The Audacity of Nope: Chicagoans Protest the Olympic Bid

No Games Chicago led this evening's protest against the Olympic 2016 bid this evening in front of City Hall on LaSalle St. About 200 people turned out to say NO to the Olympic boondoggle. It was a cheerful, orderly crowd that included people of every sort, and the police monitoring the event were grinning broadly at us all.

I saw a number of familiar faces among the other protesters, including our own Lorraine Swanson of Lake Effect News, among the many media reps in attendance.

All our big guns are over in Copenhagen right now, and they must look just a little desperate to the IOC people, what with Barack and Richie and Michelle and Oprah in tow, while other contenders are represented merely by their heads-of-state- sort of like some pathetic social climber from the wrong side of town who has a wedding with 10 bridesmaids or something and gets a HELOC loan to buy a $40,000 dress and invites the mayor and the whole city council to her shindig. What with the country completely bankrupt on every level and fighting no-win wars on two fronts, you'd think Obama would have more pressing concerns, and GOP leaders are seizing on his junket on behalf of Chicago's bid as evidence of his lack of seriousness.

Let's hope they all make royal asses of themselves over there. Rio has come up fast and is now the front-runner. Brazil has guaranteed $14.4 Billion to cover expenses and losses, which is more than the other three contenders put together, and there is no significant opposition there.

This is no time to rest easy, though. Email President Obama and let him know that if he wants to throw some pork to his home town, that we have many more urgent needs than an over-hyped egofest for da Mare that will cost the public at least $4 billion and cause major disruption and displacement.

Environmentalists Protest Desert Solar Plant

There's just no pleasing some folks.

Certain environmentalists, whose cause is being championed by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-California) are seeking to block the construction of a large solar power plant in the Mohave desert because of its potential environmental impact.

"It would destroy the entire Mojave Desert ecosystem," said David Myers, executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy.

It's difficult to think of any means of electrical generation that has less environmental impact than solar, even wind, and the only thing either wind or solar have going against them is that they are outrageously costly, inefficient means of generating small amounts of unreliable electricity; and that there isn't enough land in the United States to fit the solar panels it would take to generate the power that the denizens of California guzzle in any given month.

However, everything bears a cost, and there is simply no way to generate large amounts of electricity without some environmental impact. There is also no way for a population of 39 million people to conduct any other activity pursuant to maintaining their lives without environmental impact, and even were all the denizens of California (and the U.S.) to relinquish modern life in favor of a primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle, there would be far-reaching environmental consequences. We can easily imagine the desertification of the entire state of CA as its denizens cut down every growing thing more than a foot tall for firewood for cooking and heat.

The exasperated Gov. Schwarzenegger asked "if we can't put a solar plant in the Mojave, where in the hell can we put it?"

The moral of the story is, of course, that that there is no way to eliminate environmental impact except to maybe lie down and die. Will any of the deep ecologists volunteer to do this? Strange how the human-hating Gaia-worshippers who gloatingly contemplate the die-off of 90% of the species as resource depletion collapses us socially and economically will not volunteer their own lives by way of reducing the human impact on the planet.

People like Feinstein and the people at the Wildlands Conservancy have cost the environmental movement whatever credibility it ever had, yet never has human life been so at risk from environmental degradation and its multiple threats to the basic necessities of human life, such as our water and food supply. The only way to overcome the overwhelming hostility of the public to the concerns of the movement is to make concern for the human being the movement's central focus, for that is really what this is all about- to provide a liveable cradle for human life and to assure that our children and their descendents will have the wherewithal to live lives with a tolerable level of comfort and technological amenity. The point is not to avoid all environmental costs, but to manage and minimalize impacts as much as possible and to manage our resources so that we can continue to live comfortably and with basic technological amenity. For that, we need the cleanest and most efficient means of power generation we can devise, not the means we will be stuck with if we foreclose every means of large-scale electrical generation on the grounds that it may someohow, sometime, have some sort of negative impact.

The 49th Ward Green Corps Forum:From the Holler to the Hood

Where: Loyola University LakeShore Campus
Life Sciences Building, Room 142
1050 W. Sheridan Road, Sheridan & Winthrop, Chicago, IL
When: Monday night, September 28, 2009, at 7 PM

An e-mail blast from our Alderman, Joe Moore, announced a very important event this coming Monday night.

The 49th Ward Green Corps and the Rogers Park-based Eco-Justice Collaborative are sponsoring a forum on the devastation produced by coal mining and production to discuss so-called "clean" coal and the permanent destruction of the Appalachian landscape.

Loelei Scarbro from the Coal River Valley in Appalachia, an activist and community organizer with the Coal River Mountain watch, will be on hand to discuss the destruction wrought on this part of the world by mountain-top removal on the landscape.

Commonwealth Edison is considering closing two aging coal-fired plants here in Chicago, but Illinois is unfortunately spurning future nuclear development in favor of "clean" coal development. A 600 MgW "clean" coal plant is currently planned in Southern Illinois, while the moratorium on nuclear development remains in place. We in Illinois need urgently to consider whither our current energy policies are leading us, and whether coal is an acceptable alternative in light of the environmental destruction it causes, and most of all its human toll, whether measured by deaths in coal mines, illness and death caused by coal pollution, or the loss of the landscape that has supported a community of human beings for generations, Appalachia.

What Are Our Lives Worth: $1.4 Trillion More for Housing Rescue vs. $8 Billion for Dam Rehabilitation

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a true Third World nation is flagrant disregard for human life,which is usually manifest in a society's spending priorities. In failing societies with rapidly increasing populations and shrinking wealth, what remains of the nation's financial resources are increasingly diverted by political corruption and statist initiatives designed to sustain the unsustainable at unlimited cost to the taxpayers, for the benefit of select constituencies, which in the case of the United States are the Wall Street financial cabal, the homebuilders, and homeowners buried in homes that continue to lose value.

The financial black hole opened by the collapse of our housing and credit markets keeps growing and threatens to suck every dollar of tax revenue we hope to realize for years to come into it with no offsetting benefit to taxpayers (least of those who rent and aspire to buy homes), and most of all at the cost of every other necessity, notably our emergency preparedness and our rapidly decrepitating Pharaonic infrastructure, to which a pittance, relatively speaking, has been allocated to affect urgently needed repairs on critically deficient roads, bridges, and dams. While nearly $1.4 Trillion of taxpayer guarantees have been extended to the housing market over the next few years, Congress is still debating whether to commit $8 Billion to repairs to dangerously deficient large dams whose failure could cost thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars in economic losses. The Wired Magazine article I linked speaks only of non-federally owned dams that have been "orphaned" by owners who've gone out of business. There is no discussion of the 600-foot or taller mega-dams owned by the Bureau of Reclamation, whose spokespeople glibly assure the public that most federally owned dams are in safe operating condition, despite what is known about a couple of its largest structures, notably the fragile 710-foot-high Glen Canyon Dam that nearly breached in 1983 and has been "shit-rigged" ever since, while the movement to decommission and remove the dangerous structure was quietly tabled by its owner, the Bureau of Reclamation, for unstated reasons.

Is the Glen Canyon really any safer than it was in 2007, when it was named one of the two most dangerous dams in the country, or is it just that there is no money available for the massive task of removing it?

Fixing the 1,800 large American dams that represent the biggest threat to human lives will "cost billions, but can we afford this in addition to roads, bridges, and other projects?" asks one recent article on CNN Money.

How could we even ask if we can "afford" $8 Billion to fix "worst-case" dams with their immense watersheds containing millions of people exposed to major flood hazards, in a context where we are committing trillions to propping up property values, modifying mortgages, and enticing new homebuyers into a falling market, creating yet another future wave of defaults in the process? The money spent on Cash for Clunkers could have paid for the repairs on a couple of the larger and more endangered dams, or for a number of critically deficient bridges. Can we afford not to make these repairs?

"Where food is dear, life is cheap", someone once remarked a couple of centuries ago, and the depletion of our resources and in tandem with an expanding population,falling incomes, and increasing internal divisions and conflicts, has dire implications for our future political and social climate. We seem to be well along the path so many other societies have traveled as they ratchet down the slope of declining productivity and increasing impoverishment, as we become more and more apathetic and callous in the face of rising crime, violence, and poverty.

The Oil Industry at 150: A Celebration or a Funeral?

You have to wonder if Alex Epstein on the blog Voices for Reason, grasped the irony of the title of his recent post, Oil at 150: An Unhappy Birthday. The blog is operated by The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, which is headed by her designated spokesman and intellectual heir, Dr. Leonard Peikoff.

This article was a follow up piece to his previous post, Oil at 150:Celebrating Oil's Birthday, a short piece lauding the first drill in Pennsylvania 150 years ago and the ensuing discovery of the incredible power and versatility of the liquid that literally built the modern world and to which we owe every essential of modern life.

In his follow-up post, Mr. Epstein lamented that there had hardly been any comment on the occasion at all from either our opinion makers or oil industry leaders themselves.

That might possibly be because for the oil industry and for everyone who aspires to a lifestyle better than that of a 19th Century subsistence farmer, this is a time of grief, not joy, for the landmark Epstein commemorates will more likely be the industry's tombstone, and no one knows it better than oil industry insiders themselves.The most prominent Peak Oil spokesmen are, after all, alumnae of the oil industry; Colin Campbell and Kenneth Deffeyes are retired petroleum geologists who spent their professional lives in the employ of major oil producers, Matthew Simmons is a prominent investment banker and oil analyst, and former U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, who remarked on disparity between growing demand for oil and the ever smaller and less frequent discoveries of unexploited reserves, is the former Chairman and CEO of Halliburton. Each of these men, along with dozens of fellow executives and scientists in the energy industries, has expressed their conviction that we have arrived, or will soon arrive at, the peak of global oil production and the inevitable steep decline in available oil supplies.

And none of them, nor anyone else, can say for sure what will replace oil, but there is among them and other students of Peak Oil, the disquieting thought that there will be no replacement for it. And neither the cornucopians nor the "green"' promoters of renewable energy care to dwell on the thought.

I like Alex Epstein and many of the other intellectuals whose writings appear at The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, and intend no disrespect for them or the Objectivist philosophy that they articulate and that I share, when I say that their extremely linear logic regarding the necessity of oil fails to factor in a number of important points, like the possibility that we will likely have to do with a steeply reduced supply of it. Another contributor, Dr. Keith Lockitch, author of The True Meaning of Earth Hour, criticizes the movement to reduce carbon emissions because a steep reduction in emissions would mean a steep reduction in our lifestyles. His reasoning is likewise rigidly linear to the point of simple-mindedness: it says, our comfort and advanced technologies depend upon the ability to consume large amounts of fossil fuels, therefore we must have fossil fuels, and since we demand them they must therefore be available. Well, what happens when they no longer are available, or supplies are steeply reduced from current levels? Will our demand for them in and of itself produce them once every oil field on the planet is in steep depletion along with most gas wells and coal mines?

This is not Objectevist thinking, this is not rationality. This is wish-based thinking that refuses to recognize a distressing reality.

Unfortunately, Dr. Lockitch, Mr. Epstein and other writers at the Center have fallen into the Cornucopian trap that has ensnared most "conservatives", a variety of wish-based thinking that believes that just because our civilization badly needs dense, energy-intensive fuels in order to drive our advanced technology and supply the comforts and amenities that are the difference between a long, healthy life with opportunity, choice, and incredible luxury; and a life that's nasty, brutish, and short, that those fuels will always be there and that the market will provide them simply because we want them, need them, and demand them.

The "conservative" cornucopians are as in denial regarding the hard limits we are confronting as the "liberal" environmentalists and "greens" in their approaches to the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels and other essential resources, and just as irrational, and neither mode of thinking will help us negotiate the tectonic economic and social shifts that are sweeping the globe, and sweeping away our favored way of life and the assumptions we have based our thinking and planning on.

If ever we needed rational philosophy, this is the hour, but the latter-day spokesmen of the philosophy that supplies the epistemology that supports it and defends it are frantically evading it and denying the conclusions to which it would lead them.Evasion, denial, and emotion-based thinking are the hallmarks of irrationality and subjectivity, which are not only cardinal sins in Objectivist philosophy, but will lead us to the same place that they always have, and will defeat our efforts to retain our civilization and develop the techniques and organization we will need to cope in a resource-constrained world.

Couldn't Happen to Nicer People: ACORN Loses its Federal Funding

Both Congress and the Senate voted overwhelmingly to strip the community activist group, ACORN, of its federal funding amidst allegations that the group counseled its clients on how to commit tax fraud and other crimes. Last week 11 ACORN workers in Florida were charged with submitting fraudulent voter registration papers, and most disturbing of all, ACORN workers are alleged to have aided in human traffic, including the recruiting of underage girls into prostitution.

Many of us here in the 49th Ward of Chicago remember the role this unsavory group played in the hotly contested city election of 2007. ACORN activists worked to help re-elect the incumbent alderman, Joe Moore, and distributed "attack" fliers that slandered and vilified his opponent's supporters, including myself.

It's rather a shame, really. ACORN started out in the 70s as a grass-roots activist group whose mission was to help lower utility rates and provide affordable housing for the poor. Since that time, the group has degenerated into a blatantly political action group that advocates for favored candidates and engages in questionable and perhaps illegal practices on behalf of people who distinctly aren't poor or disadvantaged.

Feds Promote Irresponsible Lending

Signs like the one pictured have been sprouting on parkways all over Rogers Park and Edgewater. Looks like we're setting up for another wave of foreclosures after the one just in front of us plays itself out.

If recent FHA loan generations and current FHA delinquencies and defaults can be seen as indications of where the housing market is headed, we can expect another costly home-loan bailout in a couple of more years, in addition to our current soaring default rate and the tottering $3.5 trillion tower of shaky commercial debt. Delinquency rates for recently-generated FHA loans are at 14%.

2nd Quarter Notices of Defaults were the highest ever recorded, and these were for loans that actually defaulted 6 to 9 months before the NODs were issued. Lenders have so large a backlog of delinquencies that many borrowers are in default a year or more before any action is taken against them.

The $8000 tax credit is just about to end, coinciding with the end of the selling season, and we will then see how durable the recent hike in housing sales really is. But it looks from here like the taxpayers will be paying for this recent uptick two ways, first with the $8000 taxpayer subsidy for new home buyers, and then again when these subsidized-down-pay loans start to default. Given that about 80% of all home loans being written now are FHA-guaranteed, that could mean another record-setting wave of defaults and foreclosures.

The Feds always were the most irresponsible lenders of all, inasmuch as the wave of bad lending was made possible by the alphabet soup of government agencies- HUD, GNMA,FNMA, FHA-that either backed or bought the mindboggling array of "creative" loans that got us into our current financial predicament. Now the FHA is THE irresponsible lender, and just about the only functioning home lender.