Usual Rubbish

Plugging.

Another Web bucket to fill. Good grief, tubey! How many Web sites am I supposed to maintain? I’m the one with the arms, remember… and the cerebral cortex.

Oh, hi. Yeah, I was just in the process of dressing down the mansized tuber. Why? Well, it’s simple – he keeps making more work for us bipeds, signing us up for these aggregator sites like Reverbnation and the like. I can’t keep up with it, man! And my bandmates want nothing to do with it. I’m the janitor here in Big Green land. (My brother Matt is the cinematographer, I should mention.) But what the hell, I’m complaining again, aren’t I? I should be grateful to have a roof over my head, three square meals a day, two round ones, and a couple of hexagonal snacks. That’s more than most can say these days.

As always, money is a challenge. Copies of One Small Step are not exactly flying off the shelf on this planet (though I hear it’s moving quite briskly on Kaztropharius 137b, that nasty little planetoid that hosts us every year or so). It’s predictably hard to repatriate profits from other planets – that’s not surprising at all. They use a whole different kind of currency up there… not to mention a whole different kind of gravity, air, and background radiation. Hell, funds transfers are the least of it. If you’re a bank courier, you’re lucky to get out of there with your skin. Word of warning.

There are ways we can maximize our budget down here without the help of space aliens. One way is to eat less. I’ve been trying to get by on bread heels and brick fragments, but yesterday I broke down and got some Chinese food. Not that cutting back on nutrients is the best way to save money – far from it. We’ve been trying a host of innovations. Mitch Macaphee, for instance, came up with these little power generation gizmos he calls “Nano Mills” – tiny windmills that adhere to your clothing and generate enough power to … well … to make an LED glow dimly for a few seconds. Not much, but it’s a start. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is now covered with the little contraptions. 

Note to Mitch: Your next invention should just be money. Just invent some cash, there’s a good chap.

Political Rants

Power.

A year ago this time, on the eve of Earth day, millions of barrels of oil began spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, accompanied by millions of gallons of a toxic dispersant banned for use in the U.K. (but still, apparently, okay to use over here). Both substances were disastrous by-products of a rush to profit by multinational corporations tied to our seemingly unbreakable addiction to fossil fuels. As was pointed out at the time and many times since, such catastrophic events are inevitable at this stage in the depletion of global energy resources. All of the easy-to-get oil is gone or spoken for, so expanding this highly profitable extraction industry requires brinkmanship of the type that has soured the waters of the Gulf beyond the sorry point to which they had sunk previously.

This is generally true of the extractive energy industries. Oil is being sought from ocean depths far more profound than either drilling or safety technologies can facilitate. It is being rendered from the tar sands of western Canada, where the very earth is being ground to squeeze every ounce of the precious fluid for export to the U.S., mainly. (As a result, Canada was recently our single largest source of oil.) The volume of global reserves is calculated based upon those deposits that are economically feasible to extract – as the price per barrel rises, more reserves enter the equation. The trouble is, the very act of extracting them from an exhausted mother earth causes as much environmental degradation as burning the oil in generators and vehicles.

Last year’s spill did teach us one valuable lesson: the energy companies fear nothing more than public opinion. Before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, cable television was choked with ads about “America’s Gas and Oil Industry” and all the jobs they were creating, not to mention BP and other oil companies touting their commitment to the preservation our environment and the development of renewables. When the rig blew, they vanished – Poof! No ads until well after the hole was plugged. Now they’re back again, though a bit more muted than before the disaster. They know their limits … and they know that they can only push the public so far. The real power is with us, if we can manage to use it.

We have an opportunity, right here in my backyard. Local landowners are preparing to play host to hydrofracking – another post-peak energy extraction method now destroying water resources in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. We need to make our voices heard now, before the industry gets a foothold and destroys New York the way the coal industry has riddled West Virginia.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Wunderkind.

Paul Ryan has come up with a remarkable innovation – gradually bring elderly and disabled folks back to the standard of living they enjoyed in the 1930s. Brilliant! Obviously the idea behind moving Medicare to a voucher system is to save the government – and, therefore, the collective “us” – money.  But it’s only a savings if you don’t count the vast, vast majority of elderly people for whom that voucher will be worth very little in terms of health services. This is a very serious issue for anyone planning to become elderly one day. (Note: if you care nothing about the elderly and disabled and plan on jumping off a cliff when you turn 65, the Ryan plan will probably be fine by you.)

I’ve blogged about this before, so forgive me for covering the same ground – it’s just that when a person of influence advances a legislative plan that overtly calls for the dismemberment of Medicare and Medicaid, I feel compelled to repeat myself. This isn’t a question of saving money. This is a question of what we collectively decide is necessary to preserve the well-being of the nation. I’m not trying to appeal to your sense of charity. I’m saying that virtually every one of us is liable to need this type of coverage at some point in his/her life. Like investing in first responders, this is something we all have an interest in preserving.

No matter how much Ryan and his associates claim that is precisely what they are trying to do, don’t buy it. A voucher plan will throw elderly people into the private insurance market – one that is already way too expensive for pre-retirees to afford. What kind of premium will an Excellus ask of a 75 year old with a weak ticker? Seriously… Medicare is there for a reason. Before its existence, elderly people relied on charity, family members, etc., and many had access to neither.

The only reason why wunderkind Ryan and his express can feel comfortable criticizing such vital programs is that Medicare and Medicaid cost so much. They do because they cover those most prone to serious illnesses. If we had a reasonable single-payer system – Medicare for all – the system would also cover those many millions of us who see a doctor once a year and no more. Include them (i.e. us) and the system will finance itself. And frankly, wouldn’t you be willing to trade whatever plan you have (if you have one) for Medicare coverage at a reasonable cost?

Note to Dems: there’s a reason why Medicare is a third rail issue. It’s because it’s freaking necessary.  

luv u,

jp

Weird ass music since 1986