Sadly, this is all too likely to come true as shown

The Age of Stupid:

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Update: The Democratic minority in the Senate and President "No, We Can't, They'll Say Bad Things About Us If We Try" Obama have failed miserably and in the most cowardly way imaginable, rolling over to the Republican majority and condemning the world to its fate from the climate crisis. If you have kids or grandkids, you should be furious. We're left with ideas like this -- good enough, but totally inadequate to the scale of the problem.

The Right Question makes all the difference

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Sam Smith notes this spot-on observation from Alvin Toffler:

An important question to ask of any proposed educational innovation is simply this: Is it intended to make the factory run more efficiently, or is it designed, as it should be, to get rid of the factory model altogether and replace it with individualized, customized education? - Alvin Toffler

Salem Hospital's Ugly Side More and More Prominently Displayed

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Jim Hightower likes to repeat a saying he picked up as a young man about people and institutions who crap on others as they become more powerful --

"The higher the monkey climbs, the more you see his ugly side."

Popped into my head when I saw this depressing story, proving that the cynics were right that the closure of the Oregon School for the Blind was nothing other than a vicious real estate grab by the Salem Hospital. And for what!? A parking lot.

With a little imagination, it's easy to see about a million better uses. For instance, that property could be converted to a long-term care facility for people with high-demand medical care needs -- it's already residential, it's in a beautiful spot with great access to medical and to Bush Park.

The City Council needs to step up fast, or we'll lose a historic facility and gain a blight.

An educational reform actually worth more than the words used to describe it

Image by Chris and Jenni via Flickr

There's so much trendy BS going on in the EdBiz today, mostly a function of the terrible takeover of schools by business interests. Real, promising ideas are all too rare. But here's one:

The NFER surveyed a selection of 1,300 school teachers and studied in-depth 10 schools belonging to the RHS Campaign for School Gardening, from a large urban London primary to small village school in Yorkshire, to discover that gardening in schools encourages children to:

Become stronger, more active learners capable of thinking independently and adapting their skills and knowledge to new challenges at school and in future;

Gain a more resilient, confident and responsible approach to life so they can achieve their goals and play a positive role in society;

Learn vital jobs skills such as presentation skills, communication and team work, and fuel their entrepreneurial spirit;

Embrace a healthier, more active lifestyle as an important tool for success at school and beyond;

Develop the ability to work and communicate with people from all ages and backgrounds.

Gillian Pugh, Chair of the National Children’s Bureau and The Cambridge Primary Review, explains, “Not only does gardening provide opportunities for increasing scientific knowledge and understanding, and improving literacy, numeracy and oracy, but this report shows that it also improves pupils’ confidence, resilience and self-esteem.”

Not to mention that children who garden eat what they grow, whereas bad diet is the root evil of much of what plagues kids today (and TV, which is mainly used to push bad food and junk at kids, accounts for much of the rest).

Even better, there's no standardized test for gardening skills! There can be as many styles as there are children, and they can all succeed at it.

The most important story you'll never hear of in the US media

What happened when Portugal decriminalized drugs?

Is Salem smart enough to learn from other cities?

An official with a clear, reality-based perspective!

As we swerve around a familiar Michigan tableau—a dead deer on the side of the highway—Kildee previews the speech he is scheduled to deliver that afternoon on a familiar Michigan imponderable: "The Future of Michigan Cities." For Kildee, the talk is yet another chance to trumpet what he sees as a common-sense approach to urban planning in an age of decline. Others view it as a radically un-American idea that embraces defeat and limited horizons.

First, he says, shrinking cities must accept that they're not going to regain their lost populations anytime soon. Abandoned houses and buildings should be leveled and replaced with parks, urban gardens, and green space. Eventually, incentives can be used to lure residents into higher density neighborhoods that have been reinvigorated with infill housing and rehab projects. While there are no hard numbers, local governments could save money by reducing infrastructure costs, and the housing market would stabilize, if not improve.

The reality that the bridgebuilding fantasists ignore

This will be considered a good road before long if we don't stop extending pavement everywhere. Image by Zanthia via Flickr

Overextending on paving is a sure route to bankruptcy and a fast route to bad roads.

It's time for the Mid-Valley counties and cities to declare a paving moratorium: No new paving except under a "depave and trade" scheme, where for every new lane-mile of paved roadway, you take up twice the lane-miles of underused paving elsewhere in the same jurisdiction.

This has several good effects: makes the governments -- and the taxpayers that those governments depend on -- recognize that pouring a new roadway is a serious, long-term commitment to maintenance, just as we are entering a period where all serious, long-term commitments will be tested severely as tax-revenues continue falling. And, second, it provides a way to recycle the roadway materials from the depaving. Also, it encourages conversion of roads from full access (including heavy trucks) to restricted access roads (bikes, peds, emergency vehicles only), which can endure essentially forever. Weight destroys roads; get the hefty boys off the roads and they hold up amazingly well (even in the face of hard winters, because it's the heavy traffic that damages the roads and initiates the freeze/thaw cycle).

Ho hum . . . planetary disaster speeding up ... What's LeBron doing today?

Image by wildoceans via Flickr

Excellent Kristof column today.

More proof here. If only proof mattered to the denialists, the confusionists, and the oblivious who are condemning the people of the future to a greatly diminished life.

If you see M. Lee Pelton (President of Willamette University and board member of PGE, owner of the biggest polluting facility in Oregon, the Boardman coal plant) at the Art Fair, ask him if he's read Kristof's piece and how that might relate to Boardman.

UPDATE: By the way, for those who are fond of eating regularly, welcome to the future of crop failures caused by intense heat:

A blistering heat wave has made life miserable for millions in Russia and northeastern Europe, few of whom have air conditioners, and destroyed millions of acres of Russian wheat, setting back an agricultural revival that was just reaching its stride after years of faltering efforts.

The heat has been besting decades-old records here. At 92.5 degrees Fahrenheit, Friday was the hottest July 16 ever in Moscow, topping the record set in the summer of 1938. It was even hotter on Saturday, at 95, though not a record, and temperatures were expected to remain in that range for the rest of the week.

Book to look for

Her "This Organic Life" was excellent -- bet this one is a gem

Like this book? Digg it!

ISBN: 9781603582926
Year Added to Catalog: 2010
Book Format: Paperback
Book Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Release Date: November 29, 2010
Web Product ID: 539

Growing, Older

A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables

by Joan Gussow

Michael Pollan calls her one of his food heroes. Barbara Kingsolver credits her with shaping the history and politics of food in the United States. And countless others who have vied for a food revolution, pushed organics, and reawakened Americans to growing their own food and eating locally consider her both teacher and muse.

Joan Gussow has influenced thousands through her books, This Organic Life and The Feeding Web, her lectures, and the simple fact that she lives what she preaches. Now in her eighties, she stops once more to pass along some wisdom—surprising, inspiring, and controversial—via the pen.

Gussow's memoir Growing, Older begins when she loses her husband of 40 years to cancer and, two weeks later, finds herself skipping down the street—much to her alarm. Why wasn't she grieving in all the normal ways? With humor and wit, she explains how she stopped worrying about why she was smiling and went on worrying, instead, and as she always has, about the possibility that the world around her was headed off a cliff. But hers is not a tale, or message, of gloom. Rather it is an affirmation of a life's work—and work in general.

Lacking a partner's assistance, Gussow continued the hard labor of growing her own year-round diet. She dealt single-handedly with a rising tidal river that regularly drowned her garden, with muskrat interlopers, broken appliances, bodily decay, and river trash—all the while bucking popular notions of how "an elderly widowed woman" ought to behave.

Scattered throughout are urgent suggestions about what growing older on a changing planet will call on all of us to do: learn self-reliance and self-restraint, yield graciously if not always happily to necessity, and—since there is no other choice—come to terms with the insistence of the natural world. Gussow delivers another literary gem—one that women curious about aging, gardeners curious about contending with increasingly intense weather, and environmentalists curious about the future will embrace.

Salem's budget gaps flow from a leadership gap

Pardon me while I rant, but there's a great example of "business as usual" that explains why City of Salem is cutting the services that people want (pools, libraries, parks) so that the city staff can continue doing things the way they've always been done:

The monthly mailed out water/sewer bill, which even gets sent to those of us who have signed up to have our bill paid with a credit card automatically each month.

This waste of paper -- a full sheet, plus envelope, plus 38 cents postage (this entirely superfluous mailing isn't even sent bulk rate -- it comes at the spendy presorted first class rate) must consume an extraordinary sum each year, merrily indicting Salem's city staff as blithely unconcerned with doing the right thing.

Worse, the folks behind this missive, which drives me bonkers when it arrives at LOVESalem HQ every month like clockwork, refuse to allow the people of Salem to turn this sow's ear into at least an imitation silk purse by letting the neighborhood associations ride along in the envelope for free.

In other words, even as Salem gives the neighborhoods a pittance for a communications budget, it refuses to let neighborhoods supply preprinted inserts for the envelope so that they could reach all the residents in their neighborhood association without having to do a separate mailing.

So what's the score?
Wasted energy and materials 1 vs. Common sense 0
Wasted utility money 1 vs. City credibility over budget concerns 0

Bureaucratic routine 1 vs. Better neighborhood communications 0

That looks like we lose this game every month, 3 to zip. I'm sure LOVESalem readers could come up with plenty of better ways to use money being squandered on sending useless water/sewer billing notices to people who have already said that they don't need or want them. But what's just as important to notice is how even the most ludicrous practice continues, mindlessly wasting dollars month after month after month, all because nobody in the City hierarchy demands better.

We have some really hard challenges coming up in the years to come. If we can't even take advantage of the "gimme's" -- fixing the really easy, stupid things -- then woe betide us down the road.