GranolaFag Weekly

From msnbc.com

Gulf Coast residents were on watch and oil companies evacuated hundreds of nonessential workers as forecasters said Thursday that a storm system now off Florida could strengthen as it moves west.

I love how the fact that another hurricane might not only kill thousands of innocent people, but it’s not a news story until THE OIL COMPANIES have to evacuate workers ( I have a question: If they’re not essential, why are the workers there in the first place?). God forbid the giant corporations should lose some of their billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. It would be areal shame if their CEOs had to sell one of their vacation houses because of severe weather their own companies are largely responsible for in the first place.

We never had hurricanes like this before, how can anyone face the evidence (Hasn’t everyone seen An Inconvenient Truth by now?) and still insist that we’re not in trouble?  How can anyone delude themselves like that? I’m not talking about backwoods rednecks, either, there are tons of people out there that live in real cities and have access to real newspapers and the Internet (the NYT just quit charging for content)  yet still fall victim to the lunatics and corporation-sponsored disinformation? Some people just refuse to face the truth and it makes me pity them.

The National Hurricane Center was sending an aircraft into the system later Thursday to get more precise data. 

Good plan, Einstein.  Burning fossil fuels are  what got us into this mess in the first place and now you want to put even more of them directly into the hurricane??? Who is in charge of the National hurricane Center?  Probably one of W’s idiot rich Yale buddies who doesn’t know the first thing about science or weather. Maybe we should dump some plutonium in there, too!

In New Orleans, emergency preparedness officials urged residents to begin making evacuation plans in case the system develops into a tropical storm or worse.

“We want citizens to understand their personal responsibility of developing their own plan,” said Col. Terry Ebbert, the city’s homeland security director. He urged them to buy supplies and be ready to care for themselves.

Ha! Way to blame the victims and shift the burden to the poor people of New Orleans.  Isn’t that what they elected you to do, Col. Terry Ebbert? Now people are supposed to buy their own supplies and ride the storm out on their own? I bet if Halliburton sold buses there would be thousands of them ready to take the citizens to safety. Well, maybe not, since they’re black and, to quote my main man Kanye: George Bush doesn’t care about black people. He nailed it right there, anyone who doesn’t get it after that is a lost cause.

The weather system also led oil companies to fly nonessential workers off of offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, but only a small amount of production had been stopped so far.

Nice, the oil  company employees get first class treatment and a free flight home (except for the essential ones necessary to keep the blood money flowing) but the working class folks in New Orleans are left to fend for themselves with whatever supplies their food stamps will buy for them and their family. I am literally sick to my stomach thinking about it.

I like to end on a happy note,  but I don’t know if I can find a silver lining in this cloud of gasoline smoke. I’ll try, anyway:  If a few thousand MORE people get killed in this hurricane maybe this will be the wakeup call America needs and this whole disaster might have actually been worth it.

From The Baltimore Sun

Suburban sprawl is the missing link in climate change, a group of urban planning researchers said today, warning in a new report that global warming can only be slowed by changing development patterns to reduce the need for driving.

It’s simple and obvious solutions like these that our fearless leaders so blatantly ignore in their rabid quest for profit at the expense of our environment and the lives of the working class.

Fact: Global warming is real and is caused by humans, mostly the United States

Fact: Fat-cat racist corporations like Exxon/Mobil and Chevron/Texaco spend BILLIONS of dollars a year on misinformation campaigns designed to keep the public in the dark so that the CEO’s stock options will go up a quarter of a point

Fact : If we don’t do something soon life as we know it on Earth will cease to exist. The planet has never* experienced a crisis of this magnitude before and it is up to our generation to save it.

Simple ideas like this not only make sense, they save money in the long run. If everybody lived in properly planned cities we wouldn’t need cars or even buses, we could walk or ride super-efficient vehicles like Segways wherever we needed to go.

Building homes and businesses closer together, with more opportunities to walk to work and to shop, could reduce driving by 20 to 40 percent, the report argues. Residents in compact urban neighborhoods with access to public transportation typically drive a third fewer miles than do auto-dependent suburbanites, it points out.

It seems like I see African-Americans utilizing public transportation and walking or cycling much more often than I do European-Americans. Just another example of the valuable lessons we can learn from minorities. I’ve always said they had more to share with us than Jazz and Maya Angelou. We shall overcome!

*except for the meteor that killed the dinosaurs and the flood in Genesis