Cocoposts

Old Mare Dying in a New Year

My old mare Llorileigh, is dying.  This is a picture of her from the 1990s. She is also featured on the cover the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County North Valley Area Plan in her, fatter, early retirement days.

This week's Clusterfuck post from Kunstler:

We need to begin planning right away for a transition away from automobiles, not in order to be good socialists but because Happy Motoring is at the core of our unsustainability trap. The car system is going to fail in manifold ways whether we like it or not, and it will fail due to circumstances already underway. For one thing, it will cease to be democratic as the remnants of the middle class find it impossible to get car loans, or pay for fuel, or insurance, and that will set in motion a very impressive politics-of-grievance setting apart those who are still able to enjoy motoring and those who have been foreclosed from it. Contrary to what you might make of the the current situation in the oil markets, we are in for a heap of trouble with both the price and supply of petroleum.

In Deep Salty Water

The Albuquerque Journal's Sean Olson follows-up on news of the Puerco aquifer.  Massive energy costs are associated with desalinization.  Just how far does that fact deflate boosterism about the brackish water? 

Water consultant and former Metropolitan Water District of Southern California CEO Ronald R. Gastelum said the energy use won't be a big problem for desalination in New Mexico, as soon as a market opens for the technique.
        "I'm not foreseeing the availability of energy will be an issue or even the cost of energy will be an issue," said Gastelum, who is working as a consultant for SunCal. He added that it will definitely raise the cost of water.

 No, SunCal has bigger issues. 

Desert Rock Fair Shake

Headline in the Durango Herald:  Official: Desert Rock to get fair shake - N.M. attorney general says new EPA means encouraging changes. 

The proposed Desert Rock power plant near Burnham would, by proponents own estimates,  discharge 12.7 million tons of carbon dioxide per year into an already overburdened airshed in order to power HVACs in California.  The application needs a fair shake like a good rat terrier gives a fair shake. 

A Welsh Terrier we had once was a real rodent killing machine. He'd dig in pursuit until the catch, then get a good neck-hold and shake like crazy.  Twisting and jumping he'd make that wild little high-pitched growl, known as ratter-chatter, over our  squeals of horror.  Long after the creature's neck was broken he'd play with the lifeless body -  tossing it up in the air for celebratory effect.

That's the kind of fair shake Desert Rock should get.

Silverton Blizzard

You have to really love snow to voluntarily spend more than one winter in Silverton Colorado.  The most recent storm brought four feet of snow and 60 mph winds.  All the passes were closed.  Even the ski areas were closed. 

Photo from the Denver Post of their main street yesterday.  The paper reports all this and more - skiers and sleds being pulled behind cars and tourists shoveling snow -  under a breaking news story entitled Blizzard Buries Silverton.  The coverage sparks a doctorate-level discourse about global warming in the comment section.

Quiet Commercial Bailout

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo says No Dice about the justification for a commercial real estate bailout - that's what bankruptcy courts are for.  Quoting Calculated Risk:

Although the headline says "developers" this is really about property investors who bought commercial buildings at the price peak and are now underwater. But say the owners default and the properties are transferred to the bondholders - what is the risk to the economy? None.

But which is the quieter method of resolving financial crack-ups? Which is more conducive  to maintaining the illusion that we need to continue building more crappy sprawl because we're different here  - just because we're behind on an inevitable curve? 

Big Dog Christmas Toy

 

On The Heels

The San Francisco Chronicle featured an Onion-sounding Guide to Walking in High Heels Without Pain, which I wasn't going to write about until they altered it for the SF Gate web site to:  Guide to Walking Sexy in Stilettos.  That was too sad and stupid to take.

Wynn's Sinatra

So what does it mean that Wynn is opening yet another casino?   Coasting on nostalgia, we're all Las Vegans now.

"The children and I are in our 60s. The calendar and the clock, the chronology is running on all of us," Wynn said. "Frank and Dean are gone, and Sammy — but these memories and these relationships were real."

Unsettling Las Vegas

In the San Francisco Chronicle, David Sirota goes-off on a Kunstler-tinged screed and comes to the dark conclusion that we are all Las Vegans now. Read the whole thing if you have to.

There is something especially unsettling about visiting Las Vegas these days - and it is not the town's lascivious culture. A voyage to Sin City in this moment of ecological and economic crisis is a journey to a giant concave mirror reflecting back the magnified - and ugly - truths about this epoch of cataclysmic consumption and hubristic hedonism. ...