400 parts per million
As New Mexico becomes the sun’s anvil, and carbon dioxide rises past 400 parts per million (PPM) in the planet’s atmosphere trapping heat and drying out the American west, the haunting question is: Have we reached the tipping point?
Not five years ago, 350 PPM was said to be the outer limits of CO2 saturation before we’re reached the point of no return. All the warnings, of course, went unheeded. The use of fossil fuels grew enormously all over the planet. Renewable energy was drubbed in the marketplace by its government subsidized opposition...
Weekly Poetry: For Daniel Berrigan
become
as name:
willows descending
or building another
of longevity
some call fast in
*
a prison first
or lent’s regrets of carrying on –
Social Security and the brat named Sequester
One of the greatest and most intractable problems we face these days is what to do about our exploding population of oldsters. Some Progressive nitwits have suggested things are just fine and Social Security will not run out of money anytime soon. Conservatives know better and they have always raised the cry of alarm striking fear into the hearts of God-fearing people everywhere.
“The trust fund will go bust in the next few months if we don’t make radical program changes in the next fifteen minutes!” They intoned. “God wants us to do the right thing for future generations. Amen." ...
Who’s surprised by the AP phone records seizure?
The recent seizure of Associated Press reporter’s phone records by the Justice Department has raised a modicum of virility in an agency that covered civil liberty breaches by the last two administrations with a distant gaze. Gary Pruitt, AP president and CEO, stated in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, “I am writing to object in the strongest possible terms to a massive and unprecedented intrusion by the Department of Justice into the newsgathering activities of The Associated Press.” Indeed that spirit of objection would have been welcomed by the millions of Americans caught up in dragnet digital surveillance by a national security state run amok for more than a decade...
The rape of a five-year-old
Almost lost amidst the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon was the news a few days later of a five-year-old girl raped and left for dead in New Delhi, India. Only four months earlier, a young Indian woman was gang raped on a bus; she died of her injuries. Much of the world’s attention focused on that faraway country, on its startling number of sexualized power crimes against women and girls, and the failure of its authorities to take such crimes seriously.
But this is not an Indian problem. There is really nothing unusual about men raping or otherwise sexually abusing women and young girls...
Governor’s terrible indiscretion revealed
The scandal has gone on almost a year. Gov. Martinez and her super minions in state government were exchanging state business, but doing so in private e-mail apparently to avoid public scrutiny.
Just recently Attorney General Gary King, who will run against Martinez in the upcoming gubernatorial election, seized these communications. And guess what: a hideous breach of trust has been revealed in one of the gov’s communications. Yes, Susana Martinez has been caught red-handed e-mail ordering undergarments from some Internet purveyor...
Ojo Caliente: Metamorphoses
1.
The summer has been shattering.
Too much pressure and heat
change the nature of stone.
For this, we walk a dry path
under the spiraled flight of two eagles
disappearing into blue.
2.
The lightness of letting go is good to sink into.
Golden and afloat, leaves drift, sonorous
in their descent. We pass ancient villages,
small mounds along the stony path. Peaks
blue in the distance, shimmer under snow...
The stupendous week that was
If you are President Obama surveying the scene from the Oval Office, here is what you might have seen last week:
• A House of Representatives committee finally negotiating a bipartisan deal on immigration, and doing so at the 11th hour just before negotiations would have collapsed.
Although it differs substantially from the bill moving through the Senate, the deal goes a long way toward assuring that some kind of immigration reform will eventually emerge from the congressional sausage factory.
• Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan, authoritative judge of all things budgetary, saying the unexpected strength of the recovery has increased tax receipts and reduced expenditures to a major degree...
Big foot and the tea party
New Mexico paranormal investigator, journalist and filmmaker Tony Della Flora has heat-imaging evidence Big Foot has been hanging around in the Valles Caldera. Not many people know this, but Sasquatch is the Grand Poobah for New Mexico’s Tea Party and he’s really pissed off. It seems the IRS has been asking a lot of vague questions about the NM Tea Party re. their 501 (c) (4) status.
Big Foot and his Tea Party friends want to edumuhcate New Mexicans about their ideas that are anti-government, anti-tax, anti-Obama, anti-immigration, anti-econ. stimulus, and anti-16th and 17th amendment. New Mexico’s Tea party wants to audit every family in New Mexico for constitutionality and purity. That’s why they can’t understand why the IRS wants to audit them about their non-profit status.
Paolo Soleri Amphitheater—monument to a dream
A writer's name appears on the cover of his novel. A painter signs his canvas. A playwright is credited on the program. A star's name adorns a marquee. But what of an architect?
His creation obscures rather than announces him. He lives and works in the shadows of his buildings, which are named for their location, function or owner, not their creator.
However, there are two famous exceptions: the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Paolo Soleri Amphitheater in Santa Fe...