Don't Think - Zen & The Art Of Baseball

From Roch Kubatko's excellent blog on MASN, covering the Baltimore Orioles spring training:

Robert Andino collected two more singles yesterday to raise his spring average to .280. Each day seems to bring another two-hit game.

The easy explanation is he's not trying to hit every ball 500 feet. Andino has some pop, but it can't be forced.

Andino makes it sound even easier.

Me: "What adjustment did you make from earlier in the spring, when you got off to a slow start?"

Andino: "Don't think."

Andino was referring to himself, though I often take that advice.

"Just have fun and stop thinking at the plate. See it and hit it. When you're taught the game and you talk to Crow, everything you hear is easier said than done. But this game's a mind game. Once somebody gets in your mind, you've got to get back on track to get focused. Otherwise, it's not going to work out too good."

It's been working for Andino.

http://masnsports.com/2010/03/free-your-mind-and-the-rest-wi.html

Bumper Sticker

No Child Left With A Mind

Bumper Stickers

Culture Change
One Watershed At A Time

Hip Hop In Israel

From The New York Times:

August 16, 2004

Honk if You Love to Sing Bumper Stickers

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

JERUSALEM - Several days after Yitzhak Rabin was murdered in 1995 by an assassin opposed to the peace process, the Israeli author David Grossman was driving through a forest preserve just outside this city. He noticed a car stopped on the shoulder of the road and slowed to see what might be the matter. The motorist, he saw, was scraping off a bumper sticker that said, "Rabin Rotzeach'' ("Rabin is a Murderer").

At that moment Mr. Grossman, a novelist and essayist, fathomed the peculiar and intense importance of bumper stickers in Israel, where sometimes an entire car can be pasted with them, endorsing any cause from Palestinian statehood to the expulsion of Arabs to the coming of the Messiah. He began to scribble down examples, enlisted friends and family members to do the same, and ultimately collected 120 slogans, united only by their brevity and certitude.

Now he has transformed 54 of those phrases into the rhyming lyrics of a song, which has been recorded by one of Israel's leading rap groups, Hadag Nachash, and become the surprise pop-music hit of the season. Radio stations play it ubiquitously, and the album containing it has topped sales charts and sold 15,000 copies in only two months, the equivalent of 750,000 in the United States. To use another American equivalent: imagine the dazzling unlikeliness of Russell Banks having collaborated with Mos Def or Chuck D on a chart topper.

"Shirat Ha'Sticker'' ("The Sticker Song") is no mere novelty, however. It offers a kind of aural collage of the fractious and volatile political environment here. Over a Jamaican dub beat, the singer Sha'anan Streett chants slogans as irreconcilable as "A strong people makes peace," "No Arabs, no terror" and "Long live the king Messiah."

The song's refrain, an astringent bit of double-entendre, uses a bumper sticker created by animal-rights advocates to protest the force-feeding of geese, ''Kama roa efshar livloa'' ("How much evil can we swallow?"). In the hands of Mr. Grossman and Hadag Nachash, the words speak to the almost unbearable passion of political debate here, which, as with Rabin's killing, can shift from verbal violence into the lethal sort.

''When I had my list of stickers, I realized it's like a capsule of Israeliness, all the brutality and aggression and the need to get out of this situation,'' said Mr. Grossman, who is best known for magical-realistic novels like ''See Under: Love'' and volumes of left-of-center political essays, including last year's ''Death as a Way of Life.''

''The more the dead end of the situation grows, the more frustrated people become with their inability to influence it,'' he continued, in a telephone interview. "Few people on the left or the right are satisfied. And the more they are frustrated, the more they are extremists, the more bumper stickers they have on the car. Sometimes you stop behind a car that looks like a shouting demonstration.''

Gadi Taub, one of Israel's leading cultural critics and public intellectuals, put Mr. Grossman's experience into a larger context. ''Israel is such a small place that taking a political position is like declaring the very core of your identity,'' he said. ''For many years it was unthinkable for Israelis that if you're a Likud voter you could marry someone from Labor. It would be a battle over every dinner and every breakfast. So your car, too, will declare your identity. You don't think you can even make friends across bumper stickers.''

The words of ''Shira Ha'Sticker'' convey a consistent style of political advocacy here, but the music points to a dramatic generational change. Mr. Grossman, who is 50, grew up revering Israel's great balladeers of popular song - Ehud Banai, Yehuda Poliker, Meir Ariel - whose subjects stretched from the Holocaust to the peace process to the fear of suicide bombers.

The nation also produced first-rank jazz musicians like the bassist Avishai Cohen and jam bands like Sheva that fused Israeli, Arab and Indian influences.

Hadag Nachash is of the emerging Israel hip-hop scene, which runs the gamut from Russian and Ethiopian immigrants' flourishing ethnic pride and causes to the right-wing nationalism of Kobi Shimoni. With a name that literally translates to Fish Serpent and also is a deft pun on a license-plate designation for a new driver (Nahag Hadash), Hadag Nachash has made its reputation with raps about Israel's domestic issues: income inequality, poverty and the demise of the welfare state in favor of free markets.

Fittingly, the middle-aged Mr. Grossman heard about the band through his teenage children. ''As soon as I was rhyming the lines,'' he recalled of his initial efforts to compose the song, ''I realized it was best suited to rap. Rap has the energy and immediacy of the bumper stickers.''

So last summer he invited Mr. Streett to coffee. On his side of the generational divide, the 33-year-old musician had read only one of Mr. Grossman's 19 books, and that was a children's novel. He was stunned, then, to have the author not only hand over a sheet of lyrics but quote from memory a line from one of Hadag Nachash's singles. ''And that one didn't sell very well,'' Mr. Streett said. ''So I knew he really knew our music.''

Along with the producer Yossi Fine the seven members of Hadag Nachash created a melody that strung baritone saxophone, trombone, acoustic guitar and some Indian instrumentation over a mesmerizing beat. The result, released in June on Hadag Nachash's album ''Local Material,'' became an instant surprise hit. While singles are not sold in Israel, the CD already has proven Hadag Nachash's most commercially successful, heading toward the 20,000-unit level that brings platinum status here.

"I hear people are even playing it at weddings,'' Mr. Streett said. And Mr. Grossman said his second career as pop-song lyricist could help his first, as author. ''Somebody approached me in the post office the other day,'' he recalled, ''and told me, 'My daughter said she should read your new novel because you wrote the sticker song.' ''

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/arts/music/16bump.html?pagewanted=1

Failed Technology Seeks More Money

Nuclear projects face financial obstacles

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 2, 2010; A01

Hopes for a nuclear revival, fanned by fears of global warming and a changing political climate in Washington, are running into new obstacles over a key element -- money.

A new approach for easing the cost of new multibillion-dollar reactors, which can take years to complete, has provoked a backlash from big-business customers unwilling to go along.

Financing has always been one of the biggest obstacles to a renaissance of nuclear power. The plants are expensive, and construction tends to run late and over budget. The projected cost for a pair of proposed Georgia plants would be $14 billion; the Obama administration last month pledged to provide them with $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees.

So utilities have turned to state legislators and regulators to help contain capital costs. In states such as Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, utilities have won permission to charge customers for some of the cost of new reactors while construction is still in progress -- a financing technique that would save utilities a couple of billion dollars for each reactor. Previously, utilities had to wait until power plants were in operation before raising rates, as they still do in most states.

"We tell people it's like paying off the interest on your credit card as you go along, rather than letting it compound," said Suzanne Grant, a spokeswoman for Progress Energy.

But businesses and other electricity users in those states aren't buying that argument. Instead, they are saying utilities are pawning off much of the projects' liabilities on customers because bank lenders and investors will not take the risks.

"It's a terrible idea," said Jim Clarkson, a consultant with Resource Supply Management, a Georgia firm that advises companies on how to reduce electricity use. "We've had decades of subsidies for nuclear plants and all sorts of preferential treatment. They still require loan guarantees because the smart money won't touch them."

"Nuclear power is very important," says John W. McWhirter, who represents the Florida Industrial Power Users Group. "We just wish consumers could be protected."

The reaction of big businesses, as well as other consumers, has turned states that were bastions of support for nuclear power into hazardous territory. And it could thwart the Obama administration's efforts to jump-start nuclear reactor construction by handing out chunks of the $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees Congress authorized in 2005.

Turning to the states

Thirty to 40 years ago, expensive nuclear plants drove some utilities into bankruptcy. That has made banks gun-shy about lending and investors wary about buying bonds. Moreover, the new plants are so expensive that a single unit could equal a quarter to 100 percent of the market capitalization of an entire utility company, potentially damaging the utility's credit rating.

That's why utilities turned to the states, lobbying in recent years for the ability to charge customers while construction is in progress. "Without this legislation, we would not be considering building new nuclear generation in Florida," Grant said.

The savings for the utilities are huge because they have to borrow less money. Southern Co. said the law passed in 2000 will help its Georgia Power subsidiary shave nearly $2 billion off the cost of the two new nuclear reactors at its Vogtle site -- and Georgia Power owns only 45 percent of the project.

Last month, Southern received "conditional" approval for $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees from the Obama administration on that project. (While still under negotiation, the terms of the federal loan guarantees would probably save Southern an additional $15 million to $20 million a year, a company spokesman said.)

In Florida, Progress Energy and FPL have won approval from state regulators to pass along about $360 million in costs associated with new nuclear power units northeast of St. Petersburg. Progress Energy says it has already collected $196.6 million from customers, a third of its total expenditures so far.

But the Florida utilities have not yet obtained permits they need from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, so while some site preparation has taken place, construction hasn't even started.

The utilities' gains are the consumers' losses -- and businesses such as the Georgia Industrial Group and the Georgia Textile Manufacturing Association have joined consumer and environmental groups in combating the state laws and higher rates.

In Florida, PCS Phosphate, which has a fertilizer plant that uses about 1 percent of Progress Energy's output, told the Public Service Commission that new rate increases "will substantially affect" the company "by directly increasing the cost of power."

"Certainly coming on top of the recession, it is badly timed," said James W. "Jay" Brew, attorney for PCS Phosphate, a unit of Potash Corp. "It's asking a lot of current customers to fund that large a capital expense up front."

Worth the wait?

Progress Energy says that over time, companies such as PCS Phosphate will be better off. "It lowers the overall costs of a nuclear power plant to customers by several billion dollars," the company said in a statement. "Paying these costs in advance significantly lowers the long-term financing costs. The overall cost of the plant decreases, minimizing the price customers pay over its operating lifetime."

But the ratepayers disagree. They say that if the plants are delayed, ratepayers will absorb the expense. When the Florida utilities said the increasingly hostile atmosphere might prompt them to abandon the nuclear plants, the consumers said that only proved their point: Consumers could pay millions for a project that might never reach fruition.

"If a project cannot attract private investment, it's a turkey and we shouldn't be wasting taxpayer money or forcing the users of electricity to pay for something the stakeholders and lenders won't risk their money on," Clarkson said.

In addition, the consumers argue, many residential customers might move to another state, or even die, in the six to 10 years it will take for new plants to come on line, and they might never see the benefits. Others will have to stick around another 15 years before the savings compensate for higher rates now, Brew said.

FPL Vice Chairman Moray P. Dewhurst said intergenerational fairness is always an issue for power plants. "Look at the wonderful deal that retirees are getting now from nuclear plants built years ago and which are paid for," he said.

Financing questions have also challenged nuclear plans in other states. In Missouri, a backlash from ratepayers helped defeat a similar proposal to allow higher electricity rates during nuclear plant construction.

In South Carolina, the state Supreme Court on Thursday will consider an appeal by Friends of the Earth of a decision by the state Public Service Commission allowing South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G) to begin collecting higher rates to cover costs associated with a two-reactor project.

In Texas, rising cost projections for a pair of new reactors threatened the credit rating of San Antonio's city-owned utility, which owned 40 percent of the project, and raised the specter of tax increases. San Antonio fired the head of its municipal utility and filed a $32 billion lawsuit against its partners, NRG Energy and Toshiba, alleging they concealed cost information. On Feb. 23, the partners agreed to shrink the San Antonio utility's stake in the project to just under 8 percent.

There is one state that has presented new obstacles to nuclear power for reasons having nothing to do with economics. Last month, the Vermont state Senate voted against extending the operating license for Vermont Yankee, the state's sole nuclear power plant, after the discovery of radioactive tritium in test wells raised fears about plant safety. (Tritium raises cancer risks.) Vermont, unlike most states, must approve any extension of the plant's license, which will expire in 2012. Most plants must get approval only from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/01/AR2010030103975.html?hpid=topnews

Farming While Black

Hope, worry about settlement of discrimination suit with black farmers

By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 26, 2010; A22

Now that black farmers have reached a new settlement in their massive discrimination lawsuit against the federal government, other minorities and female farmers are watching the case closely in hopes of getting similar grievances addressed.

Congress has yet to come up with $1.15 billion to fulfill the agreement black farmers reached last week with the Agriculture and Justice departments. It has set aside $100 million as an initial payout of what is known as the Pigford case.

In anticipation of the settlement, President Obama asked for the $1.15 billion in his budget request this month. The agreement is years in coming, and congressional leaders generally support the move. But the House Appropriations Committee has just begun looking at the White House's request, and there is no timetable for approving the money.

"We don't have a timetable . . . but we are hopeful that we can, once and for all, clear the deck of all of this," said House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.). "I can tell you without any fear of contradiction that this is probably one of the most substantive cases ever brought against the federal government."

Clyburn, who ran the South Carolina Commission for Farm Workers in the 1960s, said he saw the kind of discrimination against minority farmers that gave the Agriculture Department the nickname "last plantation."

On the Senate side, Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) thinks the settlement is long overdue and "is hopeful the matter can be resolved legislatively in the very near future," said spokesman Jim Manley.

As many as 70,000 black farmers are anticipating the payout and want Congress to move quickly. Under the settlement, farmers can walk away from the deal if Congress does not appropriate the money by March 31, although officials involved have said they think they could secure an extension if necessary.

USDA spokesman Justin DeJong said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has called members of Congress and sent a letter to Capitol Hill.

"There is certainly cause for worry" that the budget request will not be approved, said Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), who supports the appropriation. Last year, the Obama administration asked Congress for $1.25 billion to settle the case, but the money was not appropriated. Now, pay-as-you-go spending rules could complicate matters by forcing Congress to find ways to come up with the money without adding to the federal deficit.

Rep. Robert C. Scott (D-Va.) is hopeful about a rapid response. "We owe the money," he said. "We'll have to pay the bill. The fact that it went on so long was regrettable, and sometimes when you let things go on so long, the costs run up."

The Pigford case originally was settled in 1999 for $1 billion after 16,000 black farmers said they had been unfairly denied farm loans because of their race. Other minority groups -- women, Native Americans and Hispanics -- sued the USDA about the same time. Each group has begun talks with the government.

-- Female farmers, who filed suit against the USDA in the Love case, have 10 plaintiffs and thousands of declarations from farmers who say they were discriminated against because of gender. Their lawsuit was not certified as a class action in federal court, but lawyers in the case hope that Congress will intervene the way it did for black farmers. In December, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) introduced the Equality for Women Farmers Act, which would force the government to resolve its discrimination claims. So far, no hearings have been scheduled for the bill.

-- Hispanic farmers have had settlement meetings with the USDA but are frustrated. As with the female farmers, their case -- Garcia v. Vilsack -- was not certified as a class action. They say the department's Farm Service Agency denied or delayed their loans and in some cases caused Hispanic farmers and ranchers to lose their land.

"We don't begrudge the well-deserved justice that black farmers have received, but . . . we have suffered exactly the same discrimination," said their attorney, Stephen S. Hill. He estimates that thousands of Hispanic farmers have been affected.

-- Joe Sellers, lead attorney for the Native American farmers in the Keepseagle case, said their court proceedings have been put on hold while they negotiate with the USDA. Sellers estimates that tens of thousands of Native American farmers have been affected by discriminatory practices.

The Keepseagle case was certified as a class-action lawsuit. Because of that, any settlement between Native American farmers and the government would not be contingent on congressional approval, Sellers said.

"It's been more than 10 years, and up to this point, there hasn't been a whole lot done," said Porter Holder, a Native American cattle rancher in Soper, Okla., who is a part of the lawsuit. "The Obama administration and Secretary Vilsack are acting aggressively, but so far the talk to the Native American is cheap."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/25/AR2010022504960.html?sub=AR

Electricity In Holland, Pollution In The US

Manure becomes pollutant as its volume grows unmanageable

By David A. Fahrenthold

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 1, 2010; A01

Nearly 40 years after the first Earth Day, this is irony: The United States has reduced the manmade pollutants that left its waterways dead, discolored and occasionally flammable.

But now, it has managed to smother the same waters with the most natural stuff in the world.

Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem, scientists and environmentalists say. The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.

That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country's fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas.

And it washes down with the rain, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived "dead zones" that have proliferated along the U.S. coast. In the Chesapeake Bay, about one-fourth of the pollution that leads to dead zones can be traced to the back ends of cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys.

Despite its impact, manure has not been as strictly regulated as more familiar pollution problems, like human sewage, acid rain or industrial waste. The Obama administration has made moves to change that but already has found itself facing off with farm interests, entangled in the contentious politics of poop.

In recent months, Oklahoma has battled poultry companies from Arkansas in court, blaming their birds' waste for slimy and deadened rivers downstream. In Florida, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed first-of-their-kind limits on pollutants found in manure.

In the Senate, Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) has proposed a bill that would allow farmers in the Chesapeake watershed to cut pollution more than required and sell the extra "credits" to other polluters. The EPA, in the middle of an overhaul for the failed Chesapeake cleanup, also has threatened to tighten rules on large farms.

"We now know that we have more nutrient pollution from animals in the Chesapeake Bay watershed" than from human sewage, said J. Charles Fox, the EPA's new Chesapeake czar. "Nutrients" is the scientific word for the main pollutants found in manure, treated sewage, and runoff from fertilized lawns. They are the bay's chief evil, feeding unnatural algae blooms that cause dead zones.

Around the country, agricultural interests have fought back against moves like these, saying that new rules on manure could mean crushing new costs for farmers.

"It's clearly going to put a squeeze on people that they've always said they didn't want to squeeze," including family-run farms, said Don Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

The story of manure is already a gloomy counterpoint to the triumphs in fighting pollution since the first Earth Day in 1970. An air pollutant that causes acid rain has been cut by 56 percent. By one measure, the output from sewage plants got 45 percent cleaner.

But, according to Cornell University researchers, the amount of one key pollutant -- nitrogen -- entering the environment in manure has increased by at least 60 percent since the 1970s.

"We've dealt with the kind of conventional pollutants," that helped spark the first Earth Day, said Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "Now, we see the things that are eating our lunch, if you will, are natural products . . . that are just overloading the system."

The reasons for manure's rise as a pollutant have to do, environmentalists say, with a shift in agriculture and a soft spot in the law.

In recent decades, livestock raising has shifted to a smaller number of large farms. At these places, with thousands of hogs or hundreds of thousands of chickens, the old self-contained cycle of farming -- manure feeds the crops, then the crops feed the animals -- is overwhelmed by the large amount of waste.

The result in farming-heavy places has been too much manure and too little to do with it. In the air, that extra manure can dry into dust, forming a "brown fog." It can emit substances that contribute to climate change.

And it can give off a smell like a punch to the stomach.

"You have to cover your face just to go from the house to the car," said Lynn Henning, 52, a farmer in rural Clayton, Mich., who said she became an environmental activist after fumes from huge new dairies gave her family headaches and burning sinuses. The way that modern megafarms produce it, Henning said, "Manure is no longer manure. Manure is a toxic waste now."

In the water, the chemicals in manure don't poison life, like pesticides or spilled oil. Instead, they create too much life, and the wrong kinds.

"You get Miracle-Gro for your water," said David Guest, a lawyer for the group Earthjustice who has fought for tougher limits on pollution in Florida.

The chemicals in manure serve as fertilizer for unnatural algae blooms. They drain away oxygen as they decompose. Scientists say the number of suffocating dead zones -- oxygen-depleted areas where even worms and clams climb out of the mud, desperate to respire -- has grown from 16 in the 1950s to at least 230 today. The Chesapeake's is usually the country's third largest, after the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Erie.

The law, however, has treated manure and other agricultural pollutants differently than pollutants from smokestacks and sewer pipes.

The EPA does not set a hard cap on how much manure can wash off farms, instead issuing guidelines that apply only to the largest operations. There, the rules might limit how much manure farmers can spread on individual fields, for instance, or order them to plant grassy strips along riverbanks to filter manure-laden runoff. Even that level of regulation has only been in place since the 1990s.

But now, the EPA has signaled an intent to tighten its grip.

Last Monday, the agency announced that reducing manure-laden runoff was one of its six "national enforcement initiatives." New rules went into effect in December that will impose even tighter restrictions on large farms.

Last fall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also considered a change to its guidelines, which would have limited the amount of manure farmers could apply to their fields. But then it scrapped that idea, saying the issue needed more study.

Last week on the Eastern Shore, where farmers raised 568 million chickens last year, the problem of excess manure was still big enough to see from the road.

"See how dark that one pile is? That's chicken manure," said Kathy Phillips, 61, an environmental activist who patrols the peninsula for piles of manure stored outdoors. As a steady rain fell, she said that pollutants were probably leaching off that mound -- as tall as a van and the color of dark-roast coffee-- and into ditch water that would eventually reach the Pocomoke River, then the Chesapeake.

Phillips usually surveys these piles from the air. She has a mental map of dozens of these off-smelling mounds.

"I don't want to be the Poop Lady," said Phillips, who got into environmentalism because she loved to surf Ocean City's beaches. "But, you know, somebody had to talk about this. It's like this dirty little secret."

A few miles north, the poultry giant Perdue has come up with one way to dispose of excess manure. At a $13 million plant outside Seaford, Del., tons of poultry manure are dried, heated to kill off bacteria and compressed into pellets of organic fertilizer that is sold to golf courses or homeowners.

"This is sort of a reverse chicken," said Perdue spokesman Luis Luna, as bulldozers moved manure below. "In a chicken, the food goes in and the poop goes out. Here, the poop comes in and the plant food goes out."

That helps Chesapeake's manure problem, but it isn't the whole solution. Luna said there is enough manure on the Shore to keep more plants like this running-- but Perdue isn't planning to build more yet. So far, the fertilizer doesn't sell well enough to make that cost-effective.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/28/AR2010022803978.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR