Laten we maar met de ‘Bad’ beginnen.
Starbucks: Bring on the guns
By Janis Mara
Contra Costa Times
Posted: 02/05/2010 05:04:57 PM PST
Starbucks has brushed aside a request from a gun control advocacy group to ban the display of guns in its retail locations, saying it will abide by laws that allow patrons to openly carry unloaded weapons.
The national Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence made the request in the wake of a series of meetings in local restaurants over the past few months by Bay Area Open Carry, a group that hopes to make it legal to carry loaded guns in California. Peets Coffee & Tea and California Pizza Kitchen responded to similar requests by banning displays of weapons in the companies’ coffeehouses and restaurants.
"Starbucks does not have a corporate policy regarding customers and weapons; we defer to federal, state and local laws and regulations regarding this issue," Starbucks’ customer relations department said in response to the Brady Campaign’s request.
“Yeah, so?”
Dollars en guns gingen altijd al hand in hand en $tarbucks komt eindelijk uit z’n schaapskleren.
Hey, Peet’s koffie is uitendelijk toch beter en desnoods koop je een bakkie bij de California Pizza Kitchen.
En, niet vergeten, bad en ugly staan nu voor $tarbucks en wapens.
The Good
De afgelopen week ben ik op stap geweest met Pieter Hoff, eens de grootste lelie teler van Nederland en ‘s werelds grootste exporteur van bloembollen.
Nadat hij z’n bedrijf zo’n 7 jaar geleden verkocht is hij onstuitbaar in de weer geweest om woestijnen te veranderen in groene oorden, dankzij zijn uitvinding; de Waterboxx.
WaterBoxx Grows Forest in the Desert17/11/2008 |
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A new Dutch breakthrough invention makes it possible to reforest large desert and rocky areas on the planet in the coming years. Experiments in the Sahara desert have shown that the WaterBoxx allows trees to grow under harsh conditions and can provide them with sufficient water. |
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The invention of the Dutch businessman and inventor Pieter Hoff has won the prestigious Beta Dragons Award during the annual Flying Dutchman 2008, Science & Technology Summit in Amsterdam. A board of scientists and captains of industry proclaimed his design to be the most promising and innovative project. Philips CEO Gerard Kleisterlee handed him the corresponding amount of 10.000 euro. |
Waterboxx nieuws uit Sonoma:
Opinion
Can Waterboxx save the world?
Published:
Thu 2/4 6 PM
Sometimes radical change comes packaged in something deceptively simple.
A section of tree trunk becomes the wheel.
A sharp stick becomes the plow.
The alphabet becomes Harry Potter.
The integrated circuit becomes the iPad.
And a $7 plastic box saves the entire planet from the effects of global warming.
If you can read, you probably know who J.K. Rowling is, and if you own any piece of computing equipment you may be familiar with Gordon Moore.
Chances are, though, you’ve never heard of Pieter Hoff or the Waterboxx. Hoff is, first of all, Dutch, which is to say he is part of a culture that has for centuries displayed an unusual degree of national pragmatism. Maybe that comes from living below sea level with the ocean at your front door; you learn to adapt because you have to.
For most of his professional life, Pieter Hoff was a very successful horticulturalist, the largest lily grower in the Netherlands and the largest exporter of flower bulbs in the world.
Five years ago, Hoff sold his business and set out to change the world. Inspired by the work of Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Prize-winning Kenyan and founder of the Green Belt Movement, Hoff did his own research on climate change and wrote a booklet turning global warming strategy on its head. He was in Sonoma this week explaining how.
Titled, "CO2, A Gift From Heaven," Hoff’s book argues that whether or not human activity is the key factor in global warming is irrelevant because the targets in greenhouse gas reduction outlined in the Kyoto Protocol won’t make more than a minor dent in the problem and probably won’t be achieved.
Besides, Hoff insists, climate change is not a problem, it’s a money-making opportunity. And the opportunity grows out of a box, a "Waterboxx," to be precise, an apparently ingenious device that costs $7 to make and captures both rainwater and atmospheric moisture which it channels to a plant – a tree, a stalk of corn, a grapevine – in its center. The box sits atop the soil allowing capillary action to draw moisture upward enhancing root development and blocking the seedling from damage by wind, weeds, rodents and inclement weather.
Hoff planted 3,500 fruit tree saplings in Morocco – in the Sahara Desert – and after three years close to 90 percent were thriving. He says the same thing could be done on a global scale to reforest the world, allowing trees to reduce atmospheric CO2 to sustainable levels while cooling vast swaths of land with shade, providing timber to a rapidly denuded world and offering vastly expanded opportunities for both small and large-scale agriculture as a result of reclaimed land.
How many trees will it take?
Hoff envisions reforesting two billion hectares (about five billion acres) on mostly denuded, unproductive land. That’s about 13 percent of the planet’s land surface. For context, the total land mass of California is about 100 million acres.
The cost for such an effort? About $550 billion a year, worldwide, for 40 years. Hoff believes that’s a lot cheaper than the capital cost and punitive taxes required to attempt a front-end reduction in global CO2. And, he has calculated, the profit on that investment would be about $822 trillion.
If this is all too grandiose to grasp, simply consider the value of a $7 box that can grow grapevines on a hillside without irrigation, corn in a desert and new forests in Haiti.
Pieter Hoff may actually change the world. We hope he succeeds.
– David Bolling
Dus gaat Mondavi daar mee aan de slag in Sonoma en hebben we j.l. donderdag en vrijdag Palm Springs aangedaan om daar de woestijn te ‘greenen’ middels hun schooldistrict. Educatie gaat daar dus hand in hand met de Good!
Inmiddels heeft ‘Popular Science’ de Waterboxx als een van 2010’s top 10 uitvindingen genomineerd die in staat zijn globale verwarming aan te pakken en onze planeet voedsel te verschaffen.
Het mag geen wonder heten dat PR Goeroe Ed Fogelman en ik tijdens Pieter’s gapassioneerde toespraak in een prachtige botanische tuin in Palm Springs, aan het ginnegappen waren over wat we zouden dragen tijdens de uitreiking van de Nobelprijs aan Pieter.
Bekijk de video op YouTube of ga naar www.groasis.com
And now for something entirely different:
Na het redden van de planeet kom ik in de alledaagse wereld van mijn beminde Astrid terecht; zij redt levens via 911!
Peter’s Angels?
En dan denk ik wel eens; wat ben ik toch een watje!
Gelukkig gaat dat snel over, daar heb ik mijn vrienden voor; Jack Daniels, Jim Beam en andere notabelen.
Morgen de familie weer verlaten voor nieuwe avonturen ter ondersteuning van het Nederlandse bedrijfsleven in den vreemde.
Raad maar waar ik heen ga, en welke stad (niet vergeten op de link te klikken!):
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