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From the Acknowledgments page of his thesis, 1974:
A man is no more than his friends, no stronger than his motivation.
From the Acknowledgments page of his dissertation (University of Missouri 1976):
I shoot the hippopotamus
with bullets made of platinum.
For if I use the leaden ones
his hide is sure to flatten 'em. Duroc
Salon has interesting story and letter exchange about Peak Oil. A commenter notes the story's focus on the transportation sector and throws out some numbers on potential for energy savings in buildings.
Homes are such an easy target that it is sad higher energy efficiency standards were not adopted long ago. A 50% decrease in home energy use is easy, and is almost a cost wash between increased mortgage cost and energy savings per month. For the cost of going from granite to corian in the kitchen, or cutting one stall from the garage of a new home, home energy use could be cut 70%. With 1.8 million homes/yr expected to be built over the next 10 years, and with 250,000 homes replaced per year, huge cuts in home energy use are possible in the next 30 years. And the homes will look identical to how they do today! If homeowners can accept some changes in appearance, even bigger savings are possible.
Another gets far-out about how maybe the planet needs oil and mineral resources in the ground for some purpose.
... As a long ago hitch-hiking teenager, I posed such questions to a lift-providing, newly retired Colorado School of Mines Dean.
I saw that old miner park that vintage Mercedes right there on Loveland Pass, extinguish his cigar, roll the convertible top down, remove his gold rim glasses and stare out into space as traffic crawled past us. He sat and thought for several moments amid timberline stillness and traffic swoosh and then he told me that in over 45 years of teaching how to remove natural resources and make money with the stuff, he had never once even considered the fact that the Earth may just have some unknown use for her black bounties and cash-ready ores.
Albuquerque Journal has the benign headline about the "troubled border" - N.M. Welcomes Mexico Troop Boost. Ticker-tape parade!
The Mexican government's decision Thursday to flood its troubled northern border with soldiers and police was welcome news to New Mexico officials concerned that Mexican drug-gang violence will spill over onto New Mexico soil. ...
Flooding something to solve a spilling problem?
The Mexican government is creating a Chihuahua Joint Operation along its border with New Mexico and Texas. It's sending sending more than 2,000 of its army soldiers, equipped with 180 vehicles and three aircraft, along with 425 federal police agents and 30 prosecutors.
I have an idea for a cute logo with a little dog.
Luna County Sheriff Raymond Cobos said he welcomes the help, but only if it is an extended effort with police willing to stand up to powerful narco-terrorist gangs. "You can't just send in people with machine guns for a few days and say it's better," Cobos said. "This is a despicable cancer that's infected the border and it has to be a long-term, legitimate effort."
In other words, it could get noisier down there for a few days years.
The Albuquerque Journal's Sean Olson covers the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority*
The one-time fee for buildings, called the "water supply charge," will be placed into an account the water authority can only use to buy new water rights or direct toward finding new sources of water.
Lynne Andersen, National Association of Industrial and Office Properties president, said the fees will most likely be passed on to home buyers and business owners. But as long as the fees are strictly for new developments, Andersen said her organization doesn't object.
"It's just part of whether it pencils into the bottom line (for deciding to start a business)," she said.
Wait a minute. The fee ought to pencil into the bottom line for deciding to build a building, not start a business. Not the same thing at all. Unless your business is speculative building. Or there are no buildings already built anywhere else in town.
Locating a business, new or not, in a shiny new industrial park outside of the already sprawling water service area just got a little more expensive to pay for the water.
* ABCWUA - an entity as fathomable as the name. Just try to use the acronym. It violates a basic bureaucratic principle that a board moniker must roll off the tongue and fit on a file label. "Abeckwooah"? Ugh. Come on.
From the OC Register March 4, 2008:
In the past 4 ½ months, eight lawsuits have been filed in Orange County accusing SunCal of failing to pay its debts or complete promised work on projects. Four properties planned for future developments either were foreclosed on or soon will be. ...
Q: What is happening with the cash flow at SunCal?
A: (David Soyka, SunCal senior vice president of public affairs) SunCal Companies is made up of many companies. It's discreetly financed, which is common for a real estate development firm. It's how non-public companies are financed. No two are identical.
The real estate business is cyclical. We've experienced downturns like this before. Like every other homebuilding and land development company, we are facing market challenges. The entire industry is affected, and we're working with our lenders and Wall Street financial partners, both public and privately held companies, to decide how to adjust our business plans.
Commenter Stan is frustrated that no one in Albuquerque caught on earlier to SunCal problems and suggests no one has ever Googled SunCal. But these stories would be unlikely to make any difference to development proponents here who put a positive twist on the meaning of the adage: Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico.
From the Albuquerque Journal we hear that approvals for SunCal have been delayed 60 days.
The city Environmental Planning Commission has a laundry list of concerns it wants SunCal Companies to address before the developer moves forward on a 500-acre West Side residential development.
The commission's staff has, in fact, compiled 15 pages of "conditions for approval" that asks SunCal to provide more information about the development, get into compliance with the Northwest Escarpment Plan and improve design standards....
Record national foreclosure rates should pose a bigger challenge to selling 500 acres of more housing than 15 pages of questions. The developer complained the questions were vague. Maybe one of them was, "Why?"
From the Duke City Fix archives:
Her real name was Ovida and she was only 17. She was a pretty waitress who got a nickname for wearing heels that chirped out a rhythm of wood on concrete when she walked. March 31,1949 was the last night of her life. Four rabbit hunters found her battered body on Easter Sunday out near the cemetery in Mesquite, 12 miles south of Las Cruces. She'd been raped, beaten and run over by a car.
The Silence of Cricket Coogler: A Political Murder, is a documentary produced and filmed in New Mexico in 2000 by Cine Productions, a local company. Here's a You Tube short.
The story is almost quaint in comparison to the murder, femicide, rape, and general violence in the border region today. Eileen
Welsome describes a violent land dispute in a place called Lomas del Poleo in Mexico near Sunland Park- a stones throw from Anapra
where The Mecca was located in Cricket’s day.
Asking who killed Cricket in an annual headline was regular practice when New Mexico Governor Ed Mechem was in office. He ran on a promise of finding her murderer. They never did.
So the movie is my new Spring tradition. Meting out a tiny and distant fraction of the violence of the world at a time in order to think about it more carefully. Along with watching big dog destroy the easter bunny, I remembered Cricket.
Denver Post - Politics West, John Ingold has news of "rallies" against new environmental regulations that haven't even been drafted yet.
The $23-billion-a-year Colorado oil and gas industry flexed its considerable muscle today, turning out hundreds of people for a rally at the state Capitol. The event coincided with similar rallies in Greeley, Grand Junction and Trinidad, according to the Colorado Oil and Gas association, which organized the rallies. And it served as a preview to the coming smackdown over proposed new regulations on the industry that are expected to be released later this month.
Bold bits mine. Shouldn't that be smackdown of ?
“We come here with a simple, important and final ask of our state government , ‘Please don’t rule us out,’” Meg Collins, the president of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, said in echoing the rally’s theme. Industry advocates have said the new rules, which seek to impose greater protections for the environment, could drive up the cost of doing business in the state and force companies to leave.
If they leave, they'll be back because the oil and gas will still be there.
The oil and gas industry employs 70,000 people in Colorado, and a grim state economic forecast on Thursday noted that the oil and gas industry helped keep the news from being grimmer. “We cannot afford to kick the state economic leader out of the state,” said Rep. Cory Gardner, a Yuma Republican who was one of several lawmakers to attend the rally. “We will protect our air, our land and our water, and we will do it be (sic) working with the people of Colorado instead of hurting them.”
Funny how this is posed as all about Colorado. It is almost like pretending energy companies are sports teams threatening to move away if they don't get what they want. Only this is bigger. Go Colorado!
Proponents of the new rule-making process called the rally rhetoric hogwash. “I don’t think they get hurt; I think that is baloney,” said House Majority Leader Alice Madden, D-Boulder. “They can say whatever they want, but factually I don’t think there’s any substance to what they say.”
Madden pointed to a recent announcement by energy giant Chevron that it will invest $7.3 billion in Colorado over the next decade, as well as a $1 billion investment by a smaller company. “That’s not a sign of an industry getting ready to leave,” said TJ Brown, the Front Range field director for the Colorado Environmental Coalition. “There’s no indication they're going to be going anywhere.”
Which is sort of sad too. "He can't take it with him and God's not making any more."
Albuquerque Journal says the Water Authority repealed the new water conservation rules.
Cadigan linked the ordinance's repeal to one "special interest group"— builders— complaining about costs. "They are not entitled to a special process because they are home building lobbyists," he said.
Oh, but they do so believe they are entitled.
(Bernalillo County Commissioner) Cummins stressed at the meeting that the board and builders believe in conservation, but the changes were not passed in the "traditional" way, with builders giving comment before the bill was drafted. "I think the tenor of compromise is different than the tenor of starting with a clean slate," Cummins said of the repeal.
Tenor of compromise and the traditional way?
I'm picturing a tradition of grandfathering - exempting entire subdivisions from new requirements and calling it compromise.
Fragmenting resource and land use regulation, in this case through multiple agencies with overlapping jurisdictions, maximizes short term real estate market and builder profits and hinders true community building. Some tradition.
The dozens of sealed and secret pleadings in the FBI's public corruption investigation will remain sealed, and the federal judge overseeing the case will probably keep sealing them until he is challenged legally, a national freedom of information expert said.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington, Va., said she found it odd that 10 months after the first guilty plea in the public corruption case was entered, federal officials continued to work in semi-secrecy.
Edited because I need an editor. Thanks Killer.
From the El Paso Times is a whole lot of news about a whole lot of corruption. A Secret Docket thing explains why we aren't hearing much about it I suppose, though it is lapping at the suburbs of Albuquerque with involvement of the Socorro school board. Nope. Different Socorro.
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