It’s just the coming of the “End of Days.” You should be preparing for the rapture instead.
Pardon me, I think I may have just gotten political cynical. May I refer you back to a previous article about Global Warming?
When I was high school-aged, things or people that were uncool were “gay.” I stopped hearing that terminology once I got to college. There the uncool were “rednecks.” Here in North Carolina, everything uncool is referred to as “Mexican”….usually with some profanity in front of the “Mexican.” I hear this language all the time at work, in the grocery store, on the radio–it is everywhere. All kinds of people use these words too. I even hear immigrants or first-generation Americans talking about the “%*&*#$@ Mexicans.”
And, people wonder how genocide occurs.
How are regular people able to chop up their neighbors with machetes without blinking an eye? How were the majority of Germans able to allow their own government to slaughter six million human beings?
I think the answer, or at least a portion of it, lies in our everyday speech.
We use language to set certain groups outside the realm of social responsibility. Everyday we stereotype people, either consciously or unconsciously placing them into the in group or into the out group. Once we’ve placed our homosexual friends, our rural cousins, and our immigrant brothers into the out group, it becomes easier to think of them as different. The in group attributes the out group with all those characteristics that it finds unpalatable. It becomes very easy just to blame the undesirables for all the ills of society. If the in group starts to feel threatened by the out group, there are calls to action to protect our values, our country, our language, etc…The in group feels it necessary for its protection to deny the out group such things as the right to get married, the right to an education, or even the right to speak their own language. Or, the in group might find it necessary to slaughter the out group in concentration camps or to start chasing after their neighbors with machetes.
I don’t think we’ve gotten that far in America yet. But, we are certainly moving in that direction with our border fence, work place raids, English only laws, and Minutemen patrols…
As innocent as it may seem at first glance, stereotyping easily turns into dehumanization. Even if you mean no harm in using “redneck” or “gay,” you are contributing to the phenomenon. The more people stereotype others, the more acceptable the stereotyping becomes.
Please speak carefully.
Carbofuran, also known as 2,3-dihyrdro-2,2-dimethyl-7-benzofuranyl methylcarbamate, is a highly toxic pesticide that is used on field crops–especially soy beans.
Carbofuran is made to kill insects, mites, and nematodes, but unfortunately, it also kills just about every other animal on the planet.
In Kenya, people have been using carbofuran to kill off the predators that prey on their livestock. They lace carcasses with carbofuran, and the predators feed on the carcass and soon die. I learned about this from a BBC article that includes some rather disturbing footage of about fifty dead vultures surrounding a poisoned carcass. The article is here if you wish to take a look.
Carbofuran acts very quickly, and only small doses are needed. It takes only one grain to kill a small bird. All forms of carbofuran are banned in Europe, and the United States has banned the granular form in order to protect birds, who often mistake poison grains for seeds. According to the BBC, carbofuran is readily available in Kenya, and I would be willing to bet that this is also the case in many other developing nations.
It’s also probably safe to say that most ordinary people in Kenya and other developing countries do not know as much as they should about the dire ecological damage chemicals like carbofuran can wreak on the ecosystem. The bottles of carbofuran obtained by the BBC in Kenya had no warnings about the danger the chemical posed to wildlife or to humans.
Carbofuran presents a formidable threat to the environment even when it is used only on crops as it is supposed to be. Pesticide concentration grows higher each step up the food chain. If a herbivore nibbles on carbofuran treated crops and doesn’t die, it might be eaten by a predator, which might be eaten by another predator. Eventually humans are going to be negatively affected by high concentrations of pesticides in their prey. Carbofuran is also highly soluble in water, and it’s use carries a high risk of groundwater contamination.
In nature, there certain species called “keystone species.” Keystone species are species that, despite their low biomass, exert strong effects on the structure of the communities they inhabit. In other words, a keystone species is a group of creatures that may not be particularly glamorous, and may be small in number, but has a tremendous role in the ecosystem. The role that keystone species play in the ecosystem might not be noticed until the species is gone and the whole ecosystem falls apart. A pesticide as toxic as carbofuran kills indiscriminately, and with so many animals dying, it’s only a matter of time before a keystone species is affected. Once a keystone species is gone, it’s usually gone forever.
So, what should we do about things like toxic pesticide use? Do developed nations have any right to tell developing nations what they can and can’t do with their land? Should national sovereignty and personal property rights be respected at the cost of irreversible damage to the earth? I also wonder about the companies that make chemicals like carbofuran. Should they be allowed to produce and sell something that is so dangerous? And, if they should be, what ethical reasoning justifies this decision?
It’s much easier to ask these questions than to answer them.
At any rate, it is best to remember that….
Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.
–from Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
George W. Bush knows that he is going out in a cloud of smoke instead of a blaze of glory. This may be his last attempt to save face, but he’ll only do harm in the process. To a lot of people, a little “free” money will be nice. Who doesn’t like money? That is why Americans will buy into it, and it is a sad day for our country.
What’s the real problem with our economy? I’m no economist; that’s one class I didn’t like in college, but I am willing to bet that spending untold billions of dollars on a fake war in Iraq is probably part of the problem. All that has done is to transfer money from tax payers to those who can afford to avoid taxes, and to those that benefit from war. Not to mention that a lot of money was wasted.
No, there would be no economic problem if Bush hadn’t turned the biggest surplus into the biggest deficit that this country has ever known. Well, I don’t have those facts, but I’ve heard that said (don’t quote me on it!)
I guess I’ll be an American, because I’ll probably get one of those checks. But you can bet I won’t be gloating when I get it. I’ll be sad because I know that once again, Americans have been duped by a total idiot and his pack of thieves. (Did I mention that the Democrats seem to be strong supporters of said bill?)
In conclusion, there are only two people that I think (at this point) are worth voting for in the next Presidential election. I think that both Mike Gravel and Ron Paul are honest hard-working, uncompromising people, and we should consider them as candidates (regardless of who gets the nominations!)
I am often asked why I am a vegetarian. In fact, I am interrogated on this subject so often that I am getting very tired of answering. So, today I was happy to see an article in the New York Times outlining the main reasons I have for being a vegetarian.
I confess that I have not done mountains of research to validate my lifestyle choice. So, I cannot vouch for all the claims put forth in the article, and I do not intend to defend them. All I can say is that I have read a bit about the environmental impact of a meat based diet, and what I read was enough to persuade me to change my diet. I also think a vegetarian diet is healthier than a meat-based diet and am somewhat sympathetic to the animal rights arguments given in defence of vegetarianism.
I’m a bit dogmatic about my vegetarianism. My diet is my business, and your diet is your business. I don’t want to hear about the virtues of eating meat, so please don’t try to convert me. I promise I won’t try to convert you. I’m not the militant type.
Richard Stallman, (founder of the GNU project, the Free Software Foundation) will be speaking at VCU on March 27th of this year.
Mr. Stallman will speak on the topic of “Free Software in Ethics and in Practice”, and about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide.
This seminar will is the result of many hours of work on my part, and the donations and help of the VCU community, faculty, students and staff. It is primarily sponsored by the VCU School of Engineering’s Computer Science Department, the VCU Honors College, the Student Advisory Board to the Computer Science Department, as well as the ACM chapter at VCU. Additionally there is a private company who has offered a significant donation, but I am not sure if I should post their name here.
When: March 27th, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Where: Room 1164, Temple Building, VCU Monroe Park Campus
Directions: Please follow the VCU directions to the Main Street Parking Deck.
Whether or not you agree with Al Gore in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” is not important. That is, it’s not important that you believe that global warming is real or not. Suppose it’s not true, that global warming is a myth created by some crazed scientists (all of whom agree, and are conspiring together). So, what do we humans do differently? Do we say, forget the fuel-efficient cars, forget trying to reduce coal-burning power plants (or at least clean them up)? Not exactly. We will still recognize that these things are generally good for the world (our home). So we’ll keep trying to do good things for the world.
The real issue with global warming isn’t what we do, but how fast we do it, and how high a priority we make it to improve pollution problems, etc. While I don’t agree that Al Gore was 100% objective in his documentary, I do think his point is still valid; we have to take action now, and that goes for global warming or just keeping our world clean. We can never focus our efforts on keeping our home green, clean and beautiful if our government and corporations are busy killing people in foreign countries. There just isn’t enough money for both things. How about switching gears?
I guess I lied above. I think it is important that we all recognize there is a problem. We should demand that our governments take an objective stance and make real plans to stop polluting so much. I’m tired of the government downplaying environmentalists as radicals and spreading fear that the economy depends on us polluting.
According to the National Counterterrorism Center, there were 14,602 deaths due to terrorism around the globe in 2005. This equates to 40 deaths per day. Iraq accounted for 55% of these fatalities.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported 43,443 fatalities due to traffic accidents in the United States during 2005. This equates to 119 deaths per day.
The International Rescue Committee estimates that 4 million civilians have died in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1998. A little math reveals that this is equivalent to 666,667 deaths a year or 1826 deaths a day.
Many newer automobiles run on ethanol, either partially (mixed with gasoline) or completely. Recently, the price of corn has increased in response to the growing demand for ethanol for fuel. I see a two major problems in using ethanol as a major fuel source for the future. First, it is causing corn prices to increase dramatically, which in turn is causing some poor people to pay more money for food they may already have a hard time buying. Second, I’m not convinced that growing corn and converting it to ethanol is the best solution to the global craze for fuels. I’ll discuss these two arguments further in this article.
The tortilla accounts for almost half of the calories the average Mexican consumes each day [1]. I’ve been to Mexico with a friend for about a week. We stayed with some country folk who ate a ton of tortillas. We ate them at every single meal. If prices of tortillas increase (due to the increase in corn price), it will hurt a lot of people who depend on corn as a cheap supply of food. Recently, in Mexico, tortilla prices increased as much as 400 % [2], though President Felipe Calderón imposed restrictions on how much stores can charge. The restriction ends soon.
The price increase for corn also drives up the prices of other foods (Beef, Chicken, Eggs, etc) since they are fed primarily corn. However, as one woman says, “When there isn’t enough money to buy meat, you do without; Tortillas you can’t do without” [3]. The dependency and overuse of fuel-burning machines like cars is affecting what people eat (as well as the environment, the ozone layer, etc).
Clearly the price of corn for food is directly related to the demand for ethanol for fuel. It might be a stretch, however, to say that burning ethanol is causing people to starve.
There is a huge movement sponsored by government and others to come up with an alternative fuel, one that isn’t so evnvironmentally harmful. Ethanol is touted as an environmentally friendly solution because it burns relatively clean when compared to gasoline. However, it is all too easy to concentrate on the consumption part of the process and ignore the effects of the creation process. “Some ethanol skeptics have even argued that the process involved in growing grain and then transforming it into ethanol requires more energy from fossil fuels than ethanol generates. In other words, they say the whole movement is a farce” [4]. This may be a slight over exaggeration, but there is a grain of truth at least (forgive the pun).
In reality, ethanol burns cleaner than gasoline. It produces useful by-products when refined, even though it is more expensive per gallon than gasoline. DDGS (distillers dried grains with solubles) can be used to fullfill a portion of the diet of livestock. (A bushel of corn produces about 18 pounds of DDGS). [5]
The major consumers of ethanol are the US and Brazil. In the US, access to E85 (85% ethanol, 15% gasoline) is limited, and almost non-existant outside of the midwest. In addition, according to a Consumer Reports article, “the fuel economy of the Tahoe dropped 27 percent when running on E85 compared with gasoline, from an already low 14 mpg overall to 10 mpg (rounded to the nearest mpg) [6]. The fuel is more expensive per gallon, and you can drive less miles per gallon. These are some of the reasons that many people aren’t buying FFVs (Flexible-Fuel Vehicles).
Will the world find oil-independency in corn-base ethanol sometime in the future? Will the world continue to be able to feed its poor if that is the case? (The world isn’t feeding its hungry now, but it is able to). I think these are not the real issues, but only side effects of the real issues. The real issues are:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.â€
—Attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller, a German minister imprisoned during World War II for opposing the Nazi party
The US Government declared the conflict in Darfur to be genocide back in 2004. Nothing has been done about it. The UN approved a resolution to send a 17,000 strong peace keeping force to Sudan but will not do so without the consent of the Sudanese government. The Sudanese government continues to refuse UN forces and to hamper the efforts of the African Union peace keeping forces.
