May 2006 Archives

I went to see Al Gore's new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, yesterday. I was very impressed, even though I didn't need to be convinced of the fact of global warming, and I suspect that most of the others who are going to see the film on its opening weekend were part of the choir that was being preached to as well. A film this effective should have a significant effective in shifting public opinion and moving political action, but we only have to look back at the experience of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, to see that even a film that popular, from a box office standpoint, only had a limited effect.

As summarized at Brian Flemming's blog, Gore shows in the film that:

… a study done of over 900 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals found that zero percent claimed humans may not be the cause of global warming. Zero. But that same study of articles in the popular press found that over 50% claimed that humans may not be the cause.

But of course to repeat from my last post, facts do not matter to the current administration:

"We need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and, at the same time, protect the environment," the president said.

Oh woe is us!

Click below to see the film's trailer.

My heart started racing in panic when I read this, and it is still is, as I write this.

From the LA Times story, amazingly filed on their site as "entertainment news", Bush Doesn't Plan to See Gore Documentary:

President Bush had a two-word response when he was asked Monday during an appearance before the National Restaurant Association in Chicago whether he would see Al Gore's documentary on global warming.

"Doubt it," the president said.

…

"We need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and, at the same time, protect the environment," the president said.

I don't think anything that the man has ever said has made me this angry, which is saying a lot. We are in serious trouble.

I suppose that the issue of illegal immigration is "important", but I really doubt that it is truly timely and in any case it seems to me that it is more about an ugly xenophobia rather than about real problems. If I were to list the most important issues that we as a nation should be addressing, illegal immigration would not rise to anywhere near the top of the list. Global warming, universal health care, nuclear proliferation, the war in Iraq, homelessness, hunger ... I could go on and on before I would reach the immigration issue. But Bush and his ilk are way down in the polls and they is grasping at straws to pander to "the base" in hopes that the 2006 mid-term elections and I suppose his legacy are not a disaster. Too late for that methinks.

This post by David Corn, Good Fences and Lousy Reading Comprehension, speaks well to the the cheapness of the debate and points out that the frequent mentions of the phrase "good fences make good neighbors" abuse the sense that the line as it is used in Robert Frost's poem, "The Mending Wall":

… I doubt he had the US-Mexico border in mind when he penned these lines. But he was clearly wondering about a fellow who clings so solidly to the idea of a wall. Frost's "good fences make good neighbors" line was no policy prescription. It was an illumination of the human tendency to embrace and then stick with a simple and comforting thought.

'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'

I just really, really like the tile of this article,
Americans don't like President Bush personally much anymore, either

WASHINGTON - It's not just the way he's doing his job. Americans apparently don't like President Bush personally much anymore, either.

A drop in his personal popularity, as measured by several public polls, has shadowed the decline in Bush's job-approval ratings and weakened his political armor when he and his party need it most.

Following from last week's revelations that virtually all telephone calls are being logged, for "national security data mining" purposes, Billmon blogs on the ever more apparent, evolving police state that we are living under in his tour de force, or should I say a justifiable tour de paranoia, titled Leviathan:

Leviathan, in other words, is almost free of any restraint, save the arbitrary limits - such as they may be - set by the Cheney administration or, perhaps more importantly, by custom and habit. The creature doesn't know all the things it can do, but only because it hasn't tried to do them yet. But it's starting to figure this out, and it's going to take more than an election and a few corruption probes to make it back down. Having entrusted their security and their liberties to the beast, Leviathan's subjects will be lucky not to wind up like Jonah, lodged in its belly.

He ends by citing polling data that shows that a very large chunk of the populace would rather be "protected":

Carroll Doherty, associate director of the Pew Research Center, said in repeated polls taken since Sept. 11, 2001, "a solid plurality, around 50 percent" continues to say they would rather the government went too far in restricting civil liberties than not going far enough in protecting the country.

"There's a concern about terrorism that continues to this day. And, on balance, people are saying, `protect us,'" said Doherty.

From CNN.com - Da Vinci book 'shows ignorance':

The popularity of The Da Vinci Code is a shocking indication of both mass ignorance and the "voluptuous pleasure" the media take in promoting works with no basis in truth, the Vatican's culture minister says.

Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, on Monday told Europe 1 radio he had no objection to people seeing the film if they understand it is fiction, but many would watch this "nonsense" and think that it was true.

I think that stuff like The Da Vinci Code is trash too, but is it any trashier when compared to the "basis in truth" of the Bible?

Neil Young's latest album is, to me, in the tradition of Tom Paine's pamphlets in railing against tyranny ... in this case, the war in Iraq and Bush and his gang. The music is energetic and the lyrics speak right to the point. Song titles include Let's Impeach The President, Looking For A Leader. The record closes with a 100 voice choir singing, somewhat cheesily in my mind, but effectively to make a point, America The Beautiful.

Its encouraging to see that many musicians are making records that speak to the dire straights we are in today. Young, acting as the elder statesman that he has become, continuing his tradition of speaking out that started with "Ohio"; remember "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming ... Four dead in O-hi-o". While he lapsed in the '80s in professing support for Reagan ... I am willing to forgive him for that. If nothing else, Neil Young is sincere.

The preznit in an interview with Germany's largest mass-circulation newspapers, Bild-Zeitung, displays his grasp (not) of history, his self-absorbtion and sense of personal manifest destiny. While giving a tour of the Oval Office to the reporter he says:

That's George Washington, the first President, of course. The interesting thing about him is that I read three -- three or four books about him last year. Isn't that interesting? People say, so what? Well, here's the "so what." You never know what your history is going to be like until long after you're gone. If they're still analyzing the presidency of George Washington -- (laughter.) So Presidents shouldn't worry about the history. You just can't. You do what you think is right, and if you're thinking big enough, that history will eventually prove you right or wrong. But you won't know in the short-term.

You can read the whole car crash, which is painful to read but very instructive here.

From Reversing The Sexual Revolution in The Washington Monthly:

Since 1996, thanks to the Republican addition of Section 912 to that year's welfare reform bill, the federal government has spent over a billion dollars funding "abstinence only" sex education programs for teens. Recently, however, the Bush administration rewrote the rules so that programs can only get funding if they promote avoidance of sex at any age until you're safely ensconced in a traditional marriage of one man and one woman.

That's ONE BILLION DOLLARS, folks ... IN YOUR COUNTRY, to promote, and they hope (hopelessly, I hope), enforce this stupidity.

From Creationism dismissed as 'a kind of paganism' by Vatican's astronomer:

Believing that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday. Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.

I didn't know that the Vatican had or even needed an astronomer, but at least his head is partially screwed on straight.

Back in the '70s I made my short-lived stab at going to college and one class that I took and was really interested in was Astronomy, and my interest in the subject and amateur practice of it goes on today. But, one thing that stuck in my craw that I vividly remember from that class was the teacher's unwillingness to entertain a discussion of infinity. To me it was and still is absurd that he thought that it was meaningless speculation to think that given that infinity is, well infinite, that there might be and probably are many instances of universes that exist throughout the cosmos, each expanding, living and dying on their own. (Of course the word "universe" is a misnomer for these conglomeration of space, galaxies, dust. But never mind that. I think that there are some cosmologists who have come up whit the term "multiverse". )

Here is an article that I came across yesterday from the Guardian, One Big Bang, or were there many? that posits that my youthful speculation may not have been so far off.

The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory. The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us, was just the most recent of many.

So there, closed-minded-college-teacher-who-tried-to-stifle-my-curiosity!

I really had to read this twice to make sure it wasn't a joke.

From the NY Times Article, One Day, That Economy Ticket May Buy You a Place to Stand:

The airlines have come up with a new answer to an old question: How many passengers can be squeezed into economy class?

A lot more, it turns out, especially if an idea still in the early stage should catch on: standing-room-only "seats."Airbus has been quietly pitching the standing-room-only option to Asian carriers, though none have agreed to it yet. Passengers in the standing section would be propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness, according to experts who have seen a proposal.

UPDATE: The Times has issued a correction that states that this idea was abandoned in 2003. Nevertheless, it is amazing that they ever considered it. And one never knows ...

As my disappointed worldwide readership has no doubt noticed, I set a record low of only one post in April. Why? Many reasons: blogger's fatigue, a lot of other stuff going on, tired of being outraged, just didn't care, etc., etc.

In any case I haven't given up on posting, I just took a break.

For anyone who cares, and doesn't know about blog feeds, they are a great way to keep up with postings to blogs that you care about but don't want to check every day. You do this by subscribing to your favorite blogs using a news reader. The blog reader that I use is Bloglines which requires no additional software to set up. Once you set up a Bloglines account, you can add feeds to it and when a new post comes up on one of the blogs you have subscribed to, it will show up when you go to Bloglines. To make it even easier, I've added a Bloglines link at the upper right hand corner of this site, under the Subscribe/Feeds heading, so once you have a Bloglines account all you have to do is click on the logo on my page and this blog will automatically be subscribed to. (I've also added links for RSS and ATOM feeds, for those of you who are of those persuasions.) That way you should never miss one of my posts ... whenever it may occur.

For your further reading enjoyment here is an article about a wide range of blog reading software.

Love, me.