Strong

Rock bottom in the age of extreme resource extraction.
500 years of colonization have left us addicted to fossil fuels,
short-sighted "development" and resource wars.
where has our pursuit of the American Dream led us?
How can we begin the road to recovery?

Our water, source of all life is being threatened by a trio of new, extreme extraction processes:
Fracking, tar sands and sulfide mining.

This blog attempots to share hard-hitting, honest analysis,
entertaining and compassionate story-telling,
with graphics from Beehive Collective
and stories from around the Great Lakes.

The beaver is just doing what beavers do, however, whole ecosystems develop and thrive upon their decisions and actions. Last Summer, I walked on a ten foot tall beaver dam and saw more than a dozen species all helped by a single beaver family.

The information preceding the photo was taken pretty much wholesale from the Beehive Collective. Their works are in the public domain as part of the Creative Commons. I urge all of my readers to donate to their cause, as well as support my work at paypal. My account there is my e-mail, tnsaladino42@hotmail.com

Weak

I have been AWK Away From Keyboard for a long while. Sadly, the last stupid thing the Deceitful traitor said was something incoherent about bird memorials below wind turbines. Over one billion birds fly headlong into buildings every year, most commonly into lit buildings at night, which leads to their death. One billion, compared to between 20,000 and 500,000 Even at that high end, a half million, two thousand times as many birds die from building collisions as get killed by turbine blades. Perhaps it is time to scientifically make decisions based on facts, not whim.

Each day, I continue to share truth as it comes to me. I still cannot fathom why we don't have the ability to just vote no-confidence and get on with inviting a whole new batch of leaders to the table. These old farts who are stuck on last generation thinking need to shove off! Get organizing, challenge all seats! Make sure that the voice of the people rises to such a din as to drown out the oligarch-owned media! Remember, when planning your actions we have no need to get defensive, our position is truth. You cannot simultaneously negotiate peace, while preparing for war. Laws have been created to protect us from kings and tyrants. Money was never intended to be "speech". Corporate welfare is class warfare end of story.

I was attempting to build a sunshade for the upstairs porch, but we found a much more elegant solution. This solar panel, built in 1974 continues to produce 1/3 the annual heating budget for this two-family home. It was the first of this now-defunct brand to be fabricated from aluminum, after nearly forty years, the panels have clouded some, but this Summer, it will get new, higher tech polymer glazong that will last even longer than the fiberglass they had available in 1974. Whenever it is eighty or hotter in the panel, a fan circulates the air into the house. Literally, four moving parts. Efficiency.

Every dollar we spend, every hour we spend is in service to something. When we enrich the faraway billionaires, that value never comes back. When we spend within our local community, the money reverberates around enriching many layers of the same local economy. The argument that oligarchs use, that they are divinely entitled to rule, dates back to Calvinism. I think we can give up on it after 500 years of evolution. The poor are not the problem, it is the tiny scintilla of a fraction who rule with their dollars. Buying local and producing everything here shuts off the spigot of our dollars, making them and their arguments weak.

You know the drill, buy local and enrich the people you care most about, those around you. If you want tips on energy efficiency, so you can spend less on energy, retaining more of your wealth for local investment, I'll be happy to share some things I have learned. I have owned five houses, each one uses half the energy and water it did when I bought it. These benefits will last, being multiplied throughout the lifespan of each of those homes. My brother-in law is a salesman at heart and posts inspirational sayings where he can see them each day, changing them by the week so he does not treat them like wallpaper. The last time I was at his place, one of his sayings really got to me. It said that the value of our lives is not just in what we could do or amass for ourselves, but all the benefits to all the people we have helped as well. Powerful words to live by.