IN YOUR HANDS

DE-ICED

Chasing Ice - Changing Lives

"I saw this movie Chasing Ice today

it hasn't just changed me about Global Warming

it has changed me as a person."

"I'm 60 years old,

there must be something I can do

to help our children 

to help my grandkids."

CHASING ICE

GO SEE IT

Showtimes - HERE

James Balog 

on Capturing Our Disappearing Glaciers

"THE EARTH IS HAVING A FEVER"

"Where can you go

-even in your imagination-

if you've got grandchildren in this world?"

John Rember

"There's no one to hear

You might as well scream

They never woke up

From the American dream

And they don't understand

What they don't see

And they look through you 

And they look past me

Oh, you and I dancing slow

And we got nowhere to go"

Woe The Prey - Barabara Peets

GO CHASE TRUTH

ROMNEY'S FRACKING HIT LIST

The top 10 targets for destructive drilling 
if Romney is elected

"If Mitt Romney is elected president, expect drilling for fossil fuels to explode. The Republican challenger has promised to double the number of drilling permits issued for federal lands. And that boom would go unregulated: Romney has blasted the current administration's "effort to crimp natural gas by federal regulation of the very technology that produces it."

Virginia's George Washington National Forest
Montana's Blackfeet Reservation and Glacier National Park
Monterey County, California
Delaware River Basin
Wyoming's Noble Basin
North Carolina's Sand Hill
Utah's Arches and Canyonlands National Parks
Ohio's Suburbs
North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park
Florida's Everglades

Rolling Stone - HERE

Much, much more on Mitt Romney, FrackWad...

Greed and Debt: 

The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital

HERE

Mitt Romney's Dirty Dozen 

HERE

Mitt Romney's Real Agenda

HERE

Mitt Romney's Tax Dodge

HERE

Mitt Romney's Bailout Bonanza

HERE

Mitt Romney, Bully

HERE

Seems to me that he once fell asleep 
too close to a large green pod.

"Flying at higher platitudes in the thin upper air of his own mind last week, Republican candidate Mitt Romney remarked apropos of airplane travel: "[T]he windows don't open. I don't know why they don't do that. It's a real problem. So it's very dangerous."  

     "It turned out that Mitt meant the remark as a gag. But it sheds some light on the hazard of trying to be funny by saying the opposite of what you mean, and also on the essential character of Mr. Romney who, to put it as plainly and directly as possible, is the sort of person commonly described as "an asshole." Hence, the thought that must be flashing through many people's minds these days when Romney's off-kilter, square-jawed, grinning visage floats over the nearest flat-screen: Who would vote for that asshole...? Being given to more baroque taxonomy, myself, I would be satisfied in calling Mr. Romney an empty vessel in a vacant room in an abandoned property in a forsaken land, and leave it at that."  James Kunstler      

Scumbag Blues

When I control,

You will despair

You won't make it out...

EVERYBODY ROW

"The era of human arrogance is at an end; 

The age of consequences is upon us."

David Abram

If there's one thing you can say

About Mankind

There's nothing kind about man

You can drive out nature with a pitch fork

But it always comes roaring back again

For want of a bird

The sky was last

For want of a nail

A shoe was last

For want of a life

The knife was last

For want of a toy

A child was last

Misery's the River of the World

Misery's the River of the World

Everybody Row! Everybody Row!

ENDURE

DON'T FRACK MY MOTHER

Yoko Ono & Sean Lennon

Introduce 

Artists Against Fracking

Last Night on Jimmy Fallon's Show

Website - HERE

Facebook - HERE

Don't Frack My Mother

getting back...

"Laurel and Hardy, that's John and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot."
John Lennon

Grow old along with me
Whatever fate decrees
We will see it through
For our love is true
God bless our love
God bless our love

It's All Too Much

SONGS AGAINST FRACKING

"We are the music makers,

and we are the dreamers of dreams"

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Songs Against Drilling

From the Concert in Albany, May 15, 2012
New Yorkers Against Fracking

Take a look at Pennsylvania...
I don't want your millions, Mister,
I don't want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
You can't lease my land from me

"One day in April, I got a call from Natalie Merchant wondering if I would round up some volunteers to film an anti-hydraulic-fracturing concert and rally in Albany. I couldn’t resist. First of all, I had thought for some time that the rush to hydraulic fracturing was reckless. Second, I really liked Natalie’s idea: mounting a kind of “teach-in” about the topic and a celebration of the activists who had spread the word about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing . Most of the recent political discourse is so grim, shrill and angry. Here, wonderful rocking voices — and man do they soar! — would shake the windows and rattle the walls in Albany, even as Gov. Andrew Cuomo was deciding what to do about hydraulic fracturing ."

Alex Gibney

NY Times Op-Doc - HERE

Really fine job

More on Alex Gibney - HERE

New Yorkers Against Fracking - HERE

And really fun to see Natalie Merchant. 

I loved 10,000 Maniacs a couple of decades ago - 

especially this old Cat Stevens cover...

Now come and join the living, it's not so far from you
And it's getting nearer, soon it will all be true

Now I've been crying lately, thinking about the world as it is
Why must we go on hating, why can't we live in bliss

Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again

Peace Train's a Holly Roller
Everyone Jump Up On the Peace Train
Come On, Come On, Come On...

FOURTHWISE

Bill Moyers Essay:
On July 4th

"Welcome. Here comes the Fourth of July, number 236 since the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence and riders on horseback rushed it to the far corners of the thirteen new United States -- where it was read aloud to cheering crowds. These days our celebration of the Fourth brings a welcome round of barbecue, camaraderie with friends and family, fireworks, flags, and unbeatable prices at the mall.

"But perhaps, too, we will remember the Declaration of Independence itself, the product of what John Adams called Thomas Jefferson's "happy talent for composition." Take some time this week to read it -- alone, to yourself, or aloud, with others, and tell me the words aren't still capable of setting the mind ablaze. The founders surely knew that when they let these ideas loose in the world, they could never again be caged.

"Yet from the beginning, these sentiments were also a thorn in our side, a reminder of the new nation's divided soul. Opponents, who still sided with Britain, greeted it with sarcasm. How can you declare "All men are created equal," without freeing your slaves?"

"So, the ideal of equality Jefferson proclaimed, he also betrayed. He got it right when he wrote about “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” As the core of our human aspirations. But he lived it wrong, denying to others the rights he claimed for himself. And that's how Jefferson came to embody the oldest and longest war of all -- 

the war between the self and the truth, 
between what we know and how we live."
"So enjoy the fireworks and flags, the barbecues and bargain sales. But hold this thought as well -- that behind this Fourth of July holiday are human beings who were as flawed and conflicted as they were inspired. If they were to look upon us today they most likely would think as they did then, how much remains to be done".

The Great Bill Moyers - HERE 

In The Meantime...

"When was it that reality, after enduring decades of chronic abuse by Americans, turned away and hid its face among the stars?

It’s not like reality has ever been the foundation for the United States of America. The fine, idealistic, abstract language of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the American Constitution came out of a tradition of British utopian fiction.

The Puritans wrote of a Shining City on a Hill, even when there was no city and no hill. Thomas More gave the world the ideal state, Utopia, which like a lot of ideal states, depended on slaves to do its dirty work. British colonists in America wrote of, and on, the blank parchment of a rich, unclaimed continent, even when they knew it would take a couple of centuries of genocide to scrape that parchment clean. Jonathan Swift gave the world the airy, arrogant, disconnected country of the smarter-than-human Houyhnhnms.

The slaveholders and oligarchs who wrote the American founding documents were good writers, but they used their skills to write exceptionalist, democratic, rights-of-man fantasy. That fantasy was a deliberately constructed alternative to the official reality of their day—the British Empire, its monarch, its well-drilled military and its machine-like factory workers—and they more or less made their dreams come true, 

if only on pieces of paper."

John Rember

Born down in a dead man's town

I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go

I'm a long gone daddy in the U.S.A.

A FAMILY GETS FRACKED

A Fracked Family In PA

"Yolandita presents the imaginary Frack Family and their dog Rocky of Beaver County, PA who help us to visualize the staggering quantity of chemicals that were used in a typical frack job (hydraulic fracturing for natural gas extraction) near their imaginary house in the Marcellus Shale region of western Pennsylvania."

Meet the Frack Family

by Sky Truth - HERE

What's In My Frack Fluid?

by Sky Truth - HERE

Totally Outstanding!

Many Thanks to Yolandita & Sky Truth

"We've been standing in the shadows all our lives

Where it's stand in line and don't look back

And don't look left and don't look right..."

"So we hide our eyes

And wonder who'll survive

Waiting for the night"

Well...It's Running Straight Back up...

ENTROPY

I can see it with my eyes closed

SHALE PLAYED

"Willful blindness sees no end of damage done."
Stephen Richards

Shale Gas Reality Begins To Dawn

"It has long been our position at The Automatic Earth that North America is collectively dreaming with regard to unconventional natural gas. While gas is undeniably there, the Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI) is dramatically lower than for conventional supplies. The critical nature of EROEI has been widely ignored, but will ultimately determine what is and is not an energy source, and shale gas is going to fail the test."

The Automatic Earth
HERE

The article links to Dimitri Orlov's post from May 8 
which is one of the most revealing pieces I have ever read 
about the american shale gas farce. 

Not pink - not blue...
 just perfectly clear...
and far from the carnival

Shale Gas: The View From Russia

HERE

I visit Club Orlov every Tuesday

IT'S NOT GOING TO STOP

TILL YOU WISE UP

"Thus our civilization has entered what John Kenneth Galbraith called 'the twilight of illusion,' the point at which the end of a historical process would be clearly visible if everybody wasn’t so busy finding reasons to look somewhere else."

John Michael Greer

PINKED

THE SKY IS PINK

By Josh Fox

New Anti-Fracking Film 

by Gasland's Josh Fox Targets Cuomo: 

'Governor, What Color Will the Sky Be Over New York?'

By Jeff Goodell

Rolling Stone - HERE

I saw it written

And I saw it say

Pink Moon is on it's way

And none of you stand so tall
Pink Moon gonna get you all
It's a Pink Moon

Pink, Pink, Pink Pink...

RIVERDALED

"...I need to make very clear that 

what has happened here is profoundly wrong."

"...I would encourage us not to forget that 

while Riverdale was first and foremost 

about the human rights of its residents,

 it is also about the rape of the environment for fracking."

Wendy Lee

"Beautiful 10-year-old children who are now living in what amounts to a prison replete with chain link fencing, construction machinery, the decimation of their community and its grounds, the loss of all of their new friends among the activists, and the loss of all of their old friends evicted from their homes. I can’t even imagine what this experience has been like for them."

"These are kids"

"The stress Aqua America has created for them is one of the ugliest, most revealing, and most damning aspects of this story. Look at the pictures of their handprints on our barricades reconstructed after the former owner, Skip Leonard, mowed them down. Imagine what it must be like for them to see what remains of these brightly painted walls now that Aqua America machinery has destroyed them. Imagine what they are learning about being an American."

"...everything we need to know about corporate fascism, the valuing of property rights over human rights, and the crass drive for profits is contained in the fact that Aqua America is so determined to build their water-withdrawal-for-fracking-station that they’ll risk the lives of two little girls on their bicycles rather than wait until they leave. And we cannot forget that this “leaving” is naught but the forced ejection of children from their homes, their friends, potentially their school, and their lives."

"That, Aqua America, 

is conscienceless."

Quotes & Photos by Wendy Lee

Raging Chicken Press

Here 

Mother, father please explain to me
Why forests march to desert speed
While snowcapped mountains melt away
What do we tell our babies, when do we say, oh

Mother, father please explain to me
How this world has come to be so
Twisted between time and dreams
Oh, mother, father please explain to me
Oh, whats all this talk about?
All this talk about it
Spinning down, down, down, down, down
All this talk about
Endless words without
Nothings done

Mother, father ...
Do you know?

WHAT A LOAD OF CRAPLAND

Truthland made its debut this week

PATHETIC

I won't embed it...

You can find it HERE

Along with some other crap

I knew it wouldn't take long for details...

It's all right HERE

Thanks to Little Sis !!!

My favorite part...

Unfortunately, the environmental and health concerns about fracking that Truthland’s protagonist, Shelly Depue, determined to be “unfounded” after her trip have become a reality on her own property. In March, after a DePue neighbor outside Montrose, PA reported sludgy water and an “erupting” water well that was also determined to have unusually high methane levels, the Scranton Times-Tribune investigated and found that Tulsa, OK-based drilling company WPX Energy had been cited for environmental violations on multiple nearby wells in 2011, including on the Depues’ property, which they had leased to WPX (then Williams Production Appalachia) in July 2010. The violations were for “defective casing or cement … meant to protect aquifers [which contain drinking water] from gas and other fluids.”

From The Times Tribune, March 13..

"DEP inspectors also found gas bubbling from between the casing strings on three more WPX wells on the same two well pads - the DePue and Hollenbeck - although those wells were not cited for violations. Bubbling is often viewed by state regulators as an indication of a leak or defect in a well's construction."

HERE

It keeps goin' around...

and comin' around...

and around...

and around...

Oh...

You should also check out Chip Northrup's rave review...

Truthland Lies  

HERE

Chip is priceless

Y'think any of those people understand Karma?

"Time is running out,

to permeate the piece."

Tommy Tune

BE SEEING YOU

WE FRACKED UP

photo by Zena Halloway

My first grandchild is due in August.

My heart is torn.

So is Chip Ward's...

"We Screwed Up:

A Letter of Apology 

To My Granddaughter"

Dear Maddie,

I address this letter to you, but please share it with Jack, Tasiah, and other grandchildren who are yet unborn. Also, with your children and theirs. My unconditional love for my children and grandchildren convinces me that, if I could live long enough to embrace my great-grandchildren, I would love them as deeply as I love you.

On behalf of my generation of grandparents to all of you, I want to apologize.

I am sorry we used up all the oil. It took a million years for those layers of carbon goo to form under the Earth's crust and we used up most of it in a geological instant. No doubt there will be some left and perhaps you can get around the fact that what remains is already distant, dirty, and dangerous, but the low-hanging fruit will be long-gone by the time you are my age. We took it all.

There's no excuse, really. We are gas-hogs, plain and simple. We got hooked on faster-bigger-more and charged right over the carrying capacity of the planet. Oil made it possible.

Machines are our slaves and coal, oil, and gas are their food. They helped us grow so much of our own food that we could overpopulate the Earth. We could ship stuff and travel all over the globe, and still have enough fuel left to drive home alone in trucks in time to watch Monday Night Football.

Rocket fuel, fertilizer, baby bottles, lawn chairs: we made everything and anything out of oil and could never get enough of it. We could have conserved more for you to use in your lifetime. Instead, we demonstrated the self-restraint of crack addicts. It's been great having all that oil to play with and we built our entire world around that. Living without it will be tough. Sorry.

I hope we develop clean, renewable energy sources soon, or that you and your generation figure out how to do that quickly. In the meantime, sorry about the climate. We just didn't realize our addiction to carbon would come with monster storms, epic droughts, Biblical floods, wildfire infernos, rising seas, migration, starvation, pestilence, civil war, failed states, police states, and resource wars.

I'm sure Henry Ford didn't see that coming when he figured out how to mass-produce automobiles and sell them to Everyman. I know my parents didn't see the downside of using so much gas and coal. The all-electric house and a car in the driveway was their American Dream. For my generation, owning a car became a birthright. Today, it would be hard for most of us to live without a car. I have no idea what you'll do to get around or how you will heat your home. Oops!

We also pigged out on most of the fertile soil, the forests and their timber, and the oceans that teemed with fish before we scraped the seabed raw, dumped our poisonous wastes in the water, and turned it acid and barren. Hey, that ocean was an awesome place and it's too bad you can't know it like we did. There were bright coral reefs, vibrant runs of red salmon, ribbons of birds embroidering the shores, graceful shells, the solace and majesty of the wild sea...

...But then I never saw the vast herds of bison that roamed the American heartland, so I know it is hard to miss something you only saw in pictures. We took lots of photos.

We thought we were pretty smart because we walked a man on the moon. Our technology is indeed amazing. I was raised without computers, smart phones, and the World Wide Web, so I appreciate how our engineering prowess has enhanced our lives, but I also know it has a downside.

When I was a kid we worried that the Cold War would go nuclear. And it wasn't until a river caught fire near Cleveland that we realized fouling your own nest isn't so smart after all. Well, you know about the rest -- the coal-fired power plants, acid rain, the hole in the ozone...

There were plenty of signs we took a wrong turn but we kept on going. Dumb, stubborn, blind: Who knows why we couldn't stop? Greed maybe -- powerful corporations we couldn't overcome. It won't matter much to you who is to blame. You'll be too busy coping in the diminished world we bequeath you.

One set of problems we pass on to you is not altogether our fault. It was handed down to us by our parents' generation so hammered by cataclysmic world wars and economic hardship that they armed themselves to the teeth and saw enemies everywhere. Their paranoia was understandable, but they passed their fears on to us and we should have seen through them. I have lived through four major American wars in my 62 years, and by now defense and homeland security are powerful industries with a stranglehold on Congress and the economy. We knew that was a lousy deal, but trauma and terror darkened our imaginations and distorted our priorities. And, like you, we needed jobs.

Sorry we spent your inheritance on all that cheap bling and, especially, all those weapons of mass destruction. That was crazy and wasteful. I can't explain it. I guess we've been confused for a long time now.

Oh, and sorry about the confusion. We called it advertising and it seemed like it would be easy enough to control. When I was a kid, commercials merely interrupted entertainment. Don't know when the lines all blurred and the buy, buy, buy message became so ubiquitous and all-consuming. It just got outta hand and we couldn't stop it, even when we realized we hated it and that it was taking us over. We turned away from one another, tuned in, and got lost.

I'm betting you can still download this note, copy it, share it, bust it up and remake it, and that you do so while plugged into some sort of electrical device you can't live without -- so maybe you don't think that an apology for technology is needed and, if that's the case, an apology is especially relevant. The tools we gave you are fine, but the apps are mostly bogus. We made an industry of silly distraction. When our spirits hungered, we fed them clay that filled but did not nourish them. If you still don't know the difference, blame us because we started it.

And sorry about the chemicals. I mean the ones you were born with in your blood and bones that stay there -- even though we don't know what they'll do to you). Who thought that the fire retardant that kept smokers from igniting their pillows and children's clothes from bursting into flames would end up in umbilical cords and infants?

It just seemed like better living through chemistry at the time. Same with all the other chemicals you carry. We learned to accept cancer and I guess you will, too. I'm sure there will be better treatments for that in your lifetime than we have today. If you can afford them, that is. Turning healthcare over to predatory corporations was another bad move.

All in all, our chemical obsession was pretty reckless and we got into that same old pattern: just couldn't give up all the neat stuff. Oh, we tried. We took the lead out of gasoline and banned DDT, but mostly we did too little, too late. I hope you've done better. Maybe it will help your generation to run out of oil, since so many of the toxic chemicals came from that. Anyway, we didn't see it coming and we could have, should have. Our bad.

There are so many other things I wish I could change for you. We leave behind a noisy world. Silence is rare today, and unless some future catastrophe has left your numbers greatly diminished, your machines stilled, and your streets ghostly empty, it is likely that the last remnants of tranquility will be gone by the time you are my age.

And how about all those species, the abundant and wondrous creatures that are fading away forever as I write these words? I never saw a polar bear and I guess you can live without that, too, but when I think of the peep and chirp of frogs at night, the hum of bees busy on a flower bed, the trill of birds at dawn, and so many other splendorous pleasures that you may no longer have, I ache with regret. We should have done more to keep the planet whole and well, but we couldn't get clear of the old ways of seeing, the ingrained habits, the way we hobble one another's choices so that the best intentions never get realized.

Mostly I'm sorry about taking all the good water. When I was a child I could kneel down and drink from a brook or spring wherever we camped and played. We could still hike up to glaciers and ski down snow-capped mountains.

Clean, crisp, cold, fresh water is life's most precious taste. A life-giving gift, all water is holy. I repeat: holy. We treated it, instead, as if it were merely useful. We wasted and tainted it and, again in a geological moment, sucked up aquifers that had taken 10,000 years to gather below ground. In my lifetime, glaciers are melting away, wells are running dry, dust storms are blowing, and rivers like the mighty Colorado are running dry before they reach the sea. I hate to think of what will be left for you. Sorry. So very, very sorry.

I'm sure there's a boatload of other trouble we're leaving you that I haven't covered here. My purpose is not to offer a complete catalog of our follies and atrocities, but to do what we taught your parents to do when they were as little as you are today.

When you make a mistake, we told them, admit it, and then do better. If you do something wrong, own up and say you are sorry. After that, you can work on making amends.

I am trying to see a way out of the hardship and turmoil we are making for you. As I work to stop the madness, I will be mindful of how much harder your struggles will be as you deal with the challenges we leave you to face.

The best I can do to help you through the overheated future we are making is to love you now. I cannot change the past and my struggle to make a healthier future for you is uncertain, but today I can teach you, encourage you, and help you be as strong and smart and confident as you can be, so that whatever the future holds, whatever crises you face, you are as ready as possible. We will learn to laugh together, too, because love and laughter can pull you through the toughest times.

I know a better world is possible. We create that better world by reaching out to one another, listening, learning, and speaking from our hearts, face to face, neighbor to neighbor, one community after another, openly, inclusively, bravely. Democracy is not a gift to be practiced only when permitted. We empower ourselves. Our salvation is found in each other, together.

Across America this morning and all around the world, our better angels call to us, imploring us to rise up and be as resilient as our beloved, beautiful children and grandchildren, whose future we make today. We can do better. I promise.

Your grandfather,

Chip Ward

TomDispatch - HERE

My Thanks to Chip

"Our better angels call to us,

Imploring us to Rise Up...

Our salvation is found in each other,

Together"

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE