Here's the Kickstarter for Salem . . . a cheesemaker's factory in Independence!

These are great people with a great product.  Let's help them get re-established so they can continue to supply awesome cheese for us in Salem (go to Lifesource or Cascade Baking Co. to find it if you haven't tried it).

The Mrs. and I met at the University of Wisconsin
(state motto: "Come and Freeze in the Land of Cheese"), so we tend to feel like we know good cheese. And anyone who looks at me immediately can tell that I still have a thing for great cheese.

And the Full Circle Creamery cheese is EXTRAORDINARY.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/633809969/full-circle-creamery-builds-independence-creamery

It’s hard to worry about polar bears when Malawi is flooding RIGHT NOW | Grist

http://grist.org/climate-energy/its-hard-to-worry-about-polar-bears-when-malawi-is-flooding-right-now/

Good article with fantastic, lengthy comment from an Aussie appended, discussing why Obama has taken a such a profoundly hypocritical dive on responding to climate disruption. And one commenter has proposed what might be the only way to get elites in America to care about the issue:

"Climate Change to End Spring Break, Scientists Say"

"Scientist say white kids and some kids of color (who aren't too colored to be kind of scary) will not be able to party their asses off in Cancun by 2020 due to coastal beach resorts being submerged. Scientists have had to ask the tough question: "won't someone think of the children (white meritocratic high achieving children, of course)?"

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

As Oregon considers extending clean-fuel standard, environmentalists are divided | OregonLive.com [feedly]

Environmentalists who are willing to study the science instead of the politics aren't divided: science-based environmentalists know that biofuels subsidies through use mandates are a hugely destructive policy that does nothing to stop or slow catastrophic climate disruption and instead only serves to further lock in liquid fuels long enough for Big Oil to finish destabilizing the basis of human civilization, a life-sustaining climate.

Anyone willing to admit the crucial, absolute need to take meaningful action to get off fossil fuels but then proposes biofuels as a step in that direction is like a drunk at a distillery who says that the way to get off alcohol is to drink all the booze that the distillery can supply, so that eventually the distillery workers will get tired and the booze will be depleted.

Biofuels are the current era equivalent of the Carter era Synfuels nightmare, where coal operators got huge subsidies for spraying and burning coal with diesel, calling it a synfuel.

Support real action on climate!  Stop coal, stop fossil fuel transshipment and exports, support the OREP agenda, kill the clean fuels nonsense.

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As Oregon considers extending clean-fuel standard, environmentalists are divided | OregonLive.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/02/not_all_environmentalists_supp.html
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Shared via my feedly reader

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

The myth of the American love affair with cars (The Washington post) [feedly]

The myth of the American love affair with cars (The Washington post)
// A post-automobile world?

BY EMAILY BADGER, PUBLISHED ON JANUARY 27TH, 2015

For decades, Americans have been in love with the automobile — or so thesaying goes. This single idea has been a central premise of transportation policy, pop culture and national history for the last half-century. It animates how we think about designing the world around us, and how we talk about dissidents in our midst who dislike cars.

"This 'love affair' thesis is like the ultimate story," says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia, who warns that we need to revisit how we came to believe this line before we embrace its logical conclusion ina future full of driverless cars. "It's one of the biggest public relations coups of all time. It's always treated as folk wisdom, as an organic growth from society. One of the signs of its success is that everyone forgets it was invented as a public relations campaign." ...

(Much more at link)

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

Don't set yourself up to commit vehicle homicide: hang up and drive

Please stop making or answering phone calls while driving. Hands free or not.

It puts you and everyone else on the roads with you at as much risk as if you were driving impaired by alcohol.

There is ZERO evidence that hands-free telephone use while driving is any safer than holding the cell phone.  Every single study, going back to the 90s has shown that the distraction caused by hands free phone calling is every bit as pervasive as using a regular cell phone while driving.

The hazard is not what you're doing with your hands, 

it's what you're doing with your attention.

If you are a driver who talks on the phone while driving (rather than a passenger), please watch this video, and ask yourself what call you make that is worth killing someone to make.

http://youtu.be/_BqFkRwdFZ0

Although this powerful documentary is about people who kill while texting, 

THERE IS VERY LITTLE DIFFERENCE IN THE DEGREE OF IMPAIRMENT BETWEEN A DISTRACTED DRIVER DISTRACTED BY A PHONE CALL AND BY TEXTING.

That's not just me, that's what the data show.

I know there are fifty or five hundred people ready to tell me "what about adjusting the radio?" Or "what about people who eat while driving" etc. etc. and all I can say is that it is a FATAL mistake to not understand the difference in how humans actually behave in interactions with others (conversations or text exchanges) and how humans behave with inanimate things. 

Please do not endanger the rest of us and set yourself up to be commit vehicular homicide.

If you are driving, please do not converse with people not in the same car with you by any means.  Period.  Your loved ones, and other peoples' loved ones will thank you.

Six goals for making Salem, Oregon a much better place -

Interesting goals list -- the first five are outstanding ... 

No. 6 hits an important issue, but invites trouble as proposed, and could be greatly improved
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Six goals for making Salem, Oregon a much better place - HinesSight
http://hinessight.blogs.com/hinessight/2015/02/six-goals-for-making-salem-oregon-a-much-better-place.html

I would revise 6 to read "Discourage Unused and Underused Space by Charging Owners for Degrading The City" -- instead of putting the city even more into the "subsidy for business" business, we let the market figure out what's best, by forcing building owners to pay a rising fee monthly for each month after a minimum (3?) that a developed lot or storefront within the downtown core remains vacant or underused. 

The money would go into funds for downtown projects, so it would benefit the downtown businesses indirectly, and help ameliorate the burden they bear because other building owners let their properties be idle so long, exerting a drag on all downtown businesses.

In this way, instead of promoting graft and city government cronyism, we get a uniform, transparent policy that will strongly incent landlords to find and keep suitable tenants downtown, or sell to someone who will use the space themselves or wants to be a better landlord at rents the market is willing to pay. 

Right now, we're suffering from landlords who aren't paying high enough carrying charges on their buildings, so they're fine with no rent coming in too long. Rather than raise taxes generally, we should simply penalize the landlords who impose costs on downtown with their refusals to bring the rents down enough to get a tenant into the space.

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

A chilling reminder that climate is no game -- collapsed farm output IS an option

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-02-24/do-warmer-winters-mean-less-fruit

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

Biofuels: the anti-Vaxxerism and faith healing of the climate crisis

Let's be clear, the folks who refuse vaccinations for their children are not intentionally or willfully exposing their own children and communities to the return of dread, often lethal or crippling diseases. 

Same with the poor benighted souls who are so brainwashed by their particular brand of faith that they refuse modern medicine to their children, leading to horrendous and agonizing outcomes as child sized corpses pile up, mute testimony to the efficacy of faith healing.

In the climate realm, these people have their match in the biofuels adherents, the folks who blend huge dollops of wishful thinking with the paranoid view of Big Oil -- blissfully unaware that there is nothing Big Oil welcomes more than a debate about how much money to throw at locking in the liquid fuels/internal combustion paradigm even further. 

Big Oil plays Bre'r Rabbit -- oh please, don't throw me in that briar patch -- but they are only too happy to see states lining up to shovel money into heaping subsidies atop subsidies, all in the name of supposedly hitting at Big Oil.

"Low carbon" standards might have been a meaningful step in 1988, when Hansen first testified to Congress; right now, they're worse than trying to shut the barn door after the horses escape -- a low carbon fuel standard gives preference to the immoral biofuels scam and delays action on the real issues, which come down to taking emergency action against coal, fracked fossil fuels, and all the horrors of the alt fuels -- tar sands, shale oil -- that will rapidly drive CO2 through the planetary redline and beyond.

The low-carbon fuels scam is wishful thinking turned into policy at its most destructive. Biofuels are nothing more than a Rube Goldberg system for using vast areas of land to convert fossil fuels into disguised fossil fuels, while extracting a fortune in money, at the cost of mass mining of irreplaceable topsoil and creation of biological dead zones precisely where life was once most abundant. In a world where hunger and collapse of biological diversity already loom, organizing things so as to further expand biofuel-driven mono cropping will only accelerate mass species extinctions.

The more we pretend that we can supplement fossil fuels with these disguised fossil fuels (petroleum and nat gas energy converted to corn to be converted back to hydrocarbons, with subsidies and toxic pollution galore), the more we are preventing the transition away from fossil fuels.

An important graphic about biodiesel that everyone concerned about a livable planet needs to see.
http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/biodiesel/bob.html

So the advocates of the low carbon fuels standard are, like their cousins in the anti-vax movement and the faith healing cults, not intending to do harm. But they do great harm anyway.

If you want to strike back at Big Oil, don't buy into the fantasy that we can keep living in Big Oil's kind of world -- a world where even the poorest among us have cars and must drive them everywhere -- without paying for our fantasy.

"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."

Oregon Public Empowerment News (Oregon PEN) - New Newspaper Launched!

Subscribe at OregonPEN.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just in time for the announcement to be obliterated by the ex-Gov's stepping down, Oregon PEN launched on Oregon's 156th Birthday!

The publisher is Oregon Public Empowerment Network LLC, one of those new-fangled "B" Companies -- private companies, but formed specially to be able to take account of the public interest rather than acting solely for profit. 

The OPEN LLC mission is to publish Oregon PEN, a weekly all-digital online newspaper to empower and engage Oregonians in making Oregon better. 

Oregon PEN will be an "all signal, no noise" newspaper, sifting through the flood of information competing for your attention and helping you spot the most significant issues and meaningful trends, and giving you the information you need to make your voice heard on those issues.

All proceeds above expenses will be go to support organizations and entities that provide for critical needs, such as Legal Aid Services of Oregon, or that make Oregon better for everyone. 

OregonPEN.org. Weekly email Oregon issues/legal newspaper.
All signal, no noise, fluff or filler. Seriousness without solemnity.

WORD: Notice to All Banker Types from a Teacher

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/07/953476/-Notice-to-All-Banker-Types-from-a-Teacher?detail=email


"Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay."