Joe Nocera Gets High On Natural Gas

UPDATE AFTER PUBLICATION OF COMMENT 2 IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, 20 DECEMBER.
Only the 2d comment submitted was accepted. It was well recommended by readers, and 4 also wrote replies that make "interesting" reading. Comments had been closed when I got the chance to read the replies, otherwise I would have had much to say. I add nothing here since no one has visited this post. If someone does, then I might put one or two  replies in here to illustrate how difficult it appears to be for many of my fellow Americans to understand renewable energy. This inserted 2014-12-21 kl. 17:08

Joe Nocera is one of my "favorite" New York Times columnists - "favorite" in quotes. Why? The simple answer is that his infatuation with natural gas is  so total that he is a sitting duck for simple comments in the comment column seen to the right of his declarations of ever lasting love for natural gas.

I have just filed two main comments at his column chastising Governor Cuomo (New York State) for banning fracking. The essence of the comments is that Joe Nocera knows so little about renewable energy that he never even can mention renewable energy in his many columns advertising natural gas.

My headline is, of course, ironic. Natural gas  kills, most recently as reported in a Times story a couple of days ago. Not the hazard that guns are of course, but more easily avoided than death by a bullet. Use one of the renewable systems described in this blog and nothing to worry about

At the moment on Bus4You toward Göteborg, will add internal links later.

This link takes you to a post by me with photos of Göteborg wind power and Styrsö Ground Source Geothermal (Heat pump) and the additional URLs in the post take you to Fjärrvärme systems (MSW incineration provides hot water to heat just about everything)


Passing Brahe Castle Wind Turbine park, very impressive turbines peacefully producing electricity, each turbine surrounded by picea forest.

My comment on Charles Blow's column: Blacks, Obama and the Election

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST Charles Blow

Blacks, Obama and the Election

NOV. 2, 2014

Picture of Charles blow at URLs below 

The text below my ikon (Swedish flag overlain by Vermont license plate) is copied from my main comment on Charles Blow’s column in the New York Times today November 3, 2014.  I place it here in my blog because I have invited New York Times readers to reply to me via my Gmail here.

The tiny URL to his column is:http://nyti.ms/1xQswD6

 

The tiny URL to his column “Constructing A Conversation On Race” is http://nyti.ms/1mo4ERj

 My ikon appears at my comment 

Larry Lundgren

 Linköping, Sweden 51 minutes ago

Charles, after filing this I Email you to beg you – yes beg – to take the next step in “Constructing a Conversation on Race” (your column 2014-08-20) @http://nyti.ms/1mo4ERj

Here I beg – yes beg - commenters to take part in replies and/or Email to you/me in this conversation by responding to questions I pose. You give 2 reasons for Republican opposition to Barack Obama:

1) He embodies the idea that federal government has important roles to play, as in the ACA.
2) He has a skin color not acceptable for anyone being president of the United States.

Question I: What is the relative importance of (1) and (2).

Question II: Is opposition based on (2) really based on the belief that every person designated in the uniquely American way as belonging to a black “race” is genetically inferior to those designated as belonging to a white “race”?

You note that “Race is a construct that, unfortunately, is woven through the fabric of America”, a view with which I agree in the strongest possible way.

So Charles, take that conversation further by expanding on that sentence.
I shall do so and even am considering the need for a blog “The American Riddle of Race”.

Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
My birth certificate, Attleboro, MA, reads: “color-white”

·        3 Recommend (16:21 CET-2014-11-03)

End of comment appearing in the Times OnLine

I rarely, if ever, succeed in getting anyone to join the conversation, but this is placed here just in case.

USA-Sweden comparisons

I cannot keep up here but have been citing this blog in New York Times comments every single day so want to encourage any NYT visitor who wants to communicate with me to do so directly via Gmail (address to the left). Of course if you wish to remain anonymous you can reply to this short post.

I have been commenting daily in the Times on four subjects that I know something about:

1) Medical care in the US and in Sweden (both from the viewpoint of patient and from the viewpoint of one who reviews manuscripts for Swedish medical researchers and sometimes does translations for them from Swedish to English).

2) Renewable energy and related subjects.

3) The American Riddle of Race - In the USA medical researchers routinely use "race" as a variable even though these researchers cannot define "race". Since the main users of "race" in Sweden appear to be supporters of the SD party, we have some strange situations arising. Older blog posts provide samples.

4) USA-Iran-Israel triangle (maybe later I will enter sample URLs)

For the moment, here is a URL to a comment dealing with the cost of health care in the USA, costs that any American citizen must face on returning, even for a short visit, since we expats may have Universal Health Care in our present country of residence, but that health care may not cover us if we return to the USA. As one who is over 65 I have American Socialized Health Care Insurance called Medicare.

Here is today's URL:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/opinion/gail-collins-a-political-crystal-ball.html?comments#permid=13194224

Two Parent Family-Trumpeter Swans In Sweden

At the Hour of the Wolf on 30 August on an island in Sweden, I had before me New York Times writer, Tim Egan's, story about the return of trumpeter swans to his favorite place in the west. Here is my own story about "my" trumpeter swans and their return to my favorite place in the east, Ullstämmaskogens naturreservat, Linköping, Sverige.

This URL will take you to his story and my comment filed at 04:00 h from Styrsö.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/opinion/timothy-egan-new-west-renaissance.html?comments#permid=12688428

The Two Parent Family's story for 2014 begins with the return of these two on February 22d, one of the restored ponds between Tinnerö eklandskapet and Ullstämmaskogens naturreservat. I will add to this during the day-it is after all only 2 AM in New York. (Note that you can view any image much better by clicking on it and some can only be seen by clicking and then viewing in photo-album series.)

                                                            The rocky outcrop where she would lay her eggs was still completely ice covered but is just barely visible at the

right edge of this view below of Ullstämma sjön, which for me is The Tree In The Pond lake where a single Alnus glutinosa still stands, now more than three years after the pond was created.




Once the pond was ice free the pair moved to Ullstämma pond along with several Canada Geese that for a time seemed to have eyes for the future birth place of the seven offspring of the swan pair.

Since you never know if you will have time to create the post you have in mind, I give you a typical family picture, this one on June 1, 2014, from their feeding ground in May and June, the next pond upstream from the Tree in the Pond, which is connected by a centuries old small rock walled passage created by settlers at Ryddare torpet.

There were seven small cygnets in early June, but then one of them disappeared and a few weeks later a second so then there were five left. In the next montage you see them at about 4 months old, now gray and showing more independence. 

Charles Blow - Constructing A Conversation On Race

One of the New York Times finest - if not the finest - columnist is Charles Blow. I have been asking for quite a while to take up the subject of the American system for classifying people by "race", and this column seems to be his first step in that direction. He does not, however, refer explictly to that subject).

The short URL will take you to that column and to the hundreds of reviewed comments published by the New York Times.

I mention the fact that the New York Times publishes only reviewed comments unless they have been submitted by Verifieds. Verifeds are Times comment writers whose submissions are "printed" immediately without review. They have been chosen by successfully passing review by an NYT algorithm!

I call attention to this because my Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter DN has no such system. Because of this it is not possible for DN readers to do for Sweden what Charles Blow is trying to start for America, "Skapa ett samtal om "race"" (Jag använder "race" på Amerikanska eftersom det svenska ordet "ras" motsvarar inte "race" på Amerikanska)

So today I would like to enter a conversation about "race" in Sweden to which Judith Kiros (see previous post) was a recent contributor in the form of an essay that DN published in full. That essay is discussed in DN today, 24 August, in a thoughtful essay by Susanna Birgersson (dn.se ledare). I would like to discuss both Judith Kiros and Susanna Birgersson essays in a forum of the quality of the New York Times comment forum. 

Not possible, Never In Sweden. Efforts to get Judith Kiros to reply to tweets go unanswered. 

No conversation

(I add here the URL to Susanna Birgersson and will add one to JK later:
http://www.dn.se/ledare/signerat/offerkoftan-en-antirasism-som-befaster-ojamlikhet/

The short URL below will take you to Charles Blow and hundreds of comments accepted for publication by the New York Times Comment Reviewers.

OP-ED COLUMNIST Constructing a Conversation on Race BY CHARLES M. BLOW A true racial dialogue is not one-directional — from minorities to majorities — but multidirectional.

Or, copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://nyti.ms/1mo4ERj

Church Street - Burlington VT - 2014

Welcome to Church Street and Church Street People, 2014. There ain't no place on earth like Church Street and if you had the time to look back through this blog you would see why I say that. Each summer I leave Linköping in Sweden to spend a few weeks in the woods of northern Vermont and an hour or two almost every day on Church Street where so many great people turn up every day - without fail.

I am just back from the USA so tonight, July 2d, I just want to start in case any of the people shown here here have gone in to the blog and found nothing. Will be adding more. Right now I will just use captions to tell a bit about the people in the pics.

The High Point of Church Street 2014
Kids Lemonade Run by the "kids" from the King Street Center
All of those I got to know have their family roots in Sub-Saharan Africa but they are now just plain old Americans
(They are going to get their own post here but they provide the banner for 2014)

Church Street becomes the concert hall for a real potpourri of musicians of every age, musical taste, and development. In my time in Burlington this year the street was quieter than in the past - will insert URL to a previous year but not now.) There have been some really fine fiddlers in the past and that tradition is kept up by this fiddler whose fiddling caught my ear and led me to her.

I was just about to leave when I heard some really fine fiddling
giving some Irish folk tunes their place in the Church Street Sun.
The fiddler is Addie, 14 years old, and she gets the little kids dancing
 and even climbing the rock in back of her. She went from the Irish
 tunes to some French Canadian that were really neat.
 Now I hope to introduce her to  Swedish and Norwegian fiddlers.
She plays great!

What I love about being in my part of the USA - New England - is that it is so easy to talk with people and learn something about them and what they have on their minds, even if you will never see them again. Case in point below. We were both listening to Addie and "she" (unnamed at the moment) was praising Addie as was I when suddenly she said "Can I borrow your camera". The result is a Sony DSC RX 100 "Selfie" which without a doubt is convincing evidence of the happiness Church Street people can bring out in others.

"She" took the selfie with my camera, something I absolutely
could not manage myself, probably proof that people like
her who have grown up taking selfies have mastered the art of
holding an I phone or even more difficult a Sony DSC RX 100 and getting a pic.

Last for my first evening back in Sweden - need I say I need some sleep - is a clue to the range of human beings you will see on and around Church Street on any given day. My thought on seeing Mr. Orange was that he could stand next to Kids Lemonade and drum up business for them - as if they needed any help, they don't.

Want to have your 15 minutes of fame? Do as Mr. Orange,
wrap yourself in a color of your choice and strike up a conversation
as Mr. Orange had just done here.

SIGNING OFF FOR TONIGHT. 

TOMORROW YOU GET TO SEE A PERFORMER WHO IS ALREADY AT MY FB.

You Read It In The New York Times by Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize Winner in Economics told New York Times readers on April 18, 2014 that the future of renewable energy in the United States is much brighter than one could ever guess from reading the New York Times or even much put out by the United States government. He chose to tell his readers that the cost of solar energy installations is falling rapidly so they can become a reality.

I had 5 comments/replies accepted and in the very last at this URL 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/opinion/krugman-salvation-gets-cheap.html?comments#permid=11595549

An addition: 16:05 Central European Time 19 April. You can read below that I discovered the solar energy installation as a benefit of running along Götakanalen. If you are more interested in the canal than in solar energy, visit one of my favorite posts:

http://only-neverinsweden.blogspot.se/2011/09/har-du-sett-nagot-have-you-seen.html

There you can see the canal and read about Eva Dickson, the remarkable women who grew up in Slottet and became legendary for her exploits in Africa. Every time I run along the canal I stop to talk with Eva as I call this sculpture that has been in this  tree since 2011. In the distance across the wheat fields is Slottet and the solar-roofed barn you see below. If you have the time and visit the URL above then click on the Olive URL there and listen to You're Not Alone, which is what I tell Eva.

I promised readers that I would show them something I have never yet seen in my part of the United States, New England but can see here in Sweden every time I go out to run along Götakanalen. The photo at the bottom of this set of three was taken 18 April just west of Ljungsbro as I drove along Götakanlen toward Ljung and Ljungs Slott. If you go in to ppam.se you will see that these "Solar Swedes" know how to present information to the people. Yes, it is all in Swedish, but just sample anyway. Never in (my) New England, not yet.

It gets better there. I walked in on the road you see back of my Hyundai Atos and discovered some extraordinary buildings, each with full solar roof. As of this moment I know nothing about the buildings, but the solar area is, forgive me, "awesome". Not only that there was really nice rock-and-roll coming from the end of the building, live or not I do not know.

Then I drove up to Ljungskyrka and looked out across the wheat fields I truly love and photographed the barn you see directly below this text. What I particularly love is the juxtaposition of the absolutely new, solar cell technology, and the historic old, Ljungs Slott, the "Castle". At an older post in this blog I tell you a bit about that but I cannot go further right now. 

So I pose a question: Why do I see all such technologies "Only in Sweden" and never in my New England, which really resembled Sweden when my forebears Oskar, Hulda, Anders, Hanna arrived there in the 1880s (see them att seekonk.se)? David Underwood, one of my California friends and New York Times Verified tells me (and Krugman readers) that one reason is that major efforts are made by big business in America to prevent the spread of renewable energy.

And, get this, today's Krugman column actually appears under the headline, "How Do You Say 'Nobody Could Have Predicted This' In Swedish?" Two real Swedes "Swede" and "Jonas" have answered his question and I  have filed a comment or two.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/how-do-you-say-nobody-could-have-predicted-in-swedish/#permid=11598074

More on these pics when I get information from ppam.se

NYTimes West Bank and Water

 Roger Cohen discusses the progress of negotiations concerning the future of the West Bank. A reader filed a comment in which he correctly noted that the groundwater resources of the West Bank must be a major point in the discussion, something that few readers presumably would have known anything about.

My reply to the reader praises him for providing this information and promised that I would copy this section from my long-out-of print Environmental Geology (2d edition, 1999). Here it is.

Oddly I have been contacted by a faculty member who would like to use this book in a course to begin in the fall 2014, and the book is presently in India being copied. Stay tuned. (as with reading microscopic NYT comments just use Ctrl + the wheel on your mouse to make the smaller page readable). Blogspot does not want it shown larger than what you see. I have to leave for the Red Cross where I will meet my Jerusalem born Arab friend I refer to in my main NYT comment.

Pipe Dreams - Keystone Or?

At this hour I am confronted by a headline in the New York Times telling me the "happy news" that maybe the pipes shown in the picture under the headline can soon be put in the ground as part of the Keystone pipeline.

URL http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/us/politics/report-may-ease-way-to-approval-of-keystone-pipeline.html?hp&_r=0

I have submitted a comment (there are already 379) referring Times readers to my blog post of one year ago - 15 February 2013 - which shows a better kind of pipeline that could be laid. This kind of pipeline is bringing my home the hot water that silently and fumelessly is keeping me warm.

Since the New York Times refuses - long experience, I assure you - to show its readers pictures of such pipelines I copy two from the post of one year ago. These pictures are to suggest that there is more than one kind of pipeline laying that could provide employment in America.

 

Distance heating pipeline being laid in Linköping, February 2013

Link to 2013-02-15
http://only-neverinsweden.blogspot.com/2013/02/fjarrvarme-distance-heating-phase-iii.html
and
http://only-neverinsweden.blogspot.com/2013/02/fjarrvarme-distance-heating-phase-ii.html

As I have written in more than one comment in the Times, after many years of living with this system as the means of heating my home I would never want to live in a home heated by oil or natural gas - never.

Connection to the system that lies under the entire city 

Reflecting on the last days of 2013

The New Year named 2014 is underway and I am looking forward to it on this the second day of 2014. I have been engaging in serious reflection on one of the activities to which I devoted much time and thought in 2013, the reading of New York Times Editorials and OpEds followed by writing comments and replies to other commenters.

Those that engaged my attention most deeply were what I call the USA-Iran-Israel triangle, all articles that touch on American thought and practice as concerns racism and American concepts of "race", and renewable energy as seen in the USA in contrast with the Nordic countries.

My experience and reflecting on that experience led me to make two successive decisions. The first was to stop writing comments - completely. During the ensuing period, I studied comments in all the fields of major interest to me, reflected on what I had read, and made the second decision.

The second decision was to largely restrict myself to writing comments and replies concerning every article touching on racism and American concepts of "race". There are two basic reasons for doing that. The first is that my Verified friends and a few others cover areas such as the USA-Iran-Israel triangle so well that I can leave that exercise to them. The second is that the New York Times treatment of racism and the American concept of "race" - including use of "race" in American medical research - that someone has to take a critical view of that treatment.

I am only a lay person but as an American living in Sweden I have had unique opportunities to study the dramatically exceptional approach of America and Americans and to compare that with a very different approach in Sweden.

My friends among the Verifieds warn me that entering this area as a critic is to enter a minefield. I have known that for a very long time and recent experience in the New York Times most obscure blog shows that they - Verifieds - are right. All the more reason then to try to improve the comments I will make in that territory.

If you are curious about this recent experience, take the time to visit this blog and make sure first to study the text and the fine series of photographs. Then and only then, if you still have time, do a sample reading of the comments. URL to the blog in the fine print at the bottom.

I can only hope that somebody reads this and sends comments directly to my Gmail (appears at the left).

2014 awaits you, make the most of it. Larry

I have just discovered that I should explain what the following is: At the New York Times Lens Blog you can see a very interesting portrayal of the variety of human beings that in America are simply put in one box "black". If you look at the 18 images you will see, oddly enough, that not a single one is what my Somali friends call truly "black", for example an African from the Congo.

One Drop, but Many Views on Race - NYTimes.com BY MAURICE BERGER A series of portraits and an accompanying book argue that racial identity is not merely biological or genetic, but also a matter of context and even personal choice.
Or, copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://nyti.ms/1dhcc4d