FDR Fireside Chat. 2nd Bill of Rights

See how far we have come or not. Obama needs to find his inner FDR>

RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism

Come with me and Hafiz and sing and dance with LOVE!!!

A Golden Compass




Forget every idea of right and wrong

Any classroom ever taught you



Because

An empty heart, a tormented mind,

Unkindness, jealousy and fear



Are always the testimony

You have been completely fooled!



Turn your back on those

Who would imprison your wondrous spirit

With deceit and lies.



Come, join the honest company

Of the King’s beggars –

Those gamblers, scoundrels and divine clowns

And those astonishing fair courtesans

Who need Divine Love every night.



Come, join the courageous

Who have no choice

But to bet their entire world

That indeed,

Indeed, God is Real.



I will lead you into the Circle

Of the Beloved’s cunning thieves,

Those playful royal rogues –

The ones you can trust for true guidance –

Who can aid you

In this Blessed Calamity of life.

Hafiz,

Look at the Perfect One

At the Circle’s Center:



He Spins and Whirls like a Golden Compass,

Beyond all that is Rational,



To show this dear world



That Everything,

Everything in Existence

Does point to God.



--Hafiz

Pema Chödrön- Why I Became a Buddhist

This woman is a TRUE HUMAN BEING. I have read almost all her books and have benefited by them all.

Bo Lozoff -- Life is Deep (prison talk)

Gulf Oil Spill : Toxic Popsicle or Extinction Event?

The post below is from the Rag Blog which you gan find by clicking the tiltle above.

A speckled crab -- and an American flag -- are encased in a thick layer of oil just offshore from the Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge. Photo from BP Slick.

Methane in the Gulf:
Is the oil spill a toxic popsicle
Or an extinction event?

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / July 6, 2010

Tar balls have hit Galveston now, observations from Monday show patches of oil south of Vermillion Bay, Lousiana, half way between New Orleans and Texas, but poor observation conditions due to rough seas may be hampering the identification of oil.

The oil spread models for the Gulf south of Western Louisiana and Eastern Texas show that strong southeast winds have set up a strong westward current that could result in impacts to Texas.

NOAA says there is a 60% chance that Miami Beach will be hit, and although the models show the oil ejecting far out into the North Atlantic on the Gulf Stream, NOAA is saying that it is increasingly unlikely that anything north of North Carolina will be affected.

It is also interesting to understand how these models work. The current NOAA model says that the "coastlines with the highest probability for impact (81 to 100 percent) extend from the Mississippi River Delta to the western panhandle of Florida...”

Science is science. There are industry standards in the world of science that dictate how scientists behave. To say that there is only an 81% probability of oil hitting the coast from Louisiana to Florida, may be perfectly valid to a computer modeler. But tell that to the wildlife, the fishermen, the business owners and the generation (generations?) of people who will have to live with the results of this modeling.

The model uses 90 days of spill at 33,000 barrels per day, or just about 3 million barrels (120 million gallons). The official Deepwater Horizon Spill Response numbers for what is actually coming out of the blowout are between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels per day or up to 2.5 million gallons per day.

As of July 6, the 77 days of spill could have released 4.6 million barrels or 193 million gallons of oil. This would be equal to 17 Exxon Valdez spills. This volume of oil is now approaching the level of the largest spill ever -- the Gulf War spill in Kuwait.

British Petroleum (BP) says they have captured about 10 million gallons of oil and 28 million gallons of oily water.

Eighty one thousand square miles of the Gulf are closed to fishing, an area larger than the six New England States and New Jersey combined. Enough boom has been placed to almost stretch from Pheonix, Arizona to Pensacola, Florida. More than 45,000 personnel are working the spill with the on and offshore response. More than 1.7 million gallons of dispersant have been deployed.

Five hundred miles of shoreline are oiled, but the area of marsh impacted is not readily available. I was able to dig up this quote from Plaquemines Parish (on the Mississippi delta in Louisiana) president Billy Nungesser: “Well, they can go to Pensacola and find tar balls. If they want to find 4,000 acres of thick oil, destroying wildlife, eating up the marsh, where everything is dead, come to Plaquemines Parish.”

What Nungesser is saying is something that is feared in the environmental community. When oil soaks a marsh, it not only kills the vegetation, but it can form a seal on the marsh muck where the marsh plants have their roots. Once this happens, oxygen is cut off and the roots of the plants die, along with all of the life that lives in the muck (a lot more than just crabs and crawdads).

Without this life, the countless number of air channels and decomposition gas pockets (think of rotten eggs) and root paths that gave the marsh muck that good old mucky feel -- well, all of that collapses. Once it collapses, it can take years, or even decades to regenerate.

So now we have a situation similar to that in the Rockies, where the forests are dying because their changed climate is just too warm. The foresters say that the trees will grow back in 100 years but in 100 years the temperature will be 13 degrees warmer than it is now. (The Rockies will warm like the polar regions -- at a much greater rate than the rest of the planet.)

If the forests are dying now because of a few degrees of temperature change, how will they grow back with five times that much change?

In Lousiana, the marshes are already struggling with sea level rise, subsidence, and lack of sediment nourishment. But that will not complete the death sentence of the marshes. Sea level rise is rapidly accelerating.

For most of the 20th century sea level rise was about 1.5 mm per year. Since the turn of the Century it has jumped to 3.4 mm per year and is rapidly accelerating.

I know 3.4 mm per year doesn’t sound like much, but it is cumulative. And the Army Corp of Engineers has recently published a report stating that, in healthy ecosystems, when sea level rise reaches 7 mm per year, the dynamical processes will begin to disintegrate -- meaning that even healthy marshes will disappear. How will these marshes devastated by oil be able to cope?

To keep some of the spill from hitting shore, 275 fires have been set in the Gulf to burn oil corralled by containment booms. These fires are the fires that have reportedly burned sea turtles alive, confirmed by testimony from NOAA scientists in a Huffington Post article on July 2.

The wildlife report below is of course the official statistics for the subject. None of the turtles burned in the 275 offshore fires were included in this report. These are just the numbers of reported impacts by the official collectors and rehabilitates. The actual number of impacted individual animals is also unknown, but it's likely to be far in excess of the official statistics.


CLICK ON CHART TO ENLARGE.
The Ixtoc blowout in the Bay of Campeche in the far southwestern Gulf of Mexico in 1979, the second largest oil spill ever, dumped 140 million gallons in nine months. The Deepwater Horizon spill surpassed this milestone in late June, after about three months. The difference in scale too is dramatic. The Ixtoc was in 160 feet of water and the well was 10,000 feet deep. The Deepwater Horizon is in 4,100 feet of water and the well is 18,000 or maybe even 25,000 feet below the ocean bed (there seems to still be some uncertainty involving the permitted and actual numbers).

There is a big difference between the Deepwater Horizon oil and that from most other oil wells because of the amount of natural gas in this particular oil field. As a result, this spill contains enormous amounts of natural gas, or methane.

This methane has caused a lot of trouble beginning with the actual blowout itself. Natural gas in an oil well is common, but not in large amounts and it is usually not a good thing. A lot of natural gas makes things even worse.

This well pushes the limits in many ways -- with the combination of the deep water, the deep well, and the high natural gas concentration -- and then we add in the technical mistakes, which we won't be able to fully determine until sometime in the future.

The methane continued to cause problems, as the oil recovery devices started to became clogged with methane ice, or what is really called methane clathrates -- a combination of methane and water ice that can freeze when the temperature is above 32 degrees and the pressure is high enough (like at the bottom of the ocean).

But this is not the worst that methane can do. Texas A&M Oceanographer John Kessler says that deep-ocean methane levels from the Deepwater Horizon blowout are hundreds of thousands of times higher than background levels and even approached one million times higher than normal in some of the samples that his team made while researching the “oil plumes” around the blowout.

One million times greater than background is indeed astonishing, but when put into context it becomes all the more sobering.

Methane is the same as the natural gas that we burn in our stoves. It is a greenhouse gas with one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. It has a global warming potential many times that of carbon dioxide, but when burned as a fuel only emits 71% as much CO2 as oil and 56% as much as coal. (Some say it could be a good transition fuel to get us off of coal.)

This well has a tremendous amount of natural gas, estimated to be 40% by weight of the total spill by Kessler and 50% by Samantha Joye at the University of Georgia. This is compared to about 5% from normal oil deposits.

By day 160 of the blowout we will hopefully have the pipe plugged. It should be well into August when the relief wells are finished. But we should note that it took the Mexican oil firm Pemex nine months to get their relief well to work on the Ixtoc blowout -- a well that was only 10,000 feet deep in 160 feet of water. And by the time 160 days have elapsed, the Deep Horizon will have spilled 236 million barrels of natural gas.

To put this much methane into perspective, we have to understand its global warming potential. Normally, we know that methane, as a greenhouse gas, is capable of capturing about 25 times more heat than carbon dioxide. But recent studies have shown this to be low. Because our planet is warming and the natural CO2 sinks are slowing, methane really has about 34 times the heat trapping capacity of CO2.

But wait, that’s not all.

The figure of 34 times the heat trapping capacity is for time spans of 100 years. In the not too distant past, this was an appropriate time span to consider for climate change. But that was 20th century climate change. A decade -- a half generation -- has passed since those times. The climate change times scale of relevance today is 20 or 30 years, not a century.

So when we realize that the heat trapping capacity of methane should now be based on a short 20 or 30 year times scale, the number increases to something more like 62 times more potent, not 34, or even 25.

So methane has a warming capacity that is 62 times more than carbon dioxide. And when we calculate the global warming potential of those 236 million barrels of methane, it is equal to about 5 percent of the total U.S. transportation fleet emissions of carbon dioxide. This is one incredibly huge well.

But are the emissions really important? Doctors Kessler and Joye are finding that little of the methane is making it to the surface. It is becoming dissolved in the great ocean depths and suspended with the oil in those massive plumes.

Microbiologoic activity then begins to consume the methane (and the oil). It is this bioactivity that consumes the oxygen in the water and creates hard times for the organisms that live there. Kessler and Joye said that oxygen depletion had not reached a critical level yet, only falling about 30 to 40 percent below normal. But this was about three weeks ago and at the time they said that, levels were falling 1 to 2 percent per day.

This oxygen depletion would put the waters in question down in the 4 ppm (parts per million) range. Levels of 2 ppm stress most fish. Levels below 1.4 ppm are deadly. The plumes are still 30 to 40 miles long, miles wide and thousands of feet thick. The closer to the well you get, the lower the oxygen content is, and the higher the methane concentrations.

From all over the oil-impacted coastal areas, we are hearing anecdotal reports of strange fish behavior, of sharks and turtles congregating near shore, dolphins disappearing, and that sort of thing. There are also reports about other oxygen deprived waters in the Gulf that are not associated with the great Mississippi Delta dead zone for which there are no ready explanations.

Dead zones are increasing significantly in our world’s oceans because the oceans are getting warmer (warmer water holds less oxygen) and because of increased nutrient runoff from agricultural industrialization. But further study is needed concerning these new Gulf of Mexico dead zones.

Methane occurs naturally in sea water; it is released as a byproduct of the decomposition of organic material. The organic material gets there because of the constant cycling of life; fish live and die and organic debris is washed into the oceans from rivers, but mostly it comes form what is called primary productivity. This is the planetary sized mass of life that creates half of the oxygen on Earth -- the algae and plankton of the oceans.

These single and few celled organisms are like grass and trees on land. They are the fundamental building blocks of life in the oceans. There are approximately 50 gigatons of primary productivity in our oceans (one gigaton is a billion tons). To put this to scale, there are about 2 gigatons of crops on earth.

Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, this natural production of methane collects in sediments. Below a couple of thousand feet in depth, pressures are so high and water temperature is generally cool enough that the methane decomposition products can freeze, just like the natural gas coming out of the busted blowout preventer froze and clogged up the top hat spill collector that BP had deployed.

The frozen methane, or methane clathrates, collect in the ocean sediments and over tens and hundreds of millions of years form oil deposits deep below the ocean floor.

This is where the methane that clogged the top hat oil collector that BP deployed came from -- four to five miles beneath the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

But the formation of the shallow methane clathrates continue to this day. The Gulf of Mexico contains some of the greatest shallow methane clathrates deposits in the world and the oil giants are itching to get their hands on them.

There is only one problem. Methane clathrates are very unstable. They form on the edge of the envelope of pressure and temperature. Just a little warming and they become unstable. The recent Congressional inquiry into the Deep Horizon incident brought up this point:

Offshore drilling operations that disturb methane hydrate-bearing sediments could fracture or disrupt the bottom sediments and compromise the wellbore, pipelines, rig supports, and other equipment involved in oil and gas production from the seafloor.

Destabilization of methane clathrates has also been identified as a likely culprit in some of Earth’s more punctuating moments. These moments usually took tens to hundreds of thousands of years, as the earth’s climate naturally changed from warm to cold because of solar influences and natural feedbacks.

But at some point, an additional forcing, like an asteroid striking the Yucatan Peninsula, caused a perturbation in the natural cycle. The additional warming triggered the instability of the methane clathrates, great amounts of methane were released causing great warming, and abrupt climate changes occurred that caused great extinction events.

This is a very critical path that our planet occasionally follows . Right now mankind is increasing the CO2 concentration on this planet faster than at any time in the last 20 million years and likely as fast as when the giant asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula and the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago.

Methane concentrations on earth have started to rise again after a decade of stability. It is thought that contemporary agricultural techniques and their expansion across the world had halted the increase in our planet’s methane emission, and this is probably what happened.

The new increase is likely coming from methane clahtrates in the Laptev Sea on the edge of Siberia and the Arctic Ocean. This area of the planet has warmed 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 20 years and the methane clahtrates on the bottom of the Laptev sea have started to vent.

The venting is so great that it rivals all the rest of the methane emissions from all of the rest of the world’s oceans combined.

The methane gas also melts beneath the clahtrates. The heat of the earth can cause free methane gas to collect beneath the solid sheet of methane ice in the sediments at the bottom of the sea. This sheet of ice has become perforated in the Laptev Sea. But what happens when the clathrates are on a slope like in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi Canyon where the Deepwater Horizon is?

In the past, phonemena called methane outburst occurred when their overlying methane ice laden sediment became destabilized. Scars from dozens of massive tsunami causing landslides along the continental shelf of the east coast are evident from prehistoric times.

These things happen when our climate is rapidly changing. Eight thousand years ago when Earth had just warmed out of the depths of the last ice age, a great undersea landslide took place off of the shores of Norway.

It is called the Storrega slide. It was 200 miles across and the slide traveled for 800 miles under the Atlantic Ocean, most of the way to Greenland. The tsunami it produced was 65 to 82 feet tall. The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, that killed 200,000, was 50 feet tall.

I am not saying that anything of the sort is imminent. I am saying that there are important things to understand about our Earth and the way it operates. So the important things to understand now are that clathrates are unstable on slopes, the Deepwater Horizon is on a big slope, and the product coming out of the blowout is 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

[When Bruce Melton, P.E., isn't practicing civil engineering, he's studying climate change and writing about it. Melton was one of eight Austinites named in the "Heroes of Climate Change" article published in The Good Life magazine in July 2007. To read more of his work on climate change, visit his website, Melton Engineering Services Austin.]

References:

EIA Transportation Sector Emissions in 2008 –
Total CO2 emissions from transportation sector in the U.S. = 1.93 billion tons
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/carbon.html

Primary Produtivity 50 Gtons in the oceans, 2 gtons in world crops
http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/30382

Methane GWP 20 year timeframe – 62 times more potent than CO2
Nisbet, Have sudden large releases of methane from geologic reservoirs occurred since the last Glacial Maximum, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 2002.

Dr, John Kessler, Texas A&M University, Department of Oceanography
http://tamunews.tamu.edu/2010/05/26/prof-heads-out-to-study-gulf-oil-spill-with-first-nsf-grant/

Samantha Joye, University of Georgia
http://solveclimate.com/blog/20100701/methane-dead-zones-gulf-waters-confirmed-gas-levels-100-000-times-normal

Methane clathrates:
Laherrere, Oceanic Hydrates - more questions than answers, Energy Exploration and Exploitation, May 2000.

The national Methane Hydrates R&D lab
http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/oil-gas/FutureSupply/MethaneHydrates/projects/DOEProjects/MH_5668EMCharGOM.html

NOAA Modeling Threat
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100702_longterm.html

Wildlife Report – July 5, 2010
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/posted/2931/WildLifeConsolidated5july.739707.pdf

Gulf Oil Spill – The Plight of the Sea Turtles, Huffington Post, July 2, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/02/gulf-oil-spill-the-plight_n_634083.html

Stats July 5, 2010, Government Monitor
http://www.thegovmonitor.com/world_news/united_states/florida-releases-july-6-2010-gulf-oil-spill-situation-update-34982.html

Tsunamis India 2004: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

The North Atlantic tsunami caused by a methane clathrate slide:
Record Breaking Height for Tsunami in the North Atlantic 8000 yrs BP, EOS, 2003

Stability of methane clathrates on slopes:
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Selected Issues for Congress
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41262.pdf

The oil coming out of the seafloor in Mississippi canyon is about 180 degrees F.
A July 1 interview on the American Geophysical Union blog of marine goechemist John Farrington, one of a group of scientists of the Consortium of Ocean Leadership at Louisiana State University.
http://blog.agu.org/geohazards/2010/07/01/oil-spill-science/

The Rag Blog

Posted by thorne dreyer at 10:00 PM
Labels: British Petroleum, Bruce Melton, Climate Change, Climate Science, Ecology, Environment, Global Warming, Gulf Coast, Nature, Oil Spill, Rag Bloggers

4 Make/read comments:
Anonymous said...
Besides the obvious ecological damage, had the BP well (and the entire potential oil field) been developed safely, logic dictates that this field would have served America's oil needs for the next century.
Of course, this in itself brings up a three-fold problem.. (1)Lotsa Oil Equals no interest in alternative fuels. (2) The cost to develop alternative fuels is still cost prohibitive. (3) Any actual Production of Alternative Fuels is also too cost prohibitive (has been since the mid-'60's!)
Never understood the second and third parts.. If "corn squeezin's" are so damn cheap, why are we being charged so much for it?? Oh, I know.. Government Regulations, Subsidies, etc. To pay the BIG Oil Companies making BILLIONS of dollars in Profits PER QUARTER!!
Never Been a fan of Government run anything, but "Nationalized Oil Companies" (not seeking a 75% profit margin), run by competent people, NOT political appointees nor elected buffoons, just might result in plentiful and affordable gasoline (sans alcohol and stable at under $2.00/Gallon) for the masses.
Bottom line: The USA NEEDS a complete and comprehensive regulatory position, as it relates to oil production, that is strictly enforced by knowledgeable people... NOT former Oil Company Execs, Lobbyists, and other criminals.
It has been fairly commonplace when Tech Industries move into a geographical area to "set-up shop" that during the time the facilities are being constructed, the area "Junior Colleges, as well as mainstream colleges and universities taught a syllabus related to the job requirements of the Tech Industry, resulting in an available and educated workforce. Could not the same be done for US Govt Regulatory Agencies? After all, we have four years to "prepare" (well, two, now) till the next election cycle.)..
Or am I being "pie-in-the sky", or just too hopeful that our government and citizenry would do "The Right Thing"?? (actually, it's a "Left Thing" Idea!!).
Charles.

Jul 7, 2010 7:34:00 AM
my little life said...
This is a brilliant article -- and the photo OMG should be on the cover of TIME mag. With so much censorship on this spill, I cannot thank the author enough for this information.

Jul 8, 2010 1:37:00 PM
Anonymous said...
The three devils;Oil, Arms & Drugs.
They are hard to deal with.
smp

Jul 8, 2010 9:43:00 PM
Extremist to the DHS said...
Since you guys have all gotten the WH talking points and continually refer to the BP Oil Spill (which it is). Can we start to refer to the economy as the Obama Death March for Jobs? (which it is)

Jul 9, 2010 12:23:00 PM
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Wake Up and Laugh! Learning to see the world as it truly is

This post is from a beautiful Buddhist blog found by clicking the title link above.


Seon Master Daehaeng – Discover your courage


July 6, 2010 by Chong Go Sunim



No matter how many thousands of things confront you,

no matter how painful or difficult,

even if someone you love is about to die,

entrust all of these to your foundation,

your inherent nature,

your true essence.



It’s always been taking care of me,

it’s guiding me even now,

so what’s there to worry about?



Just entrust everything there

while going forward.



You need this kind of attitude.

All of those things that confront you are your homework,

the path through which you can grow.

If everything in your life is smooth and trouble free,

you won’t be able to rise above the level

of an unenlightened being,

or understand the hardships facing others.



It all depends upon how well you can handle good and evil,

on how non-dually you can let go of both sides,

even including the Buddha.

Frustration, stress, and loneliness,

and situations where success seems unlikely,

all of these things are the raw materials of your spiritual practice.



So, when difficulties and suffering come,

be grateful for them.

For through these

you are able to practice and to grow.



–Daehaeng Kun Sunim

Portraits & Passages A Memoir of an Artist

Click the above title to go to his webpage.


NARCISSUS DANCING

An Introduction to a Memoir




The word prodigy used in the sense that the Renaissance gave it has all but been eliminated from use when speaking of contemporary art. No room is given it in the current dialogues of what constitutes mastery, for the visual arts have been subjected to the suzerainty of cultural theory whose agents provocateurs are blind to the magic of the visual executed directly by hand and eye.

Where does that leave an individual born with the innate ability to make a line or a brushstroke come alive on the form of a face or a limb of a body and who loves the poetry in the human image? It leaves him stranded.

So here in a nutshell is where this story begins of someone born to the call of the visual, is allowed in childhood and in youth to fine tune his gift, and then in early adulthood hits the brick wall of a culture turning its back to the enchantment of the hand drawn image.

That’s the basis for the story, but then, something incredible gets overlaid on top of it. This unique individual is also born into a privileged artistic breeding ground whose other participants become the leading artists of their day, and they, by virtue of their artistic decisions, strong arm him from their ranks. And so he finds himself alone.

But that’s only part of the story which takes on the aspect of a Hollywood fantasy as this young artist, who by nature is an unadventurous homebody, stumbles time and time again into worlds that few have access to in any manner that engages, if ever so briefly, real personal dialogues whose substance forms over time a polemic dispute of some significance.

Who would have imagined such an unassuming person would have found himself for over half a year a regular at the family dinner table of the greatest publishing family in the world! It is not something one can set out to do; there is no calculated strategy that could have orchestrated that!

Nor can one suppose it purely serendipity alone; some other factor in play makes this episode but one of a number of intertwining events that now viewed decades later make a compelling dramatic background for the paintings that were made without support or applause.

And how does one judge such a person who fails to win anyone’s favor, who can’t find a niche anywhere, who neither thinks himself brave or belligerent, but simply someone who must turn away from the negativity addressed to him and regain each time a hard earned enthusiasm to start another painting?

Still, this would only be another tale but for the historic moment where the artistic choices of half a century have turned sour and depleted leaving no way out of the nihilistic morass we find ourselves. We are pressed on all fronts by a surfeit of phenomena fragmented and made mute by the weakness of form and the hollowness of intent.

If only we can be freed of the superfluous mindset of the technocratic program we live, we might begin to see ourselves more clearly. The inundation of trivia by non-images parading as art keeps us weighed down in commentary. It is truly an iconoclastic rub. Isn’t popular culture’s mirroring the state we’re in sufficient reflection? Do we need inquiry into the baggage of our frantic lives?

There is no time for respite. Isn’t that exactly what art once gave us- time to regain ourselves, time to let go of the non-essential. But seeing our essential nature is mercilessly rejected by the purveyors of cultural enlightenment who insist they are guiding us to superior comprehension.

The nightmare of this duplicity is the evil of the academic bureaucracy hiding behind what is approved. Just one glance at the outright passive acquiescence of the editors, critics, and professors of “enlightened theory” during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan says it all. They were all too preoccupied by trivia to focus on events that murdered over a million people. Who among them voiced concern as the artists they wrote about almost universally ignored the subject of war and the direction of our foreign policy? Doesn’t that suggest a complete denial of art as a carrier of consciousness! Shouldn’t that lack of backbone alone be sufficient to demand their stepping down from their exalted stations!

The dispute this artist has with the entrenched avant-garde establishment is their unwillingness to face the essential human condition in any sociopolitical matter of consequence and their reversal of all moral logic and responsibility in its expression.

So, as in one very controversial case addressing the exhibition “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art” they praise artists who mask genocide in media mockeries while disclaiming as ‘obscene’ the lack of discretion by an artist who employs sophomoric bravado in making images of the horrific. Granted, if in the second instance, the artist ignores aesthetic restraint and turns images of atrocity into illustration more appropriate for the fancies of Hieronymus Bosch; the first instance whitewashes depravity by a numbing pseudo-infantile playacting reducing meaning to parody intent on amnesia. If it were a delicate call on the part of critical oversight to distinguish the two approaches, each failing to convince at opposite poles of the other, the last thing we need is demagoguery; for to do it self-righteously is the greatest danger and illustrates what brought about the Nazi pollution to begin with.

That lack of restraint on the part of critical authority suggests that they are afraid of art’s power to reach the heart and mind of the viewer without the need of their august instruction and its excessive polemical liturgy that, as in the case above, supports farce in place of the integral melding of aesthetic to empathetic purpose. If Kafkaesque immersion has superseded much of our lives; all the more do we need the grounding of the human image made humanely, respectfully.

Now that the aesthetic component in an artwork which once allowed for the viewer the freedom of individual perception and interpretation has been banished from the authorized dialogues, these arbiters of what is important in an artwork have appointed themselves as the supreme judiciary safeguarding enlightened practice. They have taken on the role of priest and prelate in pronouncing the definitive interpretation on any contextual expression obligating the viewer beforehand to what is expected from his or her experience in a programmed response affirming the authorized world view.

Art has always been subject to the dictates of state religion and the supervision of that doctrine’s watchful priesthood by which everyone knows his place on earth and how to petition God in the correct manner. Like the institution of The Inquisition, the Church of the Museum of Modern Art and its avant-garde curia have run the art world with an iron fist, and like all theocracies it ruthlessly eliminates with religious zeal any threats to its sovereignty.

It is amazing the universal condemnation of anyone who deviates from the teachings sanctioned by the leadership and instead offers a simpler and more humane view. Whether in religion or art, it remains a small council of elders and bishops and doctorial critics who lead the flock, and it is only the wayward fool or criminal who leaves their protection and guidance. So this artist finds out what it means to disregard compliance to the new orthodoxy at the given call to obedience to empire – but in this case instead of Pharisee or Jesuit or KGB policing adherence to God and Caesar, it is the avant-garde dispensing justice.

What is startling to the artist is to review a lifetime’s preoccupation on the imagery of death and on man’s inhumanity towards others and see in his earliest images of lamentation and mourning inspired by the structural magnetism of the human figure and its intense evocation of pathos that an obvious parallel demands to be included in the conversation on his works - that the image of the Crucifixion of Jesus symbolically represents a minority demonized and punished for following a different path.

Still, it would take almost forty years before paintings such as The Escape through the Desert would be fully acknowledged as symbolic of the terror inflicted upon the Jewish people. He had not imagined the subject of that persecution to become the core expression of a life’s work, or that his most important images arrive from two parallel stories on the recurrent theme of the suppression and punishment of unique individuals – from the Old Testament Joseph in the Pit and from the New Testament The Passion of Jesus.

One might suppose it seems hubris to paint oneself as Jesus as this artist did in The Burial of Christ, but back in 1964, his sophomore year at Carnegie Tech and wishing to emulate the great painting by Titian, he had no one who could model for it but himself. Yet even then at nineteen he had the prescient knowledge that he would in his own way suffer chastisement for his ambition.

As a youngster of seven or eight he was compelled by the beauty of form and its overwhelming sense of compassionate sorrow in the great figure paintings that mostly were from the Christian repertoire. Later, when facing the instituted iconoclasm of utopian modernism’s quest for abstract purity that at the time of his leaving school turned minimal and conceptual, he would not abandon his passion for the power of the hand drawn figure. He needed no official sanction justifying his dream. He had been summoned.

Of course this artist understood the implications of his use of the Christian iconography. But to paint that way was alien to what was approved that he avoided making polemical statements; it was as yet a private matter. One didn’t understand it was a calling separate yet inseparable from the act of painting. For him the attraction embraced his whole person from the beginning. To paint figuratively meant to paint a holy person, as all persons are holy in that moment that invariably speaks of our mortality yet is of a greater continuum and a greater mystery that all the while returns back to the holiness of a person.

So from the very beginning he understood instinctively to the very depths of his being that painting is the language of compassion – that one approaches painting as to another world, a silent world, and as such remains outside the boundaries of representation by that very enigma. That enigma is the attraction at the heart of representation that holds us suspended - an enchantment if we can use that word to speak of the allure of the question that is never answered – where in the depths of time and space does the soul go.

One never thought or needed to put words to it, to formally think it agenda. Simply, it is a sacrament – a feeling more holy in its doing than any other one performed. One had no appetite for approval dependent on argument and how one measures against another. The holy is simply holy - the work before one that affirms the holiness of life.

The power in those images is exactly what the strict observance against graven images rejects outright. But the purpose behind this artist’s borrowings was compelled not by idolatry but by compassion for the terrible consolation in the act of witnessing. It was never an attempt to express the ineffable, but his images of the Holocaust are treated as sacrilege by those who insist that the vacancy of abstraction is the only decent manner of remembrance and any attempt to express it in human form the sin of iconography and a violation of the humanity of those who were victimized.

Why contemporary art criticism has this iconoclastic abhorrence of visual representation and in its place favors the conceptual play of text and the power of the word is principally a literary demand of techno critics whose pedagogy ascribes greater value to signage than to poetry; and so the ascendancy of the verbally-biased hieroglyphic over visual representation seems a puritanical continuation of the ancient Hebraic prohibition.

Obedience to the commandment against representation had become the central proof of allegiance to the new creed; whereby even the barest trace of content would hold the artist apostate. De Kooning sidetracked this prohibition by violence directed at his women; Rothko would deny even the suggestion of the spiritual. Otherwise, only negation towards sincerity in representation that arrived with the full blast of iconophobic sarcasm of the postmodern would escape judgment.

But this Modern-era renunciation of sympathetically representing human form, especially where it concerns tragedies, makes an insurmountable barrier for art to embrace the whole person of the viewer approaching an image on an empathetic level.

In a letter to the editor, that never saw print, on The New York Times article BONN JOURNAL, Germans, Jews and Blame, New Book, New Pain (April 25, 1996), this artist wrote about why: “It is understandable that the Germans wish to discourage the ‘mystification’ of the Holocaust… It is only through mystification that the collective imagination can build poetic instruments to hold knowledge cross generations, otherwise it evaporates.”

But it is not only on this subject that contemporary criticism rejects a non-ironic representation of the human image. Yet one suspects these pundits’ motives are neither religious nor altruistic, but simply the disingenuous ravings of those in academia who have made art the step-child of critical discourse.

They have used up their stated purview of making art more accessibly democratic to the common intelligence by making it a common pastime celebrating the most banal and often degenerate aspects of contemporary existence but dependent upon their enlightened instruction. So reliance on their intellectual foreplay has become an industry unto itself; and consequently has so emasculated the power of art that it can’t reach the heart and soul of its audience simply by its own means.

If it were not for the promise of the avant-garde having failed us, first during Vietnam, and then Iraq, and now simply the unwillingness of its constituents, its institutions, its periodicals to let go of self-righteous jingoism that for over half a century have held all other views in contempt, this story might not have needed to be written. We have lost our way in this jaded closure of intellectual decadence - a sophistication which long ago denied the simple truth that the human image made compassionately has always had something to tell us about ourselves. If we can only get the avant-garde to get off our backs, we might regain what art once offered in support of our humanity.

Still, despite the example of following in a great heritage far exceeds any other claim for our attention; this artist’s memoir is viewed as vanity. Clearly it is of minor concern but for the cultural stasis imposed on us by our leading institutions. If it were error to align one’s purpose with that tradition now eclipsed by the pedagogical entitlement of the common dressed in the dandy calculation of neo- Duchampian cunning; his parading deserves our displeasure.

So if you’re wondering how the title Narcissus Dancing arrived; frankly it came by accident as this artist twirled before a painting while being photographed in an open space where he often dances alone. Aptly, the painting is called Narcissus as it is the artist who is its model. Still people like to judge; but if others see meanness in self-sufficiency, so be it. He’ll dance to that!

Believing in oneself is the greatest blessing of all; for no one undertakes a great journey without an abundance of faith; for only those with courage go alone to listen in its silence to what the heart can hear and see; how else to find your fate but to enter into sacred places alone.

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Windmill-boom-curbs-electric-power-prices From Bloomberg.com

To see the source click on the title above.

On windy nights in northern Germany, consumers are paid to keep the lights on.

Twice this year, the nation’s 21,000 wind turbines pumped out so much power that utilities reduced customer bills for using the surplus electricity. Since the first rebate came with little fanfare at 5 a.m. one October day in 2008, payments have risen as high as 500.02 euros ($665) a megawatt-hour, about as much as a small factory or 1,000 homes use in 60 minutes.

The wind-energy boom in Europe and parts of Texas has begun to reduce bills for consumers. Electricity-network managers have even ordered windmills offline at times to trim supplies. That hurts profit for wind-farm operators, said Christian Kjaer, head of the European Wind Energy Association, which represents RWE AG of Germany, Spain’s Iberdrola SA and Dong Energy A/S of Denmark.

“We’re seeing that wind energy lowers prices, which is great for the consumers,” Kjaer said at his group’s conference in Warsaw this week. “We as producers have to acknowledge that this means operating the existing plant fewer hours a year, and this has an effect on investors” and profit.

After years of getting government incentives to install windmills, operators in Europe may have become their own worst enemy, reducing the total price paid for electricity in Germany, Europe’s biggest power market, by as much as 5 billion euros some years, according to a study this week by Poeyry, a Helsinki-based industry consultant.

Wind Capacity

Germany has doubled capacity to generate power from wind since 2002 and has turbines producing about 7.5 percent of the nation’s electricity, according to the German Wind Energy Association. That compares with 4.8 percent for the European Union and about 1 percent in the U.S. The turbines operate about a third of the time and are idle in calm weather.

“Wind is playing an important role in spot-price volatility because it’s very difficult to predict when more power is coming on line,” said Ruxandra Haradau-Doeser, an analyst at Bankhaus Metzler in Frankfurt.

The erratic nature of weather makes it difficult for utilities to estimate by how much wind power pushes down revenue they earn from competing energy sources such as natural gas. A spokeswoman at Bilbao, Spain-based Iberdrola, the world’s largest wind-power operator, declined to estimate.

Spanish power prices fell an annual 26 percent in the first quarter because of the surge in supplies from wind and hydroelectric production, the Spanish wind-industry trade group said in a statement yesterday on its Web site.

Negative Prices

RWE, Germany’s second-largest utility, minimizes the risks of having to pay consumers to use power by using a “broad” range of different generation technologies in different markets, a spokesman for the company said. Rebates, or negative prices, do not have a big negative effect on the company, he said.

“Negative electricity prices happen when supply outstrips demand and we literally don’t know where to put it,” Peter Smits, head of central Europe at Swiss power-equipment maker ABB Ltd., said in an interview on April 20 in Hanover. “We will see this happen more often in the future.”

One solution is more investment in transmission systems to move power from northern Germany wind farms to heavy industry in the south, he said. “Power transmission is the bottleneck.”

Power trading needs to be expanded further, Kjaer said. Tying European markets together, already done among France, the Netherlands and Belgium, lets temporary surpluses flow toward electricity-poor zones. Germany plans to join them on Sept. 7.

Price Volatility

Trading more electricity across markets reduces price volatility, spreading any excess capacity from wind and solar power plants across a broader area, he said.

Storing electricity may be another fix. In Scandinavia, Danish wind power is used to pump water into Norwegian and Swedish reservoirs and later released to drive hydroelectric plants when the wind is not blowing.

Nord Pool, the Nasdaq OMX Group Inc.-owned Scandinavian power bourse, last year took steps to encourage generators to limit production by implementing a minimum price. The most generators would pay users to take their power is 200 euros per megawatt hour if there is excess electricity from too much wind.

The measures are meant to “increase the effectiveness of the market forcing power generators to consider reducing their electricity generation or having to pay for delivering electricity,” the company said on its Web site.

Wind’s impact on prices results from its “low marginal costs,” which pushes more expensive technologies including natural gas and coal out of the market, the Poeyry study said. Fossil-fuel burning relies on fuel, which can boost the price of electricity from those sources.

Negative Power Prices

Texas had so-called negative power prices in the first half of 2008 because wind turbines in the western part of the state weren’t adequately linked with more populated regions in the east, according to the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas.

Until there’s more integration and better transmission grids, prices probably will fluctuate, leading to negative prices, in which payment to consumers is reflected as a discount on their monthly bills.

That hasn’t yet stopped the expansion of wind power. Britain now has wind turbines with the capacity to generate 1 gigawatt of power offshore, enough for 653,000 homes, the industry group RenewableUK said today.

China WindPower Group Ltd., Iberdrola and Duke Energy Corp. will lead development of an estimated $65 billion of wind farms, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Around the world, the potential output of electricity from wind is already 157.9 gigawatts, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, a Brussels-based industry group.

Projects in Danger?

“I haven’t yet seen that negative pricing is a danger to new projects,” said Andrew Garrad, chief executive officer of GL Garrad Hassan, a wind consulting company. “We do need to get the right market mechanisms in place” to better integrate wind power into energy grids.

Wind power is as cheap as electricity made from burning coal on windy days, and those lower costs drive down power prices. In parts of Texas, some utilities are using wind power because it’s the cheapest form of energy, said Garrad.

China is the most attractive nation for developing wind energy, followed by the U.S. and Germany, Ernst & Young said yesterday in a study. The consultant surveyed factors such as unexploited energy resources, power rates, taxes and financing.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeremy van Loon in Warsaw via jvanloon@bloomberg.net

Waking Life the movie

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"A boy has a dream that he can float, but unless he holds on, he will drift away into the sky. Even when he is grown up, this idea recurs. After a strange accident, he walks through what may be a dream, flowing in and out of scenarios and encountering various characters. People he meets discuss science, philosophy and the life of dreaming and waking, and the protagonist gradually becomes alarmed that he cannot awake from this confusing dream,"