Grass needs to be cut, and sheep need to eat. Hmmmm.
Sheep are taking over some of Carlisle Area School District groundskeeping chores. They are saving the district up to $15,000 a year and cutting local air pollution . . . .Instead of workers spending six hours a week mowing and trimming near solar panels, sheep have moved in for the summer.
Rick Santorum exudes an unbelievable hypocrisy over abortion. You can read the article here. Basically, Mr. Santorum has it in mind to use the law to prohibit a medical procedure his wife had to go through in order to save her life. As the piece makes clear, in October of 1996, Karen Santorum underwent an abortion in the 19th week of pregnancy in order to save her life from an infected fetus. She had a 105 degree temperature. She would have died without the procedue. Santorum would make that option illegal. Basically, his position seems to be that sacrificing his wife for the fetus would be his choice now. This overlooks the fact that had they not done the procedure, the fetus would not have survived, either. He would have lost both. Sacrifices to his conscience, which seems incapable of the kind of triage humans must make all the time. Well and good, some people just can’t go there. But this man is running for president. He intends that his personal inability to cope be made a national policy of denying anyone the choice of coping. [More . . . ]
It's easier for most of us to think of our extreme droughts, floods and tornadoes as isolated unusual events, and to deny any connection to global warming. That denial makes good sense. It allows us the freedom to not consider that our daily actions are destroying people's property and lives. Hence, this denial is the tactic of the mainstream media, which sees its job as keeping its audience in a good mood so that it can sell products for its advertisers. Bill McKibben says we really do need to start connecting the dots, however. It's not that we can say that any particular drought, flood or tornado is necessarily a result of human-caused carbon dioxide, but McKibben insists that it is time to invoke the phrase "climate change" to describe the current level of occurrences of extreme weather. And it's time to force the Obama Administration to take this issue much more seriously at a time when many members of Congress refuse to consider the issue at all. At Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviews McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org. According to McKibben, who outlines numerous recent cataclysmic weather-related disasters worldwide, there's a lot of room for improvement for the Obama Administration:
Now, to President Obama, look, the guy has done a better job on climate change than George Bush. That’s not an enormous claim to make, but, you know, happily, he’s doing something. He’s also doing a lot of things that are very, very damaging. He has opened this vast swath of the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming to coal mining. The early estimate is there’s enough coal there to be at the equivalent of having 3,000 coal-fired power plants running for a year. His administration is currently considering allowing a permit for a huge pipeline across the center of the country that will run from Canada from the tar sands in Alberta down to refineries in Texas. That’s the equivalent of lighting a fuse on the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.What is the meaning of "350" in 350.org?
Three-fifty is the most important number in the world. The NASA scientists told us three years ago that any value for carbon in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million was not compatible with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted. That is strong language. It’s stronger still when you know that everywhere, outside your studios, up on top of Mount Everest, in the Antarctic, right now we’re at about 390 parts per million CO2 and gaining fast. That’s why this is not some future problem. It is the most pressing present crisis that we have.
Much to my surprise, I recently was diagnosed with melanoma. Fortunately, I was suspicious of a skin spot, and showed it to a dermatologist. He shrugged and said, "probably not," but cut it off for a biopsy. A week later he called and told me to see a surgeon ASAP. I now am scheduled for minor surgery and further biopsy. The prognosis is, "Don't worry about it." Then a friend from high school shared this video with me, and told me that he's been inspired by my post to see a dermatologist to check out his spots. What you don't know can kill you. Had I ignored the spot, I might have lived another decade before it killed me. I knew a fellow who had a mole burned off, a couple of times, before someone bothered to biopsy it. By then, they gave him 6 months. But he was an athletic individual who wouldn't quit, and lived five years. But those last couple of years were hardly living, in terms of quality of life.
At Truthout, Ellen Dannen points out that we live almost entirely in the present, as consumers:
As consumers, we live today in a perpetual now, ingesting and eliminating. But our ancestors understood the importance of being conservative, of conserving. They saw the value of building infrastructure of lasting value - not thinking only of themselves - but building also for their children and progeny yet to be. They understood, as did Oliver Wendell Holmes, that the taxes they paid were the price of admission to life in a civilized society. They understood that to live in a civil society required providing real nourishment, including the best education possible, for everyone. That society at least gave lip service to the principle that, "What you have done to the least of these you have done to me." The things they produced and created still contribute to our security and progress. Among other things, they created a high-quality, heavily subsidized system of education that eliminated cost as a bar and made our country a leader in so many areas. We would be better off today had we properly valued their investment in us, rather than having consumed and destroyed so much of that inheritance.I consider this issue often. If one were really to implement "family values," would we be trashing the planet and failing to plan for the future? Wouldn't we be obsessed with making sure that our children will have access to a well-cared-for planet on which they can live out their lives, one they can hand to their children? But as a government, we really do seem to be living in the present, dealing with the disasters as they arise rather than taking steps to avoid them. We excel at kicking the can down the road just a bit, putting off for another day.