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| Hello? I just watched an "Outside the Lines" episode where host and guests were, I don't know, trying to figure out Dennis Rodman, or how to solve his problem with depression, or something. It's not that I'm afraid of controversy, but here's my take: What's so fucking wrong with conformity? I mean, Rodman was a great basketball player, or at least a pretty good one, but if his cross-dressing or his earrings through his lips, or whatever was causing him to be depressed, is supposed to be a big deal, then it seems to me that he just can't handle his nonconformity. So? What's so fucking wrong with conformity? I expect to take a lot of heat for taking this position, for a lot of reasons, but I maintain: If you're a weirdo, and you're getting depressed, then stop being a weirdo. I realize that I might be switching cause and effect, but what's wrong with trying something different, if the first thing isn't working? If you want to criticize me for writing this, go ahead, but please be kind. I don't like being criticized. | | |
| The following is op-ed column written for the New York Times by the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. It appeared on Thursday, May 10, 2012, and I just got around to reading it this morning. It pulls no punches and it is SCARY. Game Over for the Climate By JAMES HANSEN GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.” If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate. Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk. That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels. If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground. The global warming signal is now louder than the noise of random weather, as I predicted would happen by now in the journal Science in 1981. Extremely hot summers have increased noticeably. We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events — they were caused by human-induced climate change. We have known since the 1800s that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. The right amount keeps the climate conducive to human life. But add too much, as we are doing now, and temperatures will inevitably rise too high. This is not the result of natural variability, as some argue. The earth is currently in the part of its long-term orbit cycle where temperatures would normally be cooling. But they are rising — and it’s because we are forcing them higher with fossil fuel emissions. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from 280 parts per million to 393 p.p.m. over the last 150 years. The tar sands contain enough carbon — 240 gigatons — to add 120 p.p.m. Tar shale, a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States, contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon. If we turn to these dirtiest of fuels, instead of finding ways to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels, there is no hope of keeping carbon concentrations below 500 p.p.m. — a level that would, as earth’s history shows, leave our children a climate system that is out of their control. We need to start reducing emissions significantly, not create new ways to increase them. We should impose a gradually rising carbon fee, collected from fossil fuel companies, then distribute 100 percent of the collections to all Americans on a per-capita basis every month. The government would not get a penny. This market-based approach would stimulate innovation, jobs and economic growth, avoid enlarging government or having it pick winners or losers. Most Americans, except the heaviest energy users, would get more back than they paid in increased prices. Not only that, the reduction in oil use resulting from the carbon price would be nearly six times as great as the oil supply from the proposed pipeline from Canada, rendering the pipeline superfluous, according to economic models driven by a slowly rising carbon price. But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world’s governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This encourages a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling. President Obama speaks of a “planet in peril,” but he does not provide the leadership needed to change the world’s course. Our leaders must speak candidly to the public — which yearns for open, honest discussion — explaining that our continued technological leadership and economic well-being demand a reasoned change of our energy course. History has shown that the American public can rise to the challenge, but leadership is essential. The science of the situation is clear — it’s time for the politics to follow. This is a plan that can unify conservatives and liberals, environmentalists and business. Every major national science academy in the world has reported that global warming is real, caused mostly by humans, and requires urgent action. The cost of acting goes far higher the longer we wait — we can’t wait any longer to avoid the worst and be judged immoral by coming generations. © 2012 New York Times. All rights reserved. James Hansen directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is the author of “Storms of My Grandchildren.” ******************************* Blip32962 (aka twoberry) here: I was eager to see reactions from others, and found a couple of compelling articles HERE at Andrew Revkin's blog for the New York Times. If you do go to Mr. Revkin's blog, and I hope you do, I also hope you'll click on Mr. Revkin's link to an earlier piece by himself; the hyperlink is titled "my work" and can be found at the very bottom of his page. | | |
| Rick Reilly of ESPN has forced me to change my thinking. ********** More great reading, on the same subject: Chris Carter *********** More great reading, on a way different subject: Jennifer Granholm ************ Tuesday, May 8, 2012 Vilma's options not appealing By Rick Reilly
ESPN.com There are few institutions more like the U.S. Army than the National Football League. Uniforms and helmets and training camps. Stick with your squads. If you're on time, you're late. Be 15 minutes early. Pull up your socks or you'll pay. Next month's optional workouts are mandatory. Take ground. Never retreat. You're injured? Next man up. This is war. Above all, in both, you do what your leaders say, no questions asked. They bark, you bolt. If you think, you hurt the team. So what did NFL commissioner Roger Goodell think New Orleans Saints football players would do when their leaders put in a bounty program for quarterbacks' heads? Did he expect them to stand up in the middle of the fire and brimstone the night before a huge game and say, "Uh, Coach? I'm not entirely sure that's ethical. Maybe we need to check with Roger?" Did he expect the Saints players to raise their hands and say, "You know what, Coach? I'm out. But good luck with that!" Did Goodell expect players to risk insurrection, to risk the esprit d' corps, to risk their jobs by conscientiously objecting? Apparently, he did. Because he just threw one of the Saints players out of his league for a year. Linebacker Jonathan Vilma was suspended the entire season without pay. That's more than $2 million, flushed. That's more than four times the $500,000 Goodell fined the Saints' multimillionaire owner, Tom Benson. So remind me: Whose head had a bounty on it in this thing? Then Goodell gave former Saints defensive lineman Anthony Hargrove (now with Green Bay) eight games, defensive end Will Smith four, and linebacker Scott Fujita (now with Cleveland) three. And here was the most hilarious part. The NFL hired a former U.S. attorney named Mary Jo White to "review" the evidence, and you'll never believe what she concluded. She said the NFL was right. "[The players] always had the option to say no," she wrote. "They didn't say no." And who knows the intense peer and coach pressure of an NFL locker room better than Mary Jo White? On May 7, Vilma and his former teammates announced they would appeal their suspensions. So who does somebody like Vilma go to when he thinks the sentence handed down by Goodell is unfair? Who does he see to get his hands on the evidence that Goodell will show Mary Jo White but not him? Goodell, of course. Goodell: Jonathan, we have evidence. Vilma: What? What evidence? Goodell: You don't get to see it. You're suspended one year. Vilma: What? I appeal! Goodell: No problem. (Goodell flips "Commissioner" sign around on his desk to the other side. It reads, "Appeals Court.") Goodell: Court's in session. What's your beef? This is the worst railroad job since Amtrak. These guys had zero chance to stop this bounty program. In the NFL, you stand up to your coach on something like this, and you're immediately a "locker room lawyer" and suddenly you're Super-Glued to the bench. There are no guaranteed contracts in the NFL. You have two choices: You do what your coaches say or you do what your coaches say. And don't forget, there's no video of any Saints player making illegal hits on Brett Favre or Kurt Warner in the two bounty games in question. To be ordered to carry out a hit and then doing it are two separate things. Yes, according to the NFL, Vilma offered $10,000 to his teammates for the head of Warner in their 2009 playoff game with the Arizona Cardinals. But there are also reports that the money was given to him in the first place by his defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams. ESPN's Ed Werder reported that Vilma gave it back to him after that game, saying he didn't want to be in charge of it anymore. Why didn't Vilma go see Goodell when he was offered the chance, weeks before the sentence came down? I'll bet you a Ferrari to a flapjack it was because his team told him not to. "You'll just get us in deeper," is what they probably said to him. Why do I think that? Because in one of the few documents that have filtered out from the NFL, Goodell says Hargrove confessed to lying about participating in the bounty scheme but admits "you were instructed to [lie] by the coaching staff." Exactly. You do what your staff sergeant orders you to do, or you're playing in Winnipeg. What's happening here is that Goodell is staring down the barrel of more than 1,000 lawsuits from former players with concussions. He has to prove the NFL front office is dead-set against violence, while, in NFL locker rooms, the coaches are dead-set in favor of it. Now that Vilma is out one-ninth of his career for following orders, he's finally standing up. "I intend to fight this injustice," he says. But it's too late. During the lockout, the NFLPA signed up for nine more years of a dictatorship, nine more years of a one-man judicial system. They agreed to it in exchange for not having to play an 18-game season, hoping to lessen the number of holes in their brains from collisions that equal a car hitting a brick wall at 45 miles per hour. But that doesn't mean the NFL shouldn't have an independent panel. To most Americans, the way the NFL is set up now looks positively Cuban. I'm not saying the players didn't take part. They did. It was wrong and dangerous and they deserved punishment. And I admire Goodell for the steps he's taken to stop players from stupefying themselves with helmet-to-helmet collisions. But to slap these players as harshly as their bosses is like giving Bernie Madoff's secretary the same sentence as Madoff. The players are led by, and at the mercy of, the absolute and unchecked power of Goodell. This time, he led them into a trap. © 2012 ESPN. All rights reserved. | | |
| I'm proud to call myself a tree-hugger, and here are a few dozen reasons why. This article was written by Jim Robbins, author of the forthcoming book, "The Man Who Planted Trees," and it appeared in the April 12, 2012, edition of the New York Times. *********************************** Why Trees Matter Helena, Mont. TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention. North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more. The common factor has been hotter, drier weather. We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes. For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes. Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me. What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned. Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma. In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment. Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows. Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth. Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures. A big question is, which trees should we be planting? Ten years ago, I met a shade tree farmer named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Champion Tree Project who has been cloning some of the world’s oldest and largest trees to protect their genetics, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland. “These are the supertrees, and they have stood the test of time,” he says. Science doesn’t know if these genes will be important on a warmer planet, but an old proverb seems apt. “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The answer: “Twenty years ago. The second-best time? Today.” © 2012 New York Times. All rights reserved. Jim Robbins is the author of the forthcoming book “The Man Who Planted Trees.” | | |
| The New Frontrunner I don't imagine Rick Santorum's candidacy will stand up to scrutiny any better than those of the nutcases who preceded him in the Republicans' nomination derby. I base this opinion on the fact that he was VERY soundly defeated when in 2006 he ran for a third term as U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania voters were rightly scared of his extremist positions, once they got to understand that he means what he says. But at least he's a more serious candidate than Donald Trump, Herman Cain, and even Newt Gingrich, who are referred to in the article I've republished today. Margaret Carlson (see below) is one of my favorite writers, and I thought I'd share the following article with you. I'm not sure how I got on the newsmax emailing list, but when I saw her byline I knew that the article wouldn't make me throw up, as most of the newsmax articles do. **************** By Margaret Carlson Like Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum is more admired than liked. Many of Santorum's former Senate colleagues don't love him, though some respect him. Even the Christian right had a hard time wrapping its arms around him. So I suspect Santorum's three wins last night won't mean much in the grand scheme of things. Unlike Romney, however, Santorum is sweaty with belief. He is convinced that life begins on the first date and ends with "death panels" created by Obamacare, which he will repeal by executive fiat within seconds after being inaugurated. Whether this intensity will help him is unclear. What is clear after last night is the shallowness of Romney's front-runner status. Thus far the anti-Mitt vote has been split. The Republican base has given a string of candidates — from a vulgar casino owner to a crackpot pizza magnate to a grandiose adulterer — a twirl around the dance floor. Can Santorum finally unite the anybody-but-Romney vote? If the current field of Republican candidates lived in your neighborhood — a shuddering thought, I realize — you might think of them this way: Romney is a great next-door neighbor, never complaining when you don't return the hedge clippers, but you wouldn't have him over for a beer. Ron Paul looks and sounds like the cranky old man across the street — and he pretty much is, though he occasionally makes sense at the debates. Gingrich is the guy from the block who never stops talking, smooth and entertaining but so full of himself you soon find yourself shutting off the porch light when he appears. And then there is Santorum, whose default expression is a pout, even when you're telling him how much you admire his lawn. The Republican race will now proceed with two unloved candidates. May the best man win. © 2012 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved. | | |
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