Marissa, a newly minted 2canologist at Shelburne Farms, has just lit about 4 pounds of softwood pellets in the TLUD [Top Lit Up Draft] stove she has just built. In about 75 minutes, this will turn into about 1 pound of biochar suitable for experimenting with.

For more on 2canology at Shelburne Farms, please see this item in inFARMation.

For illustrated documentation and directions for becoming a certified 2canologist yourself — it is easy, fun and very entertaining — you will find Dr. Hugh McLaughlin’s instructions here. 2canology is Dr. McLaughlin’s ingenious and creative gift to the world of biochar.

Biochar is now entering the mainstream media — as evidenced by this front page story in USA Today.

Photos courtesy of Marshall Webb of Shelburne Farms.

In a historical context, we have yet to conceptually realize the philosophical foundations of the 2008-2009 public affirmation of the country’s [Pakistan] judiciary. I do not recall a single modern historical precedent wherein the elected government of the day was almost swept from its incumbency by popular revolt that resulted in re-establishing the country’s superior judiciary headed by the present Supreme Court and its chief justice.

In a country where praetorian, feudal and colonial norms determine social thinking and public behaviour, democracy remains susceptible to anti-democratic challenges. Playing the role of a knight in the service of democracy in Pakistan is neither easy nor follows any set practice since polemical rhetoric or the borrowed and fake robes of a martyr are always seen through by the masses who are being made the target of such an adornment. The people have become as suspicious of the calls of “democracy being in danger” as they are wary of slogans such as ‘Islam in danger’ or ‘stability at any cost’ or ‘Pakistan first’. The weaknesses in the case of those gunning for the independence of judiciary are clearly visible, but its defenders need to see that the task in front of the Supreme Court’s handling of national causes is both delicate and difficult.

Please read the full essay here.

I first heard that phrasing by Glenn Beck. Then I noticed it several times in several different Fox sNooze segments. Then in some of the tea-party speeches. (I sometimes like to get ALL perspectives, first-hand.

Sooo … whatever happened to the phrase that USED to be the mainstay of American political advocacy – demanding “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, as it IS stated in the Declaration of Independence?

Why are so many on the Raght systematically abandoning that long-standing declaration, subtly replacing it with this new formulation with its property preoccupation?

Hmmmm??? [Spread the word - or the question!]

–jim; Jim Warren, open-govt & tech-civlib advocate & sometime columnist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Warren

justjim36 on twitter | Jim Warren on Facebook

Today, we need to reflect on the lack of meaningful change and the seemingly unchangeable ancien regime of 20th century America.

The Boston Globe ran a front page story on how Corporations invested $100 million per month for ten months, thats a B as in one billion dollars, to stymy change and preserve the legacy approaches of yesteryear. If they could not block Obama’s election, they could make sure no change you could hope for would be enacted.

DailyKos has run an item “No One Is Going To Save You Fools“.

Before I explain the generic insult, let me first make something perfectly clear: I am your enemy. That you don’t know this is understandable: after all, people like me prefer it that way. But until you understand just what you’re up against and why, you’re going to continue to lose, and look like fools in the process.

Barack Obama has indeed sold you out. He and many of his Democratic colleagues have sold you out on healthcare, and they’ve sold you out on financial reform. You were looking for a savior, and you’ve been had–not an altogether atypical result for those looking for a strong leader to “save” them.

He hasn’t done this because he’s a bad guy. In fact, he’s a great guy. I think he’s doing pretty much the best job he can. He’s sold you out because he’s not afraid of you. And really, if I may be so bold, he shouldn’t be afraid of you. You don’t know who really runs the show, and you’re far too fickle and manipulable to count on.

thereisnospoon’s diary :: ::
The first thing you need to understand about healthcare reform is what Jane Hamsher identified long ago: nothing–absolutely nothing–is going to trump the White House’s deal with PhRMA and the insurance industry. The question you need to ask yourselves is: why? If you’re intellectually mature enough to get past “personal betrayal” as your best answer, you’ll be on the right track.

While you ponder that one, you might want to also consider why nothing has been done–nor will anything serious actually be done–about financial industry reform. Standing up to the financial industry in the current political environment should be a no-brainer. So what in the heck is going on here? If you can think past shadowy conspiracy theories and possible personal enrichment for the Obama family, you’ll be doing the kind of thinking that will help actually solve the problem.

The problem is people like me, and the people I work for. I’m what they call a Qualitative Research Consultant, or QRC for short. Here’s my website. There’s even a whole association of us who meet regularly to discuss ideas and tactics. Together with the AAPC, the MRA, the AMA, ESOMAR, and a whole host of other organizations you’ve never heard of, we have more power and control than you know. We’re extremely good at what we do, and we do it all behind the scenes, appealing to and manipulating your subconscious brain in ways that your conscious brain has little to no control over.

Clearly, today, too many politicians are too beholden to corporate money. If we want real change, if we want to spend $1 billion dollars inventing the future and the next release of the Modern Era, we have to begin by getting corporate money out of politics. In a word, we must abolish the entrenched fiction that corporations are persons with constitutional rights. Only when we do this, and restore the prohibition of corporations engaging in political activity, will our elected representatives truly work once again for we the people.

“… The reality, which is that western power is in retreat nearly everywhere, is insistently denied. Yet the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century – neoliberalism just as much as communism – are obsolete. Belief systems in which the categories of western religion are reproduced in the guise of pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most rapidly advancing nation state has never been monotheist. Western societies are well worth defending, but they are not a model for all of humankind. In future they will be only one of several versions of tolerable modernity.

For secular western intellectuals to accept this fact would rob their life of meaning. Huddled in the tattered blanket of historical teleology, which tells them they are the leading lights of humanity, they screen out any development that demonstrates their increasing irrelevance. …”

As Gray points out below, this bankrupt intellectual fraud hardly bodes well for our ability to deal successfully with the harsh realities of climate disruption.

The intellectual default of politicians cannot be remedied by returning to the ideologies of the past. It is shared by much of the public, and comes from a chronic inability to engage with reality. Perhaps only a more serious crisis will overturn the delusive fancies on which so many policies are based. A run on sterling in the event of a hung parliament after the next general election; the cataclysmic defeat that will follow Barack Obama’s decision to reinforce inevitable failure in Afghanistan; a spiral in oil prices after a flare-up over Iran; the collapse of the dollar as the world finally loses patience with American solipsism – any one of these eventualities, together with others that cannot be foreseen, could be a catalyst for rethinking.

But the omens are not encouraging. The make-believe that surrounds climate change – epitomized in the empty statements of intent regarding unachievable goals that will be the only outcome of the Copenhagen meeting – shows that the biggest challenge for the future is being evaded. It looks as if we may be wandering in the ruins of the Noughties for some time.

A design goal of Modern Era 2.0 should be a cure for what Gray calls “a chronic inability to engage with reality”. This is but one of many very serious ‘bugs’ in the systems software of Modern Era 1.0

This is a first-draft proposal for a ballot initiative, stated for my home-state, but equally applicable to other states:

In the State of Washington, corporations are not people,
and a corporation is not a person, and corporations have
no rights other than those enacted by legislation,
explicitly stating that they are rights for corporations.

It’s brief, easy for anyone to read and understand, and would seem to be “obvious”. Please let me know if you’re interested in pursuing such a ballot measure in ANY state.

[Note: There are numerous organizations and websites already concerned with fighting judicially-invented corporate personhood, but I don't know of any efforts in any state to address this problem via statewide ballot initiative.]

–jim; Jim Warren, open-govt & tech-civlib advocate & sometime columnist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Warren

justjim36 on twitter | Jim Warren on Facebook

It also called on Federal Agencies to create portals, in the form, http://www.agency.gov/open and http://www.whitehouse.gov/open is up as an example.

Wednesday, I received a press release from the Department of Justice about their Fiscal Year 2008 Freedom of Information Act Requests which talked a little bit about their efforts to be more open.

I downloaded the spreadsheet detailing data about the Department of Education’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) processing. The Education Department has the equivalent of about 33 people working full time on FOIA requests. FOIA processing requests are about $1.9 million, with an additional $100,000 in legal fees. 2,236 requests were processed and the average time to process a simple request was 111 days. There were 67 requests for expedited processing, of which ten were granted. There were 326 requests for fee waiver, of which only 4 were granted.

Processing FIOA requests are expensive and cost money, and this is something that people need to keep in mind during the discussions about the future of journalism. Us volunteer, citizen journalists and bloggers are unlikely to fork out of our own pockets the money it takes to get big FOIA requests processed.

On the other hand, making more information available for free on the Internet could significantly cut down the amount of FOIA requests. It will be interesting to see a long-term analysis of the trend in FOIA requests following the implementation of the Open Government Directive.

I sent off a quick email to a friend at the Department of Justice with my suggestion about something that could make the Federal Judiciary much more open. Court records and documents for the U.S. Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy Courts are available in a system called Pacer. Currently, reporters and bloggers wishing to get access to these records must pay eight cents per page to access the data online. I can understand why you might charge eight cents a page for something that needs to be photocopied, but data distributed over the Internet shouldn’t cost eight cents a page.

In terms of the timeliness of information, the FCC and FTC are pretty good about making comments that they’ve received available online in a timely basis. They have systems in place to facilitate that. They may not be as easy to navigate as I would like, but they are a great starting point. Other governmental agencies do not have this ability.

This was driven home to me yesterday when the Connecticut General Assembly Appropriations Committee held a public hearing on the latest proposed budget cuts.

Over 350 people came to testify, which means over 350 documents needing to be scanned in and made available as part of the public record. This is likely to take a week or two of time from the overburdened staffers of the committee. In addition, numerous other people submitted testimony via email. The technology is not in place for those emails to be made automatically available online or forwarded to interested parties, so they will be included with the over 350 documents waiting to be scanned.

If more of this information could be made available immediately, the way the FCC and FTC do, or perhaps even made available in such a way that they could be loaded into an online system where people could rate, tag, and comment on the documents, a richer and more nuanced discussion of how best to allocated limited resources could take place.

The Federal Open Government Directive is a great starting point in making government more efficient and more responsive. It will be great to see how it gets implemented over the coming months. It will be even greater if state and local governments and even nonprofits adopt similar directives.

Do you really think 100,000 contractors and 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan are about do for the Afghans what we will not, cannot, do for ourselves? And if we cannot, do not, what chance of success do we have there? Or Iraq? Or at home? Where is the change we can believe in? When will Obama stand up to the monied interests of Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex?

If what people see is mainly greed and rigid ideologies run amok and contaminating the highest levels of our government, what should they believe? We talk one talk, but we walk quite another walk. In a word, our propaganda and our actions are in conflict and provide no reliable reference point. Would you trust anyone who did this?

Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world

What, then, is the soil, the essential foundation, of our economy and Western culture? Perhaps it is entrepreneurial start ups, small business and enterprises on Main Street. These have historically been the largest generators of jobs. If this economic soil, like the soils of our forests and fields, has been over-mined and voraciously exploited by the industrial model, then is it any wonder we have a jobless recovery? After all, the government’s economic soil amendments have, so far, gone to the largest and most predatory businesses in America, especially to the too-big-to-fail banks and car companies. What do we call banks that will not loan Main Street and small businesses our very own tax dollars? Our money that they are now handing out as bonuses to the already rich? Is this any way to restore the soils that support our very economic well being?

Properly inoculated biochar is, in many ways, all about restoring the carbon content as well as the health and vitality of the living soils of our forests and fields — as well as many other environmental benefits. What is the biochar analog we need to apply to the economic soils that nurture and support entrepreneurial start ups, small businesses, and Main Street? If we want to have a recovery that provides plentiful jobs, we had better find that analog and start applying it as soon as possible.

Update:

“Jane D’Arista is an economist with the Financial Markets Center in Philomont, VA. She is a Research Associate with the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) and author of the masterful study of U.S. financial regulation, The Evolution of U.S. Finance. For more than thirty years, Jane D’Arista has been one of the country’s most insightful analysts of financial markets and regulation.”

D’Arista was interviewed by The RealNews Network to create “Anatomy of casino capitalism”. The interview is presented in 8 parts. Please be sure to watch all 8 parts. If you do, you will have some pretty good ideas about what needs to be done to start rebuilding our economic soils and preserving some vestige of Economic Sovereignty.

Watch all 8 episodes here.

Read her Oct. 29th testimony before the US House’s Committee on Financial Services here.