Going solar in Tucson

I am always amazed there is not more use of solar power going on here in Tucson. The average day is sunny. Almost all days are sunny. You can power your house, business, you can make your electric meter spin backward. A solar house setup featured in a recent episode of This Old House in Austin, Texas detailed a system that costs 18,000 dollars- I think this was after incentives had cut the original cost 40 to 50 percent.

Today's article in the AZ Daily Star got me thinking about Arizona in solar circles. The house is a "showcase" home, at a quarter of a mil, but generates all its own energy and harvests water. When it rains here, it really rains, so if you're clever you can water you gardens with what you harvest. But the point is, the more people that go to the trouble of outfitting their homes to face the future, the cheaper it will become.

To say that it pays for itself is important. To say that it's necessary, if we are not going to exterminate our own species with pollution from coal burning power plants, is a more important point.

Kurt Vonnegut dies

This guy had a bearing on life that was a big influence on me from the time I started reading his books when I was 12. Like the AP copy below says, he spoke out about many destructive things- things others just blindly accepepted. The AP copy does not emphasize something else: Vonnegut was a VERY FUNNY GUY. Humor was interlaced in every book he wrote.

Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle," died Wednesday. He was 84.
Vonnegut, who often marveled that he had lived so long despite his lifelong smoking habit, had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago, said his wife, photographer Jill Krementz.
The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic.
He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.
"I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations," Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.
A self-described religious skeptic and freethinking humanist, Vonnegut used protagonists such as Billy Pilgrim and Eliot Rosewater as transparent vehicles for his points of view.
He also filled his novels with satirical commentary and even drawings that were only loosely connected to the plot. In "Slaughterhouse-Five," he drew a headstone with the epitaph: "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt."
But much in his life was traumatic, and left him in pain.
Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.
His mother had succeeded in killing herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge.
He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs created a firestorm that killed an estimated 135,000 people in the city.
"The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am," Vonnegut wrote in "Fates Worse Than Death," his 1991 autobiography of sorts.
But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW's inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

I was always shaken, inspired, enlightened by every book of his I read. No matter what age I was, each Vonnegut book meant something very big to me and I read many of them a few times. They say he had depression- but here was one guy who didn't spread depression, as I believe so many others do, he spread humor instead.

BushCo hiring grads from Pat Robertson's "Christian" law school

Regent University School of Law, Pat Robertson's attempt to change the world through intertwining "Christian values" and the Law, has had 150 of its graduates hired by the Bush administration since 2001. The attorney who recently resigned as part of the Gonzales scandal, Monica Goodling, who looks like a cast-member from the Lawrence Welk show circa 1973, was a Regent grad. Goodling had graduated from the "law school" 2 years earlier and had been part of BushCo's effort to dump U.S Attorneys who were doing too good of a job. Goodling was involved in importing Karl Rove's pal Timothy Griffin to fuck things up in Arkansas.

Way to go BushCo. The attempts to pack the U.S. Circuit courts with rightwing zealots for judges, label all other judges "activist judges," subvert the law in a million other ways, promote creationism, destroy habeus corpus, the Bill of Rights, and so on, is now joined by a transparent and gutless attempt to give legal muscle to fucking morons who can't separate church from state, who are apparently unaware of the tyrannical actions taken throughout century after century in the name of religion, and are stupid enough to go to a school founded they King of Dorks, Pat Robertson.

Furthermore in an act that surly must be illegal, BushCo placed a Dean from Regent in charge of hiring at the U.S. Government's Executive branch. The hiring of the 150 moronic followers of Pat Roberton's insane and prejudiced social views began immediately after. According the Globe article we can thank the psychopathic John Ashcroft, who put a curtain up so nobody could see the breasts on a statue representing Justice, for the lowering the hiring standards at the DOJ:

"John Ashcroft , then attorney general, changed longstanding rules for hiring lawyers to fill vacancies in the career ranks.

Previously, veteran civil servants screened applicants and recommended whom to hire, usually picking top students from elite schools."

Naturally, Ashcroft is now a professor at Regent University School of Law.

Details are here in the Boston Globe's story by Charlie Savage.

And yes I read about it here in the venerable and great Raw Story.

U.S. attorney firings, Gonzales & Rove

Even the Republicans are fed up with BushCo's attempt to replace U.S. attorneys with compliant BushCo substitutes such as Karl Rove's friend Tim Griffin. The Huffington Post reports here that two additional Republican Congresspeople, Gordon Smith and Dana Rohrabacker of Oregon and California, respectively, have publicly stated it's time for Attorney General Gonzales to call it quits. Senator John Sununu was the first republican to speak up on the obvious transgressions in this matter.

To top it off, 2 years ago Karl Rove and Gonzales were involved in a plan to replace all 93 U.S. Attorneys. Emails cited by ABC news show Rove and Gonzales involved in the sneaky plan long ago, which eventually led to the firing of 8 U.S. attorneys, and a lot of inconsistent rhetoric and explanations from BushCo.

New unreleased e-mails from top administration officials show that the idea of firing all 93 U.S. attorneys was raised by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove in early January 2005, indicating Rove was more involved in the plan than the White House previously acknowledged. The e-mails also show how Alberto Gonzales discussed the idea of firing the attorneys en masse while he was still White House counsel — weeks before he was confirmed as attorney general.

The e-mails put Rove at the epicenter of the imbroglio and raise questions about Gonzales' explanations of the matter.

The fact the people found out about this and are outraged is BushCo's second-worst nightmare. The truth is that this type of transgression is business as usual for the Bush administration. We see evidence of it week after week after week, they just say, "well we're responsible for that, and mistakes were made..." blah blah blah, and get away scott-free. But it seems like once people find out about it, the wheels start rolling, and the idea of justice starts to come about, like what do you do with people at the very top of a government, a democracy, who break the law again and again, and who do great harm to us and our beloved country, and the government which serves us and makes the U.S. a free country, great, wonderful and awesome. You just can't say "shame on you" and let it go and just accept the harm done.

diversion vs. replacement plans for attorney generals

Hm not quite sure what to say about this one but I know I am not the only one thinking it. See this link at the LA Weekly blogs.

The point is, as has been pointed out to me, isn't it funny the terms mastermind, mega-confession and 911 have been floating around all of a sudden right after the whole fucking country finds out that BushCo had been about to fire the entire staff of United States Attorneys General and replace them with new Attorneys General who agreed with BushCo? The seriousness of the firing of the 8, the disregard for law, the trashing of checks and balances, the destruction of the independence of the judiciary, not to mention BushCo's shitty rhetoric surrounding the topic, quickly became a serious enough issue that Brittney and other fluff-crap could not eclipse it.

Bushco and torture

'Prisoners of war' vs. 'Unlawful combatants.'
Philip Zimbardo is the kind of guy who would be targeted by right-wing moron and highly-paid propaganda expert Horowitz. The Stanford psychology professor, who has some serious credentials, in his last lecture before retirement, and not doubt not for the fist time, blamed BushCo higher-ups, rather than U.S. Military personnel, for the style of torture and abuse we've heard about over the last couple years.

Zimbardo — who spent months interviewing [Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick II, the highest-ranking officer implicated in the scandal] and his friends and relatives, and poring over his work history and personal background — argued that his sentence should be lessened.

Based on academic research, Zimbardo said, very few people could resist the situational pressures of Abu Ghraib — particularly Army reservists, themselves subject to hazing and abuse by active duty soldiers.

"There's only one rung lower than reservists, and that's the detainees," Zimbardo said while flashing dozens of "trophy photos" of Iraqi prisoners in naked piles, being menaced by snarling German shepherds, covered in blood, or with their eyes missing.

Zimbardo, an unusual icon of both academia and pop culture also starred in the 2002 Discovery Channel reality show "The Human Zoo" and the PBS series "Discovering Psychology."

On Wednesday, he displayed a grainy, 1971 photo of Stanford's mock prisoners with bags over their heads, guards looking on casually — then switched to an eerily similar digital photo

The SF Chron article is here.

Lightening it up with Isabel Baker

Alright, let's lighten it up here. I ain't saying nothing about the Brian Jones hairstyle in the photo but I'd kill for the old Fender Mustang. Listen to Isabel's caterwaulin' gospel here.

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