My man Al set the terms last week -- a 10 year goal of energy independence via sustainable energy production. There've been a couple of great diaries and stories recently that made mention of the Overton Window -- the middle ground between extremes, in terms of what can be achieved politically.

My favorite was Did Al Gore Move the Overton Window?, a great diary by caldreaming; s/he finds merit in a really smart framing methodology for arguing progressive positions (presented by Joe at the Rockridge Institute):

Present a Positive Moral Mission - with a moral problem, a solution, heros, and villains.

I think that structure could be put to use as a nice framing device for a few other giant, looming catastrophes on the horizon. I'll focus on one.

As I was doing some research for my main side project, a website on apocalyptic scenarios, I ran across a story that, as I read further, deeply troubled me. It was from a small paper in Colorado, the Durango Herald. Colorado is home of many natural-gas wells, and energy is a big part of Colorado's economy, so they pay attention to a different set of issues than the national news sectors do.

As I've written in earlier diaries, I gave $5 to the Republicans in 2000, and figure I've cost them three or four times that in mailings, energy, effort.

And consequently I get emails directly from "President George W. Bush" himself, personally.

Sometimes the emails are pretty cool. This one, with the subject line of the title, just came to me from Mr. 20% himself:

It's not Obama vs. McSame, but it's gotten my dander up, reading otherwise sensible diaries -- and even stories by Kos and others -- that demonstrate a misunderstanding of a fundamental element of written communication, and its importance. It's time for me to give it its due.

Yeah, I know, who cares about grammar? But we is learning, after all.

As part of my research on another project, I discovered a remarkable headline from ABS CBN News Online, in the Philippines:

No 'significant' release of toxic chemical yet: experts

Hell of a title. I couldn't help but read further. The lede was another inference- and fact-packed masterpiece:

It's only a small panic attack.

They happen, doing the work I do in my off hours.

It's about confluence, I suppose: a confluence of apocalyptic news stories that chill me:

As part of my research for another project, I found myself today somewhat astonished by this story:

From Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:
New research suggests that ocean temperature and associated sea level increases between 1961 and 2003 were 50 percent larger than estimated in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.... The research corrected for small but systematic biases recently discovered in the global ocean observing system, and uses statistical techniques that "infill" information in data-sparse regions. The results increase scientists' confidence in ocean observations and further demonstrate that climate models simulate ocean temperature variability more realistically than previously thought.

50 percent LARGER than estimated in the IPCC report!?!

The endless drumbeat of scary climate stuff just got scarier, for me:

From down under:

'No return' fears on climate change: The Age (Australia)
The world could be tracking towards irreversible climate change as warming takes place much quicker than previously thought, an Adelaide academic has warned. Climate change expert Barry Brook, of Adelaide University, told a Canberra conference [that] atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were headed towards 600 parts a million, and forecast global temperature increases of up to six degrees.... "We're seeing events predicted for the end of the 21st century happening already," Professor Brook said.... "We are at or exceeding the fossil-fuel-intensive scenario, which the latest IPCC report didn't cover because they thought it was too much," Dr Pittock said.

As part of another project that consumes me more and more, I ran across a story that called out for a diary, and an alert to to the DailyKos community.

MRSA -- methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or "Multidrug Resistant Staphylococcus aureus" -- is a scary bacterium. It is a variant of Staph that has evolved to withstand virtually all the antibiotics that we have. It's hard to treat, and really wicked:

Dr. Monina Klevens [of the CDC] examined the cases of the disease reported in hospitals, schools and prisons in one year and extrapolated that "94,360 invasive MRSA infections occurred in the United States in 2005; these infections were associated with death in 18,650 cases."

MRSA is the inevitable result of overuse of antibiotics, not only in humans, but also in agriculture, where antibiotics are often used "prophylactically" -- as a preventative, and to fatten up pigs and cows.

So this title jumped out at me:

Potentially fatal bacteria found in pigs, farmworkers [Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mon, Jun 9, 2008]

This afternoon I listened offhandedly (while doing much else), to the rerun of Fox News Sunday, and offhandedly heard Virginia governor Tim Kane saying something like:

Obama's plan is to tax new businesses and green businesses at 0%, while raising the capital gains taxes for other capital gains.

My jaw dropped open. This is news to me.

However, if this is the case, it's astonishingly smart. Which is, of course, the sort of thing I've started to expect of the Obama campaign.

But I've been searching all I can, and not finding anything outlining this program. Does someone have a link? I think this is possibly a Presidency-maker.

Why do I think it would it be smart? Five fundamental reasons:

Troops, The Independent (UK) has a sad little news story:

Paradise lost: climate change forces South Sea islanders to seek sanctuary abroad
After years of fruitless appeals for decisive action on climate change, the tiny South Pacific nation of Kiribati has concluded that it is doomed. Yesterday its President, Anote Tong, used World Environment Day to request international help to evacuate his country before it disappears.

Water supplies are being contaminated by the encroaching salt water, Mr Tong said, and crops destroyed. Beachside communities have been moved inland. But Kiribati – 33 coral atolls sprinkled across two million square miles of ocean – has limited scope to adapt. Its highest land is barely 6 feet above sea level.

These are refugees, my fellow soldiers -- not from a typhoon, or an earthquake. They are our own war refugees.

I'm no fun at parties anymore.

I'm like that guy whose only conversational gambit is to talk about the Spassky-Fisher match of 1973. Or the geek who has discovered SecondLife or WorldOfWarcraft. Or the airhead, who only wants to talk about celebrities, and other virtual worlds.

Or more to the point, that guy who has recently converted, and sees everything through the lens of the revealed.

In my case, that lens is cascading, endless bad news about species collapse, environmental degradation, peak oil and gas and phosphorus, toxic breaches and endocrine disruptions, and climate warming leading to ocean acidification. It's the human-made horrors of the last century.

... just what we all expect. Call on us to rise above expectations.

Acknowledge that we have tremendous challenges ahead. That we have serious national and global issues to confront. That we will need to sacrifice, to restore civilization, and lead the world to a better future.

What Obama will have confronting him (and us) from 2009 through 2016 are so deep, so awful, so deeply systemic, that he will need to have a landslide victory based on the truth.

That we will have to face up to:

Whether the next president is Obama or (cringe) McCain, quite apart from rebuilding the charred ethical wasteland of the Administrative branch of government, coping with the ruins of the housing market and its effects on the economy, and dealing with the aortic congestion caused by ever-increasing energy prices, he will be facing complex, system-wide, slow-motion apocalypses that will span his presidency.

I'm someone who has written programming code -- crappy code, but stuff which made other stuff, that didn't exist before, suddenly exist.

I know that it's possible to create amazing, transformative software, over something like a long weekend of code-writing -- meaning 72 hours with only a few dream-laden hours of sleep within it.

So here's what I want, from those who can write this kind of code: the software tool that could change the way I, and we, understand the world.

I want, over the Web, to partner with a FOX-ite, a neocon, a willing Republican participant in an amazing Web event: the pairing of me, with another from the other side.

Because I gave $25 to McCain in 2000, trying to stave off Bush (and back when he seemed to truly be a "straight talker," silly me), I'm on his email list. So I have received a fundraising letter with the subject line "My First Term."

Thought I'd share it with DKos, with the bolds as provided in the email; I've added some comments, [in brackets].

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) can raise my hackles. But only sometimes. Other times, I'm delighted by the creativity, ingenuity, and smarts of the technology and its scientists.

What scares me most, I've discovered while working on a related project, is idle blurring of the various issues involved with "Genetic Modification." When we speak as if it's all the same, and worse, when our leaders polarize the issue, then society is the worse for it. We need to acknowledge that it's not necessarily the process, but rather the implementation that is at issue.

On the one hand, you can have stupid GMO, as we have seen with Monsanto's proprietary "roundup ready" crop seeds -- corn, soybeans, and a few other crops they've developed, which can withstand Monsanto's herbicide Roundup™.

In the process of another project we're working on, my friend came across this astonishing story in UK's The Independent:

US plan to protect right whale from shipping blocked by Cheney

Efforts to protect the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale from being killed by ships are being blocked by Vice President Dick Cheney according to leaked documents.

A behind the scenes struggle is raging between the White House and US government scientists who want to force ships to slow down near the calving grounds of the almost extinct right whale.

While this story was diariedby The Baculum King on 4/30, the Independent story has more: