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"Threatening us with lawsuits and annexing Kent property is Camarda's way of saying" he doesn't care about Kent or the thousands of people who live in Lake Carmel. He is determined to profit from destroying their quality of life whether they like it or not." - Paul Spiegel
Good Monday Morning,
 If you missed the show at the Arts Center on Lake Carmel on Saturday night you missed out on another great event. 100 people came out to dance the night away and bands from as far away as New York City journeyed north to our humble burg for a rockin' good time. You really should have been there.
The power went out here just after noon on Saturday and when we got home from working the show at the Arts Center at 11:15PM, I called NYSEG and was told it would take until 6PM Sunday to have the power turned back on.
Miller Hill Road must be the bastard stepchild of the Town of Kent. We have no cable. I had to fight to get DSL, scores of through-travelers trash the roadside each day on their hurried way to and from work and when the lights go out we're the last to get turned back on again. And let's not even talk about Verizon's cellphone service.
An impassioned call to NYSEG led me to "Jackie", a customer service representative who, though she understood the frustration about being repaired last and handled the matter with a cool manner for which she should be enshrined in The Museum of Customer Service, stuck by NYSEG's policy that the most populated areas are repaired first. I asked what it was I could do so that, "once in a while NYSEG might throw us a bone..." She said, "Not much."
At 6:45 AM yesterday the power did come back - 12 hours ahead of schedule - and I'm wondering if anyone out there in PlanPutnamLand took any longer?
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not adverse to not having electricity. I lived for a time in a place with no electricity or running water whatsoever and you get used to it pretty quick. Once that 60 cycle hum is gone you'd be surprised at just how quiet things are and how dark the sky becomes. But it was the "brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" of neighborhood generators that was most annoying and that coming from neighbors whom I have a pretty good idea don't have a relative on a lung machine. What were they powering? I have no idea. A decent refrigerator should have no problem keeping food frozen for 12 hours or longer. Reading lamps? The warm yellow glow of candles on a silent night is a wonderful experience. Anyone who lives next to a house with air conditioners running has an idea of what this is like and I sympathize with you. When the power goes out it should be quieter - not noisier!
If you're running a generator and it's not for emergency medical purposes do us all a favor: run it for 20 minutes every three or four hours - if you must - just to give your fridge a boost and then only if it's an ancient and cranky one like mine. Keep some bottled war around and flush with the water you've collected in your rain barrels. Enjoy the quiet. Enjoy the dark. It's really quite wonderful.
According to an article in the Journal News this morning, (see below) developer Paul Camarda is considering a proposal that would have Patterson annex land from the Town of Kent so that he can build Patterson Crossing without interference from those who live nearby. While he's at it, the Town of Carmel should be renamed Camardaville and the County Legislature could just bypass the messy application of election laws and appoint him to the County Executive's office once Mr. Bondi retires. This would require that Mr. C and Mr. B be surgically separated but medical science has come a long way and that operation should go rather smoothly.
The new issue of Environment DEC is on the web today. It's usually filled with good information about that most important State agency and is always a decent read. Check it out here.
To prove how wonderful they are, Communist China announced that people could hold demonstrations at three designated parks during the Olympic games if they applied - in person - 5 days prior to the event. The report says the parks include one in Rangoon, one in Darfur and one in Baghdad. However, to ensure that they are not flooded with requests, they have been arresting and detaining anyone who might apply for a permit or who cannot sing the Olympic hymn in Latin, backwards, over the past few weeks.
At the bottom of today's report are three articles collected over the weekend about Bruce Ivin's apparent suicide and how it neatly ties up the government's investigation into the 2001 anthrax scare. Regardless of what 'evidence' the Feds claim to have they clearly didn't have a case strong enough to stand up in an open courtroom. Mr. Ivin's death negates that need. Suicide? It's just too convenient.
And now, the News:
- Patterson Crossing study suggests annexing land from Kent
- Once-prosperous river shipping has a revival
- DEC Announces $900,000 in Urban Forestry Grants
- Reckless and Feckless, Congress Sandbags Renewables
- Evidence That Pesticides Are Seriously Messing Up Our Honey Bees
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize-Winning Chronicler of Soviet Gulag, Dies
- They Used to Say Whale Oil Was Indispensable, Too
- From: A Push to Wrest More Oil From Land...
- Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News
- Anthrax Evidence Is Said to Be Primarily Circumstantial
- Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation
Patterson Crossing study suggests annexing land from Kent Michael Risinit
The Journal News
PATTERSON - Developer Paul Camarda is suggesting the boundary between Kent and Patterson be redrawn, should Kent rezone his land where he plans to build a shopping center.
The shopping center, Patterson Crossing, would sit off Route 311 near Interstate 84 and straddle the towns' border. Seventy-four of its acres are in Patterson, 16 in Kent.
Kent officials talked last year about rezoning the 16 acres from commercial to residential use, as part of an overall revision of the town's code. In Patterson Crossing's final environmental study, which was prepared by Camarda's consultants, that discussion is seen as a potential roadblock.
"As set forth below, the contemplated rezoning is not based on sound planning, and the applicant believes that the Town of Kent has considered the rezoning for the sole purpose of stopping the proposed Patterson Crossing Retail Center," the study said.
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Once-prosperous river shipping has a revival By Craig Wolf
Poughkeepsie Journal
For anyone who thinks trucks and planes are the only modern ways to go, a visit to the shore can change that view.
Today, modular containers are bringing new life to rail and river, helping reverse a long decline. Both forms of cargo transportation have adopted the big boxes that can be lifted on and off rail cars and boats. The Hudson conveys a wide mixture of freight, including cars, heavy machinery, scrap metal and grain.
The biggest change on the river in the long term remains, however, shrinkage. There's less traffic than in the old days.
Ask Robert L. Miller of Pleasant Valley, 81, a retired tugboat captain whose father and grandfather were also captains in the steamboat era.
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DEC Announces $900,000 in Urban Forestry Grants Funding Will Help Support Tree Plantings and Other Projects Across the State
Urban forestry grants totaling $900,000 are being awarded to communities and organizations across New York, state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Pete Grannis announced today. The release of the list of awardees coincides with the annual New York State Urban and Community Forestry Conference taking place today at Cornell University in Ithaca.
"Urban forestry initiatives are key to promoting clean air, clean water, energy savings, habitat creation, and improved quality of life for New York residents," Commissioner Grannis, said. "These grants build upon Governor Paterson's interest in improving the environment across the state and will have a lasting impact by creating cleaner, healthier communities for both current and future generations to enjoy."
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Reckless and Feckless, Congress Sandbags Renewables Senate Politics And Renewable Energy Tax Incentives
August 3, 2008 at 9:01AM by Jim DiPeso
Hollywood screenwriters could come up with a fictional scenario that makes Congress look worse than it did in real life last week.
But it’s hard to see how.
Both Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress have professed their undying love for renewable energy resources. Their affection, however, took a back seat to rock 'em, sock 'em partisan politics when the Senate failed to move legislation extending various tax incentives for renewable resources.
If the game of chicken goes on much longer, the tax incentives will expire at the end of the year, and billions of dollars in wind, solar, and other clean energy investment capital is likely to go elsewhere, where the politics are less toxic and the financial certainty more solid.
Rather than putting money where their energy mouths are, both parties are playing for political trophies.
Reckless and feckless, that’s what they are.
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Evidence That Pesticides Are Seriously Messing Up Our Honey Bees The Indictment Against Farm Insecticides Is Growing More Detailed
Back to the beginning....
A couple of years ago it was Dave Hackenburg who got the world to pay attention to what was happening to his bees and that it was unlike anything he’d seen before. He woke up a few folks at Penn State, who woke up a few folk at the USDA Honey Bee Lab in Beltsville, Maryland, who woke up more folks out at Missoula, Montana (who coined the name Colony Collapse Disorder), who woke up ... well, you know the rest.
Dave stayed in the thick of things for quite awhile, supplying a lot of samples for the researchers, helping them get oriented to what was going on in the world of commercial and migratory beekeeping, and giving interview after interview after interview to magazines, newspapers, radio and television shows, and blog pages like this one.
But lately, as media attention has turned more to the actions of others ... researchers, bureaucrats, regulatory agencies and other beekeepers ... Dave’s been busy trying to keep his bees alive.
“Keeping bees alive is a seven day a week job now”, he said this week when I called.
“Used to be, I had time for a bit of fishing and riding my motorcycle, but not anymore. The bees need attention.”
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize-Winning Chronicler of Soviet Gulag, Dies MOSCOW (AP) -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.
Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday at his home near Moscow, but declined further comment.
Through unflinching accounts of the years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.
And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.
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They Used to Say Whale Oil Was Indispensable, Too By PETER APPLEBOME
SAG HARBOR, N.Y.
Call us Ishmael.
Of course they would have arrived on the Hampton Jitney, not the Pequod, and it’s not likely that any of the characters in “Moby-Dick” would have known what to make of the exhibit at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum.
But in this dour summer defined by the racing digital readouts at the gas pump, there’s a meditation worthy of Melville in the question raised by the modest exhibition being displayed here, in a frayed Greek Revival building constructed around 1845 by a local whaling magnate: Is the oil business the new whaling business? And, if so, is that a good sign or a troubling one?
Bear with us. Whaling, after all, was one of the world’s first great multinational businesses, a global enterprise of audacious reach and import. From the 1700s through the mid-1800s, oil extracted from the blubber of whales and boiled in giant pots gave light to America and much of the Western world. The United States whaling fleet peaked in 1846 with 735 ships out of 900 in the world. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States; in 1853 alone, 8,000 whales were slaughtered for whale oil shipped to light lamps around the world, plus sundry other parts used in hoop skirts, perfume, lubricants and candles.
Like oil, particularly in its early days, whaling spawned dazzling fortunes, depending on the brute labor of tens of thousands of men doing dirty, sweaty, dangerous work. Like oil, it began with the prizes closest to home and then found itself exploring every corner of the globe. And like oil, whaling at its peak seemed impregnable, its product so far superior to its trifling rivals, like smelly lard oil or volatile camphene, that whaling interests mocked their competitors.
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From: A Push to Wrest More Oil From Land... But Most New Wells Are for Natural Gas The environmental effects have been palpable. The expansion of the energy industry has subdivided parts of western Wyoming and western Colorado into a rabbit warren of wellheads and roads. The Pinedale, Wyo., area had its first ozone alerts last winter, thanks to a combination of factors: natural gas flaring from scores of wells, increased vehicle traffic associated with drilling activities and seasonal temperature inversions. One study showed that the mule deer herd that migrates near Pinedale declined by nearly half from 2000 to 2005.
Brian A. Rutledge, the executive director of Audubon Wyoming, said that in energy-drilling areas around the state sage grouse populations had declined by more than 80 percent in the last seven years.
Read the Full Article
Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News (Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V - Update VI - Update VII)
The FBI's lead suspect in the September, 2001 anthrax attacks -- Bruce E. Ivins -- died Tuesday night, apparently by suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the attacks. For the last 18 years, Ivins was a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where he was one of the most elite government anthrax scientists on the research team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID).
The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters -- with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 -- that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.
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Anthrax Evidence Is Said to Be Primarily Circumstantial By SCOTT SHANE
The evidence amassed by F.B.I. investigators against Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist who killed himself last week after learning that he was likely to be charged in the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, was largely circumstantial, and a grand jury in Washington was planning to hear several more weeks of testimony before issuing an indictment, a person who has been briefed on the investigation said on Sunday.
While genetic analysis had linked the anthrax letters to a supply of the deadly bacterium in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., at least 10 people had access to the flask containing that anthrax, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation also have no evidence proving that Dr. Ivins visited New Jersey on the dates in September and October 2001 when investigators believe the letters were sent from a Princeton mailbox, the source said.
The source acknowledged that there might be some elements of the evidence of which he was unaware. And while he characterized what he did know about as “damning,” he said that instead of irrefutable proof, investigators had an array of indirect evidence that they argue strongly implicates Dr. Ivins in the attacks, which killed 5 people and sickened 17 others.
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Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation (updated below - Update II - Update III)
The death of government scientist Bruce Ivins has generated far more questions about the anthrax attacks than it has answered. I want to return to the role the establishment media played in obfuscating the anthrax investigation for so long and, at times, aiding in what was clearly the deliberate deceit on the part of Government sources. This is yet another case where the establishment media possesses -- yet steadfastly conceals -- some of the most critical facts about what the Government has done, and insists on protecting the wrongdoers. Obtaining these answers from these media outlets is as important as obtaining them from the Government. Writing about ABC's dissemination of the false Iraq/anthrax story, The New Republic's Dayo Olopade wrote yesterday: "Pressure on ABC to out their sources should be swift and sustained."
The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum argued yesterday that despite the need for journalists to use confidential sources, "the profession -- and the rest of us -- [are] better off if sources know that they run the risk of being unmasked if their mendacity is egregious enough to become newsworthy in its own right." Drum added: "I'd say that part of [Ross'] re-reporting ought to include a full explanation of exactly who was peddling the bentonite lie in the first place, and why they were doing it." Nonetheless, Drum said: "In practice, most journalists refuse to identify their sources under any circumstances at all, even when it's clear that those sources deliberately lied to them."
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