Lakerfan on Global Warming, Re-posted

I've reposted this comment by Lakerfan that was buried in a comment due to tech issues:

I would like to rant about a subject that we have not discussed in class, but concerns me immensely.
It has been in the news lately that Al Gore recently was a co-winner of the Nobel peace prize for his work in the subject of global warming. Gore, and most of our media, reports that global warming is accelerating and that if we do not do something quickly, the process will be irreversible. They would have us believe that this will lead to rising sea levels, the extinction of certain species, and eventually the destruction of the earths atmosphere, and maybe us.Is this scarry or what? Or, is this exactly what they are trying to do, scare us.
As my trust for the media has waned in the last few months, I have begun to research this global warming subject myself.I ran across an article on digitaljournal.com, written by Michael Wagner.He reports that much of the medias information regarding global warming, is supplied to them by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.This is a 3,000 member panel appointed by the United Nations, consisting of mostly politicians, not scientists.Many of the scientists on the panel dispute the global warming findings, but are having their opinion deleted from the panels reports.
The truth, according to Wagner, is that most scietist in the world disagree with the idea of global warming. He reports that a petition has already been signed by 17,000 scientist that states they do not agree with the conclusion of global warming.
Hearing these statistics makes me leary of our medias reporting of the global warming facts.Does anyone remember the medias reporting of the "fact" that Iraq had WMD's. Was not that meant to scare the American public, as global warming is doing.And was not the truth regarding WMD's shown to be "they never existed".I know the two issues do not seem to be related, except that most Americans receive their info regarding these two issues almost exclusively from the media. It sure makes me wonder.
History has shown that the best way for a government to subvert their peoples rights or to accomplish an unpopular political goal is by scarring them into believing that it is being done to protect them. Personally, I do not put it passed our government to pull a dirty trick like this against the American public.

Reposting Lakerfan II - Iraq War debate

Due to a tech difficulty, Lakerfan's earlier post got buried in comments:

I had a conversation with a friend regarding the war in Iraq.He stated that he supports it. I asked why; he said because he is patriotic. I asked "what does that mean?" He said it means he loves his country.When I asked why he loves his country , He did not seem to have a response.

If you claim to love your country, what is it that makes you think this is true.What do you love about it. Do you love your house, your job, your street, your city, or your state? Do you love the parts of the country that you have never been to or seen? Do you love our political system? how about our president.Do you love the fact that our country sends our young men to die in a war for no good reason, or that this war is costing innocent women and children their lives(granted, their not Americans) . A war that we started.

Do you love the fact that their are millions of people in our country that are deprived of healthcare, while many of the European countrys have universal health care that treats all of their citizens, no matter what.
Who is better now?Do you love the fact that our country claims that drug addiction is a disease, but if you are caught, you are not put in a hospital, you are thrown in jail.Many of the European nations actually do treat drug addiction like a disease and provide treatment.

Do you love our banking system; how about our mortgage brokers. I bet , after this sub-prime loan fiasco,that the people that have lost or are losing their homes do not love this country as much as they did, if they love it at all.Would you?
What I am saying,is that "I love my country" is too freely used without any thought of why? It seems to be a catch phrase for "I am a patriotic American, and we are the best." If you really think about it, are we the best? Just wondering.

Re-Posting Lakerfan

Because of some tech troubles with new posts, I'm reposting something that Lakerfan did not intend to leave buried in a comment line.

I would like to dicuss the issue with Kobe Bryant and the Laker Management/Kobe haters.First of all, I think it would be hard to deny that Kobe is currently the best offense player in the NBA. Last season he averaged 32 pts a game and the season before had a game in which he scored 81 points(second only to Wilt Chamberlains game of 100 pts. in 1962.)As good as he is, Kobe can not always win basketball games on his own. Nobody can. It is a team sport.The problem Kobe has with the management, which I agree with, is why won't they trade for a quality player to give him help.Granted their are salary cap issues, but they can be worked around. Kobe watched almost every team in the NBA make improvements to their team last summer by making trades, while the Lakers did nothing(for the second year in a row).I understand Dr. Buss(the owner) has given control of the team to his son, which may be the problem.The Lakers current team will never win a championship, and Kobe knows it , and it sure isn't Kobe's fault.If the Lakers don't trade for someone quick, they will lose the best player since Michael Jordan, and they will regret it for ever.Also, why do the Kobe haters continually call him a rapist. Weren't the charges dropped. Aren't we, as American citizens, innocent until proven guilty. It reminds me of the Barry Bonds issue. He was never "proven" to have taken steroids.So why do people , including the media, continue to treat these athletes like criminals.Its kind of funny, the best player in baseball and the best player in basketball are the ones criticized the most. Watch out Tom Brady!!

Biofuels a crime against humanity?

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9436

If you are not aware of the background in the sudden surge of bio-ethanal perhaps a small review is in order. Due to rising costs of gasoline and the fact that the majority of our supply comes from a part of the world void of any type of stability either politically, economically or religiously; we have been trying to wean ourselves and ultimately our nation from such dependence on foriegn oil. One fabled savior is that of renewable, self grown commodities. In our case; corn. Corn is used now more so as a vehicle for fuel development than that of a food product. This was in large part due to a Government backed endorsement (and, coincdentally, reduced fuel consumption mandates for those vehicles that are "duel fuel" ready) and the whole romanticized Americana day dream of an all American chain of supply. American farmers (who already receive ridiculous, outdated and damaging subsidies on their crops) grow our fuel so that hard working blue collar American factory workers produce our cars so that Americans can drive to the store and purchase goods!

Goods, more than likely, made in China. But I digress.

The fact that Corn has gone from a food product to a fuel source not only affects us at home, but it has also had a negative effect on persons such as those in Mexico. For whom Corn is a staple of food more so than here in America due to their consumption of the delicious, nutritious and edible food plate that is the tortilla. Producers in Mexico of corn have started to plant more of it, but it is now for export to us here so that we can turn it into a fuel with less energy per pound than gasoline, and with an increase in N2O emissions. Nevermind the fact that the process to produce such a fuel from Corn is more so environmentally damaging than that of turning the traditional fossil fuel into Petrol. In addition to this obvious one sided growth spurt of Corn, those vehicles that either run entirely off of biofuel or off of both traditional dino Petrol and biofuel, are exempt from the normal Government mandated mile per gallon standards. So Ford can continue to produce outdated, unneeded gigantic Trucks that don't meet fuel standards for 1987, let alone 2007, can tweak their engines to run both kinds of fuel (which is quite easy) and be exempt from the already existing miles per gallon standard. Yay. It is a circle of inefficient, jingoistic self deprecating patriotism consisting of a lot of smoke and mirrors to make ourselves feel better.

Think about it.

Sustainability of the earth.

This is both a test post and a post made at the behest of Prof. Crandall to verify that us students can indeed create brand new posts. I read this article linked from fark.com. And if you don't read fark, this is a very positive advertisement for that site. It is all real headlines about any and all subjects, but with absolutely hilarious one liners so that it gets you to click the links and read.

www.fark.com

And here is the article in question. It is about a current study into the "extinction periods" that have been part of the very existence of the earth for the past 4.5 billion years. It is hypothesized that the current use and abuse of the earth and its resources are not sustainable.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleid=DEAF205F-E7F2-99DF-35C3B60FE3CC788B

Kind of scary. In fact, really scary. We only have one of these things. Until we can get to mars and robot wives are cheap and effective; things must change.

Cookie for the reference to the robot wives bit.

Fires

Hello all ---

Pursuant to class requests, I'm posting some responses to current events and class readings to see whether it makes posting easier.

BTW, the comments we've gotten are good, but do remember that students can make new posts also.

I suspect those who want me to write here are more interested in my opening a topic than in my particular opinions about any one thing, so let's see ----

What about the coverage of these fires? Is it better than coverage of foreign policy or elections? If so, how so, and why do you suppose that might be the case?

Agnew on TV

What did you think of Agnew's speech?

He's speaking some time around 1970, so when he talks about modern media, he means television networks. At the time, there were several national networks and some relatively local networks, too. TV dials (round knobs; you turned them and they went click-click-click between channels) went all the way up to 13, though of course not all the channels were occupied in any one city.

Agnew was Vice President during the Nixon Administration, at the height of the Vietnam War, during part of the big roil of social and political unrest that people mean when we talk about "the sixties" or "the seventies."

Some people still talked about television as the educational wave of the future. We were all going to be able to see and almost touch the world, right as things happened. We would be more informed than ever before. For the last ten years or so, we have heard the same thing about the Internet. What happened to TV? What might happen to the Net? What should happen?

Agnew Again

How do you feel about Agnew's opinion that reporters did not give President Richard Nixon a chance to properly explain his opinions or be heard or understood?

Breton, "Freedom of Love"

Andre Breton -- the man who wrote "Freedom of Love," the piece about the poet's "with the waist of an otter" -- was the leader of a movement called the Surrealists. They felt that a lot of what matters to humans is subconscious or semi-conscious and not completely logical, so they used startling analogies to summon feelings and things that they felt were obscured by what we usually consider as logic or as common sense.

Is there conflict between human logic and human feeling, and if so, how does that work?

Some say that "human logic" is an oxymoron, but how can logic happen without a human logician?

If each of us senses separately, what is "common sense"?

Dooce

In what ways does Dooce relate to kinds of media performances that are called gossipy?

Dooce herself (it's her nickname as well as the site name) has become a small-time celebrity, probably because her blogging was indiscrete enough to get her canned from her job, but also because she spills her guts online about her depression and hospitalizations, and because she gets personal about her relationship with her daughter and her husband -- all items that relate to the concerns of young and middle-aged women who raise children.

It seems to me that in some ways Dooce is very similar and in some ways very different from gossip mags and the schlock that's called entertainment news. Gossip mags like People make a lot out of celebrities' very personal lives and problems. Many people find this either predatory, trivial or both, yet very many people are fascinated by all this, including people who would rather not admit it.

If the most personal parts of our own lives are the parts we value most, in what sense is knowing about those parts of other people's lives trivial or nosy?

Now, what does this say about someone like Dooce, who's not telling us about other people's lives? (Well, alright, I reckon she has had a talk or two with her husband and has some doozies coming up with that daughter, but she's not ratting out strangers or acting like she's personally concerned with people she has never met.) Is this only a moral distinction, like a person has a right to talk about personal things they're details from that person's own life? Or if the nature of this information differs from tattle-tale reports of Ms Spears' or Ms. Hilton's recent difficulties, how does it differ?

Dooce

I suppose all the questions and ideas I mentioned with regard to "Yellow Wallpaper" apply to Dooce as well.

What do you think of blogs? It occurs to me that yo might feel different about different types:

• The personal blog, like Dooce, in which the topic grows out of the blogger's personal life and obsessions, almost like a public diary.


• Blogs kept primarily by one person, but which deal primarily with a personal approach to some topic, like Rocinante or Insta-Pundit


• Blogs sponsored by an online journal or some other entity with its own interests, like professor's blogs or, say, Chomsky's blog on the Z-Magazine Website.


• Blogs kept by a lot of people equally, like Common Dreams.org


• This.

Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman

Perkin-Gilman published "The Yellow Wallpaper" in 1892, a few years before I thought. But a lot of current issues run under the narrative. Some have to do with gender issues, but many also have to do with self-determination in general.

The narrator's condition at the start of "Yellow Wallpaper" reminds some people of what's now called post-partum depression. In a way, it's interesting we should even have a separate term for that. Why would women become depressed after childbirth? It happens very frequently, and to women in many different circumstances.

What has made narrator so unhappy before she's even shut up in the room, before the story proper even gets started?

Some might say she has everything she can want. Lots of people were poor; she was fed. Lots of people died of disease with little or no medical treatment; she was healthy and had doctors on call to take care of her. Lots of women were and are abandoned by husbands and significant others; her husband is still there, providing. Lots of people, particularly women, are exhausted by the demands of work and childcare; she has little worries about either.

I could go on.

How does this situation relate to these situations:

• Women with post-partum depression today


• Dooce


• The narrator's needs


• Her husband's needs


• Her child's needs


• Her servants' needs


• The needs of child laborers at the time


• The needs of poor mothers who had to work and send their young children to work


• The needs of single mothers today


• The needs of mothers who wish to have professionally satisfying careers and rich social lives, including rich family lives with their children


• The needs of young couples or singles trying to get the education society demands of them while they raise young families, and the needs of those families.

What should be done about all this? Who should do it? How?

Wikis

I notice a lot of people like to use Wikipedia. Besides the obvious convenience, why?