The Watering Hole: August 12 – Rain Barrel

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This Video says it all:

What better topic for the Watering Hole? If you look around, Olive barrels can be found for under $40!

This is our Open Thread. Please feel free to present your thoughts on any topic that comes to mind.

185 thoughts on “The Watering Hole: August 12 – Rain Barrel”

    • Arguable.
      For example Citizens United is something Obama couldn’t affect.
      But the fact that he seemed to think the GOP would negotiate in good faith was a ridiculous blind-spot, and the fact that he thinks he’s in a debate every time instead of a fight is ridiculous.too .
      .

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      • I agree, there is no way The President could have had any effect on a Supreme court stacked with cronies from the Bush administration.

        The “republicans” are not “republicans”. They are corporate fascists and they only play the game one way.
        They only understand “might makes right”

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  4. Colorado Water Law requires that precipitation fall to the ground, run off and into the river of the watershed where it fell. Because rights to water are legally allocated in this state, an individual may not capture and use water to which he/she does not have a right. We must remember also that rain barrels don’t help much in a drought because a drought by its very nature supplies little in the way of snow or rain.

    That quote is supposedly from a page on this site
    http://www.denverwater.org/Conservation/WaterUseRulesRegulations/
    but the link I followed to confirm that source delivered the site but the page itself did not exist.

    I can guess at some of the rationale as to why private rain collection would be prohibited in Colorado, mainly that water is a public resource appropriately subject to planned distribution, but it still seems stupid to prohibit private collection instead of simply ensuring it is subject to some minor regulation, such as ensuring that the barrels are screened against mosquitoes, and determining the number of collection barrels that may be reasonably used by a given household

    “rain barrels don’t help much in a drought….” is idiotic.
    The idea is to collect the water IN CASE THERE IS A DROUGHT AND USE IT DURING A DROUGHT. as well as to CAPTURE AS MUCH WATER AS POSSIBLE WHILST IT IS AVAILABLE.

    ,

    .

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      • Your comment just made me have a vision…

        It’s the future. Water is in short supply. People are 98% water. A strange company pops up that seems to have a previously untapped supply of water which they bottle and sell. It’s called Soylent Clear. (Okay, so this isn’t an original idea… but that’s where my mind went when I read your comment.)

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    • I live in Colorado and what you posted is accurate in all but one obviously more ‘progressive’ County. We live in Pueblo County, and it is indeed illegal here to collect rainfall. We do it anyway. Fuck ’em. The price of tapwater is sky high here, and people with gardens easily wind up spending more than $250 per month just for water. Plus, this year because of the drought one can only use water outside on specified days.

      We don’t have a large garden, but we do have a lot of potted plants, indoors and out, some for edibles, most for flowers and greenery. Last spring the local hardware store had a sale on 40 gallon garbage cans. We bought two of them, one for each of the two downspouts on our duplex, and every time it rains even a little, the barrels quickly fill. If it rains once a week, we have enough water to take care of all our potted plants plus a tomato plant in a sheltered back yard corner. If we can find some “decorative” 55 gallon barrels, we’ll switch to them next year.

      So far no visits from the rain water police, although we do know of someone who got nailed a couple of years ago. They got a ticket and a fine, probably a tongue lashing in the process.

      The stupid law blows me away; I can’t imagine the cumulative “dumb” behind it. When I was a kid in Minnesota, virtually every house in town had a cistern, collected a huge volume of rain water, of snow melt. In our house we had, at each sink, a separate tap for “city water”, i.e. drinking water from the village water department, but our hot and cold taps were cistern water which also provided the flow to everything from laundry to bath to the toilet tanks. In these days where conservation of natural resources is typically encouraged, it’s harder for me to imagine a law that forbids rain water capture rather than a law which mandates it.

      Oh well, so we have to be sneaky. Kinda like Bonnie and Clyde we are, “stealing” 80 gallons of water every time it rains. I envision the final shootout with the rain police: we’ll use the garden hose to soak both him and his ticket book!

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  5. Fox News Ignores and Pulls Post Debate Poll That Ron Paul Wins

    The Fox News commentator tells everyone who just got done watching the Republican Presidential debate in Iowa to go on FoxNews.com and vote. So then Hannity comes on and brings his hired propagandist Frank Luntz and then interviews several candidates except Ron Paul. I don’t even remember Hannity showing a video clip of Ron Paul during the entire show.

    The announcement of the poll results was supposed to be done during the hour long Hannity post-debate show. The entire show was a propaganda piece saying nice things about everyone but Ron Paul.

    This is the funniest thing about last night’s debate. Paul wins the poll, and Fox has to bury their own poll!

    Poll results. Votes are still coming in this morning.

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      • That was a good link—I did read it all yesterday.
        Ron Paul has ALWAYS been shut out because he’s not the right-kind of insane. He’s genuinely anti-corporatist as well as anti-regulation—practically an anarchist—which is no good because the the corporatists need just enough government to provide cover for their greed and control. Ron Paul threatens that.

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          • actually that should read “genuinely selectivelyanti-corporatist.
            He’s been consistent about reducing military spending which of course offends the MIC.
            He was against the TARP, when the banks were of course all for it.
            He’s also a nut for the Gold Standard, which is absolutely ‘anti-corporatist” as gold isn’t anywhere near as transferable, manipulable and easily stolen as money (plus the supply is too limited)–it’s best used as an industrial material or bling. So although Paul will back specific corporate aims—such as destroying regulations—-his economic dogma is actually anti-corporatist, as it is founded on pure fantasy.

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        • Yes. “Fascism,” according to Mussolini, “should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

          In the US, things are reversed from Europe in the thirties and forties. There the government — the dictator — was all powerful and ordered corporate enterprise whereas here it’s the opposite, the corporate oligarchy orders the government around. For the rest of us, though, the differences are not all that noticeable. Brown shirts don’t really care whether they’re corporate or state; all they demand is the power implicit.

          Viewed from another tack, Germany had Goebbels, Amurka has Fox News. No difference: propaganda is propaganda, always.

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    • Well, I think Paul’s crazy enough (even though his son is even more crazy). Fox prefers the even crazier. Interesting thing about the poll. The winners are the ones who tried to stay above the tea-party crazy, none of those wins a medal. That must hurt…

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      • Cats, this year totally beats me, when it comes to American politics. Or rather, after the election of Obama and the rise of the tea party, I stopped to be able to relate what is going on. Maybe I’m not at TheZoo enough. I will have to do a lot of thinking an reading, maybe somehow I can get a handle on what’s happening. My comments are otherwise really useless.

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        • Your comments are never useless. Sometimes even a misconception shines new light on an issue. I think you’ve got a better grip on reality than most Americans, EV.

          This year is the result of Republican gains in the 2010 election. Before, they were clinging by their fingernails to enough power to stop Obama’s agenda. Now, they are going all out to create chaos and portray him as a failure. I think too many people are catching on to the scheme.

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  7. From LL’s link about Fox and Roger Ailes.

    Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by al-Qaida for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun.

    There’s no way al-Qaida is targeting Roger Ailes. He’s a gift to their cause. If it weren’t for Ailes, and Fox in general, we probably wouldn’t be talking about al-Qaida much these days.

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  8. I am totally flabbergasted. We are recycling waste water for ages. Every town has a wastewater plant. Now Texans are getting started on this only now?

    Maybe I misunderstood something, but this is standard practice all over here and all our drinking water supply has excellent water quality and no chlorine, too. Where does Texas wastewater go to normally? And where does the tap water usually come from? I admit, I totally don’t get it.

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    • Where does Texas wastewater go to normally? And where does the tap water usually come from?

      You might not want to know the answers to those questions.

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    • Funny that you should ask that… I used to work in the laboratory of a Wastewater Treatment Plant in Texas… it goes into the rivers and streams closest to the plant… the effluent is monitored…. but yep… the rivers and streams are where the water goes… But… I hear that there is a drought in Texas so the dilution might not be as much as in previous years.

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      • LL, I don’t see a problem with properly treated wastewater to go into rivers. If the monitoring is done properly. They say tap water in Cologne, Germany has been drunk and peed for several times before you even drink it, but still it is perfectly good water. All the water on our planet must have been going through some kind of organism since the beginning of existence. The yucky stuff is eliminated. The dilution in Texas may be a problem. I picture the microorganisms living in these plants must be pretty obese by now.

        Wasn’t it W.C. Fields who said: “I don’t drink water. Fish f*ck in it.”

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    • I responded before I clicked on the link… Big Spring is a relatively small plant… some of the smaller plants in Texas only do secondary treatment before releasing wastewater to the stream… but with the drought, it sounds like they are just adding on more treatment.

      What they are talking about in the article is going above and beyond in their treatment of their waste stream and then mixing it with water from the water treatment plant. It doesn’t say, but they are probably going to treat the
      wastewater 4 different ways to get it safe to drink.

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    • Water in the US comes from many sources. In this area of Florida, it comes from an under ground aquifer which is emptying into the Atlantic a little bit off the coast of Crescent Beach. In other areas, it comes from lakes and streams.

      New York city gets its water from upstate lakes and resevoir which are fed via underground aqueducts. Some of it is d5rained from the Hudson River above the salt line (Newburgh-Beacon). Chlorine is added before the water enters the aqueduct. The nutrients in the water, unacceptable by international standards (except in China), are left to reach the tap. Twenty years ago, nutrients were removed by precipitation at the pump house for the city’s water from the Hudson. PCBs get into the system thanks to GE’s old transformer plants upstream.

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    • I know Europe has its nutcases and idiots, but I just can’t imagine any burgher, mayor, or MP even articulating actual praying as a course of action, let alone staging such a ridiculous event.

      BTW, just blocks away, 3-times as many people showed up for a massive give-away of school supplies—half of them had to be turned away because the organizers didn’t anticipate the demand. . .

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    • Rick still walks this Earth, so my prayers also didn’t get answered. I must use logic and conclude that praying doesn’t work.

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      • Well I don’t wonder if God isn’t listening to me. I’m not listening to Him either…at least to what the church says He says.

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        • Isn’t it odd that you have Tea Party nutters and Ayn Rand nutters that are also Christian nutters. On one hand the individual is supposed to look after himself and on the other your supposed to pray to God for some sort of help. No wonder these people are all messed up.

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          • Whenever something goes wrong you are to blame. You haven’t looked after yourself properly or you haven’t prayed hard enough.

            I vote for Rick Perry…

            …to go back to Texas and to pray properly and stop wasting valuable time running for President.

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            • when an individual prays to God for some kind of relief, and relief actually comes, they of course attribute it to God even though it’s purely circumstantial or logically explicable.

              When a whole group prays for supplication, to ‘amplify’ the ‘strength’ of their prayers, definitively NOTHING EVER HAPPENS!

              Ignoring the sheer delusion of it all, these lunatics are doing it all wrong, according to their own texts. The only way to get God’s attention is to have a barbecue—it says so in the Holey Bibble.

          • The brains are different on these nutters. There was that group of people that committed synchronized suicide so that they could get on the spaceship that followed the comet Hale Bopp. At least they didn’t try to take the rest of the planet with them.

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    • And to think that he just said that god can fix the US economic problems. If god said no to the rain, what makes Parry, yes, that’s Parry with an “A” 🙂 think that god will say yes when he prays for jobs. I read somewhere that if one plan on moving to Texas, they need to have an exit plan before making the move.

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  10. When I was a kid, we lived in a house that had a tar and gravel roof. There were cats in the neighorhood, and they knew how to jump from the fence to the roof, which had rows and rows of mounds in the gravel.

    Wouldn’t suggest trying to capture run-off from a tar and gravel roof.

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    • I would also suggest using a used whiskey or wine barrel…I’d be concerned about carcinogens from the plastic, especially if it gets baked in the sun.

      Here out West, one still sees a lot of old windmills that operated pumps to draw up the ground water and store it in a large tank. Left over from the days before electricity – the original use of green engergy – wind power.

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      • Yes. A wood barrel works as long as it;s not made of a poisonous or oily wood.
        If you look around NYC you will see all the 5-10 story buildings from the turn of the century have wooden water tanks on the roofs.

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      • the original use of green engergy – wind power.

        Watermills were at least as early as windmills. Depending on locale, a small river might provide a more consistent source of force than the wind. Both depended on the development of gears and bearings to advance their technology. Early gears were wooden, with pegs for teeth. Early bearings were lubricated with animal fat.

        I have seen photos of very early machine shops (my trade, you know) where the single shaft down the center of the building, the power take-off shaft, was originally water powered, then later steam powered, with belt-driven machines on both sides of the shaft.

        We could still have technology without fossil fuels.

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        • Wikipedia: The windwheel of the Greek engineer Heron of Alexandria in the 1st century AD is the earliest known instance of using a wind-driven wheel to power a machine.

          It seems the waterwheel appeared appeared about 3 B.C. in historical records.

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        • A friend of mine toured a working brewery (in the Cotswolds?) that was still using all of its original equipment, including steam power, with shafts and belts all over the place. If I could remember the name of the place, I could see if they’re still in business.

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        • well…if you’re going to get all technical about it…yeah, I guess watermills were around before windmills….

          still a lot greener than burning black gunk from the ground, or irradiating the planet…

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    • In some places in the Caribbean they have flat, white roofs and collect ALL the water that lands them. Not sure if they have cats!

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    • My father in law has a cistern built into the ground. He collects the rainwater from the roof, through a rain gutter (no cats) and uses a pump to water his garden with it. The cistern is too small lately as we rarely have enough rain anymore in the summer (this year is different, we could water Texas with the rain we had this summer).

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  13. And the biggest moment was when every single GOP candidate on the stage agreed that they would reject a budget deal that was $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. Even Fox News’s Bret Baier couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. He asked again just to make sure they had understood the question. Mind-boggling.

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    • THAT should be the headline topic. Not who ‘won’ but what EVERY GOP CANDIDATE thinks is important—-no compromise, total pandering to the lunatic fringe, or else all of them actually BEING the lunatic fringe, (about 70% of the public acknowledge the need for targeted tax increases, according to polls), and ALL of them being idiots with no interest in the surprisingly rational, more reality based public opinion (and even the opinion of the finance industry). .

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  14. re; yesterday.
    I didn’t watch the GOP pageant last night, but read the live-blog by The Guardian—very entertaining.
    So who ‘won’?

    Rick Perry, apparently :D.

    Paul got the respect of the crowd for wanting out of Afghanistan but of course that raises the specter of Bin Laden being killed under Obama’s watch, so he had to be shut out (as well as for the usual reasons).
    Herman Cain apparently impressed Vanilla Ice.
    Pawlenty had the presence of a “Glade plug-in”
    Santorum had to beg for attention
    The main action was Bachmann and Romney deploying Word-Salad-Shooters against each other.
    Ging-bitch used Palin’s media-victim gambit which only works when combined with SEXISM! so…epic fail.
    Was Huntsman even there? Who-sman?

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  19. Still another call came from Hinkle himself later, and she told him what she had told his family members. “You just ruined me,” she says Hinkle responded.

    Gay marriage doesn’t destroy marriage, it’s gays (married to non-gays) who go around gaying-up their gayness with other gays whilst legislating against gays. who destroy their own marriages.

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  21. From TP: Rick Perry Says Social Security And Medicare Are Unconstitutional

    Ask your constitutional lawyer if this is right for you.

    Warning:
    Believing in this may cause you to become homeless. You may get sick and never get better. You may loose any money you put into these institutions. Your mind may loose the ability to think clearly.

    In case of winning the lottery or inheriting a shitload of cash you will not have to think about the constitutionality of these institutions.

    Don’t worry about other people as this may cause your head to explode with an infusion of empathy.

    Not suitable for illegal immigrants.

    Do not consult a lawyer if you believe the GOP is working in your best interests.

    Available in Somalia and many other places with less government.

    * This message brought to you by the GOP with a side of Rand.

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    • I’m tired of hearing ‘what the founding fathers intended’ with regard to the Constitution. What matters is the exact wording and the most recent interpretation of the Nine Monarchs on the current Supreme Court.

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  24. Hartmann just said the SEC is looking into who shorted stocks at S & P before the downgrade. I’m still wondering if they shorted stocks ahead of the debt ceiling deal, and needed the downgrade to cover their bet.

    SEC Investigating S&P Over Whether They Leaked News About Downgrade to Investors

    A couple days ago, Yves Smith speculated that Standard and Poor’s broke SEC regulations by leaking word of its imminent downgrade of US debt before it occurred. Charlie Gasparino backed her up a day later. And now, the Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating whether S&P leaked.

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  26. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need a President that prays (or preys) publicly… He can do that if he chooses in the privacy of his residence. So I would not be inclined to vote for a man who publicly displays his faith… as it says in the Bible –those who pray in public have already received their reward. Sadly though, there are many that are fooled by such public displays or there wouldn’t be as many TV evangelists living the good life.

    But the funniest thing is that Rick Perry’s going to steal the last vestige of voters from Mrs. Palin. And that will be a good thing to finally shut her the hell up… except maybe for her to play spoiler in the upcoming Republican selection process.

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    • .
      There’s one part that won’t be quoted by the FauxNews:

      Appeals Court Says Key Parts Of Health-Care Reform Unconstitutional

      Significantly, the court concluded even though that key section to be unconstitutional, the entire law need not be set aside.

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      • Fox’s big graphical headline right now is “ObamaCare Slapdown”

        No reputable news organization calls it ObamaCare. Only political operatives.

        Link to image here.

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  29. Quote of the Day:

    “Chalk one up to the crazies. If Congress wanted to get rid of tax exemptions and exclusions amounting to $100 billion in new taxes in exchange for $1 trillion in tax cuts, and Republicans turned the deal down, I would personally drive down to Washington and pelt them with rotten vegetables, and possibly with rocks. $100 billion in new taxes plus $1 trillion in cuts balances the budget in 2012,” – Kevin Williamson, NRO, focusing on what I called the biggest moment of the debate.

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    • Anyone who writes for NRO should realize that $1.1 trillion in deficit reduction is actually $110 billion a year, because Congress traditionally does their math in ten year projections, so it won’t balance anything in 2012, or even 2020. He can’t be that stupid, can he?

      I wonder what this year’s deficit would be if you averaged the last ten years of revenue and deducted it from 2011 spending. That’s only fair, since Bush/Fed economic policies brought us not only the housing boom, but the inevitable bubble and bust as well.

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  30. Working on a buzzword generator as part of a class assignment I’m doing (since my job is going overseas, I’m being retrained – thankfully).

    Anyway, it came up with this:

    “We need a pervasive shared space.”

    Sounds more like nerd pickup line to me. 🙂

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  32. Quote of the Day II:

    “Michele Bachmann’s first answer, Mark Halperin, was “I wish the federal government had defaulted.” Had defaulted, a week after Americans had lost–some of them perhaps lost half of their pensions. Lost half of their 401(k)s, when trillions of dollars went down the drain [pounds the table] with Americans suffering, she said that and got applause, and if anybody thinks that guys like my dad are going to be voting that way when this rolls out of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, in the early stages, and really gets going, they are out of their mind and they are too stupid not only to prognosticate, they are too stupid to run Slurpee machines in Des Moines. I’ll let you go now. I got it off my chest.

    Michele Bachmann is a joke. She is a joke. And now I will pass it on to you. Her answer is a joke, her candidacy is a joke, and anybody that sits here and says she has any chance of winning anything is out of their mind. Take your straw poll, take your caucus, but Iowa, if you let her win, you prove your irrelevance once again,” – Joe Scarborough, on Morning Joe.

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  33. [Warning: the E word is used several times/]

    Plesiosaur dinosaur fossil solves breeding puzzleThe fossil bones of a giant, long-necked swimming reptile from the age of the dinosaurs have resolved a long-held mystery about the animals and how they reproduced.

    I love when puzzle pieces begin to fall into place – explaining how things evolved!

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  34. Just wondering but if America is such a Christian nation from its inception, how come the ‘In God We Trust’ and the ‘Under God’ part of the pledge didn’t happen until in the 1950’s when we were fighting the godless commies?

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        • .
          It was a very narrow world view the nation held back then – god was in everything – that’s what “guided” people.
          Then we saw the wider world where god wasn’t always the center.
          Sometimes many gods were.
          Our nation sometimes learns…late…or not at all. ?

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          • You are such a nice person. But the fact is the world would not have the Christian population it has without the violent influence of the Spanish, Portuguese, French and Americans. They are the only reason the Western Hemisphere is inflicted with that disease.

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  35. Just returned home from the movie theater. I saw the movie, “The Help”, also read the book. The characters looked just the way I pictured them which usually doesn’t happen. The story brings up the issue of race and discrimination. My guess is that it is no accident that this good story was made into a movie. How sad that we haven’t moved very far from the 1960’s.

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  36. Palin got what she so desperately craves. Attention.

    The headline: “Sarah Palin stokes 2012 speculation with Iowa appearance”

    Republican Sarah Palin rolled into Iowa’s state fair Friday, stealing the spotlight from the party’s presidential contenders and sparking a new round of speculation about her plans for 2012.

    The rest of the story.

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    • Here’s what puzzles me most: Who the fuck cares where Palin is, what she’s doing, what she’s “thinking,” what her family is up to, or even where her dog shits?

      She is a complete and total non-entity, one who can only possibly appeal to low IQ or some other form of intellectual dementia, and ….

      Oh. Wait. Hmmm. Never mind. I get it.

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    • It really is a pity that Americans can’t see that Republican politicians are all about flash and appearance. Palin and Perry doing what they can to blank out the Iowa Straw polls that showed the Republican candidates had no intention of listening to anything.

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  37. And if anyone is interested, last night I made a cast iron skillet of browned pork followed by a carmelization of onion, green pepper and thin sliced baby carrots. Then it all simmered in BBQ sauce (Famous Dave’s since that was what I had) and a bit of red wine. On top of that was cornmeal dumplings.

    It was a huge hit and the dumplings and BBQ got along very well together.

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  38. Stroganoff here. With fresh green beans. Just because the Russians lacked culinary imagination doesn’t mean the rest of the world should.

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    • That court is fucked up, but the SCOTUS is fucked even more.

      I get the feeling that the right is trying to move the health care bill through the courts ASAP, in order to get a ruling by the Roberts court.

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  41. (NOTE: I’m probably going to be away from the computer for a couple days so, if you think it’s worthy, please feel free to repost this on Saturday’s Watering hole. Thanks.)

    Are corporations “people”?

    If they are “people” they must be held to the criminal code. The way in which I would like to see it enforced is personal liability of company officers.. The rich and powerful will always find a way to satisfy their need to acquire more. That isn’t going to change and it only hurts when they get sick of stealing from each other. But… how much different would it be if corporations, and the officers thereof, were actually treated like common criminals?

    Two particularly tragic recent events, the Massey mining deaths and the BP blowout, are clearly cases of gross and willful negligence leading to a loss of lives. In both instances the greatest crime is that the very real, human, people who were ultimately responsible for this extreme and obvious negligence have never so much as been charged with a crime despite the massive evidence available in publicized records.

    Massey and BP are just two famous recent examples among many so I use them as a convenient example. In both cases there are reports, documenting the exact problems that caused the subsequent loss of life, that were dismissed by high officers of the companies up to and including CEOs, government agencies, and majority stock holders.

    Humanity aside, if we ever want corporations to be good citizens, we have to start treating criminals who happen to run big corporations as criminals. We need to start with those who have killed and maimed their workers and customers. Then we can put the emphasis on various other crimes perpetrated against Man, Nature, Persons and Property.

    The right-wingers mistake this for an attack on capitalism but, obviously, it’s not. It’s a response to the immunity bestowed on the ruling class who can kill with impunity as long as they can claim they were just trying to make a bigger profit. As if that can absolve murder, mayhem, exploitation, market manipulation, fraud, and theft?

    Our country has faced this before and so has every other human society that lasted more than a single generation. Sometimes the reaction is measured and rational and sometimes it becomes violent. Despite recent events I still think that our society and system have many strengths that can still prevent major violence but any change from the path we’re on will be traumatic.

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    • The corporate death penalty is the only death penalty I can get behind, and I say go at it with a vengeance.

      An eye for an eye. A corporation kills a person, it dies.

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      • I vacillate on the death penalty. I think that there are acts that demand the death penalty but I’ll be damned if I would take sole responsibility for enforcing it. In a way it’s the mirror image of the abortion issue.

        No one wants to kill a criminal if there’s the slightest chance of rehabilitation but there are cases that are pretty clear. No one wants to abort a fetus that has a chance at a long, healthy, happy life. In a healthy society, that can afford to offer choices in desperate times, both should be both legal and rare.

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  43. Corporations can be bought or sold and thus are slaves and do not represent a whole person.under the Constitution. They do not fall under any inclusions defined in the 14th Amendment. They are thus foreign nationals.

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