I wish to stay in the Christmas spirit.

I want to look for happy news, hopeful news, hip news that does not bring one to merely bemoaning his alcoholic hangover arising from too much jolly.

I mean we have 8 days until cable pundits will have something to talk about that is real.

It is clear that there will be no news news on cable for a week or so.

Right now they are broadcasting more prison reality shows on MSNBC and CNN hosts their B team most of the time.

The Iowa Caucuses will meet and choose a proposed repub dictator.

The result of those votes will most probably mean nothing!

So let us move onto real news about things that involve real people in real

environments.

ENVIRONMENT

Vermont, hosting one of my favorite United States Senators of all time, is bucking the trend of some of those repub states created in the 2010 elections.

Well Vermont has a hell of an energy problem. And whilst its neighbor, the repub ridden NH is focused upon works of art that might be commie in nature as well as other irrelevant issues, Vermont decided to look ahead in May of this year:

Vermont’s energy reality is bleak: We Vermonters are dependent on fossil fuels to meet 99 percent of our transportation needs and well over 80 percent to meet our space heating needs, and these energy sources are becoming increasingly costly.

That means we face some very difficult energy choices. Fortunately, people have been getting active. Over 100 community energy committees, for example, are leading Vermont’s transition to a new kind of energy future. They are undertaking initiatives to reduce energy consumption, save money and develop renewables by weatherizing municipal buildings, tightening up neighbors’ homes, installing solar panels on community schools and much more.

http://www.revermont.org/blog/

So in May, the Governor of Vermont actually signed a real energy bill. I mean the Vermonters decided they would band together and take a look at WHAT they could do to change this situation!

Gov. Peter Shumlin wants the state to satisfy 90 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2050, largely eliminating its reliance on fossil fuels.

Shumlin joined Public Service Commissioner Elizabeth Miller and other officials on Thursday to unveil a comprehensive energy plan that lifts what had been a moratorium on construction of renewable energy projects on state land; calls for more use of electric vehicles coupled with energy efficiency in the electric sector; says large-scale hydroelectric power like that imported from Canada should be considered renewable; and calls for expansion of piped natural gas in the state...

We made the Renewable Energy Atlas of Vermont to show how renewable energy flows through Vermont. We think the Atlas is a cool, new way of depicting a ton of information- and we’ve received inquiries from across the United States, Canada, the U.K. and Australia from organizations that want to duplicate our effort.  We worked with the Vermont Center for Geographic Information and Fountains Spatial, Inc. to make the Atlas, and drew on the expertise of several REV members during our development process.

Wiki tells me that there are only 2/3 of a million folks residing in the entire state.

I sympathize with all of those residents because they face the same winters I do. Ha

But I really sympathize with a community that wishes to face the future and see what they might do about a serious problem that faces our entire country.

Global warming is a serious issue, but what Vermont has done is faced this issue by dealing with problems that face the ordinary citizen. Wind power and solar power are energy makers that cut CO2 emissions. And so several real problems facing Vermont and this country will be ameliorated and Vermont might represent an experiment that other states might wish to emulate over the coming decades depending upon the results—of course.

INFORMATION AGE

The infamous MIT brings us happy news.

While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge — and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught.

This is a big big deal to me!

I have written often about how there is all this information on the internet free to members of the public who are curious enough to look for it.

But there is so much more information out there, duly organized and ready to be consumed by members of the public who wish to learn.

Lately there have been more and more barriers to this free flow of information. Even Salon wants my money.

Now these MIT courses are not going to necessarily lead to a degree. But damn! I mean Gates and Jobs and a host of others never even bothered to get a damn degree. Hahahaha

I dunno. This little squib made me happy.

Gang Violence

Gang violence is no laughing matter.

I have not researched the number of deaths in this country from gang violence in any thorough manner but it appears that 10,000 to 15,000 people died last year alone from gang violence that I assume would include the innocent bystanders.

http://www.chacha.com/question/how-many-people-world-wide-have-died-from-gang-violence

I can tell you that our government tells us that some 34,000 people in the US died from gun violence in 1996.

http://www.ojjdp.gov/pubs/gun_violence/sect01.html

Both links demonstrate only one year's statistics with regard to this issue.

Well this fellow by the name of David Kennedy (make sure when you google that you find the right David Kennedy) decided to look at the problem without regard to politics. Even though Mr. Kennedy's proposed 'cures' include a lot of politics.

Finding a way to end gang violence is as easy as offering gang members a "way out."

At least according to David Kennedy, author of "Don't Shoot" and the man behind Operation Ceasefire, a long-running program intended to curb inner-city violence.

Kennedy says many gang members are "scared to death themselves, they just don't know a way out."

To reduce gang violence, cities need to give gang members an alternative, he claims. They can start by identifying the gangs and bringing together communities, social service groups and law enforcement organizations.

"You sit the gang members down you say, 'Your community needs you to stop, we want to help you, and the next gang that kills somebody gets all of our attention,'" said Kennedy.

"It actually turns out to be not that hard to fix this stuff."

So I found this rather long article focused upon the intersection of politics and gang violence.

Baskin—who was himself a candidate in the 16th Ward aldermanic race, which he would lose—was happy to oblige. In all, he says, he helped broker meetings between roughly 30 politicians (ten sitting aldermen and 20 candidates for City Council) and at least six gang representatives. That claim is backed up by two other community activists, Harold Davis Jr. and Kublai K. M. Toure, who worked with Baskin to arrange the meetings, and a third participant, also a community activist, who requested anonymity. The gang representatives were former chiefs who had walked away from day-to-day thug life, but they were still respected on the streets and wielded enough influence to mobilize active gang

members.

I am reminded of Boss Tweed and the Gangs_of_New_York; going back 150 years.

There is a reality out there. Deal with it!

Fine we have 3 million folks in prison or jail and another 4 million on probation or parole. Shall we spend trillions to put another ten million in irons?

Oh but guilty folks will get away with felonies.

Well, consult Taibbi about Wall Street some time!

Kennedy has a book out on this subject and he is actually doing something about issues he writes about.

I mean, I like this dude!

TIME.

We are using a system that breaks time. The quality of time is continuity. This is why a majority in the international community want to change the definition of UTC and drop the leap second.

But not everyone is in favor of the change.
There is some passionate opposition, especially about the fact that the link between international time and astronomical time will be lost because, little by little, they will diverge. Yet even today we are not living exactly on astronomical time—where noon is when the sun is directly overhead.

If you take into account national time zones, people in the U.K. can be shifted up to 2½ hours from astronomical time. In France it's 3 hours. The 1-minute difference we will see in about 100 years due to the dropping of the leap second is nothing in comparison.

In the future, when there is a big divergence between the astronomical time scale and the atomic one, won't an adjustment be needed?
It was agreed some years ago that we should not think of any kind of adjustment in the near future, the next 100 or 200 years. In about the year 2600 we will have a half-hour divergence. However, we don't know how time-keeping will be then, or how technology will be. So we cannot rule for the next six or seven generations.

Just to finish up.

We still, as a global tribe, are not all in-sync concerning the all important question:

WHAT THE HELL TIME IS IT?
 

I just found it interesting.

So, during this Holiday Season, I have stayed away from obscenities and blasphemies and rage against the forces of evil.

Pretty good huh?

HAPPY HOLIDAYS.