't get the people in power and the people down the street aware of the importance of these efforts. We can at least throw out our current crop of elected nincompoops and get some new ones in who maybe will Pay Attention to the writing on the wall.

Yes! Dave's Quick Crumpets!

Dave Down Under, also known as Dingo Dave to himself, has posted a recipe for crumpets. I've had crumpets, and they are YUMMY. I did not have them in Merry Olde England, though. I had some in -- get this -- that West Coast metropolis and American harbor town of commerce with the Far East, Seattle. In a wonderful little tea and crumpet shop down by the waterfront. Seattle, for those of you whose tastebuds have not gotten off the East Coast, is a really really great town for eating.

One of these days I'll get to Australia. Maybe by boat. I don't relish a 26-hour plane ride, or however long it is. All I know is Australia's got lots of poisonous whatsits, heat, drought, an active Green Party (especially in Tasmania, where the very first Green Party ever is still going strong), some old family friends, AND on top of that it's a day ahead of itself. Or us. Or part of us, if the Aleutians were sensibly back on sun time.

Anyway, I want to go there.

The mainstream media finally notices

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. The Green Party has been jumping up and down about this for some time, but at long last, the New York Times has noticed that, far from being the "land of the free," we are the land of the imprisoned:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Adam Liptak is doing an invaluable public service by exposing our system's workings to the public. Let's hope he goes on to examine the for-profit prison.

The cost of the war

Diane Benson, Green gubenatorial candidate in 2002, like many other mothers, has had to deal with the cost of Iraq in a very personal way: her son Latseen was recently severely injured by a roadside bomb.

The article in the Anchorage Daily News says:

"Latseen Benson, in the 101st Airborne, was struck Sunday by a roadside bomb in Tikrit, north of Bagdad. Monday night, the 26-year-old had not regained consciousness, Diane Benson said from her Eagle River home."

"Benson said her son's first four-year tour was over Oct. 31 and that he was forced to extend his service under the controversial Stop-Loss Program."

"My son is now fighting for his life with half a body left," Benson said."

George Bush was in Anchorage the next day, Monday the 14th, but he didn't offer his condolences.