Happy Groundhog Day, Candlemas, or whatever you call it…
About The Author
Knoxville Progressive
47, an environmental scientist, Italian-American, married, 2 sons, originally a Catholic from Philly, now a Taoist ecophilosopher in the South due to job transfer. Enjoy jazz, hockey, good food and hikes in the woods.
Today the news bucket runneth over…
Birds join frogs as bloggers – Twenty pigeons in San Jose, CA will be outfitted later this year with tiny GPS receivers, air pollution sensors, and a cellphone, and will transmit data in real time as text messages back to a blog site. The pigeons’ locations will appear on an interactive map, and they will carry cameras to send photographs to the blog as well. The project is a work of both research and interdisciplinary art, and will start posting August 5 as part of a conference in San Jose. No web address was given in the story (d’oh!).
Big outbreaks of malaria can be predicted several months in advance by a look at the weather, says a study published on Thursday in Nature, the British science weekly. Weather forecasters built a computer model of Botswana’s rainfall patterns and factored in the lifecycle of the mosquito, which carries the parasite that causes malaria.
More from Gore – Corporate America must face up to green and ethical challenges if they are to avoid disaster, former US Vice President Al Gore has told BBC Radio 4 in an interview. Meanwhile, investors with some $30 trillion of assets have written to 1,933 of the world’s biggest companies demanding disclosure on their climate change stance, the UK-based Carbon Disclosure Project said on Wednesday.
Genetic engineering to save planet? Global warming just may have met its match, according to researchers at Emory University School of Medicine, who have discovered a mutant enzyme that could enable plants to use and convert carbon dioxide more quickly, effectively removing more greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, and causing the plants to grow quicker. [But can they turn it off later once it gets into the environment? Can the soil support more rapid plant growth? And what are the effects on the crops produced? See next headline…]
The mineral content of milk and popular meats has fallen significantly in the past 60 years, according to a new British analysis of government records of the chemical composition of everyday food. Intensive farming is blamed – feed crops that are grown more rapidly are lower in nutrients; the result is consistent with US and Danish research. The food and farming industries blame newer analytical methods, to which scientists counter “Posh!”
Kinda warm, eh? Most of Canada basks in record winter warmth [I wonder why?] No news here folks, move along, move along…
They must have read my New Environmentalism diary last weekend, LOL: Greenpeace activists will shift their focus to protest against pirate fishing off Africa’s west coast following two months battling Japanese whalers, the group said on Wednesday. Greenpeace said it now planned to expose illegal fishing as part of a year-long campaign to save the world’s oceans.
Warning – The following editorial comment may be offensive to some:
I guess their god doesn’t give a flying f**k, then… The National Association of Evangelicals said yesterday that it has been unable to reach a consensus on global climate change and will not take a stand on the issue, disappointing environmentalists who had hoped that evangelical Christians would prod the Bush administration to soften its position on global warming. [Earth to National Association of Evangelicals: “Keep your head in the sand, and I’ll make your life hell on earth; you won’t need no stinkin’ Armageddon!”
Thanks for jumping today!
(re your last news snippet: they’re really counting on that rapture thing to save their sorry behinds, aren’t they?)
That should be “Thanks for jumping in today”…
LOL! I’m relieved to hear you’re not one of those folks who sees a man on a ledge and yells “Jump, Jump!”
{{{Knoxville Progressive}}} You da Science Man.
The National Association of Evangelicals took this courageous about-face on global warming at the prompting of such Christian luminaries as Chuck Coulson and Dr. Dobson – read their letter to the NAE leadership here.
“By their fruits ye shall know them…”
The big news around these parts today is that Bushie is coming for a visit this morning – a little get-together with the corporatists at 3M. Our Republican Governor Pawlenty has said that he will continue to support Bush – even if he’s 2% in the polls. We can only hope that they both go down together!!
Becky Lourey for Governor!!
…Bushie is coming for a visit this morning…
Hide the children! Stockpile food and water! Duct tape the windows!
Better not let Ductape see you write that. Ouch!
Full Article
Yay! Serves them right; I hope the women win.
Gee, do you think has anything at all to do with the attacks on women in the military that we read about earlier this week? Salon.com
the Army is right now is deafening. We in the military have lost our feeling of community among each other. We have now come to avoid each other and each family fights for what it needs privately. The less that anybody knows about us the better, better to not know who is working feverishly to get out under a medical discharge and best not to know who is career and doing everything they can to stay in while they drive their heads through sheet rocked walls. The family advocate wants to speak with me again about family pressures and problems……I refuse, I have a daughter dealing with serious teen social issues and trying to figure out who she is and all they want to do is attempt to ice over whatever happens within the family so that the can jerk my husband at a moments notice and nobody has a leg to stand on in challenging them. I tore up the note she sent home with my husband. I know what her goals are, she will take her social worker degree and she will stay on mission. I read her last report about how stable my family is and she didn’t mention that my son is even disabled or that he has two surgeries a year that are must haves and others that will be mixed in with those. She left out that my husband was even having “anxiety problems” and made no mention of people planting their heads into walls in the middle of spousal arguments after returning home from Iraq. It’s so quiet in the military right now I can almost hear a pin being pulled!
In the sense of the blogosphere, what’s the best thing people like me can do to help? I’ve avoided the subject after getting mixed reactions with some folks misunderstanding my intent. Should we bring this up in discussions or would that make matters worse? I just want to help but I’m not sure how.
about mixed reactions. When it comes to the military it seems to be that we all have a lot of preconceived ideas. Some of us have military experiences woven into our lives and some of us don’t. I was one who had none until meeting my husband and then meeting and finally knowing many soldiers. Soldiers are people and people and soldiers and at the end of the day being a soldier is a job, like being a police officer, or a doctor, or a lawyer……all jobs that require taking oaths and have standards and ethics that they follow or don’t follow. The only difference is that a soldier can’t just “quit” the job…..a soldier has a very special place of need that none of those jobs has and that need is the honest voice of the people. The voice of the people is the only thing that stands between a crazy government inciting unlawful wars and a protected civilized nation. When people get passionate in their responses listen to what they are saying they need you to hear and find where the truth lies within the gray zones. Yes we need a military…..we all know that the world isn’t guaranteed to be a nice place…..using our military in this fashion though and breaking something that in reality we need for our own safety and welfare can have huge ramifications. Our military was once highly trained and they were fresh to protect you and I…..they could have always been hurt or harmed and they knew that and we all knew that but that was a risk they and we chose/choose as acceptable to keep the American populace safe. Our soldiers are no longer “fresh” and “ready” to defend this nation, those who could get out got the hell out and took all of their hours and skill with them when they left. It isn’t that they were afraid to die protecting their nation because nothing could be further from the truth, but nobody has a meeting with reality like a soldier in the middle of a war. Everything becomes crystal clear and whether these guys/women can say it in public yet or not, nobody wants to die for a fucking lie and watch us blow the shit out of innocent people everyday and destroy our ethics in the process. They couldn’t stop it but at least they might not have to participate in it! We give people with criminal records now waivers to take their place and five years ago the military didn’t have a job slot or a weapon for a criminal to carry! Your military has extremely sophisticated weapons these days and I’m not sure how well the new recruits are going to fit in or how trainable they are compared to what we need. Of course thugs with automatic weapons don’t need a whole lot of training but they will only be thugs confidently using automatic weapons whether they are in Baghdad or Boise!
Yup, we’re on the same page for the subject. If there is anything specific I can do, let me know. Until then, BushCo corrections/removal would go a long way to helping everyone.
And perhaps I missed previous news about it because I really don’t spend a lot of time focusing on video games. My son does. Yesterday afternoon I had to get some batteries and I took my son to the store with me. While I was picking through the batteries he asked if he could go look at the video games and I said okay. I found what I was looking for and turned to find him visually in the game area. He was trying to play a game demo and it wasn’t working for him. There was a healthy beautiful lad of about 15 playing a game demo next to him. I watched my son go up to the boy and ask him something and suddenly found myself on the outside looking in. My son has special needs but it hasn’t been our sole focal point in raising him and he has such an amazing personality. He is only six but unafraid to ask a 15 year old something. I see the 15 year old hand him the controller he was using and start to explain to my son what button does what. Then the 15 year old wanders off among the demo controllers to find something else to play. I allow my son to play for awhile before I snatch him away and I just watch him. The 15 year old doesn’t have much luck with the other demo’s, they don’t seem as interesting so I see him begin to wander back and it is time that we go anyhow so I approach my son and tell him we need to head home. That was when I actually looked at the T.V. screen that displayed the game he was playing. The scene was that a middle eastern home. What I have always understood as Moroccan style lamps decorated the game scene. Rugs on the floor and the “building” that the “soldier” who was my son was walking around in appeared to be made out of adobe or mud and windows were without glass in them. Dead tallish and thin brown men in drab colored clothes lay strewn about…..I felt the bile rise. Are we crazy? I don’t think that most video games incite violence but this is something so disgusting to me I start to feel nauseated. I glance at the screen again and on the wall of the “middle eastern insurgent house” there is a swastika flag hanging on the wall apparently decorating the place. I still don’t know what the fuck to say or think or feel about the whole thing. I was so overwhelmed I had a hard time locating the game name for I rushed the hell out of there but I made myself look for it. It is Call to Duty 2. I asked my husband about it when he got home and he said that the original Call to Duty was WWII series. Our 15 year old boys playing that game though and how they might equate all that in their minds with Iraq and people of middle eastern ethnicity and now we have added swastikas? I’m just sick today remembering it and knowing that it is out there.
Now, aside from the truly deranged attempt at reasoning the religio-dude who’s pushing Colorado’s new amendment makes (something about: we love god, so we have to punish the gays until they feel pain, but really it’s not bad pain because we’re only doing it because we love god and god only really loves Christians when they’re causing the gays to be in pain — whatever), clearly, the political gay-bashing that the Republicans believe was so successful for them in ’04 is going to play a major sub-thematic role in the ’06 campaign season. And if they are not stopped, it will come back again in ’08.
Because look, even though an anti-gay petition drive just failed in Florida, we’ve got ole Jeb talking about how to strengthen the DOMA — and this in a state where gay people are already explicitly forbidden by statute from adopting children. (And no, there’s nothing ambiguous about the Florida law. I will never fucking forget being only 18 years old and seeing the black and white print in the law book that said, starkly, that a person could not adopt if that person was a homosexual. Thanks, Anita Bryant, you homophobic asshole.)
So what are the Democrats going to do? Are they going to lurch even further to the right about denying equality for millions of gay American citizens? I know better than to ask if they’ll fight for me. They won’t. And that’s a huge strategic mistake because you know the Republicans are going to “smear” Democrats with the gay-lover label anyway, so when the Democrats equivocate on the issue like they always fuckin’ do — “Oh, I have nothing against gay people, it’s just that I agree with the Republicans that straight people are a little more special” — they’re playing right into what Republicans want them to do. Republicans are not successful with a gay-bashing strategy, they’re successful with a strategy of painting the Democrats into corners they know the Democrats won’t try to fight their way out of, and then loudly proclaiming that the Democrats are too weak to fight. And of course they look right when they say it, which, all voter fraud issues aside, is another huge reason why we’re basically living in a Republican dictatorship right now.
Here’s a bold strategy suggestion: Fight for equality and equal opportunity for everyone. I bet anyone who actually did that would win in a fraud-proof fuckin’ landslide.
The Focus on the Family Saved Straight group downtown one night in Colorado Springs looking for other gays who needed God to save them from “it”. They are all “previous” gays who have been delivered from the evil and they look like they are walking around in a conjoined trance. Their voices are all soft and monotone devoid of any emotion about anything but Jesus and Focus on the Family. I hated listening to them talk, it was like listening to silent screaming from someplace within them. It gave me the creeps…..it was like being around one of the Stepford wives that I know. I guess they’re the Stepford gays!
There’s some really funny sketch comedy hiding behind that phrase.
Seriously, I agree that the whole thing is tragically sad. Like a cult. And as we’re all learning the hard way lately, you can’t really save people from cults if they do not wish to be saved. Or if they already consider the cult to be their savior, which is an image most cults are pretty good at cultivating.
I got the folloing in an email from a co-worker and wanted to share it with all of you.
Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address occur in the same week. As Air America Radio pointed out, “It is an ironic juxtaposition of events: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication while the other involves a groundhog.”