Pointless Drivel

Cold Frame

2009-03-25T20:33:53Z

This post is dedicated to chthonictonic as he expressed some concern about me. Don't worry! My last post was just a smidgen of my time - I really am kicking the media habit. This is what I've done instead, with the help of Steve Solomon in his book, Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, as well as ideas from many people online.

This is a shot looking west at the northeast corner of the bed. Strawberries and hinges!

Please, if you like, take a look at the PDF of my original cold frame plans!

Hopefully this gives the overall idea.

Fully opened, as on hot summer days. A storage shed is going in tomorrow (ooo that reminds me I should go get some before pictures) right nearby where the frames and west wall will be housed.

Putting the northerly wall up to support the frames.

And the easterly wall. The whole project is red cedar except for these angled side walls, which are birch plywood. I stained them brown with copper-naphthenate, which is the wood preservative with the lowest plant toxicity. I think I lucked out with the color match (they started out as pale as I am). Not thinking about it, I used pressure-treated posts for the beds but their preservatives are probably nasty, so I plan to plant flowers around all the posts instead of vegetables, as a toxicity margin. Another mistake: I only sunk the posts 6", and when the soil went in, the frame bowed out, making the frames not align right. Luckily my neighbor helped me put a piece of all-thread through the middle two posts across the bed (beneath the soil line) and ratchet the two sides back together. Thank you Ron!

Front-and-center, the expensive piece of the project. My jaw dropped when I priced the plexiglass for this. But it's supposedly 10+ x stronger than glass and is warranted for 10 years and soooo much lighter, which makes getting these things on and off even by myself a cinch. BUT! Don't pull a permaculture votive-candles-will-produce-CO2-AND-keep-it-warmer-at-night-in-there move, or you'll melt your plexiglass. Like me. But not too bad, it's not ruined, just a couple of divets in one of the frames now. Oopsie. Yay mistakes!

Uh oh be sure to vent to let the moisture from the drying soil escape! I suspect slightly that the soil is being kept moist via capillary action b/c the other half of the bed keeps getting rained on, and I'm concerned that's going to decrease the soil temperature, but the air temperature (measured by a radio-transmitting thermometer inside a yogurt container inside the frame) stays a good 5 degrees warmer (vented or un-) than the surroundings at night, as promised. Thank you Steve Solomon! The main use of this setup is to harden transplants before planting and to grow leafy greens year-round. Evidently endive and kale have no problem with the cold, in fact it makes them sweeter, it's just the rain they can't handle! It collects in their rosettes and makes them rot despite that they're perfectly happy that cold. How much fun is this!

Next project: cloches. (Yes, I'm essentially living by Steve Solomon's advice here...) Stay tuned!

Raised Bed 1

2009-03-15T06:40:19Z

Raised Bed 2

2009-03-15T06:33:57Z

v3risimilitud3 @ 2009-03-14T23:19:00

2009-03-15T06:20:26Z

The Heat Pump Works!

2009-03-15T05:54:32Z

For background, please see my post on the heat pump. More below the fold.

So, the heat pump works! The temperatures converge. (That graph was with Spitty outside the closet.) Sadly, even with short-cycling, at this time of year the fluid doesn't lose enough heat to its surroundings overnight to last a full day with enough oomph to keep the tomatoes from getting leggy. Hardening is hard enough without starting with seedlings who've never seen the cold side of 60 and have had every day since birth above 75. So, during these few weeks each spring I'll have to lug ice downstairs once each day or two. I'm hopeful, though, to find some sort of fruit, veggie, or scented flower I can grow in there that will be happy with temperatures in the 80's all the time, so I can just use the heat pump without short-cycling. Does anyone have any suggestions?

It's nice with Spitty outside the closet, the door can be closed nearly fully, reducing ballast hum and overpowering light, although spitty's kinda loud himself, so I may upgrade his ducting and just have his inlet and outlet plumbed through the closet door. I also placed a humidifier in the closet, and now it smells a little bit like tomato plants in here. I'm excited to try it out with jasmine and make my office smell like jasmine all the time!

an engineer gardens

2009-03-06T02:24:29Z

I have geeked. Behold my new babies:

They are my hopeful tomato and pepper seedlings. The tomatoes get a red dot and the peppers a green one.

All images in this post can be expanded by right-clicking and selecting "view image".

You see, I have a basement office (good for my line of work) but it isn't on the same heating system as the rest of the house. It has a 2000 W convection electric heater installed *in the ceiling*. It does a great job, in the winter, of making the top 4 feet of the room a balmy 95 degrees F while down here at my desk it's still frigid.

Well I've been doing all this permaculture research and it hit me that I could save money on my winter electricity bill, grow otherwise-pricey organic fresh tropical veggies year-round indoors, *and* combat seasonal affective disorder by replacing the (usage of the) 2000W convection heater with a 600W grow-lamp-AKA-radiative-electric-heater in the closet of the office!

Alas! The radiative heater is *too* efficient! My babies were scorching. See early in this graph? (right-click and view image):

Well my first solution was to pipe in cold air from outside. This had a considerable effect, but totally ruined the permaculture aspect of the project, IMHO, since it made the air in the rest of the office even colder than it would have been otherwise. Oh noes! That's not right.

What I needed was a HEAT PUMP. Like an air conditioner, in reverse! I'd seal off the closet from the office, and let the thermal mass in the closet heat the closet air, which I'd then pump through the seal to the office.

I calculated I'd need a ~1500 BTU heat pump to enact this plan. The smallest portable air conditioners sold are 6000+ BTU (intended for a small room) and are at least $300. Scratch that plan.

Enter Spinny. Made from: $100 worth of plumbing hardware, a free fan from the old apartment, and an old cooler I'd had sitting out back for a couple of years. Throw some ice in there and my plant-scorching issues are over. (Check out the stable temperatures now, on the right of the graph.)

However, I'd like to really get a heat-pump going, not to mention relieve myself of ice-toting duty. Behind Spinny you may notice Spitty. Spitty is a 6" axial fan that I think I'm really not getting the most out of by having him connected to 3" dryer vent ducting, but it's what I had on hand for proof-of-concept.

Spitty spits (or sucks) air. Outside the closet, the air spitty is currently sucking swirls around another spiral of refrigerant tubing plumbed to the cooler, inside of the dryer vent ducting beneath the loveseat. Right now spitty is on the inside of the closet, because I'm still using ice, so the ambient temperature of the office is above that of the coolant, so I may as well just double-up on plant-cooling power. To be a true heat-pump, though, I plan to allow the coolant temperature to rise above the ambient temperature of the office (but below that of the closet). Once this happens, Spitty will both draw and exhaust air in the office. With a temperature differential of the coolant relative to the closet of 43 deg F (75 - 32), I'm able to keep the temperature very stable, but I've got to keep adding ice. Once that differential is reduced to only ~10 deg F (75 - 65, versus 55 in the office), the cooling power of Spinny will be greatly reduced. Once the plants germinate, though, I plan to attempt the true heat pump situation, likely with a short-cycle period (15 mins on, 15 mins off) for "day" and an off period for "night". (Short-cycling the light greatly helps dissipate the heat from the thermal mass in the closet, and I've already verified it doesn't void the warranty on the bulb!) I still hope to make the true heat-pump plan come to fruition and eliminate the need for ice. The short-cycling combined with a sufficient thermal mass of water in the cooler I hope will enable its daily temperature fluctuation to buffer the natural heat loss of the whole room, which I strongly suspect is greater than 600W in the winter. What do you all think? Could the heat pump work without a compressor with only a 20-degree-F temperature differential?

From my rough calculations, I should save about $20 per winter month on electricity with this get-up, or $10 if I forego the short-cycling (and get a heat pump to work somehow nonetheless). The bulbs are expensive and eventually do wear out but if I include the year-round organic veggies, I think I'm coming out way on top here. You can't buy a ripe tomato around here in winter no matter the cost.

I've really been obsessed with this project the last couple of weeks. There were a great number of unanticipated setbacks and expenses. I hope you will wish me luck! Ug now I need to return to all that housework I've been neglecting all week.

v3risimilitud3 @ 2009-02-11T00:00:00

2009-02-11T08:00:20Z

book review: Plan C Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change by Pat Murphy

2009-02-06T17:56:21Z

Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change by Pat Murphy is all about doom. Or at least, I assume it is but don't know for sure because I only read the last 1/4 of the book. See, that's the way these books work best: it's only really the last quarter in which they say anything much different from one another. Actually, there was an infographic that really summed up the first 3/4 of the book, I expect, but out of courtesy I've delayed excerpting it until the penultimate paragraph of this review.

Plan C's hind quarter was quite good, possibly the best I've read. It was well organized, here are the chapters:

Changing Practices
Kicking the Media Habit
Localization
Reviving and Renewing Community

Murphy's best points in Changing Practices I thought were a distinction between CONSERVATION and CURTAILMENT and a cry for much more loudly communicated energy measurement of our changes in practice:

Curtailment implies sacrifice, a word that is anathema to most Americans. It will be neither easy nor convenient. [...] A recommendation to "turn the thermostat down at night" is very different than a recommendation to "turn the thermostat down to 45 degrees at night and no higher than 55 degrees during the day." The first suggestion [, "conservation,"] is comforting while the second [, "curtailment,"] demands we sacrifice some comfort. [...] If the media endlessly tell us to use Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFL) but never articulate the actual savings, then they encourage complacency and discourage initiatives to curtail. [...] A national commitment to CFL use in homes would save about 5% of US total electrical consumption and, based on success to date, might take many decades to reach. But the challenge facing us is to reduce total energy use by 5% each year [...] .

In Kicking the Media Habit, Murphy promulgated some ideals that shocked me in their potential for abuse of civil rights were they codified: "There should be relatively small numbers (a dozen or so) of topics." Certainly Murphy isn't suggesting censorship of all news media down to a dozen topics? While I could never condone such censorship, Murphy does a superb job of stating both how and how spectacularly the mainstream media fails us:

Americans get something (entertainment, data, information, motivations, truths, falsehoods) from conventional media which is global (focused on far away events), corporate (run by extremely large companies) and elite (controlled by wealthy individuals). Mass media must constantly manipulate and deceive us in order to sell products. Readers and viewers are referred to as target markets and consumers, which define the relationships between humans and the corporations. The most fundamental deception perpetrated on the public is that consumption of material goods [beyond a subsistence level] is the source of human happiness. A secondary deception is hiding the fact that such consumption leads to major collateral damage [e.g. climate change, global inequity, possible extinction of the species].

Although the support for this claim I found a bit lacking (as I often do about this claim), perhaps it is better supported in the 3/4 of the book I didn't read, and I need no further convincing anyway. The focus of the chapter isn't the statement of the problem however, it is rather the response he suggests: "If media is a negative force which provides propaganda rather than information or education, then it is a threat to society and must be resisted. Instead of seeing it as a source of information it should be viewed as a source of disinformation, no matter if a few useful tidbits appear amongst the constant barrage of spin [and distraction]." It is as a part of his reconception of media that he suggests such censorship, but his main point was to trash your own personal consumption of electronic media entirely: "An alternative to corporate mass media is community conversation. Put another way, knowledge, insight and inspiration that is gained within one's community can replace corporate media propaganda."

Murphy does a standard job with Localization. A common theme in these kinds of books, I grew bored with the section. I did appreciate the exhortation to localize the banking and finance sectors which is sometimes oddly absent from other treatises on localization, as though localization is going to start somewhere *other* than with the banking and finance sectors. At this point in history, we need entire books explaining the nitty-gritty of how to localize the banking and finance sectors, but at least he said this most important point of the section, even if it was only as the penultimate and thus least likely paragraph to command attention in the entire chapter:

Most investment today, other than the equity in homes, is in stock markets. This kind of investing directly supports the current economic system with powerful corporations controlling the economy. To invest locally would mean to invest in small businesses rather than in globalized corporations. This is difficult as our current financial system makes it easy to invest in stocks and hard to invest in individual businesses. Local communities should address this problem as the basis of revitalizing local businesses."

Have you shopped for a bank or credit union whose commercial investments are exclusively or even predominantly to businesses owned and operated locally? The task is so daunting, I haven't even tried. It's water water everywhere and not a drop to drink, like the task of buying local produce in most big US cities.

Of his four chapters, Reviving and Renewing Community hit closest to home, no pun intended. Relative to the greatest travesty of corporate media being the chimera of happiness through increased personal consumption:

When community is defined and measured by the interrelationships people have with each other on a day to day basis in a particular place, then community is the most important element in a satisfactory quality of life. This means that people's relationships - not material goods, wealth or status - are the fundamental source of happiness in life. We can explain many social problems in affluent countries by the lack of this kind of community.

Murphy is suggesting that we replace television, newspapers, radio - though treating them specially, he even includes books - with activities that result in high scores on a specific litany of metrics. Consider how commercial television would rate on Murphy's Test of Community Communication:

Living with Many Familiar Personal Relationships
Identifying with a Particular Place
Practicing Unity and Cohesion
Assuming Mutual Concern and Mutual Assistance
Focusing on Common Collective Concerns
Including Celebrations, Traditions and Rituals

He details each metric and contrasts them with a similar set of metrics that consumer capitalism embodies which I omit somewhat for brevity but mainly embarrassment at how highly my own life scores on said latter metrics.

In the strongest terms I urge you: bike to your local library and check out the book, and better yet, get to know your librarian while you're there!

happy winter solstice

2008-12-21T18:33:35Z

Yay! Autumn's over! We made it. From here on out, though cold, every day will deliver more light than the last, until summer. Hooray! Celebrate with friends and family.

Steadfast and resolutely,

Tim

v3risimilitud3 @ 2008-12-17T12:22:00

2008-12-17T20:23:01Z

WTF on Prop 8

2008-11-21T00:29:01Z

This guy holds it together whereas if I were saying things he says, I couldn't.

Direct link for the cross-site-scripting-averse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnHyy8gkNEE

physicality, consciousness, spirituality, culture, law, and religion

2008-11-10T20:02:37Z

These are more complete musings on topics I was discussing with my friend Sam after seeing Bill Maher's movie, Religulous. Incidentally, I thought it was an OK movie. It could have been funnier and was very negative overall, and I felt unfairly portrayed both Islam as a violent religion and Islamic violence as more common and/or pronounced than Christian or Jewish violence. It had some very good points, though, mainly the tenets of agnosticism I agree with.

I believe (on faith) that there's a spiritual reality just as there is a physical reality. I don't know very much about that spiritual reality, but I think that conscience derives at least in part from it, and that it is composed of beings, just as the physical reality is composed entirely of beings (both living, dead, and never alive, although this distinction isn't important: they're all beings in that they exist.)

I also believe that consciousness is better conceived of as a reciprocal participant in reality than as an observer. Two ways human consciousnesses participate with reality are in having the physical processes sufficient, although not necessary, for our species' consciousness supplied by the physical matter in our nervous systems, and by the effects upon the physical world caused by our physical actions. This latter form of cause-effect participation is the flagship form of participation with all reality in modern culture. It is rationalism, and rationalism is awesome!

Rationalism has brought wonderful things. To an enormous degree, it defines who we are - *especially* in terms of its specialized domain of influence: the physical world. It liberated humankind from a great deal of hardship and iniquity - lives solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short (Hobbes). It was not, however, always in vogue. If the time the modern human species has been around (and therefore a minimum time, per our human bodies' other above-mentioned rational participation with reality, that human consciousness has been around), as determined by rationalism itself via scientific fossil dating, were compressed into one year, the Enlightenment occurred at around 1 PM on December 31. From January 1 at midnight until that time we did not necessarily believe that reason was in itself a source of knowledge superior to and independent of sense perceptions. Sense perceptions were the trump-all of reality, not reason.

That's an awful lot of time of human consciousness being around without trump-all belief in reason! Reason is a wonderful teacher about reality, but it is not the only possible teacher about reality. Certainly during roughly 200,000 years of pre-rational consciousness, humans figured something or other out about reality, and I contend some of that figuring-out was valid and real and irrational. Humans are social creatures, rational or not, and an enormous spectrum of culture has been around a lot longer than rationalism, and pre-rational cultures still exist today. What do they have to tell us about the reality in which all of humanity was enmeshed for so long?

Malidoma Patrice Somé describes in "Of Water and the Spirit" that his aboriginal African culture does not distinguish between fiction and nonfiction: that if a member of his tribe were to see a sitcom on a television, the sitcom's events would not be a depiction - the consciousness expressed by the actors in the sitcom would define a reality itself. I interpret this (and many other texts on aboriginal culture) to mean that there is not a single direction of causality between consciousness and reality in those cultures. For the pre-rational, consciousness itself, not the physical world, is the arbiter of what is real and what is not. When everyone's consciousness in your culture agrees with yours on this point, as the consciousnesses in our societies have for over 99.8% of their existence, I contend that this alters reality itself for the members participating in it with that perspective. I actually find it somewhat arrogant to declare that the experiences of 100% of a (theoretically pristine, unmodernized) culture are simply wrong without myself being a member of that culture on both physical and spiritual planes - a feat not achievable without an integration (initiation) from an early age into that society.

Consider the impact that our modern techniques of depiction - from the written word through computer-generated virtual reality - and telecommunication have had on our culture. Depictions are consciousness pods and telecommunication distributes them to every corner of the earth reinforcing the current globalized modern fashion of conceiving of the world rationally. Rationalism itself contributes to making rational the reality we "enlightened" humans interact with.

That said, rationalism is all we've got in terms of legal agreement on matters any more. Whatever spiritualism remains in modern society must not interfere with the rationality our culture has (in part) imposed upon the reality we experience. Any spiritual beliefs we continue to harbor must derive from other than the physical world that we have rationalized, since rationalized reality informs us *only* of physical reality. If we are to acknowledge our spirituality, we have no choice but to do so by faith. (I do not believe this is so in irrational cultures - non-rationalized reality can indeed inform of spiritual reality.) That faith is an individual decision whereas the rationalized reality around us is not - we have no choice, raised in a rational culture - we're stuck with rational reality, and we must live with it or go insane. This is why government in rational cultures must be secular and rational. It is downright dangerous in rational reality to guide political decisions and legal policies by the spirit, since objective spiritual reality has been shattered by rationalism yet physical objective reality has been reinforced enormously by it. I am all for spiritual practice, but reason, as it is for our modern consciousness-reality, must be the ultimate arbiter of correctness in law and government.

discrimination

2008-10-28T23:31:10Z

discrimination (n.)
[...]
3. Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality or prejudice

All Californians currently have the intrinsic right defended by its constitution to legally marry one other person of their choosing.

Prop 8's explicit goal is to amend the constitution of the state to consider (me undeserving of the aforementioned currently state-constitutionally-defended right) based on my category (of being homosexual) rather than my individual merit (to fulfill the responsibilities that accompany the right, principal among which is to love my spouse actively). It *is* partial: (adj.)

[...]
2 : inclined to favor one party more than the other : biased
[...]

and it *is* prejudiced: (prejudice) (adj.)

1: injury or damage resulting from some judgment or action of another in disregard of one's rights ; especially : detriment to one's legal rights or claims
[...]

Again, Prop 8's *explicit and sole intent is to disregard my intrinsic legal right based on category*.

Jeff, you are discriminating against me, by direct dictionary definition. You are expressing prejudice against me, again by direct dictionary definition. What kind of brother is prejudiced and discriminates against his own brother? It is wrong. It is *not* Christian. Jesus was an *ally* of the disaffected of his time. Please see your way clear on this. Please everyone in our family help Jeff see his way clear on this. Please everyone we know in common help Jeff see his way clear on this. Please stand up for me.

Vote No on Prop 8 in California. Please forward, for me. To grandpa Bud and to Mark and Karen and Alex and Nate, to Aunt Barbara, to all the Stanleys - Courtney and Quinn and Megan, Doug and Colleen, Gail and Dave, to Warren and Kathryn's aunt I haven't seen in too long! to Shawn and Ahron and Todd and Sheila and Larry and Lisa and Allegra and to Rick's dad Jim and mom Rusty and Darryl and Debbie and Susan and Keith and Del and Luanne anyone at all who knows me, who knows that I'm a fine human being and deserving of my rights equal to Jeff's. Please CC me so I know you support my rights, because I need that support right NOW. Please forward this, for me, especially to California voters. And donate. http://www.noonprop8.com/ And vote.

-Tim

p.s. Church and Parent-Education-Involvement rights are fully protected in California, which I also support!

2-minute pressure cooker success story

2008-10-28T18:09:35Z

Yay! I tried the recipe for baked ziti with three cheeses and OMMUGUH! It was a success! From the time I opened the fridge to get the cheeses out to the time the pot was washed and drying, it was only 30 minutes, and that included eating! What I learned that I wasn't expecting was that cooking pasta in a pressure cooker conserves a great deal of water too, since you put in only enough to be absorbed by the pasta. Thank you Mark (emtel) and Nico (chthonictonic)! You rock!

2-minute engineer makes soup post

2008-10-28T02:43:25Z

So I finally undertook the investigation of this here new fangled Pressure Cooker that emtel and chthonictonic got for me. I scanned the tables for ingredients I had and took the same time to cook at pressure. I wound up with beet-potato-white bean soup. It was awful. To others: I recommend trying a recipe rather than mixing things willy-nilly based on their similar cooking times.

But! It was great for my digestion and it made a lot easily and quickly.

I plan to try out one of the recipes in Pressure Perfect this week! One-pot baked ziti with three cheeses!

Colin Powell Endorses Obama

2008-10-22T05:18:37Z

Please watch if you are still undecided, or if you're a McCain supporter!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/27265490#27265490

Vote No On Prop 8, Californians!

2008-10-19T22:53:28Z

Hello folks!

Even if you don't have time to read this email, please watch the thirty-second video here and at least read my conclusion at the bottom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHeTVAE4ZkY

I'm writing you to personally ask that you vote No on Proposition 8 in California. Proposition 8 is a state constitutional amendment to revoke the right of homosexuals to marry. I hope that you will read what I have to say.

What I have to say is in three parts. First, I will share some facts regarding exactly what the proposition's success or failure would or wouldn't cause to happen. Second and third, I have some personal and heartfelt comments on homosexual love and homosexuality's relationship to sin, and the philosophical relevance of those ideas to this proposition.

ON FACTS

There has been some confusion in the presentation of what this proposition would and wouldn't do if it does or doesn't pass. Remember, a Yes vote on 8 means you support revoking a constitutional right for homosexuals to marry, whereas a No vote on 8 means you do not support revoking that constitutional right. Here are some clarifications, in case you've heard conflicting reports.

-Nothing in Prop 8 mentions eduction.

-When homosexual couples began to be permitted, a few months ago, to marry in California, the court decision indicating those marriages had to be permitted explicitly stated that no religious bodies may be forced to marry same-sex couples. Churches are *not* in danger of losing their tax-exempt status over this issue.

-Unlike Massachusetts, California gives parents an absolute right to remove their kids and opt-out of teaching on health and family instruction they don’t agree with. That protection is already available without the need for Prop 8.

-Judges didn’t grant the right for homosexuals to marry. What they did was interpret (as is their both their specialization and their charge) the state constitution to guarantee that right, and that it has all along, but that the right had thus far been improperly protected by the government itself. That is why to revoke the right, the state constitution would have to be amended as Prop 8 is attempting to do.

-California’s laws already prohibit discrimination against anyone based on race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Proposition 8 does nothing additional to protect anyone from being sued, and suitable protections are already available without it.

For more detail on some confusion regarding the facts of this Proposition, please see http://www.noonprop8.com/about/fact-vs-fiction .

ON HOMOSEXUAL LOVE

If it is your view that homosexual love cannot exist, please consider these things on which I hope we agree:

- Love and its experience is the preeminent timeless mystery of humankind's conscious and soulful existence.

- It is frequently an ineffability.

- A case of being-in-love is different for everyone, and it is a uniquely personal thing that no one other than one's partner will ever come close to understanding all the nuances and details of.

For these reasons, please grant that love is simply outside the purview of government. Prop 8 cannot be supported by something as mysterious, indescribable, and intimate as a conjecture of what it may or may not feel like for any citizen to be in love or not in love. What-love-is simply does not meet the rigor of demonstrability that it is our civic duty to guard our legal documents with - it should not serve as a basis for law.

ON HOMOSEXUALITY AND SIN

Whether or not it's your view that homosexual acts are wrong, it is a religious view. All people are free to, and should be free from religious views as well. It is not right to amend the California constitution on the basis of a religious view, either.

What I see as a far greater threat to the moral fiber of American culture than homosexual marriage is widespread promiscuity. Please end the hypocrisy of those who decry homosexual promiscuity yet call for the revocation of the right for homosexuals to participate in that social institution one of whose core sociological values is monogamy!

CONCLUSION

Please don't single out a specific social minority to revoke their rights in a state constitutional amendment. Please don't institutionalize a second-class citizenship for homosexuals. Please vote No on Prop 8.

Please also urge those you know whose minds are not made up to vote No as well. This latter step is extremely important. The funding for the Yes side far outstrips the funding for the No side, and this will be a close call. Please do what you can to defeat this proposition by talking about it with the undecided Californians in your life.

For more information, please visit http://www.noonprop8.com/ . A copy of this plea is available on my blog (here).

With utmost sincerity,

Tim Heilman

retaining wall and stairs

2008-10-13T21:22:24Z

Mid-March 2006	Oct 13 2008

more on bailout as disaster capitalism

2008-10-05T21:09:26Z

Some great quotes from Naomi Klein regarding the bailout as an example of the shock doctrine.

"The offloading of that private debt onto the public payroll is really just the first stage, because the crisis that Wall Street wants to get rid of isn't being solved - the location is being moved, it's dumped on taxpayers, dumped on Washington. The really scary part comes when the crisis is used as the excuse for why the next administration can't afford health care, why it has to privatize social security, why you need to cut corporate taxes to make America more competitive. ... The real disaster has yet to hit."

from http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/54244-are-we-witnessing-the-shock-doctrine-in-effect

and here's a real zinger:

"The Bush administration doesn't really believe in the free market. They have invented no-risk capitalism. ... They spend seven years just transferring public money into private hands, [then] their final act is taking [over a trillion dollars of] private debt and transferring it into public hands."

from her recent interview on The Colbert Report, here:

http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/55758-colbert-report-naomi-klein-warns-of-wall-street-shock-doctrine

(For those wishing to understand what she's talking about with "transferring public money into private hands," check out her book, The Shock Doctrine. Here's one of exhaustively many examples: no-bid cost-plus contracts awarded to Halliburton and other contracting companies to "rebuild" Iraq - many billions of dollars for projects that were fully funded and paid for yet never came anywhere close to completion.)

2-minute review of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine

2008-10-05T07:01:51Z

I thought it was a fantastic book, and Naomi Klein is a hero of the free press. The bailout just passed is a textbook example of the shock doctrine in practice, with the suburban cash-out mentioned in the prior post being the new form of extraction of wealth and power for the few.

bailout is the cashing-out on suburbia

2008-10-05T06:51:57Z

It occurred to me that this financial bailout is the cashing-out on the real value of suburbia during an era of cheap liquid transportation fuels. As the price rose and rose on suburban land, it was used to create huge fortunes for a relative few based on the debt they collateralized as the price rose. Then, when the price began to fall on suburbia, that private debt was transferred to the public whereas the fortunes made on the rise of the valuation of suburbia and the resulting debt were not. In effect, this was a massive transfer of wealth from the public into a relative few private hands. Am I wrong here?

pictorial landscaping update

2008-10-03T01:34:46Z


Mid-March 2006	October 2, 2008

Hrm. This table thing seemed to work out well above the fold! I will continue it.

Mid-March 2006	October 2, 2008

This one, sadly, there's not really a before picture from this angle, but this gives a sense of the gazebo and hot tub area:

And here's a diptych-turned-triptych:

Mid-March 2006	September 20, 2008	October 2, 2008

LHC webcams

2008-09-12T05:38:12Z

Oh man, this is pretty cool! Have you heard about the Large Hadron Collider that just started under France? If not, well, um, never mind, but if so, check out these webcams they set up over there!

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Red Dress '08

2008-09-03T18:49:56Z

Finally got around to scanning the picture of me in my red dress from Red Dress '08. Enjoy.

World of Workcraft

2008-06-25T05:12:33Z

LMAO

http://www.wegame.com/watch/World_of_Workcraft/