07/24/2008

… And I Can’t Shut Up

Remember those commercials from 20 years ago with senior citizens using their electronic buzzers to summon help? “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” was the tag line. A friend of mine used to parody that commercial at parties. “I’m talking and I can’t shut up,” she’d say.

My friend has more self-awareness than many of our fellow citizens. How often are we subjected to someone on a street corner braying into his or her cell phone like a homeless jackass?

Remember when cell phones came out and everyone got one “just for emergencies”? Do you just use your cell phone only for emergencies? Have you EVER used your cell phone for an emergency? It was a contrived justification, like the line about driving an SUV: “I just feel safer.”

This week Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, sent a memo to 3,000 members of the staff, advising them to limit their cell phone use. If they must use a cell phone, Dr. Herberman said, they should use a wireless headset or the speaker phone option. He strongly advised that children not be allowed to use cell phones.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)
07/17/2008

Get Used To It

A reader said to me the other day, “You’re stuff’s getting dark lately.” She was right; it has. I don’t know what to do about that, given I define the mission of this site as calling it as I see it. Right now, it looks dark. If it’s any consolation, it’s worse if you live with me. Adrienne says she doesn’t want to hear about it anymore. I have to go find someone else if I want to have those conversations. (Actually, those “conversations” are starting to turn into monologues.)

So here we go again and let’s see if we can find some reason to chase the clouds away. It won’t be easy. What’s sticking in my mind is a piece New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a week ago about the leaders of the G-8 nations failing to take any action on the Darfur genocide at their recent meeting.

Mr. Kristof ran through the reasons for inaction – that more people die annually of more soluble problems, that perhaps we should apply our efforts where we will get the most significant results. A fine argument, if the industrialized world actually did anything significant to combat malaria or AIDS, but our efforts are not commensurate with what is needed. Our efforts are not even commensurate with what we spend on say, pet care.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)
07/10/2008

In the Good (?) New Summertime

It’s hot in Vermont. It’s been in the 90s and humid for weeks. This is great for cherries and plums, grapes and apples. My neighbor’s been making cherry jam for days (add a hot stove to the equation) and she’s had to prop up the boughs of her plum tree, so heavy are they with fruit.

The sun was shining through the weekend, so farmers followed the adage and made hay. Global warming models show the northeast getting warmer and wetter, which is a better fate than the drought modeled for much of the continental U.S. Still, it will take some adjusting. As good a growing season as this has been, it’s been lousy for hay. Farmers lost a cut because it was too wet to bring it in and so it rotted in the fields.

Some fight back with technology. There’s a baling technique that will supposedly allow farmers to bale wet hay in plastic. If you live in the country and see those things in fields that look like overgrown marshmallows, they’re hay in plastic bales. The idea is that the plastic creates an anaerobic (i.e. “no oxygen”) environment, which means even wet hay won’t rot. Supposedly.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy, Electoral Politics, Energy, Global Warming | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
07/03/2008

Like a Motherless Child

Vermont had its first AMBER alert last week. (AMBER is an acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response, a cumbersome tribute to Amber Hagerman, who was abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996.)

Twelve-year-old Brooke Bennett disappeared on the 25th of June. Stories soon circulated that she had lied to her mother about where she was going and instead had gone off with a man she’d met on the Internet.

Different versions of the story displayed different photos of Brooke. One looked like school photo, showing a pretty young girl wearing a sweater. Another showed a sexualized pre-teen with heavy makeup on her eyes.

I won’t try to build suspense with this story; Brooke was murdered. Although the Internet was involved, this is not one of the horror stories we warn our kids about, it’s worse. Brooke’s uncle and former stepfather have been arrested in connection with Brooke’s abduction and for their involvement in a sex ring that traded in under-aged girls. They apparently intended to initiate Brooke into the ring. Instead, she’s dead.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Economy, Global Warming | Tagged | Comments (0)
06/26/2008

Back to the Garden

There are a number of opinions about the Bible and, as is too often the case, they tend to divide, rather than unite us. Some people think the Bible is the unerring word of God, each and every verse. Others think it’s “divinely inspired,” but perhaps not absolutely correct in every respect.

Other people – many of my friends on the left – are surprised when I make a reference to the Bible. “Do you read that?” they ask, in a tone of incredulity and amusement.

Yes, I do. I don’t think it’s all true and I have no ideas about its inspiration. I do know it is a book written from centuries of human experience and the people who wrote it are, whether we like it or not, the ancestors of much of the culture in which we live today. I don’t think it makes sense to either blindly believe all it contains or ignore it and it’s truly foolish to determine one’s position on the book based on being in opposition to some other group. The more we learn about our history, our anthropology our (dare I say?) evolution, the more light we have by which to re-read the text.

But this isn’t about the Bible. It’s about the cavemen. Last week’s New Yorker has an article by Judith Thurman about the Paleolithic cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain. (If you think people have diverging opinions about the Bible, don’t even get started on the New Yorker or the French.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy | Comments (1)
06/19/2008

Learning to Pay Attention

The walls are closing in or, if not the walls, then the groundwood sheets of newsprint, the pixilated screens of the news that never stops. Maybe this is the way we should feel at the end of eight years of presidency/puberty. It’s bad enough having teenagers in the house, but when the house is the White House…

(The Internal Editor is not happy with the presidency/puberty metaphor. “Far too mild,” he says, peering over my shoulder. “Don’t even associate the word ‘presidency’ with this miscreant. Compare him to an autocrat, a tyrant – Vlad the Impaler, something like that.” I think I’ve got a fine metaphorical theme about to unspool, but to placate the Internal Editor I agree to include some of his thoughts, at least parenthetically.)

The price of oil and therefore gas and therefore everything else, is running out of control. The economy crashes through one floor after another. On the news this morning, a couple of former Bear Stearns execs, accused of tripping the first in the series of fateful dominoes, were perp-walked through the streets of New York, the modern equivalent of the stock and pillory. Eighty years ago, at least stockbrokers had the moral fiber to throw themselves off ledges and crash into the streets below. Now they either wind up in rehab, church or a country-club federal prison. Or just pay a $50,000 fine after they assault flight attendants and take a crap on an airplane drink cart. (Yes, Gerard B. Finneran of Citibank and Trust Company of the West, we remember you.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy, Electoral Politics | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
06/12/2008

What They Say About Paybacks

“Well, you know what they say about paybacks….” That’s not the kind of payback I have in mind, the payback that line refers to is more appropriately called revenge and is a dish best served cold.

I’ve been thinking about other paybacks this week. Tuesday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have taken away tax breaks from the major oil companies, imposed a windfall profits tax on them and directed some of that money toward investments in alternative energy. The five major oil companies have made over 35 billion dollars so far this year. Yes, that’s billion with a “B.” The service rendered by the GOP is a payback for all those campaign contributions the oil companies have showered on them for the past decade. Good luck running on that in November, Republicans. You may run into a payback of the type alluded to in the first sentence above.

Republicans argued that passing such a bill would do nothing to lower the price of gas at the pump and they’re absolutely right. The bill would, however, take some of that money away from the oil barons and put it in service to the American public, so someday this price gouging may come to an end, because we will have developed other ways to live our lives than solely via an oil addiction.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy, Energy, Global Warming, Oil | Tagged , | Comments (1)