Kathleen Chalfant and Darryl Larson

...takes the stage, dressed in black, to read "Pity the Nation." Found a book by that title in addition to the poem.

Larson reads a Peter Matheson piece about the impact Bush and Cheney have had on our environment: They've cut programs to find alternatives to oil; they've invaded countries for oil; they've not enforced environmental regulations. These crimes, like those committed to steal the elections in 2000 and 2004, are not included in our articles of impeachment, nor those of Wexler nor Kucinich. But That doesn't make them less grave, just less easy to prosecute.

Larson points out that all the money in the world won't save the Bushes and Cheneys of two hundred years from now from the scorching sun and the undrinkable water. Booyakah, future-Bushes. Sadly. Booyakah.

Republicans, Debating, Not As A Team

(Before the titular stuff, mad props to Roger Cohen for his concise, timely defense of secularism in today's NYTimes.)

Ahem.

Props to Ron Paul for saying, in the Republican debates last night:

"We [Americans] maintain an empire which we can't afford."

His answer to budgetary questions, unlike the other candidates', made sense; he recognized that America's attempts to police the world and bully oil-producing nations not only isn't helping us, it's costing us two arms, three legs, and part of a pelvis.

And when asked what he would do in his first year in office:

"We would threaten nobody." Word.

Also, not to be overlooked, Ron Paul on trade:

"It's time we changed our attitude about Cuba."

Mitt Romney had this to say about taxes:

"I don't stay awake at night worrying about the taxes that rich people are paying."

Of course, he followed up by calling for tax-cuts, but at least not rich-people tax-cuts.

Rudy didn't think a failing economy was as big a deal as "Islamic terrorism," which has certainly been the reason behind all my money woes. If only Al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia would stop messing with our housing market and vitiating the middle class... Those rascals.

Fred Thompson was the most frustrating candidate, refusing at first to answer a simple yes or no question about whether or not global climate change was a serious threat caused by humans. (Of course, the moderator should have added "caused in part by humans," or something to that effect - "certainly not helped by human pollution," etc.)

Alan Keyes declined to talk about the environment, instead attacking his opponents and saying America should reduce "hot air" (from politicians); Thompson then - I don't know why, exactly, perhaps in a fit of Dada - said he "agreed with Alan Keyes's position on global warming." Which was cute, but meant he never actually addressed our warming, tidal wave-wracked globe.

Tom Tancredo and Mike Huckabee were both weak on green, the former saying he doesn't believe in mandates. (I.e., simply because the vast majority of us don't want to live in a warm, wet, smoky, landless swamp in a few hundred years, that doesn't mean Tancredo [had anyone heard of him before last night?] and his lizard-people should listen to us.)

Huckabee was quite simply weak. Instead of espousing a coherent policy on/acknowledgment of energy emissions, oil production, the car industry, etc., the Huckster said the U.S. government is the world's biggest energy-user and should therefore be cut down to size, which makes sense most if you're talking - like the Dems (minus Hillary) and Ron Paul - about reducing the U.S. war-machine.

But Huckabee had already said defense was one of three primary features of the vital modern state (including food and oil); he literally called for the U.S. to be able to make its own "tanks, airplanes, bullets, and bombs." Sheesh.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but outsourcing the making of our tanks has never been the issue, no? We're not losing any wars (say, the war against religious extremism, here and abroad) due to lack of/shoddy manufacturing of tanks.

Anyway, Chuck Norris aside, Huckabee is not inspiring.

Duncan Hunter won the G.W.B. Education Award of the evening, however: When asked about, well, education, he said, "Three words: Jaime Escalante and inspiration." Those are four words, Dunk. (You just got slammed.) [Sorry, bad pun.]

No mention of gay rights.

But to bookend:

The whole thing - the gyre of history - turns on this question of religiosity. When asked about "values" (what a terrible reduction/conflation of "metaphysics," "ethics," and "morals"), or in Keyes's case when asked anything, the candidates focused on themselves instead of on the whole of the not necessarily white, not necessarily Christian whole of America.

Instead of saying "church and state are separate; you can be a Muslim-American, a Christian-American, a Buddhist-American, a Satanist-American, an atheist-American, etc.," or anything even remotely similar, they spent their precious seconds trying to out-faith one another.

Need we be reminded? Ours is not a country of "faith," but of reason and individuality: Reason rules the government; individuals are then free to be as faith-y or faithless as they like.

If the government were, say, Buddhist, the Catholics might get mad; if the government were Catholic, the Lutherans might throw a fit, and so on. It's a balancing act wherein the fulcrum is an absence - an absence of a state faith. In fact, it's an absence of any metaphysical principle whatsoever.

"The universe exists and we exist in it" is pretty much the only metaphysical proposition the Framers left us. Some very severe atheists might even take issue with that, but I think 99.999% of Americans can say that, yes, the universe somehow exists.

(Yes, there's the "Creator" bit in the Declaration of Independence, but look at it in context - "endowed by their Creator" is just Deist slang for "alive." Doesn't go into detail about who that Creator is or in what sort of metaphysical hooptie he cruises through time-space.

Full breakdown: Constitution: 0 "God"s, 0 "Creator/created"s; Dec.o.Ind.: 1 "God," 1 "Creator," 1 "created.")

Anyway, I try to take Republicans seriously, as seriously as cancer and good hygiene (both of which, I think, we should consider very seriously), but I just don't get the problem with separating church and state. Seems like a tidy, no-hassle solution to an otherwise impossible problem.

Newest dream-team: Colbert/Bell Hooks '08.

Beef eaters bad for the environment

A study in Japan has concluded that preparing 2.2 pounds of beef is the environmental equivalent of driving a car non-stop for 3 hours at 50 mph. You can read the story here.

And a little dance couldn't hurt either....

There is a massive drought in Alabama. The National Weather Service has called it the worst in decades. But the Governor there, Gov. Bob Riley, has a solution - prayer! Yes, folks, the Governor asked all Alabamians (Alabamists?) to pull together and pray for rain. That should do it.

Multi-Zooform Rapture Means Wythe [And His Tummy] Sad

All the tuna are disappearing along with the bees! It's a multi-zooform Rapture! WTF!

Without these delicious animals to eat, we'll have to eat meat-flavored chocolate like in Matthew Derby's brilliant Super Flat Times.

The upside of this madness, for omnivores, is that we get to eat horses and shit; from the NYTimes:

If worse comes to worst, he said, he could always try horse and deer again. The only drawback he remembered was customers objecting to red meat in the glass display case on the counter of his sushi bar.

"One customer pointed and said: ‘You have something four-legged in your fish case? That’s eerie!' "

Google Hybrid (Changes Icon Only On Holidays)

Google's search engine, email, blog, and internet applications are free... Maybe they'll start givin out hybrids. (Also, can one attach solar panels to a cat? He just sits in the sun all day. Time to start earnin that Meow-Mix.) Anyway, this news is fantastic and much welcomed...

From The New York Times, June 19, 2007, "Google and Utility to Test Hybrids That Sell Back Power," by FELICITY BARRINGER and MATTHEW L. WALD:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 18 — Google and Pacific Gas & Electric have unveiled their vision of a future in which cars and trucks are partly powered by the country’s electric grids, and vice versa.

The companies displayed on Monday six Toyota Prius and Ford Escape hybrid vehicles modified to run partly on electricity from the power grid, allowing the vehicles to go up to 75 miles on a gallon of gas, nearly double the number of miles of a regular hybrid. They also modified one vehicle to give electricity back to the power company.

Google’s philanthropic foundation, Google.org, headed by Larry Brilliant, led the conversion and announced that it would be investing or giving away about $10 million to accelerate the development of battery technology, plug-in hybrids, and vehicles capable of returning stored energy to the grid.

The six vehicles are used by Google employees near the company’s Mountain View headquarters, and sit under a carport with a roof of solar cells. The cells are connected to the power grid, so they make energy whether the cars are charging or not. ...the carports were meant to demonstrate a switch from fossil fuels to solar power.

PG&E, the utility serving Northern California, will send wireless signals to the car while it is parked and plugged in to determine its state of charge. It can then recharge the batteries or draw out power.

The transactions will be tiny, a few kilowatt-hours at a time, worth a few cents each, but if there were thousands of such vehicles, a utility could store power produced in slack hours until it was needed at peak times...

Some researchers say that utilities pay billions a year to power plants to stand by, ready to produce extra power or to provide small quantities of energy to maintain the frequency of the system at precisely 60 cycles a second. Plug-in hybrids could fill those roles, annually earning thousands of dollars each, some experts say.

A plug-in hybrid can lower emissions of carbon dioxide and smog-causing gases. It can go three to four miles on a kilowatt-hour, experts say. If that electricity came from natural gas, that may mean under a quarter-pound of carbon dioxide is emitted each mile. In contrast, a car that gets 20 miles a gallon on unleaded gas emits about a pound of carbon dioxide each mile.

And I thought MERCURY was a problem...

Seems the army has been dumping major amounts (only about 64 million pounds) of weapons of mass destruction into the Atlantic Ocean! How awesome is that?! You can read all about it here. But suffice it to say, somebody's got some 'splainin' to do!

Merkel Reversal; Gay Arab Speakers

(Say "Merkel reversal" three times fast. Never mind.)

O happy day - Bush compromised, on something, anything! Even though the US never ratified the Kyoto Protocols, we might sort of agree to demonstrably cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

From the NYTimes, June 8, 2007, "U.S. Compromise on Global Warming Plan Averts Impasse at Group of 8 Meeting," By MARK LANDLER and JUDY DEMPSEY

HEILIGENDAMM, Germany, June 7 — The United States agreed Thursday to “consider seriously” a European plan to combat global warming by cutting in half worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, averting a trans-Atlantic deadlock at a meeting here of the world’s richest industrial nations.

The compromise, worked out in tough negotiations between the United States and Germany, also endorses President Bush’s recent proposal to bring together the world’s largest emitting countries, including China and India, to set their own national goals for reducing emissions.

The agreement reached Thursday does not include a mandatory 50 percent reduction in global emissions by 2050, a key provision sought by Chancellor Angela Merkel, nor does it commit the United States or Russia to specific reductions.

Bad news: We kick loyal, Arabic-speaking soldiers out of the army. For being gay. Not for doing anything wrong - we don't tell them it's "wrong" to be gay - just don't say you're gay, at least not while you're in the army. (?) Doesn't make sense to me, might not make sense to you, but it makes sense to my grandfather and probably your grandfather. Why even John McCain thinks it works well for now. Mitt Romney's not happy about it, of course, but he's a perennial Grumpy Gus.

(Probably he and Fred Thompson are only confused because the Teletubbies were honorably discharged from the National Guard before they confessed to being celibate gay Jupiterians, complicating the whole "homo" rights issue.)

From the NYTimes, June 8, 2007, Op-Ed Contributor, "Don’t Ask, Don’t Translate," By STEPHEN BENJAMIN

The lack of qualified translators has been a pressing issue for some time — the Army had filled only half its authorized positions for Arabic translators in 2001. Cables went untranslated on Sept. 10 that might have prevented the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Today, the American Embassy in Baghdad has nearly 1,000 personnel, but only a handful of fluent Arabic speakers.

I was an Arabic translator. After joining the Navy in 2003, I attended the Defense Language Institute, graduated in the top 10 percent of my class and then spent two years giving our troops the critical translation services they desperately needed. I was ready to serve in Iraq.

But I never got to. In March, I was ousted from the Navy under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which mandates dismissal if a service member is found to be gay.

...

I could have written a statement denying that I was homosexual, but lying did not seem like the right thing to do...

The result was the termination of our careers, and the loss to the military of two more Arabic translators. The 68 other — heterosexual — service members remained on active duty, despite many having committed violations far more egregious than ours; the Pentagon apparently doesn’t consider hate speech, derogatory comments about women or sexual misconduct grounds for dismissal.

...

Consider: more than 58 Arabic linguists have been kicked out since “don’t ask, don’t tell” was instituted. How much valuable intelligence could those men and women be providing today to troops in harm’s way?

In addition to those translators, 11,000 other service members have been ousted since the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was passed by Congress in 1993. Many held critical jobs in intelligence, medicine and counterterrorism.Stephen Benjamin is a former petty officer second class in the Navy.

Bush on Merkel: Chummy Bud, or Budding Challenge?

The horror isn't that we're wrong, but that we're so unwilling to try and be right. This isn't about specific taxes or some looming Euro-treaty that will destroy American Freedom: We just had to agree with Europe that all nations, everywhere, should work on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and that we should develop cleaner, more efficient fuel. And - on behalf of you and me and Americans everywhere - Bush proudly stood his ground and did what he wanted regardless of what we want.

The scoop:

The NYTimes, June 7, 2007, "At Group of 8 Meeting, Bush Rebuffs Germany on Cutting Emissions," By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, additional reporting contributed by Mark Landler:

ROSTOCK, Germany, June 6 — As leaders of wealthy nations converged Wednesday on a Baltic Sea resort for their annual meeting, the White House effectively derailed a climate change initiative backed by one of President Bush’s strongest European allies, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

The White House said it would hold firm against concrete long-term targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, a major priority for Mrs. Merkel, the host of the Group of 8 meeting.

...

After lunch with Mr. Bush, Mrs. Merkel seemed to concede — without explicitly saying so — that her plan was off the table.

“There are a few areas here and there we will continue to work on,” she said, standing side by side with the president outside an elegant white castle on the grounds of the Kempinski Grand Hotel. When Mr. Bush turned to her and said he has “a strong desire to work with you” on the issue, the chancellor pursed her lips.

Specifically, Mrs. Merkel is pressing the Group of 8 to adopt a plan to cut emissions in half by 2050 and to limit the rise in global temperature to two degrees Celsius — terms the president’s chief environmental adviser, James L. Connaughton, said Wednesday the United States was not prepared to accept.

Ah, but Captain frickin America has a plan!

“Here’s a way to get China and India at the table,” Mr. Bush said Wednesday, in a roundtable with reporters before his lunch with Mrs. Merkel.

He said the United States “can serve as a bridge between some nations who believe that now is the time to come up with a set goal” and “those who are reluctant to participate in the dialogue.”

Ah. So China is going to reform its energy policies just as long as we don't enter into some preemptive agreement with zee Germans? That makes sense; China's just been waiting all this time for us to stop working with Europe; then the laogai will close and the cars will run on happiness instead of diesel cars (which, by the way, are the future of clean - read this)...

To put it mildly, we will be lucky ducks if Bush's isolationist let's-not-even-talk-about-it-ism doesn't result in further anti-American sentiment in Europe and in any other region that cares about its people's health, its forests' existence, its future, &c.

(I'm voting Mos Def / The Lorax in '08.)

Newsflash: Another Rich Man Seemingly Devoid Of Sane Thought Enters Presidential Race

We seriously admonish you not to vote for Fred Thompson, a former Tennessee senator and retired movie actor.

Here are, in his own words and ours, four good reasons why we think Thompson will make, if not an immoral president, then at least an unhelpful one:

CLIMATE CHANGE

"Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. ... NASA says the Martian South Pole’s ‘ice cap’ has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter’s caught the same cold, because it’s warming up too, like Pluto. This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, nonsignatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their airconditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle." -- March 22, ABC Radio.

Damage to the environment due to rapid climate change is both real and acknowledged as real by a vast consensus of scientists.

We're not sure how candidate Thompson plans to address environmental damage, but we firmly excoriate him for opting to mince words about such a vital problem, make silly suggestions about Jupiterian SUV-driving, and insinuate that the Bush administration's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocols is somehow good for us.

If Mr. Thompson wins, we can only hope he will think more lucidly about the future of our planet.

(Or, if he has no interest in this increasingly hot, increasingly crowded, hurricane-riddled planet, he can move to another one. We suggest Mercury.)



TAXES

"President John F. Kennedy was an astute proponent of tax cuts and the proposition that lower tax rates produce economic growth. Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan also understood the power of lower tax rates and managed to put through cuts that grew the U.S. economy like Kansas corn. Sadly, we just don’t seem able to keep that lesson learned." -- April 14, The Wall Street Journal.

While targeted tax cuts may indeed help some of us, some of the time (check out Bill Richardson's past and proposed cuts), the country overall is lucky to have not kept learned "that lesson" -- the lesson of taxing those who can afford to be taxed, so that we can build roads, keep schools open, etc.

A self-styled Federalist, Thompson plans to follow in George W. Bush's footsteps and make the rich richer and poor poorer. We doubt that this strategy is good for anyone.

(The rich can only spend so much money in their lifetimes. But perhaps Thompson's Jupiterian friends -- he also makes frequent reference to "dwarf planets," perhaps in an effort to make Jupiter feel bad about its size -- can find a way for the rich to continue their spending posthumously. Perhaps by buying up dwarf planets...)

Separation of Church and State

Thompson has concerns of federal judges deciding "social policy." "Many federal judges seem intent on eliminating God from the public schools and the public square in ways that would astound our founding fathers. We never know when a five to four Supreme Court decision will uphold them. They ignore the fact that the founders were protecting the church from the state and not the other way around." -- The National Review.

We stand by a government that is entirely, 100% divorced from expressions of any particular faith.

The various odious, gay-bashing, abortion-for-raped-teens-denying pseudo-religions espoused as Truth by so many conservatives (among them Fred Thompson) should have no greater or lesser standing, in the eyes of the state, than Islam, Judaism, Yazidism, Wicca, atheism, Scientology, Yo-ism, or subGenius-ism.

Courts do not need to post the ancient tenets of the Abrahamic God in sight of accused criminals who may or may not believe in them; schools needn't trespass on the minds of young capitalist, imperial Americans than they already do.

(Jupiterists, of course, should be burned at the stake, if we can only figure out how to tie-down their fifty undulant tentacles long enough to light the kerosene-soaked witch-sticks below them. Amen.)

Torture

"I doubt, for example, that our television networks have spent as much time exposing the horrors of life for millions of women in pre-liberation Iraq and Afghanistan as they've spent covering Abu Ghraib. For some reason, everyday atrocities such as the endemic beatings, honor killings and forced marriages of women just don't seem to be newsworthy." -- a Thompson essay for the American Enterprise Institute.

We feel that this statement is so obviously antithetical to good thinking, good government -- to sanity -- that it needs no further amendment.

Please vote; please don't vote for Fred Thompson.

The Trouble With Bottled Water

Man, I been said you shouldn't have to pay for water, at least not more than you already pay the city to filter it for you tap. I also think non-tap water tastes funny (not funny "ha-ha," but funny "annoying"), so I'm biased.

Too, NYC has some of the best drinking water in the world, and my friends go out an buy some oil-crafted Evian... but won't eat meat or touch my cat (who is, to be fair, kind of dirty because he likes to chew candles, and candles get MAD dusty).

Exploring the debate, as ever, are the Californians.

Here are a bunch of interesting snippets from the NYTimes: May 30, 2007, "Fighting the Tide, a Few Restaurants Tilt to Tap Water," By MARIAN BURROS:

The “eat local” movement first became popular in California, so it makes sense that “drink local” is catching on there as a way to reduce the environmental costs of manufacturing and transporting bottles of water, as well as the mountains of plastic that end up in landfills.

“Filling cargo ships with water and sending it hundreds and thousands of miles to get it around the world seems ridiculous,” Mr. Bastianich said. “With all the other things we do for sustainability, it makes sense.”

When Maury Rubin opened the first Birdbath Neighborhood Green Bakery in the East Village in 2005 and the second in Greenwich Village last month, banning bottled water was a no-brainer. “It was actually an easy decision,” Mr. Rubin said. “Bottled water is not great for the environment.”

Tom Colicchio, the chef and an owner of Craft restaurant and several spinoffs, was incredulous that restaurants would contemplate such a change. “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” he said. “Why would you do that — not from a money standpoint, but from a service and hospitality standpoint? Fifty to 60 percent prefer bottled water, especially sparkling.”

“The students were up in arms, but a year later no one says anything,” said Ann Cooper, director of the district’s nutrition services, who added, “We have been marketed to the point that children believe they can’t drink water out of the tap.”

“The rationale for buying bottled water is a fantasy that has a destructive downside,” Dr. Solomon said. “These companies are marketing an illusion of environmental purity.”

But Stephen Kay, the vice president for communications at the International Bottled Water Association, said eliminating bottled water would have “a negligible, nonexistent impact on protecting the environment.”

Some restaurants make a point of serving tap water but still provide bottled water on request. “Santa Monica is known for its terrible tap water,” said Anastasia Israel, an owner of Abode, which opened there a month ago. Patrons are reluctant to drink the tap water, but after servers explain the filtration process, 80 percent of them give it a try. Carbonation will follow soon.

Mr. Wolf, the consultant, said he is confident that if restaurants are pressed to eliminate bottled water, they will figure out how to do it. “No one is more adaptable than a restaurateur,” he said, noting that they whined when smoking was banned but “survived beautifully.”

Check out details courtesy Chris Sacca >>

A Book Worth Investigating, We Think; Wind Farms; & Carpet Conversions You Might Emulate

From the NYTIMES, May 22, 2007, Books of The Times, "Al Gore Speaks of a Nation in Danger," By MICHIKO KAKUTANI:

In “The Assault on Reason” Al Gore excoriates George W. Bush, asserting that the president is “out of touch with reality,” that his administration is so incompetent that it “can’t manage its own way out of a horse show,” that it ignored “clear warnings” about the terrorist threat before 9/11 and that it has made Americans less safe by “stirring up a hornets’ nest in Iraq,” while using “the language and politics of fear” to try to “drive the public agenda without regard to the evidence, the facts or the public interest.”

The administration’s pursuit of unilateralism abroad, Mr. Gore says, has isolated the United States in an ever more dangerous world, even as its efforts to expand executive power at home and “relegate the Congress and the courts to the sidelines” have undermined the constitutional system of checks and balances.

The former vice president contends that the fiasco in Iraq stems from President Bush’s use of “a counterfeit combination of misdirected vengeance and misguided dogma to dominate the national discussion, bypass reason, silence dissent and intimidate those who questioned his logic both inside and outside the administration.”

He argues that the gruesome acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq “were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity — encouraged, authorized and instituted” by President Bush and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. And he writes that the violations of civil liberties committed by the Bush-Cheney administration — including its secret authorization of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a court order on calls and e-mail messages between the United States and other countries, and its suspension of the rights of due process for “enemy combatants” — demonstrate “a disrespect for America’s Constitution that has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of democracy.”

Similar charges have been made by a growing number of historians, political analysts and even former administration insiders, and President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings have further emboldened his critics. But Mr. Gore writes not just as a former vice president and the man who won the popular vote in the 2000 election, but also as a possible future candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 race for the White House, and the vehemence of his language and his arguments make statements about the Bush administration by already announced candidates like Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton seem polite and mild-mannered in contrast.

And yet for all its sharply voiced opinions, “The Assault on Reason” turns out to be less a partisan, election-cycle harangue than a fiercely argued brief about the current Bush White House that is grounded in copiously footnoted citations from newspaper articles, Congressional testimony and commission reports — a brief that is as powerful in making its points about the implications of this administration’s policies as the author’s 2006 book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was in making its points about the fallout of global warming.

This volume moves beyond its criticisms of the Bush administration to diagnose the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy — low voter turnout, rampant voter cynicism, an often ill-informed electorate, political campaigns dominated by 30-second television ads, and an increasingly conglomerate-controlled media landscape — and it does so not with the calculated, sound-bite-conscious tone of many political-platform-type books, but with the sort of wonky ardor that made both the book and movie versions of “An Inconvenient Truth” so bluntly effective.

Mr. Gore’s central argument is that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions” and that the country’s public discourse has become “less focused and clear, less reasoned.” This “assault on reason,” he suggests, is personified by the way the Bush White House operates. Echoing many reporters and former administration insiders, Mr. Gore says that the administration tends to ignore expert advice (be it on troop levels, global warming or the deficit), to circumvent the usual policy-making machinery of analysis and debate, and frequently to suppress or disdain the best evidence available on a given subject so it can promote predetermined, ideologically driven policies.

Doubts about Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction were sidestepped in the walk-up to the war: Mr. Gore says that uranium experts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee told him “there was zero possibility” that aluminum tubes acquired by Saddam Hussein were for the purpose of nuclear enrichment, but felt intimidated from “making any public statement that disagreed with the assertions being made to the people by President Bush.”

And the Army chief of staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki’s pre-invasion recommendation that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for a successful occupation of Iraq was similarly dismissed. “Rather than engaging in a reasoned debate on the question,” Mr. Gore writes, administration members “undercut Shinseki for disagreeing with their preconceived notion — even though he was an expert, and they were not.”

Moreover, Mr. Gore contends, the administration’s penchant for secrecy (keeping everything from the details of its coercive interrogation policy to its National Security Agency surveillance program under wraps) has dismantled the principle of accountability, even as what he calls its “unprecedented and sustained campaign of mass deception” on matters like Iraq has made “true deliberation and meaningful debate by the people virtually impossible.”

Mr. Gore points out that the White House repeatedly implied that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, between the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Iraq, when in fact no such linkage existed. He observes that the administration “withheld facts” from Congress concerning the cost of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which turned out to be “far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the president.”

And he contends that “it has become common for President Bush to rely on special interests” — like those represented by the Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi before the war, and ExxonMobil on the climate crisis — for “basic information about the policies important to these interests.”

...

Much the way that the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” showed a more accessible Al Gore — at ease with himself and passionate about the dangers of global warming — this book shows a fiery, throw-caution-to-the winds Al Gore, who, whether or not he runs for the White House again, has decided to lay it all on the line with a blistering assessment of the Bush administration and the state of public discourse in America at this “fateful juncture” in history.

We applaud Mr. Gore's efforts: In an age of journalistic weakness, he has joined Lewis Lapham, a handful of bloggers, and too few others in his commitment to tell the truth -- even about the president, even about money -- even if the oil barons and CIA bunglers would prefer that the illusion of an omnipotent, universally and infinitely good-hearted American Government remain the only image that government casts.

More good news we recommend to you:

May 22, 2007, "An Old Steel Mill Retools to Produce Clean Energy," By DAVID STABA:

LACKAWANNA, N.Y., May 21 — Empty grain elevators and dormant railroad tracks line the Buffalo River to the east and Lake Erie to the west, interspersed with empty fields overgrown with gnarled shrubbery. Test wells that monitor decades of buried industrial waste dot the landscape. A passenger ship, rust overtaking its aqua paint, sits beside a decaying mill.

The road from Buffalo to this city to the south offers a stark reminder of the region’s faded past as a hub of industry and shipping.

Yet in the past few months, a different sight has emerged on the 2.2-mile shoreline above a labyrinth of pipes, blackened buildings and crumbling coke ovens that was once home to a behemoth Bethlehem Steel plant: eight gleaming white windmills with 153-foot blades slowly turning in the wind off Lake Erie, on a former Superfund site where iron and steel slag and other industrial waste were dumped during 80 years of production.

“It’s changing the image of the city of Lackawanna,” said Norman L. Polanski Jr., the city’s mayor and a former Bethlehem worker who lost his job when the company stopped making steel here in 1983. “We were the old Rust Belt, with all the negatives. Right now, we are progressive and we are leading the way on the waterfront.”

Christine Real de Azua, of the American Wind Energy Association, said Steel Winds, as this wind farm is known, is the largest to rise in a city, and according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation, it is the first to rise on land overseen by New York’s brownfields program. (Brownfields are low-level toxic waste sites concentrated mainly around abandoned factories.)

“It’s a way to convert the Rust Belt to the Wind Belt,” Ms. Real de Azua said.

...

The greatest effect of the eight windmills, however, may have more to do with attitude.

“A community that has had difficulty moving forward has accepted a technology that leapfrogs other forms of energy generation,” Mr. Mitskovski said. “Decades of steel-making created this environmental legacy. But that also created the opportunity to take this fallow, contaminated land and reuse it.”

And once more, from Atlanta:

May 22, 2007, "Executive on a Mission: Saving the Planet," By CORNELIA DEAN

VININGS, Ga. — What Ray Anderson calls his “conversion experience” occurred in the summer of 1994, when he was asked to give the sales force at Interface, the carpet tile company he founded, some talking points about the company’s approach to the environment.

“That’s simple,” Mr. Anderson recalls thinking. “We comply with the law.”

But as a sales tool, “compliance” lacked inspirational verve. So he started reading about environmental issues, and thinking about them, until pretty soon it hit him: “I was running a company that was plundering the earth,” he realized. “I thought, ‘Damn, some day people like me will be put in jail!’ ”

“It was a spear in the chest.”

So instead of environmental regulation, he devoted his speech to his newfound vision of polluted air, overflowing landfills, depleted aquifers and used-up resources. Only one institution was powerful enough and pervasive enough to turn these problems around, he told his colleagues, and it was the institution that was causing them in the first place: “Business. Industry. People like us. Us!”

He challenged his colleagues to set a deadline for Interface to become a “restorative enterprise,” a sustainable operation that takes nothing out of the earth that cannot be recycled or quickly regenerated, and that does no harm to the biosphere.

The deadline they ultimately set is 2020, and the idea has taken hold throughout the company. In a recent interview in his office here overlooking downtown Atlanta, Mr. Anderson said that through waste reduction, recycling, energy efficiency and other steps, Interface was “about 45 percent from where we were to where we want to be.”

Use of fossil fuels is down 45 percent (and net greenhouse gas production, by weight, is down 60 percent), he said, while sales are up 49 percent. Globally, the company’s carpet-making uses one-third the water it used to. The company’s worldwide contribution to landfills has been cut by 80 percent.

“He bet his entire company,” said Bob Fox, an architect who specializes in “green” buildings and who, like Mr. Anderson, is a member of the advisory board of the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment. “It worked out probably better even than he hoped. He has set the mark for every other corporation in this country.”

And in the process, Mr. Anderson has turned into perhaps the leading corporate evangelist for sustainability. He had a head start, he acknowledges, because he ran his company and controlled its voting stock. But he can make the case effectively, he said, because his Interface experience teaches that sustainability “doesn’t cost, it pays” — in customer loyalty, employee spirit and hard cash. He says Interface sustainability efforts have saved the company more than $336 million since 1995.

In fact, sustainability has been such a successful strategy that Interface established a consulting arm last year, to market its methods to other companies.

As befits an evangelist, Mr. Anderson, a trim 72-year-old, has taken his message on the road, preaching the sermon of sustainability in at least 115 speeches around the world last year alone.

Since last year, when he turned operating responsibilities over to Dan Hendrix, his successor as chief executive, selling sustainability has been “pretty much my full-time job,” Mr. Anderson said, and several people on the company payroll work more or less full time on it too, handling his schedule and fielding inquiries. “I think he was a typical corporate executive: the bottom line was everything,” said Eric Chivian, director of the Harvard Center. “He really did not think about the impact of his work.”

But today, Dr. Chivian said, Mr. Anderson is “a model of creative thinking about sustainable business practices.”

When Mr. Anderson began his crusade, there were those who thought it was quixotic, and some in the company worried that he was a bit too intense about it. Others thought carpet tiles — squares of nylon pile glued ubiquitously underfoot in offices, classrooms, hospitals, airports and elsewhere — were an unlikely focus for an effort to change the way business does business.

“Well, he won us all over,” said Jo Ann Bachman, one of Mr. Anderson’s assistants.

...

So he put together the necessary financing and started Interface in 1973. Today, the company says it has about $1.1 billion in annual sales and 38 percent of the global market for carpet tiles.

But when it comes to the environment, he eventually realized, carpet “is a pretty abusive industry.”

Carpet makers use lots of petroleum and petroleum derivatives, both as components of synthetic carpet and to power its production. Dyeing carpet is water- and energy-intensive. And when people are finished with the carpet, “it goes into landfills where it lasts probably 20,000 years,” Mr. Anderson said. “Abusive.”

So he challenged his employees to find ways to turn all of that around. And he forestalled objections from his own stockholders, he said, by making the elimination of waste the first target. “We saved money from Day 1,” he said.

He acknowledges that some of the advances the company has made so far are relatively obvious and easy, and that some of its claimed progress relies on steps, like carbon credits, that are far from ideal. For example, the company pays to plant trees that, in theory, take up enough carbon to compensate for the greenhouse gas generated by airplane flights on company business.

“All you are really doing is inventorying the carbon for 200 years,” Mr. Anderson said of the company’s tree-planting efforts, which it subcontracts to a company in the carbon credit business. “It’s better than nothing, but it’s temporary.”

In the future, he said, progress will come “in a lot of little steps and a few very big ones.”

Developing recyclable nylon — “that’s a big step,” he said. (Whoever does it will get all his company’s business, he has said.) Substituting “carbohydrates” — using corn dextrose instead of petroleum — would be even bigger. Renewable energy at a reasonable price would be another big step. Transportation remains “a huge issue,” in spite of the carbon credits.

Even so, customers responded to the campaign, he said, noting that it was questions from customers that prompted the sales force to ask for his environmental views in the first place. “In the aggregate, our products are not costing any more,” he said, and customers do not seem to resist those that are more expensive. “Our profit margins are up, not down,” he said.

...

And after an argument with the landlord, Interface’s office space here is now illuminated with low-energy, long-life light bulbs.

Mr. Anderson is also proud to say that as a member of an advisory council at Georgia Tech, he persuaded the institution to modify its mission statement to proclaim the goal of “working for a sustainable society.”

...

After the speech, he said, “I heard the whispers, ‘Has he gone round the bend?’ ” Mr. Anderson recalls proudly how he confessed at once that he had. “That’s my job,” he said. “To see what’s around the bend.”

THE BEES MAN! THE BEES (a rant on colony collapse disorder a.k.a. the rapture of the bees)

okay...seriously people...the bees...i know people are all really hot and bothered about imus and congress's vote(ish)ing against(ish) the war in iraq...but i mean if all the bees are gone who cares!...and if you don't think bees are political, look closer...

maslow's hierarchy of needs people...food is pretty much the bottom of the pyramid...

i am going to introduce the idea of a bee awareness club called "SAVE MAYA: STOP COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER!" after our own maya the bee...and if that puppet vanishes i am gonna freak out...

i am just saying people, big picture!...zoom out...bee rapture...bee rapture...

Sheryl Crow is so scary....

She must be, cuz Karl Rove freaked when she touched his arm. He's a real piece of work!

War of Water

Former US Military leaders including General Anthony Zinni and Bush's former Middle East chief, have joined forces to call for serious efforts to commence to stop global warming. These leaders explain the impact of continued non- action in global warming: tens of millions of refugees, civil strife, genocide and increased terrorism, major security risks across the country, and the inevitable wars over lack of water. Yes, we will be at war over water.

flat-top mountain's chinese brothers and sisters

to lend a global addendum to wythe's post last month about mountaintop removal mining in the U.S, here's an amazing narrated slideshow about the effects of mining in Linfen, China:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/v5/content/features/chinaslideshow/index.html

really scary. really worth watching.

Win For The Home Team On The Mountain

The flat-top / lobotomized mountain.

Pill stops cow burps and helps save the planet

And it's not a joke.....

From the Guardian:

Cut down on flying, sell the car and recycle your bottles. But if you really want to tackle global warming, you should stop your cow from burping.

According to scientific estimates, the methane gas produced by cows is responsible for 4% of greenhouse gas emissions. And now, German scientists have invented a pill to cut bovine burping.

The fist-sized plant-based pill, known as a bolus, combined with a special diet and strict feeding times, is meant to reduce the methane produced by cows.

Read the whole article here.