This columnist  took a break from his recent tasks to attend the Appalachia Rising Day of Action in Washington D.C. on Monday, September 27. At least one thousand people took part in an inspiring and passionate rally calling for an end to the devastating practice of mountaintop removal by the coal companies in Appalachia.

I was already cruising over the Chesapeake Bay in my personal airship, the Silver Pelican, and with sidekick Ross Perot still on board as my guest, we set a course for our nation’s capital, and turned what would have normally been a two-and-one-half hour car trip into a bracing fifty-minute flight. My Head On Radio Network credentials cleared us for a one-day dirigible mooring pass, and I found a great spot on the old zeppelin mast atop the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. Encouraging me to “Get straight to the bull’s-eye on this deal down there,” Ross elected to remain with the ship and observe the activities from above, so I grabbed my camera and a rain jacket and descended, amidst  beaucoup d’esprit de bienvenue, to the genial but serious gathering below. You know, I never get tired of that.

Readers of this column are aware of our penchant for mirth and satire. But there is nothing amusing, let alone necessary, about blowing the tops off our mountains to extract more dirty fossil fuel–a process that we should be ramping down if not eliminating outright. Also in town were Bob Kincaid of the HORN – http://headonradionetwork.com/ and Matt Osborne – http://www.osborneink.com/ and we discussed this very topic later in the day. (You’ll notice in one of the pictures that Bob has no problem jumping right in the middle of the action. Unfortunately, this makes it easy for Dick Cheney’s spy satellites to locate and train their deadly high fructose rays on him.) It wasn’t so much that the rally lacked humor–it was certainly a jovial, exuberant and sociable affair. The funny part was how totally different this was compared to a typical tea bagger party.

These men and women are passionate and intense with their message, but unlike the Right, they’re not trying to scorch debate and criticism with shrill and incoherent posturing. Appalachia Rising and similar groups are made up of caring and discerning citizens who have a specific and legitimate concern and they are directing their protest at exactly the source of their anguish: Big Coal and the government which supports it. On Monday, I heard and watched these voices of the mountains, along with many others sympathetic to their cause, being eloquent, expressive and articulate. They understand history and context; they demonstrate an awareness of the connections between life, work and health and the real institutions which threaten them. To put it another way, those arrayed against Big Energy and mountaintop removal and in favor of conservation and alternative energy broadcast signal. The other side only transmits noise.

They are what the tea baggers wish they were and can never be.

An overwhelming majority of Appalachians stand in opposition to mountaintop removal. When your kids’ teeth are rotting, your water is poisoned, your home and land is being dynamited, and your neighbors are getting sick and dying, you don’t need handlers to tell you what the day’s talking point is. The folks who reside within the sound of mountains exploding every day don’t need to be reminded that we all live downstream, and that the damage is irreversible. I like to end my occasional call-in conversations to Bob Kincaid with a line from the book Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan. It’s simply stated: make it personal. I don’t know how it could get any more personal for the people living in these corridors of destruction. The fact that they keep their tempers in check and their disobedience civil is even more to their credit.

The Right Wing has classically attempted to misrepresent the two basic camps of Americans by perpetuating an erroneous national distinction between them. It goes like this: those on the negative side who promote war, destruction and profit above all else–who essentially worship death– are strong and patriotic. Those on the positive side who seek peace and protecting the earth and it’s people from harm–who worship life– are portrayed as weak and un-American. I’ve never been quite able to have my synapses to fire completely around this. If I can ever get Ross out of the Silver Pelican’s rec room and away from playing Galaxy Girl for two minutes maybe he can explain the appeal of this anti-progressive myth.

It’s a characterization that has no substance. Because what results from building genuine and positive strength from the bottom up is a power that can face down the most entrenched opposition. Once you become a true victim of the system–once you realize that the Establishment will sacrifice you and your family for economic and political gain–then you become a force to be reckoned with. The cries and protests rising out of West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky are resolute and unwavering. They are of the same grassroots stock as those who helped bring an end to the Vietnam War, who marched for civil rights, and who should hit the streets against our senseless crusade in the Middle East. But there are too many causes and not enough time, and right now, the war zone for these people is in the heartland of Appalachia.

You almost have to pity those who sat at the gates of the White House on Monday (and about one hundred peacefully arrested), and basically begged their president to acknowledge these reasonable and justifiable concerns from the people who helped put him there. Mr. Obama and all the legislators who were the fortunate recipients of the wave of populist spirit in 2008 should make no mistake about it:  these were your voters for hope and change. You asked them to believe and to show up on election day and they did. Now they are asking you in return to listen and act on their behalf. The only special interest here is our quality of life.

There is no doubt that there is a sense of powerlessness over America. Inequality has never been greater and participation in government and affecting the forces that shape our lives by the middle and working classes has never been more difficult. Those with wealth and influence can pick up the phone and be patched through to Senator Snorebuckle’s office as I write, and some call that democracy. Well, it ain’t. Anyone who claims to believe in the real thing should have been in Washington for the Appalachia Rising Day of Action. That is what democracy looks like.

Reverbo                                                                                                                                                                           Critic-At-Large

Climatologist James Hansen

Our man in the middle

Organizer Bo Webb

“Mr. President, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.” These famous words of support were, of course, offered by Gen. Buck Turgidson, played by George C. Scott, in the classic black comedy, Dr. Strangelove, after a rogue U.S. Air Force general subverted America’s “fail-safe” system and sent a wing of nuclear-armed bombers to annihilate the Russians.

This seemed an appropriate intro to General McChrystal’s meeting today with President Obama, where the general’s attempt to explain numerous slip-ups to his Commander-In-Chief predictably resulted in dismissal. Scott’s line is also the lead-in to my reaction to a piece sent to me by Bob Kincaid, host of our favorite nightly progressive radio show on the HORN, describing our pay-offs to Afghan travel agents–otherwise known as insurgents and warlords–to safeguard passage for our military convoys. In a campaign fraught with mistakes and distorted vision, buying into protection rackets which invariably end up funding our enemy seems like another in a series of tragic slip-ups.

See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/21/AR2010062104628.html?hpid=topnews

After you look at the story, try to re-read the opening sentence of paragraph six without making those gurgling noises we’re so fond of here at A Cavalcade of Crazy. No disagreement with that senior official here. After nine years and over 1100 American casualties, I think we need to give it more time. It’s just too early to tell. And all along, I thought U.S. Army trucks still transported the U.S. Army. Where have I been? Actually, I’m having trouble understanding what the program is at all, anymore.

Once again, we are totally out of our element. Here we are, once more, Third World invaders in a classic relationship-based country. News flash: The illegal heroin trade trade originates there. In addition to lacking a legitimate government–rather a huge obstacle to our success–Afghanistan has no, well, rules–no dependable legal structure with the incentives to chase down the bad guys. Were we expecting to go over some contracts with village leaders? These people conduct business on a handshake, plain and simple. Friends and enemies can change every day. This place has ground up everybody in history who’s tried to mess with them. On the surface, maybe greasing palms is a good idea.

Unfortunately, these tactics just sink us deeper into the quagmire. We’re not going to change any hearts and minds, let alone institute our democratic form of government for which they’ve been waiting so breathlessly for centuries, by buying them off. Of course if anyone reading this still believes we do this to spread democracy, we can find you some hogs to wash. Our military has and continues to be for rent at the pleasure of big business, for dirty resources and dirty money. We are up to our necks, past our necks, into where one hoped by now we would have discovered a brain, with the puppet Karzai and this scene of total madness. Do we even need to mention just how critically we must to attend to our own backyard, that it is redundant and ridiculous to even consider foreign entanglements?

The American people know nothing good can come from this. But we’re not in charge anymore, and haven’t been since the Industrial Age aristocrats opened up branch banking in Washington, D.C. This is corporatism at its finest. The fabulous New World Order. What’s Good for GM is Good for America–and the rest of the solar system, no doubt. Admittedly, GM’s stock price is a little low right now for such grandiose claims. Oh well, we all got the point.

Ah, the enduring Gilded Age. There’s so much in it for everyone, isn’t there?

In related news, let’s follow the Senate as they obstruct the latest unemployment extension benefits. Evidently, keeping the jobless remnants of our once-stalwart middle class alive is not on the agenda. It’s so difficult, these days, to get sustained help for life, but there’s always plenty of cash available for death.

We might as well be fighting space aliens on one of the moons of Saturn. Imagine the weekly briefing sometime in 2410: “Well General, how’s the mission on Titan coming along? What’s your assessment after 14 years of bloody warfare?”

“Well, we’re still taking it to them, although it would be easier if there was anything like a legitimate government or legal system up here. But we’re pressing on, and securing as much crazillium-7 as we can.”

“Sir, we understand United Crazillium is poised to make a fortune with the exclusive rights to sell this amusing and revolutionary energy source. Is that still our goal?”

“God willing. Their contractors have been working with us from the outset. Lord knows, they’ve written enough checks to right people.”

Four hundred years from now, those choosing to review the failed campaign on Titan will no doubt reflect on the history we ignored centuries before–and were thus doomed to repeat–of the conflict on a similarly hostile and formidable world known as Afghanistan.

Reverbo                                                                                                                                                                 Critic-At-Large

While seeking evidence that BP had been lying about oil flow from the start, I stumbled across a bipartisan agreement on America’s energy policy.

Enjoy!

She’s a gusher! Millions of gallons of oil are spoiling the Gulf because someone used the wrong diagram to build a major failsafe device. But there is good news: experts think this will actually result in criminal charges against companies.

Courtesy Mother Jones:

Last year, Beluga Shipping discovered that there’s money in global warming.

Beluga is a German firm that specializes in “super heavy lift” transport. Its vessels are equipped with massive cranes, allowing it to load and unload massive objects, like multiton propeller blades for wind turbines. It is an enormously expensive business, but last summer, Beluga executives hit upon an interesting way to save money: Shipping freight over a melting Arctic.

Beluga had received contracts to send materials on a sprawling trip that would begin in Ulsan, South Korea, head north and west to the Russian port city of Archangelsk—located near the border with Finland—and wind up in Nigeria. Normally, this route requires Beluga’s ships to navigate an 11,000-mile route through the Suez Canal. But in 2008, its executives decided that global warming had eroded the Arctic’s summer sea ice significantly enough that their ships could travel the Northeast Passage along the north coast of Russia. Previously, a cargo ship could only safely navigate that route if an icebreaker went ahead, smashing a route through thick ice.

Now, a warming climate had—for six to eight weeks beginning in July—transformed much of the route into mostly open water, studded with ice floes that the Beluga ships could navigate. So the executives got permission from the Russian government to travel along the coast, paid a transit fee of “a comparably moderate five-digit figure,” and sent the ships on their way. Four months later, they’d finished the trip. Compared to the old Suez Canal journey, this shorter route saved an enormous pile of money: It cost $300,000 less per ship in lower fuel and bunker costs. Global warming had boosted the company’s revenues by more than half a million dollars in one year alone.

When I interviewed Beluga CEO Niels Stolberg via email this spring, he said he envisions using the Northeast Passage regularly. Indeed, he’s planning on another trip this summer. He said that since the shorter passage requires generating far less C02, it’s “greener”; it’s also more ironic, since it was high concentrations of C02 that helped melt the route in the first place.

“I am convinced,” Stolberg added, “that the Arctic will become an area of quite regular sea traffic at least during summer.”

If you looked merely at the realm of politics, it would be easy to believe that the question “Is climate change really happening?” is still unresolved. In recent months, skeptics have attacked climate science with renewed vigor. Doubters seized on “Climategate“—leaked emails from bickering atmospheric scientists—to argue that the evidence in favor of warming is being cooked. Other skeptics unearthed shoddy parts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s main report, such as the fact that it cited non-peer-reviewed work by an activist group when it predicted that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. And all along, conservative politicians have hissingly denounced global warming as a shady liberal scheme: Senator James Inhofe of Oklahomafamously called it “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” These attacks appear to be working. A spring Gallup study found that Americans’ concern over global warming peaked two years ago, and has steadily declined since.

Continued at Source.