This is one of the issues were I pretty strongly agree with Ron Paul, this Freddie and Fannie bailout bill is just insane when you look at the specifics. This bill is not about keeping grandma in her house, this bill is about writing a 800 billion dollar blank check to the two firms that helped mightily into getting us into this mess. In addition this bailout will only make the longer term problems worse and if you don't let the market correct it self then the rotten will continue and spread.

The follow text came from an e-mail I received and I did make some modifications

• It is unjust to “backstop” Freddie and Fannie when over $50 billion a year flows to investors who were supposedly taking risk in buying their debt, many of them being foreign governments, and now we’re asked to cover any shortfall with our taxes.
• It is unsound to allow the FHA to underwrite hundreds of billions of dollars in “workout” mortgages when some eighteen percent of the loans they already have are delinquent, and nothing has been done about their unsafe mortgage underwriting standards.

The transition Town Initiatives is something I'm checking out to see if this is a model that would make sense to implement here in Portland, OR and thought folks might be interested in in this 50 page prime.

http://transitionnetwork.org/Primer/TransitionInitiativesPrimer.pdf

This document provides an overview of these initiatives for transitioning to a lower energy future and to greater levels of community resilience.

This document comes to you from the Transition Network, a charity recently formed to build upon the groundbreaking work done by Kinsale, Totnes and the other early adopters of the Transition model.

Our mission is to inspire, inform, support, network and train communities as they consider, adopt and implement a Transition Initiative. We're building a range of materials, training courses, events, tools & techniques, resources and a general support capability to help these communities.

It's early days, so we have a long way to go. But we understand how massive the task is, and we're giving it everything we've got. Recent funding from Tudor Trust has given us a firm foundation for our work.

I wrote the following for a client and thought I should post it.

Broadly speak, drupal is an open source content management platform, writing in PHP and licensed under the GPL.  Most commonly run on Linux with Apache and MySQL, and frequently used with MS SQL and IIS, with support for Oracle being added.

Drupal’s Principles

• Modular and extensible.  Drupal aims to provide a slim, powerful core that can be readily extended through custom modules.
  
  • Meaning you never patch the core modules, making upgrades much more straight forward.
• Quality coding.  High quality, elegant, documented code is a priority over roughed-in functionality.
• Standards-based.  Drupal supports established and emerging standards.  Specific target standards include XHTML and CSS.
• Low resource demands.  To ensure excellent performance, Drupal puts a premium on low-profile coding (for example, minimizing database queries).  Drupal should also have minimal, widely-available server-side software requirements.  Specifically, Drupal should be fully operational on a server with Apache web server, PHP, and either MySQL or Postgresql.
• Open source.  Drupal is based on the open source philosophy of collaborative free software development and is licensed under the GPL.  Drupal is itself open source and builds on and supports other open source projects.  Specifically, Drupal is coded in the open source scripting language PHP and supports as primary data sources the open source database formats MySQL and Postgresql.
• Ease of use.  Drupal aims for a high standard of usability for developers, administrators, and users.
• Collaboration.  Drupal development supports open, collaborative information sharing systems and approaches.

I was inspired to by attending the Car Free conference last week and decided to buy a new bike, a folding bike, specifically the Dahon Speed P8.

 I rode it about 3/4 of a mile this morning to the bus stop and folded it up and brought it on the bus.