What is truth?  Such a timely topic these days, now that we seem to be in the post-truth era.  I gathered these quotes on the meaning of truth from my favorite quote site, The Quotations Page.

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902)

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
Lenin (1870 - 1924)

I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.
Harry S Truman (1884 - 1972), in Look, Apr. 3, 1956

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Annajanska (1919)

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.
William O. Douglas (1898 - 1980)

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865)

An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007), Cold Turkey

If you want the truth, ask a child.
French Proverb

All truth passes through 3 stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)

The United States and the European Union have taken a “criminal path” by contributing to an explosive rise in global food prices through using food crops to produce biofuels, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food said today.At a press conference in Geneva, Jean Ziegler of Switzerland said that fuel policies pursued by the U.S. and the EU were one of the main causes of the current worldwide food crisis.

The Special Rapporteur warned of worsening food riots and a “horrifying” increase in deaths by starvation before reforms could take effect.

For the full article, visit Common Dreams.

Arrest George W. Bush.

That is the suggestion of Ted Rall, writing on Common Dreams.   Who should arrest President Bush?

There is, however, a person who could begin holding Bush and the others accountable for their crimes.

She is Cathy L. Lanier, the 39-year-old chief of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department. Chief Lanier, take note: you have probable cause to arrest a self-confessed serial torturer and mass murderer within the borders of the District of Columbia. He resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Go get him.

History is calling, Chief Lanier. Your city, and your country, needs you.

What are we to make of this latest flap over a teen icon revealing herself as a potentially sexual being?

I was only dimly aware of Hannah Montana till the Vanity Fair scandal (if scandal is the word). Now it seems I can’t get away from her, which is, of course, the goal of marketing—to make something inescapable for the general public. There are elements of the incident that require less froth and more examination. The accusations of “whose idea was it in the first place and how was Mylie Cyrus manipulated?” are loud and in many ways naive.

First off, Hannah Montana is a Disney product. I don’t think we’re yet quite comfortable with the idea of a person—even a fictional one—being a “product” like a box of soap or a car, but this is indeed what the character is. Designed, engineered, and road tested, Hannah Montana is a money-making machine for Disney and the various participants in the show and franchise.

Pause for a moment and consider: Disney.

It is difficult to imagine a marketing machine that is better at what it does. Which means the chances of something being done with one of its properties that it (a) doesn’t know about and (b) doesn’t approve are next to zero. Especially when you add to that:

Vanity Fair.

Big magazine, famous magazine, a magazine people in show business lust to get into. In the vernacular, Lot A Bank there.

So we’re talking about two major corporate entities, huge public presence, who are involved—without a doubt contractually—in a presentation of a property. Again, the oddness of talking about a person as property is unsettling, but this is a show business idiom quite common. Agencies discuss “properties” all the time and they’re talking about musicians, actors, artists.

Throw into the mix Annie Liebowitz, who is arguably iconic herself. From the early days at Rolling Stone up through the present, Annie is a public figure. Meaning that, especially “in the business”, everyone knows what she does. She would also have been involved in the arrangements between Disney and Vanity Fair.

So far so good. Everyone knew what was going on.

Now, the photoshoot was crowded. Lots of people there. Including Mylie Cyrus’s parents. Not sure who mom is, but dad—Billie Ray—is an entertainment industry insider. He’s been around a long time. He has survived quite well. He knows the ropes. He is not a “stage dad” in the sense of not knowing what’s going on.

I’ve laid this out at some length to show how utterly unlikely it is that the photographs of 15-year-old Mylie in a pose more appropriate to a 20-something were an accident. That no one knew what was happening. It’s not like this was done in a basement studio, digitally, and the shots immediately posted to the web. Disney would have had to clear the shots. I cannot imagine it wasn’t in the contract that someone at Disney would get to look at them and say, one way or the other, whether they could be published. Of the two, Disney is by far the bigger gorilla—Vanity Fair was not likely to hold them over a barrel.

So what then is the Big Deal? And, if this is so inappropriate, why was it allowed?

Control over a teen-age superstar is doable. Look at Leann Rimes. Her burgeoning sexuality, while certain present and eminently marketable, was not “unleashed” till she was over 18. Her parents kept a handle on it. We can doubtless find other examples. Reese Witherspoon. Jody Foster. Helen Hunt. Even earlier, Annette Funicello.

(Though Annette is a curiosity—she never really stopped being a Mousketeer. Her emergent sexuality—blatant and impossible to get around—somehow failed to take her into “adult” consideration. Management may have been too tight and she remained—popularly—the girl on the beach who never went past the first kiss. This happens—actresses who have the audacity to “grow up” and find themselves trapped in an adolescent image. Sally Fields is a case in point. She went from Gidget to The Flying Nun, completely bypassing a mature sexual phase, and nearly remained stuck with it. She made a minor film—I forget the title—in which she appeared nude. In an interview, she admitted that the decision to do so was calculated to shatter the Gidget/Flying Nun image so she could then be taken seriously as an adult actress. The tactic might be questionable to some, but the result was a critically-successful career.)

Managing the property is the whole game here. And Hollywood (and Nashville, etc) have a problem with starlets like Mylie. Once they establish them as an icon for preteens to teens—what is called “tweens”—what do you do when they grow up and start acting like women?

Age here isn’t the issue. Let’s face it, sexuality strikes in the teen years, some sooner than others, and the limelight of a successful career seems somehow to advance the timetable. We are all-too-familiar with the meltdowns in instances where the transition is, well, bungled—Lindsey Lohan and Britney Speers are the poster girls of crash and burn. (more…)

This Chris Kelly headline says it all:

America: #1 in Bibles. #37 in Infant Mortality.

Here’s an excerpt from Kelly’s Huffpo article:

Europeans are feeling pretty smug lately, with their sturdy currency, “health care,” and rising rates of life expectancy, but there’s one area where we kick their ass: American Christians read the bible a lot more often than European Christians do.

Here are a few interesting tidbits about the Bible (these are some of my previous Bible-relevant posts from Dangerous Intersection):

Reading violent Bible stories can make you more violent.

If you’re a Bible literalist who’s going to read the Bible, don’t cherry-pick. Make sure you read these parts too.

The Bible is not really inerrant.

Adam might have had a belly button.

You can love going to church, even if you’re an atheist.

The New Testament says some bizarre things about morality (in addition to saying some very good things).

And finally (as Kelly suggests), most Americans who claim to read the Bible are liars.

–

I’ll end on a bleak note, because I’ve made the mistake of paying too much attention to the “news” today: The intellectual deterioration of the United States is about to his critical mass (or has it already?).

What? The White House is endangering us by withholding information?

This is getting to be a familiar story, right? Here’s the typical plot: There’s something going on that poses a serious risk to Americans, and the White House decides to protect big corporations rather than protect the people at risk.

This time, the protected industry consists of chemical manufacturers. The victims are American citizens, many of them recalcitrant admirers of the Bush Administration. Here’s an excerpt of the article by the Associated Press:

The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting non-scientists have a bigger - often secret - role, congressional investigators say in a report obtained by The Associated Press.

The administration’s decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program’s credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.

At issue is the EPA’s screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.

How many people are dying out there because they have been exposed to common chemicals of which most people don’t know of the dangers? How many of those people are children? Every time I hear of another person getting cancer (especially when I hear of a young child getting cancer), I wonder whether it’s because he or she has been exposed too long to that thick cocktail of chemicals in which we live. And we live our lives in ignorance thanks to a government which should be protecting us.

You might be thinking “Surely, the government is at least letting us know about the most commonly used risky chemicals?” That assumption would be wrong:

After years of stops and starts, the GAO said, the EPA has yet to determine carcinogen risks for a number of major chemicals such as:

-Naphthalene, a chemical used in rocket fuel as well as in manufacturing commercial products such as mothballs, dyes and insecticides.

-Trichloroethylene, or TCE, a widely used industrial degreasing agent.

-Perchloroethylene, or “perc,” a chemical used in dry cleaning, metal degreasing and making chemical products.

-Formaldehyde, a colorless, flammable gas used to making building materials.

Environmentalists say these chemicals have been widely found at military bases and Superfund sites and in soil, lakes, streams and groundwater.

Now . . . if you really want to know how bad things are, read this Harper’s article: “Toxic inaction: Why poisonous, unregulated chemicals end up in our blood.” (more…)

Yall might could be tiring of my babbling on about Bible study in science classes. But I shall continue. According to this article, Louisiana has, and Florida still may pass amendments to their education codes to give free reign to teachers who choose to use texts other than (and conflicting with) science books to teach biology in science classes. Although these remarkably similar bills don’t actually mention the Bible, Creationism, nor their apparent origin from the Discovery Institute, their intent is clear.

I’ve been following this issue for a while (here’s one of my earlier posts), and continue to find it disturbing.

The main argument they make is that nothing is “proven” in science. Dedicated and well educated scholars have been trying diligently for over 200 years to disprove evolution. Yes, the battle predates the birth of Chas. Darwin! So far, no luck. Every piece of evidence and each new tool reinforces this theory. But with shrewd political action, the anti-science crowd could win enough popular support to hide the actual science from American kids. Theocracy, here we come!

If Pope Urban VIII (nee Cardinal Mafeo Barberini) had the political clout of American Fundamentalists, the Copernican/Galilean theory of heliocentrism might still be challenged in schools.

I’m not a big fan of big Pharma. There’s a good reason for my attitude. Many drug companies are selling hype rather than bona fide drugs. And some of those big drug companies have been caught outright lying.

Merck has already been shown to have killed tens of thousands of people as a result of its lies regarding the alleged safety of Vioxx. The well known lies of Merck involved the withholding of important data that suggested that Vioxx was more dangerous than Merck wanted to allow the public to know. “FDA analysts estimated that Vioxx caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, 30 to 40 percent of which were probably fatal, in the five years the drug was on the market.”

The April 17, 2008 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers) indicates that Merck’s deception was more prevalent than previously suspected. These new accusations have come to light as a result of the extensive litigation regarding Vioxx. The discovery responses produced by Merck made thousands of documents available for analysis. This analysis, paid for by the litigants in a Vioxx case, “seem to show Merck’s extensive involvement in ‘ghost writing’ and ‘guest authorship’ of research and review papers.”

This new evidence seems to show that Merck had its own employees designing the drug trials, analyzing the data, writing the papers and then simply recruiting academic authors to give these papers supposed authenticity. This ruse was discovered by analyzing first drafts of the manuscripts compared to the final articles. The first drafts were written by Merck employees, whereas the final drafts indicated that allegedly independent academics had done the studies and authored those articles. Worse yet, the articles failed “to disclose relevant financial relations” regarding the participants.

The bottom line is that Merck apparently manipulated the authorship of dozens of “independent” articles in order to promote Vioxx.

But that’s not all.  This same article in Nature reports on a second recent article based on documents obtained in a separate court case.   This second article “reports ’striking’ disparities between the mortality results for the drug in published papers and those contained in Merck’s internal analyses.”

It makes you wonder what other drug companies are manufacturing lies along with their drugs. It’s also further evidence that the FDA is largely a rubber stamp for the drug industry rather than a public watchdog.  It’s also evidence that motivated trial lawyers can sometimes do an impressive job of puncturing corporate obstructionism and exposing disturbing wrongdoing that others fail to find.

I’m constantly learning valuable new lessons, but I generally find it difficult to recall any particular good lessons at any particular moment. I got the same problem with jokes. I’ve heard a lot of good jokes in my life, but if I’m put on the spot, I’m at a loss to remember more than one or two.

I thought it might be a good time to dig deep to try extra hard to remember a few of those lessons that have taken deep root with me. One shortcut would be to cite some of the books I have read which have provided some good lessons. For me, one of those books has been Inner Peace for Busy People, by psychologist Joan Borysenko (2001). She divided her book into 52 chapters, each of them offering a strategy for holding things together and finding peace in one’s life.

In chapter 1 Borysenko recommends that we pay attention to the Yerkes-Dodson law, which holds that increased stress makes us more productive only to a point, while further increases decrease productivity. Borysenko argues that many highly productive people operate “on the descending limb of the stress/productivity curve.” In short, they could be more productive if they could only push themselves a bit less, which would reduce the toll they are putting on their overstressed bodies.

In chapter 2 (of her 52 chapter book), Borysenko draws on the Buddhist saying that “Peace is like a sun that’s always shining in your heart. It’s just hidden behind clouds of fear, doubt, worry and desire that continually orient you toward the past or the future. The sun comes out only when you are in the present moment. Step one when you feel crazy busy is to take a breath to help let go of whatever it is on your mind. Think, here I am. Let your body relax, and feel your connection to the larger whole.” Breathing is so incredibly important that Borysenko devotes her entire third chapter to teaching her readers how to breathe.

Many of the worthwhile lessons I have learned have come in the form of written quotes. For instance, you can see that many of the posts at this site have been categorized as “quotes.” Those “lessons” arrive in a constant stream. Here are three recent quotes that constitute good “lessons” for me:

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
Abraham Lincoln

It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.
Thomas Paine

We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.
Thomas Edison

I do not follow any form of organized religion, but some of the figureheads of some of the most popular religions teach some excellent lessons. One of those impressive religious leaders would be the Buddha, who taught that A) suffering is an inherent part of existence; B) that the origin of suffering is ignorance and the main symptoms of that ignorance are attachment and craving and C) that attachment and craving can be ceased. I find these lessons to be incredibly important in my life, even though I struggle to employ these lessons in my daily existence.

Speaking of religious leaders, some critically important lessons have been attributed to Jesus. Again, I do not follow any organized religion; I certainly don’t believe in any of the supernatural claims that many Christians proclaim.  In fact, here is a post that presents some of the many reasons I disbelieve claims of supernatural occurrences and indicating my doubts that the “Jesus” of the Gospels ever actually existed. On the other hand, the lesson that one should love one’s enemy is both elegant and powerful, no matter who taught this lesson. (more…)

The Onion News Network is right on top of this trendy story:

In The Know: How Can We Make The War In Iraq More Eco-Friendly?

According to McClatchy, the Veterans Administration withheld inconvenient information regarding the number of veterans who have attempted suicide:

The Veterans Administration has lied about the number of veterans who’ve attempted suicide, a senator charged Wednesday, citing internal e-mails that put the number at 12,000 a year when the department was publicly saying it was fewer than 800.

“The suicide rate is a red-alarm bell to all of us,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. Murray also said that the VA’s mental health programs are being overwhelmed by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, even as the department tries to downplay the situation.

FirstFreedomFirst.org was co-founded by two Believers, Barry Lynn and Dr. Welton Gaddy. On behalf of First Freedom First, they have produced an hour-long video to inform others of the importance of maintaining a political wall of separation between church and state. The Separation Clause appears in an abstract form in the U.S. Constitution, but there are deleterious real life consequences for violating the Separation Clause.

These issues are clearly illustrated by a diverse collection of guests, including musicians and comedians. Micheal Fox also makes an appearance, speaking out on the issue of stem cell research.

One of the guests is Matthew LaClair, an extraordinary high school student who publicized the fact that his “American History teacher” was actually preaching conservative Christianity in his New Jersey public high school classroom in 2006. Instead of being commended for speaking up, LaClair was ostracized by his high school’s administration and fellow students. That’s the price one should expect to pay, I suppose, for secretly tape-recording the “history teacher’s” lectures, then playing those tapes for the school board after the “history teacher” accused Matthew of lying. Matthew did what he had to do and his actions were courageous. What is truly amazing is that this same “history teacher” had been freely preaching religion in the public school classroomfor twelve years prior to Matthew speaking up.

The First Freedom First show includes about a dozen guests, each of them well spoken, paying tribute to this important issue of the separation of church and state.

After watching the show, it occurred to me that I had never seen any show like this before, anywhere. I’ve never before seen any video made for the general public that counters the “America is a Christian Nation” silliness that permeates the airwaves. It would seem that seriously reviewing the operation and importance of the Separation Clause should be mandatory for U.S. History students and the rest of us. After all, the Separation Clause is in our Constitution and it’s in there for a good reason.

The title to this post comes from actor James Whitmore’s challenge to this year’s crop of candidates: “Will you defend my right to worship . . . or not?

Arianna Huffington recently wrote a post that summarizes enough hypocrisy to throw the happiest concerned citizen into a long-term funk. The deep theme that all of these recent events have in common is that prominent American sources of information are demonstrably untrustworthy. How else can you explain the Administration’s military propaganda being spewed out by the networks as though it’s journalism? Huffington cites David Bromwich:

The cavalier attitude of the networks is astonishing. No system but despotism can survive when so many high up do such things without embarrassment.

Unfortunately, that about captures the high level hypocrisy that has become an everyday occurrence.

Bush sure has a talent for driving up the retail price of oil (and, thus, oil company profits). This week, with gasoline hitting all-time high prices, Bush directed the U.S. DoE’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to *buy* gasoline — a move that enriches oil companies both directly (i.e., by making long-range purchases when prices are peaking) and indirectly (i.e., by increasing demand during a tight supply, thereby forcing prices higher). This week also saw increased levels of sabre-rattling with Iran — for example, a U.S.-contracted cargo ship firing warning shots at approaching vessels believed to be from Iran.

Based on Bush’s past behavior, we should probably expect the remainder of his term to consist largely of taking whatever action is in the best immediate interest of Big Oil…which means get ready to open your wallet even wider when you stop at the pump.

Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi assumed the role of a true Believer in order to see what it’s like to be one.   In Taibbi’s entertaining and well-written article, “Jesus Made Me Puke: And other Tales from the Evangelical Front Lines,” he describes that he almost got too caught up in the situation:

It’s not something that’s easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise — two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses — a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you’re a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene — even if you’re intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry — outwardly you’re swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that “inner you” begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest — in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the “work” of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your “sinful” self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

The Rolling Stone article also provides a clear description of Hagee’s disturbing views on Israel and the end of the world.

In 2006, I also wanted to know what happens in evangelical churches.   To do this, I spent a couple hours in the pews, prior to writing one of the first posts on this site:  “What it’s like to go to an evangelical church.”

I previously wrote that I bought a little camera that I try to take everywhere. Having that camera nearby forces me to look more carefully at the startling sights that are everywhere. Many of those sights are the postures and expressions of people, but privacy concerns keep me from freely photographing or sharing the photos of strangers (I haven’t given up somehow accomplishing this!). To this point, I’ve focused on taking photos of nature and architecture. This morning, my wife Anne and I took a walk in Forest Park (in St. Louis, Missouri). In the morning light, we came upon some startling bursts of color, causing me to take out my little camera.

When I look at biological wonders, I sometimes imagine standing with Charles Darwin and learning from him. That’s how I felt a few weeks ago at an orchid show at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Even before Darwin published his findings there were various levels at which one could appreciate nature (it’s beautiful, it’s functional, it inspires poetry). Darwin added an explosive new level, however. Such was his impressive legacy. Before I appreciated Darwin’s contributions, my attention to plants was limited. But now I see functionality embedded in the beauty–there is now so much more to behold [I was also inspired last year when I viewed David Attenborough's Private Life of Plants and Life in the Undergrowth (focuses on bugs). These are both spell-binding must-watch collections].

There are life and death wars going on out there among the plants and bugs. The thing that first caught our eye this morning was this flowering fruit tree. It was truly exploding with blossoms in its effort to propagate.

It’s beauty was “fractal,” in that it offered similar views from different distances. Anne especially enjoyed the contrast between the blossoms and the blue sky behind them. She took the photo below.

I was most fascinated by the sex organs of the trees (see below photo–parental discretion advised).

As we strolled away from this tree I noticed the expansive patches of clover that were lit up by a huge ball of nuclear explosions 93 million miles away. I took this picture to illustrate a quirky story: I have repeatedly seen something (actually many things) that I can’t explain. This particular story has to do with my wife Anne. She has the uncanny ability to spot a four-leaf clover while walking briskly. I’ve seen her do this several dozen times. When walking, she will stop suddenly, maybe back up a step or two and then reach down to pick up a four leaf clover. The first few times I witnessed this, I suspected that it might be a trick, but it wasn’t. She can really do it.

What makes it more amazing (or, perhaps, more believable) is that Anne’s mother can also do this. They are both gifted with incredibly sharp long-distance vision, but that really doesn’t explain this ability. For most people, finding a four leaf clover requires getting down on one’s knees and carefully and slowly fingering through the individual plants. When I ask Anne how she does it, she says “I just see them. Four leaf clovers stand out. (more…)

I have been anticipating the FCC switch from analog to digital for several years. The original plan was to have the final demise of NTSC (”analog”) broadcast in 2006. Now, it will really happen. The change that they averted when they went to color is finally here. Everyone needs a new TV.

Unless you have cable or satellite. Then you can wait until your old box dies. But I use rabbit ears in my multipath hell of a location in the city. On good days, I can get 7 channels of regular interest, plus 4 explicitly Christian channels (24, 26, 49, 51. The 700 Club shares 11). Sometimes I cannot get ABC-30 or CW-11 clear enough to record or avoid watering eyes. Other times Fox-2 and My-46 are too bad to watch, too. So I really only have 3 reliable channels in analog.

Enter digital clarity. Yesterday I got my gummint subsidized converter box and hooked it up. Now I get perfectly clear (in numerical order) Fox-2.1, CBS-4.1, NBC-5.1, local weather 5.2, and PBS 9.1-9.4. That’s it.

(more…)

The best way to get people to neglect a cause is to dedicate a Special Day to that cause each year. On that one special Day, we will hold thousands festivals where we treat the cause in a trite way and we will ignore that cause the other 364 days. We’re just too busy with our amusements and distractions to give a damn about important things here in America. Earth Day fits the mold perfectly. You would think that at Earth Day festivals, people would take the purpose of Earth Day seriously. You’d think that people would feel the need to make substantial immediate changes in their lives in order to live and procreate in healthy and sustainable ways, leaving the planet in good shape for the following generations of humans and the other animals. What could be done on Earth Day? We could talk big. We could make real plans to take the actions suggested by visionaries like Lester Brown, who proposes that we cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2020. It could really be done. Here’s how Brown describes his plan in his book, Plan B 3.0:

First, dramatically and systematically raise the efficiency of the world energy economy; second, massive investment in renewable sources of energy; and third, increase the earth’s tree cover by planting billions of trees.

Really doing something on a big scale could “inspire awareness of and appreciation for the Earth’s environment.” But most people aren’t doing anything at all. They are content to live the same wasteful lives people lived 20 years ago.

I discussed Earth Day with several people recently (in stores, not at the Earth Day festival). They rolled their eyes when I suggested the need to actually change the way we live our lives. They think that Earth Day is run by a bunch of hippies and they don’t trust hippies.

Even those who don’t scoff at the idea of Earth Day mostly believe in belief in Earth Day (just like most religious believers, who often believe in belief). Many Earth Day’ers believe it’s sufficient to merely say and think responsible things, even if the way they live their lives are indistinguishable from those who don’t believe in Earth Day. Many of these people celebrating Earth Day drive to Earth Day festivities in SUV’s from their homes way out in the Suburbs. When they’re done shopping at Earth Day (and there are lots of non-essential things to buy at Earth Day), they drive back out to the suburbs. This inaction reminds me of a neighbor who mentioned a topic to which I responded “That really concerns me.” He immediately chastised me: “No it doesn’t. If you were actually concerned, you’d be doing something about it.” (more…)

Check out this billboard. Apparently, there is a “Bike Show” at the “Family Arena” in St. Charles, Missouri (St. Louis area). If you attend the Bike Show, you can “Register to Win a Free Breast Augmentation.”

I’d avoid buying only your raffle ticket in the name of the family, however, because if it is the winning ticket, the family members will have to fight over who gets the free breast augmentation.

I’m wondering what they’ll offer next at the Family Arena. Perhaps the next raffle will be for one of those alleged penis enlargements that show up so often in spam.

[For St. Louis areas residents who are interested in admiring this billboard in person, it is located in the City of St. Louis, on South Kingshighway a few blocks north of Chouteau].

What wacky liberal is saying these treasonous things?  It’s actually Lee Iacocca, who used to run Chrysler Corporation.  These excerpts are from Iacocca’s book, “Where Have all the Leaders Gone?” :

‘Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage?

We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car.

But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, ‘Stay the course’. Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America , not the damned ‘Titanic’. I’ll give you a sound bite: ‘Throw all the bums out!’

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore.

What’s it mean to be neutral?  Is it possible to be neutral?  I referred to the trusty Bible for guidance:

Matthew 12:30: “He that is not with me is against me.”

Mark 9:40: “For he that is not against us is on our part.”

OK . . .

BTW, there are numerous other contradictions in the Good Book.  For instance, you are commanded to both love and disrespect your parents.   Here are dozens of other pointed contradictions to consider (gathered by the Skeptics Annotated Bible).

Do you want to buy worm poop fertilizer in used soda bottles?  You can, thanks to Terracycle:

At TerraCycle we manufacture affordable, potent, organic products that are not only made from waste, but are also packaged entirely in waste! TerraCycle Plant Food™ is made by feeding premium organic waste to millions of worms. The worm poop is then liquified into a powerful organic plant food and bottled directly in used soda bottles.

The Terracycle idea is to find marketable uses for objects that used to be considered waste.  Where do they get the waste products (like the used soda bottles)?  They often pay school kids to gather them (doesn’t this method of fundraising make more sense than having kids sell you things you don’t need?).  Will they run out of raw materials (waste) with which they make their products?  Not likely:

Since almost every output that is produced through industry ends up as waste and growth is rewarded, we have been throwing out more and more waste each day. According to the EPA, in 1960 the average American, produced 2.7 pounds of waste per day and in 2003 that number had steadily increased to 4.5 pounds.

If you want to know more about these products or where to buy them (they are sold at many big box stores, such as Home Depot, as well as many smaller stores), check the TerraCycle website.

Television Leads Us.
Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City

Who’s Bitter?
Wolverton, Cagle Cartoons

TV or not TV
Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City

Interior televisivo
Alen Lauzan Falcon, Caglecartoons.com

Olle Johansson, Sweden

TV
Osmani Simanca, A Tarde, Brazil

Here’s what it would be like:

For commentary on this video, go here.

In a Reuters article, Peru is claiming that

Yale University researchers took more than 40,000 artifacts from the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu in the early 1900s, or 10 times the original estimate, the state news agency reported on Sunday.

That’s quite a load of artifacts, far more than the 5,000 Yale once claimed that it had “borrowed.” You can read about that controversy here. Back in 1911, a history lecturer at Yale, Hiram Bingham, was credited with “discovering” Machu Picchu even thought it was clear that others had visited the site prior to Bingham. Apparently Bingham and his fellow explorers brought back far more than originally reported.

This article about the artifact dispute brought back wonderful memories. I had the opportunity to visit Machu Picchu in December, 1998. A friend and I first traveled to Cuzco, an incredible city–300,000 people living 11,800 feet above sea level. Cuzco is also the site of exquisite stone work, and you’ll see it everywhere. In fact, we checked into a hotel where the owner asked us if we wanted an “Inca room” or a regular room (”Inca, o no Inca?). We weren’t certain what it meant to have an “Inca room,” but we ended up paying an extra bit of money. Here’s what we got: one entire wall of our large room consisted of ancient Incan stonework. The hotel had been built around an ancient Incan structure. In Cuzco, you could see stonework consisting of massive stones fitting together absolutely perfectly. You couldn’t help but reach out and touch the stones and wonder how they did it.

I’ll never forget a concert we attended in Cuzco. A man from Italy had fallen in love with Cuzco and bought a concert hall. We were invited to attend for free because we had just met another Italian man who had met the concert hall owner. Everyone was family. We conversed (in Spanish) with dozens of people, all of them so incredibly patient with our slow Spanish.

We had somewhat acclimated to the thin air by having stayed for several days in Quito Ecuador (elevation 9,350 feet). From Cuzco, we travelled to Aguas Calientes), a small town at the base of Machu Picchu.

As you might have read, Machu Picchu is, indeed, a magical place. I’ve never heard of anyone who made the long journey there who was disappointed. I’ve heard, though, that tourist traffic has now grown so large that the site is endangered. During my trip, my companion and I spent one night at a hotel adjacent to Machu Picchu itself (at 7,900 feet above sea level). Our thought was that we wanted to be there as the sun set over this magic place. Later that night, I watched as swarms of bats flew over the site. My companion went to bed early and elected to wake up at 4:30 am to see the sunbeams land on an ancient stone, the marking of the equinox. I’ve sometimes been berated for sleeping, but watching the bats flit about over Machu Picchu in the dark (there were many hundreds of them) was an exalting experience.

Here are a couple of photos I took back in 1998. Mostly, the weather was cloudy and misty. For 30 minutes, though the sun came out, allowing me to see Machu Picchu lit up (click on the photo to see the details).

Although the sunlit Machu Picchu was the most startling version, it was the misty-twilight version that was my favorite, because it invoked meaning-of-life considerations.  Here’s an overlook I photographed in that more typical “mood.”

Below, I’m posting a shot of some of the incredible stonework you can see at the site:

Even though the path to Machu Picchu was not difficult, I felt like it was a substantial endeavor to get there. We took public transportation all the way. As you can see, I thought I was Indiana Jones. Unlike the previous explorers, I didn’t remove anything from this sacred site.

There are many places along our trip where we needed to speak Spanish to be understood. I had studied Spanish in high school and college, and was thrilled to make use of it. After two weeks traveling, I even started to have a few dreams in (halting) Spanish.

I would love to return to Peru. There are lots of stories I could tell about Peru and Machu Picchu (and Ecuador), but I’ll simply suggest that the people, the history and the architecture were all big parts of the trip, the only negative being our time spent in congested and polluted Lima.