FBI on the Trail of Dangerous Vegan Potluck Dinner Attendees

Dayum! So apparently we’re not the only ones who think militant vegans can get a little crazazy – the FBI is on their trail, too. Those wily wilesters are looking for a few good moles who aren’t afraid of stepping into those infamous dens of dissent – vegan potluck dinners.

College student Paul Carroll was called into a meeting at a coffee house with the campus police sergeant and a female FBI special agent. Carroll had previously been charged with a misdemeanor for spray-painting the inside of a campus elevator, and knew the police officer from when he turned himself in. What they had to say once he got there wasn’t exactly what he was expecting.

From City Pages:

“She told me that I had the perfect ‘look,’” recalls Carroll. “And that I had the perfect personality—they kept saying I was friendly and personable—for what they were looking for.”

What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant—someone to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement. The effort’s primary mission, according to the Minneapolis division’s website, is to “investigate terrorist acts carried out by groups or organizations which fall within the definition of terrorist groups as set forth in the current United States Attorney General Guidelines.”

Carroll would be compensated for his efforts, but only if his involvement yielded an arrest. No exact dollar figure was offered.

“I’ll pass,” said Carroll.

Those vegans. You gotta watch out for them, seriously, what with their non-leather accessories, tofu and almond milk. They are some dangerous mofos who won’t hesitate to cut you if you dare to pledge your support for meat eating in their presence. As we speak, they’re covering their tracks so the FBI doesn’t find their secret vegan activist hideaways complete with seed bombs, trays of dairy-free bakery treats and posters of famous vegans Alicia Silverstone and Woody Harrelson. They are armed with PETA brochures and planning a terrorist infiltration of the Republican National Convention complete with dangerous ‘Go Vegan’ stickers and peacemongering propaganda.

Link [City Pages] via [BoingBoing]
Photo credit: Flickr user Joi

Big Shocker: EPA Chairman is Just a White House Puppet

Wow, this is so totally shocking. I mean, who knew that the White House pressures and at times, completely overrides the heads of various government agencies in favor of their own twisted agendas? Who would have thought that the United States government isn’t as democratic as it claims to be? I just fell out of my chair in shock.

From MSNBC:

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency [Stephen Johnson] came under sharp attack at a House hearing Tuesday, with Democratic lawmakers accusing him of repeatedly caving in to White House pressure on environmental issues such as global warming and a recently enacted health standard for smog.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the committee chairman, said depositions provided by senior EPA staff members suggest that Johnson had been overruled or heavily influenced by the White House on recent EPA decisions on the smog standard, its rejected of a waiver for California on global warming regulations, and the EPA ongoing deliberations on whether to regulate carbon dioxide.

“You have essentially become a figurehead,” Waxman told Johnson. “… In each case, you backed down.”

Crazy, man. What are we going to learn next – that our leaders take money from corporations to enact legislation that works in their favor? That they give large government contracts to companies they’re personally associated with, for their own financial gain? My confidence in the dedication of our government to protect and further the interests of the people is truly shaken.

Link [MSNBC]
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons & Wikimedia Commons

Libertarian Ocean City-States: The Wave of the Future?

Sick of the government? Uninterested in moving to another country? Well, if certain Silicon Valley millionaires have their way, you may have another choice! PayPal founder Peter Thiel has invested $500,000 into an organization that aims to create an experimental ‘seastead’: a permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters.

From Wired:

It might sound like the setting for the videogame Bioshock, but the institute isn’t playing around: It plans to splash a prototype into the San Francisco Bay within the next two years, the first step toward establishing deep-water city-states, or what it calls “seasteads” — homesteads on the high seas.

Instead of starting with a grand scheme worthy of a James Bond villain, the Institute is bringing an entrepreneurial, DIY mentality to creating oceanic city-states.

“There’s a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that’s not crazy,” said Joe Lonsdale, the institute’s chairman and a principal at Clarium Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.

In essence, the seastead would consist of a reinforced concrete tube with external ballasts at the bottom that could be filled with air or water to raise or lower the living platform on top.

The primary living space would be inside the tube, with the top platform reserved for gardens, buildings, solar panels, wind turbines and satellites. They plan to fly a ‘flag of convenience’ to protect them against governments that want to force their jurisdiction on them.

It does sound like a sci-fi movie! It’s a fascinating idea, to be sure. Starting small would certainly be the way to do it. I think a lot of environmentalists will be concerned about waste disposal and disturbing sea life, so it will be interesting to see how the ‘seasteaders’ aim to deal with those issues along with the many other obstacles they face.

Link [Wired]
Illustration by Valdemar Duran

Stupid Utility Rules: 612 Year Wait for New Minnesota Wind Projects

Tell me how much sense this makes: due to some major old school bureaucratic clusterfuckery there is now a 612 year waiting list to build renewable energy projects in Minnesota. That’s right, if you want to put up a nice clean wind farm up in Garrison Keillor’s home state you have until 2620 to get everything together. What’s the holdup?

The Midwest Independent Transmission System (MISA) is the group in charge of the power lines and decides which power generation project gets to connect to them. Their regulations say they have to take two years to review each application and that they can’t look at more than one app at a time.

Those rules worked back in the day when the only thing going up was big ass coal plants but it got bogged down quite a bit with a flood of new wind farms wanting on the grid. Even with smaller operators bending the law a bit by clumping their projects together in one application there’s at least a fifty year wait. How dumb is that? Dumb enough to expect it’ll get fixed soon, but still… wtf.

Link [Solve Climate] via EcoGeek

The Downside of Water Conservation: More Expensive H2O, Slashed Revenues

We all know we need to conserve water. The Southern and Southwestern parts of the United States are in the midst of a pretty good drought and Australia is coming around to the fact that the rains aren’t coming back anytime soon. Himalayan glaciers are melting, threatening the water sources for a good chunk of the world’s population and it’s not a stretch to say that the next big wars will be fought over H2O.

So it may come as a bit of a shock that some small municipalities are freaking out over how much less water their customers are using.

The problem for them is that the reduced consumption means reduced incoming revenue. Or as one water works czar Cliff Curtis says:

“Conservation is killing us.”

The city of Toronto, Canada has almost a billion dollars in repair work now the books but only saw revenue of $604M last year. Other Canadian regions are seeing the same problems as more citizens use less water and install water saving devices like low flow toilets.

To combat the budget shortfalls water czars and boards are being forced to raise water prices.

No one said it’s going to be easy to ease ourselves into a greener tomorrow and there will most certainly be hiccups and bumps along the way. Paying more for our water even as we use less seems to be one thing that we’re all going to have to deal with at some time. It’s certainly better than using up all the world’s clean freshwater in a frenzy of consumption.

Link [TheStar]