I created a petition to John Fischer, Mass Dept of Environmental Protection and Governor Deval Patrick which says:

“Do not lift the moratorium on incinerators in Massachusetts as long as there are far better alternatives to incineration.”

The people who run the SignOn petition web site have said, If you get 20 signatures on your petition, we’ll email it to at least 1,000 people in your area to help it grow (assuming of course that it’s consistent with MoveOn’s progressive values).

Will you sign this petition? Click here:

http://signon.org/sign/keep-the-incinerator – Pardon the misleading shortening of the URL.  SignOn truncated it just before the keyword.  It should have been  keep-the-incinerator-moratorium

After reading the story Barracuda Security Equipment Contains Hardcoded Backdoors, I immediately put these products on my s-t list.  My worry is how to remember that these products are on my list for as long as the problem exists.  I am afraid I might make a purchase after I have forgotten this story.

This is one reason to post this story on my blog and other pages that I have on the internet.  I hope this sticks in my mind.  Maybe yours, too.

Reader WayneP sent me a link to the item Nicholas Eberstadt: Yes, Mr. President, We Are a Nation of Takers.

A growing body of empirical evidence points to increasing dependency on state largess. The evidence documents as well a number of perverse and disturbing changes that this entitlement state is imposing on society.

I decided to do a little research on this item.  So far I have found The Big Lie About the “Entitlement State” .

Is the view that “entitlements”—government programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—“will bankrupt the country” a “sensible conclusion”? No. It’s scare-mongering of the “OH MYGOD WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!” variety, completely unjustified by a sober look at data on government transfer payments between 1960 and 2010.

This second article is not a direct refutation of everything in the first article, far from it.  However it does delve a little deeper into the interpretation of raw numbers that might seem very scary if you leave out certain relevant context.

Obviously more research needs to be done to figure out which story is closer to reality, if in fact either story is anywhere near reality.

Do you ever wonder with the share of wealth and income migrating to the upper few percent in this country over the last 30 or more years, who are the real takers?  Well, at least who are the more successful takers?

How about the above for some undefined data taken out of context? Make of this what you will.

Here is an email I received from Elizabeth Warren on her view of the recent filibuster reform. I am glad to see that she realizes that this is but a first step in the process.

Steven, I’m disappointed by the filibuster reform deal we passed in the Senate last night. Since Election Day, hundreds of thousands of people all across the country have spoken out for big, bold rules changes to stop Senate gridlock. That’s not the bill we voted for in the Senate yesterday, and that’s why I’m really disappointed. But some change is better than no change at all. If my new colleagues can compromise to reduce the use of the filibuster, even just a little, then it’s a step forward. I’m new to the Senate, but I’m not naive. What happens if the new filibuster deal doesn’t work? What if the Republicans go straight back to the same playbook? Then we keep on fighting for more changes until we get it right. This vote shows that we need to remain vigilant, we need to work hard, and we need to stand strong for what we believe in. We got some change, and we’re not giving up. I want you to know that your participation made a difference. Without you — and thousands of other people — we’d have nothing and no hope for ending the gridlock. Now we have something, and we’re staying on high alert for what comes next. Thanks for being a part of this, Elizabeth

Daily Kos has the article Takeaways from the filibuster fight.  The author starts with the following:

Okay, before we decide once and for all whether this is a win or a loss, there are a few things I want out on the table. And the first point, appropriately enough, is that whenever you’re talking about the Senate, since the answer to any question about it is either “well, yes and no,” or, “it depends,” the answer to whether this is a win or a loss will be the same. Yes and no. And, it depends.

So, you know you are in for a long read before you find out.  To cut to the chase, I think the answer is that it was a fair start, but we have more work to do.

Rolling Stone has the article ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Is Osama bin Laden’s Last Victory Over America by Matt Taibbi.

Now we have this movie out that seems to celebrate the use of torture against Arabs, and we’re nominating it for Oscars. Bigelow can say that “depiction is not endorsement,” but how does she think audiences will receive it in the Middle East? Are they going to sell lots of popcorn in Riyadh and Kabul during the waterboarding scenes?

Besides not wanting to see torture scenes, the bottom line, as Taibbi describes it above, is one reason we won’t be seeing this movie.

Perhaps I grew up on too many movies about World War II where we were taught to hate the Nazis because of their use of torture.  I can live with that.  I’d hate to think the next generations will be taught to love America because we use torture.  What is this world coming to?

RogerS lent me a copy of his DVD of Heist: Who Stole The American Dream?

The movie is best exsplained by its synopsis.

SYNOPSIS

HEIST: Who Stole the American Dream? is stunning audiences across the globe as it traces the worldwide economic collapse to a 1971 secret memo entitled Attack on American Free Enterprise System. Written over 40 years ago by the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, at the behest of the US Chamber of Commerce, the 6-page memo, a free-market utopian treatise, called for a money fueled big business makeover of government through corporate control of the media, academia, the pulpit, arts and sciences and destruction of organized labor and consumer protection groups.

But Powell’s real “end game” was business control of law and politics. HEIST’s step by step detail exposes the systemic implementation of Powell’s memo by BOTH U.S. political parties culminating in the deregulation of industry, outsourcing of jobs and regressive taxation. All of which led us to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the continued dismantling of the American middle class. Today, politics is the playground of the rich and powerful, with no thought given to the hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans. No other film goes as deeply as HEIST in explaining the greatest wealth transfer of our time. Moving beyond the white noise of today’s polarizing media, HEIST provides viewers with a clear, concise and fact- based explanation of how we got into this mess, and what we need to do to restore our representative democracy.

If you know how this country got in the mess we are in, this is a good refresher course. There may be some details you missed. In that case the movie fills in some of the gaps. If you think the cause of troubles is that Social Security and Medicare are too generous for us to be able to afford, what an eye opener this movie will be for you.

The movie is so distressing, I was almost going to joke that RogerS turns out to be no friend of mine.

The Massachusetts Chapter of The Sierra Club has an item about Backing the Ban on Incinerators.

Tell MassDEP Commissioner Kenneth Kimmell to maintain the ban on incineration and enforce waste bans. Comments will be accepted until February 15, 2013, 5pm, and sent to: John Fischer at dep.swm@state.ma.us or by mail to: John Fischer, MassDEP, One Winter Street, Boston, MA 02108. Please copy the Sierra Club on your communication at office@sierraclubmass.org.

As an example, here is the email that I wrote to the MASS DEP.

Subject:	Comments about the proposed lifting of the moratorium on incinerators
Date:	Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:48:14 -0500
From:	Steven Greenberg <steve@ssgreenberg.name>
To:	dep.swm@state.ma.us
CC:	office@sierraclubmass.org

John Fischer,

Do not lift the moratorium on incinerators in Massachusetts.

In the Tellus Report, commissioned by the Commonwealth, there is all the necessary information on why the moratorium should not be lifted. Not only did Massachusetts commission this report, but the link takes you to the report posted on the Massachusetts web site.

The department that commissioned this report owes us all an explanation of why they would take action that is contrary to the technical, environmental, and economic information that they already have at their disposal.

Until such explanation is forthcoming, the moratorium should remain or perhaps be turned into a permanent ban.

/Steven Greenberg

KirstieP has sent me information about this issue.  One item is the press release from Clean Water Action, State backs away from garbage reduction policy.

Three years after MassDEP drafted a statewide Solid Waste Master Plan for reducing trash called “Path to Zero Waste,” the Patrick Administration appears to have veered off the path.

The Administration has announced it will soon release a new proposal to lift the 22-year-old moratorium on more incinerators.DEP asserts that the reason for the unexpected policy shift is that Massachusetts is running out of landfill space and needs more ways to dispose of garbage. But environmental and public interest groups protest that new disposal sites are unnecessary because MassDEP could conserve landfill space by enforcing its own regulations against disposal of certain recyclable materials at transfer stations, landfills, and incinerators. The list of materials that are banned from disposal includes commonly trashed items such as paper, cardboard, wood, bottles, cans and more.

The incinerator companies and their lobbyists probably have the obvious ulterior motives for pushing for the lifting of the moratorium.

I suspect that the public could be easily fooled into thinking incineration is a good idea because the waste seems to disappear when incinerated.  Some of it may no longer be visible, which is the true definition of disappear, but that does not mean it doesn’t exist.  Except in nuclear reactions, matter does not go away or be turned into energy.

If you weigh the waste after it is incinerated and include the weight of what goes up the smokestack, then you won’t find any loss of mass.  It’s all still there.

Some people are thinking of the air around us the way we used to think about rivers.  We used to think that you can dump your waste into rivers, and it will all be washed away and diluted,  We know now that their is a limit to how much we can put in a river before we exceed its capacity to dilute and wash away.  That started to become obvious when we could start to see the remains of what we had dumped into the rivers.  The diluting and washing away idea only works to postpone the time when we recognize that we have not solved the problem.

Some of the latest incinerator technology claims to get the particle size of the smokestack effluent down to sizes which are below what we normally think of as causing visible air-pollution.  That just means we can’t see it, but it doesn’t mean that it is no problem.  In fact, if it is problematical to put some of these toxins into solid waste landfills, then why would we want to set them loose in the air we breathe.

We are much better off keeping a close eye on the containment of the toxic solid waste that we cannot recycle or reuse, than we are to let it go into the wild, where we have little idea of where it is going or the harm that it is causing.

It may turn out that these nano-particles of incinerated waste are biologically more dangerous than the larger particle.  From a high-tech point of view, I know that issues are being raised about semiconductor nano-technology.  People are concerned that we do not have a thorough understanding of the consequences of nano-particles entering the body.  This concern is raised about things that are engineered to be helpful.  We should show at least as much concern about nano-particles of toxic material that were not ever intended to do good to the human body.

MaryA has provided me with the link to the Tellus Report, Assessment of Materials Management Options for the Massachusetts Solid Waste Master Plan Review.  The link is to the report as posted on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ own web site.  It was commissioned by the state and published in December of 2008.  So the state government cannot claim that it is unaware of this information.

The report’s disclaimer says:

This report was prepared by the Tellus Institute, a not-for-profit research and policy organization under a contract with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. The report (including its summary and analysis of information) is entirely the work of the Tellus Institute and its subcontractors on this project. The opinions expressed in this report are those of the Tellus Institute and do not necessarily reflect MassDEP policies.

There is a great 9 page executive summary at the beginning of this 68 page report.