Environmental Defense

Three decades ago, Environmental Defense was started when four scientists on Long Island set out to halt the use of DDT (dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane), the pesticide Rachel Carson warned about in Silent Spring. DDT caused eggshells to weaken and crack, threatening the survival of magnificent birds like the osprey, bald eagle and peregrine falcon.
Our founders tried a novel approach, common today but unheard of in 1967: They went to court on behalf of the environment. Their efforts led to a nationwide ban on DDT and the birth of modern environmental law. The osprey has since made a dramatic recovery, and the bald eagle and peregrine falcon have been removed from the endangered species list.

Soon we were hiring economists, engineers and computer analysts to find ways to help the environment without harming the economy. In the process, Environmental Defense became one of America's most influential environmental advocacy groups, now with over 400,000 members and more Ph.D. scientists and economists on staff than any similar organization.

From the beginning, we made a commitment not only to oppose ill-conceived policies, but also to propose alternatives. We still go to court when necessary, but increasingly we work directly with business, government and community groups, forging solutions that make sense for all.

Some Notable Environmental Defense Victories:

• 1967: A small group of scientists incorporates our organization as the Environmental Defense Fund after winning a battle against the pesticide DDT, which had been harming wildlife.
• 1970: We help bring all hunted whales onto the U.S. endangered species list.
• 1977: Our campaign curbs the use of the hazardous flame retardant TRIS in children's sleepwear.
• 1985: We help convince federal regulators to phase lead out of gasoline.
• 1989: Southern California's largest urban water district adopts our plan to finance water conservation on farms by buying the conserved water.
• 1990: The new Clean Air Act incorporates our innovative market-based methods to cut air pollution, leading to less acid rain.
• 1991: McDonald's accepts the recommendations of our joint task force, eventually eliminating a cumulative total of more than 150,000 tons of packaging waste.
• 1996: We help the Panará Indians of Brazil win protection for their homeland, protecting 1.2 million acres of Amazonian rainforest from deforestation.
• 1999: Pollution from older fossil-fuel power plants in Texas is brought under tighter control when we help draft and win new legislation.
• 2000: Environmental Defense partners with eight leading companies to cut greenhouse gases. Also, landowners enroll about 2 million acres in Safe Harbor programs Environmental Defense developed to protect endangered wildlife.
• 2001: Environmental Defense empowers nearly 1 million individuals to take action globally and in their own communities through its ActionNetwork.org web site, and provides detailed environmental information for every Zip code in America on its Scorecard.org web site.
• 2002: We encourage New York Governor George Pataki to sign an executive order requiring diesel-powered equipment at the World Trade Center reconstruction site use clean fuel technologies to reduce pollutants in Lower Manhattan. Within several months, this requirement spreads throughout all of New York City and becomes a model for other localities as well.
• 2003: With our backing, in part through the launch of the Global Warming: Undo It campaign, the bipartisan Climate Stewardship Act (sponsored by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman) wins unexpectedly strong support from 43 senators on its first vote in the Senate. This strong showing marks a shift in political momentum on global warming in the United States.
• 2004: FedEx Express's new hybrid electric delivery trucks, spurred by Environmental Defense and developed by Eaton Corporation, take to the streets in Sacramento, New York City and Tampa, Florida. The trucks, which reduce emissions by up to 90% and cut fuel use some 57%, are creating rippling effects throughout the express delivery business.

While we can point to some big victories, the environment is declining on many fronts. Each day more species are lost, more pollution enters the air and more contaminants spill into our rivers and seas. To reverse these trends, we must galvanize every public and private sector. By joining Environmental Defense, you can help support that goal.

Taxable Sales Summary – December 2005

TAXATION REVENUE STATISTICS – DECEMBER 2005 Taxable Sales Summary – December 2005 Statewide taxable sales for December 2005 of $4,624,592,265 represents an 8.7% increase over December 2004, and an 11.3% increase for the six months of fiscal year 2006. The largest increases in statewide taxable sales for December were realized by Miscellaneous Retail, up 14.4%; General Merchandise Stores, up 8.7%; Apparel and Accessory Stores, up 17.9%; Wholesale Trade, up 15.7%; and Eating and Drinking Places, up 5.0%; The following major sales indicators represent changes in Nevada’s economic activity for December 2005 compared to December 2004: Statewide Sales Up 8.7 % Clark County Sales Up 8.6 Washoe County Sales Up 7.9 Eating and Drinking Places Statewide Up 5.0 Clark County Eating and Drinking Places Up 5.7 Washoe County Eating and Drinking Places Up 3.0 General Merchandise Stores Up 8.7 Apparel and Accessory Stores Up 17.9 Automotive Dealers and Gasoline Down 0.3 Building Construction and General Contractors Up 33.9 Construction - Special Trade Up 22.1 Business Services Up 10.0 Six counties showed a decrease in taxable sales for December 2005 compared to December 2004; Douglas, Esmeralda, Eureka, Lincoln, Mineral and Storey. All 17 Nevada counties show increased growth in taxable sales for fiscal year to date. Revenue Collections from Sales and Use Taxes - December 2005 Gross revenue collections from sales and use taxes amounted to $357,412,815 for December 2005 which represents a 13.94% increase compared to December 2004 and a 12.67% increase for the six months of fiscal year 2006. Compared to the May 2005 Economic Forum projections, the General Fund portion of the sales and use taxes is 2.86% or $26.7 million above their forecast for fiscal year 2006. Modified Business Tax and Business License Fees The Modified Business Tax passed by the 2003 Legislature became effective October 1, 2003 and at the same time the Business Tax was repealed. The MBT is based on the gross wages paid by employers for each calendar quarter with a deduction for allowable health care expenses paid by employers on behalf of their employees. Two different tax rates are applied. General businesses pay a rate of 0.65% effective July 1, 2005 and Financial Institutions pay a rate of 2%. The Department reports $61,400,757 was collected and distributed to the State general fund for the quarter ending December 31, 2005 for Modified Business Tax from General Businesses and Financial Institutions. This represents a 4.26% increase above the same quarter prior year. Businesses reported $10.3 billion in gross wages and took $713 million in allowable health care deductions for the December quarter, which represents 7% of the gross wages. The Economic Forum May 2005 forecast for this tax is $247 million for fiscal year 2006. The tax revenue for the two quarters of fiscal year 2006 is down by 2.78% or $6.9 million from their forecast. Business License Fees from newly registered businesses or annual renewals amounted to $6,258,511 for the December 2005 quarter which represents a 33.25% increase above the December 2004 quarter collections. This represents a 9.46% increase or approximately $1.9 million above Economic Forum projections. Excise Tax Revenue Collections – December 2005 The Department reports excise tax collections of $125,610,752 for the month of December 2005 increased 9.85% compared to the same month prior year. Compared to the Economic Forum’s May 2005 projections, fiscal year to date cigarette taxes are .82% above projections. The liquor tax is 5.43% above projections. December 2005 collections for Live Entertainment Tax were $495,593, 13.56% below projections for fiscal year to date. The quarter filing for Bank Excise Tax amounted to $633,460, 16.46% above fiscal year projections and for the Real Property Transfer Tax, $42,646,641 was collected for December, which stands at 11.43% above Economic Forum projections. Governor Kenny Guinn’s Comments “Nevada’s economy continues to thrive. Businesses have delivered another successful month of sales for December. The gross revenue numbers for the first six months of fiscal year 2006 show a double-digit increase over the same period the previous fiscal year. This translates into increased revenue for the state, and a continuing boom in job growth in Nevada.”

Governor stays in Nevada

GOVERNOR GUINN’S HIP REPLACEMENT SURGERY
SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED

CARSON CITY – Gov. Kenny Guinn’s hip replacement surgery on his right hip this morning at Spring Valley Hospital in Las Vegas was successfully completed. He is now back in his room, resting comfortably. First Lady Dema Guinn said, “Kenny came through the surgery beautifully. Hopefully he will be able to be up and around soon without the pain he was feeling before the operation. We are very grateful to Dr. Swanson and the staff at Spring Valley Hospital for their care and attention.” According to Naomi Jones, spokesperson for Spring Valley Hospital, the operation went very well and there were no complications due to the surgery. Jones said Gov. Guinn will remain at Spring Valley Hospital until this Thursday or Friday, recovering from the operation. The Hospital and Dr. Todd Swanson, who performed the operation, will conduct a news conference on Wednesday, April 5, at 8:15 a.m. in Conference Room B, to discuss the procedure and answer any questions relating to the surgery and recovery period. Dr. Swanson developed the state-of-the-art procedure used to replace the Governor’s hip, which uses a minimally invasive technique that allows for a quicker recovery of the patient. With x-ray guidance, a surgeon inserts small instruments to remove the damaged ball-and-socket hip and replaces it with a metal-and-plastic implant. Ligaments, muscles and tendons are avoided, rather than cut as in traditional surgery. The duration of the surgery is approximately 2 ½ hours. Patients are usually discharged within 24-48 hours, compared to a 3-5 day average length of stay after traditional hip surgery. Recovery includes a 4-6 week rehabilitation program. A traditional total hip replacement requires 6-8 weeks on crutches or walker, and 3-4 months total recovery time. In accordance with state law, Lt. Gov. Lorraine Hunt is the acting governor while Gov. Guinn is recuperating from the surgery. Although Gov. Guinn will be recovering from the surgery for several weeks and be curtailing his travel and appearance schedule during the month of April, he will be “on the job” throughout that process. For more information about the surgical procedure, please contact Naomi Jones at (702) 853-3308. If you would like to send a card or flowers, please send to Governor Kenny Guinn, Spring Valley Hospital, 5400 S. Rainbow Boulevard, Las Vegas, 89118. Kenny Guinn may be unique among Nevada politicians by staying at home during surgery as opposed to running off to Texas , California or where ever. I noticed this trend to leave the state growing as our health care crisis loomed. Those disesed rats in Carson city poise themselvs to strike a death blow to Nevada hospitals, then run down a sewer pipe to some state with health care and doctors! I'm no fan of grandpa's policies, but I must say thank you Governor, and God be with you.

What I need in a computer is the reliability of a hammer and the versatility of hot iron. With both, you know what you’re going to end up with, a hammer and cold iron. No surprises! I hate, and by hate I mean “round and round the fires of hell in death ‘till I have my revenge!” Microsoft products. I hate the way designers think. I hate the advertisements. I hate pissing away more time with security updates than their are hours in an actually day.

I feel this intolerance is part of my Paleolithic upbringing. As a wee little cave boy I would while away the hours plating various fibers into twine for snares, and fishing line. Or weaving baskets for the various odd jobs like fermenting rye. Yes you can! Ill get to that in another article. My point being, that with a firm grasp of mechanical principals and piercing curiosity I was able to rely upon the soundness and solidity of the material world. Their exist examples galore, I assure you, of materials wholly or in part unsuited for particular tasks. Bunch grasses that make better mats than twine, stone of a grade that it must be fired and quenched before knapping to name a few.

It falls to the itinerant cave man to know these limits and procedures, some hard won from bare rock. That is why I’m getting a Mac. Never have I skinned something to have its hide return inexplicably. Nor after fire softening wood to bend into a form had it straighten without cause. Why then should I put up with crap analogous to that from a typewriter? As a poet/journalist/madscientist “yes that is a compound word!”/mystic I feel that I have the right to expect performance out of tools. The cost/utility coefficient is something Apple understands that Bill Shitforbrains et al do not.

As someone completely lacking in sanity, I would never recommend that anyone follow my example. Normal people should resign themselves to mediocre products and productivity. After all, The Man owns your work before you’ve even started doing it! Having been carefully trained since birth to think of your labor as someone else’s property, what the hell difference should working software make to you? As long as the video games are HotShit, computers are fulfilling there function.

Creative people with work to do, however, need reliable tools to accomplish that work. Not for The Man to run off with and sell for a premium, while you rot in a slum apartment! The Man! Wine glass in his hand, cigar in his to thin lips! Laughing with his friends about exporting jobs, all the while ramming caviar in his distended maw! You go on working for The Man so he can afford the rising price of my art! After all, who wants to live in a cave?

Daylight at the cave.

I am having trouble visualizing myself as a blogger. Perhaps I should describe something familiar. The smell of the smoke wakes me. In the night I placed dry dung around the edge of the pit. Experience has taught me that it will burn through and begin to smoke as the greener wetter underside catches. It wont burn through till about dawn, if I’ve placed it carefully. An alarm clock of sorts. The kind of thing my people would undoubtedly have taught me if I had any people. I’m here alone, last Paleolith within walking distance as far as I can tell

So now I’m up, and the coals need tending. Dung is good for low heat long duration fires though they tend to smother themselves if not cleaned properly. The ash needs to be removed and wetted down to put any remaining fire out. You don’t want a repeat of the range fire that almost cleared me from the territory.

Next, a small amount of fresh dung is needed as I’ll be out all day. Cry me a river of salt about leaving a fire unattended! I do it all the time! I do use precautions, like stones encircling the dung to lessen my liability. And I’m alone in this world! The alternative is making a fresh fire every night, and the drain on local kindling won’t permit it.

I eat cold hare and yambah, that is rabbit and a native potato. I get my #3 digging stick and my posibles bag and head out.

Now, you might think rhubarb don’t grow in the mountains of Nevada, though you people think you can raise spending, lower taxes, and balance the budget! Kind of why I live in a cave now. You might also think crow’s eggs aren’t edible. Well I intend to get both today! Mmmm! Mmmm! Good!

As to the rhubarb, the spring it grows along is far. Therefore be it known that I shall get their last. The crow’s eggs however occur along the way. Getting them home requires ingenuity. Or, in one piece it requires ingenuity. As yuck it don’t take more effort than to put em in your pockets. Yuck ain’t my type of eggs. So a contraption is in order.

Using my knife I cut a strip of bark from an aspen. Rectangular the bettor, that is, a piece around two feet long and six to eight inches wide is desired. Finding the center, and moving your hands three to four inches from it, in both directions you come to the part about folding the bark. As bark comes from trees it is rounded. Well more or less. The fold shall place the edges towards one another and approximate a cylinder. You will notice, only if you’re paying attention, that the bottom is concave. In fact your cylinder resembles a card board pie holder in a fast food restaurant. The two edges will need to be fastened together somehow. Sewing with grass, thread, sinew or other material works fine.

Along the way to rhubarb creek, I notice pairs of crows chasseing each other around. All that noise means eggs! I’m in luck! I don’t know why crows make all that noise while there $%ing. It’s a dead giveaway to the location of the nest, and the presence of eggs. Stuffing the bottom of my basket with dry grass I put some eggs in. some more grass and eggs, then its time for lunch!

Dead Cow Blues

Dead Cow Blues

I smell a cow lying in a field dead for several days and it is remarkable. It clears my
head, filling my actions with purpose, and energizing me! Focusing and directing this energy
toward getting far from its source swiftly as possible. No such luck for me, that cloud swept,
drizzling nightmare of a day. I was here to skin the aforementioned beast not long enough gone
from this world.

This critter died ignominiously enough, being after all a cow. Not like a pet dog run over
by a hay wagon. Torn and piteous, bleeding howling and evoking horror in Kyle. That’s whose
dog Little Shit was. In the ground to spite my efforts in stitching her up with the silk from my
“Sunday at the movies shirt.” Nor like Chip, Kyles other dog, put down for chasing chickens. For a cow it would be for rooting up a garden plot, though I doubt anyone would blame the cow for that. More likely whoever left the gate open would catch hell.

Of all the things a cow might choose to lick, a car battery would not be on any list I would
draw up. Salt blocks, the bed of a hay wagon, something normal. Truth is that we have bred
cows to be dumber than Congress in or out of session. I have seen with my own eyes, cows
nosing around in machine sheds, junkyards (what ranch does not have one?) city dumps, and
unused saddle shops. Everywhere they go, bet me if they won’t lick everything incapable of
escaping, including Little Shit.

Now she is dead and my job is to take her jacket off as the Shoshone would say. It is their
ranch so they can say whatever they please. Just someone tell me why Carrie said “chazz, go skin that cow in the boneyard”? Carrie and her sister Mary Dann, run the 2D, 29, and the D9 brand in Crescent Valley Nevada. Two renegade Shoshones raising their livestock without paying B.L.M.or any other fees.

Just this spring I received word that Mary passed away. Early Friday, the twenty-second
of April 2005 my great-aunt was fixing a busted fence when her atv rolled over, killing her
instantly. It is no cliche to say that she died with her boots on, and I’ll fight anyone who so much
as implies it. Because of work obligations I had to miss the week long mourning and scattering of
her ashes on the ranch, still a sore subject for me.

Squatting in the cold, knife put to work, I wondered as I shivered “What the hell could
those two crazy old ladies want with this hide?” Before an hour had passed light freezing rain
soaked through the bone, and to shelter from the worst of it I pulled the skin (hair side down if
you please) over me. A grey fog that slithered snakelike down the side of the mountains
cheered my soul lead coffin like. What would make this more fun than I was having at that very
moment? Lying next to a corpse, covered with its partially disembodied skin, and blue with cold?

As the rain let up, my shaking did not. Had I more sense than the animal I was about
disassembling, I would have trudged empty handed the mile or more back to the ranch. Hot
coffee, a warm tub, dry clothes that had not been under a cow, and some of Mary’s apple pie.

None for me! I stubborn and stupid enough to sit in the high plains desert skinning a cow till I
get through to please my auntie. I do not believe the tales about cows being dumb out of love for
us, though I do love my auntie still.

Lack of body temperature can cause shaking, which in turn generates heat. Extreme cold
can impair motor coordination as well as judgment. If all I had been up to was shivering this
might not be so interesting. I however was skinning a cow! To do this you need a strong
constitution, a sharp knife, and some skill at butchering. For a hide to be useable there must not
be holes in it, it must be scraped clean of flesh, and should not be covered in blood.My working
hand was shaking badly, then the knife just slipped part of the way through the other. Between
the wrist and pinky finger a bright red fountain opened. Bitter cold had claimed me, so I did not:
jump, yell, cry, swear, or even move. I watched the red rooster tail with something like
detachment, wondering what this was going to sound like when I had to explain it. Ruining a
hide through carelessness was an inexcusable outrage! Wow was I going to hear an earful!

Stiffly I made my way back home along more pre-Columbian art than a road. Dewey
Dann, the first of the Dann Band to settle in Crescent under the Treaty Of Ruby Valley, had
cleared it with a horse drawn grader. So the local legends go. I have seen with my own eyes a
horse drawn wagon with an appropriate blade fixed under it at the extreme north end of the
Valley, so it could be true. It is a demonstrable fact that blood is no good on leather, and my
moccasins were stiffer than me as a result of the soaking they had taken.

Sewed, washed, fed and dried, I finally had an opportunity to ask Carrie what Mary wanted the hide for. Through gales of laughter auntie Butch (not to her face) replied “a new set
of moccasins for you!