A press release from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 300:

Montpelier, Vt. – (Dec. 30, 2009) – A coalition of construction unions will hold a press conference to announce their support for Vermont Yankee, a nuclear power facility whose license is up for renewal in 2012.  The event is open to the public, lawmakers and members of the media and will take place in the State House’s Cedar Creek Room Jan. 4 at 1 p.m.

The Vermont Building and Construction Trades Council is a partnership of 15 labor unions that represent several thousand workers – many of whom work at Vermont Yankee as both year-round employees and subcontractors.  Jeff Potvin, business manager of UA Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 693, serves as president of the Council.

“Our members have logged thousands of hours at the facility since it opened,” said Potvin. “Clearly, the subcontracting opportunities available at Vermont Yankee are immense.  They all pay above-average wages, health care and retirements benefits, and are vital to the regional economy.  The economic benefits are a big reason why the state’s construction unions support re-licensing Vermont Yankee.”

[…]”Closing Vermont Yankee would effectively squash hundreds of union jobs that pay wages far exceeding the norm for our area,” said IBEW Local 300 President George Clain.  “Eliminating these careers, along with the almost certain rise of statewide electricity rates if Vermont Yankee exits our energy portfolio, is not in the best interests of working Vermonters.  Nor is it responsible to chase off an employer that annually pumps millions in payroll, state and local taxes, as well as $100 million in economic activity into the coffers.”

[…]”Given our turbulent economy, Vermont is in need of quality jobs and access to reasonably priced, low-carbon, domestically-produced energy.  Vermont Yankee provides both,” said Clain.  “Renewable power sources and efficiency should definitely be in the mix and will create jobs, but cannot reasonably be expected to replace Vermont Yankee in the near term.  Now is not the time to gamble with so many livelihoods.”

Cross posted from Rational Resistance:

Yes, it's that time again. The Pew Forum released its annual survey of rational thinking and Vermont and New Hampshire, combined in the totals because of our small population, came out in first place.

Well, okay, if you want to get technical about it, that wasn't the way the Pew people viewed the survey. The way Pew asks the questions: Which of the 50 states has the most religious population? Since there are many ways to define “religious,” there is no single answer to this question. But to give a sense of how the states stack up, the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life used polling data to rank them on four measures: the importance of religion in people's lives, frequency of attendance at worship services, frequency of prayer and absolute certainty of belief in God. Mississippi stands out on all four, and several other Southern states also rank very high on the measures.

Although the Vermont/New Hampshire combo ranked at the bottom of the scale in the importance of religion in people's lives and certainty of belief in god, we were one from the bottom in church attendance (above Alaska, which may be assisted by the difficulty of transportation) and fourth from the bottom in frequency of prayer.

Still, those of us who favor rationality and evidence-based thought can take pleasure in Vermont's stellar performance. Keep up the good work, Vermonters!

(crossposted at five before chaos)

… have always been, I believe, rooted in capitalism and economic libertarianism. Basically, if anthropogenic global warming proponents are correct (as I believe they are), it basically means that we can’t just “do what we want” regardless of the consequences. One of those right wing definitions of freedom seems to be mind-numbingly simple , i.e. freedom is doing (or buying or destroying, but certainly not having sex with) what you want, regardless of the consequences. It certainly doesn’t take into consideration other people’s freedoms to be free from pollution, dirty water or having the public commons completely corporatized and exploited.

And of course, apologists for this worldview inevitably point to “market based” solutions and the convoluted illogic that regulations are hampering environmental progress, as though if there were no MPG standards, and they could build a car that gets 2 MPG, somehow people will miraculously all start buying hybrids. It’s really as crazy as what the Rapture-Ready™ crowd believes, but it’s more harmful, as it truly affects every single thing on the planet.

This free-market fundamentalism consistently fails to address a rather salient point… how do you fix things, when consumers, given a choice between something environmentally friendly or not, healthy or not, toxic or not, repeatedly choose the detrimental option? Nobody seem to be able to give me a decent answer on that, instead blathering on about “individual choice” and “it’s not my fault if people make bad choices”, or when all else fails, “who are you to decide what’s right?”, as though there are really upsides to lead paint or BPH that are somehow escaping me. If all else fails, some vague reference to the Soviet Union and waiting hours on line for a roll of toilet paper are thrown in for good measure.

More below the jump.

Now, for any of you kooky kons who happen to be reading this, and are thinking, “but global warming is a lie, so it doesn’t matter”, just put aside that premise,  and use that seldom-used part of that brain that uses hypotheticals just to try to make your case. Don’t worry, Jim Inhofe isn’t reading this.

So, anyways, Daniel De Groot over at Open Left has a bit up right now, called Why the Right Denies Anthrpogenic Climate Change, that really struck a nerve with what I’ve believed since day one, that if it is indeed real, that whole worldview comes crumbling to the ground because it simply can’t fix it.  De Groot’s article was prompted by a few others in the blogosphere, kicked off by Digby:

Can someone explain to me why these people hate this climate science so much? I mean, I get that they don’t like gays and think women should stay barefoot and pregnant. I understand that they hate taxes that pay for things that help people they don’t like. Evolution — yeah, that’s obvious.

But global warming? Why? Is it all about their trucks or what? I just don’t get where the passion comes from on this one.

Amanda Marcotte thinks it’s because it pisses liberals off. But Krugman disagrees, having a much more nuanced view, namely that it’s rooted in both the pervasive anti-intellectualism that has permeated the right-wing, coupled with that whole “real men don’t have to change what they’re doing – they just kick ass” mentality that I alluded to above.

It’s really an act of desperation, if you think about it. De Groot:

What’s really happening is that anthropogenic climate change is a fundamental assault on right wing ideology and the solution requires a worldwide implementation of liberal policies that will undercut right wing ideas at every level well into the future. Right wingers maybe do not grasp this fear consciously, but intuitively everything about this issue stinks for them. Denial is the only way to save their worldview.

It’s not so much a conservative/libertarian worldview, it’s really one of unrestricted hypercapitalism, specifically one that intends to maximize every last profit that can be squeezed out of our 19th century petro-based energy system. It's why, when one looks at the most prominent “studies” cited by global warming denialists,  it's no surprise that they are often funded by the petrochemical industry and “free-market” organizations. And with that, the kinds of “liberal” changes that would need to come about would have a chilling effect on the hypercapitalist worldview, which De Groot gives a knockout punch to in his closing paragraph:

The solution to the climate crisis requires increased world governance (though not a “world government” proper). Voluntary action by individuals is not nearly enough, and even individual nations taking internally collective action will fail. Taxes on carbon, or a government imposed “cap”, or regulation on industry is needed. Lots of major international coordination to curtail freeloading and even wealth transfers from rich to poor so that poor countries can curtail emissions too. Sure, cap and trade takes advantage of markets, but overall, the solutions are by and large liberal ones, that would leave the world a fundamentally unconservative place. There will be spillover into other topics, trade, labour standards, economic justice. Once governments around the world agree to coordinate regulation of carbon, they will find it easier to coordinate regulation of other things. The infrastructure will be there. It’s easier to add a few staff and enlarge the mandate of a particular bureaucracy than to build it from scratch.

One way or another, climate change is the demise of the right wing economic worldview. The only question is whether liberalism “wins” (by solving the problem) or gets dragged into calamity by the deniers blocking needed action.

That’s why they fight this so hard. It proves everything they believe is wrong.

Indeed.

BorderJumpers.org began in October 2009 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — when Bernard Pollack and Danielle Nierenberg began a journey to visit nearly every country in Africa. At every stop they are meeting with farmers, community organizers, labor activists/leaders, non-governmental organization (NGOs), the funding and donor communities, and local, regional, and international press.

With a Sony handycam, a 8-year old laptop, and sporadic internet connections – their goal is to bring stories of hope from across the region to as large an audience as possible. They will tell the stories that aren’t being told-from oil workers fighting to have a union in Nigeria to innovative ways farmers and pastoralists are coping with climate change.

The readers of Green Mountain Daily will enjoy reading their informative and interesting posts that include pictures, videos and writing from interviews and project visits on the ground, in Africa.  All material posted on this site can aslo be found at www.BorderJumpers.org.

Enjoy!

And by “completely different,” I mean winter raptors.

This coopers hawk showed up in our yard this weekend:

Note– all these photos are smaller versions.  Clicking on them gets you to the larger versions hosted on my web site.

And it got me thinking: what other really cool, big birds, can we find in winter in Vermont?

A fairly unusual one that showed up throughout New England this year is the Northern Hawk Owl:

Northern Hawk Owls are rarely found in New England, and when they do show up here, they are forced down by scarcity of food in their own area, so when we see one in the region, as with last winter, we tend to see several.  The one I photographed came from Eden, VT, on my third attempt to track one down to photograph (the other, unsuccessful, trips were in Troy, NY, and Center Harbor, NH).

Northern Hawk Owls, like Snowy Owls…

…and short-eared owls…

Are daytime feeders.  One of the reasons most owls are so difficult to photograph is that they, like this barred owl:

tend to hunt at night, making it uncommon to see them in the daytime.  This is why I’ve only managed to photograph a few owls outside of captivity.

Most all of our raptors migrate.  Even though we have red-tailed hawks around throughout the year…

the ones we get in Summer go South for the winter, and are replaced by ones who come down from the North.  

Among non raptors, the winter can bring large woodpeckers, such as this red-bellied woodpecker:

And this pileated woodpecker:

Feel free to post your own bird photos, bird observations, etc, in the comments.  

Jim Douglas never met a ribbon he wouldn’t cut, and now he has officiated at a demolition. Nice parenthetical move, Governor!

The decaying bridge had a final moment of glory as it transformed from a lonely span across silent snow fields into a living garland of exploding debris.

As that image echoed in slow motion all over the internet, it got me to thinking about the frozen waters below. On a hunch, I phoned AOT and asked if anyone had thought to apply for a 1272 discharge order before the Governor pressed that fateful button. I was told by John Narowski’s office that no 1272 Order had been obtained because the bridge was under Coast Guard jurisdiction, but that permits had been issued in New York State.  Nice. Apparently no one in the Douglas administration paid equal attention to satisfying our own regulations.  

I am certainly no expert, but it would seem to me that when tons of mixed debris are to be discharged from great height into Vermont waters, a 1272 Order would absolutely be required; and no Federal jurisdiction would trump that requirement. Why else would there be permits regarding the blast from the State of New York?  Poor beleaguered Lake Champlain just can’t seem to get a break from the Douglas Administration!  

(Crossposted from The Huffington Post)

Consider a couple of tried and true axioms. “Divide and conquer.” “Diversity is strength.” When you think about it, they are, on the face of it, contradictory. Nevertheless, they both have an inherent wisdom, and there can be a fine line separating the two when you’re talking about politics. While many in the left are now concerned about the danger of the former, it may well be time to consider instead the opportunities of the latter.

First a little context. It’s hardly news to say there’s a split within the left, following the bitter struggle over health care reform. While many progressives see the final Senate product as a qualified win, many others see it as a giveaway to the insurance companies that will make a bad situation worse. Gone from both sides of the left is the pretense that the White House has not been a major player; those that support the bill praise Obama for its passage, those that fear the bill blame Obama for its passage.

But while some on the pro-bill camp are now reciting the “no hard feelings” victory mantra to disheartened members of the “kill the bill” camp, leading activists from the latter set have charted a different path. Bloggers like Jane Hamsher are diving headlong into the strategy laid out by Cenk Uygur in what has become a manifesto of sorts to those liberals stinging after their expulsion from the negotiating table and steaming at the open dismissal by White House legislative hammer Rahm Emanuel. Uygur’s piece gave voice to what more progressives have come to realize (based not only on the health care struggle, but virtually every other political hot potato from the Afghan War and civil liberties to Presidential appointments); that this administration will seriously consider no policy to the left of the Senate’s most conservative Democrats.

The solution, to Uygur, is for an organized and mobilized progressive movement to “hurt” the President. To draw political blood. That this is, by process of elimination, the only way to be taken seriously in the hardball world of Emanuelian politics which Obama has embraced.

Again, this isn’t breaking news. Still, there should be no question as to the reason for the speed and ferocity of the manifestation of the Uygur strategy that has appeared at progressive website Firedoglake. On the one hand, this faction sees the failures of the health care bill as a massive electoral loser, and with November looming, it becomes necessary from this perspective to improve the Democratic Party’s record despite itself.

More significant, though, is the fact that other major policy battles near and dear to the left are rapidly approaching (particularly climate change and the final disposition of the Employee Free Choice Act). Progressives are not willing to again cede these decisions to the “corporatist” wing of the party without a fight. In this sense, the clock is ticking to rediscover enough power to be taken seriously again (if indeed they ever were by this administration).

So that’s the liberal split in a nutshell, but it’s more than just a difference in strategy. It’s the form the opening salvo from FDL is taking that is serving to further antagonize these divisions; a corruption charge tailored not only to the populist inclinations of independent voters, but the scandal-obsessed traditional media as well. Yes, it’s increasing tensions, but there is also an undeniable cleverness to this line of attack.

The charge of corruption (through the person of Rahm Emanuel and questions around his involvement in Fannie Mae) is uniquely non-ideological, and has thereby allowed for an alliance with right wing hero Grover Norquist. This political jiu-jitsu co-opts a major driver of the very right wing machine Obama and Emanuel are concerned about, but puts it in service of a left wing ideological bloc, eager to garner the same respect from the White House. While many on the left are understandably finding the alliance distasteful, its potential potency is hard to deny.

Still, it is unquestionably cementing the fractures that have formed among the left. Calls of “why can’t we all just shake hands and get back to working together” fall apart before such a strategy.

Given, then, the innate wisdom of the “divide and conquer” axiom, this scorched earth approach must be a bad thing. A fractured left is a weakened left, and a weakened left can never, ever find its way back to relevance. Right?

In reality, it all depends on how it plays out in the coming month, because “divide and conquer” may not be the axiom in play if the rift can be finessed. Instead, the far more liberal mantra of “diversity is strength” could cede policy victories to the American left – even to those currently demonizing FDL’s Jane Hamsher and her allies.

So-called  “movement conservatives” have proven that size does not necessarily matter when it comes to impacting policy. In fact, the beltway seems to respond to a definition of political force that mirrors Newton’s own definition of physical force in his second law: f=ma (force equals mass times acceleration). The Uygur/Hamsher activist faction may divorce itself of some mass through its approach, but through an even greater increase in its acceleration (by being more focused and nimble), it could end up a far more potent political force when all is said and done.

In addition, there’s even the potential for a good-cop/bad-cop dynamic among progressive ideological allies on either side of this attack-strategy divide. It may be distasteful for the Hamsher opponents among the left to consider, but the fact is that Rahm Emanuel may be more inclined to bring what he sees as agreeable progressives into the process in an active way if he thinks it may limit or even undermine the FDL-set during delicate negotiations. It may not put Jane Hamsher or Glenn Greenwald at the table personally, but it would be progressives at the table nonetheless – which is better than what we’ve got at present.

Is this more optimistic view the way the dynamics will play out in the coming months? Maybe, maybe not. There’s no question that FDL and company are engaging in a high stakes gamble that could either enhance the left’s impact, or further erode it. The answer to the question of which way it will all turn depends less on who is right, and more on how this tightrope is walked in the coming weeks.

However you slice it, a decision to turn up the heat on this White House, in the process solidifying the split in the left, is a high risk strategy. But it would seem that the administration has left progressives little choice if they want a way back to the negotiating table.

( – promoted by odum)

     [… a lousy political agreement.”]

Detailed accounts from participants in the recent Copenhagen climate summit are still trickling in, but a few things are quite clear, even as countries have stepped up the blame game in response to the summit’s disappointing conclusion.

First, the 2 1/2 pages of diplomatic blather that the participating countries ultimately consented to “take note” of are completely self-contradictory, and commit no one to any specific actions to address the global climate crisis. There isn’t even a plan for moving UN-level negotiations forward. Friends of the Earth correctly described it as a “sham agreement,” British columnist George Monbiot called it an exercise in “saving face,” and former neoliberal shock doctor-turned-environmentalist Jeffrey Sachs termed it a farce. Long-time UN observer Martin Khor has pointed out that for a UN body to “take note” of a document means that not only was it not formally adopted, but it was not even “welcomed,” a common UN practice.

Second, the global divide between rich and poor has never been clearer, and those countries where people are already experiencing the droughts, floods, and the melting of glaciers that provide a vital source of freshwater expect to find themselves in increasingly desperate straits as the full effects of climate disruptions begin to emerge. Not to mention the small island nations that face near-certain annihilation as melting ice sheets bring rising seas, along with infiltrations of seawater into their scarce fresh water supplies. Especially despicable was the changing role of the governments of the rapidly developing “BASIC” countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China), who claim to speak for the poor – in their own countries and around the world – when it is convenient, but mainly seek to protect the expanding riches of their own well-entrenched elites.

Third, even the meager and contradictory progress of the past 17 years of global climate talks is now at risk, as is the flawed but relatively open and inclusive UN process.  

After the 2007 climate summit in Bali, Indonesia, the Bush administration tried to initiate an alternate track of negotiations on climate policy that involved only a select handful of the more compliant countries. That strategy failed, partly because its figurehead was George Bush. Now that the Obama administration has adopted essentially the same approach, with the full collaboration of the “BASICs,” the utterly substanceless “Copenhagen Accord” can be seen as this coercive strategy’s first diplomatic success.

As I wrote just as the Copenhagen meeting was getting underway (see my “Repackaging Copenhagen,” posted in early December on Counterpunch, ZNet, AlterNet, and Burlington’s TowardFreedom), the US had planned for some months to attempt to replace the quaint notion of a comprehensive global climate agreement with a patchwork of informal, individual country commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and undertake other appropriate measures. If the Copenhagen document means anything at all, it establishes that process as a new global norm for implementing climate policy. Nothing is binding, and everything is voluntary, only to be “assessed” informally after another five years have passed. (Pages 4 and 5 of the “accord” actually consist of a pair of high school-caliber charts where countries are free to simply write in their voluntary emissions targets and other mitigation actions, nominally by the end of January.)

The document was hammered out in a back room, WTO-style. It hedges all the important issues, and appends loopholes and contradictions to every substantive point that it pretends to make. While discussions will nominally continue under the two UN negotiating tracks established 2 years ago in Bali, the “accord” provides a justification for leading countries in the process-which Bill McKibben has termed the “league of superpolluters,” plus a few wannabes-to continue subverting and undermining those discussions in the name of a more efficient and streamlined process to continue business as usual for the benefit of the world’s elites.

As some have pointed out, it could have been worse. A useless non-agreement may be better than a coercive agreement that entrenches insufficient targets and destructive policy measures, such as expanding carbon markets. But the potential loss of an accountable UN process could prove to be an even worse outcome than that. The US, of course, has always tried to undermine the United Nations when it couldn’t overtly control it, but replacing the processes established under the 1992 UN climate convention with a cash-for-compliance, anything-goes circus that more closely mirrors the World Trade Organization’s discredited mechanisms doesn’t bode at all well for the future.

Did anything positive happen in Copenhagen? For climate justice activists around the world, Copenhagen may have been a long-sought Seattle moment. It was a unique opportunity for activists and NGO representatives from around the world to gather, forge personal ties, and begin raising the global profile of an essential climate justice agenda. Independent journalists, most notably Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now team, helped amplify the voices best able to explain how climate disruptions are no longer an abstract scientific issue, but one that is already impacting the lives of those least able to cope. Even the mainstream US press featured some notable stories of people around the world who are struggling to live with the effects of climate chaos. More than ever before, people are coming to understand that the only meaningful solution to the climate crisis is to “leave the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, and the tar sands in the land,” following the slogan raised by campaigners against oil drilling in Ecuador’s endangered Yasuni National Park.

It was also a pivotal moment for the ALBA countries of Latin America-most notably Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela-which continued to the very end to stand up to intimidation from the US and other powerful countries, and refused to buckle under last-minute pressure to approve the vapid and destructive “Copenhagen Accord” as an agreement of the assembled nations. This is in stark contrast to the role of the European Union, which once stood for a strong worldwide agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, but has now fallen in line with the disruptive strategies of the US. Another positive income is that there was no new bone thrown to the world’s financial elites, who were banking on a Copenhagen agreement to help inflate their artificial market in tradable carbon allowances. Carbon prices in Europe have begun to decline, which may help prevent the enshrinement of carbon markets (so-called “cap and trade”) as the primary instrument of climate policy in the United States.

So now the struggle returns to the national and local levels, where people may be best able to create examples of just and effective ways to address the climate crisis. There is no shortage of positive, forward-looking approaches to reducing excess consumption and furthering the development of alternative energy sources, especially ones that can be democratically controlled by communities and not corporations. But the power of positive examples is far from sufficient to address the crucial problem of time. A few years ago, climate experts shocked the world by saying we had less than ten years to reverse course and do something to prevent irreversible tipping points in the global climate system. The disastrous outcome of the Copenhagen conference makes it harder than ever to feel confident that it isn’t too late.

————————————————–

Brian Tokar is the current director of the Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org), author of The Green Alternative and Earth for Sale, editor of two books on the politics of biotechnology, Redesigning Life? and Gene Traders, and co-editor of the forthcoming collection, Crisis in Food and Agriculture: Conflict, Resistance and Renewal (Monthly Review Press). He works with Climate SOS and the Mobilization for Climate Justice (climatesos.org, actforclimatejustice.org).

The Christmas bomber has unleashed a whole new level of ineffectual crazy on us.  I am not talking about the Nigerian perpetrator himself, but the new wave of airline regulations his attempt has triggered.  If they become permanent, air-travel that is already uncomfortable will be even more so.  First-up is a rule on international flights that prohibits travellers from leaving their seats or having anything on their laps in the final hour of the flight.   Anyone with a weak bladder might have to forgo the Continent this year; but would-be bombers will not be inconvenienced at all. They will simply detonate an hour earlier.

This new rule mimics the logic that, in the wake of the 2001 “Shoe-Bomber’s” attempt to ignite his Ked’s, has us removing our shoes for inspection before every flight.  The latest would be blaster left his seat and attempted to detonate himself in the bathroom one hour before arrival. Process of elimination.  One can only extrapolate that this approach will ultimately have us arriving at the airport a day earlier, stripping naked, submitting to a cavity search, then donning orange jumpsuits equipped with NASA waste collectors for the trip home.

We all know and love the rule change that netted a bonanza of free health and beauty products for some casual somebodies charged with emptying the bins of discarded toiletries at security check-ins.  Now how does that rule go again?  I try not to fly, but I think the current rule might go something like this: only 2-oz. containers of any one liquid or gel, sealed in a quart-size zip-lok baggie, with  a maximum of five items per baggie.  My husband, who travels much more than I do, once asked the security screener what would happen if he decided to open his baggie during the flight and take something out?  The security screener was at a total loss for an answer.  He clearly had been given no explanation for the purpose of the rule.  I think we all have similar stories of complete disconnect in the airport security chain, but the latest episode over Detroit compels me to share one more personal tale of security sillies.

In September, I drove a friend to Burlington airport for a flight to Las Vegas.  She was attending her nephew’s wedding, and she had crammed as much as she could into her carry-on in the likely event that  her luggage got lost.

It was a Sunday, the airport was quiet and she had arrived well in advance of her flight.  When she reached the security screeners table, they asked her if, since there was plenty of time,  she would “mind” if they submitted her carry-on to one of their random full-searches.  She considered saying “no” because she didn’t like the idea of trying to cram everything back into her bag again; but she couldn’t see how she could refuse.  The screener opened the bag and “wanded” the interior with a preliminary swipe, then ran the swab through a spectrometer which reacted with an alarm.  All hell broke loose.  “PETN!”  the screener called out to another security staffer, “PETN?!” she responded concernedly.   A chorus rose of “PETN!, PETN!”  

The suitcase was unpacked and thoroughly swabbed, inside and out.  My friend was searched and asked again if anyone had had the opportunity to tamper with her bag.  She finally demanded an explanation and was told that PETN is essentially the “bang” in bullets, and there was a trace of it somewhere on her suitcase.  They told her that she could have picked-it-up just wheeling her bag through the airport!  The equipment was so sensitive that it could detect the tiniest grain of PETN. She stuffed her possessions back into her bag and was allowed to board.  It made a great story at the wedding; and on her way home again, she wasn’t even queried.  Then we forgot all about it until yesterday when the whole country learned that the Christmas bomber had somehow smuggled eight ounces of PETN onto his flight!

Ah, the myth of airport security:  extremely random searches with equipment so insanely sensitive that it can detect particles too small to detonate, and so expensive and time-consuming to employ that only a tiny fraction of passengers can ever be screened.  And who does the random screening nab for PETN?  Not Mr. Christmas bomber who sails through check-in on an international flight with eight ounces of the Big Bang…no, not him,  despite  the fact that his own father had already warned the authorities.  Instead, a middle-aged Vermont woman on her way to a Vegas wedding gets the full business.

When is National Security going to finally admit that we might as well be reciting incantations over passenger lists for all the practical good each new “regulation” does toward securing terror-free skies?  We’re never going to be able to throw enough money at the problem to actually solve it through screening and regulations.  In reality, if every single passenger was physically checked for every possible threat, and every single article in every single bag was screened as well, we might narrow the percentages considerably, but the cost of an airline ticket would quadruple, and we’d all have to get to the airport the night before our departure.  The airline industry won’t absorb the losses, the taxpayers won’t fund them, and the passengers will get the shaft pretty much as usual.

Welcome to 2010.  

In today’s Barre/Montpelier Times Argus we find Vermont ranks lowest in religion survey. This story (barely) discusses a recent Pew Research Center offering that describes just how religious various states are and the state of religious belief in general for the US. (Pew Research’s better explanation is through this link.)

The short story is Vermont and New Hampshire share in leading the nation with lowest percentage of population who say “religion is very important in their lives.”

Actually the Times Argus says we’re at the bottom of the list and Pew Research does indeed list it the way the Argus reports … but I think they’ve it backwards … personal thing for me only, and it could reflect differences in definition of religion and spirituality. BUT MY BIGGER POINT …

Okay, we’re a state full of godless heathens or so Pew Research claims. I can offer more proof …

GO TO THIS LINK … Vermont Department of Ed’s transformation document!

Or they could just be trying to fit into the whole military/industrial complex thing, but nonetheless a pentagon is a pentagon … right?

Okay, let my tongue leave my cheek … nice Wikipedia article on pentagrams.