alias Bruce.

And this Wall Street piece by Naomi Klein,

Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now, gets at the heart of what is happening. It's the full text version of a speech she gave at the NYC occupation.

By the way, it is time we (and that includes me) stopped calling this concerted action a "protest" and started calling it what it is: an occupation. A political act that has profound underlying, if as yet undefined, ambition. As is slowly becoming clearer to perplexed corporate journalists who wonder why so many people care, the Wall Street events are not just another car accident or plane crash to talk about for 7 seconds while the capitalist machine lurches along as normal. They represent, at their deepest level, a calling into question of the machinery itself.

So here's the problem with earthquakes and hurricanes and tornadoes and violent storms and forest fires

and the entire weird plethora of extreme environmental events we are painfully beginning to get used to:

We have a whole cast of players with colossal vested interests in a way of life that creates climate change: oil companies, coal companies, natural gas companies, timber companies, real estate developers, car and truck manufacturers and dealers, agribusiness, food processors and distributors, fast food conglomerates (who depend on agribusiness), highway builders, airlines, furniture manufacturers, factories of all kinds. And that's just a sampling.

But at the same time, we citizens have a growing shared certainty -- like the knowledge in the pit of the stomach of a married person who knows they are going to have to ask for a divorce -- that the increasingly wild earthly events through which we are living are not accidents, but a looming warning. A hammer over our heads. Most us feel it. With every new report of a "freak storm" or "monster fire" or "surprising string" of events, we feel it.

We know, more and more, that our way of life won't work. And we know that the planet is trying to shrug it off, and that if we don't change it, and change it fast, she will shrug us off with it.

But our moneychangers and their Capitol Hill employees don't want to hear what we know. We need pipelines, they tell us. We need more roads. We need timber, we need oil, we need mass-production grain-based agriculture, we need cheap patio furniture from South America and Asia. We need to do what we're doing. For just a while longer.

And meanwhile Hurricane Irene crashes into New York and an earthquake hits the East Coast and tornadoes spring up like killer weeds and scientists agree that we are in big trouble. And every morning when you and I walk out into the world we feel as if we are taking another step off a cliff.

Because we are.

The problem with nuclear power

is that its inherent danger – radiation – is simply too great a liability for it to be a viable long-term source of energy.

To be sure, no energy source is immune to natural or man-made disasters. Earthquakes happen. So do floods, tsunamis, accidents, malfunctions, human errors, fires, and terrorist and military attacks.

The difference between nuclear power and other major energy generators, though, is this: When a coal or hydroelectric or wind or solar plant blows up, there is a conflagration and a loss of power and perhaps an awful loss of life in the immediate area. But when a nuclear plant blows up or melts down, there is a threat to life for a radius of potentially thousands of miles affecting possibly millions of people for decades or longer.

A disaster with non-nuclear energy is a terrible thing. But for all practical purposes – as the jewelry ads once said about diamonds – a nuclear disaster is forever.

No matter what the nuclear industry and a corporate-corralled President Obama tell you about the "necessity" and the "safety" of American nuclear power, you should know that when some awe-inspiring calamity wrecks a nuclear facility in New York or Michigan or California, we will fare little better than Japan, and perhaps worse. Any gambler knows to never put more on the table than you are prepared to lose. Nuclear power, by its very nature, puts more at risk than we are actually ready to give up. It sets up consequences that we are unwilling to live with, and it, foolishly, props them up against forces we cannot control. It is a classic case of the worship of pure luck.

If we continue to significantly rely upon nuclear power, the question of a true nuclear disaster in America is not if, but when.

NYT: "Oil Soars as Libyan Furor Shakes Markets."

More than ever, it's time to shop for a hybrid or an electric.

"We want other governments to

get the word out that people should not simply show up at the South Pole." – A State Department official on the prospect of tourists and adventurers making their own journeys to honor the arrivals 100 years ago of Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen. (New York Times, 1/16/11)

I wasn't planning on making the trip, but this pretty much guarantees that people will.

Bass-ackwards worldview of the day:

This quote from a story in today's NYT about the human-caused disappearance of the grizzly bear from the North Cascades, where there has not been a grizzly sighting since 1996:

“Grizzlies are a threat to livestock and to humans,” said John Stuhlmiller, the director of government relations at the Washington State Farm Bureau. “People might think they’re neat and they might want to go see them in the zoo, but in the wild they’re not a friendly, cuddly creature.”

People whose livelihoods are not threatened by predators do not get it, Mr. Stuhlmiller said. “If my 401(k) was being raided by grizzly bears, I would think differently,” he said.

We'll leave aside the further irony that an Alaskan governor-turned-performer has anointed her favored political players as "Grizzlies" while trying to get government out of the way of industry decimation of grizzly habitat.

The case for campaign finance reform, Exhibit #1,217.

This from today's NYT:

"A ballot initiative to suspend a milestone California law curbing greenhouse gas emissions is drawing a wave of contributions from out-of-state oil companies."

BP's threat that an offshore drilling ban would prevent it from making oil spill payouts,

as reported in the NYT, is like something from a bad mafia movie.

How much lower can this bottom-feeder sink?

Skeptical about sunny BP oil spill reports?

Read this.

What's kicking America's butt about capitalism

is that system's inherent quality of exhausting that by which it prospers. As in land. As in buffalo. As in fisheries. As in forests. As in oil. As in human potential.

Today I am looking at an August 6 story in the Baltimore Sun about the degradation of Deep Creek Lake, a man-made tourist haven in western Maryland that is suffering fish kills and algae blooms after a 50% growth in new homes there in the past 25 years. The state, in bed with campaign-financing developers, is mouthing concern but doing little.

Right now I can see three possible survivable exits from American capitalism's built-in self-destructiveness:

1.) A massive grassroots movement arises, demanding campaign finance reform and/or public policy divorced from money.
2.) A phenomenally charismatic leader arises who inspires such a movement.
3.) The economy and/or infrastructure implode so spectacularly that reforms that were previously viewed by the mainstream as radical are recognized as essential for national survival.

Other than that, I think we're slated to be part of the planet's self-recycling project.