COTW: Not Bad for a Pet Rock!

Gold, constantly trashed by stock shills and despite frequent stock market goosing by the central bank, has outperformed stocks (represented by the S&P 500) since 1967:

Here is a simple truth: owning gold does not generate enormous revenue for finance institutions like stock trading does. Fewer than 1% of investors own gold according to financial blog Zero Hedge. Want an investment tip? Buy gold before it gets too expensive.

'Toontime: The Plutocracy Wins, Again

credit: Michael Ramirez, Business Investors Daily

Yes, my friends the GOP, bless its capitalist soul, is stuck with 'the Donald' as its presidential nominee. After his sweep of the latest round of primaries, he has earned the right to call himself "presumptive" and his opponents "pathetic". A floor fight at the convention intending to deny him the crown will be disastrous for the Repugnants, alienating 'Donald' supporters who will vote for the almost as conservative 'Crooked Hillary' or stay home in retaliation. The polls show neither presumptive nominee is popular, so 'Merica once again will be the loser. Run, Bernie run!

credit: J.D. Crowe, Alabama Media Group

New Zealand Breeds More Kakapos

New Zealand researchers are over the moon about the record number of Kakapo chicks hatched this year.  Thirty-seven have survived so far making a record season in more than twenty years of conservation.  The Kakapo (Strigops habroptilus) is New Zealand's rare, endemic parrot.  Because it cannot fly, the ground dwelling, nocturnal parrot succumbed to introduced predators, human hunters and loss of old growth forests where it lives. Once found all over the two main islands the world's heaviest parrot numbers about 125 is now protected on a few predator-free islets.  They disappeared from the North Island in 1840.  At one point they were thought to be extinct, but a male and female were found on Stewart Island in the 70's. They reached their lowest number of 18 in 1977.

Rangers use technology to keep track of the remaining birds, record which parrots are mating and brooding behavior.  All known kakapo have names too.  Their data is transmitted by satellite to kakapo conservation headquarters.  Talk about being watched!  The hope is that the birds will increase to sufficient number that they can be left to their own devises in the wild.  The intense conservation efforts include genome sequencing of every known kakapo, artificial insemination and supplementary feeding to increase productivity.

San Francisco Goes Solar

More: According to the respected environmental group, Center for Biological Diversity, ten states are blocking the deployment of solar power on a large scale to replace fossil fuel power generation. Most of them are sunny states with a potential to generate 35% of rooftop solar power in the US but only have 3% of the total capacity installed. These states definitely receive F's for failure: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee and Virginia. Is it merely coincidence that most of these are southern, politically conservative states? NOT.

Solar power has inexplicably gotten caught up in 'Merica's on-going culture wars along with public restrooms. Alternative energy sources, despite the existential threat of global warming, are still identified by sections of the country as 'hippie' nonsense. Something for Californians to play with, but not for serious people bent on making a living. Too bad for US. The fact is resistance to free solar energy is building in boardrooms too. Of the states with net metering legislation in place, half have encountered political opposition intended to weaken or replace the laws that allow consumers to sell back excess energy production to the corporate owned grid.

{25.04.16}The San Francisco Board of Supervisors adopted new rules last week requiring all new buildings under ten stories to be equipped with solar panels. The rule will allow the city to reach its goal of 100% renewable energy use by 2020. Two other California cities, Lancaster and Sebastopol, have adopted similar legislation, but San Francisco is the first metropolis to take such action. The rule builds on state law requiring 15% of new roof space to be exposed to sunlight to allow future installation of solar panels.

A report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory says that if all available rooftops were fitted with solar panels, the United States could generate 40% of its annual energy consumption or about 1,181gW of power. The three year study employed LIDAR and GPS to map 128 US cities down to the square meter. Using computer simulation researchers estimated the amount of power that could be generated on identified rooftop space and extrapolated those numbers into a national estimate. Surprisingly two northeast cities ranked high in solar energy capability. Concord, New Hampshire rated 72% of its needs could be met with solar energy while Buffalo, New York rated 68%.  Mission Viejo, CA topped the list of cites with 88% potential renewable energy supply.

30 Year Anniversary of Chernobyl

Thirty years ago a nuclear accident occurred during experimental operation of nuclear power unit four at Chernobyl, Ukraine.  The ensuing meltdown of an entire generating plant and the release of huge amounts of radiation into the atmosphere (400 more times the amount released over Hiroshima) have left a poisonous legacy that continues to haunt the continent of Europe.   The 2600 square kilometer exclusion zone established after the disaster will be unfit for human habitation for the next 20,000 years should humanity manage to avoid its own annihilation for that long. Thirty years after the explosion milk produced at the border of the exclusion zone contains ten times the acceptable level of radioactive elements according to testing conducted by AP.

a band of feral Przewalski horses

Like human survivors of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, animals and plants exhibit varying abilities to resist the effects of irradiation. Mammals exposed at Chernobyl exhibit eye cataracts and have smaller brains while many birds suffer malformed sperm. In the most radioactive areas about 40% of birds are completely sterile. Tumors of various types are also prevalent in plants and animals in areas receiving the heaviest fallout. All major groups of animals studied show declines in population and serious genetic damage. But not all species are affected similarly. Wolves seem to be unaffected by radiation levels, and there is a well documented increase in the number of game animals such as elk, boar and brown bear in less exposed areas of the ecosystem abandoned by man. There is controversy in the scientific community over the health status of animals reoccupying the zone. There is no denying, however, the Chernobyl disaster wreaked havoc on a pine forest ecosystem*. A thousand acres of the Red Forest perished and the land around the destroyed reactor turned into a desolate, toxic moonscape. Four square miles of topsoil was scraped off by heavy machinery and buried as contaminated waste.

Currently there are more than 400 nuclear power plants in operation around the world, and despite adverse economics 165 more are planned or ordered. The legacy of Chernobyl should be that these plants pose a present threat to Earth's well-being and consequently to humanity. US Person is proud to have participated in citizen opposition to this ill-advised method of power generation. The unlimited promise of the atom was touted for three decades after WWII by mega-corporations like GE, Westinghouse and Brown & Root, but the 'too cheap to meter' electricity generated by these ticking time bombs has, after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima proved atomic power to be too risky to operate. Yet the captured NRC is in the process of re-licensing every US nuke in operation (99) for a life span of 60 years, two decades beyond original design capacity.  It is no mystery why the nuclear power industry cannot buy private insurance for its business.

*Not to mention the havoc visited on the human population of the region. According to a 2001 conference in Kiev on the subject of Chernobyl and its aftermath, the Soviet Union mobilized 800,000 young men from all over the nation to put out the radioactive fire and entomb the plant.  Already, one-third of the "liquidators" are dead, but these figures have never been published. Of the registered Ukrainian liquidators, 94% are ill. A press release from Ukraine's embassy in Paris in 2005 acknowledged 2,646,106 Ukrainians were victims of the Chernobyl disaster.  One third of these were children.

'Toontime: Finishing the Race

a young socialist, Bernie Sanders

The mass media hacks and party controllers want Bernie to give up.  His loss in the New York primary was expected, but Bernie Sanders has never been an insider in the Democratic Party.  He came to politics by way of Vermont's Liberty Union Party and only gave up those credentials when he concluded that third-party participation is a dead-end in 'Merica's political duopoly.  Simply put he cannot quit the race because he now has a responsibility to represent the approximately 20% of the electorate who want a federal government focused on social justice, not corporate profits. Unfortunately there are a lot more 'Mericans that are afraid to say so. Kuznet's economic analysis was tainted by Cold War propaganda: a rising tide lifts some boats much, much more than others.  Or As Marx artfully and perhaps correctly put it, "What the bourgeoisie, above all, produce are their own gravediggers."

credit: Jeff Danziger

Criminal Charges in Flint Water Crisis

The Flint Michigan water crisis produced its first criminal charges Wednesday against state and city officials who handled the city's switch from Detroit water to the Flint River.  A sharp increase in the acidity of the municipal water supply increased the rate of corrosion in the city's antiquated lead pipe distribution system causing some residents to suffer from lead poisoning.  Officials sought to minimize the public health hazard of lead contamination and even distorted water test results.  The charges brought by the state's attorney general against two state water district officials and one city utilities manager included felony official misconduct for misleading the EPA and evidence tampering.  The attorney general felt compelled to claim the state's criminal justice system was not broken when announcing the charges against the relatively low-level "career bureaucrats", and that these charges were not the last in an ongoing investigation.  The Republican governor has received a great deal of criticism for the crisis including calls from Democratic presidential candidates to resign.  A review panel appointed by the governor lay most of the blame for the scandal on state officials.  The report said the governor's office staff adopted a "whack-a-mole" approach to dealing with persistent negative reports about the problem.  It also added that Flint's lead contamination was an example of environmental injustice in the which the poor are disproportionately impacted by pollution.  The governor has pledged to drink Flint municipal water for a month.  He did not say whether his stunt would be recorded.