Volunteer Work Parties

1PM to 5:00 PM
Every Saturday
1320 8th Ave SE Olympia

RSVP at Bread & Roses' website

Saturday Supper

The first week of spring is shaping up to be a busy one at the city of Olympia.

• A guided walk at Watershed Park with park ranger Todd Smith, Wednesday at Noon
• Dedication ceremonies for the new Plinths at Percival (now there's a word for you), Tuesday at 3:30 p.m.
• Open House and public meeting on the draft Parks, Arts & Recreation Plan, Wednesday, 6:30 p.m.
• Arbor Day Tree Planting honoring former Mayor Mark Foutch, Saturday the 27th at 10:00 a.m.
• Also on Saturday, Stream Team tree planting along Black Lake Ditch, 1:00 p.m.
• City Council and Port Commission special meeting, Thursday, March 25, 6:00 p.m., at the Phoenix Inn
• "Reinvent Your Lawn" workshop, Tuesday evening, 7:00 p.m.
• Plus the usual assortment of meetings.

Check out the City's new online calendar for details: http://olympiawa.gov/calendar.aspx

Cathie

I'm not sure what you're doing, but Oly Hackbloc has been busy
celebrating sunshine week, a week that celebrates transparency in
governments.

Unlike most organizations who have their members dress up in suits and
talk about the importance of transparency, we have been hard at work
obtaining government records and putting them online. Over the past
three months, we've sent public records requests to every sheriff
department in the state for emails, payroll lists, cell phone numbers,
internal phone directories, records indexes, and administrative records
processing manuals. They're all online at
http://mynetblog.com/media/docs/massrequest. We also uploaded hundreds
if not thousands of pages of records from the City of Tacoma to
http://mynetblog.com/media/docs/tacomadocs. Appeal after appeal, these
are the records we have now and more trickle in every day.

We've also set up a wiki at http://mynetblog.com/records where people
can learn how to make public records requests, find sample letters,
upload their records, look at other records, and collectively analyze
data obtained from government agencies in Washington state like state
agencies, state colleges, public ports, city and county governments, and
police departments. All of these records will be indexed by Google and
made available to anybody searching for their contents (such as a
particular officer who may or may not send racist emails to their
colleagues, tainting their testimony in court). We need help getting
more records, analyzing them, and making the wiki look pretty.

From crooksandliars.com.

Here are some recent photos from around town, including the new Moon.

Remember, tonight is the Peace Vigil at Percival Landing, from 4:30 to 6. It looks like it is going to be a great day weather-wise, so consider stopping by and holding a sign for peace and reconciliation. Check out the great scene. The Artesian Rumble Arkestra will most likely be there!

mathias

einmaleins

Help! Does anybody have a live trap that I can borrow to catch my pet rat? He is a small rat, so the trap would have to work for a mouse-sized rodent. I would be extremely grateful for the favor. I let him outside in the sunshine yesterday, and he decided to run under the house. I am thinking about building a live trap, but if somebody has one that I can borrow that would be much appreciated! I live near Harrison and Division and can pick-up/drop-off anywhere in Oly/Tum/Lac by bike/bus. Thx!

From Counterpunch.org:

March 18, 2010 The Meaning of the Cave In
Kucinich and the Media

By DAVID SWANSON

When I worked for Dennis Kucinich's presidential campaign in 2003, he routinely won the most applause at debates but was minimized or entirely left out of the next day's stories in the corporate media. This meant that peace, and fair trade, and single-payer healthcare were left out too. At one debate at the University of New Hampshire, Kucinich pushed back.

Ted Koppel of ABC opened the debate with questions about endorsements. The second round of questions was about standing in the polls. The third was about the campaigns' bank accounts. One had to wonder when, if ever, the debate would touch on, you know, what the candidates intended to do if elected. Kucinich cut Koppel off, saying:

"I want the American people to see where media takes politics in this country. We start talking about endorsements, now we're talking about polls and then talking about money. When you do that you don't have to talk about what's important to the American people."

The applause for this was so intense that the other candidates on the stage started joining in the media bashing. Kucinich had briefly changed the narrative from a horse race to a demand for decent political reporting.

That's what he should have done on Wednesday when he flipped to support a disastrous health insurance bill. Rather than talking about the legitimacy of the presidency, Kucinich should have talked about the illegitimacy of the current narrative in the corporate media.

... read the rest: David Swanson: Kucinich and the Media

I read an article by John Dodge in yesterday's Olympian. It was about an expansion of the 550 megawatt Satsop gas powered electrical generating station. It's an interesting article for sure. It made me think.

The article includes a statement by local economist Jim Lazar. The statement by Lazar was about the important role of gas plants, like the one at Satsop, in a sustainable energy future. Gas plants could fill an important niche in filling in gaps where less harmful sources of electricity, like wind-power, become inconsistent or unreliable.

I wonder if there might be other technologies that could be available to fill in gaps - even before resorting to these giant gas turbines. For example, I think of a technology I saw one time on the discovery channel many years ago.