Apologies for not putting this up sooner, but it just popped into my inbox a few minutes ago, from Johnson State College:

Dr. Winfrid Eisenberg, German pediatrician and recognized authority on the hazards of nuclear energy on public health, will discuss recent reports on the increased incidence of cancer in children living near nuclear installations and the health consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.  Organized by JSC SANE (Students Against Nuclear Energy) and VYDA (Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance), this talk is free and open to the public.

It’s at the Stearns Cinema on the Johnson Campus today ta 4pm.

UPDATE: Mark Johnson has a podcast with an interview wih Dr. Eisenberg here.

Yeah, good people, they’re out there … not looking for the limelight or public adulation or noteriety … just out there, quietly doing their good things.

Here’s a motorcycle story …

Many years ago I strapped a duffle bag on the back of and hopped on my Honda 650 4 cylinder bike heading off to the northwest of the US. No place in particular; Washington or Oregon or maybe even northern California.

I left North Carolina with just under $300 to my name.

While driving northwards in Iowa, I started having problems with my front wheel … and on a two wheeled machine having one wheel go bad … well that’s bad. I pulled into this little mechanics garage/gas station and asked the two gentlemen there if anything could be done.

These two spent the next couple of hours straightening, tightening and otherwise fixing the front end of my motorcycle, and then billed me fifty cents (no typo) for one bolt.

They didn’t know me. They could have charged me whatever was their desire. They could have found out I had about $250 to my name and told me to bug off.

But instead these two took care of a total stranger in grand fashion. (Side note: the bike made it to Missoula, Montana where a kaput clutch spelled the end of my trip and motorcycle.)

This is just one of quite a few experiences in my life that inform me 98% of the people on this planet, in this nation and in every state and local community across our country are good folks who want to do the right thing.

Which brings me to this story:

After selling a majority stake in Miami-based City National Bancshares last November, all he did was take $60 million of the proceeds — $60 million out of his own pocket — and hand it to his tellers, bookkeepers, clerks, everyone on the payroll. All 399 workers on the staff received bonuses, and he even tracked down 72 former employees so they could share in the windfall.

For longtime employees, the bonus — based on years of service — amounted to tens of thousands of dollars, and in some cases, more than $100,000.

(Miami banker gives $60 million of his own to employees, Miami Herald, 02/14/09)

One of my basic “business” tenets has always been to reward those who help me earn money. Walmart is an egregious example of what I don’t want to be like: a few top of the company owners and managers making mega bucks while chintzing on the compensation paid to the very folks who made the upper crust so rich.

Obviously I have like minded life traveler in Mr. Abess …

Asked later what motivated him, Abess said he had long dreamed of a way to reward employees. He had been thinking of creating an employee stock option plan before he decided to sell the bank.

”Those people who joined me and stayed with me at the bank with no promise of equity — I always thought some day I’m going to surprise them,” he said. “I sure as heck don’t need [the money].”

(ibid)

The unfortunate thing is we’ve spent decades rewarding grotesque greed that is designed to enrich a very few folks at the expense of a very many. The fortunate thing is we’ve got stories like those above to show us the right thing to do.

(Re-promoting a diary from February that’s timely… – promoted by odum)

Primaries can and should be healthy for the Democratic party. They certainly benefit voters by offering more and better choices and we should embrace the opportunities primaries offer to vet policies, candidates and ideas. 

The timing of post-Labor Day primary elections, however, will more likely hurt a winner.  Fall primaries risk being counter-productive to the democratic process because they occur too close to the General Election in November. 

Vermont's election year primary needs to happen earlier.  Town Meeting day (March) is too early, but June is late enough to do the job.  Once the calendar hits July & the summer months, it is too late to have a truly effective primary.

Scot nails it with his spot-on comment at the Open Thread, —

We Need A Primary

[W]e need a full fledged primary to rally the troops and get us engaged in taking out the Governor.

Deb, Susan, Doug and others would all be fantastic candidates. Everyone should dive in and may the best candidate win. I mean, when was the last time we had a three-way primary for Governor?

It will make the nominee stronger.

Could not agree more.

We need good candidates running in our primaries, and we need primaries that serve voters by showcasing our best candidates. We will continue to have neither as as long as the primary occurs in the fall rather than before the summer months.

More on better nominees and a better process, after the flip. . .

  — IT IS TIME TO DITCH THE SEPTEMBER PRIMARY —

Primaries are good for rallying troops, preparing candidates and sharpening campaign skills. They are great for all-around voter education and general awareness.  Vermont Democrats have been deprived of well fought primaries lately, and it's a shame.

The Democrats have an excellent bench, but a generally untested one too. The Democrats' bench is also populated by people who generally do not answer to voters, particularly liberal voters, in state-wide primary elections. The democratic process can do better, much better.

The current September primary is not challenger-friendly, and it is definitely not voter-friendly.  Unless the goal is to protect incumbents or to drag out intra-party campaigning until the last few weeks before the November election, there is no rationale for a September primary.

In this – the 21st Century media age of continual campaigning by incumbent office holders – there is no good rationale to run the primary all the way into September.

Voters do not need months and months of in-house/intra-party debates. The benefit of a normal (spring) primary date, is that we can see candidates differentiate themselves relative to how they will run the state for the better part of the campaign. The current calendar suffocates the process by dedicating most of election year to the contest within candidates' respective parties.  

Consider:

1. The September primary hurts primary winners because they spend the vast majority of their resources (particularly time, one of the biggest, most critical, resources) keeping the fight in-house.

2. The September primary hurts voters because it discourages potential candidates from entering into primaries in the first place, or a candidate may wait until it is realistically too late to enter. 

3.  The September primary REALLY hurts primary loser(s) who spend an entire summer campaigning for a job they will not have.  This dynamic discourages people from entering the primaries or running for office in the first place. (See #2).

4. The September primary hurts the eventual winner, particularly challengers to incumbents, because there is little time to shift gears and refocus on the incumbent. (See ## 1, 2 & 5))  The person most likely never to see a primary is your generic incumbent.  And incumbents love watching their future opponents drawing friendly fire up until a few short weeks before the November election. 

5.  The September primary REALLY hurts the primary winner. When candidates treat the voters to a particularly healthy and hard fought primary, the eventual mid-September winner has, effectively, LESS THAN TEN (10) BUSINESS DAY REMAINING to finish raising the bulk of money needed for General Election media buys.  Sure you want to have that fundraising done months earlier, but try it sometime.

The General Assembly is already considering changes to Title 17 (Vermont's election statutes) this session (For instance, see S. 35, it's a shitty bill but it's a start). The General Assembly badly needs to refocus on the primary date instead of focusing exclusively on fixing the decade old and unconstitutional finance provisions.  Setting a reasonable primary date needs to be the top priority.

The legislature needs to act now. It needs to fix its campaign finance problem and set a reasonable primary date. If the Legislature does not fix this problem THIS SESSION, it is not going to happen in time for 2010.  There is no time to waste. 

September primaries are anachronistic.

September primaries are incumbent protection rackets.

There are bills in the hopper to fix Vermont's invalid, unconstitutional and court-rejected campaign finance law. The first order of business should be to put into any new election laws a workable primary date.

Fix the primary and we take one big step toward fixing the problem of too little voter choice.

I think that quote best sums up my idea of Nordic ski jumping. I’ll go on forever about the times I jumped in high school and my first year in college… but I’ll save it.

I can’t tell you how great it was to see ski jumping back in Brattleboro. It’s been four years since the last meeting and the town wasn’t sure it would make a comeback… it did!

I’ve got a lot of photos but I’ll highlight my favorites. In addition, I’ve also added a YouTube of today’s events starring me and my “three and eleven-twelveths year old” son, Forrester.

Hope you enjoy below the jump!

Today’s winner, Christian Reiter of Austria.

Thanks y’all!

Today is Odum’s!  Happy Birthday, old man.

Okay, not political, but cultural.

For the many who don't know the name, Tom Rush is one of the last men standing from the Great Folk Music Scare of the 1960's. He became famous for recording great songs, by songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and Murray McLaughlin before anyone else had ever heard of them. Tom's also from just over the river in Merrimack, New Hampshire, although he's lived in Wyoming for several years.

Tom has a new album coming out, his first studio album in thirty-five years. You can get a preview of it here. Even though he hasn't been recording in the studio, he's been touring, and he's going to be playing at Lyndon State College on Saturday, March 7, as part of the Catamount Arts series.Maybe I'll see you there.

When I started to write a little, I started looking at Green Mountain Daily.  I said to myself, “Holy crap.  Their site looks cooler than ours.”  But I was too humble at that point to bug Geoff.

Then my writing, although provocative, began to get a few compliments.  All the time I was watching GMD.  You re-did your look.  I said, “Wow!  They are much cooler than we are.”

Then I heard a V-log where John said we’re more connected, but you guys are ahead in tech.  Very perceptive, I thought.  I was encouraged yet eager to tell Geoff we needed to step it up.

Eventually, I just got too arrogant and bugged Geoff too much.  (A few compliments will do that to an ungrounded person.)  Then I noticed that GMD saw the awesome potential of suing for state records.

So, I did, all the while annoying Geoff more because he didn’t believe in the private record search.  Anyway, I used it to help Symington come in third.  But the GOP sees me as a wild man, and they don’t trust me.

This is all kind of like the Zen Master story in Charlie Wilson’s War.

Then I learned a deep, deep lesson from the Internet.   You see, liberals in education had been telling me to pay attention to the underachievers, to seek ways to connect to them.

But for 20 years, I was too arrogant to see it.  Then one day on my conservative website, I got a ping.  It was from a young Christian website.  A young person who had always thought I was a liberal, because, you know, in class I would bend over backward to be fair and balanced.  Now he was confused, because he’d stumbled upon my conservative website.

I knew this student had been someone who didn’t fit.  He’d had a religious upbringing, but I’d feared he’d lost his way. His grades had slipped.  He started hanging with shady characters. I distanced from him.   But I began to understand the awesome power of the Internet.  He didn’t fit in at FHU.  His interests weren’t mainstream (like basketball).  He discovered his talents on the Internet.  He had hundreds of followers across the country.

The Internet is both good and bad.  We have to watch out for it.  Tim Berners-Lee is, like, a God.  He created an awesome web, where everything’s there for a reason.  Kinda like our world.

It was a deeply humbling experience.  So, I’ve been reconnecting with education and with religion.  I hope you guys will wish me well.  I won’t be by here too much, because that would just be annoying for you.

I asked Charity the other day why you guys seem to put up with her.  She thought it was because you guys had met her once face to face.  I want to meet you guys.  First round is on me.  Maybe do shots with Julie, JD and Kestrel?

Meanwhile, I’m not getting along with Vermont Tiger.  

Per today’s Rutland Herald:

Gov. James Douglas is the second highest paid state employee in Vermont, according to payroll numbers, making $68.53 an hour for an annual salary of $142,542.

Douglas is also among the highest paid governors in the country… only 14 other state governors in the United States make more money… He’s also the highest paid governor in New England…

Among the perks of the job Douglas does enjoy are access to a state car – driven by his security detail from the Vermont State Police – and a regular travel allowance.

Also on that list are Secretary of Human Services Robert Hofmann ($58.54 an hour, annual salary of $121,763); Public Service Board Chairman James Volz ($56.10 an hour, annual salary of $116,688); Agency of Administration Secretary Neale Lunderville ($55.58 an hour, annual salary of $115,606); Agency of Transportation Secretary David Dill ($55.58 an hour, annual salary of $115,606); Department of Health Commissioner Wendy Davis ($55.54 an hour, annual salary of $115,523) and Agency of Agriculture Secretary Roger Allbee ($52.50 an hour, annual salary of $109,387).

Now… far be it from me to question the wisdom of the Vermont pay structure, but I have to ask what is it that Neale Lunderville does for that $121,763/year?  

I guess I have to seriously ask why any public official in Vermont needs to be paid a six-figure salary.  I’d also like to know if any top Douglas administration employees are slated for cuts among those 600 employees Douglas wants to lay off.  If, for example, we were to lay off Lunderville, we could probably save the jobs of three other state employees, at least one of whom might actually accomplish some form of social good.  

Of course, it’s also important to remember that for some of these individuals, these are not full-time jobs.  If they were, it would be more complicated, for example, the following to be true:

…in addition to her work with the Health Department, Dr. Davis is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Vermont College of Medicine… She has been an attending physician at Fletcher Allen Health Care since 1987…

I don’t begrudge anyone the ability to work several jobs at once (personally, I work three, which is one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging so much lately), but when one’s on the public dime, it does raise questions.

Or maybe not.  Maybe it’s more important to just slash government programs and ask ourselves, really, who cares about the poor when we can make sure that Douglas’ top people live extremely well off of taxpayer’s dollars?

• More Secretary of State candidates? There’s hubbub that Dem Senator Bobby Starr and Republican Representative Peg Flory may be eyeing the Secretary of State spot, with Deb Markowitz all-but-officially leaving to run for Governor. Funny, but it seems like big news if the Vermont Republicans can come up with anybody to run for any statewide office. If true, the two would join former Chittenden Sen. Jim Condos who is also considering an SoS run.
• Sen. Susan Bartlett moving closer to a run for Governor? That’s what more folks are saying. Could the Lamoille County Senate seat be up for grabs (in a real way) for the first time in years?
• The always interesting Jon Margolis lays the definitive smackdown on Thomas Naylor and the Second Vermont Republic as only he can. It’s withering, and will probably become the go-to web reference piece on the topic in the future.

( – promoted by odum)

(This is a re-posting of something I put up on Integral Psychosis last Valentine’s Day; it’s proven to be pretty popular and I’ve gotten a bunch of emails about it, so I figure I’ll share.  Hope you enjoy)

In all likelihood, a national poll would identify Osama Bin Laden as the most wanted criminal alive today.  A similar global poll just might even identify President George W. Bush as the holder of such a title.  Even still, if asked to identify the most devious criminal mind known to man, the more “reality-challenged” among us may give Lex Luthor the distinction.  But here in Vermont’s Capitol City, evil knows a different name: the Valentine’s Day Bandit.  While many prefer to think of this monster as a miraculous, wonderful gift of kindness and caring benevolence bestowed upon the people of Montpelier by an anonymous angel, I think it’s high time to shine some daylight onto the truly nefarious and shadowy reality of the person who asks to be known as the “Valentine’s Day Phantom”.

For those who don’t know, since the early 1990’s a person (or group of people) has mysteriously rushed through Vermont’s Capitol City in the pre-dawn hours of February 14th, taping 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of white paper with a singular, large red heart onto buildings, shop windows, street signs, homes, and the like.  The result is that, come Valentine’s Day morning, hundreds, if not thousands of these paper images over-take the visual landscape of Montpelier in what is surely as near to a miraculous sight as many of us will ever experience.

But it’s come time we stop reveling in this mystery, and get about to the truth of the matter: the self-described Valentine’s Day Phantom is without argument a social deviant.  While in and of themselves, the facts may be small and capable of being ignored, taken together, the picture we can paint of the Bandit/Phantom is not that of an earthly angel, but instead of no less than the Greatest Criminal Mind of Our Times:

Environment destruction.  In this Age of Global Warming, we can little afford the excess of carbon released into our atmosphere by the lengthy and inefficient industrial process of paper production and distribution.  Is the further destruction of our planet really an exceptable “blowback” from an annual act of “random kindness”?  Further, though out of vogue for about 15 years, once upon a time us environmentalists rallied around cries of “saving the rainforest” (yeah, remember the rainforests? they’re still being destroyed, and at a faster rate, with no help from the Phantom’s wayward usage of paper products).  In addition, it would be presumptuous of us to assume that each and every one of these pieces of paper make their way to be properly recycled, which although is a process that is far from carbon neutrality in it’s own right, nonetheless keeps mass out of our landfills and avoids even further de-forestation.  And lets not even get into the environmental costs of the ink used to print the Phantom’s little “gifts”: from production to the moment it is discarded, that is not a pleasant cycle.

Plagiarism.  Surely one of the most despicable of crimes: intellectual crime.  The Montpelier Phantom has struck our community since the early 1990’s.  However, since at least 1976 a “Valentine’s Day Phantom” has committed the identical terror throughout the city of Portland, ME.  Come on, Phantom, couldn’t you have at least become the “St Patrick’s Day Phantom” or the “Easter Phantom” (hell, I don’t care if you’re the “Memorial Day Phantom”!); originality is what makes for true magic-your copy-cat ways make you a criminal fit for the original Batman TV serious, not our modern, sophisticated world.

The image that we commonly refer to as a “heart” (the image of choice for this particular sociopath) is, frankly, un-American.  We all know (now, thanks to the efforts of Pat Robertson, Fox News, and many others) that our nation is a Christian nation; “under God”, and with good, Christian values.  Well let me let you in on something here folks: that heart image is widely believed to derived from either Pagan or Hindu imagery, and in both instances likely not in away associated with monogamy, prudence, or chastity.  The leading theory of the origins of what we refer to as a heart- hape: the ancient Greeks (well-known for their Dionysian orgies and intoxication) arrived at the shape out of their worship of the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite.  According to Dr Pranzarone of Roanoke College in Virginia, she “was beautiful all over, but was unique in that her buttocks were especially beautiful.  Her shapely, rounded hemispheres were so appreciated by the Greeks that they built a special temple to Aphrodite Kallipygos, which literally meant Goddess with the Beautiful Buttocks.  This was probably the only religious building in the world that was dedicated to buttock worship.”  As well, long before any European records of this symbol, the heart-shape (or  shapes quite similar) have often been found within Hindu art associated with the practice of Tantric sex.  Whichever of these are the true origin of the image, it is certainly something you’d want to put your parental controls on for if there were a television special about it.

As with all truly terroristic crimes, it is not just the crime itself that we must fear: there is ample evidence that the Valentine’s Day Phantom is a gathering menace who seeks not contentment, but in fact will inevitably expand upon his/her hellbent agenda.  Put more straightforward, the Phantom represents the growing possibility of future attacks on our American way.  For instance, in 2007, the Phantom not only took the bold step of demonstrating his/her ability to operate regardless of the most extreme weather conditions (a fact that anonymous sources in the intelligence community confirmed to me were beyond what was previously believed to be the Phantom’s technological limitations), but as well, the Phantom clearly violated the PATRIOT ACT’s definition of a terrorist, when he/she sought to influence the government by covering the Statehouse with the largest of these heart’s.

Just imagine- is it really possible to send a message of strength, dominance, and Manifest Destiny across the globe when our governmental centers are decorated like this?  Can we really persevere in our friendly neighborhood feuds with New York and Quebec, or our not so friendly one with New Hampshire, with an image like this likely to fall into their hands at any moment?

Even more troubling, in 2008 the Phantom (or members of his/her decentralized cell) for the first time expanded their reign of terror beyond the City limits of Montpelier, into Calais, East Montpelier, and according to a source I spoke with early that morning, throughout the inside of a home in Plainfield!  As Kissinger warned us: one bad apple can ruin the whole bunch, and since we failed to put an end to this menace at it’s onset, we now find ourselves faced with the expansion, the spread, of this maniacal worldview which has infested our mid-winter slumber and threatens to destroy all that we stand for.