Pre-Thanksgiving Sunday Variety

Paul Broadwell (Via)

Howdy everyone.

Top of the mind today is the conflict rebuilding between Israelis and Palestinians. Good discussion, as usual, to be had on Metafilter with heavy moderation, thankfully. I took a modern middle eastern history course in my last semester of Community College (before heading for the Umich), and by the end of the class I believed the whole ordeal to be a mess, and I still do today. It's hard really to know where to start without getting your ass intellectually ripped apart and left for dead. I do however have strong feelings for both sides involved, and hope that peace is achieved soon.

Also, I really don't want the world swallowed into the conflict. That is one of my greatest fears.

What else? Oh yeah, the scandal still unfolding with David Petraeus and the CIA (Insert alternative acronym definitions here). NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me (11/17 in case you get to the link late) was unusually great this week, partially due to that. There's nothing like hearing an old, 78-year-old radio personality narrate the now famous New York Post headline for the story.

Lastly, the fiscal cliff, and a still somewhat gridlocked congress. No links here. My simple belief is that every American owes a base amount of taxes to keep running the proportion of infrastructure they use to live. Those that take advantage of this fairly powerful and scalable infrastructure and do more than just live off of it should pay more, proportional or scalable to the amount of income over the median income level. We need to pay off our debt, and my (and mostly everyone else's) barely $30K/year from hourly work income is nothing to use to pay that off. I have faithfully paid taxes on scholarships I have gotten previously, and will continue to do so. Meanwhile I work to ease my pressure on the water, electrical, and road system in place. It's a continuous process.

The American Music Awards on it, and I want to enjoy them. So I will talk to y'all later!

US might have wider, longer straw by 2017

I was perturbed today by the trumpeting of news on The Oil Drum, Yahoo, and worse yet NPR that the US is projected to overtake Saudi Arabia in terms of oil production by 2017 (or 2020, as stated in the NPR article). The hypothesis of such a growth in production this large has been fairly critiqued one way or another (1, 2, 3, 4; sorry for lack of variety they are all Oil Drum Reports).

There are other problems though:

• There's a larger-than-most-intellects-think portion of this population that want to live on gasoline like they live on oxygen: cheaply, and dependably. To have any hope of a sustainable society going into the future, this inertia/momentum needs to be halted, and the idea of weening ourselves off limited fuels needs to become mainstream. This news may make me a little less antsy, but odds are that will be compensated with fears of new born momentum and inertia that may not be controllable later on.
• While I am not your stereotypical environmentalist, I do look at the environment as a tool for humans to use to live. Like all tools, you have to use and maintain Earth well, otherwise Earth gets rusty, and can get a little problematic (i.e. Sandy and numerous earthquakes that have occurred attributable to hydraulic fracturing). We need the environment for food, clean water, food for livestock, shelter material, clothing from livestock, etc. We break it, we lose most of everything we used to adapt to various environments, and die.

So, aside from the fact that, fossil fuels, no matter how many new sources we find and how fast we extract them over time, are limited, we have the human inertia factor, and of course the environmental one. This news today was like a trident blow to my mind.

And now to welcome Facebook and Twitter

Facebook notes are pretty few and far between.
Twitter is only 140 characters per post, and chain tweets don't seem wise

...and of course, what am I saying? Blogs are a dime a dozen.

So what am I doing with this?

Call it the Kellogg effect for news articles I read: the big flake news stories I come across I'll share here and provide a bit of commentary, but nothing too gruesome that you'll get lost in details, and nothing too short like: "we're screwed", or "DOOM!", or "That's good", or "Excellent", or a common one - "A very good article on XYZ".

Aside from that, I think some good discussions can happen here. I think you might have a good idea where I am going with this given the topic I never hesitate to talk about in one way or another, and has dominated my thinking since the summer of 2010. But of course, I won't just talk sustainability, 'cause you gotta have fun in life.

For more info, read the first post not too far down from here.

Cheers!

Addendum: Apparently you have to turn a page to my first post since I posted this one... oops!

Sunday Service...

Some Facebook post regarding how MI Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow supports religious employers providing contraceptives and Republican challenger Pete *cough and gargle* Hoekstra supports religious freedom prompted me to passively respond:

"It kinda scares me more, now that it has really sunk in, that 'religious freedom' has become a substitute for a good social, environmental, and resource conscious life, faith or no faith, that actively works to peacefully mitigate the consequences of the industrial age, and bring it to a close. Our Lord may be forgiving, but even He clarified that His forgiveness is not a blank check, as He, according to scripture, made the Earth, and every single trapping that we have discovered comes with it."

Good Sunday to you all.

A Terrific Ode to Video Games and More

When you get a chance this weekend, go see Wreck-it-Ralph in theaters. Not only does it hat-tip a ton of classic video games, it throws you back in time to an era of wonderfully querky branding. That's all. More later.