Going Green - Part 1

This is my first post in an ongoing series where I try to document our continuing attempts to green up our lives, our house, our cars, etc. This will include all the starts, stops, frustrations caused by availability, cost, usability, whatever.

Things that we already do include fairly fastidious shutting off of electronics and lights when not in use. This even extends as far as Michelle frequently completely unplugging the microwave and her computer. Sounds nutty, but devices still use power even when off. Standby consumption can be equivalent to a 75 or 100 watt bulb continuously on. Of course, there are power strips that will serve the same purpose, but we have not went that far yet. I didn't just want to get a cheap strip that doesn't do what we need it to.

During the summer and when we're not in the house, our thermostat is set at 84. Even when home, we rarely set it below 80. We have always used the local electric company's "Time-of-Use" plan which rewards you shifting some of your electricity usage to off-peak times. We have used compact fluorescent bulbs for years.

Just this week, we've stopped using paper napkins (and will try to stop using paper towels) and will use cloth napkins. We're even going to order hemp napkins. You can't get much more birkenstocky than that. In shopping around, I found several pretty cool sites that sell organic items:

Grassroots Natural Goods
Downbound
EcoKitchen

Every year, we try to use our tax refund to get something that improves the efficiency of our house. A few years back, it was high-efficiency, low-water Bosch appliances. This year, it was going to be something along the lines of solar power. Nothing major, maybe just a panel that could power a few devices. But, unfortunately, it's not quite that simple and not that cheap. To really get something that will generate any sizable amount of power, you've really got to spend some money (on-grid residential solar). There a lot of incentives from the electric company and from both local and federal governments that reduce the price, but you are still talking a big outlay. If we had it all to do again, we'd have set it up at the time of building our new house. It's disgusting that in Arizona, where the sun pretty much shines all the time, solar power is pretty much an afterthought.

There's a cool tool at Nature Conservancy that helps you estimate the impact that you are having on the planet with your choices. With each change that you make, you can get a tangible feel for how much of an effect it makes.

This is not about doing something because it's trendy or because you think you are viewed better for doing so. Or at least it shouldn't be. But too much of anything - even a good thing - is a problem. Here's an interesting article that likens the selling of carbon offsets to that of the Catholic Church's selling of indulgences before the Reformation:

Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?

That's like a double-bonus for me ... making fun of the Catholic Church and trendy hypocritical hipsters at the same time.


The environment and conservation weren't always "liberal" issues. You know, "stewardship of the earth", and all that crap. Conservative and conservation didn't use to be mutually exclusive. When did it become a partisan issue? Morons like Rush Limbaugh certainly have accelerated the process. Look, I don't care if you are a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, whatever. I don't care if you believe in God, Vishnu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I don't care if you don't believe in global warming. It's just smart to conserve what you have and to not crap in your own house. The earth is our house.

If you have 1 kid, don't have a 4,000 square foot house and a Hummer that you only drive to the grocery store. Don't be wasteful just because you want to get back at Democrats. Shopping and consumerism, despite what W says, aren't "patriotic". Don't be a friggin' skidmark on the Earth.

I'd be interested to know any further suggestions that you guys have. I know some of you don't have cars. Some telecommute. Some are vegetarians. (all things that reduce your carbon footprint)

This Blog is Not Yet Rated

In an odd bit of synchronicity, I just finished watching This Film is Not Yet Rated last night, which I had DVR'd off of IFC. I then woke up this morning to find that Jack Valenti had died. See, Jack Valenti, for better or as this movie suggests, worse, is the father of the movie rating system.

It is this movie's contention (and I'd have to agree) that our current movie rating system and board unduly penalizes movies for sexual content while being lax on violence. A movie with sexually suggestive content (especially what puritans would call deviant) is four times as likely to be slapped with an NC-17 than a violent one. This hang-up is exclusive to the U.S. and can be correlated with the rise of the Religious Right.

Movies like Boys Don't Cry and The Cooler were initially given NC-17's because of scenes of female pleasure. Apparently this is taboo but decapitations and gun violence in just about any Swarzenegger, Stallone, etc. movie is OK, perhaps even OK for PG-13.

The item that I found most interesting was that the appeals board for the MPAA included movie and theater industry people (which one would expect) but also two clergyman, an Episcopalian and a Catholic. Why the hell would there be any religious representation here at all? And if you decided to have such representation, why those two to the exclusion of all others (and atheists)? The answer is that the movie industry is about 95% big movie studios, which in turn are owned by just a few huge media conglomerates. And those conglomerates are owned by people like Rupert Murdoch. You have to kiss the ass of big business and big religion lest you get boycotted by groups headed by James Dobson. I guess they're not so worried about organized boycotts by atheists. lol.

This is a movie with an obvious slant, but the facts that are laid out are not disputed. It does an effective job of pointing out the problems with the current movie ratings system. There are a lot of insightful interviews with actors, directors, etc., including Kevin Smith and Matt Stone (of South Park). I recommend it. Grade: B

Conspicuous Wealth

So, there I am, 80 degrees, beer in hand, swaying palm trees, sitting beside the pool at the lovely Palm Springs Tennis Club. The very picture of conspicuous consumption. Except:

• we're just visiting my wife's cousin who has a timeshare there
• we're staying down the street at the Motel 6 and we're only in town for a day
• as I'm sitting by the pool, I'm reading articles in Mother Jones and Sierra Club Magazine about income inequality and conservation

Believe me, the irony of all this was not lost on me.

In the article, Reversal of Fortune, in the latest Mother Jones, what we value and what we work for are explored.

Is our sin in getting away and living a little or in the exact opposite (not taking the time to enjoy life)? We work harder to get more things that we enjoy less and less.

"...according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound—like climate change and peak oil—that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier..."

Every day is a battle to determine exactly what our role should be. Should we feel guilty for occasionally letting our hair down? I don't think so, but as we walked around Palm Springs and watching people and cars and house, I couldn't help feeling that something was just off-kilter. Most people didn't seem to be there to enjoy themselves or to relax. They were there to prove that they could be ... to show off. Young trophy wives. Rolls Royces. Maybe I'm just being cynical. We were there to enjoy ourselves ... and we did. We weren't trying to impress anyone.

We try and make a trip to San Diego or Manhattan Beach every year. Nothing fancy. Sometimes stay with relatives. Sometimes get a simple condo. Are we trying to impress someone or are we making these trips because we have fun? Would our money be better spent by saving or giving to charity? Sure. But we do both of those things also. I don't know what the right balance is. I just know that we're constantly re-evaluating exactly what that balance should be. That's all that anyone can do, I guess.

Classic economics would say that if we are spending money, then we should be happy. Our economy has been built on the model that if we are producing and buying and selling, all is good. But is that model still valid?

"...An orthodox economist has a simple happiness formula: If you buy a Ford Expedition, then ipso facto a Ford Expedition is what makes you happy. That's all we need to know. The economist would call this idea "utility maximization," and in the words of the economic historian Gordon Bigelow, "the theory holds that every time a person buys something, sells something, quits a job, or invests, he is making a rational decision about what will...provide him 'maximum utility.' If you bought a Ginsu knife at 3 a.m. a neoclassical economist will tell you that, at that time, you calculated that this purchase would optimize your resources." The beauty of this principle lies in its simplicity. It is perhaps the central assumption of the world we live in: You can tell who I really am by what I buy.

Yet economists have long known that people's brains don't work quite the way the model suggests. When Bob Costanza, one of the fathers of ecological economics and now head of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont, was first edging into economics in the early 1980s, he had a fellowship to study "social traps"—the nuclear arms race, say—in which "short-term behavior can get out of kilter with longer broad-term goals.""

"...We all know in our own lives how irrationally we are capable of acting, and how unconnected those actions are to any real sense of joy ... "

"... Since happiness had increased with income in the past, we assumed it would inevitably do so in the future. We make these kinds of mistakes regularly: Two beers made me feel good, so ten will make me feel five times better ... "

So, that's what it comes down to. More is not always better. Spending does not equate to happiness. Taking it easy and spending time with family and friends does equate to happiness. It's about doing things for the right reasons and not living beyond your means (or the planet's means).

"Wealth is the ability to fully experience life." -- Henry David Thoreau

Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

A new survey ... by Pew Research Center ... found that despite the mass appeal of the Internet and cable news since a previous poll in 1989, Americans' knowledge of national affairs has slipped a little ...

... Pew judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot ...

Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly.

Big shocker ... not.

But look into the stats a little closer and there are some surprises. From Mother Jones:

Daily Show/Colbert Report 54%
Major Newspapers' Websites 54%
NewsHour w/ Jim Lehrer 53%
Bill O'Reilly 51%
NPR 51%
Rush Limbaugh 50%

O'Reilly's and Limbaugh's audiences score surprisingly (to me, at least) high. I'm not completely sure why this might be but I suspect their shows attract the more serious idealistic true conservatives who, while making the wrong conclusions about how to change the world, at least are informed about what is going on in that world.

Newsmagazines 48%
Local Newspaper 43%
CNN 41%

The obviously painful one in this group is CNN. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. What used to be a fairly serious news channel has become the Anna Nicole channel. Their CNN Headline News Channel is manned by trained monkeys. There is no better indication of how big a joke they are when they have Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace plastered all over it. Glenn Beck is a straight-up Right Wing racist masked under an aw-shucks-"I'm just telling the truth"-common man veneer. Nancy Grace milks manufactured indignation and fake concern for ratings.

Network Evening News 38%
Blogs 37%
Fox News 35%
Local TV News 35%
Network Morning Shows 34%

No big shocks here. The scary part is that there is a huge majority of the country that get their news from one (and only one) of these sources. Fortunately, that is an aging part of the population.

It's not very complimentary to see blogs listed but if one exclusively got your news from blogs, you'd be hurting ... especially if that blog was, say, ... The Drudge Report.

"Your intelligence is measured by those around you; if you spend your days with idiots you seal your own fate." -- Mary M. Illigassch

Violence

I was going to write something on today's events at VA Tech, but my words would have paled in comparison with Shawn's at Cheese is Moldy Milk:

Violence

Whose Morality Are We Talking About?

"Morality is of the highest importance - but for us, not for God." -- Albert Einstein

A long-awaited national study has concluded that abstinence-only sex education, a cornerstone of the Bush administration's social agenda, does not keep teenagers from having sex. Neither does it increase or decrease the likelihood that if they do have sex, they will use a condom.

... eight states that used to receive funding for abstinence programs have decided to stop doing so ...

... The federal government spends $176 million a year on abstinence-only education, and millions more are spent every year in state and local matching grants. Harry Wilson, a top official in the Department of Health and Human Services, said yesterday that the administration has no intention of changing funding priorities in light of the results.

"This study isn't rigorous enough to show whether or not [abstinence-only] education works," Wilson said.

Courtesy of Campus Progress

That last quote is a common and unfortunate response from the Right. There have been many studies on the efficacy of prayer on patients in hospitals. When they seems to indicate a positive effect, religious leaders are quick to say, "I told you so!". When there is no correlation shown, they are quick to say that God must have know there was a study going on or that there were flaws in the methodology.

For the case of abstinence-only, the responses are similar. I have even heard some suggest that the fact that the study shows that abstinence-only doesn't work is all the more reason to increase funding. They say that the reason it is not working is because it's not extensive enough. Sound familiar? Maybe the war will go better if we just send some more troops.

Abstinence-only is yet another case (along with the marriage amendment) that has nothing to do with helping people and everything to do with pushing some perversion of religious "morality". If they were truly concerned with our young people's health, they would encourage abstinence as part of a comprehensive sex education program that also included discussions of birth control and safe sex.

Pushing one's own morality to the exclusion of personal rights and practicality is also at the forefront of a controversy right in my back yard. The famous and nauseating publicity whore, our county sheriff Joe Arpaio, was recently rebuked by the State Appeals Court for his department's policy of not transporting prisoners for abortions:

An Arizona court of appeals recently struck down as unconstitutional a policy denying women in Maricopa County jails access to abortion care. The ACLU filed the lawsuit to defend the rights of women prisoners to obtain timely, safe, and legal abortions.

"... Sheriff Joe Arpaio cannot ignore the medical needs of prisoners simply because he does not agree with the decision to end a pregnancy," said Alessandra Soler Meetze, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arizona. "A woman in jail has a right to make her own decision about whether to have a child."

At issue was an unwritten Maricopa County policy prohibiting jail officials from transporting a prisoner to obtain an abortion unless she first received a court order. The ACLU argued that the policy served no legitimate purpose because the jail regularly transports prisoners without a court order for all other necessary medical care, including prenatal care and childbirth. The jail also regularly transports prisoners for various non-medical reasons, including to visit terminally ill family members or attend relatives' funerals.

... Sheriff Arpaio has maintained this policy throughout his tenure, consistent with his well-publicized stance against abortion and his 'America's toughest sheriff' persona. In fact, Arpaio himself has admitted that under this policy, "The gal may have the baby by the time [the case] gets through the court system."

Are you telling me that it is better to force a baby to be born to an incarcerated mother, who is unable logistically or financially to care for it? The way in which so-called "moral" politicians and lawmen neuter the law of the land to fit with their own needs is reprehensible. You cannot arbitrarily decide for others which laws you feel should be upheld and which should not. You are making a decision for that woman and her child that will affect them for the rest of their lives. Are you going to take that child into your home and care for it, Joe? Do you really care about anything but getting your mug on national TV?

"Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Blog Roundup

Since I've been busy lately (or lazy), I thought I'd point you to the funnier highlights of some of my fave blogs. At least they've been doing some thinking and writing:

• James at Genius of Insanity has a clever take on the tendency of this president to create a Czar of everything -- WTF is a War Czar???
  It's all very consistent with his king (or God) complex.

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• "It was a dark and stormy night" ... or something like that. Shawn from Cheese is Moldy Milk channels Raymond Chandler -- The Big Orange Moon

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• Iraq war as prep-school football game from Shrimplate -- Snap. I love the line, "And why is that stupid cheerleader quarterbacking?" Wicked funny but way too true.

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• Josh at Schulzone has a link to a version of Fuck Tha Police that you could actually show your kids -- Help the Police

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And as always, some very sober and intelligent discussions on dominionism, and gays in the military from Sadie at Sadico Junction and Laura at Sarchasm, respectively.

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Finally, some smokin' movie reviews:

Grindhouse from Laura
Grindhouse from Reel Fanatic

Republican Cartoonish Behavior

Ah, the beauty of the Internet. Everybody thinks that something that they say will only be heard by the people right around them. Luckily for us, not so:

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney explains hunting

The former Massachusetts governor has called himself a lifelong hunter, yet his campaign acknowledged that he has been on just two hunting trips _ one when he was 15 and the other just last year.

"I'm not a big-game hunter. I've made that very clear," he said. "I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter. Small varmints, if you will. I began when I was 15 or so and I have hunted those kinds of varmints since then. More than two times."

Romney has also supported gun control. When he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1994 he backed the Brady law and a ban on assault-style rifles. As governor, he supported the state's strict gun-control laws and signed into law one of the nation's tougher assault weapons laws.

He joined the National Rifle Association last August as a "Lifetime" member.

And before you right wing nuts get your panties in a bind, yes, I realize that Kerry did something similar a few years back. It's kinda ironic to read that article and see some of the quotes that administration stooges said about Kerry:

"... The NRA ... accusing Kerry of suiting himself up as a sportsman while opposing gun owner rights. Kerry has said he supports hunters and sportsmen's rights to own guns, but gun advocates have assailed him for supporting the ban on assault weapons and for requiring background checks on gun purchases."

"If John Kerry thinks the Second Amendment is about photo ops, he's daffy ..."

A spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign called the orchestrated event "another example of John Kerry presenting himself as someone he is not."

"It's a fraud," said Steve Schmidt, the Bush spokesman. "He has fought against the interests of gun owners throughout his 20-year Senate career."

Wow, pretty much all of those things could be said about Romney. But there's pretty much silence from the NRA now. Hmmm. Maybe it's not really about liberty, the Bill of Rights, etc. It's really about political partisanship and money. Hypocrisy, thy name is Romney/NRA/Republicans.

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courtesy of monk

I am the walrus, coo-coo cachu. The man who put the "dip" in diplomacy recently decided it was time to lecture a foreign leader, Saudi's King Abdullah on the legality of the US Iraq invasion:

"With all due respect to the King, it's a mistake to characterise the US presence in Iraq as illegal," -- Bolton said the US was in Iraq at the invitation of its government and its presence was further sanctioned by a United Nations Security Council resolution.

Right. We listened to a couple of rich Iraqi expatriates (hardly the Iraqi government) and we lied to the UN about the Iraqi threat in order to get them to sanction the war. Sounds like the Saudi king pretty much has it correctly pegged as an illegitimate war.

John Bolton, you ignorant slut. What a pompous ass. He goes around with an air of righteousness and is consistently proven wrong. Recently, after repeatedly telling Jon Stewart that Stewart was wrong on issues of policy, history, etc., it was quite easy for the Daily Show to prove Bolton wrong. In other words, the man that was the ambassador to the UN, a position of great influence in which one should have a fairly encompassing knowledge of history and foreign policy, was schooled by a comedy show. In an administration full of people without the slightest bit of self-awareness or modesty, Bolton still stands out.

Jesus Camp

The Exorcist is not the scariest movie I've ever seen now. It's been replaced with ... Jesus Camp. I'm tellin' ya, Linda Blair has nothing on the 9-year-old Rachel in the film. I was half expecting her head to swivel 360 degrees. And don't get me started on the whole speaking in tongues thing.

Jesus Camp follows several kids raised in Evangelical families and their trip to an Evangelical summer camp. The parents of these kids and the proprietors of the camp work very hard to inculcate these kids to worship George Bush, to see all judges as evil and to disregard all science. From a very early age, they are forced to insulate themselves from any views outside the narrow ideological slant of their church. Harry Potter is evil and the earth is 6,000 years old.

To those that criticize this movie for casting fundamentalists in a bad light, blame the movement itself. There is no narration and it is the words and actions of the followers themselves that are used to show what it stands for. The Evangelical movement as a whole is not necessarily represented by this movie as there are many liberal evangelicals (most notably, Sojourners' founder Jim Wallis). But an all too vocal fundamentalist group of Evangelicals ARE represented by the group in this movie.

"I want to see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places... Excuse me, but we have the truth!" -- Pastor Becky

I'm really trying very hard to figure out exactly how this is different than any of these other groups we call "cults". The obvious big difference is that we have a so-called "religious" President that panders to this particular cult, so they are given a free pass.

indoctrinate -- teach doctrines to; teach uncritically

There's the rub - "teach uncritically". That is why 75% of home-schooled kids are Evangelicals. Is it that they are afraid that in the open marketplace of ideas, their doctrines will not hold any water and even a child would see their shortcomings? Any belief system that only works under isolation from any competing or critical views is not really a belief system. It's brainwashing. And that is what is going on at camps like the one shown in Jesus Camp.

As if the footage needed to be any more chilling, there is an appearance by these kids at the mega church where Ted Haggard used to preside over. The footage and the movie were completed before the revelations of his duplicity became public. But the strange thing is how slimy and fake he comes across when speaking to the kids. You get the feeling that even these little Christian soldiers thought he was bad news.

"Pastor Ted's" subsequent fall from grace casts an even worse light on the footage. His revealed homosexual activity and drug use are not so much the problem. His hypocrisy in preaching against them are. This is a man who on a weekly basis had the ear of the President and preached to congregations of 2,000+ weekly about the "sanctity of marriage".

To those who have not seen the movie, they might assume it is a smear piece intended to attack the Evangelical movement. But it's fairly straightforward and without editorializing. The main stars of the movie even approved of it:

"Though opposing viewpoints are sporadically proffered by Air America radio host Mike Papantonio, a practicing Christian appalled by the fundamentalists' political agenda, the film employs no exposition and professes no overt bias; indeed, Fischer was apparently delighted with the finished product. Both the camp's children and the adults welcome the camera as a witness to their crusade." -- from Variety

If anything, this movie shows that the building of this country into a theocracy starts young. Catch kids before they are able to cast a critical eye on their indoctrination and it might be too late to save them later.

And don't think that it stops with kids of this age. A recent article revealed that there are more than 150 Regent University graduates in the Bush administration. Yep, that's Pat Robertson's Regent University.

This has all been building for 30 years plus. It's no wonder that it feels like our foreign and environmental policy is being made by people who expect the Rapture is right around the corner.

For anyone who wants to get a glimpse into the world that has spawned zealots who are threatening judges, killing abortion doctors and pushing the marriage amendments, check out this movie. Grade: B+

"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

John Mayer -- "Waiting on the World to Change"

Here's proof that not all pop music is mindless. It reminds me in tone, beat and subject matter of the early 70's political/activist pop music of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye (especially What's Going On).

John Mayer's obviously extremely talented and is much more than the pop albums that he has released. He's a great guitarist and songwriter and has released blues albums. Here's my political song of the day:

me and all my friends
we're all misunderstood
they say we stand for nothing and
there's no way we ever could
now we see everything that's going wrong
with the world and those who lead it
we just feel like we don't have the means
to rise above and beat it

so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

it's hard to beat the system
when we're standing at a distance
so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change
now if we had the power
to bring our neighbors home from war
they would have never missed a Christmas
no more ribbons on their door
and when you trust your television
what you get is what you got
cause when they own the information, oh
they can bend it all they want

that's why we're waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

it's not that we don't care,
we just know that the fight ain't fair
so we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

and we're still waiting
waiting on the world to change
we keep on waiting waiting on the world to change
one day our generation
is gonna rule the population
so we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

we keep on waiting
waiting on the world to change

Global Warming - Alternate View

In the interest of full disclosure and because I am not afraid of an open forum of ideas, please check out The Great Global Warming Swindle at my buddy Scott's blog. Scott's a nutty pro-business anarchist (lol), but I like him anyway because he's at least honest and consistent in his skewed worldview. And, painfully, we occasssionally agree on something ... just not in this case.

Check out his post before continuing because I don't want to taint you with my take on the video ....

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Alright, all done? 75 minutes later, or maybe you skipped through it. My complaints:

- like other anti-global warming adherants, Patrick Moore, to a large part, lets commerce dictate his science -- He's a paid mouthpiece for the timber and plastics industries.

- Several of the scientists that actually appeared in the video have questioned the manner in which their interviews were used and taken out of context, most notably that of Carl Wunsch: - Climate change: An inconvenient truth... for C4

Professor Wunsch said: "I am angry because they completely misrepresented me. My views were distorted by the context in which they placed them. I was misled as to what it was going to be about. I was told about six months ago that this was to be a programme about how complicated it is to understand what is going on. If they had told me even the title of the programme, I would have absolutely refused to be on it. I am the one who has been swindled."

When told what the commission had found, he said: "That is what happened to me." He said he believes it is "an almost inescapable conclusion" that "if man adds excess CO2 to the atmosphere, the climate will warm".

He went on: "The movie was terrible propaganda. It is characteristic of propaganda that you take an area where there is legitimate dispute and you claim straight out that people who disagree with you are swindlers. That is what the film does in any area where some things are subject to argument."

- "Eight of the scientists in the film - John Christy, Paul Reiter, Richard Lindzen, Paul Driessen, Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, Fred Singer and Tim Ball - are linked to American neo-conservative and right-wing think-tanks, many of which have received tens of millions of dollars from Exxon." - from PURE PROPAGANDA - THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE

- Scientists appearing in the video have received funding from and have been expert witnesses in court cases for: Exxon, Shell, Arco, Unocal, Sun, Edison Electric Institute, the largest utility trade association in America, Western Fuel Association, coal companies, fuel lobby’s Global Climate Coalition

- There are many distortions and misrepresentations in the film that have caused even the original channel that aired it to distance itself - Channel 4 Distances Itself From Documentary

For more problems with the program, check out Deconstructing Channel 4's Great Global Warming Swindle

This is Your Life

- You went to law school

- You served in the military

- You obtained your appointment as attorney general because of friendship and longtime loyalty to the president prior to his being elected. You served him in other capacities prior to your appointment.

- "As attorney general, you believed that the government's need for "law and order" justified restrictions on civil liberties. (You) advocated the use of wiretaps in national security cases without obtaining a court order and the right of police to employ the preventive detention of criminal suspects."

- You repeatedly perjured yourself

This is your life ...








... John N. Mitchell.

Bet you thought I was going to say Alberto Gonzales.



Is it just me or is there a tremendous sense of deja vu here? Every day brings a new scandal and a new cover-up. From assistants not wanting to go the Libby route and take a bullet for those above them:

Gonzales aide to invoke Fifth Amendment, refuse to answer Senate questions

to a disastrous parsing of language in a TV interview:

Gonzales like a '7-year-old' who broke cookie jar

to outright petulance and hostility:

Gonzales Runs Out Of Conference To Avoid Scandal Questions

This is how this government works --
(1) Make politically motivated decisions
(2) Act surprised when you get caught
(3) Lie about what you did -- creating an even worse offense with the cover-up
(4) Nail yourself up on the cross and play the martyr -- it's all the media's and vast left-wing-conspiracy's fault

Well, even as apathetic and uninformed as a large part of the country has been for far too long, it will eventually come to a head:

"On February 21, 1975, Mitchell was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and sentenced to two and a half to eight years in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up ..."

So, those of you who don't think that there is anything fishy going on in Washington (and has been going on for 6 years), keep walking around in your haze. Most of our blogs have been harping about the disregard for the democratic process by this government for years. History will mark this group of crooks as having done a much greater disservice to our country than Nixon's crew.

Borat / Premonition / 300 Reviews

Borat - I wanted to like this movie. I get what he was trying to do. Maybe it's because I never watched his show. Maybe it was because it was pumped up too much as being the "funniest movie ever" and I was the victim of unrealistic expectations. Maybe it was the audience I was watching it with (my wife). I laughed sometimes. Just not enough. More than anything, it made me feel uncomfortable because of how embarrassing some of my countrymen are on issues of race, misogyny, religion, etc. That's the point, I know.

I have to give credit to Sacha Baron Cohen for having the guts to take a joke all the way. After all, not many people are willing to take in a mouthful of a large sweaty man's ass for a laugh. Perhaps that is a good thing.

Laura likes this movie. For those of you who read both of our blogs, you probably already know her judgement trumps mine, so read her good review here.

Grade: C

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Premonition - From IMDb, "Depressed housewife learns her husband was killed in a car accident the day previously, awakens the next morning to find him alive and well at home, and then awakens the next day after to a world in which he is still dead."

I wish I had a premonition before going to see this movie. Then I would have been able to save the time and money that I wasted. It's like the screenwriter, director and all the actors seemed disinterested about the whole thing. No cogent message. No discernible structure that makes sense. And actors with no real chemistry or effective characterization. Utterly frickin' disposable. Grade: D

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300 - Also from IMDb, 300 "... concerns the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae, where the King of Sparta led his army against the advancing Persians; the battle is said to have inspired all of Greece to band together against the Persians, and helped usher in the world's first democracy." An obviously important event (CK hits on it and other "accidents of history" in his latest post). It's stunning visually. Based on a Frank Miller graphic novel (like Sin City), it shares the living comic book quality of that movie (both due to Frank Miller being actively involved). The fight scenes are spectacular.

I understand the criticism that it seems to advocate a pro war message (like Black Hawk Down). But I liked that movie too. You can take movies on their visceral elements without having to attribute a deeper meaning to them. I think you can have movies about war that are not pro war, yet, conversely, are not revisionist and trying to send a negative message of war.

Gerard Butler, with his thick Scottish accent, seems well-suited to this role -- alternately yelling and delivering corny, manly lines ... sometimes both at the same time. But it's all part of the experience. He's primarily been in manly movies and served them well (Timeline, Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life, Reign of Fire) mostly because of a natural charisma.

Through all the dismemberment and ogres, it still struck me as darkly funny and campy, intentionally, I hope. This movie is proof that you can have something that is both homophobic and homoerotic. 300 Greeks with sweaty hairless chests? Come on [grin]. I highly recommend this movie. Grade: A-

Check out Reel Fanatic's quality review of 300, here.

Who Killed the Electric Car? / Global Warming

We watched a great documentary today, Who Killed the Electric Car?. It goes into to the various agencies and conditions that contributed to the demise of the popular GM electric car, the EV1. A girl that I used to work with leased an EV1 and loved it but were forced to give up their car at the end of the lease and had no option of buying it. Despite how much my friends and others loved their cars, GM took all of them back and destroyed them.

Many things contributed to the EV1 and other electric cars being phased out, including energy companies, the auto industry and a government in bed with both of them. But also consumers with a myopic view of the future and a desire to have the biggest, least efficient vehicles possible.

The movie is pretty even-handed and gives both sides opportunities to state their case. But ultimately, even the words of the auto companies themselves expose the real agenda. Grade: B+

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from: Global Warming Cartoons

In a related vein, I caught a bit of the congressional hearings on global warming. My observations:

If you have the preponderence of scientific evidence and the overwhelming majority of scientific minds firmly in your camp, who do you march out in front of Congress to speak on the dangers of global warming ... Al Gore, of course. A person accustomed to speaking before Congress and a man with more than 30 years of interest and involvement in the environment.

What do you do if you are on the other side, with the flat-earthers, with one of your biggest advocates being the man who wrote Jurassic Park? You march out a parade of clowns who couldn't find their asses with two hands and a flashlight:

Texas Republican congressman Joe Barton, who has in the past regaled us with such gems as:

"I cannot imagine any objective finding that CO2 is a pollutant," he said. "If that's true, God is a polluter."

"As long as I am chairman, [regulating global warming pollution] is off the table indefinitely. I don't want there to be any uncertainty about that." — Congressional hearing entitled, "National Energy Policy: Coal" Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality (March 14, 2001)

and this week,

"You're not just off a little, you're totally wrong," - to Mr. Gore.

I try not to sink to ad hominem attacks, but the lack of quality and credibility of these critics directly comes to bear on the issue:

'Mr. Barton, a member of the Republican Study Committee, which promotes "the preservation of traditional family values", Barton divorced his first wife, the former Janet Sue Winslow, with whom he has three children, in 2003.'

This group pushes conservative themes and is promoting the Marriage Protection Amendment. I find it sickening how many people that push this amendment on religious grounds have no problem divorcing, an issue that was talked about a whole lot more in the Bible than homosexuality.

Opposed the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 2006.

People like Barton and his ilk disgust me. Their angle on global warming is so predictable, it's painful. Guess where the most campaign contributions for Barton have came from ($2 million and counting) ... energy companies and their PAC's.


Oklahoma senator James Inhofe:

famous for being outraged at people that were outraged about Abu Graib

In 2006, Inhofe was one of only nine senators to vote against the McCain Detainee Amendment banning torture on individuals in U.S. Government custody

Only Texas senator John Cornyn received more campaign donations from the oil and gas industry in the 2004 election cycle. The contributions Inhofe has received from the energy and natural resource sector since taking office have exceeded one million dollars.

He believes in god dictating policy: "I believe very strongly that we ought to support Israel; that it has a right to the land. This is the most important reason: Because God said so. As I said a minute ago, look it up in the book of Genesis. It is right up there on the desk."

Inhofe had previously claimed that Global Warming is "the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state."

No, actually, the first and second largest hoaxes in history would be yours and Joe Barton's tenures in Washington. So, to you two, I say, "You're not just off a little, you're totally wrong."

Movie Review - The Proposition

I bought the movie, The Proposition, a few months ago after hearing several glowing reviews from Ebert and Roeper and others. I hadn't taken the time to watch it until tonight. Now, I wished I had watched it sooner.

It's a western but what makes the movie different is that it is not set in the classic American West. It is set in the outback of Australia, a land that many say was much wilder than it's American counterpart. From IMDb,

Rural Australia in the late nineteenth century: Capt. Stanley and his men capture two of the four Burns brothers, Charlie and Mike. Their gang is held responsible for attacking the Hopkins farm, raping pregnant Mrs. Hopkins and murdering the whole family. Arthur Burns, the eldest brother and the gang's mastermind, remains at large has and has retreated to a mountain hideout. Capt. Stanley's proposition to Charlie is to gain pardon and - more importantly - save his beloved younger brother Mike from the gallows by finding and killing Arthur within nine days.

In at least two regards, it reminded me a lot of Clint Eastwood movies. First of all, in the look of Guy Pearce's character, Charlie Burns, it was very evocative of Clint in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns.


Secondly, the ambiguity of good and evil reminded me of those very same westerns but also of The Unforgiven. The people that are supposed to be good have bad in them and the people that are supposedly bad have a morality about them that makes it hard to completely hate them.

It is very much of the genre of modern revisionist westerns. Real life is not like the good guy/bad guy simplification of 50's westerns (or some would say, our current government). A scene from The Unforgiven just about sums it up:

... Later, the cocksure Kid breaks down as he fully grasps the enormity of cold-blooded murder. "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man," Munny agrees. "You take away all he's got, and all he's ever going to have." The Kid suggests that the victim had it coming. Munny replies, "We all have it coming, Kid."

The cast is is universally outstanding. It includes the previously mentioned Pearce (also of Memento), Ray Winstone (recently of The Departed), John Hurt (V for Vendetta), the always great Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves), and David Wenham (LOTR). The cinematography takes advantage of the vastness and barrenness of the outback. It has a sepia-toned hue to it to evoke the look of old-timed photographs. An interesting sidenote is that the script was written by singer Nick Cave.

If you are scared away by graphic violence, then you may want to rent City Slickers instead. But if you want a gritty, realistic, and dark western that is beautiful in its own way, check The Proposition out.

I liked this movie a lot and believe it is every bit as good as the other Westerns I mentioned. Grade: A

Gay Babies

A leading Southern Baptist and evangelical acknowledged this week that he believes there may be a biological basis for homosexuality. When I first saw this, I thought, "Great!" See, even religious leaders cannot deny science. Maybe this means that other contentious issues will be able to be reasoned logically by groups of differing religious beliefs. Then, I read on ...

"... However, Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., was assailed even more harshly by gay-rights supporters. They were upset by his assertion that homosexuality would remain a sin even if it were biologically based, and by his support for possible medical treatment that could switch an unborn gay baby's sexual orientation to heterosexual.

"He's willing to play God," said Harry Knox, a spokesman on religious issues for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay-rights group. "He's more than willing to let homophobia take over and be the determinant of how he responds to this issue, in spite of everything else he believes about not tinkering with the unborn ... ""

Oh, yeah. This guy's a real winner. He successfully managed to piss off both his own (Conservative Christians by suggesting that homosexuality may be biological) and everyone else (by suggesting that we can change orientation).

And the irony of advocating messing with unborns is apparently lost on him:

"... but he would endorse prenatal hormonal treatment — if such a technology were developed — to reverse homosexuality. He said this would no different, in moral terms, to using technology that would restore vision to a blind fetus. "I realize this sounds very offensive to homosexuals, but it's the only way a Christian can look at it," Mohler said. "We should have no more problem with that than treating any medical problem.""

The good doctor should know that you don't have to treat it medically. If you are really worried about having a gay baby, just check out this site:
Is My Little Baby Going to Go Gay?

My personal favorite:

9. A boy must not use brightly colored crayons or any crayons from any colors of a rainbow. Christian parents should remove and destroy any suspiciously colored crayons from their boy's box of Crayolas. This needs no explanation, as we here at Landover Baptist are all familiar with Mr. Crayola's so-called "alternate lifestyle," and his reason for putting "Pansy Pink" and "Engorged Penis Head Purple" into his boxes are quite obvious. A boy must also draw in straight lines. Some curves are fine, but if you suspect your child of "doodling," and see that he is using more curves than straight lines, please call your Pastor immediately.

Too funny.

"The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision." -- Lynn Lavner

Zell Miller

Ah, Zell, I'd almost forgotten about you. But here you are, reinforcing every negative view of you that I already have:

"How could this great land of plenty produce too few people in the last 30 years?" Miller asked. "Here is the brutal truth that no one dares to mention: We’re too few because too many of our babies have been killed."

Miller claimed that 45 million babies have been "killed" since the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade in 1973.

"If those 45 million children had lived, today they would be defending our country, they would be filling our jobs, they would be paying into Social Security," he asserted.

That's right. Apparently we can breed all of our problems away.

I can handle a difference of opinion on abortion. It's a personal and sometimes religious choice that I would not presume to force an opinion of on anybody. But to pine for the influx of poor that have resulted from those abortions coming to term is sick. You are trading one potential life for another that would be grist for the mill, a virtual abattoir, that we call Iraq. Zell Miller is one of those breed of individuals apparently not blessed with a sense of irony or the slightest bit of self-awareness.

By his logic, we don't need to implement the draft or raise the allowed age for soldiers. We just need to breed more.

If all that we are looking for is more soldiers and tax-payers, why don't we just legalize cloning. We need someone to clone who has a zombie-like allegiance to our President and a singular vision unsullied by practicality... maybe Zell himself.

"If the anti-abortion movement took a tenth of the energy they put into noisy theatrics and devoted it to improving the lives of children who have been born into lives of poverty, violence, and neglect, they could make a world shine." -- Michael J. Tucker

War on Easter

I'm not making this up:

John Gibson Hypes A ‘War on Easter’, Announces Easter Bunny Under Attack

So far, FOX News is the only place where I've heard of this nonexistent controversy, but knowing how many of my moron acquaintences like believing whatever they see there, I'm sure I'll be getting 'War on Easter' chain e-mails soon. I love how some members of such a pampered majority will look for every opportunity to hoist themselves up on to the cross and cry how they are being persecuted.


Stephen Colbert hilariously lampoons FOX and Hannity who choose to heap even more crap on this controversey:

Colbert: There is a War on Easter

In other news, godless liberals are declaring war on St. Patrick's Day, rebranding it Green Beer Day. -- OK, I made that last one up, but you know that it won't be long before FOX declares the 'War on St. Patrick's Day'.

Darwin’s God

I read an interesting article in the NY Times recently that takes a slightly different tact on the whole God/atheism issue. Instead of debating whether there is a God or not -- an issue that most of us have pretty strong views on already -- let's look at why some people believe in God:

"...Call it God; call it superstition; call it ... “belief in hope beyond reason” — whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. ..."

"... Atran is Darwinian in his approach, which means he tries to explain behavior by how it might once have solved problems of survival and reproduction for our early ancestors. But it was not clear to him what evolutionary problems might have been solved by religious belief. Religion seemed to use up physical and mental resources without an obvious benefit for survival. Why, he wondered, was religion so pervasive, when it was something that seemed so costly from an evolutionary point of view? ..."

Some say that it has to do with the earliest humans, " ... that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history ...". CK reviewed a book that says something to that effect.

The subject of the article makes the startling (to some) assertion that a belief in God may be the most natural state because the brain is hardwired for it:

"... Why, he wondered, did people work so hard against their preference for logical explanations to maintain two views of the world, the real and the unreal, the intuitive and the counterintuitive?

Maybe cognitive effort was precisely the point. Maybe it took less mental work than Atran realized to hold belief in God in one’s mind. Maybe, in fact, belief was the default position for the human mind, something that took no cognitive effort at all...."

Another interesting note, if we assume a Darwinian evolution of religion, is that religion may have once served a practical purpose for human survival or may have just been a side note to something else:

"... Darwinians who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that are byproducts of adaptations, like the redness of blood. There is no survival advantage to blood’s being red instead of turquoise; it is just a byproduct of the trait that is adaptive, having blood that contains hemoglobin.

Something similar explains aspects of brain evolution, too, say the byproduct theorists. Which brings us to the idea of the spandrel.

Stephen Jay Gould, the famed evolutionary biologist at Harvard who died in 2002, and his colleague Richard Lewontin proposed “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own. They borrowed the term from architecture, where it originally referred to the V-shaped structure formed between two rounded arches. The structure is not there for any purpose; it is there because that is what happens when arches align.

In architecture, a spandrel can be neutral or it can be made functional. Building a staircase, for instance, creates a space underneath that is innocuous, just a blank sort of triangle. But if you put a closet there, the under-stairs space takes on a function, unrelated to the staircase’s but useful nonetheless. Either way, functional or nonfunctional, the space under the stairs is a spandrel, an unintended byproduct.

“Natural selection made the human brain big,” Gould wrote, “but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels — that is, nonadaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”

The possibility that God could be a spandrel offered Atran a new way of understanding the evolution of religion. But a spandrel of what, exactly?..."

The fact that this "byproduct" has stuck around is common in evolution:

"... Atran ascribes the persistence to evolutionary misdirection, which, he says, happens all the time: “Evolution always produces something that works for what it works for, and then there’s no control for however else it’s used.” On a sunny weekday morning, over breakfast at a French cafe on upper Broadway, he tried to think of an analogy and grinned when he came up with an old standby: women’s breasts. Because they are associated with female hormones, he explained, full breasts indicate a woman is fertile, and the evolution of the male brain’s preference for them was a clever mating strategy. But breasts are now used for purposes unrelated to reproduction, to sell anything from deodorant to beer. “A Martian anthropologist might look at this and say, ‘Oh, yes, so these breasts must have somehow evolved to sell hygienic stuff or food to human beings,’ ” Atran said. But the Martian would, of course, be wrong. Equally wrong would be to make the same mistake about religion, thinking it must have evolved to make people behave a certain way or feel a certain allegiance. ..."

As I mentioned earlier, the belief in God may be a standard position for the brain at birth:

"...The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics. It is a little like language acquisition, Paul Bloom says, with the essential difference that language is a biological adaptation and religion, in his view, is not. We are born with an innate facility for language but the specific language we learn depends on the environment in which we are raised. In much the same way, he says, we are born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up believing — whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven or occupies another animal after death — are culturally shaped. ..."

The article goes in to many different things (it's 19 pages long). It touches on the possible benefits of religion in an evolutionary sense if you assume that it served a purpose instead of being a byproduct.

It talks of the conflicts between scientists who both believe in evolution (Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, for example).

One final thing that the author said that I found intriguing was how it was hard to be an atheist because it is not the default position of the brain. I don't agree with this view, but I found it interesting nonetheless:

"...What can be made of atheists, then? If the evolutionary view of religion is true, they have to work hard at being atheists, to resist slipping into intrinsic habits of mind that make it easier to believe than not to believe. Atran says he faces an emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world, and he suspects that is where his little superstitions come from, his passing thought about crossing his fingers during turbulence or knocking on wood just in case. It is like an atavistic theism erupting when his guard is down. The comforts and consolations of belief are alluring even to him, he says, and probably will become more so as he gets closer to the end of his life. He fights it because he is a scientist and holds the values of rationalism higher than the values of spiritualism. ..."

I find it easy to not believe in God, but I do find myself being superstitious at times for no apparent reason. Is it because the brain is set up to be that way, regardless of whether you believe in God or not?

I'm curious what all of you will take from the article (Christian and atheist).

Beer Chucking Fridge

Great White Bear, I think this invention is for us:

New York - An American inventor has come up with a fridge that throws cold cans of beer to lazy drinkers.

John Cornwell spent £1 500 creating the Beer Launching Fridge, reports the Mirror.

And his invention is attracting lots of interest since videos of it in action were posted on the Internet.

The fridge is activated by a remote control which sets off a lift mechanism in the fridge.

The lift delivers the can to an electronic catapult, which rotates until it is lined up with its thirsty target.

It then hurls the beer up to five metres to the drinker. It can hold a full 24-can crate - 10 beers in its magazine and 14 more in reserve.

John, 22, who has just graduated from university in North Carolina, said: "The idea was conceived when I was sitting on the sofa having a few beers.

"I thought, 'What if instead of me going to get the beer, the beer came to me?'"

"About three months later I have a fully automated, remote-controlled, catapulting, beer-launching mini-fridge.

"There is a slight danger of being hit in the head with a flying can but this danger decreases the more you use it." - Ananova.com

And they say American ingenuity is waning ... I think not. I love that last line - "There is a slight danger of being hit in the head with a flying can but this danger decreases the more you use it." -- I beg to differ. I think the danger would INCREASE as you drank more beers.