I was afraid to stop and open it up, but, if you want to, I can tell you exactly where it is.
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found in ypsi: hannah’s x teacher stuff
Posted in Found Objects 19 Comments
texas t
U.S. oil companies posted record profits last quarter. Over the course of three months, Exxon alone made $45 million an hour. Seeing a direct correlation between these profits and the fact that we were all, not too long ago, paying about $4 a gallon for gas, several politicians came forward to accuse the industry of price gouging. Oil Company execs, dragged in front of a Senate sub-committee looking into the possibility last week, claimed indignantly that no such thing had happened. During the hearing, they also denied being involved in secret meetings with Dick Cheney before the war, ostensibly discussing how Iraq’s oil fields would be divied up. Apparently not believing them, Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, now wants to call them back in, this time under oath, to testify as to “their involvement with Vice President Cheney’s secretive energy task force.” And, Senator Frank Lautenberg has asked that an inquiry be opened to look into whether or not “these oil company CEOs broke the law by making false statements to the Congress.”
I personally don’t care that gas was $4 a gallon. I think that it should have been $4 a gallon a long time ago. I suspect that, if not underwritten by our government and its multi-billion dollar taxpayer-funded hand-outs, and aided by our military, it would cost at least that much. The idea that we see inexpensive gas as a birthright in this country pisses me off. It’s not cheap, and, more importantly, it’s not going to last forever. If we were sane, we’d tax the hell out of gas (let’s say, increasing the tax by fifty cents a gallon for ten years) in order to drive people to conserve, and we’d invest that money in research and development — in programs like The Apollo Alliance – creating jobs in the process… But we aren’t sane.
We’re fighting the right people when we go after Big Oil in the Congress, but we have absolutely no idea why we’re fighting them. We think it’s because they gouged us at the pump. The truth is, it’s much worse than that. It’s worse than screwing us at the pump, and taking our tax dollars, and even being complicit in the planning for the war in Iraq. Worse than all the rest of it is the fact that they’re still letting us believe that the system can last as it is. It cannot.
(If we’re to survive into the future, we need to push (with tax credits and other incentives) urban living, mass transportation, alternative energy, telecommuting, and concervation.)
Here’s a pertinent clip from author James Kunstler. Read it and weep…
If the American public could stand the truth, we would stop calling it the Iraq War and rename it the War to Save Suburbia. Of all the things that Bush and Cheney have said over the last six years, the one thing the Democratic opposition has not challenged is the statement that “the American way of life is not negotiable.” They’re just as invested in it as everybody else. The Democrats complain about the dark efforts by Bush and Cheney to cook up a rationale for the war. Guess what? The Democrats desperately need something to oppose besides the truth. If they would shut up about WMDs for five minutes and just take a good look around, they’d know exactly why this war started.
When the American people, Democrat and Republican both, decided to build a drive-in utopia based on incessant easy motoring and massive oil dependency, who lied to them? When tens of millions of Americans bought McHouses thirty-four miles away from their jobs in Boston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Dallas, who lied to them? When American public officials adopted the madness of single-use zoning and turned the terrain of this land into a tragic crapscape of strip malls on six-lane highways, who lied to them? When American school officials decided to consolidate all the kids in gigantic centralized facilities serviced by fleets of yellow buses that ran an average of 150,000 miles per year per school, who lied to them? When Americans trashed their public transit and railroad system, who lied to them? When Americans let WalMart gut Main Street, who lied to them? When Bill and Hillary Clinton bought a suburban villa in farthest reaches of northern Westchester County, New York, who lied to them?
You want truth, Progressive America? Here’s the truth: the War to Save Suburbia entailed an unavoidable strategic military enterprise. Saving Suburbia required that the Middle East be pacified or at least stabilized, because two-thirds of the world’s remaining oil is there (and in case you haven’t figured this out by now, Suburbia runs on oil, and the oil has to be cheap or we couldn’t afford to run it). The three main oil-producing countries in the Middle East, going from west-to-east are Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. We had serious relationship problems with all of them at various times, and they with each other, leading at frequent intervals to a lot of instability in that region, and consequently trouble for us trying to run Suburbia on cheap oil (which they sold us in large quantities)…
Posted in Alternative Energy 10 Comments
project b1: bucky mind control
Hey, I just wanted to pop in and let you know that I’m not dead. I’m just hard at work on my comic, which, I guess I can tell you, is about my hope that my daughter might be bright enough to get into the space program and off this planet one day (a theme I know I’ve talked about here before). Basically, in the comic, I go through a bunch of different ideas that have occurred to me for boosting her IQ. My favorite idea is gutting her beloved Tinky Winky doll, and hacking its voice box, so that instead of screaming little phrases like “Tubby toast” and “big hug” in the voice of a mutant Paul Lynde / Krusty the Clown hybrid, it reels off hour-long lectures by Buckminster Fuller. (The cool thing is, I’ve just discovered (via Metafilter) that 42 hours of Fuller lectures from 1975 are publicly available, and just waiting to be appropriated for such purposes.) I know it’s probably just one more idea that I’ve never follow though on, but I think that there would have to be a pretty big market for little, hacked voice boxes that could be slipped into children’s toys, so that instead of babbling about nonsense, they explained the underlying principles of Newtonian physics and quantum theory… At any rate, that’s the tangent I’m off on right now. Don’t worry though, I’ll be back soon enough to talk about Bob Woodward’s role in the Plame Affair, our fantastic new sonic weapons and the right wing’s assault on the courts…..
Oh, I know this is completely off subject, but I was wondering if anyone could suggest a good book of children’s songs. As much as we love them, Linette and I are getting tired of singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” “Bah Bah Black Sheep” and the songs of the Ramones (which actually work quite well as lullabies).
Posted in Mark's Life 13 Comments
betraying jesus
Jim Wallis, the author of the bestseller “God’s Politics,” has a new book out entitled “Call to Conversion,” and, judging from the excerpt posted on the Soma Review site, I’d say it looks pretty promising. Here’s a clip:
I remember a conference in New York City. The topic was social justice. Assembled for the meeting were theologians, pastors, priests, nuns, and lay church leaders. At one point a Native American stood up, looked out over the mostly white audience, and said, “Regardless of what the New Testament says, most Christians are materialists with no experience of the Spirit. Regardless of what the New Testament says, most Christians are individualists with no real experience of community.” He paused for a moment and then continued: “Let’s pretend that you were all Christians. If you were Christians, you would no longer accumulate. You would share everything you had. You would actually love one another. And you would treat each other as if you were family.” His eyes were piercing as he asked, “Why don’t you do that? Why don’t you live that way?”
There was more sophisticated theological and political analysis per square foot in that room than most places. Yet no one could give an answer to the man’s questions. He had put his finger on the central problem we face in the churches today. Our Scriptures, confessions, and creeds are all very public, out in the open. Anyone can easily learn what it is supposed to mean to be a Christian. Our Bible is open to public examination; so is the church’s life. That is our problem. People can read what our Scriptures say, and they can see how Christians live. The gulf between the two has created an enormous credibility gap…
Evangelism in our day has largely become a packaged production, a mass-marketed experience in which evangelists strain to answer that question that nobody is asking. Modern evangelists must go through endless contortions to convince people that they are missing something that Christians have. Without the visible witness of a distinct style of life, evangelists must become aggressive and gimmicky, their methods reduced to salesmanship and showmanship. Evangelism often becomes a special activity awkwardly conducted in noisy football stadiums or flashy TV studios, instead of being a simple testimony rising out of a community whose life together invites questions from the surrounding society. When the life of the church no longer raises any questions, evangelism degenerates. The phrases “Jesus saves” and “Jesus is Lord” have been so often used in the absence of any visible historical application that most people simply do not know what the words mean anymore. Perhaps never before has Jesus’ name been more frequently mentioned and the content of his life and teaching so thoroughly ignored. One wonders what remains of Jesus in American culture except his name. Unless accompanied by a clear demonstration of what it means to follow Jesus now, the evangelistic message falls on deaf ears or, even worse, calls people to a conversion empty of real content…
Not surprisingly, our self-centered culture has produced a self-centered religion. Preoccupation with self dominates the spirit of the age and shapes the character of religion. Modern evangelism has played right along with this central theme. The most common question in evangelism today is, “What can Jesus do for me?” In other words, the question is how Jesus can help us make it in the present order, not how we can respond to the new order. Potential converts are told that Jesus can make them happier, more self-satisfied, better adjusted, and more prosperous. Jesus quickly becomes the supreme product, attractively packaged and aggressively sold to a consuming public. Complete with billboards, buttons, and bumper stickers, modern evangelistic campaigns advertise Jesus in a competitive market. Even better than Coca-Cola, Jesus is “the Real Thing.”
I know it’s all stuff that I’ve talked about here before, but I think that you’ll agree that it’s good to hear it enunciated eloquently for a change.
Oh, and I forgot to mention it above, but Wallis is the Executive Director of the Christian social justice organization Sojourners… If you haven’t stopped by his site before, you might want to check it out. (I have to get back to working on my comic now. I just wanted to pass that along before I forgot.)
Posted in Church and State 8 Comments
placenta stretch
My mom just left (she was the visitor we were scrubbing toilets for on Friday), and I’ve got tons of shit I need to work on, like my Peter Falk interview for the Ann Arbor Paper, this month’s My Life in Ypsi cartoon, and the record cover for the soon-to-be-released Monkey Power Trio record, “Spiders in the Blood Supply”… so I may not be blogging much tonight. Sorry about that… Here, instead, are just a few quick links without too much in the way of exposition.
This wasn’t a particularly good week for the truth. First there was word that the White House had altered the official transcript of Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s response to a question concerning the outing of Valerie Plame from, “That’s accurate,” to, “I don’t think that’s accurate.” And, then there was this footage of Dick Cheney as he set out to un-correct the record with regard to what he’d said about a tie between Saddam and the 9/11 terrorists in the run-up to the war. And, as if that weren’t enough for one week, the Republicans found someone to claim that Joe Wilson had publicly outed his wife as a CIA agent five times. (The person making the claim has, upon being confronted with several inconsistencies in his story, given it some more thought, and now claims that Wilson only outed his wife to him once.) On our side of the aisle, however, you’ll be happy to know that we’re doing a much better job of talking about the issues, and doing so truthfully. In evidence of this, I give you three examples. First, John Edwards is finally acknowledging the fact that he was wrong to vote with the President on the war in Iraq. Second, Barack Obama came across as one hell of a bright and likeable guy on the Daily Show. And, third, Howard Dean did a great job of framing the issues on Meet the Press this morning. (Video of Dean’s segment can be found at Bradblog.) And, since we touched on the subject of television, it looks as though Arrested Development is on the chopping block once again. I don’t know how many times rabid fans can bring a series back from the dead, but if you’d like to pitch in, you can sign a petition here… I really have to get back to work now.
Oh, but first, here’s a photo I just downloaded from my cell phone. This is one of Clementine’s dolls. His name is Mr. Toothbrush Leg. (As for the title of this post, “Placenta Stretch,” it comes from the subject line of a spam email that I just received. I think it was about designer watches.)
Posted in Mark's Life 3 Comments
